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The
St. John’s
^EGE
•
SUMMER
Annapolis • Santa Fe
Dostoevsky
Experiences with Crime
and
Punishment
2OOa
�On Dostoevsky
yodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky ’s own life had all the elements
Fof a complex psychological novel. Born in 1821, Dostoevsky
spent his childhood in Moscow. His early years were defined
by the opposing personalities of his parents: the gentle mother
who bore seven children; the cruel, repressive father-a physi
Dostoevsky was educated at home and at a private school. After the death of his
cian who was likely murdered by his own serfs during a quarrel.
parents, undoubtedly following his rational side and the guidance of his elders, Dos
Both died by Dostoevsky’s i8th birthday.
toevsky studied military engineering at a St. Petersburg college. However, by the
time he wa.s in his mid-2os, he had resigned his commission to write novels, the first
two of which were Poor Folk (a success) and Fhe Double (panned by the critics).
In 1846, Dostoevsky joined a secret utopian society. The socialistic tenden
cies of the secret group were not favored by the government, and Dostoevsky
was arrested on April 23,1849 as he read a tract in public. Although Dostoevsky
was sentenced to death, the emperor ordered a reprieve of the sentence. Dosto
evsky wasn’t informed until moments before his scheduled death, after he and
two others had been tied to posts in the prison yard. He served four years of hard
labor at a prison in Omask, Siberia, before being exiled “into the ranks” as a
common soldier. In the solitude of prison, in the suffering of his body and soul,
Dostoevsky began the self-examination that led to his spiritual awakening. He
still professed unbelief, yet, as he wrote in a letter from prison, “Sometimes God
sends me moments in which I am utterly at peace.”
After the stint in prison and the army, Dostoevsky returned to St. Petersburg. He
wrote The ImuliedandIrijuredXri&et^ on his experiences, but the book was so
unpopular he felt compelled to defend his ideas in a public letter. When he was 36,
the struggling writer married Maria Isaev. He worked as the editor of a publication
called Time which was shut down because of its political reporting. Personal crises
culminated with the death of his wife and brother in 1865.
In his middle years, Dostoevsky suffered from frequent epileptic seizures and
spent most of his time in dire poverty which he made worse through obsessive gam
bling. He wrote Notesfrom Underground, Crime and Punisliineru, and The Idiot
within a five-year period during this turbulent time. With his second wife, the young
stenographer Anna Grigorievna, he began to lead a more stable existence, finally
settling in a small provincial town after several years of travel. Proceeds from The
Possessed enabled them to buy a house. There he worked on his final book. The
Brothers Karamozov, and enjoyed a measure of public admiration. Dostoevsky’s
later books were serialized, making him something of a cult figure with his deeply
spiritual voice and commentaries on the state of Russian society.
Dostoevsky’s novels are marked by the dichotomies he himself experienced: gen
tleness and cruelty, faith and unbelief, sin and redemption, suffering and love. He
knew criminals well and had ample opportunity to reflect on their sensibilities. He
had strong political opinions (socialist in his youth, much more conservative later in
life) and explored the social implications of evil and sin in his novels.
In this issue of The College, we look at some views on crime and punishment
formed, like Dostoevsky’s, on the anvil of experience.
SC
STJOHN’S
College
ANNAPOLIS . SANTA FE
The College (usps 018-750)
is published four times a year by
St. John’s College, Annapolis, md
and Santa Fe, nm.
Known office of publication:
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Box 3800
Annapolis, md 21404-2800
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at Annapolis, md
postmaster: Send address
changes to The College
Magazine, Communications
Office, St. John’s College,
Box 2800, Annapolis, md
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Annapolis
410-295-5554
b-goyette@sjca.edu
Barbara Goyette, editor
Sus3an Borden, managing editor
Susanne Ducker,
art director
Advisory Board
John Christensen
Harvey Flaumenhaft
Roberta Gable
Kathryn Heines
Pamela Kraus
Joseph Macfarland
Eric Salem
Brother Robert Smith
Santa Fe
505-984-6104
classics@mail.sjcsf.edu
Laura J. Mulry, Santa Fe editor
Advisory Board
Alexis Brown
Grant Franks
David Levine
Margaret Odell
John Rankin
Ginger Roherty
Tahmina Shalizi
Mark St. John
Magazine design by
Claude Skelton Design
�{Contents}
PAGE
ZO
DEPARTMENTS
Grime and Punishment
a FROM THE BELL TOWERS
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Five Johnnies-two lawyers, a judge, a
probation officer and a prison librariandiscuss the reality behind the drama of
criminal justice.
PAGE
l6
Commencement 2002
24 BIBLIOFILE
A review of Charles Nelson’s book on Barr
and Buchanan
A military historian and a novelist
known for literary experimentation
sent surprisingly close messages to
graduates in Annapolis and Santa Fe.
PAGE
The New Program seal
Ancient philosophy in Seattle
SJC as international model
News about tutors and students
Homecoming in Annapolis
Santa Fe’s fundraising triumph
Letters
26 THE PROGRAM
Alumni in the corporate world debate how
math is taught at SJC.
20
29 ALUMNI NOTES
Remembrances
Pranks Past
oe
ALUMNI PROFILES
32 Holly Miller (SFGIoi) writes for
Laura Bush.
A short history of senior prank.
PAGE
22
PAGE 16
34 Nathan Wilson (AGIoi) parodies
apocalyptic novels.
41 OBITUARIES
A Buddhist in
THE Bookstore
42 CAMPUS LIFE
Johnnies reclaim croquet superiority.
Santa Fe bookstore manager Andrea
d’Amato brings an awareness of Eastern
thought to her job and her life.
44 ALUMNI ASSOCIATION NEWS
•
•
Minneapolis/ St. Paul tackles tragedy
Election Notices
48 ST. JOHN’S FOREVER
PAGE ao
ON THE COVER
Dostoevsky
Illustration by DavidJohnson
�2.
{From the Bell Towers}
On Liberalism and Liberos
Stringfellow Barr, one of the New Program
founders andpresident of the collegefrom
193'2 to 1947, delivered a series of radio talks
on WFBR in Baltimore. Here are excerpts of
the talk he delivered on June 20, 1938, in
which he tells the story behind the ''books
and balance ” seal that had come to symbol
ize the program. Editor's note: Today we
use inclusive language to translate the
motto: "I makefree adultsfrom children by
means of books and a balance. ”
confronted with a worldwide decline of liberalism.
...Since the New Program is an effort to restore liberal arts edu
cation in American colleges, I should like to speak this evening
about liberalism and what it means to those of us who are still will
ing to fight for it.
Like most liberals today, I am disturbed by the rise in many
parts of the world of government by violence as a substitute for
government by reason and consent. But unlike most liberals I
know, I am much less disturbed by the overthrow of free govern
ment in states that were once democratic than I am by the con
fusing of the liberal mind in states like ours which are still tech
nically free. You may argue that confusion in the liberal mind
disturbs me because I know that such confusion is normally fol
lowed by the overthrow of free government. I agree that this is
what normally happens; but even if you could assure me that “it
can’t happen here,” I should still be disturbed by the present
state of liberalism. Because I agree with those who founded our
Republic that what they and we have called free institutions
cannot alone and of themselves make men truly free. Free insti
tutions are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. The
end is the freedom of individual men and women...
Is ANCIENT
PHILOSOPHY
STILL
RELEVANT?
The original art for the
books and balance seal, used until
1997,
WAS HAND DRAWN. ThE LaTIN PUN WAS WRITTEN BY A FRIEND OF BaRR’s.
The other day an interesting and curious gift arrived at St.
John’s College. It was a design in the form of a circular seal, and
it was the work of a Harvard man who admires the educational
program which this College has undertaken and who chose to
express his admiration by designing this symbolic seal. In the
center of the seal is a pair of scales, or balances. Around it in a
circle are placed seven open books, representing the seven liber
al arts. And around the open volumes is lettered the motto,
“Facio Liberos ex Liberis Libris Libraque.” I suppose the motto
may be fairly translated; “I make free men out of boys by means
of books and balances.” The punning on the stem of the Latin
word for free is a serviceable pun now that liberal education is
{The College.
Is ancient philosophy stiU rele
vant? Such was the theme that
faculty professors, students, and
guest lecturers were invited to
address at Seattle University’s
7th Annual Philosophy Confer
ence held on May 17. Among the
visiting lecturers was St. John’s
tutor Joe Sachs (A68).
I think most of The College
readers would agree, the
answer to the theme question is
a resounding Yes! The distin
guished panel at the conference
shared this opinion and sup
ported it with readings from
their essays. The readings cov
ered topics inspired by the
works of Hegel, Aristotle,
Plato, Husserl, Nietzsche, and
Diogenes.
In his essay “Wholes and
Parts in Human Nature,” Joe
Sachs tackled the tough ques
tions of Who are you? and What
are you? Drawing on the tradi
tion of thought established by
5t. John’s
College ■ Summer 2002
}
Plato, Aristotle, and Hume, Mr.
Sachs put forward the thesis
that our characters are indeed
composed of the parts known as
Reason and Passion, but added
that there is an equally impor
tant third part. Spirit, which
employs Reason and Passion
and creates a whole from the
triumvirate.
Aristotle gave us the analogy
of a syllable in the Nicomachean Ethics to illustrate the
notion of a whole composed of
inseparable parts. A syllable is
visually composed of separate
letters but is considered a
whole when spoken. Take the
first syllable of the word “mem
ory,” for example. If you sound
it out slowly you’ll hear that the
continuity of sound requires
that each utterance be shaped
by the following letter. Sound
ing out each letter individually
does not a syllable make. In this
way the syllable is a whole com
posed of parts that are harmo
niously united.
Mr. Sachs drew on this analo
gy to talk about the soul as
being composed of universal
Reason, generic Passions, and
distinctive Spirit. In a harmo
nious unity of parts, the Spirit
interacts with the Passions as
an impetus to action and uses
�{From the Bell Towers}
3
St. John’s Education
A Model for Myanmar
Seattle University professors Corinne Painter, Bort Hopkins,
AND Christian Lotz
discuss
Ancient Philosophy with Annapolis
TUTOR Joe Sachs (center).
Reason as a guide for action.
The Spirit, then, is the source
of practical judgment in our
daily affairs. Greatness of soul,
brought about by the Spirit’s
dialectic movement in which it
first attains, then disdains, the
rewards of virtue and honor,
becomes the distinctive differ
ence that leads to a correct
sense of one’s own self-worth,
right action, and a happy life.
Readings from other visiting
lecturers and Seattle University
professors and students were
similarly interesting and
informative. For instance. Vil
lanova University professor
Walter Brogan examined the
kinship between practical and
theoretical philosophy as illus
trated with Aristotle’s notion of
friendship. Seattle University
was well represented by several
professors from its Philosophy
department. Licia Carlson pre
sented a holistic picture of
ancient Greek music, and con
cluded with the discovery that
philosophy is a form of music
in itself. Christian Lotz, also a
professor at Seattle University,
simultaneously entertained
and informed with his power
point presentation on the
important example of Dio
genes, who practiced philoso
phy in a wholly public life
(eating, sleeping, and philoso
phizing in the marketplace)
instead of exclusive institutions
and academies.
With these and other fine
expositions, the 7th Annual
Philosophy Conference was
considered a success by its
organizers and attendees.
Several St. John’s alumni were
in attendance to hear Mr. Sachs
speak, including Bill Boon
(A80), Diana Klatt (A89), and
Nina Tosti (A89). The Philoso
phy Club at Seattle University
organized this annual confer
ence to give students and pro
fessors the opportunity to pres
ent their work to an audience
of colleagues, peers, and the
general public.
—wthMinh. Stickford (SFoi)
Educators from Myanmar (for
merly knovra as Burma) visited
the Annapolis campus last
spring, attending sophomore
seminars on Macbeth and
Descartes’s Discourse on
Method, freshman lab, junior
mathematics tutorials, a senior
language tutorial on Flannery
O’Connor, and a senior oral.
“I was asked to help them
understand how we teach and
learn together at St. John’s,”
says tutor John Verdi, who
organized their visit at the col
lege. “They are especially
interested in how tutors help
each other to become better
teachers of discussion classes,
and how students learn to sup
port their positions with rea
soned arguments.” The visit
was coordinated by Dorothy
Guyot, a former tutor who is
currently working with
Burmese educators through a
non-profit organization, the
Myanmar Foundation for Ana
lytic Education.
Myanmar became isolated
from the outside world in
196a, when its military gov
ernment shut off most
exchange in commerce, the
arts, and education. New
books are scarce and those
that arrive are photocopied;
Burmese visitors Khin Maung
Win and Khin Ma Ma
{The College- St. John’s College ■ Summer 2002 }
most academics have not been
able to receive journals for a
long time. The country has
begun to encourage tourism
and other types of interaction
with the rest of the world.
Dr. Khin Maung Win, who
earned his PhD at Yale and
went on to become professor
of philosophy at Yangon Uni
versity and then Minister of
Education and Ambassador to
France and India, came to
observe St. John’s along with
his daughter Dr. Khin Ma Ma,
who earned her medical
degree at Yangon University
and now practices medicine in
Mandalay.
He hopes that what he
learned in his U.S. visit can be
used to lay the groundwork
for new modes of faculty
development in higher educa
tion and a new program to
prepare high school graduates
to study in the U.S. “Seminars
are very important to train
future citizens,” says Dr. Khin
Maung Win. “A modern socie
ty needs people to have dis
cussions... In Myanmar, tradi
tionally teachers are very
highly respected. There is a
saying ‘when the teacher says
the sun rises in the west, it
must be true.’ Students don’t
ask questions.”
Introducing the St. John’s
pedagogy of student-led learn
ing in Myanmar will not be
easy, according to Matthew
Ting, a 200a Annapolis grad
uate of Burmese descent. As
an American, Ting says, “I
have a tendency to open my
mouth and not shut it. But
some of my cousins that were
raised in Burma are quiet.
And a lot of St. John’s educa
tion is just getting people to
talk.” 4—BY
Beth Schulman
�{From the Bell Towers}
4
Announcements
The students
Annapolis rising senior
Aaron McLean received
Honorable Mention for a
paper submitted to the Elie
Wiesel Ethics Essay contest, a
national competition spon
sored by the Elie Wiesel Foun
dation for Humanity. Mr.
McLean’s essay is entitled
“On the Combing of Hair in
Herodotus.” The essay is post
ed on the Foundation’s web
site at WWW. eliewieselfoundation. org.
The Elie Wiesel Prize in
Ethics Essay Contest is an
annual competition open to
undergraduate juniors and
seniors in the U.S. and Cana
da, designed to challenge col
lege students to analyze
urgent ethical issues con
fronting them. Students are
encouraged to write thought
provoking, personal essays.
All submissions are judged by
a committee of scholars, and a
jury that includes Nobel laure
ate Elie Wiesel decides the
winners.
Andrew Hui, of Garland,
Texas, who graduated from
Annapolis in May, received a
Jack Kent Cooke scholarship
for graduate study. The award
covers full tuition, expenses,
travel, and a stipend, and is
renewable for up to six years.
A first-generation immi
grant from Hong Kong, Mr.
Hui came with his family to
America the summer of the
Tienamen Square incident.
His parents operate a retail
aquarium in Garland, where
he has worked over school
vacations. Mr. Hui plans to
study sacred music and com
parative literature, probably
at Yale. He is interested in the
religious influences in Dante,
Milton, and Racine and will
examine how they manage to
encompass Greek mythology
in a Christian worldview.
Officer and Staff
Appointments
Under an administrative change
in the structure of the college,
Jeff Bishop (HA99), formerly
vice president for advancement
in Annapolis, has been appoint
ed vice president for college
wide advancement. He will
coordinate fundraising efforts
and external relations for St.
John’s and will travel between
the two campuses. On the west
ern campus, Michael Franco
Grecian
has been appointed vice presi
dent for advancement, Santa
Fe. Mr. Franco formerly held
advancement positions at
Rhode Island School of Design,
the University of Rochester, and
Boston College. Barbara
Goyette (Ay3) has been
appointed vice president for
advancement, Annapolis. For
the past eightyears, she has
served as director of public rela
tions and publications (aka
communications) in Annapolis.
Jo Ann Mattson (A87) has
been appointed director of
alumni activities in Annapolis.
women, an illustration by the new
Alumni Director,
Jo Ann Mattson, A87 decorated last year’s Homecoming brochure.
{The College. St. John’s College ■ Summer 2002 }
She replaces Roberta Gable
(A78), who is now director of
placement. Ms. Mattson is a
teacher, musician, and artist.
She drew the spoofs of Greek
statues that decorated last
year’s Homecoming and Cro
quet weekend brochures.
Marline Marquez Scally
has been named registrar in
Santa Fe. She formerly worked
at the Santa Fe Waldorf School,
where she played many roles:
Spanish language teacher,
events coordinator, develop
ment coordinator, faculty chair,
member of several boards,
administrative council mem
ber, admissions director, and
college member (comparable to
the SJC Instruction Commit
tee). Ms. Marquez Scally
received her BA from College
of Notre Dame (Calif.) and pur
sued an MAT at Trinity College
in Washington, D.C.
Rosemary Harty has been
appointed director of communi
cations in Annapohs. She held a
similar position at the Universi
ty of Baltimore, and has worked
on public relations and publica
tions at Catholic University
(Washington, D.C.) and the
University of Dayton. She was a
newspaper reporter for to years
prior to working in higher edu
cation. As one of her duties she
will become editor of The
College magazine, replacing
Barbara Goyette.
David Pierotti has been
appointed Entering Director of
Laboratories in Santa Fe. He
will work closely with current
director Hans von Briesen for
the coming year. Mr. Pierotti
has been working in the fields
of environmental science
research and education for the
past 35 years and has also been a
consultant with a number of
governmental and commercial
laboratories. Some of the agen
cies with which he has worked
include the EPA, NASA, the
Cahfornia Air Resources Board,
and the National Academy of
Sciences - National Research
Council.
�{From
Stafford loans______________
As reported in the last issue of
The College, now is a great time
to consolidate student loans.
For alumni with loans from sev
eral different colleges, or from
undergraduate and graduate
study, this option should be
considered, according to Bryan
Valentine, treasurer in Santa
Fe. When student loans are
consolidated, the rate is locked
in, rather than the rate being
re-set each July as it is in the
normal repayment cycle. Rates
for Stafford loans went to
4.625% on July I. Information
on student loan rates can be
found at www.staffordloan.com
(click on “consolidation”).
Changes on the board________
The St. John’s Board of Visi
tors and Governors has a new
chair, new officers, and several
new members. Ray Cave (A48)
is serving as chairman of the
Board. Cave was the editorial
director of Time, Inc., and has
been a long-time member of
the Board and supporter of the
college. He was co-chair of The
Campaign for Our Fourth Cen
tury. Greg Curtis has com
pleted his tenure as chair; he
remains an active member of
the Board. Stewart Green
field (A53) and Jonathan
Zavin (A68) are serving as vice
chairs. Jeremy Shamos,
(SFGI76) is serving as secre
tary. This marks the first time
in memory that all officers of
the Board of Visitors and Gov
ernors are alumni of the col
lege.
New members of the Board
are Jaune Evans (with the Lannan Foundation), Richard
Hoskins (an attorney with the
Chicago firm of Schiff Hardin
& Waite), Roger Kimball
(with The New Criterion),
Mark Middlebrook (A83),
and Theodore Rogers (with
American Industrial Partners).
the
Bell Towers}
Shared Identities in Physics,
Philosophy, andLiteratureyta&
published by MIT Press in Feb
ruary. An article, “Quantum
Identity,” appeared in the MayJune 2002 issue oiAmerican
Scientist. In the article, he
addresses some of the ques
tions that arise when thinking
about quantum mechanicsespecially the unusual conse
quences of “like particles being
completely indistinguishable
from one another.”
“Bacon’s Proof; The Career
and Controversies of Edward
Teller” is a review of Teller’s
memoirs written by Annapolis
tutor Adam Schulman and
published in the spring 2002
issue of “The National Inter
est.” A physicist who worked on
the Manhattan project. Teller
was one of the European theo
retical physicists who “laid the
foundations of quantum
mechanics.” Schulman con
nects the physics involved in
5
the making of the atomic bomb
with Bacon’s notion that scien
tists “would secure and aug
ment their prestige in socie
ty...by the mastery of nature
that their practicable science
would confer on other men.
Bacon predicted that the fruits
of the new science would
include not only inventions for
the relief of human misery but
also weapons of immense
destructive power.”
Annapohs tutor emeritus and
former dean CuRTis Wilson
was honored in April with a
festschrift organized by the Dibner Institute, an international
center for advanced research in
the history of science and tech
nology established in 1992 at
the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT). Held at
the Annapolis campus, the
festschrift featured talks,
demonstrations, and tributes to
Mr. Wilson, who was honored
for his role as an eminent histo
rian of science. George Smith,
a professor at Tufts, noted that
Mr. Wilson “has done far more
than anyone else to provide all
of us with a deep understand
ing of the three centuries of
orbital astronomy from Kepler
through Simon Newcomb.”
The weekend also featured a
lecture by Noel Swerdlow of the
University of Chicago on “Sci
entific Cosmologies” that
focused on our understanding
of Ptolemy. Other presenters
included Bill Donohue (A67),
of the Green Lion Press, who
spoke about the section in
Kepler’s manuscript where he
comes to the realization that
orbits are elliptical; James
Voelkel of the Dibner Institute;
Dana Densmore (A65), of the
Green Lion Press; and David
DeVorkin of the Smithsonian
Institution. A surprise finale to
the weekend was a musical
presentation by Santa Fe tutor
Peter Pesic.
The Tutors_________________
Santa Fe tutor Peter Pesic has
a new book out. Seeing Double:
Spring tradition
for
GIs: At
the
Graduate Institute dinner
in
Santa Fe,
WEEK ACTIVITIES, MaRY AnN ClEAN TOASTS HER COLLEAGUES AND TUTORS.
{The College. St. John’s College - Summer 2002 }
part of
Commencement
�6
A Congress
OF Johnnies
Homecoming in
Annapolis is setfor
October 4-6.
JoAnn Mattson {A87), the new
Director of Alumni Activities in
Annapolis, will kick off the fes
tivities this fall in a personal
way: she’s hosting a Friday
evening barhecue (with her hus
band Walter Mattson, A87) for
the fifteenth year reunion class,
the redoubtable Class of r987
Annapolis. But then she’ll hus
tle back to campus to preside
over a Homecoming filled with
events not only for reunion
classes but for all and sundry
who return to Annapolis when
they hear a party’s going on.
Eva Brann (HA89) will deliv
er the Class of ’94 Homecoming
Lecture at 8:15 Friday evening
(not that any alumni need to be
reminded of the time for lec
ture), in the newly refurbished
FSK Auditorium. After lecture
alumni will follow their lights,
either to the Question Period,
to a reception in the dining hall
with the Class of 2003, or to the
Boathouse, where a traditional
boathouse rock party will evoke
The Cave, but in a nice way.
Saturday morning brings a
cavalcade of seminars, on read
ings from Plato to Emerson,
from Dostoevsky to Wallace
Stegner. After the big Homecoming Picnic down by the
sycamore trees, all are invited to
the Annual Meeting of the
Alumni Association, where
tutors emeriti John Sarkissian
and Robert Williamson, and
longtime creator of lab equip
ment Al Toft, will be made Hon
orary Alumni. Annapolis Presi
dent Chris Nelson (SF70),
Annapolis Dean Harvey Flaumenhaft, and Alumni Associa
tion President Glenda H.
Eoyang (SF76) will give reports.
{From the Bell Towers}
and the Alumni Association
elections will be held.
After the Annual Meeting
there’s a wide variety of diver
sions around campus: a Mitchell
Gallery Tour (the exhibition
will be “The Sweet Uses of
Adversity: Images of the Bibli
cal Job”), Freshman Chorus
Revisited (led by Tom May), a
Pick-up Basketball Extravagan
za sponsored by the Classes of
1987 and 1988, the traditional
Soccer Classic (us against
them), and a happily crowded
Bookstore Autograph Party,
where ro faculty and alumni
authors will autograph their
wares, from Complexity and
Analysis (Stewart Umphrey) to
The Golden Age: A Romance of
the Far Future (John Wright,
A84), from Strategic Renais
sance: New Thinking and Inno
vative Tools to Create Great
Corporate Strategies Using
Insightsfrom History and Sci
ence (Evan Dudik, A72) to The
Shape ofan Ear (Elliott Zucker
man, HA95).
All reconvene in McDowell at
6:00 for the cocktail party,
which stretches throughout the
first two floors of the building,
with the core party in the Great
Hall, and reunion class gettogethers in classrooms.
Thence to Randall Hall for the
Homecoming Banquet, where
the reunion classes will offer
toasts, and two members of the
class of 1967, Candace Brightman and Howard Zeiderman,
will be given the Alumni Associ
ation Award of Merit.
Those with true virtue and
endurance will then repair to
McDowell, where two parties
will parse them according to
their taste: in the coffee shop,
yet another cave-like rock party,
this one with, more appropri
ately, no water view; in the
Great Hall, a waltz party spon
sored by the class of 197a, with
floral decorations (reminiscent
of Rose Cotillions), and Elhott
Zuckerman at the piano. (Yes,
there will also be swing music
for you swingers.)
Finally, the traditional Presi
dent’s Brunch will be held on
Sunday, with this innovation:
we’re moving the apostrophe
and this year calling it the Pres
idents’ Brunch, since Santa Fe
President John Balkcom
(SFGIoo) will be in town to join
Annapolis President Chris
Nelson (SF70) in hosting the
brunch at his home in Wardour.
Interspersed throughout the
SiDDiQ Khan,
weekend into all these general
events are special shindigs for
the reunion classes, all the
years ending in seven or two:
1937,1942,1947, etc. through
t997- Check the Homecoming
brochure (with McDowell on
the front cover) for details, reg
istration form, everything you
need to know about Homecom
ing and some fine photos
besides.
artist and pottery instructor on the
Santa Fe
CAMPUS, POSES WITH SOME OF HIS CREATIONS. ThE FACULTY AND StAFF
Art Show, held every spring,
features paintings, drawings,
PHOTOGRAPHY AND TEXTILES AS WELL AS POTTERY.
{The C o l l e c, e ■ St. John ’5 College . Summer 2002 }
�{From
Future
Farmer of
Annapolis
As a sophomore, Justin Naylor
(A02) worked in the college
archives processing the papers
of New Program founder
Stringfellow Barr. Among the
hundreds of Barr’s documents
that Naylor indexed were those
that explored world govern
ment, higher education, for
eign policy, and rehgion. And
gardening.
Though it’s not on the pro
gram, Johnnies might be inter
ested to know that Barr is the
author of The Kitchen Garden
Book, written in 1956 when
Barr was teaching at the Uni
versity of Virginia. The book,
subtitled “Vegetables from
Seed to Table,” is part essay,
part instruction manual, and
part cookbook. It covers soil
preparation and garden plan
ning in addition to detailed
sections devoted to 3a different
vegetables, from the humble
turnip to the popular tomato.
“Barr was a lifelong dedicated
gardener,” says Naylor. “His
brother James was a farmer. I
sense Barr was interested in
farming in the Jeffersonian tra
dition-small scale agriculture,
the culture around agriculture,
the kind of citizen it pro
duced.”
Around the time that Naylor
was reading Barr’s book, Masao
Imamura’s (AGI99) wife, Jack
ie, recommended that Naylor
read Ehot Coleman’s The New
Organic Grower and several
other books that fed his interest
in agriculture and environmen
tal sustainability. Interest led to
endeavor. In r999, Naylor took
a year off from St. John’s to
serve a lo-month apprentice
ship on a small-scale, six-acre
organic farm that raised mixed
vegetables in Delaware.
When he returned to the col
lege, he started a gardening
the
Bell Towers}
club. Along with about ten
other Johnnies (including
Librarian Lisa Richmond), he
built seven 25-foot beds and
three ro-foot beds on back cam
pus between the tennis courts
and King George Street. Work
ing mainly on Saturday and
Sunday mornings, the club
members grow spinach, peas,
tomatoes, peppers, melons,
cucumbers, lettuce, marigolds,
cosmos, and sunflowers. At any
given time, between 5 and 10
students are actively involved
in the work-a respectable
showing on a campus of 450.
Naylor likens the appeal of
gardening to that of the gym or
the woodshop: When you spend
so much time thinking, you
need to find an outlet for doing.
“The gardening club meets a
lot of needs,” says Naylor.
“Club members are interested
in working with plants, work
ing outside, growing food, and
working with their hands.”
This spring the gardening
club teamed up with the envi
ronmental club to sponsor a
talk by Brian Halweil, a
research associate at the World
watch Institute (a policy
research organization that
focuses on emerging global
problems and the hnks between
the world economy and its envi
ronmental support systems).
“Halweil focussed his talk
around the two major claims of
biotech companies: that
biotech crops are necessary to
make agriculture sustainable
and that they are necessary for
feeding the world’s growing
population. Both of these
claims are highly emotionally
charged and are difficult to be
against,” explains Naylor.
“Brian’s approach was to look
at what has actually been pro
duced by these biotech compa
nies and to show that there is a
disconnect between their claims
and actual practices. For exam
ple, the few biotech crops
released so far have, if anything,
increased chemical usage and
are thus less sustainable.
{The College.
Sr.
Agricultural
7
sustainability interests
Justin Naylor,
shown
HERE WITH THE COLLEGE GARDEN HERBS.
“Halweil also made the case
for an ecologically-based agri
culture, and used as a case study
a particularly noxious weed in
Africa that has not been dealt
with adequately using conven
tional chemical means. He
pointed out, however, that this
weed is only a problem in
depleted, over-farmed soils. In
soils that have been properly
cared for, this super-weed is
simply not a problem.”
As Naylor learns about mod
ern approaches to agricultural
sustainability, he says that in
some ways, not much has
changed since the publication
of Barr’s book. “He was a
thoughtful advocate of organic
agriculture when it was consid
ered a world of hippies and
freaks,” Naylor says, reading a
relevant passage:
“There is a ferocious war of
words on between organic
farmers and those who depend
on chemicals. The case for
organic gardening has made
great progress; the proof is
that more and more of its
opponents have begun to argue
that both methods are needed.
The case would have pro
gressed even faster if cranks
had not overstated it.”
John ’5 College • Summer 2002 }
Naylor praises The Kitchen
Garden Book and recommends
it to anyone working the earth.
“Even if it weren’t by Barr,” he
says, “it would still be a worthy
book on my shelf.”
Newly graduated, Naylor
continues to pursue his inter
est in agriculture. With the
help of a USDA loan, he is rent
ing four acres on a property
adjacent to the farm he worked
on last summer. His first crops
should be out next spring.
BY SUS3AN
Borden
(A87)
The Garden
Bookshelf
Naylor recommends these books
to all Johnnies with an interest
in gardens:
The New Organic Grower
by Eliot Coleman
Four Season Harvest
by Eliot Coleman
7'he Kitchen Garden Book
by Stringfellow Barr
Heirloom Vegetable Gardening
by William Woys Weaver
Botanyfor Gardeners
by Brian Capon
�{From the Bell Towers}
8
Philanthropia Brings
Reality to Advancement
How many Johnnies does it take to raise
$12, ooo? Fifteen—if they Je juniors
volunteering their services to help out
Reality Weekend.
In the Philanthropia spirit of
alumni working on alumni
fundraising, the Annapolis
Reality archon, Justin Jones
(A03) put together a team of
pre-alumni (St. John’s juniors)
to conduct an advancement
office phonathon. In
exchange for their help,
advancement donated $500
to Reality.
The April 23 phonathon
proved a resounding success,
with 457 calls made in 3 hours
raising $12,691 dollars (so farmore checks continue to come
in). Maggie Griffin, Director of
the Annual Fund in Annapolis,
says that the most impressive
statistic for the phonathon was
the number of gifts made in the
weeks following the phonathon
when messages the students
left on answering machines
were returned by enthusiastic
alumni. Of 331 messages left.
56 have already sent checks.
“That number is absolutely
astounding! ” says Griffin.
“The students delivered the St.
John’s message so effectivelythe alumni really responded to
them.”
By the end of the night, stu
dents were asking about vol
unteering for the next
phonathon and seeking stu
dent aide positions in the
advancement office. “And
they were good,” says
Advancement Officer Mary
Simmons. “There were quite a
few we would have loved to
hire on the spot.”
Another positive effect of
the phonathon will be felt this
coming year as the junior class
begins to form the senior class
gift committee. Perhaps a
repeat of Santa Fe’s senior
class triumph (see page 9) is
in the making.
As PART OF PhILANTHOPIA’s EFFORT TO INSTILL AWARENESS OF ALUMNI
FUNDRAISING IN THE STUDENTS AT SaNTA Fe (wHO ARE, AFTER ALL,
THE ALUMNI OF THE FUTURE) , THE GROUP BROUGHT 6OO KrISPY KrEME
DOUGHNUTS TO CAMPUS THE MORNING BEFORE REALITY. STUDENTS
BLEARY-EYED AFTER A NIGHT OF FINISHING UP PAPERS AND FACULTY
WHO ARRIVED EARLY FOR THEIR CLASSES AGREED—DOUGHNUTS AND
COFFEE MAKE FOR A HAPPY BEGINNING TO ANY DAY, PARTICULARLY THE
FIRST DAY OF “REALITY.”
Letters
Winter Warfare_____________
On page 16 of the Winter/Spring
2002 issue of The College, there
is a winter scene of Annapohs. In
that photo of “Winter Warfare,”
I am off stage left with my friend
Matt. Matt had the good arm.
The targets are Liz Stuck and
Wendy LeWin, both freshmen in
1977-1978, which should date the
picture more accurately. Both
were from Minnesota, I think,
two of three Minnesota girls
(Marian Sharpe, from Pine Gity,
being #3) that started that year,
and therefore impervious to win
ter.
- David Nau, A8i
Liberty Bell________________
Students
delivering the message about the college’s needs were
HEARD LOUD AND CLEAR BY ALUMNI.
Kudos to St. John’s for refurbish
ing the Liberty Bell rephca (Win
{The College - St. John’s College ■ Summer 2002 }
ter/ Spring issue). This symbol of
our democracy has an even
greater significance since 9/11.
As one of the school children who
contributed pennies for the yoke
of the beU 50 years ago, I have
always had a particular fondness
for the beU. I am pleased and
proud of the stewardship the col
lege has provided this great
emblem of our freedom.
-Ron McGuirk , A6o
More Calendar Ids
_______
In the Philanthropia Calendar
for 2002,1 can identify the gui
tar players pictured for Octo
ber. Linda Stromberg was at
SJC (Santa Fe) from 1973 to
1975. Later she attended Anti
och College and earned a
degree in biology, I think. With
her might be Jim Shea (based
on the hair), who began with
the same class.
-Sheri Anderson, SF78
�{From the Bell Towers}
The One
Hundred
Percent
Solution
February, Paula Maynes
{SF77), a member of Pbilanthropia (the alumni group that
encourages financial support
for the college), spoke to the
seniors about life after St.
John’s. The class then dis
cussed what changes they
would like to make at the college-from faculty compensa
tion to scholarship support-if
money were no object. By the
end of the event, they zeroed
in on the film collection as
their gift.
On the day of Commence
ment, the seniors were ready to
celebrate their success. Com
mittee members Emma Wells
and Sara Abercrombie stepped
forward to present Balkcom
with the certificate commemo
rating the gift, as well as their
class’s new record for partici
pation. “There’s one thing
they can be certain of,” says
Santa Fe Annual Fund Director
Ginger Roherty. “It’s a record
that can be equaled, but it will
never be broken.”
The Santa Fe class of
2002 has set a new
standardfor giving.
Who J next to meet
the challenge?
On the wall of President John
Balkcom’s Santa Fe office
hangs a certificate he
received at Commencement:
“The Senior Class Gift: on
behalf of eighty-seven gradu
ating seniors, each of whom
made a contribution,” it
reads. The certificate com
memorates not just the gift,
but the story behind the gift.
The class is the first to
achieve 100% participation
in a St. John’s fundraising
effort. Each of the graduates
contributed to the nearly
$3000 collected so far for the
gift-a classic film collection
for the Meem Library.
Work on the project began
early in the year when seven
seniors- Sara Abercrombie,
Erik Barber, Jessica Godden,
Maria Goena, Katherine
Greco, Matt Reiter, and Emma
Wells-stepped forward to form
the Senior Class Gift Commit
tee. The kickoff event was a
party at the Cowgirl Hall of
Fame, a local hang-out, where
committee members explained
the annual fund. In December,
before the winter ball, seniors
were invited to a reception at
the president’s house, where
the committee provided
eggnog and appetizers and
repeated the message of the
role of alumni in the financial
workings of the college.
At a Valentine’s Day party in
Exciting times
in the mailroom:
Renzo BrundelRe, Michael Sullivan, and Michael Tereby held
COVETED STUDENT AIDE POSITIONS IN THE MAILROOM LAST YEAR AS PART OF THEIR FINANCIAL AlD PACKAGE.
Financial Aid Factoids
• Financial aid at St. John’s is
admissions bhnd and need
based. Admissions blind
means that students are
admitted to the college
regardless of whether they
apply for financial aid or
not-their family’s financial
status is not a factor in their
admission. Need-based
means that the college con
siders only the family’s and
student’s income in granti
ng aid and does not offer
aid to various categories of
students (trombone-playing
triathletes, perhaps?) to fill
the class with “desirable”
students.
• St. John’s attempts to
offer an aid package that
meets the demonstrated
needs of students. But,
since the college budget is
finite, not every student
can receive 100% of the
funds they need. Applying
early in the cycle helps
assure that students
receive an optimal pack
age. Students are some
times placed on a waiting
list if the money available
for student aid has already
been allocated.
{The College- St. John’s College ■ Summer 2002 }
• Students receive a package
with some or all of the
following components:
St. John’s College grant.
Federal work-study posi
tion (student aide job), and
loan. Many students seek
scholarships and fellow
ships independently.
• In 2001-2003, the average
aid package was $20,762.
(Tuition for the year was
about $25,000.)
• 50 % of students on finan
cial aid last year had an
annual family income of
less than $60,000.
• About 50% of students on
both campuses received
financial aid from the
college last year.
�{Johnnies
on
Justice}
CRIME
and
PUNISHMENT
Five alumni who work in thefield tell the real story behind the drama ofcriminaljustice.
Wi Sus3AN Borden, A87
A woman lies in waitfor her husband who
has just returnedfrom a long trip; she
kills him as he relaxes in the tub. A thief
is sentenced to be chained to a mountain;
each day an eagle devours his newly
regenerated liver.
rom the bloodbath of Clytemnestra to
Prometheus bound, crime and punishment
have long proved inspirational for the
imagination of writers. This ancient well
spring continues to inspire the artists of
our modern world. Literature on crime and
punishment is a mainstay of bestseller lists.
Television-“Homicide,” “Law and Order,”
“The People’s Court”-feeds our hunger
for the subject. Movies-Ziopc, Twelve Angry Afczz-sometimes
offer a more thoughtful examination.
A criminal act is the essence of drama: man opposes man in con
flict’s barest form. The killer stalks his prey. The thief plots
against the land owner. Even after the crime is committed, oppo
sition is at the heart of the system; The defense lawyer fights the
prosecuting attorney. The witness defies the judge. The guard
beats the prisoner.
These are the antitheses through which we’ve learned to view
crime and punishment. But are they valid?
St. John’s alumni who work in the field of criminal justice sug
gest they are not. Far removed from the seminar table and discus
sions of justice, motive, and retribution, alumni who work with
criminals confront these issues directly. As the dramatic interplay
of crime and punishment come together in the province ofjustice,
it is justice’s role to resolve, rather than heighten that drama. Jus
tice is society’s mechanism for placing an irrational act into a
rational context. Once a crime is assigned its proper weight, the
scales of justice return to balance and society is able to function.
Through punishment, the criminal justice system imposes a
rationality on the irrational world of crime. This, for the most
part, is too thoughtful a process to allow for much drama.
The Criminal Mind
A desperate young man plans the perfect
crime—the murder of a despicable pawn
broker, an old woman no one loves and no
one will mourn. Is it notjust, he reasons,
for a man ofgenius to commit such a
crime, to transgress moral law—if it will
ultimately benefit humanity?
—publisher’s copy {Bantam Classics)
Punishment
for Dostoevsky’s Crime and
The idea of the criminal mind-from Smerdyakov to Hannibal
Lechter-both fascinates and repels. What must it be like, we thrill
to imagine, to loose ourselves from the bonds of morals, to think
the unthinkable, to plan the forbidden, to perform the act that
will forever set us apart from our fellow man?
{The College- St. John’s College • Summer 2002 }
�{The College- St. John’s College • Summer 200s )
�T2,
{Johnnies on Justice}
'Td hate to live in a country in which 50 % ofthe
people who are arrested are innocent. ”
-Elizabeth Unger Carlyle(A73)
Criminal
Elizabeth Unger Carlyle (A73), a criminal defense lawyer who
lives in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, has regular and close associa
tion with the criminal mind. She is neither repelled by her clients
nor fascinated by their misdeeds. “I think there’s a group of peo
ple, a sad group, who really perceive themselves as powerless and
at the mercy of circumstances,” she explains. “They get into bad
situations by not thinking more than one step ahead and they end
In “You Can’t Get Away with Murder,” Bogie’s
defense lawyer
“I spend a lot of time reminding people that the people who
get into trouble are just like the people who don’t,” says Car
lyle. “In many ways it’s ‘there but for the grace of God go I.’ If
you took my current clientele and dressed them in suits instead
of prison clothes and took them to some casual restaurant
and interspersed them among the patrons, you couldn’t pick
them out. When people say ‘how can you deal with people who
character seems irredeemable: he’s a thief, douele-crosser, murderer, and blackmailer.
up in the middle of the burglary or the middle of the murder and
can’t tell you how they got there. A lot of people come to me say
ing, ‘I don’t know how this happened. Trouble always finds me.’
They don’t know how not to be found by trouble.”
David Johnson (A68), a probation officer for 30 years who
now teaches in the criminal justice department at the Universi
ty of Baltimore, says that addiction is often a factor: “Some
criminals are what we call sociopaths, but by and large I’ve
worked with people who have exercised bad judgment. A lot
of people who commit crimes have problems with substance
abuse or gambling. That causes them to have problems with the
law because first, their judgment is really poor and second,
they have a need for money. They resort to crime-to stealing or
dealing drugs.”
are guilty?’ I say, ‘don’t you ever make a mistake?’ I’ve got a
client now who managed to get himself ten years for selling
six grams of marijuana. That’s not a bigger mistake than most
people make.”
Order in the Court
Several young girls, caught in a minor
transgression, are unjustly accused of a
capital crime. In a trial poisoned by petty
suspicions, financial disputes, supersti
tion, and lovers' revenge, accusations fly
{The College- St. John’s College ■ Summer 2002 }
�{Johnnies on Justice}
13
and soon eighteen
citizens are brought—
unjustly—before the
court. Eleven of them
are put to death.
When exculpatory
evidence is presented
to the judges they
reject it, fearing it
willplace their earli
er verdicts in doubt.
In the end, seven
more innocentpeople
go to the gallows.
—PLOT SUMMARY, ARTHUR MilLEr’S
THE
Crucible
The scenes are replayed
every week on TV: Corrupt
police arrest the wrong man.
The prosecutor pulls out all the
stops in the relentless pursuit
of a guilty verdict. The jury fol
lows the lead of a misguided
foreman as the judge wearily
shakes her head.
However common these
scenes of injustice are in fiction
and drama, front-line profes
sionals say they are rare in real
life. From arrest through sen
tencing, those involved in the
U.S criminal justice system say
that, despite its flaws, it’s a sys
tem that works.
At first it seems strange when
Elizabeth Carlyle praises the
system hy saying that most of
the clients she defends are
guilty. But then she explains
why this is a good thing: “I’d
hate to live in a country in
which 50% of the people who
are arrested are innocent.” Still,
despite the guilt of most of her
clients, the system is set up to
work in their favor.
Suave detective Nick Charles, played by William Powell,
FOR BAD GUYS IN “AfTER THE ThIN MaN.”
{The College • St. John’s College • Summer 2002 }
looks
“Somebody said it’s better
for a hundred guilty people to
go free than for one innocent
person to be convicted,” says
Carlyle. “That’s the way the
system ought to be. But I don’t
think that guilty people often
sneak through. More than 90%
plead guilty. For those who go
to trial, there is a question of
their guilt. It’s not usually a
question that they’ll get off, but
that they’ll get off with less
than five years.”
Maureen Barden (A70), an
assistant U.S. attorney in
Philadelphia who works on gun
possession cases, says she’s
encouraged by what she sees in
court: “The jury system works.
In my experience of trying
cases, only a very small per
centage of the time do I think
jurors reach the wrong result.
They’re careful, thorough, they
think hard. It’s heartening to
be a part of that,”
Once the verdict is deter
mined, the judge steps in for
sentencing. Johnson, the crimi
nal justice professor, outlines
the aims of that process:
“There are four classic goals of
the corrections system: inca
pacitation, retribution, deter
rence, and rehabilitation. If
possible, the sentence meets all
four goals in the appropriate
measures for the particular
crime and individual. Incapaci
tation gets considered first.
Then, retribution: how much
punishment
the
person
deserves in addition to that.
Next is deterrence, and finally
rehabilitation.”
County Court Judge Pattie
Swift (SF82), who works in
rural Costilla County, Col
orado, finds that the goals fall
in a different order in her court.
She often relies on the deter
rence effect of prison. “There
are people who need the shock
of jail for a short period of time.
�{Johnnies on Justice}
14
''Judgment has two cups, a cup ofJustice and a cup ofmercy.
-David Johnson, A68, probation
I send them in for a week. Our local county jail is benign, but
still, they’re locked up and it’s frightening. This is useful for
some people who have committed DWIs before and didn’t take
it seriously.”
Swift turns to long-term incapacitation only as a last resort.
Her position limits her to passing a two-year sentence. “For
people with whom we’ve tried everything, the last ditch thing is
Peter Falk
is hitman
Abe “Kid Twist” Reles
in the
i960
victim and their families, and gathering information about the
accused’s prior record and social history to make an evaluation
and recommendation.
When he worked in probation, Johnson appreciated this
opportunity to influence the judge’s decision. “I always
remembered that judgment has two cups: a cup of justice and a
cup of mercy. How much of each does the defendant get?”
gangland flick
long-term jail to get them out of society. If they are unable to
change, if they have four DWIs, it’s the only thing you can do to
protect the public.”
Johnson discusses the problem of disparity in sentencing:
“In sentencing there are no rules to speak of and the judge has
virtually complete discretion. Somebody who’s convicted of
bank robbery in Brooklyn might get probation; for the same
crime in Texas he might get ao years. It’s an oddity because
everything is rule-driven up to the point of conviction. Once we
go to sentencing in criminal matters, the judge is supposed to
exercise the wisdom of Solomon.”
In today’s world, fortunately, Solomon has a consultant.
The probation officer conducts a presentence investigation for
the judge, reviewing the crime, interviewing the defendant and
chief
“Murder, Inc.”
Behind Bars
A man is sentenced to two years on a
southern chain gangfor a minor offense.
His rebellious manner is met with psycho
logical torment andphysical brutality.
The guards seem to enjoy their project of
breaking his spirit. In the end, they take
his life.
—PLOT SUMMARY OF THE 1967 MOVIE, CoOL HaND LuKE
{The College- St. John’s College • Summer 2002 }
�{JohnniesonJustice}
15
This is one area where, unfortunately, the movies have it
contraction of prisoner rights. With state budgets in the condi
right. Prison is often a hrutal place and prisoner rights are fre
tion they’re in, programs for offenders will be on hold or
quently disregarded. Even where efforts are made to protect
decreased.”
the inmates hoth physically and legally, the difficulties of man
Carlyle, the criminal defense attorney, shares Booker’s pes
aging a captive population have yet to he satisfactorily
simism and is concerned about how current policy will play out
addressed.
when prisoners return to society: “In my 25 years of practice,
Margaret Booker (SFGI94) directed a state prison library for
there’s been pretty much a complete turn from ‘incarceratefour years. She says that the system she worked in was set up to
punish-rehabilitate’ to ‘let’s show them how mad we are
protect the prisoners and their rights, hut it often didn’t work
and treat them like we’re mad for 20 years and then have them
as planned.
live next door to us.’ ”
“During my training I was told not to
And Justice For All
pay attention to the justice or injustice of
the offender’s act or sentence. Missouri
Criminals go free, justice
Cast of Characters
tells the same thing to all new offenders as
they enter reception and diagnostics:
proves to be not-so blind,
Maureen Barden (A70)
don’t talk about your crime to your peers;
and lawyers andjudges
the staff doesn’t need to know either. But
Assistant U.S. Attorney for the U.S.
that rarely works. Very few can keep their
make deals... exceptfor one
Department of Justice in Philadel
lives private to a degree that would keep
phia. Before becoming a lawyer she
young idealistic lawyer who
them safe or lessen the risks they face in
I worked on the investigation of the
prison.”
bucks the system while rep
Attica prison uprising and the Nison
In her own sphere of influence, Booker
I impeachment.
resenting a ruthless judge
saw real-life practice reveal the faulty pre
sumptions of a legal theory intended to
Maruaket Booker (SGI94)
accused of a brutal rape.
safeguard the inmates’ rights. “While
most offenders use the library for educa
—CAPSULE REVIEW OF THE I979 MOVIE, AnD JUSTICE
Library services coordinator for the
FOR All, from MoviesUnlimited.com
tion, entertainment, and enlightenment,
Missouri Department of Corrections
every offender in Missouri has access to
in Jefferson City from 1998 to 2001.
Unlike the corrupt cop, the cynical
legal materials,” she says. “This is the
She is now manager of the Kansas
lawyers, and the jaded judges that
state’s way of providing ‘access to courts,’
City, Missouri, Public Library, West
are so popular in today’s crime stories,
the requirement that offenders be able to
port Branch.
Johnnies in justice veer to the idealistic.
represent themselves in their appeals. In
When Johnson speaks of his career as a
Elizabeth Unger Carlyle (A73)
other states, access to courts is interpreted
probation officer, he says that the friend
differently,” Booker explains. “Some have
ships he’s maintained with people he’s
Criminal defense lawyer. She handles
attorneys who travel the system or public
supervised over the years are priceless
everything from speeding tickets to
librarians who do research for the inmates.
benefits.
murder trials, doing most of her work
Arizona just sold off a huge amount of legal
Swift treasures the times when defen
< with appeals and post-conviction
material and now provides paralegals who
dants who have complained bitterly about
remedies. She is married to the Rev.
travel a circuit across the state to assist
a sentence of alcohol treatment come
James Carlyle (A72).
offenders.”
back for review and say “thank you, it
Booker has a dim view of Missouri’s
David Johnson (A68)
really opened my eyes to see what was
approach. “I don’t think any sort of justice
wrong.”
is given through the collection of materi
Worked in criminal justice for over 30
Barden, who’s worked as a federal pros
als to those who might be innocent or have
years. Retired as chief of federal pro
ecutor on large scale fraud cases, says her
been tried inappropriately or irresponsi
bation for the state of Maryland, he
work gives her the opportunity to serve
bly. The information and organization is
teaches criminal justice at the Univer
justice. “In many cases, you’re vindicat
too complex, as is the court system, for
sity of Baltimore. He is married to
ing the rights of individuals who’ve been
the offender population on the whole to
Sally Johnson (A65).
defrauded. It’s very good when you can
navigate.”
get justice for somebody who has been
Pattie Swiff (SF82)
Booker is pessimistic about the state’s
stolen from or in another way injured. It’s
inclination to improve the system, given
a chance to do the right thing,” she says.
County court judge in Costilla County,
today’s political and economic climate.
“That’s the luxury of being on this side of
Colorado, and municipal judge for the
“When I started, prisoners were called
the courtroom: the interest of the govern
town of San Luis.
prisoners or inmates. Now they’re called
ment is to do justice. That’s not always
offenders. In the ’80s and ’90s we saw a
simple, but it is the goal.”
{The College -St John’s College • Summer 2002 }
�{Commencement}
COMMENCEMENT
2002
(Santa Fe)
Barbara Goyette, A73 (Annapolis)
BY Marissa Morrison, SFGIoa
AND
he graduating seniors-ioa in Annapolis
and 88 in Santa Fe-chose as their com
mencement speakers a military historian
and a novelist who has produced a series
of literary experiments. Rather than pres
ent opposing viewpoints on life or on the
St. John’s experience, the two gave sur
prisingly close send-offs to the graduates.
Their messages contrasted the education
a St. John’s graduate receives with the vapidness of many aspects
of modern culture, and both saw St. John’s as supplying the back
ground necessary for a beginning to a life devoted to questioning
and thinking.
The Importance of “The Human Thing” - Annapolis
At the 210th commencement in Annapolis, 102 undergraduates
and 36 Graduate Institute students
received their degrees. The day was
sunny and bright, the grass was
green, the air was still and cool as
the parents, family members, and
friends gathered on the front lawn.
Faculty and students processed
from the Great Hall to the click and
whir of cameras and the ceremonial
strains of the Carrollton Brass.
President Christopher Nelson
and Dean Harvey Flaumenhaft
announced the various prizes and
awards, including that for best sen
ior essay, which went to Katherine
Gehlberg for her essay “A Nature
Within and Without; An Inquiry
into the Evolution of the Moral
Sense.”
Seniors had chosen Victor Davis
Hanson, who teaches classics at the
University of California at Fresno
and has published books and
columns on military history, as the
commencement speaker.
Mr. Hanson stressed universal
human truths that are covered in the Program as those that the
graduates will draw upon wherever their lives carry them in the
future. “Most of you will ...enter the professions,” he said.
“Many-I have no doubt of it-shall become rich and powerful. But
I am also equally confident that such success will accrue more
because you shall be deft and experienced about what Thucydides
called ‘the human thing,’ and resigned about the way humans
think and act, rather than because you were simply adept at a par
ticular skill.”
In a perhaps unintended allusion to the famous (among John
nies) admissions proclamation “The following teachers will
return to St. John’s next year; Plato, Sophocles, Kant, Tolstoy,
etc.,” Mr. Hanson said that St. John’s has given the graduates “a
reservoir of learning from great men and women. These are your
intellectual mentors, your friends for life. Each hour, each day
from now to the end they will be there with you-to remind you,
chastise you, and enlighten that what you experience is neither
novel nor unique.”
And considering the great books
authors as mentors, and their
words as universal human truths,
Mr. Hanson suggested, is helpful in
evaluating current situations that
citizens need to understand.
“When others suggest that educat
ed citizens should not profess patri
otism or think of their culture as
unique and worth defending, you
will remind them of Aeschylus at
Marathon and Socrates at Delium.
And when you despair that men
with money, degrees, status, and
fame can be petty rather than
noble, and are as likely as the illit
erate and impoverished to steal and
defame, Juvenal, Dante, and Swift
will laugh along with you.” A St.
John’s education, he suggested,
makes those who have undergone it
“empirical and inductive, open to
truth when it comes from the
uncouth and enemies-and resist
ant to lies when they come from the
{The College- St. John’s College • Summer 2002 }
�{Commencement }
''Open to truth...resistant to lies.
Victor Davis Hanson
Eva Brann
leads the procession to front campus in
Annapolis (left),
while in
Santa Fe, Genevieve Giddings
LIGHTS THE PlACITA WITH HER SMILE (ABOVE).
{The College- St. John’s College ■ Summer 2002 }
17
�i8
{Commencement}
sweet and friends. You will not just pon
der and equivocate, but decide, judge,
and act.”
Mr. Hanson used an extended Homer
ic image to discuss what the future might
hold for the graduates, and what dangers.
He characterized their journey as like
that of Odysseus and referred to “suitors
feasting away at our society’s once ample
social capital and spiritual reserves” as
those the graduates would have to con
front. He warned against the Charybdis
of the Right, which he said “assures that
the university and education itself are
simply to be utilitarian and commercial
certifications of dexterity with spread
sheets, glibness with the law, or mere
master of regulations, tables, charts, and
graphs.” And he identified the Scylla of
the Left as “the idea, now almost univer
sal, that the purpose of education is ther
apeutic, to change what words mean, to deny how people act, to
create absolute equality of results, rather than of opportunity in
the here and now-or else!”
Acknowledging the power of education, Mr. Hanson urged the
audience to use wisdom wisely. He likened knowledge’s strength
to that of Tolkein’s One Ring, whose great power was so alluring
that it ruined lives and threatened races. “Education used foully
for a good cause, is nevertheless foul, and thus the cause not so
good after all. Remember instead the first and oldest command
ments of the humble Greeks-know yourself/nothing too much/
grow old learning.” He suggested that some time spent in smaU
pursuits-away from the bigness of our present age’s government,
corporations, and overriding materialism-is valuable. “Seek out,
or perhaps at least protect and enhance-if only for a year or two of
your odyssey-those sand bars and reefs that are washed over but
not quite, not quite yet
submerged-the love of
Greek and Latin, the
knowledge of the mason
and woodworker, the fami
ly nursery and small farm,
the horseman and the
shoemaker, the town of
2,000, and the art and
music of rural Ameri
ca...Like your Great
Books, these unobtrusive
people, things, and memories-forgotten by WalMart and unknown at
Blockbuster-also possess
wisdom-learning that we
need in our present hour
of peril against enemies
cruel and medieval.”
Mr. Hanson closed with a promise. As a
farmer, student of Latin and Greek, resi
dent of a rural community, writer, and
“as one who at times has failed at all that
and so much more stiU”-he promised to
join the graduates to “keep alive the
ancient education that we still know to be
good and necessary-and can alone keep
the melodious, but deadly. Sirens at bay.”
Points of Departure, Not the Journey’s
End - Santa Fe______________________
By graduation day in Santa Fe on May i8,
the fear and sadness that characterized
the early part of the academic year after
September ii had given way to a feeling of
jubilation. The brilliant sun shining
above the Meem Library Placita and a
lively commencement speech by John
Barth added to the bright spirit of the day.
Barth is a Johns Hopkins University professor emeritus and a nov
elist who delights in literary experimentalism while engaging read
ers with the power of his storytelling abilities.
In a speech titled “The Tragic View of Liberal Education,” Mr.
Barth praised the St. John’s program for permitting discourse
within a shared frame of reference richer and more stable than pop
ular culture-which is perhaps all the students at some departmen
talized institutions have in common. He also presented the down
side to an education based on a hmited selection of Great Books.
While attending Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Mr. Barth
often heard debates over the liberal arts program at nearby St.
John’s College in Annapolis. According to one half-serious opin
ion, “the problem with the Annapolis curriculum was that it left
out not only all the bad books-which, like bad art, may be indis
pensable to defining and
appreciating the good
hut also aU the arguably
great books that happen
to disagree with the ones
in the canon.” He noted
that no four-year under
graduate survey could
include all the books one
ought to read.
To
illustrate how
impossible it is for a stu
dent to actually read
everything, Mr. Barth
referred to one of his fel
low undergraduates who
was said to have done just
that. “To this day,” Mr.
Barth joked, “he is scarce
ly able to complete a sen
{The College- St. John’s College ■ Summer 2002 }
�{Commencement}
tence, much less publish a coherent essay,
because every word he utters sets off so
many synaptic hot-links in his mind that
he has difficulty getting from subject to
verb to object, astray in the hypertextuality of his splendid erudition.”
The tragedy of a liberal education,
according to Mr. Barth, lies in the real
ization that one cannot read-or learneverything. “Since time, attention, ener
gy, and opportunity are all finite, we
must radically exclude and delimit if we
are to learn anything at all well; yet in so
doing we may very possibly leave out
things that, had we discovered them or
they us, might have been keys to the
treasure that we were scarcely aware we
were seeking,” he said.
Mr. Barth lamented that only the books
he has actually read can make an impres Barth the novelist
sion on him. As a fiction writer, he wishes
that he could read every other written work. Without reading every
description of the dawn and the sea that has ever been recorded on
paper, how can he know whether his own descriptions are unique
and valuable? However, he comforts himself with the fact that the
number of possible word combinations, like the number of stars in
the galaxy, is “finite but astronomically large.”
Mr. Barth noted that the St. John’s program list is a good start
ing point for one’s education. The real reason for celebrating com
mencement is not the completion of an education, but rather the
start of a lifetime of exploring new ideas.
Santa Fe president John Balkcom gave an overview of the chal
lenges this academic year had brought, with September ii having
impacted our lives and the nature of our college community. Citing
Virginia Woolf, who wrote, “One of the signs of passing youth is
the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we
take our place among
them,” Mr. Balkcom noted
that what the faculty and
staff observed this year
was
the
emergence
of a greater sense of com
munity among all of our
learners. “We come to
gether to celebrate these
graduates for the learning
they have shared and the
community they have cre
ated, for their taking a
place now among the
wider community of this
human race.”
He made lighthearted
references to many sen
iors and Graduate Insti
{The College.
19
tute students he had encountered during
the year, and talked about community
events such as the holiday concert, the
presentation of Senior Essays in Febru
ary, and Reality Weekend-when hun
dreds of paper flowers decorated trees
and bushes throughout campus.
The commencement address of Santa
Fe Dean David Levine reminded stu
dents that hberal education is a great
gift. The college gives this gift, he said,
in the hope that its graduates will devel
op proportionally in relation to challeng
ing thinkers; experience inspiration in
their own capacities for original thought;
develop new capacities to ascend to
undiscovered places; become strength
ened in facing the toughest human ques
tions; grow their own sense of responsi
bility; become more self-resourceful; and
achieve a heightened fullness of inde
pendence. “Make us proud,” Mr. Levine urged the graduates.
“Honor this education with lives of distinction.”
The class of aooa included 88 candidates for the Bachelor of Arts
degree and 25 candidates for the Master of Arts in Liberal Arts
degree. The graduates hailed from 33 U.S. states, as well as from
Israel and Canada.
For the first time in the history of the college, the Senior Class
Gift Committee achieved 100% participation from all members of
the Class of 2002. Neither campus had ever accomplished this feat.
Ms. Abercrombie and Ms. Emma Wells presented the senior gift to
the president, accompanied by a swell of applause from the audi
ence, including loud accolades from class members. The class gift
will purchase The Classics Film Collection for Meem Library.
Graduates honored with awards and prizes included Benjamin
Lorch, who received the Medal for Academic Excellence. The
medal is offered by the
Board of Visitors and Gov
ernors and was presented
by board member Dick
Morris. Anna Canning
and
Marie-Monique
Wentzell shared the
Richard D. Weigle Prize
for the best senior essay.
Among the Graduate
Institute graduates, Court
ney Manson was acknowl
edged for her excellent
essay.
St. John’s College . Summer 200Z }
Thefull text ofboth comencement addresses is on
the web: www.sjca.edufor
Annapolis and www.sjcsf.edu
for Santa Fe.
�ao
{Campus Life}
REMEMBRANCES
OF PRANKS PAST
BY Sus3AN
Borden
(A87)
t’s a warm night in early spring.
Students sit in seminar reading
Euripides, Descartes, and Adam
Smith. They work their way
through the text and follow the
conversation closely, hut spirits
are running a little high. They’ve
heard the rumors, they’ve seen
the signs. Their minds occasion
ally drift. Is tonight the night?
As the first hour comes to a close, attention
is drawn outside the classroom. A door slams.
laughter bounces down the hall. A few minutes
later a team of seniors hursts through the door. Books slam shut,
tutors are escorted from the room. Senior prank has begun.
It wasn’t always like this. Senior prank started as a daytime
event; the prank was the seniors’ way of shutting down the col
lege. Over the years it has blossomed into a a4-hour ritual, begin
ning with the nighttime break-in, following with a skit and dance
party, and continuing the next day with games and a campus-wide
picnic for students, faculty, and staff.
For the original prank, pulled in 1964 and talked about to this
day, seniors removed all the chairs from the classrooms and tutor
offices and stored them in the crawl space in the basement of Mel
lon. Tutor Samuel Kutler (A54) remembers it well: “I walked to my
classroom in McDowell with a prospective freshman and her moth
er, who were scheduled to sit in on our mathematics tutorial. As we
entered the room, I told them to please be seated, but when I looked
up the students were sitting on the table. All chairs had been
removed from the entire building. I told the students that we were
behind and I would hold class anyway. Then President Weigle
appeared. He was not amused, and he announced that there would
be no classes until the chairs were returned. I shrugged my shoul
ders, turned to the mother and the prospective student, said that
there were some good liberal arts schools in Ohio, and went home.”
That simple prank unleashed a legacy of mischief that has
driven class after class to put time and energy into creating a
memorable prank.
The class of ’68 distinguished itself with a four-part prank:
all classrooms were locked from the inside, the lobby of FSK
was transformed into a used car lot, a thirty-foot purple flag
reading “Class of ’68” in red letters flew from the flagpole,
and-thepiece de resistance—nearly two dozen steel-belted radi
{The College.
St.
als were stacked on the flagpole, a technical
feat that was as challenging to remove as it
was to install.
The flagpole-tire stunt, explains Alec
Himwich, was the hrain child of David
Roberts. “He devised a contraption with two
wooden Vs oriented perpendicularly to a long
wood pole. One V was at the top of the pole and
the other somewhat helow and opposite the
first. On this pole were fasteners that corre
sponded to those on the rope used to raise and
lower the flag. The device was attached to the
rope and a tire was placed on the upper V.
Guide ropes were attached to the lower V. Then the whole thing
was raised up by means of the flag rope. During the hoisting, the
guide ropes were used for stability. When the tire finally was
above the top of the flag pole the guide ropes were used to orient
the tire so that when the device was lowered, the flag pole would
be inside the tire.
“The whole procedure was complicated by a gusty wind,”
recalls Himwich. “Also, the operators were not the steadiest
since some of them were already imbibing in anticipation of a day
of celebration.”
The class of ’75 produced an elaborate skit-“West Street
Story,” in which Tony sang “Pure Reason” to the tune of “Maria”
and Ben Milner (HA97) was portrayed as the campus’ Officer
Krupke. They also put bookplates that read “Gift of the class of
1975” in all the books in the King William Room.
Jason Walsh (A85) remembers the class of ’8a’s Alice in IForaderland prank: “It was quite remarkable. Amusement rides were
set up on lower back campus, seemingly while we were in semi
nar. Seminars were of course interrupted by the march hare,
Alice, and the hatter, who led us to the rabbit hole (in the audito
rium stage) down into the Wonderland that was set up in the hall
ways of the basement, through the now-deserted Mellon class
room hallways and out by the Planetarium to the waiting
amusements. It was remarkably choreographed and seemed
quite magical.”
“Underclassmen were required to dance the lobster quadrille
in FSK lobby,” recalls Peter Green (A84) of the Alice prank. “The
next day we played croquet using pink flamingoes for mallets.”
The 1984 prank took the Canterbury Tales as its theme. Sem
inars were interrupted by knights, nuns, maidens, monks, a
John’s College ■ Summer 2002
}
�ai
{Campus Life}
jester, and a barmaid wench.
Dan Knight and Duke Hugh
es converted the fireplace
room of the coffee shop into
an English tavern. Grady
Harris, as the Pardoner,
stood on the steps of the
quad presenting students
with penances for the seven
deadly sins. For the sin of
pride, they were told to
dance later that evening with
everyone who asked; for
sloth, they were to dance five
dances in a row. Minstrels
entertained the wayfarers
outside McDowell and lumi
naries lit the path from the
base of the quad to the gym.
There John Ertle presided as
archbishop and head of the
ecclesiastical court, charg
ing each tutor with a sin (see
sidebar).
For the class of ’88’s
Odyssey prank, class mem
bers built in secret an i8-foothigh Trojan Horse of wood,
chicken wire, and papier
mache. John Lavery and Greg
Ferguson constructed the
horse’s frame and shaped its
outlines with chicken wire.
Karin Johns supervised the
papier mache effort, using 75
pounds of flour and endless
reams of newspaper to sculpt
the body. Several dozen sen
iors worked on the project
under Johns’ direction.
Students led out of Mel
lon and McDowell for the
Annapolis’
class of
1988
built a papier mache
Trojan Horse to rule
THE QUAD on PRANK DAY.
Prank Skits: A Retrospective
g
by Chris Denny (Ag^)
I99IA:
“Operation Dorm Storm” Fielding Dupuy’s haunting portrayal of a crazed
army officer shocked 90’s audiences with its stark portrayal of a nuclear apoc
alypse, as well as a campus without Chase-Stone. The special effects of a cam
eraperson running forward while shooting with a Camcorder in order to simu
late a smart-bomb brought the cinematography of SJC Senior Pranks into a
new era of artistic brilliance. Rated PG13 (language, and lots of it).
i99aSF:
“Oscar Night” Matthew Kelty stars in a hilarious parody of Hollywood’s
wildest night of the year. Rated R (language, sexual situations and potty
humor involving large bowel movements).
T993A:
“It’s a Wonderful Life” Starring Tom Lind as Clarence and Millicent Roberts
J as God, this touching story involved Devin Rushing’s horrible nightmare of a
world in which SJC was transformed into an “overpriced basketball school.”
With Walter Sterling, Sr. reduced to Up-synching “Achy-Breaky Heart” at Mar
maduke’s and a demonic Andre Barbera (played by the dashing CoUn Meeder)
J bent on reducing Western Civilization to rubble, only the fearless James Beall
I can rescue SJC, and a terrorized Patricia Locke (Deirdre Crosse), from oblivI ion. Rated SJC (wicked nasty satire and monogrammed female gludii maximi).
{The College- St. John’s College • Summer 2002 }
start of tbat prank were con
fronted with the enormous
beast. Ele Hamburger (A87)
remembers its demise: “A
storm hit after the horse had
been up a few days. I remem
ber it being blown up so it
reared on its hind feet and
then collapsed.” However,
she adds, “I am not entirely
sure this is not a false memo
ry, since it is so cinematic in
my mind’s eye.”
The 2002 prank included
a return to the mischief
making aspect of the tradi
tion. Assistant Dean Judith
Seeger says that the seniors
sent letters to a number of
students saying that the state
of Maryland now required
random urine testing for
drugs. The letters were
accompanied by small paper
cups and recipients were
instructed to bring a sample
to the director of Student
Services by 3 p.m. on prank
day. Seeger reports that no
one showed up at the Student
Services office, but she
heard that several prankees
visited the health center that
day.
Pranksters also ticketed
every car in the college park
ing lots. “After a few calls from
disgruntled drivers, I walked
around and removed them
myself,” says Seeger. “Except
for the one on college presi
dent Chris Nelson’s car.”
�1
2,2
{Campus Life}
A BUDDHIST
IN THE BOOKSTORE
Bookstore manager Andrea dAmato
brings an awareness ofEetstern thought to Santa he.
hat makes a good college
!
bookstore? Surely, as with
t
any other kind of bookstore,
^^k
^^k
t
a comprehensive selection
^^k
!
of books, current as well as
^^k K ^^k !
classic and attractively dis^^k
^^k^
played, ought to be near the
top of anyone’s list. HosY
Y
pitable environment would
also seem a must, encouraging the customer-student or teacherto linger and browse. Then there are the less obvious attributes
such as efficient management practices ... but wait. Shouldn’t the
more relevant question be not what makes a good college book
store but who?
Untold numbers of the St. John’s community in Santa Fe
would have only to point to Andrea d’Amato, who has been man
ager of the bookstore for more than ao years, for the answer.
Personal affection and professional admiration for this
unusual woman-she is a novice Buddhist priest and mother
of an adopted fifteen-year-old girl as well as successful
businessperson-comprise their views in more or less equal
proportion.
“Bookstore people are special people,” says Georgia Knight,
who has been a tutor at St. John’s since 1974. “Andrea personi
fies the best of them. She has been a close friend for many years
and unflaggingly helpful to me. She has made books a real
adventure. She helps me trip over things I wasn’t necessarily
looking for. But what I admire most are her enthusiasm, per
suasiveness, and generosity of spirit. She radiates friendship.”
Ralph Swentzell, who joined the St. John’s faculty 35 years
ago, credits Andrea’s management skills for the “exceptional”
qualities of the bookstore and also declares that the whole East
ern Classics program, which he and a colleague, Bruce Perry,
launched as an experiment only la years ago, “owes its exis
tence” to Andrea. He explains: “I was an amateur at first,
assigned to Chinese language. Andrea began auditing my class
of IO or II students and got very excited. She helped us work out
the language as a computer program. Eventually we had a full
lexicon in front of us and translated Confucius, Lao-tse, Chi
nese poetry, and other works.
“But it was a very tumultuous affair bringing the Eastern Stud
ies program into being. The college was ethnocentric in those
days. In that environment we kept asking ‘How (in this institu
tion of great books) can you ignore Eastern studies?’ The book
store was a not-so-subtle influence on the college’s decision to
adopt the program, with Andrea making sure that there were
great books on Eastern studies available and prominently dis
played on the front table.”
It would seem natural to assume that her close association
with the burgeoning Eastern Classics program directly influ
enced Andrea’s decision to become a Buddhist, although such
was not entirely the case. Working in a bookstore, however, was a
serendipitous situation for her at a time of great personal crisis.
“It was a case of having ready access to books that bore on my
overwhelming need for a way out of my suffering,” she says. “I
was seeking spiritual enlightenment for my pain, for my great
heartache. My heart, in fact, broke open to Buddhism as soon as
I started reading from a list of texts I had encountered through
suggested Eastern Classics texts. I began with the “Acts of the
Buddha” by a second-century Indian writer named Asvaghosa. It
was the first time I had encountered the Four Noble Truths of
Buddhism and as soon as I read those I thought Wow! This is
what I’ve been looking for. This is my medicine. This addresses
exactly what I’m feeling.”
Andrea immersed herself in the great primary sources while
continuing with her job. “I realized that this was not a way out of
suffering but I had to start meditating. If you want to realize it
you have to sit. You have to. I read enough Buddhism to know
that it cannot just be read about. I learned that in order to bene
fit from it you need to practice. One of the main practices is
Zazen, which is sitting practice. So I sought a meditation
teacher.”
After many years of sitting. Buddhism became essential to
Andrea. In December of 2000, she shaved her head to become a
priest, a novice, she explains, in the Zen Buddhist belief, with its
strong traditions of meditation and honoring of ancestors.
{The College- St. John’s College • Summer 2002 }
�{CampusLife}
23
A novice priest carries forward the form of the practice. The tra
three-and-a half months in the making.
Andrea made a pilgrimage to the Chinese temples that Dogen
dition Andrea practices is Japanese Soto Zen, which is based on the
four noble truths. The differences in the forms of Buddhism he in
(the founder of the Japanese line of Buddhism) traveled to in the
the ritual, the services, the practices. The Tibetan tradition is very
13th century. “I was able to sew on my robe in the very room ded
rich iconographically, with colorful temples, painted demons on
icated to Dogen, originally a 900-room monastery Tien Tong.
the walls, and beautiful images. The Japanese tradition is very
This is of deep importance to me because Dogen is part of the
stark, sparse and beautiful,
direct lineage,” says Andrea.
“Dogen found the true dhar
but very simple. “A priest is
ma
again, and brought that
trained in the form-how you
tradition
to Japan. Every
approach the altar, how the
morning
we
put the robe on
incense is offered, which way
you turn from the altar, how
our head, and with our
chants we vow to liberate all
you hold your hands during
human
beings.”
the service. Since I am a
Little in Andrea’s early
detailed person the Japanese
background, except perhaps
tradition suits me well,” says
a youthful restlessness, a dis
Andrea. “It’s all in the details.
satisfaction with the way her
God is in the details. A priest
life was going, would seem to
can transmit and carry the
augur what appears to be its
form to the next generation. I
present happy resolution.
don’t know if I will arrive at
She stopped attending the
that level of service, as I am in
Catholic Church while in
training and will be for many
high school and dropped out
years, but that is what I am
of the University of Massa
doing-paying close attention
chusetts in Amherst (where
to details.”
she worked part-time in a
Andrea has made pilgrim
bookstore) because, she says,
ages to China and Tibet,
“I had too much living to do.”
where she circumambulated
She became active in the
the hohest of mountains. Her
women’s movement and con
hope was to manifest the
sidered for a while opening
dharma more in her life. After
up a feminist bookstore
that experience, she decided
somewhere with a friend.
to become a priest as a way to
During a visit to Santa Fe, she
be more involved in Bud
answered an ad in The Santa
dhism.
Fe New Mexican for an assis
To become a priest in this
tant’s position in the St.
tradition, Andrea had to cre
John’s College bookstore.
ate her own robe by hand,
She became its manager in
though she hadn’t done any
1981.
sewing since home economics
“The bookstore, along
in seventh grade. She also
with
my colleagues and
copied by hand sacred texts
friends,
” she says, “has been
from the 13th century. And,
my
anchor,
the stabilizing
she had to shave her head.
Every stitch is a prayer: Andrea d’Amato wears the robe she made
fact
of
my
life
in Santa Fe. If I
The robe, an okesa, is com
WHEN SHE BECAME A BuDDHIST PRIEST.
am
credited
with
helping to
prised of patches of material
make
it
an
important
part of
that she gathered from family
the college life I’m grateful for what it has given back to me.”
and friends. With an intricate design, it is a personal project. The
She enjoys spending weekends with her daughter Nandita at
pattern derives from the Buddha, who, standing with his disciple,
home in Taos. With this melding of family, career, and belief, it
said he wanted a robe with a pattern after the rice fields. “All the
is no wonder that she considers herself, as she says, not just con
stitching shows on the outside and every stitch is a prayer,” says
tent, but a person on the path of awakening as well. Says Andrea,
Andrea. “Not something that could be done while watching TV or
“At night we say, ‘Let me respectfully remind you...Do not
doing anything else. It took a lot of concentration, time, and effort,
squander your life.’ ’’-i^
accompanied by a candle, incense, and prayer.” The robe was about
{The College.
Sf.
John’s College Summer 2002 }
�{Bibliofile}
^4
BEYOND THE
BARR-BUCHANAN MYTH
Review by John Van Doren, A47
eloquent, the other, quizzical and complex
in all he said. Yet their spirits reflected two
old traditions in America, of Virginia and
Massachusetts, which had met before.
Barr, inclined to history, had graduated
from the University of Virginia; Buchanan
was a philosopher, educated at Amherst
and Harvard, who said he got an under
standing of his subject not from either
school but only afterwards, as assistant
director of the People’s Institute, offering
adult education, in New York.
At Oxford, where they were Rhodes
Scholars, they found they had a common
interest in speculative thought and the dis
verybody connected with St.
cussion of ideas. Buchanan went on to pur
John’s, and many ontside it,
sue both and discovered their sources in
know that Stringfellow Barr
the Great Books, which he took up with
and Scott Buchanan were the
students at the People’s Institute as well as
founders, in 1937, of the Pro
with some of the faculty at Columbia Uni
gram by which the college has since been
versity, among them Mortimer Adler,
known. Some are aware that when they left
Richard McKeon, and Mark Van Doren.
St. John’s, both men worked together on
Barr, with whom he kept in touch, went
other projects, less well defined, having to
back to Virginia, where he was an
do with what might be called the state of
immensely successful but unrepresentative
the world, and that after many wanderings
they came to the Center for the Study of
Democratic Institutions in California,
where both served for a time and where
Buchanan worked until he died in 1968.
But who were they? How did they come
to think they should do the things they did?
What did they seek to accomplish by doing
them, nearly always together as friends and
colleagues in a relationship which, begin
ning at Oxford in 1919, lasted till
Buchanan’s death? These are matters most
people don’t know much about. We are
thus indebted to Charles Nelson (class of
1945) for having written this fine book,
which provides an account of them that will
be instructive, even essential, not only to
those who cannot remember those years,
but also to those who can.
Barr and Buchanan made an unlikely
combination: the one, hot tempered and
Radical Visions: Stringfel
low Barr, Scott Buchanan,
and Their Efforts on Behalf
of Education and Politics in
the Twentieth Century by
Charles A. Nelson. With an
Introduction by William H.
McNeill. Bergin & Garvey,
Westport, CT, 2001
E
{The College- St. John ’5 College - Summer 2002 }
teacher who sat on his desk in a green suit
and purple shirt and talked basic texts with
his students.
By the end of the iqaos, both men had
come to think that American higher educa
tion was badly in need of the kind of reading
and discussion they were carrying on in dif
ferent places. To this end, and notwithstand
ing the failure of an early effort to institute
such activities by Buchanan’s friend Alexan
der Meiklejohn at the University of Wiscon
sin, the two men joined forces at Virginia in
the mid-i93os and formulated a plan for a
college within the college there which antic
ipated the St. John’s Program. But Virginia
never adopted this, and it was only when
they were approached by the trustees of St.
John’s, a school in grave academic and
financial difficulties, that they found an
opportunity which they accepted, not with
out qualms, to practice what they preached.
What happened there is known to every
one at this college, or if it isn’t, Mr. Nelson
will recall it for us. Within four years, the
Program was recognized everywhere in the
country as a striking innovation, supported
in some quarters, disapproved of in others.
The effort seemed to have succeeded. But
then came the war and the student body
went off to fight, while much of the new fac
ulty disappeared. Barr and Buchanan kept
the college going with inadequate funds and
students who had not finished high school,
but the effort was exhausting. They were
further tried by the attempt of the Navy to
acquire the college campus for expansion of
the Naval Academy, a struggle that ended
only in 1946 when the Navy gave up. By then
both men, besides being weary, had soured
on the college’s prospects in Annapolis and
decided to leave, rejecting funds offered for
its continuance there, to the dismay of the
trustees.
In truth the two had come to think that
something more than St. John’s was needed
�{Bibliofile}
2,5
'"The two came to think that something more than St. Johns
was needed to make sense ofthepost-war world..
to make sense of the post-war world they saw
emerging-something perhaps with under
graduate, adult education, and research
facilities combined. Then they realized, or
thought they did, that even this was less than
what the times required, which was a new
politics and a new technological and social
order. Their subsequent involvement in the
Foundation for World Government, their
separate sojourns in Israel and India, and
their last brief interval together at the Cali
fornia Center-years in which they both
wrote interesting and important books and
pamphlets-can be seen as efforts to suggest
ways in which these changes could be real
ized. Nothing they did was successful in
terms of tangible accomplishment, but most
of it was prescient in its focus on what we
now recognize as world realities.
Was there a divide between what the two
did for education and what they tried to do
in other areas later? Superficially, yes, but
in essence, no. From the first, as young men
with intellectual interests and capacities,
they thought the world was in need of a bet
ter understanding of itself than its educa
tion gave it. St. John’s was an attempt to
provide this. But the forces of technological
change and social upheaval that appeared
after the Second World War seemed to
require a different kind of examination,
though with the same objective. Barr and
Buchanan, and the associates they got to
work with them, sought to discover for
themselves and explain to others what the
underlying problems of the world were,
looking foolish to those who thought
“something should be done at once” about
these, but seeming wiser now as we realize
most of them are still there.
All along, both men maintained that
inquiry and discussion were propaedeutic
to action. Every enterprise they started or
tried to start had something of the seminar
about it. Always they found themselves
questioning first formulations and digging
back to the root of things, so far as they
could find it. In that sense they seemed to
live the life of this college wherever they
went, and partly it was so. But in another
sense it was the other way around. That is
the lesson of this book. Unique though it is,
the college imitates something greater than
itself. It is but a station of the active intel
lect, nurturing in its given way an abiding
interest in things brought to it by two who
were bound on a common odyssey, a con
cern that comes only (if I may change my
figure) from those on lean horses and fat
donkeys whose journey never ends.
Short Reviews of
Alumni Books
ters fits well with Bellamy’s other Cleve
land crime books: The Corpse in the Cellar,
The Maniac in the Bushes, and They Died
Crawling.
Phaethon, of Radamanthus House, attends
a party at his family mansion to celebrate
the thousand-year anniversary of the High
Transcendence. There he meets an old man
who accuses him of being an impostor and
then a being from Neptune who claims to be
an old friend. The Neptunian tells him that
essential parts of his memory were removed
and stored by the very government that
Phaethon believes to be wholly honorable.
Phaethon embarks upon a quest across the
solar system to recover his memory and
learn what crime he planned that warranted
such preemptive punishment.
100 Names oe Mary: Stories and Prayers
By the staff of The College
A Priest’s Journal_____________________
Victor Lee Austin (SF^S)
Church Publishing Incorporated
Austin writes about his ministry as a parish
priest in a small town in upstate New York,
about his work as a theologian, and about
the intersection of the ordinary concerns
and profound questions that priest and
parish share and explore.
Anthony F. Chiffolo (AGIg4)
St. Anthony Messenger Press
Calling upon Scripture, the writings of the
early Church, the pronouncements of the
saints, papal statements, and recent bibhcal
and theological scholarship, this book pro
vides historical and theological explanations
of the origins of one hundred of Mary’s most
popular and intriguing names. Each of the
names includes both traditional and newlywritten prayers of intercession to Mary.
OE Cleveland Woe_____________________
The Golden Age: A Romance oe the Far
Future_______________________________
John Stark Bellamy II (Ap)
Gray & Company
This book of Cleveland murders and disas-
John C. Wright (A84)
Tor Books
In this well-received science fiction novel.
Killer in the Attic; And Still More Tales
{The College -St. John’s College ■ Summer 2002
Periodically, The College will list or review
alumni books. Please send notice of books
pubhshed or review copies (which will be
donated to the library’s alumni author col
lection) for consideration to: The College
Magazine, St. John’s College, Box 2800,
Annapolis, MD 21404.
}
�{TheProgram}
a6
STATISTICS VS. PTOLEMY
Has St. John s made the right choicesfor the math tutorial?
Alumni in the corporate world discuss theprogram.
By Sus3AN Borden, A87
igh up in McDowell Hall, math tuto
rials work their way through Euclid,
Ptolemy, Newton, and Lohachevsky.
Meanwhile, in a large corporation
in Washington, D.C., three recent
St. John’s graduates are doing the
work of computer science PhDs.
Was it the symmetry of the spheres,
the ingenuity of the ecliptic, the
lucidity of Newton’s lemmas that prepared them for this demand
ing work?
Their boss, Eric Rosenblatt (A74), says no.
Rosenblatt, a vice president at Eannie Mae, began hiring John
nies in 2000 and currently has a hand in the careers of eight John
nies who work at Fannie Mae, the secondary market enterprise
that makes mortgage money available for lenders. He expects to
hire more Johnnies.
His original decision to take a chance on the St. John’s grads
was in part because of a lingering affection for his alma mater, but
mostly because he thought it made good business sense. “Corpo
rations live and die on good labor. I get paid because people who
work for me make good decisions,” Rosenblatt says. “I decided
that St. John’s would be a filter for employment. The students are
intelligent and motivated. Although Fannie Mae has incredibly
high standards, programming is something that, if you’re smart
and you really want to do it, you probably can.”
Rosenblatt continues to do most of his hiring at the annual
meetings of the Allied Social Science Association; the staff he
finds there are PhDs, which he says are simple to hire because
PhDs tend to meet his criteria. But they’re also expensive and not
always willing to do the simple charts and tables that convey the
most insights. He points with pride to Jon Lawless (Aoo) and
Brian Shea (Aoo), who started working just after they graduated.
“Those two are already competitive with PhDs,” he says. “They
started at around $50,000, but I’ll tell you something: they were
worth more. I’m sending them to grad school and over time their
earnings and opportunities will climb.”
Although Rosenblatt has developed a win-win arrangement for
Fannie Mae and St. John’s, he finds himself frustrated by what he
sees as the limitations of the St. John’s math program.
He says that the program’s lack of emphasis on mathematical
mastery is a significant and unnecessary deficiency in an other
wise fine education. It cuts many graduates off from entering a
{The College
number of careers that would be of interest to Johnnies. “Stu
dents at St. John’s don’t have the typical math background of col
lege graduates entering the social sciences. Sociology, experi
mental psychology, economics-these are all fields Johnnies
would enjoy,” he says. “The prerequisites are a few years of cal
culus, statistics, maybe linear algebra. If they don’t have it, it
seems like a daunting hill to climb, one more thing to keep them
from targeting a career objective they would find satisfying and
do well in. And if you want to go into engineering or the hard sci
ences, you’re just in the hole. You avoid making the decision to
undertake the work that graduate school would require and then
it gets to be too late.”
Recently retired Annapolis placement director Karen Krieger
says that a long-term undertaking of her office was to make sure
that students-from as early as their prospective visit-know that
the St. John’s curriculum must be supplemented by additional
courses for students seeking careers in math and science. “Stu
dents have long known this is the strategy in medicine, and now
there’s a growing understanding that this is the case in other
fields. Once you get your education at St. John’s, you then go back
and pick up your required courses,” says Krieger.
“Getting enough math for careers is easy to do,” says Annapolis
dean Harvey Flaumenhaft. “A number of students go on to careers
in math and science. For example, several recent graduates are
now studying astrophysics at George Mason University. “It’s true
that we don’t do statistics, but our students can go to the commu
nity college and take elementary statistics for a semester. If we did
statistics, we’d have to give up something else. Now don’t get me
wrong. The absence of their treatment does not mean that statis
tics are not important. There are a lot of important things we
don’t study here. Not only things we should do, but things that it’s
an outrage not to do. We can’t do everything-we have to make
choices.”
. Sr. John’s
The Math Gap
A pack of recent Johnnie graduates working at Fannie Mae go
to lunch and-no surprise-a seminar breaks out. They’re dis
cussing Rosenblatt’s ideas and talk turns to Annapolis’ calculus
manual (a brief handbook presenting the rudiments of calculus as
done with more contemporary notation and notions). Using the
manual is one of the few points of universal agreement, but the
concord is not positive. The alumni are frustrated that the manu
al is neither one thing nor another-not an original text, but not a
College • Summer sooa }
�{The Program}
"Distilled modem math alsoprovides excellent mental training, also
integrates and reinforces a variety ofprogram readings and labs. ”
Eric Rosenblatt, A74
St. John’s College Fannie Mae
Misha Hall, and John Lawless
campus:
Eric Rosenblatt,
are a few of the
Johnnies who
WORK FOR the SECONDARY MORTGAGE ENTERPRISE.
{The College- St. John’s College ■ Summer 2002 }
a?
�aS
{The Program}
textbook either, offer
ing just two or three
problems to illustrate
each concept.
John Lawless, now a
Fannie Mae economist
working toward a mas
ter’s of finance at
George Washington University (paid for by Fannie Mae), suggests
pages of additional problems to supplement classroom discus
sion. “The people with me in graduate school are not that smart,”
he says. “The advantage they have is that they’ve seen a lot of this
stuff before. They have a broad exposure to basic math.”
Lawless illustrates his grad-school handicap by bringing up the
simple operation of multiplying exponents as part of an equation.
“Of course I know how to do it. It’s simple. But I always have to
take a second to remind myself how to do it. This makes high level
math that much more difficult, having to translate such small
things each time.”
Rosenblatt knows exactly what Lawless means. He now has a
PhD in finance, which he started working on at the age of 35. “I
was always translating,” he says. “Math never became my lan
guage.”
Flaumenhaft (not at the lunch, but commenting later) points
out the trade-offs St. John’s makes. “I’m not someone who thinks
that the program contains everything that’s important, worth
while, fundamental and deep, but we can’t do everything at once,”
he says. “I took some high-powered math courses early on. I did
well, but I wish that before taking them I’d done something like
what we do here. It might mean you can’t solve some problems as
early in your academic life, but if you’re interested in understand
ing and not immediate facility, if you’re interested in looking at
what makes sense and is simple enough to be seen as harmonious
and clear, something that is fundamental and fruitful enough to
be important when you’re 18 or 19 years old, then this is far more
important than getting what seems to be the most useful item in
your tool kit.”
Rosenblatt says “I understand that math at St. John’s serves a
lot of purposes, including training in a priori thinking and inte
gration with other readings in the program, but distilled modern
math also provides excellent mental training, also integrates and
reinforces a variety of program readings and labs. Beyond that, it
will concretely help Johnnies with their careers. I worry that St.
John’s students are not all finding careers appropriate to their
abilities, and I think
the math gap is part
of the problem. Why
is Ptolemy more ele
gant or better train
ing
for
future
guardians than gen
uine calculus?”
Some of the lunchers point out that the college is not just for
people with strong interests in math, and that the St. John’s
approach can show non-mathematicians the wonder of mathemat
ics, can even turn them into mathematicians. Most determined to
make this case was Misha Hall (Aoo), a data analyst who writes
requirements for and runs tests on the Fannie Mae database.
A Beautiful Paradigm
“The way we go about studying Euclid in the first year is great.
You have the chance to see the beauty of mathematics,” Hall says.
“And Ptolemy is really interesting. By the end of the first semester
you have to catch yourself, because you’ll end up saying that the
earth is really in the center of the universe. Mathematics proves
everything Ptolemy says; this makes you question the things that
you assume, it makes you question numbers and statistics.”
Others in the group were not so fond of Ptolemy, saying that the
amount of time spent studying the Almagest is ridiculous, even
describing the first semester of sophomore year as “the long
death march through Ptolemy.”
Flaumenhaft, however, appreciates Hall’s case for the value of
Ptolemy. “Ptolemy is maybe the primary example of having expe
riences that are puzzling precisely because there’s so much about
them that seems simple, clear, orderly, and beautiful, yet there’s
just enough to bother and annoy. The activity of trying to make
sense of observations given to you, while something within your
self points to an idea-it’s a beautiful paradigm of scientific enter
prise. I regard the study of Ptolemy as an important intellectual
experience. There’s the interplay of the world we see and the
world we think, but it’s also a necessary prerequisite for appreci
ating the absolutely astounding fact that when you start thinking,
you can end up with everything familiar looking altogether differ
ent.”
At lunch’s end, Rosenblatt prompts the Johnnies to repeat a
line he’s heard before and obviously enjoys. Lawless obliges; “If
you want to learn math, go to MIT; if you want to learn why math
is heartbreakingly beautiful, St. John’s is the place for you.”
{The College- St. John's College ■ Summer 200Z }
�{Alumni Notes}
1932
Senior Status, Growing Caseload
1943
J.L. Bean writes: “I hope to make
Peter Kellogg-Smith is still
my 70th reunion.”
making sculpture, writing on edu
cation, and working on a fuel effi
cient internal combustion and
steam engine.
1933
John F. Wager, Jr. writes: “Still
alive at 91 years.”
1935
Richard S. Woodman writes: “My
brother Robert G. Woodman,
class of 193a, died June 2001.1 am
still working at a leisurely pace and
still reside in a small dehghtful vil
lage in central New York state.”
“I’m 88 and still rarin’ to go,”
says Melville L. Bisgyer. “My
best to the alumni and SJC. You
sound wonderful-keep it up.”
1936
Gilbert Crandall writes: “Only
one member of the class of ’36
attended the alumni reunionMarttn W. Rausch. I had planned
to attend but ill health prevented
me from doing so. I have improved
and hope to make the ’03
reunion.”
1939
After 59 years, Malcolm Silver,
DDS, has retired from the practice
of dentistry.
1942
Based on national scores of the
PGA Rules test, Ernest J. HeinMULLER has been appointed a PGA
referee. “This has been a great
experience, following the great
players on great courses and rul
ing on situations as they occur,”
he says.
1945
Lawrence Levin writes: “I’m cur
rently leading discussions of the
news at Seniors’ Community Cen
ters, which I enjoy very much as I
do singing tenor with the local
chorus.”
1947
Steve Benedict writes: “After 50
years behind too many desks. I’ve
repaired to a 1754 farmhouse, with
barn and creek, in Spencertown,
New York-northern Columbia
County. My aim: to sort out and
maybe chronicle a whole bunch of
not very coherent life themes,
helping it all go dotvn with plenty
of tennis and piano. If anyone can
help-or even if you can’t-give a
ring and drop by. It’s 518-392-0487
or Box 16, Spencertowu, NY
12165. E-mail is:
stevebenedict@taconic.net.
Howell Cobb (Class of 1944) writes: “As of March 2001,1 took senior
status as a U.S. District judge. But my caseload is growing as it is
throughout the Eastern District of Texas. My replacement has been
nominated by President Bush, but the Senate Judiciary Committee has
not granted him a hearing. After he is confirmed, I anticipate my case
load will be about 60% of what it is now. Senior judges remain active,
and there are over 200 now with about 650 active judges. About 100
vacancies continue.” Howell and his wife have six children-3 sons and
3 daughters-and a total (as of now) of 18 grandchildren. His grandson,
Andrew C. Cook, starts in the Graduate Institute this fall.
enjoying worshipping in the con
gregation in the 49th year in the
ministry.”
1951
“The college did an exquisite job
in arranging our 50th class oncampus reunion,” writes Dr.
Lawrence Myers. “It was both a
charming and an educational
experience for us. Renewing my
friendships with my classmates
made me feel very fortunate to be
a class member of such a noble,
intelUgent, and interesting group
of men.”
1953
Robert Hazo reports that he is
1949
The Rev. Frederick P. Davis
writes: “We ‘3-D’s’ of the Davis
clan (wife Rita, son David, and
self) are still hanging loose in
sunny southern California. Most
of the time we continue to take
care of each other: Rita tied to
tank-oxygen here at home but
doing most of the inside house
work; David in wheelchair from
compound fracture of both bones
below left knee but doing all the
hot cooking of dinner, and the ‘old
man’ doing all outside house and
garden work while running all
errands for food, etc. Relieved of
most church work; I’m at long last
finishing up 30 years of teaching
St. John’s type seminars at the
University of Pittsburgh. He also
coordinated a lecture series that
featured many prominent speak
ers, including George W. Bush.
He’s now working on a book titled
“Minority Rule.”
1954
A profile of Sydney Porter was
found by Joe Kaufman (class of
1953) in the winter 2001-2002
issue of Radon Reporter. The pro
file recounts highlights of Porter’s
career: He is a founding member
and early president of AARST
(American Association of Radon
{The College. St. John’s College ■ Summer zoos }
Scientists and Technologists), a
Certified Health Physicist, and a
fellow of the Health Physics Soci
ety, the American Nuclear Society,
and the American Association of
Physicists in Medicine. He was one
of the founders of Radiation Man
agement Corporation.
1955
“Maintain imperturbable equa
nimity! ” writes John Joanou.
Harold Bauer is in mid-season of
his 40th year as a conductor of
symphony and opera. He wiU con
tinue as Music Director of New
Philharmonic and DuPage Opera
Theater, two professional organi
zations in the Chicago area,
through the summer of 2004. He
has just concluded conducting
Massenet’s “Werther,” which he
says “shares a quite remarkable
union with Goethe’s novella of 125
years earlier.” In addition to a
concert of Brahms, Bartok, and
Bauer (the premier of his “Cele
bration for Orchestra”), he con
ducted a June production of
Lehar’s “Zigeunerliebe” for Light
Opera Works in Evanston, and a
July production of Floyd’s “Susan
nah” for DuPage Opera.
1957
Thomas Sigman writes: “Henry
Ansell passed away summer 2001.
Hank had been a successful restau
rateur in New York City. He was a
�{Alumni Notes}
lifelong opera buff. In retirement
he volunteered in several impor
tant positions at the New York
Metropolitan Opera. We remem
ber him also as a fine comedian
who could have been a profession
al. I miss him.”
Cornelia Hoffman Reese writes:
“In the aftermath of the tragedy of
9/11 when our stunned senses had
to recreate a semblance of normal
ity and daily living habits, we
decided to go forward with plans
to visit my daughter’s (Angelina
Kleneburgess, A83) friends in
Brussels. On Christmas day after
our celebration with children, we
departed from BWI. We included
myself, Angelina, Edward
Burgess (A79), and my Burgess
grandchildren—Genevieve, Louis,
and Cynthia. Though unable to
visit Mary Sullivan Blomberg in
Sweden as hoped, I was able to
have a most delightful phone con
versation with Mary, our first
voice contact in roughly 30 years.
Mary is living in Stockholm.”
1958
BlakelyLirrLuroN Mechau (also
SFGI70) and Michael K. Mechau
(class of 1959) write: “Both of us
are retired, living on a small farm,
reading books, and entertaining
friends and family.”
few months ago from Bank of
America, where I ran all informa
tion technology engineering activ
ities. Am doing a bit of consulting,
but am basically thoroughly enjoy
ing life. Marie and I are traveling
around, indulging our interest in
orientalia. We’re frequenting auc
tions and estate sales. I’m finding
life is wonderful after many years
of i8-hour frenzied days! ”
1963
Temple Porter has lived in
Raleigh 30 years with Brenda, his
wife of 35 years. After graduating
from Coach University in 1997,
Temple founded Triangle Coach
ing Services, a professional organ
ization that provides coaching,
counseling, and advisory services
to businesses and individuals
nationwide. In its infancy now,
coaching is gaining great credibil
ity as it spreads to all facets of our
culture. Any St. Johnnies interest
ed in exploring this growing field
may contact Temple for informa
tion. Empty nesters now. Temple
and Brenda have three children-a
social worker, a property manag
er, and a photographer-all in
N.C. Their oldest grandchild (of
3) is a teenager now, and is ready
to take scuba diving lessons as
preparation for a career in marine
biology.
David Benfield writes: “We
i960
Col. (RET) John Lane writes:
should all try to make the reunion
this year. Remember the old
advice from Chase and Phillips:
‘The beautiful is difficult.’ ”
“Hi, decided to retire completely
from a full-time job and retired a
Life’s Continuum
Virginia Seegers Harrison (Class of 1964) writes: “I’m continuing
to learn from the elders with whom I work. Even though they are
‘declining,’ they are storehouses of memories. (Many are old lefties
who recall firsthand WWI and so on.) I try to arrange living situations
which preserve or promote quality of life for them. In the meantime,
my eldest son and his wife had another child-a girl this time. It’s won
derful to have a two-year-old grandson and a 6-month-old granddaugh
ter, and to see the continuum of life.
1965
John Hetland is still (since 1973)
directing the Renaissance Street
Singers (www.streetsingers.org).
1966
really enjoying the one-on-one
therapy.”
Charles B. Watson (A) writes:
“#i son, Ivan Watson, now report
ing from Kabul for NPR. Busy life
continues unabated now that we’re
empty nesters and I still only get to
New York City two times a year.
Recently experienced 3rd world
health care as Masha broke her
arm on a boat in BVI.”
Christopher Hodgkin (A) is
Antigone Phalares (SF) writes:
looking forward to retiring this
summer and having time for seri
ous reading for the first time since
leaving the college.
“Our small but longstanding and
dedicated Sacramento SJC semi
nar group chugs along and enrich
es our lives, most of all because we
are lucky to have Tom (HA94) and
Marion Slaeiey who have blessed
us with their culture and refine
ment and warm hearts. I strongly
recommend to each alumni semi
nar that they seek out retired
tutors and nudge them to move
into your area and participate in
your seminars.” She describes the
Slakeys’ renewal of their wedding
vows this past January and notes
that she, Arianne Laidlaw (class
of 1957), and Curtis and Becky
Wilson (HA83 and 82AGI) were
among the Johnnies in attendance.
1967
For Helen Hobart (A), March
through June 3002 was a season
springing with change. She retired
as director (and founder) of the
City of Sacramento’s Alzheimer’s
day program to launch a new pro
gram of peer support groups for
individuals beginning the journey
of memory loss-and in June, unit
ed in marriage with a beloved
friend from her Buddhist Sangha.
“We take heart from the beautiful
renewal of wedding vows that TOM
(HA94) AND Marion Slakey held
here in Sacramento this winter!”
she says.
George Partlow (A) is looking
forward to retirement in June. His
fifth grandchild, Dakota Aragron
Watson, was born on Christmas
morning.
Rick Wicks (SF) was in Alaska
1968
Joy Avery-Balch (SF) writes: “My
email is still joy@tums.org. Let
me tell you about my new career. I
went back to school for three years
and got an associate’s degree in
Health Sciences in 1999 and am a
Certified Occupational Therapy
Assistant. However, there were no
jobs for C.O.T.A.s nationwide
until now. I’ve just been hired by a
national rehabilitation company
and finally earning enough money
to live on (my first non-not-forprofit job) AND still helping peo
ple cope with the problems caused
by strokes, heart attacks, acci
dents, etc. I’m working in two
nursing homes with rehab and
{The College. St. John’s College ■ Summer 2002 }
last summer for the first time in
ten years, where he had a chance
to visit Carl Bostek (SF) and his
fantastic Alaskan lodge. “We visit
ed our land and the kids and 1
caught salmon in the ocean-a
great time!” he writes.
ThomasG. Keens (SF) writes: “I
am a professor of pediatrics, physi
ology, and biophysics at the Keck
School of Medicine of the Univer
sity of Southern California. In
February 3002,1 organized a post
graduate course in Non-Invasive
Ventilation of Children with Res
piratory Failure as part of the 5th
International Congress of Pedi
atric Pulmonology in Nice,
France. I also spoke on Transition
ing CCHS Patients to Non-Invasive Ventilation at the Second
�{AlumniNotes}
About the Four Cats. ..
1970
31
which will be torn down. We
expect to spend winters there once
both boys are in college.”
Marii ynne (Maury Wills) Scott (SF) writes: “My husband David
and I enjoyed to our daughter, Emily’s, May graduation from Sarah
Lawrence College. She has been accepted at Yale Divinity School
where she will pursue a master’s of Art and Religion to combine her
interests in music (trombone) and liturgy. I continue to teach first
grade in a suburban school outside Seattle. This year will be my asth
in public education. The standards/accountability movement has
been discouraging to those of us who prefer to view children as
human beings glorious in their uniqueness. They say life begins
when the dog dies and the last child has left home-both of which
have happened to me. So how did 1 end up with four cats?! ”
International Symposium of Con
genital Central Hypoventilation
Syndrome in Paris, France. I coor
dinate one of the world’s largest
home mechanical ventilation pro
grams for children at the Chil
dren’s Hospital, Los Angeles. We
have sent home 346 children on
part-time or full-time mechanical
assisted ventilation in 34 years.”
Ellin Barret (SF) is a member of
the board of California Revels-a
non-profit performance organiza
tion. Revels groups exist in nine
cities across the U.S. and present
non-rehgious winter solstice pag
eants and other musical events. It’s
a great way to celebrate the winter.
The website is www.revels.org.
1969
Jamie Cromartte (SF), Frances
Burns, and Mark and Linda
Bernstein (all A69) met at the
Trenton Thunder Minor League
game on August 19. A mini-’69
NJ/Phila. Reunion.
Wendy Watson (SF) writes: “I’m
alive and well in Detroit, Michi
gan. I’m running three senior cen
ters and concerned with aging pol
icy development. My daughter
Amy is 15 and interested in theater
and is a good actress. She’s mak
ing her way through Shakespeare.
Peace and justice activities on a
local level are important to me.
Most of my friends are somehow
engaged in these activities too.”
Beth Kuper (SF) has left the cor
porate world and is now working
as a feng shui consultant.
Margaret Gaefney (SF) writes:
“My home is now 30 blocks from
Luther Burbank’s Home and Gar
den. I’m planting roses, tomatoes
and chilies in Santa Rosa, Califor
nia. Ahh! The Sun! Good for baby
boomer bone marrow. There is a
guest bedroom-St. Johnnies are
welcome. I’m doing landscaping,
nutritional-RN triage (cradle to
grave) and photography.
Barhara Mordes Ross (A) writes:
“To all the ones who have ever
known me, loved me, despised
me-I just want you to know that I
held each and every one of you in
my heart as I lay near death after
being broadsided by a truck that
went three feet into my driver's
seat. I was miraculously saved,
first by my good dear little Maxima
that I’ve loved and taken care of
for 17 years because she talks to
me. Second, by the red trauma
team that wanted to beat out the
blue trauma team to rescue me. I
ended up with six broken ribs, a
broken clavicle, a collapsed lung,
and a new love for old friends.
Now, when I say I love you to peo
ple I haven’t talked to for thirty
years, I realize how much I do love
them.” Barbara would appreciate
phone calls (407-493-4047) or let
ters (3913 Autumnwood Trail,
Apopka, FL 33703) from old
friends. Flowers would also be
lovely.
Susan Swartzherg-Rubenstein
(SF) (formerly Susan Wood) is
working as a foreign correspon
dent for public radio while living
in France. She can be reached at
Ssrub@aol.com, or by post at 6,
Impasse Pierre Simon, 93340
Malakoff, Paris, France. She
writes: “The St. John’s College
alumni living in Paris had a
reunion last month in the cafe at
the top of the Pompidou Center
with a magnificent aerial view of
half of Paris, sweeping from Sacre
Coeur to the Eiffel Tower around
to Notre Dame, and looking over
the plan of the city and the Hausmannian mansard rooftops.
“It was a delightful, unrushed
afternoon of fellowship with some
discussion about how we would
like to continue meeting. The five
of us included Bill Randolph
(A75), Nathanael Long (SF90),
Jennifer Donnelly (A96),
Georges Contos (class of 1953)
and yours truly. We have plans to
meet again on June 31, this time at
someone’s home, to discuss the
following list of poems:
Pierre de Ronsard - “Recueil:
Sonnets pour Helene”
Robert Herrick-“To The
Virgins, To Make Much of Time”
W. B. Yeats-“When You are Old”
Jules LaForgue-“Autre
Complainte de Lord Pierrot”
Thosophile Gautier-“L’hippotame”
T.S. Eliot-“The Hippopotamus”
Ronald H. Fielding (A) writes:
“Now in my seventh year with
Oppenheimer Funds, managing
four municipal bond funds with
over $8.5 billion (yes, that’s a B)
and 30 staff. Ron was the subject
of a three-page spread in Barron’s
April 39 issue. Sons Daniel and
Michael are in nth and 9th
grades, so college planning has
begun, and I showed Dan St.
John’s this summer. Also, we’ve
just begun architectural design
work for a new house on the beach
on Kiawah Island, S.C. I bought an
older house on the property from
Archibald Cox three years ago.
{The College . St. John’s College ■ Summer 200Z }
1971
Michael ViCTOROFF (A) has left
his job as medical director for
Aetna and is writing a book on
errors in medicine.
John Stark Bellamy II (A) is
astonished to announce the publi
cation of his fourth book devoted
to Cleveland murders and disas
ters, The Killer in the Attic: And
Even More Tales ofCleveland Woe,
published by Gray & Co. Publish
ers, Cleveland.
1972
Claude F. Martin (A) writes: “30
years? It seems longer! ”
Leslie Starr (A) has played a
third season as substitute second
oboe with the Baltimore Sympho
ny and took part in the orchestra’s
fall 3001 tour of Europe, which
included performances in London,
Paris, Berlin, and Vienna.
1973
Wilfred (Bill) McClay (A) was
nominated by President Bush to be
a member of the National Council
on the Humanities, which is the
governing board of the National
Endowment for the Humanities.
Deborah Achtenberg’s (A) book.
Cognition of Value in Aristotle’s
Ethics: Promise ofEnrichment,
Threat ofDestruction, was pub
lished by State University of New
York Press, May 3003.
Stephen A. Slusher (SF) is prac
ticing intellectual property lawprimarily biotechnology patent
prosecution and litigation, as a
partner at Peacock, Myers &
Adams, P.C. in Albuquerque.
�{AlUMNIPrOFILE}
3a
White House Wordsmith
Two bright September days—onejoyful, one tragic—have
set the tonefor Holly Miller's White House work.
BY SUS3AN
Borden A87
t was a crisp sunny Saturday
in early September when
Holly Miller (SFGIoi), a
new writer on Laura Bush’s
staff, brought her visiting
parents with her to the Jefferson
Building of the Library of Congress
to hear the First Lady speak at
Washington’s National Book Festi
val. “It was a beautiful day and a
great event for the city,” Miller says.
“We heard Mrs. Bush’s remarks,
strolled around, watched children
playing on the lawn, and listened to
Stephen Ambrose speak.”
Three days later, September ii,
was also a beautiful day in Washing
ton, but instead of celebrating.
Miller found herself and her col
leagues from the Old Executive Holly Miller (right) with hoss Laura Bush.
Office Building fleeing their work
space in confusion and fear as a
Boeing 767 struck the Pentagon and the thinking that no matter where you live or
safety of downtown D.C. seemed unimagin who you are, there is a level at which we can
all connect. Even more simply, I was think
ably flimsy.
Despite the somber note that tragic day ing that there are so many good people out
brought to the lives of Washington workers, there.”
Miller says that the excitement of work
it did not mark the end of Miller’s honey
moon with her dream job. “After 9/11 the ing in the White House has not diminished
position definitely had new meaning,” says over time and adds that she’s never met
Miller. “The attacks gave me a greater anyone, no matter how long they’ve
sense for where I worked and why I was in worked there, for whom it had. “Anyone
public service. Having the opportunity to with any interest in history can’t help but
write for someone who is in a position to be thrilled to work here, to walk through
offer comfort to so many people made me these hallways. It’s so humbling, so fasci
realize that I was to contributing to the larg nating. I’m always learning about the his
tory of this place.”
er work of the White House.”
Miller is learning about a lot more than
Shortly after the attacks, Mrs. Bush’s
staff relocated to the East Wing of the the history and lore of 1600 Pennsylvania
White House where Miller now works in a Avenue. An ongoing challenge of her job is
small office next to the Visitors’ Center. to capture the style and sentiments of Mrs.
Over the next few months, a number of fam Bush to use in the writing she does on her
ily members of the 9/ii victims visited the behalf.
“It’s a learning process,” she says. “I
White House. “It was inspiring to meet
them and an honor to have the chance to trained under my predecessor, who had a
express my condolences,” she says. “They good sense of Mrs. Bush’s voice. I’ve read
were so brave and gracious. I remember her old speeches. Sometimes I can go back
{The College -St John's College • Summer 2002 }
and find what I want to write in a
speech she delivered months ago.
Learning to write for her is a matter
of marrying of my style and her style;
her style changes and I evolve with
her.”
Of course in Miller’s potentially
sensitive position, getting the style
right is only part of the challenge.
She discusses policy-related corre
spondence with Mrs. Bush’s direc
tor of policy. When she writes
thank-you letters to foreign heads of
state, she consults the National
Security Council.
And all her work is checked by the
First Lady before she signs it. “My
communication with Mrs. Bush
comes through the written word,
which informs my style,” says Miller.
“She’s the best editor. Her changes,
whether of a word or a sentence,
make everything read just right.”
Miller’s a competent editor on her own.
She notes that all of her jobs-whether in
government, television, or public relations-have been writing jobs. After earning
a BA in English and creative writing from
Denison University in 1995, she began her
career as a writer and legislative aide to Sen
ator Olympia Snow of Maine and enrolled in
the Craduate Institute at St. John’s in 1997.
“What a great time to do it,” she says. “I
was reading texts about early government
and how democracy came about, reading
The Prince while working on the Hill.”
Now Mrs. Bush’s deputy director of corre
spondence, Miller’s literary focus is prima
rily on the words and thoughts of the First
Lady, although she does make time to read
the words of others. “I just finished reading
the David McCullough biography, John
Adams, and I’m trying to read more from
the great collection of books I got at St.
John’s,” she says. First on the list for this
White House staffer? Alexis de Tocqueville’s
Democracy in America.
�{AlumniNotes}
Jon Ferrier (A) writes; “I just fin
ished an introduction to jazz pro
gram at our local public library
where Kayne, my wife, was branch
head.”
Laurie Franklin Callahan’s (SF)
daughter, Erin Callahan, will be a
freshman on the Annapolis cam
pus in the fall.
From Steve and Melissa Sedlis
(both A): “Steve is chief of cardiol
ogy at the Manhattan VA Medical
Center. He is an interventional
cardiologist and associate profes
sor at NYU School of Medicine.
Melissa is a pediatrician in private
practice in Manhattan and on the
faculty of Weill Cornell Medical
College and Mt. Sinai School of
Medicine. Our oldest daughter,
Elizabeth, is graduating from
Barnard College with a degree in
neurosciences. Our second daugh
ter, Jennifer, is a sophomore at
Scripps College studying political
science, and Julia is in high
school.”
School of Architecture. He is also
a painter and is presently design
ing large screens (oil on wood) and
continuing to work in pen and ink.
Cynthia Kirschner Swiss (A)
writes: “My husband and I are
sponsoring a coffeehouse for
singer-songwriters at St. John’s
Methodist Church on Harford
Road in Baltimore the first Satur
day of every month.”
“I’ve largely left newspapering for
longer forms,” writes Eric
Scigliano (SF). “A new book.
Love, War, and Circuses: the AgeOld Relationship Between Ele
phants and Humans was published
by Houghton Mifflin this spring.”
1976
Phyllis P. Goodman (SFGI)
became a great-grandmother on
March 22.
After over ao years as a computer
consultant serving the healthcare
industry, Jan Lisa Huttner (A) is
now devoting herself full time to
her web site FILMS FOR TWO:
THE ONLINE GUIDE FOR BUSY
COUPLES (www.films4a.com
<http://www.films4a.com/>) and
related speaking and writing proj
ects. Alumni who logged on this
summer had an extra treat-a guest
editorial by David Chute (Aya).
Landrun Hardy Mason (A)
writes: “I’m living happily in the
Connecticut countryside with my
wife and daughter. Our son is now
a freshman at MIT, and I’m in my
third career. After 10 years each as
a computer scientist and then a
corporate manager. I’m now an
investment advisor and fund manager-and loving it. Would be
thrilled to hear from any of my
friends from my abbreviated
career at St. John’s.”
1974
1977
Alla and Jeff Victoroff (A) are
pleased as punch to announce the
birth of their beautiful daughter
Maia on February 23, aooi.
1975
In addition to his editorial work at
the University of Miami in NorthSouth Center, Jose Grave de Per
alta (A) is teaching art history at
the Art and Art History Depart
ment and freehand drawing in the
WalterT. Featherly (SF) writes:
“As of July I, 2001,1 joined the
Washington D.C.-based law firm
of Patton Boggs, but I continue to
reside and work in Anchorage,
Alaska.” He’d like to hear from
any Johnnies traveling to Alaska.
Bob Elliott (A) writes: “I have
just started my own investment
banking/securities boutique after
18 years at JP Morgan. I am happy
to discuss careers on Wall Street
with interested students/alumni,
especially those in the Chicago
area where I live with my wife,
Stephanie, and three daughters.”
1978
Victor Lee Austin (SF) writes:
“In the spring of 2002, three
Austins celebrated graduation. I
received my PhD in theology at
Fordham; my dissertation title: A
Christological Social Vision: The
Uses ofChrist in the Social Encycli
cals ofJohn Paul II. But also in the
same season, our son, Michael,
received his BA from Thomas
Aquinas College; and our daugh
ter, Emily, graduated from high
school. My wife, Susan (Gavahan,
SF76), doesn’t quite know what to
think, but is enjoying some physi
cal and mental improvement of
late. (In 1993 she had brain sur
gery. ) A book of my meditations, A
Priest’s Journal, was published in
late 2001 by Church Publishing in
New York.
Peter Buck (SF) continues his
work to set up a year-long rites of
passage workshop in North Caroli
na and continues his work with
Quakers.
1980
Peter Grubb (A) writes: “2002
celebrates 18 years of marriage,
the 8th and nth birthdays of our
two lovely children (Mariah and
Jonah), and 23 years owning my
business ROW (River Odysseys
West/Remote Odysseys World
wide). ROW’S Missouri river
adventures, paddling 34-foot
canoes that replicate those of the
early fur traders along the Lewis
and Clark trail, are selling like hot
cakes. Visit ROW at
WWW. rowinc .com.”
1981
Chris Mark (A) bought a house in
Laurel, Md. in late 2000. “It’s
within earshot of I-95, so any
33
Johnnies passing through the area
are welcome to stop by for a
refreshing beverage. My email
address is cjmark@speakeasy.org.”
Matt Hartzell (A) writes:
“Amongst other fun and frolic. I’m
now on the Board of Directors for
a new bank we helped organize
and start up. The Right Bank for
Texas opened its doors May 13. I’m
still waiting for my Director’s fees,
but I guess I haven’t drawn the
right ‘Chance’ or ‘Community
Chest’ card yet!”
Marilynn R. Smith (SFGI) writes:
“I’m retiring this year from the K12 school district for which I’ve
worked for 27 years. I’ll continue
to teach, though, for the local
community college. Also I’ll have
time to spend with my 4 grandchil
dren!”
1982
Gail Donohue Storey (SFGI), a
novelist, and her husband. Dr.
Porter Storey, bicycled 2400 miles
in seven weeks from Houston,
Texas to Camden, Maine on their
tandem bicycle, fully self-support
ed with four panniers.
Kathi Sue Nash Wilson (SF) has a
daughter, Karina, who graduated
in June from the University of Cal
ifornia at the age of 19. The family,
which includes her husband Wayne,
and seven-year-old son Kennedy,
are relocating this summer.
Patty (Sowa) Rubin (A) is living
on Maryland’s Eastern Shore with
husband Eric and children Anna
(16), Madalen (12), and Alden (8).
“I’m teaching preschool music
(best teaching job I’ve had, for the
worst pay), directing church
choir, singing as soloist and as
member of local choruses. Cur
rent improbable ambitions: to
have my own office and sing Die
Wesendonk Lieder.”
David HershelWeinstein (A) has
lived in Florida since 1985 and is
still the director of research for a
brokerage firm. He’s recently
continued on p-jG
{The College. St. John’s College ■ Summer 2002 }
�{Alumni Profile}
34
Unmasking the Apocalypse
A Johnnie parodies a hest-selling series ofapocalyptic novels.
BY Sus3AN
Borden
(A87)
rebuilt and the sacrificial system reestab
lished as the world prepares for the apoca
lypse) has ridden one wave of popularity
after another since it first showed up in
the 19th century. He says that, not only
does the dispensationalists’ vision rob
Christianity of its depth and meaning, but
its promoters often have another agendato rob Christians of their
worldly possessions.
“Dispensational theolo
gy has always been a rest
ing place for thieves. In
the 1890s they said the
end of the world would be
in ten years. They got peo
ple to sell their homes,
give them their money,”
Wilson says. “Some peo
ple will take on massive
debt, do short term things
like not get married and
go off to work in the mis
sion field for what they
think is the world’s last
few years. There’s nothing
shallower than a Christ
culture with end-of-theworld fever, because
everything’s short-term
thinking.”
As Wilson has reflected
this shallow thinking in
the mirror of parody, he’s
caused a stir among a
number of readers of
the Left Behind series. “I
was expecting far more
anger,” he says, “but I got
a lot of feedback that was
positive and thoughtful. I
heard from people saying
‘thanks for letting people
know that the Left Behind
books are not the only
is sentences are stilted, his ed to demonstrate that historic Christian
nouns too often abstract. ity is much bigger than what Left Behind
His dialogue is plodding presents.”
Wilson says that dispensational theolo
and his reasoning is circu
lar. His characters are gy (the theological position that holds
stereotypes living in a world of cliches. His that God covenants with people in differ
plot is far-fetched and his descriptions are ent ways in different periods of history-in
this case requiring that the Temple be
long and largely irrelevant.
You’d think a graduate of
St. John’s and a lecturer at
New St. Andrews College
would know better.
And you’d be right.
Nathan Wilson (AGloi) is
the author of Right Behind, a
parody of the best-selling
apocalyptic novel Left
Behind. In Left Behind, the
world is confronted with the
sudden disappearance of a
significant portion of its
population as the true
believers are raptured, leav
ing a confused world of non
believers behind to discover
the truth and live out the
Bible’s apocalyptic vision.
In Right Behind, Wilson
mocks every aspect of the
book, from the heavy-hand
ed character development
to the clumsy writing. “I
wanted to imitate the writ
ing style, the thought
process, the plot structure.
I wanted to imitate into car
icature every literary aspect
of the work and its theolo
gy,” he says. But his main
goal was to reveal the perni
cious thinking behind Left
Behind’s theology-and its
success. “[Authors] LaHaye
and Jenkins have created a
Parodist Nathan Wilson with his son, Rory D.
false view of Christ. I want{The College.
St. John’s
College ■ Summer 2002
}
�{Alumni Profile}
option.’ And I heard from people who
have awakened and started reading
those hooks in light of Right Behind.
My goal was not to present a theology,
hut to trigger an investigation of
LaHaye’s and Jenkins’ ideas.”
Readers’ comments on Amazon,
com include: “It’s about time a Christ
ian who is concerned with what the
Bihle actually says writes a hook,” and
“I laughed my evangelical Christian
keister off.” Two self-proclaimed
authorities on dispensational theology
also weighed in, says Wilson: “Tim
LaHaye said my hook was funny hut
Jenkins got really, really mad.”
Those most critical of Wilson’s
book saw him as anti-Christian.
“Some people got really fired up and
thought I was blaspheming against
Christianity and attacking God,” says
Wilson. “But I was most certainly not
doing that. I was attacking a new and
not too long-lived movement in the
evangelical world.”
Far from being prone to take pot
shots at Christianity, Wilson comes
from a Christian background and
takes religion seriously. “My parents
came out of the ‘Jesus People’ move
ment in the ’70s. It was a bunch of hip
pies who moved on from ‘make love
not war’ to somehow find the doc
trines of Christ. My dad became a pas
tor in a Jesus People church in an auto
body shop.”
Wilson’s father is still pastor of
that church, which has become a
Presbyterian church, and Wilson
describes his parents now as oldguard historic Protestants. “I’ve lived
through most of that process,” he
says. “I was born into the body shop
church, and am now currently attend-
From Right Behind
BY Nathan D. Wilson
Buff sat by his window in business class and watched
the sun come up like a single tooth in a bleeding gum.
f He remembered that time in Israel. You know, that
J time when he became a deist and began to think that
I he led a charmed life because he always was, to coin a
phrase, in the right place at the right time.
An old woman sat across the aisle from him, a passed
out drunk next to him. He turned from his window and
looked at the old woman. She had a pair of cotton
nylon blend underpants in one hand and dentures in
the other. She stared at Buff in shock.
“Excuse me mister,” she said.
“Yes?” Buff said.
“He’s gone. My Harold’s gone. He’s just gone, van
ished, disappeared. Could you help me find him?”
“I’m afraid that there is going to be no finding him
Ma’am.”
“Why?”
“Has he left all material things behind him, clothes,
dentures, hairpiece?”
“’Ves.”
“Then he has finally turned his back on this world of
matter and all things evil. He has jumped right out of
the corruption that matter entails. He has taken every
thing essential to his being and left the rest behind. He
has reached the enlightened world of Forms where
there is no jewelry but spiritual jewels, where dentures
cannot go, where everyone is naked. He has been
Raptured.”
“How do you know?” the woman said.
“I write bad apocalyptic fiction. 1 know things.
Endtimes are my game.”
{The College
Sf.
John’s College • Summer 2002 }
35
ing that Presbyterian church.”
In addition to leading the church,
Wilson’s father founded the Logos
School, a K-ia classical school, and
New St. Andrews College, where Wil
son got his BA in 1999. “I came out of
there looking for a graduate liberal arts
program. The only thing that was
appealing was St. John’s. I was already
addicted to great books, having been
boiled in them at an early age. After
experiences with courses in other
schools, I thought St. John’s was ideal.”
Wilson has now returned to New St.
Andrews College as a part-time lecturer
in literature and will teach Euclid’s
geometry and classical rhetoric this
fall. He’s also managing editor of
Credenda/Agenda, a magazine he
describes as “a philosophically and reli
giously Trinitarian cultural journal.”
He’s working on study guides for Par
adise Lost and Faerie Queen for Veritas
Publishing in Pennsylvania and is in the
process of editing a collection of arti
cles comparing Islam and Christianity.
Wilson’s Right Behind publisher.
Canon Press, is thinking of following up
with another parody. Wilson favors a
Christian romance novel.
As for the theology that served as
counter-inspiration for Right Behind,
it’s still out there, more popular than
ever. The Left Behind series has sold
over 50 million books in 2,1 languages.
Left Behind products include 10 nov
els, five graphic novels, a6 children’s
books, several audio tapes, a calendar,
and a movie. For his part, Wilson does
not see its continued influence and
success as an impediment to his beliefs.
“I think the evangelical church is a
mess,” he says, “but I still count myself
part of it.”
�{AlumniNotes}
36
spent some time studying counter
bioterrorism and Joseph Camp
bell.
Jim (A84) AND Tish Heysell’s (A)
daughter, Maria, who was carried
across the graduation stage in
1983 as an infant when Tish grad
uated from St. John’s, has finished
her freshman year. She enjoyed
her year and loves the “great con
versation.”
Elizabeth Colmant Estes (A)
writes: “After nine years climbing
the corporate ladder at AT&T, I
found myself pregnant and ready
for new life. Joined a creative web
firm where I was the oldest
employee. Got bought out by a
bigger firm in moo. Watched the
web business disappear and my
colleagues with it. Took home the
plants and lo-foot giraffes this
week. Setting up my home office
as a business consultant. Helping
companies like the New York
Times and Morgan Stanley Dean
Witter to go paperless. Working
6o-hour weeks but mostly from
home where I can watch two-yearold Olivia play in the garden
below. This May I joined my son
Michael, 17, in Italy where he
spent the year with his sabbaticalized dad.”
Ruth Ann Smith Plummer (A)
says hello to anyone who might
remember her. She asks her old
friends to email her if they will be
attending the aoth reunion:
r.plummer@ntlworld.com.
1983
Lyn DesMarais (A) writes: “Our
kids are growing, healthy, and
active. We are engaged in a lot of
music, mainly bluegrass, and hope
to have a barn full of animals by
winter.”
From Margaret S. Mertz (SF):
“Santa Fe Class of’83 alums-where
are you? I am in my 3rd year as the
Dean of General Studies at the
North Carohna School of the Artsfinally a winning combination of
my St. John’s years in the context of
a performing arts conservatory.
Email is always welcome:
msmertz@mindspring.com.”
1986
Amy Bianco (SF) is living in
Sleepy Hollow, New York, and
working as a science editor at large
for Princeton University Press.
Her email address is amybianco@earthlink.net.
Daniel Schoos (A) participated in
1984
Liz Travis (SF) writes: “Leaving
my role in higher education was
tough, but I originally picked St.
John’s with the intention of going
on to become a lawyer, and when I
found that an annual ski pass was a
part of the deal I knew I belonged
here in Mammoth. If ever you are
wandering in the Eastern Sierras,
look me up; the door will be open.”
Er. Robert John NicoLETn, M.J.
(SF) is living in Ukraine and
searching for benefactors for an
orphanage for 14 children (soon to
be many more) and a soup kitchen
(serving over 350 people a day).
“Greetings to all my friends from
St. John’s,” writes Reth KoolBECK (A). “I keep very busy home
schooling each of our four school
age children. (We have two
preschoolers, as well.) This
sounds a lot harder than it is,
since the older kids do much of
the chores. The hardest part is
getting along with each other,
which we do for the most part. It’s
never dull, and sometimes we
have moments of glory.”
Elizabeth and John Rush (SF) and
Salem and Loran say hello from
the mountains ofVirginia.
Chris Rutkowski (A) is thrilled to
announce the birth of her daugh
ter, Rose Adelajda Rutkowski.
Russell Titus (A) writes: “It’s an
Sarah DeKorne (A) writes: “I am
exciting year for me. I have a new
job with terrific training facilities
and my wife and I are expecting
our third child in September.
Hmmm...ril be 63 when this child
graduates high school.”
working as a technical writer for a
medical software company. My
daughters, Cecelia and Helen, are
now 14 and 13.1 am remarrying in
the fall, Mark Howe. I hope to see
my classmates at our 30th
reunion.”
the Washington, D.C. AIDS ride
in June, a 330-mile bicycle trek
from Norfolk to Washington, D.C.
Stephanie Rico (A) writes: “Todd
(Todd Peterson, A87) was hang
ing out as ship’s surgeon on the
U.S.S. Stennis in the Arabian Gulf
while Steph was waiting for their
first child to arrive. Todd was
sorry to miss the birth, but came
home in May. Steph taught high
school physics up until the day it
all happened. Exciting times for
both of us.”
Elisabeth Long (A) is currently
splitting her time between co
directing the Digital Library
Development Center at the Uni
versity of Chicago and her latest
endeavor-getting an MFA in book
and paper arts at Columbia Col
lege. She had her first piece in a
gallery show in January. It was
based on the 3 Fates.
1987
Michael David (SF) writes: “Left
Sandia Labs in October 3000,
tried technology marketing con
sulting until recession arrived.
Been teaching algebra and geome
try at Sandia High School in Albu
querque. Students loved Euclid
Book I and doing propositions. I47 is still fun. Now looking for
business position.”
Sallie Fine Lewin (A) writes: “On
March 34th I married Michael
Lewin in Cleveland, Ohio. While
not a Johnnie, Mike did win the
approval of many of our fold. We
were thrilled that Jerry Abrams
(A87), Dave Heimann (A87),
SheilaMonen’Virgil (A88),
Linda Hamm Grez (A86), Tamara
{The College- St. John^s College ■ Summer 2002 }
(A87) AND Jerome Downey (A86),
Jo Ann (A87) AND Walter Matt
son (A87), and Joe Miller (A89)
could join us as we celebrated the
start of our new life together.
After a fabulous honeymoon in
Australia, we’re adjusting well to
our new filing status.”
1988
Sarah Waters (A) writes: “I’m
back on Kent Island and loving it.
I’m senior designer for Vanguard
Communications in Washington,
D.C., and doing my art on the
side. Would love to hear from my
classmates. Come visit.”
1989
George Erhard (SF) writes: “I
am currently working as an Inter
net technical course developer and
instructor and have recently re
discovered philosophy by way of
motorcycling”
Joe Miller (A) will move from
Chicago to Portland, Oregon in
late May. He will join the faculty of
Lewis & Clark Law School as an
assistant professor teaching intel
lectual property and evidence law
courses.
Heidi Ann Hoogstra (SF) writes:
“I am primarily responsible for
getting a new Buddhist Peace Fel
lowship chapter started for Port
land, Oregon. I am also the con
tact person for this new chapter. I
would love to hear from folks (you
know who you are). My email
address is enji@earthlink.net.”
Sophie Ehrhardt (Romano) (SF)
writes: “Mac and I still find our
selves in the heartland with (his)
family business and (my) growing
Montessori school, and enough
community involvement to drown
in. We know we have the two
smartest and most beautiful chil
dren this side of the Mississippi
River. If anyone knows where John
Ange (SF88) is, drop me an email:
orchards@deskmedia,com.”
�{AlumniNotes}
Jennifer Rogers Hoheisel (AGI)
writes: “Eric, Will, Luke, and I
are beginning to put down roots in
New Jersey. I just got a tenure
track teaching job in philosophy at
Camden County College. This fall
has been quite a time to contem
plate and ‘teach’ ethics, especially
with a wonderfully diverse group
of students. I continue to be an
evangelist for St. John’s style semi
nars. Eric is enjoying his 5th year
as a pastor at a local church that is
geographically and economically
between Camden and Haddon
field, New Jersey. Will is in third
grade, and Luke just started
kindergarten. We miss everyone at
St. John’s!”
Joy Kaplan (SF87) came for a
quick trip to Texas, where she vis
ited with Dixie Davis (A), Jim
Tourtelott (A73), and ran into
Kevin Heyburn (SF86) at a book
signing.
Beverly Angel (SFGI) graduated
in May from University of Texas
School of Law. She was recently
selected as one of 16 third year stu
dents (out of a class of 450) for
Peregrinus Consul. Consuls are
chosen for recognition based on
leadership and service to the law
school community. She hopes to
practice general civil litigation
after graduation. She is currently
clerking part-time at Hilgers &
Watkins, a mid-size Austin firm.
Rick Craven (A) writes: “Rick and
his wife Debbie were expecting
their first baby in July. They can be
reached at 2007 Bent Tree Loop,
Round Rock, TX 78681; rpcrfaven@hotmail.com. We’d love to
hear your news and visitors are
welcome! ”
Jeanne Blackmore (nee
Duvoisev) (A) writes: “I’ve never
written into the alumni magazine;
after all these years, I guess it’s
time! To start from the beginning,
I became a lawyer (ugh, I know,
how boring) after college, and
wound up practicing tax
law/mergers & acquisitions for
Ernst & Young’s San Jose office.
After too many years of that, I met
my husband and we decided to
take two years off from real jobs to
work for an animal rescue group in
beautiful southern Utah, Best
Friends Animal Sanctuary. We ran
their mobile adoption program for
dogs, and loved it. My firm never
let me quit completely, but for
some unknown reason asked me to
continue working part time from
home in a research and writing
capacity. This fall, after we fin
ished our two year stint in Utah,
we returned to the East Coast in
Burlington, Vermont. We are
enjoying it very much, snow and
all. I’m back to work full time for
Ernst & Young from my home
office-much better than a real
office.
Somewhere in all of that, we had
a baby boy named Benjamin Rex.
He’s eight months old now, and we
think he’s a blast! But, I guess all
parents think that about their
babies!
Over the years. I’ve kept in
touch with Garfield Goodrum
(A89); he and his wife Lucy just
relocated to Vermont. They have a
beautiful spread near Woodstock,
with horses, guest houses, and the
like. We’re contemplating moving
in with them. I’ve also kept in
touch with Alexandra Kambouris-Alberstadt (A87), who
lives in NYC and just had her sec
ond baby-a boy. And Sandro
Battaglia (A90) got married last
year and then narrowly (phew) sur
vived the WTC disaster. All three
are lawyers-egads!
I’d love to hear from any John
nies in the area or from any of my
long lost classmates! Feel free to
e-mail atjeannevt@adelphia.net.”
1990
Kevin Graham (A) has been
granted tenure and promoted to
the rank of associate professor of
philosophy at Creighton Universi
ty, the Jesuit University of Omaha.
Graham Harman’s (A) book,
Tool-Being: Heidegger and the
Metaphysics of Objects, is available
from Open Court Publishing.
Jonathan Ying (A) earned a mas
ter of industrial and labor rela
tions from Cornell University in
37
May, 2001. During his studies at
Cornell he was an intern at Amgen
and General Mills. Jon is currently
a human resources manager at
Texas Instruments’ Wireless Ter
minals business unit. His email
address is jyingioo@yahoo.com.
Sean P. Scally (AGI) and Debo
rah S. Scally NEE Lilly (AGI91)
have relocated to 9107 Demery
Court, Brentwood, Tennessee
37027 (615-373-1094). Deborah is
the editor of Bank Director Maga
zine and Board Member Magazine
and can be reached at
dscally@boardmemmber.com.
Sean is University counsel and Tax
Attorney for Vanderbilt University
and Medical Center and can be
reached at sean.scally@vanderbilt.edu. “We have two wonderful
children: Case, age 8 and Molly,
age 5,” writes Sean. “Both of us
miss all our GI classmates and
tutors and the special program
that is SJC. We’d also like to hear
from Johnnies who are near
Nashville even if you are just pass
ing through!”
Ken Turnbull (A) recently
changed law firms and is now an
associate in the Washington, D.C.
office of Orrick, Herrington and
Sutcliffe, LLP, a firm that origi
nated in San Francisco. On May 4
he married Leslie Spiegel, who
also is a lawyer in D.C. “I’d love to
hear from old friends at my email
address: kturnbull@orrick.com.”
From the parents of Mickey MeriCLE (AGI91): “In 2001, seeking to
cut back to a 10 hour day from the
hectic life of a consultant, Mickey
took a pay cut and accepted a posi
tion with Kinko’s. Six months later
Kinko’s CEO laid off most of the
California workforce and moved
their headquarters to Dallas, so
Mickey returned to one of her pre
vious employers, OFDA. The
Office of Foreign Disaster Assis
tance was glad to have her back
and posted her to Sierra Leone,
Liberia, and Mali. They also gave
her a global positioning system to
pinpoint possible landing strips
for small planes as she traveled
around Western Africa.
“From beautiful Freetown, high
on a hill overlooking the ocean,
via satellite phone, Mickey sighs
wistfully and says, ‘Someday I’ll
find a job where I can stay in one
place long enough to have a per
sonal life and have Murphy and
McDuff’ (her two bassets).
“The caretakers of M and M sigh
and hope for this too.
“Mickey’s diplomatic pouch
address is 2160 Freetown Place,
Dulles, VA 20521-2160. Her per
sonal email (bassetpal@aol.com)
at 9600 baud is available but not
answered often.”
1992
1991
Lani Makholm (AGI) writes: “I’m
Deirdre Routt (A) has taken a
position as a cataloger and refer
ence librarian at the main branch
of the Omaha Public Library.
Sally Henderson Keller (SFGI)
writes: “I am in my roth year of
teaching Honors Philosophy at the
high school level. Bruce Grigsby
(SGI95) was a great help during
the early design stages. I designed
the course featuring the seminar
method as a key component. It was
approved in 1991 and I’ve been
teaching it every year since that
time. I was honored to be chosen
the Teacher of the year 2001 (dis
{The College. 5t. John ’5 College ■ Summer 2002
trict #60, Pueblo, Go.). Again, a
graduate of St. John’s, Lenore
Trujillo (SGI95), was one of my
strongest supporters.”
}
currently through my church tak
ing a six-month certificate course
on the Islam faith. Also through
the U.S. Dept, of State I have
recently completed a two-week
course on the Near East and
Africa. When I graduated from St.
John’s, I was working for the U.S.
Information Agency which merged
in 1999 with the State Depart
ment. For the USIA, I worked pri
marily with educational and cul
tural exchanges but since the
merger, have had to get up to
speed on politics and U.S. policies
in the countries for which I am
responsible. I hope through my
�{AlumniNotes}
38
studies on the Near East to be led
to short-term mission work in
Islamic countries.”
Elyette Kirby, formerly Elyette
Block (SF), writes: “I’ve moved to
Tunbridge Wells, UK, originally
for work but am now a stay-athome mom to Benjamin and am
expecting another baby this Sep
tember. I’m always interested in
meeting up with old friends who
may be in the area.”
Victoria Burgess (SF) writes: “I
was able to catch up with Nicole
Kalman Levy (SF93) this past
August when I was in the U.S.
which was super. I am still hving
in London and would love to get in
touch with any Johnnies in the
London area.”
Greg Francke’s (A) piece,
“Israeli actions toward Palestini
ans a crying shame,” was published in April in The Citizen.
sense that I would become a
farmer. My ii-year-old mutt,
Judas, and I have been working at
Organic Herbs Unlimited in Sara
sota since September. Among the
many reasons I moved to Florida,
learning to grow food organically
is an aromatic challenge. I am also
in the process of publishing a
memoir and a collection of shorter
work, mostly poetry. At 31,1 am a
vegan, Quaker, divorcee without
an undergraduate degree! Educa
tion is a luxury for which I am
grateful every day, and hope to
finish only with a final breath. In
the meantime, Johnnies are always
welcome.”
Michael A. Baldwin (SFGI) is
now a Program Manager for the
Community Development Block
Grant Program for the Local Gov
ernment Division for the Depart
ment of Finance and Administra
tion for the State of New Mexico.
Joseph Walter Sterling FV (A)
Jim Cachey (SFGI) has recently
opened his own real estate broker
age firm in Chicago. His website is
www.jimcachey.com.
Dawn Beltz Pollard (AGI98) and
Phil Pollard (AGI93) have three
daughters-Eleanore, Anna, and
Thea. They’re opening a Waldorfinspired school in Knoxville. Phil
plays lots of drums and has about
75 music students.
writes: “Since June 2000 I have
had the privilege of working for
Project H.O.M.E., a non-profit
organization in Philadelphia dedi
cated to helping individuals break
the cycle of homelessness. Being a
part of this community has been
the most extraordinary experience
and blessing for me. I continue to
work (slowly) on my doctoral the
sis in philosophy at Emory U.”
Kevin Johnson (A) writes: “Even
1993
Sharon Fitzpatrick (A) writes:
“Despite prestigious ambitions as
an adolescent, I had an intuitive
though I was never married, I can
faithfully report that I am single
again. And loving it.”
Sarah Louise Horton Stilwell was
born March a, aooa to Millicent
and McDavid Stilwell (both A).
Laura Anne Stuart (A) writes: “I
recently started a new job as the
health educator for students at
MIT. I am also a new member of
the board of the Boston Women’s
Health Book Collective, Publish
ers of Our Bodies, Ourselves. This
spring. I’ll wrap up a sexuality
education program for 7th and Sth
graders that I’ve been teaching
since last fall at the Cambridge
Unitarian-Universalist Church. I
spend most of my days and nights
talking about sex, which is great! ”
Thomas Hammerman (A) finished
his master’s degree in library sci
ence and is now the Hebrew mono
graphic cataloger at University of
Chicago.
The Ellermans write: “Alex
(AGI): Much to my amazement
and chagrin, the Navy’s promoting
me to Lieutenant Commander this
year; just in time for my resigna
tion. We’re planning to move back
to the D.C. area, where I’ll look
for an airline job. Vanessa (A): I’m
coming up on my and year at my
law firm here in Corpus Christi
and I’m celebrating by taking up
triathlon racing. I’m looking for
ward to finding a good law firm in
the D.C. area and settling down for
awhile. Ian (SFaa): I can count to
four now! ”
Kyle Linzer (SF and EC95) is hav
ing a great time teaching dance
and yoga at Rio Rancho High
School, and “living world’s rehgions” and philosophy for UNM.
He’d love to hear from alumni. His
email is Nikosdad@aol.com.
Jeffrey Spencer Wright (SFGI)
writes: “I received a National
Endowment for the Humanities
Fellowship last summer and so got
to spend last summer in San
Diego, California, as part of a sixweek seminar titled “Greek Values
in Crisis: Thucydides, Sophocles,
and Plato.” Pat Harnett (SGIoi)
was also one of the 15 participants
from around the United States.
Marvelous experience!! Carmel
High School’s philosophy class,
utilizing a real seminar method,
continues to flourish. Motivated
high school kids can read and
think and conduct real seminars!”
Phoebe Merrin Carter (SF)
writes: My husband Greg and I had
a baby boy in September, named
Dylan Guthrie, and we are really
enjoying being parents. I am the
Youth Services manager for the
Weber County Library System in
Ogden, Utah. Since I’m out of
touch with many of my old friends.
I’d like to say hi to everyone. My
e-mail address is pcarter@weberpl.hb.ut.us.”
Nancy Marcus (A) has been
named the Director of the Nation
al Abortion Federation’s Depart
ment of State Public Policy. She
continues to live in the D.C. area
with her cat Nicoless (whose name
reflects Nancy’s ongoing struggle
to quit smoking). Nancy welcomes
email from Johnnies at nmarcus@prochoice.org.
AnthonyChiffolo’s (AGI) sixth
book, too Names ofMary, has just
been published by St. Anthony
Messenger Press.
1995
Aaron Fredrickson (SF) writes:
A Year in Tuscany
1994
Mosheh Vineberg (SF) writes: “I
Anne Schuchman (A) and James Berrettini (AGI93) write: “We
spent the past academic year living in a i6th century farmhouse on
the outskirts of Florence, Italy. Anne had a Fulbright grant to do dis
sertation research on a 13th-century woman mystic and Jim quit his
job and is currently a full-time dad to Samuel, now 3. We returned to
New York (and to reality) in July. Baby #2 is expected in October so it
looks Uke we’re going to miss Homecoming (again). Maybe Croquet
2003? Anne can be reached at; ams8050@nyu.edu and Jim at
jpb@alum.mit.edu.
think an exciting life is accessible
to everyone everywhere, wherever
you find yourself, provided that
you listen to your heart and make a
little time each day or each week
to cultivate your dream and life
purpose. My dream/purpose is to
live as a Jew in Israel, build a fami
ly, learn Torah and make art.”
{The College. 5t. John’s College . Summer aooa }
“I’ve had an eventful fewyears. The
condensed version is that my wife
and I have returned to my native
soil in the San Francisco Bay Area
after finishing law school and
spending a mostly futile year in Vir
ginia. I’d very much like to speak
with any Johnny lawyers hving in
the area, as I’ll be taking the bar
this July and am curious about what
is, by reputation, the hardest bar
exam in the nation. Also, I’d love to
speak with any current or former
Johnnies contemplating law school;
�{AlumniNotes}
Sarah Van Deusen Flynn (A)
writes: “We are finishing our tour
in Guam, which has been wonder
ful. In September 02, we are head
ing back to the D.C. area. I am
leaving medical school for good to
he with my two boys.”
Texts for Tots
Mike Layne (SF95) writes: “My wife, Rachael, and I have been mar
ried three years as of June la, 2002, Our daughter, Audrey Rae
Layne, was born on February 12, 2002, in Anchorage. I spend at least
30 minutes each day reading her sections of Rousseau’s Discourse on
the Origin ofInequality and Emile. Marx is next on our reading list.
We are still living in Barrow, Alaska, and I am working as a counselor
at an emergency shelter for youth. Would love to hear from SJC
alumni and tutors. You can email me at mike_layne@hotmail.com.”
Faith Echele (SF) writes: “I am
it’s not as bad (or good) as you
might expect! I can be reached at
aefredrickson@rocketmail.com
if any of you would like to get in
touch.
someone who remembers the peo
ple who shared her St. John’s expe
rience more fondly than you might
imagine is welcome to do that at
webmaster@franzworld.de.”
Janet Sutherland (SFGl) writes:
Sean Stickle (A) writes: “I am in
“I finished seminary, moved to
Kansas City, and started a church.
Go figure. I’m also writing a book.
My web site is www.churchofantioch.org/coakc.html or write me at
suncliff@planetkc .com.”
love with and married to a woman
of profound excellence, who is
applying to the Graduate Institute
to acquire her own SJC-style edu
cation. On less important fronts, I
am employed as the Senior Manag
er of Information Systems at the
Corporation for Enterprise Devel
opment, a national nonprofit
research and economic develop
ment outfit, where most of my
time is taken up with the spectacu
lar intricacies of XML routing and
financial systems integration. I
encourage any Johnnies who want
to get into the bizarro world of
IT/IS to drop me an email at stickle@cfed.org. The field needs more
people who have read the Posteri
or Analytics. Really.”
In August, Aaron Benjamin
Rutherford (AGI) will begin his
fourth year and his internship at
Southern College of Optometry in
Memphis, Tennessee. His address
is 543 Par Drive/ Apt. 12/ Marion,
Arkansas 72364.
Angelika Franz (SF) writes:
“One among many things St.
John’s made me believe in was to
follow one’s call-which I already
put into practice with my decision
to leave the college after my fresh
man year. The fascination with
Greeks and Romans, however, has
never left me and led me to a PhD
in classical archaeology last sum
mer. After having done archaeolo
gy (among other things like waitressing and organizing
humanitarian aid transports into
Kosovo) for some nine years, the
call to follow was something else
St. John’s made me believe in: the
power of words. So I traded in the
ancient stones for current events
and am now working as a freelance
journalist. I guess what still sums
it up for me today, ten years after
having left St. John’s, are the four
wise words of Mr. Aigla: ‘Trust no
one. Trust yourself. Read every
thing twice. Enjoy life.’ Anyone
who cares to spare a few words for
Thea Agnew (SF) writes: “I’m
self-employed as a consultant to
rural communities, mostly work
ing on planning community proj
ects and seeking funding. Still liv
ing between Anchorage and
McCarthy. Getting married this
fall out in McCarthy. Saw Mike
Layne (SF) and Rachael, his wife,
and his beautiful new baby Audrey.
Will be seeing them again in Bar
row later this month.”
Gil Roth’s (AGI) publishing com
pany, Voyant Publishing, has
recently released two novels: Paul
West’s The Place in Flowers Where
Pollen Rests and Samuel R.
Delany’s The Mad Man. He hopes
to reissue Walter Pater’s On Plato
and Platonism in 2003.
{The College.
St.
currently teaching lower elemen
tary, ages 6-9, at Henson Valley
Montessori School in Temple
Hills, Maryland. I would enjoy
connecting with St. John’s alumni
in the Maryland/DC area. Also,
Henson Valley Montessori is in
need of Great Books discussion
leaders. We are looking for people
willing to volunteer once a week
to guide literature discussions
with elementary students.”
Tucker Braddock (A) writes:
Married an Aussi in Sydney in
December 1998. Live in Annapo
lis, work in Washington making
money. Daughter born December
2001: Ivy Elizabeth. 7 lbs. 13 oz...
In case you’re wondering, still
interested in Jesus; haven’t found
Hinduism, Ms. Hack.”
Rohert A Gammon II (SGIEC)
graduated May 19 from the Uni
versity of Hawaii with a PhD in
East Asian Languages and Litera
tures (Chinese). His dissertation
is titled “A common architecture
for expressing linguistic theories:
With illustrations from Chinese
languages, cognitive grammar,
and software engineering.” He
was selected to participate in a
National Science Foundation
summer program in Taiwan.
Patricia Greer (AGI) received a
PhD from the University of Vir
ginia in May, in history of reli
gion. Her dissertation is titled
“The Net of the Mahabharata.”
Ms. Greer is a tutor at St. John’s in
Santa Fe.
In December 2001 Benjamin
Friedman (SF) earned his MFA in
film and television production
from the University of Southern
California. He’s living in L.A. and
looking for a job in the entertain
ment industry.
Tracy Whitcomb (A) and Josh
SiLBERSTElN (A94) are now
John’s College ■ Summer 2002 }
39
engaged. They’re planning a fall
2003 wedding.
1996
Adrien Dawson nee Gehring (A)
finished seminary in May and was
ordained in June at the Baltimore
Episcopal Cathedral. She and her
husband, Sean, moved from NYC
to the Towson area following grad
uation. Adrien is now the assistant
rector at Trinity Church, Towson,
Md.
Amy Jane King (SF), formerly Amy
Jane Borsick-Stanton, writes: “I
am back in NM, studying Spanish
and silversmithing, making arts
and crafts. I am also a balloon
twister, you know, I make balloon
animals.”
Ezra Nathaniel Hubbard (SF)
writes: “After making movies in
L.A. and New York, met wife on
tropical island of Hawaii and got
married June 23, 2001 in St. Louis,
Missouri. Now live in Taos, New
Mexico, where we are very happy—
would love to have any alums come
and stay with us.”
1997
Salvatore Scibona (SF) received a
Pushcart Prize for one of his short
stories. It was published in the
Pushcart Book ofShort Stories: the
Best Storiesfrom a Quarter-Centu
ry ofthe Pushcart Prize in January.
Salvatore is currently a Fiction Fel
low at The Fine Arts Work Center
in Provincetown, Mass.
Leslie Norton (AGI) is unem
ployed at the moment. She is try
ing to change careers from teach
ing to working for an international
aid organization. If you read this
and you can help, feel free to con
tact her. She’s in the SJC Alumni
Directory. Leslie is in touch with
Aaron Mannes who spends his days
writing serious stuff about the
Middle East (he’s looking for a job
too) and she also remains in con
tact with George Strawley-he’s
still working for AP in Penna.
�{AlumniNotes}
40
Artist Inya Laskowski (SFGI)
showed her work at two solo shows
in 2,002,: Gallery Route One, Point
Reyes, Calif, (encaustic minia
tures) and Sebastopol Center for
the Arts, Sebastopol, Calif, (recent
work). She will also exhibit in a
two-person show at Pacific Union
College, Angwin, Calif, in Septem
ber as well as several group shows
throughout the year. She says her
art is moving into a new phase
because she now has use of
a large press.
Larissa N. Parson (A) is still in
grad school-slowly working
toward her Classics PhD. She’s
taken up running marathons.
Diane Marie Shires (SFGI) and
Christopher Patrick English
(SFGI97) were happily married on
December 37, 3001 on Santa
Catalina Island, Avalon, Calif.
They note that this was 135 years
to the day Darwin set off aboard
the HMS Beagle. Tricia Daigle
(SFGI97) was in attendance.
Jehanne Dubrow (A) is currently
Billy Sothern and Nikki Page
at the University of Maryland
working on an MFA in poetry. She
attended writing workshops at the
University of Prague this past
summer.
(both A) were married in their gar
den at their home in New Orleans,
La. on March 30, 3003.
JillNienhiser (SFGI) is now the
Director of Writing and Web
Development at Mind & Media,
Inc. in Alexandria, Virginia.
1998
Stephen Conn (SF) found himself
in New York City for most of 30013003, involved in film and art
studies, as well as being an intern
with the Pulse Theatre. While
studying at the New York Film
Academy he made three short
films, two of which relate to Sep
tember II, while the third is a little
vignette which features Steve as
the main character. These films
were recently shown at an under
ground film event in New York
City. There is a copy of these three
short films on VHS in Meem
Library at St. John’s College in
Santa Fe. He sends his love to all
his old friends at St. John’s.
David Turney (AGI) writes: “Wife
Stephanie (Bardis) recently gave
birth to our first child, Christo
pher David. I gave up France and
goat cheese adventures for a
career in scientific publishing with
Reed-Elsevier. Contact us: writerscramp@worldnet.att.net.’’
Marjorie Roueche (A) writes:
“We are expecting a baby girl,
though we’re still working on a
befitting Greek name.”
Dawn Star Borchelt (A) sends
what she calls a silly rhyme:
“Though I live not far away/To
Annapolis, I rarely stray./Early
Autumn, Early Spring/Never
work. You see the thing/Is that
work requires my presence/Most
often at these times ofyear./Alas
my fond, fond alma mater-/Many
moons shall pass’ere I draw near.”
Lorna Anderson (SF) became
Lorna Johnson on May 35, when
she married Aaron Johnson at the
Woman’s Club of Evanston in
Evanston, Illinois. Aaron is a clas
sical pianist who received his mas
ter’s degree in music performance
from Northwestern University in
1993 and has been performing
original and classical composi
tions in the Midwest and east
coast. Lorna is pursuing publica
tion of her poetry in various jour
nals and has become an active
member of RHINO: The Poetry
Forum, an annual poetry journal
based in Evanston. She welcomes
anyone passing through Chicago,
and can be reached at velvet_6o636@yahoo.com.
1999
Paul Ronco (SF) writes: “Hi all,
hope everything is going well for
you out there in the real world.
What more should I say? The
Army was fun, St. John’s was fun
ner [sic]. Drop me a line at pronco@hotmail.com anytime.”
Cheryl Hut (AGI) writes: “I am
living in Scotland with my 3-yearold son, Gabriel, who was born a
week after graduation. I am work
ing on an M. Litt in Shakespeare
Studies at the University of St.
Andrew’s and love this town by the
sea. I would love to hear from any
St. John’s alumni in Great
Britain.”
TracyNecroux (A) graduated
from St. Andrews in June. She’s
now living in Ilhnois and hopes to
begin teaching soon.
Greg W. Koehlert (SF) writes:
“Moved from Atlanta to New York
City in June. Teaching in an LD
High School-Enghsh, History,
Outdoor Education, and yes,
Euclid Book i.”
Ruth Busco (SF) writes: “I am
currently enrolled at the Tradi
tional Acupuncture Institute in
Columbia, Md., where I am pursu
ing a master’s degree in acupunc
ture. I ivill start seeing patients in
September-anyone in the area
interested in the institute or in
acupuncture treatment please feel
free to contact me by phone 410313-0991 or email (rmbusko@hotmail.com)!”
2000
Abigail Weinberg (SF) has been
accepted into a masters program at
the School of Forestry and Environ
mental Studies at Yale University.
Andrew Burgard (SF) is attend
ing an intensive Czech language
program at Indiana University.
Anne Berven (SF), Alexis Brown
(SF), and RaifeNeuman (SFoi),
will not leave the college. Mr. Neu
man is constantly outside smoking,
contemplating which office he will
work for. Ms. Brown is attempting
to finish the EC program and her
last pack of cigarettes. Ms. Berven
is communing tvith the young
minds of America while she
attempts to find her car keys.
Eowyn Levene (A) has been work
ing in an organic, brick-oven bakery
(The College. St. John’s College ■ Summer 2002 }
for the pastyear or so and has
recently spent a few months travelhng in New Zealand. She is begin
ning a two-year apprenticeship to
get her diploma in biodynamic agri
culture. She will be doing this at a
community for the mentally dis
abled in Gloucestershire, England.
Paul Spradley (A) writes: “Hello
ya’ll! I’m still teaching math in the
Mississippi Delta and am fixin’ to
graduate from the University of
Mississippi with a master’s degree
in curriculum and instruction. In
addition to my teaching duties I
have been made head baseball
coach. Unfortunately, that sport
was not well covered in intramu
rals in Annapolis.”
Anna Marissa Abbott (SF) writes:
“I am interested in knotving about
job opportunities in Santa Fe. I’m
currently working part-time at a
Sylvan Learning Center (as I have
been for the past year). Hello
Kelsey Bennett, wherever you are,
I hope you are happy. Jennifer
Rogers, Matthew Duffy, and
Kathy Pluth-1 send you my
regards and God bless...”
Karina Noel Hean (A) writes: “I
am moving back to New Mexico to
start an MFA program in fall 3003
at NMSU in Las Cruces. Feel free
to stop by for a visit! Have had a
lot of luck getting artist residen
cies, one in Harper’s Ferry, W.V.
and one at VSC, Vt. And a few
small shows. (P.S. did not go to
Amsterdam, not enough $$.)
email: karinahean@hotmail.com”
Christopher Vaughan (A) recent
ly visited Fletcher Cunniff (A) in
Catonsville. Christopher writes:
“I’m attending and loving every
minute of Flagler College. I hope
to get my degree in deaf education
by 3005. All of my former class
mates are in my prayers. If anyone
is near St. Augustine let me know.
I would love to hear from any
alums. Best wishes to old friends
like Tim Freeman (Aoi), Adella
Fay (SF), PaulNino (A), and
Claudine Cristoforides (A). At
first I was bitter about getting dis
enabled. Now I am just proud of
the time I had with you all at such
a wonderful school! ”
�{Alumni Notes}
Alice Baldwin (SF) writes; “I
hope everyone is well!”
fall. I thought four alumni in one
department was strange enough to
be worth noting.”
Alan Rubenstein (A) won a Uni
versity Fellowship to study lin
guistics at Georgetown University
this fall.
Lizzie Jump (A) writes: “I just fin
ished a year of service to Volunteer
Maryland (an AmeriCorps pro
gram) in Baltimore at the Neigh
borhood Design Center. I’m prob
ably going to move to North
Carolina and start working
towards a master’s degree in psy
chology. Folks should feel free to
email me if they’ve questions
about AmeriCorps.” Lizzie’s email
is iameloise@yahoo.com.
Wyatt Dowling (A) writes: “I just
finished my first year of graduate
school at Boston College in the
political science department. Eric
Dempsey (Aoo) is here too and two
other Johnnies, Steve Ide (SFoi)
and Jonathan Culp (Aoi) are
starting grad school at BC in the
2001
so that I may really focus on this
opportunity. I’ll most likely try to
make a move into journalism and
catering when I return. If I
return.”
Ian Mullet (SF) and Ben Judson
ing forward to retirement. Big ups
and much love coming out of
Crimebridge.”
(SF) are both teaching in San
Antonio, Tex. at Judson Montes
sori School, which is run by Ben’s
parents, James Judson (SFGI95)
and Gay Judson.
Talley ScROGGS (A) writes: “Upon
Basil Bryan Thorpe Cleveland
finishing my seven weeks as a
“debutante” student at L’Ecole
Francaise at Middlebury College my
goal was to move to France. Follow
ing my budding passion for food as
an object of study and of course
immense pleasure, I found an
apprenticeship with a Frenchtrained American chef and teacher
named Robert Reynolds. From
March to May 2,002, I’ll be living in
Montesquieu, France, going to mar
kets and cooking regional cuisine.
I have yet to plan the next move
leaving my desire to plan behind
(A) writes: “I will gladly host any
Johnnies passing through the
Chicago area-I’ve got a futon and
some floor space you can borrow
just for the asking.”
EbenLasker (SF) writes: “Look
Joel Hopkins (SF) is working in a
program for troubled youth in
Santa Fe right now. He took cours
es in art history at Tulane Univer
sity and at the College of Santa Fe.
He has received a scholarship to
pursue an MA in art history and
criticism at SUNY Stonybrook
starting this fall.
Calling All Alumni
The College wants to hear from
you. Call us, write us, e-mail us.
Let your classmates know what
you’re doing. The next issue will
be published in December; copy
deadline is October 15.
In Annapolis:
The College Magazine, St. John’s
College, Box 2800. Annapolis,
MD 21404; s-borden@sjca.edu.
In Santa Fe:
The College Magazine, St. John’s
College, Public Relations Office,
1160 Camino Cruz Blanca, Santa
Fe, NM 87505-4599;
classics@mail.sjcsf.edu.
Alumni Notes on the Web:
Read Alumni Notes and contact
The College on the web at:
www.sjca.edu - click on “Alumni.”
{Obituaries}
Rogers Albritton
Rogers Albritton, class of 1945, a professor of phi
losophy at University of California at Los Angeles
and at Harvard, died on May 21. He was 78.
Mr. Albritton was born in Columbus, Ohio, to
a physiologist and a chemist. He began his stud
ies at St. John’s but left to serve in the Army Air
Forces in World War IL He returned and gradu
ated in 1948. Mr. Albritton received a master’s
and a doctorate in philosophy from Princeton.
He taught at Harvard from 1956 until 1970, and
was chair of the philosophy department for
seven years. He then taught at UCLA until retir
ing in 1991.
Mr. Albritton has been praised for the breadth
and depth of his philosophical interests, which
included ancient philosophy, philosophy of
mind, free will, skepticism, metaphysics, and
the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. At St. John’s,
his senior thesis defended lyric poetry from log
ical positivism. Although he did not publish
much, he was nevertheless widely known and
admired in the academic world. A colleague at
UCLA, Gavin Lawrence, wrote in an obituary,
“Rogers had the finest philosophical mind I
have ever encountered. He never rushed to a
facile answer and was a wonderful sounding
board.” Mr. Albritton was awarded the Alumni
Association Award of Merit in 1995. He is sur
vived by his sister, Heloise Frame.
Paul Krol
Paul G. Krol (A76) died in May. He was a loved
and respected international businessman. He
was fluent in German and Polish and spoke
some Spanish, Korean, and Japanese. He was
financially responsible for the building of the
Southwest CARE Medical Center in Santa Fe.
Paul was a computer engineer who published
the book ORC AD Capture, a text used to teach
the teachers in that industry. He also wrote
many poems and short stories.
Paul spent half of his hfe volunteering and giv
ing to others. After being diagnosed with a ter
minal illness, he requested permission from
Catholic schools in New Mexico to talk to stu
dents about death and dying. His talks were so
successful they have been published in a book.
Although he was only 47 years of age, he
affected so many people in the world in such a
positive way, that I have no doubt there is a
“new star” in Heaven.
—submitted by Ron Moar
H. Ralph Lewis
H. Ralph Lewis, a former tutor in Santa Fe, died
in March in Hanover, N.H. Born in Chicago, he
was a physicist who studied at the University of
Chicago, the University of Illinois, and the Uni
versity of Heidelberg. In 1963 he joined the staff
at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he
worked on the controUed thermonuclear fusion
project. He taught at St. John’s and then at Dart
mouth, where he was on the physics faculty.
Mr. Lewis is survived by his wife, Renate; two
daughters, and a sister.
Admiral Robert Long
Adm. Robert Long, commander in chief of U.S.
military forces in the Pacific and a former mem
ber of the Board of Visitors and Governors, died
June 28 at the National Naval Medical Center in
Bethesda. He was 82 and lived in Annapolis.
Born in Kansas City, Mo., Robert Lyman John
Long graduated in 1943 from the U.S. Naval
Academy. He served during World War II in the
Pacific. In 1972, Adm. Long was named com
mander of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet Submarine
Force and vice chief of naval operations. He saw
combat in the Vietnam War. He headed the
American military forces in the Pacific from
1979 to 1983, when he retired. Soon after retir
ing, he was caUed to assist President Ronald
Reagan and Defense Secretary Caspar Wein
berger, who asked him to lead the commission
continued on p.43
{The Colleges;. John’s College ■ Summeraooi }
�{CampusLife}
4^
THE TWENTY YEARS’ WAR
Johnnies reclaim the Annapolis Cup, brinp^ing the croquet series to i6 and4.
BY Sus3AN
Borden
(A87)
he opening shots of the St. John’s-Naval After Heyburn returned to campus, he
remembered that several students had been
Academy croquet series have long been playing croquet and that they were pretty
the subject of speculation and rumor. good, so he decided to challenge the acade
my. “My main aim was to get the two groups
Some say the first match was the result of of students together and my hope is that the
a barroom bet. Others say it was a last- match is still a way to foster better relations
between the two schools,” he says.
minute substitute for a barroom brawl. And so it has happened. The spirit of the
has remained,
The truth, says Kevin Heyburn (SF86), wasmatch
much
more more or less, one of
peaceful camaraderie. The team uniforms
simple-and peaceful.
(footloose and fanciful for the Johnnies,
T
campy-casual for the Mids) bespeak a play
ful rivalry, not war games. The crowd’s
attention is on picnicking, not the score
board. And the goodwill that the opponents
display after each match is no clenchedteeth affair, but rather a hearty handshake
for a job well done.
At this year’s match (in April), however,
there was just the hint of a martial edge to
the Johnnies’ attitude. The Middies had
won last year’s match, breaking a nine-year
St. John’s winning streak. An article in the
Washington Post quoted senior Louis
Kovacs announcing before the match, “I’m
out for blood. I’m out to hurt people and
humiliate them.”
Newly inaugurated Santa Fe president
John Balkcom hit out the opening ball. Next
the freshman chorus, under the direction of
tutor Tom May, in an apparent welcome to
our comrades-in-croquet, launched into a
stirring rendition of the Navy Hymn:
Eternal Father, strong to save.
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave.
The
few, the proud, the victorious: the
aooa sjc
team.
Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep
It was 1981 and Heyburn, then a freshman
in Annapolis, was curious about the Naval
Academy. He and a friend went to the acad
emy’s pep rally for the Army-Navy game.
On the way back to St. John’s, they found
themselves walking behind the Comman
dant of the academy. “Being a bold fresh
man, I started to talk with him,” Heyburn
recalls. “I told him that in the old days, St.
John’s had quite an athletic program and
would often beat Navy at sports like foot
ball and lacrosse. The Commandant said
that now there was no sport where the St.
John’s students could beat Navy.”
{The College ■ St. John’s College • Summer 2002 }
Its own appointed limits keep:
O hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea.
As the chorus sang the next two verses
(penned by Tanya Hadlock Piltz, A05), their
loyalties became clear:
�{Campus Life}
Oh Johnnies who doplay
croquet.
43
greeting, offering its now-traditional menu of cucumber sand
wiches, college-logo chocolates,
and champagne. Tote bags with an
image of a Greek-style statue play
ing croquet on front campus wear
ing nothing but Birkenstocks and
a fig leaf were prized souvenir
giveaways.
The games ended just before
5:00 and the alumni office packed
up its champagne and chocolates
at 6:00. But the crowds, enjoying
the spirit of croquet and the thrill
of victory, lingered on the lawn
until dark.
Congratulations go to Imperial
Wicket Jon Polk, next year’s
Wicket Ben Porter, and team
members Lucas Ford, Nick Whit
tier, Mike Maguire, Jon Cooper,
Lou Kovacs, Tom Juskevich, Peter
Speers, and Terry Duvall. >
Protect our honor on this day.
Our battle cry: Let Middies kneel!
To them theform ofGood reveal.
Oh hear us when we boldly say
Defeat the Middies at croquet!
Oh ye who books do seldom read
Your unexamined lives concede
Beware each Middy girl and boy;
We are the Danaans to your Troy!
Oh hear us when we boldly say
Defeat the Middies at croquet!
The Johnnies on the field pro
ceeded to answer the pleas of the
singers, shutting out the Middies
5-0 before a crowd of over 1000,
including more than 300 alumni.
Throughout the day the alumni
tent was a locus of meeting and
{Obituaries}
continuedfrom p.41
to investigate the bombing of the marine bar
racks in Beirut, Lebanon. The commission
looked into security lapses in its fact-finding
mission on the incident, in which a terrorist
drove a truck laden with explosives into the
barracks, killing 241 marines.
He served on the St. John’s Board from 1986
to 1992. Later, he maintained his ties to the col
lege by encouraging the croquet rivalry between
St. John’s students and the residents of the
retirement community of Ginger Cove, where
he served as chair of the community associa
tion.
He is survived by his wife, Sara, and his three
sons, Charles, William, and Robert.
Roberts. Parr
Robert E. Parr, a former tutor in Santa Fe, died
Sept. II, 2001 in Ada, Oklahoma. He was 77.
Mr. Parr taught music at St. John’s and was a
life-long musician and active in theater. Born in
Norman, Oklahoma, he graduated from the
University of Oklahoma. During World War II
he served in the military in Europe. After the
war, he studied at Yale with German composer
Paul Hindemith, then moved to San Francisco,
where he received a master’s degree in composi
tion from the University of California, Berkeley.
He taught at Candell Conservatory and at pri
vate schools in New Mexico and St. Louis, in
addition to St. John’s. He also ran a wheat farm
in Oklahoma, raised Arabians, and enjoyed his
involvement with puppet opera. Mr. Parr is sur
vived by his lifemate, Dianne Stowers.
Charles Wallace
Charles “Charlie” Wallace, the superintendent
of buildings and grounds for the Annapolis cam
pus for many years, died in April. Mr.
Wallace was born in Baltimore and served in the
U.S. Marine Corps during the Korean War. He
worked as a construction superintendent for
Dunton, Inc. for 20 years, building many public
schools in Maryland. He retired from his job at
St. John’s in 1998.
Surviving are his wife, Emily; two sons,
Charles and William; one daughter, Lisa
Delasko; a sister, and six grandchildren.
John Wirth
A long-time Board member of St. John’s Col
lege, John Wirth passed away on June 20.
He was 66.
Mr. Wirth and his wife, Nancy Meem Wirth,
were active members of the college for many
years. Beginning with the donation by Nancy’s
parents. Faith and John Gaw Meem, of the land
for the Santa Fe campus and continuing into the
present with their involvement on the faculty
housing project, their dedication to the mission
of St. John’s has always been exemplary. Mr.
{The College- St. John’s College - Summer 2002 }
Wirth served as vice chairman of the Board of
Visitors and Governors, and worked on the Cali
fornia property project.
Mr. Wirth was born in Dawson, New Mexico
in 1936. He graduated from Harvard University
in 1958 and received his doctorate in Latin
American History in 1967 from Stanford Univer
sity. He served in the army in 1958-59. He was
the recipient of numerous awards, prizes, and
fellowships related to his expertise in Latin
American history. He commuted weekly to
teach undergraduate courses in contemporary
Brazilian history, environmental history, and
Canadian history at Stanford University where
he held the Gildred Chair of History. He retired
from Stanford in June.
He founded and was president of the North
American Institute, based in Santa Fe. The tri
national organization is dedicated to better rela
tions between Mexico, Canada, and the United
States. A prolific writer, his latest book is
Smelter Smoke in North America: The Politics of
Transborder Pollution. He recently completed a
history of the Los Alamos Ranch School, which
wiU be published shortly by the University of
New Mexico Press.
He is survived by his wife, Nancy Meem
Wirth; sons, Peter, Tim and Nicholas; and four
grandchildren.
�44
{Alumni Association News}
Letter from
THE Alumni
Association
Dear Johnnies,
What does it mean to “come home?” For
most colleges and universities. Homecom
ing means foothall, old haunts, a few old
friends, and lots of people you hardly
rememhered the day after graduation. At
St. John’s, Homecoming is some of those
things, and many more.
It might mean coming hack to a place that
smells and looks and feels not so different
from when you left it. Homecoming might
also mean visiting a place you’ve never
been. If you spent your college years in
Santa Fe, you might just as well enjoy
Homecoming on the water and in the midst
of colonial red brick in Annapolis. If
Annapolis was the locus of your personal
memories, you might also come home to
the wonderful mountains and desert sun
sets of Santa Fe. The places, though both
beautiful and significant, are not the
essence of Homecoming for Johnnies.
Yes, you’ll see old friends, especially if
you choose a Homecoming for one of your
class’s special five-year reunions. But
even if you come when other classes are
having their reunions, you will still see old
friends-tutors, staff, members of classes
before and after yours. The community on
each campus is surprisingly constant with
the familiar names and faces scattered
among the new ones. Chances are that
you’ll also meet new “old friends,” includ
ing many who are familiar because they
shared the experience of reading and talk
ing about the same books in the same ways
that you did. Everytime I return-whether
to Santa Fe or Annapolis-I discover inter
esting and stimulating people whose his
tory makes them part of an intellectual
and institutional family. The family
resemblance is striking, regardless of
when or where or for how long they lived
in the Program.
The Homecoming Dinner last October
in Annapolis was an excellent example for
me of the cross-generational nature of the
Johnnie experience. According to tradi
tion, after dinner is served and awards are
presented, each reunion class gives a toast.
Sometimes the toasts are funny and some
times they are poignant, and last year was
no exception on this count. It was an excep
tion, however, because all of the toasts
revolved around a theme very near to each
of us on that evening, just three weeks after
September ii. Each class toast reflected, as
only Johnnies can, on the meaning of the
college in the wake of our national trauma.
Classes from the ’40s remembered the dis
ruption of their lives during World War II.
Classes of the ’50s talked about what it
meant when women entered the campus as
fellow students. The ’60s reflected on a
rediscovery of patriotism that had not been
part of their early engagement with the
world. The ’70s talked of Vietnam and the
dissention that war introduced to personal
and social self-knowledge. Classes of the
’80s and ’90s opened our eyes to a genera
tion that approaches self and institution
with confidence and assumed security.
Together, the toasts framed a social history
of America from the point of view of
thoughtful and admirable individuals. For
me, it was a touching and powerful mes
sage about my self, my community, and my
nation
But most of all, for me. Homecoming is
coming home to the books. There is always
a formal time when alumni and guests
meet in official seminars to inquire togeth
er as we did in the old days. Sometimes the
books are different, and usually the tutors
and students are different, but always the
experience is the same. I come to the table
with certainties and questions and leave
with fewer certainties and more questions.
My real measure of a good seminar is
whether it inspires me to read the text
again. Seldom does a seminar fail to meet
this expectation. Just like our student
{The Colleges?. John’s College ■ Summer 2002 }
ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE
ALUMNI ASSOCIATION
Whether from Annapolis or Santa Fe, under
graduate or Graduate Institute, Old Program
or New, graduated or not, all alumni have
automatic membership in the St. John’s Col
lege Alumni Association. The Alumni Associa
tion is an independent organization, with a
Board of Directors elected by and from the
alumni body. The Board meets four times a
year, twice on each campus, to plan programs
and coordinate the affairs of the Association.
This newsletter within The College magazine
is sponsored by the Alumni Association and
communicates Alumni Association news and
events of interest.
President - Glenda Eoyang, SF76
Vice President - Jason Walsh, A85
Secretary -Barbara Lauer, SF76
Treasurer - Bill Fant, A79
Getting-tke-Word-Out Action Team ChairLinda Stabler-Talty (SFGI76)
Web site - www.sjca.edu/aassoc/main.phtml
Mailing address - Alumni Association, St.
John’s College, Box aSoo, Annapolis, MD
21404 or 1160 Camino Cruz Blanca, Santa Fe,
NM 87505-4599.
days, however, coming home to the books
is not restricted to the time around the
table. Informal conversations over food,
drink, or dance remind me of the wellgrounded conversations of my student
days. Themes emerge and common refer
ents are invoked. The conversations are
decidedly different from those I have dayto-day, and they feed my curiosity and my
ever-developing view of the world and
myself.
Homecoming is an opportunity to revisit
whatever lives in your memory of your days
at St. John’s. It is also an invitation to
reflect on current aspirations and activities
in the context of personal, institutional,
and intellectual history. I hope that you will
plan to join the next Homecoming party,
and I hope you find, as I have, that coming
home is a richly varied experience that
transforms memories of the past into reali
ty of today and hopes for tomorrow. See
you there!
For the past, the present, and the future,
Glenda Eoyang
President
St. John’s College Alumni Association
�{AlUMNiAsSOCIATIOnNeWS}
As will not surprise any Johnnie, our
progress could be measured more in the
improvement of our questions, or in the
introduction of new ones, than in reaching
final answers.
On one conclusion there did seem to be a
consensus: the efforts of Aristotle, Hegel
and Nietzsche to capture the essence of
tragedy pale in comparison to the real
thing. The profundity and variety of the dra
matic experience exceed their descriptions,
and analysis of it is like trying to “catch
lightning in a bottle.” ♦
Report From The
Hinterlands
What the Minneapolis/St.
Paul Alumni Chapter Has
Been Up To For the Last
Few Years
The Minneapolis/St. Paul chapter of the
Alumni Association has recently completed
its second set of readings and seminars
organized on a theme. Politics was our first
theme. Tragedy our second. Each extended
over a year. Prior to that, for over 20 years,
we had read books more or less at random;
and, although there were some memorable
seminars during that period, the theme
approach has generally produced more con
tinuity of thought and depth of discussion.
We would recommend the approach to
other chapters.
Our Tragedy list:
• Agammenon, Aeschylus
• Oedipus Rex. Sophocles
• Poetics, Aristotle
• Othello, Shakespeare
• The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche
• Three Sisters, Chekhov
• Bartleby the Scrivner, Melville
• Mourning Becomes Electra, O’Neill
• The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald
• The Tragic Sense ofLife, Unamuno
We were somewhat naive in our choice of
readings. For example, none of us knew
what to expect from Unamuno’s Tragic
Sense of Life, and we were divided after
wards concerning its intrinsic value; but
most agreed that it produced some of the
best discussions. It helped us discuss
Tragedy as Philosophy, not merely as a dra
matic form.
As evidence of the continuity, some of the
same questions persisted throughout the
year. For example:
• What is Tragedy? Is a precise defini
tion possible?
• Are Greek Tragedy and Elizabethan
Tragedy essentially the same or diff
erent? (and the same question when
comparing the plays of Aeschylus,
Sophocles and Euripides).
• The Bacchcie, Euripides
• Is Cosmology an essential ingredient
of Greek Tragedy? Can we ever fully
appreciate Greek Tragedy without
sharing its cosmological view?
• Poetics, Aristotle
• Is Christianity anti-tragic?
• The Orestia, Aeschylus
• On Poetry, Hegel
The list is eccentric and somewhat acciden
tal. We discussed Agammenon twice, once
by itself and once in the context of the
Oresteia. We also read and discussed Aristo
tle’s Poetics twice, once at the beginning
(with the help of Santa Fe tutor Matt Davis)
and once at the end, when we had a “theme
overview” discussion. In the middle, and at
their suggestion, we did Bartleby the
Scrivener with the help of Santa Fe presi
dent John Balkcom and then-vice president
Robert Glick.
45
• What is the “tragic effect”? Does
either Aristotle’s “catharsis of fear
and pity” or Hegel’s “resolution of
substantive values” adequately
describe it?
• Why didn’t the Greeks have an inter
mediate dramatic form, like Tragi
comedy?
• What is the role of Tragedy in Educa
tion? Is it central?
• What is a Tragic Sense of Life? Is it
healthy or unhealthy?
{The College- St. John’s College ■ Summer 2002 }
Regular contributors to the monthly discus
sions were: Glenda Eoyang (SE76), Judy
Kistler-Robinson (SF77, SGfg), Robert Neal
(Abo), Walter Burk (SFgo), Nick Colten
(Ag?), Garol Freeman (AGIgg), John Hart
nett (SF8g), Graig Lefevre (Ag2), Kait Schott
(SFgi), J. Shipley Newlin (Afi7), Lori
Williamson (Agg), Mike Woolsey (Afig)
CHAPTER CONTACTS
Call the alumni listed belowfor information
about chapter, reading group, or other alumni
activities in each area.
ALBUQUERQUE
Bob & Vicki Morgan
5O5-=i75-9ora
ANNAPOLIS
Beth Martin
410-^80-0958
PITTSBURGH
Robert Hazo
412-648-2653
AUSTIN
Jennifer Chenoweth
512-483-0747
PORTLAND
Dale Mortimer
360-882-9058
BALTIMORE
Deborah Cohen
410-472-9158
SACRAMENTO
Helen Hobart
916-452-1082
BOSTON
Ginger Kenney
617-964-4794
SAN DIEGO
Stephanie Rico
619-423-4972
CHICAGO
Lorna Johnson
773-338-8651
SAN FRANCISCO,
NORTHERN
CALIFORNIA
Jon Hodapp
831-393-9496
SANTA FE
John Pollak
505-983-2144
SEATTLE
Amina Stickford
206-269-0182
DENVER
Lee Goldstein
720-283-4659
LOS ANGELES
Elizabeth Eastman
562-426-1934
MINNEAPOLIS/
ST. PAUL
Garol Freeman
612-822-3216
NEWYORK
Joe Boucher
718-223-1957
NORTH CAROLINA
Susan Eversole
919-968-4856
PHILADELPHIA
Bart Kaplan
215-465-0244
WASHINGTON DC
Jean Dickason
301-699-6207
ISRAEL
Emi Geiger Leslau
15 Aminadav Street
Jerusalem 93549
Israel
972-2-6717608
boazl@cc.huji.ac.il
�46
{AlumniAssociationNews}
Election Notices
Election ofAlumni
Representatives to the
St. John's College Board
of Visitors and Governors
In accordance with Article VIII, Section II
of the By-Laws of the St. John’s College
Alumni Association, notice is hereby given
that the following alumni have been nomi
nated by the Alumni Association Board of
Directors for election to the St. John’s Col
lege Board of Visitors and Governors.
Notice is also given that nominations may
be made by petition.
The rules governing submission of nomi
nations bypetition are asfollows:
• Petitions must be signed by at least
fifty members of the Alumni Associa
tion in good standing.
• Nominations must be accompanied by
a biographical sketch of the nominee.
• The consent of all persons nominated
must be obtained.
• The petition must reach the Directors
of Alumni Activities NO LATER THAN
DECMBER 1, 2002.
c/o Alumni Office
St. John’s College
P.O. Box 2800
Annapolis, MD 21404
Mr. Bienenfeld has worked for Honda for 21
years in a variety of areas in the U.S. as well
as Japan. Mr. Bienenfeld served on the
Alumni Association Board of Directors from
1998, and more recently on the Board of Vis
itors and Governors since July of 2000. He
served as the president of the Los Angeles
Chapter of the Alumni Association in the
early eighties. In addition, Mr. Bienenfeld
helped organize alumni to support the Cam
paign for Our Fourth Century.
Thomas Stern Sl- '6g
Palo Alto, CA
Mr. Stern has been involved with motion pic
ture production since receiving an MA from
Stanford University in r97i. In 1981 he began
his association with Malpaso Productions at
Warner Brothers, Clint Eastwood’s produc
tion company. Mr. Stern works as a lighting
consultant, and has been responsible for the
lighting more than 40 feature-length motion
pictures including “Risky Business”, “Pale
Rider,” “Goonies,” “Bird, The Unforgiven,”
“Space Cowboys,” and “True Crime.”
Steve Thomas SFJ4
New York, NY
Following a few years as a computer opera
tor, Mr. Thomas spent the academic year
1976-77 in graduate school at the University
of Texas at Austin, in the Ancient Philoso
phy program. Remaining in Austin, Texas,
but dropping out of graduate school, he
worked as a computer operator by day and
became active in local and state politics as a
gay activist. In r98o, Mr. Thomas was named
as an at-large alternate delegate to the
National Democratic Convention, which
means that he gets hohday cards from the
White House whenever it is occupied by a
Democrat. He proceeded to attend the Uni
versity of Texas School of Law, initially to
acquire credentials for his political career,
when he discovered an actual interest in the
law. He served on the Texas Law Review
and was a member of Chancellors, which is
the highest honor society based on grades at
the school. He graduated with honors in
1984. He then moved to New York City,
where he has been admitted to the bar since
1985. He worked as an associate at the Wall
Street law firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen
and Hamilton from 1985 through 1991, and
since 1991 has been employed by Financial
Security Assurance (a monoline bond insur
ance company), most recently as associate
general counsel. Mr. Thomas has also been
involved since r989 with HIV Law Project,
an organization that provides legal assis
tance and advocacy to low income people
infected with HIV, for most of those years in
If nominations by petition are received,
there will be an election conducted by mail
ballot. If there are no such nominations, the
nominees listed above will be considered
elected. Terms will begin in July of 2003.
Robert Bienenfeld SF’8o
Long Beach, CA
The Senior Manager of Product Planning
for American Honda Motor Co. Inc., Mr.
Bienenfeld is responsible for planning the
vehicle line ups for Acura and Honda cars
and trucks in the U.S. In addition, he is
responsible for the sales and marketing of
electric, natural gas, hybrid and, believe it
or not, fuel cell automobiles. In addition, he
serves on Honda’s Environment Committee
for the Americas, and operates a small ven
ture capital operation for American Honda.
Great
moments in croquet history
(circa 1985): St. John’s teammates (l-r) David Kidd
(A85), Andrew Bi'.ckman( A87), Steven Werlin(A85) and Bryce Jacobsen (class
POSE WITH THE AnNAPOLIS CuP AND MiDDIE RIVALS.
{The College. St. Jo hn’s College ■ Summer 2002 }
of
1942)
�{AlumniAssociationNews}
his current capacity as chair of the Board of
Directors. Since 2000 he has served on the
SJC Alumni Association hoard. Mr. Thomas
is a fanatical opera fan, and is devoted to the
New York Mets. In his spare time he still,
helieve it or not, reads philosophy hooks;
and he still doesn’t understand Plato.
Election ofDirectors of the
St. John A College Alumni
Association
In accordance with Article VII, Sections I
and II of the By-Laws of the St. John’s Col
lege Alumni Association, notice is hereby
given that the following alumni have been
nominated to serve as directors on the St.
John’s College Alumni Association Board of
Directors.
Notice is also given that nominations for
the positions as officers and directors of the
Association may be made by petition.
The rules governing submission of nomi
nations bypetition are asfollows:
• Petitions must be signed by at least
thirty members of the Alumni Associa
tion in good standing.
• Petitions must be presented to the
Secretary of the Alumni Association
prior to the Annual Meeting at which
the election is to be held. Petitions
should be sent to Barbara Lauer, c/o
Alumni Office, St. John’s College,
P.O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD
21404.
• The election will be held at the Annual
Meeting on Saturday, Oct. 5, at 1:45
p.m. in Annapolis.
• The candidates for Directors receiving
the highest number of votes for those
offices shall be declared elected.
Terms will begin on January i, 2002.
Mark Middlebrook A ’8g
Oakland, CA
Mr. Middlebrook currently is testing the
truth of the well-worn dictum “in vino veritas,” as well as his hopeful corollary “in
vino pecunia.” He has worked in the wine
industry in Oakland, California, for a year.
As he waits for both truth and money to flow
from oenophilic endeavors, he continues
his mercenary masquerade as a computer
consultant. In addition, he teaches litera
ture and philosophy seminars at St. Mary’s
College of California. When he isn’t too
busy juggling three jobs, he enjoys playing
flamenco guitar and oud.
Jonathan Sackson A ’6g
Miami, Florida
MBA in Finance, Wharton, 1982. Mr. Sackson worked in various controller and finance
positions at Ryder System (1982-1989) and
served as Vice President and Controller of
the Bekins Corporation (1982-1992). Since
1992, he has been an investment advisor to
private and institutional clients in Miami,
Florida. He is currently Senior Vice Presi
dent at UBS PaineWebber. Mr. Sackson has
served as an at large member of the Alumni
Board since 1999. For many years he has
functioned as liaison to South Florida appli
cants to St. John’s. He was also Class Chair
for the Campaign for Our Fourth Century.
C. Frank Davis SFGI’gg
Santa Fe, NM
Mr. Davis has a BA in economics/govern
ment from the University of Texas (1958),
and he completed the Small Company Man
agement Program at the Harvard Graduate
School of Business in 1981. From 1963 to
1969 he was a broker for Bache and Co. in
Corpus Christi, Texas and from 1969 to
1998 served as the Chief Executive Officer
of Whataburger of El Paso, Inc. and Taco
Cabana of El Paso. In El Paso he has served
on the boards of Renaissance 400, the Rad
ford School for Girls, and the Bank of the
West, and has also served on the board of
the Texas Nature Conservancy. He has trav
eled extensively in Africa, Europe, and
Asia, and has participated in several Earth
watch projects in Nepal and Thailand, as
well as flying his own Cessna 185 for Wings
of Hope in Guatemala and Nicaragua, for
Lighthawk, and for local Santa Fe conserva
tion organizations. He volunteers in the
Santa Fe public schools, and has been a
longtime participant in Summer Classics
and Community Seminars at the college.
Gary Edwards Sk ’-g
Arlington, VA
Surgical oncology physician assistant,
Washington Cancer Institute, Washington
Hospital Center, 1995 to present. Surgical
physician assistant, Sibley Memorial Hos
{The College ■ St. John’s College ■ Summer 2002 }
47
pital, Washington, D.C. 1990-1995. B.S.
Physician Assistant program. The George
Washington University 1990. Medical
transcriptionist. The Neurology Center,
Washington, D.C. 1984-1990. Customer
service representative, Tulsa Oklahoma
1981-1984. Reporter KLMN television,
Fayetteville, Arkansas 1980-1981. Editorial
Assistant, National Review magazine,
summer 1979. Participated in class fundraising efforts Campaign for Our Fourth
Century. Co-class leader Philanthropia
1999. Appointed interim member SJC
Alumni Board member 3/02.
Joanne Murray, A ’^o
Pittsburgh, PA
Ms. Murray took her PhD in solid state
physics at the University of Maryland and
gradually slid into a profession in metallur
gy at the National Institute of Standards and
Technology (1977-1986) and then Alcoa
Technical Center. Although she is a con
firmed theorist, she also takes great pleas
ure in donning steel-toed shoes and hard
hat and heading out to the plant floor where
aluminum is being melted, cast, and rolled.
At Alcoa, she is leader of the Alcoa Techni
cal Center Women’s Network and presi
dent-elect of Sigma Xi, the Scientific
Research Society. She maintains ties with
the college through local alumni seminars,
the summer sessions in Santa Fe, and the
online Johnny-list.
Proposed Amendments to the St. John’s
College Alumni Association By-Laws_____
In accordance with Article XIII Section i of
The St. John’s College Alumni Association
By-Laws (as amended 9/29/01), notice is
hereby given that certain proposed amend
ments to the by-laws (to Article III, Section
III; Article IV, Sections II, II a, II b, II d, II
e, II g, II i, VI; Article V; Article VII, Sec
tion I; Article VIII, Seciton V; Article X;
and Aritcle XIV) will be considered by the
membership of the Association and
brought to a vote at the Annual Meeting,
1:45pm, Saturday, October 5, 2002, in the
Conversation Room in Annapolis. These
proposed amendments are posted at
http://www. sjca. edu/aassoc/main.phtml
(see navigation sidebar). Call the Alumni
Office in Annapolis (410-626-2531) if you
prefer to receive a copy via mail or fax.
�48
{St. John’s Forever}
ack Landau (top, class of ’44) and picking them up. The ones that stick
James Waranch (class of ’43) together, we put in the same room.”
Seriously, though, Ranson’s method is
undoubtedly had a memorable year
rooming together. But not every rather more effective. The roommate form
one ends up a winner in the room asks a series of questions relating to smoking
mate lottery. Luckily, the odds are practices, sleeping habits, noise tolerance,
and inclination towards neatness or slobbery.
good for freshmen arriving this fall. Andrew
Ranson, director of Student Services on the Ranson enters the answers into a computer
Annapolis campus, puts a great deal of for an initial match-up. Then, he looks at
thought into the roommates he matches: answers to a more general question asking if
“We have a roommate questionnaire we there’s anything else he should know about
send out,” he says. “When they all come the respondent’s ideal roommate. “I get the
back we throw them on the floor and start best and easiest matches from that ques
J
{The College- St. John’s College ■ Summer 2002 }
tion,” says Ranson. “When two people men
tion they play instruments, say that they’re
rehgious, talk about their interest in travel,
or note that they’re vegans, we put them
together and it usually works out well.”
Some answers to the “anything else”
question, he says, are so vague and subjec
tive as to be unhelpful. Incoming freshmen
might say they want a cool roommate or a
laid back room-mate, or someone who’s not
a moron. “We took the moron question off
the questionnaire a couple of years ago,”
Ranson says.
�{Alumni Events Calendar}
Homecoming aooa—Annapolis
Friday, October 4—Sunday, October 6
ilieanion Glasses: 193?, 194a, 1947, i
1957,1962,1967,197a, 1977,198a, 1987,
199a, and 1997
■■ ■:
Homecoming Highlights
Friday, October 4
by Eva Brann
(HA89): “The Empires of the Sun and
the West”
Career Panel
Wine and Cheese with the Class of
2003 in the Dining Hall
.Rock Party in the Boathouse
■ • • g'
Saturday, October 5
PPaturday Morning Seminars
‘ Homecoming Picnic and Reunion
Class Luncheons
• Mitchell Gallery Tour;” The Sweet
Uses of Adversity: Images of the Bibli
cal Job”
*•---------
• Classes of 87 and 88 Pick-Up Basketball
Extravaganza (all alumni are invited)
• Freshman Chorus Revisited led by Tom
May
Philanthropia, the alumni
A COCKTAIL PARTY AT THE BrOWN PaLACE HoTEL IN DeNVER IN JUNE. ThIS WAS THE GROUP’s SEC
OND
event; the first took place last
(piCTUED above). Events Chair
ROLE OF Philanthropia and its
porting
• Alumni-Student Soccer Classic
• Bookstore Autograph Party
• Tour of the Renovated Mellon Hall
• Cocktail Party in the Great Hall and
McDowell Classrooms
group that works on fundraising for the college, sponsored
pated
THE
IN the
college.
for
December
in
New York City. Stef Takacs, A89
Philanthropia,
familiarized those gathered with the
goal of informing alumni about the importance of sup
The Denver/Boulder chapter of
event, with
the
Alumni Association partici
Lee Goldstein, Liz Jenny, and Craig Sirkin choosing the ele-
GANT LOCATION. NoT THAT JoHNNIES WOULD NEED THE PERFECT SETTING FOR CONVERSATION TO
TAKE PLACE....
John Balkcom (SFGI 00),
president of the
Santa Fe
campus, initiated a lively discus-
SION AMONG ALMOST 50 ALUMNI ABOUT THE CURRENT STATE OF THE COLLEGE. “ThIS IS A GREAT
TIME TO BE ASSOCIATED WITH St. JoHn’s COLLEGE,” HE SAID. “ENROLLMENT IS STRONG; WE ARE
DOING FINE FINANCIALLY—ALTHOUGH WE COULD DO BETTER. ThE QUALITY OF CONVERSATION IN
• Homecoming Banquet: Candace
Brightman (A67) and Howard Zeiderman (A67) will receive the Alumni
Association Award of Merit; John
Sarkissian, Robert Williamson, and Al
Toft will be recognized as new Hon
orary Alumni
• Waltz Party in the Great Hall
THE CLASSROOM IS SUPERB. WHENEVER I LOSE SIGHT OF WHAT WE ARE HERE TO DO I GO SIT IN
THE DINING HALL AND A HALF-DOZEN TO TWO DOZEN STUDENTS SIT DOWN WITH ME. I DON’t KNOW
WHAT YOUR CONVERSATIONS WERE LIKE WHEN YOU WERE THAT AGE, BUT WHEN I WAS 18 YEARS
OLD MINE WERE NOTHING LIKE THESE. ThOSE CONVERSATIONS RENEW MY INSPIRATION AND
SENSE OF COMMITMENT TO WHAT WE DO AS AN INSTITUTION.”
Topics ranged from what the
college is doing to become more involved with the local
COMMUNITY IN SaNTA Fe TO HOW THE COLLEGE HAS CHANGED OVER THE YEARS TO THE POSSIBILITY
OF INCLUDING MORE WOMEN AUTHORS ON THE READING LIST.
For MORE INFORMATION ON PHILANTHROPIA AND UPCOMING PHILANTHROPIA EVENTS CALL OR
EMAIL Maggie Griffin
TY IN Santa Fe
at
in
Annapolis
at
410-626-2534,
505-984-6099, groherty@aol.com.
Sunday, October 6
uflch at the President’s
ouse
{The College. St. John’s College ■ Summer 2002 }
m-griffin@sjca.edu or
Ginger Roher-
�STJOHN’S COLLEGE
ANNAPOLIS • SANTA FE
Published by the
Communications Office
Box aSoo
Annapolis, Maryland 21404
DAVID TROZZO
ADDRESS SERVICE REQUESTED
Periodicals
Postage Paid
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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<em>The College </em>(2001-2017)
Description
An account of the resource
The St. John's College Communications Office published <em>The College </em>magazine for alumni. It began publication in 2001, continuing the <em>St. John's Reporter</em>, and ceased with the Fall 2017 issue.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="The College" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=56">Items in The College (2001-2017) Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Creator
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St. John's College
Coverage
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Annapolis, Md.
Santa Fe, NM
Contributor
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
Language
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English
Identifier
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thecollege2001
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
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paper
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Number of pages in the original item.
48
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
The College, Summer 2002
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 59.1-2 (Fall 2017-Spring 2018)
Double Issue
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Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
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��Contents
Essays & Lectures
We Are, Nonetheless, Cartesians:
A Prodigal Johnnie Reports Back ..........................................1
Antón Barba-Kay
Jacob Klein: European Scholar and American Teacher....................22
Eva Brann
On Negation: Other Possibilities in
Wallace Stevens’s Parts of a World .............................................35
Jason Menzin
“The Student,” by Anton Chekhov:
A Story Told and Glanced At .......................................................55
Louis Petrich
Poetry
Tetrastichs .........................................................................................79
Elliott Zuckerman
Please Note:
This is a special double issue containing both
numbers 1 and 2 of volume 59.
A separate number will not be published
in the spring of 2018.
��We Are, Nonetheless, Cartesians:
A Prodigal Johnnie Reports Back
Antón Barba-Kay
I fancy that every speculative thinker, however solid he may believe the grounds of his
thinking to be, does harbor, somewhere
deep down in him, a skeptic—a skeptic to
whom the history of philosophy looks
rather like the solemn setting up of rows of
ninepins, so that they may be neatly
knocked down! That way of looking at
things is tempting, no more; it is tempting,
and for philosophy it is in a sense the temptation—just as for man in general suicide
is that. It is a kind of suicide, too.
—Gabriel Marcel
It is said that philosophy makes no progress—that its history is a
series of footnotes to Plato, say, or that it is an ever-renewed attempt to find a beginning that cannot be known by being taken
for granted. The remark is sometimes made to rouge over our
blushes at the fact—striking to newcomers—that philosophers
have not been known to settle any fundamental questions once
and for all to everyone’s satisfaction. And yet there is at least one
point to which just about every modern thinker subscribes predictably and monotonously: I mean that Cartesian philosophy has
got it all very wrong.
Descartes was wrong that philosophy should be founded on
a closed set of first principles, wrong to think he could subtract
himself from the world, wrong to imagine himself as a pure
Antón Barba-Kay teaches philosophy at The Catholic University of
America in Washington, DC. This lecture was first delivered St, John’s
College in Annapolis on Wednesday, July 6, 2016.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 59.1-2 (2017-2018)
monadic subject, wrong to conceive of his consciousness as an
impartial spectator, wrong that we have privileged access to immediate self-knowledge, wrong about qualia making up the stuff
of perception, wrong to try to demonstrate God’s existence on
purely rational grounds, wrong about the separability of mind
from body, wrong in reducing organisms to mechanisms, and
wrong to think that mastery and possession should be our proper
disposition toward nature. There would seem to be a whole buffet
of wrongheadedness on offer here, such that any observer surveying the past three hundred years of philosophical writing at a
glance would be forced to conclude that Descartes was so wrong
about so many things that there could be nothing worth talking
about anymore—at least insofar as it isn’t clear whether there is
anyone still standing who is in need of being disabused.
The reductio ad Cartesium is as characteristic of twentiethcentury phenomenology (which acknowledges Descartes as its
awkward stepfather), as it is of Frankfurt School and post-Heideggerian thinkers who have taken special issue with Descartes’s
Enlightenment view of the unadulterated, monological cogito.
But this anti-Cartesian impulse has been even more evident in
Anglophone philosophy, taking its cues as it does from late
Wittgenstein, who directs so much of his laconic ingenuity
against what is usually identified as the Cartesian view of consciousness. There is virtually no one writing about philosophy of
language or philosophy of mind who disagrees with the substance
of Wittgenstein’s criticisms. And yet one opens up just about any
subsequent book in this vein—by Sellars, or Rorty, or Dennett,
or Ryle, or Nagel, or Searle, or McDowell—and sure enough the
doornail has been resurrected, the dead horse is propped up and
flogged with relish as if for the very first time. Attend almost any
academic conference on an epistemological theme, and you will
hear Descartes mentioned as a foil to the true view being advanced with a frequency that would make for a decent game of
bingo, if it did not partake of the regularity of law. I add to this,
finally, that I have been surprised by the animus with which most
of my students treat Descartes. They tend to find him smug, glib,
and bratty, almost always returning the favor by letting him have
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BARBA-KAY
3
it in the most peevish and conceited manner. Or rather, I would
be surprised if I did not take care to remember the hysteric
falsetto that I felt myself adopting toward him when I first read
him at St. John’s. Bacon was a magnanimous humanitarian,
Machiavelli inspired giddy admiration, Montaigne had his salty
candor, but Descartes I held responsible for every modern perversion. My question, then, is why this is so, what is it about
Descartes that gets our goat? Why can’t we get over him?
Now, there are of course many ways of being wrong. There
are authors whom we honor with perennial disagreement; we remain interested in their mistakes because we acknowledge that
being dead wrong is harder than being half right. And so,
Anaxagoras or Lucretius or Spinoza will continue to have a home
among our philosophical counterfactuals, as thinkers who have
staked out a wrong—but nonetheless basically and fundamentally
wrong—position, a fixed Charybdis with respect to which all
other positions must navigate. Philosophers are, on the whole,
trying to stake out the middle ground of justice between extreme
positions, and so those who have argued that there is no such
thing as middle ground (between the mind and the body, say)
cannot but continue to figure in such discussions. Our disagreement with Descartes has something to do with this, but I don’t
think it’s enough to account for the allergic obsession with which
we seem to return to him. I have known no one to get his or her
dander up on account of Anaxagoras.
Descartes also figures disproportionately in our imagination
because we understand him to be one of the fathers of the modern
scientific method. Any throat-clearing prefatory to discussing the
history of science and technology therefore feels compelled to
take its bearings by him—just as any book on the history of painting starts flexing its erudition with those obligatory couple of
paragraphs about the caves at Lascaux. What’s more, by routinely
taking Descartes to be such a father figure, we acknowledge how
much of his practical project has gone exactly according to plan.
No one disputes the fact that he was a gobsmackingly gifted
mathematician, for instance, or that his mechanical, anti-teleological interpretation of nature proved a necessary condition of
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modern industrialization. We only worry about the scientific mastery and possession of nature because it is a fait accompli and it
is no great strain to see the trade-offs. All the same, it is both as
scientists and as philosophers that we continue to try to worry his
views out of ours; and if this is so, then I want to say that it is for
parallel reasons—that despite our best efforts to refute his philosophical views, we remain, nonetheless, and in decisive respects,
Cartesians. As Wittgenstein says: it is as if a certain picture of
the world holds us captive.
But before saying what I take to be the most distinctive aspects of this picture and why we can’t seem to exorcise it from
consideration, here is my (very un-Johnnie-like) disclaimer: I will
be more concerned in what follows with relatively conventional
Cartesian views—views routinely ascribed to Descartes—than
with scrupulous attribution to his work, because part of what I
take to be most remarkable about our widespread view of Cartesianism is how impervious it is to questions about what the historical Descartes might have actually thought. It seems at least
likely, to take one example, that Descartes was not the grossest
kind of mind/body substance dualist—I have seen many diligent,
knowledgeable scholars at pains to argue so. And yet this is
treated as irrelevant outside such localized discussions: as soon
as anyone brings up dualism, you can brace yourself for the requisite, tendentious summary of Descartes’ views. This will annoy
anyone who has taken some trouble over his words, of course,
but it should also alert us to the fact that Cartesianism has a sort
of life of its own. I do not say that Cartesianism has nothing to
do with the texts of Descartes. But we should be interested in the
fact that its mistakes have not been straightforwardly rectified by
quoting chapter and verse. It is because Cartesianism does not
(exactly) exist, that, for some reason, we have had to invent it.
In what respects, then, is Cartesianism still intimately ours?
The clearest way in which Descartes continues to have a hold on
our thinking is that he is the first philosopher to insist on reasoning as an individual dislocated from a tradition of thought. He is
the first to make the claim that everything worth knowing can be
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BARBA-KAY
5
worked out methodically and self-evidently by the projected light
of one’s own analysis. Any thinker amounting to anything has of
course found him or herself somehow at odds with tradition. But
Descartes’s discussion in the Discourse of his teachers and the
academic curriculum at La Flèche is not so much an argument
with tradition, or a criticism or purification of standing opinions,
as an out of hand dismissal of the possibility that convention
could have any bearing on the task of knowing the truth. Poetic
fables, he says, are full of exaggerations, oratory is nothing but
the prettification of rigorous thought, the moral writings of the
ancient pagans are “magnificent palaces that were built on nothing but sand and mud” (5),1 and theology is pointless because
salvation is either available to all without study or beyond anything that any amount of study could hope to establish. All of this
is striking less for what Descartes says than for what he thinks
goes without saying. When he then says of philosophy that “there
is still nothing in it about which there is not some dispute, and
consequently nothing that is not doubtful;” he does not even feel
the need to defend the glorious havoc contained in that single
consequently. The same goes for the habits and customs which
he purposes to extirpate from his mind: “the mere fact of the diversity that exists among them suffices to assure one that many
do have imperfections” (8), there being “one truth with respect
to each thing” (12). That these are breathtaking non-sequiturs
should not obscure the fact that they are hugely attractive ones,
and that we risk misunderstanding both Descartes and ourselves
so long as we do not acknowledge the full strength of that attraction, and continue to look for its sources.
Surely what is most attractive about his position is its promise of original and pristine certainty, his adoption of a stance anterior to and abstracted from any particular context of experience
from which to judge truth or falsity. Let me begin by saying what
I take to be insightful about this direction of approach. The main
1. Page numbers are keyed to Discourse on Method and Meditations
on First Philosophy, translated by Donald Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998).
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 59.1-2 (2017-2018)
questions of the Meditations are the programmatic questions of
modern philosophy. What can I know, and how can I be sure of
it? What difference do I make to the objects of my experience
and thought? I open my eyes and the world seems to show up effortlessly, a spectacle articulate and whole. Descartes’s experiment in doubt is meant, on the contrary, to call attention to the
sense in which what I witness is not simply self-standing, but
something that can only take place where I freely work to sustain
it. I must be party to my experience in order for it to be constituted as experience at all. Everything that lies in my thinking
must be doubtful—subject to the possibility of being doubted—
because it is a condition of its being thought that I own and affirm
it. Experiencing something thus means that I am in some sense
at work at implicating things in, and explicating them according
to, a woven whole of conscious expectation. Descartes goes so
far as to doubt the most basic truths of mathematics, not because
there is any real likelihood that they are false in themselves, but
because it is not inconceivable that I may slip up every time I add
two to three (61), which is meant to emphasize that even the most
basic arithmetical operations work out by being kept in mind. To
the extent that I can then imagine willfully abstaining from the
activity of discriminating and articulating the world as mine, to
the extent that I can hold all of my experience in abeyance, the
world collapses in on itself, an abyss opens up beneath my feet.
The malevolent genie personifies this possibility of existential
vertigo, in which doubt unfixes all things because there is nothing
not affirmed by me that could steady them. The one intact, unshakable point that cannot even be subject to doubt is therefore
that very activity of my conscious intending. I am a thing unlike
any other because in some sense I carry the very weight on which
I stand, I bear the full weight of the world—even if I can only be
sure of myself so long as I continue to catch myself in the act.
This thought experiment undeniably shows us several aspects
of what it means for us to have the world in view. It throws into
relief that objects of experience are only fully realized because I
mind them; that my attention lends a hand to constituting the tissue of ordinary experience; and that the thought of a world must
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BARBA-KAY
7
always be coupled to the thought of its nothingness. But
Descartes’s errand is more ambitious than this, since, once he has
taken it apart, he then aims to piece the world back together on
his own terms, which is to say, in no uncertain terms. The connection between what can be absolutely evident to me and what
is self-evident is crucial here. The one discipline that impresses
Descartes at school is mathematics—less for what it has
achieved, he says, than for the kind of certainty it promises; the
clarity and certainty that are supposed to govern his inquiry in
the Meditations are therefore cast with an eye to that peculiar pattern. Since mathematics has always been regarded as the learnable and knowable discipline par excellence, this could hardly be
called a bad choice. For mathematical clarity to be our wholesale
guide to knowing as such, however, Descartes must conflate what
is knowable with what is self-contained in its own deduction—
that is, with what I am always in the position to recognize as selfevident. To set all of our knowledge on such footing, we must
each of us take up a position in which everything must be knowable in advance of our experience, in which to know means to be
certain, and in which what is not certain is demoted to arbitrary
and optional. I am asked to take up an autonomous position, a
vantage beyond belief, before which the objects of my thinking
are arrayed and assessed, before being assented to. My knowledge is the absence of mind—nowhere and no one in a position
to see it all.
It is this flattering affinity between what I am always in the
position to know and mathematical clarity that underpins the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity that has made up
our epistemic bread and butter ever since. These are not
Descartes’s explicit terms, but this casual and widespread way
of approaching inquiry undeniably has roots in something like
the Cartesian identification of truth with a specific experience of
certainty. What is objective is what cannot be denied without contradiction, what would be the case if I did not know it, what is
valid for all times and places, and so what must be impersonally
assessable and deducible. It is the realm of necessity, best exemplified by our usual deferential attitude toward mathematics and
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 59.1-2 (2017-2018)
the sciences; it is the knowable as such that leaves no room for
doubt. Outside this impersonal I, however, there is a subjective
remainder—ambivalently understood as a domain of arbitrary
preference and convention, but also as a domain of pure privacy
and inner freedom, a place sealed and secret, from which I cannot
be shaken and to which I may always retreat, if I should be so
minded. It is the disengaged mental retina, the fixed point from
which I invest what is not objective with my own meanings, and
at which every man is for himself and on his own.
This is an admittedly unsophisticated and flat-footed version
of a picture that I find to be widely prevalent among my students,
though I also think that one need not squint too hard to see variations on this theme as the common guiding thread of modern philosophy. Whether in the form of Spinoza’s distinction between
natura naturans and naturata, or in Hume’s between relations of
ideas and matters of fact, or in Kant’s scission of nature from freedom, or Hegel’s counterpoint between what is ‘in itself’ and what
is ‘for itself,’ or more proximately in the Nietzschean or Weberian
opposition of facts to values, it is clear that the attempt to render
philosophy into a quasi-scientific a priori body of knowledge has
had the effect of sharpening under its pressure a corresponding
view of our inner freedom as a naked power of self-possessed
willing lying beyond the appeal of ordinary, shared reasons. For
every Descartes, there has then followed a Pascal.
This is an imprecise generalization, of course, but if anything
like this dialectic between necessity and freedom underlies our
picture of the world, then it would help to explain why our thinking somehow continues to circle back to Descartes. Perhaps the
most striking feature of the Cartesian project—which is to establish the full truth to one’s own satisfaction—is that it has the effect of forcing all its opponents to adopt it. Once Descartes has
withdrawn from the premises of ordinary shared experience, the
only strategies for flushing him out are to question the soundness
of his premises, to note the ways in which his position does not
itself acknowledge its historical debts, or to point out all the ways
in which his position of radical doubt would be incoherent in
practice. These might, in fact, be the only logical responses open
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BARBA-KAY
9
to us. But they are responses that, Gorgon-like, turn us into the
kind of skeptic that we take ourselves to be trying to undermine,
because we feel we must turn to a priori thinking and presuppositionless logical analysis in order to refute him. This is what I
have found most striking in the classroom: because Descartes has
denied or removed the shared bases of ordinary experience, we
feel forced to take up a position somewhere on the unmediated
poles of subjectivity and objectivity—both of which in fact take
for granted the Cartesian picture of a fully self-constituting and
autonomous beginning to knowledge. We find ourselves having
to reason at him rather than with him, because we tacitly accept
his opening claim that there is no we who could reason in common. It is half way through Meditation III, only after Descartes
has established the existence of God, that he claims to prove that
he is not alone in the world (74), but it is a strange discovery for
him to make, since he has addressed his spiritual exercises to us
all along. Cartesian thinking is cinematic: it is a condition of our
witnessing it that we be excluded from its proceedings.
In what sense can objectivity be a Cartesian innovation,
though? It is clear that philosophy has always and everywhere
sought to describe what is permanently and universally true—as
Nietzsche put it, philosophy’s demand of itself is that it become
timeless. But it is equally clear that other analogous distinctions—between human and divine knowledge, say, or between
convention (nomos) and nature (physis)—are by no means congruent with the way in which we contrast subjectivity to objectivity. To take up the second example: physis in ancient
philosophy is something like a transpolitical domain subtending,
and prior to, any particular human arrangement. But it refers, on
the one hand, to a reality that is found variously embodied in
(rather than separated from) those arrangements, and, on the other
hand, to an ordered whole that is neither apodictically reducible
to, or immediately transparent to, discursive analysis. As Plato
shows in the Timaeus, the attempt to generate the order of the
world from the measurement of harmonious ratios results in a
leftover interval that balks the intellect’s designs to tidy it up.
Physis hides. She will not fully yield herself to logos.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 59.1-2 (2017-2018)
That this can no longer be our picture of the world—that our
universe is no longer cosmic, so to speak—should not prevent us
from realizing that communal friendship held a central place in
pre-modern philosophy, the very absence of which marks our
own somewhat impoverished oscillation between subjectivity
and objectivity. The Platonic Socrates is entirely at home using
the most cynical maneuvers of logical jujitsu, but he usually reserves those moves for his arguments with the sophists. In his
discussions with more generous interlocutors, he tries to establish
the kinds of philosophical affection (both for the truth and for his
fellows in speech) that distinguish him from the sophists he otherwise so much resembles. Similarly, we can hardly underestimate the importance of the first person plural in Aristotle. He
understands that the deepest truths are somehow already present
within his students’ ways of speaking and acting; starting from
shared conceptions, he works to deepen their understanding.
When he notes near the beginning of the Ethics that mathematical
exactness is not an appropriate standard for ethical investigations
because different inquiries are measured by different kinds of
precision, we register our distance from him by his deadpan indifference to justifying this assertion. And yet what kind of Cartesian argument could ever sufficiently establish such an
assumption? It is exactly at this point that we are hostage to the
demand for clarity and certainty, because the latter criteria are always in the position to undercut any such shared understanding.
It is Descartes’s innovation, then, to deny any implicit
“we”—a first person plural opening up upon the world—as a necessary or helpful middle term between my thinking and the objects of experience. His project is to dissociate friendship from
reason and to seek knowledge without community. Mathematical
precision is therefore paradigmatic of its aspirations for good reason: it seems to admit no ambiguity, seems to be independent of
historical circumstances, and seems to proceed on premises that
cannot be denied without contradiction. Agreement or disagreement do not seem to touch its truth. Mathematics is no respecter
of persons (you may depend on it). And again, mathematics is
bewitching to the extent that it promises to take the measure of
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BARBA-KAY
11
the world prior to encountering it—hence the notion of a method
or an instrument of investigation that, once established, will be
able to generate results algorithmically and impartially. The
mathematization of nature gives us mastery over it—it affords us
vast powers of prediction and control even as it narrows the scope
of what we care to attend to. But applying such a common denominator to philosophical inquiry reduces it to only two areas
of discussion—that to which I am forced to acquiesce and that
which I am free to dispute. To the extent that I insist on being a
pure subject, I also insist on making the world purely subject to
me. If, however, there are forms of knowledge we can only know
by holding things in common—as we do in friendship or faith or
trust or loyalty or love—and if we take their pledges seriously as
more than private stimuli, then there is a whole set of goods that
are unavailable to Cartesian thinking, forms of knowledge whose
inside-out, rather than outside-in, character is checked from the
outset by the Cartesian demand for certainty. There may be
strength in numbers, but it is a strength that can lift you no higher
than yourself.
I want to indicate here—too hastily, perhaps—some of the
ways in which the Cartesian fascination for impregnable speech
has shaped modern philosophy. If it is the promise of disembodied speech to settle matters somehow in advance of knowing
them, then it cannot be surprising if there has been special hell
to pay in political and moral reasoning. The very project of the
classical contract theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—attempts to deduce the legitimacy or illegitimacy of a certain state of affairs by specifying the beginning point of all
possible human arrangements—obeys a Cartesian impulse to
project a point of fixed certainty into the world (although in this
domain it is Hobbes rather than Descartes who counts as the first
Cartesian). The state of nature served as a quasi-geometrical postulate from which, once accepted, certain prescriptive conclusions could be drawn. With some contemporary exceptions (like
Rawls), it is true that this approach was later abandoned under
pressure from historicist criticism. But nineteenth- and twentieth-century historicism itself obeys a neo-Kantian, and so quasi-
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scientific, impulse to read our historical formation as an a priori
schema governing all possible human experience. Historicism is
also Cartesian, therefore, in the sense of attempting to settle the
fundamental, constraining forms of human knowledge in advance
of any particular experience of them.
But if the issue of historicism has lost some of its urgency
since the end of the Cold War, I would ask you to consider what
we mean by morality. The term, understood as a system of prescriptions stipulating right conduct, is a modern one, itself a result
of the Enlightenment attempt to bring mathematical precision to
bear on our conception of the good. Aristotle’s Ethics and its medieval appropriations are not systems of morals (like Kant’s and
Mill’s), because they do not conceive their project as establishing
the goodness of certain practices and habits from a position outside of themselves. Nothing in Aristotle answers to this description. Our contemporary notion of morality, on the other hand,
aims at scientific rigor precisely to the extent that it purports to
deduce our duties from infallible rules—in other words, to specify how we ought to act regardless of our particular attachments
and responsibilities.
This apparent rigor has done very little to win the kind of
widespread consensus that might have been expected from it.
Moreover, it funnels ethical conversation into an adversarial, winner-take-all pattern. Most of my class discussions on ethical matters take the form of a predictable tug-of-war between “you’re
bad for judging others” and “I am entitled to my opinion that others are bad,” because everyone has independently realized that
the best strategy is to ask one’s opponent to define his or her
terms, and then to disparage those definitions in order to stalemate whatever may be supposed to follow from them. This strategy is not good enough to win any arguments, but it is a surefire
way not to lose any either. (The expectation of absolute moral
certainty thus goes hand-in-hand with relativism.) The underlying
Cartesian assumption is that a winning argument is one that no
one could reasonably find fault with, when in fact the predictable
outcome of such reasoning is dilemmatic casuistry about, for in-
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stance, how many innocent people to rescue from hypothetical
runaway trains. Even where we do share a general postulate—
say, that human beings are ends in themselves—it is by no means
clear that a notion of such generality could univocally help us
make an a priori judgment between competing kinds of goods.
In addition, Hume’s, Kant’s, and Mill’s moral visions continue
to rely on, in more or less obvious ways, the sensibilities of decent, Protestant, liberal citizens: that is to say, they all claim to
give contextless grounds for already existing forms of conduct.
This reliance is even clearer in Descartes’s list of practical
maxims in the Discourse—don’t mess with the law, stick to your
guns, control your desires, play to your strengths—which sound
little better than the avuncular therapy of self-control offered by
Polonius when contrasted with the rigor that Descartes otherwise
brings to bear on scientific matters. It is true that he presents his
maxims as provisional; they are designed to be cast off once he
has built his system of knowledge from the ground up. But his
subsequent silence on this point is therefore eloquent, as is his
affinity (along with that of many modern moralists) to ancient
Stoicism, which was the first philosophical school to preach withdrawal from the world and a steady diet of sour grapes as the
means of attaining happiness. Again, if to know is to be certain,
then I can be certain of my own pleasure (as Descartes might say)
or perhaps even of my duty (as Kant might say), but it is precisely
the character of this certainty that prevents my thinking from taking place somewhere in particular or inhibits my attending to
common cares and thoughts. So long as I try to reason my own
way into the world, I will not know exactly what to do with you.
I realize that I am myself running the risk of sounding reductionist and skeptical, since I might seem to be asserting that there
is no such thing as truth in moral matters except through some
sort of wishful or willful consensus. But that is precisely the
shape that Cartesian certainty forces on us, whereas I am trying
to call attention to differences between Cartesian and other forms
of disagreement. Neither antiquity nor the Middle Ages were conspicuous for their concord, respect, and unanimity—in philoso-
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phy or in any other area of life. It may be that the very opposite
is true and that quarrels are fiercest among brothers, as Aristotle
says. But it is also clear that most of the ferociously sectarian disputes about philosophical principles in Europe and the Near East
up to, and perhaps even including, the Reformation were understood as differences within and about a shared conception of the
world. And I am tempted to call this a kind of friendship—a commitment to common goods of thought. It is, in contrast, one of
the marks of our continuing dependence on Cartesianism that we
feel the need to reason from scratch, and that this need in turn
shapes the forms of speech that are available to us. Such forms
are by no means inadequate in all respects. Like a searing fire,
they dissolve and clarify, even if they cannot establish or sustain.
But so long as we understand philosophy as clinically disengaged
thought, we will continue to prize guarded and ungenerous forms
of speech that pretend to a scientific certainty they cannot achieve
(e.g., scholarship), we will continue to disagree about first principles erratically and without end, we will continue to excel only
at the philosophical genre of critique, we will continue to be
tempted toward forms of irrationality as the only exits from a stifling objectivity, and we will continue to find ourselves stuck at
Cartesian square one. Square one is no doubt a fine square. But
if a conversation is such that I can always undercut an argument
by refusing my agreement—if that is the exemplary form of critical thinking—then no conversation can exceed my current view
of how things stand. You are only right for all I know.
Accusing contemporary philosophy of solipsism will perhaps
seem strange, since the theme of intersubjectivity has been all
the rage for two centuries and counting. But I take this to be yet
another case in point—and a good example of how Cartesianism
unleashed caustic powers of analysis that we have not been able
to put back in the bottle. Descartes was the first to formulate what
has since been called the “problem of other minds” at the end of
Meditation II, in a passage where he looks out on a busy street
and questions his usual assumption that those moving figures are
people. They might, he says, be no more than automata draped
in hats and coats. Following Descartes’s lead, the “problem” of
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other minds has been understood as this: How can I justify my
inference that you have a mind no different from mine when it’s
clear that no amount of raw sense data could ever sufficiently
warrant it? It is worth noting that Descartes does not even register
this as a special problem, nor did any major philosopher in history up to and including Kant. The deduction and explanation of
intersubjectivity has, by contrast, been one of the main preoccupations of every single major post-Kantian thinker—from Fichte
through Husserl and Wittgenstein and Habermas—all of whom
have sought to establish intersubjectivity as a distinctly nonCartesian form of knowledge.
I do not say that we have learned nothing of value from these
attempts, but it may be that what we have learned has been in the
way of hungry people reasoning about bread. In other words, it
is worth asking what we think we have to prove, or why we continue to feel as if there is a problem that needs addressing, when
no one seemed to feel such a need until the mid-1790s and when
even now there is almost no one arguing the contrary. The very
term ‘intersubjectivity’—a barbarous neologism for what used
to be called philia—suggests that our solution only replicates the
problem, insofar as it represents an attempt to maintain an attitude
of impersonal detachment in my description of the most personal
of experiences—namely, what you mean to me. ‘Intersubjectivity’ has become a bit of fashionable jargon in philosophy much
like ‘interdisciplinarity’ is in education: both words elicit a buzz
of self-congratulation all around, even as they affirm the terms
that cause the very problem they are supposed to overcome. Both
of them take for granted from the outset a situation in which subjects or disciplines are atomic units in need of combinination.
And yet, if your recipe calls for oil and water, chances are you
will never end up with a solution. Intersubjectivity promises to
be an endless though limited subject of discussion for philosophy
not simply because we have discovered in ourselves over the past
two centuries unprecedented capacities for alienation and loneliness, but also because we formulate the discussion in the wrong
kind of speech for the experience it purports to get at. We expound in monologue on the great benefits of dialogue. Said an-
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other way: the problem of other minds is not a problem except
when it is formulated in terms that assume a fundamental difference between what is absolutely certain (my mind) and what is
qualitatively less certain (you out there), so that, like most other
problems of a Cartesian pedigree—like the relation of mind and
world, mind and body, reason and experience, freedom and nature, and so forth—it can neither overcome nor be satisfied by
the dualistic terms in which it is asked.
One recurring feature that vitiates from the outset Cartesian
questions such as these is the accompanying sense that the question
proscribes a personal middle term between the proposed extremes,
a term that, before Descartes, constituted the common ground I inhabit with others because we share a world. Just as Descartes prizes
mathematics because it admits of no shades of certainty, so too the
criteria of clarity and certainty mute the sense that I should accept
common practices and concerns as the best starting point for my
thought. As Descartes says in Meditation IV: “I have been so constituted as a kind of middle ground between God and nothingness,
or between the supreme being and non-being” (82): that is, there
is nothing outside me to break the fall between certainty and ignorance. The absence of this middle term then finds literal, and striking, expression in Descartes’s view of the soul.
I am not sure whether Descartes is rightly called a dualist—
certainly there are passages in the Meditations and in his correspondence with Elizabeth that suggest he was aware of the
difficulties entailed by the view that thinking things are substantially different from extended ones, and that the two may also interact. (Of course, realizing that you have a problem and wishing
that you did not have it don’t add up to not having it.) What seems
true of both the Cartesian picture and of its Kantian successor it
is that the mind/body distinction is produced under the pressure
of locating the certainty that I am intelligent and free within the
certainty that there is no object of experience that is not material.
This is no longer the same kind of question that generates the
parts of the soul in Aristotelian or Platonic psychology or in their
Christian descendants. Many of these earlier views include a third
part of the soul between reason and desire—a part that is charac-
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teristically human by virtue of being responsive both to reason
and desire, a part that is also (and not incidentally) represented
as the seat of our social spirit, the power of soul by which we can
take things personally. It is precisely this third, mediating part—
the part by which we are understood to be attached to others—
that is done away with by the Cartesian picture of the soul. The
distinction between mind and body is thus the distinction between
subjectivity and objectivity concretely instantiated within our
own selves.
A final passing note on how this missing personal middle has
affected even the most rarefied metaphysical questions: One
would think that if anything is objectively the case, it is questions
about being as such. And yet it is owing to Descartes’s polarization of subjectivity and objectivity that the notion of epistemology as a specialized, delimited discipline exists in contrast to
ontology. It was the Cartesian inspiration of early modern epistemology to focus more precisely on the conditions of possible
experience by surrendering the assumption that the world is intelligible in itself. This approach gave us what is valuable in Kant,
Nietzsche, and Heidegger, while simultaneously making inescapable the question, In what sense can things be said to be
both knowable and “outside” the mind? Ancient and medieval
metaphysics were by no means widely shared social attitudes,
and yet their stance toward their objects of inquiry was nonetheless personal, both because they understood inquiry into being
also as inquiry into the divine, and because knowledge of the
whole was understood as a kind of communion within which that
whole knew itself to be completed.
I have doubtless already said too much, or tried to. My main
point has been that our continued attraction to being repelled by
Descartes has less to do with the fact of his having formulated
some set of terms or themes or questions that we are still concerned with, and more with his having established a certain
stance toward philosophical speech that continues to reassert itself within our attempts to deny it. Quasi-scientific speech—contextless speech treating philosophical questions as problems to
be mastered once and for all from an ex ante position—is in fact
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a form of deeply skeptical speech, and so long as we understand
it as the only mode of philosophical speech, then we will continue
to fall back into the reductive, dualistic terms of the questions
framed by Descartes. It can be no accident that it has been one
of modern philosophy’s main post-Cartesian aims to mortify
skepticism once and for all. Indeed, it is only in modern philosophy that skepticism has been felt to be a real threat, rather than
a crank position held by unwashed men living in barrels. Fear of
skepticism is a sure mark that you have set out to reason on your
own: as you tighten the demands of certainty, you are gripped by
doubt. As you sharpen the light of clarity and distinctness, the
shadow of doubt lengthens and lengthens; and if you will be
guided only by your own self-evident terms, if there is no middle
term between absolute certainty and error, then any misstep
threatens to bring the world crashing down, and you will surely
encounter skepticism at every turn.
Skepticism’s lesson, however, is that the truth is more than
a matter of words, since it is not in speech that the most aggressive skeptic will meet his match. The cure for skepticism has always been the same. You provoke the skeptic to act—you ask
him to go outside for some fresh air or, if you must, beat him
with a stick—in order to show him that he is incoherent in deed
and so to ask him to rejoin a common world larger than his way
of thinking can conceive. This is sometimes felt to be a kind of
concession of defeat on philosophy’s part—as if the need for action here showed that reasons just come to an end—whereas it
should help us realize that reasons may sometimes outstrip arguments. If, that is, what is most distinctive about Cartesianism
is its posture of voluntary neutrality, its attempt to specify the
only kind of answer that would satisfy it from the outset, and if
that feature thereby marks it as skeptical, then we should also
not expect for it to yield to strictly theoretical answers. Heidegger may help us see how Cartesianism is merely one historical
episode within a larger philosophical arc, and Wittgenstein may
convince us that if only we talked long enough about Cartesianism we would be cured from the supposition that there is anything left to talk about. And yet so long as we think the limitation
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involved is logical or discursive, we do not possess the right kind
of response.
For this reason I do not take Cartesianism to be exclusively—
and perhaps not even primarily—a theoretical problem or error.
A first step in escaping its attraction is to rediscover forms of reasoning in common, to realize that friendship is essential to clear
thinking. The kinds of goods that Cartesianism cannot see—
goods requiring belief, trust, and shared conviction—are not ersatz reasons, nor do they lend themselves to proof if we do not
lend ourselves to abiding by and in them. It is true they are subject to groupthink abuses to which we are highly sensitive. But
they are goods of knowledge, knowledge of a sort that is the only
point from which to break the tenacious hold that Cartesianism
continues to have on philosophical thought at large—perhaps beginning with the thought that there is any such thing as philosophical thought at large. The goods of friendship are
distinguished, in contrast to Cartesianism, by the relinquishment
of a particular kind of certainty, in order to make room for a
greater one. We acknowledge our dependence on the given context and circumstances within which we serve to make the good
in common with others—a set of books and questions and friends
and places and tasks—in sum, on a tradition. We accept this tradition not as a bias clouding our view of a more universal knowledge, but as an anchor deepening our thought and lending truth
a voice in time. That is, we acknowledge the partiality of our position not as a reason for undermining it, but, like the acknowledgment of our mortality, as a condition of our taking root.
Unlike Cartesian knowledge, the goods of friendship are never
available from the outset. They are at once retrospective and
prospective. Friendship is a vow that I do not know everything,
and so a way of holding myself in readiness. It is the knowledge
that my words may only be generous where we own something
in common, and that the weight and resonance of their shared
truth goes beyond what could be called their correctness. Cartesianism’s denial of this dimension makes it difficult to change
the question, as I’ve noted, since all attempts to reason in terms
of certainty flatten everything else to their level. It is friendship’s
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promise, on the other hand, that we can compass the whole by
knowing it to be wider than our thinking, that it is because the
world exceeds our single grasp that we are capable of having it
in common reach.
If I have ventured these thoughts aloud here, it is because I
found one such community of learners in St. John’s, and because,
having been away some years, I realize now how few and far between are such settings for friendship. As Tocqueville noted,
Americans seem to be Cartesians from the cradle—there are always so many different competing views of the pursuit of happiness, that we tend to equate truth proper with what is outside the
scope of democratic contradiction. Because of this, Cartesianism
and American egalitarianism are apparent (though only apparent)
relatives. But the pressure of world-historical forces should not
prevent us from attending to the kinds of conversations concretely available to us. Nor should it prevent us from seeing that,
so long as we conflate the rigor of philosophy with the rigor of
mathematics, we will continue to be haunted by Descartes, the
first to speak the singular idiom of such a possibility. Perhaps it
is no longer possible to speak of public reason in the terms I’m
suggesting; but philosophy, after all, has never been comfortable
in public, and approaching it as a quasi-technical discipline has
only subordinated it further to the natural sciences.
There was once a man, the first philosopher of all, who, upon
being asked his name under duress, gave it out as Noman. At that
moment, he realized something each of us must discover for ourselves as adolescents: that reason is always in some sense slipping out of the bonds of the particular, that it cannot be fully fixed
in place, that our thinking runs out beyond our station and our
term of life. Intelligence draws lines, but in doing so it always
manages to straddle both sides of them; it can contain every multitude. It is outlandish—as Carl Page likes to say; there is no resting place it cannot quit. But Noman did not stop at that. He
recognized the anonymity of his cunning as an episode within
the larger story of the restoration of his name, which would only
be fully fleshed out as the name of a father, a son, a husband, a
king belonging to his land, a friend to a dog and to the pear trees
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he had planted in the orchard as a boy. In the same way, while
we are trying to squirm out from under the depthless vision of
the Cyclops, anonymity is our best and only protection. But so
long as that insight is not then relocated within the task of making
speech personal, of giving speech a way of dwelling in the world,
then our words cannot have place, cannot take root, and cannot
thrive. We will remain Cartesians.
�Jacob Klein: European Scholar
and American Teacher
Eva Brann
The subtitle of my talk might be “Liberal Education: Program
and/or Pedagogy?” The reason is that I think of Jacob Klein’s life
as being an embodiment of that slash, “and/or” and therefore an
occasion for asking what seems to me a question the answer to
which determines the success—I mean the lively and secure survival—of liberal education.
There is the much more often debated converse to the question: “Is there a specific pedagogy for liberal education?” This is
the question: “Is there a specific curriculum for liberal education
which goes with the kind of teaching you might call “liberal?” I
won’t dwell on the answer today, except insofar as it bears on
particular aspects of teaching. I’ll just say that I think the answer
is that almost anything can be taught liberally—to a point. In particular, the shop crafts are germane enough to the liberal arts
(which form one part of liberal education, as I’ll spell out later)
to serve as a suitable complementary curriculum. To prove it,
there’s that wonderful book by Matthew Crawford, who is both
a student of philosophy and a motorcycle mechanic: it is called
Shop Class as Soulcraft (and is the much worthier successor of
that cult classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance); it
shows how fixing things forms souls, just as reading books does.
Let me give my answer to the topic question up front. I’m
not a great believer in that mode of talking to my colleagues
which attempts to make a whodunit of the telling so that they get
to learn my resolution to the inquiry only when they’re mostly
long adrift in mind.
Eva Brann is a tutor and former dean at St. John’s College in Annapolis,
Maryland. This lecture was first delivered as the keynote address at the
Jacob Klein Conference on Liberal Education held at Providence College on Friday, March 11, 2016.
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I am persuaded, even with a certain passion, that Liberal Education does have its most appropriate program, its preferable
matter, and that this matter particularly calls for its own pedagogy. Concisely and thus a little too peremptorily put: You cannot
achieve liberal education in the mode of a specialized teaching
authority, a professor. That is by no means to say that professors
who know their stuff inside-out can’t sometimes teach liberally—
but it will be, I think, in an alternative style for them: Ex cathedra, “from the podium” will have to become “in the trenches,”
on a chair around the table with the other human souls.
I was one of that diminutive number of refugees for whom
that little devil Mephistopheles’ shamelessly candid admission
held: “I am a part of that power that ever seeks evil and ever accomplished good.” (It comes from Goethe’s Faust which no German-born person can live through a year without citing thrice.)
The Nazi persecution brought me to America where, with some
practical know-how and some luck, anyone who knows how to
be happy, can be happy, and to St. John’s College, where several
of my older colleagues were refugees. I came very young and
grew very old in Annapolis, so this band of my seniors, including
Victor Zuckerkandl, a well-known Viennese musician, and
Simon Kaplan, a Kant scholar, who came in middle age, are all
gone. Jacob Klein, called Jasha by us all, including by some
cheeky students (who are supposed to accord each other and their
tutors, as I will do, the honorific “Mr., Mrs., Miss” and later
“Ms.”), was among them. As far as I could tell—and I observed
avidly—they were well appreciated, even well loved by their
American hosts who, in their gracious naiveté, admired them for
their thorough learning and marveled at them for their pronounced personalities. But Jasha held a special place.
All the refugees that I’ve known or read of who were fully
adult when they emigrated led a cleft life—a European formation
and an American re-formation. Mr. Klein grew up and studied in
Slavic and central Europe and fled to the Anglophone West, from
the Nazis’ politically, but psychologically also from an antically
tyrannical father. This ogre, however, also came to the States and
made Sonoma County, where he turned grapes into raisins, unsafe for habitation. Among the many stories about him that Jasha
told me was that of his wedding gift to Jasha and Dodo. Dodo
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Tammann was the divorced wife of Edmund Husserl’s son, and
she became a powerful presence at St. John’s. The wedding gift
was a smallish bag of these raisins.
The years of Mr. Klein’s life were split almost exactly between Europe and America: from his birth in 1899 to 1938, his
arrival in America—thirty-nine years, and from 1938, his arrival
in Annapolis, to 1978, his death while still teaching—forty years.
(Winfree Smith, in A Search For The Liberal College [1983],
gives an indispensable account of Mr. Klein’s early years at St.
John’s, ending with his deanship.)
To me there is, in my mythifying mood, something providential in this half-and-half life. For in Europe Mr. Klein was a
private scholar without institutional bonds. He studied, conducted
private seminars and above all, wrote his principal book, entitled
in English, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (1934-36). It is a work of enormous scholarship, drawing
from primary and secondary works in all the modern and classical languages—oddly not Hebrew; this visibly Jewish man governed by a Jewish fate didn’t, as far as I could tell, have a Jewish
bone in his body. Let me interject here my understanding of this
apostasy. It was not the ordinary assimilation of convenience,
still so hotly debated when I was young, but an allegiance that
trumped everything, even his love for Russian novels, namely
his deep affinity for the Greeks—not the esthetic Greeks captured
in the formula “Noble naiveté, quiet grandeur” which appeared
in the first and greatest history of antique art, that of Johann
Winckelmann (1717-1768) and which dominated that famous
German philhellenism.—I myself grew up under its aegis. What
drew Mr. Klein to the Greeks was—let me joyfully risk some political incorrectness—a very masculine view of that Greek grace
as sober soundness, as, so to speak, the apotheosis of good sense,
a virtue which the Greeks call sophrosyne—literally, soundmindedness. It was a glory that I, who had spent my post-graduate
years as a Greek archaeologist, had never suspected—that behind
all those canonical great books, there might be a very specific intellectually handsome togetherness.
Since I’ve begun to understand something of the Origin of
Algebra, I’ve thought that its doctrine was a, perhaps the, principal example of this sense of Greek soundness. The book, after
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25
all, traces out a loss, the loss of just this whole-heartedness. Not
that Mr. Klein was a modernity-basher. Far from it—he had studied physics and found the revolution on which he was reporting
and its modernity (plus, I should say, its extreme realization in
post-modernity) irresistibly interesting, and so his account of our
condition seemed to me far deeper and more persuasive than the
socio-political explanations I was given as a history major in
Brooklyn College. There was, furthermore, I learned in time,
nothing Heideggerian in his approach to the mode of this loss,
no call for the Destruktion (mitigatingly translated as “de-construction”) for the sake of recovering a pre-traditional ontological
origin. But, it seems to me, there might actually be large, sensibly
practical consequences from a propagation of the thesis of the
Origin of Algebra.
Obviously, I should now say as concisely as possible what
this thesis, this teaching, seems to me to be. The very subtle, very
reliable paragraph by paragraph exposition of the thesis in all its
complexity is to be found in Burt Hopkin’s Origin of the Logic
of Symbolic Mathematics (2011). I see it, more simply, in this
way: The Greeks, meaning the relevant written texts we have (but
I think the artifacts harmonize), had a direct, an immediate approach, to beings of thought, what might be called a first innocence, and if you like, even a naiveté, perhaps after all, even of
a noble sort. Their direct intellectual sight accorded those beings
a fullness, a meaning-fraught concreteness. Their way of regarding numbers is a prime example and probably the most illuminating case—negatively, because for mathematics the psychological
element is much reduced so that the intellectual mode stands out,
positively because the loss of this immediacy enabled the principal
science at the foundation of our epoch, astronomical and terrestrial
physics. Greek numbers, arithmoi, are collections of things, a
counting-up of them, in German, Anzahl. These counted-up assemblage-numbers undergo, in a long-breathed conversion traced
in the book, a reduction to mere symbols, completed by Vieta and
Descartes. In the helpful medieval language, they are transformed
from first to second intentions, meaning that a word that once
reached for a thing now reaches for the thought-belabored abstraction of the thing. This second-intentionality dominates so
much of modern discourse as to be practically a signature of
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modernity. My favorite example is this: Socrates follows a way,
in Greek a methodos, “a way gone after” (a good example: Republic 596a). We tend to have not a “method” but a “methodology,” not a jigged way, but the conception of the jigged way. We
talk, very often, in concepts rather than objects. Mr. Klein, a most
natural and, I might say, earthy person—and I might also say, like
most flesh-and-blood people full of student-delighting singularities—kookiness in plain language—had a gut-aversion to this
world of abstractions. He used to expend himself in trying to persuade Johnnies that Socrates’ forms, the eide, were not “abstractions,” literally “drawn-off,” life-deprived, thought-ghosts, but
full of attractive being.
That brings me to the second half of Mr. Klein’s life, the
American part, spent almost entirely at St. John’s College. He
did, to be sure, write two more books in this epoch. The first was
A Commentary on Plato’s Meno (1965). The Meno is to St. John’s
College something like what the Declaration of Independence is
to the United States, the condition of its possibility; it is our enabling work for freedom from academicism. The Meno shows
under what conditions learning by inquiry, as distinct from
knowledgeableness by study, is possible. Like the Algebra book
(as it is, ridiculously, known at home) the Meno book contains
some unforgettable insights—unforgettable because as soon as
you’ve read them you think you’ve always known them. This
was the kind of mental plagiarism Mr. Klein chuckled over as a
mark of his insights having been understood and adopted. My
particular pick is his discovery that the capacity of “image-recognition” (eikasia: not “imagining” or “imagination”) attached to
the lowest section of the divided line presented in the Republic
(509 ff., the commentary on the Meno mines other dialogues for
relevant illuminations) ranges through all the divisions to the
highest, because imaging is the generating principle of the world
that flourishes under the “Idea of the Good.” Thus our lowest capacity is also our most encompassing. These assimilable insights
are life-changing; I’ll refrain from personal testimonials, but you
can see that at the least the thought of an imagination-ontology
will affect your way of reflecting.
The second late book, Plato’s Trilogy, on the Theaetetus,
Sophist, and Statesman (1977), I could never take to. It is written
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in a mode that seems to belong to old age: It paraphrases the text
with the intention that the reader will extract a commentary from
the emphases and deviations. David Lachterman’s review of the
book1 helped me to see its accomplishments, one of which is that
it really functions as a sort of provocation to reflection on texts
left intact by the interpreter. (I might say here that David was, to
my knowledge, the most universally learned student who ever
came out of St. John’s; he carried on Mr. Klein’s projects in his
own competently ingenious way.)
Most of Mr. Klein’s writing was for lectures directed to our
students, and these, insofar as they were recoverable, were edited
by Robert Williamson and Elliot Zuckerman and published by
the college. They have that same quality that he saw in the Greek
authors: simultaneously with having grasped it, it grasps you: it
sits naturally in the intellect—mine, at least, and many of my colleagues’.
But these published works are not what dominated the second part of his life. In fact, he was almost comically inimical to
publication. When I came in 1957 for my appointment interview,
he placed me in a chair and, so to speak, danced around me, holding the two pot-publications I had proudly sent with my application—I was then an archaeologist—between thumb and index
finger as if they were some loathsome matter and then tossed
them back to me. (Publication wasn’t and still isn’t a criterion for
appointment or tenure at St. John’s.) Taking his aversion to publication seriously, I translated the algebra book in secret and confessed only late, because I had questions to ask. Then, however,
with splendid inconsistency, he was eager for it to come out into
the world, where it first languished, only to emerge slowly and
steadily into some fame and influence, particularly of course,
under Burt Hopkins’s energetic shepherding.
So now to the point. If the first half of his life, the European
part, was under the aegis of learning and scholarly production,
the second, American half was predominantly a teaching life, be
it as a tutor (our replacement of the title “professor,” though it’s
not used in address) or as dean of the college (1949-1958). As
1. David Lachterman, “Review of J. Klein’s Plato’s Trilogy, Nous 13
(1979): 106-12.
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for the latter function, I remember vividly that when the end-ofclass bell rang he would issue from his office to stand at the bottom of the stairs of our main building and scan the faces of
descending students for signs of life. Once he caught me coming
down, maneuvered me into his office, and chided me for having
threatened with bodily harm a student who had not been able to
inflect the Greek verb “to be.”
Here is the serious aspect of Mr. Klein as a teacher in an institution whose faculty had bound itself to an all-required, coherent plan of liberal education, with the consequent abolition of
electives for students and specialization for teachers and the replacement of the ways of learning and modes of teaching then,
and even more now, current in universities and colleges—less in
the latter since some of these ways are functions of size and consequently of—phantasized—economies of scale.
In my young and ardent years as a tutor I saw in Mr. Klein
the incarnation of a teacher in a program which was conceived
by its founders, Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan, as a contemporary re-animation of the traditional liberal education that
was first set out in the seventh book of Plato’s Republic and in
the eighth book of Aristotle’s Politics (where the word liberal,
“belonging to the free” [eleutherion] is, as far as I know, first
used to distinguish this upbringing from the vocational, utilitarian
sort). For Rome, the guiding text was Quintilian’s Teaching Program for Oratory, and in the Middle Ages, Hugh of St. Victor’s
Didascalicon and John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon (which is,
however, concerned only with the verbal arts). These works, to
be sure, often concentrate on the specific liberal arts, the skills
of learning, rather than on liberal education, which relies on texts
for reflection.
Indeed, when Mr. Klein arrived in late 1938, for the second
year of the college’s New Program, it was already fixed in its
broad organization into tutorials for the exercise of the liberal
arts and seminars for the discussion of great books. The liberal
arts were exactly the trivium, the three-way of words: grammar,
logic and rhetoric, their correctness, validity and persuasiveness,
and the quadrivium, the four-way of things: arithmetic, geometry,
astronomy and music, their countability, extendedness, regular
motions and attendant harmonies. The program of tutorials stuck
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quite closely to this scheme—reducing it to language and mathematics classes with the modern addition of laboratory. Rumor
has it that in the library of those early days, physics books were
catalogued under music, the study of bodies in ratio relations.
Learnedness was required to find the finest working examples
for exercises in these arts, taken from the most highly regarded
works of language, mathematics, and science. The early faculty
had put enticing tutorials together by the time Jasha arrived.
What he also found was a particularly felicitous modern fusion, instigated by Buchanan, of the so-called Great Books with
the Liberal Arts, which had long been regarded as ancillary, particularly to the exegesis of Scripture. Canon-establishing lists of
Great Books go back to antiquity and forward into our times, so
our founders were well-supplied (especially: Ernst Robert Curtius, Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter, 1948;
Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working
Classes, 2011). As it seems to me, Mr. Klein’s function with respect to the Program’s teaching matter was largely to add an additional element of competence and, most importantly, to
undergird the programmatic sequence with an intellectual history
that put the dawn of modernity found in the mathematical writers
of the late sixteenth and seventeenth century at the center of the
drama of a break between antiquity and modernity. It was a break
mirrored roughly in the discontinuity of our sophomore and junior years; its pathos is that of a great loss of human substance and
a huge gain of human power.
Buchanan himself was what is called a charismatic figure,
evidently (I didn’t know him) full of pedagogically energizing
outrageousness—very much the memorable master teacher dominating and drawing the college together—just what it needed in
its uncertain youngest years.
I must say here that the view I am about to offer of Mr. Klein
as presenting a model, perhaps the model, of teaching best fitting
a stable community of liberal learning is my own, perhaps to my
colleagues more of a construction than it ought to be, but very
plausible to me. It goes along with the conviction to which I’ve
confessed that a liberal education which is mindful of its tradition
and works pretty well day-to-day, with semi-frequent ascents into
sheer glory, has its own, proper teaching mode. I think that the
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delineation that follows fits not only a program of liberal education that has its own institution but also more partial, more tentative efforts. But I should report here that our founders
emphatically asserted that the program they were instituting was
not a curricular experiment. I think that attitude was crucial to
our holding together over the years: We thought—how shall I put
it?—that if this didn’t work out, then there was something wrong
with the world, not with the Program. And contrary to all pious
preaching about not being too inward-turned but more accommodating to reality, that passionate sense of being, for all our
flaws, on the right path turned out to be intensely practical. As I
recall him, Mr. Klein had a sovereign sense of being in a place
that had it right. I might add that I’ve visited a number of schools
where they did things quite differently but had the same sense of
“having got it right,” and the consequent affect between us was
immediate sympathy and potential friendship.
To begin with, then, he had the right temperament—a bit of
a gourmand (he, who despised academic grading would grade
Dodo’s uniformly delectable cuisine at every meal), a little indolent, pipe-puffing (a horrible weed called Balkan Sobranie),
amusedly tolerant toward all signs of intellectual effort in the
young and overtly repelled by adult intellectualism. In fact, he
took delight, not always fairly distributed, in the eager naiveté
and good-natured hijinks of the student generation of his first arrival; he had a special affection (which I’ve inherited) for the
scamps. (Our students of the present day, I might say, are more
experientially sophisticated and thus more psychologically
fraught—but none the wiser for it.)
I say “the right temperament,” but I mean a temperament; all
teachers in the liberal mode need a bit of a personality, both to
attract willing attention and to repel a too easy familiarity. Mr.
Klein had a lot of the appurtenances of personality, for example,
the ability to draw perfect circles on the board while facing the
class by pivoting his arm behind his back—a source of delight
to students studying Ptolemy. But these are gifts that you ape at
your peril.
Then there were other traits that were not a gift of nature but
the fruit of time. Older, more experienced teachers tend to carry
their authority with less strain and more élan, to maintain their
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repose and to intervene with aplomb, even when a learning occasion goes embarrassingly wrong—well mostly. These ways
you acquire more by keeping at it than by having a hero.
Then there were the bread-and-butter virtues of any teacher
in an institution, enforcing some discipline by mundane means—
calling on the silent, administering quizzes, requiring and attending to projects to be handed in. This dutiful fulfillment of
institutional requirements ought to be supervised by those in
charge, in our case that is the dean. Mr. Klein learned meticulous
dutifulness, as his wife told me, on the job; his pre-dean nature
was to let such things—such mere necessities—go in favor of
spontaneous life.
So far I’ve described a teacher at once too distinctively himself and too ordinarily dutiful to be a very imageable model. I’ll
now try to say how he came to be the paradigm of a teacher in a
school devoted to liberal education.
Let me begin by forfending the imputation that he followed
something called “the Socratic Method.” Neither Mr. Klein nor
we, the epigonoi as the Greek say, the successors, do any such
thing. On the one hand, it’s a contradiction in terms: Socrates
had, as I’ve said, a way, a pursuit, but not a method in the Cartesian sense of a set of jigged procedures for following an inquiry.
Mr. Klein used to say that each dialogue was its own world, and
in each conversation Socrates goes about his search in a different
way, taking into account the character of his conversational partners and of the object in question. So Socrates has his ways which
are not a method, and in that respect he is the very incarnation of
liberal teaching and our super-model. Yet, on the other hand, this
Socrates of the Platonic dialogues is, after all, Plato’s marionette,
who does as he’s told, which means he knows, or Plato knows
for him, exactly where he’s going. And that we never do know—
and we manage to rejoice in that fact.
And here finally begins my positive delineation of a pedagogy specific to liberal education and to Jasha Klein’s embodiment of it. It presupposes that liberal education, in its most
specific sense, is realized in a curriculum of texts handed to us
by the tradition, be they verbal, musical, visual. These works are
primary in the order of making or finding and prime in the ranking of quality or worth. Confronted with such works a teacher
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does well to recede into equality with the students, to inquire
along with them, and yet to be the safekeeper, the tutor of the enterprise. Mr. Klein was a master of the somewhat mysterious art
of leading from behind— by solicitous listening, by intimating
questions, even by expectant silence. He himself particularly admired a colleague, Richard Scofield, a gentleman of the old
American type, for his elegant tacitness.
This reticence had its infuriating aspects: The more a young
fellow-tutor wanted to be initiated into the deep lore we were
sure he possessed, the less forthcoming he was—sometimes, I
discovered, because he didn’t actually know, but more often because he was terminally disciple-proof; he would tolerantly respond to the admiring affection of beguiled students but would
not bind them to him by an inside teaching. It was part of that
soundness of his, which did have a Socratic look about it. His
most consequential discoveries fit, as I’ve said, into our own intellects as if there’d always been a place ready for them. Of
course, in time the insufficiencies emerged, not such as to undo
the insights, but such as to make them the center of a second sort
of attention, critical attention.
Playfulness, another Socratic element, is of the essence in
liberal learning—playfulness in making the most of the misfiring
of the inquiring intellect, playful exploitation of felicitous coincidences and other fortuities, playful extraction of sense from
nonsense, playful pinpointing of students’ personal ways—the
sort that feels to them not like offensive denigration but like gratifying spot-lighting. Playfulness, after all, goes with laughter, and
surprised laughter is the physical analogue to wonder, the beginning of philosophy. We young tutors, who had just emerged from
post-graduate studies, learned something wonderful: Learning
has a human face, and a teacher who can’t laugh, can’t be serious.
Seriousness is naturally next. Seriousness is opposed in one
respect to levity, for example a leaning some bright students
evince toward easily distractible intellectual gadgeteering. In another respect, seriousness is opposed to earnestness, dead earnestness, such as rigidly relentless industriousness. Both evade
entering into the “seriousness of the concept” (as Hegel terms it;
“Preface” 4, Phenomenology). “Seriousness” here means not be-
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laboring a thought but letting it work on you, not willfully grasping for insights but letting them come, by giving them room or—
as I like to put it—by futzing around. Time-taking patience and
messing-about belong to liberal learning, because these works
don’t open up to strategic invasions.
Serious teachers who join their students in dithering purposefully and procrastinating concentratedly must also sometimes appear in a formidable aspect. Socrates, for example, appears thus
formidable just once that I know of, though that leaves its daunting impression: When confronted with a young life going seriously wrong, here that of Callicles, he concludes with an
impassioned speech in a tone devoid of any tint of parity or playfulness: He says that he will follow his own account for a life of
virtue and bids Callicles and his crowd follow the same rationale
of conduct. “For,” he ends, “yours is worth nothing” (Gorgias,
end). On rare occasions I’ve heard that tone from Mr. Klein, a
tone utterly distinct from that of powerlessly querulous righteousness sometimes adopted by academics when great perturbations
are caused by small differences. These were moments when the
stakes were high—our students’ souls or our school’s survival,
particularly its resolute non-careerism—for this is, as I’ve said,
what the word “liberal” in “liberal education” originally betokens.
That brings me to the protection of the exchanges that are the
life of learning from dangers both within and without the classroom. Of these there are many, of which I’ll mention only one:
the corruption of conversation into debate, into argument, and
even into discussion, into all the modes of human communication
in which the passion of competition outweighs the desire for illumination. Mr. Klein practiced a pedagogy that incited in students the desire to shine but damped their impulse to outshine
each other. I think what made it work was his own sense that
some of the greatness of the works we were grappling with magnified us, but also that in the face of this grandeur our gradations,
natural or acquired, were minimized. But there was some kindly
cunning in it as well: to pretend in the face of much contrary evidence that everyone was genuinely at work and really up to it
and to keep pretending it until it—sometimes—came true.
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Perhaps I’ll mention one more vulnerability of any serious
community of young learners: the excitation of friendships
formed in the face of deep questions and difficult texts displaces
proper preparation and solid learning. For young teachers that
somewhat vacuous intensity wears out with time, but some of
our students do graduate having had more experience of the love
of learning than of learning. Characters like that hung around
Socrates, and, as I recall, Mr. Klein didn’t know what to do about
them either. However, to my mind there are worse ways to waste
one’s time.
I have not at all exhausted the pedagogical lessons that many
of my colleagues and I myself learned from Jacob Klein. Since I
can’t recall his ever mentioning to me a living model for himself,
this conclusion may be justified: What shaped the soundly ingenious scholar of intellectual history that he was in the first half of
his life, into the devoted teacher’s teacher of liberal learning that
he became in the second half, was a tiny college, St. John’s, with
an unadulterated program of liberal education, seated in the continent-wide American republic, with a continuous tradition of enabling liberty.—This half-European was as American as they
come.
I’ll finish with a little anecdote to show how Jasha was my
teacher and my model. When, after his death, Dodo was disposing of his library, she told me to take whatever I wanted. I was
simply paralyzed by the prospect of suddenly owning a lot of irreplaceable books. So I went minimal. I chose only his Greek
Plato in the Teubner and Oxford editions, multiple volumes,
falling apart with use and heavily underlined as well as annotated
in his tiny, legible script. Then, nearly two-score years ago, I
bound all the volumes up in a broad golden ribbon and never
looked inside them again until I was writing this talk. He would
have chuckled.
�On Negation: Other Possibilities in
Wallace Stevens’s Parts of a World
Jason Menzin
After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
—Wallace Stevens
“The Well Dressed Man with a Beard”
In three poems from Parts of a World (1942)1—“Of Modern Poetry,” “Landscape with Boat,” and “The Well Dressed Man with
a Beard”—Wallace Stevens reflects on the idea that poetry enables human life, and on the idea that the poet’s fictions can console us, compensating to some extent for the loss of older ideas
of order. This perspective is a shift in tone and sensibility from
the sharp irony, cool distance, and florid diction characteristic of
Harmonium (1923).2 Parts of a World seems to seek a solution
to the problem of Crispin in Harmonium’s “Comedian as the Letter C,” who is “washed away by magnitude,” overwhelmed by
the violence of untamed reality:
[Crispin] now beheld himself,
A skinny sailor peering in the sea-glass.
What word split up in clickering syllables
And storming under multitudinous tones
Was name for this short-shanks in all that brunt?
Crispin was washed away by magnitude.3
1. Wallace Stevens, Parts of a World (New York: Knopf, 1942).
2. Wallace Stevens, Harmonium (New York: Knopf, 1923).
3. Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode
and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997), 22.
Jason Menzin has taught philosophy at the Morrisey College of Arts
and Sciences, Boston College.
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“Of Modern Poetry” is a short, self-referential poem in the ars
poetica tradition. It enacts what it describes, pointing to itself at
its beginning and end:
The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.
...
It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.4
This “poem of the mind” is mainly the imaginative act of the poet
in the process of creating. But for Stevens, the poem of the mind
is also a more expansive metaphor for all imaginative activities,
from faith and philosophy to history, literature, and science. It
stands for all fictive acts, all human attempts to find coherence in
the chaos of the world outside themselves. “The act of finding /
What will suffice” is this imaginative project, which is rooted in
the need for order, meaning, beauty, joy, play, and pleasure.
The “Modern” in the poem’s title indicates that the imagination faces new challenges. Poetry must adapt to contemporary
needs. In the past, the mind “has not always had / To find” because “the scene was set”; it merely “repeated what / Was in the
script.” The poet could borrow freely from religious, philosophical, political, economic, moral, and artistic certainties. But the
script of a scriptwriter God not only controls reality’s radical contingency, it also constrains the imagination’s possibilities. God’s
scripted world unfolds from birth to death with logical, or at least
dramatically plausible, necessity among thoughts and feelings.
Belief in such a coherent narrative could once, perhaps, have provided a sense of stability.
4. Ibid., 218-19.
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But Stevens signals the transformation of the world with a
line break—“then the theater was changed”—suggestively enjambing “To something else.” The broken line mimics a fracture
in the world, while the enjambment underscores the urgency of
transitioning to a new order. The gap between the first and second
sections of the poem, across which the enjambment moves, mirrors the imaginative leap required if the poet is to cross from one
structure of meaning to another.
When the scene changes, the past becomes merely a “souvenir”—a stale memento—and the poet must renovate the theatre
of human meaning.5 For Stevens, the poet must step into the gap
of feeling and meaning created by the collapse of the old verities.
The imagination
. . . has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice.6
It cannot any longer repeat God’s script, but must meet the new
realities head-on, connect to contemporary people and places, even
“think about war.” It must leave Romanticism behind and search
out reality in plain language. “And it has to find what will suffice.”
But what is the sense of sufficiency? In essence, it is a response that matches a need. In physics, it is the equal and opposite reaction to an action. It is not, however, an answer or a final
resolution, but a reaction that reestablishes balance. It is, for a
time, enough.
“Of Modern Poetry” presents Stevens’s thinking about the
voice of the poet, written in Stevens’s own voice, without the eva5. William Butler Yeats described the same change of scene in his wellknown poem “The Second Coming,” in which “things fall apart” so
that “the centre cannot hold.” He compares this change of scene to the
fall from paradise, an apocalypse auguring a new creation. William
Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Scribner,
1996), 187.
6. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 218-19.
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sions of irony. The first lines of the poem are expressed in short
strokes with simple diction. The word it and its declined variations
occur fifteen times, and the whole of the piece lacks the sharp tone
in much of Harmonium. Despite the spare language, the governing
metaphor of the opening section is theatrics—plays and playing
in the theatre of the world. The image of poetry is a performance
before an audience. Play and performance run through the whole
poem, from a theatre with a set-scene, to an insatiable script-less
actor on stage, to a guitar-twanging metaphysician in the dark, to
a man skating, to a woman dancing. Play is part of a living being’s
response to the pressures of life, but it is also a self-sufficient act,
done for its own sake, a good in itself.
But if there is play, there is also work. And since “it,” the
mind of the poet, “has to find what will suffice” in a world where
“the theatre was changed,” the imagination must “construct a new
stage.”7 Stevens knows, as Nietzsche knew, that the death of God
means the loss of old givens. Several years after “Of Modern Poetry,” Stevens will echo Nietzsche, re-announcing that “the death
of one God is the death of all.”8 But Stevens also knows, with
Sartre, that human beings—and poets in particular—have the
artistic capacity to build a world out of their own experience. The
mind’s construction of a new stage is part of the poet’s construction of reality. This is Sartre’s existentialism compressed and
transmuted into the language of poetic creation.
Having constructed the new stage of poetic reality, Stevens
sets a single, long and complex sentence across the mid-point of
“Of Modern Poetry”:
It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 329.
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Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one.9
The imaginative mind not only develops new forms through
which reality may be understood, it also, “like an insatiable
actor,” plays at playing a role, and speaks words to the world.
These are the two complementary halves of the poetic whole: a
created stage-world and a fictive performance. But as with the
woman singing by the sea at Key West, the relationship between
creator, creature, and spectator is not simple. And here Stevens
insists that the poet must speak carefully, “slowly and with meditation,” the words that suffice.
Stevens’s figure for sufficiency is consonance, like words
that rhyme: the echo of “ear” in “hear,” the repetition of “ear”
and “ear.” The sounds of rhyme, expectation and fulfillment, imitate the poem’s broader ability to satisfy a psychic need. It is first
the sound, not the sense, of his words that triggers a response in
the actor-poet’s invisible audience. It is the sound that prompts
the audience to turn inward, to feel an internal response, listening
“not to the play, but to itself.” This is the mystery of poetry. A
bridge of words, of sense and sound, emerging from nowhere and
crossing the gap between poet and audience. This is sufficiency,
a temporary unity of feeling, “expressed / In an emotion as of
two people, as of two / Emotions becoming one.” It is through
this unity, when it happens, that the poet changes the world.
Stevens not only fuses feelings—unifying people and emotions—but also transmutes the mind poetically. At the poem’s beginning, the mind is an actor in the world-as-theater. When “the
theater was changed,” the mind becomes an insatiable actor who
“has to be on that stage.” Then, allowing the analogy to disappear,
mind as actor becomes musical metaphysician. The fictive personae merge, echoing in poetic form the fusion of “two / Emotions
9. Ibid., 219.
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becoming one.” Actor-mind, now reconstituted as instrumentalist,
continues to make sounds:
The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly
Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,
Beyond which it has no will to rise.10
In a poem about poetry, Stevens inserts an image of a philosopher, one who lacks a Platonic sun, lacks the light of reason—a
metaphysician making music in the dark. And the sounds that
issue from his guitar are sounds of the imagination.
But why does he “twang”? And why on one string instead of
several? Again, the sound of words first moves the audience toward emotion. “Twang” is sensibly onomatopoetic, vibrating in
the mouth as a string vibrates in the air. The single string reflects
his harmonization of distinctions; his music briefly unifies minds.
From the sounds of the wiry string a new formulation of “what
will suffice” emerges. Moments of “sudden rightnesses” flash
into existence and create a temporary equilibrium of feeling, a
womb-like sense of containment, a nearly unimaginable fullness
of satisfaction: “wholly / Containing the mind, below which it
cannot descend, / Beyond which it has no will to rise.” This is
not the permanence of a set-scene, nor the eternal verities of old
metaphysicians, but a moment of passing human integritas.
The poem closes with brief sketches of simple scenes from
human life:
It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.11
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
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Gone is the metaphorical stage, the actor, and the musical metaphysician. What remain are simple figures of play and motion
and gentleness: “a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman /
Combing.” Prefiguring the tone in much of Stevens’s late poetry,
these are quiet, transient, and lonely images of sufficiency. Like
the poem itself, these are instances of what might suffice, “the
poem of the act of the mind.”
✢✢✢
Unlike his practice in much of Harmonium, Stevens employs
irony in Parts of a World not merely to mock, but also to clear
an imaginative space upon which to frame new possibilities.
“Landscape with Boat,” a poem with a painterly title about an
artist, reflects this development in Stevens’s ironic sensibility.
First published in the autumn of 1940, “Landscape with
Boat” has four main sections, each with its own distinct focus
and tone: the first, like the “Snow Man” of Harmonium, is largely
descriptive; the second is critical; the third revelatory; the fourth
calmly reflective. Moreover, the poem has two halves—the first
framing the life and art of an ascetic figure, the second exploring
the sense of other possibilities.
“Landscape with Boat” begins with a deceptively simple line:
An anti-master-man, floribund ascetic.
He brushed away the thunder, then the clouds,
Then the colossal illusion of heaven. Yet still
The sky was blue. He wanted imperceptible air.
He wanted to see. He wanted the eye to see
And not be touched by blue. He wanted to know,
A naked man who regarded himself in the glass
Of air, who looked for the world beneath the blue,
Without blue, without any turquoise hint or phase,
Any azure under-side or after-color. Nabob
Of bones, he rejected, he denied, to arrive
At the neutral center, the ominous element,
The single-colored, colorless, primitive.12
12. Ibid., 220.
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The opening—“An anti-master man, floribund ascetic”—is
a sentence fragment, an extended noun, a label, language that
might appear on a small card beneath a painting on the wall of a
museum. It signals the poem’s subject matter without incorporating the living action and motion of a verb. The syntax of this
phrase—the indefinite article, the negation, the missing verb—
hints at the meaning of the figure Stevens has introduced. The
anti-master man is defined in part by inversion. He is by being
what he is not. He is neither Nietzsche’s master man nor Hitler’s;
he is not even the anti-master man. He is merely an indefinite
“an.” But he is also a “floribund ascetic.” “Floribund,” a neologism, clearly suggests “florid,” probably also “abundant,” and
therefore forms an oxymoron with “ascetic.”13 Although “floribund” is not a word in English, floribunda, “many-flowering” in
Latin, is a species of rose popularized at the 1939 World’s Fair.
With some or all of this in mind, Stevens characterizes the antimaster man as an ironic paradox of empty-fullness, a man of selfdenial and roses.
But what is this floribund ascetic? He is an artist, a peculiar
abstractionist, who removes elements from a painted canvas: “He
brushed away the thunder, then the clouds, / Then the colossal illusion of heaven.” This painter is both poetic imaginer as well as
ambiguously broom-brush-wielding artist. Thunder is sound, not
shape. The illusion of heaven is idea, not image. Neither can literally be “brushed away.” But the ascetic artist does brush them
away, removing both the real and the imagined sky, the thunder
and clouds as well as heaven, the stale ideas of order and coherence lost to the modern world. This inverse painting, the brushing
of negation, is a necessarily imperfect, incompletable process.
The painter who removes all color from a canvas ceases to produce painting. This ultimate abstractionist would succeed in his
end only by failing as an artist. And just so, despite his brushing
13. In “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” Stevens disaggregates this
fusion, in “happy fecundity, flor-abundant force” (Collected Poetry
and Prose, 336).
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away, “Yet still / The sky was blue.” The ascetic may succeed in
removing images and ideas, but he cannot brush away the blue
of the imagination.
But who is this anti-master man, this floribund ascetic? Is
this Stevens himself? The rich connoisseur of food and art and
flowers and books, living alone in a small upstairs room at home
in Connecticut? Is he the idea of a modern artist, a poet-painter
who denies the world and life to achieve a truth beyond the real?
Is it an echo of Nietzsche’s conception of the ascetic? A mockery
and critique of the poet? A critique of critique?
What is this abstractionist trying to do? What does he want?
What does it mean to take blue away from the imagination? Like
a refigured image of the earlier “snow man” of Harmonium, the
abstractionist tends toward negation and nothingness. He must,
in other words, “have a mind of winter” and “have been cold a
long time”14 to want “imperceptible air,” to want to see with a
single, cyclopean “eye” and not be touched by the blueness of
feeling and imagination. He would see with Homer’s monster’s
eye, without the depth of emotion, without color, half-blind, in
an almost perspective-less perspective without human sense—
an urge not for the chaos of senseless nonsense but for the bare,
“naked” barrenness of non-sense. He is also, perhaps, a figure
for the twentieth-century physicist, peeling back the surface of
both the world and the mind to find a colorless absence as the ultimate object beneath. Or, more comically, he is the poet carried
away by critique and the poetic reassessment of old ideas of coherence. He is Stevens critiquing himself and his own poems
about poetry, parodying the act of tossing too many things onto
the dump heap.15
This ascetic artist, a figure of negation, is “Nabob / Of bones,”
a non-man, shorn of everything but his internal frame. “He rejected, he denied,” brushing away his painting, his world, and his
14. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 8.
15. Cf. Stevens’s poem “The Man on the Dump,” Collected Poetry
and Prose, 184-86.
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self, in an effort “to arrive / At the neutral center, the ominous element.” The danger of this kind of abstraction is acute. It turns a
man into a skeleton, pulls clouds from the sky, rejects, denies,
and destroys. It is the search for the “ominous” center, something
non-human, sub-human, and impossible: “The single colored,
colorless primitive.” The primitive, like the artist’s “eye,” is singular, so that the form of the seeker here matches the form of the
thing sought. It, like the artist figured in the poem’s opening line,
is oxymoronic, colored colorlessness, and, like the artist himself,
is a thing of negation, neither this, nor that, but “neutral.”
It was not as if the truth lay where he thought,
Like a phantom, in an uncreated night.
It was easier to think it lay there. If
It was nowhere else, it was there and because
It was nowhere else, its place had to be supposed,
Itself had to be supposed, a thing supposed
In a place supposed, a thing that he reached
In a place that he reached, by rejecting what he saw
And denying what he heard. He would arrive.
He had only not to live, to walk in the dark,
To be projected by one void into
Another.16
This unsympathetic, comic-tragic figure’s effort fails, however, because lifeless life is not life but death, which is the end
of possibilities: “It was not as if the truth lay where he thought, /
Like a phantom, in an uncreated night.” There is finally no colorless color to find, no human experience beyond human feeling
and human thought. Unreality, however, does not prevent its supposition. The abstractionist is not only ascetic, but also paradoxically floribund. He seeks a truth beyond the imagination by
means of supposing, by imagining. And within Stevens’s poetics,
this seeming inconsistency makes perfect sense, since “the absence of the imagination had / Itself to be imagined.”17
16. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 220.
17. Cf. “The Plain Sense of Things,” in Collected Poetry and Prose, 428.
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Hypothetically, if the truth beyond the imagination were
“nowhere else,” then it would be “there.” But this truth is not
only not the twice-repeated “nowhere else,” it is also not even
“there.” It is non-truth. It is only “nowhere” because it is an experience of nothing. The negated, brushed away world and the
mind of ultimate rejection and denial does not exist. Or, if this
non-truth does exist, it has no sense for the living human being.
It would be “a thing that he reached / In a place that he reached,
by rejecting what he saw / And denying what he heard.” Nevertheless, Nabob perseveres in his efforts; despite obstacles and
impossibilities, “He would arrive.” But at what ridiculous,
tragic cost: “He had only not to live, to walk in the dark.” Perhaps the floribund ascetic is not only florid and abundant, but
also florid and moribund, flowery and dead, since his is a poetics of death.
In a remarkable use of enjambment, Stevens both uncovers
the heart of the ascetic painter-poet and figures his inevitable
end, explaining that Nabob had only “To be projected by one
void into / Another.” At the exact mid-point of the poem, a position which here signals the ascetic’s central emptiness, he is projected by one void—himself—into the blankness of the
unfinished sentence at the end of the poetic line. He is thrown
into the nothingness beyond the poem, a senseless non-existence
beyond human meaning. Strongly paralleling the “nothing” of
the “Snow Man” in Harmonium, the ascetic is projected by one
void, the nothing that he is, into another void, the nothing of the
non-world that he seeks.18
Had Stevens concluded the poem at this point, it would
merely be an ironic recasting of the “snow man” into the figure
of an inhuman poet-artist—from snow man to no man. The continuation of the poem reveals an important aspect of Stevens’s
poetic development.
The third section opens with a continued reflection on the ascetic artist in much the same tone as before:
18. Cf. again “The Snow Man,” in Collected Poetry and Prose, 8.
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It was his nature to suppose,
To receive what others had supposed, without
Accepting. He received what he denied.
But as truth to be accepted, he supposed
A truth beyond all truths.19
These five lines form a bridge between the second and third sections of the poem. They recapitulate the opening half of the poem,
reminding the reader of the abstractionist’s practice of un-painting. The metaphor of brushing away images is here made plain—
the ascetic artist receives ideas and images from “others”
“without accepting” them, supposing without believing, inheriting and denying his inheritance. Nabob is a figure of critique,
whose only affirmative supposition is “a truth beyond all truths,”
a nothing-truth of emptiness, a metaphysics of non-.
Stevens uses repetition in the bridge-section to create expectation and emotional force. The empty suppositions of the ascetic,
reiterated by the repetition of “suppose” in the five lines of the
bridge passage, are finally overwhelmed by a new supposing, the
powerful revelation of other possibilities of life through creative
figuring:
He never supposed
That he might be truth, himself, or part of it,
That the things that he rejected might be part
And the irregular turquoise, part, the perceptible blue
Grown denser, part, the eye so touched, so played
Upon by clouds, the ear so magnified
By thunder, parts, and all these things together,
Parts, and more things, parts.20
With a complete shift in poetic tone, Stevens undoes the ascetic artist’s opening act of de-creation. The return of the world,
with language that feels like air and sunlight overwhelming desolation, is beyond the abstractionist’s supposing. And although
carefully couched in the subjunctive “might” and the conditional
19. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 220.
20. Ibid., 220-21.
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“if,” the feeling of these lines, especially as it contrasts with the
sense of a world brushed away in the poem’s first half, contains
romantic—nearly biblical—force. The negating ascetic, of
course, “never supposed / That he might be truth, or part of it.”
And with the pulse-like repetition of “part,” Stevens brings back
the parts of a world brushed away by the ascetic in the poem’s
opening section. Stevens brings back the “turquoise tint”—now
“irregular”; the “blue”—now no longer the “imperceptible air”
of the ascetic, but “perceptible,” “grown denser”; the “clouds”—
now playful on the eye; the “thunder”—now magnifying the ear.
The painting of the poem’s opening has been restored, renewed,
with all but the “colossal illusion of heaven” reinstated. And
even that illusion, perhaps necessarily left off the canvas in
modernity, is transmuted in a second and final, restorative supposition:
He never supposed divine
Things might not look divine, nor that if nothing
Was divine then all things were, the world itself,
And that if nothing was the truth, then all
Things were the truth, the world itself was the truth.21
Echoing “Sunday Morning,”22 where divinity lives within the self
and within scenes of earthly emotion, this second supposition
projects the possibility of a new kind of divinity. Here the ascetic
is inverted. The thing sought is not nothing, but everything: the
world itself, the parts of a whole. This everything is not under
the canvas, not beneath the blue, or beyond, but here and now
and as things actually are. As in the flight of the angel in “Notes
Toward a Supreme Fiction” and that poem’s “expressible bliss,”
here differences are collapsed, like a mystical epiphany, and truth
is seen everywhere.23
But surely this goes too far. Stevens’s skepticism and his poetics of sufficiency is not a poetics of totality. And indeed, all of
21. Ibid., 221.
22. Ibid., 53-56.
23. Ibid., 349.
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this would be too sentimental, too romantic for belief, if not for
the qualifying conditionals, the uncertainty of “might,” the indefiniteness of “suppose.” These are not assertions of certainty,
but expressions of possibilities, contrapuntal potentialities to the
ascetic artist’s negations. Yet even these evasions fit into the orchestrated whole of Stevens’s own poem. This suggests, if only
obliquely, that the two abstractions—one of negation, one of totality—are not equally plausible or equally human.
In “Landscape with Boat,” artistic repetition, not mere repetitiousness, signals the potential for actual order—both in the
poem and in the world. Even as “suppose” is repeated several
times in this section, the word “he” is repeated seven times in the
opening section, “it” eight times in the second, and “part” seven
times in the third. After the repetition of “it” in the second section,
“he” is repeated six times. Before the repetition of “part” in the
third, “he” is again repeated six times. These symmetries of repetition provide cohesion to the poem both in sense and sound.
They are like a pulse within the poem, from the ascetic “he” to
the non-truth of “it” to the revelatory “part.” The existence of
these parts of the poem themselves enact the “parts” described
within the poem. If artistically shaped patterns, structures of poetic repetition, point to the possibility of parts in the world, then
there may be a concordance between poem and cosmos. The
poem may make possible a belief in the possibility of parts, a belief in the possibility of a whole defined not by inversion but by
life itself.
Within the shape of this whole, Stevens completes the poem
with a reflective voice, moving into the warmth of sunlight, air,
and water. He ends with a “better” supposing, a life of motion
and sound and warmth:
Had he been better able to suppose:
He might sit on a sofa on a balcony
Above the Mediterranean, emerald
Becoming emeralds. He might watch the palms
Flap green ears in the heat. He might observe
A yellow wine and follow a steamer’s track
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And say, “The thing I hum appears to be
The rhythm of this celestial pantomime.”24
Here, with the appearance of the steamer’s track, is a refreshed
“Landscape with Boat”—not the landscape brushed away by the
abstractionist, but a rich place, an image of what might be, of
what “might . . . might . . . might” be, of possible poetry and possible life. Here in the south of Europe a better painter, a man alive
to the scene before him, sits at rest on a sofa on a balcony overlooking the play of light and water on the Mediterranean. Unlike
the abstractionist—a void becoming void—this artist, like the sea
before him, is perhaps an “emerald / Becoming emeralds,” the
green jewels that are the parts of reality. This greater artist observes rather than destroys, and, instead of brushing away thunder
and clouds, watches palms flap leaves like green ears that can
hear a world in the warm air. This possible poet observes the liquid pleasure of wine and the liquid of the sea. He sees in the water
a “steamer’s track,” a relic of motion, a hint of the boat of the
poem’s title, an affirmation that this moment itself, this lived moment from the balcony above the sea, is the landscape with boat.
In the midst of this renewed world, the poet reflects in spoken
words on the sense of his own poetry: “The thing I hum appears
to be the rhythm of this celestial pantomime.” In harmony with
the poetics of the poem’s second half, this better poet feels his
poetry fitting into the rhythm of the world. He feels the rhythm
of his own language to be a sound of concord, a thing that might
reflect the greater poetry of a cosmos of moving parts.
✢ ✢ ✢
In “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard,” another short poem
with a painterly title, Stevens continues to work through themes
and ideas from “Of Modern Poetry” and “Landscape with Boat.”
Unlike the latter poem, however, with its two distinct halves,
“The Well Dressed Man with a Beard” consists of a body and
tail, a single stanza of sixteen lines and a one-line coda.
24. Ibid., 221
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After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.
If the rejected things, the things denied,
Slid over the western cataract, yet one,
One only, one thing that was firm, even
No greater than a cricket’s horn, no more
Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech
Of the self that must sustain itself on speech,
One thing remaining, infallible, would be
Enough. Ah! douce campagna of that thing!
Ah! douce campagna, honey in the heart,
Green in the body, out of a petty phrase,
Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:
The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,
The aureole above the humming house . . .
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.25
On initial reading, the negative conclusion of the poem’s
coda seems strangely paired with the humming affirmations that
end the main stanza. Perhaps a closer examination can help clarify the relationship between the coda and the whole.
The opening line is a compressed version of the two halves
of “Landscape with Boat,” in which the first half involves the
negations of the ascetic artist, while the second half makes affirmations that re-create the world. Similarly, this poem begins with
the recognition of a “no,” before moving to the affirmation of a
“yes”: “After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the
future world depends.” This sentence is obscure because “no”
and “yes” are not responses to particular questions, but instead
they express psychological polarities or even cosmic antitheses.
The “final no” is the end. It is death, rejection, perfection, and
apocalypse. This final no echoes the artistic purpose of the ascetic
painter-poet in the earlier poem. Here again, the “no” is not
merely an ironic negation, but rather an idea that clears the
ground for something else and greater—a “yes.”26
25. Ibid., 224.
26. Cf. the final line of Joyce’s Ulysses.
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Once the last “no” is spoken or thought, there is not nothing,
not silence, but the advent of a Christ-like “yes.” This “yes” is
the actuality of affirmation beyond negation. It is the basis of a
whole “future world.” “No” is the night, the absence of the world
in sleep; “yes” is the sun, the light of seeing, the world seen, the
imagination’s possibilities. “No was,” in the negation of past time
and non-existence, while “yes is” in the actuality of the evanescent present.
The long, dense conditional sentence that follows contains the
poem’s central imagery and points to the possibilities of a “yes.”
As in “Of Modern Poetry,” Stevens is again in search of what will
suffice—here the possibility of finding one thing that “would be /
Enough.” The skeleton of this sentence—“If the rejected things
slid over the western cataract, one thing remaining would be
enough”—echoes the structure of the poem’s opening line: from
no to yes. The protasis opens with negation—“the rejected things,
the things denied”—while the apodosis points to the potential for
something more, something “remaining,” that is sufficient. This
pattern, in small, suggests the whole of “Landscape with Boat,”
the possibility of moving from abstract negation to discovering
meaning to reclaiming a whole world. Stevens emphasizes the
conclusion of the apodosis through enjambment in the last line,
pointing from the potentiality of “would be” to the sufficiency of
a suggestively lonely “enough.”
Water passing over a cataract is an irreversible moment of
loss. The “western cataract” is the poem’s own “final no.” It is
the horizon of the setting sun, a spatialization of death. Like the
musty theatre from the opening of “Of Modern Poetry,” the rejected things that pass beyond are exhausted fictions, empty ideas
incapable of engendering meaning in the modern heart. But if not
every idea slides over the western cataract, if—in a remarkable
quadruple expression of singularity—“one, / One only, one thing”
should remain, then that “would be / Enough.” Even if the one
thing were physically infinitesimal, “no greater than a cricket’s
horn,” even if the one thing were intellectually insignificant, “no
more / Than a thought to be rehearsed all day,” it would be enough
because it would be something.
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The one thing, no matter how small, that survives the
decimation of time is actual and therefore powerful. The cricket’s
horn suggests both small size and enormous sound wholly
disproportionate to the insect’s physical magnitude. This
disproportion indicates the power of the one thing preserved from
the cataract’s eclipse. “[N]o more / than a thought,” rehearsed in
the mind (as if for a play on the stage in “Of Modern Poetry”),
the one thing remaining points to a passage on repetition in
“Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”:
A thing final in itself and, therefore, good:
One of the vast repetitions final in
Themselves and, therefore, good.27
The one thing, rehearsed and repeated, final in itself, is poetic expression, the power of words to change the world. Echoing the
actor and the metaphysician in “Of Modern Poetry,” both of whom
use sound to move their audiences, the thing that suffices here is
“a speech / Of the self that must sustain itself on speech.” As much
as bread and water, the right words may sustain life.28
To complement the “better” supposing in the second half of
“Landscape with Boat,” here the idea that something might
survive oblivion provides pleasure, even to the point of eliciting
exclamations. The “douce campagna” blends with the sweetness
of “honey in the heart” and the vigorous receptivity of “green in
the body.” This is a place of peace and pleasure brought on by
words that are enough. The “douce campagna” is a dream-like
belief, “a thing affirmed,” a ghostly energy humming in the
night—like crickets—where the human being sleeps and dwells.
But what is the meaning of the coda, “It can never be satisfied, the mind, never”? Is Stevens undercutting the possibility of
encountering and experiencing the “douce campagna”? Is this an
27. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 350.
28. Cf. the final stanza of “Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction”: “How
simply the fictive hero becomes the real; / How gladly with proper
words the soldier dies, / If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful
speech.” Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 352.
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anti-romantic backlash against the apparent sentimentality of the
poem? Is this the speech that ends possibilities? As with the conditionals and evasions in the revelatory third section of “Landscape with Boat,” it is reasonable to remember that Stevens
disdains the falsifying voice of naïve idealism. But perhaps there
is also more. Perhaps the coda is itself an instance of the “final
no” from the opening line of the poem. Perhaps the one thing that
survives the “western cataract” is the poem itself or the “petty
phrase” that is the poem’s opening line. By the poetic logic of
“The Well Dressed Man with a Beard,” after the “final no” there
comes a “yes.” And if this is true, then the reader must feel the
inevitability of an as-yet-unspoken “yes” coming after the
poem’s final “never.” If the opening line is to be believed, then
the end of the poem is not the end. Despite the emphatic negations “never . . . never,” which point to the impossibility of permanent satisfaction, “yes” implies an unending process of poetic
refiguring, a never-ending poetic response to a never-ending
human need for something real.
✢✢✢
Stevens’s shifting usage of terms of negation is a critical clue to
a change in his poetic sensibility between the publications of
Harmonium and Parts of a World. In Harmonium, negation is
characterized, on the one hand, by desolation, as in the impossibly icy mind of a snow man who, “nothing himself, beholds /
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is,”29 and, on the
other hand, by the half-mockery of Mon Oncle’s opening address,
in which “[t]here is not nothing, no, no, never nothing, / Like the
clashed edges of two words that kill.”30 But in Parts of a World,
despite the apparent similarity of expression, negation begets new
and potentially endless possibilities. In “Of Modern Poetry,”
“sudden rightnesses” create an emotional space for the mind
“below which it cannot descend, / Beyond which it has no will
to rise,”31 signalling not the inability of the mind to progress, but
29. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 8.
30. Ibid., 10.
31. Ibid., 219.
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the temporary bliss of sufficiency. In “Landscape with Boat,” the
ascetic “never supposed / That he might be truth,”32 signalling
not another layer of artistic demolition, but the opening of a new
vista on life. And in “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard,” that
“it can never be satisfied, the mind, never,”33 signals not the end,
but the never-ending need for poetry. “Never” and “not” and
“no” in Parts of a World signify affirmation rather than despondency. They point away from the precipice of the “western
cataract” and toward the solid ground of meaning, feeling, and
expression offered by a supreme fiction.34
32. Ibid., 220.
33. Ibid., 224.
34. The difference in Stevens’s understanding of negation in Harmonium and Parts of a World might well be compared to the final “no” in
Rev. 6:8 (“And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat
on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given
unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with
hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth”) and the “yes”
of a future cosmos in Rev. 21:1 (“And I saw a new heaven and a new
earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there
was no more sea”).
�“The Student,” by Anton Chekhov:
A Story Told and Glanced At
Louis Petrich
We students take our pleasure in stories. We students love stories
that lift us to the light of meaning and fill us with confidence to
face life’s elements on friendly terms. We are nevertheless engaged in a precarious undertaking. The meaning and strength we
obtain may be shared and the stories proclaimed universal; or they
may be unshared—opposed to each other—their stories indeterminate and parochial. In this second case the meaning and strength
that we happen to find may appear to others as the desperate attempts of a literate organism to keep its skin warm and its way lit
in the local cold and dark. It may not be possible to tell the difference in truth between these two kinds of meaning and strength.
I would like to tell you a story now, written in 1894 by Anton
Chekhov, called “The Student.” It is a multi-layered story, but
very short—about three and a half pages—taking twelve minutes
to tell. If you are reading this lecture, please try to hear the words
of the story, here included, as if they were being told to you for
the very first time.
∽
The Student
Anton Chekhov1
The weather was fair at first and still. The blackbirds were calling and
a creature in the nearby swamps plaintively hooting as if blowing into
1. Translated by Michael Heim. Used by the kind permission of The Estate of
Michael Heim.
Louis Petrich is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, where this lecture
was first delivered on November 3, 2017. It is dedicated to Amy Kass (19402015) and her husband, Leon (b. 1939). Like many others, the author was a student in their light of reflection for some years.
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an empty bottle. A woodcock flew past, and a shot boomed out merrily
in the spring air. But when the woods grew dark, an inauspiciously cold,
piercing wind blew in from the east, and silence fell. Needles of ice
stretched over the puddles, and the woods became disagreeable, godforsaken, hostile. Winter was in the air.
Ivan Velikopolsky, a seminary student and deacon’s son, was on
his way home from a hunt, following a path through a water meadow.
His fingers were numb, and his face burned in the wind. He felt that the
sudden blast of cold had violated the order and harmony of things, that
nature herself was terrified and so the dark of evening had come on
more quickly than necessary. Desolation was everywhere, and it was
somehow particularly gloomy. The only light came from the widows’
vegetable gardens by the river; otherwise everything far and wide, all
the way to the village four versts off, was submerged in the cold evening
mist. The student remembered that when leaving the house he had seen
his mother sitting barefoot on the floor in the entryway polishing the
samovar and his father lying on the stove coughing. It was Good Friday,
so cooking was forbidden and he was terribly hungry.2 And now,
stooped with the cold, he thought how the same wind had blown in the
days of Rurik and Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great3 and there had
been the same crippling poverty and hunger, the same leaky thatched
roofs and benighted, miserable people, the same emptiness everywhere
and darkness and oppressive grief, and all these horrors had been and
were and would be and even the passing of a thousand years would
make life no better. And he had no desire to go home.
The gardens were called the widows’ gardens because they were
tended by two widows, mother and daughter. The crackling fire gave
off great heat and lit up the surrounding plowlands. The widow Vasilisa, a tall, plump old woman wearing a man’s sheepskin coat, stood
nearby, staring into it pensively; her daughter Lukerya, who was short,
pockmarked, and had a slightly stupid face, sat on the ground washing
a pot and spoons. They must have just finished supper. Men’s voices
came up from the river, local farmhands watering their horses.
“Well, winter’s back,” said the student, going up to the fire.
“Hello there.”
2. The Lenten fast that lasts for forty days calls for varying degrees of abstinence
from meat, dairy, fish, olive oil, and alcohol; on Good Friday, the somber anniversary of Christ’s crucifixion, Orthodox Christians observe the strictest fast
of the year and are meant to eat nothing at all.
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Vasilisa started but then saw who he was and put on a welcoming
smile.
“I didn’t recognize you,” she said. “God be with you and make you
rich.”
They talked. Vasilisa had been in the world: she had worked for
the gentry first as a wet nurse and later as a nanny, and she had a dainty
way of speaking and a gentle, stately smile that never left her lips; her
daughter Lukerya, a product of the village and her husband’s beatings,
merely squinted at the student in silence with the strange look of a deafmute.
“Peter the Apostle4 warmed himself at a fire just like this on one
cold night,” the student said, holding out his hands to the flames. “It
was cold then too. And oh, what a terrible night it was. An exceedingly
long and doleful night.”
He looked around at the darkness, gave his head a convulsive
shake, and said, “You’ve been to the Twelve Apostles service,5 haven’t
you?”
“I have,” Vasilisa responded.
“Remember when Peter says to Jesus during the Last Supper,6 ‘I
am ready to go with thee, both into prison, and to death’ and the Lord
says, ‘I tell thee, Peter, the cock shall not crow this day, before that
thou shalt thrice deny that thou knowest me’? When the supper was
over, Jesus, grieving unto death, prayed in the garden, and poor Peter,
weary of soul and weak, his eyes heavy, could not fight off sleep. And
sleep he did. Later that night Judas kissed Jesus and betrayed him to
3. Rurik: semi-legendary Viking hero of the Russian Primary Chronicle (1200),
who conquered in the ninth century and whose dynasty ruled the area occupied
by Kievan Rus until the sixteenth century. Ivan the Terrible: Grand Prince of
Moscow 1533-84, first ruler to be crowned Tsar, feared for his power and traditionally associated with cruelty. Peter the Great: Peter I, Tsar 1682-1725, first
to assume title of emperor; most famous for his efforts to modernize Russia by
westernizing it.
4. One of Jesus’s twelve original apostles, who plays a large role in the Gospel
events.
5. Twelve Apostles: Also called “Twelve Gospels” or the “Lord’s Passion”; the
service conducted on the evening of Holy Thursday consisting of twelve readings drawn from all four Gospels, leading up to and including the Crucifixion.
The passages Ivan cites are a combination of verses from Luke 22, John 18,
and Matthew 26.
6. The final meal Jesus shares with the twelve apostles just before he is taken
into custody and crucified.
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his torturers. He was bound and taken off to the high priest and beaten
while Peter—exhausted (he’d hardly slept, after all), plagued by anguish and trepidation, sensing something dreadful was about to happen
on earth—watched from afar . . . He loved him passionately, to distraction, and could now see them beating him . . .”
Lukerya laid down the spoons and trained her fixed gaze on the
student.
“Having arrived at the high priest’s house,” he continued, “they
began questioning Jesus, and the servants kindled a fire in the midst of
the courtyard, for it was cold and they wished to warm themselves. And
Peter stood at the fire with them, and he too warmed himself, as I am
doing now. And a certain maid saw him and said, ‘This man was also
with Jesus,’ meaning that he too should be taken for questioning. And
all the servants standing by the fire must have looked at him with suspicion and severity because he grew flustered and said, ‘I know him
not.’ And when shortly thereafter another recognized him as one of
Jesus’ disciples, saying, ‘Thou art also of them,’ he again denied it. Then
a third time someone turned to him and said, ‘Was it not thou I saw with
him in the garden today?’ and he denied it a third time, whereupon the
cock immediately crew, and Peter, gazing from afar at Jesus, recalled
the words he had said to him at supper . . . And having recalled them,
he pulled himself together, left the courtyard, and shed bitter, bitter
tears. The Gospel says: ‘And Peter went out, and wept bitterly.’ I can
picture it now: the garden, all still and dark, and a muffled, all but inaudible sobbing in the stillness . . . “
The student sighed and grew pensive. Still smiling, Vasilisa suddenly burst into sobs herself, and tears, large and abundant, rolled down
her cheeks, and she shielded her face from the fire as if ashamed of
them, and Lukerya, her eyes still fixed on the student, flushed, and the
look on her face grew heavy and tense like that of a person holding back
great pain.
The farmhands were returning from the river, and one of them, on
horseback, was close enough so that the firelight flickered over him.
The student bade the widows good-night and moved on. And again it
was dark, and his hands began to freeze. A cruel wind was blowing—
winter had indeed returned—and it did not seem possible that the day
after next would be Easter.
The student’s thoughts turned to Vasilisa: if she wept, it meant the
things that happened to Peter on that terrible night had some relevance
for her . . .
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He glanced back. The lone fire glimmered peacefully in the dark,
and there were no longer any people near it. Again he thought that if
Vasilisa wept and her daughter was flustered then clearly what he’d just
told them about events taking place nineteen centuries earlier was relevant to the present—to both women and probably to this backwater
village, to himself, and to everyone on earth. If the old woman wept, it
was not because he was a moving storyteller but because Peter was
close to her and her whole being was concerned with what was going
on in Peter’s soul.
And all at once he felt a stirring of joy in his soul and even paused
for a moment to catch his breath. The past, he thought, is tied to the
present in an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of the other.
And he felt he had just seen both ends of that chain: he had touched one
end and the other had moved.
And when ferrying across the river and later climbing the hill he
gazed at his native village and to the west of it, where a narrow strip of
cold, crimson twilight still shone, he kept thinking of how the truth and
beauty guiding human life back there in the garden and the high priest’s
courtyard carried on unceasingly to this day and had in all likelihood
and at all times been the essence of human life and everything on earth,
and a feeling of youth, health, strength—he was only twenty-two—and
an ineffably sweet anticipation of happiness, unknown and mysterious,
gradually took possession of him, and life appeared wondrous, marvelous, and filled with lofty meaning.
∽
So what should we do now? Is the story not sufficient in its
telling? The student glances back to see if meaning adheres to
what his listeners outwardly felt by that fire. Let us do that, we
movers-on: glance back with me to the outward-looking first
paragraph, and let us creatively accompany the author as we wonder about felt meanings.
The weather was fair at first and still. I wonder why authors
bother to describe the weather. Is it merely to assist our imaginations in making the story seem vividly real? Or does the weather,
as banal a subject as they come, determine our recognition of
things, profoundly, not merely superficially? We like it to remain
fair, but we know it always changes, never quite predictably, like
lines of verse that obey a form but surprise us at each step. Any
attempt to describe the weather must therefore be qualified with
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Chekhov’s: “at first.” The word “still” that follows “at first” and
earns its momentary stop is a favorite of his. It captures the punctual motion and rest that we would feel as hearers of his musically
made stories if we knew Russian. The weather, when “still,” feels
poised, self-same, and we can almost rest our hope in its authorized continuity. But this lovely stillness, because it is “at first,”
feels ready to tip over, betray its promises, despoil its fair face,
and move unplotted toward no home of rest. So begins the story
Chekhov called his most perfect. Perfection lacks nothing, contains everything that belongs to its life and form. For a story to
be perfect, should it not be the first story told, yet poised to bend,
alter, and pour itself out as someone else’s?
The blackbirds were calling and a creature in the nearby
swamps plaintively hooting as if blowing into an empty bottle.
There is, at first, a “calling” sound, and we recognize the
source—blackbirds, but Chekhov does not tell us the meaning of
their calling. Shall we tell ourselves as co-authors that they are
calling each other to fulfill the wondrous and marvelous biological yearning to make life on earth reproduce itself always and
everywhere? It is good to recognize a call out there and feel uplifted by strong purposes, rather than to face the silence of nothing or the cacophony of chaos. At the center of this story is the
call of a particular bird at a precise time. It is not uplifting to its
intended hearer, at first.
Appearing second in this sentence, without even a comma of
pause (so quickly the weather changes), is a hooting sound of
complaint from some unknown “creature,” implying a creator if
we take the word literally. (Do you take the word “creature” literally? I shall answer that for myself, at least, at the end.) The
hooting sound, issuing from nearby swamps, places of growth
and decay, reminds the storyteller of the blowing one makes into
an empty bottle, the origin of music and poetry, perhaps. It reminds me that the pains of creaturely life must be relieved, for
even the righteous who survive the floods of annihilation take to
emptying the bottle afterwards, as the Bible tells, whose story of
creation begins with an almighty poetic blowing upon the original
chaos and emptiness. Calls to life and complaints of death that
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sound together in a chord: take them as the telltale sounding of
this particular author, Chekhov. Do the birds and other creatures
display the signs of a certain kind of author? I shall answer that
as well, twice over, in proper time.
A woodcock flew past, and a shot boomed out merrily in the
spring air. Another bird is recognized in the atmosphere of
spring: a cock of the woods, now here—boom!—now gone. Supper is being provided with that merry shot. The hunter may now
go home to fulfill family desires and rest.
But when the woods grew dark, an inauspiciously cold,
piercing wind blew in from the east, and silence fell. The
weather changes, as we knew it would, and the former blowing
into bottled emptiness to make sounding motion arise from stillness, now pierces to silence the calling birds of spring. Darkness
spreads its cold wings. That supper of woodcock may be the last,
for some time.
Needles of ice stretched over the puddles, and the woods
became disagreeable, godforsaken, hostile. Winter was in the
air. The puddles of swamp, from which life, they say, arises,
adapts to air, and returns at last to mud are now become icy needles to sting and pierce the touch. Who is responsible for the infliction of sharp pain on sensory life? He whose breath once
hovered over the empty deep and spoke things into being from
nothing by naming them has forsaken the woods, and the air of
speech belongs to the winter wind. Whose name is pronounced
from out of that disagreeable, hostile air?
The name we hear at once, at the start of the next sentence
of a new paragraph, is “Ivan.” This name is common in Russian
history and literature, but there is one Ivan among them all who
is particularly relevant (note that word, please).7 Ivan Karamazov
faces the question of whether to stay close to home to protect his
dissolute father from the threat of murder. Ivan Karamazov, after
much deliberation, decides not to remain near home, and thus he
is complicit in his father’s murder. By denying practical relation
7. Chekhov often instigates comparison with his literary masters, in this
case, Dostoevsky, author of The Brothers Karamazov (1880).
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to a person existentially connected to him, he negates the existence of that person and puts his own in question. Ivan Velikopolsky faces the same question: whether to return home to a father
coughing his life away on the stove while his mother sits barefoot
on the dirty floor polishing the samovar, or to leave them there,
cold and stooping in the dust.8
While we are at it, let us consider the names of the two widows. Vasilisa is a common Russian name found in fairy tales for
a peasant or housekeeper who by elevation of marriage becomes
a princess (think Cinderella). Our Vasilisa has imitated her storied
namesakes by working among the gentry, learning to speak daintily, and smiling in a stately fashion determined to live happily
ever after. The thought of her, by name, makes the despairing student turn back to the fire at which she stared, the light of which
inspires his spiritual elevation. But by its connection to a character whose storied smiles turn to sobs, his elevation by that light
is associated in our minds with fairy tales.
Let us pause over the image of light to do a little theology,
shall we? Recall that in the beginning of John’s Gospel, the light
goes unrecognized by the world, though the world came to be
through that light, and the dark never masters it. To those who
do see the light, there is given the right to become children of
God, not born of the “fleshly desire of a human father, but offspring of God himself.”9 This is elevation to an absolute love
and happiness of the highest order. Is this elevation by means of
the light, seen and recognized, a fairy tale? It ends, true enough,
with “a narrow strip of cold, crimson twilight” still shining in
the west, not yet mastered by darkness. But after we hear that
exhilarating, final (one long sentence) paragraph, built on this
twilight image: do we see and recognize any light as master illuminator of our diminishing turning pages? Calls and complaints,
8. Ivan Karamazov, in consideration for the suffering of innocent children, frames his position to his younger brother in terms of a ticketed
earth traveler: “It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return Him the ticket.” Without a ticket to the divine harmony
of things at the end of time, there is only the present, in which all things,
according to Ivan, are permissible.
9. John 1: 4-5, 10-13.
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fullness and emptiness turn, as leaves do, into the fading colors
of the persistent past.10 But who authors them and gives meaning
to their turnings?
Our consideration of Vasilisa’s name tasks us to pull together
our dispersed attention to fairy tales, John’s Gospel of light, a
storyteller’s poeticized feelings, and the miserable facts of nature
and society. Will we be elevated or broken down by our task? We
have one more name to consider before testing the outcomes.
Lukerya is so named to direct our attention to the Gospel of
Luke, who is said to have been a physician, like Chekhov, and
more relevant to the poor and oppressed than the other three
evangelists. Luke’s telling of Peter’s denial contains unique details seized by Chekhov for their dramatic interest. The maid who
first identifies Peter does so in Luke by staring at his face and
figure, not by his Galilean dialect.11 Lukerya lays down her
spoons and stares fixedly at the student’s face, as if, like the maid,
she were finding out his relation to a victim of torture, in order
to ask him something. Does he know and love that victim actively, or does he merely preach? Is he pierced by the present
look of suffering, more than by the icy wind on his skin? Lukerya
does not once look into the face of her mother, who by living
among the gentry distanced herself from her daughter’s cries of
pain. She holds in those cries like a deaf-mute, while staring open
the storytelling soul of the student for purpose of recognition.
We, too, shall stare open his soul, our souls, all of them.
To undertake which, recall this tremendously helpful insight
into the summoning power of storied words. Luke tells how
Peter and Jesus, the one uttering his third denial while the other
is being beaten by his guards, hear the cock crow (a new day!)
and turn their faces to meet and remember the words at the Last
Supper;12 so fantastical at the time of utterance, those words now
become scripted history. And only then, as a character in a story,
10. The last paragraph, a single sentence of prolonged poetic mastery,
elevates painful facts in thought and feeling to a realm of beautifully
expressed meanings, without the possibility, in a second sentence, of
contradiction.
11. Luke 22: 56.
12. Luke 22: 60-61.
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does Peter (in the student’s telling) “pull himself together.” Previously, he was dispersed, the input of his eyes denied by his
tongue relation to the history of his ears. Lukerya, tongue-tied
and stupidly staring, still waits for the crowing sound that will
summon recognition of her pain and give her the strength to pull
herself together as a character in a bigger story than her own,
but one that she can co-author.
The word “relevant” that I asked you to note often arises in
discussions of Chekhov. He was sharply criticized in his own
time for not writing relevant stories—that is, for not taking a position and prescribing a cure for Russia’s social and political ailments. He claimed that his only duty as a writer was to present
the truth of human life, as lived by late nineteenth-century Russians, as simply as he could, not to advocate particular reforms.
He honored Tolstoy as his master in truth-speaking letters, but
he had this to say of Russia’s bearded prophet of reform: “There’s
more love for mankind shown in electricity and steam engines
than in chastity and vegetarianism.” Chekhov puts the conflict
of purpose between relevance and truth at the heart of his story.
The student reaches for truth of the highest, most encompassing
kind, after he leaves the widows in their pain with nothing more
than a “good night.” While thinking of the meaning of the tears
of Vasilisa, not of their comfort or remedy, he stares back to see
the fire glimmer “peacefully in the dark,” with no people near it.
That solitary fire inspires his felt discovery of the truth and
beauty guiding the events of history. This was Tolstoy’s concern
in 1500 pages of War and Peace. The student gets the truth of
history in three and a half pages. But that is the art of Chekhov,
a writer trained by empirical facts as a physician to the discipline
of brevity. Can truth ever be relevant unless it accommodates our
brevity of breath? Chekhov understood the answer to be obvious.
He left relevance, as understood by his critics, to the secret workings on each soul of his briefly measured, immediately felt, simple words.
Perhaps you find no conflict between relevance and truth
even under pressure of mortality. For students as such are always
young, while they seek as lovers to meet the face of truth, like
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sea kissing sky at the horizon. Let us grant this fine sentiment to
ourselves—I think Socrates would. Three questions remain. Are
the truths met by the student credible? Do they justify the suffering that their instigation augments in the widows? And is growing
wise as the cock crows worth the bitter tears of heartbreak when
love of the dear old self is found facing you with a kiss at the
horizon? Let us try out two sets of answers to these questions,
which will, in turn, settle our earlier question about nature’s author. First, in sympathy with the student, let us glance back some
more (second paragraph).
The student is on his way home from a hunt on Good Friday.
He feels that the “sudden blast of cold”—like a shot from a gun—
has “violated the order and harmony of things.” But Good Friday
is supposed to be especially mortifying, and a seminary student,
no matter how cold his hands, ought to recognize the priority of
spirit over mere elements. In the Gospels, darkness covers the
land while Jesus expires on the cross mid-day, and an earthquake
splits rocks open when he breathes his last.13 But our student,
Ivan, remembers not these disordered phenomena, only the discordant postures of his earthly parents: his mother sitting barefoot
on the floor and his father lying on the stove. How hard it must
be to hold Gospel truths in mind before the uncouth suffering of
one’s dearest relations. As he moves homeward, he has a vision
of history inspired by the weather and his parents’ conditions.
The same wind always blows in your face—that is a fact of nature—and despite all proud conquest, unification, and modernization, Russians still squander the light stupidly, polishing their
silver samovars under leaky roofs, coldly coughing, downward
grieving, always dying. There is “the same emptiness everywhere,” which is also a fact of nature, scientifically understood
not to contain meaning in its dust. “All these horrors had been
and were and would be and even the passing of a thousand years
would make life no better.” The student has acquired a Biblical
prophetic cadence, but he has no good news to deliver, “no desire
to go home” to the ones he loves and cannot help.
13. Luke 23: 44; Matthew 27: 52.
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But what is most oppressive, we jaunty Americans might especially feel, is the tedium of all that Russian moaning and groaning. This native feeling of ours has received precise critical
formulation. In addition to being called “irrelevant,” Chekhov was
accused of indulging the “banalities” of useless complaint and
fantasies of hope. This criticism is easiest to appreciate in his
plays: while one character, stage left, let us say, is tearing her life
to shreds and another, stage right, is costuming hers in silk, inevitably a household servant from out of memory limps on stage,
trying not to spill a large samovar, and announces that it is time
to clear the table and drink some tea. That peasant woman, with
her insistence on commonplace reality, is sitting expectantly in
the background of this story: the student’s mother. When her son
arrives at home, full of the loftiest revelations of meaning, she
will be ready to serve the tea center stage and talk about the
weather and the proverbial world, for that is how people really relate. Chekhov, you understand, did not go for those Tolstoyan
episodes of being thrown to the ground half dead and looking up
at the infinite sky to encounter the life-altering repository of Truth,
ever solicitous of our human happiness. He thought, rather, that
the truth about relevance (another word for which is relationship,
or in the positive sense, love), is often a banal truth: you meet the
right person for mutual love and happiness, but at the wrong stage
of development, and the discordance of years or of readiness to
recognize each other’s relevance cannot usually be rectified by
the dramatic realigning of motions and ends, as Tolstoy performs
for Natasha and Pierre or Kitty and Levin.14 Nevertheless, it is not
too late in a Chekhov story, as in life, to make the best of bad timing by constant improvisation and large stores of quiet laughter
and watery eyes. When these fail and emptiness massages the
heart, resort from dread is taken in repetitions of phrase or gesture,
which like the polished samovar of tea punctuate the weary days
and awful nights with something familiar, shining, and collective
14. The first couple are major characters in War and Peace, the second,
in Anna Karenina.
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of people who seek warmth in the drink and light of life from the
banal superfluities of plaintive or fantastically hopeful speech.
Now to continue in sympathy with our student: as he first approaches the fire, the presence of the women being irrelevant to
his desire for warmth, he says “Well, winter’s back,” and he gets
no response. He then adds, “Hello there,” to which Vasilisa starts,
as one always jumps a little when something appears out of nothing. Then, seeing who he is, she puts on a welcoming smile, for
a student is good company to a woman who has learned to talk
above her station, and she says, “I didn’t recognize you. God be
with you, and make you rich.” Otherwise, what comes into being
out of nothing may quickly return to nothing. Her proverbial
words have an ultimate relevance, which Luke and John, in their
gospels, emphasize. They report, as instances of Peter’s denial,
these words, “I am not,” which are the precise negation of Jesus’
thrice repeated answer to the cohort who come to arrest him in
the garden, “I am he,” at which they fall to the ground, from
whose dust man first came into being.15 The student, like Peter,
puts his existence as a creature to question by approaching the
fire for bodily warmth while his soul at first goes unrecognized,
as if empty of riches, that is, of love. For take note of this: Peter’s
love for Jesus, which our translator describes with three words,
“passionately, to distraction,” is in Russian two words, bez pamjati, meaning literally, “without memory,” as if it were uncaused,
always there. To deny such a love, to empty it out at the moment
of trial, is to subject something timeless to historical criteria, according to which things without cause and memory go unwritten.
The student, recognized in memory, finds his existence as a
creature fortified when the widow invokes love without memory
in the proverb: “God be with you and make you rich.” She gives
evidence of the existential potency of these words by appearing,
like Peter in the courtyard, distracted by something always there.
She is wearing a man’s heavy coat, presumably her dead husband’s, and standing clean of dirt she stares into the fire pen15. Luke 22: 58; John 18: 5-6, 17, 25.
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sively. Chekhov does not say if she is distracted by her husband,
for what doctor knows where dead people go to occupy themselves, or what living people are thinking when they look occupied? No living men are present, though at any moment the
farmhands may appear from the river and change everything. The
daughter sits on the cold ground, ugly, stupid-looking, and
washes a pot and spoons. Who can tell what she is thinking?
Maybe we should consult the historical record of people who
have felt the same cold and terror of the dark. That is the student’s
approach to the mystery of three souls, who from out of all time
and space have become opaquely present to each other in bodies
lit by a fire in a garden on a particularly “doleful” night.
Peter, as we are told by Matthew and the student, follows
Jesus into the High Priest’s courtyard to watch from afar and see
the end of it all.16 Remember the empty bottle of the second sentence, which the student feels everywhere on his way home as
the condition of life. That emptiness, harboring potentials of
sound to creators, Peter will feel inside Jesus’ tomb. The end of
it all, which he would like to watch from afar, on the outside of
events, he must experience up close, from the inside. Our student
also sees afar in the past Peter’s bitter tears, but touches inside
the present the widows’ emotions.17 These two-sided aspects of
the “end of it all”—seen and touched, past and present, outside
and inside—are thematic in much of what follows.
In all four Gospels, it is a serving maid who first questions
Peter in the High Priest’s courtyard. The student adds dramatic
body to this verbal moment: the maid’s assertion of his identity,
“This man was also with Jesus,” lingers a few beats unanswered,
causing the other servants, men included (in John’s account, the
arresting police loom conspicuously),18 to look at Peter “with suspicion and severity.” Their hard looks “fluster” him into saying,
16. Matthew 26: 58.
17. The student is a Thomas who does not come up short on our modern
demand to test the veracity of past appearances by probing their present
wounds.
18. John 18: 18.
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“I know him not.” The flustering indicates that he begins not to
recognize himself inside as the recipient of those outside looks.
Who knows what Peter might have answered if only women were
present, without men to raise fears of what men do to each other
and to women? 19 If Peter had answered the maid honestly, thence
to be hauled away by those severe men, we would recognize him
today as another self-made hero of friendship (like those in
Homer and Virgil), rather than a runner to the empty tomb who
enters it alone and learns to fill it with the sounds of life.
That is something new, born of three denials, which we students practice all the time in three forms, for three worthy purposes of our own.20
I deny that a story is all about me for the purposes of sanity
and objectivity. I deny that I am free of past teachings and newly
elevated by present ones for the purposes of continuity and commonality. And I deny that it is art that moves me to imitate proud
combative heroes for the purpose of giving greater influence to
humble truth.
In practicing these three denials, I follow Peter, who points
every good student the way. First, he denies that Jesus’s ques19. Recall that it is the boasting of Peter in a group of men, each feeling
superior to verbal challenges as they compete for honor in the presence
of their beloved Jesus, which brings forth the prediction of his three denials and the crowing of the cock. The future is caused by a present
when both are understood as parts of one plot, whose characters serve
action, not speech—so cheaply uttered much of the time.
20. It was Chekhov’s story that made me attend to the richness in the
four Gospel accounts of Peter’s denials. His words of denial are not
identical, and neither are the questions they answer. They are three distinct replies to three different inquiries. Moreover, to fully understand
their meanings, we must remain aware of all seven layers of the story:
the Hebrew scriptures; the historical events and personages; the four
Gospel accounts of those events as fulfilling the scriptures; the student’s
retelling of Peter’s denials to the widows; Vasilisa’s attention to this
same story during the Twelve Apostles service the previous night;
Chekhov’s story of the student’s telling; and finally my telling to you,
this Friday evening, November 3, 2017, Chekhov’s story.
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tioning has everything to do with him personally. This gets him
admitted by the maid to the courtyard of objective seeing and discussion, with love kept safely impersonal. Second, he denies that
he is another, “of them,” loosed from the past and a newly authored beginning, rather than a conforming Jew. This keeps him
close to the fire of the ancient teachings. And third, he denies that
he is the memorable one from the garden, moved by a heroic
image appropriated from epic stories of martial friendship to
draw his sword and lop off the enemy’s ear. This denial keeps
him free from the suspicion that he comes, not in peace and civility, but wielding a sword.21 Without the practice of these three
denials, especially the third, there is no learning as we students
practice it here.
But then the cock crows, and Peter undergoes three distinct
responses, which successively undo the three denials. First, as
told by the student, he gazes at Jesus from afar, same scene as
before, but the questioning is entirely about him now. Second,
their faces meet and he recalls in the words said at supper that
he is one of them in character, people who associate and speak
differently, elevated but answerable to authority. And third, he
pulls himself together, leaves the courtyard, and weeps bitterly
for his beautiful, heroic image, emptied out for ease of breath and
freedom from pain. This third undoing, the most important, lets
the truth about Simon, the humble fisherman prone to sinking
and weeping, become the new fairness and stillness of human nature. We students, like Peter, undergo these same three motions
when we hear the cock crow and feel undone in our previously
objective, conformist, and anti-theatrical reading of stories.
What happens next? The Student sighed and grew pensive.
That sigh forces a little pause in the flow of events, where freedom is to be found. In that free pause, Vasilisa bursts into sobs
and hides her face, while Lukerya, still fixed on the student,
21. Matthew 10:34. Peter strikes at the ear (John 18:10) so that we might
recognize the meaning of this third denial: by it he escapes having to
suffer the priesthood’s violence, born like his from pride in its own severe agency, awarded precedence over the ear’s hearing of the Word.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PETRICH
71
grows heavy and tense, “like a person holding back great pain.”
This would seem like a good time for the student to perform a
kind outward act, or, since he is pensive, to ask the obvious question: “What is going on inside your soul?” But instead, at the approach of the male “farmhands,” the opportunity to “move on”
he quickly takes. Since we are in sympathy with him, we shall
say that he bravely risks his spirit to solitary thought in the cold
and dark.
The reflection of light off the farmhands makes the outer
world of men’s affairs touch the inner one being stared opened by
women. It is like the crowing of the cock that instigates Peter’s
going out to stir the stillness of the world with tears, detesting
what he knows about his inside in relation to outside questions
and cruelties. The student knows that he has made an old woman
cry and her daughter much upset. He goes out from them into a
world whose facts deny the coming of Easter. But he makes Easter
happen in himself. How does he perform this transformation?
He performs it in three stages of physical and mental action.
First Stage: his thoughts turn to Vasilisa; her “abundant” weeping and its shame he interprets from afar this way: “if she wept,
it meant…[Peter’s] relevance for her”; but this conclusion, without external support, is forced by his inner hunger; so he dares to
glance back for evidence, and for that glance we must praise him;
he sees the fire glimmering peacefully in the dark, absent of people; again he thinks of Vasilisa—and also of her daughter—and
again he thinks, more confidently now, that those events narrated
from long ago must “clearly” have relevance to both women and
“probably” to “everyone on earth;” and this is so not because of
the universal art of storytelling that he has mastered—he is a
modest student in that regard—but owing to the “whole being”
of the old woman taken by concern for Peter’s soul, as if he were
her present child;22 for souls feel intimate with each other across
time and space by means of repeated words and common gestures
issuing from similar bodies. Second Stage: the soul of the student
stirs with joy, as the stillness of the freezing hour flows towards
22. Mark 12: 30-33.
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ends he sees and touches; he pauses to catch his breath, as the
former sigh of his spirit’s slow death is reversed in a quickening
of life;23 history he now thinks of as an unbroken chain of events
that conducts motions from end to end, not as a circle does, always repeating the same misery, but as a satisfying linear progression from beginning to ending, like a story told by a
master—but what kind of story? Third Stage: he crosses the
river—we hear nothing of the painful ice needles now; he climbs
the hill—nothing is felt of the biting wind now; he gazes upon
the village of his birth—no glimpse of the beatings and cringing
of life; he sees the last bit of crimson sunset, and again the light
encourages him with supreme confidence to find what he has
been seeking—the truth and beauty guiding human life in gardens and courtyards past and present; “in all likelihood and at all
times” they form “the essence of human life and everything on
earth”; and finally, life appears to him “wondrous, marvelous,
and filled with lofty meaning.”
The first sentence of the first stage is the key to all the rest:
“The student’s thoughts turned to Vasilisa: if she wept, it meant
the things that happened to Peter on that terrible night had some
relevance for her . . .” This sentence ends in the Russian with the
word, otnoshenie, translated by Michael Heim as “relevance.”
(Literally, it means “relation” or “relationship.”) This word is followed by an ellipsis that makes it linger critically in our thoughts.
The new paragraph answers at once to criticism: “He glanced
back.” The concern for relevance turns the head of the student to
see the light of the fire, which he first approaches in order to
warm his hands, but at which he stays to tell a well-known story
to two differently staring widows. It is not the warmth, but the
light of the storyteller’s truth—the fire that gives inspired voice
to the face—that the student and Chekhov insist on delivering.
The widows go home deeply moved by that voice and face. The
student, as we just witnessed, moves on to three revelations: universal relevance and intimacy of souls; the pulsing chain of interconnected events; and their guidance by truth and beauty,
23. 1 Peter 3: 18.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PETRICH
73
always and everywhere. We can take these three stages and revelations as demonstrative of how the mysterious words that begin
John’s gospel actually operate in human beings: all that comes
to be is sensitive to the Word, and the relevance of the Word to
all the living is as light, which shines in the dark, and is never
mastered by the dark.24 Of course, as a reminder, our present
glances at the story are precisely those that sympathizers with a
seminary student would be expected to take.
But there is another story to tell about our relation to this
story. Just as Matthew reminds us in his Gospel that another story
is told among the Jews about the empty tomb of Jesus—that the
body was stolen, not raised—so there are another set of answers,
in the negative, to the three questions we asked earlier.25 Are the
student’s truths credible? Are the sufferings of the widows justified? And is the love at the horizon ever other than of self?
Matthew discredits the thieving story as a Jewish conspiracy.
Chekhov lets us relate to his story unhindered by his authorial
elbows. Here follows the negative relation to Chekhov’s story,
no less probable to thought and feeling, I think, than the positive
one we just experienced.
Let us begin by repeating two impressive words from the
first stage of the student’s transformation: “whole being.”26 Now
recall the two great commandments taught by Jesus in keeping
with scripture: to love the Lord your God, who is the one and
only God, with your whole being—all your heart, all soul, all
mind, and all strength; and, like the first, to love your neighbor
as yourself.27 The student fails to obey the second command to
turn self-love outward, to make it relevant, and this failure to be
relevant undermines his adherence to the first command to identify entirely with the truth of the ever present living God—living,
therefore, in the widows, presently. Let me now give standing
to these claims.
24. John 1: 3-5.
25. Matthew 28: 11-15.
26. “Peter was close to her and her whole being was concerned with
what was going on in Peter’s soul.”
27. Mark 12: 30-31; Matthew 22:39.
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In the garden, Jesus asks his three closest friends, Peter included, to stay awake with him. That is not a lot to ask, but the
love of self, rooted in bodily needs, overmasters their willing
spirits. The student is a sleeper of a much deeper kind, a waking
dreamer who loves life in the abstract, far from miserable people,
malleable to the hungers of his thought. Consider the characters
again. Lukerya is the innocent victim of her husband’s beatings.
She fixes her gaze upon the student, holding in the great pain that
his picturing power aggravates; but he walks away suddenly,
without a word of recognition, just as her husband inexplicably
died one day, leaving her unrecoverable, with “the strange look
of a deaf-mute.” Vasilisa, bettered by conformity to high society,
denies present relation to her dirty daughter by hiding her face
in shame not of her tears, as the student conveniently thinks, but
of her whole being, whose career has entailed denial of child for
the sake of worldly gains. Ivan treats both women not as neighbors to be loved by command as a suffering of unlovely particulars, but as characters to be drawn into making his dreary return
home part of a story that he wants to end triumphantly, without
any upsetting questions. He catches his breath from their sobs
and flusters.
This alternative understanding of character accords with the
following re-interpretation of the three denials. The student first
denies that he and the widows are concerned wholly with what
is going on in their own souls, not with the goings-on in Peter’s
soul. The wholeness of their beings they do not give away to anyone. Second, the student denies that history is open-ended, plotless, free to become better, worse, or incomparably different from
the past, not auto-progressively chained to it.28 Third, the student
denies that life is guided by ego and chance much of the time,
not by truth and beauty. (You might want to roll up your
sleeves—we’re going to push hard now.) What truth makes Vasilisa smile all the time? It is the ego of a social climber. What truth
28. Ironically, his retelling of Peter’s story contains his own creative
additions, in which he ought to recognize his freedom to occupy a better
or worse state of mind.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PETRICH
75
makes her shield her face as she sobs by the fire? The shame of
happiness found out as pretense. What truth makes her sob so
abundantly? The fact that ego and its pretensions require ongoing
sacrifice of the one you love. Lukerya is guided by what solicitude? The chance that the husband who beats her may die sooner
rather than later. What beauty is there in a face that squints to see
things in the dark, is stupidly silent for fear of another beating,
and becomes fixed in a stare, heavy and tense, when the pain calls
her back unrelieved? Ivan Karamazov would applaud her insistence on the right of suffering innocence to hold back from brokered Easter reconciliations. Here, then, is the truth, if you really
want it relevant to modernity: try to better yourself by abandoning the dear ones who would otherwise keep you stuck in their
dull care, or by hoping for the early death of a painful relation,
until fortune can be mastered to achieve those ends. And if you
glance back, consider not the human wreckage, only the golden,
solitary fire. New days call for new gods and horizons of riches.
All this ugliness the student denies, though it is plain and ordinary
to see (and points the way to necessary social reforms), because
at the age of twenty-two he cannot help standing closer to birth
than death. Still healthy, strong, able to give his head “a convulsive shake” to throw off the encompassing dark, ferry the cold
river, and climb with ample breath the hill to see the last rays of
light shine upon his place of nativity, of course he feels, in the
days of egotistical youth, that everything on earth is guided by
similar motions of self-fulfilling vitality.
The student gets his Easter going by freely misconstruing
what is terrible and ugly in the souls of the widows, and moving
on from them. Their Easter is still hostage to shame and anger in
the day of desolation. Perhaps we cannot do better than to practice, like him, the denials that get us, in despite of others, the way
home from emptiness. But should we not try to hear the cock
crow after every twilight seminar song, like a gunshot?
Apropos of that question, I have to tell you something about
Chekhov’s acoustic tastes. He liked gunshots a lot. A year after
he wrote “The Student,” he was finishing his first major successful play, The Seagull. It contains a mother—an actress who lives
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entirely for herself in art—and it ends with her son’s suicide by
gunshot. Chekhov’s subtitle: A Comedy in Four Acts. Its opening
in St. Petersburg was a fiasco, and Chekhov was dismayed by an
art that gave its form over to the freedom of actors and audience
to misconstrue by their unlovely particular contributions. But
when The Seagull was staged a few years later by Stanislavsky
and the new Moscow Art Theatre it was a triumph, and
Chekhov’s name was on the way to becoming an adjective of reality—“Chekhovian.” The Moscow players knew how to let the
cock crow in the silent beats of the comedy, and so the minor
keys in its music were heard, and its mutually incomprehensible
characters, whose talking substitutes for plot, were pulled together by an audience properly concerned with the complicated
simplicities of their own knotted relations of love. Anyway, that
is what I meant a moment ago: we have to hear the cock crow if
we want to triumph in our egotistical comedies of living and
dying.
I am almost done talking, not improperly I hope. Jesus, you
know, was executed for talking very improperly: “blasphemy,”
his crime was called, which is the opposite of empty, unplotted
talk. To blaspheme, as you students know from the Greek, is to
injure the relations among men, women, and God by speech.
Peter denies knowing the accused blasphemer because he is
rightly afraid of the power of speech to make hate happen. In
fact, his second and third denials (in two of the gospels) become
vehement; he even curses his questioners for not believing him,
though cursing is itself a kind of blasphemy.29 Here, in miniature,
we witness the degeneration of speech from having lethal power
over the devotional lives of people, to self-contradiction, incredulity, bitterness of failure, and over time to empty talk and
shallow feelings that make nothing happen and no one takes seriously. The student follows Luke and John by leaving out from
his story the anger and cursing of Peter, and he follows Matthew
and Mark by leaving in the weeping. We may suspect that he
lacks the instinct for righteous anger, while possessing the pity
29. Matthew 26: 72-74; Mark 14: 71.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PETRICH
77
of a young heart. Chekhov, too, lacks anger, his critics would say,
while he waters the eyes too much. He does not know the blasphemer, they would say, for he is a connoisseur of empty talk
who honestly shows us the vanity of literary pretensions. That is
why he points out at the end of this most perfect of his stories
that the storyteller is only twenty-two: all his transformational
thinking and feeling are but the workings of his youthful metabolism, which throws off the impertinent assaults of winter when
it is that time in the calendar—no more significant than a change
in the weather.
But wait a minute. If Chekhov has the honesty to admit that
the weather and chemistry are the powers that either kill or resurrect the sick soul, then is his admission not justly called by us
“blasphemy”? Try the question out this way: Chekhov, a doctor
who writes about ailing people denies relation to higher sources
of meaning in the names of applied biology and meteorology.
This injures the respect owed to his literary art—to speech itself—by making storytelling a pre-scientific substitute for drugtaking and social revolution. The making of love then loses its
articulate way and people become incomprehensible bodies one
to another. That denial of relation to higher meanings, with those
consequences, should sound like blasphemy to the priesthood of
letters and its seminar students, I think.
But wait one last minute, please. Remember that Chekhov
showed signs of tuberculosis in his twenties, but denied for years
the implications. He wrote “The Student” at the age of thirtyfour, while coughing up blood. During the ten years of worsening
health that remained, he devoted much precious time to playwriting, and he married an actress, Olga Knipper, whom he made
love to mostly from afar in the form of wonderfully articulate letters. He stopped practicing medicine. I think, in the end, he was
trying to pull together in new dramatic forms the movements of
bodies much given to dispersive talk by denials of love and death.
Have we not seen how his student, Ivan, needs the expressive
bodies of the widows for him to call Biblical characters into
presence to speak, as in a theater, into the outer darkness of the
world, to test the light of words? Remember also that the outer
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plot revealed by Jesus requires only that Peter deny him three
times before the cock crows. The anger or weeping is Peter’s
free contribution, or rather, a creative act by the particular storyteller. And that act makes all the difference to the soul. Our student does not get angry, does not weep, as Lukerya and Vasilisa
do; yet all three respond freely in body and soul to the same story.
There are many ways to deny that the cold and dark are curable;
yet the student still seeks, by the last glimmers of light, the way
home to the unlikely love that gave him improbable birth. When
he arrives, a young man still, but older than he was, he will drink
tea with his parents, his mother soon also to become a widow,
and I like to imagine that he will continue his story, taking note
of the weather and its changes, which he is learning to read.
And what about the widows? I myself would learn from Lukerya’s fixed face to beware the anger born of suffering that feels
betrayed and trapped by the egotism of love, for what is more
prone to hate than misery of heart that hears itself as the only
story being told? And from Vasilisa’s career I would beware of
guilt that relieves its burden in self-pity, hidden from the fire and
faces of the injured, turned to the stately world of swelling
speeches and fairy-tale smiles. And finally, speaking as I began,
let us students remember our creators in the days of our youth,
before the songbirds fall silent and the guardians of the house
stoop to dust.30
Thank you for listening to Chekhov’s story of the student,
and my attempt to show how much, and little, there is to tell.
30. Ecclesiastes 12: 1-4.
�Tetrastichs
Elliott Zuckerman
Preludes have long since ceased
to promise Fugues. What’s here—
each time after a silence—is yet another
interruption of uncertainty.
Meanings will spread, as when a loaded brush
touches some cotton-wool too wet
to limit bleeding. Etymons
will crawl along the fibers.
I think you will particularly like
Siberia. Let us all know
about the customs and the cold.
Think of us on holidays.
Do not say that Sometimes
it is only a cigar.
The point is not
to denigrate cigars.
The plaster hand, the portrait of Busoni,
all music put aside to try again
to stop the wrist from getting stiff:
What was this a lesson in?
Elliott Zuckerman is a tutor emeritus at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. These forty tetrastichs have been selected from a collection of 120. Each quatrain is meant to be a separate poem.
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A love potion? There is no need for one.
Just dramatize a double suicide
and leave the poison out. It can be done
with lemonade.
There was a different tenor in each act.
She sang her song of rapt transfiguration
and in her tones of ecstasy made clear
that she was ready to take on three more.
In the closing pages of your lecture,
you can take your leap. They’ll say
you haven’t proved you got there step by step.
There were no steps—the lecture started there.
Let’s celebrate the woman who
was tired of trees.
No longer to be reasoned with, no longer
listening, it’s one way to be old.
Your face is next to mine,
and even lingers—
the warm surprise of graceful lankiness,
my prince factotum.
After a thousand and three in Spain alone,
what clearer signs of drawing to an end
than throwing parties for the peasantry
and asking almost anyone to dinner?
�POETRY | ZUCKERMAN
The trees themselves
sensing how much space they need
plotted their equidistance
like dancers with extended arms.
I’d like the actor who agrees
that he must get inside the role he plays
to tell me what he tries to feel when he
portrays hypocrisy.
Hers were not hymn-tunes,
square in meter and in rhyme.
Her dashes represent
unmeasured time.
I’m happy that the Shropshire Lad
has his own pad.
I used to think that he
lived here with me.
I cannot hear the pipe unless
the shepherd blows it.
How can I tell the music
from the music?
At the doorpost of the tenement
I studied densities of old enamel:
pastel maps,
an opaque residue of smell.
81
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After the concert, she told the other ladies
the pianist had a memorable rubato.
The ladies took it that the two of them
had spent the night together.
There is an elf
who charms me at the root of being.
Yet elfhood serves
no evolutionary purpose.
One must be
an artist
not to find
a food one likes.
Can one do in words a vast expanse
of every possible hue and shade of green
with somewhere a small patch of cadmium red?
Has it just been done?
The seven types of ambiguity
are not so clearly differentiated
as the seven
deadly sins.
The man who asks us
to excuse his pun
fears that we
may overlook his wit.
�POETRY | ZUCKERMAN
When rhetoric already lies
we cannot tell
whether what lies beneath the cant
is lying.
Imagine a garden without any toads
but the birds are real
and named by their song: two cuckoos, a quail,
and a nightingale.
It was hard to accept him as half of a pair
and the girl couldn’t hide her victorious air;
I tried not to stare at the hand on the knee
and acted a plausible copy of me.
I slice and sculpt and sand what happened till
an anecdote redecorates my past.
Such labor is the compliment
that humor pays to truth.
Someone says that wit began
with not the word but laughter alone.
It follows perhaps that early man
wept before the cause was known.
What if everything that came to mind
arrived with (so to say) a grade from God?
Little would change, for half the world would wonder
whether God was good at giving grades.
83
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Elders who are troubled all their lives
by doubts that they’ve gone deep enough,
may want to test the thickness now
that so much surface has worn off.
Have I condemned nostalgia? It is the source
Of aching loveliness, maligned because
we had to wait for it, and at its dawn
it gave scant notice that it might return.
Nausicaa washing at the water
was grace itself.
But follow the line of her white arm
to reach the hand of merely human gesture.
The irises were cream and indigo,
a lazy bird prepared herself for flying—
and in the middle distance: Lo
and behold! the silver gateway of implying.
At ninety she retained the girlish charm
they taught her and she took to at sixteen—
a habit long impervious to reform,
no longer fired by flesh but baked in bone.
This castle runs on wheels, with makeshift brakes.
It inches on, headed askew. It leaks,
sudden, burning. The royalty worship the days—
Good morning, Good afternoon—and clutch their keys.
�POETRY | ZUCKERMAN
I used to say that song need not be sounded.
Now pitches are distorted in the treble.
No doubt the tones I hear have been confounded
by some didactic Muse, to cause me trouble.
Americans with European souls
need not restrict their comedy to manners.
The question of what continent we’re born on
takes second place to why we’re born at all.
Faces are plaster masks, egg-white, cream, and gray.
Silenus, spent, will hobble down the hall.
Three actions are complete: the quest, the crux, the fall.
Old age is not a coda, but a satyr-play.
When once again you tell that anecdote,
acquire a gurgle as you near the end.
They’ll think that you’ve just found renewed delight
in the climactic phrase already planned.
A musical trick was employed by the muscular Icarus
when inventing the famous lament about flying too high.
His appoggiaturas brought tears to a cynical eye
while his anapests lent the lament their precipitancy.
85
�
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Pastille, Willaim
Brann, Eva T. H.
Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Barba-Kay, Anton
Menzin, Jason
Petrich, Louis
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St. John's Review
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 58.2 (Spring 2017)
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Editorial Assistant
Sawyer Neale
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
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Joseph Macfarland, Dean. All manuscripts are subject to blind review.
Address correspondence to The St. John’s Review, St. John’s College,
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ISSN 0277-4720
��Contents
Essays & Lectures
Leibniz’s Monadology and the Philosophical Foundations of
Non-locality in Quantum Mechanics .....................................1
J. H. Beall
Depth Versus Complexity .................................................................25
Eva Brann
A Note on Apollonius’s Reconceptualization of Space ....................43
Philip LeCuyer
“Aristotelian Forgiveness”: The Non-Culpability
Requirement of Forgiveness ........................................................52
Corinne Painter
On Two Socratic Questions ..............................................................77
Alex Priou
Poem
Sabbatical..........................................................................................93
Louis Petrich
��Leibniz’s Monadology and the
Philosophical Foundations of
Non-locality in Quantum Mechanics
J. H. Beall
One of the most troubling aspects of our understanding of modern
physics generally, and quantum mechanics specifically, is the
concept of “non-locality.” Non-locality appears in an entire class
of experiments, including the so-called “two-slit” experiment. In
these, particles and “quanta” of light can be emitted and absorbed
individually. Yet in the way these particles or quanta traverse the
space and time between emission and absorption, they appear to
behave not as point particles, but as though they were distributed
throughout the entire spatial volume and temporal extent of the
experiment. That the phenomenon of non-locality has recently
been corroborated over macroscopic distances of the order of 10
kilometers makes these effects all the more remarkable.
In this lecture, I shall review the experiments and arguments
that have led to an acceptance of non-locality in modern physics,
and will suggest that the concept of space and time that this
understanding implies is consistent with Leibniz’s Monadology,
in which our ideas of space and time are fundamentally different
from those given to us by our intuitions.
1. Leibniz’s Monadology
Leibniz’s writings on the philosophical, mathematical, and
natural sciences represent a coherent, if somewhat surprising
whole. Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in the
Monadology, the Discourse of Metaphysics, and the LeibnizClark correspondence.
Leibniz begins with the view of God as a maker, a being who
makes the world the best it can possibly be.
Jim Beall is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. This
lecture was originally delivered on December 4, 2015.
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Part and parcel of this view is Leibniz’s Principle of Sufficient
Reason. It goes something like this: one monad can only be
different from another because of its different character or
qualities. I’ll use a modern idea of a monad to illustrate this: an
elementary particle like an electron. I hope my choice will become
plausible a bit later when we start the discussion of quantum
mechanics.
Is one electron the same as another? If so, if there is no
difference between “this electron” and “that electron,” then they
would be the same, since by the Principle of Sufficient Reason
they cannot be distinguished. But my simply pointing to them is
an indication of the differences. “This electron” is different from
that one, because it has an explicitly different representation that
is indicated by my pointing at them. If I were to insist on a
Cartesian representation of this difference, I can make a threedimensional coordinate system with a particular origin and three
orthogonal axes, labeled x, y, and z. Numbering these axes, I can
locate “this” electron and distinguish it from “that” electron by
the use of three numbers, x1, y1, z1, and x2, y2, z2. I can then say
that I have a representation of each of these two electrons as
different, given these two sets of three numbers. I can even
represent their separation of this electron from that electron by a
three-dimensional version of the Pythagorean theorem.
Leibniz makes this explicit several places in his works. For
example, in the essay, “On Nature Itself,” he states this point in
arguing against Descartes’s reliance on geometry in physics.
Given such an identity or similarity between objects,
not even an angel could find any difference between its
states at different times, nor have any evidence for
discerning whether the enclosed sphere is at rest or
revolves, and what law of motion it follows. . . . Even if
those who have not penetrated these matters deeply
enough may not have noticed this, it ought to be accepted
as certain that such consequences are alien to the nature
and order of things, and that nowhere are there things
perfectly similar (which is among my [Leibniz’s] new
and important axioms) (Paragraph 13).
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Of course, electrons have other properties as well: charge,
mass, angular momentum (they seem to spin like tops), magnetic
moment (they act like tiny bar-magnets), velocity, momentum,
and kinetic energy, among other things. Each of these qualities
or characteristics can also be represented by a series of numbers
or “coordinate expression.” I’ve always fancied that in a very
formal sense an electron or any other elementary particle (had
Leibniz known about them) could be represented as an aggregation of numbers (or coordinate expressions) related to another
monad. This other monad could also be represented in a similar
way. By the Principle of Sufficient Reason, some of these coordinate expressions are different from the coordinate expressions
of all other monads.
The other thing to mention about monads is their unity.
They are “simple.” They do not have parts. According to
Leibniz, they represent a unity of different properties, much like
a geometric point that is the nexus of many geometric lines.
Leibniz states that:
Everything is full in nature. . . . And since everything is
connected because of the plenitude of the world, and
since each body acts on every other body, more or less,
in proportion to its distance, and is itself affected by the
other through reaction, it follows that each monad is a
living mirror or a mirror endowed with internal action,
which represents the universe from its own point of view
and is as ordered as the universe itself (Principles of
Nature and Grace, Based on Reason, Paragraph 3).
Some even have the property of being “be-souled.” So look
around you. According to Leibniz, you are sitting among a
reasonably large group of monads, each of which is capable of
noticing you and regarding you as separate, individual “beings.”
There is one final thing about monads (among their many
interesting properties) that bears on our discussion of quantum
mechanics. As Leibniz says at another point in the Monadology:
The monads have no windows through which something
can enter or leave (Monadology, Paragraph 7).
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Monads have no “windows.” Yet each monad is a representation
to a greater or lesser extent of everything else in the Universe
because it is linked to all other monads by means of its relation
to God. That is, each monad is a reflection of the entire
Universe precisely because it is in some way a projection of a
part of God. The debt Leibniz owes to Plato’s Republic for this
concept (note that I did not say “image”) is nowhere directly
acknowledged by Leibniz, but it is manifest. The one quarrel
Leibniz would have with my associating him with the image of
the Cave in the Socratic dialog is simply that it is an image
rather than something that dwells in the understanding. For
Leibniz’s God is, at least to my thinking, a Mathematician, and
He, like Dedekind, holds that mathematics has no need of
geometry.
In this conception, then, there is a profound similarity
between all of our connections with one another and with the
physical, social, and moral world.
It seems clear, therefore, that Leibniz does not think that
space has an actual existence. As he states explicitly,
As for my own opinion, I have said more than once that
I hold space to be something relative, as time is, that I
hold it to be an order of coexistences, as time is an order
of successions (Letters to Clark, Leibniz’s Third Paper,
Paragraph 4).
This is radically at odds with Newton’s Principia, in which
Newton seems to deduce the existence of absolute space from
the existence of absolute (i.e., accelerated) motion. For Newton,
space is the “sensorium of God.”
Let us ponder this for a moment. For Newton, space has an
existence. We can look out into the space before us and hold it in
our minds as something, even though we can (as Kant does) in
our imaginations remove all of its contents from the space that
holds it. What is left over is space, be it a cubic centimeter in
front of us or a volume 100,000 parsecs on a side.
When Leibniz sees this emptiness, he views it as an actual
metaphysical void, something that not even God can relate to. As
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such, it is an abomination. Leibniz cannot accept a thing that God
cannot act upon, and the idea of an actual void is such a thing.
Since God must be able to act on all creation, a genuine
metaphysical void cannot exist. This is one of the reasons why
the Leibniz-Clark correspondence (Clark was taking Newton’s
part) makes little headway to change the authors’ minds. The
grounds of the conversation are radically different.
It is a worthy anecdote to relate that Leibniz and Newton
never acknowledged the other’s invention of the differential and
integral calculus. And it is helpful to note that Newton’s development of the calculus relies on geometrical constructions, while
Leibniz’s relies on an evolution of Descartes’ algebra. It is true
that Leibniz uses sketches of curves and lines for his derivations,
in part because we are visual creatures, but Leibniz’s derivations
do seem to be less reliant on images of extension.
Thus, for Leibniz, extension has no actual existence. What
we interpret as extension, as space, is a representation given to
us by God. It is very likely that the same is true for time in
Leibniz’s metaphysics. This separation is like a three-dimensional
Pythagorean theorem whose terms are given to us. What we
interpret as a spatial extension is a coordinate interval that we
call space, just as temporal separation is a coordinate expression
that we call time. What separates us, what we interpret as
distance, is just a shadow on a Cave wall caused by our origin
within a common light. What separates us from the amber light
of ages past is an equivalent coordinate expression whose
regularity is provided by God.
I cannot resist at this point recalling for you the yarn in the
Odyssey when the hero is among the Phaeacians, and Homer
brings us back from the story Odysseus is telling into Alkinoos
and Arete’s palace hall with its feast and polished stone floors
and torchlight. The momentum of that telescoping does not stop
there, but places us back firmly into the present where we realize
that we are reading words two thousand years old about a story
that is a thousand years distant even from that remote past. Like
Leibniz’s God, Homer has linked us to the ages, and three
millennia are as nought.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
One other element of Leibniz’s philosophy will prove
useful later: Leibniz directly addresses the problem of a Deity
that weaves out our destinies to construct the best of all possible
worlds. This Deity knows everything we are capable of doing,
knows all of our potentialities, and further, knows all of our
past.
