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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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Goyette, Barbara (editor)
Borden, Sus3en (managing editor)
Ducker, Susanne (art editor)
Mulry, Laura J. (Santa Fe editor)
Johnson, David
Morrison, Marissa
van Doren, John
Eoyang, Glenda H.
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The St. John's Review
Volume XXXVIII, number three (1988-89/3)
Editor
Elliott Zuckerman
Editorial Board
Eva Brann
Beale Ruhm von Oppen
Cary Stickney
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Subscriptions Assistant
Ninda Letaw
The St. John's Review is published three times a year by the Office of the Dean,
St. John's College, Annapolis; William Dyal, President; Thomas Slakey, Dean. For
those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $12.00 per year. Unsolicited
essays, stories, poems, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address correspondence
to the Review, St. John's College, Annapolis, MD 21404. Back issues are available,
at $4.00 per issue,- from the St. John's College Bookstore.
© 1989
St. John's College. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole or in part
without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Composition
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��Contents
ESSAYS
I . . . . . . . The Fields of Light
Peter D. Pesic
17 . . . . . . . Brilliancies Involving Equilateral Triangles
Samuel S. Kut!er
STORIES
45 ....... Autopsy
Melinda Rooney
55 . . . . . . . Petrella's Blood
Leo Pickens
VERSE
63
Three Poems
Robert J. Levy
REVIEW ARTICLES
67 . . . . . . . The Analytic Art of Viete
Richard Ferrier
75 . . . . . . . The English War and Peace:
Paul Scott's Raj Quartet
Eva Brann
Diagrams by Emily Kutter
��The Fields of Light
Peter D. Pesic
Socrates: Then just take a look round and make sure that none of the
uninitiate overhears us. I mean by the uninitiate the people who believe that
nothing is real save what they can grasp with their hands and do not admit
that actions or processes or anything invisible can count as real.
Theaetetus: They sound like a very hard and repellent sort of people.
Socrates: It is true, they are remarkably crude.
Plato, Theaetetus (155e)
Those who reflect on physics often express a certain dismay at what seems
the aridity of the "new science" that began with Descartes's project of a
mechanical understanding of Nature. Granted that its results are imposing and powerful, the question remains: What is interesting about it? Here
interest bears its original economic sense, as when capital yields interest.
In this usage the Latiu interesse signifies the emergence of new and different accrual to the initial deposit of an idea. It denotes something novel,
even surprising, proceeding from given premises. This essay will try to show
how the attempt to describe Nature solely in terms of palpable matter leads,
through its own inner development, to a new understanding that transcends
matter. To put it tersely, matter is not material. It calls forth a new mode
of being, the field, which ultimately eclipses matter itself.
The question concerning the nature of light reveals this shift with particular clarity and was in many ways also the ground for its occurrence.
Peter PeSiC is a Tutor and Musician-in-Residence at St. John's College, Santa Fe.
This essay is based on a lecture delivered at the Santa Fe campus in April, 1984.
It is dedicated to the memory of the author's father, Paul PeSiC (1912-1988).
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Lucretius can stand here as an exponent of the initial thrust of these accounts. Following Epicurus, Lucretius suggests that an object sends out
films of atoms which detach themselves from its outer surface and float
outwards.' Some of them, quite by accident, encounter the eye and give
rise to the visual image. Others, impinging upon ears or nose, give rise to
sounds or smells. This account may be contrasted with the hypothesis Plato
entertains that the eye itself sends out rays whose encounter with the object constitute vision. 2 The activity of the eye in Plato's account is essential. For Lucretius the eye is a passive receptor that converts the impinging
atoms into the visible sensation. Thus he explains vision in terms of traveling
material substances.
His account is in many ways similar to the account Newton offers much
later in his Opticks. However, for Newton the light is not simply atoms
from the surface of the body that enter the eye. He speculates that the
rays of light are "very small bodies emitted from shining substances."' The
light is distinguished from the shining substance that emits it. As Newton
writes:
The changing of Bodies into Light, and Light in Bodies, is very conformable to the Course of Nature, which seems delighted with Transmutations .
. . . Eggs grow from insensible Magnitudes, and change into Animals, Tadpoles into Frogs, and Worms into Flies . ... And among such various and
strange Transmutations, why may not Nature change Bodies into Light, and
Light into Bodies? 4
It is noteworthy that Newton chooses these organic images of transformation in describing the behavior of light rays, themselves composed of inorganic bodies regulated by mathematical principle.
A crucial similarity to Lucretius nonetheless remains: Light is "very
small Bodies" traveling until they impinge upon the eye, which. is a material
structure also. Many powerful conclusions flow from this approach. Color,
for Newton, results from the different sizes of the light particles. Refraction results from the acceleration of these particles as they move from air
into glass or water. A comprehensive account is formed that seems to encompass all known optical phenomena. Yet, as Newton admits, the only
sure account is really a mathematical description of the phenomena which
leaves largely unknown the underlying physical reality, just because he will
"feign no hypotheses" concerning the forces he describes in the theorems.
In his Queries, however, Newton suggests that particles of light will now
most readily account for the theorems he proved earlier when speaking
of rays of light. These rays are mathematical entities which he had discussed
�PESIC
3
as such without needing to specify their nature. For Newton, there is a
difference between the assurance with which he speaks of the mathematical
properties of the rays and the diffidence with which he speculates that the
rays are composed of particles.
But, as Newton starts to speak of the manner in which glass or water
affects the rays so as to cause the appearance of refraction, he remarks
that these substances "act upon the Rays of Light at a distance ... and
this Action and Re-Action at a distance very much resembles an attractive
Force between Bodies."5 He makes similar assertions elsewhere that the
force of gravity also and perhaps all forces between bodies seem to act
at a distance. That is, one body can affect another, distant body in a manner that simply depends on the distance between them. For Newton, it
would go too far, at this stage at least, to assert that such a force must
necessarily travel somehow between the bodies. Mathematically, it seems
to act at a distance, and we should not then "feign the hypothesis" that
such action at a distance then implies transmission of the force passing
in some describable way through the space intervening between the two
bodies.
So in his public writings Newton felt that describing gravitation or the
action of glass upon a light ray as action at a distance was all he could
do with full circumspection. But privately Newton felt the necessity to go
further. In a celebrated letter to Bentley he wrote that
it is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else, which is not material, operate upon and affect other
matter without mutual contact, as it must do if gravitation, in the sense of
Epicurus, be essential and inherent in it. ... That gravity should be innate,
inherent and essential to matter, so that one body can act upon another at
a distance, through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by
and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to
another, is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man who has in
philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it. 6
In some of his Optical Queries Newton tried to account for gravitation
in terms of the pressure of some medium, but much of this work he left
unpublished because, as Maclaurin wrote, "he found he was not able, from
experiment and observation, to give a satisfactory account of this medium,
and the manner of its operation in producing the chief phenomena of
nature." 7 So for NeWton, at least, the attempt to advance the Lucretian
notion that light is simply a stream of small bodies led to the need for
some sort of mediation of the forces acting between bodies. Newton felt
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
that such mediation required some sort of medium, and that medium
baffled him.
In reaching this impasse, Newton considered and rejected the suggestion of Huygens that presumed the existence of a universal medium or
aether, and described light as waves traveling through this medium, much
as water waves represent a state of vibration which passes through the
medium of water.' Huygens imagined the space between bodies as packed
with small, hard particles of equal size. When a body began emitting light
at some point, he considered that these ether particles would transmit a
shove much as a pool table packed with billiard balls would transmit an
impulse imparted to some ball at the edge of the table.
But Newton replied:
A dense Fluid can be of no use for explaining the Phaenomena of Nature,
the Motions of the Planets and Comets being better explained without it.
It serves only to disturb and retard the Motions of those great Bodies, and
make the Frame of Nature languish ... so there is no evidence for its Existence, and therefore it ought to be rejected. 9
Such a dense medium is for Newton the prime example of a "feigned
hypothesis," as he terms it, which turns from the appearance of empty space
to the daring and questionable supposition of an invisible and dense
ethereal medium pervading space. Thus for Newton the notion that rays
of light are "very small Bodies emitted from shining Substances" 10 is vastly
preferable.
Though he rejects the dense medium he felt was necessary for Huygens's
theory, Newton nonetheless did not hesitate to argue for a "much subtiler
Medium than Air, which after the Air was drawn out remained in the
Vacuum." 11 He argues that this subtle, rarefied medium would give way
before the passing planets and not disturb their orbits, and its varying density would explain the refraction of light and the transmission of heat. All
this seems less paradoxical when Newton asserts that his ethereal medium
is not like that of Huygens, "which fills all Space adequately without leaving any Pores, and by consequence is much denser than Quick-Silver or
Gold." 12 The resistance of Newton's ether would be inconsiderable, he
argues, because it is so rarified. There are void spaces between the ether
particles which permit Newton's ether to be more or less r~refied or compressed. Those void spaces allow his ether to slide around the planets
without hindering them, whereas Huygens's picture fills space with particles densely packed with no space between them.
Thus one comes to see that Newton's ether is not in his eyes a feigned
�5
hypothesis, because it seems to him unavoidable in explaining the refraction of light and yet does not impede the motion of bodies. But that leaves
him in the quandary about how forces act between the particles of material
bodies. For Huygens, bodies act by direct contact, and not at all at a
distance. For Newton, it would seem that, finally, bodies can only act at
a distance, since he does still require the empty spaces between bodies. But,
as Newton himself admitted in the letter we cited earlier, such a notion
of action at a distance is disturbing and mysterious. To quote him again,
"It is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else, which is not material, operate upon and affect other
matter without mutual contact .... " These words, "the mediation of
something else, which is not material," are thrown into even higher relief.
Newton seems to understand that this mediation is not simply by means
of a material medium. That is, if for instance we consider that two bodies
exert forces on each other by sending little particles out, we are still left
with the problem of how these little particles act, by direct contact, or at
a distance. So there is no escape from our problem of how bodies exert
forces on each other simply in postulating even smaller particles that
somehow accomplish this mediation. Eventually, we must face the question: action at a distance or direct contact?
Huygens's notion of direct contact would seem satisfying except for
Newton's objections and the further problem of the unyielding hardness
of the particles that is required. For imagine two bodies coming into contact. If they are not absolutely rigid and hard, there is a certain delay from
the moment of first contact and the resulting recoil. That implies a certain mediation of the directness of contact. Even worse, when is the exact
moment of contact? The edges of the bodies would have to be perfectly
sharp and square for one to be able, even in the imagination, to assign
a true moment of contact, rather than a certain interval during which they
contact each other and interact. Perhaps our problem would disappear if
we were to treat each body as a Euclidean point, much as Newton teaches
us to do in the Principia." But it is very disturbing to think that the force
only springs into existence in the moment of contact, when the two points
coincide. For if two points coincide, they are really not two points, but
one point. And how can one point exert a force on itself? Or what sufficient reason would give the magnitude of such a force, exerted by a dimensionless body at no distance? On the other hand, if the tWo points do not
coincide, our supposition of force as direct contact would say they cannot
exert any force on each other! As if this were not difficult enough, our
picture of material bodies as points, which we required in order to speak
exactly of contact between bodies, is really a mathematical representation
�6
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
only, as Newton says. The bodies we are familiar with are irregular and
rough and hence couldn't simply be treated as points, even if the argument about points would have worked! Another way of putting this is that
even if I envision a body as composed of point-like atoms, those points
could never touch.
I am left with the strange and disquieting conclusion that no material
bodies have ever touched, in the sense that I cannot find the moment of
contact even if I picture the bodies as points or composed of points. Perhaps
difficulties such as these moved Newton to speak of action at a distance,
since no simple hypothesis of action by contact will do. Yet it was the inscrutability of action at a distance that made him speak of "the mediation
of something else, which is not material .... " 14 This mediation offers a
reasonable escape from our dilemma. If action by contact is fallacious,
then the mediator cannot be material but must be "something else." This
leads to the conclusion that the natural philosophy of matter cannot remain complete without invoking a mediation that is not material. So matter must point beyond itself.
The full implications of such a statement must rest on inquiry into what
we mean by "matter." The rough sensual description of matter as something
weighty, and able to be touched, seen, and smelled, obviously begs the question, since we must refer to organs of sensation or measurement which
are themselves material. By speaking of it in terms of interactions between
material objects and material measuring instruments we still beg the question of matter (by itself, in itself). In a celebrated passage, Newton writes
that
All these things being consider'd, it seems probable to me, that God in the
Beginning formed Matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable Particles ... and that these primitive Particles being Solids, are incomparably
harder than any porous Bodies compounded of them; even so very hard,
as never to wear or break in pieces; no ordinary Power being able to divide
what God himself made one in the first Creation.~~
What these particles are, or are made of, would seem almost an inadmissible
question, if they are to be the primitive, most basic constituents. Yet if they
are not simple points and have some size, we surely must entertain the question of what forces between the points of these atoms make them so extraordinarily hard. The atom seems to dissolve into a constellation of immaterial forces. Even were the atom utterly dimensionless and point -like,
we would have the pregnantly absurd situation of matter, which presumably
occupies space, occupying no space at all! And if the atom is extended
�7
in space, we can still speak of the distance between certain points within
the atom, or the forces between these points. But we have just shown that
there can be no matter simply at a point. If we cannot say that there is
matter at any point, where then is it?
Our problem reflects an ambivalence in Newton's own thought between
the material, physical world and the mathematical principles, which speak
of forces that are not material but mathematical entities. In this mathematical view mass itself is a pure magnitude and not palpable stuff. In
speaking of hard particles Newton means, I suppose, to return to the world
of experimental appearance from the world of mathematical principles.
Even though he wishes to show that the mathematical principles guide and
describe the observed motion of bodies perfectly, yet the language and
rhetoric of mathematics jar against that of "stuff' and matter. It was Kant's
insight at this point to say that what we can know of matter is force and
only force. To attempt to speak of matter in itself, beyond the character
of the forces experienced, is to ask to know something beyond our capacity. Kant goes on to argue that an absolute and empty space through which
Newton's action at a distance might act is "nothing at all belonging to the
existence of things." 16 These powerful observations were to a great degree
ignored by practicing scientists of the time, though it must be said that
Kant's teaching of the primacy of forces in natural philosophy had an immense influence through the German Naturphi/osophie. I would suggest
that the heart of field theory, and even of relativity and quantum theory,
lies implicit and foreshadowed in Kant's deep insights. Indeed, I do not
think that modern natural philosophy has yet by any means exhausted the
depths he pointed out.
Let me turn from Kant and return to Newton's thought that it does
make sense to speak of "solid, massy, hard, inpenetrable particles." What
is it that makes us so sure that "brute inanimate matter," as Newton calls
it, really must be part of our conception of the world? We seem to pay
respect to our sensations and give them credit, as it were, by referring them
to a thing, matter, which is the true source of smells, tastes, and sights.
But our argument has led us to see the solid mass of matter dissolve into
a web of interacting forces. Why do we continue to speak simply of matter? Perhaps because it would seem like an insult to our senses if we denied
them an external source and origin.
Nevertheless, even with the greatest enthusiasm for a notion of matter
and of primitive particles such as Newton had, we have been led to consider a maze of forces as the key to the behavior of matter, as if mattereven if we should cling to this notion- were finally at the disposal of the
forces and wholly guided by them. Whether we begin with streams of light
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
particles, as Newton does, or with an undulating medium, the mystery of
light is contained in that non-material mediation which is the actuality
of the reception of the hypothetical light particles or of the hypothetical
wave. Finally, there is always a gap across which a leap, an act of mediation, must occur.
It is here that Aristotle helps, in a way that shows that the interweaving of these themes is not merely historical but even more richly complex.
I present it here intentionally out of chronological order to stress the
timelessness of the insight. In De Anima Aristotle has much to say about
vision that speaks eloquently to the point we have reached in our inquiry.
Light, he says, is "the activity [energeia] of the transparent in that [it is]
transparent.m 7 He, too, understood that it is in the transparent, seemingly
empty, gap that the true nature of light lies. Light is "neither fire, nor in
general any body, nor an emanation from any body (for in that case it
would be a body of some kind), but the presence of fire or something of
such kind in the transparent." 18 He goes on to explain that, since in his
view there are no void, empty spaces, there is no space for another body
to enter in. So light cannot simply be a body, for it would have to be at
the same place as other bodies (the air, for instance) at the same time.
Rather, light is energeia, a word closely related to work and activity, and
is the particular activity of the transparent medium he calls metaxu, literally
the "in-between." It is not this metaxu that is light, but rather light is a
kind of activity or energization which is perhaps best expressed by the way
Aristotle speaks of energeia elsewhere throughout his works. One gets the
sense of maturity, of coming to full bloom, of a process or an organism
coming into its full estate. Aristotle also observes that "matter is relative
to some thing," signifying that matter exists in a state of relation to form
and purpose." He does not consider that it exists apart from these larger
relations.
In the case of light, Aristotle speaks of a state of being energized and
active which applies to this transparency between seer and object. This
energization of the in-between zone seems to tally with the sort of "nonmaterial mediation" Newton was groping for. Yet there are many divergences
also: Newton's light particles travel in a void, while Aristotle's light is the
energization of a region replete with substance, not void anywhere. In that
respect Aristotle seems much closer to Huygens's picture of a dense medium
through which vibrations pass. So Aristotle's view emerges as an immensely
suggestive synthesis, before the fact, of Newton's play of forces (which he
might understand as a sort of energeia) and Huygens's vibrating medium.
This constellation of accounts seems in want of further development,
and indeed it is Newton who finds the crucial issue. In criticizing Huygens
�PESIC
9
he remarks that if light were wavelike motion propagated through a fluid
medium, like water waves, it would necessarily follow that light should not
simply travel in straight lines but rather bend around obstacles just as water
waves do. As he puts it,
The Waves on the Surface of stagnating Water, passing by the sides of a broad
Obstacle which stops part of them, bend afterwards and dilate themselves
gradually into the quiet Water behind the Obstacle. The Waves, Pulses or
Vibrations of the Air, wherein Sounds consist, bend manifestly, though not
so much as the Waves of Water. For a Bell or a Cannon may be heard beyond
a Hill which intercepts the sight of the sounding Body, and Sounds are propagated as readily through crooked Pipes as through straight ones. But Light
is never known to follow crooked Passages nor to bend into the Shadow.
For the fix'd Stars by the Interposition of any of the Planets cease to be seen/0
This would seem a critical problem, since Huygens also admitted that light
seems to travel in straight lines, and he had to resort to rather tortuous
and unconvincing arguments to make his light waves not seem to do just
what Newton argued they might do. Thomas Young first observed
phenomena that indicated that light does not simply travel in straight lines
but indeed bends around obstacles just as Newton said that it would do
if it were a wave. This seemed to be the moment of triumph for Huygens's
notion of a vibrating medium, and of disgrace for the Newtonian picture
of light as a particle. In the century following Young's first experiments,
the great drama of the elaboration of the theories of electricity and
magnetism unfolded, led by Faraday and Maxwell, leading to a notion of
light as a wave composed of electric and magnetic fields.
What are these fields? In them may be the reappearance of Aristotle's
notion of energeia, its phoenix-like rebirth after centuries in which Aristotle's physical thought was usually said to be simply wrong, dead, and
useless. This may be an example of how the process of thought does not
unfold simply historically, the later views a product of what preceded them.
Aristotle grapsed an essential facet of the problem of light in a way one
appreciates more fully after reading Newton, Huygens, and Maxwell.
The term field in this sense was in essence created by Maxwell, but it
emerges from Michael Faraday's earlier discussions of what he called lines
of force. The nuance is, I think, crucial and reveals much about Faraday
and Maxwell. The son of a blacksmith, and himself a bookbinder's apprentice, Faraday became a laboratory technician at the Royal Institution
in London. Through many years of reading and ceaseless experimentation,
he became a great luminary of European science.
He hated the term "physicist," which had only recently (1830) been
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
coined by Whewell, and wished to be, and to be called, a philosopher, an
"unmathematical philosopher"21 to boot, quite uneducated mathematically
and separated from the great tradition of mathematical physics that Newton
inaugurated with his Principia. Faraday wrote no treatise as Newton and
Maxwell did, but left instead his episodic Experimental Researches and
his Diary. As Thomas Simpson has written, these works were
not theory, but a vast weaving and unweaving of suspected powers, a process of continual discovery and identification, a great, highly unified for-
mulary for the production and classification of effects .... [He] is the great
'discoverer'; the paradigm for Faraday is Odysseus rather than Euclid: in a
sense he, too, travels from land to land, reporting wonders, guided by legend
and myth, rumor or divine love. For Odysseus, the dominant desire is to
see men's cities and to know their minds, and to gather all this together in
the return to Ithaca. For Faraday, it is to investigate all the powers of nature
and to unveil them as esssentially one in the lecture hall on Albemarle Street. 22
Faraday was the most practical of men and intensely attentive to the vivid
detail of experimental phenomena. He was a true virtuoso of experiment,
insightful and indefatigable, and endlessly inventive. He grew up with notions of electricity and magnetism as palpable and ponderable stuff. Yet
this immensely practical and clear-sighted man gradually convinced himself
that the true seat of electric and magnetic effects is the space surrounding
electrified or magnetized bodies, whether that space be filled with some
noticeable substance like air or seemingly empty.
Strange, is it not, for such a man to pass from the palpable bodies he
sees before him to consider instead the impalpable, empty space between?
Yet it was many experiments that led him thither, perhaps the most pregnant being one of the simplest. Consider a magnet upon which have been
sprinkled iron filings. These filings seem to align as if to outline invisible
lines that characterize the magnetic force. The presence of the filings makes
the force visible. Does it not seem inescapable, thought Faraday, that these
same lines of magnetic force are present even before the filings have been
introduced? Many other considerations, particularly the characteristic
curvatures of the lines, moved Faraday to speak of the lines as "physically
real."23
Further, he felt persuaded that there was no need to speak of electric
or magnetic fluids or substances, that these lines of force were the real,
the essential seat of electric and magnetic phenomena. He writes that "as
magnets may be looked upon as the habitations of bundles of lines of force,
they probably show us the tendencies of the physical lines of force where
they occur in the space around."24
�11
Faraday seemed happiest with a vision in which his physical lines of
force arch through space, without even ether, invisible yet physical. His
friend Maxwell, in an admiring letter, describes this vision: "You seem to
see the lines of force curving around obstacles and driving plump at conductors, and swerving towards certain directions in crystals, and carrying
with them everywhere the same amount of attractive power ...."25 In many
parts of his great Treatise, Maxwell frankly admits his debt to Faraday,
making us feel that he had indeed realized Faraday's vision in a
mathematical way that Faraday himself could not have achieved." In his
letter to Faraday, Maxwell goes on to say that
you are the first person in whom the idea of bodies acting at a distance by
throwing the surrounding medium into a state of constraint has arisen, as
a principle to be actually believed in. We have had streams of hooks and
eyes flying around magnets ... ; but nothing is clearer than your description of all sources of forces keeping up a state of energy in all that surrounds
them ... . 27
Even this frank praise reveals something about the two men. Faraday's lines
of force become, for Maxwell, the "state of constraint of the surrounding
medium," which he feels has a mathematical form and which he calls a
field. Those physical, yet immaterial, lines of force Maxwell understands
as states of a medium and the fields are the states of polarization of that
medium.
Though Maxwell describes himself as translating Faraday's ideas into
a mathematical form, the differences between the two men are extremely
interesting. Writing to the great theorist Ampere, Faraday himself remarks
that
I am unfortunate in a want of mathematical knowledge and the power of
entering with facility into abstract reasoning; I am obliged to feel my way
by facts closely placed together so that it often happens I am left behind
in the progress of a branch of science, not merely from the want of attention, but from the incapability I lie under of following it, notwithstanding
all my exertions . ... I fancy the habit I got into of attending too closely
to experiment has somewhat fettered my power of reasoning, and chains me
down; and I cannot help, now and then, comparing myself to a timid ignorant navigator who, though he might boldly and safely steer across a bay or
an ocean by the aid of a compass which in its action and. principles is infallible, is afraid to leave sight of the shore because he understands not the
power of the instrument that is to guide him. 28
Faraday wrote to Maxwell, "I was at first almost frightened when I saw
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
such mathematical force made to bear upon the subject, and then wondered
to see that the subject stood it so well.m 9 There is gentle irony here, as
well as respect for the power of the mathematical symbols Maxwell was
forging. Also, Faraday maintains a certain pride in the integrity of his own
progress, even as he self-deprecatingly calls himself a "labourer." He knew
the value of his labors, or at least felt serenely confident that posterity
would sift the gold from the dross. Yet there is also the note of a wistful
Moses, who sees the promised land from afar and recognizes that he will
not himself enter into the fullness of it.
In the case of Faraday and Maxwell, the promised land was the fields
of light. It was left for Maxwell, through the power of his mathematical
symbols, to discern in exact mathematical detail how light might be the
coupled undulations of electric and magnetic fields, how moving a charged
body sends a wave down their lines of force, a wave we can perceive as
light. Yet I must emphasize that, in his own way, without mathematics,
Faraday found these fields of light. He says that "the view which I am bold
to put forth considers, therefore, radiation as a high species of vibration
in the lines of force which are known to connect particles.... It endeavors
to dismiss the ether, but not the vibration."30 It seems to me that this
discovery may be more wonderful than Maxwell's mathematical deduction and translation, in the way that one admires the pioneer explorer even
more than the settlers that follow him. But there are excellences in both
men that should be savored. Together they saw how the field leaps free
of its source and can travel through boundless space.
Maxwell followed Faraday also on a further flight of speculation. If
indeed these lines of force flex far from any body and if their state of tension is the true seat of the electromagnetic interactions, perhaps the notion of electric charge as a sort of fluid or simple material substance should
be abandoned. The true actuality of electricity, magnetism, and light lies
in the mediating fields; matter and charge dwindle and disappear from
sight. At first Maxwell tried to think of "empty space" as filled in imagination with gears and idle wheels, an elaborate mechanical structure that
helped guide his understanding as he wrought his equations." Though he
cherished his gears and wheels, when he came to write his Treatise he
omitted all mention of them, now relying on the finished mathematical
structure. Maxwell continued to believe that there might be a physical ether
of which the fields were states of vibration, even though he ceased describing it in simple mechanical terms. Here the practical Faraday is more
visionary still, for Faraday understood the lines of force as themselves sufficient, without any need for an ether to give them substance and habitation. The lines of force, the fields as Maxwell thought of them, are all that
�13
is. The great project of the purely material and even mechanical understanding of Nature has demanded these immaterial mediators which at
last have eclipsed matter.
It does seem very odd simply to discard matter in favor of ghostly fields.
Here it is helpful to think of music. Victor Zuckerkandl has written that
"music is movement of tones in dynamic fields." 32 Music is indeed in no
single note, but rather it is in the web of interrelationships that can be aptly
termed a field. That is, the music is also between the notes. There is no
silence in the sense of a void, utterly blank. The silence that precedes a
piece of music is part of it, as one realizes when watching the different
silent gestures a conductor uses to give the up-beat that precedes the sounds.
I suppose here is Aristotle's insight regarding the absence of utter physical
nothingness in the world, of sheer emptiness. If we take either Faraday's
or Maxwell's account, there is not nothingness anywhere, for the field is
there. Aristotle has shown us how energeia must emerge from a prior state
of preparation, of dynamis, and not from nothing. The contemporary
quantum theory of fields has argued, in extending Maxwell's mathematical
theory, that sheer emptiness is self-contradictory." This agrees deeply with
Aristotle and gives the sense that the seemingly empty space, the silence,
is the heart of activity, of music.
At times this vital silence is brought before us with particular intensity. The silences of a great work of art are the seat of its mysterious power
and deserve our closest attention. Let me give you an example. Schubert,
in his next-to-last piano sonata, in A major (0.959), concludes with a rondo
based on a theme he had written when he was twenty, and which also
became the song "Irn Friihling." Here is the theme as he first presents it
at the beginning of the rondo (measures 1-16):
RONDO.
�THE ST JOHN'S REVIEW
14
Here is how Schubert shows us this theme at the end of the movement,
after many variations and vicissitudes (measures 328-347):
11•-t+-
I
~
~
L
~·
-==~
'
dlm.
'
"' ""
-~
r
~
:>........
t
~~~
I
··r
~~q-r.
.
,.....,...,.,
I
I
"flo
T~<~
T
-
The silences form a final revelation of the inner life of the theme. In each
silence something immense happens. We are plunged into the field of force
that is the music, when the music stops-as it would seem-and yet evidently does not stop. It is like that when we look at the light which only
exists in and by virtue of the so-called "empty space." Our experience, then,
is a field.
�15
Randomly bumping particles and mechanisms do not hold much prospect of touching the sort of beings we are, but speaking of fields is more
like us. A field is most of all a state of inter-relationship which has an
inner integrity. In grasping such connections, the human mind shows its
affinity with the field.
Perhaps in closing we should recall Einstein's first encounter with an
object suspended in a field- a simple magnetic compass which his father
gave him at four or five years of age.
That this needle behaved in such a determined way did not at all fit into
the nature of events, which could find a place in the unconscious world of
concepts (effect connected with direct "touch"). I can still remember-or at
least believe that I can remember- that this experience made a deep and
lasting impression upon me. Something deeply hidden had to be behind
things. 34
Recalling this in later life, he also remembered how he "trembled and grew
cold."
Notes
I. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura IV, 42 ff.
2. Plato, Theaetetus 156d.
3. Isaac Newton, Opticks (New York: Dover, 1979), p. 370. This and most
of the following passages can also be found in Peter PesiC (ed.), Junior
Laboratory Manual (Santa Fe: St. John's College, 1986), 2 vols.
4. Newton, Opticks, pp. 374-75.
5. Ibid. pp. 370-71.
6. Isaac Newton, Principia (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1962), val. 2, p. 634.
7. Cited by Maxwell in W. D. Niven (ed.), The Scientific Papers of James
Clerk Maxwell (New York: Dover, 1965), val. 2, p. 316.
8. See Christiaan Huygens, Treatise on Light, in Great Books of the
Western World (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), val. 34, pp.
553-75.
9. Newton, Opticks, p. 368.
10. Ibid., p. 370
11. Ibid., p. 349.
12. Ibid., p. 352.
13. Newton, Principia, val. I, pp. 19 ff.
14. Ibid., val. 2, p. 634.
�16
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
15. Newton, Opticks, p. 400.
16. I. Kant, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1985), p. 132. See L. Pearce Williams, The Origins of Field
Theory (Langham: University Press of America, 1980), pp. 32-43. I
have continued this inquiry in a forthcoming essay "The Principle of
Identicality and the Foundations of Quantum Theory."
17. Aristotle, De Anima 418b 9-10.
18. Ibid., 418b 14-17.
19. Physics, II, 194b 9.
20. Newton, Opticks, pp. 362-63.
21. See the valuable essay by Thomas K. Simpson, "Maxwell's Treatise
and the Restoration of the Cosmos," in The Great Ideas Today,
(Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1986), p. 226.
22. Ibid, p. 227.
23. Faraday, "On the Physical Lines of Magnetic Force," included with
his Experimental Researches in Electricity in Great Books of the
Western World (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), vol. 45, pp.
816-19.
24. Faraday Experimental Researches in Electricity (New York: Dover,
1965), vol. 3, pp. 435-36.
25. L. Pearce Williams (ed.), The Selected Correspondence of Michael
Faraday (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), vol. 2, p. 882.
26. See, for instance, J. C. Maxwell, A Treatise on Electricity and
Magnetism (New York: Dover, 1954), §528.
27. Faraday, Correspondence, vol. 2, p. 882.
28. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 134.
29. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 864.
30. Faraday, "Thoughts on Ray Vibrations," in his Experimental Researches
in Chemistry and Physics (London: Taylor and Frapcis, 1859), p. 370
(reprinted identically by Culture et Civilisation, Bruxelles, 1967).
31. See his writings on the theory of molecular vortices to be found in
Maxwell's Scientific Papers, vol. 1, pp. 451-88.
32. Victor Zuckerkandl, The Sense of Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), p. 37.
33. See, for example, P.A.M. Dirac, Quantum Mechanics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958 [4th edition]), pp. 306-10. I have also addressed this matter in a forthcoming essay, "Virtuality and the Paradox
of the Vacuum."
34. See Einstein's "Autobiographical Notes," in P. A. Schilpp (ed.), Albert
Einstein, Philosopher-Scientist (New York: Harper and Row, 1959),
p. 9.
�Brilliancies Involving
Equilateral Triangles
Samuel S. Kutler
In the very first proposition of the Elements, Euclid constructs an equilateral triangle. Among the theorems that I know about involving equilateral triangles, the most brilliant are presented here. Although none of them
appears in the works of Euclid, every one of them, I am convinced, would
have delighted him. Most of the books listed in the bibliography are referred
to in this article. They present beautiful mathematics that does not require
many preliminaries.
I. Odom's Golden Section Theorem
When I wanted to construct a golden section on a simple plane figure,
the finest example known to me before 1988 was the regular pentagon,
where the diagonals, AD and CE of figure I, cut each other in golden sections at the point K (Elements XIII.8). In the early 1980s George Odom
found an even simpler and more elegant way to produce a golden section.
Odom's theorem appeared as an elementary problem in The American
Mathematical Monthly' in 1983. Since I do not always read or even skim
through the Monthly any more, I would not have known about Odom's
theorem at all if it hadn't been for David Fowler, who refers to the theorem
both in an article in Ancient Philosophy', where I first saw the construe-
Samuel Kutler is a Thtor at St. John's College, Annapolis.
17
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
18
B
c
A
K
E
D
FIGURE 1. Diameters AD and CE cut each other at Kin golden sections.
tion, and in his book entitled The Mathematics of Plato's Academy. Here
is a statement of Odom's theorem exactly as it appeared as problem E3007:
Let A and B be the midpoints of sides EF and ED of an equilateral triangle
DEF. Extend AB to meet the circumcircle (of DEF) at C. Show that B divides
AC according to the golden section.
Although no figure was published to accompany the problem, figure 2 is
included here to illustrate Odom's theorem and to facilitate attempts by
readers to find their own proofs. Both the solution that was published in
the Monthly' in 1986, and another that is equally simple, appear at the
end of this section.
Let us recall the definition of a golden section under one of its two
other names. In the Elements, Euclid calls it a line cut in extreme and mean
ratio and defines a straight line to be cut in such a ratio when
as the whole line is to the greater segment, so is the greater to the less. [VI,
def. 2]
Even before Euclid begins his treatment of ratio and proportion, he makes
use of a line so divided to construct a regular pentagon. Consequently,
he must give an equivalent ratio-free formulation:
To cut a given straight line so that the rectangle contained by the whole and
one of the segments is equal to the square on the remaining segment. [II.ll]
�19
KUTLER
F
FIGURE
2~
~------Cyo
Odom's theorem: B divides AC according to the golden section.
The thirteenth and final book of the Elements concludes with the construction of the regular solids inscribed in spheres and the proof that "no
other figure, besides the said five figures [pyramid, octahedron, cube,
icosahedron, and dodecahedron] can be constructed which is contained
by equilateral and equiangular figures equal to each other." The first six
theorems of that book involve a line cut in extreme and mean ratio. In
the analysis of these solids the golden ratio appears frequently. For example Euclid concludes his proposition 17 on the construction of the
decagon with the insight that "when the side of the cube is cut in extreme
and mean ratio, the greater segment is the side of the dodecahedron."
Another name for the golden section was given in the early sixteenth
century. Fra Luca Pacioli published a book in Venice in 1509 (reprinted
Milan 1956) on the golden section, with drawings by Leonardo da Vinci.
Pacioli coins a name for what will later be called the golden section. It
appears in his title: De Divina Proportione. Dan Pedoe quotes Johannes
Kepler, who, in his own w'ritings, adopts the name divine proportion, and
writes about it (and Elements I.47) that
Geometry has two great treasures: one is the theorem of Pythagoras: the
other the division of a line into extreme and mean rati.o.
In the second half of the twentieth century, H. E. Huntley adopts the name
for his book: The Divine Proportion. Just as George Odom later finds
the golden section using the circumscribed circle of an equilateral triangle,
�20
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Huntley finds it in an inscribed circle of an almost-equilateral triangle (see
figure 3, in which there is a doubled 3,4,5 triangle; that is to say, a 6,5,5
triangle).
Finally, the name golden section itself seems not to have been used until
the 1830s in the second edition of a textbook by Martin Ohm. Professor
R. Herz-Fischler, who published a history of the golden section' in 1987,
speculates that rather than coining the term himself, Martin Ohm is citing
a name that had recently come into current usage.
D
K
FIGURE 3. A golden section in a doubled 3-4-5 triangle.
BED is a right triangle with sides BE : ED : : 3 : 4.
Extend BE to F so that EF=BE, and join FD.
Let the bisector of angle B meet DE at K. Then K is the center
of the inscribed circle to triangle BDF.
Inscribe circle GEH in triangle BDF, and let BK meet that circle
at both C and A.
DK : KE : : BD : BE [VI.3], so that the diameter of the
circle= BE.
The square on BE=the rectangle AB, BC [111.36]; that is,
AB : BE : : BE : BC; but BE is equal to the diameter AC, so that
AB : AC : : AC : BC, and AB is cut in a golden section at C.
�KUTLER
21
Enough about names! When I saw Odom's theorem, I could no more
get it out of my head than I can do so with certain tunes. At first I thought
it was because this most important ratio of all was constructed with the
very first figure that Euclid constructs: the equilateral triangle. Furthermore, nothing else was needed but a circumscribed circle and a straight
line constructed through any two midpoints and continued, on one side
or the other, until it reaches the circle. As Fowler put it in his article, "[this]
surely must be its simplest construction." It took me days to realize that
something else was bothering me. Theorems as simple and delightful as
the one by George Odom are not what mathematicians are interested in
these days; such discoveries are made in antiquity or its renaissance. Maybe
I could find out how George Odom hit upon his construction. David Fowler
left a clue in a footnote of his article:
I first heard of this construction in correspondence with H. S. M. Coxeter;
who was inquiring if anybody had come across it before. Coxeter had received
it in a letter from George Odom.
For me at least, Harold Scott MacDonald Coxeter is the world's leading
geometer. I was reluctant to bother him with my questions, but my curiosity
overcame my reluctance, and I telephoned Professor Coxeter, whom I had
met in 1972. What follows is an approximation of part of the telephone
conversation:
SSK: Is George Odom a mathematician? HSMC: No, he is an artist
with an amateur's interest in mathematics. SSK: Did he have a proof for
his construction? HSMC: Yes, but not as elegant as the published one. SSK:
Do you know how he discovered his theorem? HSMC: Yes, he was studying the icosahedron in my book Regular Polytopes. SSK: Do you think
that perhaps one of the ancient Greek mathematicians had discovered
Odom's theorem? HSMC: (Knowingly) No, I don't think so.
Since our conversation, I believe that I have figured out why Professor
Coxeter seemed to be certain that this theorem was unknown until the 1980s:
The construction is so simple and beautiful that it would have been shown
from one friend to another, been written down many times, and survived.
Now, as I promised, I will present two proofs. The first is printed below
figure 4. I have supplied the steps, since Jan van de Craats of the
Netherlands submitted it as a "proof without words" and it was so published
in the Monthly in the Aug.-Sept. issue in 1986. The second one, with figure
5, is an even shorter proof; it was submitted by David Fowler and others.
It makes splendid use of Euclid's crossed chord theorem (111.35).
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
22
FIGURE 4. The proof of Odom's theorem by Jan van de Craats:
For the proof, modify figure 2 by continuing CA to the circle at
G and construct GE.
Angles GEB and BCD are equal, since they stand on equal circumferences. So are angles EGB and BDC.
Then triangles GBE and BDC are equiangular and hence
similar:
GB: EB:: BD: BC, but GB=AC, EB=AB, and BD=AB; so that
AC : AB : : AB : BC, and AC is cut in a golden section at B.
I myself found a three-circle construction of a golden section on Saturday, November 12, 1988. This theorem, which is illustrated in figure 6a,
is both inspired by and derived from Odom's theorem:
Let there be three concentric circles. The radius of the middle circle is double
that of the inner and half that of the outer circle. From any point on the
inner circle draw a tangent line that makes a chord AC on the middle circle,
and extend this chord from the point C until it reaches the point B on the
outer circle. Then AC is cut in a golden section at B.
Because of this discovery, I no longer believe David Fowler's assertion that
George Odom's construction is the simplest possible. For the three-circle
construction seems to me to be a bit simpler even than Odom's. Except
for the line that is cut in a golden section, it consists entirely of circles.
Furthermore, rather than the six golden sections that can be constructed
on Odom's diagram, there is no end to the number that can be constructed
�23
KUTLER
E
F
D
FIGURE 5. The proof of Odom's theorem by the crossed-chord theorem:
Rectangle GB, BC=rectangle EB, BD [111.35], which implies that
GB: EB:: BD: BC; but GB=AC, EB=AB, and BD=AB, so that
AC : AB : : AB : BC, and AC is cut in a golden section at B.
A
FIGURE 6a. The three-circle theorem.
The three circles are concentric.
The middle circle has double the radius of the inner circle
and half the radius of the outer circle.
AC touches the inner circle at H.