And since every present state of a simple substance is a
natural consequence of its preceding state, the present is
pregnant with the future (Monadology, paragraph 22).
Thus, the “demon” in Laplace’s Essay on a Theory of Probability
takes its inspration from Leibniz. Laplace says explicitly:
We ought then to regard the present state of the universe
as the effect of its anterior state and as the cause of the
one which is to follow. Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which
nature is animated and the respective situation of the
beings who compose it—an intelligence sufficiently vast
to submit these data to analysis—it would embrace in the
same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of
the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing
would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be
present to its eyes (Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on
Probabilities, Chapter II).
Leibniz seems to recognize the determinism of such a God, but
sidesteps the troublesome argument of the lack of free will by
claiming that God knows all possible predicates of our being, and
so chooses the path which we would follow anyway!
I regard the foregoing comments about Leibniz’s Monadology as a preamble to our discussion of the problem of nonlocality in quantum mechanics, especially as the concept of nonlocality has been articulated by interpretations of the work of
John Bell, an elementary particle theorist who worked at CERN
before his untimely death in the Fall of 1990. But first, I shall try
to provide some background on the landscape in which Bell
developed his justifiably famous theorem.
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2. An Eternal, Golden Braid: Quantum Mechanics in
Rutherford, Bohr, de Broglie, Heisenberg, and Einstein
It is surprising at first glance that of the four papers Einstein
published in 1905, the one for which he was awarded the Nobel
Prize in Physics was not the paper on special relativity, entitled
“On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” (Annalen der
Physik 17 [1905]: 891-921); nor the famous E=mc2 paper, “Does
the Inertia of a Body Depend upon its Energy Content?”
(Annalen der Physik 18 [1905]: 639-641); nor the one on Brownian motion, “On the Movement of Small Particles Suspended in
Stationary Liquids Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of
Heat” (Annalen der Physik 17 [1905]: 549-560).
(As an aside, it is worthy of note that this is the one
hundreth anniversary of the publication of the 1915 paper on
General Relativity, and the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of
Maxwell’s publication of his theory of light as electromagnetic
waves.)
The actual phrasing from the Nobel Prize Committee was
“for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his
discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.” The so-called
“photoelectric effect” paper has a curious title: “Concerning an
Heuristic Point of View Toward the Emission and Transformation
of Light” (Annalen der Physik 17 [1905]: 132-148). This was the
publication that marked the beginnings of what is now called
Quantum Mechanics.
In the paper, Einstein characterizes the wave theory of light
in the following manner:
The energy of a beam of light from a point source (according to Maxwell’s theory of light or, more generally,
according to any wave theory) is continuously spread over
an ever increasing volume.
In the next paragraph, Einstein notes that
The wave theory of light, which operates with continuous
spatial functions, has worked well in the representation
of purely optical phenomena and will probably never be
replaced by any other theory.
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But in the next paragraph, he says,
It seems to me that the observations associated with
blackbody radiation, fluorescence, the production of
cathode rays by ultraviolet light, and other related
phenomena connected with the emission and transformation of light . . . are more readily understood if one
assumes that the energy of light is discontinuously
distributed in space. In accordance with the assumption
to be considered here, the energy of a light ray spreading
out from a point source is not continuously distributed
over increasing space but consists of a finite number of
energy quanta which are localized at points in space,
which move without dividing, and which can only be
produced and absorbed as complete units.
On the one hand, Einstein allows for a “wave theory” like
Maxwell’s waves in a luminiferous aether in which the light is
transmitted, reflected, and refracted. He “heuristically” considers
light to be a particle during light’s emission from and absorption
into material bodies. It is perhaps ironic that Einstein was never
able to reconcile his conception of the dual nature of light with
the equivalent, dual character of particles as both material bodies
and waves, a solution posed by de Broglie to provide an explanation of Bohr’s model for the energy levels of the hydrogen atom.
Of course, this entire “braid” began with efforts to apply
models from classical physics that explain everything from
cannonballs to asteroids to planets to the very small structures
within matter such as atoms and elementary particles via Galileo,
Thomson, Millikan, and Rutherford.
By way of a truncated outline of the argument, Bohr used the
existence of hydrogen spectral lines and the contemporary work
by Planck to explain so-called blackbody radiation. Planck made
the hypothesis that discrete oscillators in matter had only certain
fundamental modes with which they could vibrate. He asserted
that these oscillators were in equilibrium with the thermal
radiation from matter with a particular temperature, and thus
explained blackbody radiation. Bohr wondered what the “Planck
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oscillators” could be, since the classical picture of an orbiting
charge holds that it should radiate continuously. He hypothesized
that his atom settled into quasi-stationary states and emitted and
absorbed radiation during transitions from one energy level to
another.
It is likely that everyone in the audience is familiar with
Bohr’s model from high school science classes and many popular
lectures and books on the subject of science. You Seniors are in
the process of completing this sequence of papers.
In fact, the Bohr model has become a commonplace picture
of the atom. But such familiarity hides the utter strangeness of
the concept. The atom is stable for a while, and then is excited or
de-excited by the absorption or emission of light at a specific
frequency. These energy levels are Bohr’s answer to why the
spectra of light from certain gases contains only certain
frequencies. If you sprinkle salt onto the logs in your fireplace,
the resultant light is a brilliant yellow. That yellow light contains
only certain frequencies, frequencies that are as much an indication of the presence of the sodium in salt as your finger prints
are of you as an individual person. We know the constitution of
stars precisely because of this line-spectrum identification of
elements, stars that can be hundreds or thousands of light years
distant.
The strangeness of the idea of the Bohr atom bothered de
Broglie, who reasoned by a kind of symmetry derived from
Einstein’s photoelectric effect paper (wherein light can have a
particulate nature, as well as a wave-like nature) that particles
could perhaps have both a discrete nature and also a wave-like
nature. In an immensely clever argument (he won the Nobel
Prize for it), de Broglie argued that one can calculate the
“wavelength” of a particle by assigning it a specific momentum,
which implies that it has an energy. That energy can be used to
calculate a characteristic wavelength, E = hν = hc/λ. It is a
stunning triumph for so simple an argument that the wavelengths
thus calculated for an electron in the Bohr orbits for hydrogen
is exactly the circumference of the quasi-stationary orbits for
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electrons in the hydrogen atom. So the electrons are not exactly
particles when they are inside the atom. They also have wavelike qualities.
Schroedinger was a young assistant professor when de Broglie
published his astonishing idea. I have it on good authority that
Schroedinger was assigned the task of giving the journal club
lecture at his university the next week. It’s a bit like these Fridaynight lectures, but less formal and typically they are on a weekday
afternoon. The assignment was something like, “Take a look at
de Broglie’s paper and give us a synopsis of it at the journal club
next Tuesday.”
Schroedinger had a ski trip planned for that weekend (Friday
through Sunday, apparently). Being the persistent soul that he
was, he took a copy of de Broglie’s paper and a book on
solutions to differential equations in various coordinate systems
(rectilinear, cylindrical, and spherical) with him on the ski trip.
The short version of the story is that he didn’t get much skiing
done, but he came back well on the way of inventing wave
mechanics, an explanation for the energy levels of atoms as kind
of standing waves in space. His “eureka” moment came when
he said to his bewildered ski companions, “I have just fit the
energy levels of the hydrogen atom in a way you would not
believe!” The standing waves were similar to the threedimensional oscillations of sound waves in a concert hall. But
standing waves of what?
I believe Schroedinger originally thought of the standing
waves as waves of charge density. The electron has wave-like
qualities à la de Broglie, and it has charge, so it would make
sense as an extension of de Broglie’s hypothesis. But electrons
have discrete charges when they are measured by Millikan in
his famous oil-drop experiment. How come we never see
fractional charges?
Schroedinger’s description of electrons (or any elementary
particle, for that matter) was that they are aggregations of waves
that reinforce in a certain region and cancel out everywhere else.
This makes sense in explaining the energy levels of a hydrogen
atom, but causes other conceptual problems.
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Schroedinger’s description of a
particle as an aggregation of waves
of some sort caused Heisenberg to
analyze the behavior of such particles
when we try to measure them. If we
try to localize the particle as we do in
the act of measurement, we confine
it to a narrower region in space. That
means we add up more and more
waves. Each wave has a slightly
different speed. Schroedinger needed
these different speeds for different
wavelengths in order to get the
“wave-packet” to behave like a particle. But that means that the
momentum of the particle becomes less certain over time, since, in
order to localize the particle, we need to add more wavelengths, and
adding more wavelengths means the velocity (and therefore the
momentum) become more uncertain.
There is actually a calculable limit to the uncertainty in the
momentum times the uncertainty in the position of a particle. It is
greater than or equal to Planck’s constant. This is of course the
Heisenberg Uncertainty Relation. It says that there is a fundamental,
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and not simply an experimental, limit to our knowledge of the
location of a particle and its momentum.
A particularly helpful illustration of the Heisenberg derivation (and one that will be useful to us later in this lecture can
be had by looking at single-slit diffraction of a plane wave. The
wave can be a wave of light, an elementary particle like an
electron, or even a water wave. If it originates from a far-distant
source, the wave is essentially a series of parallel troughs and
peaks with its propagation direction perpendicular to those
troughs and peaks. When we allow it to approach a screen so that
the peaks and troughs (as seen from above) are parallel to the
screen, we can watch the interaction of the barrier with the
oncoming waves. If there is an opening in the barrier that is of
the same order as the wavelength of the waves, a fraction of the
waves can pass the barrier. When this happens, a part of the wave
front gets through the barrier, but for some fraction of the waves,
the direction of the waves is changed because of the wavefront’s
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interference with itself. This interference produces a dispersion
of the wave front that gives its velocity a vertical component. It
is important to note what has happened here. We have limited the
wavefront in the vertical direction to a δx that is essentially the
width of the slit. It has produced a dispersion in the velocity of
the wave in the vertical direction, a δv.
In Schroedinger’s terms, this dispersion in the velocity of the
wave in the vertical direction (that is, in the same direction as the
opening of the slit) is an uncertainty in the velocity. If we
consider the wave as representing the motion of a particle, then
the localization of the particle within a δx produces an uncertainty
in the momentum of the particle of order δp. This illustration is
not entirely fanciful. In fact, Heisenberg uses it as one of his
derivations of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Relation. Furthermore,
the smaller the slit, that is, the smaller the uncertainty in position,
the greater the uncertainty in the momentum.
This has led to no end of problems in interpretation. One
example of this is the fact that elementary particles (be they
electrons, protons, or photons), when emitted from a source and
directed toward a screen or grid whose spacings are the same size
as the wavelengths of the elementary particles, will show a
diffraction pattern on a screen downstream from slits. For the
sake of clarity, we will consider only photons, although the
discussion could as well apply to any elementary particle,
including neutrons, protons, electrons, etc.
Let a stream of photons set forth across the chaotic gulf toward
a screen. Imagine this as like a scene from Milton’s Paradise Lost
as Satan launches himself across the chasm between hell and
paradise. These photons are transmitted and diffracted as though
they are electromagnetic waves. When they reach two slits in the
screen, the waves interfere with one another so that there is a very
specific pattern of light and dark lines on the screen downstream
from the slits called a “two-slit” pattern.
Suppose we turn down the intensity of the light. Let us make
the light exceedingly dim, so that when we look at the screen or
detector, we find only one cell on the screen illuminated or
exposed (you remember photographic film, I trust) at a time.
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What happens next is remarkable. This figure shows the
buildup over time of electrons in a two slit experiment at very low
flux levels. We see one quantum at a time arriving . As we watch,
the diffraction pattern begins to develop. We see the characteristic
two-slit pattern. But we have allowed only one quantum (in this
case, electrons) to be emitted at a time. How can we possibly get
a two-slit pattern. Such an experimental apparatus exists. The
results from it behave exactly as I have said.
Apparently, the individual light or particle quantum goes
through both slits at once. It is spread out over the entire space
of the experimental screen (or more properly, the experimental
volume) and then excites only one element of the detector. If this
seems quixotic to you, it is. It is known as “the problem of
measurement” in the vernacular of Shady Bend. The wave
function (remember all those waves adding up to produce the
wave packet) is spread out even for a single particle or quantum
of light. The moment before it hits the detector screen, it is
everywhere on the screen. At the next instant, it collapses into a
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single point. This is known as the “collapse of the wave
function.” The collapse is apparently instantaneous. If these are
material particles or quanta of light, they sort themselves into a
single area on the screen instantaneously.
There were many objections to this explanation, not the least
of which was that it violates causality. The wave-packet description of the two-slit experiment requires that the waves instantly
collapse to a single point, after having, a moment in time before,
occupied the whole of the experiment.
Bohr and Heisenberg made noble efforts to resolve this
apparent contradiction by supposing that the wave function
description of elementary particles was merely a calculation of
likelihood or probability. Since probability is only a likelihood,
the collapse of the wave function is merely the result of a
measurement. And like any measurement, once it occurs, the
answer is always, “Yes. That’s what happened!”
Einstein would have none of it. His famous quote, “God
does not play dice!” about the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics was an indication of his
objection to the probability interpretation of the psi-function. In
his view, there was an underlying causal relation between the
elements of the experiments and their outcomes that was not
represented by quantum mechanics (QM). Yet QM is a remarkably successful theoretical method.
In a paper in response to the probability interpretation of
QM, Einstein, Podolski and Rosen (EPR) tried to show that the
uncertainty relation developed by Heisenberg was flawed, and
that some variations of the single or two slit experiment would
give an inroad into figuring out precisely what the momentum
and position of the particle would be. One of the thought
experiments proposed to measure the momentum transferred to
the screen by the impact of the particle, This (by conservation
of momentum) would allow the particle momentum to be
measured exactly, while the position would be localized to the
region within the slit. But when one took into account the
uncertainty in the position of the screen, the Heisenberg
Uncertainty limit returned.
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A variant of one of the thought experiments used two
particles that interacted prior to the slit, and then had one transfer
its momentum to one screen while another’s position was
determined independently. Again, by conservation of momentum
the second particle’s momentum and its position were to be
determined beyond the Heisenberg limit. Each response to EPR
by Heisenberg and Bohr led EPR to further amplifications of the
experimental apparatus. While the correspondence in the
scientific literature led many to accept the Copenhagen Interpretation and the Heisenberg Uncertainty limit, Einstein was
never able to believe the probabilistic nature of Bohr and Heisenberg’s interpretation.
Yet the alternative to a probabilistic interpretation was an
instantaneous collapse of a physical wave function. This instantaneous collapse would clearly exceed the speed of light, and thus
render it difficult to accept, since the limiting speed of the transfer
of information in Special Relativity is the velocity of light. This
is one of the fundamental hypotheses of Special Relativity.
This led John Bell to a further analysis of the two slit experiment, and the theoretical development of Bell’s Theorem (or
Bell’s Inequality), which has allowed many experimental test of
locality, causality, and the predictions of quantum mechanics. It
appears to contradict Einstein’s hopes for a “hidden variable”
theory, wherein true causality would be returned to the world.
Apparently, this is not to be realized.
3. Bell’s Theorem (or Bell’s Inequality)
But how does this happen? Bell’s theorem is essentially a test of
whether or not two particles, once they interact, can be separated
enough so that their states do not influence one another.
Remarkably, it is posed in such a way that it can be implemented
as an experimental test.
Schroedinger called this phenomenon, in which the wave
function of two particles becomes joined by their interaction, an
“entanglement” of the wave functions of the particles. And you
recall that all particles have a wave function description that
guides or governs their behavior.
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This hypothesis bears on EPR’s paper. To reiterate, if two
particles interact, then the momentum of one could be determined
by inference due to measuring the momentum of the other, since
the momentum of the pair has to be conserved. At the same time,
the position of the first particle, for which we inferred the momentum, could be accurately measured for its position as long as
the pair were sufficiently far apart. Thus, the momentum and
position of a particle could be measured at a precision which
violated the Heisenberg uncertainty limit. At this point, EPR
could claim that the Heisenberg Uncertainty relation was merely
a practical limit, and that there was some underlying, governing
relation which we simply needed to find, some sort of “hidden
variable” that really determined the evolution of the system.
J. S. Bell was sympathetic to EPR’s view. His theorem (called
variously Bell’s Theorem or Bell’s Inequality) was an attempt to
establish whether or not EPR’s hypothesis could be tested
experimentally. The experimental setup is remarkably simple, but
not trivial. Two particles would be allowed to interact, to become
“entangled,” and then would separate and go off in opposite
directions. After a time, the particles would each be measured to
determine their properties. As with the EPR paper, the hypothesis
that their states could no longer interact would produce one result,
whereas the hypothesis that their states were still entangled when
they were measured would produce another result.1
The next figure (overleaf) shows the results of one of the
experimental tests of Bell’s Theorem, in this case the orientation
of the polarization of photons measured by two separated systems.
The straight line shows the limit of a “local, realistic” hypothesis,
that is, that the results are uncorrelated. Any experimental result
below the diagonal straight line indicates a correlation (that is, an
entanglement) between distant particles and their experimental
1. For a readable proof of the theorem, see Nick Herbert’s book Quantum Reality (New York: Random House, 2011) and his account at
http://quantumtantra.com/bell2.html, as well as his articles “Cryptographic approach to hidden variables” in the American Journal of
Physics 43 1975): 315-16 and “How to be in two places at the same
time,” New Scientist 111 (1986): 41-44.
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apparatuses. Perhaps most important, the results predicted by QM
show a very close agreement with the data!
In some later experimental tests, groups have tried to
estimate the speed of the transmission of the correlations by
changing slightly the timing of the setting of the measuring
apparatuses. In a ground-breaking paper by Robert Garisto
entitled “What is the Speed of Quantum Information?” (Quantum
Physics 2002 [arXiv:quant-ph/0212078v1]) the result of a
measurement conducted at CERN is that the correlations happen
at a velocity at least 10,000 times the speed of light over a
distance of 18 kilometers. I say “at least” because the electronics
of the experi-mental setup could not measure a faster correlation.
So for all intents and purposes, this speed is a lower limit. The
correlations occur effectively instantaneously.
What are we to make of such results? Henry Pierce Stapp’s
paper, entitled “The S-Matrix Interpretation of Quantum Theory”
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BEALL
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(Physical Review 3 [1971]: 1303-20), provides a highly recommended discussion of Bell’s Theorem, despite the imposing title.
(By way of a friendly warning, it’s best to get a bit of orientation
first by reading Section X, “Ontological Problems,” and Appendix B, “World View.”)
To give you some idea of Stapp’s take on Bell’s Theorem, I
quote from his paper at a point just after he shows a concise proof
of that theorem.
A conclusion that can be drawn from this theorem is that
the demands of causality, locality, and individuality
cannot be simultaneously maintained in the description
of nature. Causality demands contingent predictions;
locality demands local causes of localized results;
individuality demands specification of individual results,
not merely their probabilities.
As Stapp puts it:
I can see only three ways out of the problem posed by
Bell’s theorem.
1. The first is to accept . . . the idea that human
observers are cognizant only of individual branches of
the full reality of the world: The full physical world
would contain a superposition of a myriad of interconnected physical worlds of the kind we know. An
individual observer would be personally aware of only
one response of a macroscopic measuring device, but a
full account of reality would include all the other
possible outcomes on an equal footing, though perhaps
with unequal “weights.”
2. The second way out is to accept that nature is
basically highly nonlocal, in the sense that correlations
exist that violently contradict—even at the macroscopic
level—the usual ideas of the space-time propagation of
information. The intuitive idea of the physical distinctness
of physically well-separated macroscopic objects then
becomes open to question. And the intuitive idea of space
itself is placed in jeopardy. For space is intimately
connected to the space-time relationships that are
naturally expressed in terms of it. If there are, between
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far-apart microscopic events, large instantaneous connections that do not respect spatial separation, then the
significance of space would seem to arise only from the
statistical relationships that do respect it.
3. The third way out is to deny that measurements that
“could have been performed, but were not,” would have
had definite results if they had been performed. This
way out seems, at first, to be closest to the spirit of the
Copenhagen interpretation. However, it seems to contradict the idea of indeterminism, which is also an
important element of the spirit of the Copenhagen interpretation.
Some comments are clearly in order here. The third option
Stapp articulates bears remarkable similarities to Laplace’s
Demon or Leibniz’s God as architects of the best of all possible
worlds. In that instantiation of reality, what we choose is exactly
what we will. But what we will as a predicate of our being is
completely known by the Deity and determined by it.
The first option is known as Stapp’s “many-worlds”
interpretation. That option is often mentioned in the same breath
as Schroedinger’s Cat.
In that interpretation, as Stapp says, the cat is both alive and
dead in the multiply unfolding universe of outcomes. Each point
where the quantum hits the screen represents a starting point for
a separate future.
As an interesting aside, we have some hopes of conducting
Bell’s Theorem type experiments here at St. John’s in a room in
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BEALL
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the basement appropriately called the Quantum Lab. But of
course, no cats will be allowed in that room.
Most people find the second option, non-locality, most
“appealing,” if that is the right phrase.
In the case of the first experimental measurements, conducted with two low-energy neutrons colliding; then recoiling
down separate arms of a vacuum line; and finally having their
angular momenta determined by a Stern-Gerlach apparatus (I will
spare you the details), there were (some thirty or forty years ago)
five measurements, four of which agreed with Bell’s inequality.
Since then, all of the experimental tests of Bell’s theorem have
confirmed it.
To emphasize how surprising this has been, I recall a
conversation I had with Professor Carol Alley at the University
of Maryland when I was a graduate student there. He is a famous
experimental physicist, one who used a laser to measure the
distance to the Moon from a site near Goddard Space Flight
Center during one of the Apollo Lunar Landing missions. As we
talked about Bell’s theorem, and it’s apparent experimental
corroboration, standing in the hallway in the Physics Building at
the University of Maryland, he was clearly quite perplexed that
there was any corroboration of the inequality. As we spoke, his
voice was getting louder and louder. Finally, I said to him,
“Professor Alley, you realize that you are shouting at me?” He
laughed and said, “Well, it’s certainly not you that I’m shouting
at, Jim. It’s the idea of this result!”
Left with the options Stapp articulated, which would you
abandon: causality, locality, or individuality. You cannot have
all three! Most people, faced with these options, give up
locality.
4. Like shadows on a Cave Wall: Leibniz’s ideas of “space”
as a kind of answer to the problem of non-locality
It is time to recall one of the things I am attempting in this lecture:
to use Leibniz’s conceptions of space and time in the Monadology as a metaphysical foundation for the idea of no-locality in
quantum mechanics.
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Let us reiterate the properties of monads. Monads are
singular. That is, they have many properties, but no parts. They
have no windows. All their impressions and reflections of the
Cosmos come through their reflection and articulation of the
Deity, which they represent in a small part.
Finally, it is likely, based on the experimental results of Bell’s
Theorem, that our intuitions of space and time are far removed
from the way the Universe actually is.
5. Concluding remarks
I conclude this lecture with two principal points and some
speculations.
First, it was many years ago that Roger Penrose in a book
called The Emporer’s New Mind, tried to explain the coherence
of mind by the physical effects of non-locality on a relatively
small scale—the electrochemical and quantum mechanical
processes in the human brain (cats, also, most likely, since
Penrose is fond of cats). This coherence would require entanglement of the prior physical states of these electrochemical wave
fronts, but this does not seem terribly surprising.
Second, entanglement does not depend simply or perhaps
even necessarily on proximity. At a fairly formal level, entanglement depends on interaction. The entanglement of cognitive
processes with the experiential world might be sufficient to
explain the commonality of experience, a term which I coin here
in this essay, especially given that the correlations persist over
manifestly macroscopic differences.
This bears, quite generally, on our ideas of culture, also. As
an example, think of how easy or difficult it can be to change
one’s entire conception of the world via a single conversation. I
thank Mr. William Braithwaite for the suggestion.
The concept of non-locality thus articulated can extend far
beyond the possibility of common experience to the possibility
of kindredness with our common weal. We might not, actually,
be separate spheres, hoping to connect, hoping to touch and
know the world. Like shadows on a cave wall, both we as
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BEALL
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individuals and the rest of the sensible world could actually
spring from a common light.
Finally, and this is a bit more speculative, but hardly
original, the entire evolution of the history of the Cosmos has
involved some pretty heavy entanglement. We now call it the
Big Bang.
This brings us to a further point regarding Leibniz’s Deity.
God might not have simply said, “Let there be Light.” God
might have actually been that light.
�Diver Tomb, Posidonia (Modern Paestum)
ca. 480-470, Museum, Paestum
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
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Depth Versus Complexity
Eva Brann
What a great honor it is to be invited to speak to the philosophers
of Athens, though I came flying into Atlanta through the blue
skies by airplane rather than sailing into the Piraeus over the
wine-dark sea by trireme!
My topic is a duality, an opposition in the way our world offers itself to the search for knowledge, which is mirrored in our
personal predisposition for a way of inquiry.
I’ve learned not to expect an audience to sit with bated breath
until I reveal my own inclination and also not to indulge myself
in post-modern indeterminacies. So I’ll say up front where, as
my students say, I’m “coming from” and, as matters more, where
I’m going with my title, “Depth Versus Complexity.” I think that
the first dimension of depth describes such bottom-seeking
knowledge as we’re capable of searching out; it may be called
philosophia, “love of wisdom.” The second dimension, on the
other hand, describes such surface-covering information as we
can attain by research; it could be named, to coin a term,
philotechnosyne, “love of skillful fact-finding.” Since it seems
to me hazardous, both aimless and dangerous, to plunge into the
depths below a surface that I’m not acquainted with, it also seems
to me that those who attempt such a plunge, which is always
made with eyes closed, should have their eyes wide open above
Eva Brann is a tutor and former dean at St. John’s College in Annapolis,
Maryland. This lecture was first delivered to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia on September 16,
2016.
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and be acquainted with much of the wide surface, always keeping
in mind Heraclitus’ dictum that “Eyes and ears are bad witnesses
to humans that have barbarian souls” (D-K 107). I will cite rather,
in behalf of being extensively informed, Socrates, who lived in
that first Athens as an ardent urbanite. He seems to Phaedrus, his
ostensible guide, like a stranger outside the city in the country
around Athens, and he says that he, Socrates, only learns when
within the city; but he shows that he has far more real local
knowledge than his companion.
The direct opposite of complexity would be simplicity; of
depth it is shallowness. I’m not disavowing but rather avoiding
those antitheses, for now. So I’ll describe the two ways not as directly opposite, but rather as orthogonal to each other. Therefore
let me begin in a somewhat unlikely way: with the most basic
Cartesian coordinate diagram of classical physics, in which the
horizontal x axis represents the fundamental independent variable, time, and the vertical y axis orthogonal (that is, at right angles) to it represents some other physical dimension—early on,
distance, velocity, and acceleration. That’s so even in latter day
elementary textbooks. But at a crucial moment in physics, its first
modern moment, the direction is different. The second theorem
of the Third Day of Galileo’s Two New Sciences (1638), sets out,
under the title of “Naturally Accelerated Motion,” the earliest
clearly quantified law of nature, that for free fall at the surface
of the earth,1 where acceleration is naturally uniform. Here time
is represented by an upright line, while the horizontal stands for
velocity. Moreover, time begins not at what will later be called
the origin, the intersection of the representative lines, but at a release point. Picture the diagram as rendering Galileo, nearly half
a century earlier, standing at the top of the Leaning Tower, about
to start his experiment by letting go of a ball. That experiment
was not, to be sure, an experiment at all but a demonstration of a
remarkable fact already known by Galileo, namely that balls of
different weights would, absent friction, hit the ground together.
1. The third day of creation in the Hebrew Bible is when the earth appears (Genesis 1:9).
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
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That’s somewhat to my point, since so-called information, gathered by experimental research is, I would guess, far less often put
to use as the source of new discoveries than as the corroboration
of pre-conceived knowledge.
What is a little off my point is the mind-boggling and modernity-determining way Galileo proves the law on the basis of a
postulate suggested by the Pisan demonstration. The postulate
says that, since weight is not involved in free fall close to the
earth’s surface, the simplest possible relation of velocity to time
is to be assumed, namely that the former varies directly with the
latter. Then the velocity-lines, set up horizontally on each moment of time, increase proportionally with the time of falling and
so assume the outline of a triangle whose base represents the velocity at the moment of impact. The interior of this triangle is a
kind of proto-integral, a summation of all the near-infinitesimal
velocity-lines, with side t for time and d/t for distance per unit
time, or velocity. These sides, when multiplied, yield twice the
area of a triangle representing the dimension t·d/t . Simply put,
the area of a triangle, a plane figure, now represents a distance,
a linear figure. I’m moved to say that this counterintuitive procedure instantiates the crucial effect of quantification: the symbolic quantity has no immediately apprehensible similarity to the
quality of the symbolized phenomenon, here distance.
I must interrupt my account here to say, very emphatically,
that Galileo clearly saw what was eventuating and did his clever
and careful best to circumvent the representation of distance by
area, so that his proof is conceptually clear but mathematically
cumbrous. More efficient and less mindful ways would soon be
found.2
As it turns out, the tsunami of information now available is
largely numerical in form and bears a ruptured relation to its qualitative subject. Incidentally, the law of free fall then simply stares
at you from the diagram: Since by the postulate the velocity ratios
2. Of course, this transmogrification had already preceded, when a
length uniformly increasing had been made to symbolize a similarly increasing rate, namely, the ratio of distance to time or velocity, d/t.
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are the same as the time ratios, we can substitute the time for the
velocity and say: In free fall on earth, in abstraction from friction
and in the absence of a force that might increase acceleration, the
distances vary as the squares of the times, d ~ t 2 Let me repeat:
I’m a little off topic with this tale, but only a little, since the story
of non-similar symbolism is deeply implicated in the tale of depth
vs. complexity.
My recall of a moment when time went diagrammatically
downward rather than outward is intended to remind you of other
ways time goes downward—and inward. If Galileo’s ball hadn’t
been stopped at ground zero it would have gone inward toward
the center of the earth.
There is another discipline in which time heads down. In archaeology, the deeper we dug (I say “we” because in my pre-Socratic days I was an archeologist), the later it was in our personal
day, the earlier it became in the world’s time: the deeper down,
the farther back. On our earth, the buried past lies progressively
deeper below the visible now that presents itself on the surface.
These material survivals went, if undisturbed, in readable stratifications, way back into prehistoric times.3
I refer to digging because it is an analogue, perhaps even the
source of metaphor for a psychic capacity called remembering.
In remembering we dive into our memory tank, often to meet a
memory floating or flashing up to forestall or even anticipate our
search. But sometimes we must recollect, dig laboriously downward through stratum after stratum of compacted memories, until
the desired one halts the search. Socrates distinguishes memory
(mneme) from recollection (anamnesis)—e.g., in Symposium
208a, and Meno 81d. Augustine, that great Platonic theologian,
devises an imaginative topology of the soul which visualizes that
3. “If undisturbed:” I recall a day of excitement at the American Excavations of the Athenian Agora (Marketplace), when a pristine Neolithic
deposit was thought to have been discovered. By evening the excavators
had reached bottom—and there lay a little button bearing the legend:
Army of the Hellenes. It came from a Greek army tunic; its presence
spoiled the temporal virginity of the find and with it much of its informational value.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
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depth-sounding destination of recollection (Confessions, Bk. X,
Chs. 11, 12, 17). Our quasi-sensory memory images densely fill
the innumerable fields and caves and caverns of our inward
quasi-spatial memory. Here we wander in remembrance. But yet
deeper within the huge inner world are placeless places for imageless presences such as true mathematical figures (meaning
those drawn with breadthless lengths on an inner quasi-plane),
precepts of the liberal arts, including logic, and the invisible
being of things discerned within, “themselves by themselves,”
the Platonic forms. These flee into the remotest recesses and must
be “excogitated,” literally “driven together and out,” that is, laboriously recollected. Then Augustine extends the depth—or
height—of the soul beyond memory and its recollective recesses.
“I will transcend” (transibo), he says, my memory and “ascending” (ascendans) through and beyond my memorial soul I will
mount up to God who is above me.
To my mind, this is a remarkable correction, or perhaps a
consummation, of Socrates’ account, who never tells, except in
post-mortem myths, how the forms and their ruling principle, the
Idea of the Good, actually come into the soul—or it to them. In
Augustine’s account, they penetrate, they enter, the innermost
depth of the soul, that is to say, the soul opens onto the heights
of Heaven. Depth and height are strangely identical. I will dwell
on this later, but here recall to you that the Latin word altus means
both “high” and “deep,” and also that Heraclitus says “The way
up and down is one and the same” (D-K 60).
Like Augustine, the enhancer of Platonic psychology,
Freud, its traducer, has an outside-in psychic topology. He himself called psychoanalysis “depth-psychology” (Encyclopedia
Britannica, 1926). His early typology in the Interpretation of
Dreams (1900) names at the upper end the perceptual system,
that is, awareness; behind or below comes the preconscious system, that is, the subconscious, where reside psychic facts not
presently in awareness but readily accessible. And deep down
there is the place of the unconscious, a hermetic hell, reachable
only by the experts in deep penetration, by the psychoanalysts.
The motto of Freud’s early book is “If I cannot bend heaven, I
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will raise hell” (Virgil, Aeneid VII 312). And that is why I call
Freud a traducer of the two ancients: For them the light increases with depth, for him the murk. As Lady Macbeth, who
might, poor woman, be a Freudian case, says: “Hell is murky”
(Macbeth, V.i.41).
I’ll return to Augustine’s Confessions, Book XI (23, 27, 28), to
me the highpoint of the inquiry into time. Here memory becomes
the place and the condition of time. Time is a “distention” of the
mind, a dilation brought about by its accumulating memories, and
the amount of this mental stretching is the measure of times. Neither
future nor past are; only the present, the here and now, exists. The
future is expectation now and the past is memory now, and time is
the presently felt extent of this expectational and memorial stretching upward into the future and downward into the past respectively.
To be sure, Augustine says nothing about up or down. But
Husserl, who takes his departure from Augustine in what is probably the greatest application of the phenomenological method to a
subject, namely his Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (1905), does exactly that in describing his own “Diagram of
Time” (para. 10). He speaks of the new nows changing into pasts
that continuously “run off’ and plunge “downward” into the depths
marked on a vertical line which symbolizes the “retention,” that is
to say, the memory of impressions.
Before showing you where I plan for all this to be going let me
take a minute to tell you about the etymologies of the words “deep”
and “down.” I am far from imagining that recovered meanings, be
they the careful etymologies produced by learned linguists, who
trace a word to its speculative Indo-European root, or the creative
derivations devised by imaginative amateurs, which have no basis
in research, prove anything at all. The dead-serious but linguistically
dubious etymologizing of certain philosophers strikes me as an improbity, while the apt hijinks of others seem to me good fun.4 But
both linguistically sound etymologies and imaginative verbal jeux
4. An example of—how shall I put it?—unstraightforwardness is Heidegger’s translation of Greek aletheia, “truth,” as “un-concealedness,”
as from alpha-privative a (“un”) and Lethe (“forgetfulness”), from a
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
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d’esprit can be thought-provoking, the latter because they’re meant
to be, the former because they may tell us something about the development of human reflection. But all in all, etymologies are incitements, not revelations, and poetic play, not philosophy.
Here is the linguistically respectable etymology of “deep.”
The Indo-European root, dheub, gives rise to “dip,” “dive,” as
well as “deep.” Thus it is reasonable to infer that “deep” originally signified plunging into an element and bringing up some
of it. The deepest dipping and diving our earth affords us is the
ocean, the deepest of the deep the Mariana Trench; let it stand
for non-metaphorical, literal, depth and diving. The “down” adjective is similarly physical; it is derived from dune, “hill”;
“down” means “off the hill,” moving from top to bottom.
Now let me do the same for “complexity.” “Com-,” Indo-European kom, signifies “beside, near, with”; “-plexity” derives
from plek-, “to plait,” originally from “flax,” a plant yielding textile fiber. So like depth, complexity is rooted in our dealing with
material objects. I’ve read that the most complicated object
known to us is our brain. I don’t need to insist that its complexity
is non-metaphysical, literal, just because I believe that complexity hardly ever is a metaphor.
We deal with complexity by “ex-plicating,” that is, undoing
the im-plicating entanglements of complexity, or by “ex-plaining,” that is, setting complexities out plainly. The two meanings
of the word “plain,” that is, “clear” and “flat,” have the same origin: the wide “plain” is where things are plain because view is
unobstructed, and the mathematical flat surface, the “plane,” has
the same origin. Hence “explaining” is a mode of extracting
meaning that explicates its subject by projecting it onto a flat surface. Thus, for instance, the brain is contained by a roughly round
skull (because, I imagine, the sphere is that mathematical solid
verb that means “to elude notice.” The etymology has some support,
but there is no evidence that to early and classical authors aletheia
meant anything but truth and genuineness as opposed to falseness and
counterfeit. An example of fun is from Plato’s Phaedrus (252c): Pteros
means, “Winged Eros” since pteron means “feather.”
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which has the lowest ratio of surface to content), so that its involutions need to be explicated in plane surfaces: in marked cross
sections for viewing and labelled schemata for functions and
plane mappings for neural networks.
What I’ve just said can serve to deal with an annoying sort
of argumentative deflection. Someone will interject, to derail
you: “It’s more complex than that.” To which the answer is: “Well
then, if you mean it, draw me a picture.” For complexity is the
eminently diagrammable, spatializable problem; it can be set out
plainly. To be sure, complexity is the opposite of simplicity, and
what these folks often say as the final put-down is: “You’re being
simplistic, you’re over-simplifying.” To which the apparently
merely eristic, that is, merely contentious, answer is: “And you’re
being shallow, superficial,” meaning: your overview has too few
nodes and connections to begin with and doesn’t go into the matter to boot.
It will be the point of my talk to show, perhaps a little too
briefly, that it is not merely argumentative to say that complexity
is a superficial view of the world, but has real non-derogatory
meaning, and then to conclude by attempting a description and—
I’ll be upfront about it—a defense of depth. Just as I don’t want
to say that they are opposite kinds of thinking, so, far be it from
me to claim that complexity and depth are “kinds” of thinking at
all. To my mind, it is plain unthinking to claim that there are different ways of thinking. Thinking is always thinking—always
the same in being “about” something, thus always qualified by
what it is about. It is always the same but often about something
different. For, of course, there are different objects of thought,
different ways to see what you must think about.5 Thus the people
who used to be referred to as primitives, and before that as savages, felt surrounded by well- or ill-intentioned spirits and, most
rationally, concluded that these needed to be propitiated in ways
they themselves might respond too—just as we would.
5. People also employ different devices, modes, ways of thinking, such
as figures, analogies, conjectures; it is hard to see how they could do it,
except against a backdrop of plain mentation.
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Or take Socrates. Some folks say that he was interested in
defining certain objects, that is, in delimiting them in the universe of discourse, in explaining them and their interrelations
verbally. Well, so he was, but only when they were heavily affected with non-being, as in his multi-definitional pursuit of the
sophist in the dialogue of that name, the results of which I’ve
spent some amusing hours diagramming. But when he is within
view of a true being, like one of the human excellences, asking
that notorious “What is . . . ?” question, definition is not his aim,
but a delving descent to depths attained in literal “under-standing” (as we say) or in a truth-following ascent to the heights
achieved through “over-standing” or epi-steme (as the Greeks
say). It is always thinking but sometimes of words, or about objects, or from different positions. Consider that if thinking
weren’t always just that we wouldn’t even know when we have
different intentions.
Now to some gist. What is complexity? Well, first, there are
several kinds I’ve discerned and no doubt others I haven’t.
There’s Wittgenstein’s kind, very clearly set out in the Philosophical Investigations (Part I, 1945, Part II, 1949). He says at
one point: “The deep aspect eludes us easily” (I 387, 594). “Do
not try to analyze the experience in yourself” (my italics, II xi).
So we are to turn to the public use of words, for example, explanations (I 69) and the behavior it induces, called the “language
game.”6 The external view, he says, “reveals a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing” (I 66). His
figure here appears to be one-dimensional, a thread of overlapping fibers (I 67), but since these also criss-cross, the real figure
6. It seems to me that the language game, which teaches meaning by
ostension, doesn’t work except for a dull-witted apprentice: Master
teaches pupil the word “slab” (flagstone) by pointing to an exemplar
and then sends him to fetch another from a pile (I 6). If he’s dull enough,
he’ll come back with a slab, but if he’s brightly observant, he’ll come
back and say: “I didn’t see another just like this one.” The master will
be thrown back on communicating The Slab, itself by itself, since no
one, I think, can see likeness except through modelling essence—but
the last clause goes beyond my present point.
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is clearly two- or three-dimensional. This is verbal complexity,
and it is characterized by overtness, extensive relationality, and
interconnectivity: “family resemblances” (ibid.); its point is to
get on with practicalities; speech is known from its use in the
world.
Another kind of complexity can be characterized as computable: It has sharply defined digital elements related by rules
of computation, that is, problem-solving procedures, algorithms. This complexity is hard-edged: digits in clear calculational relations. The point is to get the solution to the kind of
pre-formulated question called a “problem,” whose relation to
human experience is determined by the fiat of postulation.
Yet a third kind of complexity is informational, characterizable as bits of fact, raw or inferred, singular or aggregated in
categories. Information has only relative existence; in its first
nature it is like a mud flat, which becomes discrete only when
handfuls are molded into a clump of clay. Abstract information
is therefore irrelevantly pre-formed pseudo-knowledge. Thus
information, even when verifiable, consists of relational factoids that become active facts in a context of human intention.
Information becomes relevant to final decision-making when
a desire is formulated and an intention is formed. Then the
point is usually to underwrite the desired action, or to modify,
even to cancel it, if the facts are really terminally unspinnable.
My final, but surely not last, kind of complexity is psychical and social—that is, human. I won’t attempt to delineate it.
Its elements are too various in kind and degree and their relations too difficult, be it by human intention or natural obscurity.
Ungifted experts tend to deliver very gross conceptual depictions of the human world, but very great psychologists and anthropologists (the latter need to be the former more than the
converse, I think) manage to combine an extensive overview
with penetrating insight. I am thinking of the Greeks’
Herodotus and our Tocqueville. They manage to survey the
many phenomena that surface on our earth and to clue out underlying, I would say, the underlying distinctions and commonalities.
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Here, by a natural and easy transition (as Robert Brumbaugh
used to say, when he meant quite a leap7) I shall try to speak of
depth. It might seem presumptuous, did I not think that one may
speak of it without having been there: Trying is all.
To begin with, the deep divers that I have read and even
known, display respect for and acquaintance with phenomenal
complexities.8 I say “phenomenal” because the juxtaposition of
phainomena and onta, sensed “appearances” and intellected “beings” must surely underlie the distinction between complexity
and depth. Let me here say again that complexity usually is and
means to be a literal description of its realm, while depth is a
metaphor, a figural application of a this-worldly phenomenon:
dipping and diving into a material element.9
Thereby hangs a tale, a tale I will foretell in a sentence:
There is no, repeat, no way of speaking of the soul and of the
realm whose emissary it is except by analogy (prosaically) or
by metaphor (poetically). Indeed, all philosophical speech is, I
dare to claim, figurative. Let me remind you of two prime examples. Plato’s Socrates speaks of eidos, literally “look” or “aspect.” But the word is used “meta-phorically,” which means
“carried over” into the realm of thought, in which reside the beings that have “invisible looks.” (Mythically and punningly their
place is in the underwold: Aides aeides, “Hades the Invisible,”10
Phaedo 80d, Cratylus 404b.11) Or take the Stoic invention of the
7. At Yale, I slipped in and out (more out) of his lectures, the only graduate class in philosophy I ever attended at all (1951). The required undergraduate course at Brooklyn College was a big nothing
8. “Even known”: Jacob Klein, Dean of St. John’s College when I arrived (1957).
9. Thus descriptions that mean to delve are usually simplifications. Of
whom is it truer to say “you’re simplifying” than of a novelist who is
experienced in the delineating soul and the world?
10. Aeides: an allusion to the un-murky Greek Hades (Aides), the underworld where dwell luminously invisible things.
11. In other dialogues they are located up high (Symposium 211), in the
heavens (Phaedrus 247).
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“concept,” literally a “grasping together [of particulars].” These
metaphorical ways, the poetry of philosophy, are not, to my
mind, primitive evidence of some logic-overleaping access to
the Unconcealed that hides itself from the prosaic professors,
but our one possible way to reach beyond the sensory world by
taking advantage of the deadness of the metaphors that make up
our latter-day language. It is a semi-extinction that allows us to
use our words as if they had always meant what we mean them
to mean: non-sensory beings directly denoted by pure imageless
speech. Who hears “concept” as an assembling grasp, or “logic”
as a collecting art?12
Aristotle and Wittgenstein actually agree—imagine this!—
that there is articulable thinking not in need of quasi-sensory
imagining. For Aristotle it is the highest kind that functions without imagination: intellecting, noesis, the direct apprehension of
the knowable. For Wittgenstein no understanding of a proposition
is in need of imagining (On the Soul 1129a ff.; Philosophical Investigation I 396). I can believe it of Aristotle that his mind, his
nous, had such a capacity for viewless thinking, sightless insight—do any of ours?13
So, I claim, whether or not we are practicing etymologists,
whether we are literally the “truth-tellers” about our first words
(for that is the etymology of “etymology”), their defunct spirits
tug at us to return to them.
—No way to speak of underlying being non-somatically, I
said a moment ago, and no way to go into sightless depths (divers
without goggles do keep their eyes closed) without first taking
in the surface, the place of laid-out overtness, of infinite particularity, of connecting context. Here’s another Socratic corroboration: Socrates is generally and inattentively presented as
denigrating the multifarious and shifting phenomenal surface on
which we crawl about. But recall that he, an inveterate urbanite,
who says that country places don’t teach him a thing, had more
12. Logic: from Greek logos, whose root is leg-, as in “collect.”
13. It is practically undecidable whether either Socrates or Plato ever
claimed to have come within sight of the forms.
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local knowledge and more scenic sensibility than his companion,
a suburban stroller. That’s in the Phaedrus (229b ff.). And in the
Symposium (206b ff.), Socrates, we learn, has been taught to
think that the ascent into the heights of being must start with the
surely complex, and mostly surface-captivated experience of
falling in love, which is also the first glimpse into psychic depths.
And the same is true of Aristotle and Thomas and Hegel, who all
seem to know a lot about worldly and human complexity, especially the monk.14 I’m not just dropping names here but citing
concrete examples of experiential expansiveness.
With complexity given its due, what then is depth, this mode
figuratively orthogonal to complexity, a mode more askew of than
opposite to it? But I will stall one last time: What is depth and
the way down not?
1. It cannot, by its very nature, be governed by the formalisms of logic. For it is always reached through the revealing
veil of metaphor, which assures that the blunt first law of logic
be set aside, the one that proscribes “p · ~ p.” This law of noncontradiction forbids that a proposition be at once true and not
true, though for its first formulator, Aristotle, this is not a formal
axiom but an affirmation that its intentional object, the thing
meant in declaratory speech, is always a determinate being,
which either is or is not. So with acquiescence in the law of thinking and being goes this very implication, that the spatial world is
determinately, positively, what it is. Not so the depths. The way
down is very much a via negativa on the one hand: “I don’t really
mean what my speech is saying”—and therefore, on the other, a
via in-ventionis, a way of “going into,” of discovery—of things
not quite thinkable.
2. Nor is depth-diving a way of deduction, of the logical descent from maxims to conclusion, nor of induction, the logical
ascent from facts to generalizations.
3. Nor are the depths a mere alternative universe of dis14. Thomas: His “Treatise on the Passions” in the Summa Theologiae
seems to me unsurpassable; consider also Aristotle’s researches in the
animal kingdom and Hegel on history and the arts.
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course, an idly eccentric language game, since, I am convinced,
urgent intimations from that quarter, from our internality, those
pulls that precede articulated speech, are a common, an ineluctable, human experience. This is a claim scarcely capable of
verification other than by testimonial. But I simply believe that
even people who revel in their own and their world’s brute materiality are visited by such transcendent innuendos.
4. Nor is the way into depths subject to a Cartesian method,
prescribed by teachable rules for the direction of the mind.15
*****
What then, finally, is depth and the way down?
Well, to begin with, as Heraclitus says: “The way up and
down is one and the same” (D-K 60).16 I’ll adapt it to my purpose.
Perhaps I can put it thus: The way of our search and its discoveries leads deep down into the depths of our soul, mind, or consciousness, towards what is found last but is in itself first, a
grounding principle.17 Once discovered, it becomes the ruling
principle (arche) of our account-giving as we come back up onto
earth. So the delving and climbing reach the same end, an “alpha
and omega,” the insight and its expression.
That is the way, but the mode of our search is question-asking
rather than problem-solving. In this phraseology, depth is the
15. Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637), Rules for the Direction of
the Mind (1628).
16. He might concede that my experience of the way up and back is different, because I’m facing in opposite directions, but still, the overseeing Logos will give the same account of both. For the Heraclitean Logos
is both immanent, as determining the ratios (logoi) of the elemental
transformations of nature, and transcendent, as the one who gathers,
collects (legei) Everything into One; it is the latter Logos who contracts
up and down into one.
17. My version of Aristotle, Physics 184a: “The way is from things
more knowable to us and clearer, to things clearer by nature and more
knowable.” There is another meaning of “ground,” not mine here. It is
the a priori, the conceptually prior basement upon which to construct
an epistemological edifice, an explanatory system such as Kant erects
(Critique of Pure Reason, B 860).
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venue of questions, complexity of problems. Statements of problems can actually do without question-marks, they are perplexities presented to be explicated, straightened out, conceptually or
practically. Or, if you like, a problem is a hard-edged, well-defined question with a correspondingly jigged answer drawn from
a predetermined pool.
For example, here’s a metaphysical problem: to discern the
number of causes operative in the world. The solution is constrained by such presumptions as these: Everything this-worldly
has a cause, including apparent chance (Aristotle, Physics Bk.
II iv ff.); therefore, if anything is uncaused or self-caused it is a
divinity (Physics, Bk. VIII; Metaphysics, Bk. XII); causes are
multiple, because the world is complexly constituted, and “responsible,” meaning that they come to us as responses forced
from the beings pinned down by an interrogation. And so forth.
The solution is definite, and the discussion continues only insofar as some people reject it.
Here’s a practical problem: On my way back from Athens, it’ll
be a problem how to circumvent the notoriously long security lines
of your Atlanta airport. When I get to the front, I’ll think of other
things. Solving practical problems takes this-worldly know-how;
solving philosophical problems takes other-worldly activity. In either case, when a problem is really solved it is also dissolved; it
becomes moot. People preoccupied by solved problems are told to
get a life. (There actually are some solved philosophical problems
that stay solved, mostly those involving a superseded physics.18)
Questions, on the other hand, seem to me not properly perplexities. They don’t go away, they are perennial, not because
they are demonstrably insoluble but because they are not properly
proposed for solving but rather for going into, deeper and deeper.
The mode of engagement with questions, as I delineate it
for myself, is what Socrates calls aporia—literally, waylessness.19 Therefore the way of searching out the deep is indeed a
18. Some of these do in fact remain interesting, sometimes as testimonials to the concrete impasses that make grand theories implode.
19. Or “unprovidedness.” The above meditation on modes of searching
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meth-odos, a “way-to-be-followed,” but only in the sense of
an oriented movement, not in the modern meaning of a method,
a progress guided by procedures.
Entertaining questions thus requires wisdom, a considering,
reflecting frame of a mind still resonating with past experience
but now focused by desirous expectation. Otherwise put: Questions are a mode of blessed ignorance, a thorough apprehension
of our own cognitive limitations which clears our minds of mere
opinions and, while it prevents us from reaching for personal
originality rather than objective origins, moves us inward.20
A question, then, is a receptive opening in us—who knows
in what capacity of ours. The reception is expectant of an answer—of a spontaneous intimation rather than a driven determination, of an incitement more than a settlement, of a mental
vision or a verbal hypothesis instead of a conclusive solution.
has as a background Aristotle’s Book III of the Metaphysics, which
marks the transition of philosophy from amateur question-asking to professional problem-solving, the second such transition in the West. The
first was from pre-Socratic initiation into Logos or Truth by a divinity
to the Socratic search by going into oneself.
The word “problem” is not actually used by Aristotle in Book III; in
fact he speaks of “difficulties” and aporiai, which I think he assimilates
to “problems” in our sense. Plato already uses problema in the geometry-derived sense. A problem asks for a construction, which yields a
product, as opposed to a theorem, which gives insight. Some ancients—
this is to my point—objected to the notion of a mathematical problem
since mathematics is about knowing, not making (Heath, Euclid’s Elements, I 125). By this distinction hangs a tale extending into modernity,
but beyond the scope of this talk: the development of mathematical objects from concrete items to abstracted symbols.
20. “Blessed ignorance” is my adaptation of Nicolas of Cusa’s title, Of
Learned Ignorance (De Docta Ignorantia, 1440)—“blessed” for
“learned” because, of course, it’s precisely not learned. Even though
lots of graduates might be correctly awarded an I.D., an Ignorantiae
Doctor, it would be in the wrong spirit. What Cusanus means by learned
ignorance is the fully realized desire to know that has become unobstructed when we have thoroughly learned our ignorance (Bk. I i). Directing features of this desire are the via negativa (the way of gaining
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Such responses are often fraught simplicities, not abrogations of
difficulties but rather problem-generating fecundities.21
The aim of asking questions is to penetrate spatio-temporal
experience so as to reach the atemporal inwardness, commonly
called the essence, whose surface is the appearance. Here I should
stop because I am being carried away toward an ontological speculation from what I would be glad to call a meditation on, or at
most a phenomenology of, inquiry.22
*****
a foothold in the transcendent by what it is not), conjecture (the way
of holding a well-motivated opinion firmly enough to go on with but
flexibly enough for alteration), and analogy (the way of levering up
thought by recognizing similarities in different venues and through
these likenesses discovering differences). I think that these ways are
mutually implicated, but I have neither studied Cusanus enough nor
sufficiently thought out my notions.
21. Prime examples are to be found in the sayings of Heraclitus and
Parmenides, the two pre-Socratics distinguished by being not “physical”
(Aristotle, Physics 186b), but meta-physical. Here is one example: Parmenides says: “For it is the same both to be aware (noein) and to be”
(D-K 3; D-K 8, line 34)—most often translated along these lines: “For
the same thing can be thought as can be.” Heidegger interprets ingeniously in line with his notion of unconcealment: Being’s essence involves being apprehended (Introduction to Metaphysics (1935), 106).
I think we should not subvert bold depth by refusing to read what is
written. Parmenides regards Being as One, for which his figure is a
sphere. So he countermands the multiplicity inherent in his spherical
metaphor by gnomically intimating that Being is self-aware, self-translucent, self-implicated—as unextended, partless, undifferentiable, being
everywhere and nowhere, just as is awareness when its object is itself.
22. I regard it as somewhat corroborative of the descriptive verity of
my depth metaphor for a tendency of inquiry that it plays no discernible
role for Heidegger either in Being and Time (1927), where phainomena
and onta are assimilated [31, 35] or in the Introduction to Metaphysics,
where Being is self-emergent and involves its own manifesting appearance as a defining delimitation [77]. The reason for this absence is, I
think , that Dasein (an abstraction from a human being) which is only
in caring about its being, is altogether temporal and this-worldly—so
perforce a-metaphorical and un-deep.
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Are there consequences to the preceding exposition? To my
mind, there are personal ones surely—such as the acquisition of
a template to gauge what you’re doing and to judge if a quarter
turn inside and down may be desirable. There are disciplinary
ones probably, such as querying cognitive scientists concerning
the feasibility of inward-turned mental depth emerging from the
ultimate complex structure, the brain. And there are institutional
ones possibly—such as a reconsideration by philosophy departments of their highest degree, now the Ph.D., Philosophiae Doctor. It is, after all, a comical title which claims that you are a
proficient preceptor, a doctor, of the love of wisdom, a teacher,
that is, of love—a situation nowadays full of moral and legal pitfalls. Departments might add a secondary but more sensible degree, the Ph.D.2, to be read as Philosophiae Dilector, a “delighter
and dilettante in the love of wisdom.” For I think that while the
mapping of complexity, which is an institutional way of “doing”
philosophy, can keep you promotion-worthily busy and often
contentedly absorbed, the dilettantish delvers into depths, amateurish because philosophy true to its name cannot be a profession, might also have their diploma, though such diving may
bring up nothing but deep delight:
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song
To such a deep delight ’t would win me . . .
Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”
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A Note on Apollonius’s
Reconceptualization of Space
Philip LeCuyer
Apollonius re-envisions Euclidean space. He does this indirectly
by slowly and carefully re-envisioning one of the two most important objects in Euclidean space—the circle. Apollonius reopens the question that Euclid seemed to have settled in
Definition 15: what is a circle?
Euclid’s Elements is the only mathematical work used by
Apollonius in the Conics. The Elements constitute Apollonius’s
intellectual inheritance, a fundamental aspect of which is a concept of space that is essentially negative. Euclid’s series of five
negations is conveyed through the five postulates. The first one
states: “from every point to every point to draw a straight line.”
This means there are no holes in Euclidean space. The second
postulate states: “to produce a finite straight line continuously in
a straight line.” This means there are no edges to Euclidean space.
The third postulate, “to describe a circle with any center and any
distance,” means there is no directionality in space—all radial
directions are equivalent. The fourth, “all right angles are equal,”
means there is no handedness, no distinction between left and
right.
The famous fifth postulate is longer:
If a straight line falling on two straight lines make the interior angles on the same side less than two right angles,
the two straight lines, if produced toward infinity (ep’
apeiron), meet on that side on which the two angles are
less than two right angles.
This means that Euclidean space has no curvature. No holes,
no edges, no directionality, no handedness, no curvature. It is an
essentially negative concept.
Philip LeCuyer is a tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
The author thanks Grant Franks, also a tutor in Santa Fe, for fashioning
the figures.
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Apollonius does not—as Lobachevski, Bolyai, Riemann, and
the topologists do many centuries later—change any of these postulates. Rather, he exposes an unarticulated postulate which pervades or underlies the five stated ones, and in so doing introduces
a positive characteristic to space.
There are two sides shown in the fifth postulate: 1) the side
on which the three lines form a triangle, and 2) the other side on
which the lines produced toward infinity diverge forever. Euclid
leaves this other side of things in knowing silence. The Elements
is about the triangle, which is a figure, and about the circle, which
Euclid also defines as a figure, a schema. What then is a figure?
Euclid defines a “figure”as “that which, beneath (hypo) any
boundary or boundaries, is contained (periechomenon)”—literally, that which has a perimeter, a horizon, around it, something
characterized by “surroundedness.” The Elements stands as the
authoritative study of two and three dimensional figures and the
notion of containment. It culminates in the construction of the
five regular solids, and, as its finale, Euclid presents for our contemplation a comparison of the respective linear edges of the five
solids when contained in the same sphere. The definition of figure
governs the Elements from start to finish.
Figures are present in Apollonius’s Conics, but they are not
what is being studied. What is being studied is a set of curves,
first encountered as conic sections, to which Euclidean figures
are attached like monitoring devices on an athlete or a patient.
And what are these curves as a class? As a class, they are not figures because they do not all enclose finite areas. The exact same
reasoning, the same proofs, apply to those that do enclose areas
(ellipses and circumferences of circles) and those that don’t (hyperbolae and the special case of the parabola). If they are not figures, what are they?
One can see a sharp difference between Euclid and Apollonius in the way that each generates what is conical. Euclid does
this by revolving a right triangle around one of its two shorter
legs while that leg, held stationary, becomes the axis of a right
cone. Euclid’s cone is a three-dimensional figure made by revolving a two-dimensional figure. Each type of right cone pro-
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duces a different kind of conic section: one that has a right angle
at its vertex, made by revolving an isosceles right triangle, will
yield a parabola when cut by a plane perpendicular to its surface;
an acute cone will yield an ellipse, and an obtuse cone will yield
an hyperbola. This is true, but it is not true enough. Apollonius
will demonstrate that every size of every shape of each type of
conic is present in every conic surface—both right cones such as
Euclid generated finite versions of, and oblique conic surfaces
such as Euclid never dreamt of.
Apollonius’s foundational definition states:
If from a point a straight line is joined to the circumference of a circle which is not in the same plane with the
point, and the line is produced in both directions, and if,
with the point remaining fixed, the straight line being rotated about the circumference of the circle returns to the
same place from which it began, then the generated surface composed of the two surfaces lying vertically opposite one another, each of which increases to infinity (eis
apeiron) as the generating line is produced to infinity (eis
apeiron), I call a conic surface, and the fixed point I call
the vertex.
A conic surface is not a figure in the Euclidean sense. It is a
boundary, but not a boundary that contains by closing back on itself. Apollonius studies the conics, the parabola, ellipses, hyperbolae, and the circumferences of circles not as boundaries
containing areas, but as lines which reveal something deeper and
more important than space as inert content. (Note that when
Apollonius includes circles in a list together with conic sections,
he always calls them “circumferences of circles.”)
Before I turn to consider the step-by-step transformation of the
key Euclidean proposition through which Apollonius re-understands what a circle is, and so what space is, I will take up briefly
the remarkable last proposition of Bk. I of the Conics. The implications of this theorem are momentous. The pair of opposite hyperbolic sections produced by cutting the upper and lower conic
surfaces with a plane (the upper and lower curves in Figure 1) produce a second set of opposed curves, also hyperbolic and conjugate
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to the first set (the dotted curves). No point on this second set of
curves is on the conic surface. They are merely in co-planar space
with the first set of curves.
How did Apollonius do this? He prepared this moment by
defining (in Definition 11) a “second” diameter, which simply
names what Apollonius had just demonstrated for the ellipse in
Proposition 15. This “second” diameter in the ellipse is conjugate
and is also the mean proportional between the first diameter and
the first diameter’s upright side. It is therefore finite. Do opposite
hyperbolic sections have a “second” diameter? They do have a
conjugate diameter which as such bisects all the external lines
between them parallel to their first diameter (Proposition 16). But
is it finite? This conjugate diameter of the original vertical hyperbolic sections does not touch them anywhere. These sections
extend up and down to vertical infinities whereas the conjugate
diamter extends sideways—neither in nor on, but outside the
conic surface. Apollonius, citing Definition 11, states in Proposition 38 that the finite “second” diameter that was demonstrated
to exist in the ellipse, a finite curve, is also present in hyperbolic
sections. Based on this undemonstrated analogy with the ellipse,
the assumed “second” diameter of the original hyperbolic sec-
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tions is pressed into service as the first diameter of these conjugate curves, which therefore exist, but which were not produced
by cutting a conic surface. Not only that: these conjugate opposite
curves could themselves produce, in reciprocation, the original
hyperbolae without reference to any conic surface.
If this constitutive analogy between hyperbolae, ellipses,
and circumferences of circles holds, it means that conic curves
have no more or less to do with conic surfaces or cones than the
number four has to do with how many legs are on a cow. How
we discovered these curves, how we first produced them, does
not amount to a sufficient account of what they are. Neither
conic surfaces nor cones are ever again considered by Apollonius after this moment of liberation in the last proposition,
Proposition 60, of Bk. I.
The crucial proposition in Euclid, which Apollonius transforms by relentless generalization, occurs at the conclusion of
Bk. II of the Elements (and again in Bk. VI, 13). There Euclid
demonstrates that the square on any ordinate in a circle—i.e., on
any line from a point on the circumference of a circle perpendicular to a diameter, is equal in area to the rectangle on the resulting two segments of that diameter (Figure 2a). His first move, so
to speak, is to substitute this property of a circle for Euclid’s definition. We see this accomplished immediately in the first propositions in Bk. I of the Conics.
In his fourth proposition in Bk. I, Apollonius demonstrates that
the section produced by a cutting plane parallel to the circle used
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to generate the conic surface is itself a circle. Here he does use as
the basis of his proof Euclid’s definition of a circle as a closed figure (schema) in which all the straight lines falling on the circumference from a point within the circumference are equal to each
other. But in the very next proposition, Proposition 5, Apollonius
does not use that definition, but rather the Euclidean property that
the square on the ordinate is equal in area to the rectangle on the
diameter segments, in order to prove that what is called a sub-contrary cut in an oblique conic surface is also a circle. Having substituted this property for Euclid’s definition, the rest of the act of
re-understanding is accomplished by generalization.
The next step is to re-label the lines which embody the property (Figure 2b). Line “a” is still the ordinate. Line “b” is now
the perpendicular (least) distance from the point on the circumference to the one tangent of the ordinate’s diameter, and line “c”
the least distance to the other tangent. This re-labeling brings all
the components of the crucial property together at any and every
point on the curve (except the points of tangency themselves).
In Figure 2c, the restriction on which tangents are allowed is
broadened to include any tangents to the circumference. If both
of the tangents do not touch the same diameter, they will intersect. The line connecting the two points of tangency is no longer
a diameter but now a chord. The distance “a” is revised as shown.
Lines “b” and “c’”are still the least distances from some point on
the circumference to the new generalized tangents. How does it
stand with the square on the revised ordinate “a” vis-a-vis the
rectangle “bc”? This is a difficult problem, and as we gather from
the letter to Eudemus, Euclid was not able to solve it. Here we
have our first glimpse of the full-bodied three-line locus problem.
I will try to indicate why it is important.
Now comes the fundamental proposition—Bk. II, 29 (See
Figure 3). The curve has been generalized into “a section of a
cone or circumference of a circle.” The proposition demonstrates
that AD is a diameter, but Apollonius can only establish this by
a reductio ad absurdum proof. This means that it is not a direct
deduction from particular prior theorems, but an inference from
the system as a whole. It is not true because some other thing is
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true. It is true because otherwise all the other truths would collapse. In this sense, this proposition reveals a principle. It is this
principle, I think, this “additional thing,” that Apollonius was referring to in his letter to Eudemus when he wrote:
The third book contains many incredible theorems of use
for the construction of solid loci and for limits of possibility of which the greatest part and the most beautiful
are new.
And when we had grasped these, we knew that the
three-line and four-line locus problem had not been constructed by Euclid, but only a chance part of it and that
not very happily. For it was not possible for this construction to be completed without the additional things found
by us.
Apollonius’s construction of the locus problem itself in
Proposition 54 of Bk. III looks like figure 4. He cites Proposition
29 of Bk. II as the basis and backbone of his proof. The upshot
of it is that the square on HX (the distance from any point on the
curve to the chord connecting the tangents) is in a constant ratio
(not necessarily equality) to the rectangle BY, ZC. These in turn
are the distances (not necessarily the least) of the same point H
(which can be any point on the curve) to those two tangents. The
angles do not have to be right angles, and they can differ from
each other. Still, whatever the ratio is, it is constant.
These curved lines investigated by Apollonius reveal a property of space that lies deeper than the bundle of Euclidean characterizations. It is the property of constancy. Any two points,
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every two points, though differently located, can have in common
a ratio not of distances simply, but of areas specified by those
distances to three co-planar lines. The areas are no longer statically contained, no longer aristocratically contained “beneath”
the imposed boundary of a figure. They change incessantly. Only
the ratio between them, which is itself not an area, is constant. It
is as if all the points on a conic curve are the same point, exhibiting the same essential relationships to three given co-planar lines,
and differing only in location. The coherence of a conic line
comes about not by an artifice of drawing, nor from without by
the act of cutting a cone, but is intrinsic to the curve itself. A conic
curve is not a figure. It is a law.
For Apollonius, space is no longer the passive recipient of
figure or form that Plato described in Timaeus 51, (“a dream from
which we cannot awaken”), and as Euclid also thought. It is no
longer merely a medium which tolerates logic. The Apollonian
property of constancy in space matches with, and is manifested
by, conic curves, just as the presence of oxygen in the air is manifested by fire, by oxygenation. Space is not outside of time, not
merely eternal; it is constant in and through time. Apollonius has
in this way re-conceived space as a medium which is hospitable
to and enabling of certain lines, conic curves, that share this property. Through Proposition 54 of Bk. III we see that these curves
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in mathematical space can crystallize into a physical path, and
we understand why.
After Apollonius, between every two points there is not only
the austere straight line of Euclid’s first postulate, but an abundance—an actual infinitude—of self-defined intelligible curves.
It will take a bit more generalization to re-join the two sides of
Euclid’s fifth postulate. The three co-planar lines of the locus
problem, the two intersecting tangents and the chord connecting
their points of tangency on the curve, are Euclid’s two non-parallel lines and the line transecting them that we encountered on
the finite side of the fifth postulate. They will be re-drawn as nontangents and a non-chord, as any three co-planar lines, thereby
allowing the part of the curve within the triangle and the part beyond it—the converging finite and the diverging infinite— to be
re-joined as one thing. The constancy of the ratio of areas still
holds over the whole curve. Descartes would undertake that task,
but the heavy lifting in this new conception of space had already
been accomplished by Apollonius.
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“Aristotelian Forgiveness”:
The Non-Culpability Requirement
of Forgiveness
Corinne Painter
Introduction
Forgiveness is a topic of much historical, contemporary, crossdisciplinary scholarly and popular work. However, the literature
on Aristotle’s account of forgiveness (sungnomē)1 is not as significant as the treatment of other ethical, political, or psychological phenomena in his work, probably because his own treatment
of forgiveness is not given as much attention as other matters in
his thought.2 Although the existing scholarship dealing with Aristotle’s thought on forgiveness is extensive,3 this essay does not
1. For simplicity’s sake, I will use the English translation of this term
throughout the essay.
2. Gregory Sadler also acknowledges this in his article “Forgiveness,
Anger, and Virtue in an Aristotelian Perspective,” American Catholic
Philosophical Association, Proceedings of the ACPA 82 (2008): 229247, on 229-230.
3. For example, a recent general volume that includes a discussion of
forgiveness in Aristotle and other ancient authors is Ancient Forgiveness: Classical, Judaic, and Christian, ed. Charles L. Griswold and
David Konstan (NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and another
still fairly recent monograph that examines forgiveness beginning with
ancients is Charles Griswold, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration
(NY: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Both of these books are interested in situating their interpretations of Aristotle’s thought about
Corinne Painter is Professor of Philsophy at Washtenaw Community
College in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
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intend to present an examination, critical or otherwise, of the literature. Much of the work that investigates Aristotle’s thought on
forgiveness tries to locate it in an historical account of forgiveness
or focuses narrowly on the question of whether forgiveness is itself
a virtue or whether it is merely associated with virtue in Aristotle’s
thought. Neither of these interesting questions is my concern in
this essay. Instead, without settling the question of whether forgiveness is a virtue or is merely associated with virtue,4 I will examine Aristotle’s claims5 about forgiveness that appear in Books
III, V, and VII of Nicomachean Ethics,6 within the framework of
his discussion of unwilling, willing, and chosen, deliberate actions.
forgiveness within a broader context of other historical and contemporary accounts of forgiveness. Additionally, Gregory Adler’s essay (see
fn. 2) is an instructive essay that focuses on the relationship between
forgiveness, anger and virtue, as is Patrick Boleyn-Fitzgerald, ”What
Should Forgiveness Mean?” The Journal of Value Inquiry 36 (2002):
483-498. Like Adler, Boleyn-Fitzgerald also examines the relationship
between forgiveness and anger—especially helpful since I will not consider the topic of anger here. Obviously this short list of references is
not meant to be exhaustive. Another subset of the literature focuses on
the role that forgiveness plays in Aristotle’s virtue ethics, typically in
the context of Aristotle’s views on the emotions, where the latter appears
to be of primary concern. In this connection, see Essays on Aristotle’s
Rhetoric, ed. Amelie Oskenburg Rorty (Berkley: University of California Press, 1996) and Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. Amelie Oskenburg
Rorty (Berkley: University of California Press, 1980).
4. Beyond being interesting in itself, this question is also difficult to answer, since Aristotle’s analysis of forgiveness seems to allow both interpretations. I will attempt to show that we can discover much of value
in Aristotle’s account of forgiveness without answering this question.
5. I point this out in order to emphasize that I will be focusing on Aristotle’s text rather than on interpretations of his text by other scholars,
since my aim is to offer a coherent account of Aristotle’s remarks on
forgiveness rather than a comparison of how other interpreters of Aristotle have understood him.
6. Abbreviated hereafter as NE. I use the translation by Joe Sachs, Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics: Translation, Glossary, and Introductory
Essay, (MA: Focus Publishing, 2002).
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First, I try to explain which actions Aristotle claims are forgivable, when forgiveness ought to be granted, and why. Second,
based on this explanation, I compare Aristotle’s unassumingly
rich account of forgiveness to the leading contemporary secular
view of forgiveness that is advanced by Jeffrie Murphy, whose
account I take to be representative of what may arguably be characterized as the “standard” contemporary secular account of forgiveness.7 By focusing on Aristotle’s claim that forgiveness is only
appropriate for those wrongdoers who are not morally responsible
for their actions, I show that unlike the leading account of forgiveness—and perhaps even against our intuitions—forgiveness is intimately connected both to excusing and to justifying wrongdoings,
and that resentment need not precede forgiveness. Third and finally,
I conclude with the claim that Aristotle’s account of forgiveness
is more coherent than the leading account, and I wonder whether
it is not also more compelling, given the importance Aristotle
places on compassion for wrongdoers as opposed to holding them
accountable and then foreswearing the resentment held against
them, which take center stage in the contemporary account of forgiveness.
§1. The Forgiveness of Unwilling and Willing Action
There is more than a little disagreement in the literature regarding
Aristotle’s ethics—which depends upon his conception of virtue,
its general nature, its various instantiations, and how one becomes virtuous— and about his complicated account of the emotions—which he ruminates about in many of his works. Still,
while Aristotle does not define forgiveness in the most straight7. I do not mean to suggest that there is only one contemporary account
of forgiveness, or that there is no disagreement amongst contemporary
thinkers who reflect on forgiveness. As a perusal of the contemporary
literature on forgiveness shows, however, there are fundamental elements of the contemporary secular accounts of forgiveness that are held
in common, even if some of the details are debated. In the second part
of the paper, I focus on what I take to be the key element of the leading
contemporary account of forgiveness, critically comparing it to Aristotle’s account.
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forward manner, a reasonable account may be constructed on the
basis of attending to relevant descriptive remarks about forgiveness that he offers in NE.8 For example, in Bk. III, Ch. 1 and Bk.
V, Ch. 8, where Aristotle distinguishes unwilling, willing, and chosen, deliberate actions, we find explicit remarks about forgiveness
suggesting that chosen, deliberate wrongful actions are not properly forgivable, whereas “for unwilling actions [that is, actions
whose source is external force or certain forms of ignorance
(1110a1-2)] there is forgiveness” (1109b33), and that “there is also
forgiveness” (1110a24) for some acts that could be construed (in
a qualified sense) as “willing” since their “source . . . is in oneself”
(1110a16), i.e., in the wrongdoer.
§1a. Forgiveness and Unwilling Action
Regarding unwilling actions, Aristotle says that in addition to externally forced actions,9 the ignorant actions that are candidates
for forgivability are actions about which the wrongdoer knows
that the action ought not to have been done. Aristotle identifies
these actions as actions done “on account of ignorance of the particulars . . . with which the action is concerned” (1110b351111a3), which cause the wrongdoer to suffer and about which
the wrongdoer expresses regret or repentance (1110b19;
1110b24, 1111a20-21).10 In Book V, however, Aristotle clarifies
8. To be sure, Aristotle also discusses forgiveness in other works, especially in his Rhetoric; however—although there is no room here to defend this claim in the confines of this paper—his remarks about
forgiveness in the Rhetoric and elsewhere, if attended to carefully, can
be seen as consistent with those made in NE, even though they arise
while he is attending to different guiding themes or questions.
9. Not incidentally, Aristotle notes the difficulty of determining when
actions have their cause in an external force (see Bk. III: Ch. 1).
10. Aristotle uses “suffering” (or pain) as a synonym for “remorse,”
which is an effect that the wrongful act has on the wrongdoer’s feelings,
whereas he uses “regret” as a synonym for “repentance,” which is not
an effect on the wrongdoer’s feelings but involves in the wrongdoer’s
thinking. Importantly, neither of these effects require the passage of
time; for Aristotle seems to view these “effects” as sometimes experi-
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that not all unwilling actions are forgivable (1136a5), distinguishing differing forms of ignorance as follows: “for those
things that people do in error not only while being ignorant
but as a result of ignorance are forgivable, but those that are
done not as a result of ignorance but while one is ignorant
and as a result of a passion that is unnatural and inhuman are
not forgivable” (1136a6-9, emphasis mine). Aristotle also
states that
what is done on account of ignorance is in every instance not a willing act, but it is unwilling by its
painfulness and by one’s regretting it, while someone
who does a thing on account of ignorance without
being in any way distressed by the action has not
acted willingly, since he did not even know what he
was doing, [but] he has not acted unwillingly either,
since he is not pained by it (1110b18-23).
Since there are actions that do not fit neatly into the willing
or unwilling classifications, Aristotle creates the category of
“non-willing action” (1110b24) to mark off those “unwilling”
wrongful actions about which the wrongdoer is unware of the
wrongness and thus is neither pained by nor regretful of. It might
seem difficult to discern whether the newly categorized actions
are forgivable in Aristotle’s view; however, directly after constructing this new category of action, and despite the fact that he
uses “on account of ignorance” in his remarks both about “unwilling actions” and about “non-willing actions,” he states that
“acting on account of ignorance seems different than acting while
being ignorant” (1110b26, emphasis mine), where the latter
enced while the wrongful act is being performed; and in any case, these
dispositions demonstrate the non-culpability of the wrongdoer at the
time at which forgiveness is to be granted. I do not defend this claim
here, as I am fairly certain that this is commonly agreed to by scholars
of Greek who work on Aristotle. Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out
for those who are not familiar with Aristotle’s use of these terms and,
more importantly, because I will come back to this point in part two of
the paper.
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seems to mean that the person is ignorant in a robust sense. This
distinction appears to be determined on the basis of whether the
ignorance is associated with incomplete knowing or complete ignorance. Regarding incomplete knowing, this could be associated
with failing to know the particulars that frame the conditions for
the action when such knowledge is not expected, or with the
wrongdoer being innocently unaware of the wrongful nature of
the act, which occurs when there is no reasonable expectation for
the person to have known better. While the former acts are those
actions about which wrongdoers feel regret and pain and the latter
are acts about which wrongdoers do not feel pain or regret, both
kinds of actions seem to be unwilling actions of the sort for which
the ignorant wrongdoer is not to be blamed but should be forgiven, on Aristotle’s view (Bk. III, Ch. 1).
In contrast, the ignorance that is associated with complete ignorance appears, for Aristotle, to arise out of unnatural, inhuman passions, which, in turn, tends to result in not knowing about the
wrongness of the action in question even though one ought to know.
While these, too, are actions about which the wrongdoer does not
feel pain or regret, in this case, these actions appear to be non-willing
actions for which the wrongdoer is at least possibly blameworthy,
depending on other conditions or circumstances that characterize the
action or the disposition of the wrongdoer. As an example of this
kind of action, in Book V, Aristotle writes that “people apply punishment for ignorance itself if the one who is ignorant seems to be
responsible for it, as when . . . people are drunk, for the source is in
oneself, since one has the power not to get drunk, which is the cause
of the ignorance (1113b30-34). Although there are good reasons that
are known to us now that should move us to advance a more complex account of drunkenness that addresses its possible link to alcoholism, which is as an addiction over which those who suffer from
it have little to no control, this is a problem that goes beyond what
can be considered in this paper. In any event, it is reasonable to interpret this passage as suggesting that Aristotle appears to characterize (at least a certain kind of) drunkenness as the result of a
controllable passion that is unnatural and unsuitable for humans,
given that it causes us to act ignorantly in a blameworthy sense.
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However we interpret the distinction Aristotle makes between
the different kinds of actions based on ignorance—i.e., acts that are
performed on account of ignorance and acts that are performed while
one is ignorant—Aristotle’s remarks about unwilling and non-willing action reveal a long-debated tension in his thought that arises in
many contexts and is rooted in his teleological account of nature in
general and of human nature particularly. For the present consideration, the important question involves whether Aristotle claims that
wrongdoers should be held responsible for non-willing wrongful actions that are caused by what he calls “unnatural” and “inhuman”
passions, since the answer to this question determines whether such
an act is forgivable and, thus, whether the wrongdoer should be forgiven. This challenging question will be addressed shortly.
§1b. Forgiveness and Willing Action
Like unwilling actions, only some willing actions are forgivable,
namely, “when one does what one ought not to do on account of
motives” such as insufferable conditions that “strain human nature too far, that no one could endure them” (1110a25-26), or,
“when one endures something shameful or painful in return for
things that are great and beautiful” (1110a21-22). Here, one
might be motivated to argue that this last kind of action would
be better characterized as a chosen, deliberate action, given its
apparent utilitarian nature. But the appropriateness of this characterization depends upon whether all the conditions for an action’s having been intentionally chosen and deliberated upon are
met, which (amongst other things) include (in the case of vicious
action) whether the action is chosen from out of an unshakable
and firmly vicious character, and whether it is performed merely
for the sake of immoderate or otherwise excessive self-interest
or gain (see 1105a-27-35).11 Since the action that Aristotle describes here does not meet these conditions—for it is neither
11. I assume at least basic familiarity with Aristotle’s virtue ethics and
with his attendant account of virtuous and vicious action, and so I do
not offer a consideration of his Ethics here, especially as this would
take us too far afield from the focal concern of this paper.
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viciously performed nor done for self-interest of the sort described but for things that are “great and beautiful”—it is properly characterized as a willing, though unchosen, action. The
(complicated) distinction between these two classifications of
action and whether they are forgivable is discussed in what follows.
Notwithstanding this distinction, like unwilling actions for
which wrongdoers feel pain and regret, wrongdoers who perform these sorts of willing acts also feel pain and regret; however, unlike unwilling actors who are either externally forced
to perform wrongful actions or are ignorant of some necessary
information about the circumstances that would lead to a right
action, here, the actor is not forced by external causes to act,
since the source is in the actor and “anything for which the
source is in oneself is also up to oneself either to do or not”
(1110a17). Moreover, the (in a sense) “willing” wrongdoer
knows the wrongful nature of the action, including the “particular circumstances in which the action takes place” (1111a23),
but she cannot be expected to act differently, given the conditions that accompany the wrongful action, including its possible
consequences.
Given Aristotle’s complex consideration of the distinction
between willing and unwilling acts, which motivated him to
add non-willing acts as a new category of action, it seems clear
that what distinguishes forgivable unwilling actions from forgivable willing actions is (a) the source of the action—is the
cause external force or is it in oneself, at least in a qualified
sense?—as well as (b) whether there is ignorance involved and
if so, (c) what sort (1111a22-24). Additionally, in those cases
in which there is sufficient knowledge and ability to act in a
wrongful manner that either prevents a greater evil than the
wrongful action itself (1110a5) or “for the sake of something
beautiful” (1110a6)i.e., in order to bring about genuinely noble
ends – such actions are, indeed, forgivable, which is supported
by the distressed state in which this kind of wrongdoer finds
herself, which is characterized by suffering and regret.
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§1c. Forgiveness and Chosen, Deliberate Action and the
Double-Tiered Nature of Non-Willing Action
Careful reflection on his remarks in Book III and Book V suggests that Aristotle’s account of forgiveness does not allow
wrongdoers who perform chosen, deliberate actions, which are
those that are properly associated with virtue, or, in this case,
vice, and, thus, those that are in the fullest sense blameworthy,
to be forgiven. For it is clear that he speaks only of unwilling
(not non-willing) and some willing actions as those that are appropriately forgivable; indeed, chosen, deliberated upon wrongful actions are conspicuously absent from Aristotle’s account.
Hence, wrongful actions appear to be unforgivable if they are
committed (i) deliberately and intentionally (certainly not accidentally or in ignorance), (ii) with full knowledge of the
wrongful nature of the action, (iii) where there is a realistic possibility of choosing not to act wrongfully, (iv) on the basis of a
considered choice to gain pleasure or avoid pain (of the trivial,
self-interested sort), and (v) on the basis of the stable (virtually
immutable) disposition of the wrongdoer, which are the conditions that describe genuinely vicious action, insofar as it is performed viciously and not just in accordance with vice (see
1105a-27-35).12
It is important to acknowledge that for Aristotle, truly vicious action is not performed on the basis of losing a struggle
against a natural tendency to act in accord with a particular passion, such as being too quick to anger, for example, since the
vicious person no longer struggles to keep her unsuitable13 pas12. Again, I assume basic familiarity with Aristotle’s virtue ethics; but
for further elucidation of the conditions for virtue and vice and for the
genuinely virtuous and vicious action that is associated with these dispositions, see also: 1103b23-25; 1105b1-4; 1111b5-7; 1112a16; 1113b4-6;
and 1114b21-15.
13. In what follows, I use “unnatural” and “inhuman”—Aristotle’s
terms—and “unsuitable” and “unbefitting”—my terms—interchangeably, since I think Aristotle employs these terms as a way to describe
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sions in check but gladly takes pleasure in choosing to act in
accord with these “inhuman” passions while knowing that
doing so is inappropriate; for, this is a sign that a firm and unshakable character is at work, which is a condition of genuinely
vicious, and thus, fully blameworthy action (1103b23-25;
1105b1-4).14 However, in acknowledging this, we are moved to
re-consider the difficult question about non-willing action that
was posed earlier regarding whether Aristotle claims that
wrongdoers should be held responsible for non-willing wrongful actions that are caused by “unnatural” and “inhuman” passions, especially since the answer to this question provides the
key to determining whether these actions are forgivable. For,
simply put, if a wrongdoer is responsible for her wrongful act,
then her act is not forgivable, on Aristotle’s view, and, hence,
she ought not to be forgiven.
It was already acknowledged (in section 1a) that wrongful
actions that arise out of complete ignorance that is based in a person’s so-called “unnatural” passions and are therefore not accompanied by remorse or regret are neither willing nor unwilling
actions; however, these actions also do not appear to be chosen,
deliberated upon actions, given that they are performed in complete ignorance, i.e., while one “is ignorant.” Indeed, this is why
Aristotle created the new category of “non-willing” action. But
along with this, we noted the tension this newly created category
of action creates. For it seems that wrongdoers who perform nonwilling actions should not be held responsible for their actions
since they have no appreciation for the wrongness of their actions, given their basis in an apparent natural tendency to act in
passions that steer us away from achieving a virtuous character, which
is the means by which we can achieve our proper human telos, according to Aristotle. Again, it is not my aim to elucidate or examine Aristotle’s moral theory (or, for that matter, his teleology) in this paper.
However, in what follows, I discuss what I take to be Aristotle’s understanding of the meaning of “unnatural” and “inhuman” in the context
in which he uses these terms in this passage.
14. See fn. 12 for further textual evidence of this.
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accord with “unbefitting” passions over which such wrongdoers
do not seem to have control, at least not initially (and maybe
never). All human beings have passions and tendencies with
which they simply find themselves without having willed or chosen them. In fact, the attempt to develop a morally virtuous character involves our struggle to rid ourselves of the tendency to act
in accord with these “unsuitable” passions, which move us to act
in excess or deficiency of the mean that constitutes virtuous action, whatever this may be.15
This further clarification allows us to formulate the tension
at issue here more precisely: on the one hand, we neither will nor
choose to possess the natural passions and tendencies with which
we find ourselves but which present obstacles to the development
of a virtuous character. But, on the other hand, Aristotle’s further
consideration of non-willing actions that arise out of our natural
tendency to act in accord with these passions identifies these passions as “unnatural” and “inhuman” (1136a6-9), which appears
to motivate him to characterize these as actions for which the
wrongdoer may, ultimately, be responsible and for which, therefore, forgiveness ought not to be granted. I think this apparent
tension can be resolved, first, by noting that Aristotle characterizes these passions as “inhuman” and “unnatural” because they
present obstacles that must be overcome in the process of developing a virtuous character, and second, by acknowledging (a) that
this characterization is not only not inconsistent with the recognition that it is perfectly natural to possess tendencies to act in
accord with our passions, but (b) that it is necessary for us to possess such passions and tendencies in order for genuine virtue to
be possible. For the process of becoming virtuous requires us to
possess passions that we must attempt to reign in from the extremes of deficiency and excess to which they naturally tend until
15. What constitutes virtuous action and how one develops a virtuous
character is not discussed here; rather, the conditions for vicious action
are outlined only briefly in order to make sense of why Aristotle claims
that chosen, deliberate, wrongful action is not forgivable, unlike unwilling and most willing actions, which are forgivable.
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we are no longer struggling against this challenge, as was previously acknowledged.
Recognizing this prompts us to assign a “double-tiered” character to these sorts of actions. At first—and probably for much if
not all of our lives – these kinds of actions are non-willing actions
that arise out of entirely unwilled, unchosen “natural tendencies”
to follow passions with which we simply find ourselves, and
about which Aristotle remarks that “there is more forgiveness for
following natural tendencies . . . [particularly] for those that are
of a sort that is common to all people” (1149b4-5). Furthermore,
while Aristotle distinguishes between some natural tendencies that
appear to be common, such as “spiritedness and aggressiveness”
(1149b7) and those that appear to be less common, such as “desires that are for excess or desires that are for unnecessary things”
(1149b8), this is a difficult and nuanced distinction to understand,
not to mention one that does not allow us to easily identify the
specific actions that belong in each category. Nevertheless, he
clearly states that (at least) the former are forgivable, further elaborating on this in Book VII, Chapters 7—10, within which Aristotle initially distinguishes different forms of “unrestraint,”
claiming that persons who act in an unrestrained manner that is
associated with excessive desires are “more shameful” than persons whose unrestraint is associated with natural spiritedness
(1149b25-26). However, he subsequently identifies the former —
i.e., the more shameful—as “dissipated persons” who, “without
regret,” “choose” their actions typically for the sake of “gaining
pleasure for themselves,” not only characterizing them as “incurable” (1150a20-23), but distinguishing them from unrestrained
persons, who are “capable of regret . . . and curable” (1150b3234). He furthermore claims that acting in an unrestrained manner,
while certainly not admirable, is not vicious (1151a7):
the unrestrained person is not even like someone who
has knowledge and is actively paying attention to it,
but is like someone who is asleep or drunk. And
though he acts willingly (since he acts while knowing
in some manner what he is doing and for what end),
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he is not vicious, since his “choice”16 is that of a decent person (1152a15-18).
With this claim, Aristotle intimates that such persons are not (robustly) responsible for their actions and that they should therefore
be forgiven.
Importantly, even if we acknowledge that distinguishing dissipated from unrestrained actions is difficult and cannot be done
outside the concrete context within which actions are performed,
it seems clear that in order to determine when forgiveness ought
to be granted, we must be able to discern when a wrongdoer passively follows17 her natural tendencies or desires, for example, to
act aggressively (or to pursue unnecessary ends), or whether the
wrongdoer deliberately chooses to allow her natural tendencies
to act in accord with her immoderate, unsuitable passions to govern her actions, which can be accomplished by observing the
wrongdoer.18 For Aristotle argues that only if the latter occurs,
should persons be held responsible for the actions that arise out
of them, given that this demonstrates a deliberate, committed re16. Here Aristotle uses “choice” in a looser sense than when he uses it
while discussing actions that are richly and robustly deliberated upon,
the latter of which is a condition both for truly virtuous and for truly
vicious acts; but here, as the passage makes clear, he is attaching
“choice” to willing actions that do not rise to this level.
17. Joe Sachs offers an extremely helpful discussion of the passive nature of unrestraint, advancing that “Aristotle repeatedly refuses to call
unrestraint anything but a passive experience.” See footnote 201, Ch.
7, Bk. VII, p. 122; see also footnote 183, Ch. 3, Bk. VII, p. 122, which
provide evidence for how challenging it is to interpret Aristotle properly
with respect to how he conceives of unrestraint and the actions that flow
from it. For example, as Sachs points out, while Aristotle sometimes
speaks of unrestrained action as a “hexis,” namely when making indirect summary statements that include mention of unrestraint along with
other phenomena (e.g., 1151a27; 1151b29; 1152a35), whenever he
speaks about unrestraint on its own, he calls it a “pathos” (e.g., 1145b5,
29; 1147b 8, 16; 1148b6).
18. Probably for most of us, our actions will be motivated by a mix of
these “extremes” throughout out adult lives.
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fusal to attempt to overcome natural tendencies to act in accord
with unbefitting passions; indeed, despite knowing the wrongness
of our actions, in this case we allow our unsuitable passions to
rule us to such an extent that they become part of our very character, which we are unwilling to change. If this happens, we take
pleasure in intentionally and knowingly performing wrongful actions and we certainly don’t feel pain or regret over them. Consequently, these actions are unforgivable, and, thus, forgiveness
ought not to be extended to persons who perform them.
Having said this, it is imperative to underscore that for Aristotle, it is extremely difficult to develop the kind of character just
described, from out of which truly unforgivable actions arise,
which means that most wrongful actions are ultimately forgivable
in Aristotle’s view. For careful reflection on the reasons, conditions and circumstances that frame wrongdoings typically render
them excusable or justifiable rather than inexcusable or unjustifiable actions for which wrongdoers are morally responsible, and
when this is the case, forgiveness ought to be extended, according
to Aristotle. As we will now see, this is in contrast to the leading
contemporary account of forgiveness.
§2. A Closer Look at Forgiveness: Culpability,
Resentment, Excusing, and Justification
Aristotle’s account may strike one as strange, particularly if one
is familiar with the contemporary literature on forgiveness, since
in these accounts,19 in contrast with Aristotle, for whom it is the
non-culpability of the wrongdoer that makes the wrongdoer’s act
forgivable and the wrongdoer deserving of forgiveness, it is typically claimed that the question of forgiveness does not arise unless the wrongdoer is morally culpable for her wrongdoing. For
example, Jeffrie Murphy, a contemporary philosopher and legal
scholar whose work on forgiveness is amongst the most well19. As I mentioned in the Introduction, I take the work of Jeffrie Murphy on forgiveness as representative of the “standard” contemporary,
secular account.
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known, well-regarded, and frequently cited,20 appealing to the
account of forgiveness offered centuries ago by Bishop Butler,21
defines forgiveness as “the foreswearing of resentment, the resolute overcoming of the anger and hatred that are naturally directed toward a person who has done an unjustified and
non-excused moral injury” (504). Although Murphy (and others)22 may not agree with every aspect of Butler’s account of forgiveness, which I will not recount here, this definition highlights
that in addition to being preceded by the negative attitudes and
emotions of resentment, anger and, even, hatred, forgiveness requires the moral culpability of the wrongdoer. As Murphy states,
“we may forgive only what it is initially proper to resent; and, if
a person . . . is not responsible for what he did, there is nothing
20. For example, see Jeffrie Murphy, Getting Even: Forgiveness and its
Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) and “Forgiveness and
Resentment,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 7, Social and Political
Philosophy, ed. Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard
K. Wettstein (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 503516. Further references to Murphy refer to his 1982 article. But it is
worth noting that his more recent text takes an even stronger “anti-Aristotelian” position, in advancing the general thesis that forgiveness ought
to be more sparingly extended than it is and that resentment (and associated negative attitudes) ought to be more greatly valued and explicitly
cultivated as morally legitimate responses to wrongdoers.
21. Joseph Butler, “Sermon VII: Upon Resentment” and “Sermon IX:
Upon Forgiveness of Injuries,” in Fifteen Sermons (London, 1726). Not
incidentally, most contemporary scholars working on forgiveness appeal to Bishop Butler’s account of forgiveness in their analyses, and indeed, further references to Bishop Butler’s account refer to Murphy’s
analysis of it and are cited accordingly.
22. Two additional informative contemporary essays on forgiveness
include: Norvin Richards, “Forgiveness,” Ethics, 99.1 (1988): 7797 and Joanna North, “Wrongdoing and Forgiveness,” Philosophy,
62.242 (1987): 499-508, who, in agreement with Murphy, advances
that “one cannot forgive when no wrong has been done, for there is
no breach to be healed and no repentance is necessary or possible”
(502).
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to resent. . . . Resentment—and thus forgiveness—is directed toward responsible wrongdoing” (508).23
Indeed, Murphy goes to great lengths to distinguish forgiveness from several other concepts with which he claims it is often
confused (506), including the concepts of excuse and justification
(ibid.). According to Murphy, the essential role that resentment
plays in forgiveness gives rise, necessarily, to the distinction between these notions and forgiveness (ibid.), since these other dispositions are not defined by a foreswearing of resentment. In
elaborating on the distinction between forgiveness and excuse
and justification, Murphy maintains that
to excuse is to say that what was done was morally
wrong; but because of certain factors about the agent
. . . it would be unfair to hold the wrongdoer responsible or to blame him for the wrong action. [And] to
justify is to say that what was done was prima facie
wrong; but, because of other morally relevant factors,
the action was—all morally relevant factors considered—the right thing to do (ibid.).
Put plainly, neither excusing nor justifying actions of a wrongdoer are to be identified with granting forgiveness to a wrongdoer, on Murphy’s view, since it is only legitimate to raise the
question of forgiveness if the person who is wronged is justified
in resenting the wrongdoer, and resentment is only justified if the
wrongdoer is culpable for her action, which is a condition that
is not met when “wrong” actions may (or should) be excused or
justified.
In the context of forgiveness, Murphy sees the primary justification for and appropriateness of resentment as a tool that allows individuals to demonstrate proper self-respect, so that what
23. In the analysis that follows, I focus on Murphy’s consideration of
resentment, leaving aside a discussion of anger or hatred. This is both
because Murphy focuses his own analysis on resentment and because
resentment is the feature of his account that is most closely connected
to his claim that forgiveness requires the moral culpability of a wrongdoer, which is the point of disagreement that provides the primary
ground for my thesis that Aristotle’s account is more compelling.
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is at stake in the relationship between resentment and forgiveness
is a proper sense and celebration of one’s worth and the recognition of the significance of how intentional wrongdoings are a sign
of disrespect (505; 507). From this it follows that, on Murphy’s
view, the foreswearing of resentment that is a necessary element
of forgiveness is only appropriate in a moral sense24 if it is
granted under the condition that (a) forgiving the wrongdoer expresses rather than denies the autonomy and self-respect of the
person wronged, as well as (b) the moral agency—i.e., the culpability—of the wrongdoer is respected (ibid.; 508).25
24. I highlight the language of morality in order to reflect Murphy’s understanding that genuine forgiveness is to be identified with moral forgiveness, since it is granted for the “right” – i.e., for moral – reasons
(508). Additionally, although Murphy considers whether forgiveness
might be obligatory (511), ultimately, he claims that “we are not obligated to forgive… and no one has a right to be forgiven…. [though] we
can have good reasons for bestowing forgiveness” (ibid.). Dissimilarly,
Aristotle seems to articulate when and why a wrongdoer deserves – has
a right to – forgiveness, which suggests that he believes these cases may
be obligatory.
25. Murphy also lists a third condition that must be met in order for forgiveness to be appropriate, namely, that the generally accepted rules of
morality, whatever they are, must not be violated (505; 507; 508). In
addition, although I will not address this claim explicitly in this paper—
primarily because it seems both obvious to me and certainly not incompatible with Aristotle’s view of forgiveness—it deserves mention that
on Murphy’s view, genuine forgiveness should be identifiable neither
with forgetting a wrongdoing for the sake of therapeutic (e.g., emotional) reasons (507) or with letting a wrongdoer off the hook with the
hope of bringing about her repentance, the latter of which is a position
often argued for in religious contexts (512). Forgetting a wrongdoing
for therapeutic reasons would be motivated by a desire for self-preservation, whereas letting a wrongdoer off the hook in order to motivate
her repentance may be rooted in arrogance, neither of which is an explicitly moral motivation for action. Moreover, while these practices
may be personally or socially beneficial, they are not necessarily consistent with maintaining self-respect or autonomy, or, with respecting
the moral culpability of the wrongdoer; and in some cases, they may
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There are many reasons that Murphy analyzes as those typically offered as justifications that may be consistent with the conditions he lays out for appropriate (moral) forgiveness. However,
before briefly examining these, we would do well to note that
Murphy’s account of the distinction between forgiveness, excuse
and justification is perplexing. For in explaining why excusing
and justifying wrongdoings are not to be confused with forgiveness, he cites the fact that the wrongdoer is not responsible for
her wrongdoing due either (a) to the excusability of her action,
which is based on conditions about the wrongdoer (i.e., in Murphy’s terminology, the wrongdoer’s agency), or (b) to the justifiability of the action, which is based on conditions surrounding
the action in question (506). But isn’t this precisely why otherwise wrong actions are forgivable and why such “wrongdoers”
should be forgiven? As Murphy himself admits, these wrongdoers are clearly not responsible for their actions and thus they
should neither be resented nor be held accountable (ibid.). So,
why does Murphy (and many other scholars who agree with him)
refuse to claim, as Aristotle does, that these wrongdoers should
be forgiven? The reason appears to be his unwavering commitment to the idea that foreswearing resentment is a necessary element of the process of forgiveness and since there can be no
(proper) resentment in the case of wrong actions that are excusable or justifiable, forgiveness must be different than these (ibid.).
Sadly, the commitment to the existence of a necessary connection between resentment and forgiveness appears to be dogmatic, as I do not see any argument for the necessity of this
connection. For in Murphy’s analysis of the meaning and condibe incompatible with these values. Genuine, i.e., moral, forgiveness
should also be distinguished from letting a wrongdoer off the hook too
quickly (505), without engaging in proper reflection about whether the
wrongdoer deserves forgiveness, which is discussed in what follows.
It should be noted that there are other interesting aspects of Murphy’s
account of forgiveness that I do not consider in this paper, as I intimated previously, but this is only because I focus on what I take to be
the most glaring deficiency in his account, especially when compared
to Aristotle’s account.
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tions of forgiveness within which he discusses why resentment
is the precursor for forgiveness, he claims, as was acknowledged,
that the primary value defended by resentment is self-respect
(505; 507; 508). However, while it seems reasonable for a person
to resent moral injuries that are intentionally performed against
oneself, and that to fail to do so could signify (amongst other
things) a lack of self-respect, what does not seem reasonable is
(a) that wrongdoers who perform moral injuries intentionally are
the only appropriate candidates for forgiveness, as Murphy
claims, or, for that matter, (b) that such wrongdoers should be
forgiven, certainly not if they are pleased about the intentional
wrongdoing. Regarding (a), what seems to distinguish Aristotle’s
view from Murphy’s is whether it makes sense to consider an action “wrong” and the person who performs it a “wrongdoer”
when the action may legitimately be justified or excused (e.g.,
for one or more of the reasons Aristotle articulated). Given that
(in this context) the language of justification and excuse implies
that an action was performed that is taken to be wrong in some
sense—otherwise this language would not be used—we should
be compelled to acknowledge that wrongdoings may in principle
be justified or excused. It seems that Aristotle was aware of this,
given that his account of forgiveness relies on and promotes this
understanding of the way in which judging a questionable action
as justified or excused and, thus, as forgivable, ultimately presupposes its “wrongness” in some relevant sense.
Regarding (b), in order to determine whether wrongdoers
who perform their wrongful actions intentionally should be forgiven, it is helpful to consider the reasons that Murphy offers as
possible justifications for moral forgiveness and to compare them
with Aristotle’s view of when forgiveness should be extended
and when it should not. According to Murphy, the most promising justifications for forgiveness include: (i) the wrongdoer’s repentance or change of heart, (ii) the wrongdoer’s sincere apology,
(iii) the wrongdoer’s good or well-meaning intentions, and (iv)
the wrongdoer’s suffering being sufficient to demonstrate a relevant transformation of the wrongdoer (508). While Murphy goes
on to discuss each of these justifications separately (508 – 511),
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it is sufficient to note that they share in common that the wrongdoer may be separated from her wrongdoing (508; 509),26 since
only in these cases is forgiveness potentially appropriate, given
that this separation not only (1) allows respect for the worth and
autonomy of the one wronged as well as for the initial moral culpability of the wrongdoer (ibid.), but also, paradoxically, (2) recognizes the non-culpability of the wrongdoer at the time at which
forgiveness is granted (509).
Importantly, although, unlike Murphy, Aristotle does not
propose a necessary relationship between resentment, foreswearing resentment, and forgiveness, nor does he (explicitly) emphasize the importance of upholding self-respect and autonomy, and
although he outright rejects the notion that forgiveness requires
the culpability of the wrongdoer, arguing the opposite, Aristotle
nonetheless supposes the separability of the wrongdoer from her
wrongdoing, just as Murphy does. We need only recall the examples of unwilling and willing actions that Aristotle claims are
forgivable to see this, which were outlined in section one. In
fact, some version of each of the reasons listed, which Murphy
defends as potentially compatible with what he characterizes as
moral forgiveness, can be interpreted as present in Aristotle’s
account of forgiveness, given that they all imply the non-culpability of the wrongdoer at the time at which Murphy claims forgiveness is appropriate. Indeed, when Murphy’s reasons for
forgiveness are examined carefully, it appears that wrongdoings
are forgivable for him, too, only when wrongdoers are no longer
responsible for their actions, which suggests that although the
acts retain their “wrongness,” they are nevertheless either excusable or justified: they are still “wrong,” but because of conditions that are true about the actor or about the circumstances
framing the action, it would be unfair—i.e., wrong (pardon the
26. In this connection, taking cues from St. Augustine, Murphy writes:
“to the extent that the agent is separated from his evil act, forgiveness
of him is possible without a tacit approval of his evil act” (ibid. 508,
emphasis his) viz. the well-known religious proclamation to “hate the
sin but not the sinner.”
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pun)—to hold the wrongdoer responsible, as Murphy himself
admits (506; 511).
The main difference between Murphy and Aristotle on this
point was introduced in an endnote within which not only the
synonymous meaning of “suffering,” “pain,” and “remorse” as
well as the synonymous meaning of “regret” and “repentance”
was noted, but it was also noted that although these dispositions
refer to a “gap” in the wrongdoer’s feelings or thinking, this does
not necessarily imply a passage of time, as these dispositions
could be experienced simultaneously. For Aristotle, there is no
requirement that there be a point in time at which the wrongdoer
is inseparable from her action and thus should be resented but
then at some later time she is separable from her act because, for
example, she has repented, apologized or otherwise demonstrated
her regret and sorrow. Instead, Aristotle claims that if a wrongdoer is to be forgiven it is because either (i) her “wrong” act is
performed unwittingly (e.g., because she had incomplete knowledge), (ii) she regrets and is suffering from it, either while she
performs it or later, which, for him, means that her character is
not the (vicious) character of an intentional wrongdoer, which is
immutable,27 (iii) she means well insofar as she attempts to prevent a worse outcome than her action (e.g., she was well-intentioned), and/or (iv) she cannot reasonably be expected to act
otherwise, all of which make the wrongdoer non-culpable, and
hence the act justified or excused.
It seems to me that despite his appeal to the wrongdoer’s disposition at different points in time, Murphy ultimately agrees with
Aristotle, especially since he claims that the strongest case for forgiving a wrongdoer occurs when she has genuinely repented, apol27. Recall that for Aristotle, the transformation of a genuinely vicious
character is not possible, as was briefly discussed in section 1c of the
paper. To be sure, whether genuinely vicious (or virtuous) characters
are mutable is a feature of Aristotle’s virtue ethics that can (and continues to) be debated; however, with respect to the question of forgiveness,
as I will argue in the conclusion, his account is coherent and compelling
in a way that Murphy’s is not.
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ogized, or otherwise demonstrated remorse (509-511). For this
likely means that the wrongdoer is no longer culpable and thus
should no longer be resented, given that she has become a different person (511). Of course, Murphy would say that these kinds
of actions are only candidates for forgivability if their wrongdoers are initially culpable for their actions but later become no
longer culpable; for otherwise they were either never culpable
to begin with, since this is a requirement of forgiveness for Murphy, or they did not undergo a process that changes them from
an initially culpable wrongdoer to a person who is no longer that
same culpable wrongdoer. But beyond insisting on (a) the necessity that forgiveness requires the initial culpability of the wrongdoer and (b) foreswearing the resentment that appropriately
directs itself toward the culpable wrongdoer, Murphy does nothing to convince us of the connection between these. For, recall
(again) his attempt to distinguish forgiveness from excuse and
justification: when excuse is appropriate, something about the
wrongdoer’s ability to act makes it unfair to hold her responsible
for her action, thereby making her action excusable; and when
justification is appropriate, something about the conditions or circumstances framing the action also makes it unfair to hold the
wrongdoer responsible for her action, thereby, making her action
justified (506). As I think this (and related) passages in Murphy’s
analysis show, despite Murphy’s attempt to distinguish forgiveness, excuse, and justification, ultimately, even for him, proper
(moral) forgiveness cannot be granted to culpable, resentable
wrongdoers but should only be extended to wrongdoers whose
actions, at the time at which they are forgiven, are excusable or
justifiable, just as is the case for Aristotle.
§3. Concluding Remarks: On the Compelling Nature of
“Aristotelian Forgiveness”
On Aristotle’s account, resentment is not a necessary element of
forgiveness, not initially or in the form of needing to overcome
it, because from the outset, the kinds of wrongful actions that are
forgivable are not attached to wrongdoers who should be resented;
rather, their actions are excusable or justified, as was argued. I
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submit that Murphy (and others who agree with him)28 should give
up his reliance both on the moral culpability of the wrongdoer and
on the accompanying resentment and its eventual foreswearing as
essential ingredients of forgiveness for at least three related reasons. First, as I argued, even Murphy admits that at the time at
which forgiveness is appropriate, the wrongdoer is not culpable
because something about her or the conditions under which her
acts was or is performed—e.g., she repented or apologized or
meant well—result in the wrongdoing being justified or excused
without eliminating its “wrongness.” Again, Murphy himself admits this (506), betraying the incoherence of his position.
Second, holding onto resentment until the wrongdoer undergoes some sort of magically transformative process, which, with
Aristotle, we have good reason to believe is not possible if the
wrongdoer is someone who genuinely takes pleasure in intentionally acting wrongly, may be unreasonable to expect from a
person who is wronged, regardless of whether doing so upholds
autonomy or self-respect, which is by no means a foregone conclusion. This is especially true, given that there are many ways
that self-respect and autonomy can be maintained that do not require harboring dangerous, negative emotions that may easily
transform themselves into attitudes or actions, such as hatred and
vengeance, which (at least arguably) often fail to respect anyone,
and certainly speak against a sense of humility, not to mention
an appreciation for a shared sense of humanity (which is a point
to which I return in what directly follows). Furthermore, overcoming resentment requires some emotional gymnastics that it
is not clear could or should be cultivated, particularly given the
shaky foundation Murphy offers for why wrongdoers should be
resented, which Murphy does not support with much more than
his insistence that Bishop Butler is correct on this point. Again,
why should it be the case that forgiveness must involve the
foreswearing of resentment, since either it is unclear that the
wrongdoer should be resented in the first place, or, taking Aris28. Recall that Murphy’s account represents the mainstream, leading
contemporary secular account of forgiveness.
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totle’s lead, it is unclear that she should ever be forgiven? Put
plainly, why not understand forgiveness, as Aristotle did, namely,
as an attitude one takes with respect to a wrongdoer who deserves
it for one or more of the reasons outlined, none of which require
the one wronged to resent the wrongdoer, and all of which
demonstrate the non-culpability of the wrongdoer?
Third, given that there is no reason to believe that the absence
of resentment or its foreswearing in Aristotle’s account of forgiveness results in the one wronged failing to respect herself or
to exercise her autonomy, as I already hinted, Murphy would do
well to discard his insistence that forgiveness requires resentment
at all. Instead, he should offer an account of forgiveness that calls
for us to take on the perspective of the wrongdoer, as this is compassionate and respectful of the worth of all persons who deserve
it. I cannot help but wonder whether Aristotle’s account instructs
us to treat wrongdoers in an (appropriately) compassionate way,29
which allows us not only to exercise self-respect but also to respect the other and her circumstances more easily than Murphy’s
account permits. For the latter not only advances an arguably fictive distinction between forgiving and excusing and justifying
that fails to withstand philosophical scrutiny, but also fails to attend robustly to the reality that all persons are potential wrongdoers in the ways that both Aristotle and Murphy articulate. For
although Murphy acknowledges what he refers to as “moral humility” (513), he concludes from this only that we “should be
open to the possibility of forgiveness” (ibid.). In contrast, Aristotle suggests that relating to wrongdoers through compassion is
the goal, since this demonstrates human decency, which he intimately connects with compassion and thoughtfulness, which, in
turn, he claims should govern our relations with (most) others
(1143a20-22).
Thus despite what may remain unclear in Aristotle’s account
of forgiveness, “Aristotelian forgiveness” is (1) internally coher29. I take it that compassion—generally speaking, not within Aristotle’s
theoretical framework—can be inappropriate; however, I do not defend
this here, as to do so would take us too far afield from the paper’s focus.
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ent, (2) properly appreciative of the many reasons a wrongdoer
should not be held responsible for her act and should be forgiven,
which (3) is consistent with respect both for those who are
wronged and for those who perform wrongdoings, (4) calls for
compassion towards others and an appreciation for our shared
humanity, and finally, (5) does not fall prey to the emotional
quagmire that may threaten our attempts to forgive when we
ought and to refrain from forgiving when we ought not. Consequently, Aristotle’s account of forgiveness ought to be preferred
over the leading contemporary account.
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On Two Socratic Questions
Alex Priou
What pointless images come up on account of a
single word. Take the word something, for example. For me this is a dense cloud of steam that has
the color of smoke. When I hear the word nothing,
I also see a cloud, but one that is thinner, completely transparent. And when I try to seize a particle of this nothing, I get the most minute particles
of nothing.1
The most famous Socratic question—ti esti touto?—is often preceded by a far less famous, but more fundamental question—esti
touto ti? Thus we read, for example, in Plato’s Hippias Major:
Socrates: So, then, are not also all the beautiful things
beautiful by the beautiful?
Hippias: Yes, by the beautiful.
Soc.: By this thing that is something (tini)?
Hipp.: That is something, for what (ti) [else] is it going
[to be]?
Soc.: Say, then . . . what is this thing (ti esti touto), the
beautiful? (287c8-d3)2
Or, in the Symposium, where Socrates asks Agathon, “Is love love
of nothing or of something?” (199e6-7) Aristotle implicitly affirms the priority of this question to its more famous counterpart by only claiming that there is a science of being after
having confronted the “most difficult and necessary aporia of
all to look into,” namely, whether or not “there is something
1. Luria 1968, 132.
2. All citations are to Plato and his Euthyphro, unless otherwise noted.
All translations are my own.
Alex Priou is Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Kutztown
University in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. This paper was first delivered at
the Annual Meeting of the Association of Core Texts and Courses on
April 16, 2015 in Atlanta, Georgia.
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(esti ti) aside from the particulars,” “something one and the
same (hen ti kai tauton)” that would make such knowledge
possible (cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics 999a24-9, 1003a21-2).
Though this question is posed in many dialogues with respect to myriad topics,3 in every instance it receives but one
answer: it is something, namely something that is. The dialogue devoted to why this question always meets with an affirmative answer would appear to be the Parmenides, for
there Parmenides throws into question whether the eidē are,
only to establish that, if we have opinions that there is some
unity in being, such unity must be. 4 Nevertheless, the dramatic setting of the Parmenides is the quarrelling of the PreSocratic schools, and the popular dismissal of philosophy
that their quarrelling engendered. For a dialogue that establishes that the object of inquiry is simply because we have
3. Some examples (by no means exhaustive): Charmides 161d1-5 and
168b2-4, Parmenides 132b7-c2, Phaedo 64c2-3, and Theaetetus 160a9b4 and 163e4-7. Of course, Socrates often doesn’t ask this preliminary
question, perhaps with some reason for his silence in mind, the most
obvious and necessary example being Minos 313a1.
4. This claim condenses the respective thrusts of the first and second
parts of the Parmenides. Let the following suffice to establish the above
claim. The second part’s inquiry into the one that is preserves the intelligibility of unity without addressing the skepticism raised at the peak
of the first part, i.e., the view that there is no access to the one that is or
that the one simply is not (cf. 133a ff.). Parmenides addresses that skepticism in the final five deductions, which function as a reductio ad absurdum. This reductio culminates in a denial of unity not just in
being—for being could nevertheless still always appear to be, without
being—but in appearance and opinion, as well. This conclusion proves
untenable, since as a matter of fact unity is opined to be—indeed, at
many points during that very conversation. Thus the dialogue pushes
us to the conclusion that is enough that unity is opined to be for it simply
to be, i.e. for the claim that one is to be true, at least so far as human
beings may recognize. It’s on this point that the Parmenides and Euthyphro converge.
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opinions about it, we must, as I hope to show, turn to the Euthyphro. 5
From the very beginning of the dialogue, Socrates’s whole
way of life is in question. For an indictment has brought him to
the stoa of the king, thus compelling him to leave his usual haunts
in the Lyceum, where we find him in dialogues as early in his career as in the Charmides and as late as in the Euthydemus and
Lysis.6 To some extent, then, we share in Euthyphro’s surprise at
finding Socrates in such a place. Euthyphro expresses his surprise
by asking Socrates, “Has something new (ti neōteron) come to
be?” (2a1) Euthyphro’s phrasing, quite unintentionally prescient,
shows that more than Socrates’s way of life is in question. For
when Euthyphro later asks Socrates what Meletus claims
Socrates does (ti poiounta), Socrates will respond that Meletus
claims that he makes new gods (kainous poiounta tous theous)
(2a8-b4). Socrates appears to have made a new ti, a new something or what, and so to have radically revised how we think
about nouns.7 Not (just) Socrates, but his question is on trial (cf.
Apology 22e6-3b4). Euthyphro, however, understands Meletus
to mean by these “new gods” Socrates’s daimonion, and thus
takes Socrates to be his fellow religious innovator, to be something of an ally.8 But they are in many ways quite different.
Whereas Euthyphro expresses the utmost pride in his wisdom,
5. “The theoretical or methodological assumption (that to ask about
piety is to ask about an idea or form), if it is to be something more than
an assumption, requires a non-methodological—a conversational or dialectical—justification” (Bruell 1999, 127).
6. Cf. Bruell 1999, 118.
7. Cf. Davis 2011, 217.
8. Religious innovators, of course, could hardly ever be allies.—Geach
1966, 369 follows Euthyphro’s interpretation of the accusation. Burger
2015, 25-7 and Strauss 1996, 15 suggest that these gods may be
Socrates’s eidē. Meletus’s use of the plural in every version of the accusation we have suffices to dismiss Geach’s proposal (cf. Apology
24b8-c1; Xenophon, Memorabilia, I.1.1; Diogenes Laertius, Lives of
the Eminent Philosophers, II.40). Cf. Bruell 1999, 118-20.
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Socrates expresses shock when he first hears about Euthyphro’s
unorthodoxy and closes by cautioning him against deviating from
orthodoxy.9 To be sure, Socrates seems unique in his (however
ironic) respect, if not reverence, for Euthyphro, even going so far
as to say he is a desirer of Euthyphro’s wisdom, though others
laugh at him (14d4, 3b9-c2). Nevertheless, the situation is not
one of two religious innovators, but of two men with some inclination toward unorthodoxy. The one succumbs; the other resists.
If Socrates is not so unorthodox as he initially appears, then to
what extent is his allegedly new “what,” his ti, in reality new?
To what extent is Socratic philosophy latent in orthodoxy itself?10
9. Euthyphro twice affirms his wisdom with an oath by Zeus (cf. 4a12b3, 5b8-c3). The first oath comes after Socrates expresses shock with
an oath of his own at Euthyphro’s innovation (4a11-12). A little later,
Euthyphro momentarily slides into the third person while speaking of
his precise knowledge. That is, he speaks of himself as spoken of by
others. Socrates exploits Euthyphro’s vanity in his response by imagining a conversation, in which he speaks of him as wise before another
(cf. 5a3-b7, esp. 5a9-b1). Socrates is successful, for upon hearing this
imagined conversation Euthyphro swears his second oath. Socrates’s
closing caution against innovation occurs at 15c11-e2.
10. In this way, the question of the Euthyphro is much broader than
much of the literature assumes. For what is at stake is not just “the relation between religion and ethical knowledge” (Hall 1968, 1 [emphasis
added]), with the dialogue presenting “a powerful argument against any
attempt to base moral judgments on religious foundations” (Mann 1998,
123), but the relation between religion and knowledge as such. (For a
helpful list of secondary literature on this question, see Mann 1998, 123
n. 1.) The principal difficulty with this view is that the argument in question has a much broader range than the ethical or moral. No form of
dikaion or its cognates occurs in the argument in question (cf. 9d111e1). The argument thus abstracts completely from what the basis of
the gods’ love is. Indeed, the whole purpose of the argument is to raise
the question of whether there even is such a basis. Thus the fundamental
dilemma of this crucial passage, and so of the dialogue as a whole, is
not between a knowledge-based and religion-based ethics, but between
passive obedience to divine whim or wisdom and the active search for
wisdom by human beings, between reason and revelation.
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It is necessary to begin from the position of orthodoxy, as
represented by the reaction Euthyphro’s father has to the murder
of one of his servants. Euthyphro relates that his “father, binding
together his”—i.e., the murderer’s—“feet and hands, sent to
here”—i.e., Athens—“to hear from an interpreter (exēgētēs) what
(hoti) it’s necessary to do (poiein)” (4c6-d1). In certain circumstances, the position of orthodoxy makes clear precisely what we
are to do. Suspected criminals are to be bound. But in those circumstances where we don’t know clearly and precisely what we
are to do, the position of orthodoxy compensates for this lack by
having us defer to an interpreter. Such interpreters answer our
questions about what is to be done—in this case, say, regarding
what punishment is fitting for a hired servant who has killed a
household slave. Within the position of orthodoxy, then, there is
some reason for questioning—of what sort, though, we are as yet
unclear. Despite his apparent orthodoxy, Euthyphro’s father
clearly believes the fitting punishment to be death, for, when the
hired servant dies in his bonds, he is untroubled.11 Indeed, everyone except Euthyphro seems to agree with his father—the rest of
his family, the Athenians generally, and even Socrates. And
though this gives Euthyphro’s decision to proceed against his father a foolish air, it at least minimally redeems his efforts at religious innovation, since everyone, as it turns out, has arrived at
what orthodoxy demands on their own.12 That is, everyone plays
the interpreter. The ubiquity of interpretation comes to the surface
11. Edwards 2000, 218, following Allen 1970, 21, points out that Euthyphro’s father assumes he has “a right of summary justice which dispensed him from any duties to the man accused of murder,” a right that,
Edwards adds, Euthyphro implicitly denies. Both Euthyphro and his father appear more ambivalent than Edwards’s characterization allows.
After all, his father does send for an exegete, and Euthyphro does wait
some time before bringing the accusation to court.
12. Though Euthyphro questions the justice of the punishment his father
inadvertently visited upon the hired servant, not even Euthyphro questions that such a punishment is what the interpreter would have advised.
Indeed, Euthyphro is speciously silent on what the messenger said the
interpreter proscribed.
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when Socrates, in an attempt to explain his line of questioning
about what piety is, mentions his confusion about the words of a
poet. In attempting to clarify his confusion, Socrates begins to
speak of parts (though not of wholes)—that is, to use the ontological language more familiar from the Parmenides.13 Accordingly, if Socrates’s apparently unorthodox question lies latent in
the position of orthodoxy, it is in the role of interpreters (whether
ourselves or officials) and the phenomena that make them necessary to the position of orthodoxy.14
It is clear that Euthyphro considers himself a sort of interpreter, inasmuch as he bases his religious innovations on the traditional stories told about the gods. Socrates is surprised to learn
that Euthyphro has such an orthodox view. He goes so far as to
have Euthyphro swear before Zeus that he truly holds these things
to have come to be thus (6b3-4: su hōs alēthōs hēgēi). Socrates’s
second invocation of a god suggests that he is perhaps as surprised here at Euthyphro’s extreme orthodoxy as he was earlier,
when he learned of the extent of his unorthodoxy. Indeed, so surprised is Socrates that he interrupts a particularly simple argument, familiar from the Meno and Theaetetus—about what
constitutes an adequate answer to the ti esti touto question—to
affirm Euthyphro’s orthodoxy. Socrates’s interest in Euthyphro
thus stems from the fact that his religious innovations have one
13. Once Euthyphro says Socrates speaks correctly in claiming that the
pious is a morion of the just (12d4), Socrates (with Euthyphro following
suit) only refers to it as a meros (cf. 12c6, d2, 5, 6, 8, e1, 7, 9). In so
doing, Socrates throws into question (immediately after Euthyphro has
deemed it beyond question) the agreement that the pious is a proper
part, in the sense of having a natural joint, rather than just a piece or
fragment of justice.
14. In other words, the basic issue of the dialogue is this: “How can
[Socrates] make his ignorance prevail . . . over [Euthyphro’s] knowledge?” (Bruell 1999, 125) In order to so prevail, we must understand
why Socrates’s ignorance “permitted or compelled him to draw positive
(or negative) conclusions about the most important matters” (Bruell
1999, 124).
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PRIOU
83
foot in orthodoxy and one foot out. His case shows how the orthodox requirement for interpreters allows for such unorthodoxy
as we see in Euthyphro, an unorthodoxy that Euthyphro, Meletus,
and many others identify—whether rightly or wrongly—with
Socrates’s peculiar mode of questioning. Additionally, by asking
Euthyphro to say what the pious is, Socrates draws on Euthyphro’s desire to play the interpreter (exēgētēs), thus exploiting
Euthyphro’s offer to explain (diēgeomai) many things concerning
the divine (6c5-d2). Euthyphro’s offer comes on the heels of
Socrates’s surprise that Euthyphro believes or holds (hēgeomai)
such an extremely orthodox view (6b2-c4). Socrates uses hēgeomai for believing or holding some view in place of Euthyphro’s
earlier use of nomizō (5e6). In this context, Euthyphro offers to
show how what “human beings themselves happen to believe
(nomizontes)” gives “a proof that the law (nomou) is such” as
Euthyphro interprets it (5e2-6a3). Socrates’s substitution of hēgeomai for nomizō thus aims to arrive at certain phenomena present within law, the phenomena of believing, interpreting, and
explaining. By posing his idiosyncratic question in this context,
Socrates tests the extent to which the ti of the ti esti touto lies latent
in such phenomena, and thus in the view of orthodoxy itself.15
Socrates touches on the relationship between the ti of ti esti
touto and the phenomena within law most pointedly during an
argument famous for articulating the so-called “Euthyphro
problem.”16 In this argument, Socrates attempts to show Euthyphro that the love of all the gods is not a sufficient criterion for
determining what particular acts are pious—that is, that the godloved is an inadequate definition of the pious. Toward this end,
Socrates distinguishes between active and passive participles,
between the loving and the loved (10a10-11). The passive participle, i.e., the verb reified as a substantivized verbal adjec15. After Euthyphro’s proof, no forms of nomos and nomizō occur, an
especially surprising fact in a dialogue concerned with the rules or opinions that guide correct action with respect to the gods.
16. See note 10.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
tive,17 is then argued to be the consequence of the finite, passive
verb form, rather than the other way around. That is, Socrates
intends to show that something is a loved thing because it is
loved, but not that something is loved because it is a loved thing
(10c10-12). When brought to bear on the claim that the pious is
the god-loved, the priority of the finite verb to the substantivized
form shows that the gods’ activity of loving is but an affect or
experience of the pious, and not what it is. Socrates thus argues
that the ti of ti esti touto is, independent of how anyone—god
or man—is disposed to it intentionally. What something is is not
dependent on our inclinations, then, but our inclinations on what
it is. Yet Socrates’s argument is flawed principally because there
are some who love something simply because it is a thing loved,
i.e., a thing loved by another or others. Certainly some such phenomenon is what makes the Athenians laugh at Euthyphro or
grow angry with Socrates, what makes the Athenians inclined
to view such acts of interpretation as unorthodoxy. The position
of orthodoxy thus seems to exclude the ti of Socrates’s ti esti
touto. For from the perspective of orthodoxy, the fact that something has been said provides sufficient justification that it has
been said well (7a11-b1).18 No appeal to being is necessary, just
to opinion.
Nevertheless, orthodoxy’s manner of justification is not so
exclusive as it first appears. In his presentation of the aforementioned “Euthyphro problem,” Socrates expresses this manner of
justification in rather confusing language. His language poses a
significant problem for understanding his argument, not simply
because the logic is unclear or the use of “because” (hoti) is
17. Because rendering the passive verb forms in Greek into English requires using the verb “to be” with the participial form, the distinction is
somewhat elusive, as many notice (see, for example, Geach 1966, 378).
The distinction turns, I maintain, on the reification of an experience or
affect as a quality—and an essential one, at that—of what they seek to
define. Thus I have chosen to render philoumenon as “a loved thing.”
18. Reading eirētai gar at b1 with all the manuscripts and against their
seclusion by Burnet and others.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PRIOU
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equivocal,19 but rather because it is difficult to know which sense
Socrates intends hoti to have in this or that clause. More than
once, Socrates uses hoti to mean both “because” and “that,” i.e.
to indicate a fact and a justification, in a single sentence. Further, in his summary of his argument, Socrates clarifies that Euthyphro has failed to say what (hoti) the pious is, using hoti in
the sense of ousia, i.e., in the sense familiar from ti esti touto
(11a6-8). Socrates thus uses hoti in its three primary senses—
what we could call its justificatory, factual, and essential
senses—and in a way that appears unnecessarily confusing.
Thus in an argument meant to delineate a causal relationship
between particulars and universals, Socrates uses a word that
mixes all three into one. As we read, then, we must determine
in each instance which sense Socrates means hoti to have. In
the process, however, we cannot help but note that, as separate
as these senses may be syntactically, they are also quite inextricably linked. In accordance with proper usage, Socrates uses
hoti in the justificatory sense interchangeably with dioti. But
dioti is itself a contracted form of another phrase Socrates uses,
dia touto hoti, which employs hoti in its factual sense. If hoti
in the justificatory sense is equivalent to dia touto hoti, then
hoti in the justificatory sense contains within it hoti in the factual sense.20 Reasons rely on facts. But this still excludes hoti
in the essential sense, the sense interchangeable with the ti of
Socrates’s question, ti esti touto. Is the factual sense of hoti
completely separable from its essential sense? How could essential hoti be excluded, but factual and justificatory hoti main19. On the difficulty of understanding the sense of “because,” see Geach
1966, 379; Hall 1968, 6-9; and Cohen 1971, 6-8.
20. In reality, the justificatory language is far more complex: hoti is used
at 10a2, 3, c2 (twice), 3 (twice), 10 (twice), e5; dioti at 10b1, 4, 5, 7, 8,
9 (twice), 10, 11, d6, 9, e3; dia at 10b2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, d4, 5; dia touto
hoti at 10d4, 6-7, e2-3, 6-7; and the substantivized infinitive as an instrumental dative at 10e5-6. Of the forty-three occurrences of dioti in
Plato, twelve are in the Euthyphro alone, i.e., just over a quarter of the
occurrences in just fifteen Stephanus pages—really, on one page alone.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
tained? Doesn’t the lexical intimacy of these three senses suggest
a necessary connection between them? And if so, what is it?
This question amounts to whether the particular acts piety
dictates we perform are wholly particular, or rather must be
viewed in light of some general understanding of what piety is.21
Euthyphro seems reluctant to venture beyond these particulars.
When knowledge of piety first comes up, Euthyphro seems interested in teaching Socrates the pious and impious things, and
not the pious as such (4e4-5a2). Likewise, when Socrates first
asks Euthyphro about the pious as such, Euthyphro understands
the neuter singular to hosion to indicate a single pious thing, and
not the idea common to all particular, pious things (5c8-e2). And
much later, when Euthyphro begins to pull away from Socrates,
he is clear that what he would have to teach Socrates is not some
one thing, but a number of things (14a11-b1). Nevertheless, even
in his first definition, Euthyphro does come up with a somewhat
general rule that applies not just to his case, but to many others.
Likewise, when Socrates gives voice to the objection he and the
Athenians raise against Euthyphro’s innovation, his formulation
is rightly general (cf. 4b4-6). Indeed, the disagreement between
Euthyphro and the Athenians regards which general rule (or example become rule, e.g., Zeus’s “prosecution” of his father) applies to the particular case of Euthyphro’s father, his hired
servant, and the household slave.22 Justificatory hoti thus entails
21. It is an old question as to whether the Euthyphro “is meant to imply a
full-blown theory of Forms” (Geach 1966, 371). For a thorough discussion,
see Allen 1970.
22. At one point, Socrates shows Euthyphro that those disputing in courts
don’t dispute whether one should pay the penalty for injustice, but whether an
injustice was committed (8b7-d3). Shortly after this, Socrates expresses the
general rule guiding Euthyphro’s prosecution of his father in as particular a
form as he can, indeed to quite comic effect (cf. 9a1-8). Euthyphro’s initial
(and nearly absurd) inability to put himself in the shoes of the accused amounts
to an inability to see the ambiguity of how this or that law applies to a particular
deed, i.e., it amounts to the mistake of restricting the general entirely to the
particular. As Euthyphro’s quick retreat shows, this mistake is untenable, even
to those most devoted to the precision of the laws. Cf. Benardete 2001, 201.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PRIOU
87
not just factual hoti, but essential hoti, as well. For which particular act is pious depends on the general rules that collectively
constitute what piety is. Consequently, it is not the case, as earlier
surmised, that, from the perspective of orthodoxy, the fact that
something has been said provides sufficient justification that it
has been said well (7a11-b1). As Socrates observes, other things
are said that don’t quite jibe with what has been said, thus necessitating further interpretation or conversation from us (7b2-5).
Indeed, without the question of which rule to apply to this or that
particular situation, there would be no need for interpreters.23 At
least in the present circumstances, then, the altogether orthodox
question of which rule or law applies to these or those circumstances provides sufficient grounds for Socrates to ask his apparently unorthodox question, ti esti touto?
But are these grounds sufficient in all circumstances?
Socrates suggests so when he compares his question about the
relationship between piety and justice to an account of fear (deos)
and reverence or shame (aidōs) in a pair of epic verses (12a6b1). When introducing these verses, Socrates speaks of the poet
as making two things, one of these being the verses, the other
being something he wishes to compare to what he and Euthyphro
were just discussing (12a7-8: epoiēsen, poiēsas.) But what the
poet made that is comparable to what they were just discussing
lies on an entirely abstract level. Thus, the poets don’t just make
verses; they make ideas, or rather determine their relationship.24
Socrates thus compares his inquiry into the ti of ti esti touto to
his interpretation of the poet’s verses (cf. Republic 515d2-7). But
23. “Euthyphro,” and, I would add, everyone else, “is unwilling . . . to
leave matters at the merely factual relation of a pious deed to the approval the gods confer on it by loving it, to let the piety of the deed be
determined by that love alone” (Bruell 1999, 129).
24. Burger 2015, 83-5 points out that grammatically the object of poiēsas
is Zeus himself, an allusion back to Meletus’s charge that suggests that
not Socrates, but the city’s poets are the makers of (new) gods. On the
complex way in which the poet’s genetic account relies on an eidetic account, see Bruell 1999, 131-2 and Burger 2015, 83 ff. (esp. n. 44).
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
in his interpretation, Socrates criticizes the poet on the basis of
his and Euthyphro’s experience of deos and aidōs (cf. 12b2-c9).
Though Euthyphro happily goes along with Socrates, Meletus
would be unlikely—to put it mildly—to take Socrates’s criticism
of a fellow poet so lightly (cf. Apology 23e5). Nevertheless, Meletus’s claim that Socrates is “a maker (poiētēn) of gods,” namely
“one who makes (poiounta) new gods while not believing (nomizonta) in the archaic or original ones” (3b1-3), seems at best a halftruth.25 In a certain respect, Meletus appears to be right. As Socrates
argues, action requires discerning (diakrinō) what is good or bad,
noble or shameful, and just or unjust, so as to reach a sufficient
judgment (krisis) about what to do (7c3-d7). But in his mode of
questioning, Socrates exposes the insufficiency of all judgments by
exposing his interlocutors’ inability to answer (apokrinō). Meletus
is therefore correct that Socrates doesn’t believe (hēgeomai, nomizō)
in the archaic or original gods, since his investigation of the phenomena within law (nomos) exposes that answers are not forthcoming. Meletus is wrong, however, to conclude from this that Socrates
seeks to replace the archaic or original gods with new ones. For at
the core of Socratic refutation is the same issue that plagued Euthyphro and his father, that makes interpreters necessary and court
cases unavoidable: the ambivalence or multivalence of particular
deeds as to which vomos they fall under, and thus whether the deed
is pious or impious, or, should the particular deed already be agreed
to be pious, which nomos makes it so or is implicit in it and thus
renders like deeds pious.26 These altogether pious questions invoke the factual, justificatory, and essential uses of hoti that pro25. It is only “at best” a half-truth because, as Burger 2015, 35 notes,
Socrates is the (perhaps inadvertent) cause of both the dangerous liberation from generally accepted opinion and the subsequent return to that
opinion.
26. Socrates gives two competing formulations of the subject of his question. The first—tou hosiou te peri kai tou anosiou (4e2-3)—suggests a clear
and precise separation of the pious from the impious, while the second—
peri . . . tōn hosiōn te kai anosiōn (e5-6)—suggests that the same things
can be both pious and impious. On the connection between this issue and
polytheism, see Bruell 1999, 130-1 and Burger 2015, 59-61.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PRIOU
89
vide the necessary and sufficient conditions for Socratic philosophy.
What is at bottom unorthodox about Socrates, then, is not the
introduction of new gods per se, but the willingness to confess
ignorance about which laws apply to which particulars, and the
attempt to articulate the recalcitrance of the opinions contained
in law to clear and easy application to particulars. For in his
mythical self-presentation, Socrates says that Daedalus is both
his and Euthyphro’s progenitor—that is, that the circular character of Socratic refutation is not exclusively Socrates’s, but human
(11b9-c6). Man is somehow fundamentally Socratic, and it is
Socrates’s exposure of this fact that arouses the Athenians’s ire
(cf. 3c9-d2). They simply kill the messenger. Under this interpretation, what Socrates does may be an unorthodox failure of
piety, but it is the humble failure to rise to piety, rather than an
attempt to go above and beyond it. What is missing from this interpretation, however, and unfortunately takes us beyond the Euthyphro, is Socrates’s anticipation in the Sophist that a stranger
from Elea may be a theos elenktikos (216a1-b6). This substantial
revision of Homeric theology appears to guide Socrates’s reaction
to the god’s assertion of his wisdom, which assertion Socrates attempts to refute as though that were unproblematically pious
(Apology 21b9-c2). In this revision, Socrates implicitly claims
that not just human beings are beholden to the above ambivalence
or multivalence of particulars with respect to generals, but gods
as well. Let it suffice to conclude that this deeper implication of
what Socrates uncovers in the Euthyphro amounts, paradoxically,
to an accusation against orthodoxy of impiety: not Socrates, but
the city has made new gods in place of the theoi archaioi.27 For
27. Compare the alternative of Strauss 1996, 16-17. The present understanding of Socratic piety falls outside of the debate that McPherran 1985, 283-4 frames as between the constructivists, who take there
to be a view of piety latent in what follows the “aporetic interlude”
of 11b-e, and the anticonstructivists, who deny the same. For that debate presupposes considerable agreement, namely that what is referred to as “Socratic piety” relies on a definition of what the pious
as such is, whose reconstruction they respectively claim to be possi-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
not just man is Socratic, but his god as well.28
ble and not. If there is anything like “Socratic piety,” it cannot be based
on a static definition, but rather only on the awareness that no sufficient
definition is forthcoming.
28. The deeper implication of Socrates’s substitution of hēgeomai for
nomizō lies in the former’s secondary, original sense of “to lead,”
which suggests that believing is the active attempt to guide oneself
(and others), and not the passive acceptance of laws (on Plato’s use of
voice—middle, active and passive—see Davis 2011, 205-21). That is,
the laws present themselves as the answer to some desire for guidance.
But that desire, in posing the question the laws purport to answer,
proves not just prior to (and thus of higher status than) the laws, but
more general than the laws, which are always these particular laws.
The primary or principal phenomenon within law would thus be man’s
longing for such wisdom as would allow him to live well. On this phenomenon as that of soul, see Burger 2015, 73-5 (with 69 n. 36), as well
as Davis 2011, 217-18 and passim.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PRIOU
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Bibliography
Allen, R. E. 1970. Plato’s Euthyphro and the Earlier Theory of Forms.
London: Routledge.
Benardete, Seth. 2001. Plato’s “Laws”: The Discovery of Being. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Bruell, Christopher. 1999. On the Socratic Education. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Burger, Ronna. 2015. On Plato’s Euthyphro. Munich: Carl Friedrich
von Siemens Stiftung.
Cohen, S. Marc. 1971. “Socrates on the Definition of Piety: Euthyphro
10a-11b,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 9: 1-13.
Davis, Michael. 2011. The Soul of The Greeks. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Edwards, M. J. 2000. “In Defense of Euthyphro,” American Journal of
Philology 121: 213-24.
Geach, Peter. 1966. “Plato’s Euthyphro: An Analysis and Comentary,”
The Monist 50: 369-82.
Hall, John. 1968. “Plato: Euthyphro 10a1-11a10,” Philosophical Quarterly 70: 1-11.
Luria, A. R. 1968. The Mind of a Mnemonist. New York: Basic Books.
McPherran, Mark. 1985. “Socratic Piety in the Euthyphro,” Journal of
the History of Philosophy 23: 283-309.
Mann, William. 1998. “Piety: Lending Euthyphro a Hand,” Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research 58: 123-42.
Strauss, Leo. 1996. “An Untitled Lecture on Plato’s Euthyphron” (David
Bolotin, Christopher Bruell, and Thomas Pangle eds.), Interpretation 24:
3-23.
��POEM | PETRICH
93
Sabbatical
Louis Petrich
I would have thought the broad summer airs,
By amplitude of want, more friendly shared.
Life—no surprise—opportune in corners,
Echoes up the cry of fire and ashes:
Teach us to care and not to care,
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks.
Island mine, sit me still, hair to skin light,
Sun beaten by the whip of wind and salt spray,
Stomach fitted upon rocks and coral,
Mostly hidden, unseparated below,
Sharp and aspiring above,
Good to take counsel over cares hard gone,
These straight and crooked cravings of my sea soul
To pour each drop of time that remains
Into practice of present looking toward,
Looking after what I found fine in you—
Deep-eyed causes,
Welling up close to speak
Through summer lips—
Oh, stay a little, and kiss the strewed rocks
Forsaken of stars, but here my remaking.
How fine the faces of sea and sky at the horizon meet!
Their line of appointment never bent
To give up place and tell long secret looks.
Unmeasured goings, no reckoning of returns!
An hour’s breath is allowed this body
To go beneath and feel no heaviness:
Louis Petrich is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. He wrote
this poem while on sabbatical in Bonaire, Dutch Caribbean.
�94
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Quiet there, beauty there,
Vast riches, strange attachments,
Currents you would never guess,
Cold-eyed passers-by at ease
In the whirligig of Becoming.
Counting down to the last,
I follow with borrowed sufficiency
The beaded gleams of light
Up to the birth meeting,
And pour handfuls of new looks upon the awful leavings of Love.
Contend less much, eternal counselors—
A made man collects by the shore.
���
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The St. John's Review 58.2 (Spring 2017)
St. John's Review
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The St. John's Review
Volume 50, number 3 (2008)
Editor
C. Nathan Dugan
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Bramt
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Thomas Browning
The St. John's Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John's College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson,
President; Michael Dink, Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $10 for one year. Unsolicited
essays, reviews, and reasoned letters are welcome. All
manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to the Review, St. John's College, P.O. Box 2800,
Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available, at $5
per issue, from the St. John's College Bookstore.
©2008 St. John's College. All rights reserved; reproduction
in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
The St. Jolm's Public Relations Office and the St. fohn's College Pri11t Shop
�2
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�3
Contents
Is There Great Jazz? ...................................................... 5
Andre Barbera
Preformationism In Biology: From Homunculi To
Genetic Programs ........................................................ 33
jorge H. Aigla, M.D
The Persians and the Parthenon: Yoke and Weave
Part Two: The Parthenon............................................. 53
Mera ]. Flaumenhaft
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�5
-.:f Is There Great Jazz?
fj:-- Andre Barbera
Ten years ago I began a lecture with an excerpt from "Split
Kick." [Musical example 1] 1 That lecture was ostensibly
devoted to one evening's recorded performance by Art
Blakey's quintet in 1954. My barely hidden agenda was to
ask, 'is there great jazz?', to answer 'yes', and to consider the
implications for St. John's College. Now I ask the question
explicitly, although my confidence in an affirmative answer
has waned. Addressing the practical problems associated with
an affirmative answer is not the main thrust of my remarks.
Rather, I want to consider whether jazz really is worthy of
our attention.
What is 'great' and what is 'jazz'? I shall not attempt to
define greatness. As we consider jazz and its possible merit,
however, we may uncover some of the aspects of greatness
that we attribute to the works already on St. John's program,
or at least think about some of our prejudices on behalf of
those works.
Let us get straight about what kind of music jazz issomething we all know already. Jazz is primarily instrumental
music, emphasizing brass and reed instruments, based on
dance, popular song forms, and the blues, and is of distinctly
African-American character in its origin, development, and
soul. Jazz entails swing, the blue tonality, and improvisation.
Jazz musicians employ idiosyncratic timbres or tone colors. In
jazz, instruments are treated like voices and voices like instruments. Ultimately, one might find in jazz expressions of
Andre Barbera is a tutor at the Annapolis campus of St. John's College.
This lecture was delivered at AnnapOlis on September 8, 2006. }.,.{usical
examples arc listed in Appendix 1 and can be heard online by visiting the
St. John's Review webpage (www.stjohnscollege.edu/news/pubs/review.shtml)
and clicking the link "Jazz Examples to Accompany 'Is there Great Jazz?' by
Andre Barbera".
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
individuality, autonomy, freedom. Many examples of jazz
lack some of these characteristics and perhaps a few lack
them all, but this rough definition should suffice. Of these
various characteristics, some are more important than others,
for example the African-American natnre of the musical
idiom. Jazz is race music, by which I do not mean that one
need be overtly cognizant of race to appreciate it, nor that
jazz musicians need to be African Americans. Nonetheless,
the nature of jazz, its soul, is African-American. Other
important characteristics of jazz include swing, the blues, and
expression of the individual. I shall speak about swing now,
and comment on the others later.
Swing is good, out of place in much music, but
undeniably a good musical characteristic. Swing is difficult to
define. It requires that the music neither speed up nor slow
down, thus betraying its origin in dance. Fifty years ago, in a
famous albeit imperfect treatment of the phenomenon, Andre
Hodeir noted: "In jazz, the feeling of relaxation does not
follow a feeling of tension but is present at the same
moment." And, "Swing is possible ... only when the beat,
though it seems perfectly regular, gives the impression of
moving inexorably ahead .... " 2
A well-known example of swing can occur in consecutive
eighth notes that are played such that the note on the beat
lasts longer than the note off the beat. [Musical example 2;
Appendix 2, Swing Eighths] How much longer one note lasts
than another varies and presents a notational challenge that is
usually and wisely ignored. One does not learn about swing
from written examples, and besides, this depiction is very
narrow, pertaining only to consecutive notes of equal
notational value. We shall consider a more subtle and
complex example of swing later.
Now that we have skirted the question of greatness and
provided a loose description of jazz, we might reasonably
wonder: why even ask if there is any great jazz? Empirically,
one can discern the influence of African-American music all
�BARBERA
7
over the globe, from the blues revival in 1960s England to the
second-hand influence of the Beatles throughout the Western
world, India, and the Far East, from the popular music of subSaharan Africa to the internet-transported pop music of
today. There are a handful of exceptions: the Nazis banned
this kind of music, and it is prohibited in some strict Muslim
societies. But by and large, blues, jazz, and African-American
music in general can be heard all over the world, in its
original forms as well as in myriad adaptations and dilutions.
Of the various sub-types of African-American music, jazz
is clearly the most sophisticated, the highest, by which I mean
the most developed and complex. Thus I maintain with little
or no reservation that jazz is the great music of the \Xlestern
world over the past one hundred years; but here I am using
'great' to mean hegemonic. Pervasive influence is insufficient
for us to canonize the music as great in our terms, as worthy
of our study, but it is sufficient reason for us to consider it.
Our aim here is to begin to evaluate the musical merit of jazz.
What are the qualities of jazz that might make it great in
the sense of The Republic or Euclid's Elements of Geometry
or The Brothers Karamazov? Here the long list of what is
ordinary about jazz intrudes, the reasons why jazz for all of
its charms is not great, but in fact rather common. I shall
address five aspects: setting, structi1re, boredom, recording,
and individuality.
Setting
We can go right back to our opening example to start
working on our list. The object of scrutiny is a performance,
a live recording. (Let us just agree to use the common if
somewhat nonsensical terminology of "live recording" to
distinguish recordings made in front of an audience from
recordings made in a studio.) The piece, "Split Kick" by
Horace Silver, is not written down in the traditional sense.
The performance is an isolated event occurring on a Sunday
night in February 1954, in a nightclub. People drink in nightclubs and talk and eat while the musicians are playing. Jazz
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
has made it into the concert hall, but most often its setting is
one of entertainment and amusement. The use of 'noble' in
such a context seems overdressed and proud.
Blakey's quintet had been playing at Birdland for the
entire week, two sets a night. But these musicians were not a
working group, having been pulled together for the specific
purpose of that week's performances leading up to a live
recording. 3
Let us not ignore the spoken introduction. William
Clayton "Pee Wee" Marquette was the short-statured m.c.
who worked also as doorman at Birdland. He lived upstairs,
took his meals there, and "touch[ed] the guys in the band for
money. "4 Pee Wee reasoned that his promotion of the
musicians entitled him to a commission. Pee Wee also carried
with him an adjustable butane cigarette lighter set at the
maximum: apparently the sight of a two-foot flame shooting
up in the dark, basement nightclub provided a thrill to
patrons. 5 Does great music need a pitchman with a flamethrower?
At nightclubs, jazz musicians usually give two performances per night, and sometimes three on weekends. The
Village Vanguard, an old-style, cash-only jazz club in New
York, books groups Tuesday through Sunday, with performances at 9 and 11 on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and
Sunday; 9, 11, and 1 on Friday and Saturday. That's not art;
that's work!
Therefore, the setting for jazz is common.
Structure
"Split Kick" is a contrafact that relies on the standard, 32measure structure and harmony of a popular song, that is, on
a small, narrow, and fragile framework. 6 A structure like this
is central to almost all improvisation-this is in part why free
jazz blew itself up and did so fairly quickly. What did Mozart
do with this structure? There are his variations on themes,
usually for keyboard, which doubtless are close to transcriptions of improvisations. They show Mozart not at his best-
�BARBERA
9
one might even say 'worst' except that worst and Mozart's
music don't really go together. The variations are boring and
lack intensity, just one elaboration after another. The
structure of theme and variations imposes in most cases
limitations of harmony, meter, and phrase. There are a few
instances of jazz that break out of this mold, generally
ambitious and pretentious endeavors. If jazz were to be great,
it seems to me it must work within and simultaneously
transcend by some means the limitation of theme-andvariation structure.
Boredom
Structural limitations lead to the indisputable fact that vast
stretches of jazz performances are boring/ One might make
the same remark about other works of art, literature,
philosophy, and so forth. I shall not mention those works on
the program that I find most tedious, with the exception of
Tristan tmd Isolde. The conclusion of that opera is glorious by
any measure and stands perfectly well as good music, severed
from what comes before it. But part of its true glory rests in
relief, or release, the sense that the bad trip of the past four
hours is about to end.
We do not read all ancient geometers, do not study all
Viennese classical composers, do not read all enlightenment
philosophers. There is a fair amount of material attributed to
Euclid that we never look at, and for that matter we read only
about half of The Elements of Geometry. We have time to do
only so much, and besides, much of what we skip is boring.
With jazz, in a misguided sense of fairness-everyone gets
a turn-we have drum solos and bass solos, most of the
former and virtually all of the latter being boring to listen to.
This is not to question in the least the nearly indispensable
roles played by drums and bass in making good jazz. But all
sorts of solos by melodic or chording instruments are also
boring. My friend Stevie Curtin, a guitarist, says that there is
a lot of killing time in jazz. Such a notion is related to the
labor of the entertainer, and is of a lower order artistically
�10
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
than the boredom that is composed into works with an
intention of ultimate release or exhilaration.
Recording Industry
Since the 1920s, jazz has been disseminated not only to its
audience but also to its future practitioners largely by means
of recordings. To cite just one sequence: Lester Young listened
to the recordings of Frankie Trumbauer, Charlie Parker to
those of Lester Young, Lou Donaldson. and just about
everyone else to those of Charlie Parker. The recording
industry is a business, and most decisions regarding what gets
recorded and who hears it are made with an eye toward
turning a profit. All art and literature might be constrained to
some degree by the practicalities of life, but the short-term
demands of the free market hardly allow for the unfettered
and ennobling expression of the human spirit.
Worse still, the idiom of jazz, which depends upon
spontaneous invention, is disseminated in recordings that are
hardly products of spontaneity. Records are made by
acoustical engineers and then marketed. No doubt the live
recording is an attempt to mitigate this apparently contradictory relationship. Michael MacDonald, an audio
technician, producer of jazz records, and graduate of St.
John's College, mentioned to me that his goal as producer of
a "Live at ... " recording "was to place the listener in the
second row of tables, in from the stage." 8 To some extent, I
believe such recordings are effective. Think of our opening
example: it is as if we really are at Birdland; we can visualize
Pee Wee Marquette on the stage; we can see the musicians
taking their places; we imagine that the music is produced
spontaneously before us.
Alas, in this case there is some deception. From the Blue
Note documents sent to me by Michael Cuscuna, I conclude
that "Split Kick" was recorded in the middle of the third set
of five sets of recordings made that evening. Marquette says,
"We're bringing back to tl1e bandstand at this time, ladies and
�BARBERA
II
gentlemen, the great Art Blakey and his wonderful group .... "
Were they really coming back to the bandstand, or were they
just sitting there, waiting for the audio technicians to record
an introduction ?9
The Individual
In a list of the hallmarks of jazz, Gunther Schuller has placed
primary emphasis on the development by the performer of a
unique tone or tone color. 10 Schuller argues that the more
resistant the instrument, trumpet versus alto saxophone for
example, the more important it is to develop such a tone.
This idea characterizes jazz no differently than one might
describe pop singing-it all comes down to some captivating
tone color. In thinking especially about Miles Davis, a master
of various tones, I thought that Schuller might be right.
[Musical Example 3]
How to characterize Davis's tone? Variety: brassy notes,
bent notes, dirty notes, decaying notes, breathy notes. One
trumpet sound, in fact, seems to be pitchless, or composed of
many pitches, all breath. Writers have used various terms to
describe the color of Davis's tone. To me it seems first and
foremost to be fragile but inherently contradictory, both
harsh and delicate at the same time. An intended accolade
given to some popular and jazz musicians and singers is that
they could have played classical music, or they could have
sung opera. I am thinking of Sarah Vaughan in this regard. It
is safe to say, with that tone Miles never could have played
classical music.
In review, jazz is common, not great, because:
1. It is performed primarily in nightclubs;
2. It relies on the structure of theme and
variations;
3. In many instances it is boring, exuding a
workman-like or laborious quality;
4. It is controlled by the recording industry;
5. It is obsessed with tone color.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
12
From these remarks, one might think that I was called in to
help put down an insurrection of jazz rebels seeking to
contaminate the St. John's program with their music. To
generalize, the issue that I am placing before you is one of
entertainment versus ennoblement, that is to say, refreshing
versus new and improved. Thus far, I have been making the
case for jazz as entertainment, and as I attempt to show some
ennobling qualities of jazz, you will see that we never leave
entertainment and its limitations far behind.
*
*
*
There are many great jazz musicians about whom I have to
say only that they deserve lectures of their own. In addition,
strong, fruitful influences, like Latin music, important issues
regarding the composition of the jazz audience, and widely
celebrated and influential recordings do not figure in my
remarks. Thus my remarks are not broadly representative of
jazz, although I hope that they touch on its character. Most of
early jazz and all recent developments are also absent, which
betrays my prejudices and age.
Rather than great jazz musicians, let us ask if there is
simply a great jazz recording, or more narrowly, a great jazz
solo. We turn first of all to the great man of jazz, Louis
Armstrong, who almost single-handedly transformed his
work into one that revolves around the exceptional
individual.
Here is an excerpt from "Hotter Than That" recorded by
Armstrong and his Hot Five in 1927. The excerpt includes a
polyphonic, eight-measure introduction, then three choruses
of 32 measures each, followed by a call-and-response passage
between voice and guitar. I direct your attention especially to
the first and third choruses where we hear Armstrong first as
cornetist and then as vocalist. Despite the relatively primitive
recording conditions, it is abundantly clear to me why this
jazz was called 'hot'. I also call your attention, although it is
hardly necessary, to the latter half of the third chorus where
�BARBERA
13
Armstrong sings in 3/4 meter against the prevailing 4/4 meter.
[Musical example 4]
What I find truly remarkable about this vocal passage is
how Armstrong extricates himself from the 3/4-meter
pattern. He does not do so abruptly, but rather before
returning to 4/4 he follows the ten measures of 3/4 with a
measure of 12/8, whose off beats do not jibe with either the
4/4 or the 3/4 pattern. Jazz writers comment on the interchange between Armstrong and guitarist Lonnie Johnson that
follows this passage, although I sense a letdown at this point
after the brilliance of Armstrong's cornet playing and his
stunning scat singing.
"Hotter Than That" is a very important piece in the
history of jazz, but I feel the need to make some excuses for
it-primitive recording, no drums, a time-killing piano vamp.
Let us consider a somewhat more modern piece. A quick
search on the internet produced the following testimonials: 11
1. Terell Stafford, who has been hailed as "one of
the great players of our time, a fabulous trumpet
player" by piano legend McCoy Tyner, cites as one
of his most profound musical influences Clifford
Brown's rendition of "Cherokee."
2. On bandleader Bob January's website My
Favorite Things, under "My favorite recordings,"
there is a short list that contains Clifford Brown's
"Cherokee."
3. Trumpeter Woody Shaw, in an interview for
Down Beat [Aug. 1978], said: "I'll never forget
[Brown's "Cherokee"]. It just haunted me. Such a
beautiful dark tone. Clifford more or less shaped
my conception of what I wanted to sound like."
4. On a site that seemed to be connected to
Springfield Public School District 186, Springfield,
Illinois, in a section entitled "Entertainment:
Rediscovering classic jazz," Justin Shields cites
"one of the greatest jazz recordings in history, the
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
classic 'Cherokee' [by Clifford Brown]."
5. And on a blog entitled Corn Chips and Pie:
Chunky nuggets, Millicent posted the following
[May 3, 2006]. "Let me tell you something: if I
played the trumpet (well, I did once, in the sixth
grade), I would transcribe every single note of
Clifford Brown's solo ... of 'Cherokee,' and I would
work on it every day of my life. Finally, at age 97,
I would master it, and every single resident of my
nursing home on Mars would shit himself in
wonder and awe. Then I would die."
Perhaps we should take a listen. We hear the introduction,
the tune or head, and then two choruses of improvisation by
Clifford Brown. A word about the introduction: it is a
pejorative cliche about the music of native Americans, but it
functions well in setting up the rapid, soaring, pentatonic
melody. [Musical example 5]
Clifford Brown's solo is truly exhilarating, especially the
last quarter of his first chorus with its breathless overflowing
of notes. The remaining solos on this performance by other
musicians are good, but certainly not in a league with
Brown's. So one experiences a let-down of sorts in the latter
half of the piece. Indeed, the same thing happens in Brown's
solo itself: the second chorus, as fine as it is, cannot match the
first. The bar has been set too high, too soon, having the
effect of a denouement that lasts too long.
Now I would like to turn to a jazz solo that I think is
great, on Frank Wess's "Segue In C,'' performed by Count
Basie and his orchestra at Birdland in 1961. The arrangement
of the piece is masterful, but I want to home in on the first
solo after Basie's introduction, Budd Johnson playing tenor
saxophone. Johnson was a highly regarded and widely
traveled musician, but it is safe to say that his is not a
household name, not even in some jazz circles. We shall hear
the last introductory chorus by Basie, followed by Johnson's
solo.
�BARBERA
15
Johnson's solo lacks the dazzling virtuosity that is heard
on "Cherokee." Rather it comprises six beautifully designed,
integrated blues choruses. Here we have a successful attempt
to overcome the inherent limitation of the theme-andvariation structure. Johnson has fashioned each chorus as a
melodic and emotional succession to the previous one, and
with a musical sense for the shape of the entire set of six. The
first is restrained, sweet-toned, and bubbles over with swing,
in part owing to the entrancing rhythm section. Indeed, much
of the music produced by Basie's orchestra can be taken as
exemplars of swing. The second chorus expands the register,
emphasizing tone 5, and ends with repeated tone 6 as a
springboard to a further expansion of the register to tone 8
in the third chorus. In the third and fourth choruses, the wind
instruments from the orchestra accompany the soloist with
riffs. The fourth chorus is marked at the beginning by a
quotation of "I Dream Of Jeannie With The Light Brown
Hair," which I note solely to orient the listener. The fifth
chorus is the emotional high point of the solo, containing
loud, long, high blue thirds leading into the first and fifth
measures. The sixth chorus, the denouement, is as subtle and
effective as the first. It begins with repeated C's, tone 1, and
ends with an almost self-effacing descent down to low tone 3.
[Musical example 6]
I have also attempted to notate the first three-plus
measures of the sixth chorus to emphasize an aspect of swing.
[Appendix 2, Triplets] Excluding subtleties of intonation, and
even assuming that the rhythmic designation of the individual
notes is approximately correct, where does one place the last
note, B-flat, of the example? In other words, is it the third
part of a triply divided half measure that falls late (indicated
by the arrow pointing right), or is it an anticipation of the
downbeat of the next measure (indicated by the arrow
pointing left)? Probably neither. [Musical example 7]
What we hear is the soloist fall behind the beat. Triplets
can produce the effect of speeding up or slowing down
depending upon the durational value to which the ear hears
�16
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
them as an alternative. In this case, the triplets in and of
themselves produce a drag on the beat, and Budd Johnson is
playing the triplets progressively slower. The passage is made
even more effective by the early appearance of the B-flat. This
is the note that transforms the tonic harmony of C major into
a secondary dominant chord pointing to the subdominant
harmony of measure 5 in the chorus. The secondary
dominant has occurred throughout the piece in measure four,
but in this case the phrase is truncated, at least theoretically,
by the omission of a second occurrence of the note C.
Therefore, the transformational B-flat arrives just a little bit
early even though the triplets are gradually slowing down.
The ear and the heart make sense of this.
Why don't we stop here and canonize "Segue In C"? I
have already mentioned that the piece is well orchestrated
and unfolds beautifully. There are a couple of written-out
ensemble passages to come as well as a trombone solo. The
latter is the problem. The trombone solo is not bad, and the
audience at Birdland that night seemed to like it, but in fact it
is no match for Johnson's solo, and at times seems downright
crude. It effectively diminishes the work.
With the examples by Louis Armstrong, Clifford Brown,
and Budd Johnson, we have encountered the problems or
dangers of seeking greatness: (1) in a recording; (2) in an
improvisation; (3) in a whole that consists of a series of
contributions by different individuals. I shall return to this
example by Budd Johnson at the end, but let us move on.
What is the work? In most cases we have books, writings
assembled and organized at some time and place into what
are now books with titles like the Elements of Geometry or
the Critique of Pure Reason. In some cases our works are the
realized performances of musical scores, for example Bach's
St. Matthew Passion. In other cases, somewhat more
problematic for us at St. John's, but not really for our
conception of the work, the object resides in a museum,
Leonardo's Mona Lisa or Picasso's Guernica, for example.
�17
BARBERA
With jazz, the nature of improvisation turns the work into
an action. Certainly there are instances of improvisations
becoming fixed compositions.' 2 Nevertheless, the very
essence of jazz seems to entail spontaneous music making,
real-time poiesis. Charlie Parker's legendary status in the
world of jazz rests in part on his unmatched ability to
produce unique improvisations repeatedly, even on multiple,
consecutive takes of the same tune in the recording studio.
Ted Gioia addresses this problem in The Imperfect Art:
Reflections 011 jazz and Modem Culture. He proposes to
develop an "aesthetics of imperfection." Gioia writes, " ... the
virtues we search for in other art forms-premeditated
design, balance between form and content, an overall
symmetry-are largely absent in jazz." And later, "our
interest in jazz, it would seem, is less a matter of our interest
in the perfection of the music, and more a result of our
interest in the expressiveness of the musician ... [whose
performances) are judged ... not by comparison with some
Platonic ideal of perfection but by comparison with what
other musicians can do under similar conditions. Our interest
lies primarily in the artist and only secondarily in the art." 13
On first reading, such a suggestion seems to imply a kind
of hagiography of individuals, in short, a study of great men
and their deeds. The achievements of Alexander the Great are
indeed great, and conceivably we might sit around and
discuss how he did it. In that discussion, the contributions of
some participants would be more valuable than others, but
likely so because of experience or at least outside reading. I
presume that an appreciation of jazz does not entail an
interest in this man or that, in Louis Armstrong or Charlie
Parker, but rather in the artist. We might be amazed at the
man who can play the fastest, or the highest, or the loudest
on a given instrument, but certainly this amazement differs
from our enchantment with Clifford Brown's solo on
"Cherokee."
As listeners to jazz, we marvel not at the highest or
loudest or strangest note, but at that consecution of notes
- -----------
---~
--------------
--
�18
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
aptly fitted to the tune, at a specific time and place, on a
specific instrument or instruments. If in so doing we are
studying great men, we are doing so only while they are
actually performing the deeds that make them great.
This brings us to a reconsideration of individuality, which
previously I had listed among those characteristics that make
jazz common. There the subject was tone color, that quality
of sound that might be uniquely identified with a performer.
A unique sound is of some interest owing to the originality
and skill needed to produce it, but it is hardly a principle of
great music. It is, at best, an ingredient.
There may be in jazz, however, a sense of the individual
far more significant than unique tone color. Part of Louis
Armstrong's great achievement during the 1920s was to make
jazz a soloist's music in place of the quasi-egalitarian ethos of
collective improvisation. His effect on jazz was analogous to
what Babe Ruth did for baseball, making it a slugger's game.
Since Armstrong, nearly all jazz has been concerto music,
music that requires an ensemble, but only to throw into relief
and to support the music of the individual.
The jazz soloist, the individual, goes about his work in
connection with the blues. The connection is in fact threefold. First, there is the structure, usually tripartite, built on
strong harmonic pillars. Second, there is the blue tonality
with its characteristic tone 3, its subtonic, and its embellishment of tone 5. Third, there is the sentiment, the lament
that conveys the soul of jazz. It is this third meaning of the
blues that is of paramount importance in defining the role of
the jazz soloist.
Lament underpins much jazz, but not in such a way that
hearing jazz (or blues) is a sad experience for the listener.
Quite the opposite. The listener, through the music, has his
cares-not necessarily woes-articulated in a way that
surpasses his own ability to express them. Blues guitarist
Brownie McGhee went so far as to reverse the relationship
ordinarily expressed by "having the blues." He said, "The
�BARBERA
19
blues was in the cradle with me rockin'. I never had the blues.
The blues had me. My cradle would rock without anybody
rockin' it. " 14 For the listener, something like catharsis takes
place, but not in the sense that the listener pities or fears a
representation of truly pitiable beings or frightful conditions.
The listener's condition or lament, rather, is transformed in
the musical expression and, if not lifted from her shoulders,
is at least lifted up before the community and to God. The
jazz soloist is a priest.
As is the case with most works of art, the expression is
individual, particular. The sentiment is not ''Abandonment
and infidelity are evil" but rather "My baby done left me."
Blues musician Bill Broonzy said, "It's a natural thing that no
two human beings had blues the same way." 15 Expressions by
and of the individual are hardly unique to music or to the
United States, but in this country there has existed over the
past two centuries a remarkably and perhaps uniquely fertile
ground for the sprouting up and growth of a musical idiom
that so expresses the soul. The setting is, of course, a special
case of the melting pot, a fertile ground that includes the
contradiction of enslavement of Africans sanctioned by a
government that in spirit may be the best attempt so far to
secure individual liberty in the context of society and its
responsibilities. The contradiction is enslavement coupled
with insult and irony.
One need not know about the enslavement of Africans in
the United States in order to appreciate jazz, but the existence
of jazz is, in my opinion, unthinkable without the
enslavement. This notion might cause mathematical minds
with a taste for justice to worry about or question the
goodness of the world: the price for a great artistic development being cruelty and dehumanizing social structure.
Such a thought-if there were not any cruelty, there would
not be any jazz-puts emphasis in the wrong place. The
world is a wonder, aspects of which may be considered in
terms of equations. (For those of you familiar with The
�20
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Brothers Karamazov, one might think of the difference
between Ivan and Zosima.)
A brief review: after considering an argument for jazz as
common, jazz as entertainment, we have been considering the
possibility of something greater. We have heard excerpts from
legendary solos by Louis Armstrong and Clifford Brown, and
a solo by Budd Johnson that overcomes the limitation of
theme and variations and in so doing achieves integrity. From
these examples we were required to consider what is the jazz
work, and this in tnrn led us to think about the jazz soloist as
an individual who, in the context of the blues, makes a
connection with the individual listener.
I have proposed an image of the priest for the jazz soloist,
but I want to emphasize the limited, thoroughly Western
notion that I have in mind. I do not see the soloist as a kind
of African tribal leader, or even as a Levite. In other words,
although the soloist serves as an intermediary, taking upon his
shoulders the burden of articulation, and thus in a way
performs a sacrifice, he does not do it primarily for the good
of the community. That good may be a by-product of his
action. Rather, he does it for you, or for me. He acts for the
individual. His entire musical being is that of the individual,
the autonomous one, cast in relief against the communal
background.
Before concluding with remarks on how the connection is
made, I would like to consider one more musical example, a
candidate for a great work, albeit a miniature. In fact, we
shall hear three versions. The piece is not much more than a
riff, composed by Charlie Parker and set in the 12-measure
blues sequence. Entitled "Now's The Time," it has a
moderate tempo in between the slow lament and the fast
instrumental blues. I call it a dance blues. 16
Parker recorded "Now's the Time" more than once, and
although his solos are almost always interesting, I know of
nothing special about those recordings to recommend them
as great. Here is the beginning of one from 1953-Parker's
solo on this recording is very good-so that we can hear the
�BARBERA
21
basic plan. In lieu of trying to write out the head or theme
based on a single performance by Parker, I have provided the
version published in The Real Book, with a copyright of
1945,17 [Musical example 8; Appendix 2, "Now's The Time"]
Now let us listen to the beginning of a recording by tenor
saxophonist Sonny Rollins from February, 1964. We shall
hear the head, just one blues chorus in this case rather that
two in Parker's, and then four choruses of improvisation.
[Musical example 9]
In my opinion, there are many factors that contribute to
the greatness of this performance: the busy drums; the highly
propulsive bass-clear evidence that you do not need to allot
a solo to the bassist as long as you let him really blow during
the performance; the tone of the sax-narrow or with
minimal vibrato at times, but chock full of pitch variation;
omitted notes, for example measure six of the head; thematic
choruses, the first built around ghost tones in approach to the
tonic, the second and third emphasizing tone 6 in both the
upper and lower registers, the fourth emphasizing tone 2. A
comprehensive analysis would tie together these tones of
emphasis, which function like the recitation tones of improvised psalmody." But here my analytical goal is much smaller
and narrower.
I call your attention to one very brief passage in measure
8 of the second chorus, although I shall gloss over the details.
I have transposed Rollins's solo to F for purposes of
comparison. 19 [Musical example 10; Appendix 2, Rollins,
2:5-8]
Rollins has centered initially on D, tone 6, for this middle
phrase of the blues, measures 5-8, but then there is a startling
flourish, the beginning of which is presented in the last
measure of the example. Assuming that D-flat and C-sharp
are the same notes, you can see that the sixteenth-note run is
a whole-tone scale. The whole-tone passage ruptures the
music; it breaks the groove. But this rupture makes musical
sense. Three or four of the tones comprising the scale are part
of the tonality, a blues in F. The B-natural and the C-sharp
�22
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
however are definitely outside, and these are the notes that
startle us, that give us the tension that accompanies relaxation. I believe that the inspiration for this rupture, and what
makes it work so well, can be found in the accompaniment to
the head.
We hear Ron Carter, the bassist, play a chromatic ascent
in the head in measures 5-8, in a rhythm only approximated
in the written musical example. [Appendix 2, Rollins, head 58] The B-flat and arguably the B-natural and C are also part
of the theme, but what about the C-sharp? The latter note
does not appear in the two recorded versions by Parker that
I am familiar with nor in the written version. [Musical
example 11]
From whom did the chromatic ascent come? Horace
Silver, perhaps? During A Night at Bird/and in 1954, Blakey's
group played "Now's The Time," and the chromatic ascent is
clearly presented by the pianist, Silver. Note that while the Bflat, B-natural, C-natural and their harmonization are played
by the entire ensemble, only Silver plays the C-sharp.
[Musical example 12; Appendix 2, Blakey and Silver, head 58]
Rollins must have heard this recording, and perhaps the
chromatic ascent had been making the rounds for some time
in the performance of "Now's The Time." Ten years separate
the two recordings. 20 When the chromatic ascent is carried to
an extreme of four notes, then we arrive at C-sharp, which
along with B-natural provides the missing tones for a
complete whole-tone scale. It is precisely in this connection
that Rollins is able to push or break the tonality, albeit for a
moment, and to do so with inherent musical logic.
I am not suggesting that Rollins came to his performance
in a fashion as pedantic as my presentation, although in jazz
circles he is famous for his introspection. A close look,
however, at an admittedly very short passage provides an
insight into and possible understanding of the musical
thinking of a jazz genius. Rollins apparently liked the result,
�BARBERA
23
because he plays a very similar passage in measure 7 of the
third chorus. [Musical example 13]
Let us now move from small to large, from consideration
of chromatic passing tones to the general question posed by
the title of the lecture. Have we found a great work of jazz?
Undoubtedly, provided that we stay within the realm of jazz.
The rest of the performance is also very good, with solos by
Herbie Hancock and again by Rollins, with further references
to the whole-tone phrase. But is the work really great? I see
two related reasons for saying "No." First, it is a recording,
and second, the recording took place in a recording studio.
There is no way around the first problem, one that is shared
by virtually all music that we study and to some degree by just
about every work on the St. John's program insofar as the
books are translations made from texts established by editors.
I feel that the problem is more serious with jazz, with that
musical idiom in which, as I have claimed, we are entertained
and perhaps ennobled by the individual in the very act of
individuation.
Attempting to solve the second problem, the studio
recording, is a temptation that I find irresistible. The solution
is a temptation because we know that in most cases the "live
recording" is also somewhat of a fabrication, a piecing
together by recording engineers of recorded excerpts. This is
the case with A Night at Bird/and. The reason why the
temptation is irresistible is because the engineers often do a
good job.
By a good job, I mean that the recording approximates
the real thing, and I make this claim from experience. I know,
I have experienced the real thing, an ennobling performance
by a jaz.z musician. At one point I considered apologizing for
what amounts to a dressed-up version of "jazz in my life."
Further reflection on the subject inclines me to think that the
personal aspect of the subject is in fact central. Jazz is about
individuals, it is music by the individual and for the
individual. It is not only concerto music, but concerto music
best heard in its actual, spontaneous development, and best
�24
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
heard up close, that is, as chamber music, in a setting where
the listener relates intimately and personally to the
performer. Our chambers are nightclubs.
The Blakey performance at Birdland is about as good a
recorded live performance as any that I know of. It is a
recording and thus artificial, or doubly artificial, but it
captures a sense of spontaneity and improvisation. The music
and the musicians are of high caliber. And they were cookin'
that night. Nevertheless, there may be no individual piece,
not even an individual solo that we could call great, not on a
par with the performances that we heard by Louis Armstrong,
Clifford Brown, Budd Johnson, and Sonny Rollins.
Where does this leave us? Even if we were to decide that
there are great performances of jazz that could be revisited
repeatedly, those performances would be relatively brief: five,
ten, fifteen minutes. There are a few examples in jazz of
extended compositions and performances, but by and large,
the great performances of jazz are miniatures. Such being the
case hardly excludes jazz from our consideration. We might
approach a performance like Sonny Rollins's "Now's The
Time" in a way similar to our approach to a motet by Josquin
des Prez or a sonnet by Shakespeare. Were we to try for
something larger, longer, my inclination would be toward the
Live at ... genre rather than the extended work-A Love
Supreme-or the thematic collection of recordings, for
example Out of Time. The problem with my preference, A
Night at Bird/and, is that we know it is an artifice, a collection
of miniatures pieced together to give the impression of a
whole. Its advantage, on the other hand, is the success of the
ruse, the conveyance of a sense of spontaneity spread out
over an evening's work, and this is crucial. For a great work
of jazz must convey the sense of the artist at work, that work
being a priestly lament that strives for, that longs for, that
articulates ... and here words fail me. I cannot say what jazz
articulates. Jazz, I believe, really is about something, albeit
ineffable. Furthermore, jazz has meaning, not just musical
meaning, but meaning as jazz. It exudes the spirit of America,
�BARBERA
25
especially North America. Freedom of the individual is
perhaps the characteristic most commonly associated with
jazz, and although this seems to be generally true, the peculiar
qualities of lament, sacrifice, and beauty are missing in this
characterization.
Let us narrow our scope by returning to the example of
Budd Johnson's solo in "Segue in C." The structure of theme
and variations is a limitation that hinders musical development, but at the same time it provides the channel through
which improvisation, individuation can take place. 21 Unlike
with literature and the non-temporal arts, with jazz the clock
is ticking. Unlike with the music of Mozart, with jazz the
clock is ticking now. Jazz is urgent, and so we feel it when
Budd Johnson falls behind the beat. We feel it not because we
fear that Johnson is going to lose the beat, but rather because
we can feel his control, his autonomy. [Musical example 14;
Appendix 2, Triplets] The blues and song form provide the
foundations of phrase and harmony that allow for such free
elaboration, that allow for elaborations about the
autonomous individual.
Time flows. Music forms time. Improvised music forms
time in time, perhaps self-referentially. Jazz, if it is great,
forms time in time in history: this individual, this place and
time, your lament, but made beautiful, transcendent.
I do not know if there is great recorded jazz. The portion
of this account that has sought such a work, that has
attempted to determine its characteristics, and that has
argued diffidently in behalf of a few cases, is shamelessly
based on personal testimony. In the final analysis, no amount
of explanation on my part will make jazz or any individual
performance great for you, just as I am powerless to persuade
you, ultimately, that the Mozart-da Ponte operas are great.
Knowledgeable and sensitive human beings point to these
works and tell us they are great. Personally I am certain in one
case, Mozart, and favorably inclined but uncertain in the
other.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
26
Appendix 1: Recorded Music Examples
Musical examples can be heard online by visiting the St. John's Review
webpage (www.stjohnscollege.edu/news/pubs/review.shtml) and clicking
the link "Jazz Examples to Accompany 'Is there Great Jazz?' by Andre
Barbera".
1. Split Kick
2. Now's The Time
Art Blakey Quintet, A Night at Bird/and, val. 1
Clifford Brown (tp), Lou Donaldson (as),
Horace Silver (p), Curly Russell (h), Art
Blakey (d), February 21, 1954, Birdland, New
York City
0:00- 0:58 (Marquette's introduction) and
0:00- 1:05 (Blakey, "Split Kick")
Sonny Rollins Quartet, The Essential Sonny
Rollins: The RCA Years
Sonny Rollins (ts), Herbie Hancock (p), Ron
Carter (b), Roy McCurdy (d), February 14,
1964, New York City
0:00-0:09
3. I Thought About You
Miles [)avis Quintet, The Complete Concert:
1964
Miles Davis (tp), George Coleman (ts),
Herbie Hancock (p), Ron Carter (h), Tony
Williams (p), February 12, 1964,
Philharmonic Hall, Lincoln Center, New York
City
0:00-1:13
4. Hotter Than That
Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five, The Hot
Fiues and Hot Sevens, vol. 3
Louis Armstrong (cor, voc), Kid Ory (tb),
Johnny Dodds (d), Lil Armstong (p), Johnny
St. Cyr (bj), Lonnie Johnson (gt), December
13, 1927, Chicago
0:00-2:16
5. Cherokee
Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet, Clifford
Brown's Fittest Hour
Clifford Brown (tp), Harold Land (ts), Richie
Powell (p), George Morrow (h), Max Roach
(d), February 25, 1955, New York City
0:00-2:48
�BARBERA
6. Segue In C (Alternate)
7. Segue in C (Alternate)
27
Count Basie Orchestra, Basie at Bird/and
Thad Jones, Sonny Cohn, Lennie Johnson,
Snooky Young (tp), Quentin Jackson, Henry
Coker, Benny Powell (tb), Marshall Royal (cl,
as), Frank \Vess (as, ts, fl, arr), Frank Foster,
Budd Johnson (ts), Count Basie (p), Freddie
Green (gt), Eddie Jones (b), Sonny Payne (d),
June 27, 1961, Bird land, New York City
1:04-3:28
Count Basie Orchestra
3:02-3:12
8. Now's The Time
Charlie Parker Quartet, The Essential Charlie
Parker
Charlie Parker (as), AI Haig (p), Percy Heath
(b), Max Roach (d), July 28, 1953, Fulton
Recording Studio, New York City
0:00-0:37
9. Now's The Time
Sonny Rollins Quartet
0:00 -1:40
10. Now's The Time
Sonny Rollins Quartet
0:36-0:52
11. Now's The Time
Sonny Rollins Quartet
0:00-0:15
12. Now's The Time
Art Blakey Quintet, A Night at Bird/and, vol. 2
0:00- 1:39
13. Now's The Time
Sonny Rollins Quartet
0:36-1:10
14. Segue inC (Alternate) Count Basic Orchestra
3:02-3:12
Play List
To locate the music examples on www.rhapsody.com, search by album
title, then by song title.
Album Title
Song Title
Basie At Birdland
Segue In C (Alternate Take)
Clifford Brown's Finest Hour
Cherokee
The Complete Concert: 1964
I Thought About You
The Essential Charlie Parker
Now's The Time
The Essential Sonny Rollins: The RCA Years Now's The Time
�28
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
The Hot Fives And Hot Sevens, Vol. 3
Hotter Than That
A Night At Birdland, Vol. 1
Announcement
Marquette
A Night At Birdland, Vol. 1
Split Kick
A Night At Birdland, Vol. 2
Now's The Time
Appendix 2
Swing Eighths
Triplets
Now's The Time
by Pee Wee
�BARBERA
29
Rollins, 2:5-8
Rollins, head 5-8
Blakey and Silver, head 5-8
Notes
1
Here is Pee \Y/ee Marquette's introduction:
"Ladies and Gentlemen, as you know, we have something special down
here at Birdland this evening, a recording for Blue Note Records. \Vhcn
you applaud for the different passages, your hands goes right over the
records there, so when they play 'em over and over, throughout the
country, you may be some place, and uh say: 'Well, that's my hands on
one of those records that I dug down at Birdland.'
We're bringing back to the bandstand at this time, ladies and gentlemen,
the great Art Blakey and his wonderful group, featuring the new trumpet
sensation, Clifford Brown; Horace Silver on piano; Lou Donaldson on
alto, Curly Russell is on bass.
And let's get together and bring Art Blakey to the bandstand with a great
big round of applause.
How 'bout a big hand, there, for Art Blakey.
Thank y' all."
�30
2
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence (1956; rev. ed., New York: Grove Press,
1979), 195 and 198.
3
I presume that the recording was made over the course of the last night
of the engagement because this specific collection of five musicians was
not a working group. Horace Silver recalls the recording lasting for two
nights over the weekend rather than one (HS 12/20/96). [This format
indicates the date of conversations between the author and Lou
Donaldson (LD) and Horace Silver (HS).] Other sources indicate one
night's recording. In 1975, Michael Cuscuna discovered four takes previously ignored or unknown. These were issued on a separate record as
Volume 3 (BNJ 61002). In addition there are according to Cuscuna four
"rejected takes, some not even complete on tape-never to come out."
(Personal correspondence, 1996) The current two-volume set of CDs
contains all preserved material except for the rejected takes (Blue Note
CDP 7 46519 2, DIDX 1130 and CDP 7 46520 2, DIDX 1131).
4
(HS 12/20/96). Lou Donaldson remembers Marquette serving the
function of 'policeman', who had his hands full keeping the often-rowdy
audience in check (LD 12/18/96).
5
Bill Crow, From Bird/and to Broadway (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1992), 88.
6
The harmonic sequence underlying the piece is 'borrowed' from
another song, "There Will Never Be Another You" by Harry \Varren and
Mack Gordon. It is quite common among jazz musicians to compose a
piece by adding a new theme or melody to the harmonies of a popular
song, and this procedure in itself would not seem to disqualify a work
from greatness.
7
Ted Gioia, The Imperfect Art: Reflections 011 Jazz and Modem Culture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 108-109. Gioia quotes Andy
Warhol: "I like to be bored." The author adds: "That much-if not
most-jazz is boring seems scarcely undeniable; given its extreme
dependence on improvisation, jazz is more likely than other arts to
ramble, to repeat, to bore."
8
Personal correspondence, June 26, 2005.
9
The same holds for "\Vee-Dot" on A Night at Bird/and. Marquette says,
"How 'bout a big hand, for Art Blakey, Art Blakey and his wonderful allstar[s]." But the recording documents show that this version of "\VeeDot" was recorded in the middle of a set.
10
"What Makes Jazz Jazz?" Musings: The Musical \Vorlds of Gunther
Schuller: A Collection of His Writings (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1986), 27. This is a talk given by Schuller at Carnegie Hall on
Dec. 3, 1983. " ... jazz is, unlike many other musical traditions both
�BARBERA
31
European and ethnic/non·Western, a music based on the free unfettered
expression of the individual. This last is perhaps the most radical and
most important aspect of jazz, and that which differentiates it so dramatically from most other forms of music-making on the face of the
globe ... so typically American and democratic .. .I would like particularly
to dwell on one dear way in which jazz distinguishes itself from almost
all other musical expressions ... and that is the way jazz musicians play
their instruments, with particular regard to the aspect of sonority, timbre,
and tone color.,
1l The internet addresses for (1)- (3) and (5) are given here; (4) is no
longer available.
www.terellstafford.com/main.html
www.bobjanuary.com/favorite.httn
www. woodyshaw.com/downbeat 1_cberg. pdf#search =%22Woody%20Sha
w%20DownBeat%22
http://cornchipsandpie.blogspot.com/2006/05/chunky-nuggets.html
12 Portions of the Rite of Spring apparently came from Stravinsky playing
around on the piano. Conversely, jazz musicians repeat solos, a famous
example being Coleman Hawkins's "Body and Soul," the thinking being
that if you have come up with a good solo, why mess with it. Lou
Donaldson admitted to engaging in an activity nearly the opposite to
learning one's solos (LD 7/8/96). In response to my question regarding
whether he practiced his instrument any longer, he said "No." Rather, he
has worked out a way of practicing on stage, at gigs. He plays songs in a
variety of keys and tempos, which amounts to practice.
13
Gioia, The Imperfect Art, 55 and 101.
14
Interview by Studs Terkel of Big Bill Broonzy (vocal), Sonny Terry
(harmonica), and Brownie McGhee (guitar), "Keys to the Highway," May
7, 1957, Chicago, WFMT.
15
Ibid.
16
Indeed another composer, Andy Gibson, combined the riff with a
simple melody to make "The Hucklebuck/' a popular dance and
recording of the late 1940s.
17
The Real Book, vol. 2, 2nd ed. (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Corporation,
no date), 293. The written example includes only the melody and not the
indicated harmonization.
18 Tone 6 substitutes for tone 5, a slight extension of normal movement.
Tone 2 does not substitute for tone 1 but rather points to it. Tone 2
specifies the end while at the same time leaving open the possibility of
additional choruses, a possibility that is realized by the piano choruses
and two subsequent choruses on saxophone.
�32
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
19 The head appears on the upper staff and Rollins's solo on the lower
staff.
20 Rollins had been working on "Now's the Time." Three weeks earlier,
Jan. 24, 1964, he recorded the piece with the same musicians. That
recording lasts sixteen minutes, four times longer than the one under
consideration. In some ways, it sounds like practice for the real thing. My
version of the Jan. 24 recording seems to be pitched in the key of B! And
even if it is in B-flat, the range for Rollins is a fifth above the range for
the Feb. 14 recording. Note also that Hancock only camps in the Jan. 24
recording, and does very little of that, in the course of the sixteen
minutes, perhaps another indication that this is an experiment in the key
of B major.
21
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann
(New York: Random House, 1966), 213. Necessity and "freedom of the
will" become one in artists.
�33
Preformationism In Biology:
From Homunculi To Genetic
Programs
1-
Jorge H. Aigla, M.D.
I. Introduction
Organic beings come to be. The way in which they do so has
been subject to much speculation and debate. In this paper I
shall review some of the ideas put forth regarding generation,
and argue that ways of thinking and seeing in the study of
development have had weighty influence on other areas of
biology.
II. Development
I should begin with what is perhaps the most notorious image
in all of biology: that of a human sperm containing a
miniature organism (Figure 1). I use the word "image"
advisedly, as this is not a drawing of what is seen, nor a
schematic diagram of an object, simplified in order to aid
understanding. Nicolas Hartsoeker produced it in his 1694
Essay de Dioptrique. 1
We would do well to study it attentively: it has detail,
definition, there is no blurriness, and it depicts a familiar
form. It wishes to suggest that a preformed microscopic
human individual is already present, complete, in the male
Jorge H. Aigla, M.D., has been a Tutor at St. John's College in Santa Fe since
1985. This essay is a modified version of a Friday Night Lecture originally
delivered in Santa Fe on December 6, 2002. The lecture was dedicated to
two friends and retiring coileagues: Hans Von Briesen, Director of
Laboratories, and to the late Ralph Swentzell, Tutor. I again dedicate this
essay to them. The author acknowledges his indebtedness to Professor
Richard Lewontin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard
University for his close reading of the essay followed by his helpful and
insightful comments and suggestions.
�34
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
sex cell. This type of what would come
to be known as "preformationism" is
really a 111<Jrphological pre-existence of
a miniaturized adult homunculus. It
rests folded, patiently, apparently
peacefully, and it is already developed.
Once presumably created, this future
being is simply "awaiting the hour of
its birth." 2 All that needs to happen is
growth of its parts by accretion. This
living being will be engendered, but
was not, strictly speaking, reproduced.
The image's beauty and suggestiveness (and cuteness) are nonetheless
plagued by its unreality: Hartsoeker
never saw it, could never have seen it
(given the state of microscopical
science at his time with absence of
corrected objectives for aberration and
astigmatism, without oil immersion for
increased resolution, and lacking
staining techniques for enhanced
contrast and visibility), and lastly, no
one shall ever be able to see it. It
simply does not exist. Hartsoeker
himself explicitly says only that
perhaps one would see this, if there FIGURE 1
were better instruments. 3
In order to expect to see this, or to be able to claim to
have "seen" this cased figurine, several observations and
mental conceptions have to come together. We shall take a
brief detour in our attempt to understand their confluence.
There are two, and only two, options for understanding
development: either the future being and its parts exist in
smaller form from the very beginning, or the adult parts come
�AIGLA
35
to be as products of development from structures that do not
originally resemble them in the least.
For the former "preformationist" possibility, a miniature
form of the future organism is already present, and development is merely unfolding (what was termed in early days
"evolution"), with growth of pre-existing morphological
entities.
Marcelo Malpighi (who had discovered with the aid of
the microscope the capillaries in the lung just four years after
William Harvey's death-1661) was the earliest proponent of
this view, and gave us several drawings in 1673,4 where the
baby chick is all there, from the start. One may be tempted to
disregard this view as nonsensical, but consider: how is one
to explain an apparent gelatinous blob of unformed matter in
the egg, giving rise to and becoming a chick (or a
salamander)? The puzzle of development was solved (in a
way) with the preformationist hypothesis, and it was
explained in purely mechanical terms: unfolding and
enlargement of pre-existing components. The alternative, so
it seemed to Malpighi and his followers, would have to
postulate a mysterious directiveness to the process of development, a vital and, to them, non-material force.
Two thousand years earlier Aristotle clearly understood
the two possibilities, and perspicuously argued against preformationism: "How will the foetus become greater by addition
of something else if that which is added remain unchanged?
But if that which is added can change, then why not say that
the semen from the very first is of such a kind that blood and
flesh can be made out of it, instead of saying that it itself is
blood and flesh?" 5 And wondering how parts of the embryo
get made, he asserts:
Either all the parts, as heart, lung, liver, eye, and
all the rest, come into being together, or in
succession, as is said in the verse ascribed to
Orpheus, for there he says that an animal comes
into being in the same way as the knitting of a net.
That the former (parts coming into being simulta-
�36
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
neously) is not the fact is plain even to the senses,
for some parts are clearly visible already existing
in the embryo, while others are not. 6
This argument of his is one of temporal succession in what
one observes. He concludes: "If the whole animal or plant is
formed from seed or semen, it is impossible that any part of
it should exist ready made in the semen or seed .... " 7 In
addition, his logical division of bodies into matter with form
inseparable from it, makes possible the whole doctrine of
epigenesis: the possibility of pattern emergent as a process,
like plaiting a net or painting a picture. Aristotle does not
address the further impossible consequence of the preformationists: not only is the organism pre-existent, but in this
already formed being, all of its descendants have to be present
-the so-called theory of encasement or fitting.
Trying to make clear the way in which matter and form
jointly come to be in the embryo, Aristotle wrote that "the
female contributes the material for the semen to work upon"'
and that the semen communicates to the material body of that
embryo the power of movement and form.' In this formulation Aristotle is simply being consistent with his notion that
"the mover or agent will always be the vehicle of the form," 10
and also with his conception that "that which produces the
form is always something that possesses it." 11 So the male
provides "the form," what seems to be at once formal,
efficient, and final cause, and the female contributes the
material cause.
Malpighi and Hartsoeker seem to be have clung to these
latter statements of Aristotle, but appear to have disregarded
the same author's foregoing arguments against preformationism. For Aristotle the semen provides the form for the
embryo, not the formed embryo.
Another factor that must have helped Hartsoeker believe
one should eventually be able to see what he delineated is the
observation by Anton van Leeuwenhoek of spermatozoa in
semen in 1680 {which he likened to "animalcules") through
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AIGLA
his microscope (Figure 2), which apparently was able to
magnify specimens 270 timesY It should not be forgotten
that a cell theory (of which I shall speak presently) did not yet
exist for Hartsoeker-it would take 150 years for spermatozoa to be identified as cells by Kolliker in 1841.
In any preparation of human semen, seen with the very
best available optics, the folded foetus cannot be seen; it can
only be imagined. In critical microscopy work, it is difficult
for the eye to see what the mind does not know, and the eyes
may well be blinded by what the mind knows. Further, the
eyes, at times, may see what the mind desires. Hartsoeker's
homunculus is a beautiful example of what I would call
wishful proleptic observation being fitted to preconceived
theoretical commitments. Malebrauche has described this
mode of operation: "The mind should not stop at what the
eye sees, for the vision of the mind is far more penetrating
than the vision of the eye." 13 I beg to differ, and would
venture to say, by contrast, that seeiug with the eye of reasou
may not be the best way of looking. Seeing is a complicated
8
FIGURE 2
1
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
matter. Observation is colored by expectation and theory
(preconception). It may not be possible to encounter scientific
"facts" as data, objectively discovered. The wish to see
something may often well determine what is "discovered."
One could hardly blame Hartsoeker for providing us with his
famous image, notwithstanding the fact that he was not
adhering to the dictum our students are repeatedly urged to
follow: "Make sure you do not merely find what you are
looking for!"
Preformationism does not have to deal with the formidable problem of development as such, and Hartsoeker sided
with the "spermist" sub-school in wishing to find the
miniature organism in the male seed (the other school being
the "ovist").
Another microscopist, Wolff, in 17 64, described
"globules" in animal tissues, and when he aimed his good
instrument (by the day's standards) at the developing chick
egg, he saw no minuscule baby chick; and in cross section, he
discerned layers of spherical structures that eventually gave
rise (or differentiated) to an embryonic organism. He
opposed the preformationists, and his "epigenesis!" school
taught that development started from an entirely homogeneous and unformed mass, acted on by an extraneous forcea "vis essentialis" (a force related to being alive). The camps
had been set, and preformationism with its purely mechanistic tendencies, seemed to have been forever discredited, in
favor of an epigenetic process of differentiation, that in its
inception embraced a form of vitalism, and left us with the
gargantuan problem of true development.
III. Cell Theory
That the development of the cell theory itself was influenced
by other theories in biology is not widely recognized. Of
course atomistic speculations from the physical sciences
played a role; but there is more.
�AlGLA
39
c
In 1665 Robert Hooke had observed pores and box-like
structures in cork, which he christened "cells," but he said
nothing of their possible biological meaning.
Schleiden, studying plant tissues, attempted to explain
what he saw in strictly physico-chemical terms. A good
biologist, he knew of Wolff's publications and eliminated
preformationism altogether from anatomy and embryology.
He applied what must have seemed to him "epigenetic"
considerations to cell formation and development, and in
1838 summarized his work 14 (see Figure 3 15 ). He could illafford to think that cells came from cells (which sounded too
much like preformationism), so cells had themselves to
develop. He made the cell nucleus (discovered by Robert
Brown five years earlier) the center of cell formation, calling
it the "cytoblast." The nucleus itself (or the nucleolus, as his
writings are unclear on this point) separated out of the
formative fluid (the "cytoblastema") by a sort of precipitation
in a "mother liquor," and only then, about it condensed the
rest of the cell (the cytoplasm) and its membrane. He emphasized that plants consist exclusively and entirely of cells and
their products, and an early version of the cell theory was
born.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Notice that for Schleiden cells are mostly structural
elements and without physiological import, nor is there a
continuity of cells or of life in a precise sense. Also, we must
remark, this epigenetic cellular thinking fits well with spontaneous generation.
Schwann, a colleague of Schleiden, accepted this theory
of cell formation, and he deserves credit for extending it to
animals in 1839. 16 He also added some thoughts about
function and metabolism to this intermediate cell theory.
Schwann described the formation of blood corpuscles in
excruciating detail, ascribing also to the precipitated or
crystallized nucleus the power of cell formation de novo.
Let us pause and regard the engraving of Figure 3. After
much consideration I have come to the conclusion that cells
just do not look like this, and I say so after carefully studying
many different plant tissues, and having studied for over
three decades animal tissues nuder the microscope. The only
thing that resembles to any degree this illustration are figures
of the special form of cell death called apoptosis. Apoptosis is
programmed cell death, was characterized by the pathologist
Kerr in 1972, 17 and is now one of the most widely studied
genetic molecular phenomena. Cells that die due to a genetically programmed mechanism in apoptosis show nuclear
shrinkage, condensation, fragmentation, and in contrast to
other forms of cell death (necrosis), exhibit no inflammatory
response. Could Schleiden and Schwann have seen apoptosis
and interpreted it with the eye of their cellular epigenetic
framework? That is, did they take dying cells for cells
forming? It is impossible to tell, as this type of cell death
apparently plays a minor role, if at all, in plant tissues. Or
could perhaps their preparations have had bad fixation and
poor staining, and they be describing artifacts? This is
unlikely. What is possible for me to tell in reference to
Schwann's writings on blood cell formation, is that he was
imposing a chronological order on what he saw statically,
thinking the nucleus of red cells came before their membrane
and cytoplasm, whereas the order of development is precisely
�AIGLA
41
the opposite: the nucleus of red cells becoming smaller and
eventually being extruded, Schwann inferred, with the aid of
the imagination, a dynamic sequence of events in fixed
tissues, and he erred. He wished what he saw to depict and
imply what he wanted.
It is intriguing that the conceptual frame of epigenesis,
and the disproval of preformationism by Wolff in embryology, carried over into cell theory, retarding it and giving it
an originally erroneous mechanism for cell genesis.
This mistake was brilliantly dispelled by the pathologist
Virchow. In 1860, twelve years after Schleiden and Schwann,
he defined the cell as "the ultimate morphological and
functional element in which there is any manifestation of
life. " 18 For Virchow all cells (including abnormal ones like
those found in cancer growths) do come from pre-existing
cells, and he rightly saw Schleiden and Schwann's theory of
free cell formation as nothing but an avatar of de novo
spontaneous generation; and this, before Pasteur's work of
1860 and 1864, disproving once and for all the discontinuity
of life. At last the cell theory developed into its mature form,
and a unity underlying the diversity of living organisms was
established. The word "Biology" (coined by Lamarck and
Treviranus) now, finally, became meaningful.
The capping of the cell theory comes with Walter
Flemming, 19 who in 1879 described cell division or mitosis:
not only did cells come from cells, as Virchow showed, but
now all nuclei come from pre-existing nuclei.
rv: Modern Embryology
Once the sperm and the egg were also recognized to be cells,
investigators turned their eyes to the process of fertilization.
Hertwig20 in 1876 and 1885 determined that this event is due
to the joining of the male and female nuclei. Heredity must
then be due to the transmission of a material substance, and
the male contributes to the new organism some matter as well
as the female (contrary to Aristotle's teachings), and it is the
nucleus that is embodying this matter.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Van Beneden21 in 1883 saw that the colored stubby bodies
discovered by Flemming in cell division (and now named
chromosomes) played a role in fertilization. Studying the
round worm Ascaris megalocepha/us bivalens, which has four
chromosomes in each adult cell, he observed that two
chromosomes came from the father's sperm and two from the
mother's egg, before the new zygote formed and divided.
Although he does not say so explicitly, the hereditary
substance now seemed to be confined to these nuclear bodies.
The chromosomes then, are equally contributed by the
parents, and are constant in number for the species.
With the recognition that all cells arise from cell division
in adults as well as during embryonic development starting
with the zygote, the next question tackled was: How do cells
become different and give rise to a complex organism?
Let us turn to the experimental embryological work of
Roux, Driesch, and Spemann and Mangold. Roux 22 destroyed
one of the two blastomeres at the two-cell stage in the frog,
and got a half-embryo. Notice his experiment constitutes a
defect study. He concluded that the potency of a cell equals
its fate, and that each cell is self-differentiating, the whole
organism being simply the sum of independently developed
parts. In a sense, he advocated a preformation of limited,
fated, and pre-assigned potentialities, and established embryology as an experimental science of proximate causations and
mechanisms.
Roux's experimental results ran into difficulties with the
work of Driesch. 23 When this investigator separated (not
destroyed) one of the blastomeres of the sea urchin at the
same two-cell stage, he got a half-sized full embryo. Notice
his experiments are isolation studies. These results induced
Driesch to embrace an extreme vitalism, postulating a
nonmechanical entelechy (Factor E). 24 For what machine, if
cut in half, could still function normally? The potency of an
early cell is not preformed, and turns out to be much greater
than its fate. The resulting half-sized embryo strongly
suggests that cells at very early stages of development are
�AIGLA
43
pluripotent. Eventually Driesch's thinking, without a mysterious non-material "entelechy," became known as holistic
organicism: the organism is more than a mere summation of
individual parts added together.
The climax of this part of the story comes with Spemann
and Mangold25 who in 1924 showed that a portion of tissue
from a newt embryo could induce the formation and
production of other tissues, even of an incomplete new newt,
in a recipient. Developmental possibilities, then, are not
totally preformed, and many events in morphogenesis must
be the result of cell-to-cell interactions.
It must be emphasized that in Roux's experiments the
killed cell remained attached to the viable one, and the developing embryo did not "sense" this cell was dead. If the killed
cell had been separated, as in the work of Dreisch, the
embryo would then have compensated (regulated) its development into a (smaller) whole embryo. Driesch's work
reveals that a developing organism is a whole, and that its
plan for differentiation at any time and stage of its embryology lies in the totality of its being. This does not mean that
any and every alteration in a part of an organism will
interfere with the normal development of the rest of the
complete organism-this would be a claim of an extreme
form of wholism. The developmental process is a regulative
one, where the embryo has the ability to grow normally even
when some portions are removed or rearranged. The embryo
is a "harmonious equipotential system"26 because all the
potentially independent parts function together to form an
organism. Driesch's concept of "regulation" implies that cells
must interact with each other in complex ways, and the work
of Spemann and Mangold demonstrates that one tissue can
direct the development of another neighboring tissue. The
small grafted region in their experiments was called "The
Organizer" since it controls the organization of the complete
embryonic body. The organizer is a piece of tissue; tissues are
made up of cells; cells contain nuclei with chromosomes
within.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
V. Chromosomes
Mendel's work was published in 1865, and only
unearthed in 1900, after much embryological and cytological
work had been performed. Shortly after the re-discovery, in
1902 Boveri 27 united the sciences of embryology and
cytology. In his experiments he demonstrated that normal
development depends not on the number of chromosomes
per se, but in the normal combination of a complete set of
these structures. He managed to fertilize a sea urchin egg with
two sperms, so three sets of chromosomes became apportioned to four cells after the second zygotic division. The
chromosomes were distributed asymmetrically, by chance, to
the daughter cells. When these cells were gently separated
and allowed to develop, only those with at least one whole set
of chromosomes gave rise to a normal individual.
Furthermore, the abnormal embryos were abnormal in
different ways. His conclusion was seminal: chromosomes are
functional individuals, that is, each chromosome must possess
(and give rise to) different qualities.
The same year brought the work of the American Walter
Sutton, 28 who painstakingly documented the continuity and,
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45
more importantly, the distinct individuality and physiological
singularity of chromosomes in the Giant grasshopper. Figure
4 shows his most elegant camera Iucida drawings (not
diagrams or photographs) of chromosome groups. They are
unprecedented and unequaled, even when compared to
modern ones, in resolution and accuracy. Chromosomes are
then continuous in a given species from one generation to
another, from one cell to its descendants, and are also
morphological individuals one from another. They are the
preformed material substrate for heredity and development
in living organisms.
In truth, the chromosomal theory of inheritance, meaning
that chromosomes are the bearers of hereditary factors or
traits, had been established by Boveri and Sutton. But some
biologists wanted stronger, unequivocal evidence or proof.
Thomas Hunt Morgan, a senior colleague of Sutton at
Columbia University, was originally trained as an embryologist, and of course, detested any suggestion of preformationism. He was "an experimentalist at heart" (his own
words) and very much disliked inferences in biology. 29 From
the start he opposed the chromosomal theory of heredity,
since to ascribe to chromosomes the ability to confer
character traits must have carried the vice of preformationism
for him. We must add that the controversy over what had
exclusive responsibility for hereditary development, either
the nucleus itself or the cytoplasm instead, was not yet totally
settled. Furthermore, Morgan's opposition stood despite the
fact that sex determination seemed by then to be caused,
quite clearly, by chromosomes.
When he turned to genetics, studying the fruit fly
Drosophila, Morgan was unconvinced that a strict association
between specific characters and specific chromosomes
existed. He read in the work of Boveri and of Sutton only a
parallel behavior, during cell division and fertilization, of
chromosomes and Mendelian traits. His apprehensions may
strike us as peculiar but are not altogether awkward: it is
indeed strange to suggest that the shape or color of an organ
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
in a living being was preformed in some as yet mysterious
way, in these stubby colored structures known as chromosomes. Although we do not have now, as with Hartsoeker,
any preexistence of a complete homunculus, our eye meets
preformed materials that are passed on and could determine
form and function.
Morgan's paper of 1910 30 is extraordinary in many ways.
In no other does one see the struggle an author is undergoing
in arriving at an inevitable conclusion that contradicts his
previous beliefs. He prevents himself throughout from even
using the word "chromosome"; he establishes that the traits
for sex and white eye color are "combined," but avoids
calling them physically linked. He refutes his own distrust
and establishes the chromosomal theory of inheritance by
demonstrating that one specific character corresponds to the
behavior of one specific "factor" (later shown to be a
chromosome, visible under the microscope).
Fortunately in this case, and unlike in the history of cell
theory, the suspicion against preformationism did not retard
progress in genetics. Morgan himself was soon converted,
becoming one of the staunch advocates for ascribing to
chromosomes their genetic role through his further work and
that of his students, particularly Sturtevant and Bridges (who
provided direct proof of the chromosomal theory of inheritance in a most difficult paper).
VI. The Genetic Program
Chromosomes were found to be constituted largely of
deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). DNA was shown to be the
material responsible for conferring visible (phenotypic)
traits. 31 The molecular structure of DNA was determined in
1953,32 and soon after the language of the genetic code. DNA
is the preformed element in natural living beings, and it
controls development-to a degree. In other words, development could be said to be preformational as regards genes
and their hereditary influences, but rigorously epigenetic in
actual constructional activities from undifferentiated begin-
�AIGLA
47
nings. And this leads us to the concept of the so-called
"genetic program," and to new problems and questions.
There are really two problems that both genetics and
embryology must address in order to get an adult organism
from a fertilized egg: cells becoming different (differentiation) and cells producing shapes (morphogenesis). Both
processes appear to be directed, and with the rise of information theory and the knowledge of the molecular biology of
instructions and mechanisms for protein coding by the DNA
base triplets, the notion of a genetic program is quite
reasonable. What exactly do biologists mean by a genetic
program? Where is it coded? And if it is coded in DNA, how
so?
First, the program is one of combinations of three
molecules (bases) determining an amino acid, and about three
hundred of these amino acids specifying an average protein.
If the genetic program has a language, the alphabet is made
up of single bases. It must be noted that a protein is not even
completely specified by its amino acid sequence, originally
coded by the DNA. The intracellular environment plays a
role in the final folded stable state of proteins, and every
protein has alternate stable states. The future shape of a string
of amino acids is "open," and the actual final configuration
only "closes" through environmental conditions."
Secondly, the genetic program must be an open one.
Evidence for this was provided one hundred years ago by
Harrison, 34 who observed independent differentiation in
nerve fiber outgrowth from single cells. Frog protoplasmic
fibers extended from nerve cell bodies into any region where
frog lymph was present in a Petri dish (in vitro)-a result not
consistent with a rigidly preordained genetic program. That
the program is modifiable and plastic is obvious from the
experimental results of Spemann and Mangold, and from
recent work with stem cells. Also, the phenomena of regeneration of limbs in some animals, of memory and of learning,
imply that the program is not rigid, yet has some specificity. 35
It is worth emphasizing that both-cell differentiation and
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
morphogenesis-are the result not only of a genetic program,
but also of what some have appropriately designated as a
"somatic program," consisting of the whole embryo at any
particular time and stage. 36 Neighboring cells and their
respective positions cause and induce changes in cell shape,
adhesion, motility, migration and function, and in the shape
of organs and of the organism as a whole. The program is not
a "recipe" for the final product; environmental information
and random developmental noise enter into a notcompletely-determined process."
Lastly, it is essential that the program turned out to be not
a descriptive program, as was thought previously (specifying
what the cell or the whole organism will look like), but
instead a program of instructions describing how to make an
organism. 38 Consider a structure in origami. A set of data
completely specifying its final configuration would be
extremely difficult to collect, and would not at all explain
how to achieve the end form. It is much easier to formulate
instructions on how to fold a piece of paper; simple instructions about folding have complex spatial consequences. In the
same way during development, gene action sets in motion
sequences of events that can bring about profound changes in
the embryo. If the program were the full description of the
organism, modern molecular biologists could rail again, this
time with an ultramicroscopic intonation, against preformationism. This generative program of instructions is carried
out on an epigenetic basis, and the road from DNA to
proteins to phenotype is extremely complicated and
tortuous." It is also the case that the environment can
influence, to a great degree, the variable expression of the
genetic program. 40 The embryo not so much develops as
emerges from the fertilized egg; it reveals itself, and one may
be tempted to say that it is almost evoked.
For some modern molecular biologists like Changeaux (a
famous collaborator with Jacob and Monod), any talk of a
developmental program is pointless, 41 and he wishes to
dispense with the term altogether, placing exclusive emphasis
�AIGLA
49
on epigenetic processes. He arrives at this (to me) extreme
view from his work on the development of neural connections in the nervous system (a sophisticated extension of
Harrison's work), where much plasticity occurs. This
malleability is only to be expected, so why is Changeaux so
much against the concept of a program? I am afraid that a
specter is haunting him: the specter of preformationism.
Rightly understood, a genetic program need not totally
determine and predict exactly what the precise shape of a
given nerve cell or of a nervous system with its billions of
synaptic connections, or of a whole vertebrate, will be. No
animal or plant is fully shaped and entirely determined by its
DNA. In this sense, living beings are not absolutely
predictable and may never be "computable. "42 Speaking of a
genetic program does make sense, especially if one considers
that this program is an historically evolved one, 43 and does
not provide an unalterable architectural blueprint, but only a
set of instructions for·the construction of a living being, and
at the same time, the means to carry it out.
Prominent developmental and molecular biologists have
recently wondered whether we "understand" development at
all. 44 The implications for a philosophy of biology are deep;
what seems to be at stake is our understanding of the concept
of "understanding" itself. It has become nearly impossible to
discern or even expect any broad general principles in embryology,45 and there may be not mnch more to explain than
what is observed. 46 We have an alphabet (nucleotide bases)
and words for development (triplets coding for amino acids
that make up proteins). What appears to be wanting, and has
so far remained elusive, is a "grammar of development." 47 My
guess is that this will not be forthcoming merely from the
completed human genome project that ascribes to portions of
DNA in different chromosomes the coding for the various
proteins that help constitute a living organism.
The foregoing discussion should result in a change in
conceptualization in the posing of the problem of differentiation and development. The old "classical" question was:
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
"How does an apparently homogenous, small ball of yolkladen cytoplasm with a nucleus, turn into a large, complicated, highly organized adult with fully functioning organs?"
Now we had better ask: "How does the encoded structure,
compressed into the specialized maternal organ-the eggbecome transformed into the realized structure of an adult
organism?"48
VII. Epilogue
I have attempted to investigate the role of an idea, preformationism, in several areas of biology: developmental
anatomy, cell theory, the chromosomal theory of inheritance,
and the concept of a genetic program. Beholding an egg
should remind us that it embodies, for Aristotle, a world of
explanation. It should be apparent that for us, one of the
greatest mysteries lies hidden within, and what is more,
comes out of it.
Notes
1
Nicolas Hartsoekcr, Essay de Dioptrique (Paris, 1694), 230.
2
F. Jacob, The Logic of Life (Princeton, Nj: Princeton University Press,
1993), 20.
3
Hartsoeker, Essay de Dioptrique, 229.
4
L. \'V'olpert et alia, Principles of Development (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998), 3.
5
Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals, Bk. I, Ch. 8, 723a15-20, A.
Platt, trans., in The Complete \Vorks of Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
6
Ibid., Bk. II, Ch. 1, 734a16-22.
7
Ibid., 734a33-35.
8
Ibid., 729a29-32.
9
Ibid., 729b5-8.
10
Aristotle, Physics, Bk. Ill, Ch. 2, 202a9. R.P. Hardie and R.K. Gayc,
trans., in The Complete \Vorks of Aristotle, ed.
Princeton University Press, 1984).
11
Ibid., Bk. VIJJ, Ch. 5, 257b10.
J. Barnes
(Princeton, NJ:
�51
AIGLA
12 E. Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1982), 138.
13
Nicholas Malcbranche, De fa recherche de Ia
1700), 48.
verite, Vol. I, (Paris,
14
M.J. Schleidcn, Contributions to Phytogenesis, H. Smith, trans.
(London: for the Sydenham Society, 1847 [orig. 1838]).
15
R. Virchow, Cellular Pathology (London: John Churchill, 1860), 10
(Figure 4).
16 T. Schwarm, Microscopical Researches into the Structure and Growth of
Animals and Plants, H. Smith, trans. (London: for the Sydenham Society,
1847 [orig. 1839]).
17
]. F. R. Kerr ct alia, "Apoptosis: A Basic Biological Phenomenon with
long-ranging Implications in Tissue Kinetics," British Journal of Cancer,
26 (1972): 239.
18
Virchow, Cellular Pathology, 3.
19
In B.P. Voeller, The Chromosome Theory of Iuheritance (New York:
Appleton Century Crofts, 1968), 43-47.
20
In Voeller, The Chromosome Theory of Inheritance, 4-8; 26-33.
21
Ibid., 54-59.
22
In B.H. \Villier and J.M. Oppenheimer, Foundations of Experimental
Embryology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1964), 2-28.
23
In \Villier and Oppenheimer, Foundations of Experimental
Embryology, 38-50.
24
Hans Dreisch, The Science and Philosophy of the Organism, vol. I
(London: Adam and C. Black, 1907).
25
In \Vrllier and Oppenheimer, Foundations of Experimental
Embryology, 144-184.
26
Hans Dreisch, The Science and Philosophy of the Organism.
27
In \'\i'iliier and Oppenheimer, Foundations of Experimental
Embryology, 74-90.
28
W. Sutton, "On the Morphology of the Chromosome Group in
Brachystola Magna," Biological Bulletin IV, no. 1 (1902): 24-39.
29
S.F. Gilbert, "In Friendly Disagreement: Wilson, Morgan and the
Embryological Origins of the Gene Theory," American Zoologist 27
(1987): 797-806; S.F. Gilbert, "The Embryological Origins of the Gene
Theory," Journal of the History of Biology II, no. 2 (1978): 307-351.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
52
30
T.H. Morgan, "Sex Limited Inheritance in Drosophilia, '' Science
XXXII, no. 812 (1910): 120-122.
31
O.T. Avery, CJv1 Macleod, and M. McCarty, journal of Experimental
Medicine 79 (1944): 137-158.
31
J.D. \Vatson and F.H.C. Crick, "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids,"
Nature 171 (1953): 737-738.
33
D. Whitford, "Protein folding in vivo and in vitro," in Proteins:
Structure and Function (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2005).
34
R.G. Harrison, "Observations on the Living Developing Nerve Fiber,"
Anatomical Record 1 (1907): 116-118.
35
E. Mayr, "Cause and Effect in Biology," Science 134 (1961): 15011506.
36
E. :Niayr, This is Biology (Cambridge, lvlA: Harvard University Press,
1997), 21, 171.
37
R. Lewontin, The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment
(Cambridge, .MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
38
\X'olpert, Principles of Development, 21.
39
Science 295 (1 March 2002): 1661-1682, see complete issue.
40
Lewontin, The Triple Helix.
41
J.P. Changeaux, Neuronal Man (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1997), 195.
41 L. \Vol pert, "Development: Is the egg computable or could we generate
an angel or a dinosaur?" in M.P. Murphy and L.A.J. O'Neill, What is
Life? The Next Fifty Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995), 57-66.
43
.Mayr, "Cause and Effect in Biology"; Mayr, This is Biology.
44
L.Wolpert, "Do We Understand Development?" Science 266 (1994):
571-572.
45
Ibid.
46
R. Lewin, "Why is Development so Illogical?" Science 224 (1984):
1327-1329.
47
Ibid.
48
E. Mayr, "Comments on Theories and Hypotheses in Biology," Boston
Studies in Philosophy of Science 5 (1968): 450-456.
�53
The Persians and the Parthenon:
Yoke and Weave
Part Two: The Parthenon
1
Mera J. Flaumenhaft
"Who are you and what is your family? .. .How old were you
when the Medes came?"
Xenophanes
1. The Building and the Polis
There are no words on the Parthenon (Figure 1). So in one
sense it is true that, unlike Aeschylus's Persians, the building
offered Athens a "visual, non verbal" education. 37 But, like
every other feature of this logos-loving city, this silent marvel
in marble invites all who see it to articulate in words the
story-or multiple stories-it too tells about Athens and
Persia.
The first is the story of the building itself, the story of its
building. Like Aeschylus's play, it has its origin in the Persian
wars. But its site far predates these events, reminding us of
ancient times when Athens was a fortified community
centered around a palace monarchy. From its earliest days,
Athens, like Persia, shaped and rearranged the natural
features of the environment to serve the demands of its
communal life. In the early Bronze Age (1300-1200 B.C.), the
Mera Flaumenhaft is a tutor at the Annapolis campus of St. John1s College.
This essay is in two parts. Part One of this essay appeared in the previous
issue of The St. Jolm's Review, volume 50, number 2. Notes are continuous.
The photos included in the text are courtesy of Ann M. Nicgorski,
Willamette University, 1998. Dr. Nicgorski's excellent collection of images of
all the parts of the Parthenon discussed in this essay is available and easy to
use at www.willamette.edu/cla/Ytrvicws/parthenon/. For websites and books
with a fuller selection of photos, see the Bibliography before the Endnotes.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
FIGURE l (Courtesy of A. Nicgors.ki)
Acropolis, "high city," was artificially terraced and shored up
by a wall of cut rocks. So old and huge was this rampart that
it was called the "Cyclopean" wall; it was said to be the work
of a barely-civilized pre-human people, or of the legendary
Giants under the direction of Athena, who had defeated them
in an early war between the Gods and the Giants. 38
Eventually, the Acropolis above it became the site of a
fortified citadel from which the Athenian royal family ruled
the surrounding population.
Legend also told how Poseidon and Athena long ago vied
for primacy in this land. The sea was Poseidon's claim to
power; he caused a pool of salt water to appear on the rock.
Athena brought forth an olive tree as evidence of her power.
The judges ruled that the olive was the more valuable gift and
the goddess became the patroness of the city whose name she
shared. The incident was memorialized in the pool and the
olive that remained in the Erechtheion, one of the earliest
temples on the Acropolis. There is a story that, in 480 B.C.,
on the day after the Persians burned the Acropolis, the men
whom Xerxes sent to sacrifice in the shrine fonnd that "the
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55
olive had put forth from its stump a shoot of about a cubit's
length" (Hdt., 8.55). By the early sixth century, the hill was
no longer dominated by a royal palace, but had become a
major sanctuary, accessible to all by a wide ceremonial ramp
that led visitors to a temple with an altar to a small olivewood
statue of Athena Polias, that is, "of the city." This carved
figure, xoanon, wrapped in her pep/as (robe), remained a
focus of civic religious life for centuries.
The statue had such close relations with Athens that, like
the supposedly autochthonous human population, it was
associated with no other earthly place. Its origins were
unknown; it was said to have fallen on this spot from the
sky, 39 the home of Athena's father, Zeus, on whose unlimited
empire Xerxes wished to model his own. Unlike the shadowy
legend of the statue's beginnings, the story of the birth of the
goddess herself was well known. So, indeed, are those of the
other Greek gods. Anthropomorphic in looks and character,
these gods are immortal, but not eternal; each came into
being, and each is associated with partial aspects of nature or
human experience. The story of a god's genesis often points
to the characteristic nature of that god. The full divinity of
each is most fully expressed when all are considered together.
But, unlike Persian multiplication, pantheon does not mean
mere aggregate or multiplied strength. Rather, it means a
defined plurality in which the elements are related, but differ
from, and are even in tension with, each other, and so
compose a viable and complete whole. Once again, as we saw
in Part One of this essay, the metaphor of well-woven fabric
comes to mind.
It was predicted that Athena's mother, Metis, whose
name means "cunning," "craft," or "counsel," would give
birth to a child excelling in these same qualities, one who
might rule the world. So Zeus, the child's father, swallowed
the pregnant Metis. When the time came, Hephaestus, also
crafty and cunning, split Zeus's head with an axe and
delivered the baby. And so Athena appeared in the world:
full-grown, fully armed, with an extraordinary intelligence,
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the very personification of immediacy, wily craft, and
resourcefulness. Not born from a mother, never to be one
herself, the maiden, parthenos, became the patron goddess of
a city of extraordinary masculine activity, one that excelled
not only in physical strength, as evidenced in war, but also in
the political arts of public speech and commerce and the
technological arts of agriculture, horse chariots, and ships.
But this child of her father was patron to women as well. Her
craft was manifest in the spinning and weaving of wool, as
well as of words. The image of her owl appeared on loom
weights that remained indoors, at home, with the women, as
well as on the currency exchanged in the open-air Agora
below the Acropolis, where men congregated to conduct the
commercial affairs of the city. Pallas Athena stood behind the
pep/as-weaving women and the spear-carrying warriors
whose lives together made a complete human city. The civic
fabric of Athens was woven from her arts, equally at work in
men and women ..
The annual Persian feast to celebrate the Great King's
birthday was called "tuktu," that is, "perfection" (teleion,
Hdt., 9.11 0). Athens' greatest festival celebrated not the birth
of a divinized despot who claimed that he was different from
all other men, but that of a civic deity who really was. The
meaning of her pep/as, in contrast to Xerxes' in Aeschylus's
play, reveals much about the two regimes. 40 There were two
related summer festivals devoted to Athena, one involving
part of the city and one all of it, both focused on the
olivewood image and what she wore. In May, the women
celebrated the Plynteria, the "washing rites." Gently
undressing and veiling the olivewood Polias, they carried her
pep/as to a spring, or perhaps as far as the sea, to launder it.
In the meantime, in the Kallynteria, the "adorning rites," the
crude and featureless image was prepared to receive the clean
garment. She was bathed and oiled and decorated with
jewelry. Robed again, she was replaced near her altar in the
old temple to await the most important festival of the year,
which took place in the following month, and bore her name.
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57
From as early as the seventh century B.C., the June
Panathenaia, the festival of "all Athenians," culminated in a
citywide procession in which Athena's people presented her
with her annual birthday gift, a new peplos. By the next
century the festival included musical and rhapsodic performances, athletic and equestrian contests, and the awarding of
tripods, figurines, and large vessels of olive oil to those who
excelled in honor of the goddess who brought the olive.
The weaving of the peplos for the olivewood statue was
begun, appropriately, nine months before the goddess's
birthday celebration during a festival of crafts, when the
loom's warp-the upright cords-was set up by nine women
"workers," ergastinai, from designated aristocratic Athenian
families and several seven to nine year old girls dedicated to
the service of Athena. These children lived on the Acropolis
for the nine months and helped weave the pep/os. This bright
purple and yellow, woolen "story-doth" was decorated with
a tapestry-like depiction of Athena's exploits in the victory of
the Gods over the Giants. As we shall see, the Parthenon, like
other Athenian works, repeatedly associates this mythical
victory with Athens' historical victory over Persia. In the early
celebrations of the Panathenaia, the peplos was a rectangle of
about five by six feet and would have fit the human-sized
wooden image. Later, it may have been as big as a ship's sail
and, like real sails, would have been made by sewing several
loom weavings together. 41 The larger peplos was probably
made by professional male weavers for the Greater
Panathenaia every fourth year 42 and may have been exhibited
in the old temple of Athena Polias after the festival. Before
that, however, the pep/os was transported, perhaps on a
wheeled ship-cart, from the northwest city gate near the
Kerameikos district along a processional route to the Agora,
to the base of the Acropolis, and then carried up to the top
for presentation to the goddess. The ship "float" may have
been made from a Persian trireme captured at Salamis. Like
the wooden benches in the theater, and the roof and internal
decorations of the Odeion, which were made of Persian masts
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
and spars,43 it would have been an explicit reminder of the
Persian defeat. Again, the analogy of the Spanish Armada
makes vivid the attempt to keep an averted disaster literally
before one's eyes. In the hall of Gray's Inn in London, a
carved wooden screen thought to have come from a flagship
in the Spanish Armada has served a similar function for
centuries. It was rescued by firemen when the building was
badly damaged during the London Blitz and survives today to
remind the small island nation of its unlikely survival of both
Spanish and Nazi attempts to invade and conquer it. 44
How can we understand the festival fabrication rituals on
which this ancient city and its citizens spent so much time and
effort and money? Both the weaving and the civic procession
are prime examples of the ways in which the democratic polis
produced and maintained itself as a civic community.
Representatives from all parts of the population-old and
young, men and women, citizens and resident aliens, slaves,
and workers in many different crafts-participated in the
preparations that were overseen by a large number of administrative officials. The weaving at the center of the
Panathenaia was thus the occasion for weaving together not
only the pep/os, but also the different elements of the
Athenian city. The prescribed rituals and legal instructions
concerning the workers, places, times, materials, patterns,
colors, and the delivery of the woolen cloth occupied the
attention of much of the population. One can observe the farreaching effects of such "material" rituals in the building of
the ark and tabernacle by the wandering Israelites; it kept
them busy and made them obedient, law-abiding, and
devoted to what they had worked so hard on. The same
effects are aimed at in the annual festival that removes and
replaces the K'aaba cover in Mecca, and in Christian processions of a beautifully dressed image of a patron saint, like the
annual fiesta for La Conquistadora in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
In their outlook and technology, Athenians looked to the
new, the future, and change. At the same time these rituals
held them to the old, the past, and the recurring. Festival
�FLAUMENHAFT
59
preparations and participation compelled these self-sufficient
and resourceful citizens to recognize their dependence on
what was beyond their control. Free and self-governing, the
Athenians on such occasions devoted their powers and
resources to obedience to laws and the service of old traditions and gods. If, in celebrating Athena, they were simultaneously celebrating their own achievements and character,
the rituals in honor of the goddess seem designed to remind
them also of their limitations. By the middle of the fifth
century, the birth of Athena Parthenos, her victories over
Poseidon and the Giants, her procession, and her peplos
would all be pictured on the most outstanding building on the
Acropolis. For that fabrication and its effects on the city we
must return to the events memorialized in Aeschylus's
tragedy.
At the battle of Marathon in 490 B.C. a small Athenian
army and their allies defeated a massive Persian force that had
traveled vast distances by land and sea, transforming even the
shape of the lands they traversed, to conquer resisting cities
in Greece. 6,400 subjects of the great king died at Marathon.
The Athenians lost 192 citizen hoplites. In the aftermath of
this unlikely victory, Athens began to build a new temple on
the south side of the Acropolis in honor of her patron
goddess. This required extending the south platform of the
Acropolis, which dropped too steeply to accommodate the
planned temple. Although much work had been done, the
Marathon Hekatompedon ("hundred-footer" temple) was
still unfinished when the Persians returned under Xerxes in
480. This time they reached Athens itself and burned the
entire city, including the unfinished temple. Before the
Persians arrived, almost the entire population of Athens had
been evacuated to Troezen and to the nearby islands of
Aegina and Salamis, to which they probably brought the
olivewood image of their goddess. 45 As Aeschylus reminds his
Athenian audience, the religious and political life of the polis
lay not in its streets and buildings, but in the characteristic
activities and attitudes of its citizens. The boule (council)
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
continued to meet at Salamis, even as those it governed saw
smoke rising from the burning buildings and their contents,
including the peploi of former years, 46 on the Acropolis. A
year after Xerxes' defeat at Salamis, the force that had
remained in Greece with the Persian general Mardonins was
decisively smashed by the Athenians and their allies at the
battle of Plataea.
Here the story of the Parthenon almost ended, for after
the victory the Greek allies took an oath:
I will not set life before freedom ... having
conquered the barbarians in the war .. .I will not
rebuild any of the temples that have been burnt
and destroyed by the barbarian, but I will let them
be left as a memorial to those who come after of
the sacrilege of the barbarian. 47
This way of remembering through preserving ruins is seen in
the preserved parts of the cathedral the Nazis destroyed at
Coventry and was urged in recent deliberations about what,
if anything, should replace New York skyscrapers destroyed
by twenty-first century barbarians. The rubble in Athens was
left to lie or was used haphazardly in the hasty fortification
and reconstruction of the city. But in the repaired north wall
of the Acropolis some of the column drums from the
unfinished temple to Athena were deliberately placed so that
they could be seen from the restored Agora, the marketplace,
below. These pillars remain on view today.
Thucydides tells the story of the recovery of the victorious, but destroyed, city of Athens (1.89-108). Domestic and
civic buildings were rebuilt, and the port at Piraeus was laid
out and fortified. Despite Lacedaemonian objections, long
walls were built to the sea, and the Athenian naval force was
expanded. Most of the Aegean and coastal cities became allies
of Athens in the Delian League to keep the seas open and to
discourage future Persian invasions. Before long, the allies
preferred, and were encouraged, to give money to Athens and
let it build the ships necessary to protect them all. These cities
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61
soon found themselves members of an alliance that was
rapidly coming to be dominated by its strongest city. In 454
B.C. the League's treasury was moved from Delos to Athens.
When peace was concluded with Persia in 449 B.C., the
Athenians summoned all the Greeks to a general assembly to
discuss future safety and to reconsider the Plataean oath not
to rebuild sacred places. One consideration was to be that the
Greek allies had failed to sacrifice to the gods who had saved
them from the Persians. Pressured by the Lacedamonians,
who declined to attend, and resenting the growing power of
Athens, no other League members showed up, and Athens
decided unilaterally to continue policing the seas and
collecting tribute.
At this point Pericles proposed rebuilding and enlarging
Athena's temple on the Acropolis. His oligarchic enemies in
the assembly objected to spending the money of the Delian
League for an Athenian project, charging that they would be
"gilding and bedizening our city .. .like a wanton woman
[who] adds to her wardrobe precious stones and costly statues
and temples worth their millions" (Plut. Pericles, Xll}. 48
Pericles countered that the allies were "owed no account of
their moneys" as long as Athens effectively "carried on the
war for them and kept off the Barbarians" (Plut. Pericles,
XII). Plutarch describes the enthusiasm with which the
populace then embraced this vast public works project. It
would call many arts into play and involve long
periods of time, in order that the stay-at-homes,
no whit less than the sailors and sentinels and
soldiers, might have a pretext for getting a
beneficial share of the public wealth ... So then the
works arose, no less towering in their grandeur
than inimitable in the grace of their outlines, since
the workmen eagerly strove to surpass themselves
in the beauty of their handicraft. And yet the most
wonderful thing about them was the speed with
which they arose. (Plut. Pericles, XII-XIII)
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Here Plutarch emphasizes the competitive spirit and the
speed that, like the swift victory at Salamis, characterized all
things Athenian. When the oligarchs continued to complain
about the great expense of the Parthenon, Pericles offered to
fund the undertaking himself, as years before, he had funded
the production of the Persians, and as, more recently, other
wealthy individuals had underwritten other buildings and
beautification projects in the ciry. In this way, he said, Athens
would be saved the cost and "I will make the inscription of
dedication in my own name" (Pint. Pericles, XIV). At this
dramatic gesture, the wary assembly quickly voted in favor of
public funding and sparing no cost. For the next few decades,
a great deal of the assembly's time was spent deliberating on
the features and expenses of the new temple. Even as it took
shape, it was supervised and discussed by the democratic
population for which it was being built. These discussions are
recorded in civic records and in the narrative accounts of the
extraordinary writers Athens also produced. Thus the aristocratic Pericles maneuvered his oligarchic enemies into
supporting polis-sponsored projects that would increase the
power of his radically democratic supporters. The Parthenon
was the centerpiece of the building program. The man whom
Plutarch calls "that political athlete" (Pint., Pericles, III) was
among the most interesting competitors ever to exhibit
himself upon the Athenian stage. The Panathenaic trophies
and the names of the athletes who won them are lost in the
anonymity of time, like those of the Persians who died at
Salamis. The name of the young aristocrat who made his
"brilliant debut"49 as the choregos of Aeschylus's Persians, was
not inscribed on the temple, but it was known forever after as
Pericles' Parthenon. 5•
Before looking at the Parthenon, let us glance briefly at
some Persian buildings where, as in Athens and Sparta,
physical constructions reflect the political structure and
principles of the regime. As Aeschylus describes it, the everexpanding Persian Empire is centered on the royal palace and
nearby tomb of the divinized monarch, the only godlike
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63
figure who appears on stage. Although the play is set in Susa,
it is clear that the king's palaces, like everything else in
Persia-except the monarch himself-are multiple; in
addition to Susa, Ekbatana and Persepolis are mentioned
repeatedly as the king's headquarters. But, unlike the civic
and political activities of Athens, which took place in one
bounded, permanent location, the Persian court was also
always on the move. 51 Super-civilized in some respects, it
retained nomadic aspects more characteristic of lessdeveloped peoples. The King sat upon a movable throne. The
portable royal tent, as elaborate as the palaces, was an object
of wonder to the Athenians, who may have copied its shape
in the roof of the new Odeion. 52 Herodotus says that
Ekbatana, the palace fortress built by Deioces, the first king
of the Medes, was built for himself and his bodyguards on a
hill and was reinforced artificially with seven strong walls; the
rest of the people lived outside the stronghold. Deioces
arranged that all business "should be contracted through
messengers and that the king should be seen by none" (Hdt.,
1.99). The structure of the hierarchical Persian regime
insured that each level-subjects, local officials, and regional
satraps-had dealings only with the ones immediately above
and below it. At Persepolis, the huge compound was not far
above the plain below and may have been surrounded by a
mud wall. This too was a closed site, open only at the king's
pleasure. An ancient commentator remarks that, "at Susa or
Ekbatana, the king was invisible to all," but everything was
arranged so that he "might see everything and hear everything. " 53 His viceroys, "the Great King's eyes/' 54 as
Aeschylus's Persians refers to them, were ever vigilant.
Even in the public audience hall, the Apadana, at
Persepolis, vision seems to have been obstructed by the many
columns and the distant ruler in the large, dark chamber
would not have been easily observed by his subjects. 55
Directions came from an unseen center from which attention
was also turned by the king's desire for unlimited expansion.
A long inscription describes "the palace which I [Darius] built
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
at Susa" 56 of timber, gold, stone, ebony, and brick transported
from the far reaches of the empire. Unlike the Athenian
political records with their public accounts of the expenses
and inventories of Periclean buildings, there is no Persian
record of the architects, organization, or political context of
Persian building. In Persia, as in Egypt, the King's massive
construction projects, like his military campaigns, were facilitated by the unlimited, enslaved manpower at his command.
The eastern monarchy did not discuss its "public" buildings
any more than it discussed its foreign and military policy. It is
not surprising that Persia produced no narrative history or
drama and that among the extant ruins of its great buildings
there is no evidence of either assembly places or theaters.
Herodotus's observations about the buildings and
monuments of "barbarian" nations other than Persia are also
instructive about what was different about Athens' greatest
monument. Not surprisingly, the nomadic and under-civilized
Scythians had no temples or cities; residing in movable tents,
their only significant permanent places were their fathers'
gravesites (Hdt., 4.127). These itinerant non-builders were
also not producers of cloth. They made no linen or woolen
fabrics, both of which require a stationary economy, but
dressed themselves mostly in animal skins. Early Persians,
before the eras of the great buildings, also wore leather.
Croesus and the Lydian conquest softened tl1em into the
lovers of luxurious fabrics, robes, and slippers with which,
along with enormous palaces, the Greeks associated them. In
Lydia, the greatest building was a royal tomb constructed by
craftsmen and by prostitutes who worked on it to earn their
dowries (Hdt., 1.93). The walled city of Babylon had two
walled compounds within it, one for the royal palace, the
other for a stack of multiple towers, ziggurats. The latter
contained a huge temple for Zeus with a great gold statue of
the god and altars for sacrifice to him. Herodotus says Xerxes
took the statue and killed the priest who had forbidden him
to do so (Hdt., 1.181-2).
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65
The most impressive buildings of the Egyptians were not
temples for gods, but massive memorials to the godlike kings
who built them. Thus, Moeris built a propylaia (gateway) to
the temple of Hephaestus as a memorial to himself (Hdt.,
2.101), and Cheops built pyramids, intending to preserve his
memory as a divinized ruler. Cheops used slave labor,
ordering all Egyptians to work only "for himself" (Hdt.,
2.124). Amasis, the last of the Egyptian kings described by
Herodotus, considered himself a "great lover of the Greeks"
(Hdt., 2.178). But Herodotus emphasizes how different
Egypt was: the sheer size of his propylaia and temple to
Athena at Sa'is, the "supernatural" (hyperphueas) size of its
stones, how long it took for two thousand men to transport
its building materials from great distances, and the many
colossal statues and hybrid man-headed sphinxes around the
temple. Herodotus was "amazed" at the huge shrine, made
from a single stone, outside the temple. It was said that one
of the workmen had been killed while trying, unsuccessfully,
to lever it into place (2.175). The story strikes an odd note,
given the thousands of anonymous slaves who lost their lives
to Egyptian projects. In Memphis, the statue of Hephaestus
measured seventy-five feet; it was so large that it had to lie flat
on its back in front of its admirably large temple (Hdt.,
2.176). Again and again, Herodotus associates the size and
character of the buildings of non-Greek peoples with their
political and religious character.
Now behold the Acropolis again, this time with the
completed Parthenon and surrounding buildings in place
upon it. From the top, all of Athens, including its boundaries,
would have been visible. The ancient city itself was walled,
and contiguous lands were contained between mountains and
the sea. Herodotus observes that the longest wall of the Great
King's private domain in Ekbatana was "about the length of
the wall that surrounds the city of Athens" (Hdt., 1.98,
emphasis added). Unlike the eastern empire that recognized
no natural boundary, Athens was open on the inside and
bounded-though accessible to outsiders-on the outside,
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
both physically and politically. Political life was not contained
in a closed palace, garden paradise, or tomb, where all
communication with the royal family was mediated by
officials or bodyguards. The sacred precinct upon the
Acropolis was articulated from its surroundings by its
elevation and by the grand gateway, the Propylaia, through
which it was entered. But, like the Agora, which was no more
than a ten or fifteen minute walk from any place in the city, 57
the Acropolis was accessible to all Athenians, to resident
aliens, metics who "dwelled among" (met-oikeo) them, and
to foreigners (xenoi) who visited from elsewhere. In festival
processions and athletic competitions, in battle, assembly, and
the theater, Athenians were on view to each other and direct
speech was the preferred medium of exchange. Unlike the
staircase to the Apadana, the stairs to the Propylaia invited
those who climbed them to enter and to look.
The new temple could be seen from everywhere in
Athens: from the lower hill on the Pnyx where the assembly
met, from the theater on the south slope of the Acropolis, and
even from the sea. Most other buildings in Athens were made
of dark wood and baked brown mudbricks. Rebuilt quickly
after the Persians went away, they were not made to be
looked at or to be visible from afar. Even the public buildings
in the Agora, including marble stoas, temples, and fountains,
would have had, at least from their location, a lower status
than the temple on the Acropolis. Various architectural
"refinements" that will not concern us here make the
Parthenon appear to be "springy" or to float skywards,
increasing its high status in the physical city. Because it is
located on the highest spot on the hill and near the edge of
the southern side where less traffic was possible, most views
of it from elsewhere on the Acropolis would not have
included other large structures. 58 Unlike the Agora, which
was planted with shade trees, the rocky hill above it did not
support trees or other vegetation-except Athena's olive.
There were, however, numerous smaller buildings,
monuments, and billboards, so that the ancient visitor's view
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67
would have been far more cluttered than what we see today.
As we have seen, some of this "clutter" functioned as a
"public archive in bronze and stone," 59 providing information, to those who could read, about the building projects
themselves.
The temple to Athena was not used for child sacrifices,
prostitution, or royal burials. Visitors to the Parthenon came
to deliver the birthday peplos to the goddess-and to look.
What they saw was themselves, both in the flesh and represented in local marble. The temple was not used for
worship of the goddess. Rather, like Aeschylus's play, it was a
"monument" or "reminder" of the city's collective defeat of
a different way of life, a house for a goddess who exemplified
what they regarded as a superior life for human beings. As we
shall see, the pictures of the Parthenon clearly distinguish
men and gods, humans and beasts, as well as male and female
human beings. Deified kings, as well as sphinxes, Centaurs,
and Amazons, are all rejected as hybrid; each in its own way
undermines human nature. Unlike the unlimited, enslaved,
yoked manpower that worked and died on Persian palaces
and Pharaohs' pyramids, the Parthenon work force, although
it certainly included slaves, consisted of citizens, resident
aliens, and foreigners as well, all paid for their labor. In
addition to the myths depicted on the temple, there are myths
about it. An old story tells how a mule that was resting from
its task of dragging heavy marble up to the building site came
back, of his own free will, to encourage his yokefellows in
their work. 60 Athenian civic propaganda, spread easily among
a small population whose politics consisted of constant talk,
insisted that even beasts of burden were enthusiastic participants in this project. Self-yoking in a noble cause is the theme
of the story that Athenian Solon tells Croesus about the
blessed brothers, Cleobis and Biton, who put themselves
"under the yoke" of a carriage to pull their mother to
worship at the temple of Hera (Hdt., 1.31). Another story
contrasts with that of the Egyptian laborer crushed in the
temple of Athena at Sa'is, where the goddess is present only in
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the huge, inert statue (Hdt., 2.175). In Athens, in contrast,
Plutarch reports that, when the most zealous workman at the
construction site of the Propylaia entrance to the Acropolis
fell off the building, mortally injuring himself, Pericles was so
dispirited that the Goddess appeared to him in a dream and
told him how to heal the man (Piut. Pericles, XIII). The
popular myths repeatedly assert that Athena watched over
and took an active interest in the building of her city.
The dimensions of the new Parthenon were larger than
those of its predecessor so that it could accommodate the
statue that Phidias planned for it. But, like the city that
withstood the mixed and disproportionate Persian force, the
Parthenon is a monument to unity and proportion. In what
follows I shall not discuss the architecture itself, but concentrate on selected parts of the temple, in which "narrative"
depictions shape the viewers' collective memory of their
victory over the Persians. On the stage Aeschylus depicts
Persians who, although different from Athenians, are recognizable human beings like themselves. On the Parthenon, the
actors on the "stages" of the pediments and metopes on the
outer temple resemble the humans who view them, but are
super or sub-human in size or form. The inner walls of the
temple are the "stage" on which Athenians view themselves
engaged in the paradigmatic Athenian festival, the celebration
of Athena's birthday. As in Aeschylus's tragedy, the civic
clothing and dynamic "weaving" of Athenian democratic
politics is meant to look superior to the luxurious fabrics and
strong yoke of the Persian Empire. The most important ritual
fabric in Athens was woven to clothe the wooden image of
the goddess who watched over this city. Just as Aeschylus's
play represents the power and failure of Persia in the Queen's
robes and Xerxes' peplos, so the Parthenon's pediments,
metopes, and frieze, and the celebrated statue of the goddess
herself, make Athena's pep/as a politically significant artifact.
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2. Pediments: Before and Above the Polis
Although the Parthenon stands at the center of polis life, the
citizens who come to see it are made to look again, to re-view
their city in the light of what is outside it, both spatially and
temporally. Thus, the pediments, the triangular gables facing
outward east and west on the short sides of the temple, depict
the outermost context of the city, the cosmos in which the
bounded polis takes shape and flourishes. Unlike the
divinized Darius and Xerxes, who aspired to a realm as
extensive as Zeus's sky, the Parthenon assumes a realm that
transcends the limited human world. In two dramatic scenes
depicting well-known stories, the pediments exhibit divine
beings who have their primary location outside the city, above
the mortals whose affairs they are both spectators of and
participants in. These representations of the gods depict the
continual adjustment and balancing of different and complementary human qualities. They show how Athens became
Athena's city through the careful interweaving of all the other
gods-including those who seem antithetical to her waysinto a heterogeneous but viable whole. Although it depicts
opposition and strife among the gods, the "polytheism" of
the Parthenon is informed by a principle of a coherent,
unified cosmos. The "dramas" staged on the pediments do
not conclude in the mere defeat of one of the contesting
sides; the gods don't die. The victor wins by assimilating the
vanquished and adjusting the order of the world. We know
about the pediments from a few remarks of the traveler
Pausanias who saw them in the second century A.D., from
Jacques Carrey, who made drawings of them in 1674 before
they were largely destroyed in a gunpowder explosion in
1687, and from the damaged yet remarkable figures in
Athens, Paris, and the British Museum in London. Classicists
and archaeologists have put together a variety of plausible
scenarios for the two pediments. The non-expert can follow
their lead and think through, in a general way, what the intent
and effect of these scenes might have been.
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The pediments are populated with three-dimensional
sculptured figures. These are positioned at different angles,
some facing forward, others seen in profile. Some appear to
be moving towards the front triangular plane of the scene,
and some actually do penetrate it. The originals had attachments, some of which mnst also have projected outside the
plane. The triangular frame and the rounded character of the
sculptures remind one of theatrical tableaux; viewed more
closely, the sculptures might even have appeared to be
"rounder" than would distant actors who might appear flat in
a very large theater. The pediment figures are unusual in that
their backs, unseen after the sculptures were mounted, are
finished; like actors on a stage, they appear as "real"
personages, not just building ornaments. The "backdrop"
wall was originally painted bright red or blue, and the
colorful patterns painted on the sculpted clothing of the
figures would have stood out against it as costumed actors did
onstage. Tragic actors, like those in the Persians, are intelligible to the spectators, the "audience," primarily through
their heard speech. How do the silent pediment actors
"speak" to Athenians about the Persian wars of recent
memory and about the community that survived them?
The west pediment faces the spectator as he approaches
the Parthenon from the great (unfinished) entrance gate, the
Propylaia. His first view of the highest part of the "back" of
the temple (as it appears in descriptions and drawings) would
be a tableau of the contest between Athena and Poseidon,
who take center stage. The scene is set on the Acropolis.
Pausanias says their strife was for the "land," suggesting a
very early, almost proto-Athenian time. They are symmetrically flanked by horse-drawn chariots and gods. In the
narrowed corners are reclining river gods (and perhaps the
autochthonous king Kekrops), snakes, a sea monster, and
other figures associated with early legends of king Erechtheus
and his family: "The figures in the angles represent the royal
population of Athens before it was Athens. " 61 The contest
between Poseidon and Athena pits the natural abundance of
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71
surging fluidity against the artful prosperity of rooted solidity.
Fruit and oil, wooden boats and oars, will characterize
Athena's city, where speech and artful skill, techne, will shape
the sheer power and fertility of Poseidon. Thus, the victory of
Athena in this pre-political agon results not in the elimination
of the immortal god of the sea, bnt in his assimilation. On the
north side of the Acropolis both the olive tree and the salt
spring remained as reminders of the outcome. Travelers by
sea leaving or arriving at Athena's city would always see the
great temple of Poseidon on the cliff at Sounion. Equilibrium
rather than mere defeat is suggested by the position of the
contenders, both of whom remain upright in a "great
'Pheidian V'," 62 and by the way Poseidon's leg overlaps
Athena's, placing him in the foremost position. The pediment
suggests that balance in Athena's city involves harnessing
Poseidon for the city's benefit. But harnessing does not mean
simply yoking. Every visitor to the Parthenon remembered
that the Persians were defeated at sea, and that Athens'
greatness, in contrast to that of landlocked Persia, was the
result of her close and comfortable relation with Poseidon.
Unlike Xerxes and the Persians, Themistocles and the
Athenians knew that one doesn't "beat" or shackle the sea,
but collaborates with it by sailing and swimming. In the 4 70s,
after the maritime victory at Salamis, Athens may have
developed a Poseidon cult around the salt spring and the sign
of the trident,63 which, like the olive tree depicted in the
center of the pediment, remained visible on the Acropolis.
The west pediment memorializes the victory over Persia by
asserting that Athens succeeds under the supervision of gods
who transcend the city in time and place, but that, in Athens,
there is a time and place for all the gods.
The "front" east pediment also pictures a cosmic event,
"in the manner of classical drama ... played out in the course
of a single day." 64 The scene is Olympus. In the center, the
viewer would have seen a tableau that included Zeus, perhaps
seated on his throne, Athena, newly emerged from his head,
and Hephaestus holding the axe that liberated-and
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
delivered-her. With a mother named Metis, "craft" or
"wisdom," and gestation in the head of Zens, she comes into
the world as a manifestation of rational, self-reliant thought.
Just as the symmetry of Athena and Poseidon on the west
pediment conveys their simultaneous existence in Athens,
here the symmetry of Athena and Hephaestus around Zens
indicates that these two must be thought of together. "In
Athens, the birth of Athena makes a new god of Hephaestus,
for they share between them the patronage of all things made
by the hands. " 65 He is her midwife, but also the "working
partner to the newborn goddess of work. "66 Like the central
figures on the west pediment, the central group here is
flanked by an array of divinities, some individuals, and some
in groups carved from common blocks of marble. Tied
together, they suggest again that Athenian mortals look up to
a pantheon of complementary divinities. The east pediment's
location, Olympus, is a loftier mountain than the Acropolis of
the west pediment. It is far removed from the city around the
Acropolis, but the "explosion of power"" from the head of
Zeus affects not only the gods who have homes on Olympus.
"The event taking place between" Helios, the sun, in the
south angle and Selene, the moon, in the north "is ... an event
of cosmic significance. It is dawn. There is a new order on
Olympus. The coming of Athena has changed the world." 68
As we have seen, Athens commemorated Athena's birth
with a new dress, whose weaving and presentation provided
the city with an elaborate protocol for holding itself together.
The fast-moving, quick-thinking city of rationality and
progress here tied itself to tradition and repetition, to time.
The east pediment, like the festival and the Parthenon itself,
made the Athenians look backward as well as forward and
recognize their mortal limits. Thus, although the gods who
live forever have an endless future, time as it is depicted on
the east pediment is cyclical, not linear. Just as Athena's
victory on the west pediment does not simply banish
Poseidon, here on the east "Light does not banish darkness
from the world, for neither can exist without the other." 69
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73
Dawn, like Athena's birthday, always comes round again. But
although the gods do not die, even they tire and retire when
the sun goes down. Nothing captures this quite so well as the
immortal but weary horse of Selene's chariot, about to sink
under the night horizon in the northern angle of the
pediment. The horse breaks the plane and thus the distancing
frame of the pediment, and seems to reach into our world.
Viewers have always loved him, for although his days are not
numbered like ours, he expresses weariness as we too know
it.
Like the Persians, the Parthenon suggests "weaving" as an
image for the holding together of a human community. One
of the most astonishing things about the pediments is the
sculptured clothing, a trademark of Pheidias's style
throughout the Parthenon. Unlike the stiff Persian costumes
and royal gear that obscure nature with conventional wealth
in Aeschylus's dramatic depiction, the fabrics pictured here
reveal the bodies they cover. Iris's clinging, blowing dress,
Hestia's light, crinkly crepe under heavier woolen folds, and
Amphytrite's belted peplos amaze the viewer with the art of
the sculptor, who imitates soft fabrics in stone, but also with
the art that weaves real soft fabrics of cloth, the art of Athena
herself. Through the draperies, and probably through the
"embroidered" patterns that were painted upon them, the
groups of sculptures could unify "motifs involving a complex
dramatic action and including many interlocking
figures ... Pheidias invented a plastic means by which a scene
composed of many parts could be transformed into a single
powerful image." 70 Their flowing garments and the variety of
angled positions make the three goddesses on the east
pediment (perhaps Hestia, Dione, and Aphrodite) seem to
"weave" in and out among each other (Figure 2). We shall see
something similar in the low relief frieze inside the
Parthenon. Like the Athenian pantheon and Pheidias's sculptured tableaux of these gods, the weaver's art combines many
elements into a coherent whole. The politics of the city that
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
FIGURE 2 (Courtesy of A. Nicgorski)
fabricated the Parthenon sculptures and Athena's woven
peplos did something similar: it fabricated its way of life by
weaving together free speech in the political deliberation of
free individuals. Entirely different are the lined up, repetitious figures on the Persepolis Apadana staircase. Unlike the
lovely, varied, and flexible materials of the Parthenon, their
stiff, identical robes do not convey the famed beauty of
Persian weaving. In contrast to the dramatic tableaux vivants
of the Olympians on the pediments and the Athenians and
gods on the frieze (to be discussed below), even in Persia's
most accomplished works of art, the Persians remain
arbitrarily and stiffly yoked together, just as they are said to
be in Aeschylus's play.
3. Metopes: Outside the Polis
The outer sides of the temple display what's outside: earthly
alternatives that threaten to invade and destroy Athena's
polis. Wrapping around the outermost upper wall of the
Parthenon, below the pediments, is a horizontal band of
ninety-two squares, thirty-two on the long sides and fourteen
on the short. These metopes, seen "between the holes" or
"between the eyes," are separated from each other by slabs of
three vertical bars called "triglyphs," which frame each scene.
Originally painted in bright, contrasting colors, the figures on
the metopes were far more distinct than they appear today.
Each square presents a framed static scene, a snapshot, to the
�FLAUMENHAFT
75
spectator who can view one whole side at the same time, or
each picture in the band, as he circles the temple. The
metopes are carved in high relief and most do not appear in
the round as the theatrical pediment statues do. Here, too,
the effect is sometimes compared to the changing scenes in a
drama, but now the scenes remain in place while the
spectator moves. Another difference is that in the theater the
scenes follow one another in time, suggesting causal relations
between them, while the metopes are freestanding or paired
images that do not depict a sequential narrative in time. The
central scene of Aeschylus's play is central in time; the center
of a band of metopes is central in space, although, as we shall
see, on the south side, it may represent a different time, but
one related in theme, to those around it. Like the play, the
metopes can be seen as four sets or "acts," each depicting a
particular conflict between Greeks (or their champions) and a
particular enemy: on the east, gods and Giants; on the north,
Greeks and Trojans, on the west, Greeks and Amazons, and
on the south, Lapiths and Centaurs. These subjects appear
repeatedly in the Parthenon and in other fifth-century
buildings. The threats depicted are all analogues to the
Persian invasion depicted by Aeschylus. The play uses words
to depict the unseen Greek alternative to the Persians seen on
stage. But the metopes depict the Greeks as well as their
would-be destroyers. Each set can also be "read," like
Herodotus's inquiries, as the struggle between the civilized
Greek city and a particular deficient alternative to the life it
regards as human.
All four sets depict battles with mythological enemies. On
three sides, mortal victors defeat mortal enemies. But on the
east wall, the final destination of visitors to the Parthenon, the
viewer would have faced the early cosmic conflict in which
the Giants, sons of Gaia, the Earth, arose to challenge the
hegemony of the heavenly Olympian gods. As we have seen,
the great "Cyclopean" foundations of the Acropolis were
reminders of Athena's victory and harnessing of Giant power
in the service of her city. In some versions of the legend the
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Giants are defeated and imprisoned in the locations of
volcanoes. The primitive Giants are the first depiction on the
metopes of an attempt of massive force to overcome divine or
human civilization. Their eruptions are associated more with
the powers of nature than with intentional evil. They cannot
be simply destroyed, but are containable and even usable.
Little remains of the eastern metopes, but their theme
appeared repeatedly on the Parthenon, most notably on the
great statue's shield and on the peplos itself." Thus, every
element of the east side of the Parthenon refers the ultimate
prosperity of Athenian civilization to the divine. Beneath the
birth of Athena on the east pediment and behind the Giant
metopes, the viewer would see the culminating panels of the
interior frieze, picturing the Olympian gods towards whom
the procession of Athenians moves. And through the east
doorway, beneath the pediment, frieze, and metopes, in the
innermost part of the temple, he would view the statue of the
Goddess herself. Nowhere on the Parthenon does any
historical human being become an immortal, as did the
mythical Heracles, who probably was depicted helping
Athena overcome the Giants. And unlike the giant representations of Darius and Xerxes in Persia, there are no enlarged
portraits of identifiable individual human beings.
Themistocles, not named but clearly referred to in
Aeschylus's play, is not identifiable on the Parthenon, and
Pericles, as we have seen, is present only in the spirit of the
project. 71 Nowhere is it suggested that human rule might
extend indefinitely, like that of Zeus or the Great King's
dreams. In the stories depicted on the Parthenon and in the
contained inward focus of the building itself, Athens differentiates itself from its recent Persian enemy. As we shall see,
the story of the Parthenon itself and of the politics of its
construction under Pericles suggests an Athens that will need
to expand its own aims, even as it remembers its defeat of
unlimited expansion. As the articulated and delimited city
moved towards its own version of empire, its relationship
with the goddess and gods of the eastern "front" of the
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77
Parthenon would shift radically from that celebrated in its
memorial monument in the decades immediately following
the Persian War.
For the conflict between mortal human beings, the
designers of the Parthenon's north metopes (the ones facing
the Athenian Agora) selected the war with the Trojans, a
people who are the same as their Greek enemies in their
nature, physis, but whose conventions, nomoi, like those of
the Persians, represent a different way of life. Although the
Trojan War was a Greek invasion, it was viewed as a response
to a previous "invasion" on the part of the Trojans since
Paris's violation was thought to undermine all civilized
custom. Thus, some of the surviving slabs show Menelaus,
Helen, and Paris. The historical and mythological Trojans
were an eastern patriarchal monarchy that, in some respects,
resembled Persia. Homer depicts the "Trojans" as a mixed,
polyglot, loosely combined force from many different places.
In contrast, the Greeks, although from many cities, are ethnically coherent; they speak the same language, function as a
political community, and coordinate their military efforts. 73
Like Aeschylus's Persians and Herodotus's Inquiries, the
Parthenon's north metopes depict an alternative human
culture in order to think about the customs most appropriate
to human nature.
The anthropology of the remaining metopes, the
Amazons of the west and Centaurs of the south sides, depicts
mythical beings that resemble, but are not quite, human
beings. Unlike the Trojans and Persians, they represent a
difference in kind-in nature-rather than in custom. The
first are entirely human, but entirely female, rejecting life
with males of their own kind. The second are entirely male,
but are hybrids of human and beast. Athenian civic
mythology had long depicted Amazons and Centaurs as
enemy invaders and threats to Athens and to Theseus, its
founding king. The metopes, like the tragic dramas, assume
familiarity with these stories, but they do not dramatize
incidents involving particular heroes. Little remains of the
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Amazon metopes, but a brief consideration of what they
represent will help to understand the unified thought of the
Parthenon and to set the stage for the better preserved
Centaurs.
The Amazons are liberated women. In contrast to the
typical Athenian confinement of women and their children
within the home, these untamed, unmarried horsewomen
hunt, fight, and even mate in the open air, rejecting the
confinements of the polis, of buildings generally, of conventional female clothing, and even of their own bodies. Their
name seems to refer to their custom of removing the right
breast; the breast-less (a-mastos) woman could more easily
pull a bow or throw a javelin, typically Persian weapons, as
opposed to Athenian hoplite spears. The voluntary mastectomies are reminiscent of Persian castrations described by
Herodotus; the exclusion of males and the isolation of the
Amazons also require denaturing and mutilation. Some depictions of Amazons show two breasts, exposed in a way
unthinkable for ordinary Athenian women. In others, they
appear in pants, short belted jackets, and pointed caps, and
have pale skin as opposed to the outdoors tans of Athenian
men.74 Athenian artists often pictured Amazons in Persian
dress and hats in order to mock the latter as effeminate.
Athenian mythology credited the defeat of the Amazon
invasion of Athens to Theseus, and located his victory on the
hill of the quintessentially masculine war god Ares, the rocky
platform just below the Acropolis. In the Oresteia Aeschylus
depicts the establishment of the Athenian court on the
Areopagus and makes clear that its supersession of the female
Furies is a critical step in the development of civic justice in
the Athenian polis. The defeat of the Amazons by the male
founder of Athens invites two questions.
The first concerns the truth of the common claim that
Athens simply assumed male superiority and that women
were regarded as inferior human beings. There is no doubt
that Athens was a male hoplite culture; men fought its wars,
spoke in its assembly, met in its markets, socialized in its
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79
gymnasia and symposia, wrote for and performed in its
theater, and designed and built its temples. Women, in
contrast, spent their time at home, indoors, among other
women and female and young male children. They had no
property rights, did not take part in public deliberation, and
were certainly less articulate and less visible than their fathers
and brothers, husbands and sons. The myths about au
Amazonian alternative to such a life are not surprising. But it
is misleading to claim that Athens aims to exclude women as
it does the half-humans and barbarians on the outside of the
temple. There is a difference between differentiation and
exclusion. Athens and its myths distinguish appropriate
realms for male and female human beings, but they do not
attempt to eradicate the female. Amazons are excluded
because they attempt to exclude the male from human life.
Their defeat by Theseus resulted not in the elimination of
women, but in their integration into a human life that
includes both sexes. In the carefully revised civic legends that
replaced the hyper-masculine, godlike Heracles with Theseus,
the unequivocally human founder marries the Amazon queen.
She and her comrades live on in what, from the perspective
of egalitarian modernity, looks like a subordinate position.
But Athenian drama and religion make clear that women are
necessary, not just as producers of children, the only role for
which the Amazons reluctantly acknowledged their need for
men, but for civilized life as the Athenians saw it.
Once again, women's work offers an appropriate
metaphor. The communal fabric is woven from warp and
weft: each requires the other; they have different jobs to do.
One is upright, stiff, a visible support; the other is horizontal,
more pliant, weaves in and out, sometimes behind the scenes,
sometimes visible. Modern technology has gone a long way
to liberate the sexes from their strictly differentiated natures;
how far is yet to be seen. But in fifth-century Athens, where
Persians had to be repelled by hand-to-hand combat, and
where birth control, frozen foods, and mass-produced textiles
were not available, division of labor follows from natural
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
differences bet\veen the sexes. Differentiation may require
hierarchy. But we shonld also note that refusing to medize
included rejecting polygamy, as well as effeminate dress and
luxury. This snggests that polis life inclnded a developed
sense of the individnal worth of women as well as of men,
however constricted the lives of the former now appear. As
we have seen, the Panathenaic festival included, and even
featured, women. Only they could perform certain civic
fnnctions, including the most intimate ministering to the
patron goddess. The peplos had to be made, not by slaves, but
by female "citizens with known ancestry" who performed
this rite, "not for themselves, bnt for the city. It is the ritnal
that distinguishes the women of Athens from the women of
other states ... it is a ritual in which women and men both play
important roles." 75 However dominant the males of Pericles'
city were, its women were present and visible. The Amazons,
we must conclude, are on the outside, partly because they are
women who relocate themselves from inside to outside, but
also because they are women who attempt to remove
themselves from the full hnman condition, that is, from a
civic life that interweaves, however hierarchically, men and
women.
A second question about these warrior women is that of
their relation to Athens' patron, the warrior goddess, Pallas
Athena. Is she to be considered the paradigmatic Amazon? A
complicated answer is suggested by the different, but
overlapping, aspects of her presence on the Acropolis. In the
early days, worship of Athena Polias seems to have taken
place in the old Erechtheion temple where the olivewood
statue resided, and where Athenians brought multitudes of
little statuettes as offerings to her, seeking, perhaps,
protection, like that sought by later generations when the
Parthenon was sanctified as "Our Lady of Athens." During
her great annual festival, the women bathed her, applied
cosmetics, and dressed her in traditional female garb and
jewelry. She was human-sized or smaller and was associated
with female fertility, agriculture, and domestic prosperity in
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81
peacetime. She may have been seated and she carried no
shield or weapons. There is nothing of the Amazon about her.
Another Athena, called the Promachos, "foremost
fighter," was a large bronze statue made by Pheidias perhaps
as a thank-offering for the Greek victory at Marathon. This
one stood outdoors on the western side of the Acropolis. Her
armed figure, the Centauromachy pictured on her shield, and
the Persian spoils displayed around her base, 76 suggest the
more masculine task of defending Athens. Although she is
more a symbol of public military strength than an object of
worship and private protector like the Polias, here she seems
relaxed, a secure victor over Persian invaders rather than an
aggressor in her own right. Her shining spear and helmet
were visible to ships sailing towards the city as they passed
Cape Sunium. 77 This Athena is no more suggestive of the
Amazons than the Polias is. In action, Athena as battle god
differed from her brother, the bowman Apollo. Walter Otto
long ago suggested "immediacy" as the feminine element of
her fighting spirit. 78 Unlike the "far-shooting" god, and unlike
Amazons and Persians, both of whom fought with bows and
arrows, Athena shows up near at hand among those she
champions, both women and men, as she does at Homer's
Troy and Aeschylus's Salamis.
The temple Pericles built in the decades after Salamis
housed the third Athena on the Acropolis, Pheidias's most
famous statue of Athena, the Parthenos, "maiden"; unlike the
Amazons, she is comfortable with a roof over her head. We
shall consider the colossal image when we arrive at the
innermost chamber of the Parthenon. For now, let us merely
raise the question: is she the divine image of the ordinarily
reclusive, fierce but shy, race of women warriors of Athenian
legend? Or is she something new, an Athenian god on the
march, ready to leave her home and city, the Promachos of
the post-Parthenon empire that Pericles sees as the natural
successor of the Persian one that failed in Athens?
The south metopes, which depict women merely as the
occasion for masculine conflict, have survived in good
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
enough condition to convey some idea of what they once had
to say. The thirty-two tableaux depict a well-known legend,
the battle between the Lapiths and their half-brothers, the
Centaurs, who, like Theseus's friend, the Lapith king
Pirithous, were fathered by Ixion. 79 Demanding a share in the
kingdom, they made war on the more civilized branch of the
family until an uneasy truce was established. In a foolish
gesture of reconciliation, Pirithous invited the estranged
relatives to his wedding, but the unruly Centaurs got drunk,
wrecked the party, and attempted to carry off Pirithous's
bride and the other Lapith women. Although the panels do
not present a continuous linear narrative of this event or its
outcome in the defeat of the Centaurs, they are arranged in
pairs, triplets, and groups by their composition and subjects.
All but one contain only two opposed figures, and that one,
east 21 (moving to the right, facing the south side of the
temple), concludes a central set of nine panels in which the
Centauromachy is not the subject. We reserve this mysterious
center for the end of our discussion.
As we have seen in Aeschylus's play and on the
Parthenon, Athenians associated their Persian enemies with
the fully human Amazons. Like Persian Xerxes, Trojan Paris,
and Amazon women, the male Centaurs disrupt marriage and
hospitality as the foundations of the human city. 80 But, for
several reasons, they seem even more alien. However
lopsided the Amazon attempt to avoid the limitations of
ordinary mature female lives, they are recognizably human in
form, belong to a coherent community, and make arrangements for its continuity. The Centaur seems more a member
of a herd than of a community. His hybrid body combines a
mature human nature with a mature beastly one. The result,
as pictured in the metopes, undermines rather than enhances
human wholeness. The Amazon isolates herself from the male
half of humanity; the Centaur combines male halves of two
different kinds. Aeschylus's play and the Persian Queen's
dream raise the question of whether different nations of
human beings can be viably yoked together to form a
�FLAUMENHAFT
83
coherent human regime. The Parthenon Centaurs depict a
"yoking" of two different kinds that is incapable of coherent
human life. Egyptian and Assyrian art often represent hybrids
of different animals and of animals and humans in the service
of humans. Persian monsters of this kind are found in eaglefaced lions and human-headed bulls in Pasargadae and
Persepolis. But on the Parthenon such a combination is the
enemy and would-be destroyer of civilized human life.
In contrast to the bodies of the Lapiths, who are beautiful
even in their painful twisting, the bodies of the Centaurs lack
unity and proportion. Combining the upright and horizontal
forms of its progenitors, the Centaur lacks the full powers of
either orientation. Like snapshots or scenes in a dramatic
pageant, the metopes freeze moments of violent action,
exhibiting the peculiarity of Centaur posture: they cannot
stand or kneel like men; they can rear like horses. Although
all Centaurs are man above and horse below, there are early
depictions (not on the Parthenon) with human forelegs. From
the front, these might look more human, but from the side,
they appear even less unified, since their nether parts are also
dual. Both combinations viewed from the side or rear present
not one whole, natural being, but a beast with two backs.
The most human parts of the Parthenon Centaurs are the
faces. Although some are grotesque and mask-like, while
others are said to be "sensitive" or "grandfatherly," several
features emphasize their un-emerged humanity, or their
reversion to bestiality. Their heads are set low on their
shoulders and are less visibly articulated from their bodies by
necks than those of the humans (south 26, 29, 31). Unlike the
dean-shaven faces of the young Lapiths, the Centaurs are
bearded; they look older and shaggy and the beards further
obscure the articulation of their heads. 81 In south 31 the
bearded head of the Centaur is hard to grasp, but the Centaur
has the Lapith by the throat (Figure 3). Rationality seems
pulled down or sunken into their violent, marauding Centaur
bodies. A recent interpreter claims that the more "human"
faces among the mask-like, ferocious ones are evidence that
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the sculptors did not
view these problematic
beings as uniformly alien
and hostile, or offer an
"easy apology for human
superiority," and asks
"whether they [centaurs]
should be construed as
other at all." 82 It seems
more correct to say that
the occasionally human
expressions underline
the grotesqueness of FIGURE 3 (Courtesy of A. Nicgorski)
their bestial behavior,
just as Xerxes' pain at his disastrous failure intensifies the
audience's understanding of what is wrong with his grotesque
project. Persian violations are the result of human nature
aspiring to the super-human; Centaur violations are the result
of human nature sunk into the subhuman. In both cases,
hybris characterizes the hybrid.
The sunken heads are emphasized even more by the
prominent rear ends of the Centaurs. Their upright human
torsos are short and the heavy bulk of their horizontal horse
bodies pulls them groundward. Even when rearing or
bucking, they are not taller than their human opponents.
Many originally had carved hairy tails that protruded out of
the frames of the deeply carved reliefs. Some interpreters
associate the tails with the supposed phallic character of the
Centaurs, deriving their name from the Greek word for
"goad" or "prick" (kentros), and relating it to obscene phallic
jokes that play on their name and sexually aggressive
character. 83 But interestingly, many of the Centaurs do not
have prominent or even visible genitals, as do most of the
Lapiths, who are often pictured in full frontal nudity. \Vhen
the Centaur organs of generation are visible, they are in
equine location. The early Centaurs with human front legs
raise the odd possibility of two different sets of genitals. One
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85
would expect that these organs would be of great interest,
given the virile potency of the horse component, as well as
the hybrid nature of the combination. The relative lack of
attention to the genitalia of the Parthenon Centaurs reminds
the viewer that there are no accounts, as there are for
Amazons, of communities of Centaurs. After the first mating
of Ixion, references to females or to reproduction are rare.
The human torsos of the Parthenon Centaurs have navels
indicating their generation. But whatever their own
genealogy is, it seems that Centaurs, like mules and other
hybrids, are themselves sterile dead ends. Amazons do not
marry, but they generate and raise children; Centaurs do
neither: they rape.
Finally, the Parthenon Centaurs seem remarkably
unsexual in their attack on the Lapith women. The
impression the metopes give is more of disrupted communal
festivity, marauding violence, and theft than of lust; more
unfamiliarity with the celebratory social use of wine by a
civilized community, than a coordinated attempt to provide
themselves with women. This is not the rape of Sabines taken
for marriage to perpetuate a community. The two slabs that
do depict Centaurs with women (south 25, 29) show only the
attempted abduction and call attention to the awkwardness of
any actual coupling. Viewed as a whole, these metopes
suggest that the sculptors are more interested in depicting the
opposition of male bodies than the violation of female ones.
Like the pediment sculptures, the metopes are extraordinary in their representation of drapery, the fabric that
indicates the presence of differentiated but coordinated activities of men and women in a well-fabricated human
community. The nude bodies of the Lapiths are repeatedly
displayed against the fabric of woven capes made by the
mothers and wives they are fighting to protect. Kenneth
Clark's distinction between nudity and nakedness 84 reminds
us that the visible bodies of the Lapiths are not merely
exposed as those of animals would be. Rather, they suggest
the freedom and equality of citizen soldiers on view to each
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
other. Like the Athenian youths who performed a nude
armed dance at the Pauathenaia, they exhibit their readiness
to protect their threatened community. 85 In contrast to the
"nude" Lapiths, the half-animal bodies of the Centaurs, with
their lifelike muscles, hairs, and veins, would look strikingly
"naked." They are unfettered by the yokes, reins, and bridles
with which, elsewhere on the temple, human masters have
"clothed" their animals. On the frieze, these signs of human
domination were made more visible through the use of paint
or real reins or bridles attached to the stone with bronze
rivets. Two of the best-executed and best-preserved metopes
demonstrate some of the themes sketched above. Both focus
our attention on woven cloth as a sign of civilized humanity.
The composition of south 27, the sixth slab from the eastern
corner, positions the Lapith and Centanr combatants so that
their bodies pull away from rather than turn upon each other
as Poseidon and Athena do in the West Pediment (Figure 4).
The Centaur appears to be trying to remove a spear from his
back, and the Lapith is about to strike him again. All the
features described above-the upright posture of the man,
supported by his two sturdy legs, the exposed human genitals,
the unusually low horizontality of the beast, the sunken
Centaur head-are present here as in other panels. But the
remarkable pulling
apart of the two
bodies allows the
sculptor to concentrate attention on
the full folds of the
long cape worn by
the youth; the eye
falls especially on
the curved vertical
folds between the
figures. The cloth,
as well as the fact
that the nude man
FIGURE 4 (Courtesy of A. Nicgorski)
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87
is carved in much
higher relief than the
Centaur behind him,
separates and makes
him stand forth from
his surroundings as the
naked beasts never do.
In his almost threedimensional
roundness, this man
resembles pediment
gods or human stage
actors. The open cape
FIGURE 5 (Courte-sy of A. Nicgorski)
reveals his articulated
human body and its dominating and generative powers, but
attests also to human shame and the recognition that, for the
human, cover and exposure are appropriate in different
circumstances. Finally, the sculptor's craft has represented in
its own medium the product of the weaver's craft: soft,
folded, perishable cloth is captured in hard, rigid, permanent
marble. In their drunken rampage, the Centaurs have
scattered weapons and jugs about the wedding feast turned
war. Techne, in the form of weapons, wine, and weavings, is
the trademark of the human; mere force characterizes the
non-human.
South 28 (Figure 5) functions as a partner to 27. Stunned
or dead, a Lapith youth lies flat on the ground, legs useless,
arms pinned under him, genitals flaccid, head tipped back.
Under him is his crumpled cloak, likely to be his burial
shroud when the battle is over. A bucking Centaur, naked
chest erect and arm stretched out like the Lapith's in 27,
towers above the youth. His carved tail, miraculously intact
over the centuries, stands out in triumph, and he grasps a
bowl from the wedding feast, perhaps the domestic "weapon"
with which he felled the Lapith. Unlike some depictions of
Centaurs, the ones on the Parthenon are not shaggy. 86 For the
most part, they are naked and unprotected. Therefore, the
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
most striking feature of this panel is the extraordinary wild
panther skin that hangs upside down from the Centaur's
outstretched arm. Part shield, part cloak, it is the complete
antithesis of the fabricated cloth that signals the human, even
more so since parts of it hang in folds reminiscent of the cloth
in other metopes. Here a wild hybrid carries the barely transformed skin of a wild beast, another violently killed victim
who never self-consciously faced his killer as human
combatants do. The open-fanged jaws and outstretched claws
of the dead panther hang directly over the face of the dead
Lapith, emphasizing the confrontation of the wild and the
civilized. Finally, the combination of man and beast in the
triumphant Centaur appears even more monstrous by the
additional limbs and tail provided by the draped panther skin.
Moving one more slab to the right, the spectator would
have faced, in south 29, another frozen moment. An elderly
Centaur with short, flabby torso and bald, bearded head low
on his chest abducts a struggling young Lapith woman. Her
vulnerability and violation are indicated by her torn peplos
and exposed naked shoulder and breast. Greek art often
displays the kalokagathos-the "noble and good" mannude, as he would have displayed himself in the gymnasium.
Respectable women, the wives, mothers, and daughters
whose lives were more secluded than those of the men,
usually appear clothed, only partly visible to observers. The
Lapith girl's crinkly dress reveals her spread legs, although, as
we have suggested, the Centaur seems more intent on robbery
than on sexual assault. All his strength is concentrated in his
left arm and the hand that restrains her powerless hand and
holds up her body as he attempts to gallop away. On this
Centaur's back, balancing the crinkly dress pressed against his
chest, is one of those capes that appear on some of the other
metope Centaurs. The garment does not fall naturally on the
Centaur's back; rather, this beast with two backs is cloaked
only on its human shoulders. Unlike the capes that "frame"
the vertical bodies of the nude humans, this one grotesquely
emphasizes the monster's hybrid nature; the naked horseflesh
�FLAUMENHAFT
89
of its nether part interrupts its downward flow. The
"piecrust" edging on the cape will be seen as the characteristic decoration of the cloaks of the young Athenian
horsemen of the frieze. Once recognized as a mark of the
civilized city and its citizens, it appears even more anomalous
on the horse-men that threaten civilized life.
The greatest mystery about the south metopes concerns
the apparent intrusion of seemingly unrelated material in
south 13 through 21. Unfortunately, these scenes are known
only through the Carrey drawings, which reveal that the
center panels of the Centauromachy contain no Centaurs.
Jeffrey Hurwit reviews suggestions that these panels are
dramatically (or cinematographically) coherent as a "mythological 'flashback"' in the manner of "similar debriefings in
the choral odes of tragedies," and that they may have
presented the background story of Ixion and his descendents,
or of "early Athenian kings and heroes."87 He suggests that
the central panels are not intrusive at all, but relevant to the
central purpose of the Parthenon: the celebration of Athena
and her city is itself a paradigmatic civic activity. Thus, these
carvings may depict Athena and her cult statues. South 19-21
may "have represented the spinning of cloth, the removal of
a robe or pep/as in a roll from a loom" and the "disrobing of
a stiff, old-fashioned cult-statue (the Athena Polias) in anticipation of the presentation of a new dress: the central events
of the Plynteria and Panathenaia come to mind. " 88 As we shall
see, these events are represented also at the final destination
of the Athenian procession on the east end of the frieze. If, as
I have suggested, the Parthenon repeatedly uses woven fabric
and the women who weave it as images of the interwoven
elements of a coherent enduring community, female woolworkers and dressers at the center of the male
Centauromachy make sense. From both ends and at the
center of the south side of the Parthenon, the violent
Centaurs undermine the foundations of human society:
hospitality, marriage, weaving, and civic religion.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
4. Frieze: Within the Polis
At the outermost and highest position of the temple's short
east and west ends, the pediments and their sculptures in-theround point to what is beyond and above the city. The
external band of "framed" metopes carved in high relief
below them on all four sides of the temple depict the
struggles of the civilized polis to maintain itself against terrestrial threats in the shape of fully and partially human aliens.
Within the columns on the inner structure a three-foot-high
ribbon of pictures carved in low relief also wraps around the
temple. The frieze is continuous, broken visually only at the
four corners of the building. But since it is viewed from
outside and below, through the columns, it is also seen as a
series of separate scenes like the metopes and like the articulated episodes of Aeschylus's play. Like the Persians, which
differs from most tragedies by depicting a contemporary
historical rather than a distant mythical event, the frieze
differs from other Greek friezes in depicting a contemporary
subject; it is a "documentary"" in real place and time: "For
the first time in Greek history, it shows mortal human
beings." 90 On the inside of the temple we view the city from
the inside, at home, at peace: a terrestrial, civilized
community attached to and defined by a particular locale.
In the play Athens views Persians and examines itself
indirectly by looking at them. On the Parthenon frieze Athens
looks directly at itself. The Parthenon frieze shows victorious
Athenians rather than defeated Persians. The Persians are now
remembered, not by preserving ruins and abstaining from
civic rituals, but by restoring these rituals at-and even onthe temple. The setting is, once again, the Acropolis. The
festival procession that had to be abandoned "when the
Persians came" now makes its way through all the important
public places in the city, serving once more, but with special
meaning, "as a symbolic reappropriation of the city's space by
the community." 91 Mourning memory has given way to
festive memory. The frieze replaces the flight of the people
and Athena from the city to Salamis with the procession of
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91
the reestablished populace to the new home of the goddess at
the center of the city.
Like Pericles' funeral oration, the city on the frieze does
not emphasize individuality; unlike those of the Centaurs and
even the horses, the Athenian faces on the frieze are indistinguishable from each other. 92 Also, unlike the metopes with
their opposed pairs, the frieze contains all the elements of a
coherent population organized into groups. In characteristic
clothing, young and old, male and female, magistrates and
citizens, warriors and weavers, and even resident aliens who
call this city home, make their way to the east front of the
temple. The frieze resembles a story·cloth, wrapped around
an enclosed form. Like the city and the building itself, it
emphasizes the boundedness of the city. The observer circumnavigates the sides, looking inward towards the center. 93 As
we have seen, the final pomp€, "procession," of Aeschylus's
tragedy depicts the disintegration of the Persian regime and
the shamed ruler's retreat in his tattered pep/as into the
private confines of his palace, out of the view of those he has
ruined. In contrast, the Panathenaia pomp€ on the frieze
depicts an integrated regime in the act of delivering a new
pep/as to the goddess and openly displaying the "ruler"-the
demos, "people," itself-to the public view.
In the Persians, the dramatic action moves forward; the
scenes change, while the spectator remains stationary. On the
Parthenon, the procession is frozen into stationary stone. But
as the spectators move forward towards the front of the
temple, the frieze procession itself seems to advance. 94 The
spectators in the theater are simultaneously in their own time
and that of the play. Likewise the viewers at the temple are in
both the time of their own procession and the time of the
procession on the frieze. Like the play and the east pediment,
the frieze respects the unity of time, and its action too has a
beginning (at the southwest corner), middle (on the north
and south sides), and end (on the east where the two sides
meet). Unlike the framed metopes, which depict separate
episodes, the Ionic frieze is a "seamless whole" that can
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
present a narrative in "a continuous spatial and temporal
flow." 95 "Everything here is ongoing; everything is process.""
Various participants turn in different directions, adjust their
clothing, and wait, like actors, for their cues. Marshals
motion them forward, cavalry and chariot horses wait
patiently or rear restlessly, trained acrobats jump on and off
chariots, and a sacrificial ox digs in its heels.
A selective discussion will once more highlight the way
the frieze "remembers" the Persians and defines Athens in the
same "vocabulary"-this time pictorial-of yokes, woven
fabric, and speech. Again, comparisons with Persian visual art
prove instructive. The designers of the Parthenon and many
other Athenians were familiar with the great buildings of the
eastern empire, and it is likely that some of those who carved
its marbles had earlier worked on Persian buildings. Was the
Parthenon frieze "an ideological reply to the creation of their
old enemy," 97 or, after Athens had avoided the Persian yoke,
was "Persian imperial propaganda ... appropriated and
adapted by nco-imperialist Athens for the purposes of
promoting her own self-image"? 98 On the peripheral
pediments, metopes, and frieze of the great democratic
temple, the differences from Persian buildings are more
striking than the suggested "appropriations." But, as we shall
see, in the innermost chamber of the temple, the viewer is
sharply aware that Athens, too, "required an empire, but an
empire different from any that had ever existed." 99
Let us look again at the relief on the Apadana (throne
room) staircase at Persepolis. It depicts foreigners in
procession, bearing gifts to the Persian king. Their clothing is
repetitive, stiff, and stylized; no animated human body is
revealed or enhanced by the heavy robes of the Persians or
the simple tunics of their subjects. The foreign groups are
distinguished from each other in dress, gifts, and the animals
that accompany them but, like Xerxes' army of soldiers, they
are all alike in the most important respect, their enslavement.
They march stiffly, in single file, all in the same position, at
the same distance from each other. 100 The individuals are
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93
isolated even as they form a unit. The loss or addition of a
few figures would have little effect for, like Xerxes' armies,
they are not woven together into a coherent whole. Their
sameness suggests that the army of craftsmen who made them
were also "under the yoke." The figures are clearly carved,
with beards, hands, and feet making pleasing decorative
patterns like those in interior tiling or wallpaper. But they
lack animation and will of their own, neither gesturing to nor
speaking with one another. Individual figures or groups are
regularly tepeated so there is no narrative in time, no illusion
of motion. The effect is mesmerizing and intimidating, and
reduces the viewer to "gaze in something like awe-from
prostration level." 101 Another Persepolis relief shows Persian
subjects carrying the king on his throne. They too are all the
same; he is unique, above, and much larger than they. They
serve as the patterned architectural support on which his
weight presses.1 02
The difference in size is also seen in a rock relief at
Bisutun on which captured rebel kings approach Darius.l 03
The location of this impressive carving is itself interesting. It
sits high on a cliff overlooking a mountain, inaccessible, like
the Persepolis Apadana, to the sight of Persians as if it were
meant for the realm to which the King aspired-the whole
world. Unlike the Parthenon in the middle of Athens, this
monument in the middle of nowhere-or everywhere-bears
an inscription, the same words that begin all public utterances
of the King: "Proclaims Darius the king ... " The picture of the
diminished and yoked human beings before him conveys the
same political principle as the words: absolute despotism. On
the Persepolis staircase the camels, mules, and horses are
reined and bitted. On the Bisutun monument the hands of the
captured kings are tied behind their backs. Forced to face
their conquering master, they cannot look at or speak with
each other. The metaphor of Aeschylus's choruses and the
Queen's dream is depicted on the cliff at Bisitun: the captive
kings are literally yoked together by the cord around their
necks.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
In contrast to the Persian unity of repetition, the long and
varied Parthenon frieze conveys the dynamic unity of the city
it celebrates. Among the Greek cities, the Athenians alone
celebrated their unification in a public festival. 104 Civic
mythology told how, long before the building of the
Parthenon, Theseus united a number of independent communities to "live together," szmoikeo, in a single city. No longer
held together by a single monarch, the democratic citizens on
the frieze walk in pairs or groups that articulate them into
sub-classes of the city. Unlike the mass pictures on Persian
palaces and rock reliefs, the Athenian participants are neither
unconnected individuals nor yoked teams, but autonomous
and willing parts of an organized whole. The frieze conveys
their freedom-the same freedom Pericles describes in the
funeral oration-in several ways. The people are local
citizens, not foreign subject peoples of other nations. They
are self-organized. Marshals resembling their fellow citizens
in size and dress are stationed at various points to keep an eye
on the parts of the procession and to direct them to move at
the right times. There is no all-seeing agent of an unseen
monarch supervising the action. Other city magistrates at the
east end take part in the central ceremony of the festival, the
folding of the goddess's festal robe.
The figures on the frieze differ in size, but not as in the
Persian murals. In order to fit the frieze horses into the
confines of the three-foot band, the sculptors made them the
size of ponies, and the bulls being led to the sacrifice are no
taller than their human masters. There is no colossal Great
King or Pharaoh towering above his subjects. In the selfgoverning democratic city, only the gods are larger than the
citizens; seated, they are the same height as the standing
humans who deliver offerings to the only beings they
recognize as above them. The rest of the frieze figures are
distinguished into ranks of horses, lines of chariots, pedestrians, bearers of various implements and, on the east side,
the only mortal women depicted on the temple. Unlike the
figures in Persian frieze processions, the Athenian participants
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95
take different positions, and look in different directions.
Unlike yoked non-Persian processors, here even nonAthenian metics, who carry trays and parasols, willingly
weave their way in the procession to the front of the temple.
Only animals are reined or yoked together. The beautiful
horses on the frieze are separated from their human handlers
who coordinate animal strength with human needs in finely
wrought chariots. Unlike the diminished Persian subjects,
these zeugei pompikoi,' 05 "yoked processionals," seem to have
their nature enhanced by their participation in the civic
festival. They might remind us of the story of that mule who
returned of his own will, unyoked, to further the work on the
temple. Elsewhere on the frieze, graceful young riders recall
that Athena was also the "horse-taming goddess." Hers is the
power that enables men to train and work with horses, rather
than merely to subjugate them by force. The bulls and sheep,
as objects of sacrifice, are more mere instruments of their
human masters. But, like that of the weary pediment horse
described above, the depiction of the resisting "heifer lowing
at the skies" 106 reveals an extraordinary sensitivity to the
psychic dimension even of mastered animals. Persian bulls
and horses seem stiff and unanimated in comparison.
The frieze unfurls in a horizontal band, but there are no
prostrate subjects, dying La piths or half-horizontal Centaurs.
The posture of free citizens is upright. As if to underline the
free character of the event, the frieze includes among the
chariots, acrobatic contestants, apobatai, about whom little is
known, but who seem to have shown their agility by jumping
on and off moving chariots in competitions. It is sometimes
suggested that they represent the freedom and flexibility of
the Athenian hoplite warriors who, to the perplexity of historians, are not represented on the frieze. Most importantly like
Herodotus, Thucydides, and Aeschylus, who all point to free
speech as the key distinction between Persians and Athenians,
the Parthenon frieze depicts Athens' citizens communicating
with each other. Marshals beckon, horsemen and pairs of
girls chat, magistrates converse in groups, and the chief
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
archon instructs the child who helps him fold the pep/as. In
their freedom to speak-to describe, deliberate, and
disagree-the human members of this city resemble their
gods, who, on the frieze, are also depicted in conversation.
The procession begins at the southwest corner of the
temple. The first figure on the west side-the one farthest
from the front-is a nude young man who is arranging his
large cloth mantle as the procession is about to begin. Most
of the figures are clothed. The Parthenon frieze, like the
metopes and like the peplos ceremony of the Panathenaic
festival itself, repeatedly draws our attention to the ways in
which human beings cover their bodies.l 07 Along three sides,
the moving spectator sees at intervals marchers who are
adjusting their clothing, belts, or footwear as they progress
forward. The clothing of the figures on all sides of the temple
articulates them into groups, identifiable by cloaks, tunics,
hats, and footwear. The fabrics also indicate motion, speed,
and the direction of the procession and contribute to our
sense of real live activity on the frieze. The frieze also depicts
many objects-chariots, bridles, pots, trays, and stoolsfabricated by this technologically sophisticated people.
Interestingly, it shows no buildings, agreeing perhaps with
those who evacuated to Salamis, that the Athenian polis could
survive even if its buildings were destroyed, as long as its
political and ritual activities were maintained.
The long north and south sides of the frieze exhibit the
male warriors of Athens, unarmed, at peace. Modern viewers
have puzzled over the depiction of archaic chariot warriors
rather than fifth century hoplites. Some explain it as
supporting Pericles' expansion of the Athenian cavalry.
Others claim that the 192 figures (if you count right) on the
frieze were meant to represent the 192 hoplite soldiers who
fell at Marathon as they participated in the last Panathenaia
before the battle. 108 The depiction of young men guiding
spirited yet orderly horses suggests the character of the city
Pericles describes in the Funeral Oration. It is a stark contrast
to the dream that the Persian Queen describes in Aeschylus's
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play. As we saw in Part One, the submissive and the spirited
women pull against each other when Xerxes yokes them to
pull his chariot. The chariot horses on the frieze have more
in common with the horses that pull the chariots of the gods
in the corners of the west pediment. These horses and
humans who, unlike centaur horse-men, are fully distinguished from each other, are nevertheless a masterpiece of
intertwining elements. Here the technical art of perspectival
carving in extremely shallow bas-relief produces a stone
picture that looks almost like a flat woven mat. Once again,
the interweaving of the figures suggests the way in which this
city is bound together. A computer video in the British
Museum turns the chariot horses to show how they would
look if they faced the viewer. As the figures turn, the frieze
resembles a weaving that, stretched in different directions,
reveals but does not unravel the separate strands of which it
is fabricated. The horses and humans in the frieze procession
"hold together" as individuals do in the Athenian polis, but
not in Persia.
As the procession weaves its way forward, slowing as it
approaches its destination, the culminating scene takes center
stage and is "framed" by the
two central columns of the
eastern front. The frame is
structural and therefore
more prominent than the
changing "frames" the
viewer makes for himself as
he progresses towards the
pep/as scene (Figure 6); this
makes this scene "static
and eternalized." 1' ' Many
viewers feel that the
procession also becomes
"hushed" or "silenf' at this
point, as all senses focus on
the most important human
FIGURE 6 (Courtesy of A. Nicgorski)
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
fabrication on the frieze. It is literally a woven fabric. Below
the pediment depicting the birth of Athena are pictured the
city's chief ceremonial magistrate, the archon basileus ("king
archon"), his young assistant, and the goddess's birthday
pep/as. That they are folding, and not just holding, the pep/as
points to the integrity and continuity of the city, for they are
preparing to put it away, according to the custom of the past,
for the dressing of the image in the future.uo The confidence
about continuity and the future is also suggested by the
participation of children in the ritual. It is a stark contrast to
the dead-end feel of the Persians, where Aeschylus's young
and childless king withdraws in pathetic pompe in his tattered
pep/as. The ritually woven story-doth, which may have been
painted on the marble in bright yellow and purple, depicted
the victory of gods over Giants, the subject of the east
metopes. Its making and its part in Athena's festival symbolize
the way in which Athens itself is "woven" together. Evelyn
Harrison observes that, like the one on Keats's Grecian Urn,
"this is a picture of a folk." 111 By "brede/ of marble men and
maidens," Keats means both "breed" and "braid." Like the
urn pictures, the chiseled Parthenon "folk" resembles a
"braided" tapestry. Horizontal lines are still visible "to serve
as a sort of warp for the design." 112 Like the gods who
overcame the Giants, these citizens were able to overcome the
Persians because they were politically "well-woven." This is
what Athenians meant when they said they were "worthy of
the pep/os." 113
The web of state, or fabric of society, is the product of the
interweaving of warp and weft: male and female, public and
private, and, as the Eleatic Stranger explains in the
Statesman, of courage and moderation. In his description of
the ruling art, the true statesman, like the master weaver,
supervises and interweaves all the subordinate activities of the
city. After preparing a multiplicity of single strands of wool,
he combines them in a tightly woven, but freely flexible,
unity. Unlike autocratic tyrannies like Persia, where difference
is regarded as rebellion, and ropes, bridges, and fetters bind
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unrelated parts into a rigid, unnatural "whole," the Greek
city thrives on the "tension" between its different elements.l 14
It holds together from within, like a well-woven fabric or, as
we have seen, like the pantheon of the gods. The designers of
the Parthenon suggest that a "smooth web," which is smooth
not despite, but because of its tension, can be achieved in a
law-abiding democracy as well as in the virtuous monarchy
described by the Stranger. Here, too, statesmanship has interwoven raw materials, tools, vessels, servants, laborers,
merchants, ship owners, clerks, heralds, soothsayers, and
priests into a working whole. Plutarch's description of
Athens, coordinated and collaboratively at work on Pericles'
building projects comes to mind. But the statesmanship is that
of citizen magistrates, not monarch.
The eastern side of the frieze depicts women, not as
objects in the hands of Centaurs, but as active members of a
flourishing society, the producers of the city's swaddling
cloths, everyday garments, and ceremonial fabrics for the
living, as well as shrouds for the dead. Again, we should
emphasize that the weaving pictured here is not private but
civic work. The loom for weaving, like the plough for
planting and the press for making olive oil, is a domestic
peacetime contrivance of the armed goddess who, at other
times, champions the warriors who defend her city. Near the
end of the procession, Athena appears without her helmet
and weapons with the aegis in her lap. Here we see the
worker goddess, Athena Ergane, the patroness of
shipbuilders, woodworkers, and weavers like the ergastinai
who wove the peplos, seated, appropriately, with the metalworking smith, Hephaestus, who split Zeus's skull with his
ax, enabling Athena to be "born."
Like the gods on the pediments, the gods seated together
at the head of the frieze procession are multiple strands that
together make up a unified whole. They too are a "folk." Like
the rest of the frieze figures, they present a silent story to be
articulated by the viewer. Each divinity is identifiable by
distinctive looks or by conventional tags, some in the form of
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
objects that were once attached to or painted on the marble
reliefs: Apollo's headband (drill holes remain), Poseidon's
trident (now missing from his left hand), Hermes' hat, Ares'
club, Athena's aegis, Hera's veil, and Zeus's throne (the
others are on simpler, backless, stools). Each god has a special
position with respect to the others, either by genealogy and
history or by what each personifies. But not even a god is
autonomous or self-sufficient. None can even be himself until
woven into the pantheon in the context of the others. In
some places, the perspective of the low relief carving makes
their limbs look entwined or interwoven. They lean against
each other (Hermes-Dionysus, Poseidon-Apollo, ErosAphrodite), and refiect each other in their arm gestures
(Dionysus, Hera, Apollo) and veils (Hera-Aphrodite). Jenifer
Neils suggests that those in the right hand group, which
includes Poseidon, are associated with ports, the sea, and
naval battle. They are balanced by those of the left hand
group, which includes Demeter; these are associated with the
countryside, agriculture, and land battle. All together, she
claims, the gods remind the viewer of the completeness of the
recent Athenian victory over the Persians. 115
Their overlapping draped garments also unify them in an
integrated group. Like the garments everywhere on the
Parthenon, where there is little nudity,'" these are
remarkable. Except for the child Eros, the gods, like the frieze
Athenians, are all clothed in rippling, crinkly, folding, fiexible
material that conforms to the lifelike bodies beneath it.
Athena's peplos is carefully pinned at the shoulder and tucked
under her legs; Artemis wears a head cloth and modestly
adjusts her gown to cover her shoulder, and her skirted robe
falls about her differently positioned legs in a different way
from Athena's. The Athenian people, "worthy of the pep/os,"
worship gods whose clothing is tailored for anthropomorphic
bodies.
How are the frieze Olympians related to the frieze
Athenians? Some claim that the gods turn away and show
little interest in the procession in honor of the goddess. 117 But
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101
Neils revives a view that they are sitting in a semicircle and
thus are attending to the central pep/as scene "before"
them. us Viewers of the frieze who think of the "row" of gods
this way visually deepen the low-relief carving and bring out
its "texture." Like the flattened ranks of horses, the gods and
humans appear as they might in a woven tapestry. So the gods
are both interested and not interested in the mortals who
honor them. As at Troy, they can turn away to pursue their
amours, quarrels, and conversations. But, as Homer shows,
the most serious and interesting activities of the gods who live
on Olympus are the ones that are interwoven with those of
mortals on earth. Athena is as interesting as a strand in
Homer's stories of Achilles and Odysseus and in Aeschylus's
accounts of the founding of the Athenian court and defeat of
the Persians as she is in her own story. The Parthenon gives us
the gods both on their own and woven into our mortal
stories.
The frieze offers the Athenians a picture of themselves
that is also worthy of the gods' attention. The human festival
is, after all, the reason they have gathered together in Athens.
The only other place where they assemble in this fashion is at
home on Olympus. Now they have accepted seats of honor
and look relaxed, keeping their distance from the mortals yet
prepared to stay and grace the holiday with their presence.
There is time to be passed before the animals are sacrificed
and the meat is distributed in the Keramikos at some distance
from the temple. The Gods, who dine on nectar and
ambrosia, do not appear eager for the festival feast. Mortal
fighting, yoking, and weaving require mortal eating. But the
gods who live forever have leisure just to look and to talk.
Some of them view the approaching procession. Aphrodite
points out something to young Eros, who perhaps has seen
fewer of these events than the others have. And others, Zeus
and Hera, Athena and Hephaestus, and Poseidon and Apollo,
turn to each other and converse, just like the rwo groups of
five magistrates fianking them. If the pep/as has already been
displayed and is now being folded away, the culminating
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
scene of the frieze illustrates the purpose of the temple as a
memorial of the Persian attempt to destroy Athens. The
Persians have come and gone. In Athens, the gods who live
forever participate in the Athenian Panathenaia; Athena's
pep/as-and the people "worthy of the peplos"-endure.
5. Statue: Parthenos, Polis, Empire
As they arrived at the front side of the Parthenon the
spectators would first see the eastern pediment depicting the
birth of Athena. Beneath it the eastern metopes showed the
goddess's battle with the Giants. From between the central
columns her birthday pep/as on the frieze would be visible.
But the extraordinary visual displays we have discussed so far
were all only wrappings, the decorative coverings of the
house of the goddess herself. Ancient visitors to the temple do
not even mention the frieze, but all marvel at the statue. Deep
within, in her own private chamber, Athena Parthenos stood
alone, visible and awesome in
looks and size, to the "folk"
that came to her birthday
party. Unlike the Great King in
his Persepolis throne room,
this divinity was made to be
seen. But Pheidias's masterpiece can no longer be seen.
Pausanias's descriptions, some
ancient souvenir statuettes, a
small Roman copy, the
Varvakeion Athena (Figure 7)
and other statues of the type,
are all that's left to shape our
understanding of the famous
statue and what it could have
meant when the Parthenon
was the highpoint of the
Athenian polis. The full-size,
concrete reproduction in the
FIGURE 7 (Courtesy of A. Nicgors.ki)
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unlikely setting of Nashville, Tennessee has attracted much
popular and scholarly attention, but it is hard to believe that
the Parthenos could have looked like that.
The size of the little korai statues presented with
petitionary prayers of individual Athenians to the familiar
wooden image of Athena Polias 119 suggests the personal
attachment and affection that those who brought them felt
for their domestic goddess. The bronze Athena Promachos is
larger than the human warriors she would lead in warding off
a threat to their city; outdoors and approachable, she stands
"foremost" but at ease among them. We have seen how the
Parthenon, unlike the colossal buildings of other places, is
large, but somehow commensurate with human size aud the
capacity to take it in. This is true, despite the fact that
Pheidias deliberately made it larger than the earlier
"Parthenon" on its site so that it could contain the statue he
intended to put in it. Similarly, the large size of Athena on the
east frieze is subtly suggested by her seated position, but does
not overwhelm either the mortals depicted near her or the
mortal viewers of the frieze. But the standing 120 Parthenos
statue, although of human shape, was colossal, almost forty
feet tall, far beyond human scale. She was the power behind
the most powerful city in the world. Full-breasted and
clothed in an Athenian pep/as, she would not have resembled
the human-sized Amazons at the edges of the city. She held iu
her extended right hand a much smaller statue of Nike, the
goddess of victory, that was almost six feet tall. Athena
Parthenos stood ready and armed, with the Gorgon aegis not
resting on her lap as in the frieze, but as visible armor over
her pep/as. Her helmet, crowned with sphinx and griffins,
had its earfiaps up to indicate peacetime, but it was on her
head, and she held her spear. Her shield was engraved with
the familiar subjects of fighting Amazons and Giants, and her
sandals depicted, once again, the Centauromachy. Here, as
elsewhere in the building, Athena's defense of Athens in
contemporary times is associated with her defeat of these
earlier threats. But now the victor over the Giants is herself a
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
giant. The folds of her giant pep/as recall the stiff, fiuted
columns of her giant temple more than they resemble the soft
and folding fabrics we have been observing elsewhere in the
Parthenon.
Like the Zeus at Olympia, the Parthenos was marveled at
for its size and for the materials it was made of: the bright
white ivory of her face and arms, the gemstones of her eyes,
and the gold of her clothing and equipment. Unlike the
olivewood Polias that fell from the sky, perhaps as a gift from
Zeus, the Parthenos was admired as the fabrication of an
extraordinary Athenian artist. Just as the later, world-famous
statue at Olympia was Pheidias's Zeus, this masterpiece was
Pheidias's Athena, the product of human imagination and
technical prowess at their peak. In contrast to the smaller,
worn, wooden slab, this Athena was huge, hard, and very
heavy. The plates of gold that formed her dress weighed
almost a ton.
The atmosphere inside the temple was mysterious and
unsettling, illuminated by window light reflected from a pool
at the statue's base. The shimmering water and light must
have suggested a sort of animation in the immense and
immovable stone figure. The beauty of the Parthenos was
reportedly breathtaking. She must have been deinos, simultaneously "terrifying" and "terrific," "awful" and "a\vesotne."
Unlike the (probably) seated wooden doll that received
female ministrations and petitions, and unlike the seated and
sociable Athena of the east frieze, Pheidias's goddess was
upright and alone. Unlike the statuesque Persian Queen, who
is humanized by what she says, the Parthenos was silent. She
did not communicate with the mortals who came to see her.
Gifts were not presented to her or animals sacrificed at her
altar, and no priestess interpreted messages from her. Since
the huge, flat, ivory face was fastened to the surface and
removable-like the theater mask of Xerxes' mother-it must
have been less realistic and human than some of the more
expressive marble faces elsewhere on the temple. The size of
the immense, white hands, one holding a man-sized statue
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and the other balancing an enormous spear and shield, must
have appeared proportionally larger than the neck and face,
because they were closer to the viewer. Could one still see in
this colossus the goddess of handiwork, Athena Ergane, the
"worker," with hands on a woodcarving, pot, or loom? Or
would her hands suggest those of great Achilles, whose great
man-slaying hands ruthlessly killed Priam's son?
As we have seen, the Persians and Egyptians made such
statues, sometimes so large that they had to lie prone on the
ground. They were usually the images of Kings and Pharaohs,
who represented themselves as all-powerful, even divine, in
their homelands and as entitled to the universal empires they
aspired to outside. Does the colossal Athena still celebrate, as
the outer parts of the temple do, the bounded, self-governing
city and its victory over the despotic juggernaut that sought
to yoke it and deprive it of speech? Or is she, deep within the
temple, the embryo of the imperial Athens destined to emerge
in the fifty years following the Persian Wars? Paradoxically, in
preserving what it viewed as its fully free way of life, Athena's
city, democratic within, was becoming despotic without. The
rule (arche) that began in self-defense against an everexpanding despot soon became the ever-expanding means for
maintaining the extraordinary expense of its extraordinary
achievements. But necessity-for defense or for maintenance-was just the prologue to full-scale empire (arche) in
the Athenian mode.
The necessary means soon became an end in itself as
empire became the full expression of Athenian glory.
Thucydides' account of the war between Athens and its
erstwhile ally Sparta alludes frequently to Athens' erstwhile
imperial enemy Persia. The Persians had always exhibited the
King's valuable possessions as a means of displaying his
power. After the Persian wars, Athens, contrary to its earlier
customs, began to exhibit the valuable trophies left by the
fleeing Persian army. In 454 B.C., the year the Delian treasury
was moved to Athens, each of her colonies and "allies"
marched in the Panathenaic procession with an offering of a
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
cow and a full suit of armor. Some of these "allies" must
uneasily have remembered the Great King's demands for
earth and water several decades before. The Parthenon frieze
does not picture tribute-bearing allies, armed Athenians, or
alien slaves. But as Athens grew rich and powerful she began
to display herself, not only as the producer of dramas, games,
festivals, and art, but as a city worthy of power, as well as the
pep/as. The empire itself soon became part of the display.
Pericles' three speeches in Thucydides make clear that the
internal glory of Athens required external support, often at
the expense of those who did not participate in the
democratic life that Pericles describes. In contrast to the
Persian yoke, weaving has been the appropriate metaphor for
Athenian democratic politics. But Athens' appropriation of
the resources of the unraveling Delian League was destined to
conclude with the unraveling of Athens itself. Pericles does
not use the word "yoke" in his tough arguments for Athenian
rule over the former allies; nor do the Athenians who later
present Melos with their ultimatum. But the Melians know
they must choose between subjugation and death. Just as
Athens had become the only independent city in the Delian
League, its nominal democracy had become the rule of one
citizen (Thuc., 2.65). And Athena, comfortably interwoven
with her fellow gods on the Parthenon frieze, had reappeared
like Darius, in the depths of her temple, huge and
shimmering, overpowering and alone.
As an expensive war with Sparta became increasingly
likely, Pericles assured the Athenians that they had at their
disposal tribute from the allies, public and private dedications, sacred vessels, Persian spoils, and temple treasures.
Several decades before, Aeschylus had vividly contrasted the
private gold of the Great King with the communally owned
silver of the city that defeated him. Xerxes' stage-mother
asserts that he is accountable to no one. Now Pericles
reminded the Athenians that the pep/as of Pheidias's statue
was not a soft woolen fabric like that of Athena Polias, but
one of solid gold. But it, too, could be removed. For, when
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Pheidias began his masterpiece, Pericles had advised him to
make the pep los detachable (Plut. Pericles., XXXI). 121 Pericles
now reminded the assembly that the goddess was there not
only to be looked at, but also to finance their "safety," and
that no ally need be consulted. As long as they replaced the
loan, they could make use of "the gold plates with which the
goddess herself was overlaid" (Thuc., 2.13). By this time, the
storeroom of the Parthenon was the depository of the Delian
League treasury that had been moved to Athens. Within the
lifetime of the men who had survived Salamis, the building
that began as a memorial of free Athens' defeat of imperial
Persia metamorphosed into a monument to imperial Athens.
In truth, the building was less a "temple" in which to worship
a goddess than the city's icon of its own power and a secure
storehouse for its usable resources; it had become "the central
bank of Athens." 122
Reversing Themistocles' pre-Salamis strategy of evacuating the population from Athens and depending on a
"wooden wall" of ships, Pericles' first speech advised outdwelling Athenians to "bring in their property from the
fields" and "come into the city" (Thnc., 1.143; 2.113) behind
the walls Themistocles had hurriedly built in anticipation of
war with Sparta. Donald Kagan points out that Pericles recognized this strategy as an attempt to overcome "problems
presented by natnre" by turning mainland Athens into a more
defensible "island" (Time., 1.143).123 One is reminded, not
only of Salamis, but also of the "unnatural" projects of
Persian and other barbarian overreachers to "yoke" the
Hellespont, turn peninsulas into islands, and reroute rivers by
digging channels. Thucydides says it was hard for a rural
Athenian to leave behind his town (polis) and the ancient
form of government (po/iteia) of his father (Time., 2.14).
When these suburban Athenians had come into the city-here
he says astu (Thuc., 2.17), the physical surroundings-they
had nowhere to go, so they camped in deserted places, and in
sanctuaries and shrines. The Acropolis and Parthenon were
off-limits. But many crowded into land at the foot of the
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Acropolis-land that an oracle had warned against inhabiting-and in areas between the Long Walls, and in the
Piraeus (Thuc., 2.17).
Just before Pericles' second speech, the funeral oration,
Thucydides says that the Athenian army that invaded Megaris
with Pericles as its general was "the largest army of Athenians
that had ever been assembled in one body" (Thuc., 2.31). His
enumeration of the different parts of this force reminds one
of Aeschylus's descriptions of the Great King's army in the
earlier war. His Persian Queen would have been satisfied with
this numerical account of Athenian strength. The funeral
oration is the more subtle account of the source of Athenian
strength, the one the Queen could not appreciate. The free
city that defeated the Persians is to be celebrated and loved
for the character of its life: its political institutions, laws,
physical beauty, wisdom, and the character of its citizens.
Athens is open to all the world; no one is prevented "from
learning or seeing" (mathematos e theamatos, Time., 2.39);
the city is an exhibit, a school, from which all Hellas can learn
(Thuc., 2.41). But as Pericles continues, it becomes clear that
Athens is not a large enough stage on which to exhibit its own
excellence, and that he is thinking of a wider audience than
even Hellas. The delimited city that once remembered the
Persians is now offered the prospect of being honored and
remembered forever by the whole civilized world. Its citizens
can win glory by fixing their gaze, not only on the city but on
the "power [dzmamin] of the city" (Thuc., 2.43). Athens'
power must be displayed in the great theater of war and only
colonies or defeated enemies will serve as "everlasting
memorials" (mnemeia ... aidia, Thuc., 2.41) of her greatness.
Immediately after Pericles' celebration of Athens in the
funeral oration (2.34-46), Thucydides describes the plague,
making it clear that it was exacerbated by the crowding of the
country people into the city (again called astu): now even
temples were filled with corpses and "No fear of gods or law
of men restrained" (Thuc., 1.53). It is unlikely that Athena's
temple on the Acropolis remained unviolated. Plutarch says
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that Pericles' enemies blamed him for the plague, attributing
it not only to the crowding, but also to the idleness of the
multitudes of men who were "pent up like cattle with no
employ or service" (Plut., Pericles. XXXIV). We might
remember his earlier enthusiastic description of the opportunities for employment and prosperity that Pericles' building
projects had provided.
Pericles' third and last speech is a sober acknowledgement
of the Athenians' sufferings and an exhortation not to allow
these private ills to jeopardize the "common safety" (Thnc.,
2.61). But "freedom" no longer means defying the Great
King's demands for "earth and water" and halting the
expansion of the Persian Empire. Athens and Sparta, as
different as they were, could willingly "yoke" themselves
together to avoid subjugation by Persia. Here Pericles speaks
again of the relationship between Athens' expanding
"empire," her drive to supersede her own limits, and the
necessary subjugation of her erstwhile ally:
... of two divisions of the world which lie open to
man's use, the land and the sea, you hold the
absolute mastery over the whole of one ... to
whatever fuller extent you may choose; and there
is no one, either the Great King or any
nation ... who will block your path as you sail the
seas ... Nor must you think that you are fighting for
the simple issue of slavery or freedom; on the
contrary, loss of empire is also involved and
danger from the hatred incurred in your sway.
From this empire, however, it is too late for you
even to withdraw ... for by this time the empire you
hold is a tyranny, which may seem unjust to have
taken, but which certainly it is dangerous to let go.
(Time., 2.62-63)
Pericles reminds his discontented fellow citizens that their
fathers acquired, preserved, and bequeathed the empire to
them, giving Athens a "great name" (Thuc., 2.64),
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
presumably one far greater than the "Athens" that Darius
wanted to be reminded of, and than the Persian names which
had frightened all Greeks until Athens defeated Xerxes.
Pericles' last words are again about how, even as all things
decay, the memory (mneme) of the glorious Athenian enterprise will endure; the "splendour of the moment and the
after-glory are left in everlasting remembrance" (aeimnestos,
Time., 2.64).
The ivory skin and golden pep/as of Pheidias's Athena
seem to have remained on the statue through the end of the
Peloponnesian War. But she must have provided a kind of
political and psychological support for the empire that was
incubating as Pericles beautified and glorified the city.
Thucydides recounts how internally democratic Athens
became as brutal and denatured to its external subordinatesand eventually to itself-as the internally despotic tyranny of
Persia had been in its expansion. But the silent Parthenon tells
a much more tragic story than the one Aeschylus dramatized
for his fellow citizens. For Athens at her peak exemplified a
human way of life more noble and more natural than overextended Persian despotism, despite the latter's impressive
multiplication of territory, people, buildings, and gold. The
story of Athens is tragic, rather than merely sad or repellent,
for the same reason the story of Oedipus is tragic: the terrible
collapse comes about not, as in Persia, because of grotesque
suppressions and distortions of the human soul, but precisely
as a result of the full exercise of human capacities: selfgovernment, mastery of the sea, poetry, mathematics,
philosophy, art, and architecture, and the free human speech
that makes it all possible. It is difficult simply to say that we'd
prefer for Oedipus or Athens to have been more "moderate."
Pericles urged restraint, even as he cultivated an Athenian
love for Athens that was bound to end up as an eros for Sicily
(Time., 6.24). His ward, Alcibiades, the man most in love
with the Sicilian expedition, was disastrously recalled to
Athens in a ship called the "Salaminia." In the first half of the
century, Phrynichus and Aeschylus made it possible in the
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theater for the surviving Athenians to weep for Miletus and
even for the Mede. As Athens completed the building
intended to remember its own razing and restoration, the city
hurtled forward to the events described in Thucydides'
terrible account. The colossal Athena within that building was
the terrible image of power that Pericles said would insure the
survival of Athens' name. The shining, bright monument to
Marathon and Salamis could not deter the dark, bloody
massacres at Mytilene, Melos, and Mycalessus. In some
terrible way, it contributed to them.
6. Pandora
We come at last to our last Athenian pep/os. The pedestal of
the statue of Athena depicted another carved gathering of the
gods at another birthday celebration of yet another
parthenos, the maiden Pandora. Hesiod gives two accounts of
the world's first human woman; in both, she and the gods are
the source of all of mankind's troubles. 124 After Prometheus
defied Zeus by giving fire to human beings, Zeus ordered
Hephaestus and Athena to produce a counter-gift, a
"beautiful evil" (kalon kako11), in response to Prometheus's
empowering gift. Hephaestus mixed earth and water and
fashioned a lovely maiden, Pandora, "all-gifts." Athena taught
her to do needlework and to weave the "skillfully embroidered" (po/udaidaloll) web. She dressed and veiled her, and
the other goddesses adorned her with finery. A surviving cup
shows Athena in her own shawl and aegis, pinning the peplos
on the new-made girl. 125 Everyone knows the end of the
story: Pandora opened the jar of "all gifts," releasing them
upon previously free and unburdened man, forcing him to
"bow his neck to the yoke of hard necessity." 126 Along with
the blessings of fire, agriculture, and weaving, man now
possessed the curses of disease, war, and slavery. The source
of human ills, of course, is human nature itself, and Athens
understood itself as the paradigmatically human city. The
tragic account of Athens' glory that we read in Thucydides'
long discursive book can also be "read" in the emerging
�112
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
empire's most impressive building. Like Pandora, the
"beautiful evil" made by Hephaestus, and like the terrible
events depicted in the tragedy that Aeschylus and Pericles
made beautiful for the theater, the monument that Pheidias
and Pericles made beautiful on the Acropolis is a kalon kakon:
the story of the Parthenon and the stories that it tells show
Athens in full flower, and also show the seeds of her selfdestruction.
This story began with an account of Aeschylus's Persians,
a humane view of the tragedy of an empire that attempted to
subjugate free Greek cities under the yoke and mantle of
worldwide tyranny. As different as they were, the defensive
alliance that voluntarily yoked Athens and Sparta together
succeeded in preserving them-and their differences.
Decades later, having torn each other and themselves apart in
the war that Thucydides attributes to Athens' own pursuit of
empire, Alcibiades, who had spent the war bouncing from
Athens to Sparta, to Thrace, to Persia, suggested that the two
former allies might achieve true glory if they once again
yoked themselves together to oppose Persia. This time the
alliance would not be defensive, but aggressive, with the aim
of establishing a Pan-Hellenic empire. The project could
never work since, as we observed above, the yoking of nnlike
partners, even under Darius or Xerxes, is bound to be
temporary. Athens and Sparta were too different to ally for
joint conquest, in contrast to defense, and Alcibiades was
nurtured in Pericles' Athens, not in the palace at Persepolis.
His last wild scheme collapsed completely as the Spartans
entered Athens, unopposed, seventy-six years after the battle
of Salamis. There is no play describing that event.
�FLAUMENHAFT
113
Bibliography
All the images discussed are available online at many websites. Any
reliable search engine will locate a large selection. They can also be found
in the following, easily available, books:
Athens:
Bruno, Vincent J. The Parthenon. New York: \'7.\V. Norton, 1974.
Connolly, Peter and Hazel Dodge. The Ancient City: Life in Classical
Athens and Rome. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Hurwit, Jeffrey .M. The Athenian Acropolis: History, Mythology, and
Archaeology from the Neolithic Era to the Present. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1999.
Jenkins, Ian. The Parthenon Frieze. Oakville: British Museum Press, 1994.
Neils, Jenifer. The Parthenon Frieze. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2001.
~~-~-·
YVorshipping Athena: Panatheuaia and Parthenon. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.
Neils, Jenifer, ed. Goddess and Polis. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1992.
\Voodford, Susan. The Parthenon. New York: Cambridge University Press,
1981.
Persia:
Allen, Lindsay. The Persian Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2005.
WiesehOfer, Josef. Ancient Persia. London: LB. Tauris & Co., 2001.
Notes
37
Donald Kagan, Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy (New
York, 1991), p. 161-62.
38
Jeffrey M. Hurwit, The Athenian Acropolis: History, Mythology, and
Archaeology from the Neolithic Era to the Present (Cambridge, 1999), p.
74.
39
40
Pausanias, I.xxvi, declines to comment on the truth of this story.
Peploi were given to Athena in the rituals of other Greek cities; Athens
seems to have been the only place where the "garment was actually
placed upon the statue." E. J. W. Barber "The Peplos of Athena," in
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
114
Jenifer Neils, ed., Goddess and Polis (Hanover, New Hampshire, 1992),
p. 106. Perhaps the earliest description of such a presentation is described
in Book Six of the Iliad, when the desperate women of Troy under siege
make such an offering in hope of her aid. \Vhen she prepares to go to the
aid of the Greeks, she takes off her "soft peplos, that she herself had
made and her hands had fashioned" (VIII.385-86) and dons the tunic of
Zeus and her armor.
41
Barber, in Neils (1992), p.llO.
42
The festival and evidence for its changes over time are described in
detail by Hurwit (1999) and H.\V. Parke, Festivals of the Athenians
(Ithaca, New York, 1977), pp. 29-50. See also Jenifer Neils, "The
Panathenaia: An Introduction," in Neils (1992), pp. 13-27. H. A. Shapiro,
"Democracy and Imperialism: the Panathenaia in the Age of Perikles," in
Jenifer Neils, ed., \Vorshipping Athena: Panathenaia and Parthenon
(Madison, Wisconsin, 1996), 215-25.
43
Kagan, p. 168.
44 Jan
Collie, Hidden London (London, 2002).
· 45
Brunilde Sismondo Ridgeway, "Images of Athena on the Akropolis,, in
Neils (1992), 122-42, p. 122; Peter Connolly and Hazel Dodge, The
Ancient City: Life in Classical Athens and Rome (New York, 2000), p. 12.
46
Hurwit, p.136.
47
Russell Meigs, "The Political Implications of the Parthenon,, in The
Parthenon, ed. Vincent J. Bruno (New York, 1975), p. 103, citing the
orator Lycurgus, Against Leocrates 81.
48 Plutarch's
Lives, Pericles, XII, Vol. III, trans. Bernadotte Perrin
(Cambridge, Mass., 1967), p. 37. Subsequent references will be given in
the text.
49
Kagan, p. 37
50 Meigs,
51
p. 111.
Allen, pp. 93-4.
52 Pausanias,
I.xx.
53
Joseph Wieseh6fer, Ancient Persia (New York, 2001), p. 34.
54
Persians, 979, and Hall, n. 979, p. 172.
55
Donald N. Wilber, Persepolis: The Archaeology of Parsa, Seat of Persian
Kings (New York, 1969), p. 57.
56
Wieseh6fcr, p. 26.
�FLAUMENHAFT
115
57
Christian Meier, Athens: A Portrait of the City in Its Golden Age, trans.
Robert and Rita Kimber (New York, 1998), p. 381.
58
The setting of the full-scale reproduction of the temple in a flat, treefilled park in Nashville, Tennessee makes the building itself feel very
different. The ancient view \vas probably more restricted than it is now;
the view from the west side was best. Ian Jenkins, The Parthenon Frieze
(London, 1994), p. 18.
59
Hurwit, p. 54.
60 Susan Woodford, The Parthenon (Cambridge, 1981), p. 20. Montaigne
says that "The Athenians ordained that the mules which had served in
building the temple called Hccatompedon [the earlier Parthenon] should
be set free, and that they should be allowed to graze anywhere without
hindrance." "Of Cruelty," in The Complete Essays ofMontaigne, trans.
Donald M. Frame (Stanford, 1975), p. 103.
61
Hurwit, p. 176.
62
Hurwit, p. 176.
63
Hurwit, p. 32.
Vincent J. Bruno, "The Parthenon and the Theory of Classical Form,"
in The Parthenon (New York, 1974), p. 91.
64
65
Evelyn B. Harrison (1974), "The Sculptures of the Parthenon," in
Bruno, 225-311, p. 248.
66
Harrison (1974), p. 249.
67
Harrison (1974), p. 233.
68
Hurwit, p. 179.
69
Harrison, p. 278.
70
Bruno, p. 94.
71
This may suggest that the primary aim of the building was to celebrate
this victory, rather than Athena's birthday. See Hurwit, p. 30.
72
An enemy of Pheidias claimed that the sculptor had made likenesses of
himself and Pericles in the Amazon metopes. Pheidias died while in prison
on these charges. Plutarch affirms the resemblance to Pericles (Pint.,
Pericles, XXXI).
73
Mera ]. Flaumenhaft, "Priam the Patriarch, His City, and His Sons,"
Interpretation, 32.1 (Winter, 2004): 3·31.
74 Page duBois, Centaurs and Amazons: W!omen and the Pre~History of the
Great Chain of Being. Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1991), p. 54, citing Bernard
Ash mole, Architect and Sculptor itt Classical Greece (London, 1972),
�116
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
pp.165ff. Sec also Larissa Bonfante, "Nudity as a Costume in Classical
Art," American Journal of Archaeology, Volume 93, No.4, (October,
1989), p. 555.
75
Mary R. Lefkowitz, "Women in the Panathcnaic and Other Festivals,"
in Neils, ed., \Vorsbipping Athena, 1996, 78-91, p. 81.
76
Hurwit, p. 24.
77
Pausanias, I.xxviii.
78
\'\falter F. Otto, The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek
Religion (Boston, 1954), p. 53.
79 The
myths about their ancestry are confused: they are the products of
the mating of Ixion and a marc, or of Ixion's offspring and a mare, or of
Zeus in the shape of a horse and Ixion's wife.
80
duBois, pp. 27-8.
81
In the frieze behind the mctopes, only older men, officials, and some of
the gods are bearded, but all have articulated necks.
82
Robin Osborne, "Framing the Centaur: "Reading 5th Century
Architectural Sculpture," in Art and Text in Ancient Greek Culture, Simon
Goldhill and Robin Osborne, eds. (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 71, 75-76.
Osborne ends by suggesting that "treating others as beasts" may "itself
constitute a lapse in propriety," p. 83.
83
duBois, p. 31.
84
Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (New York, 1956).
85
Bonfante, p. 554.
86
duBois, p. 30.
87
Hurwit, p. 173 and Note 62.
88
Hurwit, pp. 173-74.
89
Neils (2001), p. 196.
9
°Kagan, p. 160.
91
Louise Bruit Zaidman and Pauline Schmitt Pantel, Religion in the
Ancient Greek City (Cambridge, 1992), p. 106.
92
Peter von Blanckenhagen, Unpublished lecture, St. John's College,
Annapolis, date unknown.
93
The British lvluseum's Duveen Gallery reverses the direction of the
viewing, enclosing the viewer rather than the pictures.
94 The
CD that accompanies jenifer Neils's The Parthenon Frieze
(Cambridge, 2001) attempts to approximate the experience of walking
�FLAUMENHAFT
117
alongside the frieze by moving the frieze before the stationary viewer.
The corners of the temple are indicated by four red lines.
95Ncils (2001), pp. 33,37-8.
96
Evelyn B. Harrison, ''The Web of History: A Conservative Reading of
the Parthenon Frieze," in Neils (1996), 198-214, p. 211.
97 Woodford, p. 33.
98 Jenkins,
99
p. 26. Jenkins rejects the latter view.
Kagan, p. 111.
100 Woodford,
101
p. 36.
Green, p. 5.
102 \Vieseh6fer,
Plate V.
103 WiesehOfcr,
Plate I.
104
Robert Parker, Athenian Religiou: A History (Oxford, 1996), p. 14.
105
Neils (1992), p. 93.
10 6 John
Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn," 1820.
10 7 This
theme has been fully explored by Jennifer Neils in \'(!orshipping
Athena (1996), Goddess and Polis (1992), and The Parthenon Frieze
(2001). On Greek weaving, the pep/as, and cloth fabrication in general,
see also Barber, in Neils (1992) and Barber (1994).
lOS
Harrison (1996) is critical of John Boardman's speculation, 199-200.
109 Neils (2001 ), p. 70.
110
Harrison (1996), p. 203; Neils (2001), p. 68.
111
Harrison (1996), p. 210.
11 2 Neils
(2001), p. 80.
113
Harrison (1996), p. 200.
ll 4
Plato, Statesman, 303b-311c.
11 5
Neils (2001), pp. 188 ff.
11 6
Neils (2001), p. 186.
117 Phillip
Fehl has argued that the rocks in the frieze locate the gods, also
emotionally distanced from the humans, on distant Olympus. "Gods and
Men in the Parthenon Frieze" (1961), quoted in Bruno (1996), 311-21.
118
Neils (2002), pp. 61-6.
119
Hurwit, p. 18.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
118
120 Pausanias,
I.xxiv.
121
His foresight later saved the sculptor from an accusation that he had
stolen some of the gold. \Vcighing proved he had not.
122
Hurwit, p. 164.
1D
Kagan, p. 113.
124
Hesiod, Theogony, 571-616 and Works and Days, 60-105.
125
Jenkins, p. 41.
126 Jenkins,
p. 40.
�
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Brann, Eva T. H.
Hunt, Frank
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Williamson, Robert. B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
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Barbera, André
Aigla M.D., Jorge H.
Flaumenhaft, Mera
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 51, number 2 (2009)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Barbara McClay
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson,
President; Michael Dink, Dean. All manuscripts are subject to
blind review. Address correspondence to the Review,
St. John’s College, P
.O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 214042800. Back issues are available, at $5 per issue, from the
St. John’s College Bookstore.
©2009 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction
in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
The St. John’s Public Relations Office and the St. John’s College Print Shop
�2
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
3
Contents
Essay
The Secret Art of Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis
Principia Mathematica, Part Two...................................5
Judith Seeger
“The Things of Friends Are Common”........................37
Christopher B. Nelson
Review
“My Subject Is Passion”...............................................45
Eva Brann’s Feeling Our Feelings: What Philosophers
Think and People Know
Ronald Mawby
�4
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
5
The Secret Art of Isaac
Newton’s Philosophiae
Naturalis Principia Mathematica
Part Two
Judith Seeger
4. The Second Hidden Text: The Great Work of Nature
Tis true without lying, certain & most true.
That wch is below is like that wch is above & that
wch is above is like yt wch is below to do ye miracles
of one only thing
And as all things have been & arose from one by
ye mediation of one: so all things have their birth
from this one thing by adaptation.
The Sun is its father, the moon its mother, the
wind hath carried it in its belly, the earth is its
nourse. The father of all perfection in ye whole
world is here. Its force or power is entire if it be
converted into earth.
Separate thou ye earth from ye fire, ye subtile from
the gross sweetly wth great indoustry. It ascends
from ye earth to ye heaven & again it descends to
ye earth & receives ye force of things superior &
inferior.
By this means you shall have ye glory of ye whole
world & thereby all obscurity shall fly from you.
Judith Seeger is a tutor at St. John’s College, Annapolis. This essay is
published in two parts. Part one appeared in The St. John’s Review, volume
51, number 1. All bibliographical references appeared at the end of part 1.
Endnotes are numbered continuously through both parts
�6
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Its force is above all force. ffor it vanquishes every
subtile thing & penetrates every solid thing.
So was ye world created . . . . (“Tabula
Smaragdina,” translated by Isaac Newton)37
The General Scholium with which the second and third
editions of the Principia end is so powerful that it may
obscure the discussion of comets that precedes it. That
discussion, however, is of crucial importance. The main text
of all three editions of the Principia culminates with
Newton’s demonstration that the formerly fear-inspiring
comets, rather than being supernatural signs of God’s wrath,
are natural bodies that obey the same laws as the planets. This
accomplishment is one of the triumphs of the book. But
Newton did not stop there. The wide-ranging disquisition on
comets at the end of Book 3—consisting primarily of celestial
observations, mathematical calculations, and inferences
drawn from Newton’s optical studies—includes, as well,
assertions about the active role comets play in the universe, in
passages that stand out in the context of mathematical calculations and demonstrations.
Consider, for example, the remarks that follow
Proposition 41 of Book 3 in all three editions. At this point,
Newton has already established that the bodies of comets are
“solid, compact, fixed, and durable, like the bodies of
planets” (918), and that their tails are composed of extremely
thin vapor which the head or nucleus of the comet emits
under the influence of the fierce heat of the sun. Then,
surprisingly (for what does this have to do with the mathematical determination of celestial motion ruled by universal
gravitation?), he states that this extremely thin vapor is
essential to the replenishment both of water on earth and of
a more subtle spirit required for life. The passage continues:
For vapor in those very free spaces becomes
continually rarefied and dilated. For this reason it
happens that every tail at its upper extremity is
SEEGER
7
broader than near the head of the comet.
Moreover, it seems reasonable that by this
rarefaction the vapor—continually dilated—is
finally diffused and scattered throughout the whole
heavens, and then is by degrees attracted toward
the planets by its gravity and mixed with their
atmospheres. For just as the seas are absolutely
necessary for the constitution of this earth, so that
vapors may be abundantly enough aroused from
them by the heat of the sun, which vapors either—
being gathered into clouds—fall in rains and
irrigate and nourish the whole earth for the propagation of vegetables, or—being condensed in the
cold peaks of mountains (as some philosophize
with good reason)—run down into springs and
rivers; so for the conservation of the seas and
fluids on the planets, comets seem to be required,
so that from the condensation of their exhalations
and vapors, there can be a continual supply and
renewal of whatever liquid is consumed by
vegetation and putrefaction and converted into dry
earth. For all vegetables grow entirely from fluids
and afterward, in great part, change into dry earth
by putrefaction, and slime is continually deposited
from putrefied liquids. Hence the bulk of dry earth
is increased from day to day, and fluids—if they
did not have an outside source of increase—would
have to decrease continually and finally to fail.
Further, I suspect that that spirit which is the
smallest but most subtle and most excellent part of
our air, and which is required for the life of all
things, comes chiefly from comets. (926)
This is an allegory of circulation as the alchemists understood
it, in which the spirit provided by the tails of comets is
analogous to the philosophers’ mercury—whose many names
included dew of heaven, oriental water, celestial water, our
�8
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
balm, our honey, May dew, silver rain—the spiritual agent,
whose properties were activated, according to Basil
Valentine, by expulsion from its habitat in the form of airy
vapors, and whose descent was perceived as heavenly
condensation falling to nourish the earth, which would perish
without it (Nicholl, 92-3).38 Newton is not here speaking of
circulatory motion within a single immovable plane, which he
has shown in Proposition 1 of Book 1 to be the motion of
bodies driven in orbits under the influence of centripetal
force. He is describing, rather, a continual churning within
the universe, the manifestation of nature as a circulatory
worker, to borrow his characterization of it in 1675.39 This is
an image of earth as retort, inasmuch as comets supply both
the fluids and the subtle spirit required for the development
of life itself.
The final book of the first edition of the Principia ends
abruptly with Proposition 42. But the second edition
continues. In addition to incorporating more observations
and calculations of the paths of comets, Newton in the 1713
edition extends the image of renewal nourished by comets to
the fixed stars themselves, writing, “So also fixed stars, which
are exhausted bit by bit in the exhalation of light and vapors,
can be renewed by comets falling into them and then, kindled
by their new nourishment, can be taken for new stars. Of this
sort are those fixed stars that appear all of a sudden, and that
at first shine with maximum brilliance and subsequently
disappear little by little” (937). This phenomenon, he
comments, had been noted by such reliable observers as
Cornelius Gemma, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler’s pupils.
In his last recorded conversation with John Conduitt,
Newton, at the age of 83, expanded upon the circulatory
image implicit in this understanding of those celestial events;
for, as the preceding citations from the Principia show, he
regarded the appearance of what we call supernovae as
evidence that the universe itself undergoes vast cycles of
destruction and regeneration. Conduitt wrote of this conversation that:
SEEGER
9
it was his conjecture (he would affirm nothing)
that there was a <sort of> revolution in the
heavenly bodies that the vapours & light gathered
<emitted> by the sun <which had their sediment
as water & other matter had> gathered
themselves by degrees into a body <& attracted
more matter from the planets> & at last made a
secondary planett (viz. one of those that go round
another planet) & then by gathering <to them>
& attracting more matter became a primary
planet, & then by increasing still became a comet
wch after certain revolutions & by coming nearer
& nearer the sun, had all its volatile parts
condensed & became a matter fit to recruit <&
replenish> the sun (wch must waste by the constant
heat & light it emitted), as a fagot put into
<would> this fire if put into it (wee were sitting
by the <a wood> fire) & and that that would
probably be the effect of the comet in 1680 sooner
or later . . . (Iliffe, 1: 165).
Newton added that when this collision occurred, after
perhaps five or six more revolutions, it would “so much
increase the heat of the sun that <this earth would be burnt
&> no animals in this earth could live” (Iliffe, 1: 165).
Indeed, he seemed to Conduitt “to be very clearly of opinion”
that such a collision, and subsequent “repeopling” by the
Creator had happened at least once already, observing, first,
“that the inhabitants of this earth were of a short date,” partly
because “all arts as letters long ships printing – needle &c
were discovered within the memory of History, wch could not
have happened if the world had been eternal,” and, further,
that as far as the earth itself was concerned, “there were
visible marks of men [Westfall (1984: 862) has “ruin” here;
the word must be difficult to make out.] upon it whch could
not be effected by a flood only” (Iliffe, 1: 166). Such collisions were, Newton speculated, the cause of the suddenly
�10
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
brilliant stars he had noted in the Principia—but without
mentioning there, as he did in his conversation with
Conduitt, that he took those stars to be “suns enlightnening
other planets as our sun does ours” (Iliffe, 1: 165). When
Conduitt asked him “why he would not own as freely what
he thought of the sun as well as what he thought of the fixed
stars—he said that concerned us more, & laughing added he
had said enough for people to know his meaning” (Iliffe, 1:
166).40
Newton could laugh, even in the face of past and future
death and devastation, for he trusted that a benevolent and
all-powerful God—both perfect mechanic and perfect
alchemist—determines everything that happens in the
universe, including the generation and apocalyptic
destruction of all living things (as, of course, Newton had also
read in the Bible, though he seems not to have mentioned
that particular bit of testimony in the conversation Conduitt
recorded). The second text concealed in the Principia, by
giving us an alchemical account of the generation of life,
expresses Newton’s confidence in God as perfect master of
the Great Work. This text is fully contained in the following
sentence, added to the second edition of the Principia, in a
translation based on that of Cohen and Whitman (938), but
retaining the ampersands of the Latin text. The issue is not
the use of the ampersand itself, which appears stranger here
in English than it does in the Principia, as it is used
throughout that work. What is striking is that both a comma
and an ampersand separate every term from the one that
follows it. This is not Newton’s common practice when
listing members of a series:
And the vapors that arise from the sun & the fixed
stars & the tails of comets can fall by their gravity
into the atmospheres of the planets & there be
condensed & converted into water & humid
spirits, & then—by a slow heat—be transformed
gradually into salts, & sulphurs, & tinctures, &
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slime, & mud, & clay, & sand, & stones, &
corals, & other earthy substances.
In the second edition this sentence is followed by two more
sentences. In the third edition those two sentences have been
omitted, so that the sentence cited above is the last one in the
body of the work immediately preceding the General
Scholium.
By the time he wrote these words, Newton had
abandoned his attempts to achieve experimental evidence for
the existence of the forces he had sought through his
alchemical work, but his references to comets show that he
had not abandoned his faith in the truth behind that quest,
for the language and imagery of this sentence come from
mystical alchemy. The sentence can be read as an allegory of
the three fundamental processes by which, according to the
alchemists, nature perfects her work: sublimation (the vapors
arise from the sun, the fixed stars, and the tails of comets);
distillation (by gravity they are condensed and turned into
water and humid spirits); and concoction (they change form
under the application of a slow heat). This process as a whole
Newton knew as vegetation, which in one of his earliest texts
on this subject (called “Of Nature’s obvious laws & processes
in vegetation,” written between 1670 and 1675) he explicitly
distinguished from what he called the “gross mechanicall
transposition of parts” (3r). In the 1670s Newton had no
inkling either of universal gravitation—writing, for example,
that clouds could rise high enough to “loos their gravity”
(5r)—or of a possible connection between comets and life on
earth. Although he writes in the manuscript that, “this Earth
resembles a great animall or rather inanimate vegetable,
draws in aethereall breath for its dayly refreshment & vitall
ferment & transpires again with gross exhalations” (3v), he
does not claim to know the renewable source of the ethereal
breath. After writing the Principia, however, he was able, in
allegorical language, if not in the language of experimental
science or mathematics, to complete the system of life-giving
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circulation.41 The products of vegetation, listed in order as
rising from the depths of the planet toward its surface in the
presence of the fertilizing philosophical mercury falling from
the heavens are emphasized in the Latin text by the repetition
of the ampersand. The first three—fundamental salts,
oleaginous and fiery sulphurs, and transforming tinctures—
are alchemical ingredients of increasing power, associated
with spirit and necessary for the origin and development of
life. The next four describe the evolution of matter under the
gradual drying effect of slow heating: slime (the residue of
putrefaction), mire, clay, and sand. With the eighth member
of the series, stones (a category that includes precious stones),
we begin to see the organization associated with the mineral
kingdom, considered a union of spirit and matter. The ninth
member of the series is coral, which also appears in the generative series in “Of Nature’s obvious laws.” Unmodified this
would be red coral, a precious natural analogue (according,
for example, to Michael Maier, nine of whose works were
part of Newton’s library) of the crimson philosophers’ stone
(169). With coral we pass from the mineral to the vegetable
kingdom, for coral was thought in Newton’s day to be a
marine plant, which grew under water and hardened to stone
when brought into the air. The last member of the
sequence—seventh in the group comprising the evolution of
matter, third in the group comprising the evolution of life in
terms of the three “kingdoms,” and tenth in the entire
process comprising the gradual union of spirit and matter—
brings us to the animal kingdom, telling us that “all terrestrial
substances,” a category that includes our own bodies, have
come into being through the natural transmutation of
celestial vapors by gravity and the planet’s slow heat. Newton
begins this sentence speaking generically about planets. He
ends it speaking specifically about that which “concerns us
more”: our earth and ourselves.
The final sentence of the body of the Principia, then,
reaches back to the very beginnings of Newton’s concern
with cosmology. He has returned at the end to the old
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questions on a new level of understanding made possible by
his discoveries in the Principia, though not yet sufficiently
developed to be expressed openly in the mathematical
language of experimental philosophy. In the second and, even
more pointedly, in the third edition of the Principia (both
prepared with more leisure than the first edition), it seems,
Newton wanted to end his book with a powerful vision
encompassing all of nature; a vision which, like that of the
veiled text at the beginning of Book 1, would be at once as
clear as crystal to those who knew how to read it and as clear
as mud to those who did not. The dissertation on comets is
the last dual teaching. Through careful observations and
sophisticated mathematical calculations Newton has transformed our understanding of the nature of comets and the
laws behind their motion. But he has also composed hauntingly beautiful images of generation in our universe and on
our earth, for in the final allegory comets link the earth and
everything in it to the heavens. Newton chose not to express
this grand life-giving circulation openly in the Principia. But
he did include it. The processes revealed in these allegories
declare the Great Work of nature under the guidance of God.
In this vision perpetual circulation leads to life itself, and
universal gravitation is its motor.
5. “The fountain I draw it from”
Nature may truly be described as being one, true,
simple, and perfect in her own essence, and as
being animated by an invisible spirit. If therefore
you would know her, you, too, should be true,
single-hearted, patient, constant, pious, forbearing
and, in short, a new and regenerate man. (The
Sophic Hydrolith)42
I am not so bold as to assert that I have interpreted the
concealed texts correctly in every detail and I certainly do not
claim that I have discussed every appearance of symbolism in
the book. Nevertheless, I hope I have shown that a coherent
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vision may be seen by reading the beginning of Book 1 of the
Principia in terms of numerological, esoteric geometrical,
theological, and alchemical symbolism, and by reading the
end of Book 3 in terms of alchemical allegory. I am not
arguing that the Principia properly understood is a sort of
Paradise Regained couched in mathematical metaphors, and I
have not forgotten for a moment that I am dealing with the
foundational text of modern terrestrial and celestial
mechanics; that what I have been calling the exoteric text has
existed ostensibly on its own for over 300 years; and that the
esoteric texts, in the absence of the exoteric text, would be no
more than mystical fancies, and perhaps not particularly
interesting ones at that. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake
to dismiss or avoid the esoteric texts, because they open the
way to a new and richer level of understanding of the work
as a whole, as well as of its author.
In fact, the existence of concealed texts in the Principia is
a solution, rather than a problem. Newtonian scholarship has
been a prolonged and uneasy exercise in rethinking his work.
Isaac Newton devoted the passion of his soul and the activity
of his intellect to discovering the intelligibility and the unity
of the world in all its manifestations. Yet even before we knew
of his vast manuscript collection of theological and
alchemical writings, whose subjects and style are so very
different from those usually attributed to the author of the
Principia, Newton was considered a complex and contradictory character. Now, the impacts of successive revelations—among them the ardency of his alchemical pursuits,
the intensity of his theological studies, and his conviction that
much of his work was restoring ancient learning—seem to
some to have shattered the possibility of ever seeing him as a
single, cohesive individual.
The Principia has been the crux of the problem.
Mathematicians and physicists have, quite reasonably,
focused on its mathematical and physical aspects. Meanwhile,
Newton’s biographers and the students of his theological and
alchemical pursuits have, for the most part, surrendered the
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Principia to those capable of following its formidable mathematics. I hope that, by looking closely at the Principia in a
way that (to my knowledge) has not been attempted before, I
have demonstrated that the mathematical, philosophical,
theological, and alchemical aspects of Newton’s work are
intertwined. But, even granting the existence of the concealed
texts, important questions remain: Why would Newton have
incorporated these teachings into the Principia? Why would
he have hidden them rather than revealing them openly? And
to whom are they addressed?
The first hidden text is particularly perplexing. Even as
mounting evidence persuaded me that it must be there, I had
no ready answer to the question why someone absorbed in
the relatively hasty composition of such a difficult and timeconsuming work would (or even could) have taken the time
and trouble to construct it. And yet perhaps it is not so
surprising. The language of symbol and allegory would have
been second nature to a man so thoroughly steeped in the
interpretation of alchemical and theological texts.
Incorporation of allegory and symbolism into his own text
would not have required inordinate effort. More importantly,
while for readers of the Principia, the hidden texts might
seem to be subsidiary to the open text—if they are seen at
all—for its author the relationship would have been the
reverse. The esoteric texts are not appendages to the exoteric
text; they are, instead, its foundation. There were certain
things Newton was not disposed to doubt and he held certain
convictions he would not deign to explain. In 1676, for
example, in a letter to John Collins, after asserting what he
realized was astonishing power and generality for his method
of fluxions, Newton wrote, “This may seem a bold assertion
because it’s hard to say a figure may or may not be squared or
compared with another, but it’s plain to me by ye fountain I
draw it from, though I will not undertake to prove it to
others” (Correspondence, 2: 180). The symbolic texts allow
Newton to incorporate into his masterwork the certainty
which was the source of his amazingly fruitful vision of the
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world, without having also to prove its existence to others.
They proclaim the glory of God suffusing both the universe
and the souls of men: the ground of Newton’s assurance that
the pursuit of knowledge through experimental and mathematical means is the proper vocation of humankind.
So did Newton include the hidden texts as a prayer of
thanksgiving to God, or perhaps as a personal meditation,
without intending them to be visible to others? I do think that
expression of his deepest beliefs at the heart of his greatest
work must have been a balm to the lonely soul of its author.
Newton had an attentive niece, devoted disciples, sympathetic colleagues, and even friends; but he had no peers. His
manuscripts with their repeatedly suppressed declarations
and speculations tell the story of an individual tormented by
the conflict between the aching desire to share his convictions
and the conviction that he could not do so. The “classical”
scholia, parts of which I have quoted above, serve as a particularly poignant example of this struggle, which he finally
settled by not including them in the Principia. The hidden
texts, thus, help resolve what must have been nearly
unbearable tension. Newton would have known that,
whatever their fate as far as the rest of the world was
concerned, they were there as his testimony of faith.
Nonetheless, it seems impossible that he concealed texts
in the Principia simply for his solitary satisfaction. There are
abundant indications within the work that signal the existence
of the first hidden text, while the remarks cited concerning
comets are in plain sight of anyone who reaches the end of
Book 3. Moreover, Newton himself, in the General Scholium,
calls our attention to the relation between God and natural
philosophy in a way that, when read only in the light of the
surface text of the Principia, is more puzzling than enlightening. The extended discourse on God, located at the center
of the General Scholium, is, frankly, shocking. It bursts
through the surface of the text with the force of a pent-up
spring, a surging torrent of words, far too powerful and far
too passionate to be neatly contained within the book the
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Principia seems at first to be. And then this ardent outpouring
vanishes without a trace, subsiding as suddenly as it began,
beneath the sentence: “This concludes the discussion of God,
and to treat of God from phenomena is certainly a part of
natural philosophy” (943).44 No one who reads this passage
can doubt that its author was a man of exceptional piety, but
if he was so very pious (and if he really believed that to treat
of God from phenomena is part of natural philosophy), how
could he have slighted God in his greatest work? It is true that
the Principia is a book of experimental philosophy (though
there are necessarily few actual experiments in it), and that
there is no experiment that will simply prove the existence of
God. But, except for a few scattered remarks, God appears to
be so utterly absent from the work that—despite the
testimony of Richard Bentley’s lectures, titled A Confutation
of Atheism from the Origin and Frame of the World, delivered
in 1692 and published in 1693—Newton has been
condemned for writing an atheistic book (or, alternatively,
commended for writing a secular one).45 Of course, I have
been arguing that God is not at all missing from the Principia.
On the contrary, anyone willing to admit that this work (like
white light, the stone of the philosophers, man, and the
universe) may be simultaneously one and many, and able to
follow the clues Newton has provided, can see that it is, in
fact, filled with God’s presence and that we are meant to see
that presence.
But if we are meant to see that presence, then why hide
the teachings? There are several partial answers to this
question. One reason may have been Newton’s personality,
which has been described by such various terms as prudent,
paranoid, modest, arrogant, cautious, suspicious,
domineering, fearful, and vindictive. A more important factor
in his decision to hide the teachings could have been his
particular situation in the context of the political and
religious turmoil that was occurring in England during his
lifetime. Most importantly, the nature of the teachings
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themselves would have determined the form of their presentation.
As for his personality, extreme reticence, whatever its
source, was apparently part of Newton’s character. Public
revelation of any of his work seems often to have required a
struggle with himself as well as with others; most of what he
wrote, by far, he did not publish. But a simple appeal to
character does not really resolve the issue, for in the works he
did publish Newton was not always quite so reluctant to
reveal his beliefs as he was in the Principia. In the Opticks, for
example, published during his lifetime in six editions (three
in English, in 1704, 1717/18, and 1721; two in Latin, in
1706 and 1719; and a French translation in 1720), he wrote
increasingly openly of his hopes and speculations regarding
natural philosophy, though he still disguised them (however
transparently) as queries. He first published the Opticks,
however, after the death of his nemesis Robert Hooke in
1703 and his own ascent to a position of fame and power as
author of the Principia and president of the Royal Society,
and at a time when he was becoming more conscious of the
need to leave his work for posterity. Openness had also
characterized his early “New Theory about Light and
Colours.” But the tone of ingenuous excitement in which on
January 18, 1672 Newton (who was not yet 30 years old)
described his discovery of the nature of light to Henry
Oldenburg as “in my Judgment the oddest if not the most
considerable wch hath beene made in the operations of
Nature” (Correspondence, 1: 82-3) is one he never again
employed publicly. Instead, burned by the hostility that work
aroused, he designed his Principia to ensure that the
expression of his deepest passions and convictions would be
visible only to like-minded readers.
Newton’s penchant for secrecy, however, was not simply
(and perhaps not even primarily) a matter of character. He
had compelling external reasons to conceal his theological,
philosophical, and alchemical beliefs. With respect to
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theology, in the General Scholium to the Principia Newton
finally affirms the strict monotheism and the vision of God as
Παντοκρατϖρ that underlie his work, though with characteristic discretion he eschews the scorching anti-Trinitarian
diatribes he allowed himself in his unpublished manuscripts.
But by the time the second edition of the Principia was being
prepared—and the General Scholium was Newton’s final
addition to that edition—its author was Sir Isaac, secure in his
renown; and the Principia was so highly regarded that it had
practically become a sacred text itself. Had the unknown
Cambridge professor expressed his dangerously unorthodox
beliefs in 1687, he would have risked his career if not his life
(for religious heterodoxy was a capital offense in England at
the time). Moreover, the peril of confessing such beliefs did
not abate during Newton’s lifetime. He was a member of the
Convention Parliament of 1689, which declared equally
illegal the Roman Catholicism he loathed and the Arianism he
held.46 Newton could reasonably conclude that open
acknowledgment of his religious convictions would have put
his entire philosophical program at risk. At the very least it
would have provided for a lifetime of distraction, as he would
have been forced to engage in endless discussion and defense
of his beliefs. He had better things to do.
Newton had good reasons, as well, not to proclaim his
unorthodox philosophical convictions in the Principia,
closely tied as they were to his heterodox theology. He
believed that the existence of gravity had been made manifest
through its effects as revealed in the Principia, and that such
revelation, as he wrote in the General Scholium, was—
indeed, had to be—enough for now. Throughout his long life
he repeatedly tried to claim the right to say that he did not
know the cause of gravity, insisting (as had Galileo) that
knowledge of causes was not necessary for the pursuit of
natural philosophy. In fact, Newton was convinced that
requiring that causes be known, or hypothesized, before
effects could be studied stifled philosophical progress.47 In the
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General Scholium, after his often quoted assertion that he
does not feign hypotheses, Newton continues: “For whatever
is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a
hypothesis, and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or
physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no
place in experimental philosophy” (943). This statement—in
addition to neatly equating, in terms of their uselessness, the
metaphysical with the physical and the mechanical qualities
that the Cartesians held with the occult qualities which to
them were anathema—stakes out Newton’s philosophical
position on this issue. He publicly refuses to attempt to
explain gravity, and, with the authority of the Principia
behind him, he goes on to declare that a search for its cause
is, at best, beside the point.
But his protestations were not accepted by the mechanical
philosophers. Surely the heat with which they attacked him
was due in part to their understandable suspicion that he
thought he knew the cause of gravity, and that it was not
mechanical; for it was quite clear that impulse was unable to
account for universal gravitation. Explanation of gravitation,
therefore, seemed inevitably to require acceptance of a
doctrine of attraction, of action at a distance, of a force that
was, to use their heavily-laden word, “occult.”48 Newton
would readily have admitted that the workings of gravity
were occult—in the simple sense that we do not know exactly
how God does it. But he could never have satisfied the strict
mechanical philosophers on this point, no matter what he
said, for conservation of the universe as Newton understood
it required active force;49 and any admission of a nonmechanical cause into the universe was unacceptable to those
who held that the physical world could only be intelligible in
terms of matter and motion alone. If Newton harbored
personal beliefs about God’s active role in the universe, he
also realized that it would have been foolish for him to
express openly in the Principia convictions for which he
could not supply experimental evidence. Wisely, he designed
the surface text of the book to preclude speculation about
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causes. The deeper teachings—composed in a language not
susceptible to argument—were reserved for those who could
appreciate them.
As concerns Newton’s alchemical quest, as well, there
were abundant reasons not to reveal it openly in the
Principia. Again, one was the character of the open text as its
author constructed it, for if he had no demonstrable evidence
of the cause of gravity he had no demonstrable evidence even
of the existence of the forces he sought so avidly through
alchemy. Newton seems to have read alchemical texts with
the same intent with which he read all texts: seeing their
deliberately deceptive exposition and dense symbolic enigmas
as expressions of a single truth uniting nature and revelation,
obscured by a veil that could be penetrated by interpretation,
which in this case was aided by the experimentation at which
he was so adept. Whatever the philosophers’ stone may have
meant for other alchemists, for Newton I believe achievement
of the stone would have been the culmination of his life’s
work: it would have meant the acquisition through experimental means of that truth which he sought so very intensely.
As early as the first edition of the Principia, Newton struggled
with the desire to reveal his alchemical pursuits, writing in
the Preface, after describing the procedure he would follow
in the book:
If only we could derive the other phenomena of
nature from mechanical principles by the same
kind of reasoning! For many things lead me to
have a suspicion that all phenomena may depend
on certain forces by which the particles of bodies,
by causes not yet known, either are impelled
toward one another and cohere in regular figures,
or are repelled from one another and recede. Since
these forces are unknown, philosophers have
hitherto made trial of nature in vain. But I hope
that the principles set down here will shed some
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light on either this mode of philosophizing or
some truer one. (382-3)
As usual, however, he resolved that the open text of the
Principia was not the proper place for conjectures, no matter
how fervently he may have held them. This brief statement of
his strong suspicion and hopes and a few speculations in the
last paragraph of the General Scholium, which he cut short
for lack of experimental evidence, are as close as he comes to
openly stating his chemical aspirations in that work.50
Failure to obtain experimental evidence for chemical
forces might have been sufficient motive for Newton to
withhold open acknowledgment of those aspirations, but
there were other cogent reasons for discretion, as well.
Newton surely considered himself among the philosophical
alchemists, for, unlike the puffers or smoke-sellers, whose
base activity the philosophical alchemists universally decried,
he was surely not interested in acquiring personal power or
amassing wealth through chicanery. Nevertheless, he knew
that alchemists were widely considered to be rogues and
conjurors and as such were both ridiculed and feared.
Therefore, in personal terms, there was much to be lost and
nothing to be gained by publicly espousing alchemy. In
practical terms, serious alchemists considered the power they
hoped to achieve too dangerous to be proclaimed openly to
an imperfect world, a constraint that we know Newton
respected.51 And finally, the philosophical alchemists were
engaged in a spiritual quest for purification and perfection,
which they also called healing, not only of metals but also of
their own souls. True philosophical alchemy required a
relationship between the practitioner and his God wherein
the success of the work depended at least as much upon the
state of the alchemist’s soul as upon his facility in deciphering
texts or his dexterity in following procedures. The one thing
serious alchemical writings make perfectly clear is that only
the pious and pure of heart will be able to discern the proper
proportions of materials, the correct degrees of heat for each
part of the procedure, and the precise timing necessary to
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perfect the work.52 Achievement of the philosophers’ stone
would have been a gift of God awarded to one who merited
it. Open acknowledgment of engagement in this intense and
intimate quest would have been not only foolhardy but also
impious.
There are, then, abundant negative reasons for Newton
to have hidden his theological, philosophical, and alchemical
beliefs; but there is also a powerful positive argument for
including those beliefs in the form of concealed texts.
Newton seems to have considered, repeatedly, the possibility
that the world was ready for him to reveal, in his own name,
the convictions he held. And every time he considered that
possibility, he rejected it. He, therefore, took his place as a
member of a distinguished secret fraternity long engaged in
the task of seeking the truth and revealing it in a dual
manner: each work simultaneously expounding one text for
the many, and another, through symbols and figures, for the
few.53 He believed that the alchemists, the ancient sages, and
the inspired writers of the Holy Scriptures—recognizing the
peril to themselves and quite possibly to others of openly
displaying their true convictions in unsettled times like those
in which he was living—had conveyed their mystical
teachings in metaphors, fables, allegories, images, parables,
and prophecies, as well as numerological and esoteric
geometrical symbolism. All of their texts, like the book of
nature itself, required interpretation. Newton understood the
worth of his Book of Principles. Why should it differ in this
respect from the world-changing works that preceded it? In
his remarkable passage about God in the General Scholium,
Newton comes close to expressing in words the vision of the
concealed texts. But the full force of mystical belief cannot be
conveyed in everyday language, corrupted by the Fall and
confined by what Newton called its “unavoidable
narrowness” (McGuire, 199). Newton had numerous reasons
not to express his mystical teachings openly, but he also had
a powerful reason to express them in the way he did:
Symbolism is their proper language.
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An unavoidable, and perhaps uncomfortable, consequence of this reading is the recognition that not all of the
teachings in the Principia were meant for everyone (though
the shock of this realization should be attenuated by recalling
that the book is a restricted text at every level). But if the
teachings were not meant for everyone, to whom were they
addressed? Clearly, Newton wanted others to continue the
work he had begun. He published and repeatedly revised
both the Principia and the Opticks in the interest of
promoting the development of natural philosophy, which, he
told Conduitt toward the end of his life, he felt the comfort
of having left less mischievous than he found it. But, aside
from those two books, he seems to have cared so little (or
perhaps, in some cases, feared so much) what his contemporaries would think of his work that he preferred not to
publish it during his lifetime, particularly if publication meant
that he would be hounded and pestered by critics.54 On the
other hand, he cared very deeply that his work be preserved
and, furthermore, that others know that it was his. Both his
reluctance to publish and his wounded outrage—when his
originality, at least with respect to his fellow moderns, was
assailed (as by Hooke); or his work, to his mind, was
hindered (as by Flamsteed); or his priority and even his
probity were challenged (as by Leibniz)—may be partially
understood if we realize that Newton considered the intellectual community to which he belonged to be temporal.55 In
the concealed texts Newton was addressing primarily those
he would consider his true intellectual heirs. Those philosophers, carrying on the task of improving natural philosophy
and presumably familiar with its venerable dual tradition,
would be able to see and recognize the true foundation of the
work in which they were engaged.
For Newton knew that the work was not complete.
Although he recognized that his remarkable achievements
had reached new heights of natural philosophy, he was also
well aware that his deepest questions had gone unanswered.
There is evidence that when he finished the first edition of the
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Principia, he still hoped he would find those answers. In the
early 1690s he immersed himself in a monumental study of
the entire alchemical tradition. He may, as well, have
attempted to initiate his young disciple, Nicholas Fatio de
Duillier, into his alchemical pursuits. But it came to nothing.56
In 1693 Newton suffered a breakdown, a mysterious episode
which led to rumors on the Continent that he had become
permanently deranged or had even died. The onset of this
crisis has been attributed—not fully persuasively—to various
causes; but equally remarkable (and also unexplained) is its
abrupt end. This end was characterized by the full resumption
of his sanity—if not of the intense intellectual power that had
previously marked his life—only a few months after he wrote
the rambling letters to Samuel Pepys and John Locke that
were the source of their fears for his state of mind.57 His
failure to unlock the chemical secrets of the universe, despite
his fevered attempts to do so, must have been devastating.
But Newton finally accepted that he would not be the one to
answer those questions. In 1696, at the age of 53, he
abandoned his experimental search into the unity of nature
and took a position as master of the mint.
Nevertheless, he did not repudiate his earlier failed
attempts. On the contrary, he left ample evidence of his
ongoing conviction that such unity did exist. This evidence
includes his elaboration of the second concealed text in the
second and third editions of the Principia, as well as his
decision to leave both that work and the Opticks open,
inviting further study and suggesting possible directions for
it. Newton also scattered clues to his beliefs outside of the
works published in his name. He impressed some of his
unpublished views upon the young men whose careers he
fostered, and they in turn disseminated them. His disciple
David Gregory, for example, in “The Author’s Preface” to his
Astronomiæ physicæ & geometricæ elementa (1702) included
a history of astronomy, according to which the laws his great
mentor Isaac Newton supposedly was the first to discover had
been in fact only rediscovered, as they had been known to the
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ancients. In the twentieth century the manuscript of this
passage was found among Newton’s papers, written in
Newton’s hand. Newton himself had composed it.
In addition, though he is said to have burned numerous
papers in the days before his death, Newton left millions of
words concerning the interpretation of history and scripture,
as well as his interpretation of alchemical texts and detailed
notes on his experiments.58 As he seems to have left no
written account of his reasons for wanting his unpublished
manuscripts to survive him, it is impossible to be certain of
his motives. One might surmise, for example, that Newton
left us his alchemical notes as proof of failure, as evidence
that not even he could unlock the chemical secrets of the
universe by following that path, and therefore as an
indication of precisely how not to proceed. But what, then,
do we make of the historical and scriptural interpretations
that accompany that record? Are we to regard them as
repudiated, too? In the absence of a note stating his intent—
whose discovery among the manuscripts would be a real
coup—it seems likely that he retained hope that another,
knowing of his efforts now that he was “out of the way,”
could pick up his task of unifying scripture, history, and
natural philosophy where he had abandoned it. Newton
could not have known that the executors of his estate would
label his alchemical writings not fit to print. Nor could he
have known that his more radical theological manuscripts
would also be deemed unprintable, despite the desire his
niece expressed in her will that they be published. Newton, in
short, could not have known the extent to which his
published work—particularly his Principia—like the
philosopher’s stone he had sought for so long, had begun to
transform both the world and himself within it. One of the
effects of this transformation may have been to shield the
secrecy of its author’s convictions after his death more
thoroughly than he intended. But he seems not to have cared.
Dying intestate, he left the matter in the hands of God, who,
he trusted, would allow it to be revealed at the proper time.
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27
For Newton believed the time would come when an
improved world would be ready to accept his teachings. In
the spirit of the ancient philosophers he most admired, his
philosophical aspirations extended beyond the realm of
natural philosophy; he trusted that its perfection would lead
to that of moral philosophy, so sadly imperfect in the
turbulent world he saw around him. The last edition of the
Opticks ends with the following passage, looking toward
progress in natural philosophy, which Newton believed
would lead not to a new morality but to a return to pure
ancient morality:
In this third Book [for the Opticks, too, is divided
into three books] I have only begun the Analysis of
what remains to be discover’d about Light and its
Effects upon the Frame of Nature, hinting several
things about it, and leaving the Hints to be
examin’d and improv’d by the farther Experiments
and Observations of such as are inquisitive. And if
natural Philosophy in all its Parts, by pursuing this
Method, shall at length be perfected, the Bounds
of Moral Philosophy will also be enlarged. For so
far as we can know by natural Philosophy what is
the first Cause, what Power he has over us, and
what Benefits we receive from him, so far our
Duty towards him, as well as that towards one
another, will appear to us by the Light of Nature.
And no doubt, if the Worship of false Gods had
not blinded the Heathen, their moral Philosophy
would have gone farther than to the four Cardinal
Virtues; and instead of teaching the
Transmigration of Souls, and to worship the Sun
and Moon, and dead Heroes, they would have
taught us to worship our true Author and
Benefactor, as their Ancestors did under the
Government of Noah and his Sons before they
corrupted themselves. (405-6)
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But the outcome of Newton’s “method” has been quite
other than the unification of natural and moral philosophy he
intended. We can never know how things would have been
different had his concealed convictions been brought to light
before the twentieth century. In the event, his Principia was
driven like a wedge between reason and faith. Designed to
declare the power of the deity in the world and, thereby, to
revive and foster both natural and moral philosophy,
Newton’s masterwork has instead been seen as a monument
to the separation between science and religion, as antithetical
to the unity of the very traditions of which it was in fact the
culmination.
6. Conclusion: The Old Made New
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.59
So what then is this Principia? To construct his grand vision,
encompassing the whole of creation, Newton, of course,
drew on his exceptional mathematical ability. But the
Principia is more than the mathematical and physical
treatise—however great—that it appears to be. It is a little
world, an artful elaboration of secular and sacred traditions
of human knowledge, born both of Renaissance
Hermeticism, which was so influential in the development of
experimental science in the seventeenth century, and of
Newton’s faith in a beneficent creator who ruled the universe
and who (in the fullness of time) would allow his human
creatures to discover and reveal its lawfulness. Behind everything that Newton did was a firm faith in God’s providence.
All of his work conveys his conviction that we live in a world
whose history is the working out of God’s great story from
the creation to the apocalypse. We humans do not have the
power, he thought, nor should we have the desire, to alter
SEEGER
29
that already-written story; but God has hidden clues to it in
both nature and scripture, which some of us may be granted
the power to see and understand. The texts concealed in the
Principia—in their vision of God’s glory filling, fertilizing,
and illuminating the entire universe and the soul of his
disciple—are Newton’s grateful acknowledgement of the
source of his understanding and also his message to the
future; they are the manifestation of his peculiar genius and
his true secret art.
I do not intend here to discuss the validity of Newton’s
vision of the world. My goal in this study has been merely to
urge a thoroughgoing reconsideration of his Principia, a book
that resolutely resists easy classification. Seen as a whole, the
work both supersedes, and incorporates, the secular and
sacred traditions of learning that preceded it. It is a
magnificent product of transformation and circulation, a
manifestation at every level of the old made new (and, for
that matter, of the new made old). Together with the unparalleled mathematical achievements of the open text, the
mystical journey near the beginning of Book 1 teaches us that
our minds are capable of ascending to the heavens and
beyond, while the cosmic allegory at the end of Book 3 shows
us that our bodies are composed of the material and spiritual
stuff of the universe. The open text is grounded upon the
visions expressed in the hidden texts, and the hidden texts
depend for their power upon the open text while extending
its domain.
The Principia, in sum, speaks to both our intellect and our
imagination, addressing our deep human desire to be intellectually, spiritually, and materially at one with our universe.
Newton’s greatest book is far stranger and far richer than we
have ever suspected. A mathematical and physical work of
prodigious power, the Principia is also an expression of the
highest art and a declaration of the deepest love of which this
remarkable man was capable.
*
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I would like to thank Curtis Wilson, Tom Simpson, and Dana
Densmore for reading and commenting on an early draft of
this paper. I would also like to thank Rob Iliffe and Peter Pesic
for doing the same for a nearly final draft, and the editors and
editorial assistants of the Review for seeing it through to
publication. I am especially grateful to Eva Brann for her
unstinting support from beginning to end. I have attempted
to address the questions and suggestions of these generous
readers. None of them bears any responsibility for anything
written here.
Notes
37
Isaac Newton’s translation of the Tabula Smaragdina, the “Emerald
Tablet” attributed to Hermes Trismegistus (quoted in Dobbs 1991, 274).
The passage continues with some alchemical instructions.
38
Simpson, too, in the final section of his article, addresses what he calls
the astronomical alchemy that comets undergo in their close approach to
the sun, which he calls the “furnace of the heavens,” a crucible that
reaches a temperature unattainable on earth, thus leading to “the
emission of that ‘spirit’ which was always the ultimate objective of the
alchemic search and is fundamentally needed in order to complete
Newton’s account of the true System of the World” (164).
39
Newton wrote in his Hypothesis explaining the properties of light: “For
nature is a perpetuall circulatory worker, generating fluids out of solids,
and solids out of fluids, fixed things out of volatile, & volatile out of
fixed, subtile out of gross, & gross out of subtile, Some things to ascend
& make the upper terrestriall juices, Rivers and the Atmosphere; & by
consequence others to descend for a Requitall to the former”
(Correspondence, 1: 366). These sentences were written while Newton
still accepted the vortex hypothesis of planetary motion, well before he
had any idea of universal gravitation. As he developed the Principia, he
abandoned the hypothesis of vortices and, indeed, in the Principia he
takes every opportunity to combat that hypothesis. I believe, however,
that the sentiment of the passage survives as a metaphor of the circular
chemical processes, moved by gravity, that make life possible.
40Actually
he had acknowledged it, writing: “The comet that appeared in
1680 was distant from the sun in its perihelion by less than a sixth of the
sun’s diameter; and because its velocity was greatest in that region and
also because the atmosphere of the sun has some density, the comet must
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31
have encountered some resistance and must have been somewhat slowed
down and must have approached closer to the sun; and by approaching
closer to the sun in every revolution, it will at length fall into the body of
the sun. But also, in its aphelion, when it moves most slowly, the comet
can sometimes be slowed down by the attraction of other comets and as a
result fall into the sun” (937). He does not, however, dwell on the implications of the predicted collision for life on earth, but moves directly on
to his remarks about supernovae to which Conduitt called his attention in
their conversation.
41
This image appears in the Opticks, as well. In Query 30, one of those
added to the Latin and later English editions of that work, Newton muses
about the convertibility of light and gross bodies into one another,
writing, “The changing of Bodies into Light, and Light into Bodies, is
very conformable to the Course of Nature, which seems delighted with
Transmutations” (374), and, later, “All Birds, Beasts and Fishes, Insects,
Trees and other Vegetables, with their several Parts, grow out of Water
and watry Tinctures and Salts, and by Putrefaction return again into
watry Substances. And Water standing a few Days in the open Air, yields
a Tincture, which (like that of Malt), by standing longer yields a Sediment
and a Spirit, but before Putrefaction is fit Nourishment for Animals and
Vegetables. And among such various and strange Transmutations, why
may not Nature change Bodies into Light, and Light into Bodies?” (375).
Like the alchemical allegory at the end of the discussion of comets in the
Principia, these passages were written after their author had abandoned
alchemical experimentation.
42
Quoted in Waite, 1: 75.
43
There are exceptions: notably Alexandre Koyré, I. Bernard Cohen, and
Richard Westfall. But Westfall, who has produced the most comprehensive account of Newton’s life and work, admits with frustration that
during two decades of study Newton became ever more of a mystery to
him. In a modern version of the opinion of the Marquis de l’Hôpital—
who wondered if Newton ate, drank, and slept like other men or was
truly the god he seemed—Westfall concludes that there is no measure for
Newton, that he is wholly other. I do not agree; but I do believe that
until we acknowledge the texts hidden in the Principia we will never
understand its author.
44
Et hæc de deo, de quo utique ex phænomenis disserere, ad philosophiam
naturalem pertinet (764). This quote is from the third edition of the
Principia. In the second edition Newton states that to discourse of God is
the business of experimental philosophy, a statement which makes even
more perplexing the apparent absence of God from this particular book.
Newton seems to have thought better of that claim, for he changed it in
the final edition. Larry Stewart contends that the General Scholium “was
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written, and certainly perceived to have been written, with an eye to the
difficulties and the defence of the anti-Trinitarianism of his disciple
Samuel Clarke” (145-6). It is not clear to me why Isaac Newton would
have used his masterwork as a tool to defend Samuel Clarke, though it is
possible, as Stewart claims, that the General Scholium was (at least to
some degree) a salvo fired against societal assault on experimentalism. If
Stewart is right we find ourselves presented with yet another case in
which Newton manages to say what he means in a veiled manner.
45
The scholium following the Definitions does mention “Scriptures,”
(414) which is Cohen and Whitman’s translation of the Latin “sacris
literis” (52). And the first edition of the Principia contains (in Corollary 5
to Proposition 8 of Book 3) the following sentence: “Collocavit igitur
Deus Planetas in diversis distantiis a Sole, ut quilibet pro gradu densitatis
calore Solis majore vel minore fruatur” (583). Corollary 5 was excised
from the later editions, and some of its content was included in Corollary
4. But Newton replaced “God placed . . .” with “the planets were to be
placed. . .” (Cohen 1969, 529-30). This, by the way, is further evidence
that Newton’s use of the passive voice in the Principia is deliberate and
significant. Cohen argues, I think rightly, that these passing references are
indications that Newton was thinking of God all along, as he constructed
every edition of the Principia.
46
During Newton’s lifetime, refusal to accept the doctrine of the Trinity
could lead to prison; in 1696 a man was hanged for denying that article
of faith. Moreover, open expression of unorthodox beliefs was costly to
some of Newton’s disciples. Edmond Halley’s supposed atheism, for
example, cost him the Savilian professorship of astronomy at Oxford
University, which was awarded to David Gregory, another protégé of
Newton, who apparently was scarcely more religious than Halley, though
he was more discreet about his heterodoxy; and William Whiston lost his
position as successor to Newton in the Lucasian professorship of mathematics at Cambridge University for espousing religious views similar to
those Newton held. Newton, of course, considered the Trinitarians to be
the real heretics, and at crucial times in his life he refused to compromise
his beliefs. He was willing to sacrifice his appointment to Cambridge
University rather than take the requisite holy orders; he fought hard and
successfully against appointment by King James II of a Benedictine monk
to the university (though in this case the grounds were Roman
Catholicism rather than Trinitarianism as such); and on his deathbed he
refused the sacrament of the church. Nonetheless, he attended church
services occasionally; and he supported the Anglican Church. I doubt that
his intent in doing so was merely to disguise his true convictions in order
to protect his reputation. Newton would have regarded the Church of
England as a valuable bulwark against the political and religious
encroachments of the Roman Catholic Church, which he called the
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Whore of Babylon, and which he identified in his Observations on the
Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John, published posthumously in 1733, as the little horn of the fourth beast prophesied in the
Book of Daniel.
The widespread social upheavals of the time may also have influenced
Newton’s decision to be circumspect about his theological beliefs. David
Kubrin, in his article “Newton’s Inside Out!” speculates that the reason
he censored himself and repressed his insights, ideas, visions, and grand
plan of the cosmos, “was largely social, and stemmed from the fact that
Newton realized the dangerous social, political, economic, and religious
implications that would be associated with him should he dare reveal his
true thoughts” (97). Though Kubrin focuses on the social aspects of
Newton’s ideas, his claim is reminiscent of Law’s assertion that Newton
did not reveal his supposed indebtedness to Boehme because he did not
want to be associated with enthusiasm.
47
Descartes, for example, criticizing Galileo’s method in his Discorsi, had
written to Mersenne, “Nothing that he says here can be determined
without knowing what gravity is” (October 11, 1638, quoted in de
Gandt, 118). If Newton had waited to know what gravity was before
writing the Principia, the book never would have been written.
48
Newton considered action at a distance, in a universe containing only
matter, ridiculous, for he did not believe that brute matter could act in
any way at all. In Rule 3 of Book 3 of the Principia, added in the second
edition (Koyré, 268), he explicitly repudiates the notion that gravity is
inherent in matter. In his third letter to Richard Bentley, he expressed this
conviction even more strongly, writing: “That gravity should be innate
inherent & essential to matter so yt one body may act upon another at a
distance through a vacuum without the mediation of any thing else by &
through wch their action or force may be conveyed from one to another
is to me so great an absurdity that I beleive no man who has in philosophical matters any competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it”
(Correspondence, 3: 254).
49
As he wrote to Bentley, “Gravity must be caused by an agent acting
constantly according to certain laws, but whether this agent be material
or immaterial is a question I have left to ye consideration of my readers”
(Correspondence, 3: 254).
50
Further evidence for Newton’s struggle with himself over this issue, as
well as his awareness of the effects revelation of his beliefs would have
had on others’ perceptions of both himself and his work may be seen in a
draft of a Proposition 18 (crossed out and relabeled Hypothesis 2), which
he wrote after finishing the first edition of the Principia. This hypothesis,
which was to have been part of a general conclusion to the Opticks,
reads: “As all the great motions in the world depend upon a certain kind
of force (which in this earth we call gravity) whereby great bodies attract
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
one another at great distances: so all the little motions in the world
depend upon certain kinds of forces whereby minute bodies attract or
dispell one another at little distances.” He refers to his demonstration of
universal gravitation in the Principia, and continues: “And if Nature be
most simple & fully consonant to her self she observes the same method
in regulating the motions of smaller bodies which she doth in regulating
those of the greater. This principle of nature being very remote from the
conceptions of Philosophers I forbore to describe it in that Book least I
should be accounted an extravagant freak & so prejudice my Readers
against all those things which were the main designe of the Book: but &
yet I hinted at it both in the Preface & in the Book it self where I speak
of the inflection of light & of the elastick power of the Air but the design
of the book being secured by the approbation of Mathematicians, I had
not scrupled to propose this Principle in plane words. The truth of this
Hypothesis I assert not, because I cannot prove it, but I think it very
probable because a great part of the phenomena of nature do very easily
flow from it which seem otherways inexplicable: . . .” (quoted in Cohen
1982, 63) He goes on to list some of the phenomena he has in mind.
Newton repressed but did not destroy this remarkable statement.
51
We know that Newton admitted the possibility that this fear was well
founded because of a letter he sent on April 26, 1676 to Henry
Oldenburg, Secretary of the Royal Society, regarding a question raised by
a “B. R.” (Robert Boyle) in the Philosophical Transactions whether he
should publish the recipe for a mercury that heated gold when mixed
with it. Newton stated that he doubted that this particular mercury could
be useful “either to medicine or vegetation.” Then he continued:
But yet because the way by which mercury [Newton here
places an alchemical symbol instead of the word] may be so
impregnated, has been thought fit to be concealed by others
that have known it, & therefore may possibly be an inlet to
something more noble, not to be communicated wthout
immense dammage to ye world if there should be any verity
in ye Hermetick writers, therefore I question not but that ye
great wisdom of ye noble Authour will sway him to high
silence till he shall be resolved of what consequence ye thing
may be either by his own experience, or ye judgmt of some
other that throughly understands what he speakes about, that
is of a true Hermetic Philosopher, whose judgmt (if there be
any such) would be more to be regarded in this point then
that of all ye world beside to ye contrary, there being other
things beside ye transmutation of metals (if these great
pretenders bragg not) wch none but they understand. Sr
because ye Author seems desirous of ye sense of others in this
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35
point, I have been so free as to shoot my bolt; but pray keep
this letter private to your self. (Correspondence, 2: 2)
Newton and Boyle engaged for years in a correspondence about
alchemical research, which itself was typically guarded in the manner of
alchemical writers who rarely revealed everything even to sympathetic
correspondents. Few of these letters survive, but in a letter of August 2,
1692 to his friend John Locke, who shared Newton’s interest in
theological and alchemical pursuits, Newton observes, and respects,
Boyle’s “reservedness” about revealing a certain recipe, a restraint he
speculated might have proceeded from his own (though he does seem
somewhat miffed that Boyle is being quite so reserved with respect to
him). (Correspondence, 3: 218)
52 Newton himself, in his old age, implied as much in a conversation with
John Conduitt, stating that, “They who search after the philosophers’
stone by their own rules [are] obliged to a strict and religious life”
(quoted in Dobbs 1975, 15; also see Iliffe, 1: 178).
53
In one of the “classical” scholia, which Newton decided not to include
in the Principia, after writing of the analogy the ancients made between
the harmony of musical strings and the weights of the planets, he
continues: “But the Philosophers loved so to mitigate their mystical
discourses that in the presence of the vulgar they foolishly propounded
vulgar matters for the sake of ridicule, and hid the truth beneath
discourses of this kind” (McGuire and Rattansi, 117). I am not claiming
that Newton considered the surface text of the Principia to be a vulgar
matter foolishly propounded for the sake of ridicule. My claim is merely
that in emulation of the ancient philosophers he composed the work as a
layered text.
54
As early as 1676, reacting in part to the criticism that followed his
1672 publication on light, Newton wrote to John Collins, who had urged
him to publish his method of fluxions:
You seem to desire yt I would publish my method & I look
upon your advice as an act of singular friendship, being I
beleive censured by divers for my scattered letters in ye
Transactions about such things as nobody els would have let
come out wthout a substantial discours. I could wish I could
retract what has been done, but by that, I have learnt what’s
to my convenience, wch is to let what I write ly by till I am
out of ye way. (Correspondence, 2: 179)
55
Special circumstances, among them Newton’s own character and that
of his adversaries, influenced the particular course of each conflict, but it
seems plausible that, as far as Newton was concerned, they all had the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
same ground. The perception that the importance of his work was
historical could also go some way toward explaining the numerous
portraits of himself he commissioned. Further, it sheds light on his
willingness in his later life to let others carry on the controversies his
work aroused, rather than entering them himself until they touched his
reputation too closely, at which point he would join the fray, but usually
anonymously. This tactic was not unique to Newton, but it may have
been unusually powerful in his case, as in later life he was able to speak
with the voice of the Royal Society. He allowed Roger Cotes to write an
explanatory introduction to the second edition of the Principia, but he
refused to read it, so as not to be asked to clarify or defend it. He did not
want his peace to be disturbed by the obligation of justifying his work to
anyone.
56
During the same years that he was making, and failing at, his final
alchemical attempts he may have contemplated excision of the first
hidden text from the Principia. Whether we think he did depends upon
how we read David Gregory’s notes and Newton’s own manuscripts of
proposed alterations to the book. In any event, if he considered dismantling that text, he did not do it.
57
The letter to Pepys was dated September 13, 1693 (Correspondence, 3:
279), and the letter to Locke three days later (Correspondence, 3: 280).
On September 28 Pepys’ nephew John Millington visited Newton in
Cambridge and was able to report to his uncle that, though “under some
small degree of melancholy,” he seemed quite sane as well as “very much
ashamed” at the rudeness of the letter, which Newton himself characterized as “very odd” (Correspondence, 3: 281-2). In a letter of October
3, Newton apologized to Locke, explaining that “by sleeping too often by
my fire I got an ill habit of sleeping & a distemper wch this summer has
been epidemical put me further out of order, so that when I wrote to you
I had not slept an hour a night for a fortnight & for 5 nights together not
a wink” (Correspondence, 3: 284).
58
Rattansi estimates that Newton wrote 1,300,000 words on theological
and biblical subjects (167), and Westfall estimates that notes and compositions on alchemy in Newton’s hand exceed 1,000,000 words (1980, 163).
59
Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act I, Scene 2.
37
“The Things of Friends are
Common”
Christopher B. Nelson
I came to a startling realization over the summer as I was
preparing to greet our newest class: that I had returned to this
college to take the position I now hold in the year in which
most of our incoming freshmen were born. The years have
passed quickly, it seems to me now, and my appreciation for
the community of learning I joined back then has grown as
my friendships within the community have deepened. I think
I became a wee bit sentimental as I ruminated upon my first
year as a student at St. John’s more than forty years ago. My
Greek has gone rusty, but as with most all of memory, the
things learned first are remembered best, and I have kept with
me over the years two Greek sentences I recall reading in my
first days at the college: χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά and κοινὰ τὰ τῶν
φίλων.
The first can be roughly translated as “Beautiful things are
difficult” or “Noble things are difficult.” The second can be
translated as “The things of friends are common” or “What
friends have, they have in common.” Back in the days of my
youth the College used a different Greek grammar book, so
this last week I took a peek at the Mollin and Williamson
Introduction to Ancient Greek, with which our students now
begin to learn Greek. And there they were, the same two
sentences, buried in an early lesson on the attributive and
predicate position of the definite article, and I rediscovered
something I once must have known about the two sentences,
something I had carried with me all these years: they are both
nominal sentences with the article τά in the predicate
position, making it possible to write intelligible, whole
Christopher B. Nelson is President at the Annapolis campus of St. John’s
College.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
sentences without the use of a verb. I was pretty sure I had
not committed these sentences to memory because of the
substantive-making power of the article τά. It’s more likely
that I remembered them because they were both quite short,
and perhaps because they appeared to carry a mystery and a
whiff of truth in them that I might untangle for myself if only
I worked on them long enough. I felt justified in this interpretation when I read in this new text that “nominal
sentences are best suited to the impersonal and timeless
character of maxims or folk-sayings” (31).
I wanted to understand better the little maxim κοινὰ τὰ
τῶν ϕίλων, “The things of friends are common.” The
sentence seemed to capture a beautiful thought, and I had the
notion that if I made the effort to understand this maxim
better, I also might come to see why “beautiful things are
difficult.” Two birds, one arrow—so to speak.
So, I begin my reflection by asking whether this little
maxim means that friends share what they have, or that they
ought to share what they have. Today, I give you half of the
lunch I packed for us both, and tomorrow you will share
yours with me. But the sandwiches we eat are hardly common
to us both; quite the opposite, they are rationed out
separately to each of us, albeit equally. We may each have an
equal share in a good thing, but not a common good. We each
consume what the other does not and cannot consume. So it
is with all sorts of goods, earthly goods, goods that are
external to us; what I give to you in the spirit of sharing with
a friend is something I will no longer have after giving it. I
will have less of it after sharing it than I did before I shared
it, however good and generous my act of friendship has been,
and however much I imagine I may have gained in the
improvement of my character by sharing.
But what, then, are the things that could be common to
friends? What kinds of things can truly be held in common
without having to be meted out among friends? I suppose
things of the soul are of this nature, things that belong to the
heart, the spirit, the mind, things that belong to our inner
NELSON
39
lives. We both may love a single object or person without our
having to share that love as we might share the expense of a
gift to the beloved one. My love doesn’t grow less because
you love too. And, of course, if we should actually love one
another, that love is surely greater and stronger for it being
reciprocated and reinforced over and over. So it is with things
of the intellect. When I learn something you have shared with
me, it does not pass from you to me like milk from a pitcher;
you have lost nothing, and yet I have gained something that
is now common to us both. The sum of what is common to
us has just grown; it has not been redistributed. And should
we together go about learning something new, we will each
be richer for what we come to have in common.
In pursuing such learning together we enter a whole new
community. For example, when we learn Euclid 1.47—the
Pythagorean theorem—each of us has it wholly but neither of
us possesses it. We now have something that belongs to us,
but not merely privately; we have gained something that is
common to us both, and in learning it we enter the
community of all who have learned it. This perhaps is why we
say “things in common” belong to “friends”: the soul is not a
wholly private place, but is able to enter this sort of
community with others.
But there is an added dimension that I think has
something to do with the reason we seek these common
things. We are moved to love something because it is
beautiful, or to love some person because he or she is
beautiful to us. We seek to know something because we
believe that knowing is better than not knowing, that this
knowledge will be good for us, perhaps even that it can be
turned to good in the world about us. These things we have
in common are beautiful and good things, and we wish
beautiful and good things for our friends. If the common
goods are those that increase our community by pursuing
them together, then the greatest acts of friendship must be the
searching together for such a common good.
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St. John’s College exists for this purpose: to provide a
place and countless opportunities for our students to pursue
together the common goods of the intellect. We call ourselves
a community of learning, aware that the word “community”
in English, as in Greek, has the same root as the word
“common.” We make many an effort to put into practice the
conviction that we learn best when we learn with others, who
like us, wish to increase the common good. Such a
community offers some pretty fine opportunities for
friendship.
We also have a common curriculum that has us all reading
books that are worthy of our attention, even of our love—
books written by men and women who were themselves
model fellow learners. The books and authors may even
become our friends, as can the characters in some of these
books. If incoming students have not already met the Socrates
of Plato’s dialogues, they soon do, and they spend a lot of
time with him in the freshman year. For some of them it is the
beginning of a lifelong friendship with a character with
whom—if open to the possibility—one can converse over and
over again. The words on the page may remain the same, but
the reader brings a new conversationalist to the text every
time he or she returns to the dialogue. At least, so it is with
me. I call Socrates a friend of mine because I know that he
seeks only my own good. He has taught me humility,
inasmuch as I possess it all.
I have many such friends in the Program. Some of them
are books. Homer’s Iliad has been my companion since the
seventh grade, and I never tire of returning to it. The Aeneid
has become a more recent friend who has helped me to
understand and better bear the responsibilities of fatherhood
and the trials of leadership. The Books of Genesis and Job
have helped me understand what it means to be human and
how great is the distance between the human and the divine;
I read them to remind me how little I really understand about
the relation between the two, which in turn serves as a spur
to seeking to understand better. Euclid’s Elements may be the
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finest example on the St. John’s Program of the practice of
the liberal arts, and it is beautiful for its logical, progressive
movement from the elemental to the truly grand. Plato’s
Republic is the finest book about education ever written; it
inspires much of what I do as I practice my vocation at the
College, reminding me that a community of learning is
reshaping and refounding itself any time a few of its members
come together to engage in learning for its own sake—and
that this is what we ought always to be encouraging at this
college, even by device when necessary.
Other friends of mine are authors: Sophocles, who can
evoke a human sympathy to inspire pity in each of his
dramas; George Washington, whose restraint in the use of
power is evident in his finest writings and in the mark he left
on the founding of this country; Abraham Lincoln, whom I
consider this country’s finest poet, whose very words
reshaped what it meant to be an American; Jane Austen,
whose every sentence can be called perfect (and so she is a
beautiful author to me); and Martin Luther King, who taught
me that non-violent protest is more than a successful tactical
measure to achieve a political end, but a proper and loving
response to the hateful misconduct of fellow human souls.
Then there remain the characters whom I embrace as
friends: besides Socrates, there is Hector, Breaker of Horses,
“O My Warrior”; and Penelope, who weaves the path that
allows Odysseus to return home, and is far worthier of his
love than he of hers. There is Don Quixote, the indomitable
spirit, and Middlemarch’s Dorothea Brooke, whose simple
acts of goodness change the whole world about her. I rather
like Milton’s Eve, mother of us all, who still shines pretty
brightly in the face of his spectacular Satan. I was a teenager
when I met Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, and I grew to
adulthood with him, probably following a little too closely
his path to responsibility. There’s the innocent Billy Budd,
unprepared to face the force of evil in man, and his Captain
Vere, the good man who suffers to do his duty.
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The Program also offers some reflections on friendship:
every winter, Aristotle provides freshmen with a framework
for considering different kinds of friendships and the goods
they afford. Perhaps they will find his list incomplete, or
perhaps their own experiences will be embraced by his explication. And then there are examples of friendships, pairs of
friends in many of the books, who will also provide lessons in
friendship, for better or worse: Patroclus and Achilles, David
and Jonathan, Hal and Falstaff, Huck and Jim, Emma and
Knightley, to name a few.
We journey through the Program with the assistance of
many friends, some of whom live among us here and now,
while some others live on in the books we read during this
four-year odyssey. They help us as we struggle with the big
questions that in turn can help to free each of us to live a life
that truly belongs to us. It is these friends, standing close by,
who help us to find our answers to the questions: Who am I?
What is my place in the world? How ought I to live my life?
One of my more beautiful living friends, a colleague here at
the College, has put it this way: “Our friends are doubly our
benefactors: They take us out of ourselves and they help us to
return, to face together with them our common human
condition” (Eva Brann, Open Secrets/Inward Projects, 55).
Another of my friends, a St. John’s classmate and medical
doctor, gave last year’s graduating class in Santa Fe this
reminder, that we can learn from our friendships with the
books how we might be better friends to one another: “So
often we make shallow and inaccurate presumptions about
people, like the cliché of telling a book by its cover, which
robs you of the deeper experience that defines us as humans
in our relationship to each other. For me every patient is a
great book with a story to tell and much to teach me, and I
am sometimes ashamed when my presumptions are exposed
and I then see the remarkable person within, between the
covers of the book of their own story.” This doctor has
devoted himself to saving the lives of patients suffering from
cancer, and he has this to say about how he is guided by the
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spirit of community and friendship within the soul of every
human being: “In my own work, it is sometimes said, we are
guided…by the idea that to save a person’s life, it is
considered as if one has saved the world. To me that has
always meant the life saved is much more than a single life
restored, as that person is someone’s spouse, someone’s
brother or sister, someone’s parent, or child, a member of the
community, of a church, synagogue or mosque, or a friend,
and as all are affected by loss, all are restored by their return.”
(Stephen J. Forman, 2009 Commencement Address, Santa
Fe). This statement is a powerful testament to the wonder of
friendship at work in the world.
In this last story, I have moved us away from the inner
world of reflection and learning to the outer world of putting
what one has learned to work in a life devoted to helping
others. The second must always follow the first. By this, I
mean that we owe it to ourselves and to others to take
advantage of the opportunities this community offers to learn
with our fellow classmates and tutors how we might acquire
a little self-understanding through the common endeavor we
practice here, before going out and putting it to work in the
world. And in the process, perhaps we will make a few friends
who will stay with us for the rest of our lives, enriching them
because “what friends have they have in common.”
This little nominal sentence, κοινὰ τὰ τῶν ϕίλων,
happens to be the penultimate sentence in one of Plato’s
dialogues, Phaedrus, which is the only book read twice for
seminar, at the end of both freshman and senior years.
Phaedrus and Socrates have engaged in the highest form of
friendship as they have conversed together to try to understand how a man or woman might achieve harmony and
balance in the soul by directing that soul to a love for the
beautiful. Socrates concludes the inquiry with a prayer to the
gods:
Friend Pan and however many other gods are here,
grant me to become beautiful in respect to the
things within. And as to whatever things I have
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outside, grant that they be friendly to the things
inside me. May I believe the wise man to be rich.
May I have as big a mass of gold as no one other
than the moderate man of sound mind could bear
or bring along.
Do we still need something else, Phaedrus? For I
think I’ve prayed in a measured fashion?
To which Phaedrus responds:
And pray also for these things for me. For friends’
things are in common. (279B – C, trans. Nichols).
45
“My Subject is Passion”: A
Review of Eva Brann’s Feeling
our Feelings
Ronald Mawby
Feeling our Feelings: What Philosophers Think and People
Know is Eva Brann’s latest large and wonderful reflective
inquiry into what it means to be human. Previously she has
written on imagination (The World of the Imagination, 1991),
time (What, Then, Is Time? 1999), and negation (The Ways of
Naysaying, 2001) as “three closely entwined capabilities of
our inwardness” (2001, xi). Now she takes up our affective
life: “that subtly reactive receptivity we call feeling, the
psychic stir seeking expression we call emotion, and the not
always unwelcome suffering we call passion” (2001, xi) as
well as those pervasive unfocused feelings-without-objects
called moods, each “as seen through the writings of those
who seem to me to have thought most deeply and largely
about it” (2008, 441).
Her inquiry aims at thinking about our feelings. The
second part of her subtitle—what people know—insists that
we have in our own experience the data that thinking about
feelings must address. Anyone who has been angry, for
instance, in one sense knows what the feeling of anger is. Yet
merely having felt the feeling does not enable one to grasp its
nature, sources, psychic situation, and human significance. To
grasp the full meaning of the feelings we need thinking, and
Ms. Brann believes that those who have thought best about
them are the philosophers. Hence she proposes “by way of
picked philosophers” to hit the “high points that will best
help me to make sense of myself—and of the world, natural
Eva T. H. Brann. Feeling Our Feelings: What Philosophers Think and People
Know. Paul Dry Books, 2008. Ronald Mawby teaches in the Honors Program
at Kentucky State University.
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and human-made, then and now, passing and perennial, the
world that impinges on me by instilling or eliciting feelings in
me” (xxi).
This book is singular. I would say it is sui generis were it
not of a kind with her previous trilogy of the human center
(1991, 1999, 2001). The reader naturally wants to classify
the book under the identifiable rubric of some collective
scholarly enterprise, but it resists. Ms. Brann explicitly warns
us of ten scholarly categories into which her book fails to fit.
In fact, although the book is full of learning, it is intended not
“as a work of scholarship for scholars but rather as an effort
at inquiry for amateurs” (xxv). Her inquiry into our affective
being aims at “getting a clear view of the contrasting possibilities and developing a warm—though correctable—
adherence to one of them for carrying on my life” (122), and
she hopes that reading philosophy “might be useful at the
least for gaining some sense of the way particular human
experiences are entailed by larger frameworks and, perhaps,
for finding a coherent set of livable opinions for ourselves”
(401). Her standards are dual: “verisimilitude by the criteria
of knowing and verifiability by the test of life” (442).
Ms. Brann, I would say, seeks significant truth, that is, a
view that can stand the scrutiny and serve the purposes of
both thought and life. She believes that large philosophical
accounts offer her the best chance of advance toward
significant truth. She knows her approach is not obviously
sound:
My approach is, I think, not very hard to defend
as a working method for marshaling views but not
so easy to justify as a way to establish truth. For
these grand wholes of philosophy are obviously
even less easy to reconcile than the narrow partialities of scholarship, while to cannibalize such
frameworks for handy parts to cobble together
would break up the very integrity that gives their
passion theories stature. Therefore the justification
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for my—somewhat unfashionable—interest in
grounds can hardly be, it seems to me, in culling a
theory from this tradition, but rather in showing
how and why the inquiry into human affect might
be thought to involve all the world there is. (398)
An option that Ms. Brann has declined would look toward
“psychological theories—those points of view that base their
observations concerning the passions on natural theories of
the soul (or the converse) and often only implicitly on
metaphysics (or its denial)” (xx). She justifies her neglect of
psychological science by saying that discredited psychological
theories disappear at once or fade away after becoming either
literary tropes or folk-psychological terms, whereas philosophical systems show a sort of eternal recurrence. Her
unpersuaded scientific opposition would interpret Ms.
Brann’s observation as showing that in science false coin is
eventually withdrawn from circulation, whereas in
philosophy bad pennies continually turn up. The scientist
would add that even for discerning the phenomena scientific
experiment has an advantage over philosophical reflection
because experimental manipulation can separate factors that
are ordinarily confounded, so the experiment may reveal
things that ordinary observation may not. On the other hand
the scientific literature tends to be dry: vital issues can be
desiccated through operational definition, and the reader
must travel many a dusty mile through descriptions of experimental setups and statistical analysis of results to find the
small god of factual truth who lives in those details. The issue
finally is whether such factual truths lead to a livable oasis of
significant truth, or whether philosophical reflection can lead
there, or whether “significant truth” names a mirage. I am a
lapsed psychologist whose life witnesses my sympathy with
Ms. Brann’s approach, but I add that psychological studies
too can be thought-provoking.
Having sketched Ms. Brann’s aim I turn to the book itself,
a handsome, well-produced volume of over 500 pages. I urge
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potential readers not to be put off by the perhaps daunting
prospect of so much philosophical exposition. As she says,
“my subject is passion” throughout, but one topic does not
imply one continuous argument. Ms. Brann presents the
philosophers independently, on their own terms, and saves
her own conclusions for the end, so one need not read from
beginning to end to profit from the book. The ten chapters
between preface and conclusion could be read separately as
free-standing expository essays, serving as orientation for
those who go on to the original texts, as recapitulation for
those who have previously read them, or as cribs for those
wishing to be spared the trouble. And the work is a delight to
read. Her expositions are clear, her comments insightful and
judicious. Basing my judgment on the texts I know, her
accounts, even when brief, are nuanced and correct. She
knows the conceptual geography so well that she is never lost.
As a guide Ms. Brann is attentive to the needs of the reader
and her lively lucid graciousness makes her a fun companion.
The prose moves quickly without hurry, combines delicacy
with penetration, shows a keen wit and generous spirit, and
exemplifies Eliot’s dictum on diction: ”the common word
exact without vulgarity, the formal word precise but not
pedantic.” The honesty of her thinking and the accuracy of
her writing produce a dominant impression of sun-lit clarity.
*
In the remainder of this review I wish to imitate Ms.
Brann’s model by separating my exposition of the book’s
contents from my personal response. I do not think Ms.
Brann expects everyone who reads her book to adopt her
conclusions; neither do I expect everyone to adopt mine.
When, after considering various factors and divergent
viewpoints, we tentatively conclude on a way to put it all
together, our conclusion is neither independent of nor strictly
entailed by the dialectical considerations that inform it.
Truthful reporting should be disinterested, all the more so
where the topic has personal significance. Therefore I first
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present the contents with minimal commentary, and then
discuss my response.
Ms. Brann begins considering “passion itself ” through
the depiction of erotic love in Greek lyric poetry. The
passionate lover receives the uneasy privilege of being subjugated by an external power: “Eros whacked me.” Here the
source of the passion is outside, and the soul contributes only
the power to be so affected. One persistent issue in thinking
about feelings is the ratio between exogenous and
endogenous factors: how much is the feeling shaped by its
object, and how much is the object merely a trigger that
evokes a soul-formed feeling?
Plato begins the philosophy of feeling with his inquiries
into eros (brought inside the soul), spirit, desire, and
pleasure. We get the Platonic images of the soul from the
Symposium, Phaedrus, and Republic, and the account of
pleasure in the Philebus. Ms. Brann follows the latter thread
to Aristotle on pleasure as a bloom on activity, to Freud on
pleasure as the reduction of psychic excitation, and to
modern research on desire.
Aristotle gets a chapter of his own as the founder of
methodological emotion studies. Aristotle writes about the
passions in his ethical and rhetorical works because of the
centrality in the soul of appetite. Passions, like virtues, are
seen as means between extremes. A focus of Ms. Brann here
is the analysis of shame, which in the “cycles of popularity”
among passions has recently been on the rise.
The Stoics come next, with special attention to Cicero. As
“moderns among the ancients” they have a representational
theory of mind and insist on the primacy of the theory of
knowledge. Yet unlike many moderns who view a drench of
the passions as a welcome relief from arid rationality, the
Stoics view passions as mistakes, irrational excessive impulses
that upset the soul, and philosophy as the cure.
We then make a long jump to Thomas Aquinas, who
places us as rational animals in the midst of creation and
situates passions between the intellectual and vegetative
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powers in the center of the soul. Thomas presents a “comprehensive and differentiated synthesis” (186) of the tradition.
Ms. Brann in a high tribute says that Thomas offers “the most
extensive and acute phenomenology of the passions known to
me” (446).
Descartes, the cunning innovator, next gives us “an initiating and deck-clearing simplification” (186). Descartes
considers a human being not as a rational animal but as a
minded machine, and says the passions arise in the body and
are felt in the mind. Ms. Brann traces Descartes’s taxonomy
of the feelings and ends her discussion of his Passions of the
Soul with this summary judgment: “a seminal treatise that
combines confident assertion with ready retraction, brisk
definitiveness with unabashed equivocation, proud
innovation with tacit recourse to the tradition, hopeful
emphasis on experimental science with a speculative physiology, and a determined reliance on the metaphysics of
distinct substances with an insistence on a human union that
the theory itself forestalls. But if the theoretical exposition is
surely obscure just by reason of its attempted lucidity, the
practical advice might be sage just because it is wisely
ambivalent” (227).
Spinoza refashions Cartesian notions into a system that
aims to overcome traditional oppositions such as body/mind,
impulse/freedom, desire/virtue, passion/action, emotion/
reason, and feeling/thinking. Spinoza’s onto-theology implies
that the impetus at the base of our being is emotional and that
affect is our body’s vitality. Intellectual understanding transmutes experience from passive to active and entails an
increase of joy. This chapter I found fascinating, as I have not
studied Spinoza, and his metaphysics is often taken as a
grounding precursor to contemporary mind-brain identity
theories. I don’t know whether his “God-intoxicated”
metaphysics finally works—Ms. Brann thinks not—but
thinking about it is invigorating.
The Spinoza chapter contains an interlude on Adam
Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, with its “wonderfully
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wise worldliness” that “operates with three moral-psychological terms, “sympathy,” “propriety,” and “the impartial
spectator” (236).
Whereas Smith assumes common sense, David Hume, the
topic of Ms. Brann’s next chapter, is reductively skeptical in
the Treatise of Human Nature. As she observes, “in matters
philosophical, when you deliberately deny depth you seem to
have to embrace compensatory complexity” (292). Thus
Hume’s view of the passions as reflective impressions
becomes “baroquely elaborate” (292), yet “the analysis of
pride in particular seems, complications aside, true to life”
(309).
In the chapter entitled “Mood as News from Nothing:
Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and the Age of Anxiety,” Ms. Brann
begins with Romanticism. She comments on Rousseau, Kant,
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Pascal before proceeding to
two thinkers who take up an “uncircumventable sense of
nothingness borne by a persistent mood about nothing in
particular” (342). Kierkegaard views anxiety as “the
intimation of the possibility of being free—to sin” (342) and
thus invests this mood with a deep theological-existential
import. Heidegger says anxiety reveals “The Nothing” that is
beyond beings and thus attunes us to the aboriginal. Ms.
Brann, who dislikes Heidegger’s character for its lack of
probity, nonetheless avers “Heidegger has told us an unforgettable truth in “What is Metaphysics?”: Moods are human
affects that tell not only how we are but what our world is”
(356).
Unlike these existential-ontological theories, Freud’s
account of anxiety uses “developmental, mechanistic, quantitative, that is, basically naturalistic terms” (368). Ms. Brann
contrasts ancient passion with modern moodiness, and notes
that moderns tend to see good moods as superficial and bad
moods as revealing, so anxiety, depression, ressentiment,
disgust, boredom, and their kin prevail in 20th century
thinkers and writers.
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We come at last to the dispersal of theorizing in our times.
Ms. Brann presents the very different philosophical accounts
of Sartre and Ryle, the empirically-based conceptualization of
Silvan Tomkins, and the currently dominate English-language
school of cognitivism. Cognitivism includes a cluster of
theories that generally view emotions as judgment-like evaluations that can motivate behavior. Modern theoreticians
emphasize the utility of emotions for the organism, a role I
think is made the more urgent since, unlike older theories in
which responsive and responsible reason can discern and
judge ends, many current theories admit only a shrunken,
neutered, calculative rationality.
In the final chapter Ms. Brann begins with a disquisition
on philosophical accounts as responses to the open receptivity of questions and as frameworks that set definite
problems by pre-determining constraints on solutions. She
then articulates the leading questions of the philosophical
accounts she has examined in the preceding chapters. She
concludes with her tentative answers to the questions that
motivated her project: Is feeling a legitimate object of
thinking? What is human affect? How are thought and feeling
related? Are emotions judgments? Are we fundamentally
affective or rational beings? Are the passions revelatory?
What distinguishes aesthetic feeling? Are the emotions good?
This fragmentary statement of content fails to convey the
book’s richness. It is full of insights, with many sagacious and
thought-provoking incidental remarks. It is striking how
often Ms. Brann can summarily depict philosophical accounts
of the soul with diagrams—images of the topography of our
inwardness.
*
Now then, what response did the book elicit from me?
Ms. Brann says that to make sense of ourselves we should
read the philosophers, and that made me wonder, for in my
experience the benefit of reading philosophy for finding
livable opinions depends on which philosophers I read, our
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shared basis in what I call common sense, and the dependence
of their insights on their systems. Let me explain with
examples.
Plato and Aristotle—the former through images and
arguments, the latter through analytic articulations—
organize, refine, and supplement common sense, so when I
read them I feel that we share a common world. They see
what I see, and a lot more, so I benefit. As a ‘seventh-letter’
Platonist I don’t look to the dialogues for a systematic
philosophy that can settle every question it raises, and I don’t
find one. Aristotle used to annoy me when I felt he truncated
a discussion saying “enough about that”; I would rebel,
wanting—I now see—a systematic completion that is askew
to his enterprise; he is usually not imposing a theory but
trying to articulate what is there, and when he has said all he
has seen, he stops. I profit enormously from reading these
authors, though, of course, for both, if we push every
question to the end we come upon mysteries.
In contrast, philosophers such as Descartes and Hume
seem to be constructing systems intended as alternatives to
common sense. They say, in effect, that what is really there is
less or other than common sense imagines, so when reading
them I feel I am in their systems rather than in the world, and
if their systems are incoherent, as I believe they are, then I am
nowhere, and the insights I do gain from them are in spite of,
rather than because of, their systemic notions. Take
Descartes. Ms. Brann agrees that we can see clearly and
distinctly that Cartesian matter and Cartesian mind cannot
interact, yet according to Descartes, they do. And Hume’s
systemic notions don’t illuminate my experience but render it
inconceivable; his conclusions seem to me an unacknowledged reductio on his premises. These authors, rather than
ending in mystery, begin there.
So I wonder, What is the value of an incoherent system
for illuminating the passions? How can we make sense of
ourselves using notions that don’t make sense? Ms. Brann
writes, referring to Spinoza’s Ethics,
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What is the good of attending to a text so beset
with perplexities? Well, to begin with, I cannot
think of a work that is not so beset when pressed.
At any rate, don’t we study philosophical writings
largely to learn what price is to be paid for certain
valuable acquisitions, and don’t we think out
things on our own largely to find out what
problems follow from what solutions and what
questionable antecedents we can tolerate for the
sake of their livable consequences? (278)
Our choice, then, is not between some perplexity and no
perplexity, but between various configurations of perplexity.
To avoid perplexity is to abandon thinking, or at least to give
up that serious amateur personal thoughtfulness that since
Socrates has been called philosophy.
Philosophy as amateur (i.e., loving, hence feeling)
thoughtfulness is related to Ms. Brann’s distinction between
problem-solving and question-answering, which I would
describe as follows. Problem-solving aims at reduction of
uncertainty; when a problem is solved, our sense of the world
becomes more determinate. A solved problem moves out of
our center of attention; as the solution becomes a determinate thread woven into the fabric of belief or projected as
a settled line of action, attention is freed for new tasks. The
question-answering thought of reflective inquiry aims at
heightened awareness. A question is the soul’s attentive
receptivity focused and formulated. When an answer is
glimpsed, our experience brightens. The question does not go
away when an answer is disclosed; rather the answering
world is formed and focused in our soul more intensely.
Philosophies in Ms. Brann’s scheme sit between questions
and problems, and face both ways. Philosophies can set the
terms for formulating problems. In this employment
philosophy is often antecedent to science, a communal enterprise devoted to the piecemeal discovery of truth.
Philosophies can also assemble and organize questions. In this
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employment philosophy contributes to living well, and is not
a collective scholarly enterprise. It is an individual way of
being more consciously alive. Friends can help each other
here—in the end Ms. Brann’s book is just such a friend—but
we are finally alone in our sense of what is true about what is
significant.
I have a final response that concerns one of Ms. Brann’s
conclusions. Among the “unformed urgencies” that she
brought, or brought her, to this study is this question, the
question of her project: “Are we fundamentally affective or
rational beings?” (461). Spinoza affirms the former, Aristotle
the latter, and Ms. Brann sides with Spinoza but quite
properly plays on an ambiguity in “fundamental” to have it
both ways: “while we are at bottom affective, we are at our
height thought-ful” (362). She concludes that our inwardness
is affectivity variously aroused (453). Thus my being, not the
impersonal intellectual “I” that Kant says accompanies every
representation, but me, my very own inner ultimate self, my
subject, is passion.
But the question, Are we thinking or feeling beings? is
inadequately posed, since it excludes other alternatives.
Maybe what is primary for us is neither feeling nor thinking,
but doing and making. Maybe as human animals we act and
produce to remain in being and thinking and feeling arise out
of our living agency. Deeds worth doing and artifacts worth
making surely have been praised in our tradition. That Ms.
Brann writes books is at least consistent with the primacy of
works and deeds. For she agrees with Thomas that baths are
restorative, and she has tenure. Why not soak in a luxurious
bath, feelings one’s feelings, thinking thoughts, and when one
has a “eureka” insight rest content with a self-satisfied smile?
Why leap out and write a book? Might it not be because the
“production of a perfect artifact” (443) is another fundamental way of being human? Now she could reply, rightly,
that clarity of thought requires verbal expression, so writing
is a means to thinking. And certain feelings, such as pride,
require genuine achievements about which to be proud. Thus
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
56
good works and deeds may be instrumental to the best
thought and feeling. Granted. But the best works and deeds
also require, as instruments, good thought and feeling. Which
is primary, which derivative, is not clear to me, so I cannot
approve of excluding a possible answer through the posing of
the question.
While this is a weighty issue when considering what it
means to be human, in terms of this book it is a minor
quibble. Ms. Brann undertook this project to better understand herself as a feeling being, and offers the book as an aid
for any reader also “hoping to come near to an answer to the
question: What does it mean to feel?” (234) The final test for
each reader, then, is whether after having read it one better
understands one’s affective being. For myself the answer is,
Yes, I do. My vision is larger and my discernment is keener. I
am still not sure in what sense the inquiry into human affect
reaches all the world there is, but it surely reaches the depths
of the soul and, as Aristotle observed, the soul is in a way all
things. This book energized my thinking mind and enlivened
my feeling soul, and engaging with it has been a pleasure. Ms.
Brann is again to be congratulated for a marvelous
achievement.
*
Brann, Eva T. H. (1991). The World of the Imagination: Sum and
Substance. Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Brann, Eva. (1999). What, Then, Is Time? Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers.
Brann, Eva. (2001). The Ways of Naysaying: No, Not, Nothing, and
Nonbeing. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Brann, Eva. (2008). Feeling our Feelings: What Philosophers Think and
People Know. Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books.
�
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Hunt, Frank
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Hopkins, Burt C.
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Yee, Cordell D. K., 1955-
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Flaumenhaft, Mera J.
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The St. John's Review
Volume XL, number one (2007)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Peter Ara Guekguezian
The St. John's Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John's College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson,
President; Michael Dink, Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $10 for one year. Unsolicited
essays, reviews, and reasoned letters are welcome. All
manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to the Review, St. John's College, P.O. Box 2800,
Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available, at $5
per issue, from the St. John's College Bookstore.
©2007 St. John's College. All rights reserved; reproduction
in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
The St. John's Public Relations Office and the St. John's College Print Shop
�2
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�3
Contents
Essays and Lectures
Aurum Antiquum: Reflections in and on
Virgil's Aeneid .............................................................. 5
John C. Kohl, Jr.
Reviews
The Finest Fruits of Reason
Michael Comenetz's Calculus: The Elements ............ .43
M. W. Sinnett
Occasional Pieces
The Sting of the Torpedo Fish .................................... 53
Christopher B. Nelson
For the Graduate Students in Classics at Yale ............. 61
Eva T. H. Brann
�4
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�5
Aurum Antiquum:
·
Refle~tions In and On Virgil's
Aenetd
·
John C. Kohl Jr.
Part 1: Heroic Tension in Aeneid 5 and 6
Palinurus
Virgil's Aeneid leaves the attentive reader with many puzzles.
One such puzzle pertains to the de~th of Palinurus in books 5
and 6. On the voyage to Italy that closes book 5 (S.838-71)
Aeneas' helmsman Palinurus is enticed at night by the god
Somnus: since the seas are calm with a following wind and no
threat is on the horizon, steering itself is not needed; one can
take a break from the helm altogether. Palinurus vigorously
opposes this suggestion and clings to the tiller all the more
tightly, so much so that when Somnus overwhelms the sailor
with drugs, he falls into the sea, dragging the tiller and part
of the stern with him. Aeneas laments his missing helmsman:
"Palinurus, having trusted too much in the calm sky and sea,
you shall lie naked on unknown sands." However, when the
two meet next in Hades (6.337-83) Aeneas betrays nothing of
his former judgment, asking Palinurus, "Which of ,the gods
tore you from us and plunged you into the open sea?"
Palinurus, unaware of what we had been told, replies that it
was not by a god but by chance !forte), that he had slipped
John Kohl is an alumnus of St. John's College (1961), a retired biologist
(Ph.D., 1967) and an amateur classicist. He has taught Greek, mathematics,
and 'physical and biological sciences in liberal arts programs at Shimer
College, The College of St. Thomas More (fexas), and Thomas More
College (New Hampshire) and has held research positions in mammalian
mutation research, in chemical defense, and most recently in cancer
immunotherapy at Baylor Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, where he
currently resides.
�6
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
and, grabbing the tiller for stability, dragged it and part of the
stern into the sea. Nor was he washed up a corpse on the
beach, but made it alive to the rock cliffs of the shore where
barbarous natives killed him and threw him into the breakers,
and now his body awaits burial.
This discrepancy is usually attributed to Virgil's having
composed books 5 and 6 at different times and having not yet
worked out fully the differences in the death of Palinurus; 1
however, I think that here in the underW-orld rhe poet is deliberately posing counter-lessons in how to read the fate of the
sailor. Charles Segal explains the two contrary aspects:
The apparent discrepancy is only a difference in
the point of view and in the mode of narration. In
5 the story is told in the third person by the
omniscient narrator with the full panoply of epic
conventions. In 6 the victim tells the tale as he
experienced it. Like any victim of a sudden catastrophe, he does not know exactly what happened.
Indeed, his vagueness about the 'great force' that
tore off the rudder (6.349) is only a subtle
reflection of the skill with which Virgil has kept
apart and yet reconciled the divine and human
levels. 2
According to Segal, in book 5 we have the comprehensive,
divine view of Palinurus' death, and in book 6 a personal,
human view of the same action. The act itself, Palinurus'
disappearance into the sea together with part of the ship, is
shrouded in mystery, and becomes ambiguous, enigmatic.
Yet, there is a Homeric precedent for this death, a
Homeric counterpart, that of the young and hapless shipmate
of Odysseus, Elpenor (x.552-60; xi.51-80), who got drunk in
Circe's house, forgot he was at the top of the stairs, fell down,
and broke his neck. 3 So the same sort of accident befalls on
the one hand Aeneas' trusted, prudent, and skilled helmsman
�KOHL
7
and on the other hand Odysseus' young, inexperienced, and
indiscreet shipmate.
Games And Underworlds
The points of comparison that Virgil raises in the Palinurus
episode constitute a subtle invitation to look at the other
principal episodes in the fifth and sixth books of the Aeneid
in light of one another and to consider the Virgilian episodes
in relation to their respective Homeric counterparts.
An overview of the episodes in the upper world of Aeneid
book 5 and lower world of 6 suggests that such a comparison
is warranted and, therefore, possibly illuminating. Aeneas
announces five contests for the Sicilian games (5.45-71): a
ship race, a foot race, a boxing match, an archery contest, and
a javelin throw. In addition, however, a riding display by the
boys (the lusus Troae), not given in Aeneas' initial agenda,
takes place after the fourth (archery) contest, and the last of
the announced contests, the javelin throw, is never held. The
Sicilian landing and activities are a prelude to Aeneas' visit to
Hades in the sixth book where there are, similarly, five major
encounters of Aeneas in the underworld: first, with his lost
and unburied helmsman Palinurus; second, with Dido; third,
with his half brother and former comrade Deiphobus; fourth,
with the punished souls in Phlegethon as described by the
Sibyl; and, finally, with his father Anchises and posterity in
the Blissful Groves. This indicates paired associations seriatim
of the respective episodes in each book.
Substantial portions of both of these books also have their
respective Homeric counterparts. In the fifth book the funeral
games instituted by Aeneas in honor of his father, Anchises,
clearly invite comparison with those instituted by Achilles in
Iliad XXIII in honor of his beloved Patroclus. 4 Only four of
the eight events in Iliad XXIII correspond with those in
Aeneid 5: a chariot race, a foot race, a boxing match, and an
archery contest. Virgil has recast the first and longest event in
the Iliad (XXIII.262-650), the chariot race with five
challengers, as a ship race between four boats selected from
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
8
the fleet as a whole, which is the most lengthy athletic contest
in the Aeneid (5.114-285). 5
Similarly, the five encounters in the Aeneid have parallels
with the respective five encounters in Odysseus' visit to
Hades in Odyssey xi: first, with his unburied shipmate
Elpenor; second, with his mother Anticleia; third, with his
comrade. Agamemnon; fourth, with. the punished in Hades
including a brief conversation with Heracles; and, finally,
with the prophet Tiresias, which in the Homeric order
.actually comes between the first conversation with Elpenor
and that with Anticleia, but which has a parallel in Aeneas'
visit with Anchises.
A comparison of Aeneid 5 and 6 with the two Homeric
parallels thus yields a rich complex of associations. In order
to explore these associations· systematically, the five events in
Virgil's games will be discussed in order. Each contest is first
examined in light of its Homeric counterpart in the Iliad,
then compared with the respective encounter in Virgil's
underworld; and lastly the underworld encounter is cast
against its counterpart in the Odyssey. The general scheme is
diagrammed below.
3
4
Chariot race Foot race
Boxing
Archery
Aeneid 5
Ship.race
Foot race
B,oxing
Archery
Troy Game
Aeneid 6
Palinurus
Dido
Deiphobus
Tartarus
Elysium
Antideia
Agamemnon Herades
Sequence
1
Iliad 23
Odyssey 11 Elpenor
2
5
Ship Race
The drama in both the Homeric and Virgilian accounts of the
race depends upon the· layout of the race course, which in
each consists of an outward-bound leg, a turning point, and
an inward-bound leg to the finish line. In the Iliad it is on the
inbound stretch that Apollo and Athena contest with one
another to decide the race between Eumelus, the front runner
�KOHL
9
and Apollo's favorite, and Diomedes, Tydeus' son and
Athena's champion, who is in hot pursuit. Thanks to Apollo,
Diomedes loses his whip, but Athena restores it, breathes new
strength into Diomedes' horses, and in her anger goes after
Eumelus' car and breaks the pole of his chariot, causing a
wreck. Antilochus now rashly challenges Menelaus for
second place by forcing the older hero to draw his team off
the course in a narrow passage near the finish line in order to
avoid a collision. For this act, the young man's second place
finish is later challenged by Menelaus at the awards ceremony
and he is rebuked: young warriors, no matter how valiant,
must learn to remember their place in the face of their
betters.
Virgil elegantly reworks the elements of Homer's race to
draw significantly different lessons. The narrow place in the
racecourse is resituated at the; turning point itself, where two
of the four ships fail of their own choosing. Gyas' ship, the
leader on the outbound course, enters the turn, but the ship's
pilot, Menoetes, fearing rocky shoals there, steers too wide
and loses the lead. For his timidity, Menoetes is pitched into
the sea by Gyas, and the ship loses its pilot and the race in the
bargain. Next, Sergestus, challenging Mnestheus for the lead,
rashly takes the inside course, where his ship founders on the
rocks. Mnestheus' ship, taking the middle course, flies
through the gap like a startled, frightened dove, leaving the
embarrassed Sergestus to free his ship and later slink back to
port like a wounded snake. Now the race is between the
survivors of the turn, Mnestheus and Cloanthus. As in the
chariot race, the gods decide the victor, but only after
Cloanthus vows sacrifice and libations to the host of divinities
of the sea and harbor did Portunus " ... with his own great
hand [drive] him on his way: swifter than wind or winged
arrow the ship speeds landward and found shelter in the deep
harbor" (5.241-43).
Aeneas' conversation with Palinurus in Hades constitutes
a counter-lesson to the boat race. As we have seen, Palinurus
claims here that no divine agency was involved in his fall
�10
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
from the helm, that it was solely by chance, although we also
see that Palinurus struggled against his sleeplessness on the
fateful night. If we view this again in light of the Homeric
counterpart Elpenor, we learn that such accidents happen to
the skilled and responsible as well as to the young and inexperienced, even though Palinurus prudently tried to resist his
misfortune, while Elpenor seemed totally unaware of his.
Foot Race
There is a similar reworking of Homeric precedents in the
second contest on Sicily, the foot race. Three contestants are
racing for the finish line in Homer's story, Oileus' son, Ajax,
Laertes' son, Odysseus, and Nestor's son, Antilochus, who by
now has learned to respect his betters and is in last place.
Odysseus calls on his patron Athena, who not only assists her
favorite with added strength but also causes the challenger,
Ajax, to slip in the path on the dung from the sacrificial bulls,
much to the amusement of all onlookers. Ajax's complaints
and Antilochus' deference do win the former second prize at
the awards ceremony.
The field in Virgil's race is much wider than in Homer's;
in fact, we do not know exactly how many racers there are,
but seven-Nisus, Euryalus, Diores, Salius, Patron, and two
Sicilians, Helymus and Panopes-are named. The pair, Nisus
and Euryalus, the former the lover of the latter, is first and
third, respectively, as they come into the home stretch; only
Salius in second place separates them. Here Virgil presents an
episode altogether analogous to and reminiscent of Homer's
but with a shift in its comedic emphasis. Unlucky (infelix)
Nisus slips in the slippery blood (not dung) which, poured
forth by chance (forte) from the slaughtered calves, had
soaked the ground and green grass in the path of the runners.
Nisus, seeing Salius now as the leader, trips him up, allowing
his beloved Euryalus to win the race. No divinity has intervened here, and the end of the race, rather than relying
entirely on the befouled and risible aspect of Nisus to achieve
�KOHL
l1
a humorous pathos, dissolves in a comedic wrangling over
prizes. Salius vehemently claims first place and fraud.
Meanwhile, the comely Euryalus, his eyes filled with tears
over possible loss of victory, is winning favor with the crowd,
and Dibres, who would finish fourth and out of the money if
Salius wins, is protesting on behalf of Euryalus. When Aeneas
compromises by ruling in Euryalus' favor but giving Salius a
prize anyway, out of pity "for the fall of an innocent friend,"
Nisus now (successfully) puts in for a prize on his own behalf.
The prize awarded Nisus, a shield captured by Aeneas
from a Greek, foreshadows an incident later involving the
pair in much darker circumstances. In the first real action of
the Italian war, described in book 9, the pair is clispatched at
their own suggestion from the besieged Trojan camp to get
relief from Aeneas. As they pass through the sleeping, wineladen Italians at night, the pair takes advantage of the
situation to work havoc on the enemy forces like the
celebrated night expedition of Odysseus and Diomedes in
Iliad X. Unlike the Argive night expedition against the
Trojans, which proves wholly successful, that of the two
young Trojans against the Italians has a different outcome,
primarily because of the pair's avidity here for booty, as it was
for prizes earlier. Nisus, whom we know as a good runner,
could have escaped through the enemy lines to Aeneas, but
his loyalty to his companion, the captured Euryalus, a loyalty
which led to a comic scene earlier in Virgil's narrative, now
in the darkness of war proves fatal to both.
The counter-lesson to the foot race is furnished by the
second of Aeneas' principal encounters in Hades, Dido, who
answers Aeneas' earlier silence at Carthage (4.331-96) with
her own: in the face of such intense passion, words falter
because they are from her point of view unnecessary. Aeneas,
conversely, feels he owes her an explanation, but the explanation he finally gives her in Hades-that he left her unwillingly (invitus)-is weak and of no avail: hers was a love
unrequited. If the death of Nisus was the culmination of love
fulfilled, then in this counter-lesson Dido's death was the
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
12
culmination of a love unfulfilled. What we seem to have at
the center of such passions in either case is death, which
renders the value we place upon passionate love ambiguous.
The intensity of the passionate relationships here is
heightened further by the parallel in the second major
episode in Horner's Hades (xi.155-224), Odysseus' meeting
with his mother Anticlea, who wasted away and perished in
grief over the absence of her son. In the Odyssey it is the
ebbing of passion, not its waxing, that proves fatal.
Boxing Match
The boxing contest in the Iliad (XXIII.653-99) is a relatively
short and direct affair. After Achilles has called the contest
and set forth the prizes, Epeius, "son of Panopeus and a man
valiant and big and with the looks of a prizefighter" (XXIII
664-65), stands up to take on any and all challengers. Only
one in the silent crowd rises to challenge him, Euryalus,
whose father Talaus, had been a good boxer. Epeius makes
good his appearance and repute and very quickly and
magnanimously dispatches the challenger, Euryalus. Virgil
reverses this pattern of events in the boxing contest on Sicily:
it is the reluctant challenger, Entellus, who eventually
vanquishes the favorite, Dares. But the match does not start
out that way: the older Entellus flails wildly at the more
nimble Dares, loses his balance, and takes a fall on his own.
This marks the turning point in the fight. In Homeric turning
points we would ordinarily have the arrival of a hero or a
god, who would advise and rally the oppressed warrior,
lighten and breathe strength into his limbs, and then retire as
the tide of affairs reverses. But no god directly enters into
Virgil's account here (5.450-57), nor are we privileged to
learn what Entellus thinks and says to himself:
Eagerly the Teucrians and Sicilian men stand up; a
shout mounts to heaven, and Acestes first runs
forward and in pity lifts his aged friend from the
ground. But neither downcast nor dismayed by the
�KOHL
13
fall, the hero returns keener to the fray and rouses
strength from his wrath. Shame, too, and
conscious valor kindle his strength. Heatedly he
drives Dares headlong over the entire arena with
redoubled punches, right and left.
Entellus, loser of the first round of the fight, will be declared
victor in the second round when the contest is halted to
prevent the very death of Dares himself.
The course of events here reminds us of a broader theme:
the Trojans, losers at Ilium in the first round, will be the
eventual winners overall in Italy. Such a reversal has its broad
appeal. There is a widespread impulse to cheer on the
underdog and a perennially engaging fascination with
turnings in the tides of affairs of men, whether they be in real
battles or in athletic competitions. The roots of this impulse
and this fascination lie in the hope and in the curiosity that
things are not what they seem and that appearances may be
deceiving. Here in the games anger, shame, and honor have
erupted to transform old Entellus, the one appearing physically weaker, into a furious fighter of overpowering strength.
Pulling the vanquished Dares from the fight, Aeneas says to
the overmatched warrior: "Unhappy man, how could such
frenzy seize your mind? Don't you see the other's strength
and the changed will of the god? Yield to heaven" (5.465-67).
To Aeneas this sudden transformation of Entellus can only be
attributed to the subvention of a god and to a change in the
favor of a god. Has a god chided Entellus and brought him to
a new sense of himself?
The counter-lesson to the boxing contest is found in the
third of Aeneas' major encounters in Hades, that with
Deiphobus, who recounts how his wife Helen betrayed him
on the fateful night when Troy fell. She seemed to be a
faithful wife and, trusting in her, Deiphobus sleeps, while
Helen, actually an enemy accomplice, disarms the house and
allows the enemy entry. Thus surprised and with his guard
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
down, Deiphobus is killed and mutilated. Entellus also seems
to be what he is not, a weak old man and not much of a
match for the younger and nimble Dares. But there are
numerous instances both in team and individual sports where
the favored contestant, deceived by the poor reputation and
weak appearance of the opponent, becomes overconfident,
prepares poorly for the contest, and does not prosecute it
with vigor, trusting that the outcome has or will soon be
settled favorably. As a consequence the favorite is surprisingly
defeated in an upset. From Dares' perspective, is not this an
alternative explanation for the result in the boxing contest
suggested by the juxtaposition here?
The Homeric parallel is found in the third major
encounter of Odysseus in Hades, that with Agamemnon, who
tells his visitor of his betrayal and murder at his homecoming
by his deceitful wife Clytemnestra and her companion
Aegisthus. This is an unseemly and shocking deed, so much so
that the victim is totally unprepared either tactically or in
spirit to defend himself and falls, "slaughtered like a bull in a
manger," Agamemnon says.
Archery Contest
The archery contest, the last of the contests described in the
memorial games to Anchises, parallels in most of its details
the archery contest in the Iliad, penultimate in the sequence
of events ordained by Achilles. The goal in both is to hit a
dove, tethered to the top of a mast. Twice as many men (four:
Hippocoon, Mnestheus, Eurytion, and Acestes) compete in
the Aeneid as in the Iliad (Tencer and Meriones), and Virgil's
account of sixty lines (5.485-544) correspondingly goes
beyond Homer's twenty-five line episode (XXIII.859-83) in
its emotional depth.
·The first of Virgil's contestants, Hippocoon, misses and
the dove flutters her wings in terror as she perceives the force
of the arrow in the quivering mast. Then Mnestheus succeeds
with his shot, like the first of Homer's contestants, Tencer, in
severing the cord holding the dove to the mast: " ... off to the
�KOHL
15
south winds and black clouds she sped in flight" (5.512 f.).
Then the dove, "now happy in the open sky and clapping her
wings beneath a black cloud," is transfixed by an arrow from
the third of Virgil's competitors, Eurytion (as by Homer's
second, Meriones): "Down she fell, dead, left her life amid
the stars of heaven, and, falling, brought down the arrow that
pierced her." Virgil's subjective sympathy for the victim here
far surpasses that of Homer, who simply describes the dove at
one point as "timorous" (XXIII.874) and her flight. as
"circling" (XXIII.875). Consequently the pathos is not
captured and concentrated by the successive reversals of fear,
freedom, exultation, and sudden end as in the Aeneid, nor is
the transfixed bird, the epitome of death, brought to earth for
all to examine but, rather, dove and arrow fall separately.
The counter-lesson to the dove killed in flight is furnished
by the fourth of Aeneas' major encounters in Hades, the visit
to Tartarus. In contrast to the senseless loss we feel at
witnessing the sudden death of a happy innocent-the dove
in flight-here we witness those who have committed crimes,
the guilty, and who are now being punished. The whole of
Tartarus is encircled thrice with walls, then with flames, and
entered by a gate of adamant, which is guarded by Hydra and
surmounted by an iron watchtower where sleepless Tisiphone
stands watch. There is no escape. The Sibyl, who says she was
instructed by Hecate, tells Aeneas of the inmates, their crimes
and punishments: the Titans, the twin sons of Aloeus,
Salmoneus, Tityos, Ixion, and Pirithous-all challengers of
Jupiter's reign-and those guilty of fratricide, of fraud, of
adultery, of betrayal of their kin, and of treason. The
admonition is given by Phlegyas, most miserable of all:
"Learn to be just and not to slight the gods" (6.620). This
sums up the lesson, though the Sibyl adds that it is impossible
for her to recount all the forms of crime and their punishments.
The Tartarean visit has its Odyssean parallel in the last
episode in Hades in Odyssey xi where Odysseus sees Minos
giving judgment; Orion with his club; Tityus being pecked in
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
his liver by vultures because he had raped Zeus' consort,
Leto; Tantalus being tempted; Sisyphus rolling his rock
repeatedly up the mountain; and Heracles, who stole the dog
Cerebus from Hades. Odysseus wanted to stay to see "men
still earlier," such as Theseus and Pirithous, but he is afraid of
being immobilized in Hades by Persephone and her Gorgon's
head, so he leaves. Of those whom he does see, only Tityus'
and Heracles' transgressions are specifically mentioned. In
general, Odysseus is more attracted to these and the others by
their notoriety rather than by their infamy, and the punitive
dimension in the Homeric adventure is not strongly brought
out, unlike that in the Virgilian parallel.
Returning to the archery competition on Sicily (5.519f.),
we are left with the fourth competitor, Acestes, who is yet to
shoot. The prize has already been taken, yet Acestes still
draws back his bow and launches his arrow into the empty
sky.
On this a sudden portent meets their eyes,
destined to prove of lofty presage; this in after
time the mighty issue showed, and in late days
terrifying seers proclaimed the omen. For flying
amid the airy clouds, the shaft caught fire, marked
its path with flames, then vanished away into thin
air; just as often shooting stars, unloosed from
heaven, speed across the sky, their tresses
streaming in their wake.
Unlike the three earlier contests, there is no direct point of
contact between this sign and anything in the comparable
Homeric event. Acestes is the fourth and supernumerary
competitor in the archery program, and his action goes
beyond anything that is conceived in analogy with Iliad
XXIII. The flaming arrow thns assumes a significance in the
drama of the Aeneid that lies beyond the action in the
Homeric epics and retutils us to Virgil's poem itself to find its
proper reference. The description quoted above (5 .522-28)
doubtless recalls the earlier shooting star shown by Jupiter to
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KOHL
Anchises (2.692-700), who like Acestes stood before a prize,
Troy, which had been lost.
The Lusus Troiae
And so, as the dust of the contest clears, we have what is
known as the Lusus Troiae, in which sons parade across the
field on horseback under the proud and attentive gaze of their
fathers: "The Dardanians greet the bashful boys with cheers
and rejoice as they gaze, seeing in their features their sires of
old" (5.575-76). The scene gives precise expression here to
the term "religion," binding the sons to the fathers, and
through them, to the forefathers in an unbroken line of
temporal succession. The first part of their equestrian
maneuvers (5.575-87) appears to consist of mock charges and
combat. The second part (5.597ff.) emerges as a sort of
intricate dressage:
Just as once on lofty Crete the Labyrinth produced
a track woven with blind alleys and possessed a
perplexing trick in its thousand paths, where for
one following the signs insoluble and irremediable
wandering awaits, so scarcely otherwise do the
sons of Tencer entangle their tracks and weave
their flight and battle games, like dolphins
swimming through the watery seas who divide the
Carpathian and Libyan waters and play amid the
waves.
6
The counter-lesson to the celebration of Trojan youth on
Sicily is the parade of future Roman greats on the Fields of
Elysium, which Anchises shows Aeneas at the conclusion of
his visit to Hades. In Virgil's depiction, it is as if Aeneas is
situated at the stationary hub of a rotating wheel on whose
periphery various Roman figures are affixed; he looks up at
the section moving in the upper world to see youths moving
from past into future, then looks down at the section in the
lower world to see heroes moving from future into past,
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
about to be recycled to the upper world. Anchises explains to
Aeneas the doctrine of palingenesis, i.e., purgation in the
underworld and rebirth above, as they watch the succession
of Romans. How does this transgenerational rejuvenation
take place? The capacity to describe it is beyond us, since it
involves a reversal in the usual temporal order. Aeneas sees
only the barest, iconic presentation of his Roman successors
processioning by in a direction opposite to his and not their
growth, development, or interrelationships.
Tiresias, the blind Theban prophet and counterpart to
Anchises in this scheme, warns Odysseus that Poseidon is
angry over what Odysseus did to the Cyclops Polyphemus
and will make his return voyage difficult. If Odysseus really
desires a peaceful death at an old age, then after getting home
he must journey far inland to a place where oars are no longer
recognized as nautical implements and perform a funeral over
a sailor's cenotaph. Tiresias also gives Odysseus a second
warning: if he and his shipmates harm the Cattle of the Sun
on the island of Thrinicia (which the ancients later identified
as Sicily), then only Odysseus will come home, in a foreign
ship, and after much time, so that he will have to contend
with insolent suitors for the hand of Penelope. In all this
Odysseus hears much but sees very little from Tiresias, and
what he does hear is given as conditional instructions-if you
do this, then that will follow. Aeneas hears from Anchises,
and also sees much, but what he does hear and see is given
unconditionally.
Heroic Tension
The parallels between the events in Aeneid books 5 and 6 and
those in Iliad XIII and Odyssey xi, respectively, do not simply
focus our attention on certain elements of the action but also
contrast the lessons of the Virgilian events with those of their
Homeric counterparts, that is to say, the new with the old.
Thus in the first event, the chariot/boat race, we have
moderate resolve and the positive assistance by the gods
�KOHL
19
(Virgil) vs. interference and disruption by the gods and
respect for betters (Homer); in the second, the foot race,
pious love and loyalty (Virgil) vs. humiliation by divinities
(Homer); in the third, the boxing match, spirited determination and resolve in the face of disgrace (Virgil) vs. magnanimous strength (Homer); .and in the last event, archery,
persistence in the sacrifice for the larger goal (Virgil) vs. the
celebration of skill (Homer). In Hades Palinurus' struggles
(Virgil) contrast with Elpenor's ineptitude (Homer), Dido's
passion (Virgil) with Anticlea's loss of passion (Homer),
Helen's treachery not only to her family but also to Troy
(Virgil) with Clytemnestra's murder of her husband for her
lover (Homer), guilt and punishment in Phlegethon (Virgil)
with crime and notoriety in Tartarus (Homer).
Collectively, the Virgilian readings center upon civic
virtues rather than individual virtues in the Homeric counterparts. This is not surprising. Virgil's special concern, as
pointed out by Maurice Bowra/ "is the destiny not of a man
but of a nation, not of Aeneas but of Rome," whereas
"Homer concentrates on individuals and their destinies. The
dooms of Achilles and Hector dominate his design; their
characters determine the action." Curtius captures this
contrast as one between sapientia (King Latinus) and
fortitudo (Turnus); Putnam detects in Aeneas an irreconcilable difference between freedom and force, and Desrosiers
that of the patient, enduring, nearly comedic type of
Odyssean hero and the decisive, active hero whose pride
prefigures a tragic doom in the manner of Achilles. 8 Thus a
tension emerges between the spirit of the Augustan Age of
Peace and its ethical ideals and the spirit at ancient Troy with
its celebration of human excellence and valor.
. . The parade on the fields of Elysium is perhaps the most
conspicuous of the lessons in book 6 that pose interpretations
contrary to those of the corresponding events in book 5 but
it is not the only such lesson. In fact all the lessons do. Thus
we have, in the first place, an accidental occurrence (Palinurus
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
in the underworld) placed in opposition to occurrence due to
divine intervention (Palinurus on board ship, and the ending
of the ship race). In the second, passion that is altruistically
directed (Nisus and Euryalus in the foot race) is in opposition
to passion reflexively directed to one's own fulfillment (Dido
in the underworld). In the third, victory by wrathful spirit
(Entellus in the boxing match) opposes victory achieved by
exploiting disinterest and dispiritedness in the opponent by
surprise (Deophobus in the underworld). In the fourth, death
or injury as innocent victim (dove in the archery contest)
stands opposed to death as guilty transgressor (the prisoners
in Tartarus). In the fifth and final pair, events arising through
individual striving and skill (boys in the Lusus Troiae) are
opposed to those predestined as part of an atemporal cycle or
plan (the parade in Elysium). In general, these alternatives
reflect an elemental, Lucretian interpretation of motives in
which an agent is acting autonomously for himself or herself
alone, placed in opposition to a traditional, providential
interpretation of motives where figures past, present, or
future, and remote from the agent lay claim to that agent's
actions and intentions.
Once again we are brought back to the tension between
the two heroic types: the man of fortitude, confidence, skill,
and strength, mindful of his own prowess in light of his
forebears, and the man of prudence, negotiation, patience,
and persistence, mindful of and guided by thoughts of his
posterity. Aeneas, a refugee warrior from the plains of Ilium
is well acquainted with the first type of hero. Through his
Odyssean journey to Italy, home of his Dardanian ancestors,
and his prophetic experiences there, most especially in
Hades, he has now become acquainted with the second
heroic type. If such interpretations as we have given to the
events here indicate Virgil's concern with Aeneas and his
mission, we expect, therefore, that the second or "Iliadic"
half of the poem will be dominated by a man who represents
the fusion of these complementary types as the complete
hero. Such a man will display courage, martial skill, and
�KOHL
21
prowess, while acting as leader and statesman in adjudicating
and resolving disputes. In judging these disputes, he will be
aware of the contradictory motives and lessons pertaining to
each action, which will enable him to reach a just decision in
each case.
As Aeneas emerges from the underworld, soon to face this
civil strife and deal with its resolution, which he does entirely
successfully, we might expect him to be a much more
complex figure than before, laced with contradictory motives
and the task of resolving them. This would add an interiority,
a dimension of depth to his soul. But of the psyche of the
Trojan leader we learn nothing directly. There are no
monologues reported, nor internal dialogues, nor even the
occasional battlefield self-exhortation, any of which might
have revealed this psychic space. The terms "wooden" and
"frigid" have sometimes been applied to this frustrating
aspect. Yet Virgil's silence here may be a tacit invitation to the
reader to reflect upon the character and formation of the
beneficent leader as well as a quiet comment on how little
Aeneas is directly in control of his own destiny and that of his
people, being instead like a cipher in a cosmic account, told
by powers largely beyond his knowledge.
Part 2: Regarding Virgil's Golden Age
Aura Discolor
How much, then, of his mission does Aeneas in fact understand? If his project itself-to lead his Trojan refugees out of
the dying city and found a new Troy somewhere else-is
straightforward, the symbol attached to that project, the
golden bough, is problematic. The symbol has had many
interpretations, but is distinguished above all by being the
fusion of opposites: the natural shape and properties of
regeneration and growth contrasted with the artificial ones
formed of refined metal and having a sheen and a crackling
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
sound in the wind. To found the new Troy, then, is to plant a
contrivance that must yet regenerate and grow naturally.
In a well-known study, "Discolor Aura: Reflections on the
Golden Bough," Robert Brooks reflects on his subject in this
way:
The poet has expressed life and death, both as
opposites, in the wisdom of the Sibyl, and as union
in the will of Aeneas. The human actors have
reached the impasse of inner experience and
outward observation, two irreconcilable aspects of
reality. The golden bough is the necessary and
external sign demanded to resolve the antinomy,
and bears a fundamental relation to it?
Later in the same study Brooks returns to the opposition:
The essence of the golden bough is the contrast
between its lifeless nature and its organic
environment. But we cannot stop here. Obviously
the image of gold must express other relevant
associations; otherwise lead or iron or stone would
have done equally well.
Brooks attaches considerable importance to the bough's
appearance at the moment of its discovery (6.204): discolor
unde auri per ramos aura refulsit. ("With diverse hue shone
out amid the branches the gleam of gold.") 10 The word aura,
a play on aurum, normally has no visual sense but rather
denotes an. atmospheric emanation, while the gleam is
discolor, variegated and not a pure color. Discolor aura, then,
is a strange way to describe the brilliance of gold and suggests
a secret, enigmatic, even sinister quality of the golden bough.
In Hesiod we read that Cronos held sway over a golden
age of men, but the old god was deposed by his son Zeus and
sent to Tartarus, and a new, inferior silver age of men was
initiated, followed by further declensions of men down to our
present iron age. But in Ennius' later account the destiny of
Cronos (Saturn) does not quite work out that way: he finds
�KOHL
23
refuge (cf. lateo) in Italy, in Hesperia, land of the ancient
Latin folk. In the Aeneid King Latinus later greets the Trojan
delegation, telling them (7.202-04) that the Latins are of the
race of Saturn, and Evander will later explain (8.314-27):
Native Fauns and Nymphs used to inhabit these
groves and a race of men born of tree trunks and
the hardy oak, for whom there was neither custom
nor culture, nor did they know how to yoke oxen,
lay up wealth, nor spend their gains, but branches
and harsh hunted fare for sustenance nourished
them. First from heavenly Olympus carne Saturn
fleeing the arms of Jove and an exile from his lost
kingdom. He united an unruly race dispersed
among the high mountains, gave them laws, and
chose to call it Latium, since he lay safe in this
country. Under this king were the ages which they
say were golden. So calmly he used to rule the
people in peace, then little by little there followed
a worse age of duller hue (deterior. . .ac decolor
aetas).
So into this worse age ·of duller hue now steps a new man,
Aeneas, who forges a (re)union between his Trojans and the
Latins. Is the diverse hue of the golden bough, the token and
emblem by which he gains access to Hades and thence to his
mission in Latium, reflected later in the age of duller hue in
which that mission is carried forth in the second half of the
Aeneid? Conversely, is the decadent, discordant, discolored
age, which Aeneas seeks to resolve in Italy, heralded by the
variegated aura of his golden bough? That is, does the
decadence in the post-golden ages have its roots in the golden
age from which it declines?
Decolor Aetas
Virgil intends that his hero Aeneas prefigure his own patron
Octavian, whom Anchises describes to Aeneas, as we have
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
seen, as the promised one, the son of a god, who will
reestablish the Golden Age in Saturn's Latin land, and spread
a Roman Empire. He also appears on Aeneas' brazen and
golden shield (8.675-81), a double flame corning forth from
his face and the Julian star upon his head as he commands the
fleet at the triumphal battle of Actiurn.
To indicate what is at stake in this Augustan picture, a
brief sketch of the mythological background of this golden
figure is important. As in much else in Virgil's epic, it is
instructive to begin by way of comparison with Horner and in
particular with the principal figure of the Iliad, Achilles.
Laura Slatkin11 has called attention to the legend in Pindar's
Eighth Isthmian Ode that Thernis had counseled the gods that
the nymph Thetis marry a mortal rather than the divine Zeus
or Poseidon, since the son of such divine union would
challenge father Zeus and overthrow the entire Olympian
order. Thus Thetis marries mortal Peleus instead, and the son
is the half-god Achilles. But at Troy Achilles now becomes a
similar threat to his commander in chief Agamemnon, an
inferior man, to whom, nevertheless, he must pay honor by
yielding the captive Briseus. It is at this point (Iliad !.503-10)
that Thetis puts to Zeus the request that her son Achilles be
properly honored. The subsequent action does not relate
primarily to the hegemony of either Zeus or Agamemnon but
rather to how Zeus works out the end of Achilles in the Iliad
and whether the hero's short-lived life and glorious end
constitute a just, fitting response to Thetis' request. Achilles
amidst the carnage of the ensuing war, the death of his
beloved Patroclos, and the retributive killing and desecration
of Hector exacts tribute from Argive and Trojan alike. In the
extraordinary last scene of the poem Achilles has in effect12
already achieved his goal as ruler and is enthroned as king of
Hades, where he will later lament to visiting Odysseus that he
would rather be a slave among mortals than hold his present
regal station. We are left to wonder whether such excellence
among men can only be so rewarded.
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25
The compass of the Aeneid's action, in contrast to the
Iliad's, is not from the heights to the depths of heroic fortune
but the past, present, and future of successful statecraft. In
comparison with the Iliadic myth, the central problems raised
by the Aeneid do not relate to the justice due a central heroic
figure such as Achilles but to the very existence of a city in the
face of a civil war, a city in which just dispensation might be
given. In this sense, the problems upon which Virgil's epic
turn might be said to be antecedent to those of its Homeric
prototype. A practical reading of the Iliad in this light
suggests at a minimum that preservation of the city is favored
when the best men are not situated in subordinate positions.
Such inverted circumstances often lead to internecine strife
among leaders, which, in turn is often fatal to the city as a
whole.
The problem of civil war is faced directly in the story of
Atreus and Thyestes. In one common version of the myth,
there is a dispute between the two brothers, Atreus (father of
Agamemnon) and Thyestes, over the kingship of Mycenae. A
ram with a golden fleece, a symbol of election, is born into
Atreus' flock. With the aid of Atreus' wife, whom Thyestes
has seduced, the golden ram is stolen, and Thyestes assumes
the kingship. Hermes then persuades Atreus to desist until the
course of the sun is reversed, which Zeus then accomplishes.
Again, let us first take note that the questions upon which this
myth centers do not focus on the two fraternal antagonists
and their doom but upon the very survival of the political
order of Mycenae, which will be torn asunder if and when the
two brothers collide in civil war over the kingship. Only some
outside, extraordinary intervention is able to avert this
destruction, in this case Zeus' action.
The Statesman
The mythic context of the Aeneid, as disclosed in an
important contribution by Jacob Klein, 13 turns on the myth of
Atreus and Thyestes and, in particular, on the re-embodiment
and extension of that myth in the story of the reversed
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
26
cosmos in Plato's dialogue The Statesman. Virgil probably
read and discussed this dialogue with Octavian. A reading of
Virgil's ancient biographies, notably those sections attributed
to Suetonius in Aelius Donatus and that of M. Valerius
Probus, indicates that Virgil was in the circle of patronage of
Octavian long before the principate. Virgil's lifelong interest
in philosophy seems at first to have centered upon the
Epicureans and later shifted to the Platonists. 14
If we turn our attention to The Statesman itself, however,
it becomes evident that the Atreus{fhyestes myth is not quite
the entire story the Stranger wants to discuss with young
Socrates. The two had spent their previous discussion, in
effect, trying to find out what a ruler was, and by a laborious,
dialectical process had arrived at a provisional definition of a
ruler as a guide over human beings, a "shepherd of the
people" as is usually applied to Agamemnon at Troy. But men
can seize power by various means, usually violent. What
distinguishes legitimate from illegitimate rulers? If I say,
"Obey my orders!" to you and a group of your fellows, what
compels you to do so? or not to do so? It is this question that
leads them to the Atreus/Thyestes myth in the first place and
to the witness of Zeus especially. What is the pathos by which
the restoration of the throne to Atreus is enforced? Thus the
Stranger in Plato's Statesman is led to tell of the god's action
directly (268E-274E), where the god reverses the course of
the world from the ever more chaotic age of Zeus to restore
the earlier, Edenic age of Saturn or "golden age."
The Ever-Recurring Return
The Stranger explains:
During a certain time the god himself joins in
guiding and rolling around all in its motion, while
at another time, when the periods have at length
reached the proper measure of time, he lets it go,
and of its own accord it turns back in the opposite
direction, since it's a living being and endowed
�KOHL
27
with intelligence from him who put it together in
the beginning. (268C-D)
One is fancifully reminded of a spring-driven toy or top that
one winds up at the beginning, then lets go of until the toy or
top runs down, becomes wobbly, and tips over, at which
point one winds it up again. And the stranger adds that bodily
things like the cosmos can't go on forever in one direction
like the divine, but this winding up and running down is the
next best thing to it. (269A-270A) Translated into political
terms, we see a society originally face-to-face with the
divinity that organizes and inspires it. Then the divinity
retreats into the background. As the generations of men
proceed one after another, the original divine memory
becomes ever dimmer, the inspiration weaker, the inhabitants
more forgetful of their origins, the organization more
corrupt, and the society more dissolute. We see Plato's
concern for this weakening reflected in many other dialogues:
the myths of recollection in the Meno and Republic, the
replacement of defaced images by fresh images in the
Symposium, magnetic chains of iron rings hanging from a
lodestone in the Ion, et cetera. In the face of dissolution, a
renewal by a divinity is then required.
But what then is suffered by the cosmos during this liferestoring winding-up? young Socrates asks. This leads to
further elaboration of the Stranger's myth. (270Bff.) There is,
in fact, great destruction of humans at this time, the Stranger
declares, and only a small part of the human race, having had
many strange experiences here, has survived to tell the tale.
The renewal, we infer, is a violent one, a period of protracted
and most destructive civil war, and the reversal is. indeed a
cosmic reversal. Time itself is reversed; everything is put back
to its original condition; memory itself is now put out of
question. Things are not begotten in succession but spring up
out of the earth on their own accord. There are no special
bonds of kinship and no special claims thereby on wealth and
power. Creatures do not eat one another and do not have to
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
labor for their food; strife and competition are thus eliminated. Men may even have the power of conversing with
other animals. Such is the Edenic life of men during the reign
of Cronos when the god himself is their shepherd and unlike
that of the present age of Zeus, who remains aloof.
So, once the universe is turned back and the earthquake,
shock, and destruction resulting from the end of the old age
subside, the new epoch takes over; however, the material
element in the cosmos persisting from previous times
gradually takes over and prevails. The cosmos therefore
becomes more and more fierce. Men require special assistance from the gods (Prometheus, Hephaestus, Demeter,
Dionysus) and finally a more extreme intervention is
warranted to reverse the whole order again. But here (274E2)
a difficulty arises: the two interlocutors are in search of the
statesman and his art. If Cronos as shepherd of the people is
the paradigmatic statesman, then Cronos has no statecraft, no
art, because Cronos in the golden age has nothing to do,
neither to feed or lead men nor to care for them at all. The
good statesman is a statesman paradoxically by not having to
exercise any statecraft. This puzzle, which we may perhaps
characterize as that of the philosopher-king, will send the
conversation of the two off again in search of the statesman
and his rule. Here we will leave them and turn back to look
at the story in a wider context.
The Statesman myth has been reexamined more recently
by Pierre Vidal-Naquet, who begins his discussion with a
passage from the peripatetic Dicaearchus, a student of
Aristotle, a passage that in turn was cited by Porphyry in his
treatise de Abstinentia. 15 According to Dicaearchus, the
Golden Age, which in his account actually existed and was
not an idle fiction, was home to men who were vegetarians
and had food in abundance, though not in superabundance,
lives devoid of property, social conflict, and wars and a style
of living simple and frugal, symbolized by the acorn. These
Golden-Age people lived under the direct patronage of
Cronos, who is according to Vidal-Naquet "an extremely
�KOHL
29
ambiguous divine personage." Vidal-Naquet asks, What does
Dicaearchus' text acquire from the past and what does it
conceal? Vidal-Naquet finds an answer to his question in
Theophrastus' tract On Piety where this era is portrayed as a
period of vegetable consumption and animal sacrifice, which
apparently has succeeded vegetable sacrifice and has actually
appeared as a substitute for human sacrifice: thus,
vegetable-human-animal. These fourth-century speculations of Dicaearchus and of Theophrastus and later of
Porphyry are built on a theory of actual progression or
evolution from one earlier stage to the next. In this
progression Cronos emerges as a terrible, cannibalistic god
and the golden age as an age of enormous ambiguity from a
political standpoint.
Virgil's account of Saturnus in the Georgics and especially
in the Aeneid draws in many of its aspects upon Ennius' translation of Euhemerus' account of Saturn.' 6 But Euhemerus'
Saturn used to dine on mortal flesh (until Jupiter put an end
to it) and he was not beneficent god; Saturn in Virgil, on the
other hand, is a vegetarian and a benefactor.
Do wild men become tame in the age of Cronos, or do
tame men become wild (cannibalistic) in this epoch? Since we
are moving from one kind of man, one kind of animal, to
another, we cannot say. But two contrary attempts, two
contrary movements, have been made, according to VidalNaquet, to bridge the gap. In the "upward" movement, we
import the civic order into the virtues of the golden age, a
tendency expressed by the Orphics and Pythagoreans; in the
"downward" the entrance into the Golden Age is tantamount
to making contact with bestiality, expressed in various
Dionysiac practices. In some cases, notably in Euripides'
Bacchae both movements are present. The ambiguity even
seems to reach The Statesman in a somewhat lighter, more
playful fashion. The Stranger asks the young Socrates
whether men were more blessed in the reign of Cronos or
now in the reign of Zeus? They decide that it depends on
whether men in the first age engaged in philosophical conver-
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
30
sation with the animals or merely ate, drank, and gossiped
with them. (272B1-D1)
In the Aeneid itself this ambiguity surfaces in the figures
of the Cyclopes. When we first encounter them in book 3 of
the Aeneid, they are the sheep-grazing, cannibalistic savages
with whom we are familiar from Horner's Odyssey. But in the
Aeneid's sixth book we learn of and in the eighth book we see
the Cyclopes of Aetna, skilled metal workers in Vulcan's shop
who set to work on Aeneas's shield. In contrast, Horner's
Hephaistos in Iliad XVII works on Achilles' shield alone, and
the robot-like, wheeled tripods he has made cannot be
compared to Vulcan's Cyclopean assistants, who have names
("Thunderer," "Lightning," "Fireworker") and who respond
to Vulcan's exhortations. Clearly some sort of Cyclopean
transformation has taken place, of which, however, we
receive no further information. On the deeper ambiguities in
Virgil there will be more to say later; now we move on to
other aspects of the Golden Age in Plato.
History
Colin Starnes17 brings our attention to the eighth book of
Plato's Republic where, having concluded along with the
other interlocutors their description of the best state, the true
aristocracy, Socrates and Glaucon embark on a description of
the other, inferior ones. These Socrates subsumes under four
types: tirnocracy, (whose principle is honor); oligarchy
(wealth); democracy (liberty); and-worst of all-tyranny
(power). They then talk about the ways in which one type
may collapse into the next, inferior one. Socrates prefaces this
discussion with the following observations:
Hard as it is for a state so framed to be shaken,
yet, since all that comes into being must decay,
even a fabric like this will not endure forever, but
will suffer dissolution. In this manner: not only for
plants that grow in the earth, but also for all
creatures that move thereon, there are seasons of
�KOHL
31
fruitfulness and unfruitfulness for soul and body
alike, which come whenever a certain cycle is
completed, in a period short or long according to
the length of life for each species,IS
Seen in the light of Socrates' discussion of the political
forms in the Republic, the myth of the golden age in the
Statesman has sufficed to bring to light a new conception of
social history. As Klein points out, the myth does not rest on
the old, "organic" conception as seen in the Republic,
according to which the social order goes through successive
cycles of growth, maturity, senescence, and death like the life
cycle of an annual plant, but rather on a revolutionary
conception, where at the beginning of each cycle there is a
revolution, a reversal, a renovative overthrow of the
previous, senescent, decrepit age, and the restoration of the
new age, which then gradually declines. In turning the course
of events back to a golden past, the statesman turns back and
binds the political order back to its ancestral foundations.
This gives a deeply religious character to Roman politics and,
conversely, as Hannah Arendt has explained, a deeply
political character to Roman religion:
In contrast to Greece, where piety depended upon
the immediate revealed presence of the gods, here
religion literally meant re-ligare: to be tied back,
obligated, to the enormous, almost superhuman
aud hence always legendary effort to lay the
foundations, to build the cornerstone, to found for
eternity. To be religious meant to be tied to the
past, and Livy, the great recorder of past events,
could therefore say, Mihi vetustas res scribendi
nescio quo pacta antiquus fit animus et quaedam
religio tenet ('While I write down these ancient
events, I do not know through what connection
my mind grows old and some religio holds
[me ]'). 19
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Negatively, as in the case of transgression, it is the
loosing, the releasing from these bonds of religio either by the
restitution of damages or by the paying of a like penalty that
constitutes just absolution. 20 Positively, the religious sense of
the Romans, which was cultivated at funerals by the presence
of ancestral death masks and the giving of orations honoring
ancestors as well as the recently departed, has been observed
to contribute significantly to the formation of future generations of Roman citizens.
For who would not be inspired by the sight of
images of men renowned for their excellence, all
together and as if alive and breathing? What
spectacle could be more glorious than this?
Besides, he who makes the oration over the man
about to be buried, when he has finished speaking
of him, recounts the successes and exploits of the
rest whose images are present, beginning from the
most ancient. By this means, by this constant
renewal of the good report of brave men, the
celebrity of those who performed noble deeds is
rendered immortal, while at the same time the
fame of those who did good service to their
country becomes known to the people and a
heritage for future generations. But the most
important result is that young men are thus
inspired to endure every suffering for the public
welfare in the hope of winning the glory that
attends on brave men. 21
In Virgil's epic this conception, eminently both religious
and political, centers upon that revolutionary figure, pious
Aeneas, from whom the poem takes its title. The variegated
hue of the golden bough by which he gains access to Hades is
an external sign of the union of life and death, of freedom
and force, fused in the character of Aeneas. But this union,
which characterizes the hero and pervades his age, only
extends so far. In subsequent generations of men this union
�KOHL
33
progressively falls apart; the ages become inferior. Thus to
extend the metaphor: the brilliance of the variegated hue
now diminishes as the elements successively separate to form
ever-duller colors. 22 Further, turning the cosmos back to its
pristine condition is accompanied by much destruction and
civil strife, as Plato's Stranger reminds us. The gold of the
golden age thus achieved is a gold alloyed with sadness and
loss. This, I suggest, is another meaning of the bough's
discolor aura.
There are other dark aspects of the golden age as well. In
the eighth book of the Aeneid, as we have already seen,
Evander describes to Aeneas Latium's past (8.314-36); from
this description it is fairly clear that Saturn, overthrown by
his son Jupiter, came as a refugee amongst the aboriginal,
primitive peoples of Italy, to whom he was a political and
cultural hero, ruling in peace. This Saturnian age then gave
way to debased societies as warfare and acquisitiveness
supplanted the Saturnian element, a decline aided and
abetted by waves of invaders. The Latins under Latinus are
remnants of this aboriginal Saturnian element, as is made
clear by various other allusions in the poem as well. 23 Now
come Evander and Aeneas, exiles from foreign lands and both
descendants of Jupiter. Aeneas is persistently and vehemently
opposed throughout the poem by Saturnian Juno. Her wrath
against Aeneas and the Trojans is announced at the very
beginning of the epic (1.4) and is sustained nearly until the
end (12.842). In two soliloquies (1.37-49; 7.293-322) and in
three conversations (Helenus to Aeneas: 3.435-40; Juno to
Allecto: 7.331-40; Juno to Jupiter: 10.63-95) Juno makes
clear the reasons for her antipathy: her beauty has been
slighted in favor of others (the Judgment of Paris); her
husband cheats (Dardanus, the Trojan founder comes from
the dalliance of Jupiter with Electra), and her own children
are not pretty to look at Uuventa has been spurned by Jupiter
in favor of Ganymede, and Mars and Vulcan generally are not
attractive figures either). In contrast, Aeneas' mother is
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Venus, the winner of the Judgment of Paris, and both Aeneas
and his Trojan companions are described as handsome,
beautiful people. Witness the taunts of Numanus at Ascanius
and the encamped Trojans at 9.598-620 and the protest of
Iarbas to Jupiter at 4.215-18: the Trojans are effeminate,
foppish people, incapable of fighting. The very sight of these
beautiful Trojan dandies, we imagine, makes Juno angry-a
properly Saturnian sentiment. Finally and more broadly,
there is the prediction that a Trojan remnant will someday
establish itself and overthrow Carthage, Juno's favorite city.
Mythological orthodoxy within the foregoing context thus
indicates that restoration of the golden age in Italy would
entail bringing Saturn or at least his representatives out of
hiding and reestablishing them. But the divine allegiances are
all wrong for this. Juno, the chief opponent of Aeneas, and
her associates-Turnus, Latinus, the Latins, Jutnrna and
allies-are of Saturnian stamp and resist the new order in
Italy, while Aeneas, Evander, and the Trojans and their allies
are the J avian protagonists of that new order. The institution
of the new order represents, therefore, the complete
subversion of the Saturnian elements and not their reinstitution. But Aeneas' institution, as we have seen, is quite
precisely advertised as setting up the return of the golden age,
which Virgil's own patron Octavian, descendant of Aeneas'
Jovian line, will reestablish in Saturn's Latin land, and from
which will extend a golden empire (6.789-800; 8.675-81).
How, then, can the usurpers of golden Saturn properly found
a golden age?
There are two ways to look at this new foundation, and
here the recent critics are sharply divided into two camps.
Advocates of the Empire, the "Augustans," point to the final
reconciliation of Juno and Jupiter in which the latter will
declare her to be not only Saturn's other child but also his
sister (12.830) and are well aware of the century of civil strife
and confusion that marks the late Republic; they will look at
the amalgamation of the Saturnian and the Jovian as a
complete solution to the dynastic and political problems of
�KOHL
35
the, past. The Saturnian gold will be alloyed with the Jovian
iron to produce a metal of stronger characteristics, if duller
hue. But the scene of this reconciliation is somewhat
ambiguous. Jupiter sees Juno seated on a cloud above the
battle, watching the final battle between Aeneas and Turnus,
and they exchange decisive words in the following dialogue,
beginning with Jupiter: "The end is reached. You have had
the power to chase the Trojans over land or wave, to kindle
monstrous war, to mar a home and to blend bridals with woe.
I forbid you to try any more." To which Juno with submissive
expression responds:
Because indeed, great Jupiter, this as your will was
known to me, I left unwillingly Turnus and the
earth: you would not have seen me alone on an
airy seat to suffer fair and foul, but girt in flames I
would have stood beneath with the very ranks and
dragged the Teucrians into hostile strife. Juturna I
confess I persuaded to help her miserable brother
and I approved that she dare greater things for his
life, but not spears nor stretch the bow. This I
swear by the implacable fountain head of Styx,
sole dread ordained for gods above. And now I
truly yield and I give up the fight in loathing.
(12.803-06)
Juno had in fact earlier told Jutnrna this: "If you dare
anything more favorable for your twin, do it; it is fitting.
Perhaps better things may follow for the unhappy."
(12.152-3) While not openly encouraging Juturna to do
battle on behalf of her brother, these words do not discourage
it either. Consequently, Juno's later vehement denial before
Jupiter, who has reproached her for the fact that Juturna now
faces Venus on the battlefield, may indicate that Juno's
withdrawal has less to do with a fundamental change of heart
and more to do with the implicit external threats of her
brother. Under this view, the new golden age is not the
voluntary melding of the Saturnian and the Jovian but the
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
involuntary usurpation of Saturnian by the Jovian. The new
age is really the age of iron; instituted by political force and
by poetic craft, it has been gilded in Saturnian guise to
produce a shaded gold. The Saturnian partisans of the old
Republic will say that by sleight of hand the Jovian has been
substituted under the appearance of the Saturnian, and they
were clear about the Augustan parallels. As put by Ronald
Syme, one of the exponents of this point of view,
In the Revolution the power of the old governing
class was broken, its composition transformed.
Italy and the non-political orders in society
triumphed over Rome and the Roman aristocracy.
Yet the old framework and categories subsist: a
monarchy rules through an oligarchy. 24
This line of reasoning has been carried forward by Inez
Scott Ryberg, who writes:
But if one side of Virgil's picture of Latinus is
Saturnian, the other side is Roman. He appears
wearing the trabea, the traditional garb of the
Roman king; he presides over Roman customs, the
opening of the Gates of War and the making of
treaties; he resists the breaking of the alliance with
the Trojans and will take no part in the
unrighteous war. 25
This ambivalent picture of Latinus carries over to an
ambivalent position of Augustus: "That the new Golden Age
of Augustus will embody the qualities of the reign of Saturn
is an important part, but only part, of the concept." Thus, she
suggests, the phrase said of Augustus, aurea condet saecula
(he will establish the golden age) has the overtones condere
lustrum (to establish the purifying sacrifice) and condere
urbem (to establish the city). This overtone or "echo,"
according to Ryberg, "hints, with 'flattering ambiguity,' that
the founder of the new Golden Age will be like Jupiter, the
son greater than his father who brought to a close the reign
�KOHL
37
of Saturn." But here, I think, we find a deviation from the
scheme we have been exploring: rather than successive
restorations of the golden age, we have successive challengers
to it, each challenger aspiring to overthrow and outdo his
predecessor, a scheme not devoted to achieving political
stability but, if anything, to undermining it.
Virgil in his poem does not resolve the status of the
golden age. Like his mentor, Plato, he shows us much, tells us
little, and moments of resolution seem rare. In the case of the
bough, it is a symbol, and it has a certain power, namely of
guaranteeing Aeneas passage through the underworld, but
not much more. There is, in Brooks' critique, no
"transcendent quality, passing beyond the contrasts of nature
to an ultimate harmony. . .it is unnatural, embodying the
contrasts of nature, rather than the supernatural,
transcending them." The bough is received and exercised in
ritual silence. "The rite is effective," Brooks comments,
and the hero receives his power, but not the
knowledge of what that power should mean...
The amor which impels him to pass living into
death receives no answer. This deeper antithesis of
success in action/frustration in knowledge is the
central and fundamental significance of the golden
bough. Certainly it is this which effects that
curious distortion of the language at the moment
of the bough's discovery. Discolor aura: not the
light of revelation, but the dubious and shifting
colors of the magic forest.
In similar manner, the more we turn back to pursue and
to restore the golden age, the more this age seems to recede
into the past. It becomes a dim, indistinct, and shifting glow,
the object of a quest that is ever-to-be-completed. Saturn
remains hidden, and with him hides that direct apprehension,
that illuminating knowledge of man's true estate. That to
which we keep turning back is instead a counterfeit Saturn, a
Jupiter disguised as Saturn, or perhaps a sort of negotiated
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
cobbling together, an amalgamation of elements of the two.
Thus, the same antithesis of success in action/frustration in
knowledge, which Brooks uncovered as the central and
fundamental significance of the golden bough, discloses itself
here also. As a result, we have the constituting of a new
political order without the express declaration of its constitution; we have a new beginning, a novum principium, but
without the enunciated new principles. To indicate this intermediate, indeterminate quality 'which seems to pervade
Virgil's poem, Brooks says, "the Aeneid is a work in limbo,"
and he concludes his study with an allusion to Dante's well
known exposition of that place in the fourth canto of the
Inferno, where Dante's Virgil tells us that because he is
unbaptized he is lost, and without hope he lives in longing.
But unlike Dante, I would suggest that "limbo" in its original
meaning is not a place of darkness but a place at the edge of
things. Those who fell under the sway of the old order, the
pagan "ancients," were drawn and moved by the figures of
Aeneas, of Anchises, Ascanius and others, no matter how
dimly descried. In a distant, indistinct way virtues were made
visible, although unlike for Dante and the People of the Book,
they could own little true explanation.
Notes
1. SeeR. D. Williams, P. Vergili Marionis Aeneidos Liber Quintus (Oxford,
1960), xxv-xxviii.
2. Charles Segal, "Aeternum per Saecula Nomen, the Golden Bough and
the Tragedy of History: Part 1," Arion 4 (1965): 617-57.
3. Citations are based on the Oxford editions of Munro and Allen (third,
1920), Allen (second, 1917), Mynors (corrected, 1972), and Burnet
(1901) for the .Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, and Statesman, respectively.
4. "In fact, all of Virgil's poem is modeled on what you might call a
mirrored reflection of Homer's," we are told by Macrobius in his
Saturnalia, "you have only to compare the two passages." Macrobius: The
Saturnalia, Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Percival
Vaughan Davies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969). The
passage quoted is from book 5, chapter 2, section 13. Macrobius goes on
�KOHL
39
to identify over one hundred half-line to two-line parallels between Virgil
and Homer. Georg Nicolaus Knauer in his more recent work, Die Aeneis
und Homer: Studien zur poetischen Technik Vergils mit Listen der
Homerzitate in der Aeneis, 2nd ed. (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck and
Ruprecht, 1979), expands the list to over five hundred such parallels.
5. AB if to emphasize the nautical and equestrian parallels, Virgil borrows
part of his description of the start of the boat race from a passage in
which spirited horses are described in the third book of the Georgics
(5.144-45 = G 3.104-05).
6. The labyrinthine associations of the Trojan riding display are elicited
by John L. Heller, "Labyrinth or Troy Town?" The Classical Journal 42
(1946): 123-39.
7. C. M. Bowra, From Virgil to Milton (London: Macmillan and
Company, 1945), p. 35.
8. E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 173; M. C. J. Putnam,
The Poetry of the Aeneid: Four Studies in Imaginative Unity and Design
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965.), xiii - xiv and pp. 191 194; R. V. Desrosiers, "Two Greek Concepts of the Hero and their Echo
in Virgil's Aeneid," unpublished lecture, Berlin, N.H., 1989.
9. American Journal of Philology 74 (1953): 260-80.
10. The sections pertaining to the Cronos discussion in Hesiod are found
in Works and Days, 109-201 and Theogony, 736-885, and those in
Ennius in Euhemerus, 8-65 and Annals, 25-29.
11. The Power of Thetis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
Zeus' obligation to honor her son is fulfilled through the unfolding of the
events on the plain of Troy. I have traced Zeus' latent direction of the
principal actions here in "Design in the Iliad Based on the Long Repeated
Passages," Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 22 (1994/5):
191-214.
12. See Eva Brann, Homeric Moments, Clues to Delight in Reading the
Odyssey and the Iliad (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2002), Chapter 13,
''Achilles as Hades and Achilles in Hades." This interpretation makes it all
the more striking that Priam, guided by the psychopomp Hermes, has
come to Achilles to ransom the body of his son from the underworld so
that it might be properly honored by and among the living. And so they
held funeral for Hector tamer of horses.
13. Jacob Klein, "The Myth of Virgil's Aeneid," Interpretation: A journal
of Political Philosophy 2 (1970): 10-20. [Also in Jacob Klein, Lectures
and Essays, ed. by Robert B. Williamson and Elliott Zuckerman
(Annapolis: St. John's College Press, 1985): 269-84.] Klein speculates
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
that the frequent Homeric references throughout the Aeneid, which the
poet has deliberately transposed or otherwise modified elements in the
Homeric originals, reflect the reversals in the Statesman myth. Further,
Macrobius' discussion of such occurrences in Virgil at the very center of
his Saturnalia, a dialogue that is reported as taking place at the winter
solstice when the sinking sun is now reversing its course, also suggests
such a revolutionary view. And Aeneas' Dardanian homecoming to
Latium where the whole Homeric cycle begins (in an extended sense)
now situates Virgil as the poet ancestral to Homer, thereby rendering
some plausibility to Virgil's enigmatic boast that it was easier to steal
Neptune's trident or Hercules' club than a verse from Homer.
14. As recorded by Henry Nettleship,Ancient Lives ofVergil, with an
Essay on the Poems of Vergil in Connection with his Life and Times
(Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1879). Later writings also support Virgil's
reputation as a Platonist: "Emperor Severus Alexander. . .Vergilium autem
Platonem poetarum vocabat eiusque imaginem cum Ciceronis simulacra in
secunda larario habuit, ubi et Achillis et magnorum virorum." "Emperor
Severus Alexander... used to call Virgil the Plato of poets and he kept his
portrait, together with a likeness of Cicero, in his second sanctuary of the
Lares, where he also had portraits of Achilles and the great heroes." See
The Scriptores Historiae Augustae, with an English translation by David
Magie, Ph.D. (Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, Loeb
Classical Library, 1953), Vol. 2, 21.4.
Klein (loc. cit.) calls our attention to part of an interpolation by an
unknown hand in a 15th century manuscript of Donatus' biography of
Virgil: audivit a Silane praecepta Epicuri cuiits doctrinae socium habuit
Varum. et quamvis diversorum philosophorum opiniones libris suis
inseruisse[t] de animo maxime videatur. ipse fuit Achademicus. nam
Platonis sententias omnibus aliis praetulit. "From Silo Virgil learned of
the teachings of Epicurus. Varus was his companion in this doctrine. And
although he seems to have inserted the opinions of opposing philosophers
in his books with great intent, he himself was of the Academy. For he
preferred the views of Plato before all others." See Jacobus Brummer, ed.
Vitae Vergilianae (Leipzig: Teubner, 1912), apparatus plenus, pp. 32-3.
15. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, "Plato's Myth of the Statesman, the Ambiguities
of the Golden Age and of History" pp. 285·301 (Chapter 14) in The
Black Hunter: Forms of Thought and forms of Society in the Greek World,
trans Andrew Szegedy-Maszak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1986)
16. Patricia Johnston, "Vergil's Conception of Saturnus," California
Studies in Classical Antiquity 10: 57-70 (1977).
17. "The Eternity of Rome: Virgil's Doctrine and its Relation to Plato" in
Philosophy and Freedom: The Legacy of James Doull, ed. David G. Peddle
�KOHL
41
and Neil G. Robertson (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 2003),
pp.·· 181-200. For Starnes the primary elements corrupting and thus
ultimately destroying the city "have to do with the random, irrational
aspect of nature that is in principle impenetrable to human knowledge
because we can only have sure and certain knowledge of what is both
fixed and universal-that is, the Forms or Ideas." (p. 190)
18. The Republic of Plato, translated by Francis MacDonald Cornford
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1945), p. 269 [546A]. Socrates goes
on in this passage to associate political instability with the instability of
human generations. Certain marriage numbers govern the procreation of
perfect children, thus assuring the perfect continuity of generations and
perfect order in the city, but it is difficult to determine such numbers and
inferior children are born out of season, leading to disharmony.
19. From "What Is Authority?" in Between Past and Future: Eight
Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 121.
The citation is from Livy's Annals, book 43, chapter 13.
20. See Richard Broxton Onians, The Origins of European Thought:
About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), Chapter XII, esp. pp.
439-42.
21. Polybius, The Histories with an English Translation by W. R. Paton
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1923)
Book 6.53.10-54.4.
22. "Moreover, the more minute the particles into which anything is
pulled apart, the more readily it is perceived that the color gradually
fades away and is extinguished: as happens when purple wool is torn up
into small parts; the purple and scarlet colour, brightest of all, is wholly
scattered apart when the wool has been pulled apart threadwise; so that
you may learn from this that the particles breathe away all their colour
before they are dispersed apart into the seeds of things." Lucretius, De
Rerum Natura 2. 826-33, W. H. D. Rouse translation in the Loeb
Classical Library (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 3rd ed. rev.,
1937).
23. The allusions to the Saturnian character of Latinus, Turnus, and
Juturna, on the one hand, and the Jovian associations and descent of
Aeneas and Evander, on the other, have been recently discussed by
Richard F. Thomas, "Between Jupiter and Saturn: Ideology, Rhetoric and
Culture Wars in the Aeneid," The Classical ]oumal100 (2): 121-47 (Dec.
2004-Jan. 2005).
24. The Roman Revolution (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1939), introductory chapter.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
25. Inez Scott Ryberg, "Virgil's Golden Age," Transactions and
Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 89:112-31 (1958).
For a recent survey of the ambivalent and contradictory ways the golden
age presents itself in Virgil's poetry and their various critical interpretations, see Christine Perkell, "The Golden Age and its Contradictions in
the Poetry of Virgil," Vergilius 48 (2002): 3-39.
�43
The Finest Fruits of Reason
Review of Michael Comenetz's
Calculus: The Elements
M. W. Sinnett
The Principle of Sound Learning is that the noise of vulgar fame
should never trouble the cloistered calm of academic existence.
Hence, learning is called sound when no one has ever heard of it;
and 'sound scholar' is a term of praise applied to one another by
learned men who have no reputation outside the University, and a
rather queer one inside it. If you should write a book (you had
better not), be sure that it is unreadable; otherwise you will be
called 'brilliant' and forfeit all respect.
-F. M. Cornford
Microcosmographia Academica:
Being a Guide for the Young Academic Politician
Of the making of textbooks about the calculus there is no
end, and, as Steerforth says to young "Daisy" Copperfield,
"there never was a more miserable business." It's not that
they prove to be "unreadable"; much worse, they're not
meant to be read in the first place. Reading, after all, is an
intensely personal enterprise replete with risks and responsibilities, and offering consequences uneven and unpredictable
at best. Textbooks, on the other hand, are intended to be
successful, and therefore proceed without reference to or
dependence upon such quaint contingencies as the judgment
and perseverance of individual students. (That they accordingly do nothing to foster the judgment and perseverance of
individual students is perhaps a trifle inconvenient from the
standpoint of anyone with the interests of education at heart,
Michael Comenetz, Calculus: The Elements. World Scientific Publishing Co.,
2002. M. W. Sinnett is a tutor at the Annapolis campus of St. John's College.
�44
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
but there's no doubt of its being good for business: The intellectual and spiritual vices reinforced by most textbooks
strengthen the market for more of the same, a nice example
of what systems analysts call a "negative feedback loop.")
"Success" is defined in terms the modern world owes to
B. F. Skinner: the subjects are to be conditioned into the
reliable performance of certain operations, the origins and
meaning of which remain soothingly obscure. The colorcoding of components of its presentation, for example,
practically allows a modern text to read itself to the students,
and since even this may fail to produce the desired results,
many textbooks now include a computer disc in order to
offer "interactive guidance," as well as, in a warm and
supportive voice, the text's personal encouragement: "I am
your friend. Trust me. Math is fun." A week's worth of class,
meanwhile, demonstrates that the blue, purple, magenta, and
brown bits (constituting roughly 900AJ) of the text can be
safely ignored; the important parts are the section summaries
(in red, for easy reference) and the worked examples (in
green, the color of life). These, in turn, are keyed to vast
arrays of repetitive and uninteresting exercises which
sufficiently disclose, in and of themselves, the venerable
pedagogical principle governing the whole: monkey see,
monkey do.
It was not always so. In the age when men were formed
of gold, there were texts in the land that were also booksgood books withal, perhaps even great books. Hardy,
Whittaker, Courant, Spivak, Apostol. These were the names
of high places, points of entry and the means of apprenticeship to the professions of science. The latter, the two
volumes of Calculus by Tom M. Apostol of CalTech (known
to us as "the gospel according to the Apostol Tom"), was the
constant companion for four solid semesters of any of us in
the University's departments of science or engineering. It was
a book we not only read and re-read, but also poured over,
despaired of, rejoiced in, feared, hated, loved, savored,
�SINNETT
45
emulated. It was a book of which we hoped to be found
worthy. These modern texts seem rather the work of a pygmy
race.
Nor, in most respects, does the work under review,
Calculus: The Elements by Michael Comenetz, bear
comparison with these great treatises; in its scope, intended
audience, and purpose, it is poles apart. And yet, in one
essential way, it both invites and survives such comparison,
for Comenetz's text is also a book, a very good book, a book
that demands and rewards careful reading and reflection.
The beginning of Calculus is with the "problem of
calculus," and comprises brief discussions of five types of
inquiry about physical and mathematical objects for which
neither classical Greek geometry nor medieval Islamic algebra
provide adequate resources. By way of proposing "lines of
thought" that lead naturally to "the problem," Comenetz asks
us to consider (1) the density and mass of a wire; (2) the
growth rate and total volume of some quantity in threedimensional space; (3) the velocity, acceleration, and distance
traversed by a "particle" in space; (4) the accumulation of
quantities such as velocity and momentum through the
operation of a force over time; and, (5) certain quantities
associated with curves, such as the areas bounded by a curve
or the inclination of a curve. In each case, a problem entirely
amenable to classical or medieval treatment under conditions
of appropriate uniformity becomes wholly intractable under
the circumstances of variability often prevailing in the world
around us. If the density of the wire, for example, is
uniform-that is, if the ratio of mass to length is independent
of the size or location of the segment of wire consideredthen the ordinary algebraic operations of multiplication and
division are sufficient to express the relations between these
quantities: density is the quotient of mass by length, and
hence, mass is the product of density with length. If, on the
other hand, the density of the wire varies with length, as one
expects in practice, then the "generalizations of notions of
quotient and product" that appear in Chapter Two are called
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
for. As the reader proceeds through the situations described
in (2) through (5) "the same problem presents itself again and
again to the eye that knows how to look;" namely, the
problem of understanding the mutual determination of
quantities whose relation is non-uniform. That such relations
prevail between quantities routinely experienced in the
physical world suggests an essential feature of the calculus
that Comenetz is determined we shall see. This mathematics
arises not through turning away from the world, but through
active engagement with it.
This connection with (what Eric Voegelin would call) the
"engendering experience" of the subject is sustained
throughout. Questions from the first chapter are employed in
the second in order to motivate the introduction of the
integral and derivative. Problem (1), in particular, pertaining
to the mass of a non-uniform wire, plays the central role in
introducing the "integral" as a generalized sum of differential
quantities reflecting the variations in the wire's density along
its length. The notion of integral is then more briefly applied
to the components of problems (2) through (5), which
pertain to the accumulation of quantities over space or time.
The process is then repeated in terms of the components of
these same problems that pertain to the generalized quotients
expressing the infinitesimally local character of the
phenomena in question. Beginning again with the wire, the
"function" m = m(x), which gives the mass of the wire at
each point x along the wire's length, is used to define the
density of mass at x as the "limit" of average densities over a
sequence of decreasing intervals containing x. This notion of
"derivative" is then applied to the corresponding components
of problems (2) through (5); that is, to the determination of
the strictly local characteristics of the quantities being
considered. Thus, just as Comenetz in Art. 2.4 applied the
definite integral in calculating the area bound underneath the
graph of a function, so in Art. 2.9 he turns to the computation of the graph's slope at an arbitrary point. The careful
arrangement of the problems, with geometric properties of
�SINNETT
47
graphs corning last, permits smooth transitions between the
two halves of Chapter Two and between Chapters Two and
Three. The use of the definite integral to discuss the area
bound by a curve over a fixed interval (Art. 2.4) leads
naturally to the "indefinite integral" (Art. 2.5) interpreted as
a function giving the area bounded by the curve over a
variable subinterval. The question that then naturally arises
(even if not explicitly forrnulated)-how fast this variable
area is changing-leads to the discussion of the derivative (in
Art. 2.6 and following). Lurking in the background, of
course, is the Fundamental Theorem, which Cornenetz
reserves for the following chapter. The immediate transition
to Chapter Three is also effected by means of problem (5) on
the geometry of curves, where (especially in §2.9.9 on
"Differentiability") he presents examples that raise rather
difficult questions as to the existence and general properties
of derivatives and integrals.
We therefore turn from the physical problems that
motivate the concepts of "integral and derivative" in Chapter
Two to a largely mathematical account of the processes of
"differentiation and integration" in Chapters Three and Four.
Here the emphasis is upon an orderly mathematical account,
which proceeds from an heuristic discussion of limits and
continuity, through an abstract (though not rigorous)
definition of the derivative, to the delineation of differentiation formulae for standard categories of functions and the
general algebraic properties of differentiation. The explicit
statement of the Fundamental Theorem then leads to
discussion of indefinite integrals, the formulae for definite
integrals corresponding to known derivatives, and to the
further applications of differentiation in determining mathematical properties of functions and of their graphs. This
approach is continued in Chapter Four, where "local"
properties disclosed by derivatives are applied to "global"
properties best characterized by the generalized summation
of definite integrals. Thus the chain rule for the differentiation of suitable compositions of functions leads to
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
techniques of integration such as "substitution," "parts," and
"partial fractions." We discover in general that the applicability of integrals is as various as our ability to build differentials of relevant quantities. The two chapters of pure mathematics then lead to two more of applied mathematicsspecifically, to the study of equations containing differentials
(a.k.a. "differential equations"), and again the same inverse
relationship between "differentiation and integration" is
found: the equations that express physical processes as
relations between derivatives can be solved (at least in these
elementary circumstances) by means of integration.
Perhaps the most beautiful thing in Calculus is
Comenetz's seventh chapter on "plane curves." Nowhere else
do we see so clearly the historical background that modern
analysis has transformed. The tools constructed in preceding
chapters are the means to a simplified and very clear
discussion of the "arc length" and "curvature" of smooth,
non-intersecting curves in the Cartesian plane. Precise references to the Lemmas of Part 1 of the Principia permit
Comenetz not only to connect his account with that of
Newton, but also to show what is at stake in both. Instead of
a characterization that applies to a figure as a whole, as in the
geometry of Euclid or Apollonius, the modern approach,
which begins with Newton and applies to a much wider class
of curves, characterizes curves in terms of their "local
geometry" (Art. 7.3); that is, it characterizes them in terms of
their behavior in neighborhoods of individual points. The
qualities that are truly "intrinsic" to such curves, such as "arc
length" and "curvature," are therefore most naturally defined
analytically. This chapter includes a number of examples in
which the analytical definition of curvature is beautifully
illustrated in terms of the geometrical figure known as the
"osculating circle"; but in the end it is curvature as a function
of arc length, k = f(s), that determines the curve independently of all geometric considerations. And this use of arc
length as an independent variable expressing position "along"
a curve allows a smooth transition to the final topic of the
�SINNETT
49
chapter, a lovely yet brief treatment of the generalization of
the Riemann integral known as the "line" or "contour
integral."
The elegance and cohesiveness of this chapter is but the
clearest example of a general feature of Comenetz's Calculus;
namely, that it is a carefully thought-out and entirely selfcontained whole. The five problems briefly discussed in
Chapter One return time and again, and develop in tandem
with the mathematical language they help to motivate.
Because they demonstrate the depths that open up through
the appropriate analytical concepts and techniques, the
problems not only receive extensive discussion in their own
right, but also necessitate the application of the virtually all
the mathematics that Comenetz presents. Even the
concluding chapter on Taylor series, which might at first seem
to have been tacked on, provides the author a chance to
survey the journey on which he has led the reader. Thus,
there are no loose ends. Indeed, as the book concludes, we
are invited to "contemplate," not the five platonic solids as at
the close of Euclid's Elements, but "the elegant formula" for
the power series computation of n/4, and to recognize in it
"the depth that yields the finest fruits of reason."
Its elegance notwithstanding, there is also something
disquieting about the wholeness of this book; in particular,
there is something artificial-not to say unnatural-about
Comenetz's invitation to contemplation, which is as if to
suggest that we have arrived someplace special. No such
invitation is forthcoming from Euclid at the close of Book 13,
since none is needed, except in the case of perverse moderns
such as myself whose cosmic piety on that august occasion
was all too rapidly swept away in a torrent of rather obvious,
and rather blasphemous, questions. (What do "Platonic
solids" look like in n-dimensions? or in a locally compact
topological vector space? or in a Banach space? Are there
Platonic solids in a Banach space? Hilbert space, sure, but
Banach space? What happens if ... ?) For those who come
freshly to Euclid-which in a just world would include every
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
literate person-the urge to contemplation arises ineluctably
from the movement of the text itself; one contemplates
because it's the natural thing for anyone who (thinks he)
dwells in a cosmos to do. Modern mathematics, by way of
contrast, promulgated by inhabitants of the universe, is
fragmentary by nature. Consummations are therefore
illusory, and wholes are inseparable from the idiosyncrasies of
authors, as witness the fact, which Comenetz knows perfectly
well, that from any point in Calculus one can ascend vertically into the theoretical ionosphere and never be heard from
again. This, in turn, is simply further evidence of the
perspective that guides Comenetz's careful arrangement of
his material in the first place; since this mathematics is exegetically related to the order of the physical world, to entertain
seriously some final wholeness about it would be to indulge
oneself in the fantasy of (what Paul Feyerabend calls) "the
conquest of abundance." Our true place in the order of things
is more aptly described by Newton's famous metaphor
(suggested by the cover of Calculus) that we moderns, at best,
are as small boys playing on a beach and diverting ourselves
in finding now a shinier pebble or a more curious shell, while
"the great ocean of truth" lies undiscovered before us.
Comenetz has indeed presented his readers a cornucopia of
"the finest fruits of reason," but ten more volumes of such
would still imply that the greatest harvest is yet to come,
indeed, that the greatest harvest will always be yet to come.
These considerations also lend urgency to the question
for whom Calculus: The Elements is intended. It certainly has
the features of a textbook, including sets of "questions" with
"answers [in the back]," a "topical summary" keyed to the
appropriate articles and sections of the text, and a "reader's
guide" that, among other things, offers alternative routes
through the material. It is somewhat difficult to imagine,
however, the nature of the course (or courses) in a conventional college or university to which it would be appropriate.
It is clearly not intended, on the one hand, for the training of
mathematicians. The book is indeed full of delightful
�SINNETT
51
surprises for the mathematically-minded reader (integrals and
derivatives clearly presented prior to, and with nothing more
than a "cautionary" remark about, limits; a definition of
continuity that clearly derives from general topology; and
numerous intimations of a beautiful generalization of calculus
known as differential geometry), but it contributes little to
the learning that the beginner would require in order to
notice them. Only a few of the central theorems of the subject
are formulated as such, and even these cannot be rigorously
proven given the relegation of such things as a precise
("epsilon-delta") definition of limit to brief discussions in fine
print. On the other hand, it seems too demanding for the
"calculus for poets" course and has the wrong practical orientation for the "calculus for business administration" course.
Nor is it appropriate to a class of science or engineering
students, in which context it would be judged both deficient
and superfluous at the same time, deficient in certain
necessary technical matters and superfluous in offering a
good deal of instruction in physics that would be more
exhaustively taught elsewhere. Precisely as a coherent and
self-contained whole, Comenetz's Calculus is a terminal
introduction to a non-terminal subject. One can easily
imagine it enticing its reader to further study, but it is difficult
to see how such study could be undertaken without the
reader, at least in part, starting over someplace else.
This is not to deny, however, the worth of reading
Calculus. To the contrary, members of any of the categories
mentioned will profit from the perspective, not to mention
the idiosyncrasies, presented here. But perhaps it is not
categories of readers that Comenetz has in mind. Perhaps it is
only when we stop thinking about categories of readers (as
authors of mere textbooks never do )-perhaps it is only when
we consider who, and not what, the readers are-that we
discover the "actually existing individual" (Kierkegaard) for
whom this book is a godsend. What, in the end, does it
achieve? What does it do? And the answer is that it doesn't
do anything. It's a book not a machine; it's meant to be read,
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
and wondered at, and reflected on, and struggled with. It can
be said to make the case for mathematical physics as among
"the finest fruits of reason," but even this only for those who
have eyes with which to see, and energy with which to
persevere, and courage with which to inquire. It is hard to
imagine the person willing to undergo the risks of genuine
reading who would not profit from, and delight in, what
Comenetz offers.
A painful duty, thus, confronts me: Calculus: The
Elements is, in my opinion, definitely not unreadable.
Comenetz, therefore, as I need hardly add, cannot be judged
a sound scholar. Alas!
�53
~
The Sting of the Torpedo Fish
fj:-- Christopher B. Nelson
Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue can be taught? Or if
not teachable, is it acquired by practice, or if neither, whether
men possess it by nature or in some other way?
So begins Plato's dialogue, Meno, opening as abruptly upon
the reader as my remarks have upon you this afternoon. You
freshmen will spend a good part of this year with Plato, his
frustrating protagonist, Socrates, and this very dialogue,
Meno, in both English translation and the original Greek. I
think I am on relatively safe ground in saying that the reason
we spend so much time on the Meno is that this dialogue
belongs peculiarly to this college; it is deeply rooted here. I
hope to expose a few of those roots this afternoon, but let me
first return to the beginning.
Tell me, Socrates, if you can, whether human
excellence can be taught? If not, whether we can
acquire it by practice? Or if neither of these,
whether we are born with it or it comes to us in
some other way?
Meno's question is interesting, for it appears to go to the
heart of some very big questions that all of us share: what
does it mean to be human? and how can we be better human
beings? Parents would love to know how to raise children
who are improvements on themselves; all parents want what
is best for their children. Teachers would be happy and
honored above all others if they could teach their students
virtue. As for students, why else are you here but that you
Christopher B. Nelson is President at the Annapolis Campus of St. John's
College. This is the Convocation Address to the Class of 2010, delivered at
Annapolis on August 23, 2006.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
believe that some answer might be given to Meno's question:
What is the right path to virtue? How might I acquire hnman
excellence?
But Meno's question has its flaws. For one, it comes ont
of the blue and without context. We are supposed to know,
somehow, what Meno is talking about. We are assumed to
have a common vocabulary and even a common nuderstanding of basic concepts.
Speaking of vocabulary, some of you will have noted that
I translated the Greek in two different ways when I repeated
Meno's question in English, an exercise you freshmen will
undertake as you try first to discover what is being said and
what it means before asking whether it is true. Such attempts
at translation will be first steps to getting at the root of
Meno's question.
Socrates appreciates what is at stake in Meno's question.
He thns goes straight to the heart of it with a response that
would confound any student hoping to receive the almighty
truth from a teacher. Socrates in effect says: how can I say
how virtue is acquired when I don't even know what it is?
And worse, Socrates then says that he has never met any other
person who knows what virtue is. He entreats Meno to help
him understand what Meno thinks it to be. Meno makes the
attempt, responding confidently with what he has heard from
other teachers, repeating their opinions as his own. Yet, under
Socrates' questioning, Meno finds himself disowning the
opinion he began with. After two false starts, Meno begins to
get uncomfortable with Socrates' examination. When
Socrates begs him to start over yet a third time, Meno tries to
divert the conversation from the question of virtue to the
problem with Socrates:
Socrates, I certainly used to hear, even before
meeting you, that you never do anything else than
exist in a state of perplexity yourself and put
others in a state of perplexity. And now you seem
to me to be bewitching me and drugging me and
�NELSON
55
simply subduing me with incantations, so that I
come to be full of perplexity. And you seem to me,
if it is even appropriate to make something of a
joke, to be altogether, both in looks and in other
respects, like the flat torpedo-fish of the sea. For,
indeed, it always makes anyone who approaches
and touches it grow numb, and you seem to me
now to have done that very sort of thing to me,
making me numb. For truly, both in soul and in
mouth, I am numb and have nothing with which I
can answer you. And yet thousands of times I have
made a great many speeches about virtue, and
before many people, and done very well, in my
own opinion anyway; yet now I'm altogether
unable to say what it is.
It is beginning to look as if Meno has no interest in the
answer to the question and is more concerned with his image
or reputation than with the truth. On the other hand,
Socrates is not satisfied; he still wants to proceed with the
search for an answer. He is also willing to conduct the search
with Meno, a man who seems to have no thoughts of his
own. Socrates, in wishing to proceed, has done two things: he
has told Meno that he will serve as Meno's teacher if Meno
will let him, that is to say, that he will join Meno in the
search; and he has told the reader that he is willing to do so
because he might actually learn something from Meno. He is
truly open to the possibility that the teacher may learn from
the student-any student, even Meno. So, Meno, what is
virtue?
Meno now tries a sting of his own, challenging Socrates
with a classic learner's paradox: either we know something or
we don't. If we know it, we don't need to search for it. But if
we don't already know what we are looking for, how will we
ever recognize it when we see it? Socrates will not be deterred
by Meno's attempt to bring the conversation to an abrupt
halt. Instead, he takes Meno's problem seriously and answers
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
56
in two ways. First, he repeats a myth he has heard that
suggests that learning is a kind of recollection, which requires
an exercise of responsibility for learning by the one doing the
learning. Learning does not occur when someone else, a
teacher for example, tries to put knowledge into a student.
Instead, it is an act of recovery, in some way, of something
already known to us.
When Meno demonstrates that he doesn't get it, Socrates
resolves upon a way to show Meno what he means, asking
Meno to observe carefully as he examines one of Meno's
slave boys about a problem in geometry which is new to him,
a problem that can be demonstrated by a drawing in the
earth-a problem, not incidentally, that you will be working
on in your mathematics tutorial with Euclid. The slave boy
reaches a point where he expresses with confidence an answer
that is false, an answer that he comes to understand as wrong
a few moments later under Socrates' questioning. The slave
boy tries again with the same result. Socrates asks him to start
over, just as he did with Meno a little earlier. He asks the boy
to produce another answer, and the slave boy says: "Indeed,
Socrates, I do not know."
Socrates turns to Meno, and by extension to us, and says:
Do you see, Meno, what advances he has made in
his power of recollection? He did not know at
first, and he does not know now, what is the
[answer]: but then he thought that he knew, and
answered confidently as if he knew, and had no
difficulty; now he has difficulty, and neither knows
nor fancies that he knows.
Meno: True.
Socrates: Is he not better off knowing his
ignorance?
Meno: I think that he is.
�NELSON
57
Socrates: If we have made him doubt, and given
him the "torpedo's shock," have we done him any
harm?
Meno: I think not.
Socrates: We have certainly, it would seem, assisted
him in some degree to the discovery of the truth;
and now he will wish to remedy his ignorance, but
then he would have been ready to tell all the
world again and again [the answer he gave at
first?].
Meno: True.
Socrates persuades Meno that the slave boy simply would not
have been ready to inquire and learn the truth without first
being reduced to perplexity. The torpedo's shock not only did
not hurt, it positively helped; it was the condition for the
learning that did occur (and the slave boy did go on, with
Socrates' help, to find the solution to the geometry problem).
Socrates has shown us, the readers (and Meno, if he were
listening), that understanding our own ignorance is necessary
for learning to take place, especially understanding our
ignorance of the everyday, common things we thought we
knew well. When we can look at the familiar and suddenly
realize that we really do not understand it, when we can look
at what we always thought we knew, and ask "what is this
thing?" then we are ready to learn and well along the path to
better understanding. In that state we are truly torpid, just as
the slave boy was, and we bring a sense of wonder to our
search. This wonder comes not from something we understand, but rather from our desire to understand, what we
sometimes call a love of learning, born not in understanding
but in ignorance.
Socrates has done something else in his demonstration.
He has also shown us the power of discovering what
something is not, and helped us see that knowing what
something is not is much more than knowing nothing; it is a
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
kind of "knowing ignorance," an "intelligent perplexity" that
comes from trying out and discarding false notions. He has
also helped us see not only that we do not know what virtue
is, but also that we do not even know what learning is.
We now look at Meno and see that he is a slave: a slave
to his pride, a slave to the opinions of others, unwilling to
examine what he clearly does not understand. Meno's
problem is not that he is ignorant, but that he has no desire
to be free from the shackles of that ignorance.
We look at the slave boy and see that he is free; free from
the false notions he has been carrying around with him, free
from barriers to learning. This freedom, strangely, comes not
from the certainty of knowledge but from the recognition of
his ignorance.
Let me return to the place where I began, when I said that
this dialogue of Plato's is deeply rooted at the College. We
want you to acquire the freedom of Meno's slave boy, the
freedom that allows you to acknowledge the one certainty in
life: "Indeed, Socrates, I do not know." Recognition of that
certainty is the path to learning things that will belong to you,
not just repeating things that belong to others. We also want
you to have practice with the tools you will need to acquire
this freedom, tools that will help you to listen and to read
attentively and deeply, to express yourselves intelligibly and
precisely, and to measure and reckon the world in which you
live accurately and comprehensively; tools that will help give
shape to your understanding who you are and where you live,
and what your responsibility is toward others and the world
you inhabit together, the world of the body and the world of
the spirit.
We live with a deep paradox at the College, one that you
will confront right at the outset. We have made very deliberate choices about what should and should not be included
in this all-required curriculum (and there are many, many
excellent works that are not on the program list simply
because there is no room for them in just four years). Yet we
tell you that, for all the conviction we may have that these
�NELSON
59
choices constitute the best undergraduate curriculum we can
devise, this conviction is not grounded in the answers these
books purport to give but in the questions they raise. When
we say that this college is committed to radical inquiry, we
mean inquiry into the very traditions and books that have
shaped the world into we are born. This is why we are not
ashamed to admit that, although we are called an institution
of higher learning, we really do not know what learning is.
We share the conviction, nonetheless, that it is worth the
search to find out. When we welcome you to St. John's
College, we are welcoming you to join us in a search that we
imagine will sustain all of us for all of our lives, a search for
origins and foundations that will be firm enough to support
the good life we each wish to live. We call on you to join us
as fellow lovers of learning, not as would-be scholars.
One of the things you will discover as you read the
several Platonic dialogues on the program is that they
demand your engagement. They ask for you to reflect on how
you might respond to Socrates. So, let me venture into the
conversation of the Meno with a small, tentative reflection on
the question Socrates puts to Meno: "What is virtue?" My
thoughts, at least for now, are these: the way to virtue may
require that we come to know our great weakness, our own
ignorance. This ignorance is common to all who are less than
divine; it is something we share with one another in our
humanity. If there is a connection between knowledge and
right conduct, it is likely to be found in our ignorance and in
the humility it inspires, in seeing that every single one of us
has a long, long way to go toward understanding, in the
endless search for truth. I suspect that human virtue lies
somehow coterminous with this strange path toward
knowledge, which is a path through ignorance and therefore
available to us all. As we are not likely to attain great heights
of knowledge, it is more likely that we can share with each
other the great peaks of desire. It may be that the love of
learning, more than the attainment of understanding, is what
binds us together most tightly. It may also be this love of
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
learning which impels us to great acts of virtue, like the virtue
we will be asking you to exhibit every day in class: helping
your classmates to experience the loving sting of the torpedo
fish, helping them see that you too have a lot of baggage to
unload, and coming to see that learning is best pursued in a
community of lovers of learning, each seeking what is best for
the others.
And now I see that I have found my way to a typical
difficulty experienced by all Socratic interlocutors. I have
tried to say something about the nature of virtue, in terms of
loving and learning, when I'm not sure I know what these are.
So, let me leave you with this question: Tell me, freshmen,
what is this love of learning that has brought you to our door,
and where does it come from? For I do not know, although I
am happy in the thought that we have this much to share with
each other for four full glorious years.
Welcome to St. John's College! May you experience the
sting of the torpedo fish early and often. May the sting never
hurt, but help you along the path toward understanding and
freedom.
�61
For the Graduate Students in
Classics at Yale
1
Eva Brann
I'll begin by thanking you for coming to listen to me on a
busy weekday. As far as I know, a sense of guilt was not a
recognized affect in the pagan world where about forty-nine
percent of my moral allegiance lies, otherwise I would
apologize to you-apologize for being about to suggest to
you a way of life, a way that may not jibe with your purposes
and plans as graduate students who have chosen your place in
the academic organization of studies at a large university, as I
did over half a century ago. The least I can do, however, is to
give you my bona fides, although, as I will tell you in a
moment, I did not exactly keep the faith.
About fifty years ago I haunted Phelps Hall, as you do
now. The tutelary deities of those days were called Bellinger,
Bennett, Dawson, Immerwahr, Silk. I recall them with the
tenacious affection that the young conceive for their teachers.
Not that we were all that well taught: we learned not what
we needed to know but what our professors wanted to teach.
It is my impression, gained from our students' reports and
appointment interviews, that you graduate students are far
more rationally and rigorously prepared than we were.
Perhaps that, too, has its downside. In any case, our teachers
were giants, but our education was haphazardly splintered.
Nonetheless we scrambled ourselves into some semblance
of learning, but above all we achieved what we really wanted:
to get to Greece, or Rome, or wherever our hearts lay.
Eva Brann is a tutor and former dean on the Annapolis campus of St. John's
College. The occasion for this talk was the award of the Yale Graduate
Alumni Association's Wilbur Cross Medal as well as the celebration of the
sixtieth year of Yale's Directed Studies, a Great Books Program. It was
delivered on October 12, 2006.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
I went to Athens, full of philhellenic fervor. It was an
uneasy first year at the American School of Classical Studies.
I learned that the Hellas of my dreams-partly, I guess, a
legacy of my German childhood, but more, I like to think, tbe
manifestation of some aboriginal memory-was most reliably
accessible in the secure irrealities of my imagination, as I was
before long to learn that the Greeks were most inexpugnably
alive in the volumes of my then incipient library. Yet tbe
place, Greece itself, was pervading my reading and imagining
with its sensory lucidities: the pungent aroma of the thyme at
landfall on Ceos after a wild, nauseated crossing from
Sunion, the backlit blown poppies growing on Hymettus, but
above all the then still pristinely diaphanous atmosphere of
Attica, which gave sensory truth to Aristotle's saying that
light is the activity of a transparent medium (De Anima 418
b9).
Unfortunately this numinal landscape was overrun by
latter day squatters, the modern Greeks. I must have been
infected with tbis attitude from my elders, but I certainly
colluded in it. It was only eventually that I began to wonder
with some empathy what it must feel like to be the rightful
yet very remote heirs to all that broken and buried glory. We
archaeologists were, in any case, called to be intent on ruins
above ground which were meant to be salvaged from the
daily business of a modern-and then very poor-city, and
from the detritus-a treasure trove to us-from which we
scraped the earth away, careful trowelful by trowelful. Not
that I did that myself; I wasn't any good at it, capable of
sweeping away millennia at a trowel-stroke, while inspecting
at puzzled length what a discerning eye would have immediately identified as discombobulated fill. Also, I was intimidated by the Greek workmen who had been competently at
this job for generations.
But I saw what we were doing, and I studied what we
brought to light. For one thing, there was a melancholy to it.
A colleague of those years, Seth Benardete, once said to me
that Roman buildings were enhanced by ruination, while
�BRANN
63
Greek temples were diminished. It seemed true, but why? I
now think it is because Roman edifices anticipate romanticism, as it were, for they have in them something that lends
itself to the deconstruction into that suggestive incompleteness which is indeed one characteristic of the romantic.
A cracked Roman column will gather around itself a pastoral
veduta; a Greek column drum will focus the eye on its
collapsed perfection. For romantic is what the Greeks are not,
at least at their canonical best: plan and detail participate in
each other reciprocally; ruination cannot enhance them. A
shorn or broken temple or treasure house is a kind of animadversion on passage. One might say, fancifully, that temples
disapprove of time.
I am going somewhere with these divagations. (You will,
by the way, forgive all the vocabulary. There is an expansive
pleasure in being among people who, by reason of their
profession, are able to decode, even if they don't know, all the
excellent words our Grecolatinate Auglosaxon English holds
in store for us.) What I'm wandering toward are all the intellectual aporiai, the perplexities, that bedeviled that essentially
glorious first year-the intellectual ones, I mean; I'll spare
you the personal ones brought on by youth and Attic nights.
These perplexities were far more engaging than the mere, idly
sweet melancholy of being too late in history.
First I should say that I fell heart and soul into the activity
that engendered these perplexities. I was endlessly lucky and
still feel full of gratitude for falling in with an organization
like the American Excavation of the Athenian Agora-if there
are many like it. To put it succinctly: these were fanatics; they
worshiped at the (anum of scrupulousness: of digging
technique, of cataloguing protocol, of generous collegiality.
In the fifties not all the foreign schools were up and running,
and visiting unhoused scholars would marvel at the institutional hospitality they received. The Agora was a model for
canonicality: everything that was done was done exemplarily,
from spelling to photography, from restoration to exhibition.
There was a kind of communal concentration on the work,
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
any JOmmg of two sherds, each discovery of a pottery
workshop or (glory of glories) of a pot painter, every
convincing serialization of artifacts was noted with interest.
I got into this meticulous enterprise in a way I can't
account for to this day. I was invited to come down from
Soudias Street on the slopes of Lycabettos to the Agora below
the Acropolis. Homer Thompson, the director, took me
through the show rooms where the unpublished potsherds
were laid out and asked me what I'd like to work on. I
pointed at some attractive looking stuff; never was there a
luckier index finger. It landed on the Late Geometric and
Protoattic pottery, the period when the black praying-mantislike figures of the Dipylon funeral amphorae were morphing
into rounded polychrome human representations, and the
funerary somberness was replaced by sometimes intentionally
comical exuberance.
I might inject here that that very inclusive respect for all
times and populations of the Athenian market place which is
now doctrine in the humanities was practiced earlier in the
American excavation, perhaps there first and most paradigmatically. But there was-or seemed to me-to be something
behind it, something tacit but palpable, which lent both
backbone and pathos to the studious objectivity of the
research: everyone knew that there was a center, quite
literally evident in the study vitrines of our museum and
workrooms, the Stoa of Attalus. There was a culmination, a
standard, a reference point: the Athenian mid-fifth century,
the Classical Period. No one would have dreamed of saying
so, but it was known, the way in a decently egalitarian
community everyone knows to whom the aristeia would go if
there were to be a competition, but no one has the bad taste
to say so.
I left archaeology. One way to explain it is that there were
just too many issues no one had the bad taste to broach. I
might as well mention the tacitly proscribed word: it was
philosophy. My leaving was, in a very mild way, felt to be a
�BRANN
65
defection by those who had helped me and meant me to have
a career in archaeology. I still feel a twinge.
We were all deeply engaged in our work. I remember a
night when those funereal stick-figures off a Geometric pot
marched across my brain in a dream. But what was that
work?
We were erecting what had fallen and turning up what
had been buried, often in actual graves. Were we mounting a
renaissance for real life or a reburial in display cases? What,
to leap to the largest context, was the human intention
behind all those latter day "-logies" and "-graphies"-archaeology, topography, chronology, epigraphy? What did we
mean by reaching back into time, resurrecting the dead
through their artifacts and making what was earliest appear
latest? I recall sitting in my apotheke, my work and storage
room, with all those eighth- and seventh-century pots, when
Homer Thompson, who was not only a brilliant but an
attentive director, stuck his head in and asked, "What's new?"
What could be new? I was cluing out laboriously what the
most ignorant potter's ten-year old paidion would have
known as a matter of course. A friend and I once figured out
that it took fourteen times as long to study one of those little
oil lamps the excavation produced by the thousands as it did
to make one.
What were we doing? Were we not systematically and
well-intentionedly, yet literally, abusing what we had seized
on in research? Take drinking cups: kotylai, skyphoi,
kantharoi-I could type and serialize them, yet I'd never
drunk from one of them; it would have been against
protocol. Take ancient texts: we mined them for topography,
chronology, prosopography, but we didn't read them, not as
words meant to tell human truths.
I learned the lingo, the serviceable dialect of the trade, the
necessary initiation into the mysteries of the guild, one dialect
in the very language you are now learning to speak with
aplomb. I used it appropriately, but did I know what I was
saying?
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Archaeology is, if anything, grass-roots history. Who can
doubt that there is Herodotean history? Historia is inquiry; of
course one may inquire, as he does, into great and wonderful
human deeds to keep them from falling into oblivion. It
makes immediate sense. But historical research as an
academic discipline, and particularly archaeology, is
concerned also with pots and pans and babies' potty chairs.
(The Agora has several.) A sophisticated intellectual structure
is needed to warrant the study of what one might call
"deedlets," ergidia (to coin a term) rather than a deed, an
ergon, a significant action. For we should wonder under what
hypothesis the essentially surd realia of the long dead begin
to speak: how does an artifact, especially an undistinguished
one, express its maker's world? And how should we care:
engagedly to learn of our advances and our losses, or objectively, just for the heck of it, just because what is buried
beneath asks to be exhumed, just as a mountain is climbed
because it is there?
I spoke, as we all did, of development: pot-shapes
developed, evolved. How, by what detours through the
potter's vision-governed hands, did inorganic pieces re-enact
the evolutionary lines of organic species? We spoke of
chronology and were intent on establishing datings, but what
was time that it could be accounted for through excavational
strata, the spatial laminations of time, as it were? The
measurement of time by motion is problematic enough, but
its visible capture in vertical stasis-nothing is more
anathema to an excavation than a disturbed stratification-is
terminally puzzling.
We all talked of proportion: the masked standard was
classical harmony. The degenerate members, say of a series of
amphorae, were long and lank, while earlier examples were
refreshingly, finely young, and tautly chubby, like those
archaically smiling korai. But of the theory of proportion,
probably the greatest topic of Greek mathematics, we never
spoke, and to the question "what must the world be like for
the parts of a whole to be in a proportion, to have the same
�BRANN
67
ratio to each other?"-of that we seemed never to think.
Some of you probably know the remarkable answer to that
very question: how is it possible that a first element of a shape
is to a second as a third such element is to a fourth. Only in
a Euclidean world is such proportionality possible; there are
other realms in which two shapes may be the same but no two
can be similar, so that one canonical proportion cannot
govern differently sized items.
One cold winter's week I went down to Corinth to look
at the Protocorinthean pottery collection in the American
excavations. I had the excavation house to myself; at night
there was a fire in the common room and a hot meal. There
I perpetrated a horrible deed, all unknowing-as Greek
hamartiai are ever committed. I got hungry at midnight and
ate up the Corinthian starter yogurt in the icebox, the one
that made the far-famed, the finest, creamiest yogurt in the
archaeological world. There also I found a bookcase of the
olive-green Loeb series and determined in youthful hubris to
master in the cozy evenings all thirty-six Platonic dialogues,
both those certainly genuine and also those probably
spurious. I carne back with an anathema on me for the yogurt
and treasure in my heart from the Plato.
I have been at my college, St. John's, for the past halfcentury, thinking back now and then on my early years as a
graduate student of classics and archaeology. I think I am
intended to wax wise on the basis of age, and I'll take the
challenge. You must know that where I come from we have
no professors, authorities, or specialists, and our students are
meant to look on us as just better-prepared fellow learners.
That is not hyperbole but actual practice. As a result none of
us tutors, as we call ourselves, wilt readily under scepticism.
So if you find the following three lessons I've drawn from my
two lives doubtful or even repugnant, I can't ask for anything
more familiar than to hear you say so.
One. Some of you, very few I would guess, are scholars to
the bone. The pursuit of a delimited problem through
thickets of opinion and mountains of evidence gives you a
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
soberly orgiastic pleasure. You don't need advice, you'll do
what you love and gain the recognition you deserve. But
others among you, quite a few I would again guess, know in
your heart of hearts that your enthusiasm for scholarly
research is a little forced, more drawn by duty than by joy;
that the minuscule adjustments to previous opinions that you
tweak into an issue and the slight variations you contrive
upon old contextures give you only a meager satisfaction.
When you acknowledge this condition in yourself, finish your
degree, by all means. But, on the supposition that you do
want a life of learning, forget about the university and go
teach at a good small college. By good I don't mean prestigious. Lovely things go on in fairly obscure places, where
unsophisticated but willing young students often bring their
teachers back to basics, to elementary questions of the sort
that scholarly research races too far ahead of. As Thomas
More advises a promising but very corruptible young man in
one of my favorite plays, "A Man for All Seasons": "Be a
teacher."
Try not to think, in fact never think, of the writing you do
as "my work." Those of you who are researchers at heart
must believe-though there is something problematic about
it-that they are part of a common progressive work, the
advancement of learning. As I say, it's problematic whether
there is any actual progress in the humanities, or whether as
the cutting edge digs into the future, the past silts up and
sinks into sedimented oblivion. Yet whoever is nonetheless
committed to scholarship must surely believe that they can
own no real estate on the orbis intellectualis where all is
common ground tilled for the increase of knowledge. So
much the sadder is it to hear teachers speak of "my work." Is
teaching not their work?
To put it another way: The scholarly world is more and
more a virtual world, spatially expansive but often topically
constricted. For my part, I think the humanly full life is
concretely local and intellectually wide, to be lived in a faceto-face community whose members can talk to each other
�BRANN
69
about anything, where nothing of human interest is interdicted; where you don't have to mount a colloquium to have
a colloquy, where there are no taboos except indifference and
incivility; where discourse does not divide into either shop
talk or chat but observes the truly interesting human mean;
and above all, where no one owns a specialty so that others
have to venture opinions with the disclaimer, "Of course,
that's not my subject." Once I knew more about Protoattic
pottery than anyone then alive in the world, an Englishman
or two excepted. It is an experience everyone should have
sometime. And then they should stop and live in that
acknowledged semi-ignorance which is both proper to human
inquiry and the ideal state of teachers, who, before producing
another article, should set themselves to learn what their
students ought to know.
Let me make sure here that I'm rightly understood: These
instructions aren't meant as categorical imperatives, unconditional commandments. They are rather what Kant calls
"hypothetical imperatives," of the "if-then" type. The
protasis of each is: "If you want to live happily" -as Aristotle
thinks of happiness: the soul activated in accordance with
human excellence. The apodosis is: "then try doing it this
way."
Two. Socrates is said to have told the Athenians in his last
public appearance that "the unexamined life is not worth
living for a human being;" "ho ... anexi!tastos bios ou biotas
anthropoi" (Apology 38A). I think he is being more absolute
than "worth living" conveys. I would translate: "the
uninspected life is not a lived life." Socrates is uttering both a
claim and an injunction. The injunction is to ask yourself
what you're doing, and the claim is that if you don't, you
aren't all there, not quite alive. To me what Socrates says
seems utterly true, and on that hypothesis I'll proceed. What
are we mostly doing, we who are at home in the world of
learning? That's plain: mostly we use words. To be human
means to have logos-and indeed we do hardly anything but
employ /ogoi-rational speech in general and special words in
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
particular. It is, then, part of our peculiar business to know
what we are saying.
So don't use words you don't understand or don't mean
to come to understand at least partly. Graduate school is
rightly more training than education, more preparation for a
profession than learning for the sake of being all there.
Hence, the possession of a professional vocabulary, often
well-invented and always serviceable for expressing yourself
within the guild-and, I can't help adding, for marking
greenhorns and amateurs-is not only an accomplishment
but also a professional deformation. So talk human whenever
possible and know something, at least a little, of the explicit
or implicit theory behind the language of the humanities.
You might construe what I've just said as an invitation to
theorize, to engage in theory. Not so, just the opposite. It is
an incitement to philosophy, which is just the name for the
questions Socrates thinks will make you come to, be all there,
all aware. Moreover, here's a claim some of you will resist
and some of you will recognize as the articulation of your
own suspicions: Theory is the enemy-were I given to
hyperbole I would say, the deadly enemy-of philosophy,
more accurately, of Socratic philosophizing. I mean, say, legal
critical theory, literary theory, every kind of social theory; I've
just come off a bout of reading "desire theory," and I know
whereof I speak. I could talk for hours about this
displacement of thought, perhaps with some of you for a
while afterwards. But for now I'll put it in capsule form; I
understand philosophy to be everyone's business, certainly a
classicist's. It is the desire to look as straight, deep, and
directly into yourself and out into the world as you can. (It
has, of course, only a tenuous, occasional connection to the
academic subject by that name.) That effort I am speaking of,
introspective and contemplative, looking within and gazing at
the heavens, used indeed to be called theory. Theoria has had
a long and fascinating passage of diminution into "theory."
Theory is a rational screen, a mental jig under which things
are re-formed into pre-assigned shapes. It is a form of ration-
�BRANN
71
alization but not always of thinking. It is logos, however, not
plus receptive love but plus willful manipulation. A theory is
fun to devise but the devil to inherit, because duty demands
that we grasp it and wisdom asks that we resist it. Here's
another way to put it: when you spot trendiness or recognize
ideology-the marks will be a jigged and unnatural terminology-become a porcupine, all quills up.
Three. My third hypothetical imperative does verge on
the categorical. There is a sort of human minginess that
appears characteristically in academic settings-not that
academics typically practice it, but that it lurks as an endemic
danger of mutual infection. I have heard it said that its
meanness is large in inverse proportion to the minuteness of
the issues. Many of you will soon be members of departments
and will be absorbed in departmental politics. The issues are
not in fact so very small, since they concern the way the life
of learning is lived, and it is right, or seems right to me, to be
passionately involved. But passion is not pathos; beware of
false moral drama. Be as little ignoble and ungenerous as you
can.
I could fill Twelve Tables with negative advice but I'll
close with one piece particularly pertinent to this talk. In
published research plagiarism is a serious offense. In reflective
conversation it is a lovely compliment. If as teachers and
colleagues you find ideas you thought were yours by priority
turning up in your colleague's conversation, smirk with inner
satisfaction and then offer a serious critique of your own
thoughts, lest your borrowers fall into the original sin of the
intellect: holding opinions that have been purloined but not
appropriated.
I've kept you too long, but that's what happens when an
elder of the tribe is urged to talk. Yet, before I stop, one afterthought: If you could all band together to found a movement
for the abolition of the "original contribution" requirement
of the doctoral dissertation you would do the world of
learning a great service. For in the humanities the drive for
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
originality and the search for insight are too often at crosspurposes.
�
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Kraus, Pamela
Brann, Eva T. H.
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Guekguezian, Peter Ara
Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Kohl, Jr., John C.
Sinnett, M. W.
Nelson, Christopher B.
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The St. John’s Review
Volume XLIX, number three (2007)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Elizabeth Curry
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson,
President; Michael Dink, Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $10 for one year. Unsolicited
essays, reviews, and reasoned letters are welcome. All
manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to the Review, St. John’s College, P
.O. Box 2800,
Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available, at $5
per issue, from the St. John’s College Bookstore.
©2007 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction
in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
The St. John’s Public Relations Office and the St. John’s College Print Shop
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
3
Contents
Essays and Lectures
Vedic Tradition and the Origin of Philosophy
in Ancient India ........................................................... 5
James Carey
The Forgotten Faculty: The Place of Phronêsis
or Practical Sense in Liberal Education
(Plutarch and Aristotle)............................................... 67
David Levine
Reviews
Friedrich Nietzsche. Prefaces to Unwritten Works;
On the Future of Our Educational Institutions..........101
Jonathan Badger
Jan Blits. Spirit, Soul, and City:
Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.......................................... 117
John E. Alvis
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
5
Vedic Tradition and the Origin
of Philosophy in Ancient India
James Carey
1
“Philosophy” is a term that turns up with variable frequency
in presentations and discussions of the religious and speculative traditions of ancient India. There are those who
maintain that philosophy is an Indian no less than a Western
phenomenon. In support of this claim they point out that in
ancient India there was a vast amount of speculation about
the whole of things, how it is constituted and what its origins
are, and that this inquiry came to expression in a variety of
highly developed systems of speculative thought. There are
others, however, who maintain that philosophy is a uniquely
Western phenomenon. Philosophy, they claim, is not just
speculation about ultimate causes. It is, rather, a whole way
of life, one that is governed by the conviction that knowledge
is to be pursued for its own sake, as an end subservient to
none other, however so loftily conceived. This ideal emerged
first in ancient Greece, and later on only under the influence
of Greek thought.
In the disagreement between these two groups, the latter
appear at first glance to be on stronger ground. There was
indeed plenty of speculation about ultimate principles in
ancient India. There was arguably a wider range of such
speculation there than anywhere else in the ancient world,
Greece included. But speculation about ultimate principles is
Mr. Carey is a tutor at St. John’s College, Santa Fe, currently on leave and
serving as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the United States
Air Force Academy. A shorter version of this paper was presented as a lecture
at St. John’s College, Annapolis, in March, 1993. The present version is
dedicated to the memory of Ralph Swentzell, Tutor, as an expression of
gratitude for his tireless efforts on behalf of the Eastern Classics program at
St. John’s College, Santa Fe.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
as old as man and often does not rise above the level of superstition.
Moreover, philosophy is not simply the love of wisdom,
or the longing to see the whole, to see it clearly for what it is
and without illusions. Philosophy is this longing, to be sure,
but accompanied by a sense of obligation, or some kind of
urge, to give a rational account of what it takes to be true,
without appeal to external authority. In the West, philosophy
has traditionally been regarded as one member of a pair of
alternatives, the other being religion. The guiding lights of
philosophy are reason and ordinary, verifiable human
experience. Philosophy does not take its bearings, as religion
does, by alleged disclosures from above that are supposed to
transcend reason and ordinary experience altogether. That
neither philosophy nor religion can be simply reduced to the
other is not controversial. What is controversial is the claim
that philosophy and religion are so opposed to one another
that one and the same person cannot be both a philosopher
and a believer. We are, of course, familiar with the arguments
of such thinkers as Thomas Aquinas and Kant to the effect
that reason cannot penetrate on its own to the first principles
or the deepest stratum of being, that reason can recognize this
limitation and can thereby infer its need to be supplemented
by some kind of faith, be it only a religion within the limits
of reason alone. But, against these arguments there are
others, rather more widely accepted by philosophers, though
until recent times less forcefully advanced, to the effect that
religious belief contains, either in its explicit doctrines or in
its implicit presuppositions, certain contradictions the
affirming of which is incompatible with a fully rational life.
In arguing for the emergence of philosophy in ancient
India I shall make use of the narrow conception of
philosophy as an enterprise of rationally autonomous
enquiry, not simply distinct from but opposed to and in
varying degrees antagonistic to religious belief. I shall argue
for the emergence in ancient India of an atheism that under-
CAREY
7
stood itself to be grounded in a rational consideration of the
whole, and of man’s place within the whole. I shall not raise
the question of whether this conception of philosophy is
ultimately defensible but shall assume it as a working
hypothesis, so to speak. Accordingly, I shall be working with
a conception of philosophy that some might criticize as excessively narrow. I might criticize it that way myself. The justification for my procedure, however, is that I wish to show that
philosophy, even according to this narrow, perhaps excessively narrow conception, did in fact emerge in ancient India.
If this can be shown, then it can be shown a fortiori that
philosophy less narrowly conceived also emerged there. It is
not possible, however, to argue convincingly for a tradition of
autonomous rationality without exhibiting something of the
variety of forms it assumed, in particular, the main points of
controversy and the rival claims and arguments of the
contending parties. I shall be giving no more than a rough
sketch, however, and I shall omit much that is relevant to my
topic. I hope, nonetheless, not only to show that philosophy,
however so rigorously defined, really did exist in ancient
India, but to shed new light on the conditions of its
emergence and the trajectory it assumed, and perhaps to
communicate something of its flavor as well.
Philosophy and religion both are ways of regarding
ultimate causes, but philosophy is the younger of the two. In
defining its way in opposition to that of religion, philosophy
presupposes religion, not, of course, as something true, but as
a mistake that it has managed to get beyond. Moreover,
philosophy presupposes leisure, and human beings find
leisure only within the life of political communities. Political
communities are particular. They are particularized by
nomoi, that is, by laws and other conventions, among the
most important of which are religious nomoi. It stands to
reason, then, that the peculiar character of the reigning
religion would contribute something to the form that philosophical questioning of it assumes and to the prominence of
certain themes taken up for specifically philosophical consid-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
eration. For this reason, we need a preliminary overview of
early Indian religion. It must be admitted at the outset that we
are handicapped somewhat. The attitude of the ancient
Indians to history seems to have been one of ethereal indifference. We possess little in the way of chronicles, and most
dates given for significant events are crude approximations at
best, often having several centuries as a margin of error.
2
Sometime during the second millennium B.C., a people
speaking an Indo-European language and calling themselves
¯
“A ryans”1 migrated from the northwest into the Indian
subcontinent. A few centuries later their sacred hymns,
prayers, and incantations began to be gathered into three
collections called Vedas. A fourth Veda was later assembled.
These hymns were not written down at first but were passed
on orally from generation to generation by a priestly caste, to
whose prodigious memory the preservation of the hymns was
entrusted. Of the four Vedas, only the fourth, the Rg Veda,
contains much that is of genuinely speculative interest. It
consists of over a thousand hymns largely celebrating in the
most disparate fashion a florid polytheism, somewhat akin to
Greek religion and having almost nothing in common with
the religion of the Bible. But the Rg Veda also contains
material of a different sort, such as the so-called creation
hymn, the beginning and conclusion of which are as follows:
There was neither not-being (asat) nor being (sat)
then. There was neither a space nor a heaven
beyond. What stirred? Where? In whose
protection?....That one [neuter - tat ekam] was
breathing, windless, by its own determination [or
spontaneity - svadha ]....Who may proclaim when
¯
this creation was produced? The gods [came]
hither with the creation of this [world]. Who then
knows whence it has arisen? Whether it established itself or did not establish itself, the one who
CAREY
9
surveys it in the highest heaven alone knows. Or
else he does not know.2
Such questions about ultimate principles, real and not just
rhetorical, are frequently raised in the hymns of the Rg Veda.
Occasionally, questions are raised regarding even the
existence of the particular god celebrated in the hymn, and
are left unanswered or answered with what appears to be
strained conviction or, perhaps, irony.
Striving for strength, bring forth a laud to Indra, a
true one (satyam), if he truly exists (yadi satyam
asti). One and another say, “There is no Indra.”
“Who has beheld (dadarsa) him?” Whom then
shall we honor?3
And from another hymn,
He about whom they ask, “Where is he?” or say of
him, the terrible one, “He does not exist,” he who
diminishes the flourishing wealth of the enemy as
gambling does—believe in him (srad asmai
dhatta)! He, my people, is Indra!4
In spite of the prevailing polytheism of the Rg Veda,
celebrated alternately in confidence and in perplexity, there
are occasional suggestions of a tentative monotheism and,
more remarkably, even of monism simpliciter.5
Monism, or the view that all is one and that the apparent
plurality of things veils a more fundamental unity, is the
prevailing perspective in the principal Upanisads, which
emerged in the centuries after the Vedas were compiled. In
these works certain other common features can be discerned
that are characteristic of early or proto-Hinduism.6 Among
these are belief in transmigration of the soul, karmic encumbrance, the concept of dharma or law, the caste system,7 and
liberation as the end goal of all perfect self-knowledge. It is
worth sketching each of these features briefly, since one or
another of them, separately or in combination, comes to the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
fore not only in the teaching of those speculative thinkers
who present themselves as theorizing within the orthodox
Vedic tradition, but even in the thinking of some of those
who reject this tradition. There were wide differences of
opinion among sophisticated thinkers regarding the most
fundamental principles of Vedic tradition. In what follows, I
shall emphasize those interpretations that, though far from
being universally accepted by believers, were most
provocative of a properly philosophical response and appropriation. I shall focus on, without restricting myself to,
themes that are central to the principal Upanisads. The divine
is presented there in a way that has little in common with the
polytheism of the Vedas.
The word “brahman,” which is neuter in gender, names
the fundamental reality that lies behind the manifold and
multiform world of appearances. Brahman, the hidden
reality, is not many but one. The world as it appears, in all its
manifoldness, is maya. This word is frequently translated as
¯ ¯
“illusion,” but one should not assume that maya is altogether
¯ ¯
unreal. It is rather the surface play of the fundamental reality.
The world of appearances is illusion only to the extent that it
is mistaken for the fundamental reality.
But what intimation, we might ask, is there of an underlying unity? The answer is that there is one thing that is
experienced as single and self-identical throughout space and
time, throughout the multiplicity of spatial and temporal
phenomena, and throughout even the manifold topics that
thought takes up for consideration. This one thing is the self,
the ¯tman. The self cannot be identified with the external
a
objects and internal concerns with which it is almost always
preoccupied. The self in its purity is, we are told in one of the
earliest Upanisads, “not this, not that” (or “not this, not this”neti neti).8 But to the very extent that the self is distinguishable from all appearances, inner appearances—including
the individual thoughts that come and go—as well as outer, it
seems to be indistinguishable from all other selves. The
thought dawns that there is perhaps only one self, and that
CAREY
11
the path to brahman, the fundamental unity underlying the
manifold appearances of the world, is through selfknowledge. This knowledge is achieved in part by study and
reflection, and in part by mastery of desires, which may,
though need not, entail acts of physical discipline and austerities (tapas). It turns out, though, that the path to brahman is
not exactly through knowledge of the self, for in the
Upanisads the self is actually identified with the fundamental
reality: ¯tman is brahman.9 Or, as it is also said, “That art
a
thou.”10 This core of indivisible individuality at the center of
our being is paradoxically what each of us really is, what is
common to us all, and finally the underlying unity supporting
everything else that in any way exists. It is not only one but
simple and self-identical.
Brahman should not be confused with Brahma, which is
¯
the name, masculine in gender, of one of the three primary
deities in the Hindu pantheon. Brahma is the creator, Visnu
¯
the preserver, and Siva the destroyer.11 In the history of
Hinduism, cultic devotion to Brahma was superseded early
¯
on by devotion to Visnu and Siva, indicating a greater
interest, even at the popular level, in the present and future
manifestations of reality than in its originating source, a
greater interest in what the world is and the limits of its transformations than in who made it or where it came from, a
greater interest in constitution than in cause, one might say.
Of the three gods, Siva is the most puzzling to the Westerner.
He is described as the great ascetic and is typically depicted
as meditating or dancing, wearing a necklace of skulls, and
possessing three eyes, one of which is closed. When Siva
opens his third eye, which is in the middle of his forehead,
the world of appearances, it was said, will be consumed by
fire. Siva is the destroyer of illusion.
Returning to the less picturesque monism of the
Upanisads, it is all-important to realize that brahman, or the
fundamental reality, is not a person. Least of all is brahman a
transcendent deity who has created a world distinct from
himself, which he governs through law, awarding happiness
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
in rough proportion to morality, if not in this world at least
in a world to come. Hinduism is, of course, not indifferent to
the question of morality. Indeed, the vexing problem of how
desire for the fruit of action can contaminate the moral purity
of the action, and thereby render the fruit unattainable, is
discerned as early as the Upanisads and is a recurrent theme
in Hinduism, and in Buddhism as well. But in conspicuous
contrast to the way this problem is conceived in the West, a
moral theology is not invoked to manage it.12 Instead, the
problem of the connection of the just deserts of action with
the actions that merit them is addressed through the related
doctrines of transmigration and karmic causality. If the self is
indivisible then it is indissoluble. It cannot be naturally
destroyed, and so it survives the death of the body. But the
indestructibility of the self does not keep it from being
encumbered with the moral effects of the acts it has
committed. This encumbrance is called karma. Although a
man may not experience in this life the effects of the karma
within which he has encrusted his indestructible self, at death
this karma binds the self to reincarnation. Moreover, karma
causes the self to gravitate, so to speak, to a new incarnation
and re-incarceration specifically appropriate to its moral
history. By committing bad actions a man becomes bad and
accumulates bad karma. At the death of his body he finds
himself entering a new body and life worse than that from
which he has just departed. How much worse that life is
depends on how bad he was, and reincarnation as something
subhuman is a distinct possibility. The indestructible self of a
man who has lived a good life is reincarnated into a better
life. As we shall see, though, reincarnation is not the only
destination for the self.
If one is reincarnated as a human being, the karma
accumulated from the preceding life determines what caste
one will be reincarnated into. The justification for castes in
the sacred tradition is traced to a well known though mysterious passage in the Rg Veda describing the sacrifice and
dismemberment of a primordial gigantic man called the
CAREY
13
purusa, a word that in later works came to mean spirit, mind,
intelligence, or consciousness.
When they divided the purusa, into how many
parts did they apportion him? What do they call
his mouth, his two arms and thighs and feet? His
mouth became the brahmin; his arms were made
¯
into the Warrior, his thighs the People, and from
his feet the Servants were born.13
This fourfold division has over the course of time become
transformed into a great plurality of castes governed by all
sorts of injunctions and prohibitions. The original fourfold
division was not nearly so complex, nor, one is tempted to
add, was it so perverse as what holds sway in India today. In
the Arthasastra, a treatise on politics, written by Kautilya
¯
toward the end of the fourth century B.C., the specific duties
of the original four castes are described as follows.
The special duties (dharmas) of the brahmin are:
¯
¯
studying, teaching, performing sacrifices for self,
officiating at other peoples’ sacrifices, making gifts,
and receiving gifts. Those of the ksatriya (the
warrior or king) are: studying, performing
sacrifices for self, making gifts, living by [the
profession of] arms, and protecting beings. Those
of the vaisya (the farmer or merchant) are:
studying, performing sacrifices for self, making
gifts, agriculture, cattle rearing and trade. Those of
the sudra (or servant) are: service of the twiceborn [i.e., the members of the aforementioned
three castes], engaging in an economic calling [viz.,
agriculture, cattle rearing, and trade] and the
profession of the artisan and the actor.14
In addition to the duties of the special castes there are the
duties proper to the four stages of life for the members of the
three highest, twice-born castes, brahmin, ksatriya, and
¯
vaisya.15 These are the stages of student, householder, forest
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
recluse, and wandering ascetic, the duties of which are also
specified by Kautilya. Additionally, there are duties common
to all: “abstaining from harm, truthfulness, uprightness,
freedom from malice, compassion, and forbearance.”16 The
entire system of duties of the various castes and stations of
life make up part of what is called dharma. This word could
be translated as “law” as well as “duty,” depending on the
context. No more than lex does dharma mean nomos or
convention, that is to say, mere convention. It means rather
the proper order of human life sanctioned, if not explicitly by
the Veda, then at least by way of extrapolation and development of Vedic lore and tradition.17 It is supported by and
expressive of karmic causality. Moreover, and of apparently
greater importance to Kautilya, dharma, including the
distinctions of caste, is the shield against barbarism and chaos.
It is, of course, difficult for those of us living in the modern
West to regard the caste system, even the less extreme form
of it that held sway in ancient India, as anything other than
arbitrary and unjust. It has been argued, however, that an
egalitarian social order that does not degenerate rapidly into
anarchy, followed most likely by tyranny, presupposes an
economics of plenty. Instead of an economics of plenty, an
economics of scarcity reigned in ancient India, as it did
throughout the ancient world in general. It should not be
forgotten in this connection that even democratic Athens
made use of slaves. An economics of plenty, such as we have
today, allows for a more just social order to be sure, even the
possibility of equal opportunity for all. The price paid for this
social order is the technological mastery of nature as a consequence of which machines can do the work—at least a lot of
it—that slaves used to do. And, needless to say, the mastery
of nature generates problems of its own, problems that were
unknown in the ancient world.18 In any case, the dharma
promulgated by the Veda not only allowed for but mandated
study for three of the four castes while providing sufficient
leisure for them to engage in it. And leisure, to repeat, is a
CAREY
15
necessary if not a sufficient condition for the emergence of
philosophy.
The whole system of dharma was upheld by the king,
who was, significantly, not a member of the brahmin caste but
¯
of the ksatriya or warrior caste. Kautilya writes that the king
should employ the scepter or rod, that is to say, punishment,
for the good of the people.
For the rod (or scepter - danda), employed with
due consideration, endows the subjects with
dharma, material well-being (artha), and objects of
desire (or pleasures - kamas). Employed badly,
¯ ¯
whether in passion or anger, or in contempt, it
enrages even forest recluses and wandering
ascetics, how much more then the householders? If
not employed at all, it gives rise to the law of the
fishes. For the stronger man swallows the weak in
the absence of the wielder of the rod. Protected by
him, the weak man prevails.19
The education of the king in the science of politics,
(dandaka), more literally the science of wielding the rod
¯
(dandani ti), is treated at length in the Arthasastra. It aims at
¯
the formation of the sage-king, or raja rsi.20 Among the
¯
¯
subjects studied by the king is ¯nvi ksiki or reasoning, to
a ¯
which we shall return shortly.
The end goal of all action is liberation (moksa).21
Liberation is, at the simplest level, release from the cycle of
birth and rebirth, i.e., release of the self from karmic
causality. Since the self is a pure unity it cannot be dissolved
into its components. It is indestructible, and it does not need
to be incarnate to exist. The liberation of the self from the
cycle of birth and rebirth, then, is the union of ¯tman with
a
brahman. This liberation is most often presented as a state
that can be achieved only after an indeterminate number of
reincarnations through which bad karma is gradually shed.
However, if at the end of even an exemplary life, a life in full
accord with dharma, there remains any residue of bad karma,
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
there is no liberation at death. Bad karma can be shed only
within a life, and not in the transition (most consistently
regarded as instantaneous) from the previous life to the
following. But if, within an exceptionally good life, bad
karma is entirely eliminated, then there is no longer a barrier
to union with brahman within that very life. There is no need
to die in order to experience liberation. Seen in this light,
liberation is essentially release from the ignorance that
prevents one from recognizing the identity of ¯tman and
a
brahman. Although this ignorance can be regarded as due to
bad karma, the attempt to apprehend this identity, and hence
to achieve the highest possible state of existence, presupposes
right action not as an end in itself but only as a means, as the
taming of the passions that interfere with clarity of apprehension. Action in accordance with dharma, or, as we might
say, morality, is for the sake of a non-moral end, namely the
end of seeing the concealed, though immanent and impersonal oneness of all things, without the distraction of the
desires that it is the wholly subservient and instrumental
function of morality to moderate. It should go without saying
that seeing the oneness of all things, and in particular the
oneness of ¯tman and brahman, cannot be understood as a
a
union of love, for there is not the otherness that love presupposes. There is ultimately no seeing face to face, because there
is ultimately only one face.22
3
So far we have not encountered anything that can be called
philosophy, at least not as we have hypothetically conceived
it. But it is clear that the relatively “demythologized” religion
of the Upanisads does not present the same kind of contrast
with philosophy that one finds in Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam. In the latter religions the believer affirms allegiance to
a personal creator and moral governor of the universe who
transcends and is “wholly other” than his creation, and yet
who loves it and commands love in return. In the religion of
the Upanisads, the fundamental reality, even on the highly
CAREY
17
questionable assumption that it can be called “God,” is
impersonal. It is not the creator of the universe ex nihilo but
is its inner core. Brahman is not strictly transcendent to, but,
rather, immanent within, the world, and is so far from being
“wholly other” as to be wholly the same. Unlike the God of
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, brahman is not jealous.
Hinduism has historically exhibited an exceptional
willingness to concede that other religions also have insights
into the reality that is concealed behind appearances.23 It has
thus been able to assimilate other religions into itself with
some success, although, not surprisingly, it has failed to do
this with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Judaism and
Christianity have not historically been major forces in India,
disregarding, of course, the missionary efforts of the latter in
the last few centuries. The case is different with Islam, which
began to make substantial inroads into India during the tenth
century A.D. The bitterness of the conflict, often bloody,
between Hinduism and Islam is due in large measure to their
radically different conceptions not simply of the divine but of
what religion itself is.
In this connection it is worth considering the sources of
the Hindu analogue to what is known in West as revelation.
The Vedic hymns are, in effect, the foundational sacred scriptures. Actually, “scriptures” is not quite the right word since,
it is estimated, they were not written down until about
500 B.C., at the earliest. As we noted, they were memorized
and recited by brahmins, who were entrusted with preserving
¯
them and keeping them a living force in rituals and teaching.
The language of the Veda is an early form of Sanskrit. To
preserve the original hymns from alteration in the course of
recitation over millennia, the rules for euphony in different
phonetic contexts and for morphological change were
specified by Panini in his classic grammar, generally conceded
¯
by linguists who are familiar with it to be by far the greatest
work of its kind in any language. It is not certain when Panini
¯
composed his grammar, or even whether it was originally
written rather than composed orally and preserved in this
�18
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
form until written characters came to be employed. In any
case, Panini’s grammar virtually precluded further phonetic
¯
development of the language. Consequently, the sound of the
Veda when recited today is arguably the same, perhaps down
to the smallest nuances, as when it was recited in Panini’s
¯
time, if not earlier.
It is all-important to recognize in this connection that the
oral tradition of ancient India was entirely different from the
oral traditions that Westerners have recently begun to show
an interest in. Those who recited the Vedic hymns and
appended works such as the Upanisads were mere vehicles for
the most exact transmission of these works possible. The
transmitter was anything but an integral component of what
was being transmitted, unlike the narrator in many other oral
traditions—the storyteller did understand himself to be part
of the story. Consequently, the Indian tradition can be
considered, for all practical purposes, literary, well in advance
of the appearance of the written language itself. As in the case
of letters proper, the best minds could address the best minds
across centuries with a minimum of interference from intermediary transmitters.
The word Veda itself means “knowledge.” It is cognate
with the Greek word eidos. The knowledge that the Veda
contains was acquired by the sages (rsis) of old. They did not
acquire it as gift from a god. They acquired it, rather, through
their superior powers of apprehension. This knowledge was
passed on orally in the very form in which it was acquired.
For that reason successive generations have access to it and it
can be authoritative for them. This knowledge is acquired,
moreover, not through seeing but through hearing, just as it
was acquired by the sages.24 The sages heard what one hears
when the Veda is recited today, though back then there seems
to have been, mirabile dictu, no one doing the reciting. What
the sages heard was the eternal though hidden articulation of
the truth, or, as we might be tempted to say, thinking of
Heraclitus, the logos.
CAREY
19
I shall continue to use the term “revelation” to designate
Vedic lore, though the term is inaccurate to the extent that it
implies the self-disclosure of God, not to sages, i.e., to the
wise, but to the elect. Hindus have difficulty understanding
the Biblical concept of revelation, and many object to the
term being applied to the sources of their sacred tradition.25
When the Muslims first began their conquest of northern
India, about a thousand years ago, they were shocked to
discover that the Hindus did not even pretend to have
prophets.26 Still, “revelation” is the only word we have for the
Vedic analogue of Biblical and Qur’anic revelation, and I shall
¯
continue to use it, not without misgivings, in speaking of
what bears only a trace of resemblance to revelation as
conceived in the West.
Now, a distinction is drawn within early Hinduism
between two levels of revelation. The primary revelation is
called sruti, or that which was heard by the sages. It consists
of the four Vedas and appended material, the Upanisads in
particular. The secondary revelation is called smrti or that
which is remembered. It consists of later works, some
devotional, some legal, and some speculative. An instance of
¯¯
the latter is the Bhagavad Gi ta, which is sometimes accorded
almost as much authority as sruti proper. This work is an
excerpt from the Mahabharata, a gigantic Indian epic eight
¯ ¯
times as long as the Iliad and Odyssey combined. Because of
the variety of material contained in the sruti, considerable
controversy emerged among the learned as to the precise
character of Vedic authority.
So far I have sketched only the most central features of
early Hinduism, emphasizing the sophisticated religious
speculation of the Upanisads and ignoring entirely the
polytheism of the popular religion.27 The highly sophisticated
religious speculation of the Upanisads does not count as
philosophy, as least not according to the conception of
philosophy I have adopted on hypothesis. Nonetheless it is
not difficult to see how philosophy could emerge in this intel-
�20
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
lectual milieu. It was a period of leisure, mandated study, and,
not least, freedom of speculation, including freedom to
rethink and reinterpret the meaning of the Veda, which
manifestly contains passages of religious skepticism and even
satire.28
4
Sometime around the sixth century B.C. three systems of
speculative thought broke with the Vedic tradition. These
were Buddhism, Jainism, and Lokayata. All three denied the
¯
authority of the Vedas and, in particular, the caste system it
supported. The first two are classified as religions. The third
is something else.
In Buddhism, as in Hinduism, one must distinguish
between the popular belief and the philosophical appropriation. Whereas the Upanisads teach the substantial oneness of
all things, Buddhism teaches the insubstantial voidness (or
emptiness - sunyata) of all things. In the writings of the
¯
¯
Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna, who is thought to have
¯ ¯
lived and taught around the end of the first century A.D., the
implications of this teaching are pressed home with dialectical force. To take a single example, against the doctrine of
the voidness of all things, the Hindu opponent objects that if
all things are void (sunya), then the very thesis that all things
¯
are void is itself void, and is thereby refuted. To this
objection, Nagarjuna responds essentially as follows. It is
¯ ¯
indeed true that if all things are void, then the thesis that all
things are void is itself void. But this consequence, so far from
being a refutation of the thesis, is in fact an exemplification of
it and contributes to its confirmation.29 The Protagorean
relativist, familiar to us from Plato’s Theaetetus, cannot avail
himself of so neat a defense. For the thesis that all theses are
relative precludes itself from being absolutely true. The thesis
that all theses are void, however, does not preclude itself
from being absolutely true, if, that is, the Buddhists are right
in holding that voidness (sunyata) is at the heart of everything
¯
¯
that in any way is, including absolute truth itself. It would be
CAREY
21
a serious mistake to think that the Buddhist doctrine of
voidness is mystical or even intuitive. Buddhism, at least as it
developed in India, regards inference, i.e., logical reasoning,
as a valid means of cognition. The teaching on voidness is
supported with reasons. As the Hindu thinkers discovered in
their formal disputations with the Buddhists, the latter came
to the occasion well armed.
Needless to say, the Buddhist doctrine of voidness leaves
no room for an eternal and substantial being, either
immanent or transcendent. Indeed, it leaves no room for
a being, strictly so called, at all. Every so-called being is
but a phase of becoming, a segment of the indefinitely
flowing causal sequence called “dependent arising”
¯
(prati tyasamutpada). According to Buddhism, the recog¯
nition of the absolute insubstantiality and dependent arising
of all things is enlightenment. Enlightenment is liberation
from attachment to what is insubstantial and transitory. It is
liberation from deluded belief in permanence, from deluded
belief in any eternal presence. There have always been, within
Buddhism, a significant number of thinkers who have taught
that the Buddha’s enlightenment was achieved through sense
perception and inference exclusively, that is, through powers
lying completely within the nature of man.
Jainism shares much in common with Hinduism while,
like Buddhism, rejecting the authority of the Veda. There is a
¯
line of sages (ti rthankaras) who have disclosed the truth
about reality. Reality is ultimately dual. Everything is either
soul or matter, and neither of these can be reduced to the
other. It is expressly taught that there is no need to recognize
any higher being than man. Jainism includes doctrines of
karma, reincarnation, and liberation similar to those of
Hinduism, and the same is true of Buddhism. But, given
Buddhism’s doctrine of the insubstantiality of all things, and
its denial of the substantial self in particular, it has the complicated task, which it does not evade, of addressing how it is
that the exceptionless state of dependent arising can allow for
encumbrance with karma, reincarnation, enlightenment, and
�22
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
final liberation. The solution to this problem depends on the
cogency of the Buddhist claim that continuity does not
presuppose identity, at least not substantial identity. Both
classical Buddhism and Jainism were regarded as, strictly
speaking, atheistic, and neither seems to have made much of
an effort to deny the charge.30
In Lokayata (also called “Carvaka”), the third school of
¯
¯ ¯
speculative thought that denied the authority of the Veda, we
find unabashed atheism, materialism, and hedonism. We
know of this school for the most part only from excerpts of
texts no longer extant but quoted, sometimes at length, by
orthodox thinkers who not surprisingly dissociate themselves
from what they are quoting. The following excerpt represents
something of the teaching and spirit of Lokayata.31
¯
An opponent [of Lokayata] will say, if you do not
¯
allow for something unseen [or invisible - adrsta]
the various phenomena of the world become
destitute of any cause. But we [members of the
Lokayata school] cannot accept this objection as
¯
valid, since these phenomena can all be produced
spontaneously from their own nature [or own
being – svabhava].Thus it has been said [and here
¯
an earlier Lokayata text is quoted] – “The fire is
¯
hot, the water cold, refreshing cool the breeze of
morn; from whom came this variety? [Answer:]
From their own nature [svabhava] was it born.”
¯
The word translated here as “own nature” has two components, sva- which means “one’s own” or “intrinsic,” and
bhava, which is the Sanskrit word for being, derived from the
¯
verbal radical bhu.32 The text continues.
¯
And all this has been said by Brhaspati [the
legendary founder of Lokayata.] “There is no
¯
heaven, no final liberation, nor any soul in another
world. Nor do the actions of the four castes,
orders [that is, stages of life], etc., produce any
CAREY
23
real effect. The fire sacrifice [agnihotra], the three
Vedas, the ascetic’s three staves, and smearing
oneself with ashes were made by nature [or,
perhaps less misleadingly, made by the elements dhatu-nirmita] as the livelihood of those destitute
of knowledge and manliness. [Presumably the
brahmins are meant here.] If a beast slain in the
¯
Jyotistoma rite [a Vedic sacrifice] will itself go to
heaven, then why doesn’t the sacrificer offer his
own father? ... It is only as a means of livelihood
that brahmins have established here all these
¯
ceremonies for the dead—there is no other fruit
[than what is found in this world] anywhere.”
In an ancient drama, Prabodha-Candrodaya, which reflects
the views of this school, a materialist offers a simple response
to the question of why believers wear themselves out with
fasting and other forms of mortification: “These fools are
deceived by the [sacred texts] and are fed with the allurements of hope.”33
The name of this school, Lokayata, is derived from loka,
¯
the Sanskrit word for world. Sankara, a philosopher working
within the orthodox tradition, writes of Lokayata as follows:
¯
According to the Lokayatika doctrine, the four
¯
elements alone are the ultimate principles—earth,
water, fire, and air; there is none other. Only the
perceived exists; the unperceivable does not exist.
[Frank materialism and, indeed, nominalism.]
Others should not postulate [that is, infer] merit
and demerit from happiness and misery. A person
is happy or miserable through nature; there is no
other cause. [A denial of karma.] Who paints the
peacocks, or who makes the cuckoos sing? There
exists here no cause except nature. The soul is but
the body characterized by the attributes signified
by the expressions “I am stout,” “I am
youthful”…. It is not something other than the
�24
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
body. The consciousness that is found in
[organisms] is produced in the manner of the red
color out of the combination of betel, areca nut,
and lime. [Conscience is at most a mere epiphenomenon of matter.] There is no world other than
this one: there is no heaven and there is no hell:
the realm of Siva and like regions are invented by
stupid impostors…. Liberation is death, which is
the cessation of the life breath. The wise ought not
to take pains on account of it. [That is, there is no
need to take pains on account of liberation since,
being death, nothing more and nothing less, it is
going to come upon the wise and the unwise alike.
No effort is needed to bring it about.]. It is only
the fool who wears himself out by penances, fasts,
etc.34
Sankara wrote around 800 A.D., but Lokayata is much older.
¯
Its chief work, the Brhaspati Sutra, which is not extant, is
estimated to have been composed around 600 B.C. And references to Lokayata teachings occur in other works estimated
¯
to date from an early period.35
5
The denial of the authority of the Veda by Buddhism, Jainism,
and Lokayata, did not occur without provoking a response
¯
from the upholders of Vedic tradition. In the attempt to meet
the various criticisms leveled at the authority of the Veda, six
main schools of speculative thought emerged. These schools
are usually spoken of as “orthodox”, which is a rough but not
altogether misleading rendering of “astika,” (from Sanskrit as
¯
- “is”) which is employed to mean “accepting of sacred
tradition”, that is, Vedic tradition. Over and against these are
the “heterodox” or nastika (from na as - “is not”) schools of
¯
Buddhism, Jainism, and Lokayata. Each of these different
¯
schools is referred to by the Indian commentators as a view
(darsana). They were schools in the sense that they had
CAREY
25
su tras, or basic texts expressing the central tenets in concen¯
trated form, adherents, and a rich commentarial tradition of
textual exegesis. Needless to say, as the schools developed,
divisions emerged within them. There were, additionally,
important thinkers working both at the margins of the
schools and outside their confines. Formal, intermural disputations took place, and these are recapitulated and developed
further in the commentaries.36
To get a clearer view of philosophy as it existed in ancient
India, we need to undertake a brief survey of the orthodox
schools. The range of themes taken up for specifically philosophical treatment is comparable in scope, at least, to what
one finds in Western philosophy. Some themes strike the
Westerner as not only unfamiliar, but exotic, and even bewildering, while others are familiar but approached and
developed in unexpected ways. The task of our survey is
twofold. We need to observe the philosophical mind at work
on particular questions that are interesting in their own right.
At the same time, we need to determine exactly where and
how Vedic authority comes into the picture. For it is in
assessing the character of this authority that we can estimate
the extent to which philosophy in India succeeded in distinguishing its way from that of religion.
The six orthodox schools are conveniently grouped in
¯ ¯ ¯
pairs. In the first place there is the Pu rva-Mi mamsa—Uttara¯
¯mamsa pair. “Mi mamsa” means “inquiry”; “pu rva” and
¯ ¯ ¯
Mi ¯ ¯
¯
“uttara” mean “earlier” and “later” respectively. Pu rva¯
¯mamsa takes its bearings from the earlier part of Vedic
Mi ¯ ¯
¯ ¯ ¯
lore, the Vedas proper, and Uttara-Mi mamsa takes its
bearings from the later part, in particular, the appended
Upanisads. Of the six orthodox schools of thought Pu rva¯
¯ ¯ ¯
Mi mamsa is at first glance much the most orthodox. It is
concerned with such things as the resolution of inconsistencies in the Veda, their claim to be an eternal revelation,
and how sound can be the vehicle of revelation. These
inquiries are all in the service of supporting the rule of
dharma as the central Vedic disclosure relevant to human life.
�26
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
¯ ¯ ¯
Today one might be tempted to call Pu rva-Mi mamsa “Vedic
¯
fundamentalism” were it not for the cunning of its apologetics and the subtlety of its investigations, particularly into
the nature of speech (vac), which in one Vedic hymn is
¯
presented as a goddess extolling herself as all embracing and
the first of those who are worthy of sacrifice.37 Given the
¯ ¯ ¯
uncompromising determination of Pu rva-Mi mamsa to
¯
defend the Vedic injunctions to the letter, one might expect
the texts of this school to betray the kind of blinkered
irritability one often runs up against in those committed to
the defense of indefensible positions. Instead, one finds there
what is characteristic of the texts of almost all the schools,
namely, a serene and fair minded statement of the most
powerful objections that have been advanced against the
tenets of the school in question, followed by a measured
point by point rebuttal.
¯ ¯ ¯
Uttara-Mi mamsa is usually called “Vedanta,” literally, the
¯
end of the Veda, since its authority and the focus of its
interest is the Upanisads. It is probably the school of Indian
speculative thought best known in the West, as it has well
known adherents in our time. There are several versions of
Vedanta, but the most influential is Advaita-Vedanta, literally,
¯
¯
non-dualist Vedanta. Its greatest exponent was Sankara,
¯
whose account of the heterodox school of Lokayata I quoted
¯
earlier. Advaita-Vedanta holds to the Upanisadic teaching of
¯
the oneness of all things, of the world as maya, and of the
¯ ¯
identity of ¯tman with brahman. Where, one asks, does the
a
manifold and illusory world that we mistake for reality come
from? The world is not created, either ex nihilo or out of a
¯¯
pre-existent matter. The world is the play (or sport - li la) of
38
brahman. This play has no purpose outside itself. In
particular, this play is not for the good of the world, a claim
that Sankara supports by referring to a passage from the sruti,
“It is not for the sake of all, my dear, that all is loved, but for
one’s own sake that all is loved.”39 According to AdvaitaVedanta, brahman is both the efficient and the material cause
¯
CAREY
27
of the world. We might add that it is the formal and final
cause as well.
Another pair is Sankhya-Yoga. The Sankhya school is
¯
¯
dualistic. The ultimate constituents of reality are nature and
intellect, and this school gives an intriguing account of how
the two are related. The word translated by “nature” here is
prakrti. The components are pra-, kr-, and -ti. Pra- is equivalent to our prefix pro- and could be translated as “forth.” Kris the root of the Sanskrit verb for “to make” or “to do.” And
-ti is a suffix that, like the Greek -sis, endows a verbal root
with a nominal character indicating process, as with poiesis
¯
(making) or, for that matter, physis (nature or, more literally,
growing). Prakrti is then making-forth.40 To the extent that
this making-forth is an ongoing and immanent principle of
production, and not the original and originating act of a
transcendent creator, “nature” could hardly be a better
rendering of prakrti. The etymology of this word reminds
one of Aristotle’s discussion at the beginning of the second
book of the Physics, where physis is presented as a principle
of impersonal immanent governance, the source of motion
and rest within the world, and is compared to a doctor
healing himself.41 Like Aristotle’s nature, prakrti is both what
makes and what is made.
It is worth noting that the two Sanskrit terms I have translated as “nature,” namely, prakrti and, in my account of
Lokayata, svabhava, are etymologically unrelated. The
¯
¯
former names nature as process whereas the latter, which as
we saw is derivative from the Sanskrit verb “to be,” names
nature as being, primarily in the sense of essence. Parallel to
prakrti and svabhava are the Greek terms, physis and ousia,
¯
which are also etymologically unrelated. The former, like
prakrti, names nature as process, whereas the latter is derived
from the Greek verb “to be” and, like svabhava, names nature
¯
as being, also primarily in the sense of essence. Since the
Sanskrit and Greek terms developed prior to any influence of
Greek speculative thought on Indian speculative thought or,
so far as we can tell, vice versa, the correspondences are
�28
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
remarkable. One might suspect that these linguistic developments were not entirely independent, in spite of the absence
of any influence of one on the other. Because Greek and
Sanskrit are related languages, one might be tempted to chalk
up the comparable derivations of svabhava and ousia from
¯
the verb “to be” in their respective languages to merely
coincidental exploitations of a possibility latent in protoIndo-European, the hypothesized common ancestor of the
two languages.42 But the independent emergence of prakrti
and physis within Sanskrit and Greek as names for the whole
material order construed as immanent, ongoing, selfemergence cannot be easily dismissed as happenstance. On
the contrary, there is every reason to think that these two
terms came into being to express something already caught
sight of in the nature of things, so to speak, and, moreover,
that this discovery was the dawn of a properly philosophical
orientation and outlook.
The relationship between prakrti in the Sankhya school
¯
and physis in the philosophy of Aristotle is not limited to the
central and common concept of “making forth.” Prakrti is
animated to its activity by the presence of spirit. The word I
am translating as “spirit” here is, again, purusa, which in one
of the Vedic hymns we considered was the gigantic victim of
a primordial sacrifice, a victim who, on being dismembered
by the gods, served as the origin of the four castes. Not
surprisingly, in the Sankhya system, the concept of purusa has
¯
become demythologized, as indeed had already happened in
the Upanisads.43 By itself, spirit lacks any power to produce
things, and is accordingly regarded as a pure “witness.”44 The
relationship of purusa to prakrti is likened to a man who is
clear-sighted but lame (purusa) mounted on the shoulders of
a man who is sure-footed but blind (prakrti).45 The presence
of spirit stimulates nature to evolve out of itself a manifold of
beings. This evolution is from three elemental constituents
(gunas), which, had nature not been excited to activity by the
presence of spirit, would simply have remained in
equilibrium. These three constituents of nature are called
CAREY
29
sattva, rajas and tamas, for which there are no corresponding
English words. Sattva is buoyant and shining; rajas is stimulating and moving; tamas is heavy and enveloping. Their
functioning, we are told, is for a single purpose, like that of a
lamp.46 Exactly how the upsetting of the equilibrium of these
three constituents within primordial nature happens is
problematic because spirit itself does not act directly on
nature. Spirit engages in no action at all, but only in a pure
beholding. On the other hand, nature cannot be so blind as
to be totally unaware of the presence of spirit, since this very
presence is what provokes nature to activity. The problem has
a rough parallel, at least, in Aristotle’s conception of the
relationship of the unmoved mover, who is pure intelligence
(noesis noeseos), to what is moved, that is, to material nature.
¯
¯ ¯
To be sure, for Aristotle, some moved things, such as the
heavenly bodies and human beings, are themselves intelligent.
But certain other things, such as particles of earth and other
elements, which are also moved to their proper places at least
ultimately by the unmoved mover, are as blind as blind can
be.47
In the Sankhya school the modifications of prakrti, or
¯
nature, entail a complex and graduated evolution, one consequence of which is the individuation of purusa or spirit into
individual selves, which results in a delusion as to what they
really are. But prakrti, like Arisotle’s physis, also works for an
end. The end is the overcoming of the delusion of the
individual purusas. This overcoming of delusion is liberation.
That prakrti can be construed as non-sentient and at the
same time as nonetheless acting for an end, and furthermore
for the end of another, is addressed in the Sankhya-karika, the
¯
¯ ¯
fundamental text of this school, and in the commentaries on
this text. The argument begins, characteristically, with an
objection, in this case the objection of a theist. In an animal,
many organic processes such as digestion have a purpose but
nevertheless take place without the animal’s being conscious
of them. So another being, an omniscient and powerful deity,
in fact, must be invoked to account for these processes. After
�30
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
all, the objector continues, there cannot be purposes unless
they are consciously intended, either by the organism or by its
providential creator. To this objection the proponent of
Sankhya responds with an example. Milk flows out of the
¯
cow for the sake of the calf, without any conscious intention
on the part of the cow (much less, one might add, on the part
of the milk). In a similar way, the whole of prakrti, which is
non-sentient, can be understood to act for the liberation of
another, namely, for the liberation of purusa. Neither divine
intention nor any other conscious intention needs to be
invoked. No intention needs to be invoked at all. Nature,
prakrti, is purposive, period.
The proponent of Sankhya then assumes the offensive
¯
and advances an argument against a divine, omniscient
creator altogether. Every sentient being acting for a purpose
does so either out of selfishness, that is, for its own good, or
out of benevolence, that is, for the good of another. Neither
of these motives could account for God’s creation of the
universe. God cannot create the universe out of selfishness.
For, on the hypothesis of the theist, he has all that he
requires. Nor can he create the universe out of benevolence.
For prior to the alleged creation of the world—which,
incidentally, is not envisioned by either party to the dispute as
ex nihilo—the purusas would be without bodies and organs,
which are the source of their delusion. Consequently, they
would not be afflicted, prior to creation, with anything that
God could be aroused through benevolent pity to remove.
Finally, if God created the world out of benevolence he
would create only happy creatures. So, why are there so many
unhappy creatures? The theist, obviously, cannot answer this
question by attributing the unhappiness of creatures to their
past deeds, as is required by the orthodox doctrine of karma.
Prior to creation of the world, purusa, whether understood as
one or many, cannot be understood to have encumbered itself
with karma.48
According to the Sankhya school, the purposive action of
¯
non-sentient prakrti is neither amorally selfish nor morally
CAREY
31
altruistic. It is amorally altruistic. Its purposiveness is an
irreducible given, not to be accounted for by appeal to
conscious design. After all, one would not infer conscious
design unless purposiveness were apprehended first. The two
concepts, purposiveness (understood as having an end or
telos) and conscious design, can be kept distinct. As students
of Western philosophy might be inclined to put it, the proposition that purposiveness presupposes conscious design is not
an analytic judgment. It is a synthetic judgment. Its denial
entails no logical contradiction: one is not logically
compelled to infer conscious design from purposiveness. The
existence of purposiveness is so obvious, particularly in living
beings, that the theist does not argue for it and the atheist
does not argue against it. Unlike the Medieval theologians
who argued from teleology to the conscious intention of a
divine artisan, and unlike the Modern philosophers and
scientists who undertook a polemic against teleology because
they feared admitting it would commit them to the existence
of a divine artisan, the Sankhya school, like Aristotle, takes
¯
teleology as a given. It no more feels a need to account for the
fact of teleology by appeal to a divine artisan than it feels a
need to account for something equally mysterious, namely, a
plurality of spirits or minds, by that same appeal.
Purposiveness is, then, simply a feature of prakrti, just as
consciousness is a feature of purusa. Neither of them can be
convincingly accounted for by appeal to something as
problematic as the intention of an omniscient creator since,
again, no rational motive can be assigned for his creative act.
The flowing of the milk from the cow to the calf is a
paradigm of this purposiveness. It occurs without any
intention from within on the part of the cow and without any
intention from without on the part of a god. The Sankhya
¯
school of orthodox thought was openly atheistic.
Sankhya is, as noted earlier, usually paired with Yoga in
¯
summaries of the orthodox views. There is more to Yoga than
the system of physical discipline and exercises familiar to us
in the West. Yoga employs the prakrti-purusa distinction, the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
distinction between nature and spirit that we find in Sankhya,
¯
and, like that school, regards this dualism as irreducible.
Unlike Sankhya, however, Yoga is theistic. However, it intro¯
¯
duces the concept of the Lord (Isvara) more as an object
of devotion than as a causal principle. The Lord can serve as
the focal point of mental concentration. So envisioned the
Lord is but one purusa among many, though unique in his
eternal freedom from illusion and perfect cognition.49 In
some respects he seems to function chiefly as an ideal to
approximate.
The remaining pair of orthodox schools is Nyaya¯
Vaisesika. Their concerns and investigations appear, at first
glance, at the greatest remove from the Veda. The best known
teaching of the Vaisesika school is atomism. More significant
is its attempt to categorize all that in any way can be said to
be. Though Vaisesika is at least nominally theistic, its attenuated theism is hardly central to the ontological investigations it undertakes, and the sincerity of its theistic
commitment was called into question by philosophers of
other Indian schools, both ancient and modern.50
The Nyaya school is interested in the question of how
¯
knowledge is possible. According to this school, knowledge
involves a knower, what is known, the means whereby
knowledge is attained, and the act of knowing. The means of
valid cognition that are admitted by the Nyaya school are
¯
perception, comparison, inference, and verbal testimony.
“Perception is that knowledge which arises from contact of a
sense with its object, and is determinate, un-nameable, and
unerring.”51 Perception is determinate in that its object is
present in clarity and distinctness, and it is unerring because
falsity occurs only in propositions. The argument that
perception is un-nameable is directed against the claim that
all cognition has a linguistic structure. A thing can be
perceived for which we do not yet have a name. And when
something we perceive has already been given a name, the
name is not a part of the perception proper. Communicating
the name of a thing to someone who has never perceived the
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33
thing does not, by itself, produce for him a perception of it.
And even when someone has at his disposal a name for
something he actually has perceived, calling up the name does
not produce a genuinely determinate perception of the
thing.52
The Nyaya school developed, independently of Aristotle,
¯
a theory of the syllogism and principles of reasoning. Rather
than three steps—major premise, minor premise,
conclusion—the Nyaya school distinguishes five steps in the
¯
syllogism, at least as it is employed in disputation. These are:
proposition, reason, example, application, and conclusion.53
They are ordered as follows, with the favored example.
1. The proposition to be established: Sound is noneternal. This step indicates that in disputation
reasoning is directed from the beginning toward a
conclusion that it intends to establish. The
conclusion rarely pops up as an unanticipated
proposition, resulting from the fortuitous
conjunction of a major premise with a minor,
which just happen to have a middle term in
common. Not that such things do not occur, but
they never or almost never occur in a formal
disputation.
2. The reason why the proposition is affirmed:
Because it is produced. In effect, this step is an
anticipatory relating of the major premise to the
minor.
3. An example founding what is, in effect, the
major premise: A dish, which is produced, is not
eternal, so—unless our opponent produces a
counter example at this point—we say that everything that is produced is non-eternal. If the
opponent cannot at this point name a counter
example invalidating the major premise, the latter
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
has to count as established and true.
4. The application or reaffirmation: Sound is
produced. This is, in effect, the assertion of the
minor premise on the heels of the major premise if
the latter has been established by the example, i.e.,
if the opponent was unable to produce a counter
example in the preceding step.
5. The conclusion: Sound is non-eternal. This
should, of course, be the same as the proposition
stated in the first step. It is nonetheless a separate
step in the inference. The first step announces the
project. The last step concludes it.
Comparison, or knowledge by analogy, the third means of
valid cognition admitted by the Nyaya school is “the
¯
knowledge of a [new] thing through its similarity to another
thing previously well known.” The fourth and last means of
valid cognition is verbal testimony.
There is clearly a decreasing reliability reflected in the
order in which the four means of valid cognition are listed.
Perception was said to be unerring. The same was not said for
inference, since there can be faulty inference, a problem
treated specifically in the Nyaya-Sutra. Comparison is
¯
obviously less reliable than inference, since the fact that two
things, one of them familiar and the other unfamiliar, have a
certain feature in common does not, by itself, justify the
inference that every feature the one has, the other has as well.
Just as inference needs to draw its examples from the more
reliable perception, so comparison needs to anchor itself in
the more reliable inference and perception. By implication
then, verbal testimony, the last mentioned means of valid
cognition, is the least reliable of the four. It is, as we say,
“hearsay.” It is a means of valid cognition in that it might be
true; but, then again, it might not be true. Some combination
of the other three means of valid cognition must be employed
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35
to determine whether the verbal testimony comes from a
reliable source rather than from a child, a lunatic, or an
impostor. And yet verbal testimony is the sole means for the
transmission of the Veda. Consequently, we can infer that the
Nyaya school regarded Vedic authority as less than fully
¯
reliable, except when buttressed by other, more reliable,
means of valid cognition.
This inference is supported, as we shall see, by the curious
example that the Nyaya-Sutra uses in its treatment of the
¯
syllogism, an example that recurs throughout this text: the
non-eternality of sound.54
6
Of the six schools that professed allegiance to Vedic tradition,
¯ ¯ ¯
Pu rva-Mi mamsa could appear to have been the least specula¯
tively adventuresome. Among other things, it did not accept
the Vedanta teaching that the phenomenal world is illusion.
¯
Things are pretty much the way they appear. Pu rva¯
¯ ¯ ¯
Mi mamsa affirmed a rather prosaic and sober, even tough
minded, realism—with one big exception. This school based
its argument for the authority of the Veda on its presumed
eternity. In accounting for the revelation of the Veda, the
¯ ¯
Mi mamsakas had argued that it was quite literally heard by
the sages of old. We today no longer hear the Veda because it
is covered by a veil, so to speak. Unlike the sages we lack the
discernment to hear through this veil. The Veda is a hidden
but nonetheless eternal sound. An eternal sound is
¯ ¯
conceivable, argues the Mi mamsaka, because sound is incorporeal. Being incorporeal, it is not subject to decay and dissolution.
¯ ¯ ¯
The prime concern of the Pu rva-Mi mamsa school, as the
¯
¯mamsa Su tra indicates, is the explication of
first line of the Mi ¯ ¯ ¯
dharma, i.e., right conduct or duty. The medium whereby
dharma is announced is sound (sabda), which construed as
¯
verbal testimony is a means of valid cognition. Now, an interesting principle of reasoning in formal disputation, as
¯ ¯ ¯
practiced and urged by the Pu rva-Mi mamsa school, is that
¯
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
any proposition advanced, and therefore any verbal
testimony, must count as true until and unless it can be shown
to be false.55 The only way verbal testimony can be shown to
be unreliable is if its author can be shown to be untrustworthy
or if the testimony is itself preposterous.
The first line of attack will not work if the Veda—in
particular, the sound of which it is constituted—is eternal.
For verbal testimony cannot have an untrustworthy author if
it has no author at all, either human or divine. Atheism is one
¯ ¯ ¯
of the tenets of Pu rva-Mi mamsa, not in spite of, but because
¯
of its, adherence to Vedic tradition. Its atheism is not
extracted from the Veda, but read off it, so to speak, as a kind
¯ ¯
of meta-atheism. The Mi mamsaka asks, with a perfectly
straight face, if the Veda were composed by a god, might he
not be inclined to exaggerate his accomplishments a little bit,
to lie, in fact? How can we rule that possibility out? The truth
of the Veda is most plausible on the assumption that it is
¯ ¯
eternal. And it can be eternal, so the Mi mamsaka argues, only
if it has no maker, that is, no author.
The second line of attack, trying to show that the
contents of the Veda are preposterous, will not work either.
¯ ¯ ¯
For example, the opponent of Pu rva-Mi mamsa asks, “How
¯
do you know that all this [the Veda] is not like the utterance
of lunatics and children? After all, we find in it such sentences
as ‘Trees sat the sacrificial session.’”56 To this objection the
¯ ¯
Mi mamsaka responds that all such sentences can be interpreted figuratively. This particular sentence is merely a poetic
way of indicating the centrality and solemnity of the
sacrificial session. The polytheism of the Veda can also be,
and in fact has to be, demythologized. Of greater concern are
the dharmic injunctions. There are statements about the fruits
of dharma that seem to be contradicted by facts. But they
cannot really be contradicted by the facts, for the fruits are all
future relative to the enjoined action. If promised fruit
follows shortly after the enjoined action, the truth of the
Vedic promise is confirmed. If it does not follow shortly after
the enjoined action, it will most assuredly follow later on.
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37
Reincarnation is invoked. If the fruits of enjoined actions do
not follow in this life, they will most assuredly follow in the
next life. But what of people who receive fruits in this life
that the Veda declares are consequent only to specifically
enjoined actions, which these same people say they never
performed? These people are wrong. They did perform these
actions, only not in this life but, rather, in a preceding life.
The Vedic promise is not contradicted.
In spite of such ingenious ways of interpreting Vedic
assertions that seem on the face of it not to be true, there is a
¯ ¯ ¯
marked tendency in Pu rva-Mi mamsa to downplay declar¯
ative statements in the Veda across the board and to
emphasize those that are prescriptive only. The basic concern
is always dharma, that is, what ought to be done. As such, a
Vedic injunction cannot be contradicted by anything that
sense perception or any other means of valid cognition might
determine about what exists. Put another way, the ought,
precisely because it is not derived from the is, cannot be
contradicted by the is. What might appear to be the weakness
¯ ¯ ¯
of the Pu rva-Mi mamsa position, namely the virtual
¯
detachment of the ought from the is, turns out to be its
strength.
But free floating dharmic injunctions presuppose at least
the declarative sentence that the Veda is eternal, and consequently that the sound, the sabda, that reveals these injunc¯
tions, is eternal. This claim is so odd, not to say weird, that
one is inclined to tone it down. Is it possible that the
sounding of the Veda is to be understood figuratively, perhaps
as a metaphor to indicate the eternal order of things having
come to expression in language proper? No. The sounding of
the Veda is not a metaphor. The Veda is literally sounding,
sounding and resounding eternally through the cosmos.
Indeed, the very letters that go to make up the verses in the
Veda have an eternal sound.57 Put together they constitute an
articulation that is more than just noise, and these articulate
sounds are those that one hears when the Veda is recited. The
recitation that we hear only manifests a sound that is already
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
and always there. The word and the utterance manifesting it
are, we are told, analogous to a pot and the lightening
manifesting it in an otherwise dark night.58 Just as the lightening does not cause the pot to come into being, so the
utterance does not cause the sound to come into being. The
lightening only manifests the pre-existent pot, and the
utterance only manifests the pre-existent sound, which in the
case of the Veda is the very sound of eternal truth that the
sages heard. The eternally sounding Veda is in a language.
That language—it will come as no surprise—is Sanskrit. We
can perhaps see more clearly now why it was critical to freeze
the development of the Sanskrit language, particularly its
sound, early on. In any case, however strange we may find the
notion of an unmanifest eternal sound, however much of an
exception it is to everything we experience in the production
¯ ¯
of sound, the Mi mamsaka makes his point: “Prove, without
begging the question, that the Veda is not eternally
resounding throughout the universe. That you cannot hear it
is a trivial fact that does not contribute materially to the proof
you need.”
The counter-argument for the non-eternity of sound, in
the example that the Nyaya school appears at first glance to
¯
have taken out of nowhere simply to illustrate its syllogistic
theory, is directed quite obviously against the teaching of the
¯ ¯ ¯
Pu rva-Mi mamsa school. But, more strikingly, this counter¯
argument is directed against the very concept of sruti, of
“what is heard,” construed as an eternal foundation of sacred
¯
tradition.59 According to the Nyaya school, it is not sufficient
to say that sound is eternal simply because of its incorporeality. On the basis of perception and reasoning, i.e., on the
basis of experience, we know sound to be produced. At least,
we have no experience of an unproduced sound. From the
perspective of the Nyaya school, an admission of the possi¯
bility of an unproduced sound would be something like an
admission of the possibility of miracles, which are by
definition wondrous occurrences that are exceptions to the
regularity and continuity of experience. Indeed, sabda, i.e.,
¯
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39
¯ ¯ ¯
verbal testimony, as understood by Pu rva-Mi mamsa, would
¯
seem to be the miracle, the miracle par excellence, one might
say. The possibility of such a thing would not only undermine
the authority of sense perception and reasoning, it would
undercut the possibility of there being any thing like nature
in the strict sense of the word. To this concern the
¯ ¯
Mi mamsaka would respond that the Veda, though wondrous
indeed, even miraculous, is not an exception to anything. It is
an eternal miracle. The Veda is the norm. Precisely because it
is eternal it cannot be construed as an interruption to the
regularity and continuity of experience.
There was a sustained controversy between the Pu rva¯
¯ ¯ ¯
Mi mamsa and the Nyaya schools on the character of Vedic
¯
authority, turning on this very issue of the eternity of sound.
In the controversy, the primacy and timeless validity of Vedic
revelation, advanced by the putatively ultra-orthodox Pu rva¯
¯ ¯ ¯
Mi mamsa school, takes the form of an argument against the
existence of a creator God and for the eternity of the world,
precisely so the Veda can be understood to be uncreated and
its authority unqualified. The counter-argument for the
temporal character of Vedic revelation, and its subordination
to sense perception and reasoning, advanced by the epistemologically oriented Nyaya school, takes the form of an
¯
argument for a creator God and against the eternity of the
world, precisely so that the Veda can be understood to be
created and its authority qualified. If we are right in our
contention that the root of the Naiyayika denial of an eternal
¯
sound is, in effect, a denial of miracles, then it has to count
as a capital irony, at least from the Western point of view, that
this denial had to be supported by an argument for the
existence of a creator God.
The depreciation of Vedic authority, and thereby of Vedic
tradition, in the orthodox Nyaya school is not announced
¯
with trumpets. It can be discerned in the choice of a wry
example adduced ostensibly just to clarify a simple logical
distinction.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
That word is called “too generic” which, while
applying to the thing desired to be spoken of overreaches it. For example, the brahmin-hood [i.e.,
¯
the priestly caste that transmits the Vedic
tradition]—which is denoted by the term
“brahmin”—is sometimes found to be concomitant
¯
with “learning and character” and sometimes
found to over-reach it, i.e., not be concomitant
with it….60
Nyaya was not the only orthodox school to call into
¯
question, however so delicately, the authority of Vedic
tradition. The Sankhya-karika begins with a discussion of the
¯
¯ ¯
various kinds of pain and how they can best be removed.
Among pains are mental pains, of which several are
mentioned, two of them being fear and “the non-perception
of particular objects.” The text addresses this matter bluntly.
The revealed (or scriptural - ¯nusravikas) means
a
[of removing pain] is like the perceptible: it is
verily linked with impurity, destruction, and excess
(atisaya); different in form and superior thereto is
that means derived from the discriminative
knowledge of the manifest, the unmanifest, and
the knower [i.e., the discriminative knowledge
touted by the Sankhya school].
¯
The appended commentary explicates this text as follows.
The means of removing pain, consisting in the
direct discriminative knowledge of the intellect
(purusa) as apart from matter, is contrary to Vedic
means and hence is better. The Vedic remedy is
good inasmuch as it is authorized by the Veda and
as such is capable of removing pain to a certain
extent; the discriminative knowledge of the
intellect as distinct from matter is also good; and
of these two, the latter is better, superior.61
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41
Vedic testimony is recognized by the Sankhya school and by
¯
every other orthodox school (astika-darsana) as a means of
¯
valid cognition. Indeed this recognition is what stamps a
school as having an orthodox teaching (astika-mata). But
¯
¯ ¯ ¯
except in the case of Pu rva-Mi mamsa, and to a lesser extent
¯
Vedanta, the authority of Vedic testimony is tightly circum¯
scribed. We are told shortly after the passage just cited that
Vedic testimony is limited to what cannot be controverted by
the other means of valid cognition (perception and inference
for the Sankhya school) and to what is not accessible to them.
¯
This formulation could appear to be only the flip side of the
¯ ¯ ¯
Pu rva-Mi mamsa principle that any proposition advanced in
¯
disputation has to count as true until refuted. But in the
Sankhya teaching it is not clear what is left over as the specific
¯
matter for Vedic authority. For, in the passage just quoted, the
Sankhya school’s superior knowledge of the manifest (vyakta)
¯
and the unmanifest (avyakta) is explicitly contrasted with
Vedic testimony, to the disadvantage of the latter. Even
concerning the unmanifest,62 then, the “discriminative
knowledge of the intellect” advocated by the unabashedly
atheistic Sankhya school is superior to Vedic authority, to
¯
which this school nonetheless concedes a measure of ambiguously defined validity.
My earlier remarks on Sankara, arguably the greatest
philosopher India has produced, might have seemed unduly
meager. Sankara wrote near the beginning of the eighth
century A.D., and so his teaching is somewhat off topic in an
introductory account of the origin of philosophy in ancient
India. Moreover, it is not possible to present an adequate
summary of his complex, ingenious, and extended elaboration of Upanisadic monism in a few paragraphs. One issue,
though, is of particular relevance in the present context.
Sankara speaks both of an impersonal brahman, which, just as
in the Upanisads, is identical with one’s own innermost self
(atman), and of a personal lord (or governor - ¯svara), who
¯
i
qua lord would have to differ from one’s self. Or so it would
seem. One way of managing this two-fold interpretation of
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
42
the highest principle is to say that Isvara is simply the way
brahman is experienced under the conditions of illusion,
which after all is the illusion of multiplicity and otherness.
Devotion to Isvara has the salutary effect of elevating the
mind above preoccupation with worldly worries and desires,
which are mistaken for the self—a confusion of empirical ego
with transcendental ego, a Kantian might say. Detachment
from worldly concerns, which devotion to Isvara helps effect,
is a necessary condition for realizing the identity of brahman
and ¯tman, and, concomitantly, for enlightened recognition
a
of the illusoriness of all multiplicity and otherness, including
not only the world but also any lord distinct from the self.
One might have expected Sankara to reserve the term
¯svara solely for contexts in which he is speaking of the world
i
as it appears and our efforts to penetrate through this veil to
what is fundamentally real. But such is not the case. Sankara
is disinclined to treat Isvara as illusory even when regarded
from the most privileged perspective of enlightenment.63
Accordingly, one could infer a commitment to theism on
Sankara’s part, given his virtual identification of Isvara and
brahman. But, then, the realization that, through this very
identification, Isvara also becomes identical with ¯tman could
a
as easily lead one to the opposite inference. It should be
remembered that, for Sankara, Isvara is the material cause of
the phenomenal world as well as its efficient cause, a teaching
rejected by his more theistically oriented successors in
Vedanta. Moreover, in spite of using Isvara and brahman
¯
more or less interchangeably, Sankara explicitly teaches that
¯
the Lord’s lord-ness (i svaratva), presumably his lordship over
the world and over man within it, is ultimately illusory. And
in the sentence, “[H]e who, having been led to be brahman,
is consecrated to sovereignty does not wish to bow to
anybody,” Sankara the philosopher momentarily removes his
mask.64
7
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43
In the Arthasastra of Kautilya (c. 300 B.C.), whose description
¯
of the duties pertaining to the four castes I cited earlier, we
find a limiting of Vedic authority similar to what we have seen
in some of the other orthodox schools. After describing the
contents of his treatise in the first chapter, which is primarily
on politics, Kautilya devotes the second chapter to an
enumeration of the sciences (vidyas). The four sciences are
¯
¯ksiki or analytics, the Veda, economics, and the science
¯
¯nvi
a
of politics. The first science mentioned is the science of
¯
reasoning. Since ¯nvi ksiki is listed as a science, and not just a
a ¯
means of valid cognition, it would seem to have, like the
other three enumerated sciences, a subject matter of its own.
For this reason it has occasionally been translated as
“philosophy.” But we shall use the more precise translation of
“analytics,” understood as the science of reasoning.65 Shortly
after his enumeration of the four sciences, Kautilya quotes
Brhaspati, whom he does not specify as the founder of the
heterodox Lokayata school. “Vedic lore is only a cloak
¯
(samvarana) for one conversant with the ways of the world
(lokayatravid).”66 Kautilya himself takes exception to this
¯ ¯
Lokayata reduction and includes Vedic lore within his
¯
enumeration of the sciences, giving as his reason “since with
the help [of these four sciences] one can learn dharma and
material well being.” He then proceeds immediately to a
discussion of analytics, explicitly citing the Lokayata school
¯
or system as one instance of it.
Sankhya, Yoga, and Lokayata—these constitute
¯
¯
analytics. Investigating by means of analytics
dharma-and-non-dharma [dharmadharmau - a
¯
Sanskrit copulative compound] in Vedic lore,
material gain and loss in economics, good policy
and bad policy in the science of politics, as well as
the relative strength-and-weakness [balabalau ¯
copulative compound] of these [three sciences],
analytics confers benefit on the people, keeps the
mind steady in adversity and in prosperity, and
brings about proficiency in thought, speech and
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
action. Analytics is ever thought as the lamp of all
sciences, the means of all actions, and the support
of all dharma.67
This passage is interesting for several reasons. In the first
place, Kautilya includes Lokayata, along with Sankhya and
¯
¯
Yoga, as part of analytics, in spite of the fact that he has just
quoted Brhaspati, the founder of this school, as limiting
science to economics and politics. Kautilya evidently thinks
that at least some of the claims of Lokayata can be appro¯
priated by his own ostensibly orthodox account, which
includes a defense, of sorts, of the very tradition that was
excoriated and mocked by this arch-heretical school.
Moreover, according to the passage under consideration,
analytics is autonomous. As in Western philosophy, reason is
subject only to its own laws. It is analytics that determines the
scope of dharma in Vedic lore, this latter being apparently less
than fully coherent or sound in its own proper realm. Even
more strikingly, analytics investigates both the strength and
the weakness of Vedic lore. One can hardly imagine a similar
formulation of the relation of reason to revelation by a pious
Jew, Christian, or Muslim.68 Nor can one imagine any
orthodox believer saying that it is reasoning, and not sacred
scripture or holy tradition, that brings about proficiency in
thought (including belief?), speech (including prayer?), and
action (including the performance of sacrifices?).69 Most
interestingly of all, in the final clause of passage, which is the
final clause of the chapter, Kautilya assigns to analytics, rather
than to Vedic lore, the “support of all dharma.”
This mystifying conclusion is clarified in the chapter that
immediately follows, the scope of which is limited to what
Kautilya wishes to say about Vedic lore itself. Since he has
said that analytics is the “support of all dharma” we expect
him to employ reasoning, and not just an appeal to authority,
in making his case for why Vedic lore is beneficial. This
expectation is not disappointed. After a preliminary listing of
the Vedas by name and the topics they include, Kautilya says
in the third sentence of the chapter:
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45
The dharma laid down in this Vedic lore is
beneficial, as it prescribes the special duties
(svadharma) of the four castes (varnas) and the
four stages of life.
This sentence, the first substantive sentence in the chapter,
must be read as an expression of analytics, of the science of
reasoning, in the thought of Kautilya himself, and aimed at
clarifying the relative strength of Vedic lore in the “support of
all dharma.” The sentence gives the reason for why Vedic lore
is beneficial: it prescribes the duties of the four castes and the
four stages of life. This reason is meant to be accessible not
just to the orthodox but to anyone reading the treatise,
including adherents of the anti-Vedic Lokayata school, who,
¯
Kautilya implies, should have known better.70
8
We are now in a position, at last, to see what exactly constitutes orthodoxy in those schools and thinkers who
acknowledge the authority of the Veda while nonetheless
subordinating Vedic lore as a “means of valid cognition” to
perception and reasoning, that is, to powers possessed by
man as man, powers that are independent of the hearsay of
unknown sages living in the remote past. The break with
Vedic tradition occurred with the emergence of the three
heterodox schools of Buddhism, Jainism, and Lokayata.
¯
Although the first two of these are typically classified as
religions, all three of them are atheistic, the last one exuberantly so. Of the six orthodox schools that formed within early
¯ ¯ ¯
Hinduism, Sankhya is atheistic and so is Pu rva-Mi mamsa.
¯
¯
Nyaya is theistic, though, as we have seen, its theology is
¯
advanced at least in part as a counter to the excessive claims
¯ ¯ ¯
for Vedic authority made by the Pu rva-Mi mamsa school.
¯
Vaisesika adopts the theology of the Nyaya school, though
¯
theism is even more tangential to the atomism of the former
than it is to the logicism of the latter.71 Vedanta, taking its
¯
bearings from the Upanisads, emphasizes the identity of the
self with brahman and the ultimate oneness of all things, and
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Sankara’s Advaita-Vedanta, in particular, has no room for
¯
God in anything remotely resembling the Biblical sense.72
Yoga alone is unambiguously theistic, though Isvara serves
there more as an object of devotion and mental focusing than
as a causal principle per se. Still, the adherents of all six of
these schools, and the independent, no-nonsense political
realist Kautilya as well, concede at least some authority to the
Veda, with exactly how much varying from school to school
and from individual to individual. It is by virtue of this
concession that these thinkers understand themselves to be
situated within the Vedic tradition, however daring their
speculative ventures.
But why do these thinkers bother to concede any
authority at all to the Veda? Kautilya tells us why, and he tells
us as clear as day, in the passage from the Arthasastra we just
¯
considered: the Veda is beneficial. It is beneficial because it
prescribes the duties of the stages of life and of the four
castes.73 But the stages of life are subsumed under the caste
system, since they pertain only to the top three castes. Who,
then, we are led to ask, benefits from the caste system?
Kautilya’s explicit answer is that the whole people benefit.74
The more pertinent answer, which he leaves us to infer, is that
the life of free inquiry, exhibited even in the most orthodox
of these so-called orthodox schools, itself benefits from the
caste system. We noted that economic circumstances, not just
in ancient India but in the ancient world in general, simply
could not support an egalitarian social order. Whatever its
injustices and to whatever abuses it led, the rule of dharma,
of which the hierarchy of castes was much the most
conspicuous embodiment, permitted the leisure and
mandated the literacy without which philosophy could not
emerge. And it permitted surprisingly candid depreciation of
the authority of sacred tradition. The interpreters of dharma
and of sacred tradition in general, namely, the members of the
brahmin caste, enjoyed an unparalleled freedom of specu¯
lation. Within the orthodox schools of speculative thought
we see monism, dualism, an attenuated monotheism, and
CAREY
47
¯
atheism, with a deity or lord (i svara) forcefully denied,
simply ignored, identified with the self, and construed as
distinct from the self as part of a technique for disengaging
the mind from worldly concerns; arguments for the necessity
of creation and arguments against the possibility of creation;
ontological categorization of different kinds of entities;
logical and epistemological investigations; inquiries into the
material constitution of the world with cases being made for
and against an irreducible atomism; idealist and realist
accounts of the phenomenal world; and, with surprising
frequency, a distinct ranking of the authority of sacred
tradition below reasoning and ordinary perception, which is
a giant step toward dismissing the possibility of miracles out
of hand. And this broad range of speculation can be found
within the sphere of what passed for orthodoxy.
Now, although most brahmins may well have accepted in
¯
complete sincerity the whole of Vedic lore, at least to the
extent that it formed a whole, it is virtually certain, I think,
that more than a few paid only lip service to it. Of these,
some may have insisted on the authority of the Veda because
of the social privileges accorded them by the caste system it
mandated (though it should be noted that the brahmins were
¯
themselves subject to a variety of strictures, social and
otherwise). But it is highly likely that some brahmins upheld
¯
this authority solely because of the intellectual freedom it
granted them. They appealed, in a tour de force of resourcefulness, to religious authority in support of a social order that
uniquely guaranteed the possibility of unimpeded questioning
and inquiry.75 To repeat, the brahmins were not subject to any
¯
authority other than that of the king. And the king, who came
from the warrior caste and not from the brahmin caste, did
¯
not have the authority to teach the Veda. He was not in a
position, then, to compel the brahmins to toe a more conser¯
vative line in their speculations and queries. Furthermore,
there was no ecclesiastical structure, and there were no
creeds.76 The way to whatever wisdom is naturally available
to man was, for the brahmins, wide open.
¯
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Some of the most astute scholars of the tradition of speculative thought in ancient India have admitted that they find
the adherence of the orthodox schools to Vedic authority
inscrutable, given the sophistication and independence of
their views on the question of ultimate origins and on the
question of Vedic authority itself. It is remarked, with
something amounting to dismay, that the logical, physical,
and (with a few exceptions) even metaphysical speculations in
these schools are not supported by appeal to Vedic lore but by
appeal to reasoning and ordinary experience.77 The express
adherence of the orthodox schools to Vedic authority is often
put down to a thoughtless cultural bias, as though it never
occurred to the orthodox thinkers that the caste system might
be mere artifice and convention, in spite of the fact that the
heterodox schools, whose emergence provoked the orthodox
response, had taught precisely that.
9
It has been claimed that philosophy originates with the
discovery of nature, more particularly with the discovery of
the difference between nature and convention, nature being
an intrinsic governing principle inherent in the world, as
distinct from an extrinsic governing principle, i.e. a creatorGod, transcendent to the world. We saw earlier that the
concept of prakrti, particularly as developed in the orthodox
Sankhya school as a teleological, though unconscious,
¯
intrinsic governing principle, corresponds in large measure to
the Greek concept of physis. Another close correspondence is
found in the concept of svabhava, which, I noted, can be
¯
translated as “own being” or “own nature.” Lokayata
¯
contrasts svabhava directly with unseen causes and indirectly
¯
with Vedic injunctions, both ethical and ritual, that is, with
convention.
That the uncaused nature of things, their own being,
could emerge in explicit connection with a critique of
convention in the heterodox Lokayata school should, then,
¯
come as no great surprise. That nature did not emerge in
CAREY
49
explicit connection with a critique of convention in the
orthodox schools, even the most venturesome of them,
should also come as no great surprise. The precarious state of
svadharma prevented nature from being opposed to
convention within the orthodox tradition. But for this reason
a theme conspicuously present in Western philosophy is
conspicuously absent in Indian philosophy. Although the
nature of consciousness, mind, and intellect are central
questions, the question of man as such does not receive much
of an investigation. The reason for this otherwise
unaccountable omission is that even before the question is
asked the answer is given, appalling in its starkness. Man as
such is the caste animal.
But how, the student of Western philosophy will ask,
could genuinely philosophical natures endure the injustice of
such a system? To this question a sophisticated brahmin might
¯
respond, “It was precisely the passion for justice, coupled
with the attempt to elevate the fundamental principle of
reality, brahman, above all concern with justice, that led to
the doctrine of karma: one gets exactly what one deserves,
without any assistance from on high. One’s present caste
standing is determined by the moral quality of one’s past
deeds, just as one’s future caste standing is determined by the
moral quality of one’s present deeds. What’s that, if not
justice?” But it’s just a myth. “True, but it’s a salutary myth.
After all, isn’t it one of the discoveries made by philosophy
itself that all political communities have, and must have, their
myths, their noble lies, about justice?” You’re right of course,
but…. “And while we’re at it,” our sophisticated brahmin
¯
might continue, “let us not forget that the philosopher as
philosopher, in the West no less than in India, necessarily
gives wisdom a higher place than morality in his scheme of
things. What business does a philosopher have being
indignant?” (Profound silence.)
Seen in the above light, the ethical order of law and duty,
of dharma, supported by Vedic tradition, simply could not be
taught in the orthodox schools to be merely conventional, to
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
be only one way among others, to be “just our way.” The
thinkers in these schools taught, quite understandably, that
Vedic dharma was the right way simply. But it is likely that the
more speculatively bold among them upheld Vedic dharma
solely for the reasons mentioned earlier. At any rate, it is
incontestable that, by institutionalizing a system in which
status and power were vested in different castes, a system in
which learning was the sine qua non for the higher if less
politically powerful, though nonetheless independent, caste,
the Veda, as interpreted by the brahmins, also institution¯
alized the possibility of speculative boldness, or philosophy.78
Still, one might object, is not the knowledge that this socalled speculative boldness aims at merely a means to
something else, namely liberation? And is not knowledge, as
an end in itself, the goal of philosophy properly understood?
There is a twofold response to this question. In the first place,
it is by no means clear that knowledge is conceived by all, or
even by the greatest, Western philosophers as an end in itself
simply. They might say that the end in itself, at least for
human beings, is happiness. If knowledge contributed not to
the happiness of the knower but to his unhappiness,
philosophy as a way of life could hardly be defended except
in moral terms. And a moral defense of philosophy would
hardly be congenial to philosophy, at least not as I have
narrowly defined it.79
In the second place, though knowledge in Indian
philosophy is indeed in the service of liberation, liberation is
not first and foremost liberation from successive reincarnations. It is, first and foremost, liberation from illusion, i.e.,
liberation from ignorance. Certainly a demythologized
concept of liberation would have occurred to those orthodox
thinkers whose allegiance to the Veda was mainly prudential.
In any case, knowledge, and neither mere belief nor moral
action and dutiful fulfillment of Vedic ritual injunctions, was
in several of the orthodox schools held to be the sole path to
liberation. More precisely, knowledge was held to be both the
necessary and the sufficient condition for liberation, or to be
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51
liberation simply. Knowledge for its own sake, knowledge as
an end in itself, then, cannot be regarded as a specific feature
of philosophy in the West in contradistinction to philosophy
in ancient India.
One of the curiosities of the Indian speculative tradition
was its tendency to become more, not less, theistic with the
passage of time. One cannot help but suspect that the
growing theistic orientation was occasioned in part by
external developments, especially by contact with Islam
following the Muslim conquest and with Christianity during
the British raj. A number of articulate and well known Indian
thinkers of the last two centuries, apparently construing
themselves as something like good will ambassadors to the
West, have offered popularized accounts of Indian speculative
thought that have exaggerated the affinities between Vedic
tradition, including the philosophical tradition, and the
revealed religions of the West, particularly Christianity. At the
other end, Westerners in search of an alternative religious
experience, free from the scrutiny of a judgmental God, have
claimed to find in Hinduism a less guilt-ridden spirituality,
one that is less dogmatically divisive and more accepting of
people for what they are.80 All this has led to the familiar
picture of Indian thought as almost uniformly mystical and
intuitive, a caricature that a number of scholars, Western and
Indian, have taken pains to correct.81 Students of the rationalist tradition of the West, from Parmenides through
Thomas Aquinas right on up to Husserl, as well as students
restricting their attention to the contemporary analytic scene,
are not inclined to regard what strikes them on first hearing
as an amorphous mix of meditation and compassion as a
substitute for thought. Few of them are aware that the ideal
of rational autonomy, to which they themselves are
committed, shaped the life of the mind in ancient India as
well.
The study of Indian philosophy provides an important
perspective on Western philosophy, a perspective from which
Western philosophy can be viewed from without but not from
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
above, and as an alternative rather than an opponent. In
particular, the study of Indian philosophy sheds unexpected
but welcome light on a theme dear to Western philosophers,
namely, the choiceworthiness of the philosophic life itself. In
the West the great antagonist to philosophy has been revealed
religion. The truth-seeking philosopher cannot be indifferent
to the possibility that the Truth might choose to reveal itself,
or rather himself, to man. For such revelation, undertaken at
the initiative of the divine and eclipsing in significance everything man could find out about ultimate principles on his
own, would render the achievements of philosophy paltry, to
say the least. Not surprisingly, then, Western philosophy has
invested a lot of energy in trying to rule out this possibility,
so much so that, viewed from the outside, it can appear to be
more interested in convincing itself of the rightness of its own
way than in apprehending ultimate principles and ontological
truth. Indian philosophy, on the other hand, devotes little
attention to justifying itself. It has no comparably great antagonist. For Vedic religion, as interpreted in the various schools
of orthodox speculation, is, as I have tried to show, not a
religion of revelation, at least not in the Biblical sense. The
existence of the divine, or the closest thing there is to the
divine, namely brahman, does not imply limitations on what
man can achieve in the way of knowing ultimate principles
and ontological truth on his own. Quite the contrary. Of
course, the Western philosopher might say that it is not just
the possibility of revelation, of a disclosure undertaken at the
initiative of the divine, that is worrisome to philosophy. Quite
apart from the special problem of election that is part and
parcel of the concept of revelation, the possibility that there
is a being who, right now, possesses the very wisdom that the
philosopher does not possess, but only loves, is humbling. To
this concern the Indian philosopher would respond that it
needn’t be regarded that way at all. Certainly not, if ¯tman is
a
indeed brahman, not just later on in some kind of misty
hereafter but here and now. He would attempt to reassure his
Western counterpart on this point: “That art thou.” It is just
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53
a matter of realizing this fundamental and ultimate truth, he
would add. And he would ask what experience the Western
philosopher has had that causes him to persist in doing battle
against an opponent so immature and unworthy of serious
consideration as is Biblical religion.
I shall not venture to suggest an answer to this question
on behalf of the Western philosopher82 The primary purpose
of this paper has been to argue that philosophy, even
according to its most austere conception as rational atheism,
did in fact emerge in ancient India.83 After all, if philosophy
is natural to man, if it is not just the dispensation of an
inscrutable historical fate, then one would expect it to have
emerged, given enough time, wherever it was not impeded.
The impediments to the emergence of philosophy are absence
of letters, absence of leisure, and the presence of a religious
or political authority hostile to unfettered speculation about
the whole, its essential constitution and its ultimate
foundation. These impediments were not operative in the
speculative tradition of ancient India. It would be surprising,
then, if philosophy had not emerged there, assuming that
historicism is wrong and that the classical Western philosophers were correct in their assessment that philosophy is
natural, that it is a permanent possibility coeval with man.
Notes
1
I have adopted the current Romanization convention for Sanskrit terms,
with one exception: I have rendered anusvara prior to labials with an
¯
“m,” but in all other cases with an “n.”
2
Rg Veda 10.129 in A Source Book in Indian Philosophy, ed. Sarvepalli
Radhakrishnan and Charles A. Moore (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1957), 23. Hereafter cited as Sourcebook. (In the interests of
greater literalness and consistency, I have modified some of the translations from this text and from others that I cite. I have entirely retranslated certain passages.) Compare 10.121 (24-25). On the original relation
¯¯
of being and non-being, see Bhagavad Gi ta (ed. and trans.Winthrop
Sargeant (Garden City, NY: Doubleday), 9.19; 11.37; and especially
13.12: the “beginningless” (anadimat), which is neither being nor non¯
¯¯
being, is identified with brahman. Compare also Bhagavad Gi ta 2.16.
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3
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Ibid. 8.89.34 (Sourcebook, 34). Compare 10.121 (24-25).
4
Rg Veda 2.12.5 in The Rig Veda: An Anthology, ed. and trans. Wendy
Doniger O’Flaherty (London: Penguin, 1981), 161.
5 See, for example, 1.164.6 (Sourcebook, 21) and 10.114.5, quoted in
The Vedic Experience—An Anthology of the Vedas, ed. and trans.
Raimundo Panikkar (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 660.
6
Vedic religion gradually turned into Hinduism. Although a distinction
can be made between them, I shall, in the interests of simplicity, treat
them as earlier and later stages of one evolving phenomenon.
7
It is sometimes said that the original fourfold division should be understood as a division into classes, and that only the polymorphous divisions
that subsequently emerged should count as caste divisions. This
distinction, however, cannot be insisted upon. The bewildering multiplicity of castes that came into being later on appears to have emerged
¯¯
out of the forbidden mixing of the original four. See Bhagavad Gi ta 1.4044 and Laws of Manu 7.24, 8.352-353, 8.418 (Sourcebook, 186,177,
187). There was also a certain overlap in the usage of the terms “class”
(varna) and “caste” (jati) in the so-called “Epic” period of ancient India.
¯
See Wilhelm Halbfass, Tradition and Reflection (Albany: SUNY Press,
1991), 350-53. The term “caste” has the advantage over “class” of
naming not merely a group into which one happens to be born, but, due
to karmic causality, the group into which one deserves to be reborn. “The
problem of a potential injustice of such exclusion [of the su dra, or
¯
servant, from the Vedic ceremonies of initiation] is…easily resolved by
referring to the doctrine of karma and rebirth, which explains and
justifies the current caste status and allows for a future ascent to higher
stages” (Ibid. 72; cf. 349. See Chandogya Upanisad 5.10.7; Manu 9.335,
¯
12.9 in Sourcebook, 66-67, 188, 173). Louis Dumont, in his important
and controversial study, Homo Hierarchicus (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980), refers to this karmic justification of caste (359, n.
25g.), but he can hardly be said to give it proper emphasis, although it
supports his claim that hierarchy is an essentially religious concept (6566). Dumont himself tries to limit the term “castes” to the later development and uses “classes” to name the original distinction. But in the
original distinction we also find the separation of status from power that
Dumont rightly insists is constitutive of Indian society, ancient and
modern, a separation that is not readily suggested by the word “class.” In
this paper I use “caste” in referring to the original fourfold division. Since
it is only about this fourfold division that I shall be speaking, there should
be no confusion.
8
Brhadaranyaka Upanisad 4.5.15, in The Thirteen Principal Upanishads,
¯
2d rev. ed., trans. Robert Hume (Delhi: Oxford University Text, 1931),
147. The whole clause “sa eva neti netyatman” (with sandhi) is translated
¯
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55
by Hume as “That Soul is not this, it is not that,” which is fine except for
the fact that ¯tman is more literally rendered as “self ” than “soul.” The
a
Sanskrit text, moreover, does not distinguish between small and large case
letters. The demonstrative pronoun is presumably intended to distinguish
between the ¯tman, i.e., the genuine self in its purity, and the familiar
a
though spurious self that is absorbed, one might say, in maya.
¯ ¯
9
Brhadaranyaka Upanisad 1.4.10; Chandogya Upanisad 3.14.4; 8.7.4;
¯
¯
8.10.1; 8.11.1. These two Upanisads are of great antiquity. See also
Mandu kya Upanisad 2; Isa Upanisad 4-6, 15-16; and Mundaka Upanisad
¯ ¯
¯
2.1.2-4,10; 3.2.9. (These texts are all contained in The Thirteen Principal
Upanishads.) The threefold relationship of brahman, maya, and ¯tman
¯ ¯
a
forms something of a parallel to the threefold relationship of thing-initself, phenomena (the total complex of which is nature), and transcendental ego that one finds in the philosophy of Kant.
10
Chandogya Upanisad 6.9-13; 8.11.1: tat tvam asi.
¯
11
Nor should brahman be confused with brahmana, the name of a
¯
member of the priestly caste. To avoid confusion I shall adopt the
convention, employed in Sourcebook and other texts, of transliterating
the latter term as “brahmin.”
¯
12
In the West, philosophy has been concerned with validating itself as the
most choiceworthy way of life. It has been concerned in particular with
showing that the philosophical life is more choiceworthy than the life of
simple piety, that is, than the life of devotion and loving obedience to the
loving command of a providential God. The evidence closest at hand for
the existence of such a God is found in our moral experience. The moral
view of the world, which originates out of this experience, postulates
God as the ultimate author of the moral law, or as moral judge, or both.
A central project of Western philosophy, then, has been the critique of
morality, especially of such concepts as radical freedom of the will,
transcendent law, and dutiful obedience as the unconditioned condition
of the human good. There is no comparable critique of morality in
classical Indian philosophy. The reason is that in the Hindu religion, at
least in the sophisticated religion of the Upanisads, the divine is neither
the author of a moral law nor a moral judge, nor providential in any
sense recognizable in Biblical religion. The doctrine of impersonal karmic
causality lies entirely outside the theological problematic except insofar as
it supports an equally impersonal concept of the divine. See, for example
Sankhya-Pravacana Su tra 5.2. (Sourcebook, 450).
¯
¯
13
Rg Veda 10.90.11-12. Compare Brhadaranyaka Upanisad 1.4.10-15;
¯
¯¯
Bhagavad Gi ta 4.13; Manu 1.31.
14
Kautilya, Arthasastra, ed. and trans. R.P Kangle (Delhi: Motilal
¯
.
Banarsidass,1988), 2:1.3.4-7, hereafter cited as Arthasastra.
¯
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
15
The expression “twice-born” refers to the initiation (upanayana) or
investiture with the sacred thread that the members of the upper three
castes undergo. It is likened to a second birth.
16
Kautilya, 1.3.13.
17
Kautilya, 1.3.4-8. I shall use the general expression “the Veda” to refer
not only to the four Vedas but also to the appended treatises that were
accorded comparable authority in the tradition. Kangle makes the
following observation: “[A]ctually it is only in the Dharmasu tras, a
¯
branch of the Vedanga Kalpa, that the duties of the varnas [castes] and
¯
¯sramas [stages of life] are laid down in detail” (2:7). This fact may help
a
explain why su dras were not permitted even to study the Veda.
¯
18
See Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy (Glencoe, Ill: The Free
Press,1959), 37 and Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic
Books,1969), 11-12.
19
Arthasastra 1.4.11-15. On the separation of the political from the
¯
religious, see Dumont, 263-93. On the concept of danda as legitimate
force, see pp. 302-03, where Dumont quotes the following passage from
the Mahabhvrata: “if there was on earth no king bearing the stick of
¯
punishment, the stronger would roast the weaker as fishes on a spike.”
See also Manu 7.22. In this connection, it is worth noting that a rise in
caste status within a single life occasionally happened as a result of
political exigency, a state affairs expressed in the dry aphorism, “Whoever
rules is a ksatriya.” See A. L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India
(Calcutta: Rupa and Co., 1954), 92.
20
Arthasastra 1.7.
¯
21
There are other end goals, namely, right action (dharma), wealth
(artha), and pleasure (kama); but these end goals are subservient to liberation, which is, above all, liberation from ignorance.
22 Hume, in his translation of the Katha Upanisad (The Thirteen Principal
Upanishads) renders the second half of 4.2.1 (353) as “A certain wise
man, while seeking immortality, introspectively beheld the soul (Atman)
face to face.” The translation is marred by the inexplicable insertion of
the phrase “face to face,” which corresponds to nothing in the Sanskrit
text, at least as it appears in Eight Upanisads, (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama,
1989), 1:180. There the text reads, without sandhi, as follows: kas cit
¯
dhi ras pratyak ¯tmanam aiksat ¯vrttacaksuh amrttvam icchan.
a ¯
a
23
“Those who, even worshiping other divinities, sacrifice with faith
¯¯
(sraddha) sacrifice also to me,” Bhagavad Gi ta 9.23. Compare Exod.
34:14; Deut. 29:17; Ps. 96:5; John 4:22; 1 Cor.1:20.
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57
24
The Sanskrit verbal radical “vid-” means “know,” not “see.” The root
sense of “veda” does not refer to sight, though this sense is present in the
Greek “eidos” and “idea” (which were originally preceded by a digamma
having the sound of an English “w”) and also in the closely related Latin
“video” and English “vision.” All these words are conjectured to have
derived from the Indo-European root “weid-”, which itself may not have
referred exclusively to sight. Two conjectured derivatives of “weid-” in
English that do not refer exclusively to sight are “guide” and “wit.” Cf.
Calvert Watkins, The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo European
Roots (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), 74.
25
There is nothing in Hinduism, at least in the sophisticated Upanisadic
tradition, that is comparable to, say, God’s election of Abraham.
26
Cf. W Halbfass, India and Europe (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), 29.
.
27
It should go without saying that faith (sraddha), particularly in the
¯
carrying out of ritual performances, and devotion (bhakti) are central to
religious Hinduism, however marginal they may be in this or that speculative school. Such concepts are not absent from the Upanisads.
Occasionally, however, what at first glance seems like an unqualified
theism turns out, on close inspection, to be quite different. See, for
example, Katha 1.2.23. There the self (atman) that reveals (or discloses,
¯
vivrnute) its own (or its own character, svam) is not exactly “a thou”
¯
since it is ultimately the same as the self that is seeking it. Hume (The
Thirteen Principal Upanishads, 350) divines “the first explicit statement of
the doctrine of Grace (prasada)” just a little earlier in this section, at
¯
1.2.20. To his credit, however, he notes that prasada can also mean
¯
tranquility, that it unquestionably has this meaning in other Upanisadic
passages that he cites, and that the greatest commentator on the
Upanisads, namely, Sankara takes the term to mean precisely tranquility,
and not grace. See Eight Upanisads: With the Commentary of
¯¯
Sankaracarya, trans. Swami Gambhi rananda, (Calcutta: Motilal
¯¯
¯ ¯
Banarsidass, 1989) 1:153-54. That prasada, in the philosophical tradition
¯
at least, presupposes advance preparation and discernment (not to
mention merit) on the part of the recipient, if that’s even the word for it,
further distinguishes this notion from the Biblical conception of grace.
28
See, for example, Rg Veda 7.103; 9.112; 10.86.
29
¯
Vigrahavyavartani , Sections 21-24.
¯
30
“The worship of the Buddha is merely an act of commemoration. The
popular gods were introduced into Buddhism in its more religious form
to serve as objects for meditation,” Sourcebook, 273. Sokyo Ono, in
Shinto: The Kami Way (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1962), gives the
following account of the adjustment that, after an initial period of
conflict, allowed for the peaceful coexistence of Shinto, which is the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
native religion of Japan, and Buddhism, which had been imported from
without. “[I]n the eighth century a compromise was reached which
resulted in the teaching that the kami [Shinto gods] were pleased to
receive Buddhist sutras as offerings and to hear them recited in worship.
As a consequence, Buddhist temples were established alongside shrines,
ostensibly to satisfy the kami, make them into Buddhist believers, and
finally raise them to the level of buddhas” (85-86). One wonders if the
Shinto gods, in coming to recognize their own insubstantiality, were
supposed to have converted to atheism.
31
Excerpted from the Sarvadarsanasangraha in Sourcebook, 233-34. I
have added some commentary within brackets, in this text and in the
next one cited, to bring into sharper relief the central claims of this
school.
32
W Halbfass speaks of the “intriguing etymological kinship” of the
.
Sanskrit bhu with the Greek phy- from the Greek word for nature,
¯
physis, is formed. On Being and What there Is: Classical Vaisesika and the
History of Indian Ontology (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 21-22. On the
Indo-European root bheu-, see Watkins, p. 8, and the table of sound
correspondences on p. 111. In the first passage that I quoted from the Rg
Veda, the word I translated as “own determination,” which can also mean
spontaneity, namely svadha, includes the component sva, as does
¯
¯¯
svabhava. Note the use of svabhava in Bhagavad Gi ta 5.14; compare with
¯
¯
sambhavami, “I originate myself.” in 4.6.
¯
33
Sourcebook, 248.
34
Sarvasiddhatsangraha, in Sourcebook, 234-35. I commented on some of
¯
these passages in my article, “On the Discovery of Nature,” The St. John’s
Review, 46/1, (2000): 127-28, 141.
¯¯
See, for example, Baghavad Gi ta 16.8, and compare 18.71. One
occasionally comes across materialist speculation even in the sruti, the
most venerable sources of Vedic tradition. See, for example,
Brhadaranyaka Upanisad 2.4.12; compare Chandogya Upanisad 8.7-8
¯
¯
35
36
A close equivalent in the West can be found in the Summa Theologiae
of Thomas Aquinas, the articles of which commence with a statement of
objections to the thesis being proposed, followed by a quotation from
authority, often but not always scriptural, and, after this, a comprehensive
argument in favor of the thesis, typically without appeal to authority, and,
in conclusion, responses to the objections seriatim.
37 Rg Veda 10.125. The dividing up of speech by the gods, referred to in
the third verse of this hymn, reminds one of the dismemberment of the
purusa in Rg Veda 10.90.
CAREY
59
¯
Brahma-Su tras 2.1.33 in Brahma-Su tra-Bhasya of Sri Sankaracarya,
¯
¯
¯
¯¯
trans. Swami Gambhirananda, (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1983).
38
¯
Brhadaranyaka Upanisad 2.4.5. See Brahma-Su tra-Bhasya of Sri
¯
¯
¯
Sankaracarya, 360.
¯¯
39
40
“The Discovery of Nature,” 122 ff.
41
Physics 199b31.
42
That philosophy may have emerged more naturally where IndoEuropean languages were spoken would hardly prove that the emergence
of philosophy was an accident of linguistics. After all, it is at least
thinkable—if not so easily sayable these days—that some languages are
naturally superior to others, precisely because they are more in tune with
what is fundamentally real or at least suggest a wider range of possibilities
for thought. See Martin Heidegger, Einleitung in die Metaphysik, 2d. ed.
(Tübingen:Max Niemeyer Verlag 1958), 43. See the English translation
by Ralph Manheim, Introduction to Metaphysics, (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1959), 57. In any case, the conditions favoring the
emergence of philosophy in ancient India were, as I argue in the sequel,
not so much linguistic as theologico-political.
43
See, for example, Brhadaranyaka 1.4.1; Katha 1.3.11, 2.1.12; Isa 16.
¯
¯
44
There are a plurality of purusas, in the Sankhya school. But they are all
¯
of the same kind, so the system can still be regarded as essentially
dualistic.
45
Sankhya-Karika 21 in Sourcebook, 424. This analogy, however, cannot
¯
¯ ¯
be pressed too far, since for Aristotle the divine intellect does not, as final
cause, direct nature in quite the same way that the lame man being
carried would presumably direct the blind man carrying him.
46
¯¯
Sankhya-Karika 13 in Sourcebook, 429. In the Bhagavad Gi ta it is said
¯
¯
that the gunas are present everywhere, even among the gods in heaven,
and that they, too, originate out of prakrti (18.40; cf. 3.33).
47
Physics 922b19; cf. Metaphysics 1072b14.
¯ ¯ ¯
Sankhya-Karika 56-57 in Sourcebook, 442-43. The Pu rva-Mi mamsa
¯
¯ ¯
¯
school makes similar arguments against divine creation of the world. The
notion that the play of brahman, and not any purpose outside of this
play, is responsible for the phenomenal world may have emerged in
response to arguments against creation such as the above. Sankara at least
argues this way. See his commentary on Brahma-Su tras 2.1.32-36.
¯
48
49
50
Yoga Su tra 1.23-29. (Sourcebook, 458-459).
¯
Halbfass, On Being and What There Is, 231; cf. 70 and 271. Halbfass’s
study is a comprehensive account of Vaisesika and contains translations of
some of the more interesting ontological texts of this school, 237-69. See
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
also Archibald Edward Gough, The Vaisesika Aphorisms of Kanada (New
¯
Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1975, originally published in 1873).
Knowledge of the truth is explicitly said to be the highest good in
Aphorism 4, and this may be implied as early as Aphorism 2 (see the
commentary on pp. 2-3). In Aphorism 3, authoritativeness, presumably of
the Veda, is linked to what is said in Aphorism 2. After Aphorism 4, the
author gets down to business, namely, categorizing all that exists,
beginning with substances (dravya): earth, water, fire (tejas) air, ether,
time, space, self (atman), and mind (manas). Halbfass points out that the
¯
“radical [Vaisesika] innovator…identified space, time, and ether, with
God.” On Being and What There Is, 217.
51
Nyaya-Sutra 1.1.4 in The Nyaya-Su tras of Gotama, trans. M. M.
¯
¯
¯
Statisa Chandra Vidyabhu sana, rev. and ed. Nandalal Sinha, (Delhi:
¯ ¯
Motilal Banarsidass, 1990), 3. Compare The Nyaya-Sutras of Gautama,
¯
trans. and ed. Ganganatha Jha, (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1984), 1:111,
¯ ¯
¯
hereafter referred to as Jha. Jha’s four-volume edition of the Nyaya-Sutra
¯ ¯
¯
includes a massive amount of commentary, both traditional and more
recent.
52
Compare Aristotle, On Sense and Sensible Objects 442b9.
53
Nyaya-Sutra, 1.32-39 in Sourcebook, 362-63. Jha, 1:355-445. Note
¯
¯
that Steps 3, 4 and 5 virtually replicate the classical syllogism familiar in
the West. Whatever is produced is non-eternal; sound is produced;
[therefore] sound is non-eternal. Steps 1 and 2 of the Nyaya syllogism set
¯
the stage for what we might call the syllogism proper. Step 1 is the
enunciation, and this is rarely omitted, even in the West. It suffices to
think of the propositions of Euclid’s Elements, the articles of Thomas’s
Summa Theologica, and the “Antinomies” in Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason, all of which commence with an announcement of what is about
to be demonstrated. Step 2, which is the most dispensable of the five,
foretells and encapsulates the syllogism that is about to occur. What is
most peculiar in the Nyaya syllogism is the use of an example—a single
¯
one suffices in the absence of a counter example—to establish the major
premise. The syllogism implies the presence of an opponent not so much
as the target of an elenchus but, rather, as a kind of conscience to check
the introduction of less than fully evident major premises.
54
In the Nyaya and Vaisesika schools, sabda “is of two kinds: noise
¯
¯
(dhvani) and articulate alphabet sounds (varna).” John Grimes, A Concise
Dictionary of Indian Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), 287. In the
English version of the Nyaya-Sutra to which we have been referring, one
¯
and the same Sanskrit term, sabda, is variously rendered as “sound,”
¯
“word,” and “verbal testimony.”
55 This principle occurs in a slightly different form in the syllogistic of the
Nyaya school, where, as we saw, a universal proposition can be estab¯
CAREY
61
lished as a major premise by means of a single example, unless the
opponent can advance a counter-example.
56
See Sourcebook, 491.
57
Slokavartika, trans. G. Jha, in Sri Garib Das Oriental Series, no. 8,
¯
(India: Sri Satguru Publications), 460.
58
Slokavartika, 416
59
Grimes, A Concise Dictionary of Indian Philosophy, 301 and 339. See
¯
¯
Bruce Perry, “Early Nyaya and Hindu Orthodoxy: Anvi ksiki and
¯
Adhikara,” Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the
¯
Humanities 59 (1997): 455. “Vacaspati [a Naiyayika] thus contends that
¯
¯
the ultimacy of reasoning consists in the ability to teach someone the
validity of the Veda and the nature of the objects of knowledge. That
these cannot be conveyed without reasoning is a bold enough claim. That
Nyaya actually establishes the validity of the Vedas is extraordinary. The
¯
Vedas, which define orthodoxy, are now dependent on reasoning. It
follows that Nyaya is the most fundamental of the orthodox sciences,
¯
since it is the means by which orthodoxy itself is established.”
60
Nyaya-Sutra 1.2.13, Commentary; Sourcebook, 365; cf. Jha, 1:571-72.
¯
61
Sankhya-karika 2 in Sourcebook, 427; Gerald Larson, Classical
¯
¯ ¯
Sankhya, 2d rev. ed. (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1979), 256. Compare
¯
¯¯
Bhagavad Gi ta 2.46 and 2.52.
62
Not insignificantly, “the unmanifest” according to Sankhya is nature.
¯
The products of evolving nature, among them the particulars that lie
before our eyes, are “the manifest.” The relationship between the unmanifest process of production and the manifest products is comparable to
the relationship between natura naturans and natura naturata, respectively, in the philosophy of Spinoza.
The complexity of Sankara’s account of ¯svara is treated by Paul
i
Hacker in “Distinctive Features of the Doctrine and Terminology of
Sankara,” in Philology and Confrontation, ed. W Halbfass (Albany: SUNY
.
Press, 1995), 90-91: “What characterizes God as creator of the universe
and Lord of the universe…is ‘dependent on restriction through illusory
upadhis [deceits, or adventitious connections, i.e., the conditions of
¯
maya].’ It is possible to conceive of God as creator and Lord of the
¯ ¯
universe only in the context of mundane existence….” And yet, “[t]he
term ¯svara can be replaced for brahman everywhere….With ¯svara…is
i
i
seldom [sic!] connected the notion that there is something illusory about
it.” Not surprisingly, Sankara has sometimes been accused of an
unaccountable “illogicality” in his account of ¯svara, in spite of an
i
abundance of evidence attesting to the fact that his logical acumen was
extraordinary.
63
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
64
Vakyabhasya on the Kena Upanisad, cited in P Hacker “Relations of
¯
¯
.
Early Advaitins to Vaisnavism” in Philology and Confrontation, 38. The
word translated as “sovereignty” here is svarajyam. Compare Chandogya
¯¯
¯
Upanisad, 7.25.2, where it is said of anyone who recognizes the
omnipresence of the ¯tman (self), “he becomes sovereign” (sas svarat
a
¯
¯¯
bhavati). Whereas Gambhi rananda (564) translates svarat as “sovereign,”
¯
Hume (261) translates it as “autonomous,” which is somewhat more
accurate. The components of this word, in stem form, are sva and raj—
¯
literally, “own king.” It is worth noting here that Sankara explicitly calls
attention to a significant privilege of the ¯tman: its logically indubitable
a
existence. See Sarvepalli Radharkrishnan, Indian Philosophy, (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, Centenary Edition, 1989), 2:476.
65
Perry, 466, n. 16.
66
Arthasastra, 1.2.5. See the gloss of the Malayalam commentary (Cb):
¯
“[Vedic lore] only serves the purpose of preventing people from calling
[one conversant with the ways of the world] a nastika [one who does not
¯
accept the authority of the Veda].”(Arthasastra, 2:6).
¯
67
Arthasastra, 1.2.11.
¯
68
Compare The Decisive Treatise, Determining What the Connection is
between Religion and Philosophy, in which Averroes similarly shows how
the interpretation of the Qur’an can be carried out in a way that is
¯
compatible with the aims of philosophy.
69
It goes without saying that reason was not universally accorded such
authority and autonomy in ancient India. Perry, (450, 465), cites the
following colorful passage from the Mahabharata 12.173.47-49: “I was a
¯ ¯
savant (panditaka), a logician, a despiser of the Veda, devoted to
worthless analytics, the science of reasoning (or logic, tarkavidyam), an
utterer of logical doctrines, a speaker with reasons in assemblies, both a
reviler and haughty in speech against the twice-born concerning Vedic
rituals, heterodox (nastika), and a doubter of everything, a fool and a
¯
self-styled learned man: the full fruition of which is this—my being a
jackal, oh twice-born one.” It stands to reason that this text and others
that Perry also cites would have made sense only if certain individuals,
perhaps even whole schools, were well known to be living this
questionable life of autonomous inquiry. Compare Manu 12.95.
70
Consider, in this connection, the following passage from Leo Strauss’s
Persecution and the Art of Writing: “Of the superstitious ‘books of the
astrologers,’ the [Jewish] scholar mentions one by name, The Nabatean
Agriculture, to which he seems to ascribe Hindu origin; and of the Hindus
he says in that context that they are a people who deny Divine revelation
(the existence of a ‘book from God’)” (123). “[T]he possibility is by no
means excluded that the originators of some of the superstitious practices
CAREY
63
or beliefs, and hence perhaps the authors of some of the superstitious
codes, were themselves philosophers addressing the multitude….[The
Sabeans] believed in the eternity of the world, i.e., they agreed with the
philosophers over and against the adherents of revelation as regards the
crucial question” (124). “It is perhaps not absurd to wonder whether
books such as The Nabatean Agriculture were written, not by simpleminded adherents of superstitious creeds and practices, but by adherents
of the philosophers” (125). “Avicenna’s esoteric teaching was expounded
in his Oriental Philosophy, and he is said to have called that teaching
‘oriental’ because it is identical with the view of the people of the orient”
(126 and n. 98). Strauss refers his readers to studies on these themes by
others, but to my knowledge, he does not undertake a further exploration
of the possibility of an Indian philosophy, properly so called, in his own
published works. See, however, Liberalism Ancient and Modern, 7.
71
It has been suggested that passages in Vaisesika texts that refer to
“liberation” might be later accretions, perhaps added in response to
accusations of heterodoxy. Cf. Halbfass, India and Europe, 271.
72
That the non-dualism of Advaita-Vedanta is truly theistic was
¯
challenged by later Vedantists, who abandon strict monism in favor of
some form of dualism that allows for an ultimate and not merely
aspectual distinction between the human self and brahman.
73
“An important consequence of accepting the Vedas as valid is that the
whole orthodox social order (varnasrama), which derives from the Veda,
¯
has to be accepted as valid as well” Perry, 465.
74
Arthasastra, 2.9. The classic if extreme expression of the necessity of
¯
staying within the confines of the caste to which one has been assigned by
karma accumulated in a previous life is the following:
Better one’s own dharma defective (that is, defectively performed viguna)
Than another’s dharma well performed;
Doing the action (karma) prescribed by one’s own nature (svabhava)
¯
One does not incur guilt.
¯¯
Bhagavad Gi ta 18.47; 3.35 and Manu 10.97. Compare Socrates’ use of
the phrase “to tou hautou prattein” at Republic 433a ff.; see also 434c1.
75
Not surprisingly, neither the Buddha nor Mahavira, the founder of
Jainism, were members of the brahmin caste. However, Brhaspiti, the
¯
legendary founder of Lokayata, appears to have been a brahmin prior to
¯
¯
his apostasy. All teachers in the orthodox schools were, of course,
members of the brahmin caste since the brahmins alone were permitted to
¯
¯
teach the Veda.
76
Consider the observation of S. Radharkrishnan, “The Brahmins are not
¯
a priesthood pledged to support fixed doctrines, but an intellectual
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
aristocracy charged with the moulding of the higher life of the people,”
Indian Philosophy, 1.112. Needless to say, this “moulding” can take a
variety of forms. For example, “According to all Indian traditions [the
emperor Candragupta—fourth century B.C.] was much aided in his
conquests by a very able and unscrupulous brahman advisor
¯
called…Kautilya,” A. L. Basham, The Wonder that was India, 51. The
ruler “is told [by Kautilya] to go the length of having his secret agents
disguised as gods, and allowing himself to be seen in their company, in
order that his simpler subjects may believe that he mixes with the gods on
equal terms” (84).
77
Daya Krishna forcefully asks exactly what is meant by acceptance of
the Veda in the so-called orthodox schools, but after persuasively ruling
out the inadequate answers usually given to this question, he seems to
abandon the question itself. Indian Philosophy; A Counter Perspective
(London: Oxford University Press, 1991), 7 ff.
78
“…mit Hülfe einer religiösen Organisation haben [die Brahmanen] sich
die Macht, dem Volke seine Könige zu ernennen, während sie sich selber
abseits und ausserhalb hielten und fühlten, als die Menschen höherer und
überköniglicher Aufgaben” (#61); […with the help of a religious organization the brahmins appropriated the power of naming kings for the
¯
people, while they held themselves, and felt themselves, apart and
outside, as men of higher and supra-royal tasks.] Friedrich Nietzsche,
Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Kritische Studienausgabe 5, ed.Giorgio Colli
and Mazzino Montinari, 80.
79
Cf. n. 12.
80
It goes without saying that Western admirers of Hinduism are rarely
inclined to offer a spirited defense of the caste system.
81
I have in mind Surendranth Dasgupta, Daya Krsihna, Wilhelm
Halbfass, Paul Hacker, Natalya Isayeva, Jitendra N. Mohanty, and Dale
Riepe, to name just a few.
82
For a possible answer to this question see Leo Strauss, Spinoza’s
Critique of Religion, trans. E. M. Sinclair (New York: Schocken Books,
1965), 8- 9.
83
If this is true, it follows that what is most distinctive about the West is
not philosophy but the Biblical God.
Glossary of Terms
Advaita - non-dualism (i.e., monism), a branch of Vedanta
¯
¯
¯nvi ksiki - analytics, reasoning
a ¯
¯tman - the self
a
CAREY
65
brahman - the fundamental reality
brahmin (brahmana) - a member of the priestly caste
¯
¯
dharma - law or duty
Isvara - the Lord
karma - the effect of one’s actions on the self
Kautilya - a political philosopher and author of the
Arthasastra
¯
ksatriya - a member of the warrior caste (the king is a
member of this caste)
Lokayata - a heterodox school—materialism and hedonism
¯
maya - illusion; the world of appearances
¯ ¯
¯ ¯
¯ ¯ ¯
Mi mamsakas - adherents of Pu rva Mi mamsa
¯
Nagarjuna - A Buddhist philosopher and dialectician
¯ ¯
Nyaya - an orthodox school—logic and epistemology
¯
prakrti- nature
purusa - spirit; intellect; person; witness
¯ ¯ ¯
Pu rva-Mi mamsa - an orthodox school—Vedic apologetics
¯
sabda - sound: verbal testimony
¯
sandhi - adjustments for euphony within and between
Sanskrit words
Sankhya - an orthodox school—fundamental dualism of
¯
nature and spirit
Sankara - an Indian Philosopher and proponent of AdvaitaVedanta
¯
smrti - that which is remembered - secondary “revelation”
sruti - that which was heard by the sages - primary
“revelation” = the Veda
su dra - a member of the servant caste
¯
sunya - empty; sunyata - emptiness - the fundamental
¯
¯
¯
ontological concept of Buddhism
svabhava - own being; nature
¯
svadharma - lit.“own duty” i.e., one’s duties as a member of
a given caste
Upanisads - speculative treatises appended to the Vedas
¯ ¯ ¯
Uttara-Mi mamsa = Vedanta; an orthodox school—based
¯
chiefly on the Upanisads
Vaisesika - an orthodox school—atomism and categorization
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
vaisya - a member of the farmer-merchant caste
Veda - generic name four the four Vedas and appended
treatises
Vedanta (lit. “end of the Veda”) - an orthodox school based
¯
on the Upanisads
vidya - science; knowledge
¯
Yoga - an orthodox school, paired with Sankhya
¯
Some tips on how to begin pronouncing Sanskrit words Macrons over “a,” “i,” and “u” indicate a lengthening of
these vowel; “s” and “s” can both be pronounced as “sh;” and
“c” is pronounced approximately as English “ch.” The letter
r (note the dot under it) is a vowel, not a consonant (the
consonant does not have a dot under it), often pronounced by
Westerners as “ri” but closer to “er” uttered quickly and with
a hint of a trill. Otherwise, the letters can be pronounced
pretty much as written, ignoring the dots under consonants,
which signify that they are cerebrals and not dentals. Native
speakers of English have difficulty distinguishing between
cerebrals and dentals, since the English dental is actually a
cross between a genuine dental and a cerebral. I have
rendered the nasal, anusvara, prior to labials with an “m,” but
¯
in all other cases with an “n.” Unvoiced non-aspirated consonants are hard to pronounce without hearing them in
contrast to unvoiced aspirated consonants. For example,
Sanskrit aspirated “ph” is pronounced exactly like English
“p”; Sanskrit unaspirated “p” has no English equivalent, that
is, no air is expelled when it is pronounced. Voiced aspirated
consonants, such as Sanskrit “bh,” are hard to pronounce too.
67
The Forgotten Faculty: The Place of
Phronêsis or Practical Sense in Liberal
Education (Plutarch and Aristotle)
David Levine
We think in generalities; we live in details.
Airport terminal display
Reading maketh a full man,
Conference a ready man,
And Writing an exact man.
Francis Bacon
Would a new Plutarch even be possible [today]?
Nietzsche1
1. Prologue in Seminar
Educations tailored to each person
are better than those given in common.
Aristotle2
The title of tonight’s talk, The Forgotten Faculty, is
ambiguous, deliberately so. One might have anticipated a talk
on the role of the teaching faculty in modern higher
education, in particular the regrettable subordination of the
teaching function to other lesser ends in today’s universities,
thereby distorting its proper role. Important though this
subject is, this is not my subject tonight.
Indeed, it is our good fortune at St. John’s that the faculty
is rightly understood to be at the very heart of the college, the
David Levine is a tutor and former dean on the Santa Fe campus of
St. John’s College. This is the Dean’s Lecture, delivered on August 27, 2004,
in Santa Fe.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
ministers and stewards of what we call the Program. We
tutors are not content with imparting bare skills and empty
generalizations, not satisfied with conveying the results of our
own or others’ thinking without requiring that you develop
your own capacities for such thoughtfulness. We have learned
from Plato’s Meno that lecturing and learning are not correlates like throwing and catching. Thus we don’t lecture at or
‘talk down’ (katagorein) to you. In our view it is the question,
¯
and not some answer, that is the proper instrument of
education. We begin each class accordingly.
Last night your seminars began with a question. Perhaps
at that moment, or perhaps somewhat later in the evening, a
member of the seminar, a tutor or fellow student, asked a
question or made a remark that “spoke to you,” that is, it
seemed “tailor-made” just for your learning, that bore on
your perplexity, your state of understanding then and there.
In “speaking to you” it spurred you to further reflection. It
somehow enabled you to step over your settled or
unexamined view and opened up a horizon of possibility
hitherto unforeseen. All of a sudden you were engaged as
never before; you were propelled forward; you had an
investment in jointly finding out where it all led. In short, you
were actively engaged in that joint enterprise we call conversation. You were on your way to discovery.
The question or remark that prompted all this was not so
much leading as opening, not a disguised commentary but an
invitation to exploration. It didn’t necessarily provide the
missing link of an incomplete thought process but, rather,
made you think about how you had been thinking and, in so
doing, cleared the way for discovery, or it offered for consideration something that opened a window of unsuspected
prospects. Such remarks or questions may have been coincidental, but they may also have been a tailor-made question
that artfully and with foresight made for greater thoughtfulness. How is this possible? To help us with this we need to
take a bit of a detour with the help of two authors on the
program, Aristotle and Plutarch.3
69
LEVINE
2. “Human Beings Like to Talk”
They fought their countries battles and
conducted their campaigns in their talk.
Pyrrhus 1.5314
Aristotle is not an especially funny man. But there is a remark
in the Nicomachean Ethics—a book freshmen will spend long
hours studying this spring—that makes me smile at least, one
that suggests a very wry and penetrating way of looking at the
world, in particular at human life and our foibles and pretensions. He observes that human beings like to “talk,” in
particular we like to talk about human excellence or virtue
(aretê). Indeed, by so “philosophizing,” we think we are being
“serious human beings” (spoudaios).5
We all recognize this tendency to speak more loudly with
words than with deeds, to posture without actually being
effective, to “philosophize” and “pontificate” in the worst
senses of those terms (as well as to second guess, to play
Monday morning quarterback, to presume to know what one
should have done “if I were only there”—in short, to enjoy
the barbershop or coffee shop conversation, etc.).
There is much in Aristotle’s wry remark, but minimally he
is seeking to redirect his reader (“transpose them,”
Heidegger), and this in a decisive way, to get us to see that the
“truth” of such reflections and discussions—of what has come
to be called “ethics”—is not to be found in the talking, and
surely not in a “theory,” but can only be in the life lived and
the numerous individual deeds out of which a life is made.
Human beings like to talk, to be sure, but Aristotle, and we,
are interested in much more than just talk.
So let us turn tonight to someone who sought to look
carefully at “lives,” the writer of Lives of the Illustrious
Greeks and Romans, the first century political philosopher
Plutarch. In his work we see men of action who are often also
thinkers and who are distinguished by their judgment as
much as by their actions. They lived their lives one insight at
a time—as we all do—yet with such quality that their actions
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
70
are not a staccato series of events, but reflect and have their
source in a more developed faculty. These are men who are
not content to just talk but to act and live fully, if not also
well.
3. Much More than History
Antony was so great that he was thought by others
worthy of higher things than his own desires.
Lives, Comparison of Demetrius and Antony 2.535
There is another reason why we should turn to Plutarch.
I was walking out of the bookstore last fall and about to turn
into the coffee shop, when I overheard a sophomore say to a
friend, somewhat puzzled and maybe even a little
exasperated, “Why are we reading Plutarch? It’s only
history.” At that point, turning around, I interjected the
enthusiastic remark of Rousseau (actually he was quoting
Montaigne at the time), and I quote, “Plutarch, he’s my man”
(“C’est mon homme que Plutarque”),6 hoping thereby to
encourage a reconsideration. I don’t know if it helped that
student, but it did spur me to undertake a course of reading
this past year from which I tried to answer this question and
understand the enthusiasm for Plutarch on the part of so
many of our program authors. For these authors—and they
number not a few,7 including, in addition to Montaigne and
Rousseau, Shakespeare, Montesquieu, most of the founders
of our country (Franklin, Madison, Jefferson), Emerson,
Nietzsche, Tolstoi, etc.—for them he is not “just history” but
much more, a teacher of a higher order.8
Though I read all of Plutarch’s Lives—all 1,451 pages!—
I have to admit that it was only a first reading for most of
these, and in general this is a new arena of exploration for
me. Nevertheless, drawn by the question, I ventured forth.
Now here I am before all of you, presenting my first formulations for your consideration (1.27). As in seminar, I trust
that I am among friends, friends who help each other to think
better, more precisely and deeper, about one another’s first or
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nascent thoughts. Thus this dean’s lecture, my “annual essay”
if you will, is indeed an essay, an attempt, a first effort of
discovery with all the attendant uncertainty that such a
venture always entails—as many of you know well from your
own efforts of discovery. Thus your generosity and
forbearance will be called upon this evening.
In reading Plutarch we are invited to re-enter9 the realm
of the city, of the “political” (politikê) in its original meaning:
the realm of the probable and the unlikely, of the inadvertent
and the deliberate, the unpredictable as well as of “signs and
auguries,” of strife (2.42) and harmony, fortune and
misfortune, good and bad (2.104) (where “things can be
otherwise,” according to Aristotle). We re-enter, in short, the
world in which we actually live our lives, “worthy of
memory,” Plutarch would say (1.49, 100, 583; 2.61), indeed,
worthy of our deepest consideration.
Here not everything is easily seen. With some things we
need assistance, a magnifying glass if you will, in order for
them to be brought to fuller view. Plutarch helps us to
experience the contest, travails, and challenges of the soul by
portraying it writ large,10 so to speak, in the public arena, on
the world stage and on the field of battle.11 Alongside the
virtues—moderation, justice, courage, prudence—we
experience the encompassing, worldly context in which
virtue fights to raise its head and become effective: jealousy,
fear, ambition; betrayal, flattery, avarice, cultural decline, and
ambition; privilege, shame, superstition, hatred, rivalry, and
ambition; avarice, disillusionment, panic, self-interest, and
ambition.12 Here we are given an opportunity to reflect on
the distinctive features of lives lived, their relative effectiveness, their weighty consequences, and their manifold
difficulties.
In reading Plutarch we experience the complexity of the
attempt to give order to human life in the city with Lycurgus
and Numa Pomplius; the precariousness of virtue with
Themistocles, Aristides and Marcus Cato; the havoc of tyrannical ambition with Pyrrhus and Lysander; the limited effec-
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tiveness of justice with Lucullus; the disasters consequent
upon excessive caution with Nicias and Crassus. We
experience also the lamentable loss of prudence with
Pompey; the ineffectiveness of absolute principles with Cato
the Younger; the transformation of excessive tenderness into
its opposite with Alexander; the futility of virtue when undermined by life’s circumstances with Phocion; the unbridled
desire for glory with Agis; the suspect powers of eloquence
with Demosthenes and Cicero; and, of course, the dominion
of passion with Antony.
Amidst these abundant and luxurious life stories—
“histories” he sometimes calls them—are observations
perhaps neither bound nor diminished by time: we are
encouraged to reflect on “the ages of man,” the causes of
political change, on statesmanship as the “art of the possible,”
the political force of character and example (paradeigma), the
ambiguity of greatness and the liabilities of success. We are
asked to reflect as well on the fate of youthful optimism; the
clash of virtue and misfortune, the psychodynamics of human
failings; on self-transformation forced by rude experience,
the absolutist language of the passions, the self-justifying
linguistic universes of the vices; on the pathological strategies
of ambition, and the moral intractability of wealth. These,
and many more, are indeed “worthy of memory.”
Before we proceed, one further remark. In presenting
Plutarch’s mature reflections, we are reminded of Aristotle’s
concern about young people:13 young people, he says
profoundly, are, well, young. And this presents a difficulty.
Because young people lack life experience, he says, they do
not make good observers and students of “politics,” that is,
they do not make good students of their own lives in the city,
in the polis.
Here Aristotle does not mean to be insulting, only honest.
For experience can only be one’s own. It cannot be taught,
and surely cannot be borrowed or poured from one person
into another. It requires time and judgment. Thus for
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Aristotle, there is no alternative to “growing up,” to
overcoming isolating adolescence and becoming a person of
experience—“mature.” So it falls to us during our period of
personal transformation at the College (beginning this
evening) to resolve to overcome this lack, through careful
reading (1.201) and greater thoughtfulness, that we might be
“strengthened by [such] experiences (1.646),” made better
students of our own lives in the polis and better able to
navigate its often-bewildering seas.
4. The Liberal Art of Life Writing
Everyone has faults; not everyone has virtues.
Goethe
It is in bagatelles that nature comes to light.
Rousseau
At various moments throughout his work, Plutarch steps back
and reflects on the activity of writing lives. On the first such
occasion, what strikes him above all is the benefit to himself
of such exercises:
It is for the sake of others that I first commenced
writing [what he here calls] biographies [he says,
yet] I find myself...attaching myself to it for my
own [sake]; the [excellences] virtues of these great
men serving me as a sort of looking-glass [or
mirror] in which I may see how to adjust and
adorn my own life. Indeed it can be compared to
nothing but daily living and associating together;
we...entertain each successive guest, view their
‘stature and their qualities,’ and select from their
actions all that is noblest and worthiest to know.
(Timoleon 1.325)
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“What more effective means to one’s [own] improvement
[than associating with what is excellent is there]?” he
wonders. He then elaborates:
My method in the study of history, is...by the
familiarity acquired in writing, to habituate my
memory to receive and retain images of the best
and worthiest of characters. I thus am enabled to
free myself from any ignoble, base, or vicious
impressions...by the remedy of turning my
thoughts....to these noble examples.
What is striking about this passage is that for Plutarch this
kind of writing is first of all a liberating (and hence a liberal)
activity, freeing and enabling him to shape himself as he seeks
to give shape to the lives of others. He here draws on two
ancient nomic principles:14 (1) we become like those with
whom we associate. This he extends to writing and books: we
become like that about which we think and like those from
whom we choose to learn.15 And its correlate, (2) we are
moved to imitate what we admire,16 or what one might call
the principle of emulation. “The mere sight of a conspicuous
example of excellence,” he says, immediately (euthus) brings
one to admiration (thaumazesthai) and therewith brings one
to imitate the doer. Indeed for Plutarch there is nothing like
the “living example” of human character (1.99).17 The
beautiful,18 he says, moves one to action towards it (to kalon
eph’hauto praktikos kinei kai praktiken euthus hormen
entithesin) (Pericles 1.202; 2.2-3).19 As a result he “thought fit
to spend his time and pains” associating with these illustrious
Greek and Roman “guests” for the benefit both of himself
and us.
Let us note, especially for our work here at the college,
the many rewards of writing that reach beyond the final
product. Writing can be an occasion for self-discovery and
self-improvement. It is the process, after all, that is enabling.20
Later he compares writing lives to portrait painting. He
says, we first must do “honor” (2.245) to our subject and that
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means, in the case of human beings, to capture “the stature
and qualities” of the person and not be content with external
likenesses (the mere “face”). Yet there is a question of
judgment here. He writes:
As we would wish that a painter who is to draw a
beautiful face, in which there is yet imperfection,
should neither wholly leave out, nor yet too
pointedly express what is defective, because this
would deform it21...so it is hard, or indeed perhaps
impossible, to show the life of a man wholly free
from blemish....any lapses or faults that occur,
through human passion or political necessity, we
may [generously] regard...as the shortcoming of
some particular [excellence] virtue, than as a
natural effect of vice...[and this] out of a
tender[ness] [aidoumenous: respect] to the
weakness of nature. (Cimon 1.643-4)
Conspicuous in this reflection is a different principle of care
from what we are accustomed to. It judiciously abstains from
journalistic realism, and above all from that sensationalism by
which we are daily overwhelmed by our media. It seeks rather
a measured rendering of a whole life, without at the same
time ignoring or exaggerating the negative (see 1.699; 2.285,
394). Discretion, in this view, is the better part of realism:
discriminating, weighing, focusing, estimating (2.394),
selecting (2.445), and finally diagnosing22 (1.699). On yet
another occasion he forewarns his readers that he is not—as
we might first think and as he himself sometimes says—an
historian, “collecting mere useless pieces of learning” (1.699),
but rather that he seeks to “epitomize” the lives of his
subjects.
It must be borne in mind that my design is not to
write histories, but lives. [For] the most glorious
exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest
discoveries of [excellence and deficiency] virtue
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and vice in men; sometimes a matter of less
moment, an expression or [even] a jest informs us
better of the character and inclinations, than the
most famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the
bloodiest battles.... Therefore, as portrait-painters
are more exact in the lines and features of the
face, in which the character is seen, than in the
other parts of the body, so I must be allowed to
give my more particular attention to the marks
and indications of the souls of men. (Alexander
2.139)23
So I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to
the marks and indications of the souls of men. The outside of
a human being reveals the fullness of the inside, more than we
might think. Little things, after all, are not any the less
significant for their being little or not obvious; they are only
harder to discern.
It thus falls to us as readers of Plutarch to seek to emulate
his perspicacity, to attend to the fullness of being he presents
to us. That this might require that we not be unduly taken by
the great and the eventful (and “what is done publicly in open
day” (1.469)) in favor of the private and the small means that
we too must resist our own inherited tendency to look at
things from an historical perspective24 (see also 1.698)).
Plutarch’s psychographic art, then, entails a different kind of
insight, one that sees past the obviousness of “weighty
matters” to the telling marks, however small, that bespeak
and “epitomize” a soul.25
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5. “A Subtle Logic of Discrimination”
It works in practice but unfortunately not in theory.
French Diplomat26
Plutarch relates this story about Caesar:
Seeing some wealthy strangers at Rome,
carrying...puppy-dogs...embracing and making
much of them, [he] took occasion not unnaturally
to ask whether women in this country were
unused to bearing children.... By th[is] prince-like27
[that is, indirect] reprimand [Caesar] gravely
reflect[ed] upon persons who...lavish upon beasts
that affection and kindness which nature has
implanted in us to be bestowed on those of our
own kind. (Pericles 1.201)
While we may not particularly like this example—we may
ourselves have puppy-dogs—Caesar’s and Plutarch’s intent
can be made plain otherwise: human beings do not always
attend to what serves them best, indeed what nature would
have them do.
“With like reason,” Plutarch says,
may we blame those who misuse the love of
inquiry and observation which nature has
implanted in our souls, by expending it on objects
unworthy of the attention either of their eyes or
their ears, while they disregard such as are
excellent in themselves and would do them good.
We can misdirect our attention to unworthy objects. We can
even misuse our love of inquiry, philosophy. He continues,
whereas
[T]he mere outward sense, being passive...
perhaps cannot help taking notice of
everything...be it...useful or unuseful; in the
exercise of his mental perception every man...has a
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natural power to turn himself...to what he judges
desirable. Therefore it becomes a man’s duty to
pursue...the best and choicest of everything, that
he may not only employ his contemplation but
may also be improved by it.... A man ought [then]
to apply his intellectual perception to such objects
as...are apt to call it forth and allure it to its own
proper good.
We see here a suspicion of abstract speculation, of that
theorizing that takes us away to the remote reaches of
thought—the “clouds,” in Aristophanes’ image—“mere
theory,” as we and Plutarch sometimes say (Dion 2.543)—
and away from the things that bear most on our own lives.
We have control over that to which we apply our “intellectual
perception,” yet paradoxically, in Plutarch’s view, we do not
always apply ourselves well to what would do us the most
good. “We find such objects,” as we have seen, “in the works
of excellence (aretês ergois),” he says, “which also produce in
the mind [even] of mere readers...an emulation and eagerness
that may lead them on to imitation....” (1179b8-11). No less
than life experience, reading provides such formative
examples.
Understandably wary, Plutarch is not condemning
philosophy here (as some might: see 1.47628). On the
contrary, he seeks rather to focus his philosophic attention,
and therewith to redirect ours, back onto its “worthy and
proper objects.”29 In being so constrained, philosophy
remains no less indispensable to the perfection of human life:
How else can one find one’s bearings amidst the turbulence
and tides of fortune but through that human insight which
enables us, amidst it all, to be thoughtful, farsighted, circumspect, principled, and steady? This he brings us to see
repeatedly (for example, 1.329, 336).
Thus as we read Plutarch’s accounts, the reader is brought
to a new manner and degree of acuity, to a new sensitivity to
the rich complexity of human things, ordinary and extraor-
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dinary. Each life is different. Each figure vigorously seeks to
make a life of distinction out of circumstances that are, well,
never quite “tailor-made,” but rather challenging, threatening, and over the course of a career, hard to sustain. Each
“story” is treated, not abstractly, but with the attention to
detail that brings forth what is original and properly its own.
The active judgment and skills necessary to live such lives of
distinction—and write about them—is itself exemplary.
The higher degree of acuity aspired to is revealed in a
reflection on two of his subjects:
Phocion and [Cato] may be well compared
together...for assuredly there is difference enough
among virtues of the same denomination, as
between the bravery of Alcibiades and that of
Epaminondas, the prudence of Themistocles and
that of Aristides, the justice of Numa and that of
Agesilaus.... The mixture both of lenity on the one
hand, with austerity on the other; their boldness
on some occasions, and caution on others; their
extreme solicitude for the public [etc...] so that we
should need a very nice and subtle logic of
discrimination to detect and establish the distinctions between them. (Phocion 2.247)
Plutarch’s Lives are such gold mines of subtle distinctions.
They actively attempt to flesh out the overly broad categories
of abstract “theories of ethics” and, to be sure, that of the
natural generality of language.30 Plutarch paints his characterological studies with a subtlety of observation known to us
from playwrights and novelists, embedding each in their life
circumstances, rich in variables and innumerable vectors. In
this regard the Lives needs to be seen as a necessary
complement31 to our tradition of theoretical accounts of
“ethics,” allowing us to consider the fate of the effort of
virtue in the world, to consider the formative importance of
circumstance, the variety of courses of development, and the
real consequences of personal decisions, however large or
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small. He was concerned that this was what the liberal arts
did not teach often enough (2.440). Moreover, in Plutarch’s
own artful approach to writing we have seen a different sort
of touch, one that is properly self-interested, discreet,
measured, judicious, and self-reflective.
All this brought me to wonder whether there wasn’t a
different “sensibility” made evident here or more precisely, I
would venture, even a different faculty of discernment at
work. It is not just that we have here a different line of sight.
Rather, there seems to be brought to light another rational
excellence, one that has its distinction in revealing the
richness of the particular as opposed to the breadth of generality, that allows us to focus on the life lived as opposed to the
one that is, as we have come to say somewhat emptily,
“ideal.”
6. Phronêsis
It is not possible to understand phronêsis and sophia
under the guiding line of the Kantian distinction
between practical and theoretical reason.
Heidegger32
We are thus presented with a paradox of sorts: we are asked
to consider a mode of thoughtfulness that is not speculative
(1141b1), yet is deeply rational, that is not as “profound” as
theoretical wisdom (1141a21; Lives, 2.181), perhaps, yet is
more important for human life (1140b30).
Aristotle may be of help in considering this paradox. In
the middle of his account of the shaping of human
character—Chapter 6 of The Nicomachean Ethics—we find
an extended reflection on our possibilities for thoughtfulness.
He looks first at the various objects available and concludes
that there is not just one faculty, not one “reason,” but
multiple modes of truth, artful know-how, deductive
knowledge or science, and wisdom among them. In addition
he introduces us to another active condition (hexis)33 that
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may be unfamiliar to us, however one that proves to be
distinctively human: phronêsis.34
Let us step back. Aristotle does not think as we do.35 We
see this, for example, in his very different understanding of
“choice,” a concept especially important to us today. Choice,
according to Aristotle, is not just some “personal preference”
we willingly stick with. In his view “...without intellect and
thinking [and] without an active condition of character
(1139a33-4; also 1145a4f),” choice is nothing but blind selfinsistence. Moreover, we tend to focus on choice in the
abstract, either on the intention or on the outcome by itself.
But for Aristotle choice is part of an integrated event “since
[with] action there is no such thing as doing well or the
opposite without thinking or [without] character.” We will
see in a bit why this must be so.
He begins his exploration of this special capacity by
asking us first to consider what sorts of people we say have
“good sense.” Preserved in our languages is a recognition of
a unique mode of insight evident in persons whose
perspective on human things, on people and circumstances, is
particularly sound. A person of “singular judgment,” we
might say: a wise grandfather, a seasoned friend, a native
truth teller, a parent—in short, people who have taken their
long experience and made it bear on their and others’ lives.
He puts it this way: they are people who are “able to deliberate beautifully about things that are good and advantageous
for [themselves]” (1140a23-4), those also who know what is
“conducive to living well as a whole.” We look to people who
are not necessarily concerned to know things “in general” but
rather to those whose life experience has been brought to
bear on their own lives, and equally, those who are not shortsighted but seek to see how each particular event and act
might contribute to one’s overall good.
This focus on the particularity of events and actions
brings Aristotle to point out the obvious yet for us surprising
conclusion, namely, that “there is no [necessary] demonstration of these things, since all of them are capable of being
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otherwise” (1140a31-4).36 Nevertheless, despite being
indemonstrable, Aristotle is emphatic that these things are
not therefore untrue. That they are not matters of theoretical
knowledge does not invalidate them—does not make them,
as we might say, matters of “mere opinion,” and surely not
“merely relative.” (Their truth therefore is not to be
dismissed as merely mundane, merely demotic, or merely
ontic.37) Our question becomes, if not knowledge per se, what
faculty is at work discerning what is to be done?
Here Aristotle introduces phronêsis, a faculty difficult to
translate, rendered variously as practical sense, practical
judgment, practical intellect, particular reason (Thomas),
circumspection (Heidegger), prudence, and indeed
sometimes practical wisdom. “[Practical sense] is a truthdisclosing active condition (hexis alêthê meta logou pratikê)
involving reason that governs actions, concerned with what is
good and bad for human beings” (1140b3, also b20).38 This
will take some explaining.
Phronêsis, or practical sense, differs from those other
faculties that have to do with “what is everlasting” in that it
is of “the part of the soul concerned with opinions,” that is
with the world of change we live in, the world Plutarch
invited us to consider seriously. Though concerned with
opinion, it is not some mere “idea” that Aristotle is looking
at but something “far more deeply interfused” (Wordsworth).
He brings us to see this by observing that such a developed
capacity is not something one can “forget.”39 While we might
forget one of the zillion Greek forms or a proposition in
Euclid—not a good idea—we are speaking of a different kind
of thing, a state of being of the soul, a developed state of
readiness, of incipient action. And like riding a horse or
mastering a craft, he points out that, while it can be
perfected, once possessed we can’t “lose” it.40 We always
thereafter somehow have it.41 This points to a deeper mode
of having.
Indeed, we even think we see such a deeper source in
other animals. Concerning other species, Aristotle observes
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“that that which discerns well the things that concern itself is
possessed of [a kind of] ‘practical sense’” (1140a25). Animals
are said to have such a sense of what is best for them. We
mean thereby that they have a “capacity for foresight about
their own lives,” that is, they act in such a way that they do
not justly blindly react to some present stimulus but in a way
that secures their overall good. By way of contrast, Aristotle
gives the embarrassing human example of the early Greek
philosophers Thales and Anaxagoras, whom people unfortunately said were “wise but not possessed of practical sense”
(1141b3f.). He here highlights the paradox of the overly
theoretical man, who knows divine things, perhaps, but not
his own good.
In so doing Aristotle puts the man of practical sense into
further relief: “one who is a good deliberator simply is one
who, by his reasoning, is apt to hit upon what is best for a
human being among actions” (1141b12-3), he says; such a
person responds not to the demands of a syllogism but to that
of circumstance, and their reasoning ends, not in some
abstract proposition, but with action. (Phronêsis “lives in
action” [Heidegger].) Plainly this entails a different kind of
reasoning, one that “is not only about what is universal but
[also] needs to discern the particulars [in their difference] as
well...since action is [finally] concerned with particulars”
(1141b15).42
Practical sense is thus that unique faculty that is able to
integrate particulars—this, that, and the other this and that—
into a larger view that leads to action.43 Again contrasting the
theoretical man, Aristotle points out that “those who have
experience are more adept at action than those with
knowledge [alone]” (1141b17). That’s why we admire our
grandfather or friend; because they have done things that
show that they have learned the lessons of life and can turn
them to account to what one should do next. Experience with
particulars, Aristotle emphasizes here, is the more valuable in
this regard.44
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Indeed, it is this same capacity to deal with particulars, he
notes, that is also at work on the world stage—brought so
vividly to view in Plutarch—as in our own efforts to live well.
“The political art is the same active condition as practical
sense” (1141b22f). The ability requisite to craft a specific
political decree—not a general law but a specific mandate—
must have in view “an action to be performed as an ultimate
particular thing” (cp. 1137b11-32). So just as the artisan
crafting a chair, just as our own efforts to do the right thing
in given circumstances, the lawmaker is not well served by
generalities alone but must think the circumstances through
to a specific recommendation. This too, according to
Aristotle, is a species of knowledge.
But of what sort? Aristotle sees a kind of middle between
art and wisdom. While “it is clear that practical sense is not
knowledge [in the sense of science], for it is directed to an
ultimate particular” (1142a22), Aristotle is emphatic that
“knowing what pertains to oneself [and knowing what one
should do in a particular circumstance] is [yet] a species of
knowledge” (1141b33).
But how? At this point Aristotle notes something of
interest. Practical sense, he observes, would seem to focus on
...the opposite extreme from the intellect [nous],
for intellect is directed at ultimate terms of which
there is no articulation, while practical sense is
directed at the ultimate particular of which there is
no knowledge [technically speaking] but only
[simple] perception [aisthêsis]—not the perception
of the separate senses, but the sort of [“intellectual
perception” (Lives, 1.201)] by which we perceive
that the ultimate figure in mathematics is a
triangle. (1142a22-30)45
Surprisingly, the example that Aristotle gives to highlight
the particular mode of insight that is practical sense comes
from geometry. We “see” that the smallest figure into which a
rectilinear plane figure can be divided is a triangle. We see it.
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He thus asks us to consider another mode of access to things
in their completeness as wholes that he also calls
“perception,” though of particulars that are sensible only to
the mind’s “eye,” an intellectual perception, if you will.46
7. “An Eye Sharpened by Experience”
The manner of forming one’s ideas is
what gives character to the human mind.
Rousseau47
Before we proceed, let us step back for a moment and look at
the requirements of responsible action. In the earlier
chapters, Aristotle was at pains to point out that to act well
requires a great deal of thought and experience. It requires
that we somehow have a world of things in mind all at once,
as the rightness of any action “results from what is beneficial
in the end for which, the means by which, and the time in
which it ought to occur” (1142b28).48 Action is through and
through specific and circumstantial, responsive to the many
vectors that need to be factored into consideration in order
for some appropriate good to be accomplished.
Thus our question: what kind of thinking can integrate
such particularity in its particularity? Other than a name, we
may still be hard pressed to see what it precisely is, to identify
it in its own right. Aristotle thus turns to other like-seeming
faculties to contrast and therewith to delimit it. For example,
one might think that what we are talking about is someone
who is skilled at thinking things through (angchinoia;
1142b14f). While there is some overlap here, Aristotle at this
point says something by way of contrast that, if not shocking,
may at first make no sense to us as a reply. He says: “someone
who lacks self-restraint or someone of bad character
will...deliberate badly.” He does so first that we might see that
we are not looking just for some “mental agility.” Rather, we
seek a deeper, more responsive source. Surprising though it
may be, one’s thinking, he suggests here, is deeply dependent
on one’s character. He therewith challenges us to make a
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connection between things where today we see no
connection.
Might we mean by “practical sense” a kind of astuteness
of judgment (sunesis or sagacity), then? Yet “practical sense is
something that [also] imposes obligations, since the end that
belongs to it is what one ought or ought not to do” (1143a710). And astuteness is satisfied to identify distinctions (“mere
theory,” Lives, 2.543). Perhaps then we mean another form of
thoughtfulness: “the right discrimination of what is decent,”
considerateness (sungnôme), if you will? All these various
examples—skilled thinking, astuteness, considerateness,
practical sense—converge for Aristotle to the same meaning:
“All these capacities are directed at things that are ultimate [as
well as] particular.... All actions are among the things that are
particular and universal” (a27-30),49 and this requires a
different and separate faculty to apprehend (1139a9-11).
This brings Aristotle back to his earlier observation about
the similarity of theoretical intellect and practical sense. He
now sees that it is the same fundamental activity, though
differently directed, that is at work in both universal and
particular knowledge. For Aristotle, thought, whether
theoretical or practical, is always rooted in specific experiences and it is intellect, we now learn, that allows us to
apprehend these specific beginnings. “Intellect [nous],” he
observes, “is directed to what is ultimate on both sides, since
it is intellect and not reason [or speech, ou logou] that is
directed at both the first terms and the ultimate particulars”
(1143b1-6).50 On the one side, intellect discerns the ultimate,
first terms of logical demonstration. And on the other, the
very same faculty, in thinking about action, sees the other sort
of “premise,” the ultimate, if contingent, particular. “Of these
[particulars],” he says, “one must have a perception and this
[ultimate] perception [aisthêsis] is intellect.”
But by “intellect,” we now learn, Aristotle means even
more than the apprehension of these beginnings. He asks
how the several perfections he’s considered become useful to
us. It is not through theoretical wisdom (sophia) that they
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become so. Indeed, truth be told, “Wisdom contemplates
nothing by which a human being will be happy” (1143b19).
Rather it is this other faculty phronêsis that “is concerned
with things that are just and beautiful and good for a human
being [;] these are the things that it belongs to a good man to
do, and we are not more able to perform these actions
[merely] by knowing about them” (b21f). At this point we
may still be having difficulty seeing that practical sense is
more than a latent potential (a “capacity”). Rather, we have
to understand it as an active condition, a fullness of thought
that seeks to actively integrate circumstance and experience
in a complex calculus issuing in an action. And for Aristotle
knowing does not get us to such a developed and active
readiness of soul. It is rather practical sense, phronêsis, that
allows us to so engage the world (1139b1-7).
Seeing the soul as an integrated whole (and not made up
of disparate parts, distinguishable though they may be),
Aristotle now returns to his earlier perplexing insight that the
character of our minds is dependent on the character of our
characters. “The work [ergon] of a human being,” he says, “is
accomplished as a result of practical sense and of excellence
[virtue] of character” (1144a5f), for “the starting point [of
thoughtful action]...does not show itself except to a good
person.” This, Aristotle observes, is plain from its opposite:
vice warps our perspective and makes it difficult for us to see
what is good. Thus he concludes it is the “eye sharpened by
experience” (1143b9) that sees what is beautiful as an end or
highest good of action and gains its active state only with
virtue (1144a31-2; Sachs paraphrase).51 Good judgment
about the right action issues only from a person of like
quality. (Good sense here reclaims its double meaning.)
To be effective, excellence requires even more than the
having of goodness. It requires an activating intelligence
(nous), Aristotle says, the kind of intelligence that “carries
over into action,” or what he calls “virtue in the governing
sense” (1144b12f).52 And it is precisely this that “practical”
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sense makes possible53 (b17: “does not come without
practical sense”54).
Phronêsis is thus not just one among the several human
excellences: “all the excellences will be present [only] when
one excellence, practical sense, is present.” Here we see that
phronêsis is the enabling excellence.55 Moreover, at the very
beginning of his book, Aristotle emphasized that we must first
discover what is the principal activity or work, unique to a
being, for it is the perfection of this “work” that leads to its
fulfillment or happiness. We here learn that it is practical
sense that is the prerequisite to that fulfillment, our
fulfillment.56
This conclusion is striking both for what is said and who
says it: Aristotle, the man who for the tradition represents the
speculative philosopher par excellence. Yet it is Aristotle here
who urges us to develop “that other intellectual excellence,”
as the virtue that will enable us to think well and that is the
one most important for “our own proper good” and for our
lives together in the city.
8. The Looking Glass
He did not know how to govern free men.
Lysander 1.594
It is a hard thing to give laws to the Cyrenians,
abounding [as they do] in wealth and plenty.
Lucullus 1.661
Such a view of the centrality of phronêsis is shared by
Plutarch. Indeed here we see why the reading of Plutarch is
so valuable. Many things in his work are “worthy of
memory,” but unlike abstract treatments, the Lives display
pre-eminently the interplay and indeed the consequences of
character and practical sense in the world of circumstance.
We are brought back to our place in the city, re-concretized
in our thinking, our thoughts firmly founded on the rich soil
of unmediated experience.57 This Plutarch understood to be
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the proper role of “history” and “biography” in liberal
education.
But not only “in theory.” Just as he discovered for
himself, it is Plutarch’s profound hope that his readers would
find in the “looking glass” of his texts experiences wherein
their own capacities for “subtle discriminations” might be
developed and their practical sense honed. He hoped as well
that we would find therein people from whom we might
“gain experience,” both of what to avoid—and there are
plenty of lessons there to be found—and of those rare
individuals whose excellences might inspire us to emulation.
Thus for those wondering, “Why are we reading Plutarch?
It’s only history,” we would propose this as the beginning of
a reply.
So we ask you to reopen the book on “that other intellectual excellence,” phronêsis or practical sense, and reclaim
its priority for our lives. Minimally, by so doing we would
become more attentive to the complexity of human things
and the richness of the world before us; maximally we would
develop our fine judgment and perhaps begin to live up to
that with which we choose to associate ourselves (2.445).
So we ask you as well to emulate Plutarch—not just by
being “strengthened by the experience” (1.201, 646) of
reading him—but also by ourselves taking up the “looking
glass” of writing as a medium of self-discovery wherein we
may shape ourselves as we seek to discover the shape of
things.
9. Postscript in Seminar: The Faculty of the Faculty
Good judgment goes with the way
each one is educated.
Aristotle58
Lastly, let us return to where we began: seminar. By a
somewhat long and oblique route, we have been exploring a
faculty of knowledge, distinctive to human beings, that
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focuses on the confluence of the general and the specific. At
the outset we spoke about an ability that good tutors and
students possess that enables them to so craft their questions
or remarks that they are not only generally apt but are tailormade thoughts aiding learners in their personal struggles to
find their way through the confusions of a developing conversation. That is, our prompting questions or nudging remarks
might be “just right” both for the larger context—the seminar
conversation as a whole—and for you, the learner with your
particular degree of readiness and openness to possibilities.
Such just-right questioning presupposes a knowledge both of
the particular and the general; it requires that capacity, I
would submit, that Aristotle identifies as “practical sense.”
Thus we see that speaking is not the same as thinking. It
is more complex. When we speak, we not only think about
something but also speak to someone. Speaking is thus biintentional (or bi-prepositional, if you will). And it is this
additional to-ness that is required for a conversation to be
successful, for genuine communication to take place. This toness seems also to require an additional sense, that sense of
aptness, that practical sense that enables one to speak to
someone in their particularity, “where they are,” not to
mention at the right time, in the right way, etc, or all the
qualifiers that, for Aristotle, distinguishes practical sense.
Indeed, this is the distinctive excellence of a teaching
faculty59 (as opposed to a research faculty): to hear where a
particular learner is “coming from” and design our response
“to order” that our question or comment might help them as
they seek to find their way to discovery. In the midst of
perplexity, what we want and need as learners is not a lecture
or a theory but helpful, specific, “practical” guidance.
(Phronêsis is not unique to the faculty, though perhaps it is
more developed there.) Thus we do our students and one
another a disservice when we do not offer an opening
question but give a closed answer; we fail as a faculty when
we fall back into being professors, and you fail as students
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when you fall back into being passive scribes. As we learn
from Plato’s Meno, answers and abstracted, deracinated,
blind thoughts do not help us to find our way to Larissa.
Such tailor-made teaching (10.9, 1180b8-9) can only
happen in a place small enough for genuine conversation,
where faculty are present to their students and not lost in
their own thoughts, where we are all attentive to the learning
trajectories of one another, and where—and this is equally
important—students likewise are insistent that they must find
their own way to discovery.
So we ask you to make such a place a reality, to seek to
question well, to make your efforts of inquiry such that they
further both your own learning and that of your fellow
learners. And may we continue to say: Good question!
1
Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in Hard Times, #71 in Philosophy and
Truth, ed. Daniel Breazeale (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979), 117.
2
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Joe Sachs (Newburyport, Mass.:
Focus Publishing, 2002), 10.9.1180b8-9. All references to Aristotle’s
Nicomachean Ethics—hereafter NE—are from this translation.
3
All references are from Plutarch’s Lives, trans. John Dryden (1683) and
rev. Arthur Clough (1864), 2 vols. (New York: Modern Library, 2001),
hereafter Lives.
4
See also Demosthenes 2.396: They were “...better able to recommend
than to imitate virtues of the past.”
5
NE, 2.4.1105b11-13: see also 1112a10; 6.10.143a1-20, 1179b5.
6
Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom
(New York: Basic Books, 1979), 240.
7
Montesquieu: “What Histories can be found...that please and instruct
like the Lives of Plutarch? ... I am of the Opinion with that Author, who
said, that if he was constrained to fling all the Books of the Ancients into
the Sea, Plutarch should be the last drowned.” And Emerson: “A bible for
heroes.” For an even longer list of those influenced by Plutarch, see Roger
Kimball, “Plutarch and the Issue of Character,” Lives of the Mind: The
Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Chicago: Ivan R.
Dee, 2002), 18-21.
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A question we should ask of all the authors on the program.
9
“Re-enter” because we live in more than one world, we moderns, with
our abstract thoughts overriding and prisming our experience.
10 Compare Plato, Republic, Book 2, where we are asked to see the city as
the magnified image of the soul.
11
“The Greeks invented the art of biography as an exercise in moral
philosophy. The lives of “pre-eminent” statesmen and generals were to
serve as ethical exemplars—both good and bad—for the rest of us, subject
as we are to the same all-too-human appetites and temptations. Thus the
early years of an Alcibiades, an Alexander, or a Cicero were mined by
Plutarch for anecdotes that might reveal an unchanging and essential
character; its elements becoming more manifest during the crucible of
adulthood and thereby accounting for the subject’s ultimate achievement”
(Victor Davis Hanson, Commentary, vol. 116, no. 5 (December 2003):
53-4.
12
“Beware of ambition, as of all the higher powers, the most destructive
and pernicious” (1.609). “For men whose ambition neither seas, nor
mountains, nor unpeopled deserts can limit, nor the bounds dividing
Europe and Asia confine their vast desires, it would be hard to expect to
forbear from injuring another ...when they close together. They are ever
naturally at war, envying and seeking advantages of one another, and
merely make use of those two words, peace and war, like current coin, to
serve their occasions, not as justice, but as expediency suggests...” (Lives,
Pyrrhus 1.527). Also, “...the innate disease of princes....” (1.523)
13
NE 1.3.1095a1-10: “Therefore good judgment goes along with the
way each one is educated.... For this reason, it is not appropriate for
young people to be students of politics, since the young are inexperienced
in the actions of life.... And since the young are apt to follow their
impulses, they would hear such discourses without purpose or benefit....
And it makes no difference whether one is young in age or immature in
character, for the deficiency doesn’t come from the time, but the living in
accord with feeling and following every impulse.” Also 6.8.1142a12-20:
“A sign of what is being said is why young people become skilled geometricians and mathematicians, and wise in respect to such things, but they
do not seem to become possessed of practical judgment, and the reason is
that practical judgment has to do with particulars, which become known
by experience, but the young are not experienced, since it is length of
time that produces experiences.” See also 6.9.1143b 10-15, and Lives,
Lucullus, 1.661.
14
Plato, Republic, Books 2-3.
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15
As we recognize in proposing a “great books program” for one
another’s improvement.
16
“For the mere sight itself of a shining and conspicuous example of
virtue in the life of their prince will bring them spontaneously to virtue,
and to a conformity with that blameless and blessed life of good-will and
mutual concord, supported by temperance and justice, which is the
highest benefit that human means can confer; and he is the truest ruler
who can best introduce it into the hearts and practice of his subjects”
(Lives, Numa Pompilius, 1.99). In this respect, there is little one can say
that can approximate the radiance of the paradeigma or example: “Now
there’s a man!” Indeed it may not be something that lends itself to logos,
“to argument and proof ” (cp. 1.420). Plutarch thereby helps us to restore
our attention to what is imposingly present even in our small worlds.
Martin Heidegger in Plato’s Sophist (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1997), renders paradeigma as “striking example”: “they show the
universal through the obviousness of some particular case, through a
definite example. This is the way to produce conviction in others. This is
the way of epagogê (Posterior Analytics, 71a8).” “To elucidate what is
familiar already at the outset is rather a matter of epagogê, the mode of
clarification proper to straightforward perception. Epagogê is clearly the
beginning, i.e. that which discloses the archê [the source]; it is the more
original, not epistêmê” (25). How to articulate what is revealed thereby
remains a question for us: do “striking examples” show the universal
through the particular or the fullness of the particular? See also
Emmanuel Levinas, “Without Identity,” Humanism of the Other, trans.
Nidra Poller (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2003), 61.
17
Aristotle too urges us to take our bearings by those who are serious
(spoudaios, paradeigma). They provide a standard or reference (not just
an illustration or instance) by which to act, from our direct experience of
their influence and from our reading of their deeds.
18 To kalon: the beautiful; see NE 3.6.1115b12-13: “…for the sake of the
beautiful, since this is the end that belongs to virtue.” See Sachs, NE, p.
49, n. 61. “Measure, proportion and harmony are in the nature of things
and we have a direct responsiveness to them that orients us in the world”
and “Measure, Moderation and the Mean,” The St. John’s Review, vol.
46, no. 2 (2002): 9.
19
“The supreme arts of temperance, of justice and wisdom, as they are
acts of judgment and selection, exercised not on good and just and
expedient only, but also on wicked, unjust, and inexpedient objects, do
not give their commendations to the mere innocence whose boast is its
inexperience of evil, and whose truer name is...simpleness and ignorance
of what all men who live aright should know.... The ancient Spartans, at
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their festivals, used to force their Helots to swallow large quantities of
raw wine, and then expose them at the public tables, to let the young
men see what it is to be drunk. And though I do not think it consistent
with humanity or with civil justice to correct one man...by corrupting
another, yet we may, I think, avail ourselves of the cases of those who
have fallen into indiscretions, and have, in high stations, made themselves
conspicuous for misconduct.... In the same manner, it seems to me likely
enough that we shall be all the more zealous and more emulous to read,
observe and imitate the better lives, if we are not left in ignorance of the
blameworthy and the bad” (Lives, Demetrius 2.445). As we become what
we do, so we live out what we have become: “...their fortunes carried out
the resemblance of their characters” (2.446).
20
95
Physiognomy does not reveal itself in large features, nor character in
great actions. It is in bagatelles [trifles] that nature comes to light. The
public things are either too uniform or too artificial; and it is almost
solely on these [public things] that modern dignity permits our authors to
dwell” (Rousseau, Emile, 240-1).
26
From a Cartesian perspective, this may be taken as an expression of
regret; though in this context it is intended as a conundrum of our onesidedly abstract orientation. (Related to me by Roger Kimball.)
27
The obliqueness of prince-like discretion.
28
See Plato, Apology of Socrates.
29
Levine, ‘I Hate Books,’ or Making Room for Learning, 3.
21
Cp. the pimple on the nose of the Miller (Chaucer, Prologue,
Canterbury Tales).
22
In Plutarch, medicine is frequently the metaphor of the diagnostic
political art—knowledge of “the causes of disorders in the body politic”
(1.609): see 1.215; 2.125, 286, 336, 560, 565, 699.
23
“Marks and indications of the soul,” see 1.337, 469, 479; 2.61, 285,
294, 324, 374, 596. Also see Xenophon, Memorabilia, 3.10.1-8.
24
Nor is he thus a “biographer.” Though he uses both terms, biography
and history, Plutarch is at pains to show that his is of a very specific sort,
unlike what we have become accustomed to expect. The history of these
terms would be interesting to explore.
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Here we see the origin of Montaigne’s and Rousseau’s admiration for
Plutarch. “Those who write lives,” says Montaigne, “are more suited to
me to the extent that they are interested in intentions more than in
results, in what takes place within than in what happens without. That is
why Plutarch is my man” (see n. 6). “Plutarch excels in these very details
into which we no longer dare to enter. He has an inimitable grace at
depicting great men in small things; and he is so felicitous in the choice
of his stories that often a word, a smile, a gesture is enough for him to
characterize his hero. With a joking phrase Hannibal reassures his
terrified army and makes it march laughing to the battle which won Italy
for him. Agesilaus astride a stick makes me love the Great King’s
conqueror. Caesar passing through a poor village and chatting with his
friends betrays, unthinkingly, the deceiver who said he wanted only to be
Pompey’s equal. Alexander swallows medicine and does not say a single
word; it is the most beautiful moment of his life. Aristides writes his own
name on a shell and thus justifies his surname. Philopoemen, with his
cloak off, cuts wood in his host’s kitchen. This is the true art of painting.
In this respect, Plutarch is seeking to reinitiate the Socratic turn back to
the city, though with a specifically ethical intent (see Plato, Phaedo). It is
thus not only modern thought that tends to the excessively theoretical or
abstract. In line with this, he does not read Plato as an “idealist” (see
Dion 2.543-550), but reads the dialogues as embedded in the world (a
cave though it might be) leading thereby to action. As we see as well, he
is not unaware of the precariousness of such an undertaking by
philosophy even here.
30
Consider the problem of equity at NE 5.10.1137b11-32.
31
Just as the modern novel complements the abstractness of modern
philosophy.
32
“Phronêsis is not a speculation about archê and the telos of action as
such; it is not a [theoretical] ethics, not a science, not a hexis meta logou
monon [an active condition according to reason alone] (6.5 1140b28),”
Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 40-2.
33
Hexis is variously translated as habit, disposition, active condition. We
miss what is essential therein if we fail to see it as a developed, if
incipient, mode of activity, an “active having” (Sachs). It is not just a
propensity, predisposition, orientation, or even mere capacity or
potential, but an active state of readiness that manifests itself when
circumstances require, an immanent responsiveness, if you will.
“Intelligence carries over into action,” Aristotle will say later. Consider
the sense of fullness and vitality that comes with growth and discovery, an
inner resourcefulness ready to emerge.
34
What is notable about Aristotle’s classification of the faculties of the
soul is his singling out of a capacity that we today don’t even admit as a
human capacity. It is here claimed to be different in kind from our
general intelligence. Indeed the largest part of Book 6 is dedicated to the
introduction and disclosure of phronêsis. See note 53.
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35
Aristotle presents a different view of the development of character
(“ethics”). His is not a backward looking ethic, a genetic psychology
where one is defined by one’s first beginnings. Human motivation is not
limited to hidden or subconscious sources. Rather, Aristotle’s view is
forward-looking, a growth psychology, an end directed and open to new
possibilities. The future is defining, and not just the past. Character
formation thus supersedes developmental histories, maturity supersedes
“coping mechanisms.”
36
Cp. NE 1.3.1094b22-24: “…it belongs to an educated person to look
for just so much precision in each kind of discourse as the nature of the
thing one is concerned with admits; for to demand demonstrations from
a rhetorician seems about like accepting probable conclusions from a
mathematician.”
37
“Phronêsis is a hexis of alêtheuein [truth disclosing active condition], a
disposition of human Dasein such that in it I have at my disposal my own
transparency. For its themes are the anthopina agatha [human goods].
And it is a hexis of alêtheuein which is pracktike, which lives in action”
(Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 37). Also “Phronêsis dwells in praxis still
more than in logos,” (96) and “Phronêsis is nothing if it is not carried out
in praxis” (115).
38
Who do we think of as having such a “truth disclosing condition”? The
examples Aristotle entertains range from those overseeing a household to
political figures, and in this context he gives the wonderfully ambiguous
example of Pericles, the ruler of Athens at the outset of the Peloponnesian
war (and whose full ambiguity is seen in Plutarch’s account).
39
It is at this point that Heidegger makes his famous observation:
“...Aristotle has here come across the phenomenon of conscience.
Phronêsis is nothing other than conscience set in motion, making an
action transparent. Conscience cannot be forgotten” (Plato’s Sophist, 39).
That phronêsis is not an inferential, reasoning faculty does not mean that
it is an “intuitive” faculty. It is “the other intellectual virtue.” Moreover
phronêsis for Aristotle is not given in its perfection but can and indeed
needs to be developed. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method
(New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1982), 278-89; and Ronald Beiner,
Political Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 72-82.
Earlier Heidegger writes: “For one who has learned to understand an
author it is perhaps not possible to take as a foundation for the interpretation what the author designates as the most important. It is precisely
where an author is silent that one has to begin in order to understand
what the author himself designates as the most proper” (32, 43). Here we
see the origin of deconstruction: the premises of one’s thoughts are often
inexplicit, hidden even from the thinker himself. This would seem to be
an over-reaction to the problem of embedded presuppositions. For it
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would make all science, all knowledge, mysterious, if not meaningless,
where it might only be unreflective (not necessarily wrong). Moreover it
would seem to mean that ‘truth’ ultimately resides in one’s premises.
While our conclusions are only as good as our premises, truth resides in
the author’s developed view as well. A house stands even if we can’t see
its foundations; its strength is evident in the sturdiness of the whole.
40
Gadamer puts this into relief thus: its antithesis is blindness not error
(Truth and Method, 287).
41
Aristotle notes that while it is true, in a certain sense, that “...it is
absurd for anyone to believe that...practical sense is the most serious kind
of knowledge, if a human being is not the highest thing in the cosmos”
(1141a21; also b1)—and for Aristotle we may not be the most important
beings in the cosmos—still, without forgetting the bigger picture, this
faculty remains the most important for human life, lest we not live life
well as a whole.
42
“Phronêsis makes the situation accessible; and the circumstances are
always different in every action” (Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 20); “This
circumspection [mode of circumspective disclosure] isolates that with
which the action, the bringing into being, begins” (32); “Phronêsis is the
inspection of the this-here-now, the inspection of the concrete momentoriness of the transient situation” (112).
43
It is thus a mistake to think of practical insight as the subsumption of
the particular to the universal. For example, Thomas Aquinas: “...we
must say that the practical intellect has a beginning in a universal consideration, and, according to this, is the same in subject with the speculative,
but its consideration terminates in an individual operative thing”
(Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, trans. C.I. Litzinger
(Notre Dame, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 1964/1993), 361 (#1132)—
hereafter Commentary). Or again: “...to frame a decree that is simply the
application of universal reason to a particular practicable...” (381
[#1199]). For Thomas practical intellect is thus a subspecies of
theoretical intellect, the act of practical judgment the application of a
universal rule to a specific situation.
Whereas Aristotle says that the uniqueness of phronêsis lies in its simple
apprehension of ultimate particulars, Thomas sees it in the subordination
of specific wisdom to theoretical wisdom. Here we see the beginning of
the loss of phronêsis as a separate faculty with a unique purview and, with
the loss of continuity with the things of our world, the increasing
estrangement and subjectivity of thought (the skeptical spectator), with the
end result that this faculty, phronêsis, is largely eclipsed or lost sight of in
modern thought. All thinking becomes abstract thinking. See notes 31 and
54 above. The alienation of the Cartesian ego is not far behind. This is the
beginning of a much larger study for us. See Burt Hopkins, “Jacob Klein
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and the Phenomenological Project of Desedimenting the Formalization of
Meaning,” The St. John’s Review, vol. 47, no.2 (2003): 65.