AC is cut in a golden section at B.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
24
on these circles. If one considers a sequence of circles in the plane, all con-
centric, each of which has a radius double that of the one immediately
within it, then a tangent can be drawn to any one of the circles and golden
sections can be imagined to appear on this diagram smaller, or larger, than
any given size.
Neither Odom's theorem nor mine begins with a line that is to be cut
in a golden section, but figures 6b and 6c and their accompanying explanations show how these theorems lead one to such a construction. Perhaps
this construction is published for the first time here.
~
12oo·
A·~c
FIGURE 6b. To cut a given line in a golden section.
Construct angle CAD=30°, and angle ACD=a. Let a be the
angle whose sine is 114 {see figure 6c). Construct angle
ADB=120°.
Then B cuts AC in a golden section.
FIGURE 6c. To construct angle a for figure 6b.
Construct a circle with a given line LM as its diameter.
Let LN = \l.i LM, and construct a circle with LN as radius.
Let P be one of the points where the circles intersect.
Join PM. Then angle LMP= a, an angle whose sine= \l.i.
�25
KUTLER
II. Morley's Theorem
It is impossible to trisect the sixty-degree angle of an equilateral triangle
with straight lines and circles, or, to use the language of instruments, with
straightedge and compass. Trisectors of an angle can be constructed,
however, with the use of conic sections. On page 356 of Geometrical Investigations by John Pottage, he constructs a regular three-pointed star
from the trisectors (see figure 7), and he asks his readers to show "that
the star covers exactly two-fifths of the area of the triangle." Although Pottage does not mention the intersections DEF of the trisectors that are adjacent to each side of the triangle, they are indicated on figure 7. Because
of the symmetry of the original equilateral triangle, it is to be expected
that the three points DEF themselves form the vertices of a new, centered,
inverted, equilateral triangle.
Next let us consider (see figure 8) a triangle for which each of the angles
can be trisected with straightedge and compass: an isosceles right triangle.
A
FIGURE 7. A three-pointed star made from the trisectors of angles A, B,
and C.
The area of the star is two-fifths that of the triangle.
D, E, and F are the vertices of an equilateral triangle.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
26
A
FIGURE 8. The trisectors of the angles of the right triangle ABC meet at
points D, E, and F, which appear to be the vertices of an equilateral triangle.
Again we expect the trisectors to meet with their intersections forming the
vertices of an inverted triangle, perhaps another isosceles right triangle.
But figure 8 does not exhibit a right triangle. To the eye, it too seems to
be equilateral.
Finally, figure 9 is a representation of the same kind of trisected figure
now for a scalene triangle. Even here, the triangle DEF seems to be equilateral! As in the case of Odom's theorem, no one seems to have investigated
such a configuration before the last hundred years. This time the discovery
occurs at the very beginning of this century. Let us quote from the
Biographical Notes' about Frank Morley, a President of the American
Mathematical Society in 1919 and 1920:
By about 1900 the following result due to Prof. Morley was well known to
Cambridge mathematicians and others: "if the angles of any triangle be
trisected, the triangle, formed by the meets of pairs of trisectors, each pair
being adjacent to the same side, is equilateral." The first reference to it as
"Morley's theorem," a term now in general use. seems to have been ... in 1914.
In 1924, Frank Morley revealed how he found his theorem. Just as George
Odom found his construction that takes place all in one plane while he
was reflecting on a more complicated configuration, a solid figure; so did
Morley find his elegant theorem that involves nothing but straight lines
by considering a more complicated situation in which a higher order curve,
a cardioid (see figure 10), touches the sides of a triangle. In 1909 the first
�27
KUTLER
FIGURE 9. The trisectors of scalene triangle ABC meet at points D, E, and
F, which again appear to be the vertices of an equilateral
triangle.
The proof accompanying figure 11 determines the lines HF and
KE.
elementary proofs were published in response to a challenge in the Educational Times. None of these proofs is quick, for it seems necessary to
calculate the sizes of many angles. The proof that accompanies figure 11
is a ghostly one, by H. D. Grossman', in which the top part of the figure
is never drawn and only comes into being at the last step of the proof.
The motivation for this proof can be seen in figure 9, where each of the
trisectors is extended. The whole effort is to determine lines HF and KE
of that figure and to determine that they are the trisectors of the invisible
summit angle.
What is the next step to take after considering Morley's theorem?
Perhaps this: On page 98 of Mathematical Gems, Ross Honsberger asks
his readers to
show that Morley's theorem holds also in the case of the trisection of the
exterior angles of a triangle. He has a solution on pages 163 and 164.
�28
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
FIGURE 10. A Cardioid.
From any point X on the circle ABC, let A be the center and
AX the radius of another circle. The cardioid is the envelope
to these circles. The point X is called the cusp. Frank Morley
discovered the theorem that bears his name by considering
how a cardioid touches the sides of a triangle.
FIGURE 11. H. D. Grossman's ghostly figure for Morley's theorem.
�KUTLER
29
Proof of Morley's theorem:
1. BC is the base of the triangle for which we shall prove Morley's
theorem. The base angles are 3b and 3c. A is the invisible vertex at
the summit, and the angle is 3a.
2. Let BF and BD trisect angle B, and let CE and CD trisect angle C.
3. Let BF and CE meet at S.
4. Construct angles SDF and SDE each equal to 30".
5. D is the center of the inscribed circle of triangle SBC. Therefore OS
bisects angle BSC.
6. Triangles FDS and EDS are congruent. FD =DE, and triangle FED is
equilateral.
7. Angle EDC=60"+b, and angle FDB=60"+c.
8. Angle FDT=60" -b, and angle EDR=60" -c.
9. Construct angle DFH=60"-b, and angle DEK=60"-c.
10. Angle HFB=60"-c=a+b.
11. By Euclid's fifth postulate HF meets BT, at an angle=(a+b)-b=a.
Similarly, EK meets CR at angle a.
The proof will be complete when it is demonstrated that the straight lines BT,
H F, KE, and CR meet in a single point, which must be the vertex A otthe triangle.
12. Draw FK, which bisects angle EKD.
13. By Euclid's fifth postulate, EK meets BT, and it meets it at angle a, and
F is the center of the inscribed circle of the triangle with sides BT, BK,
and KE. The bisector of the summit angle of that triangle divides the
summit angle into two angles each equal to a; therefore it must either
be parallel to HF or coincide with HF. And it must coincide with HF
because F is the center of the inscribed circle, and that is where the
angle bisectors of the triangle meet.
14. Similarly, in the triangle with sides FH, HC, and CR, the bisector of the
summit angle coincides with EK.
15. Thus the undrawn angle at A is trisected by FH and EK, and the trisectors adjacent to each side of the triangle meet at points D, E, and F,
which are the vertices of an equilateral triangle.
�30
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
III. Viviani's Theorem
On page 22 of Mathematical Gems, Ross Honsberger does not consider
Viviani's Theorem to be one of the outstanding theorems involving equilateral triangles. It is a mere "easy property" to serve his needs later. To
use his own image of a gem, I believe that this theorem is a gem when
it is placed in the proper setting, but Ross Honsberger did not choose to
do so. I attempt to remedy that omission here. Much of the beauty of
Viviani's theorem will be lost if it is even stated at the beginning of the
discussion. It depends on a surprise. Let us delay our formulation of
Viviani's theorem and pose a problem of finding a minimum.
For any point in or on the boundary of a triangle, construct the perpendiculars to the triangle's sides. For which point is the sum of these perpendiculars a minimum?
To frame a conjecture for this problem, consider a scalene triangle as in
figure 12, where calculations have been made at several points showing
the sum of the distances to the sides. When we look at the calculations
A (30, 60)
6o~
1
62.1
.
t
64.5
'"'-
6~.7
64.1
66.6
.8
66.2
68.6
""''6~0~
71.1
7~.3"
""'
z: ::: ::: :~: ;:~ ::~ :~·:~~
.
/00
65.0 67.5
~
70.0
J.........__ _ _ • _ _ _ _ _ . _ -
B
(0, 0)
72.4
7'!:_il_2L3___ 1~1
8_~,1__ 84.6
87.o
89.4
c
(100, 0)
FIGURE 12. The minimum sum of the distances of perpendiculars to the
sides of triangle ABC seems to be at the vertex of the
greatest angle A.
�31
KUTLER
given on that figure, a reasonable claim is that the minimum lies at the
corner of the triangle with the largest augle. In that corner two of the three
perpendiculars are unnecessary, and certainly the point at the largest corner is closer to its opposite side than is the case at either of the other corners. We shall prove at the end of this section that this conjecture is correct. But first, it is easy to build on the conjecture for an isosceles triangle
in which the equal base angles are each larger than the summit angle, by
claiming that either of the vertices at the base serves as a minimum. This
claim is also correct. Finally, consider an equilateral triangle. It seems clear
that there are three minimum points- namely, at the three corners or
vertices- but it is not clear. Unlike the other claims, this one is false! The
search for a minimum here is misguided. Instead Viviani's theorem holds:
For any point in or on the boundary of an equilateral triangle, the sum of
the perpendiculars to the sides of the triangle is always equal to the height
of the triangle.
The beauty of this theorem, then, depends, at least in part, on its surprising character. A proof of Viviani's theorem is given accompanying figure
13. It depends on a theorem that is not in the Elements, and could not
B
c
FIGURE 13. Viviani's theorem.
Triangle ABC=triangles APB, BPC, and CPA.
y,BC•AF= Y2AB•PR+ v,BC•PS+ y,cA•PT.
But both AB and CA are equal to BC, so that
y,BC•AF= \I,BC•PR+ \I,BC•PS+ Y,BC•PT.
Therefore AF=PR+PS+PT.
�32
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
A
FIGURE 14. The sum of the perpendiculars is a minimum at the vertex
with the largest angle A.
Triangle ABC=triangles APB, BPC, and CPA.
V2BC•AF= V2AB•PR+ V,BC•PS+ V2CA•PT.
But BC>AB, and BC>CA.
Therefore V2BC•AF < V2BC•PR+ v,BC•PS+ v,BC•PT
and AF<PR+PS+PT.
be there, that the area of a triangle equals half the base times the height.
Readers are encouraged to construct a proof in the manner of Euclid.
To conclude this section, accompanying figure 14 is the proof that I
promised to give, that for scalene triangles the minimum point for the sum
of the perpendiculars is at the vertex of the largest angle. (This is problem
17 in Maxima and Minima Without Calculus by I. Niven, who gives this
solution on pages 279 and 280.)
IV. Napoleon's Theorem
In Ross Honsberger's chapter on Equilateral Triangles on page 34 of
Mathematical Gems, we read:
Historically, the following theorem is known as Napoleon's theorem, although
it is very doubtful that Napoleon was well enough versed in geometry to
have discovered and proved it himself.
Whatever its origin, Napoleon's theorem is wonderful:
Consider any triangle with equilateral triangles drawn outward on each of
the three sides, as in figure 15. Napoleon's theorem states that the centers
of these three triangles are themselves the vertices of an equilateral triangle.
�KUTLER
33
FIGURE 15. Napoleon's theorem.
The points K, L, and M are the centers of three equilateral
triangles drawn outwardly on triangle ABC. To prove that K, L,
and M are the vertices of an equilateral triangle.
What is perhaps surprising here is that no matter now unequal the sides
of the original triangles, a perfect equilateral triangle will still be formed.
The advantage of placing equilateral triangles on the sides is that there
is no need to worry about which center we have in mind: the center of
gravity, the center of the inscribed circle, the center of the circumscribed
circle, the orthocenter (where the three heights meet), or some more exotic
center. The extreme symmetry of the equilateral triangle guarantees that
all of these centers merge into a single point: the center.
An excellent setting for Napoleon's theorem is another minimum problem that was posed by Fermat to Torricelli:
Find a point in an acute-angled triangle so that the sum of the distances
to the three corners is a minimum (see figure 16).
This problem is now called the airport problem:
Where should we build an airport so that the sum of the distances to three
cities is a minimum?
In figure 17, we have added a construction to figure 16 in which triangle
ACN is rotated 60 degrees about point A to position AED. Moreover, we
have joined points C and D as well as Nand E with straight lines. In that
process, two equilateral triangles have been constructed: AEN and ADC.
Consequently, the sum that we wish to minimize, BN + CN +AN, can be
replaced by the equal path BN + NE +ED. In the same figure 17, the letter
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
34
c
----"'B
FIGURE 16. Fermat's problem (the airport problem).
In an acute-angled triangle find the Fermat point F such that
the sum FA+FB+FC is a minimum. The point N is a nonFermat point, since there are smaller sums than
NA+NB+NC.
c
FIGURE 17. A path is found equal in length to BN+NA+NC.
Rotate triangle ACN 60° about A. Connect CD and NE.
Triangles ACD and AEN are equilateral.
Since NA=NE and NC=ED, we have BN+NA+NC equal to
path BN+NE+ED.
This path will be a minimum when the three segments BN,
NE, and ED lie in a straight line. Such a path is drawn in
figure 18.
�35
KUTLER
N stands for a Non-Fermat point because the path is not a minimum. The
excellence of this method of proof is that we shall know at once when we
have F, a Fermat point, as in figure 18, for the path will be minimized when
F is chosen so that BF, FE, and ED all1ie in one straight line. Underneath
figure 18 is a calculation that shows that the Fermat point is the one in
the triangle that makes all three angles AFB, BFC, and CFA equal to 120
degrees. Figure 19 shows the first of two constructions that enable us to
locate the Fermat point. Because the opposite angles ADC and AFC of
quadrilateral AFCD sum to two right angles, the circle about equilateral
triangle ABC passes through the Fermat point F. Thus we have the first
of our two constructions for F:
To find the Fermat point for any acute-angled triangle ABC, construct an
equilateral triangle outwardly on one of the sides AC. Then the Fermat point
is the intersection inside the triangle of the circumcircle of triangle ABC and
the straight line BD.
There is another construction for the Fermat point illustrated in figure 20.
Here we have equilateral triangles ADC, AOB, and BHC constructed outwardly on each side of the triangle. For the same reason that the Fermat
c
D
FIGURE 18. The Fermat point F solves the airport problem.
The three angles at Fare each equal to 120":
Angle AFB=180"-angle AFE=120".
Angle AFC=angle AED=180"-angle AFE=120".
Therefore angle CFB must also be equal to 120".
�36
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
FIGURE 19. First construction of a Fermat point.
By 111.22 the opposite angles of the undrawn quadrilateral
ADCF are equal to 180°. Angle ADC=60°, so that angle
CFA= 120°. Consequently F satisfies both conditions for a
Fermat point: F lies on BD, and angle AFC= 120°.
point lies on BD, it will also lie on AH and CO. Not only do we have this
second construction for a Fermat point, but we are also all set up for
Napoleon's theorem, in which we must show that the centers of the three
equilateral triangles are necessarily the vertices of an equilateral triangle.
Consider the circles about the two upper equilateral triangles in Figure
21. CF is a chord of both circles. By the first proposition of Book III of
the Elements, the perpendicular bisector of CF must pass through the
centers K and L. Similarly, in figure 22 the perpendicular bisector of AF
passes through K and M, and of BF through L and M. Since the three
chords FC, FA, and FB make angles of 120 degrees with each other, a simple calculation shows that the angles of triangle KLM are each equal to
60 degrees. This is enough to determine that triangle KLM is equilateral,
and our proof of Napoleon's theorem is complete.
I close this section with two questions:
1. Is Napoleon's theorem still true if the triangles are drawn inwardly?
2. On any triangle draw similar triangles outwardly on the three sides.
For which kind of center for the triangles will the three centers form the
vertices of a triangle that is similar to the other three?
�37
KUTLER
H
c
D
FIGURE 20. Second construction of a Fermat point.
Just as the Fermat point must lie on BD, it must also lie on
both AH and CO. Than we can construct the Fermat point as
the intersection of any two, or all three, of the lines BD, AH,
and CO.
F
\
I
\;
FIGURE 21. The beginning of a proof of Napoleon's theorem.
Again F is the Fermat point. By 111.1, the perpendicular bisectorto the chord CF must pass through the center's K and L of
both circles.
�38
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
FIGURE 22. Conclusion of Napoleon's theorem.
By 111.22, the angles at K, L, and M must each be equal to
60", and triangle KLM is equilateral.
V. Triangles of Maximum Area
As an appetizer:
For all triangles inscribed in a given circle, which has the greatest area?
The delightful method of solving this problem that is presented here comes
from pages 19 and 20 of The Enjoyment of Mathematics by Rademacher
and Toeplitz:
This proof comes in two parts. We show that of two triangles inscribed
in a circle
I. An equilateral triangle has a greater area than any triangle that has
only one side equal to an equilateral triangle.
2. A triangle with one side equal to an equilateral triangle has a greater
area than a triangle with none equal to an equilateral triangle.
Let triangle ABC be inscribed in a circle with one side AC equal to an
inscribed equilateral triangle oriented with AC as its horizontal basefigure 23. If an equilateral triangle AHC is inscribed on the same base,
�KUTLER
39
FIGURE 23. The area of an inscribed equilateral triangle is greater than
any other inscribed triangle on the same base.
then as everyone knows the equilateral triangle will rise to the highest point
H of the circle, and since of two triangles on the same base, the one with
the greater height has the greater area, the equilateral triangle has a greater
area than the scalene triangle with one arc equal to 120 degrees.
The proof will be complete when it is shown that of inscribed triangles,
the triangle with one side equal to an equilateral triangle is always greater
than one with no sides equal to an equilateral triangle. Such a triangle must
have at least one side-say AB-cutting off less than a third of the circumference, and at least one side-say·BC-greater than a third of the
circumference; it does not matter whether the third arc is greater or less
than 120 degrees. Place AC as the horizontal base, as in figure 24. Now,
let arc CB*=AB, so that triangle ACB* can be considered the mirror image of triangle CAB about the vertical diameter. Finally, if AH is the side
of an inscribed equilateral triangle, then, since AH is greater than AB and
less than AB*, H must lie in the arc BB* across the top of the circle, and
H will be higher than Band B*. This means that the triangle AHC, which
is taller and on the same base, is necessarily of greater area than ABC.
Consequently, any triangle with one side cutting off one-third of the circumference of the circle has a greater area than a triangle that does not
have such a side, and the proof is complete.
The last theorem was the appetizer. Here is the main course:
Of all triangles with the same perimeter, the equilateral triangle has the
greatest area.
�40
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
FIGURE 24. Triangle AHC, which has one side AH equal to that of an inscribed equilateral triangle, is greater than triangle ABC,
which has no such side. Triangle AB•c is the mirror image of
triangle ABC when the vertical line through the center serves
as the mirror.
I know an algebraic proof of this theorem that I learned from pages 47
and 48 of Maxima and Minima Without Calculus by Niven. While away
from my library in the snmmer of 1988, I was able to devise a two-part
proof that seems to me rather elegant. When I returned to my books, I
learned that Ivan Niven himself suggested the first part of the proof that
I had found:
1. On a given base and for a given perimeter, the isosceles triangle has the
greatest area.
As in figure 25, let ST be the base, and let ST+ TU +US be the given
perimeter. Then the locus of all triangles on the base ST lies on an ellipse.
Moreoever, the point U* where the triangle is isosceles is located at the
highest point of the ellipse. Thus the first part is clear: Again, since the
area of a triangle is equal to half the base times the height, the isosceles
triangle has a greater area than any triangle on the same base with sides
that equal its sides in length.
2. To show how the equilateral triangle dominates in size any isosceles
triangle with the same perimeter, let us take an example that presents a
�41
KUTLER
FIGURE 25. The semi-ellipse is the locus of all points U such that SU + UT
is constant and greater that ST.
The isosceles triangle SU 'T has a greater area than that of
any other triangle inscribed in the semi-ellipse.
method that will work for every triangle. Begin with a scalene triangle with
sides of length {7, 10, 5}. From the last theorem this triangle has a smaller
area than the triangle {6, 10, 6}. The trick now is to let the base be 6 rather
than 10, and so we write the same triangle {10, 6, 6}. Then the same averaging method of finding a new isosceles triangle on this base yields the triangle
with larger area: {8, 6, 8}. Notice how the triangles are becoming closer
in shape to an equilateral triangle. The next steps yield {7, 8, 7}, the next
{7.5, 7, 7.5}, and so on in infinitum. As Isaac Newton would say, this sequence of triangles of ever-increasing area is ultimately equal, or is equal
in the limit, to the equilateral triangle. All that is needed to make the proof
rigorous-but I will not do so here-is to show that the ever-increasing
sequence of triangles differs from its limit, the equilateral triangle, by less
than any pre-assigned difference D.
I was very pleased with my discovery, and I wondered if anyone had
ever followed the same line of reasoning. I found it all carefully worked
out in Nicholas Kazarinoffs excellent book called Geometric Inequalities.
Following his presentation, on page 41, which he attributes to Simon
Lhuilier, Kazarinoff presents what he calls a "clever geometric construction ... due to Jacob Steiner [that) neatly avoided the method of successive approximations employed by Lhuilier." However, Lhuilier's method
is charming, and is in fact a fine theorem with which to teach the theory
of limits.
The next question
For all plane figures with a given perimeter, which one contains the greatest
area?
is addressed as the sole subject matter in chapter 22 of The Enjoyment
of Mathematics by Rademacher and Toeplitz.
�42
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
VI. Concluding Remark
In an involved connected account- Euclid's Elements or Newton's
Principia- a large measure of the beauty that one finds comes from the
more or less systematic presentation. I have tried to illustrate in this article that there is another kind of beauty that one can appreciate: particular
theorems that, in order to delight, need not be presented in a long chain
of argumentation. No doubt any of the sections here can be extended, and
I have made some suggestions about how to continue beyond what is
presented here. My claim is, however, that these theorems and proofs can
be appreciated just as they stand. Each is a good in itself. In the bibliography given below such goods abound.
VII. Footnotes
I. Vol. 90, p. 482.
2. Vol. VII (1987), pp. 201-10.
3. Vol. 93, p. 572.
4. A Mathematical History of Division in Extreme and Mean Ratio (Waterloo, Ont.: Laurier).
5. R. C. Archibald: A Semicentennial History of the American Mathematical Society, Vol. I (Menasha, WI: The Collegiate Press, 1938).
6. The American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 50 (1943), p. 552.
VIII. Bibliography
Coxeter, H. S. M. Introduction to Geometry. 2d ed. New York: Wiley, 1969.
__ and Greitzer, S. L. Geometry Revisited, New Mathematical Library,
No. 19. New York: Random House, 1967.
Courant, R., and Robbins, H. R. What is Mathematics? New York: Oxford, 1941.
Davis, P. J. and Hersh, R. The Mathematical Experience. Boston: Birkhauser, 1981.
Fowler, D. H. The Mathematics of Plato's Academy. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1987.
Honsberger, R. Ingenuity in Mathematics. New Mathematical Library, no.
23. New York: Random House, 1970.
__. Mathematical Gems. Washington, D.C.: Mathematical Association
of America, 1973.
__. Mathematical Gems II. Washington, D.C.: Mathematical Association of America, 1976.
�KUTLER
43
Kazarinoff, N. D. Geometrical Inequalities. New Mathematical Library,
no. 4. New York: Random House, 1961.
Niven, I. Maxima and Minima Without Calculus. Washington, D.C.:
Mathematical Association of America, 1981.
Pedoe, D. Geometry and the Liberal Arts. New York: St. Martin's, 1976.
Polya, G. Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning. Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1954.
Rademacher, H. and Toeplitz, 0. The Enjoyment of Mathematics. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957.
Pottage, J. Geometrical Investigations. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1983.
Steinhaus, H. Mathematical Snapshots. 3d ed. New York: Oxford, 1969.
��Autopsy
Melinda Rooney
The first time Lucy went to see her father take a horse apart it was near
Halloween. She'd been asking to go for weeks. She was sitting on
newspapers in the middle of the kitchen with a pumpkin between her legs,
scrubbing it with water and a stiff brush. He came in and swung a chair
around and sat on it backwards. She looked up at him. When he didn't
say anything she looked back down and picked up a black magic marker
and drew a wobbly line around the pumpkin's stem for the knife to follow.
"Lucy?"
"What." She didn't look up. The long blade of the butcher knife
squeaked in the pumpkin.
"Do you want to come watch tomorrow while I post a horse?"
She looked up, leaving the knife standing handle-up in the pumpkin.
"Really?"
"I'm asking you if you want to come with me. It'll be a whole morning, a Saturday. Do you really want to give up a whole Saturday morning?"
"Yeah," Lucy said. There was a silence.
"How come?" her father said.
"I don't know," Lucy said. "To see what you do. I never get to see what
you do." I want to see a dead thing, Lucy thought.
"Well, okay. You'll have to be up early in the morning. I need to be
there by six-thirty."
"Okay."
Melinda Rooney, a graduate of St. John's College, Annapolis, is currently living
in Chicago, where she studies creative writing and teaches composition at the Univer~
sity of Illinois.
45
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
46
"Are you supposed to be using that knife in here all by yourself?"
"Yeah."
"Lucy?"
"What?"
"You really want to go," he said.
She looked down and pulled the knife handle back with her finger then
released it and watched it vibrate, embedded in the pumpkin. "Yeah," Lucy
said. "I want to see."
"It's not very pleasant," he said.
"I know," she said, grabbing the stem of the pumpkin and pulling the
top off. She held it above the newspapers, pulp and seeds hanging like sticky
hair, then dropped it and stuck her hand in the hole and closed it in a
slippery fist of thready pulp. Warm air rose from it.
"I know," she said again, leaning down and speaking into the pumpkin. Her voice had a thick echo. "I just want to see how you do it."
"Okay," her father said. He stood suddenly and said "Be careful with
that," and walked away.
When Lucy was ready for bed her mother sat her on the edge of the
bed and looked at her forehead and said "Now stay out of your father's
way tomorrow. This is his job. He doesn't have time for all your questions
the way he does when he's at home." She finally looked her directly in the
eyes. "All right?"
Lucy nodded.
"All right," she continued. "Just save them all up for when you get home,
and he can answer them then. All right?"
"Okay."
"0 kay," said her mother. "All right," she said again, leaning stiffly over
to kiss her.
Lucy arranged her stuffed animals around her body in a tight embrace.
There was a plush tiger that had belonged to her dead aunt, fixed in a
lying-down position with a pink nose and plastic whiskers like fishing line.
There was a hinged bear, stiff and stuffed with straw, with prickly fur and
a roar box that mooed when you tilted him. There was a St. Bernard with
patchy fur and one shredding cardboard eye. Lucy had seen him lying by
the side of the road and made her mother stop the car so she could run
back to get him. He'd been lying on his back, one ear thrown out above
his head. His coat was clogged with gravel and old rain. He was clean now,
but he still smelled like road. There was a grey felt snake six feet long,
�ROONEY
47
When Lucy was sleepy she would feel the bed jump and wiggle, then
settle into a rising and falling like it was travelling across water and her
animals would sway and murmur with the movement and then it was the
next morning but tonight she wasn't sleepy. The bed sat still as a stone
and her animals were stiff and silent.
Lucy did everything her father did. She followed him everywhere. When
he plowed a garden she had marigold seeds in styrofoam cups on her
windowsill, or beans, sprouting in little white curves. When he started
writing books she'd begged for a toy typewriter. She'd sit on the toilet seat
and watch him shave, then once took a razor blade from its waxy white
paper and drew it across her cheek, laying it so neatly open it took almost
five seconds to start bleeding.
Lucy's father was sad the way Lucy was sometimes sad, the way she
was sad at night. It was worst when animals died. And animals died a lot
where they lived, in a country house on a high-speed road. He would sit
in a chair and stare in front of him when kittens died, or dogs, or the little
ducks or birds Lucy brought horne and fed sugar water from soaked QTips. They always died and he would sit and watch them and he would
tell Lucy it was nature and that was the way things lived and died but once
their eyes dropped closed or their heads sagged against torn-up towels in
their cardboard boxes he would have to leave the room and he could barely
speak for days.
The first time this happened that Lucy really noticed it was when one
of their cats had a kitten that was brain damaged and it cried from the
time it carne out of her mother to the moment she died, almost a day later.
The mother didn't know what to do. She would curl herself around it then
jump up and walk away. Lucy's father put the whole litter into the wagon
of his tractor and sat with them, drinking cold coffee. All the kitten could
do was lie still and cry. He sat with them for an afternoon and when she
finally died he took her out back in the palm of his hand and buried her.
He dug the grave with a spoon. He carne into the kitchen and sat Lucy
down at the table and explained how her brain hadn't got put together
the right way and so she had died. "Nature takes care of things like this,"
he said, "and death is sort of a relief," and he got up and left the room.
He carne horne one day and told Lucy's mother he'd found a horse that
had been struck by lightning in a field and Lucy went upstairs and made
beds for her animals out of shoeboxes and lined them up like hospital cots.
�48
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
She asked her father later what he did with the horse and tried to imagine
its insides. He had to be all black like the inside of a bag of charcoal, his
blood hard and red like clay. He said they'd cut it open to make sure that's
how it died. That was when she started wanting to see an autopsy.
Lucy woke up in the cold dark and saw her father sitting in a little chair
by the window.
"Is it time to go?" Neither Lucy nor her animals had moved in her sleep.
"Almost," he said, looking out the window.
"What time is it?"
"Quarter to five."
"It's still dark," Lucy said.
"I know."
There was a noise in the air. Her father stood up and pushed the chair
under its little desk. It was a wooden desk with a white metal top scattered
with plastic letter magnets. Lucy hardly ever played with it anymore because
she couldn't fit under it without lifting it off the floor with her knees.
Her father looked at her, startled. "What?" he said.
"I didn't say anything."
'
"Oh. I'm sorry. I'm tired."
"Oh."
"We have to leave in about a half-hour," he said, standing up and· walking to the bedroom door. "So up."
They had to walk a long way to the garage. Dull white frost sat in the
grass and Lucy wore her father's sweater, tears standing in her eyes from
the early cold. It hung to her knees. She bunched the sleeves in both fists
and smelled her father all around her. There were buckets and a length
of hose in the bed of the truck and the floor of the cab was covered with
fine gravel from other men's boots. Thick heat filled the cab as they drove
and Lucy started to talk.
"What's wrong with this horse?"
"A nervous system thing. Convulsions."
"Oh." There was a pause. "Can't you fix it?"
"Not really. I'm not even sure we'll be able to see anything once we open
it up. This only shows up in tissue samples."
"What only shows up?"
"The problem. What's wrong."
"Germs?"
"Yeah," her father said, "Well, sort of."
"How can you find little germs in all that horse?"
"Microscopes."
�ROONEY
49
The sun was up. Lucy remembered a movie her father had in the home
movies box that was a filly running around a paddock with men circling
around her. She had a funny, jerky run and her legs would fly out at odd
angles and her head would toss back as though she were on strings. When
she stood still she looked fine but she could never stand completely still.
They were almost to the lab when Lucy said "How can you fix what's
wrong if you have to kill him to find out what's wrong?"
There was a long silence as they pulled through a humming metal gate.
"So that maybe we'll be able to fix it next time," he said, pulling around
a curve and letting the wheel slide through his fingers.
"Oh," Lucy said.
The building with the autopsy room in it was at the end of a long asphalt
drive spotted with flattened dung and wet hay. Four men were huddled
together in front of giant motor-driven doors. The doors were latched shut
and bound with a thick chain like the doors to a big freezer. Lucy's father
jumped out of the truck and half-ran, half-walked over to the men and
they talked quietly, their words puffs in the cold air. Mist rose from the
grass. The men turned and walked off in different directions and Lucy's
father came back to the truck and opened the door.
"Okay, hop out," he said and she slid down from the high seat. He
kicked arcs in the gravel as he thought a minute.
"Okay," he finally said. "I'll take you in and get you settled. It'll be
a few minutes before you see me. I have to get dressed and talk to these
fellows and get everything set. Will you be okay for a few minutes by
yourself?" Lucy nodded, suddenly frightened.
"You can't touch anything," he said. They walked over to the giant doors
and he unlocked the chain lock with a silver key and pushed a button.
Somewhere a motor jumped and sighed and the doors rattled open on their
greasy tracks. He walked Lucy over to a long counter at the other side of
the room where he lifted her up so that she was sitting next to a deep sink
with a thin curving faucet.
"I'll be back in a minute. I'm going to go find you something to play
with," he said, and disappeared through a door. Its square glass window
had a wire net running through it.
The room was all gray cement and stainless steel; the floor had a silver
drain in it for hosing away mess and the counter Lucy sat on was lined
with glass jars of old white twisted guts soaking in formaldehyde. There
was a table with an electric saw in it for cutting bone.
There was a rusty hook hanging from a chain in the ceiling, and a steel
�50
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
table with a groove down the middle. Lucy looked down at her feet, stuck
the toe of her sneaker into a drawer handle and tried to pull it open but
it was locked. There was a long yellow bone behind the faucet handles.
Lucy's father came back through the door with both hands full. He
stopped at the counter and lined up what he'd brought. The best were
syringes, minus needles, wrapped in thick plastic.
"You can play with these in the sink if you don't splash too much,"
he said, handing them to her. There were a few glass slides with little pink
explosions of stained tissue and a magnifying glass with a heavy black
handle. There were three or four heavy silver cylinders that her father said
were cow magnets. He told her they put the magnets in cow stomachs and
they would collect little metal things like nails or staples they picked up
as they grazed so their stomachs wouldn't get cut.
"Do you think this will keep you occupied for awhile?"
"Yeah, definitely."
"Okay, I'm going to get dressed. I'll be back in a couple of minutes."
Lucy sat on the counter, banging her heels against the metal drawers.
She picked up a cow magnet and walked around the room, touching it
to metal things and pulling it off again. She went back to the sink and
ran it half full of water and grew absorbed with the syringes, drawing water
into the narrow plastic barrels and shooting it against the side of the sink.
It made a ringing sound.
When Lucy turned around there were three men in the room who were
looking at her, startled.
"My dad's getting dressed," she said. They were wearing baggy green
clothes and paper slippers over their shoes that looked like the white paper
frills on Thanksgiving turkeys. Her father came in dressed in the same way
except he wore black rubber boots with thick red soles. Lucy emptied the
sink then jumped to the counter and hooked her toe in a drawer pull. Her
father sharpened a knife.
The big freezer doors slid open again and two men in green with parkas
on walked in with a white horse who jerked and wobbled like a mechanical
toy. Even as she stood still some part of her was moving, twitching the
wrong way and she stamped as Lucy's father walked to her carrying a
syringe. Lucy thought suddenly of a toy she'd taken from her dentist's treasure chest years before- a hinged donkey that collapsed when you pushed
a button under its little stand- and her father pinched a fold of skin at
the base of the horse's neck and slid the needle in and after only a few
seconds she sank to her knees and died on the tile floor, as though she'd
�ROONEY
51
suddenly been overcome by sleep. He stepped back and away as she
stretched out on her side.
Lucy's hands sat cold in her lap while the giant iron hook was lowered
from the ceiling and two men bound the mare's legs together with rope.
They hooked the loop in the rope over the hanging hook and a motor
whined loudly as the hook rose again, pulling her up and off the ground.
The hook followed a track in the ceiling over to the big steel table and
they lowered the horse onto it, her back fitting neatly into the groove.
They released her legs and unwound the rope and a man came in with
a hose and sprayed down the floor. Her white head hung upside down off
the end of the table and her tail brushed the floor, its ends dampening.
Lucy's father stood so she couldn't see his hands but by the way his back
tensed she knew he was cutting her open and there was a sound like wet
fabric tearing. Steam rose from her body and she spilled apart on the table
and onto the floor.
The guts smelled like wet cardboard boxes and were more colors than
Lucy had expected- green, blue, yellow. Her father slid most of the horse
out onto the floor like he was digging through a pile of laundry. No one
was talking. She looked again at the electric saw:Jhe words "Butcher Boy"
were spelled out in red and silver letters opposite the thick blade.
"Dad?" Lucy said, sliding off the counter and standing with both hands
fixed in drawer pulls. She stepped forward but her hands stayed cold and
locked on the handles.
"Dad?" She felt a thick pain under one eyebrow where she'd fallen once
and hit the corner of a table. "Can I see what you're doing?"
With blood on them she could suddenly see how white and thick his
arms were and when he turned to face her she saw a gash of brown blood
by his ear and under one eye. His mouth was fixed in a line when he said
"What, Lucy," and she suddenly remembered when she'd gone with her
mother to see him play ice hockey once and he had been standing in a
little net cage wearing a white plastic mask and her mother had pointed
and said, "Look! There's your father!" and she'd looked at the mask with
its slanted black holes and screamed "That's not my father!" and a man
on the bleacher in front of her jumped and tossed his popcorn in a yellow
shower. She'd screamed until her mother picked her up and carried her
to the car. She'd fallen asleep on the cold seat and refused to go into the
house all night.
"Lucy," he said now. "What." She felt the drawer pulls making ridges
in her hands.
�52
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
"You have blood on your face," she said.
He looked at her.
"I want to go back to
t~e
car," she said.
"Lucy," he said, "I'm busy. Sit down." He turned back to the guts.
"Dad!" she shouted.
"Hey, John, I'll take her back to the car," one of the men said.
"No," he said, "just . . . "He fixed the knife handle up in the horse's
belly. He turned to Lucy.
. "Lucy,'~ he s~id. "Sit down. You carne tCi see this. Now sit down."
They stared at each other for a long minute that smelled of blood and
formaldehyde and some dead, rotting thing. Then· she jumped back on
the counter and held a cow magnet until it grew hot in her hand and her
eyes had cleared and her father had emptied the horse.
When it was over he walked out of the room and the men hosed what
was left down the drain or out the door to an open dumpster. All that
was left of the horse was a white shell, the ribs standing stiffly like hands
reaching up, waiting to be given something.
Lucy slid off the counter and looked at the slides with the magnifying
glass, then looked up to see one of the men standing next to her. He had
black hair cut so short the skin of his head looked blue and his arms were
raw with harsh soap and goosebumps. He had black plastic glasses on with
a string attached and he offered Lucy a piece of gum.
"You okay?" he said.
"Thanks."
He opened his mouth to say something, then paused, cleared his throat,
and looked away before he finally said "What do you think of all this?"
"I don't know. It's okay. It's interesting." Her voice shook.
He looked at her for a moment. He walked away, then stopped and
turned around. "Do you want me to take you in to see your dad?" Lucy
looked at him for a long minute, backed against the counter.
"I guess," she said, not moving. "Or I could just wait for him here."
"Come on," he said, walking back over to her and reaching out his hand.
"I'll take you to him."
She went reluctantly, feeling the pull of the man's arm in her shoulder.
He took her through a heavy wood door into a room full of lockers and
loud talking and cigarette smoke. Her father was at a sink, soaping his
hands and scrubbing between his fingers with a little brush. He looked
over at her. She sat down on a bench and the man who'd brought her in
walked away without a sound. They stared at each other.
�ROONEY
53
"What do you have in your mouth?" he finally said.
"Gum." She paused. "That man gave it to me. He thought I was scared."
There was a silence.
"Give me one more minute," he said, and rinsed his hands and arms
and disappeared into the lockers. He came out a few minutes later in his
regular clothes. He didn't even pause in front of her but only said "Ready?"
and took her wrist and walked back out into the autopsy room. He walked
to the counter and gathered. up the syringes and. magnets and gave Lucy
the slides to carry. The man' who'd given lier'the gum was coiling up the
hose.
·-'""'·· ...· _,
.. - . .
Lucy's father smoked a cigarette and the ash grew long ·and dropped
off as he drove.
"Well?" he finally said.
"What?"
"What do you think?"
"I'm not sure."
"Was it what you expected?"
"I'm not sure."
"We couldn't see a thing," he said, rolling the window down an inch
and thumbing the glowing butt out the window. "We'll have to wait for
the tissue samples."
"Oh." Lucy looked out the window.
"Do you want to know what I found?"
"I thought you said you couldn't see anything."
There was a long silence. "Well, we won't know for sure until the tissue
comes back," he said, almost to himself, then, his voice higher and a little
afraid, "It's, it's kind of like when you carve your pumpkins, and you find
one strange seed in the middle of all the regular ones. You know what I
mean?"
"I guess."
It was quiet the rest of the way home. Right before they pulled into
the driveway he slowed down, as though he were going to pull over, and
looked at her. "Lucy?"
She moved suddenly back against the door, feeling the arm rest in her
back as he pulled the truck onto the shoulder and stopped. She saw his
face change and he reached out to her and took the back of her neck gently
in his warm hand.
"Oh, Lucy," he said, his voice small.
"What?"
�54
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
There was a long silence. He sighed and took a knot of her hair in his
hand and forced brightness into his voice.
"Don't you ... don't you want to ask me any questions?" His thumb
was rough over the pain in her eyebrow. He smoothed it over and over.
Lucy said "No, not really," because she couldn't think of anything else
to say. Her chest was full of hurt.
He sighed and said "Okay. Maybe some other time then, right?" He
pulled the truck into the driveway in a whisper of gravel. "Okay?"
She looked at him for a long moment and he looked at her and she
just said "Yeah, okay" and got out of the truck and walked into the house.