44
For Heidegger (Plato’s Sophist, 97) the benefit of experience is the
amount of time to accumulate enough experiences to “dominate the
manifold”—not the time necessary to refine and mature one’s judgment
to the range of possibilities, to weigh their respective worth, to assess the
manifold factors as each adds yet another vector to the complex calculus
of phronêsis.
45
Sachs directs us to De Anima 431a14-18 and b3-10 as well as to NE
1109b23 and 1126b4. Attention to the fundamental role of intellect was
highlighted for me in freshman seminar two years ago by the perspicuous
questioning of Jackson Carpenter, for which I am grateful.
46
Cp. Thomas, Commentary: “However it is not apprehended by that
sense which perceives the species of proper sensibles...but by the inner
sense which perceives things sensibly conceivable. Similarly in mathematics we know the exterior triangle, or the triangle conceived as
singular, because there we also conform to a sensible conceivable singular,
as in the natural sciences...” (384-5 (#1214)); “Prudence, which perfects
particular reason, rightly to judge singular practicable relations, pertains
rather to this, i.e. inner sense” (#1215).
“Aristotle says that we know such things by perception, not the
perception of any one of the five senses, but the sort by which we
perceive that a triangle is the last kind of figure into which a polygon can
be divided (1142a 28-30). This sort of perceiving contains thinking and
imagining, but what it judges, it judges by perceiving it to be so.... “such
things are among particulars, and judgment is in the act of senseperception” (1109b23-4). But this is the calmly energetic, thought-laden
perception, Sachs, “Three Little Words,” The St. John’s Review, vol. 44,
no. 1 (1997): 12, 15.
47
Emile, 203.
48
Aristotle’s formulation of the utter specificity of action: NE
2.3.104b23: “...the ones one ought not, or when one ought not, or in a
way one ought not, or in as many other ways such distinctions are articulated.” See also 2.4.1105a3-35: “...with the things that come about as a
result of the virtues, just because they are a certain way, it is not the case
that one does them justly...but only if the one doing them does them in a
certain way, if one does them first of all knowingly, and next, having
chosen them and chosen them for their own sake, and third, being in a
stable condition and not able to be moved out of it.”
49
Thomas says this beautifully: “...the man who considers the common
features alone will not know how to proceed to action by reason of this
generality,” Commentary, 354 (#1111).
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50
“At 1142a23-27, [it is said] that intellect and practical judgment stand
at opposite extremes, directed at the unarticulated and individual terms
of thought and the ultimate particulars of perception. The two extremes
are now said to be united in the one faculty of intellect, that contemplates
the universals contained in the ultimate particulars, which can be the only
terms for a knowledge of truth. The same activity that holds a particular
thing together is at work on the soul even in perception. Thus the claim
that a single power stands at the root of theoretical and practical knowing
rests on the ultimate conclusions of the highest kind of philosophy, which
are arrived at in Bk. III of On the Soul and Bk. XII of the Metaphysics.
Here that claim asserts the unity of the human being” (Sachs, NE, 114,
n.168). See 1141b15.
51
NE 1113a29-b1; 139b4-5;1143b13-14;1144b30-32; and Sachs, NE,
117, n. 173.
52
By “governing sense”, Thomas reminds us, we mean that which will
allow us to “govern ourselves” above all, Commentary, 377 (#1185).
53
Thus it is the case, Aristotle says, that human excellence cannot be
“...just an active condition in accord with right reason,” as Socrates seems
to say at times, for example in the Meno (though see Gorgias), “but one
that [must actively] involve right reason” (NE 1144b25).
54
This is puzzling. Since choice is rational desire for Aristotle, it is inseparable from action. Yet here it is intellect that is the motive agency underlying action. Our new question: what is the relationship of reason and
desire in Aristotle?
55
“The two highest modes of alêtheuein [truth disclosure] [in Aristotle]
are phronêsis and sophia” (Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 39.)
56
Lest we still think that he is speaking of some merely practical ability
like “cleverness” [deinos], Aristotle once more helps us by making a
distinction. We’re not just speaking about some natural craftiness or
shrewdness. “...Cleverness enables one to do the things that are
conducive to the object one sets down and to achieve it... [However] if
[one’s] object is base, [then this ability] is shameless...” (1144a22-29).
Practical sense is not cleverness, though it too presupposes an ability to
achieve ends.
57
See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 288, and Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist,
25.
57
NE 1.3.1095a1-2.
57
Indeed, this is the virtue of all good conversation (Venkatesh).
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101
Kultur and the Obligations to
Philosophy
Jonathan Badger
Michael Grenke’s translations of Nietzsche’s On the Future of
Our Educational Institutions and Prefaces to Unwritten Works
offer readers of English a previously unavailable view into
Nietzsche’s thought. These works have not received as much
attention as perhaps they deserve, and Grenke’s careful and
astute English rendering of them is likely to change this.
Grenke’s strategy is to capture the subtleties of
Nietzsche’s prose by means of a rather extreme literalism. As
Grenke points out in his preface, this has occasionally
resulted in difficult English, but it succeeds in preserving
Nietzsche’s peculiar punctuation and diction, which are often
“corrected” in commercial translations. Grenke’s translations
offer an utterly reliable reflection of Nietzsche’s phrasing and
word-play. Key terms are flagged with their German counterparts, and there are ample footnotes to qualify the renderings
of ambiguous terms. Grenke has compiled and organized
relevant portions of Nietzsche’s own notes and drafts for
these works, and has included them in appendices for both
books. His approach allows the reader to track the use of
terms through these texts, and he is meticulous and disciplined in his stated aim of leaving the task of interpretation
to the reader. In this respect, these translations are exemplary.
In addition to the translation and a general introduction by
Grenke, each of the items in the Prefaces is accompanied by a
short and illuminating essay. These are written by Mathew K.
Davis, Lise van Boxel, and Grenke himself.
Friedrich Nietzsche. Prefaces to Unwritten Works. Trans. and ed. Michael W
.
Grenke, South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2005. Friedrich Nietzsche. On the
Future of Our Educational Institutions. Trans. Michael W Grenke, South
.
Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2004. Jonathan Badger is a tutor on the
Annapolis campus of St. John’s College.
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Each work emerged as a completed whole in the year
1872, and the two are deeply connected to one other. For
instance, one of the prefaces in Prefaces to Unwritten Works
is called “Thoughts on the Future of Our Educational
Institutions,” and Nietzsche suggests that it be read before On
the Future of Our Educational Institutions (Prefaces, 28).
Both books focus our attention on the individual Nietzsche
calls the “genius,” a luminary who sees beyond the horizons
of his particular time and place. The genius is unafraid to
smash tablets and to propose new configurations for human
community. Nietzsche depicts the genius sometimes as a
philosopher and other times as a poet or “artist” (see below).
The genius is a theme Nietzsche addresses in detail
elsewhere,1 but these two books specifically address the
question of our response to the genius. How should we
respond to the presence of such an individual? Nietzsche’s
view here would seem to be that the presence of the genius—
be he prophet, poet, or philosopher—carries with it a specific
imperative for the rest of us. We are obliged to allow
ourselves to be lifted by genius. How do we do this?
Nietzsche’s answer seems to be what he calls “culture”
(Kultur). A genius’ vision can in principle be transferred into
a group in the form of a culture or “way of life.” This way
can elevate the non-genius far above his natural capacities
and include him in the work of genius. Moreover, the proper
work of the non-genius includes preparing for the next
appearance of genius in the world, and this work is made
possible by the culture, which organizes and ennobles the
activity of the non-genius.
The Prefaces offers a set of meditations on why Kultur is
necessary, and On the Future of Our Educational Institutions
displays a high level thinking-through of what this might
actually mean in practice at the first stage of implementation,
namely at the level of education.
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The Prefaces
Prefaces to Unwritten Works is Grenke’s edition of a work
originally entitled “Five Prefaces to Five Unwritten Books,”
which was a book handmade by Nietzsche himself and
presented as a gift to Cosima Wagner in 1872, with the
expectation that Richard Wagner would also read it. The care
with which Nietzsche prepared this little volume, clearly
intended for highly regarded readers, should alert us to its
importance as a glimpse into his own conception of his larger
body of work. Many of the themes taken up in the Prefaces
are recognizable from Nietzsche’s published corpus, and we
can clearly see the outlines in it of Nietzsche’s well-known
conceptions of time, history, morality, and art. The
compactness and concision of his presentation, however,
shows us an example of how Nietzsche might have wished his
philosophy to be presented or introduced to intelligent,
educated non-philosophers. This should be of interest to
anyone who aspires to understand Nietzsche.
On first glance the topics of the five prefaces seem quite
disparate. Their titles are:
1. On the Pathos of Truth
2. Thoughts on the Future of Our Educational
Institutions
3. The Greek State
4. The Relation of Schopenhauerian Philosophy to
the German Culture
5. Homer’s Contest
Grenke’s introduction helps us see the common threads
that unify these topics. What most conspicuously emerges is
the theme of culture. Nietzsche views culture as crucial to the
proper development of human life. Modern civilization
seems stunted by either a lack of culture or bad culture.
Nietzsche challenges his readers to foster a new culture of
health, which aims to turn us toward the genius.
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The order that Nietzsche envisions holds the genius in a
place of distinction: he is either the focus or the founder (or
both) of a culture; the culture is an ongoing context in which
the rest of us lead elevated lives as we look toward the genius
and take our bearings in the light of his insight and creation.
Genius alone would seem to be a kind of meaningless dead
end. Authentic genius propagates itself through culture, so
that the entire community can be enriched, and also so that a
new genius can eventually be brought into being.
For Nietzsche there are two classes of genius, “the genius
of wisdom and of knowing,” who is the philosopher, and “the
genius in his universal concept,” who would seem to be the
artist or poet (13, note 1). The question of which of these is
actually primary is complex. In the Prefaces Nietzsche at
times locates the philosopher at the center of culture, while at
the same time he characterizes the artist as one who can
create a culture. It would seem that the two are not easily
separable.
A second unifying thread running through the Prefaces is
the theme of time (8-9). Human beings perceive time as the
annihilator that separates them from their natural vision of
themselves. We love ourselves and our products, and this love
suggests that these things should persist, should be. Time,
however, destroys them. We respond to time metaphysically
through philosophy, art, history, culture, politics, and war.
This second thread turns out to be more fundamental than
the first: culture emerges as a response to the problem of
time.
In the first preface, “On the Pathos of Truth,” Nietzsche
is explicit regarding time as a fundamental problem for man.
We recoil at the specter of everything disappearing into time;
it offends us. One response is to link together the “great
moments” into a chain that runs through the millennia: this
is the “fundamental thought of culture” (22). This rebellion
against time also brings about the notion of “truth.” Truth
stands outside of time, and hence is not subject to its
destructive power. Nietzsche recognizes Heraclitus as an
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exemplar of the genius who explores this kind of truthpositing in a life-affirming manner. Heraclitus, however, is
exceptional in this respect. The general run of philosophers
falls short of “art,” which aims to live, while “knowing”
achieves only annihilation (27). “Truth” is potentially annihilating in that it is indifferent to human dignity and well being:
truth informs us that human life is a short-lived, insignificant
anomaly flickering in a remote corner of an indifferent
universe. Yet truth is necessary in order for us to escape the
annihilation of time. This, it would seem, is the pathos of
truth.
This preface sets out the terms and the tone for the other
prefaces, which explore various aspects of culture, namely,
what is its source, who is responsible for it, and what should
be its proper end.
The next preface, titled “Thoughts on the Future of Our
Educational Institutions,” builds on the previous preface’s
critique of “truth.” Nietzsche here challenges the reader to set
aside his former education so that he might escape into a
position from which he may grasp the “authentic problem.”
Only then can the reader understand the nature of
Nietzsche’s proposal for a radical reformation of education, a
reformation that seeks to establish a culture that takes its
bearings from the greatest achievements of philosophy and
poetry of the past, and that seeks to make ready the
appearance of new geniuses in the future. Nietzsche is not
explicit about what this “authentic problem” is. In his introductory essay to this preface, Matthew Davis persuasively
argues that the “authentic problem” is the problem of truth,
articulated in the previous essay. The pathos of truth is
approached culturally by means of education. The next
preface is on politics, and thus we see a path forming in the
sequence of prefaces: a theoretical insight into the problem of
truth, followed by an educational response, leading into a
formulation of a political structure. This is a practical
response to the unifying themes mentioned above. Time is the
fundamental problem, and it can be mitigated by “truth.”
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Truth is posited by philosophy and given life by means of
culture, which in turn must be established through education
and politics. Philosophy, education, politics. It is striking that
the concern for education is prior to politics.
The next preface, “The Greek State,” tells us that a
consolation for the outrage of time is a species of politics
Nietzsche identifies as “artistic culture,” for which he credits
Plato. He seems here to appropriate and exploit the
Republic’s city in speech for the purpose of illustrating a
highly ordered “artistic culture” that places the genius at the
top and orders all of life according to the insights of the
genius. “Plato’s” completed “state” sought the “ever-renewed
generation and preparation of the genius” (57). The state in
its best form does not view the individual as dignified in
himself, but rather values the individual as an instrument of
genius. The individual is lifted above his natural condition of
moral and intellectual feebleness (and above his fleeting life)
to become part of the work of the genius; each ordinary life
is thus brought into the realm of genius and culture, and
thereby beyond the immediate threat of annihilation.
Nietzsche notices the irony of the fact that the poets are
ejected from this city, which Nietzsche has associated with the
artistic culture, but he also notes quite correctly that the
Republic is a product of “poetic intuition and painted with
bluntness” (57). Further, we must ask how Nietzsche would
account for the fact that “Plato” places the “genius of
wisdom” (the philosopher) at the top of this “state,” when
Nietzsche has identified this genius as derivative from the
“genius in his universal concept” (the artist). Again, he
acknowledges this contradiction, but passes over it quickly,
calling it a symptom of a struggle internal to Plato, who still
suffers from the influence of Socrates. Nietzsche calls his
interpretation of Plato’s “hieroglyph” the “secret teaching of
the connection between the state and the genius” (59,
emphasis Nietzsche’s).
Nietzsche then turns to a practical, contemporary
challenge that emerges from this analysis. To what should his
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contemporary Germans look as they contemplate what a
proper culture would look like? His response to this question
is Schopenhauer. Nietzsche offers no account here of
Schopenhauer’s philosophy; he only notes that he is “their”
(the Germans’) single philosopher in the nineteenth century
(69). He suggests that they begin with the philosopher and
then consider what culture belongs to him.
Nietzsche conspicuously avoids doing this work for his
readers. He challenges them to work out for themselves what
the culture of their time should be, and how they should
derive it from a particular philosopher. Again, strangely,
Nietzsche has selected a genius of knowledge—that is, a
philosopher—for his starting point. Thus, by this point in the
Prefaces a rich set of questions has emerged, and Grenke
intelligently frames many of them in his essay that accompanies this preface (60-4).
The final preface, “Homer’s Contest,” addresses the
culture of combat. We children of modernity have difficulty
affirming any sort of goodness in war. Our desire is for a
world of peace. Nietzsche poses a challenge for us. Our desire
for peace is a desire to escape nature, to escape time and
become eternally at rest. We must ask ourselves if this is
possible or best. Is it a meaningful solution to the annihilating
effects of time?
To get at this question, Nietzsche leads us back through
the horrors of the Trojan war, deeper into the world of the
Homeric gods, and deeper still, back into the primordial
divinities of Hesiod, who describes a reality ruled by the
“children of the night.” This is a world of cruelty, deception,
and death—the fundamental reality. The battles of the Titans,
says Nietzsche, represented a relief from the primordial
condition of chaos and disorder. Battle is “grace” and
“salvation” (83).
Two kinds of strife emerged from this initial condition:
one is merely cruel, seeking only discord, while the other is
jealous and ambitious and seeks distinction and pre-eminence.
This second type of strife is “good” strife; it leads men
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toward excellence and is life promoting, despite its violence.
It is this good strife that Nietzsche says characterizes the
Homeric contests as exemplified at Troy, and this is an answer
to the question why Homeric poetry seems to exult in the
glorious horror of warfare.
In her introductory essay to this preface (70-80), van
Boxel argues that this insight extends to our fundamental
desire to see the world coherently, to render it as intelligible.
Conflict tames the primordial chaos and thereby establishes
measure. Prior to battle, nothing is measured against anything
else; nothing is knowable. Battle is the means to establishing
the measure of one against the other. The greater is established, and thus order is established. Further, the greater
points us toward the good, which we begin to see more
clearly. Through the establishment of measure by means of
combat, the world is rendered not only intelligible but also
moral (77-8).
Nietzsche’s formulation is obscure. He claims that the
pre-Hellenic, Oriental genius envisions a motion out of
primordial chaos and cruelty by means of strife. This motion
passes first through “disgust in existence, to interpretation of
this existence as an expiating punishment, to belief in the
identity of being there [Dasein] and being guilty” (83). The
Hellenes take up this conception and extend it into a vision
of the “good strife”: the life-promoting violence leading to
victory and excellence.
Another feature of this Homeric-Hellenic view is the
conviction that an ongoing subservience to a single master is
undesirable. There will be many geniuses and they must clash
and mix.
[O]ne removes the over-towering individual, [and]
thereby now again the contest of forces awakes: a
thought that is hostile to the “exclusivity” of
genius in the modern sense, but which assumes
that, in a natural order of things, there are always
more geniuses who reciprocally incite [each other]
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to deeds, as they also reciprocally hold [each
other] within the borders of measure. That is the
kernel of the Hellenic contest-idea: it abhors
solitary mastery and fears its dangers; it requires,
as a means of protection against the genius—a
second genius. (89)
Thus, although every gift must disclose itself in fighting,
this is not a call to a master-slave ordering. It is rather a call
to a recognition of the agonistic character of human being
and seeing.
Finally, this view of being suggests that volitional action is
not possible without fighting. For Nietzsche, the Greeks
discover what it means to be free. In the absence of the
contest neither the Greek individual nor the Greek culture
can find measure, and thus cannot direct themselves. The
danger for post-Hellenic civilization is degeneration into the
primal chaos. Without the noble strife there is a sliding back
to cruelty and vengeance. Without ongoing strife and combat
man may not remain properly human.
Nietzsche was conscious that the ideas he formulated in
these prefaces were unfashionable in 1872. They are perhaps
even more unfashionable now. The liberal West has become
quite unified in its preference for individual rights and peace.
Even the proponents of particular war efforts do not defend
war on the basis of its salutary effects on soldiers or culture;
it is regarded as a necessary evil, instrumental for political
and strategic ends. The stated aims of Western military action
are the removal of brutal despots, the elimination of threats
to security, and the restoration of regional stability. However
paradoxical or contradictory, modern war is for the sake of
peace and prosperity. We wage wars to end wars.
Nietzsche challenges a belief so deeply held that it is
perhaps not even recognized as a belief. We modern liberals
do not regard love of peace as an article of faith; it is, rather,
experienced as a recognition of a manifest good. This makes
it difficult to hold Nietzsche’s challenge in front of us.
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It is nevertheless important that we take up this challenge.
If we reject Nietzsche’s claims about war, does this mean that
we reject the Homeric presentation of human life? If we
reject Nietzsche’s vision of the individual’s relation to the
genius through culture, does this mean we must reject Plato’s
Republic? Or can we rest secure in the belief that Nietzsche
offers us flawed readings of these works? Would we say that
our readings of Homer and Plato are superior to Nietzsche’s?
The mastery and power of Nietzsche’s presentation
makes it difficult to dismiss his readings out of hand, but
perhaps we have some room to maneuver. Could it be that
Nietzsche intentionally misrepresents Homer and Plato for
the sake of co-opting them into his project? Or is it that he
emphasizes particular aspects of them for the sake of
shocking their modern readers into seeing that at some point
we must make a choice between our modern prejudices and
our admiration for Homer and Plato? How would we make
such a choice? At the very least this would involve two
considerations: First, we should carefully examine the
opinions that pull us so powerfully toward perpetual peace
and universal autonomy—opinions that lead us not only to
recoil from the realities of war but also to withdraw from the
idea of the genius and the “cults” that follow in his wake;
second, we should read Plato and Homer very carefully—is
there any chance that Nietzsche is right in saying that we tend
to impose modern sensibilities upon them and thereby distort
or obscure their significance?
On the Future of Our Educational Institutions
Nietzsche’s series of lectures delivered at the University of
Basil in the winter of 1872, called On the Future of Our
Educational Institutions, was a public reading of a dialogue
set in an idyllic forest wilderness near the banks of the Rhein
in late summer. The interlocutors are an old philosopher, his
younger companion, and two passionate university students
wielding pistols. A dog also participates in the drama. There
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is in fact a great deal of dramatic action in the dialogue; as
Grenke points out in his introduction, there is “shooting,
shouting, singing, wrestling, a star falling, a torch-lit
procession, a musical signal, and, of course, biting.”
Because the speeches are situated within a drama, we are
challenged to interpret them accordingly. Where do we locate
the voice of Nietzsche? The lector identifies himself with one
of the young students, but the weightiest monologues come
from the old philosopher. Moreover, of the two students, the
“friend” is the more articulate. Finally, as a young academic,
the philosopher’s “companion” seems to occupy the lector’s
social position and professional status at the time these
lectures were delivered.
The central topic of discussion is education. What is it,
and how should it be achieved? What is its relationship to
politics and the “state”? Along the way we encounter the
concept of “culture.” According to the philosopher, many
seem to believe that becoming educated means becoming
“cultured.” What does this mean? Is this something to which
we should aspire? What are the alternatives to it? What is
culture and what is its proper status within a regime?
One of the primary concerns of the dialogue is the
democratization of education, which seems to imply—or at
least coincide with—a trivialization of the activity and the
production of countless subfields of study, all of which fail to
comprehend the greatness of ancient philosophy and poetry,
as well as the greatness of modern German visionaries such as
Goethe. Central to this loss is the deterioration of proper
language study. Contemporary Gymnasium students, says the
philosopher, are not only unable to read ancient Greek in a
way that gives them access to the power of Plato and
Sophocles, but they are also unable to speak and write
German properly. They have sunk to the level of “journalism”
(2.45-57; 3.73).
This newfangled education purports to make students
independent in their thinking, allowing them to eschew
authority and to write about whatever they please, as though
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their untutored inclinations were highly valuable. This
generates a smug and unjustifiably aloof student who remains
uninitiated into philosophy, says the old philosopher (5.1057). These students learn to be contemptuous of authority, but,
says the philosopher, they pay for their “grandiose illusion of
freedom through ever-renewing torments and doubts”
(5.111). Contemporary education indulges the personality
and the particular. It celebrates the individual and his quirks.
Proper education, says the philosopher, “should be purified
from the imprint of the subject and carried out above the
interplay of the times, as the clear mirroring of the eternal
and unchanging essence of the thing” (4.97).
The two students naturally resent this critique and point
out that their Gymnasium education has cultivated them and
given them a taste for science, which they presume to be
clearly good for mankind. The philosopher scoffs at the
proposition, and remarks that he feels “terrified” by this
development (5.105); this scientistic culture has spawned an
industry of degenerate erudition that marks an escape from
authentic life and culture.
A danger the philosopher sees is that, in the absence of
philosophic leadership within the educational institutions,
the students with the greatest capacity grow to despise
themselves under “the unendurable burden of standing
alone” without a true teacher (5.112). Another danger, he
warns, is the seduction of the best students by false gods,
namely, perverse ideological and political movements.
The philosopher is deeply concerned that the state has
taken control of pre-university education to use for its own
insidious ends. The production of serviceable citizens who
are unmoved by greatness is at odds with philosophy’s
interest in education. The old philosopher persuades his little
audience that the purpose of proper educational institutions
is to cultivate the soil in which philosophy can flourish.
These institutions would acknowledge that philosophy is
extremely rare, and requires extraordinary effort. Out of the
multitude of students only a few would be sufficiently
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endowed to participate in the work of the philosophic
schools, of which there would only be a small number in all
of Germany. A small number of teachers would emerge from
this rarified sample of students, and even these would only
serve as laborers in the service of bringing forth the rarest of
breeds, the philosopher himself. Those with “second- and
third-class gifts” can thus be brought to their full potential
and can contribute to the work of philosophy. (4.97)
As we consider this dream, we must remember that this is
not Nietzsche speaking, but a character in his lecturedialogue. This does not mean that Nietzsche does not intend
to advance such a vision of education and philosophy, but we
are obliged, as we are with Plato’s Republic, to hesitate to
conclude that this is Nietzsche’s blueprint for education.
We are encouraged, however, to consider what we think
the proper relationship is between philosophy and educational institutions, and how this relationship stands with
respect to the regime in which we live. Can educational institutions peacefully service both the needs of the nation and the
demands of philosophy (or more broadly, the demands of
genius2)? This raises a more fundamental question for us. Do
we view philosophy as an activity with an imperative? That
is, does it call us and make demands of us? If it does, how
does this call stand with respect to our “individuality,” our
“persons,” and our inclinations about what a good life should
be? Do we view philosophy as merely instrumental to our
individual lives; that is, do we grapple with philosophic texts
only so much as is pleasant and convenient for our personal
inclinations? Do we view philosophy as merely a good
exercise for thinking and talking about difficult matters, for
the sake of a higher quality of discourse in personal life, in
business life, in political life? Is philosophy then merely a
handmaid to the ordinary affairs of life?
It is likely that most of us within the academic traditions
of liberal democracies in the twenty-first century do not
respond with vigorous principled support to the idea of a
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culture of genius. We tend to believe that the artifacts of
genius are to be read and considered seriously either within
an enterprise of historical inquiry, or with a view toward a
kind of personal enlightenment. Some of us even go so far as
to believe that these notable books can help us navigate the
political and social questions of our own time. It is unusual,
however, for anyone to approach them out of a sense of
service to something else, something higher to which one
feels obliged to subordinate oneself. Academics and their
students dabble in texts that strike their fancy. The old
philosopher of Nietzsche’s dialogue claims that, for the best
students, the consequences of this casual, personal
relationship with genius are confusion, doubt, and selfloathing, as well as an unwarranted arrogance. The alternative he offers is initiation by a teacher into the proper study
of philosophy within a culture that surrounds genius. The
student is brought into a central region of the culture, and
this gives the education authenticity and authority (5.11013). The student is brought into the work of philosophy for
the sake of philosophy.
A question emerges: Are we the servants of philosophy, or
is philosophy an instrument for our “personal” ends? If we
answer in a manner that suggests that philosophy does carry
an imperative, then we must follow that imperative or reject
philosophy. If we follow it, will there be implications not just
for the individual but also for human life generally or at least
for the worldly community within which philosophy
appears?
1
2
See Gay Science, 361; Human, all too Human, 1.126,157-168.
I speak specifically of philosophy here, although Nietzsche’s conception
of the genius would seem to be broader. To be safe we might speak of
“the artist or philosopher.” I frame the issue in terms of philosophy for
several reasons. As noted above, Nietzsche makes the distinction between
“the genius in his universal concept” and “the genius of wisdom,” and we
might take care to preserve this distinction in our general understanding
here. One might reasonably conclude that the proper focal point or
BADGER
115
center of a Kultur would be “the genius in his universal concept,” and
this would not be the philosopher, but rather “the artist.” This, however,
does not appear to be Nietzsche’s application of his terms. He observes
and valorizes Plato’s placing philosophy in charge of the ideal regime; he
names the philosopher Schopenhauer as the best source for a new
German culture; and in On the Future of Our Educational Institutions the
account of the ordering of the institutions comes from the “old
philosopher.” We can therefore speak here in terms of philosophy and its
relation to politics and educational institutions, though we should be
mindful of the subtle relationship between Nietzsche’s “philosopher” and
his “artist,” which a more complete analysis of Nietzsche’s thought would
explore. See Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, for an
explicit account of the distinction, as well as his view that this distinction
is transcended by certain pre-Socratic philosophers.
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117
Jan Blits and the Virtues
of Commentary
John E. Alvis
The sprightliest thinker of our time once presented a lecture
on the virtues of Jane Austen beginning with a list most of the
audience considered an enumeration of defects: few settings
within unimproved nature, no symbols, tame emotions,
language under restraint, no derangements of plot, no
authorial confidences, predictable outcomes, or unabashed
moral assessments. Implicit in the lecture was a gentle reproof
of the manner of fiction writers well regarded, though, by
comparison with Austen, overwrought, as well as of the taste
of a readership similarly impolite in its avidity for strong
sensations. Timely and welcome, one might suppose, would
be something on similar lines but directed against presently
influential literary critics, too many of whom are, to the
extent permissible by academic conventions, sensationalists.
Yet, since not the least objectionable of the preoccupations of
contemporary critics is their insistence upon telling us more
of other critics than we need to know, offering a corrective by
better practice seems preferable. For that we can applaud the
example set by writers such as Jan Blits in his five books on
Shakespeare, and most recently in his study of Coriolanus.
Blits has the good sense to realize that each of
Shakespeare’s major plays affords material sufficiently
abundant to require book-length treatment for its elucidation. He devotes an entire volume to Julius Caesar (The
End of the Ancient Republic: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar),
another to Macbeth (The Insufficiency of Virtue: Macbeth and
the Natural Order), another to Hamlet (Deadly Thought:
Jan Blits. Spirit, Soul, and City: Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Lexington Books,
2006. John E. Alvis is a Professor in the Department of English, the
University of Dallas.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Hamlet and the Human Soul), and a book on A Midsummer
Night’s Dream (The Soul of Athens: Shakespeare’s A
Midsummer Night’s Dream). His newest volume, Spirit, Soul,
and City: Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, is occupied with the play
probably composed last of the group Shakespeare drew out of
Plutarch’s Lives. Confining himself to a single play enables
Blits to do more than is usually done in the way of discerning
connections. One of the more striking of such discoveries
occurs with the discussion of the play’s “two endings.”
Shakespeare seems to have directed his story to one
conclusion with the success of the family embassy that turns
back a vengefully triumphant Coriolanus, yet he ends the play
a second time with the actual slaying of the title character,
since returned to Corioles, the city on behalf of which he had
warred against Rome. Blits makes sense of this peculiarity in
the play’s construction by perceiving the first climax as the
defeat of spirited ambition, and the second as the destruction
of the hero’s soul, his death coinciding with his inability to
see that his insistence upon a virtue unconditional has
continued to the end to make him the victim of conditions set
by meaner souls.
At times the dividend of dwelling upon a single play lies
in detecting overtones of particular words or phrases that
modify each other over wide intervals of text. Such a concentrated focus may also allow leisure for observing differences
in superficially similar incidents, or for developing the implications of certain repeated imagery, e.g. body parts for
members of Rome’s political organism, beast metaphors
applied to opponents, and diseases as figures for political
disorders. The tight focus also facilitates attention to
Shakespeare’s arrangement of incidents into a plot that
conveys dialectical thought by dramatic means. The focus of
the dialectic, announced in Blits’s title, is the relation between
a particular kind of civil society and the distinctive human
type that regime has produced. Coriolanus’s “spirit” and
“soul” have their genesis in his “city,” yet Shakespeare reveals
within his protagonist a persistent conflict with the
ALVIS
119
community that has educated him in spirited ambition and
has by public acclamation conferred his honorific name.
But the chief benefit of Blits’s approach is that by
attending to one play at a time, it encourages the supposition
that each play is a complete and coherent body of thought
rather than an exhibit from which evidence may be extracted
in service of a critic’s thesis. You will notice that the thematic
parts of Blits’s various book titles make use of no words alien
to Shakespeare’s own usage. This is a departure from the
widespread practice of blazoning titles that advertise intent to
examine their subject from perspectives generated by modes
of thought ill sorting with Shakespearean diction. It is
refreshing to readers more used to immodest titles that decry,
say, Hegemony engaged in exploiting the dispossessed, that
promise a Deconstructing of some Ideology, or that propose
to demonstrate Undecideability (sic) vaporizing some Text
hitherto deemed determinable (Marxist powers, ideology,
and writings exempted). Blits’s satisfaction with a
Shakespearean vocabulary for rendering Shakespeare’s
thought permits his audience a less mediated acquaintance
with whatever play he discusses. The critic does not obstruct
so much the reader’s access to the thought of the poetry.
Students complain of teachers who persist in standing
between them and the light emitted from an author. Some
rare teachers know how to remove the impediment, and
come to know as well the happy result that occasionally
follows, that of learning simultaneously with the class. As far
as it appears possible to do so, Blits writes in the way of a
teacher receptive to this lesson.
Spirit, Soul, and City further distinguishes itself by its
organization. Contemporary expectations prescribe for the
commentator a vantage from the heights of which he will
profess to look over the head of the author whose work he
has contracted to elucidate. By preferring a topical division of
his own devising to the progression of action of the poem, he
declares his superiority to his subject. Blits adopts a more
modest but to my mind a more fruitful address to the task. He
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
proceeds as the progression of the play prescribes, following
its development from act to act, scene after scene, line by line.
Conventional Shakespeareans will object to arranging
discussion in this manner and might well dismiss the result as
a mere “commentary.” Readers who seek to understand
Shakespeare rather than tame him might wish for more such
commentaries. From Blits we can collect the useful lesson that
an important dimension of the thought of the play comes into
view once we appreciate the dramatist’s development of
thought by repetition, congruence and incongruence, echo
and dissonance, and progression and retrogression, all of
which one best grasps when interpretive comment adheres to
plot. Never mind that college must caution students not to
peg their argument to the plot. They need not try this at
home. Still, Blits understands, and guides his reader to understand that a Shakespearean play is already a course of imaginative reasoning. Its logic will reveal itself to patient attention
operating consecutively rather than synoptically.
Obviously the risk incurred by such an organization is
that, as some parts of the play may interest us more than
others, a commentary proceeding in accord with the plot may
not sustain a constant interest. In this case, happily, a strong
theme prevents Blits’s commentary from plodding. He never
permits us to lose sight of his principal argument: that the
play examines a Roman republican community in tension
with a hero at once its product and the most serious challenge
to its survival. The book gives us to see something universal,
what one might call an anatomy of the excellences—accompanied by an exposure of the limitations—of spirited
ambition; this in conjunction with scrutiny of a perennial
problem confronted by all civil societies: how to regulate
such outsized souls as are required for defense of a nation.
While a nation must enlist men emulous for honor, it must
also secure justice and due respect for the less strenuous
temperaments these warriors lead in battle and govern during
peaceful interims. To put it another way, Shakespeare’s
Republican Rome rejects both items of advice Aristophanes
ALVIS
121
puts in the mouth of his Aeschylus in Frogs. Shakespeare has
depicted a republic that insists upon rearing a lion within its
walls; yet having done so refuses to permit the lion to rule. In
Shakespeare’s version of Rome’s history, the republic
contrived somehow to survive until the advent of Caesar, or,
alternatively, until the city-state had extended its imperial
dominion as far as it ever would. The explanation for Rome’s
durability may lie in the republic’s ability extemporaneously
to produce at various crises institutions that in their eventual
arrangement answer to the Aristotelian scheme of a mixed
regime balancing every constituent interest with some other.
Blits assists us in perceiving how such a mixed polity can
preserve itself from external threats by breeding ambitious
generals, and yet produce families that will defy their own
blood when the ambition or indignation of such men should
threaten their country.
Blits displays one field of learning not evident from his
previous treatment of Shakespeare’s Rome in The End of the
Ancient Republic. His present work puts to effective use a
knowledge of the precepts and method of classical rhetoric
gleaned from Aristotle, Cicero, Tacitus, and Quintillian. The
benefit comes with his explication of the set speeches of
major characters. Persuasive speech was the operative art of
statesmanship for thinkers of classical antiquity. To understand rhetoric entails grasping the practical implications of
adapting political principle to political circumstance. Blits
understands this significance of rhetoric and thus he understands something essential to what Shakespeare would have
his more serious readers comprehend. Blits also shows a
command of ancient Latin historians more reliable than one
meets in any Shakespearean now writing. In contexts where
other scholars might guess that Aristotle or Cicero may have
crossed Shakespeare’s mind, this study cites appositely a half
dozen classical texts, chapter and verse, as well as such
moderns as Machiavelli, Hobbes, even Hegel, when appropriate.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Coriolanus seems to be thought of now as impressive
theater, but not comparably impressive when regarded as a
course of thought. It certainly has failed to enjoy the
reputation for philosophic scope or penetration accorded
Lear, Hamlet, and even Macbeth. Possibly the philosophic
substance of the work unfolds to readers themselves habituated to the sort of speculative thought Shakespeare would
have learned in the Elizabethan schools and from the books
favored by his contemporaries. His affinities seem to lie with
the tradition of thinking one discovers in Plato, Aristotle,
Cicero, and Plutarch, classical political philosophy inclusive
of ethical analysis and rhetoric, its practical political
instrument. The title of Blits’s book assumes this tradition by
taking “spirit” to mean thumos (spiritedness, ambition, indignation), “soul” to mean an unstable compound of reason,
spiritedness, with appetitive and aversive passions, and “city”
to mean a civil constitution combining a form of government
with a purpose of promoting a national way of life. Such
thinkers as I’ve mentioned were concerned with understanding the interrelatedness of human character and political
institutions, the latter including religious, educational, and
what in our day are termed “social” or “cultural” assumptions
relating to marriage, family, manners, and pieties. The
presiding questions for this tradition were the proper
ordering of the individual soul together with the ordering of
a regime most conducive to encouraging such souls.
Shakespeare adheres to a similar syllabus with the significant
addition of his concern to understand these issues as they
have been affected both by historical conditions perhaps
unanticipated by pagan classical thinkers—that is to say,
distinctly Christian and modern conditions—and by
challenges to classical thought posed by Machiavelli and
Bacon. This way of thinking, attributed by Locke to “the old
philosophers” and becoming less and less familiar today, Blits
finds congenial. That difference in intellectual training and
disposition accounts for the superiority of the book to other
recent studies of Shakespeare’s Roman plays. This author
ALVIS
123
manifestly understands the mode of thought I have just
described and can therefore come closer than his contemporaries to tracking Shakespeare’s thought. Much closer.
�
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Carey, James
Levine, David
Badger, Jonathan
Alvis, John E.
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The St. John’s Review
Volume XLIX, number two (2006)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Elizabeth Curry
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson,
President; Michael Dink, Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $10 for one year. Unsolicited
essays, reviews, and reasoned letters are welcome. All
manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to the Review, St. John’s College, P
.O. Box 2800,
Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available, at $5
per issue, from the St. John’s College Bookstore.
©2006 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction
in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
The St. John’s Public Relations Office and the St. John’s College Print Shop
�2
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
3
Contents
Essays and Lectures
The Fixed, The Fluid, and the Flexible:
Achilles, the River, and Homer’s World........................ 5
Mera J. Flaumenhaft
Making Up Our Minds............................................... 47
Robert Richardson
Reviews
What Good Are Friends? Lorraine Smith Pangle’s
Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship................... 73
Robert Goldberg
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
5
The Fixed, the Fluid, and the
Flexible: Achilles, the River,
and Homer’s World
Mera J. Flaumenhaft
Homer’s Troy is a mainland city with access to the sea.
Although Troy’s riches have been acquired through trade
with other cities, in the Iliad the seafaring life is almost
entirely associated with the Greek flotilla moored on Troy’s
shores. We hear of Greek ships, Greek captains, and voyages
from Greek lands across the sea. The army of the Greeks is
enumerated in the catalogue of ships they sailed to Troy,
while the Trojans and their allies are listed by the lands they
come from. Troy has had a history of troubled relations with
the god of the sea. An early king failed to pay the promised
price for walls built by Poseidon, and the weakened city
barely survived the sea monster sent to avenge this violation.
Several generations later, a Trojan prince sailed “over the sea
in seafaring ships” (3.46-47) and stole away with the wife of
his unsuspecting host. In the Iliad Paris is the only prominent
Trojan who is said to have gone to sea.1 When the Achaean
host besieges Troy to regain Helen and destroy Priam’s city,
Poseidon takes the side of the Achaeans.
But Troy’s relationship to the watery realm is not entirely
troubled, for the city also owes its prosperity to the river
Scamander, which rises in the mountain above the land,
meets a tributary, and flows down to the “broad gulf of the
sea.” The Olympian sea god Poseidon, “who circles the earth
and shakes it,” is, like Ocean, associated with water of the
cosmos, universal water. Scamander, like all rivers in Greek
myths, is descended from Ocean. But, like the others, Troy’s
river is local water, associated with a particular place; it serves
Mera Flaumenhaft is a tutor on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
as a symbol of its “habitability.”2 It irrigates crops, provides
water for drinking and cooking, as well as hot and cold water
for the tanks in which the fabrics that so characterize Trojan
wealth are laundered (22.147-56). There is no indication in
Homer that Trojans, or others who come to Troy, navigate the
river. Ships ply the sea from coast to coast, but inland places
are usually reached by land. The river is lively; it eddies and
bubbles, swirls and crests. Because of its yellow-brown color,
the Gods call it Xanthus, but in Troy it has a personal name,
Scamander (20.74), which is also the name of the grandson of
the present ruler (6.402), the future heir to the kingship. Like
its tributary Simoieis, another source of Trojan fertility, the
river serves almost as a “landscape symbol for Troy itself.”3 As
an offspring of the “river Oceanus” from whom all the gods
are sprung (14.246, 302), Scamander is also a descendent of
immortal Zeus (14.434; 24.693). The river has its own priest,
whose name (Hypsenor, “high,” 5.75-78), like the epithet of
his father (huperthumou, “high spirited,” 5.76-77), suggests
his high status; the Trojans honor him “like a god” (5.77).
They sacrifice bulls and live horses (21.131-32) to Scamander
to insure the continued fertility of the land. An old story
predicted that Troy would survive if its Thracian ally
Rhesus—or his horses—could drink the waters of
Scamander.4 It is fitting that Zeus lifts his golden scales to
signal the death of Hector just as he and Achilles, on their
fourth circuit of the city, come to the two springs that feed
eddying Scamander (12.147, 208). When Hector dies, the
city by the river will come to its end.
Scamander has another important function in Troy.
Although its flowing and shapeless water can be removed by
the mortals who dwell around it, the river itself remains
channeled between steep banks, and its channel, which does
have a set shape and location, divides the land that surrounds
it. It is a natural landmark that, unlike the Trojan or Achaean
walls, can never be erased. Homer charts the war geographically, as the sides repeatedly cross the river, waging battle,
now at the Trojan walls, now at the Greek ships. At the end
FLAUMENHAFT
7
of the Iliad, when Priam goes to Achilles’ tent to ransom
Hector’s body, he leaves the relative safety of Troy and
crosses into the no man’s land on the other side of Troy’s
tutelary river.
In Book Twenty-one the river becomes the site of some of
Achilles’ strangest encounters as he moves towards the walls
of Troy, determined to take revenge on Hector for the death
of Patroclus. The strangeness of this part of the Iliad has
suggested to some that it is alien material, or that Homer here
regresses to a more primitive mode of thinking.5 The book
consists of four parts: the admired, realistic encounters of
Achilles with Lycaon and Asteropaeus; the battles between
Achilles and Scamander and between Scamander and
Hephaestus, which scholars sometimes compare to episodes
in other epics and folktales or describe as just plain weird;6 a
reprise of Olympian wrangling over the mortals; and the
Trojan retreat into Troy, where Priam awaits the coming of
the man who will kill his son.
This essay will suggest that, rather than pulling away from
the Iliad, Book Twenty-one points to the deepest meaning of
Achilles’ experience. Part One discusses the three river
episodes as graphic depictions of Achilles’ response to his
own mortality. Part Two offers three alternatives to his tragic
opposition to the threat of dissolution. The shield of
Hephaestus and Homer’s poetry suggest the interplay of
fixity and fluidity, stability and change, in the human soul and
in the cosmos as a whole. Odysseus, too, exemplifies a kind
of flexibility as a viable alternative to the tragic extremes of
stable fixity and unstable fluidity as they are presented in
Book Twenty-one. The essay concludes with a brief note on
another river, the one to which Achilles might return, were he
a less extraordinary man.
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
8
1
1. Battles by the River: Achilles, Lycaon, and Asteropaeus
However the book divisions came to be, Book Twenty-one is
set off from what comes before and after it by its association
with the watery world. As Achilles drives the Trojans towards
the city, some of them “pour forth” (“streaming,” proechonta,
from cheô, 21.6) in flight. Others are pent up in the “deep
flowing river with its silver eddies, [where]…whirled about,
they swam this way and that” (21.8-11). Homer emphasizes
the noise. In addition to the usual din of battle, we hear the
sound of flowing and splashing water, now disturbed by the
confused and violent action between the riverbanks. The din
will increase, as the river speaks in human voice and bellows
in anger. At the end of Book Twenty-one, those Trojans
who have survived the episode “pour back” (or, “stream,”
esechunto, from cheô, 21.610) into the city. Between the
“streamings” which begin and end the episode, Achilles
literally battles the great Trojan stream itself.
He is first compared to a fire driving locusts into a river
and then to a huge dolphin devouring prey in a harbor. We
have entered a realm where all conventional restraints are
about to be abandoned and where natural predation is
uninhibited: big fish go after little fish, undeterred by pity,
self-control, or the laws of nations. Revenge is the sole
motive. In the catalogue of Trojan allies in Book Two Homer
mentions a foolish Carian named Nastes who came to the war
“all decked in gold, like a girl” (2.872) and was slain in the
river by Achilles, who “bore off the gold” (2.875). In Book
Twenty-one, Nastes is not named and Achilles has no interest
in gold. Before the major confrontations, he pulls from the
river twelve Trojan youths, dazed, “like fawns,” to reserve for
sacrifice on the tomb of Patroclus. In the following verses,
two other Trojans emerge from the river, only to be tossed
back after their pleas for mercy are denied. Human sacrifice
and the rejection of surrender violate the ordinary conventions of battle between civilized human beings.
FLAUMENHAFT
9
The first of these two named Trojans, Lycaon, is a son of
Priam who has only recently returned to battle, having been
ransomed previously by a gentler Achilles and returned to his
father’s house. Now, desperately “unwilling,” he is destined
for the house of Hades. Like the twelve anonymous youths,
he is “dazed,” but, unlike them, he makes a personal plea for
his life, promising many gifts if Achilles will ransom him
again. Achilles hurls his spear, which misses him, but “stands
in the ground” (eni gaiê estê, 21. 69-70), upright and fixed,
an emblem of his own refusal to be moved. Lycaon’s plea
rests on his having a different mother from Hector, although
he knows that did not deter Achilles from refusing to give
back Lycaon’s full brother, Polydorus, whose name ironically
means “many gifts.” Achilles now sounds like Agamemnon at
earlier moments when he brutally rejects pleas for ransom
and vows to let no Trojan’s son remain alive for ransom
(6.46, 11.131). In their brief but memorable exchange,
Achilles calls the naïve boy who begs for his life first “fool”
(21. 99) and then “friend” (21.106), sardonically assuring
him that he must die. Homer here reminds us that Achilles,
despite his immortal mother, is no less subject to death than
this hapless Trojan boy. Using a word associated most strongly
with Achilles himself, Lycaon says he was born minunthadion, “to a brief span of life” (21.84). He dies as all men
do in Homer’s battles; his knees and his heart are “loosened”
(luto, 21.114) and his dark blood “flows”(rhee, 21.119). In
life, men are solid beings, distinct from their surroundings,
upright and contained. In death, they dissolve, go slack, and
lose their shape and outlines. Internal fluids, no longer
contained within the channels and boundaries of a closed
body, flow forth and gather outside it in shapeless pools on
the ground.
Achilles flings more words at Lycaon as he flings him into
the river. No longer governed by his own will, the precious
son of the king of Troy will be carried away (21.120),
passively, like an object, by the “eddying Scamander…into
the broad gulf of the sea” (21.125). The savagery of Achilles’
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
treatment of Lycaon is intensified by blasphemy. He throws
Lycaon into the river as he says Lycaon has thrown many
sacrificial bulls and even living horses into the silver eddies of
Scamander. In a grotesque parody of Trojan piety, Lycaon is
a human offering to his own river. Achilles cruelly taunts him
by describing how the fish, actively leaping among the waves,
will eat his lifeless “white fat” (21.127). The mutilation of
human bodies by the fish of the sea is a horror even beyond
that of the devouring of corpses by birds and dogs on the
battlefields.7 Here the predators are even lower in the
hierarchy of living beings, are themselves more subject to the
flow of their medium, and lack the ability to express
themselves, even in cries and howls. Their human victims are
nibbled at, silently and out of view. With no bathing, burning,
or funeral ceremony, they will not be touched again by
human hands, and there will be no visible reminder of them
to those who come after. They are, quite literally, dissolved.
By now, the river is red, literally a bloodbath filled with
men, corpses and horses, and is “pondering in mind”
(21.137) how to aid the Trojans. Achilles’ next opponent is
not a son of Priam, but a Trojan ally, Asteropaeus, the
“star”(astêr) of Paeonia, who is said to be descended from
“wide-flowing [eurureontos] Axius,” his own local and “deepeddying river” (21.141-43), the “fairest water upon the
earth” (21.158). The ancestry of this new opponent is on
Achilles’ mind from the moment he sees him: “Who among
men art thou, and from whence…? Unhappy are they whose
children face my might” (21.150-51). Xanthus, angry at the
pitiless Achilles for wreaking havoc beside his banks, puts
courage in Asteropaeus’s heart. Achilles now faces a man who
is riverine in origin and proud of his ancestry. He is the only
man in Homer who is said to be ambidextrous (peridexios,
21.163); his strength is not fixed on one side, but alternates
between right and left or flows from both sides at once.
Xanthus gives him courage as he “stands forth from the
river” (21.144), holding two spears. In contrast, Achilles’
single ashen spear, which misses Asteropaeus, “fixes
FLAUMENHAFT
11
itself ”(enestêrikto, 21.168) “up to half its length” in the bank.
For all his ambidexterity, Asteropaeus is unable to draw out
this spear, which again suggests the implacable hero’s desire
for eternal fixity. In this round, the fixed defeats the fluid.
Asteropaeus wounds Achilles with his sword, making his
“dark blood start forth” (21.167). But this wound, the only
one Achilles suffers in the Iliad,8 is not fatal. It elicits, as he
kills Asteropaeus, an account of his own genealogy, which he
claims is superior to the one derived from the Paeonian river,
and, indeed, from any water, however great:
Wherefore as Zeus is mightier than rivers that
murmur seaward, so mightier too is the seed of
Zeus than the seed of a river….With him [Zeus]
does not even king Achelous vie, nor the great
might of deep-flowing Ocean, from whom all
rivers flow and every sea, and all the springs and
deep wells. (21.190-97)
Achilles easily pulls his own spear from the bank and strikes
Asteropaeus in his belly, from which all his bowels “flow”
(181, chunto from cheô). The grandson of the river Axius is
left in the sand, where the dark water “moistens”(21.202)
him, and fish and eels immediately begin to “tear the fat
about his kidneys” (21.203-4). Like Lycaon’s, his body is no
longer a shaped whole.
Achilles’ claim about his superiority is a bit puzzling. He
traces his origin, not to his immortal mother Thetis, but
through his mortal father Peleus and grandfather Aeacus, to
Zeus who, as he says in Book Nine, will honor him above all
men. Throughout the book, it is understood that his death,
anticipated from the beginning, is the legacy of Peleus. But in
Book Twenty-one Achilles’ mortality is suggested even in his
immortal mother. To be immortal is to be fixed in an
unchanging eternity. But Achilles’ mother is a sea-goddess,
the daughter of Nereus, the aged god of the sea. The old
stories tell how, unlike other goddesses, who willingly marry
mortal men, Thetis resisted marriage to Peleus. Fluid, she
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
tried to avoid his grasp by slipping through his fingers,
metamorphosing into a lion, snake, flowing water, and even
burning fire. He finally got hold of her while she was sleeping
and unable to change her form.9 She married Peleus, and
produced the swift-footed son destined to run through his
brief life brilliantly, yearning for eternity even as he ages from
moment to moment. Thetis is a minor divinity in the Iliad,
with an ambiguous relationship to the more solid gods “who
have their homes” on high Olympus. Lower than they are,
she is at home in the depths of the slippery, changing sea.
Lacking the clear, dry outline of Athena and Apollo, she
appears, in the brief third simile in the book, “like a
mist”(1.359), visible only to her son. By the time of the Iliad,
she is wed to an aging mortal from whom she has withdrawn
in distaste (18.432-35). But, despite her lesser, more fluid
status, her marriage and mortal son were the conditions that
insured Zeus’s unchanging reign. Had she married Zeus, her
immortal son would have been greater than his father.
Cosmic equilibrium is bought at the cost of human
mortality. The alternative would mean perpetual
evolution, perpetual violent succession, perpetual
disorder.10
At another time, she is said to have prevented the other
Olympians from binding Zeus (1.396-406), again insuring his
continued power.
When Patroclus is killed, Thetis and her sister nymphs,
the Nereids, anticipate the death of Achilles himself. In a cave
in the depths of the sea, they augment the waters with their
tears, as Homer, in flowing hexameters, intones a mellifluous
catalogue of their names (18.39-49). The character of
Achilles’ divine maternal origins—eternal fluidity and slip—
make all the more poignant his will to fix his character,
reputation, and memory, in the even more mutable and less
permanent world he inhabits, “the human order, where each
generation must yield to the next.”11 In any case, confronting
the very fact of descent—on either side—is problematic for
FLAUMENHAFT
13
the man who aspires to the autonomy of a god. It forces the
hero to acknowledge that his being is dependent on those
who generate him, even if these progenitors are themselves
immortal. Those old stories also tell how Thetis tried to
insure the immortality of her extraordinary child by dipping
him in the waters of another river, Styx, the boundary line
between the living and the dead. Instinctively, she held on to
him to prevent his drowning, and thus neglected to dip the
ankle by which she held him. Homer only alludes to the
stories of his birth and death, but his ancient audience—and
most readers today—knew that Achilles dies of an arrow
wound in that undipped heel.
2. Battle Against the River: Achilles and Scamander
Homer quietly foreshadows the clogging of the river in Book
Sixteen when Achilles gives Patroclus permission to enter
battle. There, he points out that, if Agamemnon had not
insulted him, the Trojans would be fleeing and “would fill the
watercourses with their dead” (16.71). After the death of
Asteropaeus, Achilles slays seven other Paeonians, until the
river rises in anger. Slipping from god to man to beast, it calls
forth “like a man” (21.213), bellows “like a bull”(21.237),
and warns him to slay his Trojan victims on the plain, not in
his waters. From now on, although it never assumes a human
form,12 the river is personified in its behavior. English translations, which require a subject pronoun, now call the river
“he.” Throughout this episode, the gods refer to the river by
its divine name, Xanthus, while the man Achilles calls it
Scamander. The narrator raises its status by using both names
or simply calling it “the river,” capitalized in some translations. The river’s streams are clogged with corpses and
cannot flow down to the sea. Achilles’ rage and self-exertion
literally have begun to interfere with the natural flow of
things. Incited by Apollo, he leaps from the bank into the
river itself, which sweeps along the bodies in his midst,
tossing corpses up onto the land, and hiding the living in his
deep eddies.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Achilles’ battle with the river is a vivid image of what the
Iliad suggests throughout: that his desire for undying glory is
a desire to transcend human mutability, to become an
unchanging god. Consider how he differs from Diomedes,
the surrogate “best of the Achaeans” when Achilles is absent
from battle:
… he stormed across the plain like a winter
torrent at the full that with its swift flood sweeps
away the embankments; this the close-fenced
embankments hold not back, neither do the walls
of the fruitful vineyards stay its sudden coming
when the rain of Zeus drives it on. (5.87-91)
Later, at the sight of Hector, who he assumes must be
protected by some god, Diomedes gives ground, like a man
who “halts in dismay at a swift-streaming river that flows on
to the sea, and, seeing it seething with foam starts backward”
(5.597-99). Here the river suggests a boundary; Diomedes
recognizes his mortal limits and declines combat with a god.
But Achilles, confronting a real river, jumps right in. The
verse itself now imitates the action of the river, as it concentrates all its force on overwhelming Achilles.13 We have seen
how his desire for constancy makes him the uneasy progeny
of a sea goddess. Thetis has always had to visit him on earth;
he has never joined her and her sister Nereids in the watery
deep. Now he actively opposes a fluid divinity, and it is clear
that he is out of his element. While Achilles attempts to play
the role of a god in what was supposed to be a theomachy
(20.73ff.; 21.31-32), the river god behaves more and more
like a human opponent. Against Achilles’ rage, Scamander
will not slacken his own fury (menos, 12.305). His proper
motion is usually described as “fair-flowing”(eürreês), relaxed
and horizontal; now he “stands up” vertically and beats down
on Achilles’ shield. But Achilles’ land skills dissolve when he
fights with the watery deep. The great hands that have killed
so many men are powerless against water that cannot be
grasped, or pierced with a spear. His swift feet, deprived of
FLAUMENHAFT
15
solid land beneath him, cannot “stand firm” (stêrixasthai,
21.242) in the slippery flow. This is the same word used when
Achilles’ spear “sticks” in the bank; it is related to stereos,
“solid” or “rigid.” In Book Nine Phoenix says that Achilles
“stubbornly” (stereôs, 9.510) refuses to return to battle, to
“bend”(gnamptô, 9.514; see also 11.669; 23.731; 24.359).
He remains in his tent, literally unbudgeable, until he finally
allows Patroclus to enter battle. Now, fighting for his own
life, he grasps a “well-shaped”(21.243) elm in an attempt to
anchor himself. But the tree comes right up by the roots and
dams the river with its thick branches, making it even deeper.
Unlike Achilles’ dead ashen spear that resists Asteropaeus’s
attempts to free it from the earth, here a living tree easily
comes loose from the solid riverbank. Like it, the uprooted,
godlike hero, unattached to his mortal, down-to-earth home
in Phthia, is now ungrounded in Troy. Unlike the Trojans who
also are whirled around in “deep-eddying” Xanthus at the
beginning of Book Twenty-one (21. 2, 11, 15), he makes no
effort to swim.
Even when Achilles flees from the water to the bank, he
cannot outrun the swiftly running river, which pursues him,
overflowing its natural channel to flood the plain. At this fluid
violation of boundary, obscuring some primal distinction
between water and dry land in an organized world, Achilles
is said to feel fear (21. 248). Again Homer emphasizes the
impotence of swift feet and his inability to “make a stand”
(266) as the violent river “weakens his knees” and “snatches
the ground from beneath his feet” (270-71). In a peculiar
extended simile, Homer reminds us of the connection
between Scamander and Troy’s continuing fertility: the swift
river, now uncontrollable by the most powerful warrior at
Troy, is compared to the artificial and directed stream that a
farmer makes to divert water from a spring to his crops. He
clears obstructing dams of pebbles, and the stream flows
swiftly and “outstrips [phthanei] even the one that guides it”
(21.257-62). Scamander, rising high, makes the “wave of his
flood into a crest” (korusse, 21.306) like the crest of a
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
warrior’s helmet. But unlike a mortal enemy, who would
speak to him in battle, the immortal river does not address
Achilles. This battle is strikingly devoid of the usual boasts
and insults of the human contests, although the river does
exhort his “dear brother,” the tributary Simoïs, to help him
save Troy. Also missing is the usual human audience of whom
the fighting heroes are always conscious. Further distancing
this part of the Iliad from the political context of the war,
Homer does not here mention other Greeks or Trojans. To
Achilles, death in these circumstances, like the drowning of a
miserable swineherd (281-83), would be far more
contemptible than death at the hands of Hector while making
a courageous stand, exchanging speech, face to face, against
a human antagonist, before a human audience. Scamander’s
speech to Simoïs echoes Achilles’ taunt to Lycaon:
I deem that his strength shall not avail him, nor in
any way his looks, nor yet that goodly armor
which, I think, deep beneath the sea will lie
covered over (kekalummena) with slime; and he
himself I will wrap in sands and shed over him
great store of shingle past all measuring; nor will
the Achaeans know where to gather his bones,
with such a depth of silt shall I enshroud him.
Even here will be his sepulcher, nor shall he have
need of a heaped-up mound, when the Achaeans
make his funeral. (21. 316-23)
The worst disgrace for the shining hero, whose shapely glory
distinguishes him from his surroundings, is to be “covered
over.” The way of the warrior Achilles is to stand forth—
disdaining deliberate deception, surreptitious strategies, and
indirect speech—and show himself, like a bright star, or
blazing fire. He has never anticipated that his own fire might
be “quenched” by a river. Now it is fire, in the shape of an
anthropomorphized deity that must rescue him.
FLAUMENHAFT
17
3. Fire and the River: Hephaestus and Scamander
At the end of Book Eight, the Trojans await their dawn
victory over the Achaeans. On the plain between the Achaean
camp and the streams of Xanthus, “a thousand fires” burn.
This early juxtaposition of fire and water is an eerily beautiful
scene of quiet peace before the expected slaughter. When the
gods line up at the beginning of Book Twenty to fight on
behalf of the Achaeans or Trojans, Hephaestus is listed as the
opponent of Scamander (21.73-74). In Book Twenty-one,
after godlike Achilles has substituted himself for Hephaestus,
only to meet with disaster, the two gods finally do face each
other. Hera calls upon the halting, crook-footed
(kullopodion, 21.331) god to rescue the floundering, swiftfooted (podarkês) man just as he has lost his footing and is
about to be swept away in the seething flood of “foam and
blood and corpses” (21.325). Hephaestus’s shield has proven
“helpless against the river” (21.317-18); he himself must now
come to Achilles’ aid.14 The enmity of Paris and Menelaus,
Achilles and Hector, Greeks and Trojans, and of the partisan
gods on Olympus is now expanded to include the cosmic
elements themselves, as fire and water, primal nature deities,
confront each other. Personified and quick with motion,
changing but remaining themselves, they seem alive. The
opposition of the river god and the Olympian has suggested
to some the overcoming of a primordial “water world” of
flux and “pure process” by a “sky world” characterized by
“form and meaningful signs.”15 Like a hot wind, Hephaestus
“dries up”—we hear the word xêrianô three times (21. 345,
347, 348)—the plain where the swollen river has overflowed
its channel. The fire consumes the dead Trojans on the plain
and the living vegetation that the river nourishes, both in and
beside itself. The musical catalogue of waving, abundant plant
life transforms the river, now called “bright” and “fair,” from
the destructive aggressor of the previous encounter with
Achilles into the helpless victim of the harsh fire. Its “blast”
“torments” the eels and fishes that Achilles said would nibble
the fat of Lycaon and Asteropaeus. Even under the “whirls”
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
or “eddies” of water, these animals, like the plants, are not
fireproof. Finally, in a reversal of the natural quenching of fire
by water, Hephaestus “burns” the river. Unlike mortal
warriors, watery Scamander has no body parts that an
opponent can grasp or upon which he can inflict mortal
wounds. But Hephaestus can make the river seethe and boil
like his own molten metals. Homer compares the boiling to
the melting of solid hog fat into a shapeless liquid in a
cauldron on a cooking fire (21.362-64). No longer does
Scamander even “wish to flow forward, but is “stayed” (ouk
ethele proreein, all’ ischeto, 21.366). The closest the immortal
river can come to death is immobility. It cannot be evaporated
like ordinary boiling water, or consumed like corpses on a
pyre; but Hephaestus can arrest its flow.
The battle between water and fire differs from mortal
combat in another striking way: here, as with Achilles,
there is no verbal exchange between the antagonists. Hera
warns of Scamander’s soft words and threats (16. 339), but
Hephaestus, who in earlier passages is fully articulate, does
not speak to his opponent. The silence of this terrible fire, in
contrast with the speech and shouts of men and gods and the
bellowing of the river, is particularly grim. The horror abates
only when the river promises not to intercede even “when all
Troy shall burn with the burning of consuming fire, and the
warlike sons of the Achaeans shall be the burners” (21.37576). This promise evokes the terrible image of the end of
Troy, which the Iliad does not depict. Only after Scamander’s
promise does Hephaestus “quench” his fire and allow the
river to rush down again within its bed.
The ancient nature-philosophers puzzled over the primal
stuff of the cosmos. Impressed by the ubiquity of water in the
world, Thales derives all heterogeneous being from this single
substance, recognizing ice, water, and vapor as different
forms of the same fundamental material. In addition to
appearing in these three modes, water is infinitely changeable
with respect to its own form: it takes the shape of any
FLAUMENHAFT
19
container. Water itself appears relatively lacking in qualities,
but takes on the characteristics of other substances; it can be
blue, salty, hot, and smelly; and the intensity of these characteristics can vary. Solid lands appear to float on wider
expanses of water, and all life arises from the moistening of
seeds. If form and life are fundamental conditions of things
that are, one might well conclude that all things are continually solidifying into individual particularity and dissolving
into undifferentiated homogeneity, that all things are,
somehow, water.
Heraclitus asserts the fluidity of such a world, seeing its
transformations in both water and fire: all things flow; you
can’t step in the same river twice and you yourself are not the
same “you”; dry things become moist, the moist become dry;
there is exchange of all things for fire; it becomes sea or earth,
and itself again; everything gives way, and nothing is fixed.
But, if nothing self-same endures, the apparent multiplicity of
stable, articulated particulars must be an illusion.
Heterogeneity in flux becomes homogeneity, a solution of
chaotically swirling stuff, not an ordered “world.”
Furthermore, even Heraclitus’s own assertion is unstable,
since words themselves flow in time, and their meanings
cannot be univocal or fixed. Heraclitus attempts to address
this difficulty by imitating the condition he asserts in the
syntax and diction of his language. His word order takes
advantage of the fluidity of Greek, allowing, even more than
is usual, for different predications, and his words have
multiple, even conflicting, meanings. His readers are
endlessly intrigued by the infinite slipperiness of his pregnant
pronouncements16 and by the paradox of meaningful speech
about constant change. Even the fragments that remain of his
writings may be, not the victims of time, but deliberate
attempts to mimic a “world” that lacks wholeness, continuity,
and order. Diogenes Laertius says Heraclitus died of dropsy.
The story is unconfirmable, but fitting: he drowned in his
own fluids. “It is death to souls to become water.”
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At the other extreme from Heraclitean flux in time and
place, is Parmenidean fixity, outside time and beyond place.
Pure, complete, and homogeneous in its unity, Being simply
is; there is no beginning or becoming, past, future, or
conclusion; all is solid, stationary; all Being is one. If singularity, homogeneity, stability, and permanence are the great
sticking points of the Heraclitean hypothesis, multiplicity,
heterogeneity, instability, and change slip up the partisans of
Parmenides. Language seems inadequate to this view too, for
predication itself requires multiplicity and an articulated
cosmos. In Greek, esti can stand alone, but, even a nominal
sentence, aiming at full identity of its parts, must have two
elements. Human speech is rhêsis—the “flowing” forth of
words in time. Heraclitus’s words, in brief fragments with
fluid meanings, flow together; Parmenides’ words, even the
lofty vision of the “Way of truth” in articulate Homeric
dactylic hexameter, point to silence—or to mere pointing.
Homer, of course, does not speak the metaphysical
language of the early philosophers. In his vocabulary, kosmeô
and kosmos are not abstract terms, but refer to the setting in
order of troops, dress, or behavior. But Homer’s stories and
his people do, nevertheless, suggest his own thinking about
what later writers call the “cosmos.” And, as we shall see, his
own speech is shaped to depict a world that participates in
and is informed by both fixity and fluidity, neither to the
exclusion of the other. Angered by Achilles, whose attention
is fixed first on immortal glory and then on eternal revenge,
the river threatens to dissolve the world into Heraclitean flux.
The episode suggests that both the desire for fixity and the
response in mere fluidity would destroy a heterogeneous
cosmos of changing beings that are, nevertheless, distinguishable and, in some convincing sense, enduring.
Homer repeatedly describes physiological or psychological collapse in terms of dissolution17 or as the liquefying
of firm structure. Wine and tears can bring on this kind of
collapse, and the “strength” or “limbs” of dying warriors are
“loosed” (luomai). When Priam meets Hermes on the way to
FLAUMENHAFT
21
Achilles’ tent, the old man is so overcome with fear that his
“mind became fluid” (voos chuto, 24. 358), the word used for
“pour” or “flow”(cheô) in Book Twenty-one. As Norman
Austin says “It collapsed and lost its shape.”18 In the Odyssey
Homer describes sleep as lusimelês, “limb-loosening,”
“relaxing,” (10.57), and Sappho and Archilochus use this
word to describe the effects of eros or desire.19 We too know
what it means to “drown” in wine or tears, to “be at sea” or
“out of our depths,” and “to go down the drain.”
There are, in the Iliad, suggestions of destruction by flood
of the solid, articulated world experienced by mortal men.
When no Greek warrior rises to accept Hector’s challenge,
Menelaus curses the Achaeans collectively: “would that all of
you would become earth and water” (7.99), that is, disintegrate into their constitutive elements. Many of them will die
in battle and their bodies will be reduced in fire, water, or in
the bellies of scavenger dogs, birds, fish, and worms.
Likewise, all human artifacts seem destined to disintegrate.
Poseidon objects when the Achaeans build the wall around
their ships, but Zeus assures him that it will not endure for
long (7.446ff.) In Book Twelve, Homer tells how, at the end
of the war, when the Achaeans depart, Poseidon and Apollo
will bring all the waters of the world—rivers, rain, and the
salt sea—to sweep away the wall:
Bringing against it the might of all the rivers that
flow forth from the mountains of Ida to the sea—
Rhesus [speech, or flow] and Heptorus and
Caresus and Rhodius, and Granicus and Aesepus,
and goodly Scamander and Simoïs…of all these
did Apollo turn the mouths together, and for nine
days’ space he drove their flood [rhoon] against
the wall; and Zeus rained ever continually, that the
sooner he might overwhelm the wall in the salt
sea. And the Earth-shaker, bearing his trident in
his hands…swept forth upon the waves all the
foundations of beams and stones, that the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Achaeans had laid with toil, and made all smooth
along the strong stream [agarrhoon] of the
Hellespont and again covered the great beach with
sand, when he had swept away the wall; and the
rivers he turned to return and to flow [rhoon] in
the channel, where before they streamed [rhoon]
their fair-streaming [kallirhoon] water. (12.17-33)
The ease with which this wall will be destroyed is previewed
in Book Fifteen when Apollo breaks the Achaean trench and
wall, “as a boy scatters a sand castle by the sea” (15.360-64).
This allows Hector and the Trojans to rush over the wall like
a “great wave of the broad-wayed sea” (15.381-83). From the
standpoint of the immortal gods, human life and its constructions are easily destroyed and slip quickly into oblivion.
We should note, however, that the predicted destruction
will reduce neither the plain nor the beach to Democritean
elements or to mere swirling chaos. Rather, it will restore
them to their “natural” shape, stripped of human constructions, and marked only by the relatively permanent features
of the landscape. The paths of rivers, the stony mountains,
and the boundary between shore and sea are themselves
subject to temporary disturbance and slow change but,
compared to living and dying beings and their fabrications,
they endure in shapely permanence. The exact location of the
city of ancient Troy remained a mystery for centuries, but
Scamander has flowed in the same place since antiquity. Men
may come and go, like generations of leaves and fish in the
sea, but the cosmos and the kinds of beings that inhabit it
endure.
This is the condition for the belief of the hero that there
will be others like himself, kindred men, to tell and to hear
his story. Achilles does not explicitly acknowledge that he
requires a bard to maintain his heroism, but the hero who
asserts his autonomy is, in fact, doubly dependent: on his
parents who give him life and upon the poet who keeps him
alive in the minds of others. Nowhere in Homer is there the
prospect of the destruction of the entire human race—by
FLAUMENHAFT
23
flood or fire or any other means—or of institutions or
teachings that would definitively wipe out the characteristic
human quest for autonomy and immortality. Homer’s
depiction of such human striving is tragic, rather than merely
negative. The very qualities that make the hero outstanding
are the ones that will destroy him. Achilles’ extreme heroic
exertion finally meets its limit, but the world that produced
him will produce others like him and they will continue to
inspire awe in their fellows. The Homeric gods did not create
the world and its inhabitants, and there is no suggestion that
the gods will wipe them out. In such a world it is problematic,
but not merely evil or delusion, for mortals to aspire to
permanence. Some readers see similarities between the river
battle in Iliad 21 and those in Mesopotamian flood stories
like Gilgamesh.20 Others persuasively contrast the floods in
Gilgamesh and Genesis, where the story of Noah is meant to
“drown the natural human aspiration to apotheosis through
heroic deed.”21 Homer’s river Scamander puts an end to
Achilles’ rampage, but men like him will arise again.
Although, like the Biblical oversteppers, they do awful things,
they, like the gods, are, somehow, awesome.
Perhaps the work of Hephaestus suggests how changing,
continuous fluidity can coexist with enduring articulated
form. On at least two occasions the divine smith has been
hurled down from Olympus, but, of course, neither fall
results in his destruction. In Book Eighteen he recalls how, on
account of his lameness, Hera once hurled him down to the
watery cave of Oceanus’s daughter Eurynome and the Nereid
Thetis, “and around me flowed, murmuring with foam, the
stream of Oceanus, an immense flood” (18.402-3). For nine
years Hephaestus, himself misshapen, lived in this unshaped
watery deep, but he spent his time shaping beautiful
ornaments. His lame feet did not preclude, and perhaps they
even contributed to, the extraordinary powers he developed
in his skilled hands. Like the “ambidextrous” Asteropaeus,
the smith-god is “strong [or, “bent]-limbed on both sides,”
amphiguêeis. He is polumêtis (21.355), a “god of many
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24
wiles,” and poluphrônos, “of great intelligence” (21.367). In
Book Twenty-one the only way he can counteract the flow of
Scamander is brutally to burn and dry up all-threatening
liquidity. But, in the face of the more gradual dissolution of
all earthly things, he solidifies the fluid into form. On lofty
Olympus, as in the deep sea, he liquefies solid metals into
shapeless fluids, and then re-forms the softened materials into
bronze houses and tripods, silver-studded chairs, golden
wheels and handmaids, and greaves of “flexible” (heanou,
18.613) tin. His most memorable masterpiece is the solid
shield of bronze, made of fused copper and tin, that he
fashions for the unbending son of the tearful water goddess.
What does it tell us about being and time in the cosmos as
Homer sees it?
2
1. Hephaestus’s Art
Scamander threatens to cover all Achilles’ beautiful armor
with slime (21.318). Although a shield may last longer than a
man, it too is not forever. Like all Hephaestus’s works,
Achilles’ shield is made of metals and glass, melted into fluids
in “melting vats” (choanisi, from cheô, “flow,” 18.613), and
then re-solidified into stable forms. But the figures on it are
not static or frozen like the Achilles whom Patroclus describes
as the pitiless offspring of grey sea and the rocky cliffs
because his mind (nous) is so unbending (apênês, 16. 33-35).
Nor are they like the stony frozen Niobe whom Achilles
describes to Priam at the end of the Iliad (24.605-17). Rather,
the wonder of the shield is that its figures seem to be alive and
in motion. This is partly because, as Lessing points out, they
come into being before our eyes, in words that take time, and
partly because they are so artfully made that they appear to
be actually engaged in the activities described.22 In the
progressive form of Homer’s verbs, the dancers are described
as dancing, the ambushers ambushing, the bull lowing, and
the field being turned over, although it is made of lifeless
FLAUMENHAFT
25
gold: “this was the marvel [thauma] of the work” (18.549).
Hephaestus makes an enduring picture of a changing life,
albeit a life that will not satisfy the aspirations of the warrior
hero of the Iliad.
The cosmos depicted on the shield combines the formal
fixity of a stable world with the living, changing life of everything associated with the human beings who live in it. Even
its river combines duration and change. The shield’s dry
riverbed—in another season, a watering place for the herds—
is the scene of an ambush (18.520-21), and men fight beside
its banks (18.533). Shortly after, the river is stable, contained,
reliably watering the cattle that low and pasture
Par’potamon keladonta, para hrodadon donakêa
Beside the sounding river, beside the waving reed
(18.576)
Noting the way it appeals to differing senses, one reader has
described this as the “most beautiful verse in Homer.”23
Another calls attention to the “rippling dactyls,” alliteration,
and chiasmus of the line.24 The pictured people are not
“immortal and ageless all their days” as the single-minded
Achilles and other heroes might wish to be. They are of
different ages, changing with the passing of time, and unlike
the gods and eternal heavenly bodies pictured there, the
mortals have no lasting names and fame. There are dead men
and animals on the shield, and red blood stains some of the
golden figures. But the elders will keep on talking, and the
boys and girls dancing, even as Achilles holds them forth on
the shield in deadly battle. The point of view of the shield is
wider than that on the battlefield where Homer’s “camera”
zooms in on the horror of war for particular—named—
people at particular moments. Hephaestus’s view suggests
that the life of men, as well as of cities, never merely ends, but
has a cyclical character. Glaucus compares such lives to the
“generations of leaves” (6.146). But the nameless leaves and
crops and cows and river, and even the nameless humans
depicted on the shield, are not merely ephemeral, “of a day.”
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Mortality and change make generation necessary, but generation itself insures a kind of continuity that even living and
dying beings can participate in. They, like the vegetation and
animals, and even their own artifices, are not immortal, but
they do recur according to regular patterns and in recognizable forms. There are recurrent, recognizable kinds of
beings in the articulated, heterogeneous cosmos; the most
interesting of them are human beings. Tragically, human
beings are often prevented from fulfilling the natural shape of
their lives, but human lives do have natural shapes, and they
generate others who are the same in kind.
Homer’s mortals are not part of a historically directed
trajectory of the sort described by the Bible, Virgil, and
Hegel. But they do achieve a kind of permanence. Although
the shield does not depict lasting personal glory, even for men
like Achilles, it does not bitterly insist on the tragic futility of
our desire for duration. Nor should it make us think, as C. S.
Lewis did, that Homer’s greatness lies in his depiction of the
human and personal tragedy built up against a background of
“meaningless flux.”26 Rather, Homer, like Hephaestus,
depicts a beautiful image of regular change in time, and a
world in which the tragedies of individual mortal lives are
intelligible. What is perhaps even more important is that he
makes us feel that these lives are worth our attempts to
understand them.
The circular pattern of return is repeated on the shield, as
if to emphasize the possibility of appropriate change that
does not simply negate existence. Thus, we hear about the
young men “whirling” (edineon, 18.494) in the wedding
dance, the judgments given in the “sacred circle” (hiero eni
kuklô, 18.504), the repeated “wheelings” (dineuontes,
18.543) of the ploughs and of the youths and maidens
dancing in circles (18.599-601), and the agricultural cycle of
the seasons. The word for these whirlings and wheelings
(from dineô) is the one used to describe the “eddies” of the
raging Scamander, as well as “deep-eddying” Ocean (10.511).
But here on the shield it suggests ordered regularity rather
FLAUMENHAFT
27
than Scamander’s destructive turbulence or the meaningless
chaos asserted by Aristophanes’ Socrates who preaches that
“Whirl”(Dinos) has replaced Zeus.26 The beginning and end
of the description of the shield call attention to circularity in
the cosmos itself: the full round moon, the circular daily
motions of most of the stars, and the Bear, or “Wagon,” that
“turns in place and has no part in the baths of
Ocean”(18.488). On the outermost rim is the “great might of
the river Ocean” (18.608), that same Ocean towards which
Scamander and Simoïs and all the other rivers flow, when
they are not unnaturally impeded. Unlike any other “river” in
the poem, Ocean is apsorroos, “backwards flowing”; turning
back into itself, it encircles the world. The edges of the
cosmos do not dissolve into watery flux; rather, the world is
surrounded, held in shape, by Ocean. Although the shield is
called a sakos, the word usually used for a rectangular shield,
we must imagine it as round.
Hephaestus’s pictures include simple agricultural and
musical implements—yokes, plows, baskets, pipes, lyres, and
bronze tips on spears—evidence of human culture beyond
mere nature. But there are no signs of more sophisticated
human technology or art. Homer depicts Hephaestus, but
Hephaestus does not depict himself and his own technology.27
Also, although there are rivers and Ocean on the shield,
Hephaestus does not depict any ships. They belong to a
different world, one in which men sail off to distant places:
to make war, to trade, and to learn how other men live. Ships
point to progress, to radical change beyond that seen in the
communities and natural world of the shield. Both Trojans
and Greeks sail the sea, but Homer’s Greeks—and, as we shall
see, one Greek man especially—are particularly associated
with the seagoing technology that brought the Greek army to
Troy, but is not the focus of the human activities depicted in
the Iliad.
Nor does Hephaestus include Olympus, the abode of the
gods, or Hades, the destination of all mortal warriors, on his
shield. The former is the clearly illuminated setting for many
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
scenes in both of Homer’s poems. In the Odyssey we are told
of the other realm, beyond the “stream of Ocean” in the
outermost circle of the shield, a realm reached by crossing the
roaring rivers of Periphlegethon and Cocytus (Blazing and
Wailing), a branch of the dread (stugeô) River Styx. On Styx,
the Iliad tells us, men and gods swear their most solemn oaths
(2.755; 8.369; 14.271; 15.37). The Iliad, which depicts the
deaths of so many men, contains no description of the land of
the dead. But in the Odyssey, the “house of Hades” is a dark,
“dank” [eurôenta, lit. “moldy,” 10.512] place, and a whole
book is devoted to exhibiting its inhabitants. The dead souls
are misty and ungraspable, but recognizable, as weakly delineated shadows of their former selves. In the indistinct realm
of the “un-seen” (a-idês), the shade of Achilles is now fixed,
eternally denouncing his former desire for fixed and shining
visible fame. He reveals his unchanged mind, however, in his
joy at the report that his son is just the way he was.
Achilles’ attempt to stop Scamander is a violation of the
natural flow of things, of nature itself, although Homer does
not use nature as a philosophical term any more than he uses
abstract philosophical language elsewhere.28 Achilles’ retreat
and his return to his main object, killing the mortal man who
killed his mortal friend, is a forced admission that, despite his
divine genealogy, he too is a mortal man. The course of the
swift-flowing river can no more be stopped than the swift
flowing of Achilles’ life can be. But Hephaestus prevents
Scamander’s attempt to dissolve the hero who aims at fixity
and to flood the dry land that ordinarily bounds the flowing
water. The god of fire reminds us that mortality does not
mean mere obliteration and oblivion, mere washing away, but
orderly change in an enduring, coherent cosmos. The river is
a river even when it flows outside its well-defined borders.
The lives of mortal men do have shape, and so do the artifacts
and stories that outlive them, even if not forever. The verbal
description of the shield is Homer’s likeness of the whole
world, the longest extended similitude in the poem.
FLAUMENHAFT
29
2. Homer’s Art
In addition to the description of the shield, there is further
evidence in Homer’s poetry of both the whole unity and the
articulated multiplicity of his cosmos. Book One introduces
the major Greek characters of the Iliad in all their particularity. Here, for the first time, we hear their identifying
epithets and see their first defining acts. Although the official
enemies against whom they test themselves are Trojans, these
men are concerned about who is the most outstanding, even
among the Greeks. They are determined to distinguish
themselves, and not to be confused with others. Thus,
Achilles and Agamemnon dispute who is the “best of the
Achaeans.” Their quarrel is filled with comparisons, but each
claims that he, as the best, is incomparable. There are only
three brief similes in Book One (47, 104, 359), and two of
them describe gods. The human actors are concerned, not
with likenesses, but with singularity.
Book Two recounts how Nestor and Odysseus rehabilitate
Agamemnon as commander and reunite the Achaeans after
the quarrel. The latter parts of the book present Homer’s
warriors both as one whole, continuous mass, and as
separate, individual elements of an articulated multitude.
Like Homer’s cosmos generally, the descriptions in Book Two
point to the very things we have been considering in Book
Twenty-one: the unifying fixity of the man who attempts to
oppose a divine river, and the dissolving fluidity of the river
that responds. As we shall see, Homer’s epithets, catalogues,
and similes have meaning only if one assumes a unified, selfsame whole consisting of a multiplicity of differentiated
elements.
The relative scarcity of metaphors in the Iliad is a sign of
the poet’s reluctance to completely collapse two compared
things into an identity. Phrases like “winged words” and the
“barrier of your teeth” are implied similes that identify the
subject and the comparison so completely that the compared
object almost disappears as its attribute is transferred to the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
present subject. Epithets are adjectival tags, stable descriptions that characterize enduring intelligible individuals in an
enduring world. Epithets, like names, are permanent.29 Like
the phrases above, the same epithet can contain an implied
comparison when it is attached to different subjects, or an
ironic reflection when it no longer suffices to describe their
subjects. The implications of “swift-footed Achilles,” “Hector
of the shining helmet,” and “white armed Helen” deepen and
are more fully understood as the narrative unfolds and the
bearer acts out his entire story.
Agamemnon announces his plan to test the troops at the
beginning of Book Two. The people (laoi, plêthus, mass
nouns) respond immediately as soon as the leaders or elders
(plurals) arise. Homer describes this folk in a great, extended
simile, comparing the companies to the tribes (ethnea) of bees
that feed on flowers in the spring (2.87-93). The men, too,
emerge in “many tribes.” Homer’s bee simile and the subsequent description emphasize the turmoil and noise of this
“throng” as it rushes towards the water. The noise, like the
buzzing of bees and the confusing urgings of Rumor, obscures
the inner organization of the army. Stirred by Agamemnon,
the men, like the bees, are seen as a great multitude (plêthus)
that moves as the sea and corn move when they are stirred by
the winds of Zeus. (2.142-49). The crossed adjectives
produce a sub-simile between the two main ones: the “long”
sea-waves move as the “deep” fields of corn do. The wave is
simultaneously one and many, as are the field of corn stalks
and the army of warriors. We have already seen, in the river
incident in Book Twenty-one, the literal power of such waves
to stir the articulated many into a homogeneous fluid. In
these early similes the troops exhibit the same loose, or fluid
character as they come pouring out of their tents on dry land.
Although they shout “to one another” and come on in
“tribes,” they are not fully articulate, either in speech or in
body.
Prompted by Athena and by his own prudent assessment
of the situation, Odysseus quickly does articulate the disor-
FLAUMENHAFT
31
dered troops into the kings who “stand out”(exochon) and
whom he addresses individually by name, and the anonymous
men “of the people,” whom he beats into submission. His
humiliation of Thersites further organizes the Greeks, forcing
them to shape up, both as individuals and as groups, to
confront the Trojans. Nestor proposes the separating out of
the men by tribes and by clans (phula, phrêtra, 2.362). The
extended similes that follow compare them to flocks of birds,
recognized as distinct species, to undifferentiated swarms of
flies around milk pails, and to mingled goats, more visible as
individuals than the aggregates of birds and insects, but still
not articulated by name. The only named individuals are the
leaders who attended Agamemnon’s council. Agamemnon
has spoken of the relative size of the enemy (2.123-33), but
not until Homer sings the component parts of each army, do
we have a concrete and vivid picture of how many are in the
host, as well as how large it is.
Unlike the earlier similes in Book Two, the catalogues are
characterized by specificity. The armies are now two wholes
that are articulated and organized into parts identified by
their geographical origins and by their leaders. The
marshalling or ordering of the troops—the Greek word is
diekosmeon—shapes them into an ordered whole, a kosmos.
The many items in the catalogue are held together by the
general categories it describes, but the detailed description of
each item differentiates them from one another. The order in
which the different companies are listed reveals much about
the political organization of the two sides. The catalogues
describe multitudes that are now articulated masses. They
have more elaborate shapes than the two-member similes,
which usually give the extended comparison first. The Trojans
and their allies are also listed—although not enumerated—in
a catalogue in Book Two as the leaders from the different
cities lead them forth, each marshalling (kosmêsamenos) his
own men. Among them are the same Trojans who “pour” or
“flow”(cheô) into the river and city at the beginning and end
of Book Twenty-one. But by then they have been floated off
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
from their allies; their former force has been dissolved into its
elements, each of whom swims for his own life. No catalogue
of names and leaders is possible in such devastating dissolution. We shall hear a few minor catalogues in the last books
of the Iliad: the names of the mourning Nereids with Thetis
in Book Sixteen, and the sons of Priam, in Book Twenty-four,
for example. They remind us how the orderly, articulated
cosmos, as we knew it at the beginning, has been disrupted by
the horrors of war.
Like the epithets and catalogues, Homer’s similes
throughout the poem suggest that his cosmos is neither a fluid
Heracleitean multiplicity nor a fixed Parmenidean “one,” but
an organized, enduring whole whose parts can be understood
and related to each other. There is not only one analogy for
each being; rather, similes contain other similes and are interwoven and overlap. They cover the cosmos with a flexible
net, not a rigid grid. The cosmos is intelligible because, in
some way, “all nature is akin.”30 The beings in this world have
stable characteristics by which they themselves can be recognized and by which they can help us to know other beings
and ourselves. Despite their special characters, even fire and
water are stable elements; this is, in fact, the necessary
condition of their occasional attempts to encroach on each
other. The gods too are stable combinations of related characteristics; they may disguise themselves before mortals, but
they do have enduring and intelligible natures. Aphrodite,
Athena, Ares, and, as we have seen, Hephaestus are all understandable as coherent collections of characteristic qualities,
ways of being, in a coherent cosmos. Even those associated
with the fluid elements in Homer’s world—Poseidon,
Oceanus, Thetis, the Nereids, and the river Scamander—
remain consistently fluid. Beneath his many shapes, Proteus,
the changeable old man of the sea in Odyssey 4, can slip from
shape to shape, as lion, serpent, leopard, boar, tree, even
“fluid water” [hugron hudôr, Odyssey, 4. 456-58]. But, at
last, he can be held down and made to speak as “himself.”
FLAUMENHAFT
33
In the extended similes the hero can be like a god, great
oak (16.482), mother bird (9.323) or the “most baneful star
in heaven”(22.26-31) only if gods, oaks, mother birds, and
Sirius, complex and multifaceted as they are, have consistent,
recognizable meanings. There are few proper names in
similes; the likenesses are not between particular individuals,
but between a particular individual, for example, and a
general category to which he is compared. People who are
said to be “like” particular named gods (Ares, Aphrodite) are
compared to them as personifications of generalized
attributes (Might, Beauty). Although the gods sometimes call
things by different names (1.403; 2.813; 14.291; 20.74;
18.487), there is no indication that human subjects are
merely projecting their own perceived structures on a chaotic
or differently organized “real” world. Homer weaves
together a picture of a natural world that is whole and
shaped, in which and by which mortal humans can take their
bearings. This is why, as Norman Austin has shown, not only
similes, but paradigmatic myths, omens, dreams and other
symbols have meaning both for gods and humans in the
poems, and also for those who read and interpret the
stories.31
The last way in which Homer avoids both the Charybdis
of Heraclitean flux and the Scylla of Parmenidean fixity is
seen in his own poetic language, which is not confounded by
the language paradoxes of either philosopher. Syllables,
words, lines, episodes, narrative and direct speech, the structures of parts and the whole, are clearly recognizable even as
the singer’s speech (rhêsis) flows (from rheô) on continuously
for hours and hours. There is nothing fragmentary about the
Iliad; it is an ordered whole. The regular and sustained
dactylic hexameter rhythm is heard even when the meter
deliberately departs from it, and the intelligible diction and
syntax endure throughout, even as we delight in the sounds,
puns, and verbal flexibility that guide our thoughts and
feelings. Homer is as subtle as Heraclitus in conveying
multiple meanings by the artful arrangement of sound and
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
syntax. But one rarely feels that one has lost one’s footing or
that there is no footing to be had in the deep flood of his
verse. Homeric wonder does not call into doubt the stability
of the multitudinous cosmos, or the adequacy of human
speech to describe it, even as it faces tragic paradoxes and the
most shattering human experiences. Similarly, unlike
Parmenides’ vision of the “Way of Truth,” the unity of
Homer’s world does not strain against the rich multiplicity of
the individual beings that dwell together in it.
The character of Homer’s poetry has offered one
conclusion to this discussion that began with Achilles and the
river. The other is to be found in the man who represents the
most interesting alternative to both the fixity we desire and
the dissolution we fear.
3. Amphibious Man
This story, like most stories in the Iliad, points to Odysseus.
Although the quarrel about the “best of the Achaeans” that
begins the Iliad arises between Achilles and Agamemnon, the
natural and conventional contenders for that title, it is
Odysseus who offers the most interesting alternative to
Achilles. In the Odyssey we do hear of a quarrel between
these two over who was the “best of the Achaeans” (8.75-78).
In fact, Odysseus and Achilles are incommensurable, as they
exemplify two entirely different ways of being human.
Achilles single-mindedly pursues individuality, purity, and
permanent glory, thereby suggesting the Parmenidean
perspective: unity, fixity, being. The life of Odysseus
embraces multiplicity, change, and becoming, but it does not
abandon the conviction that, although human beings must
suffer and die, they can lead coherent and integrated lives in
a stable cosmos. In a lived life, as opposed to a philosophical
quandary, one can step twice into the same river and one can
go home again. Homer’s two poems offer an extended
meditation on the difference between immortality and
endurance. Unlike Achilles’ tragic embrace of early death as a
means to immortal glory in an infinite future, Odysseus’s
FLAUMENHAFT
35
goals point always to continuing life in the foreseeable future.
Achilles is Homer’s hero of fixity, the man who can only
make a stand on land. A brief examination of Odysseus in
both poems does not see him as Achilles’ opposite, the hero
of Heraclitean fluidity, but as the flexible man, the one who
can endure in any medium.32 It is no surprise that Odysseus
has a special relationship to Poseidon, the earth-shaking god
of the rolling sea, a relationship that must be stabilized before
his story can be completed.
Our first view of polumêtis Odysseus in the Iliad, displays
the “man of many wiles” as a sailor, when he commands the
ship that crosses the “watery ways” (hugra keleutha, 1.312) to
return Chryseis to her father. Unlike Achilles of Phthia and
other mainland Achaeans, Odysseus rules over several small
islands in the extreme west of Greece. His special skill with
ships and his versatility generally have something to do with
his origins in a small rugged “isle in a surging sea” (poluklustôi pontôi, 4.354), “sea-girt” (amphialôi , 1.385) Ithaca.
Always at sea, he is never at sea; Derek Walcott calls his later
incarnation “sea-smart Odysseus.”33 More than any other
Homeric hero, he delights in the pleasures of a warm bath
(10.576; 6.210; 7.174, 296; 10.360; 19.356-473). His
ablutions in both books aim not at Achillean purity or
absolution, but at restoration and the continuation of a life
that he accepts as mixed, stirred, stained, scarred, alloyed.
Hephaestus sponges himself before dinner after a day’s work
at the forge (18.414-15). Similarly, Odysseus, returning from
the dirty work of the ambush in Iliad 10, washes off, first in
the sea, and then in a bath, to “refresh” himself or to “lift his
spirits”(anepsuchthen, 10.575). There is no indication that he
thinks what he has done to Dolon and Rhesus requires purification.
In his own book, he is characterized by an extraordinary
flexibility. Achilles strives always to move forward and remain
erect; Odysseus is always willing to bend over and curl up, to
turn back and change direction, in order to preserve himself.
Again and again, we hear how he is able to improvise a solid
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
platform to make a stand, even on the unstable sea.
Repeatedly he emerges from dangerous waters to dry land,
having endured the repeated attempts of Poseidon to swamp
him in “deep-eddying Ocean” (Odyssey, 10.511). The
amphibious hero is at home in all elements, and equally
prepared to resist threats of petrifaction and dissolution, both
of which would undermine his integrity as a stable, although
changing, being in time. Achilles’ furious swift motion and his
refusal to move both assert his absolute independence of
outside influences. Odysseus recognizes—or learns—that
viable autonomy and self-reliance sometimes require external
tools and coordination with others, rather than head-on
opposition. He is polumêchanos, a man “of many devices.”
Achilles’ most important “tool” is his spear, which seems
almost an extension of his own arm. His lyre accompanies a
song he sings for himself. Odysseus, in contrast, is an enthusiastic user of tools and of other men, whom he skillfully uses
as tools. Unlike Achilles’ song, Odysseus’s stories are often
tools to achieve desired ends. He has a bow, not a lyre, in his
storeroom.
Odysseus delights in the liquid warmth of good wine—
apparently mixed with water—with no adverse effects. But he
intoxicates the Cyclops with a deliberately undiluted fluid
(12.205, 209) unfamiliar to the monster, and slips through
his hands by concealing himself horizontally beneath a dumb
ram. He sails by the Sirens in his natural position, rigidly
upright and attentive to their song, but is able to remain
standing at the mast only by arranging to be tightly tied to it.
He liberates himself by being willing to bind himself,
overcoming his human limitations by resorting to a clever
device: he uses knots to maintain his freedom. Like the
ambidextrous Asteropaeus, Odysseus prepares to face the
monster Scylla with “two spears in his hands” (12.229).
When his ship is shattered in the “wine-dark sea,” he deals
with the whirlpool Charybdis, not by opposing her turbulent
(kukômenê, 12.238), sucking waters, as Achilles does
Scamander’s turbulent (kukômenos, 21.235) streams, but by
FLAUMENHAFT
37
waiting patiently for his mast and keel to be flung forth again.
He has discerned that the whirlpool, like the Cyclops, has
absolutely regular habits.34 Like Achilles in Scamander, he is
not able to “plant his feet firmly” (stêrixai posin empedon,
12.434) to save himself from her. But, unlike Achilles, in
whose hands a rooted tree comes loose from the riverbank,
Odysseus manages to cling to the branches of a tall fig tree
that remains firmly rooted. By turning the rescued keel into a
boat and “rowing with [his] hands” (12.444), he makes it to
Calypso’s island, the “navel of the sea.”
Seven years later, he builds the raft that carries him from
Calypso’s “sea-girt”(“stream-surrounded,” amphirutê, 1.198)
isle. Zeus speaks of the raft as an instrument of Odysseus’s
self-liberation; he will return home by his own devices, “not
by the escort of gods or mortal men” (5.32). Achilles never
makes anything; productive labor is base to the man who
seeks only to make himself worthy of immortal glory. His
man-slaying hands and the weapons they hold are useless
against Scamander, and he almost dies the ignominious death
of the drowned. In contrast, after seven years of enforced
inactivity, Odysseus seems to come to life again. With forged
tools, rather than forged weapons, in his hands, he constructs
a seaworthy raft with sides, mast, oar, and sail, and even a
device to move it from land into the water (5. 252-61). Here,
and throughout his story, he works in wood, a material of less
duration, but greater pliancy and flexibility than stone or
metals. A long simile explicitly compares him to a skilled
boat-builder.35
Finally, it is no surprise that, unlike Achilles, Odysseus
is a great swimmer. Swimming, like navigating, offers a
paradigm for human activity that requires strength, skill, and
calculation for self-preservation in an alien element. Unlike
fighting, it pits man against nature rather than against his
fellow men. But it requires a certain degree of knowledge and
coordination with the opponent, rather than mere opposition
aiming at his destruction. Achilles fights a river god with a
will to destroy him. Odysseus saves himself from the sea, a
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
natural element in service of his own divine nemesis, by
floating on and swimming with the sea. He knows not to fight
it, but to have confidence in the water’s power to support
him.36 In this respect, swimming is like “rowing with the arms
and legs”37 or sailing with the wind and current, rather than
against them. Man’s ability to move in water is a key sign of
his extraordinary adaptability, his ability to cross boundaries,
and his capacity to utilize, as well as oppose, the powers of
the natural world. In this regard it is Odysseus the sailor and
swimmer, rather than Achilles the warrior, whom Homer
depicts as a paradigm of human excellence. There are no
swimming or boating events in either the funeral games or in
Phaeacia. This kind of prowess is not yet an occasion for
leisurely recreation or for competitive display or glory.38 But
Homer clearly recognizes that it is in keeping with the other
virtues of his third contender for the designation “best of the
Achaeans.”
As the raft nears Phaeacia, Poseidon whips up a great
storm, “rolling before him a mighty wave” (mega kuma
kulindôn, 5.296), and Odysseus’s knees and heart are
“loosened” (or “melted,” luto, 5.406), in the Iliadic formula
for dying warriors. In the dissolving element, the familiar
metaphor suggests a more literal meaning than it has on dry
land. Like Achilles in the river, Odysseus tells himself that an
honorable death and burial on the Trojan plain would have
been preferable to drowning (5.312). Homer even makes him
think, at this moment, of the “dead son of Peleus” (5.310)
who did not drown in the sea, but died gloriously in battle. A
great wave “whirls” (elelixe) the raft around and beats down
on him from “on high” (5.313-14), just as Scamander assaults
Achilles. When the raft Odysseus has made with his hands can
no longer withstand the assault of Poseidon, he heeds Ino’s
exhortation to “swim with [your] hands” (5.344), to the land
of the Phaeacians. Unlike the Iliad’s chivalric, horse-drawn
heroes who carefully dress and arm themselves for battle,
Odysseus rides one recovered raft plank “as though he were
riding a horse” (5.371), and strips himself of Calypso’s
FLAUMENHAFT
39
garments as he prepares to face his enemy. With “arms
outstretched, eager to swim”(cheire petassas, nêchemenai
memaôs, 5.374-5), he flings his naked body into the sea.
He swims, and then “is driven,” or “wanders,”(plazeto,
5.389) for two days and two nights, and on the third day
catches sight of Phaeacia. But he soon realizes that there are
no harbors or low places on which to land; again, his “knees
are loosed and his heart melted” (5.406). For Odysseus, as for
Achilles in the deep river, it is not possible to “set both feet
firmly” (podessi stêmenai amphoteroisi, 5.413-14). He clings
to a jagged rock, until the waves rip him away. At this point,
we are told that he would have perished, had not Athena
given him “prudence” (epiphrosunên, 5.437). Homer does
not mean that Athena saves him, but that he follows his own
characteristic instinct not merely to oppose nature—the
waves—with brute strength, as Achilles does the river, but to
discern its behavior, as he did with Charybdis, and to
coordinate his own powers with those of the sea. Thus, he
makes his way “out from” (exanadus, 5.438) the main current
of the wave, and “swims alongside” (nêche parex, 5.439) it to
the mouth of a river. This river, like the Trojan Scamander, is
called “fair-flowing”(kallirooio, 5. 441). Unlike Achilles, who
impiously attempts to fight the Trojan river god, Odysseus
prays as a wandering suppliant to the Phaeacian river god
who stops the stream and holds back the waves. Odysseus lets
his “knees and strong arms bend” (ekampse, 5.443-44) and
emerges from the river to kiss the solid earth, a gesture
unimaginable in godlike Achilles. That night he curls up in an
improvised bed of dry leaves that protect him from “bitter
frost and fresh dew” (5.467), watery enemies that still
threaten to overcome him. The last leg of his journey home
begins with this improvised shelter and the home offered by
the hospitable Phaeacians. Nausikaa welcomes him by
allowing him to wash off the brine and salty crust of the sea
with fresh water from the now-calm river (5.224-26).
As we have seen, Odysseus’s ability to make or to elicit
offers of new homes does not preclude attachment to his
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
original home. Ithaca does not float like the windy isle of the
shifty king Aeolus, the home of a peculiarly static and inbred
tribe. Rather, it remains in place, awaiting the return of its
king to his ever-aging wife, son, father, and subjects.
Odysseus’s landfall on Ithaca is in the sloping harbor of
Phorkus, another “old man of the sea,” whose headlands
keep back the great waves of the open ocean. An olive tree
grows beside a cave sacred to the Naiads, river nymphs who
weave beside the “everflowing streams” (13.109), Thetis’s
companions who had wept for Achilles in the watery deep.
After twenty years at sea, Odysseus sleeps at last beside his
own native waters. When Athena reveals them as his own, he
again kisses the earth and prays to the Naiads, vowing to
dedicate gifts to them. Just as he identifies the island by its
flowing streams in the cave, so he is identified by Eurycleia
when she washes his feet and the water in her basin “flows
out” (exechethuso, 19.470). His homecoming culminates in
the identification of the wedding bed he crafted from a still
living, rooted olive tree. In contrast, Achilles meets his match
in a turbulent foreign river on whose bottom his swift feet
cannot find firm footing, and of whose waters his man-killing
hands cannot get a hold. Fixed on the promise of unchanging
eternity, Achilles loses touch with his past and rejects the
prospects of a living future. Odysseus declines Calypso’s offer
to keep him at her static island in the sea and to make him
“immortal and ageless,” in effect, to make him stand still, in
time. He chooses to return to his own island in the sea, where
nothing has stood still in his absence. Paradoxical as it
sounds, he holds onto a flowing human life in time.
The peculiar nature of his relation with Poseidon is
resolved in a strikingly Odyssean way. As punishment for
helping Odysseus emerge from the threat of immobility and
invisibility and return to life in a world of change, the
Phaeacian ship that delivered him is immobilized, turned to
stone, like Niobe at the end of the Iliad, and their city is
covered over with a great mountain (13.149-52) and lost
sight of forever. The enmity between amphibious man and
FLAUMENHAFT
41
the unstable sea is to be concluded after the adventures that
constitute the Odyssey. Odysseus is told in Hades, and he
repeats the prophesy to Penelope when he returns home, that
he will soon have to make another journey, this time inland
on the solid earth. After traveling a great distance he will
come to a place where the inhabitants are so unfamiliar with
the watery, salty ways that have been his life, that they will
mistake the oar he carries for a winnowing fan. Planting it
among them, he will serve as an ambassador for the unruly
god who has been his nemesis, and who is thus also responsible for some of his strengths. Life away from, as well as life
protected from, the vicissitudes of Poseidon is not a full
human life. The shifting sea of risks and the virtues it fosters
is a more interesting, seasoned life than the immortal life of
Calypso and the protected lives of landlubbers, Aeolians, and
Phaeacians. Gods and Phaeacians may zip from element to
element, “swift as birds on the wing or thoughts” (7.35;
5.50), but a mortal man must make his way through rough
waters and seas of pains and troubles. The viable alternative
to Achilles’ attempt to fix time and oppose watery flux is not
a becalmed flat sea, or a freshwater lake with no “deep
eddies,” but a life in time that builds, sails, swims, endures
troubles, governs men, loves a like-minded woman, and
generates a maturing son to continue life when his own time
has come to an end.
Epilogue
The man who, at the beginning of the Iliad, claims to be the
“best of the Achaeans” is nearly overwhelmed by the fluid,
churning force of the Trojan river. In Scamander, Achilles
faces an opponent beyond his experience. From this point on,
he fights only on land, where his swift feet can make a firm
stand or can outrun an opponent whose enduring shape is
visible, and who runs in only one direction.
But Homer’s use of the episodes involving Scamander
points to a related fact about the “best of the Achaeans”:
Achilles has his own tutelary river in his own homeland,
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42
Phthia, the land where mortals waste away (phthiô) and die,
where neither life nor time is fixed forever. Like Scamander
(21.268, 326), it is called a “heaven-fed river” (16.174). It
too marks, fertilizes, and protects the land, and from it
occasionally spring forth mortal children like the Myrmidon
Menesthius (16.173-78), just as Asteropaeus’s father sprang
from the “wide-flowing Axius” in Paeonia. The proper name
of the Phthian river, Spercheius, points to Achilles, for
sperchô means “to set in rapid motion,” or, as a middle
participle, “hastening, impetuous, without loss of time.” In
Book Twenty-three, when Achilles prepares Patroclus’s body
for the funeral mound, he cuts a “yellow lock” of his own
hair to place in his dead friend’s hands. The Greek word for
“yellow,” xanthê (23.141), might remind us of the immortal
Trojan river, called Xanthus by the gods, against whom
Achilles strives in Book Twenty-one. Now, at Patroclus’s
funeral, he says that his father had vowed that he, Achilles,
upon his return (nostêsanta, 23.145) to Phthia, would offer
this hair and a hecatomb to Spercheius, and that he would
sacrifice fifty rams into his waters. Such sacrifices were often
dedicated to local rivers by boys (and girls) when they came
of age.39 Hesiod says that the daughters of Tethys and Ocean,
the nymphs, with the help of Apollo and their brothers the
Rivers—which include “divine Scamander”—bring young
boys to manhood.”40 That it was Peleus who made the vow
suggests that for his swift-footed son, there can be no normal
coming of age, and no return (nostos) to the swift-flowing
river of his native land. Like the rest of his story, the savage
slaughters and mock sacrifices near the Scamander in Book
Twenty-one bear witness to the Homeric paradox that the
fully developed heroic excellence exemplified by Achilles
must alienate the hero from the very wellsprings of his own
life.
FLAUMENHAFT
43
1
After Troy falls, Aeneas undertakes the extended voyage that takes him
from Troy to Italy. Homer only alludes to this future (20.302-08).
2
Oliver Taplin, Homeric Soundings: The Shaping of the Iliad (Oxford,
1992), 237.
3
Seth L. Schein, The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad
(Berkeley, 1984), 75.
4
This seems to be an unstated motive for the ambush of Rhesus and his
men and horses in Book Ten of the Iliad.
5
E. T. Owen, The Story of the Iliad (Michigan, 1966), 210-12.
6
Taplin, 228.
7
But see James M. Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad (Chicago,
1975), Note 15, 250.
8
Taplin, 224.
9
Proteus, the “old man of the sea” in Odyssey 4.365-570 is also hard to
pin down.
10
Laura M. Slatkin, The Power of Thetis: Allusion and Interpretation in
the Iliad (Berkeley, 1991), 103.
11
Slatkin, 113.
12
Perhaps this is why there are very few visual representations of this
incident, either in extant Greek art or later.
13
Richardson, N., The Iliad: A Commentary. Volume VI: Books 21-24
(Cambridge, 1993), 72. Note to lines 21.233-50 on enjambment, and the
progressive piling-up of sentences.
14
Atchity, Kenneth John, Homer’s Iliad: The Shield of Memory
(Carbondale and Edwardsville, Ilinois, 1978), 243.
15
Redfield, Note 15, 251.
16
Plato, Theaetetus 179E-180B; Aristotle, Rhetoric 1407b9-18.
17
Austin, Norman, Archery at the Dark of the Moon: Poetic Problems in
Homer’s Odyssey (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1975), 112.
18
Austin, 113.
19
Sappho, LP fr. 130; Archilochus, West, IEG 196.
,
20
***
Michael N. Nadler, Spontaneity and Tradition: A Study in the Oral Art
of Homer (Berkeley, 1974), 149ff.
21
Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (New York,
2003), 167.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
22
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of
Painting and Poetry. Trans. Ellen Frothingham (New York, 1968), 114,
120-22.
23
S. E. Bassett, The Poetry of Homer (Berkeley, 1938), 156-57.
24
W B. Stanford, The Odyssey of Homer (London, 1965), I.xxii.
.
25
C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (New York, 1970), 31. Quoted
also in Mark W Edwards, Homer: Poet of the Iliad (Baltimore, 1987),
.
322.
26
Aristophanes, Clouds, 379ff. Trans. Alan H Somerstein. The Comedies
of Aristophanes, Vol. 3 (Chicago, 1982), 46.
27
Atchity, 243.
28
The word appears only at Odyssey 10.304 to describe the môly root
that Hermes gives Odysseus.
29
Vera Lachman. Homer’s Sun Still Shines: Ancient Greece in Essays,
Poems, and Translations (New Market, Virginia, 2004), 83-84.
30
Plato, Meno 81D.
31
Chapter 2 of Austin’s Archery at the Dark of the Moon is the best
discussion I know about Homer’s “analogical” thought, the unity of the
cosmos, and correspondence between human and natural order.
32
For an extended discussion of Odysseus, see Mera J. Flaumenhaft,
“The Undercover Hero: Odysseus from Dark to Daylight,” Interpretation,
Vol. 10, No. 1, January, 1982.
33
Derek Walcott. The Odyssey: A Stage Version (New York, 1993), 1.
34
Austin, 133.
35
Again, compare the sailable, steered raft that Odysseus builds with the
merely floating ark that Noah makes, not by his own ingenuity, but by
strictly following God’s instructions. Kass, 167-68.
36
B. Franklin, “Learning to Swim,” in The Ingenious Dr. Franklin:
Selected Scientific Letters of Benjamin Franklin. Ed. Nathan G. Goodman
(Philadelphia, 1974), 41-45.
37
38
Franklin, “On Swimming,” in Goodman, 48.
Herodotus (8.89) remarks on the number of Persians who died at
Salamis because, unlike the Greeks, they did not know how to swim.
Thucydides reports that the Athenian ships preparing to sail to Sicily
strove to outdo each other in appearance and speed (6.31) and raced with
each other as they left Athens (6.32). Elaborate boat races begin Virgil’s
FLAUMENHAFT
45
funeral games (Aeneid, 5) where the events have a more communal, or
political, character than Homer’s.
39
Walter Burkert, Greek Religion. Trans. John Raffas (Cambridge, Mass.,
1985), 174-75.
40
Hesiod. The Theogony. Trans. Norman O. Brown (Indianapolis, 1953),
63.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
47
Making Up Our Minds
Robert Richardson
With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By
a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions
and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us
like a torrent. We are not wholly involved in Nature. I may be
either the drift-wood in the stream, or Indra in the sky looking
down on it. I may be affected by a theatrical exhibition; on
the other hand, I may not be affected by an actual event which
appears to concern me much more. I only know myself as a
human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can
stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense
my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of
a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but
spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it; and
that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the
tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind
of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was
concerned. This doubleness may easily make us poor
neighbors and friends sometimes.—Thoreau, Walden
1
“I…am sensible of a certain doubleness…” The feature of
experience that Thoreau remarks upon here is both
remarkable and commonplace. This sense we sometimes have
of being apart from ourselves is an instance of what I believe
to be the constitutive feature of human thinking, its doubling
power.
Robert Richardson is a tutor on the Santa Fe campus of St. John’s College.
This essay is a version of a lecture he delivered at Santa Fe on February 2,
2005.
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We notice things and notice our noticing; we observe
events and appraise them, hear statements and affirm or deny
them, act and assess our actions; we see one thing as being
like another and employ it as a simile; we make something
into a sign and, like a string around our finger, let it stand for
something else. We count, tell time, chronicle the past, anticipate the future and memorialize the dead. We worry and
regret. We can speak the truth or tell a lie. We play with
words and pun; we laugh and tell jokes. We wear clothes,
apply make-up and use deodorants. We accept little pieces of
paper with faces stamped on them in exchange for the goods
of life. Without “a certain doubleness,” without the ability to
stand apart from the things and feelings we experience, and
momentarily at least, even to be other than ourselves, we
would not do any of this.
“We are not wholly involved in Nature,” as Thoreau
reminds us. Our doubleness brings us into the sight of
ourselves and sets us apart from everything else. It marks us
off from our animal kindred who, if they share in it at all, do
not partake fully in the ability to observe themselves from
afar. Animals close to us in evolutionary terms and those born
and bred to share our domesticity display something like our
doubleness at times, but this power seems rudimentary in
them at most. Despite their lively awareness and evident
intelligence, it would be a stretch to suppose they can stand
aloof from themselves and appraise their own actions as
humans habitually do. They are “wholly involved in Nature”
in a way that we are not.
We do have, it is true, moments of active work or play
when, fully immersed in our actions, we think of nothing but
what we are doing and do not think to watch ourselves doing
it. These vivifying moments, complete and sufficient as they
are, give us a sense of what it means to be at one with
ourselves.
When we experience it deeply and for its own sake, the
power of witnessing can induce in us a blissful state of
oneness, which is at the other pole from our immersion in
RICHARDSON
49
immediacy. In such a moment the notion of an undifferentiated, enduring, and unalterable consciousness overarching
all of existence and containing it, yet neither affecting it nor
affected by it, is but a thought beyond. “Indra in the sky
looking down” in Thoreau’s account is, according to the
ancient Indian religion, a manifestation of the highest
consciousness: “He is the unseen Seer, the unheard Hearer,
the unthought Thinker, the ununderstood Understander.”1
“The witness, the sole thinker, devoid of qualities….without
parts, without activity, tranquil, irreproachable, spotless.”2 as
it is characterized in the Upanishads. This Vedic conception
has affinities with the view found in the western theological
tradition that the divine mind is eternally single, simple,
whole, unchanging, and impassive. It knows no doubleness.
(The old Greek gods were of a different sort. Sharing everything with humans but our mortality, they were as doubleminded as could be.)
An animal never leaves nature. The Most High, according
to many traditional accounts, lies beyond and never enters it.
We dwell somewhere in the middle, between Nature and the
pure Empyrean, confounded and confounding, looking up
and down.
One of our muddles here in the middle is what to think
about our own thinking. That we can think about thinking at
all is, of course, a consequence of our doubling power, but we
are often confused by this ability even as we exercise it. What
we are doing when we look at our thinking, how we look at
it and what we think we see—as well as what words such as
‘looking’ and ‘seeing’ are doing in this context—are among
the most vexing of questions.
In thinking about these aspects of our experience I have
arrived at beliefs which, although not unique to me, are far
from the usual ones. My aim in what follows is to state my
beliefs as boldly and simply as I can. It would please me to
find that they are more widely shared than I suppose, but I am
afraid I cannot count on this. To put the matter provocatively,
I am not trying to sweep the cobwebs out of the mind, but to
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50
sweep the mind out with the cobwebs. Preposterous as it may
seem, I do not believe we think in our minds or even that we
have minds to do our thinking in.
2
When we want to express our thinking we do a peculiar
thing. With lips, teeth, and tongue we bite and rend and
pummel the air. Out of our breath we sculpt our thoughts and
send them on their way. The medium of the air—so nearly
unresisting it scarcely seems to be a body at all—briefly,
evanescently, takes the shape of thought and carries it abroad
to rap at the portals of the public ear. Speech is a plastic art.
Our words are not so much winged as wind-carved. Perhaps
we ought to pause now and then in our palavering and pour
a libation to the mellifluous air.
It is utterly remarkable that so slight an alteration in such
a thin and subtle medium could produce such great effects.
Of all the capacities we have for shaping things this is surely
the most potent. No human activity has done more, directly
or indirectly, to change the world than the artful expulsion of
these little bursts of air.
Speaking is a public art and a public act. Once the art is
acquired it may be privately employed but that is an
accidental feature of it. The possibility of its private
employment is derived and secondary, not primary or
essential. An individual who learns to speak acquires what is
never the learner’s alone. The common tongue belongs to all
who speak it. It lives in the customary practices of its users. If
all the beings who know how to employ it cease to exist, it
dies with them. Its being is in its active use. While it is alive,
it is a potent influence, yet it is nowhere locatable. A
language, the common practices of a people’s speech, is not
in the organs of propulsion or reception; it is not in the air
between; it is not in the brains of its speakers and hearers. Its
occurrence may require all of these, but it does not belong to
or inhabit any of them.
RICHARDSON
51
We can see, though, that there is a doubling here. The art
of speech is more than the making and hearing of sounds.
The sounds can be names that stand for things. In the giving
of names we stand apart, like an Adam in Eden, and know
both that the thing is other than the name and that the name
stands in for it. This capacity arises from the doubleness
already noted—the power to be seer and doer, observer and
actor at once—and it greatly enhances it. Only with the
burgeoning of speech, it seems, does our doubleness reach
full and telling strength. In speech doubleness finds a vehicle
that once and for all, for good or ill, transports us out of
nature. Double now, our fate pronounced, we rise—or fall—
into the world, there forever to contend with the partial
stranger each of us calls ‘myself ’. Givers of names, bearers of
names, we are now fully and forever beside ourselves.
Language and doubleness are at least fraternal twins. To
say which deserves the elder’s status is probably impossible.
The evidence which would establish the birthright of either
one is lacking. No testimony can be given until we have
learned to speak, and then it is too late: the witness is
impeached.
Like talking, the doubling power is physiologically
grounded and it, too, is an acquired skill. It develops over
time, improves with practice and is enhanced by circumstances and structures which invite it and support it. We see
this in children as they grow. Early in life they start to notice
and attend to things around them and learn their names.
They begin to distinguish between themselves and others, to
ask questions, to deliberate and choose. They become capable
of thinking about persons and things which are not immediately present, they undertake projects and pursue goals. In
time they become aware of possible opportunities or dangers
and learn to direct their own conduct and look out for
themselves. The developing skills of language grow along
with this process and are instrumental to it. Through
doubleness and its linguistic accompaniments humans extend
their awareness beyond what is immediate and present at
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hand, thereby increasing their ability to meet their needs,
satisfy more of their desires, and pursue their long term
interests.
Something like this must have happened to us as a species,
too, although we cannot say how or when. Our remote
ancestors, who were anatomically and perhaps emotionally
very much like us, apparently existed for hundreds of
thousands of years before they began to speak. Not very long
ago in the span of evolutionary time, their doubling power
developed and languages came to be. Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
perhaps to buttress his claim that pity is so natural to humans
that they could not even have learned it at their mothers’
knees, imagines the first humans living solitary lives practically from the moment of birth, gradually acquiring language,
then becoming social beings. But this is surely backwards.
Language and doubleness grow out of our social nature. In
the presence of others who respond to our gestures, return
our gaze, alter their facial expressions and aid or hinder us,
we begin to speak and to recognize ourselves as belonging to
a community which simultaneously contains each of us
individually yet is separate and apart from us.
We are not born into Nature, but into an established
world, a world founded in our doubleness. This world is
shaped by the language, customs, beliefs, institutions,
artifacts, and practices of the people we are born among. It
has developed over time, may have undergone many changes,
and may be changing even as we are born into it. Any
particular instance of it may be in conflict with itself,
threatened from outside, and gathering or losing its influence,
but it is our human home. It is what gives or denies meaning
and significance to what we do. It shapes who and what we
are, provides the boundaries—more or less plastic—of our
thinking and acting, and establishes the grounds of worth.
The self is the private counterpart of the world. It
develops in dialogue with it, sometimes in discord and
opposition, sometimes in seeming consonance. I am partly
RICHARDSON
53
the story I tell myself, partly the story the others in my world
may wish me to be, allow me to be or take me to be—and also
something as yet to be disclosed in the on-going reciprocity
of self and world.
Neither the self nor the world is primordial. Both are
artificial productions arising from human effort, articulation,
and invention. (Artificial is not, here, the antonym of real.)
Both are fluid to varying degrees. Each can change relatively
independently, but changes in the one can, and often do,
affect the other. Nothing metaphysical need be implied by the
existence of this pairing. Self and world are names for
patterns of activity that have been and may continue to be
shaped by deliberation and choice. They are especially
intimate and important to us since they represent for us the
extremes of our existence; the mine and not mine; what I am
and what I am up against, what I want and what is available
to me. They are akin to poetry and myth, but not necessarily
illusions because of that and certainly not without meaning.
Our bodies and the natural forces at work in the things
around us energize the stories of self and world and are in
turn incorporated into their unfolding episodes. From our
cultural surroundings, our personal experiences and our
thinking—including forays beyond the cultural givens—we
frame the story of the world, and under the impetus of our
aspirations, interests, and fears we undertake to act in ways
that will make the details of our own adventures in it come
out as we want them to.
When we use written marks to communicate instead of
making sounds, our doubleness is doubly confirmed. If proof
were needed for the fact of doubling, the writing and reading
of any sentence would provide it. Without the conventional
marks employed by the writer as stand-ins for words there
would be no sentence to read, and if the reader were not able
to see them as standing for words they would be taken only
for the little squiggles they really are and they would have no
other meaning.
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Writing, like speaking, depends upon and enhances our
doubling power. It gives our words a more permanent body
than air, extends their reach and greatly increases their sway.
We are inclined to say that an author puts concepts,
images, feelings, characters, or events in a text, but it would
be more accurate to say that the writer, using the conventions
of a written language, provides a set of tacit instructions
which the reader follows in order to enact or constitute the
thoughts or events which the work elicits. Literally speaking,
there are no thoughts in any book.
We are also disposed to say that the thoughts which the
work conveys enter the reader’s mind and may be stored in
the memory and later recalled. But it would be more accurate
to say that in the act of remembering, the reader’s initial
activities when encountering and comprehending the work
are reiterated, rehearsed, or re-enacted and thereby reconstituted.
Thus, just as we should circumspectly say there is nothing
in the book, so we should also circumspectly say there is
nothing of it in the mind or memory. When, as practiced
readers, we look something up in a book, we do not attend to
the marks on the page as such and scarcely notice they are
there although they are the means by which we understand
what the book says. When we remember something, the
means by which the memory is activated are not available for
our inspection, as the marks on the page are if we happen to
distract ourselves by noticing them, but in both reading and
remembering there are embodied procedures which make the
acts possible. In the act of reading, static embodiments are reactivated by procedures dynamically embodied in living
tissues; the procedures of memory are dynamically embodied
in living tissues alone; we know how to read and to remember
without, in either case, really knowing how we are able to do
it.
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RICHARDSON
3
It is surprising, when we stop to notice it, how much of our
thinking lies openly before us. Thinking is manifest in all the
things presently at hand. This table, the chairs, the carpet, the
lights, the drapes, the pictures on the walls, the doors and
windows, the walls themselves—all embody thinking. Our
needs, interests, hopes, fears, and fantasies have forged out of
the elements a multitude of things. Whether planes, trains, or
automobiles the reality is the same: thinking makes them and
thinking makes them go. In this respect, thinking is the least
mysterious enterprise there is. We see it everywhere we turn
and know it well.
Thinking is made evident just as surely, if less tangibly, in
the ordering of our common life. Courts, colleges, corporations, cities, states, musical concerts, and baseball games are
all embodiments of thinking. Our organized forms of work
and of play, of commerce and of art, are beings of thought.
Seemingly more real than the events and things they order,
they cannot be directly seen or pointed to and have no actual
location in space and time. They show up only in the activities they circumscribe. The rules of the game, the charter of
the college, the laws of the land, govern invisibly. Much
metaphysical hay might be made of this if one were so
inclined, but there is no need to loft the formal aspects of
experience into eternity to preserve what is real in them.
It would be pointless to ask, where is the justice system in
the body politic? We can locate the courthouses and the
statute books, but the system lives in the customs and
practices, the activities of its constituents. Without buildings,
books or human bodies, there would be no system, yet, real
as it is, we cannot locate it in any one of them or all of them
taken together.
Again, we might ask, where is the English language? We
can point to dictionaries and grammars, as well as books that
are written in it, but the language is not in them. It lives in the
habits and practices of those who know how to use it, but it
is not in their bodies. The language is real, it has effects and
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consequences, the world is different because it is employed,
yet it is not anywhere. Speaking the language and thinking
thoughts are alike in this respect. The organs that make them
possible are locatable, but the language and the thoughts are
not.
Where is a game of chess or soccer? And where, we could
also ask, are science and poetry? For that matter, where in the
world is the world?
It is amazing when we stop to think about it how many
things there are that cannot be said to be in any place and yet
are constantly assumed, repeatedly invoked, and powerfully
consequential. We speak a language. We speak our minds.
There is a similarity worth pondering here.
There is a nearly unshakable conviction that the mind
exists and can be looked into. Many tell us they have taken a
look and have reported impressively on what they have seen.
Withdrawing his attention from his surroundings and peering
into his mind, Descartes plucked out his famous cogito.
Hume took a long inward look and spied an assortment of
discrete atoms of thinking which he called impressions and
ideas. William James, stepping into the celebrated chapter on
the stream of thought in his Principles of Psychology, says,
“We now begin our study of the mind from within.”3 In Kinds
of Minds, Daniel Dennett declares, “It is beyond serious
dispute that you and I each have a mind.”4 And “…each of us
knows exactly one mind from the inside, and no two of us
know the same mind from the inside.”5 We are not
“something that is all outside and no inside like a rock or a
discarded sliver of fingernail.”6
Although all people and all schools of philosophy,
according to William James, affirm this inner realm, although
many heroes of thought have dared the labyrinth hoping to
see what thinking is really like when it is at home, I must
remain outside and cannot go in. I have read the accounts of
these interior expeditions often enough over the years but I
have never been persuaded by their individual claims or
managed to see how their mutually incompatible certainties
RICHARDSON
57
might be forged into a comprehensible whole. I would cut a
sorry figure now if, like some Quixote of consciousness, I
plunged into this legendary space and went adventuring to
see what I might rescue there, then returned to defend my
fugitive darlings trolled up from the inner dark. No; better, I
think, to close the hole.
The putative effort to look into our minds, if nothing
else, takes doubleness for granted; the agent examines the
patient, although they are ‘really’ one and the same. The
mind observes the play of mind upon the mental stage. As
long as we are speaking metaphorically, and know that we are
doing so, such fancies are innocent enough. Figuratively, ‘in’
will do. Taken literally, it is a dose that is fatal to our understanding.
One important piece of evidence that this metaphor is
taken literally is the fact that, ever since Descartes, thinkers of
all sorts have made it the basis for what they consider to be a
real distinction between the internal and external worlds:
there is an inner world, intimately experienced, directly
accessible, and certainly known, and there is an external
world, which is represented in the mind in some problematic
way that leaves its real existence doubtful. By some strange
alchemy, what is so manifestly happening around us has been
transmuted into an inner world with us, as knowers,
somehow inside it. Once we have stumbled into this maze it
is impossible ever to find our way back through our own
mentations to reach the outside and see it directly and simply
as itself again.
I am not ignorant of the circumstances and the arguments
that led to this way of thinking about thinking, but in my
opinion this picture of an inner reality and a represented but
doubtful external world out yonder is exactly backwards. To
stay for the moment with this inside-outside distinction
despite its dubious character, I would have to say that
thinking is constituted outside us and then imported. What is
out there surrounding the body, encountered by it and
engaging it, is the real. The inner world is its imaginary
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58
simulacrum, an invented counterpart. In making up our
minds, we bring the outside in.
I began with speech and language and spoke in passing of
political and social structures as well as the making of things
because these instances of thinking seem to me to have more
to tell us than can be learned by trying to turn our gaze
inward in acts of introspection. I want to stay on this outward
path even though to nearly everyone else all the signposts
seem so evidently to point the other way.
4
We are constantly telling ourselves how the mind works, and
it is instructive to notice what we say. We forge an understanding, draw a conclusion, render a judgment, grasp a
problem, shape an idea, build a theory, make a decision. We
hit the nail on the head, are struck by a thought, see an idea
clearly, approach a problem, keep things in mind, get a rough
idea, have a touching thought. We apprehend and
comprehend, but in either case, behind the Latinate terms for
it, the plain English of it is, we grasp. All these motions of the
mind are metaphors, grounded in our interactions with the
things of daily life. Most of the time the mind is either a
seeing eye or a grasping hand. The notion that the mind or
consciousness does things—like a person moving in physical
space—is itself a metaphor. The mind is, in short, the double
of the body, its imaginary counterpart—and its mask. It only
exists in a manner of speaking.
Recounting his efforts to observe his “palpitating inward
life,” William James says: “Whenever my introspective glance
succeeds in turning around quickly enough to catch one of
these manifestations of spontaneity in the act, all it can ever
feel distinctly is some bodily process, for the most part taking
place within the head.”7 This picture of a mind pirouetting
inside itself reminds us a little of the hope we had when we
were children of stepping on our own shadow if only we were
quick enough. We can eliminate such shadowy motions if we
ascribe thinking to the body itself, something James often
RICHARDSON
59
seems on the brink of doing. Time and again his inner exploration of the stream of thought seems about to beach on the
shores of the body, but he backs water and paddles away.8
One aspect of his inward journey is particularly illustrative of the difficulties such ventures face. Describing his
struggle to follow and observe his thoughts, noting how they
seem to be concentrated in the neck and head, he says, “My
brain appears to me as if all shot across with lines of
direction, of which I have become conscious as my attention
has shifted from one sense-organ to another, in passing to
successive outer things, or in following trains of varying
sense-ideas.”9 Here William seems to have forsaken the role
of scientific observer and taken up his brother Henry’s art. An
introspective faculty so agile and penetrating it overleaps the
possible and spies the brain itself is simply too uncanny to be
taken for a fact.
We may describe the mind as Hume does as “a kind of
theater, where several perceptions successively make their
appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an
infinite variety of postures and situations,”10 but the actors
appear before the footlights costumed in raiment which the
solitary spectator has unwittingly sewn backstage before the
play began. Habits, conventions, language, and expectations
are part of the story of what we see with our inward gaze.
The inside story of our thinking is a work of inspired imagination. We do not look on thinking bare.
The mind is an idea but there are no ideas in the mind.
The mind does not produce thoughts; it is a product of them.
The mind is a name for a complex of activities. It is nothing
over and above these activities, and apart from them it has no
being. In this it resembles such terms as the English language,
the judicial system, the game of chess, the college, or the city.
The mind is the ether of thinking.
We would do better, I believe, to speak of minding rather
than a mind. The verbal form represents the facts more
perspicuously than the noun. Activities are the real subjects
here, and not a thing that acts. To quote James again, “If we
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could say in English ‘it thinks,’ as we say ‘it rains’ or ‘it
blows,’ we should be stating the fact most simply and with the
minimum of assumption. As we cannot, we must simply say
that thought goes on. ”11
Our many mindings, although they reside nowhere, still
go about their business unimpaired. The activities we denominate as sensing, feeling, wishing, opining, believing, liking,
and fearing go on undomiciled, as do imagining, judging,
reasoning, and the like.
Such terms, it is worth noting, are highly generic. When
we think of the range of our desires, wishes, feelings, or
beliefs we have to wonder if these general terms ever
adequately express what occurs in any particular instance,
especially when we notice how often these ways of minding
infuse one another, commingling in varied ways and countless
combinations. It is also true that many aspects of our thinking
life are too indeterminate to be singled out and named. Subtle
alterations of mood and inclination, flickering images, and
passing fancies come and go without our pausing to
acknowledge them, much less provide them with a moniker,
yet they affect us and are often significant despite their lack
of definiteness.
In contrast to this, some of our mindings are not only
specified distinctly but are ascribed to particular faculties: the
imagination, the judgment, the intellect, the understanding,
the reason, or the will. This helps satisfy our inclination to
provide a mental doer for every thinking deed, even though
there is nothing that actually answers to these names. A
thorough renovation of our thinking would require us to
renounce our inheritance and refuse to take title to them. The
absence of most of them, outside of philosophical discourse,
would probably go unnoticed but—having gained wide
acceptance since its invention in Roman times—the will is
now something of a popular favorite and likely to be missed.
61
RICHARDSON
5
In denying the existence of an inner realm I do not mean to
deny that each of us has experiences uniquely our own and
known only to us. Although a lot of what we undergo is not
known to us at all, and a lot of what we know about what
happens to us is known in the same way it might be known
by anyone else since we use common words and concepts to
recognize it, report it to ourselves and comprehend it, there
is an irreducible something in each person’s experience that
is that person’s alone. You cannot have my headache, and
believe me, you wouldn’t want to. But if we look at this
closely I think it comes to very much the same as saying that
we have different bodies and different life experiences. I have
mine with its sensations and you have yours and there is no
possibility of the one being the other. We may mix our saliva
in a kiss, but I cannot secrete yours and you cannot produce
mine. We may extend our imagination to the fullest reach of
its powers, but we can never know exactly what it is like to
be each other—much less to be a creature like a bat.
If the mind is a metaphorical construct, as I believe it is,
and therefore not a place for thinking actually to be in, where
is thinking then? In the body? Well, perhaps, but can we say
just where?
Often, as we struggle with a difficult problem or confront
an issue important to us, we feel a mounting pressure in the
chest, the heart pounds, the stomach churns. This might lead
us to locate our thinking where most of humankind most of
the time has felt it to be, somewhere between the navel and
the chin.
When we are not trying to locate thinking it just seems to
hover around; it is present without being anywhere.
Sometimes it seems to float slightly above and before us, as if
somewhere nearby in the sky. The cartoonists’ use of the
thought balloon may be as good a convention for locating it
as any.
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When we are conversing with a friend and trying vigorously to make a point, thinking seems to be located in the
space between us. If we were cracking a safe we might feel it
to be concentrated at our fingertips, and at the end of a stick
if we were using it to feel our way in the dark over rough
ground. With a little practice I believe we could learn to place
it almost anywhere—on our back between our shoulder
blades, or perched on our shoulder—if we were persuaded by
a likely enough story to expect to feel it there.
There is, of course, something experientially plausible
about locating thinking in our heads. The vocal organs are in
the neck and head and, since so much of thinking is a kind of
silent speech, as the stranger points out in Plato’s Sophist, it
is easy to feel that the mind is there, too. Likewise the organs
of hearing, sight, smell, taste—and even touch if we consider
the tongue—are in the same vicinity, so it is not surprising
that we might come to take it for granted that our many
mindings are housed somewhere in our heads. However, it is
our present understanding of physiology and not the
experience of thinking itself which leads us to locate thinking
in our skulls where the brain is found. In the Tractatus
Wittgenstein says, “nothing in the visual field allows you to
infer that it is seen by an eye.”12 So, too, there is nothing in
the activity of thinking itself from which we could infer that
it goes on in a brain.
Although we frequently are aware of activity in many
parts of our body—especially the heart and lungs, the
digestive tract, and our major muscles—and we can increase
our awareness of these activities to some degree by paying
attention to them, we have no sensations from the part of the
head where the brain is housed, and the brain, unlike some
other organs of the body, does not enter our awareness. The
unnumbered firings of its synapses, those diminutive and
distant cousins of the lightning bolt, do not crackle in our
ears. Thinking doesn’t gurgle, wheeze, hiss, or hum. This
absence of sensible experience is laden with consequences
and merits further consideration, but the main point of this
RICHARDSON
63
quick survey is to see how irrelevant it is. No matter where
we decide to place thinking in the body and no matter which
bodily organ we attribute it to, when we look for it there, it
is not to be found. Open head or belly or chest, look at brain,
heart, liver, stomach, or spleen and nothing like thinking
appears. There is no mind there. This is too obvious to need
pointing out, perhaps. Still, it ought to cast a shadow of
suspicion over the use of the word “in” when talking about
our mental activities. The fact that “I do my thinking in my
study,” and “I do sums in my head,” are grammatically similar
expressions does not imply that both refer to equally
locatable places where thinking actually occurs.
Thinking is a mode of bodily activity. It is like walking,
swimming, playing a musical instrument. There is no place
where these activities reside when they are not occurring. The
fact that I know how to play the piano does not mean there
is music either in the piano or in me.
Saying that thinking is a bodily activity invites us to
compare it with other fundamental activities of the body.
Breathing, like thinking, is something I would not do without
my body. It seems locatable in a fairly straightforward way,
even though there is more to respiration than simply filling
the lungs with air and emptying them. All of its components
(excepting, some might want to argue, its impulse) are
physical things moving in physical space in detectable ways.
Thinking is not so straightforwardly locatable. That the brain
is a central organ in the process of thinking is surely true, but
we cannot find our thinking there. The motions and activities
in the brain are to some extent locatable, detectable, and
measurable, but they do not reveal our thinking. In this
respect thinking is like living. In both cases the body is indispensable. We say, speaking loosely, that life is in the body and
when we die it departs. But if we are more circumspect, we
realize that life is not a thing, and is not in the body except in
a metaphorical sense. The body’s fundamental activity is
living. All its organs, motions, and processes participate in
this activity, although not all in the same way, of course, or
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64
necessarily all at once. When the body is no longer active and
all its motions stop, we say life departs although there is
nothing to go anywhere or anywhere for it to go. In this way,
life and mind are alike. They are substantive fictions that
name complex activities and treat them as entities that are
real.
Not surprisingly, the effort to understand thinking has
about it some of the same difficulties that confound the
attempt to understand life itself. It is a wonder that life arises
from a combination of chemical elements. No explanation
seems commensurate with this amazing occurrence, just as no
account seems to explain adequately how the energies of the
body are sublimed into the vapors of thought.
The body, to varying degrees and with alterable intensities, can be aware of itself and its activities, its thinking, its
sensations, its feelings, and its impulses. It can also be aware
of this awareness. Neither in the first instance nor the second
is any other entity—substantial, spiritual, or metaphysical—
required either as a medium or an agent. The body’s ability
to do all this is prodigious, manifold, complex, astonishing—
and not well understood. But it is the body and only the body
doing it. There is nothing else to do our thinking for us.
6
The activities and excitations of our bodies, especially of our
brain and nervous system, are correlated, we are sure, with
our sensations, desires, ideas, and feelings, our thoughts of
every sort. But how does this work? It may be as James says,
that “the passing Thought itself is the only verifiable thinker,
and its empirical connection with the brain-process is the
ultimate known law.”13 Making this connection, however, is
no easy business.
One problem is that the physical part of the correlation is
not open to direct inspection. Even if I can see or feel what I
am thinking, I cannot see or feel my brain. Another observer
cannot see directly what I am thinking, or see directly what
my brain is doing, even if my skull is open and the would-be
RICHARDSON
65
observer is looking inside with the finest equipment available.
Seeing what is going on in the brain requires a lot more than
simply looking.
It is probably too obvious to need stating, but a scientist
examining brain processes employs theories, models, and
metaphors. The atomic theory of matter is taken for granted
along with its attendant explanation of chemical reactions.
The theory of electrical discharges and other more specialized
theories about cells, neurons, and synapses, are part of the
picture as well. It might even be necessary, as some are now
suggesting, to utilize quantum mechanics and the indeterminacy principle. Additionally, some investigators embed the
affairs of brain and mind in the context of evolutionary
theory. Thus it is safe to say that no account of how the brain
works can be direct and literal. Oddly enough we can see it
do what it does only because we have garbed it figuratively in
thought.
Even to suggest the possibility of correlating thoughts and
brain states might seem to imply that our mental life can be
reduced ultimately to a complex of deterministic mechanical
causes. But this prospect is less worrisome than it might seem
to those who fear it and a great deal less likely than it is
presumed to be by many who remain committed to it as the
goal of their inquiries.
One significant deterrent to such a mechanical mapping is
the complexity of the task. To every subtle difference,
distinction, nuance, and gradation of every different thought,
feeling, insight, or perplexity, some specific bodily event or
series of events—a brain-state or a brain-process—must
correspond if we are to be told the whole affair. Imagine an
account, in terms of neurophysiological activity, of all that
any one of us has experienced since rolling out of bed this
morning and arriving here—all that we have felt, imagined,
remembered, considered, decided, seen, heard, tasted, liked,
disliked, sought, or avoided. It would make for a mighty long
story, even though for most of us nothing of much significance happened. But suppose a loved one had died, or we had
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converted to Islam or become a socialist, survived a near-fatal
accident, won the lottery, or been elected president? What
would be the neurophysiological effects of such life-changing
events? When the meaning and deliverance of everything
changes, what goes on in the brain? Some physiological alteration must correspond to every change of every kind if the
law which decrees their correlation is to be upheld. Where is
the meter for this? Who will write the equations that capture
it? Compared to this complexity and subtlety the motions of
the planets are simplicity itself and the atom smasher, with its
tinier and tinier fragmentations, a mere toy.
The crux of the matter, however, is not the size of the
task. The mode of explanation contemporary science allows
in these matters—the correlation of a mental event with an
underlying mechanism or mechanisms—can work in only one
direction if it works at all. A physical change in the brain may
be asserted to have a mental consequence, but as the one
turns into, produces, or somehow causes the other, explanation loses its grip. The thought or feeling resulting from a
change in the brain cannot enter as a term into the
mechanical relationship that is said to have caused it. By the
nature of the case it is immaterial and can have no mechanical
efficacy. There is no mechanism on the thinking side of the
presumed relationship that would make it possible for mental
activities to have consequences. There are no levers to shift us
from thought to thought and no thinking wheels to spin the
brain. This not only makes it impossible to say how one
thought leads to another but also to say how any thought can
alter a brain state. There is an explanatory gap here that
mechanistic explanations fail to bridge.
Beyond this problem lies a deeper one. Scientific
mechanism—somewhat ironically, given its historical roots—
is a determined effort to explain natural phenomena without
invoking ends, goals, or purposes. Thinking, however, is
naturally forward-looking and goal-oriented in many of its
manifestations. Whatever a complete account of thinking
might ultimately look like, if it should ever emerge, it would
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have to do justice to our purposiveness, our capacity for selfdirection, our ability to deliberate and choose, our powers of
originative making. These are aspects of thinking known to us
directly, and are fateful in their consequences. Our powers of
choice may not be always as extensive as we suppose, but they
are real nevertheless. A science noticing that it could not exist
or hope to go forward without them and thus enlightened by
the vision of their actuality might in time pursue these powers
to their natural ground and by describing their physical basis
help us understand more fully how they do what they are able
to do. But it will not work to rule out from the beginning and
by fiat all purpose and direction and then attempt to conjure
from this paucity the full story of how a human body thinks.
This is not a demand that the idea of purpose be put back into
our account of natural processes. It is only a recognition that
whatever the place of thinking in nature may be, much of it
is clearly purposeful and no tale can be persuasive which
denies this telling fact.
7
Taking the mind out of the picture and acknowledging the
body as the thinker ascribes to thinking its proper origin,
gives credit where credit is due, and brings home to us the
body’s true nature as an intelligent being. Even those
researchers and theorists who take the reality of the mind for
granted are unlikely to be satisfied until the mind’s doings are
understood in terms of body and brain, so one must ask them
what explanatory aid this imaginary entity actually provides.
It seems to be a real hindrance, multiplying entities beyond
necessity and requiring additional explanatory principles
without producing cogency or clarity. We have thought the
body and its powers too small. If we let our minds go and
think again we may see that it is proper-sized and will suffice.
The body and its energies are the foundation of the real.
Although I know it only confusedly and imperfectly, I feel my
body’s encounters, its urges, its aims and intentions, and
know that my being is grounded there. I know some of its
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capacities, am aware of many of its possibilities, and know its
vulnerabilities all too well. I know it can be injured, get out
of whack with itself, be invaded by other agents, and become
diseased. I know that it grows old and dies.
I am entirely a body, I can know only what can be known
by my body and do only what it can do. In acknowledging
this I do not deny to myself any of the real capacities or
possible attainments that an embodied consciousness, mind
or soul might claim, save one: I never have and never will go
anywhere without my body. The end of my body is the end
of me.
In a bodily sense, I have some inner awareness: some of
my innards make something known of what they are doing
some of the time. But speaking strictly and literally I have no
such inner awareness in a mental sense. I can be aware of my
thinking, but I cannot see into my mind. Except metaphorically, I have no inner being, no inner life, no mind. Those
elusive sprites of consciousness—bare sentiences, raw feels,
immediate awarenesses, pure sensations and all their
evanescent kin—are strangers to me. When I try to look for
them, they fail to appear. If I could see my own unmediated
thoughts I would be like a playwright seeing my own play
without having written it. I can enter such a drama only by
passing through the looking glass and becoming a fictional
character myself.
Although I have no inner life, in the sense in which it is
usually avowed, I am not a robot or an automaton. I think
and feel robustly and am vividly aware of it. I tend to muse
incessantly and am constantly contending with myself. In fact,
it is these musings and reflections, this almost obsessive
monitoring and self-examination, which has led me to
conclude that there is no mind lying open to our direct
inspection and that we do not do quite what we think we do
when we try to examine it. It is not the fact of these musings,
feelings, urges, and sensations that is at issue here, but their
nature and ground.
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RICHARDSON
What I am aware of when I am known to myself is my
story, the life adventure in which I am engaged, and which I
endure, enjoy, anticipate, and almost unremittingly recount
to myself. I wake to it in the morning and, if I am able, put it
to rest at night. My dreams rise out of it and into it. Beneath
its episodes are energies, urges, inclinations, and desires
whose origins and destinies exceed my understanding. I seek
to guide them as they move me. I am boy and dolphin, black
horse, white horse, chariot and charioteer; a protean shapeshifter that all the powers of science, philosophy, poetry, and
myth have not pinned to earth or caused to yield its secret up.
With its obscure prologue, its brief and feeble aftermath
in public memory, this story, because it is the meaning of life,
means as much as life itself. This is what passes in my
experience for a soul.
8
Since ‘the mind’ is a story the body tells itself, how did it
come to fall for its own fantastic tale? The lack of sensation
associated with thinking is part of the answer. In physical
work or play, when it is vigorous, the body lets us know it;
the heart pounds, we begin to breathe rapidly and perspire.
But we can think long and hard without ever breaking a
sweat. Thinking arises with such magical ease—like a genie
rubbed up from the lump of the body—nothing at all seems
to be doing it or to be needed in order to do it. The casual
way our thoughts drift off in memory or in reverie to far
away times and places or worlds that never were makes it
easy to suppose this mortal clay to be but a prison house from
which we might be freed. We might, it seems, be able to think
without a body. The myth recounted in Plato’s Meno,
purporting to show that all knowledge is only the soul’s
recollection of what it saw in a prior existence, is plausible
enough as far as direct experience can testify: so much of
what we know seems to come to us out of nowhere, bearing
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no traces of its origins. Some more or less likely tale is always
required to say how our thinking comes to us.
But there is a darker side to the story. When thinking—
bright Ariel spirit—looked down, detached and self-aware,
and saw itself bound to the body of a beast more rude than
Caliban, it revolted and began at once to sew itself a suit of
clothes. But this disguise was not enough: the body and its
excrements still offended the delicate appraisal of its own
nostrils. Worse yet, it lived by devouring its animal kindred
after tearing them limb from limb, and when it ceased to live
it betrayed its earthy origins, succumbed to a foul corruption,
stank to heaven and drew flies. Wanting no part of anything
so base, thinking revolted, took out an option on a place in
paradise and began to dream of a bodiless bliss.
I would not claim much plausibility for this mythical
portrayal of the ultimate doubling act, but without some such
affront to our appraising gaze it is hard to understand what
could have led one misguided expositor to say, and multitudes before and after him tacitly or explicitly to believe, “…I
[am] a substance whose whole essence or nature consists
entirely in thinking; and which for its existence, has need of
no place, and is not dependent on any material thing; so that
this I, that is to say the soul by which I am what I am, is
entirely distinct from the body, and would not itself cease to
be all that it is, even should the body cease to exist.”14
How desperate for safety and certainty a man must be to
willingly undergo, even in thought, such extreme selfmutilation. Yet to this day we are haunted by this dictum of
Descartes’—and still have trouble disbelieving it.
1
The Thirteen Principal Upanishads, trans. R. E. Hume (Oxford India
Paperbacks, New Delhi, 1985), Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad, (-3.8.2) 117.
2
Upanishads, trans. Hume, Svetasvatara Upanishad, (-6.11) 409 and (6.19) 410.
3
William James, The Principles of Psychology, (Dover Publications, New
York, 1950), Volume 1, 224.
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71
4
Daniel C. Dennett, Kinds of Minds: Toward an Understanding of
Consciousness, (Basic Books, The Science Masters Series, Perseus Books
Group, New York, 1996) 8.
5
Dennett, Kinds, 3.
6
Dennett, Kinds, 14.
7James,
Principles, 1.300, italicized in the original.
8James,
Principles, 1.301-302, is a conspicuous instance of this.
9
James, Principles, 1.300.
10
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, rev. P
.
H. Niddick, (2d ed, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), Bk.1, pt.4, ch.6,
253.
11
James, Principles, 1.224-225.
12
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, (Routledge and
Kegan Paul, London, 1961), ppn. 5.633, p.117.
13
James, Principles, 1.346.
14
Descartes, Discourse on Method, Part 4.
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73
What Good Are Friends?
Robert Goldberg
One might wonder whether theoretical books on friendship
are really necessary. Aren’t we all thoroughly familiar with
friendship from our own experience? Is there anything about
friendship we can learn better from books? Perhaps, however,
our experience of friendship has not always been free from
disappointment, confusion, and doubt. For instance, there
may be times we feel betrayed by friends. At other times, we
may ask more of them than they feel they can give or, in fear
of doing so, hesitate to ask as much of them as we would like.
We may have felt guilty on occasion for not giving as much of
ourselves to a friend as we might have. Such experiences can
make us wonder who our friends really are and what kind of
person we ourselves are. We may then resolve to be more
careful about choosing our friends in the future and to do
better by those we regard as true friends. Disappointment,
confusion, and doubt, however, may be signs of problems
with our very notions of friendship and of what a friend is:
we may be expecting something more, or something other,
than what friendship can deliver. Reflecting on the experience
of friendship we might ask: Just what is a friend? Is he
someone who loves you for your own sake? Someone who
cares about you at least as much as he cares about himself? Is
the true friend one who is willing to give up everything for
you, including, if need be, his own life? Are there limits to
what friends owe each other? We might also ask why we form
friendships to begin with—whether out of some need we
have for the assistance of others, or rather for the sake of the
Lorraine Smith Pangle. Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship. Cambridge
University Press, 2003. Robert Goldberg is a tutor on the Annapolis campus
of St. John’s College.
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enjoyment we derive from their company, or perhaps because
of the loneliness we would have to endure without them, or
from some other cause. Such questions take us to the heart of
what it means to be a human being. In pursuing answers to
them, we are led to radical questions: On what grounds, if
any, do we have obligations to others, including those who
are closest to us? Are we capable of the extreme selflessness
that good friendship seems to require? Does a life that is by
nature good need friendship? Indeed, Lorraine Smith Pangle’s
remarkable book, Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship,
shows that the issues of the relationship of friendship to
justice, of the possibility of selflessness in friendship, and of
the naturalness of friendship form the central themes of a
number of classic treatments of friendship, particularly the
one on which she concentrates—Books eight and nine of
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Pangle 5).
The Ethics is a perennial favorite of St. John’s undergraduates, one of the most memorable books read in
freshman seminar and one often referred to in subsequent
years. Of its various themes, friendship may be the one that
students and other modern readers can relate to most directly.
Indeed, the Ethics is one of the few books we read at the
College, and the only philosophic one, that gives substantial
attention to friendship; two of its ten books are entirely
devoted to investigating the nature of friendship and its place
in a good human life. Not surprisingly, every student recalls
Aristotle’s threefold classification of friendships developed in
the second and third chapters of Book eight: there are friendships based on pleasure, those based on utility, and those
based on virtue. But few remember the other twelve chapters
of Book eight or the twelve of Book nine—and with good
reason, for the rest of his analysis is not nearly so clear and
concise as is his initial classification of friendship. It can also
be disturbing, as Aristotle delves into such questions as
whether we love others for their own sake or for our own
sake and whether we really wish for our friends the greatest
goods imaginable.
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Because we have so much at stake in understanding
Aristotle’s teaching about friendship, and also so much
difficulty in figuring out what that teaching is, it is a pleasure
to recommend Pangle’s book to our community. Pangle
provides just the kind of guidance a student of Aristotle needs
in negotiating the twists and turns of his astonishingly
complex, rich, and nuanced argument. All readers will find
her book accessible and engaging. In a mere 200 pages of
lively prose Pangle takes us through Books eight and nine of
the Ethics, with fascinating excursions into Plato’s Lysis,
Cicero’s Laelius On Friendship, and Montaigne’s Of
Friendship. The book is chiefly an interpretation of Aristotle’s
text, but it also compares and contrasts Aristotle’s views with
the views of these and other thinkers and addresses the
question why friendship is given so much attention by ancient
thinkers while being largely neglected by such modern
thinkers as Hobbes and Locke. True to its title, the book
manages to provide a comprehensive treatment of the
philosophy of friendship. For scholars, or those wishing to
pursue alternative interpretations, the book has an additional
forty pages of footnotes, largely treating other interpreters of
Aristotle. These need not be read, however, in order to follow
Pangle’s own argument; they are wholly supplementary in
character.
The Socratic Challenge
Pangle uses Plato’s Lysis to pose the questions to which her
analysis of Aristotle will eventually provide answers.1
According to Pangle, Socrates in the Lysis
pursues the unsettling idea that all friendship is
rooted in human neediness and defectiveness and
is treasured only because and only to the extent
that we hope to get from others things that we are
unable to provide for ourselves. (20)
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This appears to be connected with another of Socrates’
contentions in the Lysis, namely, that the good for human
beings consists of those things that remedy the illnesses and
defects of our bodies and souls. Hence, Socrates uses
medicine as both the prime example of something good for
human beings and the key analogy for the human good as
such. We love people and things only insofar as we believe
them to be good for us. This view seems to be contradicted
by our experience of friendship, which suggests that it
proceeds more from our virtues than from our deficiencies.
Our capacity to love, to devote ourselves to our friends, to
rise above self-interest and care for our friends for their sake
and not our own—all this comes very close to what we mean
by virtue. This capacity may even strike us as what is best in
us. Perhaps in recognition of our experience, Aristotle begins
his treatment with the observation that friendship either is a
virtue or goes together with virtue. But Socrates, for his part,
is unyielding in his insistence that friendship is rooted in our
neediness. Thus the question arises: Will friendship prove to
be an outgrowth or sign of our virtue and strength or will it
prove to be rooted in our weakness and neediness?
Pangle maintains from the start not only that Socrates’
argument in the Lysis is implausible but also that Socrates
himself would admit as much. Citing various features of the
argument, she suggests that he exaggerates the neediness at
the root of friendship in order to make an important point. It
might be true, she concedes, that the greatest or most
important human goods have the character Socrates ascribes
to them. If so, we, no less than the young men Socrates
converses with, would have to come to recognize this truth if
we are ever to become healthy in soul. But this leaves open
the possibility that other goods exist that have the character
not of medicines healing diseases but of activities we engage
in once health is achieved. Pangle tempts us to think that
friendship might be one of these. Prior to achieving health,
however, we may actually be harmed by friendship if it makes
us content to remain unhealthy in soul. Perhaps it would be
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more accurate to say that friendship in such a case is not
genuine. Friends are supposed to be good for us, but if the
love others have for us (and we for them) leads us to believe
we possess a goodness we do not possess, we may never take
the decisive step toward health. As Pangle puts it:
The great comfort of feeling that one belongs to
others, that they belong to oneself, and that one is
loved for oneself just as one is tends rather to
induce complacency. Pursuing the charms of such
friendship can distract us from the task of thinking
through what we need for true fulfillment, for
these charms tend to mask altogether the
neediness and unhealthiness of our souls. (35)
Friendships that harm us by concealing our defects lack what
we think of as an essential characteristic of genuine
friendship—that it is something good for us, perhaps even the
greatest good. At least until we become healthy, according to
Pangle’s interpretation of the Lysis, friendship will have two
roots: the main root of serious friendships (i.e., friendships
between those aware of their defects and intent on correcting
them) will be utility, and the root of friendship between the
ignorant and needy who remain unaware of their defects will
be kinship (35). So far, of course, we have been taking
Socrates’ word for it that the souls of the unwise—our
souls—are sick and needy. What this means, however, is
fleshed out by Pangle only in the course of the book as a
whole; it turns out that sustained reflection on our experience
of friendship itself, such as we find in the Ethics, brings to
light the very defects in soul that friendship can help to
conceal.
Aristotle’s Classification and Beyond
Pangle’s treatment of the Lysis provides a helpful introduction to Book eight of the Ethics, which then appears as a
response to the challenges posed by Socrates to our
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unexamined opinions about friendship. In this light,
Aristotle’s famous threefold classification of friendship looks
like a deliberate rejection of Socrates’ view: it leaves room for
precisely the kind of friendship Socrates denied the possibility
of—that in which one loves one’s friend for his sake and not
for one’s own. Aristotle includes among lovable things not
only the pleasant and the useful but also the good (which
seems to be something other than the useful). As Pangle
explains, love of a friend who is good may not exclude his
being good for you (and your loving him for his usefulness),
but it allows also for loving the goodness in him without
regard to its usefulness to yourself (38). However, as Pangle
cautions, Aristotle also asserts that everyone “loves what is or
seems best for himself ” as distinct from “the good” (43;
Ethics 1155b23-6). If this assertion is taken to mean that the
basis of our loving things or people is our belief that they are
good for ourselves, then how exactly does Aristotle’s position
differ from that of Socrates, according to which need is at the
root of friendship? Aristotle thus leaves us with two possibilities, according to Pangle: either friendship between those
who are good provides “the highest benefits to both partners”
(and is just a special case of friendships of utility), or friendships of pleasure and utility are those that provide to the
partners pleasure and all benefits (high and low) while
“virtuous friendships are fundamentally different” (43). In
accordance with the second possibility, Pangle contends,
Aristotle speaks of friendship “for the sake of the useful” and
of friendship “for the sake of pleasure” but of friendship “of
the good” (my italics). This evidence may seem ambiguous: it
could be taken to suggest, for instance, that, however friendships of the good may differ from other friendships, they are
alike in being for the sake of the useful and the pleasant (and
not for the sake of the good). And in any case, as Pangle
shows, the picture with respect to friendship becomes steadily
more complicated as we move away from Aristotle’s initial
classification and into the intricacies of his full argument.
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We come to see, in fact, that Aristotle’s threefold classification of friendships is by no means his last word on the
matter. For one thing, each kind of friendship has elements of
the other two. If there are friendships based on virtue, the
friends are also useful and pleasant to each other. By the same
token, partners in friendships based on utility and pleasure
may see each other as good, even if they do not live up to (or
would even reject) the strict notion of human goodness that
Aristotle articulates in the Ethics. As Aristotle himself
observes, most human beings believe that they are basically
good and that their best friends are, too (1155a31, 1166b34). Because we normally think well of ourselves and our
friends, it seems that even friendships between those who do
not possess genuine virtue may nevertheless be based partly
on the supposed good character of the friends and not only
on their utility and pleasantness to each other. Presumably,
the chief difference between friends who are good in the full,
Aristotelian sense of the term and those who are not is that
the truly good are not mistaken about what human goodness
consists in.2 Complicating things further, Aristotle soon
comes to speak as if the fundamental ground of friendship is
none of the three things he initially describes as lovable—
pleasure, utility, and the good—but rather the similarity or
likeness (homoiotês) of friends to each other (48; NE
1156b19-23; 1157b2-3; 1159b2-3). On this ground, friends
who are not good may be friends no less truly than those who
are good. The significance of friends’ similarity to each other
will prove to be one of the key issues in Aristotle’s analysis of
friendship, most notably when he comes to call the friend, in
his famous and paradoxical formulation, “another self.”
Montaigne, Aristotle, and Cicero on Devotion
Key issues that surface before then include whether we can
love friends and wish them well entirely for their sake
without regard to our own good and whether genuine
devotion or self-sacrifice is possible. Indeed, in one of the
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Ethics’ most provocative passages, Aristotle makes the case
that each human being wishes the greatest goods for himself
but only some of the greatest goods for his friends (8.7,
1159a5-12). His argument here, and a number of others he
makes in regard to friendships where the parties are not each
other’s equals (the subject of 8.7-8), calls into question our
beliefs about friendship and is intended, according to Pangle,
to incite in us a desire to examine those beliefs. Pangle
describes the beliefs she has in mind movingly:
. . . that love is the very core of what is precious in
life, that loyal devotion, even to one who fails to
return one’s love, is not foolish or ridiculous but is
supremely noble, and that loving and being loved
in return is the greatest blessing we can have as
human beings. (64)
In order to explore further the possibility that we are not
mistaken in these beliefs, Pangle turns to a brief but illuminating examination of Montaigne’s “Of Friendship” and
other essays, where he seems to support those beliefs.
Although “Of Friendship” makes a powerful case for the view
that friendship is the greatest good—“that the deepest
longing of the human heart is for the simple communion of
souls that occurs in true friendship” (56)—we come to see
that “Of Friendship” actually supports rather than refutes
Aristotle’s implication that friendship cannot itself be the
greatest good. The problems with Montaigne’s case for
friendship are pointed to by Montaigne himself. Among them
is a problem with what he calls “noble generosity,” the desire
to do good for one’s friend even at the expense of one’s own
good, a problem that Aristotle himself will eventually take up.
Pangle explains the problem this way:
To be devoted to another is, after all, to be
devoted to the good, the benefit, the utility of the
other. But if each friend, being noble-minded as
well as devoted. . . deeply desires to be a generous
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benefactor to the other, then being such a
benefactor is in fact a greater good in the
benefactor’s eyes than is the low-level good he
gives away when, for example, he pays a friend’s
debts. (69)
After quoting Montaigne to show his awareness of this
difficulty, Pangle gives an example of noble generosity that he
offers in “Of Friendship”:
To illustrate such noble generosity, Montaigne tells
the story of Eudamidas and his friends Charixenus
and Aretheus, to whom he bequeathed in his will
not money, for he was poor and had no money to
give, but the nobler opportunity of looking after
his elderly mother and his unmarried daughter,
and Montaigne tells us that both friends were well
satisfied with the gift. (69)
To clarify what she calls “a problem and indeed an absurdity”
that Montaigne himself appears to be gently calling to our
attention, she elaborates:
The absurdity consists, at bottom, in a certain
confusion or self-deception within each friend:
Each is competing for the position he covets—that
of selfless benefactor—but neither is willing to face
squarely the fact that in doing so, he is seeking
what he considers the greatest good for himself,
and that this is a good he cannot share with the
one he seeks to benefit. (69-70)
In other words, the greatest good from this point of view
appears to be one’s own nobility or virtue, which, in a sense,
is purchased at the expense of one’s friend (cf. 124). In the
case of Eudamidas, we can say that he did the nobler thing by
giving his friends the opportunity to exercise their nobility.
Had he taken the trouble to look after his elderly mother and
unmarried daughter himself, he would have deprived his
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friends of this opportunity. He thus took the greater good for
himself, a fact Montaigne himself points to by calling the one
who gives such opportunities to his friends “the liberal one.”
As for why virtue may be so important to us, consider
Pangle’s quotation from another of Montaigne’s essays
(“That To Philosophize Is To Learn To Die”): “Among the
principal benefits of virtue is disdain for death, a means that
furnishes our life with a soft tranquility and gives us a pure
and pleasant enjoyment of it, without which all other
pleasures are extinguished” (72; my italics). How virtue or,
more precisely, the belief in our own virtue, could have the
effect of leading us to disdain death, and whether that disdain
is justified, remains to be seen.
The absurdity or self-deception we have just encountered—that one believes oneself to be more concerned with
the good of one’s friend than with one’s own good—plays a
central role in the analysis of friendship that Pangle,
following Aristotle, develops in the course of her book; it is
the one strand that runs through and ties together its various
parts. A similar self-deception may operate elsewhere in our
lives, whenever we believe we are devoted to something
outside ourselves, as we learn in Pangle’s next chapter (4),
“Friendships in Politics and the Family.” Commenting on
Aristotle’s inclusion of religious associations among those
that exist for the sake of pleasure, she speaks of the following
“paradox”:
Even at the moments at which human beings are
most clearly seeking to lose themselves or
transcend or sacrifice their self-interest in devotion
to something higher, they are also pursuing their
own good by ennobling or sanctifying their lives, if
not also through the pleasure of good fellowship.
(83)
If people believe they have transcended or sacrificed their
self-interest, and thereby ennobled their lives by devoting
themselves to something higher, whereas in fact the
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enoblement they achieved was a greater good for themselves
than the goods they gave up, their situation is indeed
problematic. Leaving aside such knotty questions as whether
the object of devotion was truly higher and whether a
coherent notion of “higher” can even be given, there would
appear to be no devotion here at all: such devotion to
something or someone entails rising above oneself, but in this
case one serves oneself, indeed, it seems the deepest and
therefore most precious part of oneself.3 And where there is
no sacrifice of self-interest, there is no transcendence of self
and hence no ennoblement of the kind Pangle is discussing.
As to the character of the good we might seek to acquire
through our devotion, a suggestion emerges from Pangle’s
fascinating chapter on Cicero’s dialogue Laelius on
Friendship. The dialogue “explores the friendship and the
self-understanding of two noble Roman statesmen” (105),
Laelius and his much more famous and intellectually
impressive friend, Scipio. Pangle helps us to see the shortcomings Cicero points to in Laelius’s understanding of
himself as the devoted friend of Scipio. She shows us how
Cicero “quietly indicates that much of Laelius’s attachment to
friendship is fueled by the promise friendship seems to hold
of providing a bulwark against misfortune and death,” a
promise latent in the feeling of deserving that attends “noble
acts of selfless devotion” (120).4 Pangle seems to be
suggesting that this feeling of deserving may be a root,
perhaps even the principal root, of the belief in divine providence, the belief in a cosmos not coldly indifferent to such
acts or to the worthiness of those who perform them. But in
light of the problem already encountered, the notion that we
deserve (i.e., are worthy of or owed) something as a result of
acting for the sake of our friends becomes problematic. And
so Pangle speaks of the “confusion” or “incoherence in
Laelius’s claim to deserve honor or other protection as a
result of his great friendship for Scipio,” an incoherence
visible in his “claiming at once that such friendships are life’s
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sweetest gift and that they entail heroic steadfastness and
sacrifice” (121).
Aristotle and the Problem of Nobility in Friendship
A passage in the next chapter (6) offers further support for
the contention that we act with a view to our own good and
not from selfless devotion to others. In the context of treating
a type of utilitarian friendship that Aristotle calls “ethical”
(Ethics 1162b21ff.), Pangle notes a tendency of human beings
to shut their eyes to their own expectation of a reward for
their virtuous acts, an expectation that often becomes visible
only when they fail to receive one (if only in the form of an
acknowledgment of indebtedness). On this tendency she
observes, “Shutting one’s eyes to one’s expectations at the
time of acting does not make the act disinterested, but only
confused” (127). This tendency points to “a great paradox of
the noble: It is only when one can be indifferent to any
reward that one seems to deserve it.”5 The paradox appears
to be this: ordinarily we do not think of someone’s working
hard and ably for the sake of a reward as a disqualification for
his receiving it—for example, in an athletic contest or in
tracking down a fugitive from justice with a “price on his
head.” The case of virtue is different. Here the purity of
motive essential to virtue would be compromised by acting
for the sake of reward. Rather than leave it at the assertion
that the reward is our true motive, Pangle proposes as a
thought-experiment “two ways to choose a virtuous action
without confused expectations of reward.” One is to choose
it knowing that it is bad for oneself and one’s happiness but
nonetheless noble; the other is to choose it as not only noble
but also intrinsically good for oneself, without expectation of
reward (127-8). But do human beings ever act in either of
these ways? Casting doubt on the first, Pangle wonders
“whether such a disposition toward virtue and one’s
happiness is humanly possible” (127). Her doubt is certainly
plausible: it may well be that no one who wishes to act virtuously really believes that virtuous action is noble but funda-
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mentally bad for those who undertake it. Casting doubt on
the second, she raises the suspicion that no one is so delighted
by the purity of his own soul as not to harbor some hope of
reward for it, also a plausible doubt. Having rejected these
possibilities for avoiding confusion, however, Pangle
proceeds to ask whether demanding that we banish all hope
of reward for virtuous action and that we be content with the
great good of having a noble soul is not “too strict a standard
for perfect virtue”: couldn’t the reward be “a kind of icing on
the cake,” something we might believe we deserve and expect
to receive without the reward being the motive for which the
virtuous action was performed (128)? Yet, as she notes, we
have a sense that virtuous action is deserving of reward. This
implies that “we are unsure of whether virtuous action is
truly good in itself, or we consider it good to do it, but not as
good as benefiting from it” (129). Pangle suspects that
virtuous men secretly believe it is good to give but even better
to receive and that they cannot choose virtue for its own sake
but always act with a view to reward. She asks a provocative
question:
Can [virtuous men] be content endlessly to accept
the lesser of two goods, endlessly to be on the less
advantageous side of all their transactions with
others, without reward? (129)
If not, Pangle concludes, then they must always have at least
one eye on the reward and are to that extent confused about
their genuine motive.
In addition to her own reasoning in support of this
suspicion, Pangle has in mind several passages from the Ethics
that suggest Aristotle himself agrees that the virtuous, no less
than those who are not virtuous, aim above all at what they
believe to be their own good. When treating Ethics 8.7, for
example, Pangle cites Aristotle’s blunt assertion that “each
man wishes for his own good most of all” and might not wish
his friends all the greatest goods (59, 64). And in the two
chapters that treat self-love (9.4 and 9.8), as she notes,
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Aristotle maintains that all the friendly feelings one has
toward others one has toward oneself most of all (142; 170).
Moreover, in Ethics 9.8—the first of two culminating
chapters in his entire analysis of friendship—Aristotle himself
makes the argument that Pangle has already found signs of in
Cicero and Montaigne. In her words, this chapter indicates
that “moral nobility is not something that accrues to the
moral man incidentally as he goes about seeking to help his
fellows; it is precisely the prize that he keeps his sights fixed
upon.” Hence, “acts of apparent noble sacrifice, made by
those who understand such nobility as the highest good,
really are not acts of sacrifice at all” (175). She has prepared
us for this conclusion by quoting such statements from 9.8 as
the following:
The morally serious man. . . will do many things
for the sake of his friends and his fatherland, and
if necessary he will give up his life for them. He
will give money and honors and all contested
goods, seeking above all the noble for himself. He
would prefer to feel pleasure intensely for a short
time than mildly for a long time, and to live nobly
for one year than indifferently for many; he would
rather perform one great noble act than many
small ones. Those who give up their lives perhaps
achieve this, and they choose great nobility for
themselves. The morally serious man will give
away money so that his friends may have more,
for they thus get money, but he gets the noble: He
assigns the greatest good to himself. (172; cf.
Ethics 1169a18-29)6
Here again is the confusion to which Pangle, following
Aristotle’s indications (as well as Cicero’s and Montaigne’s),
has been calling our attention all along. The friend who
sacrifices himself in the belief that it is noble to do so is really
only trading a good he regards as lesser for one he regards as
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87
greater. If the nobility consists in the alleged sacrifice, there is
no nobility here at all. The morally serious man is merely
confused. Pangle uses this line of reasoning to show the
irrationality of the view that the highest good for human
beings can consist in sacrifice (or in virtue, if virtue is understood to consist in self-sacrifice or to demand it). Indeed, it is
one of the chief points of Pangle’s book, following Aristotle,
to expose the irrationality of this perspective (perhaps the
perspective we all share to the extent we are morally serious).
The irrationality of this perspective does not mean, however,
that a rational human being will not act for the sake of others.
That he may do so is confirmed for Pangle by Aristotle’s
statement that “intelligence always chooses what is best for
itself ” (176; cf. 1169a17). By reflecting on both the text and
our experience, she arrives at the following conclusion:
The intelligent mind always chooses what is best
for itself as a rational mind, and this means acting
intelligently, consistently, with self-command, and
guided by a full understanding of its own deepest
concerns which begin but do not end with the
concern for personal happiness of the being whose
mind it is. (179; my italics)
In fact, Pangle’s examination supports the view that all
human beings, including the devoted friend or the morally
serious man, choose what they believe to be best for
themselves. The person who believes he acts out of devotion
to a friend does not in fact choose his friend’s happiness in
place of his own; rather, he believes (in his heart of hearts)
that his own happiness is best served through the nobility he
believes he practices by “sacrificing” his own good for the
sake of his friend. The intelligent mind differs from the rest,
then, not in preferring what appears to be best for itself—the
others do the same thing—but only in knowing what really is
best for itself. That said, nothing that has so far come to light
rules out the possibility that human beings, including the
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most rational, will act for the sake of their friends as long as
doing so is compatible with what they believe to be their own
greatest or deepest good. If this whole line of argument is
true, it would still have to be determined what genuine
happiness consists in and what place friendship has in the life
of one who has thought through the confusions about
sacrifice, nobility, and virtue.
However, Pangle’s statement that our deepest concerns
do not end with the concern for personal happiness comes as
something of a surprise. The thrust of her main argument
appears to go in the opposite direction, and Aristotle himself
argues in Book one that the individual’s end is happiness (see,
e.g., 1097a30-4). Her formulation allows of two possible
interpretations: that the rational mind (1) has concerns in
addition to, but consistent with, the concern for personal
happiness, or that it (2) has concerns for the sake of which it
would be willing to give up personal happiness. Here in
chapter nine Pangle argues that the rational mind or human
being—the human being who has worked through the confusions she has treated and who is capable of living free of those
confusions—might under certain circumstances give up his
own good for the sake of a friend, though without any
illusions about what he’s doing (i.e., without believing that he
is thereby noble and hence somehow deserving). In support
of this possibility, Pangle invokes the example of Socrates,
who gave up “a few uncertain years in exile and in decline so
that philosophy might win renown, and so that his young
friends like Plato, who had as yet written almost nothing,
might prosper” (181). She concludes:
[T]he wisest man is the one most capable of both
the truest self-love and the truest friendship, for
only he has a mind that is perfectly good and
lovable, only he can love what he is without inner
conflicts, and only he can love another without
illusions, without competition over the noble, and
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89
without surreptitious expectations of repayments
or reward. (181)
One implication of this conclusion is that it is possible to love
another human being even after freeing oneself from all
illusions that ordinarily accompany love. (I take Pangle to
mean that it is out of love for Plato that Socrates could die at
least in part for Plato’s sake.) A little into the final chapter of
her book, however, we learn that this conclusion was only
provisional. To see whether it stands we must first answer the
question of the Lysis: “Why would one who is self-sufficient
treasure another enough to love him?” (183). In other words,
assuming self-sufficiency is possible, why might a person who
has it nevertheless need friends?
Is the Friend Another Self?
The opening sentence of Book nine, chapter nine, which
according to Pangle contains Aristotle’s “deepest reflections
on the relationship of friendship to human neediness” (183),
announces that it is disputed whether the happy man will
need friends or not: “For people assert that the blessed and
self-sufficient have no need of friends, because they [already]
possess the good things” (1169b3-5). The chapter gives a
series of six arguments, which seem to show that, contrary to
this assertion, even a happy human being will need friends.7
The last three of those arguments appear to elaborate two
suggestions of Aristotle’s we noted earlier but have not yet
had occasion to examine: (1) that similarity is a basis of
friendship possibly more fundamental than pleasure, utility,
or virtue and (2) that the friend is another self. Indeed, this
famous formulation, which is used only three times in the
entire Ethics, appears twice in 9.9 (its first appearance came
in 9.4). And although Aristotle doesn’t speak here of the
similarity of friends, he does speak of the activity of one’s
friend as one’s own activity, and “one’s own” or “the
kindred” (to oikeion) seems to be closely related to similarity;
the two were linked by Pangle in her treatment first of the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Lysis and then in the Ethics (24, 48-9; but cf. Lysis 222b-c).
Furthermore, in 9.9 Aristotle focuses on the activity of
friends who are morally serious and whose activity is in that
respect similar. Of the six arguments in this chapter, the first
two (1169b8-10; b10-16) are brief, sketchy, and based more
on “conventional opinion” than the remaining four, all of
which have recourse to nature (186). The third argument
(1169b16-21) merely asserts that “man is by nature a political
being and lives together with others”; shortly after, Aristotle
concedes (to those who deny that the blessed and selfsufficient need friends) that one who is blessed has no need of
useful friends and little or no need of pleasant friends. But
does this mean that he has no need of any friends? The last
three arguments, which Pangle characterizes as Aristotle’s
“most serious” (186), purport to establish the blessed (or
happy) person’s need of friends on the basis of something
other than utility or pleasure. What, then, is that something?
Is it “the good,” as Aristotle’s initial classification of friendships would lead us to expect?
According to Aristotle’s fourth argument, that something
is instead the need the blessed person has to observe the
actions of those who are morally serious or good. Pangle
paraphrases this argument as follows:
[I]f happiness consists in living and acting, if the
activity of the good man is good and pleasant in
itself, and if what is one’s own is pleasant, then
observing the activity of good men who are one’s
own friends will be choiceworthy, too. (186)
If we look at the Ethics itself (1169b30-1170a4), we find that
the full version of this argument contains seven premises in
the form of if-clauses (five before he gives the then-clause plus
two more at the end), whose truth Aristotle does not vouch
for. Pangle shows that at least two of them are highly suspect.
One is that we are more able to observe our neighbors than
ourselves. This may be true of most of us, but in this chapter
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91
Aristotle is considering the blessed person, of whom Pangle
says, “the mature, wise, truly happy man, who sees his
neighbors with perfect clarity, has no inexplicable failure of
understanding when it comes to himself ” (187; see her
supporting reference to Aristotle’s Magna Moralia). The
other suspect premise is that the activity of a friend is also
somehow one’s own. Perhaps because Aristotle himself finds
these premises suspect, he proceeds to his fifth argument,
“which helps to put in perspective and explain the previous
ones” (187). It improves on the fourth argument by giving
due place to the fact that what matters most to us is our own
activity rather than that of our friends. According to
Aristotle, the life of a solitary is hard in that to be continuously active by oneself is not easy; it is easier to be continuously active together with someone else and toward others
(Ethics 1170a5-6). If we act together with a friend, we
ourselves will be more active. And, Aristotle adds, there
might also arise a certain training in virtue from living in the
company of good people. Pangle interprets Aristotle to mean
that we have a tendency to flag and that an excellent
companion can spur us on, inspire us, and confirm for us our
own excellence. However, it seems that the fully formed
human being under consideration here would not be in need
of inspiring examples. This applies not only to moral action
but to all endeavors, especially philosophy, which, in anticipation of Book ten, Pangle pays increasing attention to. She
notes that in Book ten Aristotle will argue that “the wisest
souls do not need company in order to remain active in
philosophy” (188; indeed, Aristotle maintains not only that
the theoretical man is least in need of other people but also
that theoretical activity is the most continuous—see
1177a21-22 and a27-b1). This line of thought prompts
Pangle to offer a striking suggestion: friendships at the peak
of human existence would be “more tranquil and less
intense” than friendships on the way up (189). In other
words, the most intense friendships may be those between
defective human beings. But what is the cause of the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
intensity? Pangle does not spell it out but seems to have in
mind here the need we have for those people whose assistance seems to us indispensable for acquiring the goodness we
regard as a necessary, and perhaps even the sufficient,
condition of our happiness.
Perhaps because he has yet to account for the necessity of
friendship in the life of someone at the peak of human
existence, Aristotle moves on to his sixth and final
argument—”his profoundest account of the necessity of
friendship in the happy life” (189). This argument depends
on a number of conditions (expressed in a complicated sixpart if-clause), one of which is that our enjoyment of our life
or being comes from our awareness of our life, and another
of which is that the morally serious man is disposed toward
his friend as he is toward himself. After summarizing
Aristotle’s complex argument, Pangle observes that it does
not answer the question of why a happy man will need
friends because it does not show that one will be disposed
toward a friend as one is disposed toward oneself; the
argument hasn’t proved that “friendship itself is a good
thing” (189). Rather than consider this a fatal defect in the
argument, as some other scholars appear to have done,
Pangle takes a closer look at its details to see whether an
argument for the necessity of friendship in a good life
emerges from them. What she finds is this: in the light of our
own mortality (one aspect of the determinateness or finite
character of life that Aristotle refers to at 1170a20-1)
“friendship becomes precious as a way of augmenting and
intensifying the goodness—the full active aliveness—that we
love and cannot keep” (190). Our aliveness depends not only
on our being active but also on the awareness we have of our
own activity, a point made by Aristotle partly through his
choice of verbs. Our sense of being alive is heightened by
engaging in activities with others who share our interest in
them and whose responses therefore “reflect, confirm, and
expand” our awareness. This, then, is the “deepest justification” of friendship: “its capacity to enhance the awareness
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of activity and pleasure.” The awareness of a friend engaging
together with us in the same activity is good for us because it
enhances our awareness both of our own activity and, as
Aristotle makes clear again by his choice of verbs, of our very
being—of our existing at all.
No sooner has Pangle developed this argument, however,
than she raises a most serious question about it: “How solid
a good is this good of enhanced aliveness, charged as it is by
our awareness of life’s brevity and the desire to find a
compensation for it, if not to escape it altogether? Is it a good
necessarily laced with self-deception?” (191) The selfdeception she has in mind here differs from the deception
involved in our notions of devotion and sacrifice, which she
has treated at length in the course of her book. This new
deception has to do not with the belief that we have
transcended and ennobled ourselves through sacrifice but
with the bewitching power of friendship to draw us out of
ourselves and thus distract us from thinking about the
finitude of our lives. (The two deceptions have the same root,
however: they are ways in which we cope with the
awareness—always somehow present to us—of our own
mortality.) Pangle spoke of a related deception when
commenting earlier on Aristotle’s formulation in 9.4 that a
friend is another self; at that time, she issued a caveat:
A clue to the real meaning of this enigmatic
expression is found in its other appearances in the
Nicomachean Ethics. In each case, Aristotle shows
how the friend who is loved as another self is, in
some important way, cherished as an extension of
oneself, an extension that can tempt one into the
delusion that this other really is still oneself, and as
such able to help overcome one’s limitedness and
mortality. (152)
That Aristotle has such a delusion in mind appears to be lent
support by his prior use of a related formulation (in 8.12),
which Pangle cites in this context. There Aristotle says of
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
offspring that they are “like other selves” to their parents, by
having been separated from them (1161b28-9; my italics).
Despite the possibility of these deceptions, Pangle maintains
here (in chapter ten) that there is “nothing necessarily illusory
about friendship’s power to magnify and enrich life, just as
there is nothing necessarily illusory about the pleasure of
being a source of good to friends”; we can enjoy the genuine
good of enhanced aliveness that friendship offers just as long
as we resist the temptation to escape the grip of mortality “by
escaping ourselves altogether”—i.e., by going too far in
“immersing ourselves. . . in the absorbing affairs of others”
(191). At the same time, it is when we resist this temptation
that we can be a genuinely valuable friend to another, helping
him to attain the only solid happiness through “the shared
activity of thinking and helping each other to think as clearly
as possible.” This helping is itself a solid pleasure and hence
an addition to our own happiness as long as we don’t fall prey
to the illusion that we can truly live on in a friend when our
own lives have ended. Drawing on the conclusion of 9.9,
Pangle goes on to say that friendship is chiefly not about
sacrificing for friends but living in company with them, and
this means that friendship consists above all in conversation.
As Aristotle powerfully puts it, living in company with
others—in the case of human beings, as distinct from cattle—
would seem to mean sharing in discussion and thought
(1170b11-14).
I must confess that I remain suspicious of Aristotle’s
arguments purporting to establish the need for friendship in
a happy life, including the last and most powerful one. To
mention just a few of the grounds for my suspicion,
Aristotle’s fourth and sixth arguments depend on three ifclauses with a total of thirteen often elaborate parts between
them that issue in two very brief then-clauses.8 Why do the
arguments take so provisional a form? Where does Aristotle
either show that the conditions referred to in the if-clauses
are true or at least state them unambiguously as his own
views? In addition, there are not only the explicit assump-
GOLDBERG
95
tions of the if-clauses but also more hidden assumptions in
the various arguments. For example, in his preface to the
sixth argument Aristotle points to the question whether
human life is defined by perceiving or instead by thinking, but
the sixth argument depends on the view that perceiving, not
thinking, is paramount. In addition, four of the six arguments
in 9.9 (including the three that Pangle calls, rightly in my
view, the “most serious”) refer explicitly to the morally
serious person, but, as Pangle has already shown, there is
reason to think the highest type of human being (the happy
one) is the one who is wise as distinct from the one who is
merely morally serious and confused. Furthermore, Aristotle
varies his terms in 9.9, referring not only to the morally
serious but also at various points to the good and to the
decent. Are these one and the same type, or is Aristotle calling
our attention to differences among them that may be crucial
to determining whether the blessed or happy human being
has need of friends? For that matter, is to be happy the same
as to be blessed and self-sufficient? If so, is self-sufficiency,
and hence happiness, a possibility for human beings? And
what does it mean to be blessed? By moving back and forth
among these terms, Aristotle may be pointing to the question
of whether the happiness we long for as human beings is
available to us. Is he perhaps helping us to reason out the sort
of happiness or contentment man at his best can achieve? And
might it be the morally serious rather than the wise as such
for whom friendship offers the sense of enhanced aliveness
and for whom that sense is an essential ingredient of
“happiness”? These are some of the stumbling blocks I find in
accepting Aristotle’s well-hedged conclusion that “the one
who is going to be happy, then, will be in need of friends”
(1170b18-9; cf. b14-7, one last if-then sentence on which this
conclusion depends).
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96
Conclusion
Whether or not I am thus justified in doubting Aristotle’s
arguments for the necessity of friendship in a life by nature
good, Pangle herself emphasizes that the good of friendship
remains secondary to the greatest good available to human
beings. Engaging in an activity together with friends may
enhance our enjoyment of it as well as our awareness of being
alive, but it is still activity itself that is the crucial ingredient
in happiness. Having reflected on the experience of
friendship no less than on Aristotle’s text, Pangle concludes
that what “matters most for happiness. . . is not the companionship that friendship brings but the pleasures and good
activities it augments, and even its goodness as an enhancer of
life would not be so very good if it were not for the
inevitability of death” (197). Furthermore, as Aristotle will
conclude in Book ten, it is not just any activity but rather the
activity of philosophy that can bring the happiness of which
man at his best is capable (see especially 1178a4-10). Indeed,
the argument Pangle has developed through the course of her
book helps to prepare us for Aristotle’s rather surprising
conclusion and to understand how the two books on
friendship contribute to it (and therefore why they immediately precede Book ten). Pangle observes that in the books on
friendship Aristotle
. . . shows some of his reasons for judging even
this finest of active lives to be not quite the best
simply. Even when the grave confusions
surrounding self-sacrifice are cleared away,
Aristotle insists that practical, political activity
(under which he subsumes the work of moral
education) is too much driven and constrained by
necessities to be simply choiceworthy in itself.
(199)
Once we see the true character of such activity, she continues,
philosophy appears both as the invaluable source of the
GOLDBERG
97
clarity we need if we are to be truly good and as the activity
that is the most delightful in itself, one not forced upon us by
immediate needs. In view of such considerations, the happiest
of friendships appear to be “partnerships in which the
capacity to see and enjoy and think and reflect is given the
fullest possible scope” (199). Pangle is now in position to
answer the question of whether friendship is, or is rooted in,
virtue: the impetus to friendship, Aristotle has shown, comes
largely from “weakness, deficiency, and confusion.” Thus the
apparent disagreement with the Lysis is resolved. Book ten
tellingly emphasizes “the self-sufficiency of the philosophic
life, rather than the goodness of friendship within it.” With
this in mind, it seems to me we could say that friendship
between those who possess what we may call genuine virtue
(philosophic wisdom) is based on nothing more than their
similarity (the deep interest each has in understanding things
as they are), the pleasure their companionship affords them,
and their usefulness to each other (three grounds that have
not been shown to involve, of necessity, illusion and selfdeception). If this is so, we could say that friendship between
the best human beings differs from ordinary friendship in
being admittedly based on nothing more exalted than
similarity, pleasure, and utility. The strength of the best
human beings would then be visible, at least in part, in their
not even being tempted to believe that their friendship is
rooted in or is an expression of self-transcendence.
Pangle’s book always encourages us to return to the
Ethics to test our conclusions and explore the issues further.
It does so by fully engaging us in, and basing itself on,
Aristotle’s dialectical analysis of friendship. Pangle has given
us a superb study of that analysis, one that guides readers
through Aristotle’s always dense and often uncertain
arguments, helping us to follow his analysis in its gradual
unfolding. If we ignore the details of Aristotle’s arguments,
we learn what he merely seems to be saying; with Pangle’s
highly competent assistance, we find that taking account of
the details invariably leads us toward a deeper and more
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
adequate understanding of friendship.9 In addition, Pangle
demonstrates how fruitful it is always to be thinking about
our experience of friendship in order to bring to life what
might otherwise remain sterile formulations and to enable us
to use our experience and the text to illuminate each other.
In reproducing here portions of what I take to be her central
argument (which is far more ample than my abridgement of
it might suggest), I have had to leave out much else that is
compelling in her book, such as many more eye-opening
thought-experiments and her evocative reflections on a vast
array of phenomena associated with friendship, aspects of her
study that make it not only thought-provoking but lively and
even gripping to read. Pangle performs the invaluable service
of placing Aristotle’s teaching (and not only Aristotle’s)
within reach of the careful reader determined to understand
what friendship is and what kind of good it is for human
beings.
Notes
1
Of special interest to the community is Pangle’s lively engagement with
the argument of St. John’s tutor David Bolotin’s book on the Lysis, which
includes an excellent translation (Plato’s Dialogue on Friendship [Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1989]).
2
Even here, however, there is a complication: goodness or virtue is an
ambiguous term in the Ethics; it could mean either moral virtue or intellectual virtue—and the two do not necessarily go together. Is the good
man, then, the man of moral virtue, or is he the man of intellectual
virtue? Pangle, though clearly aware of the distinction, sometimes leaves
ambiguous the sense in which she, or Aristotle, is using the terms “virtue”
and “goodness.”
3
Consider a kindred remark Nietzsche makes in responding to an
objection to his critique of “disinterestedness”: “But anyone who has
really made sacrifices knows that he wanted and got something in
return—perhaps something of himself in return for something of
himself—that he gave up here in order to have more there, perhaps in
order to be more or at least to feel that he was ‘more’” (Beyond Good
and Evil, Aphorism 220; Vintage Books: New York, 1989).
GOLDBERG
99
4
Perhaps this is one way in which virtue may lead us to a disdain for
death, as Montaigne put it.
5
By “indifferent” I take her to mean that one would perform the act (1)
even if one knew that there would be no reward of any kind for
performing it and (2) even when it would be at enormous cost to oneself.
6
How Aristotle himself can know this remains unclear. It may require a
thoroughgoing examination not only of oneself but also of others who
believe they act virtuously not for their own sake but only or above all
for the sake of others (or for virtue’s sake)—the kind of examination we
see the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues engaging in (see, e.g., Meno 77b-78b).
Aristotle may be offering not a definitive argument, then, but rather
guidance in conducting this examination for ourselves, pointing out the
crucial things to look for in examining ourselves and others.
7
The first three begin respectively at 1169b8, b10, and b16; the second
three, at 1169b28, 1170a4, and a13.
8
St. John’s tutor Joe Sachs’ translation of the Nicomachean Ethics
(Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2002) is the only one I know in
English that accurately tracks these conditions.
9
This seems to me to constitute a proof that Aristotle’s writing demands
the kind of ingenuity and attention to detail that Pangle brings to the
Ethics: only thus does one uncover many genuine questions about and
problems with both friendship and our opinions about it that we would
otherwise have to say Aristotle failed to notice, thereby calling into
question his competence as a philosopher. As to why he chose to write in
so opaque a style, Pangle shows us that the subject matter requires such
writing, not only because it is intrinsically complicated but also because it
touches on many sensitive issues having to do with how we understand
both ourselves as human beings and the character of the world we live in.
�
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Kraus, Pamela
Brann, Eva T. H.
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Curry, Elizabeth
Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Flaumenhauft, Mera J.
Richardson, Robert
Goldberg, Robert
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The St. John’s Review
Volume XLIX, number one (2006)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Sarah Navarre
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson,
President; Michael Dink, Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $10 for one year. Unsolicited
essays, reviews, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address
correspondence to the Review, St. John’s College, P
.O. Box
2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available,
at $5 per issue, from the St. John’s College Bookstore.
©2006 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction
in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
The St. John’s Public Relations Office and the St. John’s College Print Shop
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Contents
Essays and Lectures
In the Beginning. . .
The Genesis of the St. John’s Program, 1937................ 5
Charles A. Nelson
Understanding Quantum Mechanics
with Bohr and Husserl................................................ 33
François Lurçat
Eve Separate................................................................71
Eva Brann
Going in Silence........................................................ 111
Abraham Schoener
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5
In the Beginning. . .The Genesis
of the St. John’s Program, 1937
Charles A. Nelson
The transformation of St. John’s College in 1937—with the
introduction of what was then, and for many later years,
called the New Program—set on foot a way of learning and
teaching that has now enfolded, inspired, and perplexed
students and teachers for lo these sixty-eight years. I shall
attempt to describe and explain what took place here on this
campus in 1937. Let me say parenthetically that this is not an
exercise in nostalgia, a yearning for “the good old days.” On
the contrary, I can assure you that the College is much
stronger now than it was then, the faculty is better, and the
entering students are, on the whole, smarter, a bit better
educated, and a lot better looking!
On Tuesday, September 21, 1937, the student newspaper
here in Annapolis, announced that, under the new leadership
of Stringfellow Barr as president and Scott Buchanan as dean,
the fall term would open with a “different set-up” for the
arriving freshman class.
A different set-up indeed! Probably no other educational
institution anywhere has undertaken so radical and so swift a
transformation as took place at St. John’s in the eighty-three
days between July 1, 1937, when Barr and Buchanan took
office, and September 22, when the fall term began. Before
describing what took place on this campus that summer and
fall, I will provide some of the context by recounting activities of our two “transformers” in the preceding years.
Perhaps as good a place as any to begin is at the University of
This lecture was delivered at St. John’s College, Annapolis, September 30,
2005. Mr. Nelson is the author of three books about the founding of the
Program at the College and about the founders, Stringfellow Barr and Scott
Buchanan.
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Virginia at Charlottesville, and then to go backwards and
forwards from there.
Stringfellow Barr had been a history teacher at Virginia
since 1924, and, since 1930, a full professor and the editor of
the Virginia Quarterly Review. Buchanan had been teaching
philosophy there since 1929.
Before Buchanan was appointed to the faculty, Barr had
been consulted. He recalls:
The head of the philosophy department accosted
me and asked what I knew about Scott Buchanan
. . .I said, “He’s the most remarkable man I’ve ever
met, but he’s not an easy person, and I would
rather not urge his appointment. It would mean a
great deal to me personally to have him here, but
. . .you might find him a very difficult customer to
handle.” They decided to risk it and got him.
Despite that rather ambiguous endorsement, the
friendship prospered. Both men developed formidable
reputations as teachers. They also shared a deep concern
about the inadequacies of the undergraduate curriculum.
Buchanan reported that “The college at the University was
being squeezed, exploited, and reduced to the size and
functions of a secondary preparatory school for the graduate
schools.”
This concern was sufficiently widespread that it led
President John Holcomb, in 1934, to appoint a Committee
on Honors Courses. He asked both Barr and Buchanan to
serve. This small group of six met almost weekly for a period
of about six months and issued its report in March 1935. The
report has three sections. The first is an exposure of the grave
weaknesses of the existing undergraduate curriculum, drafted
by Barr. It must have offended many members of the Virginia
faculty more senior than he. Here is an excerpt:
The able student, on his part, feels. . .that many of
the lectures now given are not worth listening to
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and that the textbooks assigned are not worthy of
serious study. In his more charitable moods, he
recognizes that, given the present student body, the
professor is not much to blame. Observing this
low morale on the part of both professor and
student alike, the publishers have done their best
to supply increasingly “easy” texts. . . .The selfrespecting professor has consoled himself with
research. . . .Or he has found consolation in
graduate courses in which “real work” may be
attempted. . . .The able undergraduate has turned
to athletics and other “activities”. . . .He comes to
look on the strictly curricular exercises of the
university as interruptions that must be borne
patiently but which he quite sees through. . . .
The second section of the report is a detailed plan for a
two-year “college within the college,” a required program of
tutorials, laboratory work, lectures, and discussions, all based
on the reading of the great books of the Western tradition,
including a substantial number of mathematical and scientific
works. This section was written by Buchanan. The range and
depth of the plan are extraordinary; it bears a strong resemblance to the program installed here at St. John’s.
Buchanan contended that the best materials for the
proposed curriculum are the literary and scientific classics of
Europe. He states that “all instruction will be based on the
reading, analysis, interpretation, criticism, imitation, and
discussion of the books in the following list.” That list
includes over a hundred authors, and it will look familiar to
anyone with a St. John’s connection. When the report was
circulated on the Charlottesville campus, the most startling
feature, I feel sure—apart from the very notion of an allrequired two-year program for a select twenty of the best
undergraduates—is the inclusion on this list of numerous
works in Mathematics and Science, a grand total of forty-two
titles, ranging from Euclid, Nicomachus, and Hippocrates to
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Darwin and Faraday and Lobachevski and Mendel, and
including those giants Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler,
Newton, and Harvey.
In Winfree Smith’s insightful book A Search for the
Liberal College, published by St. John’s in 1983, he
comments on Buchanan’s proposal:
When one considers that the plan was to read in
two years almost as many books as St. John’s
undergraduates now read in four years, and to
read in their entirety books many of which are
now read at St. John’s only in part, and that list
contained Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologicae,
Part I, Newton’s Principia, Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason, Hegel’s Phenomenology, Maxwell’s
Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, etc., one
sees the impossibility of the task.
To that one might add that there were also included
works not so inherently difficult, but very long—Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the Bible, Marx’s
Capital, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Tolstoi’s War and Peace.
What Buchanan in this report called the “machinery of
instruction,” was to be conducted in four modes: once-aweek discussion of the assigned reading for the whole class
(of no more than twenty), with two instructors in charge;
formal lectures at least once a week, based on the expository
texts; tutorials in languages and mathematics, for “formal
drill and supervised practice,” and for detailed criticism and
discussion of student papers; and a laboratory “equipped for
the performance of the crucial experiments in the history of
science, for the practice of the arts of measurement and
experimentation, and the illustration of scientific theory.”
The full report, including a third section on the elective
portion in the third and fourth years, was submitted to
President Newcomb in March 1935—and that was the end of
it! The country had not yet emerged from the Great
Depression, and the Committee report was shelved, at least in
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part, for lack of funds. But in retrospect one can readily
imagine how Buchanan’s plan would have been chopped to
pieces department by department if it had ever emerged as a
serious proposal.
So by this time, Barr and Buchanan had developed not
only a deep conviction of the necessity for college curricular
reform but also this specific plan for its radical transformation. It was no doubt frustrating to have worked so hard
and so productively in developing their proposal and to see
no result. (If it can be said that a seed was planted at Virginia,
it must be added that the seed was not nurtured there, and a
transplant would be required to keep it alive and growing.)
Meanwhile, at the University of Chicago, what appeared
to be a more favorable climate for curricular reform had been
created by President Robert Maynard Hutchins. He had
earlier enticed Mortimer Adler and Richard McKeon from
Columbia, and Adler had persuaded Hutchins to invite Barr
and Buchanan to come and join Hutchins’ Committee on the
Liberal Arts. They accepted, though Barr was reluctant to
leave his native Virginia and the University he loved in spite
of all its shortcomings. Although there was considerable
muttering on the Chicago campus about Hutchins’ unconventional opinions and appointments, it soon transpired that
the Committee members themselves were the chief cause of
what turned out to be a farcical failure. Buchanan’s account
is especially interesting:
The first meeting of the Committee on Liberal Arts
will never be forgotten by any of those present. It
was one of those occasions of recognition that
mark the crises in tragedies and comedies. . .and in
spite of many interchanges of lectures and papers,
McKeon, Adler, and I, each of us, had constructed
. . .quite different universes of discourse. . . .Heat
and light became thunder and lightning. There was
never another general meeting of the whole
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committee. We agreed to disagree and to pursue
our separate courses. . . .
One significant outcome of that year’s work at Chicago
was the effect on Barr of his seminar readings with Buchanan.
He says in one of his oral history interviews, “We read the
dialogues of Plato. . .and we read the whole of Euclid’s
Elements. . .I’ve been saying ever since. . .that I would never
have touched St. John’s if this hadn’t happened.”
Chicago was, to say the least, another very frustrating
experience for both Barr and Buchanan. Later Adler claimed
that the seeds of the New Program at St. John’s “were sown
in the meetings of the Committee on the Liberal Arts at the
University of Chicago in 1936-37,” but he is wrong on two
counts. The seeds were sown at Virginia, or earlier, and the
year at Chicago added virtually nothing to the conception of
the New Program that emerged here in 1937.
In the same academic year, 1936-37, an event occurred in
Buchanan’s life that appeared to be totally unrelated to his
pursuit of educational reform but that turned out to be the
key that unlocked the door. He accepted an invitation to a
meeting of “Christian leaders” in Alexandria, Virginia, in
May, 1937, to discuss how to combat the rising threat of
Fascism and Communism in Europe. Buchanan shared a
room with a friend, Francis Pickens Miller, and they soon got
to talking about the state of college education. Miller had
recently agreed to serve on the Board of Visitors and
Governors of St. John’s, and the trustees were looking for
new leadership for an institution in deep trouble. It was not
long before Miller arranged a meeting between Barr and
Buchanan, on the one hand, and the College trustees on the
other, followed by a full day’s discussion with Richard
Cleveland, then secretary and later chairman of the College
board. An offer soon came, and so it was that Barr, reluctantly, and Buchanan, more hopeful, but no doubt with reservations, agreed to come promptly to St. John’s. Less than two
months after the Miller-Buchanan conversations in
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Alexandria, Barr and Buchanan were installed at St. John’s.
The world was not thus saved for democracy, but this college
found a new life.
A few words first about the college they found on arrival
here in the fall of 1937. The president, Amos Woodcock, had
just cost the college its accreditation by awarding a bachelor’s
degree to a senior against the judgment of the faculty. The
dean, a retired Navy captain, was formerly director of the
Naval Academy’s athletic program. Although there were only
twenty-four faculty members, fifteen majors were available.
There was just one faculty member in each of the departments of Art, German, Classics, Spanish, Government,
Philosophy and Psychology, and Physics. There were four
national and two local fraternities. Intercollegiate athletic
schedules were maintained in football, basketball, and
lacrosse.
St. John’s thus had a conventionally organized but weak
academic and extracurricular program. Lest it be thought a
hopeless case it is worth remembering that among the faculty
who made a successful transition to the New Program were
the very able Ford K. Brown and Richard Scofield, both
themselves Rhodes Scholars; John Kieffer, a Greek and Latin
scholar with a Harvard education; and the mathematician
George Bingley.
When Barr and Buchanan took over the all-but-bankrupt
college, they prescribed a four-year curriculum alike, in all
important respects, to that now in place here and in Santa Fe.
In the sixty-eight years since its inception, the “bones” of
what was then called the New Program—seminars on the
great books, language and mathematics tutorials, laboratory,
and a weekly all-college formal lecture—have not changed.
Significant refinements have taken place, however, as the
curriculum has undergone constant review. The most
important of these are probably (a) in the language tutorial,
instead of one year each of Greek, Latin, French, and
German, the current pattern is two years of Greek followed
by two years of French; (b) Music has found a solid place in
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the required program; and (c) the preceptorial has been introduced.
An equally radical—perhaps even more radical—alteration in the modes of instruction accompanied the curricular
revolution. In the seminar, which became the heart and soul
of the program, a group of eighteen to twenty students sat
facing one another around a long, wide table and discussed a
book read by all. The two faculty members in charge took
turns opening the discussion with a question (not “When did
Plato write this dialogue?” but perhaps, “What is justice?”).
In the conversation that followed, students and tutors
together sought answers by reviewing and analyzing, for
instance, the conflicting definitions of justice debated in the
first book of the Republic.
The New Program called for a complete transformation
of the structure and functions of the faculty. There were no
longer any departments, ranks, or specialization. Of course
this raised questions of status and dignity and inevitably
raised the question of whether Buchanan was the leader of
the faculty so desperately needed—or simply out of his mind!
Each new member and every retained member of the existing
faculty became a “tutor” and was offered the opportunity, as
well as the challenge, of learning how to teach throughout the
curriculum. Could a physicist learn to teach Greek and to
discuss Plato’s Meno? Would a philosopher be willing to
study the conic sections of Apollonius or to dissect a frog in
the laboratory? Was this too much to ask of self-respecting
teachers with credentials from Oxford, Columbia, Princeton,
and Harvard? And there were no tenure appointments to the
faculty during the Barr-Buchanan years.
In the space of two years, all intercollegiate sports were
discontinued and were replaced by an intramural program
designed to attract and involve everyone. The fraternities,
too, were abolished, and their entryways on the campus
buildings where they had been housed were renamed by Barr
in honor of the four Maryland signers of the Declaration of
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Independence—William Paca, Charles Carroll of Carrollton,
Samuel Chase, and Thomas Stone.
Although both Barr and Buchanan hoped that their plan
would inspire other colleges to follow their lead, they did not
want it to be universally copied, even if it were feasible to do
so. That would have left the entering freshman without a
significant choice, and the freedom to choose the St. John’s
path is essential to its success. The discipline and commitment
required in order to gain the rewards of the program presupposes that the path is freely chosen. In fact, I believe that most
alumni would assert that it must be not only freely chosen,
but also pleasurable; otherwise, it isn’t worth the pain.
Buchanan was convinced that an understanding of
modern science was essential to the liberal education of the
modern man or woman, and that in turn required an understanding of—among other things—Newtonian physics.
Newton’s Principia appeared to be inaccessible to the average
college student. How could it be made accessible? Buchanan
made it accessible by plotting a chronological course of study
through mathematics, physics, and astronomy, beginning
with Euclid’s Elements and proceeding through the works of
Apollonius, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler, along
with straight mathematical exercises and accompanying
laboratory work.
The decision to abolish academic departments had several
consequences. First, Barr and Buchanan were able to assert
and dramatize their shared conviction that every faculty
member should establish as a goal, no matter how long it
would take to reach it, to teach across the curriculum, to
transcend his or her specialty, to aim to become a liberally
educated person.
Equally important, the abolition of the departments and
divisions broke through one more barrier to the direct
confrontation of a book by the student. A reading of Plato’s
Republic, for instance, would not be filtered through the lens
of political science, or philosophy, or history, or theology; the
work would speak for itself. It would not be categorized and
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thus prejudged. The student was to confront each author and
each work in its own right. Except for the necessity of reading
most of the books in translation, there would be no intervention between the author and the reader. It is this radical
departure that allows the College to claim that the great
books are the teachers, the primary faculty within which the
tutors and their students are learners together, with the tutors
as the more seasoned guides.
Lessons Learned, Lessons Applied
The transformation wrought by Barr and Buchanan here in
1937 seemed nearly miraculous to some (and errant nonsense
to others!). But in fact it was in part an incorporation of
lessons learned not only early in their lives, but especially
during the eighteen year period from their arrival as Rhodes
Scholars at Balliol College, Oxford, to their arrival in
Annapolis. I add only that they came to St. John’s not just
with lessons learned, but with that indispensable daring and
conviction without which the sturdy structure that now
flourishes here and in Santa Fe sixty-eight years later, would
not have survived the first winter.
Perhaps at this point you have some curiosity about these
two “transformers,” Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan.
What were they like? What did they do before Charlottesville
and Annapolis?
Barr—Growing Up
Stringfellow Barr, known to his family and friends since
infancy as “Winkie,” was born and grew up in Virginia, the
son of an Episcopalian bishop, and the grandson, on his
mother’s side, of Franklin Stringfellow, famous in Virginia as
a daring cavalry scout for Jeb Stuart and Robert E. Lee. After
the war Grandfather Stringfellow became a country parson,
and a man of simple convictions. Barr recalled: “He said. . .that
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he didn’t want to go to heaven if Dixie (his horse) wasn’t
there.”
Winkie grew up under the engaging influence of that
celebrated grandfather and of his learned and devoted father
who introduced him to Dickens, Shakespeare, and the Bible.
He recalls reading all of Oliver Twist out loud to his older
sister, Jane, when he was eight or nine. Even earlier, when he
was five or six, he had begun reading the Bible to the black
servants in the kitchen. And then, he says,
On my tenth birthday. . .Father gave me a
Shakespeare play. . .He said, “You won’t understand this well when you read it, but keep reading
it.” So I did. I’d do anything for him. . .I adored
him. . .I was so taken with Macbeth I wanted to
express myself somehow, but the thing that I was
taken with was not Macbeth, for God’s sake, it
was King Duncan. He was the first king I ever met
. . .I had been given. . .a funny little kimono-sortof-garment with a blue and white design on it,
with a belt. . .I would put this on, not over my
pajamas or anything, I’d walk rapidly across the
room so that the train would float better behind. .
.This had the disadvantage of leaving my belly
completely exposed, but nobody gave a damn.
It will not surprise you that this boy then grew up, went
to college and graduated from the University of Virginia at
Charlottesville. When Barr received his B.A. in 1916 he was
nineteen years old, and had behind him four years of Latin,
three years of Greek, eight years of English and English
Literature, and an abundance of extra-curricular activity. He
was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship in 1916—not surprising.
But the Brits were deep in the first World War, so he did not
take up his Rhodes until three years later. During that period,
several dramatic events shaped and matured him. In April,
1917, the United States entered the war against Germany.
Conscription had not yet begun, but Barr promptly enlisted
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in the Army in May. He was transferred to an ambulance
corps training at Allentown, and, expecting a quick trip
overseas, he began intensive study of French. But it turned
out that the Army had no vehicles available for ambulance
training; so Barr, severely flat-footed and unable to do the
foot-soldier drill, was transferred to the Sanitary Corps,
which was organizing instruction about venereal diseases,
“not a very glorious assignment, and not one I coveted.” His
talents as a speaker and writer continued to be appreciated.
When he spoke to recruits about the dangers of “the clap,”
he composed entertaining verse designed to catch their
attention. Many, like Barr, frustrated and disappointed, were
never sent overseas.
And so, Winkie Barr, having enlisted out of a sense of
duty, having suffered the humiliation of unfitness for combat
service, and having prepared uselessly to be an ambulance
driver in France, made the best of his assignment to teach
recruits the risks of venereal disease. And, somehow, he
managed to do that with a light heart!
Then, immediately after his discharge from the Army, he
was called upon to undertake what he called “the most
painful adventure of my whole life.” His adored father
suffered a mental and physical collapse, requiring Winkie’s
services as an attendant to him at a mental hospital in
Asheville. Perhaps miraculously, after six months of daily
round-the-clock attendance, his father recovered, and was
able to return home.
So when the Armistice was signed in November, Barr was
free to take up his Rhodes Scholarship at Balliol College,
Oxford. At age twenty-two, a young man of some
experience.
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Buchanan—Growing Up
Meanwhile, what about Scott Buchanan? A markedly
different sort of person with a markedly different set of
childhood and youthful experiences.
Born in a small town near Spokane, Washington, Scott, an
only child, was soon carried by his parents across the
continent to Jeffersonville, Vermont, where his father, a
country doctor, soon died. The boy was then just seven years
old. His mother and he were left in near poverty.
In an interview many years later, Buchanan recalls his
early education:
Jeffersonville was a small town, probably not over
a thousand inhabitants. There was a schoolhouse
in the middle of town next door to our house. . . .
It was a curious school, with four rooms that
included everything from the first grade through
high school. There were three grades in each room
and recitations were held in front of the room in
rotation. From the very start I was listening to
classes ahead of me and then, as I went on, to
classes behind me. So I had a sort of triple
education. . .
I had to prepare my own work but I was always
watching the teaching and learning. . .from the
other classes as I went on. It made me realize very
early how much teaching goes on between
students. . .Since then I’ve always seen a classroom
as a very lively relationship between mutual
teachers.
In his youth, Buchanan was an earnest Christian and a
“great church-goer.” “I used to count five times on Sunday
that I did something at the church.” Young Scott had been
converted by a visiting evangelist and “they took me in as a
member of the church at the age of eight. I don’t think that is
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often done but Congregationalists are free-wheeling. . . .Then
after that I began having doubts, of course. . . .By the time I
was in high school. . .I refused to take Communion. . . .I
didn’t understand why you should eat bread and drink wine
because it was the body and blood of Christ.” (I recall
Buchanan saying in my language tutorial in 1941-42 that
“hocus pocus” was a corruption of Jesus’ saying at the Last
Supper, “Hoc est corpus meus.”) These recollections may
suggest that Scott’s young life was consumed with religion
and personal reflections on the meaning of Christian
doctrine. As evidence to the contrary, he later recalled how
much he missed the winters and the ice skating in northern
Vermont.
Amherst College was a natural destination for Buchanan,
and he was admitted there, no doubt on scholarship, in 1912.
By a happy accident it was the very year that the estimable
Alexander Meiklejohn joined Amherst as President.
Somehow a bond developed between them despite a twentythree year age difference. And when Meiklejohn brought
together in his study five or six members of the faculty for a
reading and discussion of Immanuel Kant, the undergraduate
Buchanan was invited to join. The two became lifelong
friends. (When I say “the two,” I mean Meiklejohn and
Buchanan, but I might as well have said Buchanan and Kant.)
Scott Buchanan had a good academic record at Amherst.
He won the mathematics prize in his sophomore year and the
Greek prize in his junior year, he was the Ivy Orator at his
commencement and received his degree cum laude, and, most
notably, he was awarded the Rhodes Scholarship from
Massachusetts.
The United States entered the Great War in 1917, and, in
1918, Buchanan signed up for the Navy, though a pacifist and
a conscientious objector. Although he didn’t want to fight, he
thought it was wrong to escape what his college friends, who
had been drafted, were going through. In any case, after the
Armistice was signed in November, 1918, Buchanan was
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discharged from the Navy, leaving him free to take up his
Rhodes Scholarship.
Barr Meets Buchanan
And thus it happened that our two “transformers” met for the
first time at Balliol College, Oxford, in the fall of 1919. Barr
remembered vividly their first encounter:
There was a knock and I opened my door.
“Hello,” he said, “I’m Scott Buchanan,
Massachusetts.” He stood, smiling, relaxed, his
head a little on one side. He wore the heavy tweed
jacket and gray flannel “bags” that I was beginning
to recognize as the Oxford student’s favorite
costume. . . .[He said]: “I’m looking for Barr,
Virginia.”
Thus began a friendship that lasted until Buchanan’s
death forty-nine years later. But it had a rocky beginning.
Perhaps that is partly because Barr did not quite realize at first
that he was in the process of becoming Buchanan’s student.
After all, they were Rhodes Scholars together, and, although
Buchanan was two years older, they had graduated from
college only a year apart. But Barr discovered that the best
conversations seemed to take place when Buchanan was on
hand, and later, during Buchanan’s last term, an informal
seminar developed, in which Barr and several Englishmen
began to meet regularly in a discussion group led by
Buchanan. Barr recalls:
It was his curious kind of questioning that bound
them and me. . . .I had quite simply been snared
into Platonic dialectic, by a dialectician who had
staked his life on Socrates’ statement that the
unexamined life is not worth living, a dialectician
who may already have agreed with that stately first
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sentence in Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “All men desire
to know.”
Buchanan later reported that during those Oxford years
he and Barr “had spent long hours in talk about the plight of
American education.” He did not say explicitly what the
conversations encompassed, but the context suggests that one
of their main concerns was that the growth and dominance of
the graduate schools in the American universities was turning
the undergraduate years into preparation for specialization
instead of cultivating the liberal arts.
From Balliol and Oxford, Buchanan and Barr borrowed
the “don-rag.” In one of his letters to Meiklejohn from
Balliol, Buchanan describes it briefly: “Our term closed on
Monday,” he wrote, “with what is called a ‘don-rag.’ One
goes before his tutor and the Master to hear his work
commented on and discussed in approval or encouragement
for better work in the future.” Barr, years later at St. John’s,
refers to “a device we stole from English university practice,
the device which British undergraduates term a ‘don-rag,’”
and then goes on to describe what “we have adapted . . .more
nearly to our needs,” an adaptation with which most of you
are quite familiar.
Also, they borrowed the title “tutor,” and made the
tutorial not, as at Oxford, a weekly meeting of one or two
students with a tutor to discuss a paper prepared by the
student, but a small group of eight to ten students meeting
daily to study language and mathematics. (And let me interpolate here: it appears that Buchanan and Barr borrowed
liberally, but they never copied; whatever they took
underwent a Buchanian twist.)
They also took the best of the informal discussions that
had enriched their lives at Balliol and transformed them into
the “seminar,” in which the size of the group was limited to
twenty or so, in order to ensure the primacy of student participation and, by using two tutors, to counterbalance any
tendency, on the part of either, to impart “the truth.”
NELSON
21
Oxford encompassed many colleges of varying sizes. A
“large” college might have as many as 450 resident students.
St. John’s in the 1940’s shrank to almost nothing during the
war years, and didn’t reach 300 even after the war. But now
St. John’s, by Oxford standards, is a large college! Barr and
Buchanan, despite the experience of Amherst, Harvard, and
the University of Virginia, thought that the Oxford colleges
were about the right size.
After graduate work at Harvard and two years teaching
philosophy at City College, New York, Buchanan, in 1925,
with a Harvard doctorate in hand, began four stimulating
years at the People’s Institute at Cooper Union in New York.
He enjoyed providing adult programs for first—and second—
generation European immigrants who were not looking for
credits or degrees, but seriously interested in learning.
Perhaps of greater import for our current concerns, he
organized with the New York Public Library, eighteen great
books seminars meeting in library branches around the city,
which were led by instructors or recent graduates from
Columbia. These seminars no doubt confirmed his conviction
that the great books were accessible to a wide readership of
serious, intelligent readers, and should not be considered the
exclusive preserve of university scholars.
This was also a time of invention, exploration, and experimentation in the undergraduate program at Columbia,
where Mortimer Adler, Mark Van Doren, and Richard
McKeon were in the thick of it. Unlike the situation at many
leading research universities, the undergraduate program at
Columbia engaged the continuing attention of many of its
leading scholars and its brightest young instructors, who
quickly discovered that providing young men with an intelligible introduction to their world could not be achieved
within strictly departmental confines. They developed an
interdepartmental course, and by making it required of all
freshman underlined the conviction: “However intelligent a
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
boy may be, he is in no position, when he first enters college,
to determine a curriculum for himself.”
The effort to introduce the great books into the Columbia
undergraduate program had a long and choppy history
beginning with John Erskine in 1917. The opposition came
chiefly from classical scholars provoked at the notion that any
good could come from undergraduates attempting to read
and discuss one classic a week. Many scholars also objected
that to read a masterpiece in translation was not to read the
same work at all. Erskine relished the argument and happily
reported:
I agreed. I couldn’t help adding that I marveled at
my colleagues who did their reading exclusively in
the original. I publicly offered them my sympathy
for never having read the Old Testament, nor the
words of Christ. Of course the Old Testament was
possible for any colleague who knew Hebrew, but
there was no text extant of the words of Christ in
the language he spoke.
When the faculty finally relented, Erskine offered his
course in 1920. He later said that the original instructors
were a “remarkable lot:” they included both Mortimer Adler
and Mark Van Doren.
The Columbia faculty had long been dedicated to the
small discussion group for undergraduate instruction. The
renowned Nicholas Murray Butler, president of the
University for forty-three years, said forthrightly in 1912:
“The habit of conveying information to college students by
means of lectures is wholly deplorable. It is not only a waste
of time, since the printed page would be far better than the
spoken word, but it leads to unfortunate and undesirable
intellectual habits on the part of the student.” The serious and
long-standing efforts of Columbia College to provide a sound
liberal education for undergraduates employing the great
books and the small discussion group were well known to
NELSON
23
Barr and Buchanan, especially through the close, enduring
friendship between Buchanan and Van Doren.
Now I have given as much attention as the occasion
allows to those activities and events leading up to the arrival
of Barr and Buchanan at St. John’s in the summer of 1937.
Barr was reluctant to come to St. John’s. He knew a bit
about the college, and what he knew was not good. He had
occasionally come to Annapolis from Charlottesville to
lecture at the Naval Academy, and he had found that the
reputation of the college next door was poor and that it had
just recently lost its accreditation. He did not see it as a
promising site for a revival of the great classical tradition.
Buchanan, on the other hand, was intrigued. Perhaps his
experiences at Virginia and Chicago had shown that only at
an institution in dreadful difficulty would they be given a free
hand to overturn completely the existing structure and install
a revolutionary new order. Barr was persuaded to make the
attempt, though he expected to fail; he just felt he had a duty
to try. Then it was left to them to sort out their respective
responsibilities. Barr relates:
Buchanan said I would have to be president. I
scoffed at the idea and reminded him that the
curriculum we had dreamed of was his baby, not
mine. But he answered he couldn’t be president;
he didn’t answer his mail. I retorted that this was
because he believed a lot of it was not worth
answering. He agreed but pointed out that his
correspondents thought it was, so I would have to
be president. I groaned and told him he would
have to be dean. He loudly objected but I declined
to budge.
I think everyone who knew these two men will agree that
it would have been incongruous, and perhaps fatal, if it had
turned out the other way. It is just possible to imagine Barr as
dean, but Buchanan as president? No way. But Barr as
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
president and Buchanan as dean seem, in retrospect, almost
providentially well-suited to their respective capacities.
Buchanan’s function was to create and refine the basic
structure; to match tutors to assignments; to build faculty
understanding of the Program; to teach, and by teaching, to
embody the methods of the seminar leader and of the
language and mathematics tutor; to find new faculty members
with the capacity to learn how to be tutors, teaching across
the program, conquering unfamiliar, treacherous ground. He
also had the usual tasks of any college dean: to counsel with
students and with tutors; to provide letters of recommendation for graduating students and departing faculty
members; to respond to parents’ complaints about discipline
or lack of discipline. He also took the responsibility to set
forth in print, for all skeptics and critics to see, as he did in
the catalogues of the college, the reasons why this college had
adopted a curriculum radically different from anything else
on the academic scene.
Barr confirms that “it was Buchanan who conceived,
established, and continuously developed the St. John’s
program. In a sense he had been building it ever since his
work at Cooper Union in the late twenties.” Barr continues:
Meanwhile, my job was to interpret it to the
public by wide lecturing and by writing; to teach
one seminar on the books and usually one
language tutorial so I would understand the thing I
was publicly interpreting; to find quickly the few
men and women who could both grasp what we
were doing and finance it in time to keep the
College open; to fight off. . .three successive
attempts of the Navy Department to get possession
of our entire campus; and to reorganize the board
of the college.
One interesting sidelight: although typically we see
Buchanan as the radical force and Barr exercising some
restraint, it was Barr, against Buchanan’s advice, who
NELSON
25
abolished intercollegiate athletics. Buchanan thought that was
one step too many when the alumni were already deeply
disaffected, and it would be better to wait another year or
two. Barr, however, feeling directly responsible for the health
and welfare of the students, was concerned, especially with
respect to football, that the Johnnies were outclassed, battling
against bigger and better-trained opponents, and that injuries
would result for which he would be responsible. He also
noted that the scheduling of away-from-home contests
required team members to be absent from classes, and the
Program was simply too demanding to permit it: student
athletes would inevitably fall behind. Instead, he championed
a vigorous intramural sports program in which all students
could engage on a schedule consistent with their academic
obligations.
These two collaborators were very different in
temperament and capacities. Quoting Barr again:
. . .three or four years after our New Program
started I was delighted with it and Scott was
depressed with it. The difference between Scott
and me was that when I see a baby I’m enchanted
with him and Scott is always feeling, “Well, that’s
not the baby I had in mind. Babies ought to be
better than that.” All human enterprises, including
birth, seem to him a little disappointing. He’s a
Platonist in the sense that he’s got some notion of
a baby in the back of his mind that no baby lives
up to, whereas to me it’s such a miracle the little
brat is alive—so what if he has defects. His ears
stick out and he is cross-eyed, certainly, but he’s
still alive.
At Buchanan’s death in 1968, Barr said of their long
friendship and collaboration, “Aside from our dialectical
bond, he and I were in many ways incompatible; with it, our
incompatibilities made our friendship richer.”
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Since there is so much about Buchanan that helps us to
understand the Program, I turn to Winfree Smith, who was a
student of his (and of Barr’s, as well) at Charlottesville, and
who arrived here in the fall of 1941, and who continued to
teach here until his death. Although he was an admirer of
Buchanan as a teacher, he nevertheless criticized him for
being “cavalier in the way he read the great books” and goes
on to cite “blunders” he made in his reading of Aristotle and
Thomas Aquinas. Smith’s examples are convincing. They
naturally raise questions about the soundness of Buchanan’s
“scholarship.” Buchanan was not the sort of man you would
have asked to write a textbook on the history of philosophy,
nor would he have said yes if asked. His interest was not that
of a bird overhead, surveying the distant fields below, but of
a cannibal on the ground, devouring what he needed, turning
flesh to food. I remember that when he was reading the
volumes of Arnold Toynbee as they came off the press in the
1940’s, almost everything he thought about and talked about
related to Toynbee. He made Toynbee his own, so that, in a
sense, it was no longer Toynbee. He was engaged, as no other
man I have known, in the process that Michel Montaigne
called learning.
It is a sign of crudity and indigestion to throw up
what we have eaten in the same condition it was
swallowed down. The stomach had not performed
its office unless it has altered the form and
condition of what was given it to cook. . . .Bees
pillage the flowers here and there, but they then
make honey of them which is all their own; it is
no longer thyme and marjoram; so the fragments
borrowed from others he will transform and bend
together to make a work that shall be absolutely
his own; that is to say, his judgment. His
education, labor, and study aim only at forming
that.
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27
As a teacher, it was never Buchanan’s aim to trot out a
student who could dutifully and accurately disgorge the
opinions and precepts of Plato or Aristotle or Thomas
Aquinas or Kant. He hoped, rather, that his students, by
means of their fresh encounter with these best minds, would
begin to develop, however imperfectly, minds of their own.
That would be the beginning of lifelong self-education.
This is not the occasion for an account of the nine-andone-half years of the Barr-Buchanan leadership nor for a
recapitulation of the crises, one after another, that characterized their tenure here, some of which they themselves
created, and some of which were thrust upon them. But their
departure cannot be understood without some further
reference to the attack from the Navy. As everybody here
knows, the College is physically separated from the Academy
by nothing more than King George Street and a wall, as it was
then. The advocates for the Academy argued the necessity of
acquiring the College’s meager acres to meet further
expansion needs. (Although today’s enrollment at the
Academy is a bit over 4000, it was then projected to rise to
7500.) Perhaps you can imagine the convenience to the
Academy of an overpass somewhere along King George
Street or a tunnel underneath it connecting the two campuses
and fulfilling nicely the Academy’s requirements.
The unfolding drama involved President Roosevelt,
Eleanor Roosevelt, Secretary of State James Byrnes, Secretary
of the Navy Knox and his successor James Forrestal, Admiral
Chester Nimitz, Admiral Ernest King, both houses of
Congress, and, of course, Admiral Ben Moreell. He was the
Navy’s Goliath to our David. St. John’s defense was led by
Barr, Baltimore lawyer Richard Cleveland, and Thomas
Parran, Surgeon General of the United States, and fortunately
then chairman of the St. John’s Board. I am convinced that if
World War Two had not ended in 1945, the Navy would have
won its war with this college. This was no croquet game; it
was life or death for St. John’s. But in 1946 the Senate and
House committees decided for the College. Except for the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
accidents of war and the passage of time, the Navy would
have prevailed, and we would not be here. The narrowness of
the victory, and the pro-Navy alignment of the local business
interests with the local newspaper, led Barr and Buchanan to
believe that there would never be an end to these attacks.
They were not comforted by the language of the concluding
official letter from Secretary Forrestal stating that in view of
a resolution adopted by the House Naval Affairs Committee
to the effect that “the national emergency neither justifies nor
warrants the proposed acquisition of St. John’s campus,” the
Navy Department would acquiesce in the Committee’s disapproval, [and] that this “makes it possible for the College to
pursue its plans with assurance that it will be secure on its
historic site for the foreseeable future.” That concluding
phrase, “for the foreseeable future,” provided little comfort
to Barr and Buchanan. They could see ahead unending
attacks on the College and its vulnerable property. They were
wrong, but if one looks objectively at the situation as it was
in 1946, it is easy to understand why they thought that the
only secure future for the college lay elsewhere.
In a tribute to Barr at the memorial service for him here
in 1982, I said:
It is very hard indeed to understand, looking back,
how St. John’s College survived those first ten
years of the New Program. . . .Just as Stringfellow
Barr and Scott Buchanan were turning up the
lights on this campus in the late 1930’s, the lights
were going out all over Europe. The recently
arrived immigrants on the faculty here heard the
grim news on their radios as they plotted on their
wall maps at home the daily advance of the
German armies over Poland and Czechoslovakia
and France and the Soviet Union. My freshman
class arrived here exactly two months before Pearl
Harbor. . . .At the College there were farewell
parties virtually every week, as one small group or
NELSON
29
students after another entered the Army or the
Navy or the Marines or the Air Force. Within two
years sixty of the sixty-five members of my class
were scattered all over the world. In June 1943
there were fifteen graduating seniors; a year later
eight; in 1945, five; in 1946, three.
Yet, for me at least, the memories of the College
during those war years are not of hardship and
struggle but of exuberance, spirited conversation,
and laughter. The tone and style and mood were
set [pretty much] by Winkie; without his lively
presence, those would have been grim days indeed.
Both of the founders were highly controversial figures.
Buchanan was called “a destroyer, an irresponsible amateur,
and a corrupter of young men—a man who drew students
into worlds of the intellect too difficult for them, who made
them, as Buchanan [himself said], ‘misfits in the universe for
the time being.’”
In May of 1958, twenty-one years after Barr and
Buchanan had sprung the New Program in Annapolis, a
group of their former students organized a picnic in their
honor. The forty-four of us who gathered for the occasion
first heard from their old friend and our friend too, Mark Van
Doren. Memorably, he characterized the two men in this
fashion:
Both of them are incendiary; both are burning;
they have always burned. Scott burns slowly and
smokelessly. Winkie burns with a blaze, bright and
red and always there, always at the top of his
intensity.
When it came Buchanan’s turn to speak, he began by
saying: “I want to stage a little tableau for you, a composite
oral examination and don rag. I have some questions I want
to ask you.” It is questions, not answers, that seem to me to
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
be the appropriate last words here from Buchanan, even
though these questions are admonitory, unlike most of the
questions I remember him posing to us in our seminars.
The first question is: Do you believe in and trust
your intellect, that innate power that never
sleeps?. . .Many of you have gone on to graduate
and professional learning. . . .You have fallen into
the hands of scholars and into the grooves of
practice. . . .In all these learnings and practices
have you listened to the small spontaneous voice
within that asks continually if these things are
true? Do you believe that knowledge is possible,
that truth is attainable, and that it is always your
business to seek it, although evidence is
overwhelmingly against it?
The second question. . . .Have you yet recognized
that you are and always have been your own
teacher? Liberal education has as its end the free
mind, and the free mind must be its own teacher.
Intellectual freedom begins when one says with
Socrates that he knows nothing, and then goes on
to add: I know what it is that I don’t know. Do
you know what you don’t know and therefore
what you should know? If your teacher is
affirmative and humble, then you are your own
teacher.
My third question is. . .more superficial perhaps,
but fateful, nevertheless. . .have you persuaded
yourself that there are knowledges and truths
beyond your grasp, things that you simply cannot
learn? Have you allowed adverse evidence to pile
up and force you to conclude that you are not
mathematical, not linguistic, not poetic, not
scientific, not philosophical? If you have allowed
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31
this to happen, you have arbitrarily imposed limits
on your intellectual freedom, and you have
smothered the fires from which all other freedoms
arise.
The fourth question: Do you accept the world? I
am thinking of. . .The Brothers Karamazov, when
Ivan tells Alyosha that he finds it easy to believe in
God, but that he finds it impossible to believe in
the world. Because he believes in God, he cannot
accept the world. For most of us these days, the
case is that we have believed in some things so
weakly or fanatically that other equally or more
real things have become absurd or impossible. This
results from our crippled minds. . . .I am
persuaded that the cure for this sickness of mind is
in some vigorous and rigorous attempt to deal
with that most puzzling and mysterious idea, the
idea of the world. . . .There have been other such
ideas that have governed thought, the idea of God
or Being as it puzzled and dazzled the ancient
world, the idea of Man as it stirred and fermented
the world from the Renaissance on. God and Man
have not disappeared as charts and aids to intellectual navigation, but they are in partial eclipse at
present, and the world is asking us the big
questions, questions in cosmology and science,
questions in law and government. They are not
merely speculative questions; they are as much
matters of life and death and freedom as the old
questions were. Most of us have made, with Ivan,
a pact with the devil, an agreement not to face
them and accept them—yet.
“If these questions are valid,” Buchanan concludes, “they
may come somewhere near indicating a standard by which we
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32
judge our common intellectual life, and therefore our
common education in this country.”
It will come as no surprise that Buchanan did not think
that the curriculum he had designed was definitive, the
answer. It was undertaken as a step “in search of a liberal
college,” his own descriptive phrase. This idea of “the search”
was not a transient notion. On several occasions, he imagined
curricula quite different from the one we associate with his
name. More than thirty years after the launching of the New
Program, he asked a group of the College’s students and
tutors the question with which I conclude my remarks: “How
is the search going?”
***
The chief source of material for this lecture is my recent
book, Radical Visions: Stringfellow Barr, Scott Buchanan, and
Their Efforts on behalf of Education and Politics in the
Twentieth Century, Bergin & Garvey, 2001. I have also relied
on two earlier works of mine published by the St. John’s
College Press: Stringfellow Barr: A Centennial Appreciation of
His Life and Work, 1997; and Scott Buchanan: A Centennial
Appreciation of His Life and Work, 1995. The primary
sources on which I have depended for all of the above work
include the following: J. Winfree Smith, A Search for The
Liberal College: The Beginning of The St. John’s Program;
Harris Wofford Jr., Embers of the World: Scott Buchanan’s
Conversations with Harris Wofford Jr.; Papers of Stringfellow
Barr, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia
Library; St. John’s College Papers at the Maryland State
Archives; New Program files in the Greenfield Library, St.
John’s College; Scott Buchanan Papers, Houghton Library,
Harvard University; unpublished transcripts of interviews
with Stringfellow Barr; Lionel Trilling and Justus Buchler, A
History of Columbia College on Morningside; Alexander
Meikejohn Papers, Amherst College Library; author’s private
papers and correspondence.
33
Understanding Quantum
Mechanics with Bohr and
Husserl
François Lurçat
There is no quantum world. There is only an
abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong
to think that the task of physics is to find out how
nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about
nature.
Niels Bohr1
Quantum mechanics brilliantly succeeds as a mathematical
formalism: the numbers it provides are always successfully
compared with experimental results. But it is often said to fail
as an explanatory theory allowing us to understand the laws
of atomic processes.2 Richard Feynman (1918-1988), author
of essential contributions to both the theory and its applications, once declared: “I think I can safely say that nobody
understands quantum mechanics.”3 According to Roger
Penrose, it “makes absolutely no sense.”4 And René Thom
described it as “the intellectual scandal of the century.”5
There exists, however, an interpretation of quantum
mechanics that makes it understandable. It was worked out
by Niels Bohr, author of the quantum theory of atoms, in the
François Lurçat is emeritus professor at the Université de Paris XI (Orsay). As
a theoretical physicist, he has worked on nuclear resonance (magnetic and
quadrupolar), later on particle physics; he is still busy with strong interaction
theory. He has also published several books and articles on the cultural effects
of science. He asks again and again the same question: why does Western
culture remain unable to use the works of such scholars as Husserl and Bohr
that might allow it to understand at last the nature of science? The present
essay will appear in a collection of essays: Rediscovering Phenomenology,
edited by L. Boi, P Kerszberg, and F. Patras. It is published here with the kind
.
permission of the editors.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
course of more than thirty years of researches and discussions. During the 1930s and 1940s, there was a sort of loose
consensus in its favor. But most physicists did not even try to
follow the line of Bohr’s subtle and deep arguments.
Einstein’s seminal discoveries had become classic, and he was
presently busy with topics outside the mainstream. Bohr, on
the contrary, was making essential contributions to nuclear
physics. So he was necessarily right about everything, Einstein
was a troublemaker, and the debate between both physicists
was not really relevant. In the last decades, however, the
situation has changed. Some theoreticians have proposed that
we replace the “thought experiments” discussed by Einstein
and Bohr with feasible ones. Thanks to advances made in
measurement techniques and to the ingenuity of many experimentalists, crucial experiments have been done, and their
results have supported Bohr’s conceptions.6 This might
perhaps have made these conceptions more acceptable; it
turned out, however, that they became less and less accepted.
The whiff of heresy no longer lingers about Einstein’s
thought, but now it surrounds Bohr’s. When physicists,
philosophers, and historians of science write about such
questions, as a rule they refer only vaguely to the Danish
physicist’s ideas without ever going explicitly and clearly to
his texts.7
I would like to present here an approach that in my
opinion should help to explain why Bohr’s essential contribution has been rejected for its strangeness even after its
successful confrontation with experiment. I rely on Husserl’s
definition of phenomenology in his article in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica (1929). Phenomenology, he writes,
“has established (1) an a priori psychological discipline, able
to provide the only secure basis on which a strong empirical
psychology can be built, and (2) a universal philosophy,
which can supply an organum for the methodical revision of
all the sciences.”8 My assumption is as follows: as far as
physics is concerned, the kind of methodical revision Husserl
had in mind was never undertaken; it is, however, needed
LURÇAT
35
even more urgently now that quantum physics has come to
light, in fact, at the same time as phenomenology. The lack of
revision, which has permitted the persistence of age-old
confusions, can help to explain the paradoxical rejection of
the Bohrian approach and the ensuing failure to understand
quantum mechanics.
Of course one should not forget that there are many
publications devoted to the interpretation of quantum
mechanics, some of which are quite valuable. My aim here is
not to discuss what has been done recently in this field of
research, but to go back to the origins in order to understand
why, despite so many efforts, confusion remains about several
important aspects of the problem, for instance, about such
notions as “observer,” “Copenhagen interpretation.” In my
opinion, as long as Bohr is understood to be an incomprehensible author, the beginnings of quantum mechanics will
continue to be shrouded in mist, and the same will probably
be true for quantum mechanics as a whole.
Bohr’s thought is generally considered difficult to grasp,
a difficulty commonly ascribed to what he himself called an
“inefficiency of expression.”9 One may wonder, however,
whether the clarity of classical physics, implicitly contrasted
with Bohrian obscurity, is not itself at least partly based on an
illusion. Because we are familiar with mathematically
formalized space and time, we assume a degree of clarity
about it. This familiarity has a double origin. It comes from
our technical environment, which embodies in some way
Euclidean space and Newtonian time (or, when electromagnetic signals are exchanged, Einsteinian space-time). And it
follows from a feature analyzed by Husserl: the substitution
of the mathematically substructured world of idealities for
the real world.10 The lack of clarity commonly found in Bohr,
and the inefficiency of expression for which he blames
himself, are actually effects of thought exploring virgin territories. They can be understood as traces of Bohr’s effort to
free himself from old mental habits. But the feeling of
obscurity experienced by Bohr’s readers is also due to the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
result of that effort: a reasoning free from several—most
often implicit—premises of common thought
“We take,” says Husserl, “for true being what is actually a
method.”11 By retaining only those properties of things that
can be geometrized, Galileo laid the foundations of modern
physics, but at the same time he gave credibility to the
prejudice that declared those properties to be the only real
ones: nature is mathematical, and whatever cannot be mathematized is relegated to the swamp of preconceptions and
subjective impressions.
What made classical physics understandable was the
general acceptance of its metaphysical foundations, laid by
Galileo and Descartes.12 During the twentieth century, the
development of quantum physics challenged those foundations—a major event in the history of scientific and philosophical thought. But the prevailing positivist view of
sciences did not allow that event to be understood or even
noticed. According to positivism, there are no metaphysical
foundations of sciences; there is a scientific method, the only
one that allows us to reach correct conclusions. One can thus
understand the negative reception of the Bohrian conception
of quantum mechanics. Bohr’s thought has indeed challenged
generally accepted ideas, but the status of those ideas is
misunderstood. Their metaphysical character is not recognized: they are mistaken for basic and necessary methodological principles.
Classical Physics
Why is quantum theory reputed to contain paradoxes?
Because the Galilean and Cartesian substitution of mathematical abstractions for the real world has been almost unanimously and uncritically accepted by scientists and philosophers—except, of course, phenomenologists. The strangeness
of quantum physics might even follow from affinities with
phenomenology that remain implicit. We must therefore
begin this study by taking a brief look at the Husserlian
critique of the metaphysical foundations of classical physics.
LURÇAT
37
According to Husserl,13 Galileo’s essential discovery is that of
“nature, which is in itself mathematical.” Summarizing the
Galilean view, he writes again: “Nature is, in its ‘true beingin-itself,’ mathematical.” Hence follows, for Galileo, the “law
of exact lawfulness”: every occurrence in nature must come
under exact laws. Here we apparently have the basic
principles of physical theory, used daily by scientists. Yet the
mathematical nature in question is a “methodical idea,” so
when we accept Galileo’s discoveries as “straightforward
truth,” we repeat his “naïveté,” a naïveté never overcome by
his successors. Galileo is a genius: his idea of mathematical
nature “blazes the trail for the infinite number of physical
discoveries and discoverers.” But he is “at once a discovering
and a concealing genius.” With the Galilean mathematization
begins “the surreptitious substitution of an idealized nature
for prescientifically intuited nature.” In the world where we
live, “we find nothing of geometrical idealities, no geometrical space or mathematical time with all their shapes.” This
is an important remark, Husserl observes, even though it is so
trivial. “Yet this triviality has been buried precisely by exact
science, indeed since the days of ancient geometry, through
that substitution of a methodically idealized achievement for
what is given immediately as actuality.”
Physics, then, appears as “a particular technique, the
geometrical and Galilean technique which is called physics.”
“In geometrical and natural-scientific mathematization, in the
open infinity of possible experiences, we measure the lifeworld—the world constantly given to us as actual in our
concrete world-life—for a well-fitting garb of ideas, that of
the so-called objectively scientific truths.” This garb of ideas
allows us to make predictions relevant to our practical life,
and this kind of prediction infinitely surpasses the accomplishment of everyday prediction. But, on the other hand, it
dresses up the life-world as “objectively actual and true”
nature. It is because of this substitution that the actual
meaning of the method was never understood.
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Since the days of Galileo, the substitution of a mathematical schematization of nature for the real world has
obscured the nature of classical physics; this continuing
confusion now hinders us from understanding quantum
mechanics. Believing that the trouble started with the advent
of quantum physics would be an illusion. Both the obscurity
of quantum physics and the clarity of classical physics are
grounded in the same initial mistaking of mathematized
nature for the world we live in.
For three quarters of a century, the persistent Galilean
substitution has been an insuperable obstacle in the way of
the acceptance of Bohr’s conceptions, which provide a
rational and understandable frame for quantum mechanics.
The fundamental criticism of substitution by Husserl has not
been taken into consideration, and we still pay the price for
this neglect or refusal.
Bohr’s Dissertation (1911) and Bohr’s Atom (1913)
Let us now set some milestones on the way followed by Bohr
as he discovered and developed his interpretation of quantum
mechanics. This will require placing his work in a historical
context, in order to regain with their original strength
arguments now covered with various layers of sedimentation.
In 1911, the young physicist defended his dissertation on
the electron theory of metals. Its theoretical frame was the
statistical mechanics of a gas of electrons. The main result was
that magnetic properties of metals cannot be explained in this
frame. As Rosenfeld commented in his biographical sketch,
“the very rigour of his analysis gave him, at this early stage,
the firm conviction of the necessity of a radical departure
from classical electrodynamics for the description of atomic
phenomena.”14 In 1921, the primary finding of the dissertation was rediscovered by a Dutch physicist, J.H. van
Leeuwen; it is currently known as the “Bohr-van Leeuwen
theorem.”
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39
Two years later, Bohr published his trilogy, On the
Constitution of Atoms and Molecules. His starting point was
Rutherford’s hypothesis: an atom is composed of a central
nucleus and peripheral electrons. In the first article, devoted
to the hydrogen atom, he assumed that the single electron of
this atom can follow only a discrete set of trajectories, characterized by a “quantum condition” involving Planck’s
constant. This means that when the electron is on one of
those allowed orbits, it is in a “stationary state” and does not
emit electromagnetic radiation. Each of the allowed orbits is
characterized by its energy. Radiation takes place only in the
transition from one orbit to a second one of smaller energy;
the difference between the energies of both orbits is taken
away by the quantum of radiation emitted. Such a process is
called a transition. From these simple assumptions Bohr
deduced the empirical Balmer formula, which describes the
main features of the hydrogen spectrum. But, however simple
they are, they represent a radical innovation with respect to
classical mechanics and electromagnetism.
In classical mechanics, there is a possible trajectory for
any initial condition (position and momentum): this
precludes any quantization of trajectories or of energies. Bohr
understood very early that this freedom of classical trajectories was incompatible with the stability of matter. As he
later explained it to Heisenberg:
What I mean by stability is the fact that always the
same substances are found, with the same
properties; always the same crystals are formed,
the same chemical compounds are created, etc.
This must mean that, after many modifications due
to external influences, an iron atom becomes again
an iron atom, with exactly the same properties as
it had previously. This cannot be understood
according to classical mechanics, above all if one
admits that it is like a planetary system. Hence
there exists in nature a tendency to produce
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definite forms—here I use the word ‘forms’ in its
most general sense—and to make these definite
forms reappear again and again, even when they
have been perturbed and destroyed. . . .This looks
incomprehensible if one admits the basic principle
of Newtonian physics, namely the strict causal
determinism of phenomena; in other terms, if
the present state of a system must always be
determined uniquely by the state that comes
immediately before it, and only by that one.
This contradiction worried me very early.15
According to the trilogy, when a transition takes place the
frequency of the radiation emitted depends on the energy of
the initial state (before the emission of radiation) and on the
energy of the final state (after the emission). If the transition
is a process continuously unfolding in time, as are those
described by classical physics, how can we understand the
idea that the intermediate stage (the emission of radiation) is
partly determined by the final stage?16 To this, Bohr simply
answered that while the stationary states of an atom follow
the laws of usual mechanics, these laws do not hold for the
transition from one state to another.17 Later he was to
develop this idea, specifying that a description of atomic
processes in space and time is not always possible. A
transition is not a process of which the physicist can write a
history, but rather a “quantum jump.” Here we have a radical
break with the principles of classical physics, which declared
a description in space and time to be a universally valid
requirement.
In the relation of physics to experiment we can see
another aspect of the break. Newton lays down his axioms of
mechanics and draws consequences from them about
planetary motions, tides, etc. The refined calculations
performed by his successors are almost always borne out by
astronomical observations: the only exception, a detail in the
motion of Mercury, was explained by Einstein when he laid
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down new axioms in his theory of general relativity. Similarly,
Maxwell’s equations prevailed until Bohr called into question
their universal validity. This represents a new kind of
challenge. The aim is no longer to replace one theory with a
new one that better meets the Galilean ideal of identity with
the physical universe. Rather, Bohr’s atom inaugurated a new
conception of the relations between theory and experiment.
While classical mechanics and electromagnetism remain
essential to describe the stationary states of the atom, some of
their implications are rejected: stationary states are quantized
and radiationless, despite classical impossibilities. Nature can
no longer be identified with the theories of Newton (or
Einstein) and Maxwell. They are not wrong, but they have
only limited validity.
A Digression on Semiclassical Theories
As we shall see further, Bohr’s atom—“the old quantum
theory” as it is now called—is currently considered to have
been a provisional theory, superseded by quantum mechanics.
This is only a partial truth, however. Bohr’s atom still
survives under the rubric of semiclassical theories, an active
field of research nowadays.18 In atomic, molecular, and
nuclear physics, for instance, it happens in many cases that
the phenomena of interest involve a large number of
quantum states: one is thus near the limit where the correspondence principle becomes relevant, as we shall soon see.
On the other hand, as Miller puts it, semiclassical theories
play an interpretative role: they provide spatiotemporal
descriptions, of approximate validity, which nevertheless give
tools for understanding that are more efficient than what
“exact” quantum mechanical calculations can offer. In the
case of the formaldehyde molecule, for instance, or of
exchange collisions between a hydrogen atom and a
dihydrogen molecule, we are told by specialists that
“rigorous” quantum-mechanical calculations are untractable,
while semiclassical description permits both an understanding
of the phenomena and acceptable numerical results. We must
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consider semiclassical theory, then, as the truly relevant
theory for such objects or phenomena.
Hence the idea of limited validity has not become
obsolete with the advent of quantum mechanics. The epistemological lesson of this idea is as relevant as ever: our
concepts are not written in the book of the universe, we
ourselves devise them in an effort to understand the laws of
natural and, more generally, physical phenomena.
Wave-particle Duality and Its Consequences
There is no question here of summarizing the main stages of
the development of quantum theory, or even of Bohr’s contributions to it.19 I would only like to show, relying on Bohrian
texts, how phenomenological thought can give a meaning to
quantum physics. In order to do that, some historical data
will have to be recalled; let us begin with the debate about the
quanta of radiation.
A photocell is now a familiar object (found, for instance,
in every elevator). One century ago, the photoelectric effect
was something new, unexplained by classical electromagnetism. In 1905, Einstein published an article: “On a
Heuristic Point of View about the Creation and Conversion
of Light.”20 He showed that the thermodynamic properties of
thermal radiation could be described by comparing the
radiation to a gas of light quanta (later called “photons”).
Applying this assumption to the photoelectric effect, he
obtained a simple relation (the “Einstein equation”) between
the frequency of incident light and the energy of the electrons
freed from the metal. Einstein’s “heuristic point of view” so
obviously contradicted some known properties of electromagnetic radiation (such as interferences and diffraction) that
it was received with scepticism. In 1916, however, the careful
experiments of Millikan confirmed the Einstein equation.
Another experiment went further in the same direction.
When a beam of X-rays falls on a sample of matter, a fraction
of the beam is deflected (what is called “scattering”) and its
wavelength increases. This phenomenon cannot be explained
LURÇAT
43
by classical electromagnetic theory. In 1923, however, Arthur
Holly Compton’s experiments showed that it could be understood by making use of the hypothesis of light quanta, if they
are endowed not only with energy but also with momentum.
The scattering of X-rays (now called the Compton effect) is
described as a collision between an X-quantum and an
electron. From this point on, light quanta seemed to possess
all the attributes of particles. The Compton assumption
implies a definite relation, well confirmed by experiment,
between the increase in wavelength and the angle between
scattered and incident radiation.
Thus electromagnetic theory found itself in a strange
situation: from interference and diffraction experiments
followed the inescapable conclusion that radiation has a wave
nature, while other experiments, such as those regarding the
photoelectric and Compton effects, convincingly proved its
corpuscular nature. While this mysterious duality remained
unexplained, it was generally recognized as a fact. There were
still opponents to the light quanta, however, and Bohr was
one of them. His point of view was well expressed at a
conference given in 1922:
In spite of its heuristic value, however, the
hypothesis of light-quanta, which is quite irreconciliable with so-called interference phenomena, is
not able to throw light on the nature of radiation.
I need only recall that these interference
phenomena constitute our only means of investigating the properties of radiation and therefore of
assigning any closer meaning to the frequency
which in Einstein’s theory fixes the magnitude of
the light-quantum.21
What did Bohr have against the hypothesis of light
quanta? The relation that gives the energy of a quantum
(equal to the frequency multiplied by the Planck constant),
whatever its experimental success or “heuristic value” may
be, is meaningless. Indeed, the frequency can only be
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measured using interference phenomena that are incompatible with the hypothesis of light quanta.
But why should one look for the meaning of a physical
concept? For classical concepts, such a problem did not arise:
the concepts of classical physics were supposed to be inherent
to the physical objects that they described; nature simply was
mathematical. Classical physicists might have repeated
Galileo’s famous assertion that the book of universe is written
in geometrical characters. As far as I know, the question about
the meaning of a physical concept was first explicitly asked in
Einstein’s seminal paper about relativity theory.22 He
explained there that the usual description of the motion of a
material point (based on coordinates as a function of time)
“has no physical meaning unless we are quite clear as to what
we understand by ‘time.’” He then analyzed the experimental
procedure allowing us to establish the simultaneity of two
events located at two different places; this analysis led him to
relativistic kinematics. The important point is that the
meaning of simultaneity is disclosed by the experimental
procedure that establishes it. The reasoning that goes from
experiment to meaning is radically different from that of
classical physics, which goes from a priori mathematical
principles to the interpretation of experiments. It deviates
from the metaphysical foundations of classical physics and
gets closer to phenomenology, according to which one should
abandon dogmatic certitudes and pay attention to modes of
givenness.
When he looks for the meaning of frequency in the
experimental method for its measurement, Bohr follows in
Einstein’s footsteps; but while Einstein came back to the
Galilean identification of the universe with geometry, Bohr
did not stop moving forward towards phenomenological
thought.
Quantum Mechanics
One of the main tools used by Bohr to work out his 1913
theory of atoms was found in the relations between quantum
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and classical theories. The stationary states of the hydrogen
atom can be numbered according to increasing energies. The
number of a state is called its quantum number. Bohr noticed
that the numerical results obtained by application of the
quantum laws approach the classical results when the
quantum number becomes very large. This “correspondence
principle” was well borne out afterwards. Between 1919 and
1925, Bohr and his followers worked out the consequences
of the correspondence principle. It turned out that, in the
simplest cases, important results could be obtained, especially
about the interactions between atoms and electromagnetic
radiation; but the “systematic guessing guided by the correspondence principle”23 failed as soon as one dealt with any
systems except the simplest ones. For instance the hydrogen
atom, with its single electron, lends itself well to these
methods, but for the helium atom, which has two electrons,
they no longer work. Physicists needed to depart further from
classical physics.
The decisive step was taken in 1925 by Heisenberg. In his
article “On the Quantum-Theoretical Re-interpretation of
Kinematic and Mechanical Relations,”24 he showed how, by
transforming the differential equations of classical mechanics
into difference equations, one could get a formulation of the
expected theory—“quantum mechanics,”as it was called by
Max Born. While in classical mechanics the physical
quantities are represented by numbers, in the new theory they
are represented by matrices. Very soon this “matrix
mechanics” became a powerful tool, able to deal successfully
with problems that had defied the physics of correspondence
principle. But a theory that prescribes representing such
familiar quantities as the positions and momenta of the
electrons by mathematical objects other than numbers is not
easy to understand.
Before dealing with this difficulty, some facts should be
recalled. With Louis de Broglie’s thesis (1924), the waveparticle duality had been extended to electrons. Experiments
about the diffraction of electrons by a crystal soon confirmed
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that electrons could indeed behave as waves. In 1926, Erwin
Schrödinger raised this physical idea to the rank of a coherent
theory: wave mechanics. Starting with very different physical
conceptions he found again the results of matrix mechanics,
especially concerning the stationary states of the hydrogen
atom. He hoped that wave mechanics would lead to a theory
closer to classical physics. These hopes were to be disappointed by the ensuing developments: the Schrödinger wave
is not a classical wave, as shown by the essential fact that the
function that describes it is not real-valued but complexvalued. As Max Born showed, the squared modulus of this
function can be interpreted as a “probability of presence.”
Debates between Bohr and Heisenberg
Bohr at once recognized quantum mechanics as a father
recognizes his child. “The whole apparatus of the quantum
mechanics,” he stated in 1925, “can be regarded as a precise
formulation of the tendencies embodied in the correspondence principle.”25 Among all the debates of that time, the
most relevant for us here is the one between Bohr and
Heisenberg. While Heisenberg emphasized mathematical
formalism, Bohr wanted to understand physical concepts and
to explain them in common language. According to him,
whatever the merits of quantum mechanics, the problem of
wave-particle duality was not yet solved.
Heisenberg’s discovery of the indeterminacy relation
took place after long months of intense discussions with
Bohr. In his article,26 he first defined the notion of understanding: “We believe we understand intuitively a physical
theory when we can imagine qualitatively its experimental
consequences, and when at the same time we have recognized
that the application of the theory never implies internal
contradictions.” From the mathematical formalism of
quantum mechanics, he then deduced the indeterminacy
relations: that the product of the imprecisions with which the
position of an electron and its momentum are determined is
of the order of the Planck constant. (It will appear later that
LURÇAT
47
it is in fact a matter of inequality: the product is greater than
or equal to the constant.) He also gave a physical interpretation of the indeterminacy relation, in the case of the state of
lowest energy of the hydrogen atom. To determine the
position of the electron, one must use a microscope illuminated with a light of wavelength shorter than the size of the
electronic orbit (a notion that has no precise meaning in
quantum mechanics, but retains some sense as an order of
magnitude). Therefore we shall have to use gamma rays. The
gamma photon changes the position of the electron
(Compton effect), from which comes an imprecision in the
determination of the position; the product of the imprecisions about the position and the momentum satisfies the
Heisenberg relation.
As will be seen, Bohr criticized this demonstration; but let
us first have a look at both protagonists’ conceptions of
physical knowledge. They clashed during heated discussions
during the winter 1926-27. Unfortunately, “hardly any trace
has survived of their conversations in the documents of that
time.”27 There is, however, in an interview of Heisenberg in
1963, an analysis that agrees with what is known from other
sources:
The main point was that Bohr wanted to take this
dualism between waves and corpuscles as the
central point of the problem, and to say: “That is
the center of the whole story, and we have to start
from that side of the story in order to understand
it.” I, in some way, would say, “Well, we have a
consistent mathematical scheme and this consistent
mathematical scheme tells us everything that can
be observed. Nothing is in nature that cannot be
described by this mathematical scheme.” It was a
different way of looking at the problem because
Bohr would not like to say that nature imitates a
mathematical scheme, that nature does only things
which fit into a mathematical scheme. While I
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would say, “Well, waves and corpuscles are,
certainly, a way in which we talk and we do come
to these concepts from classical physics. Classical
physics has taught us to talk about particles and
waves, but since classical physics is not true there,
why should we stick so much to these concepts?
Why should we not simply say that we cannot use
these concepts with a very high precision,
therefore the uncertainty relations, and therefore
we have to abandon these concepts to a certain
extent. When we get beyond this range of the
classical theory, we must realize that our words
don’t fit. They don’t really get a hold in the
physical reality and therefore a new mathematical
scheme is just as good as anything because the new
mathematical scheme then tells what may be there
and what may not be there. Nature just in some
way follows the scheme.”28
After quoting this interview in his book about Bohr,
Abraham Pais adds: “Having talked countless hours with
Bohr on complementarity, I could imagine that to
Heisenberg’s ‘our words don’t fit’ he would have replied:
‘Our words have to fit, we have nothing else.’”
The difference between both conceptions most clearly
appears here. Heisenberg follows the Galilean tradition when
he imagines a nature strictly obedient to a mathematical
scheme. That can be seen also from his article, when he
explains finally:
The proposition that, for instance, the xcomponent of the velocity is “in reality” not a
number but the diagonal term of a matrix, is
perhaps no more abstract and no more unvisualizable than the statement that the electric field
strengths are “in reality” the time part of an
antisymmetric tensor of the spacetime world. The
phrase “in reality” here is as much and as little
LURÇAT
49
justified as it is in any mathematical description of
natural processes. As soon as one accepts that all
quantum-theoretical quantities are “in reality”
matrices, the quantitative laws follow without
difficulty.29
The ideas of abandoning the classical concepts and giving
up common language logically follow from Heisenberg’s
essential statement that “nature follows a mathematical
scheme,” which repeats the Galilean thesis that the universe
is written in mathematical language. As will be seen, Bohr
maintained and developed the idea that classical concepts and
common language remain necessary.
Thus the current idea of a “Copenhagen interpretation”
of quantum mechanics, supposedly worked out by Bohr and
Heisenberg, should be clarified and even rectified. The discussions between Heisenberg and Bohr were very fruitful for
both of them, and they gave rise to two different interpretations of quantum mechanics.30 The Heisenberg interpretation
continues the Pythagorean and Galilean traditions; it has
been adopted by many theoretical physicists. Bohr’s interpretation breaks with these traditions; it has deep similarities to
the Husserlian critique of the metaphysical foundations of
classical physics.
Complementarity
The close personal collaboration between Bohr and
Heisenberg came to an end in the summer of 1927, when
Heisenberg left Copenhagen to take up a professorship in
Leipzig. In September 1927, an “International Congress of
Physicists” took place in Como, on the centenary of
Alessandro Volta’s death. Bohr gave an address there: “The
Quantum Postulate and the Recent Development of Atomic
Theory.”31 He first characterized the situation of quantum
theory with respect to classical physics: on the one hand it
entails “a fundamental limitation in the classical physical
ideas, when applied to atomic phenomena”; but on the other
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hand, “our interpretation of the experimental material rests
extensively upon the classical concepts.”
Here a brief comment is in order: we are thus, from the
very beginning, at variance with the metaphysical foundations of classical physics. Concepts whose validity is subject to
a fundamental limitation cannot be found in nature as one
finds a character on a page; rather, the fact that they play an
essential role suggests that they are built by physicists to allow
an understanding of physical processes. Their privileged role
stems, inseparably, both from the features of human
knowledge and the nature of physical phenomena.
Bohr then expressed the quantum postulate: “to any
atomic process [it] attributes an essential discontinuity or
rather individuality, completely foreign to classical theories
and symbolized by Planck’s quantum of action” (by “individuality” Bohr means indivisibility).32 Indivisibility is indeed
completely foreign to the metaphysical foundations of
classical physics; in Western science the division of processes
or of objects into as many parts as may be necessary is
generally considered as a self-evident methodological
principle.33
Bohr then explains:
The postulate implies a renunciation as regards the
causal space-time co-ordination of atomic
processes. Indeed, our usual description of
physical phenomena is based entirely on the idea
that the phenomena concerned may be observed
without disturbing them appreciably. . . .Now the
quantum postulate implies that any observation of
atomic phenomena will involve an interaction with
the agency of observation not to be neglected.
Accordingly, an independent reality in the ordinary
physical sense can neither be ascribed to the
phenomena nor to the agencies of observation.
As to the indeterminacy relations, Bohr did not deduce
them from the interaction with the measuring device, but
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51
from classical considerations. In the theory of optical instruments, indeed, there are well-known relations between the
duration of a wave train and the width of its frequency
spectrum, and similarly between the spatial extension of the
train and the indeterminacy of its wave number. Combining
these results with the Planck relation between frequency and
photon energy, and the de Broglie relation between
wavelength and photon momentum, one gets the Heisenberg
relations.
This reasoning is essentially different from Heisenberg’s.
According to Bohr, the indeterminacy relations should not be
explained by the perturbing action of the photon used for
observation, but by the mutual limitation of the possibilities
of definition of the conjugated physical quantities.34 This
point lies at the center of the misunderstandings so often met
with, especially in pedagogical or popular accounts of the
Heisenberg relations. The central idea is the limited validity
of classical concepts, from which follows the limitation of the
possibilities of definition. The approximate validity of the
concepts of coordinates and momentum components allows
us to make picturesque representations of atomic processes.
But the very fact that their validity is only approximate
requires us to be careful when we ask such questions as
“What is the value of the coordinate?” or “What is the value
of the momentum component?” Asking such questions
carelessly means going no further than Galileo’s mathematical nature, with material points having definite values of
their coordinates and momenta. Heisenberg’s proposal takes
up again the idea of mathematical nature, simply replacing
the old mathematical concepts with new ones. Bohr’s
proposal is more fundamental: the meaning of any question
has to be clarified by defining the experimental device that
allows us to ask it concretely. Such is the meaning of an idea
that, from the point of view of the classical tradition, looks
strange and even incomprehensible—the reciprocal nonautonomy of atomic processes and experimental devices.
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The Debate with Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (“EPR”)
In the years following the Como congress, a discussion began
between Bohr and Einstein. The account of it by Bohr is the
most illuminating of his texts.35 I will retain here only some
passages of particular relevance for a study of Bohr’s way
towards phenomenology. In 1935, Einstein, who had become
a refugee in the United States, published an article with Boris
Podolsky and Nathan Rosen entitled “Can QuantumMechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered
Complete?” (commonly known as EPR). Bohr’s answer was
published some months later under the same title.36
The first sentence in the abstract of EPR’s article at once
characterized the philosophical conception of the authors:
“In a complete theory there is an element corresponding to
each element of reality.” This shows how opposite are the
premises on both sides: as we have just seen, Bohr’s quantum
postulate states precisely that atomic processes are indivisible.
Einstein and his collaborators considered the case of two
particles A and B that have interacted in the past, between
which exists such a correlation that the measurement of a
quantity (coordinate or momentum) belonging to A immediately gives the value of this quantity for B. (That such correlations exist is a consequence of quantum mechanics.) EPR
states: “If, without in any way disturbing a system, we can
predict with certainty. . .the value of a physical quantity, then
there exists an element of physical reality corresponding to
this physical quantity.” Now, EPR continues, we can choose
to measure of A either its coordinate or its momentum.
Because of the correlation between A and B, these measurements will give the value of the coordinate or of the
momentum of B. As we did not touch B, we must conclude
that B has indeed determined values of the coordinate and the
momentum. Since according to quantum mechanics this
cannot be, it follows that the quantum-mechanical
description is incomplete.
In his answer, Bohr first outlined the general frame of the
debate. The apparent contradiction raised by EPR, he says,
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53
“in fact discloses only an essential inadequacy of the
customary viewpoint of natural philosophy for a rational
account of physical phenomena of the type with which we are
concerned in quantum mechanics. Indeed the finite interaction between object and measuring agencies conditioned by
the very existence of the quantum of action entails. . .the
necessity of a final renunciation of the classical ideal of
causality and a radical revision of our attitude towards the
problem of physical reality.”
Bohr then shows that the correlations, presented by EPR
in the abstract form of a mathematical expression for the
wave function of the two particles, can be realized by sending
the particles across suitably arranged diaphragms. He comes
at last to the core of the argumentation. The criterion of
physical reality proposed by EPR, he says, “contains an
ambiguity as regards the meaning of the expression ‘without
in any way disturbing a system.’” Of course there is no
mechanical disturbance of the system B. But there is “an
influence on the very conditions which define the possible
types of predictions regarding the future behavior of the
system” (Italics are Bohr’s). And he concludes: “Since these
conditions constitute an inherent element of the description
of any phenomenon to which the term ‘physical reality’ can
be properly attached, we see that the argumentation of the
mentioned authors does not justify their conclusion that
quantum-mechanical description is essentially incomplete.”
He then points out that the experimental procedures
permitting the definition of complementary quantities (such
as coordinate and momentum) are mutually exclusive; this
“provides room for new physical laws, the coexistence of
which might at first sight appear irreconcilable with the basic
principles of science.” The final conclusion then follows: “It
is just this entirely new situation as regards the description of
physical phenomena, that the notion of complementarity
aims at characterizing.”
We have here a further elaboration of ideas already
presented at the Como conference. But the critical passage of
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Bohr’s answer, quoted above, enjoys a special reputation
because John Bell had explained why he did not understand
it37 (One should not forget how fruitful Bell’s lack of understanding of Bohr’s conceptions was: it gave rise to Bell’s
fundamental discovery, perhaps the most important one in
theoretical physics in the second half of the twentieth
century). It may be useful, therefore, to comment briefly on
the italicized passage. In the first sentence, by “the very conditions that define the possible types of predictions regarding
the future behavior of the system” Bohr means the whole
experimental arrangement. The sentence then means:
choosing to measure either the coordinate or the momentum
of A has practical implications, because, in accordance with
this choice, we must modify the experimental device. The
second sentence then could be stated: in the quantum
domain, a relevant description of a real phenomenon is one
that includes the whole experimental arrangement.
The core of the contradiction between Bohr’s conception
and what he calls “the customary viewpoint of natural
philosophy” may appear even better in less formal accounts.
The physicist Robert H. Romer tells us how, as a graduate
student, he had the opportunity to spend an hour with
Einstein.38 “Do you really believe,” Einstein asked him, “that
if you would measure the z component of the spin of an atom
here, that might instantaneously have an effect on the spin of
another atom, perhaps miles away from here?” The question
here is about the correlation between two atomic objects,
already considered in EPR’s article, but in a different form,
one nearer to practically realizable experiments. Probably
inspired by David Bohm’s treatise on quantum mechanics,39
what Einstein had in view was not the coordinates and
momenta of two particles, but the spins of two atoms. To be
even nearer to experiments that have been really carried
through, we shall now speak about the correlated polarizations of two photons, emitted by a calcium atom. The result
of the measurement of polarization of photon A is random,
and the same is true for photon B. But as the two photons
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55
have been emitted by the same atom, when we know the
result of measurement A we can predict with certainty the
result of measurement B, and conversely. What Einstein refers
to, then, is the following paradoxical question: if the two
photons are far apart, how can the result of one of the
measurements have an influence on that of the other one?
The correlation of both experimental results has been
well proved now; for instance, in Gisin’s experiments both
measurement devices are more than 6 miles apart.40 Einstein
had always considered such correlations (which during his
lifetime were never experimentally proved) as unacceptable;
this opinion justified his opposition to quantum mechanics. In
1947, speaking to his friend Max Born about the statistical
interpretation of quantum mechanics (and hence about
quantum mechanics itself), he wrote: “I cannot, consequently,
believe it really, for the theory is incompatible with the
principle according to which physics must represent a space
and time reality, without spooky action at a distance.”41
Let Bohr and Husserl answer Einstein in an imaginary
dialogue:
“I had,” says Bohr, “answered in advance in
general terms in my Como report. What the
quantum postulate says is precisely that quantum
phenomena have a character of indivisibility
completely foreign to classical physics. Of course
one may be surprised at a feature so remote from
our every day experience, but there is nothing
unacceptable here.”
Husserl adds for his part: “When you speak about
atoms (or photons), you have in view small objects
belonging to ‘nature, which is in itself mathematical.’ You do not take into account the way by
which these supposed objects come to our
knowledge. It seems that now, experiment is for
you no longer anything else but a way of checking
the theories. If the raw experimental facts (the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
click of a counter, or a trace in a Wilson chamber)
were mere signs for elements of the mathematical
nature, one could disregard the signs and care only
about the signified. But as I have explained long
ago, it is misleading to think that in physics we are
dealing with ‘true’ physical things, while the
appearances are only signs of these true things. As
I said, ‘the perceived physical thing itself is always
and necessarily precisely the thing which the
physicist explores and scientifically determines
following the method of physics.’42 Now there is
nothing in the experimental results that would
allow us to state that the part of the experimental
arrangement located in A, for instance, deals with
a definite partial object, named the photon A; we
can only say that the complete experimental
arrangement deals with the radiation (two photons
per atom) emitted by calcium atoms. We must
abide by what is or can be actually perceived.”
“This is,” Bohr adds finally, “precisely what you
did at the time of your seminal article about
special relativity, when you discarded Newton’s
absolute space (at that time an essential part of the
supposed mathematical nature) because it has no
counterpart in the experimental methods of
measuring distances and durations.”
To follow Bohr’s and Husserl’s wise advice, we should
mention measurements carried out on the “biphotons”
emitted by calcium atoms. The correlation between the
results recorded by both parts of the experimental
arrangement (photomultipliers and polarizers on both sides)
shows that as far as the polarizations are concerned, the
biphoton is not separable into two photons. This result is
surprising, but it is the case. One of the great merits of EPR’s
article is that it raised the problem of distant correlations, a
striking proof of the originality of quantum phenomena.
LURÇAT
57
Bohr’s Report about His Discussions with Einstein:
Complementarity
This report was published in 1949, in a volume of the
collection “The Library of Living Philosophers” devoted to
Einstein.43 Going back over the successive stages of the
debate, Bohr improved or corrected several of his formulations, nearing a phenomenological approach. First he
reviewed the role of classical concepts, which he considered
essential for the description of experiments and their results
to be communicable to other people. Bohr then critically
examined the interpretation of the indeterminacy relation. “A
sentence like ‘we cannot know both the momentum and the
position of an atomic object,’” he explained:
raises at once questions as to the physical reality of
two such attributes of the object, which can be
answered only by referring to the conditions for
the unambiguous use of space-time concepts, on
the one hand, and dynamical conservation laws,
on the other hand. While the combination of these
concepts into a single picture of a causal chain of
events is the essence of classical mechanics, room
for regularities beyond the grasp of such a
description is just afforded by the circumstance
that the study of complementary phenomena
demands mutually exclusive experimental arrangements.
Let us comment on this passage. Energy and momentum,
subjected to conservation laws, allow a causal description of
atomic processes. In the Compton effect, for instance, the
collision between a photon and an electron—which in the
initial state are supposed to have definite values of energy and
momentum—is the cause of a final state in which both
particles take different directions (“scattering”). This
description allows us to discover a relation, well confirmed by
experiment, between the deflection of the X-radiation and
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
the increase of its wavelength. But on the other hand a spacetime description of the X-beam is necessary for the definition
and measurement of its wavelength; such a description corresponds to experimental situations where diffraction
phenomena, described in terms of waves, can take place.
Bohr’s comment, then, is that these two descriptions require
mutually exclusive experimental arrangements. This allows a
rigorous critique of the quoted sentence (“We cannot know
both”), which implicitly assumes that the particles really have
at any time, as in classical mechanics, determined values of
coordinates and momenta. According to the Galilean
conception of nature as in itself mathematical, one may speak
about “the position (or the momentum) of the particle,”
without wondering whether these words have a precise
meaning. Bohr requires us to become aware that a particle
has such an attribute (coordinate or momentum) only as a
part of a relevant experimental arrangement. As the arrangements relative to coordinate and momentum are mutually
exclusive, the criticized sentence has no rigorous meaning.
This example shows how complementarity requires us to
get rid of the “nature mathematical in itself ” and relate any
statement about atomic objects to the experimental situation
in which it can be tested.
Bohr’s Report about His Discussions with Einstein:
The Observer and Objectivity
The report then described Einstein’s objections to some
quantum statements. In his answers, Bohr always implemented the above stated complementarity principle. He also
dealt with the random aspect of atomic processes (This is an
aspect which can be easily observed if one uses a radioactive
source of weak intensity and a counter: the only reasonable
description of the time sequence of the clicks of the counter
is as a random sequence). According to Dirac, individual
effects of that kind correspond to a choice on the part of
nature. According to Heisenberg, on the other hand, in such
cases “we have to do with a choice on the part of the
LURÇAT
59
‘observer’ constructing the measuring instruments and
reading their recording.” As he quickly refuted both points of
view, Bohr put forward an interesting argument about
Heisenberg: “It is certainly not possible for the observer to
influence the events which may appear under the conditions
he has arranged.”
This sentence briefly settles both sides of the question of
the “observer.” The observer does not create or influence the
phenomenon, but he creates the conditions of the
phenomenon. On the one hand, the laws of atomic processes
are objective, independent of our desires and of fashions (at
least in their essential content); but on the other hand, the
properties of individual atomic objects can only appear when
we, physicists, prepare an experimental arrangement and
record the results. (Or else, when we prepare the
arrangement for the automatic recording of the results.) This
statement is not a dispensable comment: it is inscribed in the
very mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics. The
basic element of the formalism is indeed an amplitude, made
of two abstract vectors; one of them represents the preparation of an experiment, while the second one represents one
of its possible results.44 Without physicists, there is neither
preparation nor results. Of course the experimental results
are objective: if the experiments are correctly and honestly
carried out, their results will be (approximately) the same in
different laboratories and different countries. One can hardly
say, however, that they are independent of human beings,
because without human beings there would be no results.
In that respect, atoms differ from physical objects of
human or astronomical dimensions. One might try to
summarize this essential difference by saying that atoms are
invisible. This formulation, however, is too cursory. Microbes
and remote galaxies seem invisible as well, but they are able
to be seen. To see them, one magnifies their image with a
microscope or a telescope; as Galileo replied to those who
questioned the objectivity of the images given by his
telescope, perhaps lynxes, with their sight better than ours,
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
can see the satellites of Jupiter he had discovered. But atomic
objects make their entrance in the sensible world of appearances thanks to a much more complex and roundabout
process: in a counter or in a Wilson-type chamber, they come
into contact with a macroscopic system in an unstable state,
in which they trigger an avalanche-type process. For the
believer of “nature mathematical in itself,” such a difference
does not deserve any attention: atoms, like stones and stars,
are “in space.” But it is an essential difference from the point
of view of common sense, as well as for the phenomenologist,
whose field of study can be defined as “the method of the
analysis of essences within the sphere of immediate
evidence.”45 Furthermore, the phenomenologist has
something to add here, because for him the essential
difference between the modes of givenness of atoms on the
one hand, and of stones and stars on the other hand, points
out that they belong to different regions of reality.46
The misunderstandings between Bohr and most physicists
stem from his claim of an essential difference between
quantum phenomena and the world of classical physics. The
drama of physics, and more particularly of quantum physics,
is that it never admitted the notion of regions of reality or,
equivalently, the notion of essential differences. When
Galileo annexed sensible appearances to the world of mathematical concepts, he put an obstacle in the way of understanding what physics really is, an obstacle still not overcome.
In his study “Einstein and the Quantum Theory,”
Abraham Pais recalls his conversations with Einstein.47 There
we find one of the most striking examples of a refusal of
essential differences. I quote Pais:
We often discussed his notions on objective reality.
I recall that during one walk Einstein suddenly
stopped, turned to me and asked whether I really
believed that the moon exists only when I look at
it.
LURÇAT
61
There is no question that the moon existed before human
beings were there to look at it; all the same, quantum
mechanics describes phenomena as prepared and observed by
human beings. Abiding by “nature mathematical in itself ”
leads to insuperable problems. It would probably be wiser to
take into account the notion of regions of reality, admitting
that the moon, on the one hand, and atomic objects, on the
other hand, which are given to us in such radically different
ways, belong to different regions.
This being said, one should never forget that without
Einstein and some of his followers (David Bohm, John Bell),
who resolutely and perseveringly opposed Bohr’s views, we
would have perhaps gotten no further than the Bohrian
vulgate of the 1930s and 1940s, according to which there was
essentially no problem. Today mimetism and unanimity are
harmful to science.
Bohr’s Report about His Discussions with Einstein:
The Phenomenon
Finally the report recalled a review of some terminological
questions, made by Bohr in his contribution to the
conference, “New Theories in Physics” (Warsaw, 1938):
In this connection I warned especially against
phrases, often found in the physical literature,
such as “disturbing of phenomena by observation”
or “creating physical attributes to atomic objects
by measurements.” Such phrases, which may serve
to remind one of the apparent paradoxes in
quantum theory, are at the same time apt to cause
confusion, since words like “phenomena” and
“observations,” just as “attributes” and “measurements,” are used in a way hardly compatible with
common language and practical definition.
Both phrases are in fact quotations from Heisenberg. We
have already discussed the first one, and the second one can
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
be found in his article on the uncertainty relations: “The
‘trajectory’ first comes into being by the fact that we observe
it” (“Die ‘Bahn’ entsteht erst dadurch, dass wir sie
beobachten”).48 Bohr then explained how one should understand the words “phenomenon” and “observation:”
As a more appropriate way of expression I
advocated the application of the word
phenomenon exclusively to refer to the observations obtained under specified circumstances,
including an account of the whole experimental
arrangement. In such terminology, the observational problem is free of any special intricacy
since, in actual experiments, all observations are
expressed by unambiguous statements referring,
for instance, to the registration of the point at
which an electron arrives at a photographic plate.
Moreover, speaking in such a way is just suited to
emphasize that the appropriate physical interpretation of the symbolic quantum-mechanical
formalism amounts only to predictions, of determinate or statistical character, pertaining to
individual phenomena appearing under conditions
defined by classical physical concepts.
Here, Bohr defines his rules: break with “nature mathematical in itself ” and use “practical definitions,” dealing with
experiments and their results. Describe them in the language
of classical physics, appropriate to the visible world. Keep to
the definition of the phenomenon: it occurs in conditions
determined by the physicist; it consists of macroscopic
events; it is within the reach of senses, hence it can be
described in “common language.”
Finally, in the use of the notion of attribute, Bohr sees the
danger of forgetting that position, momentum, and other
quantities relating to an atomic object can only be defined in
terms of a method of measurement, which implicitly supposes
LURÇAT
63
an indissoluble bond between object and measuring
apparatus. Of course, it is not always easy to follow these
rules, for an age-old tradition constantly incites us to ask:
Where is the atom? Which path did the photon follow? But
we know that we should answer these questions with
practical definitions: if you want to know which path the
photon has followed, build and use an apparatus designed to
give an answer.
Conclusion
In his Vienna lecture of 1935, Husserl summarized the
situation of modern physical sciences:
Mathematical natural science is a wonderful
technique for making inductions with an efficiency,
a degree of probability, a precision, and a
computability that were simply unimaginable in
earlier times. As an accomplishment it is a triumph
of the human spirit. As for the rationality of its
methods and theories, however, it is a thoroughly
relative one. It even presupposes a fundamental
approach that is itself totally lacking in rationality.
Since the intuitively given surrounding world, this
merely subjective realm, is forgotten in scientific
investigation, the working subject is himself
forgotten; the scientist does not become a subject
of investigation (Accordingly, from this standpoint,
the rationality of the exact sciences is of a piece
with the rationality of the Egyptian pyramids).49
In classical physics, the oversight of the subject manifests
itself in the form of belief in mathematical nature. Galileo
began with the sensible world of appearances; he then
amputated from it of most of its qualities, and, finally, denied
the reality of the suppressed qualities. (There is no essential
difference between the Galilean illusion and the present-day
naturalistic illusion, according to which the essence of subjec-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
tivity lies in the electrochemical processes that take place in
the brain.)50
With quantum physics, the negation of the subject began
to exert its corrosive action within the physics itself. The
classical physicist did not understand the nature of his
science; the quantum physicist does not understand his very
science, and, as we have seen, he is in many cases aware of
this lack of understanding. Locked up in the Galilean prison,
he does not see the key proposed by phenomenology, a key
that Bohr, to a certain extent, rediscovered by himself.
For a long time, atoms could be reached only by speculation, first philosophical, then scientific. It became possible
to perform experiments on atoms only when scientific instruments designed to comply with theoretical notions about
their nature could be made. To make counters and chambers
of various types, one must have the electromagnetism of
Maxwell-Faraday, notions about electrical discharge in gases
or about thermodynamics, and basic notions of atomic
theory. Atoms, molecules, nuclei, particles, which are not
parts of the sensible world of appearances, can have perceptible effects and become accessible to experiment, but only in
a society with a high degree of scientific and technical development. They are given to us in quite a different way than are
stones, trees or stars.
But the essential importance of this difference can be seen
only by getting out of the metaphysical matrix inside which
the growth of classical physics took place. As long as physics
is understood as dealing with “nature mathematical by itself,”
perceptibility, or lack thereof, will continue to be reputed
unessential. In the prevailing way of understanding quantum
phenomena, quantum mechanics is a universal theory, while
classical physics is merely an approximation valid for
processes involving actions large with respect to the Planck
constant. The subjective side of the difference thus falls out of
sight, and both the way to Bohrian conceptions and the way
to phenomenology are barred.
LURÇAT
65
Quantum mechanics is really, as René Thom once put it,
an “intellectual scandal”: a theory successfully used in many
different fields of science and technology, which most people
accept without understanding it. Husserlian phenomenology
proposes a frame in which this paradoxical lack of understanding might be understood, thereby opening a way
towards recovery. It invites us to enlarge our horizons,
especially by going back over the origins of physics (of
modern physics, but not only of it). It suggests that our
irrational attitude towards quantum mechanics is part of a
wider historical fact: the global lack of understanding of the
nature of science, which became an acute problem with the
advent of modern science. In the present situation of the
world, this problem has become particularly urgent.51
I would like to thank Pamela Kraus for her kind linguistic and
editorial help.
1
Declarations of Bohr reported by A. Petersen, The Philosophy of Niels
Bohr, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 19, pp. 8-14 (1963). See also
M. Jammer, The Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics, New York, John
Wiley & Sons, 1974, p. 204.
2
I use the convenient term “atomic” to refer to such physical entities as
atoms, molecules, nuclei, and particles.
3
R.P Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, Cambridge, Mass., MIT
.
Press, 1965, p. 129.
4 R. Penrose, in: R. Penrose, C.J. Isham (eds.), Quantum Concepts in
Space and Time, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986, p. 139.
5
R. Thom, Prédire n’est pas Expliquer, Paris, Flammarion, 1993, p. 86.
6 Conclusive experiments about the violation of Bell’s inequalities have
been made by Alain Aspect and his collaborators in Orsay: A. Aspect, P
.
Grangier, G. Roger, Physical Review Letters, Vol. 47, p. 460 (1981); Vol.
49, p. 1804 (1982). More recently, I have been interested in the experiments of Nicolas Gisin and his group in Geneva: W Tittel, J. Brendel, H.
.
Zbinden, N. Gisin, Physical Review Letters, Vol. 81, p. 3563 (1998); A.
Stefanov, H. Zbinder, N. Gisin, A. Suarez, Physical Review Letters, Vol.
88, p. 120404 (2002). Additionally, I have considered those of Anton
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
LURÇAT
Zeilinger and his group in Vienna: G. Weihs, T. Gennevein, C. Simon, H.
Weinfurter, A. Zeilinger, Physical Review Letters, Vol. 81, p. 5039 (1998).
York, Harper and Row Publ., 1971. I translate from the French translation by Paul Kessler, La Partie et le Tout, Paris Albin Michel, 1972.
7
67
16
Such is the case, for instance, of the philosopher David Z. Albert’s book
Quantum Mechanics and Experience, Cambridge, Mass. and London,
Harvard University Press, 1992; of the historian of science Mara Beller’s
book Quantum Dialogue, Chicago and London, The University of
Chicago Press, 1999; of the physicist Frank Laloë’s article “Do We Really
Understand Quantum Mechanics? Strange Correlations, Paradoxes, and
Theorems,” American Journal of Physics, Vol. 69, pp. 655-701 (2001);
and of the physicist Bernard d’Espagnat’s book Traité de Physique et de
Philosophie, Paris, Fayard, 2002.
8
E. Husserl, article Phenomenology, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 17
(1947) (first publication: 1929). See also E. Husserl, Collected Works, Vol.
8, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht/Boston/London, 1999.
9
Commenting on his answer to Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen, Bohr
writes: “Rereading these passages, I am deeply aware of the inefficiency
of expression which must have made it very difficult to appreciate the
trend of the argumentation.” N. Bohr, “Discussions with Einstein on
Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics,” in: P Schilpp (ed.), Albert
.A.
Einstein, Philosopher-Scientist, New York, Tudor Publishing Company,
1949. This text is reprinted in: N. Bohr, Atomic Physics and Human
Knowledge, New York, John Wiley & Sons, 1958. Also in: J. Kalckar
(ed.), Niels Bohr Collected Works, Vol. 7, Amsterdam, Elsevier, 1996, p.
234. (In the following the Collected Works is abbreviated as BCW
.)
10
E. Husserl, Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften und die
Transzendentale Phänomenologie, §9h. Translation by David Carr: The
Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Evanston,
Northwestern University Press, 1970.
11
E. Husserl, The Crisis §9h. Translation quoted, p. 51. All the analysis in
the following section is a simplified summary of this paragraph of the
Crisis.
12
See E.A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical
Science (1924; revised edition, 1932), Doubleday Anchor Books,
Doubleday & Company, Garden City, N.Y., 1954.
13
E. Husserl, The Crisis, loc. cit.
14
L. Rosenfeld, Niels Bohr, Biographical Sketch, in: J. Rud Nielsen (ed.),
Niels Bohr Collected Works, Vol. 1, Amsterdam, North-Holland Physics
Publishing, 1972, p. XIX.
15
From W Heisenberg, Der Teil und das Ganze, Munich, R. Piper & Co
.
Verlag, 1969, chapter 3. English translation: Physics and Beyond, New
The remark about the frequency determined not only by the initial
state of the atom, but also by its final state can be found in Bohr’s Nobel
Conference (1922): The Structure of the Atom, in BCW Vol. 4, 1977,
,
pp. 467-482.
17
N. Bohr, On the Constitution of Atoms and Molecules, Part I, § 1; in
BCW Vol. 2, 1981, p. 167.
,
18
W Miller, “Semiclassical Methods in Chemical Physics,” Science,
.H.
Vol. 233, pp. 171-177 (1986). T. Uzer, D. Farrelly, J.A. Milligan, P
.E.
Raines, J.P Skelton, “Celestial Mechanics on a Microscopic Scale,”
.
Science, Vol. 253, pp. 42-48 (1991).
19
The interested reader may refer to: M. Jammer, The Conceptual
Development of Quantum Mechanics, New York, Mc Graw Hill, 1966;
B.L. van der Waerden, Sources of Quantum Mechanics, Amsterdam,
North-Holland, 1967; or to A. Pais, Niels Bohr’s Times, in Physics,
Philosophy, and Polity, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991.
20
A translation of this article is given in: D. ter Haar, The Old Quantum
Theory, Oxford, Pergamon Press, 1967.
21
N. Bohr, The Structure of the Atom, above quoted conference; see p.
470.
22
A. Einstein, Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper, Annalen der Physik,
4th series, Vol. XVII, pp. 891-921 (1905). A translation of this article is
given in: H. A. Lorentz, A. Einstein, H. Minkowski, H. Weyl, The
Principle of Relativity, New York, Dover Publications, 1952.
23
This phrase belongs to van der Waerden, see reference 19.
24
W Heisenberg, “Über Quantentheoretische Umdeutung Kinematischer
.
und Mechanischer Beziehungen,” Zeitschrift für Physik, Vol. 33, pp. 879893 (1925). A translation of this article is given in van der Waerden,
reference 19.
25
N. Bohr, “Atomic Theory and Mechanics,” Supplement to Nature,
December 5, 1925, pp. 845-852. In BCW Vol. 5, pp. 273-280.
,
26 W Heisenberg, “Über des Anschaulichen Inhalt der
.
Quantentheoretischen Kinematik und Mechanik,” Zeitschrift für Physik,
Vol. 43, pp. 172-198 (1927). The original text is given in BCW Vol. 6.
,
There is a translation in: J.A. Wheeler, W Zurek, Quantum Theory
.H.
and Measurement, Princeton University Press, 1983.
27
I have used the book by Jagdish Mehra and Helmut Rechenberg The
Historical Development of Quantum Theory, Vol. 1 to 6, New York,
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Springer-Verlag, 1982-2001. See Vol. 6, “The Completion of Quantum
Mechanics, 1926-1941,” chapter 2. The quotation is from page 151.
28
Interview of Heisenberg quoted by A. Pais, Niels Bohr’s Times. .
.quoted above, pp. 309-310.
29
W Heisenberg, “Über den Anschaulischen Inhalt,” article quoted
.
above, end of § 4; translation quoted, p. 82.
30
See the books, already quoted, of J.Mehra and H.Rechenberg, and of
A. Pais, and above all the introduction and comments of J. Kalckar to
Vol. 6 of BCW
.
31
N. Bohr, ”The Quantum Postulate and the Recent Development of
Atomic Theory,” Nature, Vol. 121, pp. 580-590 (1928). Reprinted in:
The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr, Vol. 1, Atomic Theory and the
Description of Nature, Ox Bow Press, Woodbridge, Connecticut, 1987.
Also in: J.A. Wheeler, W Zurek, Quantum Theory and Measurement,
.H.
book quoted above; and Vol. 6 of BCW
.
32
“The inability of the classical frame of concepts to comprise the
peculiar feature of indivisibility, or ‘individuality,’ characterizing the
elementary processes.” N. Bohr, Discussions with Einstein. The passage
quoted is at page 34 of: N. Bohr, Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge.
op. cit.
33
Descartes, for instance, states this principle explicitly in the Regulae ad
Directionem Ingenii (Rule 13), and in the Discours de la Méthode, Second
part.
34
“Indeed, a discontinuous change of energy and momentum during
observation could not prevent us from ascribing accurate values to the
space-time coordinates, as well as to the momentum-energy components
before and after the process. The reciprocal uncertainty which always
affects the values of these quantities is (. . .) essentially an outcome of the
limited accuracy with which changes in energy and momentum can be
defined, when the wave-fields used for the determination of the spacetime coordinates of the particle are sufficiently small.” (N. Bohr, “The
Quantum Postulate,” § 3)
35 N. Bohr, Discussions with Einstein. I have analyzed other aspects of the
Bohr-Einstein debate in my book Niels Bohr et la Physique Quantique,
coll. “Points Sciences,” Paris, Editions du Seuil, 2001.
36
A. Einstein, B. Podolsky, N. Rosen, Physical Review, Vol. 47, pp. 777780 (1935). N. Bohr, Physical Review, Vol. 48, pp. 696-702 (1935). Both
texts are reprinted in: J.A. Wheeler, W Zurek, Quantum Theory and
.H.
Measurement, quoted above. Also in BCW Vol. 7.
,
LURÇAT
69
37
J. Bell, “Bertlmann’s Socks and the Nature of Reality,” Journal de
Physique, Vol. 42, Coll. C2, suppl. n°3, pp. 41-61 (1981). Reprinted in: J.
Bell, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics, Cambridge
University Press, 1987.
38
R.H. Romer, Editorial: John S. Bell (1928-1990), “The Man Who
Proved Einstein was Right,” American Journal of Physics, Vol. 59, p. 299
(1991).
39
D. Bohm, Quantum Theory, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice Hall,
1951.
40
See the articles of the Gisin group quoted above, reference 6.
41
A. Einstein, letter to Max Born, March 3, 1947, in: M. Born (ed.), The
Born-Einstein Letters, London, Macmillan, 1971. French translation by
Pierre Leccia: Albert Einstein, Max Born, Hedwig Born, Correspondance
1916-1955, Commentée par Max Born, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1972.
42
E. Husserl, Ideen zu Einer Reinen Phänomenologie und
Phänomenologischen Philosophie. I. Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die
Reine Phänomenologie (1913), p. 99. Translation by F. Kersten: Ideas
pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological
Philosophy, First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology.
Edmund Husserl, Collected Works, Vol. 2, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff
Publishers, 1982.
43
N. Bohr, Discussions with Einstein, see note 9.
44
This is explained in textbooks, for instance by Feynman: R.P Feynman,
.
R.B. Leighton, M. Sands, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. 3,
Reading, Mass., Addison-Wesley, 1965.
45
E. Husserl, Die Idee der Phänomenologie (1907), p. 14. Translation by
Lee Hardy: The Idea of Phenomenology, Kluwer Academic Publishers,
Dordrecht/ Boston/ London, p. 70.
46
E. Husserl, Ideen zu Einer Reinen Phänomenologie und
Phänomenologischen Philosophie. Drittes Buch: Die Phänomenologie und
die Fundamente der Wissenschaften, ed. by Marly Biemel, Husserliana 5,
The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1971. Translation by Ted E. Klein and
William E. Pohl: Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a
Phenomenological Philosophy, Third Book: Phenomenology and the
Foundations of the Sciences. Edmund Husserl, Collected Works, Vol. 1,
The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1980.
47
A. Pais, Reviews of Modern Physics, Vol. 51, p. 863 (1979). The quoted
passage is at page 907.
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71
48
W Heisenberg, article quoted above (note 26), §3, page 185 of the
.
original text.
Eve Separate
49
Eva Brann
E. Husserl, Die Krisis des Europäischen Menschentums und die
Philosophie, published as an Appendix of Die Krisis der Europäischen
Wissenschaften. Translation by David Carr in The Crisis. Philosophy and
the Crisis of European Humanity, a lecture presented before the Vienna
Cultural Society on May 7 and May 10, 1935.
50
This prejudice had been already aptly criticized by Erwin Straus, Vom
Sinn der Sinne, Ein Beitrag zur Grundlegung der Psychologie, 1st edition,
1935; 2nd edition, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, Tokyo, Springer-Verlag,
1956.
51
Such is the problem that I study in my book De la Science à l'ignorance, Paris, Editions du Rocher, 2003.
In memory of John P. McNulty (1952-2005), an acute and
sensitive reader of great books and a lovely partner in our
seminar conversations, particularly about Paradise Lost.
Contents
1. Is there a Subtext?
2. Satan’s Eve: The Schismatic Pair
3. Eve Separate: The Mother of Modernity
4. Domestic Adam: The Clod Erect
5. Poetic Milton: The Devil’s Party
6. Insipid Heaven, Sapient Hell
7. Mismanaged Monarchy
8. Infected Paradise
9. Original Siring
10. Eve’s Happy Fault and Salutary Fall
11. Wisdom Without Their Leave
For stirring up thought in general and for particular insights I warmly thank
the members of a seminar on Paradise Lost held at St. John’s College on
October 30-31, 2005: Patricia Cook and George Lucas, Margaret and Steve
Crockett, Cecie and Paul Dry, Murray Dry, Emily and Sam Kutler, Gretchen
and Barry Mazur, Joyce Olin and Chris Nelson.
At lunch with Max Kronberg, then one of our juniors (who one and all
read Paradise Lost), I asked him why God made some angels, a third, to be
precise, prone to pride and jealousy. He shot right back: “Because he wanted
all this to happen”—the very answer to justify Milton’s ways to God.
My thanks to my colleagues in Annapolis: Tom May, who told me a
number of interesting things that I’ve made mine below, and Jonathan Tuck,
who looked at the piece with a keen eye.
After completing this piece I co-led a week’s worth of alumni seminars on
Paradise Lost with my colleague David Carl in Santa Fe. In its course pretty
much everything I had noticed was brought on the scene and a lot more
(much of it by my co-leader), which is here incorporated.
Eva Brann is a tutor and former dean at St. John’s College, Annapolis.
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1. Is there a Subtext?
Milton’s Paradise Lost is a poem of such panoramic grandeur
and such human acuteness as may wean one—and has even
weaned me—from a lifelong exclusive Homerophilia. Partly
its attraction is that it is insinuatingly suspect. I keep having
the sense that something is going on that runs right counter
to the overt text. There seems to be a separate, opposed
meaning. Should it be called a hidden agenda, a subtext? On
the supposition of trust—to which I warmly subscribe—what
the words in a book say is what the author means; it is simply
the reasonable faith that the writer knows how to express
himself. So if an attentive reader discerns an under-meaning,
there is in fact a subtext, a second probably more seriously
meant meaning. Such occulted meanings are associated with
esotericism, “insiderism,” the notion that the author speaks
with a forked tongue—one text for the naively simpleminded, another for the initiable. The purpose is to protect
the author from misapprehension by ungifted, and from
persecution by orthodox, readers.
But I don’t think great authors are often in that mode.
The deep matters they raise are too well guarded from overeasy access by their inherent difficulty to want the shield of
obscurantism, while from imputations of heterodoxy there is
really no protection; its odor cannot be masked.
Consequently I have a feeling, just a sense, that something
much stranger than the double intention of a subtext runs
through Paradise Lost: that Milton’s judgments denigrate
what his representations magnify, that his characters
contradict his condemnations and justifications. I have no
idea how much a close study of his published opinions or a
deep penetration into his private thoughts could establish the
truth; I feel terminally baffled by the points I’m about to
make. I keep having the sense that some truth in this cosmic
Christian drama keeps asserting itself to Milton as poet
which, as a theologian, he suppresses. But that notion implies
that the story of this temporal episode within eternity is not
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altogether a made fiction but has the power of unintended
consequences that belongs to living truth; I just don’t know.
So I’ll set out my sense, in brief.
2. Satan’s Eve: The Schismatic Pair
Satan lies in wait, hardly hoping that he “might find Eve
separate.” “Eve separate he spies” (9.422, 424). She has
separated herself from her consort Adam—“split,” as our
young now say. It is a good word, the English for the Greek
verb whence comes “schism,” breaking away. Satan, in turn,
addresses her as “sole wonder” and presents himself as
“single” (9.532, 536). He often speaks of himself as “alone”
(e.g. 2.975, 3.441), but “single” had then as now another
meaning as well: unmarried. And surely he woos her; he is
the primal seducer. But it doesn’t take much. Eve, that
crooked bone, is a born schismatic as Satan is a created one.
Or it is at least a great question just how he and his host of
fallen angels come to be heaven’s splitters, the aboriginal
protestants.
Here is how they are a pair, alike in features that bear the
name of badness in Milton’s book, but are attractive in
description, and what is more have the stamp of approval in
our day.
First then, Eve too wants to be alone. We respect that: “I
need time to myself, I need space.” She is indeed the instigator of her separation from a weakly reluctant Adam. “Eve
first” speaks up: “Let us divide our labors”—she is the
inventor if not of the division of labor then of separate work
spaces!—“Sole Eve, associate sole” he answers, meaning
more than he knows, the clueless man, but then he gets it:
“but if much converse perhaps / Thee satiate, to short absence
I should yield”—though she has pleaded efficiency rather
than surfeit (9.205 ff.). He, the “patriarch of mankind,”
lectures her on free will: “O woman. . . .” But “Eve / persisted,
yet submiss.” It is what we have learned to call the
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passive/aggressive mode, the underdog’s determined selfdefense.
She is, like Satan, a dissimulator who keeps some things
private. For she has had a week to ponder Satan’s night
visitation in which, “Squat like a toad” he whispered suggestions in her ear (I imagine the left, for this is surely a parody
of the impregnating Holy Spirit who comes to the Virgin by
the right ear in many late Medieval paintings) and manages to
“raise / At least distempered, discontented thoughts” (4.806).
Thus she surely has more in mind than mere efficiency in
weeding Paradise as she separates from her husband. As she
will later say: “Was I to have never parted from thy side? / As
good to have grown still there a lifeless rib” (9.1153).
There is a whole list of similarities of situation and
likenesses of character between the fallen angel and the
woman, for which I could cite book and line: Both are kept
at a remove from their God, he by the Son, she by her mate.
His rebelliousness is proudly asserted, her resistance submissively masked, but both have that in them that is ready to
abrogate obedience: “Our great Forbidder” she calls God,
and Satan calls him “the Threat’ner” (9.815, 687). Satan is a
brilliant sophist on the ancient model, but his clever proof to
her that a God who inspires fear is no God, so that her “fear
itself of death removes the fear” (9.702), is matched by her
clever musings: “good unknown, sure is not had, or had / And
yet unknown, is as not had at all. / In plain then, what forbids
he but to know, / Forbids us good, forbids us to be wise? /
Such prohibitions bind not” (9.756).
She is willful, restless, venturesome, poignant in her
lapse, proud as the mother of mankind. Satan is willfulness
incarnate, a great engineer, the original Adventurer (10.440),
both as explorer and in the older sense of undertaking grand
ventures, such as the development of Hell, the colonizing of
earth, and the sponsoring of the great highway that makes
Hell and this world “one continent of easy thoroughfare”
(10.392). He is, in fact, a Promethean figure, a god at odds
with his Chief, who is a patron of invention and, in his
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perverse way, a benefactor of mankind (Sec. 1). He is the
instigating cause of the earth’s obliquity, that skewing of the
terrestrial pole which brings us seasonal variety and moral
diversity; he is the ultimate reason for human mortality and
the succession of generations (how on earth would Eden have
held all the promised increase of immortals?), in short, of
history. There is true pathos in the racking pain of his
inability to love: About to spoil Paradise, he curses familiarly
but eerily: “O hell!” he says, seeing the bright spirits, the
humans, “whom my thoughts pursue with wonder and could
love” (4.358). There is real candor in his confession of
unwillingness to repent: He concludes a meditation on his
certain relapse were he to submit with a chillingly final
choice, “Evil be thou my good” (4.110). And there is residual
receptivity to the influence of innocent grace: Seeing Eve,
alone, “that space the Evil One abstracted stood / From his
own evil, and for the time remained / Stupidly good” (9.463).
Satan has been said to be modeled on Iago, literature’s
most notorious bad man. They are both, to be sure, racked
with resentment for being passed over by their superiors, but
there is an enormous difference in their stature: Iago suffers
meanly and mutely, Satan grandly and candidly—at least by
and to himself.
Eve cannot match his stature, but there are two capstone
transgressions in which they are nearly equal. One is the drive
to explore, experiment, experience—as he sails through the
uncreated void to explore the created world, she dreams of
flying with him to behold the earth in its immensity, the first
human to ride the skies. The second is the desire for godhead:
He thinks himself God’s equal, and she, eating, has Godhead
in her thoughts (9.790).
3. Eve Separate: The Mother of Modernity
In short, they are the original moderns, he in God’s universe,
she in our world. For there is a generic modernity: asserted
individual will; unbounded experimental science (whose root
meaning is, wonderfully, the same as that of schism: dividing,
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cutting off); chameleon-like adaptability (Lucifer-Satan is a
master of transformations, willed and imposed: cherub, toad,
serpent; Eve too undergoes some pretty dramatic changes);
future-oriented temporality (here Satan and the Son
cooperate, one to make sin endemic, the other to make
salvation attainable); and godlike creativity (such is attributed
to man by Pico della Mirandola in that manifesto of protomodernity, the “Oration on the Dignity of Man” of the
1480’s: Adam, man, has no fixed being; rather “our
chameleon” assumes by his own free will whatever form he
selects, and so he can be as God).
But this perennial possibility is realized predominantly in
historical modernity, our epoch, within which we are
temporal compatriots. We are indeed the progeny of Eve, for
with her all its deeper characteristics originate, above all
narcissistic individualism, the thirst for liberation, the lust for
experience, a hunger for equality, and a drive to resolve all
mysteries, “to leave no problem unsolved,” as a founder of
modernity puts it (Vieta, Analytical Art, 1591).
There is a startling story Eve tells Adam, a story of her
first awakening into consciousness (4.449). “With unexperienced thought” she goes to a smooth lake, bends over it—and
falls in love with what she sees, pining for her own image
“with vain desire”; she is the first self and image worshiper.
When she first sees Adam she doesn’t much like him; he is
“less fair, / less winning soft, less amiably mild.” She runs
away; Adam tells her that she is part of him, body and soul,
and she yields. Her first love is herself—even before Satan
leaps into Paradise. Is self-love ever innocent?
Now she gets what she is longing for, experience and
experiences, discovery by trying things out and stimulation by
affects deliberately aroused. She has eaten of the Tree of the
Knowledge of Good and Evil, which the Tempter calls
“Mother of science” (9.680). She has, instantly, grown “mature
in knowledge.” She knows what to call her fascination:
“Experience, next to thee I owe, / Best guide;” “thou. . .givest
access. . .” to secret wisdom (9.807). And in short order she
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invents novelties now well known to us; this wisdom of hers
has much of applied science, particularly political and
psychological know-how. She tells an outright, very politic
lie, the original lie on earth: She figures first that she might
keep the secret of the fruit so as to “render me more equal,
and perhaps, / A thing not undesirable, sometime / Superior;
for inferior who is free?” (9.823). After this very contemporary manifesto of family politics, she reconsiders to herself:
What if I do die, as promised, and he takes on another Eve?
Better to die together. But to him she cleverly claims that her
“growing up to godhead” was all done for his sake, and that
he must join her “lest thou not tasting, different degree /
Disjoin us, and I then too late renounce / Duty for thee, when
fate will not permit” (9. 883). A barefaced, self-serving lie!
Of course she has already invented drug-taking and
having ecstatic experiences, and instant knowledge; experiential learning too will be her invention (10.967). Shortly she
will propose birth-control—“willful barrenness”—and
suicide to him (10.987, 1001, 1042). Ask where all the snares
and escapes of our time come from, and the answer is: Eve.
To him she calls herself the “weaker sex” (9.383), for that is
what he thinks, but her submissiveness hides a huge ambition:
Satan gets to her by addressing her as Queen of the Universe,
Empress of the World, “a goddess among gods, adored and
served” (9.547). It cannot be a really meek, dependent
woman who glories in such appellations; it is, after all, what
domineering men want as well. Recall that the primary, the
horror-inspiring transgression of Mr. Kurtz in dark Africa is
that he accepts worship and human sacrifice as a god, and he
is a very demon of force. If anything she’s a born outlaw: To
the Serpent she interprets paradisaical life as one prohibition,
and for the rest “we live / Law to ourselves, our reason is our
law” (9.653).
But from one perspective she’s no outlaw nor a rebel
either. Our political progenitor, Locke, points out that
rebellare means “to go back to a state of war,” and that the
true rebel is the contract-breaking tyrant, not his imposed-on
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subjects; they are revolutionaries (Second Treatise, para. 226).
Now Satan can claim that his monarch has in fact revoked, if
not a social contract, then a heavenly understanding, and Eve
does claim that the single prohibition is irrational in principle
and defectively promulgated: She knows neither why the tree
is forbidden, nor what the punishment means, nor when it
will be imposed.
To return to my initial perplexity: There is no question
that the above is a skewed version of these events, that Milton
expresses more respect for Adam than for Eve, that he is not
unsympathetic when he allows Adam to call her “that bad
woman” (10.837), that Satan is the Evil One. There are
formulaic explanations for my unhistoric perspective:
Milton’s poem sets out Christian doctrine, not necessarily
orthodox but fervent; I am a post-Christian modern who
believes that the soundest part of modernity is rooted in
pagan philosophy. So what seems pernicious to him seems
admirable to me. Or, alternately, Milton was in fact a revolutionary, a republican, a defender of regicide, so naturally he
has some sympathy for the adverse party in heaven and on
earth. Both explanations have plausibility, and neither
resolves the perplexity: How do Satan and Eve come to be
such exact types of modernity? Is our world Satanic or was
Hell Luciferic, “light-bringing”?, meaning: is our present
condition the consequence of a devilish seduction—as
Goethe’s Faust sells his soul to the devil for the boon of
restless experience and grand enterprise—or is it really the
other way round: that Hell was from its founding the place
of enlightenment and progress—and we moderns found that
out?
4. Domestic Adam: The Clod Erect
And then, who is really dominant in the Original Pair? The
splendor of Adam’s looks is conveyed in sonorous lines. Satan
sees the pair, distinguished from the other creatures by being
“erect and tall, / God-like erect, with native honor clad / In
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naked majesty. . .though both / Not equal, as their sex and not
equal seemed; / For contemplation he and valor formed, / For
softness she and sweet attractive grace, / He for God only, she
for God in him: / His fair large front and eyes sublime
declared / Absolute rule” (4.288).
Here is what is odd. That Adam is a well-made creature
of fine bearing and natural dignity, a good man and loving
husband, is unquestionable. But not contemplation, nor
valor, nor absolute rule are in fact his forte. He is, to put it
plainly, an upright klutz, one of those amiable, fine males a
female might well cling to, well knowing she could run circles
around him—and so Eve does.
As for contemplation. In that wonderful interlude, Books
5-7, the archangel Raphael is sent to Paradise to warn and
instruct Adam—Adam, not Eve, who sits listening “retired in
sight” (8.41), having served the angel a paradisaical meal,
which the angel, hilariously, falls to and begins “with keen
dispatch / Of real hunger, and concoctive heat / To transubstantiate” (5.437). She listens on the sidelines to the story of
Satan’s war and defeat. To be sure, it all comes too late; he
has already leaped into Paradise and entered her imagination
in a dream—part of Heaven’s mismanagement I’ll talk of
below. But when Adam’s “countenance seemed / Entering on
studious thoughts abstruse” (8.39), that is, when the
theological account of Heaven’s battles and earth’s creation
are done and the astronomical part begins, she goes off to her
gardening “not as not with such discourse / Delighted, or not
capable her ear / Of what was high,” but preferring to hear it
from her husband; the angel, though gracious, is too stiff for
her.
Here I must interject two observations: first, the question
Adam asks that sets off Raphael’s account of hypothetical
rational astronomy is a cumbrous version of one asked him by
Eve the night before, together with assurances of submission:
“God is thy law, thou mine,” she begins and then gives the
loveliest speech of companionable conjugality imaginable:
“With thee conversing I forget all time / All seasons and their
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change, all please alike” (4.637)—to end it all abruptly by
posing the most embarrassing question of celestial mechanics:
“But wherefore all night long shine these, for whom / This
glorious sight, when sleep has shut all eyes?” She wants to
know nature’s purpose, and by implication, who’s at the
cosmic center. He gives a confidently ignorant answer, but
knows enough to ask the angel: “Something yet of doubt
remains. . . .” When he computes the world’s magnitude (he
actually can’t), how is it that the firmament with its
numberless stars seems to roll through spaces incomprehensible (he’s a natural Ptolemaean, as are we all) “merely to
officiate light / Round this opacous earth” (8.13)—same
question, more Latinate vocabulary.
Second, Raphael gives, oddly, the Catholic answer. The
preface by Bishop Osiander to Copernicus’s On the
Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543) tries to neutralize
the heliocentric revolution by ranking it as merely an alternative hypothesis, a mathematical simplification devised in
Plato’s phrase “to save the appearances,” that is, to mathematicize the phenomena. Raphael tells Adam, never mind
fact, “rather admire.” God has left his heavenly fabric to
human conjecture and disputing, “perhaps to move / His
laughter at their quaint opinions wide / Hereafter when they
come to model heav’n / And calculate the stars . . .to save
appearances” (8.75). So much for mankind’s first and
grandest and most theologically fraught science: “What if the
sun / Be center of the world. . .?” Of course the angel knows,
as we know from Copernicus, that when astronomical
obliquity enters the world after the fall, when equator and
ecliptic come apart at an angle, so that the sun appears to
spiral up and down the earth making seasons, the more
economical way to effect this phenomenon is to push the
earth’s pole askew. Yet even then Milton insists only that
“Some say he bid the angels turn askance / The poles of earth
twice ten degrees and more. . .some say the sun was bid turn
reins” (10.668) on the now-skewed elliptic—c. 23° 51', in
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fact—which obliquity produced corruption and pestilence
and variety of season and weather for us.
And Adam, the biddable, is “fully” satisfied when
enjoined to be “lowly wise,” to descend to “speak of things at
hand, useful.” For him “experience,” which widens Eve’s
horizon, teaches “not to know at large of things remote”
(8.173); he is content to be temperate in knowledge. So much
for contemplation, which means, after all, taking a wide point
of view, theorizing. Eve is—until cowed by her lapse—more
insatiable for wisdom than that, and a keener inquirer.
Now as for valor. We hear of his proneness to passion,
which he is warned against by Raphael (8.635), and of his
pusillanimity—he has to be told to have “self-esteem”
(8.572), that contemporary buzzword—and he is, though
inconsistently, upbraided by Eve for his weakness in letting
her separate from him (10.1155) and allowing Satan to
prevail. Michael, sent to comfort Adam, goes so far as to
answer thus his accusation that the beginning of man’s woe is
by women: “From man’s effeminate slackness it begins”
(11.634). This sedentary “domestic Adam” (9.315) has a
stodgy but infirm virtue that is no match for mobile,
venturesome Eve’s spirit of independence. In the end it is he
who cannot bear to be without her; she is, after all, one of his
bones. So much for valor and for authority: “Was she thy
God?,” the “sovran Presence” asks him (10.145); the very
thought had occurred to Eve (9.790). But at the least she is
used to having the final word, one way or another: The
“patriarch of mankind” has spoken “but Eve persisted, yet
submiss, though last. . .” (9.376)—a grimly hilarious line
written by a two-timed husband.
And he’s slow (though sweet) and inattentively clueless.
Eve has told him the tale of her self-love and how he at first
repelled her. When he regales Raphael, at the end of his
visitation, with the story of his own creation and of Eve’s, it
turns out he hasn’t listened at all: He thinks she ran from him
out of coyness; she “would be wooed, and not unsought be
won” (8.503). And when the great disaster has come, and
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Eve, doomed, offers him the fruit, why does he not, simple
man, think beyond the two options of dying with her or
getting a new Eve? Why doesn’t he refrain from eating and
intercede for her?
Clearly “domestic” and “dominant” are at odds here—
maybe it is the reality of the Adamic character, that ensouled
clod of earth, that is prevailing.
5. Poetic Milton: The Devil’s Party
Much stranger things are to come, so this might be a moment
to consider theological poetry. Blake says that Milton wrote
in fetters of Heaven and at liberty of Hell because “he was a
true poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it” (The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell). I don’t know what he meant,
but I think I know what it means: The devil is—or wants to
be—autonomous, a rule unto himself (as Eve thinks they are
in Paradise); he is literally a heretic—for “heresy” is a Greek
word that means “choosing,” or as we redundantly say,
“choosing for oneself.” In the realization of self-will and selfrule, he becomes innovative. Novelty is not new with him:
Heaven starts it, knowing the possible consequences, which
are therefore not wholly unintended. So also is this poet a
maker of newness: David’s Muse, Milton’s first muse, is to
sing “Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme” (1.16; not
the first one, though. Jon Tuck tells me that the line comes
from Ariosto). His Raphael tells Adam “The secrets of
another world, perhaps / Not lawful to reveal” (5.569).
Milton writes a new epic, not “sedulous by nature to indite /
Wars” and other old heroic and chivalric shenanigans (9.27),
yet his great interlude is a magnificent war poem, though
perhaps too embarrassing to Heaven to be revealed—Milton
reveals it. We might well ask: Where does the poem leave
Scripture? The poem is far more revealing; is it revealed? It is
far more visible, a huge, magnificent moving picture, a blind
poet’s telling—and showing—“Of things invisible to mortal
sight” (3.54), “lik’ning spiritual to corporeal forms” (5.573).
Is the imaging of spirits permissible? It is “in nightly visita-
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tions unimplored” dictated to him by his second Muse, his
“celestial patroness” Urania (9.21), though a heavenly, not, as
far as I know, an orthodox source. To be sure, Milton denies
that he means the pagan Muse of Astronomy: “The meaning,
not the name I call, for thou / Nor of the muses nine” (7.5).
But surely this is equivocation. The inspiration for his books
on the cosmos comes from the Greek source of enthusiasm
(literally from entheos, the god within), one “of the muses
nine,” though he disclaims her. And so this epic does not
replace but absorbs pagan epic and pagan science, and puts
Milton in a skewed position of accepting the splendor and
deriding the culture of pagan hell (see Sec. 6., below).
To give a name to the poet’s peculiar propensity: It is a
form of Manicheanism, the teaching that evil is real and
incarnable. In a long tradition, the Neoplatonists and their
Christian partisans held that badness is nonbeing, defect of
being. For example, Adam is, understandably, a confused
Neoplatonist: When he loses his wonted composure, he
nastily calls Eve in turn “serpent,” and “this novelty on earth,
this fair defect” (10.867), not sure whether a feminine being,
that “rib / Crooked by nature” is lacking in something or
oversupplied with “pride / And wand’ring vanity.” Milton’s
Satan has no such doubts: To him his evil being is real and is
accepted, no, vaunted as such, just as the darkness of hell is a
paradoxical illumination. Surely the poet who produces a
brilliant personification of evil is a perhaps unwitting,
perhaps half self-admitted follower of Mani, not exactly of
his doctrine but of the Manichean propensity for the personification of the kingdom of darkness.
There is another huge work that makes a novel tale of a
sacred story. As Milton had expanded the second and third
chapters of Genesis, comprising that book’s two alternative
accounts of the creation of man, into a huge epic, so Thomas
Mann developed his novel, Joseph and His Brothers, from
twenty-six chapters in Genesis, telling the story of Jacob and
his sons into nearly two thousand pages; he was executing a
plan conceived by Goethe. But Mann has his “irony” to
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extenuate this dubious and so doubly engaging enterprise. He
hovers above faith, and his ultimate belief is in the allusive
imaging and reference-fraught story-telling itself.
Perhaps the poet’s—and this poet’s—indefeasible partisanship for the devil, that sets him “more at liberty” when
writing of Hell, is in just this re-creative activity: Satan thinks
he might not be a creation but an original, a self-created being
(5.860). Poets too want to be original, themselves creators, if
not of themselves, of their worlds. It makes them great
iconodules (image-servers), for they love their creatures.
Iconodulia, a term from the old iconoclastic (image-breaking)
battles culminating in the eighth and ninth centuries, was by
the opponents understood as idolatry (idol-worship), praying
to, not through, the icon. The charge goes way back, to that
ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy spoken of in
Plato’s Republic, where images are devices to distance us
from Being by ensnaring us in the desire for sights (601 ff.).
Iconodulia is a sin of which Satan, the proudly unattached
leader of that “atheist crew” (6.370) is not guilty. But who
can say that blind Milton did not love his invisible universe,
made by him and made visible to himself, better than the real
world made by God and made invisible to him, and, perhaps,
better than the ultimately invisible God? He does not, in any
case, succeed in making God lovable—or his Son interesting:
“Hail Son of God,. . .thy name / Shall be the copious matter
of my song / Henceforth . . .” (2.412), he says after two
terrific books about Satan. But the “copious matter” of the
remaining ten is not the Son either, but more Satan—and Eve.
I’ll be concentrating on the problematic vision and
thought-raising qualities of Milton’s poetry, so I want to
make here a declaration of love to the texture of words
through which these are delivered: the steady English beat of
the more than ten thousand iambic lines with their ever
varied stresses in the hyper-English produced by the mixed
Latinate and Anglo-Saxon diction—which with a little
practice begins to read like mankind’s original language.
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6. Insipid Heaven, Sapient Hell
The first two books of Paradise Lost are of paradise lost, of
hell gained. Heaven itself comes on the scene only later,
mostly at war. And this is well, because it is not attractive. I
recall Bernard Williams saying in an encyclopedia article on
death that Heaven’s eternity must be boring—all that
everlasting monotonic intoning. (In fact, in Milton’s Paradise
they play harps and occasionally sing in parts. Bach knew
better; witness the glorious victory march-by in heaven on the
words of Revelation 12:10, “Now is the salvation and the
power and realm and the might” celebrating the Son’s defeat
of Satan [Cantata fragment 50]). So the notion of celestial
tedium is wrongheaded, for incorporeal substances don’t
experience the weariness of the bodily senses. What is
offputting in the poetry of heaven is God’s ultimate invisibility, for it is simply mystifying how formless light can by
mere effulgence in fact produce any shaped copy, be it an
ethereal image—the Son (6.680)—or an embodied one—
man. I suppose there’s plenty of theology about it. In any
case, God is heard out of invisible obscurity: “Glorious
brightness. . ./ Throned inaccessible” (3.375); to Satan it
looks like “Thick clouds and dark” (2.263), to Heaven it’s a
“golden cloud” (6.28); sometimes God speaks vengefully,
from a “secret cloud” (10.32).
He often speaks peremptorily and on one occasion even
with pointedly offensive vulgarity, when he promises to seal
up hell: “See with what heat these dogs of hell advance” —as
if they were bitches. He has suffered them to enter and
possess earth, to puzzle his enemies, “That laugh, as if transported with some fit / Of passion,” thinking that it has not
happened on purpose. No, they were called up on purpose,
“My hell-hounds, to lick up the draff and filth” of man’s
polluting sin, so that gorged they might nigh burst “With
sucked and glutted offal” (10.625)—infernal vacuum
cleaners. In a human, that’s surely gross talk.
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But Heaven itself, with its unvarying obedience, is
vapid—not surely to inhabit but, unavoidably, to read about.
It is the poetic problem of goodness, which is, ipso facto,
even-tenored, uneventful, not the stuff of intense drama or
vivid imagery. It does not have the snags and hollows that
throw shadows and catch our interest: Perfect globes are
intellectually perfectly beautiful, but who wants to look at
their image for long? It is why newspapers never report that
two hundred and eighty million people went to do
respectable work and came home to enjoy their families, but
always that someone or other killed, raped or stole. So
Heaven is not interesting until there is civil war, and even
then the so easily victorious Son fades against the brilliant,
beaten Adversary, whose legions the heavenly general sweeps
so easily over the brink into chaos, like Indians driving herds
of buffalo over cliffs into canyons. Moreover, who can
exonerate Heaven from the charge that in its war was born
the notion that might makes right—and the hoary justification that right is in this case might.
As if to make up for its Chief ’s invisibility and its
remaining inhabitants’ spotlessness, Milton makes heaven
and its furniture baroquely opulent. The Son’s war chariot
with its four Cherubic faces and eyes all over, made of beryl,
crystal, sapphire, amber and all the colors of the rainbow, is
extravagantly strange (6.753); there is no such vehicle even in
Revelation, one of the Biblical sources for the war in Heaven
(12:7). This is not the style of Hell.
It is, to begin with, a place of somber and restrained
beauty. Opulence calls for Corinthian capitals, which are, as
Palladio says, the most beautiful and elegant of the orders of
columns. Pandemonium, however, rising “like an exhalation,
with sound / Of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet / Built
like a temple” (1.711)—a pagan temple, of course—employs
the severe and chaste Doric order with a golden architrave,
for gold is mined in hell. Mulciber, Greek Hephaestus, the
most gifted of the pagan gods, is the architect. The inside is
illuminated by starry lamps.
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It is a People’s Palace, and there a consultative parliament
is held, a large inclusive synod (6.156) such as is never called
in monarchic heaven. Hell is a sort of democracy. Its
presiding chief was once Latin Lucifer, the “Light-bearer,” so
called for his former brightness (7.131), but in my anachronistic ear there sounds also the word Enlightenment). Now he
is Hebrew Satan, the “Adversary” and Greek Devil, diabolus,
the “Accuser.” He is a revolutionary, a “Patron of Liberty,”
not only in seeming, as Abdiel, the counterrevolutionary
angel, claims (4.958), but in fact, as one who has been made
“free to fall” (3.99), has claimed that right for himself, and
finds his companions worthy of liberty and honor (6.420).
Thus he is termed by his lieutenants “Deliverer from new
lords, leader to free / Enjoyment of our right as gods”
(6.451). He has a bill of accusations against his tyrant, not
unlike the one found in our Declaration of Independence; he
accuses God of enforcing vassalage, “Forced hallelujahs”
(2.243), and, ironically but truly, of requiring image-worship
(5.784) in interposing the Son, his image, between himself
and his angels. Interposition is indeed the sub-theme of
Milton’s justification—strange term—of the ways of God to
man: the Son as intermediary between God and the angels
and as intercessor in man’s behalf, Adam as God’s representative to Eve and interpreter to her of Heaven’s messages, and
even Satan as Hell’s emissary to earth. This God is a deus
absconditus whose ways are incessantly indirect.
Satan is, moreover, a real leader, intrepid, of unconquerable will (2.106). He heartens and rallies his troops, and
they respond to him with trusting enthusiasm (1.663),
rejoicing in their “matchless chief ” (1.486). He is strangely
like the Son in willing to volunteer for fatally dangerous
service to his people—to go through Chaos where no devil
wants to go, to break out of by now homey hell to explore
new lands for his people’s occupation (2.402); thus he is
raised to “transcendent glory” (2.427).
Proud, rebellious, and monarchical in his spirit though he
is, he knows how to assure his loyal band of their equality: “O
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friends” (6.609) he addresses them at their great crisis, but
even before his magnificent speeches to them were all about
equality—their equality in freedom if not in power. For as
Abdiel, the Tory, points out, Lucifer is himself a prince. But
he presents himself as primus inter pares, first among equals:
No one more often utters the word “equal” linked with
“free”: “or if not equal all, yet free, / Equally free; for orders
and decrees / Jar not with liberty, but well consist. / Who can
in reason then or right assume / Monarchy over such as live
by right / His equals, if in power and splendor less, / In
freedom equal?” (5.791). And as he speaks, so, it appears, he
rules in the spirit of our Declaration: that all angels are
created equal, that they are endowed, Satan would say by
their heavenly nativity, with certain inalienable rights, among
which one is liberty—that is, their freedom derives from an
equality of rights.
From Satan’s politics to his endowments: He sits exalted,
“by merit raised / To that bad eminence” (2.5). He is a
sublime psychologist and the only wit, a mordant one, in this
high drama—except of course for Milton himself, whose wit,
insinuated into the action through his whiplash enjambments
and his fork-tongued puns, is borrowed by Satan who can
have no insight or wit but his maker’s. In Satan’s “Indeed,”
when Eve naïvely tells of their perfect freedom in heaven
except for the forbidden tree (9.656) you can hear the supercilious Englishman. When he tells Hell how he seduced Man
he adds, with a witty contempt: “with an apple;” it’s a sheer,
wickedly derogatory invention; I don’t think it was just a
juicy apple, though Satan’s put-down prevailed. Here is a
pertinent ditty (see Sec. 11.) from the early 15th century:
And all was for an appil,
An appil that he tok.
Ne hadde the appil taken ben,
The appil taken ben,
Ne hadde never our lady
A bene heven quene.
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Blessed be the time
That appil taken was.
Therefore we moun singen
‘Deo gracias.’
But Satan is more than smartly cynical; he is a great
inventor and engineer. The manufacture of that tremendous
contrivance, the cannon, which he builds in heaven, that
devilish engine which nearly routs the heavenly host in the
most tremendous cannonade I’ve ever read of, is vividly
described by Raphael in Book 6. Like Persian Xerxes, who cut
a mountain off from its mainland (Herodotus 7.22), he
refigures nature: His offspring Sin and Death cut through
Chaos “by wondrous art / Pontifical” (that is, bridge-building,
10.312) to join Hell to Paradise.
But back to Hell itself, a place of relative harmony: “O
shame to men! Devil with devil damned / Firm concord
holds, men only disagree” (1.496). It is a place of music, of
“partial,” that is, of complex polyphonic sound, as contrasted
with the simple celestial unisons, I imagine. It is also “partial”
as being of the devil’s party, of their heroic deeds, and it takes
with “ravishment / The thronging audience” (1.552).
There is, above all, the sweetest soul-charming discourse:
high reasoning “Of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate,
/ Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute.” Round and
round it goes as do conversations in a serious college: “And
found no end” (1.560). They talk, as do we on earth,
philosophy: of passion and apathy, of good and evil, of
happiness and final misery. They have the experience for it; it
is not talk abstracted from life but real inquiry.
“Vain wisdom all, and false philosophy,” this passage
concludes. That is Milton’s way with Hell and the devils. It
and they are depicted gloriously and dismissed ignominiously.
It happens over and over. The representation raises what the
judgment crushes.
Hell is altogether puzzling. Following an old Patristic
tradition, Milton has all the fallen angels assume, as devils,
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the form of the pagan gods, some Levantine and horrible,
some Greek and graceful, all vivid (1.375) and more distinctively individual than ever were the loyal archangels. All are
beautiful, and though their looks deteriorate, as angels they
can never be all bad in soul or all spoiled in form (1.483).
Satan, as I have imagined him, is the aboriginal modern,
not only in his politics, but perhaps most of all when he is at
home in hell where he asserts a modern hallmark: subjectivity, solipsistic ideation, inner-world creation: “The mind is
its own place, and in itself / Can make a heav’n of hell, or hell
of heav’n. / What matter where, if I be still the same. . .?”
(1.254). But he is not only a post-Christian, he is also a pagan
pre-Christian; he encompasses the human salvational
episode, coming before and after as it were. As G. K.
Chesterton says: “It is profoundly true that the ancient world
was more modern than the Christian” (Orthodoxy, Ch. 9).
As fallen Lucifer, in Hell Satan belongs to the Greek crew,
though more as hero than god—albeit as god too. For like the
Christian God he gives birth, though not to a Son but to a
daughter, and like Zeus he gives birth through his head, not
to wise Athena but to canny Sin. Yet primarily he is like the
Iliad’s Achilles, first in battle, and offended by a sense of
injured merit (1.98). The relation is, however, perverted for
the occasion, as displayed in Satan’s adaptation of Achilles’
words in Hades: “I would wish rather to be a slave in service
to another. . .than to be ruler over all the dead” (Odyssey
11.488). For Satan, at home in Hell, says instead: “Better to
reign in Hell than serve in Heaven” (1.263); it is how he
proudly counters good Abdiel’s “Reign thou in Hell thy
kingdom, let me serve / In heav’n God ever blest” (6.183).
Milton, to be sure, disowns Achilles: His is an “argument
/ Not less but more Heroic than the wrath / Of stern Achilles”
(9.13). And he most assuredly disowns the philosophizing of
Hell. In Paradise Regained Satan advertises ancient wisdom as
the final temptation of Jesus, sounding much like the
catalogue of a Christian college trying to persuade applicants
that a liberal education should include Greek philosophy: “All
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knowledge is not couch’d in Moses’ law, the Pentateuch or
what the prophets wrote, / The Gentiles also know, and write,
and teach / To admiration, led by Nature’s light” (P.R. 4.225).
So “To sage philosophy next lend thine ear, / From Heaven
descended to the low-rooft house / Of Socrates” (4.272).
Jesus rejects it all, though, like Milton, he is an admirer of
Plato and his Socrates. He says that Socrates “For truth’s sake
suffering death unjust, lives now / Equal in fame to proudest
Conquerours” (3.96), but explains that this “first and wisest
of them all profess’d / To know this only, that he nothing
knew” (4.293). Even so he rejects Satan’s temptation. He
neither knows nor doesn’t know these things; his “light is
from above;” any great reader must needs be “Deep verst in
books and shallow in himself ” (4.286). In this spirit Milton
comments on the pair asleep in Paradise: “O yet happiest if
ye seek / No happier state and know to know no more” (P.L.
4.774).
So heroic poetry, philosophical inquiry and book-learning
appear to be rejected as Satanic. But that’s the trouble; they
flourish in or about Hell, which is a display case of antique
lore and heroic character and liberal artistry and free inquiry
and sophistic skill. Belial is Hell’s most beautiful god “For
dignity compos’d and high exploit”—here comes the
customary whiplash—“But all was false and hollow,” for “he
could make the worse appear / The better reason” (2.110);
this is verbatim the sophistry attributed to the Clouds in
Aristophanes’ play, those clouds that are parodies of Plato’s
Ideas and the sponsors of Socrates’ Thinkery. In Hell is to be
found all that was exciting in its splendor or rousing in its
dubiousness in paganism. In Hell as in life there is no
escaping its attraction, and all the poet’s damning postscripts
cannot dim the glories of his “infernal pit.” Milton’s Satan
speaks gallantly; Milton explicates: “Vaunting aloud—but
wracked with deep despair” (1.126, my dash); it’s still the
gallantry that resonates.
“Insipid” means tasteless, savorless, as sapor means taste,
savor: Milton’s Adam, influenced by the taste of the
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forbidden fruit of knowledge, discovers its etymological
connection with sapience, wisdom (9.1018). Hell is sapient as
hell; is that an inherent truth asserting itself?
7. Mismanaged Monarchy
If Hell, when not racked with supererogatory spasms such as
the yearly Hissing when all the devils turn into writhing
snakes (10.508), is a well-run republic, Milton’s Heaven can
be said to be a mismanaged monarchy or firm. The
archangels’ inefficiency cries, so to speak to high heaven. Set
to watch out for escapees from Hell, Uriel, in his simplicity,
is, “for once beguiled” by Satan’s cherubic disguise—though
the heavenly gods are supposed to know good from evil
(3.636)—and directs him straight to Eden, where he evades
the angelic pickets posted at the gates by simply leaping over
the wall of Paradise. God lets it go: “be not dismayed,” he
says to the unsuccessful sentinels; this intrusion “your
sincerest care could not prevent” (10.37)—so what was the
point of posting them? Raphael is sent too late to prevent the
capture of Eve’s imagination, and, by his own account, the
heavenly army under Michael, outnumbering the forces
under Lucifer’s command two to one, are beaten; the Son
alone saves Heaven (Book 6).
But that’s the least of it. To take a coolly secular view, the
ruler of this polity is either deliberately disruptive or disregards some prime rules of management: Don’t add intermediate layers of authority; don’t make yourself inaccessible;
don’t rebuff your insiders; if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Everyone knows what discontent the intromission of a
provost between the president and a faculty induces in it, or
the upset that bringing in a vice-president from the outside
and disappointing fair expectations causes in companies. This
is exactly what happens in Heaven. Once all worshiped and
obeyed God alone, a God who, though inaccessible to sight,
was equally so to all. Then one day there is a newcomer, a
Son, born not created. Though it is not clear that he appears
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after the angelic creation, it is clear that he is one fine day
proclaimed and anointed—and set over all the princely
angels, God’s loyal servants, as vice regent, a head to be
acknowledged Lord (5.609). It is a novelty, an innovation
whose necessity is not apparent; God seems to be, in Caesar’s
words, simply cupidus rerum novarum, “avid for new things”
(Gallic Wars 1.18). He does not need a Son. Indeed when
Adam, shortly after his creation, asks God for a mate, God
slyly joshes him “as with a smile”: “What think’st thou then
of me. . ./ Seem I to thee sufficiently possessed / Of happiness
or not, who am alone / From all eternity, for none I know /
Second to me or like, equal much less” (8.403). Either God
has forgotten or is concealing that he too now has family, or
he is signifying that he needs none. We do know that the Son
was born—whenever it was in timeless time—before Adam
was made, though, to be sure, the possibility of innovation in
an atemporal realm is humanly incomprehensible. “When?”
makes no sense in eternity. What’s of more human consequence is that Milton’s God is playing a dangerous game with
Adam: accustoming him to the sense that persisting in one’s
desire and opposing God’s advice is permissible, even
possibly successful. For Adam gets his consort.
Naturally some angels, created proud, are outraged at
being set at a remove from the throne, at having their rights
disrespected and expectations disappointed. Over and over
Satan repeats that this is the cause—be it the mere occasion
or the actual reason—of the rebellion, which is thus a
revolution.
The engaged reader (for irreverently deadpan literalism
can be a way of respecting the story) has to ask: Is Heaven’s
action an incitement, an entrapment? God has given the
angels free will. Has he made them dissimilar in nature, some
more proud, more prone to apostasy, with more propensity
to self-assertion and offense-taking? Is he calling these flawed
ones out?
Here the question arises whether the angels, to whom
God gave the knowledge of good and evil (11.85), know evil
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by their own experience or just by contrast to good. The
latter is conceivable; Socrates in the Republic demands that a
judge should learn of badness by observation, not from
within his own soul (409). Moreover, Satan says to Gabriel
that he cannot know what it means to seek relief who “evil
hast not tried” (4.896). But then, before the angelic uprising,
what evil was there to observe? Do some, a third, have it in
them? Is Heaven rife with potentiality for evil, waiting to be
realized? Is God indeed planning a razzia, a raid on putative
infidels?
God does have foreknowledge of the event. But his
argument, that omniscience does not prove determinism, is
persuasive. An atemporal Godhead oversees our entire
temporal episode as a whole from its beginning to its end.
Earth’s history is not, after all, infinite in this story: Hell will
be sealed and Heaven opened to man. Sub specie aeternitatis,
under the perspective of eternity, foreknowledge is not
foretelling, since to observe is not to interfere (at least not
outside quantum theory). Since we see the past as fixed and
conclude that because it is done it cannot be undone—which
isn’t even so very true—therefore we think, a fortiori, so
much the more, that if it cannot be altered it must have been
necessary—which is a plain paralogism. No more need God’s
sight, which includes the end, fix beforehand what happens;
he is no cryptodeterminist. To foresee completely from a
perspective outside time is not to predict certainly from
causes within.
But it is an entirely different question whether Milton’s
God wishes for the catastrophe that he has made, at least and
at most, possible. And everything points that way. He leaves
Satan to his “dark designs” so that he might “Heap on himself
damnation” (1.214); indeed the whole historical episode,
from the angelic fall of one who wants to rival God in power
to the human fall of one who wants to be like a god in
experience to its end in the re-opening of Paradise on earth
and the first opening of Heaven to mankind, is an entertainment to the Godhead who watches it as a drama, just as
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it is an acute delight to the humans who read it as an epic. Yet
while Aristotle allows that epics contain the plots for
tragedies (Poetics 1459), Milton actually switches to the tone
of tragedy within his epic: “I must now change / Those notes
to tragic” (9.5); thus a serene epic delight is, for us humans at
least, converted into that notorious tragic pleasure whose
well-known dubiousness lies in our enjoyment of the representation of excruciated bodies and souls. Is it so for God?
To rise from the aesthetic to the ethical: The poem
abounds in conversions of good to bad and bad to good, in
missed intentions and antithetical transformations. Our labor
must be, says the Arch-Fiend, “Out of our evil seek to bring
forth good. . .And out of good still to find means to evil” (1.
163). On the brink of Paradise, it is no longer transformation
he intends but identification: “Evil be thou my good”
(4.110); here the distinction between good and evil is not, as
in Hell, perverted but simply obliterated. The angels, on the
other hand, sing in unison: “his evil / Thou usest, and from
thence creat’st more good” (7.615), and God repeats it,
meaning just the opposite from Satan. How is the human
reader not to be absorbed into all this relativistic confusion?
And all this starts with the late fathering of a crown prince.
For there is no question that this is the cause of the revolt:
being set aside, twice, once by the newly born Son, once by
the newly made image, man. Over and over Satan expresses
his sense of wrong, of merit unrecognized; in Hell he may sit
“by merit raised / To that bad eminence” (2.5; note, as usual:
first some term like “merit,” then “bad”). In heaven God
excuses the Son’s elevation: “By merit more than birthright
son of God,” (3.309). Lucifer, however—at 5.666, which is
the number of the Beast, the Antichrist, in Revelation
(13:18)—thinks “himself impaired.” “Deep malice thence
conceiving and disdain,” he whispers conspiracy to his
“companion dear,” because he feels released from loyalty by
the new laws God has imposed: “New laws from him who
reigns, new minds may raise.” Then next morning at his
palace, he, “Affecting an equality with God,” takes his royal
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seat to make that magnificent speech about the equal right to
freedom. Injured merit, ex post facto laws, subjection are the
griefs—God has, “O indignity! / Subjected to his service angel
wings” (9.154)—later compounded by the replacement of his
own contingent by newly created man. All this is as
foreseeable by us as it was foreseen by God: on earth the
CEO would be blamed, and the monarch would have a
revolution on his hands.
8. Infected Paradise
Paradise is similarly questionable. How are we to go on with
Milton’s picture of terrestrial perfection? Do those who will
one day fall never stumble, those who will soon need to be
clothed—not just for shame but warmth (10.211)—ever get
nasty colds before the world is skewed? What happens if
paradisaical lushness gets out of control as Eve worries it will,
when the leisurely gardeners can’t keep up and growth goes
rank? (10.205) Is Eve pregnant, and if not, why not, since
passion is from the first practiced in Paradise (8.511)? Do
they know death, with which they have been threatened,
more distinctly than as something not-good, in some other
way than as a blind, mystifying doom? More broadly, do they
know some bad before they know evil, some harm before sin?
Is Paradise already infected, as the serpent whose head is
“well stored with subtle wiles” (9.184) seems to signify, who,
“not nocent yet,” is physically “the fit vessel, fittest imp of
fraud” (9.89), made in effect to incarnate Satan?
Kierkegaard, in his very pertinent meditation on Paradise,
says that innocence is ignorance, it is the spirit yet asleep,
dreaming. But the dream is infected with a presentiment of
freedom, a “possibility of possibility,” which makes the spirit
anxious and, once awake, unresistant to sin (The Concept of
Anxiety 1.¶ 6).
Eve conceives sin in her dreaming imagination, through
Satan’s insinuation. Adam dreams soberly, merely of what is
then actually happening and meant to be real: God—in what
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“shape divine,” one wonders—guides him, gliding, through
Paradise; shows him “the tree whose operation brings /
Knowledge of good and ill” which God has set as the pledge
of his obedience by the Tree of Life, and warns: “The day
thou eat’st thereof, my sole command / Transgressed,
inevitably thou shalt die” (8.323); he demands a companion;
falls into another sleep, really a half-conscious, waking
anesthesia, while his “sinister,” that is, his left rib is removed
by God and shaped into Eve (8.460).
Eve dreams wildly, raptly, anxiously of what is to come,
and her “organ of fancy” is receptive to evil. We already
know that she, who falls in love with her own image, is
image-prone, and now she is the first and prime instance for
a long philosophical and theological tradition that sees in the
human imagination the effective snare of evil: desire made
visible and vivid.
One third of the inhabitants of Heaven were open to the
suggestion of evil; in Paradise, it appears, one half of the
rational beings is so—the imaginative half.
Adam delivers to Eve a well-meaning little lecture on our
cognitive constitution. He inventories first judging reason,
then “mimic fancy,” and last the five senses. On the basis of
these faculties, he trots out a soothing naturalistic explanation of the “wild work” the imaginative fancy produces in
dreams from fragments of sensation, when judgment has
retired into her private cell.
How wrong he is, the complacent man! He goes on to
discourse comfortingly of evil: “Evil into the mind of god or
man / May come and go, so unapproved, and leave / No spot
or blame behind” (5.117). How would he know, not knowing
evil—yet? But, I think, Eve does indeed now know, ahead of
him. Thus Paradise is infected before the lapse. But it is not by
the devil’s temptation, it is by God’s.
For what does the whole arboreal set-up betoken? Near
the Tree of Knowledge is the Tree of Life. We learn that more
such grow in Heaven, that after the fatal fall, man has to be
moved from the proximity of the one in Paradise, for it can
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cure mortality (11.94). Why is one of these there at all?
Surely the answer is ominous: Fallen humans who ate of it
would be fallen immortals like the fallen angels, beyond
salvation, incapable of participating in the redemptive history
about to begin. Was the primal pair’s ejection from Paradise
an act of mercy—and if so had this irremediable catastrophe
crossed Heaven’s mind? What a complexity of divine design!
But that’s a side issue; it’s the Tree of Knowledge that is
at the problematic center of the Garden. Here is the question:
Is the fruit of itself deleterious, some sort of spiritual poison,
or is it a mere incitement to disobedience? Is the real evil
ingestion or transgression? Is its intoxicating effect, which
makes Eve so “jocund and boon,” a “virtue” proceeding from
the fruit itself and the tree’s “operation” or from the sinner’s
mind? Moreover, when they have both eaten and love turns
into lust, passion into concupiscence, nakedness into
exposure, candor into shame, harmony into hate, work into
labor, what has changed? What is “the mortal sin / Original”?
(9.1003) Of passion and of carnality there was plenty before:
“Here passion first I felt, / Commotion strange” says Adam at
the first sight of Eve (8.530). Or: “half her swelling breast /
Naked met his under flowing gold / Of her loose tresses” says
Milton (4.495).
Is that very turn from love to lust the original sin, or is it
its consequence? Or is the true primal sin indeed mere
disobedience? This last thought is what Adam and Eve cannot
entertain: that mere transgression will be punished. (Indeed
so far have we come in the way of Eve that “transgressive” is,
for some postmoderns, a term of approval and a sign of
sophistication.) They both think that the acquisition of
knowledge and godlikeness is the virtue of the forbidden
fruit. Adam, to be sure, first fixes on Eve’s disobedience itself:
“how hast thou yielded to transgress / The strict forbiddance”
(9.902). But soon, he deprecates the danger that God,
“Creator wise, / Though threatening, will in earnest so
destroy / Us his prime creatures” (9.938), encouraged to
think so by his previous experience with God’s leniency. So
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he accepts the profit: a “Higher degree of life.” Eve, a more
subtle reasoner, goes even further: “What fear I then, rather
what know to fear / Under this ignorance of good and evil, /
Of God or death, of law or penalty?” (9.773) In other words,
because she is ignorant of the terms she need not fear
anything before partaking, since she doesn’t even know
what’s to be feared; “Here grows the cure for all,” she
concludes, the cure, that is, for cluelessness.
The trouble seems to be, once more, the unintelligibility
of the tree’s operation (8.323, 9.796): Is it God’s command
that threatens or the tree’s powers that are dangerous? Is it
the fruit that imparts knowledge of good and evil or the fact
of human transgression? Is that knowledge an experience or
an understanding? Once again, the question is whether their
novel unbowered daytime sex with its postcoital recriminations, whether love turned into lust, is the sin or its consequence? And over, and over, is God not only expecting but
wishing the outcome?
This last question is perhaps answerable from Milton’s
perspective. He speaks in the Areopagitica of “the doom
which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil—that is to
say, of knowing good by evil” (my italics). So knowing evil
takes precedence, and, accordingly, he, Milton, “cannot
praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised and
unbreathed [unexhausted], that never sallies out and seeks
her adversary. . .Assuredly we bring not innocence into the
world, we bring impurity much rather. . .That virtue
therefore which. . .knows not the utmost that vice promises
to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue.” To me
this signifies that the eating not only caused the world’s
obliquity but prepared the pair (and its progeny) to live in it,
that is, to keep learning by experience and experimentation,
as it had begun. But if that is so, then there is too fine a
contrivance in it all not to be an intended or at least a wishedfor consequence.
And altogether God’s gift of free will, this is the occasion
to observe, is a curiously strained thing. One of our students,
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Christopher Stuart, discussed in his junior essay, which I have
before me, an apparently scandalously inconsistent line,
spoken by Raphael to Adam. After telling him once more that
his will was by nature ordained free, “not overruled by fate
inextricable or strict necessity,” the angel says, speaking of all
created beings: “Our voluntary service he requires” (5.529).
How, the student asks, as we must do, do “voluntary” and
“require”—even “require” in the weaker sense of “ask”—go
together, when it is God who asks? Doesn’t full freedom
extend beyond the liberty to choose between the allowed and
the forbidden to the determination of choices itself? Isn’t the
deepest, innermost freedom the freedom to set one’s own
limits? Isn’t that what autonomy means? No wonder then
that Satan harps on his own kind of freedom even more than
on equality. He has fully felt that Heaven’s gift of free will has
negating strings attached.
These perplexities, however, the sequence and significance of the will to disobedience and its punishment, the
eating of the fruit and its effect, the skewing of the world, and
the resulting diversity, all seem—at least seem to me—to
converge in one type: the turning of love into lust.
When Adam shyly asks Raphael whether the angels have
intimate congress he gets a forthright answer delivered with a
“Celestial rosy red” smile. The angels “obstacle find none / Of
membrane” (8.625); their intercourse is “Easier than air with
air, if Spirits embrace, / Total they mix, union of pure with
pure / Desiring” (8.625). In Hell too there is passion: Envious
Satan sees the man and the woman “Imparadised in one
another’s arms,” and bemoans that in Hell there is only
“fierce desire, / Among our other torments not the least, / Still
unfulfilled with pain of longing” (4.506). In prelapsarian
Paradise there is passionate desire and sexual congress,
“preceded by love’s embraces,” “happy nuptial league.”
Adam and Eve’s love-making after the lapse when “in lust
they burn” inflamed with “carnal desire” is now carnal
knowledge: Adam harps on Eve’s sapience: “Eve, now I see
thou art exact of taste, / And elegant, of sapience no small
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part, / Since to each meaning savor we apply” (9.1012). Now
“that the false fruit / Far other operation first” displays (note
the fricatives), we may ask: What is that operation that turns
innocence to lasciviousness and makes them, “as the force of
that fallacious fruit” evaporates, wake up from “grosser sleep
/ Bred of unkindly fumes with conscious dreams /
Encumbered.” What has happened that when they rose, they
“As from unrest, and each the other viewing, / Soon found
their eyes how opened, and their minds how darkened”
(9.1046)?
What the fruit has done is to make them sophisticated in
sexual taste, self-conscious in their bodies, self-seeking in
view of the other’s otherness: This is schism all over, the
renunciation of trusting obedience in favor of self-determination, self-will, and selfhood in desire and the advent of
solipsistic separatism in body: They see each other as other,
their bodies as obstacles to entire interpenetration, and they
concentrate on parts that are therefore now become private,
shameful and in want of hiding (9.1090). They have, to use
Milton’s word for the music of Hell, become “partial”:
particular in taste and partisan for themselves.
Now first Adam turns, in a bad moment, from an easy
assumption of superiority to misogyny. He wishes that God
had stopped his creating after the “Spirits masculine” of
Heaven and before making “this novelty on earth” (10.890),
a female; of course he doesn’t know that angels are transsexual at pleasure (1.423); oddly enough Hell proper really
does seem exclusively masculine.
So there are these degrees, from love to lust: the total
merging of angelic congress, the selfless closeness of the
paradisaical union, then the choosy separation of fallen sex—
and a last grade, the unassuageable desire of loveless, lonely
Hell, that seems to have no female but Sin.
Thus the eating and the fruit’s operation are one:
separation. The transgression and its punishment are one:
schism. Their obliquity and the skewing of their world are
one: sophistication—that is complex and varied knowledge in
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a world of polarities. At least, so it seems to me. What I
wonder about is if it doesn’t all start with Adam’s little
prelapsarian lapses: Does it begin when he asks God for a
companion? When he fails to take Eve’s Satan-inspired dream
seriously? When he gives Eve—as God gave him—the
freedom to disobey, although he has been warned? Were
there Adamic falls before Eve’s great Fall? Yes, but he doesn’t
have it in him to sin greatly.
But then arises a much more momentous question: Is the
original sin that starts our way of being, Eve’s Eating of the
Fruit, a bad thing? This consideration is the crux of this piece.
But first one more Miltonian intricacy.
9. Original Siring
There is no female birth-giving in this poem (excepting, if you
like, Sin’s, whose monster-children keep creeping back into
her womb, 2.795). The birth of human children takes place
out of Paradise. In Adam’s last hours in Paradise Michael
shows him the prospect of human history in ever more
foreshortened overview, up to the Second Coming (Books
11– 12), while Eve, not only the “mother of mankind” by
ordinary generation but also the bearer of the “Seed” by
which the “greater deliverance” is to come (12.600), is sent
to sleep and given a separate view, once again, in a dream—a
remarkable locution, by the way, this recurrent reference to
her remote progeny, Jesus, as “the Woman’s Seed” (e.g.
12.542, 601), for he is indeed begotten without male insemination.
So whatever her condition when Paradise is lost, whether
the first offspring is engendered on that racking last night in
sin or before that yet in innocence, or afterwards in their new
world, there are no women’s births before the fall: As he is
henceforth to labor in the sweat of his brow in the fields, so
she is to labor in unparadisaical pain in childbirth (10.193).
But there are plenty of male sirings, firsts of their kind
and strange, in Heaven, Hell, and Paradise. God begets a son
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(5.603) having made the angels—geneses of which the human
imagination cannot conceive. One angel—Satan—doubts his
creation; he thinks he might be spontaneously generated, selfcreated, though he doesn’t know how (6.853). As Zeus gives
birth to Athena, so Satan gives birth to Sin from his head. She
is his brain child, born from the seat of reason, in him a
source of perversion. Soon he has congress with her, his
daughter and wife, who bears Death, who in turn rapes his
mother (2.747). Adam is formed from dust in God’s image—
who is however not an imageable original, being in his nature
invisible. Eve is, not unlike Sin, born from her wombless
progenitor’s body, not from his head but from his sinister side
(8.465, 10.885), as a body part; hence she is at once apart
and, somehow, also a lesser image of his entirety and of God
at a remove. She is—strictly speaking—at once Adam’s
offspring and his consort; like Oedipus’s fratricidal sons, one,
though not both, of her children will kill the other, earth’s
first murder (11.445).
Are these origins, these firsts of begetting, creating,
imaging, producing, even intended to be closely inquired
into? Are they just the hapless by-products of making
theological mysteries into poetic pictures in which the supernatural cannot help but appear as unnatural? Or are they
meant to be dangling perplexities, intended subtexts of
questionableness, reflections on the consequences of entertaining nightly a Muse that tells of geneses beyond Nature?
10. Eve’s Happy Fault and Salutary Fall
Back to the great perplexity—the way the poem puts itself in
question: The angelic crew falls into a hell that will at the end
of time be sealed for eternity. The mortal pair wanders into a
world that is “all before them,” a world spaciously various in
places, and eventfully progressive in time. Is man’s fall and
the sin that at once was and induced that fall a bad thing
altogether?
The answer No is considered by Adam himself, when the
Archangel Michael shows him the future and the Final
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Judgment. Then Christ will reward “his faithful and receive
them into bliss, / Whether in Heaven or Earth, for then the
Earth / Shall all be Paradise, far happier place / Than this of
Eden, and far happier days” (12.462).
To this astounding prophecy, astounding because it
announces that mankind’s posthistorical condition will
exceed its prelapsarian state in happiness, Adam responds,
with one last of those “good out of evil” turns: “O Goodness
infinite, Goodness immense, / That all this good of evil shall
produce, / And evil turn to good. . .Full of doubt I stand, /
Whether I should repent me now of sin / By me done or
occasioned, or rejoice / Much more that much more good
thereof shall spring” (12.469).
This paradox of paradoxes, that one man’s great Lapse,
that his deliberate disobedience should send mankind on the
way to the greatest bliss, so that repentance itself seems
redundant, has a theological name: the felix culpa, the
“fruitful fault.” The long history of the thought and the
phrase is traced in an article by Arthur O. Lovejoy, “Milton
and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall” (ELH 4.3, September
1937); it is referenced in Scott Elledge’s marvelous edition of
Paradise Lost. The precise phrase felix culpa seems to come
from the “Exultet” of the Roman Liturgy, which also speaks
of the “certainly necessary fault of Adam,” giving a clear
answer to the question of divine intention. The thought,
however, goes back to the Church Fathers. Ambrose,
Augustine’s bishop, spoke of the fructiosor culpa quam
innocentia, “the more fruit-bearing fault than innocence,”
and Augustine himself says straight out that God “wisely and
exquisitely contrived” sinning so that the human creature, in
doing what it itself wishes, also fulfills God’s will—a generalization of the original sin.
Milton is said probably to have known this patristic
tradition. It seems to me that this notion, to which I referred
above, that the experience of vice is the necessary antecedent
to fully operative virtue, is along the same lines.
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Now here is something remarkable: In all of Lovejoy’s
quotations, including the little apple ditty copied above (Sec.
4.), it is Adam’s fault, Adam’s apple. Milton himself begins
Paradise Regained: “I who erewhile the happy Garden sung, /
By one man’s disobedience lost, now sing / Recover’d
Paradise to all mankind.”
But it’s not one man’s disobedience. Though he is the
apple taker, she is the apple giver, hers is the literal original
sin—if priority now, under the felix culpa doctrine, bestows a
certain credit. Hers is the first fault, for better or worse. Satan
seduces her first, she Adam; his is a very secondary apostasy.
Satan sins aboriginally as Hell’s native; Eve sins by seduction,
as Paradise’s malcontent; Adam sins derivatively, as Eve’s
husband (10.2): “She gave me of the tree, and I did eat”
(10.143). In fact for God this sinning at second hand is an
extenuating circumstance for humans.
Indeed, Eve tries to accept full responsibility and all the
punishment (10.934). Adam reproves her, God seems to
agree: “Was she thy God. . .that to her / Thou didst resign thy
manhood. . .?” (10.145), but she is undeterred (12.619). And
so is Milton, it seems, implicitly and explicitly: implicitly, in
making her book, the book of her absconding from domestic
Adam, the high point of the drama of the epic, with its
modulation to tragedy, according to its own invocation (9.6);
explicitly, when Michael, explaining why man is now in looks
more Satan’s image than God’s likeness, terms the
disfigurement “inductive mainly to the sin of Eve” (11.519).
So which is text, which subtext here? Eve is the original
sinner, and her sin is fruitful; she is, in fact, the Mother of the
Seed. She is, moreover, much more disposed to disobedience
than he, so why isn’t the Fall her drama? Isn’t it indeed so in
this poem where the events are vividly enough seen to blanch
out an old tradition in Adam’s favor—so to speak?
A disclaimer, lest these observations be imputed to me for
feminism. I’m not much for Eve. Her badness is bad: Her
adventurousness is feckless, her careless disobedience
immature, her rebelliousness shallow, her susceptibility to
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flattery foolish, her avidity for stimulation reckless, her
appetite for Godhead clueless, her lies to her husband ugly,
and her argumentation too smart by half. It is not Eve I
admire but Milton, for his second sight in knowing how
qualities connect, and then, now, and always make up into a
human type (of either sex) which I think of as characteristically modern—vivid and endangered and very familiar to a
teacher.
Besides, it isn’t even quite clear what she did for us.
Under the felix culpa doctrine Satan is an unwitting agent
provocateur for Heaven, but the Almighty in fact contradicts
this in a speech from the Throne: Let man, he says, “boast /
His knowledge of good lost, and evil got, / Happier, had it
sufficed him to have known / Good by itself, and evil not at
all” (11.86). This contrary doctrine jibes with a promise we
have heard earlier: Raphael, having transubstantiated a meal
of paradisaical fruit, explains to Adam how this nourishment
“by gradual scale sublimed” can raise man’s embodied soul
through degrees to full reason—“and reason is her being.”
For the soul is the same in kind as the angels’ though less in
degree, since man’s reason is mostly discursive, the angels’
intuitive. So then, “time may come when men / With angels
may participate,” and find that “from these corporal nutriments perhaps / Your bodies may at last turn all to spirit
. . .and winged ascent / Ethereal, as we, or may at choice /
Here or in heav’nly paradises dwell; / If ye be found
obedient” (5.483).
An amazing promise, though hedged: The route to
Heaven is through diet and obedience! Thus the Fall achieved
just a long detour to the same end: a choice of goods, either
of a dwelling in Heaven or an etherealized life in Paradise.
And Adam actually knew this before the Fall, as did Eve who
had been listening in! We do not hear much more about it.
Perhaps, we may surmise, the prospect of man etherealizing
directly from Paradise to Heaven is embarrassing to the
Father, for it leaves the Son without his salvific mission.
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So has Eve, in causing history, launched mankind on its
necessary road or on a futile byway? And did Milton intend
to throw such doubt on the need for the Son’s self-sacrifice,
his entering history as a man?
11. Wisdom Without Their Leave
“The world was all before them, where to choose / Their
place of rest, and Providence their guide: / They hand in hand
with wand’ring steps and slow / Through Eden took their
solitary way.” With this solemn iambic saunter, sad but
comforted, bereaved but hopeful, the divine epic ends and
human history begins. Yet in the very last of these tenthousand five-hundred and fifty-six lines there lurks still one
more provocation to stimulate the intellectual sensibility like
a dissonance in music: “solitary.” Does it mean “alone”?—but
they have a Guide. Does it mean “single”?—but they are a
Pair. Does it mean “at one”?—but her “meek submission”
(12.597) is dearly bought and perhaps not so very reliable or
heritable (moreover it’s not a meaning in the OED). Or could
the word perhaps intimate that this same sole humanity is
about to end, that in the poem Cain was perhaps conceived
on that first and last night—or afternoon—the first of the
“contagious fire” of “foul concupiscence” (9. 1035, 1078)
and the last on their “native soil” (11.269), in their Paradise
—Cain the first man born out of Eden, at once the first
murderer and the first city-builder (Genesis 4:17).
If Milton’s last lines intimate something obliquely but
precisely, something beyond the general hopefulness of the
opening of a wide land and a new era, namely the incipient
first natural birth on earth—a thing of course unprovable—
then not two only but a future three are leaving Paradise, and
history with its highway and so crucial byways has already
begun. For Cain’s generation is a false yet necessary start. It
is the main cause of the Flood in which it is itself destroyed.
Yet it is the indirect cause of God’s covenant by which the
earth is forever safely populated, for from Noah’s sons “was
the whole Earth overspread” (Genesis 9:19), and among their
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progeny was one Javan, the ancestor of the Ionian Athenians,
our Ancients. But that is a fantasy in the spirit of the two new
books (11-12) of prospective history that Milton added to the
second edition of Paradise Lost (1674). The point is that here
might be one last exemplification of that derivation of good
from bad that informs the poem and makes one think.
And so we did, all of us, think about this question in the
seminars that incited these reflections, but perhaps the
daughters of Eve in particular. One form of the recurrent
question was: What would we have done, what do we do and
shall we do, and, above all, let our young do, in the face of
Satanic temptation? By “Satanic temptation” I mean the
Serpent’s promise of a riskless transgression, of acute
experience, of our equalization with the gods to attain
“Wisdom without their leave” (9.725). Do we owe it to
ourselves to yield to temptation? The angels in Heaven
evidently know good from evil without being affected by evil;
they heard the report of man’s lapse “with pity” that
“violated not their bliss” (9.25). The Angels in Hell know evil
and violated bliss in its grand pathos and deep misery. Milton
preaches in the Areopagitica that we humans must know vice
practically and previously to virtue to be capable of vital
goodness.
If we permit, even encourage, the transgression of the
intellect—Satan’s temptation of Christ, resisted by him, to
liberal learning and philosophy—and also of the senses—the
“artificial paradises” of Baudelaire, drug-taking and similar
stimulation, to put it plainly—are we realizing a plan inherent
in our postlapsarian mortality? Unlike our Original Parents,
we are born as babies and grow laboriously into our adult
state, so we have no cause to be as cluelessly innocent as they
of the substance of sin and the meaning of the punishment.
Moreover, on earth it is required not only that prohibitions
be clearly promulgated but that they define an intelligible
crime, and that the punishments be understandably formulated before we are answerable—the reverse of the order
under which Eve commits the “mortal sin / Original”
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(9.1003). She knows what death, the punishment, is only
after she has sinned: It is, as she puts it with brutal brevity, “I
extinct” (9.829); before that it was “whatever thing death
be,” as Satan expresses for her the sum of her knowledge
(9.695). And, I think, she never quite learns wherein the
badness of the forbidden fruit lies beyond the fact that it is
forbidden.
But perhaps that really is the meaning of the felix culpa,
the fruitful fault: It is at once a first exercise of autonomy,
expressed as mere disobedience, and the first lesson in its
fruits, felt as potent wisdom. The poet of Paradise Lost seems
to intimate that we might do well to opt for transforming
experience over psychic intactness, to be adventurously bad
with Eve rather than stodgily good with the angels. But it is
not, I think, what he would agree to having said.
Postscript:
Two of the very problems considered in this essay, the intellectuality of pre-lapsarian man and the real cause of the Fall,
are raised by Maimonides in the Guide of the Perplexed (1.2;
translated by Shlomo Pines, 1963).
He finds this way out of the problem of Adam’s
knowledge: before the eating he knows True and False. The
evidence is in the fact of the commandment itself, for its
prohibition requires apprehension by the intellect. But for
inclining toward the desires of the imagination (which is the
villain organ for Maimonides) and the pleasures of the senses,
Adam “was punished by being deprived of that intellectual
apprehension” of True and False, and was instead “endowed
with the faculty of apprehending generally accepted things
[that is, common notions].” Thus, “he became absorbed in
judging things to be bad or fine [that is, Evil or Good].”
This is certainly an ingenious explanation of the original
nature and subsequent change in Adam’s intellect, though it
is neither hinted at in Genesis nor imagined by Milton (who
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does not endow unfallen Adam with much philosophical
intellect) that what he lost was intellectual certainty and what
he gained was conventional morality.
As for the cause of the Fall—imputed by Maimonides to
Adam alone—it was that Adam was greedy and followed his
imaginative and carnal appetites. His punishment, “corresponding to his disobedience. . .measure for measure” is that
he was deprived of good things to eat gotten without labor
and compelled to feed on the grass of the field in the sweat of
his brow (15a).
So here Maimonides is as equivocal on the point at issue
as is Milton: was the root of the transgression disobedience
or desire? (Many thanks to Barry Mazur for the reference.)
111
Going in Silence
Abraham Schoener
I tried to explain to a February Freshman why our basketball
games here at St. John’s have five quarters. I was not very
successful. It made plain to me how much we live in a queer
world of our own making. The same is true of the heroes in
Homer: they live in a very queer world, but it is a world—a
thriving whole, in which part answers to and contends with
part, in which each individual represents the whole and the
whole nurtures and challenges each individual. And it is a
whole of their own making—from the hollow ships to the
earthen walls to the roaring sea to the aromatic sacrifices,
even to the gods above and among them. I am not going to
justify these claims here; I only pause to suggest to you what
makes me believe them.
How could the heroes have created the inexhaustible sea,
the sea that carries them from port to port, the salt sea, the
wine-dark sea? Let me say only this: once the sea has become
“wine-dark” for them and for us, it is our sea. We name it by
one of our own creations, a creation that requires not only a
certain level of human intervention into the workings of
nature, but a creation that is most present to us in our own
social activities—in meals, sacrifices, celebrations. The sea
called “wine-dark” is now part of this, our social world. This
is equally true of Homer’s other words for the sea—the “saltsea” is the sea whose water we have tasted, the taste we feel
in our mouths—the sea, once again tied to our food, our
meals, our habits of seasoning.1 Through habits no different
from these, the heroes have created their world.
Abe Schoener was a tutor at St. John’s College for nine years. In the tenth
year, he went to California to learn how to make wine. He now directs a
winery named The Scholium Project. This essay was delivered as a lecture at
the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College on January 29, 1993.
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Their gods, however, we are only too happy to conceive
as human creations. There is nothing in the Iliad to support
this; all of its language points toward the contrary. In
particular, Zeus is called the “father of gods and men” in
order to show that he is the condition for the existence of
both the other gods and men, of the heroes in particular. So
let me rephrase what I said about the gods above: we should
be unwilling to see them as the creations of mortal men, but
we should still recognize how their continued presence in the
world of the heroes depends on the heroes themselves. There
are two small but important signs of this in the beginning of
the Iliad.
In Book 5, Dione consoles the wounded goddess
Aphrodite by telling her of the other gods who have been
grievously wounded by mortals. It is surprising, perhaps
shocking, to learn that Aphrodite’s wound at the hands of
Diomedes was not some amazing and unique transgression of
an immutable boundary, but only one in a series of impudent,
and successful, human assaults upon the immortals. Two
incidents stand out in my memory of these tales: Dione says
that Diomedes had attacked Hades—the king of the realm of
the dead, a figure I had always thought of as dead himself, a
mere shade—and wounded him severely and painfully. And
lest we think that only gods like the unsubstantial Hades and
delicate Aphrodite are subject to these attacks, Dione tells the
story of Ares, the god of war, who was set upon by two
heroes, trussed up, and stuffed into a huge brass jar for
thirteen months, as if he were a lost Jinni from the Arabian
Nights. Dione is clear about the consequences of this imprisonment: she says, simply, that if a certain mortal woman had
not heard his groans and freed him, he would have perished.
(5. 380 ff.) This suggests a possibility that Homer never
makes explicit: the gods are subject to starvation. We could
bottle them all up, forget about them and so starve them to
death. Their place in the world of the heroes is not
guaranteed. It depends upon a certain kind of attention, an
attention of which Zeus is deeply conscious. He says to Hera:
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For of all the cities of earth-bound human beings
that stand beneath the sun and the starry vault of
the heavens, the one most honored in my heart is
sacred Troy, and Priam, its king, and his people—
for there my altar was never without its fair share
of the feast, of the poured wine, of the roasting
meat. There we always got the prizes of honor due
us. (4. 41-49)
This almost nostalgic speech makes me think that there
are easier ways to starve the gods to death than by having to
stick them into brass jars—and that Zeus is painfully aware of
this. If we forget the gods at our meals, when we drink wine,
at our games. . . .
***
This is not the heart of what I want to discuss. I only wanted
to suggest to you that the world of the heroes is much like the
world you have entered here—a world of traditions, of traditions that are largely our own singular invention, of traditions
supported only in our common and constant activities of
talking, eating, celebrating, playing.
Singular as this world may be, it need not be in any way
cut off from larger spheres, different worlds. For instance, I
will now appeal to the world of Homeric scholarship, a world
in which the rigors of Freshman lab are unknown, in which
the population is too innocent to tremble at the name of
Kant—a world that might seem to discourage the interest of
us amateurs. Bah! I say. It is a world in which I have learned
things and had fun. I recommend it to you.
Any Homeric scholar, no matter how much of a
Freshman in the field, will be able to tell you right away that
Homer has two words for “silence,” siopei and sigei, and that
he never uses them as the subject or object of verbs but that
they occur only in the following construction: “in silence.”2
This is the subject of my essay: what does Homer mean by
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“silence”—in particular, what does it mean that Homer only
speaks of silence as that in which something else takes place?3
In attempting to answer this question, I will draw only on
the one fragment of a text that we all have in common: the
Iliad, Books 1 through 5. But this is no deprivation for us;
rather, even in this small piece of a text there is more in the
way of riches than we could ever appropriate, much less
digest. In the face of these riches, I will bluntly, almost
without discrimination, reach out for one of the gems that
shines most brightly, the beginning of Book 3:
Now once each of them had been put into order,
each with his captain, then the Trojans went out in
clamor and shrieking, like birds—just as the
clamor of cranes before the face of the sky, when
they flee winter and its endless rains, and they fly
toward the streams of the Ocean, all with a great
clamor, and bring bloodshed and destruction to
the men at the source of the Nile. And so these
cranes are surrounded by evil strife, even from the
break of day—
But the Achaians went out in silence, breathing
strength, each one eager to defend and protect the
other.
The contrast here is so striking that it could mislead us. If
we did not proceed with the greatest discrimination, we
might immediately infer from it that the Greeks and Trojans
were completely different races, almost different species, and,
further, that Homer much prefers the Achaians to the
Trojans, since he compares the latter to squawking birds but
treats the former with great and simple dignity. Let us sift
through this passage carefully.
We should recall that this description is immediately
preceded by the strange, nearly endless, enumeration of all
the battalions fighting at Troy. The enumeration seems to be
entailed by two parallel, but not identical, pieces of advice
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offered to the Achaian and Trojan generals by the wise elder
of each side. After the Achaian host has shouted its assent to
the counsel of Odysseus—that they should stay and continue
to fight for the capture of Troy—Nestor suggests to
Agamemnon that
[H]e separate the warriors by tribe and by brotherhood, so that brotherhood can bear aid to brotherhood, and tribe to tribe. . .Then you will know
who among the chiefs and who among the troops
is base, and who is brave—for each group will be
fighting by itself. (2. 362 ff.)
This seems to be Nestor’s idea: the Achaians have been
fighting in ranks as organized as they ever will be until now,
but they have been all mixed together, as if they were all one
tribe. But they are not: Achilles’ withdrawal has already made
that clear. If they now fight tribe by tribe, it will be easy to
assign honor and shame to the particular groups that particularly deserve each. This might eventually result in a new
principle for the division of the spoils, but Nestor does not
mention this. It might lead to even more contention in
assembly, but Nestor is surely thinking that it will spur the
troops on in battle, urging each group to exceed the accomplishments of the others.
This division into tribes makes the catalogue of the
Achaians a possible and even logical, if not gripping, part of
the narrative. This division is also the condition for their
eventual approach to battle, going in silence.
Now once Homer finishes his enumeration of the Achaian
tribes, he switches his attention suddenly to the Trojans. He
says that, at this time, they were holding an assembly by one
of the gates to the walled city, but he tells us nothing of what
they were saying. Instead, he describes how Iris, a minor
divinity thinly disguised, approaches the Trojan king Priam
and his son Hector and gives them the following advice:
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Since there are so many foreign allies throughout
the great city of Priam, and since one language is
not the same as another among human beings
scattered all over like seeds—because of this, let
every leader give orders only to those whom he
has led here, and once he has ordered for himself
his fellow citizens, let him lead them forth. (2. 804
ff.)
Hector receives the voice and immediately disbands the
assembly before we have heard the exchange of a single word.
Now this divine advice has the same effect among the Trojans
as it did among the Achaians: the men end up ranged for
battle according to their tribe and place of origin, and so
Homer catalogs them just as he did the Achaians. But we
should attend to the great differences here: it looks like many
of the “Trojans” are in fact foreign allies, sufficiently foreign
that they do not all speak the same language. They are thus
separated so that they do not continue to confuse each other,
but no special care is taken to unify them. The Achaians are
all set against each other in contention for the prizes of glory;
but this very contention will unite them in the same task.
They will all naturally seek the same end, and their quests are
not mutually exclusive but mutually assisting. The face of
battle is so vast and so varied that many of the tribes can win
great glory at once, and the more each damages the enemy,
the easier will be glory for all.4 But the Trojans, now divided
into battalions with no means of sure communication
between them, are isolated: they are neither pitted against
each other in contest, nor capable of joint action. They are
already fractured, even before they enter the battle, and
reduced to fighting the way a pack of dogs must fight, with
only barks and growls, or shrieks of terror, not words, to
communicate.
But even this great difference does not explain why the
Achaians would go to battle in silence. We must go back
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almost to the beginning of the book and retrace the way the
Achaian host behaves when it acts as a whole.
We should notice that when Achilles first calls the host to
assembly, this gathering is presented as nothing remarkable.
Every man takes his place, the whole is orderly and quiet, and
any man may approach the center and speak to the whole.
Agamemnon may well dominate, but he has neither exclusive
right to speak nor the right to decide who speaks. But the
assembly is not a model of thoughtful discussion. Achilles and
Agamemnon insult each other, and Agamemnon treats
Achilles so bitterly that he almost curses the assembly with
the slaughter of its king. When the gathering is finally
dissolved, Achilles has withdrawn from the host, Nestor has
been ignored—and if I had been seated among them, I would
be glad that this open forum for group discussion was now
over. This bodes badly for the Achaians’ future ability to
work together and makes their silence look like failure of
speech—not an act of strength or resolution.
***
The return of Chryseis placates Apollo, and health, if not
peace, returns to the Achaian camp. But soon Zeus begins to
carry out Achilles’ wish for vengeance, and sends a dream to
Agamemnon, to lure him to disaster. The dream urges
Agamemnon to rally the troops for battle, promising him that
the immortals intend immediate victory for him. But as if in
a sign that he needs no lures to disaster, Agamemnon decides
to stir the troops to battle by conveying the opposite message
to them—telling them that they are doomed to failure. This
has always seemed like the pitch of folly to me, and was a
cause of my despising Agamemnon further; but I think that I
now see some understanding behind it, an understanding that
would help restore the spirit to the host after the last disastrous assembly. Let me spell out this understanding in detail.
As soon as he wakes, Agamemnon has the heralds
summon the host to assembly. But on the way, he seems to
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catch the most important leaders—“a council of the greatspirited elders” as Homer calls them—and separates them
from the throng. To them he reveals his dream and his plan:
he will “make trial of the men with words, as is right, and
order them to flee, but you,” he tells the great-spirited elders,
“you hold them back with words” (2. 73 ff.). They agree, and
all proceed on to the assembly.
There are two especially important points to notice here:
the first is the use of a beautiful word, megathumos. I have
translated it as “great-spirited”, but this lacks much. Thumos
is one of the strongest words in the Greek language, but it is
hard to say what it means. It is at the heart of every hero, and
perhaps of every philosopher. It is connected to strength and
fury, desire and deliberation. Now Homer often uses this
word as the epithet of the Trojans; he never bestows it upon
the Achaians—they are, by contrast, prudently “wellgreaved.” Achilles, on the other hand, puts it to special use
early in his dispute with Agamemnon: when he addresses the
host as a whole, he calls them “the great-spirited Achaians.” I
do not think that this is mere flattery on his part; at this
moment he thinks highly of his comrades and expects them
to support him in his denunciation of the fat dog-king. But
soon it is clear that they will remain voiceless, mere
spectators; and that he can have no revenge through the
spilling of Agamemnon’s blood. But even worse, Agamemnon
picks up Achilles’ use of the word and uses it to address the
host in response. But this time, he casts it back in their faces
as a taunt. In answer to Achilles’ suggestion that Agamemnon
give up Chryseis and be rewarded with another prize later,
Agamemnon says:
So if the great-spirited Achaians give me a prize,
having fitted it to my own spirit, so that there will
be equal exchange—then fine! But if they do not
give me this, then I will myself come and seize
what I want—whether it is your prize, Achilles, or
Ajax’, or Odysseus’. (1. 135 ff.)
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He thus uses Achilles’ compliment to threaten and
humiliate them, clearly foreseeing that neither Ajax nor
Odysseus, nor any of the other “great-spirited Achaians”
would resist him. And he is right: only Achilles trembles with
anger and reaches for his sword. This taunt must have been a
great source of shame for the heroes, but still they stayed
quiet.
Now having witnessed this humiliation of his comrades,
Achilles returns his huge sword to its sheath and speaks in a
different voice: “You heavy with wine, you with the face of a
dog but the heart of a doe. . .you folk-devouring king—you
rule over men worth nothing: for otherwise, Son of Atreus,
you would be committing your last acts of insolence now.”
(1. 231 ff.)
With this, he pledges his withdrawal and throws the
scepter, a symbol for him of the Achaian concern for justice
and reverence, to the ground, swearing on it now merely as a
piece of dead wood. The Achaian host has gone from “greatspirited” to “worth nothing” in his eyes; its emblem is some
dead wood that “never more will put forth leaves or shoots
or run with sap.” These are heavy words from one of the
greatest warriors in the host, a man glorious in battle who
rose up to help save the people from the plague that was
about to destroy them. It seems impossible to me that this
change in his words could not affect the warriors, from
Diomedes and Odysseus, all of the way down to the nameless
foot soldiers and horse feeders. No matter whether they
thought Achilles was justified or overweening, their silence in
the assembly—in the face of Agamemnon and his brazen
taunts, and in front of their own men—this silence must have
been a source of shame for them. As the first book closes, the
miasma of the plague has been replaced by a different kind of
stain: the whole camp now festers with the shame of its
silence.
***
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This is where I begin to see the results that may come from
Agamemnon’s strange plan. He calls the elders together to
inform them of a plan to test the fighting-spirit, the thumos,
of the troops. The test is a test of shame: will the men be
ashamed to accept his order to break camp, or is their thumos
so broken that they will rush to the ships? The plan could
only make sense on the assumption that they will despise the
order and insist on staying. But Agamemnon makes no such
assumption; rather he proposes that when the men run, the
elders should restrain them with words.
Now this proposal implies two utterly natural assumptions on Agamemnon’s part: first, that the thumos of the
elders is indeed great, so that they will be in no way tempted
to go home; second, that the men will respond quickly and
completely to the words of the great-spirited elders—in other
words, that all they needed was a “pep-talk.”5 The whole plan
seems intended to cement the relations of Agamemnon and
his lieutenants and to provide the troops with the occasion
for a series of dramatic invigorating speeches by their leaders.
The plan seems more and more reasonable.
The assembly gathers—but not in the same way it did at
first, even in the midst of the plague.
The people were scurrying. Just as tribes of
thronging bees pour out of hollow rocks, always
coming in fresh waves, and they fly in clusters over
the spring flowers, and some hover here, some
there—just so did the many tribes of men pour
from their ships and huts and make their way in
throngs to the assembly. But Rumor, the messenger
of Zeus, blazed among them, and urged them on—
and so they began to assemble. But the assembly
was completely disordered, and the earth groaned
beneath the seated host, and there was an uproar
throughout. Nine heralds, shouting, were trying to
restrain it, if only the noise could be restrained
. . .with effort, the people were made to sit, and
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once they had ceased from their clamor, they were
made to stay seated. (2. 86 ff.)
The assembly is practically a rabble; the people move like
bees covering a field, but once they are pressed to order
themselves, they begin to shout and cry. They make the same
clamor that Homer ascribes to the Trojans at the beginning of
Book III and the same “uproar” that he ascribes to the joint
battles of the Achaians and Trojans all through the book. And
this is the beginning of an assembly. One could hardly imagine
calling these bee-men “great-spirited.” Agamemnon’s test,
and the eventual Achaian march into battle, seems doomed.
Once they are assembled, Agamemnon begins his
harangue, and it is a remarkable test. Following his own plan,
he points out that their dream-ordered departure will be a
“shameful thing to hear about—indeed even for those who
are yet to be, how in vain an Achaian host so good and so
huge warred a war without result, even in fighting with
weaker men.”
Next he expands on the difference in numbers between
the armies and points out that if all the Trojans were captured
and made cup-bearing slaves for the Achaians, there would
still be only cup-bearer for every ten Achaians. Then, as if
their spirits were not yet utterly broken by imagining the
contempt of future races, he says:
In fact, nine years have passed, and the timbers are
rotten in our boats, and the ropes have frayed
utterly, and, I suppose, our wives and infant
children are awaiting us in our halls.
Of course, if there were any infant children around, they
would not belong to the warriors—and what chilling effect
Agamemnon’s “I suppose” must have had! The heart of each
man must now be turned home with such longing and
eagerness that no desire for glory, nor martial shame, could
restrain it. And so Agamemnon closes his test thus: “All right
then, we should all obey—just as I say. Let us escape with our
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ships to our dear homeland—for we will assuredly never take
Troy and its wide streets.”
The results of this cruel speech are utterly predictable: the
assembly dissolves and the men fly to their ships, and with
only increasing momentum, the men are on board, and some
ships are already in the bright salt sea. Homer says: “Then the
Achaians would have had their homecoming, but beyond
what was fated.” (2. 155)
Before we consider what prevented this homecoming, we
should attend to a striking development in the language of
the poem. You will have noticed a certain abundance of
wonderful similes in the Iliad; the simile of the bees is an
instance of these. You will have noticed that they seem to
compare the events of the battlefield to moments in the world
of nature, especially to bucolic scenes of mountains and
farms, and that many of the comparisons seem odd. Let me
point this out: there is not a simile in the book until the bees
appear in Book 2, but this simile is only the beginning. Once
the troops here Agamemnon’s speech, Homer compares the
Achaians in swift succession to waves whipped by the wind
and to a wheat field knocked down by a gale; then, before
they eventually march in silence, he compares them again to
the sea, to fire, birds, flowers, and flies in a barn. But once the
Achaian begin marching, Homer describes them directly,
without simile—but then suddenly, for the first time, he
compares the Trojans to birds. We will soon understand the
reason for this development.
***
Now the Achaians do not win their homecoming because
of a remarkable series of actions by Odysseus. While the
others rushed to their ships, he, perhaps alone, did not
move—“for a great pain had seized his heart and spirit.”
Athena came to him and spurred him to prevent the sudden
departure, and when he heard her voice he began to run.
Now Homer says that when he met another leader, he spoke
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to him gently and either informed him of reminded him of
Agamemnon’s stealthy plan, and urged him just to sit down,
and to seat his followers with him. But when he met a warrior
who was not a leader—and not just a horse-feeder, but a true
warrior—and found him making noise, he would strike him
with the great scepter of the Achaians, make him sit down
and would ashame him, calling him “not worth counting,
neither in war nor in counsel.” And Homer says: “And so they
rushed back to the assembly from their ships and huts, with a
roar, as a wave of the much-resounding sea thunders along a
great beach, and the sea roars.”
We should note first that Agamemnon was perilously
wrong in his two assumptions: neither were the elders so
strong of spirit that they could withstand his test—only
Odysseus did not move; nor did the troops need only a peptalk to prepare for their next attack. They were desperate to
leave and many, even warriors, needed beatings from great
Odysseus just to sit still. This suggests that the thumos of the
whole host was nearly broken, and that Agamemnon had no
understanding of its true state. Even Odysseus and Nestor
must have misunderstood its condition, or have been terribly
weak in spirit, for neither of them—in fact, none of the
“great-spirited elders”—had objected to Agamemnon’s
foolhardy plan.
Now we must also note that the state of the restored
assembly is still far from encouraging: it is not even like tribes
of bees, but like the wild and inanimate sea, roaring incessantly and without meaning. We might wonder, who could
speak helpfully in such an assembly?
In answer to this, Homer offers us Thersites, an ugly and
impudent hunchback. We must be very careful of not taking
him as some kind of stock comic character. He rises up, lame
and misshapen, and hurls abuse at Agamemnon. We must
now notice how close he is in this respect to brilliant Achilles.
He accuses Agamemnon of keeping them in Troy only for his
own gain and urges the troops to desert. He does not speak
poorly, and perhaps he was persuasive, for suddenly Odysseus
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appears at his side and reproaches him with “hard words,”
and strikes him with the scepter. He hits ugly Thersites hard
enough to raise a bloody welt on his back, and Homer says,
“A big tear fell from him.” (2. 269)
Tears are very serious things for Homer; the heroes,
especially the Achaians, let them fall when their friends are
taken from them, parents let them fall over lost children.
Thersites’ tear is no less serious than the rest, perhaps even
more so because of his ugliness, his utter destitution of
friends. Though he is here in Troy he will never have any one
to cry with, nor is it possible to imagine that any one would
cry if he fell beneath a Trojan arrow. Some of you know
Sophocles’ play, the Philoctetes. Perhaps it will seem just to
you that Odysseus is mistaken for Thersites by the destitute
Philoctetes in the play. (5. 440 ff.)
Now Thersites’ counsel is expressed with neither
elegance nor subtlety, nor can it sound very noble. But as the
recent rush to the ships has shown, it expresses longings
recently made public by every man of the host. These men,
already reviled by the departed Achilles, now find that they
have failed a test of their shame and courage. They have been
tempted cruelly, failed, and now each finds himself humiliated before his neighbor. It would be hard for any of them to
imagine any nobility in himself, or in his neighbor.
Then up steps miserable Thersites, who speaks the
unspeakable. He presents to the gathered host the position
they are unwilling to take, the depth to which they could
never sink. They could flee the war, but never speak publicly
with such contempt for their enterprise and their leaders. His
shameless public display restores to them their own sense of
shame; but even better, his public humiliation and
punishment presents them with the scourging that each
would consider meet for his own cowardice, and for the
cowardice of his neighbor. I hate to use words like this, but I
feel that Odysseus’ beating of Thersites provides a common
release for the abashed and humiliated army. A sign of this is
their reaction:
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And the men, though they were grieving deeply, all
laughed at him with relish; and thus one would
say, with a glance, at the one nearest him: “Oh!
Though Odysseus has certainly accomplished
numerous brave deeds, leading us in good counsel
and commanding us in battle—this deed, now, this
is by far the finest he has wrought among the
Achaians.”. . .So spoke the multitude.
I had always thought that this universal laugh was odd—
there is not much laughter in the Iliad—and a little cruel and
mean-spirited for heroes. I certainly never understood why
the men would call this “by far his finest deed.” But now I
think that the laughter the deed provides is not only appropriate but necessary, and so each warrior turns to the man
closest to him, and they all share this grisly moment that
helps restore their self-respect. For now as each one turns to
the other, and as they look at each other, each one can now
think of how different he is from Thersites—how noble by
comparison, how like Odysseus. Thus do the Achaian
warriors regain some of their great spirit.
But they are not yet ready for battle: Homer’s similes
show this. After the humiliation of Thersites, Odysseus and
Nestor finally give them the speeches of encouragement, and
the troops are ready for them: at the end they shout in assent.
But Homer compares their shout to a great wave breaking
against a high cliff. One might wonder what the cliff is here—
the Trojans are still far away. There is still something bootless
in the fury of the Achaians.
As they draw closer and closer to battle, they win new
comparisons: after sacrificing and feasting and donning their
armor, they are like a forest fire, “and their gleam, shining
everywhere, went up through the sky to the heavens.” (2. 445
ff.)
And once they take their place on the plain around the
river Scamander, now closer to Troy, Homer compares them
to
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the many tribes of winged birds, geese, or cranes,
or long-necked swans, [that] fly here and there,
glorying in the strength of their wings, and with
clamor they advance, and the meadows resound
with them—just so did the tribes of men pour
from the ships and huts onto the plain of
Scamander; and the earth echoed terribly beneath
the tread of men and horses.
It is wonderful now to feel the men, so recently not just
wounded but crippled in their spirits, wonderful to feel them
stretching their strong arms like swans “glorying in the
strength of their wings;” terrible too to imagine the sound of
their tread, the clamor of gleaming bronze armor, the uproar
of their war cries. But suddenly they are like
the many tribes of swarming flies, buzzing through
the farmhouse at the peak of Spring, when the
pails dew with milk—in just such numbers stood
the long-haired Achaians on the plain, facing the
Trojans and eager to tear them apart.
And now all the illusions have been destroyed. Even as
the Achaians become calmer again, from roaring oceans, to
screeching birds, now to buzzing flies hovering in farm
houses, near sweet pails of fresh milk, even as we sense the
return of their great spirits, we must recognize the goal
toward which they are moving. The humiliated, brokenspirited men were rushing home; these stronger, fire-like,
swan-like, glorious men are gathering their strength in order
to kill other men. For these men, the Trojans they are eager
to tear apart, the flies will not be circling pails of milk.
Lest we see this all from the side of the apparently
mightier Achaians, Homer insists upon one more simile. In
this one, the Achaians are finally separated into their tribes
and brotherhoods; this separation, I now believe, ensures not
only a kind of team by team competition for glory, but
ensures that standing next to each man is a brother, a cousin,
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a companion from youth. No warrior is anonymous, no
warrior has disappeared. Each is, I think, painfully present to
his neighbor. This is the simile:
These men, their leaders ordered them, just as
goatherds easily order widely scattered flocks of
goats that had been mingling in the pasture, and
the leaders ordered some here and some there in
order for them to go into the battle.
I will say one thing about this simile: there are only two
reasons a goatherd would order his goats. Either he is going
to milk them or he is going to bring them to slaughter. As if
to settle our hesitation, Homer compares Agamemnon in all
of his glory to a great bull, the most pre-eminent of his herd.
We do not have to live long in the world of the Iliad to know
the destiny of the greatest, most beautiful bulls: they are
sacrificed on the most important occasions.
I do not mean to abuse you with a tedious reiteration: of
course we all know that these men are all liable to die soon—
that, in a certain sense, they are here to die. But do they know
it?
Let me suggest to you that this point distinguishes the
Achaians from the Trojans at the beginning of Book 3. The
Achaians have faced shame and humiliation, they have been
teased with images of a homecoming and have turned their
back on those images with their eyes wide open to what they
will face if they remain. As their spirits return, and as they are
calmed from the force of a sea or a forest fire to buzzing bees
and docile goats, they are seeing more and more clearly what
they will face. Notice the last two things that Homer says are
on their minds before the battle: in Book 2, directly before
the catalogue, he says “they are eager to tear the Trojans
apart;” at the beginning of Book 3 “they are eager in their
spirits to bring help to each other.” These warriors, whose
spirits have clearly returned, are not thinking about glory,
booty, even victory. Facing the Trojans, they think about
destroying them in the most terrible, beastly, inglorious way;
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marching towards them, hearing their wild cries, they think
only of helping each other in the horror to come. The
Achaians go in silence because they see what is ahead of them,
because they see each other as brothers, because they still see
Agamemnon’s images of their wives and children. They
march in a hard-won silence in awe of the world they have
created and willed for themselves.6
***
1
Compare the whole literary history of the word porphureos: it surely
represents something from the realm of nature in itself, not merely
through our eyes or experience. But note that Homer never uses it of the
sea itself (only of its waves, and even so only four times or so) and favors
it instead as an epithet for something very intimately related to us: our
blood.
2
It is surely worth noting that the phrase is properly a kind of comitative
dative rather than a locative since the silence names the condition—rather
than the place—in which the action takes place. It would be awkward,
though not impossible, to translate sigei “with silence” in order to show
this. I have not embarrassed the February Freshmen with these minutiae.
One might also note that the constructions occur 14 times in the first ten
books of the Iliad, but only three times after that.
3
Silence is not properly an absence of sound, noise, talk: it is the
negation or canceling of them. It takes place, but only as the result of
something. It is not a negative state, but the opposite—an intentional
state of fullness, a state the Achaians, especially, create.
4 But cf. 6. 98 ff.: it looks like the departure of Achilles is the necessary
condition for any such distribution of glory. His might is so preeminent
that no other can win glory when he is in the fray.
5
I am afraid that when Homer, narrating Agamemnon’s summons of the
elders, calls them “great-spirited,” he is only speaking ironically. Neither
now nor when Achilles first used the word were they great-spirited.
6 The Trojans have not yet had an assembly because they have not been
terrified. This seems to be when the assembly is most necessary. Similarly,
the Trojans still make lots of noise on the way to battle: they have not yet
been shaken badly enough to be quiet.
129
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Kraus, Pamela
Brann, Eva T. H.
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Navarre, Sarah
Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Nelson, Charles A.
Lurçat, François
Schoener, Abraham
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The St. John’s Review
Volume XLVIII, number three (2005)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Sarah Navarre
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson,
President; Michael Dink, Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $10 for one year. Unsolicited
essays, reviews, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address
correspondence to the Review, St. John’s College, P
.O. Box
2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available,
at $5 per issue, from the St. John’s College Bookstore.
©2005 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction
in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
The St. John’s Public Relations Office and the St. John’s College Print Shop
�2
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
3
Contents
Essays and Lectures
A Glance, A Look, A Stare........................................... 5
Jerry L. Thompson
Muthos and Logos.......................................................41
David Stephenson
Meaning and Truth in Klein’s
Philosophico-Mathematical Writings...........................57
Burt C. Hopkins
Addendum
Two Images.................................................................89
Chaninah Maschler
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5
A Glance, a Look, a Stare
Jerry L. Thompson
In 1968 or 1969 a friend asked me to the first session of a
workshop given in New York City by the photographer
Harold Feinstein. Feinstein was an experienced teacher, and
he began by talking to the assembled group of 20 or so about
his approach to picture-taking. He said that each of us, the
moment we stepped into his studio, had an immediate
impression, a notion, an idea of his place. That impression,
gained at first glance, was, he said, what photography was all
about. A snapshot—a view recognized and seized in a fraction
of a second—was the photographer’s view of the world.
Certainly many of the best-known photographs made
during the twenty years before my visit to Feinstein’s studio
could be connected to this understanding of how photography worked. Two of the books of photographs most
admired by young ambitious photographers at that time were
The Decisive Moment, a book that presented large reproductions of minimally-captioned photographs by Henri CartierBresson without any text other than appreciation of the
pictures, and Robert Frank’s The Americans, another book
whose main content was pictorial. Though very different in
form, in attitude, and in meaning, the two books contained
pictures that looked like quick glimpses of the worlds they
showed, views recognized and seized at first glance. I was a
beginning photographer, but I had experimented with several
cameras, and I knew that with a small camera a picture could
be made in daylight at 1/500th of a second. At that shutter
speed, the operator did not even have to hold the camera
Jerry L. Thompson has been a working photographer for more than thirty
years. He is the author of Truth and Photography (Ivan R. Dee, 2003), a
book of essays on photography, and a forthcoming book combining some of
his own photographs with a long essay on their making.
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perfectly still in order to get a clear picture. With a wideangle lens pre-focused (that is, set at the “hyperfocal”
distance setting, the setting which would allow everything off
to the horizon and most of what was as close as 3 or 4 feet
from the lens to be in focus when the aperture was
constricted for a daylight exposure), the photographer could
rush the camera to his eye to snap anything he saw within a
fraction of a second of his first awareness of the scene’s
potential to become a picture.
In discussing Feinstein’s approach after the class my
friend and I agreed that spontaneity was at its center. The
idea was to act—to respond to a strong impression—before
conscious deliberation or prolonged analysis could weigh in.
Feinstein was proposing, we decided, a theory of visual truth.
Directness and honesty of vision are most possible when the
photographer, or artist, acts spontaneously and seizes the
moment before he or she has a chance to ponder other
considerations: should I be a little farther off? Should I make
an exposure that will allow for detail in all the dark areas, or
one that will record only dramatic highlights in a sea of darkness? Should I wait for a more amiable expression to appear
on that person’s face? Should I shoot a vertical so that it can
be considered for the cover of Life magazine? Each such
deliberation, the thinking goes, chips away at the picture’s
“purity,” compromises the artist’s perception, and takes the
result further away from the “unmediated” truth of an instant
response. Such thinking found many receptive auditors in
1968 and 1969.
The rise in prominence of the so-called “AbstractExpressionist” painters had helped prepare the way. These
“New York School” painters did not usually make preliminary sketches, let alone use perspective studies or scaled
palettes. They rejected every device attached to European
(mostly French) Beaux Arts training. For them that training
was anathema; it reeked of the academy, flattery of princes,
dishonesty, decoration, and corruption. Immediacy and
THOMPSON
7
authenticity, not perspective, drawing, harmony, and a
pleasing likeness were important to them. Their ambition, as
a group, was not to copy nature but to create it.
Photographers were more hesitant to substitute their own
productions for the subjects they depicted. Most photographers then (if not now) still thought the pictures they took (or
made, to use the word many artist-photographers have
insisted using) at least referred to, but more likely clarified or
even understood, the world those pictures showed.
Photojournalism was a model for many, especially those who
worked with small hand-held cameras, and photojournalism
was generally thought able to present a kind of truth about
what was going on in the world. Photographers in 1969 were
more likely to single out Eddie Adams’s pictures of the
summary execution of a suspected Viet Cong than they were
to speculate about how many times Douglas McArthur had to
wade ashore on the Philippines until the photographer got
the picture the war effort needed.
Though they might not follow the painters all the way to
proclaiming their pictures a second, new nature, one that
could stand on its own without reference to a “subject,” many
ambitious young photographers in 1969 would have agreed
that (a) photography is art; that (b) authenticity and immediacy in art are good things; and that (c) authenticity and
immediacy are most available to an artist when working
spontaneously. Hovering in the background of this thinking is
the notion that there is something natural about this way of
working. When the photographer Nick Nixon (who began
photographing seriously in the late 1960s) was asked about
his way of working by a group of students in 1975 he said his
role was like that of a plant, a tree whose business it is to bear
fruit (I paraphrase his remarks from memory). His job, he
explained, was to produce the fruit. Discussing and analyzing
the fruit was somebody else’s job. He also said he rarely used
the camera’s controls for adjusting the drawing of the image
projected on the ground-glass viewing screen of the large
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view camera he used. If the picture wasn’t there (that is, if he
didn’t see it whole and ready to frame), he didn’t try to fiddle
with the camera’s adjustments in order to coax a reluctant
picture to appear. John Keats would have understood all of
this, at least at the moment in February, 1818, when he wrote
to John Taylor that “In Poetry I have a few Axioms,”
including this one:
That if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves
to a tree it had better not come at all.
Keats’s remark rightly suggests that the line of thinking I have
been discussing did not begin with Harold Feinstein, or with
the New York School painters. M. H. Abrams includes what
he calls “vegetable genius” among the theories of unconscious
genius and organic growth he finds widespread, particularly
in England and Germany, as early as the eighteenth century
(The Mirror and the Lamp, Oxford, 203). These theories have
several features in common: they hold that the artist is not
directly responsible for what he makes; that he may not
understand, in an analytical sense, what he is doing; and that
the mechanism by which he works is like that of a plant.
Johann Georg Sulzer, author of a four-volume dictionary
of aesthetic terms published between 1771 and 1774, wrote
that
It is a remarkable thing, belonging among other
mysteries of psychology, that at times certain
thoughts will not develop or let themselves be
clearly grasped when we devote our full attention
to them, yet long afterwards will present themselves in the greatest clarity of their own accord,
when we are not in search of them, so that it
seems as though in the interim they had grown
unnoticed, like a plant, and now stood before us in
their full development and bloom. (Abrams, 203)
THOMPSON
9
In 1793 Immanuel Kant went further to declare that the
productive faculty of the fine arts was properly called genius,
which he defined as “the innate mental aptitude through
which nature gives the rule to art.” This faculty of genius
cannot indicate scientifically how it brings about
its product, but rather gives the rule as nature.
Hence, where an author owes a product to his
genius, he does not know himself how the ideas
for it have entered his head, nor has he it in his
power to invent the like at pleasure, or methodically, and communicate the same to others in such
precepts as would put them in a position to
produce similar products. (Critique of Aesthetic
Judgment, ¶46; also cited by Abrams, 207)
These theories were not confined to the visual arts. The
passages quoted above speak of authors and ideas. And the
theories do not appear as the aphoristic musings of practitioners; they are not the haphazard reflections of artists
puzzling about what they do, but systematic treatments by
serious philosophical writers. These theories are presented in
the very form—discursive writing—that the activity the theories discuss, the activity of spontaneous invention, would
seem to shy away from. Writing is, after all, the setting down
of reasonable speech—argument, what Keats called “consequitive reasoning,” and what philosophers at the time of
Plato and Aristotle meant by logos: a logical train of thought.
Discursive writing involves connecting and setting down an
articulated succession of ideas.
Sometime between 1942 and 1945 Erich Auerbach wrote
one such articulated succession of ideas, a long and detailed
one, about a descriptive passage in Balzac (The essay
appeared in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in
Western Literature). In that essay, he stresses the harmony and
stylistic unity of a passage near the beginning of Le Père
Goriot (1834), which describes the first appearance of the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
pension-mistress Madame Vauquer. Every detail given by
Balzac contributes to “an intense impression of cheerless
poverty, shabbiness, and dilapidation,” and along with the
physical description, “the moral atmosphere is suggested.”
Auerbach’s discussion builds to the following observation:
The entire description, so far as we have yet
considered it, is directed to the mimetic imagination of the reader, to his memory-pictures of
similar persons and similar milieux which he may
have seen; the thesis of the “stylistic unity” of the
milieu, which included the people in it, is not
established rationally but is presented as a striking
and immediate state of things, purely suggestively,
without any proof.
By “not established rationally” and “without any proof,”
Auerbach means that Balzac does not present an extended
argument or logical train of thought to demonstrate that all
the details he names and observations he makes are in fact
related, bound in some chain of causality. According to
Auerbach, what Balzac presents is a striking and immediate
state of things, something we take in all at once, uncritically,
as if at a glance. In fact we encounter the components of this
impression one at a time, as we read, but they accumulate to
affect us as a growing ensemble, as a complete whole already
existent and gradually revealed—not as a logical proposition
or arithmetic calculation which must be worked through to
the end before we can see and accept what is meant.
“What confronts us, then, is the unity of a particular
milieu, felt as a total concept of a demonic-organic nature
and presented entirely by suggestive and sensory means,”
Auerbach concludes (416). Balzac accomplishes the remarkable feat of presenting, in words that must be read and understood in sequence, the kind of impression we would have had
if we had been there to look at the actual room. What he tells
us over the course of sixteen sentences, most of them quite
THOMPSON
11
long, we could have taken in had we been there, at a glance,
in a single glimpse, like the view we were invited to take from
the threshold of Feinstein’s studio. This is so because the
sentences do not reason with us or attempt to demonstrate—
they offer, as Auerbach says, no proof. Rather, these sentences
overwhelm us with detail and observation mixed together, an
imaginative description in which odors have moral overtones
and misfortune oozes from worn furniture.
When we know a thing at a glance, we do not consider
evidence and weigh opinions as a jury might during a
prolonged deliberation. We see the thing and know it at once
for what it is, as we recognize a face that suddenly comes into
sight without thinking, that nose, those eyes, brown hair
parted on the right: it’s John Doe! Rather than reason our way
to an identification, we somehow consult a memory-bank and
call up, all at once, the one we recognize. Recognizing this
feature of human understanding, Balzac could reasonably
expect his reader to reach into his or her memory-bank of
“pictures of similar persons” to “recognize” the intertwined
physical and moral dilapidation of Madame Vauquer and her
milieu. He doesn’t attempt to argue that this thing is
connected to that, or that the one is a cause of the other: he
presents not a thesis to argue, but a milieu to recognize; we
see it, recognize it, and take it in as a whole.
This taking in at a glance depends, as Auerbach notes, on
“memory-pictures of similar people which [the reader] may
have seen”: if I have never seen John Doe before I will not
recognize him when his face suddenly appears. If I have the
opportunity to look at him a little while, I may note a certain
kind of nose, details of grooming, hair color and texture, etc.,
and conclude that he is a certain kind of person, but I will not
“recognize” him if I don’t know him. In this instance
knowing at a glance would not be available to me, but
another approach, an approach involving sustained
reasoning, demonstration, the kind of thinking involved in a
“proof ”—such an approach might lead me somewhere. Such
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
prolonged consideration would hardly have time to come
into play during a glance, but it might during a stare. But
rather than start down this path, which will lead in a different
direction, let me take the line of thinking we have been
considering—that some operations of the soul are spontaneous—a little farther back in time.
The careful reader will have noted a new word in the last
sentence. In the quotations I cited, Kant refers to mental aptitudes and to things going on the author’s head. Kant speaks
of the operations he discusses as taking place in the mind
because he saw human experience as split between two
worlds. The phenomenal world is the physical world, the
world of space and time. Everything here is completely
explained by the laws of physics. Our bodies are in this
world. This world is nature, and it is available to us through
the understanding. The other world—the noumenal world—
is a thing apart. This is a suprasensory world in which the
reason operates; it is in this world that moral judgment and
the will exist. This is the world we can know only with the
mind, which, as he notes, is in the head.
But in the last sentence of the paragraph before last I used
the word soul instead of mind. I did so in preparation for
following the line of thinking we are considering farther back
in time. Where we are headed—the thinking of Plato and
Aristotle—there is no sharp cleavage between two worlds.
There is an ordered cosmos, and there are many independent
things in that cosmos, and some of those things have souls.
Whether the soul is a thing that survives the death of the body
it inhabits is, in this world, an open question. Plato’s Socrates
likes to speculate about this from time to time, but he freely
admits that in doing so he is indulging himself, not demonstrating, and that he does so for pleasure and comfort (as in
the Phaedo, the conversation that takes place on the afternoon before his execution). Aristotle is not prone to mythological speculation.
THOMPSON
13
But whatever its ultimate fate, the soul, in the world we
are now considering, is intimately connected with the body
and the cosmos it inhabits. One kind of thinking available to
this soul is perception, and the soul perceives by using its
bodily organs of sense. This soul has motions that may take
the form of movements, either of small particles within the
body or of large things outside us through use of the limbs.
Choice and moral judgment operate not in spite of nature,
but through nature, in cooperation with it. This is so because
nature, choice, moral judgment, and everything else are parts
of an ordered cosmos. Men tend to know and seek the good,
and avoid the bad in the same way that light things tend to
rise and heavy ones fall, and for the same reason: because the
cosmos is ordered.
Not only is the cosmos ordered, but it is ordered in a way
that men can know, at least up to a point. Reasonable speech,
offered in good faith, can be answered in good faith so that
two earnest speakers working together can come to know
what neither of them could have come upon on his own. This
is one example of dialectic, and its application leads upward
from commonplace observations everyone agrees on to ideas
about these observations, from there to groupings and classifications, and on to an awareness of causes. Specific causes
have more general causes, and the discovery of proximal
sources leads to those that are more remote, more fundamental, more unifying. All this is available to those who use
reason in good faith.
“In good faith” means with the intention of discovering
the truth. This world is no Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, no
Pollyannaish rich boys’ club where only the privileged few are
taken into account, where everyone is just, noble, and good
because he (and only hes need apply) can afford it. The texts
that give us this world are full of instances of what appears to
be reasonable speech used for base ends: flatterers, tyrants,
sophists, eristics, and practitioners of all the vices are present
in these texts. The highest and best that these texts point to
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
can hardly be called “Greek thought,” or “the Greek way.”
These best possibilities were defined—let alone practiced—by
only a handful of thinkers, some of whom were at odds with
the culture they lived in (Socrates was executed; Aristotle
died in exile).
But the possibility of knowing and playing a healthy part
in an ordered cosmos lives in these texts, and this broad
vision—this vision of wholeness—underlies the earliest
appearance of the spontaneous operations of the soul we
have been considering. According to translator Joe Sachs,
Aristotle’s On the Soul uses twenty-four different words to
mean thinking. The broadest of these, noein, can be thought
of as meaning “to think” in a general sense: the activity of the
soul that includes everything from sense perception to the
highest kind of reason. But one word in the cluster, theorein,
refers to just the kind of taking-in-all-as-a-whole we have
been considering: the view of Madame Vauquer’s pension,
and the glimpse of Feinstein’s studio. This verb is translated
by Sachs as to “contemplate.”
Contemplation gets a lot of attention from Aristotle. He
begins with simple examples such as recognizing a figure, say
a triangle, at first glance: we do not have to count the angles
to know it as a triangle; we see it all at once. In a similar way
we recognize a face we know, as in the example I used earlier.
On this level, contemplation is almost like simple perception,
only a bit more complex since it involves recognizing a
pattern and not just a single sensation.
But elsewhere Aristotle’s examples of contemplation are
of things more complex; in the Nicomachean Ethics he
speaks of the exercise of this ability not in the realm of
perception, but in moral judgment: he speaks of recognizing
instantly, without calculation, the right thing to do in a particular situation. Contemplation is available for all our actions,
from the lowest to the highest. Sachs has given the best exposition I know of this feature of Aristotle’s thinking; here is a
part of it:
THOMPSON
15
Like our highest knowing, our perceiving takes in
something organized and intelligible all at once
and whole. That is why we can contemplate a
scene or sight before us as well as something
purely thinkable. In neither case is the thing
grasped our product, and that is why Aristotle calls
both perception and contemplative thinking
passive (pathêtikos), but this receptiveness to being
acted upon should not be confused with inertness.
It is rather an effortful holding of oneself in readiness. Attentive seeing or concentration in thinking
requires work to keep oneself from distraction; it
is a potent passivity (dunamis) that becomes
activity in the presence of those things that feed it.
Nutrition is the active transformation of things in
the world into the living body; contemplation is
the effortful openness of the soul to a merging
into the intelligible foundation of the world.
Reading and listening are always hard work, and
hardest of all when one lets the meaning of the
speaker or author develop within oneself.
Contemplation, as Aristotle intends it, is the same
sort of act without the building up of interpretation; it is rather what he calls affirming something
not by thinking any proposition about it but by
touching it…Aristotle believes that the activity of
knowing is always at work in us and available to
us…potentially guiding everything we do in the
same way the blind grub worm is led to its food
and a plant is turned to the light. (Sachs, On the
Soul, 37)
In order to understand what this contemplation is, it is
necessary to distinguish between what we do in contemplation and what we do in deliberation, which is also thinking,
but thinking of a different kind. Deliberation involves paying
attention and thinking things through. We apply it when we
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
are faced with things that could be one way or another. As a
photographer in the street I notice a small detail—the
chipped polish on a fingernail, say—and I start to wonder
about what this detail tells me. Does it mean the person is
careless of her appearance, therefore unselfconscious and
possibly willing to agree to be photographed by a stranger on
a public street? Or was the chipping an unfortunate accident,
and is the stranger sufficiently concerned about this small
mishap to be worried about how she looks, and therefore
reluctant to agree have her picture taken here and now?
Things could stand either one way or the other, and deliberation comes into play to weigh the alternatives.
When we deliberate we are in the realm of practical judgment. We are using our ability to think to figure out what is
best for us to do. Such thinking is an important part of living
in society, but it is not contemplation. Contemplation does
not, like deliberation, lead us to consider things that can be
one way or another; rather, it leads us to the awareness of
what cannot be otherwise—what Sachs, after Aristotle, calls
“the intelligible foundation of the world.” And, as he carefully says, in contemplation we are led not just to see this
“intelligible foundation,” but to merge into it, to participate
in and become a part of it.
What can this mean for a skeptical, secular, subjective,
egoistic modern? One of the attractions of Aristotle’s
thinking is that it offers a way to think about the self in the
world that is neither subjective nor egoistic. What he
proposes is that the cosmos is ordered, and that things
happen, for the most part, for reasons. He calls those reasons
causes, and he consistently finds that causes usually have
other causes; those that are farther in the background are
more general causes, which he refers to as sources. Following
this line of thought does not involve rejecting modern
science, but rather taking what modern technological science
tells us and thinking about it in the context of what we know.
To do so involves remaining skeptical that scientific explana-
THOMPSON
17
tion—especially when it can be expressed only in mathematical formulations incapable of being rendered in speech that
is not either non-sensical or hopelessly equivocal—is the
whole story, the version that eliminates any possibility it
cannot presently account for. In support of this sensible attitude, I might cite the wisdom of a thinker who began as a
physical scientist, Immanuel Kant:
The understanding which is occupied merely with
empirical exercise, and does not reflect on the
sources of its own cognition, may exercise its functions very well and very successfully, but it is quite
unable to do one thing, and that of very great
importance, to determine, mainly, the bounds that
limit its employment, and to know the laws that
lie within or without its own sphere. (Critique of
Pure Reason, “Of the Ground of the Division of all
Objects into Phenomena and Noumena”)
If we follow Aristotle in accepting the principle of an
ordered universe as a model for our thinking—and in this it
claims no more of our absolute, final, and unquestioning
belief than any proposal of modern science should—then we
can think about thinking in ways that are denied us if we
accept the world as mostly dark, silent space where particles
collide at random, a realm where some accident of chemical
connection has made it possible for “us” to “think” about
those random collisions. To follow Aristotle’s lead we do not
have to believe in anything, except in the possibility that
thinking can actually lead us to things not completely determined by what we are and what we already happen to know.
As Aristotle himself says in the Nicomachean Ethics, after
observing that “the intellect is something divine as compared
with a human being”:
But one should not follow those who advise us to
think human thoughts, since we are human, and
mortal thoughts, since we are mortal, but as far as
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possible one ought to be immortal and to do all
things with a view toward living in accord with the
most powerful thing in oneself, for even if it is
small in bulk, it rises much more above everything
else in power and worth. (10.7)
Taking what Aristotle says seriously requires accepting the
possibility of an ordered universe, and the possibility that the
intellect can perceive something of this order.
As we go through our daily lives we do notice that, for the
most part, things do seem to be connected in a causal way. If
we follow Aristotle’s thinking we start with commonplace
observations that many things seem to make a kind of sense;
if we subject these observations to reason, clarify them and
try to find some order in them, we are doing what Aristotle
did. Reading his thinking can help clarify our own, and
disclose possibilities we find attractive but might not—as
“educated” post-Enlightenment moderns—have known
about without his help.
If we can entertain his notion that our world—the world
we can discover and know—has some kind of order, then we
can approach that order in contemplation. Think of that
order as what we call in everyday speech “the big picture.”
Someone who can’t get past petty details doesn’t get the big
picture: that person can’t see the forest for the trees. If we
notice that chipped fingernail (to return to the example I used
earlier), we are paying attention to details involved in what
Aristotle calls an ultimate particular. If we use that bit of the
world as a guide to whether we should act or not—in this
example, ask permission to take a picture—we are in the
realm of practical judgment. We are deliberating. But if we
happen to be in such a state—a state of open receptivity, of
“potent passivity,” as Sachs calls it—that when we see the
chipped nail we also see something about the single human
life whose whole history up until that moment includes that
nail and the events that led first to its painting and later to its
chipping, then we are moving beyond deliberation. If we see
THOMPSON
19
not only the nail and the history that led to it, but also something fundamental about what human life on earth actually is,
in its briefness, in its vulnerability to shocks and surprises,
mishaps great and small, in its reliance on vanity and attempts
to please, and on things taken up only to be discarded in
distraction a few moments later—if we see at the same time
we see the chipped nail a whole concatenated bundle of small
ambitions and great disappointments, then we are on the
point of merging into the intellectual foundation of the
world. We are in a state where ultimate particulars and
universals both are present and connected, in a state where
we can be aware of a thing itself and of its place in a larger
order at the same time. In contemplation we see neither
without the other.
“An example is in fact a source of something universal” is
how Aristotle puts it (Nicomachean Ethics, 6.3). In contemplation we see what we can know of the world’s order
unfolding before us—not from us: it is not our product,
though we are included in it, but before us. We see what is
there to be seen. How do we know for sure that what we see
is before us, rather than merely from us, the fevered product
of an active imagination? We don’t. It may be only that. But
it also may not be only that, and years of disciplined attempts
to make it be not only that may help bring about the richer
possibility, a world disclosed to us rather than a world imagined by us. The whole of the Nicomachean Ethics makes clear
that contemplation is the highest, most difficult use of our
ability to think, and that it is not available to everyone. Only
those who are able to hold themselves so that they are not
distracted by passions, needs, local interests—all the possible
missteps Aristotle calls vices—can achieve the state of undistracted calm from which it is possible to see what is there
rather than the opportunities for profit, reminders of desire,
occasions to use a favorite skill, and so forth—the buzzing
static of everyday life familiar to every normal citizen of the
everyday world. In contemplation, we use the will to suppress
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
distraction rather than to initiate aggressive action. This
explains why photographers who are extraordinarily
talented, clever, and skillful can produce work that, though it
may hold our attention for a time, never achieves greatness or
profundity. Look at how clever I am, look what I can do, the
pictures say. If a photographer has a marketing campaign in
the back of the thinking part of his soul as he works, the
needs and possibilities of that campaign will find their ways
into the picture, and a careful, thoughtful viewer’s attempt to
penetrate that picture will be blocked somewhere in the
realm of deliberation—where strategies are hatched—before
it can arrive at contemplation. What the photographer
needed to see, and not what was there, is what the picture
will be about, what that picture will show.
This distinction may be difficult for some readers to
accept, but it is real. Recall that effort is necessary, that will
must be exerted to acquire and maintain the “potent
passivity” we are discussing; steady practice of this discipline
over a long time makes attaining the sought goal increasingly
possible. It is a prospect worth pursuing. Imagine a diligent
photographer who looks at the same or similar subjects for
thirty or forty years. The showing off and cleverness, the
willful self-full-ness get used up, sown like so many wild oats
during the first few years. Eventually he or she might settle
down, so to speak—in Aristotle’s model, come to terms with
and tame the disorganized, distracted state of uncontrolled
passions normal to childhood—and begin to see what’s really
there. A genius (in the modern sense of being extraordinarily
quick-witted, not in Kant’s more neutral descriptive sense)
might come to the same point in two or three tries, and then
go off in some other direction.
I have strayed so far from the example I began with—
standing on the threshold of Feinstein’s studio—that I have
taken this discussion back to the time of Alexander the Great,
and almost brought it full circle. Read what Sachs has written
about Aristotle not from the point of view of a student of
THOMPSON
21
ancient thought, but from the point of view of a photographer:
We can contemplate a scene or sight before us as
well as something purely thinkable…in neither
case is the thing grasped our product…receptiveness to being acted on…a potent passivity that
becomes activity in the presence of things that feed
it…the effortful openness of the soul to a merging
into the intelligible foundation of the world…
when one lets the meaning [of another] develop
within oneself…affirming something not by
thinking any proposition about it but by touching
it. (On the Soul, Sachs, 37)
These could be tenets of an aesthetic of photography that
would come into play on the doorstep of Feinstein’s studio,
at the window of Madame Vauquer’s pension, on a violent
Vietnamese street, any place or time since the invention of
the camera. This suggested aesthetic, if scrupulously
followed, would produce pictures not based on the principles
of good design, nor in accordance with the wishes of an audience or market. These pictures would not speak first and
most loudly about what the photographer knows, would not
be deliberately expressive of anything urgent about that
photographer’s own self or needs, nor would they present a
poetic construction intended to distract a viewer’s attention
from the everyday world he walks and breathes in. The
pictures stemming from such an aesthetic would be quiet and
true, diligently observant of the things in front of them, and
alert to orders of order ranging far beyond ideas about scurves and The Rule of Thirds.
What might a work of photographic art called into being
according to the principles gleaned from Aristotle be like? It
might be something like a work of another kind of art
discussed by Auerbach a little later in the same essay I
referred to earlier. This work is also a work of fiction, and
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Auerbach’s commentary concerns the author’s manner of
telling the reader about his characters’ world:
We hear the writer speak; but he expresses no
opinion and makes no comment. His role is
limited to selecting the events and translating them
into language; and this is done in the conviction
that every event, if one is able to express it purely
and completely, interprets itself and the persons
involved in it far better and more completely than
any opinion or judgment appended to it could do.
This description picks up the new note introduced by
Aristotle into what we are considering. In referring to Balzac,
Auerbach noted that that author depended on his reader’s
“mimetic imagination,” on “his [the reader’s] memorypictures of similar persons and similar milieux he may have
seen.” To the extent that this is true, Balzac expects his reader
to match the description he reads with what he already
knows. Aristotle goes further. The thing grasped is not our
product; it is achieved through “an effortful holding of
oneself in readiness,” the “effortful openness of the soul to
the structure of the intelligible world.” This is not matching
selections from our memory-banks with the stimuli that
present themselves. Relying on memory-banks is mediation;
full openness to what is is im-mediate.
Balzac appeals to what the reader already thinks and even
tells the reader what he, Balzac, thinks about the world he
describes. But the later 19th century French writer Auerbach
turns to promises to go farther in the direction Sachs indicates:
There occur in his letters…many highly informative statements on the subject of his aim in art.
They lead to a theory—mystical in the last
analysis, but in practice, like all true mysticism,
based upon reason, experience, and discipline—of
a self-forgetful absorption in the subjects of reality
23
THOMPSON
which transforms them (par une chimie
merveilleuse) and permits them to develop to
mature expression. In this fashion subjects
completely fill the writer; he forgets himself; his
heart no longer serves him save to feel the hearts
of others, and when, by fanatical patience, this
condition is achieved, the perfect expression,
which at once entirely comprehends the momentary subject and impartially judges it, comes of
itself; subjects are seen as God sees them, in their
true essence. (On the Soul, 37)
The writer referred to is, of course, Gustave Flaubert, and
the letters mentioned were written while he was at work on
Madame Bovary. His practice, and the theory of it deduced
from his letters by Auerbach, take us to the threshold of an
exciting prospect—the prospect of coming to know something that is truly foreign to us. In ordinary life this is a
prospect that presents increasing difficulties for most of us,
especially after the first dozen or twenty years of life. This
prospect is also the central challenge of photography as a
mature art.
* * * * * * * *
Photography is not primarily a studio art. The discussion so
far has been directed towards photographs that come into
being when a photographer looks at something new to him,
something strange, something beyond the range of his
familiar daily experience. Some photographers have made
discoveries while rearranging the stuff on their desks or
kitchen counters, of course, and such a familiar happening as
the play of sunlight on a window curtain can appear miraculous to a certain kind of person in a receptive mood. But for
many photographers encountering something new involves
travel, or at least walking out of the house. The specific
pictures I have mentioned so far were taken in a battle zone
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
in southeast Asia and in the Philippines; the hypothetical ones
I have speculated about would have been made in the
entryway of a strangers studio and in the corner (or at the
window) of a French pension. Travel or walking around is
easiest for the young and unattached. They have more physical stamina, and more time. So it is hardly surprising that
photographers often do more work when young than later
on.
Walker Evans continued to work with a camera until very
near the end of his life, when a fall broke his collarbone,
making it difficult for him to hold even the small camera he
was using at the time. Even before this fall, his work, though
daily or nearly so, can hardly be compared in volume and
intensity to the work he did in 1935 and 1936, when he
exposed hundreds of 8x10 negatives and dozens of rolls of
35mm (and other sizes) film on a series of auto trips that took
him through parts of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Georgia,
Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. As an older man his
work was less strenuous, conducted at a more leisurely pace,
and less adventurous than the work he had done in his mid30s.
He took a job with Fortune magazine, and after retiring
from that, a job teaching at Yale University. As his work
became known to a new generation interested in the kind of
photography he did, he was asked to speak to school and
museum audiences from time to time. He gave a few
prepared talks, but mostly he preferred taking questions from
the audience. If a session went well, he might appraise its
success by saying, “They got a good talk out of me.”
As he aged, Evans grew more reflective, and he talked
about his own work and photography in general. Some of his
reflections were recorded on audio tapes by the institutions
that asked him to speak. Anyone who considers these talks as
a body might well come to the conclusion that Evans was
shaping an image of himself, presenting the story of his development and work as he wanted it to be understood.
THOMPSON
25
Some things he mentions again and again: he liked to talk
about going to Paris as a young man, about seeing James
Joyce once in Sylvia Beach’s bookstore but being afraid to
approach him. He liked to talk about spending time with
Hemingway in Cuba, and he frequently talked about other
writers he had read but not known: D.H. Lawrence and
Henry James, for example. He once began a question-andanswer session at a summer art program for college students
by reading a long sentence from James’s The American Scene.
That was his idea of getting the ball rolling with a roomful of
art students in 1972. A recently-published portfolio of his
photographs, most taken during the 1930s, was displayed on
the wall behind him, and the students’ questions were about
those pictures and not the passage Evans read.
Evans’s literary interests were more than a snobbish
pretension (though they were that as well). One observation
that comes up more than once in these late taped conversations (Evans died in 1975) was his debt to two French writers,
one of them Gustave Flaubert. I don’t think Evans ever cited
a specific passage in Flaubert, and I’m sure he never read
much (if any) critical writing on Flaubert. He had a low
opinion of criticism in general: he considered critical writing
to be a good deal below what is now called “creative” writing.
For Evans, writing fiction was art, and writing criticism was
not. He looked down on the English Department at Yale for
being concerned mostly with criticism instead of artistic
production.
But somehow, despite his disdain for critical analysis,
Evans managed to intuit that there was something in the
work of Flaubert—a writer of fiction—that he could learn
from and use in his work as a photographer. He was able to
intuit this, and to acquire what he needed not by making
propositions about it—not by analyzing what Flaubert had
done, and then constructing from that analysis a program to
direct his own approach to picture-taking. Rather, he
absorbed it directly, as if by osmosis, relying I think on some-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
thing like the procedure described by Immanuel Kant in the
passage quoted earlier. You might even say that Evans, in
looking at Flaubert as an artist, saw something whole and
formed—saw at a glance, if you like—something he recognized and understood, not by analysis and calculation, but
recognized in the way we recognize a triangle without
counting the angles, or the face of our friend John without
making an inventory of his features.
If the connection between Flaubert and Evans is a real
one, and I believe it is, then it may be worthwhile to try and
work out just how something of Flaubert can be seen in a
picture made by Evans. We might ask what it was that Evans
absorbed, if not from page 213 of Madame Bovary then at
least from the spirit in which Flaubert worked—a spirit
which, as we saw from the brief passage of commentary by
Auerbach and that passage’s parallels with Sachs’s distillation
of a current in Aristotle’s thinking, has special ambitions and
connections with other approaches to the world and earlier
bodies of thinking.
Let me take as a starting point the print that sits propped
up on the desk where I write. It is of a well-known Evans
picture, the flashlit view he made of kitchen utensils on the
wall of a frame house in Hale County, Alabama, in the
summer of 1936. The picture presents a small rectangle,
mostly light gray in tone. Some of the tiny spaces between the
vertical boards that form the room’s wall have been plugged,
and are quite dark gray, almost black. Others are cracks that
let in the daylight, and are white. Shadows of things on the
wall are dark, and some reflections of the flash (from a bulb,
probably) are as bright as the daylight showing through the
cracks. For the most part, then, the field we see in this picture
is gray, but the variations make a pattern—a pattern that is
sufficiently arresting, in a graphic sense, to be noticeable at
first glance. The material shown is unfamiliar to most of us
(or at least it was, until this picture became so famous), but
THOMPSON
27
the pattern of its display might cause anyone interested in
looking to pause, ask, What’s that? and take a closer look.
Kitchen Wall, Alabama Farmstead, 1936
Even after this preliminary, superficial examination
comments suggest themselves. This odd pattern—odd
because it is unexpected, yet graphically sure, odd because we
recognize the pattern before we identify the real-world stuff
that forms the pattern—attracts us, and causes us to linger.
Our attention has been attracted to the look of the picture.
The look of the picture may be understood as its distinctive overall form, that look that makes it different from other
pictures in the way that my face makes me different from
other faces. Just as we linger at the sight of certain faces more
than at the sight of others, so too we are more apt to linger
at the sight of certain pictures. This feature is important to
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Kant, who attempted to establish that some arrangements are
“naturally” appealing to “all men in all countries.” I am not
the one to judge how far he succeeded in this effort, but his
concern with significant form underscores its hold on our
attention.
When we are at the stage of being attracted by the look
of the picture, we are in the position we were in on the
threshold of Feinstein’s studio. We are taking in the picture as
a whole, at a glance, and we may be open to an experience of
contemplation—the experience, the reader will remember, of
letting the truth of what is seen unfold within us, directly, as
something not our product. Faced with this picture, what
would that mean?
It might mean, for a start, exerting effort to avoid distraction, freeing our attention of irrelevant demands from some
personal agenda of wants of our own. An obvious example
might be to avoid thinking about the provenance of this
particular print. How old is it? Who printed it? From what
collector or dealer did it come? What cryptic and possibly
value-enhancing notations in pencil are on the back? How
much will it bring at auction?
Each of these concerns is legitimate, in its appropriate
context, but none of them has anything at all to do with
looking at the picture contemplatively, that is, in such a way
as to let what is seen unfold within us.
In a sense, what I am describing is trying to calm down
the static so that we can approach something like the ideal
“purity” that was the justification of the spontaneous first
glance recommended by Feinstein at the first session of his
work shop. It is important to understand, however, that we
are not after a state of child-like innocence, some kind of
willful ignorance. We live in the world, and if we take this
picture seriously we will soon enough have to work very hard
at bringing as much of that world’s experience as we can to
bear on it, but only after the picture begins to tell us what we
need to bring. Before that can commence, we need to shed
THOMPSON
29
and focus, exert the effort it takes to avoid distraction and
attain quiet.
As the pattern continues to exert its hold on our attention, we may begin to survey the terrain that, at first glance,
seemed so inviting. What things do these modulated grays
disclose to our attention? The photographer’s wish to show
small details is evident, but not obsessive: the flat light of the
head-on flash illumination has minimized surface detail which
would leap to the eye if seen in hard cross-light.
The manner of rendering this humble scene hardly calls
attention to itself at all, at first glance. We have noted a
certain uneasy tension among the various things visible—the
“elements” of the “composition.” The two horizontal strips
of lath nailed across the vertical planks seem to the viewing
eye to float, in spite of the clearly-visible heads of the nails
securing them, and their echo in the darker, fuzzy marks in
the picture’s center comes into play in this connection: they
seem almost to recede in space, denying the obvious flat wall
that ends the picture’s depth. The tilt of the cross member
near the picture’s top—so flimsy a timber can scarcely be
called a beam—adds to the sense of disorder, and the objects
it supports cooperate in this impression as well. The glass jar
is cockeyed (with reference to the board edge next to it, but
who would expect a plank in this structure to keep to a true
vertical?); the metal can looks off-kilter too—unless it is
hanging true and the planks are off. The mysterious bit of
crud suspended on a tiny line from the leftmost nail confirms
the true vertical. A plate with a centered hole, odd patches of
adhering paper—one a ripped commercially-printed notice
retaining only the word fragment “AM”, in bold capitals, and
“It’s [undecipherable] ized” in small, faint, linked script—and
a single nail near the can complete the decorations on the
“ground” of this “figure-ground composition.”
Viewers familiar with other pictures by this photographer
will recognize this tense, slightly-unnerving kind of arrangement of forgettable or cast-off objects. Both the objects
shown, and their manner of framing and organization, as well
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
as the seemingly unemphatic use of light and tone are characteristic of his work. These “stylistic elements” offer interests of their own, which can be expanded upon by those who
believe the chief interest of pictures to lie in their relation to
the history of style. Or perhaps such a line of analysis is
another distraction leading away from what this picture has
to show its viewers. Indeed, the tensely-organized visual field
sets off a central focus, a “subject,” which lies at almost the
exact center of the picture, where its diagonals cross. Its
subject is the family silver chest.
The objects forming the “ground” are so nondescript, so
arrestingly organized (or disorganized), that it is easy to see
them only—that is to say, to note their visual weights and
positions without thinking too much about what they might
be, or be used for. What viewer has an experiential reference
for a topless Mason jar, or a plate with a hole in the center?
We look at the tonalities, the textures, the odd spacing, and
our experience is visual, “aesthetic.” Perhaps the can with its
quaint wooden handle and the plate, certainly the textual
fragment AM (a fragment freighted with ambiguous possible
meanings), register as knowable, if disparate, objects. Any
“kick” this recognition adds to our experience of the picture
might be related to Surrealism (the picture was made in
1936), and also “aesthetic.” It would have to do with beauty.
But at the picture’s center the rules change. The objects
shown so clearly there, and highlighted by the reflection of
the flash from their shiny surfaces, present a great load of
specific information, and of recognizable illusion. These are
utensils we know well; we feel them in our hands. We recognize the shell-like edges of one fork’s handle and note the
different pattern of the next handle over, and the lack of
ornament at all on the handle of a nearby spoon. In between
is a knife with a wooden handle (like the handle of the leftmost utensil), a handle whose halves are held together by
wire.
THOMPSON
31
No narrator or even caption is needed with material as
familiar, as everyday as this. Any viewer likely to see this
picture would recognize—and understand—the distinctions
in play among patterned, plain, wooden, broken, tarnished,
matched, and odd—as quickly as he or she might almost feel
the utensil in right or left hand, familiar from lifelong practice. These small images, so recognizable and familiar, send
out “kindred mutations” to the minds of any viewers who
bother even to identify what the picture shows. A lingering
look—the arresting organization of the picture encourages
it—raises the question of how this familiar material in the
center—the “figure”—relates to the strange unsettling
“ground” surrounding it. At this point, the picture begins to
weigh in with its full largeness of meaning, the full force of
its allusive reference.
Once the silver-chest is seen to exist in such strange form,
and understood to reside in so hostile and unsettled an environment, the imagination of an engaged viewer begins to
work. He enlists his memory-bank, allowing what he knows
to appear according to directions coming from the unfolding
representation in the picture. That imaginative work might
begin perhaps with the hands that hold, and wash, and polish,
and put away those prized salvaged utensils—might those
hands resemble the ruined members Hesiod dreamed of
preserving as new in the Golden Age? Then there might be
the odd attenuated daily chores that utilize the strange objects
on the wall, now understood as utensils also, saved and
arranged also. What sort of use might that suspended bit of
crud have? How could anyone value such a thing so much as
to hang it on the wall? Who could have such a need?
Lear has an answer: “Oh, reason not the need. Our basest
beggars/Are in the poorest thing superfluous.” This answer is
only a short space from the extreme of sympathetic identification, an extreme whose full limit finds voice in this howl:
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this hideous storm,
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O! I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou may’st shake the super flux to them,
And show the heavens more just.
This speech of Lear is offered as part of the front matter of
the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, in which this
picture first appeared.
We have now gone outside the picture. To have done so
at the beginning of our look at the picture—to have started
our look with a consideration of the book in which the
picture was published and its front matter might have been a
distraction. But at this point, well into an experience of the
picture, we want to know more: a question has been raised—
who could have such a need?—and anything we recall or can
learn about the picture’s first use and the circumstances of its
making can properly be called in to help answer that question. Our unfolding awareness of the picture—and of the
things in the picture—directs our thinking. In order to be in
us, the things in the picture tell us what they need. Our
memories and imaginations respond to the call and give the
picture what it needs to develop within us. When puzzles or
conflicts arise, they must be settled by thinking, and the
thinking appropriate to contemplation—theorein—is supplemented by another of Aristotle’s twenty-four kinds of
thinking—dianoein. This is the thinking that thinks things
through, as in propositions and demonstrations. This
thinking allows the viewer to sort out what he senses in that
first look, when he or she takes things all at once, as a whole.
But this problem-solving thinking, the thinking that looks at
details, identifies them, and connects them to other things we
recall from past experience—dianoein—operates in the
service and at the direction of theorein. A vision of the whole
THOMPSON
33
comes first, and as it develops it looms over and directs the
step-by-step thinking it requires in order to unfold
completely.
Evans made the pictures and determined their arrangement in the book, and their placement apart from the text.
James Agee was responsible for all the text. His huge sensibility may have worked its massy gravity on his collaborator.
Agee’s text suggests moral urgency, as if he desperately needs
to help the hardness and deprivation he observes, or at least
immolate himself to make up for it. For his part Evans is
moved so far as to wonder at what he sees—his “momentary
subject,” to use Auerbach’s phrase, and the qualification is
appropriate: Evans was not a humanitarian aid worker, but
an artist. He was in Alabama for three weeks, with the tenant
farmers for less time that that, and he stood in front of no
individual subject, including the human ones, for more than
a few minutes. But during that brief time he had available to
him the special attitude toward his “subject-matter” that had
been developing within him, and he paid close attention to
details. Close attention indeed: he, like Flaubert, gave his
momentary subject “self-forgetful absorption” so that the
subject “completely filled” him to the extent that “his heart
serves him only to feel the hearts of others”—others meaning
milieux as well as individual people. It is this “fanatical”
(Auerbach’s word used in connection with Flaubert; Evans
reported to Lincoln Kirstein that he was so stimulated by the
possibilities of photography that he sometimes thought
himself “completely crazy”) concentration that allows him to
come up with an approach, discover the approach that allows
his chosen momentary subjects to speak for themselves in
“mature expression.”
He has framed (and lighted) this picture in a characteristic
way, but this characteristic way does not overwhelm the
subject-things with his “artistry.” He has made a picture in
which the things shown can begin to work on the viewer, a
picture in which the world of the picture, the milieu it shows,
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34
can emerge as more noticeable, more important, and more
worthy of attention than the artistic milieu that set the stage
for its production.
This is what Evans found in Flaubert. According to
Auerbach, Flaubert completely dispenses with the “separation
of styles”—the notion, prevalent in Western literature prior
to the nineteenth century that only elevated figures (kings,
princes, and heroes, for example) were worthy of the serious
attention of tragedy. Humbler sorts appeared in comedy and
in satire, but were not taken as seriously as the figures in a
tragedy are. They did not come in for the serious treatment,
the close attention reserved for figures of high standing. Here
is Auerbach in an earlier essay (on Petronius):
Everything commonly realistic, everything
pertaining to everyday life, must not be treated on
any level except the comic, which permits no
problematic probing. As a result the boundaries of
realism are narrow. And if we take that word
realism a little more strictly, we are forced to
conclude that there could be no serious literary
treatment of everyday occupations and social
classes…in short of the people and its life. Linked
with this is the fact that the realists of antiquity do
not make clear the social forces underlying the
facts and conditions which they present. This
could only be done in the realm of the serio-problematic. (Auerbach, 270)
In Flaubert, however, he finds that
There are no high and low subjects; the universe is
a work of art produced without any taking of
sides, the realistic artist must imitate the procedures of Creation, and every subject in it essence
contains, before God’s eyes, both the serious and
the comic, both dignity and vulgarity….There is
no need for a general theory of levels, in which
THOMPSON
35
subjects are arranged according to their dignity, or
for any analyses by the writer commenting upon
the subject, after its presentation, with a view to
better comprehension and more accurate classification; all this must result from the presentation of
the subject itself. (Auerbach, 429-430) [italics
added]
The artist works for “a self-forgetful absorption in the
subjects of reality which transforms them (par une chemie
merveilleuse) and permits them to develop to mature expression.”
Flaubert wrote as a part of nature. In accordance with the
procedure outlined by Kant, Auerbach interpreted the rule of
nature given through Flaubert. Evans neither analyzed
Flaubert’s nature nor read the rules formulated by Auerbach
or anyone else. But he liked the look of the chimie
merveilleuse, the “self-forgetful absorption in the subjects of
reality which transforms them and permits them to develop
to mature expression”; through some trick of temperament,
talent, instinct, and sleight-of-hand he came up with his own
version of it. Flaubert found tragedy in the life of a provincial
wife, and Evans found matter for high seriousness in a poor
tenant-farmer’s makeshift kitchen. As the photographer Lee
Friedlander put it: after Walker we could take a picture of
anything.
It is hard to think of Evans’ pictures as glances. Many of
the best-known ones resemble nothing so much as direct
stares. This is so because the attention they give has a relentless quality: they are so clear, so unagitated—that is, not
dominated by a sense of urgency, a sense that something must
be done about state of affairs the camera shows. They avoid
extreme contrasts of black and white, presenting for the most
part a lucid field of modulated grays. They are composed not
only in the sense of being unruffled emotionally, but also in
the sense that they present their subjects in a way that might
be called appropriately elegant. This dignified presentation of
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
humble objects represents the artist’s rejection of the “separation of styles.” Like Van Gogh, Evans made a worn pair of
boots the subject of a picture.
In their stillness, his pictures are also like stares. Many of
Evans’s pictures from the mid-1930s were made with a view
camera, a large apparatus that must be used atop a tripod.
The view to be taken is framed in the camera’s ground glass
screen, which can be seen only when a black cloth covers
both the photographer’s head and the viewing screen of the
camera. The film must be inserted and the lens closed from its
viewing mode and reset before the film can be exposed and
the picture made. All this takes time, several seconds at least,
maybe a minute or two, and during this time the subject must
not change in any important way if the photographer is to get
on film the picture he saw on the viewing screen. And his
exposure times were not instantaneous. Exposure times of
one-half second and one full second, even in sunlight, were
recorded on the negatives storage envelopes. The pictures
look still because the subjects are still.
The subjects may have been chosen in part for their stillness, but the photographer’s concentration gives them an
extra measure of stillness. His attention to detail results in an
organization that includes even tiny features of the scene,
recording them with great fidelity while at the same time
preserving a masterly control of the whole picture, the overall
look of the scene that attracted his attention in the first place.
Utility poles and their shadows, the raking light on clapboards, the small figure of an onlooker with his head cocked
a certain way, even the clouds in the sky seems to settle into
their proper places like so many elements of an ordered
cosmos. The pictures seem still because they look inevitable.
Also, many of Evans’s best-known pictures were made
from a distance—from across the street or down the block.
He frequently used a lens of long focal length—a “telephoto,” which yields a picture with flattened perspective.
This tool allows the photographer to stand far off and yet
THOMPSON
37
keep the objects he looks at large within his picture’s frame.
The world is examined closely, yet held at arm’s length.
The unruffled stillness of these photographs and what we
know about the procedure of their making suggest that
photography’s glance can be extended in time so that it
becomes a stare. On the threshold of Feinstein’s studio we
were invited to take in what we saw in the blink of an eye,
before the corrupting influence of second thoughts could
come into play. Under Evans’s dark cloth, time slows down;
there is time for the appearance of second and even thirdthoughts. But under the discipline taught by Flaubert these do
not appear as corruptions or distractions: instead of listening
to distraction, the soul of the photographer exerts a willful
effort to avoid distraction so that the things in front of the
camera’s lens can fill it completely, obliterating (for the
moment) I want, I need, I hate, and even I know.
This extension of time from the glance to the stare
prepares the way for a further extension. The time of the
photographer’s stare at the subject, however long it lasts, will
still be brief. Life in the phenomenal world of space, time,
and traffic demands it. The “momentary” subject will pass
from view, and the photographer’s contemplative experience
of it will end. But the photograph lasts, and the picture can,
at any future time, become the subject of some viewer’s own,
later, separate contemplation. Flaubert’s discipline—and all
the possibilities available in contemplation—apply to pictureviewers as well as picture-takers.
Let me end this essay by stating the obvious: what a
photographer does when photographing, and what a viewer
does when he looking at a picture are similar, but are not the
same thing. Both photographer and viewer can look in
contemplation at what they see—I write “can look” because
contemplation is not available to all people, nor at all times.
But the attention each of the two, photographer and viewer,
gives is of a different order.
The viewer has a long time to look, a whole lifetime if the
picture’s hold on him is strong. The viewer has the possibility
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
of endless revisiting, re-thinking, exploring various leads,
various directions of thought that may arise, from time to
time, during moments of contemplation that are each
different, possibly increasingly comprehensive as the experience of the picture (and the viewer herself) mature during the
viewer’s prolonged intermittent stare.
The picture that occasions this viewing experience has to
be made during a relatively short time. How does a photographer “capture” profound order in a brief instant, at a
glance? How, at a glance, does a photographer take in the
ordered “look” of a meaningful scene and sense its connection to the ordered “intelligible foundation of the world?”
The only honest answer is, I don’t know how.
Discipline and experience help prepare the ground: a
prepared, receptive photographer who is also knowledgeable
about his art and experienced in its practice is receptive in a
way that is different, more potent, from the passive receptivity of a neophyte. Not everyone standing at the threshold
of Feinstein’s studio would see something worthy of much
attention or thought. An experienced architectural photographer might hit at once on the right place to put the camera in
order to make a picture suitable for the pages of Architectural
Digest. But another photographer—or that same photographer, if he managed to shed his professional ambition, even
for the moment needed to contemplate this “momentary”
subject—might find a view that would see in the ultimate
particulars on view there some universals truly worth
thinking about. How that happens, how genius operates in
that brief instant of time, is a mystery. Somehow, inside and
outside connect—merge, and an order that is corresponds to
an order we can know, perhaps an order great enough to
attract the attention and stimulate the thinking of viewers for
a long, long while. In that brief instant—during the photographer’s glance that discloses the look that prompts the
viewer’s stare—the photographer resembles Stevens’s
connoisseur of chaos, the pensive man:
THOMPSON
The pensive man . . . he sees that eagle float
For which the intricate Alps are a single nest.
39
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
41
Muthos and Logos
David Stephenson
What is a story? What is a good story? And how does a story
differ from other constructions of language either written or
spoken? From a lecture or essay, for example, a history, philosophical treatise or mathematical proof?
If you ever try to write a story, or even tell a tale without
writing it down, you know how difficult it is to define exactly
what you are doing—stringing words and sentences together,
yes, but to what end? A speech or a proof has a much more
obvious goal, viz. to praise or blame or persuade in the first
case and to demonstrate truth in the second. Stories teach
too, perhaps, but to say what or how they teach requires
insight into a very obscure part of the human soul, obscure
because logic does not operate in exactly the same way in
stories as in demonstration, nor can there be a simple truth to
illuminate or an action to promote. In fact, didactic stories
are universally condemned, because a concluding moral or an
explicit insight detract from the virtue of a story as such, and,
conversely, precisely those details that delight us in a story
will in general complicate any conclusion we might want to
draw from it.
Nevertheless, a story is always about something. The Iliad
and Odyssey tell you right at the beginning that they have a
subject: Achilles’ rage or Odysseus’ manhood. But if the
author does not tell you, it is usually a real chore to formulate in just a sentence or two exactly what a story is about.
Authors themselves confess to the difficulty or even disparage
the effort. Try formulating the subject of Oedipus or War and
David Stephenson is a tutor on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College.
This lecture was presented on June 15, 2005. Mr. Stephenson’s story, “The
Glass Eye,” won first prize in the short story contest sponsored by Bards and
Sages and will be published this winter as part of their annual anthology.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Peace or Waiting for Godot and you will see how elusive is the
task.
So I’m ready to listen to analysis and advice from
anybody who offers tell me what makes a story, even
Aristotle.
Story and Plot
Before I turn to the ancients, let me consider some modern
advisors. You can find shelves in any library or bookstore
loaded with books that will teach you how to write. So they
claim. Usually half of any such book is advice on how to sell
what you have written, and the other half encourages you to
keep writing at all costs, despite rejection, ignoring family
and friends, eking minutes out of hours and hours out of days
so that you can devote every spare bit of time to the elusive
pursuit of a writing career. No, that’s not fair; they also give
advice to the wordworn: tricks of the trade; rules of the
thumb; inspiration to the perspiring. “Avoid adverbs and
adjectives,” they say; “use short sentences”; “eliminate
cliches”; “maintain tension”; “flesh out your characters”;
“show, don’t tell”; “write what you know.” Much of this is
stylistic advice. Once upon a time, you could find both
readers and authors reveling in the clever peregrinations of a
long sentence. No longer. The modern publisher presumes
that the modern reader has a modern impatience. But if all
this advice has to be taken with a grain of salt (there’s a cliche
that somehow has not lost its savor), it also contains some
useful maxims.1 A parade of adverbs and adjectives do often
weaken rather than strengthen a description, because they
imply an attribute without exhibiting it, without making you
see or feel it. That is, “wily Odysseus” cannot charm or
dismay you with his wiles until you actually see him in
disguise or hear him telling clever lies. Nor can “swift-footed
Achilles” frighten you with the ferocity of his pursuit until
you watch him outrunning a river or hectoring Hector
beneath the walls of Troy.
STEPHENSON
43
So where the modern advisors give hints about how to
catch and hold the attention of a reader or an editor, they
rarely stop to examine the nature of the activity of writing, or
of its object: the story itself. You have to go back a little ways
to find someone, like E. M. Forster, willing to tackle that
question. “The king died and then the queen died”: that is
story, he says. “The king died and then the queen died of a
broken heart”: that is plot. Here we have a serious attempt to
characterize the storyteller’s art: he must connect events as
cause and effect, and the principal causes must lie within the
characters.2
Now E. M. Forster wrote some brilliant novels—
Howard’s End, Passage to India, A Room with a View—nevertheless, I have to modify his terminology. The first version of
“the king died, etc.” is hardly even a story, in my opinion,
though it does reflect the ancestry of the word, “story,” which
is offspring of the word, “history.” That is, in Forster’s first
example, a “story” is a mere reporting of events, which can
pass for a primitive kind of history even though these events
occurred only in the writer’s imagination.3 Forster amplifies
this dry version of his little tale into a more interesting one by
making connections, but even the second version hardly presents all the rudiments of a true story. As it stands it can hardly
suffice to identify anything. We need at least another sentence
or two to put us in mind of a specific tragedy. From the point
of view of the modern writer the connection between characters and events may be all you need, but Aristotle insists
that these connections belong to the context of the individual
work, they function within its identity.
Of course, we do need to distinguish this naked version
from the one clothed with all the linguistic and imaginative
elaborations of published literature. A plot is only the barest
skeleton of what we ordinarily call a “story,” whereas print or
performance fix it in its fullness. We can agree with Forster’s
designation of such an outline as “plot” only as long as we
reserve the word “story” for a higher kind of being than the
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unconnected sequence of deaths out of which he forms his
first example. By “higher kind of being” I do not mean a socalled “short story.” In “story” we must find the essence of a
work of literature, its “soul,” as Aristotle says.
The distinction between story in its full and its synoptic
form is easy for Aristotle, since he can call any complete work
of literature (including plays) a “poem” (something made,
poiêma). For the “essential story” he has other words, words
like muthos and logos. How well do these Greek words correspond to “story” and “plot?”
Muthos vs. Logos
The clearest distinction between muthos and logos is made by
Plato rather than Aristotle. In the Phaedo (61B), Socrates says
that the god told him in his dream to make music. His
attempt to comply turns him to meter and rhythm, and to
story as well. To be a true poet, he says, he must make
muthos, not logos. However, Socrates protests that he is not
muthologikos enough to make up a story from scratch. So he
cheats. He borrows one of Aesop’s fables and adapts it to
meter. Now this bit of dialogue is interesting not only because
it separates muthos radically from logos, but because after
dividing them it recombines the terms into a single adjective,
muthologikos. Muthologikos is hard to translate: we need to
coin a noun that tells us Socrates’ flaw: he is no mythologue,
no teller of tales, no mythologician.4 Here, as so often,
Socrates pretends to a modesty he really lacks. He has no
qualms about making up a story and even calling it muthos
when he needs one in this and other dialogues.5 But the
significance of this passage for us lies in the way Socrates’
understanding of poetry forces him to keep muthos and logos
apart, which he may have forgotten to do elsewhere.
At first these terms seem almost interchangeable in
Aristotle’s Poetics, and some scholars (e.g. Fyfe) translate
them indifferently as either “plot” or “story.”6 For example,
STEPHENSON
45
at the end of chapter 17 Aristotle uses the word logos where
one might think muthos more appropriate. Here is his
complete description of the “logos” of the Odyssey:
A man is for many years away from home and his
footsteps are dogged by Poseidon and he is all
alone. Moreover, affairs at home are in such a
state that his estate is being wasted by suitors and
a plot laid against his son, but after being stormtossed he arrives himself, reveals who he is, and
attacks them, with the result that he is saved and
destroys his enemies. That is the essence (to idion),
the rest is episodes. (Fyfe, trans.)
Whether one calls this synopsis “plot” or “story” hardly
matters: the point is that even such a brief account allows us
to identify the whole work and distinguish it from any other.
It is an only slightly more extended distillation of story than
Forster’s simple “plot.” Note that Aristotle does not name the
man or his home or son. This summary is enough to fix the
game even without naming players. It is just enough to identify the book by its events alone. Names should come later in
the construction of a story, according to Aristotle, names that
indicate character by their meaning or names drawn from the
legendary list of characters that traditionally embody the
necessary traits. First sketch the story in general (katholou),
he says, then fill it in with episodes and choose names.
Perhaps it might help to see how Aristotle defines logos in
general (Poetics 20.11): “logos is a composite meaningful
utterance of which some parts mean something in themselves.” To this Aristotle adds that logos can be one either the
way a sentence is, or the way the whole Iliad is. That any
sentence is itself a logos should be clear. A word is an atom of
meaning. Out of words the sentence forms a compound that
is not just a mixture or average or blend: it is a unity that
generates new meaning out of these components. But the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
entire Iliad too is a logos, one whose parts are logoi— viz.,
sentences. From this point of view, what causes wholeness in
either a story or a sentence is clearly meaning, and the same
could perhaps be said of any logos, whether that word
signifies ratio or reason or speech.
But this is different for muthos. Muthos too is unified, but
it is unified around action, (praxis), rather than meaning.
Aristotle defines muthos as “a representation (mimêsis) of an
action. For I say,” he says, “that muthos is the synthesis of
deeds (pragmata).”
Consider Oedipus. He has performed a series of deeds,
many outside of the play: he leaves Corinth; he kills an arrogant old man at the crossroads; he solves the riddle of the
Sphinx; he marries the king’s widow and rules Thebes; he
hunts down the criminal responsible for the plague; he
consults oracles; he examines witnesses; he ignores the warnings of Tiresias and Jocasta; he looks for his true parents; he
finds out who they are; he blinds himself. The play binds all
these deeds into a single action: the action of self-discovery.
In the end, and only in the end, does he know who he is.
Thus, in a story, deeds culminate in action, and action is the
result of choice—hence the peculiarly human quality of
stories that the word logos does not capture. An epic or a
drama has a soul, and that soul is its muthos.
It is within Aristotle’s metaphor of life that one might best
seek the source of beauty in a poem, which, he says, “must be
constructed...round a single piece of action, whole and
complete in itself, with a beginning, middle and end, so that
like a single living organism it may produce its own peculiar
form of pleasure.” Beauty, he says, belongs to “a living creature or any organism composed of parts.” The very unity of
life, the unity that nature preserves in growth and reproduction, must evoke aesthetic pleasure in the scientific or philosophical observer; so also the imitation of that life in a poem
should inspire a similar wonder and delight in everyone, all
the more when it develops a story which—as story—always
STEPHENSON
47
involves human life moved by choice and will and character
as well as desire. The analogy with nature in general is not far
to seek: praxis is to kinêsis as humanity is to nature. For
praxis—political, moral, deliberate action—is a motion
proper only to humans, and this is what moves a play or an
epic forward. A rock falls from its nature as a rock and a seed
sprouts out of its nature too; a story imitates the activity that
defines a human being as a political and social animal.
I think we must decide for ourselves whether the beauty
of a story is the cause or the result of that unity that a human
being provides through the cooperation of his own character,
means and ends, that is to say, whether beauty resides in the
representation or in the action itself. If the natural organization of a living creature, and of man in particular, is reason
for delight; so also is the construction of a poem. A poem
about human beings, therefore, a play or an epic, can bear us
a double beauty.
We might try to capture the distinction between muthos
and logos by equating them to “story” and “plot,” respectively. But if we turn to elementary plots, such as the one
Aristotle offers for the Odyssey, we find their differences
eroding. The sense of these words start to shift and overlap.
Does Aristotle’s description reflect the meaning of the epic or
its action or something else? If by “meaning” we mean what
just suffices to identify it in words, then, yes, this plot is its
meaning. But the single action, the praxis that subsumes all
the deeds of the Odysseus to his story, his muthos, is harder
to find within this description. Perhaps it lies in the homecoming itself, of which the trials and triumphs are only
details. Or maybe at the most fundamental level plot and
story are the same thing, or different aspects of the same
thing, plot emphasizing the logical sequence and progression
of events and story emphasizing their subsumption under the
larger dramatic whole of human endeavor.
An epic like the Odyssey contains many stories: it is
polymythic, one might say. There is the story of the Cyclops,
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and the story of Nausicaa, the tale of Telemachus’s trip to
Sparta and the story of the suitors’ slaughter. Similarly the
Iliad contains the “Diomediad,” Hector’s farewell, Priam’s
suit, Achilles’ scream on the wall, any one of which could
form the basis of a separate play. Each of these sequences
forms its own story. You remember Diomedes? Athena loves
him. With her help, he kills more heroes than Agamemnon
and Menelaus together, and even wounds the gods,
Aphrodite and Ares. Could not some author focus on him
alone? Or on Hector: the Trojan hero’s conquests in battle,
his sense of duty, the tender love of his wife and his son, his
willingness to sacrifice himself to protect Troy. There, too, is
a story worth isolating and presenting by itself. Each part of
the Iliad is its own story, and the whole epic is a story
composed of stories. So a story can be a higher unity in two
ways, a muthos muthôn—a story of stories, an action of
actions—or a logos logôn—a plot of plots, a meaning of
meanings. In this respect tragedies and epics differ: a tragedy
can contain only one story, one muthos, though it always
contains many logoi.
Aristotle limits the number of distinct poetic elements to
six. Muthos comes first, because he believes story to be the
aim and end of a poem. He ignores lyric poetry in this treatise, although he must know of Anacreon and Sappho and
Pindar. Why? The answer may be political: “the play’s the
thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.” Or
perhaps a poem with fewer elements is simply less of a poem.7
The remaining five poetic elements, listed in order of
importance, are: character (êthos); thought or reason (literally “thinking through”: dianoia); language, delivery or
diction (lexis, a word deriving obviously from legô); song
(melapoiia); spectacle (opsis). All of these, with the exception
of spectacle, figure in epic as well as tragedy. Character plays
an obvious role in any story. Thought, as understood here, is
the kind of thought that speech can exhibit, what displays
character and motive, but insofar as it dictates what is appro-
STEPHENSON
49
priate to a speaker and a situation, it could influence the poet
in a more general way. Aristotle refers the reader to his
Rhetoric for a full discussion of this topic. Lexis may be his
own coinage: at least, according to the Rhetoric (3.1), it is a
neglected art, however important to the public speaker— to
the poet as well, since this is what governs the choice of
words. Lexis or lexis en logô “is the interpretation by means
of words, which has the same power in prose and verse.” As
to the last two elements of a poem, melopoiia and opsis,
Aristotle says only that song is the more important.
So he has his own favorite list of features and advice to
the poet about how to improve many of them. The story must
progress from a “tightening” to a “loosening,” for example,
the first part building to a climax that turns happiness on its
head, after which the drama unravels to its natural end. For a
truly tragic effect, the hero of a story must be better than
ordinary, but must be brought low by a single failing, and his
fall must evoke pity and fear. The greatest of all writing skills
is the proper use of metaphor. This cannot be grasped from
anyone else. It is the sign of genius in a poet, since to
construct a good metaphor is to contemplate similarity.
Metaphor produces in miniature much of the pleasure of
poetry, for, Aristotle claims, we learn from metaphor the way
we learn from anything that raises our sights from species to
genus. And learning is the greatest pleasure. And so on.
Thus, the Poetics is full of such practical pointers for
writers. So is the Rhetoric. Although that treatise deals with
speeches rather than stories (the word muthos, therefore
never appears) it is worth reading for its general advice.
Aristotle could be a modern writing instructor after all. He
gives many writing tips that still work.
Other kinds of poetry might alter the order of importance
in his list. Some will disagree with Aristotle’s preferences
even in the drama or epic. Beautiful, well-crafted language,
for example: isn’t that what we love most in Shakespeare?
Wordsworth? Virginia Woolf? Should language always be
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subordinated to story-line? What about character?
Nowadays, writers often aim for “character-driven” rather
than “plot-driven” stories, that is, they spend their energy on
the development and delineation of characters, and then
pretend to sit back and let the characters lead where they will.
But this brings us back to story. Perhaps the truth is that such
works too are “story-driven,” if not plot-driven. Even those
who disregard Aristotle’s recommendation to begin with plot
must end up with some kind of unity. Can dialogue and
narrative come to life without something like a soul?
History of Muthos and Logos
Homer did not like the word, logos, or at least did not appreciate its philosophical or poetic implications. It appears only
twice in his epics: once in the Iliad and once in the Odyssey.
With only these two examples available, it is hard to discern
any peculiarities the word might entail for Homer, but it must
have been a rare or strange term to him. Patroklos takes
pleasure in logos when applying his medical knowhow to
tend Eurypylos’s wounds (Book 15). What could the word
mean here? “Chat?” “Banter?” “The anecdotes of heroes?”
The context gives us even less help with meaning in the
Odyssey, where logoi figure only among Calypso’s charms.
Maybe the word simply had not yet acquired the power
that philosophy or mathematics or even the law courts were
to give it in later times. It obviously derives from the verb
legô, whose oldest sense referred more to gathering and
selecting than to speaking, and that is how it is used in the
Iliad: in Book 23 Achilles commands his companions to
gather up (legômen) Patroklos’s bones for the funeral pyre.
From this primitive sense gradually evolved the mode of
speech signified by legô in Attic Greek.8 That is, to speak well
requires the collection and ordering of perceptions and ideas,
and this is the province of logos. Perhaps, therefore, the best
rendering of the verb in English is “recount”—one can
STEPHENSON
51
recount an experience or an adventure for the pleasure of the
audience. As to its corresponding noun, “account,” that too
can lend authority to the telling of a tale as well as reckon up
cost. Both English words express the ordering (and even
enumerating) function of discourse. In this way one can see
how after Homer the mathematical sense of the word developed naturally alongside its reference to speech.
Homer has no such hesitation about muthos. That word
laces many pages of his epics. Agamemnon sends away the
priest Chryses with a harsh word (muthos), for example, and
Nestor is accused of loving words too much (again muthos).
Sometimes, as if to emphasize Agamemnon’s despotism, its
meaning verges on “command,” but in most places, wherever
a later Greek author might use the word logos, Homer is
comfortable with muthos. In the second example one might
find a trace of its later connection to the specifics of storytelling—long-winded Nestor loves to tell tales of his past
heroism and revels in the words that recall it. But nowhere
can you discover any allusion to myth or fable or falsehood.
You accuse Nestor of exaggeration at your own peril.
Even in Plato’s dialogues the suggestion that muthos
signifies a flight of fancy would be a mistake. The “myth of
Er” in the Republic, the charioteer in the Phaedrus,
Persephone’s provisions for the rebirth of souls in the Meno:
these all have distinctive places in the dialogues, but none of
them can be dismissed as mere entertainment. Even the cave
depicted in Book 6 of the Republic is more than allegory. All
of these muthoi are more than myth. That is, muthos and
logos do not part company until much later, when truth and
fiction become the touchstones of modern discourse. They
have a long way to go before they spawn myth and logic in
the English language. Truth can adopt a mythological as well
as a dialectical or scientific form. Perhaps our modern
tendency to sunder fact from fiction absolutely makes us
exclude some mysterious region where they cooperate or
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overlap, a region Socrates saw how to exploit. Lying may be
a way to tell the truth better.
Aristotle expresses this succinctly in the Poetics: “Homer
has also taught others how best to lie,” he says (24.18), and
in constructing stories one should “choose the plausible
impossible rather than the unpersuasive possible.” Poetic
effect justifies exaggeration and distortion, he claims, as in the
case of Hector’s flight from Achilles. For Hector to outrun
swift-footed Achilles so long while the rest of the army stands
idly by strains credibility. But it also vividly exhibits Hector’s
desperation and emphasizes the imminence of Achilles’ own
demise, which will seize him soon after Hector’s death. In
answer to critics who object to a story on the grounds that it
is untrue, Aristotle suggests the reply, “But perhaps it should
be.” One can paint people as better than they are—“for the
paradigm exalts,” he says. So also other elaborations or idealizations may prove more fruitful in poetry than technical
accuracy.9
Nowhere is Aristotle’s appreciation of the value of poetry
more apparent than when he measures it against history. This
is another version of his preference of the possible to the
actual. The historian “tells what happened,” he says, “the
[poet] what might happen. On account of this, poetry is more
serious (spoudaioteron) and philosophic than history. For
poetry says things in general, but history in particular.”
History Itself
In his History of the Peloponnesian Wars, Thucydides admits
that some readers will dislike his work because it lacks
muthôdes character, which one scholar translates as
“romance.” Literally, of course, the adjective means “storylike”—muthos + eidos.10 Whether that criticism is justified or
not, I leave you to determine. But if muthos neither denies
nor requires reality for its foundation, and implies only the
unity of human action, it is possible to find much that is story-
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53
like in Thucydides’ book. For Thucydides does not confine
himself to the mere reporting of facts; he is interested in
causes as a story writer is, and, if he has to seek them in the
mere inference of document and speech and event, and,
unlike the poet, has no more than speculative access to minds
of his characters, so much the better if he succeeds in finding
the plausible and persuasive in his speculations.
Indeed, there is no one character to focus on throughout
the Peloponnesian Wars except Thucydides himself, and he
appears in the flesh only once in the course of his narrative.
However, Aristotle insists (Poetics, 8.1) the unity of a poem
should not derive from the unity of the hero, but rather from
the unity of his action. If, therefore, the war between Athens
and Sparta is not just an unconnected series of advances and
retreats, debates and battles, then perhaps it has an identity
that can give it the wholeness approximating that of a story,
of a muthos. After all, what above all makes a deed one is its
purpose, and what arranges deeds into a story is the progression of a series of deeds to a higher goal that reaches beyond
and above the separate and unrelated determinations of an
individual. Consider Oedipus, who discovers his identity at
the end of a criminal investigation aimed at anyone but
himself, the procession of witnesses whose independently
innocent responses spiral slowly inward of their own accord.
Or Achilles, whose bloody triumph on the battlefield of Troy
is forced upon him by his repeated refusals to fight. It is the
oneness of action that unifies the deeds of one man, and not
the reverse, and this is the very unity celebrated in tragedy
and epic. Perhaps a better name for that kind of grand unity
is “fate,” not because the gods force it upon the heroes of
these stories, but because their lives and their deeds acquire
meaning and power and beauty precisely in our understanding of this unity.
We have to take Aristotle’s demotion of character seriously. A story does not derive its unity from the singleness of
its protagonist, but from the wholeness of its action. This is
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hard to swallow. Can an action be one if it arises out of the
deeds of more than one person? This is a question crucial to
our inquiry into the action of history. But Thucydides would
not be the only author to think about cities as analogous to
men, and thereby to suggest that they have character like men
and might even act on the world’s stage like the actors in a
play.
So, if we can find the story in the Peloponnesian Wars,
perhaps we can discover a purpose to the great concatenation
of human events that compose that conflict and that history,
one that would justify Thucydides’ claim to have written his
book “not as an essay which is to win the applause of the
moment, but as a possession for all time.”
1 Aristotle has his recommendations, too, and many of them are quite as
helpful as those of modern writers on writing. The Poetics is full of advice
to the budding poet; so is his Rhetoric: I recommend Book three of the
latter to anyone planning an essay.
2
I am assuming that the queen’s heart was broken because the king died,
otherwise the second version, which Forster offers as “plot,” remains very
incomplete and misleading.
3
That history might better include some speculation as to causes is an
objection incidental to the present distinction, though we can return to it
later.
4
It would be a mistake to settle on “mythologist” as the proper translation here.
5 Aesop’s “fables,” by the way, are muthoi for Plato, as you might expect,
but Aristotle uses the word logos when he refers to them (Rhetoric, 2.20,
passim).
6
It is worth noting that Latin retains or even extends the breadth of
meaning of the word logos in cognates, like “lex” and “lego,” but to my
knowledge has no cognate or equivalent of muthos.
7
Later, Aristotle declares epic poetry inferior to tragedy in part because it
lacks the elements of music and spectacle.
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55
8
So also in English, the “tale” of one’s woes could begin with enumeration, continue with anecdote, and only after much retelling finally expand
into story
9
There is either irony or venom in Aristotle’s comment, however, for he
knows Socrates attacked the poets (in the Republic and in Ion) for lacking
the technical knowledge that their subject matter requires. Aristotle seems
much more forgiving or even encouraging to the liar.
10
Could there be a pun here? muthos + ôdê rather than eidos? That is,
an allusion to the lack of melody in his history?
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57
Meaning and Truth in Klein’s
Philosophico-Mathematical
Writings
Burt C. Hopkins
I want to begin my remarks with an apology for their
imposing title, which is the product of my profession, for I
am a professional philosopher. I am therefore manifestly not
a Tutor but a Professor, and, as such, a significant portion of
what I am required to spend my time doing is called—on my
view mistakenly—“research.” One of the expectations my
profession brings with it is that my research be “specialized,”
and to this end I have spent the better part of the last twentyfive years focusing my research on the phenomenological
philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger—the
two German giants of European philosophy in the first half of
the twentieth century. Jacob Klein also spent a significant
amount of time studying these phenomenological philosophies. Moreover, he attributed great things to both philosophers: Heidegger, in Klein’s own words, was “the first man
who made me understand something written by another man,
namely Aristotle”;1 and Husserl, again in Klein’s words,
“pointed to . . . a character of speech to which the ancients
apparently did pay only scant attention,”2 a character that
Husserl, and Klein following Husserl, called “sedimentation.”
From my own studies of Husserl and Heidegger, I know
that—when viewed within the context of their own
thought—both of these characteristics singled out by Klein
Burt Hopkins is Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University, and is Secretary
of the International Circle of Husserl Scholars. He is currently completing a
book, entitled Edmund Husserl and Jacob Klein on the Origination of the
Logic of Symbolic Mathematics: An Inquiry into the Historicity of Meaning.
This essay was delivered as a lecture at St. John’s College, Santa Fe, on April
29, 2005.
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are the result of each thinker’s thematic engagement with the
concepts of meaning and truth. This consideration, therefore,
brings me back to the apology for my imposing title, because
Klein never treats either of these concepts in a thematic
manner in his writings, and I think, given the apposition of
Heidegger’s and Husserl’s philosophies to his own thought, it
is legitimate to wonder and then investigate why this is. I
should add that not only scholarly curiosity leads me to
wonder about this, but also the nature of the interrelationship
between the most fundamental problems posed by Klein’s
writings, namely, how to understand properly the radically
different conceptualities that determine the meaning and
truth of the most basic concepts that belong, respectively, to
ancient Greek and modern European science, and how best
to overcome what Klein once spoke of as the “symbolic unreality”3 that is characteristic of “the modern idea of knowledge
and science.”4
To say that meaning and truth are not thematically treated
as concepts in Klein’s writings, then, is not to say that one
cannot find in his writings discussions that take up the
meaning of things or the concept of their truth. After all,
Klein, more than any other thinker in the twentieth century,
wrote about the meaning of the ancient Greek concept of
number, and, indeed, he compared and contrasted this
concept’s meaning with the meaning of the modern concept
of number. In addition, Klein, more than any other twentieth
century thinker, wrote about the fundamental change in the
relation of science to truth that occurred when, in a process
he identified as beginning in the sixteenth century,5 the
ancient meaning of the concept of number was transformed
into the modern meaning. But it is to say that Klein neither
writes about meaning and truth as concepts—about what
contemporary professional philosophers would call “the
concepts of meaning and truth,”—nor ever discusses which
concepts of meaning and truth presumably validate or otherwise justify the philosophical claims that he makes about the
HOPKINS
59
different conceptualities of ancient Greek and modern
European science.
There is, perhaps, a ready explanation for this, namely,
that Klein had no use for what he called “Modern ‘philosophical’ jargon,”6 and that he therefore sought to avoid it as
much as possible. Talk of the concepts of meaning and truth,
even by thinkers of the stature of Husserl and Heidegger,
would have to count for Klein as such jargon, because it is the
very thesis of his magnum opus, Greek Mathematical Thought
and the Origin of Algebra,7 that the philosophical preoccupation with concepts per se is a distinctly modern preoccupation. Moreover, if not in this work, then certainly in his
subsequent lectures and essays, such a preoccupation is
viewed as a philosophical mistake. Thus, in a lecture given in
1939, Klein says, “it is doubtful whether philosophy exists
today,”8 and he clearly suggests that the reason for this is that
“all our life and thoughts are molded by” the existence of a
science that is not doubtful, namely, “mathematical physics.”
And because, in Klein’s words, “the medium of mathematical
physics, or rather its very nerve, is symbolic mathematics,”
and because, moreover, this nerve (according to his Math
Book) is only made possible by concepts that refer solely to
other concepts and not to the individual objects to which
they, as concepts, should properly and rightfully refer, on his
view contemporary “philosophy’s” near total preoccupation
with such concepts per se is not worthy of philosophy’s good
name.
According to this explanation, the attempt to investigate
the concepts of meaning and truth in Klein’s writings, especially in his philosophico-mathematical writings, that is to
say, his writings on the history of the philosophy of mathematics as well as the history of mathematics itself, would be
misguided if this inquiry were oriented by the very concepts
of meaning and truth that these writings demonstrate are a
philosophically derivative byproduct of the modern “‘scientific’ consciousness.”9 According to Klein, these concepts are
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“abstractions of abstractions…which at the same time we
interpret as being in direct contact with the world.”10 They
are hardly suitable for taking the measure of any thinker’s
thought, let alone Klein’s, of all thinkers. Klein pointed out
something that even Husserl and Heidegger did not see,
namely, that the meaning of concepts as well as the meaning
of truth underwent a radical and irrevocable transformation
of their ancient and classical “meanings” in modern thought.
Therefore to properly investigate meaning and truth in
Klein’s writings on the philosophy of mathematics, one
would have to—at least according to this line of thought—
begin by comparing the status of meaning and truth in Klein’s
writings with its status in Husserl’s and Heidegger’s.
Even though Klein mentions Heidegger by name just one
time in his writings that I know of,11 and refers to him once
more without mentioning his name,12 it is still not much of an
exaggeration to say that in a certain sense Klein’s entire
thinking is informed by a fundamental criticism of a fundamental aspect of Heidegger’s philosophy. Specifically, Klein
criticizes Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato and the role that
this interpretation plays in Heidegger’s criticism of Aristotle
and then, growing out of this criticism, Heidegger’s account
of the continuity of metaphysical thinking from ancient
Greek to contemporary twentieth-century philosophers.
Heidegger maintains that Plato’s philosophy is guided by an
unexamined presupposition about the meaning of the Being
of beings, namely, that this meaning is determined by the
static cognition of what they are, and that this cognition
conceals within itself the likewise unexamined presupposition
that, inseparable from how they are, is their constant availability in terms of their “looks” (eidos) to the logos of any
soul that bothers to look at them.
With only two references to Heidegger in all of his writings (neither one of which, by the way, directly engages
Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato), my claim about the critical relationship of Klein’s thought to Heidegger’s may
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61
appear to some as tenuous. However, the following considerations should remove any doubt about this matter. In 1925,
Heidegger gave a lecture course on Plato’s Sophist, which was
published after his death in a volume based on his and his
students’ notes. According to Leo Strauss, in 1925 Klein
attended Heidegger’s classes regularly.13 Toward the end of
the course, Heidegger has this to say about 253d5-e2 of the
Sophist: “I confess that I do not genuinely understand
anything of this passage and that the individual statements
have in no way become clear to me, even after long
study.”14Heidegger then goes on to single out precisely what
he does not understand:
(1.) Mian idean dia pollôn… diaisthanetai (d5ff.),
the dialectician “sees one idea throughout many,”
one determinateness of beings in its presence in
many, of which henos ekastou keimenou chôris
(d6), “each lies there detached from the others,”
such that this idea, which is seen throughout all
the others, pantê diatetamenên (d6), is extended
and ordered from all sides.
(2.) . . . kai pollas heteras allêlôn (d7), the dialectician sees many ideas, which are different from one
another in substantive content—this is partly
understandable—but then Plato adds: hupo mias
exôthen periechomenas (d7f.), “they are encompassed by one idea from the outside.”
(3.) kai mian au di’holôn pollôn en heni sunêmmenên (d8f.), the dialectician sees “that the one
idea is again gathered together into one
throughout many wholes.”
(4.) kai pollas chôris pantê diôrismenas (d9), the
dialectician sees “that many ideas are completely
detached from one another.”15
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Heidegger mentions and rejects the traditional interpretation,
which “has been eased by the introduction of a distinction
between genos and eidos, genus and species,”16 because it is
based on an “unjustifiable procedure, since Plato precisely
does not make that distinction.” Heidegger therefore
concludes, “so in fact it remains completely obscure what is
meant by this mian di’ holôn pollôn en heni sunêmmenên
[one idea is again gathered together into one throughout
many wholes], and furthermore by the hupo mias exôthen
periechesthai [they are encompassed by one idea from the
outside] and above all by the keimenou chôris [lies there
detached] within the unity of one idea.”17
The fact that Klein most likely was in attendance when
Heidegger articulated these words (or, at the very least, was
made aware of them by others who heard them), decides, of
course, nothing about the relationship of his thought to
Heidegger’s. However, the fact that the apex of the first half
of Klein’s Math Book, Chapter 7C, presents a detailed understanding of precisely what Heidegger confessed was
“completely obscure” in the Sophist, does indeed decide
something about this relationship. In that chapter, Klein presents an understanding of the Stranger’s and Theaetetus’s
dialogue in the Sophist about the division of intelligibles that
takes aim at the following: Heidegger’s philosophy of the
continuity belonging to the putative unquestioned meaning
of the Being of beings in the metaphysical tradition, a continuity that, beginning with Plato, is supposed, unquestioningly, to think that Being is the being present to the logos—in
cognition—of beings. Indeed, there can be no mistake about
this: the heart of Klein’s chapter in the Math Book offers an
understanding of the second directive in the Sophist
regarding the division of intelligibles, that is, the directive
concerning different ideas being encompassed by one idea
from the outside, which shows that “Being” is not thought
here as something present to the logos in the cognition of
beings. Moreover, Klein’s Math Book as a whole shows that,
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63
rather than continuity, there is a radical discontinuity
between the way “Being” is understood by Plato and Aristotle
and the way it is understood in modern philosophy.
Klein’s Math Book establishes its understanding of the
Stranger’s directives about division by taking into account
Aristotle’s references to the Platonic theory of “eidetic
numbers” (arithmoi eidetikoi), specifically, his report that
Plato attributed a numerical mode of being to the eidê which,
in one important respect, is distinct from the mode of being
of mathematical numbers. While others before Klein had
taken up the issue of the relationship between Greek mathematics and Greek philosophy that is so important for the
formation of both mathematical and philosophical concepts,
both generally and in the particular case of Plato’s philosophy
(most notably Julius Stentzel, J. Cook Wilson, and Oskar
Becker), Jacob Klein was the first—and remains to this day
the only18—thinker to make “an attempt”19 to do so from, in
his words, “within the structure of the arithmos concept
itself.”20 Attempts before and after Klein’s to interpret
Aristotle’s reports about Plato’s “unwritten teaching,”
namely, that the eidê are in some sense numbers, approach
talk about numbers from the conceptual level of modern
mathematics, that is to say, from the modern symbolic
concept of number. Klein’s attempt, therefore, stands alone in
its endeavor to approach both Greek mathematics and Greek
ontology from a conceptual level that does not presuppose
the basic concepts of modern mathematics.
What Klein modestly refers to in his Math Book as his
“attempt” to think the relationship between Greek mathematics and Greek ontology from “within the structure of
arithmos concept itself,” is actually a veritable philosophical,
mathematical, and historical tour de force that ranges over
ancient texts on the one hand—neo-Platonic and neoPythagorean mathematics, and Pythagorean, Platonic, and
Aristotelian philosophy—and, on the other hand, early
modern mathematics and early modern philosophy, while
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linking them all together in the modern’s interpretation of
the arithmetical work of Diophantus. Three themes orient
Klein’s historical investigations of the mathematics involved
here together with its philosophy: (1) the shift that the
meaning of the concept of number underwent in the transition from ancient Greek to modern mathematics; (2) what
makes this shift possible; and (3) the attendant shift in the
very conceptuality of the “objects” of science and knowledge
generally—in the very meaning of science and scientific truth,
from the ancient to the modern meaning.
These themes, in turn, are tied together by Klein’s
account of the similarity between (1) the Platonic attempt to
grasp the proportional relationships between numbers in
mathematics and the analogical relationships between eidê in
ontology in terms of the isomorphism of their relationships
with the very structure of the arithmos concept itself; and (2)
the modern interpretation of symbolic calculation as the
complete realization of the ancient general theory of proportions. Both the Platonic attempt and the modern interpretation, in Klein’s words, “exceeded the bounds set for the
logos,”21 precisely insofar as each assigns to eidê, to
“concepts,” a numerical characteristic. And this means
nothing more and nothing less than that for ancient Greek
philosophy, as for contemporary philosophy (insofar, that is,
as “philosophy” can still be said to exist), there is an insuperable limit to that which the logos—speech—can make intelligible, and this limit is reached when numerical characteristics
are attributed to what the Greeks called “eidê” or “ideas” and
the moderns (both the early ones, the so-called fathers of
modernity, and us, their contemporary progeny) call “general
concepts” or “general objects.”
The reason for this, according to Klein, is, for all its
complexity, relatively straightforward, namely: numbers
properly refer to individual objects, that is, to more than one
of them; numbers, therefore, refer to a “multitude” of
objects, and, moreover, to exactly “how many” of them there
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65
are, while number concepts (eidê) properly refer to the characteristics of numbers that are responsible for the exact
delimitation of the “how many” inseparable from each
number. Numbers are therefore many, and number concepts
are one, albeit not one in the sense of each one of the many
ones that are assembled together by every number, but “one”
in the very different sense of “unity.” Moreover, even though
there are many number concepts responsible for the exact
delimitation of each number, for instance, the two most
important concepts of the “odd” and the “even,” each of
these concepts is not itself many but one (in the sense of a
unity). Hence, to ascribe to any number concept a “numerical” characteristic, specifically, the characteristic of its being
many, cannot make sense, because while numbers are intrinsically multitudinous, number concepts are not. Moreover,
not just number concepts, but any concept that is related to
their being “many” of something—many horses, many
philosophers, many emotions, and so on—is one in the sense
of being a unity. Hence Klein’s conclusion, that Plato’s theory
of eidetic numbers, of concepts whose unity is in some sense
“numerical,” cannot, strictly speaking, make sense to the
logos, to speech. Likewise, because of this fundamental difference between what a number is and what a concept is, Klein
also concludes that the modern mathematical general concept
(or, what amounts to the same thing, general object) cannot,
again strictly speaking, be said to be “numerical” in a manner
that makes any sense.
Of course, the question how Klein knows that there is a
fundamental difference between numbers and number
concepts, not to mention how he can know that there is a
radical shift in the meaning of the ancient Greek concept of
number and the modern one, returns us to the topic
announced in my title. This is the case because what Klein
knows about these matters is presumably something that he
(and those who follow him on this) thinks is true. This means
that Klein must know that it is true (1) that numbers and
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number concepts, despite their relationship, are fundamentally different; (2) that the Greek and the modern concepts of
number and number concepts have different meanings; and
(3) that because of (2), the Greek and the modern meanings
of philosophical and scientific truth are different. In other
words, for Klein to know what he thinks he knows, he must
know the truth of something that cannot be true for either
“the Greeks” or “the moderns,” namely, that the true
meaning of their concepts of number and truth are radically
different. In the case of the Greeks, they did not, among
other things, live long enough to discover this truth; in the
case of the moderns, they were prevented from discovering
this because they believed (and continue to believe) that the
superiority of their concepts and truth over the ancient Greek
ones is a superiority that is based in their completion and
perfection of the Greek concepts and their truth.
But I am getting ahead of myself here. Before considering
the question of meaning and truth in Klein’s writings, we
need to return to the critical challenge that Klein’s Math Book
presents to Heidegger’s understanding of both Plato and the
continuity of the putative metaphysical meaning of the Being
of beings in the history of philosophy. As we have intimated,
this challenge takes issue with the distinctly modern preoccupation with concepts per se that informs Heidegger’s
approach to Plato’s philosophy, and therefore may have an
important bearing on the topic of meaning and truth in
Klein’s writings. Heidegger’s approach to Plato’s philosophy
supposes that the meaning of Being is not interrogated by this
philosophy but is already understood—uncritically—as the
eidos, the “look” of something that is present to cognition
and therefore available to the logos, to speech. Moreover, he
supposes that something “remains completely obscure” in the
Stranger’s dialectical directive regarding ideas that are
different from one another being perceived as encompassed
by one idea from the outside. Contrary to this last supposition, Klein’s Math Book endeavors to show that there is in the
HOPKINS
67
Sophist, albeit in a veiled way, an articulation of how ideas
that are different can nevertheless be encompassed from the
outside by one idea. Because of the nature of the problem
addressed in the Sophist, what Klein refers to as the problem
belonging to the ontological participation of the ideas with
one another, the account offered there cannot, on Klein’s
view, be expected to be “completely clear.” Nevertheless,
Klein shows, contra Heidegger, not only that it is not
“completely obscure,” but also that the question of Being is
not “one” but “twofold.” This has the following consequences: (1) Being for Plato has an intelligible structure; (2)
Being’s intelligible structure can be articulated into its parts,
although it cannot be, strictly speaking, known, because the
logos is unable to give an account of these parts that is not
paradoxical; and (3), because of the truth of (2), it is manifestly false to think, as Heidegger does, that Being in Plato is
something that has or is “meaning.” And, once the latter is
recognized to be the case, the resultant alienation from
Plato’s philosophy of the meaning of Being that Heidegger
ascribes to it, as well as that of this putative meaning’s alienation from the history of philosophy, becomes apparent.
Klein illuminates the veiled manner in which Being’s
intelligible structure is manifest in the Sophist by using
Aristotle’s account of Plato’s unwritten doctrine in a way that
takes seriously what they report while bypassing their
polemic against the report’s contents. Moreover, Klein places
the account of numbers from both Aristotle’s texts and
Plato’s dialogues within the context of his “reconstruction”
of the phenomenon of number, arithmos, which he maintains
provides the basis for the theoretical considerations about the
proper mode of being belonging to numbers that is found in
ancient Greek mathematics and philosophy. Finally, the sine
qua non of Klein’s reconstruction of the ancient Greek
arithmos is that its mode of being is non-symbolic; that is, it
is not symbolic in the sense that both the number concept and
the numbers themselves that belong to modern mathematical
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analysis—that is, to modern algebra—must be characterized
as symbolic.
Klein discerns the intelligible structure of Being in the
Sophist on the basis of what he refers to as its “arithmological”22 structure, a structure that is related to, but not identical with, the basic structure proper to the Greek arithmos.
The latter, in Klein’s words, is “grounded in the phenomenon
of counting,”23 and according to him its basic structure
precedes “all the possible differences of opinion” regarding
the mode of being of number in Greek mathematics and
philosophy. Klein characterizes this basic structure as a
“definite amount of definite things,” and singles out two
intrinsic peculiarities that belong to it. Both peculiarities, it is
important to note, assume a fundamental significance for
Klein’s understanding of the different “conceptualities” characteristic of Greek and modern science. The first peculiarity
concerns the reference to more than one thing—that is, to a
multitude that is inseparable from each arithmos. The second
concerns the exactitude of this reference: each arithmos
delimits precisely so many things.
These characteristics belonging to the structure of
arithmos are basic to and therefore underlie the different
ancient views of its mode of being, because, despite their
differences, all of these views share the common assumption
that each arithmos is both one and many: it is “many,” insofar
as it refers to more than one thing; it is “one,” insofar as each
arithmos is exactly the “unity” of the amount in question.
Accounting for how this mode of being belonging to numbers
comes about—how not only the unity of each number is able
to refer to an exactly delimited multitude, but also how each
different number is able to delimit a different amount of
things—was the business of ancient Greek theoretical arithmetic and logistic according to Klein. Significantly, for him,
neither of these Greek sciences had as their subject matter
numbers, but rather the eidê of numbers, above all the “odd”
and the “even.” Klein explains that the reason for this is
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rooted in the basic structure of the numbers themselves: theoretical mathematicians appealed to these eidê in the attempt
to account for both the one-over-many structure of number
in general, and the different amounts that characterize the
unity of each different number.
Plato, on Klein’s view, did not think that the mathematics
of his day, or, indeed, the mathematics of all time, succeeded
or could ever succeed in explaining either the basic one-overmany structure of numbers or the differentiations—in accordance with the different numbers—of the unities proper to
the being one of each different number. Plato’s reason for this
is simple: it cannot ever make sense to the discerning logos to
say that something is both one and many—that the many is
one and the one is many. Thoughtfulness about numbers,
therefore, in contrast to counting or calculating with them,
exceeds the bounds set by the logos, by speech that is intelligible, for “accounting for” what it is that is thought.
Notwithstanding this, the combined thoughtfulness of the
mathematician and the philosopher, both together, is able to
recognize in the two kinds of unity characteristic of the mode
of being of numbers (viz., the one-over-many unity in general
and the different unity of the different amounts characteristic
of each different number) the following: the mode of being
of a unity that unites separate things in a manner allowing
them to belong together even though their unity, as a whole,
is “outside” or “external” to them. And it is precisely the
“common thing” (koinon) of this unity that can be recognized
as being responsible for the belonging together, the “community” (koinonia) of mathematical things whose mode of being
is otherwise separate from one another—or of ontological
things whose mode of being, likewise, is otherwise separate
from one another. In other words, it is the structure of this
unity, which Klein refers to as “arithmological,” that holds
the key to understanding the dialectical directive in the
Sophist and thus the key to legitimating my claim that Klein’s
entire thought can be properly understood to be informed by
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a fundamental critique of Heidegger’s disputing that this
directive can be understood.
What is it that can only be recognized by the philosopher
and the theoretical mathematician, both together? The theoretical mathematician recognizes the peculiar one-over-many
mode of being of numbers, wherein each number is
composed of many things, each of which is counted not as the
thing that it is but as “one”: anything at all can be counted
only because the items really counted are understood to be
identical ones that are many, indivisible, and, therefore, intelligible. The philosopher recognizes that the two unities
involved in the mode of being of numbers cannot be
accounted for, with precision, by the eidê of numbers
appealed to by the theoretical mathematician, namely, by the
“odd” and the “even.” The philosopher realizes this because
the mode of being of the unity of each of these “concepts” is
also one over many, albeit in a different manner than that of
numbers. Each concept, the “odd,” the “even,” is both a
unity—as what can or cannot be divided evenly—and a multitude, because what can or cannot be evenly divided is
precisely not one but many. Thus the philosopher’s thoughtfulness recognizes that the thought of the theoretical mathematician mixes together that which, if our logos—our
speech—is to make sense, cannot be combined: the one and
the many. Both together, however, the philosopher and the
mathematician can recognize what neither one of them alone
can recognize: the unity of each number is something that is
“outside” of the many things, and the many ones that it
unifies as just this determinate amount. The unity of the
Stranger and Theaetetus, as two interlocutors, is, as a whole,
outside of each one of them: neither the Stranger nor
Theaetetus is “two,”—as each is rather precisely not two but
one—nevertheless, both together are exactly “two.”
This joint recognition of the common thing that is
responsible for the belonging together or community of identical ones or monads in an arithmos, however, addresses
neither the problem of accounting for the many different
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numbers, that is, for what makes one number, say “two,”
different from another, say “three,” nor the Stranger’s directive about the dialectician seeing one idea encompassing from
“outside” many different ideas. It does not address the first,
“mathematical” problem, because each of the wholes that are
outside of the ones or monads, and that as such compose the
common thing that is responsible for the belonging together
of the mathematical monads, must comprise a different
“common thing” in the instance of each different number—if
the fact that there are many different numbers is to be
addressed. It does not address the second, “philosophical”
problem, because the very terms of the Stranger’s directive
stipulate that the many ideas that are encompassed by one
idea are different ideas, whereas the many monads encompassed by one number are the same.
What does address these mathematical and philosophical
problems, is the Stranger’s and Theaetetus’ failed attempt to
count the first “three” of the “five” greatest ideas, namely,
Rest, Change, and Being. Even though Rest and Change are
opposites and therefore manifestly different ideas, they are
both encompassed from the “outside” by the idea of Being.
Both together have to be recognized as Being, since neither
Rest nor Change, by themselves, can be recognized as Being.
(If either Rest or Change were thought to be Being, impossible things would happen: for Rest to be, it would have to
change: for Change to be, it would have to rest.) The idea of
Being, however, cannot be recognized as something different
from Rest and Change, because then neither Rest nor Change
would be at all. Hence, the only possibility left is to recognize
that, just as neither the Stranger nor Theaetetus alone is
“two,” but only both taken together are “two,” likewise,
neither Rest nor Change is Being, but only both taken
together are Being. According to Klein, the Sophist instantiates an aspect of what Aristotle reported about Plato’s
unwritten doctrine, namely, that the ideas are in some sense
numbers, and that in addition to mathematical numbers there
are eidetic numbers. Moreover, the dialogue also exhibits the
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difference between mathematical and eidetic numbers
reported by Aristotle: that the monads of the former are
many and alike, while those of the latter are many but not
alike and are therefore not comparable. Thus the idea
belonging to Being, as a whole, is like the whole belonging to
a mathematical number: it encompasses from the “outside”
the many monads that it, as a whole, brings together;
however, it and what it brings together are also unlike a mathematical number, because the intelligible monads that the
mathematical number brings together in the unity of one
number are identical—while the intelligible monads that the
eidetic number brings together are different. This is illustrated in the Sophist: The ideas belonging to Rest and Change
are different; nevertheless, the idea belonging to Being, like
the whole belonging to number, exhibits an “arithmological”
structure, although, just as in the case of the mode of being of
the mathematical arithmos, the mode of being of the eidetic
arithmos exceeds the limits set by the logos. In the former
instance, as we have seen, this is the case for Klein because
the mode of being of both mathematical numbers and their
concepts mixes the one and the many; in the latter instance,
this is the case because the attempt to give an account of the
“parts” of Being, namely, the ideas Rest and Change separately as well as the idea of both together, counts “three” of
them—Rest “one,” Change “two,” and both together “three,”
—when, in truth, there are only “two”: the ideas of Rest and
Change. The eidetic number of the idea of Being, then, is
“Two,” not “three.”
Contra Heidegger, therefore, Klein’s Math Book shows
that Being is not characterized by Plato as the idea of something that is present to cognition and therefore available to
the logos, and, in the process of showing this, he shows that
the Stranger’s second dialectical directive is not completely
obscure. Only the “arithmological” structure of the community of ideas, that is, the one idea encompassing many ideas
from “outside,” can provide the “paradigm” for the structure
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of the one over many mode of being of mathematical
numbers, and not vice versa. Moreover, only the taxis, the
order of eidetic numbers beginning with the eidetic “Two,”
the idea of Being, can account for the many discrete mathematical numbers, for the differences in the one over many
unity of each arithmos as exactly so many. In addition, only
the “arithmological” structure of the community of ideas can
account for the many genê and eidê of that which has Being,
and for the analogia, the proportion, by means of which both
certain mathematical problems and the Being of certain
things can be understood. In other words, the “foundation”
of the Being of both quantitative and qualitative beings, of the
beings counted and calculated with by mathematical thinking,
and the beings collected and divided by dialectical thinking,
are the arithmoi eidetikoi.
As I have already suggested, because of the numerical
character that is ascribed to this foundation, specifically, to
the ascription of a number-like being to its eidetic “concepts,”
Klein maintains that the “solution” to the problem of the one
and the many that is provided by the theory of eidetic
numbers, is in his words, “bought . . . at the price of the transgression of the limits which are set for the logos.”24 For not
only is the “ordinary mode of predication, such as: ‘the horse
is an animal’, ‘the dog is an animal’, etc., no longer understandable,” but the “natural” meaning of number, as the exact
amount of a multitude of things, “is now lost.” (The former
is the case, because the “arithmological” unity is precisely
something that cannot be predicated of that which it unifies:
neither the mathematical monads in an arithmetical number,
nor the eidetic monads in an eidetic number can be said to be
the number in question, as a horse or a dog can both be said
to be an animal. The latter is the case because the monads in
an eidetic number cannot be counted and therefore do not
have an exact amount.) If Klein is right about Plato’s philosophy, this much is clear: Being is neither a concept nor something that can be known and articulated “with complete
clarity” by the logos; what can be articulated about it is its
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inseparability from its opposite, and the “common thing”—
Being—shared by each term of the opposition characteristic
of it is manifestly something that does not have or express
what the moderns would call “meaning.”
Klein’s reason for this last point is also presented in his
Math Book, and can be succinctly stated as follows: the
modern preoccupation with “meaning” is, in fact, a preoccupation with “concepts” that have as their primary referents
other concepts, and, therefore, not the individual objects to
which all concepts originally refer.25 The concepts that
provide the foundation of modern, symbolic mathematics are
paradigmatic of concepts whose fundamental mode of being
is their relationship with other concepts, all of which, in turn,
are derivative of or otherwise dependent upon the symbolic
concept of number in general for their “meaning”—a term
which must be kept sharply distinct from “intelligibility.”
Individual beings are “intelligible” as changing or resting,
indeed, as changing in one respect while simultaneously
resting in another. The “invisible looks” (eidê) of Rest and
Change, too, are “intelligible,” though not as individual
things that are resting or changing, but rather as that which
all resting and changing individual things have “in common.”
Their commonality is likewise “intelligible,” although, again,
it is not intelligible as individual things are. As we have seen,
because Being is not one but twofold for Plato, the “intelligibility” either of things or their “invisible looks” can never be
complete. In comparison with this incomplete “intelligibility,” the “meaning” of the modern symbolic concept of
number in general is completely “unintelligible.” This
concept refers neither to individual beings nor to what they
share in common, their “invisible looks”; rather, the symbolic
concept of number in general does not, properly speaking,
refer to any thing, but is itself something that is referred to as
if it were some thing, namely, as if it were an individual thing
just like the individual beings that, for the ancient Greeks, are
intelligible as resting and moving. But it is not a being like
those beings. It is not a being at all, but a cipher, a sense-
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perceptible mark (or marks) that is not only treated like some
individual thing, but, in a fundamental ontological sense, also
replaces all the individual things, individual beings, in the
world with “concepts” that cannot refer to things or beings
because the mode of being of the latter is now self-evidently
taken to be “conceptual.”
Klein’s Math Book traces the symbolic number concept’s
remarkable power both to replace individual beings with
concepts, and to do so without “detection,” to the literally
twofold mode of being “unintelligible” proper to the mathematical symbol. On the one hand, it combines a completely
indeterminate and non-perceptible concept—quantity in
general—with a completely determinate sense-perceptible
“mark.” Because this mark is indistinguishable from that with
which it is combined, viz., from the non-perceptible concept
or quantity in general, it is patently not a sign, if by “sign” we
mean a part of language that indicates something other than
itself in a manner distinguishable from the significance of
what it indicates; rather than signifying something other than
itself, the mark presents itself as what it symbolizes. For
instance, “2” does not signify something other than itself, for
example, the exact amount of some kind of object; instead, it
presents itself as the “concept of two,” which means, “the
general concept of twoness in general”26—and it does so in a
manner that involves absolutely no immediate reference to
any individual things. Therefore, to call “2” a “number sign,”
or “a” a “letter sign,” is a misnomer, since in both cases what
is meant is the “symbolic relation between the sign and what
it designates.”27 In the case of “2,” what is meant is “the
general number-character of this one number,” while in the
case of “a” what is meant is “the general numerical character
of each and every number.” On the other hand, the
completely indeterminate and non-perceptible concept from
which the sense-perceptible mark is indistinguishable assumes
the status of something whose mode of being is itself indistinguishable from other sense-perceptible individual things,
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and, as such, it assumes the status of something that can be
“treated” just like these other sense-perceptible things,
including being counted. Most significantly, the completely
indeterminate quantitative mode of being of the concept that
is inseparable from the mathematical symbol becomes determinate precisely insofar as the sense-perceptible mark that is
inseparable from it is treated like other sense-perceptible
things, for instance, rocks, tables, copies of Klein’s Math
Book, and so on. Thus, in the case of the symbol “2,” Klein
says, “The concept of twoness is at the same time understood
as referring to two entities.”28
Both of these characteristics belonging to the mathematical symbol reveal their complete “unintelligibility” only in
comparison to the incomplete “intelligibility” of the Greek
arithmos. The Greek number’s incomplete “intelligibility”
involves the mixture of (1) the “intelligibility” to mathematical “thinking” (dianoia) of the exact determination
belonging to the amount of a definite multitude of sensible or
thinkable (and, in this latter sense, “intelligible”) beings and
(2) the “unintelligibility” to philosophical “thoughtfulness”
(phronêsis) of its one over many mode of being. In comparison and contrast, the mathematical symbol’s complete “unintelligibility” concerns (1) its absolute lack of an immediate
reference to any definite things and (2) the thing-like determinateness of its sense-perceptible mark, which presents the
“concept” of an indeterminate quantity in the manner of a
determinate object, and therefore, presents a mark that
neither signifies anything nor shares an “invisible looks” with
any other thing, as something that is nevertheless “intelligible.” In other words, Klein says that the “symbolic unreality” of the mathematical symbol is located in the fact that it
presents something intrinsically and completely “unintelligible” as something that is “intelligible.”
The mathematical symbol’s complete “unintelligibility,”
however, is not for Klein tantamount to a putative meaninglessness. On the contrary, it is precisely the character of its
mode of being as “unintelligible” that necessitates its involve-
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ment with “meaning,” namely, with the meaning that accrues
to it on the basis of the “stipulation” of rules for manipulating
otherwise “unintelligible” sense-perceptible marks, rules
whose “syntax” is derived, originally, from the rules of operation with non-symbolic numbers. Mathematical symbols are
therefore only meaningful insofar as their “pure” conceptual
mode of being is accorded a numerical significance that is
akin—somehow—to non-symbolical numbers, to amounts of
things that can be, “in principle,” counted.
Klein’s Math Book, and his lectures prior to 1940,
employs what he characterizes as “the” language of the
Schools or Scholastic language’s talk of first intentions and
second intentions, or, as he himself sometimes notes,29 the
more properly articulated distinction between the objects of
first intentions and the objects of second intentions, to
“express” the state of affairs involved here. He uses this
language to (1) describe both the shift from the ancient
“meaning” to the modern “meaning” of numbers and (2)
delineate the corresponding shift in the paradigm of the
ancient “meaning” and the modern “meaning” of what it is to
be a concept, the latter shift being characterized (likewise
prior to 1940) by Klein as the transformation of the ancient
concept’s “conceptuality.” (The scare quotes around the word
“meaning” here call attention to the fact that, strictly
speaking, for Klein, the term “meaning,” being commensurate solely with the modern concept, is therefore a
misleading, if not falsifying, basis upon which to compare and
contrast the statuses of ancient Greek and modern concepts.)
First intentions concern the existence and quiddity of an
object, its being in its own right; second intentions concern
an the object insofar as it has being in being known, in apprehension. Hence, the state of being of an object in cognition is
second, while the state of being of an object in itself is first.
Because the Greek arithmos is inseparable from the direct
reference to a multitude of definite things, the status of its
referents lends itself to being designated as first intentional.
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Because the concept of “indeterminate or general quantity”
concerns an object insofar as it known, the status of its
referent lends itself to being designated as second intentional.
Moreover, the sense-perceptible mark that belongs to the
modern symbolic number is, like any other sense-perceptible
thing, the object of a first intention, and because of this, Klein
maintains that the “conceptuality” characteristic of the mode
of being belonging to the modern concept of number is tantamount to the apprehension of the object of a second intention
as having the being of the object of a first intention.
Moreover, he maintains that the modern “conceptuality” of
number is only manifest in its contrast with the ancient Greek
“conceptuality,” which is characterized by the first intentional
status of the objects to which it refers and is therefore related.
Klein also appeals to the distinction between first and
second intentions to clarify Descartes’s attempt to understand
the origin of the novel mode of being that belongs to the
symbolic number concept, an attempt that Klein maintains
was the first, as well as the last such, in the philosophical
tradition. Descartes’s attempt appealed to the power of the
imagination to assist the pure intellect in making visible to it
(the pure intellect), as a “symbol,” the indeterminate object
that it has already abstracted from its own power of knowing
determinate numbers. Abstraction in Aristotle presupposes
definite beings that are intelligible in terms of common qualities, the latter being “lifted off ” the former in accordance
with a process that is more logical than psychological;
abstraction in Descartes presupposes definite beings but not
their intelligibility, in the case at hand their “intelligibility” as
so many beings. Rather, Descartes’s abstraction works upon
the mind’s act of knowing a multitude of units, separating out
the mind’s own conceiving of that multitude, which it immediately makes objective. The mind turns and reflects on its
own knowing when it is directed to the idea of number as a
multitude of units, and, in so doing, it no longer apprehends
the multitude of units directly, in the “performed act” (actus
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exercitus) and thus as object of its first intention, but rather
indirectly, in the “signified act” (actus signatus), as object of
its second intention. Thus, notwithstanding the fact that what
is being conceived by the intellect is a multitude of units, the
intellect’s immediate apprehension of its own conceiving as
something, as one and therefore as a being, has the effect of
transforming the multitude belonging to the number into a
seemingly independent being, albeit a being that is only a
“rational being” (ens rationis). To repeat: this “rational
being” is the result of the intellect, which, secondarily (in
reflection) intends a thing already conceived before, and
intends it insofar as it has been conceived. When the rational
being is then “grasped with the aid of the imagination in such
a way that the intellect can, in turn, take it up as an object in
the mode of a ‘first intention’, we are dealing with a
symbol.”30
Abstraction for Descartes is therefore characterized by
Klein as “symbolic,” because the “concept” (Begriff) that it
yields is manifestly not something that is lifted off the intelligible qualities of things, but rather, is something whose very
mode of being is inseparable from the following: (1) the intellect’s pure—by “pure” is meant completely separate from the
things it apprehends—grasping of its own power to apprehend these qualities themselves, and (2) this power itself
being apprehended as an object whose mode of being is
nevertheless akin to the very things that its mode of being
separates itself from. Klein stresses that the “kinship”
between the power of apprehension proper to the “pure”
intellect and that which is effectively foreign to it (i.e., the
things possessing the intelligible qualities that are apprehended by the “pure” intellect’s power) is established by
making this power “visible.” The algebraic letter “signs” of
Viète or the “geometric” figures of Descartes are what accomplish this. They are what—in the language of the Schools—
allow the object of a second intention to be apprehended as
the object of a first intention, and are therefore “symbols.”
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The indeterminate or general object yielded in “symbolic
abstraction” is neither purely a concept nor purely a “sign,”
but precisely the unimaginable and unintelligible identification of the object of a second intention with the object of a
first. This identification is “unimaginable” because “images”
properly—both for the ancient Greeks and for Descartes—
refer to either particular objects of first intentions or to their
particular “common qualities.”31 The identification between
second and first intentional objects is “unintelligible” because
for “natural” predication, to say that a concept is both
general and particular “at the same time” is nonsensical.
Nowhere that I know of does Klein write that this identification, which makes possible the symbolic “language” of
algebra and therefore, mathematical physics, is a mathematical mistake. Likewise, nowhere that I know of does Klein
write that the science that symbolic mathematics makes
possible is a philosophical mistake. Moreover, so far as I can
tell, Klein never even hints in his writings that the identification of the objects of first and second intentions means that
first and second intentions have been “confused” by modern
science, as some have suggested. What Klein does explicitly
characterize as a mistake is the view of the symbolic language
of algebra as “a purely technical or instrumental matter.”32
He writes, “it is a common mistake to believe that we can
translate the theorems of mathematical physics into ordinary
language, as if the mathematical apparatus used by the physicists were only a tool employed in expressing their theorems
more easily.”33 He also writes that the early modern “natural
philosophers,” in their self-interpretation of their new
science, the “true” physics, understood it to be the perfection
and the completion of the science of the ancients. And clearly,
Klein’s Math Book is an “argument” whose goal is to refute
the veracity of this self-interpretation, and to do so primarily
on the basis of the different “conceptualities” that are characteristic of the incomplete intelligibility of the ancient
number concept and the complete unintelligibility belonging
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to the meaning of the modern symbolic number concept.
That said, on my view it does not follow that the argument
extends also to the new science itself, that is, to the claim that
the symbolic cognition made possible by the “conception”
proper to the symbolic number concept is something that is
somehow false or less true, in comparison with the ancient
number concept and ancient “science” generally. Modern
science, mathematical physics, and the symbolic cognition
that is its main nerve, is therefore not a mistake on Klein’s
view.
What for Klein is a mistake, however, is the interpretation
of the “true” object (singular) of this science as the objects
(plural) of the first intentions that were and indeed remain
the “true” objects of ancient Greek science. The nature of this
mistake is neither “mathematical” nor, strictly speaking,
“scientific,” but philosophical. It is a mistake that was made
by the early modern inventors of mathematical physics, and
it is a mistake still made today by their innumerable progeny,
philosophers and non-philosophers alike. It is a mistake made
by Husserl, who, despite himself and the attempt present in
his last writings to restore the integrity of knowledge threatened by the all pervading tendency of “sedimentation,” of the
forgetfulness of the original meanings of our words and
concepts, nevertheless could not let go of his earliest belief in
the “mere” instrumentality of the symbolic calculus. Husserl
likened the putative “technicity” of symbolical calculation to
the “rules of the game” that govern it mechanically, rules that
originally spring from the categories and objects that are
“given” in the experience that makes our language and “traditional” Aristotelian logic both possible and intelligible.
Klein had to know about Husserl’s mistake, which is no
doubt why, among other reasons, Husserl’s name is not
mentioned once in the original version of his Math Book, and
why the concept of “intentionality” to which Klein appeals in
that book and in his writings and lectures before 1940 is that
of the Schools, not of Husserl. The reason for this can found
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in Klein’s account of the symbolic character of the indeterminateness or generality of the modern concept of number.
While Husserl was also aware of this indeterminateness—
indeed, besides Klein was perhaps more aware of it than any
other twentieth-century thinker, calling it the concept of the
“anything whatever” (Etwas überhaupt) and assigning to its
investigation a new science, which he called “formal
ontology”—Husserl nevertheless thought that its “intentionality” could be distinguished from the sense-perceptible
marks that manifest the mathematic symbol. This, as we have
seen, is for Klein simply not possible, because, absent such
marks, the pure concepts of modern mathematics would,
quite literally, be invisible and therefore inaccessible to the
“pure intellect” that calculates with them in symbolic cognition. Moreover, such an intentional distinction between the
symbolic “signs” and the indeterminate objects to which they
are related symbolically (and therefore not “significatively”),
occludes the most important characteristic of the general
object that this symbolic relationship makes possible, namely,
the utter impossibility of its conceptual “meaning” ever referring directly to the individual things or objects in the world.
Husserl, of course, spent most of his life trying to show both
that and how the meaning of the “concept” of “something in
genteral” is “objective,” and is such in the precise sense that
the origin of its unity (as well as the origin of all its possible
modes of being and relations) is rooted ultimately in the
“phenomena” of individual objects and the “evidence” of
their individuality that is presented in the perceptual experience of them. Klein, likewise, spent most of his life trying to
show that it is a philosophical mistake to think that the
meaning of a “concept in general” could ever be traced to an
origin in individual objects and their perceptual experience.
Klein’s “reason” for trying to show this impossibility can
be found in his account of the “symbolic abstraction” in
Descartes’ articulation of the genesis proper to the mind’s
representation to itself of its pure concepts—to what makes
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such concepts “concepts,” which Klein refers to as their
modern “conceptuality.” As we have seen, Klein characterizes
the modern “conceptuality” in terms of the, comparatively
speaking, complete “unintelligibility” of the meaning proper
to the general concepts that it makes possible, an unintelligibility that emerges when this “meaning” is compared to the
incomplete intelligibility of the “conceptuality” of ancient
Greek concepts. In a word, on Klein’s view, the “conceptuality” responsible for Descartes’ articulation of what a
“concept” (Begriff) is, is not only paradigmatic for all modern
concepts, but it is also the source of the late modern problem
of providing cognition with a “foundation,” in the sense of
both establishing and providing an account of the connection
between general concepts and their “objects.” Because,
however, this connection is second intentional in the instance
of the concept of an object in general, Husserl’s attempt to
provide the sought-after foundation by appealing to “intuition,” namely, to the intuition of the relation between the
object of a second intention to the object of a first intention,
is in principle doomed to fail. It is so for the simple reason
that the status of the relation between second intentional
objects, which manifestly are not first intentional objects—
notwithstanding their philosophical misinterpretation as
such—and first intentional objects themselves, is not perceptual but symbolic.
Klein’s reason for distancing himself from Husserl’s
phenomenological account of “meaning” is therefore at once
philosophical and historical; or, rather, it presupposes a mode
of awareness that is neither one nor the other, but “both
together.” Indeed, only the presupposition of such a mode of
awareness can justify the radical distinction he makes
between the respective “meanings” of ancient and modern
“conceptuality,” which distinction, strictly speaking, annuls
the omni-temporality—or, what is the same thing, the omnihistoricality—of the very concept of “meaning” and assigns
an historical locus to the concept of truth—a locus that is
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
relative accordingly as it is proximate to the ancient Greek or
the modern “conceptuality.” Moreover, it is only the presupposition of such a mode of awareness that can account for the
status of the vantage from which Klein makes the comparison
between ancient science and philosophy and modern science
and philosophy, a vantage whose sights are indeed set on the
things themselves that are in comparison.
I, for one, do not presume to be in the position, philosophically, mathematically, historically, or otherwise
speaking, to judge that the mode of awareness presupposed
by Klein’s account of these matters is unwarranted. Indeed,
unlike Hans-Georg Gadamer, who complained that Klein
together with Leo Strauss, “employ a style in their work that
is too much a commentary, so that finally their voices are
lost,”34 I find the hermeneutical “transparency” of Klein’s
writings thought-provoking in a manner that renders trivial
the claims of “philosophical hermeneutics” regarding the
historically conditioned character of all our understanding.
For me, Klein’s writings show not only what remains, even
now, some three quarters of a century after the publication of
his Math Book, as perhaps the most significant specimens of
our “historically conditioned” understanding “in” history, but
also, that the “history” that they are in is none other than the
historia that Plato’s Socrates’ spoke about in the Phaedo.
“Historia” in that sense is a problem, concerned neither with
a contingent sequence of events or philosophical theories nor
with the “concept” or “meaning” of “history” as such, but
rather, with the problem of inquiry itself. The mode of awareness presupposed by the philosophical-mathematical-historical distinctions that Klein’s writings make regarding meaning
and truth points, on my view, to the author’s encounter with
“inquiry” (historia) as something that comes forward as a
problem whenever the question arises of the origin of whatever it is that is under discussion. To the question of whether
the inquiries in Klein’s Math Book and other writings are
“true,” I believe that the best answer would have to be some-
HOPKINS
85
thing like this: Klein has said what he thinks is true of the
matters addressed by his inquiries. The question of whether
what he has said is “correct” is one that has to be posed not
to their author and the putative concepts and meanings that
govern his “philosophy,” but to these inquiries themselves. If
Klein has not spoken correctly, it is our “task to take up the
argument and refute it.”35
That said, I would like to close with a suggestion and a
question. The suggestion: Klein’s well-known reticence to
discuss, in any detail, the presuppositions of his own thought,
may be rooted in his polite refusal of Leibniz’s invitation to
“follow him [Leibniz]—to the audience-chamber of God,”
and to join him, along with the other immortal philosophers,
“on a little stool at God’s feet.” The question: does the shift
from the ancient Greek to the modern conceptuality of
numbers, which Klein has shown applies to the cardinality of
numbers, extend to their ordinality as well? Specifically, is
there an historical locus proper to the truth of the “firstness”
of the first intentional objects and the “secondness” of the
second intentional objects by which Klein expresses the decisive shift from the ancient to the modern consciousness?
Notes
1
Jacob Klein and Leo Strauss, “A Giving of Accounts: Jacob Klein and
Leo Strauss,” The College (April 1970): 1-5, here 1. Hereafter, cited as
“Accounts.”
2
Jacob Klein, “Speech, Its Strength and Its Weaknesses,” in Lectures and
Essays, eds. Robert B. Williamson and Elliot Zuckerman (Annapolis: St.
John’s College Press, 1985): 361-374, here 370-371. Hereafter cited as
“Speech,” while the volume itself will be cited as “Essays.”
3
Jacob Klein, “Modern Rationalism,” in Essays, 53-64, here 64.
Hereafter cited as “Rationalism.”
4
Ibid.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
HOPKINS
87
5
Although sometimes he identifies it as occurring earlier, for instance,
when he stated in 1970 that it occurred “about 500 years ago”
(“Accounts,” 1).
Plato and Platonism, ed. Johannes M. Van Ophuijsen (Washington D.C.:
The Catholic University Press, 1999), 218-239; “Figure, Ratio, Form”
Plato’s Five Mathematical Studies,” Aperion XXXII, 4 (1999): 73-88.
6
19
Klein, Math Book, 62 (my italics).
20
Ibid.
21
Jabob Klein, Math Book, 184.
22
Jacob Klein, “Concept of Numbers,” 51.
23
Jacob Klein, Math Book, 54.
24
Jacob Klein, Math Book, 99.
Jacob Klein, Plato’s Trilogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1977), 2. Hereafter, cited as Trilogy.
7
Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra,
trans. Eva Brann (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1969; reprint: New
York: Dover, 1992). This work was originally published in German as
“Die griechische Logistik und die Entstehung der Algebra” in Quellen
und Studien zur Geschichte der Mathematik, Astronomie und Physik,
Abteilung B: Studien, vol. 3, no. 1 (Berlin, 1934), pp. 18–105 (Part I);
no. 2 (1936), pp. 122–235 (Part II). Hereinafter, cited as “Math Book.”
8
Jacob Klein, “The Concept of Number is Greek Mathematics and
Philosophy,” in Essays, 43-52, here 43. Hereafter cited as “Concept of
Number.”
9
Jacob Klein, Math Book, 9.
10 Jacob Klein, “Modern Rationalism,” 63.
11
Jacob Klein, “Speech,” 374. He also mentions him by name in
“Accounts,” which, however, is a transcript of a tape recording.
12
Jacob Klein, “Aristotle, an Introduction,” Essays, 171-195, here 171.
13
“Accounts,” 3.
14
Martin Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André
Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 365.
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid., 366.
17
Ibid.
18
Works by Konrad Gaiser, J.N. Findlay, and H.J. Krämer on Plato’s
“unwritten doctrine,” for all their diversity, share the following characteristics: 1) they fail to acknowledge the priority of Klein’s work on their
topic, and 2) they (perhaps, consequently) approach Plato’s “mathematics” and “eidetic numbers” from an alien conceptual level. See,
respectively: Platos Ungeschriebene Lehre (Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1968);
Plato: The Written and Unwritten Doctrines (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1974); and Plato and the Foundations of Metaphysics, trans. John
R. Catan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990). Mitchell
Miller’s work is an exception to 2); see “‘Unwritten Teachings’ in the
Parmenides,” Review of Metaphysics 48 (March 1995): 591-633;
“Dialectical Education and Unwritten Teachings in Plato’s Statesman,” in
25
There may be one possible exception to this, namely “the so-called
general theory of proportions” (Jacob Klein, “The World of Physics and
the ‘Natural’ World,” in Essays, 1-34, here 27; hereinafter, cited as
“World of Physics”) of Euclid, although Klein does not appear to be altogether of one mind about whether this “theory” really represents a case
where ancient concepts refer originally to other concepts and not to individual objects. In 1932, he wrote, “The fifth book of Euclid, in fact,
contains a ‘geometrical algebra’” (Ibid.), which he characterized as not
treating “the ratios of particular magnitudes, geometrical forms for
instance, or numbers or bodily masses or time segments, but ratios ‘in
themselves’, the wholly undetermined bearers of which are symbolized
[symbolisch . . . versinnbildlicht] by straight lines” (Ibid.). In other words,
he seems to characterize here an indeterminate or general object as corresponding to the general procedure of Euclid, and therewith, a non-individual object as the “referent” of this procedure’s “concepts.” However,
in his Math Book, which I assume was written later (it was published
1934-1936), precisely this possibility is ruled out by Klein, when he
writes, “For ancient science, the existence of a ‘general object’ is by no
means a simple consequence of a ‘general theory’” (Math Book, 161), and
he goes on to quote Aristotle’s view on this matter (in Metaphysics M 3,
1077 b 17-20) as definitive: “‘The general propositions of mathematics
[namely the ‘axioms’, i.e., the ‘common notions’, but also all theorems of
the Eudoxian theory of proportions] are not about separate things which
exist outside of and alongside of the [geometric] magnitudes and numbers,
but are just about these; not, however, insofar as they are such as to have
a magnitude or to be divisible [into discrete units]’” (Ibid.). It is therefore
upon the basis of this, apparently, later view of Klein’s that I refer to the
“all” here.
26
Ibid., 25.
27
Ibid.
28
Ibid.
�88
29
Jacob Klein, Math Book, 306, n. 324.
30
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Jacob Klein, Math Book, 208.
31
Indeed, it is for this reason that Descartes, on Klein’s view, stresses the
“power” of imagination, and not the imagination’s “images,” to assist the
pure intellect in grasping the completely indeterminate concepts that it
has separated from the ideas that the imagination offers it, because these
ideas are precisely “determinate images”—and therefore, intrinsically
unsuitable for representing to the intellect its indeterminate concepts. The
imagination’s power, however, being indeterminate insofar as it is not
limited to any particular one of its images, is able to use is own indeterminateness to enter into the “service” of the pure intellect and make
visible a “symbolic representation” of what is otherwise invisible to it, by
facilitating, as it were, the identification of the objects of first and second
intentions in the symbol’s peculiar mode of being. The imagination’s
facilitation involves, as it were, its according its “power” of visibility to
the concept’s invisibility.
32
Jacob Klein, “Modern Rationalism,” 61.
33
Ibid.
34
The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn
(Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1997), 236.
35
Plato, Meno, 75C-D.
89
Addendum
The following images correspond to pages 68 and 69 of The
St. John’s Review, volume 47, number 1 (“What Tree Is This:
In Praise of Europe’s Renaissance Printers, Publishers, and
Philologists,” by Chaninah Maschler). Omitted originally
because of print quality, they appear now at the request of the
author.
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The St. John’s Review
Volume XLVIII, number two (2005)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Audra Price
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson,
President; Harvey Flaumenhaft, Dean. For those not on the
distribution list, subscriptions are $10.00 for one year.
Unsolicited essays, reviews, and reasoned letters are welcome.
Address correspondence to the Review, St. John’s College,
P Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are
.O.
available, at $5.00 per issue, from the St. John’s College
Bookstore.
©2005 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction
in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
The St. John’s Public Relations Office and the St. John’s College Print Shop
�2
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
3
Contents
Memorial Pieces
Memorial for Beate Ruhm von Oppen.......................... 5
Introduction to “The Tuning Fork”............................. 27
David Stephenson
The Tuning Fork..........................................................28
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
A Visit to Santayana.................................................... 43
Steve Benedict
Essays and Lectures
Kant’s Philosophical Use of Mathematics:
Negative Magnitudes...................................................49
Eva Brann
Four Poems
Where the Poet Lives...................................................73
Early Pupil
She and the Tree
Outlay
Elliott Zuckerman
Review
Platonic Pedagogy?
Eva Brann’s The Music of the Republic:
Essays on Socrates’ Conversations
and Plato’s Writings..................................................... 79
David Roochnik
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
5
Memorial for
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
Introduction: Elliott Zuckerman
During her years at the College, Beate brought us her words
and her music, and her concern about how words and music
ought to fit together. Now we are devoting to her memory
some of our words and our music.
In many of her writings and in her person, we were
reminded of the history of the twentieth century. In a time of
exaggeration, she insisted upon accuracy. And by reminding
us of war, she enhanced our devotion to the activities of
peace.
***
Delia Walker
I do not want to talk about Beate’s intellectual brilliance, of
which you are all aware, but I want to talk about her as my
sister and about the time when we were young.
She was my big sister, my senior by several years. Because
of the difference in our ages and circumstances, we lived
apart more than we lived together, but I could always rely on
her help and advice.
I must often have been a burden and a responsibility, not
to say a nuisance, but she was always there for me, especially
during the difficult war years. I know she worried about me,
and she helped me and gave me courage in tricky situations.
She even tried her hand at matchmaking! I didn’t always
agree with her advice about things, but in this instance I did,
wholeheartedly, and here I am, after fifty years of happy marriage. Thank you, Beate. I know she loved Harlan very much.
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
6
In spite of being by miles the brainier of us two, she
always had unbounded confidence in my abilities and capabilities, and her belief in me was an enormous help to get me
through periods of low self-esteem and depression. Indeed, if
she had not been continually rooting for me, I might often
have given up. So today I want to say a big “thank you” to
her.
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank my
family and Beate’s friends for the tremendous support they
have given me in this sad time.
She was very enthusiastic about my playing – far more
than I deserved – and so, though I really stopped playing seriously some years ago, I have blown the dust off my flute and
together with her friend, Chester Burke, we will play some
Telemann – a composer of whom she was very fond.
[Delia Walker and Chester Burke then played the Flute Duet
in G major by Georg Philipp Telemann.]
***
Peter E. Quint
My first trip to St. John’s College was in the late spring of
1976. I returned from that visit with many vivid memories,
but the most lively and impressive were of my conversations
with a wonderful and, it seemed to me, exotic person: a
German Englishwoman, of profound leaning and extraordinary charm, who—quite amazingly—lived right here in
Maryland.
Beate Ruhm von Oppen was one of the last of a brilliant
generation of scholars—historians, scientists, philosophers,
lawyers—who, having escaped Nazi Germany, were obliged
to resume their studies or careers in another, more welcoming land. This necessity of perhaps starting anew may have
seemed like great misfortune at the outset, but it had the
advantage—for them, and certainly for us—that they were
perfectly at home in two languages and two cultures.
MEMORIAL
7
Yet as with many other victims or opponents of the Nazi
regime, the experience left Beate with a certain, let us say,
intellectual and emotional distance from her native land.
Even in recent years, I believe that Beate thought long and
hard before accepting a high honor for her distinguished life’s
work from the German government.
Some years ago Beate, with her extraordinary linguistic
skills and deep knowledge of history, was chosen to be the
English translator of the memoirs of Konrad Adenauer, the
venerable first Chancellor of post-war West Germany. For
some days the English and the French translators actually
worked in Adenauer’s house in order to receive his last
minute changes on the German manuscript. Beate told me
that the translators worked at Adenauer’s dining room table,
and apparently because the sun was streaming in, they
adjusted a window curtain in a way that made the work most
comfortable for them. But Adenauer himself would come in
and, seeing the curtain in an unfamiliar position, would
firmly move it back to the spot that he approved.
A charming and slightly ludicrous tale—but would I be
wrong in detecting, in Beate’s telling, a subtle note of disapproval that even in this trivial instance some residual authoritarian attitude survived in the avatar of the New Germany?
The work of Beate’s that will most certainly live is her
extraordinary edition of the letters of Helmuth James von
Moltke sent to his wife Freya, that “beautifully edited” work,
in the words of the Stanford historian Gordon Craig. Moltke
was a Prussian aristocrat who opposed Hitler and knew from
the outset that the war would end in catastrophic shame and
defeat for Germany. Moltke sought tirelessly to recruit likeminded Germans of the resistance, and in three meetings at
Kreisau, his East Elbian estate, he organized the drafting of
detailed principles for a new democratic Germany after
Hitler’s defeat. At the same time, Moltke was making strenuous efforts to save whatever lives he could as a legal officer in
the German intelligence service, which was, as Beate noted,
“the focal point of much opposition to the regime.” The let-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
ters reflect this ceaseless work, as well as deep concern for
Freya and their two young children, who spent the war at
Kreisau.
Moltke fell under particular suspicion shortly after the
attempt on Hitler’s life in July 1944, and following a trial
before the notorious “People’s Court,” he was executed at
Berlin-Plötzensee in early 1945. The American diplomat
George Kennan, who knew Moltke personally, called him:
“the greatest person morally, and the largest and most
enlightened in his concepts that I met on either side of the
battle lines of the Second World War.”
Beate had been led to Moltke through her work on religion and the German resistance, lectures that were delivered
at Princeton in 1971, and much of her academic life was
focused on the issues and conundrums of resistance to a
regime of repression so horrible that it would seem impossible to imagine if it had not actually occurred.
In the editions of Moltke’s letters, Beate’s indispensable
introductions and notes reflect her remarkable knowledge
and understanding of the German resistance, as well as the
broader history of the period. Indeed the notes have a sad,
elegiac quality of their own. As each new personality of the
resistance enters the scene, there is a trenchant summary of
his career which more often than not ends—as though a bell
were tolling through out the volume—with the words: “executed in August 1944”; “executed 29 September 1944”;
“executed,” “executed.” It is fitting and appropriate that the
German edition was awarded the Scholl prize, which honors
another circle of the German resistance, the Munich
University students of the White Rose movement.
Beate’s first German edition of Moltke’s letters appeared
in 1988, and in 1990 Alfred Knopf, Inc. published an edition
in New York—wonderfully translated into English by Beate—
which brought this moving document of the human spirit to
American and British readers. The English introduction
reflects the precision and trenchancy which Beate’s friends
9
MEMORIAL
will immediately recall from her brilliant and learned conversation.
Moltke’s mother was an English-speaking woman from
South Africa, and the story of Beate’s edition of her letters is
also noteworthy. When these letters found no American or
British publisher, Beate translated them into German for a
German edition. So she translated Moltke’s letters from
German into English, and his mother’s letters from English
into German. Ordinarily one only translates into one’s own
native language, but Beate, as we know, had two native languages.
In my last telephone call with Beate earlier this summer,
she recounted that she was deeply absorbed in choosing
books to be given to the St. John’s library. Despite many
upheavals, Beate had much good fortune in her life: in getting
out of Germany when she did; in finding a subject, Moltke,
who was so congenial to her independent spirit; and in reaching a place, St. John’s College, that suited her so well in its
uncompromising quest for excellence in the life of the mind.
***
Steven Werlin
I want to make two separate speeches about Beate. Both will
be short. The first begins with an anecdote. Sometime in the
1990s, when I lived in Annapolis, I had the pleasure of driving Beate either to or from the airport. It was a long drive—
she preferred Dulles to BWI or National—and I always
enjoyed the trip. I valued the chance to chat.
One time we were running a little bit late, and it started
to rain. I was speeding around the Washington beltway—too
quickly, it turned out—and my car went into a skid. Before I
regained control, we had scraped the passenger side of the
vehicle along the right-side barrier. I pulled to the side of the
road in a panic.
I asked Beate whether she was all right. I apologized. I
asked her whether she was sure was all right. I apologized
�10
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
again. I asked her whether she was very sure she was all right
and apologized a third time. So much I remember only
approximately. I had let my car slide out of control with a
passenger who was within a half-dozen years of my grandmother’s age, and I was very upset.
Whatever I said, however many times I apologized, I must
have gone too far. The following is the part of the story I
remember very clearly: Beate finally turned to me and said,
“Steven, my dear, I made it through the bombing of London.”
I wanted to share this anecdote because I thought it
would be important for us all to think about how very funny
Beate was. I knew that others this afternoon would speak of
her scholarship and her courage. I wanted to point out that
she was a pleasure to be around.
I got to know Beate at two different dinner tables at 101
Market Street [the residence of the Klein’s], where three different sorts of dinners were served. There were large formal
occasions at which I was most often present as a waiter; there
were large informal occasions, also in the dining room, where
leftovers from formal dinners would be consumed by those
whom the hostess lovingly called her “vacuum cleaners”;
there were private dinners, for one or two friends, at the
small table in the kitchen. Beate was mainstay at all three,
because whenever she was around, conversations would be
interesting and serious, but also fun.
Here’s my second speech: I am now the Dean of Shimer
College, a small Great Books school near Chicago. I mourn
Beate’s passing for my students’ sake. I had been trying for a
couple of years to convince her to give a talk at Shimer. Most
recently I asked her to speak at commencement last spring.
She refused, saying that she was too old and unwell for the
trip.
When I heard she had passed away, I decided to try to
share my sense of her with my students, and so I invited all
who were interested to come to a Friday evening discussion
of her essay on the White Rose. It’s a lovely piece: serious and
challenging, surprising in its conclusions and beautifully writ-
11
MEMORIAL
ten in that English which she enjoyed calling “Standard MidAtlantic.”
Moved by some of her stronger claims, our conversation
focused on the importance of taking language seriously, of
paying close attention to the words that we and others use.
Much of what was said was predictable: angry claims about
the ways in which words like “terrorist” and “Nazi” and
“homeland” can be used too lightly, and the damage that
ensues when they are. But the conversation lacked depth of
passion, just as Beate said such conversation among those of
my generation and those who are younger generally do.
At a certain point, however, the conversation turned. In
order to explain how it turned, I need to share one fact about
Shimer College. At Shimer, teachers aren’t called “tutors.” It’s
not that we’re called “professors,” as we would be at most
colleges. At Shimer, there is no clear tradition. Lots of words
get used—teacher, instructor, facilitator, co-inquirer, and
worse.
We started to talk about whether it did and whether it
should matter to us what teachers are called. That question
brought the issue close to all of our lives. Several of my colleagues were present, but there were many more students—
first year, sophomore, junior, and senior—and they talked
seriously about what various decisions about the consequences that their various decisions about what word to use
in this particular instance might have. They were judging
their language, taking control of it in a serious way.
I think Beate would have been delighted.
***
Freya von Moltke
Read by Johannes Huessy
During the twelve heavy years that we lived under Hitler’s
regime in Germany, my husband, Helmuth James von
Moltke, wrote hundreds of letters to me. These letters were
not only a precious record of my husband’s thought, but also
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
12
a commentary on the events in Germany seen through the
eyes of a German and committed opponent of the Nazis. He
was executed for his opposition. For many years I kept the
letters with me as I first lived in South Africa, then back in
Germany, and eventually in the United States. Gradually I
came to realize that these letters were of historical importance and should be published. I did not believe, however,
that I was the right person to edit the letters. In Vermont,
Beate, so committed to German resistance, came into my life.
I came to love and admire her, and I entrusted the letters to
her. Over many years she edited and translated them, and
they were published in both German and English.
With Beate our letters were in very good hands. In her
work with them lively Beate invested most generously the
treasures of her gifts: her character, her mind, and mostly her
heart. And I came to cherish her friendship.
Later she began work on another collection of letters
from our family, the letters my mother-in-law, Dorothy von
Moltke, née Rose Innes, sent to her father, the Chief Justice
of South Africa from 1905 to 1935. These letters record her
life as a British-born wife and mother through World War I
and into the Nazi period, again a comment on Germany’s
troubled history of the first half of the twentieth century.
Beate translated this correspondence from English into
German, and part of the letters was published in 1999 in that
language.
So today, as you are all gathered to celebrate Beate’s life,
I want to add my voice to express my profound gratitude and
my sadness at her passing. How fortunate for her that she
died without having to leave St. John’s College.
Since I am not able to be with you in person I am very
grateful to have my words conveyed to you by one of your
students, Johannes Huessy, class of 2005, a friend of ours,
and belonging to the young generation, whom to teach had
become so central to Beate’s life.
***
MEMORIAL
13
Brother Robert Smith, F.S.C.
Beate was and is so many things to so many people that an
occasion like the present one is precious. It requires us to sort
out diverse strands in our own deeply felt but unsorted allegiances. This clarification has not been needed until now; she
was always there and ready to charm, and that was enough.
Now one needs to become explicit about what drew us to her
so strongly and for so long. That process will take a while,
and it begins for most of us now. We cannot judge ourselves
unless we fathom our enthusiasms.
Beate had an impact on people in public ways and also
privately. No generalizations can convey this, and so I rejoice
that so many people are here and have and soon will have
spoken.
I want to begin with an odd bit or two of evaluations others have made of her, principally because at least one such
view originally surprised me, but when I thought of it, it
seemed true and important. Robert Bart said something that
awakened my attention to an aspect of her I had not explicitly noted. Bart was a considerable influence in the College
for many years. He was often quite perceptive and articulated
his opinions clearly in his own idiosyncratic way. He said he
found Beate’s opinions on the work of students and her judgment of their characters to be very deep and accurate. This
judgment bears on a central matter in the life of this College.
We arrive at grades for Seminar—the central part of our work
here—by discussion and consensus between the two leaders
who share responsibility for it. We also decide in a similar
way on whether a student should be allowed to continue in
the College or not, and on whether he or she will be graduated. To show how important a judgment Bart thought he was
making about Beate, one has to realize how seriously Bart
took the matter of student evaluations. One anecdote will
suffice to show this. After an enabling meeting that started at
7 p.m. and did not end until 2 a.m., Bart was heard to say
with satisfaction to an exhausted colleague: “I think we really
did talk things out tonight.” That very careful man alerted me
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
to the real power of judging character Beate undoubtedly
possessed.
I talked about this someone else who expressed himself as
surprised by Bart’s opinion—he imagined Beate would probably have remained rather quiet on such occasions. This
shows how many sides there were to her. She was like the
man described by Pascal: when the talk turned on poetry, he
had lots to say, otherwise one would never have known he
had any views on the subject.
She was also impressive in other public ways. For many
years an important part of college life centered on dinners
given regularly by Jacob Klein and his wife. Klein was in the
opinion of most a great man and the dean whose thoughts
still influence us. People invited to give the Friday night lecture attended by all members of the Community came to
those dinners. Faculty members in turn were also invited and,
more frequently than most, Beate. It was agreed that when
she was present, her wit and general sprightliness helped
make the occasion a delight. That was certainly the opinion
of the Klein and his wife, both distinguished conversationalists themselves.
I want to bring up two more subjects. One of them is
unusual, and I think no one else is likely to have considered
it or thought it important. The other is a nostalgic look at reasons for a disappointment I have and will continue to feel
now that she is no longer reachable by telephone.
Let me turn to the first of the two topics. It will surprise
most of you.
She never attended family reunions because some Oppens
had insufficiently kept their distance from Hitler, and she was
unwilling to risk having to speak to them. She was proud of
one relative, a “parson,” to use her expression, who behaved
quite honorably.
Later, she did think of going to a family gathering, but
finally never did. She wrote an account of herself and her
father for a family publication, and she was immensely
pleased when some stranger, a man of some distinction, asked
MEMORIAL
15
her if she was indeed related to the man who was her father.
When she said yes, he told her of his admiration for him and
about the memorabilia on him and his career as an actor he
had collected.
Why am I speaking of this matter? There are, I think,
good reasons for doing so.
This aspect of her life shows both Beate’s seriousness and
her complexity. She paid respect to whatever she thought
deserved it, and this trait was balanced by her carefulness in
talking to people only about topics she thought appropriate
to a given audience. Beate never, or at least very rarely, mentioned the matters I have just spoken about. More importantly, in this very matter she did something else that goes to
the heart of who she was. In all the years she was at St. John’s,
in the annual directory published by the College, if you look
at the entry “von Oppen, Beate” you will find the words “See
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate.” She said, “My father gave me life,
but my mother’s second husband gave me nourishment and a
chance for a long life.” She always spoke of him—and she
was not sparing him in doing so—with affection and respect.
Consideration for her forbearers went along with a sense
of what is important over history. In fact some families were
the military bulwark that guaranteed continuity in a country,
and they made possible whatever degree of civilization
existed there. Beate’s respect for those who embody these
claims is of a piece with another worthwhile fact about her.
She never became an American citizen, despite her high
regard for this country and what it did for the world in two
great wars. She remembered, though, that England had
helped preserve her life and gave her an opportunity to serve
in the second great war. She said, “I swore allegiance to the
Queen and Charlie, too.” This last was her translation of “to
the Queen and her heirs.”
My second reason for talking about her origins is the
common sense and respect for herself that she showed in
keeping silent about them. Americans in one of their founding documents distanced themselves from titles, and in this
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
16
country mentioning a claim to one seems ridiculous to most.
Beate was as far removed from such a taint as possible. She
had the respect of all who knew her. She deserved it for her
personal and professional qualities. She needed no peacock
feather even if their borrowed attractiveness were valued
here.
Let me now conclude by saying how much one will miss
her. For many years I have called her whenever I heard or
read something new on any of the topics that interested the
two of us. I always wanted to hear her opinion and thereby
evaluate my own. One example: I recently read about a musical called, I think, “Quickening” composed for this year’s
Edinburgh Festival. It was on a religious subject. I immediately thought of Beate and the fact that she knew by heart
every work of every one of Bach’s cantatas. When I read
about this piece, I did not quite take the phone down and call
her about it, but I automatically thought of doing so.
Let that stand for many thoughts about the past and the
future that will preemptively summon my attention and stir
my gratitude toward someone so recently gone.
***
Ben Walker
I’d like to say a few words about my aunt Biti on behalf of
myself, my siblings, Becca and Philip, and also our partners
and children. We all called her Biti rather than Beate, so I’ll
continue to call her that throughout this talk.
Although Biti lived 4,000 miles away from us, she was a
constant presence throughout our childhoods and adult lives.
She never felt like “the aunt who lived on another continent,”
but a close and trusted friend and confidante.
She would come to visit us in England as often as she
could, normally twice a year. As we each grew up and left
home, her visits started to include trips to our homes in
Bristol, London, and Oxford, where she would come and stay
with us. She always took a very keen interest in what we were
MEMORIAL
17
doing in our lives and greatly enjoyed seeing where and how
we lived, at first hand. It was a great pleasure to have her to
stay, and you knew there would be no shortage of conversation while she was with you.
When she was back in America, we would all enjoy correspondence by letter with Biti. She was the only person with
whom I had regular correspondence by mail, and these letters
were always much more than just a quick summary of recent
events. Her letters to us would be questioning and insightful,
full of enthusiasm for whatever she was currently involved
with, full of personality and wit. Sometimes she wrote as if
she had discovered something or someone that had been a
huge secret, like Paul Scott or E.M. Forster, and she had to
share the good news with everyone.
But her handwriting was terrible; sometimes it would
take ages to decipher what she had written. She would complain about mine, and particularly Becca’s, but hers was
appalling!
Often letters would start in the normal way, but after she
had filled the sheet she was writing on, her words would spill
out onto the margins, and then on to the margins of newspaper cuttings she was sending us, as if she could never quite tell
us everything that she wanted to say.
For someone who surrounded herself with books and
even referred to her books as her friends, she was an amazingly social person. She had the ability to make friends with
people from all walks of life, young and old. She loved to talk
and was an entertaining and fascinating raconteur.
Discussions with Biti could sometimes be frustrating, as her
train of thought would often lead her seemingly miles away
from the topic being discussed, only to return twenty minutes
later via a very circuitous route; however, these conversations
were always fascinating as she would tell us about aspects of
her life that we did not know, and also stories about our own
childhoods that we had forgotten.
Her memory was quite amazing. She had the ability to
recall the most minute detail of events in her life that took
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
place decades earlier, even to the most mundane detail of
doctor’s appointments and dinner menus. Although at times
she would do the majority of the talking, conversations with
Biti were never “one way.” She took an active interest in all
of our lives, our partners and families, our work and hobbies,
our passions and thoughts.
She could drive you mad with her continual talking at
times. So it was easy to forget that Biti was a great listener.
She never felt it necessary to give advice, but she drank in all
information and would remember it. Months later she would
refer to details of a conversation that had taken place on her
last visit, and it was very reassuring. I always enjoyed talking
to her, she was wise and understanding and I felt terribly
close to her.
She also had a great sense of humour – laconic and underspoken, but never cruel. She could take you completely by
surprise with her turns of phrase, but sometimes you could
only tell that she knew how witty she was being from a twinkle in her eye. I’ll never forget her laugh, or her smile.
She really helped to form the person I am today – what
great passions she had – music and literature, history and philosophy. Such clear views about politics and religion. Good
influences for an adolescent to have in the family.
I have a copy of an autobiographical short story that she
wrote, called “The Tuning Fork,” [reprinted below] in which
she describes waiting to cross the border between Germany
and Holland in 1936. In it, she describes how, although she
was practically penniless, she spent a portion of her last 10
marks on a tuning fork. “It was a modest tuning fork, and
cheap,” she wrote, “ but it depleted my minimal resources. I
probably realised this, yet probably felt, too, that there was
not only practical but also symbolical value in a gadget that
gave you true pitch.” At the end of the story, she writes, “I
still have it. Tuning forks don’t take up much space.”
And it was those small things of symbolic significance that
meant the most to her. She wanted little, and she asked for
less. Dark chocolate and some photos seemed about it. She
MEMORIAL
19
was generous, thoughtful, and unselfish. But the small things
were important to her – the correspondence, above all, providing treasured insight into our lives, a strong link back to
her family in England, and a true measure of our love for her.
I’ve been struck, whilst going through her papers over the last
few days, quite how many letters there were from all of us to
her: it makes me realise how important a figure she was to the
whole family. But there were also letters from so many other
people—she had so many friends—people who she maintained contact with for decades and across continents.
For the last few years of her life, as many of you will
know, Biti was faced with an agonizing decision. She knew
that the time had come to move from her lovely home on
Wagner Street, and she needed to decide where to go. Should
she stay in America, or move back to the United Kingdom
after 45 years? She found this decision incredibly difficult to
make, and every time she spoke to someone else about it, her
feelings would veer from one option to another. When she
finally decided to move to a retirement community just a few
miles outside of Annapolis, we were all selfishly disappointed.
We knew that this meant we would see less and less of Biti as
she was finding continental travel more and more difficult.
Becca felt it particularly keenly. With two young children, she
knew that the opportunities to visit Biti in America would be
few.
But we all secretly knew that this was the right decision
for her to make. We knew what a unique place she had found
to live, what an amazing community, providing not only the
intellectual stimulation she thrived on, but also the social and
emotional support she needed. It was already clear to us
before she died, but has become even more so since then,
what a special place she had found in the heart of this community, how many very close friends she had, how she had
touched the lives of so many people around her. She was
every bit as loved and valued by her friends and colleagues in
Annapolis as she was by her family, and that’s why the decision was so hard for her to make.
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
20
Thank you to all of you here in Annapolis for making this
such a happy home to her for the last forty years, so far away
from her family in England. And thank you, Aunt Biti, for all
the love that you shared with us. We’ll always remember you
for the wonderful woman that you were.
***
Eva Brann
We knew each other for nearly forty-five years and for almost
twenty we lived next to each other, with only a thin dry wall
between us. We spent a lot of time in each other’s company,
eating, talking and, in the earlier years, walking.
Beate had a brisk, sometimes even brusque English exterior, a fund of stories ranging from historical happenings to
personal mishaps, a far-flung American and transatlantic
acquaintance, and a sprightly, occasionally acerbic wit.
People, among them the Graduate Institute students she liked
so much to teach, were charmed and fascinated. So was I. She
was good company, and she seemed well seated in life.
But it wasn’t quite that way. If fate had been kinder, she
would actually have been – or so I often imagined – a decisive
Englishwoman, living in a small village in one of the prettier
shires, minding the vicar’s theology and singing in his choir –
not herself a housekeeper but well-served by someone who
had become attached to her.
It wasn’t that way. She wasn’t really English but was born
in Switzerland and then, in the starving years after the First
World War, had a German childhood; she herself attributed
her small stature and some other effects to her undernourishment as an infant. She was rightly proud that because of the
complexities of her early years she grew up preternaturally
sensitive to the political climate. In the first year of the Nazi
takeover, when my own parents’ thoughts were still far from
emigration, she, a mere teenager, removed herself to
Holland, where, incidentally, she had an unlikely but often
remembered experience with a famous Indian guru. She
MEMORIAL
21
aided her family in their immigration to England, where life
was far harder for refugees than it was for those of us who
luckily landed in the States. Her university studies were
oppressed and curtailed by lack of money. There was a brief
and deeply buried expectation of happiness which ended
when the young man died in Africa under Montgomery, a
general whose cavalier strategies she despised.
Around her, complexity and anomaly accumulated.
Though she lived most of her life here, she never became an
American citizen but remained a British subject, a resident
alien who had endless troubles with the INS over her everlost green cards. She was never a full-time, regular tutor, for
she had truly no mind for mathematics. I recall hours in her
first apartment on Church Circle trying to persuade her that
a geometric diagram could display a truth expressible in
words. Nevertheless, the college was her one true home, for
her appointments, though made from year to year, were soon
made quite routinely, and she served the college well in her
own way, not least as long-time editor of St. John’s Review.
She had contracted once to write a history of twentieth-century Germany, but had to give it up, laboring, as I thought,
under too great an accumulation of detailed knowledge and
too overwhelming a sense of the responsibility for telling the
inner truth close to her political conscience. She was, one
might say, the ultimate historian, with no disposition for universals but a great urge to make the particulars express the
moral significance whose burden she so acutely felt. On the
other hand she was a good part journalist, with a reporter’s
bold inquisitiveness and a jaunty, even daring style, the style
of moral exposé. Her completed work was eminently readable and vividly opinionated.
At home nowhere and everywhere, she was up to her last
trip to see her family this summer – she died four days after
her return – an intrepid if overloaded traveler. Something in
her life left her a kind of pack-rat, with a propensity for accumulation. We used to go to yard sales together, where I’d
come away with a candlestick and she would acquire the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
largest object around, preferably non-functional; computers
which she couldn’t use anyway, typewriters of which she had
five. I recall that we were walking once in the woods (they
were then still to be found around Annapolis), when we came
on an overgrown wreck of a truck; seeing her appraisingly
eye the seat in the cabin I shouted out a forfending
“Absolutely not!”
Her religious convictions were in suspension, oddly compacted of adherence and distance. She declared herself an
agnostic but had faith only in the faithful. Baptized a
Zwinglian, she was Jewish on her mother’s side, and therefore technically Jewish. Yet she had no relation to Judaism
and a great distaste for that emotional and academic exploitation of Jewish history which she mordantly called the
“Holocaust industry.” In fact every sort of unthinking proprietary position offended her and roused acerbic epithets. For
example, she used to call feckless pacifists “peace-mongers.”
Yet she herself occupied her special historical territory whose
invasion by uncomprehending academic forces troubled her
unceasingly.
Though she admired the Lutheran theologian and resisting martyr to the Nazis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (with whose
complicated abstractions she could hardly deal), her real sympathy was with the Catholics because of the moral clarity to
be derived from the doctrine of works; she had the deepest
suspicion of the moral consequences of elevating subjective
faith over political deeds.
Perhaps the defining emblem of her semi-deliberate convolutions was her very name. She originally had the surname
Ruhm from her much beloved adoptive father Ernst Ruhm,
the natural father of her sister Delia. Just when a German surname would be least helpful in England she added her own
natural father’s name, von Oppen. He was an actor, a minor
matinee idol, whom she insisted on visiting when she learned
about him in her teens – a meeting at once gratifying and
wrenching. She was clearly anxious to carry with her all her
connections – all we’ve learned to call “roots” in America.
MEMORIAL
23
But the attendant results were confusion: Mail went ever
astray, being sent indifferently to all her initials, R, v. or O.
The territory she made her own, with the most detailed
mastery and avid reading, brought up to date to the very last
days, was, I think, deep down another exercise in preserving
and exonerating her origins and connections. She was, after
all, German, and German was her first language. She was,
incidentally, able to translate not only German into English,
her language of daily use (which most of us refugees can do),
but English into German as well; she was symmetrically bilingual, an unusual phenomenon. Her deep, absolutely persistent interest was in the German resistance to the Nazis. She
knew these “resistential” figures (as she called them)
minutely; they were her kin, and she worried over them and
their reputation (just as, Delia has told me, she worried about
her as the little sister). She found her hero particularly in
Helmuth von Moltke, who was hanged by the Nazis and to
whose surviving family, his wife Freya and their sons, she was
close. In publishing his correspondence with Freya in German
and in English she did his memory a great service.
As all else in her life, this was not so much an ebulliently
ardent passion as a held in, tenacious adherence. This mode
was, I think, the defining feeling of her life.
I have asked myself: What made us life-long companions?
I think above all Bach and Language. When we met in 1960
I already owned records of most of the cantatas and instrumental music. She introduced me to the motets. But above all
she sensitized me to something utterly new to me and
infinitely valuable in listening to sacred music: the relation of
the music to the words – music as an exegesis, a gloss, an
incarnation of the sacred text. This was a preoccupation
which was perhaps even more ingrained, more central, than
the Resistance, at once a deflection from and a focusing of
feeling. She also taught me, incidentally, that it is therefore
barbarous to listen to such music as a background to other
occupations – a lesson that left me at least with the grace of
qualms about doing it.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
I learned a lot too from her resistential studies. She had
an absolutely horrendous writer’s block, stemming, I think,
from the plethora of her information, her aversion to generalization, and the oppressive sense of the importance of this
work. So I got to work through each prospective publication
with her with, I sometimes think, more profit to me than to
her – one benefit being that I was able to think somewhat better of the country of my birth. And I learned to admire her
for her admirations, for to have true heroes is to me a sign of
an underlying soundness of soul.
Some part of our frequent dinners together was spent in
our common pleasure in language, her British English (to the
end a schedule remained a “shedule” for her) and my adoptive American. We rejoiced in the sayings of our German
childhood and put them into hilarious English. We tried to
find exact renderings of idioms in the other language and
rejoiced in silly literalisms. In short we disported ourselves
bilingually. Sometimes she would decode for me the affectionate scrawls of alumni letters, for she, who had an almost
undecipherable handwriting, was especially good at reading
that of others. This handwriting of hers, furiously determinate yet unreadable, always seemed to me to signify something. She was an extremely sociable, communicative being,
charming, witty, intriguing, a teller and re-teller of stories,
ranging, as I said, from historical circumstance to personal
complications. Yet her favorite medium was epistolary: contact through distance. She carried on a far-flung and persistent correspondence, letters whose typed parts were vivacious
but which were wreathed about with her hopeless supplementary scribbles. Her niece Rebecca described them lovingly
at the funeral in August. I should say here that her niece and
nephews, Rebecca, Philip, and Ben, were the human beings
she was most straightforwardly fond of, and they returned
her affection.
Here is a chief, perhaps central trait of Beate’s being that
was totally at odds with her incessant, self-circling anxiety –
a wonderful phenomenon. When real trouble struck – breast
25
MEMORIAL
cancer, heart disease, colitis – she became absolutely serene,
reasonable, patient. It was the gallantry of disaster confirmed,
and a sign of the strength beneath all the agitation.
For the rest, she was completely without pretensions
(though rightfully wanting recognition for her righteous
labors), quite without malice (except when oppressed by too
powerfully impending an opposition), generally without
falsehood (though inhibited to the point of furtiveness about
her feelings), and, all in all, as devoid of intentional harm as
a human being can well be.
In the last few years I took to listening through our thin
party wall for worrisome thumps that brought me to the
phone, for the TV that grew louder as she grew deafer but
was a sign of life, and for the ominous silences, the last of
which brought me over to find what I had feared. I might say
that the silence next door is sounding pretty loud these days.
***
Beate Ruhm von Oppenis was a tutor on the Annapolis Campus of
St. John’s College.
Elliott Zuckerman is tutor emeritus on the Annapolis Campus of
St. John’s College.
Delia Walker is the sister of Beate Ruhm von Oppen.
Peter Quint is Jacob A. France Professor of Constitutional Law at
The University of Maryland.
Steven Werlin is a graduate of St. John’s College and dean of Shimer
College.
Johannes Huessy is a student on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s
College.
Freya von Moltke is widow of Helmuth James von Moltke.
Brother Robert Smith is tutor emeritus on the Annapolis Campus of
St. John’s College.
Ben Walker is the nephew of Beate Ruhm von Oppen.
Eva Brann is former dean and tutor on the Annapolis Campus of
St. John’s College.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
27
The Tuning Fork
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
Introduction by David Stephenson
At the memorial service for Beate Ruhm von Oppen, I discovered a literary side to her I had not suspected. On that occasion her nephew mentioned a memoir, “The Tuning Fork,”
which recalls Beate’s flight as a teenage girl from Germany, a
precarious exodus even in the early days of Nazi domination.
Her family gave me a copy on request, and I immediately saw
how much it deserves publication in full in The St. John’s
Review.
The story rings as true as only experience can, neither
exaggerating nor belittling the fears or desires of a young student brought up in a time when freedom and truth were dying
only bit by bit. It is the personal character of her account that
tells me most what I want to know: why were so many
Germans persuaded by Hitler’s obvious lies and so few moved
to challenge them? Beate juxtaposes her school’s playful complicity in the new racial games against her own ambivalent
reaction to the bloody movies and songs that could move even
unsympathetic youth to tears. Her family’s reluctance to send
their child away requires no explanation; the gradual evolution of her own determination to leave “the fatherland” can
best be glimpsed in her own words.
Why purchase a tuning fork with money she might need to
live in exile? She explains her desire for “a gadget that gave
you the true pitch” in a world grown cacophonous, an instrument that she later justifies on the ground that it doesn’t “take
up much space.” But her love of music also shines through this
act of hope and daring. And that was also something she could
take with her wherever she went.
David Stephenson is a tutor on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
My own acquaintance with Beate grew primarily out of
her musical interests. After she came to St. John’s College, she
attended every musical performance and always discovered
the most appropriate compliment for every group. She was
particularly encouraging to the College’s fledgling orchestra.
Yet her comments about professional musicians could be
sharply critical. For example, though herself the source of several widely admired translations from German to English and
from English to German, she often expressed her disapproval
of translation when it pertained to music. She believed that
linguistic sonority had to play a significant part of a composition to any text: translation into English inevitably distorted
or corrupted its effect.
And her sensitivity to the nuance of verbal expression
extended well beyond music and poetry: at least some of the
power of political propaganda in general she attributed to
clever distortions of language. Hitler’s depredation of his
native language in Mein Kampf as well as in his speeches did
not deceive her more-than-musical ear. She never stopped worrying about the effects of political rhetoric in every language,
even our own.
The Tuning Fork
I was born in Switzerland at the end of the First World War
and grew up, or started to grow up, in Germany. I cannot
think back to a time when politics was not in the air. I remember the evidence of food shortages in my kindergarten and
elementary school days. I remember the feeling of insecurity
communicated by all around me when the currency collapsed, and when inflation galloped away in geometric or
exponential progression, so that, for instance, a lawyer’s or
doctor’s earnings of one day might not be enough to buy a
loaf of bread the next day.
Some years ago you could see, in the window of an
antique shop in our Main Street in Annapolis, an old German
50,000 Mark note, said to have been “used in Hitler’s
Germany.” Perhaps it was used as wallpaper. It might be more
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accurate to say that it was used—as money—in pre-Hitler
Germany, though I’d hate to refer to the Weimar Republic as
just that. It was a specimen of the kind of money that helped
to bring about Hitler’s Germany. Fifty thousand Marks now
would be worth about $13,000. In “normal” times four
Marks were a dollar. The date of issue on that 50,000 Mark
note was November 19, 1922. The very fact that such a note
was printed and put into circulation was, of course, a sign
that inflation had got out of hand. In the summer of 1922 the
dollar was worth not four Marks, but over 400. The next
summer it was over 4 million. And by November 15, 1923 it
was 4 trillion (4,000,000,000,000). If my reckoning is
right—but you’d better check it—that 50,000 Mark note
issued in November 1922 was worth one-eighty-millionth of
a dollar, a year later one eight hundred thousandth of a cent.
That was very cheap wallpaper, but expensive too. What it all
meant, among other things, was the pauperization and
demoralization of the social fabric.
It was in that month, November 1923, that Hitler, the
leader of a tiny party, staged his abortive putsch or coup d’etat in Munich, when he tried for the first time, and failed, to
seize power. That year had also seen communist attempts to
seize power in central Germany; they too were foiled. Hitler
was sent to a comfortable prison for a while and used his
leisure to write his book, Mein Kampf. When he got out
again, he adopted a policy of legality and with that he eventually prevailed.
By the time I had entered elementary school, in 1924, a
new currency had been established and money once more was
money, though scarce. But I noticed my teachers were not
enthusiastic about the political system, though we dutifully
and decorously celebrated the 80th birthday of our President.
His name was Hindenburg and he had been a famous field
marshal in the First World War, halting the Russian advance
in East Prussia. Being, as it were, a personal link between the
old, pre-war empire and the new, post-war republic, and loyal
to the new constitution, he was a national figure acceptable to
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the moderate right and moderate left and lasted a decade as
head of state, while chancellors, or heads of government, succeeded each other at a breathtaking rate. The country had
many political parties and an election system based on proportional representation, so that votes were distributed across
a wide spectrum and a large number of parties, and governments had to be formed out of coalitions of several of them.
They were correspondingly shaky and short-lived. I remember many elections during my school days and reports of violent rhetoric from left to right, as well as physical violence,
street fights, murders, assassinations.
Then, after the Wall Street crash of 1929 with its worldwide repercussions, there was another economic crisis a mere
six years after the beginning of the recovery from the earlier
one, with a growing, and intolerable, rate of unemployment.
It grew from 1.3 million in September 1929 to 3 million a
year later, to over 6 million in 1931. With a total population
of about 65 million, this meant that one in every two families
was hit. It was not only working class families that were so
affected. There was for instance, much unemployment among
academics too. The extremist parties, the Communists and
the Nazis, made great gains and finally occupied more than
half the seats in the national parliament, where they were
now able to paralyze the democratic process. They joined, for
instance, in a strike to paralyze the transport system in Berlin.
Otherwise they could fight each other to death, and did, with
casualties on both sides, despite the general strategy of the
Communists at that time to treat the social Democrats—
whom they called “social fascists” for the purpose—as their
number one enemy and to flirt with the possibility of a Nazi
victory as a promising prelude to a communist takeover. All
this impinged, of course, on a Berlin school child—the transport strike, the posters, the polarization, the combination of
both extremes against the middle, and the weakness and
apparent helplessness of the middle.
When President Heisenburg appointed Hitler Reich
Chancellor on January 30, 1933, he was acting in accordance
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with the letter and perhaps even the spirit of the constitution.
Hitler’s party, the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ (or
“Nazis” for short, to distinguish them from the “Sozis” or
Social Democrats), was by then the strongest party in the
country, with about one-third of the vote; the Social
Democrats had only one-fifth; the communists one-sixth; the
Catholic Centre Party, together with its Bavarian affiliate,
about the same. And there were many others, but all of them
had less than 10 percent of the vote, the largest of them the
Nationalists, with 8.8 percent; Hitler became the head of a
coalition government. I still remember seeing the faces of
these gentlemen in an evening paper that carried the
announcement.
No one knew what it meant. I was somewhat scared, for
I had read Hitler’s book. I had had to do it secretly, at night
with a flashlight under the bedclothes, for my parents, like
many other respectable people, regarded it as pornographic—which indeed in a manner of speaking it was. Also
it was very long, and that was probably why very few people
read it, though once its author had become ruler of the land,
it was widely and compulsorily distributed, for instance, as a
present to newlyweds, bound like a bible. But that did not, of
course, ensure its perusal.
Before saying anything about what I had found in that
book, let me, quickly, give you an account of the rest of my
Berlin schooldays, to show how life at school changed in the
seventeen months before I left. There was much talk of
national solidarity and the Community of the People. There
were changes in personnel and in the curriculum. And there
was a dramatic rate of attrition. My own class was reduced by
more than half—probably because girls (it was a girls’ school
I went to) or their parents thought that since the new regime
had set its face against too much academic education for
women (who were not to exceed ten percent of university
enrollment), it was hardly worth struggling through more
Latin and trigonometry and the rest, up to the rather stiff
school-leaving exam, which was normally taken at [age] 18.
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The teaching personnel changed in two ways: there were
a few dismissals, of Jews—we had very few Jews at my
school; and our English teacher, who was a Jew, was at first
said not be subject to dismissal because he had not only
served in the war but had even been shot in the head. But
eventually he left all the same and the next English teacher
was less good; and that one was in due course replaced by an
even worse one, a teacher trainee. The other change among
the teachers was a change in tone and color. A very few
revealed themselves as Nazis which, they said, they had been
all along but could only now, at last, openly avow to be. (On
the whole the school had been vaguely nationalistic, but
hardly Nazi.) Others toed the new line as best they could and
exhibited varying degrees of cravenness or caution and dignity, enthusiasm or moderation or reserve. Many new things
were required: the Hitler statue at the beginning of classes,
attendance at new celebrations that proliferated and at which
you had, of course, to stand at attention (with upraised arm)
when the new national anthem was played and sung. This was
the old marching song of the Nazi movement, with text by
Horst Wessel, saying: “Raise the flag, close the ranks, we
storm-troopers march in firm and steady tread. Comrades
shot by the Reds and Reactionaries are marching on with us.”
It was the battle song of the new revolution.
So there was all that. And there were changes in such subjects as history and science. Let me take biology, for that is
where I had my brief hour of glory. I had not done well with
the dissection of tulips and the like. But I shone once biology
was converted into race biology. Not only was there Mendel’s
law, about which my father had told me before (only that its
implication and application were now rather different from
what I had gathered from him), but—and this is where the
real fun came in—we now learnt about the German races,
“Aryan,” of course, all of them.
There were six, if I remember correctly, ranging in excellence from the Nordic to the East Baltic. Nordic was best
because Nordic man had created almost all the culture there
RUHM
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33
was, and he had qualities of leadership. The Mediterranean
race was also quite good (for, after all, there had been ancient
Greeks and Romans and there were modern Italians, good
fascists, full of leadership). The Mediterranean race could
most easily be memorized as a smaller, lightweight, and
darker version of the Nordic: what they had in common were
the proportions of their skulls and faces (long, narrow skull,
long face) and the characteristic ways of standing on one leg,
with no weight on the other, one standing and one play leg,
as a literal translation of the German names for them would
have it. Such legs could be seen in Greek statues, and such
were the legs of Nordic man. Now the Falic race was next
best. It shared many of the sterling qualities of the Nordic—
high-mindedness and the rest—but could be distinguished
from it by the fact that it stood squarely on two legs. No playleg there. Also its face was a bit broader. That race lacked,
somewhat, the fire of Nordic man, or let us say the thumos,
but made up for it by solidity and staying power. The color
scheme was fairly Nordic, blonde hair, blue eyes. So was that
of the East Baltic race whose virtues were less marked than
those of the Nordic and the Falic and whose features were
less distinguished, including a broader skull and a broadish
nose. I could not quite make out the use of this race, unless it
was, perhaps, territorial, to keep the Slavs out. The Slavs were
not a German race. Then there was German race that looked,
we might have said, a bit Jewish or perhaps Armenian, but it
was neither. It was Dinaric and seemed to be much the same
as what earlier classifications had called Alpine. Indeed, this
race dwelt in the mountains. It looked sturdy enough, but not
as prepossessing as the Nordic; and its head had awkward
measurements: Dinaric man had a prominent nose and not
much back to his head. But he had a redeeming feature: he
was musical.
Now all this, of course, seemed good clean fun, and easy
to visualize and memorize. Indeed there were visual aids: pictures of well know personages to help recognition and memorization: Hindenburg for the Falic race, somebody like
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Haydn for the Dinaric, Caesar for the Mediterranean. Then
there was a picture of Martin Luther, the great German
Reformer, and I forget now what race he was said to represent. To me he looked Slavic. But that, of course, could not
be. I suppose he was declared a darker type of East Baltic or
Falic. All this was child’s play, and this child played it with
zest and success.
History was harder. You could not inwardly laugh that off
and outwardly play it as a parlor game. You had to learn, or
appear to learn, appear to make your own—to some extent,
in some way, at least— and you had to read, say, and write the
things that had been neglected or “falsified” in the Weimar
Republic of evil memory, under “the System” (“in der
Systemzeit” as the Nazis referred to it). So we were all given
a short brochure on contemporary history, the recent and
most “relevant” period of German and European and world
history. It started with the German surrender at the end of the
world war, a surrender brought about by trickery abroad and
treason at home, by President Wilson’s 14 Point peace proposal, and the stab in the back of the undefeated German
army, a piece of treachery committed by Jews, Marxists, and
Catholics—feckless folk with international ties. These traitors
then set up their system of abject surrender abroad and iniquity and immorality at home. They accepted the shameful
peace treaty of Versailles, which not only saddled Germany
with sole responsibility for the war (in Article 231, which
Germans called the “war guilt clause” or “war guilt lie”), but
also provided for the payment—virtually in perpetuity—of
crippling reparations. Germany was unilaterally disarmed
(whereas Wilson had envisaged universal disarmament) and
was first blockaded by the British—after the cessations of hostilities—to enforce submission, and then, in 1923, invaded by
the French, who marched into the Ruhr valley to seize
German coal and steel production as reparation payments
were in arrears. It was reparations that caused the economic
misery during the republic’s fourteen years of shame.
Attempts to revise the reparations schedule to make it more
RUHM
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35
tolerable were fruitless and fraudulent. The last revision provided for the spreading of payments until 1988, and the
country was dying in the attempt to do the victors’ bidding.
The nation would have to stand together and rally ‘round the
Führer—or the “People’s Chancellor,” as he was then still
called—to throw off the shackles of Versailles. The cover of
this brochure had a muscular worker on it, stripped to the
waist and bursting his chains.
We also learned about the parts of Germany that had
been taken away by the Treaty of Versailles, which dictated
peace, and about the Germans who languished under foreign
domination. We learnt that German defenselessness was further aggravated by the geographic position of the country: it
was surrounded by hostile powers. Thus a bombing plane
could take off from France and fly right across Germany and
land in Czechoslovakia, without refueling. The lesson was
brought home by air-raid exercises. They were not very realistic, but they were educative. I still remember leading my little troop of classmates to their several homes, staying close to
the houses, as instructed, to avoid exposure to imagined
falling shrapnel and flying glass. That was in the first year or
so of Hitler’s power, five or six years before his war. It was
useless, of course, as an exercise in air-raid precautions, but it
was useful for fomenting fear and a spirit of national defense.
It also showed that the Czechoslovak Republic, even if militarily it amounted to no more than an aircraft base, was the
power that enabled France—or planes based in France—to
bomb the whole of Germany. And in addition—but this point
was not given too much prominence until four years later, in
the crisis leading up to the Munich settlement that dismembered the Czechoslovak Republic—the country was a political entity in which six-and-a-half million Czechs held over 3
million Germans in subjection, as second-class citizens.
Clearly the Sudeten region had to be united with Germany.
So much for what was taught in class and done in extramural exercises under the responsibility of the school. But
there was one other thing I should mention. Schools were
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obliged to take their pupils to certain films, propaganda films
that were being shown commercially. So, obediently, our class
went to see the movie Hitlerjunge Quex, the story of a Hitler
Youth of the working class whose father was a communist and
whose mother was long-suffering and tried to cope with conditions and her husband, but in the end attempted suicide, by
gas, from misery and despair. Quex (who was a very idealized
version of an actual Hitler Youth who had been killed) first
belonged to a communist youth group, as was natural in view
of his home background. But on one occasion, one excursion,
he was so revolted by their beastly ways that he ran away
through the woods, and came upon the camp of a Nazi youth
group which instantly and deeply impressed him as his own
and the country’s salvation. (It was a sunrise scene, to make
sure we all got the point.) Here were shining faces, clean
limbs, real comradeship, purpose, discipline, dedication, and
hope. So he joined the Hitler Youth and was active, devotedly
active in the distribution of leaflets and all that. He continued, of course, to live with his parents in the working class
district of Berlin. And one day, at dawn, the communists took
their revenge, and his particular personal enemy, a brute of a
man, pursued him through the deserted streets—also through
the maze of an amusement park, a very effective, macabre,
cinematic touch that, and long before The Third Man—and
finally caught up with him and knifed him. But Quex died for
the cause, and when his friends found him, on the point of
death, and propped him up, he raised his right arm in salute
to the German future and the camera swung up to the clouds
and the sound track into the marching song of Hitler Youth,
with the lines, “The flag leads us into eternity, the flag is more
than death.”
The trouble was twofold: that the film was most effective
and affecting (however corny it may sound as I now tell it)
and it was made with terrific competence and with the participation of some very good actors; and, secondly, that the
school was under an obligation not only to take us to see it,
but also to discuss it with us. So we had our class discussion.
RUHM
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37
I do not remember much about it except for the fact that I
decided to play the part of aesthetic and dramatic critic, arguing that, powerful though the movie was, it could have been
even better if it had been less black and white (metaphorically
speaking), if it had had more nuances, more human diversity
and verisimilitude. Why did I take that line? In order not to
embarrass or endanger our teacher who was leading the discussion, who, I had reason to believe, was very unhappy
about the Nazis, and who was a widow with two children for
whom she had to provide.
Then there was a film about Joan of Arc, replete with horrors of the Hundred Years’ War. It exposed the sadism of the
British and the brutality of the Catholic clergy. On that occasion I objected to the screening of atrocities; and that was
about as far as one could go and get away with it.
On the Saturday when it was announced that the country
had left the League of Nations in protest against the continuing discrimination of Germany in the disarmament negotiations, our class of fifteen-year-old girls went off to learn how
the peasantry lived, to make us a proper part of the People’s
Community. We were to spend two days roughing it with a
farmer in Brandenburg. The regime wanted us Berliners to
experience the hard life of the rural part of the population.
We took a train to the nearest station, then walked the rest of
the way to the rather grey and bleak village, to be received by
a distinctly unfriendly farmer. We sang to cheer our progress
on the country road. Suddenly one of the girls started singing
that song about Jewish blood spurting from the knife in a better future. About two other girls joined in. I could hardly
believe my ears.
The farmer was surly. I spent a restless night with the others, who seemed undisturbed, in the hay in his barn. What
with that song and the severing of the connection with the
League—and everything else that had happened and was happening—I began to think it might be better to be elsewhere.
But my parents and my little sister were in Berlin, our home,
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
with no prospect of getting out. I could see no way of leaving
the country and leaving them.
A way did offer itself some months later. The Quakers
were starting an international boarding school in Holland
and announced a summer course there. After another disturbing weekend at the end of June 1934, which saw the
bloody liquidation of the rebellious S.A. leaders and other
enemies and suspects, and when rumors were flying about
that men were being shot in the nearby cadet school at
Lichterfelde, a little group of children assembled on a platform of the Zoo Station in Berlin, to take the train to
Holland. I had just turned sixteen and may have been the oldest.
The summer school was a wild success. A bigger group of
children came from Hamburg, and many stayed on or came
back later. They were mostly Jewish or part Jewish. I was
overcome by the feeling of freedom and by meeting
grownups you could really talk to freely. And they were
devoted to the task in hand, to making us more comfortable
and teaching us English. The English lessons were so good
that, having been bottom of my class in Berlin—English was
our third foreign language after French and Latin, and my
classmates had all had some kind of head start—I found that
I had overtaken not only them, but also the teacher trainee in
charge of them when I returned for a visit.
My mother had insisted on my coming back for a secretarial course. She did not think it wise to emigrate without a
marketable skill. Then, in January 1935, my parents allowed
me to go back to Holland. The months until the beginning of
the academic year in October were bridged at the school in
Holland by my being maid of all work, baby-sitting and tutoring, even taking a class in music when the music master was
ill. Before that I spent Christmas with the family in Berlin and
visited my grandmother in Frankfurt. That was the last time
I saw her. In December four of us in the top class passed the
English university entrance exam. Two, oddly enough, went
back to Germany for good—one of them the son of the
RUHM
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39
Friends’ Yearly Meeting, who could easily have stayed
abroad. But two went back to England. I was one of them.
It was spring 1936. They took me off the train after it had
crossed the border from Germany. They asked me for my religion, for while they wanted to protect the Dutch unemployed
from the competition of foreigners, they also wanted to protect the virtue of young women. I was seventeen. They
accused me of coming to work in Holland. I denied it, though
they were right. They had no proof; but I had the burden of
proof. The fact was that I had in the previous December
passed the examination given by Oxford for entrance to
British universities. Being penniless and not wanting to be a
burden on the American uncle who had paid my school fees
for the year it had taken me to prepare for that exam at the
International Quaker School in Holland, I had gladly
accepted the school’s invitation to stay on as unpaid general
dog’s body until it was time to go to England to study, the following October. So I was earning my keep as matron’s assistant, occasional coach or tutor, baby-sitter, and so on. But
these services, however unpaid and unperformable by natives,
were work prohibited by law or regulations of the land that
was, like most European countries, struggling with an economic crisis at the very time when the Hitler regime created
large numbers of refugees or would-be refugees, trying to
keep such aliens out.
To admit my status as a worker, albeit unpaid, would have
meant being sent back to the fatherland, with the additional
black mark of having tried to flee it. So I denied it. The denial
was an automatic reflex. Unfortunately, my response to the
question about my religion was equally automatic. I said
“Protestant,” having been baptized at birth according to the
Zwinglian rite and having attended Protestant religious
instruction at my German schools, with even a spell of
Lutheran Sunday school thrown in for good measure. It was
a mistake. I did have the presence of mind and necessary minutes and pennies to send a cheery postcard about my “good
trip” to my Jewish grandmother in Frankfurt from the Dutch
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
side. I wanted to reassure; she had a heart ailment, of which
she died before the year was out.
Now I was put on the next train back to Emmerich,
where I was received, not to say taken in to custody, by the
Evangelische Bahnhofsmission. (Readers of Günter Grass may
remember his remarks about that institution in his Dog
Years.) It felt like a half-way house on the way to more serious, more purely political confinement. They were stern and
forbidding and had nothing evangelical about them. There
was even a touch of Nazism. As I was sitting, somewhat disconsolately, in a dark reception room, a boy of about eight
came in and sang one of those Nazi songs—I don’t know
why; perhaps it was just youthful exuberance. It grated
enough to make me decide to accept no food from this establishment or run the risk of having to sit at the table with these
professional Protestants. My grandmother had given me
enough provender for the day.
What I did not have was money, beyond the ten Marks
one was allowed to take out of the country. Yet, when the
woman in charge of this Internal Mission house allowed me
to go for a short walk in town, I could not resist buying a tuning fork at the window of a small music shop. I went in and
bought it. My instrument at the time was the violin, which I
played as badly as I had played the piano and would later play
the oboe. I may have justified the rash purchase to myself as
useful: a violin has to be tuned and there isn’t always a piano
or other instrument present to give the pitch. It was a modest
tuning fork and cheap; but it depleted my minimal resources.
I probably realized this, yet probably felt, too, that there was
not only practical but symbolic value in a gadget that gave
you the true pitch.
Before I went for the walk in the strange town I had telephoned my school and told my friends there what had
befallen me. They said they would certify me as a bona fide
pupil—I was taking lessons with the music master—and get
the local police to put an official endorsement on the document that would impress the Dutch border officials. The doc-
RUHM
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41
ument duly arrived by Express mail the next day, but also a
message that the police station had closed by the time my
friends got there and that they had made their statement
sound as persuasive as possible without the police backup.
They advised me not to try the same border crossing again,
from Emmerich to Zevenaar, where I was now known, but to
take another, from Cleve to Nijmegen, where I wasn’t.
This meant crossing the Rhine. I boarded the ferry, paid
my last Pfennige to the nice conductor, and asked him how
far from the landing place on the other side the railway was.
It was a fair step, especially with the luggage. He found me a
free ride to the station. This turned out to be a local butcher,
who gave me the seat beside him in his van, with the carcasses
behind us. He wasn’t an anti-Nazi. He sounded like a Nazi or
at least a loyal citizen of the Third Reich. In the absence of
money I gave him my last German postage stamps and signed
a document acknowledging my debt to him for the additional
small amount it cost to connect my old rail ticked with the
new stretch from Cleve to Nijmegen.
So off I went, crossed the frontier without further incident, and reached the school safely. The tuning fork came in
handy when we played Haydn quartets. I still have it. Tuning
forks don’t take up much space.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
43
A Visit To Santayana
Steve Benedict
Three years after graduating from St. John’s, I spent some
time in Europe traveling and studying languages and music.
In the summer of 1950, while in Rome, I persuaded a friend,
Tilghman B. Koons, to accompany me up the steep incline of
the Via San Stefano Rotondo to the Convent of the Blue
Nuns, where I knew George Santayana was living out his final
years. I had read a magazine piece a year or so earlier by Gore
Vidal reporting on an unannounced visit he had paid
Santayana two years earlier, and I brashly decided to see if
we, too, could pay our respects. Several hours after the visit,
which turned out to be more than brief, I made detailed
notes, which languished in my files for nearly 52 years. Last
July, I finally sat down to reconstruct the visit. While many of
Santayana’s philosophical observations doubtless appear in
his writings and interviews in more extended and coherent
form, I thought St. John’s readers might enjoy these late-inthe day fragments that seemed to tumble out of him with little prompting. Not exactly a conversation, it was more like
listening in to a monologue of memories and observations, in
no particular sequence, that happened to surface at the
moment. Readers more familiar with Santayana’s work than
I will doubtless be able to flesh out gaps and identify certain
allusions that remain obscure in my transcription of this longago encounter.
***
Upon arriving at the Convent on the afternoon of September
19, 1950, we were received by a nun who told us that
Steve Benedict is a 1947 graduate of St. John’s College. He retired in 2000
and is living in Spencertown, New York. His career was spent in government,
philanthropy, and education, with a primary emphasis on arts funding and
administration.
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Santayana had not been well for some time and was seeing
very few visitors. Even so, she agreed to tell him that two
American students hoped to be able to greet him. She
returned in a few minutes and told us Mr. Santayana would
see us briefly, but cautioned us not to tax his energy. She led
us into the Convent and down a long hallway on the ground
floor. Santayana was already standing at the end of the corridor in a long robe, which only partially covered his striped
pajamas. He greeted us with a handshake, looked at us with
large glistening eyes I have never forgotten, and led us into
his apartment. It was a modest space, sparely furnished, with
a cot-like bed partially screened off. He issued a firm instruction to sit down, motioning to two straight-backed chairs
–“you here, you there.” With no introductory chit-chat or
questions about who we were, he began speaking. He told us
he had recently been reading Terence for the first time and
found him very amusing and much indebted to his predecessors. He remarked that he had re-read Virgil and that
Lucretius, along with Virgil, had been important for him. He
spoke of them quite casually, as though they were contemporaries. In fact, he brought this quality of immediacy to all of
the philosophers he mentioned.
Santayana spoke of writing an article for an English book
entitled Why I Believe in What I Believe. He hadn’t intended
to contribute to it, but an Englishman pestered him with
three letters and had agreed to hold off publication for a year
if necessary in order to include his contribution. That was
very flattering, he commented. “After all,” he added, “I might
be dead in a year.” Preoccupation with the article was probably a good part of the explanation for the torrent of remarks
and opinions that followed.
Mr. Santayana had been reading a book by an
Englishman, O.F. Clarke, entitled Introduction to Berdyaev,
and added that he did not agree with Berdyaev: “Everything
is creative. There is no room [in Berdyaev] for imagination,
for reason, for spirit.” He said the article he was writing discusses what scientists call “energy,” using the figure of wind,
BENEDICT
45
which seemed better to him than other terms and images for
matter. “Wind is invisible. It can’t be touched. It ‘acts,’ causes
things to happen.” He mentioned that he has often used a
quotation on wind from Genesis: “‘The spirit of God moved
across the waters.’ Or, as the Cockney would say, ‘a devil of
a wind’–but I won’t use that in the article.”
Santayana insisted that his ideas about matter had not
changed. His only objection to his earlier books was that he
wished he had written them differently and waited until later
to write The Life of Reason. Nonetheless he thought he had
remained logically consistent. He now felt he had nothing
more to say–he had finished his work and would not write
any more books, only articles.
We asked Mr. Santayana how America looked to him
after 40 years. He replied, “I don’t want to go back. There is
too much going on there and I am kept busy enough here.
No, I don’t want to go back.” Friends had sent him Time and
Life magazines. He was amused by the advertisements–“slick,
well-groomed people coming out of their houses, buying new
cars.” But he enjoyed the pictures. This led him to reminisce
about Harvard, where he had studied for four years and then
taught: “I am completely a Harvard man,” he said. “I have
been accused of making too many rich friends. But I didn’t
seek them. They just happened to be rich.” He told us that his
best friends had big houses in the country and were able to
invite people for weekends. His most intimate friend married
a rich Washington widow. He went to dinner with them once
and found his friend at the head of the table, his friend’s
mother-in-law at the other end, his wife buried at the side
between two daughters. He was asked to stay on at the house
but declined after this experience.
“I never intended to go into philosophy and teaching. It
was all an accident,” he went on. This led him to muse on the
accidents of his life: If he had gone to England, he would
have done much more Plato, if to Germany, more German
philosophy. With a chuckle, he added that he did not have
much kinship with Goethe.
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Mr. Santayana then remarked that had just re-read T.S.
Eliot’s The Cocktail Party and didn’t understand why it is successful in performance. He thought the conversion of the girl
unconvincing. The play was too much of a tract. He thought
“Four Quartets” and the essays were much better, in his opinion. He recalled Eliot as a student of his at Harvard in his
course, “Three Philosophical Poets.” Eliot wrote an essay for
him, he said, and it was “very good–that’s an understatement.”
Then came an abrupt switch. “It is interesting that the
two most intelligent men in the history of the Western mind,
Plato and Leibniz–were dishonest. If you abstract Plato from
his mise-en-scène, which is so attractive, you don’t know
what he is saying. Plato has never been a favorite of mine, but
of course I owe him something. The Symposium, for instance,
I find very attractive. But I owe more to Aristotle and
Lucretius and others.”
Leibniz, he elaborated, tried to manipulate ideas as well
as people. He tried to bring the church together–“very
difficult”–and to make peace between states, and he had a
certain amount of success. The dishonesty revolves around
his assertions on matter (calculus, by implication, is dishonest) and the rearrangement of the elements (energy, mind,
matter, potentiality, etc.) into forms by imposing a new idea
from without. The Leibnizian calculus asserts that an infinite
number of points–which are only positions–in a line reduces
and expands them as if they were material. Leibniz tried to
manipulate people and institutions in the same way; however,
Santayana concluded, he had the right idea about spirit as
developing action, as did Hegel. The action or energy is not
internal, but occurs with respect to its history and experience–its relations with other forms and ideas. Hegel, he said,
knew this clearly.
Mr. Santayana said he had been praised by the English
critic, Collingwood, an Hegelian, for having held up the idea
as a crystal, examining all of its faces. In believing that the
spirit does not change but only moves on from experience to
BENEDICT
47
experience, Santayana concluded that the highest theoretical
and practical ideal is therefore passivity–the reception and
assimilation of experience, the “digesting” of action. I
brought up Gandhi and without hesitation Santayana said
that Western Buddhism and some of the Upanishads especially are very much akin to his beliefs. He added that he did
not mean to include Oriental Buddhism, which is different: “I
believe in the existence of an absolute truth,” not that man
can achieve it necessarily, but that human opinion strives
toward absolute truth. Others, he said, put it in different
terms: “God is truth,” or “The truth is everywhere.” I had
been smitten by Plotinus in my sophomore year at St. John’s
and was emboldened to ask if this wasn’t a form of pantheism akin to that of Plotinus. He replied, “I should think not.
All creation has a direct causal relation with respect to God
or the truth, but creation is different in Plotinus.” This led
him to criticize a French translation of Plotinus, which he
called “verbally accurate,” but added that the translator did
not really understand ideas. “He compares important passages with the Greek, but never learned Greek properly,
despite three years at Boston Latin School.”
No more books after this, Santayana said. As for his autobiography, he hoped it could be published after his death in
one volume. Marginal notes were impossible to include during the wartime printing shortage, but he hoped they could
be restored, as in his earlier books. He commented that he’d
had to dispose of many of his books because of space. He said
the room next door is crammed with books, but the nuns also
use it. “Now I never read Shakespeare. The room was always
full of nuns. And now the new Mother General is doing the
whole place over. Anyway, I probably only have a year or two
more to live.”
As he was saying this, a nun glowered at us in the doorway. We rose to depart, shook hands and asked if we could
come see him next time we were in Rome. Looking straight
at us with those penetrating eyes, he said, “Yes, please do.”
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He paused for a moment and added, “Come and see....” and
his voice trailed off.
****
George Santayana died at the Convent two years later, on
September 26, 1952, at the age of 89.
49
Kant’s Philosophical Use of
Mathematics: Negative
Magnitudes
Eva Brann
I hope that this consideration of a peculiar little work of great
interest will appeal to readers who want a taste of Kant’s
early work as well as to those who like to ruminate on the
meaning of the simplest mathematical notions. My text is an
essay called “An Attempt to Introduce the Concept of
Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy (Weltweisheit).” Its
date is 1763.
Its appeal to me has these three aspects: First there is the
tentative mode expressed in the title; here we hear Kant’s
pre-critical voice—not yet the magisterially conclusive notes
of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) but a tone at once
spiritedly daring and gropingly uncertain. A second and more
specific aspect is the inchoate appearance of major elements
of the first Critique; not only can we see its elements come
into being, but we can watch at their incipiency topics that
Kant will return to all his life. The third appealing aspect of
the essay is its pedagogic suggestiveness; for a teacher seeking
to help students reflect on mathematical formalisms, it is a
useful source.
The piece on negative magnitudes has been eclipsed by its
much longer contemporary, “The Only Possible Basis of
Proof for a Demonstration of God’s Existence (Dasein),”
dated 1763. This essay was subjected to an extensive and
deep analysis by Heidegger in his lecture course of 1927 (The
Problems of Phenomenology, translated and edited by Albert
Hofstadter, Indiana University Press, 1982, ¶8); his elucidation of Kant’s use of the term “reality” is particularly relevant
to the essay on negative magnitudes.
Eva Brann is a tutor and former dean at St. John’s College, Annapolis.
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What evidently drew Heidegger’s attention to this particular essay, however, was its brisk definition of Dasein—his
central word—as “absolute position.” When the verb “is” is
used not as a copula to relate a subject to its predicate as in
“God is omnipotent” but is asserted abruptly, absolutely, as in
“God is” or “God exists,” it signifies, Kant claims, a mere
positing of an object. By this, in Heidegger’s interpretation,
Kant means that the object is affirmed by a knowing subject
as available to perception. (I observe, incidentally, that in
order to express the character of existence as non-attributive
absolute position more adequately, Kant proposes language
that anticipates the existential quantifier of propositional
logic: We should say not “A narwhal is an animal” but “There
exists an animal, the narwhal, which has unicorn-attributes.”)
In other words, existence is not a predicate and adds no
objective attribute to God’s essence. Since it is the crux of
what Kant first called the “ontological argument” (whose best
known proponent is Anselm), that existence is a necessary
attribute of God’s essence, Kant’s understanding of existence
as a non-predicate seems to be a rejection of that proof.
Kant’s own demonstration calls on the concept of a “realground” (Realgrund), a concept that emerges in the essay on
negative magnitudes, to be discussed below. This concept in
turn involves the postulate that essence is prior to existence
and actuality to possibility. Since Heidegger’s thinking is
dominated by the reverse claim, he is a severe if respectful
critic of Kant’s understanding. He regards Kant’s exposition
of existence as a half-way house, situated between the notion
of existence as one predicate among others and his,
Heidegger’s, own understanding of Dasein as “extantness,”
i.e., “being-at-hand,” with respect to things and “being in the
world” with respect to human beings.
There is yet another contemporary essay that has bearing
on the essay about negative magnitudes, the “Enquiry
Concerning the Evidence of the Principles of Natural
Theology and Morality, in Answer to a Question Posed by the
Royal Academy of the Sciences at Berlin for 1763.” The aim
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51
of this essay (which did not win the prize) was to establish
what evidence and certainty natural theology is capable of; it
is thus a discourse on method. It begins with an investigation
of the difference between mathematics and metaphysics (a
difference that plays a major role especially in Kant’s last
work, the Opus Postumum).
Thus both pieces, the one on God’s existence and the
other on theological certainty, illuminate the essay on negative magnitudes, the former through its concept of an ultimate reality and the latter through its restrictions on the use
of mathematics in first philosophy. I will draw on them in my
exploration.
*****
Anyone who has stepped out for a moment from the routine familiarity of operations with signed numbers will have
wondered just how, say, 5, +5, |5| and -5 differ from each
other, and, furthermore, whether +5 and -5 are operations
on or qualifications of the number 5. Although his essay concerns numerable magnitudes, especially those discovered in
nature, questions of that sort seem to have been going
through Kant’s mind, as he considered the illuminations that
the actual quantification of experience might offer to philosophy.
In the essay on natural theology Kant sets out four definitive reasons why the mathematical method is inapplicable to
philosophy and is not the way to certainty in metaphysics (¶14):
1. Mathematical definitions are “synthetic,” in the sense
that the mathematician does not analyze a given concept, but
first synthesizes or constructs it, i.e., puts it together at will.
(In the first Critique synthesis will have acquired a deeper
meaning; it will no longer mean arbitrary construction but an
act of the understanding expressing in the imagination the
formative givens of the intuition.) In philosophy or, as Kant
says interchangeably, Weltweisheit, “world-wisdom” (as distinguished from the scholastic philosophy of mere, unapplied
concepts, see Logic, Intro. 3), on the other hand, definitions
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are analytic, in the sense that concepts are given to, not made
by, the philosopher, and he then endeavors to analyze them
into their implicit elements. (In the Critique a way will be
found for the philosopher too to form pure synthetic judgments.)
2. Mathematics is always concrete, in that the arithmetician symbolizes his numbers and operations perceptibly, and
the geometer visibly draws his figures. (In the Critique these
inscriptions will be within the field of the imaginative intuition.) Philosophers, on the other hand, use words exclusively, and these signify, in Kant’s understanding, abstractly,
non-pictorially. (In the Critique this rift between word and
picture is closed.)
3. The mathematician tries to employ a minimum of
unproved propositions (i.e., axioms and postulates), while
the philosopher makes indefinitely many assumptions, as
needed. (In the Critique the principles of experience will be
systematically restricted.)
4. The objects of mathematics are easy and simple (!),
those of philosophy difficult and involved.
In the Preface of “The Attempt to Introduce the Concept
of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy” Kant accordingly
eschews the introduction of mathematical method into philosophy, but censures the neglect of the application of mathematical matter to the objects of philosophy. The really useful mathematical doctrines are, however, only those that are
applicable to natural science. (This restriction prefigures the
use of mathematics in the Critique, where its role is the constitution and understanding of the system of nature, i.e., of
matter in quantitative and qualitative change.) As a preliminary example, Kant gives the continuity of space, which is, if
inexplicitly, postulated in the Euclidean geometry he assumes.
The concept of continuity will give insight, he thinks (but
explains no further), into the ultimate ground of the possibility of space. (The claim does prefigure the arguments for the
establishment of a spatial intuition in the Critique.) The main
example in this piece will, of course, be the concept of nega-
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53
tive magnitudes, which Kant now proceeds to clarify and
apply. I shall follow his arguments through the three sections
of the essay.
First Section
There are two types of opposition: logical, through contradiction and real, without contradiction. If contradictories are
logically connected, the result is a “negative nothing, an
unthinkable” (nihil negativum irrepresentabile; now as later
in the Critique, representabile = cogitabile, i.e., to think is to
represent in the cognitive faculty). Thus a body in motion is
a “something” (which is in the Critique the highest objective
concept, i.e., that of an object in general); so is a body at rest.
But a body at the same time in motion and at rest is an
unthinkable nothing. It is not so much a non-object incapable
of being as a less-than-nothing incapable of being thought.
Real-opposition (Realentgegensetzung), on the other
hand, involves no contradiction and thus no unthinkability.
For this opposition does not cancel the being of the object
thus qualified; it remains a something and thinkable (cogitabile). Suppose a body impelled in one direction and also
driven by a counterforce in the other. The resulting motion
may be none = 0, but the body so affected is not a no-thing.
Kant calls this result nihil privativum representabile, where
privativum has a dynamic sense, as of an achieved condition.
This nothing is to be termed zero = 0. (The distinction of
“logical” and “real” underlies the Critical difference between
merely analytic and synthetic, i.e., ampliative, judgments.)
Kant also refers to real-opposition as real-repugnance
(Realrepugnanz) because two precisely antagonistic predicates
of an object cancel each other, though they do not annihilate
the object they qualify. Moreover, it is somewhat arbitrary (or
rather, determined by extraneous human interests) which
pole is called negative. For example, ”dark” may seem to us
intrinsically negative, but it is cancelled by its own negation
“not-dark” (which might, of course, actually be light). Thus
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one may say that in real-repugnance both opposing predicates
are affirmative.
Kant gives, among others, the following example.
Suppose a person owes 100 dollars and is, at the same time,
owed this sum. This debtor-lender is worth 0 dollars, since
the two conditions cancel each other, but this fact does not
cancel him, the bearer of these modifications.
Kant then offers an example (slightly adjusted by me) that
expands the concept of real-opposition. Suppose a vessel
going from Portugal to Brazil is carried due west by an east
wind with an impelling force that would cause it to run 12
miles on a certain day, and is also subject to a countervailing
current retarding it by 5 miles; the boat’s total progress is
seven miles a day. Here the result is not = 0. It is clear that
Kant regards real-opposition as taking place along a scaled
spectrum of quantifiable qualities at whose center there might
be (though there is not always) a neutral fulcrum, 0.
If there is an “origin,” then on one side there are the positive quantities, on the other those that can be regarded either
as the relative negatives of the former, or as opposed positives
in their own right. Thus the opening question, what is really
meant by +5, -5 and |5|, might be answered by Kant like
this: The plus or minus sign is neither an implicit operation
nor a qualification of the number as itself inherently positive
or negative, for the number is, like its “absolute” expression
|5|, always positive. The plus and minus signs signify rather
the relation of numbers to each other: -5 is the negative of
+5; it is negative only in relation to a positive five. To be
sure, since Kant is not speaking of bare numbers but of magnitudes symbolizing quantified properties such as are representable along one dimension, magnitudes in real-opposition,
the application to pure numbers is conjectural.
Objects in real-opposition have, of course, many negations besides those directly opposing a positive: a ship sailing
westward is also not sailing southward, but its course is in
real-opposition only to the eastern direction. Moreover, there
are cases, say of lack of motion, which are not the result of
BRANN
55
real opposing forces but of a total absence of impelling force.
Negation that is the result of real-opposition Kant calls privatio, that which has no positive ground is called defectus or
absentia. His example of an absent or null result is what we
would call potential energy (not to be confused with “potential-opposition,” see below): “Thus the thunder that art discovered for the sake of destruction lies stored up for a future
war in the threatening silence of an arsenal of a prince, until,
when a treacherous tinder touches it, it blows up like lightning and devastates everything around it.” Aside from Kant’s
pacifistic poetry, this example shows that Kant is considering
only the magnitudes of actualized forces.
It is pretty clear that what Kant is struggling to do is to
present a conceptual underpinning for what we call directed
magnitudes as they occur in the world, including signed numbers insofar as they represent natural qualities, whose plus or
minus tells us whether we are to move respectively to the
right or the left along the line-spectrum (conceived as a
straight line, where left is negative by convention). Not that
Kant is thinking of our mathematical number line—he does
not even mention an origin (=0), and his opposition-spectra
are evidently not necessarily infinite in either direction. While
he does insist on the relative directionality of negative numbers, insofar as they countermand their positives, he also reiterates that the negatively directed magnitudes are not negative numbers insofar as these are regarded as being less
than 0.
For the use of directed magnitudes in philosophy it will in
fact be essential that the opposed quantities are indeed inherently positive, as will be shown in Section Three. Hence a
debt can be called negative capital, falling negative rising, and
so on, where it is our perspective that gives a negative emotional tint to one of the terms. Kant sums his view up in a
basic law and its converse: 1. Real-repugnance takes place
between two positives, power against power, which cannot be
contradictories but must be of the same kind (while the complement class in a contradiction, e.g., “non-dark objects,” is
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not necessarily of the “same kind” as “dark objects”; they
might be invisible objects). 2. Where a positive opposes its
proper positive, a real cancellation will occur.
Furthermore certain rules of operation follow. For example, if the opposites are quantitatively equal, their sum will =
0, or A – A = 0, which shows, Kant explains, that both A’s are
positive (since A = A). Also A + 0 = A and A – 0 = A, since
no oppositions are involved. But 0 – A is philosophically
impossible since positives cannot be subtracted from nothing:
There are no inherently negative qualities and so, as was said,
no directed magnitudes inherently less than 0 (!). This oddsounding but unavoidable consequence will have important
metaphysical implications.
Real-repugnance, strange though its label be, has an
Aristotelian antecedent. It is, I want to argue, a dynamic version of the logical opposition Aristotle calls contrariety
(Metaphysics 10.4). Kant himself says as much in his
Anthropology of 1798; he there contrasts contradiction or
logical opposition (Gegenteil) with contrariety or real-opposition (Widerspiel, ¶60).
As a formal logical opposition contrariety occurs in the
Square of Opposition, which is a tabulation of the
Aristotelian doctrine on the subject: If the basic proposition
is “Every S is P its contradictory is “Some S is not P” and its
,”
contrary is “No S is P Contradictories cannot both be true
.”
nor can they both be false, but contraries, though they cannot
both be true, can both be false; for if not every S be P yet
,
might it be false that no S is P Contrary propositions bear a
.
certain formal relation to contrary terms, for these cannot
both at once belong to an object but they might both fail to
belong to it. Thus an object could not be at once pitch black
and pure white, but it need not be either, which is untrue of
contradictories, such as black and not-black.
The above paragraph is really a digression to show that it
is not contrary propositions but contrary terms denoting
qualities that are related to Kant’s real-opposition. Contraries
are qualities that are not simply in abrupt polar opposition
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(though their extremes delimit a maximum difference) but
are connected through a spectrum of gradations. Aristotle
makes privation a particular case of contrariety, and for Kant
negation, interpreted as privatio, in German Beraubung,
meaning “deprivation,” introduces into some of the ranges of
opposition a kind of null point or zero through which the
quality goes by degrees into a negative or oppositional mode.
(As was noted, not all the spectra have such a center; for
example when bodies are brought to rest = 0 by countervailing forces this 0 is not an origin in the spectrum of forces but
is a net effect in the bodies’ position, measured in spatial
extension rather than as qualitative intensity.) Some of Kant’s
examples will be given below.
What turns contrariety into real-repugnance is the
dynamic view Kant takes of this opposition: It means not just
being supinely, matter-of-factly opposed; it means being
antagonistically, aggressively opposed. Moreover, this striving
in many different dimensions of quality is quantifiable in
degrees of intensity, as Kant’s examples will show.
Second Section
Kant now calls for examples from 1. physics, 2. psychology,
3. morality.
1. In physics his prime example is impenetrability, which
is a positive force, a true repulsion that might thus also be
called “negative attraction.” For attraction is a cause, contrarily directed, by which a body compels others to push into
its own space.
2. From psychology (Seelenlehre) come Kant’s most pungent examples of real-opposition. He raises the question
whether aversion could be called “negative pleasure.” The
fact that in German aversion, Unlust, looks like a direct contradictory of pleasure, Lust, gives him pause, but he observes
that in “real-understanding” (Realverstand), meaning in
actual psychic perception, aversion is not just a negation of
desire or even its diminution, but a real-repugnance, a positive perception. Then, to illustrate, comes an almost comical
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quantification: A Spartan mother hears of her son’s heroism;
a high degree of pleasure ensues, say of 4 degrees. Then
comes the news of his death. If the resulting Unlust were a
mere negation, a mere negation of the Lust, it would equal 0.
But 4 + 0 = 4, as if the death made no difference to her
delight. Kant concedes however (some notion of a mother’s
feeling!) that the positive Unlust of his death, the real-repugnance, will diminish the mother’s Lust at her son’s bravery by
one degree; it will therefore = 3.
In the same vein, disgust is negative desire, hate negative
love, ugliness negative beauty, error negative truth, and so on.
Kant warns against regarding this terminology as mere word
mongering: It is a philosophical pitfall to regard the evils of
positive privation as mere defects. Thus Kant is denying,
surely quite incidentally, the theological doctrine (found in
Plotinus, Augustine, Thomas) of evil as privation of good (privatio boni), for in Kant’s view in this essay evil, though a relative negation, is yet a positive force.
3. Kant naturally regards his concept of real-opposition as
having important uses in philosophy insofar as it is “practical
prudence” (Weltweisheit), that is, applied morality. Nonvirtue (Untugend) is, in human beings, not a mere denial of
virtue (Tugend), but a positively negative virtue, vice. This is
the case because humans, unlike animals that are morally
unendowed, have an “inner moral feeling” that drives them
to good actions. For instance they harbor a law of neighborly
love. To do bad deeds, human beings have to overcome this
natural inclination to good. (A quarter century later, in the
second Critique, the Critique of Practical Reason, 1788, Kant
will, on the contrary, see the test of true morality in the overcoming of natural inclinations.)
Thus certain people must make a noticeable effort to
engage even in sins of omission (such as neglecting to offer
neighborly help), which differ from sins of commission (hurting one’s neighbor) only in degree; hence the slide from the
one to the other is all too smooth, though the beginning is
effortful.
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Kant apologizes for what may seem to enlightened readers the prolixity of his exposition. He is writing for a
“indocile breed of judges, which, because they spend their
lives with a single book, understand nothing but what is contained therein.” The book is, I imagine, the Bible.
In an appended Remark, Kant forestalls the notion that
the world conceived in such a dynamic balance is capable neither of augmentation nor perfection. He points out (1) that
in potential oppositions (to be explained below) though the
total quantity of effect may = 0, yet there may be an increase
in apparent change, as when bodies widen the distance
between them; (2) that it is the very antagonism of natural
forces that keeps the world in its perfectly regular courses;
and (3) that though desire and aversion do balance each other
considered as positive quantities oppositely signed, who
would claim that aversion is to be called a perfection?
Moreover, though the net quantity of moral action in two
people may be the same, yet the quality of the one who acted
from the better intention is to be more greatly valued. Kant
adds that these calculi do not apply to the godhead, which is
blessed not through an external good but through itself.
Third Section
Kant introduces this section, which contains his startling
application of the concept of real-opposition to metaphysics,
by insisting once more that it is a mere attempt, very imperfect though promising: It is better to put before the public
uncertain essays than dogmatically decked-out pretenses of
profundity. This section is accordingly called “Containing
Some Reflections Which Can Be Preparatory for the
Application of the Concept Here Thought Out to the Objects
of Philosophy.” I dwell on this language because it is not a
tone familiar to those of us who have spent time with the
three Critiques.
1. Everyone easily understands how it is that something is
not—the positive ground for its being is absent; there is no
reason for it to be. But how does something cease to be? The
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question arises because we must understand every passingaway as a negative becoming. As such it requires a real or positive ground.
In the first two sections Kant had spoken of real-opposition or real-repugnance, by which were meant normally
apprehensible contrarieties. Now, in the third section, he
introduces real-grounds (Realgründe). As far as I can make
out from the examples, real-grounds are natural, including
psychic, causes: forces, powers, and acts exercised by material
or psychic agents. “Real” here is used not as in real-opposition, which is opposed to logical contradiction, but it seems
to mean “affecting perceptible existence.” Real-grounds seem
to be a first-level, underlying causal reality, apprehended
through its effects. Thus Kant uses “reality”—and, as we shall
see, “existence,” “being” (Wesen), as well as “actuality”
(Wirklichkeit)—quite loosely in these exploratory essays;
Heidegger shows that Kant’s later systematic meaning of reality is the “whatness” of a thing, all its possible predicates, its
essence, while existence is perceptibility.
Kant’s examples are mainly from the soul. It costs real
effort to refrain from laughing, to dissipate grief, even to
abstract from a manifold representation for the sake of clarity; thus abstraction is negative attention. Even the apparently
random succession of thoughts has real grounds, which are
“hidden in the depths of the mind (Geist),” i.e., in what we
call the subconscious. Whether the change is in the condition
of matter and thus through external causes, or of the mind
and thus through inner causes, the necessity for a causal realopposition remains the same.
Kant is focusing here, it seems to me, on a partial converse to, and a kind of complement of, a question, evidently
not asked by the ancients, which is to become a modern preoccupation: “Why does something exist rather than nothing?” It was first raised as a metaphysical problem with a theological answer by Leibniz (The Principles of Nature and
Grace, Founded on Reason, 1714), and was repeatedly taken
up by Heidegger (especially in the end of What is
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61
Metaphysics, 1949), who treated it as “the basic question of
metaphysics,” though to be resolved without recourse to theology.
Leibniz asks for a reason, sufficient and ultimate, to
account for the existence of a universe of things in progress
and finds it in God. Kant, on the other hand, asks for an adequate reason why a present condition in the world should go
out of existence and finds real-opposition as the cause. It is,
however, an unexplained cause, which, Kant says at the end
of the essay, he has been and will be thinking about and will
in the future write about. This appears to be a harbinger of
Critical works not to appear for almost two decades.
Meanwhile the metaphysical consequences are exceedingly
strange: The sum total of all real grounds equals zero, and
“the whole of the world is in itself Nothing.” More of this
below.
2. Kant says that the theses to be here proposed seem to
him “of the most extreme importance.” First, however, he
distinguishes real-opposition, or as he now calls it, “actual”
opposition, from “possible” or “potential” opposition. The
latter type of opposites are also each other’s negatives, real to
be sure, but not, as it happens, in conflict. Thus two forces,
each other’s opposites, may be driving two different bodies in
opposite directions: They have the potential to cancel each
other’s motion but do not actually do so in the given situation. So also one person’s desire may be the other’s aversion,
yet their ability to stymie each other is only a possibility.
Kant then offers the following first general thesis:
In all natural changes of the world their positive
sum, insofar as it is estimated by the addition of
agreeing (not opposed) positions and the subtraction from one another of those in real-opposition,
is neither increased nor diminished.
Recall Newton’s Third Law of Motion (Philophiae
Naturalis Principia Mathematica, 1687):
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To every action there is opposed an equal reaction:
or, the mutual actions of two bodies upon each
other are always equal, and directed to contrary
parts.
It is pretty evident that Kant is struggling to ground in
metaphysics and apply to the human world the most dynamic
of Newton’s Laws of Motion or perhaps the Law of the
Conservation of Momentum, which is implied in (or, some
argue, implies) the law of equal action and reaction; it states
that when the forces acting on bodies in the same and in contrary directions are summed (over time) the quantity of
motion (i.e., the mass compounded with velocity = mv) is not
changed. Kant says without proof that although this rule of
mechanics is not usually deduced from the metaphysical
ground from which his first thesis is derived, yet it could be.
(The first Critique will be partly devoted to giving the transcendental grounds of the laws of motion and conservation.)
Not only bodies in motion but souls in emotion obey the
law of conservation, and so do humans in action.
Astoundingly, Kant really means this: For every “worldchange,” i.e., every “natural” change (which includes the psychic realm) there is an equal and opposed change, so that the
sum of measured final positions, i.e., states of existence taken
globally, is equal to what it was before the change, or the total
effect = 0.
Every becoming, then, induces an actual or potential
counter-becoming or cessation. It can now be seen why Kant
introduced potential real-opposition: Kant’s forces not only
act in opposed pairs but they may act on different objects, i.e.,
the real-opposition may not be actualized in one body or one
soul or even in the same mode in one soul. Nevertheless these
potential oppositions enter into the summed effects of the
world-total.
Kant then goes on to give more concrete non-mechanical
examples—though these are not non-natural, because (as will
still be true in the Critiques) the soul, excepting in its practi-
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cal-moral employment of reason, is subject to natural
dynamic forces. The examples of this third section differ
from the ones in the previous section exactly as the course of
the exposition requires: They are cases not of actual but of
potential real-opposition. Thus if one person’s pleasure and
displeasure arise not from the same object, but the same
ground that caused pleasure in one object is also the true
ground for feeling displeasure in another, then in analogy to
two bodies moving in contrary directions by repulsion, there
is one potential real-ground and cause for the positive and the
negative feeling. These feelings oppose but also bypass each
other; they may cancel each other but need not do so. This is
why the Stoic sage had to eradicate all pleasurable drives—
because they always engender an associated but diverse displeasure that affects the final value of the pleasure, though
perhaps not the actual pleasure itself. Even in the use of the
understanding, we find that to the degree that one idea is clarified, the others may be obscured, though surely not by the
clarification. Kant adds that in the most perfect Being the
zero sum result does not hold, as will be shown.
Now comes the second thesis, which is simply the translation of the first thesis into its causative grounds:
All real-grounds of the universe, if one sums those
similarly directed and subtracts those opposed to
one another, yield a result which is equal to zero.
Kant immediately states: “The whole of the world is in
itself nothing, except insofar as it is something through the
will of someone other.” Regarded by itself, the sum of all
existing reality = 0; the world is an almost Heraclitean system of balanced oppositions, of mutually negating positivities. In relation to the divine will the sum of all possible reality, of the world’s existence, is, however, positive. But it itself
is not therefore in real-opposition to the divine will; it is not
the godhead’s relative negation. Consequently existence, i.e.,
whatever is perceptibly there in the world, is through its
internal relations nothing, but in relation to the grounding
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will of the divinity it is something; it is positive. For there can
be no real-opposition of the world to the divine will. (This
thought is still to be found in the Opus Postumum; there too
the real-opposition of forces is metaphysically exploited.)
The nullity of the physical and psychical world in its
summed effects, the nothingness of the underlying universe
of summed causes, and the positivity of creation only in relation to God—Kant presents these results without any discernible pathos, without acknowledgment that this cancellation of the world-whole of effect and cause might bear a religious or moral interpretation beyond the intellectual proof of
God’s existence. Nor can I discover that he ever reverted to
this nullifying construal of the laws of conservation. Perhaps
it is to be regarded as a passing notion that served as a spur
to further inquiry into the world’s relation to its ground.
(Kant does hold on to the “law of the antagonism in all community of matter by means of motion”; any divergence from
its reciprocity would, he now argues, move the very center of
gravity of the universe, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural
Science of 1786, ¶563. In this essay too the notion of realopposition is put to work in the specific antagonism of repulsion and attraction, forces which between them are responsible for the way matter, i.e., “the movable,” fills space.
However, the explanation of these forces in their specificity
remains an unsolved problem for Kant into the Opus
Postumum.)
So Kant concludes by making explicit the heretofore tacitly assumed converse of the proposition that the realgrounds are responsible for the null-ity of existence: Because
the internal sum of existence is zero, it follows that the “realgrounds,” i.e., the forces and powers producing effects in the
world, must be in a corresponding opposition: The realm of
existing and possible reality is in itself shot through with
grounding polarities that cancel existence, though in respect
to the divine will (Kant does not speak of “God” in this context) it has positive being (Wesen). This overt conclusion of
the last section is surprising since it follows close on the asser-
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tion that the zero sum of all existence flows necessarily from
the grounding being (Wesen) of the world; it is hard to tell
whether we are to infer from the zero sum of effects to the
underlying real-opposition of causes or whether these causes
are posited first. I hesitate to detect Kant in unwittingly circular reasoning here. (He is, to be sure, the master of intentional circularity in the Critique, where the grounds of the
possibility of experience are inferred from experience while
experience is certified by the grounds. Perhaps the apparent
circle in the above paragraph is a precursor of critical thinking.)
The metaphysical intention is however quite clear: (1)
The world exists as a complex of quantifiably opposed
effects; negative magnitudes express such relative opposition;
when summed with their positives they yield zero. (2)
Underlying these existences, there is a realm of grounds;
these are forces, powers and actions; they are also in mutually cancelling opposition, and, like their effects, they are so
only relative to each other. (3) In respect to an ultimate
ground they are positive, but since no real-opposition to it is
possible their positivity is not a relation of opposition to the
divinity. Kant himself knows that he has not yet sufficiently
clarified the character of real-grounds, nor their relation to
the divine will.
His first definition of a real-ground actually occurs in a
General Remark appended to the third, final section of the
essay. A logical ground is one whose consequence can be
clearly seen through the law of identity; for example composition is a ground of divisibility, i.e., it is identical with part of
the meaning of the concept and can be educed from it analytically. A real-ground, by contrast, has a relation to its effect
which, although quite truly expressed as a concept, yet allows
no judgment, no true understanding, of the real-ground’s
mode of action. In other words, the relation of a real cause to
its effect is not apprehensible by mere logical analysis. (Here,
of course, is formulated the problem that Kant will solve in
the Critique by means of the “synthetic judgment a priori”—
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the cognition in which real connections are made—not, of
course, by the logical law of identity but through our cognitive constitution.)
In this essay, this understanding of a real-ground raises—
for the first time for Kant—the fundamental question of causation: “How should I understand it THAT, BECAUSE
THERE IS SOMETHING, THERE IS SOMETHING ELSE?”
The will of God is something. The existing world is something else altogether. Yet the will of God is the ultimate realground of the world’s existence. Kant says that no talk of
cause, effect, power and act will help: God and world are
totally each other’s other and yet through one of them the
other is posited. And the same holds on a lower level for the
natural causes in the world, be they of an event or its cancellation. Kant promises an explication in the future, but for
now he remarks only that the relation of real-ground to what
is posited or cancelled through it cannot be expressed in a
judgment, i.e., a mental “representation of the unity of a consciousness of different representations,” but is in fact only a
mere, non-analyzable concept, that is, a general representation or a thought (Logic ¶1, 17). Kant is saying that the relation of an effect to its cause cannot be articulated as an
affirmed attribution of a predicate to a subject. It is his way
of expressing Hume’s rejection of empirically grounded causation. (In the Critique the attempt to make God’s causal relation to the world comprehensible to reason will be shown to
be hopeless, but causality within the world will be grounded
in the very constitution of the spatial intuition.)
So ends the essay in which the reflection on negative magnitudes has led, through the concept of real-opposition,
directly to the problem of causal connection and indirectly to
God as ultimate cause. I have not done justice to the
exploratory tone of the essay, to Kant’s witty derision of
those who get stuck in premature dogmatism, and to his sense
of having made a mere, even insufficiently explicated, beginning, but a beginning of something very important: the
inquiry into causation.
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*****
An elucidation of some of the matters left unclear in the
essay on negative magnitudes occurs in the essay on “The
Only Possible Grounds of Proof for a Demonstration of
God’s Existence” of the same year (1763), and it seems to me
so daring that I cannot resist carrying this exposition a little
further. The reflections I shall refer to are not those that most
interested Heidegger, the ones concerning existence as position, but those dwelling on the relation of possibility to actuality (or as Kant says, to existence) and on an absolutely necessary “existent” (Dasein; First Part, Second and Third
Reflections).
Possibility, Kant says, depends entirely on the law of contradiction: That is a possible something the thought of which
accords with what is thought in it. This “comparison” of a
subject with its predicates through the law of contradiction is
to be called logical or formal possibility; a triangle cannot
have other than three angles, for that would contradict its
definition. But it also has something additional, a given character as a triangle in general or in particular, say a rightangled triangle; these are the data of its material or real possibility.
Therewith possibility without prior existence is abolished. For a thing is not impossible—a “no-thing”—only
when contradictory predications are made of it, when it is
formally impossible, but also when it offers no real material,
no data, to thinking. For then all thinking ceases, for everything possible must be something thinkable, must offer stuff
for thought. It follows that for Kant possibility is conditioned
on actuality.
There is, to be sure, no formal inner contradiction in the
brute negation of all existence, since nothing has been posited
to begin with. But that there be a possibility and that
nonetheless nothing actual exist—that is contradictory. For if
nothing exists, nothing material is given to be thought about.
Therefore to say that nothing exists is, according to the previous analysis of existence (Dasein) as a positing act of
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thought, to think and say that there is absolutely nothing.
And then to add that something is possible is clearly self-contradictory, for no material for thinking at all is given.
Thinking involves material givens; without them it contradicts its own character. Thus the cancellation of the material
data of possibility also cancels possibility. It is absolutely
impossible that nothing should exist. I understand Kant to
mean that one can—logically—deny all existence, but having
denied it one cannot then retrieve its possibility.
The only really elucidating example of a necessary existence is, Kant says, that of the unique Subject (i.e., God), to
be touched on below. Meanwhile, if we ask, for example,
how existence precedes possibility in respect to “body,” we
may grant that the concept body contains no logical impossibility, yet to call on its predicates of extension, impenetrability, force, to be the data of possibility (either assumed or
experienced) in the absence of actually existing, given bodies,
is quite unwarranted. Without such data the concept “body”
is empty. (We see here the forerunner of the dictum in the first
Critique that the mere functions of the understanding are
empty without the givens of intuition.)
Then Kant explains the concept of an absolutely necessary existence. To say that it is that whose contradictory is in
itself impossible is a merely nominal explanation. Since existence is no predicate, its denial can never conflict with other
predicates. However to deny the positing of the thing itself is
not a denial of predicates but of something else, and hence is
not contradictory. Kant is looking not for logical but “realnecessity” (Realnotwendigkeit), for what cannot be denied in
any “real-explanation” (Realerklärung). This is it: “What I am
to regard as absolutely nothing and impossible must be that
which eradicates all thinking.” Now total nonexistence in fact
cancels all the material and data of thought, and hence it is
impossible.
It follows that there is an absolutely necessary being. For
all possibility assumes something actual, whose cancellation
would itself cancel all inner possibility, i.e., the real coherence
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of predicates. That part of existence, on the other hand,
which does not provide the material for all that is thinkable,
but without which there would still be matter for thought—
and thus possibility—that part is, although in a real sense possible, yet in the same sense conditionally possible, i.e., contingent; not all existence is necessary. (In his Inaugural
Dissertation of 1770 Kant will say that all worldly substances
are in fact contingent since they maintain reciprocal relations,
while necessary beings are independent, ¶19; an earlier version of this existence proof is to be found in Kant’s Nova
dilucidatio of 1755.)
Kant now goes on to show that the one necessary, noncontingent existence is God, a being that is one, simple,
unchangeable, eternal, and a spirit. But its philosophically
most important attribute is that it is (in scholastic terms) the
ens realissimum, the most real being, that which contains the
highest reality. For it contains all the givens, the data, of possibility either as directly determining other existences or as
being the real-ground of which they are the consequences. (In
the Critique, the ens realissimum will be relegated to the status of an ideal of reason, a regulative idea that marshals our
thoughts of the world; in the Opus Postumum God is once
more the most real existence, though one reason necessarily
posits for itself.)
Does the attribution to God of the most and the highest
reality mean that all realities, i.e., all real attributes, must be
assigned to God? Here the concepts of the essay on negative
magnitudes come into their own: It is common doctrine that
one reality can never contradict another reality, since both are
truly affirmed. But this assertion leaves out of account the
notion of real-repugnance, i.e., of real-opposition. Realities
may, indeed must, oppose each other without one of them
being in itself negative. That was the essay’s main finding. In
God, however, even real-opposition cannot take place,
because that would result in privation or defect and would
contradict God’s maximal reality. Thus God contains no realities in opposition to his positive predicates; for example, the
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real-oppositions attributable to bodies, such as being subject
to contrary forces, cannot without contradiction belong to a
being that has intellect and will; hence the ens realissimus has
clear positive determinations.
It is, it seems to me, implicit in these pre-Critical essays
that neither existence (Dasein) nor actuality (Wirklichkeit) is
as yet convertible with subjective perceptibility, though both
will indeed be so later, as Heidegger observes. Instead these
terms mean objective givenness, thereness, be it sensorily
received or essentially apprehended. The road to the first
Critique will be the development of this conversion from the
object of experience as given to the subject to its being constituted in the subject. The roots, however, of the primacy of
the subject are already present in one respect, now to be
shown.
*****
There is, then, necessarily a God, a being comprehending
not all, but all the highest positive reality. He is a real-ground
of the world; the world, in turn, amounts quantitatively to a
self-cancelled nothing, though it may well be qualitatively
positive. One way to get hold of this—by Kant’s own frequent confession—still inchoate complex is to ask just how
daring a departure from tradition it is.
Kant, who without naming Anselm is attempting to rebut
his argument for the existence of God, calls his own proof
“ontological” (later in the Critique that is what he will call
Anselm-type proofs). Anselm argues (Proslogium 2, 4) that
God is a maximal being whose essence is to be thought as
largely and inclusively as possible; thus it must include the
predicate existence. This—that existence is a predicate—is
what Kant denies, but he accepts something that seems to me
even deeper in, or rather behind, Anselm’s argument: that
when I must think that God exists, he exists. But this is thinking of the type Kant himself engages in when he makes God’s
existence follow from the existential necessities of thinking:
What is required for thinking to be possible must necessarily
exist. (This type of proof becomes explicit in the Opus
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Postumum.) Here Anselm and Kant are brothers under the
skin. I can think of counterarguments to their assumption
(though without being quite persuaded by them): Is it utterly
impossible that a being that must exist in thought fails to exist
in fact—is it so totally unthinkable? Is it not possible to think
that thinking can do utterly without the material, the data
grounded either in a highest reality, as in the essay on God’s
existence, or in some sensory influx from a transcendent outside, as in the first Critique? Is it unthinkable that possibilities
do not disappear when actualities fail, but that there is spontaneous, autonomous, self-generated, worldless thinking?
Kant has, it seems, levered the Cartesian-type certification for
personal existence; Cogito, ergo sum, “I think, therefore I
am,” into a proof of God’s existence: Cogito ergo Deus est,
“I think therefore there is a God.” But what if “I think”
entails instead: “I make the world,” if I myself give myself the
data?
Such misgivings and intimations aside (they will become
Kant’s own in the Opus Postumum), he has found an
approach to a question that seems never to have occupied the
ancients and was, as was mentioned, first formulated by
Leibniz (Principles of Nature and Grace, 7): “Why does something exist rather than nothing?, especially since ‘nothing’ is
simpler and easier than ‘something.’” Leibniz finds the
answer in the ultimate sufficient reason called God. Kant
argues the other way around: Nothing is harder than something, indeed impossible for thought, and God becomes necessary not as a sufficient reason inferred from the world’s
existence but as a necessary being implied by human thinking.
In 1763, having proved in one essay the necessary existence of the highest and most real ground and so (for the time
being) answered Leibniz’s question, Kant is left with the
unanswered next question of the essay on negative magnitudes quoted above, which he prints in block letters: “How
can I understand THAT BECAUSE SOMETHING IS, SOMETHING ELSE MIGHT BE?” In other words, having proved
God’s existence, how can I understand him, or his agents in
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the world, as causal grounds? (This very same question will,
as was said, be presented in the Critique as unanswerable by
logical thinking alone, but solved with the aid of the a priori
relations given in the intuition.)
By 1781, the year of the first edition of the first Critique,
Kant will have given up not only his own so circumstantially
prepared ontological proof, the only possible one, as he had
once thought, but also in principle any expectation of a theoretical demonstration of God’s existence—and so, it seems,
any rational explanation of the first question, why there is
existence at all.
The second question, on the other hand, is just what the
Critique addresses. Kant distinguishes cosmological freedom,
the power to make an absolute beginning, from causality
according to natural law, which is rule-governed consequence
acting within what already exists. An insight into the first,
into absolute causation, i.e., creation, Kant shows, is in principle impossible for us, for it is beyond the limits of human
reason. The second causality, that of lawful succession, of
cause and effect in natural events, is grounded in the synthesizing character of our cognitive constitution. The essays here
considered show Kant—and for my part I find this intellectually moving—casting about for disparate clues to the concepts
and claims which would one day come to cohere in his master edifice.
73
Four Poems
Elliott Zuckerman
Where the Poet Lives
I saw the poet once
in furnished rooms above the estaminet.
There were others in his train, and I
just tagged along.
Foremost were my sidekick feelings.
If only earlier in the evening
I’d found the man alone
at his table in the whitewashed space,
the waiters not quite in position yet,
and memorably our eyes had met.
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ZUCKERMAN
Early Pupil
She saw that her piano and only hers
was missing black notes here and there
and deemed that this deficiency was due
somehow to my neglect, a lack
of thoroughness. But never
did she carp for long, clever
enough at twelve to know
that parents don’t pay cash for caviling.
Have it your way, she’d imply.
Go ahead and
have it your way, for all you teachers
insist on throwing bowling-balls overhand.
To the narrow living room of the detached
brick building in the borough’s heart
I brought her Haydn. It was
a hurdle that the piece, her first, was titled ‘Air,’
suggesting emptiness to her, and breathing.
I told her something about sonatas,
and life chez Esterhaz,
then asked the girl to name the head
bewigged in the oval insert on the page.
‘That is George Washington,’ she said.
Among the portraits later in the book,
she stopped at Purcell in a flowing wig.
I played the left hand ostinato,
and told her how a Trojan prig
abandoned the passionate empress Dido
to fiery death, while we can hear
the drooping half-steps of imperial despair.
Pointing to Purcell’s hair,
‘At last,’ she said, ‘a lady composer.’
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76
ZUCKERMAN
She and the Tree
Outlay
On that flat terrain is there a tree?
Given at least one tree, she likes to arrange her limbs
in imitation of the branches, seeking
a quiet contraposto.
We place ourselves on stools, shoes at the rungs,
the ales in steins on the expanse between us,
midway in bowls the usual cashews,
and new pistachios.
Her earlier attempts will be ignored,
for rearrangements are encouraged.
But when at last she settles on a pose,
they’ll give that pose her name.
Though hands can reach across to hands,
no actual touch dare fluster the display:
all my intent and all your puzzlement
diffused in what we say.
They emphasize the silence of the landscape,
she and the tree.
I wonder whether anything that hangs
high in the air among the pleasantries
could close those almond eyes.
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79
Platonic Pedagogy?
David Roochnik
No Platonic dialogue depicts a conversation between two
equally mature philosophers. There is neither a friendly collaboration, nor a serious battle, between peers. Instead, the
dialogues are consistently asymmetrical. Two familiar kinds
of conversations are those between an older Socrates and a
younger man (Glaucon, for example) who is, at best, a potential philosopher, and between Socrates and a non-philosopher
(such as Protagoras, Laches, or Agathon). What is conspicuously missing is a dialogue between Socrates and a thinker
offering a well-developed theoretical position, such as the
Eleatic Stranger or Timaeus, neither of whom receives as
much as a question from a present but silent Socrates.
One explanation of this absence is that the dialogues are
thoroughly pedagogical works. Their function, on this
account, is not to present a positive or systematic theory,
which is why they do not depict a symmetrical exchange
between two theorists (who either agree or disagree), but an
encounter whose asymmetry is designed to invite the reader
to participate. As Eva Brann puts it, Plato “wants us as soon
as possible to join [the dialogue], to be converted from passive perusal to active participation, to be drawn in among the
other silent interlocutors” (p. 88).
One version of this “pedagogical thesis” would maintain
that by entering the conversation the reader, guided by the
dialogue’s clues, can, and so should, attempt to reconstruct
the teaching or theory (or logos) it implicitly contains. A second version would argue that the dialogue contains no positive theory at all. On this account, Socrates’ attempt to drive
Eva Brann. The Music of the Republic: Essays on Socrates’ Conversations and
Plato’s Writings. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2004. David Roochnik is
Associate Professor of Philosophy at Boston University.
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his interlocutors into thinking—and Plato’s attempt to
achieve the same with his readers—is the teaching. This may
sound odd, because pedagogy seems to be a means to an end.
The teacher teaches the student who, upon completion of the
instruction, is no longer a student, but instead is one who
knows. Perhaps, however, the dialogues are asymmetrical
because they are essentially pedagogical. In other words, perhaps Plato eschewed the sort of symmetrical dialogue that
would communicate a positive theory—not to mention the
fact that he never wrote a monological treatise—because he
believed there was no positive or independent theory that
could be detached from the attempt to teach it. (Brann’s own
definition of a “theory” is “a conceptual construction
designed in principle to yield satisfying explanations for every
problem brought to it” [p. 322].) Perhaps pedagogy, the leading of the younger by the older, is an end in itself. Or, to put
it somewhat strangely, perhaps pedagogy itself is the truth.
Such a view comes close to a form of skepticism, although not
of the Pyrrhonian or Academic varieties described by Sextus
Empiricus. (See Outlines of Pyrrhonism, 1.1 and 1.4.)
I think Eva Brann might accept some of these remarks,
but I am not sure which of the two versions of the pedagogical thesis (if either) she would favor. Certainly, hers is a book
written by a teacher for students. Included in this collection
of essays are three “introductions”: to the Phaedo, Republic,
and Sophist. One essay, “Socrates’ Legacy: Plato’s Phaedo,”
was written for a student journal, and another is titled,
“‘Teaching Plato’ to Undergraduates.” It and three others—
“Why Justice? The Answer of the Republic,” “The Tyrant’s
Temperance: Charmides,” and “Imitative Poetry: Book X of
the Republic”—were delivered as lectures at undergraduate
colleges.
“Socrates’ Legacy: Plato’s Phaedo,” which Brann
describes as a “view, very sketchily stated, of Plato’s Phaedo,
which might help a serious student in reading the dialogue”
(p. 36), lays out twenty-one questions that she thinks Plato
“insinuates into the purported demonstrations of the soul’s
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81
immortality” (p. 37). These are followed by a paragraph containing fourteen sentences, the first two of which are declarative, the following twelve of which are interrogative. She
concludes the essay by imagining Socrates joining a conversation about them today. “He would not care so much about
devising well-formulated breakthroughs for received issues as
for staying with the inquiry at its origin in wonder...he
is…asking [the young men who participate in this conversation] to keep his perplexities alive. For that is what philosophizing means to him” (p. 41).
These remarks suggest that Brann would favor the second
of the two versions of the pedagogical thesis described above.
So too would her description of “Plato’s Theory of Ideas.”
Despite using this well-worn academic phrase as the title of
one of her own essays, she asserts that “the Ideas are not a
theory” (p. 322) at all, and so she recommends that we “convert the falsely familiar title “‘Plato’s Theory of Ideas’ to
‘Socrates’ Hypotheses of the Eide’” (p. 324). In a similar fashion, her description of “recollection” as a “myth” (p. 332)
rather than a theory, and her declaration that in the Timaeus
“the Timaean story of the origin and nature of time is not the
Socratic, and therefore not a central Platonic, theory”
(p. 275), but instead may even “supply the reason why Plato
has offered none” (p. 272), also seems to imply that beyond
teaching lies no positive theory at all. Brann seems to believe
that, at the end of the day, the philosopher must “go back to
the beginning” (palin ex archês), and ask her questions, provoke her students, yet again. Teaching, in this sense, is an end
in itself.
There are philosophical explanations of why this would
be the case. One is famously suggested in the Seventh Letter
and is quoted by Brann (on p. 320):
There is no treatise of mine about these things,
nor ever will be; for it is not sayable like other
kinds of learning, but out of much communion
which has taken place around this business, and
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
from living together, suddenly, like a light kindled
from a leaping fire, it gets into the soul, and from
there on nourishes itself.
If Plato believes that “these things” are not sayable, then
there can be no positive theory of them, and thus neither a
monological treatise nor a symmetrical dialogue would be an
appropriate form of philosophical expression.
Another possibility, which I can here only state, is that the
dialogues resist symmetry, resist theory, because they are
attempts to do justice to “the constitution of the soul…its
topography” (p. 251), and this “topography” is itself assymetrical. Perhaps Plato wrote the sort of dialogues he did, in
which the partners are invariably unequal, because the soul is
somehow unequal to itself.
The eponymous, and far the longest, essay of this book,
“The Music of Plato’s Republic,” seems to challenge the
notion that the dialogues are essentially pedagogical, and
instead to favor the first of the two versions of the pedagogical thesis mentioned above, namely, that the Republic is
meant to teach the reader how to reconstruct the theoretical
doctrine to which it only points. Consider the following comments that Eva Brann makes about the images of the sun, the
divided-line, and the cave: “The logos behind these images is
absent in the Republic, but its terms may be recovered from
Plato’s oral ‘Unwritten Teachings,’ particularly the lecture—
or several colloquia—Concerning the Good…In these
terms…the Image of the Good represents the One and the
Image of the Cave the Indefinite Dyad” (p. 156). Later in the
essay, employing a diagram of great complexity (p. 195),
Brann begins to articulate such a logos, such a doctrine:
This scheme shows the Good as presiding over and
bonding a kind of pervasive duplication: The
Good as the cause of knowledge is responsible for
the unifying confrontation of knower and
known…and thus originates the soul…The Good
is as well the direct source of beingness…Finally,
ROOCHNIK
83
as generating source, the Good puts forth the sun,
a sensible secondary source that reduplicates the
whole structure of Being on the lower level of
sense and Becoming (p. 195-6).
Brann draws on both the Parmenides and the Sophist to
articulate the details of such a theory, a project that occupies
a major portion of this essay.
This attempt to “recover” the positive logos of the
Republic is consonant with the assertive tone that pervades
“The Music of the Republic.” The essay begins, for example,
with this statement: “The Republic is composed of concentric
rings encompassing a center” (p. 108). Books 1 and 9-10, on
Brann’s reading, comprise the outermost circle, and set the
mythic context of the entire work. Books 2-4 and then 8-9
are “the broad inner ring” consisting “of the construction and
destruction of the successive forms of a pattern city in
‘speech’” (p. 116). Books 5-7 “presents the actual founding of
a city ‘in deed’” (p. 116). This structure is diagrammed on
page 117, which is one of thirteen such diagrams found in the
essay.
This structural account of the form of the dialogue—an
account that seems of a piece with the attempt to recover its
complexly structured content—can be challenged. Consider
the following alternative: Book 1, as Socrates himself states in
Book 2, “is only a prelude” (prooimion: 357a2). In the
Rhetoric, Aristotle discusses this term. It is, he says, “the
beginning of a speech” (3.14.1) whose “necessary and specific
function…is to make clear what is the end (telos) for which
the speech is being given” (3.14.5). Brann’s arguments that
Book 1 establishes a mythic context are not without philological basis. Still, the bulk of Book 1 is a series not of mythic
allusions, but of refutations, almost all of which operate on
the basis of the “techne analogy.” So, for example, Socrates
refutes Polemarchus’ assertion that it is “just to give to everyone what is fitting” (332c2) by smuggling in the assumption
that justice is an art, a form of expertise, a techne. As medi-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
cine gives what is fitting—drugs, food and drinks—to bodies,
and cooking gives what is fitting—seasonings—to meats, so
too (if the analogy holds) must justice give what is fitting to
the determinate object of its expertise. (See 332c-d.) Because
no such object can be identified, the definition is rejected.
Socrates, then, begins the refutations of Book 1 with an
assumption, justice is a techne, which he neither makes
explicit nor defends. The refutations succeed because the
techne model of justice proves to be inadequate. Nonetheless,
it remains the case that justice, even if it is not a techne, must
still be regarded as a form of knowledge. Book 1 is a
prooimion suggesting the telos of the Republic because it sets
out a task: to give an account of justice as a non-technical
form of knowledge.
What follows Book 1 are not concentric rings but, to borrow Socrates’ own metaphor, three successive “waves” of
argumentation that become progressively more difficult to
“swim through.” Books 2-4 construct an “arithmetical” or
technical conception of both city and soul that ultimately
proves to be deficient. Books 5-7 are a response to this deficiency, but suffer from limitations of their own. As a result,
they are followed by Books 8-10, which, despite the scant
attention they receive from commentators, are rich with
insight (especially psychological insight) and so actually culminate the dialogue rather than serve as merely a descent and
completion of the ring structure.
This little sketch (elaborated and defended in detail in my
Beautiful City: The Dialectical Character of Plato’s Republic)
is mentioned only to raise a question. Is the purpose of the
essay “The Music of Plato’s Republic” to uncover a positive
teaching of the dialogue, one communicated by means of the
ring structure Brann attributes to it, and then conceptually
elaborated in a “recovered” logos about the Good? If so, does
this essay stand at odds with the otherwise interrogative and
aporetic stance seemingly taken by so many of the other
essays in this book?
ROOCHNIK
85
Perhaps “The Music of the Republic” is not quite what it
seems to be. Even though it includes a significant number of
diagrams, some of them (such as the one on p. 220) quite elegant, and contains numerically adumbrated outlines of the
arguments, and even though it seems to offer first steps
towards a coherent account of the whole (i.e., a theory), perhaps this is but the mathematical “sheen” of the essay and
does not fully reflect its author’s understanding of the full
content of the dialogue. In other words, a meta-mathematical
doctrine may not lie at the heart of the Republic. Perhaps
Brann’s diagrams and outlines, and her putative recovery of
the logos, perform a function more like that Socrates attributes in Book 7 to arithmetic, that “lowly business of distinguishing the one, the two and the three” (522c): “to draw the
soul from becoming to being” (521d). In other words, while
mathematics is without doubt of significant value, it is not the
model of a genuinely philosophical logos. Instead, arithmetic
and its kindred mathematical technai are conceived by Plato
to have instrumental value. As such, they are pedagogical in
nature. They are meant to inspire and provoke, to turn the
reader towards the project of philosophy. They are meant, in
short, to be questioned. The goal of Brann’s longest and most
“mathematical” of essays, then, is not to offer the last word
on the Republic, but to convert the reader “from passive
perusal to active participation.”
To sum up: is the apparent assertiveness, the “theoretical
optimism,” of “The Music of the Republic” compatible with
a thoroughly interrogative essay like “Socrates’ Legacy:
Plato’s Phaedo?” I believe it is. If I am right, then one of the
many virtues of this beautiful book is that it effectively imitates the Platonic dialogues themselves.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
ROOCHNIK
87
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Sachs, Joe
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The St. John’s Review
Volume XLVIII, number one (2004)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Audra Price
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson,
President; Harvey Flaumenhaft, Dean. For those not on the
distribution list, subscriptions are $10.00 for one year.
Unsolicited essays, reviews, and reasoned letters are welcome.
Address correspondence to the Review, St. John’s College,
P Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are
.O.
available, at $5.00 per issue, from the St. John’s College
Bookstore.
©2004 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction
in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
The St. John’s Public Relations Office and the St. John’s College Print Shop
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
3
Contents
Classical Mathematics and Its Transformation
St. John’s College, Annapolis
June 5-6, 2004
Foreword.......................................................................5
Harvey Flaumenhaft
Why We Won’t Let You Speak Of the Square
Root of Two..................................................................7
Harvey Flaumenhaft
The Husserlian Context of Klein’s
Mathematical Work.....................................................43
Burt C. Hopkins
Words, Diagrams, and Symbols: Greek and
Modern Mathematics or “On the Need to Rewrite
the History Of Greek Mathematics” Revisited............71
Sabetai Unguru
A Note on the Opposite Sections and Conjugate
Sections In Apollonius of Perga’s Conica.....................91
Michael N. Fried
Viète on the Solution of Equations and the
Construction Of Problems.........................................115
Richard Ferrier
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
5
Foreword
Harvey Flaumenhaft
On the weekend of June 5-6, 2004, the Annapolis campus of
St. John’s College hosted a conference on the topic of classical mathematics and its transformation. This is a pivotal topic
in the program of instruction here at St. John’s, where classes
consist in the discussion of great books ancient and modern,
and where approximately half of the entirely prescribed curriculum may be classified as either mathematics or heavily
mathematical natural science.
The topic was made truly pivotal at St. John’s by Jacob
Klein, who joined the faculty in the second year of the New
Program (1938-39) and became Dean eleven years later. Just
a few years before arriving at St. John’s, Klein had published
Die Griechische Logistik und die Entstehung der Algebra (later
translated by another Dean—Eva Brann—as Greek
Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra). In a letter
written just a few weeks after arriving at the College, Klein
said, “It is almost unbelievable to me that all the things that
occupied me for years, that is, the whole theme of my work,
are realized here. The people don’t do quite right, very much
is superficial and they are not quite right about certain fundamentals. But it….is clear that I am in the right spot.”
Klein’s presence, and his book because of his presence, had a
deepening and correcting effect on the life of this college, and
through this college, on intellectual life far beyond our halls.
The effects of his work pervade the conference papers, which
are printed as this issue of The St. John’s Review.
The conference took place through the generosity of the
Andrew W Mellon Foundation, as the culminating event
.
under a large grant supporting faculty study groups led by
me, over several years, on the topic of the conference. The
Harvey Flaumenhaft is Dean at the Annapolis Campus of St. John’s College.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
grant also supported groups on the same topic on the Santa
Fe campus, with participation by faculty members from
Thomas Aquinas College. Grateful acknowledgment is due to
Sus3an Borden, the college’s Manager of Foundation
Relations in Annapolis, who did a great deal of work, under
very severe time constraints, to set up the conference.
7
Why We Won’t Let You Speak
of the Square Root of Two
Harvey Flaumenhaft
Part One
Progress and Preservation in Science
We often take for granted the terms, the methods, and the
premises that prevail in our own time and place. We take for
granted, as the starting-points for our own thinking, the outcomes of a process of thinking by our predecessors.
What happens is something like this: Questions are asked,
and answers are given. These answers in turn provoke new
questions, with their own answers. The new questions are
built from the answers that were given to the old questions,
but the old questions are now no longer asked. Foundations
get covered over by what is built upon them.
Progress can thus lead to a kind of forgetfulness, making
us less thoughtful in some ways than the people whom we go
beyond. We can become more thoughtful, though, by attending to the thinking that is out of sight but still at work in the
achievements it has generated. To be thoughtful human
beings—to be thoughtful about what it is that makes us
Harvey Flaumenhaft is Dean at the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College. This
paper was delivered in the form of a Friday-night formal lecture at St. John’s
College in Annapolis on 27 August 1999.
The first part of it is adapted from the “Series Editor’s Preface” in the
volumes of Masterworks of Discovery: Guided Studies of Great Texts in Science
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993-1997).
The last part is adapted from the “Introductory Note on Apollonius” in
Apollonius of Perga, Conics: Books I-III, new revised edition, Dana Densmore,
ed. (Santa Fe, NM: Green Lion Press, 1998).
The three parts placed between them are adapted from the manuscript
How Much and How Many: The Euclidean Foundation for Comparisons of Size
in Classical Geometry (forthcoming from Green Lion Press), which is part of the
larger manuscript Insights and Manipulations: Classical Geometry and Its
Transformation—A Guidebook: Volume I, Starting up with Apollonius; Volume
II, From Apollonius to Descartes (also forthcoming).
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
human—we need to read the record of the thinking that has
shaped the world around us, and still shapes our minds.
Scientific thinking is a fundamental part of that record,
but it is a part that is read even less than the rest, largely. That
is often held to be because of the opinion that books in science, unlike those in the humanities, simply become outdated: in science, the past is held to be passé.
Now science is indeed progressive, and progress is a good
thing; but so is preservation. Progress even requires preservation: unless there is keeping, our getting is little but losing—
and keeping takes plenty of work.
Precisely if science is essentially progressive, we can truly
understand it only by seeing its progress as progress. This
means that our minds must move through its progressive
stages. We ourselves must think through the process of
thought that has given us what we would otherwise thoughtlessly accept as given. By refusing to be the passive recipients
of ready-made presuppositions and approaches, we can avoid
becoming their prisoners. Only by actively taking part in discovery—only by engaging in re-discovery ourselves—can we
avoid both blind reaction against the scientific enterprise and
blind submission to it.
We and our world are products of a process of thinking,
and truly thoughtful thinking is peculiar: it cannot simply
outgrow the thinking it grows out of. When we utter deceptively simple phrases that in fact are the outcome of a complex development of thought—phrases like “the square root
of two”—we may work wonders as we use them in building
vast and intricate structures from the labors of millions of
people, but we do not truly know what we are doing unless
we at some time ask the questions which the words employed
so casually now were once an attempt to answer.
The education of a human being requires learning about
the process by which the human race gets its education, and
there is no better way to do that than to read the writings of
those master-students who have been the master-teachers.
FLAUMENHAFT
9
Part Two
Manyness: The Classical Notion of Number
The first great teachers of the West, and subsequently the rest
of the world, were the classical teachers who wrote in Greek
some two-and-a-half millennia ago. In their language the
word for things that are learned or learnable is mathêmata,
and the art that deals with the mathêmata is mathêmatikê—
the English for which is “mathematics.”
In mathematics, the first and fundamental classic work is
the Elements of Euclid. From its Seventh Book we learn that
a number is a number of things of some kind. When there are
more than one of something, their number is the “multitude”
of them. It tells how many of them there are. Suppose, for
example, that in a field there are seven cows, four goats, and
one dog. If we count cows, then the cow is our unit, the cow
being that according to which any being in the field will count
as one item; and there is a multitude of seven such units in
the field. If we count animals, however, then the animal is our
unit; and now there is a multitude of twelve units. Of cows,
there are seven; but of animals, there are twelve.
Of dogs as dogs, there is no reason to make a count (as
distinguished from including them in the count of animals).
There is no reason to count dogs, for the field does not contain dogs. It contains only one dog, and one dog alone does
not constitute any multitude of dogs. If what we were thinking was “There is only one dog in the field,” we might say
“There is one dog in the field”; but if we were not thinking
of that single dog in relation to some possible multitude of
dogs, we would simply say “There is a dog in the field.” Of
pigs, there is no reason to make a count, for the field does not
contain a single pig, let alone a multitude of pigs.
If there had earlier been six horses in the field, which
were then lent out, the field might now be said to lack six
horses; but while six is the multitude of horses that are lacking from the field, there is not any multitude of horses in the
field.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
If we chop up one of the cows, arranging to divide its
remains into four equal pieces, and we take three of them,
then we have not taken any multitude of cows. We have taken
merely three pieces that are each a fourth part in the equal
division of what is a heap of the makings for beef stew.
And so when we have several items, each of which counts
as one of what we are counting, then what we obtain by
counting is a number. The numbers, in order, are these: two
units, three units, four units, and so on. The numbers, we
might even say, are these: a duo, a trio, a quartet, and so on.
To us, nowadays, that seems strange: a lot seems to be lacking.
“One” does not name a multitude of units: although a
unit can be combined with, or be compared with, any number of units, a unit is not itself a number—so “one” does not
name a number. “Zero” also does not name a number, for
there is no multitude of units when there are no units for a
multitude to be composed of. Neither does “negative-six”
name any multitude, although “six” does; “six” names a number, but there is no number named “negative-six”—and hence
there is no number named “positive-six” either.
Although “three” names a number of units, and so does
“four,” “three-fourths” does not name a number of units—
for if the unit is broken up, then, being no longer unitary, it
ceases to be a unit. The Latin word for breaking is “fraction.”
A fraction is not a number. (Of course we can, if we wish,
take a new unit—say, a fourth part of a cow’s equally divided
carcass—and then take three of these new units.)
As for “the square root of two,” it is not a number;
indeed, as we shall soon see, it is not even a fraction. And neither is “pi” a number.
To say it again, the numbers are: two units, three units,
four units, and so on—taking as many units as we please.
That is what Euclid tells us; and, after telling us, Euclid goes
on to speak of the relations among different numbers.
We learn, for example, that because fifteen “measures”
sixty—that is to say, because a multitude of fifteen units taken
FLAUMENHAFT
11
four times is equal to a multitude of sixty units—fifteen is
called “part” of sixty, and sixty is called a “multiple” of fifteen.
But fifteen is not “part” of forty, because you cannot get
a multitude of forty units by taking a multitude of fifteen
units some number of times. That is to say: the multitude of
fifteen units does not “measure” forty units. Both fifteen units
and forty units are, however, measured by five units; and five
units, which is the eighth part of forty units (the part obtained
by dividing forty units into eight equal parts), is also the third
part of fifteen units, so fifteen units is three of the eighth parts
of forty units. This is to say that fifteen units, which is not a
“part” of forty units, is “parts” of it. Indeed, a smaller number, if it is not part of a larger number, must be parts of it,
since both numbers must—just because they are numbers—be
measured by the unit.
After that, Euclid goes on to tell us about sorts of numbers, and the ways in which they are related, numbers such as
those that are “even,” or “odd,” or “even-times-even,” or
“even-times-odd,” or “odd-times-odd,” or “prime,” and so
on.
Numbers are thus of interest not only with respect to
their relations of size, but also with respect to their relations
of kind. Even and odd are distinguished by divisibility into
two equal parts (or by odd’s differing from even by a unit),
and the more complex terms here are distinguished with
respect to “measuring by a number according to another
number”—which nowadays would be stated thus: “dividing
by an integer so as to yield another integer as quotient without a remainder.”
Euclid thus defines some kinds of numbers by employing
notions such as being greater than or equal to or having a certain difference in size. However, he also sorts numbers into
kinds by referring to shape. What might lead to doing that?
We might use a dot to represent a unit, and then represent a number by dots in a line. For example, four would be
represented as it is at the top of Chart 1. We might then rep-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
resent in a shape the number produced by taking a number
some number of times. For example, the number produced
when four is taken three times would be represented as it is
in the middle of the chart, where we see that the numbers
four and three are “sides” of the “plane” number twelve; and
similarly, six and four are “sides” of the “plane” number
twenty-four. But the number twenty-four can also be represented as a solid, as it is at the bottom of the chart: the numbers four and three and two are “sides” of the “solid” number twenty-four.
So Euclid speaks of numbers that are “sides,” “plane,”
and “solid,” and also of the multiplication of a number by a
number, and then of the sorts of numerical products of such
multiplication—such as the numbers called “square” and
“cube,” whose factors are called “sides.”
But he does not represent numbers by dots in lines. To use
dots would force us to pick this or that number. To signify not
this or that number, but rather any number at all, it is more
convenient to use bare lines, without indicating how many
dots are carried on each line, although it might be confusing
that we then also have to represent by a line the unit.
FLAUMENHAFT
13
On the other hand, since the unit does have a ratio to any
number, as does any number to any other number, and since
the product of multiplying any number by any other number
is also a number, it might make everything more convenient
if we represent as lines not just the numbers that are “sides,”
as well as any “side” that is a unit, but also all the figurate
numbers that we can produce. After all, though the sort of
number called a “square” number may be somehow different
from the sort of number called a “cube,” it is nonetheless true
that any “square” number has a ratio to any “cube” number
(since any number has a ratio to any other number), whereas
a square cannot have a ratio to a cube (since they are not magnitudes of the same kind). If we go along with speaking in this
way, however, we must take care to keep in mind that when
it is numbers that are called “sides” or “squares” or “cubes”
we are not engaged in speech about figures; we are using figures of speech. Several of the books of Euclid’s Elements deal
with what would nowadays be called “number theory” rather
than “geometry.”
The numbers in the classical sense—the multitudes two,
three, four, and so on—tell us the result of a count, and
nowadays we often speak as if those numbers, the countingnumbers, are merely some of the items contained in an
expanded system that we call “the real numbers.”
Whenever we put numbers of things together we get
some number of things, and whenever we take a number of
things a number of times we get some number of things; but
only sometimes can we take a given number of things away
from a given number of things, and even when we can, only
sometimes can we get some number of things by doing so. For
example, we cannot take seven things away from five things;
and although we can take six things away from seven things,
we will not have a number of things left if we do, but only a
single thing. It is also only sometimes that we can divide a
given number of things into a given number of equal parts. A
multitude of ten things can be divided into five equal parts,
but a multitude of eight things cannot. In dividing a many-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
ness, there is constraint from which we are free in dividing a
muchness.
We often measure a muchness to say just how much of it
there is compared with some other muchness: having chosen
some unit of muchness, we count how many times such a unit
must be taken in order to be equal to the muchness that we
are measuring. A line, for example, is a kind of a muchness:
there is more line in a longer line than in a shorter line. If two
lines are not of equal size, one of them is greater than the
other. Lines are magnitudes. If we measure them, we obtain
multitudes that tell their sizes—their lengths. But magnitudes
are not multitudes. Whereas the size of a magnitude has to do
with how much of it there is, the size of a multitude has to do
with how many units it is composed of.
Not only magnitudes, but multitudes as well are often
measured: we measure these by using other multitudes to
measure them. Thus, we say that twelve is six taken two
times, or is twice six. We say, moreover, that eight is twice the
third part of twelve, or—to abbreviate—that eight is twothirds of twelve. “Two-thirds” does not name a multitude
(unless we say that we are merely treating a third part of
twelve as a new unit) but “two-thirds” is nonetheless a
numerical expression. If we therefore begin to treat it like the
name of a number, we are on the road to devising a system of
fractions. “Two-thirds” of something is less than one such
something, but it is not fewer. Two-thirds are fewer than
three-thirds—but to say this, we must have broken the unit
into three new and smaller units. The numerator of a fraction
is a number or else it is “one.” The denominator is also a
number: it is the number of parts that result from a division
(although we will allow a denominator as well as a numerator to be “one.”) With a fraction, we divide into equal parts
and then we count them. A fraction is not itself a number (a
multitude), but it may be the counterpart of a number.
“Twelve-sixths” is not the number “two”; but it is a counterpart, among the fractions, of the item “two” among the numbers. Another counterpart of the number “two” is the fraction
FLAUMENHAFT
15
“eight-fourths.” Those counterparts are really the same counterpart differently expressed, since they are both equal to the
fraction whose numerator is the number “two” and whose
denominator is “one.”
As with division, so with subtraction. In taking things
away, we may get a numerical expression that we can treat
like a number in certain respects. When we have twelve
horses and eight of them are taken away, there is a remainder
of four horses. But if eleven are taken away, then there are
not horses left; only a single horse remains. And if twelve
horses are taken away, then not even a single horse is left:
none remain. But twelve horses can be compared with a single horse: the twelve are to the one as twenty-four are to two.
“Twenty-four” and “two” are numbers, and “twelve” is also a
number—so “one” is like a number in being comparable with
a number as a number is. Moreover, “one” can be added to a
number as a number can be, and “one” is sometimes what we
reply when asked how many of some kind of thing there are.
“One” is therefore a numerical word even if it is not a number. But in that case, so is “none”: if twelve horses are taken
away, leaving not a single horse, and we are asked how many
remain, we can then say “none.” Now suppose that Farmer
Brown owes fourteen horses to Farmer Gray, but has in his
possession only ten horses. Farmer Gray takes away the ten.
How many horses does Farmer Brown now own? None. But
he might be said in some sense to own even less than none,
for he still owes four. If we did say that, then we would have
to say that he owns four less than no horses, or that fourteen
less than ten is four less than none. But then we would be
counting, not horses-owned, but horses-either-owned-orowed. We would be letting the payment of four-horses-owed
count as wealth equal to no-horses-either-owed-or-owned.
Again, as with the fractions, we have numerical expressions
that we are beginning to treat like numbers. We are on the
road to devising a system of so-called “rational numbers,”
which includes “negative” items as well as such non-negative
items as “zero” and “one” in addition to fractions (which
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include the counterparts of those multitudes that were first
called “numbers”—namely, two, three, four, and so on).
We must say “counterparts” because the multitude
“three,” for example, while it corresponds to, is not the same
as “the positive fraction nine-thirds” or “the positive integer
three.” We have not brought about an expansion of a number
system by merely introducing additional new items alongside
old ones; rather, we have made a new system which contains
some items that correspond to the items in the old system, but
that differ from the old items in being items of the very same
new sort as are the new items that do not have correspondents in the old system. For example: although the number
“three” is a multitude, “positive three” is not a multitude; it
is an item defined by its place in a system where, among other
things, “positive six” takes the place belonging to the item
that is the outcome of such operations as multiplying “negative two” by “negative three.”
We have just taken a look at part of the road that leads
from numbers in the classical sense to what we nowadays are
used to thinking of as numbers. We have looked at some steps
on the road to the so-called “rational numbers,” the so-called
numbers that have something to do with ratios. But the system of what we nowadays are used to thinking of as numbers
is the system of “real numbers,” only some of which are items
that have counterparts among the items in the system of
“rational numbers.” The system of what we nowadays are
used to thinking of as numbers is replete with “irrational
numbers,” some of them “algebraic” (such as “the square root
of two”) and some of them “transcendental” (such as “pi”).
Classically, numbers are multitudes, and there may be
some number-ratio that is the same as the relation in size of
some one magnitude to another. But there does not have to
be a number-ratio that is the same. If there did have to be
such a ratio of numbers for every ratio of magnitudes, then
there would not have been a reason for devising a system of
“real numbers.” The reason for taking the step from “rational
FLAUMENHAFT
17
numbers” to “real numbers” has to do with the difference
between multitudes and magnitudes.
The difference between how we can speak about multitudes (that is, numbers in the classical sense) and how we can
speak about magnitudes classically manifests itself in the
statements with which Euclid begins his treatment of magnitudes in the Fifth Book of the Elements and his treatment
afterwards of numbers in the Seventh Book.
Although Euclid says what number is, he does not say
what magnitude is. Examples of magnitudes can be found in
his propositions, however. After the Fifth Book of the
Elements demonstrates many propositions about the ratios of
magnitudes as such, these are used by later books of the
Elements to demonstrate propositions about such magnitudes
as straight lines, triangles, rectangles, circles, pyramids, cubes,
and spheres. Such magnitudes correspond to what we nowadays call lengths, areas, and volumes. Weight is yet another
sort of magnitude. Though weights are not mentioned in the
Elements, what Euclid says there about magnitudes generally
is applied by Archimedes to weights in particular.
At the beginning of the Fifth Book, Euclid defines ratio
for magnitudes; but at the beginning of the Seventh Book he
does not define ratio for numbers. There in the Fifth Book he
also defines magnitudes’ being in the same ratio, and only
after doing that does he define magnitudes’ being proportional. But here in the Seventh Book he does not define numbers’ being in the same ratio: he goes directly into defining
numbers’ being proportional, which he needs to do in order
to define the similarity of numbers that are of the sorts called
“plane” or “solid.”
The Greek term translated as “proportional” is analogon.
After a prefix (ana) meaning “up; again,” the term contains a
form of the word logos. This is the Greek term translated as
“ratio.” Logos is derived from the same root from which we
get “collect” (which is what the root means); and in most
contexts, it can be translated as “speech” or as “reason.”
Proportionality is, in Greek, analogia (from which we get
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
“analogy”), a condition in which terms that are different may
be said to carry or hold up again the same articulable relationship.
Later in the Elements, in the enunciation of the fifth
proposition of the Tenth Book, for example, Euclid does use
the term “same ratio” in speaking of ratios that are numerical. In the definitions with which the Tenth Book begins,
Euclid says that lines which have no numerical ratios to a
given straight line are called “logos-less”—that is, alogoi. This
Greek term for lines lacking any articulable ratios to a given
line is translated (through the Latin) as “irrational.”
Such a line and the given line to which it is referred cannot both be measured by the same unit, no matter how small
a unit we may use to try to measure them together. They are
“without a measurement together”—that is, asymmetra. This
Greek term is translated (through the Latin) as “incommensurable.” Because magnitudes of the same kind can be incommensurable, magnitudes are radically different from multitudes, and so we must speak of them differently.
Part Three
Muchness Not Related Like Manyness: Incommensurability
Let us turn now to the classic example of incommensurability: let us consider the relation between the side of a square
and its diagonal.
If a square’s diagonal were in fact commensurable with its
side, then the ratio of the diagonal to the side would be the
ratio of some number to some other number. But it cannot be
that. Why not? Because if it were, then it would have two
incompatible properties: one property belongs to any ratio
whatever which a number has to a number, and the other
property follows from that particular ratio which a square’s
diagonal has to its side. Let us convince ourselves that there is
such a contradiction.
First, let us look at that property which belongs to any
ratio whatever that is numerical. It is this: any numerical ratio
whatever must either be in lowest terms already, or be
FLAUMENHAFT
19
reducible to them eventually. Consider, for example, the ratio
that thirty has to seventy. Those two numbers have in common the factors two and five; so, dividing each of them by
ten, we see that the ratio that thirty has to seventy is the same
as the ratio that three has to seven. The ratio of three to seven
is the ratio of thirty to seventy reduced to lowest terms. If a
ratio of one number to another number were not reducible to
lowest terms, then the two original numbers would have to
contain an endless supply of common factors, which is impossible: any number must sooner or later run out of factors if
you keep canceling them out by division.
This property of every ratio that a number has to a number cannot belong to the special ratio that a square’s diagonal
has to its side. To see why this is so, consider a given square.
If you make a new square using as the side of the new square
the diagonal of the given square, then the new square will be
double the size of the original square.
Chart 2 shows that doubling. In the left-hand portion of
the chart, the diagonal of a square divides it into two triangles, and it takes four of these triangles to fill up a new square
which has as its own side that diagonal. In the right-hand portion, the chart also shows what happens if we now make
another new square, using as this newest square’s own side a
half of the diagonal of the original square. The original
square, now being itself a square on the newest square’s diagonal, will itself be double the size of this newest square—
since this newest square is made up of two triangles, and it
takes four of these triangles to make up the original square.
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Let us suppose that it were in fact possible to divide a
square’s diagonal as well as its side into pieces that are all of
the same size. Let us count the pieces and say that K is the
number of pieces into which we have divided the diagonal,
and that L is the number of pieces into which we have divided
the side. By taking as a unit any of those equal pieces into
which we have supposedly divided the diagonal and the side,
we have measured the two lines together: the ratio which the
number K has to the number L would be the same as the ratio
which the square’s diagonal has to its side.
Now, disregarding for a moment just what ratio the number K has to the number L, but considering only that it is supposed to be a ratio of numbers—which, as such, must be
reducible to lowest terms—we can say that there would have
to be two numbers (let us call them P and Q) such that (1) P
and Q do not have a single factor in common and (2) the ratio
that P has to Q is the same ratio that K has to L. Since the
ratio that K has to L is supposed to be a ratio of numbers,
there cannot be any such pair of numbers as K and L unless
there is also such a pair of numbers as P and Q. (If the ratio
of K to L is already in lowest terms, then we will just let K
and L themselves be called by the names P and Q.) So now we
have P being the number of equal pieces into which the
square’s diagonal is divided, and Q being the number of such
pieces into which the square’s side is divided. And now we
will see that there just cannot be any such numbers as P and
Q because this pair of numbers would have to satisfy contradictory requirements.
The first requirement results from the necessities of numbers; the second, from the consequences of configuring lines.
Because (as has been said) the ratio of P to Q is a ratio of
numbers reduced to lowest terms, P and Q are numbers that
cannot have a single common factor; but (as will be shown)
because the ratio of P to Q is the same ratio that a square’s
diagonal has to its side, P and Q must both be numbers divisible by the number two. That is to say, P and Q are such that
they cannot both be divisible by the same number, and yet
FLAUMENHAFT
21
they also must both be divisible by the number two—a direct
contradiction.
Now we must see just why the latter claim is true. We ask:
why is it, that if any pair of numbers are in that special ratio
which a square’s diagonal has to its side, then both numbers
must be divisible by the number two?
In order to see why, we must first take note of another
fact about numbers: if some number has been multiplied by
itself and the product is an even number, then the number
that was multiplied by itself must itself have been a number
that is even. (The reason is simple. A number cannot be both
odd and even—it must be one or the other—and when two
even numbers are multiplied together, then the number that
is the product is also even; however, when two odd numbers
are multiplied together, then the number that is the product
is not even but odd.) That said, we are now ready to see why
it is that if any two numbers are in that special ratio which a
square’s diagonal has to its side, then they must have the factor two in common.
The numbers P and Q have the factor two in common
because both of them must be even. They must both be even
because each of them when multiplied by itself will give a
product that must be double another number—and therefore
each must itself be double some number. Why?
Look at the left-hand portion of Chart 3, and consider
why P must be an even number. Because the square on the
diagonal is double the square on the side, the number produced when P is taken P times is double the number produced
when Q is taken Q times. Hence (since any number which is
double some other number must itself be even) the multiplication of P by itself produces an even number, and hence the
number P itself must be even.
And now look at the right-hand portion of the chart, and
consider why Q also must be an even number. Since it has
already been shown that P must be an even number, it follows
that there must be another number that is half of P—call this
number H. But because the square on the side is double the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
square on the half-diagonal, it follows that the number produced when Q is taken Q times is double the number produced when H is taken H times. Hence (since, as we said
before, any number which is double some other number must
itself be even) the multiplication of Q by itself produces a
number that is even, and hence the number Q itself must be
even.
Since both P and Q must therefore be even numbers, they
must have the number two as a common factor, even though
they cannot have any number as a common factor. It is therefore absurd to say that there is a pair of numbers like P and
Q. And hence there cannot be a pair of numbers like that K
and L which we supposed that there could be.
If a pair of numbers did in fact have the same ratio that
the square’s diagonal has to its side, then no matter how
many times we halved both numerical terms in the ratio, both
terms that we got would have to remain even. But no pair of
numbers can be like that. Each number of the pair would
have to contain the number two as a factor in endless supply.
Such a ratio would be irreducible to lowest terms, because no
matter how many common two’s we were to strike as factors
from the terms of the ratio, there would still have to be yet
FLAUMENHAFT
23
another two in each. No number, however, can contain an
endless supply of factors.
It is therefore self-contradictory to say that any ratio can
be a ratio of one number to another and also be the ratio of a
square’s diagonal to its side. To avoid being led into absurdity,
we must say that a square’s diagonal and its side are incommensurable.
The diagonal of a square and its side are not the only pair
of lines that are incommensurable. In the tenth proposition of
the Tenth Book of the Elements, Euclid begins to show us
how to find many incommensurable lines. After presenting
thirteen sorts of them, he concludes the Tenth Book by saying that from what he has presented, there arise innumerably
many others.
That makes it hard to say what we mean when we say that
one pair of lines is in the same ratio as another pair of lines.
Even if we could somehow ignore the difficulty with the ratio
of a square’s diagonal to its side, other ones like it would still
keep popping up all over the place, since the ratio of a
square’s diagonal to its side is only one of innumerably many
ratios of incommensurable lines. And it is not only with lines
that the difficulty arises. Whatever the kind of magnitudes
that are being compared, whatever it is with respect to which
they are greater or smaller, comparisons of muchness are not
as such reducible to comparisons of manyness. The sizes of
magnitudes cannot always be compared by comparing counts
obtained by measuring. Magnitudes of any kind can be
incommensurable. It is true that one cube may have to
another, or one weight may have to another, the same ratio
that three has to five, for example; but the one cube may have
to the other, or the one weight may have to the other, the
same ratio that a square’s diagonal has to its side.
Magnitudes are called “incommensurable”—incapable of
being measured together—not when they are of different
kinds, but rather when they are not measurable by the same
unit even though they are of the very same kind. Two magnitudes may be of the very same kind and yet it may be true that
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
whatever unit measures either one of them will not measure
the other one too. By a unit’s “measuring” a magnitude, we
mean that when the unit is multiplied (that is, when it is taken
some number of times), it can equal that magnitude.
Therefore, when magnitudes of the same kind are incommensurable, one of them has to the other a ratio that is not
the same as any numerical ratio.
The demonstrable existence of incommensurability
means that comparisons of size can only be approximated by
using numbers. We can, to be sure, be ever more exact—even
as exact as we please—but if we wish to speak with absolute
exactness, numbers fail us.
For the ancient Pythagoreans, who were the first to conceive of the world as thoroughly mathematical, knowledge of
the world was knowledge of numerical relationships. In the
world stretching out around us, the Pythagoreans saw correlations between shapes and numbers, such as we encountered
when we considered kinds of numbers, “square” numbers
and “cube” numbers, for example.
The Pythagoreans noted also that the movements of the
heavenly bodies take place in cycles. Their changes in position, and their returns to the same configuration, have
rhythms related by recurring numbers that we get by watching the skies and counting the times. With numbers, the
world goes round. We are surrounded by a cosmos. (Cosmos
is the Greek word for a “beautiful adornment.”) The beauty
on high appears to us down here in numbers.
But even the qualitative features of the world of nature
show a wondrous correlation with numbers: numbers make
the world sing. It is not merely that rhythm is numerical, it is
that tone or at least pitch, is too. If a string stretched by a
weight is plucked, it gives off some sound. The pitch of the
sound will be lowered as the string is lengthened. If another
string is plucked (a string of the same material and thickness,
and stretched by the same weight) then the longer the string
the lower will be the pitch of the sound produced by plucking it. Now, what set the Pythagoreans thinking was the rela-
FLAUMENHAFT
25
tion between numbers and harmony. (Harmonia is the Greek
word for “the condition in which one thing fits another”; a
word from carpentry thus is used to describe music.) When
the lengths of two strings of the sort just mentioned are
adjusted so that one of them has to the other the same ratio
that one small number has to another, or to the unit, then
there is music. With the Pythagoreans’ mathematicization of
music, mathematical physics begins.
Thus not only were the sights on high seen to be an
expression of mathematical relationships, so were the sounds
down here that enter our souls and powerfully move what
lies deep down within us. Thinking that nature is a display of
numerical relationships, and that human souls are gotten into
order by attending to those relationships, the Pythagoreans
formed societies that sought to shape the thinking of the
political societies of their time by being the givers of their
laws. It is said that when the discovery of incommensurability was first revealed to outsiders, thus making public the
insufficiency of number, the man who thus had undermined
the Pythagorean enterprise was murdered.
But never mind the whole wide world; even the relationships of size in mere geometrical figures cannot be understood simply in terms of multitudes. If geometry could in fact
be simply arithmeticized; if we could just measure lines
together, getting numbers which we could then just multiply
together, and thus simply express as equations all the relationships that we have to handle, then much in Euclid, in
Apollonius, and in the other classical mathematicians that is
difficult to handle could be handled much more easily—and
Descartes in the seventeenth century would not have had to
undertake a radical transformation of geometry. Instead of
manipulating equations, however, we must in the study of
classical mathematics learn to deal with non-numerical ratios
of magnitudes, and with boxes that are built from lines
devised to exhibit those ratios.
However, before we can freely deal with ratios, we must
learn what can be meant by calling two ratios the same—even
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
when they are not the same as some numerical ratio. Euclid
tells us that in the Fifth Book of the Elements. That is long
before his discussion of number, which does not take place
until the Seventh Book, thus raising a question about what
kind of a teacher he is: after all, is it not a principle of good
teaching that questions should be raised before answers are
presented?
Incommensurability is responsible for the difficulty of
Euclid’s definition of sameness of ratio for magnitudes, as
well as for the difficulty that modern readers encounter in the
classical presentation of relationships of size generally. Let us
now look at that definition.
Part Four
Muchness Related After All: Euclid’s Definition of Same
Ratio
We insist that even when two magnitudes are incommensurable, their ratio can be the same as the ratio of two other
incommensurable magnitudes. For example, we insist that the
ratio which one square’s diagonal has to its side is the same
ratio which another square’s diagonal has to its own side.
Sameness of ratio for magnitudes is therefore not to be
defined in terms of measuring magnitudes: we could so define
it only if we could divide each of the magnitudes into pieces,
each equal to some magnitude that is small enough to be a
suitable unit, and then, when we counted up all of those small
equal pieces, we found no left-over unaccounted-for evensmaller piece of either of the magnitudes; but we cannot do
that with magnitudes that are incommensurable. Although we
can say that two ratios of magnitudes are the same as each
other if they are both the same as the same ratio of numbers,
we will not say that they are the same as each other only if
they are both the same as the same ratio of numbers.
What, then, is to be said instead? According to Euclid,
this: “Magnitudes are said to be in the same ratio, the first to
the second and the third to the fourth, when, if any equimultiples whatever be taken of the first and third, and any equi-
FLAUMENHAFT
27
multiples whatever of the second and fourth, the former equimultiples alike exceed, are alike equal to, or alike fall short of,
the latter equimultiples respectively taken in corresponding
order.”
When Euclid says for ratios of magnitudes, what sameness is, it is very difficult at first to understand just what he
means. While his definition may be the proper departure
point on a road that we need to travel, for a beginner it seems
to constitute a locked gate.
A key to open that locked gate, however, is this fact:
while there is no ratio of numbers that is the same as a ratio
of incommensurable straight lines, nonetheless every ratio of
numbers is either greater or less than such a ratio of straight
lines. That is to say: whatever ratio of numbers we may take,
we can decide whether the ratio of one line to another is
greater or less than it.
For example, we might ask: which is greater—the ratio of
the one line to the other, or the ratio of seven to twelve? We
would divide the second line into twelve equal parts, and
then take one of those pieces in order to measure the first
line. Suppose that this first line, although it may be longer
than six of these pieces put together, turns out to be shorter
than seven of them. We would conclude that the first line has
to the other line a ratio that is less than the numerical ratio of
seven to twelve.
Let us consider the ratio of lines that has been of such
concern to us, the ratio which a square’s diagonal has to its
side. And let us take the following ratio of numbers: the ratio
which that three has to two. As we have seen, the ratio of
lines that we are considering cannot be the same as any ratio
of numbers whatever; so it must be either greater or else less
than that ratio of numbers which we have taken. Which is it?
It must be less—because if it were greater (that is: if the
diagonal were greater than three-halves of the side), then the
diagonal taken two times would have to be greater than the
side taken three times. But if that were so, then a new square
whose side was the diagonal of the original square would
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
have to be more than double the original square, as is shown
in Chart 4.
Having thus shown that the ratio of a square’s diagonal to
its side is less than the ratio which three has to two, we could
in like manner also show that the ratio of those two lines is
greater than the ratio that, say, four has to three. And we
could go on showing, for the ratio of any pair of numbers
which we choose, that the ratio of a square’s diagonal to its
side is greater or is less than the ratio of the pair of numbers
chosen.
Indeed, although no ratio of numbers is the same as the
ratio of a square’s diagonal to its side, we can nonetheless
confine this ratio of lines as closely as we please by using pairs
FLAUMENHAFT
29
of ratios of numbers, as follows. (The results are shown in
Chart 5.) Let us divide the square’s side into ten equal parts,
and take such a tenth part as the unit; then the diagonal will
be longer than fourteen of these units but shorter than fifteen
of them; then let us consider what we get when we take as the
unit the side’s hundredth part, and then its thousandth. We
can go on and on in that way, eventually reaching numbers
large enough to give us a pair of number-ratios that differ
from each other as little as we please; we can show it to be
greater than the ever-so-slightly-smaller number-ratio, and
smaller than the ever-so-slightly-greater number-ratio. So,
although the ratio of a square’s diagonal to its side cannot be
the same as any number-ratio, it can be confined between a
pair of number-ratios that differ from each other as little as
we please.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
The question that we want to answer, however, is not
when it is that ratios of magnitudes are almost the same, but
rather when it is that they are the very same—even when they
are not both the same as the same ratio of numbers. The key
to the answer, restating what we said, is this: given any ratio
of magnitudes, any ratio of numbers that is not the same as it
must be either greater than it or smaller.
That gives us the following answer: given two ratios of
magnitudes, they will be the same as each other (whether or
not they are the same as some ratio of numbers) whenever it
is true that—taking any ratio of numbers whatever—if this
ratio of numbers is greater than the one ratio of magnitudes,
then it is also greater than the other; and if it is less than the
one, then it is also less than the other.
Euclid’s definition seems much more complicated than
that, however, because it emphasizes “equimultiples.” Why
does it do that? Because that makes it simpler to compare
ratios of magnitudes with ratios of numbers: taking multiples
is a way to make the comparisons without performing any
divisions. We could in fact get a definition by using division,
but the definition would be clumsier if we did.
Let us put the notion of equi-multiples aside for a
moment, and consider multiples simply, in contradistinction
to divisions into parts.
Suppose, for example, that the ratio of some magnitude
(A) to another magnitude (B) is greater than the ratio of nine
to seven but less than the ratio of ten to seven. This means
that if we divide B into seven equal parts and we use as a unit
(for trying to measure A) one of those seventh parts of B, then
A will turn out to be greater than nine of those parts of B, but
less than ten of them. If A and B happen to be incommensurable, then, no matter how many equal parts into which we
divide B—that is, no matter how small we make the B-measuring unit with which we try to measure A, we will find that
we cannot divide A into pieces of that size without having a
smaller piece left over.
FLAUMENHAFT
31
So, in comparing the ratio of A to B with the numerical
ratio of some multitude m to some multitude n, it is less awkward to speak of A-taken-n-times and of B-taken-m-times
than to speak of the little piece of A that may be left over
when we divide A into m pieces that are each equal to the nth
part of B—or, in other words, the little piece that may be left
over in A, no matter how small are the equal parts into which
we divide B. To make the requisite comparisons, we must
consider multiples of magnitudes, but we need not consider
parts of them; we have to multiply, but we do not also have
to divide. Instead of trying to measure magnitudes together,
by dividing them and counting the parts, we can speak merely
of multiples of the magnitudes.
What we have just now seen is this: to say that the ratio
of magnitude A to magnitude B is either the same as the
numerical ratio of m to n, or is greater or less than it, is to say
that A-taken-n-times is either equal to B-taken-m-times, or is
greater or less than it. Let us take that and put it together with
what we saw earlier—which was this: to say that the ratio of
A to B is the same as the ratio of C to D is to say that whatever numerical ratio you may take (say, of m to n) this ratio
of numbers will not be the same as, or greater than, or less
than one of the ratios of magnitudes unless it is likewise so
with respect to the other one.
All that remains is for multiples of a certain sort to be
brought in—namely, “equi-multiples.” Equimultiples of two
magnitudes are two other magnitudes that are obtained by
multiplying the two original magnitudes an equal number of
times. Here, as Chart 5 shows, both ratios’ antecedent terms
(namely, A and C) are each taken n times, and their consequent terms (namely, B and D) are each taken m times. In
other words, equimultiples (nA and nC) are taken of the first
and third magnitudes (A and C); and also equimultiples (mB
and mD) are taken of the second and fourth magnitudes (B
and D). And m and n are any numbers at all: we are interested
in all the equimultiples of the first and third magnitudes, and
also of the second and fourth ones.
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Now at last we are in a position to see that Euclid’s definition is not so bewildering as might have seemed at first
glance. There are several ways of saying what we can do with
what we have seen. In abbreviated form, they are exhibited in
Chart 7.
FLAUMENHAFT
33
Now in interpreting the chart, just remember that whenever we say “IF something, THEN something else,” that is
equivalent to saying “NOT something UNLESS something
else.” So, the ways laid out in the chart are these:
First way: Staying with ratios, we can say that two ratios
of magnitudes (call them the ratios of A to B, and of C to D)
are the same if, and only if, whatever numerical ratio we may
take (say the ratio that some number called m has to some
other number called n) the following is true: that numerical
ratio which m has to n will not be the same as, or greater
than, or less than one of the two ratios of magnitudes, unless
it is likewise so with respect to the other one.
Second way: We might want to get more explicit by making divisions into equal parts—that is, divide B into n equal
parts and do the same to D (these, B and D, being the conse-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
quent terms of the two ratios). Then the ratios would be the
same if the following is true: antecedent term A will not be
greater than, or less than, or equal to m of those nth parts of
its consequent term B unless the other antecedent term C is
likewise so with respect to that same number m of those nth
parts of its own consequent term D.
Third way: Someone who was willing to do all that
(namely, willing to divide magnitudes into equal parts and
then count them up and compare sizes) might insist on using
fractions to restate that as follows: A will not be greater than,
or less than, or equal to m/nths of B unless C is likewise so
with respect to that same fraction (m/nths) of D.
Fourth, and final way: Rather than getting into the complicated business of dividing, counting divisions, and comparing sizes, even though we can briefly restate it all by using
fractions, we might simply take multiples alone; and then we
would say that the ratios are the same if the following is true:
A-taken-n-times will not be greater than, or less than, or
equal to B-taken-m-times unless C-taken-exactly-as-manytimes-as-A is likewise so with respect to D-taken-exactly-asmany-times-as-B.
Those are several ways to determine, despite incommensurability, when we may say that the ratio of one magnitude
to another is the same as the ratio of a third magnitude to a
fourth one. The first way formulates our initial insight, and
the final way formulates Euclid’s definition of same ratio for
magnitudes. Euclid’s definition, like the others, covers all
ratios of magnitudes, whether or not they are the same as
ratios of multitudes; but, unlike the others, it manages to do
so by speaking simply of multitudes of magnitudes.
Magnitudes and multitudes are not the same as each
other, nor is either of them the same as ratios of them, but
magnitudes and multitudes and their ratios are all, in a way,
alike. How?
In the first place, any two magnitudes of the same kind
are equal, or else one of them is greater than the other; and
likewise, any two multitudes are equal, or else one of them is
FLAUMENHAFT
35
greater than the other. Moreover, any magnitude has a ratio
to any other magnitude of the same kind, just as any multitude has a ratio to another multitude. Finally, any two ratios
(whatever it may be that they are ratios of, whether magnitudes or multitudes) are the same as each other, or else one of
them is greater than the other. This last fact supplies the
insight that enabled Euclid to define same ratio for magnitudes regardless of whether the magnitudes are commensurable.
Euclid’s definition can help us to understand what
enabled Dedekind several thousand years afterward to define
“the real numbers” in terms of “the rational numbers.”
Dedekind found himself in the following situation. In modern times, after proportions containing magnitudes and multitudes had given way to equations containing “real numbers,” there was still some difficulty in saying just what “real
numbers” were. To say much about the matter, it seemed necessary to refer not only to multitudes to which we come by
counting (that is, numbers in the strict sense) but also to magnitudes that we visualize (namely, lines). If we place the
counting numbers along a line (as in the top portion of Chart
8), it is then clear not only where to put all the “rational numbers,” including those which are fractional and those which
are non-positive (as in the middle portion of the chart)—but
also where to put such “irrationals” as “the square root of
two.” To put “the square root of two” in its place, for example, (as in the bottom portion of the chart) just erect a square
that has a side that is a unit long, and swing its diagonal
down.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
But if “the square root of two” is a number, it should be
definable without appealing to visualization. After all, we
need not visualize in order to count, or even to go on to think
up fractions and negatives. That thought troubled Dedekind
as he taught calculus in the nineteenth century, relying upon
appeals to a number-line. He finally saw how to treat “real
numbers” (the modern counterpart of Euclidean ratios of linear magnitudes) in terms of collections of “rational numbers”
(the modern counterpart of Euclidean ratios of numbers),
thus making it more plausible to speak of the “real numbers”
as really numbers.
Reading Dedekind is one way to think about what it
means to rely on a system of “real numbers.” Unless we do
think through the meaning of relying on a system of real
numbers, many of the things we take for granted in the modern world are without foundation.
But does Dedekind’s work simply represent progress
beyond Euclid’s, or are very important differences covered
over by the important similarities between what Dedekind
had his mind on and Euclid his?
Ratios relate multitudes, or magnitudes. Ratios (like multitudes) have homogeneity, and also (like magnitudes) have
continuity; but magnitudes do not have homogeneity, and
multitudes do not have continuity. Ratios themselves are
FLAUMENHAFT
37
therefore not things of the very same sort as the things that
they relate.
Ratios are not things of the same sort as quotients either.
To be sure, ratios are like quotients in that they are quantitative. Like any two magnitudes of the same sort, or any two
multitudes—or any two quotients—any two ratios (whether
of magnitudes or of multitudes) have an order of size. But
quotients, unlike ratios, are like what they are quotients of: a
quotient is itself a “real number” that is obtained through the
operation of dividing a “real number” by a “real number”; if
A and B are “real numbers,” then the quotient A/B is a “real
number” also.
Yet, although ratios and “real numbers” are things of different sorts, they do have a similarity—and not merely that
they are both quantitative. Although the magnitudes are not
homogeneous, and the multitudes are not continuous, the
ratios are both homogeneous and continuous—and so also
are “the real numbers.”
Part Five
Mathematics and the Modern Mind
In all this, we have been considering the classical handling of
numbers and lines in its difference from modern notions
which conflate the two, but we have not considered what it
was that led to the conflation. That is, indeed, an immensely
important matter, but it is too long a story to be told now. To
tell that tangled tale, one must traverse much of the road that
constitutes the Mathematics Tutorial at St. John’s College.
Along that arduous road, it is easy to be overwhelmed, however, and thus to lose sight of why it is worth our while to traverse it at all—so perhaps at least something should be said
about it now.
Euclid’s Elements prepares us for a higher study in geometry, the Conics of Apollonius. This was, for almost two-anda-half millenia, the classic text on the curves which—following the innovative terminology of Apollonius—came to be
called the “parabola,” the “hyperbola,” and the “ellipse.”
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Apollonius’ conic sections were lines first obtained upon a
plane by cutting a cone in various ways; they were then characterized by relative sizes and shapes of certain boxes formed
by associated straight lines standing in certain ratios. After
Descartes, although the names of those curves persisted, and
they continued to be called collectively “the conic sections,”
they nonetheless eventually ceased to be studied as such: they
came to be studied algebraically. But although Descartes’
Geometry may be in fact what it has been called—the greatest single step in the progress of the exact sciences—no one
could clearly see it as that without studying Apollonius, for
Cartesian mathematics has shaped the world we live in and
shapes our minds as well.
Apollonius tells his tale obliquely. He does not give us
questions, but rather gives us only answers that are too hard
to sort out and remember unless we ourselves figure out what
questions to ask. About Apollonius as a teacher we must ask
whether his work is informed by wisdom and benevolence.
Descartes did not think so. In his own Geometry, and in his
sketch of rules for giving direction to the native wit,
Descartes found fault with the ancient mathematicians.
Descartes severely criticizes them—for being show-offs.
He says that they made analyses in the course of figuring
things out, but then, instead of being helpful teachers who
show their students how to do what they themselves had
done, they behaved like builders who get rid of the scaffolding that has made construction possible. Thus they sought to
be admired for conjuring up one spectacular thing to look at
after another, without a sign of how they might have found
and put together what they present.
Descartes also suggests, however, that they did not fully
know what they were doing. They did not see that what they
had could be a universal method. They operated differently
for different sorts of materials because they treated materials
for operation as simply objects to be viewed. Hence they
learned haphazardly, rather than methodically, and therefore
they did not learn much. Mathematics for them was a matter
FLAUMENHAFT
39
of wonderful spectacle rather than material for methodical
operation. The characteristic activity of the ancient mathematicians was the presentation of theorems, not the transmission and application of the ability to solve problems.
They had not discovered the first and most important
thing to be discovered: the significance of discovery. They
had not discovered the power that leads to discovery and the
power that comes from discovery. They were not aware that
the first tools to build are tools for making tools. They were
too clever to be properly simple, and too simple to be truly
clever. They were blinded by a petty ambition. Too overcome
by their ambition, they could not be ambitious on the greatest scale.
Were the ancient mathematicians as teachers guilty of the
charges set out in that Cartesian critique? Were they guilty of
the obtuseness of which Descartes in his Geometry accused
them—were they guilty of the desultory fooling-around and
disingenuous showing-off of which Descartes had accused
them earlier, in his Rules? You cannot know unless you study
them.
In any case, the study of Euclid and Apollonius gives
access to the sources of the tremendous transformation in
thought whose outcome has been the mathematicization of
the world around us and the primacy of mathematical physics
in the life of the mind. Scientific technology and technological science have depended upon a transformation in mathematics which made it possible for the sciences as such to be
mathematicized, so that the exact sciences became knowledge
par excellence. The modern project for mastering nature has
relied upon the use of equations, often represented by graphs,
to solve problems. When the equation replaced the proportion as the heart of mathematics, and geometric theoremdemonstration lost its primacy to algebraic problem-solving,
an immense power was generated. It was because of this that
Descartes’ Geometry received that accolade of being called
the greatest single step in the progress of the exact sciences.
To determine whether it was indeed such a step, we need to
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
know what it was a step from as well as what it was a step
toward. We cannot understand what Descartes did to transform mathematics unless we understand what it was that
underwent the transformation. By studying classical mathematics on its own terms, we prepare ourselves to consider
Descartes’ critique of classical mathematics and his transformation not only of mathematics but of the world of learning
generally—and therewith his work in transforming the whole
wide world.
It is in the study of Apollonius on the conic sections that
the modern reader who has been properly prepared by reading Euclid can most easily see both the achievement of classical mathematics and the difficulty that led Descartes and his
followers to turn away from it.
It all has to do with ratio, and with notions of number
and of magnitude. For Apollonius, as for Euclid before him,
the handling of ratios is founded upon a certain view of the
relation between numbers and magnitudes. When Descartes
made his new beginning, almost two millenia later, he said
that the ancients were handicapped by their having a scruple
against using the terms of arithmetic in geometry. Descartes
attributed this to their not seeing clearly enough the relation
between the two mathematical sciences. Before modern readers can appreciate why Descartes wanted to overcome the
scruple, and what he saw that enabled him to do it, they must
be clear about just what that scruple was. Readers must, at
least for a while, make themselves at home in a world where
how-much and how-many are kept distinct, a world which
gives an account of shapes in terms of geometric proportions
rather than in terms of the equations of algebra. For a while,
readers must stop saying “AB-squared,” and must speak
instead of “the square arising from the line AB”; they must
learn to put ratios together instead of multiplying fractions;
they must not speak of “the square root of two.”
Mathematical modernity gets under way with Descartes’
Geometry. By homogenizing what is studied, and by making
the central activity the manipulative working of the mind,
FLAUMENHAFT
41
rather than its visualizing of form and its insight into what
informs the act of vision, Descartes transformed mathematics
into a tool with which physics can master nature. He went
public with his project in a cunning discourse about the
method of well conducting one’s reason and seeking the truth
in the sciences; and this discourse introduced a collection of
scientific try-outs of this method, the third and last of which
was his Geometry.
For those who study Euclid and Apollonius in a world
transformed by Descartes, many questions arise: What is the
relation between the demonstration of theorems and the solving of problems? What separates the notions of how-much
and how-many? Why try to overcome that separation by the
notion of quantity as represented by a number-line? What is
the difference between a mathematics of proportions, which
arises to provide images for viewing being, and a mathematics of equations, which arises to provide tools for mastering
nature? How does mathematics get transformed into what
can be taken as a system of signs that refer to signs—as a symbolism which is meaningless until applied, when it becomes a
source of immense power? What is mathematics, and why
study it? What is learning, and what promotes it?
With minds that are shaped by the thinking of yesterday
and of the days before it, we struggle to answer the questions
of today, in a world transformed by the minds that did the
thinking. We will proceed more thoughtfully in the days
ahead if we have thought through that thinking for ourselves.