�Petrella's Blood
.......-
Leo Pickens
Zia Pina sat at the hearth stirring beans boiling in a pot over the fire when
Bob finally came downstairs for breakfast.
"Sleepyhead!"
"Easy," Bob said. "I'm on vacation."
"Did you sleep well?" Zia Pina asked. "You weren't too cold?"
"No."
"Sure?" She regarded her distant cousin carefully.
"I'm sure," he said.
She frowned. "Tonight we will give you another blanket."
Zia Pina rose slowly. The old widow was barely five feet tall, but so
fat that she needed a small stool to sit at the dinner table. She could then
push her bulk underneath the table top and reach her food. "What legs,"
she muttered. "What legs. The spirit still works fine. It's just these legs
that don't." She opened a cupboard and took down a coffee pot.
Bob took the pot from her hands. "Sit down," he told her. "In America,
men know how to make coffee. Understand?"
Zia Pina hesitated, puzzled. "No!''. she said finally.
She grabbed the coffee pot, and as she did so Salvatore entered the
kitchen. He was tall, thin, and worn. Still handsome, his close-clipped
mustache gave him a certain dignity, even though his clothes were dirty
and ill-fitting, and his shoes, without laces, had holes at the seams.
"My God! What are you doing?" he asked Zia Pina. "Why are you
fighting with our guest?"
Leo Pickens, a graduate of St. John's College, Annapolis, is Director of Athletics
at the college.
55
�56
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
"I'm making the young man some coffee. What's it to you?"
Salvatore put an arm around her shoulder. He drew back her black
scarf. "Look," he said to Bob, and he pulled gently at her hair. "Look at
this old woman. It's snowed in her hair!"
"Ahhh ... " Zia Pina lifted a thick arm and cuffed him.
"This old woman never dies! I'd give a million lire to anyone who could
kill her. But it's impossible. She'll outlast us all!"
Zia Pina's heavy body shook with laughter. A ridge of gum appeared
where her upper teeth once were. "What kind of nephew says such things?"
she said. "What kind of nephew?"
"So you think you can make him some coffee?"
"But of
course~"---
"But you don't know how to make coffee."
"Madonna," she said. "You think that because I'm old I can't do
anything?"
"Well," Salvatore said, grinning, "old bones do make the best soup."
After his breakfast, Bob followed Salvatore outside. The morning was
cool and softly radiant. Pasquale, Salvatore's brother-in-law, sat on a low
table next to a fire burning under a barrel of water. He was sharpening
a pair of long knives. Pasquale was small and stooped, with sunken cheeks.
Bits of tobacco from his handrolled cigarettes clung to the corners of his
mouth. Old as he appeared, Pasquale's movements were still spry and
unlabored.
Pasquale greeted Bob with something he could not understand. Pasquale's accent was thicker than that of the others. Bob looked to Salvatore
for help.
"Pasquale," Salvatore explained, "says you are just like all Americans."
"How's that?"
"Because you sleep late."
Bob laughed. "Where did you learn this?"
Pasquale's face contorted. "Huh?" The old man had as hard a time
with Bob's textbook Italian as Bob did with Pasquale's dialect. Salvatore
translated for him.
"He says this isn't true."
"But it is true," Pasquale insisted.
"And how do you know?" Salvatore asked.
"I just know," Pasquale said.
"Ah!" Salvatore slapped Pasquale on the back of his head, and pushed
his beret down onto his nose. Salvatore winked at Bob and held a finger
to his temple. "This man is crazy."
�PICKENS
57
"I know," Pasquale repeated. He adjusted his beret and continued to
tend to his knives. "I just know."
Salvatore checked the water in the barrel and then picked up the length
of rope lying on the table. The three of them set off through a stony field
planted with artichokes and olive trees. A spur of the nearby mountains
was crowned by a village of white rock and faded rose-tiled roofs. Snow
still topped the mountain's highest peak, Petrella. Ever since he was child,
the mountain had loomed large in Bob's imagination. His father told stories
of his childhood during the war, when his family, driven from their village,
lived for a time in one of the hollows below the crest. During the bombing
of Monte Cassino, his father climbed to the top of Petrella to watch the
Allied bombardment of the monastery. The war had been a carnival for
the boy, and the endless night of bombing, a spectacular shower of
fireworks, never to be forgotten. To return to Italy and climb Petrella again
was an undying wish of his father's. Smoke now curled upwards at the
mountain's foot, where farmers were burning weeds and bramble that grew
along the edges of their land.
"What a stink!" Pasquale announced when the men reached the sty.
The pig was an enormous gelder, its belly, cnest, and haunches caked
with mud. It sniffed at their legs through the fence. Bob could feel the
animal's warm breath through his jeans.
"Does he have a name?" he asked.
"Name?" asked Salvatore.
"A name," Bob repeated slowly. "Does he have a name?"
Salvatore shrugged. "Pig," he said. "We call this pig."
"You have pigs in America?" Pasquale wanted to know.
"Many pigs," Bob said. "More than in Italy."
The Italians looked at each other with genuine surprise.
"Really?" asked Pasquale.
Bob nodded.
Salvatore entered the pen, his feet sinking into the muck of straw and
excrement. Getting on his knees, he slipped a noose around one of the
pig's front legs, then passed the free end of the rope to Pasquale. Pasquale
and Bob pulled while Salvatore pushed, his knees set heavily into the pig's
flanks. The pig grunted deeply and fought them in the mud. Slowly, the
men muscled the pig toward the gate. When the pig's head smacked violently
against the door jamb, it suddenly squealed, and the noise echoed through
the valley. The pig struggled against them harder than before, but the three
of them finally shoved the animal out of its pen. The pig grew calm, eagerly
nosing the artichokes on either side of the path as Pasquale led it slowly
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
58
with the rope. Salvatore lightly jabbed at the pig's flanks every now and
then with the fallen branch of an olive tree.
"Have you ever done this before?" Salvatore asked.
"No," Bob said, "but- I thought you hit it on the head first."
"Before the war, in the time of Mussolini, we did it like that. Then we
could not kill our own pigs. We had to take them to a butcher and the
meat would be given to everybody. So we did it at night and hit the pig
on the head because then it wouldn't make noise when you cut its throat."
Salvatore stopped and turned around. He pointed at the mountain with
. the olive branch. "On the other side of Petrella is Monte Cassino."
"I know," Bob said.
"Po rca miseria!" Salvatore cursed, and he began to teli.Bob of an incident during the war, when the front stretched from Formia on the coast,
through the nearby village of Ansonia, to Monte Cassino. Ausonia was
used as a German command post by General Kesselring. The people's farms
were destroyed by the continual Allied bombing. Bob nodded. Salvatore's
description matched what his father had told him. There was hardly a thing
to eat, Bob knew. Snow was carried down from Petrella for water.
One day, the Germans garrisoned in Ansonia were sent out to round
up all the people in the countryside. They were to be sent to a concentration camp in Rome. Salvatore was a boy at the time, and his family, along
with several other families, including Bob's father's, had made shelter
together in a stable. This was where the German soldier found them. As
they were leaving, the German spotted Bob's father returning to the stable
through the field with a Polish deserter. The German took aim and told
them to halt. Bob's father immediately dropped behind a pile of rocks.
The Pole froze. The soldier threatened to shoot the Pole if he did not find
the boy at once. Zia Pina, then a stout matron in her prime, began pleading
with the German. She suddenly grabbed his rifle, and another of their group
crashed a stone into the soldier's face. The German tried to flee, but he
was chased down and stabbed to death.
"It was about this big," said Salvatore, holding up his pinkie.
"What?" Bob asked.
"The knife we had," Salvatore said. "We had to stab him again and
again it was so small." Salvatore watched Bob's reaction carefully, "Your
father never told you this?"
"My father?" asked Bob with sudden revulsion. He shook his head.
Salvatore smiled nervously. He shrugged, then continued with his story:
the next day, a German patrol came looking for the missing soldier. The
Italians protested that they knew nothing. The Captain of the patrol warned
them that he would begin shooting one of them a minute until the soldier
�PICKENS
59
was found. Zia Pina confessed and they unearthed the body. The Captain
was so enraged by the mutilation of his man that he immediately executed
ten of them. The rest were taken prisoner. But just as they were departing
for the concentration camp in Rome, Ansonia was bombed by the
Americans, and many escaped into the hills during the confusion of the
raid, among them Salvatore, Bob's father, and Zia.
"The streets of Ausonia are made of stone," said Salvatore. "The Ger-
mans wore these steel-soled boots so they could never catch us in the street."
He laughed, and slapped Pasquale on the back as they led the pig up to
the table near the fire in the yard.
"Whaq" asked Pasquale.
"The war," said Salvatore. "What a time to be young, eh Pasquale?"
Pasquale spit. "Porca Dio," he muttered.
The pig's mouth was tied shut, and the heaving bulk was lifted onto
the table, its head dangling over one edge. Pasquale tied the hocks, and
setting his boot into the pig's rear, pulled its hind legs straight. Salvatore
directed Bob to put his weight upon the pig's mid-section and hold taut
the rope binding the front legs. The pig's frightened breathing wheezed
from its muzzled nose and mouth. Zia Pina appeared with a steaming pot
of water, which she poured over the pig's neck while Salvatore cleaned away
the dirt. She set the empty pot under the pig's head, and Salvatore scraped
the blunt edge of a knife back and forth slowly along the pig's gorge,
searching for the vein, before finally digging it forcefully into the pig's
throat. He twisted the blade back and forth, and the blood poured across
Salvatore's wrist and splattered into the pot. The pig shuddered and twisted,
crying mutedly through its clamped jaws, blood spurting with the animal's
convulsions. The pig's breathing gradually slackened as the blood drained
from its body. Suddenly, the mass lunged. Then it lay still.
Zia Pina took the pot of blood into the house. Pasquale poured steaming water from the barrel over the carcass, while Salvatore scraped his knife
across the body. Bristle and skin peeled off as easily as bark from a
sycamore. The two men worked quickly, without speaking. When they were
finished, the carcass lay white and cold, like a slab of marble. There was
the stench of hair and flesh smoldering in the fire.
The corpse was hung upside down from a chain secured to a rafter in
the garage. Blood trickled down the jaws onto the pavement, spreading
slowly under the soles of Salvatore's laceless shoes as he cut into the loins.
The layers of white fat, like heavy folds of warm curd, yielded easily. He
continued the incision down the belly, across the chest, and along the throat.
He cut open the neck and yanked out the esophagus. Salvatore then opened
up the belly, which gave off a humid, fecal odor, and he gathered and pulled
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
60
the coils of intestine and stomach out of the body cavity onto a wide board
that Zia Pina held. The body was propped open wide to dry with staves.
Finally, Pasquale draped the hanging corpse in a bed sheet to keep the
flies away. The only part that showed was the pig's head. Its small eyes
were closed. The mouth gaped. And the skin of the face, with all the stress
of the gutted corpse upon it, was creased by thick wrinkles that made the
gutted pig appear as if it were smiling.
Bob was still something of a curiosity to his relatives at lunch that afternoon. They watched him closely as he ate. The kitchen was warm and
smoky. There was the smell of tripe simmering on the stove, and Bob
thought of the dinners at his grandmother's when he was a little boy.
"I haven't had such good sauce since my grandmother died," Bob said
to Zia Pina. "If you can cook like this all the time, why don't you come
to America with me."
"Ah," she groaned. "I'm on my way to the grave."
"But Zia," Bob said. "Don't worry. We have graves in America, too."
She began to put more pasta into Bob's bowl. He held back her hand.
"I've had enough," he said.
She frowned. "But you just said you like it."
"I do."
She gave him another portion and pointed at his dish with her big
wooden spoon. "Eat!" she commanded. Pasquale poured Bob another glass
of wine. "And drink," he said. "For he who does not drink, does not eat."
Bob took another sip of the heavy red wine.
"What do you eat in America?" Zia Pina asked.
"What's America? What's America?" Pasquale interrupted loudly. "Hot
dogs! Ketchup! And Coca Cola!" Pasquale laughed and repeated ''What's
America? What's America?" He then asked Bob, "Do you like it here?"
"Very much," Bob answered.
"Here life is ugly," said Salvatore. He sat drained and limp in his chair.
The wine had made him dark and moody. He raised his hand. It was large,
black, and dirty, like the burl of a tree root. "Life is ugly here."
"Madonna!' Zia Pina exclaimed. She began to pass around clean plates.
"Why do you have to talk in such a way"
"Why?" he said. "Because we work and eat and sleep until one day
we die."
"Be quiet!" said Zia Pina, and she clanked her serving spoon in
Salvatore's plate as she gave him a portion from the pot she had taken
from the refrigerator.
There was a silence as she continued to serve the table.
�PICKENS
61
"What are we having now?" Bob asked.
"Try it first," Zia Pina said.
Bob took a bite. The three of them watched him expectantly. "What
is it?" he asked.
"Do you like it?"
"What is it?'; asked Bob again.
"The pig's blood," she said.
Bob's throat constricted. He looked up, trying hard not to betray his
disgust. He avoided Zia Pina's eyes, and gazed past her, out the kitchen
window, at the mountains in the near distance. The slopes of Petrella were
ruined stairs, abandoned terraces of fig, olive, and orange trees. A marble
quarry deeply scarred the mountainside yellow and beige. Bob looked back
down at his plate, took another bite, and said through his mouthful, "It's
good." He waved for Zia Pina to put more onto his plate.
"Ah!" Salvatore and Pasquale nodded with approval. They clinked their
glasses against the wine bottle and swallowed their wine in a gulp.
"Yes," Salvatore said, and he smiled. "He is one of us."
��Three Poems
Robert J. Levy
Robert J. Levy is a graduate of St. John's College, Annapolis. These poems are
reprinted from his collection of poems entitled Whistle Maker (published by the
Anhinga Press of Tallahassee, Florida), which received the Anhinga Prize for Poetry
for 1986. Last year Mr. Levy was awarded a Creative Writing Fellowship by the
National Endowment for the Arts.
63
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
64
In Sickness
Three weeks married to our symptoms
and no change in sight. Hot flashes
baffle us by day. Sudden chills
confuse us through the night. Even
sickness, however, can begin
to look like health in time, and ours,
despite its fever sweats and rheums,
has become domesticated
to a pattern of remissions,
always brief, that allows us both
to spell the other for awhile
before the next attack begins.
Monday you read me Baudelaire
in bed. Tuesday it is my turn
to bring you meus/i and a peach.
As the days wear on we trade off
the thermometer between us
like an Olympian's baton:
We run our relay race to see
who can take care of whom the best
and for how long. We just can't do
enough for each other. Frankly,
all this fevered giving becomes
quite tiresome after three weeks
sick in bed, and soon we feign all
our infirmities- withered hands,
a vile catarrh . . . anything to
inject a little selfishness
into our lives. What parity
there is in marriage and disease
is slowly weakened to the point
of no return. Still, we are left
much less alone somehow, in love
once more with the mundanity
of being well, having returned,
at long last, to our chronic norm.
�LEVY
65
The Tristan Chord
More alone with this music than ever before
I find myself thinking of you,
of that other loneliness, and of how
you always had the words for everything,
the way you once called a Beethoven quartet
"the scraping of horses' tails on cats' bowels."
No doubt you could have
talked a rainbow into grayness.
How many times have you walked out from the opera
humming arias like souvenirs?
What you take away with you is candy:
deliciously oblique and self-contained,
a thing that comforts by confining music
to the boundaries of conversation.
But if you would only listen, quietly,
you would hear ... nothing.
Not music but music's aspiration
to a silence so complete
whatever you might say about it
would be, pathetically, about yourself.
This is the Tristan chord. It melts
like ice in the palm of a word.
Like a shell's susurrus, it sings
of where it came from, where it's going,
but not of what it is. And where do you
fit into all of this? You don't.
You never did. And that's the core of it.
I could tell you how your words have broadened
my experience of art, of life, etc. . ..
They haven't changed a thing. Lately,
I find myself rehearsing the 'Ifistan chord
in all its variations. I've been thinking
how you and I are like two notes
upon a stave, parts of a tune
but not ourselves a tune. I've been thinking how words
escape us- or we from them. I've been thinking
that the search for cadence takes a very long time.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
66
On the Pythagorean Theorem
If we listen to those who wish to recount ancient history, we
may find some of them referring this theorem to Pythagoras
and saying that he sacrificed a brace of oxen in honor of his
-from Prod us
discovery.
Just as a bell curve is a kind
of breast with meaning, or graphed
hyperbolae can represent
the coy geometry of lust
(the soft curves of infinite approach
and loss), so too I can believe
that when Pythagoras deduced
the theorem, his sacrifice of
oxen to the gods was not
prompted by piety alone.
Was it for the sake of gods
the dumb beasts were spitted, charred and sent
ethereal, to bovine heaven?
Did he believe the theorem had descended,
courtesy of some mathematical
Prometheus, from on high?
I would like, instead, to think
that the electric "click" of certainty,
flooding his mind like light into a room
where only dark had been before,
was like the voice of a lovely woman
reclaiming him into the world.
At once abstract and visceral,
the "ah ha!" of sudden knowing
was like the "ahhh ... " of sexual release,
and knowledge struck the belly of his mind
with the neat certainty of wine.
I would like to think he understood
that truth was not otherworldly,
that a fact may reek of burning meat
and its proper offering must be
the smoke from flesh on fire, the smell
of food and sex, the aroma
(corrupt, delicious) of knowledgethe smoldering thigh pieces of the beast.
\
�The Analytic Art
of Viete:
A Review Essay
Richard Ferrier
Francois Viete: The Analytic Art: Nine Studies in Algebra, Geometry, and
Trigonometry from the Opus restitutae mathematicae analyseos, seu Algebra
Nova. Translated by T. Richard Witmer. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University
Press, 1983.
As knowledge of the classical languages ceases to be numbered among the
tools essential to the educated man, it becomes more desirable to have
suitable translations of significant authors who wrote when those languages
were the common possession of the learned. While this work has long been
done and redone in the so-called humanities, it has always proceeded at
a slower pace in mathematics and natural science, so much so that when
the new program was established at St. John's College over forty-five years
ago, heroic efforts were demanded to produce English texts of such central works as the Conics and the Almagest. These translations, the hasty
offspring of necessity, have remained without competition until very recently, while every year sees new versions of Platonic dialogues or classical
tragedies.
Among the mathematical classics included in the new program was
Fran9ois Viele's Introduction to the Analytical Art, which J. Winfree Smith
first translated for use in the mathematics tutorial. Mr. Smith's version
Richard Ferrier, an alumnus of St. John's College, is on the faculty of Thomas
Aquinas College, Santa Paula, California.
67
�68
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
is included as an appendix to the translation of Jacob Klein's Greek
Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra.' Mr. Klein argued there
that Viete's new algebra, or "specious logistic," as he called it, was the first
truly symbolic mathematics and that careful study of Viete's achievement
and its development at the hands of Descartes and others would shed light
on the symbolic character of modern thought, including the number concept and the notion of scientific law. Those who are skeptical of this interpretation of Viete's work must nonetheless acknowledge that he was a great
mathematician. F. Ritter, who wrote the most complete survey of Viete's
life and works, accorded him the impressive title, "inventeur de l'algebre
moderne," and the opinion of Augustus De Morgan, writing in the Penny
Cyclopedia of 1843, put the same claim in this vivid language:
If a Persian or a Hindu, instructed in the modern European algebra, were
to ask, "who, of all individual men, made the step which most distinctly
marks the separation of the science which you now return to us from that
which we delivered to you by the hands of Mohammed Ben Musa?" the
answer must be-VIETA.
The present volume includes the Introduction as well as eight treatises
on various mathematical topics. These last, which treat of the theory of
equations, multiple and partial angle formulae, solutions to cubic and biquadratic equations, and the application of specious logistic to Geometry,
are here published in English for the first time. In performing this labor,
Mr. Witmer has facilitated the study of Viete's thought by those who have
an interest in his mathematical achievements and philosophical significance
but lack the Latin necessary to read the often difficult and dense original
text. Such readers may well have been puzzled by Viete's tantalizingly brief
discussion of procedure and aims in the Introduction, but they have
heretofore been unable to interpret that text by comparison with the execution in detail of the program it enunciates. In particular, Viete proposes
a threefold analytical art comprising Zetetic, Poristic, and Exegetic or
Rhetic, but readers have not been able to agree on what precisely is the
nature or function of each part. Poristic has presented the greatest obscurity,
but there are doubtful matters in the other two as well. Several of the texts
here translated contain the evidence by which these questions can be settled.
Exegetic, or the art of actually exhibiting the unknown magnitude in a
geometrical problem, is the subject of two of the treatises, A Canonical
Survey of Geometrical Constructions and A Supplement to Geometry. The
latter contains Viete's only references to Poristic (pp. 395-97) and gives
an example of a complete synthetic solution to the problem of inscribing
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69
a regular heptagon in a circle. The meaning of such terms as "specious
logistic" and "zetetic" will be clarified by their use throughout all the
treatises, but especially the Preliminary Notes on Symbolic Logistic (Latin:
Ad logisticen speciosam notae priores) and the Five Books of Zetetica.
Viete's apparent identification of Algebra with the whole of Analysis and
his relation to Descartes can be examined more fruitfully through these
texts, and the notion of a geometrical algebra, which has been used to
describe the second book of Euclid's Elements, can be clarified. Particularly
interesting in this last connection is the comparison of Elements II, Viete's
Survey, and Paolo Bonansoni's Geometrical Algebra translated and published for the first time by R. Schmidt.'
And now, with a sense of playing the odious part of Celano at this
banquet, I must warn the reader against uncritically falling to. Mr. Witmer's
translations are so seriously flawed that the reader cannot trust them in
just those places where the greatest interest lies; and, though he may use
them, the reader would be well advised to consult Mr. Smith's earlier and
superior version of the Introduction and, if possible, the Latin original.'
Some of these flaws are the fault of the publisher. The numerous
solecisms in Greek orthography are annoying but they are no real obstacle
to understanding. Others seem to come from a lack of mathematical insight. 4 Readers with knowledge of Euclid will not be misled by hearing
the vertex angle of an isosceles triangle called a "vertical angle," though
they may be irritated at the irregular usage. The unfamiliar technical term
"mesographic" is not synonymous with "cube duplication," as a footnote
gives us to understand. It is rather to be rendered as "mean finding" or,
as Witmer himself awkwardly puts it, "the discovery of two mean continued proportionals between two given ones [sic]." (p. 395)
The most serious of the deficiencies seem to arise from Witmer's having rejected the possibility that changes in notation imply a qualitative
change in the object of mathematics or in the mode in which it is conceived. These are precisely the points that Klein investigated, concluding
that Viele was a revolutionary figure in the history of mathematics.
Witmer's neglect of these considerations shows up most clearly in his
avoidance of all English words that suggest the Latin "species" or the Greek
"Eliioc;". Viete calls his new algebra "Specious Logistic" because it "is exhibited through the species or forms of things." The last phrase is, in Latin,
"species seu rerum formas," an expression that surely is meant to remind
the educated reader of Plato and especially Aristotle, who uses exactly
equivalent language.' Could anyone guess at these echoes in Witmer's rendition (p. 17): "Symbolic logistic employs symbols or signs for things"?
In fairness I should point out that here, and in various places through the
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book, Witmer does give the Latin and, where they exist, various French
translations as well as Smith's. But why should the more interesting and
accurate rendition be relegated to a footnote? There are numerous indications that when Vifte uses "species" and its cognates, he intends to sug-
gest to the reader the philosophic use of these unusually weighty terms.
The related word genus is used throughout the Introduction in such a way
as to force these reflections upon the reader, most emphatically in Viete's
statement in Chapter I of the effect of the law of homogeneity, which he
calls "the prime and perpetual law of equations." There he employs the
significant expression "Solemnis magnitudem ex genere ad genus vi sua
proportionaliter adscendentium vel descendentium series seu scala," which
Witmer colorlessly renders "a formal series or scale of terms ascending
or descending proportionally from class to class in keeping with their
nature." Compare with this version Klein's "venerable series or scale of
magnitudes ascending or descending from genus to genus ... " or Smith's
"series or ladder, hallowed by custom, of magnitudes ascending or descending by their own nature from genus to genus." I am reminded by this text
not only of the hierarchy of species and genus in scholastic philosophy
but also of Jacob's dream (Genesis 28, 12), where we· find a ladder "scalam"
with angels of God "ascendentes et desc.endentes per earn." Is it on this
scale that the heights of heaven are to be ascended? The founders of
modernity, as readers of the tradition know, are not unwilling to portray
their project as an assault on the heavens through Promethean or even
Satanic metaphor. The whole Introduction, it will be recalled, cadences
with the proud boast "NULLUM NON PROBLEMA SOLVERE": to leave
no problem unsolved.
That the transformation of the mathematical meaning of species or
Ellioc;. particularly in its Diophantine use, is a starting point for Viete's
own specious logistic is most plainly supported by Viele's claim that
Diophantus used species calculation but hid this fact in order to excite admiration at his wit and ingenuity. This means that Viete understands himself
not as innovator but as renovator, which explains the "restitutae" in the
title, the comparison to finding "fossil gold" in the dedicatory letter to his
patroness, and his plain statement there that his new algebra is "in truth,
old." He has cleansed and restored the art of algebra as he had received
it from the Arabs by attending to certain clues and traces of a pure original
algebra found in the procedure of Diophantus in the Arithmetica and the
method of analysis as it is discussed by Pappus, Apollonius, Theon, and,
in a way, Plato. There are strong reasons, therefore, against translating the
conclusion of chapter 5 of the Introduction so as to suggest that Diophantus
did not have specious logistic and that in consequence he is to be admired,
�FERRIER
71
as it were, for operating under a handicap. Witmer's version runs thus:
[In his Arithmetic Diophantus] assuredly exhibits this method in numbers
but not in symbols, for which it is nevertheless used. Because of this his ingenuity and quickness of mind are the more to be admired." (p. 27)
Compare this with Smith:
[Diophantus] presented it as if established by means of numbers and not
also by species (which, nevertheless, he used) in order that his subtlety and
skill might be the more admired. 6
In translating the Survey and the Supplement it is important to keep
the language of specious logistic separate from that of classical geometry.
Like Toomer's otherwise admirable Almagest, Witmer's Survey treats the
operations of algebra as simply equivalent to construction of figures and
composition or decomposition of ratios. Th illustrate, the expression "rectangulam sub CF, FG" (Prop. 9, Survey) which harkens back to Euclid's
"To urro Tiiiv BA, Ar rreptex6~evov 6p9oyrovwv," should be translated
"the rectangle contained by CF and FG." In Vi~te it signifies a definite
individual rectangle. Witmer translates it as CFxFG," turning it into part
of an equation, for example "CF'+(CFxFG)= DF'." This goes beyond
translation and becomes, intentionally or not, an interpretation of the relation between Algebra and Geometry. Both the Survey and the Supplement
concern themselves with just this relation, the bond between geometry and
algebra. This is what makes them part of exegetic, the third part of the
Analytic art.
When the equation of the magnitude which is being sought has been set
in order, the rhetic or exegetic art ... performs its function ... in regard
to lengths, surfaces, and solids, if it is necessary to show the magnitude itself.
And in the latter case, the analyst appears as a geometer by actually carrying out the work in imitation of the like analytical solution7 ••• the skillful
geometer, though a learned analyst, conceals this fact and presents and explicates his problem as a synthetic one: ... 8
It is thus no accident that Viele's exegetical treatises employ the language
of classical, synthetic, geometry. This could also be shown by a more detailed examination of the diction and structure of the propositions they
contain. Viete was here writing in the manner of Euclid. With such texts
the pattern for modern English translations ought to be Sir Thomas Heath's
translation of Euclid's Elements. It is one thing, however, to show that Viele
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
gave these works a geometrical character and content, and another to uncover his reasons for doing so. Perhaps it will not be out of place to attempt an answer to this question by sketching the scheme of the simpler
of the two, the Survey.
There are three parts to this text. In the first eight propositions, Viete
offers constructions as geometrical interpretations of various algebraic
operations involving terms of the first and second genera, or degree, as
we would say. Proposition 6, for example, is a problem: "Given two straight
lines, to find a third proportional." In the 1646 edition, this enunciation
is followed by a line set in different type, apparently serving as a kind of
title for the proposition following. It reads: "The Operation of Division."
The next five propositions divide into two groups. First Viete proves
three theorems on continued proportion. These theorems involve lines forming squares and rectangles suitable for interpreting the three types of
quadratic equations that have at least one positive real root.' Next come
two problems by which the line or lines that interpret the unknown term
in the equation are found. In the last seven propositions, Viete accomplishes
for certain simple biquadratic equations what these five do for the
quadratics.
Everything in the Survey is ordered to the problems that construct the
line interpreting the unknown. Viete titles such a problem the "mechimice"
of its equation, because in it he exhibits the device, the standard and regular
procedure, by which the root of such an equation can be exhibited as a
line constructed geometrically. Unlike Descartes, Viete does not regard these
lines as solutions to the equations. It is in his Zetetica (e.g., in Zetetica
III, prop. l) that Viete gives the properly algebraic solutions, not, interestingly, as formulae, but rather more in the mode of data stated in words.
Why did Viete give the roots in two distinct ways? In particular, why
did he write treatises giving the geometric construction rather than rest
in the zetetic, or algebraic, solution? The answer lies in the fact that Specious
Logistic, though of the highest universality, remains for Viete an auxiliary
procedure. He has yet to make the object of the most universal method
the highest object. He thinks a mathematician should proceed in something
like this manner: A traditional geometric question is proposed, such as
the division of a given line into mean and extreme ratio. This problem is
expressed as a quadratic equation in one unknown. After suitable
simplifications have been carried out in accordance with the stipulations
governing specious logistic, the equation reduces to one of three standard
forms. The geometer then consults the Survey for the construction that
corresponds to an equation of that form. The resulting line solves the
geometrical problem. The geometrical problem, I say, not the equation.
�FERRIER
73
The whole figure drawn, including the line sought, explicates or interprets
the equation. A detailed example of this procedure, minus the analysis that
yields the equation (Viete is just as cunning as the ancients here), as applied to the inscription in a circle of the regular heptagon, completes the
Supplement.
Viete is thus more firmly rooted in the ancient tradition than one might
think from reading Mr. Klein's account. For him as for Aristotle, quantity
exists only as the magnitudes of geometry or the numbers of arithmetic.
Geometry calls on algebra in answering its own proper questions and
translates the aid into its own proper solutions. The equation as such is
not something whose solution is of primary interest.
There is therefore no excuse for the following translation of the first
sentence in the Survey: "This is a review of the rules of geometric construction by which all equations not exceeding the quadratic can be readily
solved.mo In particular, there is no excuse for translating "explicentur" as
"can be solved." There is also no excuse for translating "consectarium ad
mechanicen" as "Corollary on the Geometric solution" of an equation.
This translation may lead readers into the mathematical details with only
occasional misdirection, but with respect to the interesting and problematical features of Viete's work it could well have taken as its motto,
NULLUM NON PROBLEMA OBSCURARE.
Notes
1. Translated by Eva Brann (Cambridge: M.l.T. Press, 1968).
2. Annapolis: Golden Hind Press, 1985.
3. All of Viete's extant works are now available in a facsimile reprint of
the 1646 edition, with foreword and index by Joseph E. Hofmann
(Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1970).
4. For example, D should be corrected to 2D on p. 416, and an editor
should not keep silent on the related matter of Van Schooten's erroneous emendation of the inference concerning the size of the angles
in proposition XVII of the Supplement (p. 405).
5. Physics 193a31.
6. GMT, p. 345. Witmer's error is less excusable in that it also demands
bad Latinity; "quibus tamen usus est" simply cannot mean "for which
it is nonetheless used."
7. This text misled Klein into thinking that exegetic merely translates into geometry the already resolved equation- something that becomes
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
possible after the first few pages of Descartes's Geometrie but which
is never done in the work of Viete. (GMT, pp. 167-69, 164)
8. Introduction, Chapter VII (GMT pp. 346-47).
9. The three types of quadratics are x' + px = r', x'- px = r', and px-x' = r'.
These are the forms of the quadratic as Viete received the algebraic
tradition from the Arabs. Even Descartes holds to this classification
in the Geometrie, rejecting the form -px-x'= r' because its only real
roots are negative.
I 0. The Latin runs ''Effectiones Geometricas quibus equationes omnes
quae quadratorum metam non excedunt, commode explicentur, ita
canonice recenseo." I offer the following: "Those geometrical results
by which all equations that do not exceed the bounds set by squares
may be conveniently explicated, I list in standard order as follows."
�The English War and Peace:
Paul Scott's Raj Quartet
Eva Brann
I. The Post-final Novel
II. The Philistine Satan
III. The Respectful Englishman
IV. The Telling Image
I. The Post-final Novel
I want to begin with a judgment of luminous wrong-headedness. It has
appeared twice in the pages of a widely-read weekly book review:
The Raj Quartet is one of the longest, most successfully rendered works of
19th century fiction written in the 20th century.
It is, of course, meant to be put-down, not praise.
What is wrong-headed is the prank played with chronology. Time serves
us in no other way than as an imperturbable order of succession. Dates
of existence give us the only hard ordering frame we have for the world
in its going. Consequently if a novel was completed in 1975, it is a contemporary novel, and should be counted as such. And that is, of course,
precisely what is illuminating in the dictum above. It implies that citizenship in one's time does not accrue by mere reason of date of birth but must
Eva Brann, a Thtor at St. John's College, Annapolis, has been writing review articles
regularly for the Review.
75
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
be earned by passing a critical test: The honor of being here and now is
bestowed by the craft of critics.
With respect to novels this perverse notion, that the times accredit the
work rather than the work the times, takes potently concrete shape. One
would think that all the books recognized as novels come to establish a
genre: the fairly lengthy prose fiction. For such an ex post facto genre the
exception proves the rule, and so deviations are readily accommodated:
There are novels all in rhyme (e.g., Vikram Seth, Golden Gate), non-fiction
novels that are meticulous reportage (e.g., 1\uman Capote's In Cold Blood),
and novels which are one-fifteenth as long as others (cf. Robbe-Grillet's
In the Labyrinth and War and Peace).
In criticism, however, instead of novels there appears something called
"The Novel." It behaves not as a genre but as a species: It has a line of
evolution within which throw-backs like The Raj Quartet are discernible.
Since it has become maladaptive, it is probably heading toward extinction,
to join the dinosaurs. It is on this evolutionary hypothesis that what David
Lodge calls the sermons on the text "Is the novel dying" (38) have become
a preoccupation of criticism.
There is some agreement about the change in environment to which
The Novel is failing to adapt. It is Reality that is killing The Novel (5),
or rather the transmutation of reality, not from one state of affairs to
another, but out of itself altogether: "Reality is no longer realistic," as Norman Mailer says in The Man Who Studied Yoga. What this paradox is
intended to mean is that there is no common phenomenal world anymore;
our environment has gone surreal. Hence it requires a new novel, one that
experiments with "fabulating" techniques: inversions of fact and fiction,
randomness, surrealisms both vulgar and sophisticated, and bottomless
subjectivism.
Now there has got to be something wrong with this vision of things.
That the phenomenal world has illusionistic aspects is simply the wisdom
of the ancients, and it is not what is meant here. That our contemporary
world has been largely transmogrified into second nature, so that primary
beings are harder to find, and that the traditional centers are giving way
to fragmented perspectives- these and all the other much-debated features
of modernity may make the genealogy of "Reality" harder to trace. But
surely the notion that reality is over is a decision and not a finding, a sort
of deliberate self-spooking. To put it another way: the coroners of Reality
are also its assassins.
Oddly enough, among the motives for writing finis to the traditional
novel one powerful purpose is precisely the establishment of a purer, sharper
reality. Recall that "reality" is Latin for "thinginess." Robbe-Grillet's
�BRANN
77
''chosisme" is intended to disinfect things and purify them of their human
meaning, so as to restore their pristine independence.
Either way, what is clear is that the putatively dying novel is the socalled "realistic novel." What would be a good description of this, essentially the traditional novel? To begin with, realism, the usual critical term,
is not quite accurate, for the great traditional novels are full of psychic
and surreal episodes. There is, however, a delineation by Iris Murdoch of
a novel of tolerance which comes closer to the novel that is said to have
come to its end:
A great novelist is essentially tolerant, that is, displays a real apprehension
of persons other than the author as having a right to existence and to have
a separate mode of being which is important and interesting to themselves.
I must say that the defense of the characters inhabiting great novels
in terms of their civil rights gives me a little pause. (Murdoch is defining
the great novel as an expression of Classical Liberalism.) Moreover,
tolerance seems a faint term for the affirmative sympathy great authors
bestow on their characters. Nonetheless, "real persons more or less
naturalistically presented" as being "mutually independent centers of
significance" are indeed to be found in the works of the novelists she mentions, among whom are Jane Austen and Tolstoy. Now here is a huge claim:
Paul Scott belongs in this company.
Let me begin to defend this claim with respect first to tolerance and
then to Tolstoy. I shall use as a small preliminary example Scott's treatment of a character who really requires a lot of toleration: Captain Jimmy
Clark, one of the old boys of Chillingborough, the public school that plays
a fatal role in the book. Scott himself describes him in a later essay as
a "wretched cad of a chap," who, regrettably, succeeds in seducing Sarah,
the major woman of the novel. Yet for all his sexual cockiness and brutal
candor, it is he, and not the gentlemanly chaps, who has the ear for fine
classical sitar playing. That too is in Scott's account. It figures in, though
it does not outweigh Clark's coarseness toward Sarah. Tolerance does not
preclude fine moral reckoning (see III).
As for Tolstoy, the comparison was suggested in passing by David
Rubin, whose brief account of the novel is laden with insights. He was
corrected in a review by Lawrence Graver, who proposes that Trollope rather
than Tolstoy is the proper counterpart. Now I am a loyal Trollope lover,
but this comparison seems to me absurd. Trollope is said to have had more
than an amateurish knowledge of English parliamentary politics, and he
certainly has a wide and nuanced knowledge of English types. But who
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
was ever shaken by the fateful pathos of his setting or his people, as one
might be by Scott's? On the contrary, Ttollope's world is the quintessence
of snugness. That is why he was so fervently revived during the Second
World War.
No, the comparison with Tolstoy is much more telling. First, War and
Peace and The Raj Quartet are both long-breathed and large-scened, though
they do differ from each other-as the Russia of 1812 differs from the
Anglo-India of 1942. Tolstoy's Russians offer indomitable though inertial
resistance to the Western invader of their large land; the British depicted
by Scott subjugate an immense continent with half-hearted sedulousness.
That apotheosis of warm-hearted Russian girlhood, Natasha, finds her entirely lovable completion in bossy, dowdy houswifehood. The ungainly,
inhibited English girl Sarah, on the other hand, finds at the end rele~se
from family and a dawning love of her own. In both novels these consummations take place in the short epilogue of peace- deadly in the Indian
case-that succeeds the great war. The Russian book is elemental and
golden, overlaid with the sheen of a serene love of the land; the English
book is complex and melancholy, ridden with moral scruple, decline, and
loss of faith in England. Accordingly Tolstoy and Scott, who both reflect
on history, have opposite views of it. Tolstoy thinks that it is only the integral of very small human differentials, which consequently make all the
difference. Scott, sensitive to India's immensity, emphasizes the frailty of
human action in the face of history's "moral drift" (1987, 13). Nonetheless,
they and their novels end alike, with the children: Just as, in the last pages
of War and Peace, Andre Bolkonsky's son Nikolai fervently promises to
make his dead father proud, so The Jewel in the Crown ends with an episode
that postdates the quartet as a whole. Parvati, the lovely young daughter
of a dead English mother and a self-exiled Indian father, goes off to her
music lesson. She will grow up to be a gifted keeper of the great tradition,
the Indian music that her mother had just begun to understand.
Putting The Raj Quartet in Tolstoyan company implies of course that
it is a great novel. Let me specify the elements that seem to me to make it so:
(l) First there is indeed that widely affirmative mode Murdoch calls
tolerance. Elizabeth Bowen says somewhere that "a novelist must be imperturbable." Scott, on the other hand, advises the novelist: "You must commit yourself" (1987, 79). It appears to be the fusion of these, serene engagement and subtle wholeheartedness, that is the psychic mode of great novels.
(2) The great novels are full of resolved complexity. The net they knit
is enormous, but there are no dropped stiches or loose ends. The prime
example in the Quartet is the underground life of one of the two
precipitating characters, Parvati's occulted father, Hari Kumar, the Angli-
�BRANN
79
cized Indian with whom Daphne Manners falls in love and who is accused
of her rape. He vanishes from view after the first book, re-emerges in a
harrowing interrogation in the second, only to disappear, as it seems, for
good. His absence hovers over the second half of the novel: Has the author
forgotten him, left him dangling? But he returns toward the end, though
not in propria persona- those connections are missed. He reappears rather
as a printed voice, a voice of infinite melancholy, writing essays about the
lost Eden of England, indeed about Chillingborough, essays which are
signed with the name Philoctetes, the betrayed archer-hero with the incurable wound.
(3) A great novelist has in mind thousands of bits of knowledge which
when selected appear to accrue significance on their own. Scott refers to
this property as "graces bestowed'' (1987, 215). He lists as examples both
the name Daphne, which is a laurel native to Eurasia and the name of a
nymph metamorphosed into that shrub while running from a god; and
the name Philoctetes, which Scott relates to the Great Archer Hari. But
such felicities are legion in the novel.