Our scientific past is not passé.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
43
The Husserlian Context of
Klein’s Mathematical Work
Burt C. Hopkins
I have to begin my remarks with the admission of my ignorance about their ultimate topic, which is neither Edmund
Husserl’s nor Jacob Klein’s philosophy of mathematics nor,
for that matter mathematics itself, but numbers. I do not
know what numbers are. To be sure, I can say and read, usually with great accuracy, the numerals that indicate the prices
of things, street addresses, what time it is, the totals on my
pay stubs, the typically negative balance in my checkbook at
the end of each month, and so on. Moreover, I know how to
count and calculate with them, though usually with less accuracy no matter how much I try to concentrate on what I am
doing.
But if I am asked or try to think about what they are
when, for instance, I say my address is six hundred fifty-three
Bell Street, or that my house has two bedrooms, or that I only
have twenty bottles of wine left, it is obvious to me that I do
not know what I am talking about. Of course, I know that my
address refers to my abode, that my bedrooms are the rooms
in the house with beds, and that my wine is something I drink
solely for its medicinal purposes. But the six hundred fiftythree, the two, or the twenty, what are they? I do not know.
Likewise, if I am asked or try to think about what the
numbers are with which I calculate, when for instance I think
that because I need one-half pound of steak per person to
feed each of my dinner guests, that I expect five guests, and
that therefore I need two and a half pounds to feed my guests,
Burt Hopkins is Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University, and is Secretary
of the International Circle of Husserl scholars. He is the author of a book,
forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin Press, entitled Edmund Husserl
and Jacob Klein on the Origination of the Logic of Symbolic Mathematics:
An Inquiry into the Historicity of Meaning.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
or when I think that the price of two and a half pounds of
steak, at eight ninety-nine per pound is twenty-two dollars
and forty-seven and a half cents, I know well enough what
dinner guests, steak, and dollars and cents are. But the one
half and the eight ninety-nine with which I calculate, and the
two and a half and twenty-two and forty-seven and a half that
are the results of my calculations, what are they? I do notknow.
Some among us will say and, indeed have already said for
a long time, that numbers, any numbers, are amounts of
things, specifically, amounts of whatever it is that we count in
order to answer the question how many of the things in question there are. In my examples above, to talk or think about
two as the amount of my bedrooms, twenty as the amount of
my bottles of wine, five as the amount of my dinner guests,
eight ninety-nine as the amount of money it takes to buy a
pound of steak, twenty-two and forty-seven and a half as the
amount of money it takes to buy two and a half pounds of
steak, certainly does seem to make sense. But what about my
house address? Is six hundred fifty-three the answer to the
question of how many of my house? Or is the one half pound
of steak needed to feed each dinner guest the answer to the
question how many of pounds of steak? The numbers here do
not straight away appear to be telling us how many houses my
house is, since the answer to that question is that it is not
many at all but one; neither do numbers tell us how many
pounds of steak are needed to feed each dinner guest because
each does not need many pounds at all but only a half a
pound. And, to complicate things deliberately, let us consider
what it means, numerically speaking, if I have a negative balance in my checkbook at the end of the month. Whatever the
amount of the negative number, let us hypothetically say it is
an even negative one hundred six dollars, that certainly does
not seem to provide the answer to the question of how many
dollars and cents I have.
For the moment, however, let us push these concerns
aside and assume that a number really is the amount of some-
HOPKINS
45
thing. Moreover, let us suppose that the amount of something
or its number first makes sense to us when we count more
than one of something. Finally, let us suppose that any group,
that is, any collection of more than one of something, no matter how big, has a number, which is to say, an exact or definite amount that answers the question how many with
respect to the things in the group, and that this can be arrived
at by counting. Does this really answer the question what a
number is? Or, more precisely, does this really answer the
question what numbers are? I say numbers because when we
count we always use more than one number to arrive at the
exact amount of something, even though once we arrive there
we conclude the count by saying a single number.
What, then, are the numbers two, three, seven, or, if I
have a lot of enumerative stamina, five hundred eighteen, that
I say when, having nothing better to do, I count the grains of
sand I have decided to put into separate piles? Or, what are
the numbers two, three, seven, five hundred eighteen, that I
say when I count the crystals of salt that I use to duplicate the
numbers of grains of sand I previously put into piles? The
things counted and therefore their amounts are not the same;
that is to say, an amount of grains of sand and an amount of
salt crystals are different things. But are their numbers the
same? Is the two that is the amount of grains of sand the same
two that is the amount of crystals of salt?
If number is supposed really to be the amount of something, and if the stress is placed on the of something, then
number, as its (the something’s) amount, would be nothing
more or less than the two grains of sand, or, the two crystals
of salt, both of which, being different somethings, would also
be different numbers. This situation would be illustrated were
I to say that there are a number of people I do not know in
the room. If I proceeded to count them, whatever number I
came up with would be not just an exact amount of anything
whatever, but precisely the exact amount of people I do not
know in the room.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
On the other hand, if the stress were placed on the how
many of the amounts in question, then two would indeed be
how many grains of sand and crystals of salt there are in my
smallest piles of each, and therefore their amounts and hence
numbers would indeed be the same. This situation would be
illustrated were I to say all dogs, if they are naturally formed,
have the same number of legs, namely, four. The exact number is the same, though the legs are not, because, silly as it
sounds to say this, different dogs have different legs.
Now some might want to put an end to this whole line of
inquiry, but especially to my last question about whether
numbers of different things are different or the same, by saying that the obvious answer is that what numbers are are
abstract concepts. Hence they are really ideas, ideas that we
can relate to different things when we want to count or want
to apply the results of our calculations. But we do not have
to. Thus I can add 4 to 6 and get 10. I can multiply 10 times
10 and get 100, and so on, without having to think or answer
anybody’s question about 4 of what, or 6 of what, or 10 of
what, and so on. Just as it makes perfect sense to say that 2
plus 2 is 4, it does not make any sense to say 2 plus 3 is 4,
because everybody who can count knows 2 plus 3 is 5.
Perhaps. But perhaps not. And this is where Husserl and
then eventually Klein come in. But first Husserl. It is generally known that Edmund Husserl, the German philosopher
who, as the founder of the so-called phenomenological movement in philosophy, was responsible for one of the two dominant approaches to philosophy in the last century (the other
being so-called analytic philosophy), was originally a mathematician. Known likewise is that his first book, published in
1891, is titled Philosophy of Arithmetic.1 However, the contents of this book are not so well known, because, among
other reasons, soon after its publication both its author and
Gottlob Frege had some very critical things to say about
them.
For our purposes, however, the contents of the book are
more important than their criticism of them. From beginning
HOPKINS
47
to end, the book concerns the answer to the question whether
numbers are really abstract concepts that make perfect sense
without saying or thinking what they are numbers of; or
whether to make sense as numbers, numbers have to be spoken or thought about as being numbers of something. Husserl
began his answer to this question by first distinguishing
between two kinds of numbers, one of which he called
“authentic” and the other “symbolic.” We will discuss the latter first, because even though, as its name suggests, it is the
less authoritative kind of number, it is also the one with
which we are usually more familiar. A number is symbolic in
Husserl’s understanding when the number and the sign used
to designate it are indistinguishable. For example: 3. Most of
us have no doubt been taught or learned that this is the number three rather than what it really is, which is a number sign
or numeral. Indeed, even though most of us are also aware of
other numerals, for instance, Roman numerals, my suspicion
is that when we see such numerals we immediately interpret
what they really mean in terms of our numeral system, a system that was actually invented by the Arabs. A symbolic number, then, is a number that most of us—with or without thinking about it—identify with the sign that we either write or
read.
Most of us, that is, unless we have thought about the fact
that the signs used to designate numerals, and therefore these
numerals themselves, are based on what were originally and
still remain conventions, even if they are no longer recognized as such. Different conventions mean different numerals, as we have just seen. But what about the numbers? Do
different numerals mean different numbers? Many when
faced with this question conclude no. Their thinking here is
that numbers remain the same, however different the numerals that express them, because numbers are really concepts.
Hence, no matter what numeral or word is used to express
the number three, ‘three’ is a concept that remains the same
because it is not identical with some numeral (which is subject to change) or with a word from some language (which is
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
subject to variability). Moreover, for just this reason number
is a properly abstract concept: it remains identical with itself
no matter what sign or word is used to express it.
Despite the sophistication of this view of number, it is
dead wrong according to Husserl, because if numbers were
really abstract concepts in this sense, then the most basic
operation of arithmetic—addition—becomes unintelligible.
For instance, if in adding the number two to the number two,
what we are really adding is the abstract concept of the number two to another (!) abstract concept of the number two,
then arriving at their putative sum, the abstract concept
‘four’, becomes a great mystery. Most obviously, there is the
problem of how a concept that is supposed to remain identical can nevertheless change into another concept that is also
supposed to remain identical. That is, the abstract concept
‘two’ is not supposed to be able to change as words and signs
can and do, but to remain what it is, namely, the number two.
Yet precisely this supposition has to be abandoned if talk of
adding the concept of two to the concept of two to get the
concept of four is to make sense, since when the number two
is added to the number two the sum is not two number twos
but the number four.
Indeed, it is precisely this consideration that led Husserl
to the realization that authentic numbers are not abstract concepts. This is, admittedly, a difficult thought. What, then, are
they, these authentic numbers, if they are not abstract concepts? Husserl’s answer is that they are the definite amounts
of definite things that have been grouped together by the
mind. What kind of things? Literally any kind. What definite
amounts? Pretty much the first ten, namely two, three, four,
five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Why are zero and one not
among these? Because they are not definite amounts, which in
the case of zero is obvious, while in the case of one is less so
but still fairly obvious, since one is not an amount; it is not
many. What has the mind to do with authentic numbers?
Plenty for Husserl, since not only do authentic numbers first
show up in counting, but also, only those definite things can
HOPKINS
49
be counted that have been grouped together by it to compose
what Husserl, and as we shall also see, ancient Greek philosophers and mathematicians, called a multiplicity. Moreover—
and this is the most important consideration for our purposes—an authentic number really is something that manifestly cannot be found in either the reality of the definite
things that are counted or in any relationship among them.
This last point requires closer scrutiny. If we ask how is it
that the first authentic number, two, is able to register a definite amount of definite things as ‘two’, in the sense that in
saying or thinking the number two, the things in question are
recognized as being exactly two with regard to their number,
we are then asking about something that is different from the
things that this number numbers as two. Husserl, following a
long philosophical and mathematical tradition, refers to what
is asked about in this question as the unity of this number. In
asking it, we are asking how it is that distinct things, in this
case two of them, can nevertheless be brought together as
precisely this, namely, the two that is articulated by the number two. This all-important question about the unity of
authentic numbers becomes more explicit when we consider
Husserl’s reason for thinking that only the first ten or so definite amounts can be authentic numbers. Husserl’s reason is
deceptively simple: the mind can only apprehend—all at
once—each of the definite items that are numbered in a number when these things do not exceed ten. When the amount
of definite things in a multiplicity of things exceeds ten, each
one of them cannot be apprehended all at once by the mind
as when, for instance, it counts thirty of them.
These considerations, do not provide us yet with
Husserl’s answer to the question of the unity of authentic
numbers, but only address what is at stake in it. What is at
stake is that in registering the definite amount of definite
things, an authentic number is bringing them together in a
way that cannot be explained by each of the things so brought
together, no matter whether these are considered by themselves or as each relates to the other things. Each considered
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by itself cannot explain it for the simple reason that authentic numbers are always amounts of something that is more
than one. Considering the relations among things cannot
explain it either—they may be side by side, or on top of, or
bigger and smaller than one another, and so on, because none
of these relations is even remotely numerical. Each definite
thing, as one thing, can only be registered as having a number by being brought together with other definite things, each
of which is also one, a bringing together which does not
apprehend the things brought together singly but precisely as
all together.
Husserl’s explanation of how the mind does this is as simple as it is remarkable. The mind combines things into groups
or collections in such a way that what is grouped or collected
forms a whole that is different from the group members or
collected items, even though as the whole of just these members or items, it is clearly related to them. For example, in a
row of trees, a gaggle of geese, or a flock of birds, what is
named by the row, gaggle, and flock is the whole Husserl has
in mind, a whole that cannot be separated from what it is a
whole of any more than it can be identified totally with it.
Authentic numbers for Husserl are also comprised of wholes
like this, so that the whole of the number three is clearly
related to each of the things it registers as three, without,
however, its being totally identical with them. Two distinct
but related things are involved for Husserl here. One is the
fact that there are groups and collections of this kind, and the
other is that they have their origin in the mind. The talk
about the mind’s involvement in originating groups and collections of things does not mean that these things are only figments of the mind. Husserl only mentions the mind to
explain something very specific, the fact that the unity, the
whole of authentic numbers that we have been talking about,
is neither an abstract concept nor something that can be
explained by the definite things it registers as to their exact
number. Once this is recognized, and only once it is recognized, are we then in a position to understand why Husserl
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tried to explain this unity—this being a whole—of authentic
numbers by the way the mind organizes and grasps things as
groups and collections.
Husserl is very specific about this. The mind considers
each thing that it groups or collects as something that belongs
to the whole of whatever it is grouping and collecting. In the
case of authentic numbers, it considers each as something, a
certain one, without attending in the slightest to any other
qualities that belong to what it collects. This is the case
because unlike other groups and collections, which are
groups of something specific, for example, geese or trees,
authentic numbers are wholes of quite literally anything
whatever. The moons of Jupiter, Homer’s psyche, the city of
Annapolis, etc., can be collected together and the collection
registered as an authentic number—so long, of course, as the
amount in the collection does not get too big. The process of
forming authentic numbers, as well as other kinds of groups
and collections, is expressed in language according to Husserl
by the word “and,” although both this process and the wholes
it generates are for him most decidedly not anything linguistic. Hence the formation of a group, such as the group or
whole of students in a room, comes about when one student
and one student and one student and one student, and so on,
are collected by the mind. Note well, however, that in this
example not just anything can be grouped together, but only
what belongs to the whole that is being grouped, namely, students. Likewise, the formation of a collection, the whole of
which is the red objects in a room, comes about when one of
any kind of red object and one of any kind of red object and
one of any kind of red object, and so on, are collected by the
mind. Again, as in the whole that is a group, not just anything
can be collected. Finally, the formation of a collection, the
whole of which is its number, comes about when something
and something are collected, and then the process is stopped.
More precisely, when the process of collecting is stopped
after something and something are collected, the first authentic number, two, is the result. Likewise, when something and
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something, and something are collected, the authentic number three is the result, and so on, until the limit of authentic
numbers, ten, comes about.
Authentic numbers, then, are just such collections of
something, which is to say, of anything that can be considered
as simply one thing, without any other qualities or determinations of it being relevant to its belonging to a collection
that is numbered. Since its being just one is the only thing relevant here, Husserl follows a long tradition and refers to
these collected ones as “units.” Because authentic numbers
are amounts of units, Husserl can explain on their basis what
the understanding of numbers as abstract concepts cannot,
namely, addition. Adding two and two involves the combination of ‘one unit and one unit’ with ‘one unit and one unit’,
and hence, there is no mystery here, since ‘one unit and one
unit, added to ‘one unit and one unit’, yields ‘one unit and
one unit, and one unit, and one unit’, which is the authentic
number four.
Before considering what Husserl thinks happens to numbers when their number exceeds ten and they are no longer
authentic, let us step back for a minute. I have been talking
now for some time about something I have acknowledged my
ignorance of, namely, what numbers are. After considering
two common views of them—one that considers them to be
amounts of something and the other that considers them to
be abstract concepts—I have turned our attention to the contents of Husserl’s book on the philosophy of arithmetic. The
very question it attempts to answer is which of these two
views of number is correct. So far I have pointed out that
Husserl begins this investigation by distinguishing between
authentic and symbolic numbers, both of which we have now
discussed in some detail. Indeed, at this point it might seem
that Husserl’s answer to the question of whether numbers are
amounts of something or abstract concepts is pretty obvious,
since authentic numbers can explain what abstract conceptual
numbers cannot, namely, the basic operations of arithmetic.
However, things are not that simple because when we con-
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53
sider numbers greater than ten, Husserl thinks that they
become inauthentic, as they cannot be authentic. They cannot
be authentic, it will be recalled, because the mind cannot
grasp more than ten things all at once. Symbolic numbers on
Husserl’s understanding are therefore also in this sense inauthentic.
Even though they are inauthentic, however, symbolic
numbers are not inferior, mathematically speaking, to authentic ones for Husserl. On the contrary, because they deal with
numbers larger than ten, they come in handy any time calculation with large numbers is required, since without them, we
would be reduced to counting units when we calculate with
such numbers, which no doubt would be both tedious and
time consuming. At the time Husserl wrote his first book,
mathematicians and philosophers wanted an explanation
how it was possible to do what no one denies can be done: to
calculate with inauthentic numbers, which are symbolic and
so in some sense are abstract concepts. In the first ten chapters of The Philosophy of Arithmetic, Husserl attempted to
prove that authentic numbers and symbolic numbers are logically equivalent because each refers to the same objects,
specifically, the collections of more than one unit that authentic numbers register the first ten amounts of. He argued that
authentic numbers do this directly and symbolic numbers
indirectly. When Husserl reached chapter eleven, however, he
realized something that shook him to his depths, quite literally. (He later recounted a decade-long depression that
ensued as a result.) He realized not only that symbolic numbers did not refer to the same objects as authentic ones—to
collections of units—but also that the basic operations with
quantities that are known, what he called general arithmetic,
could only be explained on the basis of the very opposite of
what he had argued in the first ten chapters. General arithmetic only makes sense if the numbers it uses are symbolic in
the sense I discussed above, wherein the sign and the numerical concept are identical so that a number is interpreted to be
the sign that we write or read—what Husserl called “sense-
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perceptible” signs. Husserl also realized he had no idea of
how this is possible. As he described it some two decades
later, “how symbolic thinking is ‘possible’, how...mathematical...relations constitute themselves in the mind...and can be
objectively valid, all this remained mysterious.”2
Thus we can say that, while recognizing that some numbers are clearly definite amounts of units and others are
abstract, symbolic concepts because they do not refer to such
units, Husserl came to see that he did not know what either
of them really is. Husserl eventually thought he could solve
this mystery by explaining the manipulation of symbolic
numbers, or, more precisely, number symbols, as well as all
mathematical symbols, in terms of what he called “the rules
of a game,” rules that were invented not by mathematics but
by logic. Mathematics thus came to be understood by Husserl
as a branch of logic. Moreover, Husserl thought that all the
rules invented by logic have their foundation in concepts that
are true of other concepts, these other concepts, in turn,
being true of anything whatever, that is, anything that can be
experienced and therefore thought of as an individual object.
As a consequence, Husserl’s eventual explanation of how
symbolic mathematics is possible, in The Crisis of European
Sciences, was really not so far from his failed first attempt at
explanation. To be sure, his later explanation does not characterize number symbols as referring to the same objects that
authentic numbers do, namely to units, but it did trace the
truth of the logic that invented the rules for manipulating
them to a basis in individual objects. This, we shall soon see,
is a problem if we follow Jacob Klein’s mathematical investigations, which I am going to suggest can best be followed by
first considering their Husserlian context.
The bulk of Klein’s mathematical investigations are contained in his Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of
Algebra, which as many of you know was originally published
in German as two long articles in 1934 and 1936 and translated into English in 1968 by St. John’s tutor and former
Dean of the College, Eva Brann.3 The historical nature of the
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55
topic announced by its title might initially seem to be far
removed from what we now know is the systematic nature of
Husserl’s topic in Philosophy of Arithmetic. However, one
does not need to read very far in Klein’s book to discover that
he understands the key to the historical investigation of his
topic to lie precisely in the distinction between symbolic and
non-symbolic numbers. Specifically, he expresses the view
from the start not only that the symbolic number concept is
something that makes modern, algebraic mathematics possible, but also, that symbolic numbers were entirely unknown
to ancient Greek mathematicians and philosophers. The very
point of departure for Klein’s investigation of the origin of
algebra is therefore informed by his view that unless the nonequivalence of ancient Greek numbers and modern symbolic
numbers is recognized, the change in the nature of the very
concept of number that took place with the transformation of
classical mathematics into modern mathematics in the sixteenth century will go unrecognized.
Klein’s thought here can be made clearer by closely considering precisely how he characterizes the difference
between the ancient Greek numbers and the modern symbolic ones. Ancient Greek numbers or arithmoi are manifestly
not abstract concepts, but rather beings that determine definite amounts of definite things. In contrast, symbolic numbers
are characterized by him to be abstract concepts that do not
refer to anything definite except that which is referred to by
their sense-perceptible signs. When we consider the fact that
Husserl articulated the difference between authentic and
symbolic numbers in precisely these terms, the resemblance
between Klein’s and Husserl’s view of the distinction between
symbolic and non-symbolic numbers is striking. So striking is
it in fact that some have drawn the conclusion that Husserl
should be given precedence in this matter, as either the source
or the major influence on Klein’s formulation of the distinction in question.4 These matters, however, are not so simple.
To begin, it is important to keep in mind that Husserl
sought in Philosophy of Arithmetic to demonstrate the logical
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equivalence of non-symbolic and symbolic numbers, whereas
Klein’s book begins with the insight that this is impossible, an
insight, as we have seen, Husserl arrived at only reluctantly.
Moreover, subsequent to his first book Husserl explains the
relationship between symbolic and authentic numbers as a
matter of logic. In his Logical Investigations (1900) and
Formal and Transcendental Logic (1927), the relationship is
explained as a matter of the translation of logical truths into
rules for the manipulation of symbols. Logical truths for
Husserl are rooted in concepts that are true of other concepts, other concepts that, in turn, can be traced back to
truths that are rooted in individual objects. Husserl calls the
rules established on the basis of this logic the “rules of a
game,” because even though they permit calculational operations on symbols that yield mathematically correct results,
these operations and hence the very process of symbolic calculation have nothing to do with insight into concepts that
pertain to the objects to which they are ultimately related,
and therefore nothing to do with real knowledge. In a word,
Husserl thought he resolved the issue of symbolic and
authentic numbers by exposing symbolic calculation to be a
“technique” whose cognitive justification can only be provided on the basis of the conceptual knowledge of individual
objects that logic provides.
Klein, however, thought otherwise. He thought that it is
impossible to explain the sharp distinction between non-symbolic and symbolic numbers on the basis of the knowledge—
logical or any other kind—of individual objects. He conducted an historical investigation into how an aspect proper
to ancient Greek arithmoi was transformed into modern symbolical numbers and concluded that the objects referred to by
each kind of number are fundamentally different. The objects
referred to by arithmoi are definite, which is to say, individual. The objects referred to by symbolic numbers are indefinite. They refer neither to individuals nor to their qualities
and are therefore indeterminate. Individual objects, both
Husserl and Klein agree, are objects that we encounter in our
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57
experience of the world and thus, they can be pointed to.
Moreover, their qualities, which either some (general qualities) or all (universal qualities) individual objects share, are
qualities that, even though they are not individual, can nevertheless be spoken about in connection with the individual
objects that we do encounter in the world. For instance, we
can point to dogs and cats, each one of which is therefore
individual. We can also talk about their general or universal
qualities and relate these to the individual dogs and cats that
we encounter in the world. Indeterminate objects, on the
contrary, can never be encountered in our experience of the
world, and therefore they cannnot be pointed to. Husserl and
Klein also agree that because their objects are not determinate
in this very precise sense, symbolic numbers cannot have a
direct relationship to any individual objects in the world or to
their qualities. Finally, both Husserl and Klein agree that symbolic numbers themselves, and not their indeterminate
objects, are nevertheless encountered in the world: namely,
they are encountered as the sense-perceptible signs that, we
mentioned earlier, many of us interpret as numbers.
Where Husserl and Klein disagree, or more accurately,
where Klein would have had to express his departure from
Husserl’s understanding of the relationship between symbolic
and non-symbolic numbers, had he chosen to do so, has to do
with the possibility of theoretically clarifying the philosophical meaning of symbolic numbers. Husserl thought this could
be done—indeed, he thought he did it in his two books on
logic. Klein did not think it could be done. In fact, as we shall
see, Klein’s mathematics book explains why the very attempt
to clarify theoretically the philosophical meaning of symbolic
numbers and mathematical symbolism generally is doomed to
failure. It is so doomed because all the concepts available to
provide such a theoretical clarification, without exception,
only make sense when the philosophers or anyone else using
them are talking about individual objects and their qualities.
Klein explains why this is the case by establishing a fundamental difference in what he calls the “conceptuality”5 of
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the concepts that belong to ancient Greek and modern science. He uses this term to articulate both the way in which
the concepts proper to these respective sciences are structured and the status of their relationship to the non-conceptual realities of both the mind and the world. Klein thinks
that despite the continuity discernable in the technical vocabulary of ancient Greek mathematics and philosophy and their
modern counterparts, the mathematical and philosophical
significance of each of the words in it is nevertheless radically
divergent for the ancients and moderns. Thus in his view the
fundamental significance of words like knowledge, truth,
concept, form, matter, nature, energy, number, and so on is
completely different for the ancient Greeks and the moderns
because of the differences in the respective conceptualities of
each. In other words, Klein thinks that these conceptualities
shape the meaning of words, rather than the other way
around, that is, rather than the significance of words shaping
the structure of the conceptualities.
Klein locates the key example of the shift from the
ancient Greek to the modern conceptuality in the transformation the concept of number undergoes in the sixteenth
century. Prior to Viète’s invention of the mathematical symbol, the concept of number according to Klein always only
meant a definite amount of definite things, a meaning that
was established by the ancient Greeks and that remained
operative in both European mathematics and the Europeans’
everyday praxis of counting and calculation until the invention of algebra. Klein claimed in his book—but did not elaborate—that this transformation is paradigmatic for the conceptuality that structures the modern consciousness of the
world.
Before considering in more detail Klein’s account of this
exemplary transformation of the conceptuality of number, a
few words about the potentially misleading talk of the “concept” of number are in order. Klein engages in such talk when
his investigation is comparing what he refers to as the different “number concepts” of ancient Greek and modern mathe-
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matics. It is potentially misleading because for Klein the most
salient difference between in these number concepts is
located in the fact that the ancient Greek “concept” of number is precisely something that is not at all a concept, but a
being, while the modern “concept” of number is precisely
something that is not a being but a concept. The object of the
word “concept” in these comparative contexts is, I think,
clearly the “conceptuality” of ancient Greek and modern
numbers, which means it would be a mistake to attribute to
Klein in such contexts the thought that in ancient Greek and
modern mathematics numbers are concepts, albeit different
in kind. Klein, however, also talks about the ancient Greek
“arithmos-concept” (arithmos-Begriff or Anzahl-Begriff) and
the modern “number-concept” (Zahl-Begriff), which again is
potentially misleading, for the same reasons. Yet here, too,
careful consideration again discloses that such talk always
occurs within the context of his comparison of what he presents as the different ancient Greek and modern characterizations of numbers, only one of which formulated them as concepts.
Before elaborating Klein’s account of these different characterizations, I want to raise and then answer one more question. From what perspective was Klein able to compare the
ancient Greek and modern numbers? Klein, after all, was neither ancient nor Greek but, by his own admission, thoroughly
modern. How, then, was he able nevertheless to get sufficient
distance from the presuppositions that inform his modernity,
from his modern outlook and consciousness, such that he
could encounter and investigate what, again by his own
admission, are the radically different presuppositions of the
ancient Greeks?
I think the answer to this question can be found in the single reference in Klein’s published work to Husserl’s
Philosophy of Arithmetic.6 It occurs in “Phenomenology and
the History of Science,” an article Klein wrote for a memorial
volume of essays on Husserl’s phenomenology published in
1940, two years after Husserl’s death. In this article Klein did
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not at all hesitate to articulate the philosophical significance
of his 1934 and 1936 investigations of ancient Greek mathematics and the origin of modern algebra in terms of Husserl’s
last writings, which were published in 1936 and1939.7 In
these writings Husserl traces the cause of the crisis of
European sciences to their failure to grasp properly the scope
and limits of scientific methods that are rooted in modern
mathematics for understanding the non-physical, which is to
say human spiritual reality together with the world of its
immediate concerns. I will come back to this theme at the end
of my remarks. I want to focus for now on Klein’s reference
to what he characterizes in this article as Husserl’s “earliest
philosophical problem,” namely “the ‘logic’ of symbolic
mathematics.” He asserts, “The paramount importance of
this problem can be easily grasped, if we think of the role that
symbolic mathematics has played in the development of modern science since the end of the sixteenth century.” Klein concludes his remarks on “Husserl’s logical researches” by saying
that these researches “amount in fact to a reproduction and
precise understanding of the ‘formalization’ which took place
in mathematics (and philosophy) ever since Viète and
Descartes paved the way for modern science.”
Klein’s qualification that Husserl’s logical researches
“amount . . . to” both a “reproduction” and “precise understanding” of the “formalization” in mathematics initiated by
Viète contains the key to my answer to the question. It indicates that Klein, but not Husserl, was aware of the historical
significance of these researches. The result of the “formalization” in mathematics referred to here by Klein concerns the
“indeterminacy” of the object of mathematical symbols that I
called attention to earlier, the absence of any direct reference
to both individual objects and their general and universal
qualities that is the mathematical symbols’ most salient characteristic. Because Klein thought Husserl’s logical researches
in Philosophy of Arithmetic amount in fact to the reproduction and precise understanding of the historical genesis of this
formalization, it would follow from this that Klein under-
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stood that work’s investigation of the relationship between
authentic and symbolic numbers to mirror what his own
research presents as the relationship between the ancient
Greek arithmos and the modern symbolic number.
This being the case, the question of image and original
suggested by my mirror metaphor arises, namely, did
Husserl’s investigations mirror Klein’s or Klein’s Husserl’s?
Here I think chronology is relevant, which would suggest that
what enabled Klein to encounter the presuppositions of both
his own modern as well as the ancient Greek conceptuality
was Husserl’s reluctant discovery in Philosophy of Arithmetic
that the formal conceptual status of symbolic numbers cannot
be rendered intelligible in terms of authentic numbers. By
saying this, however, I want to emphasize in the strongest
terms possible that I am not suggesting what some others
have suggested, namely, that what makes Klein’s comparison
of the conceptuality of the ancient Greek and modern numbers possible is his projection of Husserl’s “concepts” of
authentic and symbolic numbers back into the history of
mathematics.8 On the contrary, I want to suggest and then
develop a much more subtle and more radical claim.
Husserl’s failure provided Klein with the guiding clue that
enabled him to trace and illuminate certain historical dimensions of that very failure. Klein detected an historical transformation of non-symbolic numbers: an aspect of their conceptuality was transformed into symbolic numbers. This discovery resulted in a more definitive philosophical account of
both kinds of numbers. Moreover, Klein discovered something of which Husserl had not the slightest inkling, namely,
that the formal conceptuality of symbolic numbers, and symbolic conceptuality in general, cannot be made intelligible on
the basis of theoretical concepts traceable to ancient Greek
science. And that discovery highlighted something more ominous: built into symbolic cognition is the misguided selfunderstanding that evaluates its own cognitive status as the
ever-increasing perfection of ancient Greek science’s theoretical aspirations.
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Klein’s account of the origination of algebra is really the
story of the simultaneous invention of the mathematical symbol, the symbolic formulae it makes possible, and the resultant novel art of symbolic calculation. It is a story with a such
a complex array of intricate subplots and such a diverse cast
of characters that it is not always easy to follow the action,
especially given its approximately two-thousand-year time
span. It is also a difficult story to follow, since not only are
there really no good and bad guys to identify with or to dislike, but its beginning as well as its ending is obscure. The
action takes place, for the most part, in the realm of pure
beings and pure concepts, a realm that is invisible to the eyes
and in which all the actors are likewise invisible and therefore, with some justification, referred to by many as
“abstract.” Despite its otherworldly aura, it is a story well
worth trying to follow because what it is about is the origin
of the mistaken identity of the very technique that has
enabled mathematical physics and the technology spawned
from it quite literally to transform the world. Unraveling the
plot is an exercise in discovering the true identity of this technique and, in the process, rediscovering something essential
about our relation to the world that the events surrounding
the technique’s origination continue to make it easy for us to
forget.
Turning now to the story: we have already seen that nonsymbolic and symbolic numbers are key players in Klein’s
tale. Guided by our discussion of Husserl’s account of them,
we are in a position to see what it means to say with Klein
that the non-symbolic numbers of the ancient Greeks are not
concepts, let alone abstract concepts: being definite amounts
of definite things, arithmoi were initially understood not only
to be inseparable from things but also to be what is responsible for the well-ordered arrangement proper to all their parts
and qualities. In other words, they were understood by the
Pythagoreans as the very being of everything that is. To be is
to be countable, and because to be countable each thing has
to be one, the one was very important, as was the odd and the
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even, since whatever is counted ends up being odd or even.
The one or the unit (monas), as something without which
counting is impossible, is therefore the most basic principle
(archê) of arithmos. The odd and the even, which order the
arithmos of everything countable, insofar as it has to be one
or the other, manifest the first two kinds (eidê) of arithmoi.
Moreover, since the even can be divided without ever arriving at a final arithmos, while the odd cannot be divided
evenly at all, because a one is always left over, these two kinds
are understood, respectively, as unlimited and limit.
It is important to note here three things, according to
Klein: (1) the arithmoi are inseparable from that which is
countable; (2) the most basic principle as well as the kinds of
arithmoi are not themselves arithmoi. In other words, they
are not numerical if by numerical we understand, as the
ancient Greeks did, number to be a definite amount of definite things; and (3) the arithmoi, being inseparable from what
is countable, are not abstract entities, and because they are
different from both their most basic principle and their kinds,
they are not even remotely “conceptual,” assuming for the
moment that it is even appropriate to use this adjective to
refer to the archê and eidê of arithmoi. It is important to note
these three things because, on Klein’s telling, no matter how
much the ancient Greek characterization of the mode of
being of arithmoi changes in what become, in Plato and
Aristotle, the two paradigmatic ways of its understanding it,
these three things about the arithmoi remain constant. In
Klein’s words, “All these characterizations stem from one and
the same original intuition [Anschauung], one oriented to the
phenomenon of counting.”9
While the discovery of incommensurable magnitudes
brought to an end the Pythagorean dream of a world in which
being counted was identical with being measured, Plato’s
positing of the invisible, indivisible, and therefore sensibly
pure mode of being of the archê of arithmoi brought into
being another dream, the dream of what Klein calls an arithmological ordering of the eidê responsible for arithmoi as
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well as anything else that is a being. As Klein relates it, Plato
realized that the Pythagorean account of the archê of arithmoi, the one or the unit, as something that is quite literally
inseparable from the sensible things that are countable on its
basis, presented an obstacle to understanding the true relation
of arithmoi to the soul when it counts. This is the case
because Plato must have noticed that even before, the soul
counts each one of the definite things that it perceives, it
already has some understanding of the arithmoi it employs in
arriving at the arithmos of such things. According to Klein,
Plato must have thought this possible because prior to counting sensible things the soul has available to it arithmoi that are
definite amounts of intelligible (noêta) units, intelligible in the
sense that they cannot be seen with the eyes, cannot be
divided like the things seen with the eyes, and cannot be
unequal like the things seen by the eyes. Just like the
Pythagoreans’ sensible arithmoi, these intelligible arithmoi
are either odd or even, though unlike the Pythagorean eidê,
those belonging to intelligible arithmoi are likewise intelligible, and thus cannot be seen with the eyes.
Now it has to be stressed here that absolutely nothing is
either abstract or general about Plato’s intelligible arithmoi.
They are not abstract because they are not lifted off anything.
They are not general because they are precisely definite
amounts of definite things, albeit in this case the things are
noeta. Moreover, they are not general because, just like the
Pythagorean arithmoi, they are not concepts: each arithmos is
a definite whole, the unity of which is exactly so and so many
intelligible units. What allows intelligible numbers to be used
in the counting of anything whatever is what Plato’s Socrates
never tired of pointing out to his interlocutors, namely, that
the true referents of our speech, in counting off amounts of
things or in anything else, are not sensible but intelligible
beings. Thus in counting what the soul is really aiming at
when it counts off in speech, the definite amounts of definite
sensible things, things that in being counted are treated as sensible units, are definite amounts of intelligible units. Indeed, it
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is precisely this state of affairs that allows the soul to count
anything that happens to be before it, since the true units of
its counting are not those that can be seen but precisely those
that can only be thought.
Plato’s way of explaining how the availability of intelligible arithmoi to the soul enables it to count anything whatever
means that these intelligible units are manifestly unlike the
units in Husserl’s authentic numbers. Plato’s intelligible units
explain the ability of arithmoi to count anything whatever
because they, and not the “whatever,” are each arithmos’ true
referent. In other words, for Plato—and for that matter, for
all the ancient Greeks including Aristotle10—there is no such
concept of any thing, or any object, or any being whatever.
Such a concept, as we have seen, is explained by Husserl in
terms of an abstracting activity of the mind that is so powerful it is powerful enough to create a concept so general that
literally anything whatever (Etwas überhaupt) can “fall under
it.” This is to say, for Husserl the mind is able to create a formal concept that has absolutely no determinate reference to
any individual thing in the world or to the general and universal qualities of such things. Klein’s point, and in my judgment the point is the fulcrum upon which the story told in his
math book pivots, is that until Viète invented algebra, the
power behind this abstraction—what Klein calls a symbol
generating abstraction—was something that the world had
never seen before.
Husserl’s concept of the units in authentic numbers is
therefore modern, which is something Klein was not only no
doubt aware of, but it is also no doubt the reason why Klein
silently passed over in silence Husserl’s investigations of the
logic of symbolic mathematics. Indeed, Klein’s book also
bypassed any reference to Husserl’s concept of intentionality
when he articulated the difference between the conceptuality
of non-symbolic and symbolic numbers in terms of the mediaeval concept of intentionality, and, again, no doubt it was for
the same reason: a part of the composition of Husserl’s concept of intentionality was already determined by the very for-
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mality that Klein was investigating the origin of, in the shift
from non-symbolic to symbolic numbers. Once this is realized, Klein’s use of the medieval concepts of first and second
intentional objects, rather than Husserl’s concepts of straightforward and categorial intentional objects, to talk about the
difference in the mode of being of non-symbolic and symbolic numbers makes perfect sense.
The transformation of an aspect of the ancient Greek
arithmoi into the modern, symbolic numbers, however, does
not make perfect sense. That is, Klein’s account of the shift in
the referent of ancient Greek and modern symbolic numbers
is something that does not, and indeed cannot, render theoretically transparent the philosophical meaning of either the
shift or the different numbers in question. The characterization of ancient Greek arithmoi in terms of their direct
encounter with either sense perceptible objects encountered
in the world or with intelligible objects encountered in the
soul—what Klein reports the medievals called first-intentional objects—does not explain what such arithmoi are, in
the precise sense of how it is that the different arithmoi render intelligible the different definite amount that characterizes each arithmos. Indeed, Klein never suggests that the concept of a first-intentional object can do this. Likewise, the
characterization of symbolic numbers as having their referent
in the mind’s conception, a conception the medievals called
the object of a second intention, does not render theoretically
perspicuous what symbolic numbers are, either. To characterize symbolic numbers as pertaining to that aspect of arithmoi
that concerns the “how many” of something, while at the
same time no longer pertaining to its exact determination that
each arithmos brings about, does not clarify theoretically
what a symbolic number is. In other words, pointing out that
the conceptuality of symbolic numbers disregards both the
units of the something whose definite amount it is the
province of arithmoi to determine and the exact amount of
these units that each arithmos registers, does not explain
what a symbolic number is—and neither does Klein’s account
HOPKINS
67
of how more than this shift is involved in its conceptuality.
Klein affirms that what is required in order for us to be dealing with a symbolic number is that the second-intentional
mode of being of the “how many,” which brings into the
world for the first time a formal concept because it is now
shorn of any connection to either first-intentional objects or
the exact determination of their amount, be expressed in a
sense-perceptible sign that is grasped by the mind as the object
of a first intention.
What Klein’s talk of objects of first and second intentions
accomplishes is to call attention to something that nobody
else in the twentieth century had seen, namely, that the invention of symbolic cognition represents nothing less than a
reversal of the pre-modern relationship between concepts
and objects: what were concepts for the ancient Greeks are
now objects and what were objects for them are now concepts. Modern “theoretical thinking,” being symbolical, is
thus necessarily blind to this reversal. Ancient “theoretical
thinking,” not being symbolical, is likewise necessarily blind
to it. It does not follow from this, however, that thinking per
se must remain blind to it. On the contrary, for a thinking that
is on its guard against falling victim to the most shameful
ignorance, that is, to thinking it knows what, in truth, no
mortal can know, not only is the shift in conceptuality articulated by Klein something that can be seen, but once seen, it
is something that the soul’s phronesis can never forget.
If we had more time, I would continue my remarks by
calling attention to what I think is the key to Klein’s account
of how something like a symbol generating abstraction was
able to come into the world, namely on the basis of Viète’s,
Stevin’s, Descartes’s, and Wallis’s formulating the method of
an art that permits calculation with what the ancient Greeks
characterized not as arithmoi but as their eidê. And, indeed, I
would call attention to the fact that, for Klein, with this not
only do the true objects of mathematics become conceptual,
that is, formal, but also, such concepts at the same time
become numerical. Finally, I would call attention to the par-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
allel Klein draws between the breaking of the bounds of the
intelligibility proper to the logos that is the result of Plato’s
formulation of the eidê of beings as having an arithmological
structure and the similar breaking of these bounds by Viète’s
numerical formulation of the symbolic calculation with the
species of numbers in symbolic cognition,11 and then ask the
following question: Do both of these attempts to comprehend beings theoretically transcend the limits of what can be
spoken of intelligibly for the same simple reason, namely, that
their theories presuppose a knowledge of what no mortal can
claim in truth really to know, namely that most wondrous gift
of the gods to humans—one and number?
Before I conclude, I would like to return very briefly to
Klein’s memorial essay on Husserl that I mentioned earlier
and to the matter of his articulation in that essay of the philosophical meaning of his mathematical investigations in terms
of Husserl’s of last writings, the so-called crisis texts. It is
important to draw attention here to the chronology of Klein’s
mathematical investigations and Husserl’s last writings,
because it is only in these writings that Husserl connects the
two themes that had already informed Klein’s earlier investigations of the history of mathematical concepts. Prior to
1936, when the second part of Klein’s investigations were
published, Husserl therefore had not yet recognized what
Klein had already recognized, and indeed investigated extensively, guided as I have suggested by Husserl’s first—and
failed—investigation of the relationship between non-symbolic and symbolic numbers. Klein recognized the connection
between the philosophical meaning of mathematical concepts
and the history of their origination.
Notes
Edmund Husserl, Philosophie der Arithmetik, ed. Lothar Eley,
Husserliana XII (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1970), 245; English translation: The Philosophy of Arithmetic, trans. Dallas Willard
(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003).
1
HOPKINS
69
Edmund Husserl, Introductions to the Logical Investigations, ed.
Eugen Fink, trans. Philip J. Bossert and Curtis H. Peters (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), 35. German text, “Entwurf einer
‘Vorrede’ zu den ‘Logischen Untersuchungen’ (1913),” Tijdschrift
voor Philosophie (1939): 106-133, here 127.
2
Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of
Algebra, trans. Eva Brann (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1969;
reprint: New York: Dover, 1992). This work was originally published in German as “Die griechische Logistik und die Entstehung
der Algebra” in Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der
Mathematik, Astronomie und Physik, Abteilung B: Studien, vol. 3,
no. 1 (Berlin, 1934), pp. 18–105 (Part I); no. 2 (1936), pp.
122–235 (Part II). Hereinafter referred to as GMTOA.
3
See the following: Hiram Caton, who claims that “Klein projects
Husserl back upon Viète and Descartes,” (Studi International Di
Filosophia, Vol 3 (Autumn, 1971): 222-226, here 225; J. Phillip
Miller, who writes “Although Husserl’s own analyses move on the
level of a priori possibility, Klein’s work shows how fruitful these
analyses can be when the categories they generate are used in studying the actual history of mathematical thought,” (Numbers in
Presence and Absence [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982], 132;
Joshua Kates’ account is more circumspect, as he notes “[i]t is difficult to capture adequately . . . how much of Klein’s understanding
of Greek number is already to be found in Husserl, despite the
important differences between them,” (“Philosophy First, Last, and
Counting: Edmund Husserl, Jacob Klein, and Plato’s
Arithmological Eidê,” (Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, Vol.
25, Number 1 (2004), 65-97, here 94.
4
This is the literal translation of the word in question here,
“Begrifflichkeit,” which is rendered for the most part as “intentionality” in the English translation GMTOA. Because of this, the point
I make below about the “concept of number” and “number concepts” will be more familiar to readers of Klein’s original German
text.
5
Jacob Klein, “Phenomenology and the History of Science,” in
Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl, ed. Marvin
Farber (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1940),
143–163; reprinted in Jacob Klein, Lectures and Essays, ed. Robert
6
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B. Williamson and Elliott Zuckerman (Annapolis, Md.: St. John’s
Press, 1985), 65–84, here 70.
Edmund Husserl, “The Origin of Geometry,” in The Crisis of
European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David
Carr (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970). The
German text was originally published in a heavily edited form by
Eugen Fink as “Die Frage nach dem Ursprung der Geometrie als
intentional-historisches Problem,” Revue internationale de
Philosophie I (1939). Fink’s typescript of Husserl’s original, and significantly different, 1936 text (which is the text translated by Carr)
was published as Beilage III in Die Krisis der europäischen
Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine
Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, ed. Walter
Biemel, Husserliana VI (The Hague: Nijhoff, 11954, 21976).
Edmund Husserl, “Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und
die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die
phänomenologische Philosophie,” Philosophia I (1936), (the text of
this article is reprinted as §§ 1–27 of the text edited by Biemel).
7
8
See note 4 above.
9
GMOT, 54.
Aristotle’s dispute with Plato over the mode of being of the arithmoi studied by the discipline of mathematics was about the origin
of the units that they are the definite amounts of, and not whether
theoretical arithmoi are definite amounts of units.
10
“As Plato had once tried to grasp the highest science ‘arithmologically’ and therewith exceeded the bounds set for the logos (cf.
Part I, Section 7C), so here [in Viète’s invention of symbolic calculation] the ‘arithmetical’ interpretation leads to . . . the conception
of a symbolic mathematics,” the implication being, of course, that
such a conception exceeds the same bounds as did Plato’s attempt
to grasp dialectic in terms of the arithmoi eidetikoi (GMOT, 184).
11
71
Words, Diagrams, and Symbols:
Greek and Modern
Mathematics or “On the Need
To Rewrite The History of
Greek Mathematics” Revisited
Sabetai Unguru
Mademoiselle de Sommery, as Stendhal tells us in De
l’Amour, was caught “en flagrant delit,” i.e., in flagranti, by
her lover, who was shaken seeing his “amante” bedding down
another man. Mademoiselle was surprised by her lover’s
angry reaction and denied brazenly the event. When he
protested, she cried out: “Oh, well, I can see that you no
longer love me, you would rather trust your eyes than what I
tell you.”
The historian of mathematics should behave like
Mademoiselle’s lover: believe his eyes and not what mathematicians-turned-historians tell him about the texts he studies. There are optical illusions, it is true, but they are to be
preferred to the illusionary mental constructs of the mathematical historians. A text is a text is a text. Moreover,
metaphors aside, not everything is a text and it behooves the
cultural critic, and surely the historian, to relate only to written records as texts. Furthermore, texts are about something
definite and not every conceivable interpretation suits them
all. The Conica is about conic sections not about women. It
deals with three (or four) kinds of lines obtained by cutting a
Sabetai Unguru is Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Cohen
Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at the
University of Tel-Aviv. He is the author of a controversial study with the title
“On the Need to Rewrite the History of Greek Mathematics,” as well as of a
two-volume introduction to the history of mathematics. He is (with Michael
Fried) the co-author of Apollonius of Perga’s Conica: Text, Context, Subtext.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
conic surface with a plane, lines baptized by Apollonius as
parabolas, ellipses, hyperbolas, and opposite sections. It does
not deal with a classification of women according to their
degree of perfection, as seen by a male chauvinist pig, hiding
his true intentions behind the cloud of mathematical jargon.
Texts are made of words, sometimes accompanied by
illustrations; in the case of Greek geometry, the texts are
made of words and diagrams, C’est tout. And the diagram is,
in a very definite sense, the proposition. The words accompanying it serve to show how the diagram is obtained; they
provide us the diagram in statu nascendi. But in principle it
would be possible to supply the absent words to an extant
diagram, though I doubt the possibility of understanding a
reasonably sophisticated geometrical text in the absence of
diagrams. If there is a manipulative aspect to Greek geometry,
and I think there is, it resides in the construction, the bringing into being of the diagram, while the steps of the process
are supplied by the words accompanying the diagram, typically in the kataskeue (construction).
There are no true symbols in a Greek mathematical text.
What looks like symbols to the untrained modern eye are
actually proper names for identifying mathematical objects.
They are not symbols, and cannot be manipulated, as algebraic symbols are. Even in Diophantus, which is a late and
special case, his so-called symbols are actually verbal abbreviations, making his Arithmetica an instance of syncopated, not
symbolic, algebra, in Nesselmann’s tripartite division (Die
Algebra der Griechen).
In modern, post-Cartesian mathematical texts, on the
other hand, there are words and diagrams and symbols, but
the actual necessity of the first two ingredients is minimal,
serving heuristic, pedagogical, and rhetorical needs that can
be dispensed with, leaving the text in its symbolic nakedness.
It is no exaggeration to see modern mathematics as symbolic,
while ancient mathematics cannot be seen historically in symbolic terms. This being the case, interpretations of ancient
mathematical texts relying on their symbolic transmogrifica-
UNGURU
73
tion are inadequate and distorting. They are ahistorical and
anachronistic, making them unacceptable for an understanding of ancient mathematics in its own right.
An ancient text—mathematical, philosophical, literary, or
whatever—is the product of a culture foreign to ours, whose
concerns, values, aims, standards, ideals, etc., are, as a rule, as
alien to ours as can be. Though, inescapably, all history is retrospective history, the approach described and decried by
Detlef D. Spalt, in his Vom Mythos der mathematischen
Vernunft (1981), as Resultatismus, or, “Orwellsche 1984Geschichtsschreibung für den grossen Bruder Vernunft,” that
takes its bearings and criteria from what it sees as the modern
outcome of a lengthy, linear, and necessary evolution of concepts and operations, looking always back at the past in light
of its modern offspring, is necessarily a highly distorting
approach, since it adopts unashamedly the perspective of the
present to (in this order) judge and understand the past.
Taken at face value, Percy W Bridgman’s statement that the
.
past has meaning only in terms of the present is simply not
true. The historian’s stance is rather the opposite: the present
has meaning only in terms of the past. Prima facie and on
principled grounds therefore, an interpretation of any written, reasonably extensive document belonging to an ancient
culture that results in its totally unproblematic and absolute
assimilation to our own is suspect. That this is so is, more or
less, acceptable when it comes to cultural artifacts other than
mathematical ones, which seem to enjoy the privilege of perdurablility and universality. The immunity from cultural
specificity that mathematical truths command stems from the
prevailing view that their outward appearance—their packaging, as it were—and their purely mathematical content—the
packaged merchandise, as it were—are neutral, unrelated,
and mutually independent items. It is a calamitous view and
the root of all evil in the historiography of mathematics.
But there is another entrance into an ancient text, mathematical or not, one that does no violence to it, that does not
break the inviolable unity of form and content and then enter
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
victoriously through the shambles it created, with the claim
that the text is now understood; it is rather an ingress that
accepts willingly and respectfully the unity of the text without pulverizing its inseparable aspects, bringing to its understanding both critical acumen and full acceptance of its outward appearance. This is the historical approach. The mathematical and historical approaches are antagonistic. Whoever
breaks and enters typically returns from his escapades with
other spoils than the peaceful and courteous caller.
Let me be more specific. Faced with an ancient mathematical text, the modern interpreter has an initial choice.
First is the mathematical approach. It consists of two steps:
(1) try to find out how one would do it (solve the problem,
prove the proposition, perform the construction, etc.) and
then (2) attempt to understand the ancient procedure in light
of the answer to step (1). Instead of this preeminently mathematical approach, however, the modern interpreter can
refuse to decipher the text by appealing to modern methods,
using for its understanding only ancient methods available to
the text’s author. This is the historical approach. Needless to
repeat, the spoils of interpretation differ according to the two
approaches followed. The longstanding traditional approach
has been the mathematical, though in the last three decades
or so the historical approach is gaining increasingly more and
more ground and, at least in the domain of ancient Greek
mathematics, seems to be now the prevailing one. What
seems certain is that in practice no compromise is possible
between the mathematical and historical methodological
principles. Adopting one or the other has fateful consequences for one’s research, effectively determining the nature
of the results reached and the tenor of the inferences used in
reaching them.
What I am saying, then, is that despite the numerous and
varied styles of writing the history of mathematics throughout the centuries, it is possible to group all histories of mathematics into two broad categories, the “mathematical” and
the “historical.” The former sees mathematics as eternal, its
UNGURU
75
truths unchanging and unaffected by their formal appearance,
and sees the mathematical kernel of those truths as being
independent of their outward mode of expression; the latter
denies this independence and looks upon past mathematics as
an unbreakable unity between form and content, a unity,
moreover, that enables one to grasp mathematics as a historical discipline, the truths of which are indelibly embedded in
changing linguistic structures. It is only this approach that is
apt to avoid anachronism in the study of the mathematics of
other eras.
To make this a historical talk, what is needed are specific,
historical examples, supporting the preceding generalizations. I have offered numerous such examples in my published work, most recently in the book I published with
Michael Fried, Apollonius of Perga’s Conica: Text, Context,
Subtext (2001). However, I would like now to enrich my
offerings by drawing illustrations from historical sources less
drawn upon in the past. One such source is Euclid’s Data.
In one of the attacks launched against a notorious article
of 1975, “On the Need to Rewrite the History of Greek
Mathematics,” Hans Freudenthal argues that, had its author
been aware of the existence of the Data, he “would never
have claimed there were no equations in Greek geometry.”
For Freudenthal, and not only for him, the Data is a “textbook on solving equations.” He summarizes the 94 propositions contained therein in a succinctly and strikingly epigrammatic statement: “Given certain magnitudes a, b, c and
a relation F(a, b, c, x), then x, too, is given.” But the fact
remains that Greek geometry contained no equations. One
cannot find even one equation in the entire text of the Data.
Proof (as the Hindu mathematician would say): “Look!”
Unless one has at his disposal the algebraic language and the
capacity to translate into it, it is impossible to sum up this little treatise of rather varied content as offhandedly as
Freudenthal has done, Indeed, had Euclid at his disposal
Freudenthal’s functional notation, it is rather easy to infer
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
that he would not have needed 94 propositions to get his
point across.
Each case in Euclid’s Data is unique, having its own
method of analysis, and none is subsumable under or
reducible to other cases, though, of course, later propositions
rely on earlier ones. Thus, “The ratio of given magnitudes to
one another is given” (proposition 1) and “If a given magnitude have a given ratio to some other magnitude, the other is
also given in magnitude” (proposition 2)—to use perhaps the
simplest illustration possible—are not for Euclid both
instances of “Given a, b, c and y=F(a, b, c, x), x is also given,”
but are two different problems, interesting in their own right,
having their own solutions. Of course, Freudenthal’s description is mathematically correct. Historically, however, it is
wanting. Heath is much more to the point when he says:
The Data…are still concerned with elementary
geometry [my italics], though forming part of the
introduction to higher analysis. Their form is that
of propositions proving that, if certain things in a
figure [my italics] are given (in magnitude, in
species, etc.), something else is given. The subjectmatter is much the same as that of the planimetrical books of the Elements, to which the Data are
often supplementary.
This is what the Data is, not a textbook on solving equations, but a treatise presenting another approach to elementary geometry—other than that of the Elements, that is.
As an example of this characterization of the Data, I shall
present proposition 16, in the new translation of C. M.
Taisbak [Euclid’s Data or The Importance of Being Given,
(Copenhagen, 2003)]:
If two magnitudes have a given ratio to one
another, and from the one a given magnitude be
subtracted, while to the other a given magnitude
be added, the whole will be greater than in ratio to
the remainder by a given magnitude (p. 75).
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UNGURU
First we must clarify the meaning of the expression “greater
than in ratio...by a given.” Definition 11 of the Data reads:
A magnitude is by a given greater than in ratio to a
magnitude if, when the given magnitude be subtracted, the remainder has a given ratio to the
same. (p. 35)
The meaning of this definition is, according to Taisbak, as follows (p. 57): “M is by the given G greater than the magnitude
L which has to N a given ratio;” in other words, M=L+G
and L:N is a given ratio.
Back to the proof of prop. 16:
Let two magnitudes AB, CD have a given ratio to one
another. From CD let the given magnitude CE be subtracted
and to AB let the given magnitude ZA be added.
Then, the whole ZB is greater than in ratio to the remainder
DE by a given magnitude.
Z
C
A
E
H
D
B
Now, since the ratio AB:CD is given and AH can be obtained,
by Dt. 4, from AH:CE::AB:CD, i.e., AH:CE is also given, it
follows that CE is also given. Hence, AH is given (by Dt. 2).
But AZ is given; therefore the whole ZH is given (by Dt. 3).
Since AH:CE::AB:CD, the ratio HB:ED of the remainders is
also given, by V 19 and Def. 2, i.e., HB:ED::AB:CD. But HZ
.
is given; therefore, ZB is by a given greater than in ratio to
ED (Def. 11), Q.E.D.
No algebra appears here, and although the language of
givens, the idiosyncratic concept “by a given greater than in
ratio” and the sui generis concatenation of inferences burden
the understanding, the proposition is clear and rather simple.
It is graspable as it stands, without any appeal to foreign
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
tools. And yet, Clemens Thaer, in his Die Data von Euklid
(1962), proceeds as follows to its clarification:
Let a:b=k , then the proposition claims that if x=ky, then
(x+c)=k(y-d)+(c+kd), which is, of course, correct mathematically, but this blatantly algebraic procedure betrays the
Data. It is a betrayal since ratios in Greek mathematics are
not real numbers, i.e., the initial substitution a:b=k is not
kosher. Though there is some controversy about the status of
ratios in the Elements, with respect to their being two, or
four-place relations, their status in the Data is uncontroversial: a ratio P:Q is an individual item “however impalpable. A
and B are magnitudes, most often (and least problematically)
understood to be line segments; one may think of them as
positive real numbers, that is as lengths of line segments, while
remembering that the Greek geometers could not think like
that, for want of such numbers” (Taisbak, Euclid’s
Dedomena, p. 32). Taisbak claims that distorting “clarifications” like the one above characterize all of Thaer’s algebraizations. He goes on to say:
About the following four theorems (Dt 17-20) he
maintains that they prove that all linear transformations, {ax+b a, b ℜ} form a group (‘dass die
ganzen linearen Substitutionen einer
Veraenderlichen eine Gruppe bilden’). I am not sure
I understand what he means to say, and the Data
certainly does not help me,—so probably Euclid
would not understand either. (p. 77)
Let us take our next example from Archimedes. Against
Freudenthal’s assertion, Archimedes’ works are not
“instances of algebraic procedure in Greek mathematics.”
Heath’s edition of The Works of Archimedes (1897) is “in
modern notation.” It is faithful only to the disembodied
mathematical content of the Archimedean text, but not to its
form. And this is crucial. If one abandons Archimedes’ form
and transcribes his rhetorical statements by means of algebraic symbols, manipulating and transforming the latter, then
UNGURU
79
clearly “the algebraic procedure” appears. But this procedure
itself is not “in Greek mathematics.” It is a result, as
Freudenthal himself states it, of “replacing vernacular by artificial language, and numbering variables by cardinals, a quite
recent mathematical tool.” Indeed! Archimedes’ text is
anchored securely in the terra firma of Greek geometry. If one
is not willing to compress wording, to replace “vernacular”
by artificial language, to introduce variables and number
them by cardinals, and to apply all the other technical tricks
which are “quite recent mathematical tools,” then
Archimedes’ proof of Proposition 10 of Peri Helikon is geometric, not algebraic. This was discerned in a curious way
even by Heath, who justified his algebraic procedure and the
use of the symbols , “in order to exhibit the geometrical character of the proof” (p. 109, my italics).
Dijksterhuis himself in his Archimedes said: “In a representation of Greek proofs in the symbolism of modern algebra it is often precisely the most characteristic qualities of the
classical argument which are lost, so that the reader is not sufficiently obliged to enter into the train of thought of the original.” So let us oblige ourselves to enter into the train of
thought of the original by having a look at the 10th proposition of Peri Helikon.
I shall give you the full enunciation and then set at its side
Heath’s algebraic variant:
If any number of lines, exceeding one another by
the same magnitude, are set one after the other,
the excess being equal to the smallest, and if one
takes other lines in the same number, each of
which is equal to the magnitude of the greatest of
the first lines, [then] the squares on the lines equal
to the greatest, augmented by the square on the
greatest, and by the rectangle the sides of which
are the smallest line and the sum of all lines
exceeding one another by the same magnitude are
equivalent to thrice the sum of the squares on the
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80
lines which exceed one another by the same
amount.
The enunciation is geometrical and it is accompanied by simple, linear diagrams.
And here is Heath’s enunciation:
If A1, A2, A3, ..., An be n lines forming and ascending
arithemetical progression in which the common
difference is equal to A1, the least term, then
(n+1) An2+A1 (A1+A2+...+An)=3(A12+A22+...+An2)........
…the result is equivalent to
12+22+32+...+n2=n(n=1)(2n+1)
6
The proof is not difficult, but very long (more than three
pages in Mugler’s edition of Archimedes’ works, if one
includes the porism), and I think we can dispense with it, but
not before pointing out the fact that it lies squarely within the
realm of traditional Greek geometry, relying on Elements 2.4,
it is true, which, as is well known, belongs to the so-called
geometric algebra, but which, as I have argued elsewhere, is
strictly geometric; additionally, the porism relies on Elements
6.20.
As in the enunciation, Archimedes formulates consistently
his statements in terms of lines squares, and rectangles, which
he manipulates à la Grecque, and his diagrammatic notation
is not at all perspicuous to a modern eye, making his transformations opaque, or at least cloudy, to a mind spoiled by
the easy mechanics of algebraic manipulations and their
immediate visual transparency. This makes following his elementary inferences quite difficult and almost forces upon the
reader recourse to algebraic notation. Such a procedure, how-
UNGURU
81
ever, easy, pellucid, and revealing as it is, is not legitimate historically.
What I have said about the proposition applies in its
entirety to the porism following it, out of which Heath makes
two corollaries!
Let us, again, limit ourselves to the enunciations of
Archimedes and Heath, which substantiate our characterization. Archimedes first:
It is manifest from the preceding that the sum of
the squares on the lines equal to the greatest is
inferior to the triple of the sum of the squares on
the lines exceeding one another by the same
magnitude, because, if one adds to it [the former]
some [magnitudes], it becomes that triple, but
that it is superior to the triple of the second sum
diminished by the square on the greatest line,
since what is added [to the first sum] is inferior
to the triple square of the greatest line. It is for
this [very] reason that, when one describes similar
figures on all the lines, both on those exceeding
one another by the same magnitude, as well as
on those which are equal to the greatest line, the
sum of the figures described on the lines which
are equal to the greatest line is inferior to the
triple of the sum of the figures described on the
lines exceeding one another by the same magnitude, but it is superior to the triple of the second
sum, which is diminished by the figure constructed
on the greatest line, because similar figures are in
the same ratio as the squares [on their sides].
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
82
Now Heath:
Cor. 1. It follows from this proposition that
nAn2<3(A12+ A22+...+An2), and also that
nAn2<3(A12+ A22+...+An-12).
Cor. 2. All the results will equally hold if similar
figures are substituted for squares.
The differences between Archimedes and Heath are blatant.
Faithfulness to the Archimedean way of doing things
demands, therefore, the rejection of an edition of his works
“edited in modern notation.” There is no escape for the historian but to take texts at their face value.
One last example I shall draw from Diophantus’s
Arithmetica. Diophantus is an exception in the long tradition
of Greek mathematics, which is largely geometric. Living
probably in the third century A.D., his preserved work is an
instance, the only one of its kind in Greek mathematics, of
what we call algebra. It is a sui generis algebra, however, in
which the notations are properly nonexistent, except for the
unknown, arithmos, which is itself most likely an abbreviation, and a few abbreviations for powers of the unknown and
for the unit, monas. That is all. This is what makes his rhetorical algebra syncopated, according to Nesselmann’s classification. It is an algebra in which there is a total lack of true,
operative symbols, including symbols for operations, relations, and the exponential notation, with the exception of a
symbol for subtraction, in which the exceptional skill of
Diophantus enables him somehow to overcome with great
dexterity the built-in drawbacks of his Arithmetica. This
Greek algebra, however, is most emphatically not geometric
algebra. If anything, it is conceptually a far away relation to
what has been traditionally called Babylonian algebra, perhaps not even this, in light of the recent researches of Jens
UNGURU
83
Hoyrup, who identifies the geometrical roots of the
Babylonian recipes [Lengths,Widths, Surfaces, (Springer,
2002)].
Whatever it is, it is largely a collection of problems, to be
solved by means of skilful guesses and less by systematic
methods (though one also finds methods, for example, a general method for the solution of what we call determinate
equations of the second degree and another for double equations of the second degree), involving specific known numbers. It is not a book of propositions to be proved, but rather
of exercises to be solved, leading mostly to simple determinate and indeterminate equations, by means of which one
finds the required numbers, which are always rational, quite
often non-integral. Still, despite what I just said, one finds in
the treatise also some “porisms” and other propositions in the
theory of numbers, which proved themselves influential in
the history of the theory of numbers, especially in Fermat’s
work. Thus, Diophantus knew that no number of the form
8n+7 can be the sum of three squares, and that for an odd
number, 2n+1, to be the sum of two squares, n itself must not
be odd, which means that no number of the form 4n+3 or
4n-1 can be the sum of two squares.
Now, some simple illustrations from the Arithmetica, to
get the flavor of the true Algebra der Griechen:
Problem 1. To divide a given number into two
numbers, the difference of which is known.
Let the given number be 100, and let the difference be 40 monads; to find the numbers.
Let us assume that the smaller number is 1 arithmos; hence, the greater number is 1 arithmos and
40 units. Therefore, the sum of the two numbers
becomes 2 arithmoi and 40 units. But the given
sum is 100 units; hence, 100 units are equal to 2
arithmoi and 40 units. Let us subtract the like
from the like, that is, 40 units from 100 and, also,
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
84
the same 40 units from the 2 arithmoi and 40
units. The two remaining arithmoi equal 60 units
and each arithmos becomes 30 units.
Let us return to what we assumed: the smaller
number will be 30 units, while the greater will be
70 units, and the validation is obvious.
And here is Heath’s faithful version of the solution:
Given number is 100, given difference 40.
Lesser number required x. Therefore
2x+40=100
x=30.
The required numbers are 70, 30.
Problem 2. Diophantus:
It is necessary to divide a given number into two
numbers having a given ratio.
Let us require to divide 60 into two numbers in
triplicate ratio.
Let us assume that the smaller number is 1 arithmos; hence, the greater number will be 3 arithmoi,
and thus the greater number is thrice the smaller
number. It is also necessary that the sum of the
two numbers be 60 units. But the sum of the two
numbers is 4 arithmoi; hence 4 arithmoi are equal
to 60 units, and the arithmos is therefore 15 units.
Hence, the smaller number will be 15 units, and
the greater 45 units.
Heath:
Given number 60, given ratio 3:1.
Two numbers x, 3x. Therefore x=15.
The numbers are 45, 15.
UNGURU
85
Finally, an example of what is called indeterminate analysis of
the third degree:
Problem 4.8. Diophantus:
To add the same number to a cube and its side and
make the same.
Let the number to be added be 1 arithmos and the
side of the cube be a certain amount of arithmoi.
Let this amount be 2 arithmoi and it follows that
the cube is 8 cubic arithmoi.
Now if one adds 1 arithmos to 2 arithmoi, they
become 3 arithmoi, while if one adds it to the 8
cubic arithmoi, they become 8 cubic arithmoi and
1 arithmos, which are equal to 27 cubic arithmoi.
Let us subtract 8 cubic arithmoi, and it follows
that the remaining 19 cubic arithmoi will become
equal to 1 arithmos. Let us divide all by the arithmos, and 19 squared arithmoi will be equal to
1 unit.
But 1 unit is a square, and if 19, the amount of
square arithmoi, were a square, the problem would
be solved. But the 19 squares find their origin in
the excess by which 27 cubic arithmoi exceed 8
cubic arithmoi; and 27 cubic arithmoi are the cube
of 3 arithmoi, while 8 cubic arithmoi are the cube
of 2 arithmoi. But the two arithmoi are taken by
hypothesis, and 3 arithmoi exceed by one the
amount taken arbitrarily as the side. Therefore, we
are led to finding two numbers which exceed one
another by one unit, and the cubes of which
exceed one another by a square.
Let one of those numbers be 1 arithmos, and the
other 1 arithmos plus 1 unit. Hence the excess of
their cubes is 3 square arithmoi plus 3 arithmoi
plus 1 unit. Let us set this excess equal to the
square the side of which is 1 unit less 2 arithmoi,
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
86
and the arithmos becomes 7 units. Let us return to
what we supposed, and one of the numbers will be
7 and the other 8.
Let us now return to the original question and
assume the number to be added to be 1 arithmos,
and the side of the cube to be 7 arithmoi. This
cube will be then 343 cubic arithmoi. Hence, if
one adds the arithmos to each of these last numbers, one will become 8 arithmoi and the other
343 cubic arithmoi plus 1 arithmos. But we
wanted this last expression to be a cube the side of
which is 8 arithmoi; hence 512 cubic arithmoi are
equal to 343 cubic arithmoi plus 1 arithmos, and
1
the arithmos becomes 13.
Returning to the things we assumed, the cube will
343
7
1
be 2197, the side 13, and the number to be added 13.
I assume you could follow, at least in outline,
Diophantus’s solution procedure, though this is not essential
for my main purpose. (For those of you who could not follow
after all the details, which, as I said, is not really necessary, a
glance at Heath’s, or Ver Eecke’s, Diophantus would clarify
matters.) My purpose is to compare Diophantus to his modern editors. This time, instead of Heath, I shall take, however,
Nesselmann.
Nesselmann:
It is necessary that x3+y=(x+y)3, i.e., 3x2+3xy+y2=1.
Solving for y, we get y=
1
2
2
[-3x±√4-3x ].
4mn
Putting 4-3x2=(2-=m x)2, one gets x= 3n2+m2.
n
Hence, y=
-6mn±(m2-3n2)
3n2+m2
. Taking only the + sign,
87
UNGURU
for y to be positive, it is necessary that m2-3n2>6mn,
or,
m2 -6 m
n
n2
>3, or, ( m -3)2>12, or ( m >3+√12.
n
n
Diophantus’s solution corresponds to m=7, n=1.
Now this is historical faithfulness!
Time to conclude. Historians must take the past seriously.
For historians of science and mathematics, this means taking
texts seriously. How does one do this? By reading them as
they are, in their nakedness, as it were, in the language in
which they were written, without shortcuts and transmogrification, resulting in their translation into scientific and mathematical languages which became historically available only
long after they were written. It is, therefore, crucial that the
form of those texts remain inviolable. Without this, anachronism, i.e., historical misunderstanding, becomes rampant and
the resulting interpretation is misinterpretation. As Benjamin
Farrington put it,
History is the most fundamental science, for there
is no human knowledge which cannot lose its scientific character when men forget the conditions
under which it originated, the questions which it
answered, and the function it was created to serve.
A great part of the mysticism and superstition of
educated men consists of knowledge which has
broken loose from its historical moorings.
In 1975 an article appeared in the Archive for History of
Exact Sciences, arguing for the need to rewrite the history of
Greek mathematics. In one of its many footnotes, namely the
one numbered 126, attention is called to an important book,
Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra. The
footnote in question contains a parenthesis, saying:
[L]et me urge those readers who have a choice and
wish to read [this] highly interesting study to refer
back to the original German articles: somehow the
�88
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
pomposity, stuffiness, and turgidity of the author’s
style are better accommodated by the Teutonic
cadences than by the more friendly sounds of the
perfidious Albion.
This was a nasty and uncalled for remark, attributable to the
author’s hubris.
How pleasantly and embarrassingly surprised must he
have been, then, when, a few weeks after the article’s appearance in the Archive, a postcard from the slighted author of the
book (to whom no reprint was sent!) arrived, saying: “Dear
Dr.,… Thank you very much for your important article in the
Archive.…” In character, you may say. Indeed.
As a belated, and highly inappropriate atonement for that
unsavory footnote, its author would like to finish this lecture
with a highly pertinent and lengthy quotation from an article
written by the great scholar he so carelessly slighted:
[T]he relation between ancient and modern
mathematics has increasingly become the focus
of historical investigation… Two general lines of
interpretation can be distinguished here. One—
the prevailing view—sees in the history of science
a continuous forward progress interrupted, at
most, by periods of stagnation. On this view, forward progress takes place with ‘logical necessity,’
accordingly, writing the history of a mathematical
theorem or of a physical principle basically means
analyzing its logic. The usual presentations,
especially of the history of mathematics, picture
a rectilinear course; all of its accidents and
irregularities disappear behind the logical
straightness of the whole path.
The second interpretation emphasizes that the
different stages along this path are incomparable.…it sees in Greek mathematics a science totally
distict from modern mathematics.…Both interpretations, however, start from the present-day
UNGURU
condition of science. The first measures ancient by
the standard of modern science and pursues the
individual threads leading back from the valid theorems of contemporary science to the anticipatory
steps taken towards them in antiquity.… The
second interpretation strives to bring into relief,
not what is common, but what divides ancient and
modern science. It too, however, interprets the
otherness of ancient mathematics...in terms of the
results of contemporary science. Consequently, it
recognizes only a counter-image of itself in ancient
science, a counter-image which still stands on its
own conceptual level.
Both interpretations fail to do justice to the true
state of the case. There can be no doubt that the
science of the seventeenth century represents a
direct continuation of ancient science. On the
other hand, neither can we deny their differences…above all, in their basic initiatives, in
their whole disposition (habitus). The difficulty is
precisely to avoid interpreting their differences
and their affinity one-sidedly in terms of the new
science. The issues at stake cannot be divorced
from the specific conceptual framework within
which they are interpreted.…
We need to approach ancient science on a basis
appropriate to it, a basis provided by that science
itself. Only on this basis can we measure the
transformation ancient science underwent in the
seventeenth century—a transformation unique
and unparalleled in the history of man.…
This modern consciousness is to be understood
not simply as a linear continuation of ancient
επιστημη, but as the result of a fundamental
conceptual shift which took place in the modern
era, a shift we can nowadays scarcely grasp.
89
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
91
The name of the man who wrote these lines is, as I am sure
you know, Jacob Klein. Yehi Zichro Baruch! May his memory
be blessed!
A Note on the Opposite
Sections and Conjugate Sections
in Apollonius of Perga’s Conica
90
Michael N. Fried
Introduction
To a careful reader of Apollonius of Perga’s Conica, the difference between Apollonius’ view of conic sections and ours
ought to be evident on nearly every page of the work. Yet this
has not always been the case. Indeed, it has not always been
easy to persuade readers that there really is something Greek
about Apollonius’ mathematics. Partly to blame is the seductive power of the algebraic framework in which we study
conic sections today and in which historians of mathematics
have interpreted the book in past years.1 Viewed algebraically,
for example, all of Book 4 of the Conica—the book concerning the number of points at which conic sections can meet—
can be reduced to a single proposition, namely, that a system
of two quadratic equations in two unknowns can have at
most four solutions. This tremendous power allowing one to
obtain results corresponding to ones in the Conica makes it
all too easy to think that Apollonius’ own text, in effect, can
be bypassed and replaced by an updated algebraic version of
it. However, there are things in the Conica that are refractory
to this kind of modernization of the text and show its essentially geometric character. One of these, surely, is that most
peculiar entity in the Conica, the opposite sections; it is they
that I shall turn my attention to in this note. In particular, I
want to show something about status of the opposite sections
in the Conica and show, among other things, why their status,
Michael Fried teaches mathematics education at Ben-Gurion University of the
Negev. He is the author of a translation, with introduction, of Book Four of
the Conics of Apollonius, and is the co-author (with Sabetai Unguru) of
Apollonius of Perga’s Conica: Text, Context, and Subtext.
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
92
why their place in the Conica, is different from that of the
conjugate sections.
The Absence of the Opposite Sections from the Modern View
The reason why looking at the opposite sections is a good
way to re-focus on Apollonius’ text, rather than on an algebraic reconstruction of it, is simply that the opposite sections
do not exist in modern mathematics. For us, there is only the
hyperbola. Our view of the hyperbola, on the other hand, is
that it is a curve consisting “of two open branches extending
to infinity.”2 That we are not bothered by one curve consisting of two is directly related to our defining the hyperbola, as
we do the other conics, by means of an equation. Defining it
this way, the hyperbola becomes merely a set of points given
by coordinates, say the Cartesian coordinates (x, y), satisfying
an equation such as this:
x2 - y2
=1
a2 b2
Hence, there is nothing shocking when we discover that this
set of points consists of two disjoint subsets, one containing
points whose x coordinates are less than or equal to –a
(where a is taken to be a positive real number) and one containing points whose x coordinates are greater than or equal
to +a; the only relevant question to ask is whether the coordinates of a given point satisfy or do not satisfy the given
algebraic relation.3 The equation, in this view, tells all; it contains all the essential information about the object; in a sense,
the equation of the hyperbola is the hyperbola (see Fried &
Unguru, 2001, pp. 102-103; Klein, 1981, pp. 28-29). To
speak about opposite sections in addition to the hyperbola is
unnecessary because they are not distinguished by different
equations.
FRIED
93
The Opposite Sections in the Conica
The point of view above has also been the point of departure
for an older, but still much listened to, generation of historians of mathematics. Zeuthen (1886) and Heath (1921,
1896), leaders of that generation, had no doubt that
Apollonius’ achievement was in the uncovering and elucidation of the equations of the conic sections and that
Apollonius understood the conic sections in an algebraic
spirit. For them, Apollonius’ view was the modern view. Thus
Zeuthen writes:
An ellipse, parabola or hyperbola is here [in Book
1] planimetrically determined as a curve which is
represented by the equation (3), (1) or (2) [the
Cartesian equations for the ellipse, parabola, and
hyperbola, respectively] in a system of parallel
coordinates with any angle between the axes.
Thus, apart from the determination of the position
of these curves, they seem to depend on three constants, namely, that angle [between the axes, or,
equivalently, the ordinate angle], p [latus rectum],
and a [the length of the diameter] (Zeuthen, 1886,
p. 67).
And Heath, echoing Zeuthen, writes:
Apollonius, in deriving the three conics from any
cone cut in the most general manner, seeks to find
the relation between the coordinates of any point
on the curve referred to the original diameter and
the tangent at its extremity as axes (in general
oblique), and proceeds to deduce from the relation, when found, the other properties of the
curves. His method does not essentially differ from
that of modern analytical geometry except that in
Apollonius geometrical operations take the place
of algebraic calculations (Heath, 1896, p. cxvi)
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
As for why Apollonius notwithstanding referred to both
opposite sections and hyperbolas, Heath remarks that, “Since
[Apollonius] was the first to treat the double-branch hyperbola fully [emphasis added], he generally discusses the hyperbola (i.e., the single branch) [Heath’s emphasis] along with
the ellipse, and the opposites [Heath’s emphasis], as he calls
the double-branch hyperbola, separately” (Heath, 1921,
p.139). Zeuthen simply says that, as a matter of terminology,
“What [Apollonius] calls an hyperbola is always only a hyperbola-branch” (Zeuthen, 1886, p. 67). But these remarks are
hardly satisfying. First, while it is most likely that Apollonius
was truly the first to treat the “‘double-branch hyperbola”’—
that is, the opposite sections—fully, the opposite sections
were not so completely unfamiliar to his contemporaries that
he had to continually remind them of their existence; indeed,
in the preface to Book 4 he refers to the opposite sections as
if they were known and discussed, at least by Conon of Samos
and Nicoteles of Cyrene. Second, although Zeuthen’s remark
is not meant to explain Apollonius’ use of both terms, it still
begs the question: if what Apollonius called the hyperbola is
truly represented by the Cartesian equation and therefore, is
the modern double-branched hyperbola (as Zeuthen unambiguously implies throughout his book), why cause confusion
by referring to a branch of the hyperbola as the hyperbola
and the two branches together as something else, namely, the
opposite sections? Zeuthen himself never speaks of “opposite
sections” but only of the “two (or “corresponding”) branches
of the hyperbola” the “whole hyperbola” (vollständige
Hyperbel), and, most often, simply the “hyperbola.” In this
way, he and his followers, including Heath, merely push aside
as if nugatory the obvious fact that in the Conica, from start
to finish, there are hyperbolas and there are opposite sections.
The opposite sections (hai tomai antikeimenai) are quite
prominent in the work. They figure in 24 of the 53 propositions in Book 2; 41 of the 56 propositions in Book 3, and 38
of the 57 propositions in Book 4. In all these propositions,
Apollonius treats opposite sections as something apart from
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95
hyperbolas. A sign of this is that the opposite sections are separated from the hyperbola in the enunciations of propositions. For example, the statement of proposition 3.42 is: “If
in an hyperbola or ellipse or circumference of a circle or opposite sections [emphasis added] straight lines are drawn from
the vertices of the diameter parallel to an ordinate, and some
other straight line at random is drawn tangent, it will cut off
from them straight lines containing a rectangle equal to the
fourth part of the figure to the same diameter.” 3.44 reads, “If
two straight lines touching an hyperbola or opposite sections
[emphasis added] meet the asymptotes, then the straight lines
drawn to the sections will be parallel to the straight line joining the points of contact.” If one knew nothing about the
opposite sections, these statements would suggest that the
hyperbola and the opposite sections were as different from
one another as the hyperbola is different from the ellipse.5
The proofs of these two particular propositions make little
distinction between the hyperbola and opposite sections. In
3.44 a separate diagram for the opposite sections is needed to
bring out a case that applies to the two sections together, but
in 3.42 not even that is needed, despite Heiberg’s insistence
on adding an extra diagram for the opposite sections anyway
(fig. 1). Nothing from the logical rigor would be lost if
Apollonius referred only to the opposite sections in these
propositions. So even where the logic does not require it,
Apollonius makes a point to separate, in words verbally, the
hyperbola from the opposite sections.
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96
Fig. 1: Conica 3.42 (Heiberg)
Α
Ζ
Μ
Η
Θ
97
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Fig. 2: Diagram for Conica 1.14
H
Ε
N
Ξ
Δ
Κ
P
O
Θ
Γ
Α
Y
K
Λ
Β
T
Μ
Η
Ζ
Θ
Ε
Δ
Κ
Β
A
Λ
Γ
Of course this is not to say there is no connection
between the opposite sections and the hyperbola, for the central property of the opposite sections is that they are composed of two hyperbolas. Apollonius proves this in the
proposition that introduces the opposite sections, proposition 1.14:
If the vertically opposite surfaces are cut by a
plane not through the vertex [see fig. 2], the section on each of the two surfaces will be that which
is called the hyperbola [emphasis added]; and the
diameter of the two sections will be the same
straight line; and the straight lines, to which the
straight lines drawn to the diameter parallel to the
straight line in the cone’s base are applied in
square, are equal; and the transverse side of the
figure, that between the vertices of the sections, is
common. And let such sections be called opposite
(kaleisthôsan de hai toiautai tomai antikeimenai)
Π
E
Z
B
M
Λ
Σ
Γ
Δ
This is also the way he refers to the opposite sections
later, especially in Book 4, where he consistently speaks of
“an hyperbola and its opposite section.”7 The genitive in
those phrases suggests that the opposite section belongs to the
given hyperbola, that is, every hyperbola has its very own
opposite section.
The most striking instance in which Apollonius refers to
the opposite sections as two hyperbolas is in his construction
of the opposite sections in 1.59. It is worth reviewing how
this construction is carried out. Apollonius asks, specifically,
for the following:
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98
Fig. 3: Diagram for Conica, 1.59
Δ
A
E
B
H
Γ
K
Z
Θ
Given two straight lines perpendicular to one
another, find opposite [sections], whose diameter
is one of the given straight lines and whose vertices are the ends of the straight line, and the lines
dropped in a given angle in each of the sections
will [equal] in square [the rectangles] applied to
the other [straight line] and exceeding by a [rectangle] similar to that contained by the given
straight lines.8
Let BE and BΘ be the given lines and let H be the given
angle (see fig. 3). Choosing BE to be the transverse diameter
(plagia) and BΘ to be the upright side of the figure (orthia),
Apollonius says to construct an hyperbola ABΓ, adding, that
“This is to be done as has been set out before (prosgegraptai).” For the latter, he has in mind 1.54-55 where he shows
how an hyperbola is constructed having a given diameter,
upright side, and ordinate angle. Next he says: let EK have
been drawn through E perpendicular to BE and equal to BΘ,
and draw an hyperbola ΔEZ having BE as its diameter, EK its
upright side, and H its ordinate angle, again, presumably,
relying on 1.54-55. With that, he concludes: “It is evident
(phaneron dê) that B and E [i.e., ABΓ and ΔEZ] are opposite
[sections] and they have one diameter and equal upright
sides.” I shall return to the question whether it truly is evident
that B and E are opposite sections, but for now what is
important to understand is that Apollonius constructs the
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opposite sections by constructing one hyperbola and then
another.
Hence the opposite sections are two hyperbolas but not
any two hyperbolas; they are two hyperbolas somehow
linked together; they belong to one another the way identical
twins do.9 In a sense, then, Apollonius, as I understand him
and as Zeuthen understands him, begins with the hyperbola;
however, we disagree about the direction in which he proceeds. Whereas Zeuthen begins with the hyperbola as the
two-branched curve given by the Cartesian equation and then
focuses on the single branch, which Apollonius calls the
hyperbola, my view is that Apollonius begins with the single
connected curve, which he calls the hyperbola, and then
investigates the opposite sections in terms of it. Although
Ockham’s razor would probably fall on the side of the latter
view, we need to get a better grasp of this peculiar situation
wherein two well-defined curves, the two hyperbolas, become
together a distinct geometrical entity, the opposite sections.
To do this, let us consider the ways in which two conic sections are juxtaposed in the Conica, that is to say, let us consider how Apollonius treats pluralities of curves.
Pluralities of Curves
Surely, the juxtapositions of conic sections are to be found in
Book 4 of the Conica. The very point of that book is to investigate the ways in which conic sections can come together—
whether they touch, whether they intersect, at how many
points can they touch, at how many they can intersect, and so
on. The variety of configurations Apollonius considers can be
seen in the diagram for, say, 4.56:
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100
Fig.4: Diagram for Conica 4.56
Δ
Δ
Γ
Γ
Γ
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101
straight lines drawn to either of the curved lines parallel to
some straight line…and I call that straight line the upright
diameter which, lying between the two curved lines, bisects
all the straight lines intercepted between the curved lines and
drawn parallel to some straight line.” An illustration for the
upright and transverse diameter can be seen in fig. 5 below,
which is not a diagram from Apollonius’ text.
Δ
Fig. 5 The upright and transverse diameters
Δ
Γ
Δ
Δ
Γ
Γ
As discussed elsewhere,10 one of the fundamental facts
explored in Book 4 is the ability of conic sections to be placed
arbitrarily in the plane, as Euclid postulates for circles and
lines—a fact partially justifying Book 4’s inclusion into what
Apollonius terms a “course in the elements of conics.” But it
is this arbitrariness that makes the question of the plurality of
conic sections in Book 4 the exact opposite of the one we are
trying answer about the opposite sections; for the opposite
sections are not thrown together; they belong together.
The first indication that a pair of curves may be associated
with one another as the opposite sections is given by
Apollonius in the definitions at the start of Book 1. Among
these definitions are those for the transverse and upright
diameters (diametros plagia and diametros orthia). Having
defined the diameter of a curved line, Apollonius continues,
“Likewise, of any two curved lines (duo kampulôn grammôn)
lying in one plane, I call that straight line the transverse diameter which cuts the two curved lines and bisects all the
These definitions prepare us for the transverse diameter
of the opposite sections introduced in the same proposition
in which the opposite sections themselves are defined, 1.14;
that the two hyperbolas making up the opposite sections have
a common diameter is one of the things that links them
together. Interestingly enough, the upright diameter, which is
the diameter explicitly defined for two curves and that which
is most clearly applicable to the opposite sections,11 is rarely
used by Apollonius: it is used twice in Book 2 (2.37, 38) and
once in Book 7 (7.6); and even in those cases Apollonius is
quick to identify it as one of a pair of conjugate diameters
(suzugeis diametroi), which are good for both two curves and
one. So while Apollonius provides for the possibility of distinct curves linked together, he seems almost to avoid the
idea, at least with regards to the opposite sections.
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102
The Conjugate Sections
But the opposite sections are not the only curves linked
together in the Conica. What Apollonius calls the conjugate
sections (hai tomai suzugeis) consist of four hyperbolas, or, to
be precise, two pairs of opposite sections.12 The very word
Fig.6: Conjugate Sections
K
H
Γ
B
A
Δ
Λ
Θ
suzugeis refers to a couple yoked together, a married pair.13
What links them together? First, by the definition given them
in 1.60, the diameter of the one pair is the conjugate diameter of the other, that is, if the diameters of AB and ΓΔ are D
and d, respectively, then lines drawn in AB parallel to d will
be bisected by D, and vice versa; moreover, D is equal in
square to the rectangle contained by d and the latus rectum
with respect to d (this rectangle being the “figure” or eidos of
the opposite sections), while d is equal in square to the rectangle contained by D and the latus rectum with respect to D.
Second, as Apollonius shows in 2.17, “The asymptotes [lines
HΘ and ΛΚ in fig. 6] of conjugate opposite sections are common.” This is also shown for the opposite sections in 2.15;
these shared asymptotes are certainly a crucial unifier not
only of the conjugate sections but also of the two opposite
sections themselves.14
Compared to the arbitrary juxtapositions of conic sections presented in Book 4, the opposite sections and the conjugate sections seem to be quite similar in that their component curves are bound by means of asymptotes and diameters.
Indeed, Apollonius often treats the opposite sections and conjugate sections in analogous propositions for instance: 2.41
states, “If in opposite sections two straight lines not through
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the center cut each other, then they do not bisect each other”;
and 2.42, states that “If in conjugate opposite sections two
straight lines not through the center cut each other, they do
not bisect each other.” Yet this close connection between the
opposite sections and conjugate sections raises the question
about why the opposite sections nevertheless enjoy a status in
the Conica that the conjugate sections do not? Why, in particular, are the conjugate sections never mentioned in conjunction with the other conic sections as are the opposite sections? Why are only the opposite sections included in the
clique, parabola, hyperbola, ellipse, and opposite sections?15
For this, we must return to the beginning of the Conica, for
the answer has very much to do with beginnings.
The Genesis of the Opposite Sections
The Conica opens not with the definition of the conic sections, but with the definition of the conic surface (kônikê
epiphaneia) from which arises the figure of the cone. Here is
Apollonius’ definition:
If from a point a straight line is joined to the circumference of a circle which is not in the same
plane with the point, and the line is produced in
both directions, and if, with the point remaining
fixed, the straight line being rotated about the circumference of the circle returns to the same place
from which it began, then the generated surface
composed of the two surfaces lying vertically
opposite one another, each of which increases
indefinitely as the generating straight line is produced indefinitely, I call a conic surface, and I call
the fixed point the vertex…..And the figure contained by the circle and by the conic surface
between the vertex and the circumference of the
circle I call a cone.
The definition is vivid and visual owing in large part to its
motion-imbued language. Motion, as is well known, is
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avoided in Greek mathematics. Thus, much has been made of
the hints of motion in Elements, 1.4. But avoiding motion
seems to be a desideratum chiefly for propositions and
demonstrations, for motion in definitions is not all that
unusual. Besides this one from the Conica, Archimedes gives
similar kinematic definitions for conoids and spheroids in the
letter opening On Conoids and Spheroids, and Euclid himself
defines the cone, sphere, and cylinder in Book 11 of the
Elements by means of rotating a triangle, semicircle, and rectangle, respectively. The presence of motion in these definitions gives one the sense that one is witnessing the very coming to be of the objects being defined. In this way, such definitions take on a mythic quality; one almost wants to see the
demiourgos turning the generating line about the circumference of the base circle.
Fig.7: The Conic Surface
Following the definitions, Apollonius proceeds in ten
propositions to develop the basic properties of sections of
cones and, in particular, to show (in 1.7) how a cone may be
cut so that the section produced will be endowed with a
diameter. When the reader arrives at 1.11, which begins the
series of four propositions defining the parabola, hyperbola,
ellipse, and opposite sections, one is ready to see how these
sections arise within the cone. I do not use the word “see”
lightly. In these propositions, Apollonius dedicates considerable space both in the enunciation and in the body of the
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proof to describe the sequence of geometrical operations
undertaken to produce the particular sections; just as one witnesses the coming to be of the conical surface and cone, now
one witnesses the coming to be of the conic sections.
Of all the sections presented in 1.11-14, the one that is
most obviously related to Apollonius’ cone is in fact the
opposite sections. The reason is clear when one considers
Apollonius’ definition of the conical surface and cone. When
Euclid, by contrast, defines a cone in Book 11 of the
Elements, he does it by describing the rotation of a right triangle about one of its legs. Hence, Euclid begins by defining
the figure of the cone; moreover, Euclid’s cone, from the
start, is right, that is, its axis is perpendicular to its base, and
it is bounded. Apollonius begins by defining a conic surface,
which is generally oblique (since the line from the fixed point
to the center of the circle about whose circumference the generating line turns is not necessarily perpendicular to the plane
of the circle), unbounded, and, significantly, double. The cone
arises from this surface as the figure (schema) contained by
the base circle and the vertex. Later, in proposition 1.4,
Apollonius shows that by cutting the conic surface with
planes parallel to that of the base circle any number of cones
may be produced from the conical surface. In this way, the
two vertically opposite surfaces (hai kata koruphên
epiphaneiae) of the conic surfaces give rise to cones on either
side of the vertex.
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106
Fig. 8: Conica 1.4
Η
Δ
Ε
Θ
A
A
Α
Θ
Δ
Κ
Β
E
H
K
B
Z
Γ
Z
Κ
Θ
Γ
Δ
H
Β
Ε
Ζ
Γ
The doubleness of the conic surface and the double set of
cones that arise from it is (together with its obliqueness)
surely one of the most striking aspects of Apollonius’ definition. So, when Apollonius defines the opposite sections in
1.14, the definition is not entirely unexpected; it has been
prefigured in the definition of the conic surface itself. Indeed,
while the hyperbola is defined in terms of the figure of the
cone, which is defined by means of the conic surface, the
opposite sections are defined in terms of the conic surface,
and in this sense, the opposite sections are prior to the hyperbola. It is worth observing in this connection that 1.14 is the
last proposition in the book in which the conic surface
appears, as if to say that it no longer has to appear, having
served its purpose.
But here a little more needs to be said. For while it is true
that the conic surface does not appear again in the Conica,
the cone does: it reappears in Book 6, where it is used to
carry out various constructions connected with similar and
equal conic sections, and, most importantly, at the end of
Book 1, where Apollonius constructs conic sections in a plane
having given diameters, latera recta, and ordinate angles. In
the latter constructions, Apollonius generally proceeds by
taking the given plane as the cutting plane and then constructing the cone cut by that plane so that the section pro-
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duced is the section required. One might expect, therefore,
that when in 1.59 he set out to construct opposite sections,
he would similarly have constructed the conic surface cut by
the given plane to produce opposite sections. But, as we saw
above, this is not what he does. Applying 1.54-55 in the same
sequence, he constructs one hyperbola and then another.
Furthermore, if one follows 1.54-55 to the letter in constructing the hyperbolas on both sides of BE, which involves
constructing cones as I have remarked, one does not arrive at
the two vertical opposite surfaces composing the conic surface without significantly altering the construction in 1.5455. Can Apollonius truly say, then, as he does, that “it is evident” (phaneron de) that opposite sections are produced in
1.59? I think he can. For when he produces the first hyperbola in 1.59, he does so by producing a cone, in accordance
with 1.54-55; but the cone is only a figure cut off from a
conic surface, and we know from 1.14 that when the plane of
the first hyperbola cuts the opposite surface of the conic surface it will produce the opposite section of the first hyperbola. What remains for Apollonius is only to produce that
second hyperbola so that it has the right diameter, latus rectum, and ordinate direction, which is precisely what he
does.16 So, although the conic surface does not appear explicitly in 1.59, it is still there implicitly. In fact, this is the case
with all the constructions at the end of Book 1: the initial
construction of the parabola, ellipse, and hyperbola, in which
the ordinate direction is right, is carried out by explicitly constructing a cone, but in the continuation of the constructions,
that is, in the cases in which the ordinate directions are not
right, the cone does not appear. In this way, I think it is wrong
to think Apollonius is trying to break away from the cone; the
conic sections are rooted in the cone. Indeed, it is like the
roots of a tree: although the roots are unseen, the leaves, even
those at the very summit of the tree, will not survive without
them.
Thus we can still say with confidence that the opposite
sections have the special status that they do because of their
immediate origin in the double conic surface. They inherit
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
their doubleness directly from the doubleness of the conic
surface; their unity they obtain from the single plane that cuts
the surface. This geometric birth of the opposite sections sets
them apart from the conjugate sections and puts them in the
same class as the parabola, ellipse, and hyperbola.
Summary and Concluding Remarks
Apollonius’ treatment of the opposite sections tells us much
about his mathematical world—mostly because these sections
are not found outside of it. In modern mathematics there is
only the hyperbola, and the hyperbola has two branches. In
Apollonius’ geometry there is an hyperbola and there are
opposite sections. The hyperbola is produced by cutting a
cone; it has an opposite section since the conic surface from
which the cone arises extends not only below but also above
the vertex of the cone. The opposite sections are linked by
their common asymptotes and common diameter. The conjugate sections are linked similarly by common asymptotes and,
though not a common diameter, by conjugate diameters.
However, this kind of linkage seems to be less compelling for
Apollonius than the linkage arising from the single plane cutting the conic surface, for only the opposite sections, and not
the conjugate sections, are spoken of in conjunction with the
other conic sections.
Earlier I referred to Apollonius’ definition of the conic
surface as having a mythic quality. This was to give some
explanation of the motion-filled description constituting the
definition and to highlight the possibility that the development of the conic sections from the conic surface and the figure of the cone was, for Apollonius, nothing short of a spectacle of mathematical genesis. The use of the word “myth” in
a mathematical context is jarring for modern ears; mathematics, if to anything, should be related to logos not muthos.
But in the Greek world, it must be recalled, muthos and logos
overlapped as well as being opposed (Peters, 1967, pp. 120121), so that relationship between the two was one of tension
rather than exclusion. Cassirer has gone far to show that the
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myth-making function is fundamental to human experience,
and I rather agree with him when he says:
The mythical form of conception is not something
superadded to certain definite elements of empirical existence; instead, the primary “experience”
itself is steeped in the imagery of myth and saturated with its atmosphere. Man lives with objects
only in so far as he lives with these forms; he
reveals reality to himself, and himself to reality in
that he lets himself and the environment enter into
this plastic medium, in which the two do not
merely make contact, but fuse with each other.
(Cassirer, 1946, p. 10)
Be that as it may, the use of the word “myth” in the context
of the Conica does suggest a view of Apollonius as one very
much engaged with the being of his objects and where they
come from; indeed, the distance we feel between myth and
mathematics is partly the result of an overly pragmatic view
of mathematics in which properties take precedence over origins, a view which is characteristically modern. In this paper,
I have tried to show that if we disregard visible geometrical
origins and focus only on abstract relations, such as are captured in an algebraic equation, it becomes difficult to understand why the opposite sections enjoy the status they do in
the Conica as conic sections different from the hyperbola,
and why their status is different from that of the conjugate
sections—and, conversely, I have tried to show that the opposite sections bring us back to the importance of geometrical
origins in the Conica and, in so doing, allow us one key to the
character of classical mathematics.
Bibliography
Apollonius. (1891, 1893). Apollonii Pergaei quae Graece exstant
cum commentariis antiquis. Edited by I. L. Heiberg. 2 volumes.
Leipzig: Teubner.
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Apollonius. (1998). Apollonius of Perga Conics Books I-III.
Translated by R. Catesby Taliaferro. Santa Fe: Green Lion Press.
Apollonius. (2002). Apollonius of Perga Conics Book IV. Translated
with introduction and notes by Michael N. Fried. Santa Fe: Green
Lion Press.
Cassirer, E. (1946). Language and Myth. New York: Harper and
Brothers.
Fried, Michael N. and Unguru, Sabetai. (2001). Apollonius of
Perga’s Conica: Text, Context, Subtext. Leiden: Brill.
Goodwin, W W & Gulick, C. B. (1992). Greek Grammar. New
. .
Rochelle: Aristide D. Caratzas.
Heath, Thomas L. (1896). Apollonius of Perga, Treatise on Conic
Sections. Cambridge: At the University Press.
Heath, Sir Thomas L. (1921). A History of Greek Mathematics,
2 vols., Oxford: At the Clarendon Press (repr., New York: Dover
Publications, Inc., 1981).
Klein, Jacob (1981). “The World of Physics and the Natural
World.” The St. John’s Review, 33 (1): 22-34
Peters, F. E. (1967). Greek Philosophical Terms. New York: New
York University Press.
Sommerville, D. M. Y. (1946). Analytic Conics. London: G. Bell
and Sons, Ltd.
Toomer, G. J. (1990). Apollonius Conics Books V to VII: The Arabic
Translation of the Lost Greek Original in the Version of the Banu
Musa. 2 vols. (Sources in the History of Mathematics and Physical
Sciences, 9), New York: Springer-Verlag
Toomer, G. J. (1970). Apollonius of Perga, in DSB, 1, 179-193.
Youschkevitch, A. P (1976). The Concept of Function up to the
.
Middle of the 19th Century. Archive for History of Exact Sciences
16, pp. 37-88.
Zeuthen, H. G. (1886). Die Lehre von den Kegelschnitten im
Altertum, Kopenhagen, (repr., Hildesheim:Georg Olms
Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1966).
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Notes
The algebraic reading of the Conica as an historical interpretation
has, of course, Zeuthen (1886) as its greatest representative;
indeed, Zeuthen’s view of the Conica was completely adopted by
Heath (1896) and, to some extent, by Toomer as well (Toomer,
1990, 1970).
1
From Sommerville (1946), but, needless to say, a similar description can be found in any other textbook of analytic geometry.
2
In this connection, it is worth recalling that the sense in which
functions such as f(x) = a/x (whose graph, of course, is also an
hyperbola) are to be considered continuous or not has itself an
interesting history, one that shows again how history rarely moves
in straight lines. For Euler, “continuity” referred to the rule, so that
a function, like f(x) = a/x, governed by a single analytic equation
should called “continuous.” Although this view still echoes in our
calling the hyperbola one curve with two branches, Euler’s
approach to the continuity of functions gave away to a more geometrical view of continuity, that is, where continuity has much to
do with connectedness in the work Cauchy and Bolzano (For a
detailed discussion of these shifts in the meaning of continuity in
the history of the function concept, see Youschkevitch, 1976).
3
They are less prominent, however, in the extant later books,
Books 5-7 and in Book 1, where they appear in only 9 propositions.
4
The same argument also shows the difficulty in maintaining that,
for Apollonius, the circle was a kind of ellipse. The relationship
between the ellipse and the circle has been discussed extensively in
Michael N. Fried & Sabetai Unguru, Apollonius of Perga’s Conica:
Text, Context, Subtext, chap. 7.
5
Unless stated otherwise, all translations from Books 1-3 are from
R. Catesby Taliaferro in Apollonius of Perga Conics: Books I-III
(Green Lion edition).
6
For example in 4.48 (although any proposition from among 4.4154 could be taken as an example) we have in the ekthesis: estôsan
antikeimenai hai ABΓ, Δ, kai huperbole tis he AHΓ...kai tês AHΓ
antikeimene estô he E.
7
8
My translation.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
For this reason, one might expect the dual to be used in referring
to the opposite sections instead of the simple plural. The dual was
used for denoting “natural pairs” (see W W Goodwin & C. B.
. .
Gulick, Greek Grammar, §§ 170, 838, 914). But, as Christian
Marinus Taisbak has pointed out to me, it seems that by Hellenistic
times “the dual had become more or less obsolete.”
9
Fried & Unguru, op. cit., chap. 3; Fried, M. N., Apollonius of
Perga: Conics Book IV, pp. xxi-xxvii.
10
Thus, it is not at all surprising that the figure Eutocius uses to
illustrate Apollonius’ general definition of the transverse diameter is
evidently a pair of opposite sections (Heiberg, 2.201), and not, say,
a pair of circles, which would have served as well and which I have
used above.
11
12
The conjugate sections are introduced in the last proposition of
Book 1, proposition 60. Besides 1.60, the conjugate sections appear
also in propositions 2.17-23,42-43; 3.13-15,23-26,28-29, as well
as in a very striking proposition in Book 7, 7.31.
For the verb suzeugnumi, from which suzugeis is derived, Liddell
and Scott give the definitions, “to yoke together, couple or
pair…esp. in marriage.” It is worth noting that in 4.49, 50, 51
Apollonius uses the same adjective suzugeis to refer to opposite sections.
13
14
See Fried & Unguru, op.cit., pp. 123-124.
In Book 4, particularly in 4.25 (which is the central theorem of
the book: “A section of a cone does not cut a section of a cone or
circumference of a circle at more than four points”) the opposite do
seem to be separated from the other conic sections. In this specific
case, however, Heath’s argument above might be correct, namely,
that the cases involving the opposite sections, as Apollonius stresses
in the preface, were new and needed to be highlighted. It may also
be that 4.25 does actually intend the opposite sections, even though
the proof for the opposite sections comes latter; that kind of nexus
is not unusual in the Conica. Whatever the case, it still remains that,
unlike the opposite sections, the conjugate sections do not appear at
all in Book 4.
15
One might argue here that he is using a result here from Book 6,
namely, that two hyperbolas having the equal and similar figures are
16
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113
equal (6.2), but this could be argued regarding all the constructions
at the end of Book 1.
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115
Viète on the Solution of
Equations and the Construction
of Problems
Richard Ferrier
Introduction
I wish to do two things in this paper, first to review the
grounds for taking François Viète as a pivotal figure in the
history of thought, and second to clarify an interesting technical aspect of his work, namely, what he called the “exegetical art.” This clarification will show Viète to be a traditional
thinker as well as a revolutionary one, by showing how he
stops short of writing symbolic formulae or solutions to problems in geometry.
The second part is much longer, and will take us through
some proofs, none terribly difficult, I hope. The mathematical climax is the analysis of the inscription of a regular heptagon in a circle, an example of the exegetical art in action
taken from Viète’s work.
The Importance of Viète
According to Jacob Klein, the man chiefly responsible for
interest in Viète in the last 70 years, “The very nature of
man’s understanding of the world is henceforth, (that is to
say, after Viète’s work), governed by the symbolic number
concept. In Viète’s ‘general analytic’ this symbolic concept of
number appears for the first time, namely in the form of the
species.” Now this last remark needs clarification, particularly
in its use of the term “species,” that is “form” or “eidos,” but
also, perhaps, in the notion of symbolic mathematics that Mr.
Richard Ferrier teaches at Thomas Aquinas College. He has written, but not
yet published, a study of Viète’s transformative work on the analytic art.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Klein is drawing upon (Greek Mathematical Thought and the
Origin of Algebra, p. 185). I will give a very brief account of
what I think he means.
It comes to something like this. The letters upon which
we operate when we do algebra are not signs of the same
order as the words of common speech. They do not immediately intend or signify anything. They are ciphers related to
each other by rules of connection analogous to syntax in a
spoken language. It is by those rules alone that they acquire
what “meaning” they have. That meaning is now called “syntactic” as opposed to “semantic” meaning. The equals symbol
in an equation does not mean, “is the same in magnitude or
number.” It is rather a relation between two other terms, say
A and B, which happens to be a convertible relation, so if the
first relation holds, A = B, so also the second, B = A holds.
If you give this symbol enough of the behaviors or of the
characteristics that ordinary equality has, then what will be
valid for its use, that is, what will be consistent to say of it
once you have posited the suitable rules governing its role in
a system of such symbols, will also be true of arithmetic or
geometry. This presumes, of course, that you interpret all the
symbols as the kind of beings that arithmetic considers, relations of inequality and equality, numbers themselves, and so
forth. But prior to this interpretation, the set of symbols does
not signify numbers, magnitudes, equalities, additions, divisions, or any other determinate kind of mathematical being.
Moreover, the indetermination in the single letter symbols
gives rise to the notion of a variable, which in turn underlies
modern mathematical or formal logic. Such mathematics is
symbolic mathematics. Mr. Klein claims that the symbolic
concept of number originates in the work of François Viète,
and that this concept comes to dominate modern mathematical thought and to influence modern conceptuality altogether.
Now I do not intend to demonstrate these larger claims
or to argue for them, but rather to look into some particulars
connected with Klein’s view of Viète. First let us note this
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117
aspect of his view: Klein says, “The symbolic concept of number appears for the first time . . . in the form of the species.”
How can that be? How is it that the term “species” can be the
entry point for the modern notion of number, and in general
for a mode of cognition, symbolic cognition, to enter mathematics?
This is what I understand Mr. Klein to mean, and I think
he is correct: Viète found a use of the word “eidos” in a text
of solutions to number problems, an ancient text, the
Arithmetica of Diophantus, where the word is used for the
unknown number. That is, Diophantus calls the unknown a
“species.” Viète conjoined this use to a discussion of a
method of finding unknown magnitudes in geometry. This
method is called analysis. In geometrical analysis, authors
such as Archimedes and Apollonius operate on unknown or
not actually given lines and figures as though they were given.
Viète, then, brought these two together: (1) the name
“species” or “eidos” for the unknown or, as we would say,
variable; and (2) operating or calculating without making any
distinction between unknown and known quantities. But he
went further. He replaced the given quantities, numbers, or
magnitudes with more species, and so produced the first
modern literal or non-numerical algebra, which he called
“species logistic,” that is, computation in forms.
A very elementary example may serve to clarify this idea
somewhat. You are familiar with the problem of finding a
fourth proportional. Now if you express that in algebra you
would come up with something like this: let ‘x’ stand for the
unknown. x is to a as b is to c. In that expression the letter ‘x’
does not stand for something you now have or know. It is not
clear how you should add or multiply or in any way deal with
something that you do not yet have.
Let us ignore this mystery of operating on what is not
there for you, what is not given. Writing x is to a as b is to c,
you take the product of means and extremes, and you wind
up with x times c = a times b. Then you divide both products
by c and you have x = a times b divided by c, where a, b, and
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
c are the givens that will determine x, and when you have that
you have a formula for making x be given to you. Of course,
you cannot compute x unless a, b, and c are actual numbers,
say 4, 5, and 10. If these are the given numbers, then x is
given as well, and it is the number 2. Neither can you construct x, unless you have determinate magnitudes, say straight
lines, as the three givens.
If you keep the letters a, b, and c and you allow a, b, and
c to be equally indeterminate with x, then you no longer have
a definite x so much as a kind of relation between a, b, c, and
x. In algebra, we stop with this relation, calling it both the
formula and the solution to our problem. That is what happens when the particular numbers of an ordinary problem—
to find the fourth proportional—are replaced by signs for the
possibility of finding such a number. You no longer can take
a times b and divide it by c, because a, b, and c are just as
indeterminate as the original unknown. This is what I mean
when I say that Viète used Diophantus’ term species to designate not only the unknowns but also the knowns. He called
the resulting field of calculations and operations, and the consequences of performing them according to laws set out,
“species logistic,” that is, calculation in species.
If we take two easy steps beyond what Viète did, writing
a formula for quadratics and using two unknowns as axes in
a plane, his work leads directly to negative, irrational and
complex numbers, to the idea of a variable, and to analytic
geometry. All this stems from letting the symbol, the
“species,” stand in for the determinate number or magnitude
of classical mathematics.
Viète himself puts it this way, (he uses the term “zetetic,”
which I will discuss later). “The zetetic art does not employ
its logic on numbers, which was the tediousness of ancient
analysts, but uses its logic through a logistic which in a new
way has to do with species. This logistic is much more successful and powerful than the numerical one.” So Viète commands our attention as the originator of the modern algebraic
number concept, and the notion of mathematics as a symbolic
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science not immediately about anything but the arrangements
of its own terms into systems. I say Viète commands our
attention as the originator. Now it is of course the case that
however revolutionary Viète thought he was and however
proud he was of his accomplishment, he did not see all the
things that came from it, for example, imaginary numbers, or
co-ordinate geometry. How did he think of his work? He considered his work largely a restoration of a way of seeking that
went back to Plato. I say he considered it largely a restoration
because there is an addition to the restored analysis that Viète
expressly claims as his own, which he calls exegetic, and it is
this part that I would like to set out next.
The principal ancient text from which Viète formed his
view of analysis is the Seventh book of the Collectio of
Pappus. Pappus distinguishes between seeking, or “zetetic,”
and providing, or “poristic” analyses. This difference answers
to the difference between the propositions in the Elements
that end “Q.E.D” and those that end “Q.E.F.,” that is,
between theorems and problems. There are two types of
analysis, since there are two types of propositions with which
geometers are ordinarily concerned. Viète, for reasons too
subtle to lay out here, read Pappus in another way, making
zetetic and poristic parts of one procedure, a procedure ordinarily applied to a problem, not a theorem. Still, he conceived
of his work as a restoration of the lost art—or perhaps the
partially lost art—of analysis, that is, as a renovation, not an
innovation. That is a striking characteristic of Viète and his
contemporaries. You find in them a preference for the lost or
partially recovered sources in antiquity, for Democritus over
Aristotle, and when Plato is not fully available, for Plato over
Aristotle, for Archimedes over Euclid, and in general for
whatever the schoolmen did not hand on over what the
schoolmen did hand on. They sought the key to the deepest
truths in the arts and sciences in a correct restoration of the
faultily preserved sources of antiquity in preference to accepting the ones that they had received more perfectly intact from
their teachers.
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This is what Viète says: “And although the ancients had
set forth a two-fold analysis, the zetetic and the poristic, it is
nevertheless fitting that there be established also a third kind,
which may be called ‘rhetic’, [telling] or ‘exegetic’, [showing
or exhibiting], so that there is a zetetic art by which is found
the equation or proportion between the magnitude that is
being sought, and those that are given, a poristic art, by which
from the equation or proportion the truth of the theorem set
up is examined, and an exegetic art, by which from the equation set up or the proportion there is exhibited the magnitude
itself which is being sought.” As if to emphasize his own
achievement in completing the method of analysis, he says,
“And thus the whole threefold analytical art, claiming for
itself this office may be defined as the science of right finding
in mathematics.” As to the importance of the third part,
rhetic or exegetic, he says in another place, “Rhetic and
exegetic must be considered to be most powerfully pertinent
to the establishment of the art, since the two remaining provide examples rather than rules.” He emphasizes the importance of the third part in the remarkable concluding words of
the introduction to the analytic art: “Finally, the analytical
art, having at last been put into the threefold form of zetetic,
poristic, and exegetic, appropriates to itself by rights the
proud problem of problems: To leave no problem unsolved.”
What exactly is the third part of the analytic art, the
showing or exegetic part, the part that Viète himself emphasized and considered his own invention? One way to proceed
to answer would be to read or re-read the parts of Viète’s
Isagoge that touch on exegetics. If your experience is like
mine, though, you know that it is one thing to have someone
describe a procedure, especially a mathematical procedure,
another to know it from having carried it out. Accordingly, I
propose to explicate Viète’s notion of exegesis by doing some
geometry. To prepare for the example of exegetics taken from
Viète, we will look at a problem of my own.
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Viète’s Exegetic Art
Analysis Bootcamp
Our practice will be the analysis of the construction of a regular polygon, the pentagon.
Problem: to inscribe a regular pentagon in a circle.
Figure 1 Inscription of a regular pentagon in a circle
Now the analysis of a construction always starts this way:
suppose you already have what you want to make.
Let it be done, or rather as they say, “let it have been
done.” Our figure is, then, given not really but hypothetically.
ABXCY is supposed to be a regular pentagon in a circle. All
the sides are equal, equal sides subtend equal arcs, equal arcs
subtend equal angles at the circumference, and therefore
angle ACB is precisely half the angle ABC, and is also half the
angle CAB.
The triangle CAB is therefore an isosceles triangle, CA
equaling BC, with the vertex angle half the angles at the base.
Next let the angle at A be bisected by AD. The two half
angles then will each be equal to the angle ACD and the triangle ADC will also be an isosceles triangle.
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Since the angle BAD is equal to the angle ACD, if a circle
be described through the three points A, D, C, the line AB
will be tangent to that circle, for the angle that a tangent
makes with a chord is equal to the angle subtended by the
same arc at the circumference. But the square on a tangent is
equal to the rectangle contained by the whole secant and the
part outside the circle, that is BC and BD, i.e., the square on
AB = rectangle BD, BC. But inasmuch as AB = AD = DC,
then the square on DC = the rectangle BD, BC.
Well, then, if I had this pentagon in this circle, I would
have this line BC cut at a point D so that the square on DC,
the greater segment, is equal to the rectangle contained by the
whole line and the lesser segment. But there is a proposition
that tells me how to do that, the eleventh proposition in the
second book of the Elements. So, let it be done and then
prove “forwards,” or synthetically, all the connections that I
just established “backwards,” or analytically, and at the end
we will really have our pentagon in a circle.
Now, that is a classical geometrical analysis and synthesis
of the sort you would find in the second book of Apollonius,
numerous places in Archimedes, and in Pappus. I have not
used anything algebraic. But, let us indulge ourselves in some
algebra, and look at the equation here: the square on DC =
BD, BC. Calling BC ‘a’, and DC ‘x’, the equation is x2 = a(ax). “And,” you could say to yourself, “if I could only solve for
x, then I would know how long to make DC, and if I could
make DC then I could do the problem. But this is a quadratic
equation, and I can solve it.”
That is the method of analysis. I include here what came
to be called the ‘resolution.’ We began in the classical mode
by looking at the angles and finding a proportion, which we
resolved into an equality between a square and a rectangle.
When we reach this point, we can either continue in the classical mode by thinking of the equality in geometrical terms,
and do the synthesis as a construction, which would be the
answer to the problem. Or we can examine the equality alge-
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braically and work with it in that mode to reach a formula for
x, and consider the formula the solution of the problem.
Recall what Viète said about exegetics: it is supposed to
provide the unknown magnitude itself, to exhibit or construct
it. One would expect exegetics to provide the way for finding
such an unknown as we had in the present problem, that is,
it would seem to be some sort of procedure for cutting the
line BD at a point like D that will produce the requisite properties. One is tempted to think that the procedure intended is
to use the quadratic formula to solve for x, and then interpret
the right hand side as a series of simple geometric constructions. As we shall see later, though, this is an error. Viète’s
exegetic art is not the mechanical exploitation of the formulae of solved equations.
Analysis with Live Ammunition
Next, we will see what Viète does in a real problem that is
considerably more complex but of greater interest.
The problem is to inscribe a regular seven-sided polygon,
a heptagon, in a circle. It is taken from Viète’s published work
and is a real instance of the kind of solution Viète promises in
the introduction, that is, it is a real instance, I think, of
exegetics. To solve it we will need a postulate and two lemmas.
Postulate: To draw a straight line from any point to any two
lines so that they cut off on it any possible predetermined
interval. (I have illustrated this in the next figure. See figure 2.)
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Figure 2 Postulate
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Figure 3 First Lemma: Trisection of an angle:
First Lemma: To trisect a given angle.
Let the given angle be DCE.
The point called the pole is the “any point” of the postulate. “To draw a straight line from any point”: so the straight
line must pass through the pole. “To draw it to any two
lines”—those two lines are the curved line and the straight
line below—“so that they cut off on it any possible predetermined interval”—the interval is up there above; it is given in
advance, predetermined, and what I would like you to grant
me in this postulate is the power to put a line through that
pole so that between those two other lines, that interval is cut
off. Now I must say, “Any possible predetermined interval”
because as is obvious to the eye, I guess, in this figure, if I
made that interval too short, I could not fit the line through
the pole so as to have that interval cut off on it no matter
what. If the two given lines were, for another example, concentric circles, and if the pole were the center of the circle,
then this postulate would be of no use at all because the only
distance between those two lines on lines drawn from the
center of the circle is the difference between their radii; that
is all I could have. So I must say, “any possible predetermined
interval.” If it is possible, I would like the right to place that
line passing through the pole so as to have that distance intercepted on it. This postulate is mentioned in the Isagoge. To
the reader who has not read more of Viète than the Isagoge,
it is not clear why that is in there at all—but he asks for that
postulate for certain purposes, and I ask for it, too.
Let a circle be described with C as center and radius CD.
With pole D and interval = CD we use the postulate to insert
line ABD, so that the interval falls between the circle and the
line CE extended.
I say that angle BAC is 1/3 of angle DCE.
Since AB = BC = CD, the triangle BCD is isosceles, with
equal angles at B and D. But each of these is double the angle
at A. And the one at D together with A is equal to angle DCE.
In the case where the angle to be trisected is greater than 135
degrees, we use the equal exterior angles at B and D, which
are again each twice the angle at A, as in the second figure.
Q.E.F.
Second Lemma: In the first figure for Lemma 1, if we construct DE=CD, the following equality holds:
The cube on AC, minus three times the solid contained by
AC and the square on AB, is equal to the solid contained by
CE and the square on AB.
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Figure 4 Lemma 2: cube AC - 3 times solid (AC, sq. AB) = solid (CE, sq. AB)
Looking at the figure (figure 4), if I drop perpendiculars
BI, DK, and erect a perpendicular CH and extend it, on the
vertical line FHCG I have the situation presented in the
Elements 2.5, that is, I have a straight line bisected and cut
somewhere else, and therefore the square on the half will
equal the sum of the rectangle contained by the unequal segments and the square on the segment between the bisection
point and the point making the unequal cut. And looking at
the straight lines BHD and FHG, I have the situation of 3.35,
namely two lines in a circle cutting each other. When two
lines in a circle cut each other, the rectangles contained by the
segments are equal. I will use those properties and the
Pythagorean Theorem and a few other elementary truths to
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demonstrate the lemma, but the key ones are the ones I just
indicated.
The proof is given next to the figure. The square on AB,
which, since AB = BC is the same as the square on CG, is
equal by that proposition in the second book of the Elements
to the square on CH and the rectangle contained by the
unequal segments FH, HG. But the square on AB minus the
square on CH will be the rectangle which is in turn equal to
the rectangle BH, HD by the other proposition from the third
book, namely that rectangles made of the segments of two
intersecting lines in a circle are equal. Now the square on
CH, by the Pythagorean Theorem, will be equal to the difference between the square on the hypotenuse AH and the
square on AC. But since BI is a perpendicular drawn from the
vertex of an isosceles triangle, it will bisect the base AC, and,
BI being parallel to HC, the line AH will also be bisected at
B, so that the square on AH is four times the square on its
half, AB. Then the square on CH is the difference between
four times the square on AB and the square on AC. Next,
from that and the line above, namely, that the difference
between the square on AB and the square on CH is equal to
the rectangle BH HD, the square on AC minus 3 times the
square on AB will be equal to the rectangle BH HD. Now that
is almost where I want to be because I am interested in the
cube on AC, and the difference between that and—I am looking at the conclusion now—three times the solid contained by
AC and the square on AB. I have those solids with the height
removed, as it were, I just need the height AC and I have
those solids. That is my next goal.
Then BH is to HD as IC is to CK, since any two lines cut
by parallel lines are cut proportionally. And if BH is to HD as
IC is to CK, then it is also in the same ratio as their doubles
AC and CE. So that BH is to HD as AC is to CE. Then, taking the common height, BH, the square on BH is to the rectangle BH, HD as AC is to CE. But BH is equal to AB so that
the square on AB is to the difference between the square on
AC and three times the square on AB—that was what we
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found equal to the rectangle BH, HD—in the same ratio,
namely as AC is to CE.
Then taking means and extremes, the solid contained by
the means is equal to the solid contained by the extremes,
namely the cube on AC, minus three times the solid contained
by AC and the square on AB is equal to the solid contained
by CE and the square on AB. Q.E.D.
I would note at this point that everything we have gone
through in these preliminaries is strictly classical, synthetic
geometry. It could all have been done by Archimedes or
Apollonius, and some of it, in fact, was done by them.
Now let us see what interest this second lemma might
hold. It seems to me the easiest thing would be to look at this
figure given below (figure 5) which removes all the middle
steps and just looks at the result.
Figure 5
If you have two isosceles triangles with equal sides p and
unequal sides q and x, then you get an equation answering to
the equality that I gave in the geometrical mode namely that
x3 – 3xp2 = qp2 or, in short, this is a geometrical configuration that answers to a cubic equation. If you have ever gone
back and looked at things in Euclid, trying to express them in
equations, you will know that cubics are unusual. You almost
always get squares. This theorem answers to a cubic equation.
And that is why Viète proves it. He proves this theorem in
order to give a geometrical counterpart to that cubic equation.
If the terms in the equations are interpreted as the sides
and bases of the triangles in this theorem, then the solution
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of the interpreted equation would reduce to the construction
of this figure. That is, if you could construct the triangles set
up this way, and in particular if you could give yourself x,
then you would have solved this equation, this interpreted
equation, as I would like to speak of it. To put this another
way, if x3-3xp2+qp2, then x can be found as the base of an
isosceles triangle whose equal sides are p and whose base
angle is 1/3 the base angle of an isosceles triangle with sides
p and base q. Now the angles of such a triangle, namely the
one with two sides p and a base q, are given. Why? Because
the whole triangle is given. If you have three sides you have
a determinate triangle, and so the angles are given. And given
two equal sides and any one angle in an isosceles triangle, the
remaining side and the remaining angles are also given.
Consequently the base of the flatter triangle would be given.
Thus all we need to do to solve for x is to trisect a given
angle. This is easily done by means of our first lemma.
To review: we have a postulate that allows us to insert a
rotating line through a given point across two lines so as to
have cut off on it any interval. We have found a figure that
answers to a certain cubic equation, namely, paired isosceles
triangles with a 3:1 base angle ratio, that answers to a certain
cubic equation, and we obtained this figure by trisecting an
angle. Those are the preliminaries.
Last, let us see how Viète inscribes a regular seven-sided
polygon in a circle. This problem, incidentally, is Viète’s own
final problem in his Supplementum Geometriae, his completion of geometry. I have chosen it not only for its intrinsic
interest but also because I think Viète, who calls the
Supplementum a work in exegetics, gave this problem as a
specimen of the workings of his exegetic art.
Problem: To inscribe a regular heptagon in a circle.
Let it have been done. (See figure 6.)
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Figure 6 Inscription of a regular heptagon in a circle
And let BE be one side of the heptagon; then the angle ECB
will be 1/7 of two right angles. Then the angle at E, CEA, will
also be 1/7 because that is an isosceles triangle, EAC. Then
the angle EAB will be 2/7 because it is the sum of those. Now
from the point E let ED be drawn equal to the radius of the
circle, and where it cuts the circle at F let the line FA be
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drawn to the center. Then we have two isosceles triangles of
the sort in the trisection lemma from which it follows that the
angle FAC is three times angle EDA. It is the same figure that
we had in the trisection lemma. In the triangle EAC the two
smaller angles each being 1/7 of two right angles, the remaining angle at A is 5/7 of two right angles, but the whole angle
FAC being triple the angle at D, which is itself 2/7, will be
6/7. The remaining angle FAE will be 1/7 of two right angles.
It will be equal then to the angle AEC, so that the lines FA and
EC will be parallel.
Since those two lines are parallel they cut the sides of the
triangles DEC and DFA proportionately, so DE is to DC as
DF is to DA. But, by another proposition from book 3 of the
Elements, the book of circles, the rectangle contained by the
segments of a secant, that is, the whole secant and the part
outside, DF, DE, is equal to the rectangle contained by the
segments of any other secant drawn from the same point outside. So DB, DC equals DE, DF. Then, turning that equality
into a proportion: DE is to DC as DB is to DF, but as DE is
to DC as DF is to DA, therefore DB, DF, DA are continuously
proportional. Then, in a continuous proportion the first is to
the third in the duplicate ratio, or as the squares, on any
terms in the ratios and also any terms having the same ratio
as those terms. So DB is to DA as square DE is to square DC.
But DE was by construction made equal to the radius so DB
is to DA as square AB is to square DC. Here we stop.
How does one know when to stop in an analysis? Well,
here is one way I know in this one. You stop when you have
projected the ratios you know in various parts of the figure
down to ratios on one line. It happens in the synthetic proofs
of Apollonius, too. You take a number of ratios in the figure
and when you transform them into a proportion all on a single line, that tells you how the lengths in that line are related.
That is where we are now. We have taken the ratios that exist
through the figure because of its shape and we have turned
them into a proportion among the parts of one line. That is
also beautifully adapted for conversion into an equation.
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That line, of course, is the diameter extended, DBAC, and
our proportion is DB is to DA as square AB is to square DC.
Let us turn this into species logistic, or algebra. What do
we need to construct the heptagon that we do not know? Is
it not clear that we need to know DB? If we knew DB, we
could locate point D and since DE is equal to a radius, we
could just swing a radius out from D and cut off the other end
of the side of the heptagon, and we would be done. So DB is
the unknown, and that is the only term we need to find on
this line, on the diameter extended. So call DB ‘x’, and the
radius ‘r’. DA will then be (r+x), and DC will be (2r+x). The
proportion then may be written: x: (r+x) :: r:(2r+x). Means
and extremes can be taken, yielding the equation: x3 + 4rx2
+ 3r2x = r3.
This does not look very promising. It is a cubic, and we
have a pattern for solving a cubic, but not this cubic. Happily,
there is an algebraic gimmick that Viète invented called
“plasma,” which will do the trick. (Almost none of Viète’s
technical terms passed into common use, by the way.
Accordingly, it is like reading ancient law-books to read him
talking about his procedure. One of the few Viètean terms
that did last was “coefficient,” but “plasma” did not.)
“Plasma” is the technique of getting rid of an unwanted term
in an algebraic expression by taking a substitute variable. In a
way you might say that is what you do when you complete
the square in solving a quadratic. You find the right thing to
remove the middle term, the term that is just an x, and then
it is just a simple square; it is no longer a three-term expression. Now in cubics if you could remove two terms at once,
then all you would have to do is take cube roots and you can
solve them in much the same way you solve quadratics.
Plasma gets rid of one term, a term in x or x squared, but
unfortunately only one. The substitution that you make to do
it is y = x + 4/3r, or x = y – 4/3r. Let that substitution have
7
been made, and you get the equation in y:y3 – 7 r2y= 27r3.
3
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Now if we let p = r √7/3, and r/3 be q, this equation
transforms into our pattern y3 – 3yp2 = qp2. Point D gives x
and y, and hence one side of our heptagon. Since we have the
side, we can just go around the circle six more times and the
problem is done.
I omit a slight digression in Viète’s analysis here. It is
done for reasons of elegance and does not substantially
change the argument. This is the pivot point of the argument,
where we move from analysis to synthesis. Viète’s synthesis
runs through the analysis backwards: first the analysis in the
equations and proportions, and then the analysis in the
angles, until he has a proof that the figure that he had made
in the circle is a regular seven-sided figure. I will omit the synthesis.
It must be noted, however, that not only would every
ancient geometer have provided a synthesis, but that Viète,
too, gives it in the Supplementum Geometria, the text from
which this all comes. Indeed, it is all that he gives. What I
have laid out here is a reconstructed analysis following his
remarks on how to do these sorts of problems. That is, he
says that the proof will be the reverse of the analysis and that
the analyst dissimulates and does not show you everything he
did. This seems to me to be a kind of challenge to readers of
those texts to find out what he did do. Descartes says just that
in his Géométrie. So that is what I have given you: it is a
reconstructed analysis of his problem. Like Descartes, Viète
complains that the Ancients covered their tracks and then
does the same himself!
Conclusion
A survey of our procedure is now in order. First, we did
not do something that the discussion of exegetics in the
Isagoge might suggest. I think also it is what Mr. Klein’s book
suggests, and I know it is what I thought when I first read the
Isagoge myself. We did not, using algebra, or as Viète calls it,
species logistic, solve the equation to which we had reduced
our problem. That equation would be the first one that had
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the fours in it, and that we later on reduced by plasma to
another equation. At no point in working with that equation
did we solve for the unknown in the shape of a formula.
There is not an algebraic or analytic solution to that equation;
it is not to be found. You perhaps may wonder if I misspoke
my thought there: absolutely not. In fact, the cubic equation
involved here is the so-called “irreducible cubic,” which
means that it cannot be solved by algebra. If you try to solve
it by algebra, you involve yourself with imaginary quantities,
and every attempt you make to get rid of them is like stepping on the bump in the rug: they pop up again elsewhere.
They cannot be gotten rid of. So it is not just that he failed to
do it. He cannot do it; no one can do it.
Exegetics, then, does not mean performing the geometric
counterpart of an algebraic solution as it is laid out in a formula. It does not mean getting -b±√b2-4ac
for example, and then
2a
going through the squaring,
adding, subtracting, and so on in geometry, with the formula
laid out for you as a kind of blueprint. This is something to
which the opening pages of Descartes’ Géométrie point. I say
“point” because I am not sure even Descartes does it; you
have to think for awhile to see whether he intends his figures
to be the simple exploitation of his operation or not. Perhaps
they are not exploitations of the quadratic formula, but independently given geometrical constructions. As is so often the
case with the foxy Descartes, he does not say enough to help
us be sure what he has in mind. It is defensible, though, in the
light of what he does say, that he intends you to have a geometric counterpart for each algebraic operation, and just to
exploit the formula directly. That is at least defensible in
Descartes. In Viète it is not so.
So what did we do if we did not do that? Well, first we
performed an ordinary geometrical analysis of the sort
Archimedes might have done. This ended in a proportion.
That proportion was then treated as an item in logistic. We
forgot that it was about lines and just regarded it as a number
of items in a logistic relation. It was transformed until it
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reached a certain form. What form? A form we knew in
advance from our first lemma to have its geometrical counterpart in a constructable figure—that is, constructable if you
grant our postulate. Then, after we had noted certain proper
elegances pertaining to this particular problem, we proceeded
synthetically (or rather, we would have if we had gone
through all of the steps), first constructing the requisite line
and then the whole polygon, and then, via the resulting equation and other relations, proving that it is indeed a regular
seven-sided figure in a given circle. Zetetic is Viète’s name for
the first two parts of this procedure, both the geometrical
part terminating in the proportion and the algebraic analysis
in which we reach an equation in standard form.
Zetetic ended when the equation to which the problem
had been reduced fit one of a number of standard forms, our
lemma for cubics being one such form. This lemma provides
the principal exegetical part. By means of this lemma, we can
now find the unknown, in this case the line DB. Exegetics as
a procedure is regular and synthetic. I mean those terms
strictly, that is, the construction is a standard, mechanical
exploitation of the equation that can be given by a standard
construction. The complete synthesis simply runs through the
zetetics in reverse order. If your problem reduces to a cubic
of another form (this is the same with the one we have been
examining, but with the signs on the left side of the equation
switched: 3p2x – x3 = p2q) there is, in the Supplementum,
another, similar exegetical lemma you can use to start your
construction, and the situation is quite the same for problems
such as inscribing the pentagon, reducing to quadratic equations.
Viète treats quadratics in another treatise, and it is an
extraordinarily puzzling little work. Almost everything in it is
painfully obvious, at least the first 14 or so propositions are,
and it has the rather odd and stuffy title, which I think should
now make sense, “The Standard Enumeration of Geometrical
Results.” It is a handbook; it is like a carpenter’s manual.
When you have one of these, build in this order that, etc. He
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does this for quadratic equations and for certain biquadratic
equations. Moreover, in all these cases, the proof, which follows the construction, as in Euclid, is a straightforward reversal of the geometrical and logistic analyses that preceded—
now that, I think, fits Viète’s language in his introduction; it
makes sense of his language.
So exegetics in practice comes to this. It is the provision
and employment of a series of standard constructions for
finding unknown quantities when such quantities are
enmeshed in equations of various degrees, without solving
the equations. This is important, since it manifests the way
Viète stands in two camps, modern or symbolic, and ancient
or constructive. Though species logistic is of profound value
to him, he never rests in the fully analytical or symbolic solution to his equations. They must always be perfected by realization in construction or computation, artful synthetic and
non-symbolic procedures.
I hope we may now see why Viète wrote, “Exegetic comprises a series of rules, and is therefore to be considered the
most important part of analytic, for these rules first confer on
the analytic art its character as an art, while zetetic and poristic consist essentially of examples.” The analyst who knows
exegetics will know what the standard constructable forms in
each degree are, and he will accordingly know what to aim at
in his zetesis, in his analysis. This will in turn inform his
development of the techniques of species logistic, and finally,
if he believes, as Viète came to believe, that he has all the
exegetics that can be, he may well boast that, “The analytical
art, having at last been put into the threeform form of zetetic,
poristic, and exegetic, appropriates to itself by right the
proud problem of problems, which is to leave no problem
unsolved.”
�
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Kraus, Pamela
Brann, Eva T. H.
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Price, Audra
Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Flaumenhaft, Harvey
Hopkins, Burt C.
Unguru, Sabetai
Fried, Michael N.
Ferrier, Richard
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The St. John’s Review
Volume XLVII, number three (2004)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Shanna Coleman
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson,
President; Harvey Flaumenhaft, Dean. For those not on the
distribution list, subscriptions are $10.00 for one year.
Unsolicited essays, reviews, and reasoned letters are welcome.
Address correspondence to the Review, St. John’s College,
P Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are
.O.
available, at $5.00 per issue, from the St. John’s College
Bookstore.
©2004 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction
in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
The St. John’s Public Relations Office and the St. John’s College Print Shop
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
3
Contents
Essays and Lectures
Educating by ‘the Question Method’:
The Example of Kierkegaard.........................................5
Mark W. Sinnett
What It Means To Be Human:
Aristotle on Virtue and Skill........................................43
Corinne Painter
Reviews
Kant’s Afterlife
Immanuel Kant’s Opus Postumum...............................59
Eva Brann
Odysseus’s World of the Imagination
Eva Brann’s Homeric Moments....................................87
Paul Ludwig
The City: Intersection of Erôs and Thumos?
Paul Ludwig’s Erôs and Polis.....................................105
Michael Dink
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5
Educating by ‘the Question
Method’: The Example of
Kierkegaard
Mark W Sinnett
.
“There was a young man as favorably endowed as an
Alcibiades. He lost his way in the world. In his need he
looked about for a Socrates but found none among his
contemporaries. Then he requested the gods to change him
into one.” This is an entry in the Journal of Søren
Kierkegaard from the winter of 1842,1 when he was putting
the finishing touches on his first great aesthetic work,
Either/Or. It is a reference to the pseudonymous author of the
texts that compose the first volume of Either/Or, and as such
it contains within it both the purpose and the origin of
Kierkegaard’s entire literary work. Kierkegaard’s works
embody the attempt of this gifted young man to be the
Socrates whom he could not otherwise find among his
contemporaries; they represent Kierkegaard’s attempt to
educate by what he calls “the question method,” to educate
by the method he has learned from his own teacher, “the
simple wise man of antiquity.”
In My Left Hand and in My Right
In the midst of the long-standing and ongoing disarray of
scholarly interpretation of Kierkegaard, there are two facts
on which there is general agreement. The first of these
presents us the fundamental problem in understanding
Kierkegaard’s work, while the second, as I argue, presents us
the solution.
Everyone knows, first, that Kierkegaard divided his
writings into two streams: the works, such as Either/Or, Fear
Mark Sinnett is a tutor on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College. This
lecture was delivered at Annapolis on April 6, 2001.
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and Trembling, and Philosophical Fragments, which are
populated by various pseudonymous authors and editors; and
the “religious” works, such as the six volumes of Edifying
Discourses published concurrently with the above works in
1843-44, and signed in Kierkegaard’s own name.2
Kierkegaard’s rather elliptical explanation of this curious
procedure is given in The Point of View for My Work as an
Author which he wrote (but did not publish) in 1848. Written
in anticipation of the republication of Either/Or, the The
Point of View emphasizes that his writings have been misread
and misunderstood, but that from the proper “point of view”
they can be understood “in every detail” (16). The misunderstanding in question, Kierkegaard explains, is inseparable
from the fact that he has come to be regarded as an aesthetic
writer turned religious. He asserts, to the contrary, that he has
been a “religious author” from the beginning; that “the
whole of my work as an author is related to Christianity, to
the problem ‘of becoming a Christian’, with a direct or indirect polemic against the monstrous illusion we call
Christendom” (5-6). This is demonstrated, he says, by the fact
that from the beginning of his authorship his pseudonymous,
“aesthetic” works were accompanied by “religious” works
signed in his own name. The “duplicity,” thus, “dated from
the very start. For the Two Edifying Discourses are contemporaneous with Either/Or. The duplicity in the deeper sense,
that is, in the sense of the authorship as a whole, is not at all
what was a subject of comment at the time: the contrast
between the two parts of Either/Or. No, the duplicity is discovered by comparing Either/Or and the Two Edifying
Discourses” (11).
Unfortunately, however, not only did no one undertake
this comparison, virtually no notice of any kind was taken of
the little volume of discourses, notwithstanding its relatively
greater significance. “Although Either/Or attracted all the
attention, and nobody noticed the Two Edifying Discourses,
this book betokened, nevertheless, that the [upbuilding]3 was
precisely what must come to the fore, that the author was a
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religious author, who for this reason has never written
anything aesthetic, but has employed pseudonyms for all the
aesthetic works, whereas the Two Edifying Discourses were
by Magister Kierkegaard” (12).4 The popular success of the
pseudonymous work was very gratifying, especially that of
“The Seducer’s Diary”—“how wonderful!”—but it was of no
avail since no attention was paid to the “contemporaneous”
discourses, another instance of the all too frequent phenomenon that “things of the most vital importance often seem
insignificant, . . . [like] ‘a little flower hidden in the great
forest, not sought out either for its beauty, or for its scent, or
because it was nourishing’” (19). And he summarizes the mishandling of his works as follows: “I held out Either/Or to the
world in my left hand, and in my right the Two Edifying
Discourses; but all, or as good as all, grasped with their right
what I held in my left” (20); and, we may add, grasped not at
all what he held in his right.5
These remarks, brief as they are, furnish certain basic
parameters for the interpretation of Kierkegaard’s authorship, namely, that what is offered with the left hand is to be
received with the left hand and, simultaneously, what is
offered with the right is to be received with the right. Until
quite recently there have been no interpretations of the writings that satisfy these parameters. The “true explanation,”
nevertheless, “is at hand and ready to be found by him who
honestly seeks it” (16). It is to be found, as we shall see, in
Kierkegaard’s references to his “dialectical position” (6), to
the “dialectical” character of his authorship (15), to “dialectical reduplication” (16, 17), to his “indirect method” that
“arranges everything dialectically” (25), to “patient finger
exercises in the dialectical” (38), to “the criss-cross of dialectics” (39)—and many more can be adduced.
This brings us to the second generally accepted fact about
Kierkegaard’s work; namely, that his “dialectical method” is
also his “Socratic method” (40); in other words, that his
procedure is inspired by the “simple wise man of antiquity”
who is his “teacher” (41). Although many have written about
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Kierkegaard’s use of Socratic “irony,” and referred to
Kierkegaard’s maieutic role as “midwife,” and even to
Socratic “dialogue,” we find nowhere in the secondary literature a detailed comparison between Kierkegaard’s efforts and
his Socratic model as presented in Plato’s dialogues.
The insight that emerges from a close, comparative reading of the chronologically associated texts, and that makes
sense of the “duplicity” of the authorship as a whole, is that
these texts constitute between them the question and answer
of Socratic dialectic. The reason both sides of the authorship
are needed—the reason the dramatis personae on both sides
have a real dramatic role to play—the reason Kierkegaard
insists his intended meaning will emerge only through
“comparing” the pseudonymous works with their associated
discourses—is that the associated texts constitute between
them a “conversation” (dialektos), a dialogue, within which
“Magister Kierkegaard,” speaking in his own voice, is able to
critically examine the perspectives of his own pseudonyms,
and thus to apply his “indirect polemic against the monstrous
illusion we call Christendom.”
The task of understanding this dialectical structure of the
authorship of Kierkegaard requires that we understand the
inspiration he received through the example of Socrates. We
begin our quest for this understanding with Kierkegaard’s
discussion of Socratic dialectic—what he calls “the question
method”—in his doctoral dissertation, The Concept of Irony,
with Continual Reference to Socrates.
The Question Method
The significance of Socrates in The Concept of Irony lies in his
being, in Kierkegaard’s view, the originator of irony (9).
Among the members of the “Socratic movement” known to
him—Xenophon, Plato, and Aristophanes—Kierkegaard
prefers the latter two, laying particular emphasis upon the
“narrative” and “dramatic” dialogues of the one and the
Clouds of the other. Clearly realizing that all of these texts are
artistic constructions, Kierkegaard nevertheless believes that
SINNETT
9
the “genuinely Socratic” can be recovered from them through
careful comparative study. But this brings us to what
Kierkegaard regards as the single most important source of
the “Socratic,” Plato’s Apology, which, he believes, presents
us “an authentic picture of the actual Socrates” (80).
The first lesson we learn from Apology, according to
Kierkegaard, concerns the utter “negativity” of Socrates. This
is illustrated in the course of Socrates’ defense by his indifference to the order of the family (184-85)6 and to the
collective authority of the state (193-94).7 This implies, says
Kierkegaard, Socrates’ “completely negative relation” both to
the “state” (160) and to “the established order with respect to
religion” (168). The latter is especially clear in Socrates’
reliance on the daimonion, whose silence in the face of the
Council’s death penalty persuades Socrates that he has nothing to fear from it (Apol. 40B-C). This suggests, according to
Kierkegaard, not only the privacy of Socrates’ religious life in
what is otherwise a very public Greek world (160-61), but
the silence that is here substituted for the “divine eloquence”
that permeated the whole of Greek religion (161). This is
consistent with the characteristic of the daimonion, which,
even if it is “something divine,” is “something that precisely
in its abstraction is above definition, is unutterable and
indescribable, since it allows no vocalization” (158). And the
negativity of Socrates is confirmed, Kierkegaard asserts,
by the same qualities of abstraction and silence in the
“dramatic” dialogues: the negative character of love as an
“empty longing” in Symposium (45, 46, 49); the “total
negativity” of teaching in Protagoras (52); the completely
“negative” views of death and of the soul in Phaedo (64, 71);
and the “negative conclusion” of Republic, book 1 (111,
115). What is significant, Kierkegaard insists, is that in each
case the discussion ends, not simply with no conclusion, but
with a “negative conclusion”; in other words, that it ends, not
simply with no positive result, but with Socrates’ “ironic
smile” at the vacuous result (57).
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
This suggests the quality that is actually Kierkegaard’s
principal concern, namely, the irony in which the negativity
of Socrates is properly expressed. Apology, once again, is a
good illustration, for its “total structure” lets “Socrates’
position become apparent as irony” (79). For example, in
speaking, not in his own defense but on his accusers’ behalf
(Apol. 30D), “lest they sin against the gift of the deity” (96),
the relation of prosecution and defendant has been unexpectedly reversed, demonstrating not only the lack of any real
point of contact between Socrates and his accusers (88), but
“the ironic infinite elasticity, the secret trap-door through
which one suddenly plunges down . . . into irony’s infinite
nothing” (26). In Socrates, in short, Kierkegaard sees “irony
in all its divine infinitude, which allows nothing whatever to
endure” (40).
That “irony levels everything” (79), moreover, is in
Kierkegaard’s view no accidental circumstance: it is not
simply expressive of Socrates’ “negative relation” to the
established order of things, but the means of his conscious
and unrelenting challenge to it. The irony of Apology, thus, is
not simply Socrates’ failure to present any real defense, but
the fact that it is Athens that is on trial and Socrates who is
proceeding as “counsel for the prosecution” (173). The irony
of his “wisdom” was the weaponry of his “campaign” (175),
the means of his “cutting off all communication with the
besieged, . . . which starved the garrison out of opinions,
conceptions, time-honored traditions, etc. that had been
adequate for the person concerned.” He purposed, not to
supply “the idea” which he had glimpsed, but, by the
application of that “causticity . . . which nothing can resist”
(206), to strip away anything and everything that stood in the
way. Although his “total skepticism” (115) often invited comparison with that of the Sophists, Socrates singled out the
“teachers of wisdom” for his most intense “polemic” (209,
210): “When the Sophists, in good company, had befogged
themselves in their own eloquence, it was Socrates’ joy to
introduce, in the most polite and modest way of the world, a
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11
slight draft that in a short time expelled all these poetic
vapors” (37). Socrates’ irony was the means of his challenge
to both the ancient order of the polis and the Sophists’
attempted “surrogate” order; it was the “the glaive, the twoedged sword that he swung like an avenging angel over
Greece” (211).
Of course Socrates is especially known for the particular
means by which he presented his challenge: As illustrated by
his examination of Meletus and Anytus in Apology (24C-28A),
his “customary way is that of asking questions” (45). The
“question method” (55), which Kierkegaard also describes as
Socrates’ “dialectical method” (124), was precisely the means
of his challenge to the surrounding culture. Socrates begins
his inquiry where people already are—“on the periphery, in
the motley variety of life endlessly interwoven within itself ”
(32)—and “an exceptional degree of art is needed to unravel
not only itself but also the abstract of life’s complications.”
The “art” in question is “the Socratically disciplined
dialogue,” “the rather well-known Socratic art of asking
questions or, to recall the necessity of dialogue for Platonic
philosophy, the art of conversing” (33).
This art is preserved by Plato, the dialogical form of
whose writings appear, in Kierkegaard’s view, to be not only
inspired by but also intended as an extension of Socrates’ life
and teaching (30, 188-89). What we find in Plato’s dialogues,
according to Kierkegaard, is a Socrates created by “poetic
productivity” (15, 18, 125), and a literary form engendered
by the “epoch-making” experience of him (29). And thus is
revealed Socrates’ significance “in the world-historical development”; namely, “to be the infinite beginning that contains
within itself a multiplicity of beginnings” (216-17), including
the “beginning” undertaken by Kierkegaard himself in 1843.
We are surely entitled to ask, however, what this “beginning” really amounts to. If the result of Socratic inquiry is
simply “negativity”—if, as already suggested, this method
“allows nothing whatever to endure”—is it not better
described as the end rather than as a “beginning”? What we
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
will now discover in considering somewhat more fully
Kierkegaard’s understanding of the nature of inquiry is that
“the question method,” both in the classical tradition and in
his own employment of it, is neither “negative,” nor “positive,” but always in between the two.
The In-Between Structure of Inquiry
“To ask a question,” Kierkegaard insists, “ultimately became
the primary issue for [Socrates]” (37). The crucial point is
that Kierkegaard regards this endeavor as being a form of
knowing. The polemic Socrates directed at the established
religious tradition, for instance, reflected his intimation of
better things to come: “The heavenly host of gods rose from
the earth and vanished from mortal sight, but this very
disappearance was the condition for a deeper relationship”
(173-74). Socrates’ insight represented, in this respect, “the
beginning of infinite knowledge” (174) and a “new direction”
for the age (175). According to Kierkegaard all of Socrates’
inquiry implies his apprehension of a reality worthy of being
explored and more fully understood. He describes Socrates’
questioning of his fellow citizens as the means by which “the
bonds of their prejudices were loosed . . . [and] their intellectual sclerosis was softened” (190)8; but “when his questions
had straightened everything out and made the transformation
possible, then the relation culminated in the meaningful
moment, in the brief silvery gleam that instantly illuminated
the world of their consciousness.”9
Kierkegaard elaborates on this image by means of a story
about “an Englishman who traveled in order to see the sights”:
When he came to a mighty forest and found a
place where he could open up an amazing vista by
having the intervening woods cut, he hired people
to saw through the trees. When everything was
ready, when the trees were sawed through for
toppling, he climbed up to this spot, took out his
binoculars, gave the signal—the trees fell, and his
SINNETT
13
eyes instantaneously delighted in the enchanting
view, which was even more seductive because in
almost the same moment he had the opposite. (190)
“So also,” Kierkegaard says, “with Socrates. By means of his
questions, he quietly sawed through for toppling the primeval
forest of substantial consciousness, and when everything was
ready—look, then all these formations vanished, and the eyes
of the soul delighted in a vista such as they had never seen
before.”10 This illustration is significant in that it suggests the
directionality of questioning. Just as the traveler, glimpsing
the light filtering through the trees, “found a place where he
could open an amazing vista by having the intervening woods
cut,” so Socrates knew how to direct his inquiry so as to
reveal to “the eyes of the soul . . . a vista such as they had
never seen before.” The “ideality” that irony demands is
clearly already present in the desire because, as Kierkegaard
claims, “intellectually that which is desired is always in the
desire already, inasmuch as the desire is regarded as the
agitation of the desired itself in the desiring” (213).
“In Socrates’ demand,” otherwise said, “the satisfaction was
[kata dunamin (potentially)] present” (214). The challenge of
Socrates’ polemic, therefore, was just as much a beginning as
it was an ending, “for the destruction of the earlier development is just as much the ending of this as it is the beginning
of the new development, since the destruction is possible only
because the new principle is already present as possibility.”
This invites comparison with the importance placed
upon questions and the process of questioning in the thought
of such modern philosophers as Gadamer, Lonergan
and Polanyi.11 Kierkegaard’s account of questioning is particularly reminiscent of Eric Voegelin’s understanding of
philosophical inquiry “as a movement in the psyche toward
the [divine] ground that is present in the psyche as its
mover.”12 The philosopher’s wondering and questioning,
Voegelin argues, is itself a form of cognitive participation in
the reality being sought—a “knowing questioning and a
questioning knowledge.”13 As such, “the questioning unrest
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carries the assuaging answer within itself inasmuch as man is
moved to his search of the ground by the divine ground of
which he is in search.”14 “The man who asks questions, and
the divine ground about which the questions are asked, . . .
merge in the experience of questioning as a divine-human
encounter and reemerge as the participants in the encounter
that has the luminosity and structure of consciousness.”15
This realm of divine-human encounter is further characterized by Voegelin as the “In-Between,” or the “metaxy”:
Question and answer are intimately related one
toward the other; the search moves in the metaxy,
as Plato has called it, in the In-Between of poverty
and wealth, of human and divine; the question is
knowing, but its knowledge is yet the trembling of
a question that may reach the true answer or miss
it. This luminous search in which the finding of
the true answer depends on asking the true
question, and the asking of the true question on
the spiritual apprehension of the true answer, is
the life of reason.16
The symbolism of the metaxy is derived from Diotima’s
account of the “spiritual realm” in Plato’s Symposium, a
discussion which it will be helpful (in the following sections)
to bear in mind.17
Inhabited not only by “the great spirit,” Erôs, but also by
the man who has “skill” (sophos) in spiritual matters, “the
whole realm of the spiritual,” Diotima explains, “is in
between [metaxu] the divine and the mortal”; it “is the means
of all relation [homilia] and converse [dialektos] of men with
the gods and of the gods with men” (Symp. 202E-203A). The
“spiritual man” is also described as a “lover of wisdom”
(philosophos); that is, as one (like Erôs) who is neither
“resourceless” or “wealthy,” but “is in the middle between
wisdom and ignorance [sophias te au kai amathias en mesô
estin]” (203E). In order to explain this, Diotima notes that
neither the “gods” nor the “ignorant” (amatheis) are “lovers
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of wisdom” (philosophousin) (203E-204A). The former
already possess wisdom and the latter, though they utterly
lack it, are satisfied with themselves and have no desire for
that of which they feel no defect (204A). “Who then,” asks
Socrates, “are the lovers of wisdom, if they are neither the
wise nor the ignorant?” Diotima responds: “They are the
ones in between [metaxu] the two, and one of them is Erôs”
(204B). The “lovers of wisdom” are subsequently characterized by Diotima in terms of their loving quest of wisdom and
beauty: Each of them climbs aloft, “as on the rungs of a
ladder, from one to two, and from two to all beautiful bodies, . . . to beautiful institutions, . . . to beautiful learning, and
from learning at last to the special lore which is study of none
other than the beautiful itself [ho estin ouk allou ê autou
ekeinou tou kalou mathêma]” (211C). “Whoever has been
initiated so far in love-matters [ta erôtika], viewing beautiful
things in the right and regular order [theômenos ephexês te
kai orthôs ta kala], suddenly, as he draws near to the end of
his dealings in love, an amazing vision, beautiful in its nature,
may be revealed to him [pros telos êdê iôn tôn erôtikôn
exaiphnês katopsetai ti thaumaston tên phusin kalon]; and
this, Socrates, is the final object of all those previous toils”
(210E).
Here we see the in-between structure of inquiry, the
character of inquiry as being neither empty nor full, neither
ignorant nor wise, neither “negative” nor “positive,” but
always in between. Accordingly, we see also the character of
inquiry as a form of knowing, displaying a rational structure
(as indicated by Diotima’s “ladder”) and providing a sense of
orientation through the intimation of a reality worthy of
being more fully understood, a reality, indeed, that invites the
philosopher into the quest for understanding. This is especially clear in Symposium in that Socrates, in attacking the
uncritical opinion of Agathon as to the beauty of Erôs, admits
that he is only re-enacting the examination by which the
priestess “honored by the god” (diotima) had challenged the
same viewpoint in himself (201E).18 The philosopher’s
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inquiry, in other words, is an encounter in which the philosopher “is moved to his search of the ground by the divine
ground of which he is in search,” or, otherwise said, in which
what is desired is recognized to be “in the desire already,
inasmuch as the desire is regarded as the agitation of the
desired itself in the desiring.”
That Kierkegaard does indeed share this understanding of
the in-between structure of inquiry is confirmed in an entry
from his Journal from 1851: “I certainly do think that my
presentation or illumination of the essentially Christian
comes some points closer to the truth than the proclamation
of Christianity hereabouts ordinarily does—but I am only a
poet.”19 Commenting on this disclaimer, Kierkegaard
concedes that “‘the pastor’ can make capital of this; he can
say: To be a pastor is something higher; a poet, and Magister
Kierkegaard is right here, is inadequate when it comes to the
essentially Christian, and Mag. K. is only a poet—oddly
enough, says so himself.” Kierkegaard then emphasizes, however, that this is not what he said: “I have not said that I,
measured against ‘the pastor,’ that is, every pastor as such, am
only a poet, but measured against the ideal, I am only a poet”
(emphasis added). Similarly, a little farther on, he notes that:
I have also said “that before God I regard my
whole work as an author as my own education”;
I am not a teacher but a learner. Every teacher of
religion, every music teacher, every gymnastics
coach, every part-time teacher may make capital of
this if he wishes and say: There you see what it is
to be a teacher if Magister Kierkegaard, who is for
all that a gifted person, is only a learner, as he
himself says. But I have not said that I, measured
against every part-time teacher, could not be called
a teacher, but that before God, measured against
the ideals for being a teacher, I call myself a learner.
(emphasis added)
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Recalling the ironical stance of Socrates in Symposium, we
recognize here the daimonios aner, the “spiritual man,” who
moves “in between” the amatheis, the spiritual dullards
(represented especially by the “pastor,” complacent in his
authoritative possession of what is “higher”), and transcendent reality (represented here as the “ideal,” embodying the
inexhaustible challenge and invitation of God’s truth);
we find, in other words, the one who is wise only in his
admission of ignorance, who is a teacher only because he is
first and always a learner.
As we now turn to Kierkegaard’s account (in The Point of
View) of his own application of “the question method”—
what he calls the “criss-cross of dialectics”—we will find
Plato’s Symposium a useful guide.
The Criss-Cross of Dialectics
We begin with Kierkegaard’s description of the “monstrous
illusion” of Christendom that he seeks to challenge. A situation in which everyone is automatically certified by the
church and state as a Christian (22-3) indicates the presence
of “a tremendous confusion, a frightful illusion” (23). At the
motivating center of this illusion, Kierkegaard maintains, is a
profound horror at the possibility of uncertainty in relation
to God: in a manner analogous to those in Socrates’ time who
sought the technai, the techniques, with which to insure the
attunement of human society to divine reality,20 the common
characteristic of those residing comfortably within
Christendom is to have suppressed all conscious awareness of
“the problem of ‘becoming a Christian.’” Given that “the
problem,” as a problem, is for Kierkegaard inherent to
Christian faith, the “monstrous illusion” of Christendom can
only be maintained through suppression of this fundamental
question. Kierkegaard’s endeavor, in turn, may then be
described as the effort by means of “the question method”
to restore to his society conscious awareness of “the
problem”; in other words, to gain a hearing for this fundamental question.
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The first thing to be understood about this task,
Kierkegaard says, is that it cannot proceed directly. “Direct
communication,” after all, “presupposes that the receiver’s
ability to receive is undisturbed” (40), a condition that is not
satisfied in the case of those who live in a state of illusion. In
a manner reminiscent of Plato’s contrast between Socratic
inquiry and Sophistic speech-making, Kierkegaard asserts
that there is “an immense difference, a dialectical difference,
between these two cases: the case of a man who is ignorant
and is to have a piece of knowledge imparted to him, so that
he is like an empty vessel which is to be filled or a blank sheet
of paper upon which something is to be written; and the case
of a man who is under an illusion and must first be delivered
from that” (40).21 The “dialectical difference,” furthermore,
corresponds to that “between writing on a blank sheet of
paper and bringing to light by the application of a caustic
fluid a text which is hidden under another text” (40). This
“caustic means” is also described as “negativity” (40),
indicating again the ambition which Kierkegaard shares with
his “teacher” to dispel the mists and clouds of illusion.
Kierkegaard subsequently says that “negativity understood in relation to the communication of the truth is
precisely the same as deception” (40). This “deception,”
Kierkegaard explains, “begins with self-humiliation: the
helper must first humble himself under him he would help,
and therewith must understand that to help does not mean to
be a sovereign but to be a servant, that to help does not mean
to be ambitious but to be patient, that to help means to
endure for the time being the imputation that one is in the
wrong and does not understand what the other understands”
(27-8). In this way, precisely as he describes his “teacher”
doing, Kierkegaard begins by getting in touch with a person
where he is (26); not by vaunting himself over the other as
teacher over learner, but by identifying himself with the other
as a fellow learner (29), and thereby submitting himself to the
other’s perspective (30).22
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At this point, however, we discover the ultimate purpose
of the deception, for of course, neither for Socrates nor for
Kierkegaard, is it an end in itself. There is one thing, indeed,
“the author must not forget, namely, his purpose, the distinction between this and that, between the religious as the
decisive thing and the aesthetic incognito—lest the criss-cross
of dialectics end in twaddle” (39). The “criss-cross of dialectics” refers to the conversational collision between the aesthetic and the religious in which Kierkegaard’s aesthetic
deception is intended to involve his unsuspecting readership:
If a man lives . . . in categories entirely foreign to
Christianity, in purely aesthetic categories, and if
some one is capable of winning and captivating
him with aesthetic works, and then knows how to
introduce the religious so promptly that with the
momentum of his abandonment to the aesthetic
the man rushes straight into the most decisive
definitions of the religious—what then? Why, then,
he must take notice. What follows after this, however, no one can tell beforehand. But at least he is
compelled to take notice. (37, emphasis added)
Just as Socrates seduced his interlocutors into conversation
through his repeated admission of ignorance, the religious
writer must begin with the aesthetic in order to gain the
attention and willing participation of the person lost in
aesthetic illusion, but “he must have everything in readiness,
though without impatience, with a view to bringing forward
the religious promptly, as soon as he perceives that he has his
reader with him” (26, emphasis added). The “simultaneous
achievement of aesthetic and religious production,” thus, was
no accident (31-32), for it is the “criss-cross” of the two—the
dialectical interrogation of the former by the latter—that was
intended to bring the inhabitants of Christendom unexpectedly and unwittingly into collision with the challenge of the
“religious.”
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As we began the section by noting this occurs indirectly:
the “indirect method,” in fact, “loving and serving the truth,
arranges everything dialectically for the prospective captive,
and then shyly withdraws (for love is always shy), so as not to
witness the admission which he makes to himself alone before
God—that he has lived hitherto in an illusion” (25-26). By
directing the critique of the discourses at the pseudonymous
perspectives of the aesthetic works, Kierkegaard leaves his
reader free to judge the state of his own existence, just as the
readers of Plato’s writings are left free to judge between the
different participants in the various dialogues.23 Only insofar
as the reader is indeed made “captive” to the pseudonymous
perspectives—only insofar as the reader finds himself in
them—is he then possibly, and “indirectly,” subject to the
challenge of reality, which is what Kierkegaard means by “the
most decisive definitions of the religious.”
This leads to the further similarity with Socrates that is
clear in Kierkegaard’s understanding of his work as commissioned and empowered by “Governance.” His work,
Kierkegaard explains, had to be performed under conditions
of strict “divine discipline” (67). Unlike the poet, who is supplied his thoughts under inspiration of the divine muse,
Kierkegaard “needed God every day to shield [him] from too
great a wealth of thoughts” (68). From the beginning, God’s
“aid” was experienced by Kierkegaard in his being “under
arrest” (69), in his vast talents for “poetical” and “aesthetic”
productivity being under restraint by God. “It is as if a father
were to say to his child: You are allowed to take the whole
thing, it is yours; but if you will not be obedient and use it as
I wish—very well, I shall not punish you by taking it from
you; no, take it as yours . . . it will smash you. Without God
I am too strong for myself, and perhaps in the most agonizing of all ways am broken” (69-70). In the midst of the overwhelming riches of his imaginative capacities, he repeatedly
confronted “the frightful torture of starving in the midst of
abundance” (70).
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This tension between his poetic talents and the divine
“arrest”—what Kierkegaard refers to as the “dialectical
factor” (69) in his work—is subsequently described in terms
of a conversation between himself and “Governance.”
The actual work began with “an occurrence,” a “collision”;
namely, his failed engagement with Regine Olsen.24 “What
was to be done? Well, obviously the poetical had to be evacuated, anything else was impossible for me. But the whole
aesthetic productivity was put under arrest by the religious.
The religious agreed to this elimination but incessantly
spurred it on, as though it were saying, Are you not now
through with that?”
It had been Kierkegaard’s original plan to be “through
with that” (i.e., through with the aesthetic work) very
quickly indeed. “In a certain sense it was not at all my
original intention to become a religious author. My intention
was to evacuate as hastily as possible the poetical [by
publishing Either/Or]—and then go out to a country parish”
(86). On its own, Kierkegaard emphasizes, Either/Or did not
communicate his religious intentions, for “there was as yet no
scale presented, nor was the duplicity posited” (85, n.).
He had initially thought that “the most vigorous expression
of the fact that I had been a religious man and that the
pseudonyms were something foreign to me was the abrupt
transition—to go immediately out in the country to seek
a cure as a country parson” (86); but “the urge of productivity” remained so great within him that he sought another way
to present the “scale” that was needed for the proper
interpretation of Either/Or: “I let the Two Edifying Discourses
come out, and I came to an understanding with Governance.
There was allowed me again a period for poetical productivity, but always under the arrest of the religious, which was on
the watch, as if it said, Will you not soon be through with
that?” The “duplicity” of the authorship, thus, is the outward
expression of the “divine arrest” of “Governance,” the outward expression of the divine inward challenge to
Kierkegaard’s own poetic “reflection.” The dialectic of
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pseudonym and discourse, in other words, is the outward
expression of the inward “dialectical factor,” an outward
expression of Kierkegaard’s inward conversation with God.
Kierkegaard, furthermore, clearly understands the outer,
literary expression of this inner dialogue as the means of his
transmission of God’s challenge to the surrounding society.
He writes, he claims, “without authority” (87), since the
critique that the discourses present to the aesthetic perspectives of the pseudonyms has its origin in the inner “divine
arrest” to his own “poetic production.” Governance, thus,
has “educated” him, “and the education is reflected in the
process of the productivity” (73); he has been “conscious of
being under instruction, and that from the very beginning.”25
This, however, far from disqualifying him as the agent of
God’s challenge to others, is the real source of his power:
And now as for me, the author, what, according to
my opinion, is my relation to the age? Am I perhaps the ‘Apostle’? Abominable! I have never given
an occasion for such a judgment. I am a poor
insignificant person. Am I then the teacher, the
educator? No, not that at all; I am he who himself
has been educated, or whose authorship expresses
what it is to be educated to the point of becoming
a Christian. In the fact that education is pressed
upon me, and in the measure that it is pressed, I
press it in turn upon this age; but I am not a
teacher, only a fellow student. (75, emphasis
added)
The comparison with Socrates is, once again, irresistible.
In Symposium, as we have seen, the examination to which
Socrates subjects the Sophist Agathon is presented as the
re-enactment of the examination to which Socrates had
himself been subjected by Diotima. In both cases, thus, the
Socratic figure not only begins by sharing the delusions of
those around him, but is able to challenge others outwardly
only by means of the challenge he himself has received
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inwardly; he “press[es]” upon others the challenge that “is
pressed upon [him], and in the measure that it is pressed.”
Kierkegaard, in particular, seeking a hearing for the question—“the problem of ‘becoming a Christian’”—pursues outwardly, through the dialogue of discourse and pseudonym,
the inward dialogue within which he himself has heard the
question posed by God.
Finally, there is one further similarity with Socrates to
which Kierkegaard draws our attention in The Point of View,
namely, to the fact that the Socratic figure is, in both cases,
entirely without assurance as to the effect of “the question
method.” Kierkegaard can hope, as we saw, that “with the
momentum of his abandonment to the aesthetical [a] man
rushes straight into the most decisive definitions of the religious”; and Kierkegaard is confident that thereby the man
“must take notice.” “What follows after this, however, no one
can tell beforehand”(emphasis added). As with Socrates, who
could reliably arouse in his interlocutors the “sacred rage”
but could not guarantee their response to it,26 Kierkegaard
admits that “it is impossible for me to compel a person to
accept an opinion, a conviction, a belief . . . [even though] I
can compel him to take notice” (35). This is by way of
contrast with the standards of Sophistic education, with its
emphasis upon the assurance of reliable techniques and
predictable results.
We will now find that this contrast between Socratic and
Sophistic education is an important theme in Kierkegaard’s
first dialogue, that which unfolds between Either/Or and the
Two Edifying Discourses of 1843.
Educating the Poet
In Either/Or, the first of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works,
we are presented with a conversation between two friends.
The first volume (Either) contains various texts pertaining to
the “poetic” life, written by an extraordinarily gifted young
man (hereafter referred to as “the poet”). Through a bewildering variety of compositions, ranging from the seemingly
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random aphorisms of the “Diapsalmata,” through several
essays in literary and musical criticism of a very high order, to
the concluding “Seducer’s Diary,” all of it communicating an
equally bewildering variety of moods and emotions, many
troubling aspects of human existence are examined, many
comfortable conventions of respectable life exploded. In
volume two (Or), as if in response to the poet’s challenge, we
find two long letters from a magistrate, Judge William, along
with a sermon by his friend, a Jylland pastor, all of it intended as advice for the guidance of the errant young poet. Here
we find an elaborate and rather clever defense of the sort of
respectable life—and especially of married life—the poet
appears to hold in derision. Here also, especially with the
help of the pastor, we find reliable techniques for the overcoming of the despair that the poet does in fact clearly
display. The two volumes together present (what appear to
be) two very different views of life in conversation with each
other, the “poetic” life on the one hand challenging, and
being challenged by, the “ethical and religious” life on the
other.
As we learn from The Point of View, however, the “two
sides of Either/Or” do not by themselves fulfill Kierkegaard’s
intentions for his writings. Several months after the publication of Either/Or there appeared, signed in Kierkegaard’s
own name, Two Edifying Discourses, through which
Kierkegaard shows us exactly what he thinks of the characters
of Either/Or.27
The question of educational method is explicitly
addressed in the first of the discourses, “The Expectancy of
Faith,”28 and is, in and of itself, a main point of Kierkegaard’s
challenge to Judge William. In the introduction to the
discourse (8-16), Kierkegaard presents us a man—the
“perplexed man”—who is seeking to share his faith with a
friend and falling into greater and greater perplexity in the
attempt. He learns that, while it is indisputably a good gift,
faith is the one gift he cannot give his friend by wishing it for
him, realizing in the process the questionable character of his
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25
own faith.29 Finally giving over care of his friend to God,
who alone, the man realizes, is the teacher all men can equally claim (12-13, 14-15, 28-29), he contents himself with the
essentially negative, maieutic role of challenging the
delusions which, as he knows from his own experience, shut
his friend off from faith (15-16).30 Like Socrates in his inner
dialogue with Diotima, and like Kierkegaard in his inner
dialogue with “Governance,” the perplexed man has no
pretensions to question his friend except in terms of that
which has first questioned him. The “perplexed man,” in others words, precisely in his perplexity, has been equipped as
the expert practitioner of “the question method.” He is to be
assisted in his task by the main section of the discourse
(16-28), which is devoted to description and analysis both of
the forms of “expectancy” by which human beings seek to
maintain control of their own lives, and of “the expectancy of
faith” in which alone that control is given over to God.
The “friend” Kierkegaard really has in mind, however, is
the poet of Either (1.17-445). The categories of expectancy in
the discourse, in fact, correspond exactly to the measures
taken by the poet to defend himself from the threat of time.
The essence of the “poetic life,” in fact, is the “making” (from
the Greek verb poein) of an illusory world in which the poet
can shield himself from the anxieties of temporal existence.
As he says at the close of the “Diapsalmata,” from the sorrow
which is his “baronial castle,” sitting “like a eagle’s nest high
up on the mountain peak among the clouds,” “I swoop down
into actuality and snatch my prey” (42, no. 88). He does not
stay there, of course, for the whole point is to bring his booty
home,
and this booty is a picture I weave into the tapestry at my castle. Then I live as one already dead.
Everything I have experienced I immerse in a baptism of oblivion unto an eternity of recollection.
Everything temporal and fortuitous is forgotten
and blotted out. Then I sit like an old gray-haired
man, pensive, and explain the pictures in a soft
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voice, almost whispering, and beside me sits a
child, listening, although he remembers everything
before I tell it.
Depicted here is one whom the poet himself calls “the unhappiest one,” a man “turned the wrong way [in time] in two
directions” (225), hoping for what lies behind him, recollecting what lies ahead, a man utterly lost in the illusion of his
own “making.”
The matter receives particularly clear treatment in the
poet’s essay entitled “Rotation of Crops.” This refers not
to an agricultural procedure but to the necessity of constantly varying our experience, and more importantly to a
technique for the proper “cultivation” of experience. The
recommended procedure is to achieve an appropriate balance
“between recollecting and forgetting.” No part of life should
be allowed such importance that it cannot be forgotten at
will; neither should any part of life be relegated to such
triviality that it cannot be remembered at will (293). The key
is to throw hope “overboard” (292), for only then “does one
begin to live artistically; as long as a person hopes, he cannot
limit himself.” “It is indeed beautiful to see a person put out
to sea with the fair wind of hope,” but hope makes for a
dangerous pilot of one’s own ship, steering a course and
speed which threaten the greatest of all calamities (292-93).
For he who “runs aground with the speed of hope will recollect in such a way that he will be unable to forget” (293). Far
better to throw hope overboard than to collide with that
experience so recalcitrant as to defy every attempt at the
poesis of recollection.
The challenge Kierkegaard seeks to present the poet
through the discourse is to set sail with hope still on board,
to face the future as it really is, in all its threatening and
indeterminate contingency, and yet with the “expectancy of
faith [which] is victory,”31 the trust that whatever comes will
reflect the will of God, that it will be the victory to which no
one can give a shape beforehand. And there is reason for
confidence that Kierkegaard’s challenge may not fall on
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entirely deaf ears. The poet says himself that he can imagine
being converted from his boredom and despair through experience of “the faith that moves mountains,” but this remark
only serves to demonstrate that he has never had that experience. To the contrary, in several further remarks in
“Diapsalmata,” he emphasizes his disdain for the “timorousness” of the representatives of Danish Christendom (33-34,
no. 67) who are pale and bloodless, without sufficient
courage to passionately affirm or deny anything (23, no. 22),
and who can know nothing of salvation (20, no. 8), since they
are too “wretched” even to sin (27-28, no. 41). The poet, we
recall, is the gifted young man looking for a Socrates, looking
for someone who can question him, who can give his confusion direction and sharpen it into the joyous perplexity
known as faith.32 The poet’s despair, therefore, is part of
Kierkegaard’s indirect polemic against the society that could
not challenge him.
We most directly encounter the society in question in the
person of Judge William (Either/Or 2.3-333). As husband,
father, magistrate, church member, and devotee of fashionable philosophy, the good Judge is representative of
respectable Danish society in every respect. Judge William is
Danish society writ small. Kierkegaard’s “direct” attack on
the Judge’s “ethical and religious” life, therefore, is also
simultaneously his “indirect” critique of the spiritual poverty
of Danish Christendom. Particularly at issue is the Judge’s
educational method. Judge William, too, is anxious to help
the poet, and, unlike the “perplexed man” of the discourse (as
well as the perplexed man who wrote the discourse), he
knows exactly how to go about it. The poet is afraid of the
uncertainties and discontinuities of time, so the Judge shows
how the disjointed and contingent facts of “outer history”
may be “transformed and transferred” into the “continuity”
of “inner history” (98-9, 250-51). The poet is afraid of the
rigors of duty and responsibility, so the Judge explains that
duty is the road sign that never directs a person anyplace he
doesn’t already wish to go (149), the old friend that never
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commands anything a person is not already ready to do
(146).
The poet is afraid of dependence upon the uncertain
things around him, so the Judge shows him how he can posit
his own “self ” in “absolute security” (213). Choose something, says the Judge; choose anything; choose even to
despair (208-9). By freely choosing to despair the poet will
have posited an “either/or,” one of many possible either/or’s,
and this, being a realm which implies a discernible distinction
between what he will have chosen and its alternative, will
lead him to the “ethical.” Since this choice will have been
made in freedom, moreover, the self which chooses will have
been established in complete independence from anything
outside itself (180).
A particularly important case of this desired independence is that of the complete independence of the self from
God. This is to be achieved, says the Judge, by that free
choice in which we place ourselves always in the stance of
“repentance” before God (216). Only by the freedom of this
choice, in which human love for God is unmotivated by
God’s love for humanity, and in which humility before God
bears no relation to the majesty and holiness of God, can the
self choose itself “absolutely” (216). By placing ourselves reliably in the wrong before God, more importantly, we also
deny ourselves the perspective from which to notice what the
Judge regards as being otherwise unavoidable, the necessity
to “take God to court” for the ills and injustice of human
existence (216-17, 237). To do otherwise would be to confront the “riddle” that throws everything into confusion; it
would be to acknowledge the possibility that we may not
know what God intends for us in this life, the possibility that
the complacent joys of hearth and home may not be God’s
ultimate purpose for us; it would be to acknowledge the
contingencies of existence in time which would be for the
Judge of all things the most horrifying.
These procedures, the Judge claims, not only produce
predictable results for himself, but will do so as well for
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anyone who employs them. His pretensions to “absolute”
security notwithstanding, the real goal of the Judge’s
technique is to fight down his own despair in facing the
uncertainties of life, to bring the threat of time (and, in
particular, of the poet) under control. As in various of Plato’s
dialogues we find a sharp contrast of educational method
between the Socratic figure who is powerful only in his
perplexity, and the practical man of affairs (like Callicles in
Gorgias, to whom Kierkegaard clearly compares the Judge33)
who, if he is not himself the Sophist, ideally represents the
end-form of Sophistic education. He thus also represents the
society that Paul Shorey (in his edition of Republic) calls “the
Great Sophist,”34 the society in which the Sophist has become
the representative human being.
The Sophist himself we find in the Jylland pastor, whose
“edifying discourse” comprises the “final word” (ultimatum)
in Or (2.335-54). It has often been asserted, of course, that
the pastor’s sermon is actually Kierkegaard’s, that it represents Kierkegaard’s commentary on the conversation that
unfolds between the poet and the Judge.35 This, however, is
inconsistent with the dramatic structure of the dialogue; with
the fact, namely, that the Judge sends the sermon to his
younger friend in support of his own writings (337-38). The
pastor, like Judge William, is deeply troubled by the ills of
human life as well as by the merest possibility of uncertainty
in our human dealings with God (342-44). As with the Judge,
moreover, the solution is to lay hold of “the upbuilding that
lies in the thought that in relation to God we are always in
the wrong.” In this way, not only do we establish for
ourselves a determinate relation with God, we also avoid
the necessity of imputing evil to God. The pastor asks his
listeners to imagine that they have been wronged by a
beloved friend. In this situation, he reasons, we would derive
no comfort from the thought that we were entirely in the
right with our friend. “If you loved him, [the thought that
you had done right by your friend] would only alarm you;
you would reach for every probability, and if you found none,
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you would tear up the accounting to help you forget it, and
you would strive to build yourself up with the thought that
you were in the wrong” (348). “So also,” he continues, “in
your relationship with God. You loved God, and therefore
your soul could find rest and joy only in this, that you might
always be in the wrong” (349). In effect, as an expression of
his love for God, the pastor has extended to God a mercy and
forgiveness that he believes God doesn’t deserve. The pastor’s
“God,” in other words, is “without hope except in the sovereign grace and mercy of [humanity].” The pastor is indeed the
Sophist, the man who can make the worse appear the better
case, the man possessing the technical virtuosity to disguise
his cowardly “projection” in the persiflage of Christian
proclamation. He is precisely the man who can provide the
Judge the intellectual support he needs to defend himself
from the terror of contingency in relation to God.
He is also a man who has placed himself in the direct line
of fire from Kierkegaard’s second discourse, “Every Good
and Every Perfect Gift Is from Above.”36 The two discourses
are in fact mirror images of each other: whereas the pastor
emphasizes the “upbuilding” that arises only through free
choice, Kierkegaard emphasizes the power of the
Omnipotent One to crush such arrogant pretension and the
repentance that arises only through the challenge of God’s
Word (38); whereas the pastor extends his grace to God,
Kierkegaard emphasizes the creative power of God’s grace
through which alone we celebrate each circumstance of life as
“the good and perfect gift of God” (40-2); whereas the
pastor seeks the security of a relationship—being always in
the wrong before God—that can never change, Kierkegaard
emphasizes the mercy of God that is even greater “than the
anxious human heart,” the mercy that may place us
unaccountably in the right before God (48). Kierkegaard’s
brightest hope is therefore the pastor’s (and the Judge’s)
worst nightmare, that we cannot know the future God has
prepared for us. The sense of contingency that both the Judge
and the pastor fear, especially in relation to God, is the whole
SINNETT
31
point of the “conversation” Kierkegaard pursues with his
characters, the whole point of the question for which he seeks
a hearing in the midst of the “monstrous illusion” they
represent.
The Conversation Continued
The conversation Kierkegaard began with the personalities of
Either/Or continued throughout the remainder of his short
life. We meet them again in Stages on Life’s Way, published
on 30 April 1845, one day after the publication of Three
Discourses on Imagined Occasions, a volume of “edifying
discourses” signed in Kierkegaard’s own name. And, of
course, they appear again with the republication of Either/Or
on 14 May 1849, the exact same day as the publication of
The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air, a collection of
“three devotional discourses” which, once again, are signed
in Kierkegaard’s own name, and which seek to gain a hearing
for the same question—“the problem of ‘becoming a
Christian’”—that the personalities of Either/Or are variously
attempting to ignore.37
In the course of our brief consideration of Kierkegaard’s
“direct” conversation with the personalities of Either/Or, we
have noted some indications of the “indirect” conversation
Kierkegaard was hoping to pursue with his fellow Danes. The
subtlety of his dialectic, however, was too great, and the
shades of meaning that distinguished him from the plausible
Sophistry of his pseudonyms too fine, for his critique to be
generally noticed. Kierkegaard’s “indirect” conversation with
Danish Christendom, thus, never really came off; nor, with
the passing of that cultural arrangement, will it ever do so.
Other conversations remain, even today, a lively possibility. Kierkegaard’s “interrogation” of the pseudonyms, in the
first place, will now be “indirectly” applicable to those moderns, such as the philosophers of existentialism, who are
variously adherent to the pseudonymous perspectives. Thus
may Kierkegaard’s strategy finally be vindicated: having gotten his readers with him—even if not quite the readers he had
�32
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
in mind—it is still possible to bring “the religious” promptly
forward so as to effect the “collision” through which one can
be compelled to “take notice.” There are surely as many in
our day as in that of Socrates or of Kierkegaard who look
about them for a practitioner of “the question method.”
There are many in our day, in fact, who resemble no one
so much as that gifted young man with whom we began: He
lost his way in the world. In his need, he looked about for
someone who could transmit to him, someone who could be
for him, the “true question”: He went to the “good people,”
looking for the “the faith that moves mountains,” only to find
them comfortable, and competent, and full of good advice.
He went to the magistrate, longing to see the self-sacrifice of
duty; only to learn that duty is an old friend who never
demands anything we are not already prepared to perform.
He went to the pastor hoping to hear of the grace of the
Omnipotent One to call his fantasy in question and to remake
him in the divine image; only to hear of the “God” who
stands in need of our human grace to avoid indictment for the
ills of human existence. He looked about for a Socrates, but
found none among his contemporaries. Then he requested
the gods to change him into one.
We have the evidence before us, in the dialogue of
discourse and pseudonym, to know who that gifted young
man was, and to know also that his request was granted.
Notes
1
Kierkegaard, JP 5.5613 (Pap. 4 A 43).
SINNETT
33
4
See also the “First and Last Explanation” at the close of
Concluding Unscientific Postscript, in which Kierkegaard claims
responsibility as “the dialectically reduplicated author of . . . the
[pseudonymous] authors” (627); but also insists that “in the
pseudonymous books there is not a single word by me” (626).
5 Cf. the Preface to the Two Edifying Discourses of 1844 (in
Eighteen Edifying Discourses, 179), where Kierkegaard describes
“that single individual whom I with joy and gratitude call my reader, who with the right hand accepts what is offered with the right
hand.” The same point is emphasized in the Preface to
The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air: Three Devotional
Discourses, in Kierkegaard, Without Authority, 3.
6 This
is indicated, according to Kierkegaard (184-85), by Socrates’
assertion that sons should not necessarily be taught by their fathers,
as was traditional, but by whoever was most competent.
7 This follows, according to Kierkegaard (193-94), from the fact
that in remarking on the closeness of the vote by which he was
condemned Socrates indicates his exclusive concern for the beliefs
of people as individuals and his utter indifference to the “opinion”
of the Council as a whole.
8 The imagery of “bonds” refers to the imagery of the Cave in
Republic, 7.514A-515D.
9
Cf. Symp. 210E; Rep. 515E; and Ep. 7.341D.
10
For subsequent uses of this notion of a “clearing in existence,”
see Heidegger, Being and Time, 171 (and n. 2), 214, 401; and
Voegelin, “Anxiety and Reason,” in Collected Works, 28.87.
11
Cf. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 362f; Lonergan, Method in
Theology, 22f; and Insight: A Study of Human Understanding,
33-46, 309-15; and Polanyi, Knowing and Being, 117f.
2
Cf. the appended “Publication Schedule of Selected Works of
Søren Kierkegaard.”
3
The term opbyggelig is variously rendered as “edifying” (W F.
.
Lowrie) or “upbuilding” (H. V and E. A. Hong). The latter, more
.
recent, translation is preferred as implying a more broadly existential development of life than a merely intellectual growth.
12
Voegelin, “Reason: the Classic Experience,” in Collected Works,
12.277, 272 (emphasis added). For an introduction to Voegelin’s
thought, see Webb, Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of History; Sandoz,
The Voegelinian Revolution; and Sinnett, Eric Voegelin and the
Problem of Theological Paradox.
13
Voegelin, “What Is Political Reality?” in Anamnesis, 148.
14
“Reason,” 271.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
15
Ibid.
16
Voegelin, “The Gospel and Culture,” in Collected Works, 7.175.
17
The importance of Symposium for Kierkegaard is demonstrated
by his extensive discussion of it in The Concept of Irony and by his
use of it as a model for his own “banquet” dialogue, “In Vino
Veritas,” in Stages on Life’s Way. For an extended version of the
following discussion, see Sinnett, “Eric Voegelin and the Essence of
the Problem”; and Restoring the Conversation, ch. 3.
18 Similarly,
in Republic (515E-520A), the philosopher who seeks to
free the prisoners from their bonds is one who begins as a prisoner
himself, only to be mysteriously freed, forced to turn around,
dragged “by force up the ascent which is rough and steep . . . [and]
drawn out into the light of the sun.”
SINNETT
35
who find ourselves addressed and who are called upon to account
for what we are saying.”
24
Cf. Lowrie, Kierkegaard, 1.191f.
25
Cf. Diem, 187-88.
26
Cf. Symp. 215D-E.
27
Cf. Sinnett, Restoring the Conversation, Part 2.
28
Kierkegaard, Eighteen Edifying Discourses, 8-29.
29 The challenge that brings the “perplexed man” to this realization
is supplied in an excursus on the nature of faith (10-13) which
interrupts his meditations.
30
20
In Symposium the first speeches in praise of Erôs by Phaedrus
(178A-180B), Pausanias (180C-185E), and especially by
Eryximachus (185E-188E), variously praise the technai of sacrifice
and divination which reliably establish that “communion between
gods and men” which is the basis of the right order of society.
Cf. esp. “The Expectancy of Faith,” 15: “And if he does not
possess it, then I can be very helpful to him, because I will accompany his thoughts and constrain him to see that it is the highest
good. I will prevent it from slipping into any hiding place, so that
he does not become vague about whether he is able to grasp it or
not. With him, I will penetrate every anomaly until he, if he does
not possess it, has but one expression that explains his unhappiness,
namely, that he does not will it—this he cannot endure, and then he
will acquire it.”
21
31
Kierkegaard, “The Expectancy of Faith,” 23.
32
Cf. “A,” “Diapsalmata,” in Either/Or, 42-3, n. 90.
19 Kierkegaard, JP 6.6786 (Pap. 106 B 145) n.d., 1851, in the
Supplement to Eighteen Edifying Discourses, 488-89.
Cf. Symp. 178A-D: In response to Agathon’s request to have
Socrates sit next him in order that he might be able to share in “the
piece of wisdom” that “occurred” to him as he was entering the
banquet hall, Socrates denies that genuine wisdom is so easily, or so
directly, transmissible: “I only wish that wisdom were the kind of
thing one could share by sitting close to someone—if it flowed, for
instance, from the one that was full to the one that was empty, like
the water in two cups finding its level through a piece of wool.”
22 Cf.
Symp. 175D-E: “[If direct communication of wisdom was possible,] I’m sure I’d congratulate myself on sitting next to you, for
you’d soon have me brimming over with the most exquisite kind of
wisdom. My own understanding is shadowy, as equivocal as a
dream.”
23
Cf. Gadamer, “Plato’s Unwritten Dialectic,” in Dialogue and
Dialectic, 128: “In [Plato’s] dialogues we ourselves are the ones
(thanks to the lasting effect of Plato’s artful dialogical compositions)
33
Cf. “B,” Either/Or, 2.16: “The intellectual agility you possess is
very becoming to youth and diverts the eye for a time. We are
astonished to see a clown whose joints are so loose that all the
restraints of a man’s gait and posture are annulled. You are like that
in an intellectual sense; you can just as well stand on your head as
on your feet. Everything is possible for you, and you can surprise
yourself and others with this possibility, but it is unhealthy, and for
your own peace of mind I beg you to watch out lest that which is
an advantage to you end by becoming a curse. Any man who has a
conviction cannot at his pleasure turn himself and everything topsyturvy in this way. Therefore I do not warn you against the world but
against yourself and the world against you.” Compare this description of the poet by the Judge with Callicles’ description of Socrates
in Gorgias, 485A-C: “It is a fine thing to partake of philosophy just
for the sake of education, and it is no disgrace for a lad to follow it;
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
36
but when a man already advancing in years continues in its pursuit,
the affair, Socrates, becomes ridiculous; and for my part I have
much the same feeling towards students of philosophy as towards
those who lisp or play tricks. For when I see a little child, to whom
it is still natural to talk in that way, lisping or playing some trick, I
enjoy it, and it strikes me as pretty and ingenuous and suitable to
the infant’s age. . . . But when one hears a grown man lisp, or sees
him play tricks, it strikes one as something ridiculous and unmanly,
that deserves a whipping.”
34
Cf. Paul Shorey’s Loeb Classical Library edition of Republic,
2.34, n.d.
35
Cf. W Lowrie, “Translator’s Preface,” in Either/Or, 2 (1944), 19.
.
36
Cf. Kierkegaard, Eighteen Edifying Discourses, 31-48.
37
37
SINNETT
Publication Schedule of Selected Works
of Søren Kierkegaard
Pseudonymous (“Esthetic”) Works
20 Feb. 1843
Either/Or, I-II
edited by Victor Eremita
16 Oct. 1843
Repetition
by Constantin Constantius
Fear and Trembling
by Johannes de Silentio
Cf. Sinnett, ch. 10.
Signed (“Religious”) Works
16 May 1843
Two Upbuilding Discourses
16 Oct. 1843
Three Upbuilding Discourses
6 Dec. 1843
Four Upbuilding Discourses
5 Mar. 1844
Two Upbuilding Discourses
13 June 1844
Philosophical Fragments
by Johannes Climacus
17 June 1844
The Concept of Anxiety
by Virgilius Haufniensis
Prefaces
by Nicolaus Notabene
8 June 1844
Three Upbuilding Discourses
31 Aug. 1844
Four Upbuilding Discourses
30 April 1845
Stages on Life’s Way
published by Hilarius Bookbinder
29 April 1845
Three Discourses on Imagined
Occasions
27 Feb. 1846
Concluding Unscientific Postscript
by Johannes Climacus
27 Feb. 1846
“A First and Last Declaration,”
appended to Postscript
14 May 1849
Either/Or, I-II
edited by Victor Eremita
14 May 1849
The Lily in the Field and the Bird of
the Air: Three Devotional Discourses
�38
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
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Hartshorne, M. H. Kierkegaard Godly Deceiver: The Nature and
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
43
What It Means To Be Human:
Aristotle on Virtue and Skill
Corinne Painter
In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle argues very forcefully
that virtue and skill are distinct. Although a distinction
between virtue and skill can be seen as philosophically important in a number of ways,1 and despite the force with which
Aristotle argues for this distinction, it is nonetheless the case
that Aristotelian virtue runs the risk of being mistaken for a
sort of skill, and vice versa. In fact, Aristotle’s lengthy
argument for their distinction suggests that he was aware that
this risk existed. The likely reason for such a mistake is that
virtue and skill to some extent share two important qualities:
each has a necessary connection with the knowledge of how
to do something and the exercise of each is connected to a
desired end that is taken to be of distinctive “value.”2
Moreover, because of these “shared qualities” it is even
possible to associate both virtue and skill with happiness,
since knowledge of how to do those things that we take to be
of value, i.e., those things that are connected to our desired
ends, is usually considered an essential ingredient of a happy
life. To speak more generally, it is even understandable to
conceive of the virtuous person as the one who has mastered
“the art—the skill—of living,” indeed as the one who knows
how—has the requisite skills—to do whatever he or she
deems is necessary to bring about a fulfilled and satisfying
life. In this case, it would seem to follow that exactly those
persons who possess this so-called “skill of living” will enjoy
the happy life.
In this essay, I will carefully reconstruct Aristotle’s
argument for the distinction between virtue and skill, in
order to bring out why he argues for it. In so doing, I will
Corinne Painter is a visiting Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University.
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
44
attempt to show that this crucial distinction is intimately
bound up with Aristotle’s conception of the essential relationship between virtue and happiness. Toward this end, I
will first examine the key claims that attempt to establish the
distinction between virtue and skill, which appear in Book 2,
chapter 4 and Book 6, chapter 5 of the Nicomachean Ethics,3
and, second, I will consider Aristotle’s account of the
relationship between virtue and happiness, which we find
within various chapters in Book 1. Finally, I will conclude by
arguing that because of the distinctive nature of virtue, which
serves to separate it in fundamental ways from skill, and
which links it to the distinctive nature of being human, and
because of the distinctive nature of happiness, which characterizes the way of life of those human beings who live most
excellently, virtue alone is a prerequisite for attaining happiness in the full Aristotelian sense.
Virtue and Skill
In Book 2, chapter 4 as well as in Book 6, chapter 5 of
the NE, Aristotle argues that the exercising of virtue is
not analogous to the exercising of skill. Aristotle firmly establishes virtue’s distinction from skill by offering several
related arguments that show how the two activities are
fundamentally different. One argument for their distinction is
that while what might be called the “value”—or, more appropriately, the “being-well-made”4—of a product of skill is
independent of the actual ability (skill-level) of its producer,
so that the value of such a product is the same regardless of
how (e.g., by accident) or by whom (e.g., an unskilled laborer) it is produced, the “value” or the “being-well-made” of a
virtuous act depends on whether it is done virtuously, on
whether, that is, the person performing the act is virtuous or
not. As Aristotle states in a central passage in Book 2:
It is not the same in the case of the arts as with the
virtues, for the things that come into being by
means of the arts have their being-well-made in
PAINTER
45
themselves, [so that] it is sufficient for these
[i.e. the products] to come into being in a certain
condition. But with the things that come about as
a result of the virtues, just because they themselves
are a certain way it is not the case that one does
them justly or temperately, but only if the one
doing them also does them being a certain way:
if one does them first of all knowingly, and next,
having chosen them and chosen them for their
own sake, and third, being in a stable condition
and not able to be moved all the way out of it.
(1105a27-35, emphasis mine)
A second, closely related reason for maintaining that virtue
and skill are distinct lies in the latter’s necessary connection
to external results as compared to virtue’s connection not to
external results or achievements, but rather to the internal
source from which acts done in accord with virtue5 are
generated, namely, acting virtuously or being virtuous; for
according to Aristotle, “the end of making is different from
itself, but the end of action could not be, since acting well—
virtuously—is itself the end” (1140b6-7). In appealing to the
differing ends of making or exercising skill and acting well or
exercising virtue, this passage intimates that for Aristotle one
of the primary ways in which virtue and skill are distinct
involves the motivation or reason for exercising a skill in
comparison to the motivation or reason for exercising a
virtue.
Interestingly, in emphasizing the distinction in the ends,
this passage in a sense binds together the first and second
ways in which virtue and skill are said to be distinct one from
another. It should be clear that Aristotle holds that one exercises a skill in order to bring about or produce a good that is
other than or distinct from the activity by which it is brought
about, so that skills are not exercised simply for the sake of
themselves. Skills, then, in Aristotle’s view, are intimately
related to the distinctive products that they are responsible
for bringing into being. Virtue, however, is engaged in for the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
sake of itself and not simply for the sake of bringing about
another good that is wholly distinct from itself,6 which it is
said to “produce.” Thus, in connection with the first
argument, we may reaffirm that the “value” of exercising a
skill is determined on the basis of evaluating the worth of the
product of the skill rather than on evaluating either its
producer or the process by which it came to be produced. In
contrast, the value of virtue lies primarily in its exercise,
which is dependent upon the character of the person
performing the virtue and not simply on its “result.” As
Aristotle himself claims, “it is possible to produce something
literate by chance or by being advised by someone else”
(1105a23-24, emphasis mine), whereas this is not possible in
the case of virtue (1105a27). In connection with this, it may
be instructive to appeal to Aristotle’s discussion in Book 1 of
the possibility of engaging in an activity either for the sake of
itself or for the sake of some thing other than itself. While
exercising virtue belongs to the former sort, according to
Aristotle, exercising a skill belongs to the latter, and, given
that the former kind of activity “is more complete (teleion)
than an activity pursued on account of something else”
(1097a31-33), exercising virtue is more complete than
performing a skill. Later, I will return to this point in order
to argue why virtue is essential to happiness while skill is not.
A third and equally important way in which virtue is
distinct from skill can be formulated thus: skills are abilities
that stem from knowing how to do something, such that the
“knowing how” has (at some point) been satisfactorily
demonstrated in practice, whereas virtues are firm and stable
character traits of an agent, indeed, active conditions of the
soul. This suggests that, although it is possible for one to have
a skill and not exercise it even in a situation in which its exercise is called for, it is impossible for a person to possess a
virtue and knowingly fail to exercise it, given the proper
circumstance and barring any exceptions.7 Thus, in the case
of skill, Aristotle writes, “these things [i.e., choosing the act
for its own sake as well as performing the act from a firm and
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unshakable condition] do not count, except the mere
knowing, but for having the virtues, the knowing is of little
or no strength, while the other conditions have not a little but
all the power” (1105b1-4, emphasis mine). Here we can see
that for Aristotle, possessing virtue, which is to say, acting in
accord with virtue, is a “taller task” than possessing a skill.
As an example of this, one can properly be characterized
as a skilled basketball player if one has satisfactorily demonstrated in practice that one knows how to play basketball
well, so that if the skilled player chooses not to play in
perfect playing conditions, he will not lose his status as a
skilled player. In contrast, one may not be properly characterized as virtuous, as possessing, e.g., the virtue of courage,
just in case one has demonstrated in practice that one “knows
how” to hit the middle mark between cowardice and rashness
that courage, as the mean condition between these two
(vicious) extremes of deficiency and excess, is said to represent. Rather, in addition to “knowing how” to be courageous,
whenever the conditions call for courage, the virtuous person
will actively and willingly choose to be courageous from out
of a firm and unshakable character. To put this in the words
of another scholar, “unlike skills, virtues are entrenched
character traits that one cannot turn on and off as one
pleases. Virtues are always on, so to speak, and if one fails to
perform virtuous acts, it is either because one has encountered an exception or because one is not [really] virtuous.”8
The discussion of the conditions that must be met in
order for an action to be properly characterized as virtuous
brings us to a fourth way in which Aristotle attempts to establish that virtue and skill are distinct. Although it is preferable
for the skilled person to make mistakes willingly, so that the
mistakes are not made accidentally or unintentionally, as this
would certainly call into question the actual skill, it is
“better” if the practically wise person—i.e., the virtuous
person—make mistakes only accidentally and not knowingly,
especially as one cannot purposefully behave nonvirtuously
and remain virtuous. Aristotle claims, in fact, that “in art
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someone who makes an error willingly is preferable, while in
connection with practical judgment this is worse, as it is in
connection with the virtues” (1140b24-27).
Thus far we have discovered that the following conditions must be met in order for an act to be rightfully called
virtuous: (1) it must be done with knowledge, that is to say,
knowingly, (2) it must be freely chosen for its own sake, and
(3) it must stem from a firm and unshakable character. Given
these conditions, we must attempt to understand what
Aristotle might mean when he claims that it is “better” if the
virtuous person make mistakes only accidentally rather than
knowingly or willingly. For on the basis of what we have
discovered, it would seem that virtue cannot be exercised
erroneously, unwillingly, or accidentally. Aristotle in fact
states repeatedly (e.g., at 1111b5-7, 1113b4-6, 1114b29) that
this is the case. Consequently, what renders virtuous acts
“better” or “more valuable” than those acts “performed by
accident” or “in error” cannot be that virtuous acts are
performed intentionally and with knowledge. Indeed,
virtuous acts are always and in the strictest sense voluntary
acts of choice9 for Aristotle, and thus they simply cannot be
performed accidentally10 or unwittingly by a person who
lacks the virtue in question.11
Consequently, even though action comes first, virtue
grows out of it, so that truly virtuous action can only come
about after the formation of virtue occurs, through repeated
actions. In this connection, Aristotle writes “active states
[e.g., virtue] come into being from being at work in similar
ways. Hence it is necessary to make our ways of being at
work be of certain sorts, for our active states follow in accordance with the distinctions among these” (1103b23-25).12
This passage indicates that while a person may unwittingly
perform an act that could be said to “look like” or “imitate”
a virtuous act, and while he must willingly attempt such acts
in order to become virtuous, strictly speaking, Aristotle
would not permit us to characterize these acts as virtuous
until they are the result of an active virtuous character at
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work. It is for this reason that he writes: “while actions could
be called [e.g.] just or temperate whenever they are the sorts
of things that a just or temperate person would do, the one
who does them is not just or temperate unless he also does
them in the way that just and temperate people do them”
(1105a29-b9, emphases mine). Admittedly this passage most
directly thematises the conditions that must be met in order
for a person to be correctly called virtuous. Nevertheless,
I submit that it at the same time shows that unless an act is
performed by such a person, it is at best a virtuous act “in
name only,” but it is not truly virtuous, given that it is not
performed by one who does it while “being in a certain way”
(1104b32).13
Furthermore, we must reject the notion that virtuous
action can be the result of an intentionally performed
mistake, as seems possible in the case of exercising a skill. For
in the case of skill, it seems at least possible that the skilled
person can actually demonstrate skill by intentionally making
a “mistake” in the performance of the skill. For example, the
skilled person might intentionally make a different product
than is expected, or may intentionally proceed differently as
he or she exercises the skill. Interestingly, both cases reveal
that “intentional mistakes”—“willing deviations,” if you
prefer—could be ways to display skill rather than call it into
question, especially since such deviations point to the skilled
person’s ability to exercise skill creatively. Alternatively, to
intentionally err in hitting the middle mark between the vices
of excess and deficiency that virtue is said to consist in does
not produce virtuous action, it produces precisely the opposite, namely, vicious action. Indeed, it is not only impossible
for the virtuous person to demonstrate a virtuous character
by accidentally hitting the middle mark, since a virtuous act
must be performed knowingly, it is also impossible to
willingly stray from hitting the middle mark between the
vices of excess and deficiency and still act in accord with
virtue, for to act virtuously requires that one deliberately hit
the appropriate middle mark.
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Finally, then, the claim that prompted us to consider what
Aristotle could mean when he suggested that it is “better” for
a virtuous person to make a mistake accidentally rather than
on purpose is meant to point out not whether the knowing,
deliberate and intentionally chosen virtuous act is better than
the accidentally or erroneously performed virtuous act;
rather, this claim is meant to highlight a fundamental distinction between virtue and skill, namely, that while it is possible
and even preferable for the skilled person to err in the exercise of skill willingly, since this could be a way to demonstrate
skill, to do so in the case of virtue has the opposite effect, as
it brings to a crashing halt the possibility of acting in accord
with virtue.
Virtue and Happiness
Having considered the central Aristotelian arguments for the
distinction between virtue and skill, we are now in a position
to consider the special relationship that Aristotle claims exists
between virtue and happiness, so as to show that only virtue
is a prerequisite for attaining happiness in the full Aristotelian
sense.
Notwithstanding the sense in which the exercise of virtue
is to be understood as an activity whose goodness lies in its
very doing, as argued earlier,14 if we are to fully understand
how Aristotle conceives of virtue, we must not make the
mistake of claiming that virtue remains completely untied to
any good or activity that is distinct from itself. For as we learn
in Book 1 of the NE, virtue in its very essence is linked to
human happiness, which is not to be identified with virtue but
should be understood as the proper end of virtue. This is to
say that virtue functions as the means for achieving the end
of human happiness (1097b5-6), which constitutes the
ultimate good for human beings, as it is the only good that
is sought only for its own sake and never for the sake of
another good, whereas virtue, in contrast, is chosen both for
its own sake and for the sake of bringing about happiness
(1097b1-8).
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Indeed, happiness, as we will see shortly, is not a fluctuating, fleeting, temporary, circumstance-dependent, or
incomplete good or activity, as are all other goods and a
ctivities to some extent, including moral virtue, about which
Aristotle states that as great as virtue is, “even it seems too
incomplete” (1095b30-33) to be awarded the role of the
highest and most complete good. No doubt this is hardest to
understand in the case of virtue; as we have taken great care
to show, it would be incorrect to characterize the truly virtuous person as being virtuous in a merely fluctuating, fleeting,
or temporary manner. In addition to the passages we considered earlier, which show quite clearly the stable and
unwavering nature of the virtuous character as well as of the
action that comes from such a character, Aristotle, speaking
of moral virtue in Book 1, confirms virtue’s stable
nature, claiming that “in none of the acts of human beings is
stability present in the same way it is present in ways of being
at work in accordance with virtue” (1100b12-14). Notwithstanding virtue’s stability, we must also admit that the actual
exercise of any particular virtue is connected to certain
conditions that present themselves within the context of varying circumstances. For virtue as a whole is itself “divided,”
that is to say, it breaks up into many kinds—e.g., courage,
temperance, patience, generosity, justice—each of which is
called for in a particular situation, given certain circumstances, but none of which alone is enduring, self-sufficient,
complete, or final. In this connection, it is instructive to
consider what Aristotle writes in the context of discussing the
distinction between moral virtue and the intellectual virtue of
contemplation: “a just person still needs people toward
whom and with whom he will act justly, and similarly with
the temperate and the courageous person and each of the others” (1177a32-34). Here we see rather clearly that the particular virtues are not always performable, as certain external
conditions, over which the actor has no or very little control,
must be met in order for their performance to take place.
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In contradistinction to virtue, happiness is an active
(1100b19-20), enduring and permanent (1100b18), self-sufficient (1097b8-9), complete (1097b1-2; b20-21), and final
way of life (1100b34, 1101a8); for happiness is the “thatfor-the-sake-of-which” every other activity is ultimately
performed (1097b5-7; 1102a2-3). Happiness does not need
particular external circumstances or conditions in order to be
exhibited; once one’s life has earned the “right” to be
characterized as happy, that life exhibits happiness at each
and every moment (1100b21-22). Indeed, happiness is the
active condition—the constant being-at-work of the soul—
that describes or defines the way of living of the excellent
human being. More specifically, happiness characterizes the
kind of life that is lived by those who are able to live excellently, which is to say, by those who exercise moral virtue
regularly (1098a15-17; 1099b5-7; 1101a15; 1102a4-5), in
the varied and distinct ways that are called for on the basis of
the specific circumstances with which one is faced at different
intervals in one’s life.15 In this way, happiness characterizes
the whole of the virtuous person’s life, while the exercise of
moral virtue characterizes the way in which the virtuous
person responds to each individual practical situation with
which he or she is confronted, where the exercise of such
virtue constitutes the means by which the happy life comes
into being (1099b17). “[T]he virtue of a human being,”
Aristotle writes, “would be the active condition from which
one becomes a good human being and from which one will
yield up one’s own work well” (1106a24-25, emphases
mine).16 This passage highlights the sense in which the exercise of virtue yields or brings about a good that is distinct
from itself, to put it simply, the good—the happy—life, albeit
certainly not in the same sense in which the exercise of a skill
produces a “product.”
In order to better understand the relationship between
virtue and happiness, particularly how the former is said to
bring about the latter, as well as why happiness is ultimately
that condition of being for the sake of which we do every-
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thing else, it may be instructive to remember that according
to Aristotle while virtue is “praiseworthy” (1101b13-15;
b32), “happiness is . . . the prize of virtue . . . the highest end
and something divine and blessed” (1099b15-18, emphases
mine). Acknowledging both the supremacy of happiness that
this passage suggests as well as its status as the “prize of
virtue” allows us to go a long way towards understanding the
special place that happiness occupies in the thought of
Aristotle, as well as how he conceives of virtue’s relation to it.
If we add to this our recognition of what we noted earlier,
namely (a) Aristotle’s claim that “no one chooses happiness
for the sake of . . . anything else at all” (1097b6-7), (b) his
claim that happiness is complete and self-sufficient (1097b2021), together with (c) his related claim that happiness constitutes the only good to which nothing may be “added” in
order that it become “better,” given that happiness is lacking
in nothing (1097b14-21), then it becomes clear why happiness is characterized as that condition of being towards which
all human activity ultimately aims and beyond which there is
nothing else.
At this point we have recounted how Aristotle establishes
that happiness is the final “that-for-the-sake-of-which” all
other human activity ultimately aims; so also have we
elucidated its completeness, self-sufficiency, and permanence.
But in order to bring our consideration to its proper end, we
must say more clearly why Aristotle claims that happiness
characterizes the most excellent human life, for as Aristotle
himself admits, “perhaps to say that the highest good is
happiness is . . . something undisputed, while it still begs to
be said in a more clear and distinct way what happiness is”
(1097b22-24). Here, we would do well to follow Aristotle’s
lead and elucidate what it is about virtue that causes it and
not skill to serve as the means for becoming happy. Indeed
Aristotle suggests that if we “examine virtue . . . we might get
a better insight into happiness” (1102a7-8), and, thus, into
the life of human excellence.
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If we are to discover what kind of life is most excellent for
man as distinct from all other living creatures, we will have to
determine what work is distinctive to him and his unique way
of being (1097b25f). In a central passage about this in Book
1, Aristotle maintains:
If we set down that the work of a human being is
a certain sort of life, while this life consists of a
being-at-work of the soul and actions that go
along with reason, and it belongs to a man of serious stature to do these things well and beautifully,
while each thing is accomplished well as a result of
the virtue appropriate to it—if this is so, the
human good comes to be disclosed as a being-atwork of the soul in accordance with virtue.
(1098a12-17)
From this passage we get a clear statement of just how
uniquely special virtue is, since we are told without ambiguity that virtue consists in the “being-at-work” of the human
soul who lives its life and acts in accord with reason in the
most beautiful and best way. That such a life, i.e., the
virtuous life, is the most beautiful and best for man, that it is
the way in which man shows forth his unique way of being in
the way that he ought—for this is what is meant when we
claim that something is “best”—immediately leads us to link
virtue to the good life for man, whatever this turns out to be.
But if we are led to make the connection between virtue and
the good life for man, then given what we know about
happiness, we should be compelled to further understand
both (a) that the good life for man is nothing else than the life
of happiness, and thus (b) that virtue is therefore linked to
happiness. For indeed, happiness, according to Aristotle, is
that condition of being that characterizes the human life of
excellence, that is to say, the life of virtue.
Notwithstanding the clarity we have gained concerning
the nature of happiness, one last step must be made if we are
to understand why Aristotle does not think that skill plays an
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essential role in securing the life of happiness. Toward this
end, we should not forget that unlike virtue, skill is less
stable and less complete than virtue, since (a) skills seem to be
performed, or not, according to the “moods” of the skilled
person, which are easily changeable, and (b) skills are never
exercised for the sake of themselves but only for the sake of
the distinctive products that they produce. Alternatively,
whenever virtue is called for it is exercised, and, moreover, it
is exercised both for the sake of itself and for the sake of
happiness. Thus, given that exercising virtue is a more stable
and complete activity than exercising skill, naturally it will be
a better candidate for the role of securing happiness, even if
only because it is a more reliable and satisfying activity. If,
then, we understand the reasons why exercising virtue brings
about the life of happiness, we should immediately understand why exercising skill does not. For virtue secures the life
of happiness because (1) it is that activity on account of which
“people become apt at performing beautiful actions”
(1101b32-3), (2) it allows one “to live well and act well”
(1098b24), and especially, (3) it is the way in which man, as
man, does what he ought to do and is how he ought to be.
But skill, in stark contrast, neither makes one apt to perform
beautiful actions (inasmuch as skill can also be connected to
knowing how to perform ugly actions) nor makes one live
and act well (since skills bear no necessary association, for
Aristotle, with living or acting well). Furthermore, while the
exercising of skill allows one to demonstrate a special ability
to perform a particular act or to make a particular product,
as our earlier consideration of skill should have made apparent, there is nothing about skill that suggests that it allows
one to do or be what one ought to do or be as a human being.
Consequently, since the life of happiness constitutes the
fullest expression of the most excellent human life, which is
to say the human life that is in the best and fullest way what
it ought to be most essentially, skill will not be ableto to get
ithe job done, so to speak. Indeed, the only virtue can fulfill
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this important task, which is nothing short of the human project itself.
Notes
1
For instance, contemporary ethical theorists may employ
Aristotle’s arguments for the distinction between virtue and skill to
support the general consensus that whatever moral virtues are, they
are not best conceived as skills. However, although the distinction
between virtue and skill is fairly widely maintained in the Ethics
literature, some scholars argue against a (strong) distinction, including Julia Annas, Paul Bloomfield, and Robert Roberts. See: Julia
Annas, “Virtue as a Skill” in International Journal of Philosophical
Studies, Vol. 3 (2), 1995: 227-43; Paul Bloomfield, “Virtue
Epistemology and the Epistemology of Virtue” in Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research, Vol. 60, No. 1, 2000: 23-43, as well as
Moral Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and
finally, Robert C. Roberts, “Will Power and the Virtues” in Robert
B. Kruschwitz and Robert C. Roberts, eds., The Virtues:
Contemporary Essays on Moral Character (Belmont, CA:
Wadsworth, 1987): 121-136.
In addition to the relevance of this distinction within ethics,
Aristotle’s arguments for the non-identity of virtue and skill can
also be of use within contemporary debates in epistemology. In fact,
the movement referred to as “virtue epistemology” has as one of its
primary goals to call in to question the paradigmatic status that
perceptual knowledge has enjoyed in the tradition, by showing how
something like Aristotelian virtue is necessary for knowledge. The
scholarship that discusses the connection between virtue and
knowledge, or “virtue epistemology,” is extensive, and thus I will
not give a listing of sources here, except to mention that the literature includes work from scholars such as Robert Audi, Lorraine
Code, Alvin Goldman, Alvin Plantinga, Ernest Sosa, and Linda
Zagzebski (just to mention a few). For quick reference to an introductory essay on virtue epistemology, I refer the reader to an
article published on the world wide web, which can be found at the
following address: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemologyvirtue. Especially impressive is this article’s extensive bibliography,
which offers many references to works that deal with the question
of the connection between virtue and knowledge.
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2
Shortly, I will discuss my employment of the term “value” in this
context, as it is in need of explanation.
3 All
references to the Nicomachean Ethics (except where the translations are my own) are from: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics,
Translation, Glossary, and Introductory Essay by Joe Sachs
(Newburyport, Mass.: Focus Publishing/R. Pullins Company,
2002). Hereafter, in this essay, the text will be referred to as NE.
4
Aristotle never really speaks of “value” when discussing the
“being-well-made” or the excellency of a thing or an act, but as we
can easily understand what is in a significant sense at issue here for
Aristotle, namely, what makes a product or a virtuous act “full of
worth,” by using the English term “value,” I have chosen to include
it in my explanation of the text.
5
Not incidentally, a closer translation of the Greek demonstrates
that Aristotle never uses the phrase “virtuous action” or “virtuous
act”; rather, he uses always “action resulting from (or, in accord
with) virtue.”
6
Although later, in the second part of my paper, in the context of
considering the special relationship between virtue and happiness, I
will discuss how virtue is also exercised for the sake of bringing
about happiness, as it is the means for securing the happy life.
7
In order to respond to a possible objection to this strict view—
which many scholars advance against Aristotle’s “virtue ethics”—
we should acknowledge that Aristotle does not rule out the possibility that the virtuous person might, in some, very infrequent and
exceptional cases, fail to act virtuously. These cases would likely
only include, however, the following scenarios: (1) the virtuous
person is deceived by others; (2) the virtuous person accidentally
(i.e., non-willingly and unknowingly) makes an error in determining how to attain the virtuous end; and possibly, (3) different
virtues prescribe incompatible actions.
8 This formulation comes from a paper delivered by Heather
Battaly at the Northwest Philosophy Conference held at Lewis and
Clark University, Portland, Oregon (October 2002), entitled “Linda
Zagzebski and Aristotle on the Distinction between Virtues and
Skills.”
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9
Aristotle distinguishes between willing acts and chosen acts,
claiming that while chosen acts are always willing (voluntary) acts,
chosen acts cover a narrower range (1112a15-16), since they
involve greater capacities (1111b8-18ff), most especially, the capacity to “reason and think things through” (1112a16). For a fuller
discussion of what is involved in choice, especially its connection to
deliberation, see Book 3, chapters 2 and 3.
10
This is also the case for vicious acts (see: 1113b6-15ff and
1114b21-25).
11
In this connection it might be helpful to remember Aristotle’s
discussion of the praiseworthiness of virtuous acts and the blameworthiness of vicious acts (which actually begins in Book 2 and is
filled out in Book 3). This discussion strengthens his claim that
neither virtuous acts nor vicious acts are performed accidentally,
since people typically do not praise or blame persons for committing an act accidentally, without knowledge, intent, or choice.
12
For a fuller discussion of this, see 1103b7-26.
13
Recall the central passage quoted in its entirety early on in the
paper, for it directly confronts us with the strict conditions that
must be met in order for an act to be rightfully called virtuous.
14
There are in fact numerous passages in which Aristotle claims
that virtue is exercised for the sake of itself, some of which we
considered earlier, many more of which are dispersed throughout
the NE.
15 And this is to neglect mention of the practice of contemplation,
which also figures into the happy life, and which is, according to
Aristotle, unlike the exercise of moral virtue, “the only activity that
is loved for its own sake, for nothing comes from it beyond the contemplating, while from things involving action [e.g., moral virtue]
we gain something for ourselves, to a greater or lesser extent,
beyond the action” (1177b3-5).
16
Some scholars might object to the use of the words “yield up,”
preferring the more usual translation of “perform,” but in agreement with Joe Sachs, I submit that “yield up” better captures the
true sense of Aristotle’s meaning: to give back a return on one’s
effort.
59
Kant’s Afterlife
Eva Brann
“Better late than never” is the motto of this review. The work
known as Kant’s Opus Postumum occupied him during the
last fifteen years of his working life, from 1786 to 1801. (He
died at 80 in 1804.) The first English translation, which
underlies this review, was published in 1993. The first
German printing began in bowdlerized form in a Prussian
provincial journal in 1882.
1882—that is the year after Michelson and Morley
carried out their epoch-making experiment in search of the
ether wind that must sweep over the earth if it indeed travels
through space filled with some sort of observable matter. It
had a dramatic null result. The ether, however, had a huge
role in Kant’s final project—final in both senses: last and
eschatological. Whether Kant’s ether is in principle amenable
to experiment or not is, to be sure, problematic; nonetheless
there is, to my mind, a certain pathos to the posthumous
work’s first publishing date, a pathos over and above the fact
that it took nearly a century to appear.
Eckart Förster’s English edition of 1993 (which I should
have studied ten years ago) is both an ordering and a selection. Kant left a manuscript, its pages covered in small tight
writing with even tinier marginalia, of 527 sheets (1161 pages
in the great Prussian Academy edition). The unnumbered
leaves had at one time evidently been dropped on the floor—
It was a labor to arrange and date them, a task mainly
performed by Ernst Adickes in 1916, and then to make the
Immanuel Kant. Opus Postumum. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
Eckart Förster. Translated by Eckart Förster and Michael Rosen. The
Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993.
Eckart Förster. Kant’s Final Synthesis: An Essay on the Opus Postumum.
Cambridge, Mass.: The Harvard University Press, 2000.
Ms. Brann is a tutor at St. John’s College, Annapolis.
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work accessible by judicious selection, which is what Förster
has done in the Cambridge edition. The latter effort was
called for by the character of Kant’s writing—and, evidently,
thinking—which is obsessively repetitive, ever circling about
the issues in the terminological German of the Critiques
glossed by formulaic Latin, only to explode suddenly into
astounding new resolutions.
But then, this whole post-Critical legacy is astonishing. In
1790, Kant declared in his third Critique, the Critique of
Judgment, that here “I conclude my entire Critical enterprise”
(¶ 170). Only the dependent metaphysical doctrine was to be
worked out, that is, the system of a priori cognitions that
are implied in the Critical foundations. But almost simultaneously finished business turned into unfinished business.
People who first saw the discombobulated manuscript put
about the rumor of Kant’s senility. On the contrary: If in the
three Critiques we see everything fall into its systematic
“architectonic” place, in the Opus Postumum we see the
foundations of the edifice broken open in the attempt to
make the system more encompassing. Not that Kant is
countermanding any major postulate of the Critical system
but rather that, in the effort to specify it, to make embodied
nature and man fall out from it, he opens up its abysses, not
only for the enthralled reader but, palpably, for himself—
though the one chasm he steps over without the slightest
regard is, to my mind at least, the most abysmal one; more of
that below. In any case, during the last years, before he
stopped writing, Kant seems to have returned not to a second
childhood but to a second vigor, to the searching modes of his
pre-Critical years.
Here I want to insert a personal note. Why ever, I ask
myself, did it take me so long to come to this remarkable
work, especially when I was trying to think about Kantian
topics: imagination, time, memory, and nonbeing? Well, I
sought help in the Critiques and then elsewhere, in Aristotle,
Plotinus, Augustine, Russell, Meinong, Husserl. Of the Opus
Postumum only one—unforgettable—fragment had penetrat-
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ed to me: “I, the Proprietor of the World.” It should have
been intimation enough that the Critiques were—possibly—
being transcended.
To me Kant had never been primarily the systematician,
whose thinking was a relentlessly unificatory construction
and whose expression was an intricate terminological rococo.
He was rather the philosopher who, more than the selfavowed tightrope dancer Nietzsche, built his edifice over an
abyss. I found this the more absorbing since Kant seemed to
me the soul of probity, a philosopher of originality and
rectitude, the rarest of combinations in a vocation whose
business ought to be not novelty but truth, though it has
occasionally incited its professors to the self-exaltation of
invention and the blue smoke of mystification. Kant is the
man who reconceived philosophy as work (in the essay “On
a Refined Tone Recently Raised in Philosophy,” 1796). Yet in
that sober mode he works himself late in life into strange new
territories. Förster, to be sure, ends his book by saying that it
is a futile exercise to speculate on the ultimate—
unachieved—destination of this last phase. But to me this
speculation, though it may well be beyond the reach of
scholarship, has a particular attraction: Do these late second
sailings, to be found, for example, in Homer (Odyssey), Plato
(Laws), Shakespeare (e.g., Cymbeline), Jane Austen (the
unfinished Sanditon), as well as in the great musicians,
express a necessary development implicit in the work of their
floruits or novel, adventurous departures into terra incognita?
So as not to mystify the reader let me say here, for later
amplification, what seems to me the drift of the Opus
Postumum: It is a drift toward solipsism, the radical selfauthorship or “autogenesis” of the human subject and the
nature with which it surrounds itself.
Now to Kant’s work itself. My advice is to reverse good
St. John’s practice and to read Förster’s explication of the
Opus Postumum first. It is a conscientious and in places
brilliant introduction to what is, after all, an unwieldy,
unrevised and unfinished masterpiece.
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Since, however, the Opus Postumum takes off from the
three Critiques, particularly from the first, the Critique of
Pure Reason (A edition 1781, B edition 1786), I will give a
very stripped-down and tailored version for those few alumni who don’t perfectly recall that high point of their junior
year (1). Then, since I can make the attraction of the Opus
Postumum most plausible by listing the above-mentioned rifts
and chasms in the first Critique, I will articulate the global
perplexities that have always accompanied any local understanding I thought I had achieved (2). Then, with Förster’s
help, I shall give a brief sketch of the main topics of the Opus
Postumum (3), which I shall follow with a summary of the
way in which Kant’s last work confirms or reshapes or
resolves my perplexities (4). Finally I will attempt to say a
word about the work’s bearing on Kant’s afterlife in our
contemporary thinking (5).
1. Though Kant did not expect, while working on the first
Critique (which deals with theoretical reason as it constitutes
nature), to write a second Critique on practical reason (that
is, on moral action), it is arguable that his central concern is
all along with morality, with human reason as it causes deeds.
From that point of view, the mission of the first Critique is to
ground a system of deterministic nature in deliberate juxtaposition to the spontaneity of the freedom evinced by the
rational will when it acts as it ought, from duty. The realm of
nature is a system of necessary and universal rules which we
ourselves both constitute and cognize: We can know nature
with certainty because we are its authors. (The terms pertaining to this cognition itself rather than to its objects are called
“transcendental,” or almost synonymously, “Critical”:
concerned with the conditions that make knowledge possible.) Though the first Critique, as it finally appeared, has as
its positive consequence the grounding of experience, meaning the real knowledge of nature, its negative impact is to
clear a region for human freedom conceived as autonomy,
self-subjection to self-given law. Kant does this by showing
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that the theoretical understanding and the reason which
organizes it are strictly limited to human experience and incapable of dealing with transcendent questions except in terms
of “ideals” expressing the human need for completeness.
The crucial difficulty in establishing a sure and certain
knowledge of nature is for Kant the doubt cast by Hume on
causality: Cause is nowhere to be observed; we see constant
conjunctions of events but never necessary interconnections
among them. Kant’s answer, the crux of his solution, is that
we know our way through nature with complete certainty
because and insofar as we make it. Thus its laws are ours from
“the very first”—a priori.
Our cognitive constitution is twofold: by our understanding we think spontaneously (that is, originatingly, out of
ourselves) and also discursively (that is, by connecting
concepts), thereby unifying manifolds; by our sensibility we
are affected receptively by intuitions which are already given
as unities. The understanding is thus a formal, logical faculty
whose categories are adapted from a well-established
tradition. But these categories are empty grasps in the absence
of the pure material of the intuition to fill them, where
“pure” means unaffected by ordinary sensory influence.
To me this pure, pre-experiential sensibility and its pure,
non-sensory matter is Kant’s most original, not to say mindboggling, discovery (or invention—I am as perplexed about it
now as ever), for a sensibility is, after all, usually understood
to be a capacity for being affected by the senses. It has two
branches. The pure “inner” intuition is our sense of time. It
is pure because it is analytically prior to sensation. It is
“inner” because it is, in ways that become progressively more
unclear in the second edition of the Critique and in the Opus
Postumum, closer to our ego, called the “transcendental
apperception,” meaning the subject, the I that underlies every
object we present to ourselves. For that is what human
consciousness means for Kant: presenting objects to
ourselves. Self-consciousness or apperception is awareness of
the I that is putting this object before itself. It is that
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awareness which is said in the first Critique to represent itself
to us as a phenomenon in inner sense; we know ourselves as
pure egos when we attend to numerable time as it ticks away.
The corresponding outer sense is pure space. All we
intuit (except ourselves—so far) we give the form of space;
space is not formal (as is thinking) but formative. In this
pre-sensory sensorium we find externality within us. Or better, to assume the form of externality objects must be within
our receptive sensibility, together with the sensations that
give them their quality, the material manifold that gives them
body. Nothing could be more contrary to our ordinary sense
of things, where “outside” means precisely not within.
What is the purpose of this dizzying reversal, Kant’s
sequel to the Copernican revolution? That first revolution
made the sun stand still and our earth move, while this one
makes us again home base, though now the world moves to
our measure rather than to a divine maker’s plan. Kant’s
purpose is to bring causality from an outside world, where it
is objectively non-observable, into us where it is subjectively
an inherent necessity of our cognitive constitution.
There is a missing step in this sketch, the notoriously
fugitive “Schematism of the Pure Concept of the
Understanding” (B 176 ff.). It is the crux of the crux of the
positive Critique, and its brevity should warn us that something is the matter. Schematizing is the work of the imagination; it is not the capacity for fantasy but a “transcendental”
faculty, one that makes knowledge possible. It is, in its depths,
responsible for the mystery of conjoining the unconjoinable.
It effects this by bringing forth a general diagram (Kant calls
it a “monogram”) intended to draw together the absolutely
disparate effects of the formally functioning understanding
and the formatively receptive intuition. Thus time and space
are to be conceptualized or, if you like, the concepts of the
understanding are to be time- and space-affected.
Kant hurriedly carries out this “dry and boring dissection” for the case of time. For example, the concept of cause,
when time-imbued, becomes the necessary succession of one
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thing upon another according to a ruling concept. At this
moment the possibility of a causal science that has certainty is
grounded. (Here “possibility” does not refer to what might
happen but to that which enables knowledge to become real.)
Kant silently and completely omits the schematizing of
space. I had always supposed that, whatever difficulties I
might have, Kant thought it was too easy. I couldn’t have
been more wrong. Förster shows that it was too hard, and
thereby hangs the tale of the Opus Postumum (59).
2. First to me among those deep perplexities that gives the
Critiques their philosophical poignancy have been the space
puzzles already alluded to (the underprivileging of space in
the Schematism) along with other, related ones.
In the second edition of the first Critique Kant inserted a
sort of time bomb, the famous section called the “Refutation
of Idealism” (B 274, xxxix), in which he aimed to show
that time itself can only be perceived as a determined
phenomenon by us when observed against “something
permanent in space,” that is, against matter: “The consciousness of my own existence is at the same time a consciousness
of other things outside me” (B 276). Where, I ask myself, has
the first function of the “inner” sense gone? What is now
particularly internal about my self-perception?
But so is the very meaning of space as “outer sense” a
puzzle. Outerness seems to mean three things at once: It
means extension, the way a spatial dimension consists of parts
outside of each other, stretching away from themselves. It
means, second, externality, the way objects are experienced
as outside of the subject. And it means, third, outside and
“going beyond” us—the literal sense of “transcendent” (as
distinct from “transcendental”), though this is a region in
principle unreachable. For what we know, we know in us.
That is, after all, what Kant intends to show in the negative
part of the Critique, the “Transcendental Dialectic” which
exposes the illusions reason falls into in going beyond the
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limits of our experience”—and is thus the critique of pure
reason proper.
There is, second, a puzzle that arises incidentally from the
multivalence of Critical terms. The categories, Kant repeats
emphatically, have no being on their own and achieve meaning only as they grasp intuitive material. Take then the category of unity which imposes oneness on manifolds of sense.
There is, however, also the unity that reason strives for as an
ideal but can reach only illusorily. And there is “the synthetic
unity of apperception,” the unifying work of the subject deep
beneath appearance, its chief theoretical effect. Whence, we
might ask, does Kant get the notion of unity to begin with? Is
there not something suspect about this transcendental
notion—and others, for example, “thing”—which are necessary to establish the transcendental terms of the Critiques but
which are in traditional metaphysics terms of transcendence,
the attributes of Being that are beyond sensory experience?
How does Kant come to know these terms of Critical thought
that are antecedent to properly certified knowledge?
A third enigma is immediately connected with the space
puzzles. The dialectic of reason is intended to clear the decks
for human freedom and for the exercise of practical reason,
which expresses itself in deeds. But the system of nature
grounded in the positive part of the Critique is deterministic.
There are no loose joints. How then does moral action appear
in the natural world? How does it actually change events
determined by natural laws? How do we as moral beings
insert ourselves into, intervene in, nature? Further, where, in
fact, are we in the world as phenomenal, perceiving subjects?
In the Critique of Pure Reason there is matter, but no bodies,
human or natural—nor in the second Critique, that of
Practical Reason. The simultaneous actuality of moral deed
and natural events is a mystery: How does the practical
reason make our muscles do the right thing?
The fourth open question is this: How far is nature
specified by the Critical grounds and their ensuing principles?
Are the types of forces necessarily operating in nature
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specifiable, and are their mathematical laws determinable a
priori? How thoroughgoing are the grounds of possibility, or
in Kant’s terms: Can a complete metaphysical doctrine of
nature be worked out such as will descend to and determine
the actual laws of physics? But then, what of observation,
what of contingency? Is anything not under our own rules? Is
the world nothing but our mirror?
Thence arises the fifth question, truly a mystery. Whence
comes the matter of sensation which fills our space with its
quantities and qualities and reflects to us our time by being
the permanent material background against which motions
appear? Is the occasion for the appearance of this matter
infused into us transcendently, from beyond, or are we its
authors not only formally, formatively, but really, substantively? I would say that this is the most unregarded, the totally
unregarded, question in Kant’s writing—and in his thought as
well: Are we, after all, buffeted by transcendent influxes? Or
are we, when all has been worked out, shown to be our own
authors in every respect—which would be brute solipsism,
the philosophy of solus ipse “I alone, by myself ”? But then
what becomes of the ideal republic of mutually respectful
moral beings and of the real political community of embodied human beings? What access do we then have to each
other’s subjectivity?
Finally, the sixth problem, not of doctrine but of
argumentation: In the first Critique God is an ideal of reason,
a required hypothesis or postulate if we are to act morally, an
“as if ” representation whose existence is to us a necessary
thought though its actuality is provably unprovable. As Kant
works on the Opus Postumum the thought of a necessary God
is increasingly sharpened and the claim more pointed, as
shown in III: There are reasons that drive us to think that
God is necessary; thus God’s existence must be first postulated and then acknowledged as real. He is actual for us:
Est Deus in nobis, “There is a God—in us” (my dash and italics, O.P. 209, 248). And: “Everything that thinks has a God.”
That is to say, thinking requires a divinity and what thinking
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requires it must have—but only for the thinker. I simply
cannot make out whether this God really exists or is after all
what Kant himself would call a “subreption,” a surreptitious
rustling of Being by a needy reason, or perhaps some third
being I am too literal-minded to comprehend. To me it is
marvelous how scintillatingly ambiguous the severely systematic Kant really is at great junctures.
Whether the above items are enigmas, questions, problems, puzzles, they each open up abysmal depth for the
inquiry concerning human knowledge, action, and faith.
Except for the spectacularly absent fifth question, concerning
the origin of sensation and its stimulating matter, the Opus
Postumum will show Kant grappling with these problems,
sometimes only to focus them the more pressingly.
3. The early title of the Opus Postumum was “Transition from
the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science to Physics.”
The final title is “The Highest Standpoint of Transcendental
Philosophy in the System of Ideas: God, the World, and Man
in the World, Restricting Himself through Laws of Duty”
(Förster xliii). The distance between the titles betokens Kant’s
winding himself from system-driven, downward doctrinal
specification into ascending, comprehensive speculation. An
obvious question will be whether these speculations in the
main confirm or undermine the Critical enterprise. I want to
say here that either way it is a thrilling business. If the gaping
holes in the architecture of the system can be stopped and the
foundations reinforced, the edifice will surely be the more
magnificent and rivaled only by Hegel’s system. (I omit
Aristotle, not so much because his philosophizing historically
preceded the notion of philosophic system-making, but
because he would in any case have thought that first philosophy should be problem- rather than system-driven.) But if
Kant is impelled to let his own system implode the outcome
surely glows with the sober glory of thought outthinking
itself. In the event, it seems to be a little of both.
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The first question that has occupied students of the Opus
Postumum concerns the project of the title. Why was a transition needed, where was there a gap? The Metaphysical
Foundations of Natural Science of 1786 seemed to provide a
doctrinal transition from the general principles of the first
Critique (which ground the laws of action and reaction, of
causation in time and of the conservation of matter,
“Analogies of Experience,” B 218 ff.) to the specific
Newtonian Laws of Motion. That is to say, Kant has “constructed” these proto-laws, which means he has exhibited
them in the intuition so as to display their necessary characteristics. Why, then, does this transition require another
Transition?
Förster gives a thoroughly satisfying answer (59 ff.). As
we saw, the spatial schematization of the categories is missing
in the first Critique. The Metaphysical Foundation is in fact
this missing schematism, the spatialization of the categories;
I omit the details of Förster’s proof, but the argument is on
the face of it convincing. At this point matter comes in: Kant
must analyze empirical matter and its motion and then “construct” or “exhibit” the concept so obtained in space. (This is
an epicycle in the so-called Critical circle: Kant analyzes the
object, here matter, he intends to certify cognitively and then
provides its transcendental conditions of possibility.)
But in order for matter not just to occupy and traverse
space but to act dynamically (as it is empirically observed to
do), to compact itself into bodies capable of moving each
other, the forces of matter must be established. But forces are
not to be observed as appearances (as Hume insisted) and are
thus not constructable, that is, exhibitable as configurations in
the intuition. The Metaphysical Foundations do not succeed
in solving the problem of cohesive bodies (as opposed to
shapeless matter) held dynamically within their boundaries
and exercising attractive as well as repulsive force on each
other. Thus this metaphysical transition cannot present
physics with its basic concepts. A gap bars the way to the
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categories’ objective validity, that is, to their empirical applicability; the attempted schematism is incomplete.
So a large part of the early work on the Opus Postumum
is devoted to the Tantalus-labor of finding, a priori, the kinds
and ratios of forces that will underwrite our natural world of
dynamically moving cohesive bodies. Clearly Kant now
intends (or always did) for the Critical grounding to reach
very far into empirical, supposedly adventitious (unpredictable) cognition. We may wonder what will survive that
passage between the Scylla of complete systematicity and the
Charybdis of empirical science.
Now come the ether proofs, a huge and weighty presence
in the Opus Postumum. From a certain point on, Kant regards
it as established that ether (or caloric), an “imponderable,
incohesible, inexhaustible,” medium that is “universally
distributed, all-penetrating, and all-moving” (O.P. 98, 92) is
the condition of possibility of all the mechanical forces of
matter whose effects (if not they themselves) are apparent in
the making and the motions of bodies. Förster has lucidly
reconstructed the intricate essential proof from its many sites
and disparate approaches in the text (89 ff.). It is worth
attending to in spite of the negative Michelson-Morley ether
experiment of 1881, not merely because it makes vivid the
exigencies of the transcendental system (a system which
someone—not myself—might indeed regard as having merely historical interest), but because it is the result of a deep
meditation on the conditions of spatial experience.
To begin with, Förster points out that the Opus
Postumum reverses the first Critique on the source of the
unity of all appearances (84). In that Critique it was an ideal
of reason to bring unity into our necessarily piecemeal
perception. Then, in the third Critique, the Critique of
Judgment (1719), a new source of unity comes on the scene:
Nature herself is purposive and systematic. Under the
influence of this reversal from reason ideally unifying nature
to nature herself really unifying its forces into a system, a
strange new situation arises. (The ultimate possibility of its
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arising I would trace back, without having worked it out
sufficiently, to the above-mentioned ambivalence of the term
“unity” in the first Critique: Is unity a subjective function or
a transcendent characteristic of beings?) This situation is that
nature herself must now contain a priori principles of its
objective possibility; no longer are all a priori conditions of
experience in the subject.
Or are they? Förster is inclined to think that the ether, as
a condition of possibility of a system of nature (and hence of
its science, physics) is an ideal of our reason, hence subjective
(91-92). But he does not deny that Kant himself wavered and
sometimes speaks of the underlying medium as existing “outside the idea” (O.P. 82); this oscillating effect is not unlike
that of Kant’s treatment of God’s existence (see below).
The chief elements of the existence proof for the ether are
as follows. From the subjective side: Empty space is not
perceptible; a single space filled with moving forces is the
condition of the possibility of unified experience which is
knowledge of connected perceptions; hence we must form
the idea of an elementary material that is in space and time
and has the characteristics listed above; thus we get a subjective principle of the synthetic unity of possible experience
such as must underlie physics.
From the objective side: Nature is the complex of all
things that can be the objects of our senses and hence of
experience, and we do have experience of outer objects. But
experience requires that its objects form, for our judgments,
a system which has a necessary unity according to one
principle. The ether, distributed through space yet forming a
collective whole, is the one and only candidate for such a
system. Therefore, as making the whole of experience
possible, it is actual.
Thus the ether is a unique—and very peculiar—external
object that really exists in the—to my mind—oscillating way
of Kant’s existence proofs, which argue from the enabling
grounds of knowledge to the real existence of the object.
As a ground of possibility it is not itself perceptible or
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observable. Thus Kant might have replied to MichelsonMorley that, since the ether hypothesis was the condition of
all experiments, it was itself not falsifiable by experiment. But
they, as presumably positivist physicists, would have turned
this reply around and said that what is not falsifiable is not
positive knowledge. To me, too, the transcendental ether is,
as I said, illuminating less as a real ground of science than as
a reflection on the nature of our experience of space and its
contents. For isn’t it the case, after all, that the material ether
having been eradicated from physics, other fillers of space
had to be found, such as fields of force and geometric
conformations of space itself?
In any case, Kant considers that the specific dynamic
properties he assigns to his ether solve the problem of
systematizing the mechanical forces, attraction, repulsion,
cohesion, whose effects are mathematicized in the Newtonian
manner. The—surely superseded—details of this grounding
are obscure to me and I can summon interest in the argument
about them only insofar as they realize that “transition,”
announced in the early title of the Opus Postumum, from the
metaphysical doctrine of perceptible matter in motion to
bodies subject to an a priori determinable system of forces.
And now Kant realizes that a question looms that will
have made a reader of the Critique of Pure Reason and of the
ensuing Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science uneasy
all along: However does a scientist get wind of this now
systematically embodied nature? How does the subject come
to know its now exhaustively knowable external object?
This realization brings on a pivotal moment in the later
fascicles of the Opus Postumum, when the Selbstsetzungslehre,
the “doctrine of self-positing,” comes to the fore. Again,
Förster is a much-needed guide through the text (101-116).
The terms of the first Critique are, all in all, wellmarshalled—systematic and precise—within the work; it is
when we think beyond it that they become scintillatingly
obscure. We might worry that we are undercutting Kant’s
explicit intention in thus thinking outside the box. The later
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Opus Postumum shows us Kant doing it himself. One might
go so far as to say that the older he got the more radically he
thought (which, rightly considered, is the way it ought to be).
The late work reconsiders self-consciousness, at first in
the spirit of the Critique, but then in increasingly more
boldly enunciated ways. Everything begins with “I think,” the
self-recognition of the subject. It is a piece of mere logical
analysis (since no intuition is involved) by which I make
myself into an object to myself (O.P. 182). So stated this first
transcendental event makes me ask myself: Can so momentous a self-diremption, that of exercising my autonomy in
making myself into my own object, occur by a merely logical
act, the analysis of the meaning of “I think”? Doesn’t it
require some onto-logical activity? Kant answers this
question, though along Critical rather than metaphysical
lines. The first act can occur only together with a second one:
This is an act of synthesis, meaning one in which thought
grasps and unifies something given that goes beyond mere
logic—to begin with, pure time and space. In space and time
the subject posits itself, or better the subject posits itself as an
“I.” This is the doctrine of self-positing.
To appreciate how astounding this doctrine is we must
look at the notion of positing. For Kant, to posit is to assign
existence, the one and only way to realize existence (an
identification that goes way back to an essay on the proofs of
God’s existence of 1763). Thus in self-positing I bring myself
into existence. It is an act of self-creation. This way of putting
it tells me that existence is a subordinate condition depending on a somehow prior subject which is, however, itself
not—or is not knowable as—a being that has an essence, an
actuality, or, so far, personhood. The I-subject is a mystery
into which Kant himself proscribes inquiry in his critique of
dialectical reason.
So far, however, though I exist, I have not yet made it into
the natural world. This is where the ether does its service. It
makes space real to the senses, filled as it is with a universal
proto-matter that is the condition of connected perceptions
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wherever I find myself in it. Space is thus not only the
subjective form of sensation but a real unified object outside
me, unified by the ubiquitous presence of a weightless,
unbulkable ether.
And yet I, in turn, am in it. For as space becomes perceptible because of the ceaseless dynamism of its system of ethergrounded forces, so I can perceive it since I myself am an
organic body that is sensitive to forces because this body is
itself a system of organized forces: To get sensation I must be
sensitive, to get sensations from a dynamic system I must be
such a system myself—I must be continuous with nature.
Here at last is the embodied subject in the world. Selfpositing thus has a second phase. As I made myself exist
within my pure cognitive constitution, so I posit myself as
affected by forces that I have organized to enable me to
experience nature: “Positing and perception, spontaneity and
receptivity, the objective and subjective relations are simultaneous because they are identical as to time, as appearances of
how the subject is affected—thus are given a priori in the
same actus” (O.P. 132). Förster observes that the last phrase
means that the same original transcendental act brings about
the duality of empirical self and material world. Because in
apprehending the undetermined material manifold I insert
into it certain fundamental forces I can simultaneously
represent myself as an affected body and as so affected by an
external cause (107).
So it seems that the system finally has closed in on the
human body from the inside out through the transcendental
spatial intuition and from the outside in through the “hypostatized” forces of nature (meaning forces “supposed, but as
real”): the elementary dynamical ether and the mechanical
forces of physics known against its ethereal ground. Better
late than never, though this body be merely a self-moving
machine, which, incidentally, responds to impinging outside
forces as would a system of rigid and moving parts. The
subject has now called into existence not only itself but also
its world and its body—has made itself aware of itself as a
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certified knower and simultaneously as a participating inhabitant of perceptible space. Perceptibility, however, is just what
existence means for Kant: existence is a by-product of the
relation between a cognitive subject and the object it posits
for itself, even outside itself. I would put the puzzle here thus:
How real can such existence be, in the ordinary meaning
of the word, that is, indefeasibly and self-assertively independent of me? Yet Kant would find, had found, such a
question offensively obtuse since it voids the whole Critical
enterprise and its compelling motives. Nonetheless, it does
seem that in setting the limits of reason Kant has abolished
the finitude of human autonomy, the finitude that implies
something beyond me which I am not.
Förster interprets the doctrine of self-positing as a schema
for (perceptible) outer space (114) since a schema brings
together the spontaneous understanding with the receiving
sensibility, in this case, matter- or sensation-filled space. This
schema completes the conditions for a science of nature—
though something else is missing.
There is as yet no personhood. But since persons are
subjects to which deeds can be imputed, since they are moral,
that is, free and responsible beings, and since one purpose of
the whole enterprise was to ground human freedom and with
it morality, Kant is driven to a second, a moral self-positing
and, hard upon it, yet beyond, to a focusing of the idea of
God. More precisely, from the start of this final part of Kant’s
last work these two topics, human morality and God, are
more intimately related than they ever were in the Critique of
Practical Reason. For there God is merely a postulate of
practical reason (2.2.5), a kind of by-thought, required
because nature by herself offers no ground for assuring us of
happiness commensurate with our deserts. So we must
believe that there is a cause, working outside of nature, that
will bring about such a reward. But the moral necessity of
God is subjective, that is, it is a need, not an objective ground
of duty or belief. In the Opus Postumum it is as if man,
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having brought himself, his world, and himself-in-the-world
into existence, was now ready to posit God as well.
But there are more serious, systematic reasons for Kant to
turn to God in his last work. The said postulate of the second
Critique calls upon God as a condition of making moral
actions achievable for humans. Förster traces the various
functions God is assigned (summarized on pp. 134-135). The
last of these, stemming from Kant’s Religion within the
Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793), is that of God as founder
of an ethical commonwealth. But in the Opus Postumum
Kant says repeatedly that the divine power cannot make a
man morally good: “He must do it himself ” (O.P. 249). So
here opens what Kant himself calls an “abyss of a mystery”;
Förster interprets this phrase as Kant’s realization that human
moral autonomy and God as founding father of an ethical
commonwealth are in contradiction (133). Kant finds a way
out, adumbrated in Religion and sharpened in the late Opus
Postumum.
The self-positing so far described had been theoretical,
cognitive. But now Kant introduces a second, moral-practical
self-positing, analogous to the first in having its own a priori
moving forces: the ideas of right that unite all persons, as
expressed in the Categorical Imperative (which commands,
unconditionally, the subjection of individual inclination to
laws acknowledged as universal, O.P. 198); the difference is
only that the first involves being affected by outer, spatial
forces, the second consists of obedience to one’s own rationality—self-forcing, one might say. Self-positing, recall, was
bringing oneself into existence by becoming conscious at
once of oneself as thinking and as being affected by objects
determined by oneself. So too moral self-positing is self-consciousness together with the consciousness that I can subjugate my inclinations and can myself determine my will, that
is, choose morally—which is what Kant calls freedom.
Kant now argues that the idea of human freedom, whose
force is formulated in the Categorical Imperative, brings with
it immediately, analytically, the concept of God. For the
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imperative is a command, which, like the law of a civil commonwealth, unites all rational beings, and therefore it
requires a law-giver and enforcer. Thus God must exist, and
to do as we ought (that is, our duty) is a divine command.
But God’s existence is not that of a being independent of
human reason (Förster 142). Rather just as we postulated an
ether to make a system of forces possible, so we postulate
God as real to give the idea of duty a moving force. Thus the
contradiction of human freedom and divine imposition
certainly seems to be resolved.
There is one more step to be taken. God is now an ideal
of practical reason, said, however, to exist—in some way.
What is the divinity’s relation to nature, particularly human
nature? This is Kant’s “abyss of a mystery,” mentioned above:
God and the world are heterogeneous ideas; as God cannot
make men better, for that would abrogate their moral freedom, so he cannot interfere with nature, for that would abrogate its lawful determinateness. Kant reaches for the solution
we would now expect: The unification of God and nature lies
in the human subject. It is to be found in “Man in the World,
Restricting Himself Through Laws of Duty,” as the penultimate title page puts it (O.P. 244). He is an ideal, an archetype;
the wise man, the philosopher, who knows God in himself
and the laws of nature and the imperative of action. Kant has
been, significantly it now turns out, in the habit of using the
term Weltweisheit, “world-wisdom,” for philosophy. With the
human ideal Kant has reached “The Highest Standpoint of
Transcendental Philosophy.” Förster says he has therewith
solved one of the oldest problems of philosophy, how to unify
theoretical and practical reason (146). And so he has—if we
can comprehend this solution.
From Religion on through the Opus Postumum Kant has
been emphasizing the importance of a human ethical community, superintended by God to the realization of morality.
In the latter work, it is this union of rational beings that
makes the force of moral law analogous to the unifying ether
of the natural system. Since now man has finally turned up in
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the body, a major enigma of the Critique of Practical Reason
appears to be resolved: How transcendental subjects, each,
moreover, locked within its own self-constituted natural
world, can ever appear and speak to each other.
I say the enigma appears to be solved because the subject
is now embodied and has material appearance. But that
doesn’t really help: How does my appearing body enter your
self-posited world—unless we hypostasize, very seriously, a
true outside, a transcendent Beyond, through which I can
come to you by infusing your intuition with a sensory manifold expressing my person in an appearance? But this is
language so alien to Kant that I am almost abashed to use it.
Nonetheless, the grounds of that intersubjective communication without which Kant cannot conceive an ethical
community—a human one, at least—are missing from the
Transcendental System. This enigma is clearly conjoined to
that of another’s body, because before we apprehend each
other as rational beings we must appear to each other as
material bodies. For we have no way (short of entering each
other’s minds) of conveying thought except in embodied
form.
Nor is the God implied in our recognition of “human
duties as divine commands” intelligible to me. This subjective
God induces in me a desire to get down to brass tacks: Is a
god who is “the inner vital spirit of man in the world”
(O.P. 240) a God who exists in any ordinary sense, that is, a
God who is a stand-alone substance, who is there, in his
realm, whether I exist or not?
Kant refuted, more than once, Anselm’s proof that God
exists (e.g., in the Critique Of Pure Reason B 626) because it
depends on regarding existence not as the subject’s positing
of an object but as a property of the object itself; thus Anselm
argues that in conceiving God we must necessarily include his
existence in his essence. Yet it seems to me that Kant has
accepted a precondition of Anselm’s proof, namely that when
thought necessarily conceives of (and therefore conceives
necessarily) the object as existing, then it must exist—only
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where Anselm would say “beyond me,” Kant says “in my
thought.” Is this an argument that gains anything as it goes?
I think the final pages of his life’s work, preoccupied though
it is with God-positing, show no sign that this question
oppressed Kant, that he felt an insufficiency in the thought
that the unifier of all realms is the dutiful man who has God
within but is otherwise left on his own, is “his own originator” (O.P. 209) and also the maker of Heaven and Earth—
except that once he says this: “There is a certain sublime
melancholy in the feelings which accompany the sublimity of
the ideas of pure practical reason” (O.P. 212).
4. Here, to conclude, is a summary review of the perplexities
that I found in the Critiques and of the bearing the Opus
Postumum has on them.
First, the space puzzles. The Opus Postumum acknowledges what the transcendental Critiques had, ipso facto, no
place for: that if the transcendental subject is to be affected
by sensation through, or better, in its sensibility, it must be
embodied. Kant now puts the subject’s body in space so that
through its own forces it may interact with the forces of
nature. This somatic positing quite literally fleshes out the
system, and it does so by fixing on one of the several meanings of “external” that “outer sense” seems to carry in the first
Critique: As one would expect, Kant now sometimes speaks
as if the ether-filled space, where my body meets nature’s
bodies, was in some real sense outside of myself as subject.
That cannot be, however, since space never ceases to be what
it was in the first Critique, the pure content (so to speak) of
our receptive outer sense, the spatial intuition. But that fact
results in this strangely involuted condition: The body,
through which the world affects me, is within this Kantian
sensorium, the intuition, the spatial sensibility; so we project
a body within ourselves to receive sensations from an “outer”
world we have ourselves created (Kant’s own term, e.g.,
O.P. 235). I keep asking myself how Kant would have
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responded to this construal of the post-Critical layout. Would
we could raise the dead!
On the second, more general, question concerning the
origin and fixing of the transcendental terms that stake out
the system, the Opus Postumum is silent, though Kant asks
himself over and over what transcendental philosophy is—his
very last proposed title (at least in Förster’s selection) is
“Philosophy as a Doctrine of Science in a Complete System.”
The question I am asking could be put like that: Where does
the philosopher stand when he establishes “The Highest
Standpoint of Transcendental Philosophy”? If Kant considered this question he does not say—perhaps he would have
thought it madness—much as Aristotle thinks it is ridiculous
to try to show that there is nature (Physics 2.1).
The third question, “How is moral action actually inserted into a deterministic natural world?”—is in fact answered
in the Opus: The rational subject exerts a moral force analogous to natural forces. But is it an answer? How exactly does
the force of reason move bodies? Psychokinetically?
My fifth question, “Whence comes adventitious sensation
and hence that contingency of nature which makes science
empirical in detail?,” is simply and spectacularly untouched
in the Opus Postumum, as it was in the Critiques. Yet it is not
an unreasonable problem to raise, because, though Kant likes
to describe what it is that comes to us as a mere “manifold”
(manyness simply), sensation is in fact the material of specific
appearances; hence, as it seems to me, some sort of
evidence for its origin must be forthcoming (for from
antiquity on, appearance is appearance of something, that is
to say, is evidence and screen at once of something beyond it).
One motive for drawing sensation more and more into
the subject is precisely the principled specification of natural
science: The more detail comes under the subject’s control
the more transcendentally grounded physics becomes, that is,
the more it can anticipate its findings and make laws by analogy. As it is, the ether theory goes pretty far in prescribing, a
priori, the types of mechanical force whose effects are to be
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noticed in bodies, even up to dictating some of their
mathematical laws, for example the inverse square law of
attraction: Kant explains that the following argument holds
for any force that is diffused from the center of force through
concentric spherical shells. Since the spherical surfaces vary
as the square of their radii, the larger the sphere, that is the
more distant from the center, the less will be the force distributed over each unit surface. Thus the effect of the force
will vary inversely as the square of the distance or as 1/r2
(Met. Found. ¶ 519).
Could it be that Kant might be driven to say that we ourselves are the creators of our sense material? In the
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783) he distinguishes bounds that are positive in having an enfolding
Beyond, from limits that are mere negations. In that work he
says that metaphysics leads to bounds beyond which lie the
“things in themselves,” which are inaccessible to experience
and cognition because they are beyond our cognitive faculties, but which it is nonetheless necessary to assume as
sources, presumably, among other things, of sensation (¶ 57).
In the Opus Postumum that Beyond seems to have receded;
then must we ourselves be the generators of sensation? Might
we be driven to suppose that the unknowable transcendent
noumenal I is itself the source of the sensations that affect
me? And if so, how is Kant’s system in that respect different
from Fichte’s Science of Knowledge, in which the subject is
completely self-posited, including its sensory affects, and of
which Kant says that he regards it “as a totally indefensible
system . . . for the attempt to cull a real object out of logic is
a vain effort” (O.P. 264)? Call it absolute idealism or
solipsism, in putting the world in man it leaves him solus, a
subject alone without a confronting object, and Kant seems to
find that insupportable in the Fichtean system. Recall from
hints above that the first Critique itself was already vulnerable to the charge of solipsism. Sartre, for example, in the
chapter “The Reef of Solipsism” in Being and Nothingness
(3.1.2), raises it with respect to time, insofar as it is an inner
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sense: How then can a Kantian “I” be synchronous with any
“Other”?
I want to insert a reflection here. Philosophers pride
themselves on following wherever honestly consequential
thinking leads, even into the insufferable. There came
generations after Kant who took a kind of unholy joy in their
desperate conclusions. But Kant is the philosopher of “conditions of possibility,” of finding the terms that enable the
satisfaction of rational humanity. So I imagine him to be open
to the question: Quo vadis?, “Where are you going?” For that
the love of wisdom should turn out to be totally self-love
seems indeed to be insufferable.
Finally, the sixth perplexity, the proof, no, rather the
positing of the existence of God: In the first Critique the
understanding, our faculty for organizing given material into
experience, sets the starting terms; the theoretical reason is
considered mainly as a faculty for attempting, indefeasibly, to
marshal judgments connecting these terms into inevitably
illusory syllogistic conclusions. In the Opus Postumum, however, the practical reason is paramount, for its requirements
come to be dominant. It leads the way in the positing of self,
body, and finally God. This God-positing is no longer the
“as-if ” postulation of Kant’s moral works, which entitles us
to act merely as if there were a God who sanctions and
rewards. In the Opus Postumum reason is compelled to posit
God as actual—though in me and not as a substance. Actual
though not substantial, subjective but an object—I seem to
lack the intellectual wherewithal for entertaining these
conjunctions. Indeed, one of the benefits of entering into the
ratiocinative preoccupations of a Kant, who explores and
pushes his own concepts to their limits and who is
moreover—as I think—incapable of mere invention or simple
confusion, is that one is confronted in precise and compelling
terms with the limits of intelligibility.
5. The Kant we study as a community is and will continue to
be the Kant of the two Critiques of Pure and Practical
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Reason, and so it will be, I think, for most students of philosophical works. Thus Kant’s influence on the thinking world
(where attention to Kant is growing rather than waning, for
example in cognitive science and in ethics) will be mostly
Critical.
That Kant had a living post-Critical afterlife is in itself a
source of fascination, which the review has tried to express.
The Opus Postumum, however, though it may never, and
probably should not, exert the direct influence of the
Critiques, also contributes to Kant’s posthumous afterlife, not
so much, as I said, in directly influencing the thinking of
people now alive, as in projecting a drift that is being realized
among us.
I am referring primarily to the topic of subjectivity. In
many departments of life the outcome of a venture is an
advance over the beginning—which is called progress. In
philosophy, however, the working-out of the origin is often a
shallowfication, to coin a term. One reason is precisely that
philosophy is treated as progressive, which entails either
contracting the deep open questions of original inquiry into
more effectively resoluble tight problems, or, on the contrary,
loosening the precisely significant terms of a coherent philosophy to connote its bowdlerized, or at least more relaxed,
possibilities. Kant’s terms are more liable to the latter fate.
For Kant expands, late in life, and late in the Opus
Postumum, on what he had asserted earlier: “Philosophy is to
be regarded either as the habitus of philosophizing or as a
work: through which there arises, proceeding from it, a work
as a system of absolute unity” (247; I can’t resist quoting a
neighboring entry, which shows Kant in what he would call a
“technical-practical” mode, that is, displaying mundane
practicality—always an index of mental alertness: “N.B. The
melon must be eaten today—with Prof. Gensichen—and, at
this opportunity, [discuss] the income from the university.”)
Consequently Kant’s terms are from the beginning welldefined and well-seated in a system, and thus apt to descend
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to the public by acquiring more diffuse rather than narrower
usages.
System-building is out of style at the present moment; the
mood is anti-foundationalist. Particularly out of favor in
philosophy are the two great Critical assumptions, the one so
deep beneath Kant’s thinking that there is no overt reflection
on it in the Critiques, the other perhaps the central preoccupation of the Opus Postumum. The former is representationalism, the apprehension of thinking as the activity of putting
objects before the cognitive faculties; the German for “representation” is Vorstellung, literally “setting [something] before
[oneself].” (I should mention that representationalism at least
is alive and well in the cognitive sciences, as opposed to
philosophy.) The latter assumption is the one expressed in the
quotation above, that the work of philosophy is “architectonic,” the building of a well-grounded, completely unified,
and thoroughly detailed edifice representing the activities and
aspects of the rational subject, the “I.” (To be sure, Kant’s
system is only the penultimate great Continental system; in
the ultimate one, however, that of Hegel, the dialectic of
concepts supersedes representational thinking, and the
system is not constructed architectonically but develops
organically.)
Three hugely influential shapes that the “I” as an object of
reflection has taken are: the Cartesian Ego, a thing that
knows of its existence as it thinks and can apply itself to
mathematicizable spatial extension; the Rousseauian Self, a
pure interiority that knows and revels in its mere sense of
existence; and a Kantian Subject, an I that knows itself in two
capacities, as theoretical (the subject of formal thinking and
of a formative sensibility which together give laws to external
nature), and as practical (an autonomous person that gives
the law to itself as a moral actor).
All three, Cartesian quantification, Rousseauian selfconcern and Kantian personhood, have been absorbed and
naturalized into contemporary thinking. The subject of the
Critiques, however, being the most complex and comprehen-
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sive of these ideas, has also been most liable to second-hand
connotations. For example, the word “subjective” evidently
got into general philosophical and hence into common use
through the Critiques, though when we say something is
“purely subjective” we tend to mean it in a denigrating sense:
lacking hard, public objectivity.
But the expanded terms of the Opus Postumum are not,
as far as my reading goes, known to our contemporaries—the
work has, after all, been available for barely a decade—
neither to the proponents of human self- and world-construction nor to the post-Nietzschean value-relativists who
hold some version of the idea that man himself is the creator
of values, or the religious thinkers who regard God as a selfgranted response to human need. Yet all these notions are in
a more disciplined, systematic form adumbrated in the Opus
Postumum: in the self-positing of the subject and its worldconstruction, in the autonomy of its moral life, and in the
required postulation of its God.
But in what mode, to return to a question asked in the
beginning, has Kant thus become the occulted projector of
our modernity? Did he succumb—Förster thinks this implausible (76)—to the then-current craze of “posito-mania”
(Setzkrankheit)? Is he spinning out the deep implications of
the Critical enterprise, perhaps into originally unintended
consequences and to his own uneasy amazement? Or has he,
in adventurous old age, leapt beyond the Critiques into the
stormy oceans that he once said surrounded the land of the
pure understanding, an island of truth enclosed by the
unchangeable bounds of nature (Critique of Pure Reason,
B 294)?
These questions I am in principle unable to answer for
myself, because I am not sure whether there can be a philosophical system with joins so tightly fitted that its inherent
necessities are unambiguously fixed, and in particular,
because the transcendental system of the Opus Postumum
offers surprises (the ether), superadded requirements (the
specification of empirical physics), shortfalls of closure (the
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source of sensation). Nor am I certain in general whether,
when a philosopher takes a structure of thought to a new
level either by fine-tuning its technicalities or by driving it to
its ultimate conclusions, he is doing the work of interpretation or of deconstruction. Instead I want to express this, my
sense of Kant’s late unfinished work: If “awe” signifies a
mixture of admiration and unease, here is the occasion to
recall a good word to its proper use, and to say that the Opus
Postumum is indeed awesome.
87
Odysseus’s World of the
Imagination
Paul Ludwig
Eva Brann’s Homeric Moments teaches where and how to
find hidden delights in the Odyssey and the Iliad. The book
aims to be a companion to Homer that can modestly step out
of the way after pointing out “moments,” those episodes or
imaginative visions within episodes that achieve vibrant stasis
and are therefore at once stations and peaks in the narrative
flow—an idea based on Aristotle’s distinction between
episodes and bare plot. The slow or static parts such as long
similes and apparent digressions, which many readers wish to
skip over in order to get on with the story, Homeric Moments
regards as affording the intellectual pleasure peculiar to reading epic. Brann’s interpretative assumptions are provokingly
face up on the table, and her conclusions are surprising and
radical: there is no archaic “mentality” by which heroes think
differently from us or which enables them to see a world full
of gods rather than natural causes. A world populated by
gods is superior to most of our own modern accounts of the
world: Odysseus’s tales of his adventures, like Homer’s gods,
are imaginary but true, factually false but better than a
recounting of material facts because they are spun from
Odysseus’s imagination, an imagination that practically
requires that he lose or destroy his men.
Epithets, Similes, and Gods
Homeric “moments” are primarily visual snapshots, including word-paintings such as Hephaestus’s shield and many
Homeric similes as well. Their meanings, like the meanings of
paintings, are not simply told to the reader. At issue is the
Eva Brann. Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey and
the Iliad. Paul Dry Books, 2002.
Paul Ludwig is a tutor on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College.
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place of surmise—including, for Brann, wild surmise like that
of Cortez’s men—in literary interpretation. What sorts of
surmises Brann makes about moments can be seen from her
treatment of an actual painting, Ajax’s suicide as depicted on
a sixth-century amphora. The vase painter’s huge but delicate
Ajax squats over his task of fixing into the ground the hilt of
the sword he will fall upon. A few choice words explain the
difference between black-figure and red-figure techniques of
vase painting: in the earlier genre, figures appeared as black
silhouettes on red clay backgrounds, but in the later genre
figure and ground were reversed. “Rather than black bulks
blocking the light, [figures] will appear as sunlit openings in
the lustrous black glaze” (Moments 73). For Brann, the blackfigure genre “seems made to depict a Hades-bound soul, a
prospective shade,” for example Ajax leaving the light. Few
classicists in their right minds would venture such a claim.
Since the painter is thought to have died around the time redfigure was invented, to give him a choice flirts with anachronism. The lack of clear historical evidence that the blackfigure artist ever worked in red-figure dictates that his genre
left him no recourse but to paint Ajax black. Since it is safer
to posit only one cause per event (shades of Occam’s razor),
and this generic explanation is sufficient, scholars discipline
themselves to refrain from speculating further. Brann by contrast “surmises” that the black-figure artist intended to
exploit that unique resource of his genre (blackness of
figures) that made it peculiarly appropriate for this depiction
(a soul in shadow). The crucial thing about interpretative
surmises is that they can never be conclusive. Here, the
generic cause screens or hides the existence of another cause,
the artist’s intention. Doubt, in the historical or critical
methods Brann opposes, takes on a life of its own, and lack
of a proof effectually becomes proof of a lack. Unconfirmed
means untrue. As with vase painting, so it is with Homer’s
epithets and the issue of their significance: Brann freely
admits that some epithets are scarcely significant and are
governed by metrical convenience, but that admission does
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not stop her from investigating each epithet or cause her to
doubt the appropriateness, irony, or other significance she
finds in many of them (28-9). Of course it remains obvious
that an epithet can both fill the meter and signify (i.e., fulfill
two purposes at once, thus having two “causes”) since even
the weakest epithet performs better than any random word
would have done. It would seem to follow that epithets may
sometimes have further significance; the issue is whether it is
more sophisticated to ignore these or to point them out.
Vision becomes double in Homer’s similes. First the
reader is presented with a visual background (“like a
poppy”), against which the vision of the thing or event
described (“he let his head droop”) can be seen afresh. The
insight that similes usually work better when the background
comes first can be substantiated simply by trying out some
Homeric similes backwards (139). The real situation quickly
entrenches itself and the comparison becomes mere embellishment (“he let his head droop like a poppy”). Such natural
occurrences are often the likeness made for manslaughter in
the Iliad; Brann concludes that the function of the simile is to
mitigate the horror of war. The Odyssey, with less gruesomeness to mitigate, specializes in uglier similes and tends to
magnify rather than mitigate. If, however, the horror is worsened and Nature seems all the more peaceful when the two
are juxtaposed, the sharpness of the contrast might work
against alleviating the pain in the Iliad. Homer’s observing
the horrific together in one vision with peaceful nature is a
“dry truth” akin to when economic considerations obtrude
on Diomedes’ and Glaucus’s exchange of armor, a truthfulness which Schiller thought “naive” and said often gave an
impression of insensitivity (Moments 122). The modern taste
prefers to concentrate on one side of life at a time: sweeping
the other temporarily under the rug becomes sensitivity.
Gods do the same work as similes and therefore they, too,
can make Homeric moments: they transfigure human life.
“Faith” is a term misapplied to the Homeric deities because,
unlike the invisible one God of the Abrahamic faiths, no one
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believes or disbelieves in them; rather, everyone senses their
presence unless or until the gods themselves choose to withdraw (36). Brann thus overcomes a misleading dichotomy of
the gods as either superseded objects of a naive faith or background machinery created by the sophisticated agnostic
Homer. A third alternative not considered might be
Herodotus’s claim that Hesiod and Homer essentially gave
the Greek gods their birth, honors, arts, and shapes (Histories
2.53). If Homer is telling a story of a fictional past time when
belief was not necessary because the gods were accessible, this
would not eliminate the possibility that belief might become
necessary in “latter” days, e.g., for Homer’s audience. Every
so often a Greek did opine that the Olympians were fabrications: Xenophanes said that if horses could draw, they would
draw gods shaped like horses.
It is here that Brann proudly declares her radicalism:
Homer’s gods are both imaginary and true, or at least truer
than many a world without them. Their manifestation to us
through the faculty of our imagination says nothing about
whether they originate in the imagination alone; rather, the
denigration of that faculty would seem to be the only motive
for dismissing the gods on the grounds that they manifest
themselves through our imagination. Because the gods transfigure the human, we are better off with them than without
them. Brann uses Athena’s visual transfigurations of Odysseus
to make this clear. Whenever the goddess is upon him,
Odysseus is most himself. His beautiful moments are
bestowed by the goddess yet are totally his own. Homer
observes something natural and calls it a divine gift. “Nothing
happens to [Odysseus] that does not happen to us all; we too
glow and crumble and have our alternating moments. What
is wonderful about that? Or rather when is it ever less than a
wonder?” (49-50; emphasis added). Thus the gods are a mode
of access to the all-important appreciation of the wonder in
everyday life. We are measured by our ability to see gods, but
what we mainly see them doing is watching us. Nothing
would change in result if the gods ceased to look on, but
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everything would change in significance (43): we would no
longer be dignified by the respect—literally “regard”—of
being watched, and we would no longer be blessed, or cursed
since it still dignifies life to have a Poseidon who curses us).
There could be none of that magnification and beautification
that Thucydides warned against (1.20). In a contrasting way,
the gods also bring gravity to mortal life by their own lightness of being. Because they do not die, nothing is serious for
them, and as a result, they lack seriousness. The gods, for
whom the living is easy, achieve a vulgarity in their bickering,
favoritism and one-upmanship that only the wealthiest and
most independent mortals can dream of, and they lead parodies of lives. This amounts to magnification, too, because the
“ability to lose one’s life is magnified by the divine inability”
(41). The gods represent the pinnacle of ordinary human
desire, and while for some Greeks the gods simultaneously
act as their own reductio ad absurdum to show why no one
should desire immortality, in Homer the grace and elegance
with which the gods carry through their vulgarity make it
possible for mankind to take a “proud delight” in them (42).
Like black-figure painting, their lightness and brightness form
a backdrop against which the dark shapes of mortals act. If
one grants that the gods, as products of the imagination, are
more true or genuine than the brute or material facts of the
world, one still feels cornered into a false choice between
materialism and imagination. Could the gods be propaedeutic to wonder at the cosmos and man’s place in it, a wonder
also devoted to the use of the imagination, as in geometry or
philosophy?
Mentality
The question of whether the gods cause events or merely
observe them involves an interpretative surmise governing
much of Homeric scholarship, namely, that Homer or his
heroes have a “mentality” different from our own. For Brann,
the issue comes down to exhibiting a passage in which Homer
or his heroes “think in an alien mode” rather than merely
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thinking about different things than we do (27). Some
previous scholars have seen the alien mentality at work when
the gods cause events which nature also causes. Two causes
then exist for the same effect, and Occam’s razor says that
should not be. A Homeric event is “overdetermined” if it has
two or more causes. The simplest physical occurrences such
as a spear’s ceasing to quiver in the ground can be attributed
to the gods (“Ares took away its impulse”; Iliad 13.442-4
with 6.611-13). Brann is nuanced on the issue. In the seaside
meeting with Nausikaa, “[n]othing happens that does not
happen to us all; balls get tossed wide and land in the drink;
people are woken up by shouts. Yet nothing happens that is
not under Athena’s aegis—both at once” (221). “Both at
once” sounds like overdetermination, but Brann provides an
avenue of escape from mentality, which she regards as a trap.
Homer and his characters see the wonder in everyday
occurrences and accordingly ascribe to divine interference
what would have happened anyway. Hence no miracles occur
in the strict sense of events running contrary to nature.
Nothing unnatural occurs, even at surprising moments, such
as when Eurycleia recognizes the scar and drops Odysseus’s
foot in the bathwater. Though he seizes her by the throat to
keep her silent, the old woman seeks out Penelope with her
eyes trying to tell her the stranger is Odysseus. Penelope,
however, “‘is unable to meet her glance or to pay it any mind,
for Athena had turned her mind away’” (280). Brann
interprets: on the merely mundane or unimaginative level,
Penelope is exercising tight self-control; she refrains from
even glancing in the direction of the husband she knows is
sitting disguised in her house. Brann’s Athena represents—or
is—the evocation of our wonder at Penelope’s control, her
mindfulness, Athena’s specific province. Thus Athena does
not cause the event in any way that would compete with
natural causes. A reading that allowed for miracles might
assume that Penelope has not recognized Odysseus yet.
The occurrence which, in the ordinary course of events,
would have been the occasion of her recognizing him is
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miraculously taken away by Athena’s interference. The goddess intervenes causally; she prevents nature from taking its
course. This miraculous reading, too, can avoid overdetermination, since there are many ways of being a cause, with the
proximate efficient cause being the least of these. The hand
which threw the spear could be one kind of cause, while Ares’
will is another (and Zeus’s plan a third). To find a Homeric
mentality in causal overdetermination would entail meeting a
higher bar of evidence, showing two causes of the same type
simultaneously causing the same event in the same way. For
Brann, modern critics have thought their way into a mentality: the only people with a mentality are those who think they
have one.
But Brann’s rejection of Homeric mentality goes further
and seems to entail rejecting the weaker, epistemologically
less radical assumption of ethical alienness. For many years,
an anthropological approach has been looking for “difference” in Homeric society. Brann asks students to see the
similarity between the heroes’ hunger for beautiful gifts and
their own patronage of department-store gift counters; she
uses the students’ own suppressed longings for recognition to
help them understand the glory-seeking of the heroes (26-7,
179-80). Here one wonders whether the vastness of the difference in degree does not cover over ethical differences that
could be historical or social developments. Few of Brann’s
students would enter the Cyclops’s cave to see if he would
give them gifts. Brann’s objection that societies as wholes do
not think and that only individual humans can do the thinking seems answered by the lemming or herd instinct. Societies
do tend to produce recognizable types; notwithstanding that
many individuals remain free to think their way out of their
society’s prejudices, a majority could be left (perhaps including or composing the sovereign) who thoughtlessly imitate
one another. Ethical alienness could then be responsible for
protagonists’ behaving in ways that modern readers do not
instinctively find admirable.
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The ethically alien preoccupation with fame is at issue in
Brann’s controversial interpretation of Penelope (see also
below). When, if ever, does Penelope consider remarriage,
and what constitutes faithfulness toward the husband she has
every reason to believe is dead? Penelope like the male
heroes—with the possible exception of Odysseus himself—
appears to be motivated primarily by a desire for fame. Brann
acknowledges this glory-seeking when she quotes the line
with which Penelope explains her motivations to the suitors:
“If Odysseus were to come home and be handmaid to my life,
my glory would be greater and finer that way” (Odyssey
18.254-5). But the primacy of fame over fidelity has broad
implications for Penelope’s intention to remarry. For Brann,
Penelope’s sudden announcement that Odysseus told her to
remarry once Telemachus had his beard is Penelope’s way of
signaling to the husband she knows is in the room that she is
mindful of his instructions. But what is alleged to be
Odysseus’s instruction could also be Penelope’s own newlyminted invention, designed not only to save what is left of the
throne for Telemachus (she says she will “leave the house” to
make clear that marrying the queen does not bring the kingship with it; 273), but also to recoup or secure such fame as
remains possible for a famous widow. This widow says
privately that the Olympians ruined her magnificence or
splendor the day Odysseus went away (18.180-1). That
splendor depends on her beauty and cosmetics (18.178-9;
192-6). So too in their speeches to her, the suitors exhibit
what they think she wants to hear: “You excel women in
looks and stature and the balanced mind inside you”
(18. 248-9; cf. 19.124-6, 108). Her rejoinder scarcely denies
that what she wants is to excel other women, although she
subtly changes the bill of goods by starting with aretê: “my
prowess and looks and figure the immortals destroyed, when
the Argives embarked for Ilion and with them went my
husband Odysseus” (18.251-3). A husband like Odysseus is
required for feminine magnificence or splendor. Penelope has
a conventionally acceptable motivation, then, for setting up
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the Bow contest: her fame has been diminished by Odysseus’s
delay or demise. Her fame can be partially recouped by
remarriage, but she needs a husband who approaches the
stature of Odysseus (one who can string his bow) so that her
fame will not be diminished further than necessary. In the
event, Odysseus’s successful return takes her fame to new
heights, but that is irrelevant to her motivations now. If these
motives were not sufficient, the suitors also appear capable of
forcing Penelope into marriage: since she has no protector to
prevent strong-arm tactics so long as the suitors feign obedience to the convention, she herself breaks the convention by
extending the courtship indefinitely. Brann admits that
Penelope may at times have seriously considered the unthinkable (262-3). If sometimes, why not now, with Odysseus
unrecognized in the room?
The difficulty with imputing this “alien” social ethic to
Penelope is that it makes her into a woman unlike any we
could admire under modern assumptions (though the still,
small voice of assumptions like ours is also present in Ithacan
assumptions: 23.149-51). Brann in another context rebuts
Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief,” perceiving the
futility of the attempt studiously to “cancel” our instincts
(36). Intellectual honesty at its best would assume the fault
lies with us: our current prejudice prevents us from seeing the
good in Penelope’s acceptance of a remarriage that is “hateful” to her. The ascription of alienness, like the ascription of
mentality, renders interpretation at once easy (they were different, that is all) and difficult since we implicitly assume that
our receiving equipment has a flaw. Artificially canceling and
correcting for our alleged flaws can produce monstrous
chimerical interpretations that say more about ourselves than
about Homer. For Brann, the fame-talk is mainly a screen, a
likely story Penelope tells about what another woman in her
circumstances might want, behind which she hides her true
intentions. But the likely story proves the rule for Homeric
woman generally. We tolerate Achilles’ desire for fame in
the Iliad, why not Penelope’s in the Odyssey? Brann thus
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rehabilitates fame-seeking but hesitates to ascribe it wholeheartedly to Penelope. Does she perhaps surmise a
Penelopean analogue of the conclusion Odysseus himself
arrives at—that fame is empty?
Penelope
Penelope penetrates Odysseus’s disguise the moment she sees
him. Moments supports this surmise with a host of small
details. Odysseus himself understands her beguiling the
suitors into a more standard gift-giving courtship to be a
sneaky Odyssean way of getting material wealth out of men
not long for this world (18.281-3; 273). The Bow contest
itself is all her own genius, a perfect way of getting a weapon
into the hands of the disguised Odysseus. Brann shows that,
in the foot-washing scene, Penelope’s thought pattern stumbles over both caesura and diaeresis, as she catches herself so
as not to betray her knowledge to Eurycleia. “Wash your
lord’s—agemate; and perhaps Odysseus/ By now has such
feet and such hands” (19.358-9; 279-80). The dash is the
caesura, the semi-colon the diaeresis. Penelope was about to
say “Wash your lord’s feet,” but caught herself, hesitated only
an instant and hastily substituted “agemate.” Then during the
diaeresis she thought up how to cover her faux pas with
speculations about how Odysseus’s feet—and hands—must
have aged. This is beautifully observed.
Yet the thesis that Penelope helps orchestrate Odysseus’s
retaking of the palace would have to explain away a soliloquy
(hence without guile) in which Penelope imagines Odysseus
far away or in Hades, wishes to join him there, and states that
the oblivion of sleep will help her to endure pleasing an
inferior husband (20.79-83). Brann’s thesis would also have
to explain away a good deal of weeping. During her interview
with the disguised Odysseus, the word used for her “weeping” is that used for the lamentation made for the dead
(19.210). Homer says explicitly that Odysseus hid his own
tears of sympathy with a trick (19.212). Why not construe
this small deception as a part of a successful overall
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deception? Perhaps Penelope’s tears at recognizing the “sure
signs” that the stranger met Odysseus long ago might be
explained as tears of relief that Odysseus is home rather than
as tears of renewed loss (19.249-50). But why go to bed and
weep for Odysseus until Athena throws sweet sleep upon her
eyelids if she has just met him (19.602-4)? Likewise she
weeps as she retrieves the Bow from its closet, and weeps for
Odysseus when sent away from the Bow-contest she herself
devised (21.55-7, 356-8). Is it tension about the long odds
against his successfully killing all the suitors with it? Or is it
grief over a cherished marriage that is finally coming to an
end?
Which is artistically more satisfying: to show that
Odysseus can fool even his nearest and dearest, or to show
that Penelope’s deviousness is the equal of, and hence a match
for, his own? Brann finds a number of telling ironies in the
dialogue between Penelope and the disguised Odysseus.
Would we rather hear innuendo in such lines as “Odysseus
will never again come home” (sc. “because you’re already
here now”; 276) or is it more poignant to make such lines
examples of her talking against her own hope? Brann points
out that he calls himself polystonos [much-groaning], intending that she hear odyssamenos [hated], directly after signaling
his name with odynaon [feeling pain] (244, 278); he is transmitting, but is she receiving? Irony there is for sure, but
whose irony is it: Homer’s or one of the two protagonists’,
that is to say, is the irony dramatic or verbal? If the ironies in
her own speech remain dramatic, Penelope could remain
ignorant that she is speaking to Odysseus in disguise, and
Homer would be teasing us with how close their conversation
comes to admitting his presence without her knowing it. It
would elevate Odysseus’s deviousness to read this teasing as
analogous to his later teasing of Laertes.
Here as in a host of other ways Moments shares assumptions with Seth Benardete’s The Bow and the Lyre even while
arriving at different conclusions. Both authors see in Queen
Arete of the Phaeacians what a female ruler can be and that
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her co-ruler husband can defer to her (Moments 223).
Benardete accepts that Odysseus deceives Penelope and
deprecates his shutting her out of the power struggle to
retake Ithaca. Brann refuses to accept what she too would
deprecate and pushes on with a thesis of equality: Penelope
cannot be a match for Odysseus if her cleverness is only a
diminutive version of his. For her worth to rest elsewhere and
not be defined by his, is not fully entertained (258-60),
probably because Penelope is in fact clever, self-possessed,
and steadfast—all virtues Odysseus has too. Brann finds it
more satisfying intellectually if the Bed-test shows recognition in a fuller sense than mere factual identity; this fuller
recognition can only be premised on Penelope’s already
knowing Odysseus is Odysseus. The “mutuality of their memory” is at stake: has Odysseus changed, or is he the same person he was before (283-4, 287)? Perhaps a “return of Martin
Guerre” situation, in which suspicions about imposture could
exist in tandem with worries about forgetfulness, would be
too confusing. The crucial passage occurs where Penelope
tricks Odysseus into an anger that betrays his selfsameness.
Odysseus feels betrayed by Penelope, but in what way precisely? He may think Penelope herself has forgotten the rootedness of the bed, but more likely it is a “How could you
think I thought” situation: he blows up at the injustice of her
gambit. “How could you think I would forget and fall for a
trick like that!” Penelope’s trick would then be two-pronged,
with her test of (or pretense about) his imposture also being
exactly the right instrument to test mutuality of memory.
Odysseus
Brann finds for Odysseus a motive to destroy his men still
more shocking than Benardete’s motive of prideful anger at
their opening the bag of winds (The Bow and the Lyre 83).
For Odysseus to be what he is—the soul of imagination—he
must rid himself of their unimaginative minds (Moments
175). Odysseus’s separate goals for his men and for himself
(striving for their homecoming but for his own soul, in the
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fifth line of the poem) prove to be incompatible aims (116).
Where many readers would say Odysseus indulges a reckless
curiosity, Brann stresses his imagination. The emphasis on
imagination makes better sense of how he transforms his
experiences into the concrete and tangible. If he is curious to
view the towns of mortal men and to know their mind, his
imagination transforms this mental intercourse with mortal
men in towns into carnal knowledge of immortal women
who live in isolation (249). To his men, the captain must seem
to be plunging ever deeper into a world of his own, losing
his grip on “reality.” Ordinary concerns such as security
and profit fade for him as he pushes them into greater and
greater dangers for smaller and smaller hopes of plunder.
Companions are required for the early experiences, for example, six to serve the Scylla. But as he retreats ever deeper into
his imagination, the issues become utterly private. The choice
Calypso offers between mortality and immortality is a choice
offered to a solitary (171). A self-referential narrative opens
up, in which the men are extras in a plot which has decreasing need for them and so Homer must invent ways to kill
them off (175). But Brann insists that Odysseus is culpable of
nothing worse than neglect leading to mutiny—he lets them
die, opportunistically passive (for example, asleep) at the
right times.
Striving for his soul means externalizing his own soul
through the exercise of his imagination. For Brann, the
fictional Wanderings are the progress of his mind (31, 177);
they unfold Odysseus’s true self or identity. By contrast,
Benardete’s Odysseus must cease to be himself and become
the anonymous universality of mind, living up to the pun on
one of the pronouns of negation in the Cyclops episode:
mêtis means “no one” but also “mind.” By struggling to maintain his identity as king of Ithaca and husband of Penelope,
Odysseus succumbs to the temptation of pride and self-glorification, and fails to sustain the peak of humanity he achieved
on Circe’s isle: knowledge of nature rather than desire for
fame. For Benardete, learning means becoming no one in
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particular. For Brann, learning entails being an “I” who learns
(51); Odysseus’s flexibility is all about using tricks to endure
or be steadfast, that is, to stay himself. Brann’s idea of learning saves Odysseus’s desire to return home from being overwhelmed by the wanderlust that overwhelms Dante’s and
Tennyson’s Odysseus. But it may be significant that domestic
bliss remains a promissory note at the end because of the
prophesied final journey. Brann admits that Odysseus prays
(like Augustine): help me return home, but not yet (116).
The encounters with Scylla and Charybdis never
happened; nor did any of the tall tales Odysseus tells, such as
the Cyclops, Circe and the rest. What Odysseus was really
doing during the decade he says he was having these adventures can be gleaned from the lies he tells upon his return in
disguise to Ithaca. The mundane events that actually made up
his journeys consisted of piracy and marauding, trading, and
the giving and receiving of gifts, all on known sea-routes and
in known countries such as Crete, Cyprus, and Egypt (182,
242, 247). Nymphs like Calypso are fairyland versions of the
prostitutes whom sailors dream about and find in port (1923). The lies Odysseus tells in the persona of a Cretan are “lies
like the truth” (19.203). They may not have happened, but
they are the kind of things that do happen. By contrast, the
adventure tales are lies of a different order: they are like
nothing that ever happens. The truth about Scylla and
Charybdis is that they are a fanastically-rendered image of a
universal human dilemma: the Choice of Dangers, when
neither alternative is good (211). Odysseus may have experienced several mundane versions of this choice, but none
could have captured the essence of the Choice like the
fantastic story he eventually relates. Therefore, the tall tales
are true, while the underlying trip is merely real (183-4). The
reader may consult his or her own experience: Scylla and
Charybdis are as proverbial today as the devil and the deep or
the rock and the hard place. And if that is what Scylla and
Charybdis are now, why not also for Homer’s first audience
and ever since? Brann dares to read our modern experience
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back onto the poem. Lotus-eating is equally proverbial, as is
the sirens’ song. Meeting a man with one eye? Readers will
have to savor this brief foray into postcolonial theory for
themselves.
Homer
It is especially daring to disbelieve the factualness of
Odysseus’s tales (while accepting their essential truth) in a
poem where Homer himself recounts equally mythical occurrences such as conversations in Hades, as well as vouches for
Calypso’s magical island (169). Distinguishing between fairyland adventures (made up by Odysseus) and “real” places like
Hades (known to all Greeks) introduces an odd literalism
into Brann’s interpretations. To declare, on behalf of the
Greek people, that Hades is “as real a place as there ever was”
comes close to attributing a mentality to the Greeks. Hades is
real until some Greek finds out differently. But Brann means
to draw a distinction between what Homer appropriates from
(or for) the tradition, and what he adds. Even if Homer is
making it all up, he presents some of it as made up by
Odysseus and pretends the rest is real. Brann’s Homer subtly
makes concrete to the imagination the way his epic brings
Greek mythology to the Greeks: Odysseus’s return from
Hades (the treasure house of memory) represents the poet
bringing the tales of great women and men back with him
(17, 200, 204-7). The mundane reality is that we remember
the dead, but the imagined truth is that the dead remember.
The poet tells us that none of the people in Hades are
fictions; they live down there and he heard of them through
the Muses. Brann is at pains to take Homer at his word: she
thus avoids rationalizing away her chance to engage with his
claim. But this feels odd because Brann permits no looking
behind that claim. Her refusal to know Homer better than
Homer knows himself could lead her into the trap of conflating Homer’s poetic persona with the real Homer. “The
Author” is a character in his own right in novels like Tom
Jones or Don Quixote, which are episodic and picaresque
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(and therefore comparable to the Odyssey although still
generically different). It would be a mistake to identify “The
Author” with the author of such a novel, or the intentions of
“The Author” with those of the author, who wishes us to
penetrate his persona in order to have access to yet greater
delights. The humor or absurdism in these modern novels
vitiates the comparison because the self-referentiality of an
authorial persona also generates humor. But it is unclear in
principle why, in a poem with the complexity Brann attributes to it, Homer might not have employed a similar subtlety, giving glimpses of himself that are equally important but
equally contrived. Surely the road to understanding Homer’s
intention runs through Brann’s careful distinctions, but she
does not base many surmises on those distinctions.
A related literalism is Brann’s insistence that Odysseus’s
tales were never meant for publication (notwithstanding the
fact that she has published a book about them). Observing
that the tales’ first audience, the Phaeacians, is cut off from
the world (though if Odysseus did not anticipate the
enclosure of their land, he might have expected these seafarers to carry his fame to all lands; 226), and their second
audience is Penelope in the privacy of home, Brann preserves
the possibility that Odysseus is exceptional among heroes: he
truly seeks something other than fame. Odysseus cannot
know that the Muses will find out about his private tale and
tell Homer, who will publicize it. The fact that Odysseus prefaces his account to the Phaeacians by saying his fame reaches
heaven does not imply a hero’s desire for more glory but
rather that he rests secure in the fame he already has (180).
Odysseus learned his lesson when he shouted his name to the
Cyclops, from which deed he earned the undying enmity of
Poseidon (189). Brann sums up: Odysseus’s adventures “will
never become a myth among public myths” (300; cf. 205).
And yet they did. Odysseus’s exceptionality may be indicated
by the fact that Homer in the Odyssey never calls him a hero;
only Circe does, after his return from Hades (180, 196).
Odysseus hears from Achilles that it is not better to reign in
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Hell than serve on earth. The discovery that fame is empty
may help Odysseus to transcend heroism. Yet Odysseus ends
up with a poem of comparable (though shorter) length to the
one Achilles gets, a poem which furthermore has acquired a
title which names it securely after Odysseus, an honor
Achilles is denied. Odysseus is very lucky to have won maximum fame after ceasing to seek it. His alleged eschewal of
fame is rewarded with fame. Virtue rewarded always entails
the problem of whether the virtue was sought for its own sake
or only for the reward. But Brann would never let such
skepticism essentially eliminate the possibility of true virtue
rewarded; to allow that would be to fall into a mentality. As
we saw, Brann’s Penelope also chooses what could be called
the path of least fame—to remain in widowhood—but thereby gains the greatest fame possible. If Odysseus learns to
demote fame, then Homer portrays a character who thinks
his way out of a central tenet of his society’s ethics, thereby
giving the lie to the inevitability of mentality.
Moments opens up many more windows on Homer than
can be discussed here. Not the least of these are the myriad
quotations of modern lyric poets—from Keats to H. D.—who
interpret Homer. Each of these, too, provides a moment in
which readers can lose themselves. Not to be missed are the
Helen chapter and the chapters laying out the structures of
the Odyssey and Iliad. Brann is particularly wonderful with
time, and many delightful intricacies come into focus when
she juxtaposes the order of occurrences with the order in
which they are narrated. The simple device of generous crossreferencing, so lacking in most books, enables the ripples to
spread. The accomplishment of Homeric Moments is to
progress from the visual to the invisible, but observation
remains its greatest virtue.
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105
The City: Intersection of Erôs
and Thumos?
Michael Dink
Ludwig takes us on a tour of sex and politics in Greek
political theory, focusing largely, but not exclusively, on the
political effects of the practice of homoerotic pederasty as
understood by certain Greek thinkers, using as his principal
texts Plato’s Symposium (primarily Aristophanes’ speech),
Aristophanes’ plays, and a few selected passages from
Thucydides. The ultimate goal seems to be to investigate how
these thinkers understood the political relevance of erôs in its
various forms. Not surprisingly, Ludwig finds that, at least in
its political manifestations, erôs is always mixed up with
thumos.
The path taken by the exposition can seem labyrinthine,
as Ludwig moves back and forth among different texts, and
takes up in sequence various loci of the intersection of erôs
and politics, while at the same time trying to develop an
account of what erôs is, what different forms it takes, how it
is related to thumos and its forms, and which aspects of it are
natural and which are conventional or “socially constructed.”
For a reader like myself, primarily interested in the intertwining of erôs and thumos, it is helpful to have a clear, even
if initially oversimplified, statement of the distinction
between erôs and thumos as a thread with which to negotiate
the labyrinth. Since Ludwig himself does not provide this
thread, I have spun my own, which I will share with you.
Let us define erôs as the striving to fulfill a perceived lack
in oneself and thumos as the striving to assert something
present in oneself, perceived as good. In erôs, one feels an
Paul Ludwig. Erôs and Polis: Desire and Community in Greek Political
Theory. Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Michael Dink is a tutor on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College.
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emptiness of self in need of fulfillment; in thumos, one feels
a fullness of self in need of expression.
The striving of erôs tends to seek possession of some
object outside of the self, in the expectation that this will fill
its lack. The object sought is usually regarded as being high,
exalted, or beautiful; the lack is considered to be grave and
its fulfillment of the greatest importance because tantamount
to finding happiness, and thus the striving is accompanied
with great intensity of feeling
The striving of thumos tends to be in opposition or antagonism to some object other than the self, either one that
threatens the self or one that is in some way in opposition to
the goodness that the self strives to assert. The sense in which
goodness is perceived in the self and the sense in which it is
asserted may vary widely: as existence asserted in selfdefense; as, excellence asserted in the striving for recognition; as rule over others asserted in the pursuit of conquest.
Ludwig begins with Aristophanes’ speech in the
Symposium, in which he finds two manifestations of erôs. The
one which Aristophanes explicitly calls erôs and makes the
object of his praise is the desire of each split half of the original circle people to rejoin with its former other half in order
to recover its (their?) original wholeness. The other impulse
which Ludwig identifies as a form of erôs is whatever motive
caused these original circle people to ascend into the heavens
and seek to displace the gods, thus provoking the splitting
that brought into being the first kind of erôs. Aristophanes
himself does not even name this second impulse, much less
call it erôs, and he does not give any explicit characterization
of its object. Ludwig names it ‘Ur-erôs’ and characterizes it in
a number of different ways. He argues that it is more original
and natural than the erôs of the split halves and that the
latter is the result of efforts to restrain ‘Ur-erôs’ in most
people, an effort originally made by a tyrant in the service of
better fulfilling his own ‘Ur-erôs.’
While Ludwig has not yet introduced the distinction
between erôs and thumos at this point, it seems to me that the
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erôs of the halves does fit the definition of erôs, insofar as it
strives to fill a perceived lack, even if there is lack of clarity
about what constitutes this lack and its fulfillment. Ludwig,
however, treats this aspect of Aristophanes’ account as a
romantic dressing up of a less attractive reality: a desire for
what is like oneself, which uses the self as the criterion of
likeness. Ludwig calls this “horizontal erôs,” twisting it in a
direction that strikes me as more thumotic: he makes it into
a kind of assertion of the goodness of the self, as if what it
seeks is only more of the same.
The other form of erôs, which Ludwig calls ‘Ur-erôs’ or
‘vertical erôs,’ is an impulse implied in Aristophanes’ very
brief statement that the original circle people made an ascent
into the heavens and launched an attack upon the gods. I find
both thumotic and erotic aspects in this impulse. The antagonistic and assertive aspect of thumos is manifest in the
attempt to overthrow or displace the gods by a violent struggle, as if they were a hindrance to be overcome. Nevertheless,
the erotic component emerges insofar as the circle people are
attempting to gain something high and exalted that they lack.
Ludwig does not initially thematize this duality or relate it to
thumos, but later adumbrates it in the phrase “violent
admiration.” He gives a wide range of characterizations of
the goal sought by the circle people without an explicit
attempt either to unify these or to choose among them: tyrannical domination of others; equality with or superiority to an
admired object; becoming a more grandiose version of oneself; higher status; self-aggrandizement; self-apotheosis; an
inhuman wholeness and perfection. In many of these phrases,
I find the peculiar implication that the one who seeks to
fulfill a lack nonetheless manages to suppress his recognition
of this lack, by somehow believing that what he does not yet
possess is rightfully his own or is the fitting external expression of what he really already is.
Ludwig reads Aristophanes’ speech as covertly acknowledging the natural character of this “Ur-erôs” while recognizing that it is dangerous and needs to be restrained, both by
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laws and by civil religion. The other kind of erôs is derivative
from the restraining effects of convention, but is safer.
Aristophanes tries to make it more attractive by playing up
the romantic and idealistic side of it and covering up its dark
and selfish side.
Ludwig, however, identifies a particular problem in
Aristophanes’ strategy. He has included male homosexual
love as one of the forms of the convention-tamed erôs. Yet in
noting that the political men come from lovers of this kind,
he recognizes that Ur-erôs is less tamed in them, and that they
represent a tendency to reconstitute the original whole at the
political level, rather than at the private level. As a consequence, they tend toward the dangers of internal tyranny and
external imperialism.
This question of the political effects of the Greek practice
of homosexual pederasty forms one of the main strands of the
book’s analysis. The practice combines erotic neediness on
the individual level with ambition to rule and conquer on the
political level. Ludwig identifies a basic internal contradiction
in the practice as one of the principles of its dynamism. While
the relationship of older lover to younger beloved was in part
understood as a path to political power for the beloved, the
acceptance of the passive sexual role by one male in relation
to another was regarded as shameful and as a disqualification
from the exercise of citizen rights (technically only if in
exchange for money). Hence the threat of such hubris on the
part of the lover was guarded against by a convention that
encouraged the pursuit of young males by older ones, while
at the same time discouraging sexual consummation. Ludwig
argues that this convention fostered the sublimation of sexual desire into a kind of love that expressed itself largely in an
attempt to educate the beloved so as to win the favor of his
recognition. But Ludwig points to a number of elements in
this education that strike me as thumotic: the lover first seeks
to cultivate and display his own excellence in rivalry with
other lovers, and then to impress the stamp of his own excellence on the beloved. Insofar as this excellence has a political
DINK
109
character, and insofar as erotic energy is directed away from
heterosexual love and the private household and is denied
sexual satisfaction, it tends to spill over into ambitious political activity. Insofar as this pederastic relationship was an aristocratic or oligarchic practice, the political activity tended to
be oligarchic, and to be viewed as a threat by the democrats.
In his plays Aristophanes often satirizes the pederastic
proclivities of Athenian politicians, and suggests that heterosexual desire is more compatible with contentment with
private life and avoidance of dangerous political ambition
and the wars brought on by imperialism. Yet Ludwig finds
evidence in the plays that Aristophanes is aware that heterosexual desire and the pleasures of private life may have their
own admixture of thumos, in a kind of belligerently possessive and even randomly cantankerous behavior.
In connection with the practice he calls “civic nudity,”
in which Greek males exercised and engaged in athletic
competition in the nude, Ludwig explores politico-erotic
phenomena along a different axis, stretching from shameinduced covering of the body to its shame-free (but not
shameless) uncovering. He seems to want to argue, on the
one hand, that some degree of covering up out of shame or
modesty is a necessary condition of the emergence of love as
distinct from sexual desire, but on the other hand, that an
obsession with covering up is an over reaction that generates
a vicious cycle of “modesty—sensitization—predation—modesty.” Ludwig argues that Thucydides, at least, regarded
Greek civic nudity as a sign of civic trust and a display of
“conspicuous moderation,” in contrast to what is reported of
modern nudist colonies, that universal nudity of itself
suppresses sexual desire. In treating this as a single axis, he
may not give sufficient attention to the distinction between
the shame or modesty involved in covering and uncovering
the body and that involved in the desire for privacy for sexual intimacy.
In a bold extrapolation, he claims that a “structural
feature of erôs” emerges from this dialectic of covering and
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
uncovering. What erôs really desires is not the consummation
of sexual desire, much less the naked body, but rather the
transgressive motion from one degree of covering to the next
lower degree, ad infinitum, albeit per impossible. He even
suggests that beauty itself may somehow have a structure that
lures us on to such transgressive unveiling. If his claim is that
this is a structural feature of all erôs, he has not substantiated
it by showing how it is present in all the cases he has
examined. Although he does not make this explicit, the transgressive character that he finds in this kind of voyeuristic erôs
bears traces of the aggressive and antagonistic features of
thumos.
In his final chapter, Ludwig both introduces new political
manifestations of erôs and tries to sort out some of the possibilities he has surveyed. The augmented range of possibilities
includes the narrow attachment to and preference for one’s
own because it is one’s own; the attempt to extend this to the
city as a whole in part by weakening it at the family level;
homoerotic pederasty, as a practice which diverts erotic
energy from love of one’s own into a relationship with civic
consequences both beneficial and dangerous; Periclean love
of the city because of its grandeur or merit, along with a
desire to be honored by it, shadowed by the ambition to possess it as sole tyrant and/or to leave one’s stamp on it; love of
seeing things exotic and alien, which undermines the effort to
conquer them; and love of acquiring foreign things, which,
when assimilated, undermine loyalty to and defense of one’s
own.
Ludwig tries to marshal this motley crew into a single
orderly column or spectrum, with the narrow, possessive love
of one’s own on one end, and the selfless love of beauty on
the other end. He further suggests that Sparta and Athens
each marched gloriously over the cliff at one end of the spectrum, Sparta staying too close to the narrow love of one’s
own, although transferred from family to city, and Athens
flirting dangerously with love of the beautiful as detached
from one’s own.
DINK
111
Ludwig’s book does much valuable work in uncovering
and exploring many aspects of erôs in Greek political
phenomena and theory. His tone is always judicious and
non-polemical, and his mastery of a wide range of material,
primary and secondary, ancient and modern, philological,
sociological, and philosophical, is impressive. From the point
of view of explicating the intertwining of erôs and thumos,
however, the organization of the book presents a significantserious structural impediment. His discussion of the two
kinds of erôs in Aristophanes’ speech in the early chapters
precedes his introduction of the distinction between erôs and
thumos. When he introduces thumos in chapter 4, his discussion focuses almost exclusively on ways in which it shows up
in combination with “horizontal erôs.” His primary example
is a character from the Wasps, Philocleon. An old man who
loves to serve on juries, his attitude is one of punitive moralism, ostensibly in response to threats against the common
good of the city. In contrast, Ludwig’s discussion of
Peisetairos, a character from the Birds, who resembles the
circle people in making an ascent into the heavens that turns
out to be tyrannical, is couched entirely in terms of erôs. In
other words, despite a brief allusion to the connection of thumos to the ascent of the circle people, Ludwig never makes
an explicit attempt to assess the thumotic elements in
“vertical erôs.” Thus we are left with the impression that
verticality and violence belong together intrinsically, and that
this togetherness is the most fundamental form of erôs.
In contrast, when he lines up the many manifestations of
erôs along a spectrum in the final chapter, he seems to put the
violence together with the selfish and the possessive on the
horizontal end of the spectrum, which is therefore regarded
as more thumotic than erotic, and to put self-forgetting in the
presence of the beautiful at the other, vertical, end, which is
therefore regarded as more erotic than thumotic. We can’t
help wondering where on this spectrum to fit vertical erôs as
the aspiration to tyranny.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Perhaps this apparent inconsistency could be resolved if
we said that the violence and assertiveness in the aspiration of
the circle-people are due to an admixture of thumos with the
erotic desire for a certain kind of perfection. This would still
leave us with a number of questions. Are erôs and thumos
halves of an original, natural whole, which are only split from
one another by convention? Or are they intrinsically distinct
principles, whose co-presence in any phenomenon is in need
of explanation? If the latter is the case, is one more natural
than the other? Is the impulse to ascend more fundamentally
due to one rather than to the other? Is the desire to acquire a
perfection that one finds lacking in oneself necessarily linked
to an impulse to displace others who are seen as possessing
this perfection? If erôs and thumos are mixed along both
horizontal and vertical axes, what determines the difference
between these axes?
113
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Carey, James
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
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Coleman, Shanna
Sachs, Joe
Sinnett, Mark W.
Painter, Corinne
Ludwig, Paul
Dink, Michael
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The St. John’s Review
Volume XLVII, number two (2003)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Shanna Coleman
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson,
President; Harvey Flaumenhaft, Dean. For those not on the
distribution list, subscriptions are $10.00 for one year.
Unsolicited essays, reviews, and reasoned letters are welcome.
Address correspondence to the Review, St. John’s College,
P Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are
.O.
available, at $5.00 per issue, from the St. John’s College
Bookstore.
©2003 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction
in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
The St. John’s Public Relations Office and the St. John’s College Print Shop
�2
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
3
Contents
Essays and Lectures
The Wisdom of Jacob Klein..........................................5
Olivier Sedeyn, Translated by Brother Robert Smith
History and the Liberal Arts........................................11
Jacob Klein
Prudence and Wisdom in Aristotle’s Ethics..................25
Eric Salem
Jacob Klein and the Phenomenological Project of
Desedimenting the Formalization of
Meaning......................................................................51
Burt Hopkins
Opening Questions......................................................69
Ronald Mawby
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
5
The Wisdom of Jacob Klein
Olivier Sedeyn
Translated by Brother Robert Smith
In the Apology Plato tells us what led Socrates to the practice
of philosophy, a practice that finally landed him before the
Athenian court of law to defend himself against the charges
of not believing in the gods of the city and of corrupting the
youth. It happened, Socrates said, because his friend
Chaerophon had asked the Oracle at Delphi if any man existed who was wiser than Socrates, and had been given the
answer that there was none. Socrates reacted characteristically in refusing to believe the oracle and, upon noting “a god
cannot lie,” in wanting to verify the answer. The best way to
do this was to find people who everyone agreed were wise
and to examine them in order to “show the gods” that there
were many men wiser than Socrates. Everyone knows the
outcome: Socrates examined these men and realized that,
although they were reputedly wise and thought themselves
genuinely wise, they were not. Insofar as Socrates himself did
not claim to be wise but was aware of his ignorance, he could
in a sense be said to be wiser than they. Perhaps human wisdom consists in knowing that one doesn’t know, in being
aware of one’s ignorance, rather than in the “divine” wisdom
that those who think they penetrate the secrets of nature or
who think they know the secrets of education, like the
Sophists, supposedly possess.
Olivier Sedeyn, graduate of L’École Normale Supérieure, is professor of
philosophy in a lycée in Caen. He has completed a translation into French
of Lectures and Essays of Jacob Klein and is translator of works of Leo
Strauss in twelve volumes. The above essay originally appeared in
Commentaire, number 88 (1999-2000), pages 831-33, to introduce the
French translation of “History and the Liberal Arts,” and is reprinted with
their kind permission. Klein’s essay is reprinted below. Brother Robert Smith
is tutor emeritus at St. John’s College on the Annapolis Campus.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
But are there wise men among our contemporaries? The
very posing of this question shows how strange it is. Even so,
is not philosophy the “love of wisdom”? It is said that
Alexandre Kojève thought Jacob Klein was a wise man. What
can such a claim mean when made by the famous Hegelian
who inspired the idea of the “end of history”? Surely we are
not being shown an example of Hegelian wisdom, which rests
on the idea of the cyclical completion of the Concept, and is
founded on the history of Reason. He can mean none other
than ancient wisdom—that of Socrates, the seeker who
knows that he does not know, who never ceased to fascinate
Kojève, as his dialogue with Leo Strauss on tyranny shows.
Jacob Klein was a life-long friend of Leo Strauss, whom
he knew from the time the two were students at Marburg in
the early 20’s. And Leo Strauss felt it possible to say: “In my
opinion, we are closer to one another than to anyone else of
our generation.” It can be said that Strauss and Klein tried,
each in his own way, to reopen the quarrel of the ancients and
the moderns, and that each was determined to show that the
ancient point of view can be legitimately held today.
Obviously this stance did not win them widespread admiration—Klein is even less well known than Strauss. My purpose
in writing this introduction to the seemingly simple lecture
that follows is to encourage readers to consider it thoughtfully.
Klein was born in Russia in 1899. He was educated in
Germany between 1912 and 1922. He studied philosophy,
physics, and mathematics. He then continued his study of
mathematics and ancient philosophy. In 1923, he was influenced decisively by Heidegger’s way of reading the ancients:
to read them without presupposing the superiority of the
modern view; to read them for what they are, according to
their own criteria. From that point on Klein tried to deepen
his understanding of Plato and Aristotle. To acknowledge
Heidegger’s influence—and this is important—does not mean
an acceptance of Heidegger’s own philosophy. Neither Klein
SEDEYN
7
nor Strauss was ever in that sense a Heideggerian. They were
drawn exclusively to his way of reading the ancients. We see
this in the fact that Strauss and Klein, who throughout their
lives were intent on understanding and judging the differences between the ancients and the moderns, rejected
Heidegger’s judgment that subjectivity and modern metaphysics had their origin in Plato. The break, according to
them, occurred at the birth of modernity. Klein’s most important book, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of
Algebra,1 locates the difference between the ancients and
moderns in the distinctive way they conceptualize number. To
give a brief and insufficient account of this matter, we can say
that the ancients considered number to be “a definite quantity of definite things”; or, in other words, number always
refers to some thing beyond itself. On the contrary, for the
moderns, beginning with Vieta and Descartes, number does
not refer to things, but to a general concept, namely body or
extension. Modern abstraction is “symbol-generating.” It cuts
number off from a world it is supposed to reveal. This
explains the connection between this concept of number and
“universal method,” itself inspired by a mathesis universalis,
a method valuable in every domain. This is quite different
from the Greek notion of method as always particular, that is
to say, related to the objects under consideration. Klein’s
reflections thus bear directly on what seem to be the most
powerful pillars of the modern conception, the origins of
mathematical physics.
Klein tried to point out this striking ontological shift,
linked to the new way of conceptualizing number, which
allowed modern science to be concerned no longer with
ontological problems, to “leave them aside.” We hope that it
will soon be possible to read Klein’s book in French. It is
strange that a work whose importance is considerable is not
better known: it opens up an understanding of the origin of
mathematical physics, a discipline that holds a unique position of authority in the modern world.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Be that as it may, circumstances forced Strauss to emigrate
during 1932-33, first to France, then to England; and forced
Klein, after having taught in Prague, to immigrate to America
in 1938. He came to know Scott Buchanan, who was then
trying to renew an old college in Annapolis. In that Maryland
town, Klein was to find a new direction for his activities. The
program of learning that he along with Scott Buchanan established aimed to provide “over four years an education in the
liberal arts in which one reads great books from Homer and
Euclid to Freud and Russell.”
Klein’s main work from 1938-1976, at least up to his partial retirement in 1969, was consequently to teach the liberal
arts. The liberal arts, as is generally known, are composed of
the quadrivium—arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy—and the trivium—grammar, logic, and rhetoric.2 It is
surprising that in an era in which it seems that education and
instruction ought to have as their aim social utility, a university should choose as its model a type of study drawn up in
the Middle Ages and rooted in Greek antiquity. Yet maybe the
utilitarian purposes of today find their true meaning, if they
are to have one, in the higher purpose of making us free.
Jacob Klein consecrated his life to transmitting his knowledge of the fundamental texts of the Western tradition. In
particular, he placed emphasis on the arts helpful for interpreting texts. In his own way, Klein, like Strauss, insisted on
“the problem of the art of writing,” and a great part of the
program at St. John’s College consists in the reading of “great
books.” Klein pressed us especially to read Platonic Dialogues
paying particular attention to the dramatic structure of the
conversation. It even appears that he was the first to recognize the necessity of doing so. Every claim of a Platonic character, even Socrates, has to be interpreted in the particular
context of the dialogue in which it appears. It cannot be said,
as is perhaps common in contemporary works, that one finds
the theology of Plato, for example, at the end of the 10th
book of the Republic, because this “theology” derives its
SEDEYN
9
meaning from its place in the construction of the just city in
books 2-4. Klein was right to raise again and again the question of how to read a Platonic dialogue.
Klein wrote only three other books: A Commentary on
Plato’s Meno,3 which he pondered for several decades and
was published only in 1965; Plato’s Trilogy,4 comprising the
Theatetus, Sophist and Statesman, which is clearly imbued
with his knowledge of Greek mathematics; and a volume
entitled Lectures and Essays,5 assembled by his students and
friends after his death, that treats Greek mathematics and
mathematical physics, speech, and precision, and thinkers
such as Virgil, Dante, Plato, and Aristotle. This collection
constitutes a remarkable introduction to liberal education.
The following lecture is from this collection. Klein
attempts to show what specifically constitutes history and
what distinguishes it from what we call an “historical sense.”
History understood in the modern sense is in fact one of the
great gods of our era. Understanding history amounts to
preparing to better understand what is at stake in the quarrel
of the ancients and the moderns, since the ancient, Socratic
notion of wisdom has perhaps not disappeared. It may yet be
valid, despite the claims of universality of the “historical
sense.”
Notes
1
Die Griechiche Logistik und die Enstehung der Algebra, Quellen
und Studien zur Geschichte der Mathematik, Astronomie und
Physik, Abteilung B: Studien, vol. 3, fasc. 1 (Berlin, 1934): 18-105
(first part); fasc. 2 (1936): 122-235 (2nd part). Published in English
as Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, trans.
Eva Brann, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968.
2
Thirty years ago, the corridors of the National Pedagogical
Institute were decorated with windows representing these liberal
arts. I suppose that these ancient references have disappeared.
3
A Commentary on Plato’s Meno, Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1965.
�10
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Plato’s Trilogy, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977.
11
History and the Liberal Arts
5
Lectures and Essays, Annapolis: The Saint John’s College Press,
1985.
Jacob Klein
Friends and enemies of the St. John’s Program, visitors to the
college and many of its alumni often raise the question: Why
is History neglected in the St. John’s curriculum? They point
to the obvious contrast between the chronological order in
which the “Great Books” are read and the remarkable lack of
historical awareness displayed by the students. The time has
come, I think, to deal with this question extensively. I propose to do that in this lecture. Let us reflect on the role and
significance of History in a liberal arts curriculum.
The first, rather simple, statement that can be made is
this: Man, having the ability to understand and being inquisitive by nature, wants to explore everything that he sees
about him—the various plants and animals, the stars and the
clouds and the winds, the surface of the earth, the rivers and
the forests and the stones and the deserts. Whether this preoccupation stems from his immediate and urgent need,
whether his inquisitive attitude is merely an extension of his
concern to provide the necessities of life for himself, whether
it is the manifestation of his very nature or simply idle curiosity, need not be discussed at this point. Whatever the origins
of this desire, man wants to find out, to figure out, to know.
In this sense, then, man may be said to be inquisitive not only
about what surrounds him, at the present time, but also about
the future: he wants to know what is going to happen to him
as well as to everything else around him. And finally he wants
to know what happened in the past. Out of this latter desire,
we may somewhat naively say, grows History, i.e., the exploration of the past, the finding of the past, the description of
what has happened in the recent as well as in the most remote
Jacob Klein (1899-1978) was a tutor at St. John’s College, Annapolis, serving
as dean from 1949-1958.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
past. Curiously enough, as you know, the Greek word historia means originally exploration of any kind. Gradually, it
came to mean, even to the Greeks, the exploration of the past
and the description or narration of past events.
Thus we have History, i.e., historical books: Herodotus,
Thucydides, chronicles of all kinds, histories of Europe,
America, India, of Guatemala, of the city of Annapolis, of the
Universal Postal Union, of St. John’s College, of the Imperial
Palace in Peking. Such histories may be more or less correct.
Descriptions of events must be checked as to their accuracy
with the help of all the evidence available: books, old records,
letters, inscriptions, etc. Special skills in exploring and checking the evidence must be developed. Historical science and
the methodology of historical science become a branch of
knowledge; history can be taught and learned. Departments
of History and archives are established. Historical journals
come into being, dedicated to the improvement and enlargement of historical knowledge. All this circumscribes what
may be called the domain of History. Is this, then, what
History is?
You sense immediately: this is not quite it, this is not a sufficient description of History and what History means.
First of all, there is a special emphasis in the pursuit of
History which is lacking in other branches of learning. Take
the science of geology, for example. However important and
interesting its investigations and findings might be, this science does not make universal claims, it restricts itself to a definite domain. There is no such thing as a “geological
approach” to any given problem. And yet there always seems
to be an “historical approach” to almost any kind of problem
in almost any field.
Secondly, it is not quite correct to state that history is the
description and narration of past events. Not everything that
is past is “historic.” That one of us here went to Washington
or to San Francisco last week or some time ago does not
necessarily belong to any history. It might, though. From a
KLEIN
13
certain point of view, with regard to an event we judge a
significant one, we can—retrospectively—recognize the
importance of events which led to that significant one.
Nobody, indeed, ever assumed that all events and happenings
are equally important and significant and could become
recorded in history books. Even Tolstoi, who formulated the
idea of such an all-comprehensive history, based on integration procedures in the face of infinite series of minute events,
of historical infinitesimals, as it were, did that merely to
reduce history thus understood to absurdity. All written and
traditional history is based on a principle of selection. This
means that we must have—and in fact do have—some yardstick to measure the significance and importance of events,
whatever history we may be writing.
It is not too difficult to discern these yardsticks in
Herodotus or Tacitus or Gibbon, for example; more difficult
perhaps, but not impossible, to discover them in Thucydides.
We can even venture to say that in general the yardstick is
provided either (a) by the consideration of the present state
of affairs, the salient features of which want to be traced back
to their origins, in a sort of genealogical procedure, or (b) by
the desire to derive a lesson for the future either from mistakes and failures or from exemplary actions in the past,
which desire leads to what has been called, since Polybius,
pragmatic history. Sometimes both kinds of yardstick are
combined.
I say that both—the universality of the tendency to subject any theme to an historical investigation and the selecting
of events or facts to be dealt with historically—help us to win
a better understanding of this human enterprise called
History. This enterprise does not seem to be grounded in an
inherent property of events or facts that permits us to arrange
them in a sequence, an historical sequence, but seems rather
to depend on a certain way of looking at things which stamps
them into an historical pattern. One might be tempted to
apply Kantian terminology to this phenomenon—and people
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
have actually done so—: there might be something of an historical a priori, a form of our thinking that inescapably leads
us to see things in an historical perspective. Let us consider
this for a moment. Let us beware though lest we indulge in an
empty, if easy, construction.
As far as pragmatic history is concerned, the selection is
based on our sense of moral virtues or our understanding of
practical maxims of conduct. Hybris versus Moderation,
Tyranny versus Freedom, false hopes and foolish fears versus
prudence—these are presented and pointed out to us in the
unfolding drama of historical successes or catastrophes. Here,
then, the historical scene is merely the enlargement of our
daily life, providing us with great examples in large script.
History in this sense is founded on completely “unhistorical”
points of view. That is why this kind of history writing does
not constitute a specific domain like Physics or even Poetry.
Note that Aristotle, the great systematizer of human knowledge, in the face of such history—the only one he knew—did
not treat it as a pragmateia, a discipline in its own right. The
same Aristotle who investigated, defined, elaborated on every
conceivable art and science—grammar, logic, physics, botany,
zoology, astronomy, theology, psychology, politics, ethics,
rhetoric, poetry—did not elaborate on history, although he so
often prefaces his investigations with a review of positions
and opinions held in the past. I conclude: there is no historical a priori in pragmatic history.
The same holds true of the genealogical type of history,
though not in the same way. The very notion of genealogy
comprises notions of origin, source, development, more generally, the notion of a temporal order. But these notions are
not strictly historical ones. They also determine our understanding of biological phenomena, or more generally, of phenomena of change. They are not constitutive categories of
historical experience. They are operative in any myth, they
help to picture the growth and decay of institutions, the
expansion of dominion and power; but the emphasis is on the
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nature of those institutions and the overwhelming character
of that power. The bases of this type of history, exemplified
in Polybius and the Roman historians, are still unhistorical,
mostly legal and political.
But when we turn to that universal tendency to view
things historically, to use the historical approach in almost
any field, the picture changes. It seems, indeed, as if here the
form of History shapes the material under consideration so as
to make anything we look at assume historical clothing, as if
the very basis of our looking at things were—we hear it so
often—History itself. When, a moment ago, I denied that this
was the case in pragmatic and genealogical history, I implicitly assumed, by way of contrast, the possibility of such a view.
The question, then, is whether this historical way of looking
at things is itself a necessary form of our understanding.
One way of answering this question would be to apply the
following test: Can we approach and solve this problem
historically?
The pragmatic and genealogical types of history are the
only ones known in antiquity and the understanding of the
nature of history corresponds to them. But a new understanding of history begins with the advent of Christianity. Let
us consider briefly in what it consists. I shall use two outstanding examples: Augustine and Dante.
Augustine, in the City of God (15-18), gives a World
History based on a fundamental distinction. Mankind consists of two parts: there are those who live according to Man,
i.e., in sin, and those who live according to God; there are
two communities, the city of men and the city of God. The
latter is in the making and after the Second Advent will
become the everlasting Kingdom of God. The earthly city will
then be destroyed and its inhabitants will join Satan. As long
as this world exists, both cities are intertwined. Augustine distinguishes six ages: 1) from Adam to the Deluge; 2) from
Noah to Abraham; 3) from Abraham to David (the “prophetic age”); 4) from David to the Babylonian captivity; 5) from
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the Babylonian captivity to Jesus Christ; 6) from Jesus Christ
to the end of this world. This universal history is conceived
mainly in terms of the Biblical account; but the great oriental
kingdoms, as well as Greece and the Roman Empire, have
their place allocated in the general flow. This is not a
“Philosophy of History”; it is rather History itself, i.e., the
description of succeeding ages according to God’s providential ordering of all events. The important thing for us to note
is that historical succession itself, the fact of History, the fact
that men’s lives weave the history of the World, is not an accidental property of those lives but their very essence. Our and
our fathers’ years have flowed through God’s eternal Today,
says Augustine in the Confessions: “from this everpresent
divine ‘To-day’ the past generations of men received the
measure and the mould of such being as they had; and still
others shall flow away, and so receive the mould of their
degree of being.” History, then, reflects the essential temporality of man, but reflects no less the eternal timeless pattern
of his being. In following up the chain of historical events we
do not select significant links. We follow God’s providential
plan. Our historical perspective is our view of an eternal
order, just as the flow is our way of incomplete existence. For
us “to exist” is identical with “to exist historically.” But that,
again, means that our existence spreads out in time the timeless pattern of God’s wisdom. This is neither pragmatic nor
genealogical history. It is, one might say, symbolic history.
History presents the symbols that unfold in succession the
eternal relations between creation, fall, redemption, and salvation.
Let us turn to Dante. Here, again we see a World History
conceived in terms of God’s timeless providential pattern.
History is the sinister chronicle of man’s fall pursued through
all generations of men. The Greek and Roman worlds occupy a far more important place in this chronicle than in that of
Augustine. The horrors of Thebes more than those of
Babylon indicate the complete abnegation of God’s grace. It
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is not the contrast between the City of Men and the City of
God which determines Dante’s general view of historical
events, but rather the contrast and intertwining of God’s spiritual and God’s secular order, of Church and Empire. The
secular order, stemming from God, reflects but is not identical with the spiritual order. Troy and its destruction are symbols of man’s pride and man’s fall. “And it happened at one
period of time,” Dante writes in the Convivio, “that when
David was born, Rome was born, that is to say, Aeneas then
came from Troy to Italy. . . . Evident enough, therefore, is the
divine election of the Roman Empire by the birth of the Holy
City (i.e., Rome), which was contemporaneous with the root
of the race from which Mary sprang.” The history of the
world is here a kind of symbolic duplication of the spiritual
history of man. It is by this very nature, as in Augustine, twodimensional. Or, to put it in different words, the horizon of
this kind of history, or better, of this kind of historian, is not
historical. In this respect this kind of history is akin to the
pragmatic and genealogical kinds. Here, again, it is worth
noting: the primary liberal disciplines listed by Dante in the
Convivio and linked to the ten heavens of the world (the
spheres of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter,
Saturn, the sphere of the fixed stars, the primum mobile and
the Empyrean Heaven) are Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric,
Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, Astronomy, Physics and
Metaphysics, Ethics, Theology. History is not one of them.
When Machiavelli and Hobbes dethrone classical philosophy and revert to pragmatic history as the best teacher man
can have in planning and conducting his life, they still cling
to a two-dimensional history to build their own political philosophy.
But now the scene changes: Vico’s New Science marks a
new beginning. Like Machiavelli and Hobbes he defies all
preceding philosophy. He bases his work on the fundamental
(Leibnizian) distinction: the true and the certain. What is true
is common and therefore abstract. What is certain is the
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particular, the individual, the concrete. “Certum and commune are opposed to each other.” The philosophers pursue
what is common. They lack certainty. Only history (which
includes philology) deals with the certain. The most certain
for us is that which we ourselves have made, the facta, the
facts. “The world of civil society has certainly been made by
man; its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind. Whoever reflects on this
cannot but marvel that the philosophers should have bent all
their energies to the study of the world of nature, which,
since God made it, He alone knows; and that they should
have neglected the study of the world of nations or civil
world, which, since man had made it, men could hope to
know.”
Vico sets out to fulfill this hope. This is the scope of his
New Science. It is historical by definition. The historian looking at man-made worlds can understand their innermost core.
He will thus attain a more certain truth than the philosophers
ever could; he will discover “the common nature of nations”
or the “ideal eternal history” of nations established by divine
providence. The New Science will thus be “a rational civil
theology of divine providence.” “Since divine providence has
omnipotence as minister, it develops its orders by means as
easy as the natural customs of men.” This also means that this
science is a “history of human ideas” (not a philosophical
reflection on ideas). There are recurrent cycles in the history
of nations that always comprise three stages: the divine, the
heroic, and the human. The proper field of the historian is the
customs of men, their institutions, their laws, their writings,
their poetry. In understanding them he understands truth that
is certain—truthful certainty—precisely what the philosophers are unable to accomplish.
At first sight it seems as if history in Vico’s understanding
preserved its two-dimensionality, since the objects of his findings are the “universal and eternal orders established by providence.” But these orders do not exist outside of time. Divine
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providence is not the providential plan of salvation anymore.
Vico’s history is bent on finding the laws governing the
human world in contradistinction to the laws governing the
world of nature. Historical reality with its recurrent stretches
is one-dimensional. On the other hand, the historian alone is
now the true philosopher. The methods of interpretation and
of philology he has to use constitute a new organon comprising axioms, definitions and specific rules of inference. In
other words: Vico’s work competes with the work of Natural
History, with the work of Mathematical Physics.
We have here a rather amazing historical fact before us.
Let us remember. Towards the end of the sixteenth century a
reinterpretation and reconsideration of the traditional, “classical,” mathematical sciences lead to the establishment of
Algebra, a hitherto obscure and “vulgar” discipline neglected
by all recognized institutions of learning, as the eighth Liberal
Art. Its progress coincides with the development of a new
symbolic discipline, understood as Universal Mathematics, a
new and most powerful instrument of human knowledge
which is meant to replace the traditional Aristotelian
Organon. The science of nature becomes mathematical
physics, begins to dominate all human understanding and
gradually transforms the conditions of human life on this
earth. The only force opposing this development is History
with its claim to universality, first attributed to it by Vico and
maintained with increased vigor up to this moment. It is significant, I think, that Vico’s idea of an “ideal eternal history”
is a derivative of the idea of a Universal Mathematics, a shadow, as it were, that the latter casts. As Universal Mathematics
is to all specific mathematical disciplines so is the “ideal
eternal history” to all specific histories of nations. But this
parallelism between Universal Mathematics and Universal
History is to be understood in the light of the distinction
between that which is “abstractly true” and that which is
“concretely certain.” The new science of Mathematical
Physics leaves the natural experience of nature far behind: all
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that is concrete vanishes behind a screen of mathematical
symbols. Any teleology loses its meaning. The new science of
History tries to restore the dignity of the concrete, fills the
gap between the abstract symbolic understanding of nature
and the immediate human experience of the world around us.
It cannot dispense with the notions of means and ends. It is
the distinction between the true and the certain which underlies the familiar and superficial distinction between Science
and the Humanities. The latter are conceived as inseparable
from History, can only be approached in historical perspective, come actually to life only in the medium of History.
Since Vico, the idea of an eternal pattern of history, a vestige
of the original Christian understanding, although occasionally forcefully advanced, has been generally abandoned. The
emphasis is on the development of what has been called the
historical sense.
Three consequences follow.
First, the fascination with the “otherness” of the past: the
discovery or reconstruction of cultures and civilizations “different” from ours, each with a different “sense of values”
ascertainable in customs, institutions, works of art, architecture, literature, philosophy, religion. This very notion of an
autonomous “culture,” underlying the various manifestations
of human activity can arise only within an historical horizon.
Truth itself becomes a function of “culture,” the existence of
which appears a certain fact; “relativity of values” becomes
inevitably the concomitant of the historical perspective.
Secondly, the sense of participating in the relentless
historical flow makes observable trends the guide of our
actions. The acceptance of events and doctrines that are supposed to follow the “historical trend” is one of the most
potent causes for the predicament in which European nations
have found themselves in recent decades. The impact of
Marxism which goes under the name of historical materialism and the reaction to it derive their strength from the
historical sense projected into the future. The Gallup Poll is
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one of the most recent and most ridiculous examples of this
preoccupation with trends.
Thirdly, a man understands himself completely as an historical being. “Historicity” becomes his very nature, but not
in the sense that it reflects some timeless pattern. His Self disintegrates into a series of socially, and that means historically,
conditioned reflexes. Historicity does not mean Tradition. To
see ourselves as historical beings means to break the invisible
traditional ties in which we live. At best, tradition then
becomes a romantic notion, at worst, an academic phantom.
If we consider the disciplines taught in our schools, it is
easy to see that all natural sciences are patterned on the
model of mathematical physics. The idea of a universal mathematics as the new organon of all science, however, dies away.
On the other hand, all the disciplines within the realm of the
humanities have become historical to the very core. The study
of literature, philosophy, religion, music and the fine arts, for
example, is almost exclusively the study of the history of literature, the history of philosophy, the history of religions, the
history of music, the history of art. Fields of study of a more
practical applicability as, for example, languages, political
science and economics, retain a certain autonomy. The theoretical dignity they may have, however, is safeguarded only by
historical considerations or, for that matter, by methods
borrowed from mathematical physics.
It seems, then, that Mathematical Physics and History
divide between themselves, in a fairly exhaustive way, the rule
over the entire domain of human knowledge. Does this
permit us to consider them as the two necessary ways and
forms of our understanding? If this be so, Mathematical
Physics and History would come close to being the two
Liberal Arts of the modern age. Any liberal arts curriculum
ought then to concentrate on these two great bodies of learning in keeping with the trend of events and in preparing
students to follow it further.
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At this point, we can pause and reflect on the results we
have reached.
As to Mathematical Physics, the task before us is clearly
not the tracing of its historic development. We have rather to
understand the methods and the nature of the concepts that
have made this development possible. We have to understand
the specific use made of mathematical symbols, the relation of
a mathematical deduction to a verifying experiment, the relations between observations, hypothesis, theory and truth.
That is indeed what we are trying to do in our Mathematics
Tutorials and in the Laboratory. And if we do not do that fully
and in the most satisfactory manner, we have to improve our
ways. The danger we are running in this case is the very same
that has threatened the integrity of scientific understanding
since the seventeenth century and which has barely begun to
be warded off in recent developments: the danger to confuse
the symbolic means of our understanding with reality itself.
If we turn to History, we have first to remember the question which gave rise to the preceding historical account. The
question was: Is the historical way of looking at things a necessary form of our understanding? The answer—in the perspective of History—is in the negative: The universal historical approach is itself a product of, and presumably nothing
but a phase in, an historical development, which cannot claim
any absolute validity, no matter how “natural” and familiar it
seems to us at the present moment. We have to recognize,
moreover, the possibility of a dangerous confusion similar to
the one I just mentioned with regard to Mathematical
Physics. The results of historical investigations based on specific historical concepts and methods of interpretation ought
not to be confused with the real picture of a real past. Not to
see that, means to surround us with a pseudo-historical horizon of almost mythical quality so as to make us talk glibly of
“Greek culture,” “medieval times,” “Renaissance,” the
“Seventeenth Century,” the “Age of Enlightenment,” etc.
Such pseudo-mythical notions are usually in the minds of
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people who recommend that we take into account the proper “historical background” whenever we read and discuss a
book. The assumption behind this recommendation is a
rather naive one, to wit, that in the effort we make to understand a book or a series of books we could fall back on an
objective and certain datum, the general culture in which the
ideas expressed or propounded in those books are rooted and
from which they derive their strength and intelligibility. We
ought to see instead that the commonly accepted picture of
an historical period is largely due to an interpretation of the
content of books and other documents which presupposes in
the first place the ability to deal with grammatical patterns, to
discern rhetorical devices, to grasp ideas in all their implications. In point of fact, the main task of any historian is of
necessity the interpretation of whatever data he may collect.
The art of interpretation and all the other arts which minister to it depend on the understanding of the function of signs,
of the complexity of symbolic expressions, and of the
cogency of logical relations.
To understand a text is not a simple matter. To arouse and
to cultivate this understanding is one of the primary tasks of
our Language Tutorials. More than anything else, more, certainly, than the historical sense fed so often on sheer ignorance, an improvement of our interpretative skills could help
foster genuine historical research and writing. We may ultimately get to see that the problem of History is itself not an
historical problem.
It follows, then, that in pursuing these goals we should
ignore history’s claim to universality, ignore History itself, if
you please, in order to devote our full attention to the development of all the arts of understanding and all imaginative
devices man can call his own. It takes courage to pursue a
rather narrow and steep path hardly visible from the highways of contemporary learning. But let us remember the
inscription on the old seal of the College: No path is impassable to courage. The reward may be high.
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25
Prudence and Wisdom in
Aristotle’s Ethics
Eric Salem
In Book 1 of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle defines happiness or the human good as an “activity of the soul in accordance with virtue,” then adds immediately, “and if the virtues
are many, in accordance with the best and most complete” of
them (1098a 16-18).1 Aristotle spends the next five books filling in this “sketch” or “outline” of happiness. He distinguishes intellectual and ethical virtue (1103a4-18).2 He
defines ethical virtue and its centerpiece, choice (1105b291107a2; 1111b4-1113a14). And he discusses at great length
a total of thirteen virtues, eleven ethical, and two intellectual. But nowhere in these first six books does he tell us which
of these virtues is “best and most complete.”
Could it be courage, the first of the virtues taken up by
Aristotle? Does happiness consist in doing beautiful deeds on
the field of battle, in withstanding one’s fear of death and
tempering one’s eagerness for the fight (1115a4-b24)? Or is
it perhaps justice, the only virtue to which he devotes an
entire book of the Ethics? Does the human good show itself,
above all, in the setting right of wrongs and the distributing
of good things according to merit (1130b30-1131a1)? Again,
is wisdom, the last of the virtues defined by Aristotle, a likely
candidate? Can we be fully ourselves, fully achieve human
happiness, only in looking away from the shifting tangle of
human affairs and looking to the unchanging sources of all
things (1141a16-1141b2)? Or is the sought-for virtue perhaps that curious disposition tucked away at the end of Book
4 which inclines us to listen and speak to one another in a fitting way in our moments of leisure? Is happiness to be found
Eric Salem is a tutor on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College. This
essay is a revision of a paper originally prepared for delivery at the 1986
meeting of the Southwestern Political Science Association.
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in the witty play of intelligent conversation, in telling the
right joke at the right time to the right sort of people
(1127b28-1128a33)?
We are not told. We are not even told—or at any rate, not
told explicitly—how we might go about deciding the question, how, that is, we are to decide whether one virtue is better and more complete than another. And yet we are dealing
with a matter of the greatest practical import, and Aristotle
knows it. It is not just that our own good, our personal happiness, is at stake. From the outset Aristotle characterizes his
investigation of the human good as “a sort of political
inquiry” and he reminds us repeatedly, especially in the early
books of the Ethics, that the primary task of the statesman or
lawgiver is to make his citizens good, i.e., to educate them in
virtue by means of the laws (1094b10-11; 1102a7-10;
1103b2-6). But to set down laws with a view to happiness
would clearly require both that one know the order of the
virtues—and hence which one of them is best and most complete—and also that one know whether that highest virtue is
the sort of virtue that can be brought about by means of the
law.3
I think Aristotle has his reasons for almost leaving us in
the dark about these questions. Were he to dot every “i” and
cross every “t” in his argument, he would do us, his readers,
an injustice. We would not be disposed, or not as disposed, to
read his account of the virtues with discernment, to make that
argument our own by asking ourselves at every moment,
“Could this be the virtue that will bring me or my fellow citizens happiness?” Like Plato, the teacher and fellow lover of
wisdom to whom he refers with affection in Book 1, Aristotle
invites his readers to participate in, and not merely to
observe, his own inquiries. Aristotle the inquirer writes his
books for inquiring minds.
I said a moment ago that Aristotle almost leaves us in the
dark. I do not mean by this that he provides us with clear-cut,
final answers to the questions I’ve just raised at some later
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point in the Ethics, say, in Book 10. For I think—and I’ll say
more about this later—that what Aristotle says there about
happiness and the virtues is fraught with difficulties and full
of questions. I rather mean that in various passages throughout the Ethics Aristotle leaves hints which help us to think
through, if not to answer once and for all, the question,
“Which of the many virtues lies at the core of human happiness?” The famous discussion in Book 10 is certainly one such
passage. Another, and one of the most helpful, forms the conclusion of Aristotle’s inquiry into the virtues. In what follows
I want to focus on the latter passage, to see what progress one
can make by working through what Aristotle says and implies
at this critical juncture of his inquiry.4
*
Aristotle begins the final section of Book 6 by raising two
questions about the intellectual virtues. The first question
concerns the usefulness of prudence and wisdom; the second
treats the relation between them.5 Aristotle spins out the first
question roughly as follows. Men do not seem to become
happy through wisdom, for wisdom, as knowledge of the
eternal, knows nothing of becoming, “contemplates none of
those things through which a human being will be happy”
(1143b19-22). Nor are men better off for having knowledge
of the human good, i.e., prudence. For what prudence knows,
namely, “the just and beautiful and good things for man,” the
good man does (prattei) and does without needing to know
them (1143b22-28). What’s more, even if prudence were
knowledge, not only of the human good, but also of the
means whereby men become good, an already good man
would not need it. And a man who wished to become good
would not need to have it himself. After all, men do not
become doctors in order to become healthy—they simply
visit and obey them (1143b28-33). Or as Aristotle himself
had suggested as early as Book 2, men become virtuous, not
by reflecting on virtue, but by doing virtuous things, that is,
by doing the things prescribed by the law and the lawgiver
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(1103a31-1103b7; 1103b14-23; 1105b9-17). Why, then,
should a man who desires to become good or virtuous and
hence happy seek to acquire either wisdom or prudence?
Before we look at Aristotle’s answer, or rather answers, to
this question, we would do well to reflect for a time on the
particular understanding of both happiness and virtue that
gives rise to it. In the first place, Aristotle’s question seems to
rest on the assumption that the activity or being at work
(energeia) which constitutes happiness lies in deeds (en ergois), in performing good and beautiful works (erga): happy
men are men who act courageously, justly and so on. Because
happiness is this sort of activity (and not, say, the activity of
thinking), Aristotle can further assume that the virtues it
accords with are, in the first instance, the ethical virtues: if
happiness consists in doing courageous and just deeds, then it
makes sense to say that the virtues are courage and justice.
Some form of thinking might be an element of happiness, but
it could be only if it somehow made possible and were for the
sake of the doing of such deeds. Finally, Aristotle’s question
assumes that in fact the ethical virtues can both arise and
flourish within the human soul without the aid of thinking.
The sphere of ethical virtue and action is, as it were, a selfsufficient whole. Men acquire the ethical virtues, become
men of good character, by doing virtuous deeds, and once
they have acquired them, they need only exercise them, i.e.,
act in accordance with them, to be happy.
In sum, Aristotle’s question concerning the usefulness of
prudence and wisdom hints at a first answer to our initial
question; in fact, it presupposes an answer to it: the virtue we
are looking for is simply ethical virtue. For if happiness is a
matter of doing the right deeds, then ethical virtue, the stable
readiness to do such deeds, has to form at least part of that
virtue. But if ethical virtue is in itself sufficient to produce
those deeds, if ethical virtue can do without the help of reason, then it seems to possess the character of completeness
which Aristotle’s definition demands. Ethical virtue, by itself,
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seems to be the “best and most complete virtue,” best because
it issues in the highest human good, and most complete
because it accomplishes this without help from elsewhere.
Of course, someone might note at this point that we are
looking for one virtue and might raise the objection that ethical virtue is not a single virtue, but a name for eleven distinct
virtues. This objection seems to have been anticipated, however, by Aristotle’s own presentation of the ethical virtues,
where it is intimated, at least twice, that the ethical virtues
may be one in more than name (or even kind). First, in his
account of the magnanimous or great-souled man, whose perfect goodness and self-sufficiency he repeatedly emphasizes,
Aristotle calls magnanimity “all-complete” and describes it as
“a sort of kosmos of the virtues; for it makes them greater and
does not come to be without them” (1024a2-10).6 Here we
seem to be invited to imagine that the various ethical virtues
become fully themselves only as they occupy their proper
places within the spacious soul of the magnanimous man—to
imagine, that is, that ethical virtue becomes one complete
whole in the person of the magnanimous man. Again, several
times in the course of his account of justice in the broadest
sense, Aristotle identifies such justice with “complete” or
“whole” virtue (1129b26-27; 1130a14-16; 1130b6-8). The
notion here seems to be that the laws, at least the laws in the
best regime, enjoin men to be good in every sense of the
term—to be zealous in defense of the city, to be generous and
gentle and fair toward fellow citizens and so on—so that, in
principle, to be just, to be steadfast in one’s obedience to the
law, is to be virtuous simply (1129b11-26). Once more we
seem to be invited to regard the ethical virtues, not as a heap
of disparate dispositions, but as a unified whole, in this case a
whole that has its origin in law and its end in the good of the
political community.7
Someone might also wonder why, after spending a whole
book discussing the intellectual virtues, Aristotle would
choose to raise a question which so pointedly calls into ques-
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tion the goodness or usefulness of prudence and wisdom. The
first thing that must be said here is that Aristotle’s question,
and the assumptions upon which it rests, are in keeping with
much of what he says in the earlier books of the Ethics.
Activity and action, ethical virtue and virtue are treated as
near synonyms throughout the first five books. Only occasionally does Aristotle suggest that the life of action might
depend, ultimately, on the activity of reason, much less on a
virtue of reason; he never even broaches the possibility that
thinking might be choiceworthy for its own sake. Generally
speaking, the life of action and ethical virtue remain at center
stage in that discussion: reason and thought lurk in the wings,
barely visible at rare moments.8
Perhaps Aristotle wrote the first half of the Ethics in the
awareness that even the most serious of his readers would
tend to identify ethical virtue with virtue and happiness with
right action, and would have to be persuaded—and could be
persuaded only gradually—that excellence in reasoning must
play a central role in the good life. Or what may amount to
the same thing, Aristotle’s curious way of proceeding may
arise out of the determination, exhibited everywhere in his
works, to think his way to the truth of a matter by way of
everyday experience and common opinion—in this case the
common opinion that courage, moderation, liberality and the
like are the virtues and that happiness is a matter of eu prattein, acting or faring well.9
Whatever the reasons for Aristotle’s way of proceeding in
Books 1 through 5, the first question elaborated by him at the
end of Book 6 seems to sum up the general view of happiness
found in those books: ethical virtue, perhaps in the form of
magnanimity or justice, is the “best and most complete
virtue” whose issue is happiness. In Book 6 prudence and wisdom come in from the wings and occupy center stage for a
time, but the body of that book still leaves us wondering
whether those virtues are to be more than minor characters
in the drama of the Ethics.
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*
How, then, does Aristotle answer the question he has raised
about the usefulness of prudence and wisdom? His first
answer can be summarized as follows. Even if prudence and
wisdom produced nothing, each would be worthy of being
chosen for its own sake, for each of them is a virtue of the
part of the soul that thinks (1144a1-3). Moreover, wisdom
and prudence do produce something. Wisdom, in particular,
produces happiness, not in the way that medicine produces
health, but in the way that health itself produces healthiness
or healthy activity (1144a3-5). “For being part of whole
virtue, it makes a man happy through its possession and its
activity” (1144a5-6).