(4) In all the great novels I know there is an inextricable reciprocity
of scenes and characters, of atmosphere and action. The Raj Quartet is
full of subtle deeds and fine-spun conversations which slowly weave a
magnificent panoramic tapestry. But it also exudes strong, strange-familiar
redolences, enveloping auras, which seem to precipitate the individual
figures. In Section IV below something will be said about how Scott
achieves this effect.
(5) The occurrences and deeds of great novels are explicit. In particular
is the evil done literal evil. I shall dwell on this matter in the next section.
In sum, a very great novel, a post-final novel, was completed little more
than a decade ago, although The Novel was supposed to be dead. Or as
Scott puts it, inveighing against the "literary body-snatchers ... the sort
of people who prove that the novel is dead because they want it to be":
"Well, if the novel is dead, all I can say is that it's having a lovely juneraf'
(1987, 193).
II. The Philistine Satan
The Raj Quartet has something War and Peace lacks: an evil presence of
enormous pathos. It is the almost vibrant desolation around this person
which confirms Scott as a "tolerant" novelist in the'most positive sense.
This villain is Ronald Merrick, whose name, as so many in this novel,
sounds overtones, here those of merit gone wrong. There are, to be sure,
other unadmirable characters in the book. Authorial tolerance, as has been
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
said, does not preclude personal or moral aversion. There is, above all,
Sarah's mother Mildred Layton, a languidly snobbish, rigid Memsahib,
who displays, however, her own sort of arid valor. There is also Pandit
Baba, the fanatical behind-the-scenes instigator of rebellion, Merrick's
ultimate nemesis, who has, for all his slipperiness, a certain blunt righteousness. But neither of these has the odor of unholiness that hangs about
the monstrously efficient District Superintendent of Police in Mayapore,
later a captain in the Indian army, who acquires a defacing scar and a prosthetic hand.
But great treatments of human evil do not take refuge in indeterminate
demonisms. They have the courage of their moral revulsion: Definite crimes
are committed. Thke for example that dark evil which preoccupies Marlowe
in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, surely the greatest novelette of our century. For all its ineffable horror, there are also namable misdeeds: Kurtz
has allowed himself to be worshipped as a god, with human sacrifices. Or
consider how much more vaporous Dostoevsky's Possessed became when
the first editor prudishly excluded Stavrogin's confession, which reveals
the actual deed corresponding to his spiritual perversion: He had seduced
and driven to suicide a little girl.
Scott's Merrick tortures and molests prisoners, and drives one of them
to suicide. He manipulates superiors, blackmails subordinates, and abuses
confidential knowledge- always working discreetly, though at the limits.
Moreover, the explanation of this appalling man's conduct is given along
straightforwardly secular lines, in terms of an unfortunate conjunction of
sexual pathology, social inferiority, and tearingly ambiguous racial feeling. This not unsympathetic account, rendered after Merrick's lurid semisuicidal death, comes from the most understanding quarter, the wise and
decent sophisticate and long-inactive homosexual, Count Bronowski (Book
IV, 594).
It is because there are real crimes and secular diagnosis that Merrick
can acquire theological gravity. This perspective is provided by one of the
most moving figures in fiction, Barbie Batchelor, the missionsary spinster
whose book, The Towers of Silence, is the intense heart of the Raj series.
She is the sort of person one could not stand to spend an hour with in
a social setting. She scurries about officiously and talks compulsively. But
Scott follows her fate from her own center, from the threatening void behind
her chatter, through the spells of "imaginary silences," moments of insight
when she does not know whether she has actually uttered anything, to her
final mute madness. Her despair derives from love deprived of an aim;
above all she is oppressed by an intense devotion to an absconded god.
�BRANN
81
This woman's precarious sanity is finally unhinged as a direct result
of her encounter with Merrick. She is packed and ready to leave Panko!
when she first catches a glimpse of him; she gasps "both at the sight of
a man and at the noxious emanation that lay like an almost visible miasma
around the plants along the balustrade which had grown dense and begun
to trail tendrils." In the course of their meeting- he had sought her out
as he had gone after other victims he had chosen: men, women, finally
a child- he teaches her about despair. In particular he reveals to her the
despair behind the suttee-like death of her friend and heroine, Edwina
Crane. Miss Crane had set herself afire after the fatal beating of the
schoolmaster Chaudhuri, who had been protecting her from a mob on the
road from Dibrapur:
"There is no God. Not even on the road from Dibrapur."
An invisible lightning struck the veranda. The purity of its colourless
fire etched shadows on his face. The cross glowed on her breast and then
seemed to burn out (375).
Having thus undone Damascus, he sends her off on a tonga which, overburdened with the weight of her trunk (it contains the testimonials of her
life), careens down-hill to calamity. Her last sane words are: "I have seen
the devil."
That Merrrick is Satanic is utterly clear: He has a sort of non-being;
he is "a man," as Guy Perrin, the fresh hero of the last book says, "who
comes too late and invents himself to make up for it"- too late, that is,
for the kind of domination he longs to exercise. He hunts and catches souls.
He purveys despair. But he is a smaller and newer devil than Milton's "lost
Archangel" who rules Pandemonium in self-confident grandeur. Merrick
is goaded to middle-class ressentiment by the frosty superiority of the Chillingburians, white and black, not possessed by rebellious pride. What is
more devastating, he is a renegade without a Lord, consigned to traveling
to and fro in India and to riding up and down in it with no one to report
to. He is a devil in a world without a god, a humanistic devil, a human
devil, a human being.
Now I am mindful of the cheap frisson to be gained from that notorious
interpretational identity: "The ostensibly human character X is really the
mythical Y," the Great Earth Mother, say, or the Wicked Witch of the West.
But aside from the fact that Scott's indicators are urunistakable, it is actually only to Barbie Batchelor that Ronald Merrick is the devil, and his
essentially human deviltry is the direct complement of God's absence: In
a world from which God has absconded a man can be a demon.
�82
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
The wonder is that this frigid philistine can invest his own perverted
person with such a bleakly piteous aura. Scott's early novels, some of which
are clear preludes to The Raj Quartet, are all about the moral struggle of
lonely men against forces of disintegration. It is almost as if Merrick had
been molded out of the negative to their common essence.
III. The Respectful Englishman
As the complement to the delineation of the policeman's private perversion, the novel as a whole bears a moral mission. It is an engrossing fact
that the mission is a noble failure, at least in one of its two facets. When
faced on a certain occasion with a direct qnestion by an Indian abont the
present-day contribution of his work, Scott had no positive answer (1987,
147). Nonetheless he made it clear, and others understood, that he was
combatting two evils: the ignorance of the English not so much about
India-that is beyond novelistic cure- but about their own moral responsibility for its fate (1987, 157); and the ingrained lack of respect the English
aliens have for the dark-skinned Indians in whose land they are camping.
It is for racial arrogance alone that Scott shows real contempt.
Now The Raj Quartet is indeed a deeply absorbing history lesson in
the rise and fall of the raj, the English rule of India. So far the mission
is fulfilled.
It is otherwise with the respect of the British for the Indians. For this
has in turn two aspects, a racial and a religious one. The germinal and
controlling event of the book is the consnmmation of Daphne's and Hari's
love in the Bibighar Gardens, and her subsequent rape by a gang of
hooligans, for which Hari is arrested by Merrick. True to his promise to
Daphne (exacted by her for his protection, not hers) he never divulges the
truth of the affair. Hari Kumar is for Daphne Manners a full human being; in the intimacy of this affair color is nothing. But he is also Harry
Coomer, a Chillingburian, Englishman through and through- indeed the
novel's English gentleman par excellence.
If color is at least in one decisive instance conquered, Indianness, Hindu
Indianness, is another matter. Except for Kumar and the above-mentioned
Chaudhuri, "B.A., B.S.C.," who "did not profess to be a Christian" but
"on the other hand, ... did not profess any other religion," no hero of
the book is born Hindu. Indeed there are many unsavory Hindus like the
Pandit. In Staying On, which bears to the Raj tetralogy the relation that
a satyr play has to an ancient tragic trilogy, it gets worse. There we find
that mountainous monument of petty corruption, who exceeds the nastiest
Britisher in nastiness, Mrs. Boolabhoy.
�BRANN
83
In truth, the Indians, who, like the two Kasims, have the authorial
respect are Muslims, and even when apostate they are not unmindful of
their history. Young Kasim is not the only Muslim in this novel who dies
an unassuming hero's death defending English women. I do not know
whether Scott was aware of the fact that he favors the Muslims. The inclination certainly goes way back in India novels.
"One does not write out of one's feelings for books but out of one's
feelings about life," says Scott (1987, 160). But books are part of a writer's
life, the more vitally so the less he is playing "Can you top this" with the
tradition. The book vital to the shaping of The Raj Quartet's mission was
of course E. M. Forster's A Passage to India. Scott was puzzled and disturbed by Forster's final judgment that the liberal Fielding and Dr. Asiz
cannot be friends. Forster's earth and sky say: "No, not yet," "No, not there."
But now it should be possible, Scott thinks, to portray such a friendship
(1987, 1962). Perhaps so, but it is to my point that Asiz is in fact a Muslim.
There is an old, old history of British revulsion from Hinduism (Rubin,
8, 168), and Scott does not break out of it. Perhaps in Hinduism the West
may face its uttermost antithesis, where appreciative respect is perilous.
I do not know. But I do know that Scott's failure should give us pause
in our incessant sanguine calls for understanding our non-Western fellow
humans by means of heaps of self-denigration and a few three-credit
courses. It can't be done: At most we can examine ourselves to discern what
is inalienably ours, what is insuperably alien, and what is residually
common.
Accordingly, this English novel is more than anything about being
British, that is to say, about being an English man or woman cut off from
and forgotten by England, camping on alien soil, coping with obligations
and succumbing to spiritual temptations not known at home. Such highly
local trials bring out deeply human quandaries. Except for the color question, Scott's sympathy is inexhaustible, so much so that he has been, absurdly, accused of being an "imperialist-manque." But then the novel has
also been called anti-British: If it is, then anxious reproaches are not a
part of love. In fact, of course, the charges balance out, confirming the
work as the "moral dialogue between writer and reader" that Scott thinks
a novel should, among other things, be (1987, 149). He does not think,
however, that the moral effect is the essential function of a novel.
Here is what a novel, more centrally, is: It is "a view into a private vi-
sion of reality." (1987,104). For Scott this definition has a meaning at once
deep and precise.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
84
IV. The Telling Image
The deeper meaning is that a novelist works with being and with a perspective on being, with reality acknowledged and with reality viewed. It should
be said here that the catchword "reality" includes all sorts of observed
otherness, from infinite landscapes to intimate reveries, from hardest
thinghood to surrealist visions: Viewed reality is precisely reality viewed
as experience, "human reality" (107). The implication of this complex notion is that one might work out-not here, though-a metaphysics specific
to the "the novel of tolerance," the traditional great novel par excellence.
Of course a novelist of Scott's stature was deeply preoccupied by what one
might call "applied metaphysics." His reflections, scattered but cohesive,
are to be found in the essays collected in On Writing and the Novel.
The more precise, almost technical meaning of Scott's definition is that
a novel is the telling of an image. Here is the author's most specific idea
of "what a novel is'':
A series of images, conveyed from me to you, in such a manner that my
view of life is also conveyed- BUT ONLY TO ONE PERSON AT A TIME:
THE READER (consenting adults). IT IS THAT READER I'M WRITING
TV (212).
So to begin with, and as he continually emphasizes, a novel is a communication; indeed it is a sort of love affair between the writer and each separate
reader. This intention distinguishes him from the experimental writer, whose
responsibility is to keep the genre alive by his innovations and the critics
at work by his sophistication.
That is not to say that Scott is not a very clever narrator. He uses a
great multiplicity of means: audacious perturbations of time, such as
reprises, anticipations, parallelisms; large varieties of sources, fictive and
real, such as diaries, newspaper accounts, descriptions of cartoons; and,
above all, the several kinds of narration: direct, oblique, third-, second-,
first-person narrative. In fact there are in The Raj Quartet two distinct narrators. The first of these is an anonymous inquirer who investigates the
ramifications of the Bibighar affair in the first book. The second is Guy
Perrin, the character obviously closest to the author. He is introduced in
the last book as a "breath of fresh air," to represent a healthier "modernity," a man who baffles Merrick's designs on him (214). We learn in Staying On that the delicate understanding between him and Sarah, first expressed in the aftermath .of the Hindu massacre of Muslims during which
they had failed to save their friend Ahmed Kasim from self-sacrifice, had
resulted in a happy marriage. The "question of who is telling the story"
�BRANN
85
(212) was on Scott's mind; one might say that its asking- whose first occurrence is in Plato's Republic (393)- is one chief mark of a self-conscious,
reflective writer.
The telling, the narrative, is packed into the "small, hard rectangular
object" (114) which the reader gets to hold. The material book and the
telling between its covers are successive reductions of a first, originating
element: the image. Here then is Scott's most concise definition of a novel:
A novel is a sequence of images. In sequence these images tell a story (74).
Hence the language of a novel is for all its verbal linearity not a telling
but a showing (74). This secret of Scott's novels is first set out in an essay,
antedating The Raj Quartet, called "Imagination and the Novel" (1961).
And indeed, the earlier novels which, though fine in themselves, look in
hindsight like exercises for the Raj, are full of such images. In The Chinese
Love Pavilion, for example, a crucial image is the "landscape without
figures," "the intimate distances preserved behind glass,'' pictures of India
painted by the narrator's grandfather. They are shown to signify the complication introduced into the romantic love of_ the land by the presence
of real people, dark-skinned natives and white dispensers of justice. Here
one can see how the image invokes the moral preoccupation of a novel.
Indeed, in "Method: The Mystery and the Mechanics" (1967), Scott goes
so far as to say that writing which does not grow out of an image but in
which, conversely, the image is fitted to the text, is flat and tenuous (75).
He "won't begin until the images start coming" (212). The mystery-for
Scott that image is the writer's mystery-must precede the mechanics.
Again, in The Birds of Paradise the narrator is beset with images, often
flashing forth as from a lost paradise (Swindon). However, mention of this
novel gives an opportunity to make a different, though essential point:
Scott's aboriginal image is not a literary image in the usual sense. The dead
paradisea regia of the title and the very live parrot with which the narrator
makes do are-very resonant-literary images: of beauty fallen prey to consumption, of rajahs and of the Raj. But the image Scott means is another
thing: It is a vision, a literal vision of the visual and, secondarily, of the
auditory imagination, a sight before the mind's eye with the specific
properties of internal vision:
First, ... the primary materials, from both the author's and the reader's
point of view, are the images. Secondly, ... because they are images- illusions
of a mobile, audible, human activity-there are perhaps no actual rules to
follow which will ensure they hold together, or to depart from which will
�86
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
lead to collapse. You could say that because the images are not tactile. the
question of their holding together simply doesn't arise ... (110).
This passage presents the canonical properties of visual imagery established
in the disciplines and sciences that study them: freedom from the laws of
motion and of inertial bodies; elsewhere Scott adds yet another, release
from temporal determinacy (83). But it also says something about the
special relation that the image-based novel establishes between author and
reader: The reader's absorption of the novel recapitulates its genesis in the
writer's imagination: Both begin with the image.
And end with it. Scott's theory is entirely abstracted from his practice,
and accordingly the Raj books begin with, are sustained by, and end on
an image, the specific spontaneous vision from which and into which the
novel grows. One might say that the novelistic image acts somewhat like
an Aristotelian form: It guides the novel's coming into being and it is the
shape of its completion.
The governing image of The Raj Quartet is that of a girl running (82,
84). The writer starts "bombarding the image with experience," the image
here being a girl he's met briefly in Calcutta, a husky, awkward girl (85)
as both Daphne and Sarah will be. The image opens up, shows the plot,
the problems it contains. The Jewel in the Crown begins with this running
girl, gawky Daphne Manners fleeing from the Bibighar catastrophe. It
closes with a running girl, Parvati, her graceful golden-brown daughter
running to her music lesson. And the whole quartet ends with a double
image in a song by the Muslim poet Gaffur: the bowman choosing his
arrows and the girl running with the deer- Hari and Daphne raised to a
mythical vision.
The running girl is indeed the human figure of the image, but behind
that figure is a scene, an Indian setting, vast and variable, "conveying to
a girl running ... an idea of immensity." Hence the whole image consists
of the landscape and the figure in it: a reciprocating vision of intimating
atmosphere and poignant action.
Works Cited
Scott, Paul. The Chinese Love Pavilion. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode,
1960.
__. The Birds of Paradise. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1962.
__. The Raj Quartet. New York: Avon Books, 1979.
Book I: The Jewel in the Crown [1966]
Book II: The Day of the Scorpion [1968]
�BRANN
87
Book III: The Towers of Silence [1971]
Book IV: A Division of the Spoils [1975]
__. Staying On. London: Heinemann, 1975.
__. On Writing and the Novel: Essays by Paul Scott (1961-1975). Edited
by S. C. Reece. New York: Morrow, 1987.
Graver, Lawrence. Review of Paul Scott: On Writing and the Novel· and
David Rubin: After the Raj. The New York Times Book Review, March
15, 1987.
Lodge, David, The Novelist at the Crossroads. London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1971.
Murdoch, Iris. "The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited." The fule Review,
49 (1959), pp. 247-71.
Rubin, David. After the Raj: British Novels of India. Hanover, N.H.:
University Press of New England, 1986.
Swinden, Patrick. Paul Scott: Images of India. London: Macmillan, 1980.
������
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Pesic, Peter D.
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The St. John's Review
Volume XXXVIII, number one (1988 - I)
Editor
Elliott Zuckerman
Editorial Board
Eva Brann
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
Cary Stickney (Santa Fe)
John Jim Doren (Alumni)
Robert B. Williamson
Assistant to the Editor
John Lavery
The St. John's Review is published thrice yearly by the Office of the Dean, St.
John's College, Annapolis; William Dyal, President; Thomas Slakey, Dean. For
those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $12.00 yearly. Unsolicited essays,
stories, poems, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address correspondence to the
Review, St. John's College, Annapolis, MD 21404. Back issues are available, at
$4.00 per issue, from the St. John's College Bookstore.
© 1988 St. John's College. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole or in part
without permission is prohibited.
ISSN OT/7-4720
Composition
Best Impressions
Printing
The St. John's College Print Shop
�A Notice about Volume Numbering and Dating
The two preceding issues of the Review were Volume 37, number one, which
contained the writings ofWilliam O'Grady, and Volume :rl, numbers two and three,
the double issuethatincludedessays in honor of Mr. O'Grady. They bore the dates
Winter, 1986, and Spring, 1986. The Review now continues with Volume 38, of which
there will be three issues, labelled one, two, and three, and bearing the date 1988,
without the specification of seasons. No issues of the Review bore the date 1987.
�Contents
LECTURES
1 ...
25 . "
'Ear-Tickling Nonsense':
A New Context for Musical Expression
in Mozart's 'Haydn' Quartets
ftYe J. Allanbrook
Some Interpretations of The Magic Flute:
The Auden Translation and the Bergman Film
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
OCCASIONAL SPEECHES
41
The Program Old and New
Douglas Allanbrook
47
Truth Given and Truth Sought: Two Colleges
J. Winfree Smith
FICTION
55 ...
How Liberty Won the Sweet Sixteen
From The Tales of the Liberty Renaissance
Ken Colston
VERSE
66
Two Translations of La Fontaine
Elliott Zuckerman
BOOK REVIEW
71 . "
Allan Bloom: The Closing of the American Mind
Eva Brann
Decorations by Emily Kutler
Musical calligraphy by Tina Davidson
��'Ear-Tickling Nonsense': A New
Context for Musical Expression in
Mozart's 'Haydn' Quartets
Wye J. Allanbrook
My talk today is a "likely story" -an attempt to present a coherent aesthetic context in which to place some familiar music, in the
light of several questions that have occupied me recently. The music
is some string quartets of Mozart. The questions are threefold: first,
the problem referred to by the teaser in my title: why did late-eighteenthcentury theorists and critics think so little of music without a text, that
"ear-tickling nonsense," as one described it?' Second, why is there
so little recognition today of the importance of the topos, or characteristic musical style, to the rhetoric of Classic music? And finally,
perhaps most perplexingly, what does instrumental music express? Can
we say that it is about something? I think the three questions are related, and the following is my attempt to tell a convincing story about
this music that takes them into account.
It is strange that a repertoire we place high in the canon of serious music-the Classic instrumental ·repertoire-developed without
Wye J. Allanbrook is a Tutor and Assistant Dean at St. John's College, Annapolis. She
is the author of Rhythmic Gesture inMozarl: Le nozzedi Figaro and Don Giovanni (University of Chicago, 1983). This lecture was written while she was in residence at the National
Humanities Center in North Carolina. It is a sketch for the introduction to a book on the
chamber music of Mozart and Haydn.
A shorter version of the lecture was delivered at the October, 1987, conference of
the Midwest Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and was awarded the prize for the
best paper.
1
�2
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
spokesmen for its new and.compelling ways; no one seemed to be watching. Or the few who were watching clung to a tradition that devalued
instrumental music as at best unnatural and uninstructive, and at worst
"nothing but mere noise. " 2 We think of the last decades of the eighteenth century as the time when instrumental music had at last attained
its majority: Haydn "fathered" the string quartet and symphony, so
the story goes, and J.S. Bach had already contributed masterworks for
various instrumental ensembles. Nevertheless, as one observer points
out, in Bach's oeuvre vocal works predominate; he did not grant pride
of place to these autonomous instrumental marvels. 3 And, as the quotations suggest, writers on music in the latter half of the century seem
strangely to overlook the untexted works of instrumental genius that
were being composed under their noses. We expect such "mainstream"
music to have been as central to its own time as it is to ours, and not,
as is more the truth, somewhat condescended to. Did late-eighteenthcentury writers on music simply ignore a considerable body of eloquent
and popular music? Is this another occasion to chide music theory for
being myopic about actual musical practice? My "likely story" lays
less blame at the feet of the theorists and critics of the period, although
it does not pretend to return them to full authority. The very aesthetic
theories that devalued instrumental music-the body of mimetic
doctrine-nevertheless provide a surer foundation for understanding its
late-eighteenth-century flowering than any theory that followed. But
our peculiar modern unease with aesthetic theories that characterize art
as referential, not to say imitative, has blinded us to this relationship,
leaving us to construct after our own lights a picture of Classic instrumental music that has stubbornly prevailed.
Although it is fairly well accepted that Baroque music operated
under the old-fashioned Aristotelian dogma that art is imitation, most
students of what we call "Classic" music abandon this kind of talk with
relief, even though these two repertoires have in fact much in common. Talk that suggests pictorialism or a program is avoided by the
sophisticated. Of course it is difficult to ignore the obvious: no one would
think of discussing Beethoven's Sixth Symphony without mentioning
the pastoral, or Mozart's so-called "Hunt" Quartet without a reference to the type of music that gave it its nickname. But these are considered exceptional, and the ubiquity of such allusions is ignored: no
standard analysis of the first movement of Mozart's String Quartet in
D minor, K. 421, mentions the flavor of the antique lament it takes
on by using that old-fashioned organizing device, the chaconne bass;
or that his Sonata in B-flat major, K. 333, opens with the piano imitating a music box playing a tune in the so-called Empfindsamer, or "sen-
�ALLAN BROOK
3
sitive" style. Although sophisticated techniques exist for structural
analysis on the deepest levels, the level that is in fact most palpable,
and moves us most directly-the level on which the expressive gestures
that enliven the work are operating-is generally treated as though it
didn't exist.
One reason for this silence is the powerful legacy left by writers
on music aesthetics in the nineteenth century. The intellectual traditions
of the previous age have been rendered opaque to us by the radical change
in attitudes toward expression in music that took place over a period
of one hundred years. Two oft-quoted remarks provide the extremes
for this enormous traversal of aesthetic distance. "Sonata, what do you
want of me?" asked Fontenelle, or at least, more importantly, in 1768
Rousseau says he did. 4 A little over one hundred years later Walter
Pater turned matters on their head in a remark that has become an
aphorism: "All art aspires constantly to the condition of music. " 5 My
gloss of this hypothetical exchange between epochs: the eighteenth century asks a rhetorical question: "Instrumental music, whatever can you
imagine you offer me?" The nineteenth century's reply is, resoundingly, "Everything. "
Clearly, the type of music each era embraced as the appropriate
paradigm for the art was closely linked to the prevalent attitude toward
musical expression. Eighteenth-century theorists and composers consistently gave primacy to vocal music, to music "completed" by a text.
Rousseau quotes Fontenelle approvingly on instrumental music's inscrutability because of his own strong preference for song. His article
on unite de melodie in the Dictionnaire (1768) clearly articulates this
prejudice:
Now the pleasure in harmony is a pleasure of the senses pure and sirilple,
and the pleasure of the senses is always brief; saturation and boredom fol-
low it quickly. But the pleasure in melody and song is a pleasure of interest
and feeling which speaks to the heart . ...
Music, therefore, must necessarily sing in order to move, to please,
to sustain interest and attention . ... Any music that does not sing is boring.
[italics mine]
Rousseau's judgment was echoed by most respectable writers through
the century. H. C. Koch, an important thinker about musio to whose
work I will return, could still write in his Musikalisches Lexikon of 1802,
in the article Instrumentalmusik, "It remains an absolute fact that song
maintains a most obvious and undeniable superiority over instrumental
music. " 6
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
4
It is true that Koch has some positive things to say about the possibilities for imitation in the instrumental works of certain composers:
The possibility of injecting ... a particular [bestimmt] character into the sonata, as a pure piece of instrumental music, has long since been demonstrated
by the sonatas of C. Ph. E. Bach, and in Haydn's and Mozart's works of
this type one finds more recent evidence for this assertion. (article Sonate)
But he still finds it necessary in the last analysis to make the same judgement about the relative merits of instrumental and vocal music that his
predecessors had been making throughout the century. The sonata
presents a blank and impenetrable facade to these writers because, in
their opinion, without language it can imitate no objects, and thereby
offers the listener mere sensual pleasure instead of moral articulacy.
Music left to itself, they argued, can paint feelings only in a vague and
generic way, since its means of painting are necessarily "indeterminate"
(unbestimmt). Koch concedes that textless music can "work directly
on our hearts and ... arouse in us pleasant or unpleasant feelings." "If,
however," he continues,
it should undertake to stimulate in us feelings for which the situation in which
we find ourselves offers no occasion, feelings to which our hearts are not
open, . .. it lacks the means to make these feelings interesting to our hearts.
It cannot make intelligible to us in these circumstances why it wants to transport us into gentle or sad, exalted or happy, feelings; it cannot awaken in
us either the images of that good whose enjoyment is to delight us, or the
images of that evil that is to cause fear or distress . ... In vocal music, on
the other hand, the text prepares the spectator, helps him to the intended
frame of mind, and gives interest to the feelings to be expressed. (article
Instrumentalmusik)
Only a text can provide a context, can supply for the music the determinacy necessary if the listener's cognitive and moral faculties are to
be brought into play. Because pure instrumental music moves the feelings directly, without reference to an external correlative or final cause,
it must always remain incomplete.
But confidence in the expression in music of such moral universals, and in the existence of the universals themselves, was on the wane.
Thus, as the nineteenth century began, this apparent deficiency began
to take on the look of a virtue. As they came to place a high value on
originality and individual expression, writers delighted in the very muteness and lack of prescription in instrumental music that had so disturbed
the eighteenth-century rationalists. As Joseph Kerman points out, it was
not "hymns or waltzes or cantatas" that Pater idealized, but "pure"
symphonic music, 7 which, precisely because of this freedom from con-
�ALLAN BROOK
5
nection with extra-musical things, epitomized to the Romantics what
is most "musical" about music. "Pure music" had the potential to be
the truest poetry, "which is all the purer," said one early nineteenthcentury critic, "the less it is dragged down into the region of vulgar
meaning by words (which are always laden with connotations). " 8 In
short, the doctrine of music as a mimetic art yielded to that of music
as an autonomous one, and there was little looking back. We today have
inherited this aesthetic with its elevation of instrumental music as the
dominant mode, and consequently we resist a perspective that asserts
the natural primacy of song as a first principle. So firmly are we in
the grip of this particular notion of musical priorities, however dimly
we perceive it, that the high position the eighteenth century accorded
to melody seems touchingly primitive, and not worthy of much attention.
***
If Classic instrumental music is not the ideal and autonomous
music the Romantics imagined, how can we bend mimetic doctrine to
describe it? A brief look at the long history of the doctrine is in order:
in one form or another it influenced thinking about art from classical
antiquity until the end of the eighteenth century, when it seems to disappear. Although the nature of object and imitator has varied with different aesthetic practices, one central assumption unifies them all: that of
a world held in common among human beings, which it is the artist's
role to copy in some fashion in his art-to "catch in his mirror," in
M. H. Abrams' well-known metaphor.• This world is external to the
individual soul, and the composer must look to it to give form to his
musical materials. Of course the constituency of this external worldthe nature of nature-has varied from time to time. Most mimetic doctrines are in some way didactic or corrective: in the Renaissance music
was essentially a Pythagorean art, imitating the numbers that inform
God's cosmos; human music, by vibrating in time with universal harmony, would bring human souls into a proper attunement. But over
the years after the publication of works like Descartes' Les passions
de l'ame in 1649, attention turned to humankind in a more rational,
mechanistic cosmos, and the enterprise was to represent human nature
by codifying our passions and thus speaking to our· souls. Descartes
legitimized the passions, acquitting them of mere excess, and proposing them as an instrument whereby the body could be brought under
some measure of control. ''Even those who have the weakest souls,''
he stated, "could acquire absolute mastery over all their passions if
we employed sufficient ingenuity in training and guiding them." 10 Thus,
�6
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
although the moral intent was somewhat mooted in the eighteenth century, still to "paint the passions" amounted to a moral imperative to
the composer. "The expression of the passions in their different modifications," says Koch in his article on expression, "is the proper aim
of music, and ... the principal requirement of every composition.''
''Expression'' became the word of choice in the later eighteenth
century, supplanting "imitation" in accounts of music's natural task,
and this use of the all-important word has misled many modern scholars. But too frequently in eighteenth-century texts the term has been
read as meaning "self-expression"-the venting, or "pressing out,"
of the artist's original and idiosyncratic feelings in an uncalculated, spontaneous manner. As a result, recent writers have tended to discover this
predominant doctrine of nineteenth-century aesthetics in texts earlier
and earlier in the eighteenth century, assuming that the word "expression" directs the composer to turn inward to his private passions. 11 Yet
in most cases the adoption of the word "expression" in eighteenthcentury texts does not represent a substantive rejection of mimetic doctrines, for the question does not actually turn on the use of the verb
to "express" over the verb to "imitate." The crux is whether or not
there exists a confidence that human feelings have models, which we
can construct because of our shared knowledge of what the passions
are like. If such a confidence exists, then the composer is involved in
the act of expressing feelings, of "painting the passions," not when
he looks to the unique inner authority of his own emotions to give shape
to his musical materials, but when he consults these universal authoritative models.
Where this confidence in a shared human nature is absent, as
it was in the nineteenth century, feelings are judged not to be susceptible of codification; they are fluid, mysterious, part of the dark self.
Clearly, however, Koch still trusts in the consensus gentium; he sees
the composer in possession of a "science"-a psych-ology-for portraying the passions, which he defines as "movements of the soul"
(Gemuthsbewegungen). Because music is a sequential art, he argues,
it is "fully suited to portray all these kinds of movements of the soul,
so to make them perceptible to the ear, if they are only sufficiently
familiar to the composer and he is sufficiently in possession of the science
to imitate each movement through harmony and melody." (article
Ausdruck 12)
On occasion Koch seems to hint that the source of the feelings
is to be found within the composer himself, in passages that have been
interpreted as a nod toward the doctrine of self-expression: "Only that,"
he says, "which [the composer] feels vividly will he express success-
�ALLAN BROOK
7
fully." (article Ausdruck) This sentiment would seem to echo the dictum of C.P. E. Bach-"the extreme expressionist of the eighteenth
century," as Dahlhaus calls him 13 -that a musician cannot move others
unless he himself is moved. But the rest of Koch's discussion leaves
no reason for doubt that for him the subject matter of music is not the
personal and interior, but the enduring and universal passions of men
as they are recognized by persons of reason and taste. Success comes
to the composer from his familiarity with the structure of these shared
passions, and from a careful study of the means music has at its disposal to imitate them. To "feel vividly" is to put oneself in the mode
that the model codifies, to see what it feels like to experience a particular passion; study-not self-expression-makes the artist.
Koch was not alone in styling passions as "movements of the
soul.'' It was the consensus in the eighteenth century that the link that
binds music and the passions is motion-that music imitates the passions by means of musical movement. One could quote as an exemplary passage Daniel Webb's argument from his Observations on the
Correspondence Between Poetry and Music (1769):
I shall suppose, that it is in the nature of music to excite similar vibrations,
to communicate similar movements to nerves and spirits. For, if music owes
its being to motion, and, if passion cannot well be conceived to exist without
it, we have a right to conclude, that the agreement of music with passion
can have no other origin than a coincidence of movements. 14
Johann Jakob Engel, in his Ueber die musikalische Malerey (On Painting in Music; 1780), a treatise that Koch quotes extensively, elaborates
a theory of the reciprocal transmission of these vibrations from soul
to body and from body to soul that is typical of popular attempts at
scientific explanations of music's effects:
Since all representations of the passions of the soul are bound inseparably
with certain corresponding movements in the nervous system, they are maintained and strengthened by the observation of these movements. Yet not only
do these corresponding natural vibrations arise in the body when previously
in the souls the representations of the passions have been aroused~ but also
these representations of the passions arise in the soul when p,reviously in
the body the related vibrations have been produced. The influence is mutual: the same path that travels from the soul into the body travels back from
the body into the soul. By nothing, however, are these vibrations so cer-
tainly, so powerfully, so variously produced, as through pitches. 15
In this resonance theory of affects, if the soul can be the sending oscillator, Engel reasons, why can't the process be reversed?
�8
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
There are obvious problems with this ''theory,'' none of which
should worry us unduly; they do not seem to have troubled its advocates, and our concern is with what satisfies them. The principal difficulty
is precisely what does occur in the soul of the listener: is he transported
by the effects of pitches to experience the passion in its fullness on the
spot, or does he merely recognize the feeling pricked out by the tones?
Somehow the motions of the tones, imitating the recognizable motions
of our passions, steal upon us as listeners and have thie effect; we recognize what we already knew, and in the directness of this sensing lies
the enigma that often causes heavy weather in modern struggles with
the question of expression in music. Engel's position on the question
is somewhat ambiguous. When he is advancing the theory of sympathetic
vibrations, he does use the verb "awakens" (erweckt), as if the listener
were roused to experience the same emotion as the subject. But he follows by comparing the effect on the soul of the listener to the ''compassion," or "feeling with" (Mitleid, Mitfreude), that arises in the soul
when one hears the howls of a suffering beast (p. 143). This comparison gives a certain distance to the feeling in the listener's soul; compassion is not the same as passion. In speaking of imitation in more
narrowly musical terms, he neatly sidesteps the problem by calling the
effect of the oscillations an "impression" (Eindruck) made on the soul.
When the actual act of composition is in question, the feeling is not
so much aroused in the soul as it is impressed therein, perceived, not
awakened: ''the impression of a gentle color has something similar to
the impression of a gentle pitch on the soul" (p. 140).
Peter Kivy, in his influential book on musical expression, The
Corded Shell, in which he elaborates a modern theory of expression
that takes its inspiration from eighteenth-century writings, is critical
of what he terms the "arousal" theory, arguing, for example, that no
listener could or would willingly endure the range of emotions and the
deep anguish depicted in a five-hour performance of Tristanl 6 His
studied readings of the texts seek an exactitude in these writers that they
do not possess. They are interested in the exercise of their craft, and
somewhat loose in determining the precise way in which the listener
is affected. Is the listener aroused? Does he recognize? Both accounts
have some plausibility. At times the notion of being "transported irresistibly" (p. 144) to joy or sadness does find a place in the prose,
but the specter of an audience now moved to martial wrath, now dulled
to melancholy, does not seem to weigh on the minds of these writers.
Surely they would find the picture of an audience collectively weeping
in the concert hall as absurd as does Kivy, and are using the verb "to
arouse" in a metaphorical sense. Perhaps the happiest resolution of the
�ALLAN BROOK
9
question is to take "arouse" as "arouse to sympathetic cognition of,"
in accord with the ambiguities eighteenth-century proponents of the
theory seemed to have comfortably accepted.
***
Both Engel and Koch assert that music has sufficient means to
imitate tbe motions of the passions, and they inventory these resources
in various passages. Here late-eighteenth-century mimetic theories grow
vague. Recent scholarship has rectified the false impression that writers
in the tradition of the Baroque doctrine of the affections-Mattheson
et al.-not only retained the confidence that the passions could be codified, but had codified them thoroughly . 17 Such attempts were, in fact,
rare, and often idiosyncratic; the confidence didn't produce the cookbook. Later eighteenth-century notions are even less specific; the notion of the imitation of move;nents is left to a large extent to the taste
and science of the composer. Koch, for example, lists as the devices
at music's disposal:
!)Harmony, ... which in gentle and pleasant affects must progress lightly
and naturally, without great complexities and heavy delays; in unpleasant,
especially vigorous affects, however, [it is] interrupted, with frequent modulations, . .. with greater complexities, many and uncommon dis-
sonances .... 2)Meter, by means of which just by itself we can imitate the
general quality of every kind of movement. 3) Melody and rhythm,
which ... are also already capable by themselves of picturing the speech of
all passions. 4) The alterations in strength and weakness of tones, which
also contribute much to expression. 5) The accompaniment, and especially
the choice and variety of accompanying instruments; and finally 6) Modulations and delays in other keys. (article Ausdruck)
Elsewhere, in the article Leidenschaft ("passion"), Koch quotes a long
excerpt from Engel that categorizes the passions themselves, following it up with a lengthy but again only general discussion of particular
musical devices for representing them.
The concern seems to be that too profuse a system of categories
will lead to gimmickry in music. We can better understand this concern if we look at the kind of composition these writers disapproved
of. The change in terminology from "imitation" and "mimesis" to
"expression," far from stemming from a disaffection from the aesthetic
position that art is properly a reflector of a common nature, seems to
have come about on account of a growing distaste for the narrowly
mimetic effect, for the habit of "madrigalism" or "word-painting."
Much of the word-painting in Baroque vocal texts seemed all too bes-
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
10
timmt, too "determinate," for this galant age. Engel makes clear this
distinction between the mimetic expression of feelings (Empfindungen)
and the mere representation of an object-"word-painting'' in the strictest sense of the word:
The composer should always paint feelings rather than objects of feeling;
always the state into which the soul and with it the body are removed through
contemplation of a certain circumstance and occasion, and not this circumstance and occasion itself . ... One should . .. paint the inner movements of
the soul in a storm rather than the actual storm that arouses these move-
ments. (p. 146)
Often, as both Koch and Engel point out, the internal and the external
will coincide. A musical figure, for example, which paints the restless
bobbing of a skiff on the sea is really catching the motion of the soul
torn between fear and hope; Koch uses this example in his own article
on "painting," "Malerey." In other cases, seizing on a single word
and giving it an individual expression- "painting" it-will either trivialize the feeling of the whole or divert it in an inappropriate direction.
The advice to paint feelings rather than objects was hardly new, having been given as early as 1719 by the Abbe Dubos, in his treatise
on a comparative system of the arts, 18 and it was echoed with increasing frequency as writers looked back with scorn on what they took as
the madrigalizing habits of their Baroque predecessors. By the end of
the century it had become canonical. The inscription placed by Beethoven
at the head of the Pastoral Symphony, ''Mehr Ausdruck der Empfindung als Malerey" ("Not painting, but the expression of feeling") has
been connected with Engel's formulation quoted above, ''The composer
should always paint feelings rather than objects of feelings." Beethoven's
characterization of the expressive matter of his famous programme symphony manifests the thorough distaste of the times for too literal a connection between tone and text. In this context Koch quotes an image
from Sulzer's article Ausdruck:
The kind of work that merely fills our imaginations with a row of harmonious tones without engaging our hearts, resembles a heaven beautifully painted
by the setting sun. The lovely mixture of various colors amuses us; but in
the figures of the clouds we see nothing that can engage the heart. (article
Ausdruck; italics mine)
Again there is the echo of that phrase of Rousseau's: ''to engage the
heart.'' The desideratum is a music that, neither abstract nor filled with
fussy pictorialisms, speaks directly to the soul. And the operative
metaphor is still captured in the word "speaks."
***
�ALLAN BROOK
11
Clearly, from this account, the aim of this music is the same as
that of the art of rhetoric-to persuade. That is, to arouse the listener
to sympathetic cognition of common human conditions. To learn just
how Classic instrumental music is to "speak to the heart," we can again
turn to Koch. In his article on instrumental music, he invents a pseudohistory for its development, hypothesizing that instruments first performed separately from voices at the time of the Pythian games in honor
of Apollo. This could take place because the victory songs with their
texts were already familiar to the spectators.