Perhaps the first thing we should notice here is the
use Aristotle makes of medicine and health. Earlier, in the
course of framing his question, he used that analogy to suggest that reason is of no use to the virtuous man: ethical
virtue was likened to health, and reason likened to the art of
medicine for which a healthy man has no need. Now reason,
especially in the form of wisdom, is itself likened to health,
and the art of medicine, for the moment at any rate, drops
out of the picture entirely. If wisdom does not replace ethical
virtue as the health of the soul, it is at least set on an equal
footing with it.
Two elements seem to be involved in this shift in analogy
or argument. The first is a certain deepening of our understanding of causality or responsibility. Aristotle’s question
assumed that wisdom and prudence could be regarded as useful or productive only if they brought forth virtue and virtuous activity in the manner of so-called efficient causes. But
wisdom, at any rate, cannot—and need not—be regarded as
a cause in this sense. Like the other virtues—and the vices as
well—wisdom is a hexis, an enduring condition, and, as such,
it both forms the soul and shapes the soul’s activity (1106a1012; 1139a15-17).10 But for just this reason it can be regarded as a cause, and in the measure that the part of the soul it
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conditions and the corresponding activity it shapes are central to our being human, wisdom can be regarded as responsible for human happiness. Wisdom, in other words, is, or
may be, a formal cause of human happiness.11
The second and, to my mind, more fundamental element
involved in the shift—without it the question about what sort
of cause wisdom might be could never arise—is Aristotle’s
abrupt setting aside, without the slightest comment, of the
assumption that happiness consists simply in right action.
That is, the ethical virtues could earlier be assumed to constitute the health of the soul, and wisdom could be dismissed in
a sentence as useless, only so long as happiness was assumed
to be a matter of acting well. And conversely, wisdom can
now be placed on an at least equal footing with the ethical
virtues only if the reigning assumption of Books 1 through 5
is no longer allowed to be the measure of the usefulness or
goodness of the virtues. Clearly, then, Aristotle’s first answer
is a radical one; it goes to the root of his question concerning
the usefulness of prudence and wisdom by denying the very
premise upon which that question rests, by denying, that is,
that happiness consists simply in right action.12
Indeed Aristotle’s answer might leave us wondering
whether happiness has anything at all to do with right action.
After all, he does not say that wisdom and the ethical virtues
together constitute the health of the soul and together produce happiness; he simply likens wisdom to health and says
that wisdom produces happiness. Aristotle does say that wisdom produces happiness in the measure that it is part of
“whole virtue,” and we might be inclined to think that by
“whole virtue” he means wisdom plus the ethical virtues plus
prudence, but he is in fact silent about the meaning of the
words “whole virtue.” Perhaps the ethical virtues have no
part in the whole of which wisdom is a part.
It may be useful at this point to spell out in some detail
the various possible consequences of Aristotle’s answer. In the
first place, if we accept Aristotle’s claims about wisdom, we
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can of course no longer regard ethical virtue, taken as a
whole, as the “best and most complete virtue,” and can no
longer assume that the activity of soul that is happiness is
exhausted in the performance of good and beautiful deeds.
Good works are not good enough. The activity that makes up
happiness must somehow include the being at work of thinking, and not just any thinking, but the knowing of objects
which are at once “most honorable” and “incapable of being
otherwise” (1139b18-22; 1141a18-20, b2-3). And the disposition of soul that makes this activity possible, namely, wisdom must form at least part of the “best and most complete
virtue.”
This is not to say that the ethical virtues cannot also be
part of the “best and most complete virtue.” It could be the
case that by “whole virtue” Aristotle means “the sum of the
virtues,” that wisdom, prudence and ethical virtue together
constitute the “best and most complete virtue.” If this were
true, the happy man would be the man whose soul’s parts
each possessed its proper virtue, and his happiness would
show itself in the beauty of his deeds, in his understanding of
human affairs, and in his knowing of the first and highest of
things. Again, if this were true, we might be compelled to
deepen and broaden our understanding of magnanimity, to
see it as the kosmos or constellation of all the virtues, including prudence and wisdom. And finally, if this were true, we
would surely be obliged to read the “if ” clause in “if the
virtues are many, in accordance with the best and most complete of them” as a genuine question: “if the virtues are
many” would have to mean “if the virtues are many and not
facets or parts of one whole virtue.”
On the other hand, it could well be the case that the ethical virtues are to be excluded from the notion of whole
virtue. Wisdom and prudence might be the two parts of
whole virtue. Or wisdom might be part of a whole whose
other parts are as yet unnamed. Finally, it seems at least possible that the words “whole virtue” are simply the first line of
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defense in Aristotle’s freeing of wisdom from the charge of
uselessness. By locating wisdom within the whole of virtue,
he suggests that wisdom deserves at least equal consideration
with the ethical virtues. But Aristotle’s final position might be
that wisdom, in isolation from the rest of the virtues, is the
sole cause of human happiness.
*
Aristotle’s second answer, to which I now want to turn, seems
to me to be a far less radical defense of reason than his first.
It answers the charge of uselessness, not by posing an alternative to the life of action based in ethical virtue, but by
showing that reason in the form of prudence is an integral
part of that life.
In effect, Aristotle shows here that the analogy drawn
from medicine and health does not adequately represent the
relation of prudence to ethical virtue. That analogy suggests
that the ethical virtues, and the actions commonly associated
with them, are in themselves independent of prudence, and
only incidentally in need of it. But in fact, Aristotle argues,
the ethical virtues cannot themselves produce the equivalent
of healthy activity, as health presumably can in the case of a
healthy body. The character of a man’s actions depends on
the quality of his thinking as well as the goodness of his character. We aim to do justice or to act generously, we are moved
to do what is just or what is generous, because we are just or
generous; the ethical virtues are responsible for the rightness
of desire and the rightness of our ends. But it is up to prudence to see all that bears on or contributes to those ends (ta
pros ta telê), and hence to discover just what the right things
are, right here and right now: we must think, and be able to
think well, if we are to see the particular shape that generosity or justice must take on in a particular situation. In short,
prudence and the ethical virtues are co-causes of those
motions or activities of the soul which make for happiness on
the level of deeds—assuming, that is, that such deeds have
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anything to do with happiness (1144a6-9, 20-22; 1145a26).13
But Aristotle’s answer goes further than this. Not only the
actions we associate with the ethical virtues, but also the ethical virtues themselves depend on the presence of prudence
within the soul. To be sure, Aristotle argues, there seem to be
certain natural bases for the ethical virtues. Certain men seem
to be by nature disposed to be just or moderate or courageous, and these “natural virtues” can exist in separation
from prudence (1144b4-9). But ethical virtue in the strict
sense cannot be or come into being without prudence
(1144b14-17). And the reverse is also true. Again, there
appears to be a natural power or faculty within the soul that
enables us to discover the means necessary to accomplish a
given end (1144a23-26). But this power of the soul, which
Aristotle calls shrewdness or cleverness, is open-ended; it can
be used for good or for ill (1144a26-27). Once developed
and perfected, it becomes prudence, but it cannot be developed and perfected unless the ethical virtues are there to
make the ends that we aim at the right ends (1144a271144b1). Ethical virtue and prudence, then, are not only cocauses of right action, but also co-causes of one another. They
form a two that does not admit of division: neither can be or
be at work without the other; neither of the parts of the soul
of which they are virtues can be fully itself in the absence of
the virtue of the other (1144b30-32).
The consequences of Aristotle’s second answer seem clear
enough. If by the words “best and most complete virtue”
Aristotle means to refer to only one of the many virtues he
has discussed, and if by “complete” he means, even if only in
part, “able to be and be at work without help from elsewhere,” then clearly neither prudence nor any of the ethical
virtues can even qualify for the position of “best and most
complete virtue.” This would leave wisdom as the only possible candidate. And the account of wisdom that Aristotle provides in the body of Book 6 suggests that wisdom does indeed
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possess the completeness which prudence and the ethical
virtues lack. For there wisdom is distinguished from knowledge precisely on the grounds that knowledge as knowledge
lacks insight into its starting-points, and is therefore incomplete, while in wisdom insight into starting points and knowledge of what follows from those starting points are inextricably linked (1139b25-35; 1140b31-35; 1141a17-20).14
And yet the very way in which Aristotle articulates the
relation between prudence and ethical virtue in his second
answer suggests that those virtues, taken together, possess
something like completeness. Although each by itself is
incomplete, prudence and ethical virtue together seem to
form a sort of self-sufficient whole, independent of wisdom
and, indeed, analogous in structure to wisdom, with ethical
virtue supplying prudence with the starting points from
which it deliberates, and prudence supplying ethical virtue
with that discernment and judgement of particulars upon
which any right action depends.
*
We seem to have reached an impasse. Although it has become
clear that the ethical virtues cannot themselves constitute the
“best and most complete virtue,” clear that reason in some
form must play a part in the good life, it still remains unclear
which form of reason is most likely to lead to happiness. Of
all the virtues, wisdom best fits Aristotle’s definition of happiness. Wisdom must not only form part of complete virtue,
as we gathered from Aristotle’s first answer; it may well be
that virtue. But it seems that prudence, in company with the
ethical virtues, could also lay claim to the title of complete
virtue. In fact, Aristotle goes out of his way here to single out
prudence, as if it, rather than magnanimity or perfect justice,
were the true unifying ground of the virtues related to action
(1144b32-1145a2). Should his bare assertion that wisdom
plays a major part in happiness be allowed to obscure what
can be said for prudence? Finally, we have not yet seen any
evidence to contradict the hypothesis, again drawn from
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37
Aristotle’s first answer, that by complete virtue Aristotle
means “whole virtue” and by whole virtue he means all the
virtues. Why should happiness not consist in the being at
work of all the parts of the soul, each in accordance with its
proper virtue?
As it turns out, the second of the two questions Aristotle
raises in the final section of Book 6 bears directly on the issue
before us, i.e., the relation between prudence and wisdom. If
that question and its answers do not provide us with final
solutions to the difficulties I have just articulated, I think they
may at least help us to understand them more clearly.
Aristotle asks: can prudence, whose work it is to rule and
give orders concerning each thing, also be said to rule and
give orders to wisdom (1143b33-36)? Like his first question,
Aristotle’s second question has two answers. And like those
earlier answers, these answers point us in different directions.
In this case, each answer hints at a different understanding of
the relation between prudence and wisdom.
Let me begin with Aristotle’s second answer. To say that
prudence rules wisdom, Aristotle claims, would be like saying
that politics rules the gods because it gives orders concerning
all things in the city (1145a10-12). Just as the gods dwell outside the city, out of the reach of politics, so too, we infer, wisdom lies outside—indeed, above—the domain in which prudence properly exercises its authority.
Aristotle’s answer seems at first glance to be a straightforward denial of the power and right of prudence to rule wisdom. But the very brevity of his answer—and if brevity is the
soul of wit, it should probably count as the wittiest response
ever made to a fundamental question—seems to invite further
reflection. We might wonder, for instance, whether politics
can and must give orders concerning all things in the city precisely because the gods take no interest and no part in the life
of the city. And we might wonder, too, whether political life
takes on a kind of wholeness and self-sufficiency precisely
because the gods leave men to their own devices. In short, we
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might wonder whether the supremacy and self-sufficiency of
the gods not only limits the extent of political authority, but
also constitutes that authority and the very domain in which
it is exercised: perhaps politics and the city are only in the
wake of divine withdrawal. But what may hold for the city
and its gods may hold for prudence and wisdom as well.
Perhaps the particular character that wisdom takes on over
the course of Book 6—its self-sufficient contemplation of the
unchanging sources of all things, its consequent separation
from human affairs and human doings—requires Aristotle to
grant the life of action a certain wholeness and requires
Aristotle to find a central place for prudence within it
(1141b2-8). The two apparently contradictory views articulated a moment ago, the view that wisdom alone possesses
completeness and the view that prudence in company with
the ethical virtues possesses a sort of completeness, may not
be incompatible after all: the second view may follow from
the first. The assumption about happiness which characterizes
such a large part of the Ethics, the assumption that human
happiness lies in acting well, may be the result, curiously
enough, of Aristotle’s gradually unfolded claim that wisdom
and true happiness exist in utter separation from ordinary
life.
Of course, to return to Aristotle’s image, it does not quite
seem true to say that politics and political life exist in complete separation from the gods. Surely one of the tasks of politics, one part of its educative work, is to teach citizens to
honor the gods.15 If so, might prudence not have an analogous task: to make the superiority of wisdom visible on occasion, to remind the ethical virtues, or those who possess
them, that wisdom is after all the most honorable of activities? Granted that for the most part prudence must keep its
ear to the ground, its nose to the grindstone and its eye on the
particular; granted that in general it must take its bearings by
what the ethical virtues disclose as the human good; still, it
seems difficult to believe that prudence would not in some
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form and on some occasions look beyond and point beyond
the horizon established by the ethical virtues.16
Indeed, isn’t this just what we find Aristotle himself doing
in Book 10? There he makes his most explicit claim for the
absolute superiority and self-sufficiency of wisdom, and he
does so in the strongest language imaginable (1177a18-b4;
1177b17-27; 1178b22-24). In light of that claim, the claims
of prudence and the ethical virtues pale: in Book 10 Aristotle
insists that the life based on prudence can be called happy
only in a secondary way, that the wise man will take up that
life, a merely human life, only with a certain reluctance
(1178a9-23; 1178b3-8). And yet, almost in the same breath
Aristotle begins to speak of educating men in what seems to
be ethical virtue, and begins to introduce his study of politics
as if nothing had happened (1179a30-b4; 1179b23-28). One
minute he is telling his readers not to settle for the human-alltoo-human but “to be immortal” instead, the next he is
exhorting them to attend to families and friends and to
engage in his “philosophy concerning human” i.e., mortal,
affairs (1177b32-35; 1180a29-33; 1181b12-16). He gives his
readers a glimpse of the highest life, shows them enough of it
to make them honor its claims, but then leaves them and their
lives more or less intact.
*
Aristotle’s first answer to his question concerning the relation
of prudence to wisdom tells a somewhat different story, and
leads to a somewhat different way of reading the drama of
the Ethics. Once again, the superiority of wisdom to prudence is emphasized: Aristotle calls wisdom the virtue of the
“better” part of the soul. And once again, Aristotle insists that
prudence does not give orders to wisdom. Likening prudence
to the medical art and wisdom to health, he says that prudence does not “use” wisdom, but sees to it that it comes into
being: prudence gives orders for the sake of wisdom, not to
wisdom (1145a7-10).
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Still, Aristotle’s very use of this medical analogy—yet
again—points to a different way of understanding the relation between prudence and wisdom than we find in his other
answer. Much earlier, in his initial question, Aristotle had
used the analogy to suggest that the ethical virtues are sufficient unto themselves: prudence might be needed to bring
those virtues into being, but those virtues, once in place within the human soul, can do without the help of prudence.
Now, having rejected this analogy in the case of the ethical
virtues, Aristotle resurrects it in the case of wisdom. He thus
suggests that wisdom in fact enjoys the self-sufficiency earlier
attributed to the ethical virtues. But he also suggests, as he
had not in his other answer, that wisdom in some sense
depends on prudence. Indeed his use of the words “sees to it
that it comes into being” seems intended to underscore this
dependence.17 Wisdom is not a god after all; it may possess a
divine self-sufficiency once it has come into being, but it must
come into being and prudence is somehow responsible for
bringing it forth.
What follows from Aristotle’s suggestion that wisdom is
not quite self-sufficient? If wisdom depends, for its very
being, on the activity of prudence, it cannot be regarded as
the sole cause, among the virtues, of human happiness. If by
the “best and most complete virtue,” we mean all those
human excellences through which happiness comes into
being, then that virtue would have to include prudence as
well as wisdom. But if prudence, in turn, depends on the ethical virtues, would it not follow that happiness depends on
the presence within a soul of all the virtues—at least in the
measure that wisdom is not fully present and at work within
that soul? Does Aristotle, then, intend us to identify complete
virtue with the sum of the virtues? Are we to understand,
after all, that happiness somehow consists in the being at
work of all the virtues, including the ethical virtues?18
Perhaps. But Aristotle’s words “prudence gives orders for
the sake of wisdom” oblige us, I think, to reconsider the rela-
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tion of prudence to the ethical virtues. According to
Aristotle’s earlier argument, prudence depends on the ethical
virtues because the ethical virtues, in directing desire aright,
illuminate or disclose the ends by which prudence takes its
bearings. But if the proper ends for the sake of which prudence makes its deliberations are not, or are not primarily,
courageous, moderate or just actions, if the proper end of
prudence is wisdom or the activity of wisdom, the ethical
virtues would seem to fall short in their work of forming right
desire. What seems to be needed instead is a new hexis, a new
ordering of the soul, that corresponds to the desire for and
delight in wisdom above all things. In short, what seems to be
needed is an inner condition or virtue we might call philosophia, love of wisdom.19
This is not to say that in the new order of things ethical
virtue would be rendered useless. What seems to be required
instead is a sort of transformation of the ethical virtues, a reformation of them that would leave wisdom at the core of
right desire. The man who underwent such a reformation
might, to all appearances, be scarcely distinguishable from the
man for whom right action was everything. The ethical life
would not have to be a matter of reluctance to him, as it
seems to be to the wise man alluded to in Aristotle’s other
answer. But his would be a greatness of soul, a “kosmos of the
virtues,” big enough to house a longing to take in the very
sources of all things; an ever-present appetite for wisdom,
which would somehow shape his every deliberation, would
distinguish him from the man who honors wisdom without
pursuing it. In short, the complete or whole virtue of such a
man, in whom prudence gives orders for the sake of wisdom,
would include the ethical virtues without being defined by
them.
Now nowhere in the Ethics does Aristotle explicitly discuss the constellation of virtues I have just described. He
does, however, point to it from time to time. For instance, I
think it is difficult to read Aristotle’s account of the curious
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disposition mentioned at the beginning of this essay without
being reminded of the philosophical life, especially when it is
read in conjunction with the discussion of its two companion
virtues, also unnamed: “friendliness” (displayed toward those
with whom one is not fully friends) and “truthfulness” or
“love of truth” (in which Socrates and Socratic irony or selfdepreciation loom large) (1126b19-31; 1127a33-1127b9;
1127b22-32). Indeed, by placing his account of the readiness
to engage in playful, leisurely, tactful conversation in the
midst of his account of the ethical virtues, Aristotle suggests
that philosophy can occur in the midst of the ethical life.20
But perhaps the clearest of Aristotle’s allusions to this conjunction of the virtues is to be found in his account of friendship, which by its position provides a delicate contrast to the
account of the apparent disjunction between wisdom and the
other virtues in Book 10.21
There, when at the end of Book 9 he returns to the theme
of complete friendship or the friendship between good men,
Aristotle makes it clear that the virtue or goodness of such
men lies in thought and action. In the course of a single chapter he at once describes the unalloyed delight which good
men take in contemplating one another’s deeds, and yet
insists that their living together comes to completion in philosophic conversation, in their “sharing of words and thought
in common” (1169b30-1170a4; 1170b10-12). Aristotle even
suggests that something like the completeness or self-sufficiency that belongs to wisdom characterizes the life of reflection and action enjoyed by good men who are friends. Using
language which seems intended to remind us of his account
of the divine life in Book 12 of the Metaphysics—the life in
which wisdom at work presumably shares—Aristotle
describes the “living together” of good friends as a sort of
“thinking of thinking” (Meta. 1074b15-35). Since friends are
other selves, friends see themselves “at work” in seeing their
friends “at work,” and this seeing or “theorizing,” being itself
a form of being at work, brings completeness and joy to their
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common life (1169b30-1170b19). While men who are lovers
of wisdom rather than wise may not themselves possess the
divine self-sufficiency which comes with wisdom, their lives
acquire a kind of wholeness and divinity in the presence of
their friends.22
*
Why does Aristotle leave us with these two, rather different
accounts of happiness? Some time ago I suggested that
Aristotle, exercising his own prudence, makes the superiority
of wisdom visible in order to instill in his readers a kind of
distant respect for wisdom, but then leaves them and their
lives more or less intact. I think that this suggestion, while
true, has its limits. Some of his readers might retain their
focus on the life of action; they might come away from the
Ethics with a deepened understanding of the foundations of
the ethical life along with a well-founded, if distant, admiration for wisdom and its pursuit. But for others, for those most
engaged by Aristotle’s inquiry into the highest good and most
eager to make his inquiry their own, the experience of reading the Ethics, especially Books 6 and 10, would surely be different. They would see, with Aristotle, the insufficiency of the
everyday, customary understanding of virtue and happiness,
would see that the life of action must in truth be suffused and
completed by deliberative thought. But they would also see,
with Aristotle, the ultimate insufficiency of thought aimed at
action, would see that thought as thought reaches completion
only in the thinking for it own sake of what is simply thinkable. They would thus see, with Aristotle, that there is a space
in the human soul—the soul of the animal defined by thinking—that only wisdom can fill, would see that being complete
as a human being ultimately means passing beyond what is
human. For such readers a simple separation of spheres—“my
life of action here, the sphere of being wise somewhere over
and up there”—is simply not a possibility. For to have taken
in the thought that wisdom is the highest good, to have made
it truly one’s own, is already to have undergone the re-orien-
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tation of prudence described above; it is to have become
philo-sophic. And to have arrived at the thought that wisdom
is the highest good, to have taken a genuine part in Aristotle’s
philosophic deliberations, is to be already on the way to wisdom; it is to have made a beginning in the being at work of
philosophizing.23 To leave such readers with only a distant
vision of the superiority of wisdom would not be enough.
Aristotle must provide some sense of the sort of life to be
lived on the way to wisdom, if only to show how the pursuit
of wisdom might “fit” within ordinary life. Prudence and the
wish to see respect for wisdom flourish among those dedicated to a life of thoughtful action may require Aristotle to voice
the claims of wisdom, but prudence and a kind of friendship
with certain of his readers equally oblige him to show them,
in word and in deed, what a life of loving wisdom might look
like.
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4
1 All references to the Nicomachean Ethics are to Bywater’s edition,
the Oxford University Press (London, 1894). Citations and references are generally given in Bekker numbers. Translations are my
own.
Because the following investigation begins with the middle of
Aristotle’s own inquiry, it will have to take for granted any number
of claims, above all, the claim that happiness is an activity (rather
than, say, an occasional feeling) and the claim that it has everything
to do with virtue or excellence (rather than, say, pleasure). Aristotle
himself argues for both claims in Book 1, most explicitly in the
chapters (7 and 8) that treat his definition directly. A brief reflection
on the words he uses to define happiness may help make more
apparent what is at stake there. The word I have translated as
“activity” or “being at work,” energeia, is one of two words used by
Aristotle for the core meaning of a thing’s being; the near synonym
for it is entelecheia, which means something like remaining fully at
one’s end or being fully complete (Metaphysics 9, 1048a32-b9;
1050a3-24). Kata, “in accordance with,” clearly has its strong
causal meaning here; it means “through” or “because of ” rather
than simply “in alignment with” (Meta. 5, 1022a14-23). Finally,
“virtue,” aretê, related to the verb arariskô, “to join” or “fit together,” means “fitness,” the inner condition that allows for something
to be and work as well as possible (Ethics, 1106a15-21). To say that
happiness is an energeia, then, is to say that it is that activity in
which what we are as human beings, i.e., our human form, becomes
fully present. And to search for the virtue it accords with is to
search for the inner condition through which that complete presence arises, i.e., through which we are fully human or, as we like to
say, “are all there” (Meta. 9, 1050a34-b2).
2
5
Notes
Roughly speaking, the ethical virtues are the human excellences
that define character (êthos); they thus shape our responses to the
world, i.e., our feelings or passions (pathê), and our actions (praxeis) within it. The intellectual virtues have to do with the activities
most central to the “part” of us that thinks, that “has reason (logon
echei)” in almost every sense of those terms.
3
Aristotle’s inquiry is clearly meant, in the first instance, for men
who are serious about the pursuit of happiness both for themselves
and their cities (1095a8-11; 1102a12-26). His book is thus
addressed to hoi charientes kai praktikoi, “men of a certain cultivation or grace who are also able to act”—and this means, to men
who, if asked, would identify happiness with honor but who, if
pushed, would identify it with virtue (1095b22-30).
“Prudence” and “wisdom” are traditional translations of phronêsis and sophia. Neither is entirely adequate to the task. Sophia has
overtones of skill and precision in the arts entirely missing from the
ordinary sense of “wisdom,” while its connection to craftiness in
speech (as in “sophistry”) turns up only in degraded forms like
“wise guy” and “wisecrack.” Prudence, on the other hand, can
suggest a caution that has no correlate in phronêsis: Aristotle’s
phronimos is no fool; still, there might well be occasions and circumstances in which phronêsis would demand that a man throw
caution to the winds and hurl himself once more into the breach.
6
Kosmos has been variously translated as “ornament” (Apostle),
“crowning ornament” (Rackham) and “crown” (Ross). Though
magnanimity may be a crown, it is surely much more than an ornament. How it might serve as something like a unifying ground for
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the virtues begins to become clear as we recollect that hoi charientes
kai praktikoi are lovers of honor to begin with, that being chosen
for their own sake rather than the sake of honor is the hallmark of
virtuous actions and that magnanimity is the virtue concerned with
one’s response to another’s conferral—or failure to confer—honor
on one’s virtue (1105a26-1105b5; 1124a4-12). More generally,
magnanimity has to do with the way the good man keeps a grip on
himself and his virtue in the face of good and bad fortune
(1124a112-16). Hence its first appearance (in Book 1), where it is
said that, “the beautiful shines through whenever someone bears
many and great misfortunes with good grace, not through want of
sensibility, but because he is well-bred and great-souled” (1100b3033).
7
I have focused here on what magnanimity and whole justice share
in common. But there are also significant differences between them,
differences that point to significant difficulties with each of them.
The emphasis in the account of magnanimity is on self-sufficiency
and near stillness: the magnanimous man is said to be “lazy” or
“workless” (argos=a-ergos) in the absence of a project worthy of his
virtue and “to be unable to live for (pros) another (except for a
friend)” (1124b23-26; 1124b31-1125a1). In the description of
complete justice, by contrast, the whole emphasis is on the activity
or “using” of virtue for (pros) others; the perfect citizen is apparently completely absorbed in promoting the happiness of his city
and fellow citizens. The self-sufficiency and activity that together
characterize happiness seem to fall asunder in these first attempts to
characterize complete virtue (1097b14-21).
8
To be sure, Aristotle defines choice in Book 3 and defining it
involves him in a discussion of deliberation; he also mentions the
intellectual virtues at points and notes once that there will have to
be a discussion of “right reason” later on (1111b4-1113a14;
1103b31-34). Still, the whole emphasis is on the importance of
doing, of acquiring a good and stable character by acting in a certain way; “mere” knowing looks like a refuge for the lazy and weak,
and Aristotle no sooner gives himself opportunities to talk about
the virtues of intellect than he squanders them (1103b20-31;
1105b9-18; 1098a7-17; 1098b23-26).
9 For enunciations of the “hermeneutical” principle at work here,
see 1095a30-b4 and the beginning of the Physics, 184a16-184b14.
SALEM
47
For the centrality of the principle to the whole dialectical enterprise, see the beginning of the Topics, 100a30-b23 and 101a35-b4.
The grounds for the principle are perhaps best stated best at
Metaphysics 2, 993a30-b11. John Burnet provides a useful summary of the business and character of Aristotelian dialectic and its relation to ethical inquiry in the introduction to his excellent edition
and commentary on the Ethics. See The Ethics of Aristotle (London:
Methuen, 1900), pp. xxxiv-xliv.
10
For an illuminating discussion of the meaning of hexis and its
place within the ethical life, see J. Sachs, “Three Little Words,”
St. John’s Review 54, no.1 (1997), 1-9. Mr. Sachs underscores the
distinction between hexis and mere habit as well as the activity
implicit in hexis. Both points are well worth making. It is no accident that hexis is an action word derived from the future form of
echein, which means “have” “hold” or (used intransitively) “be in a
certain condition.” A hexis is no mere effect of an activity, as, say,
poverty is an effect of thinking; nor is it a mere condition for activity as, say, eating is a condition for thinking. It is instead a particular readiness for a particular activity; it is a being-in-shape-for, an
intending-to, a being-about-to that requires nothing but opportunity to spring into action; it is, one might say, that activity “on hold.”
11
For the senses in which wisdom and the other virtues can be
regarded as formal causes, see Burnet, op. cit., pp. 144 and 283.
12 Has anything in the intervening discussion in Book 6 prepared us
for this change in perspective? I think so. Although the bulk of
Book 6 remains focused on thought as it bears on human action, at
the beginning of the book and again in the discussion of knowledge
in the strict sense (epistêmê) we are reminded that not everything
we think about has to be marked by the changeability of human
affairs: there are some objects of thought which exist of necessity
and we have the “parts” to know them (1139a6-11; 1139b22-23).
Then, in the discussion of wisdom (sophia), we are reminded, or
told, that man is by no means the best thing in the cosmos—and
that it is precisely the “action” of sophia which puts us in contact
with the best of those unchanging things (1141a20-22, a33-b2).
13
Once Aristotle reminds us here of the part that reasoning plays
in the life of action, his question about the usefulness of the intellectual virtues may begin to seem merely odd, at least as regards
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prudence. But I think we should beware of dismissing that question
too quickly. In the first place, there seem to be any number of
moments in life when the most honest answer we can give for why
we did something is, “It just felt right” or “I had the sense there was
nothing else I could do.” In fact Aristotle himself notes in his discussion of courage that we really see whether the virtue is truly
there precisely in moments of sudden danger, when deliberation
simply is not a possibility (1117a17-22). Moreover, it seems possible to argue that the perspective of Aristotle’s initial question is simply the perspective of the law. We have already taken note of those
places where it is said that the intention of the law is to make men
good, i.e., to be a sufficient condition for (ethical) virtue in men.
But Aristotle also notes that it is the very nature of law to overlook
the particulars with which prudence works: from the point of view
of law, prudence, which frees a man to become “a sort of law unto
himself,” seems to be at best unnecessary (1128a29-33). Hence the
need for “equity,” which ad-justs for the universality of law by looking, if you will, from the particular situation, through the law to the
intention of the lawgiver (1137b11-34).
14
For example, the mathematician as mathematician uses his definitions and postulates rather than reflecting on them; he takes his
slice of being, his “field,” for granted and sets to work learning as
much as he can about it. The man engaged in first philosophy, the
man in pursuit of wisdom in the strict sense, accepts no such limit
on his thinking; even the so-called principle of non-contradiction—
the mathematician’s favorite tool—becomes for him an occasion for
reflecting on the being of beings. See Metaphysics 1003a20-28;
1005a19-b8.
15
For Aristotle’s comments on the place and necessity of “care concerning the gods” in the city, see the Politics 1322b18-29, 1328b1113; 1329a27-34.
16 At 1141b22-30 Aristotle distinguishes two aspects or modes or
kinds of prudence, an “architectonic” form that closely resembles
lawgiving and a form that corresponds to politics in the ordinary
sense, i.e., the hands-on deliberative engagement with the particulars of political life.
17
Aristotle’s words here directly echo the language he had used earlier in Book 6 to characterize art (technê): “art” or “the activity of
SALEM
49
art” (depending on what text one chooses to follow) “sees to it
(theôrein hopôs) that there comes into being some one of the things
that admit of being and not being . . . ” (1140a10-14).
18
I am assuming here that what Aristotle is referring to in the first
instance is the relation of prudence to wisdom within a single soul,
that the wisdom that prudence is working to bring forth is in the
first instance wisdom for oneself: the prudent man is like the doctor who tries to heal himself. To be sure, prudence in this sense
might also direct itself toward bringing about wisdom and the pursuit of wisdom in others; one need look no further than the Ethics
for evidence of this. Yet I think—and this should become clearer
momentarily—that prudence can direct itself outward in this way
only if it has already undergone an inner realignment, into a prudence that sees wisdom as the chief good. Only a man who had
come to see wisdom in this way, and so wanted it for himself, would
want to see others have it as well.
19
For the appropriateness of the name, consider Aristotle’s discussion of philo-words at 1099a7-21 (especially the philo-theôros, the
man who loves to behold) and the passage from the Republic it
clearly echoes, where Socrates “defines” the philosopher as a “lover
of the sight (philo-theamon) of the truth” (475b8-e4).
20 It is here that Aristotle first introduces the thought that a man
might be responsive to the demands of law or custom while remaining independent of it: “So the graceful (or gracious) and free (or
generous) man will keep himself in this condition, being a sort of
law unto himself ” (1128a31-32).
21
That friendship in some form may be a candidate for “best and
most complete virtue” is suggested by the following considerations.
Aristotle opens his account of friendship with the claim that friendship is “a virtue or involved with virtue . . . ” (1155a3-4). We later
learn that genuine friendship (philia) involves more than mere liking (philêsis); it is a hexis and involves choice, i.e., it shares certain
important structural features with ethical virtue (1157b28-31). We
also learn that justice, which at least in its broadest sense was earlier identified with whole or complete virtue, is in important respects
superseded by friendship (1155a22-28; 1163b15-18). Finally,
Aristotle’s name for friendship at its peak, “complete friendship,”
points directly back to the language of “best and most complete
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virtue,” and the friendship in question is between men who are
simply good or virtuous without qualification (1156b7-35). The
connection between friendship and philosophy begins to become
apparent in chapter four of Book 9, the beginning of the sequence
that leads to the passage discussed below. Here, for the first time in
the Ethics, man is openly identified with the intellect or thinking
part of himself, and the good man is characterized by his abiding
love and cultivation of his self in this sense (1166a13-23).
22
Cf. Amelie Rorty, “The Place of Contemplation in Aristotle’s
NE,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty
(Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1980) esp. pp. 388-391.
23
In the Ethics itself we are witness to a peculiar coming together
of theôria and praxis; “philosophic deliberations” is meant to get at
this conjunction. From one point of view Aristotle’s inquiry is simply a sustained practical deliberation about what to do with our
lives; from another it is a sustained philosophic exploration of a
what-is question—“What is the human good?”—in which any number of basic features of human being come to light. In it we see the
thinking of what is turn practical as it turns its gaze on itself—the
being capable of thought—and the conditions for its own activity.
But more to the point, we see practical thought turn theoretical as
it turns from deliberation about the particular conditions for this or
that virtuous act to deliberation about the virtues themselves, i.e.,
the conditions for happiness itself. Once we take into account this
doubleness in Aristotle’s own inquiry we must begin to wonder seriously just how settled the distinction is between prudence and wisdom—or at any rate, between prudential and philosophic inquiry
(1112b20-24; 1142a31-b2).
51
Jacob Klein and the
Phenomenological Project of
Desedimenting the
Formalization of Meaning
Burt C. Hopkins
Scope and Limits of Husserl’s Reactivation of the Sedimented
Origins of the Modern Spirit
For Edmund Husserl, phenomenology as First Philosophy has
but one goal: intuitive knowledge of what is. On his view,
both what in the world the formalized meaning formations of
mathematical physics (e.g., f = ma) refer to and therefore
make intuitable, and how in the world this reference and corresponding intuition is possible, is obscure. He traces this
obscurity to the fact that the formalized meaning at issue in
modern mathematics is made possible by the progressive
“emptying of its meaning in relation” (Crisis, 44/44)1 to the
“real [real]” (35/37), that is, to the intuitive givenness of the
things manifest to everyday sense experience in the surrounding world. Husserl’s historical reflection on the beginnings of the development of modern, Galilean science,
reveals that it is first made possible by this progressive emptying of meaning. That is, the meaning formations of the
mathematics that make physics possible are themselves made
possible by their “becoming liberated from all intuited actuality, about numbers, numerical relations” (43/44), and, of
course, from the intuitively given shapes of actual things.
More precisely, the ideal shapes of Euclidean geometry are
Burt Hopkins is Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University. He is CoEditor of The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological
Philosophy and is currently writing a book whose working title is Edmund
Husserl and Jacob Klein on the Origination of the Logic of Symbolic
Mathematics.
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substituted for the intuited shapes of things, while algebraic
calculation with “‘symbolic’ concepts” (48/48) that express
numbers in general—as opposed to determined numbers—
excludes the “original thinking that genuinely gives meaning
to this technical process and truth to the correct results”
(46/46).
To be sure, Husserl’s investigations of this problem in the
Crisis-texts are fragmentary. Their focus is on the origin of
geometry and on what he refers to as the “sedimentation”
(52/52) involved in the Galilean impulse to treat Euclidean
geometry in a taken-for-granted, and therefore straightforward, manner. Husserl uses the term “sedimentation” to designate the “constant presuppositions . . . [of the] constructions, concepts, presuppositions, theories” that characterize
the significations of the meaning formations of a science—in
the case at hand, of Galilean natural science—insofar as they
are not “‘cashed in’ [einzulösenden],”2 (OG, 376/366), that is,
reactivated in terms of the original activities that produced
their meaning. Cashing in the meaning formations in question requires that we eventually reactivate the “historical
beginning” (367/356) that this science “must have had,”
which in the case of Galilean natural science means that we
eventually have to reactivate the origin of the Euclidean
geometry that was taken for granted when its meaning formations were first established.
Husserl’s fragmentary analyses of the “origin of the modern spirit” (Crisis, 58/57), in which he links to Galileo’s name
“all of our characterizations . . . in a certain sense simplifying
and idealizing the matter,” function therefore to “de-sediment” the meaning formations and thereby to reactivate their
historical beginnings. Specifically, Husserl’s de-sedimentation
cashes in the impulse of the Galilean spirit to mathematize
the world by tracing this accomplishment back to its origin in
“the sphere of immediately experiencing intuitions and the
possible experience of the prescientific life-world” (42/43).
Husserl encounters the obscure or unintelligible meaning for-
HOPKINS
53
mations of present-day mathematical natural science, and
moves backward to an historical reference that mediates his
access to the life-world. Thus it is not as if Husserl, sitting in
his study, is somehow able to conjure up the direct experience
of the prescientific life-world and to compare it with the
abstract view of the world presumably found in the meaning
formations that make up mathematical physics. Rather, his
experience of mathematical physics, when combined with his
expectation that its meaning formations must somehow be
ultimately founded in a reference (or, more precisely, an
intention) to the world that is capable being intuitively fulfilled at some level, leads to his discovery (or, more properly,
his re-discovery) of the prescientific life-world and its true
origins.
Rather than rehearse Husserl’s well-known analyses,
what is necessary here is to thematize their salient results and
highlight their fragmentary character. Husserl shows that the
Galilean impulse rests on both a direct mathematization of
the appearances of bodies and an indirect mathematization of
their sensuous modes of givenness as they show up in the
intuitively given surrounding-world. That is to say, Husserl’s
attempt to cash in the ideal meaning formations of the pure
shapes of Euclidean geometry, which Galileo took for granted as the “true” shapes of nature, reveals that our direct experience of nature never yields geometrical-ideal bodies but
“precisely the bodies that we actually experience” (22/25).
Directing our regard to the mere shapes of these bodies in an
abstractive way cannot yield what modern science understands as “geometrical ideal possibilities,” nor can their arbitrary transformation in fantasy. Even though the latter yields
“‘ideal’ possibilities” in a certain sense, these possibilities
remain tied to sensible shapes and thus can only manifest
their transformation into other sensible shapes.
The method of operating with the pure or ideal shapes
that characterizes Euclidean geometry thus does not point
directly back to the sensible shapes of the bodies we actually
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experience in the life-world, but rather to measuring, “the
methodology of determination by surveying and measuring in
general, practiced first primitively and then as an art in the
prescientific, intuitively given surrounding-world” (24/27). It
is therefore the praxis of perfecting such measuring, “of
freely pressing toward the horizon of conceivable perfecting
‘again and again’,” (23/26) which yields “limit shapes
[Grenzgestalten] as invariant and never attainable poles”
toward which the series of perfecting tends. Euclidean geometry is then born when “we are interested in these ideal
shapes and are consistently engaged in determining them and
in constructing new ones out of those already determined.”
This is the geometry that was pregiven to Galileo as a takenfor-granted tradition. The original activity in which the ideal
meaning formations of Euclidean geometry were accomplished remained concealed to Galileo. Thus when Galileo
mathematized the intuitive shapes of bodies directly and their
sensuous manners of appearing indirectly by substituting for
them the ‘anticipation’ of their true being in the ideal shapes
of Euclidean geometry, the original intuition of the sensible
shapes of bodies, along with their transformation into limit
shapes by the praxis of measuring, became “sedimented.”
That is to say, as a consequence of Galileo’s methodical construction of the “true nature” through the substitution of the
ideal shapes of Euclidean geometry for the experience of sensible shapes proper to bodies, the original intuition of sensible shapes was lost. Hence, Husserl’s famous characterization
of Galileo as “at once a discovering and a concealing genius”
(53/52).
Husserl’s analyses of the Galilean mathematization takes
cognizance of the fact that “one thing more is important for
our clarification.” This “one thing more” is the “‘arithmetization of geometry’” (44/44). Aided by “the algebraic terms and
ways of thinking that have been widespread in the modern
period since Vieta,” this arithmetization transforms the ideal
shapes of Galileo’s Euclidean approach to the world into
HOPKINS
55
algebraic structures whose symbolic formula-meaning displaces—“unnoticed” (44/45)—the signification of magnitudes. The geometrical shapes of Galilean science are covered
over when replaced by algebraic notations. Husserl considers
this the “decisive accomplishment” (42/43) of the natural scientific method. In accord with its “complete meaning”
(Gesamtsinn), this accomplishment makes possible the anticipation of systematically ordered, determinate predictions
about the practical life-world. Such predictions are made possible by hypothesizing underlying ideal mathematical structures expressed in general formulas with indeterminate values. By means of these, empirically verifiable regularities can
anticipate the intuitions that constitute immediate, prescientific experience. Consequently, “[t]his arithmetization of
geometry leads almost automatically, in a certain way, to the
emptying of its meaning” (44/44). Husserl points out that this
unnoticed emptying of meaning eventually “becomes a fully
conscious methodical displacement, a methodical transition
from geometry, for instance, to pure analyses, treated as a science in its own right” (44/45). Thus this process of methodical transformation leads beyond arithmetization to “a completely universal ‘formalization’.” A purely formal analysis
transcends the pure theory of numbers and magnitudes of
algebra: analysis assumes the guise of a mathesis universalis, a
universal mathematics of “manifolds.” Manifolds are thought
of in “empty, formal generality”; they are conceived of as
defined by determinate modalities of the “something-in-general.” And although Husserl does not explicitly mention it
here, the construction of the “formal-logical idea of a ‘worldin-general’” at issue in the mathesis universalis is what he
elsewhere refers to as “formal ontology.”3 In contrast to his
analyses of the Galilean geometrization of nature, however,
Husserl’s analysis of mathesis universalis or formal ontology
does not attempt to reactivate the historical beginnings of the
original accomplishment that makes it possible. He makes no
attempt to cash in the sedimentation of meaning that accom-
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panies it. This sedimentation is inseparable from the displacement of the immediate intuitive experience of the lifeworld that takes place in the arithmetization of geometry, the
displacement that originally makes possible the formalization
of meaning at issue in formal ontology.
Despite Husserl’s failure to pursue this task of de-sedimentation with respect to formalization, it is clear that he
thinks that its de-sedimentation would lead to immediate
intuitions in the life-world. This is evident from the following
passage:
If one still has a vivid awareness of this coordination [among mathematical idealities] in its original
meaning, then a mere thematic focus of attention
on this meaning is sufficient in order to grasp the
ascending orders of intuitions (now conceived as
approximations) indicated by the functionally
coordinated quantities (or, more briefly, formulae);
or rather, one can, following these indications,
bring the ascending order of intuitions vividly to
mind.
Likewise in Formal and Transcendental Logic Husserl
expressed the conviction that
the meaning-relation of all categorial meanings to
something individual, that is, on the noetic side, to
evidences of individuals, to experiences—a relation
growing out of their meaning-genesis and present
in every example that could be used by formal
analytics—surely cannot be insignificant for the
meaning and the possible evidence of the laws of
analytics, including the highest ones, the principles
of logic. Otherwise, how could those laws claim
formal-ontological validity? (217)
However, neither the Crisis-texts nor Formal and
Transcendental Logic contain, respectively, concrete analyses
HOPKINS
57
that bring vividly to mind the ascending order of intuitions at
issue in the original meaning of symbolic formulae-meaning
or that trace the meaning-genesis of formal analytics from the
immediate intuitions of individual objects. Consequently,
Husserl’s conviction that it is possible to provide such analyses remains without a demonstrable phenomenological foundation. In what follows, I shall argue with the help of Jacob
Klein’s work that the peculiar character of the abstraction
that yields the symbolic formulae that underlie formalization
precludes, in principle, the cashing in of its meaning formations in the intuition of individuals. More precisely, I shall
show that the categorial meaning formations at issue in formal ontology do not refer directly to individual objects but
only to other materially and individually empty meaning formations. I shall do so by demonstrating that the original
accomplishment of the symbolic representation of numbers
leads to an indirect understanding of numbers and ultimately
to the substitution of symbolic expressions for the ideal
numerical entities referred to by Greek arithmetic. I shall also
show that the consequence of this is that a sedimented understanding of numbers is superimposed upon the sedimented
geometrical evidences at issue in Galileo’s mathematization of
nature. Finally, I shall argue that the result of this “double”
sedimentation is the impossibility of locating in the immediate experience of the life-world a direct referent proper to
formalized categorial meaning formations.
Jacob Klein’s De-Sedimentation of Symbolic FormulaMeaning
Jacob Klein’s Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of
Algebra,4 which was published in two installments in 1934
and 1936 (on the basis of research completed in the early
1930s5 and thus before Husserl began his Crisis-texts in
1934)6 is remarkable in that it, in effect, accomplishes the
de-sedimentation of the historical genesis of the development
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of symbolic thinking in modern mathematics that remained
unclarified in Husserl’s fragmentary analyses of mathematics
in the Crisis-texts. Klein accomplishes this by reactivating
what he refers to as the process of “symbol-generating
abstraction” (GM, 129/125), a process which he contends initially makes possible the formalized meaning formations of
mathematics. Yet unlike Husserl’s attempt to reactivate the
Galilean impulse behind the development of mathematical
physics, Klein’s reactivation is based upon actual research in
the history of mathematics.
Klein’s reactivation of this development traces its basis to
an abstraction that is radically different from the ancient
aphairesis (abstraction). Klein shows how the meaning formation that results from symbol-generating abstraction does
not refer to the direct perception of the quantity or magnitude of things. Rather, the term symbolum, which originated
with Vieta, was used both for the letter signs and the connective signs that referred neither to determinate numbers nor to
the arithmetical operations performed upon them, but to
indeterminate numbers and the general rules that govern the
algebraic art of calculation. Klein reactivates the meaning that
became sedimented in Vieta’s “universal extension [universale Erweiterung]” (179/172) of the ancient concept of the
eidos (species) of an arithmos (counting number), an extension “through which the species become the objects of a ‘general’ mathematical discipline which can be identified neither
with geometry nor with arithmetic.”
Regarding the transformation of the ancient concept of
number, the first part of Klein’s study definitively establishes
that Greek mathematics shared a common understanding of
arithmos as a “determinate amount of determinate things”
(53/46). Greek arithmetic sought to establish the truth of its
object, first as it shows up in counting, then as a determinate
amount of pure units (monads), and finally with respect to its
mode of being. Notwithstanding the ancient debate over the
ontological dependence (Aristotle) or independence (Plato)
HOPKINS
59
of the latter, the “theoretical” concept of number, as an ideal
being comprised of a determinate amount of “pure” units
that are indivisible, remained constant for the ancients. With
Vieta’s innovation of calculating with species represented by
letter signs, however, the direct relation of “number” to a
determinate amount of determinate things or units is lost. As
Klein puts it:
While every arithmos intends immediately the
things or the units themselves whose number it
happens to be, his letter sign intends directly the
general character of being a number which belongs
to every possible number, that is to say, it intends
“number in general” immediately, but the things
or units which are at hand in each case only mediately. (182/174)
Klein appeals to the mediaeval distinction between first
and second intentions (intentio prima and intentio secunda)
to characterize the letter sign as designating a “second intention,” that is, as designating “a concept which itself directly
intends another concept and not a being,” i.e., not a thing or
unit. In addition, the independence accorded the general
character of number (or “general number”) signified by the
letter sign insofar as it is now the object of Vieta’s calculational operations, “thus transforms the object of the intentio
secunda, namely the ‘general number’ intended by the letter
sign, into the object of an intentio prima, of a ‘first intention’,
namely of a ‘being’ which is directly apprehended and whose
counterpart in the realm of ordinary calculation is, for
instance, ‘two monads’, ‘three monads’.” The consequence of
this is that the “being” of the species “is to be understood neither as independent in the Pythagorean and Platonic sense
nor as attained ‘by abstraction’. . . in the Aristotelian sense,
but as symbolic. The species are in themselves symbolic for-
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mations—namely formations whose possible objectivity is
understood as an actual objectivity” (183/175).
As a result of this shift in the intentionality of the concept
of number, what was originally a “concept” for the ancients,
namely the eidos, species, is now treated as an “object.” It is
impossible, however, “to see amounts of things or units in the
isolated letter signs ‘A’ or ‘B’” (183/176) used by Vieta to represent this “object.” Hence, their “numerical character” is
only “comprehensible within the language of symbolic formalism” (183/175). According to Klein, Vieta derived the
rules of this formalism from “‘calculations’ with amounts
[Anzahlen] of monads.” Thus it is only through the application of these rules to the letter signs or symbols, that they
acquire a numerical character. Indeed, “[t]hese rules therefore represent the first modern axiom system; they create the
systematic context which originally ‘defines’ the object to
which they apply.” However, because letter signs do not signify amounts of things or monads but rather the “concept” of
“number in general,” Klein observes that they can retain a
numerical character “only because the ancient ‘amounts’
(Anzahlen) of monads are themselves [eventually] interpreted
as ‘modern numbers’ (Zahlen), which means that they are
conceived from the point of view of their symbolic representation” (184/176).
For Klein, Descartes was the first—and perhaps the
only—thinker to attempt to render intelligible the new mode
of abstraction at issue in the symbolic “mode of being” of the
modern concept of number. In addition, Descartes extended
the methodical scope of the general analytic of algebra. In
Vieta’s hands, algebra was thought of as an auxiliary discipline, in the sense that he still understood it as the method for
finding the solutions to traditional arithmetical and geometrical problems. By contrast, Descartes identified the methodically “general” object of the algebraically conceived mathesis
universalis, “number in general,” “which can be represented
and conceived only symbolically—with the ‘substance’ of the
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61
world, with corporeality as ‘extensio’” (207/197). This identification amounts, of course, to Descartes’s symbolic interpretation of Euclidean geometry, an interpretation that for
Klein involves “a ‘sedimented’ understanding of numbers. . .
[being] superposed upon the first stratum of ‘sedimented’
geometrical ‘evidences’”7 at issue in Galileo’s direct and indirect mathematization of nature. As a consequence of this,
“the ‘general analytic’ takes over the role of the ancient fundamental ontological discipline” (GM, 175/169). With this,
“an effort is made to let it supersede the traditional logic
completely,” an effort that for Klein gave rise to the battle
between the ancients and moderns in the seventeenth century, a battle that “is still being waged today, now under the
guise of the conflict between ‘formal logic’ and ‘mathematical
logic’ or ‘logistic’, although its ontological presuppositions
have been completely obscured.”
All of this can be seen more clearly on the basis of Klein’s
analysis of Descartes’s thinking in the Regulae. In that work,
Descartes attempted to come to terms with the mode of being
of the “pure” concepts presupposed by the “formal” meaning
proper to the symbolic concepts of the new algebraic quantities. Descartes speaks there of “‘abstract beings’ (entia
abstracta)” (210/200) that are the products of the “‘pure
intellect’ (intellectus purus),” which the mind apprehends
“when it thinks” and “in a way turns itself toward itself.” In
order to be true, these abstract beings “must be altogether
divorced from the imagination” (209/199). Thus for
Descartes “‘extension is not body’” (208/198), “‘number is
not the thing enumerated,’” and “‘a unit is not a quantity’”
(209/199). The mind’s attempt to represent the pure concepts
extension, number, or unit by means of the imagination
“‘would necessarily arrive at contradictions,’” because “‘in
the imagination the “idea” of extension cannot be separated
from the “idea” of body, nor the “idea” of number from the
“idea” of the thing enumerated, nor the “idea” of unity from
the “idea” of quantity.’” However, when the “pure” intellect,
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for instance, separates “from a multitude of units ‘represented’ in the imagination (a number of units, that is), their ‘multitudinousness’ as such, i.e., the ‘mere multitude’. . . the ‘pure’
indeterminate manyness to which simply nothing ‘true’, nothing truly in ‘being’, and hence no ‘true idea’ of a being corresponds, it must employ the imagination in order to be at all
able to get hold of the thing separated.” Thus for Descartes
the imagination, which allows the mind to envisage, for
instance, “‘five units’, here enters into the service of a faculty
not ‘perceptually clear’, namely the ‘pure intellect’, which,
being bare of any reference to the world, comprehends ‘fiveness’ as ‘something separated’ from ‘five’ counted points or
other arbitrary objects—as mere ‘multiplicity in general’, as
‘pure’ multiplicity” (211/201–2). Hence, according to Klein
for Descartes “the imaginative power makes possible a symbolic representation of the indeterminate content which has
been ‘separated’ by the ‘pure intellect’” (211/202). Klein calls
the “abstraction” at issue here a “‘symbol-generating abstraction.’” On his view “[i]t alone gives rise to the possibility of
contrasting ‘intuition’ [Anschauung] and ‘conception’, and of
positing ‘intuition’ as a separate source of cognition alongside
of reason.” This is the case because for Descartes neither the
“pure” intellect nor its symbolically represented “pure” ideas
have any “relation at all to the being of world and the things
in the world.” And because the ontological issue here is not
so much the “incorporeality” of the “pure” intellect and its
ideas but their separation from the corporeal, it is a philosophical legacy of Descartes and the formalization of the
modern concept generally that “intuition” comes to fulfil the
function of “re-establishing” an ontological connection
between cognition and the world.
The result of all of this for Klein is Descartes’s view that
the intellect, when directed to the “idea” of number as a
“multitude of units” presented by the imagination, turns to its
“own knowing” (221/208) and no longer sees it directly in
“the ‘performed act’ (actus exercitus). . . but ‘indirectly’,
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‘secondarily’ (secundario), or in terms of another scholastic
expression, in the ‘signified act’ (actus signatus). . . . Its immediate ‘object’ is now its own conceiving of that ‘multitude of
units’, that is, the ‘concept’ (conceptus) of the number as
such; nevertheless this multitude itself appears as a ‘something’, namely as one and therefore as an ‘ens’, a ‘being’.”
And when this “ens rationis as a ‘second intention’ is grasped
with the aid of the imagination in such a way that the intellect can, in turn, take it up as an object in the mode of a ‘first
intention,’ we are dealing with a symbol, either with an
‘algebraic’ letter sign or with a ‘geometric’ figure as understood by Descartes.”
If we substitute Husserl’s terminology of intentionality
for the mediaeval terminology employed by Klein, we can
readily understand the symbolic meaning formation yielded
by symbol-generating abstraction as an “empty intention.”
However, it is “empty” in a sense that Husserl did not appear
fully to appreciate, and could not because his programmatically announced project in the Crisis-texts has as one of its
goals the intuitive “cashing in” of the formalized intentional
meaning formations of symbolic formulae.8 But this is precisely what Klein’s de-sedimentation of the symbol-generating abstraction that produces such meaning formations shows
is impossible in principle. It is impossible for the simple
reason that what such empty meaning intentions intend is a
concept or category (presented in a “secondary” or “categorial” intention), which is apprehended by means of a first or
straightforward intention and which therefore presents a
“formalized” meaning formation that does not directly refer
to or intend the kind of individual entities that can be
presented or fulfilled in “intuition.” Put differently, Husserl’s
“felt” need to “de-formalize” the empty intention characteristic of the mathematical formula in the intuition of individual objects in the pre-scientific life-world—in order to provide a foundation that would render such meaning formations intelligible—is itself symptomatic of the lack of direct
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reference to these objects, a lack that makes symbolic meaning formations possible in the first place. He, of course, recognized that a progressive “emptying of meaning” was inseparable from the initial constitution of symbolic meaning formations. In other words, when the standard of meaning is
conceived as the immediate intuitive contact with the things
of the world, the formalized meaning formations that make
modern science possible cannot but be experienced as
“empty” of meaning. But this conclusion only follows if the
intuitive contact with the individual things of the world is
established as the sole criterion for providing a foundation
for meaning. However, this is precisely what Husserl fails to
establish but instead simply assumes. He assumes this as a
consequence of what he supposes is the “inner intentional
unity” of the history of philosophy and, therefore, the unity
of the intention proper to the First Philosophy of the ancients
and his transcendental phenomenology. Klein’s de-sedimentation of the historical accomplishment of the symbol-generating abstraction demonstrates that this standard for meaning
cannot be established for all meaning formations and therefore demonstrates that the relationship between ancient First
Philosophy and modern metaphysics is characterized by a historical discontinuity. In Husserl’s terms, what Klein shows is
that the intentional referent proper to the “empty intention”
of formalized meaning formations is essentially different
from that of the “empty intention” proper to general meaning formations. Thus, whereas the latter—for instance, the
categorial meaning of a house that is presented to consciousness in the absence of the perception of a house—lends itself
to the direct intuitive fulfillment of its meaning when a house
is “given” in perception, the “empty intention” of the formal
meaning of y = mx + b does not lend itself to a direct intuitive fulfillment of its meaning.9 The consequence of this,
then, is not the unintelligibility per se of the formal meaning
intention of the formula, but rather its relative “unintelligibility” in comparison to the “foundedness” of the general
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(i.e., the traditional categorial meaning formation or eidos)
meaning formation in the intuition of the individual things in
life-world.
Postscript: Symbol-Generating Abstraction and the Universal
Formalization of Meaning
The universal formalization of algebraic thinking that began
with Leibniz’s concept of a mathesis universalis, which severs
Descartes’s identification of the formalized meaning formations yielded by symbol-generating abstraction with extension, eliminates once and for all the possibility of establishing
even an indirect relation between such meaning formations
and the pre-given scientific life-world. Whatever else this universalization of formal analysis accomplishes, it is clear that it
removes the basis for any reference to the life-world by the
“empty intention” of the formal category proper to “the
something-in-general.” The consequence of this is that the
possibility of—however indirect—an intuitive “cashing in” of
the formalized meaning formations of the mathesis universalis of modernity is in principle precluded. Thus, also precluded in principle is the possibility of realizing Husserl’s
dream of grounding the formal ontology presupposed by
mathematics and formal logic in the intuition of individual
objects in the life-world.
Notes
1 Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und
die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die
phänomenologische Philosophie, ed. Walter Biemel, Husserliana 6
(The Hague: Nijhoff, (1)1954; (2)1976); The Crisis of European
Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970). Hereinafter
cited as Crisis, with German and English page references, respec-
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tively. Quotes in series will bypass the convention of repeating the
reference to their source.
2
Originally published in a heavily edited form by Eugen Fink as
“Die Frage nach dem Ursprung der Geometrie als intentional-historisches Problem,” Revue internationale de Philosophie 1 (1939),
203–25; Fink’s typescript of Husserl’s original, and significantly
different, 1936 text (which is the text translated by Carr) was published as Beilage 3 in Biemel’s edition of Hua 6; “The Origin of
Geometry,” appears in The Crisis of European Sciences and
Transcendental Phenomenology, 353-83. Hereinafter cited as “OG”
according to the convention for serial quotes stated in n. 1, above.
3 Edmund
Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorian
Cairns (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1969), 190; German text: Formale
und transzendentale Logik, ed. Paul Janssen, Husserliana 17 [The
Hague: Nijhoff, 1974], 67; hereinafter cited as FTL with original
page reference, which is included in the margins of both the
German and the English additions cited.
4
Jacob Klein, “Die griechische Logistik und die Entstehung der
Algebra” in Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der Mathematik,
Astronomie und Physik, Abteilung B: Studien, vol. 3, no. 1 (Berlin,
1934), 18–105 (Part 1); no. 2 (1936), 122–235 (Part 2); Greek
Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, trans. Eva Brann
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969; reprint: New York: Dover,
1992). Hereinafter cited as GM, with German and English page references respectively, following the convention for serial references
stated in n. 1, above.
5
Klein’s wife, Dodo Klein (who was Gerhart Husserl’s ex-wife),
reports that it was “probably 1932, 1933” when he wrote this text.
The quote is from p. 14 of a typed transcript of a tape recording of
memories of her second husband. The transcript (the tape recording is apparently lost) is among Klein’s papers housed in St. John’s
College Library, Annapolis, Maryland.
6 Husserl’s
work on the Crisis was begun in 1934, whereas his work
on the origin of geometry dates from 1936 (see Die Krisis der
europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie,
ed. Reinhold N. Smid, Husserliana 19 [Doredrecht: Kluwer,
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67
1993)], editor’s introduction, xi and lvi). The former was first published in 1936 and the latter, posthumously in 1939 in the version
edited by Fink.
7
Jacob Klein, “Phenomenology and the History of Science,” in
Marvin Farber, ed., Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund
Husserl, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1940),
143–63; reprinted in Jacob Klein, Lectures and Essays, ed. Robert
B. Williamson and Elliott Zuckerman (Annapolis, MD: St. John’s
Press, 1985); the quote is from p. 84 of the latter.
8
This goal is consistent with Husserl’s articulation of the possibility of a formal judgment in FTL. Regarding the “ideal ‘existence’
[Existenz] of the judgment-content” (193) that is at issue in formal
judgments, he writes: “we are referred to the syntactical cores,
which seem to be functionless from the formal point of view. That
would imply, then, that the possibility of properly effectuating the
possibility of a judgment (as a meaning) is rooted not only in the
syntactical forms but also in the syntactical stuffs. This fact is easily
overlooked by the formal logician, with his interest directed onesidedly to the syntactical—the manifold forms of which are all that
enters into logical theory—and with his algebraizing of the cores as
theoretical irrelevancies, as empty somethings that need only be
kept identical” (194). Thus for Husserl: “Prior to all judging, there
is a universal experiential basis. It is always presupposed as a harmonious unity of possible experience.” And this means that “in
respect of its content, every original judging and every judging that
proceeds coherently, has coherence by virtue of the coherence of
the matters in the synthetic unity of the experience, which is the
basis on which the judging stands.” However, it is just this experiential basis that Klein’s analysis of the shift and transposition of the
levels of intentionality at issue in the symbol-generating abstraction
shows is no longer a factor in the “intentional genesis” of the formal judgments that are at issue in algebraic calculations.
9
Husserl, of course, recognizes that “formalization is something
essentially different from variation. It does not consist in imagining
that the determinations of the variants are changed into others;
rather, it is a disregarding, an emptying of all objective, material
determinations” (Erfahrung und Urteil [Hamburg: Meiner, 1985],
435; Experience and Judgment, trans. James S. Churchill and Karl
Ameriks [Evanston, IL: Northwestern, 1973], 359). However, it is
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precisely the lack of relevance of the variation of an intuitively
apprehended individual variant (presented in the straightforward
intention proper either to the perception or imagination that yields
the individual exemplar that is the basis of variation) that is at issue
in formalization, which eliminates the possibility of tracing the
intentional genesis of the formal meaning (yielded by the formalizing abstraction proper to the symbol-generating abstraction) to an
intentional activity directed to the experience of the life-world’s
objects. Thus, in the case of the “empty intention” of a house, the
possibility of its general categorial meaning refers to an intentional
genesis in the intelligible structures of a straightforwardly intended
house. In the case of the “empty intention” of an algebraic formula, however, its formal categorial meaning refers to an intentional
genesis in a straightforwardly intended category—in other words,
the intentional referent of its “empty intention” is not the “synthetic unity” yielded by the “harmonious unity of possible experience.” “De-formalizing” the “empty intention” of a formal meaning
formation, then, does not lead to the possible experience of
straightforwardly intended objects in the life-world, but to ideal
meanings, meanings that of necessity have only an indirect relation
to this world. Insofar as the latter must already have been mathematized in order for the ideal meanings in question to achieve a
“worldly” status, the referent proper to the “empty intention” characteristic of formal meaning formations is in principle precluded
from straightforwardly intending the pre-scientific (pre-mathematical) objects of the natural life-world.
69
Opening Questions
Ronald Mawby
Introduction
One of the delights of language is that a single string of symbols can entwine so many meanings. So it is with my title,
“Opening Questions,” which unravels five ways. This essay is
first a reflective exploration of questions, so I will be opening
questions to our examination. We look briefly at what questions are, how they arise, what they presuppose, and the like.
Second, questions often occur in speech or thought as opening moves. When we think in the sense of engaging our minds
to find out what is true, we begin and direct our inquiry with
questions. Thus every episode of thought opens with a question. Third, questions appear as openings or gaps in the fabric of knowledge. The relation of enclosure between the area
of ignorance and the area of knowledge—which encloses
which—divides, I shall argue, the taxonomy of questions at
its root. Fourth, we call a question open when its answer is
not yet settled, so opening questions means posing but not
answering them. The adage says, “a fool can ask more questions in a hour than a sage can answer in a week.” Here I play
the part of the fool. The final thread ties these reflections to
our point of departure, which is the rich and important question that opens Plato’s Meno.
Rationale
Before going further, I will say why I consider this undertaking to be worthwhile. Aristotle begins his Metaphysics with
the statement that all humans by nature desire to know. A
desire to know is expressed by a question, so Aristotle
Ronald Mawby teaches in the Honors Program at Kentucky State University.
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appears to be saying that we are by nature questioners. If so,
exploring questions is one way to obey the Delphic injunction, Know Thyself.
Aristotle goes on to say that in the Metaphysics he is seeking knowledge of the highest kind, which he calls wisdom. He
thus intimates that seeking or desiring or loving wisdom, that
is, philosophy, is inherent in human being. I am told the
Greek usually translated as “desire to know” may be rendered
as “stretched out toward knowledge,” and “stretched out”
indicates a certain tension that may be uncomfortable. A
teacher of mine thought Aristotle was wrong, that human
beings by nature desire to feel comfortable, and implied that
the tension inherent in the desire to know is something we
seek to avoid. Oscar Wilde famously remarked that one way
to avoid temptation is to give in to it. Likewise we can avoid
unfulfilled desire by fulfilling it; we eliminate the tension of
desiring to know by actually coming to know. This, I take it,
is what Hegel thought himself to have done. He finished philosophy as the quest for wisdom by actually attaining wisdom, or rational knowledge of the whole.
Others tell us that the quest for wisdom should be finished by being abandoned. Recent positivists, for instance, say
philosophy is pointless because its questions are meaningless.
They depict the speculative philosopher as a failed Houdini
who entangles himself in verbal confusions from which he is
unable to escape. On this view philosophical problems are
pseudo-problems, calling not for solution but dissolution.
Kant, though his sensitivities differ, is often taken by the positivists as a precursor. His critique of human reason purports
to establish the necessary conditions for knowledge, and to
show that our reason is unsuitable for certain of its traditional speculative employments. Both Kant and the positivists
suggest that we sublimate the desire for wisdom by turning it
into channels where knowledge is possible, such as mathematics or natural science. Still others say philosophy is futile
because philosophical issues support no genuine epistemic
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distinction between knowledge and opinion. In philosophy,
they say, the distinction between truth and falsehood resembles Hobbes’s distinction between religion and superstition:
both are “fear of powers invisible,” religion “from tales publicly allowed,” superstition from tales “not allowed”(Hobbes,
56). What the community allows is truth, what it does not
allow is falsehood; the community may be either a proper
political entity or an academic group. This has been a position of rhetoricians from the ancient Sophists to the present
day.
All the foregoing, from the Sophists to Hegel, share this
opinion: the quest for wisdom is temporary. Philosophy lasts
only until we either get wisdom or give up wanting it. But
philosophy as a way of life takes the desire for wisdom as permanent. If Socrates may be said to have a position, this might
be it. Socratic wisdom is the same as Socratic ignorance; the
height of human wisdom is knowing what you don’t know.
Inquiry into which life is best reveals that very life of inquiry
to be best. But perhaps the only result of a life devoted to philosophy, the only result defensible in speech, is some coherent understanding of fundamental questions. If our most concentrated and orderly stretch toward wisdom results only in
the awareness of questions, then, at least for those of us
drawn to philosophy, it is worthwhile to ask about questions
themselves.
Meno’s Opening Question
In the dialogue that bears his name, Meno asks two large
questions, one to start the conversation, the other in an
attempt to stop it. Meno opens the dialogue by saying:
Can you tell me, Socrates, whether excellence can
be taught? Or is it not teachable but the result of
practice, or is it neither of these, but men possess
it by nature or in some other way?(70)
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What can we say about this question? First we can say
that it is important. We all have a stake in bringing about
human excellence. As parents, teachers, citizens, members of
the human community, as people trying to shape for ourselves
good and satisfying lives, the answer to Meno’s question is
important for us. How does one attain excellence? The question surely seems natural, the kind of question that might
arise for anyone who reflects on what he or she is doing. The
question is old, but fresh. It is a question that won’t go away.
Second, we can say that the answer is not obvious. Is
excellence teachable? Perhaps, but is it teachable in the way
that mathematics is teachable? Perhaps not. Do we attain
excellence by practice, as we acquire a skill or habit “by
doing”? This is plausible, though not self-evident. Does excellence arise from nature? Is it inherent in us, or at least in
those of us who have good natures? It seems reasonable that
nature at the least could help or hinder in the pursuit of
excellence. Are there other ways in which excellence could
arise? Perhaps from the grace of God? Perhaps in some way
that we cannot even name? Although Meno’s is a natural
question to ask, it is not an easy one to answer.
Third, we see very quickly that the question conceals
another question, namely, what is human excellence? If excellence is a kind of articulable knowledge, then it may be teachable. If excellence is a practical skill, then it may arise through
practice. If excellence depends on an innate capacity or disposition or insight, then it may arise from nature. If excellence is a free gift of the gods, then it comes to be neither by
teaching nor practice nor nature but in some other way. And
there is a further question, namely, is there such a thing as
human excellence? This question has both a formal and an
existential sense. Is there a single non-disjunctive characterization of human excellence, and if there is, has it or can it be
realized? We may know what we mean by excellence in mathematics, or athletics, or music, and we may be confident that
there are excellent mathematicians and athletes and musi-
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cians. But do we know in like fashion what it means to be an
excellent human being, and are we fully confident that excellent human beings do or can exist?
Meno's opening question is thus important, difficult, and
it exfoliates other questions. Let us explore it, for it is a question that bears examination.
Meno begins “Can you tell me, Socrates. . . . ” What is
Meno seeking? Does he seek the source of excellence, or to
discover if Socrates knows that source? The form of words
does not tell us. Interpreted strictly the question asks about
Socrates’ abilities, and invites the response, “Yes I can tell
you” or “No I cannot.” But the question may be intended
otherwise. When I say “Can you pass the salt?” I am not really asking about your abilities. I am making a polite request for
the salt. “Can you tell me” in this sense means “Will you tell
me” and that means “Tell me, please.” Meno, rather than
demanding a response, may be asking for one.
Is Meno’s question sincere, that is, does he genuinely
want the answer? If Meno’s question is really about excellence I see no reason to doubt that it is sincere. A sincere
question expresses a desire to have in mind the requested
information. One asks in order that one may come to know.
A sincere question expresses a desire for knowledge. In the
soul a question is a cognitive desire. If we use eros as the general name for desire, questioning is an erotic act.
If Meno’s question is about what Socrates knows, it may
be sincere, or it may be put to embarrass Socrates. Meno says
“Can you tell me, Socrates. . . . ” I think we should hear this
phrase in three ways, by emphasizing in turn “you,” “tell,”
and “me.” “Can you tell me, Socrates” sounds like a challenge. We sense in the background something like this:
“Gorgias could tell me, Socrates; I could tell you; anyone
who undertakes public speaking or instruction should be able
to tell; you think you’re so smart, can you tell me?” This puts
a challenge, or at least sets a task.
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If we retain the emphasize on the word “you” but omit
the challenge, we get a question whose focus can be put this
way: “I am looking for someone who can tell me about excellence; are you that someone, Socrates?” This is an important
question for the interpretation of this dialogue, indeed for
most Platonic dialogues: just what does Socrates know? What
can he tell us? And if we generalize this part of the question,
so that it reads, “Can anyone tell me. . . ” we hear a question
addressed to us all, which may be taken as a question about
our cognitive capacities.
Next, change the emphasis and say, “Can you tell me,
Socrates.” Now the focus suggests this background:
“Socrates, there might be a number of different ways to convey to me the requested information; is telling among the
ways?” This emphasis makes us aware that telling through the
content of explicit speech is not the only way to convey an
answer. Showing by pointing, or by enacting, or through the
action of speech rather than its content, are alternatives. The
dialogue shows the importance of these alternatives. In the
slave boy section, where the question is: given a square, what
line will produce a square with twice the area?, the importance of pointing rather than telling is made manifest. For the
line sought is the diagonal of the given square, and the side
and diagonal of a square are incommensurable. Thus if we
call the length of the side one unit, there is no finite specification of the length of the diagonal in terms of the unit. The
requested length is irrational, unsayable. We could of course
call it the square root of two, but in context that is just a way
of saying “the line whose square is double the given square,”
and repeating the question is not telling the answer. The
answer can be given, but not directly in speech—we can point
to the diagonal. The intrusion of the irrational raises the issue
of whether human speech and reason are adequate to answer
questions of human excellence. I also merely mention the
suggestion that Socrates answers Meno’s question not in
word but in deed. Human excellence might come to be pre-
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cisely in the quest for knowledge of human excellence, and
Socrates, by showing Meno how to inquire, displays both the
route to acquisition and the possession of excellence.
Thirdly, we can emphasize Meno’s words in a way that I
doubt Meno would approve: “Can you tell me, Socrates.”
The background now is this: “Socrates, I suppose you can
convey the answer to some people, but perhaps not to everyone; perhaps there are conditions for being told that not
everyone can meet; can I, Meno, meet those conditions, so
that you can tell me?” This raises the issue of what you must
have already in order to get what you ask for. Perhaps only
the sincere seeker can receive the answer. Perhaps only those
who already in some sense have the answer within themselves
can receive it. Perhaps we can pose questions that have
answers, but answers that we cannot grasp. These alternatives
too have importance in the dialogue. It is natural to ask, who
is Meno? Scholarship identifies a historical Meno who was
greedy, cunning, and unscrupulous. We recall Aristotle’s
statement that only a person with a good upbringing and disposition can benefit from ethical discourse. Perhaps Meno is
too vicious to be told about virtue.1 Later in the dialogue
Socrates angers Anytus by suggesting that he and his peers
lack the excellence of an older generation. Generational
decay may occur either because virtue is not teachable or
because Anytus and his peers are not teachable. Perhaps the
condition for hearing the truth is not directly moral but intellectual, if indeed we can make this distinction. Perhaps Meno
is too obtuse to be told—too shallow or too stubborn or perhaps too little aware to see that the answer to his question is
not conveyed by telling. Perhaps Socrates cannot tell Meno
the answer. Whether Socrates can tell us is a question we
must ask ourselves.
How does Socrates take Meno’s question? In part as a
challenge, in part as a sincere question. Meno may want to
test Socrates, but he gives Socrates an opportunity for real
inquiry. Socrates’ reply is certainly not a direct answer;
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rather, his reply corrects two false assumptions of the question. First, in a conversation a questioner, by the very act of
posing a question, seems to assume that the one to whom the
question is put knows its answer. Socrates denies this assumption when he denies that he knows. Second, in an inquiry the
questions should be put in rational sequence; thus by putting
this question first Meno appears to assume that it is properly
the first question. Socrates denies this assumption when he
says that he does not know what excellence is, and that no
one can tell how excellence arises without knowing what it is.
To Meno’s opening thrust Socrates makes a judo-like
response, saying in effect that Meno has put the wrong question to the wrong person. Socrates admits his ignorance of
the source and nature of excellence. When he adds that he
never met anyone who knew what excellence is, he turns the
tables on Meno, who is now challenged to tell Socrates something. Socrates has inverted their roles, and called Meno’s
assumptions into question.
Meno then tries to tell Socrates what excellence is. He
describes the excellence of a man, and a woman, and says
there are excellences for young and old, slave and free. Since
there are very many excellences, Meno is not at a loss to say
what excellence is. But of course this swarm of excellences is
not what Socrates seeks. Socrates wants the one “look” that
makes them all excellence. Meno has failed to understand
what counts as an answer. We are invited to wonder whether
Socrates’ question has an answer of the kind that he seeks;
perhaps Socrates is asking the wrong question.
Meno denies that there is a single excellence for all until
Socrates leads him to admit that all excellence involves moderation and justice. Meno agrees, saying that justice is excellence. Is justice excellence, Socrates asks, or is justice an
excellence? To get Meno to understand the question Socrates
uses the examples of shape and color. Roundness is a shape,
but not shape, for there are other shapes, and white is a color,
but not color, for there are other colors. Likewise justice is an
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excellence, but not excellence, for there are other excellences.
Meno then, to better understand what Socrates is looking for,
asks for a definition of shape. Socrates gives him two: shape
is the only thing that always follows color, and shape is the
limit of solid. Meno objects that the first is useless to one who
doesn’t know what color is. Socrates agrees that in a friendly
conversation one must define with terms understood by both
parties. Later Meno asks Socrates to define color, which
Socrates does after the manner of Gorgias, saying color is an
effluvium from shapes which fits the sight and is perceived.
Do the examples of shape and color tell us something special? In reading Plato the safest assumption is that nothing is
accidental, so the choice of shape and color is likely to be significant. What might it mean? Well, one candidate for excellence is that it consists in, or is correlative with, knowledge.
If we take that seriously, we get the following proportional
analogy: as shape is what always follows color, so excellence
is what always follows knowledge. Shape stands for excellence, color for knowledge. Since shape limits the solid, we
may think that the solid stands for the soul. The soul is then
likened to a finite three-dimensional object. As such it has a
shape, and that shape is disclosed to us in self-knowledge.
Excellence, if there be such a thing, is the proper shape of
soul. The pursuit of excellence involves us with shapes.
Geometry is the science of shapes.
If the soul is a solid, it is bounded by a surface. Whatever
depths of soul we have, the inner shines forth in what appears
to others and to ourselves as we reflect. We disclose ourselves
in speech and deed, so properties of the surface should correspond to speech and deed. A surface is both visible and tangible; we yoke visibility to speech and tangibility to deed. The
tangible is perceptible by touch, and touch can operate without sight, though often sight guides touch.
We touch things usually to change them, to alter the way
things are. We look to see, to discover the way things are.
Looking eventuates in belief, touching arises from desire.2
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Explicit belief and desire depend on ideas, not Platonic
Forms but Platonic images, in which content is distinct from
reality, the what-it-is divorced from the that-it-is. That the
mind can handle ideas makes belief and desire possible. Since
a question is a desire for a true belief, that the mind can handle ideas makes questions possible. No eros or no ideas means
no questions. Meno is soon to present a paradox the nerve of
which is that questions are nonsensical. One implication is
that when he puts the paradox, Meno lacks eros or ideas or
both.
Meno says that Socrates resembles a torpedo fish in both
his look and his touch; Socrates is one in speech and deed. To
grapple with Socrates, as Meno has done, is to be numbed
with perplexity. To be numbed is to be unable to speak and
act because one can feel nothing. Perplexity is to feel nothing.
When we are perplexed, the surface of the soul, the visible
and tangible limit that defines what we are, is felt to be rent
or torn. A gap is opened in the smooth fabric of our speech
and deed. To feel that emptiness is to be perplexed. Perplexity
ruptures us, it opens us, and the articulation of that opening
is a question. The desire for wholeness is the desire for closure, and that is the desire that spurs us to try to answer questions.
Meno’s Paradox and the Myth of Recollection
After Meno admits he is numb, he proposes his paradox, the
large question he puts to Socrates to stop the conversation.
When Socrates wants to seek together after excellence, Meno
says
How will you look for it, Socrates, when you do
not know at all what it is? How will you aim to
search for something you do not know at all? If
you should meet with it, how will you know that
this is the thing that you did not know? (80d)
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The conclusion of the paradox is that inquiry is pointless. The
argument is formally a dilemma. We either know or don’t
know. If we do know, inquiry is pointless, for we are seeking
what we already have. If we don’t know, inquiry is pointless,
for without knowing what we are looking for we can neither
direct our search nor tell when we have succeeded.
Socrates resolves the paradox by denying that we either
know or don’t know. We inquire when we both know and
don’t know. We possess knowledge but do not have it at
hand. It is in our souls but not immediately accessible. This,
by itself, is not enough to answer the paradox, for we need
some way to direct the search for what we don’t know and
some way to tell when the search is successful. We need a way
for our present ignorance to lead to the absent knowledge.
The myth of recollection—duly elaborated—presents us with
an image of how this is possible.
The myth supposes that the soul, the organ of knowledge,
is an original whole, a single totality, for all nature is akin.
The complete whole comprises all knowledge. The whole is
now broken and fragmentary; the fragments remain in the
depths of the soul, but the surface of the soul has gaps or
holes where pieces are missing. Gaps in our knowledge keep
us from what we want to do or see. Most of these openings
are entirely surrounded by the firm surface. What we can’t do
lies within the horizon of what we can do, and what we don’t
know is framed by what we do know. Absence of knowledge
is bounded by knowledge. Ignorance thus appears like gaps in
a jigsaw puzzle. The enclosed emptiness has a specific shape.
This shape partially defines a content that can be held in mind
and used to direct the search for the missing piece. The hole
is not simply nothing. Although it is a hole because it is not
there, it is just the hole it is because where it fails to be is just
there. To articulate its shape is to formulate a question, to say
precisely what gap in knowledge one aims to fill. When we
see what is not there we both know and don’t know.
Ignorance is emptiness, shadow, a hole in the light. The desire
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for full insight is the erotic impulse that moves us to inquire.
As an emptiness with a boundary shape, the hole enables us
to search for what will fill it. Like Cinderella’s prince, when
we have the empty shoe we can seek the foot that fits it.
If the shape of a hole is to direct its own filling there must
be a prior totality in which the hole is set. A gap in the fabric
of knowledge implies a fabric of knowledge; to see a shadow
one needs light. If we were in total darkness where all is shadow or in unbounded space where all is empty, then Meno
would be correct that inquiry is pointless. Questions are
boundary phenomena. They arise from the edges of belief,
and if there were no beliefs there would be no edges. Inquiry
arises in situations where knowledge bounds ignorance,
where what we know shapes what we don’t know so that we
can know what we don’t know.
Socrates tells Meno that the immortal soul has learned all
things. All knowledge has been collected together, and needs
only to be re-collected. The jigsaw puzzle was once assembled, and all the pieces are present, floating in the depths of
the soul. If one is brave and tireless one can assemble it again.
Or, at the least, Socrates says, we will be better, braver and
less helpless if we believe this than if we believe that inquiry
is pointless.
The completed puzzle will form the surface of the soul
and thus fix the boundary shape or definition of human excellence. Later in the dialogue Socrates introduces the distinction between right opinion and knowledge. In our image
right opinion would have the right pieces in the right places,
but they would be liable to fall out again. The numbing touch
of Socrates, for example, would be liable to shatter to pieces
a whole that is not firmly tied together. Knowledge surpasses
right opinion in part because it cements the pieces into a
cohesive whole. In our picture human excellence is knowledge, but not knowledge only of human excellence. It is all
knowledge, complete knowledge, or knowledge of the whole.
The whole soul is the excellent soul, and the whole soul is
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composed of knowledge of the whole. The excellent soul is
an image of the cosmos, so in the myth ultimately self-knowledge converges with metaphysical knowledge.3 Wisdom as a
moral virtue and wisdom as metaphysical understanding are
thus related. The questions regarding human excellence and
metaphysics are alike. Asking what it means to be human
resembles asking what it means to be.
Questions of Mathematics and Human Excellence
Socrates gives the myth and shows the slave boy’s recollection
of geometrical truth to overcome Meno’s reluctance to
inquire. Socrates’ argument is by analogy, and goes like this.
The slave boy was ignorant of the solution to the geometrical
problem, and once he became aware of his ignorance through
the numbing touch of Socrates, he grew eager to overcome
that ignorance, and succeeded in drawing the solution out of
himself. Likewise, Meno has been shown to be ignorant of
the nature of excellence by the numbing touch of Socrates,
and if Meno too becomes eager to overcome that ignorance
he too may succeed in drawing the solution out of himself.
My question is, should we accept the analogy?
The analogy is problematic on two counts. First, consider how the slave boy was able to succeed. Was it by teaching,
practice, nature, or in some other way? Socrates asked leading questions, and in that sense directed the boy’s inquiries as
his teacher. The boy initially beheld the solution as in a
dream, but Socrates says the solution would become fixed in
his mind by practice. The boy answered out of his own convictions; his answers, right or wrong, were his own, arising
not from learned opinion but from natural capacity. So the
boy succeeded in some other way, namely, through the combination of teaching and practice and nature. Now the teaching was performed by Socrates through questioning, and his
directing questions had this property: Socrates knew their
answers. Socrates was directing an inquiry into something of
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which the boy was ignorant, but which Socrates knew very
well. In the inquiry with Meno into excellence, however,
Socrates purports not to know the answer. It is not so clear,
then, that inquiry into the nature of excellence can be as successful as inquiry into the double square.
The second problematic feature of the analogy concerns
the properties of the respective questions. The geometrical
question is well defined. We know what counts as an answer.
We can present to ourselves in thought a series of increasing
lines and think that one of those lines is the one that is
sought. Once we see that the doubled line is too large we
eliminate an entire range of candidate answers. When we see
that the three-halves line is also too large, we eliminate
another range of candidates. We narrow our search as each
thread is picked up to knit together the hole in the fabric of
knowledge. That hole is determinate, and determinate
because wholly enclosed.
What about the general question of human excellence? Is
that question also wholly enclosed? I think not. If we ask
about the excellence of a particular station in life, such as
auto mechanic or neurosurgeon or gentleman’s personal gentleman, we get an answer insofar as the gap in our understanding is enclosed. Comprehending the station, we can say
what is needed to fulfill the station. But it is otherwise when
we ask about human excellence as such. Here we do not have
a fabric of understanding with an enclosed hole in it. We have
the entire fabric of human life held in mind, and we are looking for the place into which it fits. When we ask about particular stations we have the puzzle and are looking for the
missing piece. When we ask about human excellence as such
we have the piece and are looking for the puzzle.
Aristotle says that since the function of the eye is to see,
the excellence of the eye is to see well. We can all agree.
Aristotle goes on to say that if a human being as a whole has
a function, then human excellence is to perform that function
well. Yes, but does analysis in terms of function work the
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same way when we consider parts and wholes? The proper
function of the eye is to see well. The analogous function of
the whole person would be to live well. But seeing well just
means seeing as required for living well. The parallel statement for the whole person—living as required for living
well—merely reopens the question.
Aristotle’s ethical inquiry is immensely intelligent, and is
usually kept from being radical by its massive common sense.
Aristotle proceeds, I think, by differentiating the parts of the
soul and discussing their respective excellences, and then saying that living well happens when each part of the soul functions well. Aristotle assumes a soul functioning in a certain
way, and asks how it would look if it were excellent. He
posits an adequate soul, and seeks a great soul. It is as though
he were given a square, and sought a double square.
At times, though, Aristotle reveals his uncommon sense,
as when he presses the claims of the contemplative life. There
Aristotle suggests that the best life enjoins us to change shape
as well as size. The Meno pictures what I am pointing to when
in the slave boy sequence Socrates puts three equal squares
together and asks the boy if they could fill in the space in the
corner. This is an intriguing question, for in one sense the
three squares already form a complete figure. There is no
space in the corner, just space outside the figure. Of course
what Socrates invites the boy to say is that the triple square
be completed with a fourth square. This is the common sense
response. Once the figure is seen as an incomplete square, we
know what piece is missing. If coming to know what constitutes a complete human life is like completing that figure with
another square, then inquiry into excellence is like geometrical inquiry. The ordinary soul and the great soul are similar
figures.
But we could also fill in the space in the corner with other
figures, equal in area but different in shape.4 How we complete the figure is not determined solely by our intent to make
the resulting figure four square in area. The question of how
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to fill in the space in the corner has a mathematical dimension, but not a unique mathematical solution. The question,
of which whole is the three-square figure a part, is not a
mathematical question. If knowing what constitutes a complete human life is like knowing how to fill in the space in the
corner, then inquiry into human excellence fails to resemble
geometrical inquiry. Inquiry into the double square and
inquiry into human excellence are not alike.
Topological Inversion of the Area of Ignorance
How did we get from questions as holes in the fabric of belief
to questions of what encompasses the totality of belief? What
works this inversion? Several paths force the same twist.
When we are trying to put different pieces together, that is,
when we are trying to integrate diverse domains of experience, we may be led to the question of what larger frame
encloses them. So the quest for a synoptic view of several
pieces of experience is one path to inversion.
Another way arises from any single question that is large
enough. When we are serious about answering such questions, we wish to put them precisely, so we must accurately
map the boundary of our ignorance. If the question is a large
one, that is, if the hole in our knowledge is extensive, then we
may not be able to see at a glance the entire boundary of the
hole. We must move around the boundary in an attempt to
encompass it. It is as though we were trying to map the
boundary of an inland lake, a lake too large to see across.
Inversion happens when we discover that the shore we trace
is not the edge of an inland lake but the boundary of an island
on which we stand. We encompass everything we know, and
see our island set in an ocean of ignorance. The known is
encompassed by the unknown, the familiar by the strange. We
experience wonder. What, we ask, is the significance of all
this? Where does it all fit?
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We ask this sort of question when we are turned around
on the other side of the boundary. We ask it as outsiders.
Anytus takes Socrates’ questioning into human excellence as
an attack on Athens by one with no commitment to its ethos.
Socrates is a strange citizen, a citizen who questions like a
stranger. Metaphysical questions are likewise strange. All ultimate questions are strange. If our life consists of filling the
familiar holes with the familiar pieces, answering the routine
questions with the ordinary answers, then we need never face
such questions. Philosophy is evitable. But, as Whitehead
remarks, the refusal to think does not imply the nonexistence
of entities for thought. If we think far enough we will get to
the limits of land. What should we do when we get there?
Here is what Kant says in the first Critique:
We have now not merely explored the territory of
pure understanding, and carefully surveyed every
part of it, but have also measured its extent, and
assigned to everything in it its rightful place. This
domain is an island, enclosed by nature itself within unalterable limits. It is the land of truth—
enchanting name!—surrounded by a wide and
stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where
many a fog bank and many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther
shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer ever
anew with empty hopes, and engaging him in
enterprises which he can never abandon and yet is
unable to carry to completion. (257)
Kant’s answer is that we should map the extent of the isle,
then turn back and cultivate our garden. Though the very
gravity of our mind will pull us down to that ocean shore,
once there we must discipline our reason. Though mathematics and natural science are boundless, speculative thought
must restrain itself within strict limits.5
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Hegel’s answer is that we live on a finite globe, part of
which is indeed submerged, but we are amphibian creatures,
both subject and substance, both knower and known. Every
line that limits understanding is temporary, for to be aware of
a boundary is already to have crossed it.6 The land is the sea’s
edge also; we find ourselves on each side of the boundary.
The whole globe is properly our home. Speculative thought
culminates in an equilibrium in which every question has its
answer.
Pascal’s answer is that we find ourselves marooned in the
midst of an infinite, empty, terrifying expanse that reason
cannot cross.7 Faith alone lets us pass over to the safety of the
mainland. Theology teaches that God’s power is unlimited,
and the gospel tells us that Jesus can walk on water, so the
Savior can perform the infinite task of bringing us to safety as
easily as he steps to shore from a boat on the sea of Galilee.
These three agree that the isle of knowledge is of fixed
size. Kant says that critical reason can determine the circumference once and for all, and teach us to stay on our own side
of the line.8 Hegel says reason operates in an Absolute that is
finite but unbounded—a sphere. Whatever encloses a finite
area also excludes a finite area. To grasp what is inside we
cross and look from the outside, and the dialectical sequence
of crossings and recrossings leads to a great circle of maximum circumference. Seeing both sides at once of that allencompassing circle is the absolute insight. Pascal says human
reason is finite but the world is infinite, a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. Knowledge of
beginnings and ends is forever beyond the scope of human
reason.
Others say that the boundary of knowledge can be pushed
back and the domain of the known enlarged. One such is
Whitehead, a twentieth-century advocate of the value of
speculative philosophy. He writes, “Speculative philosophy is
the endeavour to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system
of general ideas in terms of which every element of our expe-
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rience can be interpreted” (Whitehead, 3). Whitehead says
the method of speculative philosophy is imaginative generalization. We generalize the shape of present knowledge to
obtain our metaphysical categories, which “are tentative formulations of the ultimate generalities” (8). They are tentative
because, for Whitehead, “In philosophical discussion, the
merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is
an exhibition of folly” (xiv).
I am suggesting that ultimate questions, the questions of
speculative philosophy, are persistent because of their topological relations to what we know. They seek the whole
understanding in which our current limited understanding
has its proper place. Likewise ultimate ethical questions, such
as the nature of human excellence, persist because of their
topological relations. Thinking as the desire for the whole
truth and willing as the desire for the whole good are analogous.
Looking for the Puzzle
One thing we can learn from Plato’s practice is to take our
images seriously. Let us see what we can extract from the
image of the piece of the jigsaw puzzle. Take our current epistemic and ethical situation as a given puzzle piece. We ask for
the whole puzzle. What are some candidate answers? I offer
six.
1. When we look at a piece we may say that it is already
complete. Epistemic incompletion depends on questions, and
questions depend on ideas whose content is distinct from
their reality. Ethical incompletion depends on some distinction between is and ought, and that too depends on ideas
whose content lacks reality. To say that our current situation
is complete is to deny any importance to free ideas, either in
belief or desire. It seems to me to deny the essence of our
humanity, but that is precisely its point. Free ideas make possible belief and desire independent of perception and action,
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and thus raise epistemic and ethical questions. If we eliminate
free ideas we cut off such questions at their root. The conceptual level of awareness may define humanity, but human
being is an unstable and unsatisfying way of being. Better to
be a beast or a god, to turn and live with the animals or dissolve into the godhead. No ideas means no felt discrepancy
between mind and world; when belief and desire go the
thinking and willing self disappears. Certain mystical and
meditative techniques aim at this—their view is that thought
disrupts mindfulness. A soul reduced to perfect stillness, to
total ideational inactivity, would experience no incompletion.
On this side of the mystic dissolve, what might this way
of life be like? Think of surfing. You paddle out, feel the water
and the sun, the seventh wave approaches, you stroke hard to
get it, you’re up, in the curl, thrust along by a surging wall of
water. In the exhilaration of that locomotive rush there are
no questions, no reflections, just total immersion in the vivid
now. The wave breaks, you end the ride, but suppose that
when you leave the water you retain the awareness, the concentration, the music of each moment moving through you
and sustaining you like the wave. Your life is complete in each
passing moment—no plan for the future, no recollection of
the past, just embedded in a present presence as in a music, in
Eliot’s words, “heard so deeply it is not heard at all, but you
are the music while the music lasts”(Eliot, 136).
Of course you might need to think sometimes, to prepare
a case at law, or deliver pizza, or whatever, but thought never
displaces the immediate experience in which you find your
satisfaction. Thought is good only if it helps you, as Thoreau
says, “. . . to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past
and the future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe
that line” (Thoreau, 11). Perhaps the best life would be one
of simple routine, like a well-learned dance.
2. When we look at a puzzle piece we may say that the
given piece uniquely determines the entire puzzle, for the
piece is premise and the puzzle is deductive conclusion.
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Reasoning can make explicit what is implicit and so complete
the whole. There are no genuine alternatives in the completion of the puzzle, for what now looks to be contingent is in
the end either necessary or impossible. The difference
between incomplete and complete is just the difference
between what we know and what follows from what we
know. This is a rationalism. One of its ethical versions teaches the virtue of complete understanding, and says that complete understanding reveals the coincidence of the is and the
ought. Unlike the doctrine that denies any distinction
between is and ought, rationalism accepts the distinction
between incomplete and complete insight, and says that we
ought to attain complete insight. Being as such is good, evil is
privation, and ignorance is privation of understanding. With
adequate insight, we see that everything is as it must be.
On the way to complete insight we seek awareness of the
permanent present, that which remains always as it is.
Pellucid apprehension provides our satisfaction. Lured by an
experience of beauty and power in one, we seek the calm certainty of fixed insight.
3. When we look at a piece we may say that what is given
may be completed in any way whatever. Whereas rationalism
says the completion is unique, this view says the completion
is arbitrary. Any puzzle can have any shape cut from it, since
carving is arbitrary—the world has no joints. Thus given a
piece there is no way to tell from what puzzle it comes.
Reason neither determines nor limits a completion. This is a
skepticism. Whereas for the rationalist we are free if we grasp
necessity, for the skeptic we are free if we see that everything
is contingent and could be other than it is. The ethical version
of this is some sort of relativism. It may be conservative, as
with Montaigne, or revolutionary, as with the utopians, or
libertine, as with the young. Ethics might be grounded in current practice, understood as relative and historical, but if we
push this doctrine we see that current practice does not deter-
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mine its own continuation. Anything can follow anything
else, and we make up everything as we go along.
Skepticism is often an interim position on a path that ends
in celebrating art and activity. Looking beyond our puzzle
piece and finding no shape at which to aim, we project there
a figure of our own making, and get our satisfaction by bringing it into being. Of course skepticism is not the only source
of this impulse to generation. We might find outside our puzzle piece a latent ideal figure calling for realization. In either
case action, either production or deeds, engenders our satisfaction. We take the emptiness surrounding the puzzle piece
as the painter’s empty canvas, or the architect’s vacant lot, or
the engineer’s drawing board, or a field for sport, or the
silence in which we make our song. Or we may take it as the
empty space where our other half should be, a vacancy we fill
when, as we say, we make friends, or make love, or when,
extending our line beyond ourselves in a way that somehow
completes us, we beget children. Be it artifacts or deeds or
relationships, our satisfaction is made through effective
action.
4. When we look at a puzzle piece we may say that what
is given is discontinuous with what would complete it. An
epistemic gap divides what we know from what would give
us adequate moral and metaphysical insight. That gap cannot
be crossed by reason. The completion is given to us from the
other side of the chasm by divine revelation. This is a doctrine of faith. God is the puzzle that tells us what being is and
who we ought to be. Faith shares with skepticism a conviction
that reason is inadequate, and with rationalism a conviction
that our proper completion is unique. Like the Muslim, we
submit to a superior. In constant intimate relation with that
superior we find our satisfaction, like a little child who, leaping into the embrace of a loving parent, feels himself at home.
5. When we look at a puzzle piece we may deny that it is
complete, for it lacks wholeness. It is not in equilibrium, since
it satisfies neither intellect nor desire. We may be dissatisfied
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with the deductive completions we have seen, for they appear
to rest, despite their own intent, on premises that are neither
self-evident nor inescapable. We may deny that completion is
arbitrary, for such a conclusion itself seems arbitrary.9 If we
refuse revelation, reject the incompetence of reason, and
insist that thought and desire be satisfied rather than eliminated, we seem to be left with philosophy. We seek, as one
philosopher says, “...a means by which, reflecting on our
moral and intellectual experience conjointly, taking the world
and ourselves into account, we can put the whole thing
together” (Green, section 174).
6. Finally, we may look at our puzzle piece in some other
way. This residual category makes the list of alternatives formally complete. Notice how little insight mere formal completion gives.
Unmediated mindfulness, luminous certitude, free creativity, obedient faithfulness, persistent inquiry, or something
else—these are the ultimate ways. Philosophy, when it poses
the question about the best life, includes philosophy itself as
a candidate answer. This sort of philosophy, which I understand to be Socratic, tries to occupy a place between rhetoric
and mathematics. Like rhetoric, its fundamental questions
arise from concerns that shape and move the soul. Like mathematics, it seeks fully adequate insight. Its logic I believe to be
nonmonotonic, its inferences defeasible, which implies that it
must always be open to beginning again.
Of course when we ask for the best way of life we are
seeking not just candidate answers, but true answers.
Questions stretch us toward knowledge only if we desire the
truth. Philosophy may draw us toward excellence even
though, as Socrates found, it may not keep us out of trouble.
Finish Line
It is time to bring this essay to a close. We asked about questions. If we view asking a question as a conversational act, we
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can split asking into questionings where the asker knows the
answer and those where he does not. If we view a question as
an epistemological instrument that directs a course of inquiry,
we can split questions into those where ignorance is encompassed by knowledge and those where knowledge is encompassed by ignorance. Crossing these dichotomies breeds four
kinds of question. The search for the double square in the
Meno arose from an enclosed question asked by one who
knows. The question of human excellence, and the metaphysical questions which it resembles, are I believe of another type, namely, unenclosed questions asked by one who does
not know. The persistence of philosophical questions—the
fact that they won’t go away—stems from this. They are open
questions asked by those aware of their ignorance. Socrates in
the recollection myth implies that while our souls are broken,
imperfect and incomplete, the missing fragments drift submerged in our depths. We live the philosophic life when we
fish in the depths of the soul for what would make our knowledge and our excellence whole. Whether our nets are fine
enough, whether our lines are long enough, will remain for
us open questions.
Notes
1 It is not certain, of course, that Plato intends the Meno of the dialogue to be identical to Xenophon’s Meno. Jacob Klein in his commentary on the Meno says we are to make the identification, and so
should be astonished that a paragon of vice such as Meno would
initiate an inquiry into virtue. Klein may be right. If he is, it is
extremely unfortunate that no English translation of which I am
aware brings out the viciousness of Meno.
2
Blind children who are given a fragile object and told, “look but
don’t touch” respond by lightly running their fingers over the surface. “Looking” is seeking information through the sense of touch;
touching is manipulation, handling for one’s own purposes.
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3
“We may agree, perhaps, to understand by metaphysics an attempt
to know reality as against mere appearance, or the study of first
principles or ultimate truths, or again the effort to comprehend the
universe, not simply piecemeal or by fragments, but somehow as a
whole” (Bradley, 1).
4 For example, we could fill in the space in the corner with a single
figure composed of two different kinds of parts. Place the top half
of an ellipse on the hypotenuse of a right triangle whose equal
shorter sides are the same length as the sides of the other three
squares. The hypotenuse forms the major axis of the ellipse, and we
set the semi-minor axis to (√ 2)/π . The half-ellipse together with the
right triangle then make an area equal to that of each of the other
three squares.
5
Kant asserts that we can see now that certain speculative questions
are forever unanswerable; these are immortal questions. In the land
of truth, where knowledge can be grounded, Kant affirms instead
the immortality of questions, and he says the proper use of the Ideas
of pure reason is as regulative ideals within the phenomenal
domain.
6
“To say the reality is such that our knowledge cannot reach it, is
a claim to know reality; to urge that our knowledge is of a kind
which must fail to transcend appearance, itself implies that transcendence” (Bradley, 1).
7 “When I see the blind and wretched state of man, when I survey
the whole universe in its dumbness and man left to himself with no
light, as though lost in this corner of the universe, without knowing
who put him there, what he has come to do, what will become of
him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to
terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert
island, who wakes up quite lost and with no means of escape”
(Pascal, Pensées, #198).
9
“Our reason is not like a plane indefinitely far extended, the limits of which we know in a general way only; but must rather be
compared to a sphere, the radius of which can be determined from
the curvature of the arc of its surface—that is to say, from the nature
of synthetic a priori propositions—and whereby we can likewise
specify with certainty its volume and limits. Outside this sphere (the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
field of experience) there is nothing that can be an object for reason; nay, the very questions in regard to such supposed objects
relate only to subjective principles of a complete determination of
those relations which can come under the concepts of the understanding and which can be found within the empirical sphere”
(Kant, 607-608).
9
It is not the skepticism of the skeptic that I object to; it is the dogmatism. Until one has encountered it repeatedly, it is hard to credit the insistent and unyielding conviction behind the claim “It’s true
that there is no truth.”
References
Bradley, F. H. Appearance and Reality. London: Oxford University
Press, 1893.
Eliot, T. S. The Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950. New York,
NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1971.
Green, Thomas Hill. Prolegomena to Ethics. New York, NY:
Thomas Crowell/Apollo,1883/1969.
Hobbes, T. Leviathan. Indianapolis, IN: Library of Liberal
Arts,1958.
Kant, I. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp
Smith. London: Macmillan,1929.
Pascal, B. Pensées. Translated by A. J. Krailsheimer. London:
Penguin, 1966.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Civil Disobedience. Ed. Owen
Thomas. New York, NY: Norton, 1966.
Whitehead, A. N. Process and Reality. (1978 Corrected Edition
edited by D. R. Griffin and D. W Sherburne). New York, NY:
.
Macmillan, The Free Press, 1978.
MAWBY
95
�
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The St. John's Review
Volume XLVII, number one (2003)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
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James Carey
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
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�2
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�3
Contents
Essays and Lectures
Philosophy and Resurrection:
The Gospel According to Spinoza ................................. 5
John Cornell
What Tree is This?: In Praise of Europe's Renaissance
Printers, Publishers and Philologists ......................... ... 39
Chaninah Maschler
The Empires of the Sun and the West ... ....................... 83
Eva Brann
Plato's Timaeus and the Will to Order......... ........ .... .. 13 7
Peter Kalkavage
�4
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�5
i
Philosophy and Resurrection:
The Gospel according to
Spinoza
John F. Cornell
Many years ago, as a student in a course on philosophy, I
wrote the obligatory essay on David Hume's theory of causality, laying out his famous criticism of the principle of cause
and effect taken as a ground for metaphysical knowledge. I
gave my draft to a typist, as was common before the days of
computerized word processing. I recall my annoyance when I
received back the typed version of my paper on Hume's idea
of cause. The title read: "David Hume on Casual
Relationships." Now I understand that the Scottish philosopher enjoyed himself in the salons of Paris as much as any
foreign visitor, and that the new title had some potential as a
line of research. But that was not the paper I had written; and
so I had to insist that my typist correct a good hundred references to "casual connections" and the like, to express the
more philosophical affair of causality.
This correction of my academic essay recurred to me
recently in reading the books of Spinoza. It recurred to me
because this transformation of "casual" into "causal experience" seemed a perfect summary of the philosophical life as
Spinoza understood it. While Hume, the skeptic, saw our
minds' ideas somewhat as my typist had, with no great
distinction between the casual and the causal, Spinoza made
much of the difference. He taught that "casual experience,"
where things merely happen to us, is our lowest level of
awareness. If we do not wish to live and think merely at
random, we have to raise our minds above the accidents of
existence that have generated our opinions and pursue the
John Cornell is a tutor at the Santa Fe campus of St. John's College. This
essay was delivered as a lecture in Santa Fe in October 11, 2002.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
deeper reasons for things, the causal necessities inherent in
Nature . We have to replace our vague notions with what
Spinoza calls "adequate ideas," ideas manifesting their logical
power in the comprehensive order of thought.1 The distinction between casual and causal thinking thus marks for him
the two endpoints of the steep path that leads from mere
opinion or collective belief to wisdom.
The departure point of belief that Spinoza generally has
in mind is biblical religion. He holds that the foundation of
all adequate ideas is the idea of God. But he deems the stories
of the Bible to reflect a natural, in-adequate opinion about
deity and the divine rewards and punishments. The God
whose special providence in human history is described in
Scripture is a casually received notion answering to imagination. Spinozist philosophy, however, revises the idea of God,
understanding God as the one Substance conceived in and
through itself. He finds it necessary to revise other biblical
concepts, too-the "love of God," "divine decree," "blessedness," "salvation" and "true religion." Judaism and
Christianity take these ideas in an inadequate sense, whereas
his philosophy assigns them their proper meaning. Now we
know few details about the early thinking of Spinoza, which
led to his expulsion from the Synagogue in 1656. But we
might deduce that his original confrontation with orthodoxy
arose from his radical redefinition of religious language to
make its primary object purely philosophical.
Spinoza comes to rewrite the European treaty between
philosophy and faith on similar terms. He reverses the
doctrine of Thomas Aquinas that the truths of religion are
above human reason, and teaches that it is the philosopher
who knows true blessedness. What the religious believer
believes is a shadow of what the serious thinker thinks (53).
This teaching entails a unique, philosophical view of the
Gospel, which I shall try to explain by looking at Spinoza's
understanding of the idea of resurrection.
�CORNELL
7
In general, Spinoza's achievement resembles that of the
navigators who sought a new route to the East Indies and
incidentally discovered America. In the course of re-negotiating the relation of faith and philosophy, and arguing for the
separation of church and state, Spinoza incidentally founded
modern biblical criticism.2 Most scholarly explorations of the
Bible today take place on the spiritual continent that he
discovered. Yet what may be particularly significant for us in
the 21st century, as we study his view of the New Testament,
is the difference between him and present-day students of
Scripture. The difference lies in this paradox of Spinoza's
thought-that, as an interpreter of the Bible, he is more radical and rational than our contemporaries, but at the same
time he is a more considerate and humane advocate of biblical religion.
Spinoza and Present-day New Testament Scholars
I should begin by clarifying this claim about Spinoza's superiority. When one walks into an urban bookstore today, one
finds shelves upon shelves of books of the latest biblical
research, books disputing the Old and New Testaments as
creditable texts and traditions. Few of the more popular of
these writers hold anything sacred except what goes by the
name of "scientific history." On our topic, the rising from the
dead, we might find a book-length debate entitled Jesus'
Resurrection: Fact or Figment, or a video of a lecture with the
subtitle "The Greatest Hoax in History?" The blend of vulgarity and sophistication in these scholars is striking. But one
should also be on the lookout for the bad conscience betrayed
sometimes in their prose. For the majority of them are exreligionists who have not thought their way to any sound philosophy or even to a learned ignorance.3 As a result many of
them indulge guiltily in the destruction of traditional biblical
faith, while they themselves are unable to replace it with any
comparably profound vision of life, a vision that might continue to bind people to community and meaningful activity.4
�8
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Spinoza, by contrast, writes the Theological-Political
Treatise in the Latin of the learned, and further specifies that
he only addresses philosophers. Even so, he is cautious about
disclosing his boldest thoughts. While driving his stake into
the heart of religious fanaticism (and this in the service of
religion), he refrains from explicit criticism of the founding
miracles of either Judaism or Christianity, the revelation to
Moses on Mt. Sinai or Jesus' Resurrection. Publicly he
respects these miracles as constitutive of particular religious
faiths. In human terms, what matters about the Resurrection
is not the literal fact of the event (which, as we'll see, Spinoza
does not believe). What matters is what the Resurrection
means spiritually and practically to people as an idea. This
distinction corresponds to the general distinction he makes
between the truth of the Bible as a factual account of the
world and what the text's language means (91)5. For Spinoza,
biblical science could establish the essential thing for faith,
the meanings of scriptural texts, which converge in their
moral message. But believers would be mistaken to try to
establish the factual truth of, say, the miraculous events in the
history of salvation (52, 85). Establishing truth always leads
to questions of a philosophical sort. Spinoza would have
considered our contemporaries, continually testing religious
"facts" (like Creation or the Resurrection) through scientific
research and debates, as rather too literal-minded-as misunderstanding the aims of both Scripture and science.6
What Spinoza thought decided the question of religion
vs. philosophy was not the persuasiveness of some research
but the attractiveness of a particular way of life (38). This is
a point that few present-day Bible scholars understand,
perhaps because they have not made such a choice and are
neither full-fledged philosophers nor whole-hearted believers. For Spinoza, as I said, philosophers are committed to
thinking beyond accepted beliefs to a comprehension of the
whole. But most people (including philosophers in their
youth) require the support that traditional belief gives their
�CORNELL
9
efforts to live good lives. This distinction between the
philosopher and the believer-the distinction that today's
Bible scholars ignore-is important for the way it enters into
Spinoza's understanding of the New Testament and makes it
so exceptional. He holds that this distinction between the
freedom of philosophy and the natural necessity of religion is
the key to understanding Jesus. Jesus counts as a philosopher
precisely because his thinking was distinct from the religion
he taught (55,146,148). It is even reported by Spinoza's
confidant Ehrenfried von Tschirnhaus that Spinoza held Jesus
to be the "consummate philosopher." "Christum ait fuisse
summum philosophum. "7
Now one might object that such a view of the founder of
Christianity only shows Spinoza's bias. His enterprise is to
impose a naturalistic viewpoint upon the Bible and its
miracles. Of course he would project his own rationalistic
mind back onto Jesus, just as he overrates Solomon's wisdom
and Moses' political craft. Moreover, the objector might ask,
how do the rationalized heroes of Bible history that Spinoza
imagines result from his own rule of interpretation, of strictly adhering to the book? Yet Spinoza would remind his critic
that he defends the rights of reason against religion on scriptural grounds. He does not just reduce miracles through a
systematic naturalism. He argues that theology has made
more out of miracles than the Bible intended (78-79, 85-86) .
Europeans took the "miraculous," which is largely an idiom
in biblical poetry, as literal truth (17, 80-4).8 Spinoza's rules
for biblical interpretation only generalize this check on
anachronistic practices (89). So long as scholars proceed
through apt comparisons and with linguistic sensitivity, they
are free to interpret the Bible rationally and speculatively (57,
78, 82, 85, 92, 94-101, 158-9, 162-3). Spinoza's rule of
establishing scriptural teaching systematically from Scripture
itself is a guide for historical accuracy (86, 90-2), not an
excuse for literalism. He is far from underestimating the
Bible's intellectual power,9 and that is all his reading of Jesus
�10
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
insists upon. Spinoza discerns a bold philosophical mind
behind the Gospel texts, bolder than theologians might imagine. He only conceals the full import of his view of Jesus, for
he has no desire whatsoever to disturb the beliefs of ordinary
believers. He would simply indicate to philosophical readers
that the Gospel's historic power is no miracle to one
acquainted with the power of philosophy. Today's "quest for
the historical Jesus," forever entangled in religious controversy, was not only anticipated by Spinoza but also concluded by him to his own satisfaction. Jesus was a thinkera thinker with a new program, as we shall see.
Jesus' New Idea of Salvation according to Spinoza
Let us look more closely at the Treatise with this problem of
Jesus in mind. At the foundation of the Treatise is a distinction between philosophical or causal knowledge of nature
and the knowledge revealed to the prophets that they teach
to everyone. Now bear in mind that the Treatise teaches that
all knowledge is divine, and that prophetic knowledge may
simply duplicate natural knowledge under another form (9).
That leaves us to wonder what the genuinely prophetic
knowledge is, that might be unexplainable in any natural
terms. This question will play a subtle role in Spinoza's
interpretation of Jesus-or "Christ," to use the name Spinoza
chooses. Only on one point will it turn out that Christ has
characteristically prophetic knowledge. I promise to come to
that shortly. The greatest part of Christ's wisdom is simply
natural. Spinoza teaches that God communicates to philosophical minds naturally without mediation, and that
Scripture exhibits Christ's communication with God to be
like that-a direct intellectual intuition, "mind to mind" (14 ).
Although Spinoza never puts it so bluntly, Christ appears to
be specifically a Spinozist philosopher, since he assigns Christ
the indispensable credentials for philosophy according to
Spinoza's other writings. Christ perceived the things revealed
to him truly and adequately and he taught these things, at
�CORNELL
11
least to his disciples, as eternal truths rather than as laws
designed for the good of human beings (55-6).
Now, in declaring Christ's knowledge to be "true and
adequate," Spinoza refers us to Jesus' parables of the kingdom and to Matthew 13 in particular. Here Spinoza hit the
bull's-eye. In Matthew 13, Jesus addresses to the crowd parables of "things hidden since the foundation of the world."
Then, taking the disciples to private quarters, he restates the
speech, but with subtle verbal omissions and substitutions. It
can be argued-though we will not do so here-that this private speech of Jesus on what he calls scandal explains the
essential enmity that motivates the behavior of groups and
individuals.lO Spinoza's claim for Jesus' higher knowledge has
good scriptural support.ll The Gospel actually shows Jesus
adapting an obscure wisdom to the unschooled multitude
(55).
Spinoza thus discovers in Christ not a Savior sent to take
away the sins of humankind-at least not in the mysterious
theological sense-but a sage attempting to enlighten the
mass of humanity. Similarly, Spinoza wonders about the
import of certain remarks by the apostle Paul. Why does Paul
regularly state in his epistles that he is adapting his language
for ordinary human comprehension? Why does he say openly that it is not possible to say everything openly? Why does
Paul speak of having the mind of Christ, referring ambiguously to a spirit of knowledge as well as to a more encompassing spiritual renewal? (56) Much takes place in the New
Testament, in Spinoza's view, as if Jesus and some of his
disciples spoke the scriptural language of redemption as an
idiom to capture the imagination of the Gentile world without the world being able to realize just how ambiguous that
idiom might be.
Now at the heart of the Bible's mission to the Gentiles is
the teaching of "true virtue." Spinoza considers the demonstration of the "divinity" of Scripture to hang upon the truth
of its moral doctrine (90). But let us beware. Since all knowl-
�12
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
edge is divine, the Bible's "divinity" can prove nothing about
its special, supernatural source. Moreover if, as Spinoza
insists, the study of the Bible only yields what its language
means and not the truth of what it says, then only a philosopher can demonstrate its divinity through its true moral
doctrine. For only the philosopher can compare biblical
teaching to a true account of morality-like Spinoza's Ethics,
which derives the social virtues from first principles (51,
58).12 The Treatise proceeds as if the divinity of Scripture
were established by anyone and from Scripture alone, since
Scripture has to tell us what its idea of true virtue is (90). But
this procedure only tests the reader's mettle. Spinoza also
teaches that how much the reader sees into the truth of the
Bible, as truth, depends on how much reason there is in the
reader (101). Later he turns this question of the method of
discerning biblical truth into a question about the historical
origin of that truth in reason. The Apostles themselves, he
tells us, depended on a related method of rational deductions.
He says darkly that they drew many conclusions from whatever Christ revealed to them, and that they could well have
disclosed a few things but they declined to do so (146) .13
Now surely the apostles and prophets could not have
relied upon pure reason for their doctrine of God. For, in
teaching humanity about God's Providence, they attribute to
God affections such as love and forgiveness; whereas unaided philosophical reason cannot recognize the attribution of
feeling to God (166-7). Thus the teaching about God's care,
which is indispensable to the moral effort of most everyone,
reaches people through sacred Writ. Yet, according to
Spinoza, the Bible's view of Providence is not definite. He
claims that the Bible does not teach "formally" in what way
precisely God cares for all those who worship him and
practice good works (93). Scripture allows for both a popular idea of God's relation to humanity and a purely rational
idea (163). God may be taken as the exemplar of good life
because he has a just disposition (popular conception), or
�CORNELL
13
because we see by means of God what is true and just (philosophical conception). God may direct human affairs by giving
commandments or by letting some men discover natural laws
as "eternal truths" (168, cf. 56).
Now if knowledge of the way God directs the world is
not the specialty of the prophets, is not the distinctive knowledge for which we can rely on them, then what is their claim
to superior vision? Spinoza's answer-which he has presupposed throughout his discussion-is given in Chapter 15. The
essential prophetic insight is this, that those without understanding may be saved-the salvation of the ignorant.
Scripture not only teaches true virtue and obedience to all
human beings, whether they are philosophers or not, but it
also teaches that everyone may be saved. People without any
genuine understanding, indeed people with mistaken ideas
(say, about how Providence really works), if they practice
charity and justice, can achieve blessedness. Now the reader
of the Treatise must be aware that in Chapter 4 Spinoza
defines "blessedness" as the knowledge of God. Our true
salvation, our "supreme good" is philosophical knowledge, of
which God is the totality (51-2). So serious is Spinoza about
the philosopher's blessedness, that at one point he identifies
the Holy Spirit itself as the rational spirit of truth, regardless
even of how the prophets and historians of the Scriptures
expressed or experienced it (95). But in Chapter 15, he
redefines the Holy Spirit in a way that takes it to be clearly
accessible to all, not just to philosophers or the God-filled
prophets. Here he calls the Holy Spirit the peace of mind
resulting from "good actions" (177). On this view everyone,
even people with no learning at all, may be "saved."
From page one of the Treatise Spinoza has assumed an
uncompromising philosophical standpoint in looking at the
Bible. Wisdom for him is the gold standard of "salvation." In
Chapter 15 he presents almost as a philosophical curiosity the
idea that people without wisdom can be "saved." But this
curiosity happens to constitute the distinguishing feature of
�14
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
biblical revelation (175-77). And such a feature of revelation
must affect, in particular, Spinoza's account of Christianity, as
Christianity is a teaching addressed to all humankind. Now if
we turn back to Chapter 1, and to that one point on which
(as I said earlier) Christ's knowledge surpassed ordinary
philosophy, I believe we shall see how Spinoza implicated
Christ in this business of the salvation of the ignorant:
A man who can perceive by pure intuition that
which is not contained in the basic principles of
our cognition and cannot be deduced therefrom
must needs possess a mind whose excellence far
surpasses the human mind. Therefore I do not
believe that anyone has attained such a degree of
perfection surpassing all others, except Christ. To
him God's ordinances leading men to salvation
were revealed, not by words or by visions, but
directly (14)
Now the attribution to Christ of an intuition of what is not
encompassed by human cognition surely makes Christ superhuman. So one might have thought. But there is a verbal subtlety here, which the English translations obscure. Spinoza's
text does not use the term "human" as a positive description
of "mind," except in this passage. Instead, it plainly states
early on that "mind," meaning the thinker's experience of
certitude, is divine (1 0). Hence saying that Christ has a mind
"far surpass[ing] the human mind" does not place Christ
above philosophers. In fact, when Spinoza first uses this
expression, "far surpassing" (Ionge excellentiore),14 it is to say
that all mental intuition surpasses by far our grasp of words
(10). The only superiority Spinoza grants to Christ is one of
degree-as this translation has it, he "attained such a degree
of perfection." Spinoza goes on to specify that Christ received
by direct intuition "the ordinances leading men to salvation"
(14 ). This is a valuable clue to Christ's particular excellence,
but the reader cannot appreciate it until he or she reads later,
�CORNELL
15
in Chapter 15, that the one biblical idea above philosophy is
the salvation of people who are ignorant but righteous (174).
Retrospectively the implication is clear. Christ's "higher"
intuition, formerly unknown to philosophy, was the insight
that confirmed and expanded the prophets' teaching
(cf. 224). Christ saw that all ignorant but righteous people in
the world could be saved.15
The reader who discerns Spinoza's hypothesis about
Christ must apply it to a rereading of the Treatise in order to
realize its full implication. Spinoza claims Jesus for philosophy because he sees him as universalizing the Hebraic mission
of saving the unlearned (79). He sees him as recasting biblical
beliefs so that they apply to every soul independently of political context-inspiring in all people a faithful way of life that
resembles the conduct of the wise (161). Spinoza hints in
chapters 4, 5 and 11 that Jesus' popular teaching was a philosophical contrivance (55, 67-8, 146), and in chapter 13 that
such a contrivance was not in fact unknown to the prophets
(158, 169). Then in chapter 14 he derives by rational deductions a popular religion-including the indispensable but
non-philosophical precepts about God's love and forgiveness-a religion that happens to correspond to the Gospel. In
this religion, he says, a believer whose heart is inspired by the
love of God "knows Christ according to the spirit" (167).
The faithful person can "know" Christ without actually
participating (like the philosopher) in Christ's knowledge.
Spinoza's points all add up. Jesus reasoned out a general,
interior gospel on the conviction that the ignorant could be
saved. He taught what all people should do and believe in
order to experience an inward blessedness like that of the
philosopher (177)16.
A tentative sketch of the founder of Christianity as
Spinoza saw him begins to come into focus. While both the
Hebrew prophets and the philosophers of late antiquity had
glimpsed the possibility of improving human accord and thus
the fortunes of wisdom in the world, pagan polytheism had
�16
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
presented a general obstacle. For it inspired only a shallow
piety in the multitude and never commanded the social
virtues. But a sage like Jesus, arising amidst the people of the
one righteous Lord, might abstract the great moral lessons of
the prophets and broadcast them in order to pursue several
great objectives (94, 224). First, to try to preserve the spirit
of Israel, as Israel would find herself dispersed increasingly
through the Roman Empire. Second, to expose the Empire as
a mere secular authority despite its cult of divine emperors.
And third, to awaken in the Gentile world a desire for spiritual blessings and a collective life more compatible with
reason. The heart of the new program was the simplified
creed that taught the salvation of all people. But if this
general salvation was opaque to most philosophers, Spinoza
saw far enough into the Gospel to recommend it from a
powerfully practical viewpoint (17 6). For, properly understood, the Gospel would help foster the conditions of enlightenment, both for philosophers and for the multitudes, in this
world, in generations to come.17
The difficulty for us in grasping Spinoza's account of
Christianity lies not just in conceiving a Jesus with a rational
program for humanity. The difficulty also lies in imagining
Spinoza's approach to the New Testament. Unlike most of us,
he was learned in all the great Jewish literature. He did not
begin with the assumption that the Gentile Christian theologians knew best how to read Gospels and Epistles that were
written by Jews in a Hebraic style (90, 100). Himself in
possession of older and subtler practices of interpretation, he
viewed later Christian theology as translating the Bible's
extravagant poetry into dogmatic absurdities (16-21, 89).
When Spinoza conceived Jesus as a sage who taught a popular salvation, he by no means thought he flouted the account
of Jesus in the Gospel. Here is where a closer look at the
theme of resurrection may be illuminating. A philosophical
inquiry into Christianity can hardly ignore its central miracle,
though, as I mentioned, the Treatise does just that.18 Yet in a
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private letter we find Spinoza's view that the Resurrection is
not an actual physical event, but rather a powerful idea suited to the general imagination. For him the "true" resurrection
is salvation through philosophy, which is the topic of his
book, the Ethics. So our next step is to become acquainted
with his thinking about resurrection in these other texts.
Then we can test the adequacy of that thinking by trying to
read the Gospel from Spinoza's standpoint, seeing if the
Gospel treats the theme of resurrection at all compatibly with
his theories. The second half of this essay will therefore take
up two questions. What is salvation through philosophy for
Spinoza such that the believer's faith in the Resurrection
could stand in for it? Can we find in the Gospel Spinoza's
Christ, a philosopher who preaches the Resurrection as the
means of saving the unlearned? Let us try to be open to
Spinoza's boldest thoughts.
Philosophical and Popular Salvation in Spinoza
We saw in the Treatise that, to explain divine Providence,
Spinoza distinguished a popular idea from a philosophical
one. The popular mind imagines God caring for people like
an attentive, invisible parent. Spinoza's Ethics spells out that
this conception is a reflex of the believer's emotional needs.
These may evolve into the desire to find special favor with
God, to search out the divine will so as to be on the winning
side. Philosophy, the Ethics explains, has a more sublime
conception - an adequate idea of God. From experiences like
that of intuitive certainty in mathematics,19 it envisions the
divine intellect as working by necessity. God who lacks nothing desires nothing. He predetermines things without willing
or aiming at them: to have purposes would betoken imperfection. Hence God does not make extrinsic objects. He
expresses his infinite power into Nature-expresses it through
his attributes, which are dynamic like verbs, rather than static properties like adjectives.20 God is ceaselessly entering into
everything. Such is Spinoza's view, and the philosophical view
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
that he suspects lay behind the Hebrew scriptures (though
they have come down to us in a corrupted condition).21
Spinoza denies to human sentiment the satisfactions that
the God of tradition afforded, but he purports to give no
small compensation. The adequate idea or the "intellectual
love of God" sublimates the old feeling for divinity and
raises it above deception. It needs no sanction outside itself.
From blind obedience we turn to a dynamic vision of eternal
truth, according to which everything moves by causal necessities-including human beings. Over against this cosmic
necessity, the categories of the human moral world-praise
and blame, merit and sin-appear as inadequate opinions
with no power beyond our conventions (d. 49). In the universe at large the human moral perspective is a small affair,
like the interests of the salamander or the fly. Philosophers in
pursuit of self-understanding seek a connection with the larger Whole. They look suspiciously not upon the passions, as
the moralists do, but upon the moralists' self-centered ideas
about attaining the Good. Indeed the moralists' doctrine of
free will is misleading. Free will describes only our ignorance
of the causes that move us as we experience our own striving.
Philosophers prefer to search out the unconscious causes of
desire and envy. They would look upon passion without
passion, and transform it into the higher pleasure of interpreting it. In the end, if their conduct surpasses the ethical
standard of the city, it is because they are moved by reason's
deepest necessities.
Relieved of the illusory notion of the will, the philosopher is little aggravated by other people's "willfulness."
Others' offenses, like everything in the world, have causes,
the understanding of which robs them of their power to
offend.22 What we take to be a nuisance or an evil, Spinoza
says in the Ethics,
arises from the fact that [we] conceive these things
in a disturbed, mutilated, and confused manner:
and on this account (the strong human being]
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endeavors to conceive things as they are in themselves, and to remove obstacles from true knowledge.23
The so-called "problem of evil" is dispelled like vapor. It
arose simply by mistaking God for a human mind and mistaking human minds for separate, free agents. The philosopher meditates on the general causes of things and declines to
take the cosmos so personally.
Spinoza admits the existence of freedom in one sense.
Namely, freedom as the escape from ignorance that begins
when one is disencumbered of the very notion of evil. A
proposition in the Ethics states, "If men were born free, they
would form no conception of good or evil as long as they
were free." (4.48) But we are not born free, because instead
of wisdom and judgment we acquire opinions about good and
evil. We are conditioned and motivated by others' emotions;
we are ingrained in the fear of death. We "fall" into mere
nature-this is the mythical expression-we descend to an
inferior psychic state where every pain and anxiety is designated an "evil." Spinoza is actually re-interpreting Genesis in
a non-moral sense, as a note to this proposition spells out:
Thus it is related that God prohibited free man
from eating of the tree of knowledge of good and
evil, and that as soon as he ate of it, at once he
began to fear death rather than to desire to live;
again, when man found woman, who agreed most
perfectly with his own nature, he knew that there
could be nothing in nature more useful to him; but
that afterwards, when he thought that the brute
creation were similar to himself, he began at once
to imitate their emotions and lost his freedom,
which the Patriarchs under the guidance of the
spirit of Christ, that is, the idea of God, afterwards
recovered: on this idea alone it depends that man
should be free, and that he should desire for other
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
20
men the good which he desires for himself. (cf. 5457)24
Spinoza is saying that latent in every human being is the adequate idea of God or (as he calls it here) the "spirit of Christ."
Whatever our individual histories, the realization of that ideal
of wisdom would be a release from fear and obsession, from
passivity and the irrational imitation of others. What does
this Spinozist liberation look like?
Before proceeding to answer this question by further
glossing Spinoza's Ethics, I should cite the crucial statement
he makes in a letter about Christ's Resurrection. In a way it
contains our answer. For Spinoza the Resurrection is an
incontrovertibly profound symbol (cf. 83, 95). It describes for
all minds the shift in a person's spiritual center of gravity
from the self to the presence of God in the self. Remember:
the special virtue of prophecy and religion is to teach everyone, which philosophy as philosophy fails to do.
I ... conclude [Spinoza writes] that the resurrection
of Christ from the dead was really spiritual, and
was revealed only to the faithful in a way adapted
to their thought, namely that Christ had been
endowed with eternity and rose from the dead
(here I understand the dead in the sense in which
Christ did when he said, "Let the dead bury their
dead"), and also by his life and death gave an
example of extraordinary holiness, and that he
raises his disciples from the dead, in so far as they
follow the example of his life and death. And it
would not be difficult to explain the whole teaching of the Gospel in accordance with this hypothesis. (emphasis added)25
Spinoza goes on to say (and with reason) that Paul's arguments in 1 Corinthians 15 agree with him that the
Resurrection is spiritual.26 However Jesus' immediate disciples may have experienced his Resurrection, its spiritual
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essence was his being "endowed with eternity." He rose from
the dead in the sense of rising gloriously above the living
death that people accept as human life, and the disciples truly
rise from the dead when they follow Jesus' example.27 The
"fact" of the Resurrection is the spiritual event effected by
faith. Faith makes the faithful person active and able to fulfill
a higher vocation in joy.
Now to return to Spinoza's Ethics. It traces out a hereand-now "resurrection" on the plane of rational metaphysics.
(Again I must reduce the argument to simple steps.) The idea
of every person exists in God.28 Initially an individual has but
an inkling of it. What one calls one's "self" is largely one's
body's idea, one's ego we might say today, defined and affected by other people's egos,29 One's eternal essence remains
impersonal and unrealized. But rational people derive from
the adequate idea of God other adequate ideas about how the
soul functions. They learn to transform the affects that are
passions, incited in the social entanglement of inadequate
ideas, into affects associated with the joy of self-understanding,30 Spinoza's is a philosophy of endeavor: the endeavor to
be who one truly is, is the activity of God within.31 As
individuals reinforce their true being with whatever outside
them enhances it, they move by degrees toward intellection
of their true natures-as if a special Providence were guiding
them,32 Thus the self as an essence understood increases at
the expense of the inadequate idea held by the empirical self.
The individual's irreducible, original essence-at one time
impersonal and unrealized-is gradually personalized and
eternalized.33 In an early sketch of the Ethics, Spinoza called
this arrival at self-knowledge a rebirth-echoing the Gospel
of John.34 The rationally enlightened person is thus like the
man born blind in that Gospel, who washes away the mud
and begins to see. He can now say meaningfully, "It is 1." Or
to be precise, he says, "I am," ego eimi Uohn 9:10, cf. 6:20).
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Resurrection as Philosophical Allegory in the Gospel of John
Now let us turn to John's Gospel, to chapter 11 on the raising of Lazarus, to test the plausibility of Spinoza's conception
of Christ and resurrection from the biblical side. Spinoza
himself took Lazarus as a test case. According to Pierre Bayle,
the French philosopher who lived in Rotterdam, Spinoza told
his friends that "if he had been able to convince himself of the
resurrection of Lazarus, he would have broken his system
into pieces."35 Perhaps Spinoza was implying that the Gospel
itself did not really try to convince him of a literal resuscitation of a dead man. For John's story of Lazarus is extremely
odd and provokes a series of questions in the inquiring reader. Indeed, since the early Church Fathers the story of Lazarus
has sometimes been taken as an allegory.36 For no one had
found this Lazarus, the alleged friend of Jesus, in any other
ancient source,37 John may well have invented him. Such
invention is called midrash, the Jewish practice of elaborating
tales on Biblical ideas. Spinoza assumes this practice in his
general account of the Bible and recognizes the special role
midrash had in generating the Gospels (21, 146-7).38 For him
the Christian scriptures were characteristic products of the
Hebrew genius,39 for which the notion of history never
excluded fiction and poetic play. Each Gospel writer had pursued freely his own original method of teaching (147). Paul
had not hesitated to lead the Christian movement, having
fetched inspiration from the mere echo of Jesus' words.
Spinoza's awareness of the evangelical imagination made him
audacious about reinterpreting the New Testament texts; but
this audacity comes out in reference to few specific
passages.40 We cannot say exactly how he read John's text
about Lazarus. Nor can we pretend to offer this text's "true"
meaning on objective grounds. (As Spinoza knew, when it
comes to the speculative reading of Scripture, there are no
rigorous proofs.41) But we can develop a rough idea of how
a philosopher might read this resurrection episode in John.
We can try to "explain" the chapter on Lazarus as Spinoza
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suggested in the letter I cited-according to the "hypothesis"
that the whole Gospel takes resurrection to be a spiritual
awakening rather than a literal event.
Clearly John 11 teaches that resurrection follows from
belief in Jesus (11:25). But reading it as a factual account of
Jesus' power to revive a corpse does run into a paradox. For
how would any factual proof of such power over nature be
consistent with belief? Moreover, readers cannot come to
believe in Jesus and the Resurrection the way the characters
in the story do, for these latter are on the scene for the miracle. Perhaps we should first ask, what exactly is the miracle?
The very premise of the story, the fact of Lazarus' physical
death, is made ambiguous from the start. Jesus says Lazarus is
not sick with the sickness one dies from.42 When Jesus later
mentions Lazarus's "death," it is following a metaphorical
speech about spiritual deadness. It is his disciples' dullness
that takes the "death" of the living literally. Then, we note
that Lazarus' sisters suggest that his "death" is a result of jesus
not being there with him, the absence that the text dramatizes by having Jesus not go to Lazarus when he hears of his "illness" (11:6). The text becomes coherent if we posit (after
Spinoza) that Lazarus's illness-not-unto-death is metaphysical, like the ailment we call the "human condition"-the universal affliction of the "absence of God."43 This illness would
still be "for the glory of God," as Jesus says (11:4). Only
the glory here would be the "awakening" that follows a
person's experience of absolute loss and disillusionment. As
Spinoza observed, death in the Bible is a metaphor for life
lived in anxiety about all sorts of evils. Resurrection is the
higher identity a person attains that overcomes this attitude
(Mt 8:22, Jn 5 :25).
This metaphorical reading agrees well with Psalm 82,
which Jesus cites in John immediately before we hear about
Lazarus. In fact, the Psalm teaches a view of Genesis something like Spinoza's. All humans are gods, children of the
Most High, but all are living under the reign of mortality.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
According to the psalm, the weak and needy go about in
darkness, without knowledge, whereas those who should be
enlightened have done little to help humankind. Is this the
human situation that Jesus remedies, allegorically, in John
11? When Jesus proposes to go to Lazarus in Judaea, the
disciples-most un-philosophically-declare their fear of
death: they all might be killed with Jesus on the way. Jesus
replies with a metaphor inspired by the psalm: they have to
learn to walk in the night by the light within (11: 10;
Ps. 82:5). He adds that Lazarus "sleeps," associating Lazarus
with these disciples who are in the dark. Ironically, Jesus'
hints are lost on the disciples who take his speech literally. For
such as them, Lazarus' death and their visit to his tomb must
be literal events. But if we understand Lazarus' "death" and
"illness" to refer to one and the same condition, then the
story takes place in a beautiful figurative sense. Jesus calls
Lazarus by name out of the cave of the unconscious; he
enjoins the crowd to unbind him, so that he can emerge as an
individual.44 Note that not all of the disciples are left out of
the language game surrounding Lazarus' uncertain "death."
For Thomas the twin-the double man-responds with a
double meaning of his own to Jesus' proposal to go to
Judaea.45 He says "Let us go and die with him," obscuring
whether he means literally to die with Jesus, or figuratively to
die and be raised with Lazarus. So the chapter plays upon the
ambiguity of what is literal and what is literature. Thus it
unfolds on two planes simultaneously, addressing different
readers in their different needs.
Prominent among the needs of most readers is the need
for a God (like Jesus ought to be) who does not leave human
beings in the lurch. Notice, almost everyone in John's story
complains about the evil of Jesus letting Lazarus die. Martha
is the first. This wouldn't have happened, she says, if Jesus
had been here. Mary follows suit: her accusation is the first
thing out of her mouth. Finally the crowd chimes in with the
complaint against Jesus-like a chorus in a Greek tragedy,
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always a little late but nonetheless helpful in stating the
theme. For the crowd fully generalizes the grievance against
Jesus. They ask (with unintended irony), couldn't the man
who opened the eyes of the blind have kept poor Lazarus
from dying? Spinoza would detect in that complaint all the
anxiety that people have named the problem of evil (1-2).
Why did God let such and such tragedy happen? Martha, in
her grief, hints at the possibility of a miracle. The
Resurrection on the Last Day, she implies, is not doing much
for her or her brother now! So Jesus tells her (ambiguously),
I am the Resurrection and the Life who does indeed "work"
right now. People need assurance of God's willing compensations for the felt evils of the world. And Jesus gives them what
they ask.
How the "miracle" of raising the dead works-how Jesus
helps people overcome their passive devastation by the
world-seems to be indicated in a curious passage. Martha
goes to Mary to say the Master calls her, and Mary immediately "rises." But as far as the reader knows, Jesus may or may
not have called her as Martha claims. On the textual facts
alone, Mary's getting up is an effect of pure faith that she is
personally called. Is this not the faith that Spinoza says lifts
people out of their misery? Twice it is said that Mary
"rises"-once using the same Greek word as is used for
Lazarus' rising (anistemi: 11:23). The second time the crowd
watches her rise up-an even plainer adumbration of the
Lazarus "miracle." This superfluous vignette is not so
superfluous if we see it as a genuine miniature of the Lazarus
drama-a play within the play, reflecting the very power of
belief that the larger story calls upon. In other words, the text
is self-conscious. It points to its own concern to move people
in their secret depths (11 :28) in accord with their idea of a
personal God.
Yet this is not the only moment when John's text affords
us a higher perspective on his miracle play of Lazarus. As the
people remove the stone from Lazarus' tomb, and Jesus is
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
about to call him forth, he makes a not too subtle aside.
"Father, I thank you, that you have heard me. And I know
that you always hear me, but because of the crowd (ton
ochlon) who are standing by I said this, that they may believe
that you sent me." Here Jesus is certainly not addressing the
crowd, and not the Father who always hears and hardly needs
to be addressed aloud. There must be another, self-selecting
audience for these remarks. Jesus distinguishes between his
speaking for the crowd, for the sake of their belief, and his
speaking more frankly what he knows. Implicitly, he distinguishes between the apparent "miracle," and the eternal
presence of God, the fully "awakened" state to which he calls
Lazarus. But the crowd hears Jesus' prayer as expressing
gratitude for filling their need. They need, he says, to believe
that God sent him-sent him (no doubt} to display God's care
in a more dramatic way.46 The evangelist has made Jesus
rupture the realistic surface of the very story he is in, and
indicate to the attentive reader that the miraculous fiction
itself follows from his charitable mission to teach everyone.
In sum, a reader might see in the story of the resurrection
of Lazarus a spiritual allegory and-more than that-a tale of
the sage instructing appropriately both the learned and the
unlearned in the faith that will elevate them. If one is willing
to run the risk of reading the Gospel philosophically, one may
find it surprisingly consistent with Spinoza's hypothesis, that
Jesus was a wise man who, in making wisdom accessible to
all, was obliged to make it speak in widely different ways.
Summary: Spinoza and Christianity
Spinoza's account of Christianity resulted from the extraordinary combination of his Jewish learning, his passion for
philosophy, and the historical crisis to which he responded.
Following the civil wars and religious violence of the 16th and
17th centuries, it was apparent that Christianity in the West
was in jeopardy as a civilizing force. The aftermath of the
Reformation raised a fundamental question about the relation
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of traditional theology to the political order. Spinoza's
answer was officially to excise truth from the religious
sphere-to destroy the zeal for mere "true belief," the varieties of which were tearing European states apart-but to
preserve for humanity the Bible's teachings of justice and
charity.
This emphasis on the Bible's moral teachings, however,
did not prevent him from asking why these teachings agreed
with the truths of pure reason, or what pure thinking was
behind biblical texts. In this Spinoza made the learned
assumption that biblical language, like much poetry,
contained a surrogate knowledge (21,53,95). A philosophical
mind (expressing God's self-activity} might liberate from the
parables and fictions of Scripture their deeper truths.47 Given
this philosophic stance toward the Bible, and the dogmatic
conflicts of Christianity in Spinoza's day, the paradox of the
Theological Political Treatise follows. The Treatise officially
separates religion from philosophy, and insists that the Bible
does not teach speculative reasoning. 48 But at the same time
the Treatise indicates a passage from biblical faith to wisdom.
As the Scriptures occasionally associated their own teaching
with wisdom, Spinoza had only to associate wisdom in turn
with the Scriptures. The result was his use of a pious vocabulary to describe the philosopher's inner life, his express
reverence for Solomon and Jesus the sage, and his doctrine of
the salvation of the unlearned, behind which lay the idea that
belief in resurrection approximated the philosopher's identification with divine mind. To readers today, these ambiguities of Spinoza are puzzling in the extreme. But by such
ambiguities he left open for future philosophers the path he
had traveled in his own thinking. He left open the possibility
of overstepping religion with the implicit sanction of religion
itself, of moving from faith to philosophy without rancor or
guilt.49
The siren call of philosophy makes modern intellectual
adherents of the Bible anxious. If they remain faithful to their
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
religion, it is often by flirting with nihilism or skepticism
at the same time. Since Pascal they have argued that our
choices are either to subjugate the intellect to the mystery of
revelation or to wander aimlessly in a futile search after
meaning (cf. 171-2). They hardly dream that the Bible itself
might "save" anyone by confirming one in the life of reason.
But Spinoza looked at the Bible differently. He suspected that
some of its authors had faced the problems of despair and of
disappointment in divine Providence (78, 222), and had
wrestled with the problems of existence no less bravely than
the classical schools of wisdom (5). Such biblical authors simply expressed their spiritual discoveries in inspiring and philanthropic ways. As for Jesus, he was the "consummate
philosopher" because he not only knew in himself the way to
blessedness, the "natural light" that the philosophers would
always follow (cf. John 11:10), but also found a general path
for all those who could not travel the philosophers' dangerous road. If the learned grasped the Bible's intentions,
Spinoza thought, they would see that the salvation of the
ignorant was in fact their own salvation, too. For the learned
would no longer be lost in scholastic quarrels arising from a
confusion of the Bible's pedagogy with metaphysical theory,
and in compensation they would find new "meaning" both in
the literary depth of the scriptural text and in the humane
guidance of others. The political order was therefore not
doomed. The ethics of happiness might be acquired by the
multitudes and, over generations, the number of those
coming to wisdom might increase. It all depended on whether
wisdom presented itself wisely. It depended on the solicitude
of the learned toward the learners.so
Near the end of John's Gospel is an episode with Thomas
the Twin, who challenges the disciples' story that the Risen
Jesus came and spoke to them. He is struck in their account
by Jesus' showing them his hands and his side, as if this selfdisplay carried some special meaning. Only if Thomas sees
and touches these wounds, he tells his friends, will he believe.
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Days later, the group (along with Thomas) is visited again in
its sealed rooms. Jesus specifically addresses the skeptical disciple and invites him to touch his wounds. The text indicates
no such move on Thomas' part. It thus underscores what
Jesus says next, that Thomas believes because he has seen
him, using the word horao-"to see"-which in John's text
includes the divine act of knowing.51 Jesus adds, Thomas
should recognize that others too are blessed, though they
believe without "seeing."52 Now a philosophical reader,
understanding "seeing" as a metaphor for knowing, may
detect in Jesus' remarks about blessed belief the Spinozist idea
of the salvation of those without knowledge. Such a reader
might therefore entertain the ironic possibility that Jesus'
rebuke of philosophy conceals some philosophy, and that
what Thomas beheld with the eye of knowledge, apart from
his friends, is the essential question implied in the story. Did
Thomas know Jesus as the one who scorned every apparent
evil and thus overcame the world? Or, to express it in the
text's figurative language, did Thomas know Jesus as the one
who through his very wounds attained his eternal identity?
The story quietly approves some such conjecture. Yet it does
not, as a story, offer certitude. Hence the Spinozist reader
receives the same cautionary lesson as Thomas. He must
respect the belief of believers in the literal Resurrection, as
the way in which God has made manifest to them their tie
with eternity.53
Acknowledgement: The author expresses his gratitude to
many generous colleagues who gave valuable advice in the
development of this essay: Karina Gill, Ned Walpin, Brendan
Laselle, David Bolotin, Linda Wiener, Daryl Koehn, Barry
Goldfarb, David Levine, Michael Golluber, Tucker Landy,
Janet Dougherty, & Caleb Thompson.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Notes
1 Spinoza, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, translated as
The Way to Wisdom by Herman De Dijn (West Lafayette, Indiana:
Purdue University Press, 1996), pp. 21-25, and 115 on experientia
vaga; and Ethics 2, P 40, Note 2. All Ethics citations are from the
A. Boyle translation of Spinoza's Ethics and De Intellectus
Emendatione, with an introduction by T. S. Gregory (London: J. M.
Dent & Sons, 1959).
2 Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, translated by Sean Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1990), p. 112.
3 Some
examples of the New Testament scholars' true belief in "critical progress" and their innocence of philosophy may be found in
Studying the Historical Jesus: Evaluations of the State of Current
Research, Bruce Chilton and Craig Evans, ed. (Leiden: E. J. Brill,
1994), e.g. pp. 253, 270.
As examples of scholars who have popularized their work, yet have
vague misgivings about it, see John Dominic Crossan imagining
himself having to account to Jesus for his research, in Jesus: A
Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: Harper, 1994), p. xiv; and
Marcus Borg, jesus: A New Vision (San Francisco: Harper Collins,
1991) who feels he must "recover the vision of Jesus" for the sake
of "church and culture" (p. 17), but can only serve up some lame
cliches about "spirit."
4 Karl Jaspers raised similar concerns half a century ago. See his
debate with Rudolf Bultmann in Myth and Christianity: An Inquiry
into the Possibility of Religion without Myth (New York: Noonday
Press, 1958), pp. 51-53.
Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, Samuel Shirley trans.
(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1998). These and all page
references in the text refer to this edition (and differ in other printings).
5
6 Cf. Roy Hoover, "A Contest between Orthodoxy arid Veracity," in
Jesus' Resurrection: Fact or Figment (Downers Grove, Ill.:
InterVarsity Press, 2000), pp. 124-146.
7 Die Leibniz-Handschriften der Koniglichen offentlichen Bibliothek
zu Hannover, ed. Eduard Bodemann, (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1966),
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p. 103. The authenticity of Leibniz' note recording Spinoza's conversation is little contested today. See Xavier Tilliette, Le Christ de
Ia Philosophie (Paris: Cerf, 1990), p. 72. See also Richard Mason,
The God of Spinoza: a philosophical study (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), p. 212; Richard Popkin, "Spinoza and
Biblical Scholarship" in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, ed.
Don Garrett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
p. 401; Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Marrano
of Reason (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 236,
n. 4. Granted, contemporary biblical scholarship recognizes that
Jesus is steeped in the Jewish wisdom tradition. See, for example,
Frances Taylor Gench, Wisdom in the Christology of Matthew (New
York: University Press of America, 1997), and Ben Witherington III,
Jesus the Sage: The Pilgrimage of Wisdom (Minneapolis: Fortress
Press, 1994). But it is the very rare scholar who gives us any profound idea, comparable to Spinoza's, of what Jesus' wisdom was
about. See Jean Grosjean, Ironie Christique (Paris: Gallimard,
1991); Albert Nolan, Jesus before Christianity (Maryknoll, N.Y.:
Orbis Books, 1992); and Jack Miles, Christ: A Crisis in the Life of
God (New York: Knopf, 2001).
8 See also Letter 75 to Oldenburg, in The Correspondence of
Spinoza, A. Wolf trans. (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1966), p. 349,
where Spinoza refers to the style of expression typical of oriental
languages.
See Letter 21, to Bylenbergh, Ibid., p, 179-80. "I take care not to
impute to [Scripture] certain childish and absurd views; and this no
one can do better unless he understands Philosophy well, or has
Divine revelations."
9
10 See John F. Cornell, ''A Parable of Scandal: Speculations about
the Wheat and Tares in Matthew 13," in Contagion, 1998, 5: 98117. Under the influence of Spinoza's suggestion about Matthew
13, Alexandre Mather on draws similar conclusions about the deeper layers of this Gospel text. See Alexandre Matheron, Christ et le
salut des ignorants chez Spinoza (Paris: Editions Aubier, 1971),
pp. 132-134.
11 Pace Sylvain Zac, Spinoza et ['interpretation de l'ecriture (Paris:
P.U.F., 1965), p. 199.
�32
12
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
See also Spinoza, Ethics, 3 P 30; IV P 35-37, 46.
13 "Atque hoc eadem etiam modo Apostoli ex rebus, qual viderant,
quasque audiverant, & quas denique ex revelatione habuerant,
multa concludere, & elicere, eaque homines, si libitum iis esset,
docere poterant." Spinoza, Opera, Gebhardt edition (Heidelberg:
Carl Winters Universitatsbuchhandlung, 1972), III, p. 156.
Compare "natura nobis dictat, non quidem verbis, sed modo
Ionge excellentiore" (Gebhardt, III, p. 16) and "ejus mens praestantior necessaria, atque humana longa excellentior esse deberet"
(p. 21).
14
15
Cf. Matheron, Christ et le salut, pp. 144-145.
16 Johan Colerus left us some interesting biographical details bearing on Spinoza and Christianity, as cited in the introduction to the
Dover edition of Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise & A
Political Treatise, R. H. M. Elwes, trans. (New York: Dover
Publications, 1951). According to Colerus, Spinoza once assured his
Christian landlady that her religion was a good one and that she
could be "saved" in it, so long as she lived a pious and peaceable life
(p. xix). See also the end of Letter 75 to Oldenburg (touching on
the Gospel of John), in The Correspondence of Spinoza, A. Wolf
trans. (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1966), p. 350, and Letter 43 to
Jacob Ostens, p. 259, on the salvation of the ignorant among nonChristian nations through the "spirit of Christ." Spinoza's private
comportment is perfectly consistent with holding an idea of Christ
the philosopher who represents wisdom and makes salvation open
to all people whether they get that wisdom explicitly or implicitly.
The idea that Spinoza was too fearful to speak his mind tactfully
among his friends matches little in the philosopher's character. His
indifference to giving his thinking the color of orthodoxy among
them can be seen at the end of Letter 73 (21) to Oldenburg, in
Correspondence, p. 344.
17 Cf. Matheron, Christ et le salut, pp. 54-70, 77-84, 276. The
Treatise suggests, in chapter 16 (directly following the chapter on
the salvation of the unlearned), that a genuine political problem,
opaque from the standpoint of pure philosophy, is mitigated thanks
to the prophetic mission to all ordinary people. For according to
chapter 16, as less rational people enter into the social contract,
�CORNELL
33
they compromise their "sovereign right" or "self-interest" (to
remain irrational) far more than rational people. (180) Thus
Spinoza delicately raises the question of how the prophets' teaching, promising "salvation" to people who strive for moral goodness
without wisdom, helps them endure the harm they may suffer by
nature under the constraints of civilized life.
18 Spinoza could not but take an interest in the subject of the soul's
fate. Steven Nadler, in Spinoza's Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish
Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) argues that what
drove the Synagogue to pronounce its ban against the young
philosopher was his adamant denial of personal immortality.
19 Ethics 1, Appendix, p. 32. Spinoza makes an exception for the
great non-mathematical sages of history.
Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (New York:
Zone Books, 1992).
20
21
Letter 73 to Oldenburg, in Correspondence, p. 343.
22
Ethics, 5 P 5 - P 10.
23
Ibid., 4 P 73 Note.
Ibid., 4 P 68 Note. Again, independently of Spinoza but perfectly in accord with his doctrines, I have argued that Matthew 18
teaches salvation from our "fall" into the world's scandal, and
teaches it at two significant levels, one philosophic and one popular. See ''Anatomy of Scandal: Self-Dismemberment in the Gospel of
Matthew and in Gogol's 'The Nose'," in Literature and Theology,
16 (2002), pp. 270-290.
24
25
Letter 75 to Oldenburg, in Correspondence, pp. 348-349.
26 Spinoza's reading of 1 Corinthians 15 is entirely sound. One
cannot make good sense of this curious argument of Paul-"For if
the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ
has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your
sins." (15: 16-17)-on the notion that the Resurrection is a past,
historic event. The apparent consequence of Christ's non-Resurrection,
futile faith, is really the reason for the non-Resurrection! Faith has to
bring about Christ's Resurrection in the faithful.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
34
27 Spinoza avoids deciding whether the disciples all understood the
Resurrection in the same way. Both in the Treatise and in his earlier
response to Oldenburg (Correspondence, p. 344) Spinoza leaves
open what parts of Jesus' knowledge his disciples received.
According to Oldenburg's more literal reading of the Gospels,
Spinoza recognizes (or "does not deny") that that the texts show the
disciples receiving an apparition of the Resurrected Jesus and
believing in it. In this way God accomodated to them the revelation
of his mind (p. 348). Perhaps his remark near the end of the letter
applies here: Spinoza holds that Paul and John know and teach spiritual meanings, albeit in a Hebraic way (p. 349). All this is relevant
to the reading we propose of John 11, where the disciples do not
all have the same depth of insight.
28
Ethics, 2 P 11-12, 45, and 5 P 22, P 30.
29
Ibid., 2 P 13.
30 Ibid., 4 Preface, P 15; 5 P 6.
Cf. Ethics, 3 P 6, and "Short Treatise on God, Man, and his
Well-being," (chapter 5) in The Collected works of Spinoza, ed.
Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), vol. 1,
pp. 54, 84.
31
32
Ethics, 4 P 18 Note, P 19-20, 30-35.
Ibid., 5 P 20, Note, P 21-22. Regarding the distinction between
personal immortality and eternity in Spinoza, see Genevieve Lloyd,
Spinoza and the Ethics (London and New York: Routledge, 1996),
pp. 114-117.
33
"Short Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-being," pp. 138-140
(Chapter 22). Spinoza also develops there the distinction between
human beings moved merely by their animal spirits and those
reborn in spiritual knowledge, following John's Gospel and
1 Corinthians 2-3. From the discussion of the soul's re-awakening
in divine union, Chapter 23 follows on the subject of its "immortality."
34
Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary (Selections),
Richard Popkin trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co.,
1991), p. 320.
35
�CORNELL
35
Evangile de Jean, traduit et commente par Jean-Yves Leloup
(Paris: Albin Michel, 1989), p. 281. It is worthy of note that the
Fathers of the Church understood the political implications of allegorical reading of the Gospel, given that spiritual knowledge could
not be attained by most believers. See Jean-Yves Leloup,
Introduction aux 'vrais philosophes' (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998),
pp. 61-2. In any case, Spinoza's philosopher Christ can be loosely
traced back to the early Fathers, probably by way of Erasmus,
whose philosophia Christi could not have been unknown to him.
Spinoza even includes Erasmus in one of the dialogues contained in
his "Short Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-being." (See note 31,
above.) I say "loosely traced to the early Fathers" because the idea
of "philosophy" that is applied to Jesus undergoes significant mutation from the Fathers, to Erasmus, to Spinoza; and these writers
base their conceptions independently upon the New Testament. See
Anne-Marie Malingrey, Etude semantique des mots de Ia famille de
'philosophia' dans Ia litterature grecque chretienne des quatre premiers siecles, 2 vols. (Paris: Klincksieck, 1961).
36 I;
37 Add to this the fact that the ancient Gospel of Thomas (to which
John's Gospel is closest in point of view) assumes that resurrection
is an interior event, already accomplished by some disciples. See
The Gospel of Thomas, Marvin Meyer trans. (San Francisco:
Harper, 1992), and Harold Bloom, Omens of Millenium, The
Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrections (New York: Riverhead
Books, 1996) p. 188.
In contemporary scholarship, see Frank Kermode, The Genesis of
Secrecy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 81-83,
and especially pp. 105-109 regarding John's "reality effects." Also
see Bernard Dubourg, La Fabrication du Nouveau Testament, v. II:
];Invention de jesus (Paris: Gallimard, 1989). Dubourg details the
cabbalistic mechanisms that could generate Christian ideas from the
language of the ancient Hebrew scriptures.
38
E.g. Letter 75 to Oldenburg, in Correspondence, p. 349.
Incidentally, Dubourg (see previous note) makes the strongest argument, and joins a growing scholarly consensus today, that the New
Testament exhibits the same literary craft (or craftiness) as the
Hebrew Scriptures, only differently employed.
39
�36
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
In certain passages of the Treatise (35 ,67) its author suggests that
he has figured out more than he will say. He prefers to encourage
the experienced reader to re-examine the Bible with Spinoza's ideas
in mind.
40
41 Letter 21 to Bylenbergh, in Correspondence, p. 172, and cf.
Treatise, p. 105.
Kierkegaard founds his text Sickness unto Death on the Lazarus
miracle, skillfully inverting the meaning in John's text, which says
that that sickness is not Lazarus'! Nonetheless, Kierkegaard's psychological teaching exhibits some striking parallels with Spinoza's
teaching about overcoming anxiety and becoming oneself. "It is
Christian heroism-a rarity, to be sure-to venture wholly to
become oneself, an individual human being, this specific individual
human being, alone before God" See S0ren Kierkegaard, The
Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for
Upbuilding and Awakening, Howard and Edna Hong translation
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 5.
42
43 Another parallel of Spinoza's thinking with our interpretation of
Lazarus: the subtitle given (by another hand) to Spinoza's "Short
Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-being" (an early sketch of his
Ethics) mentions the text's purpose to cure those who are sick of
mind.
Daryl Koehn pointed out to me why it follows that the crowd is
told to unbind Lazarus.
44
Ancient gnostic texts even suggest that Thomas is the spiritual
"twin" of Jesus. See Robert M. Grant, The Secret Sayings of Jesus:
The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas (Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday,
1960), p. 65.
45
A related example of the pedagogy of the Bible occurring on two
levels: Spinoza refers to instances of biblical texts that both give a
poetic description of some supernatural occurrence (like "being
sent" by God) and then redescribe the same occurrence in natural
terms. (Treatise, pp. 19, 80)
46
47 See Spinoza, Emendation, (1st part regarding fictions and feigning) especially pp. 103-105. Also Ethics 3 P 11-13, 28-30, 4 P 1
Note, and 5 P 10 Note, P 11-14, 20. For discussion of how
�CORNELL
37
Spinozist reason collaborates with the power of the imagination, see
Christopher Norris, Spinoza and the Origins of Modern Critical
Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 217- 250.
Cf. Letter 21 to Blyenbergh, in Correspondence, p. 180.
Remember: Socrates could not teach wisdom to Meno or to anyone
else.
48
Concerning the avoidance of scandal by the wise, cf. e.g. Romans
14:13-23, 1 Corinthians 8.
49
50
See Spinoza, Emendation, p. 27 (paragraphs 14 and 17).
51 A complete list might begin with John 1:18, 3:3, 3:11, 3:36,
6:46, and 8:38.
52 The Greek tenses at John 20:29 indicate that what divides
Thomas from other disciples is not Thomas' historical opportunity
to converse with the resurrected Christ.
53
Again see Letter 75, p. 348.
�38
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�39
1-
What Tree Is This?
In Praise of Europe's
Renaissance Printers,
Publishers And Philologists
Chaninah Maschler
Prefatory Note
The aim of this essay is to praise certain lovers and makers of
books-the printers and publishers and philologists of early
modern Europe. That these men deserve to be remembered,
that we owe them a huge debt, though not because they
authored great books, I found out only because I stuck it out
with the perhaps "idiot" question, What tree is this? which
initially I asked about the tree that is pictured on the title
page of Galileo's last great work, the Discourses on Two New
Sciences.
Three publishing dynasties-Elzevier, Etienne, Plantinare spoken of in the course of the first portion of the essay. At
the essay's midway mark Pico della Mirandola enters the story.
My discovery that Pico had a hand in diverting a scholarly
friend of his, Aldo Manuzzio, from the life of pure scholarship to a publisher's life made the inclusion of Pico in my
narrative plausible. A brief (largely borrowed) account of
Aldo's life and work led me to a short narrative about
Erasmus's work as a Bible scholar. Inclusion of Erasmus was
due not only to my believing that it is with justice that
Erasmus is given a place among the great re-educators of
Chaninah Maschler is tutor emerita of St. John's College. This lecture was
delivered at Annapolis on January 18, 2002. The lucidity of the illustrations
for this lecture is due to the care and expertise of Cara Sabolcik and Tom
Crouse. The Editor regrets omission of the following thank-you note from the
book review of Eva Brann's The Ways of Naysaying in volume 46, number 2:
"Conversation with my friends Rob Crutchfield and Priscilla Shaw substantially contributed to the writing of this review."
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
40
Europe, but also because-enigmatic though he be-he
shows, in how he comments on the imprints of two of the
publishing houses who served him and whom he served, that
he was as aware as Bacon of the long run differences that
print might make to our lives.
I hope that when this year's crop of St. John's seniors
drinks a toast to the American Republic, to the Republic of
Letters, and to Plato's Republic, they'll call to mind that the
men commemorated in the present lecture helped make our
citizenship in these republics possible.
,~
[Before the art of book printing was known],
the manuscripts of any single book were few in
number, and to obtain the entire literature of any
one science involved considerable difficulty,
expense, and travelling, which only the rich could
afford. It was easy for the dominant party to effect
the disappearance of books that shocked its prejudices and unmasked its impostures .... Besides, only
works recommended by the names of their authors
were copied. All the research that could acquire
importance only if allied to other research, all the
isolated observations and detailed advances that
serve to maintain the sciences ... and to prepare a
way for further progress, all the materials amassed
by time and awaiting genius, remained condemned
to eternal obscurity. The conversation of scholars
and the unification of their labours ... did not exist.
Each man had to begin and to end a discovery
himself and was obliged to fight alone against all
the obstacles that nature puts in the way of our
efforts .... [Contrariwise, once printing was on the
scene], many copies of a book would be in circulation at the same time, information about facts and
discoveries reached a wider public and also
�MASCHLER
41
reached it more promptly.... Any new mistake was
subject to criticism as soon as it was made.1
Condorcet, whose words in his Sketch for a Historical
Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind I quoted just now,
is selectively expatiating on a passage in Bacon's New
Organon (Aphorism 129), where Bacon, intending, he says,
to "quicken the industry and kindle the zeal" of men of
scientific talent, had claimed that the world-historical efficacy
of such instruments as the directional compass, gun powder,
and moveable type has been far greater than the virtu of any
political or even religious leader, so that it is only right that
inventors be given divine honors, while political founders and
legislators are honored as mere heroes.
That the voyages of discovery (thus the finding of a "new
world" beyond the Mediterranean) were "made possible" by
the directional compass, and that the ways of waging war
(against, for instance, the natives of this recently discovered
new world) were drastically altered by the use of guns-of
this I was, in a dim and general sort of way, aware. But not
until fairly recently did it occur to me that the way the world
looks to human beings and even, perhaps, the way it is may
have been transformed by printing. (Take my words as paraphrase of Bacon's "[These inventions] have changed the whole
face and state of things throughout the world" Aph. 129). And
it was really more or less by accident that I became curious
about the individuals who practiced the art of printing, I
mean the businessmen, artisans, and scholars who constituted the publishing industry. As yet I know a little about just a
few. They are:
the
the
the
the
the
Italian Aldo Manuzzio
Swiss Johann Fro ben,
Frenchman Henri Estienne
Belgian Christopher Plantin
Dutchman Louis Elzevier
�-
-------
--- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
42
I learned these names because I made a mistake about a
certain picture that had provoked my curiosity. Here it is:
fig. 1
DISCORSl
E
DIMOSTRAZIONI
MATE MATICH E,
intorno J d11e nuout fcien~e
Attcnenti aUa
MEC:ANICA
& i
MoviMENTI LocALI;
tk/SjziiiiT
GALILEO GALILEI LINCEO,
Filofofo e .Matematico prima rio del Sereniffimo
Grand Duca di T ofcana.
0•111UAfpnuliutkleelllr~~ JjgrAMit.tl"Jc~~t~iSIIiJi.
IN LEIDA,
Apprcll"o gli Ellevirii. x. n. c. xnvW'.
The picture you're looking at comes one's way at St. John's
College when, in the junior year, Galileo's Discourses on Two
New Sciences are begun. Perhaps, like me, you overlooked the
bottom line identifying printer and publication date and erroneously assumed that this emblem was inserted at Galileo's
instance, either because your psychological "set" was to treat
the author as "figure," the printer-publisher as negligible
"background"; or, conceivably, because the cover of the
Dover paperback version looks like this:
�43
MASCHLER
fig. 2
dialogues concerning
TWO NEW SCIENCES
TRANSLATED llY HENRY CREW
AND ALFONSO DE SALV!O
WITH AN !NTRODUCTIQN llY ANTONIO FAVARO
fig. 3
L £ 11
CEUVRES
Mathematiques
DE
SIMON
~TEVIN'ci<Brugcs.
OufontuuctCcslco
MEMOIRES MATH.IlMATIQV·BS,
Efq,udltsldt:u.erdleTra-lu.ut&:Trc..Jllalbd'rincc M&UI.ICI
dcNu;~~~'::.~~::-._
lAI'IfllmJIIIoAWizi,(ro.g.-J
P• ALBEJlT ~IRAilD.samidou,~
A
LEYDE
CllorDon,vcnrllre&:Abr.lum~,lmpdlacllnord!n&lre.
dci'Univerlir(, AIUI!il cl~b-o.IDIT.
~
�44
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Seeing the Stevin title page (figure 3)-with the same
man, tree and motto-may, without your hearing anything
further, have the immediate effect of your correcting your
previous error and shifting to the idea that the emblem is the
printer-publisher's rather than author's "hall mark." (Goldand silversmiths or pewter ware manufacturers were required
to identify themselves on their products. Printers too were so
obliged by law. By the way, the craftsmen who made the
printing fonts had to be highly skilled workers in metal.) But
this third picture did not come my way until long after I'd
become curious about the title page of Galileo's Discourses on
Two New Sciences. Since that page is obviously carefully
designed-just look at the message conveyed by the relative
sizes of the letters!-it was not unreasonable to imagine that
the title page entire, including the picture that intrigued me,
was some sort of commentary on the message of the book
that it was introducing .
Now when I first encountered Galileo, I had spent some
years as teacher of the history of philosophy at a conventional
college. Therefore my head held such facts as the following:
Descartes's Meditations are spread out over six days, that is, a
week sans Sabbath. His Discourse too seems to be mimicking
the Divine rhythm of creation by being laid out in six parts.
In his Letter to the Translator which precedes the French
edition of the Principles, Descartes compares philosophy to a
tree.2 Bacon's Great Instauration (renewal) too was intended
to have six parts, and his College of Bensalem is called the
College of Six Days. The Latin name of Bacon's "Preparation
for Natural and Experimental History" is parasceve, which is,
in New Testament Greek, a stand-in for the Hebrew erev
shabbath (Sabbath eve). So, since I'd been taught to rank
Galileo with Bacon and Descartes as fellow-founders of
"modernity," men whose teaching sought to undermine the
medieval heritage, it was just about inevitable that I should
take the tree on the Discorsi title page to be the tree that
stood in our first parents' garden, the twisting item a snake,
�MASCHLER
45
the man a wise man such as Galileo, filosofo e matematicohere caught in the act of plucking a fruit from the forbidden
tree, this fruit being, perhaps, one of the two "new" sciences.
It did not occur to me that seeing the tree as the tree of
knowledge might be a mistake! The riddle for me was not
what tree this might be but rather, why does Galileo, as per
the motto Non Solus (Not Alone), deny that he's alone when
the picture shows him to be alone? This question was made
the more vivid when I learned that the standard name for the
emblem is The Solitary.
Puzzling over the perhaps piddling question about the
apparent discrepancy between motto and picture led to a
larger question. The Renaissance greats are often described as
marked by a new individualism and pride, such as is shown,
for example, by Bacon, when he sends his Great Instauration
into the world with a proem that begins: "Francis of Verulam
reasoned thus with himself and judged it to be for the interest of the present and future generations that they should be
made acquainted with his thoughts" (New Organon, p. 3).
This same pride is also exemplified by Descartes when, in Part
2 of the Discourse, he stresses that towns and legal codes
designed by a single "projector" are much to be preferred to
those that spring up higgledy-piggledy in the course of generations, and he insinuates that he, Descartes, is such a solitary
"projector." It is an individualism expressed in a somewhat
different way by Montaigne, when he publishes the Essays as
a book whose "matter" is himself. How, I came to ask myself,
do this individualism and pride harmonize with these authors'
equally notable emphasis on the collaborative and progressive
character of science and invention? (Advancement of
Learning, pp. 3 0-31; p. 143 of the Oxford Bacon paperback)
The book of Galileo for which The Solitary serves as
emblem is written in dialogue form: three charactersSalviati, Sagredo, and Simplicia-converse, in every-day
Italian, about matters of physics. Salviati, who opens the
conversation, is the conversation leader. He does not always
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
46
speak in his own name. Sometimes he reads aloud from a
Latin book written by someone known to all the conversation
partners but not identified by name. He is simply called "our
author."
Taking these facts into account, I construed the enigmatic emblem cum motto to mean that if there are to be "new sciences," neither the author, vicariously present to the three
men conversing through his Latin book, nor the three men
instructed by it, should be regarded, or regard themselves, as
solitaries. (Inventing a demonstration is probably something
that you do alone, in your study, but conversation, in the
course of which demonstrations are appraised, doesn't happen when you're by yourself.)
Something like this interpretation seemed confirmed by
the printer's Address to the Reader, which begins with the
sentence:
Civil life being maintained through the mutual and
growing3 aid of men to one another, and this end
being served principally by the employment of arts
and sciences, their inventors have always been held
in great esteem and much revered by wise antiquity.
It ends:
Of these two new sciences, full of propositions
that will be boundlessly increased in the course of
time by ingenious theorists, the outer gates are
opened in this book, wherein with many demonstrated propositions the way and path is shown to
an infinitude of others, as men of understanding
will easily see and acknowledge.
It may be further nuanced by the opening remarks of
Sagredo, who reports that he likes to hang around with
artisan foremen at the Venetian shipyard because by talking to
them he has frequently received information about matters of
mechanics that he would not have obtained had he relied
strictly on already available book learning.
�MASCHLER
47
The interpretation of Non Solus just reported was conceived while I was still under the mistaken impression that
Galileo was the one responsible for the emblem on the
Discorsi title page. The Solitary is, however, the trademark of
Louis Elzevier, the printer and publisher of the Discorsi, so I
found, as more books with this device on their title page came
my way-many of them, though by no means all-scientific
or mathematical books. 4 So the original question now
became, what did the printer-publisher-the man whose
Advice to the Reader spoke of how, by employing the arts and
sciences, men help one another to improve civic life-what
did he have in mind in marking his merchandise with this
emblem?
fig. 4
Figure 4 resembles the
Elzevier tree. Yet the lines
below the picture cite anothVARRONIS
opera quz fupcrfum.
er publisher, Henri Estienne,
under the date. And there
J N L I B. D E .L IN G. LAT.
Conictlancalofcpbi Scaligcri, r«<>are, of course, pictorial
gnita 3c appcnditc .wa..
differences: This bearded sage
IN Ll B R 0 S DE R B R V ST.
Notz clufdcm lof.Scal.non uuca cditz.
seems to be wearing a Roman
or Greek toga rather than a
HitJ/i1111llifotrMIII<.A DR.. T Y.RN.
c,.,..,,. in tm.DI U,guutiM:c.university man's scholar's
blltii.Uti•llih~t~ <.ANT. A Y G YSTJN/. /ttiiiP.YICTCJ!/1
gown; nothing twists around
Clliig•tUIItsitlli&.DtrtrM.fliel.
the tree, though its branches
seem similarly disposed; the
banner with the motto is on
the right rather than on the
left; and this time the motto
A N N 0 M-. D. LX X II I,
runs Noli Altum Sapere
ExcudcbatHcnr.Stephanus.
(Whether this should be read
to mean Don't Seek to Know High Things or, rather, Don't
Be Haughty depends on whether you take the Latin word
altum adverbially or accusatively).
M.. TERENTII
�48
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
figs. 5, 6, 7, 8
PAI.IIIII
&r«bwa.oa.J.TIITUB.Aifl•cnp.S;!d.-~
M.P. J:l: Ylllo
CVW
r-.IVILIDIO
.. I D I &
I find pictures 5 - 8 quite intriguing, particularly the ones
showing a pruning hook suspended from heaven and bearing
�49
MASCHLER
the motto Rami ut Ego Inserrerer Defracti Sunt (Branches
Have Been Broken Off So As To Let Me Be Engrafted). If the
pictures leave you cold, perhaps I can persuade you to take an
interest in them by showing you page 43 (notice the Arabic
numeral!) from Henri Estienne's Plato edition.
figs. 9,10
]> L A T 0
N
I S_
opera qua: extant omh!a_
EX NOVA JOANNIS SI!RRANiiN-
Rij=t:O'kn~m:~::~:::?:~7!:-~g:.--
El,ID~M ..i!Iuutdi.llwJUI~IIiiUwwprtttUtMNTiiot.
If you were to pull out your own edition of the Platonic
dialogues, you would notice that the opening lines of the
Crito bear the Stephanus page number 43 : the Estienne
dynasty's Hellenized name is Stephanus . My picture
acquaints you with the fans et origo of what you learned to
call, when you were St. John's freshmen, Stephanus pagination!
Here is another odd effect of encountering these
Stephanus trees, especially the title page of the Bible: Though
the initial interpretation of the Elzevier tree (the tree that
brought us here), was mistaken; and though the Stephanus
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tree is not the tree of knowledge either, nevertheless the
motto Don't Seek To Know High Matters or Don't Be Proud
does seem to demarcate (roughly) some such territory as
Don't Grow Too Big For Your Breeches.S
The reason for my being skeptical about the idea that the
Stephanus tree was intended as a reminder of Genesis 3 is
that some of the pictures very prominently display grafts, and
all the pictures, even those which do not exhibit a pruning
hook or marks of grafting, show branches that have been cut
off from the tree.
The world, our minds, the Bible, and other great books
are simply full of all manner of trees.6 One tree is likely to
conjure up another in our minds. But obviously, this need not
mean that so it was intended by whoever designed the title
pages. Doesn't the mind's associational play becomes tedious
when there is no principle for sorting the relevant from the
irrelevant ?
As it turns out, there is a passage inCh. 11 of Paul's Letter
to the Romans directly apposite to the Stephanus emblems
that were shown. It runs as follows:
If the dough offered as first fruits is holy, so is
the whole lump; and if the root is holy, so are the
branches. But if some of the branches were broken
off and you, a wild olive shoot, were grafted in
their place to share the richness of the olive tree,
do not boast over the branches. If you do boast,
remember it is not you that support the root, but
the root that supports you. You will say 'Branches
were broken off so that I might be grafted in.' That is
true. They were broken off because of their unbelief, but you stand fast only through faith. So do
not become proud, but stand in awe."
The Greek uses the verb hupselophroneo, that is, "I am
high minded," "I am proud," which rings rather differently
than does the Latin, especially when, as on the picture, the
�MASCHLER
51
Latin is taken in isolation. Notice that when the motto is Noli
Altum Sapere, the "solitary" points; when the motto is Ut
Ego Insererer he prays. Is the solitary intended to be St. Paul
when he points and a grafted pagan when he prays?
fig. 11
The pictures in figure 11 are three versions of an emblem
employed by the great Antwerp publisher, Christopher
Plantin. Again there is a tree and a man, but this time the man
sits comfortably in the tree's shade, to the left, and holds one
branch that he's cut off. Besides, unlike Elzevier's solitary,
he's wearing a hat. The motto runs: Exerce Imperia Et Ramos
Compesce Fluentes, that is: Exercise Authority and Trim the
Flowing Branches. I tracked down the words to Virgil's
Georgics, 2.370 (Loeb ed., p. 141) Milton, in Paradise Lost,
9.215f, 9.427f, 4.305, uses the same image, as does
Shakespeare in the garden scene of Richard II (4.3).
I earlier took the step of detaching the emblems plus mottoes from the titles and authors of the books on whose front
page they appear and of attaching them, instead, to three
publisher-printers-Elzevier, Stephanus, Plantin. Do the three
trademarks "allude" to each other? Intentionally so? How
could one tell? More generally, why would an engraver, poet,
man of letters, painter, publisher want to be "reminding" the
viewer or reader of another artist's artful item? On the other
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
hand, if there is no intentional alluding going on, why all
these tree pictures? Mere habit and lack of invention?
One of the surprises that came my way as I kept on the
track of finding the sense and purpose of the Elzevier imprint
was that bibliophiles, historians, curators of libraries, and
professors of the curious subject "bibliography" have all for
some hundreds of years been studying publishers' imprints. 7
Since these devices sometimes look reminiscent of heraldic
coats of arms, and since coats of arms-plainly visible identifying marks that can be seen even from a distance and in the
melee of battle-probably originally served warriors to make
it possible for their brothers in arms to rush to their assistance, it occurred to me that the likeness between coats of
arms and publishers' imprints to which the just mentioned
book experts draw attention may conceivably imply that the
three publishing dynasties that I have so far mentioned-in
roughly chronological order, the Estiennes, the PlantinMoretus house, the Elzeviers-all used trees as their trademark, as though to proclaim to the world that they were, so
to say, "in this together." Such a notion, of "us against them,"
is perhaps not altogether misguided, since Christopher
Plantin, in preparing his magnificent polyglot Bible, relied on
the scholarly philological work previously done, and published, by Robert Estienne,s and several Elzeviers, before an
independent press under that name became established, seem
to have worked for the House of Plantin.9
The tree motif that I've shown you was, however, not the
sole Plantin publisher 's imprint. It was the first. But the far
more famous and more frequent identifying mark of the
House of Plantin-Moretus is not a tree; it is a drawing compass. It was under this imprint that, for example, most of the
works of the Flemish engineer, bookkeeper, and mathematician Simon Stevin (1548-1620) were first published (the polyglot Bible of 1568-72 as well).
�MASCHLER
53
fig. 12
I had become interested in Simon Stevin
even before reaching the
St. John's campus or reading Jacob Klein's book on
the history of algebra for
linguistic reasons. Having
spent some of my early
school years speaking
Dutch (the vernacular
language in which Stevin's
Works were, by his
express choice, originally
published), I was aware
that Dutch holds a double set of words for things mathematical and scientific-one employing strictly ordinary
natively Dutch words and roots, the other pseudo-Latin or
pseudo-Greek, as is our English mathematical and scientific
vocabulary. When I found out that Simon Stevin was the one
who had, single-handedly, coined the former, the scientific
vocabulary employing strictly Dutch roots, I became curious
about this man. His teaching style too was special (initially it
was, perhaps, developed to instruct the then ruler of the
northern Low Countries, William the Silent's son, Maurice of
Nassau, 1567-1625). It seemed much more welcoming than,
say, Vieta's, more like Galileo's. Stevin's pedagogic mode
gives the impression of being shaped by the desire to give
"people who have good horse sense" (to use Galileo's phrase
in a letter to Kepler) an opportunity to become engaged by
and to contribute to scientific endeavor even if they lack
university training and, embarassed by this fact, feel excluded
from discourse peppered with alien Latin and Greek jargon.
To my delight, it turned out that Stevin had written a booklet
called Het Burgerlyk Leven (Civic Life), which fact seemed to
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
confirm that, though chiefly an engineer, Stevin was far from
oblivious to matters socio-political.lO
Given these facts, it is not so strange that my imagination
was piqued when I found that some of the books of Stevin's
published by the Plantin press exhibited the banner bearing
the Plantin motto Labore Et Constantia (By Dint of Work and
Perseverence) as held by a man with a spade, that is, someone
who works the soil, and a woman with a Jacob's staff (a
Jacob's staff is a right-angled cross with a long vertical used
by surveyors and anyone studying the heavens to estimate the
size of angles).ll
fig. 13
Since the hand holding
the characteristic Plantin
compass seemed to come
from the heavens (clouds
surround the wrist to which
that hand is attached),
I wondered whether the
message was that all threethe mathematician-engineer, the farmer, and the
student of the heavensshould live by the printer's motto: By Dint of Work and
Perseverance. Of course, the motto leaves enigmatic what the
goal or outcome of such a "work ethic" might be.12
Had it not been for the fact that, before joining the
St. John's faculty, I had been interested in the relations of
science and religion, so that I had spent time mulling over the
early chapters in Genesis, I would probably not have paid
much attention to the emblem with which this talk began, the
Elzevier tree. But given a long-standing curiosity about
whether the psychological sources of religion and science are
one or many, it was inevitable that I would, eventually,
encounter the Jewish mystical tradition, called Kabbalah and,
�MASCHLER
55
having heard that a certain Italian nobleman, Pico della
Mirandola (1463-1494 ), was the first Christian to dabble in
Kabbalah, that I would try to read some of this man's books.
The most famous of these, today, is called An Oration on the
Dignity of Man. Pica's Oration, which is an astonishingly
hope-filled celebration of human freedom, was intended to
serve as an introduction to the defense of a huge tome of 900
theses which the then twenty-four year old prodigy of learning had published and to the public disputation of which, in
Rome, he invited all scholars.
I have not yet read Pico's Nine-Hundred Theses. [A copiously annotated translation by S.A. Farmer was brought out
in 1998 under the title Syncretism in the West: Pica's 900 theses (1486).] I have, however, read Pico's Oration. It begins
with a retelling of the myth told by the travelling teacher
Protagoras when, in Athens, he conversed with Socrates
about the question whether virtue can be taught (Protagoras
320Dff):
Reverend Fathers: I have read in the records of the
Arabians that Abdala the Moslem, when questioned as to what on this stage of the world ...
could be seen most worthy of wonder, replied:
'There is nothing to be seen more wonderful than
man.'... It seems to me I have come to understand
why man is the most fortunate of creatures and
consequently worthy of all admiration and what
precisely is that rank which is his lot in the universal chain of being-a rank to be envied not only
by brutes but even by the stars and by minds
beyond this world .... God the Father, the supreme
Architect, had already built this cosmic home we
behold, the most sacred temple of His godhead ....
But when the work was finished, the Craftsman
kept wishing that there were someone to ponder
the plan of so great a work, to love its beauty, and
to wonder at its vastness. Therefore, when every-
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
thing was done (as Moses and Timaeus bear
witness), He finally took thought concerning the
creation of man. But there was not among His
archetypes that from which He could fashion a
new offspring, nor was there in His treasure
houses anything which he might bestow on His
new son as an inheritance, nor was there in the
seats of all the world a place where the latter
might sit to contemplate the universe. All was now
complete; all things had been assigned to the highest, the middle, and the lowest orders .... At last the
best of artisans ordained that that creature to
whom He had been able to give nothing proper to
itself should have joint possession of whatever had
been peculiar to each of the different kinds of
being. He therefore took man as a creature of
indeterminate nature and, assigning him a place in
the middle of the world, addressed him thus:
'Neither a fixed abode nor a form that is thine
alone nor any function peculiar to thyself have we
given thee, Adam, to the end that according to thy
longing and according to thy judgment thou
mayest have and possess what abode, what form,
and what functions thou thyself shalt desire. The
nature of all other beings is limited and constrained within the bounds of laws prescribed by
Us. Thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance
with thine own free will, in whose hand We have
placed thee, shalt ordain for thyself the limits of
thy nature .... Thou shalt have the power to degenerate into the lower forms of life, which are
brutish. Thou shalt have the power, out of thy
soul's judgment, to be reborn into the higher
forms, which are divine.' ... Why do we emphasize
this? To the end that after we have been born to
this condition-that we can become what we
�MASCHLER
57
will-.. .we may not, by abusing the most indulgent generosity of the Father, make for ourselves
that freedom of choice He has given into something harmful instead of salutary. "13
The two most remarkable things in the Oration are, first,
that Pico nowhere mentions original sin; and second, that (in
a passage which I did not cite) he seems to regard what we
would probably call science as the endeavor whereby
mankind becomes ruler of the powers of wickedness.
Pico never got to deliver the speech, nor was it published
during his lifetime (1463-1494). But it was published soon
thereafter, by his nephew, Giovanni Francesco, in a posthumous edition of his uncle's Works . Now Pico's Oration holds
the line: ''As the farmer marries elm to grapevine, so the
magus marries earth to heaven, that is, lower things to the
qualities and virtues of higher things."14
Look again at the Elzevier tree. What's twisting around
the tree is not a snake but a grapevine. The tree does not bear
apples or pomegranates (the fruits which the "forbidden tree"
is frequently said to have borne). It is an elm tree. But our
original idea, that the solitary man standing beside the tree is
whoever plays the role of Galileo-the filosofo e matematico
-seems affirmed. Pico calls him a "magician," but since Pico
is careful to explain that the art practiced by magi such as
Pythagoras, Empedocles, Democritus, Plato (all of whom he
mentions by name) "does not so much make wonders as
carefully serve nature which makes them," it does not seem
altogether unsafe to regard Stevin or Galileo as illustrative of
Pico's idea of the magus.l5 We seem, then, to have succeeded
in finding an answer to the question what the Elzevier
emblem means.
Pico's words become all the more interesting when one
finds out that there is a long church tradition of "hexahemeral," that is, six-day literature. It goes back to the Greek
church father St. Basil the Great's Hexahemeral Homilies.
(Basil was Bishop of Caesarea. His birth and death years are
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
330-379.) St. Ambrose (340-397, Bishop of Milan), St. Bede
(672-735, priest and author of an ecclesiastical history) and
Grosseteste (1175-1253, Bishop of Lincoln) all imitated these
homilies in their own Hexahemera. Hexahemera are, I gather
from editors' notes, a series of sermons delivered over the
first week of Lent. St. Ambrose, sometimes directly translating Basil's Greek into Latin, in the course of his sermons
affectionately describes the beautiful and well-adapted
creatures that God made. He seems to be using the opening
chapters of Genesis as a topical outline for natural history.
From the translator's editorial notes one learns that many of
the joyous descriptive passages are culled from pagan authors
while others are recognizably lines from Job, Psalms, the
Prophets, or the New Testament, where the relevant natural
wonder comes up. The effect isn't at all bookish. The
congregation, eagerly waiting for Easter, must have felt
confirmed in its faith that everything that God made is beautiful and good, that God cares for his creatures. There is no
hint of a conflict between secular and sacred authorities.
Indeed Basil, in his 6th Homily, concerning the sun and
moon, argues for rational astronomy: "Do not then measure
the moon with your eye but with your reason, which is much
more accurate than the eyes for the discovery of truth"
(Fathers of the Church, volume 46, p. 102).
As luck would have it, St. Ambrose, while celebrating the
works of the third day, touches on the tree of the Elzeviers.
He writes:
Who does not marvel at the fact that from the
seed of the grape springs forth a vine that climbs
even as high as the top of a tree? The vine fondles
the tree by embracing and binding it with vine
leaves and crowns it with garlands of grapes. In
imitation of our life, the vine first plants deep its
living roots; then, because its nature is flexible and
likely to fall, it uses its tendrils like arms to hold
tight whatever it seizes. By this means it raises
�MASCHLER
59
itself and lifts itself on high. Similar to this vine
are the members of the church.
A little further on in the sermon Ambrose, by merging the
Tower of the Prophet Isaiah's Song of the Vineyard with the
tree just described, comes to identify the tree as the church
leaders-the apostles, prophets, and doctors"-while the vine
remains the Christian Congregation.
Pico, I conclude from this textual evidence, is drawing on
a Church tradition which is not afraid of allowing Pagan
authors (Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, even Lucretius) to join the
Biblical in testifying to God's hope that human beings, rightly guided, can learn how to use their freedom wisely. But he
seems, somehow, to have added a "third thing" to Ambrose's
two: the farmer is the one who marries tree to vine; the
magus is the one who ensures the entwining of lower (say
material?) and higher (say mathematical?) things. Is God the
one who marries church leaders to their congregation? My
guess is that according to Pico the farmer's work, which
includes but does not consist of the work of matchmaking,
imitates God's work as described in Genesis 1. Non Solus
refers to the vine and the tree in the Mediterranean landscape; to Man and Woman; to church leaders and congregation.
This same short-lived Pico, whose oration on our "perfectibility"16 became (according to the Cambridge History of
Renaissance Philosophy, p. 313 ), a popular and influential
work that was often quoted and imitated, and many of whose
ideas filtered into the thought of sixteenth-century thinkers,
was instrumental in establishing one of Europe's most important early presses, the Aldine. Here's the story: Pico and
young Aldo Manuzzio had become friends in their student
days. Aldo even resided with Pico for two years. Pico
arranged for Aldo to serve as tutor to Pico's two nephews.
One of these nephews came to supply Aldo with funds to
start up a printing press. The city of Venice was selected as
locale for the printery-the same city that later figures as
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
locale for Galileo's Discorsi. The plan was that Aldo would
retrieve, edit, print, and distribute, and thus preserve for the
entire world, the whole corpus of Greek literature. The 11th
edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica (volume 17, pp. 624626) contains a glowing account:
At Venice Aldo gathered an army of Greek scholars and compositors round him. His trade was
carried on by Greeks and Greek was the language
of his household. Instructions to typesetters were
given in Greek.17 The prefaces to his editions were
written in Greek .... His own industry and energy
were unremitting. In 1495 he issued the first
volume of his Aristotle. [The whole Aristotelian
corpus, in 5 volumes, was eventually brought out
by Aldo.] ... Nine comedies of Aristophanes
appeared in 1498. Thucydides, Sophocles, and
Herodotus followed in 1502. Xenophon's
Hellenica and Euripides in 1503. Demosthenes in
1504 ... .In 1513 Aldo reappeared with Plato, which
he dedicated to Pope Leo XlB .... Nor was Aldo idle
in regard to Latin and Italian classics.... To his
fellow workers he was uniformly generous, free
from jealousy and prodigal of praise. While aiming
at that excellence of typography which renders his
editions the treasures of the book collector, he
strove at the same time to make them cheap ....
When he died, bequeathing Greek literature as an
inalienable possession to the world, he was a poor
man."19
We, who take the availability in our bookcases of our very
own volumes of Aristotle and of Plato so much for granted,
owe much gratitude to Aldo!
Aldo, the businessman and scholar, gathered 'round
himself an international circle of men of learning who would
constitute a New Academy {presumably in emulation not only
�MASCHLER
61
of Plato's Academy in Athens but also to rival the one
established under Medici auspices in Florence and headed by
Marsilio Ficino, 1433-1499). A catalogue published by the
Yale Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, commemorating an exhibition entitled "Learning from the Greeks, an
Exhibition Commemorating the Five Hundredth Anniversary
of the Founding of the Aldine Press," reports that, according
to its rules, the Aldine New Academy's members were to
meet for symposia, serve as an advisory board to the press,
and assist in the editorial tasks of seeing the texts into print.
While the Beinecke catalogue is scrupulous about discriminating what is known about the New Academy's rules (which
included the stipulation that only Greek was to be spoken at
meetings) from what is known about obedience to them, it is
altogether confident that there was an Aldine circle, to which
scholars of many different nationalities belonged, including
an Englishman, Thomas Linacre. It was owing to this English
connection that the Dutchman, Erasmus, came to visit Italy
and became an intimate of Aldo's.
The sequence of events appears to have been, roughly, as
follows: Erasmus (1469-1536), the first European to succeed,
literally, in living by his pen, keeping himself independent
from churches and courts and universities and casting his lot
with Europe's great printer-publishers,zo in his younger days
served as tutor to an Englishman, Lord Mountjoy, while they
were both studying in Paris. Lord Mountjoy invited Erasmus
to England and there introduced him to Thomas More,
Colet, and Linacre. Colet, who later became Dean of
St. Paul's Cathedral in London and founder (or re-founder?)
of one of England's most famous "public schools,"21 had
become convinced that it was necessary, and possible, "to
bring back the Christianity of the Apostles." He, though
agemate to Erasmus, seems to have set Erasmus his life's task:
Erasmus was to learn Greek very well so that he would be
able to retrieve the original New Testament as well as the
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
work of the early church fathers and have them-the original
authorities for a Christian life-published and spread.22
Erasmus carried out this plan. He went to Italy, partly, at
least, in the hope of bettering his Greek. He met and made
friends with Aldus and his circle. Eventually he brought out a
New Testament in Greek and Latin (several of the early
Church Fathers' Works as well). Erasmus's text of the New
Testament, in the 1519 edition, was the one that Luther used
for his German translation. It was also the base text for
Robert Estienne's third edition of the New Testament, published in Paris in 1550, and it was the first to be published
with critical apparatus. Erasmus's text underlies our King
James version, and when the Elzeviers, in 1633, published
their Greek Testament they proclaimed it "the received text"
(textum ergo habes, nunc ab omnibus receptus). The scholars
who produced the recent University of Toronto edition of
Erasmus's Works, on whom I am relying for this information,
write: "Thus was created the so-called textus receptus, the
foundation of protestant Bible scholarship for three centuries,
until the ninteenth century ushered in a new era of Biblical
criticism. "23
It was, more than anything, because of such philological
labors that the more learned of his contemporaries hailed
Erasmus as "the prince of theologians." One of these writes
to Erasmus:
[You are] ... the first author in our times of the
rebirth of theology, [you are the man who] called
back theologians from the ... turbid waters of the
scholastics to the sources of sacred letters ....As
with a trumpet you have summoned the entire
world to the philosophy of Christ. We do not
doubt that you were born to restore theology.
Therefore, fulfill your destiny and purge with your
most learned hand Augustine and Hilary that we
may distinguish the spurious from the genuine, as
�MASCHLER
63
in previous years you did most successfully with
Jerome.24
I do not know why Erasmus, when he brought out the
first edition of his "purified" New Testament, called it Novum
Instrumentum.25 But the coincidence that this tag should
sound so much like Bacon's Novum Organum to our ears
helps to make vivid that Erasmus's hopes for reform and
renewal were as much vested in the recovery of access to
Sacred Scripture as were Bacon's, later, in the recovery of
access to nature. Both men thought of themselves as fighting
idol worship!
Erasmus apprenticed himself to the notorious philologist
Valla (1406-1457), whose notes to the New Testament he had
discovered a decade or so earlier. By quoting from Erasmus's
letter to the man to whom he dedicated his edition of Valla's
Notes on the New Testament, I may convey why I believe we
do wrong in looking down our noses at philological labors as
mere dry-as-dust scholarship, a scholarship for which only
men who have the soul of someone raised by maiden aunts
would have the patience. Erasmus writes:
As I was hunting last summer in an ancient
library.. .luck brought me a prey of no ordinary
importance, Lorenzo Valla's notes on the New
Testament. At once I was eager to share it with
the world of scholarship, for it seemed ... ungenerous to devour the prize of my chase in solitude
and silence. But I was a little put off... by the
entrenched unpopularity of Valla's name .... 26
You, however... began to urge me ...not to cheat
the author of the credit he deserved or to deprive
countless students of such an enormous advantage
.. .I am inclined to believe that the most unpleasantly hostile demonstrations ... will be made by
those who stand most to profit, that is, the theologians. They will say it is intolerable presumption in
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
a grammarian, who has upset every department
of learning, to let his impertinent pen loose on
scripture itself.... Tell me what is so shocking about
Valla's action in making a few annotations on the
New Testament after comparing several old and
good Greek manuscripts. After all, it is from Greek
sources that our text undoubtedly comes; and
Valla's notes had to do with internal disagreements, or a nodding translator's plainly inadequate
rendering of the meaning, or things that are more
intelligibly expressed in Greek, or, finally, anything
that is clearly corrupt in our text. Will they maintain that Valla, the grammarian, has not the same
privileges as Nicholas the theologian? .. .! do not
believe that theology herself, the queen of all the
sciences, will be offended if some share is claimed
in her... by her humble attendant grammar; for
though grammar is of less consequence in some
men's eyes, no help is more indispensable than
hers. She is concerned with small details, details
such as have always been indispensable for greatness. Perhaps she discusses trivial questions, but
these have important corollaries. If they protest
that a theologian is too grand to be bound by the
rules of grammar, and that the whole business of
interpretation depends on the inspiration of the
holy spirit, what a novel distinction is offered to
theologians, who are to have the exclusive privilege of expressing themselves ungrammatically.. .It
will be said that it is sinful to change anything in
the Holy Scriptures .... On the contrary, the sin of
corruption is greater, and the need for careful revision by scholars is greater also .... The ... discrepancies in our current texts prove clearly that they are
not free from errors.27
�MASCHLER
65
If, though a Christian, you believe that serving God is
something quite distinct and separate from ferreting out
truth-the true and correct reading, for instance, of the verses in Romans that had been taken to teach men that their will
is depraved-you may impatiently shrug off Erasmus's
exegetical labors as mere fussing. If, further, you have not
been advised, by secondary literature, that ever since St.
Jerome and Augustine there had been opposition within the
Christian church between those who held to a philological
idea of Bible exegesis and those who believed in the need for
an "extra" of a directly inspirational sort, scholarly Europe's
adoration for Erasmus will be baffling. There is, however, a
book bearing the title Erasmus, Lee and the Correction of the
Vulgate: The Shaking of the Foundations (Librairie Droz,
Geneva, 1992) which argues that it would not be a distortion
to see the quarrel between Luther and Erasmus in terms of
the fact that whereas Luther claimed that at a certain time
and in a certain place he "underwent an illumination or
inspiration enabling him to penetrate to the meaning of
Romans 1:17 .... Erasmus undermines and rejects the need for
this kind of extraordinary intervention .. .insofar as his own
day is concerned" (p. 17, Coogan).
As Erasmus reads Romans 5:12, the Vulgate translation of
the Greek text eph' ho pantes hemarton was erroneous. The
Vulgate takes the Greek words to mean "in whom all sinned"
(in quo omnes peccaverunt).
Augustine had supported his doctrine of original
sin as an inherited depravity with this translation.
Erasmus was the first in the history of Western [as
opposed to Eastern) exegesis to understand [the
Greek preposition] epi as having a causal sense
(because all sinned). In a very lengthy annotation
expanded over several editions Erasmus defended
his translation and interpretation ... as referring
not to original sin in the Augustinian sense of an
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
inherited guilt but rather to personal sins committed in free imitation of the sin of Adam.
When criticized for his paraphrase, Erasmus replied that
Origen, Ambrose, and Theophylact Gerome, or rather, pseudo-Jerome as well) all favor his interpretation here. The
editors of the Toronto ed. of Erasmus's Paraphrase of Romans
(volume 42, p. 147) add a quote from the Greek Church
Father Origen in evidence: "For all who are born in this
world are not only nourished by parents, but also instructed,
and they are not only sons of sinners, but disciples"
(PG 14;1018B-C).
Given Erasmus's return to what was in the West a preAugustinian reading, more nearly in acccord with Origen, not
only of Romans 5:12 but also of 6:15ff, it is not surprising
that he became a hero to such as were filled with Pico's pedagogic hopes! And no wonder that some of the eighteenthcentury philosophes, for example, Pierre Bayle and Jean
LeClerc, embraced him as one of their own kind! The
Toronto editors of Erasmus' Paraphrase of Romans
(pp. 148ff.) go so far as to say: "Like Origen and Pelagius,
Erasmus interprets Paul as teaching that sin is more a matter
of custom [that is, second nature] than of nature."28
Erasmus's philological labors on the New Testament
made scriptural warrant for the dogma of the trinity questionable as well.29 This did not lead him to deny the doctrine.JO Rather, in accord with the Estienne motto Noli Altum
Sapere, Sed Time (Don't Be Haughty, But Be Mraid), it led
him to question a theology-, that is, theory-centered
Christianity. In evidence I cite from a letter which he used as
preface to his edition of St. Hilary of Poitier (ca.315-367):
Is he who cannot disentangle according to the
method of philosophy what distinguishes the
father from the son or the holy spirit from both,
or what the difference is between the generation
of the son from the father and the procession of
�MASCHLER
the spirit, is he destined not to have fellowship
with the father, son, and holy spirit? .... After the
richest talents have applied all their energy for a
long time to the investigation of [high theological
questions], this at last is the final result of their
effort: they realize they know nothing; and, what
is more, they contribute nothing to the devout life.
Thus, nowhere more does that well-known passage
from Paul apply: 'Knowledge puffs up, charity
builds up.' What arrogance, what contentions,
what tumult, what discord ... do we see gush forth
from this kind of absurd learning. Although our
life is so fleeting, we neglect meanwhile those
things without which no one has any hope of
attaining salvation. Unless I pardon my brother's
sins against me, God will not pardon my transgressions against him. Unless I have a pure heart, I
shall not see God. Therefore, with all my energy I
must aim, I must practice, I must strive to cleanse
my soul of malice, hatred, envy, pride, avarice, and
lust. You will not be damned if you should not
know whether the spirit proceeding from the
father and the son has a single or a double principle, but you will not escape perdition unless you
see to it in the meantime that you have the fruits
of the spirit, which are charity, joy, peace,
patience, kindness .... Toward this end the chief
concern of our study must be focused and directed .... The sum and substance of our religion is
peace and concord. This can hardly remain the
case unless we define as few matters as possible and
leave each individual's judgment free on many
questions. This is because the obscurity of most
questions is great and the malady is for the most
part intrinsic to our human nature... Many puzzling
questions are now referred to an ecumenical coun-
67
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
68
cil. It would be much more fitting to defer such
questions to that time when we shall see God face
to face without the mirror and without the
mystery.31
Let me conclude by reporting what Erasmus offers in the
way of commentary on the publishers' emblems and mottos
on which I have threaded much of this essay. He does not, in
the Adages, which are my text for this purpose, touch on the
motif of the tree and, as far as I know, omits adages derived
from Holy Writ altogether, mining solely pagan literature. So
it was I, not Erasmus, who brought an anti-theological,
Erasmian, reading of the Estienne motto and tree . He does,
however, include a motto that came to figure (in 1642, thus
long after Erasmus's death) on the title pages of some of the
Amsterdam Elzeviers: It runs Ne Extra Oleas (Not Beyond
the Olive Trees). The words were taken, says Erasmus,32 from
Aristophanes's Frogs (993 ), and a scholiast is reported to have
explained33 that the sense of the motto is Acknowledge
Limits.
Erasmus does dwell on two other printers devices-the
Aldine press's anchor-cum-dolphin and the Frobens's
caduceus.
Fig.14 and fig. 15
Without Aldo
Manuzzio-the
Venetian printer set
up
m
business
through the good
offices of Count Pico
della Mirandola, see
p. 55 above-and
without Christopher
Proben-the Basel
printer from whose
presses most of
�MASCHLER
69
Erasmus's writings issued-such
a life as that of Erasmus, independent scholar and man of letters, would have been impossible. Erasmus was well aware that
his own freedom and his service
of mankind depended on these
printer-publishers. The longest
commentary on a proverb (14
pages) is devoted to the Aldo
motto, Festina Lente (Make
Haste Slowly).34
Erasmus tracks the saying to Suetonius's "Life of
Augustus" and remarks:
It does not surprise me that this proverb was a
favorite with two Roman emperors, and they by
far the most worthy of praise, Octavius Augustus
and Titus Vespianus ... .It is easy to see that this
saying pleased Titus Vespianus, from the evidence
of ancient coinage. Aldus Manutius showed me a
silver coin of old and obviously Roman workmanship, which he said had been given him by Peter
Bembo, a young Venetian nobleman, who was
foremost in scholarship and a great delver into
ancient literature. It was stamped as follows: on
one side there was the effigy of Titus Vespianus
with an inscription, on the other an anchor, with a
dolphin wound round the middle of it as if round
a pole. This means nothing else than the saying of
Augustus Caesar, Hasten Slowly, or so the books
on hieroglyphics tell us. That ["hieroglyphics"] is
the word for the enigmatic carvings which were so
much used in early times, especially among the
Egyptian soothsayers and priests, who thought it
wrong to exhibit the mysteries of wisdom to the
vulgar in open writing, as we do; but they
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
expressed what they thought worthy to be known
by various symbols, things, or animals, so that not
everyone could readily interpret them. But if anyone deeply studied the qualities of each object, and
the special nature and power of each creature, he
would at length, by comparing and guessing what
they symbolized, understand the meaning of the
riddle .... The anchor, because it delays, slows
down, and stops the ship, means slowness; the dolphin represents speed .. ..This kind of writing... not
only has great dignity but gives no little pleasure .... What symbol is better suited to express the
ardent and dauntless activity of the mind than the
dolphin? .... So this saying, Make Haste Slowly,
appears to have originated in the mysteries of the
most antique philosophy, from thence to be taken
up by the two most admirable of Roman emperors .... Now it has come down to Aldus Manutius of
Rome [Aldo was born in Rome] as the third heir in
succession ... .Indeed I should not think this symbol
was more illustrious when it was stamped on the
imperial coinage and passing from hand to hand
than now, when it is sent out beyond the bounds
of Christendom, on all kinds of books, in both
languages, recognized, owned and praised by all
to whom liberal studies are holy.... Consider as
well that, however one may sing the praises of
those who by their virtue either defend or increase
the glory of their country, their actions only affect
worldly prosperity, and within narrow limits. But
the man who sets fallen learning on its feet (and
this is almost more difficult than to originate it in
the first place) is building up a sacred and immortal thing, and serving not one province alone but
all peoples and all generations.35 Once this was the
task of princes, and it was the greatest glory of
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71
Ptolemy [the ruler, not the astronomer]. But his
[Ptolemy's] library was contained between the narrow walls of its own house, whereas Aldus is
building up a library which has no other limits
than the world itself.
Of Proben he writes:
What Aldus was striving to do among the
Italians ...John Proben is trying to achieve on this
side of the Alps ... .lf the northern princes were to
favor good learning as honestly as the Italians, the
serpents of Proben would not be so far from the
riches of Aldus's dolphins. Aldus, making haste
slowly, gained both riches and fame, and deserved
both; Proben, holding his staff erect, looking to
nothing but usefulness to the public, not losing the
simplicity of the dove while he expresses the wisdom of the serpent ... Proben has amassed less
money than fame.
The interpretation of Proben's caduceus emblem that
Erasmus gives derives, of course, from the New Testament.
Erasmus is quoting Jesus' words, who says, addressing his
disciples: "I send you out as sheep admidst wolves, so be ye
wise as serpents and innocent as doves." (Matthew 10:16).
Whether the Proben bird really is a dove I cannot tell from
the picture. Nor have I seen a Proben imprint with this motto.
It may exist. But it is equally possible that Erasmus is pulling
everybody's leg, rousing hopes for the revelation of secrets
that are non-existent.
But perhaps both of his comments constitute an apologia
pro vita sua? Erasmus never joined Luther's Protestant fold.
And while court records of inquisitorial interrogation of men
accused of heresy show that some, for example, Baptist,
laymen framed the formula of their Christian faith exactly in
the terms provided by Erasmus's New Testament text,36
which they knew by heart and quoted to the inquisitor,
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Erasmus, unlike these Baptists, died in his bed, not at the
stake. For this he has been blamed. Luther denies him the title
of Christian and calls him a sceptic. Some pre-World War 2
twentieth-century historians have called him a coward.
I don't call him anything but thank him.
Notes
1 Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the
Human Mind, Weidenfeld and Nicolson English ed. of 1955,
pp. 72££, first published in French in 1795 . A richly detailed working out of what's "in" these words of Condorcet's is given by
Elizabeth Eisenstein's book The Printing Press as an Agent of
Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Earlymodern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1979). Somewhat
surprisingly, Eisenstein does not mention Condorcet.
2 Francis Bacon, New Organon, trans. Fulton H . Anderson (Library
of Liberal Arts, 1960); Advancement of Learning, ed. G.W. Kitchin.
3 Italics, unless otherwise indicated, are mine. Please notice that the
printer is sufficiently self-possessed to take it upon himself to
address the reader.
Since the list of Elzevier science books deserves to be known, I tick
off some of them: Descartes's Geometry, Meditations, Principles,
Passions, Opera Omnia; Gilbert's De Mundo nostro sublunari
philosophia nova; Hobbes's Elementa Philosophica; several of
Francis van Schooten's mathematical books, which were studied by
Newton; Vieta's Collected Works; Stevin's Mathematical Works, in
a French version; Christian Huygens's Theoremata; the medical
writings of that Professor Tulp whom Rembrandt depicts in his
''Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp,"-all of these were brought out by
the Elzeviers.
4
5 The Amsterdam branch of Elzevier, which used the goddess
Athena, along with her shield, olive, and owl as its imprint, likewise
stressed that curbing hybris is the mark of wisdom, for their motto
was a quotation from Aristophanes' Frogs, line 993:
me ... ektoth ... ton elaon (Not Beyond The Olive Trees) . A.C.J.
Willems, in his book about the Elzeviers, reports that an ancient
�MASCHLER
73
scholiast explained the meaning to be something like ''Acknowledge
limits!" A.C.J. Willems, Les Elzeviers, 1880, p. xciii.
Yeats's chestnut tree at the end of ''Among School Children," the
"tree diagrams" of Chomskyan linguistics, the genealogical tree of
Jesse, the tree of which the Duchess speaks to John of Gaunt in Act
1, scene 2 of Shakespeare's Richard II, not to mention the fact that
in the days when our St. John's Liberty Tree still stood, it was spoken of as a symbol for our nation in that "the relation between
branches and trunk suggests the joining of unity with diversity,
which is the genius of America."
6
7 Evidently, scholars who do intellectual or cultural history rather
than study great books, have long taken cognizance of the fact that
the capitalist enterprise of printing and publishing has, as Bacon
claimed and the eighteenth-century philosophes reiterate, changed
the face of the world.
8 Fred Schreiber, in his book The Estiennes (E.K. Schreiber, New
York, 1982), terms Robert Estienne the founder of modern lexicography through his Latinae Linguae Thesaurus. Robert was also the
publisher of David Kimchi's Sefer haShorashim, a Hebrew thesaurus
designed on the principle of grouping words of the same (usually
triliteral) root together. Henri 2 Estienne, Robert's son, later
applied this same principle of organization to his huge Thesaurus of
the Greek language. The Plantin polyglot Bible, in Latin, Greek,
Hebrew, Syriac, and Aramaic is, by cognoscenti, ranked as "the
most important work ever produced in the Netherlands by one
printer"-so says L. Voet, former director of the Plantin-Moretus
Museum in Antwerp and author of The Golden Compasses: A
History and Evaluation of the Printing and Publishing Activities of
the Officina Plantiana at Antwerp (Amsterdam, London, New York,
1969-72).
According to the business records preserved at the PlantinMoretus House in Antwerp, Louis Elzevier had done some bookbinding for the Plantins in 1565-7, and his father, Hans Elzevier,
had-between 1567 and 1589-worked as a "pressman"for the
Plantins. Colin Clair, Christopher Plantin (Cassell and Co., London,
1960), pp. 154ff.
9
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
For a summary of this little book, see Ch. 14 and 18 in Edward
Dijksterhuis's remarkable Dutch biography, Simon Stevin, an
abbreviated English version of which was published by R.
Hooykaas and M.G.J. Minnaert under the title Simon Stevin:
Science in the Netherlands around 1600, (Martinus Nijhoff, 1970).
(For Dijksterhuis's comment on what I called Stevin's teaching style,
see especially p. 121, beginning ?lines from the bottom of the page,
describing the distinctive logical and rhetorical attributes of Stevin's
famous "wreath of balls" demonstration). Dijksterhuis, in the
concluding chapter of his biography of Stevin, cites a fascinating
passage about city planning. Stevin recommends that on both sides
of the street houses be furnished with canopies. These would serve
pedestrians as protection against rain, sun, and traffic. "Such
protection would not only be agreeable for the wealthy but also
advantageous to the poor, who must, to gain a living, stay outside
and who don't have a change of clothing when once they're
drenched to the skin, and whose stockings and shoes wear out with
mud, so that they walk around with wet feet, as a result of which
they contract many diseases, diseases that are infectious, so that
they reach the wealthy. Therefore, if the wealthy were to underwrite the erection of such canopies, they would advance their own
interests as well." (I tried to render this amazing prose roughly as it
stands in Stevin's sixteenth-century Dutch. Dijksterhuis expects the
modern reader to find fault with Stevin for caring so little for the
well-being of the poor per se. It has, strangely, not occurred to him
that (a) the Adam-Smithean idea of enlightened self-interest is
entirely in accord with the rest of Stevin's thinking and (b) that
Stevin, precisely if he really wants those overhangs built, had better
appeal to the interests of the only burghers who have the wherewithal to put them up.)
10
J.
11 According to Dijksterhuis's list, the books published under this
particular Plantin vignette are: Dialectic (1585), The Art of Tenths
(1585), La Pratique d'Arithmetique (1585), The Building of Forts
(1594). I give the Dutch titles in English. We, who take the availability of printed self-help books on every conceivable subject for
granted, need a little dose of history to realize how huge a difference it makes that even commoners with just a little education can,
without going to school, teach themselves double entry bookkeeping or "how to draw a picture, compose a madrigal, mix paints,
bake clay, survey a field, handle all manner of tools." (p. 243
�MASCHLER
75
Eisenstein). Self-help literature is, to this day, the most lucrative part
of publishing.
12 Cf Bacon's New Organon Bk 2, last sentences of the concluding
aphorism, 52 (pp. 267f. LLA ed.). See also the quotation from
Bacon that Kant selected as frontispiece for the 2nd edition of the
Critique of Pure Reason.
The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernst Cassirer et al,
(University of Chicago, 1948), pp. 223££.
13
14 On the Dignity of Man, p. 28, Library of Liberal Arts ed. Cf.
Renaissance Philosophy of Man, p. 249. I am a little bewildered
that, as the English sentence runs, the elm is earthly and lower, the
vine heavenly and higher.
15 Pico holds that there are two kinds of magic. The first, he says,
the Greeks called goeteia. "The second sort they called mageia, the
perfect and highest wisdom as it were. Porphyry says that in the language of the Persians, magician means the same thing as interpreter
and lover of divine things means in our language .... The first is the
most fraudulent of arts, the second is firm, faithful, and
solid .... From the second comes the highest splendor and glory of
letters, desired in ancient times and almost always since then. No
man who was a philosopher and desirous of learning good arts has
ever been studious of the first. Pythagoras, Empedocles,
Democritus, Plato, travelled across the sea to learn the second.
When they came back they preached it and held it chief among the
esoteric doctrine ....As the first magic makes man subject to and
delivered over to the powers of wickedness, so the second makes him
their prince and lord .. ..The second, among the virtues sown by the
kindness of God and planted in the world, as if calling them out from
darkness to light, does not so much make wonders as carefully serve
nature which makes them," Dignity, p. 27-28. For commentary on
Pico's distinction between goeteia and mageia, compare D. P.
Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella,
(London: Warburg Institute, 1958). See also Maryjoe Teeter Dobbs,
Foundations of Newton's Alchemy, (Cambridge University Press,
1975). I found the latter book especially helpful in its effort to
explain how and why moral and religious self-formation was thought
to be accomplished through alchemical practices. This ought to be an
important question for those who value the distinction between
�-
-
- - - - - - - --- -- --------- -
76
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
liberal and servile arts on the ground that, unlike the merely useful
arts, the role of the liberal arts is to improve the human soul. To
determine whether alchemy and Pica's "magic," understood as
Dobbs and Walker explain them, are rivals to the Sacrament of the
Eucharist, one might have to study the portions of Part 3 of
St. Thomas's Summa Theologica that directly concern the latter.
16 Cf. Rousseau's Second Discourse, on Human Inequality, trans.
Masters and Masters (St. Martin's Press, 1964), pp. 113f.
17 Something analogous is reported, for Latin, by Henri 2 Estienne,
in a Preface addressed to his son Paul (see his 1585 edition of Aulus
Gellius). The father writes: ''And as I am on the topic of speaking
Latin, I will add another notable reminiscence of my father's family, by which you may understand the facilities I enjoyed as a boy for
acquiring that tongue. There was a time when your grandfather
Robert entertained in his own household ten men employed by him
as correctors on his press, or in other parts of his business. These
ten persons were all of them men of education; some of them of
considerable learning; as they were of different nations, so they
were of different languages. This necessitated them to employ Latin
as the common medium of communication, not at table only, but
about the house, so that the very maidservants came to understand
what was said and even to speak it a little. As for your grandmother, except one made use of some very unusual word, she understood
what was said in Latin with the same ease as if it had been French.
As to myself and my brother [Robert 2], we were allowed at home
to use no other language whenever we had to address my father or
one of his ten journeymen." Quoted by M. Pattison, Essays, vol. 1,
p. 71. Readers of Montaigne may be struck by the resemblance
between Montaigne pere and Robert Estienne. I am reminded of the
household of Eliezer Ben Yehuda, "the father of modern Hebrew,"
where, long before the founding of the modern state of Israel, only
Hebrew was to be spoken. This last observation is relevant to my
purposes because I am trying to convey how large a debt we owe to
the single-minded, perhaps fanatical, devotion of these men who
believed that through the right kind of filial piety, a critical filial
piety, re-birth is possible.
18 Before his elevation to the Papacy, Leo X was Giovanni de
Medici.
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77
19 I could imagine that the relatively lengthy narrative about the
Aldine press is included in the eleventh ed. of the Brittanica because
the Encyclopedia's editors felt that their own enterprise of serving
the public good through the diffusion of knowledge beyond the
halls of the University and that of the house of Aldo were one and
the same (If you are of little faith with respect to the educational
value of encyclopedias, you may be willing to reconsider in light of
the report that young Faraday picked up the rudiments of science in
the course of reading the scientific articles included in the encyclopedia volumes which he was binding while he was apprenticed to a
French emigre bookbinder). For a detailed acount of Aldo
Manuzzio, see Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius:
Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice, Blackwell and
Cornell, 1979. Lowry reports that there is a letter from Aldo to
Catherine Pia which expresses the "idealism" inspired in him by,
among others, Pico's faith in human dignity and Pico's hope of
"reconciling all faiths in a single ultimate mystery." Unfortunately
Lowry does not quote from this letter. He does, however, quote a
"sort of declaration of intent" which Aldo, from 1495 on, attached
to all of his editions of Lascaris' Greek Grammar and of his own
Latin Grammar. It runs: "I have decided to spend all my life in the
service of my fellow men. God is my witness, I desire nothing more
than to do something for them, as my past life shows, wherever it
has been spent, and as I hope my future life will show still more,"
Lowry p. 66.
20 In 1509 the Archbishop of St. Andrews presented Erasmus with
a ring bearing a figure that Erasmus identified as an image of the
Roman godlet Terminus. Erasmus adopted the Terminus figure,
having added the inscription Cedo Nulli (I Yield to No One), as his
personal emblem, with which he confirmed his most important documents (see Erasmus, volume 2 of Correspondence, ed. R.A.B
Mynors and D.F.S. Thomson (University of Toronto, 1974),
p. 150). I am, however, obliged to report that according to Lisa
Jardine (Erasmus, Man of Letters, p. 82), there is a letter of Erasmus
to Charles V's secretary Alfonso Valdes, in which Erasmus attaches
the words Cedo Nulli to Terminus, not to himself, and Terminus he
identifies as Death. Yet since Erasmus so writes in response to his
being criticized for pride, it is hard to tell who is "really" speaking
in the motto.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
78
The school still exists. It counts John Milton (1616), the Duke of
Marlborough (1650-1722), G.K. Chesterton (1874-1938), and
Montgomery (1887-1975) among its graduates.
21
22 Cf Frederic Seebohm, The Oxford Reformers, (London, 1869);
J.A. Froude, Life and Letters of Erasmus, (New York: Charles
Scribner, 1912)
23
Erasmus, Correspondence, 3.220.
Urban Rieger, in a letter to Erasmus quoted on p. 33 of John C.
Olin, Six Essays on Erasmus, with a translation of Erasmus's 1523
Letter to Carondelet, (Fordham University Press, 1979).
24
25 Erasmus's Novum Instrumentum came out one year before
Luther affixed his 95 Theses to the portal of the church of
Wittenberg.
Valla's reputation as an enemy of the Catholic Church derived in
large measure from his having employed his philological expertise
to debunk the genuineness of the so-called Donation of
Constantine. In this document, "the emperor Constantine, in gratitude for his conversion by Pope Silvester, supposedly granted to
that pope and his successors for ever, not only spiritual supremacy
over the other great patriarchates and over all matters of faith and
worship, but also temporal dominion over Rome, Italy, and 'the
provinces, places, and civitates of the western regions."' I have not
read Valla's De (also credita et emendita Constantini donatione
declamatio, though there is an English translation by Christopher B.
Coleman. All my information about Valla derives from Cassirer et
al., The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, (University of Chicago,
1948), and the 11th ed. of the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
26
Letter to Christopher Fisher of 1505, Correspondence, vol. 2,
pp. 89-96.
27
That Augustine's "reduction of all bad concupiscences to the concupiscence of sex and the identification of sexual concupiscence
with the ... corruption [we all have inherited from Adam was] something new, introduced by Augustine into Christian theology," is
argued at length by Harry Wolfson in a 1959 lecture reprinted as
Essay 6 in his paperback volume Religious Philosophy: A Group of
Essays (Atheneum, 1961). See also Elaine Pagels, "The Politics of
28
�MASCHLER
79
Paradise: Augustine's Exegesis of Genesis 1-3 versus that of John
Chrysostum" and "Christian Apologists and 'the Fall of the Angels' :
An Attack on Roman Imperial Power?" in Harvard Theological
Review 78:1-2 (1985) 67-99 and 78:3-4 (1985) 301-25. On this
same topic (the so-called Pelagian controversy), see Peter Brown,
"Pelagius and his Supporters ... " and "The Patrons of Pelagius: The
Roman Aristocracy... " in Journal of Theological Studies, N.S.,
volume19, Pt 1, April1968 and volume 21, Pt 1, April 1970. Our
own Peter Gilbert's finely balanced account of the Pelagian controversy in his recent lecture "Predestination in the New Testament
and St. Augustine" reopens the issue.
In Erasmus's edition of the New Testament the last chapter of
1 John lacks the Vulgate's verses 7, 8: "Quoniam tres sunt qui testimonium dant in caelo: Pater, Verbum, et Spiritus sanctus: et hi tres
unum sunt. Et tres sunt qui testimonium dant in terra: Spiritus, et
aqua, et sanguis: et hi tres unum sunt." When he was criticized for
thus deleting the "proof text" for trinitarianism, Erasmus answered
that he had not found any Greek manuscript containing these
words "though he had in the meanwhile examined several others
besides those on which he relied when first preparing his text."
(Bruce M. Metzger, The Text of the New Testament: Its
Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, (Oxford, 1964), p. 101,
quoted by Coogan.
29
Newton, along with every other Christian anti-trinitarian of
modern times, uses the philological labors of Erasmus.
It is reported that six years after the Council of Trent and sixtythree years after Erasmus's death, the following dialogue between a
Franciscan friar and an Anabaptist layman occurred:
INQUISITOR: What, don't you believe that Christ is the second
person of the Holy Trinity?
ANABAPTIST: We never call things but as they are called in
Scripture.... The Scripture speaks of one God, the Son of God, and
the Holy Spirit.
INQUISITOR: If you had read the creed of Athanasius you would
have found in it God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy
Spirit.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
ANABAPTIST: I am a stranger to the creed of St. Athanasius. It is
sufficient for me to believe in the living God, and that Christ is the
Son of the living God, as Peter believed; and to believe in the Holy
Spirit which the Father has poured out upon us through Jesus
Christ our Lord, as Paul says.
INQUISITOR: You are an impertinent fellow, to fancy that God
pour out his spirit upon you, who do not believe that the Holy
Spirit is God. You have borrowed these heretical opinions from the
diabolical books of the cursed Erasmus of Rotterdam, who, in his
Preface to the Works of St. Hilary pretends that this holy man says,
at the end of his twelfth book, that the Holy Spirit is not called God
in any part of the Scripture .... Will you be a follower of that
antitrinitarian? .... You have sucked the poisoned breast of
Erasmus .... But St. John says ... There are three that bear record in
heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three
are one.
ANABAPTIST: I have often heard that Erasmus, in his Annotations
upon that passage, shows that this text is not in the Greek original."
The source for this dialogue is an early Mennonite martyrology recorded in G. Brandt, The History of the Reformation in the
Low Countries, (London: 1720-23). All of the foregoing information derives from Coogan, pp. 68££, who also reports that the
Anabaptist, a certain Herman van Flekwijk, died at the stake at
Bruges on 10 June, 1569. Bruges is Simon Stevin's city of birth.
Erasmus's peace-loving "accommodationism" is in the spirit of
Paul's Romans 14, broadly interpreted.
30
31 Olin, pp. 99-101. See also pp. 105, 108-10 of this same letterpreface. Erasmus concludes the letter, manifestly addressing contemporary issues (his tract against Luther-the Discourse on Free
Will-comes out the following year): "Diverse are the gifts of men
of genius, and many are the different kinds of ages .... Reverence is
the due of ancient authors, especially those authors who are
recommended by the sanctity of their lives in addition to their
learning and eloquence. But this reverence does not exclude a
critical reading of them." The Colloquies, the Discourse on Free
Will, the Paraclete, the Anti-Barbarus are all to the same effect.
32
University of Toronto ed., vol. 33, p. 82
�MASCHLER
81
33 Alphonse Charles Joseph Willems, Les Elzeviers, Histoire et
Annates typographiques (Paris, Bruxelles, The Hague, 1880), p. xciii
University of Toronto ed., vol. 33, pp. 3-17. In the Margaret
Mann paperback edition of (selected) Adages (now out of print) this
is the lead entry.
34
Cf. Bacon on the three kinds of ambition, pp. 118f. LLA ed. of
New Organon. I leave it to the Bacon scholars to determine whether
the resemblances between Erasmus's commentary on the adage
Festina lente and Bacon's Aphorism 119 are significant.
35
36
See footnote 21 on pp. 26f.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�83
t
The Empires of the Sun
and The West
Eva Brann
This lecture is dedicated to my friend and fellow tutor
William Darkey in Santa Fe, who first introduced me to the
book behind this lecture, William Prescott's History of the
Conquest of Mexico.
>f
I shall begin with two sets of facts and dates. On or about
August 8 of 1519 Hernan Cortes, a hidalgo, a knight, from
Medellin in the Estremadura region of Spain, having sailed
his expeditionary fleet from Cuba to win "vast and wealthy
lands," set out from a city he called Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz
on the Gulf of Mexico to march inland, west toward the
capital of Anahuac, the empire of the Nahuatl-speaking
Aztecs. The city was called Tenochtitlan and its lord, the
emperor, was Montezuma II. Cortes knew of the place from
the emperor's coastal vassals and from delegations
Montezuma had sent loaded with presents to welcome-and
to forestall-the invaders. The presents included many works
of well-crafted gold.
Cortes had with him about 300 Spaniards, including
about forty crossbowmen and twenty arquebusiers, that is,
men carrying heavy matchlock rifles. He probably had three
front-loading cannons. His officers wore metal armor. There
were fifteen horses for the captains and a pack of hunting
dogs. (I might mention here that the Aztec dogs were a hairless type bred for food.) The band was accompanied by
Indian porters and allies, a group that grew to about 1000 as
they marched inland. Early in November they passed at
13000 feet between the two volcanoes that guard the high
Eva Brann is a tutor and former dean at St. John's College, Annapolis. This
lecture was delivered on September 13, 2002, at Santa Fe and was the
Homecoming Lecture on October 4, 2002, at Annapolis.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Valley of Mexico. Some Spanish captains astounded the
Indians by venturing to climb to the crater rim of the ominously smoking Popocatepetl. On November 8, Cortes was
on the causeway to Tenochtitlan. On November 14,
Montezuma, the ruler of a realm of 125,000 square miles,
capable of putting in the field an army of 200,000 men with
a highly trained officer corps, quietly surrendered his person
to the custody of Cortes, declared himself a vassal of
Emperor Charles V, sovereign of the Holy Roman Empire,
and transferred his administration to the palace assigned to
the Spaniards. He soon made them a present of the state
treasure which they had discovered behind a plastered-over
door in the palace aviary. Cortes's surmise that just to enter
Tenochtitlan was to take Anahuac captive seemed to be
justified.
On June 30, 1520, Cortes being absent, Montezuma was
either murdered by the Spaniards or stoned to death by his
own people as he appeared on the palace wall attempting to
contain a rebellion. The latter account seems more plausible,
since he appears to have been shielded by Spaniards to whom
he was a valuable pawn and since some of his nobles were
growing disgusted with his submissiveness. The uprising had
been induced by the young captain whom Cortes had left in
charge, who had massacred unarmed celebrants of the feast
of Huitzilop6chtli, the city's chief god; this god both was and
stood for the Sun.
The Mexican uprising culminated in the noche triste, the
Sad Night, when the Spaniards were driven from the city with
enormous loss of life. In June 1521 the Spanish situation
looked desperate to them, as a vigorous, indomitable, eighteenyear-old emperor, Cuauhtemoc, Montezuma's second
successor (the first having died of smallpox), assumed the
leadership of an Aztec army now better acquainted with these
once apparently invincible invaders.
On August 15, 1521, just two years after his landing,
Cortes's band, augmented by some new arrivals and an allied
�BRANN
85
Indian army from Tenochtitlan's old enemy, Tlaxd.la, fought
its way, foot by foot, back into the city, with frightful losses
on both sides. The Spaniards were supported by a flotilla of
forty brigantines, light square-rigged sailing vessels that
Cortes had ordered built and dragged overland to Lake
Texcoco, the complex shallow water on which Tenochtitlan
stood. It was the first fleet of sailing ships to float on the lake.
I am still in the realm of fact when I say that within a few
days this city, surpassing all cities then on earth in the beauty
of its situation and the magic of its aspect, was completely
razed. Within four years it was overlaid, under Cortes's
supervision, by a complete Spanish city, whose cathedral, the
Cathedral of Mexico City, was eventually built hard by the
Great Temple of Tenochtitlan. In this total catastrophe the
Spaniards had lost fewer than 100 men, the Aztecs or Mexica
about 100,000.
I have, of course, omitted myriads of gripping details,
such as a novelist might hesitate to invent. But I shall now
abbreviate an abbreviation: In August 1519 there was a large,
powerful, highly civilized empire called Anahuac. By August
1521 it was gone; instead there was a new realm, a colony
called New Spain; Spanish was replacing the native Nahuatl.
Now the second set of facts, even more curtailed. On May
13, 1532, Francisco Pizarro (like Cortes from the Estremadura
and his distant relation) arrived at Tumbez, a port at the
northern end of the Inca empire and of modern Peru. This
empire was called by its people Tahuantinsuyu, meaning the
Realm of the Four Quarters. Pizarro had 130 troopers,
40 cavalry and one small cannon. The Inca Atahualpa-Inca
means Lord-had an army of 50,000 men. On November 16,
1533, the Inca came, at Pizarro's invitation, to meet him in
the town plaza of Cajamara. There he was unintelligibly
harangued by the chaplain of the expedition and given a
breviary: the Inca scornfully threw the scribbles to the
ground. Within 33 minutes, he having been seized, 4000 of
his men had been massacred. Resistance and the empire itself
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
fell apart with his capture. Atahualpa offered to fill his prison,
a cell 22 x 10 feet, with gold to the height of his reach in
exchange for his freedom. While the temples which were
encrusted with gold were being denuded and the condition
was being fulfilled, the Inca was condemned to death by burning. This sentence was commuted to strangulation when he
agreed to be baptized. Pizarro soon took Cuzco, the capital,
and installed a puppet Inca, Manco Capac, who mounted a
rebellion; it was put down with great loss of life on the Inca's
side in 1534. There followed a period of civil war among the
conquerors. Again to summarize the summary: A tiny band of
Spanish ruffians brought down, within two years, the most
efficiently administered polity of its time. Quechua, the native
language, was replaced by Spanish as the chief language.
It is thought that this second scenario was, on Pizarro's
part, a reprise of Cortes's conquest. If so, it is a demonstration of the inferiority of imitations.
The kind of facts I have listed here are spectacular yet
uncontested discontinuities in the stream of life. The dates,
which tell us both the temporal order of these facts and their
distance from us, serve to dramatize the discontinuity: About
half a millennium ago there occurred, not very far south of us
and close to each other in space and time, two mind-boggling
events-the destruction by a very few Spaniards of two great
civilizations.
We at this college have read or will read in. Herodotus)
Persian Wars hqw in July of480B.C. a band of 299 Spartans,
the same in number as Cortes's original companions, died in
holding the pass of Thermopylae against an Asian army of
who knows how many hundreds of thousands, led by Xerxe~,
king of Persia. Their. object was to give the Greeks time and
courage to repel the invader. But the Spartans were defending their own land from a self-debilitating .behem<?th. The
Spaniards' situation in Mesoamerica isjustthe inverse, except
that in each case the few were the . free. What, we may
�BRANN
87
wonder, would our world be like if the Asians had prevailed
in 480 B.C. or the Nahua in 1519 A.D.?
How could it happen? How did these American empires
fall? Just as Herodotus drew conclusions about the nature of
the Greeks from the Persian defeat, so one might wonder if
illumination about the nature of our West might not be found
in these catastrophes that mark the beginning of modern life.
To put it straightforwardly: In reading about Mexico and
Peru I began to wonder if there might be a clue in these events
to the apparently irresistible potency of the West when it
touches, be it insidiously or catastrophically, other worlds, be
they receptive or resistant.
Let me explain the not altogether appropriate use of the
term "the West" in my title, "The Empires of the Sun and the
West." Our tradition-! mean the one whose works we study
at this college-is usually called the Western tradition. It is
thereby revealed as defining itself against the East, Near and
Far, the Orient, the place where the sun rises. Our North
American republic is in this sense the West's very West and its
currently culminating expression. But, of course, the Aztecslet me interrupt myself to say that the people of the imperial
city of Mexico-Tenochtitlan did not call themselves Aztecs but
Mexica and that they called those who spoke their language
the Nahua and that the term Aztec was introduced to the
English-speaking wprld by the aforementioned. Prescottthese Mexica, then~ of course thought of the invaders as being
from the quarter pf the rising sun, from the e;ast. This .turns
out to be .a significant Ja~t. C~lumbus thought that he was
"sailing not the u1)ual. way" but w:est-:-:-sailing west to reach
the East, Japaq, China, India. It was for quite a while a very
unwelcome discoyery that the people whom the adventurers
so hopefully .called Indians (as I will continue to do here)
inhabited a long continent which, although it contracted into
a J:lal:'row isthmus in the middle, blocked the ocean. route to
the fabul9us Orient.. Thus .Prescott calls Tenochtitlan "the
great capital of .the western world .." So "West" is, strictly
�88
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
speaking, nonsense as used in this context, but I cling to it
because it is the available shorthand for ourselves, for those
living in the tradition that has its roots in Jerusalem and
Athens, achieves its modernity in Europe, has come to its current culmination on this continent, and is spreading its effects
all over the globe. What can be more necessary at this
moment than to grapple with the being of this West?
As I read on it seemed to me often that the reasons given
by historians for Anahuac's sudden collapse before the
Spaniards might well be cumulatively necessary but could not
be sufficient conditions. I mean that without their operation
the Empires could not have fallen so quickly, but that
altogether they did not so completely account for the fall as
to make it seem unavoidable. It is true that the Spaniards
brought horses into a land without draft animals, and so the
cavaliers could run down the pedestrian Aztec warriors and
frighten the Indians into seeing the Europeans as centaurs,
four-footed monstrous men-horses. But these Indians soon
learned that man and horse were separable and mortal;
during their desperate and bloody defense of Tenochtitlan
there appeared on the skull rack of a local temple, beneath
53 heads of Spaniards, the heads of a number of horses, of
"Spanish deer," as they were now called. The crossbows and
cannons may have delivered more swift and terrifying
destruction than the Aztec javelin-throwers, the metal armor
deflected the cuts of obsidian-studded wooden swords. The
driving greed for gold, which, as Cortes ironically represented to an Indian official, was the specific remedy for a disease
that troubled the Spaniards, may have disoriented the people.
The physical disease brought by the Spaniards, the smallpox,
did more than decimate the uninoculated natives; Spanish
luck at crucial junctures may have demoralized the caciques,
the Indian chieftains. The harsh exactions and suppression of
Montezuma's empire did indeed provide Cortes with Indian
allies (though the 150,000 Indians that came with the now
900 Spaniards to retake Tenochtitlan were by their very
�BRANN
89
numbers an encumbrance on the heavily defended causeways
into the island city and by their excited hatred for their
Mexica oppressors a danger to Cortes's prudent intentions;
moreover, they tended to fade away when things went badly).
The crucifix may well, in Carlos Fuentes's words, "have made
their minds collapse," as they saw how their own numerous
gods demanded numerous sacrifices of them, while this one
Christian god sacrificed one man, himself. Such factors or
forces are called, in the categories in which history is conceptualized, technological, demographic, epidemiological, political, psychological, or what have you. Perhaps they were necessary to Spanish success. But a number of contemporaries
thought that at various junctures it might well have gone
otherwise. For example, the strong-minded king of Texcoco,
Cacama, said that all the Spaniards within Tenochtitlan
could be killed in an hour; Cortes himself thought so. To me
historical inevitability seems an ex post facto cause. It is the
way a fait accompli presents itself, when passage has turned
into past. I cannot quite tell whether my rejection of historical determinism should be reinforced or thrown into doubt
by the fact that the Mexica themselves had given themselves
over to fate, as I will tell. Perhaps that very self-surrender was
a sufficient condition, the factor that makes the outcome
practically certain. But that would only be half the explanation; for the other half one would have to look in the nature
of the Europeans as well.
Before doing that, let me complete the apology for my
title. In it I mention the two empires, though I will speak of
one only, Anahuac. I mean no reflection on the Inca realm,
that marvel of social administration and public works built
with the most astounding masonry I've ever seen. But both of
the Peruvian protagonists were like deteriorated copies of
their Aztec templates. Pizarro was an intrepid thug, by all
accounts, and Atahualpa a culpably and carelessly arrogant
man with a violent history. Since it seemed to me that the
pairs of chief actors in this drama not only were the main
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
factors because both empires were autocracies, but were also
in their very distinctive ways personally emblematic of their
worlds, I chose the more humanly accessible, the more
expressive duo.
Finally, I refer to the Sun because the solar domination
under which both these Precolumbian empires labored
seemed to me more and more significant. The Incas called
themselves the Children of the Sun; their great Sun Temple at
Cuzco, the Coricancha, was studded with gold, "the tears
wept by the sun." So too the Mexicans, who called their
generals "the Lords of the Sun," had come into the marshes
of Lake Texcoco, their place of destiny, led by priests who
bore on their backs a twittering medicine bundle. It was
Huitzilopochtli, who was reborn on the way at Teotihuacan,
the birthplace of the gods, and later installed in Tenochtitlan
in the Great Temple. There he was incessantly nourished with
human blood. Of course, when I use the indicative mood in
speaking of the Aztec gods, I am not reporting fact-I am
telling what the Aztecs said and are thought to have believed.
The most difficult thing, I have discovered, is for historians to
find the right voice in speaking of alien gods, especially when
they are many in number, fluid in function, and visible in
many forms.
The Indians' relation to the sun I have come to think of
as symbolic of the whole debacle. and even its proximate
cause. To anticipate my version of a common.idea: rhe daily,
annual and epochal returns of the. heavenly bodywere to the
Aztecs so fearsomely antic, so uncertain, that they burdened
themselves, as their traditions taught them,. with rituals and
sacrifices .. These were so demanding that they enfeebled bpth
th.e Nahua empire and the Nahua's souls. The West's relation
t.o the Sun was just the opposite.
In 1506, just about the time young Cortes came to the
Indies, Copernicus was beginning to write On. the
Revolutions of. the Heavenly Spheres. It .is one of Western
modernity's seminal works, which our sophomores studY. In
�BRANN
91
it he shows that the mathematical rationalization of the
heavens is more economically accomplished and the celestial
phenomena are better "saved" if the sun stands stably at the
center of the world. But his motive is not only mathematical
economy. "For who," he says, "would place this lamp of a
very beautiful temple in another place than this, wherefrom
it can illuminate everything at the same time?'' Cortes was
surely not a premature Copernican, but he acted out of a
tradition in which one God controls the cosmos through the
laws of nature. Since the deity is not capricious, celestial
nature is ever~reliable, well-illuminated and confidenceinspiring. Nature's sun does not, in any case, respond to
human propitiation and Nature's god prefers prayers to ritual sacrifices.
Let me append here a poignant incident told by Cortes.
In the final days of the investment of Tenochtitlan, a delegation of parched and starving Mexica came to the barricades.
They said that they held Cortes to be a child of the Sun, who
could perform a circuit of the earth in a day and a night. Why
would he not slay them in that time to end their suffering?
Let me hold off yet one more minute from my main task
to tell you what motives drew me into a study so far from our
Program. To begin with, there was the sheer enchantment of
what proved to be a fragile civilization and the unburdened
romance of comfortably un.~current drama. All that romance
I got from reading William Hickling, Prescott's Conquest .of
Mexico ofl843, and his Conquest ofPeru of 1847. Of the
first ~ook he himself wrote that it was conceived "not as a
philo$ophical theme but as an epic in prose, a romarice.of,
chivalry.'' For this approach later historians, for who111
demythification, deromanticization, and rhe dispersal of
human deeds into forces and patterns is a professional
requirement, despise.him somewhat, .and it .took me awhile.
to see what valuable lesson..could be .drqwn from .his telling.
Presc,ott has it right: first the great ,tale: then . the critical
theory~
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
From the first I knew I was reading the American Gibbon.
We at St. John's used to read parts, particularly the notorious
fifteenth chapter, of that English historian's monumental
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, completed in 1788. To
my taste the American is the finer of the two. Gibbon
conceals in the magnificantly Latinate periods of his style the
universal irony of the ultimately enlightened man. I do not
fault him for sitting in judgment, for a non-judgmental
historian is an incarnate contradiction and produces only an
armature of facts without the musculature that gives it human
shape. But I am put off by his judging as an Olympian
enthroned on Olympus. In that fifteenth chapter, which treats
the question "by what means the Christian faith obtained so
remarkable a victory over the established religions of this
earth?" (a question of the kind I am asking) he reflects with
raised eyebrows in turn on the mortification of the flesh,
pious chastity and divine providence, so as to come to a
pretty secular answer, just as if Christianity were not first and
last a faith. Surely when a faith conquers, its substance must
be given some credit.
Prescott, on the other hand, who had in his youth
privately critiqued Gibbon's style for its "tumid grandeur,"
writes with deliberate American plainness, though to this
twenty-first-century ear, with a dignified elegance. What matters more to me is that he does his level best to enter into the
feelings and thoughts of his alien world, finding much to
admire in the Aztecs and much to blame in the Spaniards; for
example he calls the massacre of the Indians in fateful
Cholula a "dark stain" on Cortes's record. But for all his
romantic pleasure in new marvels he never condescends to
accept the horrifying elements of Aztec civilization.· He
recognizes that these are not individual crimes but systemic
evils that his Western liberal conscience cannot condone. One
might say that he dignifies his subjects with his condemnation. For this candor he is, as you can imagine, belittled these
days as naive, culture-bound, and ethnocentric. I shall have a
�BRANN
93
word to say on the sophisticated reverse bigotry of his belittlers.
His style, to add one more feature, is extraordinarily
vivid; it compares to Gibbon's as a classical statue in all its
original bright encaustic colors to one that has been dug up,
now only bare white marble. This visual aliveness may be a
"blind Homer" effect. When Prescott was a young student
dining at the Harvard Commons, he was hit in the eye by a
hard piece of bread during a food fight and was half-blind for
the rest of his life. It is characteristic of this man that,
although he knew whose missile had hit him, he never told
the name. His enormous collection of sources was read to
him and evidently richly illustrated in his imagination.
I might mention the other chief sources I read. (A longer
bibliography, merging books read and those merely consulted, is attached.)
First for anyone interested in the actual course of the
Conquest is Bernal Diaz del Castillo's True History of New
Spain of 1555. This simply told, incident-rich account of the
march on Tenochtitlan and what happened afterwards gains
credence from the fact that the old trooper was disgruntled
with his captain's assignment of rewards-the common
condition of the Conquistador ranks; the poor devils got little for their endless exertions and wounds. In spite of his
grievances, Diaz's love and admiration for Cortes unsuppressably dominates his story.
The Conquistadores are sometimes represented as having
had eyes for nothing not made of gold. Here is the old
soldier's recall of Tenochtitlan as he first glimpsed it, thirtysix years before, on a causeway leading toward the island city:
We were amazed and said that it was like the
enchantments they tell of Amadis, on account of
the great towers and cues (temples) rising from the
water, and all built of masonry. And some of our
soldiers even asked whether the things we saw
were not a dream. It is not to be wondered that I
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
here write it down in this manner, for there is so
much to think over that I do not know how to
describe it, seeing things, as we did, that have
never been heard of or seen or even dreamed.
These men, some of them ruffians, but with medieval
romances behind their· eyes to help them see alien beauty,
were evidently not altogether sick with gold greed. But those
later writers who don't blame them for the one, accuse them
of the other: they're either merely medieval knight-errants or
merely mercantile expeditionaries. In fact, they seem to have
been poignantly aware that they were seeing sights no
European had ever seen before or could ever see after.
Here is what they saw: A city edged by flowering "floating gardens," the mud-anchored chinampas, lying on the
shining flat waters of a shallow, irregular lake collected in a
high valley guarded by the snowy peaks-even in August-of
the two volcanoes; straight broad causeways connecting the
city to the shore giving into straight broad avenues leading
from the four directions of the winds to its sacred center
which the Mexica regarded as the center of the world, with
its great, gleaming, colorfully decorated temple pyramid; a
grid of smaller streets edged with bridged canals; a myriad of
lesser temple pyramids, some smoking with sacrifices; palaces
with stuccoed walls and patios polished to gleam like silver;
sparkling pools; crowds of clean, orderly people going about
their business, especially in the great market of Tlatelolco;
gardens everywhere; and the white houses of the city's quarter million inhabitants with their flat roofs, the azoteas from
which two years hence such a deadly shower of missiles
would rain down on the returning Spaniards that the
dwellings were demolished one by one.-All these features of
the vision have been, incidentally, described with a poet's relish by William Carlos Williams:
[T]he city spread its dark life upon the earth of a
new world, sensitive to its richest beauty, but so
�BRANN
95
completely removed from those foreign contacts
that harden and protect, that at the very breath of
conquest it vanished.
Our tutor Jorge Aigla in Santa Fe has made a verse translation
of an anonymous transcript of Tlatelolco, written only seven
years after the starved and sick Mexica, who had defnded
their city foot by foot, finally surrendered its devastated
remains. Here are a few stanzas:
And all of this happened to us.
We saw it all
We watched it happen
With this sad and mournful fortune
We saw each other's anguish.
On the road lay broken arrows;
Hairs are scattered
The houses unroofed
Their walls red, blackened.
***
A price was set upon us.
A price for the young man, the priest,
The child, the virgin maiden.
Enough! The price of a poor man
was two handfuls of corn,
only ten insect cakes;
Our price was only
twenty cakes of salty gruel.
Gold, jades, rich embroidery,
Quetzal plumages,
All that which was precious
Was valued not at all. ..
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
The mutual admiration of Indians and Spaniards was
great-in the beginning. True, the Spaniards, whom Cortes's
vigilance kept sleeping in their armor, stank in the nostrils of
the much-bathing Indians, and the priests with their long,
blood-matted hair in their gore-bespattered sanctuaries
nauseated the Spaniards. (I omit here, for the moment, the
Spaniards' response to the sacrifices themselves, which
marked, on the Christians' side, the beginning of the end of
amity.} The Spaniards were astonished by Indian craftsmanship. Dfaz describes after decades a necklace made of golden
crabs (others say crayfish) that Montezuma placed around
Cortes's neck. Of course, Dfaz described the golden gifts
more often in terms of the pesos they weighed when melted
down into bullion. I note here that the Aztecs did not,
evidently, have scales and did not reduce objects to their
universal stuff, ponderable mass (thus the Mexicans used natural items, quils of gold dust and cocoa beans, for currency,
while the Spanish had the peso d'oro, the "gold weight,"
calibrated in fact to silver, to 42.29 grams of the pure
substance); this intellectual device of universal quantification
even those critics of the West who deplore it can hardly
forego in the business of life. The Spaniards were astounded
by, and perhaps a little envious of, the stately splendor of the
cacique's accoutrements. The Indians, on their part, were
amazed by the invaders' daring, tenaicty, and endurance.
They called them, as the Spanish heard it, teules, teotl being
the Nahuatl word for god. The term seems to have been used
somewhat as Homer uses dios, indicating sometimes just
excellence and sometimes divinity. As we shall see, the Aztecs
had a serious reason to call Cortes and his people gods. The
Spanish, on their side, in their very horror of the frightfullooking Aztec god-images, paid them a certain respect in
regarding them not as mere idols, deaf and dumb objects of
stupid worship, but much as the Mexica themselves did:
Sahagun, of whom I will shortly tell, records an Aztec ruler's
admonitory speech in which he says: "For our lord seeth,
�BRANN
97
heareth within wood, within stone." The god-representations
were not of masks of nothing to the Christians, but they were
images of demons, of the Devil in various shapes. Thus in
looking at the Nahuatl side in Sahagun's dual language text,
I noticed that diablo, Devil, had become a Spanish loan word
in Nahuatl-one new name for all the old divinities, to be
abominated but also acknowledged.
The second eyewitness source is Cortes himself, who
wrote to his sovereign, Charles V, five letters reporting on his
activities. Of these cartas de relaci6n, letters of report, all but
one are extant in copies. They are not notes but voluminous,
detailed accounts beginning with the first, pre-Cortes exploration of the Gulf Coast and ending with Cortes's own postConquest explorations; the second and third letter contain
the material for this lecture. The English version conveys a
flavor of studiedly plain elegance. These clearly literary works
are charged by historians with being both subtly self-aggrandizing and consciously myth-making. To me it would seem
strange if Cortes, in writing to his sovereign, on whom
depended acknowledgements and rewards, did not portray
his exertions most favorably. It might be said-! don't know
whether in mitigation or exacerbation-that he was also
willing to suppress a brave but irrepressible compaflero's
guilt: Nowhere have I found even a mention of Alvarado's
culpability in the events leading to the noche triste. It is also
said that Cortes invented the myth of an Aztec empire which
rivaled Charles's own, to whet the Spanish emperor's interest
in his new dominion. To me, the account itself, telling of
tributes owed by the subject cities and of their chiefs obliged
to be in attendance in Tenochtitlan, sounds more like information he was in fact given by proud Mexica officials or
disaffected dependents.
Above all, Cortes fills his letters with myriads of meticulously noted detail-too thick and too vivid to be attributed
to mere mendacious fantasizing. He would have had to have
been a veritable Gabriel Garda Marquez to invent so magical
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a reality. For, he says, "we saw things so remarkable as not to
be believed. We who saw them with our own eyes could not
grasp them with our understanding." Cortes himself will
appear in a moment.
The third source, the most exhaustive in scope and
remarkable in method, is The History of the Things of New
Spain by the before-mentioned Friar Bernadino de Sahagun.
He had arrived as the forty-third of the religious that Cortes
had requested in one of his letters to the emperor. The
Conquistador needed them to carry on the task of conversion, because, as he said, the Indians had a great natural
attraction to Christianity; indeed in the early post-Conquest
years, Indians were baptized by the thousands a day. (The reasons that Cortes's observation is not implausible will be mentioned below.)
The name New Spain in Sahagun's title is, incidentally,
Cortes's own for conquered Anahuac: "New Spain of the
Ocean Sea." For the Conquistador it betokens a great colonial
accession to old peninsular Spain and the emphasis is on
"Spain." But later the accent shifts to "New," as the criollos,
the Mexican-born Spaniards, rebel against the old country's
domination. Eventually a nativist revival and a growing sense
of nationhood leads to a rejection by the native-born
Spaniards themselves of their Conquistador heritage, and
when in 1821 the country achieves independence, it will be
called by the old Nahua name for Tenochtitlan, Mexico (now
pronounced in the Spanish way, Mehico). Nativist Mexico's
tutelary deity will be Quetzalc6atl, the dominating god of this
lecture, of whom more in a moment.
Back to Sahagun. He learned Nahuatl himself and spent
the rest of his life, with much untoward clerical interference, compiling the world's first inside ethnographic
account. In his college he trained his own informants,
Indian boys, often of noble descent, who could interview
their living elders and obtain the information that Sahagun
compiled in parallel columns, Spanish and Nahuatl. The
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work, in twelve volumes, is known as the Florentine Corpus.
Lisa Richmond, our librarian, fulfilled my unexpectant hopes
by buying the very expensive English edition for our library,
and if one reader a decade finds the delight and illumination
in it that I did, the investment will be well justified.
Sahagun begins with the gods and their births-for like
Greek gods, these gods were born, at Teotihuacan, 33 miles
northeast of Tenochtitlan. This sacred city was well over a
millennium old when Anahuac was established, and in ruins.
But there the Mexica came to worship, particularly at the
great temple pyramid dedicated to Quetzalcoatl. What bound
new Anahuac to old Teotihuacan-the name means City of
the Gods-was their common era, that of the Fifth Sun, upon
whose destruction the world would end.
Sahagun then records everything from the sacred rituals
and binding omens to the set moral speeches (much more
charming without failing to be scary than similar speeches
made by our elders) down to the riddles people asked, such
as "What drags its entrails through a gorge?" Answer: "A needle." The next to last book is an inventory of the "Earthly
Things" of New Spain, its flora, fauna and minerals; the chapter on herbs begins with the plants "that perturb one, madden
one," the hallucinogens. The twelfth book is Sahagun's own
history of the Conquest.
Some say that the first bishop of New Spain, Zumarraga,
conducted a huge auto-da-fe, a book burning of Aztec
codices, those screenfold books composed in glyphs (stylized
figures with fixed meanings) combined with lively pictures.
Others say that those codices that weren't destroyed by the
hostile Tlaxcalans or in the great conflagration of
Tenochtitlan were spirited away by Indians. In any case, the
art of illustration was still alive, and Sahagun used the talents
of Indian painters to supplement his records in this visually
delightful pre-alphabetic way.
Finally I want to mention the History of the Indians of
New Spain by another Franciscan, affectionately named by
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his Indian parishioners Motolinia, Nahuatl for "Little Poor
One," since he took his vow of poverty seriously. He reports
the terrible post-Conquest sufferings undergone by the Indian
population; worse than their cruel exploitation by the disappointed Conquistadores and colonists was the succession of
European plagues (smallpox, bubonic plague, measles, for
which the Indians reciprocated only with syphilis). I am
impressed, over and over, with this pattern: that the
inoculated West does most of its harm to other civilizations
unintentionally, and I mean not only through their physical
susceptibility but even more, through their spiritual and
intellectual vulnerability. The reason we can cope with our
dangerously developed, potent tradition is that we know how
to fight back, how to subject our powers to constraining
criticism and how to correct our aberrations by returns to
sounder beginnings. Critique and Renaissance are the continual evidence of our self-inoculation, and we see right now the
dangerous consequences of the Western invasion of souls not
so protected.
But Motolinia also reports successes, not only in conversions, which were too stupendous in number and abrupt in
spiritual terms to be always quite real. What is lovely to read
about is not only his affection for the gentleness and
dignified reticence of his boys but their quick intelligence
and general talentedness; some learned enough Latin in a
few years to correct the grammar-a tense but triumphant
moment for their teacher-of a visiting dignitary. They sang
liturgies like angels and easily learned to play European
instruments. No wonder Mexico City was to become, in the
eighteenth century, this hemisphere's greatest center of
baroque music; its chief composer, Manuel de Zumaya,
Chapel Master at the very Cathedral of Mexico City which
replaced Huitzilopochtli's temple, was part-Indian.
I should also mention two more works written with great
sympathy for the Indians: Bishop las Casas's Short Account of
the Destruction of the Indies of 1542, a book of passionate
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accusation against the Spanish conquerors and colonists, and
Cabesa de Vaca's Relaci6n, the story of the tribulations of a
discoverer of Florida, who was himself for a while enslaved
by Indians.
By contemporary historians the Aztecs are treated in
almost comically opposite ways. Jacques Soustelle paints their
daily life as an idyll of gentle, flower-loving, orderly culture,
made poignant on occasion by the necessities of the ritual
care and feeding of the gods. It is the myth of harmony and
happiness the Mexica themselves encouraged in the revisionist accounts that succeeded the "book burning" by Itzc6atl,
their first emperor. Inga Clendinnen, on the other hand,
depicts a somberly severe, fear-ridden, god-encumbered
society, whose sacrificial rituals, coruscating with whirling
sights and penetrating musical noise, were, she says, "infused
with the transcendent reality of the aesthetic." Hugh Thomas,
the most recent historian of the Conquest, a sensible and
thorough marshaller of thousands of facts, speaks similarly of
"the astounding, often splendid, and sometimes beautiful
barbarities" of Aztec ritual practice.
What astounds me is not the antithetical views of Aztec
life, for these polarities seem to have been of the Aztec
essence. What takes me aback is that my contemporaries seem
to wish to appear as knowing what is beautiful but not what
is wrong. There are of course exceptions, writers who feel
insuperable moral unease over these alien customs they are by
their professional bias bound to honor. The imaginary
experiment that I, as an outsider and amateur, have devised
for myself to put the profession in general to the test is this:
When the Spaniards first came on the remains of ritual
killings-later they saw the rituals themselves and eventually
found the body parts of their own comrades-they broke into
the holding pens where prisoners were being fattened and
stormed the temples. Would the professors have done the
same or would they have regarded the practice as protected
by the mantra of "otherness"? I am assuming here that they
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do disapprove of human sacrifice in their own culture. For my
part, I cannot tell what I would have had the courage to do,
but I would have been forever ashamed if I had not shared in
the revulsion, the reversal of an original appreciation that, for
all their rapaciousness, the Christians had for the Indiansand I might add, for certain remarkable Indian women.
I have thus evolved for myself two categories of historians: non-condoners and condoners. The older writers tend to
be non-condoners; they are not careful to cloak themselves in
moral opacity; what they abhor at home they will not condone abroad, be it ever so indigenous and ever so splendid.
One remarkable exception is the before-mentioned
Bartolome de Las Casas, who lays out the case for human
sacrifice as being both natural-since men offer their god
what they hold most excellent, their own kind-and also as
being within our tradition-since Abraham was ready to
sacrifice his son Isaac at God's bidding, and God himself
sacrificed his son. The difficulty with this latter argument
would seem to be that Abraham's sacrifice was called off, and
God's sacrifice was unique, while Indian sacrifices were
multitudinous.
Las Casas is the preceptor of Tzetan Todorov, a European
intellectual who, in his book Conquest, tries hard to come to
grips with "the Other," with the Aztec non-West. He finally
elevates the Other over his own: The Aztecs made sacrifices,
the Spaniards committed massacres. And here the rational
difficulty is that Aztec religion commanded these deaths and
Christian religion forbade them, so that Todorov is comparing customs with crimes.
This enterprise of restricting universal morality in the
interests of empathy with otherness puzzles me a lot. For if
we are really and radically each other's Other, then those
who leave their own side to enter into the Other will thereby
also lose their footing as open-eyed contemplators. In any
case, it seems to me that the non-condoning Prescott's grand
narrative has done more for the memory of this bygone
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civilization than have the condoning contemporaries. For he
induces what Virgil calls lacrimae rerum, tears for lost
things-while they invite, in me at least, contrariness, resistance to their sanctimonious self-denial.
You can see that as I read on I developed an interest in historiography, the reflective study of historical accounting itself.
For it seems to me of great current importance to consider a
propensity of Western intellectuals, particularly pronounced
in the social studies and expressive of a strength and its complementary weaknesses native to this tradition: knowledgeable self-criticism flipping into unthinking self-abasement
before the non-West. I say this mindful of the moral quandary
of pitting the humanly unacceptable, but, so to speak, innocent evils, the traditional practices of a whole civilization,
against the crimes of individuals transgressing the laws of
their own, crimes magnified by its superior power.
And now a final motive for this, my aberrant interest: We
here on the Annapolis campus are only 200 miles further
from Mexico City than from our other half in New Mexico;
Incan Cuzco is nearly on our longitude of 76° W Yet these
pre-Columbian empires are hardly ever in our common
consciousness, even less now than in the decades after
Prescott's very popular book appeared. True, some of the skyscrapers of the twenties and thirties intentionally recalled
Mesoamerican pyramids. True, the Nahuatl words chocoldtl
and tamdlli are in our daily vocabulary, as is Nahua cooking,
that is, Mexican food, in our diets. The Aztecs had in fact a
high cuisine; the description of the emperor's daily service
with its hundreds of dishes-among which (lest we be tempted too much) there may have been, as Dfaz reports, the meat
of little children-is staggering in its variety; indeed there
cannot ever have been a potentate more luxuriously or
elaborately served. Of all this we've adopted, through
modern Mexico, the low end, but where else do the Empires
of the Sun figure in our lives? This surprised sense of their
missing influence made me engage in another one of those
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imagination-experiments by which we see the world anew:
What if, as King Cad.ma of Texcoco and some later historians thought possible, the Mexica had just killed Cortes and
his band, so that the Westernization of Anahuac had been
held off for some centuries?-for it is not within my
imagination that the West was forever to be resisted. Suppose
the unwitting extermination of the Indians by disease had
thus been prevented. (I might say here that this huge demographic disaster, possibly among the worst in history, is
numerically unfixed. Some say Anahuac had thirty million,
some say it had four before Cortes. Some say by the midfifteenth century this population had been reduced to 2.6 or
1.2 million, to be fully restored only much later.) Suppose,
then, that the ravaged generation of the Conquest and postConquest era had instead been preserved, and Nahua civilization with it. Suppose eventually North American jeans
and technology had drifted down and Aztec gorgeousness
and craftsmanship up the latitudes.-! might inject here that
the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who has grappled
seriously with such dreams, comes to the sad but realistic
conclusion that the loss of native culture is worth the benefit
to ordinary people that these imports bring.-Suppose moreover that our American English had absorbed some of the
suavely dignified classical Nahuatl, its urbane address, its
poetic rephrasings, its expressive word-agglutinations;
suppose as well that the speech of the Nahua had accepted
some of our flamboyant informality. Suppose our clothing
had been restyled by Aztec orchidaciousness and our manners
had been a little improved by Aztec ceremoniousness.
Suppose our political discourse had been informed by a
neighboring monarchy against which we had never had to
rebel. We can learn in our imagination whether such fine
acquisitions could have come into our way of life without losing their hieratic heart. Would not one of the parties in this
cultural exchange eventually turn out to contribute the core
and the other the decoration? My provisional answer is that
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the West would assert itself as the substructure and the
Empire of the Sun would become part of its recreation-they
would be the pilgrims and we the tourists.
The Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes tells of a similar imagined reversal of history in the semi-historical story "The Two
Shores." Here Aguilar, Cortes's first interpreter who had long
lived with the Maya, speaks from the grave. He tells how
even while in Cortes's employ he held with the Indians and,
by always translating not what Cortes said but what he
thought, caused trouble . He confesses that he was jealous of
Malinche, the Nahuatl- and Mayan-speaking woman, whose
Mayan Aguilar translated into Spanish. She soon became
Cortes's mistress and learned Spanish; she was one of the
central figures of the conquest, present and mediating on
every great occasion; Aguilar was made redundant. But
revenge is not his final passion. It is rather a plan to mount
with his Mayans a reverse conquest, a successful invasion of
Spain, and there to recall the defeated Moors and the
expelled Jews, to inaugurate a darker-skinned, better melded
Europe, "a universe simultaneously new and recovered,
permeable, complex, fertile," where "Sweet Mayan songs
joined those of the Provencal troubadours . . .. "But Aguilar,
as he dreams his impossible dream, is dead of the bubonic
plague that did not attack only the uninoculated Indians.
So these imagination-experiments endorse the question
raised by the facts with which I began: How can we understand what happened here, on this American continent,
between 1519 and 1534? Can we compel the fortunes of war
and the forces of history to show their human motive power?
To get at some sort of answer, I shall take up the four
factors in the conquest of Mexico that seem to me most
revealing: One is a god, Quetzalcoatl; one is a practice,
human sacrifice; two are men, Montezuma and Cortes.
1. Quetzalcoatl, the most appealing of the Mesoamerican
gods, is also most deeply implicated in the Mexican debacle.
This is a complex figure, a god of human interiority and of
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the works of civilization, a searcher into the depth of hell and
the guardian of terrestrial idylls, a priest king of Tula and the
deus absconditus of Anahuac, an Indian Prometheus.
He was not the tribal god of the Mexica, having been in
the country long before they arrived. Their god was
Huitzilopochtli, the god of war and of the sun, or rather the
Sun itself, who shared the great temple pyramid of MexicoTenochtitlan, the scene of so much of the drama in this tale,
with Tlaloc, the god of rain-the god who floods the heavens
with the god who drenches the earth. When the Mexica were
still Chichimeca (as the Nahua called the wandering semisavages of the north), coming down from their mythical city
of origin Aztlan (whence the name Aztec) in search of their
appointed home, their priests carried on their backs, as I
mentioned before, a twittering medicine bundle. This was
Huitzilopochtli, reborn at Teotihuacan, the birthplace of the
gods, as the Fifth Sun. His name means "Hummingbird On
the Left" or "On the South," perhaps because he and his
people went southwest to find their marshland home on Lake
Texcoco, perhaps because those little hummingbirds are fierce
fighters and because the god-figure was half-bird, having a
thin, feathered left leg. In effect their god was crippled.
Cripples, dwarves, hunchbacks, albinos play a great role in
Nahua history, partly because the valley people had an inexhaustible interest in the sports and varieties of nature:
Montezuma's palace complex included besides an aviary, a
zoo, an arboretum, a gallery of anomalous humans; but there
may be something deeper to it, some sense of awe before the
exceptional-! don't know.
The war god was a hummingbird because Aztec warriors
who died in battle went not to the murky Hades of Mictlan
but to a sunny Elysium where they flitted about feeding on
flowery nectar-perfect examples of a dominant Aztec
characteristic, the abrupt juxtaposing of or transiting from
the brutal to the delicate.
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Most of the Aztec gods seem to have had frightful aspects.
There is a statue of Huitzilopochtli's mother Coatlicue, a
chunky monster with a necklace of human parts and a head
like an oblong package made up from two compressed snakes
springing from her neck. The tribal god himself must have
looked inhumanly terrifying. Not so Quetzalcoatl. The Aztecs
were very sensitive to human beauty-the ugliness of the
gods is clearly deliberate-and this god was represented as
beautiful, though in a way which, although not unique to
him, is yet most remarkable.
Quetzalcoatl's name combines the word quetzal, a
Mesoamerican bird that has precious green tailfeathers (the
green of quetzal feathers and of jade was the color of the
Mexica nobility), with coat!, meaning snake. So he is the
bird-snake, or the Plumed Serpent, belonging both to the sky
and the earth. And thus he is shown in some sculptures, with
coils whose scales are lengthened into feathers neatly piled
into a spiral. The fanged jaws are wide open and frame a
handsome, spare young male face, with high-bridged nose,
well-shaped eyes, thin-lipped mouth-the face, I imagine, of
a young Aztec noble.
Is this face that of the god within a serpentine integument, or is the creature as a whole the god, or is it the god's
priest in his ritual costume? It is not clear that it is even a permissible question. The Aztecs appear to have had the most
flexible notions of their divinities. The gods amalgamate
competences, share names, identify with their victims, and
merge with their priests. As far as I can tell, this mode is
neither confusion nor indeterminacy. It is rather a kind of
conceptual fluidity which does become fixed in the very
precisely promulgated rituals. The graphic art of the Aztecs
expresses this multifarious melding by its complexly intertwined figures with their attributes all drawn indistinguishably on one plane and discriminable only to an expert in
Aztec divinity.
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But of Quetzalcoatl we know that he was indeed both god
and man. As man he was then lord of Tula, and as the Toltec
lord he became fateful to the Mexica.
To me the most appealing characteristic of these newcomers, these recent Chichimeca, was their longing deference
to a city of the past, Tula, a city forty miles north of their lake
and overthrown more than 300 years before Montezuma's
day. Tula was to Tenochtitlan what Athens has been to Europe
and still is to us in Maryland and New Mexico: the source of
wisdom, art, and ideals of life. The Toltecs were to the
Mexica like gods, walking swiftly everywhere on blue sandals, wrapped in flowery fragrance . For them corn sprouted
in enormous ears, precious cocoa beans-one of the Mexican
currencies-were found in plenty, and cotton grew already
dyed in rich colors. They made works of art so exemplary
that the Aztecs gave their own craftsmen the generic name of
tolteca, Tulans.
Over this earthly idyll Quetzalcoatl Topiltzin, Our Dear
Lord Quetzalcoatl, ruled as priest and king, godlike but also
all too human. I cannot tell you what then happened in all its
tragicomic detail. But in brief, Huitzilopochtli and other gods
arrived in the guise of mischief-making wizards. Never mind
the disparity in dates. This is the story of a newer god of war
undoing an older god of civilization, and, I suspect, the story
of how Huitzilopochtli's people betrayed their assumed
Toltec heritage. These wizards assaulted the Toltec lord, who
had grown in some way neglectful, with portents and temptations. They tempted him with pulque, the wine made from
the maguey cactus, the American aloe, whose consumption
was fiercely regulated in Tenochtitlan. They raised indecent
passions in princesses and induced civil wars that
Quetzalcoatl had to win with his army of dwarves and
cripples. They caused the Tolteca to sing and dance themselves to death. To these temptations the lord of Tula
succumbed as a participant. Finally, however, they tried to
force him to make human sacrifices. Here he balked and
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refused and was for that steadfastness driven from Tula. All
this is told by Sahagun and other Indian sources. This is the
moment to say once more what needs saying just because it
seems too naive for words: To report that Huitzilopochtli did
this and Quetzalcoatl that is not to confer the status of
existence on these divine figures. Indeed they became fateful
to their people precisely because they were so vulnerable to
non-existence proofs.
There is a stone head that shows the Dear Lord weeping,
long clublike tears issuing straight from the god's eyes,
probably those he wept as he went into exile. The same head
shows him heavily bearded, an unusual feature in a young
god; and among the Indians in general. He is also supposed
to have been light-skinned.
Quetzalcoatl flees toward the east. He crosses, in space
not time, the path of the Mexica's god going southwest, and
he makes his way toward the east coast, there to embark with
his loyal band on a raft of serpents and to drift into the rising
sun-the very way Cortes, a white bearded man, took in
reverse going west and inland. Cortes comes this way in
1519, just as the year that in the Aztec calendrical cycle is
Quetzalcoatl's birth and death year, ce dcatl, One Reed, had
come round again. In this year the Dear Lord was destined to
return by boat from his trans-oceanic exile. You can see the
tragedy taking shape.
The biggest pyramid in America rose at Cholula to mark
one of the god-man's stations of flight. There the old god
failed his people when, on his way to Tenochtitlan, Cortes
massacred more than a hundred unarmed Cholulan nobles in
his temple precinct. Cortes thought he had uncovered a plot
to betray his band to the Mexica. Perhaps he had, and
perhaps the planned ambush would have been the end for
him if he had not prevented it with his characteristic
merciless decisiveness. That we shall never know, but we do
know this: The Cholulans remembered an old prophecy that
the god who had rested from his flight in their city would
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protect them, and that if they pulled a stone out of his
pyramid, a flood of water would sweep the enemy away. With
panicky energy they succeeded in wrenching out a stoneand got a cloud of dust.
The Plumed Serpent, briefly to finish his tale, was not
permanently discredited, nor did he cease to occupy imaginations. He became the savior god of a resurrected Mexico. The
friars who came at Cortes's request wanted a warrant for
treating the Indians as aboriginal Christians; they saw in the
wandering god St. Thomas, one of Jesus's twelve disciples
who was his missionary to India. Quetzalcoatl was also the
guardian god of the nativist movement in New Spain and
Mexico, celebrated in murals and hymns by Mexican painters
and intellectuals and even by that wandering Englishman D.
H. Lawrence. His novel of 1926, The Plumed Serpent, is a
repulsively fascinating, garishly proto-Nazi fantasy of the
god's return in provincial Mexico, complete with the
paraphernalia of Nuremberg: a charismatic god-representing
leader, choreographed soldiery, Nazi-like salutes, and finally
human sacrifice-all this so that the heroine, a manless
ageing Irishwoman, might find a man who is a man, that is,
who hardly ever talks. It is a travesty of the sorrowful Toltec
divinity of civilization.
2. Human sacrifice was, I have learned to think, not really
just a Mexican custom ascribable to "otherness." The Mexica
knew the story just told of Quetzalcoatl. I cannot believe that
some of them, especially their last emperor, did not reflect
that they were co-opting the god into a practice he abhorred
and over which he went into exile. Perhaps those priests of
Huitzilopochtli, with their skull-decorated black gowns and
blood-matted hair, were fanatics totally absorbed in their
cultic task, but the educated nobles, admirers of Tula, so
refined in their intimate habits and their social life, must have
had qualms and doubts-unless there is no way to infer from
ourselves to others.
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The numbers are staggering. It is reported that at the
inauguration of Huitzilopochtli's Great Temple in 1487,
20,000-by some readings 80,000-victims were lined up
four abreast in queues stretching from the temple onto the
city's causeways. (Is it altogether an ironical coincidence that
these were about the numbers of Indians said to have
presented themselves for conversion on certain days after the
conquest?) And this killing went on, in smaller numbers, in
the numerous minor temples of the city. Every twenty days,
by the ritual calendar, there was a god's feast, requiring sometimes quite a few children, sometimes a woman, sometimes a
specially prepared youth.
The operation itself is often shown in the codices. The
victims march, mostly unassisted, to the top of the pyramid;
there they are laid on a convex sacrificial stone, their limbs
are held by four priests while a fifth chokes off his screams
with a wooden yoke, the obsidian knife rips into the chest,
the heart, still beating, is held up to the Sun and put in a
wooden bowl, the "eagle dish." The victim is rolled down the
steps to be dismembered and distributed for feasting according to a strict protocol. The victims are children bought from
the poor, the pick of slaves for sale in the market (who are
ritually bathed), beautiful young nobles prepared in a year of
splendid living for their role as ixiptlas, god-impersonators.
Evidently certain divinities, like the ever-present
Tezcatlip6ca, Lord of the Near and Nigh, who shared functions with the city god, were not only recipients of victims
but were themselves sacrificed, albeit through their human
incarnations-one noteworthy parallel to Christianity.
It seems to be true that these ritual killings were not
sadistic in intention or demeaning to the victims. While there
are reports of weeping family and frightened victims, the
sacrificial human was evidently well co-opted into the
performance. Moreover, the cactus button peyotl and the
mushroom teonandcatl, "Flesh of the Gods," both hallucinogens, and the alcoholic pulque seem to have been
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administered to the sacrifices, who were, in any case, intoxicated with the ritual swirl and the musical stridor around
them. For the prepared chosen at least this passage into a
flowery next world was perhaps a high point of this lifethough who knows how many victims, particularly the
children, died experiencing extreme fear.
These frightful, somber, and splendid festivals were evidently thought to be truly necessary to the survival of the city
and the continuing existence of its world. Yet, as I said, the
Aztec nobility, who were so finely attuned to right and wrong
conduct (as their stock homilies, preserved by Sahagun,
show), must have felt themselves to be living over a moral
abyss, doing a balancing act in a threatening and fragile
sacred world, which doomed them in their hearts for what
they did and through their sacred duties for what they might
omit to do.
I have neglected to mention the largest and most steady
supply of victims, the prisoners.
The highest calling of Huitzilopochtli's people, the
soldiers of the Sun, was war, and the object of war was to take
captives, an even higher object than the merciless subjugation
of Anahuac's cities. Promotion in the army was strictly
according to the number of prisoners taken. The warriors
needed to take prisoners to rise in rank; the city needed prisoners for their flesh and blood, the sacrifices that would feed
and maintain the good will of the gods. It was a tight circle of
necessities.
This religious trap-! will call it that-had three devastating secular consequences. First, the Mexican army never
learned, until it was too late, to fight to kill, to fight a war for
survival in realest earnest. Second, Tenochtitlan trained up a
deadly enemy for itself, the city of Tlaxcala, seated between
itself and the eastern coast. There was a bizarre but logical
institution in Anahuac, the so-called "flowery war,"
xochiya6yotl. The Triple Alliance of Anahuac, eventually
dominated by Tenochtitlan and including Texcoco, had a
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mutual arrangement with three cities across the mountains, of
which the aristocratic republic of Tlaxcala was the most
independent. The agreement was to stage battles regularly for
the sole purpose of obtaining from each other prisoners for
sacrifice. This was a strange kind of ceremonious warfare,
which required the high-born warriors skillfully to take their
enemies alive, only to bring them back home to their delayed
warriors' death. Meanwhile the Tlaxcalans remained free, in
training, and full of hatred, and they became Cortes's most
effective allies.
And third, the evidence and actual sight of human
sacrifice turned the Spaniards' stomachs-as powerful a
revulsion as the moral one, I imagine. So when, as I said, they
saw the remains of their own people, an ineradicable repugnance seems to have turned their hearts, a disgust which
became the pretext for much savagery of their own.
3. Montezuma was installed as tlatodni of MexicoTenochtitlan in 1502. Tlatoani means "He Who Speaks,"
who has authority. Since Tenochtitlan was the secular and
sacred center of the Aztec world, he was the speaker over the
universe, the uei-tlatoani-usually rendered as "emperor."
When he was killed in 1520 he was 52. His lineage was even
shorter than the city's existence, whose founding date is
1345. The Anahuac empire was put together during the next
century; Axayacatl, Montezuma's father, who died in 1481,
was only the third emperor. As was the custom, the council
that chose the new lord did not go to the son but first to
Axayacatl's two brothers. When Montezuma became the
sixth emperor, Anahuac was less than seventy years old.
Historians disagree whether objectively the empire was in a
state of youthful vigor or in the course of rigidified decline
when Cortes came. But there can be no doubt that
Montezuma was a monarch who personally felt doom
coming. Motolinia says (probably incorrectly) that his very
name-nomen omen-meant one who is sad and serious, as
well as one who inspires fear and respect.
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As was necessary for the tlatoani, he had proved himself
as warrior and officer, but he was also a highly educated man.
The Mexica, like most high civilizations, were committed to
a well-defined and diversified plan of education for their
young. The set speeches, the traditional admonitions, that the
ruling nobles made to their boys and girls upon their having
reached the age of discretion are loving, somber, straitlaced,
meticulous-and full of Nahua charm. The one from which I
will read a sampling goes on for six of Sahagun's columns. It
begins thus:
Here art thou, thou who art my child, thou
who art my precious necklace, thou who art
my precious feather, thou who art my creation,
my offspring, my blood, my image.
And then the child is inducted into Aztec pessimism:
Hear well, 0 my daughter, 0 my child. The earth
is not a good place. It is not a place of joy; it is not
a place of contentment.
Then the little girl is given rules of conduct, for example:
At night hold vigil, arise promptly. Extend thy
arms promptly, quickly leave thy soft bed, wash
thy face, wash thy hands, wash thy mouth, seize
the broom; be diligent with the sweeping; be not
tepid, be not lukewarm.
What wilt thou seize upon as thy womanly
labors? ... Look well to the drink, the food;
how it is prepared, how it is made .. . .
Then the speech touches deep moral matters:
May thou not covet carnal things. May thou not
wish for experience, as is said, in the excrement, in
the refuse. And if thou truly art to change thyself,
would thou become a goddess?
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But there was also public education, a dual system. The
Young Men's (and Women's) House, the telpochccilli, was
open to the lower nobility and even to commoners. The boys'
house had features of our prep school. The emphasis was on
physical hardening and the performance of rough public
service. A lot of rowdy fun was overlooked; some of the older
boys even took mistresses, and, Sahagun reports, "they
presumed to utter light and ironic words and spoke with
pride and temerity."
The second institution, the famous calmecac, was part
seminary, part cadet corps. Here went the high nobility and
commoners destined by talent to be priests. The daily routine
was punishing; for example, sleep was often interrupted
when the boys were called to draw blood from their earlobes
and ankles with maguey spines. This self-sacrifice was said to
have been instituted by Quetzalcoatl, who was in fact the
tutelary divinity, the super-tutor, of the calmecac. Discipline
was fierce. There were constant humiliations, and if a noble's
son was found even a little drunk on pulque he was secretly
strangled; a commoner was beaten to death.
The curriculum was rigid and rigorous. The boys learned
the revisionist Mexica version of Nahua history from painted
books that were expounded to them. They learned to speak
ceremoniously and to perform ritual songs and dances accurately. They learned, besides the sign and number count of the
360-day solar calendar with its five unfortunate "hollow"
intercalary days, the divinatory calendar. This was the
"Sacred Book of Days" by which the priest told the feast days
of the gods, the personal destiny of a baby and the epochs of
the world. This study was evidently the most effective initiation into the Aztec way of seeing the world. That is the
reason why the friars, trying to extirpate Aztec worship,
denounced this sacred calendar with particular vehemence as
having cast loose from the natural heavenly revolutions and
being an evil convention-as they said: "the fruit of a
compact with the Devil."
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The two calendars came together every 52 years, an era
called the Bundling of the Years. Ominously, such an epoch
evidently occurred in 1506, "One Rabbit," when just as many
year-bundles had gone by as would make the setting of the
fifth Sun imminent, and with it the final destruction by earthquakes of Huitzilopochtli, his city, and the world whose
center was Tenochtitlan. The year of 1519, moreover, was, as
I said, ce acatl, "One Reed," the name of the year of
Quetzalcoatl's birth, exile and prophesied return. A student
of the calendar presumably knew himself to be living at once
near doomsday and near delivery.
From this schooling and his experience in the field,
Montezuma emerged as high priest, warrior and tlatoani:
spiritually austere for all his palatial luxury, a severe father to
his Mexica, rigidly religious, and, for all the self-abasement
his set accession speech required, an autocratic and aristocratic ruler, the first to restrict high office to the nobility. He
was inaccessible to the populace, stately and ceremonious
with his nobles, reserved as to his person: When Cortes, as he
himself tells, tried to hug him "in Spanish fashion,"
Montezuma's horrified attendants stopped him; this was
court etiquette but presumably also personal preference. But
above all he was a burdened man, doom-ridden, half hopeful,
self-doubtful. "What shall I do, where shall I hide? If only I
could turn into stone, wood or some other earthly matter
rather than suffer that which I dread!" he cried out, this victor of nine pitched battles, to his magicians who could not
turn to good the omens of evil to come (and got severely punished for it). This was no coward's funk but a pious man's
terror of a probably inevitable future.
There was a city across the lake, Texcoco, a member of
Tenochtitlan's Triple Alliance. It paralleled the Italian cities of
the Renaissance in high culture; it was a Tula revived. In the
fifteenth century it had a poet-king, Nezahualc6yotl, whose
poetry has the fragrance that arises when the melancholy of
existence melds with soundness of heart. Like a Nahua
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Lucretius he offers his bitter cup with the rim sweetened by
honey. He speaks:
I, Nezahualcoyotl, ask this:
Is it true one really lives on the earth?
Not forever on earth,
only a little while here.
Though it be jade it falls apart,
though it be gold it wears away,
though it be quetzal plumage it is torn asunder.
Not forever on earth,
only a little while here.
This is beauty to console for the brevity of being, but in the
Texcocan Renaissance prince it is without the panicky gloom
of the Mexican Emperor of the late Fifth Sun.
Nezahualcoyotl's underlying sense of life's inconstancy is the
same, but Montezuma's was infected by the consciousness of
a more starkly immediate doom.
I think that Montezuma was probably an overwrought
exemplar of a Mexica noble: devout witness of constant
bloody brutality; refined connoisseur of jade and feather
work; watcher for imminent death and destruction; avid
collector of fleeting things like birds and flowers; cruel lord
and ever-courteous prince; liar of great ability and treacherous too, as the Tlaxcalans believed; high noble of candid and
simple bearing: witness the poignant speech of submission he
appears to have made to Cortes when he was still in his own
palace, when he still believed in the Spanish savior. He said
with a smile:
You too have been told perhaps that I am a god,
and dwell in palaces of gold and silver. But you see
it is false. Myhouses, though large, are of stone
and wood like those of others. And as to my body
[here he threw open his cloak]-you see it is flesh
and blood like yours.
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Some see delicate irony in his words, particularly in the
reference to the absence of gold. But to me his speech sounds
heartfelt, and he was in fact submitting to men he thought
might be teules, gods; Cortes's band, the santa campania, the
Holy Company, might indeed be bringing back QuetzalcoatlCortes, "the white hero of the break of day."
He had had some cause to be thus receptive, for in the
decade before Cortes's arrival the omens had multiplied: the
spontaneous combustion of Huitzilopochtli's temple, tongues
of celestial fire, finally a bird found in Lake Texcoco bearing
a black mirror in its head in which the emperor briefly
glimpsed the strangers landing-Sahagun catalogues eight
serious omens.
I think Montezuma became heartsick and started vacillating, now welcoming the Spaniard from afar with golden gifts,
now holding him off or even arranging his ambush. In the
end he was transfixed like a rabbit by a snake, truly a snake
since Cortes played the role of the Plumed Serpent. So he sent
the Spaniard Quetzalcoatl's regalia, since it was the year
ce acatl, One Reed. Not all his nobles were pleased at the
emperor's submissiveness; they wept when not much later
they attended his litter to his place of custody, his father's
palace.
Some historians think the omens were an ex post facto
invention to make the catastrophe more palatable to simple
people. But they sound very plausible; ominous events do
occur in clusters before disasters (as Machiavelli observes in
his Discourses), at least for those who have prophetic souls.
The omens help explain Montezuma's fragility before the
crisis. It was, I want to say, a type of fragility almost designed
to highlight Cortes's robustness, as if Montezuma had found
his fated match, the better to reveal the West to itself.
Once he had made his submission to the Spanish emperor and been taken into Spanish custody, another side of his
character came out: He became receptive to new experiences,
learned to shoot the crossbow, sailed Lake Texcoco on a
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brigantine, the first wind-driven vessel on those waters.-It is
always the West's inventions, especially those that shoot far
and go fast, that first beguile the non-West. He retained his
exquisite courtesy and generosity; he became sociable and
even affectionate with the Spaniards. It has been suggested
that he was displaying the pathological bonding of a victim to
his kidnappers. But by a concord with Cortes Montezuma
was running his empire from Axayacatl's palace where he and
the Spaniards were quartered, and he was free to indulge in
his old pleasures like hunting. It is reported that if there was
fun afoot he could dissolve in giggles.
But this priest-emperor never converted or gave up
human sacrifice, although frequently subjected to Cortes's
passionate theological harangues against the ritual on the
grounds of human brotherhood. As Fuentes says, it was simply a more urgent question to him whether the sun would rise
and the world go on than what the Spaniards did to him or
his empire.
Nevertheless, I wonder if it ever came to him that his religious practices were, in the nature of things, futile, that the
Christians had a sun that moved reliably and stably (and
would soon even stand still) precisely because it was not a god
and therefore not amenable to human exertion and sacrifice.
Octavia Paz says in his Labyrinth of Solitude that the Aztecs
committed suicide because they were betrayed by their gods.
I think they were, speaking more precisely, betrayed by their
trust in their visible and palpable gods, who (as I think in contrast to the early invaders, who acknowledged them as devils)
did nothing and were nothing and absconded more crassly
than could an invisible deity or one less abjectly served-a
truth I have, strangely enough, never found enunciated by the
historians I have read.
4. Cortes, finally, the Conquistador, seems to me a man as
emblematic of the conquering West as Montezuma was of the
empire of the doomed Sun. Cortes was a hidalgo from an old,
turbulent, moderately situated family. Having gotten into
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various scrapes he chose to come to the Indies in 1504 when
he was nineteen-an age more often given over to wanderlust
than to acquisitiveness. In 1519 he began to subdue Anahuac,
whose chiefs became, as he put it to his sovereign, "Your
Majesty's vassals, and obey my commands." No sooner had
he conquered Mexico for Spain than he was beset by endless
audiencias and residencias, tribunals and inquiries, conducted
by officials whose rectitude was apparently not much greater
than his own and whose daring was considerably less.
Nevertheless, by 1529 he was Marquess of the Oaxaca Valley
and Captain-General of New Spain, empowered to discover
further lands and to colonize them. (In fact following Mexico
he discovered and named California after a queen in one of
those medieval romances.) He died in 1547, and his bones
have undergone grotesque removals paralleling his downward course in Mexican history, during which Quetzalcoatl
was raised to a national hero while his unwitting impersonator was suppressed by the descendants of the Conquest.
The story of his and his Holy Company's march toward
Tenochtitlan in 1519, his first peaceful entrance into the
sacred and magical city, his expulsion, near-annihilation and
devastating re-entry have lately been retold in all its fictiondefying detail by Hugh Thomas in Conquest. He lands on
Anahuac's eastern shore with his little fleet of "water houses,"
as the natives described his three-masted square-riggers, of
the type called naos. When they . first saw them, they
reported on them as "mountain ranges floating on water." '
His boldest first stroke is to dismantle his ships before he
marches inland. Now the thirty-four-year-old sailor emerges
as a man of many devices and deceits, a bold man of faithand greed-inspired audacity-albeit somewhat more devoted
to the salvation of his soul than to the amassing of gold; a
resilient man well acquainted with suffering and depression;
a man of self- and other-punishing endurance and scary
tenacity, who seems to live on little sleep; cruel and charming, careful of his companions and demanding their utmost;
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prudent and daring; circumspect and lightning-quick; generous and grasping; kind and manipulative; and always an
adventurer and a wanderer and an elegant teller of adventures and wanderings-as complex a man in his way as
Montezuma. Prescott says in his personal memoranda, in
which he details for himself the oppositions of Cortes's
character:
The great feature of his character was constancy of
purpose . . .. He was inexhaustible in resources,
and when all outward means were withdrawn,
seemed to find sufficient to sustain him, in his own
bosom.
Now listen to the beginning of Homer's Odyssey:
Tell me, 0 Muse, of the man of many twists who
wandered so much when he had sacked the sacred
city of Troy. He saw the towns of many men and
knew their mind, and suffered much on the sea,
seeking to save his soul and the return of his compamons.
No two men could be more alike; if I were to inventory the
characters of the two adventurers nearly every feature in one
list would turn up quite recognizably in the other, beginning
with "constancy of purpose" -Odysseus is polytlas, the
"much enduring"-including the occasional bouts of lassitude and depression. And this happy circumstance tells me
that Cortes was not primarily a man of his time: not just a
medieval knight-errant or a mercantile-minded gold prospector, or a hard-to-control vassal of the Spanish crown, or a
fierce competitor for the rights of first conquest.-He was
certainly all these, and it was because he returned to the Gulf
Coast to intercept his Spanish pursuers that he first lost
Tenochtitlan. But before these and more fundamentally he
was a man who in his intense individuality expressed an
ancient type of the West, Odysseus the self-sufficient, who
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talks to his own heart, who has many twists and devices, who
is blunt and tactful, who can be driven to extreme cruelty and
engage in gratuitous acts of kindness, who lies but not
ignobly, and above all, who can, in a pinch, rely on his virgin
goddess, Athena, because he relies on himself.
In Cortes that ancient pagan character type seems to have
comfortably accommodated, or better, absorbed the God
from the other root of the Western tradition, though Cortes
was-more parallelism-particularly devoted to the Virgin.
Hugh Thomas says that he became more God-fearing as the
expedition went on-who wouldn't? His flagship sailed
under a banner he had inscribed with the saying: "Friends, let
us follow the Cross and if we only have faith in this sign we
shall conquer." He was citing the legend under which the
Emperor Constantine fought the battle that in 312 turned the
Roman Empire Christian. Cortes's Christianity is a debated
subject, but to me it seems unquestionable. It is-to state the
obvious-Cortes's chief distinction from his pagan avatar,
and to my mind the reason why, unlike Odysseus the Sacker
of Troy who returns, however dilatorily, to his own rocky
Ithaca, Cortes the Conquistador of Anahuac stays to colonize
it for his "Most Catholic and Invincible Emperor." One kind
of evidence is that this prudent commander several times put
his expedition at risk because of his religious impetuousness
and had to be restrained by Bartolome de Olmeda, the wise
and patient friar with the expedition, a man who while
practicing prudence also thought of the Indians' feelings-so
unlike Pizarro's fatal chaplain. On one memorable occasion,
the emperor, at Cortes's request, invited him with some of his
captains to come up the Great Pyramid of Huitzilopochtli.
Montezuma himself was, as usual, carried to the top, but
Cortes insisted on marching up all 113 steep narrow steps
and declared to the solicitous emperor waiting for him that
"Spaniards are never weary;" indeed, as I mentioned, Cortes
slept little when on campaign. Montezuma then obtained permission from the priests for Cortes, who was clearly already
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in the Christian conqueror mode, to enter the sanctuary. This
reeking place so disgusted him that he asked Montezuma
with a smile-not a charming one, I imagine-how so wise a
prince could put his faith in a representation of the Devil. He
offered to install in this temple, as he had on other pyramids,
a cross and an image of the Virgin, before which the false
gods would shrink into oblivion. Montezuma was deeply
shocked and said-here is irony-that these were the gods
that had ever led the Mexica to victory. Cortes, perhaps
nudged by Friar Olmeda, apologized. But it was a dangerous
moment. Montezuma stayed behind to expiate the sacrilege.
This action, which could have meant the early end of
Montezuma's policy of submission, was certainly impolitic
and clearly inspired by pure if untimely Christian fervor. In
his own account Cortes naturally suppresses this incident in
favor of what must have been a later occasion, when he did
actually topple the idol down the pyramid steps, and, as he
claims, stop the sacrifices.
Cortes became de facto emperor of Anahuac close to the
time, namely 1513, that Machiavelli's Prince appeared. So I
looked Cortes up, as it were. I have often wondered for
whom this manual on rulership is meant, since natural
princes already know it all and untalented rulers will simply
use it as permission for misconduct. Cortes, it turns out,
knows most of Machiavelli's lessons: how to fight both like a
fox and a lion, for he was proud of his "cunning stratagems"
and fierce even when wounded and unarmed; how not to be
good on occasion, for he could be brutal; how to get credit
for every exploit, for his letters take care that he should; how
to rule more by love than fear, as his trooper Diaz attests;
how, finally, to be lucky, and-a Machiavellian or Odyssean
trait of his own-how to lie royally without being commonly
dishonest. But there were many more things that he did not
do by this book but did rather against its explicit advice: he
relied heavily on auxiliaries, fought with an amateur's
improvisation, and did not study eminent predecessors-for
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there were none. But above all, Machiavelli doesn't seem to
know, or at least to enunciate, the two kindred qualifications
most needful to an imperial conquistador: large dreams and
deep faith-in Cortes's case, Christian faith, but faith also in
a more expansive sense, as I will try to show.
Both rulers made mistakes. Montezuma should not have
sent gold to greet the "Holy Company," though how was he
to know? He should not have quartered the Spaniards in
Axayacatl's palace where the state treasure was hidden-and
so on. But the chief mistake was to believe the prophecies and
to submit to the omens, and so to the bearded white men
coming over the water. Some of his nobles seem to have
realized this, but they were themselves used to submitting to
their lord, and so they wept silently.
Cortes's errors were those of a nervous yet decisive
aggressor. At Cholula he stained his name with a possibly
preventable massacre. At Tenochtitlan, when he hastened to
the coast to repel his pursuers, he left in charge a valorous
young brute, Pedro d'Alvarado, whom the Indians called
Tonatiuh, the Sun, because he was blond and beautiful. He
proved worse to them than their own doomed Fifth Sun, for
as he was edgy, eager and without judgment, he unleashed a
massacre on the unarmed celebrants of Huitzilopochtli's
festival which ended every chance of peaceful dominion and
brought on that Sad Night. This was the night when the
Spaniards, their Indian allies, and the Spanish women fighting
desperately alongside their men, were driven from the city
and nearly exterminated.
Above all, he razed Tenochtitlan, the finest city in the
world. Was it a mistake, a crime? Here is what he himself says
in his account of the recapture of the city from the Mexica,
who under the young Emperor Cuauhtemoc, Montezuma's
nephew, had learned the Spanish skills: to fight to kill, to fight
at night, to fight from the water. The passage is from the third
letter to Emperor Charles V:
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All I had seen forced me to two conclusions, the
one that we should regain little of the treasure the
Mexicans had taken from us; the other that they
would force us to destroy and kill them all and this
last weighed on my soul. I began to wonder how I
could terrify them and bring them to a sense of
their error. It could only be done by burning and
destroying their houses and towers of the idols.
Of course, the letter explains first things first: why the
Emperor isn't getting his customary fifth of treasure. Of
course, Cortes assumes that the Mexica are legally in rebellion (an imperial arrogation, to be sure, on par with the Aztec
emperor's treatment of cities that refused the dominion of
Huitzilopochtli). But it also reveals a certain travail of spirit,
a conscience, a care for a people whose intelligence Cortes
admired and whose fate he pitied, albeit he was its cause. On
Cortes's premise the destruction was a necessity, but was the
premise itself necessary? For my part, I simply cannot judge.
It is true, however, that once he was master of Anahuac he
looked carefully after his realm and probably did it more
good in the long run than it ever was in Montezuma's power
to do: He spent his own resources in rebuilding the country,
introduced new plants and draught animals, condemned the
enslavement of the Indians and recorded in his will his deep
misgivings of conscience about the institution itself, and tried
to mitigate the treatment of the natives by the colonists. And,
of course, he abolished human sacrifice. All in all, his dubious
deeds had the effect of relegating Anahuac to the past; his
good deeds gave Mexico a future. And, pressed to think in
these terms about the Conquest itself, I suppose with the
Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa that it belongs in the long
run to the credit side of something, call it human welfare.
But the question I proposed was how and why it
could happen. So let me try to come to some sort of conclusion. Two worlds clashed (here the cliche tells the simple
truth), and the leaders happened to be emblematic of their
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worlds. Let me first compare the divinities that led the
leaders.
We have an alumnus, Peter Nabokov, the stepson of the
man to whom this lecture is dedicated, William Darkey. He is
an expert on Indian sacred life and its sacred space. When he
heard that I was reading on this subject he sent me a large box
of books from his private library. In one of these books I
found an article containing an antithetical listing of Aztec and
Christian religiosity.
On the left, the Nahua side, is listed (I select for brevity's
sake) Symmetry, Autonomy, Interchangeability, and Cyclicality.
On the right, the Spanish side, is listed Hierarchy,
Centralization, Fixity, and Linearity. This right side is in fact
recognizable as a checklist of features condemned in the West
as evils of the West, a compendium of the self-critique of the
West such as was current in the later part of the last century
and still is, albeit somewhat muted by recent events.
I also recognize the left side of the list, and it does appear
to me to be descriptive of Aztec religion. But notice this
strange effect: how each characteristic of that religion
induced an opposite effect on the Aztec polity. The complexly related Symmetries of divine functions make for a draining
tangle of rituals; the Autonomy of the deities-as many as
1600-leads to a burdensome multiplicity of services; the
Interchangeability of identities leads to dependence on priestly interpreters; and the Cyclicality leads to a sense of
inescapable doom. In fact it was Anahuac that most tended
toward social Hierarchy, administrative Centralization and
rigid Fixity of protocol. The Spanish side, on the other hand,
gave its real-life practitioners one supreme god, reliable in his
operations, author of a stable creation, progressing hopefully
into a new day. And so it was the Spaniards who could afford
to be free, flexible, energetic, and self-reliant: When God
permits them to be defeated it is, Cortes says, on account of
their own sins, a deserved punishment, not an unintelligible
divine antic.
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But, a student of Aztec religion might argue, the similarities to Christianity are remarkably exact and numerous, so
why would religion make the difference? To give a sampling
of the parallelisms: The Indians had the symbol of the cross,
a Maltese type, that turns up frequently in their visual art.
They had absolution by confession, though it could be undergone only once in a lifetime. They had a form of baptism,
ritual fasting, even an invisible god. Above all, they had the
ritual ingestion of their god's blood: the victim's or their own
blood was kneaded into loaves of amaranth seeds that were
god-images and were then eaten. This last practice, the
analogue of Christian communion, is most interesting to me,
because some scholars represent this Christian sacrament as a
form of cannibalism that brings Christianity closer to the
Aztec feasting on flesh. But, of course, the blood partaken of
during the Christian Eucharist is precisely not the blood of a
living human being. Even a very untheoretical Christian
knows that it is a mystery which is accompanied by a complex
rational theology. Communicants know, if vaguely, that the
wafer and wine are neither merely symbolic nor brutely
real-the nature of their transformation is open to rational
questioning: For example, have they undergone transubstantiation, so that the substance itself, the bread and the wine,
are to be regarded as now the body and blood of Christ, or
have they achieved consubstantiation, such that they present
a duality of visible properties and invisible essence?
I may be allowed to dismiss the beguiling but bizarre
notion of the friars that the Indians were lapsed Christians,
baptized a millennium and a half ago by QuetzalcoatlSt.Thomas; at any rate, they themselves were always afraid
that the willing conversions of the Indians were perhaps
rather shallow and masked the survival of the old similarseeming worship. It remains a problem, requiring really deep
investigation by people who know not only the methods of
comparative ethnography but the ways of faith, whether such
similarities betoken pure coincidence, or are features belong-
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ing to some general human religiosity, and whether such
all-human phenomena have a deep or shallow common root.
To me it seems, judging only at first glance, that a stupendously unwieldy religion supported by many disparate narratives, whose meaning, being a matter of memory, is uncircumventably in the hands of trained priests, is simply incommensurable with a religion that has one simply told "Good
News" (Evangel/ion), one master story whose ever new
interpretations, carried on by priests, theologians, and
laymen alike, strive for coherence. Let me make my point
brusquely and minimally: Such a religion, Christianity in the
present case, seems to me simply more energizing. To wit:
Cortes liked to read, as he said, when he had time, and he
knew some theology which, in turn, gave him the selfconfidence to harangue an emperor. He went to mass in the
morning without fail and was ready for the day. In defense,
Montezuma could only tell divine stories-myths to us-and
insist on his gods' past services, which he had to keep securing by spending every day much time and many resources on
arduous cultic performances.
Moreover, Cortes's Holy Company could rely on their
God who, being invisible-though having one and only one
human incarnation-was therefore impervious to sudden
physical toppling, to being bodily thrown down the temple
stairs, as Moses had once burnt the golden calf. This God, a
god mysterious but not capricious, made nature according to
laws and left it largely alone. Thus God's created nature was
open to the self-reliant inventiveness of human beings. This
natural realm, being amenable to human rationality, invited
initiative, for its God had himself engaged in radical innovation when he created the world and when he irrupted into
history in human form.
I have been engaged by this puzzle: We know that the
Indians had wheeled toys; why did Anahuac wait for Cortes
to introduce wagons? It seems to me that it is not generally
true that necessity is the mother of invention, but rather than
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129
inventions develop necessities: We see a convenience and we
need it. Anahuac, to be sure, had enough slaves and
commoners with tumplines to drag its building stones anywhere. But why didn't someone think of the splendor of
rolling in stately carriages over the waiting causeways of
Tenochtitlan? By my premise it was not lack of need but
something else, at which I am guessing: the Aztecs were close
and loving onlookers and clever users of nature, but they
were not on the lookout to go her one better, to whirl rather
than to walk over her terrain. Perhaps the wheel isn't the
most convincing general example, since it seems to have
come to the Western world not as an original invention but
by diffusion, probably from Mesopotamia, but to me its
absence in Anahuac does seem telling for Aztec inventioninertia. Why did they not lever their simple tools into
machines, those devices for compelling nature to outdo herself? Why did they refrain from enlarging their bare-eyed
observation through those instruments that bring close things
that are beyond and below human vision? Why had they, as
gifted a people as ever was, no interest in seizing the mechanical advantage or extending sensory acuity? Well, as for the
latter, they had no glass for lenses (which is why Cortes's glass
baubles were acceptable gifts). But then-why not?
Theology, the laws of nature, interpretative accessibility,
and inventiveness-these are great but they are not the only
advantages that these Westerners who came out of the East
carried with them. Others have been intimated: the fraternal
equality of human beings insofar as they are ensouled
creatures that Cortes preached to the Aztec nobles, whereas
Anahuac was caste-ridden; the ensuing closeness of the leader
to his men that made Cortes listen to the complaints and
sometimes-never at crucial moments-heed the advice of
his companions, whereas Montezuma was deliberately
remote-the tlatoani, the Speaker, not the spoken-to, whose
subjects had to avert their eyes when he passed-and autocratic; the project of propagating to all the world a truth felt
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to be universal that unquestionably drove Cortes if not the
"Holy Company"-the name was first given ironicallywhereas the Mexica, once the conquered cities had accepted
Huitzilopochtli, collected their gods in turn, ever more of
them, for whom Montezuma even established a sort of allAnahuac pantheon; and (significant for our times) above all,
the tenacity of the Christians in holding on to life, whereas
the Aztecs seemed somehow-I'm far from understanding
it-to surrender themselves more readily to the thought of
death and so to death itself.
Of course, the Conquistadores' Christianity was intertwined with that other root of our West, pagan Greco-Roman
antiquity, of which I mention now only the intellectual taproot, the Greek one. From this dual root stems, it seems to
me, that faith in a more comprehensive sense I mentioned
before, the faith that underlies a daily life free for confident
projects: the trust in the stable motions of nature combined
with a contemplative care for transcendence, the faith in "the
Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," to cite our founding
charter
All of us here know-or will learn in the next four
years-how much the Christian and post-Christian West
owes to the Greek science of celestial nature and the rational
account of divinity. But I want to recur to the human model
that is exemplified with such spectacular accuracy by Cortes,
the Homeric Odysseus, the first mature Western man (for
Achilles, though in years the same age in the Iliad as was
Cortes in 1519, is constitutionally a youth). This man, a
soldier and sailor too, is free, self-reliant, inventive, a discoverer of new lands, be it of the world or the soul, and, I nearly omitted to say, the lover of women of stature: Like
Odysseus, who had his semi-goddesses abroad and his
Penelope at home, Cortes had in his life two royal daughters
of Montezuma and two Spanish wives, but above all his comrade, his advisor and interpreter, Malinali or Malinche, the
Mexican princess christened Dona Marina. It was his
�BRANN
131
partnership with her that gave him his Nahua nicknamethe Indians addressed him as "Malinche;" if it was meant in
derision, it was a misplaced scorn. She and Cortes were, like
Odysseus and Penelope, one in their wily works, and they had
a son, Don Martin Cortes (named after the Conquistador's
father), a son to whom he was attached, as Odysseus was to
his-more legitimate-Telemachus.
I cannot pretend to understand how this distinctive
species of Odyssean individualists is propagated down the
ages, nor can I quite figure out whether this self-reliant,
energetic type produces the tradition of trust in nature's
manageableness or the tradition of inquisitiveness generates
the type of the man of many devices, the polymechanos. In
other words, to me this question seems askable and therefore
pursuable: Whatever may be the case for the rest of the
human world, is our West ultimately more a civilization or a
kind of human being? I tend toward the latter, but for the
moment I will take the safe though weasly way and say that
together, type and tradition in tangled reciprocity, they are
responsible for the West's apparently irresistible expansiveness. The Empires of the Sun, on the other hand, fell so fast
into ruin because they and their leaders displayed in their
high-bred, melancholic rigidity and their fearful care for the
courses of their Sun characteristics that were, so to speak, the
fateful complement, the matched antithesis, of the confident
and focused daring of the Western invaders.
The lessons learned in thinking about a problem amount
more often to collateral insights than direct solutions. So I
want to end with two such lessons I believe I learned: First,
that we really must come to grips with our West in its
apparently irresistible expansiveness and if, on thoughtful
consideration, it proves necessary, acknowledge candidly its
superiority-superiority, that is, in the scope it gives, remarkably enough, to individual human nature by the very universality of its conceptions. And two, that we, as conscious
representatives of that tradition, owe those overrun and
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
extinguished civilizations, with all their irreplaceable strange
beauty, a remembrance-not merely as projects for research
but as objects of human regard.
Addendum: In the question period at the Santa Fe
campus on September 13, 2002, a deeper issue than is
broached above was raised. I have presented Cortes as the apt
heir of a European tradition of ever-hopeful receptivity to
and invention of machines and devices (one such, not
mentioned above, is the huge-and ludicrously failed-catapult employed in the retaking of Tenochtitlan). Now the
question was asked whether, aside from being a more freeing
and invigorating faith than was the service of the Aztec pantheon, Christianity also provided the conditions for the transformation of the ancient theoria of natures into the modern
science of Nature and the project of mastery; in other words:
was Christianity implicated in technology? I have come upon
this claim in an article by M.B. Foster in Mind of 1935-36. Its
main point is this: Natural science presupposes that nature
must embody an intelligible mathematical scheme, but which
of the possible laws it realizes is left to experimental observation. These conditions imply that the world was created (not
generated) by a God who wills it-hence its contingencybut whose will is constrained by his understanding-hence its
intelligible lawfulness. This, Foster argues, is basic Christian
theology.
Books Read and Books Consulted
Baldwin, Neil. 1998. Legends of the Plumed Serpent: Biography of
a Mexican God. New York: PublicAffairs.
Boone, Elizabeth Hill. 1994. The Aztec World. Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Books.
Broda, Johanna, David Carrasco, and Eduardo Moctezuma. 1987.
The Great Temple ofTenochtitlan: Center and Periphery of the Aztec
World. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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133
Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Nunez. 1542. The Account: Alvar Nunez
Cabeza de Vaca's Relaci6n. Translated by Martin A. Favata and Jose
B. Fernandez. Houston: Arte Publico Press (1993).
Carmack, Robert M ., Janine Gasco, and Gary H. Gossen. 1996.
The Legacy of Mesoamerica: History and Culture of Native
American Civilization. Upper Saddle River, N .J.: Prentice Hall.
Carrasco, Davfd. 1982. Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire:
Myths and Prophecies in the Aztec Tradition. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press.
Clendinnen, lnga. 1991. Aztecs: An Interpretation . Cambridge :
Cambridge University Press.
Columbus, Christopher. 1492-1504. The Four Voyages of
Christopher Columbus. Edited and translated by J. M. Cohen.
Baltimore: Penguin Books (1969).
Conrad, Geoffrey, and Arthur A. Demarest. 1988. Religion and
Empire: The Dynamics of Aztec and Inca Expansionism.
Cambridge: Cambridge University.
Copernicus, Nicolaus. 1543 . On the Revolutions of the Heavenly
Spheres. Translated by Charles Glenn-Wallace. Great Books of the
Western World, no. 16: Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler. Chicago:
Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. (1952).
Cortes, Hernan. 1520's. Hernan Cortes, Letters from Mexico.
Translated by Anthony Pagden. Oxford: Oxford University Press
(1986).
Diamond, Jared. 1999. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of
Human Societies. New York: W. W. Norton.
Dfaz del Castillo, Bernal. 1555. The Discovery and Conquest of
Mexico. Translated by A. P. Maudslay. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux (1956).
Dfaz, Gisele and Alan Rodgers. c. 1500. The Codex Borgia: A FullColor Restauration of the Ancient Mexican Manuscript. New York:
Dover Publications (1993).
Florescano, Enrique. 1999. The Myth of Quetzalcoatl. Translated
by Lysa Hochroth. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
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Foster, M.B. 1935 and 1936. "Christian Theology and the Science
of Nature." Mind, 44 : 439-66 (part 1) ; 45: 1-27 (part 2).
Fuentes, Carlos. 1998. "The Two Shores." In Clashes of Culture .
Chicago: The Great Books Foundation.
Galeano, Eduardo. 1985. Memory of Fire: 1. Genesis: Part One of
a Trilogy. Translated by Cedric Belfrage. New York: Pantheon
Books.
Gibbon, Edward. 178 8. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
Vol. 1. New York: The Modern Library.
Jennings, Gary. 1980. Aztec. New York: A Tom Doherty Associates
Book (1997) .
Kadir, Djelal. 1992. Columbus and the Ends of the Earth: Europe's
Prophetic Rhetoric as Conquering Ideology. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Klor de Alva, J. Jorge. 1999. "Religious Rationalization and the
Conversion of the Nahuas: Social Organization and Colonial
Epistemology." In Aztec Ceremonial Landscapes. Edited by Davfd
Carrasco. Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado.
Lafaye, Jacques. 1976. Quetzalc6atl and Guadalupe: the Formation
of Mexican National Consciousness, 1531-1813. Translated by
Benjamin Keen. Foreword by Octavia Paz. Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press.
Las Casas, Bartolome de. 1542. A Short Account of the Destruction
of the Indies. Translated by Nigel Griffin. London: Penguin Books
(1992).
Lawrence, D. H . 1926. The Plumed Serpent [Quetzalcoatl]. New
York: Vintage Books (1992).
Le Clezio, J. M.G. 1993 . The Mexican Dream: Or, The Interrupted
Thought of Amerindian Civilizations. Translated by Teresa Lavender
Fagan. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Leon-Portilla, Miguel, editor. 1969. The Broken Spears: The Aztec
Account of the Conquest of Mexico. Boston: Beacon Press.
- - - , editor. 1980. Native Mesoamerican Spirituality: Ancient
Myths, Discourses, Stories, Doctrines, Hymns, Poems from the
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Aztec, Yucatec, Quiche-Maya and Other Sacred Traditions. Mahwah,
N.J.: Paulist Press.
Llosa, Mario Vargas. 1990. "Questions of Conquest," Harper's
Magazine (December):45-53.
- - - . 1989. The Storyteller. Translated by Helen Lane. New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Machiavelli, Niccolo. 1513. The Prince and The Discourses.
Translated by Luigi Ricci. New York: Modern Library (1950).
"Motolinfa" (Fray Toribio de Benavente). c. 1541. History of the
Indians of New Spain. Translated by Francis Borgia Steck, O.F.M.
Richmond, VA: William Byrd Press (1951).
Naipaul, V. S. 1969. The Loss of ElDorado: A History. New York:
Penguin Books (1981).
Paz, Octavio. 1985. The Labyrinth of Solitude and The Other
Mexico; Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude; Mexico and the United
States; The Philanthropic Ogre. Translated by Lysander Kemp, Yara
Milos, and Rachel Phillips Belash. New York: Grove Press.
Pearce, Colin D. 1997. "Prescott's Conquests: Anthropophagy,
Auto-da-Fe and Eternal Return." Interpretation, Vol. 24, 3
(Spring):339-361.
Peck, Harry Thurston. 1905. William Hickling Prescott. Port
Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press (1968).
Prescott, William Hickling. 1843, 1847. History of the Conquest of
Mexico and History of the Conquest of Peru. New York: The
Modern Library.
---.History of the Conquest of Mexico. Introduction by James
Lockhart. New York: Modern Library (2001).
- - - . 1823-1858. The Literary Memoranda of William Hickling
Prescott, Vols. 1, 2. Edited by C. Harvey Gardiner. Norman: The
University of Oklahoma Press (1961).
Ricard, Robert. 1933. The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico: An Essay
on the Apostolate and Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant
Orders in New Spain: 1523-1572. Berkeley: University of
California Press (1982).
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Sahagun, Fray Bernadino de. 1547-1579. General History of the
Things of New Spain (Florentine Codex, 12 Books). Translated by
Arthur J. 0. Anderson and Charles Dibble. Published in thirteen
parts: Santa Fe, N.M.: The School of American Research and The
University of Utah (1953-82).
- - -. 1585. Conquest of New Spain: 1585 Revision. Translated
by Howard F. Cline. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press
(1989).
Sejourne, Laurette. 1976. Burning Water: Thought and Religion in
Ancient Mexico. Berkeley: Shambala.
Soustelle, Jacques. 1955. The Daily Life of the Aztecs on the Eve of
the Spanish Conquest. Translated by Patrick O'Brian. Stanford:
Stanford University Press (1970).
Thomas, Hugh. 1993. Conquest: Montezuma, Cortes, and the Fall
of Old Mexico. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Todorov, Tzvetan. 1984. The Conquest of America: The Question of
the Other. Translated by Richard Howard. New York:
HarperPerennial (1992).
Townsend, Richard F., editor. 1992. The Ancient Americas: Art
from Sacred Landscapes. Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago.
Von Hagen, Victor W 1957. Realm of the Incas. New York: Mentor
Books.
Walker, Ronald G. 1978. Infernal Paradise: Mexico and the Modern
English Novel. Berkeley: The University of California Press.
Williams, William Carlos. 1925. "The Destruction of Tenochtitlan:
Cortez and Montezuma." In In the American Grain: Essays by
William Carlos Williams. New York: New Directions Books (1956).
Wolf, Eric. 1959. Sons of the Shaking Earth. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
�137
1-
Plato's Timaeus and the
Will to Order
Peter Kalkavage
"And whoever thinks another a greater friend
than his own fatherland, I say that man is nowhere."
Sophocles, Antigone 182-3
The Timaeus is the strangest of Plato's dialogues. It is so
strange that one wonders whether anything in it can be taken
seriously. Here conversation and inquiry are suspended, and
in their place Plato gives us long speeches that take the form
of myths. Socrates for the most part is silent. His silence is
like the receptacle we hear about in Timaeus' speech: it
provides the receptive "space" for all the stories and images
to come. We hear about Solon among the Egyptians, the lost
continent of Atlantis, an Athens grown young and heroic, the
musical construction of the soul, and the geometric construction of body. We also hear about ourselves. These are the
most bizarre tales the dialogue has to offer-tall tales about
our souls and bodies, about how we came to have a sphereshaped head, a neck and torso, eyes and ears, liver and spleen,
bone and flesh, an upright posture; about the manifold
diseases that afflict body and soul; about where sex came
from, and how birds evolved from feather-brained
astronomers. With the Timaeus, even more than with other
hat
dialogues, we wonder what in the world Plato is up to. \'(T
is the point of all this cosmomania? And why is Socrates
silent?
The silence of Socrates in the Timaeus signals the absence
and withdrawal of philosophy itself, as Socrates understands
it, from the day's proceedings. In particular, it signals the
Peter Kalkavage is a tutor at St. John's College. This lecture was delivered in
Annapolis on March 24, 2000.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
absence of that erotic stnvmg that draws the philosopher
beyond the passing show of mortal opinion to a godlike
vision of what eternally is. Plato's strange drama draws us
away from this striving. It directs our attention to a form of
thymos or spiritedness that may be called a "will to order."
This will is glorified in the famous likely story of Timaeus.
Craftsmanship, rather than contemplation, is the hero of the
story. Philosophy in a sense makes an appearance ; but it tends
to be understood as the mastery of distinct disciplines, the
systematic presentation of theories, the building of models,
and the solving of problems. It is philosophy made technical
and effective-philosophy (if one may call it that) with all the
divine madness taken out of it. Plato was so thorough a
student of Socrates that he imagined what it would mean to
go beyond Socrates-beyond the knowledge of ignorance,
the claim not to teach, the treatment of virtue as a perpetual
question, and the tension between philosophy and the city. In
the Timaeus, Plato seeks to interest us profoundly in one such
experiment in going beyond Socrates, an experiment in
which the love of wisdom is displaced by the will to order.l
The true center of the Timaeus is not its cosmology but
the desire of Socrates. This is the motive force behind all the
speeches to come. Socrates presents his desire in his longest
and most important speech in the dialogue. Yesterday,
Socrates gratified the desire of Timaeus, Critias,
Hermocrates, and the absent fourth to hear what Socrates
thought about the best political order. He did so, he says,
because he knew he would then be able to make a demand on
them (20B). He knew that those who showed up today would
be compelled by justice to pay him back with a "feast of
speech" -a feast that would depict the just city in the act of ,
waging war. Socrates expresses his desire through a provocative simile. "My affection," he says, "seems to be something
like this: it's as if someone who gazed upon beautiful animals '
somewhere, either produced by the art of painting or truly
living but keeping their peace, were to get a desire to gaze
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139
upon them moving and contending in some struggle that
seemed appropriate to their bodies" (19B-C).
The most striking thing about this desire is its irrationality. Socrates does not say, ''And so, now that we've looked at
the just city at rest, it makes sense to investigate the city in
motion." On the contrary, he portrays himself as a man struck
by a passing fancy. It is no thought, no logic that leads to the
city in motion but a mere feeling or pathos. The irrationality
is heightened by Socrates' reference to chance: he just
happens to feel like this (19B), the way we might just happen
to want to go to the movies. Furthermore, the desire for the
deeds and words of war seems to spring from thymos or
spiritedness, which delights in honor and victory rather than
truth. Socrates depicts himself as desiring, not a philosophic
account, but an encomium or song of praise. What he seems
to want from his hosts is not truth but beautification or
flattery. This fits well with the dominant word of the dialogue,
kosmos, which means not just order but ornament and beautiful display. It also fits with the name Timaeus, which
suggests time, honor. But why would Socrates, who refuses to
put up with the flattery of love in the Symposium, here in the
Timaeus compel his hosts to engage in flattery? And how is
the cosmology of Timaeus related to such a project?
The Timaeus is the story of a descent into Becoming. It
appears to be a sequel to the Republic. In that dialogue,
Socrates and Glaucon bring the discussion to its highest point
when they take up the question of philosophic education. To
reveal the need for such an education, they go down into a
cave. Human nature, we are told, dwells in a cavelike condition of ignorance and deception (7 .514A). The word for
condition in this passage is the same as the one Socrates uses
here in the Timaeus to describe himself-pathos, which also
means feeling or affection, as well as suffering or affliction.
The cave is the place of political orthodoxy or right opinion.
The cave dwellers sit in a sort of prenatal position with their
gaze forced upon the cave wall. They are enthralled-that is,
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
both fascinated and enslaved-by moving two-dimensional
images of three-dimensional artifacts, projected. on the wall
by the enforcers of the city's opinions. These projectionists
are no doubt the poets, whose art of making deceptive imitations of human excellence binds the souls of the cave-citizens
to the city's beliefs and customs. The prenatal position of the
cave people suggests that they are in a kind of womb which
paradoxically refuses to give them birth and bring them to
light, refuses to let them grow into free and upright beings.
To ensure their provincialism, the protective cave-mother
keeps them in the dark and charms them with exciting
political movies that stir the soul to praise and blame. The
potential philosopher seeks freedom from this stultifying,
prenatal condition. He is turned around, converted, from
Becoming to Being and eventually to the study of the Good.
The art of thus turning the soul around, as Socrates describes
it, comes from the power of mathematics.2
Just as the Republic takes us from Becoming "up" to
Being, so the Timaeus brings us back "down"-back to the
cave of body, custom, opinion, and change. The dialogue is a
grand defense or apologia of Becoming in response to
Socrates' indictment of Becoming in the Republic. The will to
plunge from the heights of Being into the depths of Becoming
is intimately connected with the will to order, for the turn
from Being to Becoming is also the turn from theory or
contemplation to practicality and accomplishment. Becoming
engages us as practical, productive beings. As children of
Becoming, we are caught up in the doing and making of
things. We are ambitious, restless beings desirous of both
honor and mastery.
Socrates' hosts, who are praised for their reputation and
accomplishment,3 have an agenda: to make the realm of
doing and making look as good as possible. They will try to
renovate th~ cave of Becoming in order to make it more
receptive to the intentions and designs of enlightened
political craftsmanship. But this political agenda requires a
�KALKAVAGE
141
preliminary step: a divine sanction and a basis in the overall
scheme of things. The will to order cannot accomplish politically what nature will not let it accomplish in the first place.
There must be a predisposition to order. This is where the
cosmological myth of Timaeus comes in. Through the power
of science and fiction combined, Timaeus will make
Becoming stand forth as a kosmos or beautifully ordered
Whole. This Whole is not so much discovered by the
cosmologist as it is made. Mathematics, here, has a role
contrary to the one it had in the Republic. Instead of turning
the soul from her fixation with Becoming to the dialectical
study of Being, mathematics now supplies the beautifying
principles in accordance with which the cave of Becoming
can be transformed into an enlightened home for moral
correctness, political reform, and scientific research. The
adjective kosmios in Greek means decent and well behaved.
This is the quality that Timaeus will try to infuse into the
world of Becoming. He will try to make the wild world of
body and change decent and law-abiding, at least in speech.
The turn from Being to Becoming is, in effect, the undoing of philosophic conversion. This turn is most clearly seen
in the character of Critias, the spokesman in the dialogue for
nomos or convention. At one point he tells Socrates that the
city described on the previous day was in fact a myth, and
that he, Critias, will carry over Socrates' merely theoretical
city into what he calls "the truth" (26C7-D3) . Critias
identifies the truth with Becoming. His extreme vanity
regarding his genealogy and his family connections with the
great Solon confirms this fact. The ancient Athens Solon hears
about from the Egyptian priests is more real than Socrates'
city because it actually existed in a real terrestrial place-so
Critias would have us believe. According to the wisdom of
Egypt, a wisdom Critias clearly admires, what is older is more
real and authoritative than what is younger and more recent.
Old ways are best. The oldest things are the most real and
true, and the oldest priests are the wisest of all. Truth is a
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
long-standing custom or nomos, and knowledge consists in
the oldest hearsay about the oldest things.4
The Timaeus is a time machine. It attempts to unearth
hidden origins by taking us back to those origins in mythic
time. Throughout the dialogue, speech is playfully depicted
as generative or originating and, in that sense, thoroughly
temporal. Solon's story takes us back to a forgotten place at
a forgotten time . What he hears from the Egyptian priest is
about the periodic structure of time itself. Critias, in order to
retrieve this story, goes back to the time when he was very
young. Timaeus, too, stresses the playfully generative power
of speech: he presents the cosmic order, not as it eternally is,
but as it came to be "once upon a time." This temporalization
of logos is yet another way in which the Timaeus takes us
back to temporal beginnings but not "up" to eternal principles. Instead of recollection, as we hear it described in the
Meno, the Timaeus steeps us in the shadow land of memory.
Such is my prelude to the speech of Timaeus. In what follows, we shall explore how this speech embodies the will to
order. What is thinking in the likely story? What does it mean
to be kosmios, cosmic, in one's thinking? What is the
strength, and the weakness, of such thinking? My attempt to
address these questions falls into three parts, which mirror
the tripartite order of Timaeus' speech: The Piety of Physics,
Space Dreams, and The Human Condition.
The Piety of Physics
Timaeus introduces the phrase "likely story" in what Socrates
calls the prelude or preamble to the speech itself (29D).
Socrates reminds Timaeus that he ought to invoke the gods
according to nomos or convention. Timaeus agrees that it
would be sound-minded or moderate to do so, thereby
exhibiting his favorite moral virtue. He adds an invocation
that reflects a curious brand of piety. "We must also invoke to
hemeteron," he says-what comes from, or has to do with,
ourselves, our own resources (27D). This self-invocation
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embodies the will to order that animates the upcoming myth.
God, as Timaeus proceeds to say, is a demiurge or craftsman.
But a stronger and more daring claim seems to be at work:
the claim that productive art, demiurgy, in some sense is our
god.
Timaeus begins his prelude by drawing a sharp distinction
between Being and Becoming. The strictness of the distinction makes it extremely difficult to understand how a cosmos,
as the mixture of Being and Becoming, could ever come about
at all. This is typical of Timaeus: he makes hard and fast distinctions and then immediately proceeds to blur them. After
thus distinguishing what always is from what always comes to
be, Timaeus introduces his famous demiurge. This mythical
figure, in whom the will to order is most evident, hovers
between the realms of Being and Becoming. The word
demiourgos means "one who works for the people or demos."
It refers to anyone who crafts anything.s Now we all delight
in a thing well made-a well-made chair, building or piece of
music. We love the way everything fits together beautifully,
and how a thing well made is a thing that lasts. In the likely
story, Timaeus counts on and seeks to gratify this human
delight. He makes the world of nature into a well-made, longlasting artifact.6
The divine craftsman is postulated, willed into being.
There is no proof for his existence. The question for Timaeus
is not whether there really is such a being but what he was
looking at when he made the world: was it a changeable or
an unchangeable model? Timaeus at one point expresses
skepticism regarding our ability to discover the true poet and
father of the world (28C). He makes us suspect that the
demiurge is a practical postulate that fills the void of our
theological ignorance, that he is not the true god, whom we
cannot presume to know, but the god whom decent, intelligent people should believe in if they are to affirm the best of
possible worlds. Later we hear that this divine craftsman is
good and therefore ungrudging (29£) . Unlike the gods of
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Herodotus, the divine craftsman had no envy: he did not
jealously guard his divine prerogative, the flame of artful
intelligence, but wished that all things should possess it to the
extent that their natures allowed.7 Artful intelligence, one
might say, is always in the mode of generosity. It seeks to
bestow itself on the world as a divine gift; it rejoices in seeing
itself multiplied, reflected, and embodied. The cosmos comes
about, not through chance and necessity, nor through the sex
and violence depicted in Hesiod's Theogony, but through the
sober professionalism of techne or art. By presenting god as a
generous craftsman, a divine being who works for the common good, Timaeus saves us from making god in the image
of a tyrant.
For Timaeus, the world of body and change is made in the
likeness of a changeless and purely intelligible archetype or
model. Timaeus expresses his preference for a changeless
model in pious terms: it would be "not right," ou themis, that
is, blasphemous to say otherwise (29A). Herein lies one
reason why the likely story is likely. Likely, eikos, means "has
the character of a likeness." It also means probable, reasonable, and equitable or fair. Speech for Timaeus imitates the
condition of its objects. Accounts of what is abiding and
intelligible, he says, "are themselves abiding and unchanging"
(29B), while accounts of the nonabiding and changing,
accounts of mere likenesses, are afflicted with likelihood. In
an echo of the divided line in the Republic, Timaeus says:
"just as Being is to Becoming, so is truth to trust" (29C).
Likely stories are not put forth for the sake of insight but are
a kind of rhetoric. We must be persuaded by them, trust them,
and put up with their necessary flaws.
The infirmity of speech about divine origins points to a
deeper infirmity-human nature. Timaeus tells Socrates that
he must not wonder if many of the things said about the gods
and the birth of the All are self-contradictory and imprecise
(29C). This is where the phrase "likely story" first appears.
Adopting the formal tone of a man accused, Timaeus says:
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"But if we provide likelihoods inferior to none, one should be
well pleased with them, remembering that I who speak as
well as you my judges have a human nature, so that it is fitting
for us to receive the likely story about these things and not to
search further for anything beyond it" (29C-D).9
This sentence about accepting likely stories points to the
connection that physical accounts have, for Timaeus, to both
piety and prudence. Timaeus draws a line beyond which
prudent human beings should not go in speaking of things
divine. But the drawing of this line is not just an admission of
infirmity. Rather, it demarcates the realm within which
human beings precisely because they are aware of their
limitations and all the contingencies of life, are all the more
able to exert their powers of prudent mastery, their will to
order. Timaeus' defense of the inevitable shortcomings of his
speech is a not-so-veiled warning against the immoderateness
and erotic striving of philosophy. The immoderate questioning of everything, if left to itself, would undermine the
controlled play of invention with the unpredictable play of
conversation. In the end, it would prevent human nature
from being as masterful as it could be. Timaeus thus cautions
Socrates against being Socrates, against asking questions and
striving to go beyond the boundaries of plausibly established
grounds. Socrates must be receptive to, and content with, the
likely story about divine origins. If he wants to enjoy his feast,
he must mind his manners and act like a gentleman. He must
control his striving to be divine and remember that as
Timaeus' harshest judge, he too is, after all, only human.
Socrates is more than happy to accept the terms on which
his guest-gift is offered. In the most telling moment of the
dialogue, Socrates calls the likely story, not a logos or mythos,
not an account or a story, but a nomos (29D). Nomos is both
law and song, as well as custom and convention. Timaeus is
our singer and legislator for the day. He will entertain us, but
he will also lay down the law. His logos is a form of music. It
sings of Nature as both a divine Artifact and a divinely estab-
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lished nomos or Convention. It celebrates the prudent founding of the cosmic regime and invites us to join in by following all the mathematical constructions. Long before Critias
gives man his Athenian citizenship in the dialogue, the physics
of Timaeus will make us dutiful citizens of the world at
large-good cosmopolitans.
The world for Timaeus is both image and god.9 This is his
central teaching. Unlike the images put forth by Socrates, the
cosmic image does not point beyond itself. If it did so, it
would cease to be a god. In the divided line, Socrates revealed
the power of what he calls eikasia, imagination. It was at the
bottom of the line and served as the foundation for the whole
line. This is the power of recognizing images as images,
likenesses as likenesses.lO It is the power by which we are able
to make our ascent up the line. In the upper, intelligible
portion of the line, eikasia is the power by which we move
from hypotheses to non-hypothetical archai or principles.
This power is absent in the Timaeus, where we have plenty of
image making and imitation but no image recognition as
such, at least not the sort of image recognition by which the
soul is enabled to move from images to their intelligible
originals. To be sure, the world of Timaeus is full of images.
But these are all internal to the cosmos, all within the realm
of Becoming. Images here do not transcend themselves, even
though they are crafted in the likeness of intelligible originals.
This seems to be the direct result of the fact that they are
artificial: art, whether human or divine, conceals its foundations in order to build on them. The original points "down"
to the image; but the image does not point back "up" to the
original. Mathematics is no longer the prelude to "the song of
dialectic," as it was in the Republic,11 and the eide seem to be
necessary only in the way that a lifeless blueprint guides and
points ahead to the actual building. Furthermore, when
Timaeus first appeals to the intelligible model, he does so for
the sake of beauty and stability rather than truth (28A-B). The
model is postulated so that the cosmic edifice will be secure
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and beautifully built-not so that the human soul, by reflecting on the heavens, might be drawn to the super-heavenly
beings that are beyond all hypothesis.
The construction of the cosmic soul is the most impressive architectural feat of Timaeus' first account of origins. The
soul is made out of music-a scale that stretches four octaves
and a major sixth in Pythagorean tuning. This act of scale
building is the most revealing instance of the will to order and
of what cosmic thinking means for Timaeus. Cosmic thinking
is productive and practical rather than theoretical. It makes
sturdy and beautiful wholes out of beautiful parts by negotiating its way through technical difficulties. Here the divine
craftsman takes the beautiful ratios of the Pythagoreans and
finds a way of fitting them together in a coherent whole. He
then bends his diatonic pattern into circles and makes the
orbits for the Sun, Moon, and planets. These outwardly
appearing circles are then mythically presented as the inward
revolutions of discursive thought, dianoia.
But before he does any of this, the craftsman first makes
a kind of intelligible dough out of the forms of Being, Same,
and Other, and kneads them into "one entire look." He must
use force or violence, since Other is loath to mix with Same
(35A-B). Here we have the most obvious example of the will
to order in the dialogue. Same and Other, as Timaeus understands them, have no natural togetherness. He denies them
the dialectical interweaving and participation in one another's natures that we hear about in the Sophist (253A). Same
and Other are simply separate ingredients, like Being and
Becoming. Force is required to get them to mix. The result is
not an intelligible unity but a highly useful blur. It is as
though Timaeus wanted to convince us of the impossibility of
ever understanding the world dialectically so that he could
get on with the more productive task of flattering the world
with mathematical constructs. He raises a dialectical problem
only to bury it with art.
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At several pivotal moments in his speech, Timaeus
reminds us that the cosmos is a god. The god who made the
world, in other words, bestows his divinity on the world.
Physical science, especially astronomy, thus becomes the '
truest form of piety. Strictly speaking, astronomy, like scale
building, is not theoretical for Timaeus but is a form of
praxis. This praxis supplies medicine and therapy for the
human soul. In our heads are housed the divine circuits of
Same and Other (44D). These are the circuits of sound judgement or phronesis, the circuits that govern a morally healthy
life. But once they are immersed in the sea of Becoming and
given mortal birth, they become deformed and we grow
abysmally ignorant and disordered. (Witness the behavior of
babies.) Before our birth as mortal beings, we dwelled with
the gods, whose happy life consisted in regularity, symmetry,
and perpetual health. This divinely healthy life Timaeus calls
the form, eidos, of our "first and best condition" (42D).
Astronomy is thus the great human homecoming, the happy
return to our heavenly origins. It is also the medicine by
which we correct and stabilize what Timaeus calls "the
wander-stricken circuits in ourselves" (47C).12
The piety, moderation, and lawfulness of Timaeus set him
at odds with eros and its notorious destabilizing influence
over human life. His war on eros is evident throughout the
dialogue. Eros, as it is described in the Symposium, is a yearning for that which one lacks, and Timaeus cannot abide lack.
He is driven to structural perfection, completeness, and
mastery. Timaeus is always filling things up. We see him filling
up the part of a missing fourth at the very beginning (17A-B),
filling up the musical intervals of octave and perfect fourth
(35C ££.),rejecting the existence of a void (SOC), and filling
our ignorant souls with scientific explanations designed to
dispel our wonder and cure our perplexity (SOB-C). He is
careful to make the cosmos into a nonerotic animal, an ,
animal that feels no lack. If the cosmos is to be a "happy
god," as he calls it (34B), then it must be complete and
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autonomous or self-related. Timaeus bestows on it the shape
of a sphere to ensure this result (33A ff.). As a sphere, the god
Cosmos neither needs nor fears anything whatsoever outside
itself. It has no arms, no legs, no sense organs, none of the
things we humans have that remind us of our condition of
dependence and vulnerability.13
This happy lack in the cosmic body is mirrored in what is
said about the cosmic soul-the best of all begotten things
(3 7A). The life of this soul consists in thinking. This is not
philosophic contemplation but the condition of unending,
unerring sensibleness or right judgement. This judgement is
mythically depicted as the inward circling of thought.
Happiness, for Timaeus, is really healthiness, and the healthy
process and condition of thinking are, in the end, more
important than what thinking is ultimately about. If there is
any pleasure in the soul's life of perpetual sensibleness, it
must be the pleasure of being constantly busy gathering information. She has no leisure. Soul is the thought-energy of the
world-always knowing what is going on everywhere and
always reporting to herself what she finds. She is like the
Egyptian priests described in Solon's account, and her truth,
like theirs, is really factual correctness. In the complex
description that Timaeus gives of the soul's intellectual
activity, he avoids the metaphor of seeing. Seeing suggests the
possibility of arousal and the pleasure we take in simply
beholding the objects of desire. The dominant metaphor
instead is that of touch, which is more amenable to a mechanical and physiological view of thinking. This absence of
seeing in the cosmic soul stands in marked contrast with what
we hear in the myths of the Phaedo and Phaedrus, where the
soul's ultimate joy consists in the leisured and ecstatic vision
of eternal truth.
Seeing is honored in the likely story. Without our vision
of the starry motions, we would never have discovered the
arts of arithmetic and astronomy (47A-B). But this seeing
inspires thoughts of duty rather than of love. Indeed, the stars
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themselves move in circles for Tirnaeus not, as Aristotle suggests in the Metaphysics, because they are in love with the
divine intellect,14 but because it is their assigned duty to do
so. Their prompting comes from piety toward a father rather
than desire for a beloved. In beholding the starry motions, we
indeed behold beauty. The function of this beauty, however,
is not to entice or arouse but to rectify. The glory of seeing,
for Tirnaeus, is that it leads, ultimately, to the highest form of
touch: the being in touch with our better, starry selves. To
think cosmically is to align our souls with the authority and
will of the heavens, especially with the all-mastering circle of
the Same (36C-D). In such a world as this, to think is not to
see but to obey-to obey, that is, the masterful motions of our
own souls projected onto the starry sky.
Space Dreams
The Timaeus is not just about order; it is also about disorder.
Plato makes disorder a rich and interesting topic. It even
acquires a certain dignity in the likely story. Disorder comes
from chance or what Tirnaeus also calls "necessity" (47E) and
"the wandering cause" (48A). This cause is present from the
very beginning of the dialogue when a fourth failed to show
up according to plan. Tirnaeus, in his very first likely story of
the dialogue, asks Socrates to believe that the mysterious
fourth was absent because he carne down with something,
that his absence was the work of chance and necessity rather
than choice. Chance and necessity are also present in the best
city that Socrates summarizes. Try as the city may to vanquish
disorder and keep people in their proper classes, the unpredictable sway of eros and sexual generation messes things up
(19A).15 The city can maintain its good order only by a constant and hard to imagine redistribution of human types.l6
But necessity is not just the spoiler of the best-laid plans.
It is also the other great cause, without which the cosmos ,
could never have been made. This is its dignity. Just as artful
intelligence is the cause of the good and the beautiful, so
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necessity is the cause of power and effectiveness. At a pivotal
moment in the likely story, Timaeus says: "For mixed indeed
was the birth of this cosmos here, and begotten from a standing-together of necessity and intellect" (47E-48A). He goes
on to tell us that the world came about through the persuasion of necessity by intellect. The world, in short, originated
in a grand piece of rhetoric. Presumably, this rhetoric goes on
continually, as the realm of efficient causes constantly cooperates, for the most part, with that of final causes. It is hard
to see what Timaeus means by "persuasion" here.
Nevertheless, a direct consequence of the image is that it
reminds us that intellect and necessity are two fundamentally
different and opposed orders of causality. Even as it yields to
thoughtful persuasion, necessity retains its right to do as it
pleases. Timaeus thus saves the phenomenon of unpredictability.
In this second founding of the cosmos, Timaeus is at pains
to make Becoming sound as perplexing as possible. Becoming
is the realm of unstable and illusory appearance.17 Earth, air,
fire, and water all appear to be constantly changing into each
other. They cannot be called elements at all, since they lack
integrity and steadfastness. To use Timaeus' language here,
you can never accuse fire of being a "this," since, no sooner
do you call it "this," fire, than it changes into "that," air. It is
always escaping the indictment of stability (49E). The legitimate name for any of the elements is therefore not "this" but
"suchlike" or "of this sort" (49B-50A).18 The assumption of
radical flux leads Timaeus to postulate the existence of a
mysterious "in which" that is prior to body and is the abiding
and underlying substrate of change. In the language of
Spinoza, this "in which" is the enduring substance of which
earth, air, fire and water (not to mention their composites)
are but passing modes. It is not really a thing at all but a force
field, the medium not of determinate things but of tensions
and resolutions-the field of things happening. Just as the
soul seems to be the world's thought-energy, the receptacle
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seems to be its body-energy, energy that somehow remains
self-same and "conserved" even as it assumes a variety of
forms.
Timaeus has many names for this field of dynamic qualities that underlies and causes change. He calls it a receptacle
and wet nurse (49A, 52D), a mold (SOC), and a mother of
Becoming (52D). It is simultaneously the unpredictable cause
of motion and the indeterminate ground of imaging. Art and
nature are continually blended in the likely story. Here this
uneasy blend-one of Timaeus' many blurrings-is especially
prominent. On the one hand, Timaeus likens the receptacle to
gold, which is constantly being worked into different
geometric shapes by a tireless goldsmith (50A-B). The curious
image reminds us of Timaeus' fascination with ornament:
even the matter out of which a cosmos is made must be
thought of as artistic and golden-a beautiful medium just
begging for a craftsman. On the other hand, the receptacle is
clearly biological or natural-not an artificial "it" but a living
"she," the cosmic womb and mother who gives birth to the
four kinds and keeps them in motion. The elusive receptacle
is not a merely passive substrate for form but a never-failing
process that somehow differentiates itself spontaneously or
from within, like the morphogenesis we witness in living
things. If the receptacle is body-energy, it also seems to be
life-energy. That is, the receptacle seems to correspond to a
certain primordial understanding of soul.
In spite of Timaeus' attempt to bring space down to earth
through humble similes like winnowing baskets (52E) and the
manufacture of perfumes (50E), the parts of his account are
obscure at best and don't seem to fit together. The incoherence seems to reflect the elusive character of space itself. For
example, space, chora, not only gives all things place; it also
dislodges them from their place (52E-53A). Space, we are
told, is like an instrument that causes shaking (53A). It is the
underlying cause of all the circulation and turbulence in the
mortal realm. It governs everything from vibrating strings to
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the circulation of the blood to earthquakes. We experience
this turbulence in the constant flow of our bodies and in the
passion of our souls. We also witness it, or rather hear about
it, in the rise and fall, the flowering and ruin, of cities and
even whole civilizations. The cycles of birth and death
recorded by the Egyptians are all due to the sway of space,
and so are the fates of legendary Atlantis and Plato's contemporary Athens.
But the most interesting thing Timaeus says about space
has to do with dreams. Space is neither purely intelligible nor
purely sensible. It is "graspable by some bastard reasoning
with the aid of insensibility, hardly to be trusted, the very
thing we look to when we dream and affirm that it's somehow necessary for everything that is to be in some region and
occupy some space, and that what is neither on earth nor
somewhere in heaven, is nothing" (52A-B). This amazing
description of space reminds us of Critias, who claimed to
make Socrates' city real by giving it place-Athenian place. If
the chora is, as Timaeus' description seems to indicate, a
seductive Siren who bewitches us into thinking that to be is
to be spatial, then Critias appears to be her adoring slave and
victim, her "space man." The dream-inducing power of space
reminds us of the cave-mother of the Republic. Space is the
cosmic counterpart and ground of our cave-condition. It is
the prepolitical, natural ground of our susceptibility to political indoctrination and of our unreflective rootedness in a
political place.
Critias first heard the story about Athens and Atlantis
during the festival of Apaturia (21A-B). On this day, Athenian
boys were initiated into their tribe as a preparation for fullfledged citizenship.19 The ceremony involved the singing of
songs. Critias remembers singing the songs of Solon, which
were new at the time. Through the festival that Critias nostalgically recalls, Plato draws our attention to the very
moment in time when, through songs that are also laws,
young prepolitical souls are planted in the soil and chOra of
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the motherland. The word Apaturia derives from the word
pater, father. But it also suggests the word apate, deception,
thus suggesting a dark side to this heart-warming event. In
being welcomed into the fold of tribe and city, the nascent
citizens are nourished on the nomoi. These laws and customs
are made sweet through song and are thus magically transformed into sentiments. The laws and customs will, from this
moment on, give the children eyes to see with and ears to
hear with. As dyed-in-the-wool citizens, they will be incapable of seeing and hearing anything else, anything outside
the boundaries of their protective "space." Convention will
be their wisdom.
Earlier, I suggested that eikasia, image recognition, is not
present in the Timaeus. Here in the receptacle we have the
sort of imagination that is present. The cosmic space that is
the ground of body seems, at another level, to be the inner
"space" of imagining-the phantasia of our souls. This is the
faculty that does not recognize images as images but rather
makes images and welcomes them unquestioningly.
According to this inner sense, the receptacle is our phantasia
writ large and made into a cosmic cause. When Socrates
expressed his desire for animals in motion, he seemed to
speak from within this very faculty. His irrational receptivity
to the speeches of his hosts, the pathos that he seems to have
contracted, is a playful imitation of our all-too-human
susceptibility to exciting images. It is the susceptibility that
allows us to be entertained and kept in the cave.