The entire substance of such a piece . .. was not only a well-known theme,
but also an engaging one. The feelings it was supposed to express were nearly
aroused in the spectators already; their hearts were . .. opened up just for
these feelings. It is thus understandable that music in these circumstances
could have a very specific effect on the hearts of the spectators even without
song, that is, without being united with poetry, through its inarticulate but
passionate tones, which in their sequence and movement had certain similarities with the natural utterances of these feelings. These were the circumstances in which at this time the remarkable separation of song from
instrumental music took place, which in later times had such a great influence
on music. On the one hand it gave rise to the high degree of development
instrumental music has now attained, but on the other hand ·it assured that
[instrumental music] would be used on those occasions and circumstances
in which it must necessarily work a specific effect on our heart.
If instrumental music . .. is meant to awaken and maintain specific feelings, then it must be involved in such political, religious, or domestic circumstances and actions as are of pronounced interest for us, and in which
our heart is predisposed to the expression of the feelings [the music] is supposed to awaken and maintain. (article lnstrumentalmusik)
Koch's account is revealing because it connects successfully expressive instrumental music closely with occasions; instrumental music is
properly "occasional music," because the occasion provides the particularity the medium lacks by itself. He thus identifies the source of
the efficacy of the topoi or characteristic styles: the "political, religious,
or domestic" associations they bring with them supply the context that
complements the indeterminate feelings aroused naturally by the textless music itself; the minuet was the favorite dance of the ancien nigime, fugues were popularly used in church music. The step Koch fails
to take is to realize that these occasional styles can be imported from
their religious or social rituals into art music to provide that music with
the particularity-the referentiality-mimesis requires. For this reason
he must always assert that the high instrumental forms are poorer than
their vocal correlates.
�12
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
At the same time these characteristic styles begin to be woven
together in a new way. Where a Baroque work would imitate one temperament, one stance, in each movement, a Classic movement admits
of several, in a play oflight and shadow. The result is that each movement is not monolithic, but an entire universe of discourse, functioning as a cosmic mirror, a micro-world reflecting the protean activities
on the stage of the theatrum mundi. Having a serene confidence in the
pre-existing hierarchy of kinds and classes, Classic instrumental music
approvingly images them in their variousness and order. The characteristic styles, the "commonplaces" of musical discourse, are a readyto-hand vocabulary of musical expression gathered from the simpler
music written to accompany daily activities: court life, worship, the
hunt. From their connections to the noble, middle-class, and humble,
the pious and impious, whatever is proud or abased, tranquil or restJess, antique or modern, in these occasions, they draw their referential
power and their affect.
There is a second way in which this music imitates the word:
the topoi, the content, as it were, have to be woven together "grammatically" into a convincing musical "text." Here the developing teaching about the "syntax" of a musical period is important. Whereas in
earlier music its resemblance to speech was most often remarked in
the most obvious imitations of speech rhythms-recitative, and its descendant, declamation-in Classic music the relation of speech to music becomes thoroughly internalized, extending to all articulations of musical
lengths. Koch begins his treatise on the composition of melody, a volume
entitled "The Mechanical Rules for Melody," by comparing melody
to oratory:
Certain . .. resting-points for the soul are generally necessary in speech, and
thus also in the products of those fine arts that attain their goal through speech,
namely poetry and rhetoric, if the subject they present is to be comprehensible. Such resting-points for the soul are just as necessary in melody if it
is to affect our feelings. 19
Although Koch never doubts that vocal music is music's paradigm, his
treatise is clearly about instrumental melody; it provides a sure training in the musical period-the 4-, 8-, or 16-measure phrase-and the
techniques like extension and elision that help to make "instrumental
speech" extensive, persuasive, and engaging. The point is not that vocal
music ceases to be a model for Koch, but that the new instrumental
music also maintains a connection with Rousseau's notion that passionate
speech is the origin of the art of music. The solidifying of the ways
of the musical period in imitation of rhetorical principles is connected
with the new habit of admitting contrasting affects into a movement,
�ALLAN BROOK
13
thus allowing variety and structural counterstatement. This combination results in works that do indeed "engage the heart" by their persuasive powers like a convincing oration-a "discourse of the passions."
The formal principles of this music are borrowed from rhetoric, with
the topoi-lively imitations of the way we are-embedded in its matrix
and shaping the surface. This interweaving produces the image of moral
suasion without a specific moral content; the principles of rhetoric and
mimesis come together in a passionate speech-without-words-the overt
theater of topic against the background of grammar and rhetoric as structural process.
The range of topoi available to Classic composers reflects the
homely and the elegant in their quotidian world-music that accompanies daily activities or has a resonance from concert life, the church,
even musical pedagogy:
the courtly-marches, fanfares;
the hunt;
the pastoral, as represented in the slow 6/8, the Siciliano, the
more sophisticated gavotte, and the drone or musette;
the exotic-for example, Turkish music;
the Empfindsamer or 'sensitive' style with its intimacy and unpredictability;
the declamatory, to break an even stride or make a regular rhythm
more thorny;
the musical dialogue;
the brilliant, soloistic, concertante style;
the passionate Sturm und Drang;
the singing allegro, with its trammel bass and vocal melody;
the music box, the mechanical clock;
the contrapuntal, otherwise known as the learned, or bound style
(stile legato), because of its strict old-fashioned control of dissonance,
often found in the solemn "church" meter of alia breve or 2/2;
its extension, the ecclesiastical, and, ultimately, the sublime, often
represented by a topos I have called the "exalted march" 20 ;
social dances such as the Liindler, the bourni'e, the minuet and
contredanse;
types of basses like the descending-tetrachord or chaconne, associated with lament and the antique;
the minor mode, which is a special affect for Classic composers,
not a mode of expression parallel to the major;
the wind serenade sound, so prevalent in Mozart's piano sonatas (he took great delight in having the salon-bound pianoforte imitate
out-of-doors music);
�14
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the "tune," which so often sprouts out of seemingly neutral
material to reveal a new rhythmic stratum and a newly articulate voice,
and is an effective stabilizing force.
Clearly, topoi, types, styles, tend to shade into structural
devices-opening and closing gestures, for example, or styles that normally create or undermine stability: the march is a typical opening
gesture, while the drone and the tune provide broad areas of arrival,
adding besides the flavor of folk and the country. Fugato is an obvious
undermining gesture. Topoi even become, as it were, "movementspecific.'' While the minuet and contredanse reveal Classic instrumental works as latter-day dance suites, they also have sound compositional and affective reasons for appearing there. The minuet provides a
laboratory for Classic composers' experiments with meter and topic,
because the paradigmatic regularity of the minuet's period structure,
combined with the built-in ambiguity of its evenly accented triple measures, offers an open field for experiment; often the first step away from
naivete results in the greatest complexity. The contredanse finale offers
a civilized wit that is an appealing closing gesture for a work; the notion of the sublime instrumental finale, so familiar to us from the symphonies of Beethoven, does not appear in Mozart's music except in the
last movement of the "Jupiter" Symphony.
Parts of the catalogue above suggest that topoi not only serve
a structural function, but often are topoi by virtue only of the structural
function they serve, and this is true: conventional opening and closing
gestures sometimes cannot be categorized as other than that. Indeed,
some movements offer more of a topical formedness than others, in
which the rhetorical play with periodicity, meter, harmony, and other
less referential musical devices presents itself as the surface of the work.
In other words, not all movements have as obvious a topical "conceit."
It begins to seem that structure itself is expression; the two weave in
and out in the Classic composer's effort to "engage the heart by a discourse of the passions.''
***
Having stunned you with this catalogue of topoi Leporello-style,
let me end with a few examples to illustrate the rich fund of devices
I've mentioned; they are drawn from Mozart's String Quartets dedicated to Haydn. I'll start with a favorite movement, the finale of the
Quartet in G major, K. 387, which brilliantly counterstates a motetlike alia breve fugue with a breakneck contredanse (ex. I):
�ALLAN BROOK
15
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Aside from the wit of decomposing a sober fugue into a country fiddler's tune, this opening illustrates the enormous power that the possibility of counterstatement gives to a work, assisted by the incisive profiles
of the tapai, and why the ultimate effect of this music is that of clearsighted comedy: the monoaffective style conduces to the survival of
the serious and magniloquent, but in music that plays with affect the
high-minded will always give way to the undermining commentary of
the comic.
Mozart uses fugal techniques more overtly in this movement than
in other sallies on the learned tapas: he sets up a second subject cleverly fashioned to fit in the interstices of the first: the t\'10 together build
up tension for the move away from home base to a new harmonic place,
the key of the fifth degree, the dominant. Final arrival there is confirmed by that most stabilizing of tapai, the "tune," which grows out
over the accompaniment figure in the first violin. Working on a third
�16
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
rhythmic level to provide a mean between the longbreathed phrases of
the fugue and the headlong fiddling of the contredanse, it specially "engages the heart" with the exuberance of its articulate singing voice while
providing closure for a major section of the movement. In the coda the
learned and the galant have a final tangle and resolution: a little imitative dialogue on the transition figure leads to a tight stretto of the opening subject-four entries of it in the space of six measures- which
relaxes into the reductio ad absurdum of a galant cadence crafted out
of that same sober motif Again the frame of comedy indicates that
nothing is immune to change in this gloriously many-faceted world.
The minuet of this same quartet shows us Mozart setting the
mechanical in motion, throwing off the rhythm both of the phrase and
of the measure. He creates two ten-measure phrases by offbeat punctuation in the accompaniment followed by a four-measure piano-forte alternation in duple rhythm, a playful "tick-tock" that momentarily
suspends the minuet's regular triple beat (ex. 2):
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�ALLAN BROOK
17
The imbalance created by this mechanical tick-tack is set right in measure
21 by a series of waltz-like four-measure phrases: again the "tune"
is a force for stability, and the more eccentric Minuets in the chamber
works all tend to end with one.
***
The first movement of the A-major Quartet, K. 464, has period
structure itself as a subject matter. One can clearly see the joins where
a 32-measure song reprise has been pulled apart and new, more mobile
and forceful material interleaved, to turn these 32 measures into a fullfledged quartet exposition. (At this point the reader will find the discussion easier to follow if he has a copy of the score at hand.) This
imaginary reprise would have a remarkable consistency in itself, and
could stand alone as the first section of a briefer, less imposing movement. It opens with a typical 16-measure period in a simple sentimental singing style, properly symmetrical and with all its parts. The triple
meter also emphasizes the unassuming nature of the theme (ex. 3):
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At arrival on the new harmonic plateau, the dominant, four more
measures of this Ur-Reprise stabilize the new key. Next, four measures provide a final cadence in E, the dominant, consisting of the opening
material made closing by a re-harmonization. And finally four more
measures provide a brief valedictory coda.
But the exposition is swollen from 32 to 87 measures by the much
more dramatic and labile material that forces itself in at the joins in
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
18
this Ur-Reprise; it is almost a textbook illustration of Koch's methods
of melodic extension. An inflection of the minor mode and a brief fugato
in the pathetic style on the opening theme provide the departure from
A major, home base, but only reach C, an intermediary between A and
E, where an entirely new "tune"-a Liindler with hurdy-gurdy drone
bass-provides four measures of a false stabilization, in the wrong key
(ex. 4):
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A passage in concerto style pushes away from the C major and arrives
in E for the second part of the Ur-Form. The four measures of this
so-called "second theme" look to be repeated, but a passage in dialogue style opens out into an ascending passage of parallel chords in
the "bound style," answered by a similar passage descending, but in
a more sentimental vein. More concerto style brings the exposition to
the embedded four-measure closing theme, which is separated from the
codetta by yet more measures in imitative style. The bound style in the
exposition is pure churning of the waters, but grows substantive in the
development, where harmonies and rhythms turn dense and clotted. Most
interesting is the Coda, where a rhythmic retardation in bound style
gives one serious pause before the opening motive is made three times
cadential-a final summary of the embedded Ur-Reprise.
I'll close with a discussion of the D-minor Quartet, K. 421, because it strikes me as a rare example of topical unity over four movements rather than the affective counterstatement that is usually the rule
from part to part. The first movement opens with a chaconne or
<;Jescending-tetrachord ba~s-a slow-motion descent through flat 7 to
5, and after a pause on 5, the tonic (ex. 5):
�ALLAN BROOK
19
J I;:J2J
This is an ambiguous opening for the first movement of a quartet, with
its suggestion of the antique and the pathetic, rather than the usual brisk
annunciatory march. Its unusual pathos caused one nineteenth-century
French theorist, Jerome-Joseph de Momigny, to put it to words as a
tragic duet between Dido and Aeneas. 21 The first violin ornaments the
pathetic bass with galant-style figures, but in bits and pieces (ex. 6):
The four measures are repeated in a more expansive register, and it
is this slightly varied repetition that articulates the frrst period's cadence,
rather than a through-composed unit as is more conventional in these
beginnings. This opening ambiguity is in keeping with a movement in
the minor mode, where often the key attained in the motion away from
home base provides not the usual counterstatement or challenge to the
home key, but a consolidation and stabilization in the major after the
weaker minor. Here the F major arrives as a singing allegro, with ornamental cantabile figures over repeated sixteenths, each measure arranged iambically to provide arrival (unlike the open-ended trochees
of the chaconne). The development begins with a startling play on the
linearity of the chaconne, at first mimicking the opening period but in
the surprising key of E-flat major; the bass, however, fails to stop at
the appropriate tone, extending the vertiginous scalar motion ad
absurdum-or four more steps to F, and a sleight-of-hand modulation
to the key of A minor. Thus the most distant key attained in the
movement-theE-flat -is abandoned in a matter of measures by this
cool dissolve down the scale to a key surprisingly close to home base.
�20
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
While the development proceeds to a further anatomizing of the figures
of the opening period, in part in fugal style with close entries, it takes
place in thoroughly familiar keys; the harmonic crisis is over before
it began, and it is the drama of the chaconne that has given form and
affect to the movement. Little that is new takes place in the recapitulation. But hearing the cantabile tune-earlier an affirmation of arrival
in upright F major-recast in the minor leaves an imbalance that, if
one accepts the premise that the minor is a weaker reflection of the major
mode, the rest of the quartet must put right.
I will pass more quickly over the other three movements, because my primary interest is in that unusual topical unity that seems
to prevail over the whole, and in how the D-minor uncertainty is worked
out. The second movement is a simple and grave Siciliano in F major.
Its single eccentricity is that the figuration in the opening phrase is rearranged: the normal fifth measure that we expect is inserted between
measures 2 and 3, causing a new and passionate accent to intrude in
the trim rhetoric of the eight-measure period. That we recognize this
displacement is further proof of the syntactical clarity that informs this
music (ex. 7):
~misplaced~
r s.
2..
A.,1,
~
p
~
.
I~,
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�ALLAN BROOK
21
Strikingly, Mozart ends the movement with measure 5-the triadic upbeat figure that was misplaced; he is clearly aware of his original permutation. In fact, I am increasingly struck by Mozart's habit of
summarizing in some neat and economical way at the end of a movement his primary intent with the whole.
The third movement, the Minuet, is based on another chaconnetype bass; it is a dense, gnarled, motet-like ten-measure period with
polyrhythms throughout, and no half-cadence-again the minuet as
ground for rhythmic and textural experiment.
The fourth movement, a theme and variations, echoes the topic
of the second, just as the Minuet did that of the first. The theme is a
bittersweet, Empfindsamer Siciliano-a nostalgic pastoral song-in D
minor, with gypsy violin figuration perhaps borrowed from a
tarantella-a high repeated-note figure (ex. 8):
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
22
The first reprise stays in D minor throughout, and the move to a major
key in the second reprise is damped by its brevity. So the movement
seems at first to provide no resolution to the grip of the minor. Since
even Mozart's great G-minor Quintet ends with an affirmative movement in G major, this dwelling in the minor seems uncharacteristic.
Yet at the very end a quicker, gigue-like variation, with the wayward
tarentella figure tossed obsessively from voice to voice and growing
into substantive material, ends in a surprising and otherworldly major
cadence in which the tarentella receives its apotheosis (ex. 9):
"'# ~
I
,
e·
f
f •'
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The allusive brevity of the resolution-perhaps the Pythagorean perfection of the major third has an ecclesiastical resonance here-is fully
in keeping with this terse and idiosyncratic work.
***
What then is the end of Classic instrumental music? To engage
the heart, to persuade. To persuade of what? That a complete and winning whole has been presented, a convincing mirror of the cosmos in
its variety and its order; styles, types, ways of being are stated and counterstated, developed and transformed, tangled and resolved. Always there
is the narrative attitude, though never a story; always the shape of moral
oratory, but never the moral. The imitative and referential are rarely
absent from this great instrumental repertoire, which quietly blossomed
while everyone was praising song.
If at the end of my "likely story" I may diffidently offer what
may seem a fanciful comparison-! hope it won't seem utterly so in
�ALLAN BROOK
23
your second thoughts-I would summon up the comedic vision of Dante's
Divine Comedy with the panoramic nature of its embrace, nothing less
than all human affairs, and its tranquil confidence in the mode and order of God's creation, and its commitment to a comic equilibrium, adjusting imbalances and asserting a "happy ending." It is a view of the
world in which even the tragic mode must take its proper and limited
place (remember the special treatment of the minor mode in Classic
music as a dependent of the essential major). In service of this vision,
both men use the vernacular to "engage the heart." Dante develops
the vulgar tongue into his powerful dolce stile nuovo, that most appropriate language for speaking to common humanity about sin and redemption, while Mozart develops the charming simplicities of the galant
style-artless dance melodies and popular tunes-into a complex musicallanguage that nevertheless remains true to its origin in the musical
vulgate. Both had as predecessors an elevated and weighty languageDante the high Latin tongue and Mozart the grand and pathetic style
of the Baroque. Encompassing both hell and paradise, and the purgatorial
ground in between, the Comedy sets them in order, culminating in the
great final vision of the deity who holds them properly in place. In the
same way, the Classic repertoire, a secular divine comedy, taking the
best of the notion of passionate speech, and the best of the powers of
instrumental music and the dance, with them mirrors all categories of
human experience in a mode of profound urbanity; it is a moral entertainment in the deepest sense.
Footnotes
I. Christian Gottfried Krause, quoted by J. F. Reichardt, Schreiben iiber
die berlinische Musik, Hamburg, 1775. For a fuller discussion of
eighteenth-century opinions of the new instrumental music, see Bellamy
Hosler, Changing Aesthetic Views of Instrumental Music in 18th-Century
Germany (Ann Arbor, UMI Research Press, 1981), pp. 1-30.
2. Johann Georg Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der schonen kiinste, 2nd ed.,
4 vols. (Leipzig, 1786-87), s.v. lnstrumentalmusik.
3. James Winn, Unsuspected Eloquence: A History of the Relations between
Poetry and Music (New Haven, Yale University Press, 198l),y. 217.
4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Dictionnaire de musique (Paris, 1768), s.v.
"Sonate." The translations in this essay are the work of the author.
5. Walter Pater, "The School of Giorgione," in The Renaissance, following the text of The Works of Walter Pater, vol. I, p. 135. Quoted in Winn,
p. 289.
6. Heinrich Christoph Koch, Musikalisches Lexikon (Frankfurt am Main:
August Hermann, 1802), s.v. Instrumentalmusik.
�24
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
7. Joseph Kerman, Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 65.
8. Remark in an article in Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (1801) quoted
by Carl Dahlhaus, Esthetics of Music, trans. William Austin (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 27.
9. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, London: Oxford University Press, 1953.
10. Rene Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch; 2 vols. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985), I, 348.
II. See, for example, John Hollander's distinction between "imitation" and
"expression" in The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry
(Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 172-76; Alan Lessem,
"Imitation and Expression: Opposing French and British Views in the
18th Century," Journal of the American Musicological Society 27 (1974),
325-30; Winn, pp. 232-38. For a dissenting view, see John Neubauer,
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
The Emancipation of Music from Language: Departure from Mimesis in
18th-Century Aesthetics (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1986), pp.
149-67.
Here Koch is quoting from Sulzer (s.v. Instrumentalmusik), from whose
work he adopted many opinions.
Dahlhaus, p. 22.
Daniel Webb, Observations on the Correspondence between Poetry and
Music (London, 1769), p. 7.
Johann Jakob Engel, Ueber die musikalische Malerey (1780), in J. J. Engel's Schriften, Vol. IV: Reden und iisthetische Versuche (Berlin, 1844),
pp. 142-43.
Peter Kivy, The Corded Shell: Reflections on Musical Expression (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 23.
See, for example, George Buelow, The New Grove Dictionary of Music
and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London, 1980), s.v. "Rhetoric."
Dubos, Jean Baptiste. Reflexions critiques sur Ia pOesie et Ia peinture.
1719. Paris, 1770. Facs. rpt. Geneva: Slatkine, 1967.
Heinrich Christoph Koch, Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition, 3
vols. (Leipzig, 1782-1793), II. S. 77.
Allanbrook, Wye J., Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: Le nozze di Figaro and
Don Giovanni (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 18-22.
JerOme-Joseph de Momigny, Cours complet d'harmonie et de composition, 2 vols. (Paris, 1806), I, p. 371 and pl. 30.
�Some Interpretations of
The Magic Flute:
The Auden Translation and the
Bergman Film
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
The interpretations I want to discuss are not those of the theoreticians but those of practitioners: producers, directors, translators. All
translation is bound to have an element of interpretation. I do not know
whether producers and directors are so bound; they could simply be
faithful to plot, text, music, and stage directions-unless there are compelling reasons to depart from them. And here I do not speak of "inner'' compulsions, but of political taboos. To take just two: the masonic
anti-feminism of Mozart's masonic opera and the wicked blackamoor
Monostatos. His one aria makes it quite clear that he is more lecherous
than wicked. It is very quick in tempo and to be sung pianissimo. Will
he have to become colorless in our enlightened age? Bergman, in his
film of 1975, had him somewhat swarthy, perhaps a swarthy redneck,
but took care to introduce representatives of all humanity, a cunning
racial mix, in the audience he shows us, people who are unlikely to
represent the audience of a Scandinavian opera house, but whom it
Beate Ruhm von Oppen is a Tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. Her German edition of the wartime letters of Helmuth James von Mo1tke is about to be published by
C.H. Beck Verlag, Munich, with an English edition to fol1ow. Her essay on Moltke,
'Trial in Berlin,' appeared in the January, 1977, issue of the Review.
25
�26
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
pleased the master of obtrusive symbolism to put there, so that we should
know that Mozart's Magic Flute is a work for everybody, every man,
woman, and child, and has a universal message.
In the second half of the twentieth century the Metropolitan Opera
in New York found this eighteenth-century fairy-tale blackamoor an
embarrassment. So the old Met had a production with a white Monostatos
and a black Pamina. The new Met, in a new production in the midsixties, with a gorgeous setting by Chagall, tampered with the German
text (they were singing the work in the original language and were afraid
that New Yorkers might understand it) so that in this aria of complaint
Monostatos is made to sing of his frustration not ''wei! ein Schwarzer
hiisslich ist" (because a black man is ugly) but "wei! ein Wilder hasslich ist" (because a savage is ugly). I do now know how many liberal
consciences were saved by that change. Mozart's music here is so light,
so unvengeful, in fact the music of a darker Papageno and not, say,
a raging Ferrando after Dorabella' s betrayal of him in Cosi fan tutte,
that the editorial precautions seem superfluous.
When W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman were commissioned
to produce an English version of The Magic Flute with which NBC was
going to celebrate the bicentenary of Mozart's birth on television in
1956, they too deleted all reference to the color of Monostatos (and
the performance had the black beauty Leontyne Price as Pamina). But
then they also deleted all elements of Freemasonry, deleted Pamina' s
dead father and made her illegitimate, changed the order of scenes, and
took a lot of other liberties. They produced an interesting and readableeven singable-libretto and one that I want to discuss later in some detail. Convinced, as they said in their preface, that the original libretto
needed not just translating but improving, they set to work to produce
something that would sound as though the music had really been composed for it-not the usual translation into a non-language they call
"operese" (we all know examples of that, I'm sure) but a poetic recreation, so to speak, which reads so well that they had it printed with
especially emphatic warnings against infractions of copyright.
Their work raises two or three questions. Did the original libretto
need improving? Is their version an improvement? How singable is it
and how faithful to the music? In other words, would Mozart, if he
knew enough English, have approved of it? We know that he took the
work very seriously-despite the tricks he played on one occasion, with
unexpected glockenspiel, on his fellow-mason, librettist and first Papageno, Emanuel Schikaneder. But then Schikaneder should have been the
first to understand, as an experienced Shakespearian actor who knew
the importance of light relief in certain circumstances. He just didn't
like to be upstaged from the wings.
�RUHM VON OPPEN
27
Despite the playfulness Mozart was very serious about the work,
as he told his wife, as he told those around him in his last illness, when
he was struggling-unsuccessfully-to finish his Requiem. When he
knew there was a performance of the Magic Flute at the Theater an
der Wieden, he took part in it in imagination, followed its progress,
saying: now they've got to this bit or to that, singing, and probably
wondering whether he would ever see it again. There is another reason
to think that Mozart took the work seriously: a contrapuntal study on
the cantus finnus of the Men in Armor in the second finale may have
been the first thing he wrote down of the entire opera, or at any rate
of the second act. It is an ancient hymn with text by Martin Luther based
on the twelfth Psalm, "Ach Gott vom Himmel sieh' darein." At the
most solemn moment of the Magic Flute it is the tune of this hymn which
is sung by the guardians of the dreadful gates of the final tests, but with
a text about purification by fire, water, air, and earth.
The Auden/Kallman translation has great felicities-one of them
the setting of this chorale, and no wonder, for Auden was a fervent
hymn-singer and came into his own with the language of hymnology
even in its Masonic-Egyptian variant: "Now shall the pilgrim tread a
valley dark and dire ... " ('Dir.e' is treated disyllabically, as a spondee.) But there are infelicities too and, what is worse, infidelities not
just to the original libretto but to that libretto as composed, interpreted
in the music. The composer, after all, was the first interpreter. Mozart
once wrote to his father, in connection with an earlier opera, The Abduction from the Seraglio, that the text has to be an altogether obedient
handmaiden to the music. That means for us that, since the music is
there, it must govern translations. The translator is bound by the interpretation of the composer. Wben the composer makes something clear,
he has to reproduce that clarity as best he can; where the composer
is deliberately ambiguous, he has to try to preserve the ambiguity. Just
one example: In Tamino's long and crucial dialogue with the Speaker,
where the Speaker patiently and forcefully and step by telling step disabuses Tamino of the illusions he arrived with, having believed the tale
of woe, vengeance, and promise of the Queen of the Night, this impetuous if noble young man reaches the point where he exclaims: ''So
ist denn alles Heuchelei!"-meaning "So then everything is hypocrisy!" The text in the score at that point has an exclamation mark, but
the music introduces doubt, indeed a question into this sentence. The
Speaker was in E-flat major. Tamino exclaims:
�28
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
(wW!Jehen)
~
)
~'j
.
The D flat on which he lands is a hovering 3, of B-flat minor, as shown
by the accompaniment: the exclamation is not just some accusation of
hypocrisy he casts in the Speaker's teeth, but an expression of agonized
doubt. And a translator must keep the ambivalence of that phrase and
not write, like Auden/Kallman: "Then it is all a painted lie" or, like
Dent: "Your wisdom's naught but vile deceit!" He should keep the
phrase open-ended, express some doubt about who is doing the deceiving, say something like "Then all is naught but vile deceit!" ~which
can apply either to what he has just been told here or what the Queen
told him before. When the Speaker is about to leave and when he has
left, the hypocrisy phrase has a counterpart in Tarnino's questions "When
will this veil of dark be lifted?" and "When, endless night, wilt thou
be riven?" (I follow the translation by Ruth and Thomas Martin). And
he gets the mysterious but reassuring answers first from the Speaker,
then from the Speaker's phrase played by the orchestra, while the unseen chorus shrouds itself in frightful ambiguity by singing that Tamino will see the light "Soon, soon~or never." It is the orchestra that
tells Tamino and the audience that all will be well.
Perhaps the time has come to give you a synopsis of the plot of
this two-act opera. Tamino, a prince, dressed in a Japanese hunting
outfit, runs on the stage, in C minor, pursued by a monstrous serpent.
He calls on the gods to help him and falls in a swoon. He still has his
bow, but no arrows left. Three Ladies come in on his last syllable and
downbeat and rescue him with javelins and a sudden switch, a deceptive cadence, to the chord of A flat which instantly moves on to the
dominant-seventh chord of E flat when they refer to their might making the monster die.
�29
RUHM VON OPPEN
1. u.z. Dame.
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3.
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Dame.
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.
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5tirb, Un - 9e.- heur! durch un.s - 1
re
.
.
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Macht I
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-
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They indulge in some triumphalism, then fall in love with the recumbent young man, then fall out with each other as they realize they must
tell their mistress (the Queen of the Night) about this incident and none
of them can trust the others not to take unfair advantage while she is
away. The only solution is to depart together.
Enter a man looking like a bird and singing a cheerful ditty about
his trade as bird-catcher and his desire to catch lots of birds from among
whom he could choose one. Tamino comes out of his swoon and in
the ensuing spoken dialogue tries to find out where he is and who this
Papageno is. Papageno does not know much-he does not even know
who his parents were-he only knows that he earns his keep by catching birds for the Star-Flaming Queen and her Ladies. Tamino remembers that his father often told him about her. But how did he stray into
her realm and who saved him from the serpent? Once assured that the
beast is quite dead, Papageno claims that he killed it, with his bare hands.
This is the signal for the Three Ladies to return, put the record straight,
put a lock on Papageno's mouth to teach him a lesson about lying, and
give a small portrait of the daughter of the Queen to Tamino, with
promises of happiness, honor, and renown if he does not remain indifferent to it. He does not. He sings a beautiful aria about it. It is love
at first sight.
�30
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
This brings on the Queen who, in a first plangent, then acrobatic, and always imperious recitative and aria instantly addresses and appropriates Tamino as "My dear son," telling him not to tremble; he
is, after all, guiltless, wise and pious, just the young man to console
her deeply injured maternal heart. Suffering has been her lot since her
daughter was abducted by a villain, despite all her cries for help. The
mother's help was too weak. But now, in Allegro moderato: Tamino
will go to liberate her, will be her rescuer and her husband. After the
Queen has left, with as much eclat as prepared her arrival, Tamino
wonders whether he is hallucinating and calls on the gods not to deceive him, but to protect and strengthen him. In the quintet that follows, the Three Ladies relieve Papageno of the lock on his mouth, give
Tamino a magic flute from their Queen, which has the power to protect its player, give Papageno a set of bells with similar properties, and
tell the men to proceed to the evil Sarastro' s realm. They say farewell
and turn to go but are asked how that destination is to be found. They
take a deep breath and tell the men, in an Andante that is free from
their previous assertiveness, that "Three Boys, young, fair, and wise"
will accompany them on their journey and will give counsel that should
be followed. The men repeat this most important piece of instruction
and another round of farewells concludes the scene.
Next we see a sumptuous Egyptian room and hear three slaves
complain of the black Monostatos, their overseer and tormentor, who,
they hope, will at last get his just deserts because he allowed Pamina
to escape. But they seem to be wrong: Monostatos drags her in, tells
them to chain and fetter her, and to leave him alone with her. In the
trio that follows, she pleads with him: though death cannot make her
tremble, it is her mother who will die of grief. She falls in a swoon;
but before Monostatos can do a thing, Papageno wanders in and he and
Monostatos scare each other into exits in opposite directions. Papageno rallies and returns with the sensible argument that since there are
black birds, why should there not be black men too-both he and
Monostatos had previously thought that the other was the devil. He finds
Pamina and they have quite a conversation. Pamina is very pleased that
the young Prince her mother is sending to her rescue is in love with
her already, and she assures Papageno that heaven will provide him
too with a friend of the opposite sex sooner than he thinks. Then follows their duet about love, by which alone we live and have our being
and, indeed, touch on divinity. The whole opera does not have a love
duet for the hero and heroine. So this duet for Pamina and the Child
of Nature is not only beautiful but important in the context of the whole.
The first Finale begins, as does the second, with the Three Boys.
It is their first appearance, Ingmar Bergman notwithstanding; we have
�RUHM VON OPPEN
31
only heard about them before; but here they are, telling Tamino that
this path will lead to his goal, but that to prevail he must conduct himself like a man. He must be steadfast, tolerant, and taciturn. When he
asks them about Pamina, they reply that it is not for them to tell him
about her and they just repeat their admonition to steadfastness, tolerance, and taciturnity; in brief, the Boys sing, be a Man and you will
win a Man's victory. They go off, leaving Tamino to mull over their
wise teachings and to explore the place they have led him to. Is it the
seat of the gods? The architecture is evidence of wisdom, work, and
arts, and where these dwell, vice is unlikely to maintain its dominion.
He sees a door, goes up to it, with threats against the cowardly villain
Sarastro, and is rebuffed by a voice from within. He sees and tries
another door, with the same result. But when he knocks on the third
door, an awe-inspiring Old Man appears and in a marvelous recitativic
dialogue of 52 bars gets him, in modulation after modulation, from Aflat major to A minor, and from naive and erroneous certainty to serious, painfully serious questioning. In other words-and in music quite
unlike any other in Mozart-he starts him on his quest in earnest. What
went before was just youthful impetuosity and heroics. The Old Man
calls the Queen's claims in doubt, says that Sarastro had good reasons
for his actions, but that he, the Speaker, is not free to divulge them.
After he has gone, Tamino is told by unseen voices that Pamina is still
alive and he starts to give thanks to the gods on his flute. But he breaks
off when he remembers that, though alive, Pamina is not there and goes
off in search of her.
She whom he seeks enters from another side, with Papageno and
a hurried little duet about the need for fast feet and quick courage against
the rage and ruses of the enemy. If only they could find Tamino before
they are caught! Pamina calls his name, Papageno tells her he has a
better signal and plays the five notes on his Pan pipe, to which Tamino
responds offstage on his flute. But before they have finished exclaiming about this happy turn of events, this establishment of communication, here is Monostatos, who has caught up with them and calls his
slaves to bind them. Papageno makes them dance instead, enchanted,
to a spell-binding tune from his bells. But then, with a sudden change
of key, we hear Sarastro's retinue from the distance: the Lord of the
Realm himself is approaching. Papageno would like to flee or hide,
or at least escape by verbal subterfuge; but Pamina tells him that the
truth must be told, whatever the consequences.
She kneels before Sarastro, confesses her guilt of trying to escape, but pleads the wicked moor's lecherous demands in mitigation.
Sarastro knows all and understands all. He knows whom she loves, he
will not force her to love-him?-but, but (lowest note) he will not give
�32
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
her her freedom. And all her pleas about her mother who will die of
grief are unavailing: Sarastro knows her to be a proud woman who would
make Pam ina unhappy. A man is needed to guide the hearts of women,
for without him all women exceed their proper sphere.
Enter the officious and triumphant Monostatos with the captive
Tamino. The lovers see each other for the first time but are restrained
from instant embrace by popular murmuring and the interference of
Monostatos. Then he prostrates himself before Sarastro, asks for due
punishment for the bold malefactor, Tamino, this daring would-be abductor, foiled only by the vigilant Monostatos, who anticipates a rich
reward and instead gets taken away for a beating. The people's acclaim
for the wise Sarastro ends the act. By now, of course, we have a prima
facie case for a complaint not only from the Civil Liberties Union but
also from the Women's Liberation Movement.
But the show must go on. I am still telling you the true story,
not what Auden and Bergman did with it.
The second Act opens with a solemn march of the Sarastrian
priests and a conference with Sarastro in which he informs them of
Tamino's arrival and his Quest. He seems to have all the qualities
needed-virtue, discretion, benevolence-and, Sarastro thinks, deserves
their help. When one of the priests asks whether, as a prince, he will
be up to what awaits him, Sarastro replies: he is more, he is a man.
The tests he is to undergo are not without risk and may, in fact, cost
him his life: but should he die, he will be given to Isis and Osiris and
taste the joys of the gods before those assembled. They signify their
assent at various stages of this proceeding with three lots of masonic
chords on wind instruments (without clarinets, though, since they would,
presumably, make the sound too soft). Sarastro and the priests then sing
a prayer to Isis and Osiris, not just for Tamino, but for the new pair.
There follow the tests for Tamino, with Papageno tagging along
and not trying very hard. The first test is silence, especially toward
women. The Three Ladies come to tempt the men and tell them of dire
things in store for them. Tamino speaks (or sings, it is a quintet) only
to shut up Papageno. The Ladies depart in dismay. The scene changes
and Monostatos sings his very light little aria of sexual frustration based
on racial injustice. The Queen of the Night enters, gives Pamina a dagger, and tells her to kill Sarastro, since Tamino had not done the job
she sent him to do. Pamina tries to plead with her, but her mother
launches herself into a furious aria about hell's vengeance boiling in
her bosom. If Pamina does not kill Sarastro, her mother will disown
her and sever all the bonds of nature. In the spoken dialogue after her
disappearance Monostatos tries to blackmail Pamina into entrusting herself to him, to love him or die. But Sarastro intervenes, simply dis-
�RUHM VON OPPEN
33
misses Monostatos and tells Pamina he will take no revenge on her
mother. He then sings his famous aria about the better ways of these
sacred precincts: if someone has fallen, love will bring about reform.
Guided by the hand of a friend he will walk into a better land. In these
sacred walls (Mauern: the German for Freemason is Freimaurer) no
traitor can lurk, because the enemy is forgiven. The last couplet is beautiful and hard to translate:
Wen solche Lehren nicht erfreu'n,
Verdienet nicht ein Mensch zu sein.
Literally it means: whoever does not rejoice in such teachings does not
deserve to be a human being. With its music it is a very powerful conclusion, because, as in the first stanza, where Sarastro sang about the
journey into a better land at the hand of a friend, the singer's vocal
ascent is continued by the strings when his voice turns down again. Wbat
can a translator do with a memorable phrase like that? The Martins have:
"Who by this law is led aright/will ever share the gods' delight"; Dent
has: ''Those whom this bond can not unite/are all unworthy of the light.''
Auden and Kallman go wild: "The tyrant on a golden throne/Lives in
the desert all alone.'' It is a message that seems to me excessively far
removed from Sarastro's, though, I admit, it scans right-but so do the
two others.
The Three Boys appear for a second time and in a trio tell Tamino and Papageno that they have come to restore their instruments to
them and that at the third meeting joy will be the reward of virtue. But
first there are more tests and troubles, the worst of them just about to
happen. Pamina enters, does not know of Tamino 's vow of silence,
thinks he no longer loves her and sings what is probably Mozart's saddest and most beautiful aria, in G minor: all the happiness of love is
gone, and if Tamino will not look at her tears and feels no more longing, she must find rest in death. She walks out to a brief four-bar postlude. But she does not-yet-attempt suicide. She is brought into the
presence of the Priests and Sarastro. Sarastro tells her to take her last
farewell of Tamino, who may now speak again and is about to undergo
his final testing. The farewell trio for her, Tamino, and Sarastro combines pathos with solace. Sarastro is clearly sympathetic to their plight
and, in fact, promises that they will all meet again. This trio, in this
place, does cause some confusion in the plot. But we are musically too
much captivated by it to worry about that. Still, Auden and Kallman
have a case for a reshuffle here.
Meanwhile Papageno, fond though he is of food and drink, does
want a wife too and has a nice strophic song about it all. Who turns
up? An old crone who says she is eighteen years old and that he must
�34
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
swear that he will marry her or forever live on bread and water. Papageno
as usual takes the line of least resistance and swears. She is transformed
into a young woman, feathery just like Papageno, and her name is
Papagena. But once more those priestly busybodies intervene and send
her packing because Papageno is not yet worthy of her.
Which brings us to the second Finale. The Three Boys start it,
with a song about the imminence of sunrise, the disappearance of
superstition, and the victory of the wise man. Then there is an invocation for the return of peace-when they see the distraught Pamina entering with her dagger and suicidal intentions. They stop her just in
time and restore her to life by telling her that Tamino loves her, whereupon they all go off in search of him. (I am giving a very bare account,
throughout this Finale, of the plot that is full of the most beautiful dramatic changes and music.) A change of scene brings us to two big mountains, of fire and of water. Two Men in Armor and with flaming helmets
guard the gates, and after the contrapuntal introduction mentioned before, they sing the solemn hymn about purification by the four elements:
whoever can overcome the fear of death will rise to heaven and, illumined, will then be in a state to devote himself entirely to the mysteries ofisis. Tamino presents himself and asks them to unlock the gates.
Pamina's voice is heard, calling to him that she must see him before
he goes. He is now allowed to speak to her and to enter the temple
with her. Once more a last couplet, sung by Tamino and the Two Men
in Armor, sums up a new message: A woman who fears neither night
nor death is worthy to be initiated.
Pamina enters on a simple but radiant musical transformation.
The bit about the woman worthy of initiation was in A-flat major, the
strings work up, touching on the relative F minor, to an emphatic halfcadence on the dominant of F, followed by a long rest, and Pamina
comes in on a rising major sixth, C -A, that is, in the unexpected parallel
major of the relative minor. It is one of Mozart's miraculous economies .
...
~
....
....--
Quar+.
I
I
(.)
�35
RUHM VON OPPEN
Andantt
q~di
Pam ina (Tamino umarmend)
r If fijf I r ~
Ta - mi - no __ mein!
~ If
0
r- p I I..
'
}
welch em Gluck!
Tamino shows Pamina the dreadful gates which threaten death
and destruction. Pamina simply replies that she will be at his side, she
will lead him, herself guided by love. Tamino is to play the flute which
will protect them. Then she tells him the brief history of the flute. In
a magic hour her father carved it from the depths of a millennia! oak,
mid thunder and lightning and a roaring storm. But now it is to be played
and lead them on their dreadful journey. They pass safely and serenely
through the fire, accompanied only by flute, timpani, and some subdued brass chords; after the fire they go through the water. On emerging from that they see a door opening on a brightly illuminated temple
and are hailed and invited by the choir within.
The next transformation brings us back to Papageno and his
troubles. He is still wifeless and threatens to hang himself if no-one
will take pity on him. He seems about to do it when the Three Boys
once more intervene to save him, too, and tell him to play his magic
bells. When he does it, Papagena enters and "they sing of married bliss
and numerous progeny.
All that remains to be tied up is the matter of Monostatos, the
Queen of the Night, and her Three Ladies. They have a conspiratorial
quintet in which they propose to enter the temple and destroy it. Monostatos reminds the Queen that she has promised him the hand of her daughter
for his services. She reaffirms the promise. But before they can mount
their attack on the temple, they are discovered and plunged into eternal
night. The loudest chord reveals the whole stage transformed into a sun,
Tamino and Pamina are dressed in priestly robes, flanked by Egyptian
priests on both sides. The Three Boys hold flowers. Sarastro celebrates
the rays of the sun, which dispel the night and destroy the ill-gotten
power of the hypocrites. There is acclaim for the new initiates, and
the gods Isis and Osiris are given thanks before the final chorus, a chorus
about the victory of strength and the endowment of beauty and wisdom
with an eternal crown.
�36
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
So much, then, for the plot. It is not quite what you get in Bergman. Auden and Kallman, too, eliminated the masonic element, tampered with Pamina's parentage and switched the sequence of some scenes
around, perhaps to their advantage. But what strikes me as somewhat
wilful is a change in the general style of the text, at least at times; there
were no nymphs and shepherds in the original-there are in A & K.
There was good reason for their absence in the original; the serious
aspiration of the masonic enterprise and its serious antagonists, balanced
by the feathery children of nature, Papageno and Papagena. Nymphs
and shepherds conjure up the wrong imagery, something like Dresden
china. Auden and Kallman bring them into Sarastro's aria about forgiveness, at the point where they also depart from the mini-homily about
the importance of these teachings of the Brotherhood. Where Sarastro
just sings that "whoever does not rejoice in these teachings does not
deserve to be a human being," Auden and Kallman have, not just "The
tyrant on his golden throne/lives in the desert all alone" but two extra
lines before these two (they often introduce extra lines where Mozart
just repeats):
The homely shepherds when they love
A green and homely pasture rove,
The tyrant on his golden throne ... etc.
In fact that whole number is made, by A & K, into a new song, good
in itself, but rather remote from the-well-known-original. They say
in their preface that that is what an operatic translator may have to do
sometimes: get the gist of a number, then step back and write something really coherent and shapely of his own. That may be a tenable
point of view, though I still think it makes for better reading than singing.
Auden and Kallman must have relied on having an audience which
did not know too much about the original, not even famous highlights
like Sarastro's aria. They may also have thought there was no harm
in approximating Mozart to Sullivan by rendering his text, in places,
more in the manner of Gilbert. They had few qualms or none about
introducing extra syllables where there were available notes in the score,
even if in the original setting those notes were tied together. In the case
of Papageno it does not matter much. When he first introduces himself
as "Der Vogelfiinger bin ich ja," they have
The lark, the ruddock and the willow-wren
And the jolly nightingale I ken;
In vain do all the pretty little creatures fly
When they the tall birdcatcher spy.
�37
RUHM VON OPPEN
The German replaced by the pattering "In vain do all the pretty little
creatures fly" was "ich Vogelfiinger bin bekannt. ... "All right, give
patter song to Papageno:
J
r p
bin
be - kannt
rJ. Ei rJ. Gl I r . p
the
fan - 9er
[Ich] Vo - gel -
?:f
E
tJ CJ Q
[~
!H
J
[In] Vain do all
pret-ty lit -tie
crea-tures fly
In their Notes, Auden and Kallman grant that the effect is different but
take their stand on the belief "that The Magic Flute should sound more
staccato than Die Zauberjlote."
In another case, that of the duet about love sung by Pamina and
Papageno, the translators get slightly cold feet about this and their stand
begins to wobble, and quite rightly too. Still, pride forbids them to put
the "pedantic" alternative version, with its proper scansion, in the text
itself. They relegate it to the Notes at the back, where they inform us
that ''The German lyric is written in iambic rhythm, i.e., in 4/4 time''
(I merely quote, though I must interpolate that every sophomore knows
that iambs can be written in any time signature). They continue: "This
Mozart has set to a tune in 6/8, so that certain syllables have to be (my
italics) spread over two notes, linked by a slur." Naughty Mozart! If
only he'd had the sense to stick to the iambic 4/4, there would have
been no need to spread syllables over two notes. But now that the notes
are there, the translators are jolly well going to use them, and in their
main text give us this:
when IO"ve In his bOsOm desire hils impla'ntid
The heart Of th€ he'rO grOws g€ntli 3nd ta'me;
~
./
~
';'
.~
/
-
/
- -
./
-
And soon from his passiOn enkindled, enchanted,
- :""
- ~ /~The nymph receives the Impetuous flame ...
-
/
for the German
-/-
,--:
_
_,._/~
Bei Miinnern, welche Liebe fiihlen,
- _..-Fehlt auch ein gutes Herze nicht.
/
/
/
Die siissen
- dann derTrfebe mftzllfifhten, ..
-- - Weiber erste Pflicht.
,...,._-- lst
/
�38
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
In the comments at the back of the book they say they ''found that the
English language cried out for an anapestic rhythm [?] similar to that
of the notes." And they continue: "If the original relation of syllables
to notes is not an accident of the German prosody, but a profound musical
idea, then, of course, we are wrong, so he who is pedantic, let him
be pedantic still and sing instead:
When Love his dart has deep implanted,
The hero's heart grows kind and tame,
And by his passion soon enchanted,
The nymph receives his impetuous flame . ... ·'
There's that nymph again, who, as I said, is absent not only from that
number in the original, but from the entire opera, which is simply not
written in the nymphs and shepherds and cupid style and in which love,
or Liebe, has the proper German feminine gender.
The posing of the phoney alternative between "accidental prosody" or "profound musical idea" is hardly worthy of the librettist of
The Rake's Progress. Simple respect for the gentle, not to say tender,
character of the combination of the two successive notes in one syllable, .or the music of the music-and-words together, should have made
the translators put the version they call "pedantic" in the main text.
In a later essay on "Translating Opera Libretti" they argue a bit more
cautiously, go into the interesting difference of quantitative and accentual prosody, and call on singers to sing both the iambic and the anapestic
versions (as they call them) several times without prejudice and ask themselves which, in English, sounds the more Mozartian. I am no singer,
but I have tried both, quite often, and have no doubt that a version with
Mozart's syllabification sounds more Mozartian. Perhaps they chose
the wrong idiom in their "When Love his dart has deep emplanted"?
They also state that "in English, on account of its vowels and
its many monosyllabic words, there are fewer syllables which sing well,
and are intelligible when spread over several notes, than there are in
either Italian or German-English being, intrinsically, a more staccato
tongue." They also say that feminine rhymes are more uncommon and
more often comic in English than in German. I wonder about both those
statements. Looking, for instance, at Dido and Aeneas, I found many
unfunny feminine rhymes and Purcell doing beautifully with more than
one note per syllable from the very outset and throughout the work.
I underline the syllables that are given more than one note:
�RUHM VON OPPEN
39
Shake the cloud from off your brow. Fate your wi-shes does allow.
Empire growing, pleasures flow-fig, Fortune smiles and so should
you.
Banish sorrow, banish care, I Grief should ne'er approach the fair;
Banish sorrow, ba-nish care, Grief etc.;
Then Dido herself: "Peace and I are strangers grown .... [and later]
Yet would not, yet would not, would not have ]1 guessed." It was, incidentally, on that monosyllabic two-note "it" that the German translators found themselves forced (or free?) to introduce an extra syllable.
And so on, throughout Dido, one comes up with quite a lot, from the
beginning right through to the end: ''With drooping wings ye Cu-pids come ... and scat-ter roses on her tomb.
Soft, soft and gentle ... as her heart, ... keep here your watch."
Remember, the Auden/Kallman translation was made for television. Its authors actually say that on the stage operas should be, they
think, performed in the original languages and audiences should get
a translation to read, so that they know what it is all about.
Along comes Ingmar Bergman and does a film on the Magic Flute
which is sung in Swedish and has captions, or translations, in the
languages of the country it is shown in. I was amazed at the syllabic
fidelity both of the sung Swedish and of the English translation. It was
faithful in other respects too: to the meaning of the text and, I think,
usually to the rhyme scheme. The only serious departure from the original that I detected in the Swedish and English was the excessive punishment given to Monostatos. In German he gets a bastinado of77 strokes,
in Swedish 555 (and Bergman's English translator follows that). I thought
it might be for the sake of syllables. Not so, I am told by a friend who
knows Swedish: it is simply that the number 7 is quite unsingable in
that language. But 555 seems rather a lot.
I have left myself with very little time to discuss that film. Opinions were violently divided, ranging from blissful enjoyment to outrage.
Let me simply mention some major distractions and distortions-leaving
aside the fillings in Tamino's teeth. The business, especially the sensuous business of pawing, is obtrusive and out of place. The fire and water
ordeals do not take place in Dante's Hell or Wagner's Venusberg and
we should be spared the writhing nude figures. If Bergman decided to
cut out the Freemasons, why did he have to make Sarastro and his Priests into Keepers of some Nordic Grail? How did he have the nerve
to bring on those cute three boys prematurely to sing music Mozart
gave to the Three Ladies? Why must the quintet of conspirators near
the end be represented as a heaving army on the move? Above all: he
�40
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
makes Sarastro Pamina's father and not just in the spiritual sense, but
as her begetter, with clearly incestuous leanings. This is too much!
Mozart's opera is quite explicit about Pamina's deceased father and his
legacy of the flute and the Sevenfold Shield of the Sun, which he bequeathed to Sarastro, whom he considered a worthy successor. He very
particularly did not want his wife to inherit it. Why the change? To
foist some Freud on us?
Heaven forfend any importation of twentieth-century psychology into this work. But Jung would be more suitable than Freud if something of the kind were done. But if it were done, it were better done
honestly, in a new, twentieth-century opera. Michael Tippett has done
it and called it The Midsummer Marriage. It is clearly akin to the Magic
Flute, and equally clearly Tippett's own. Using Mozart for selfexpression, as Bergman does, strikes me as impermissible, despite all
the various beauties of the film and the many people it introduces to
the music. Seductive, verging on the corrupting.
�The Program Old and New
Douglas Allanbrook
Fifty years ago Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan founded
a program of studies at St. John's College in Annapolis. We are here
tonight to celebrate that program, a program dedicated to the proposition that men are educable, a program grand in its aspirations and full
of good sense in the ways in which it lays out its specific course of
studies. Though it is difficult to imagine its having been instituted anywhere except the United States, the allegiance to the program may be
found in the minds and hearts of thoughtful men anywhere. Two men
are particularly linked with both the aspirations and the matter of the
program, Mr. Buchanan and Jacob Klein. Mr. Buchanan was a quintessential Yankee, Mr. Klein a Russian Jew. Without the imprint of
these two extraordinary men we would have no program. For all of
us-alumni, faculty, and students-who have studied the program with
some care there is no tension in this heritage other than that implicit
in the nature of discourse and study.
Fifty years is a long span of time in the ordinary train of human
events. Many students and many teachers have come and gone since
those waning years of the great Depression, years already shadowed
by the imminence of the second great war of the century. Technical
changes both beneficent and terrifying have multiplied at a geometric
rate these fifty years. Money and bombs can be mutually exchanged
Douglas Allanbrook, the composer, is a Tutor Emeritus at St. John's College, Annapolis.
This speech was delivered to the alumni of the college in September, 1987, on the
occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the New Program.
41
�42
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
anywhere in no time at all. There has been a certain progress in the
medical lengthening of our lives. Politics remains the same, though more
expensive-a change in quantity that affects the quality. We are all tempted on many occasions to say as we grow older: tutto declina-everything
is going to pot. The phrase belongs most properly in the mouth ofFalstaff, in Verdi's opera. Verdi himself was of course at a remarkably
advanced age to have been writing such an ebullient marvel. Falstaff
is something of a fool, though a self-conscious one. He is also shrewd,
no dumbbell. He contemplates his youth, his salad days when he was
young and thin, a fetching page for the Duke of Norfolk. The comedy
for him and for us who are getting older consists in confusing our own
waning powers with whatever there is out there that is perennial and
young: love, romance, energy, glory, intellect, and sharp vision.
It takes a certain distance to realize how perennially fresh this
program remains as generations of students pursue its disciplines and
goals. The senior classes it has been my pleasure to teach in recent years
thrust in front of me the fact that this is not an experimental program
but a program that works, and works for an amazing range of people.
A class which discusses Valery and Wallace Stevens with acumen and
passion consisted a mere four years ago of high-school students, some
of whom knew no grammar, and whose cherished books, depending
on the generation, were Catcher in the Rye, and Lord of the Rings. Only
too often these would be accompanied by that ever-present virago, Ayn
Rand. One of our duties as tutors is to realize what can happen, to be
aware of all that does happen in these four years. I would hope that
the program would retain its luster for those of us who have spent our
adult lives in it. The reasons for the efficacy of the program should
now be stated. But before we talk of its grand aspirations, which keep
it pointed where it should be pointed, let us examine its good sense.
Its entrancing folly we will look at last.
The daily round of its tutorials and laboratories is a slogging
through elementary things slowly and methodically. There has never
been any reasonable doubt as to what these elements are and where they
lie. They are found underneath the common skills of daily life: the grammar, rhetoric, and logic of language, the reasoning and structures of
mathematics, the daily experience of nature, the rhythm and tones of
music. From the very beginning fifty years ago it was deemed essential that modern science be dealt with, both as theory and as a world
of objects to be sensed and measured. Many who are not acquainted
with our regular classes find what I have just said vague and just a bit
pious. The very term "liberal arts" is such a casual catch-all for almost
any curriculum. There has also always been the vulgar and catchy phrase
which would describe the program as the ''great books course.'' Peo-
�ALLAN BROOK
43
pie then quite naturally are apt to be either aghast or delighted to find
that elementary does mean elementary. Sentences are to be parsed, congruence of triangles to be proven, nitrates to be distinguished from nitrites, the lack of a urinary bladder in a bird to be noted, Yankee Doodle
to be played on a musical scale constructed on a monochord.
Tutorials are classes with stubborn simple things to learn. What
is studied in them is not arbitrary. The program has never subscribed
to the kind of looseness which finds that it makes little difference what
is studied as long as it is done with conviction and provides a "learning opportunity.'' What is studied in these classes at the college is not
cultural, not intended to be a substitute for experience of the world.
For fifty years neither history nor the fine arts have had a place on the
program. Elementary education has neither the intention nor the time
to expose students to the vast panoply of splendors which the world
exhibits, though a certain necessary nostalgia is present because we don't
look at Chinese painting or the French and Russian Revolutions, or,
in general, learn to appreciate what a sophisticated man appreciates.
There has been no faltering these fifty years that there be tutorials in
language and mathematics, that there be laboratories, and (for thirtyfour years) that there be music tutorials. As for modernity, we study
its roots in Baudelaire, Hegel, Marx, Freud, and Einstein more thoroughly than any other undergraduate college in the country. The program
does not change in any essential ways. This is not because of stultification; the program stays as it is because it has its roots in reasonable
judgments as to what is elementary. The tutorials and the laboratories
often employ manuals and similarly uninspired materials. This again
makes good sense if the learning of elements requires help, which it
so often does. The program has always had the obligation to exercise
a student in matters that in certain countries were traditionally dealt
with in high-schools, gymnasia, or lycees.
Tutorials are, however, fixed on splendors. The grandest books
are read: Baudelaire, the inventor of modern sensibility, Einstein and
Dedekind, Sophocles and Lavoisier, and, in the freshman language
tutorial, Plato's M eno, which deals with the crux of how men learn things
and how they deal with what they learn. These texts are read slowly
and at length. They are chosen as exemplifying the highest expressions
of the liberal arts, whether they be by Shakespeare, Euclid, Pascal, Newton, or Homer.
We are nearing the entrancing folly of the program. Sancho Panza
plods through the fields of elementary grammar, logic, rhetoric,
mathematics,and laboratory while simultaneously Don Quixote canters
on, reading Plato in Greek after three months of grammar, and Einstein after only the slightest acquaintance with Maxwell's equations.
�44
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
If we leave the tutorials the quest becomes more quixotic. The freshmen read Homer straight off on their entrance to the school, and the
nearly unreadable text of Hegel's Phenomenology is the roadblock which
the seniors encounter as they begin their last year. The good sense of
the plodding part of the program and the enormous difficulties in dealing with the true elements cannot be coped with without the ever-receding
goal of encompassing the very best that has been set down in writing.
Sancho Panza and Don Quixote belong together. The death of the knight
leaves Sancho bereft. Without Sancho the world is only half there, even
though his shrewd horse-sense is well up to ruling his "island."
For fifty years a proposition has been voiced that the books are
the teachers. A certain inference follows from this: Everyone in a class
is a learner, including the teacher. This inference is not quixotic. It is
founded not only on the importance of the books that are read but also
on an understanding of how things are learned-on an understanding
of the soul. Learning is not necessarily play, as some would have it, but
it certainly involves activity on the part of the learner. Opportunities
for learning must be placed in front of the student, his opinions tested
and challenged. It is for this reason that Plato's Meno is not only the
core of the freshman language tutorial but also provides the clue to how
learning is thought to come about in this old program of ours. Let us
list certain things that this implies: No answers given but every opportunity for any possible answer is provided, if there be an answer. Willingness to live with the skepticism that may follow upon this. Wit, irony,
and shrewd observations as to what any particular person is capable
of answering, given that person's make-up. Seriousness deeper than
faith concerning this natural life-giving endeavor of the intellect and
the heart. Living with and putting up with the open-ended and neverending quest that lies behind conversation and argument. It is all these
habits that lie behind our program, not any set doctrine of Platonic
"ideas" or Platonic "politics."
A certain role is then envisaged for a teacher or a tutor in this
program. He may or may not be an expert in some field of knowledge.
In class, with the help of books, materials, and instruments, he provides opportunities for learning, and he himselflearns as the perennial
conversation flows. This is the life of the program and hence of the
college. It could all be done just as well if we hired a bunch of twofamily houses and furnished them with chairs, tables, and blackboards.
These past several years or so when I was on the search committee for our new presidents, traveling around the country and talking
to a great variety of people, it has been illuminating to me to note that
the program is known and widely known and respected for what it is,
and not for what it is not. I have had the same experience in talking
�ALLAN BROOK
45
to many artists, writers, and composers whom I know as a director of
an Artists' Colony. What we are commands respect. Every college from
here to Peoria exposes its students to a mixed menu of liberal arts, fine
arts, history, and, in general, appreciation of what is appreciable. It
would be foolish of this college to attempt any such thing. It would
also be impractical, since most colleges and junior colleges are better
qualified than we are to-offer cultural education. The more serious objection would be that the program would be diluted. It should be clear
that without this program we are nothing in particular, though Annapolis
and Santa Fe are charming towns and the local cultures of some interest.
I was delighted when I arrived here thirty-five years ago, one
hot afternoon after riding the bus down from Baltimore, fresh from four
years as a professional musician, to walk into a remarkably messy office
and to begin talking with someone who did not consider music to be
the most important thing in the world. This was one of the principal
reasons for my coming to St. John's. The program is and always must
be dedicated to the excellences of the reason. That there are other splendors is too obvious, one would think, to be argued. These various splendors do not negate each other, but the program rightly insists that there
is a hierarchy of them. We may not need Aristotle to rank them for
us, but he is a great help. There is also implicit in the program another
perennial question having to do with the highest excellences. It takes
the form of a kind of debate, or better still a conversation, as to the
ends of the intellectual excellences: are they aimed at the theoretical
or the practical? ·
This may be stated more formally as enquiring about the relations between the moral and the intellectual virtues. Are we preparing
for citizenship or for something higher, more open-ended, more beguiling, and entrancingly more dangerous? Such a tension arises from
the nature of the intellectual excellences. It is a philosophic question.
The college, if one can speak of it apart from the program, must
always be chary of making claims for its graduates. The program is
no panacea for success or necessary preparation for good citizenship.
It also cannot teach anyone to think.
These fifty years have shown the freshness, the good sense, and
the grandeur of the program. There is no history of the program, apart
from all of us, old and young, who have passed through it. If we are
ashamed of this program, or bored with it, or unhappy that it does not
encompass a greater range of cultural splendors, we have been poor
students indeed. Its aspirations and humble good sense are meant as
a guide to all who would pay attention to their better selves. It is often
an aid for those who have not noticed what they came equipped with,
who have need to recollect from what race they are sprung. We need
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
not be abashed at being different, nor should we boast too fervently
of our successes. We are a small place and the program will never swamp
the world. What it does is too normal, too extraordinary, and too little
interested in success. Let's hope it will never lose its great-souledness.
�Truth Given and Truth Sought:
Two Colleges
J. Winfree Smith
Bishop Ziemann, President McArthur, members of the Board
of Governors of Thomas Aquinas College, members of the faculty, students of the College, parents and guests of the graduating seniors, and
especially graduating seniors, members of the Class of 1987:
First of all, let me say that I was deeply moved by the invitation
to give this address. I regard it as a sign of the affection that exists between me and this class and between me and the members of this community, and also as a sign of the growth in mutual understanding and
Christian charity between the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion of which the American Episcopal Church to which
I belong is a part. This could indeed be an occasion for you to assure
me of what Pope Paul VI assured the Protestant theologian Karl Barth
sometime during an hour-long conversation in 1966. He lovingly assured him of his prayers that certain deeper insights might still be given
him in his old age. That, at least, is Barth's account. We do not have
the Holy Father's account of that conversation.
When I began thinking about what should be the subject of this
address, many reminiscences of my earliest experiences of the Catholic Church came to me. I shall mention a few that take me back more
The Reverend Mr. Smith is a Tutor Emeritus at St. John's College, Annapolis. This
speech was the commencement address, delivered in June, 1987, at Thomas Aquinas
College, Santa Paula, California, where he had been a visiting tutor for two years.
47
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
than fifty years. Sometime in the spring of 1935 I was called to the
priesthood of the Episcopal Church and was headed for seminary that
fall. I was then a graduate student in history at the University of Virginia. Having been a Presbyterian, I had acquired a bit of theology in
my early youth by memorizing the Westminster Shorter Catechism. But
one of my teachers at Virginia, Scott Buchanan, who more than any
other single person was later on the founder of the St. John's program
and hence one to whom Thomas Aquinas College is also indebted, got
me interested in the theology of St. Thomas, especially his theology
of the Eucharist. I thought I ought to find out how the Eucharist as understood by St. Thomas was celebrated in the Church which held his
doctrine. Every week day during Lent of 1935, I attended Mass at the
Catholic Church in Charlottesville and so became familiar with the Latin
Mass as it was celebrated in the United States fifty and more years ago.
I still have the missal edited by the Benedictine Abbot Cabrol which
I acquired in 1934 and took with me to Mass. During all the time that
I was in the Episcopal seminary, when I was not doing my assigned
work and maybe sometimes when I should have been, I was studying
the theology of St. Thomas, having acquired the twenty-one volume
translation of the Summa 7heologiae made early in this century by
English Dominicans. One day, a classmate of mine came in my room,
looked over my books and said, "You don't have books that anybody
else has." "I suppose that's right," I said. "Well," he exclaimed as
he left, "it doesn't seem to bother you."
I have always been grateful for this study and at this moment
am especially grateful because it means that what I have in common
with you and what we both hold precious entered my life a long while
ago.
Let me now cease reminiscing and come to the real subject of
my talk. Often when I was a visiting member of the faculty here, people asked me, and now often in Annapolis people ask me about the difference between Thomas Aquinas College and St. John's College. One
can consider this question about the difference only if one is aware of
how alike these colleges are. Both have in common the view that one
can best learn by reading books of the greatest excellence and that within
limits and always with the possibility of making changes one can identify these books and make a list. The lists for the two colleges are very
much the same, though not identical. The two colleges are in agreement that no student can learn as much from a book through reading
it by himself or through listening to a supposed "expert" explain it
as he can by conversing about it with his fellow-students under the
guidance of one or two fellow-learners called teachers. One can learn
through reading and conversing only if one has a good understanding
�SMITH
49
of grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Both colleges, therefore, have stressed
those traditional liberal disciplines, the arts of the trivium as well as
the quadrivial arts of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music that
provide readily accessible examples not only of ways of learning but
of learnable things.
What, then, is the difference between these colleges? A simple
answer to that question is that Thomas Aquinas College is a Christian
college, whereas St. John's has no commitment to Christianity. That,
however, does not tell one very much. Many colleges are nominally
Christian. At this college, the center of the curriculum, and hence the
center of intellectual life, is the Christian religion itself. The study of
sacred theology is the intellectual enterprise that gives direction to all
others. A sign of the centrality here of the Christian religion and of
sacred theology is the presence of a theology tutorial. At St. John's
there is no theology tutorial, although the Bible and several theological
works are read and seriously discussed by all the students. Thomas
Aquinas College, as a Christian college, assumes that there are truths
revealed by God and known by faith. St. John's does not make that
assumption but considers it a possibility to be earnestly investigated.
I have deliberately called this college a Christian college, and
so far I have not used the word "Catholic" of it. For I can imagine
that there might be an Eastern Orthodox college or an Anglican college or a Protestant college that might take this college as a model, and
so might have as the center of its curriculum sacred theology based on
what has been revealed by God in Holy Scripture and articulated through
the tradition of the Church. I am thinking of revealed truths held in
common with the Catholic Church by many Christian communions: that
God is the omnipotent, and consequently the omniscient, creator and
sustainer of the heavens and the earth, that He is three persons or
hypostases in one essence, that man's nature is corrupted by sin and
in need of grace, that grace is mediated through Jesus Christ who as
the second person of the triune God is truly God and who also is one
with us in being completely human, that those who put their trust in
Christ rejoice in the hope of the blessedness of the coming kingdom
of God. I am aware, to be sure, that the statement I have just given
of revealed truths held as such by many Christian communions is from
a Catholic point of view incomplete. It may indeed be incomplete from
the point of view of other communions, for as Pope John Paul II, anticipating the beginning of the Marian year, says in his March 25th
encyclical on the Mother of the Redeemer, "It is a hopeful sign that
these churches and ecclesial communities [he is referring to churches
and ecclesial communities other than the Catholic Church] are finding
agreement with the Catholic Church on fundamental points of Chris-
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
tian belief, including matters relating to the Virgin Mary. For they recognize her as Mother of the Lord and hold that this forms part of our faith
in Christ, true God and true man."
Thomas Aquinas College is definitely a Catholic college in its
adherence to the whole of what in the Catholic Church is to be taken
as matter of faith. It is its great merit that it stands so firmly and clearly
for God's saving truth as the foundation of theology, and for theology
as the supreme intellectual enterprise.
Sacred theology is, then, a quest that starts with faith. St. Anselm's phrase "faith seeking understanding" is a good way of describing it. It is not simply a body of demonstrations deduced from a minimum
of principles as Euclid's geometry or Newton's mathematical science
of nature is. The Bible itself does not, in the main, prove things about
God. It is a story to be read as a story-a true story of God in relation
to man, beginning in Genesis with the creation of man as the highest
earthly creature and ending with the new heaven and the new earth in
the Apocalypse. Sacred theology, whether as Biblical theology or as
based on articles of faith found in the Bible or in ecclesiastical tradition, offers a vast realm for the intellect and the intellectual imagination to explore. Sometimes in this exploration there occur demonstrative
reasonings. Sometimes, as St. Thomas indicates when he refers to the
various meanings the same text of Scripture may have, theology employs allegory and anagogical reasoning. Anagogical reasoning, in his
view, has to do with eternal glory and matters relating to the ultimate
object of hope; because of the origin of the word "anagogical," such
reasoning can also be thought of as reasoning that leads up to. There
is in theology reasoning that leads up to as well as reasoning that leads
down from. Theology is, in either case, faith seeking understanding.
The outcome in this life is not the replacement of faith by understanding. It is only in another life, the life of the age to come, that faith is
to be replaced by the intellect's vision of God. As long as those in the
pilgrim Church are wayfarers, to use a favorite name of St. Thomas
for Christians, they walk by faith and not by sight.
St. John's College, I have said, has no commitment to Christianity. That does not mean that it is hostile to Christianity. It is a
philosophical college in a very large sense of the word "philosophical.'' Philosophy, like sacred theology, is a quest, a quest for wisdom
moved by the love of wisdom. But it is a quest that does not presuppose revealed truth. What does it presuppose? It presupposes what
Socrates calls "the things around us" and what Genesis calls "the
heavens and the earth," the sky above, the earth on which we dwell,
plants and animals and human life on the earth. It presupposes also the
meaningfulness of human speech. For it is only in speech that we can
�SMITH
51
put before us the questions that arise as we behold with wonder the
things around us. It is worthy of note that Aristotle's names for particular categories are in the form of questions: the "what?", the "how
great?", the "where?", the "when?", and so on. The questions
philosophy raises are the questions that are most important for human
beings, such as the question of what the best life for man is, or the question of the relation of the human to the non-human, or the question that
Aristotle says was asked long ago and is always being asked and occasions difficulties: the question of what being is. Philosophy seeks wisdom or knowledge about being as a whole and in its parts.
One might well wonder whether with such an ambitious aim and
without the help of divine revelation the quest and the questioning ever
attain what is being sought. That wonder becomes all the greater when
one has to consider that over the centuries there have been many answers, often conflicting answers, to these questions and that the love
of truth requires that one not prejudge the answers but honestly and
humbly examine the reasons behind them. Of answers that really conflict with one another, some must be only opinions. Some opinions get
knocked out in the course of philosophizing. The true answer may be
something that is still to be sought with the benefit of whatever opinion
has stood the testing. Scott Buchanan used to give as one criterion for
a great book that it raises unanswerable questions. I would agree with
those who, on the other hand, say that a question, if it is meaningful,
is asking for a true answer. The true answer may not be easily accessible to the philosopher. There may be some answers never actually
reached. The undertaking is indeed a tremendously ambitious one. Some
Christian thinkers have regarded it as too ambitious and have spoken
of the pride of philosophers even to engage in such an undertaking.
However ambitious the undertaking is in itself, St. John's is defined by it. The faculty and students there may not be philosophers.
But they perceive philosophizing in the background of what they do
and they perceive the fundamental questions it raises. Among these is
the question of revelation. The very attempt to philosophize brings one
face to face with the question whether the most important truths are
not truths which cannot be seen as truths by the unaided human intellect
and so have to be accepted on authority. For us who are Christians,
that question is answered even if there are differences among Christians as to the relation between the authority of Scripture and the authority
of the Church.
Revelation contains all the truth we need to know for our salvation. It does not provide answers to all the questions inquiring minds
might legitimately ask. Sometimes we can test by revelation answers
not contained in revelation. Sometimes we are left wondering and, if
�52
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
no Socrates is present, or no one like Socrates, we have to remind ourselves of our ignorance of many things.
I believe that Christians must reject much of modern thought
which does not stand the test when examined in the light of revealed
truth. Of course, that it does not stand the test is something that has
to be shown. Is modernity, then, to be rejected wholesale? It is impossible to deny that modern science has led to the discovery of many truths
and that it has made possible an enormous increase in man's power over
the world at the same time that it has come to place all of human life
in jeopardy. One cannot say that it has led to wisdom. Respect for the
truth requires that we make distinctions. Never forgetting the ancient
and Biblical emphasis on duty and obedience to law as primary, we
must acknowledge the rightness of one modern idea that has been voiced
by several popes and that underlies the Constitution of the United States
with its amendments, and that is the idea that human beings just by being human have certain rights, for instance the right to liberty. In my
opinion, it is a good thing that the Constitution forbids any religious
test for public office under the United States and that the first amendment forbids Congress to make any law prohibiting the free exercise
of religion. It was a shameful thing that in England between 1673 and
1828 no one could hold civil or military offices without taking an oath
in denial of transubstantiation. One might be compelled with one's lips
to profess or deny this or that religious doctrine. But the heart cannot
be compelled. As the Second Vatical Council declared, "No one is to
be forced to embrace the Christian faith."
Aristotle in the Ethics presents two kinds of life as good kinds:
the philosophic life and the political life, and of thes~ two the philosophic
life is immensely superior. According to Christianity, the life of faith
is the best kind of life and it need not require very much in the way
of philosophy or even of theology. I do not have to exhort you to live
the life of faith. It is given you to do so. Nor do I expect most of you
to devote your lives to theology or the philosophizing that accompanies theology. But I would hope that your life in Christ would be a life
in which you continue, in a way made available to you by this college,
to be concerned with the profound theological questions and the profound answers, and the questions raised by those answers. Political life
you can hardly avoid. At the present moment, one wonders whether
the noble attempt of the founders of our republic to solve the problems
of government by the institutions of government will come to grief.
The founders well knew that the problems of government cannot be
solved merely by the institutions of government. Government of the
people and by the people will be government for the people only if the
people are educated in the way in which this college has sought to edu-
�SMITH
53
cate you, the way of righteousness and truth. We do not expect America or the nations together to become by human means the kingdom
of God. But that does not relieve us of our duty to order our own lives
and to do what we can, however small, to make human life for all men
on this planet not only possible but worthwhile. Our political hope,
whether for America or for the nations of the earth, may be~ as maybe
political hope always is~a hope against hope. We have a sure and certain hope expressed in the prayer given us by Christ our Lord when
He bids us to pray to God our Father that His kingdom come.
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�How Liberty Won
the Sweet Sixteen
From The '!hies of the liberty Renaissance
Ken Colston
To The Not Overcareful Reader of These Tales
There are those who maintain that the entire story was a countrybred New Journalist's confabulation, that Clyde Trample, by profession editor-and-typesetter-in-chief of the tiny Northern Kentucky Chronicle, quirky amateur historian and acerb wit by disposition, made it up
out of whole cloth, sending the boxed results to a half-dozen renegade
presses simultaneously, his area weekly having recently come into a
workhouse Macintosh word-processor and two letter-quality printers.
Skeptics point out that there's no such town in northern Kentucky as
Liberty, that the Interstate 64 doesn't even have an extension, that no
governor in Kentucky ever wore hair even with the tops of his ears,
never did, never will, and that Louisville high-school basketball teams
don't compete in the Twelfth or Thirteenth Regions, neither one.
Clyde will reply with eye-rolling smugness that of course in order
to protect his newspaper from unseemly and costly litigation he had
Ken Colston is the Director of Residence at St. John's College, Annapolis. The Tales
ofthe Liberty Renaissance was originally written for the Writing Seminars at the Johns
Hopkins University. Published here are the framing preface and the first part of the
first of the novel's six tales.
55
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
to change the names of certain key personages and of all the critical
locales, but that everything in the book happened as written, give or
take a few colorizing details, and that he can prove it or kick your ass
over it, your choice.
Then some ill-read nitpicking yokel will ask why if the names
is changed does Clyde keep his just as his mother-haw! haw!-give
it to him on the day he was born.
Whereupon Clyde will grip. his Mont Blanc Diplomat like a
Barlow knife and retort, "Hasn't any of you narrow-eyed incest-begot
stump-hilljacks ever heard of playful self-reference?"
How Liberty Won the Sweet Sixteen
It all started with the men who cooked up the United States
Supreme Court, but it is better to pursue a shorter thread.
The Kentucky part of it started long enough ago for memory to
be slightly imperfect when the Fabulous 89th Congress voted money
to the Commonwealth Department of Highways to connect Interstates
64, 71, and 75. The new extension would run right past Liberty, render
the buzzard-dropped burg equidistant from Louisville, Covington, and
Lexington, and pull it into the enlightened lap of the Great Society.
They were even going to build two rest areas, one north and one south
of town.
So excited were some Libertines that you would have thought
that Ford and General Motors had broken ground for assembly plants.
Jacob Range Taylor had to hire three pretty chain-smoking saleswomen
to handle all the calls in his real-estate office, a move that galled the
Backwards-Dunking Baptists. When the news broke in the Liberal, readers accused Editor Clyde Trample of being in cahoots with Jacob Range.
The feed-capped bench jockeys who sat and spat under the catalpa trees
by the courthouse in July humidity or in their pickup trucks during January rain had their suspicions:
"Clyde's made the whole thang up."
"Jacob Range has put his place up for sale. Wants a million dollars. Hit's got to be a lie."
"Better not be. Ape Collins has bought apiece of land off Taylor
for a truck stop."
"I know one thang: if the road comes, a bunch of dern niggers'll
come with it. This town ain't never amounted to nothing."
That was a lie, for Liberty had had its day in the sun-in fact,
had had several. Almost two centuries before, Erasmus Lee Jefferson,
a second cousin of our beloved Thomas, had nourished high hopes for
�COLSTON
57
his Utopian settlement along Quick Creek, a branch off the Kentucky
River. Erasmus had hit the Territory Trail with a wagonload of curious odds-and-ends: nineteen children by his first four wives, Diderot's
and D' Alembert's Encyclopedie, a swivel chair badly in need of an oiling, a telescope with a cracked lens, a rabid fifth wife, two long-rifle
boxes of sugar-cane stems packed in mud, and a map of Caintuckee
that was off by nearly ten degrees of latitude. Erasmus was determined
first to cultivate Saccharum officinarum and then he'd think up some
perfect society worthy of his dreamed Caribbean wealth. In the beginning, he was lucky. The February of his arrival was April-like, and
his wife's rabies cleared up and left her wickedly ambitious. She planted right away. The growing season was hot and muggy, and the first
frost wasn't until December. The harvest was beyond all hopes. Then
a fleet of Cincinnati keelboats took a wrong turn off the Ohio River
and ran aground in Erasmus's back yard just as his wife was wondering what to do with the bumper crop. The captain believed that he'd
never steer back on course without unloading some of the scrawny and
useless passengers, and Erasmus's wife, Gladys Ruth, believed that the
crop would rot on the banks like washed-up cattails unless white slave
labor turned the presses. So the two entrepreneurs made a swap, a barrel of raw syrup in exchange for each man, a half-barrel for each woman. That is how most of the clans arrived-the Armstrongs, Robinsons,
Henrys, Colstons, Cobs, and Taylors. The captain was so impressed
with Gladys Ruth that he dubbed the still unnamed landing Little New
Orleans and sold nonnotarized stocks on it in Louisville, St. Louis, and
Natchez. By Christmas the town boasted a trading post, a hardware
store, a bank that issued its own currency, a schoolhouse with alphabet
horns in Attic Greek, but no church.
That Easter, after putting away a pint of young rum, Erasmus
screwed up his courage and took on Gladys Ruth. He gathered together
the family's newly acquired white slaves, carved them off twenty acres
apiece of his huge claim, and set them free. "We couldn't have kept
them anyways," he shrugged to Gladys Ruth. "For this knobby terrain, like that of ancient Attica, will not admit of bondage. The future
is Liberty.'' Gladys Ruth posted three of her stepsons around the sugar
presses.
Thus, the new town had a name, but Erasmus wouldn't register
it with the Post Office until he decided upon the kind of society he wanted. He took his time because he didn't want to blow it. Our age of mere
perpetuation forgets too easily the enormous responsibility borne by
the founders, who knew that one false step and destiny might never
recover. If they read the rivers wrong, prosperity would harbor elsewhere; if they made no place for the arts, their garden crofts would
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
soon be pig sties; if they didn't strike the right balance between freedom and control, their descendants would live in chaos or in chains.
It was quite a burden, and it gave old Erasmus pause. There was so
much choice; Liberty could be anything he wanted: a theocracy, as in
Massachusetts; a corporation, as at Jamestown; a haven of religious
tolerance, as in Pennsylvania; a republic of small farmers, as cousin
Thomas dreamed about; even a communistic conglomeration of phalanxes, as some of Tom Paine's friends advocated. The kinds of societies were as numerous in those heady days as the brands of soda in these
humble times. Erasmus put off his decision, and the Kentucky Postmaster in the young state capital refused to deliver the mail without
a toponym in the books. Petty-minded bureaucrats, too, can trace their
ancestry.
Erasmus brought up the matter with his hard young wife. ''I fear
lest Government retard the People, Gladys Ruth,'' he told her that May,
when, owing to the mild winter, the mosquitoes were already as big
as hummingbirds and so full with blood that they lay on the grass like
foundered cows.