Timaeus calls attention to the fact that space is like a
dream-inducing drug. He also makes it clear that he posits the
existence of what he calls "the unsleeping and truly subsisting
nature" (52B). Presumably this refers to Being and the realm
of the eide of the four elements. Timaeus at one point "casts
his vote" for such beings (51D). But as we saw earlier, it is not
Timaeus' intention to use cosmic images to wake us up from
our space dreams so that we might transcend the cosmos
through dialectic. Likely stories employ the hypothesis of the
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forms in order to involve us, safely and entertainingly, in the
dangerous realm of body and Becoming. They are the dreams
of a sly and healthy soul. Having alerted us to the fact of
deception, to the poetic sophistry of space, Timaeus proceeds
to manufacture deceptive dreams of his own. These are the
beautiful mathematical dreams that invite us to imagine the
four elements of body, four beautiful animals in motion, as
though they were four regular geometric solids.
Along with the construction of soul out of musical ratios,
the construction of body out of geometrical figures is a paradigm of what cosmic thinking means for Timaeus. The demiurge is virtually absent here, and so the ingenious model
building arises completely from what has to do with us and
our will to order. The whole account is playfully deceptivea grand piece of poetic sophistry, in which image-making is
promiscuously fused with argument, mythos with logos. The
sophistry of geometrical physics reminds us of what Timaeus
had earlier called bastard or illegitimate reasoning. And the
poetry or phantasia that plays the guardian to this reasoning
reminds us of what he had called insensibility. Timaeus would
have us believe that geometric solidity or three-dimensionality can explain the properties of physically solid bodies. Like
Descartes, he attempts to explain body in terms of extension.
The questionable nature of this project is underscored by
Timaeus himself, who calls on "god the savior to grant us safe
passage out of a strange and unusual narration to the decree
based on likelihoods" (48D).
Like his mythic goldsmith, Timaeus schematizes space
with geometrical shapes. First, he selects the regular solids as
archetypes for the four elements of body. He does so on the
grounds that they are "the most beautiful bodies" (53D).
Truth seems not to be at issue, unless "is true" means nothing
more than "beautifully fits the appearances." Next, he fits
together or "harmonizes" the geometric solids by constructing their faces and assembling them through a kind of
cut-and-paste method. The construction here is very childlike
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and unsophisticated. Finally, he assigns each solid to the elemental body or kind that seems to be most like it: the cube to
earth, the pyramid to fire, the octahedron to air, and the
icosahedron to water. This account of body renovates and
beautifies our imagination of change. Change, the drunken
spree of appearance, is now the elegant rearrangement of
structural parts. Dionysus, it seems, has been persuaded to
accept the sober gifts of Apollo. As for the dodecahedron, the
god, we are told, used it to make panels for decorating the
sky with animals, presumably the animal figures of the zodiac and the various constellations (55C). The apparently
off-hand explanation actually reveals the point of all that has
gone before: the regular solids are a kind of jewelry that
beautifies and flatters the world. The mathematization of
body and change makes nature more presentable and more
pleasantly thinkable for decent-minded human beings. In his
Crisis of European Sciences, Husserl refers to what he calls
the "garb of ideas," with which modern mathematical physics
dresses up nature, covers its naked truth, with the formal
attire of constructs and symbols.20 Timaeus is doing consciously and deliberately what Husserl says the modern physicist does for the most part unconsciously. He is covering up
nature with a gorgeous dress of ratios and geometric figures.
Through Timaeus' playful, ceremonial act of dressing up
the world, Plato entertains us with a new kind of physicsa mythematical physics. The properties and behavior of fire,
for example, are now traced to geometric causes. Why is fire
hot? Why does it burn? Why, because it is a pyramid, and
pyramids have sharp angles and keenly cutting sides (5 6E57A). Why is earth resistant to change and motion? Why,
because it is a cube, and the isosceles triangles out of which a
cube's square faces are composed are not capable of being
redistributed to form the equilateral triangular faces of the
other solids. Furthermore, a triangular base makes an object
easy to tip, and a square base makes it harder to budge. Cause
here is completely analogical. To explain body, for Timaeus,
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is to build geometric models for body that function as beguiling analogies. Perhaps it is more correct to call them
metaphors, since the noble sophistry at work here consists in
identifying physical body with its geometric analogue, that is,
in blurring the distinction between the model and that of
which it is the model. This is what Critias says he will do with
Socrates' theoretical city: He will establish a beguiling correspondence and harmony between that city and ancient
Athens (26C-D)-a correspondence that will be so exact that
one would swear that the two cities were one and the same.
Socrates' desire was, at bottom, to be entertained by deceptive, life-like images that blur the distinction between the real
and the fabricated: the animals in motion he wanted to see
and hear about could be either "truly living" or "produced by
the art of painting." Timaeus and Critias enact a will to order
that provides Socrates with just such entertainment.
Like astronomy, physics for Timaeus has a practical function. Becoming is not just something we contemplate and
want to get to the bottom of. It is also our life-sustaining
world, the cosmic source of our coming to be and passing
away. We are the children of Becoming and must speak
appropriately about our cosmic mother. In speaking rightly of
the cosmos in general, Timaeus attempts to give physical
science a moral defense and reason for being. In fact, his
physics seems to be a direct response to Socrates' youthful
disenchantment with physics in the Phaedo. Timaeus does
what Anaxagoras had failed to do-present the phenomena
of change in terms of a best of possible worlds. He
re-enchants the world with intelligence, moral purpose, and a
kind of piety. Mathematical physics, quite apart from whether
or not it reveals nature itself as mathematical, acquires its
truest vocation in making us dutiful sons of the cosmic order.
In addition, it soothes our serious and turbulent lives with a
decorous distraction and provides what Timaeus calls "a
pleasure not to be repented of" (59C-D).
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The likely story teaches us how to sing noble songs of
change. These songs aim at "saving the appearances." But
they offer a form of consolation. They save us from despair
over our world and help us to cope with, and even to enjoy,
the otherwise meaningless spectacle of instability, violence,
decay, and death. Indeed, according to the official report of
the likely story, death from old age is geometric in nature and
is therefore a pleasure to contemplate: it consists in the
collapse of the perpendicular or root that keeps our inner
triangles erect. These triangles give way at last after fighting
numerous battles with the alien triangles that would invade
and destroy us (81D). Structure is power, and Becoming is a
war of structures, all battling constantly to preserve the
identity of their constitutions or regimes. All mortal things
eventually lose in this war-they die. But at least likely stories
furnish us human beings with intellectual armor so that we
may fight in the noblest and most intelligent way. Armed with
what Timaeus calls "the power of likely accounts" (48D), we
take on all comers who would disparage our cosmic place and
sing a song of despair. As we go off to do battle with
unhealthy opinions about the world, we remember the songs
of our cosmic Apaturia.
The Human Condition
Timaeus' role in the dialogue is assigned to him by Critias. "It
seemed good to us," he says, "that Timaeus here-since he's
the most astronomical of us and the one who's most made it
his business to know about the nature of the All-should
speak first, beginning from the birth of the cosmos and ending in the nature of mankind" (27A). Man, prepolitical man,
is the goal of the likely story. Timaeus achieves this goal in
some of the weirdest, and funniest, moments in all the
dialogues.
What is human nature for Timaeus, and why were we
born in the first place? Let us take the latter question first.
Man comes about because the cosmos must be complete. If
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the world is to be perfectly filled, it must contain all the animal kinds represented in the eternal archetype that Timaeus
calls "the intelligible animal" (39E). The various animals
derive from the mystic number Four, which is alluded to in
the dialogue's opening. The four animate kinds correspond to
the four elements of body (39E ff.). The star gods are mostly
made of fire. Then come animals that crawl on the earth, fly
through the air and swim in the water. Man is not one of
these four kinds. He is rather the generator of the mortal
kinds, the means by which the lower kinds come to be. In his
head, man lives the life of the gods, the life of circularity and
prudence. But in his torso he contains all the lower animal
possibilities-the thymos and rage of a lion, and the
epithymia or desire of all mortal animals. In the very shape of
his body, man thus unites the two cooperating causes of
cosmic order. He is the unity-in-opposition of the good and
the necessary.
The original humans were in some sense male, although
strictly speaking they lacked sexuality. When these "first
men" yield to emotionality and vice, when they abuse their
divine heritage, they are reborn, first as women, and then as
the various subhuman animals they imitated in life (42C-D).
The likely story, having begun with the stars, ends with
shellfish. These animals devolve from humans who were "the
most mindless and ignorant men of all" and whom the gods
deemed no longer worthy of "pure breathing" (92B). The
cosmos is thus completed by what Timaeus calls dike or just
retribution (92C). And yet blame and punishment seem to
have nothing to do with it at all. Vice and ignorance are
necessary if the world is to have its full complement of animals. In spite of the fact that they are said to be "punished"
by cosmic justice, vice and ignorance are nevertheless useful,
indeed necessary, to the cosmic purpose. Man completes the
world through his fall from divinity into the various animal
forms. Timaeus is so complete in his will to order that he puts
even moral evil and ignorance to an artistic use, thereby
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
completing his justification of god's ways to man. Evil, in a
sense, becomes both ornament and demiurge. It is like the
dissonance for which a piece of polyphony is all the sweeter.
Such is man's cosmic function: he perfects and beautifies
the world with his evil. But what is man's nature? Here I
return to the word pathos, which occurs frequently in the dialogue. The recurrence of this word and its cognates signals
the extent to which necessity rules the dialogue and its
conception of a world. The human condition is a continual
state of affection and affliction, a continual suffering or
"being done to." Man suffers his birth and all his mortal
baggage. His pathemata or passions are also sufferings, as
Timaeus poetically reveals when he catalogues our "affections
terrible and necessary." He cites "pleasure, evil's greatest
lure," "pains, deserters of goods," "anger, difficult to
appease," "hope, easy to seduce," all mixed together with
Timaeus' archenemy, "all-venturing eros" (69C-D). Since he
suffers desire, man must have arms, legs, and a digestive
system. He must also have a respiratory system and a circulatory system. A reproductive system is grafted onto him only
later, after he has suffered his first fall. Timaeus gives a long
account of breathing. Breathing is completely mechanical in
nature and requires no action of the soul. It is a pathos
(79A)-not something we do but something we suffer. The
surprisingly long discussion of disease highlights the fact that
life is suffering. It is the correlate to Timaeus' glorification of
health. Ignorance, too, is a disease-the greatest of all
diseases (8 8B)-and education is therefore our greatest
medicine and therapy. In Timaeus' case, we would have to
say, ''A cosmologist looks at the world as a doctor looks at a
patient."
Just as Timaeus reveals the nature of the cosmos in the act
of showing the cosmos being made, so too man's nature is
revealed through the artful making of man. The likely story
puts us at the scene of our own birth-or rather, manufacture. The gods put us together piece by piece, like benevolent
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Dr. Frankensteins. Since there is no intelligible model for
man, they must make us up as they go along. The work is
neither easy nor desirable. In fact, the gods make us only
because they were told to do so by their father (41C-D). The
making of man, as Timaeus explicitly describes it, is a pious
desecration (69D). In obedience to their father and his will to
order, the gods must take the good and beautiful principle of
intelligence, the principle he most embodies, and defile it
with mortal madness and complexity. Their work consists in
the delicate and dangerous art of compromise. They must
make us capable of unintelligent organic life while at the
same time making us as good and intelligent as possible. The
art of compromise is most evident when they invent our hair.
Hair is a compromise between an unshielded head, which
would make us very intelligent but short-lived, and a head
protected by lots of flesh, which would make us long-lived
but "dense" (75E-76D).
The gods are provident for Timaeus. They make our parts
always with an eye to the various falls we are destined to
experience. They are always saving us from ourselves. They
make flesh as a protective padding (74B) . They make our
neck to keep our intelligent heads both separate from and
attached to the lower regions of our being (69D-E). They
make our intestines to fend off the constant gluttony that
would prevent us from engaging in philosophic research
(73A). And they make our liver smooth and shiny so that the
intellect can use it as a reflecting medium to frighten and pacify the desirous part of the soul with appropriate moving
images, thus bringing about a condition of law and order
(71A-D). The point of all this outrageous wit seems to be that
there is moral meaning and purpose to how we are built and
who we are. Through all his physiological jokes, Timaeus
causes our inward nature to appear right at the "surface" of
our bodies. We are what we look like, and our being is
revealed not through a dialectical inquiry into our nature but
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
through the scientific examination of our prudently designed
structures and motions.
Throughout the likely story, Timaeus gives mathematics a
moral employment. In his account of man, he mathematicizes
morality itself. At one point, we are told, "all the good is
beautiful, and the beautiful is not disproportionate" (87C).
Virtue and happiness are a matter of establishing the right
ratios and proportions in things. Timaeus does not seem to
think that virtue is something we don't know, something
about which human beings most need to ask: what is it?
Moral education is like medicine and gymnastics. It is simply
a matter of paying attention to the manifest ratios that regulate life and seeing to it that the proper ratios and regimen are
established (87C-E). Thinkers should make sure they get
some physical exercise, and athletes should make sure they
study music and the liberal arts (88B-C). A sound mind in a
sound body. Like the cosmos, we must be well rounded. The
human good is uncomplicated. It is, like the art of medicine,
simply the conscientious application of sensible theory to life.
It is the will to order.
As we have seen, Timaeus is driven to filling things up and
making them complete. But in at least one respect his cosmos
is not complete. It does not contain the philosopher as dialectician. In the opinion of the likely story, Socrates, the erotic
troublemaker, must be banished from the cosmos. There is no
worldly place, no chora, for him. One who questions the
nomos and the dreams that attach us to place must be left
atopos-that is, both placeless and strange.
Concluding Unscientific Postscript
So why is this dialogue taking place? Why has Socrates
allowed himself to sit passively by while his hosts entertain
him with the flattery of Becoming? It seems that the hesychia
of Socrates, his silence and his peace, is really a form of
passive aggression. Socrates has set up his ambitious hosts for
a Sicilian expedition in speech-an ambitious project that
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ends in ruin. He probably knows, in general, what to expect,
as he cunningly draws them out by imitating the cave-desire
for moving images-a desire that is theirs rather than his. But,
being an avid connoisseur as well as judge of human souls,
Socrates also wants to see exactly how they will reveal themselves, and how far they will go, in the act of trying to defend
Becoming and surpass the city in speech.
In the Timaeus, Socrates has shown up to guard the city
in speech from ever coming into being in space and time. He
does so to reaffirm what he said about the best city in the
Republic, that it is not a blueprint for political actualization
but "a model ... for the man who wants to see and found a
city within himself."2l Under a deceptive flag of truce and
welcoming receptivity, he draws out his hosts as though onto
a field of battle. Their effort is sure to entertain Socrates and
perhaps even to instruct him. But I suspect he is still more
entertained, and gratified, by their ultimate failure. This
failure is represented by Critias. In the dialogue that bears his
name, Critias never gets to the war-story he promised
Socrates. Plato cuts him off in mid-sentence, just as he is
about to give the speech of Zeus that will bring divine
retribution upon the Atlantians. The promised flattery of
Athens is consigned to oblivion, like Atlantis itself. It is as
though Critias, who had boasted so mightily of his powers of
memory (26B-C),22 simply and utterly forgot. Through his
failure to recover the speech in praise of Athens' heroism,
Plato playfully mimics something deadly serious-the folly of
forcing a city back, in deed and not merely in speech, to a
purported first and best condition. In his speech to Solon, the
old Egyptian priest referred to the myth about Phaethon, son
of Helios. Phaethon tried to drive his father's car, the sunchariot, in order to prove that he too was a god. The result
was destruction for him and near destruction for the whole
earth (22C). The Egyptian priest tells Solon that the truth of
this myth has to do with a periodically recurring alignment of
the planets. The priest's piety for scientific explanation blinds
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
him to the political significance of Phaethon. The insolence of
Phaethon is the potential insolence of would-be reformersreformers like the famous Critias, who tried to force a democratic Athens into an oligarchic mold. The will to order,
when infected by the love of honor and the lust for power,
easily degenerates into the will to tyranny.
Plato, more than any other philosopher, is constantly
reminding us of the dangers of being human as well as the
dangers of philosophy. Danger and safety, perhaps the most
central terms of the Platonic dramas, become central because
of Plato's care for what we do and what we suffer. Through
the drama of the Timaeus-Critias, Plato continues his care for
the human condition. In the likely story of Timaeus, he
concocts a bizarre yet healthy-minded dream about a world
set straight by the will to order, a dream in which the world
is saved from disorder and despair. In the vanity and ambition
of Critias, he points to the diseases this will itself can
contract. Shakespeare's Ulysses supplies the most fitting last
word on the strength and the weakness of the will to order:
"0, when degree is shaked,/ Which is the ladder of all high
designs,/ The enterprise is sick. "23
Notes
1 Other experiments in going beyond Socrates include the Eleatic
stranger from the Sophist and Statesman, and the Athenian stranger
from the Laws.
2 For the "art of conversion or turning around," see Republic 7.
518D ff. The mathematical arts that pave the way for dialectic are,
in order of appearance, arithmetic, plane geometry, solid geometry,
astronomy and harmonics. The conversionary art must "draw the
soul from Becoming to Being" (7. 521D) .
The praise of Timaeus is breathtaking (20A) . He is rich, powerful,
honored, and he comes from an aristocratic family. The city from
which he hails is Locri, which Socrates calls "a city with the best
laws in Italy." Furthermore, he has "reached the very peak of all
philosophy."
3
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Solon heard the story about ancient Athens in the district of Sais
(21E). The word for district here is nomos. (Nomos comes from the
verb nemein, which means to apportion or distribute, and districts
are areas of distributed land.) Plato thus combines in one word the
deep connection between attachment to custom and attachment to
place.
4
The demiourgoi or craftsmen are central to Socrates' critique of
imitation in Republic 10. After postulating three kinds of couchesthe one produced by carpentry, the one produced by the art of
painting, and the one that is in nature-Socrates playfully suggests
that perhaps the couch that is in nature was also produced by some
kind of craftsman, not a demiourgos but a phytourgos or "natureworker" (597B-D). Socrates refers to a "craftsman of heaven" at 7.
530A.
5
6 Sometimes Timaeus makes the cosmos sound as though it were
eternal. But there are also indications that, while it is very long-lasting, it is nevertheless mortal. This fits with what Socrates announces
in the Republic: "for everything that has come into being there is
decay" (8. 546A). For example, time is said to come into being
along with the heavens "in order that, having been begotten together, they might also be dissolved together-should some dissolution
of them ever arise" (38B). And when the god makes the cosmic
body, he saves it from old age and disease but falls short of making
it deathless (33A ff.).
7 The ongoing presence of god's generous artistry in the world is
signaled by the fact that things other than the divine craftsman are
called demiurges in the speech, and that the verb demiourgein, to
craft, sometimes occurs as a synonym for "causes" or "brings
about." Earth, for example, is called "the guardian and craftsman of
Night and Day" (40C); fire is at one point the craftsman of nonuniformity in air (59A); and again, the color red is "crafted by the
cutting and staining action of fire upon moisture" (80E).
8 Timaeus' use of eti, still or more, seems to echo Socrates' use of
this little word at the end of his political summary. He asked
Timaeus whether he was "still yearning for something more in what
was said" (19A). Socrates seems to be tempting Timaeus to go
beyond the boundaries of his political mentality, beyond the will to
order. Timaeus has no yearning to do so. He says, "Not at all."
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Timaeus calls the cosmos "the god who was one day to be" (34AB) and a "happy god" (34B). See also 55D, where Timaeus says that
the cosmos is "by nature one god." In the dialogue's closing
sentence, the cosmos is a "sensed god" (92C).
9
10 Republic 6. 509C ff. For the definitive account of eikasia in the
Republic, see Jacob Klein, A Commentary on Plato's Meno, Chapel
Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1965, pp. 112-125.
11 Book 7. 532A. Socrates' language here is very close to the way in
which he describes the likely story. He speaks of the "song itself that
dialectic performs," autos ... ho nomos han to dialegesthai perainei.
12 At the beginning of the Critias, Timaeus prays to "the god who
has just now been born through speeches" (1 06A). He identifies the
just retribution of this god (dike) with medicine (pharmakon) and
this medicine with knowledge (episteme).
Timaeus derives his catalogue of happy privations from two fragments by Empedocles (29 and 134). He discretely suppresses what
Empedocles in both fragments makes explicit-that the cosmic god
lacks organs of reproduction.
13
14 The final cause of motion moves things, says Aristotle, has eramenan, "as the object of erotic love" (Metaphysics 12. 7. 1072B).
15 Sexual generation is the cause of the decay of the best city in the
Republic. The rulers will fail to perceive and calculate the marriage
number, "and they will at some time beget children when they
should not" (8. 546B).
16 This political redistribution of types foreshadows the cosmic
reshuffling of the four kinds by what Timaeus later calls the ch6ra
or space. Socrates even uses the word chara in this part of his summary. This is its first appearance in the dialogue.
17 Necessity, in the form of what Timaeus calls "assistant causes,"
first began to assert itself in the likely story just as Timaeus is giving
a mechanical account of the reflective, and deceptive, power of
mirrors (46C-D).
18 In the simile of the goldsmith, Timaeus has a hypothetical someone ask the question "Whatever is it?" in response to the constant
"morphing" of the receptacle. The safest answer, says Timaeus, is
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that it's gold (SOB). This is the closest Timaeus ever gets to Socrates'
What is it? question. It is very interesting that his concern for
safety (which reminds us of Socrates' similar concern in the Phaedo
when he recounts his "second sailing" in search of cause) and the
What is it? question lead Timaeus, not to the determinate form
whose likeness fleetingly appears in the midst of change, but to that
which is itself undergoing change. His answer, in other words,
already points "forward" to geometric schematization rather than
"backward" and "up" to the eidetic "father" of the spatiotemporal
"offspring" (SOC-D).
19 For more on the Apaturia, see H. W Parke, Festivals of the
Athenians, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 88-92.
20 "In geometrical and natural-scientific mathematization, in the
open infinity of possible experiences, we measure the life-worldthe world constantly given to us as actual in our concrete worldlife-for a well-fitting garb of ideas, that of the so-called objectively
scientific truths" (Ibid., p . 51). The drama of the Timaeus takes
place during the Greater Panathenaea, the festival in honor of
Athena. The central event of this festival was the procession in
which an elaborately embroidered peplos or robe depicting the
Battle of Gods and Giants was carried to the Acropolis and draped
over the statue of the goddess. In his likely story, Timaeus participates in, and corrects, the Greater Panathenaea. His ceremonial
"garb of ideas," paraded before the silent Socrates, replaces the
Battle of Gods and Giants with decent gods and the beautiful war
of mathematical objects in motion.
Republic 9. 592B. The centrality of place in the Timaeus and the
man who was gazing upon beautiful animals "somewhere," pou,
contrast sharply with what Socrates says about the best city in this
passage: "It doesn't make any difference whether it is or will be
somewhere (pou)."
21
In the Critias, Critias invokes Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, as the divinity on whom the whole project of gratifying
Socrates depends (108D).
22
23
Troilus and Cressida I. 3. 101-103 .
��
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Kraus, Pamela
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Carey, James
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Castle, Justin
Sachs, Joe
Cornell, John F.
Maschler, Chaninah
Kalkavage, Peter
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The St. John’s Review
Volume XLVI, number three (2002)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
James Carey
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Justin Castle
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson,
President; Harvey Flaumenhaft, Dean. For those not on the
distribution list, subscriptions are $15.00 for three issues,
even though the magazine may sometimes appear semiannually rather than three times a year. Unsolicited essays, stories,
poems, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address correspondence to the Review, St. John’s College, P Box 2800,
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Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available, at
$5.00 per issue, from the St. John’s College Bookstore.
©2002 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction
in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
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The St. John’s Public Relations Office and the St. John’s College Print Shop
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
3
Contents
Essays and Lectures
Wholes and Parts in Human Character......................... 5
Joe Sachs
Addition and Subtraction Without End in Oresme’s
Quaestiones super Geometriam Euclidis...................... 29
George Anastaplo
In Memoriam: Leo Raditsa
Toast to the Senior Class, May 12, 2000.....................59
Leo Raditsa
The Collapse at Athens and the Trial of Socrates.........61
Leo Raditsa
Poem
Ovid, Banished..........................................................83
Leonard Cochran, O.P.
Review
Philosophy Revived
Stewart Umphrey’s Complexity and Analysis..............85
Eva Brann
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5
Wholes and Parts in
Human Character
Joe Sachs
Who are you? What are you? I’m not asking for your
name or occupation, but rather for what you’re made of, or
what you amount to. And I’m not intending to be impolite or
impertinent, but to include myself in the question, to turn the
attention of all of us upon the philosophic question that
touches us most closely. Thomas Aquinas is not hesitant about
answering it (Summa Theol. I-II, Q. 1, art.1, resp.): “Man differs from irrational animals in this, that he is master of his
actions. Wherefore those actions alone are properly called
human of which man is master. Now man is master of his
actions through his reason and will.” Shakespeare’s Hamlet
articulates the same thought in praising Horatio, and formulates the contrasting state (Act 3, scene 2, 64-75): “Since my
dear soul was mistress of her choice, /And could of men distinguish, her election / Hath sealed thee for herself...Give me
that man / That is not passion’s slave and I will wear him / In
my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart, / As I do thee.” So
you amount to either a master or a slave, depending on
whether reason or passion has the upper hand in your makeup.
But is this contrast well-founded? David Hume doesn’t
think so. “Nothing is more usual in philosophy, and even in
common life,” he writes,” than to talk of the combat of passion and reason, to give the preference to reason, and to
assert that men are only so far virtuous as they conform themselves to its dictates.” But Hume argues that reason has no
Joe Sachs is a tutor on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College. This lecture was delivered to the Seattle University Philosophy Club on May 17,
2002, and to the January Freshmen at St. John’s College in Annapolis on
June 5, 2002.
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power to oppose passion or produce action, and concludes
that “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions” (A Treatise of Human Nature, Bk. 2, Part 3, sect. 3).
This deliberate paradox may be more palatable when we note
that Hume is only adding force and vivacity to an earlier formulation of Thomas Hobbes, who had written that “the
Thoughts are to the Desires, as Scouts and Spies, to range
abroad, and find the way to the things Desired” (Leviathan,
Part 1, Chap. 8). Hobbes and Hume agree that reason is
merely instrumental to our primary mode of access to our
own good, which can only be irrational.
Now the weakness of reason may be granted by those
who would not go along with demoting it to a subordinate
role in us. Immanuel Kant reflects that “if...happiness were
the real end of nature in the case of a being having reason and
will, then nature would have hit upon a very poor arrangement in having the reason of the creature carry out this purpose...And in fact, we find that the more a cultivated reason
devotes itself to the aim of enjoying life and happiness, the
further does man get away from true contentment”
(Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Hackett, p. 8;
Academy p. 395). Kant sides with reason, but as our guide to
becoming worthy of a happiness which can never be realized
in the empirical world. We are radically divided beings, in his
view, and can never have it both ways.
But an older sort of wisdom is articulated in Plato’s
Republic (esp. 439D-442B), according to which the human
soul is not a duality of reason and passion, but has three parts,
with the middle part giving it the possibility of wholeness. As
described in the Republic, this middle part is what is irrationally spirited in us, just as in a spirited horse, but capable
of obeying reason, so as to be able to follow its leader like a
dog. There is nothing spiritual in this sort of spirit, but there
is something that can have dignity, since it appears not only
in pep rallies that arouse school spirit, but also as what we call
the indomitable human spirit which can rise above any adver-
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sity. The republic, that is, the regime or constitution, that
Plato’s Republic is about is the internal human commonwealth in which reason rules and directs the passions by joining with, and giving honor to, our spirited side. Only that
third part of us is capable of loving the good and being loyal
to it, and the constitution to which it submits is not the
despotic one of mastery, but the political rule of persuasion.
About fifty years ago, C. S. Lewis wrote a book about
education called The Abolition of Man. His claim there is that
all the ancient human traditions have addressed in some form
the middle part of the human being, while the prevailing
thinking of the enlightened twentieth century has lost touch
with it altogether. If we fear all the attachments of our spiritedness as divisive or sentimental, as obstacles to progress,
then we may proclaim our rationality, while in fact we come
to be ruled by the lowest common denominators among our
appetites, if not by mere caprice. Those progressive educators
who fail to understand this may like to call themselves intellectuals, Lewis says (p. 35), but “It is not excess of thought
but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them
out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the
atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.” If
reason is universal and the passions are generic, then it is the
spirited, honor-loving element in our make-up that most of
all makes each of us what we are, and a disdain for it, with a
consequent neglect of its nurture, leads to the dis-education
that Lewis calls the abolition of man.
Now these provisional sketches of the ways reason and
passion may stand toward one another in us may serve as
background to an exploration of Aristotle’s thinking about
the same topic. When I came to spend an extended time in
close contact with the Nicomachean Ethics, I found a number
of things that surprised me. After many earlier readings of the
book, I would have said confidently that Aristotle believes the
healthy human soul to be under the command and control of
reason, and that something in us that is neither wholly ration-
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al nor wholly irrational makes that possible. As in so many
other ways, that is, I thought that Aristotle had followed a
path marked out by Plato, making it determinate in his own
way. Now I am not so sure of that interpretation. Some distinct and memorable passages in the Ethics seem to paint that
portrait of what a human being is, but others that are more
difficult, more entangled, and more central to Aristotle’s
inquiry seem to tell a different story. I hope to make both
accounts clearer to myself, and to invite all of you to take part
in assessing them, both as readings of a text and as reflections
of the subject we all have an interest in knowing best.
Now, anyone who has ever taken Plato’s Republic seriously, and hasn’t been frightened off by its lack of currently
popular jargon and currently prevalent opinions, knows that
the three-part soul offers a powerful way of analyzing human
life. Socrates is challenged in Book 2 to refute the claim that
ethical virtue provides a second-best life, a social compromise
made among ourselves by the weak, who play it safe to
achieve a mediocre and watered-down version of happiness.
This argument of Glaucon (358E-359B) is in no way inferior
to similar ones made two thousand years later by the social
contract theorists, beginning with Thomas Hobbes. But by
the end of Book 4, not even halfway through the dialogue,
Glaucon admits that his argument has been exposed as ridiculous, and needs no refutation (445A). What has made ethical
virtue go from seeming indefensible to seeming unassailable
as a thing desirable for its own sake is nothing more than the
hypothesis of the three-part soul. With that hypothesis, the
examination of the pursuit of happiness shifts from the
conflict among human beings to the conflicts within each one
of us. That permits Socrates to conclude that virtue consists
in “ruling and organizing oneself and becoming a friend to
oneself, and harmonizing those things, of which there are
three, just like the three notes of a musical chord” (443D).
But Aristotle is not comfortable with partitioning the soul
at all. In Book 3, Chapter 9 of On the Soul, he says one can
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distinguish as many parts of the soul as one wishes, and easily find parts farther apart than the three in the Republic; and
even those three, he says, cannot be wholly separated, since
desire is present in all three of them. In the Ethics he is willing to adopt the popular way of speaking of a rational and an
irrational part, but even there he cautions that these may be
no more distinct than are the convex and concave sides of the
same circle (1102a26-32). Aristotle’s own investigation of the
soul focuses on ways of being-at-work, and on the potencies
for them, rather than on parts, but the purposes of an inquiry
into ethics do not require that degree of precision.
Why, then, if the division of the soul in any manner is
merely imprecise or figurative, does Aristotle prefer to accept
a two-part rather than a three-part division? Or, what
amounts to the same question, why does spiritedness play so
small a role in the Nicomachean Ethics? It is an explicit topic
in two places, and briefly in both: in one of them it is treated
as an attitude that resembles courage but is not the genuine
virtue (1116b23-1117a9), and in the other it is described as a
particular kind of lack of restraint, an oversensitivity to
insults that is less harmful than a lack of restraint in one’s
desires (1149a24-b3). Desires are governed by pleasure and
pain, while spiritedness is governed by honor and shame.
Now over the course of the ten books of the Ethics, the topic
of pleasure re-emerges more than once; as the inquiry deepens, pleasure itself is seen in new lights, and transforms itself
through the growth of human character. By contrast, the
topic of shame is set aside early on (Bk. 4, Ch. 9), as something appropriate only to immature and undeveloped states
of character. This is one of the clearest signs that Aristotle
does not consider ethics to be concerned at all with social
pressures, or the imposition of social norms, but to depend
upon rising above motives of that sort. He calls it absurd to
credit an adult with decent motives if he refrains from certain
kinds of acts only out of shame (1128b26-28).
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Honor too, the positive opposite of shame, is left behind
early in Aristotle’s study of ethics, but it is dealt with a little
more extensively, and in fact we can observe the very moment
when it drops out of the developing account of human character. Very early, in the fifth chapter of the whole work,
Aristotle dismisses the honor that is the highest aim of political life as too superficial a thing to be a plausible candidate
for the ultimate human good (1095b22-30). Honor shifts
with those who give it; one really wants honor from those
worthy to give it, and only for things in oneself that are worthy of receiving it, so the true standards that make honor
worth pursuing are some sort of virtue or excellence, and the
wisdom to recognize it. A little later in the inquiry, though,
honor turns up again as entangled with one of the virtues,
and the account of that virtue repeats the dialectical motion
of Aristotle’s earlier analysis of honor, this time as a lived
development within a human being. That virtue is a complicated one to understand, just because of its complex relation
to honor. Aristotle calls it greatness of soul.
Our times, in which so many people have attempted to
deny the existence both of souls and of any form of greatness,
offer us no clear equivalent of Aristotle’s phrase. The old
Oxford translation called it pride, which might capture the
greatness of soul Homer portrays in Achilles; some translations have called it high-mindedness, which might capture, or
rather caricature, the greatness of soul Plato makes visible in
Socrates. The worst translation of the phrase, magnanimity,
simply plugs in Latin equivalents of each of its parts, and gets
a result that has a totally different meaning in English, in
which generosity is the primary element. Brother Robert
Smith once suggested Charles de Gaulle as the twentieth century’s pre-eminent great-souled man, and generosity was no
part of the reason. Outside the Ethics, Aristotle mentions
both Achilles and Socrates as great-souled, the former
because he tolerates no insults, the latter because he is above
caring about good or bad fortune (Posterior Analytics 97b14-
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26). These may seem too different to be one virtue, but
Aristotle sees what they share as a correct sense of one’s own
worth, when this is in fact great. It is not a mere feeling of
self-esteem, but something that has to be earned. But Achilles
appears to have earned it by deeds on the battlefield that subdued other people, while Socrates earned it through talking
and thinking that conquered nothing outside himself. The
former demands honor as a thing more precious than life,
while the latter disdains to claim any honor at all, and keeps
insisting that his only distinction is knowing that he doesn’t
know anything.
These examples are no more puzzling than Aristotle’s
account of the virtue. He says first that the great-souled man
is concerned with great things (1123a34), and then quickly
decides that those great things are great honors (1123 b2021), but it takes him only a little bit of argument to conclude
that for such a person, if he is genuinely worthy of what he
claims for himself, “even honor is a small thing” (1124a19).
Putting together the examples with the argument: (a) the
great-souled man is obviously a lover of honor like Achilles,
and (b) by being great-souled through and through, Achilles
must become a disdainer of honor like Socrates. The argument that runs from 1123b26 to 1124a19 is one of the pivotal passages of the Nicomachean Ethics, the place in which
honor stakes its maximum claim, and earns it by rising above
itself. Greatness of soul is puzzling to us not because it
belongs to an obsolete aristocratic culture but because it is
inconsistent in itself. Aristotle takes it seriously not by way of
stooping to an audience of Athenian gentlemen but because it
is something serious for any serious human being at any time
or place. It is one effective first stage toward the full development of human character. We might make this clearer by
considering two of the pre-philosophical thoughts about
virtue that form part of the background of Aristotle’s inquiry
into ethics.
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One of those common opinions is a widespread acceptance that four virtues are the cardinal ones, namely wisdom,
courage, temperance, and justice. In the Nicomachean Ethics,
Aristotle gives justice and wisdom each a book to itself, and
courage and temperance together about half a book. By this
crude test of length of discussion, greatness of soul gains the
fifth place, as either the fifth cardinal virtue, or the ambiguous virtue that almost, but not quite, belongs among the primary elements of human character. Another piece of popular
lore that Aristotle alludes to (1095b17-19) may help us
understand what gives greatness of soul both a high rank and
a secondary position; it is an old Pythagorean parable of the
three kinds of life. The parable likens the ways of life to the
three kinds of people who go to the Olympic games. The
greatest number go to buy and sell things; a smaller number
go to compete. The third group, and by this account the
smallest number, go simply to watch. Aristotle calls the corresponding lives those devoted to enjoyment, to politics, and
to contemplative thought. Their aims are bodily pleasure,
external honors, and knowing.
Now it is clear that these three lives stand behind the
Republic, in which Plato’s Socrates seeks to blend their three
aims into one soul, understood as an interior polity or commonwealth. But Aristotle’s approach seems different. Even
the bodily desires are treated in the Ethics as capable of being
educated and redirected, to gain a deeper satisfaction than
they find in their crudest form. This is not a matter of moderating them, of making compromises with them, or of reason’s holding them in check by means of its spirited ally;
according to Aristotle, the temperate person has no harmful
desires (1119a11-15; 1146a11-12). Similarly, I think, the
person whom Aristotle considers worthy to be called greatsouled has no craving for honor. He has, instead, internalized
his standard of worthiness. The brief argument I referred to
a moment ago, in which honor must abandon its claims, is
Aristotle’s way of showing the honor-loving person that his
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true satisfaction lies nowhere but in well-grounded selfrespect. I believe that Aristotle has here discovered what has
come to be called a sense of honor, a meaning that the Greek
word for honor never had. Aristotle does not dwell on this
discovery, but pushes it one more step, into the realization
that even an internal tribunal of honor is an inappropriate
standard by comparison with the virtues to which it looks.
One of the most interesting things about Aristotle’s treatment of greatness of soul is that it generates a new series of
lives that replaces the three in the Pythagorean parable. It is
the first place in the Ethics in which Aristotle finds the virtue
he is discussing to be a center around which all the virtues
must be arrayed. Greatness of soul is not so much one virtue
as one way toward the wholeness of character. Aristotle asks,
for each of the virtues one-by-one, whether it would not be
completely ridiculous for anyone who lacked it to have any
claim to greatness of soul (1123b33-34). To someone
wrapped up in the craving for honor, Aristotle asks, in effect,
“Do you just want to have it or do you want to deserve it?”
It is strange but true that anyone who really wants honor is
bound to say that he doesn’t just want honor, since any other
answer would lose him what honor he had. Imagine a politician saying, “Vote for me because I love winning elections.”
A serious person, who seriously craves honor, cannot help
concluding that honor is not the most serious thing.
Now I’m not suggesting that Aristotle thinks that all one
needs to do to transform someone consumed with a drive to
be honored is to ask him a couple of questions. As I mentioned before, the questions and their answers seem to reflect
a lived process of discovery and development. There is an
exact analogy in the life of enjoyment. When Aristotle has
made his first provisional definition of happiness as activity in
accordance with virtue (1098a16-17), he observes that this
has the properties sought by the life of enjoyment more fully
and genuinely than does the indulgence of bodily pleasures
(1099a7-21). The difference is that those who pursue the
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crudest enjoyments are always chasing after pleasure as a
thing external to themselves, while those who live the virtues
have pleasures that are internal and durable and always present. Aristotle calls the latter the pleasures that are natural,
because they are pleasant in themselves, just by being themselves. He later analyzes the cruder pleasures of eating, drinking, and sex as attempts to magnify the natural pleasure
inherent in good bodily condition by violent departures from
it and restorations of it (Bk. 7, Ch. 14). This sort of thing,
which bar owners encourage by offering free salty snacks to
make people drink more beer, can’t really fool any grownup
for long, and can only continue to appeal, as Aristotle says, to
those who have found no other sources of pleasure (1154b56). Such people are not worthy challengers to the title of happiness, entitled to the pretentious name of hedonists; they are
merely failures as pleasure seekers, failures by no standard
but their own.
The analogy in the case of greatness of soul is evident in
the contrast between chasing after externally bestowed honor
and settling into a life that is inherently honorable. It is not
such a stretch to say that Achilles can achieve his aim only by
becoming more like Socrates. The 19th-century philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil, §212) believed
that Socrates had pulled off a brilliant piece of one-upmanship, making himself appear superior to the aristocrats who
thought they had a monopoly on superiority. But in
Aristotle’s view this was no transformation of values, but a
natural dialectic that leads the honor seeker beyond the random honors that can be won to the life of natural and selfsustained honor that accompanies the virtues from within.
This explains why Aristotle leads the discussion of greatness
of soul to the need for a life that demands the whole of virtue.
The honor seeker goes in search of an isolated prize, and if he
perseveres, and keeps his eyes open, he finds instead a life.
The next prize or the next victory accomplishes nothing more
durable than would the next beer. As the latter might be the
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perpetually renewed object of the deluded pleasure seeker,
the former perpetually enslaves the competitive athlete or
politician who has not learned that he can honor himself.
So, finally, we can see why Aristotle doesn’t build good
character on the spirited part of the soul. Good character is
achieved only when spiritedness subsides, and is built not by
harnessing spriritedness but by overcoming it, in letting it find
its truer and deeper satisfaction. Greatness of soul is a way of
life not in the sense of being, for some people, the primary
aim to which all virtues are subordinated, but in the sense
that it finds its end in making those virtues themselves primary. Aristotle gives greatness of soul not a static portrait, but
a dynamic impulse toward its aim. But how does he do this?
The appeal he makes is, oddly, neither to reason nor to spiritedness. There would be nothing unreasonable, and certainly
nothing self-contradictory, about saying one wants honors
more than one wants to be worthy of them, and there must
be something deflating to an aroused spiritedness in accepting
a giving up of competition. Defeated politicians and retired
athletes talk as though being unable to keep winning things is
like death to them. What Aristotle is addressing is a whole
human being who is driven to achieve great honor; his question brings such a person face-to-face with his own judgment
of what makes one honor greater than another.
Greatness of soul is the first and lowest portrait in the
Nicomachean Ethics of a complete way of life that replaces
the untenable claims of the life of bodily enjoyment. It is not
the last or the only portrait of such a life. The craving for
honor is not a necessary precondition of the development of
good character, but only one human road that gets there in
the end, for anyone who is serious enough about achieving
satisfaction in life. Aristotle’s tactic in leading the honor-lover
to virtue is no different at bottom from his means of exploding the claims of bodily enjoyment, and it is evident in the
first sentence of Book 1: “It has been beautifully said that the
good is that at which all things aim.” His tactic is not a nego-
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tiation for turf among separate parts of a soul, each of which
wants its separate good, but a constant recurring to the question, asked of the whole human being, What end is being
sought in each good object? What makes one pleasure more
satisfying than another? What makes one honor greater than
another? Whatever in us responded to these visible goods by
pursuing them remains sovereign in judging them. The task is
to free it from enslavement to the familiar and habitual, and
to lift its gaze to the widest view of its possible choices.
Now if this conclusion sounds plausible to you, that’s
remarkable. It implies, first of all, that Aristotle believes that
the well-ordered human soul is ruled by desires and not by
reason, and second, that he regards habits not as the source
of good character but as obstructions to it. These are not standard readings of the Nicomachean Ethics, and that’s putting
it mildly. But we’ve arrived at them honestly and we’re stuck
with them; we have no honorable course other than to follow
where they lead us.
I mentioned some time ago that there are some passages
in which Aristotle seems to say that reason needs to rule us.
They begin very early, with his first conclusion that the minimal condition of a satisfying human life is to put to work that
in us which has reason and listens to reason (1098a3-5); and
they continue very late, into his final description of the happiest life, with assertions that the intellect is the best part of
us, is the part that naturally rules and leads us, and is even
what a human being is most of all (1177a13-15; 1178a6-7).
But in between these passages, one of the things Aristotle has
done is spell out what he means by intellect, and it is not a
synonym for reason. Moreover, in discussing a number of the
virtues, he has stated what power in us has the ultimate say in
judging what is right, and it is not reason. And most conclusively, although almost everything else he says in the Ethics is
dependent on the dialectical process of inquiry that leads to
it, he has along the way formulated unequivocally and cate-
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gorically what constitutes a human being as a source of
action, and again it is not reason.
The most straightforward way one might imagine that
reason should rule us is to think each of our actions should be
deduced from some principle. Aristotle does talk this way at
one point, but the only complete example he gives belongs to
a vice rather than to a virtue: one ought to taste every sweet
thing; this thing in front of me is sweet; and one more act of
gluttony takes place with apodeictic necessity (1147a29-31).
But one point that Aristotle makes here is that even though
the major premise is a universal proposition and the conclusion is an action, the minor premise is something particular,
and all such things are governed by sense-perception
(1147a26). In two places Aristotle says that there can be no
rules for right action (1113a31-33; 1137b29-32), and in two
other places he says that the judgment or decision that determines all matters of action is in the perceiving (1109b23;
1126b3-4).
But what sort of perceiving is this? My dog might have
better eyesight than I do without being able to see what’s best
to do in any situation. While the dog might associate past
experiences with present perceptions, the human power of
perception is infused with an intelligence and an imagination
that lets us grasp particular things as instances of universals.
Aristotle’s word for this (epagoge) is nearly always mistranslated as induction, which suggests imposing some general formulation on the thing in front of me, but he means something
more direct, by which I see the thing in the first place as a
thing and an example of a kind. The power in us that operates in and through our perceiving to behold the universal
directly is called nous, or intellect. The intellect thus supplies
the starting points of all universal reasoning (Bk. 6, Ch. 6),
which are at the opposite extreme from the particulars
(1142a23-27), but at the same time grasps those very particulars (1143a35-b5). Practical reasoning about action, like
universal reasoning about the way things are, cannot begin
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unless and until something in us that is not reason provides
starting points to reason about. In both cases this is the intellect, the power that beholds the ultimate invariable thinkable
things in contemplation but also the ultimate changeable particulars in perceiving. Jacob Klein once compared thinking to
walking: taking steps is like reasoning, but having something
to step off from is like intellect. Reason is ruled by intellect.
Now it might sound as though I’m quibbling. When you
hear the claim that reason is the proper guide and ruler of our
lives, you probably understand reason to mean the whole
power by which we dispassionately recognize what is evident,
whether directly or through any number of steps. The important thing is that we should be led by something that is impartial or, we may wish to say, objective. But that isn’t good
enough. What’s needed is to see things in relation to us and
our ends. Aristotle says that for knowledge to accomplish its
work well, it has to guide it by discerning the mean in relation to us (1106b5-9), which is a mean in the sense that it
does not overshoot or fall short of our natural ends. That’s
what there are no rules for. That’s what has to be perceived.
That’s the practical work of intellect.
One of the most persistent themes of the Nicomachean
Ethics is that achieving any aim in life depends upon seeing
straight, seeing things the way they are. But at least five times
(1099a22-24; 1113a25-33; 1166a12-13; 1170a14-16;
1176b24-26), Aristotle tells us that it is only someone of
good character who is capable of seeing straight. The way
most people see things, he says, is distorted by the false
appearance of things that promise pleasure (1113a33-b1),
and he notes that overly spirited people are too quick to perceive things as insulting when they aren’t (1149a25-34). It is
obvious that fear has the same effect, since he says the coward is afraid of everything (1116a2-3). In fact, one way to see
what Aristotle means by virtue of character is to imagine all
the ways we might be so mastered by some kind of feeling
that we have no capacity to see things for what they are. The
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virtues of character are the stable conditions that free us, not
from those feelings, but from being unable to make choices
about them. A courageous person can distinguish what is
worth being afraid of, and still has the option to act for an
end beyond it. A temperate person can eat, drink, and be
merry when he chooses to and not every time an opportunity for indulgence is present. A great-souled person can avenge
an insult when his good sense and courage lead him to, and
not as a reflex reaction. Some translators call these states of
character moral virtues, but that misses the point. They are
practical virtues; without them action is impossible.
Intellect is not stronger or sharper in a person of good
character, but only in such a person is it free to operate. This
is a negative sort of dependence. Good character clears away
the bad habits that obstruct the sight of the intellect. But there
is also a positive dependence. A person of good character is
not someone who is neutral about pleasant or frightening or
insulting things—thinking itself moves nothing, Aristotle says
(1139a35-36). Good character combines intellect that is
clear-sighted with desires and aversions that are good, in the
sense that they are rightly proportioned to the end of one’s
own happiness. Free choice of action depends not on objectivity or independence from our inclinations but on the presence and participation of all our desires. Aristotle says that
for a choice to be good, one’s desire must be right (1139a3031), but the rightness of desire is entirely analogous to the
clarity of intellect. Right desire is unobstructed desire.
Aristotle does not understand our desires to be a disorderly mob that needs to be ruled, but the natural components
of a life in which they all must have full scope to act. Once
we have taken responsibility for our own lives, we can develop what Aristotle calls active conditions of the soul, and it is
these active conditions that make up character. Formation of
an active condition (hexis) begins with isolated choices
(1103b14-23), such as refraining from a harmful pleasure or
enduring a frightening situation. Sticking by these choices
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requires effort, because they go against the grain of the masses of bad habits that have already become ingrained in all of
us before we have any power of choice. All deliberate and
positive habituation, from parental training, the laws of the
community, or the effort of self-discipline, is for the sake of
cancelling out the blind and passive earliest habituation that
no one intends, that comes just from the reflexive slackening
of the tension of uncomfortable feelings. The active condition
is fully formed when no more effort of self-restraint is needed. Knowing how we want to be in life and action is not
enough (1105b2-3), but being that way is still up to us
(1114b21-23). Each of the virtues of character is an active
condition in relation to some of our feelings and impulses;
Aristotle’s claim is that for each of these active conditions
there is an unimpeded way of being-at-work, and that happiness is the being-at-work of them all (1153b9-11). When
cleared, by habit, from the distortions of bad habits, our
habit-free desires constitute ourselves as we are by nature; if
these natural desires are thwarted our lives are stunted.
Aristotle’s picture of the healthy human soul is not a
three-part hierarchy but an equal partnership of everything in
us. The center of the Nicomachean Ethics, early in Bk. 6
(1139 b4-5), is Aristotle’s unequivocal definition of a human
being as the source of action in the act of choice, that can be
equally well described as intellect fused with desire or desire
fused with intellect (orektikos nous or orexis dianoetike).
Neither side can have the upper hand. The dictates of reason
as master are as misguided as the caprices or addictions of an
overmastering passion. Even a state of compromise, in which
our rational and irrational sides each give up a little of what
they want to get a little, misses the mark. What Aristotle is
talking about is a genuine whole, in which the parts are not
externally connected but internally infused with one another.
Thinking and deliberating must come to be present within
our desires, if they are to be directed toward their true ends,
rather than toward immediate delusions. But it is equally true
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that intellect would be useless if it were objective or neutral,
and it has to be led by desire to see things as ends, in relation
to ourselves. The formation of the component parts of character is not a process of reasoning, not a discipline of the passions, and not a combination of the two; it is a gradual and
mutual development of thinking and desire as enlightened by
one another, each led by its partnership with the other to its
own end.
Now if this non-hierarchical picture of the soul strikes
you as un-Aristotelian, your uneasiness is understandable and
deserves a response. Aristotle seems always to be talking
about rankings of things as higher and lower, and we saw earlier that he refers to the intellect as the best part of ourselves.
And in the Politics, he says that whatever is composed of a
number of things and becomes one has a ruling part and a
ruled part (1254a28-32), and he gives the very example we
are exploring; he says explicitly that intellect rules desire
(1254 b5-7). But he is careful to say that this is not the rule
of a master or a monarch, but political rule. He explains soon
afterward that by political rule he means rule over equals
(1255b20), and he later adds that political rule requires an
alternation or sharing of ruling and being ruled (1277b7-16).
This is a working-out of his understanding that the political
community is not merely an alliance for the sake of promoting exchange and preventing injury, but is a genuine whole.
All the more so, one might suppose, is the human soul not
just a bundle of capacities and desires, but a unity.
It is in Bk. 7, Ch. 17, of the Metaphysics that Aristotle distinguishes anything that is truly whole and truly one from a
mere heap (1041b11-12). His example of a genuine whole is
a syllable. To see what he means, take the first syllable of the
word metaphysics, and try to sound it out by parts. You will
hum, and then make an exclamation that might sound either
dismissive or interrogative, and then make an explosion of
breath. No matter how fast you make these noises in
sequence, they will not make the simple syllable met-. It is not
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a sum of parts but can only come into being as a whole. You
cannot pronounce it at all unless you make an m sound that
is already shaped by the following e, and sound the other letters similarly, not as isolated bits of noise but with the whole
syllable present in each of them. When you try to remove the
part from the whole it becomes something different; it is not
at all like plucking one marble off the heap. Something is
whole most of all, Aristotle says, when its constituent parts
are distinct only potentially (1023b32-34), and in the Politics
he gives the famous example that a human being removed
from political community is not human at all, but either a
beast or a god (1253a26-29).
It follows that dispassionate reason is not the human
thinking power at all, and unintelligent desires are not human
desires. Remember that Aristotle cautioned us, when we first
separated a rational and an irrational part of ourselves, that
we might be trying to separate the convex from the concave
side of the same curve. We saw earlier how the positing of
external honor as the greatest of goods led back into the soul,
and into Aristotle’s first depiction of the virtues of character
as composing one whole life. There are four more occasions
in the Ethics in which Aristotle leads some partiality in the
soul back to a wholeness of character. The second type of
person who needs to be so led is also focused outward, but on
the good of other people (1130a3-5). Aristotle does not have
a word of criticism for such a person, and even calls him the
best human being. He merely points out that his aim requires
the presence of all the virtues, and goes back to discussing
those virtues. But when the examination of all the virtues is
said and done, it is not this life that is called best, but an
entirely different one. Like the assertion that honor is the
greatest of external goods, that is made in Bk. 4 (1123b2021) and quietly replaced in Bk. 9 (1169b8-10), the claim that
the person devoted to doing justice to others is the best
human being is also refuted just by being unable to withstand
five books of further inquiry.
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23
I find it enormously instructive that Aristotle permits justice to stake the same claim to being the highest good that
honor does, and makes it fail. It is not in the long and detailed
discussion of justice as one particular virtue among many that
this occurs, but in a brief preface on justice as a way of life.
Aristotle mentions one celebrated ancient political leader
(Bias) in this connection, but a clearer example for us might
be a Roman, Cato the Younger. Plutarch says of him (Lives,
Modern Library, p. 920) that he was inspired and possessed
by a devotion to every virtue, but especially to that “steady
and inflexible justice that is not to be wrought upon by favor
or compassion.” He exemplifies the immersion in political
life that is governed not by honor but by duty. I mention this
only because it helps one see that Aristotle’s ethics of character has nothing to do with impersonal duty. Aristotle is constantly speaking of what one ought to do, but for him this
imperative always arises only from within, from the need to
fulfill and put to work all our own powers to achieve happiness. I noted earlier that the Aristotelian virues of character
are not moral virtues but practical virtues. I am suggesting
that morality is a misunderstanding of Aristotle’s characterbased ethics. Morality, in the sense of doing right by others,
follows from the practice of the virtues in the same way pleasure does, but doesn’t work as its end. Why should you not be
a thief? Because that is your duty to other people, or because
to be one would distort your own life and make you fail to
gain your own happiness? Or put it the other way around.
Would you rather have a neighbor who grimly and dutifully
refrains from your property even though he might covet it, or
one who has found a life in which your property is of no
interest to him?
The third life Aristotle describes is that of practical judgment (1144b30-1145a6). This is usually translated as prudence or practical wisdom. It is the virtue of intellect that is
a precondition of every virtue of character, but it in turn cannot come into being without the presence of all the virtues of
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character, which permit it to discern its ends. This mutual
dependence is the clearest evidence that the intellect is not
uppermost in practical life, but there are certainly people who
seek not to rule others nor to serve others, but to be the guiding intelligence behind political life. William O’Grady used to
say that whenever he read Machiavelli’s Prince, he always
wondered whether that book was more like housebuilding or
flute-playing; that question is Aristotle’s way of distinguishing
activities with external ends from those whose ends are in
themselves. Themistocles, an Athenian general described by
both Herodotus and Thucydides, was a great conniver who
seemed happiest when he had successfully manipulated everyone on every side of a conflict; he found political maneuvering an end in itself. But Aristotle says at the end of the Ethics
that there has been no one up to his time who had all the
requirements of the political art (1181b12-13). As with
honor and duty, his purpose seems to be to show those who
aim at superior practical know-how as their highest end that
the only role of the practical intellect in a successful life is a
more modest one, on an equal footing with all our desires.
Now the progressive overcoming of the claims of greatness of soul, justice, and practical judgment to be the pre-eminent virtue seems to exhaust all the motives for which one
might call the political life the highest life. Aristotle does not
collect them in this way, but he concludes in general that
political life is unleisured and always aims in part at a happiness that is beyond itself (1177b12-15). He contrasts it to a
contemplative life, which he argues at length is the best and
happiest human life (Bk. 10, Chs. 7-8). This produces the
greatest controversies among readers of the Ethics, since it
seems so odd that any philosopher would devote 98% of a
long and lovingly worked-out inquiry to an examination of
the practical life, only to turn his back on it at the culmination of the work. Without entering into any such controversy here, I think we are in a position to see the general lines of
a solution. There is no contemplative life for anyone who has
SACHS
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not achieved a good character, not only because his desires
would get in his way if they were not set right, but also
because human nature itself is one of the unvarying things
that the contemplative intellect needs to understand; in that
odd way, even in its non-practical employment the intellect
needs a respect for and partnership with our irrational
desires, since they are among its teachers. A human being is
intellect and desire, inseparably intertwined.
But also, I have so far skipped the fourth of Aristotle’s five
depictions of the whole life of virtue. Between the three versions of political lives and the contemplative life there is an
ambiguous middle life. The life of friendship in the full sense
also appears to involve the practice of all the virtues of character (1157a18-19, 29-31). But Aristotle does not say that
friendship requires the prior presence of those virtues, but
that friendship itself, in its proper sense, is present to the
extent that the friends possess the virtues (1156b8-9;
1157a30-31). He seems to mean that the friendship deepens
as the characters of the friends do. As with greatness of soul,
the picture seems dynamic rather than static, but not because
friendship is an inadequate motive. Like contemplative wisdom, friendship seems to be a final and all-inclusive end for
the whole of life; and Aristotle says it would be absurd to
imagine the happiest life as one devoid of friends who are
loved for their own sake (1169b16-28; 1156b9-11).
Friendship directly supersedes greatness of soul, since
Aristotle concludes that it is not honor but friends that are the
greatest of external goods (1123b20-21; 1159a25-26;
1169b8-10). But it is also precisely friendship that supersedes
justice as the highest aim and bond of political life, since
Aristotle says that where there is justice there is still a need
for friendship, but where there is friendship, justice is not
necessary (1155a22-28). Even the life devoted to the exercise
of the practical intellect seems to find its highest fulfillment in
friendship, since Aristotle says that one can contemplate his
own active life best in the actions of his friends (1169b30-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
1170a4). Everything a human being seeks in political life is
found only in friendship.
The relation of friendship to the contemplative life might
seem to be that of second best to best, and Aristotle says just
that (1178a5-9), but this is not a case in which the lower is
left behind in the achievement of the higher. As we have
noted, the claims of friendship within happiness are themselves final and indispensable, and a contemplative human
being does not cease to be a human being. And in a certain
sense, friendship has a claim to be not only of equal rank with
the pure life of intellect, but even superior to it. Aristotle
argues near the end of Bk. 9 that the highest life, spent in the
being-at-work of our highest powers, is deficient if it is not
expanded through being shared with friends (1170b7-19).
The motion throughout the Nicomachean Ethics is toward
the greatest wholeness of the life of everything in us, and this
can be achieved neither by a friendless life of contemplation
nor by any practical life shared between friends that excludes
the enjoyment of knowing. Aristotle says early on that the
truth deserves higher honor than do one’s friends, but he
does not say that either of them ever cease to be loved for
their own sake (1096a16-17); in one of the most powerful
indications of the destination of the whole work, he speaks of
the truth and his friends together in the dual number, a
resource the ancient Greek language had for naming things
that are more than one but inseparable.
So should reason, or our whole thinking power, rule the
soul? Clearly Aristotle doesn’t think so. Thinking guides
desire, but desire guides intellect, and intellect guides thinking. Under the guidance of thinking, desire can find itself
directed beyond bodily pleasures and political honors to an
end in friendship. Under the guidance of desire, intellect can
see the best choices before it in all their particularity. And we
are, first and foremost, choosing beings—not rational animals, not political animals, though we are those things too.
Choice cannot be full and unimpeded if anything in us is held
SACHS
27
back or held down or has not become fully aware of its
nature. Ultimately, for us, even contemplation is a choice, in
which the activity chosen and the whole desiring being that
chooses it are equally necessary and equally sovereign.
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29
Addition and Subtraction
without End in Oresme’s
Quaestiones super
Geometriam Euclidis
George Anastaplo
This essay is an explication of the first two questions of
Nicole Oresme’s Quaestiones super Geometriam Euclidis, a
work the Parisian master is thought to have composed
around 1350 in conjunction with his teaching in the Faculty
of Arts.1 In these questions, offered as commentary on
Campanus’s edition of the Elements of Euclid, Oresme presented a formal understanding of infinite diminution and
augmentation of magnitude that far exceeded what is to be
found in the writing of either Campanus or Euclid.2
In what follows, I first consider Oresme’s approach to
infinite diminution, its context and mechanics. I next examine his presentation of infinite augmentation and reconstruct
the understanding in which it was founded. As a conclusion,
I offer some reflections about the form of Oresme’s work and
speculate about the implication it might have for his notion
of mathematics.
*
Oresme began his Quaestiones in a peculiar way:
Concerning the book of Euclid it is first asked
about the dictum of Campanus in which he laid
down that magnitude decreases without limit.3 It
is sought first whether magnitude decreases without limit according to proportional parts.4
George Anastaplo is an architect practicing in Cambridge MA. The author
writes: “Research in Oresme’s mathematics was supported by the National
Science Foundation. Michael S. Mahoney read an earlier version of this essay.
I appreciate the insight of his comments.”
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
To a modern reader, this initial question is unexpected.
On the surface, it would seem more appropriate to begin a
work on the geometry of Euclid by addressing the geometer
himself instead of his commentator. In its context, however,
Oresme’s question makes a credible starting point.
The propositions of the first Book of Euclid’s Elements
are prefaced by definitions, postulates and common notions.
In Campanus’s edition the last common notion and the first
proposition are separated by the following editor’s note:
Moreover it must be recognized that beyond these
common conceptions of the mind, or common
opinions, Euclid has passed over many others
which are incomprehensible in number, of which
this is one:
If two equal quantities are compared to some
third of the same kind they will both be at the
same time alike greater than that third, or alike
less, or both equal to it.
Another is this. As much as some quantity is to
some other of the same kind, so much [can] some
third be to some fourth of the same kind.
This is universally true in continuous quantities.
Either the antecedents will be greater than the
consequents or less. For magnitude decreases without limit; in numbers this is not so. But if the first
is the submultiple of the second, there will be
some third alike the submultiple of some fourth,
since number increases without bound just as magnitude decreases without bound.5
Of his two additional common notions, Campanus was content simply to assert the veracity of only the first. The second
he sought to make credible. In a ratio, the antecedent term
ANASTAPLO
31
will be either greater than, equal to, or less than the consequent term. Campanus apparently thought that in the case of
equal antecedents and consequents, the existence of a fourth
term, bearing to some third term the relation determined by
an original pair, should be obvious. With regard to the cases
of unequal antecedents and consequents, however, he was
less sure. For these he introduced comparisons calculated to
quiet whatever doubts might arise. Thus, the possibility of
unlimited augmentation in number was called upon to persuade one of the existence of a fourth term when the consequent was superior to the antecedent, just as the possibility of
unlimited diminution in magnitude was offered as an aid to
the acceptance of its existence in the inverse case.
The possibility of unlimited augmentation in number is
clear to anyone with the ability to count. The possibility of
unlimited diminution in magnitude, in contrast, is less obvious. On first consideration, it is unclear how Campanus
might have envisaged a magnitude to decrease without limit
or what he intended to be removed from it to make it shrink
so small. Indeed, it is not immediately apparent that this kind
of decrease is possible at all.
Oresme’s first question finds its basis in this quandary. To
be sure, Oresme focused the doubt into a specific query worded in carefully chosen terms. Nevertheless, from the response
that is made to the question, the concern just sketched is
clearly the one Oresme intended to address.
In this and other examples of treatises written in the sic et
non style of the disputation, the author’s teaching is cast in
the form of a dialogue between a student and his master.
Typically, the student is assumed to possess both a ready
capacity for argument and the youthful courage to speak
authoritatively in words not fully understood about matters
only partly appreciated. Here both of the virtues of the student are manifest:
There are not an unlimited number of parts in a
continuous [magnitude], therefore neither is there
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
an unlimited number of parts of the same ratio.
The antecedent is obvious, since otherwise [the
magnitude] would be without limit. The consequent is obvious, since any proportional part is a
part of the same quantity as any other [proportional part of that magnitude], therefore the parts
of the same [magnitude] are of the same ratio and
of the same quantity. (1. 9-14)
Apparently unaware of what proportional parts are, but
certain of the impossibility of the limitless subtraction of one
finite quantity from another, the student confidently asserts
that a proportional part is a constitutive part, that is, a part
which, with an integral number of equal counterparts, makes
up the whole. Interpreting the words “ratio” and “proportional” as referring to the number of parts into which the
whole is divided and thus as denoting the size of each part
with respect to the whole (and not with respect to some other
part), the objector puts his conviction to work and argues that
since in the same whole parts in the same ratio are always
equal to one another, the question should be answered in the
negative.
Just as the student in this genre tends to have a prescribed
attitude and level of ability, the master has a predetermined
role as well. He is cast as the guardian of a comprehensive
understanding who is responsible for the introduction of his
charge into the aggregate possession of scholarship. Because
of his learning, the master’s arguments never have the singlemindedness of those the student is apt to make. Nor are they
the same in focus. Where the student, because he is a schoolboy, is concerned to make a judgment based on his immediate perception and assessment of things, the master, because
he is a pedagogue, aims at conveying an entire approach to
conceiving the matter on which the question touches and
then, only derivatively, turns to the question itself.
The reply the master makes here divides into three parts.
In the first he cites the authority of Campanus. Looked at in
ANASTAPLO
33
one way, all the master’s efforts are directed toward showing
why a man called “perspicacissimus” might have said “magnitude decreases without limit.” Thus, in the second part he
works to present the background considerations in terms of
which Campanus’s dictum must be seen and then demonstrates its truth. Having reconciled infinite diminution with
reason, the master finally returns to the student’s objection
and inspects it in terms of the understanding he has just established. In what follows, only the major features of the master’s exposition have been sketched. Discussion of corollary
conclusions, replies to objections and the like has been omitted in the interest of brevity.
Two groups of statements provide the background to the
demonstration of Campanus’s dictum. One enumerates
things “that must be noted,” the other those that “must be
supposed.” First among the former is that:
Parts are called proportional with respect to a continuous proportion; and that such a proportion is
a likeness of ratio, as is said in the commentary to
the ninth definition of the fifth [book] where it is
said that a [proportion] is held between at least
two ratios; and for this reason Euclid said that the
minimum number of terms in which [a proportion] is found is three and the maximum number
cannot be given, since it goes on without limit. (9.
20-26)
Only Definition nine of Book five is cited in this passage,
nothing else. What must be noted first is not the definition of
“proportional part,” “ratio” or “likeness of ratio,” but simply
the fact that proportional parts, whatever they might turn out
to be, have to be understood in terms of the relation which
binds them together with other parts of the same proportion.
Thus the note continues:
From this it follows that properly, one does not
speak of a proportional part, or of two propor-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
tional parts, but there must be at least three [proportional parts] and there could be an infinite
number. (1. 26-28)
The error the student made was to confuse proportional
and constitutive parts. What this means is that he mistook the
kind of part which is known by the relation it bears to other
parts for one which is known by the relation it bears to the
whole. Once the character of the student’s error is recognized, the intent of the statement just presented is clear. Its
goal is to spur the replacement of one notion of part with
another, and it works to do so by focusing attention on what
is distinctive about this second kind of part.6
Since every constitutive part is an integral portion of the
whole of which it is a part, the presence of one implies the
presence of the others. For such parts division is singular, and
once it is accomplished for one it is, in effect, accomplished
for all. With the acceptance of the alternative notion of part
as proportional part, however, it becomes apparent that division will have to be conceived differently. Just how, the second and third notes lay down:
Second, it is answered that division according to
such proportional parts occurs in as many ways as
there are continuously proportional [parts] and
there are as many of these as there are ratios,
which are without limit….Third, it is said that a
line and any continuum can be divided up into
such parts. A line can be divided up in two ways
because it has two ends and such parts can start
from either one. A surface can be divided up in an
unlimited number of ways and the same [is true]
of a body. (2. 1-10)
Seated in some quantity as the result of division, proportional parts may establish the relation of any ratio. And how does
the seating division take place? It takes place successively;
part by part, it radiates outward from one extremity of the
ANASTAPLO
35
quantity to be divided toward the opposite one. Unlike the
immediate and total division that yields constitutive parts,
this division is a process, not an event.
Because of these things to be noted, the consideration of
the question has been shifted into the realm of continuously
proportional parts and successive division. The statements of
things to be supposed progress further into this realm and
posit peculiarities of its determination later used in the proof
of Campanus’s comment. Rather than work through each of
them in isolation, however, these statements will be viewed in
terms of their function in the demonstration.
This is the assertion to be proved:
The first conclusion is that, if some part is
removed from a quantity and from the remainder
the same part is removed and from the second
remainder the same part is again [removed] and so
on without limit, the quantity through this manner
of endless subtraction will be exactly consumed,
neither more nor less. (2. 23-26)
It is important to be clear about the situation just described.
Let a be the total quantity. In the first division, some part of
a is removed to leave b. In the second, the same part of b is
removed to yield c that was formerly removed from a to yield
b, and so on for d, e, and the rest. The results of such division
can be schematized in this way:
a = whole
b = first remainder = a – a (part removed)
c = second remainder = b – b (part removed)
d = third remainder = c – c (part removed)
(where “part removed” is conceived as a fractional
multiplier)
What is to be proved is that the excesses taken away at each
stage to leave the remainders will eventually exhaust the
quantity.
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36
The proof itself runs as follows:
The whole assumed at the start and the first
remainder and the second and the third and the
rest are continually proportional (as can be proved
by arguing from a transformed ratio). Therefore
there is in this case, some ratio and as much again
and so on without limit.
Thus it follows from the second supposition
that the ratio of the whole to the remainder
increases without limit since it is composed with
itself.
And one term, that is the whole, is imagined
not to change; therefore, according to the first
supposition, the remainder is diminished without
limit.
And therefore the whole of the quantity is precisely consumed. (2. 26-34)
In the divided magnitude the relation of the whole to the first
remainder is reiterated in the relations of each remainder to
the one that follows it. In terms of the quantities a, b, c, d and
so on, this conclusion can be written as:
a : b = b : c = c : d…
The second supposition asserts that:
If to any ratio another [equal to it] is added and
then another and so on without limit, that ratio
will be augmented without limit and this applies to
all quantities.7
(2. 17-19)
ANASTAPLO
37
In the divided magnitude, the ratio of the whole to each
remainder is the sum of the whole to the first remainder taken
as many times as division must be made to produce that
remainder. For example,
since a : b = b : c = c : d
(a : b) + (a : b) + (a : b) = a : d
a3 : b3 = a : d
(1)
(2)
The consideration of this kind of expression provides the
basis for the crucial inference in the demonstration of
Campanus’s dictum. In such expressions, a, the whole quantity, plays two roles: it is both the basis of the first term of one
ratio (ratio 1) and the first term simply of the other ratio
(ratio 2). Now the calculation of ratio 1 through a continued
addition of a ratio with itself is exactly the calculation which
provides the situation of the second supposition, and so what
is posited there can be inferred here, namely, that the series
of ratios a : b, a2 : b2, a3 : b3… displays a limitless augmentation of ratio. But, consider the role of the ratios of this series
in expressions like the one above. There they are used to
“measure” the quantity of ratios like ratio 2, which express
the relation of the whole magnitude to some remainder.
Because of this, it can now be inferred of the series of which
ratio 2 is a member, that the succession of ratios in it too displays limitless augmentation.
Let us stop at this point and take stock of the argument.
So far, a process of division has been established in a quantity and the tendency of ratios of the whole to a succession of
remainders has been described. Now it is left to describe the
tendency that the remainders themselves reveal as division is
continued indefinitely. And to do this, the first supposition is
employed. It is a bridge between considerations of relation
and those of quantity:
And if some ratio be augmented without limit, the
first term remaining unchanged, the second will be
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
diminished without limit. This is clear since the
ratio can be increased without limit in two ways,
either through the limitless augmentation of the
first term or the limitless diminution of the second
term. (2. 11-16)
Of the two cases, it is clear which obtains here. In the
series of ratios established through the division, the whole is
the unchanged first term and the succession of remainders are
the changing second term. The conclusion is obvious: the
remainders are diminished without limit. But the remainders
are called the remainders because they are left behind after
the excesses have been removed. And, if they are diminished
without limit as division is continued, it can only be that the
excesses, when taken without limit, exhaust the magnitude
being divided. Is it possible for the excesses to consume more
than the whole through such division? No. At each stage of
division only part of what remains is removed. Therefore the
statement is proved.8
The statement just proved differs subtly from what was
asked originally, and necessarily so. In the opening question
and in Campanus’s comment the remainders of division and
their progressive diminution stood at the focus of concern. In
this statement, however, concern has been redirected toward
the whole magnitude and its eventual consumption.
To show the tendency of a series of magnitudes requires
that the members of the series be successively compared with
an invariant quantity of the same kind. In the case of continued division, the single possible standard of comparison is the
magnitude assumed at the start of division, since it is the only
invariant quantity to which the remainders themselves might
be related by means of the defining proportion or any of its
modifications. When the remainders of division are considered in isolation, as they were in Campanus’s note and in the
original question, a proof of their tendency is not even to be
hoped for because the single standard against which they
might be measured has been excluded from view. The results
ANASTAPLO
39
of division had to be restated to include the continued presence of the whole magnitude before a proof could be
offered.9
In this shift of focus from continuous diminution to eventual exhaustion can be seen a shift in conceiving the process
of continued division. When continued division is viewed as
continuous diminution, the results of division make up a
series of magnitudes known only in relation to each other.
Viewed as eventual exhaustion, on the other hand, what
before was considered a process of constant subtraction ending in either an infinitesimal particle or none at all, can now
be seen as an extended effort of addition which produces a
known sum. The parts which before were simply thrown
away, the excesses, can now be seen to fill in the divided magnitude. Because the unending process has been placed within
a known context and because its tendency can be stated in
terms of an already established result, its inherent lack of definition has been tamed and it gains an intelligibility, albeit an
indirect one, it did not formerly possess.
*
If the Quaestiones is recognized as a dialogue between
master and student, it is only natural to expect ideas introduced in the first question to be explored further in the one
that follows. In the second question the counterpart to the
first is taken up.
As a consequence, it is asked whether an addition
can be made to a magnitude according to proportional parts [applied] without limit. (3. 33-34)
To one who has just learned the lesson of the previous question, the possibility of what is entertained here seems slight.
Thus the student maintains:
If [such an addition] could [be made] it would follow that a magnitude would be augmentable without limit….The consequence follows [from the
antecedent], for from the fact that addition hap-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
pens without limit, the magnitude will be augmented without limit, since it is added on to
through the addition. (4. 1-7)
Diminution without limit was conceived as the achievement
of a finite sum through an endless addition of excesses. But
that demonstration was only possible because the addition,
although endless, always took place within a predetermined
boundary and could be shown never to leave it. In this case,
however, because the parts are added first on to the extremity of the magnitude and then on to each other, they successively establish and reestablish the boundary of their sum.
And, since the parts are to be applied without limit, it seems
obvious that the magnitude will not have a fixed extremity.
In the first question the master responded to the student
by fabricating an alternate understanding of part and division. In this question, he responds by sketching the mechanics of endless addition as they might appear from an alternate
point of view:
It is argued the opposite way that whatever can be
removed from some magnitude can be added to
another. But subtraction from some magnitude can
take place according to [proportional] parts without limit, in this way therefore, it can be proved
that [a magnitude] is augmentable without limit.
(4. 8-11)
The student views the parts to be added only in relation to
one another and so is at a loss to infer the boundary they
might approach in sum. The master counters this perception
of addition with another. In some cases, the addition to one
magnitude by proportional parts can be seen in terms of the
exhaustion by proportional parts of some other magnitude.
By presenting addition in this way, the master suggests the
existence of a boundary that might be established independently of the process of addition and thus also suggests that the
ANASTAPLO
41
process itself might be seen as the eventual exhaustion of a
predetermined quantity.
The qualification in what was just said was “in some
cases.” The different cases of addition according to proportional parts are distinguished according to the ratio in which
addition is made:
For the sake of the question it must be noted first
what the ratio of equality is and it is [the ratio]
between equals. Another [kind of ratio] is the ratio
of greater inequality which is the ratio of the
greater to the lesser, such as four to two. Another
[kind] is of lesser inequality which is of the lesser
to the greater, such as two to four…And it follows
from this, that addition to a quantity can take
place in three ways. (4. 19-25)
When the addition is made without limit by parts applied in
a ratio of either equality or greater inequality, the resultant
“whole” will be unbounded, as is clear. When addition is
made with parts applied in a ratio of lesser inequality, the
claim is made that the “whole will never be unbounded.” The
reason offered to support this conclusion is simple, and
unfortunately, almost totally obscure:
This is because the whole will have a fixed and
definite ratio to the [magnitude] assumed at the
start, that is, to that [magnitude] to which addition
is made. (4. 30-31)
It is the task in what follows to reconstruct the understanding
that lies behind this statement.
The question’s “first conclusion” provides a point of
departure:
The first conclusion is that if a quantity of one
foot be assumed and addition be made to it without end according to the subduplicate ratio, so
that first one half of a foot is added to it, then a
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
fourth, then an eighth, and so on without limit,
doubling the subduplicate, the whole will be exactly twice the [magnitude] assumed at the start. This
is clear since if from some [magnitude] parts are
taken away according to this order, exactly double
of what is removed first will be removed ultimately
from the whole, as is clear from the first, that is,
the preceding question. Therefore the same argument applies if the parts are added [to a magnitude]. (5. 9-15)
In this example of continued addition can be seen the fulfillment of the master’s earlier suggestion. The parts added to
one magnitude are understood as parts subtracted from
another. It is as if the two magnitudes were butted up against
one another and the process of addition reclaimed the latter
magnitude into the whole. In this case, to determine the size
of the magnitude to be exhausted in the course of unlimited
addition is easily done. The fact that the subduplicate series
composed on a unit basis exhausts the unit was presented as
a corollary to the demonstration of the previous question.
What would be the result if addition were made according to the subtriplicate ratio? What magnitude could such
parts be considered to exhaust? To answer these questions it
is necessary to backtrack and to reconsider continued division.
When division is made according to proportional parts,
the excess at each stage of division is less than the previous
remainder by a factor of the ratio that governs how division
is made. For example, when two-thirds of a unit magnitude is
Chart 1
removed in division,
and then two-thirds of
the first remainder is
removed and so on, the
excess at each stage is
two-thirds of the previous remainder (see
ANASTAPLO
43
chart 1). Because of this, given any excess and the ratio of
division it is an easy thing to calculate the size of the previous
remainder.
A more complex relation exists between successive
excesses. Each excess falls short of the one that precedes it by
an amount equal to the preceding excess diminished by a factor of the governing ratio. Consider chart 1 again. There, the
second excess, 2/9, falls short of the first excess, 2/3, by 4/9,
and 4/9 is 2/3 taken 2/3 times.
When addition is made according to proportional parts in
a ratio of lesser inequality, the addend at each stage of addition is less than the previous addend by a factor of the ratio
that governs how addition is made. Thus, when addition is
made in the subtriplicate ratio, the second addend is onethird of the whole and each subsequent
Chart 2
addend is one-third of the one it follows (see chart 2).
The difference between successive
addends may also be expressed in
another way. It can be said that each
falls short of the one that precedes it by
an amount equal to the preceding
addend diminished by some ratio and that this ratio is the
same for every pair of consecutive addends in the series.
Consider chart 2 again. In the subtriplicate series, the second
addend, 1/3, falls short of the given magnitude by 2/3, an
amount which can be understood as that magnitude taken 2/3
times. Similarly, the third addend, 1/9, falls short of 1/3 by
2/3, which can be understood as 1/3 taken 2/3 times. And the
same is true for the rest.
Now the groundwork has been laid for the crucial insight.
From the descriptions above, it is clear that the addends in
one series bear to one another the same relation that the
excesses bear among themselves in another series. In these
examples, the addends of addition made in a subtriplicate
ratio successively fall short of each other to precisely the same
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
degree that each excess of division made in the two-thirds
ratio is deficient of the one it follows.
Because of this, the addends of a process of addition performed according to one ratio can be understood as the
excesses left behind by division performed according to
another. The whole these terms eventually exhaust can be calculated as the “remainder” of the stage previous to the
removal of the first “excess.” And, as should be evident, that
whole will also be the sum that the addends eventually
approach. Consider chart 3. There, the addends in the subtriplicate series are expressed as the excesses of division
according to a ratio of Chart 3
two-thirds. The first
excess is 1, the first
addend, and so the
previous remainder,
which must when
diminished in a ratio
of two-thirds yield 1, is
3/2. Therefore, since it
has
already
been
proved that the excesses of division according to proportional parts exhaust the divided whole, the sum of the subtriplicate series when taken without limit is three-halves the magnitude chosen to be the first addend.
The trace of this understanding can be seen in the first
conclusion, in the justification given for the quantity declared
the sum in the subduplicate series (p. 36). There, the crucial
turn of argument was provided by the observation of the relation between the first excess and the whole that the series of
excesses ultimately exhausts. The one was presented as calculable because the other was already known.
A more explicit manifestation of the same understanding
can be seen in the second conclusion:
The second conclusion is that if some quantity,
such as a foot be assumed, and then a third as
ANASTAPLO
45
much is added, and afterwards a third of the addition and so on without limit, the whole will be
exactly a foot and a half [long]. That is, it will be
in the ratio of the sesquialtern to the magnitude
assumed at the start. And with regard to this, the
following rule should be recognized, that we ought
to see by how much the second part falls short of
the first and the third of the second and so on with
respect to the others, and to call that [quantity] by
its denomination and the ratio of the aggregate
whole to the magnitude assumed [at the start] will
be as the ratio of the denominator to the numerator. For example, in the case proposed, the second
part which is one-third the first falls short of the
first by two-thirds, therefore the ratio of the whole
to the first part or to the [magnitude] assumed [at
the start] is three to two and this is the sesquialtern. (5. 16-26)
The use of “rules” to encapsulate a method of calculation or
a criterion for judgment is a commonplace in medieval academic texts. Unlike other rules presented by other authors,
this one is not derived in the text itself. But, because of what
has already been said about addition without end, the function of its procedures can be readily unpacked.
When seeking the sum of a series of proportional parts,
the student is instructed “to see by how much the second falls
short of the first and the third of the second…and to call that
quantity by its denomination.” The amount that each term
falls short of the one preceding it is to be isolated and
expressed in terms of the preceding one. In the example
given, that of the subtriplicate series, 1/3, the second addend
falls short of 1, the first, by 2/3 which is called “two thirds [of
the preceding term].” The third falls short of the second by
2/9 which is again “two-thirds” and so on.10
In this step, the student, in effect, deduces from the series
of addends what the governing ratio would be were the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
addends considered as excesses. The analogy between this
procedure and the one laid out above for the same purpose is
obvious. There, the governing ratio was discovered as the
fractional multiplier used to diminish the first of two consecutive addends to yield the amount by which the second fell
short of it. Here, the same ratio is discovered as the relation
of the amount of difference in the first terms, a method
which, though distinct from the former, is functionally equivalent to it.
Once this ratio has been distilled, it is put to use in the
calculation of the eventual sum of the series: “and the ratio of
the aggregate whole to the magnitude assumed [at the start]
will be as the ratio of the denominator to the numerator.”
The ratio denominating the difference between consecutive
addends is expressed as a fraction, inverted and taken in this
form as the ratio between the whole that is finally achieved
and the first addend.11
As was shown above, in any process of division, each
excess falls short of the previous remainder by a factor of the
governing ratio. Or, to state the same situation another way,
each excess is to the remainder previous to it as the numerator of the governing ratio is to its denominator. Thus, to calculate the aggregate sum of addends, which, on the analogy
of division, is the remainder previous to the first excess
(addend), requires that a quantity be found which will have
to the first addend the ratio of the denominator of the governing ratio to its numerator.
The exposition just completed was taken up to explicate
the following statement:
If, in turn, [addition] is made according to a ratio
of lesser inequality, [the whole] will never be
unbounded although the addition be made without
limit. This is because the whole will have a fixed
and definite ratio to the [magnitude] assumed at
the start, that is, to that [magnitude] to which the
addition is made. (4. 28-30)
ANASTAPLO
47
The meaning of this passage should now be clear. In every
series of addends built up according to a ratio of lesser
inequality, each term is some part of the term which precedes
it. Because of this, every series of such addends (and only the
addends of such series) can be interpreted as a series of
excesses and the ratio governing the corresponding division
can be deduced. Inverted, this newly discovered governing
ratio becomes transformed into the “fixed and definite ratio”
between some magnitude and the first addend. And the route
to proving that this magnitude is the eventual sum of the
addends is readily indicated by the shift in perception which
allows the successive augmentation of the original magnitude
to be considered as the eventual exhaustion of this new one.
*
The questions of treatises written in the sic et non style of
the disputation each present a lesson in which a student is
taught by a master. In these lessons, the master is responsible
for the education of his student and strives to introduce him
into the orthodox understanding of the discipline being studied. In part, orthodoxy is a mode of perception. An aspect of
what it means to be educated in a tradition is to have adopted the established outlook on the world and to appreciate
why it is to be preferred above any other. Orthodoxy is also
a mode of communication. It is expected of educated people
that they be able to speak with precision and accuracy, in
terms acceptable to other educated people, about the matter
at hand.
In the first two questions of the Quaestiones, Oresme has
presented the master’s effort to inculcate the orthodoxy of
the infinite in his student. Within this orthodoxy, infinite
processes are never seen in isolation but are always viewed in
terms of a preestablished whole. The vocabulary in which the
orthodoxy is couched is the language of proportion. Ratio
and the relation of ratios form the means of describing the
processes posited and of demonstrating their eventual results.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Within philosophy, ethics, and theology, understanding
makes up a whole and until it has been fully grasped, each
aspect of it remains provisional. In the case of the student’s
appreciation of the infinite, this characteristic is clearly visible. As a beginner in mathematics, the student has only the
crudest grasp of ratio and proportion, the means the master
employs for denomination and proof. As a consequence, he
must accept the basis of the proof of the first question in the
form of a supposition and the teaching of the second question
as a rule. The student’s knowledge is contingent and will continue to be so until the sophistication of his understanding
matches that of his master’s.
Oresme’s willingness to present a mathematical subject in
a treatise written sic et non, his willingness to explore a mathematical subject dialectically rather than deductively, gives
some insight into his notion of mathematical understanding.
To Oresme, mathematical understanding seems to have been
of the same kind as the understanding of the traditional disciplines of disputation. It was not a special sort of knowing to
be differentiated from all others.
Notes
1
Nicole Oresme, Quaestiones super Geometriam Euclidis, edited
by H. L. L. Busard (Leiden, 1961), p. x. See also A. Maier, An der
Grenze von Scholastik und Naturwissenschaft (Rome, 1952), pp.
270, 345. Busard’s text has been reviewed and extensively emended by J. E. Murdoch in Scripta Mathematica 27:1 (1964), pp. 6791. An emended version of the Busard text of questions 10-15
appears with translation, notes and introduction as Appendix 1 of
M. Clagett, Nicole Oresme and the Medieval Geometry of Qualities
and Motions (Madison, 1969), pp. 521-575. My translation of the
questions under study appears as an appendix.
2
Two editions of Campanus’s redaction of the Elements have been
used in preparation of this essay. They are E. Ratdolt’s Praeclissimus
liber elementorum Euclidis (Venice, 1482), hereafter called Ratdolt;
and J. Lefevre’s Euclidis megarensis geometricorum elementorum
ANASTAPLO
49
libri XV. Campani Galli transalpini in eosdem commentariorum libri
XV, etc. (Paris, 1516), hereafter called Lefevre.
Previous study of this portion of the Quaestiones is confined to
Murdoch, pp. 68-70 and Clagett, pp. 130-31; 508-10. Clagett also
considered infinite progressions and their sums in other works of
Oresme and his contemporaries, see pp. 495-508. An old chestnut
on this latter subject, cited by greater scholars than I, is H.
Wieleitner’s “Zur Geschichte der unendlichen Reihen in
christlichen Mittelalten,” Bibliotheca Mathematica, 3 Folge, 14
(1913-14): 150-68. See esp., 150-54.
3
The Latin adjective infinitus is the composition of in + finio and
so has a primary sense, when used with respect to quantity, of
“boundless” or “immense.” The English cognate “infinite” possesses positive overtones as descriptive of a quality that is something in
its own right; in it the privative has lost much of its immediate connotative impact. Because of this, every attempt has been made to
avoid its use as the translation of its Latin ancestor. Only in those
cases in which avoidance would have made a complete farce of the
fluency of translation (almost all of these being uses of the adverbial
form) has “infinite” been deemed acceptable.
4
Busard, p. 1, lines 5-8. All subsequent textual references are by
page and line numbers and are included in the body of the essay. The
word proportio has been translated “ratio,” while the word proportionalitas has been translated as “proportion.” As is clear, proportionale has been translated as “proportional.”
5
Ratdolt, 2v. See also Lefevre, 4r.
6
Note that the Euclidean definitions of part and ratio (Elements,
Book 5, Definitions 1 and 3) do not focus on this aspect. Because of
this, they were passed over in preference for Definition 9.
7
Because this is a supposition, the effort has not been made to substantiate it. Nevertheless, it is credible. On the assumption that a is
greater than b, the ratio a : b added to itself results in a greater
ratio, a2 : b2. And with continued addition of the same ratio, it continues to increase. Thus a : b taken three times is a3 : b3, four times
a4 : b4, and so on. The same ratio added to itself without limit would
seem, in this way, to produce a ratio inassignably large.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
8
For those who might have found the foregoing demonstration
unsettling, the following derivation of an equivalent statement is
offered as a tranquilizer.
For any geometric series a + ab + ab2 + … + abn-1 = Sn, Sn = a
( (1-bn) / (1-b) ) as can be confirmed by division. If with respect to a
unit magnitude a is the first part removed, the “first excess,” and b the
first portion left behind, “the first remainder,” then the sum of the
excesses will be a ( ( 1-bn) / (1-b) ) where n + 1 is the number of divisions made. Since |b| < 1, lim bn = 0 and the sum of the excesses
n→
°
°
after division has been continued without bound will be a (1 / (1-b
) ) = 1, that is, the continued removal of excesses will exhaust the
magnitude. Note that in this derivation, as in the one presented in
Oresme’s text, the sum of the excesses is only calculable because the
remainder bn can be evaluated as zero as division is made without
limit. The crucial difference between the approach used here and
the one of the text is found in the difference between the ways used
to evaluate the remainders.
9
A comparison with the modern derivation, while not particularly
helpful in this context, is at least interesting. The modern analyst
employs two modes of mathematical description in the course of his
exposition. First he describes the process of continued division
according to proportional parts with a geometric series. Then, using
a completely different apparatus, one formulated without regard
for this particular series, examines his description for the symptoms
of convergence. This latter mode of description, the interval language which supports the limit concept, allows the analyst to make
the type of comparison mentioned in the body of the essay. It is a
means which may be used willfully to erect standards of comparison. With it, the analyst can import his own fixed quantities into a
mathematical context.
10
Murdoch, p. 69. Although Murdoch interprets this part of the
passage correctly, he goes on to add that “though Oresme does offer
a proof of his summation of [a] series [of excesses], he gives no
inkling of one when it comes to his rule” (p. 70).
11 Apparently Oresme wrote ratios in the bilevel form used today as
the fractional notation, see E. Grant, “Part I of Nicole Oresme’s
Algorismus proportionum,” Isis, 56 (1965): 328-29.
ANASTAPLO
51
Appendix
Question 1
Concerning the book of Euclid it is first asked about the dictum of
Campanus in which he laid down that a magnitude decreases without limit. It is sought first whether a magnitude decreases without
limit according to proportional parts.
And it is first argued that it does not. There are not an unlimited number of parts in a continuous [magnitude], therefore neither
is there an unlimited number of parts of the same ratio. The
antecedent is obvious, since otherwise [the magnitude] would be
without limit. The consequent is obvious, since any proportional
part is a part of the same quantity as any other [proportional part
of that magnitude], therefore the parts of the same [magnitude] are
of the same ratio and of the same quantity.
According to Campanus in the commentary [the matter]
appears in the opposite way.
For the sake of the question it must be noted: first, what is
meant by proportional parts or parts of the same ratio; second, in
how many ways such parts can be imagined; third, how something
can be divided up into such parts; fourth, suppositions and conclusions.
First, it must be noted that parts are called proportional with
respect to a continuous proportion; and that such proportion is a
likeness of ratio, as is said in the commentary to the ninth definition
of the fifth [book], where it is said that a [proportion] is held
between at least two ratios; and for this reason Euclid said that the
minimum number of terms in which [a proportion] is found is three
and the maximum number cannot be given, since it goes on without limit. From this it follows that properly, one does not speak of
a proportional part or of two proportional parts, but that there
should be at least three [proportional parts], and there could be an
infinite number. And [such parts] are called continuously proportional when as the first is related to the second, so is the second to
the third and so with the rest if more are assumed.
Second, it is answered that division according to such proportional parts occurs in as many ways as there are continuously proportional [parts] and there are as many of these as there are ratios,
which are without limit. For example, it could be that the first is
twice the second and the second twice the third and so on, just as it
is commonly said of continued division; and it could be that the first
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
is three times the second and the second three times the third and
so on.
Third, it is said that a line and any continuum whatever can be
divided up into such parts. A line can be divided up in two ways
because it has two ends and such parts can start from either one. A
surface can be divided up in an unlimited number of ways and the
same [is true] of a body.
Fourth, the first supposition is laid down as the following: that
if some ratio becomes augmented without limit, the first term
remaining unchanged, the second term will become diminished
without limit. This is clear since the ratio between two [terms] can
be increased without limit in two ways, either through the limitless
augmentation of the first term or the limitless diminution of the second term.
The second supposition is that if to any ratio another [equal to
it] is added and then another and so on without limit, that ratio will
be augmented without limit and this applies to all quantities.
The third supposition is this, that addition can be made according to proportional parts to any quantity and from the same quantity diminution can occur according to proportional parts.
The first conclusion is therefore that, if some part is removed
from a quantity and from the first remainder the same part is
removed and from the second remainder the same part is again
[removed] and so on without limit, the quantity, through this manner of endless subtraction, will be exactly consumed, neither more
or less [than the whole of it will be removed]. This can be proved
thus: The whole assumed at the start and the first remainder and the
second and the third and the rest are continuously proportional (as
can be proved by arguing from a transformed ratio), therefore there
is, in this case, some ratio and as much again and so on without
limit. Thus it follows from the second supposition that the ratio of
the whole to the remainder increases without limit since it is composed with itself. And one term, that is the whole, is imagined not
to change, therefore, according to the first supposition, the remainder is diminished without limit. And therefore the whole of the
quantity is precisely consumed.
From this the corollary follows that if from some [magnitude]
a foot long half a foot is removed and then half the remaining quantity and then half of the next remainder and so on without limit,
precisely a foot will be taken away from it.
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53
The second corollary is that, if from some [magnitude a foot
long] one thousandth part of one foot is removed and then a thousandth part of the remainder of that foot and so on without limit,
exactly one foot will be subtracted from it.
But this is doubted: Since exactly half a foot, half of the remainder of that foot and so on without limit make up one foot, let this
whole be a. Similarly, according to the second corollary, a thousandth part of a foot and a thousandth part of the remainder and so
on without limit make up one foot, let it be b. Thus it appears that
a and b are equal, but it is proved that they are not: Since the first
part of a is greater than the first part of b and the second part of a
is greater than the second part of b and so on without limit, the
whole of a is thus greater than the whole of b.
And this is supported [in this way]: If Socrates is moved over a
during an hour and Plato over b, and if they divide the hour according to proportional parts and correspondingly move over a and b,
then in the first proportional part [of the hour] Socrates will be
moved faster than Plato and similarly in the second and those
beyond. Therefore, Socrates will move through more space than
Plato, and therefore a is a greater space than b.
In reply to this argument the antecedent is denied, namely, that
the first part of a is greater than the first part of b and so on, for the
reason that, although the first part of a is greater than the first part
of b and the second part of a is greater than the second part of b,
nevertheless [when the parts are taken] without limit, eventually
one [part of a] is arrived at which will not be more than its counterpart [in b], but less.
From this the response to the question is clear, that any continuum can have proportional parts without limit. In imagination and
likewise in reality, the first can be separated from the others by a
process of corruption, and then the second, and so on without limit.
In reply to the arguments advanced in opposition I deny the
consequence, namely, that any part would be of the same quantity
as any other and for a proof of it I say that although some proportional part may be a part of the same quantity as others, nevertheless it is not the same in quantity as them since it is of the same
ratio. They are not equal for then it would follow that all would be
equal among one another.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Question 2
As a consequence it is asked whether an addition to a magnitude
can take place through proportional parts [applied] without limit.
First it is argued that it cannot. If it could, it would follow that
a magnitude would be actually augmentable without limit. This
consequence is contrary to what Aristotle said in the third [book] of
the Physics and to what Campanus said in the first [book] of this
[work], where he laid down the difference between magnitude and
number, namely, that number increases without limit and does not
decrease and that for magnitude the opposite is true. But, the consequence follows [from the antecedent], for, from the fact that the
addition happens without limit, the magnitude will be augmented
without limit, since it is added on to through the addition.
It is argued the opposite way that whatever can be removed
from some magnitude can be added to another. But subtraction
from some magnitude can take place according to such parts without limit, in this way, therefore, it can be proved that [a magnitude]
is augmentable without limit.
An example may be offered of a right triangle and an acute
angle, or of two right angles. Let there be a line on top of another
which makes two right angles which are a and b. Then a line, c,
turns toward one extremity, d. It is now argued thus: as much as
angle b decreases through this motion, so much angle a increases. It
is clear that whatever is removed from angle b is added to angle a.
But angle b decreases doubly, threefold, fourfold and so on without
limit, therefore angle a increases without limit.
For the sake of the question, it must be noted first what the
ratio of equality is and it is [the ratio] between equals. Another
[kind of ratio] is the ratio of greater inequality which is [the ratio]
of the greater to the lesser, such as, four to two. And another [kind]
is of lesser inequality which is of the lesser to the greater, such as
two to four. And these names differ according to the relation of
position and supposition as is clear in what has been said. And it follows from this that addition to a quantity can take place in three
ways.
Second, it must be noted that if addition be made according to
proportional parts [applied] without limit in either a ratio of equality or [one] of greater inequality, the whole will be without limit. If,
in turn, it is made according to a ratio of lesser inequality, [the
whole] will never be unbounded although the addition be made
ANASTAPLO
55
without limit. This is because the whole will have a fixed and
definite ratio to the [magnitude] assumed at the start, that is, to that
[magnitude] to which the addition is made, as will be explained
later.
Finally, it must be noted that each [magnitude which is] less
than another, but bears a fixed ratio to the other, is called in relation [to the other] either the fraction or fractions of it or the part
or parts [of it]. And this is clear in the definitions of the seventh
[book] of Euclid. And the lesser is named by the two numbers, of
which one is called the numerator and the other, the denominator,
as is clear in the same [text]. For example, one is less than two and
so it is called with respect to two one half, and with respect to three
one third, and so on. And two is called with respect to three twice
one third, and with respect to five twice one fifth. And they ought
to be written in this way, the two is called the numerator and the
five is called the denominator.
The first conclusion is that if a quantity of one foot be assumed
and addition be made to it without end according to the subduplicate ratio, so that first one half of a foot is added to it, then a fourth,
then an eighth and so on without limit, doubling the subduplicate,
the whole will be exactly twice the [magnitude] assumed at the
start. This is clear since if from some [quantity] parts are taken away
according to this order, exactly double of what is removed first will
be removed [ultimately] from the whole, as is clear from the first,
that is, the preceding question. Therefore the same argument
applies if the parts are added [to a magnitude].
The second conclusion is that if some quantity, such as a foot
be assumed, and then a third as much is added, and afterwards a
third of the addition, and so on without limit, the whole will be
exactly a foot and a half [long]. That is, it will be in the ratio of the
sesquialtern to the magnitude assumed at the start. And with regard
to this, the following rule should be recognized, that we ought to
see by how much the second part falls short of the first and the third
of the second and so on with respect to the others and to call that
[quantity] by its denomination and the ratio of the aggregate whole
to the magnitude assumed [at the start] will be as the ratio of the
denominator to the numerator. For example, in the case proposed,
the second part which is one third of the first falls short of the first
by two thirds, therefore the ratio of the whole to the first part or to
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the [magnitude] assumed [at the start] is as three to two, and this is
the sesquialtern.
The third conclusion is this, that it is possible that an addition
be made to some quantity according to unproportional ratios of
lesser inequality and the whole will be unlimited [in magnitude],
notwithstanding. But if this be done proportionally, the whole will
be bounded as has been said. For example, let the quantity assumed
be of one foot, to which half of a foot is added in the first proportional part of the hour, then a third in the next, then a fourth, then
a fifth and so on without limit according to a succession of numbers.
I say that the whole will be without limit, which is proved in this
way. There exist in this case an unlimited number of which any one
will be greater than one half, therefore the whole will be without
bound. The antecedent of this argument is clear since a third and a
fourth are more than a half and similarly [the terms] from a fifth to
an eighth are greater than a half and so too are [those] from an
eighth to a sixteenth and so on without limit.
In response to the arguments raised in opposition: “it follows
magnitude” and so on, it can be stated that a magnitude will be augmented without limit. One sense of “without limit” can be with reference to the act of augmenting and in this sense it can be conceded that such an actuality can come about in an unlimited number of
ways, as long as [the augmentation] is continued. But this is an
improper sense [of “without limit”] and it follows rightly from the
question that another sense is proper. Because [to say] that it will be
augmented doubly, quadruply and so on without limit is false and
does not follow from the question.
In response to the other argument, namely, when it was argued
about the angle that “it will be augmented as much” etc. I say that
there is a need for a distinction here since “as much” and “so much”
can denote an arithmetical ratio which extends to the extent of the
quantity of the excesses; in such a case, I concede the major premise [that a will be augmented by as much as b is diminished] and
deny the minor since the supposed solution does not occur [namely, that neither a nor b suffers change without limit]. Alternately
[“as much” and “so much”] can denote a geometrical ratio and in
this case, I deny the major since a will not be augmented in such a
ratio as b is diminished, but it is required that a will be augmented
by as much as b is diminished. And it can be argued in this way concerning any other quantity or quality and this is clear since when
ANASTAPLO
57
the angle b is diminished doubly, the angle a is not augmented doubly, rather it is said to be augmented doubly when c turns all the
way down to d and that will be when b is fully diminished and corrupted. And thus the response to the question is clear, so ends the
question.
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59
In Memoriam
Leo Raditsa (1936-2001)
Toast to the Senior Class
May 12, 2000
Leo Raditsa
To say farewell, I would like to tell you: You are teaching
me—a much harder thing than teaching you. It started the
day I walked into a classroom thirty-five years ago at NYU.
For a long time I fought it.
Coming across takes two. To accept is harder than giving.
And unless there is movement in both directions, little confidence lives. For a teacher, ceasing to hang on to his knowledge takes years.
You give me a lot also in the things you don’t say, in your
obvious tact, in your experience in putting up with things you
cannot do much about. I mean your savvy, your readiness to
put up with imperfection in your work and your teachers,
and, above all in your readiness to go on—I always fear I
might stop. Most of all, your sense of humor, which amounts
to saying you are really there and not living in distraction,
shows me something I do not readily see.
I only began to understand this undoing in me, that I was
beginning to lose my fear of students, when memories of my
teachers crowded upon me: actual faces and voices. I grew
astonished at the number of very great teachers I had had. I
had had little sense these paintings lived in me. They came to
life in me when I let go of what these teachers had given me.
Dealing with you slowly brought me to move on my own. So
Leo Raditsa, tutor at St. John’s College since 1973, was editor of The St.
John’s Review from 1978 to 1982. His essay, “The Collapse of Democracy at
Athens and the Trial of Socrates,” is printed below.
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as I toast you in a minute, in my heart I will also toast my
teachers, and the ragged world I now realize they knew I
would live in. In this way the present lives the past’s strength.
For you, too, what you give your teachers may be the
more important way you learn from them, for this giving
means you are strengthening your wings. So I toast these
beginnings in you which may not be yet obvious to you, and
maybe not to us.
Your capacity to understand you are students impresses
me, your savvy and sense of solidarity with your peers, your
readiness to converse with each other, the prerequisites for
independence, and your readiness to respect your teachers,
and yet your ability to size them up, to live with their defects,
to be truly, not defensively, critical of them. In short your
willingness to make the best of it. You also teach me a sense
of measure—something that cannot be learned in books. I
mean proportion where all living beauty hides….
I wish you fortitude and endurance in these beginnings,
and also the courage to change your minds, and above all the
courage to listen to your inner voice, for nobody can really
make those choices except yourself. When you feel fright
before those choices, when you wake up and wonder whether
you have an education, it is a sign that your education has
taken hold: You are on your own. Without standing being
lost, there is little chance of beginning. I wish you also the
courage of going through the eye of the needle—not all the
time but sometimes—of daring to be true to your feelings, I
wish you the capacity to take risks and to take disappointment.
More importantly, I have learned from you that the only
virtues you can learn are the ones you see before your eyes,
not the ones you read of in books. They cannot be read alone.
You help me read the book of life.
I raise a toast to you from us your teachers, to your
future, and to teaching as a two-way street, something you
teach me.
61
The Collapse of Democracy at
Athens and the Trial of Socrates
Leo Raditsa
Thucydides did not finish his account of the “intense movement” (so he named it) among the Greek peoples that he
judged to be the greatest event of history including the Trojan
War. The incompleteness of Thucydides’ account suggests it
never ended—and perhaps there is some truth in that. For the
kind of war—and in his opening paragraph he carefully
defines it—Thucydides describes, without specific political
aims and which proceeds by revolution, is difficult to end.
One can terminate hostilities, but to make peace: that is
another, much more difficult matter.
The crisis which we call the Peloponnesian War did, however, come to some sort of end and it is about that end and
what came after it, especially the trial of Socrates, that I am
going to talk to you tonight. The period runs roughly from
410 to 399, the year of Socrates’ trial.
The historical question I wish to face is what the relation
is of the trial of Socrates to the collapse of democracy which
occurred at Athens with the slow ending of the war. To put it
simply, why was Socrates prosecuted in 399 instead of some
time earlier, for instance, in 423 when Aristophanes had The
Clouds produced?
Xenophon, who begins his narrative about where
Thucydides leaves off, does not mention the trial of Socrates,
although he does mention Socrates’ attempt when he was in
Prytany to prevent the illegal trial of the generals who had
commanded at Arginusae in 406. Diodorus Siculus mentions
the trial, but only in passing, the way he mentions the death
of Sophocles in 406. I think ancient historians did not include
the trial of Socrates in their compositions because they understood history to deal with the public life of a city, of its
This lecture was delivered at the Annapolis Campus on February 18, 1977.
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officers and of its citizens in public assembly and in battle.
They did not conceive history to include the relation of private to public life, something which was the subject of much
of Socrates’ activity. Although Socrates was charged with a
public crime— graphe, not a dike, which referred to a civil
suit, as Socrates reminded Euthyphro at the start of his conversation with him—he was charged as a private citizen, not
as an office holder.
There was another and deeper reason for not including
the trial of Socrates in the ancient accounts of the period. In
contrast to Plato—and in this he is profounder than Plato—
Xenophon admits that he does not understand how it could
have happened that Socrates was tried and condemned. That
is, Socrates made him question the world his eyes saw, and
this involuntary questioning is Xenophon’s greatest tribute to
Socrates. But this questioning did not extend to history. For
Xenophon, history bore some relation to tragedy. But public
men and cities suffered tragedy. To include the trial of
Socrates in his composition Xenophon would have had to
conceive of the tragedy of a private man. He could not—like
most Athenians.
Think on it a second. All the Athenian tragedies are about
public individuals, kings and princes, when they are not about
Gods. There is something radically wrong with the way we
read tragedies, as if they were about the lives of private individuals. The private individuals, the individuals who hold no
office, appear in comedies. There they trip over their fantasies, which they take for actions, grow embarrassed at
themselves, at the greatness they feel trapped in their insides
but which betrays them when they open their mouths. There
they grow haughty with their magnificent and outrageous
gods. It is a measure of what happened at Athens that a generation after he had been subject to a comedy, Socrates
became protagonist of an event that the best of his contemporaries knew they could not understand.1 For it was the
tragedy of a private man. Even now we cannot easily inte-
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63
grate the trial of Socrates into the history of Athens and of the
other Greeks, just as historians of the Roman empire hardly
ever include the trial of Jesus in their accounts of that period.
The Collapse of Democracy at Athens
The last years of the war [and following years], the period
from 411 to 401, represent the precipitation of that crisis in
leadership which we call the Peloponnesian War. It is the period of the war in which the war became more and more something that happened to Athens and something that Athens did
to herself. It is also the period in which Sparta took to the sea
and in which Persia became increasingly deeply involved.2
The events of 411, the formation of the oligarchic government of the Four Hundred and then of the Five Thousand,
which represented a reaction to the Sicilian disaster, not only
shook Athens’ domestic political confidence. They isolated
Athens in the Greek world. The oligarchic revolutions in
other allied cities which had accompanied the changes at
Athens in 411 had not served, as the oligarchs at Athens had
expected, to make settlement with the Lacedaimonians possible, but had instead contributed to bringing these cities under
Lacedaimonian sway. Everywhere there was instability, and
the cities lived on the brink of civil war. At Athens itself the
situation was tense—the democracy had passed strict laws
encouraging the punishment of those who had been involved
in the oligarchic movement of 411. There were many exiles.
The division which had occurred with the coming of the oligarchs in 411 had not been overcome. In an important sense
Athens in 410 was no longer one city but two. This meant
nobody knew what might happen next.
With the weakening of the predominance of Athens and
her instability, other Greek cities grew more aggressive in
their views. For the first time during the Peloponnesian War,
Greek leaders, especially the Spartans, reckoned with public
opinion outside of their cities. For instance, Pausanias, one of
the kings of Sparta, is said to have intervened in the Athenian
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civil war at the end of the period of the Thirty because he
feared the consequences to the reputation of Sparta if the
slaughters of the Thirty continued.
In the first part of this period, the six years leading up to
the destruction of almost the entire Athenian fleet at
Aegospotami in September 405, the war was largely at sea for
both sides. The sea war of these six years took place mainly
in the Hellespont and in the Bosporus, and along the adjoining coasts of Thrace and Asia Minor with its three major
islands, Lesbos, Chios and Samos. It was through these straits
that many of the Athenian grain ships sailed. When she challenged Athens in this area, Sparta was aiming at her life lines,
but not, in the beginning, at least, for total victory. For after
several of the major battles she attempted to negotiate with
Athens. For the first time in the war Athens was on the defensive in a way she had never been when Sparta had wasted
Attica in the first years of the war.
For her part Sparta appeared to be without a coherent
policy in this period. Her most noble commander drowned at
the battle of Arginusae; Callicratidas tried to keep free of
Persian entanglements; but Lysander, the Spartan commander who was to bring the war to an end, had no scruples about
taking all the money he could from Persia for building the
fleet and paying its crews.
The main events of this period were the return of
Alcibiades to Athens in 407; the victory of the Athenian fleet
at Arginusae in 406 and the unlawful trial and execution of
the generals of the fleet which followed upon it; Lysander’s
destruction of the Athenian fleet at Aegospotami in the fall of
405; and the collapse of Athens in the period 405-401, especially after the siege and surrender, in the fifteen months
which run from [April] 404 to [May] 403, when the Thirty
were in power.
Of these events the collapse of Athens or the time of the
Thirty, as it is usually called, was the most devastating. The
experience of Athens during this period left an indelible
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65
impression on the whole ancient world. People thought of it
with the same horror as the men of Colonus looked upon the
face of Oedipus. Sallust’s Caesar, written during the death
agony of the Roman Republic, in the face of the procriptions
of the young Octavian, recalls the horrors of the years of the
Thirty at Athens with a vividness which makes one imagine
Sallust had lived through the time. The Thirty, who were led
by two of his closest relatives, and Socrates’ trial—these were
the two central experiences of Plato’s life.
Somehow no matter what she did Athens always wounded herself. This is the terrible sense of this last decade and
earlier—for it really started at Melos in 416. When the
Athenian people illegally condemned commanders they suspected to be innocent after the great victory at Arginusae in
406, they hurt themselves. As Socrates later pointed out,
when they violated their own laws they discredited themselves, destroyed their public life and made themselves incapable of recognizing and standing up to their real enemies.
In Socrates’ presence Athenians knew they were doing
this to themselves. This is the meaning of Alcibiades’ wonderful and terrifying remark that Socrates was the only man
in Athens who made him feel ashamed. In Socrates’ presence
he could not fool himself—he knew that what he did somehow betrayed what he was. Alcibiades meant that Socrates
made him feel alive. Socrates gave men something like the
feeling you sometimes get from infants when they make you
wonder how you have become what you are.
Alcibiades’ return to Athens in 407, with his appearance
before the council and the assembly and his election to position of Commander in Chief, made a deep impression on
Athens. They saw him now almost like an outcast, like
Oedipus, forced to live beyond the protection of the laws, his
life always in danger, in Sparta and Persia. Here was the man
who in his life, almost in his person, summed up most of the
destructive and constructive actions of the years since 415:
the castration of the Hermae and the parody of the mysteries
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(from which he was exonerated), the expedition against
Syracuse, the Spartan fortification of Decelea in Attica, and
the involvement of Persia in the war—and constructively and
more recently, the prevention of civil war during the oligarchic crisis in 411 and the re-establishment of Athenian
control of the Propontis and the Bosporus in 410.
When Alcibiades sailed into the Piraeus he waited cautiously, without disembarking, for his friends and relatives to
escort him up to the city. To many, both rich and poor,
democrats and oligarchs, he seemed like the one individual
capable at the same time of overcoming the division which
remained within the city and of prosecuting the war with
intelligence.
But something like six months later he was either not reelected or removed from his command because a subordinate—against his express orders—engaged Lysander and lost
fifteen Athenian ships. He went into exile on his estate in the
Chersonese. The great expectations had come to nothing—
the crisis continued.
Almost a year apart, the two great naval disasters at
Arginusae and Aegospotami were in a sense both self-inflicted. I call Arginusae a disaster even though it was an Athenian
victory, because its repercussions at home did much to discredit the unstable democracy. When Athens learned that the
Spartan commander Callicratidas had encircled the Athenian
commander Conon at Mytilene she sent out a hastily-gathered fleet of 110 ships which she manned with free men and
slaves (who were later awarded their freedom).
Immediately after the Athenian victory a storm suddenly
rose which prevented the Athenian commanders from picking
up the several thousand dead and survivors floating in the
rammed and waterlogged ships that had not sunk. At Athens,
the news of the losses blunted the joy of victory. Following a
little after the news, the Apaturia, a festival which drew
together families to acknowledge births and marriages, made
the grief worse.
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67
The matter came up in the council and the assembly.
Under the influence of their politicians the people seemed
unable to accept that some things are not under human control, that a storm occurs in “divine necessity,” as one speaker
put it.
Their politicians dominated them by nourishing their
yearning to make someone responsible for everything.
Theramenes, an important and able politician who had been
a subordinate commander at Arginusae, accused his superiors
of neglect. There was debate both in council and assembly,
and the six generals who had dared to come back to Athens
defended themselves ably and with witnesses, even though
they had not yet been formally accused. At the point when it
appeared the generals would win some kind of release the
assembly was adjourned.
In a subsequent assembly it was proposed to vote on the
guilt of the generals as a group and to count their previous
testimony as a trial—all highly illegal. A brave speaker in the
assembly attempted to stop the proceedings on the grounds
of unconstitutionality (the graphe paranomon); but the people, turning into a mob, threatened him. This was the first,
crucial attempt to resort to the graphe paranomon since it had
been restored after the Four Hundred had abolished it in
411.3 It failed. But the grounds of the illegality had been
clearly stated in the assembly. The crowd also intimidated all
of the council except Socrates when it sought to keep the
motion for sentencing from the assembly. The generals were
condemned as a group and immediately executed.
Sometime later the people regretted their action, as they
had been warned they would in the assembly. They turned
upon their leaders and prosecuted them, depriving one of
them of fire and water. But it was too late. All along they had
known what they were doing was wrong, but they could not
stop it. Against the speaker who had opposed them they had
shouted that it was unthinkable that the people should not be
allowed to do whatever they desired.
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After Arginusae the tension in many of the cities
increased. Returned as acting Commander of the Spartan
fleet, Lysander, with headquarters at Ephesus, supported the
so-called oligarchs in a bloody seizure of power at Miletus.
Four hundred of the wealthy and prominent citizens of
Miletus were executed in the market place. For his predecessor Callikratidas’s attempt to lead the Greek cities with
words, Lysander substituted terror, for which party labels
were mere pretexts. In Karia, a city allied to Athens was
wiped out.
Sailing from Samos, the Athenian fleet found no support
among the Greek cities. Except for Mitylene, all Asia turned
away from Athens. When news came that Lysander was retaking Lampsacus on the Hellespont almost the entire Athenian
fleet, one hundred and eighty ships, sailed to Aegospotami, a
barren stretch of beach just fifteen stades (a stade is 600 feet)
across the water from Lampsacus. Despite Alcibiades’ warning—from his estate on the Chersonese he watched the whole
disaster take shape before his helpless eyes—the Athenian
commanders remained in their exposed position and offered
battle to the Spartans for four days. On the fifth day Lysander
surprised the Athenians after they had disembarked and
destroyed or captured more or less their whole fleet. It was
the Fall of 405.
At Athens they prepared for siege: all the harbors except
one were filled up, walls were repaired and guards put on
them. The city sought a hasty and incomplete unity in the
restoration of full citizen rights to those who had been partially deprived in the previous troubles. But they did not
recall the exiles.
At Aegospotami in assembly with the allies of Sparta,
Lysander executed one of the Athenian commanders, because
he had been the first to break the international law of the
Greek cities. He had hurled the captured crews of two ships
of Sparta’s allies from a precipice, and in the assembly at
Athens he had supported a motion to cut off the thumbs of
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69
all prisoners of war and make them incapable of ever rowing
again. Lysander also showed himself as the undoer of
Athenian outrages: at Melos, Torone, Scione and Aigina he
restored the remaining original inhabitants.
From Chalcedon and Byzantium on the Bosporus and
elsewhere, Lysander set the Athenian garrison loose on the
condition that they sail nowhere else but to Athens. He wanted to burden Athens with as many mouths as possible.
Everywhere the Greek cities turned to Sparta.
But at Samos, the other port of the Athenian fleet, the
democracy held, and again knew itself in the slaughter of
prominent citizens. For the first time since before the Persian
wars, Athens was cut off from the sea, closed in upon herself—Athens, whom almost ten years before, Peisthetaerus in
the Birds had called “the city of the lovely triremes.”
Throughout the whole winter and until April of the following year, 404, Athens and the democracy resisted—and
people starved. There was an early attempt at negotiation in
which Athens offered to accept Sparta’s leadership in alliance,
a situation that would have allowed her considerable independence. But at Sparta the Ephors insisted on tearing down
part of the walls. In response the people at Athens forbade
any motions concerning peace. Men grew convinced that any
terms with Sparta meant the fate of Melos.
In this tense and dangerous situation Theramenes managed to persuade the assembly to let him find out from
Lysander whether the Spartans wanted to destroy the long
walls to reduce Athens to slavery, or simply as a guarantee of
their good conduct. Theramenes remained with Lysander
who was besieging Samos until with the worsening situation
at Athens the assembly granted him power to negotiate.
The new terms which the Lacedaimonians and their allies
offered were much harsher than the previous demands of the
Ephors: Athens was to have the same friends and enemies as
Sparta. (In our terms this meant Athens lost the capacity for
an independent foreign policy.) She was to tear down the long
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walls. Her fleet was not to number more than twelve ships.
The exiles were to return.
When Theramenes returned to the starving city with
these terms, men crowded around him in fear—but in the
assembly there was still some resistance to surrender. In acting as go-between between the Athenian democrats who
desired to resist to the end and the probably undecided
Spartans Theramenes had saved his native city from total
destruction—or rather from destroying itself. To the intoxicating sound of flutes, Lysander had sections of the long walls
torn down. The Spartans and the returning Athenian exiles,
according to Xenophon, imagined that that day meant the
beginning of freedom for the Greeks. It was April 404.
In the following month the Athenian assembly, in the
presence of Lysander, voted to give thirty men the power to
revise the laws and reform the constitution. The Thirty promised to make the city clean and honorable and to impel the
citizens to justice and excellence. Plato, then twenty-four
years old, and many others, perhaps even Lysias (a speech
writer, son of Cephalus and brother of Polemarchus, who
appear in the first book of the Republic), believed in them at
first.
The commission delayed the reform of the laws, but
appointed magistrates and council, and started to rule. Before
the council and with public balloting, they tried and killed
notorious sycophants, individuals who had used the threat of
prosecution for extortionary purposes. Although illegal, these
killings won wide consent among the citizens, because men
felt they were justified.
Soon, however, Critias, a close relative of Plato and an
interlocutor of Socrates, asked Lysander for a Spartan governor and garrison to support him in dealing with unruly and
subversive elements. With Spartan troops behind them, the
Thirty now began to kill all individuals who might oppose
them, and whose property would furnish the money necessary for the support of the Spartan garrison.
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71
At these outrages many went into exile, including Anytos
(who later instigated the prosecution of Socrates) and
Thrasybulus, who was to lead the democrats. Megara and
Thebes teemed with Athenian exiles despite Sparta’s order
forbidding any Greek city to receive them. (By January 403,
when the Thirty left Athens for Eleusis, where they had exterminated the population, perhaps as much as half of the male
population had left Attica.)
Among the Thirty themselves the outrages also produced
opposition. Theramenes, who knew the distinction between a
moderate oligarchy and terror, told Critias that they were
now much worse than the sycophants of the democracy who
had extorted money, but not killed for it. Critias answered,
brutally, that changes of constitution required killing: “How
do you think thirty can rule over many without terror?”
Critias now disarmed all the population except three
thousand of the more wealthy. All except these three thousand could be arrested and executed without trial. As Socrates
later pointed out in his own trial, Critias sought to dominate
by involving as many as possible in his outrages. Under the
swords of the Spartan garrison he compelled the Three
Thousand to condemn the inhabitants of Eleusis to death.
When he could no longer tolerate the free-spokenness of
Theramenes, he made the council his accomplice in his death.
Sometime during the early winter of 404, Thrasybulus,
with about seventy followers, took the border fortress of
Phyle which overlooked the whole Attic plain to Athens. The
Thirty immediately responded, but were repulsed in a minor
skirmish. This minor setback shattered their confidence and
showed that their cowardice matched their brutality.
Sometime after this Thrasybulus, now with something
like seven hundred badly armed followers, took the section of
the Piraeus called Munychia. There in pitched battle the men
of the Piraeus, as they now came to be called, managed to
defeat the Thirty and the Three Thousand. Critias, first
cousin to Plato’s mother, and Charmides, his uncle, were
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both killed. Mindful that the enemy dead were citizens, the
men of the Piraeus did not strip their bodies. They sought
instead to use their victory to shake the by now largely forced
loyalty of many of the Three Thousand (especially those who
had not committed crimes) to the Thirty. Shortly after the
battle the Three Thousand removed the Thirty from office
and elected twelve to rule. The Thirty and their followers fled
to Eleusis. It was January, 403.
At this point Athens was no longer a living city but three
factions, one in the city, one in the Piraeus, and one in Eleusis.
From Eleusis the Thirty sent men whom they fancied ambassadors to Lysander, saying there had been a revolt of the mob
at Athens and requesting his help. Intent on surrounding the
democrats at the Piraeus, Lysander managed the appointment
of his brother as naval commander and authorization for
himself to hire mercenaries. But Pausanias, one of the kings
of Sparta, alarmed at the thought that Lysander might turn
Athens into his private possession, convinced the Ephors and
the Spartan assembly—ostensibly to help Lysander, but actually to prevent the destruction of the men of the Piraeus.
Pausanias’s expedition, with the Spartan army, amounted
almost to a reopening of the war. In fact, Thebes and Corinth
refused to join, because they said Athens had not violated any
of her treaty agreements. With Spartan authority to come to
a settlement, Pausanias managed to negotiate an agreement in
which both the oligarchs of the city and the democrats of the
Piraeus agreed not to fight each other. At Pausanias’s insistence they also agreed to return property expropriated under
the Thirty to its owners. The constitution of the democracy
was restored. It was probably August 403, fifteen months
after the assembly had first elected the Thirty.
For the next two years Athens lived in fear of renewed
attempts to undo the democracy. In 401, upon rumors that
the Thirty at Eleusis were hiring mercenaries, the whole city
took arms and went out to meet them. During the ensuing
negotiations the men of the city killed the commanders from
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Eleusis and managed a reconciliation with their followers,
with the help of their relatives and friends in Athens.
Either at this time or two years earlier, in August 403,
when Pausanias negotiated the reconciliation, every individual in Athens swore not to bear grudges for anything in the
past. This meant nobody could prosecute for offenses under
the Thirty, probably including the expropriation of property
which Pausanias had sought to undo. The agreement to forget did not cover the Thirty, “the twelve” who had committed their “executions,” and several other categories. It was
contractual and could only be enforced upon appeal from
individuals in court. (Andocides, for instance, appeals to it in
his speech “On the Mysteries” in 399, the year of the trial of
Socrates.)4
Athens After The Thirty and the Trial of Socrates
The atmosphere in Athens after the Thirty was somewhat
unreal. It had become a city that feared disturbances and
feared itself. It also remained in an important sense two cities.
When you spoke at Athens during this time you always
addressed two audiences, the men of the city and the men of
the Piraeus. In these years Lysias spoke directly to a deep
sense of unease and complicity with terrifying events which
must have prevailed among the majority of Athenians. For the
heroes of Phyle and Piraeus had been few. Lysias understood
the deep struggle for self-respect Athenians waged during this
time. “The Thirty killed my brother,” he says, “they even
made it hard to bury him—I will not forget.” “Then, under
the Thirty, you were afraid,” he tells the judges, “but now
there is nothing stopping you from voting the way you desire,
now there are no excuses.”
Lysias attacked Theramenes, not distinguishing him in
any way from Critias. Theramenes had betrayed the trust the
people had shown him and brought the city down in starvation. Everything that had occurred in the assembly which
voted authority to the Thirty in the spring of 404 had been
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arranged beforehand, secretly, between Lysander and
Theramenes. The vote had not been freely taken. If the Thirty
had not killed Theramenes the democracy would have had
to—a remark that, in its inverted way, pays a deep compliment to Theramenes.
In all the violence the only obvious palpable tie that
remained between the factions was the gods; to them the city
now made appeal. Of the Thirty, Lysias said, “they wanted us
to participate in their shame instead of the gods, to substitute
complicity with them for our common relation to the gods.”
He also described the Thirty as men who believed their
power to be firmer than the vengeance of the gods—something quite like the Melians had said to the Athenians.
When the men of the Piraeus addressed the Three
Thousand after their defeat in January 403, they spoke first
of their common gods. Immediately after Pausanias had succeeded in bringing peace between the factions, Thrasybulus
went up to sacrifice on the Acropolis: he meant to reaffirm
that Athens belonged to Athena, who lived on the Acropolis.
Perhaps Euthyphro exemplifies this newfound, somewhat
showy piety of Athens after the Thirty. It is full of unquestioning assurance—and yet at a loss for words.
With this piety there was a forced and unconvincing blustering patriotism. Andocides did not blush to compare the
Athens of the year of Socrates’ trial with the Athens of the
Persian wars. Anytos showed the brittle, touchy confidence of
these years when he takes “personal” (as we would say)
offense at Socrates’ observation (in the Meno) that the sons of
the pillars of the community had not turned out so well.
People yearned for conviction, but were incapable of it.
Socrates came from another world—the world of Athens
and the Greeks before the Peloponnesian War. At its outbreak
in 431 he was about 40, and already famous throughout at
least the Greek world. Men came from as far as Cyrene to listen to him.5 This is the Athens of the fifty years between the
Persian and the Peloponnesian War, the Athens that neither
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feared itself or others. It was a city that did not fear the unexpected. A city in which important things besides crime happened on the streets. In fact, to that street life and its casual
encounters, to how one can live on the streets, Socrates is one
of our greatest witnesses. I think his refusal to wear sandals
speaks of his feel for that life and of his insistence on its
importance.
Another witness to that street life is Herodotus, whose
book, like the Odyssey, is also a book of manners.
Although—or perhaps because—careful and cautious,
Herodotus is confident and respectful of his readers’ intelligence, of their capacity to think. Socrates has the same
respect for the intelligence of the people he encounters. He
could tolerate the movement of other peoples’ minds (when
they did actually move) and he knew that movement to be as
unexpected as truth. That is why he preferred to talk, to listen as well as to speak, rather than to write or teach.
Unlike Herodotus, Socrates did not travel—as he
remarks, he never left town. Even when everybody went to a
festival, he remained behind with the cripples and beggars in
the deserted silent city. Herodotus instead went everywhere
with the same ease that Socrates stayed home. Both give an
example of the best kind of courage, the unassuming kind,
the kind that does not have to prepare a face to meet the faces
that you meet.
The Athenians of that time were used to living in a world
that strengthened them, in a world where the throbbing glow
of the sky was palpable, in a world that knew nuance, that
could see the shape of the human body because it knew it to
be more than the sum of its parts. Pericles says Athens was
largely free of the jealousy of the lives of others which contributed so much to the later hatred of Socrates. In the presence of Herodotus and Socrates one feels one’s pretensions
like a kind of awkwardness that one could drop.
The only man who breathed this confidence during the
Peloponnesian War besides Socrates was Aristophanes.
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Aristophanes knew, in the way he appears to know everything, that in this time you could only breathe it in laughter,
his kind of laughter which serves for reverence and respect.
Alcibiades knew this confidence lives, but it always eluded his
grasp although he traveled the world to seek it—when he
knew perfectly well (but only Socrates could make him admit
it) you could only find it at home.
This kind of unassuming confidence cannot be experienced without remembering Aeschylus, a man with strength
enough to have compassion for a god. Significantly, during
the time of the war it is only Aristophanes who could
approach Prometheus with something equivalent, but at the
same time entirely different from, the pitiless tenderness of
Aeschylus.
Most of the spectators and judges at Socrates’ trial knew
nothing of this world of Athens before the Peloponnesian war
except what they saw before them in Socrates. Plato was born
ca. 429, Xenophon, who was not at the trial, perhaps in 435.
Meletos, Socrates’ official accuser, was perhaps Plato’s age,
certainly not much older; “a youthful defender of the youth,”
Socrates calls him. Ashamed at appearing in Court—for the
first time in his life, he emphasizes—Socrates at his trial felt
the weight of seventy years of living and the dignity they
demand. He says he did not prepare a speech because it was
not something for a man of his age to do—especially since his
whole way of life with its love of justice speaks for him—in
his defense.
Plato knew, of course, that Socrates came from another
world; in fact one major part of his work was remembering
and recreating a world he had never entirely known, but
which he knew to be destroyed. Remember that Plato lost
Socrates just after the experience of the Thirty had forced
him to acknowledge the dishonor of his family—perhaps not
of his parents, but of the brothers of one of his parents and
of another close relative. His repudiation of their acts is
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strong, and it awakens admiration. For Plato, the trial of
Socrates was a terrible as the time of the Thirty.
Plato’s love for Socrates is for a dead man; everything he
writes is about a man who has disappeared. Unlike
Aristophanes, Plato never had to face Socrates with any of his
writings. His writings were meant to substitute for Socrates,
to replace him, to keep him alive once he was dead. This is
the hardest illusion to deal with when you read Plato, the illusion that you are inside Socrates, that you are hearing his
voice. It is also the drama of reading Plato, who is an artist, a
different kind of artist than the poets, for he thought he was
not an artist.
With Xenophon it was different. He stayed outside of
Socrates. In Xenophon you can hear how Socrates’ voice
sounded to somebody who did not entirely understand
Socrates but who knew he did not understand him, who
knew he was out of his depth but had the courage to stay
there—that is rare. “I cannot forgive him, I cannot forget
him, the memories keep overwhelming me,” Xenophon says
somewhere with wonder. But unlike Plato, he never forgot
they were memories.
Socrates was charged with impiety. The specific charge,
which is preserved with slight variations by Xenophon and
Diogenes Laertius, was that he did not worship the gods that
the city worshipped and that he introduced new gods. The
second charge is that he destroyed the youth. There are other
examples of charges of asebeia [impiety] with other charges
attached to them. For instance, Aspasia was charged with asebeia and letting Pericles meet free women in her house. There
is a text of Aristotle that associates asebeia with disrespect for
parents and corrupting the youth. In any case it is clear that
corruption of the youth was a prosecutable offense.6
Plato’s stress on corruption of the youth accords with
Anytus’s own views. In the only direct quotation from his
speech we have, Anytus told the judges he had not expected
Socrates to appear in court, but once he had, they had no
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choice but to condemn him. Otherwise, he would ruin their
sons. In this Anytus agreed with the Thirty, who had actually
attempted to order Socrates not to speak to the young,
Anytus’s argument to the fathers to protect their sons is
the strongest kind of appeal. As Socrates points out in his
questioning of Meletus, it makes him responsible for all the
troubled youths in the city. How lucky they would be if I am
the only one who ruins them, Socrates remarks.
There is plenty of evidence of disturbed relations in
Athens between fathers and sons during the Peloponnesian
War. The son of Pericles in Xenophon speaks matter-of-factly of Athens as a place where sons held their fathers in contempt. You remember the struggle between Pheidippides and
Strepsiades in the Clouds, where there is little question of the
father holding the respect of his son. In the Birds there is a
scene between a youth who desires to murder his father and
Pisthetaerus, where Pisthetaerus manages to show him, by
conversation not unlike those of Socrates in Xenophon, that
he belongs on the Thracian front. Aristophanes means to
show here—and it is probably meant as a compliment to
Socrates—that the youth can be talked out of these wild fancies if there is anyone around who knows how to take the
time to talk to him. (Incidentally, in our world, where we do
not call things by their proper names, the would-be fatherkillers pass for revolutionaries.) There is in Xenophon also a
remarkable conversation of Socrates with his son who is
deeply angry with his mother. In all this we should keep in
mind that disrespect for parents carried severe penalties, perhaps even death.7
These disturbed relations between fathers and sons were
intensified by the war. Thucydides mentions the enthusiasm
of the youth for the war at its beginning. Pheidippides would
have been brought up in the country if it had not been for the
war.
Socrates was one of the few people in Athens willing to
look these troubles in the face rather than deny them and, by
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denying them, wish them away. Anytus instead wanted to
wish them away, in somewhat the way Iocasta tried to talk
Oedipus out of what he had learned—and then committed
suicide. “Because I can help,” Socrates says with something
like astonishment, “I am overwhelmed by their jealous rage,
as you put it, Euthyphro”—the word is phroneo, used elsewhere of the gods’ resentment of overreaching human beings.
Anytus’s relation to Meletus shows something of what
Anytus thought the proper relation of the elder generation
should be to the younger. He put Meletus up to charging
Socrates, Meletus who was just a kid in Socrates’ astonished
but fearful eyes. How did he dare accuse him of impiety?
Socrates asked. Did he not know what he was getting into?
With a charge of impiety anything could happen.
Meletus was one of those young men for whom the world
is unreal, for whom, as Socrates said of others, everything is
upside down. He was one of those youths who wished to be
serious but did not dare to be, who wanted to be a hero but
feared the risks. Anytus offered him the easy way out, the illusion of self-respect, the easy way to grow up: the role of protector of the city and of his peers. Socrates is fierce when he
questions Meletus, catching all the irresponsibility of that
pretended earnestness. Anytus trapped Meletus with his conceit—and to all intents and purposes ruined him.
Contrast Anytus’s manipulation of Meletos with
Socrates’s handling of Glaucon, Plato’s brother, as Xenophon
tells it. Like Plato, Glaucon at twenty wanted more than anything else to go into politics. Uncontrollable and the despair
of his family, he was making a fool of himself climbing up and
speaking in public, and doing the other things you did to have
a political career at Athens.
Socrates cared about him because of Plato and because of
Glaucon’s uncle Charmides, and because he must have had all
the charm of intelligence awakening. (There is always something important to be said for young men who dare to make
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fools of themselves in defiance of their family—as long as it is
of their own—and not to please somebody else.)
Socrates asked Glaucon some questions which incidentally show something that I do not think is apparent from Plato,
that Socrates had a fairly extensive knowledge of the facts of
Athenian politics. He asked how long Athens could live off
the agricultural production of the Attic countryside; how
much food she needed in general; what her expenses were;
what were her revenues—the list reads like a catalogue of the
facts Pericles had at the ready when he spoke to the
Athenians.
Glaucon could not answer any of these questions. At one
point he answers, “But, Socrates, I can make a guess.” “No,
when you know, we will talk.” Then Socrates asks him something else, “Why don’t you run your uncle’s estates?”
Glaucon answers innocently, “Because I cannot persuade him
to entrust them to me.” “You cannot persuade your uncle, but
you think you can persuade the city!”
This is pretty much the opposite of what Anytus did to
Meletus. It is the kind of humiliating conversation which
teaches the difference between dreams and facts, between
illusion and life—without learning that distinction (and it is
not something you learn in the head), you live your whole life
among the shades.
Politics is also a struggle to distinguish the actual from
illusions, enemies from friends, war from peace, what you
can do from what you cannot, and, most importantly, aggression from goodwill and life from death. In the fifteen years
preceding the trial of Socrates Athens had clearly failed in
that struggle, over and over again misjudging the situations.
When the consequences of those misjudgments turned to disaster, it grew difficult to put up with Socrates: he reminded
people of too much. Without wanting to he made Anytus feel
he was a bad father, and that there might be a connection
between the kind of father he was and the kind of political
leader he was. More generally, he made people feel they
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might have been responsible for what had happened to them.
Or, as he puts it to the judges, “You cannot hurt me but you
will hurt yourselves putting me to death.”
Nobody in public life after Pericles, and probably not
even Pericles, had been able to make people feel responsible
for what had happened. Socrates made them feel responsible
because he came in between the relations between generations. You remember how he says, “If I went abroad and had
conversations, the fathers would drive me into exile; and if I
did not, the sons would.” In Athens it had taken collusion
between generations, between Meletus and Anytus to prosecute him. For it is the relations between generations which
determine whether cities live or die or merely survive.
People had gone through disaster; they had seen their
fathers and brothers and children and friends killed. They
had taken that, but they could not take the dim but unmistakable sense they had in the presence of Socrates that these
disasters were of their own doing, that these disasters had to
do with how they thought and talked and what they were.
When Socrates told them they took better care of their slaves
than their friends, of their bodies than their lives, he reminded them, quite unwittingly, of that.
Because he knew his own smallness Socrates struck other
men as grand, boastful, even arrogant. Because he took his
own measure, he appeared to tower over other men who had
trouble telling themselves from gods. And this was intolerable, especially after the events of the last ten years had held
up their smallness to them. A generation before they had
laughed at him and respected him—now in the narrowness of
defeat, possessed by memories they could not face, they killed
him—because they feared themselves in him.
Notes
1
For the relation of The Clouds to Socrates, Bruno Snell, “Das frühste Zeugnis über Sokrates,” Philologus 97 (1948): 125-34;
Wolfgang Schmid, “Das Sokratesbild der Wolken,” Philologus 99
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(1948): 209-28; T. Gelzer, “Aristophanes und sein Sokrates,”
Museum Helveticum 13 (1956): 65-93.
2
On the sources for this period, S. Accame, “Le fonti di Diodoro
per la guerra Deceleica,” Rendiconti della R. Accademia dei Lincei
(Classe di scienze morali, sotriche e filologiche) 14 (sixth series),
1938, 347-451; “Trasibulo e i nuovi frammenti delle Elleniche di
Ossirinco,” Rivista di filologia classica 28 (1950): 30-49.
3
J. Hatzfeld, “Socrate au procès des Arginuses,” Revue des Etudes
Anciennes 42 (1940): 165.
83
Ovid, Banished
Publius Ovidius Naso relegatus non exsul.
The Decree of Banishment
He envies the ocean,
its coming and going,
4
its vast itinerary
and easy arrogance.
5
Certain days he leans
toward it, reaches
For the character of this agreement, Ugo Enrico Paoli, Studi sul
processo Attico, Padua, 1938, 121-142, especially 122; also, Studi
di diritto Attico, Florence, 1930.
Burnet, Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates and Crito,
(Oxford, 1970), especially v and the commentary to the Apology.
6 For
the charge, A. Menzel, Untersuchungen zum Sokrates Processe,
Abhandlung der Sitzungsber. d. kais. Akd. zu Wien 145, 1901-02,
especially 7-29. Also E. Derenne, Les procès d’impiété intentés aux
philosophes à Athènes au Ve et au IVe siècles avant J.-C., Liége,
1930; N. Casini, “Il processo di Socrate,” Iura 8, 1957, 101-120.
For the association of asebeia with disrespect for parents, Aristotle
“On Virtues and Vices,” 1251a31:asebeia men he peri theous plem˜
meleia kai peri daimonas e kai peri tous katoikhomenous kai peri
goneis kai peri patrida. Also see J. Lipsius (with Meier and
Schoemann) Das Attische Recht und Rechtsverfahren, Leipzig, 1908,
359.
For the death penalty for disrespect of parents (kakoseos goneon
˜ ˜
˜
graphe ), Lysias, 13, 91. As with many crimes, the penalty for disre˜
spect of parents was probably not specified (for leeway in Attic legal
procedure after conviction, U.E. Paoli, Processo Attico, Padua,
1938, 86-89. Recent scholars think disrespect for parents was usually punished with partial loss of citizen rights (atimia) for life, for
instance, with loss of the right to hold office and speak in the assembly—but not with the loss of private rights, such as the right to hold
property. L. Beauchet, Histoire du droit privé de la République
Athénienne, Paris, 1897, 1, 362-371; A.R.W Harrison, The Law of
.
Athens, Oxford, 1968, 1, 78-81.
to touch, and touching
touches what it has touched.
Then the poems come,
torrential, unstoppable,
each riding the back
of the one before,
their dolphin words
like news from home.
7
Leonard Cochran
Leonard Cochran, O.P is retired from the faculty of Providence College. He
.,
is a 1982 graduate from the Annapolis campus of the Graduate Institute.
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85
Philosophy Revived
Eva Brann
Those of our alumni who had really good Republic seminars won’t have forgotten the spectacularly innocuous beginning of all philosophizing that Socrates sets out in the seventh
book. He is talking to Plato’s brother Glaucon about an education not so unlike ours. Where and how does reflection
begin? With arithmetic. Take the one finger on your hand that
doesn’t even have an ordinary name, the fourth. It sends an
odd message: It’s always a finger, but it is long in respect to
the pinkie, short compared to the middle finger. The attentive
soul summons calculative thought to examine whether the
eye’s vision is announcing one or two things. If two, then
each is other and one. And yet they are together a Twosome;
is this Two itself a unity, a one? Now the soul is forced by its
perplexity to inquire whatever One Itself might be. Counting
and calculation is thus the “winch” to Being, and thoughtful
arithmetic turns the soul around to that invisible Being. In
another dialogue, the Phaedrus, quite another, an erotically
ecstatic beginning of the ascent to Being will be set out.
Stewart Umphrey’s book is the working out, meticulously reasoned and unflinchingly self-critical, of this humble
finger problem and its relation to the second beginning in the
ecstasy of love. But it is not a commentary on Platonic dialogues or on any of the writers—Hegel, Kant and a slew of
moderns—that the author calls on. Though he puts to good
use considerable philosophical learning, especially training in
logic, it is an instrumental use. He wields the precision tools
developed over two and a half millennia in the service of
Socrates’ great last care in the Phaedo: that the logos,
thoughtful conversation, should live and not die with him. I
used to think that commenting on major texts was by and
large the most respectable kind of philosophizing, since it
kept one honest, in the sense of preventing the inventive kind
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of originality that substitutes fascinating novelties for the
same old truth. Stewart Umphrey’s book, however, proves
that there is honest originality—the kind that makes straight
for the origin but by a unique route. It shows an independence of mind whose distinctiveness verges on eccentricity—
the kind that reaches the center by leaving the mainstream,
whose perspective rouses thought by being a little askew, by
shifting the world by a few degrees.
Stewart Umphrey’s distinctive mode is a sort of faith-ful
skepticism. His first book was in fact called Zetetic
Skepticism, a title alluding to the hypothesis that searching
inquiry (zetesis) can never be complete, that it is the indefeasible human condition not to be perfect in knowledge—and
that this is absolutely no reason not to carry on; not despair
but the energizing exercise of the intellect is the proper
response. Complexity and Analysis is, among other things, a
demonstration of the intellectual gymnastics that is at once a
preparation for and an expression of this illusion-stripped
faith. Of course, the reasons why it is best to keep inquiring
are detailed along the way.
The Law of Contradiction with the divisions and branchings it induces is what this author lives by—to begin with,
when the differentiations of analysis are wanted (“this is not
that”) and also later when distinctions in truth or falsity of
statements about complex entities are to be made (“either this
holds or that”). Some sections consist of very close reasoning,
but the purpose is not to deconstruct polemically but to discover peacefully what is the case; it never gets irritating. At
worst it is a sweaty workout, at best an illuminating high.
Sometimes a long argument ends in misgivings after all; often
the author, like a reasonable human being, admits to as-yetunreasoned preferences.
If readers may quail a little before the logic (yet—no pain,
no gain), they will be enchanted with the distinctive flavor of
the style, the underhanded wit, the anomalous vocabulary,
the dry logic that supports as it contains the soaring of
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thought. Did you ever think of newsstands as an exemplification of “the truthvalueless things we make,” or use “obvelation” as the obverse of revelation, or see a rational flow chart
of philosophic madness? And then there is occasional lyricism. —If you thought you knew your tutor, read the last
couple of pages of his book.
So far I’ve talked round about the book, but I want to give
some notion of its contents. Since for Stewart Umphrey the
good of philosophy is more (though not only) in the thinking
than in the thought, in the doing rather than the having done,
the text is practically beyond summary. Though it is full of
passionate belief, it contains no thesis that won’t be denatured by being baldly stated. So I’ll be picking small samples,
those that twang my logical funny bone or that speak to my
philosophical preoccupations.
The book has three parts: The first is about analysis and
its limits, thus about ways of knowing, epistemology. The second is about complexity, about the constitution of things that
are discernible in thought (here called “entities”), thus about
the inside workings of beings. (I have no idea why the order
of the complementary parts is reversed in the title of the
book, but have perfect faith that there is an interesting reason.) The last part draws the practical, the life-affecting consequences of the theoretical insights gained; it is thus about
human wholeness and what lies beyond.
“Analysis” in this book is a way of trying to know some
given whole by breaking it up into its constituents, be they
themselves entities or something else, something central to
the argument, namely “subentities,” “parts” that are not independently countable or even discernible in analytic thought,
yet somehow in evidence. Analysis deals comfortably only
with fairly independent countable components. Analysts are
clear and precise but not always deep and comprehensive.
They can capture complexity but have trouble with unity.
(They know that the finger contains two ideas, but not how
Two comes to be one.) Some of the darkness of our day is due
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to a case of bad analysis, to “analysitis” (“Things fall apart;
the centre cannot hold”), but reflectively used it is the beginning of understanding. Stewart Umphrey reviews the tensions
that arise in mathematics and the natural sciences between
analytic precision and comprehensiveness; the notes provide
helpful sketches of several formalizations of this dilemma,
two of which our seniors study: Gödel’s incompleteness
proof, showing that there is more in mathematics than proofs
can reach, and the Einstein-Podolski-Rosen argument that the
Heisenberg indeterminacy principle taken as a description of
the physical world is incomplete. One principal aspect of
what turns out to be the inherent paradox of analysis is thus
the Socratic problem: If you analyze an entity into, say, two
constituents, you’ve lost the one whole you were trying to
understand.
In the second chapter of this part, Aristotle’s metaphysics
is considered as a model display of the insufficiency of analysis. This presentation not only advances the agenda of the
book, it also enacts it: While showing why Aristotle has to
become “transanalytic” it attempts to understand his several
approaches (often made perspicuous in diagrams), and to
comprehend in one understanding his notion of natural
beings, of form and matter, essence and accidents, actuality
and potentiality, and of divine being—unsuccessfully, of
course. Anyone—all of us—who has ever wondered how
these perspectives jibe will find this exposition independently
illuminating.
“Complexity” describes the character of all thinkable and
interesting entities. (Recall the trouble Plato’s Parmenides
runs into in trying to think simple unity, the One.) The types
of entities are set out with respect to their constitution, from
the extremes of mere pluralities or heaps to undifferentiated
unities. In between are found the ones that matter: those with
definite components that are nevertheless real unities and
those that are real unities but with parts—subentities—not
discernible in analysis.
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Entities are now inventoried; facts, for instance, which
include relations or properties that seem to require a transanalytic “ontological glue” to hold them together with the
entity itself. Living individuals are particularly complex entities, and with respect to them we can’t help asking about their
center or essence, what each being really is. But the familiar
difficulty arises: The essence is what the individual is, but is it
one and the same with or other than the individual? In the
former case, knowing the essence adds nothing new to our
understanding; in the latter it yields nothing true about the
entity.
Individuals take up or partake in space, and so space must
be analyzed. Is it itself an entity, a whole? Are points its
“parts”? They certainly belong to the understanding of space,
but they are not its components. They are almost model
subentities; space is thus a complex entity with constituents
inseparable by analysis. The chapter on space is especially
interesting, not just as an acute dissection of the spatial features, but because space is the field of display for the non-analytic thinking that is needed to understand the subentitive
complexity which characterizes the wholes we most care
about. This kind of thinking is analogical. Analysis should, at
the least, give us clear and distinct components to go on with.
But while clarity belongs to the content of an entity, to its
own internal nature, distinctness pertains to its location, its
externally delimited place in “conceptual space.” Now the
discernible components of a complex entity are particularly
clearly and distinctly expressed in spatial representations
(such as the author draws in the Aristotle chapter and
throughout the book). But such spatial images also make visible indiscernible subentitive parts, for example points (see
below).
Why is spatial representation so illuminating? Because we
naturally analogize the mind itself to space—our spatial imagination is so close a neighbor to our intellect—and space is
the most potent field there is. Moreover, being itself transan-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
alytic, space is particularly apt for representing that kind of
complex entity.
Individuals also partake in universals through their
species. And universals in turn have similar problems: How is
the species a part of the universal? Is the universal genus composed of species? Then where’s the universal? So we again
have Socrates’ “One-out-of, or -over, or -beyond Many” perplexity. The author proposes yet another non-analytic kind of
understanding which he calls dialectical prismatics: If we
think of individuals (or species) as refractions of the universal, as white light is refracted into the color spectrum, then
we might, by looking through the prism backwards, so to
speak, sight the unitary source. Anyone trying to squint
through appearances at what is thinkable in them will recognize the experience of reverse prismatics.
In the section on universals (part of the chapter on entities) we may, moreover, discover that this member of our
community inclines toward “metaphysical realms of the ante
rem sort,” a fancy way of saying that ideas not only exist, but
exist both separately and before the world. But that’s
Platonic, glory be!
Next God is viewed prismatically and then negatively.
Like the reverse prism, the via negativa, seeing God through
what he’s not, is not analytic. The chapter on entities ends
with a section called “Everything,” for wisdom—which is
what philosophy is for—is the comprehensive understanding
of everything: whether all things form a whole and how, and
if not, why not. Extreme analysts, such as the logician Quine,
eliminate whatever it is that might make wholes of parts, such
as universals. They slash away whatever isn’t countable, as
the ultimate comprehensive unity certainly can’t be. They
wield what is here wittily called “Quine’s machete,” the crude
counterpart to “Ockham’s razor,” which deftly excises only
the truly unnecessary. Extreme “haplists” (from Greek haplous, “simple”), believers in a simply single being, like
Parmenides (though I don’t know another), think that there
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91
is one non-complex entity. Neither of their accounts is sufficiently accountable for what there is.
There follow three chapters on the ways of gaining
understanding that can supplement analysis. The chapter on
analogy, already mentioned, contains a sensible inquiry into
“likeness,” since analogy involves likeness; it is so much the
more welcome because some recent estheticians have pretty
much analyzed imitative resemblance away. The chapter ends
with precepts for the safe use of analogies. The one I take
most to heart is that philosophical analogies should be carefully framed as similes (“this is like that” rather than
metaphor (“this is that”), and that some of the dead
metaphors of our daily speech should be resurrected as
instructive similes. (My favorite is the contrastive pair
“eidos,” that which is like something seen, and “concept,”
that which is like something grasped.)
Dialectic is a second transanalytic way. Dialectic is a term
that has lived through many meanings. The author begins
with Hegelian dialectic. Again, here, apart from this book’s
agenda, is a good account of the main moments of this developmental logic, whose chief feature is that all the analytic
components are synthesized and reabsorbed into each other
and the whole. It is complemented by a critique, an inventory of the “myths” underlying its beginning, its progression, its
culmination, its very possibility for our thinking. A while ago,
Stewart Umphrey, Chester Burke, and I together read our
way—it took several years—through Hegel’s Science of Logic,
a great dialectical experience for all of us (which Stewart
kindly acknowledges); this critique revived for me our perplexities of long ago—now neatly marshaled.
The author then turns to the dialectic best known here at
the college: dialogue, conversation. “The soul of dialectic,”
he says, “is philosophy. Only secondarily are dialecticians
elenctic [refutational] wizards.” This kind of philosophical
reasoning does not dwell in beginnings or completions but
the in-between. It is both its own end (as a healthy activity)
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
and for a purpose (as the search for wisdom). He says much
more, of course, but the point is that dialectic implicitly
affirms the philosophic condition of incompleteness.
Finally there are the ways of negation. “Is it possible to
combine the metaphysical splendor of infinitistic realism
[faith in vague beings] with the epistemological refinement of
finitistic irrealism [unbelief in any imprecisely delimited entity]?” asks the author. “No,” he answers. “We’re caught then
between two opposing views, one of which appears decidedly pinched, the other decidedly vain.” Then follows a critique
of Kant’s transcendental dialectic, insofar as it means to show
that our deepest philosophic desires must remain forever
unmet because the dilemmas we burden ourselves with are
based on an illusion—that we can know things in themselves
apart from the constructions of our understanding. The
author shows precisely something that is eventually divined
by every student of Kant: the Critique of Pure Reason is perforce shot through with the very transcendence Kant wants to
cure. It is a book far more self-refuting and thus far more suggestive than the first laborious reading reveals.
Kantian naysaying having been analyzed, a praise of wonder and perplexity (carefully distinguished, of course) is
mounted in a final section on intuition. Here the impersonal
“one” gives way for some reason to the politically correct
“she”—an object lesson in the trickiness of that business,
since the attribution of intuition to women is, as it happens,
quite politically incorrect. I had to grin.
The third part consists of three enticing chapters,
Integrity, Ecstasy and Community: how human beings
become whole and how they transcend themselves as persons
and also as social beings.
The chapter on integrity culminates in a section about
“presence of mind,” a kind of undefined summary virtue capping the qualities of “reason, choice, character,” to which are
opposed “will, commitment, appetite, freedom.” I find
Stewart Umphrey’s preference for unity and integrity over
BRANN
93
plurality and disorder deeply agreeable; others may find it
usefully provocative. In any case presence of mind is the oldest intellectual virtue known to the West: wise Athena once
calls her darling Odysseus angchinoos, “present-of-mind.”
The chapter on ecstasy presents a sober analysis of ways
of going beyond oneself, especially in love; its conclusion
presents the union of integrity (wholeness) with transcendence (going beyond) in the “sober madness of philosophy.”
What is remarkable is that the careful descriptions and
distinctions of these human chapters really are applications.
They are the practical consequences of the preceding pure
theoretical thinking when brought to bear on living experience; they trace out incompleteness as a human condition.
The final chapter, on community, begins with the political, the “most authoritative,” human community. Within it
we work ourselves into integrity, out of it we pass beyond
ourselves. Careful consideration shows that although it is the
basic ground of our well-being, it is imperfect as a community. Friendship appears to be the realization of a paradigmatic
community. So an analysis of friendship is in order:
“Friendship is complex. It involves a relation that is usually
dyadic and always symmetrical”—so this ultimate topic is
broached with the formal precision and logical perspicuity of
the inveterate analyst who relishes his human reserve; I have
to smile even as I’m thinking along. But the logic eventually
yields to love, and, as I’ve said, the last two pages of this book
speak of the most intimate of human experiences.
�
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Kraus, Pamela
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Carey, James
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Castle, Justin
Sachs, Joe
Anastaplo, George
Raditsa, Leo
Cochran, O.P., Leonard
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The St. John’s Review
Volume XLVI, number two (2002)
Acting Editor
George Russell
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
James Carey
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Blakely Phillips
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean, St.
John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President;
Harvey Flaumenhaft, Dean. For those not on the distribution
list, subscriptions are $15.00 for three issues, even though the
magazine may sometimes appear semiannually rather than three
times a year. Unsolicited essays, stories, poems, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address correspondence to the Review, St.
John’s College, P Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800.
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Back issues are available, at $5.00 per issue, from the St. John’s
College Bookstore.
©2002 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction in
whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Publishing and Printing
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
3
Contents
Essays and Lectures
Measure, Moderation and the
Mean............................................ 5
Joe Sachs
Plato and the Measure of the Incommensurable
Part II. The Mathematical Meaning of the Indeterminite
Dyad................................................................................
................... 25
A.P. David
Moral Reform in Measure for
Measure............................................63
Laurence Berns
Book Reviews
Eva Brann’s, The Ways of
Naysaying ................................................79
Chaninah Maschler
Eva Brann’s What, Then, is
Time?.....................................................107
Torrance Kirby
The Feasting of Socrates
Peter Kalkavage’s translation of
Timaeus...................................117
Eva Brann
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5
Measure, Moderation, and the
Mean
Joe Sachs
(with particular reference to the story Odysseus tells in
the Odyssey)
Anyone who comes to love the writings and artworks that have
survived from ancient Greece ought one day to visit Olympia. In
Athens there are wonderful things to see, but also evidence everywhere of the destructive effects on buildings and statues of some of
the most polluted air anywhere in the world. But, in Olympia, in
the Peloponnese, where the most famous of the ancient athletic
games were celebrated, one can still breathe purer air, and see glorious sights. In particular, in the museum there, at the two ends of
the large main room, restored to their complete shapes, are the two
pediments of a temple of Zeus built in the decade of the 460s BC.
(Illustrations are at the end of the text.) The form of a pediment will
be familiar to you as what sits above the appropriate sort of
entrance to a temple. Picture a rectangle, wider than it is long, made
of evenly spaced vertical columns; resting on top of this row of
columns is a triangle, shorter than it is wide, with a series of sculpted figures across it. The statue at the center of the triangular pediment is the tallest figure and the focus of the whole composition.
The eastern pediment at Olympia depicts Zeus at its center, in a
monumental style that makes one think of Egypt. In fantasy, one
might see this pediment as a doorway into ancient Greece, leading in
from the east. But the truer doorway to things that are most characteristic of classical Greece is at the other end of the room. The western pediment depicts the defeat of the Centaurs, who are men in
their heads, arms, and upright chests, but horses in their legs and horizontal lower trunks. They are attempting to carry off human
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
women, and one young boy, but the sculptor has captured the
moment of their defeat. They are being fought by human heroes,
including Theseus, but they are defeated by a look and a gesture. At
the center of the pediment is Apollo, ten feet tall, looking to his right
with his right arm outstretched, the hand level, the palm downward.
The look in his eyes is not angry but serious, and his face is not
clenched in threat but calm. The centaurs cannot have their way
when faced with the power radiated by such dignity. This scene, displaying in outward figures an inner topography of the human soul,
holds in it something of the spirit of classical Greece. The fact that
you or I can see these seemingly invisible qualities, just by being
patient and receptive in front of some shaped blocks of stone, is one
of the amazing achievements that has survived from that time and
place.
Zeus was, as you know, the father and ruler of the Olympian
gods, and even the name of the town Olympia was taken from its
temple of Zeus, who was the Olympian, but somehow Apollo came
to be pre-eminent among the gods imagined as living on Olympus.
At Delphi, on Mount Parnassus, above the Gulf of Corinth, there
was an ancient temple of Gaia, Mother Earth, which was considered the center of the earth. But people were kept away from it by
the Python, an inhuman monster, until Apollo killed it. The Pythia,
the priestess of the temple, then became a medium through whom
people could consult Apollo, and learn his word, or oracle. The
story of Pythian Apollo embodies the same meaning as that of the
Apollo sculpted at Olympia, a victory on behalf of humanity, won
over older and subhuman enemies. The dragons and half-humans
are not wiped out, but become subject to something shining and
beautiful. I think you will find some version of this insight present
in almost every work you read from classical Greece, though not
everyone would agree, and it may certainly at times be something
hard won and dimly seen. But even tragedy, a type of poetry discovered by certain Greeks, always displays that, even in the most
horrendous circumstances, there is a human dignity that we can still
SACHS
7
recognize; that when it is recognized it commands respect; and that
this respect allows all things to be seen in their true proportions.
Above the doorway of the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, we are
told (Plato, Protagoras 343B) that two sayings were inscribed:
Know thyself, and Nothing to excess. These may seem to be disconnected—an exhortation to self-knowledge and a platitude about
not going overboard with anything—but to think them together is
to find the meaning of each. Know thyself means know your true
limits, the greed and ambition to which no human being should
aspire and the depths to which no human being should sink. And
Nothing to excess is not just practical advice; it means that the
nature of anything, including human life, is revealed only when its
true proportions are found—that the truth of anything is its form.
The positive version of Nothing to excess is another saying—
Measure is best—and the measure of a thing is its form.
To take a simple example, what are the right proportions for
the entrance to a temple? When I described the pediments at
Olympia and asked you to picture them and the columns under
them, I’ll bet you got their proportions just about right. The rectangle formed by the columns is wider than it is high. How much
wider? Enough so that it will not look squashed together, but not so
much that it would become stringy looking. Let your imagination
squeeze and stretch it to see what goes wrong, and then notice that
to get it right again you have to bring it back to a certain very
definite shape. This is the golden rectangle. It has been produced
spontaneously by artists, architects, and carpenters of any and every
time and place. What is the ratio of its width to its height? I can tell
you exactly what it is, but not in numbers. I can also tell it to you
in numbers, but not exactly. It is approximately 61.8 units wide and
38.2 units high. That will get you in the ballpark and your eye will
then adjust it to make the ratio exact, but it can be proven that no
pair of numbers, to any finite precision, can accurately express this
ratio, which is that formed by cutting a line so that the whole has
to its larger part the same ratio that the larger part has to the smaller. If you have a calculator, you can check that 61.8 is to 38.2 in just
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
about the same ratio as that of 100 to 61.8, but no matter how
many decimal places you take it to, any ratio of numbers for the
parts will fail to match that of the whole to the larger part. We know
many things by measuring, and our usual way of measuring is with
numbers, but in this case numbers are too crude an instrument by
which to know something our eyes know at a glance.
Taking the measure of something, then, does not necessarily
require quantifying it. We are always going too far in trying to quantify things. The intelligence quotient is a precise number, and no
doubt it means something, but it doesn’t capture anything worth
calling intelligence. An acquaintance of mine, who grew up in
Baltimore, once watched an old, uneducated cook in North
Carolina make biscuits. She was writing down the recipe, and at one
point asked “How much shortening did you use?” The reply was
“Enough to make it short.” This example reveals both the genuine
intelligence of the cook, which would not show up on any test
score, and the fact that she was measuring the shortening not by its
volume or weight but by its feel as she mixed it into the dough. Her
hands were performing a qualitative measurement, just as the eyes
of your imagination were measuring the rectangle by its shape,
rather than by the lengths of its sides. You should not be too quick
to agree with me about this, because if you do, you may have to give
up many other things you believe.
I am claiming, and this is something I learned from certain dead
Greeks, that the world really has qualities in it, that they are not
subjective distortions projected onto it, but the true forms of things.
I know them by my senses, and I know them better that way than
by any theoretical explanations of them. With the golden rectangle,
the discovery of the ratio of its sides reveals something that we can
never name directly—we cannot say how many times bigger one
side is than the other, or than any possible fractional part of the
other—but we can still recognize that ratio in two ways: in its sameness with another ratio, or, even more simply, in the distinctively
shaped rectangle it produces. What is quantitatively incommensurable is qualitatively harmonious. Similarly, the experienced cook
SACHS
9
knows that all batches of flour and shortening are not identical, and
that they may not behave the same way at different times of the
year. If you want the biscuits to turn out right, the only thing to
trust is your hands.
We need not go through all five senses, but one example of
measurement by the ear will be helpful. Clamp a guitar string at
both ends, put a bridge under it about two-fifths of the way from
either end, and pluck the two parts. You will hear something interesting. But what if the string is not of uniform thickness all the way
along? If you have measured the two lengths to make them exactly
as two to three, you might still hear something that sounds wrong,
just a little off. The interval of a fifth is produced by strings with
lengths in a perfectly commensurable ratio, all other things being
equal, but the lack of uniformity in real strings means that one tunes
an instrument best with one’s ear. It is true that musicians nowadays
sometimes use little electronic devices that read out frequencies of
vibration. But if the machine malfunctions, it will do no good for
the musician to tell the audience he got all the numbers right. Only
for the ear is there such a thing as being in tune.
Measure, proportion, and harmony are in the nature of things,
and we have a direct responsiveness to them that orients us in the
world. These are not the ratios of mathematics, but incarnate ratios.
And the words pure and applied do not fit the distinction, because
the purer instances of measure are the ones given to our senses. A
tradition preserved by a twelfth century writer (Johannes Tzetzes)
tells us that the inscription above the doorway of Plato’s school, the
Academy, read “Let no one without geometry enter under my roof.”
Does this mean that skill in mathematics was, as we would say, a
prerequisite for his classes? I don’t think so. It seems to me important that the entrant is not required to have mathematics, but geometry. Much of mathematics develops from the act of counting, a fundamental and natural power without which we could not speak or
think, but geometry starts in a different way, from a sensory recognition of the ordering of simple visible shapes. In Plato’s Gorgias
(508a), Socrates actually tells a young man that he is without geom-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
etry, but he is not criticizing Callicles for his intelligence or learning
or skill, but blaming him for a failure of moral choice. The young
man is greedy and in danger of having no friends, Socrates says,
because he does not recognize the way geometrical equality gives all
things the proportions that let them be part of larger wholes. The
loss of a sense for geometry is equated with losing one’s way in the
human world.
An example that shows both the positive and the negative side
of this is the central scene in Plato’s Meno. Meno’s “boy,” a slave
who has never been taught geometry, begins to discover it in front
of us. Relying at first solely on his ability to count, he twice goes
wrong in trying to measure the side of the double square, but counting also shows him he is wrong. With Socrates leading the way, by
drawing figures and pointing at them, the slave eventually is led to
trust his eyes, and to see the square double itself, out of itself. And
while Socrates asks all the questions, the slave has to do all the seeing himself, out of himself, just as he was led to his mistakes, but
made them himself. This is all very elementary, but the slave has
geometry in him, and he also has a little bit of courage and determination in getting it out—two qualities his master lacked when he
found some unexpected difficulty in answering other questions.
And this finally is the point of the scene, the reason Socrates
arranges it in front of us: Meno cannot see that his “boy” is a better man than he is. We can all recognize that certain people deserve
more respect than others, if we are honest, but Meno has lost that
capacity. He has lost his way. He is without geometry.
This way of understanding geometry may help explain an
apparent inconsistency in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Near its
beginning, Aristotle says something that might at first seem to be
opposite to the inscription on Plato’s gates. He warns the reader not
to look for the precision of mathematical demonstration in the
study of ethics (1194b 19-27). Is this not equivalent to writing on
the portals of this sort of philosophy, “let no one try to enter here
with geometry”? If so, it is odd that Aristotle fills his exploration of
ethics from the beginning with references to actions that are in pro-
SACHS
11
portion, or in ratio, or in a right ratio. For instance, someone may
have good fortune and a steady course through life, but be knocked
out of equilibrium by some misfortune. The inability to cope with
disaster is out of proportion (1100a 23, 1101a 17) with the rest of
the life. Since some alteration is inevitable, and some grief would be
appropriate, and no rules prescribe its amount or how it should be
expressed, only a geometrical eye can judge this. The fitness of such
actions might be measured with some precision, but it can never be
demonstrated. All the circumstances and all the history of any
action can never be known, too many considerations have to be balanced, and equally good alternative ways of handling difficulties are
always possible.
Aristotle, then, does believe that human actions can be chosen
and recognized as right or wrong with precision, but he denies that
this is the same as the precision of a mathematical demonstration.
But he not only uses the language of ratio and proportion for the
kind of precision appropriate to ethics, he also speaks of all actions
that come from virtues of character as actions that hit the mean.
This is easy to misunderstand, because readers tend to ignore the
warning he gives almost as soon as he begins talking about the
mean, that this sort of mean is also an extreme (1107a 6-8, 22-3).
In fact, people rarely understand that this sort of mean is not quantitative at all. But taking it in a quantitative sense opens the way to
identifying the mean with the mediocre, the middle of the road, or
even middle-class morality, the sort of timidity that shies away from
anything that might distinguish one from the crowd. But one of the
things that Aristotle says hits the mean is courage, and he says plainly that there is no such thing as too much courage.
Now one way to see how courage both is and is not a mean
condition is to extend the mathematical language to a second
dimension, and this is both accurate and helpful. There is no such
thing as too much courage, but there is such a thing as too much
confidence, just as there can be too little of it. Courage occupies a
mean position on a scale of fearfulness and fearlessness. The sense
in which courage is an extreme is on a different axis, one on which
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
the person who has just the right amount of fear puts that attitude
into action in the most excellent way. We might even liken this twodimensional scheme to the appearance of the west pediment at
Olympia, on which Apollo occupies the middle position, but also
towers over everyone else. Courage is like that. As I say, this is true
and it helps one keep hold of Aristotle’s claim that the virtues are
extremes of human character, but also stand in and aim at a mean.
But for all that, this talk of measuring along two axes seems to
me to be misleading in the most important respect. I can show how
very simply. Just ask yourself if the power of Apollo over Centaurs
and humans would be greater if he were taller. As it is, he towers
over them, but the design could have been made in such a way that
he dwarfed them, reduced them to puny insignificance. With a little bit of play in the imagination, I think you can see that this would
destroy the sculpture’s effect. The designer of the pediment (who
may have been someone named Alkamenes) wasn’t aiming at making Apollo as big as possible, but at making him extend the human
stature just a little. The Centaurs are sub-human monsters; a gigantic Apollo would also be monstrous. The sculptor has not only
placed Apollo in the middle of the horizontal array; he has also hit
a mean along the vertical axis. All the power of the ensemble
depends on getting the figures in a right relation to one another. As
with the golden rectangle (and recall that the pediment originally
sat on top of one), it is not a matter simply of adjusting Apollo’s
height, but of forming a single design.
Apollo’s height is a precise mean between a ridiculous shortness
and a monstrous tallness, but that mean is also an extreme in the
sense that it is unsurpassably right. But the way in which it is unsurpassably right is not quantitative. It is unsurpassably right in the
design to which it belongs. It fits, and nothing else would. Liddell
and Scott, the authors of the standard dictionary of ancient Greek,
will tell you that aretê, the word for virtue, comes from the name
of Ares, the god of war, but another school of thought derives it
from a humble verb that means to fit together (arariskein), or be
fitting—it may be related to a similar humble verb, from wood-
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working (harmozein), from which we get our word harmony.
Courage too, as Aristotle or any thoughtful person would explain
it, comes not from the bloodthirstiness of the war god, but from
recognizing what one’s circumstances call for and carrying it into
action. Only when the circumstances are extreme, as they are for
Patroclus or Hector, does courage call for the extreme risk, or sacrifice, of life, or perhaps, in the case of Achilles, for the sacrifice of
revenge. At the end of the Iliad, the usual ways of confronting an
enemy are no longer fitting, and Achilles recognizes that.
The recognition that Hector’s body belongs to his father and to
his city has nothing to do with anything quantitative. It is not
arrived at by adjusting any sort of dial up from too little or down
from too much. But it is a measured response to the situation that
Achilles faces. It is geometrical equality that Achilles restores, by letting the dead man be given an appropriate funeral. It is dignity that
he measures. Priam, the miserable wreck of an old man at Achilles’s
feet, dominates his action in exactly the way Apollo dominates the
Centaurs. In both cases, anger takes up a subordinate position in the
design of the human soul. It finds its right proportion to the whole.
On a list of the various meanings of the word logos preserved from
Aristotle’s school by an ancient scholar (Theon of Smyrna), one of
those meanings was the ratio of one who gives respect to the one
who is respected. By looking at Apollo in his glory, or at Priam in
his misery, we can begin to take our own measure.
This kind of qualitative measurement is appropriately represented by ratios, because a ratio is not a quantity. A ratio limits a
quantity. It is a revealing fact that we all have trouble remembering
what Euclid means by greater ratio—that it is not the span of the
interval between two magnitudes but the size of the first in relation
to the second that he is referring to. A length, or an area, or a volume, or for that matter a weight is measured by its size or amount,
but a ratio is something on a different order of things. We measure
length by cutting it up and counting the pieces, but ratios do not
admit that kind of treatment. Fractions do. Fractions are quantities
but ratios are not. The nature of quantity is that of material. There
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can always be more of it or less, arranged this way or that. And this
way of looking at quantity helps one see that ratios belong to the
realm not of material but of form.
In the Odyssey, Odysseus tells a story that goes on for four long
books. About two-thirds of the way through it he tries to stop and
go to bed, but his hosts will not let him. He claims the story is taking too long to tell, and there is too much more of it, but they are
spellbound and persuade him to go on. The king who speaks for
them tells Odysseus that there is a morphê upon his words (XI,
367), meaning a shapeliness or gracefulness. This is one of the
words that comes later to be used for “form” in an important philosophic sense. Odysseus need not measure his words by time or number, the king is telling him, because his hearers measure them by
beauty and depth. A form does not merely surround its content
with a shape. It transforms the material and makes it be what it is,
through and through. And just as Alkinous praises Odysseus for the
form of his story, Aristotle too, in his Poetics (Chap. 8, 1451a),
praises Homer for knowing where to start and end an epic poem to
make it be one story goverened by one action.
What is the form that governs the story Odysseus tells the
Phaiakians? Neither they nor we ever take that story to be a simple
report of the events that Odysseus witnessed and took part in since
the time he left Troy. It is a story formed or transformed by art. But
if all stories that reshape events were lies, fiction would simply mean
falsehood. Alkinous distinguishes Odysseus from the multitude of
liars the dark earth breeds. His criterion is not easy to translate, but
it is understandable to us because we too have heard Odysseus tell
his story, and know exactly what he means. Lattimore makes
Alkinous say that the liars make up stories from which no one could
learn anything (XI, 366). The more usual translation has it that the
lying stories are made up out of things no one could see, and this,
in turn, either in the sense that all the human witnesses are dead, or
in a deeper sense. Both translations are possible, and both capture
something of what Alkinous is talking about. Odysseus is trying to
get something out of the Phaiakians, but he is also letting them learn
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from his experience, and they count that a fair exchange. Things
that are literally false, contrary to fact, are redeemed from falsehood if they capture truth that goes beyond the merely factual. No
one can go see if the story was accurate, but no sensible person
would try to check it in that way, because its proper subject is something that cannot be seen. The story puts in front of the eyes of our
imaginations things that are invisible.
What is Odysseus’s story about? It is, first of all, full of fabulous
beings, gods and monsters and people who live in strange ways. A
question that is repeatedly asked, not with formulaic phrasing but
with constant changes in its wording, is whether the characters that
are about to be encountered are human, that is, dwelling on the
earth and eaters of bread (VI, 8; IX, 89, 191). And even among
those who are not immortal gods and monsters, some dwell under
the earth and drink blood, some dwell in mountain caves and are
cannibals, and some eat the lotus fruit and dwell in their own psyches. But these non-humans are not only a background against
which the human form is displayed, they are constant temptations
to the humans themselves.
Some of the companions of Odysseus are seduced by the lotus
into the oblivion of ignorance, but Odysseus himself is later seduced
by the Sirens, toward the oblivion produced by the love of knowledge. On either side there is a loss of connectedness to the human
community. And Odysseus’s story begins among the Kikones, where
his men get drunk and reckless with success, and then, when their
luck turns, lose six of their companions out of each of their twelve
ships; his story ends among the cattle of Helios, where the men who
are left, less than fifty of them on their one remaining ship, get hungry and reckless in misfortune, and lose their lives. In both overconfidence and despair their hungers become unmeasured by judgement. And again Odysseus too experiences the same dangers, in his
different way. His hunger for recognition, when he has saved himself and his men from the Cyclops, results in a foolhardy judgement
which brings him Poseidon’s curse, and turns victory into needless
defeat; and this is followed by another foolhardy judgement, that he
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could stay awake for ten straight days with the bag of winds, and
arrive home the single-handed savior of his men. His hunger for
glory is as deadly to his judgement as his companions’ hungers are
to theirs.
This break-down of judgement is again a loss of the connectedness of human community, since disproportionate hunger of any
kind, whether from extreme self-indulgence or extreme need,
brings isolation. After the fiasco with the bag of winds, Odysseus
twice shows himself to us in isolation on top of mountains (X, 97
and 148), and this image surrounds his explicit comparison of a
monstrous Laistrygonian to a mountain peak (X, 113), and echoes
his earlier description of the Cyclops (IX, 187-92). Here is what
Odysseus says when he narrates his first sight of the cave of
Polyphemus: “Here a monster of a man bedded down, who now
was herding his flocks alone and afar, for he did not mingle with
others, but stayed away by himself, knowing no law, for he was
formed as a wondrous monster, not like a man, an eater of bread,
but like a wooded peak of the high mountains which stands out to
view alone, apart from others.” In his outsmarting of the Cyclops,
Odysseus displays the power that lets a puny human master a gigantic brute, but in his glorying Odysseus outsmarts himself, and ends
up no better than a Cyclops.
Finally, Odysseus is measured against the gods. This is most
apparent in his verbal jousting with Athena when he awakens on
Ithaca in Book XIII. She uses superhuman knowledge and magic to
deceive and test and tease him, while he holds his own with his
merely human skills, to her delight. “That’s my boy,” she says in
effect, and he replies, in effect, “So where have you been for so
long.” But this alliance of man and goddess as friendly rivals is not
the one that is his true test. It is Kalypso who offers him the ultimate choice, to be her lover forever, while neither of them grows
old, on an island that grows everything to delight the senses and
requires no work. He chooses to go back into the sea, to work, to
fight, to take chances, and ultimately to die. He does not talk about
any of this in the story he tells the Phaiakians, though he had told
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the king and queen the bare outline of it the day before. We know
the story of Kalypso’s island from Homer’s telling of it, before we
know how to understand it. It is Odysseus who puts it in context.
From the time, early in Book X, when he comes down from the
mountain on Circe’s island, the rest of Odysseus’s story is about his
losing battle to win back the trust of his companions. “I am in no
way like the gods,” he has said to Alkinous, “but count me equal to
whomever you know among humans who bears the heaviest load of
woe.” (VII, 208-212) But unlike another man who might say that,
Odysseus had a choice, and chose human troubles. What he lost,
with his companions, was more worthy of choice to him, than what
he could gain from Kalypso’s gift.
We make much of Achilles’s choice, to live a short and glorious
life instead of a long and ordinary one, and pay less attention to
Odysseus’s choice, to live not at ease forever but for a long but
bounded time, amid troubles that will eventually come to an end.
You probably know that the first word of the Iliad is wrath; of the
Odyssey the first word is man. The shaping of the Iliad rises from
the flare-up of Achilles’s wrath, to come to completion when that
wrath itself finds its limit, not just in duration but in submission to
a higher good; the wrathful, warlike side of human life finds its
form and proportion within a larger whole. The Odyssey is formed
in a different way. It starts in three places (Olympus, Ogygia, and
Ithaca). It backs up, and proceeds for a while on parallel tracks, as
we hear a story told and watch the interaction of the teller and hearers, and finally begins moving forward in its second half. But
through and through, the form that shapes the Odyssey is the form
of the human being, as it shows us a man travelling up to all the limits of what it is to be human, coming to know them, and choosing
to remain within them. A participle in the fifth line of the poem
(arnumenos), as it is usually translated, credits Odysseus for saving
his life, but it has a richer meaning: he earned or achieved his life,
proved worthy of it by learning that it was worthy of his choice.
The Phaiakians understand his story, and honor his choice by making one in its image: they choose to risk their easy life by taking on
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his troubles as their own, and their journey to Ithaca is their last
carefree voyage. The first thing we hear about the Phaiakians is that
they live far away from men who earn their bread (VI, 8), but the
human form becomes visible to them in Odysseus, and draws them
out of their isolation.
In the west pediment at Olympia, human dignity is made visible in the figure of Apollo. In the toils and troubles of Odysseus at
sea, human worth becomes apparent against a background of goddesses and monsters and bad choices. The beauty of the Phaiakians’
action is set against the perversion of the human image in the young
suitors who have taken over Ithaca. The suitors are worse than the
Centaurs at Olympia, who are simply appetites that have not yet
come under control. The suitors have no respect for any man or
woman (XXII. 414-15), and so they cannot be reformed. What they
cannot recognize, they cannot take as formative. Their image, in
their feasting, reflects that of the human pigs on Circe’s island; in
their obliviousness to someone else’s home, it reflects that of the
lotus eaters; and in their reasoning that Telemachus is about to
become an obstacle to their pleasure and so, of course, should be
killed, they are no different from the cannibal Cyclops. Odysseus
knows what to do when immortality is offered to him, because he
has learned to respect the claims of human need, and wants to
redeem his loss of his companions, for which he bears not all, but
enough, of the blame. And he will have to use the same standard to
decide what to do about the suitors.
But in Ithaca and abroad, in the story that surrounds that of
Odysseus, there is a gallery of portraits of simple human dignity.
They work on us to convey the power we respect in old people
whose experience has brought them understanding. One of them is
Nestor, who responds to strangers first by feeding them and only
afterward asking whether they are pirates. (III. 69-74) Pre-eminent
among these figures is Eumaeus, the swineherd, a victim of pirates;
born the son of a king (XV 412), he was kidnapped and sold into
.
slavery, but came to accept his lot as the lowliest of servants with no
bitterness (XIV 140-147). He balances the picture of life on Ithaca:
.
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as the suitors have turned a palace into a pig-sty, Eumaeus, with his
courtesy and shrewd judgement, has turned a pig-sty into a place of
gracious hospitality. Homer refers to him as the godlike swineherd
(XIV 401, 413), and as the swineherd, first in the ranks of men
.
(XVII. 184). But surrounding and woven through all these portraits
of age and wisdom is the un-regarded figure of Mentor. Odysseus
had left him in charge in Ithaca (II. 225-7), but his power to rule
rested on nothing but respect. With the invasion of the suitors, the
foundation of civilized life on Ithaca collapsed, and in the resulting
chaos we hardly notice Mentor, since he cannot fight, and barely
raises his voice. He is glorified in the last line of the poem, when
Athena, in a poetic equivalent of the sculpted figure of Apollo at
Olympia, has put an end to the violent strife of people who are all
alike (XXIV 543), making herself recognizable in the voice and liv.
ing form of Mentor. These last words of the whole poem confirm
our sense that its first word, man, is what it intends to reveal to us,
and the final embodiment of that revelation is in a radiant presentation of a character so humble the poet had to compel us to notice
him at all, a character whose dignity lives only in the medium of our
respect, while that dignity, in turn, is the only foundation for shared
human life. Homer makes us err, in overlooking Mentor, and come
to ourselves in recognizing him, so that, in a small way, we mimic
Odysseus’s journey.
But if we are to take the human measure from
Mentor, that must mean that he displays human excellence, and that would be a very strange claim to make.
The poet Homer can play in a serious way by putting the
kingly soul of Eumaeus in a position in which he has only
pigs to rule over, and he can leave us with the vision of a
goddess who makes a humble man resplendent, but neither of these figures seems to display any maximum of
human possibility. Instead, what we seem to see in them
is the last shred of dignity that cannot be taken away from
any human being by any sort of mistreatment from others, but can only be lost by one’s own act. When
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Odysseus comes out of the sea alone on the island of the
Phaiakians, he burrows under a pile of leaves. Here is the
way Homer describes this action: “As when someone
hides away a glowing ember in a black ash heap at the
end of the earth, with no countrymen anywhere near, no
others at all, saving the seed of fire in a place where there
is no other source from which he could start a fire, so did
Odysseus cover himself up with leaves.” (V 488-91)
,
Odysseus almost lost himself on his journey. And the
thing that nearly smothered the last spark of humanity in
him was his drive to excel.
We are told in the third line of the poem that many were the
people whose cities he saw and whose intellects he knew, and for
Odysseus every new experience was a test. Seeing and knowing
were never for their own sake for him. He was always taking the
measure of any new places and their inhabitants, and that, for him,
came to be for its own sake, continually to prove himself more than
the equal of any kind of skill or strength or strategem, and worthy
of respect from anything that exists that can pay respect. He wanted to go beyond anywhere others had been, to find every limit and
surpass it. This fits a conventional understanding of excellence, but
it makes no sense. It aims at nothing but beyond everything, so that
the task is infinite and formless. To achieve excellence in this way is
to measure oneself against what is measureless. Only a being of
infinite capacity could be genuinely successful. One image of human
finitude in the Odyssey is our need to sleep. The journey from
Aeolia to Ithaca is long and hard, but achievable, but also just barely longer than anyone could stay awake for. With a dangerous cargo
like the bag of winds, a sensible captain will have to admit his own
limits to himself, and take someone else into his confidence, but
Odysseus does not permit himself such weakness. That stubbornness costs him more than nine years of trouble, and eventually costs
every one of his companions his life. When we see Odysseus give
way to sleep again, the meaning is exactly the opposite of the former occasion. His sleep brings to an end his efforts to persuade his
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comrades, and they eat forbidden meat and die; they decide that
they are no heroes, and cannot hold out indefinitely against hunger.
Afterward, Odysseus never ceases to defend them. But it is usually not his companions themselves that he refers to, but the common lot of human beings that he discovered by paying attention to
them. No less than six times he lectures people about the cursed
belly, and the things its need can drive people to (VII. 215-21; XV
.
343-5; XVII. 286-9, 473-4; XVIII. 53-4; XIX. 71-4). The man who
once despised weakness in himself is now the fierce defender of
those whose strength fails them. His rejection of the offer of immortality is in part a gesture of solidarity with his companions, and his
disguise as a beggar on Ithaca in some way displays the truth. In
front of the Phaiakians, Odysseus could have told his story to present himself as the hero of Troy, the most important man in the
world, but he chooses instead to make his loss and his need central.
He tells one of the suitors “Nothing feebler than a human being
does the earth sustain, of all the things that breathe and crawl on
the earth” (XVIII, 130-1), using the same adjective he chose when
telling Kalypso “I know very well that thoughtful Penelope is feebler than you in both form and stature” (V 215-17). He has learned
,
to see what is fragile in us and in need of protection as having a
higher claim on his effort than any extraordinary achievements that
might extend human glory.
But the radiant dignity conferred on Mentor at the poem’s end,
and glowing from within Eumaeus in its midst, is not the whole of
the human image either. There is also heroic action that is not ambitious for glory but called forth in defence of what is dignified but
weak. In Aristotle’s ethics the word that names human dignity is
spoudê, seriousness, the quality that is apparent in certain exceptional people who know what to take seriously. But in the Odyssey
the focus is on aidôs, respect, the quality present in all of us that
enables us to recognize dignity. Respect can take the place of force,
and can bind together a community, establishing the conditions of
life under which the things that have seriousness and dignity can be
given their due. The actions that embody respect constitute what
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Aristotle calls distributive justice, the paying of what is due not
merely in the quantitative medium of money but by reference
always to the qualitative medium of honor. In a just community,
according to Aristotle, there will never be simple equality, but rather
proportional equality, actions and titles and gestures that make evident what different people deserve. And this is what Socrates called
geometrical equality, since it requires an act of seeing rather than
one of calculating.
In the Odyssey, our seeing is put to work most vividly beyond
the world in which we live and make choices, envisioning the
Cyclops, the passage between Scylla and Charybdis, or Odysseus
lashed to the mast while the Sirens sing, but as in the west pediment
at Olympia, these figures depicted as outwardly visible display the
shape of the invisible human soul. The soul that Homer lets us recognize as unsurpassably right in its ordering is the one that we see
in the hero in rags, in his feeble old father in armor (XXIV 513-25),
.
in the boy who calls an assembly of adults, in the woman who neutralizes the strength of 108 men (XVI. 245-51) and stops time itself
for four years by unweaving every night what she wove by day (II.
94-110). It is the human balance in which strength has reason to
give way to weakness, and weakness has resources to find strength.
It is the human mean that can live only within a community. The
best human life is a topic that demands philosophic reflection, but
such reflection would not be possible if one could not, in the first
place, simply see its form.
NOTE:
The central importance in the Odyssey of the respectful attitude aidôs
that makes human communities possible is something I first learned by reading Mary Hannah Jones’s senior essay, “A First Reading of the Odyssey,”
included in the collection of St. John’s College Prize Papers, 1977-78.
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25
Plato and the Measure of the
Incommensurable
Part II. Plato’s New Measure:
The Mathematical Meaning of
the Indeterminate Dyad
Amirthanayagam David
I shall argue that the controversial developments—some
would say the reversals—in Plato’s later metaphysical outlook
were in fact an inspired response to some truly epochal developments in the mathematics of his day; in particular, to certain
seminal advances in the theory of the irrational. Following on
my reading of the geometry lesson at Theaetetus 147, and of its
significance for that dialogue and for the Sophist and the
Politicus, I can now shed light on one of the most obscure
notions associated with Plato, a thing known to Aristotle as the
“indeterminate dyad.” The discovery and description of this
remarkable object—remarkable, all right, yet thoroughly nonmystical and mathematically legitimate—can be seen as the
motive force behind some of the arguments and constructs in the
late dialogue Philebus. In interpreting the ancient testimony, my
reconstruction demonstrates that the mathematical meaning of
the late Platonic metaphysics was either not transmitted to, or
simply lost on, the successors of Plato and their critic Aristotle.
But where the philosophers strayed, the mathematicians found a
fruitful path: the conclusion to the work started by Theaetetus
and Plato finds a home of concision and elegance in the mathematics of Euclid’s Book X. A historian of ancient philosophy
may have to distinguish in future between the academics who
inherited Plato’s arguments, and the mathematicians who understood them.
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Perhaps the best evidence for a revision, radical or not, in
Plato’s thought comes from Aristotle’s intellectual biography in
Metaphysics A. He there refers to a kaí flsteron, an “even
afterwards” in Plato’s career (987b1). The passage is explicit
that there was a before and an after in Plato’s thinking which
was not apparently defined by the death of Socrates. What is
more, the change was apparently of some considerable moment;
the whole force of the expression is in the kaí; Plato is said to
have accepted the premise of universal flux espoused by Cratylus
and the Heracliteans, even afterwards. The theory of sensation
we have discussed in the Theaetetus is an example of his new
approach to an old premise, an approach based on a new mathematics of measurement.
At one time during the geometry lesson in the Meno, Socrates
counsels the slave boy, who is trying to find the line from which a
square the double of a given square is generated, “if you do not care
to count it out, just point out what line it comes from (e£ m±
boúlei ¡rivmeîn, ¡llà deîxon ¡pò poía$, 84a).” This is the
vintage Socratic irony, a playful but possibly sinister half-telling:
there is in fact no straightforward way to count out such a line with
the same unit measures that count off the side of the given square.
In a passage that means to inspire confidence in our ability to learn,
Socrates hints at a shadowy impediment that lurks, even as the slave
boy triumphs. This problem of incommensurability was the bane of
measurement science—metrhtik≠, that science which assigns
number to continuous magnitude—perhaps onwards from the time
of Pythagoras. Measurement prò$ ållhla, or mutual measurement, the reciprocal subtraction (¡nvufaíresi$) of two magnitudes, came to an end or limit (péra$) at the common measure of
these magnitudes; but if the magnitudes were incommensurable, the
process of subtracting the less from the greater, and then the
remainder from the less, would continue indefinitely (i.e., it was
unlimited, åpeiron). Such everyday magnitudes as the diagonals of
squares with countable sides were årrhton, inexpressible, or
DAVID
27
ålogon, irrational, in terms of those sides, an embarrassment to
any serious measurement science.
The in-betweenness of irrational lengths with respect to rational (countable) ones—in the Meno, Socrates takes pains to show by
a narrowing process that the required length, the side of an eightfoot square, lies somewhere in between two and three feet (83ce)—may have been the clue to a new approach. Plato’s Stranger
proposes a new branch of measurement science in the Politicus
(283d ff.); alongside measurement prò$ ållhla, there is now to
be measurement prò$ t±n toû metríou génesin, measurement
toward the generation of the mean. I have suggested that
Theaetetus’ seemingly humble classification of roots (Theaetetus
147c ff.) was the ultimate inspiration for this formulation; his novel
use of the mean proportional allows number and magnitude (the
phenomena of arithmetic and geometry) to be subsumed successfully under a revitalised and heuristic measurement science.
“’Squaring’ is the finding of the mean (› tetragwnismò$
mésh$ eflresi$, De Anima 413a20),” and he who defines it this
way, says Aristotle, is showing the cause of the fact in his definition.
To square a given rectangle, one has to find the mean proportional
between the lengths of its sides. Theaetetus distinguishes between
two kinds of length as sides of squares: a mêko$ is the length of a
side of a square number (4, 9, 16, etc.), the mean proportional (or
geometric mean) between the unit and a square number; a dúnami$ is the side of a square equal to a rectangular number (2, 3, 5, 6,
etc.)—i.e., the geometric mean between the unit and a rectangular
number—which is incommensurable with the unit in length
(m≠kei) but commensurable with it in square (dunámei).
Taken by itself, this classification is hardly more than a new
way of naming the phenomena of measurement science. Even at
this stage, however, the roots of non-square numbers, formerly
irrational and intractable, have become more expressible (@htá);
they are at least commensurable in square. A third category can
now be envisioned—incommensurability in length and in square—
so that where we had a polar division of opposites (rational-irra-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
tional), now we have an enumeration of the phenomena: rational,
expressible, irrational.
But the true mathematical utility of this re-classification lies in
the lucid quality of the geometric mean. We recall that for any interval, this mean can be approximated in length by interpolating successive pairs of arithmetic and harmonic means within the given
extremes. Since in a rational interval, like that between the unit and
a non-square number, the interpolated means are also rational, and
since they define an evanescent sequence of rational intervals
around the same geometric mean, the incommensurable roots of
non-square numbers can now be systematically approximated with
numbers of their own. Each of these lengths, which we nowadays
call √2, √3, √5, etc., is approximated as a geometric mean by one
or more series, each unique and infinite, of arithmetic and harmonic means, which give better and better rational over- and under-estimates (respectively) of each incommensurable length. Though the
geometric mean is never reached, each successive pair of interpolations reduces the interval containing it by more than half, so that
each of the approximating extremes approaches closer than any
given difference to the mean (by Euclid’s X.1). Hence the process is
unlimited in its degree of accuracy.
The uniqueness of each of these “dyadic series,” corresponding
to each of the incommensurable roots, is the key to their achievement. Numbers may now be introduced, in a mathematically useful
and rigorous way, to describe the lengths of these roots.
Measurement science can thereby fulfil its mission, once paralysed
in these cases, to number the greater and the less. Irrational roots
are no longer vaguely “in between”: each dyad of interpolated
means defines all rational lengths, whole or fractional, than which
a particular incommensurable root is greater, and all than which it
is less. Since the “dyadic interval” can be made to shrink indefinitely, these incommensurable lengths have been uniquely measured in
terms of a given unit, as uniquely as any commensurable length.
A rational length is measured by one number, a “one many,” a
single collection of so- and so-many units (and fractional parts).
DAVID
29
These lengths are therefore measured both absolutely and relatively in terms of the unit length; one can answer the question, “How
many is it?” with respect to them. An irrational but expressible
length, on the other hand, is measured by a series of pairs of numbers, a unique but “unlimited” or “indeterminate” dyad (¡óristo$
dúa$). Such lengths are only relatively measured in terms of the
unit; for them, one cannot answer the question “How many is it?”
with a definite number, but one can always answer the question, “Is
it greater or less than this many?” There are now two ways in
which number can be applied to continuous magnitude—with a
normal ¡rivmó$ measured by the unit, or an indeterminate dyad
of such ¡rivmoí—so that both the diagonal and the side of a
square can be “counted off ” in terms of the same unit length.
The original significance of the unit and the indeterminate
dyad can now be recognised in the context of the new branch of
measurement science: the former, already a principle and product
of the existing branch, measurement prò$ ållhla—for the unit
is the measure of all commensurable magnitudes, and the ultimate
result of the reciprocal subtraction of commensurable quantities—
is a measure of all rational means (including the roots of square
numbers). The latter is a way of measuring all the expressible geometric means (the roots of rectangular numbers); it is a principle
and product unique to the new branch, measurement toward the
generation of the mean, for paired interpolation represents a way
to “generate” an expressible geometric mean numerically, and the
resulting indeterminate dyad of greater and lesser values is a precise
and exhaustive way to locate an expressible length within the scale
of the rational continuum. The unit and the indeterminate dyad,
the respective measures of rational and expressible means, are
therefore rightly conceived as the two proper principles of that science which approaches measurement through the construction of
means.
*
*
*
*
*
*
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
In the Philebus (23c ff.), Socrates proposes a four-part division
of all beings. The first two segments cover the limited and the
unlimited, the once all-embracing Pythagorean pair of opposites.
The third division encompasses those beings produced by the mixture of the polar principles; this mixed category represents the distinctive late Platonic innovation in ontological thinking, outlined
also in the Sophist (see 252e). A fourth division is enumerated to
cover the cause of the mixing in the category of mixed beings.
At first glance, the mathematical subtext of this classification seems fairly straightforward. The unlimited stands for continuous magnitude, that which admits of being greater or less
(24e); the limited stands for number and measure (25a-b). The
mixed class stands, as could be expected, for continuous phenomena that admit of measurement or a scale: Socrates mentions music, weather, the seasons, and “all beautiful things
(Øsa kalà pánta, 26a-b).” The demiurge of the Timaeus,
who constructs a cosmic musical scale out of elements he has
mixed (35b ff.), could be seen as a mythical archetype of the
fourth kind of being, the cause of mixing. The mixer is also a
measurer.
Certain peculiarities in Plato’s presentation suggest, however,
that it is motivated by the developments in ancient measurement
theory that I have described. First of all, the distinction made
between the limited and the unlimited is virtually analytic. This
would not be necessary for a distinction between number and magnitude, because of the phenomenon of commensurability. But the
class of the more and the less, the pair which characterises the
unlimited, is said to disallow the existence of definite quantity; if it
were to allow quantity (posón) and the mean (tò métrion) to be
generated in the seat of its domain (‰drˆ ™ggenésvai), the moreand-less themselves (a dual subject in Plato’s Greek) would be made
to wander from the place where they properly exist (24c-d). The
class of the unlimited therefore stands for the greater-and-less qua
greater and less, those magnitudes which refuse numerical measurement of any kind, like the radically incommensurable lengths
DAVID
31
(commensurable neither in length nor in square). The class of the
limited, on the other hand, is said to cover only those things which
admit of everything opposite to the more-and-less (toútwn dè tà
™nantía pánta decómena):
prôton mèn tò ªson kaì £sóthta, metà dè tò
ªson tò diplásion kaì pân Øtiper ∂n prò$
¡rivmòn ¡rivmò$ ˚ métron ˜ prò$ métron...
(25a-b)
first the equal and equality, and after the equal the double and everything whatever which is a number in relation to a number or a measure to a measure.
The limited is therefore the class of commensurable magnitude.
Is the distinction between limited and unlimited then a descriptive
one based on that between number and magnitude, or really an analytic one between two kinds of magnitude, the commensurable and
the incommensurable?
The mixed class is also described as the class (£déa) of the equal
and the double (25d); this means it must be meant to include within it the whole class of the limited or commensurable. One could
have expected this if it corresponds to a class of scalable magnitudes. But Socrates goes on to add this curious category to its
domain:
...kaì ›pósh paúei prò$ ållhla t¡nantía
diafórw$ ®conta, súmmetra dè kaì súmfwna
™nveîsa ¡rivmòn ¡pergázetai (25d-e)
also so much of a class as stops things which are opposites, differently disposed to one another, and fashions
them into things commensurable and harmonious by
putting in number.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
This function appears to be unique to the mixed kind of being.
Since only incommensurable things can be made commensurable,
the unlimited did indeed signify the incommensurable, as was surmised; and the class mixed from the limited and the unlimited
appears to include a new species not found in either apart, which
makes incommensurable magnitudes commensurable by “putting
in” or “inserting” (™ntívhmi) number. With somewhat uncharacteristic acuity, Protarchus understands Socrates to mean that certain constructions (or “generations,” genései$) follow from the
mixing of the Pythagorean opposites (25e). (This interchange
seems to be a single Platonic exposition split between two speakers. The author better remembers his dramatic premises when,
within less than a Stephanus page, he has Protarchus suddenly
express his unsureness about what Socrates could have meant by
the members of the third class.)
The two ways of measuring magnitude in terms of a single unit
length, by means of a number or an indeterminate dyad of numbers,
correspond to the two classes which make up Socrates’ third category. In particular, the second way of measuring corresponds to that
construction described above which is unique to the mixed category. Both take up magnitudes that were formerly irreconcilable, subsumed by an opposition of greater to less—i.e., incommensurables
belonging to the category of the unlimited—and make them concordant and commensurable by “inserting number.” But neither of
them does this in such a way as thereby to reduce these magnitudes
to the class of the limited. Rather, certain lengths turn up in the
measurement of magnitude, incommensurable as such but commensurable in square, that call forth a peculiar application of number, one which inserts greater and lesser values in such a way that
they become more and more equal. This use of numbers comes to
light only in measurement science, and hence only in the mixed category of beings; it does not suggest itself in the operations of pure
arithmetic, the science of the class of the limited (governing numerable, discrete quanta and their formal equivalents, like commensurable lengths). An indeterminate dyad is a numerical description of
DAVID
33
a peculiar kind of length, neither irrational nor rational, but belonging to a third analytic class called “expressible.”
The mathematical subtext of Socrates’ proposal therefore runs
as follows: the distinction between unlimited, limited, and mixed
is, after all, a descriptive one based on that between magnitude,
number, and measured magnitude. But when Socrates attempts to
bring unity to each category, drawing together into one (e£$ ‰n,
25a, 25d, etc.) the beings subsumed by each, he employs a threepart analytic distinction that applies properly to magnitude alone.
That is to say, he brings unity to each of the three realms—number, magnitude, and measured magnitude—by describing each of
them in terms of the particular kind of length, the particular kind
of one-dimensional magnitude, which uniquely characterises it.
Hence the class of the unlimited is not just the class of the greaterand-less, but the class which positively rejects numerical description, like that of the radically incommensurable lengths. (The analogy is strict, for recall that this class is said to reject from its own
rightful seat both definite quantity (posón) and the mean (tò
métrion); on my reconstruction, this means it rejects the only two
ways of counting lengths, either with a single number, or with an
indeterminate dyad of numbers that approximate a geometric
mean.) The class of the limited, likewise, is not just the class of
numerable things, things which can be expressed as ratios of a
number to a number, but also the class of certain kinds of magnitude, those which can be expressed as ratios of a measure to a
measure, for commensurable lengths share all the properties of
numbers. Hence the distinction between magnitude and number
(unlimited and limited) can be reduced to a distinction between
two kinds of line. And finally, the mixed class, or the class of the
scale, though it includes within it the class of the limited, comes to
be characterised by a use of numbers and a kind of magnitude
which are each unique to it. These are the indeterminate dyad and
the lengths which it measures, once incommensurable but now
made “expressible” by the insertion of number. The expressible
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
roots form a third analytic possibility within the field of onedimensional extension, alongside rational and irrational lines.
The reductionist spirit of Socrates’ analysis is in the best traditions of ancient mathematics. To reduce one problem to another is
of course heuristic of a solution, but the process can also be useful
in definitions and classifications. An example has been given in
Aristotle’s reduction of the problem of squaring to that of finding
a mean proportional line. One effect of Euclid’s proposition II.14,
which contains a solution to Aristotle’s reduced problem, is in turn
to reduce a comparison in magnitude between any rectilinear
figures to a comparison between squares, and hence to a comparison in one dimension, between square roots. A later and particularly virtuosic example is to be found in Apollonius’ use of the
three kinds of application of area upon lines, the parabolic, hyperbolic, and elliptic, to both name and define the three kinds of conic
section. In Plato’s case, the distinctions between his ontological
realms of the unlimited, limited, and mixed—two of which, as
opposites, had had a long-standing currency in metaphysical thinking—have been reduced to the distinctions between the three kinds
of line studied in the new measurement science: irrational lines
that are incommensurable both in length and in square; rational
lines that are commensurable both in length and in square; and the
expressible lines that are incommensurable in length, but commensurable in square.
This analysis is also in the spirit of the “enumerative” method
Socrates had earlier set out (16c-17a). One is to seek out the form
(£déa) which lends unity to a field of phenomena, and then seek out
those things measured by this hypothetical unit-form (i.e., those
phenomena which are “numbers” if the original form is taken as a
unit). The method intends to be self-correcting, for one is enjoined
in turn to analyse the original unit (tò kat ¡rcà$ ‰n, 16d) in
the same way that one has analysed the enumerated phenomena, to
see “how many” it might actually be. A converse procedure is equally espoused in the case of a science like grammar (18a-d): when the
datum seems unlimited or continuous, as does the phenomenon of
DAVID
35
human vocalisation, one is first to discover the numbers into which
it naturally divides, which govern pluralities such as those marked
out by the distinction between vowels and consonants, before one
proceeds to analyse these further into their units. There may be an
analogy here with modern analyses in terms of “sets,” which also
presume that things need to be sorted before they can be counted
or related. Euclid’s definition of ratio (V requires a relation of
.3)
kind between the compared terms. Even the infinite field of number
itself is nowadays divided in such a way that unitary types may be
distinguished (“Reals” over “Rationals” and “Irrationals”) while
individual members remain both infinite and infinitely instantiatable. An “enumerative theory of forms” would seem to reflect the
ontological and epistemological implications of the interdependence of sorting, on the one hand, and counting or measuring on the
other. The new Socratic method is developed as an explicit reaction
to the Parmenidean or Pythagorean type of thinker—but also, perhaps, to the early Plato—who analyses everything in terms of
opposed principles like the one and the many or the limited and the
unlimited, and fails to articulate the crucial phenomena that are
ordered, like numbers, in between such opposites. Hasty and simplistic analysis in terms of opposites is said to characterise arguments that are made eristically, while the enumerative method, the
method that discovers the numbers of things and their ordered relations, characterises the truly dialectical approach (17a).
Socrates had earlier made it clear (14d-15c) that the familiar
paradoxes of the one and the many were no longer his concern.
Any lazy riddler could prove that an individual like Protarchus, or
a thing made up of parts, was at the same time one and many. It
was the possibility of formal unity, in the face of the sensible births
and deaths of numberless individuals, the unity that is asserted of
things in discourse—whether of “man” or of “ox” or of the beautiful or the good—that was of vital philosophical interest. Did any
such units exist? How might they persist as individuals? And how
is it that they partake of the infinite multiplicity of things that
come into being? The genuineness of these perplexities calls forth
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
his enumerative approach, a philosophical pathway that Socrates
says he had ever loved, but which had often deserted him in the
past (16b). The method is hard, but the results can apparently be
astonishing; all the achievements of the arts (técnai) are said to
have been discovered on this road (16c).
The implications of this method, shot through as it is with the
influence of the burgeoning measurement science, are staggering for
the “classical” Plato. Consider that we are here hypothesizing the
existence of forms as measures, enumerating phenomena in terms
of a posited unit-form, and then examining the posited unit, presumably against the phenomena themselves, to check for its possible plurality. The method itself is therefore mixed, in such a way as
to cancel Plato’s earlier formulations. Neither is this the unhypothetical reasoning from forms to forms, whatever that may have
meant in The Republic, nor is it a reasoning from unquestioned
hypotheses, in the manner of synthetic geometry. The once eternal
forms, the objects and immutable guarantors of knowledge, have
become provisional and heuristic.
God is said to have made all beings out of the one and the many
with the limited and the unlimited as innate possessions (16c). This
would tend to insure that all phenomena will be inherently numerable, and hence to guarantee their susceptibility to an enumerative
method; we shall find the unifying form, for it is in there (eflr≠sein
gàr ™noûsan, 16d). It is as though the pairs of opposed ontological elements, once the principles of the eristic disputations, have
now been “re-packaged” in the premises, made the condition for
the possibility of an enumerable reality. Inasmuch as it was
Aristotle’s understanding (Metaphysics M.4, 1078b12) that the theory of forms was invented in the first place to account for our sense
of dependable knowledge in the face of a Heraclitean flux—and
note that the premise of a reality in flux is still accepted at Philebus
43a—it seems that this theory has now been modified to make sense
not so much of our ability to know as of our ability to count. And
this change of purpose is sparked in turn by a renewed confidence
in this sovereign ability, in light of Theaetetus’ successful attack on
DAVID
37
the irrational. Number had at last been restored to some of her
Pythagorean glory, as a measure of the things that are, that they are,
and the things that are not, that they are not, and what is more, of
the things in between. The victory here was sweet indeed, for the
irrational square roots were recovered from the domain of flux and
incommensurability on the very terms by which this domain is distinguished. The indeterminate dyad is both a measurement and a
process of measurement: interpolating means between means
involves a measurer and a thing measured which are continually
changing, just as in the Heraclitean or Protagorean contentions; yet
this process of itself yields a unique measure of the fixed mean proportional between the interpolated means, and makes expressible
and commensurable the once irrational root of a rectangular number.
Indeed, this process of measuring or counting in an indeterminate dyad has proved to be revelatory of form, in the sense that it
creates the class of the expressible and defines the mixed category
of being. On the one hand, things need to be sorted before they can
be counted, and hence the knowledge of form has primacy over
measurement, and the ability to count depends upon the ability to
know. But it would seem in this case that the act of measurement
can itself be disclosive of form, and hence that knowing can depend
on counting. There appears therefore to be a dialectical relationship
between sorting and counting, which is reflected in a self-correcting,
enumerative theory of forms. This methodology of the Philebus can
be seen as reincorporating certain aspects of the Pythagorean, in the
sense that once again, knowledge has become coordinated with
measurement, and to know something is in some sense to comprehend its number.
Confidence in the grounds of an enumerative approach to the
sensible world—a confidence that may once have deserted Socrates
in the face of an irrational diameter, leading him, with Meno’s
honest slave, to the abyss of irony—can allow that significant guarantees of veracity will come from the method itself. There are, for
example, different ways to “count” or measure a phenomenon,
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
each of them legitimate, based on the premises and aims of the
investigator, as the several alternate divisions of the sophist and the
statesman make clear. One measure of the truth of a hypothesis,
that such-and-such a form is a genuine unit, must, under this
method, be the economy and scope of the enumeration it affords,
as a unit in fact. A criterion for a successful articulation, a guarantor that a dialectical enumeration corresponds to a real one in the
world, must therefore be the elegance of that articulation, in terms
of the economy of means and breadth of cover which problemsolving mathematicians have always striven for in the concrete
practice of their art.
Indeed, it is an informed sense of respect for developments and
concrete formulations in the arts that seems to move the older
Plato. In the spheres of grammar and music, for example, although
it appears that an abstract analysis in terms of opposites, in the manner of the sofoí, may to some extent be applied in the interpretation of phenomena, by itself such abstract analysis simply does not
make you much of a useful theorist (17b-c). An investigation into
the numbers and kinds of sounds, on the other hand, or an enumeration of the different scales and modes and the vagaries of
rhythm—these, it seems, can truly render you wiser than the common run, in music and in grammar.
Behind this sensitivity of Plato’s to the enumerative and the
concrete aspects of the arts, as against the approach through dogmatic first principles, may rest his experience of the dramatic
changes in the mathematics of his day. A distinction like that
between the rational and the irrational, which must have seemed as
basic to the science as that between odd and even numbers—an
eternal, immutable opposition, seemingly a part and principle of the
order of things—was made obsolete by the emergence into history
of a new formulation through the mind of a single, brilliant practitioner. Recall that Theaetetus’ reforms began very humbly on the
level of classification and definition: he makes the distinction
between square and non-square the basic one for number, beyond
the distinctions between, say, odd and even or prime and compos-
DAVID
39
ite. But of itself this suggests a new way to approach the measurement of lengths, as geometric means, and this further yields, or
reveals, a third, formally distinct category of magnitude called
expressible. Experiencing this revolutionary development, as witness or participant, must lead a thinker away from a view of tà
mavhmatiká as eternal, innate verities that can be investigated and
learned as though by recollection, towards a view of mathematics
that must acknowledge the importance and ingenuity of the problem-solver in situ, together with the power of classifications, definitions and measurements to reveal, or to obscure, the fundamental
nature of their objects. As the traditional theory of forms and the
doctrine of mávhsi$ ¡námnhsi$ can be seen as responding to the
ontology and epistemology of the earlier geometry, so can a selfcorrecting, enumerative theory of forms be seen as a response to the
ontological and epistemological implications of the new mathematics and a dynamic measurement science.
Insofar as other arts aspire to the mathematical, the new philosophical outlook must also apply to them; although, to be fair, the
provisional, enumerative approach would have long since guided
the formulations of practitioners in music and grammar, without a
felt need for a mathematical paradigm or a philosopher’s blessing.
Perhaps one should credit Plato only with waking up to the new
realities of science and art around him, much in the spirit of later
revolutions in philosophy. One need not qualify, however, one’s
estimate of the implications of this change of view for Plato’s political thought; they are as great as the differences between the
Republic and the Laws. In this vein, while Plato’s guardians had
learnt their lessons and then interpreted the world, so that nature
and politics alike would have been for them a kind of applied mathematics, Plato’s statesman is of an altogether different mould of
mathematician. He is a problem solver, in amongst it like a navigator or a physician, who must be able to adapt his laws to suit changing conditions, or improve upon his formulations to serve the present (see Politicus 295c ff., 300c). It is of course notorious that the
guardians’ inability to solve a problem—the numbering of love, and
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
40
its irrational quantities—leads inexorably to the degeneration of
their regime.
*
*
*
*
*
*
In Metaphysics N, Aristotle introduces his redaction and criticism of the Platonist (or Academic) metaphysics with this statement:
“All thinkers make the principles opposites (pánte$ dè poioûsi
tà$ ¡rcà$ ™nantía$, 1087a30).” There appear to have been
various schools of thought among Academic ontologists, all of
whom posited the unit as a first principle or “element,” but each of
whom disagreed as to the nature of the opposite principle, whether
it was the “greater-and-less” or the “unequal” or “plurality”.
Aristotle makes short shrift of all these formulations, as they treat
affections and attributes and relative terms as substances (1088a16).
In N.2, he mentions a group who posit the indeterminate dyad as
the opposed element, as a way of getting around some difficulties in
the other versions; but it is still a relative principle, and in addition,
all these formulations fall to Aristotle’s argument that eternal things
simply cannot be composed of elements (1088b28-35).
Aristotle then feels, before he adumbrates his own approach to
ontology, that he must explain why these thinkers ever came up
with formulations so narrow and forced, constrained as they are by
the dogma of opposed principles (1088b35 ff.). His answer is that
they had framed the problem of ontological multiplicity in an oldfashioned way (¡rcaikô$, 1089a1-2), for they were still arguing
in response to certain paradoxes of Parmenides. The implications of
this reconstruction of recent intellectual history are decisive both
for our sense of Aristotle’s access to Plato, and for our knowledge
of Academic thought and its relation to Plato. All the Academics,
and thus Plato as well, are said to reason about existence in terms
of an opposed pair of first principles—always the unit and something else; they do this under the direct influence of Parmenides,
perhaps as part of a tradition of arguing against certain eristic dogmas of his, such as the one which Aristotle quotes:
DAVID
41
o∞ gàr m≠pote toûto dam˜, e–nai m± ™ónta
For this may never be enforced, that things which are
not, are.
These thinkers are said to have felt that the possibility of multiplicity in the world would be threatened unless Parmenides were
refuted, and some other thing than unity or being were allowed to
exist. This was the origin of the “relative” principles that stood
opposite the unit. The unit and the indeterminate dyad, on this
scheme of Aristotle’s, are but one alternative among several pairs of
first principles proposed by different Academic philosophers.
The first thing to note is that the Philebus itself is Plato’s direct
and unambiguous criticism of the ontological reasoning based on
two opposed principles, in favour of a technical, empirical, enumerative approach. From the perspective of philosophical method, the
dialogue can hardly be said to have any other point. Plato conceived
of his enumerative method as a more illuminating and more useful
way of articulating phenomena, which comes to yield significant
new categories in the analysis of being (e.g., the mixed one and the
cause of mixing). No further clue seems to be necessary for the conclusion: Aristotle, somehow or another, has entirely missed the
point of Plato’s late formulations, by classing them with the type
that Plato himself characterises as eristic rather than dialectical, and
from which he most particularly wants to distinguish his own.
The next point, however, is that there must actually have been
a vigorous tradition of thought which both preceded Plato and
outlasted him in his own Academy, characterised by the use of
opposites as first principles. To believe so much is the only way to
attach any seriousness to Aristotle’s redaction. This tradition originates with Parmenides, and must once have included Plato in its
ranks, again if one is to pay any respect to Aristotle’s judgement.
But Plato came to argue against such thinkers not only in the
Philebus, but also in the Sophist, where they are called “the friends
of the forms (o‹ tôn e£dôn fíloi, 248a).” These were the lat-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
ter-day champions of eternal, immutable, unmixing forms, the
kind of weary theoretical construct that is often now taught as
Platonism. When the differences seem so clear, the question must
become: How could Plato’s new “mixed” ontology have come to
be confused with the old-fashioned approach through polar principles?
Recall that on my reading of the Philebus, there are for Plato
three ontological realms apart from the agent of cause. The first is
the realm of the limit, the realm of arithmetic, whose principle is
the unit. The second is the realm of the unlimited; its principle,
analytically opposed to the unit, is the dual greater-and-less, the
principle of irrational flux. The third realm is that of the mixed
beings, which I have interpreted as the realm of measurable things.
Its principles are two, and reflect the two ways that magnitudes
may be numbered or made commensurable, absolutely in terms of
the unit or relatively (but uniquely) by an indeterminate dyad. The
thing to note is that the unit appears as a principle twice in this
scheme, opposed in two different ways to two different things. The
distinction between the unit and the greater-and-less is strictly analytic, and belongs squarely in the Parmenidean tradition; whereas
the distinction between the unit and the indeterminate dyad is
merely descriptive, serving to recognise ways of applying numbers
inside the sphere of measurement that happen not to arise in arithmetic. The unit and the dyad are therefore not opposites; they are
simply different.
If a thinker in the Parmenidean tradition, or a historian of the
Parmenidean tradition, were to interpret Plato’s scheme in light of
their own practices, or to force it into a Parmenidean mould to flatter a historical premise, the conflation of the two distinctions would
be an inevitable result. If the Philebus could not be consulted—if it
were ågrafo$ in the sense “unpublished”—no recourse could be
had to the original reasoning; but even if there were such recourse,
Plato’s three realms of number, magnitude, and measure, and the
important differences between the distinctions unit/greater-and-less
and unit/indeterminate dyad, could only be understood in light of
DAVID
43
an underlying mathematical paradigm, as I have argued. Such a
thinker or such a historian would not be likely to know or to care
about the analytic possibilities in one dimension. (This is as much as
to say, he would not know what was meant by the indeterminate
dyad.) He will look for the polar principles in any ontological
scheme; at best he will see that the indeterminate dyad must connote something different from the greater-and-less, as the principle
chosen to stand opposite the unit. But he will never envision a
scheme that encompasses both oppositions.
The question next to ask is whether it was his Academic
sources, or whether it was Aristotle himself who did not understand
the mathematical meaning of the indeterminate dyad. There is
intriguing evidence in Metaphysics M and N for the latter interpretation. It would seem that his sources were in the dark about this
too; but whatever one concludes about the Academy, there is evidence that Aristotle had Plato’s accounts at hand either to quote or
to paraphrase, and that he could not make sense of them.
In N.1 (1087b7 ff.), Aristotle mentions a group of thinkers who
attempt to generate the numbers, o‹ ¡rivmoí, from the “unequal
dyad of the great and small,” taken as a material principle in relation to the formal “one,” and someone else who would generate
them from the principle of plurality. (He probably intends, respectively, the followers of Plato and Speusippus.) The generation of
numbers does not seem to have been a concern of Plato’s, however; the “problem” of multiplicity, or of how things can be both one
and many, which when posed by Parmenides might have led his successors to theorise in the abstract about the generating of numbers,
seems to be regarded in the Philebus (14c-15a, 16c-17a) as merely
a staple of the eristic paradoxes, now subsumed within the premises of Socrates’ concrete enumerative approach. Which is to say, it
appears that Plato is no longer so interested in number theory as he
is in simply counting. I am therefore inclined to think that neither
the above-mentioned group nor the ‘someone else’ represents
Plato’s line of argument, or Plato’s understanding of the unequal
dyad. Aristotle bears this out by going on immediately to mention
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
an individual who speaks of the one and the unequal dyad as ontological elements (1087b9), thereby distinguishing him from the
group who had used them (afterwards, I presume) as formal and
material elements in the generation of numbers. Aristotle’s complaint about this individual is that he does not make the distinction
that the unequal dyad of great and small is one thing in formula
(lóg¨), but not in number (¡rivmõ).
Why would not Plato have made this distinction? The unequal
dyad is not one thing in formula alone: the successive pairs of interpolated numbers relate uniquely to one object as well, the side of
the square that is their single geometric mean. Further, since it consists of successively more equal sides of a single rectangular number,
the dyad can quite emphatically and strikingly be said to be of one
number, with a rationale that Aristotle might have appreciated if he
had been more familiar with the construction.
On this model of progressively “equalised” rectangular numbers, we have a transparent motivation for the original formulation
of terms like “unequal,” “indeterminate dyad,” “greater-and-lesser,” and “exceeding and exceeded,” which find their way into the
theories of Plato’s followers. In addition—and this point would
seem to be decisive for the interpretation—we should expect to
find them opposed in this context to a concept of the unit which is
associated with the square or “equal”. On no other grounds but
those of the new measurement science, as I have described them
here, would such an association be expected. Sure enough, the unit
in these theories is described as the equal (1087b5, 1092b1), in
such a way as to mystify not only Aristotle but also modern interpreters of these passages.
Neither Aristotle nor his Academic sources seem to connect
these various expressions with geometrical representations of number; the theories on the generation of numbers betray no influence
of Theaetetus’ square/oblong distinction, nor of the geometrical
interpretation of number that is settled convention by the time of
Euclid. The Academics seem to have posited “ideal” numbers which
were generated individually in succession (two, three, four, as
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Aristotle says in M.7 1081a23, and so without distinction as to
square or oblong) from the unit and the indeterminate dyad.
Aristotle takes some pains to make sense of this theory: if the units
(monads) of ideal numbers are all the same and addible, then they
are not ideal at all, but normal mathematical numbers (cf.
1081a19); but if the monads of each ideal number are distinct and
inaddible, they must be generated before each of their respective
numbers can be generated, as a point of logic (1081a26 ff.). This is
true no matter how these monads are generated; but Aristotle once
more quotes “he who first said it” (› prôto$ e£pµn, 1081a24)—
again distinguishing him from those who later used such phrases as
the “unequal dyad”—to allude to a possible mechanism for this generation of inaddible monads (¡súmblhtoi monáde$): they arise
out of unequals, once these are equalised (™x ¡níswn (£sasvéntwn gàr ™génonto)).
To begin with, Aristotle cannot rightly make attribution to
anyone of a theory on the generation of inaddible monads. As he
says, no one actually spoke that way (1081a36). Aristotle, perhaps
himself in reaction against the eristic movement, constructs these
arguments to save his opponents from the obvious fallacy of ideal
numbers composed of normal, identical, addible monads; yet the
alternative, unstated by them, but which he says follows reasonably from their own premises, turns out to be impossible as well,
if truth be told (1081b1). There is therefore no reason to suppose
that Plato thought or said that the generation of inaddible monads, or any monads, was connected with his notion of the unequal.
On the contrary; Plato seems to have anticipated Aristotle’s notion
of the unit as a measure, both in the intuitions of the enumerative
method and in the specifically mathematical context. At 57d-e, the
distinction is made in the Philebus between the units of the arithmetic of the many, which change as different things are counted,
and those of the arithmetic of the philosophisers, which are always
identical. It would of course have been an easy (but pointless) solution to the problem of the irrational to say that incommensurables
are simply measured by different unit lengths than commensurables.
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The enumeration of Theaetetus and Plato, on the other hand, is
predicated on the assumption of identical units. While some lengths
still remain incommensurable on these terms, all the formerly irrational square roots become expressible through an indeterminate
dyad, and the achievement of this articulation would be lost without the assumption.
What can be attributed to Plato, however, is that his notion of
the unequal involved a process of equalizing it. In neither place in
M where Aristotle mentions this idea (as above, and at 1083b24)
can he make anything of it, nor does it seem to have any intuitive
connection to the Academic number-generation theories he covers
there. The only conclusion, I suggest, is that Aristotle refers to this
conception of the unequal merely because he knows it to have been
true of Plato’s thought. The “Platonists” speak of the unequal as a
generative principle, Aristotle might have reasoned, and who knows
what they mean, as to how it generates; Plato himself also spoke of
the unequal, and the only action he attributed to it was “being
equalized”; perhaps this was somehow the “generating action,” as
obscure as that seems; one ought therefore to mention what the old
man said, in fairness to them. In N, Aristotle for the first time mentions a number-generation theory which did, perhaps, try to interpret the process; it first declares that there is no generation of odd
numbers at all, and that the even numbers are generated out of the
great and small when these are equalised. Aristotle’s criticism of the
logic of this account verges on the sarcastic: faneròn Øti o∞ toû
vewrêsai ‰neken poioûsi t±n génesin tôn ¡rivmôn.
(“Clearly, it is not on account of philosophical theorizing that they
produce their generation of the numbers.” 1091a29) Neither
Aristotle, for whom the notion seemed fatuously self-contradictory,
nor these latter theorists, for whom it was received dogma, could
have known the original mathematical context, for neither could
interpret or properly apply the notion that the unequal as an elemental principle involved a process of being equalized. We can now
restore the context, in the process of “equalizing” an unequal,
oblong number with an indeterminate dyad of more and more
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equal rational factors. (It is particularly striking that these latter
Academics seemed to know that the notion “unequal-when-it-isequalized” served in such a way as to divide all numbers, but they
tried, with dismal consequence, to apply it to the familiar, venerable distinction between odd and even; they must have been unaware
of the division of numbers by square and oblong, which supplanted
the earlier distinction in the course of Theaetetus’ study of irrational roots, and where alone the notion of the “equalized unequal”
has any use or coherence.)
“Those who say the unequal is some one thing, making the
indeterminate dyad from great and small, say things that are far
indeed from being likely or possible,” in Aristotle’s view (M.1,
1088a15). He complains that to adopt such ideas is really to adopt
his lowly Category of the “relative” as a substantial, unitary first
principle. Something is great or small only in relation to something
else. Unlike the superior Categories of quality and quantity, which
have more substance because they involve absolute change, whether
by alteration or increase, there is no such change proper to the
Category of the relative. While a compared term may remain substantially the same, it becomes greater or less merely by quantitative
change in the other term. Aristotle is therefore at a loss as to why
such metaphysical honour should be paid to concepts that are
inherently relative.
Plato could have replied: “Consider the nature of measurement
toward the generation of the mean.” In this process, the relative
terms do not depend simply on each other, but both are related to
an unchanging third thing, a single geometric mean. Furthermore,
the pairs of relative terms are uniquely related to their proper mean,
the root of a particular oblong number. And because the greater and
lesser lengths approach closer than any given difference to the
unchanging length of the root, their status in relation to this length,
qua members of an infinite succession of approximating pairs, poses
a heady puzzle for any common-sense idea of their ontological difference from, or identity with, this single length. There is therefore
every reason to see the indeterminate dyad of great and small, a self-
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correcting binary approximation of a single geometric mean, as a
unitary and substantial thing in its proper mathematical context.
But if the context was lost, and one had access only to the words in
its name, then Aristotle’s objections might seem judicious.
That Aristotle knew about the geometry of means is clear
enough, but he must not have been familiar with the interpolation
of means in the peculiar configuration of the indeterminate dyad,
where means become extremes, which in turn beget means, which
then in turn become extremes, while each pair of harmonic and
arithmetic means serves as the extremes to the geometric mean in
the middle. The notion of relativity embodied in this configuration,
involving a process of equalising, and motion towards a fixed
object, is more subtle and peculiar than that involved in a simple
comparison, or even a static analysis expressed in terms of a mean
and extremes. I claim it is this peculiar conception of the relative
that Plato raised to the level of a principle, to stand in tandem with
the absolute measure connoted by the unit.
While the Academic metaphysicians may appear to have used
these very same principles, right down to the letter of their formulation, it is clear that neither they nor Aristotle grasped their proper function. They have nothing to do with accounting for multiplicity in the universe, or with the generation of numbers. They
have everything to do with the measurement of numbers. After
Theaetetus, numbers are figured as square or rectangular; they can
be compared not only in quantity, but in size, by the length of their
square roots, just as after Euclid’s II.14, any rectilinear figures can
be compared by the sides of their equivalent squares. While all
numbers have either absolutely or relatively measurable rootlengths, not all lengths have countable squares. This is one of the
odd new ways that arithmetic and geometry, number and magnitude, become interlinked after Theaetetus’ happy reformulation.
It is therefore in this context, the context of measurement, that
Plato is likely to have distinguished the absolute from the relative,
being-in-itself from relative being. Aristotle alludes to just such a
distinction, in a passage which once again exemplifies his peculiar
DAVID
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mire: he wants to review the Academic theories on the generation
of multiplicity based on certain contrary principles, including principles first conceived by Plato, but conceived in a context where in
some cases they weren’t even contraries, and where they had had
nothing to do with generating either multiplicity or numbers; he
knows the language of Plato’s own articulation of these principles,
but doesn’t have the mathematics to interpret the words. In this
case, he may even foist his own innovations in usage back on to
Plato’s original phrases, just to make sense of them.
At 1089b16, Aristotle once again invokes “he who says these
things,” claiming this time that this person had also proved for himself (prosapef≠nato) that that which was potentially a “this” and
substance (tò dunámei tóde kaì o∞sía) was not “existent in
itself ” (πn kav afltó); it was the “relative” (tò pró$ ti). What
the expression “potentially a ’this’ and substance” may have meant
for Plato is a difficult thing to determine. In particular, Aristotle
seems to take dunámei, with obvious anachronism, in his own characteristic sense of “potentially”; he had just now used the word this
way when introducing part of his own familiar solution to ontological analysis, that we must hypothesize in each case what a thing is
potentially (¡nágkh mèn oun...flpoveînai tò dunámei πn
flkást¨, 1089b15-16). Perhaps Aristotle is here weaving his own
terminology into the Platonic materials? But his next comment is a
scholium, on Plato’s appropriation of the term “relative,” that it is
just as if he had said “quality” (¸sper e£ eªpe tò poión); and
there was never a scholium without a text.
So what could the Greek text “tò dunámei tóde kaì
o∞sía” have meant to Plato? Recall Knorr’s observation that
dúnami$ and dunámei mean “square” and “in square” throughout
Greek mathematical literature. (The only exception is the very passage in the Theaetetus [148a] where the eponymous hero applies
the term dúnami$, for the first time, to a square root.) Thus in
Plato’s context, the same words may well have signified “that which
has particularity and existence in square”—i.e., that which is countable (because it is commensurable) only in square (dunámei), like
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the expressible as against the rational lines. It is these very magnitudes which one could expect to find distinguished as relative in
their being, insofar as their being depends on their measure; the
rational lengths, on the other hand, have the self-subsistent being of
definite quantity, in length and in square, while the irrational lines,
which cannot be made commensurable in either length or square,
are captive to the realm of flux and non-being. If Plato equated
“that which has being” with “that which can be counted”—and his
enumerative method suggests a move in this direction—then it is
entirely and specifically appropriate that that which has being in
square be allowed only a relative existence. It has no autonomous
number, but only a relative count. Even the phrase pró$ ti may
have had a specific connotation for Plato, which is lost in the
anachronistic aura of the Categories; for such beings are measured
by a process that is inherently pró$ ti, “towards something,” measurement toward the generation of the mean. Plato’s distinction
would have been between that which exists or is measured on its
own terms (tò πn kav afltó)—the equal, the square, and rational lengths—and that which exists or is measured toward something
else (tò πn pró$ ti), the unequal being equalized, the rectangle
approaching the square, and the indeterminate dyad approximating
the mean.
It seems clear that any such significance in these phrases could
never have been allowed to emerge through the schemata of
Aristotle’s redaction. He explains (1089b4 ff.) that in response to
the diversion caused by Parmenides, the philosophers posited the
relative and the unequal as the types of opposed principle which,
when mated with being and the unit, generated a manifold reality.
He points out, however, that neither of these posited principles is in
fact the contrary (™nantíon) or the negation (¡pófasi$) of being
and unity; each is rather another single nature among the things that
exist (mía fusi$ tôn øntwn). This is also the point of his critical scholium on Plato’s use of the phrase pró$ ti: the Category
“relative” is no more a legitimate candidate than the Category
“quality” for that contrary and negation of being and the unit which
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51
the Academics were supposed to be seeking; each is simply “some
one” of the beings (‰n ti tôn øntwn, 1089b20). He goes on to
complain that if Plato had meant to explain how things in general
are many, he shouldn’t have confined his investigation to things that
lie in the same Category (whether this be “substance” or “quality”
or “quantity,” let alone the insubstantial “relative”).
The sense of this reading ranges from the misguided to the wilfully obtuse. In the first instance, we cannot fault Plato for failing
either to prophesy or to apply the revolutionary insights into
ontology expressed in Aristotle’s theory of the Categories. Nor can
we fault him for not being interested any longer, as indeed he wasn’t, in the problem of how things are many. Still less can we fault
him for giving up the reasoning by opposites. He would of course
have agreed that his conception of the relative, in the configuration
of the indeterminate dyad, is in no sense the opposite of the unit
and its measure, but simply a different way of measuring, based
also on the unit, that applies to certain types of being (i.e., certain
two-dimensional numbers and one-dimensional magnitudes—
oblongs and their roots). But the full picture of Aristotle’s plight as
a redactor emerges when one throws in the fact that Plato’s complete formulation did in fact include a genuine opposition as well,
between the unit and the greater-and-less qua greater and less. One
then has a recipe for the peculiar quandary of Metaphysics M and
N towards Platonic thought, based in part on unwitting conflations, but in part also on flagrant, self-serving anachronisms, and
characterised by a haplessness in the face of Plato’s own expressions, when read in light of their borrowed use in the irrelevant
theories of the Academy.
A question remains: where did Aristotle get those “texts” of
Plato, which he seems to treat as quoted material? Although the distinction between absolute and relative being may be consistent with
the Philebus and with other ontological discussions in the later
Plato, the specific phrases which Aristotle comments on, such as tò
dunámei tóde kaì o∞sía, do not seem to occur in the dialogues.
Where, then, did Plato draw this mathematical distinction, and to
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what did he apply it? Was it perhaps in a Lecture on The Good—a
lecture which seemed to promise moral philosophy, but delivered
mathematics—a lecture which nobody understood?
*
*
*
*
*
*
The mathematical development of ancient measurement science will prove much easier to trace than its philosophical obfuscation at the hands of Academics and Peripatetics. As forbidding
as the structure of Euclid’s Elements X seems to be, I believe its
logic is profoundly simple, following directly in the spirit of
Plato’s enumerative method, and upon Theaetetus’ geometrical
interpretation of number.
After Theaetetus’ first efforts had rendered all the square roots
countable, he next sought to extend his classificatory net even further into the uncharted regions of the irrational. He could use his
already successful methods as a paradigm: since exploring numbers
in terms of the means between them had yielded the class of
expressible lines, he was led to explore the possibility of means
between the expressible lengths themselves, and the possibility of
irrational means. While in general such means could not be “counted off,” since the expressible lengths, treated as extremes, had not
the fixed values necessary for a computation of means, the mean
lengths could still be constructed and named with respect to rational lengths; just as at the time of the Meno, the root length of the
double square could not as yet be counted, but it could be constructed within the unit square and was named “diameter” (or the
“through-measure”) by the professors (Meno 85b). Orders of irrationals could thus be defined in terms of means, though they could
not be made commensurable.
Just such an assignment of orders is credited to Theaetetus by
Pappus, in his commentary on Elements X, on the authority of
Eudemus’ history of mathematics (now lost):
...it was...Theaetetus...who divided the more generally
known irrational lines according to the different means,
DAVID
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assigning the medial line to geometry, the binomial to
arithmetic, and the apotome to harmony, as is stated by
Eudemus, the Peripatetic.32
The passage does not suggest that Theaetetus invented the three
lines and their names, but only that he first saw the essential parallelism between the structure of their relations and those of the
familiar means. The medial simply is the geometric mean between
two expressible lengths. That is why it is called méso$, the mean
proportional; the name “medial” serves only to distinguish it in
English. The binomial is a sum of two expressible lengths, and so
can be associated with the arithmetic mean, which is half the sum
of two rational lengths; but the apotome is merely a difference of
expressible lengths, and the connection with the harmonic mean is
less obvious. This also comes clear, however, as one recalls the fundamental feature of pairs of arithmetic and harmonic means which
makes possible the measurement by an indeterminate dyad: if one
applies a rectangle contained by rational extremes to the length of
their arithmetic mean, the height of the new rectangle turns out to
be the length of their harmonic mean. Euclid’s X.112-14 illustrate
a significantly parallel property of binomials and apotomes: if one
were to apply the same rational rectangle to a length that was
known to be a binomial, the height would turn out to be an apotome; further, and curiously enough, the expressible terms of such
a binomial and an apotome would be commensurable with each
other, and in the same ratio. If Theaetetus was responsible for these
propositions, he might well have been led to view the binomial and
apotome as “irrational means” between rational extremes, or as
irrational factors of an oblong number, counterparts to the rational
arithmetic and harmonic means.
It is clear, however, that Euclid’s presentation is not designed as
a theory of means. The bulk of his 115 propositions in Book X are
concerned with enumerating and constructing twelve different
kinds of binomial and apotome, making with the medial thirteen
types of irrational line; the full list is given by Euclid after Prop.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
111, before the proofs that establish the analogy between the binomials and apotomes, and the arithmetic and harmonic means. The
rationale for this enumeration becomes more apparent if one considers David Fowler’s handy grouping of the propositions:
X1-18: general properties of expressible lines and rectangles,
X19-26: medial lines and rectangles,
X27-35: constructions underlying binomials and apotomes,
X36-41, 42-7, 48-53, 54-9, 60-5, 66-70, & 71-2:
blocks of propositions dealing with each of the six types
of additive irrational lines. They are described in X3641 and also, in a different geometrical configuration, in
the Second Definitions following X47,
X73-8, 79-84, 85-90, 91-6, 97-102, 103-7, & 108-10:
blocks of propositions, parallel to the previous, dealing
with each of the six types of subtractive irrational lines.
They are described in X73-8 and also, in a different
geometrical configuration, in the Third Definitions following X84,
X111-14: the relations between binomials and
apotomes,
X115: medials of medials...
As Fowler himself observes, the propositions seem to represent an
exploration of the “simplest operations of adding, subtracting, and
squaring pairs of expressibles.” Before Theaetetus classified them in
relation to the different rational means, the binomial and apotome
may have first been distinguished and defined as part of an investigation of the “arithmetic” of expressible lengths. An investigator
might have said, if we are to understand the expressibles the way we
understand numbers—and indeed, numbers are the very paradigms
of our understanding—then we must comprehend their arithmetic;
what might the manipulations of arithmetic look like when applied
DAVID
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to expressible lines?
Whereas the prospect of such an investigation might have
daunted the most optimistic of researchers, with its seeming openendedness and unlimited number of possible cases, Euclid was
able, by manipulating squares and rectangles, to organize the
infinite additions and subtractions of expressible lengths into six
types each. Thus Euclid accomplished the first ever rigorous ordering of radically incommensurable lengths, as the sums and differences of expressible ones. One cannot measure these sums and differences as such, and so one cannot “count off ” the irrational lines
that are produced; but one can number their types, and enumerate
their orders.
While the fundamental early propositions of Book X are generally credited to Theaetetus, and the propositions about mean proportionals (“medials”) seem to suit his historical and mathematical
character, the enumeration of the binomials and apotomes must
belong to Euclid. Pappus says that Euclid, following Theaetetus,
“determined...many orders of the irrationals; and brought to light,
finally, whatever of finitude (or definiteness) is to be found in
them.” This should naturally refer to his ordering of possible binomials and apotomes, and the enumeration of six corresponding
types. Though they do not depend on the proofs involved in
Euclid’s enumeration, Theaetetus’ propositions, about the relations
between binomials and apotomes, are then placed by Euclid at the
end of Book X, so that they can be expressed in terms of that enumeration, and take on a new authority: each pair belongs to one of
six sets of ordered pairs of binomials and apotomes whose terms
turn out to be commensurable and in the same ratio; each pair consists of corresponding members of one of a finite number of possible combinations of additive and subtractive expressible lengths.
It is possible, then, to trace the genesis of Book X in this way:
Theaetetus first extended the insights of measurement toward the
generation of the mean by using the three means involved in that
science as heuristic paradigms with which to interpret irrational
magnitudes. Just as an expressible length is a geometric mean
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between rational extremes, a medial length is a mean proportional
between expressible extremes; and just as arithmetic and harmonic
means are pairs of commensurable rational factors of the rectangle
contained by the extremes of their interval, binomials and apotomes
are pairs of irrational factors of the same rectangle. In his investigation of binomials and apotomes, Euclid discovered their classification, and thereby produced an ordering of irrationals in terms of
possible types of sum and difference—an arithmetic of expressible
lines. This in turn advanced the classificatory scope of Theaetetus’
propositions on the relations between binomials and apotomes,
when they were placed after Euclid’s work, at the end of Book X.
While Theaetetus could likely have proved that a rational area
applied to a binomial produces an apotome as breadth, and that the
terms of these irrational factors are commensurable and in the same
ratio, Euclid could now add, as he does in the enunciations of
Propositions 112 and 113, that such a binomial and an apotome
belong to the same order.
David Fowler approaches the book from a very different angle,
as part of his reconstruction of the ancient mathematics of ¡nvufaíresi$. He proposes an anthyphairetic theory of ratio, where
ratios between quantities are described by counting the number of
mutual subtractions which can occur between them: one counts the
number of times the lesser subtracts from the greater, then the number of times the remainder can be taken away from the lesser, then
the remainder of that transaction from the former remainder, and
so on; the list of numbers thus produced gives a unique description
of the particular ratio. He finds evidence for the historical existence
of this approach in several quarters, including a direct allusion in
Aristotle’s Topics to a definition of same ratio as same antanairesis
; and he sees the peculiar implications of this ratio theory as providing the most economical of many proposed rationales for the
total sequence and layout of Euclid’s Book II. The most surprising
fact he uncovers is a remarkable periodicity that arises in the anthyphairetic description of ratios of the form √m:√n—that is, ratios of
expressible lines.
DAVID
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The achievement of Fowler’s work is to have rediscovered, and
in some measure to have resurrected in our day, the other branch of
measurement science, measurement prò$ ållhla. The periodic
repetition of the terms in the otherwise infinite mutual subtraction
of expressible quantities would have been the great discovery of this
science; as Fowler observes:
Those ratios that can be now completely understood
and described in finite terms by the arithmoi include the
ratios of the sides of commensurable squares, that is the
ratios of expressible lines √m:√n...
Note how fitly this parallels the development I have
described in the science of measurement toward the generation
of the mean: those lengths which can now be uniquely measured
in terms of the ¡rivmoí include these same expressible lines,
the sides of commensurable squares.
As far as the rationale for Euclid’s Book X is concerned,
however, Fowler’s reconstruction of the mathematics of anthyphairesis shows only why the relations between expressible lines
would have seemed a thing worth investigating. We gain no
insight into the specific form of the book as we have it, into its
method and structure in the classification of the irrationals;
these are better explained as an integral outgrowth of the new
science proposed in Plato’s Politicus, the science of measurement
toward the generation of the mean. This is not just because
Theaetetus is said to have classified the irrationals in terms of the
different means. Consider that the entire investigative strategy
of Book X, including the work I have ascribed to Euclid, is to
manipulate squares and rectangles, a manipulation in two
dimensions, in such a way as to distinguish and to enumerate the
forms of the associated lines. This approach was born with the
science of measurement toward the mean, on one fateful day. As
he lies dying off-stage, the story is told of how the young
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Theaetetus, Theodorus’ student, on the day of Socrates’ appearance in court, divided all numbers between the square and the
oblong, and distinguished two kinds of line as the sides of
squares equal to each kind of number. The “square side” of an
oblong number is the geometric mean between the sides of the
oblong. The names Theaetetus chose for these two lengths,
mêko$ and dúnami$, did not survive, for the implications of a
classification by sides of squares made the distinction itself obsolete: both kinds of length would now be called @htá, expressible. But the technique applied in his classification was to direct
the exploration of lines to its crowning achievement, in the enumerations of Euclid’s Book X.
We ought, however late, to acknowledge the dramatist who
saw the significance of such a day for history, saw it in a way that
must combine the personal and the universal, the historical and
the mathematical. Innovations in mathematics must have moved
that man in a way that made even innovation in religion seem a
distant charge, a memory of youthful import. We must come to
recognise the changes in this chronicler of the human argument,
as he took his bearings anew, and found new patterns, enumerative structures, emerging in a discourse that strains to keep
pace—paradigms of order no longer laid up in heaven, yet resonant, perhaps, with a piece of divinity. His myth of the globe’s
reversal (Politicus 268d-274e) encompasses a deteriorating
world, but also a return, through the numbering of its classes
and kinds, to the elegance of god’s tenure. Let him stand
absolved at last of the mystifications of his followers: Plato’s
own measures, his own mysteries, must finally furnish our count.
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2. Wilbur R. Knorr and Miles F. Burnyeat, “Methodology, Philology, and
Philosophy,” Isis, 1979, 70:565-70
3. Miles Burnyeat, “The Philosophical Sense of Theaetetus’ Mathematics,”
Isis, 1978, 69:489-513, on pg. 513, pg. 513
4. Knorr, Evolution, pg. 192
5. Ibid., pg. 192
6. Ibid., pg. 69 ff.
7. Ibid., pg. 96 (In full: “(a) The proofs are demonstrably valid. (b) The
treatment by special cases and the stopping at 17 are necessitated by the
methods of proof employed. (c) The proofs will be understood to apply to
an infinite number of cases. (d) No use may be made of the dichotomy of
square and oblong numbers in Theodorus’ studies, either in the demonstrations or in the choice of cases to be treated. (e) Theodorus’ proofs utilize the
special relations of the lines in the construction of the dynameis. The geometrical methods of construction are of the type characteristic of metrical
geometry as developed in Elements II and are closely associated with a certain early style of arithmetic theory. (f) But the arithmetic methods by which
Theaetetus could prove the two general theorems, on the incommensurability of lines associated with non-square and non-cubic integers, were not
available to Theodorus.”
8. Malcolm Brown, “Theaetetus: Knowledge as Continued Learning,”
Journal of the History of Philosophy, 1969, 7:359-79, on pgs. 3678
9. Knorr, Evolution, pg. 158
10. This proof is given by Knorr, Evolution, pg. 184
11. Ibid., pg. 159
12. see Euclid’s Elements X Def. 3
NOTES:
1. Wilbur R. Knorr, Evolution of the Euclidean Elements
(Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel Pub. Co., 1975), pgs. 65-9
13. see Plato’s Politicus, 278b-e
14. see Euclid, The Elements, 3 vols., Vol. 3, ed. Sir Thomas Heath
(Annapolis: St. John’s College Press, 1947), pg. 3
15. see Euclid II.14 and VI.13
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16. Brown, “Theaetetus,” pg. 371 ff.
17. Proclus, In Platonis Timaeum Commentaria, 3 vols., Vol. 2, ed.
Ernst Diehl (Leipzig: Teubner, 1903-6), pgs. 173-4
18. Brown, “Theaetetus,” pg. 371
19. see David H. Fowler, The Mathematics of Plato’s Academy
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pg. 14 ff.
20. see Plato’s Timaeus 36a for this usage
21. The reading of B and T; editors usually read to )to
22. Brown, “Theaetetus,” pgs. 376-7
23. Ibid., pg. 377
24. see Theaetetus, 185c
25. Brown, “Theaetetus,” pg. 374
26. quoted in Brown, “Theaetetus,” pg. 373, note 38
27. Euclid, X.1
28. Brown, “Theaetetus,” pg. 379
29. Julia Annas, Aristotle’s Metaphysics Books M and N, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1976, pg. 195
30. Ibid.
31. Knorr, Evolution, pgs. 65-9
32. tr. W.Thomson and G.Junge, in Fowler, Mathematics, pg. 301
33. Fowler, Mathematics, pgs. 169-70
34. Ibid., pg. 192
35. tr. Thomson and Junge, in Fowler, Mathematics, pg. 301
36. Fowler, Mathematics, pg. 17 ff., and see Aristotle, Topics 158b
37. Ibid., pg. 192
38. see Ibid., pgs. 190-1
DAVID
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63
Moral Reform in Measure for
Measure
Laurence Berns
(St. John’s College, Annapolis)
To what extent are the principles of classical political philosophy and the American polity reconcilable? The Declaration of
Independence did not mean, Lincoln tells us, that all men are equal
in all respects. The Declaration, however, presupposes that the difference between man and man is never as great as the difference
between man and beast, on the one hand, and man and God, on the
other. This “equality” by superiority to beasts and inferiority to the
divine sets limits both to human servitude and to human sovereignty.1 These principles issue in the rule of prudence that just government derives its authority from the consent of the governed. This
equality, as Locke put it, “in respect of Jurisdiction or Dominion
one over another” is not incompatible with the classical principle of
fundamental inequalities in capacities to govern. As a matter of fact
the institution of free elections (the Declaration’s “Right to
Representation”) introducing a principle of merit into the system is
predicated on the existence of such inequalities of ability, and the
capacities of electors roughly to discern them. (This does not, of
course, mean that the judgment of the electors is always correct, but
that it is sufficiently deliberate and well-informed to avoid disasters
that would unhinge the very frame of government.)
The classical position on democracy has been put, I believe,
with great clarity by Thomas Aquinas quoting St. Augustine:
If the people have a sense of moderation and responsibility and are most careful guardians of the common
weal, it is their right to enact a law allowing such a people to choose their own magistrates for the government
Delivered at the Convention of the American Political Science Association,
September 1993, The Washington Hilton Hotel, Washington, D.C.
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of the commonwealth. But if, as time goes on, the same
people become so corrupt as to sell their votes and
entrust the government to scoundrels and criminals,
then the right of appointing their public officials is
rightly forfeit to such a people, and the choice devolves
to a few good men. [S.T., I-II, Q. 97, A. 1.]
I have no problem with this statement in principle, despite the
questionable practicality of its remedy for corruption. As Benjamin
Franklin put it, “If any form of government is capable of making a
nation happy, ours I think bids fair now for producing that effect.
But, after all, much depends on the people to be governed. We have
been guarding against an evil that old States are most liable to,
excess of power in the rulers; but our present danger seems to be
defect of obedience in the subjects. There is hope, however, from
the enlightened state of this age and country, we may guard effectually against that evil as well as the rest.” [Lett. to Ch. Carroll,
5/29/1789] What most threatens the required state of enlightenment today, it seems to me is not any paucity of economic resources
devoted to education, but rather the reigning generally accepted
opinions about what constitutes enlightenment. The AugustineThomas statement suggests, at the very least, that there is a natural
connection between the will to preserve free institutions and the
sense that those living in accordance with them are worthy of them.
How can a corrupt people be reformed? This, of course, is the
problem set for its protagonists by Shakespeare’s Measure for
Measure. Some distinctions between Duke Vincentio’s situation and
ours must be made. He has a single city and its environs to reform,
we have a huge and highly diversified nation. Our laws derive their
constitutional authority from the very people needing reform, his
do not. His polity is monarchical, ours is not. Our polity contains a
diversity of religious sects, his does not. Religious authority and
moral authority, if not united, form a well-functioning team in his
regime, in ours ... they do and they don’t. Obviously we are not
likely to find immediately applicable recipes from a study of
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Measure for Measure. We are obliged to put things in constitutional terms: “the abuse of the first Amendment”; the tendency of
lawyers and judges to ape intellectual fashions, sanctioning licentiousness with shallow-pate notions like freedom of expression, bargain-basement moral autonomy.2 We can, as teachers, try to change
the intellectual fashions. The only way I know how to do that is to
try to rise beyond the realm of intellectual fashion altogether, by
trying to understand the Duke’s problem as much as possible, as my
better, William Shakespeare, understood it.
Vienna, the seat of the Holy Roman Empire, is ruled by a
Duke, who “above all other strifes contended especially to know
himself,... a gentleman of all temperance.” Like those two political defectives, Prospero and Socrates, he has no taste whatsoever
for the theatrical pomposity endemic to political life. His apolitical temperament has caused him wrongly (“t’was my fault”) to
allow Vienna’s strict and biting laws to become toothless and contemptible; licentiousness thrives, and “Liberty plucks Justice by
the nose.”
His keen sense of justice prevents him from punishing in his
own name evil deeds bred by his own permissiveness. But purification there must be. He appoints a Lord Angelo (soon to prove a
Fallen Angelo), a man of “stricture and firm abstinence”, who
“scarce confesses that his blood flows” to stand in for himself, that
is (unlike American executives) to “enforce or qualify the laws.” But
first something should be said about why someone like puritanical
Angelo was needed.
The Vienna presented at first in the play seems to consist primarily of nunneries, monasteries and whorehouses, with almost
nothing in between: the only family man presented is the absurd
comic figure Elbow; austere celibacy, on the one hand, and saucy
profligacy, on the other, again almost nothing in between. As sexuality is debased, celibacy, for some, gains in attractiveness.
Something seems to be radically wrong with the way most Viennese
think, feel and behave in regard to their sexuality. Immediately fol-
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lowing Angelo’s appointment the Duke pretends that affairs of state
require his hasty removal to foreign parts; Angelo is on his own.
Political scientists (Bloom and Jaffa) quite properly refer to
Machiavelli’s The Prince, chapter VII, as the locus classicus for the
Duke’s mode of procedure with Angelo.3 Cesare Borgia on taking
over Romagna found that because it had been very badly governed
it was full of robberies, quarrels and insolence. To reduce it to peace
and obedience he appointed a very cruel man, Remirro de Orco, as
his deputy with full powers. Remirro soon reduced it to peace and
unity. The reform being accomplished, in order to deflect the hatred
it had generated from himself Cesare had the cruel Remirro placed
one morning in the piazza at Cesena in two pieces, a piece of wood
and a bloody knife beside him. The ferocity of the spectacle left the
people both satisfied and stupified. Bacon speaks of this way of proceeding both in his Wisdom of the Ancients [III], and his Essays
[XIII], but both seem to have been published after this play was first
presented. One is tempted to go along with our scientific fashions
and play at being “more hard-nosed than Thou,” but the differences
between Shakespeare and Machiavelli at least deserve listing. The
Duke does not kill Angelo, though he had full warrant to do so;
unlike Cesare with Remirro, the Duke is not interested merely in
using Angelo, but also as with everyone else, including himself,
making him better, reforming him; above all, since he is not omniscient, he is interested in understanding Angelo: “Hence shall we see,
/If power change purpose, what our seemers be.” It is not simply
because he courts popularity, that he doesn’t institute the reform
himself, it is rather because he is not the right man for the job, and
it would not be, or at least not seem, just for him to do so. There is
another work of Machiavelli’s that bears close comparison with
Measure for Measure, that is Mandragola4; the Duke seems to combine characteristics of both Ligurio and Frate Timoteo, but here
again the differences should prove instructive.
The Duke does not leave Vienna, he goes underground in the
guise of a “holy friar” both to observe and invisibly to correct the
course of his reform. Angelo evidently goes to work immediately:
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the houses of prostitution are put down, and a young gentleman
named Claudio is sentenced to death for fornication; for the
woman he is engaged to marry (the marriage delayed by dowry
problems), Juliet, is big with child. Angelo rejects the urgings of his
second in command and his Provost that here the punishment is
way out of proportion to the crime. Claudio has a high-spirited sister, Isabella, who has entered the austere order of St. Clare -“When
you have vow’d, you must not speak with men /But in the presence
of the prioress; /Then, if you speak, you must not show your face;
/Or if you show your face, you must not speak”- as a novice. She
wishes for an even “more strict restraint.” We are, I suppose, to
imagine her quite beautiful; her moral beauty at least engages the
affections of the play’s two main protagonists. She is urged by the
dissolute gentleman Lucio to plead with Angelo for her brother’s
life. Despite her choosing to renounce family life, her’s is the only
powerful display of family feeling in the play. While hearing her
plea the transforming event of the play takes place, Angelo finds
himself possessed by an overwhelming passion, which, both to himself and to her, he calls love for Isabella. He, on second interview,
proposes that she yield her body to him for one night in exchange
for her brother’s life.
The critique of Angelo would seem to be a critique of
Puritanism in general. Licentious Lucio thinks Angelo “a man
whose blood /Is very snow-broth; one who never feels /The wanton
stings and motions of the sense...” This is surely wrong. The Duke
had made a similar, but more penetrating, observation: “Lord
Angelo is precise; /Stands at a guard with Envy; scarce confesses
/That his blood flows...” If he must guard against envy, he feels the
desires whose indulgences he must not be envious of. With old
Escalus, before he has fallen, Angelo admits that he too has had the
desires that lead to the actions he is punishing with death, acting
upon them makes the difference. He is too good, at least too strict
and too proud to consort with the dissolute; he proves to be not
good enough to be celibate. He wants to be associated with the
highly virtuous, is attracted by Isabella’s purity; he wants to pre-
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serve the image of his gravity; and he wants the joys of what he calls
love: your brother shall not die “Isabel, if you give me love.”
He seems to be altogether confused about the difference
between “yielding up thy body” and “give me love.”5 It was
Isabella’s moving persuasiveness that led him to give more attention
to the erotic side of his soul than he could handle: “Go to your
bosom, /Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know /That’s
like my brother’s fault. If it confess /A natural guiltiness, such as
his....” He replies to himself: “She speaks, and ’tis such sense /That
my sense breeds with it.” [2.2.137 ff.] He did warn the Duke: “Let
there be some more test made of my metal, /Before so noble and so
great a figure /Be stamp’d upon it.” The Duke knows that: “He doth
with holy abstinence subdue /That in himself which he spurs on his
power /To qualify in others.” [4.2.79] The immoderate Puritan
allows the bitterness from his own frustrated desires with perhaps a
touch of envy to spur him on to punish those who will not abstain.
The fear of falling into temptation increases the severity. The intensity of purifying zeal seems to be directly proportional to the
difficulty one has in keeping one’s own illicit desires under control.
The judgment is warped in the direction of severity by what one
feels is required to frighten oneself into abstinence. Isabella’s loveliness and what he sees when he follows her advice and looks into
his own soul push him over the edge.
And now I give my sensual race the rein:
Fit thy consent to my sharp appetite;
Lay by all nicety and prolixious blushes
That banish what they sue for. [2.4.159 ff.]
On reflection it might not seem so strange that modesty should
provoke desire.
Any competent political scientist can figure out why Angelo
never intends to fulfill his side of the bargain. Isabella can find no
“charity in sin.” “More than our brother is our chastity.” The Duke
disguised as Friar Lodowick prepares Claudio for death with a ser-
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mon crammed with Stoic commonplaces on the worthlessness of
life. From here on the Duke uses the holy privileges associated with
his disguise to inform himself of everyone else’s secrets. He overhears Isabella’s account to Claudio of Angelo’s proposal. In another remarkable scene Claudio begins by sharing Isabella’s righteous,
honorable and Christian indignation at the impossibility of Angelo’s
plan. But he has been brought to face the fear of death in a very feeling way.
Death is a fearful thing.
...to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bath in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison’d in the viewless winds
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world: or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling, -’tis too horrible.
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, is a paradise
To what we fear of death. [3.1.115 ff.]
Claudio’s speech is a beautiful illustration of that “very illusion
of the imagination” beautifully described by Adam Smith: the way
a man or woman’s sympathetic imagination attributes to the dead
what he or she would feel being alive, if he or she were housed in
the dead person’s body. And thus “the foresight of our own dissolution is so terrible to us, and ... the idea of those circumstances,
which undoubtedly can give us no pain when we are dead, makes
us miserable while we are alive.” The Duke certainly does not
explain anything like this to Claudio or to anyone else in this play,
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but I don’t think he would disagree with the way Smith closes this
chapter. “And from thence arises one of the most important principles in human nature, the dread of death, the great poison to the
happiness, but the great restraint upon the injustice of mankind,
which, while it afflicts and mortifies the individual, guards and protects the society.” [The Theory of Moral Sentiments, I.i.1.13] Bloom
quite properly refers to Lucretius [III. 417 ff.] in his discussion of
this passage, but Smith, it seems to me, is more balanced, even more
“classical”.
Claudio goes on to plead:
Sweet sister, let me live.
What sin you do to save a brother’s life,
Nature dispenses with the deed so far
That it becomes a virtue. [3.1.132 ff.]
This is not the first time Nature has been invoked to oppose
chastity law. The licentious but eloquent Lucio puts it in a way that
comes close to generally accepted opinion among our intellectuals.
Your brother and his lover have embrac’d;
As those that feed grow full, as blossoming time
That from the seedness the bare fallow brings
To teeming foison, even so her plenteous womb
Expresseth his full tilth and husbandry. [1.4.40 ff.]
The licentious have their say in this play. But Shakespeare has quite
naturally, but not altogether explicitly, built Nature’s answer to
promiscuity into their very speech: it is full of the imagery and fear
of venereal disease. The Duke seems to have come to the realization
that Nature in human society requires law for its fulfillment.6
Isabella is moved by Claudio’s speech, but in exactly the opposite direction. “O, you beast. . . faithless coward...dishonest wretch,”
she replies.
Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice?
Is’t not a kind of incest, to take life [i.e., to be born
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again]
From thine own sister’s shame?
...Take my defiance,
Die, perish! [3.1.135 ff.]
This is not the first time sexual imagery enters Isabella’s speech
in moments of great passion. Answering Angelo she is primarily
thinking of stripping herself for whipping:
Th’impression of keen whips I’d wear as rubies,
And strip myself to death as to a bed
That longing have been sick for, ere I’d yield
My body up to shame. [2.4.101 ff.]
The Duke’s first task is to avert the great impending injustice
brought on by his scheme, but he does it in a way that also seems to
be perfectly calculated to bring Isabella to face her sexuality, and
human sexuality in general, more temperately. His reform will turn
out to be a comprehensive reform; all the representative characters,
Pompey, Lucio, Claudio, Angelo and Isabella are in different ways
reformed. The Duke uses the religious authority he has assumed to
engage Isabella in a plot that will right all wrongs. Angelo, it turns
out, had been engaged to marry a lady, Mariana. When her brother carrying her dowry was wrecked at sea, Angelo “pretending in
her disoveries of dishonour” called off the marriage. This wronged
lady, the “forenamed maid” has unreasonably been driven by his
unkindnesses to a more violent and unruly love for Angelo. She still
regards him as her “husband.” Isabella is to agree to Angelo’s terms,
arrange for a short meeting in a very dark place; Mariana is to be
substituted for Isabella. If the encounter is acknowledged afterwards, it may compel him “to her recompense.” By this, the Duke
argues, “is your brother saved, your honour untainted, the poor
Mariana advantaged, and the corrupt deputy scaled.” The Duke as
friar will frame and make Mariana fit for the attempt. The fact that
this seems to pose no special difficulty suggests that Mariana may
indeed be as right as one can be to mate with Angelo. But it is too
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easy these days to berate Puritanism, Mariana may just see some
nobility in Angelo’s austerity, a nobility that manifests itself to us as
well even in his guilty self-condemnations. It can hardly escape
Isabella’s later reflection that what takes place between Angelo and
Mariana is in many respects parallel to what took place between
Claudio and Juliet. But this conjunction is sanctioned by a holy
man, who declares that “the doubleness of the benefit defends the
deceit from reproof.” Isabella is happy to go along. Even the pleasure of revenge on Angelo seems to be sanctioned by this holy man.
Isabella’s imagination is invited with no impiety to receive scenes of
her enemy coupled with his affianced lover, thinking he is violating
herself. If her soul is puritanical, it will have to become Puritanism
with a certain sense of humor.7
The Duke’s plan for deceiving Angelo succeeds, but Angelo
sends no reprieve for Claudio. On the contrary, he advances the
time for his beheading. He has no interest in preserving the life of
a man privy to his crime, and who, if he has the least grain of honor,
would be bound to think of little else than revenge. The Duke, again
using his assumed religious authority, attempts to get the Provost of
the prison to substitute the head of a convicted murderer,
Barnardine, for Claudio’s, to fool the wicked Angelo again. The
Duke had invoked “the vow of my order.” The “gentle Provost” is
the only one who refuses to bow to religious authority, “Pardon me,
good father, it is against my oath.” When the Duke, without fully
revealing himself, is forced to prove he is acting not only by religious authority but by the authority of the Duke himself, the
Provost goes along. He who refused to subordinate political authority to religious authority for his “care and secrecy” will be rewarded by the Duke with “worthier place.” But Barnardine has been
drinking and is not prepared for death today. He simply will not
consent to die today. This is an amazing prison. They all agree that
to take him in this condition is damnable. Luckily, the captive
pirate, Ragozine, who resembles Claudio, has died that morning:
the perfect head to substitute for Claudio’s. Besides provision of
some fine comedy, the prison scenes are essential for understanding
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the Duke’s basic strategy of reform. Pompey the procurer now put
out of work becomes the prison’s executioner’s assistant. The servant of false love, venereal disease and the unlawful begetting of life
quite easily becomes the true servant of its lawful taking. Pompey’s
coarseness is re-formed to serve the rule of law. The taking and the
begetting of life have been connected before. Angelo declares:
Ha? Fie, these filthy vices! It were as good
To pardon him that hath from nature stolen
A man already made [a murderer], as to remit
Their saucy sweetness that do coin heaven’s image
In stamps that are forbid. ’Tis all as easy
Falsely to take away a life true made,
As to put mettle [metal] in restrained means
To make a false one. [2.4.42 ff.]
As Jaffa put it, “Fornication, as a kind of false coinage of citizens, becomes more than a private action.”8 The regulation of
coinage, society’s circulating medium, is usually a rather unquestioned prerogative of sovereignty. The penalties for counterfeiting
have never been light. To “coin heaven’s image” joins biblical sanctity of begetting to the need for sovereign political regulation of that
private behavior which is the source of life for society as a whole.9
(The coining image occurs at least three more times in the play, in
speeches by the Duke [1.1.35-36], Isabella [2.4.128-29] and Angelo
[1.1.48-50].)
Threats of death color the whole atmosphere of the play. Fear
of death in potential malefactors seems to be indispensable for the
restoration and maintenance of law-abidingness. But absolutely no
one ever gets killed in this prison. It is the genius of this Duke to be
able to employ the fear without ever having to follow through with
the act. The ploy would never work, if it became generally known.
The great final act and scene of the play pulls all strands together, the return of the Duke and resumption of his authority in a
grand public ceremony, where the Duke “like power divine” reveals
all hidden iniquities and resolves all difficulties with perfect justice.
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This justice, both legal and natural justice, is primarily justice in
marriage. For the chaste sexuality of marriage, the raising and nourishing of families under the law, is the solution for the sexual corruption of Vienna.10 The dissolute gentleman, Lucio, is forced to
marry the prostitute who is the mother of his child. Angelo, who
sought Isabella, who was too good for him, is ordered to marry and
love the less scrupulous Mariana. But the Duke knows that the institution of marriage, upon which the health of his polity depends,
will not be on a firm foundation unless it shines forth at the paradigmatic center of society. He too must marry, and marry well. The
high-minded Duke asks the high-minded Isabella to be his wife.
How that works out, we never learn. As part of the apocalypse the
Duke staged for his triumphal return, Isabella was made to believe
that her brother had indeed been executed. It may be that the Duke
wanted her to weigh the events leading to that result more carefully, or merely, as he said, “to keep her ignorant of her good,/To make
her heavenly comforts of despair/When it is least expected.” He
might be made to pay for those hours of despair. These reservations
aside, it seems to be a near perfect marriage. If it should be that the
Duke comes short of perfection by contemplative leniency and
Isabella by spirited severity, it would be by the blending of their
virtues and the mitigating of their defects in their shared lives or in
their offspring that Vienna could hope to receive its perfect Lord.
NOTES:
1. Cf. H.V. Jaffa, The Conditions of Freedom: Essays in Political
Philosophy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), pp.
152-53; G. Anastaplo, St. Louis University Law Journal (Spring, 1965), 390.
2. G. Anastaplo, “Censorship”, The Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th
Edition, 1986 printing, Volume 15, pp. 634-641; The Amendments to
the Constitution: a Commentary, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1995), pp. 52-56: R.A. Licht, “Respect is not a Right”,
Crisis, Vol. 11, No. 7, July-August, 1993, pp. 41-47; “Communal
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Democracy, Modernity, and the Jewish Political Tradition”,
Jewish
Political Studies Review, 5:1-2 (Spring, 1993).
3. A. Bloom, Love and Friendship (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1993), p. 330; H.V Jaffa, “Chastity as a Political Principle: Measure for
.
Measure”, Shakespeare as Political Thinker, eds. J. Alvis and T.G.
West (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2000), pp. 211-12.
4. The most reliable and literal translation known to me is by M.
Flaumenhaft (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1981).
5. Cf. W. Shakespeare, Sonnets, Nos. 129 and 116.
6. L. Berns, “Gratitude, Nature and Piety in King Lear”, Interpretation,
Vol. 3/1 (Autumn, 1972), Sections V and IX; “Rational Animal-Political
Animal: Nature and Convention in Human Speech and Politics”, Essays in
Honor of Jacob Klein (Annapolis: St. John’s College Press, 1976), pp.
29-35, esp. section III; [uncorrected version in The Review of Politics,
Vol. 40, No. 2 (April, 1978), pp. 231-54.]
7. L. Berns, “Transcendence and Equivocation: Some Political, Theological
and Philosophic Themes in Shakespeare”,
Shakespeare as Political
Thinker, cited n. 3, pp. 402-4.
8. “Chastity as a Political Principle: Measure for Measure”, citation
n. 3, p. 221.
9. The locus classicus for the relation between private and public, polity and family is Aeschylus’s trilogy Oresteia. The trilogy begins with a
world where family feeling, the spirit of revenge and cycles of blood feuding dominate and characterize political and social life. Agamemnon, the triumphant leader of the Trojan expedition, is killed on his return to Argos
from Troy by his wife Clytaemestra for the sake of “my child’s Justice”, that
is , to avenge the death of their daughter sacrificed to propitiate the gods
holding up the expedition to Troy. The ruling deities are the Old
Goddesses, the Daughters of Night, the “ingrown, vengeful Furies.” In the
second play, Orestes, Agamemnon’s and Clytaemestra’s son, following the
charge of Apollo’s oracle, avenges his father’s death by killing his mother.
The Furies, “the bloodhounds of my mother’s hate,” pursue him. The third
play, The Eumenides, the well-meaning ones, celebrates the founding of the
Court of the Areiopagus at Athens. Orestes seeks sanctuary at Delphi. The
Pythian oracle is overwhelmed by the pursuing Furies. Apollo himself inter-
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venes and stills the Furies long enough for Hermes to guide Orestes to
Athens for a final resolution of his case. At Athens Pallas Athene takes
charge. She who was not born of woman (born from the head of Zeus), a
most man-like female, almost a mean between male and female, turns the
trial over to an open court of Athenian citizens. The Furies argue against,
Apollo argues for Orestes; gods as advocates, before human beings as
judges and jury. The jury of twelve human beings is given the authority to
decide. The sovereignty of hitherto untamable family feeling is brought
under the supervening authority of the polis, the political community.
Although they have the authority, the human beings by themselves are incapable of deciding between conflicting rights of mother and father. The jury
splits evenly. The deciding vote is given to the goddess Athene. Divine help
is required for settling such questions. She decides for Orestes. It seems that
reasonable procedures for settling and dispensing with problems may
sometimes be more important than assurance that the solutions are correct.
These questions are no longer to be dealt with violently behind closed
doors but deliberately before public and open spectacles of law court,
assembly and theater. The Furies are unwilling to accept these dispensations of the younger gods. By a combination of threats and persuasion
Athene cajoles the Furies to integrate their authority over family feeling and
the household into the service of the greater good of the political community. They shall “win first fruits in offerings for children and the marriage
rite.” The Furies finally agree and are transformed into Eumenides. The
feelings they preside over which are capable of tearing the political community apart cannot be extinguished: they are to be redirected against the
despotically minded consumed by “a terrible love of high renown” and
external enemies; they will bolster the mutual love of fellow citizens. “This
is a cure for much that is wrong among mortals.” Cf. M. Flaumenhaft,
“Seeing Justice Done: Aeschylus’ Oresteia”, Interpretation, Vol. 17/1,
(Fall, 1989), pp. 69-109, reprinted in The Civic Spectacle: Essays on
Drama and Community, (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994),
Chapter 1; and David K. Nichols, “Aeschylus’ Oresteia and the Origins of
Political Life”, Interpretation, Vol. 9/1, (August, 1980), pp. 83-91.
10. L. Berns, “Gratitude, Nature and Piety in King Lear”, citation n. 6, p.
50: “... love and passion ... need to be controlled by law and authority. Being
conceived outside the ’order of law’, Edmund was banished from the family circle. He is not altogether ’unnaturally’ devoid of family feeling.”
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79
A Review of Eva Brann’s
The Ways of Naysaying
Chaninah Maschler
“The first impetus” for this study,1 Eva Brann tells us in her
Preface, was the desire to deepen her understanding of the two
“capacities of our inwardness” that had been the themes of two of
her previous books, The World of the Imagination and What, Then,
is Time? “As the imagination ...makes present what is not before us
by reason of nonexistence or withdrawal, so memory ...holds what
is not with us by reason of having gone by....Therefore... to understand something of imagination, memory, and time, we must mount
an inquiry into what it means to say that something is not what it
claims to be or is not there or is nonexistent or is affected by
Nonbeing. And that is what I am after in Ways of Naysaying” (pp.
xiif, my italics).2
Addressing, I presume, readers of the first two volumes of her
trilogy, Brann explains that and why there will be less reliance on
introspection and more reliance on logic and language in the present volume: ”We could, it is thinkable, be aware of our internal
images...without having language for them....But whether we
could know about negation—that we are capable of it and how—
without speech is doubtful to me. Hence within my scheme, no,
not, non- are deeper than imagination and time, in the sense that
the former underlie the latter and are revealed in their analysis” (p.
xiii). Earlier in this paragraph, and in more detail later, when summarizing Freud’s essay “On denial” in her Chapter One, she allows
that there is a pre-linguistic “nay-saying of instinct and gesture.”
Since this paragraph is rather condensed, and much hangs by it,
let me try to say in my own words what I believe it to hold: Doing
no, for instance, spitting out or pushing away or averting the gaze,
occurs (ontogenetically and, according to Freud, also phylogenetically) before speech. And a sort of prereflective reacting to heard
Eva Brann’s The Ways of Naysaying: No, Not, Nothing, and Nonbeing. Lanham, Md: Rowman
and Littlefield, 2001. Chaninah Maschler is tutor emeritus at St. John’s College.
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“no,” or even the uttering of the syllable “no” (as mere substitute
for the gesture of rejection) may well be a phase of children’s intellectual history. Further, having images and reacting to them, or to
having had them, can occur without the one who reacts being aware
that what he or she is reacting to is an image. But to peg an image
as an image, which means, to take it as a likeness of its original, that
requires, according to Brann, the thought “This is and is not that.”
Therefore there can be no sizing up of a mirror image, memory
image, dream image, perceptual presentation as “merely” an image
until after negation has entered upon the mental scene. Now knowing about negativity, which is different from prereflectively reacting in a rejecting or separating manner, that could not occur sans
speech. While images are, therefore, existentially “prior to” (earlier
than) speech, in involving recognized negativity they show themselves conceptually “posterior to” speech.3
Brann seems to be employing some version of the
Aristotelian contrast between “first to us” and “first in nature.”
This is how I construe her claims that, while imagining and recollecting are more manifest, negativity lies “deeper” than do
these “capacities of our inwardness”; and that, furthermore,
whatever is condition for the possibility of negativity lies more
deeply still. Her book as a whole will argue that the Platonic discovery that Being “holds” Nonbeing may well be the ultimate
answer to the question “was die Welt im Innersten zusammen
halt” (“what it is that most intimately holds the world together,”
Goethe, Faust Pt. 1, li 383).
The Introduction of Brann’s book is given over to etymology. It draws attention to the fact that in English, German,
French, Latin, and Greek (the languages in which the Western
philosophic tradition is expressed), most of the basic words for
naysaying—no, not,non-,nothing, and negativity—start with a
nasal sound. Jesperson, and before him Darwin, remarked on
this fact and entertained the thought that, conceivably, our signs
for negation are transitional between naturally expressive gesture and conventionally learned word. The n-word would then
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have originated as a substitute for the snort of aversion or refusal
and in the course of linguistic and cultural history have proliferated into a multiplicity, the last but not least of which would be
the abstract general negation word “not” we use for contradiction.
In Chapter One, Brann, like many of us today, seems to
share Darwin’s impulse to give direction to speculation about
human archai by studying child development. Accordingly, the
title of her book’s first official chapter—“Chapter One,
Aboriginal Naysaying: Willfull No”—refers initially to “the primordial ‘no’ to everything” of the toddler (p. 9), but eventually
to other respondings (Goethe’s Mephistopheles serving, seriocomically, as paradigm) that reject, disobey, or spit out what is
given. Thus some of the discussion of nihilism in Chapter Six
looks as though it were continuous with Chapter One’s analysis
of childish “no.” The toddler rejects the breast, the command or
prohibition, the saying “so it is” of the grown-up; the nihilist
turns down shared traditions, institutions, and even intersubjectively acknowledged matter of fact.
I loved the affectionate and knowing description of “the terrible twos” in this chapter. I share Brann’s admiration for Freud’s
astonishingly potent brief essay on negation, which she summarizes,
pretty much in Freud’s own words, on pp. 10-12. But it looks to me
as though Freud’s quasi-Nietzschean “genealogy” of the intellectual function of judgment out of the interplay of biologically “primary impulses” has, when Brann is through with it, become tinted with
Augustinian surmises of original sin. In evidence I cite the fact that
it is rather late in the chapter (footnote 28, p. 22) that the “healthy
naysaying” of resistance to temptation and of rebellion against
tyranny are mentioned; also, that the emphasis on self-awareness’
emerging from deeds and words of “arbitrary willfullness” (cf. p.
18) does not seem to be balanced by reflections on the child’s need
to exercise, so as to perfect, skill at matching expectation with outcome, and vice versa. What I have in mind is well-explained by
Jerome Kagan. In brief, Kagan holds that much of what we
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observe in the not quite two-year-old is made intelligible if we
view it as due to the emergence of “three related competencies”:
ability to notice that some happening or action is at odds with
what is right and regular; absorption by the idea of standards as
standards, both those set by others and those set by oneself; awareness of one’s own and the world’s ability or inability to meet standards. I am confident that Brann would agree that these competencies involve the child’s increasingly better memory: Isn’t much
of the toddler’s “testing” of the world, commandeering of adults,
and “first Adam”-like rage at the world’s or the grown-ups’ not
coming through connected with practicing the ability to match
outcome with forecast and plan, remembrance with presentation?
It is my impression that Brann writes more nearly in this spirit in
What, Then, is Time? (See p. 165).
The chief questions asked and answered in Chapter Two, where
the not of logic is taken up, are as follows: 1.What is negation?
2.Where is the sentence negated? 3.Is the positive prior to the negative? 4. How is negation related to falsity?7
Following Aristotle, Brann assigns negating (the act) and negation (the act’s sentential consequence) to the genus of opposition.
An admirable overview of types of opposition, as described and
classified by Aristotle, is provided, while opposition in general is
recognized to be indefinable.8 Plainly, the idea of not is clarified
when, through insertion into its genus, it is made evident that not
must be discriminated from fellow-contenders for naysaying primacy, for example, speaking linguistically, the particles non- or un- or
a- and, speaking semantically (?), the polar relations of contrariety
and privation. The not of contradiction is declared the winner, on
Aristotle’s authority (p. 27). But, Brann hastens to add, contradiction, which is “sheer, unintermediated opposition” (studied as such
under the heading of question 4), belongs to thinking and speaking,
not to things.
We seem, perhaps contrary to expectation, to have ferreted out
something like an answer to the question of what negation consists
in. A summing up of the interim upshot of the inquiry into the
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nature of not is provided on p. 29f. and concludes with the sentence: “Negation arises from the human desire and ability to make
distinctions; it is (most likely) grounded in the oppositions and
polarities that belong to beings....”
Where in the declarative negative sentence is the particle that
accomplishes negation located? is the second question. What
motivates the question? One could imagine a linguist who is trying to learn an exotic language asking it. He would, I suppose,
have tried to obtain a corpus of utterances sufficiently rich to
hold instances of all the elementary affirmative sentence patterns
of that language (supposing this possible); next, he’d have consulted with a native informant as to how one would, in his language, “say the opposite(s)” of these. Assume the native informant is a speaker of English and the linguist’s native tongue is some
non-Indo-European language, say Chinese or Hebrew. If I understand Brann correctly, she believes that the Chinese linguist
would somehow find out that all the elementary affirmative sentence patterns of spoken English are reducible to the triadic pattern S is P How could he have found this out? The best I can
.
come up with is that, in learning English, he relies on the same
logical truth on which he relied when he acquired his mother
tongue—that whatever is said is interpretable as making some
comment on a declared or otherwise manifest topic: The topic is
named by one part of the sentence; the sentence attaches the
comment to the name; and in so doing comments on, that is,
predicates the sentence’s predicate of, the thing or things in the
world that is or are the sentence’s topic.12 The question now
becomes how and why this insight into the logically dyadic T-C
structure of simple 13 affirmative sentences issues in the triadic S
is P structure. The reason for my selecting a Chinese-speaking linguist was, of course, that (as Brann reports in the long and important footnote 22 on p. 64), Chinese sentences do not require a
copula to accomplish the job of commenting. Hebrew doesn’t
either: Joseph holech “merely juxtaposes” what is, strictly speaking,
a participial (thus adjectival) form of the verb to the proper name
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“Joseph” to say what in English would be said by the sentence
Joseph is walking. But nothing stands in the way of a Hebrewspeaking linguist’s learning that in English sentences an “is” must be
inserted between “Joseph” and “walking” for the predicating job to
be accomplished.
What all this fussing is about is the issue how logical and grammatical distinctions differ and mesh. Brann’s fourfold answer to the
question where the negation particle is located in a sentence proceeds, not on the linguist’s basis of studying a corpus of English negative sentences, nor on the logician’s basis of reflecting on the negating jobs that would have to be accomplishable if the tasks of describing and reasoning rightly are to be carried out. Rather, she works
with the S is P pattern of “traditional” logic and negates, first the
“is” or copula, next the “P” or predicate, third the sentence “S is P”
as a whole, and finally, although not whole-heartedly, even the “S”
or subject. Having done this, she points out the jobs done by the
patterns which thus emerge.14
Why does she proceed in this manner? She is, usually, not at all
friendly to mere algebraic patterning. More important, she knows
that Frege, whose “deep critique of the classical view [of negation]”
was taken up appreciatively in the concluding section of the treatment of question 1 (pp. 30-32), endorses something like what I
tried to say through my fable of the Chinese or Hebrew-speaking
linguist, that what chiefly matters is the irreducible logical contrast
between naming and predicating and their complementarity,15
whereas the presence or absence of some form of the verb “to be”
is a linguistic accident.
On first reading I thought that her manner of proceeding in
Chapter Two is due to her not being as convinced as was Frege of
the need for a principled distinction between logic, as a normative
science, and psychology and linguistics as empirical sciences which
acknowledge logical norms in practice (as we all do when we think),
but which do not study them.16 Brann reports and up to a point
explains that Frege distinguishes T-C structures qua what he calls
Gedanken (“thoughts”) from “assertions” (what Kant called “judg-
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ments”). And she appreciates that “thoughts,” including negations,
are for Frege objective and atemporal whereas he regards “assertions” as acts of a speaker or thinker who at some time or other
asserts an assertable or its contradictry. She even quotes a sentence
of Frege’s which brings this contrast to bear on the issue of negation.17 But she refuses to let go of inquiry into what it is in human
beings and the world that leads to nay-saying.18
On second reading I found an outright answer to my question,
why Brann distances herself not only from Frege but also from Plato
and the Aristotle of On Interpretation, in footnote 22 (p. 64). She
writes: “I accept...[‘S is P’] as the fundamental sentence form
because people whose thought is congenial to me19 have built on it
structures that are of great interest, and because I have corroborated by introspection that it is my most basic declarative mode of
internal speech, closer to thinking than the bipartite sentence consisting of a subject and a predicative verb.”20
Postponing till her penultimate chapter, Chapter Six, inquiry
into what she calls the “greatest question,” namely, whether
Something or Nothing is ultimate, the issue in section 3 of the present chapter is whether “in human speaking denial is always derivative and in human speech negation is always secondary” (p. 36).
Boethius, ancient authors in the Aristotelian tradition, and modern
cognitive science are reported to endorse the opinion that the affirmative is prior to the negative, as at first blush it would seem to be,
since any negating particle is an “addendum.” Bosanquet and
Bradley are described as having answered the question in a more
nuanced way: “Negation is not as such a denial of affirmative judgment; it does not presuppose a particular affirmative judgment to be
denied. But it does presuppose some general affirmation, namely,
that of a world having a positive content judged to be real....The
positive judgment itself cannot take place before the distinction
between a mere idea and a fact of reality is recognized. ‘And with
this distinction the idea of negation is given’ ” (p. 40).21 Still, the
over-all conclusion of the inquiry in section 3 is that negation is
“secondary.”
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More minute examination of Bosanquet’s and Bradley’s
remarks on negation might have yielded a scheme for differentiating the diverse senses of the prior/posterior relation; causal priority
might have become differentiated from conceptual priority; priority in dignity or rank from temporal priority.22 But as it stands, section 3 seems to favor a temporal sense of prior/posterior. This bothers me because I am inclined to believe that logicians qua logicians
have no business asking about temporal priority and that conceptually the positive comes or rather is on the scene along with the negative. Thus neither is prior to either.23 As an illustration, consider
the following: At the beginning of the Prior Analytics, Aristotle
defines argument or deduction (syllogismos) as follows: “A deduction is a discourse in which, certain things being stated, something
other than what is stated follows of necessity from their being so.”
I believe that anyone who grasps the type of necessity here spoken
of grasps along with it the impossibility of the contradictory. Upon
reflection I recognize that I base this apparently psychological
observation on the conceptual (i.e. logical) truth that must-bes are
the contradictories of cannot bes and cannot be apart from them.
Indeed, it dawns on me that my seemingly psychological claim may
be nothing but the conceptual truth itelf in another form of words.
The treatment of question 4 (how negation is related to falsity)
shows a respect for Wittgenstein that was, I believe, absent from
Brann’s previous writings.24 His Tractatus is praised both for asking
and for answering the following questions: (1)“How do Truth and
Falsity come to be obverses” (i.e. opposites)? (2)“How is negation
related to them and to truth-values?” (3)“Why are propositions
bipolar?” (4)Can we justify the logic textbooks’ assumption “that
each proposition has only one negative?”(p. 47).25 The two paragraphs immediately preceding the enunciation of these questions
seem to report the answers that Brann found in Wittgenstein. I
quote them in full:
“It all begins with a discrimination exercised by us over a logical space wherein things are seated within their place in their proper relation configurations, a discrimination of the otherness of what
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is false. So prototruth26 is in the world of fact. Now comes a proposition. In its negative and positive sense it is like a solid body that
restricts all movement into a certain place; in its positive sense it has
an empty place where the object can fit in (Tractatus 4.463). These
[comparisons ]are pictures of the ... inherent bipolarity of every
proposition. It shows negation from the beginning related to the
negated proposition, for it is that hole which the negating proposition is blocking (Tractatus 4.0641). So to understand a proposition
is to see the logical space (Tractatus 3.4) and to discriminate what
the facts would have to be like to make a proposition...[i.e. a logical picture] true or false.”
“Truth, then, or falsity, is the consonance or correlation of a
propositional picture with reality (Tractatus 2.21), where reality
(Wirklichkeit) is the existence or non-existence of facts (Tractatus 2;
2.06)—a non-existent fact being one that is pushed out of the world
picture by the fact that exists. In this correspondence is truth in the
primary sense, and it comes in the duality true-false because of the
way logical space divides and we discriminate the facts. In the sense
of propositions lies the polarity positive-negative, the latter of
which is expressed in the sign not- when the facts fail to correspond
to p. Truth values, T and F, are secondary to and derived from negation: ’The sense of a truth function of p is a function of the sense of
p’ (Tractatus 5.2341). Thus T and F are not properties of propositions (Tractatus 6.111) any more than are positive and negative.
The truth values of the truth tables capture the relations of T and F
to p and not-p more than they define the latter.”
Section 4 concludes with the following remarkable observations:
(1)The examination of the Tractatus has revealed that for
Wittgenstein and other moderns “truth comes from the world, and
negation is in propositions. For traditional philosophers it is just the
other way around: Negation is in the world of appearances and in
the beings of the intellect, and truth is in the propositions” (p. 48).
(2)What Aristotle says about the true and the false in
Metaphysics Bk. IV 1011b25 and Bk VI, 1027b19ff tends to show
,
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that Heidegger was quite right when, in his Logic, he denied that
the Aristotelian texts hold a “correspondence theory of truth” (p.
48).
(3)Aristotle speaks “for a world very different from the one in
which the propositional calculus of Russell and Wittgenstein is at
home. For Aristotle negation (I mean negation in an objective form,
contrariety interpreted as Nonbeing and its effects) is in the world
and falsity (I mean the not always unintentional failure of speech to
reveal being is in statements....Whether negation is in the world or
in speech is one of the numerous but interrelated marks by which a
classical world...is distinguished from a modern world. For a world
that has negation built in responds to receptive thought since it
reveals its own distinctions, while a solidly positive one demands
constructive reason since oppositions need to be made” (p. 49).
As the just-reported grand conclusions of section 4 of Chapter
2 tend to confirm, negation became thematic for Brann by virtue of
her interest in the psychological and ontological topics that were
mentioned in the opening paragraph of this review; whereas logicians—from Aristotle through the Stoic logicians and Frege, Peirce,
Russell, Quine—attend to negation chiefly because of how it affects
what is and what is not a valid pattern of argument. Patterns of reasoning or deduction rather than patterns of judgment or of propositions may well be their primary concern.27 This difference
between herself and the logicians might also explain the otherwise
rather puzzling remark, on p. 25, that “by and large the negations
of logic28 take place in symbols and are found in books. They are
not so much naysayings as naywritings.” For the purposes of reasoning the idea of contradiction, that is, of an opposition which is
not only exclusive but also exhaustive, is indispensable: Illiterate
Athenians have no trouble grasping the sense of arguments by contraposition such as, “If virtue were teachable, there’d be teachers of
virtue, yet there are none. Therefore, virtue is not teacheable.” And
I surmise that the pattern of Euclid’s reductios (which likewise
involve the stark negativity of contradiction) was first discovered as
a debating gambit and passed on by teachers of rhetoric. I say this
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partly because it seems to me that even Euclid’s Elements still retain
a viva voce dialogic rhetorical mode.
“When we refer to a nonexistent object, what are we thinking
of and what are we talking about?” (p. 76). Chapter Three begins
by pointing out that this is a distinctively modern question,29 different from the ancient one taken up in Plato’s Sophist, how nonbeing can be, to which Chapter Four will be devoted. Four types of
non-existents are mentioned for purposes of illustration—“members of extinct species [dodos, for instance]...deceased human
beings [for example, Socrates]...artifacts no longer extant,30 but
also all the entities that never did exist in the ordinary sensible
sense, such as unicorns” (p. 79).
Roughly speaking, four types of answers are sketched in
Chapter Three: Bertrand Russell’s “theory of definite description,”
Alexius Meinong’s “theory of objects [and objectives],” the recent
version of Meinong worked out by Terence Parsons in his 1980
book Nonexistent Objects (New Haven: Yale University Press), and
any one of a number of theories according to which “pretense and
make-believe are the chief explanatory principles,...[not of the
behavior of nonexistent objects], but [of] how they manage to
come on the scene to begin with, [and] what we cognitively do to
cooperate in fiction making” (p. 99). From the way these theories
are elaborated it becomes apparent that, although —as the two earlier volumes of Brann’s trilogy argued—our ability to think and
speak truly or falsely of bygone things is testimony to the powers
of the human imagination, in that the feat of “re-calling” depends
on or consists in the imagination’s having succeeded at making
temporally absent things present, it is the “saving” of fictional entities that chiefly matters for the purposes of the present book’s
Chapter Three.
Before she turns to a fairly detailed examination of Russell’s
treatment of proper names and definite descriptions, Brann lets us
know that “the theory that is the winner in the world of logic
[namely, Russell’s], will turn out to be something of loser in the
world of fiction” (p. 76). Russell’s theory, as she tells us Parson too
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observed, pays too high a price for its clarity: “The theory commits
us to treating the sentences of fiction as false, while most of us think
they have at least a sort of truth, and some of us even believe that
they often have more truth than mere fact does” (p. 86). Meinong,
contrarywise, “comes near to saving the phenomena of that intentional experience of central interest to this trilogy...the experience
of imagining (p. 91). Russell’s excision of nonexistents from reality31 is false to the power that some non-existent beings and places
have, moving us “as models and attractors,” and “outliving us by
millennia, and in a word impinging on us as if existence were home
to them as well [as to ourselves?]” (p. 102).
Instead of recapitulating what Brann says about the technical
aspects of Russell’s theory of description and Meinongian rival theories, I want to dwell a little on Brann’s question how we are to
account for the fact that the Natasha, Pierre, and Andrey of
Tolstoy’s War and Peace or the Hari Kumar and Ronald Merrick of
Scott’s Raj Quintet32 have become our companions.
A familiar answer begins by reminding us of our unabating
curiosity about our fellow human beings, whether met in the flesh
or encountered vicariously through what our friends, our children,
our journalists report and our television news programs show. “But
the characters who people novels are immensely more memorable
than the Tom or Dick or Harry that our neighbors tell us about.”
Well, that does somewhat depend on what a particular neighbor is
capable of telling us about a particular Tom (or Jane for that matter), not to mention the particular Tom or Jane spoken about. But
to the extent that it is true, may it not in large part be the result of
novelistic characters’ (at least those that dwell in novels of substance) becoming so much better known to us than any persons not
our “real life” intimates?33 Novelists are much better at noticing
things than most of us are, and better at imparting what they’ve
noticed too. Also, our acquaintance with novelistic characters is a
shared acquaintance, shared with other make-believe characters in
the novel, with the novel’s author, and with fellow-readers of the
novel. It is hardly news that sharing (comparing notes and impress-
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sions) is immensely pleasurable, greatly contributes to a feeling of
solidarity, and is constitutive of our sense of reality.
Add to what’s been said our relish for just about all human skills
or powers, our own as readers and the novel-making skills of the
author. Most important, count in the special joys of play and makebelieve: Aren’t we well launched on the beginnings of some sort of
answer to the question “Why and how do fictional characters
become real to us?”
Brann does not think so. At least, she rejects the idea that what
we relish, in ourselves and novelists, is the exercise of the human
power of make-believe: “Being absorbed into a fiction, living in its
landscapes and with its people, is not well described as a form of
pretense—not on the reader’s or viewer’s part and so much less on
the poet’s or painter’s part....Children, to be sure, play ’Let’s pretend,’ but that is usually when the game requires that roles be
assigned , and I’d bet that the mover of the pretense doen’t often
assign, say, the submissive role to herself; in participating in a novel,
on the other hand, we may well surrender ourselves to the experiences of the underdog ”(p. 99f).34
I wonder whether childish “dramatic play” (as the child psychologists call it) and make-believe of every sort is here conceived
of in all its richness. Think of the infinite variety of solitary and collaborative pretending and letting be we catch our children at! Sure,
sometimes there is one kid in charge (“I’ll be mommy and you’ll be
baby”) but by no means always. Two games of make-believe I
remember watching were: spreading out newspapers on the floor to
be islands and going island-finding, island-hopping, and islandworking; arranging marbles in rows and letting them be children at
school. Neither of these games called for leadership. Older children
would sometimes join the younger ones at play, humbly grateful and
gratified to be allowed “in” on the game. Improvisational theatre
has some of these qualities, I believe, though I cannot be sure since
I have never participated, either as actor or as audience.35 I went on
like this because I want to make concrete that there might be ways
of “taking fiction seriously” and trying to understand why and how
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make-believe matters that don’t proceed by way of ontology but by
way of psychology. The British pediatrician and child psychologist
D.W Winnicott may have something to teach us here.36 And as for
.
grown-ups making believe, I have begun to read Kendall L.
Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe, On the Foundations of the
Representational Arts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Part Four of this book tries to show why it is all right to do without
fictional entities. I should, however, also mention that in Austria, at
the University of Graz, much is currently being written about the
logic and ontology of fictional objects.
A reader of an earlier version of this review advised me that I
need to report where I stand on the issue of the being and non-being
of fictional characters. I am undecided, because I have insufficiently considered (to give just one example) whether my belief that one
can be as mistaken in one’s “reading” of a fictional character as one
can in one’s “reading” of a violin sonata does or does not have
ontological implications. My laziness about ontology may have
something to do with the fact that I lean toward believing that it is
more illuminating to ask questions about how imagined persons
and places are and are not like historical individuals and geographic regions, or how what one learns about good and evil from living
hooks on to what one learns about them from literature, than it is
to delve into ontology.
The rest of Chapter Three is devoted to reflections on lies and
lying37 and to Anselm’s so-called ontological proof of the impossibility of God’s non-existence.38 The setting out of Anselm’s argument is very pretty!
Chapter Four: When we begin to read Chapter Four’s first
paragraph, we are already in possession of the guidepost furnished
in the Preface (p. xiv): “Here [in section 2] comes on the scene the
Non of philosophy (my italics), a prefix signifying not the brusquely rejecting denial of fact in words but the more forgiving opposition of two elements in the same world. The thought of Nonbeing
comes among us as the unbidden effect of Parmenides’ injunction
against it, and Plato will domesticate that same Nonbeing, bringing
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it into philosophy as the relational principle of diversity, the Other.”
But to reach section 2 we must traverse section 1. It begins:
“Parmenides learned from the goddess who dwells in the house of
truth that ’Being is’ and that he must not embark on the way of
Nonbeing. As far as I know, Nonbeing had not established itself in
anyone’s thought—at least in the West—before Parmenides’ deity
warned him off this path of inquiry; nor has it ever vacated its place
in thought since. Her [i.e. the goddess’s] repeated prohibitions and
injunctions against this Unthinkable and Unsayable seem to have
done for this philosophical offense what inveighings against sin
have so often accomplished in the moral sphere—they have
launched it on its career as a well-formulated and ever attractive
presence” (p. 123).
Among the titillating suggestions of Brann’s commentary on
Parmenides’ poem there is this, that this “heroic epic” (in dactylic
hexameter) is “unmistakably [intended as?] a rival to Homer’s
Odyssey,” so that “the ancient difference between philosophy and
poetry” of which the Republic speaks (607b)39 first comes on the
world scene when the journeying of young Parmenides displaces
that of middle-aged Odysseus.
I find myself incapable of paraphrasing what Brann says about
Parmenides. Here are some more quotations: “We often use phrases like ‘sing a song,’ where the object is the action of the verb made
into a thing accomplished. Parmenides sometimes does something
symmetrical with the verb ‘to be’ at the front end of a sentence. He
turns the verbal sense into a subject. But I don’t think that Being or
its negation is thereby established as a thing....On the contrary,
mere verbal ‘Is’ remains the truest kind of showing forth, and the
nounlike forms merely display the inability, or rather unwillingness,
of the goddess’s speech to get outside the meaning of that little
word which courses through human speech surrounded by subject
and predicate. Parmenides’ poem is a rebuff before the fact to those
who will claim that Indo-European languages are indefeasibly subject-and-predicate-ridden. For this is what Parmenides is bidden [by
his goddess] to convey: the sheer Isness of which we always get hold
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when we think beyond multiplicity....The common declarative tripartite sentence...is an implicit expression of three distinctions:
between the thinker and the thought (since some thinking person is
having and uttering a thought); between the thought and what it is
about (since the sentence states a thought-proposition about an
object); and between the object and its properties (since the sentence predicates a property of its subject). At the very beginning,
before these elements have ever been formally established, the goddess wants to prevent them from being distinguished....My main
purpose in this section has been to enter just enough intothe meaning of ‘Is’ to make sense of the ’Is not’ that trails it as its unwelcome
but unshakable doppelganger” (p. 130ff.).
“The next step in the ancient story of Nonbeing is...the reversal of its outlaw status and its integration into the community of
Beings. It is taken in Athens, the city of reconciliations” (p. 138).
What follows the exquisite paragraph whose two opening sentences were just quoted40 is a fresh setting out of reflections on
Plato’s dialogue the Sophist.41
I describe a few of these.
Seasoned readers of Platonic dialogues agree in noticing that
the conversation in the Sophist begins with the question whether
corresponding to the three names or titles “sophist”, “statesman”,
“philosopher” there are three beings or three types of being. Given
the fact that there is a dialogue called Sophist and also one called
Statesman, the non-being of a dialogue called Philosopher is a glaring fact. Some Plato commentators have argued that the Philebus is
the “missing” dialogue. But Brann believes that there are indications
in the Sophist that Plato means us to understand that “sophists and
philosophers are identical,” though differing in three respects: First,
the dialectical skill which is shared by sophists and philosophers is,
in the philosopher, accompanied by a kind of professional ethics.
Dialectic is, for him, a sacred trust. For the sophist it is a moneymaking techne, for sale to the highest bidder. Second, unlike the
traveling sophist, who is detached from civic loyalties, “the philosopher never forgets his human circumstances” (p. 139). Third, the
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philosopher is “that rare sophist who acknowledges Nonbeing
without taking cover in it” (p. 139).
To catch the “vulgar” sophist, the philosopher-sophist—in this
dialogue represented by an unnamed stranger-guest from
Parmenides’ city, Elea—must somehow show that contrary to what
Parmenides’ goddess taught him, Nonbeing is.
But it is not only to catch the sophist; nor just to defend the
possibility of false speech, negative speech, and error. Rather, to
save philosophy itself (to save speech itself?), Nonbeing must be
allowed to be! (Sophist 260A). The stranger therefore, Theseus-like,
or again, Athena-like, bestows citizenship on Nonbeing by declaring
it a form among the koinonia of forms (p.141). It is the diversifying
relational principle or form Otherness, not to medamoos on,
absolute nothing. “It is its ...[being identified] as the Other that
saves it from the utter inability—which Parmenides does indeed
assert—to become sayable....Nonbeing both bonds and negates
among beings, but its negation is not annihilation” (p. 142).
The chapter’s last paragraph makes the transition to Hegel: “In
Nonbeing naysaying has found its enabling principle in the realm of
Being. Now comes a view of speech and thought [namely, Hegel’s]
as themselves having inherent negativity. As Nonbeing was a source
of ontic diversity, so this [Hegelian] negativity will be the source of
mental motion” (p. 144, my italics).
Concerning Chapter Five I merely report that it employs the
trinity Spirit, Understanding, Reason to display and classify the
kinds of negativity encountered in Hegel’s Phenomenology, Kant’s
First Critique, and Hegel’s Logic. Devotees of Hegel will find much
to admire here. The chapter concludes with a paragraph announcing that, though the earlier chapter concerning Parmenides and
Plato and the present one concerning Hegel conspire to reaffirm
that Being is prior to Nothing, this is not as yet fully established:
Therefore Chapter Six42 jousts with the “greatest question”—which
is ultimate, Something or Nothing?
Most winning, witty, and sometimes even wise of all the sections of Ways of Naysaying are the concluding pages of this chap-
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ter, Chapter Six, about Nothing, offered under the seemingly bleak
heading, “Nothing as Inescapable End: Death” (pp. 188-198)!
However much of the time I was rather lost in this chapter. The
reason, I imagine, is that Brann’s question, whether Something or
Nothing is ultimate, never jelled into being a question for me. Yet as
best I understand the chapter, the various items it gathers together—“modern nominalism” (p. 170), Epicureanism and the void (p.
171ff), the “blithe nihilism” of some of the Buddhist schools (p.
173), the political “nihilism” of the mid-nineteenth century Russian
revolutionaries portrayed in Turgeniev’s novel Fathers and Sons (p.
179), and Heidegger’s teachings concerning the nihilating nihil (das
nichtende Nichts, p. 184ff) —are thought to deserve to stand side
by side because they all affirm, albeit in different ways, that Nothing
is more C primordial, more really real, than Something. This is the
sense in which they are all of them “nihilisms.”43 Another thing that
they may have in common is an ontology in which will is prior to
understanding.
It is possible that my failure to understand the chapter and its
leading question is due to incomprehension of Heidegger: I tend to
become so overwhelmed with irritation at his preachy incantational tone, his haughtiness, his tricks of inverting grounds and their
consequents, his abuse of the scholarly riches deposited in etymological dictionaries, that I become incapable of paying attention to
what he says.
Conclusion: (1)Is all human “opposing” (in will, word, or deed)
reactive to, thus parasitic on, a “posing”? (2)Might negating
responses constitute evidence for the being of Nonbeing,
Nonexistents, or even of Nothing? (3)Supposing there are
Nonexistents and Nonbeings, by what powers of the soul do we
encounter them?
In her final chapter, Brann recapitulates the affirmative answers
she earlier gave to questions (1) and (2). But she now expands on
what was said about Nonbeing in her pivotal Chapter Four:
“Besides the nonexistents that respond to our sense of what is missing...there are also declines and falls from existence, right in the
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world around us, that we experience as a sort of nonexistence.
Take, for example, the reflection of a willow tree that appears in a
pond. Take the numerous things and people in the world without
that are not what they appear to be....This last group, fallen existences [my italics], particularly raises the question whether it is our
way of experience or the nature of things that provides the not or
non here” (p. 215). As the past participle “fallen” which I underlined just now goes to show, Brann is introducing a principle of hierarchy into the realm of being. “Nonbeing as otherness is the universal relativity....But there is also ...a vertical Nonbeing....This
Nonbeing...has in it something of absolute inferiority, of defective
or deficient Being” (p. 216). Brann has brought us back to the central books of Plato’s Republic, I mean, books VI and VII, with their
image of the sun, diagram of the unequally divided line, and story
of the prisoners confined to life in a cave.44 It is in this context that
she reaffirms the answer to question (3) that’s been with us since her
book’s opening sentence: It’s neither sensing nor thinking that give
us access to nonbeings and nonexistents but imagination and memory.45
Obviously, then, this review cannot have done justice to the
book it tried to summarize and (in some measure) appraise, since
that book is one third of a three thirds whole. I hope, however, to
have conveyed something of its extraordinary scope, writing style,
intellectual daring and imagination.
NOTES:
1. The Ways of Naysaying: No, Not, Nothing, and Nonbeing (
New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001)
2. Cf. What, Then, Is Time?, p. 165:“...we are able to have and interpret
images, to live consciously in the phases of time, and to think and speak negatively. My guess is that these three capacities are really triune, three-in-one.
They may be the root of our humanity, and perhaps the subject of another
book.”
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3. See also World of the Imagination, pp. 405 and 783, where Brann
expresses her agreement with Freud and Wittgenstein that one can “speak of
what is not, but not depict it.”
4. His self-identification, from Faust pt. 1, lines 1336-8, is quoted on p. 14:
“I am a part of the force that constantly wills evil and constantly effects
good....I am the spirit that constantly denies.” Omitted from the quotation,
though surely Nietzscheans would hold that they are, if not the, an arche of
“nihilism,” are the lines: “und das mit Recht; denn alles, was entste-
ht/ Ist wert das es zugrunde geht;/Drum besser ware es dass
nichts enstunde...” (“and rightly so, because everything that originates
deserves to perish. Wherefore it would have been better if nothing had originated.”)
5. Brann’s use of the Freud essay is filtered through Rene Spitz’s The First
Year of Life and No and Yes. I have not read these books. Therefore I
cannot tell whether her complaint that Freud’s speculations— about what it
was that first prompted the human race’s invention of a “symbol” for negation— fail to include reflection on not as accomplishing “denial of truth or
untruth” is also Spitz’s. “Psychoanalytic theory does not tell whence comes
mature negation and possible truth telling; these may not have a naturalistic
genesis” is the concluding sentence of her account of Freud. What a non-naturalistic account of origins might consist in is not explained.
6. The Second Year: The Emergence of Selfawareness (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1981).
7. This list slights her treatment of double negation, of the logical paradoxes that are generated when negation and self-reference are allowed to combine, of the stretching of the concept of number through the introduction of
negative numbers and zero, and of Kant’s discovery or invention of “directed quantities” (vectors) in the pre-critical essay “An Attempt to Introduce the
Concept of Negative Numbers into Philosophy.” Since these topics are listed
in the well-prepared index, I omit page references.
8. Cf. Metaphysics ix, 1048b1-10
9. The quoted sentence ends with the bracketed remark “...of which the first,
the opposition of oppositions, is surely that of thinking itself to its object.”
This claim makes me uneasy, given the remark, on p. xiii of the Preface, that
“the mysteries and conuncrums of intention—denotation and reference,
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sense and meaning...are happily not within the task of this book.” In my estimation, Frege’s insistence on the need for a Sinn/Bedeutung contrast and late
Russell’s attempt to dispense with it must be discussed by anyone who investigates thinking and speaking and their “objects.” Observe also that conversational exchange is given no role in the account. A quick way of making this
manifest is that, throughout the book, saying “no” is classified or explained
in terms of exercising the will, although it surely figures when answering
what linguists indeed peg as “yes/no questions.”
10. My hunch is that Anscombe’s remarks about “internal” and “external”
negation in her Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (see in Anscombe
pp. 31, 34, 35, 46, 47, 51), and her question (p. 53) “...Is the property of
being true or false, which belongs to the truth-functions, the very sam property as the property of being true or false that belongs to the propositions
whose internal structure does not interest us?” is what first prompted Brann
to make the question about the “location” of the negation particle thematic.
11. If we are both looking at the ocean and you say “Majestic!” my guess
that it is the ocean that is said to be majestic is pretty safe. That’s how I mean
“otherwise manifest.”
12. For the somewhat ampler statement of this Fregean type of analysis of
“simple” sentences which is the source of my remarks, see pp.132f,
Anscombe and Geach, Three Philosophers: Aristotle, Aquinas, Frege. Please
observe that although English, which has pretty nearly dropped the use of
case endings, tends to place the name of the topic early in the sentence,classical Greek and other languages that use case endings to express syntactic
structure may, for rhetorical purposes, place it late in the sentence. Note also
that nothing prevents a simple sentence’s having a “complex” topic, for
instance the ordered triple {Athena, Athens, this olive tree}, which is, on one
analysis, the topic of the sentence “Athena gave Athens this olive tree.” When
the topic is so identified, the predicate is “—gave—to—” When the item that
would, in Greek, be in the nominative case is singled out as the name of the
sentence’s topic, the predicate would be “—gave Athens this olive tree.”
What chiefly matters, from a Fregean logical point of view, is the contrast
between proper names (e.g. “Theaetetus”) and concept words (e.g “flies” or
“sits”) as in the sentences “Theaetetus flies” and “Theaetetus sits.” A person
who is unaware that the word “give” is trivalent and the word “fly” or “sit”
is monovalent hasn’t got the hang of the semantics of these concept words.
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Cf footnote 11 below. See further Anthony Kenny’s Penguin volume about
Wittgenstein, pp. 121f.
question (p. 63) “Is Being at the true center of every sentence even if it is
obscured by a predicative verb?”
13. How “simple” is to be understood in this context is, of course, much in
14. In the spirit of Kantian “architectonic,” these ways of negating a sentence
are later (p. 95) brought to bear on lying, so as to yield a classificatory scheme
for lies.
21. I note that there’s a large dose of such “idealist” thinking in Freud’s essay
on negation: “the performance of the function of judgement is not made possible until the creation of the symbol of negation has endowed thinking with
a first measure of freedom from the consequences of repression and, with it,
from the compulsion of the pleasure principle.”
15. In the “dream theory” of Theaetetus 202 the mistake is to suppose that
22. Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics Bk V, Ch.ll.
sentences consist of nothing but names; earlier, at 190, it looks as though sentences are being spoken of as consisting of nothing but predicate words. For
explicit correction of such “homogenizing” treatment of the constituents of
sentences, see Sophist 262.
23. Peter Geach’s essay “The Law of Exclude Middle” (p. 79, Logic
need of saying.
16. Does “doing logic”/“doing empirical science” exhaust the genus “investigation”? Brann would certainly question this bipartition.
17. “Perhaps the act of negating, which maintains a questionable existence
as the polar opposite of [affirmative] judging, is a chimerical construction,
formed by a fusing of the act of judging with the negation.” (p. 128 of Geach
and Black’s Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob
Frege, Oxford: Blackwell, 1952).
18. In footnote 54, on p. 69, Brann calls on Anscombe to testify that, as
Brann puts it, the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, in “rejecting inquiry into
the way world, pictured fact, language, and thought are related” and “pretending that epistemology has nothing to do with the foundations of logic
and the theory of meaning,” made claims that are “fantastically untrue”
(Anscombe, Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, (London: Hutchinson
University Library, p. 28).
19. For example, and especially, Kant and Hegel.
20. This sentence continues, after a colon, as follows:”The briefest way to
put the reason why is that thinking speech brings its objects to a standstill
even as it goes about discerning them through their properties. The declarative is expresses at once that transfixing done by thought and the expansion
with which the object of thought responds.” The just cited explication of
Brann’s “introspective” report is tantamount to an affirmative answer to the
Matters, Oxford: Blackwell, 1972) contains a nice exposition of this thesis.
Geach, like Brann herself (e.g., p. 28), exploits Wittgenstein’s metaphor of
“logical space” and the notion of boundary for this purpose. Note, by the
way, that it would be a mistake to assimilate Wittgenstein’s logical space to
Brann’s psychic space, as she describes it on the opening pages of her Preface.
Studying Brann’s, Wittgenstein’s, and the cognitive scientist Gilles
Fauconnier’s uses of metaphors of space would be a delicate but worthwhile
undertaking.
24. See, e.g., What, Then Is Time?, p. 112ff. In other sections of Ways of
Naysaying Wittgenstein continues to be treated as the or a bad guy: He
would, as Brann reads him,want to prevent her and fellow philosophers from
investigating whether there is “some one truth behind [the] many appearances” of, in this instance, negativity (p. xiv and note 11 on p. xvii). In the
chapter on nihilism, Brann approvingly reports that Stanley Rosen has
“shown” that “‘Wittgenstein and his progeny are nihilists because they cannot distinguish speech from silence.’” After the brief quote from Rosen, she
goes on to say: “For [according to Wittgenstein] it makes no difference what
we say. It makes no difference because if, as the later Wittgenstein
says...speech becomes meaningful only in a context of gamelike rules and
conventions and as a ‘form of life,’ then we can never get beyond these and
never receive a sensible answer when we query a conventional usage or conventionalism itself ” (p. 183).
25. I was helped by Anscombe’s version of this last question, which runs as
follows: What right do logicians have to define “not” by telling us that “not
p” is “the proposition that is true when p is false and false when p is true”?
The phrase “the so- and- so” is, after all, legitimate only when there is a soand-so and there is only one such.
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26. Does this word (or its German equivalent), occur in Wittgenstein’s text?
27. It is a striking fact that only Aristotle’s treatment of “immediate inference” is taken up (footnote 7, p. 61) and “syllogizing” omitted. Note also that
in Chapter Three, when dealing with Russell’s account of Definite
Description, nothing is said about the need, in mathematical reasoning, for
the principle of “substitutivity of identicals” or the “principle of existential
generalization.” See Ausonio Marras’ Introduction to his anthology,
Intentionaliy, Mind, and Language (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1972) for some brief remarks about the latter two. When all is said and
done, Brann does not seem to be really interested in formal logic. This is how
I account for her not catching the slip in claiming that “In symbolic logic we
do not enter the propositions as we did in section 2, but take them as primitive, symbolized by p or q, etc.” (p. 43; cf p. 212). She certainly knows that
Frege’s treatment of quantification (analysis of the sense and use of such little words as “all”, “some”, “one,” which is needed for doing predicate calculus) is what is usually singled out as the true “advance” beyond premodern
logic; Stoic logic, though “pre-modern,” had already dealt with the definitions of the logical constants of propositional logic and with its basic argument patterns.
I look as though I’m being a pedant about the history of logic. But that’s really not what I care about. Rather, ever since the days that I heard the World
War II German soldiers who were entering Amsterdam, Holland, sing
“Denn wir alle lieben nur ein Madelein, Annemarie” I have wondered, “Should I feel sorry for that girl, Annemarie, burdened with being
loved by this whole troop of men? Or are there as many Annemarie’s as there
are men in this troop, and each of the girls gets one of the singing men? For
a fine essay on this topic, see Peter Geach’s “History of a Fallacy” in Logic
Matters (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972).
28. I believe this means the not of contradiction.
29. I am not sure how “modern” is meant here: post-Occamist, that is postrealist (in the scholastic sense of that word)? I ask for clarification of the
adjective because I am not certain what, exactly, the systemic import of the
observation is. See footnote 23 on pp. 111ff. See also the remark about the
“inherent nihilism of an absolute nominalism” in her commentary on Wallace
Stevens’ poem “The Snow Man” and the continuation of this thought in her
interpretation of “The Course of a Particular,” p. 170. FootnoteA 3 on p. 199
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claims that “nominalism is one of the philosophical positions adopted by
those for whom disillusionment is a warrant of truth” and concludes with a
remark about the “fanatically honest.” These are, says Brann, the folk who
“take pride in shivering in the metaphysical cold.” The quoted passages
sound—what shall I call it?— dismissive to me. I wish there had been something more nearly like an explanation of what the nominalism/realism issue
is and why Brann favors the realists. Cf pp. 4-6 of W Stace, The
.T.
Philosophy of Hegel (New York: Dover, 1955)?
30. Artifacts no longer in use, like sliderules, or tools for living about which
we learn through literary remains but examplars of which have not been
encountered by archaeologists? I try more nearly to specify the question
because I am confused whether the general question of how we can speak or
think truly or falsely of kinds that are“bygones” is being raised or rather the
question how bygone individuals can be referred to? Cf Wittgenstein’s
Philosophical Investigations ¶79 about the many senses of “Moses did not
exist.” See also G.E.M. Anscombe and P Geach, Three Philosophers
.T.
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1973) pp. 135f about the importance of Frege’s reviving
the scholastic contrast between singular and universal propositions.
“Traditional” logic rides roughshod over the distinction. Geach’s essay “Perils
of Pauline” in Logic Matters is refreshingly lucid and unstuffy on the subject of names and descriptioons (and much else besides).
31. Cf. p. 100: ”What Russell says he means, flatly and irremediably, and
therefore he must be flatly and irremediably wrong: It cannot be the case that
what is said about and within fictions is false—unless one maintains that logically accurate speech has no correspondence with humanly normal speech.
For we say both that it is true and that it is true to life that Natasha Rostov
marries Pierre Bezuhov, and we want to keep on saying just that.”
32. See the splendid appreciation of the Raj Quintet in Brann’s contribution
to the anthology Poets, Princes, and Private Citizens edited by Joseph M.
Knippenberg and Peter Augustine Lawler (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield,
1996).
33. The special pleasure we take in our own children is not solely due to
their being ours; it has much to do with our knowing them better than most
other people’s children.
34. I worry a little about the rhetorical effects of using the words “pretend”
and “pretense” in lieu of “make believe.” But let that pass.
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35. The novelist Jorge Luis Borges writes somewhere, “[The actor] on stage
plays at being another before a gathering of people who play at taking him
for that other person.” I acknowledge, however, that novels differ from stage
plays, involve (in addition to the things mentioned) some special a deux intimacy between the reader and the book.
36. See for example Playing and Reality, London: Tavistock Publications,
1971 and perhaps also some of the essays about Winnicottt included in the
collection edited by Grolnick and Barkin, Between Reality and Fantasy
(New York: Jason Arons, 1978). I particularly recommend Rosemary
Dinnage’s “A Bit of Light.”
37. As best I recall, Brann does not, when treating of “the lie in the soul” (p.
94), worry about what Freud called repression.
38. I was puzzled that Brann did not reserve space in her book to discuss the
important topic of children’s and grown-ups’ often being uncertain whether
this or that “really happened” and whether this or that named individual
(Satan, Cerberus) or species of entities (witches) “really exists” or not.
Helping children sort out the dreamt from what’s in the public world of the
awake is among our parental responsibilities. Thus “...does not exist” seems
to me to hold as important a story as is that about the being of non-beings.
39. Cf Epinomis 990 on that mere farmer’s almanac, Hesiod’s Works and
Days?. Parmenides reputedly was the first to propose that the moon shines
by the sun’s reflected light and that the earth is a sphere; also, that the
evening and morning stars are one and the same. I therefore keep hoping for
a reading of his poem that will show that its episteme/doxa contrast has
astronomical meaning. But no such reading is endorsed by Brann.
40. These sentences allude, of course, to Aeschylus’ Oresteia and Sophocles’
Oedipus at Colonus. This well illustrates the dramatizing vividness of Brann’s
ontological discourse.
41. Cf The World of the Imagination p. 389ff. and Jacob Klein, Greek
Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (English version,
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1966), p. 82 and A Commentary on Plato’s Meno
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), p. 114f.
42. Corresponding to the afternoon of the day on which Man was created,
male and female, in God’s image? Yes, of course I am joking in playing with
the numbers. But I am not just joking: The chapters in Genesis that tell in
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detail how man became man (chapters 2, 3, 4) hold a plethora of negation
words, whereas the opening chapter lacks all negativity.
43. If there is an explicitly stated definition of the word “nihilism” in
Chapter Six, I need to have it pointed out to me.
44. Cf. Eva Brann, “The Music of the Republic,” St. John’s Review, volume xxxix, numbers 1 and 2. Se especially pp. 75,6.
45. Cf. the discussion of “opinion” on pp. 38ff of “The Music of the
Republic.”
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107
The Potent Nonentity: A
review of Eva Brann’s What,
Then, is Time?
Torrance Kirby
Time, Augustine claims, is so ordinary as to be impossibly
difficult (Conf. XI.14). This is the paradoxical theme to which Eva
Brann returns often (one is tempted to say “time and again”) in her
remarkable, recently published volume What, Then, is Time? Time,
the “potent nonentity,” proves to be as elusive a quarry as the
Sophist himself. The inquiry begins with a high sense of wonder
peculiarly fitting in this of all philosophical quests. The inner experience of time and its foundation or ultimate ground, constitute the
heart of this investigation. Brann employs an extended, highly elaborated aporetic approach to the search for a definition. So numerous and complex are the poriai encountered that this Protean
beast is not pinned down with a definition until well into the closing chapter of the book. The investigation as a whole is composed
in the form of a diptych with one larger panel devoted to the study
of various selected texts or “presentations” by philosophers who, in
Brann’s estimation, “have written most deeply and most engagingly about time.” A second smaller panel contains the author’s own
“reflections” on the matter. She is careful to point out, “study and
thought, though not of necessity incompatible, are by no means the
same” (159). This book is worthy of the most careful reading with
both ends in view.
The predominance of the prolegomena in this investigation is
consistent with the spirit of much contemporary, postmodern
inquiry. Brann’s approach is underscored by the splendidly postrevolutionary claim that her purpose is “not to change the world
but to interpret it!” Viewed in another light, however, the methodology of this book is resonant with the very best ancient authors,
Eva Brann. What, Then, is Time? Lanham, MD. Rowman and Littlefield, 1999.
Torrance Kirby is an assistant professor at McGill University.
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and its hermeneutical approach reminiscent of Aristotelian science.
The first part of the book, a study of earlier philosophical “presentations” of time, constitutes a “history” such as one finds at the
outset of many of Aristotle’s treatises. Brann’s study of the
attempts of her predecessors to define time is thus by no means any
ordinary history. Her extensive review of the preeminent contributions to the hermeneutics of time clarifies wonderfully the question concerning time and enables the reader to make the great
ascent from mere study to thought. In the “reflections” of the second part, Brann proceeds intrepidly to face the question “what,
then, is time?” head on.
Discussion of the “lisping” efforts of predecessors (Metaph.
A.1) in this chase turns out to be a daunting task. The relevant texts
range “from the hard to the hellishly hard,” as Brann puts it. As in
an Aristotelian “history,” the texts are selected with a view to clarification of certain key facets of the problem of definition. Four crucial theories about the nature of time are addressed through the
study of four pairs of philosophers. The originality of Brann’s
approach is striking. The unexpected pairings - Plato and Einstein,
Aristotle and Kant, Plotinus and Heidegger, Augustine and Husserl
- prove to be both inspired and illuminating. An important element
of Brann’s purpose in this approach is to demonstrate that the larger questions about the nature of time are themselves by no means
“time-bound.” By pairing the authors in this way Brann ensures that
the problem of definition predominates over less important considerations. The first approach to the theory of time, as exemplified by
the arguments of Plato’s Timaeus and Einstein’s Special Theory of
Relativity, proposes that time is “external,” namely that time refers
to external motions of which it is the measure, as in the case of a
clock’s measurement of the diurnal rotation of the sun. (The consideration of time as the “externality” of history and its movements
is mercifully ruled outside of the present inquiry.) In the cosmos of
Timaeus, time is the very intelligibility or “numbering” of the external motion of the visible heaven. As Brann puts it, this identification
of time with phenomenal motion continues to “bedevil” the dis-
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course of physics. Einstein displays little interest in the essential
nature of time, but is absorbed rather by the question of quantifying time owing to complications arising from the implication of
temporality in locomotion. After the fashion of the hunt for the
wily Sophist in the Platonic dialogue of that name, the consequence
of this initial “presentation” of a definition of time is to introduce a
dichotomous division - namely between time in the world and time
in the soul - which is of considerable use to Brann in advancing her
own quest for an acceptable formulation. The boundaries have been
narrowed considerably by the exclusion of merely “external” time
as a fallacy.
Before proceeding to the presentations of internal time, Brann
examines a pair who propose highly speculative accounts of the
generation of time out of space. Hegel’s dialectical exposition of the
genesis of time out of space is put forward by Brann as possibly the
most profound of all treatments of “external” time. For Hegel, time
from its first genesis as a pure Becoming, behaves like incipient spirit (Geist): “Time is the Concept itself that is there and which presents itself to consciousness as empty intuition. For this reason Spirit
necessarily appears in time, and it appears in time just as long as it
has not grasped its pure Concept, that is, has not annulled Time”
(Phenomenology ¶ 801). Through a discussion of Bergson’s mission
to suppress “extensive space” in favour of “intensive time” Brann
effects a transition to the second principal stem, viz. internal time
or “time in the soul,” which is the general focus of the remaining
three pairs of texts in the series of presentations.
With her examination of the theories of Aristotle and Kant,
Brann arrives at the second crucial stem of the dichotomous division of time into the categories “external” and “internal.” Although
for Aristotle motion is properly the “substrate” of time, while conversely for Kant time is itself the ground of motion, both philosophers are “driven” to relate the notion of time to a “psychic counting.” As Aristotle says, “time is the number of motion” where
motion is understood as disclosing continuous magnitude. The
“truth” of time resides in the numbering or counting soul that meas-
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ures the before and after of this magnitude. Time, according to this
presentation, is no longer viewed as an independent, “substantive”
reality or but is rather reduced to the status of an accident or predicate which exists “for thought.” For Brann, Kant’s treatment of
time displays a deep affinity with Aristotle’s on this more general
level. The internal sense of time, however, represents much more in
the Kantian metaphysics than ever dreamed of by Aristotle. For
Kant this psychic counting is perhaps the most intimate characteristic of humanity. Indeed Brann shows that Kant’s treatment of time
is most accessible when the Critique of Pure Reason is viewed as “a
new founding of human nature whose centre is time” (55).
Appearances may be removed from time but not the reverse, which
reveals that time, for Kant, is prior in the order of knowing; the
apprehension of change is understood to depend upon the a priori
intuition of time. In one of numerous penetrating aperçus scattered
throughout the discussion, Brann draws attention to Kant’s
nonetheless restricted view of our ability to know ourselves as temporal beings by reminding us of his low opinion of music. This, in
turn, is contrasted with Leibniz’s opposing exaltation of the unconscious counting of the soul in music as “a pleasure given to us by
God so that we may know of him; in music soul is revealed to itself
and God to it” (Principles of Nature and Grace ¶ 14).
In the subsequent paired “presentations” of Plotinus and
Heidegger, the inquiry proceeds to consider the “ground” of temporality—that is, of some higher, possibly transcendent source of
this inner sense of time. Thus the dichotomous division of the
“hunt” advances to a new level of precision. For both Plotinus and
Heidegger, as Brann shows, time constitutes the “deepest condition” for humanity. Plotinus identifies time with specifically
“human” being in its manifestations of a peculiarly ecstatic nature,
by the human’s attempt to escape the element of its temporal fallenness. The Soul’s very “appetite for things to come” (Enneads III.
7.4, 34) keeps her in her fallen state. Temporal being strives for salvation, viz. the overcoming of temporal “dispersion,” through
union with the eternal hypostasis above. Happiness, understood as
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“the flight of the alone to the Alone,” is thus altogether outside
time, for it is no mere mood or emotion, but rather a fundamental
possibility for the soul, that of an undispersed present even beyond
being (Enneads I. 5.7, 15). Time is made explicable through eternity, its original ground. Although radically distinct from Plotinus
with respect to virtually the entire substantive content of his
thought, Martin Heidegger at least shares with Plotinus the supposition that temporality is the key to understanding human existence.
As a being whose essence is its existence, this ultimate ground is for
Heidegger not the transcendent eternity of the Plotinian Primal
Hypostasis, but rather the temporality of human being itself,
Dasein. The discussion stemming from this remarkable dialectical
pairing of Heidegger and Plotinus is particularly illuminating.
In chapter four Brann arrives at her final pairing of Augustine
and Husserl with the observation that no two philosophers are both
further apart and closer together. Through an examination of their
discourse on time as a temporal “stretching” of the soul (distensio,
as Augustine puts it), the argument—for it is indeed an argument—
acquires a distinctly sharper dialectical edge. The coincidence of
identity and difference in their thinking about time is uncannily
appropriate to their strongly dialectical approaches to the quest to
define time. According to Brann, while Augustine sifts through the
phenomena in search of existence and while Husserl neutralizes
existence in order to find the phenomena, both look within themselves for the phases of time, that is to say, for past, present, and
future. For both philosophers, Brann argues, the problem of “internal” time is not to be referred to a higher ontological ground for
resolution, as is the case with Plotinus, for example, but rather time
is to be understood as arising out of and discerned within the soul
or consciousness. Brann’s argument on this point is open to some
dispute, at least with reference to Augustine if not to Husserl.
Perhaps the device of pairing the presentations has led to a downplaying of Augustine’s affinity with Plotinus. It is common among
contemporary existential readings of Augustine to de-emphasise his
dependence upon Neoplatonic metaphysics. He begins his presen-
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tation on time with the “in principio” of Genesis 1, the revelation
of the divine creative activity understood as totally beyond the temporal, narrative realm of human existence. In making his transition
in Confessions from Book X on memory to Book XI on time,
Augustine shifts gears as it were from looking within at the phenomena of consciousness to looking above at the higher ground of
the life of the soul, ab interiora ad superiora. The Creator, who is
altogether above the flux of becoming, is understood nevertheless
by Augustine to be present, knowing, and active within the temporal realm.
While temporal human existence, dispersed or “distended” as
it is through phases of past, present, and future, is to be contrasted absolutely with the undivided existence of “the One,” Augustine
finds nonetheless within the soul as imago dei a positive image of
the activity of God in creation. The enigma of the human experience of time is thus referred by Augustine to the exemplar of the
Trinity for resolution. In the psychological image of the Trinity—
memoria, intellectus, et voluntas—Augustine finds a model for his
reflection upon the experience of time as at once continuous and
without extension. He points to the chanting of a psalm as a potent
revelation concerning time. He reflects upon the recitation of a
song that he knows, Ambrose’s hymn Deus Creator Omnium. The
song is stored in memory, an already completed whole which the
soul intends to sing. Before singing, the soul’s expectation possesses the complete song. As the soul sings, the relation of expectation
to memory shifts syllable by syllable until the entirety of expectation has finally become a memory of the song as completed, as having been sung. Memory, presence, and expectation are united in
the song. Through the singing of praise, itself a mode of confession, Augustine begins to see how the timeless and the temporal
become one. Through song the soul is enabled to think the divine
object in the image, and this, Plotinus certainly would regard as the
most extreme absurdity. Thus, by “collecting” ourselves, we can
escape from our temporal constitution into God’s “standing Now,”
as Brann puts it, into eternity.
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Brann concludes the part devoted to presentations of time with
an extensive and complex analysis of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological treatment of internal time-consciousness. The text of
Husserl’s Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins we
owe, Brann tells us, to Edith Stein’s supererogatory editing of various manuscripts and notations. By way of a background sketch,
Brann offers a helpful introduction to Phenomenology itself and
looks at the influence of Augustine, William James, and Franz
Brentano on Husserl’s reflections upon time. Husserl is particularly
engaged with the problem of integrating the phases of time. Brann
claims that he in fact “solves the problem of relating the present, the
moment of primary perception to its immediate retentional past
and protentional future by giving a model for the orderly sinking
away of perceptions and their intertwining with present consciousness” (160). With Husserl, the presentations have in a certain sense
come around full circle. Husserl brings his account of time to completion by reconstituting “external” time in the form of an absolute
temporal flux which transcends the temporal phenomena of internal time-consciousness and which is, moreover, the underlying principle which sustains human subjectivity. As Brann concludes,
Husserl’s ultimate temporal flux is “a very nearly inarticulable final
fact” (156).
In the Second Part of the book, titled “Reflections,” Brann purports to finally face the question “What, then, is time?” (The claim
that the “Presentations” are a mere exercise in “study” and that
only now, in the final pages is she going to roll up her sleeves and
get down to the serious business of “thought” seems not entirely
ingenuous. Already a good deal of hard thinking has gone into
both the pairing itself and the ordering of the pairs, all of which
serves to advance the quest for a definition.) The reflections proceed with a consideration of certain formal similarities between
time and the faculty of imagination - here, once again, is the
Sophist and the wedding of Being and Nonbeing. Brann shows that
images present a relatively constant picture, viz. Being and
Nonbeing in fusion, while time, on the other hand, is a flux of
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“Being as passing over into Nothing and Nothing as passing over
into Being” (Hegel, Phil. of Nature ¶ 259). Time and imagination
are thus connected with one another through the way Being is
related to Nonbeing in both temporal process of becoming and in
images. As might well be expected, Brann offers a fascinating comparison of these concepts by building upon her previous exploration of the faculty of imagination.2
There follows Brann’s own interpretation of the phases of time
together with their appropriate faculties: past and memory, future
and expectation, present and perception. Throughout, she draws
upon the foregoing presentations of time by the philosophers which
provide both the categories and a vocabulary which enable Brann to
penetrate the question deeply and swiftly. This section of the book
is a wonderful demonstration of the dictum of Bernard of Chartres
who claimed to be able to see things far off by virtue of “standing
on the shoulders of giants.” In an interesting and frequently amusing section Brann proceeds to analyse various “time pathologies” as
forms of “phase-fixation.” Here we have an opportunity to reflect
on aspects of time’s “brutal tyranny,” e.g. the contemporary idolatry of novelty, a fixation on the “just now,” the trivialising of the
past in nostalgia or the future obsession of the IT phenomenon.
Brann even reviews cures for these time-induced pathologies such
as that offered by Nietzsche in his teaching on the Eternal
Recurrence of the Identical. Brann counters this frantic cycle of
reincarnation with another, much more attractive option, namely
the concept of Aevum, as manifest in the sempiternity of the angels
in heaven or, alternatively, in the fictional temporality of the novel.
All of this is delightful. Brann recommends the cultivation of “aeveternity” as at least “a partial relief for our temporal ills.”
In the last chapter of the book Brann moves closer to the final
struggle with the definition of time by way of a via negativa. Here
time is finally unveiled as the potent, indeed tyrannical, non-entity.
The revealing is apophatic. Time is not external motion, nor is it an
abstraction from process. It is not a power or force, nor a “fungible
substance” (i.e. time is not even money!). Time is certainly not a
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115
mere linguistic usage. As Brann succinctly puts this point,
“Language can guide thought but it cannot constrain it.” (Brann
notes in passing how neatly the distinctions of philosophical inquiry
concerning time seem to turn up in the problems of linguistics.)
Time is not Dasein. Whereas Heidegger regards human finitude as
ultimately expressed in the fact our mortality, that our existence is
“destined” to end, Brann counters optimistically that human finitude is better sought in the fact that we begin, “we do not temporalize ourselves; we are born temporal.” Time is no determinate
being; it is not perceived by the senses, it is without external effects,
and elusive to insight. Time is therefore a non-entity. Though
apparently nothing, time’s “not-being” is nonetheless very powerful
(although, be it noted, not “a power”). “What, then, is time?” Here
the argument finally shifts from marked apophasis to a more kataphatic note. The affirmative definition comes in nine-fold form (a
touch which no doubt would have pleased Pythagoras). It is not this
reviewer’s intent, however, to spill the beans. In order to reap the
full benefit of Brann’s final, dramatic unmasking of Time—to be
altogether “present” as it were at the capture of this elusive beast—
readers are well advised to follow the leader of the hunt herself
along the trail through all its intricate twists and turns. And who
indeed are the intended participants in this quest? Brann recommends her book to anyone who longs to learn about time by pursuing the quest described above, to aficionados, to students who
seek to come to grips with some of the primary texts on time, and
finally to teachers who might be on the look-out for some tips on
selections for a syllabus on the interpretation of time. This is an
unusually difficult book whose author challenges the reader to “take
note” and whose rewards are proportionate to the investment of
careful, punctuated attention.
NOTE:
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1. See Eva Brann, The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991).
117
The Feasting of Socrates
Eva Brann
Before reviewing Peter Kalkavage’s Focus Press translation of
the Timaeus for the St. John’s community, I must, in all fairness,
confess my partiality. He, Eric Salem, and myself were the cotranslators of Plato’s Phaedo and his Sophist for the same publisher.
Together, over several years, we worked out some principles of
translation which are discernible in this Timaeus version. In fact, I
think the three of us would welcome with some glee the notion of
a St. John’s school of translation. For we wanted to be working very
much with the spirit of the Program and a possible use by our students in mind. We thought that translations of Plato should render
word for word, even particle for particle, with the greatest exactitude, what the Greek said, avoiding all interpretative paraphrase,
craven omissions, and latter-day terminology. But we also stipulated that they should catch the idiomatic expressiveness and the
changing moods of the original. These principles are clearly at work
in this rendering of the Timaeus.
We learned as well, however, that each dialogue is a unique universe of discourse, the artful representation of an inquiry with its
own approaches, terms, settings, and above all its own participants,
each of whom is in a mood specific to this never-to-be-repeated, yet
ever-to-be-continued conversation. Thus it follows that the Timaeus
made its own particular demands on the translator. It is, after all,
less a dialogue than a short tale of antiquity by Critias followed by
an account of the cosmos by Timaeus—a long one. The familiar
voice of Socrates falls almost silent as these speeches are made to be
a feast for his enjoyment—or, perhaps, amusement. Timaeus’s cosmology is full of the sort of technical matter Socrates does not scruple to spoof in the Republic—the very dialogue which establishes
the sort of ideal city that his companions agree to bring to moving
life for him by giving it its historical and cosmological setting.
Peter Kalkavage, Plato’s Timaeus. Newburyport, MA: The Focus Philosophical Library (2001).
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Timaean cosmology involves not only the moving spheres and circles that bear the astronomical bodies and the geometric elements
from which they are constituted, but also the musical “harmonies”
(scales) that ensoul the heavens. Three beautifully clear appendices
provide the reader—and this edition is meant for the “adventuresome beginner”—with the fairly elementary knowledge needed to
enjoy this heavenly entertainment. It should be said, though, that
the cosmological astronomy of the Timaeus together with its sober
mathematical exposition in Ptolemy’s Almagest was the serious science that stood behind the New Astronomy of the dawn of modernity. (There is a story—I cannot vouch for its truth—that in the
early days of the St. John’s Program books of astronomy and
physics were to be found in the library ranged under “Music,” courtesy of the Timaeus.) The dialogue is so full of Greek science that
there is a danger of regarding it as a source of antiquarian problems.
But, the translator observes in his Preface, that is the very danger,
the one of reducing the cosmos to a collection of mummified facts
and recondite puzzles, to which the Egyptian priests are said to fall
prey. So less is more by way of learned exegesis, and the well-illustrated appendices give just enough to make the dialogue intelligible
to an amateur.
Since I’ve started at the back, let me say that here too you will
find an English to Greek glossary. The entries tell not only how a
Greek word is translated and, if more than one translation has to be
used, why that is necessary, it also gives the root or central meaning
and others that flow from it. In sum, the entries are a pretty interesting lesson in philosophic Greek.
To go to the front end of the book, there is, besides the Preface,
the Introductory Essay. The Timaeus, the only Platonic dialogue
known in medieval times and in all epochs the most influential one
among those philosophers to whom the constitution of the cosmos
was of central interest, is also, in Peter Kalkavage’s words, “the
strangest of Plato’s dialogues. It is so strange that one wonders
whether anything can be taken seriously . . . . [It] is strange not only
to us but also in itself.” The Introduction is intended to illuminate
BRANN
119
that strangeness without dispelling it. The odd but necessary question is pursued: What is the Timaeus about? Socrates is all dressed
up (kekosmenos) and in a strange mood. He gives a truncated, philosophy-free version of his Republic and asks to be told about this
stripped-down political blueprint mobilized to go to war. The
resulting verbal feast prepared for him among the three eminent
men who are present (one mysterious fourth is absent) has an oddly
skewed relation to the truth and the love of wisdom that are
Socrates’ normal preoccupation, for it is presented as a “likely
story,” and a story of likenesses, the way of being that is so dubious
for Socrates.
The festivity begins with Critias’s retelling of an antiquarian
tale about archaic Athens as told by the Egyptian priests to the visiting lawgiver of Athens, Solon. We hear that this old Athens,
ancient even to the ancients, once defeated a huge and sinister
island empire called Atlantis.* Critias thus presents a pseudo-historical Athens as the embodiment of a “pale image” of the Republic.
There is plenty to puzzle about in this beginning.
For this city Timaeus supplies the cosmic setting; we are invited to wonder how fitting it is. A divine craftsman appears out of
nowhere and makes the cosmos, the well-ordered beautiful world,
in the image of an original model. Hence the cosmos has two wonderful features. It is a copy and thus, while imperfect in its being,
capable of being in turn a model, as it indeed is in the dialogue. And
second, it is intelligible, interpretable, not only as an intentionally
made work of art, but as en-, or rather, circum-souled. For whereas the human animal has its soul within, the cosmos is encompassed
by bands of soul matter. All these wonderful and significant doings
can be read in the dialogue, but the Introduction brings out their
thought-provoking strangeness and their relevance to our humanity.
Thus after the cosmic construction there is a harsher “Second
Founding.” It has an elusive “wandering cause,” the “source of
power as opposed to goodness”—an intra-cosmic, semi-intractable
cause called “necessity” acting in a scarcely intelligible theater of
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operation, space. Within it arise body and the human animal: “The
making of man for Timaeus is a pious desecration,” says the
Introduction. It is delegated by the Craftsman-father to his starsons.
This part of the Timaeus, the coming-to-be of organic life within the cosmos, is so weird that our undergraduates aren’t even asked
to read it, yet Peter Kalkavage shows how to begin to make humanly applicable sense of it.
Finally he returns to the question: “Why is the greatest philosophical work on the cosmos framed by politics?” An answer is suggested: The frame signals Plato’s reflection on what happens when
the Socratic search for truth is replaced by a Timaean will to order.
But this shift to the constructive will might well stand for the revolution that initiated our modernity. The means to this new age are
also adumbrated in this miraculous dialogue; in his final assessment
of the Timaeus Peter Kalkavage says that “the likely story presents
the paradigm of what it would mean to use mathematical structures
to make flux intelligible—at least as intelligible as possible.”
Twenty-one centuries later the calculus will perfect these structures,
and so the science by which we live and which Plato has prefigured
will really take off. Read this introduction to get a sense of what it
means for a work to be great, to see deep into things and far into
time.
But better yet, read the splendid translation framed by the valuable apparatus. It is trustworthy; it sticks close to the text, word for
word. But it is also readable—not translaterese but good, lively, and
flexibly intoned English, since faithfulness in translation includes
preserving something of the literary quality of the original. This dialogue in particular is, for all the wild exuberance of its philosophical imagination, written in fresh, plain Greek, though plain terms
are often put to novel uses.—Would you expect to find Being,
Becoming, Same, Other, ordinary words with a gloss of high philosophy, in a cosmological context? Perhaps the best example is the
divine Craftsman. As the translator points out in the glossary, the
Greek word, which has passed into English as “demiurge,” merely
BRANN
121
means a skilled worker available for orders from the public, so it
was just right to preserve that sense with the plain English word. To
help with background knowledge, there are lots of footnotes right
on the page.
Here’s my recommendation, then: We have all these wonderful
alumni seminars around the country. Why not devote one here and
there to a reading of the Timaeus?—And perhaps some participants
might take advantage of Peter Kalkavage’s translation (which is,
incidentally, purposely inexpensive). I’d love to come and help, and
so, I imagine, would he.
*I can’t resist a footnote.
In our own last century, there have been droves of people,
many of them now active, who have fallen into Plato’s antiquarian
trap and gone in search of this lost continent. The description of the
island, which enormous geometrically planned public works have
transformed into something formidably awful, is set out in the dialogue Critias. Its Speer-like architecture (Speer was Hitler’s architect) appealed to the Nazis, whose mythmakers represented Atlantis
as an early Nordic utopia, to be rediscovered by state-sponsored
archaeologists. These people had at least got it right with respect to
the scariness of the drawn-and-quartered, brass-walled locale. Most
modern representations, be they in books, songs, or movies (of
which Disney’s “Atlantis” is the latest) are governed by the mistaken notion that Atlantis was meant to be a lost place of marvels and
beauties, a sort of mid-ocean Shangri-la. It’s actually a totalitarian
topography, the triumph of the will over nature.
�
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Russell, George
Kraus, Pamela
Brann, Eva T. H.
Carey, James
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Phillips, Blakely
Sachs, Joe
David, Amirthanayagam
Berns, Lawrence
Maschler, Chaninah
Kirby, Torrance
Description
An account of the resource
Volume XLVI, number two of The St. John's Review. Published in 2002.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ISSN 0277-4720
The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_46_No_2
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Publisher
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St. John's College
Language
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English
Type
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text
Rights
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St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
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pdf
St. John's Review
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