"So the hell with gov'ment," Gladys Ruth exclaimed. "Just sign
that 'air form from Frankfort so's we can get the 'skeeter netting Momma's sent us.''
"Hot damn!" Erasmus cried. "That's enough to make
Robespierre look like a Tory. Fiat sic. "
And sick it was. Word soon went around that the gobblers and
knobs north of Lexington and south of Cincinnati were a lawless territory, and those sawed-off hills and scrub clearings and swampy valleys filled up fast with Klinkenbeards and Harrisons. In those days, if
justice wasn't local, it didn't exist: no higher authority gave a damn
about some crackpot settlement on the edge of the Shawnees' stomping
ground. Before long, the town was so dark and bloody that the Indians
shied away. One night, the corpulent head of the Klinkenbeards disappeared, and a few days later a rummed-up Harrison bragged that his
brothers had diced him and tossed him into a spicy burgoo. A feud was
on. They gut shot each other's women and children, beheaded each
other's old men, and spoke disrespectfully to each other's coon dogs.
Under pressure from his Baptist constituency, who were embarrassed
by the bad name Liberty was giving the whole state, the Governor dispatched up the militia. They got scared and mutinied just above Quick
Creek, beyond which they had heard that even Georgians feared to go
without a Klinkenbeard or Harrison escort.
Human decency went by the boards. The Henrys and Boyds
walked around naked. The McGoffins staffed a whorehouse with
midgets, livestock, and the hearing-impaired. Apparently getting wind
�COLSTON
59
of this pleasure dome, some dubious emigres who claimed to have
shamed the licentious court of Louis Fifteenth showed up with their
Jesuit confessors in a rickety carrosse. They introduced love aids made
of precious metals and ostrich feathers and offered the patent rights to
anyone-man, woman, or animal-who could show the ennuye Dauphin something new. This supposed royal heir was so obese that he
couldn't close his right eye and had to have an effeminate attendant
moisten it every five minutes with salt water. The contest was on, and
after three days a big Floyd woman and her jack mule won. In no time
at all, gobblers-and-knobs smiths were selling their erotic wares to hucksters bound for the Louisiana Purchase. To this day, one of these contraptions shows up every now and then at a Liberty garage sale. One
rare find is called a cat tweezers, from chatouilleuse, and it still grips
like a professional bowler and cuddles like a collie puppy. Those old
boys were craftsmen.
Young Liberty was as experimental as a freshman dormitory at
a prestigious university, and custom was razed like a country church
by a tornado. The Taylors ate breakfast at sunset; the Jeffersons used
Bible paper as fire tinder; the McDarmint girls refused to give in to
their daddies. Nothing passed on authority. One forward-looking Jefferson boy decided that cooking was a superfluity. He began eating his
pork raw and wound up trading ten acres of prime bottomland to an
Armstrong witch for a worm charm. Another concluded that, Newton
notwithstanding, a wheel and an inclined plane created rather than saved
work. His warehouse went bankrupt, and late in life he found a negative sign in the wrong place. In those revolutionary years, if they thought
of it, they tried it. Some daring Robinson women taught a dozen black
bears to dance. This was a huge success until one night a wild-eyed
high-stepper went into heat and mauled a strongly cologned stringer
from a Louisville tabloid. These folies ursines went out of business,
and the furry chorus girls were ground up into meat patties. Erasmus
Jefferson proclaimed his desire to teach every boy and girl in the gobblers and knobs to do percentages and the brightest to read Greek, and
he was the only laughing-stock.
So it is when the world is new but the people in it have been
around: no traditions, no obstacles. Liberty's frrst promoters found that
they could bill the town anything they wanted. The keelboat captain
called it Little New Orleans, and Erasmus came up with Kentucky
Athens. An Austrian Egyptologist of the first water, enticed by Erasmus's spurious find of Shawnee pictographs bearing striking resemblances to those recently discovered hieroglyphics, proclaimed this
sugar-cane town the Luxor of the West, never minding that Liberty's
would-be namesake was plunked smack in the middle of the desert. The
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
French Jesuits who rode with the obese Dauphin sent back word to Rome
that they had come upon the Sodom and Gomorrha of the New World.
In rushed a tough Spanish comparu'a de Jesus recently reinstated by Pius
IV and ready to prove their mettle in spiritual reform. They hitched
a ride with a one-armed Harrison teamster, who talked ethics with them:
"Personally, I don't care what kind of fucking a man does so long's
he keeps it in the family." He drove his mule up a steep knob, where
his relatives were butchering for a burgoo. The Black Robes took one
look at the ceremony and turned north to work with the Shawnees, where
Satan had not gotten such a foothold. The Jesuitical allusion held,
however, and old men and women high up on Quick Creek still can
be heard saying that they were born in "Solomon and Gonorrhea."
Erasmus surveyed his anarchic Utopia and wondered where he
had gone wrong. He didn't like what he saw, but he asked himself where
one should draw the line. Cannibalism was not his cup of tea, but de
gustibus non disputandum est. The Dionysian carrying on broke his
heart. His dream of writing the definitive rebuttal to the Federalist Papers
dried up; Gladys Ruth infected him with the pox; he walked bald and
shivering through the muddy streets, talking in Greek to the hogs and
hounds. When a vision rots, the dreamer's mind goes bad with it.
The next fall, the weather's pendulum swung back like a swing
seat pumped by a hyperactive kid. A heavy snow piled in on All Saints'
Day, a foot dropping in four hours. Erasmus looked at his map and
ran out into the snow in his long underwear.
"Those pox-spreading land speculators!" he shouted.
Gladys Ruth went tromping through the drifts barefoot, wielding a cane sickle. "There ain't enough survived the cold," she declared,
"to soak a sugar tit." That night she left town with the banker, blizzard or no blizzard, and everybody with any sense or ambition followed
them, which explains why Liberty would remain poor and overcrowded for more than a century.
From boom to bust in three years: this foreshortened frontier story
was a miniature of the land of sudden sweeping change. As soon as
the snow melted, the remaining Libertines got religion. It was called
the Quick Creek Great Awakening of 1813. Abraham P.S. Cob, a
harelipped charismatic who had a way with the damned and dispossessed, picked on Erasmus Lee Jefferson in a sermon that lasted for
the entire week-long slow thaw. That babbling beanpole, P.S. whined,
was an atheist, a heliocentric, a Jacobin, a polyglot, and a Bachelor
of Arts. He burned the Bible, worked on the Sabbath, and advocated
vaccination. Moreover, like other Godless men such as Voltaire and
Franklin, he himself suffered from the pox. No wonder the Almighty
went so far as to blow in on a Catholic holiday.
�COLSTON
61
P.S. played to an outdoor crowd warmed by bonfires of burning
sugar barrels on the banks of Quick Creek. On the seventh day of P .S.'s
homily, his shivering congregation took fever. They shaked and quaked,
quook and shook, and then they headed for Quick Creek with Erasmus, dunking him backwards, nine-hundred-and-sixty-nine times-a
backwoods allusion to long-lived Methusaleh-and a Revolutionary War
sawbones said that his heart probably stopped on the hundredth immersion. After this ritualistic purification, they jumped in themselves, all
but the Klinkenbeards and Harrisons, which must have disappointed
the crawdads. Then they stormed over to the schoolhouse with flaming
oak boards, burned that last and best hope for mankind to the ground,
and urinated on the ashes.
They raised a log church on that very spot. It collapsed three
times that winter and killed six people, but was raised anew each time
with increased faith. After the first collapse, the Harrisons and Klinkenbeards headed for the briars and overhangs. P .S. joined forces with
some Robinson and Armstrong elders, and together they made Liberty's
first laws: against cannibalism, bestiality, bundling, hatless women,
Sabbath-breaking, public defecation, atheism, polygamy, snuff, chin
whiskers, earrings, whist, spirits, and the French language. The Gallic
influence got the blame for the late iniquity. Night rides against
homesteaders with names such as Le Jenne and Bomarshay were not
uncommon. Despite the heroic efforts of three Jefferson first-born males,
Liberty would not get another school until the twentieth century, and
that one would not have been built without a mysterious order from
Frankfort and a squadron of Army military police.
The obscure little village oscillated between boom and bust
throughout its !50-plus years. On the eve of Fort Sumter, a Cob discovered a rich saltpeter vein near Quick Creek. Within a month, three
gunpowder plants went up. After the Battle of Manassas, however, where
four kegs mysteriously blew up as if sparked by spontaneous combustion, Abraham Lincoln banned the purchase of all supplies from unreliable Gobblers-and-Knobs Explosives. In the 1880's, the Southern
Railroad put through a section of track connecting with the CovingtonLexington line in hopes of stimulating regional logging. The project
turned out to be only so much worthless steel and labor, for timber companies soon learned that the local white oak and scrub pine was full
of termite holes even when green and became dry and splintery when
seasoned. The last bringer of hope was Liberty Pike, started in the New
Deal and intended to be an alternative route for U.S. 25. Then mercurial Mars (to mix mythology) dealt Liberty another cruel blow on the
day that lives in infamy. With the country's resources devoted to the
national interest, all work on Liberty Pike was immediately stopped,
�62
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
and it wasn't resumed until after Potsdam, when less generous Fair Dealers saw fit merely to connect the Freedom Highway, as it was known,
to U.S. 25 via winding back roads maintained by poor counties. For
the last thirty years, the county seat of Cob County had been at least
two hours away from the three great cities of the Commonwealth Golden
Triangle.
Cut off for so long from the world, Liberty was unto itself. Even
in the mid-1960's, Bill Ed Tuck, the barber, used hand clippers. Pap
Henry, the druggist, sold two gallons of enema refills a week; Ape Collins, owner of the Pure Oil gas station and a six-footer with a sevenfoot arm span, packed standard transmissions with sawdust; Rudy Smoot,
the grocer, operated a milk truck; Doc Puckett, the chiropractor, wrote
prescriptions without having a medical degree; most of the Harrisons
and Klinkenbeards owned stills. For beer, the best bet was bootleg,
since Cob County was dry, or Wilma Harrison's First/Last Chance on
the edge of wet contiguous Crackenham County. But this new expressway promised to bring Liberty up-to-date, and fast.
That was how the story of the founding was told in an obscure
historical journal by the ambitious wife of an archaeologist whom the
Commonwealth sent down to dig around before the extension construction began. With the reluctant help of the Backwards Dunking Local
Missionaries, she interviewed the courthouse bench jockeys, the patients at the old folks' home in Ararat, and the regulars at the First/Last
Chance. The journal was eager to increase its circulation and jazzed
up the wife's prose and invented a few corroborating facts without substantially changing the thesis. When the article was published, Brenda
Mane Armstrong, aspiring School Board member and head of the Local
Missionaries, was livid. She seized the tapes she was storing for the
wife in the church basement and spearheaded an angry but unsuccessful protest on ecological grounds against the archaeologist's digs out
where the wife was told had been the Territory Trail.
"You're tearing up nature and everythang," Brenda Mane said.
The archaeologist looked for weeks and never found a sign of
the Trail, although he did delve into an Eastern Woodland midden, from
which he scraped out a buffalo pelvis. Determined to fish out some
pioneer remains, he explored along Quick Creek, but found nothing
more interesting than two ordinary fossils, as common as dirt, and they
were borderline at that.
"I can't understand it," he told his wife. "I haven't come across
anything more than seventy-five years old-not a square-head nail, a
threadless bolt, or a piece of cast iron. This town has nothing beneath
the surface."
�COLSTON
63
"Are you calling me a liar?" His wife got huffy. "I've seen copies
of the newspaper from the Civil War."
The issue was never resolved, and it destroyed their marriage.
The bench jockeys got a big kick out of it.
The wife may have been referring to yellowed issues of the
Liberal, for Clyde Trample still used antique type, spelled "public"
with a final k, spurned headlines and photographs, and wrote columnlength paragraphs. He ran excerpts from her article on the back page
to get Brenda Mane's goat and did a profile on the new governor, who
sported a Paul McCartney haircut and drove a Jaguar.
So even before the first bulldozers were heard, Liberty made ready
for the extension. The Cob County Commissioners took bids on a sewer
system. C. Williamson Robinson, known as the Incest Defender, began reading up on personal injury law. The Dairy Queen put in a whole
new line of ice-ball flavors. Morgana Tuck, Billy Ed's wife, made him
buy a neck vacuum. She had blamed the unfulfilled promise of Liberty
Pike on her husband's failure to go electric.
"This time," she said, "we're not going to let a major highway
connecting us to the throb and beat of the nation get away from us.''
She herself built up a beehive hair-do on her head just as she had seen
on a short woman in Cincinnati. Unfortunately it collapsed on her one
day when she was buying Rainbow Bread at Rudy Smoot's. Delph
Henry, Pap's smart-mouthed boy, saw it cave in on one side and said,
"Quick, Ma, let's git out of here before !hey's a swarm!"
And even before the first dust clouds billowed, the local
churches-queer little sects that had been cut off from low Protestantism for better than a century-voiced their opinions. The Unlimited
Adventists hailed it as yet another Coming. The Grape Juice Christians
said it was the beginning of the end to regional temperance. The Squawking Methodists railed that it was going to be a freeway for the Antichrist.
But the Backwards Dunking Baptists, who proudly claimed to be the
first Baptists to practice immersion in the revealed manner before all
the others climbed on the bandwagon, were the biggest church in Cob
County and their attitude counted most.
"We withhold all judgment," Reverend Isa Dale said, "for a
later date in the future down the road 'cause there is some good thangs
to be said for progriss."
It was Frank Collins, Ape's trouble-maker of a son, who saw
the first signs of the highway. He was on the truck-stop site, standing
on the cab of an asphalt truck looking through binoculars.
"Here they come, Daddy," Frank shouted. "Bulldozers and
cement trucks and a Negro road crew."
�64
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Ape threw down his asphalt rake and cussed Frank down from
the cab. "Don't let me ever hear you call them Negroes again, boy,"
he said, snatching away the binoculars so violently that Frank's head
snapped back. He mounted the cab and took a look for himself. "Them's
niggers, sure enough.''
Yes, it was true: the government was actually paying them money
to stand around with spades over their shoulders. A few operated the
big bulldozers, and one was even a foreman, giving orders to a white
crew. It was hard to take, sort of like watching old athletes sit the bench
while young bloods gained applause. The bench jockeys jabbered about
it:
"I ain't never going to drive on no road built by niggers."
"You reckon they'll be driving on it?"
"Shore. It don't go now heres but to nigger cities."
"Can niggers drive?"
''I seen one driving a Mercury the other day. It was a automatic.''
But that they vowed never to drive on the extension didn't keep
them from watching it being built. During the day, they walked from
the courthouse down to sit among the honey locusts for a close look
at the devastation. It had the magnitude of a disaster movie: dynamite
exploded hills from the ground up, like earthquakes; bulldozers razed
bushes and woods, like floods. Trees lay stretched out and helpless like
bombed soldiers. Deer and rabbits ran recklessly about as if fleeing
a forest fire.
Pretty soon, dairy farmers who had long since let their cows go
dry got two hundred dollars an acre and free barbwire for their wildonioned and yellow-clovered pastures, through which the blazed area
ran, glinting and straight like a zipper. Taking a detour only around
the horse farms near Lexington, it swerved otherwise for nothing, relentless, wide, and cold-eyed, like a convoy of tanks through a forest. "Kiss
my ass,'' exclaimed one bench jockey sitting on a lawn chair, ''if that
ain't going to be a road!"
Day by day, the Negro highway workers inched closer and closer
to Liberty. They drove to the job site six to an Oldsmobile; they fished
and hunted crawdads on their lunch hours; they got within two miles
of the white women. Boss Dunn said he saw a whole gang of them corning out of the woods behind his trailer, each carrying a possum by the
tail. Any day now he expected to see them talking to somebody he knew.
Finally, it happened, one day when the temperature reached a
hundred and the road crew was within walking distance of Market Street.
The Negro foreman tightened his belt a notch and headed straight for
town. By the time he passed the bench jockeys, he had drawn a following of nine boys who thought he was either a space man or a profes-
�COLSTON
65
sional boxer. If he didn't change direction, he would run smack into
Pap Henry's drug store and soda fountain. It was scandalous enough
to make the bench jockeys stand up.
The foreman was brilliant with sweat, and most of the gathered
crowd had never seen a Negro. In fact, they didn't know you weren't
supposed to use that word anymore. Of course, neither Pap Henry's
nor anything else in Liberty had ever been segregated, and, since the
last black in town was a telephone lineman who set foot on earth only
for lunch and coffee breaks, they weren't real sure about unwritten laws
concerning the mingling of the races. Nevertheless, they .had the feeling that this young fellow who shone like Sidney. Poi tier was going to
attempt something reckless and forbidden.
He did. He bought the boys some candy. "Give me a bag of suckers for these childerns," the foreman said inside Pap's.
The boys defied their daddies by accepting, plunking the suckers into jaws packed with chewing tobacco.
Then the foreman walked over to the fountain, and the cashier,
Lilian Waters, forgot to push in on her drawer. She had rung up ten
thousand dollars. Delph Henry got scared and ran into the back room
to fetch Pap. The customers stood close by so as to see which stool
they would have to avoid sitting on forevermore.
Well, he pissed off everybody by not sitting down. ''I's hot and
dripping everwhar," he explained.
Lilian forced a denture smile for a few seconds and then huffed,
"Well, we get by with the fan."
While the foreman eyed the menu above the ceramic-and-steel
milkshake mixers, the customers were taking their time looking over
the Epsom Salts and enemas. Finally, Pap Henry emerged from the
back room, twitching his neck as if to scare off flies.
"Root-beer float," the foreman said. Sheriff Boone was standing in the doorway by then, and he distinctly noticed that the foreman
forgot to say please. The Sheriff was ready to go to work, for there
must have been a dozen voters in there.
Pap's neck twitched some more, and then he picked up the ice
cream scoop with a flourish. "Hit's on the house," he announced. "I
was just fixing to send out some flyers. Until that 'air road is finished,
everthang on the menu's ten per-cent off for you and the rest of your
crew." Pap was a horse trader, and that was a smart move, for the
Dairy Whip was a quarter-mile closer to the ·extension, and he had been
looking for a chance to run it out of business for a long time.
*
��I \\
.,
I
�Two Translations
of La Fontaine
La Cigale et la fourmi
La Cigale, ayant chante
Tout l'Ete,
Se trouva fort depourvue
Quand Ia bise fut venue.
Pas un seul petit morceau
De mouche ou de vermisseau.
Elle alia crier famine
Chez Ia Fourmi sa voisine,
La priant de lui preter
Quelque grain pour subsister
Jusqu'a Ia saison nouvelle.
Je vous ~aierai, lui dit-elle,
Avant !'Out, foi d'animal,
Interet et principal.
La Fourmi n'est pas pretense;
C' est hi son moindre ctefaut.
'Que faisiez-vous au temps chaud?
Dit-elle cette emprunteuse.
-Nuit et jour tout venant
Je chantais, ne vous cteplaise.
- Vous chantiez? j' en suis fort aise.
Eh bien! dansez maintenant.'
a
a
La Fontaine, Fables, I,
1.
66
�LA FONTAINE
67
The Cicada and the Ant
The cicada, having sung her song
All summer long,
Was left deprived
When the north wind arrived:
Not a bit of worm laid by,
Nor bite of fly.
To her neighbor the ant
She went to chant
Her complaint of starvation
And borrow a ration
Of grain
Till summer came round again.
'I'll pay you back with interest before
Next fall,' she swore
Upon her
Insect's honor.
The ant was not a lender
(Heaven defend her
From such an accusation!)
She asked the beggar 'What did you do
When the days were warm and the sky was blue?'
'Night and day throughout the summer
I sang my song to every comer.'
The ant: 'I'm sure your singing was entrancing:
Now try dancing. '
E.Z.
�68
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Le Corbeau et le renard
Maitre Corbeau, sur un arbre perche,
Tenait en son bee un fromage.
'
' '
Maitre Renard, par I' odeur alleche,
Lui tint ii peu pres ee langage:
Et bonjour, Monsieur du Corbeau.
Que vous etes joli! que vous me semblez beau!
Sans mentir, si votre ramage
Se rapporte ii votre plumage,
Vous etes le Phenix des hotes de ees bois.
A ees mots, le Corbeau ne se sent pas de joie;
Et pour montrer sa belle voix,
II ouvre un large bee, laisse tomber sa proie.
Le Renard s'en saisit, et dit: Mon bon Monsieur,
Apprenez que tout flatteur
Vit aux ctepens de eelui qui I' eeoute.
Cette le9on vaut bien un fromage, sans doute.
Le Corbeau honteux et eonfus
Jura, mais un peu tard, qu'on ne l'y prendrait plus.
1,11.
�LA FONTAINE
69
The Crow and the Fox
Sir Crow was perching in a tree
Holding in his beak a brie.
Sir Fox, attracted by the cheese,
Spoke words like these:
'Such handsome plumage! Such a sleek veneer!
If your trilling
Is half so thrilling
How sweetly you must sing! Please do so:
Of all the woodland warblers, let me hear
The Caruso.'
The victim has no choice:
He must show off his voice.
He opens his great beak and drops the cheese.
Seizing the prize, the fox observes: 'Mon cher,
Here is a lesson worth a camembert:
Every flatterer
Lives on the income of his flatteries.'
The crow, ashamed and shaken, swore that he
Never again would be a flatteree.
E.Z.
����Book Review
Allan Bloom:
The Closing of the American Mind*
Eva Brann
I
Here is a book which compels the question whether we should
be glad of its existence. My answer is that we should be thrice glad,
glad once that it was written, and glad that, having been produced, it
found such favor with the public. The bulk of this review will address
itself to the reservations which prompt the question in the first instance.
Of the two reasons for rejoicing in its success-it is at the date of this
writing in first place on the best-seller list-one is somewhat sly and
the other quite straightforward. First, Mr. Bloom's book is the jeremiad of liberal education; but a Jeremiah eagerly heard, a prophet honored
in his own land, is a prophet more than half refuted. As for the plain
pleasure, it is simply that the book will do some concrete good.
Some good, evidenced in small incremental improvements: the
ear of a foundation here, a modest program there. Mr. Bloom himself
has no illusions about a great systemic reprise of liberal education (380).
An indication of the practical impossibility that the requisite cohesion
should ever come back, is in the concurrent success of E. D. Hirsch's
book, Cultural Literacy, in which is advocated a return to what used
to be called "general information" (now defined descriptively as acquaintance with a list of some 3800 terms), while the one solution Mr.
Eva Brann is a Tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. Shy is the author of Paradoxes
of Education in a Republic (University of Chicago, 1970). This review was written
in July, 1987.
*New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987
71
�72
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Bloom finally offers-to be sure, with many cautionary contortionsnamely the reading of Great Books (344), is disavowed in Hirsch's
preface. In truth, the thought of our whole vast establishment suddenly
converted to liberal learning is somehow appalling, like the image of
a continent-sized wheel of fine, ripe cheese. The factor of scale seems
to me serious and of the essence. Communities of liberal learning require small size and spontaneous beginnings; the unanimity which ensouls and maintains them becomes oppressive and mechanical when
hugely magnified and centrally mandated.
In fact, it is strange to me that Mr. Bloom fixed on the universities as the possible loci for the learning whose loss he mourns, when
surely our three thousand or so small colleges are its more likely home.
The glory of the modern university has properly been not in contemplative reflection and aporetic conversation but in cumulative research
and brilliant breakthroughs. And I will pit my experience in a score
of more or less obscure little schools against his among a thousand
university students: In these places student souls are still capable of grand
longings, books are read with receptive naivete, and religion is not debased to the frisson of' 'the sacred.'' Small places are our internal educational frontier, and the spirit lives in the sticks.
With respect to the effective influence the book might exert (as
opposed to the passing waves it superimposes on the roiled ocean of
opinion), there is something to be regretted in Mr. Bloom's policy of
presenting himself as a voice crying in a wilderness; for in fact the wilderness has quite a few cultivated clearings. He speaks namelessly of his
teachers and not at all of the institutional foci of resistance to the rot
he exposes. His likely motives are most reasonable: not to be set aside
because of sectarian associations, and, by suppressing the names of his
allies and predecessors, to win the right of keeping the targets of his
contempt anonymous. Consequently this irate tract manages to preserve
a certain American civility. Nonetheless, the price is that general readers will have to discover for themselves the addresses of the contemporary sources and places where effective resistance is carried on, such
as St. John's College itself.*
*Some of these fellow-fighters in the battle against the soul-unstaying piffle-terms, those
relaxants of shape and significance, which are the real, or at least the most interesting,
butt of the book, such as creativity, self, culture, life-style, and communication, are
hearteningly easy to find. For example, there are Judith Martin's vastly popular ''Miss
Manners" books, which, under the guise of pronouncing on etiquette, often ironicize
our linguistic mores; thus Miss Manners bids us to "make a special effort to learn
to stop communicating with one another, so that we can have some conversation."
Here is no inconsiderable ally!
�BRANN
73
One word more on the reception of the book. Quite a few people are obscurely enraged by it and express that aversion-just as Mr.
Bloom indeed predicts-by means of certain schematic terms, such as
racism, elitism, and nostalgia-mongering, that are currently used to
impute as sin unpopular though perfectly defensible opinions. It should
not be considered a sin for Mr. Bloom to observe regretfully the more
than occasional self-segregation of black students in the universities.
Again, if one really wished to show him wrong, one would not
angrily call him an elitist-silly term-but, by refraining, prove that
democracies can indeed contain even their contraries. On "Firing Line"
in May of this year Mr. Bloom respectfully but skeptically characterized the views of Midge Deeter (who is, incidentally, one of his predecessors in worrying about America's young) as "serious populism." For
my part, I subscribe to this sort of populism, which precisely disavows
the entity called "the People" because of the conviction that people
one by one have in them, besides sound sense, the roots of reflection;
thus they occupy places in a continuum with the deepest philosophers
and are capable of participating to some degree in a common liberal
education.
This proposition is what Mr. Bloom evidently disbelieves. He
thinks that philosophy, the highest pursuit, is not for everybody. I think
he is wrong, democratic or undemocratic aside. (I do not want to concede either to him or to his opponents that his own opinions are truly
any more incompatible with strong democratic sentiments than many
other things one needs to believe along with one's civic creed. There
is an argument which in its amplitude would have brought even Mr.
Bloom into the democratic fold had he cared to use it: pluralism.)
To begin with, his view of aristocracy has a stylized, unreal air.
He seems to think that the honor-seeking aristocratic type, the magnanimous lover of the beautiful and the useless, is dominant in real-life
aristocracies, just as he must think the vain, sycophantic, utilitarian,
democratic type is pervasive in democracies (250). From what I read
and hear, "the beautiful" for aristocrats has usually meant-and still
means-mostly horseflesh, and if Mr. Bloom were not first run through
by his aristocrat's sword for impugning his stud as useless, he would
soon find himself dying of boredom from the nobleman's conversation.
To be sure, Squire Western is more lovable than the aesthetic snob Mr.
Bloom unwittingly delineates. These aristocrats, who, Mr. Bloom himself is careful to state, are far from being philosophers, are said by him
to be likely to admire philosophers for their uselessness (250). To my
knowledge they used to require them to work for their places at the
bottom of the table as pedagogues and secretaries. But the main point
is that a careless opposition has confused the issue here. The non-
�74
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
utilitarian is not the useless but it is that which is beyond both the useful and the useless, and in particular it is what makes all usefulness
possible. Talk of the uselessness of philosophy obscures its universal
needfUlness.
As for the actual citizens of a democracy, Mr. Bloom writes as
though in this country no businessman had ever written sophisticated
yet beautiful poetry or had ever composed advanced yet lovingly American music, no backwoodsman had ever achieved incomparable yet popular grandeur, no sailor had ever told an enormous moral myth which
was also an account of the whaling industry. Mr. Bloom draws from
his anti-populist views one simple rule for the university: It should not
concern itself with providing its students with the democratic experiences
they cannot escape in democratic society, but it must provide those they
cannot have there (256). It should be a safe-house for aristocracy. This
injunction seems to politicize and turn into paradox a true pedagogical
precept, namely that colleges and universities should provide no "lifeexperiences" at all but should attend to book-learning and the other
theoretical pursuits which are their proper business. Whatever is done
in an American school cannot help but come out as a democratic experience, not least the free and direct discussion of Great Books. For
it involves the democratic presumption that a cat may look at a king.
Europeans tend to find this typically American and somewhat comical.
I have heard the charge of nostalgia-mongering with respect to
what seems to me Mr. Bloom's very restrained rehabilitation of the
fifties. To be sure, I don't quite believe his claim that these were the
great days of the American universities. As I recall it, they were the
very years when professors anticipated Mr. Bloom in bemoaning the
apathy and lack of public commitment on the part of their students, the
years whose prosperous philistinism retarded my Americanization by
a decade. But his praise of the fifties is in any case only the prelude
to the damning of the sixties, the anathema of the book, which Mr.
Bloom hates with verve enough to energize every chapter. This autobiographical impulse is patent to everyone. Not that one would blame
him. What happened at Cornell, what the faculty seems to have permitted itself by way of moral indeterminacy, might well inflict a trauma never to be forgotten. The only saving grace of the episode, which
so blessedly distinguishes it from the case of the German universities
under the Nazis, is that the people of this democracy never made common cause with the professors.
This is the moment to say a word about Mr. Bloom's writing.
As The Closing is, of necessity, something of a magpie book intellectually, so in style it has a sort of mongrel eloquence: literately turned
phrases suddenly develop colloquial cadences, the prose is inspissated
�BRANN
75
with metaphor, and the exposition is torrential. It aroused in me a sense
of sympathetic recognition. This is a style formed under the pressure
of the most pervasive sort of anxiety there is. For most human misfortunes, from physical pain to miscarried love, there is local relief and
the prospect of recovery, but the fear for the spirit of one's country
is an incessant taint upon the enjoyment of life. Mr. Bloom's country
is the America of the Universities, and the anxious patriotism which
steals the serenity from his style does his sentiments honor.
II
To pass from the circumstantial to the substantive: Is this a good
book?
People regularly refer to it as brilliant. So it is, but brilliance
belongs to the demi-monde of intellectual virtues. It would be silly to
regret the flamboyance which is winning it its audience; at the same
time it would be wrong not to register, for the record, certain substantial doubts.
Let me begin this way: I would not recommend the book to students, not because it will offend their sensibilities-it can do them nothing
but good to be forced to defend themselves articulately-but because
it is a book not only of generational pulse-taking but also of intellectual
history. I would not wish our ·students to get their intellectual history
from this book (I shall shortly argue that it is a little too coarse-grained
even of its kind)-or indeed from any book. To my mind, the notion
that the intellect might have a history, that thought might develop a direction over the generations, should come to students as a late and suspect
insight, long after each individual work of thought has been given its
a-historical due.
The Closing of the American Mind is, I am implying, a historicist enterprise or, more fairly, next cousin to it. Since historicism, the
notion that the temporal place of a text determines its significance more
than does the author's conscious intention and that history through its
movements is a real agent, is Mr. Bloom's bete nair, this is no small
charge. But there is no getting around the fact that the book continually
places and positions great names evaluatively from the outside in-of
internal philosophical substance it contains very little. Similarly it persistently sums the spirit of the times and seeks its genealogy in intellectual movements. For example, he says that the university as we know
it is the product of the Enlightenment (250), a typical historicist summation in which the tree vanishes into the forest. Indeed, some of his
judgments are simply distance effects (as are most historicist conclusions), which dissolve under a close inspection. A crucial example is
�76
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the claim that nowadays "all the students are egalitarian meritocrats"
(90). If that were true, and a group held a belief without exception,
one would indeed be driven, willy-nilly to the thought of a domination
by a supra-individual spirit, that is, a congenital psychic infection by
history. In fact it is probably false. In my experience there are always
some students who are acutely if reticently proud of the advantages accruing from the right sex, religion, and social status, while those who
do believe that "each individual should be allowed to develop his special and unequal talents" without reference to those factors might, I
put it to Mr. Bloom, not just generationally believe it but also individually think it; it is certainly what I think.
The title itself is revealing. It is, to be sure, not Mr. Bloom's
choice. He wanted the euphonious and accurate title "Souls Without
Longing" (the French title is "L'Ame desannee''). But he condoned
"The Closing of the American Mind." The "Closing" part is fine:
one of the most convincing chapters is the early one in which he shows
how openness corrupted, which becomes the lazily tolerant path ofleast
resistance, forecloses passionate doubting, and how the springboard of
learning is vigorous prejudice. But "the American Mind" is debased
Hegelianism, and a scandal. Americans do, happily, still have certain
areas of consensus; nonetheless, they have more than one mind among
them.
It is utterly clear to me that Mr. Bloom does not mean what his
words say, but it is odd that he is willing himself to supply the example
of that soul-slackening disconnection of thought from utterance that he
so spiritedly attacks. In fact this permissiveness exacts its price at the
end, when he makes the judgment without which the book would be
pointless: "Philosophy is still possible" (307), even, presumably, in
America. His philosophy of history (and the project of the book really
requires one) is simply too diffuse to support this optimism after all
the gloom: he has obscured the only basis upon which the possible can,
according to Aristotle, ever become actual, namely prior actuality. In
short, "still" is the stumbling block here.
Perhaps what is missing rather than a philosophy of intellectual
history is its antithesis, a theory of opinion-holding, particularly an explanation of how and with what effect people say non-thoughts and become attached to terms of low thought-content. I hold to the axiom,
which must seem culpably cheerful to Mr. Bloom, that shallow opinions are mostly shallowly rooted. Therefore I cannot share his passionate sadness at the deficient eros, the spiritual detumescence (136), of
the American student soul. Though somewhat masked by the gormless
language of the "sensitive, caring and non-possessive relationship,"
lustful, hurtful, exclusive love goes gloriously on.
�BRANN
77
But whether it does or no, there is something not quite consistent in this mourning over the de-compression of the soul. Mr. Bloom
describes with wicked verve the fatal invasion of the limpid American
mind by the dark knowledge of the German refugees. He must know
what a crucial role adolescent intensity played in shaping both these
Europeans and their persecutors. I think that when Americans trivialize the continental depth (!57) they so eagerly absorb, they are often
very sensibly-and not altogether unwittingly-counteracting their own
intellectual prurience. And so, when the young cluelessly acclimatize
Heideggerian Gelassenheit as "staying loose" (or so Mr. Bloom pretends to believe), it may not be such a tragedy: at least from staying
loose there is a possible road to reason.
My doubts so far have really concerned the nature of generalization as practiced in this book, but my final set of complaints concerns its quality. The text seems to be stuffed with truth that is not the
whole truth and not nothing but the truth. Of course it is very hard to
hit all the small nails squarely on the head with so large a mallet, yet
there are fine and there are coarse ways of epitomizing spheres of thought
and trends of opinion. Mr. Bloom's often anonymous and torrential mode
of presentation makes it hard to tell whether the trouble is with his accuracy or his perspective. Moreover, he sometimes seems to present
an anonymous modern opinion as though it had but to come in contact
with the air to self-destruct, while his great moderns, Rousseau and
Nietzsche, seem somehow to merit awed admiration for setting us on
the road we are condemned for following. Mr. Bloom's relation especially to Rousseau is the mystery of mysteries to me. One of the excellences of his exposition is the continual pointing to Rousseau not just
as the uncannily accurate analyst but as the brilliantly effective originator of the corruption-prone side of modernity. (The book neglects
to its detriment the complementary side, the reverence-producing splendor of modern science and mathematics). But then why is Mr. Bloom
not on record as being at least as repelled as he is fascinated by this
"inverse Socrates" (298)?
For Socrates is the pervasive hero of the book-Socrates the
anomalous man, that is, not Socrates the conductor of fairly comprehensible conversations, or the contemplator of communicable truth. This
curtailed Socrates comes before the American public brusquely defining the task of philosophy as learning how to die; from this picture it
takes but a few steps to reach the conclusion that there is an incomposable quarrel between the philosophers and most of mankind (277 -8).
Mr. Bloom manages to turn Socratic philosophizing into an utter arcanum simply through by-passing its substance. I think that when Socrates
is brought on the scene he should appear as practicing the life he thought
�78
THE STJOHN'S REVIEW
worth living.
Indeed, the fact that actual philosophy is kept at one remove in
this book, that it is a tract on the love of the love of wisdom, is responsible for a certain skewing in the analysis of contemporary ills. Let me
give one of many examples I could cite.
That "the self is the modern substitute for the soul" (173) is an
indispensible insight in the analysis of modernity. But in the section
devoted to it Mr. Bloom simply suppresses reference to "subjectivity,"
the philosophical term through which are to be reached the deep and
not ignoble motives for the substitution: to be utterly unfooled, to confront nature as its knower, to be freely good. Consequently contemporary talk of the self and its discovery is deprived of the respectable
strain that, it seems to me, still somehow resonates in the most debased
chatter. Our "three-hundred-year-long identity crisis" is, for all its latterday indignities, the unavoidable working out of a brave and compelling choice: We are essentially neither ensouled instantiations of an eternal species, nor creatures whose souls are made by God, but ungrounded
spontaneous individual subjects. The function of philosophy should be
not to shame us for it, but to re-dignify our dilemmas.
I want to end with the chapter on music, a chapter that is close
to Mr. Bloom's heart, and that he mistakenly thinks is unregarded. In
fact, young readers turn to it first and rage at it, thereby confirming
his observation that rock is their love. It is, to be sure, in a book that
insists that the best is for the few, somewhat inconsistent to discount
the lovers of classical music because they are fewer than one in ten,
but the main point, so truly observed, is that the adherence to rock is
universal. (I have never heard anyone young speak against it.) I do not
quite believe that rock "has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire" (73). I am a sporadic watcher of MTV and know that what
the visualizations pick up in the music is its weirdness, whininess, bizarrerie, meanness, and scariness-in sum, a whole vocabulary of extrasexual excruciation, which is often ironically and even wittily exploited. The appeal is not so hard to understand; it is its universality and
depth that remains a mystery.
For Mr. Bloom's explanation does not quite reach the love aroused
by this, or any, music. For him, following, as he claims, Plato and
Nietzsche, music is the "barbarous expression of the soul," the soul's
primitive, pre-rational speech, pure passion. I take it as read that he
knows his Republic, but where in it did he find this theory? His own
translation corrects the impression given by earlier versions that the
musical modes express the passions (Rep. 398 e 1). According to Socrates
they rather shape them. Moreover, the music must follow the words,
which it couldn't do if it had no close relation to reason. (Indeed it was
�79
BRANN
Socrates' Pythagorean friends who propagated the great tradition or
music as qualitative mathematics.) Some musical modes are more soulrelaxing than others, but these latter, the bracing ones, are the most
potent instruments that the community possesses for forming the soul
into grace amenable to reason. It follows fhat there is nothing truly primitive or pre-rational even about the most orgiastic music, and that when
a sect succumbs to Wagner or a generation to rock, the explanation
cannot start from raw passion, but must begin with corrupt reason. Mr.
Bloom has succumbed to the prime error of those dark Germans, which
is to think that the soul of a rational animal somewhere harbors a naturepreserve of pure primitive passions.
III
To conclude. The Closing of the American Mind is not only an
opportune summation of decades of critique, but it is also among the
early tappings of a turning tide. For the tide is turning, though not to
float a happy and harmonious new liberal learning, but to ground us
in a sad new abstinence. It has very suddenly come home to us that
the world is full of dangers just where we sought our pleasures: spending, sex, substances, sound, even sunshine. We will be drawn in upon
ourselves, we will have to take new thought, and in these straits liberal
literacy, the attentive reading of good books, may eventually play a
modest role as something of a saving grace.
Because of Mr. Bloom this thought may come a little sooner to
a somewhat larger number of people. Moreover, since it comes embedded in a critique of our current condition that is wholly passionate and
largely true, there will be a more immediate effect: Some readers of
the Closing of the American Mind are bound to experience a re-opening
of their minds to the all-but-foreclosed understandings behind our
present. That will be its success beyond celebrity.
�JACOB KLEIN
Lectures and Essays
CONTENTS
1986
393 pages, hardcover, $22.50
The World of Physics and the "Natural" World 0 On a
Sixteenth-Century Algebraist 0 The Concept of Number
in Greek Mathematics and Philosophy 0 Modern Rationalism 0 Phenomenology and the History of Science 0
The Copernican Revolution 0 The Problem of Freedom
0 History and the Liberal Arts 0 The Problem and
the Art of Writing 0 The Idea of Liberal Education 0
Aristotle, an Introduction 0 Leibniz, an Introduction
0 On the Nature of Nature 0 On Dante's Mount of
Purgation 0 On Liberal Education 0 The Myth of
Virgil's Aeneid 0 A Note on Plato's Parmenides 0 On
Precision D About Plato's Philebus 0 Plato's Jon 0
Speech, Its Strength and Its Weaknesses 0 Plato's Phaedo
TO ORDER: Send a check for $22.50 plus $1 for postage and handling to ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE
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Zuckerman, Elliott
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
Stickney, Cary
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Lavery, John
Sachs, Joe
Allanbrook, Douglas
Allanbrook, Wye Jamison
Brann, Eva T. H.
Smith, J. Winfree
Colston, Ken
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The St. John's Review
Volume XXXVIII, number two (1988-2)
Editor
Elliott Zuckerman
Editorial Board
Eva Brann
Beale Ruhm von Oppen
Cary Stickney
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
The St. John's Review is published thrice yearly by the Office of the Dean, St.
John's College, Annapolis; William Dyal, President; Thomas Slakey, Dean. For
those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $12.00 yearly. Unsolicited essays,
stories, poems, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address correspondence to the
Review, St. John's College, Annapolis, MD 21404. Back issues are available, at $4.00
per issue, from the St. John's College Bookstore.
© 1988 St. John's College. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole or in part
without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Composition
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��Contents
LECTURES
I . . . . . . . Fictional Selves and Ghosts: St. Augustine's
Confessions
Howard Zeiderman
21 ....... Human Being, Beast and God: The Place
of Human Happiness According to
Aristotle and Some Twentieth-Century
Philosophers
Deborah Achtenberg
49 . . . . . . . Dead Leaves: Illustrations of
the Genealogy of the Epic Poem
Jonathan TUck
OCCASIONAL SPEECH
75 . . . . . . . Commencement Address
Curtis Wilson
VERSE
82 . . . . . . . Two Poems
Carolyn Wade Loring
84 . . . . . . . Another Fable of La Fontaine
Elliott Zuckerman
BOOK REVIEW
87 . . . . . . . Thomas Flanagan: The Tenants of Time
Eva Brann
Sketches of McDowell Hall by Emily Kutter.
��Fictional Selves and Ghosts:
St. Augustine's Confessions
Howard Zeiderman
In Book VI of the Confessions, Augustine describes an incident that he
observed in Northern Italy. At that time, Augustine was still a professor
of Rhetoric. He was in love with words; he was not yet a lover of the Word.
The incident occurred in Milan. He had travelled there in order to hear
the man purported to be the greatest speaker alive. That man was Ambrose, the Archbishop. Ambrose was a very busy man, who was almost
constantly surrounded by people. It was during one of his rare moments
of solitude that Augustine observed him. Here is Augustine's description:
For very short periods of time, when he was alone, he was either refreshing
his body with food or his mind with reading. When he was reading, his eyes
went over the pages and his heart looked over the sense, but his voice and
tongue were resting.
This picture of a tired man reading alone is not unusual for us. We
might well wonder why it is even mentioned. Is it to show that the great
Ambrose is like the rest of us- tired, somewhat harassed, and in need of
solitude? No. Augustine does not see the similarity. He sees differenceand it startles him. He cannot understand why the bishop, though alone,
is not reading aloud. He puzzles over the sight for the next fifteen lines,
but cannot come up with a convincing explanation. In the end he must
Howard Zeiderman is a Tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. This lecture was
delivered at the Annapolis campus in January, 1988.
1
�2
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
resort to the holiness of Ambrose. As Augustine says: Whatever his reason
for acting in this way, it would certainly be a good one.
This passage about Augustine's incredulity at Ambrose's reading silently
startles me. What should I make of it? I feel that, although I understand
the words, I am missing something. And a careful re-reading of the passage
doesn't bring me any closer to the sense. Such a passage- and each text
that we read at St. John's contains many of them-does not immediately
occasion my approval or disapproval, my agreement or disagreement.
Usually, it is so far from helping me understand something that I feel as
if I understand nothing. Eventually I must move on to more familiar
ground, but the passage stays with me. It is like the ghost of a text. And
like a legitimate ghost, it haunts me. It is haunting because, through it,
a remote, dead world momentarily becomes visible.
Let me try to explain what is so troubling for me about this passage.
Reading is a fairly complicated activity. When I read, I try to understand.
And I succeed when I am being thoughtful about the meaning of words.
Thinking and understanding are private activities. They occur ultimately
in a place I call "inside myself." So I tend to think of serious reading as
an inside activity as well. Of course there are special circumstances in which
we read aloud, either with others or alone. People read aloud when they
are learning to read, or when they are sharing with others what they've
previously read. Sometimes we do in fact read aloud what we have never
read before, but then, frequently, we lose track of the passage, and have
to back-track for a silent re-reading. And there are remarkable passages,
like Augustine's description of Ambrose, which we read aloud to understand what, on a previous silent reading, we had not understood.
Now in this passage about Ambrose, Augustine is startled by the very
opposite of what would startle me. In order to make sense out of the
passage, I would like to claim that reading aloud plays the same role for
him that silent reading plays for me. But I can't do that. To do so would
be to turn what is inside and private-what I think of as reading-into
what is outside and public. Where would I find the place I called "inside
myself'? And what would happen to the thing I call myself? What on earth
could Augustine mean by the words "myself' and "me"? Our "selves" don't
seem to have the same boundaries.
The same difficulties arise if, instead of actually re-writing the text,
I simply interpret the reading aloud that Augustine and Ambrose usually
did while alone, as a form of what we do when we read aloud. However,
this won't work either, because all of the forms that I have described are
modifications and variations of "reading-as-1-know-it" -that is, variations
of silent reading. We cannot strip from what we know as reading aloud
�3
ZEIDERMAN
the circumstances of its particularity and dependence, and then take what
results as a general case.
You're probably beginning to feel lost. As these questions open out,
I too begin to feel lost. In fact, I begin to lose myself. The categories that
are implicated in these questions- reading, understanding, thinking,
physical, meaning, sharing, inside, outside, public, and private- are not
just peripheral to what I am. They are the crucial items in terms of which
I define myself. When those categories become fluid, who and what I am
becomes fluid.
What can one do in such a state? One can, of course, retreat from such
a passage to recover oneself and one's sanity. But there is a kind of arrogance in retreating back into myself untried. Or one can push forward
to lose oneself completely in madness and absurdity. This is the path of
despair, where nothing, least of all myself, has meaning. It is at just these
moments, when facing this choice, that I need others. What I can not do
alone and yet must do- precisely because I am haunted- I may be able
to do with others.
I hope this exploration has given you a sense of a relation between us
as readers and a certain kind of passage. Such passages are to be found
in every work we read here. They assert something which is not just wrong,
or unusual, or distasteful, but, rather, uncanny. This kind of uncanniness
I have called "haunting." And this characteristic does not only apply to
passages. Entire texts can haunt. In fact every text we read here can haunt.
I will explore this characteristic through the work which haunts me mostthe Confessions. It is this work, too, which is my favorite of the books
we read here, and the one that I judge to be the greatest. Since these are
more common ways of describing books, we will look at these approaches
in order to find out how a book haunts.
••*
There are many accounts of the greatness of the texts we read. Some
of these focus on the style or beauty of the work; others focus on the content and depth. Dante is a good example of the former, Descartes of the
latter. Described differently, these two categories may be called rhetoric
and poetry for style and beauty, and philosophy for content. A much more
serious characterization of greatness breaks through the perspective of the
two categories just mentioned. This third type of characterization shows
the remarkably intimate connection between the how and the what. Examples of this sort of work are Platonic dialogues, and Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind. These two are obvious candidates for the third approach,
�4
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
which looks at style and content, the poetry and the philosophy, at the
same time. This approach is, as I said, the most serious. I believe that all
the works we read here, not just the Dialogues and the Phenomenology,
satisfy it. In any case, one consideration is common to each of these three
approaches: by calling a book great-with respect to its form, its content,
or both of these combined-we are intending to describe the book itself,
and not ourselves. The search for a suitable definition and characterization has objectivity as its goal.
At the other end of the spectrum is the subjective approach to a text.
This, of course, has more to do with us as individuals than with the text.
Each of the works is loved by some, hated by others. We frequently admit
to our friends, though not in a seminar, that one or another book is our
favorite. This occurs with friends because usually our friends are interested
in our likes and dislikes, without demanding "proof." And in their company, I may feel encouraged to try to reveal my concerns, affections, or
disaffections. That is, in talking about my "favorite" book, I may reveal
important things about myself, not about the text.
So the characterization "great book" speaks ostensibly about the book,
and the characterization "favorite book" speaks primarily about me. Since,
in my judgment, the Confessions is the greatest program book, and since
it is also my favorite program book, I will use it to illustrate these two
categories. Yet neither of these two categories is what I mean by a "haunting text." That characterization is a description that is equally about me
and a text. How a text haunts may be made clearer by pointed contrast
to the other two categories. And here again the Confessions will illustrate
what I mean, because it is the book which haunts me most. In fact, the
Confessions is most haunting, and raises the question of haunting texts
to starkest visibility, perhaps because in it Augustine himself is haunted.
•••
The Confessions is probably the easiest work on the list to misread,
and the way we misread it is predictable. There is nothing more common
in our world than writing autobiographies. Everyone in this room has probably written at least one, even if only as a part of an application requesting
an autobiographical essay. And it is very hard not to read the Confessions
as autobiographical. Yet, insofar as we do so, it becomes difficult to see
in what way the Confessions is great. Though we, here and in the rest of
the world, expect application essays to be autobiographical, we do not expect seminar essays, lectures, and important books to be autobiographical.
The autobiography is not viewed as an activity, or a part of one's on-going
�ZEIDERMAN
5
life; it is viewed usually as the record of one's activity, composed at a distance from oneself.
A bit of history may be useful here, not, as we often rightly fear, to
dismiss a work, but rather to help us avoid dismissing a work by misconstruing it. The Story of My Life by Cellini, and the Confessions by Rousseau,
both written more than a thousand years after Augustine, define our notion of autobiography. These works help set the stage in the eighteenth
century for the emergence of the form of writing which both attracts and
repels us. There are very many examples of such autobiography to choose
from- and yet none of them is on our reading list. And when one reads
Augustine's Confessions as an example of this category that was, in many
respects, created by Rousseau-in other words, as autobiography-then
its place on our list seems suspect. Of course, we might then include Augustine's Corifessions not because of its merits but because other texts that
we consider great require this particular work. In other words, the Confessions is considered great by other writers, whom we consider great. A
few of these writers are Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Chaucer, Luther,
Montaigne, Descartes, Rousseau, Hegel, Kirkegaard, and Wittgenstein. So
we include it too. Faced with our own uneasiness about the greatness of
a work, we sometimes allow this kind of evidence to count. However, this
kind of approach can be dangerous, if we grow complacent, and put the
book on our list only for the sake of reading another work. But if we regard
the evidence of those other great thinkers as an incentive to exploration,
then we put the book on the list because it presents a task. The task would
be a hard and probing kind of questioning about ourselves and about those
other thinkers, though still not necessarily about the book in question.
It could lead to investigating how we and those we consider great are different on fundamental matters of judgment or thought. And this investigation, though not the same as what a haunting text makes possible, is
nonetheless similar to it.
Let us take another step to see how the greatness of the Corifessions
may be viewed more from the inside than from the outside. Let us take
three approaches to the text which we can initially describe as the perspectives of Dante, Descartes, and Hegel. These three were on the list of those
who were in awe of Augustine,· and their concerns may help direct our attention to aspects of the work that viewing it as autobiography makes
suspect- if not impossible. In another rough characterization of these three
approaches, Dante may stand for poetry, Descartes may stand for philosophy, and Hegel stands for the attempted reconciliation of the other two.
This third characterization, Hegel's perspective, may be obscure. However,
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
6
if we remember that in Plato's dialogues philosophy aspires to being, while
poetry is enmeshed in becoming, Plato's "ancient feud" between philosophy
and poetry may be understood as the feud between being and becoming.
St. John's seniors can inform their Jess knowing friends that in Hegel's
Phenomenology of Mind the two realms of being and becoming become
so intimately involved with one another that they are no longer two realms.
***
We will look at the poet's perspective first. Virgil appears as Dante's
guide in the Inferno, and much of the Divine Comedy involves the relations between Virgil's poetry and Dante's own. Virgil does not appear as
a character in the Confessions. His Aeneid, however, does. Augustine states
that when he was young, reading the Aeneid was a source of pleasure, and
reciting it was a source of glory. As an older man, he views his youthful
devotion to the poem as a waste of his time and talents. Yet in spite of
what he claims was a waste of time, he acknowledges that he also learned
to read and write from this effort. The question arises whether this boy
who grew up in and around Carthage and who, like Aeneas, finally found
his home in Rome, was able to turn his childhood Jove for the Aeneid into
something fertile and memorable in his adult life. I will mention only a
few parallels with the Aeneid to show the extent to which Virgil's fiction
echoes in Augustine's account.
In the Aeneid, Aeneas meets Dido in Book I. So too in the first book
of the Confessions Augustine meets Didn, as Virgil's character. In Book
II Aeneas moves in and out of Carthage in his narrative to Dido; Augustine
at the same time moves in and out of Carthage spatially. In Book III Aeneas
finally finishes his account of his arrival on Dido's shore. As he speaks
and Dido listens, she is increasingly captivated by his words and falls in
love with him through his account. So too in Book III Augustine finally
brings his wanderings to a pause in Carthage; like Dido, he too falls in
Jove. And he says that the object of his Jove is the idea or the account of Jove.
In Book IV of the Aeneid we read of the seduction in the grove, and
of Aeneas' reawakened desire to go to second Troy-Rome, though he only
knows of it indirectly. In order to leave Carthage he must deceive Dido;
she despairs and dies by her own hand. In Book IV of the Confessions
we read that Augustine too has moved on to seduction. He writes:
So for the space of nine years [in Carthage] I lived a life in which I was
seduced and seducing, deceived and deceiving, the prey of various desires.
�ZEIDERMAN
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And later in Book IV Augustine, too, is moved by the rumor of Rome:
Why was it, Lord my God, that I decided to dedicate this book to Hiereus
who was an orator at Rome? I had never seen the man but had come to love
him because of this very great reputation.
It is at this point that Augustine's desire to go to Rome emerges. Both he
and Aeneas set out on their journeys in Book V. In Book VI, when Aeneas
is in the underworld viewing shadows, Augustine is struggling to break the
bonds of the Manicheans. That is, while Aeneas is seeing spirits without
their bodies, Augustine is grappling with the idea of spiritual substance.
These new ideas seem as insubstantial to Augustine as the shades of Hades
seem to Aeneas. And as in Hades Aeneas is both alive and dead, so too
Augustine in Book VI says:
My life in you I kept on putting off from one day to the next, but I did not
put off the death that daily I was dying in myself.
Aeneas leaves the underworld of shadow at the end of Book VI, but it
takes Augustine many more pages to be freed.
The Aeneid plays a role in the Confessions, but the Confessions are
not merely a duplication of a previous book. The Aeneid had twelve books,
the Cotifessions thirteen, and in many cases-crucial ones-the characters
and incidents of the Aeneid are displaced in the Confessions. The most
startling transformation is that of the story of Dido's abandonment, lament, and death. In Book V of the Confessions, it is Augustine's mother
who takes on the role of Dido, and it is there- not Book IV as in the
Aeneid- that he leaves her weeping in Carthage and that he acknowledges
the lie he told her. And both of these kinds of changes are the same. The
increase in the number of books and the displacement of incidents occurs
because there is another book which is also woven into Augustine's text.
That book is, of course, Genesis. The last books of the Confessions is
Augustine's treatment of Genesis, but again, a careful reading will show
that Genesis pervades the entire work. For instance, when Augustine
describes his mother in Carthage crying over his departure to Rome, he
speaks using the language of Genesis:
So she wept and cried aloud showing in herself the heritage of Eve.
Having begun to look at the Confessions in this way, we see that it could
not conceivably be an autobiography. The events are artfully recounted,
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
8
following patterns provided by the Aeneid and glosses provided by Genesis.
And although the end of Book IX seems to mark the end of the domination by the Aeneid and the beginning of the movement toward Genesis,
there is in fact at each moment an interplay between the two texts. The
Aeneid supplies the external circumstances of the account, the outer facts,
and Genesis fills what is internal. Now the Confessions begins to take on
the shape of a fiction, or even a poem- in Latin or Greek, something made.
We could continue in this way, admiring the subtlety of composition and
the attention to detail in this beautiful piece of rhetoric. At the end of it,
we could be vindicated in not viewing it as autobiography. We might then
feel inclined to include the Confessions on the reading list as a work great
in itself, not just as a work admired by those whom we take as great.
***
This little account was a sample of the lecture you might have heard
on the Confessions as a great poem. If we now adopt the perspective of
Descartes, we can both take what we've seen further and also see the Confessions from yet another angle. This perspective would have us focus on
the role of philosophy. Philosophy appears prominently in three books of
the Confessions. These are, first, Book VII, and then Books X and XL
In Book VII, where Augustine has just entered his final struggle with the
Manicheans, he discovers books of philosophy. Reading them is what first
leads him to the possibility of immaterial substance, not just as the negation of matter, or as a shadow in Hades, but •.s something positive and
distinct: as soul. Yet even the notion of soul is treated as merely theoretical.
At this time, both the books and their ideas are represented as things interesting but external. And in Book VII Augustine keeps his distance from
these books for another reason. He realizes there is one thing he could
not learn from them. He could not learn humility. In Book X philosophy
reappears, no longer as a study but as a way of life. Philosophy is now
Augustine's own activity. And the living philosophy effects a movement
similar to, but greater than, the movement effected by the reading of the
books. The activity of philosophy leads Augustine from the outside to the
inside. He begins to investigate his own soul, to search for traces of his
being.
The activity of philosophy in Books X and XI marks the transition
from the narrative of external circumstances, patterned on the Aeneid, to
the investigation into spiritual considerations, as seen in the treatment of
Genesis. So we see that for Augustine philosophy plays the role of the inbetween. It is the in-between of inside and outside, of flesh and spirit. The
�ZEIDERMAN
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role of philosophy for Augustine- as the movement from outside to
inside- dictates its form. For, of all our faculties, it is not reason nor imagination nor sensation that first presents itself as taking the outside into the
inside. Rather, it is memory. And memory becomes the focus of Augustine's
investigation, which in turn opens the question of past, present, and future.
This focus on time in Book X sets the stage for the treatment of how to
construe the account of beginning-that is, Genesis-in Books XII and
XIII. The activity of philosophy in the Corifessions thus plays a role which
is the re-enactment of the role that his passive dependence on the books
of the Platonists played in Book VII.
Such would be the sketch of another lecture on the Corifessions as a
great book. This time the concern was with the content of the work itself
rather than with the way the work echoes other great works. And the
content-philosophy-is not in conflict with the poetry but has a definite
relation with it. For now, looking back on his use of the Aeneid, we can
see that Augustine, like Virgil, created a memory, or a kind of story. Poetry
has set the stage for philosophy and the philosophical pursuit of Book
X. What poetry presented, through books, for a passive audience,
philosophy makes one's own, through activity.
•••
I have presented two sketches for lectures on the greatness of the Confessions; the first took greatness to be something in the style or poetry;
the second took it to be something in the content or philosophy. These
two sketches together form a prelude for yet a third lecture, which takes
the third approach to greatness. It would begin with the status of the
reader- how should the reader read the Confessions? Is the reader passive,
as Augustine was in the Aeneid section, or active, as he was in the
philosophical exploration of memory and time? It is this aspect which probably most interested Hegel. It is his Phenomenology of Mind, of all the
books we read, that most requires the reader to supply, in response to one
section of the text, the transition to the next. The role of the reader of
the Confessions is comparable, though as different as the Hegelian dialectic is from sin. An example may bring out the course a reader undertakes
in the Confessions.
At the end of Book II, Augustine describes an incident which no reader
of the text ever forgets. When he was a boy, Augustine and a few friends
stole some pears from a neighbor's tree. The fruit- unlike that fated fruit
in the Garden-was neither pleasing to the eye nor good to eat. Indeed,
the boys threw the pears away. When he asks himself why he did this,
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Augustine's only answer is that he did it for the sake of doing wrongthat he loved sin for its own sake. The whole description is so vivid that
the incident becomes a kind of drama for the reader. The reader witnesses
the wrongdoing. Thus the reader plays the role of spectator. He observes
a scene in which Augustine, and not himself, plays a part.
This in fact sets the stage for the next scene of the Confessions. At
the opening of Book Ill, when Augustine is a student in Carthage, he himself becomes enmeshed in being a spectator. He attends the theater, revelling in the grief, sadness, and joy that he witnessed there. He remarks again
and again that these spectacles are external and utterly remote from him,
displayed for him insofar as he is their witness. But was not this the reader's
relation to the story about the pears? What has happened here is that
Augustine has prepared a place for the reader, and then occupied that place
himself within the text.
There must be some distance between the author of a text and the
readers of that text. However, Augustine, by writing about himself, makes
that separation between reader and text as extreme as possible. And yet
we have just seen how Augustine, in making the reader play the part of
spectator, has started to diminish that very distance. Elsewhere in the text,
the reader adopts other roles -listener, judge, critic, admirer. At each step,
the separation between external reader and the text diminishes. This distance
vanishes completely at the end of Book IX. This is also exactly the place
that marks the culmination of the external circumstances supplied by
Virgil's Aeneid. There, at the death of Monica, Augustine's mother, Augustine's Dido, he prays. (How unlike Aeneas!)
And so by means of these Confessions of mine, I pray that my mother may
have her last request of me still more richly answered in the prayers of many
others besides myself.
In other words, Augustine invites the reader to join with him in prayer,
to do the very thing that Augustine is doing. The distance between Augustine and the reader, between Augustine and me, or between me and not-
me, dissolves if we join him in the activity of prayer.
Again, at the very same place, at the end of Book IX, Augustine leaves
the account of his external circumstances and goes on to philosophical
activity. And what is the topic of that activity? Memory. Memory- we all
have it, although what Augustine remembers is different from what I
remember, or from what you remember. And even within each memory,
the me and the not-me differ, since each of us is a different thing from
the content of our memory. The tension between reader and text, between
�ZEIDERMAN
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me and Augustine, between me and not-me has been brought into the text
itself here at the end of Book IX. And that tension moves on into Book
XI and the treatment of time. The distinction between me and not-me
culminates in the placing of the self in time: now there is a difference between the me-l-was and the me-l-will-be.
And why is the distinction between what I am (or have been or will
be) and what I am not so very important? It is important because it is
the distinction between my soul and my sin. For Augustine, the soul is who
he truly is, and the sin, although in some way his, is what he is not. With
the treatment of time, we and Augustine finally face, in its clearest form,
the inheritance of the eating of the first fruit. For Adam and Eve, looking
for godhead, found sin, death, and time. Augustine invites us to pray with
him at his mother's death. If we join him in prayer at the end of Book
IX, and through that initial breaking of the barriers of self are able to
reach the question of time, then we are ready, at Book XII, to enter the
book of Genesis.
Thus the reader moves from passive to active. He was merely a passive
spectator at first, when he watched the drama of Augustine's life. If he
responds to the invitation to pray, then he becomes active. But the core
of that activity is precisely the difference he has just gone through- the
difference between action and passion, what I do and what happens to
me, or, in other words, between the me and the not-me.
The account you have just heard takes the previous accounts into a
new mode. For the poetry or fiction that became a stage for philosophy
is now so entwined with it that both the how and the what, and the text
and the reader, are revealed as temporary categories. Yet, though this account is about the reader, it does not essentially touch us. It is not about
us as individuals, but about us as the readers of this particular text. In
other words, this is still a lecture about the Confessions as a great book.
And in all such lectures, the audience, like Augustine and the reader in
the first nine books, is passive. The lecturer, who has spent time making
himself passively dependent on a book in studying it, reveals some of its
subtleties, and invites the listeners to undertake a similar relation. And
although a listener may leave the lecture and go on to study the text with
others, the effort suggested by the lecturer remains an individual and
solitary one.
So in all of these sketched lectures, the greatness of the book has been
the concern. The approaches that I have associated with Dante, Descartes,
and Hegel, do not involve me-as-an-individual, because their focus has
been the text itself. It has been with something which is not me.
•••
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
The other end of the spectrum from looking at the Confessions as a
great book is viewing it as my favorite book. Such a perspective is not
primarily focused on Augustine but on myself. When I view the Confessions as my favorite book, I don't stand on the ground of the text. Instead,
I consider the text on my own ground and as dependent on my activities.
And, although considering the book's greatness necessitated avoiding reading it as autobiography, considering the book as my favorite book is intimately connected with autobiography. In fact, it involves me in giving an
autobiographical account of myself. I do not have to surge into the story
of my life. But I do have to give an account-as one does with friends-of
what the Confessions has meant to me as an individual. It has meant many
things- the most suitable of which to address in a lecture has to do with
my life and thought, and the works of two modern philosophers: Wittgenstein and Heidegger.
Both these writers are from our world, a world where "reading" means
"reading silently." One or the other of them absorbs and influences many
of our contemporaries. Their work makes them as different as two thinkers
can be, and yet they display two significant similarities. For both, their
work falls into an earlier and later stage, the latter stage being an explicit
denial or rejection of the former, like Augustine's in the Confessions; and
both wished to end philosophy. Please don't misunderstand when I say
they wished to end philosophy. That does not mean they wished to end
thought, or seriousness, or responsibility. Rather they felt that philosophy
as a separate and autonomous activity, which they both associated with
Descartes, made one thoughtless, frivolous, and irresponsible.
These two were never casual about philosophy. At one time, there was
nothing more important, or more natural, for them to do. They did not
criticize philosophy from the outside; they were "insiders." Yet, in spite of
heroic efforts to end philosophy, they each failed- not just once, but twice!
My own thought has gravitated around their efforts because I agree with
them- I feel their desire and I feel their failure. And like them, I don't
feel it from the outside. Considering the One and the Many, being and
non-being, categories, language, and truth, was more important, and more
natural, than anything else for me. In fact, at one time it was life's breath.
Yet at times one recognizes that what comes naturally- one's gifts, one's
abilities, even one's breath itself-causes one to suffocate.
Though I had been drawn to Wittgenstein and Heidegger before that
crisis, my shortness of breath involved me with their work more and more
intimately. They were a kind of artificial respirator through which I could
consider my own task and theirs. If I scrutinized their work, I might be
able to avoid their failure. In those days I was like a chess player studying
the games of past grand masters, or like a pathologist doing an autopsy
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on a victim of the disease I myself was suffering from. However, the more
I thought about what they had attempted and failed, the more I realized
it was not their lack of cleverness and intelligence that was responsible.
In fact, quite the opposite. It was precisely their intelligence and cleverness
which caused for each not only one failure, but two. They failed because
they were geniuses and because their proposed audience was an elite group
of thinkers who could fathom the issue and comprehend certain works.
The result was not the end of philosophy at all. Instead, there was an increase of technical and arcane talk. And, because Wittgenstein and Heidegger were "canonized" as new philosophers, they gave rise to a grotesque
hagiography, developed and carried on by their own disciples, who should
have known better
The more I studied them, the more I agreed with them on their diagnosis
of the ailment. But even more pervasive than they supposed, the disease,
philosophy, appeared. Those infected were not just readers of certain books,
or practitioners of a certain philosophical school of thinking. The diseased
were not just the intellectual inheritors of Descartes, but in fact everyone
who lived in a Cartesian world-which is just a shorthand for the modern
world in which we all perform every act and gesture of our lives.
It was at this moment that I remembered the Confessions. Was not
Augustine similar to Heidegger and Wittgenstein? Was not he himself
burdened with his own gifts and was not he as skilled at technical rhetoric
and philosophy as anyone? He felt, as acutely as anyone, the desire for
philosophy and the hunger both for truth and for his own discovery of
that truth. And did he not only face these horrors but succeed in resolving
them in a work that was for everyone, not merely professors and intellectual technicians? And wasn't Augustine's indictment of philosophy similar
to my sense of why Heidegger and Wittgenstein failed? For their greatness
prevented them from seeing beyond their greatness. Augustine recoiled from
philosophy because it could never teach him humility.
It was because of these concerns and thoughts that I was drawn to the
Confessions. In my own concerns and confusions, I needed an ally and
a friend. And I didn't turn to the Confessions because he had achieved
what I was attempting. His concern and mine differ. Unlike Augustine,
the name I heard with my mother's milk was not Christ's. I was not a Christian and the task and need I felt were mine, not Christian. So I didn't read
him to learn "how-he-did-it." I read the Confessions as the struggles of
someone similar to but yet quite different from myself. In short, I read
it as autobiography, and it is as autobiography that it has been my favorite
book.
***
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
We have now looked at two ways of reading the Confessions-as a great
work and as my favorite work. As a great work I read him as a scholar
would, bringing to bear a knowledge of other books he uses, the responses
of other writers to his work, and what, for lack of a better word, I must
call history. It is because I am familiar witb the genesis of what we call
autobiography, that I realize that reading the Confessions as autobiography
would be remarkably anachronistic. Once I hold that tendency in check,
the book opens up, and I can become in some sense passive as I learn from
it. On the other hand, when I read the Confessions as my favorite book,
I read it quite differently. Then I read out of my own activity and I read
it precisely the way I guarded against before.
In the first case I read him out of knowledge, in the second case out
of need. Although both these ways of reading may involve other people,
they are primarily solitary. When I speak about the greatness of the Confessions, I'm telling you something. I may depend on the work of others
and even prompt you to find aspects of the work I had missed or gotten
wrong. I could, therefore, in telling you, also gain something in return.
But our relation to each other is essentially solitary. In sharing with you
remarks about the Confessions as my favorite book, we again can become
useful to one another. Your need may be similar to mine, and you too may
decide to turn to the Confessions. But again my reading the Confessions
was private and silent- just like the kind of reading Ambrose did one time
in Milan. Both of these silent ways of reading are important, even though
they are so different from one another. In fact from the perspective of one
kind of approach, the other is suspect. From the vantage point of my need
when I read Augustine as my favorite book, the greatness of the Confessions seems sterile, a mere diversion. From the perspective of my studies
of Angustine, reading the work for encouragement and consolation seems
undisciplined and self-indulgent. Yet, as I said, both approaches are important and even necessary.
The third approach to a text, where we are haunted by a text, overlaps
with these two familiar approaches and yet differs importantly from them.
In the third approach to the text we may start by reading the words silently
and privately, but we must go beyond this to reading publicly. What I mean
by public reading is an essentially cooperative activity. In this approach,
not only do we depend on one another, but knowledge and need are also
no longer held apart. They too merge toward one another. This occurs when
the Confessions begins to haunt us. Need stops being my particular need,
but it is rather a need we all feel, and the relevant knowledge is precisely
what we all lack. It is in this context that we no longer read as solitary
�ZEIDERMAN
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explorers or solitary sufferers; au individual reads as preparation for what
reading makes necessary- a conversation.
In reading the Corifessions as a great book, I withheld viewing it as
an autobiography. In reading it as my favorite book, I read it as I would
read such a work written by one of our contemporaries. My expectation
in seeing such a work is that it is autobiographical and I read it as such.
Though I said both readings had a kind of legitimacy, nonetheless a tension and conflict exists within me between these readings. For is it or is
it not autobiography? Well, in one sense it is clear that it isn't. Yet it isn't
just not-autobiography. Our normal expectation on reading the Confessions, and the label it often carries on its book jacket, aren't just misplaced.
To view it without keeping in mind that a man Augustine wrote about his
life-and therefore that it is autobiography-would be to fathom its greatness but lose the life of the text. But imagine such a work being published
today. It might gain a few readers and perhaps even a sympathetic review
or two. But on the whole it would be viewed as silly, or pretentious, or
even irresponsible and absurd. It is a text that could not be written now,
in our present. It is a past text, but clearly it is not a dead text-nor is
it a text that is truly alive. The text is an in-between text-not entirely dead
nor entirely alive. It is a ghost.
I need to describe more clearly what such a ghost text is and how it
haunts. The Confessions haunts because its greatness- some aspects of
which l mentioned- seems incompatible with its form as autobiography.
Insofar as we penetrate the scope and intricacy of the work, the expectation of a roughly factual account of someone's past life becomes increasingly problematic. And as the work begins to look fictional, its truth
becomes suspect. Fictionalization, whether intentional or accidental, will
earn our criticism because fact and fiction have to do with truth and nottruth. The evidence, however, from the earlier part of this lecture, is that
Augustine did indeed shape his story in a way that we would call fictionalizing. If he is replacing fiction for fact, is he truthful? The answer seems
obviously to be no. But suppose that fact and fiction are different for
Augustine than for us- that truth is different for him than for us. By this
I don't mean that he holds truths different from the ones we hold, but
rather that he means something other than what we mean by the word
truth. What a strange suggestion- and yet it has already come up earlier
in this lecture. For to ask about what one means by truth will involve what
one means by self. And then, if a self is different, then the thing which
a self writes- an autobiography- will be different from any autobiographical essay or text we have ever read or written before. I think that this suggestion is right-that truth means something strange for Augustine. But
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THE ST JOHN'S REVIEW
though I say this, and though I can explain why I say this, I don't understand what it means.
Augustine reaches a conclusion about truth in his discussion of Genesis.
In pondering the meaning of its first line- In the beginning God created
heaven and earth- he considers various possibilities. In the end, he presents
his opinion: every truth any reader knows is contained in the first line of
Genesis. In trying to understand this startling suggestion, I come up with
analogies. Is the first line of Genesis like a mathematical axiom of such
power that in itself it contains all other truths? Or is it like a painting,
which presents to each viewer a personal and legitimate vision? Both of
these options are, however, implausible. They make more sense to us than
they would to Augustine. Perhaps to probe the meaning of the first line
one needs charity, or love, without which, says Paul, one's words are like
the clanging of a bell. This looks more promising. Love or Charity turns
sound into meaning and, one could say, into truth. But if charity gives
meaning to utterable things, and makes them true, then it seems that all
utterances would mean the same truth. As I say these words, you may feel
we have returned to Paul's clanging bell. Without having resolved this riddle
about the first line of Genesis, let me go on to another one. Augustine
states that if his task had been to write such a book, he would have wanted
to write it as Moses did. Is it possible that he did this very thing in writing
the Confessions?
Let us think about what we mean by confession. Usually confession
involves an acknowledgment of a past action, and a resolution with respect
to the future. Confession is a bridge, an inbetween like the ghost text, and,
as philosophy was for Augustine, between the past and the future. The
security of that bridge depends on the commitment of the confessor. Only
time can reveal that commitment. When the confession is made to another
person, then that person must risk entering into the confessor's future.
When the confession is made to God, there can be no secrets between the
confessor and God. In such a case, however, those outside the confession
know of it only what the confessor then chooses to make public.
With this much to guide us, can we say whether the Confessions are
addressed to us or to God? Augustine speaks often, and passionately, to
God, referring to him as "You." And, although it occurs less often, he does
speak both directly and indirectly to the readers. So the answer seems to
be that the Confessions are addressed both to us and to God. Now God
can certainly hear this confession and judge or forgive Augustine. But can
we? Were we his contemporaries, we would be able to forgive Augustine
some personal offense. But of course we are not his contemporaries; our
forgiveness would be irrelevant to him. But can we even presume to forgive
�ZEIDERMAN
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him? For what? His recorded offenses are against God, not against us.
To say this another way, only God can judge or forgive. So although
Augustine is in part writing for us, he cannot be confessing to us. By con-
fessing to God in our presence, Augustine affords us the opportunity to
listen neither in judgment nor in forgiveness. What is the alternative to
listening in judgment or with forgiveness. It is to listen charitably.
Now remember what Augustine said about Genesis- that he would have
liked to have written a book like that. Somehow, for Augustine, Genesis
was written through or in charity. Somehow Moses was able to write such
a book. Augustine could not presume to reproduce this effort. But he has
been able to produce a text which can really be read only with charity.
If it is read without charity, the Confessions becomes the mere clanging
of a bell. We can try to disguise the clanging by reading it as a great book,
or as our favorite book. It is when we read it with charity that each of
its lines -like the first line of Genesis- becomes all of the truths we know.
It is when we read with charity that the differences between me and notme, between my truths and your truths, vanish.
***
Do you really understand what I'm saying about the Confessions? It's
hard for me to see how, because I don't. And it's not from ignorance or
lack of effort that we don't understand. If you feel that my words shimmer before you, tempting you, yet eluding your grasp, then you feel what
I feel. You are in the presence of a ghost, as I am. The Confessions are
a ghost which haunts. The Corifessions succeed at the task that Augustine
set for himself, or that was set for him. But what such a task is and how
it was fulfilled remains deeply impenetrable. And we do not penetrate it
by learning yet another ingenious aspect of the text, which might emerge
from reading still more carefully. For when a text begins to haunt, the locus
of attention is not the text, as it is when the text is a great book, nor
ourselves, as it is when the book is one I love or hate. In other words, we
are neither passive nor active. Rather, the locus of attention is what I can
best describe as what is in between us and the text- the gap between our
deepest expectations and those of the text.
Becoming clearer about this haunting in-between cannot be a solitary
activity. I need others- but not for their information or insights and not
for encouragement. That is, I need others neither as scholars nor as friends.
At this stage, I need others to help me see something about myself. To use
their help, and to offer help to them, my private and solitary reading must
give way to public reading. Our public reading, a modern reflection of the
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
sort of reading Augustine expected of Ambrose, is conversation. Our understanding of the Confessions as a great book or as my favorite book may
be enhanced by conversation; our facing it as a haunting text is absolutely
dependent on conversation.
A ghost text has two interrelated functions. It elicits the most salient
categories of our world. It also affords us the opportunity to think through
those deepest habits that have thoughtlessly determined our lives. So a ghost
text brings to the surface the true ghosts. These reside not in texts but in
ourselves. They are the haunting accretions of our past, our educations,
our social, economic, and political environments. It is in the presence of
the ghost text that these other ghosts come forth. To confront one means
to confront them all.
And so what do these considerations have to do with our activity here?
Great books are, as I once read on an envelope, great teachers. Great books,
as the story goes, are written by great minds- great thinkers- and understanding these books involves understanding these minds. But that requires
understanding the languages in which they wrote as well as understanding
the other works that they produced. In other words, this effort is scholarship. Some of us are better, some are worse at it. If our communal task
is scholarship, then our activities here are doomed to failure. For we read
only parts of books, in a variety of translations, and make the effort to
speak with one another about them in the strange format we call the
"seminar."
Another approach to the reading of great books is to read them because
they raise timeless concerns- the issues which have troubled or absorbed
humanity. Among these concerns we will find some that are of particular
importance to each of us. But if this is our approach, it is hard to grasp
why we read our particular texts to raise these issues. There are hundreds
of textbooks which have been written precisely to raise these timeless concerns. There, these concerns are called the problem of free-will, the problem of meaning, the problem of justice. And the result of this attitude is
what one would anticipate. Our texts would evaporate. Problems and issues
require solutions or stances. The result is an argument or debate among
those animated by a particular issue, with others who are unmoved having
nothing much to say. The text would become either loved or despised, depending on whether one agrees or disagrees with Plato's politics or St. Paul's
theology.
These two ways of reading are like those intermediate parts of Plato's
divided line where opinion and understanding are highlighted. Reading
for greatness belongs to the part of the line where understanding resides;
reading for the timeless issues belongs to the part where opinion resides.
�ZEIDERMAN
19
There is a next step in Plato where one struggles to move beyond hypotheses.
What I am describing also forces us to leave the realms of personal opinion
and scholarly understanding in order to face our most invisible assumptions and have the courage to explore them.
The relation to texts which I am calling haunting can make this possible.
The tension between my sense of meaning, language, truth, fiction, fact,
and life, and Augustine's in the Confessions, first forces me to attend to
what is so pervasive in me as to have been invisible. Because my sense of
these terms constitutes my world, the Confessions seem otherwordly, or
ghostly. So some translation is necessary. Yet it does not matter that these
texts are read in various translations, because the true effort of translating
begins once the ground opens between me and the text. It is also all right
that we read parts of works. For we are reading not authors or books, but
what I call texts. Authors and their corpuses- intact entities- give an artificial appearance of life. The temptation is very great to enter into them
and to substitute them for ourselves.
In this task of confronting a haunting text, each of us is essential.
Though ghosts are hard to see, they, like everything we see, may be seen
from different perspectives. What haunts me will overlap with but will not
be identical with what haunts you. And if I make that attempt to confront
these ghosts, and to exorcise them, then I will need your help. If you are
making that attempt, you will need mine. Descartes, making the effort
without help, so lost his sense of perspective that he looked for certainty
to hold onto, conflating it with knowledge.
So I need your certainties to risk exploring what has become uncertain
for me. I need your uncertainties to help reveal to me the fabric of my
own beliefs. The problems we face are not timeless and universal. They
are absolutely timely, because they are yours and mine. And the text is essential because without it thought is not sufficiently decisive- neither sufficiently radical nor sufficiently conservative. In my example, I would have
circled endlessly around questions of meaning, truth, and their relation
to thought. Only by allowing the Corifessions to haunt me am I enabled,
however dimly, to sense the possibility that these questions may concern
not thought but rather will, and might be answered not by my words but
by something that I need the entirely unphilosophical humility to hear.
These are disturbing prospects, which I have few notions how even to explore. As bare possibilities, they shatter my pride but in the same moment
hold open possibilities that my despair has foreclosed. The proper way to
address such matters can be neither monologue nor argument, even if at
times we do speak in those ways. Rather, speech must be confessional. Yet
one is not confessing for oneself alone nor for something that one has
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
done. Confession is the acknowledgment of a chasm between us and the
ghost-like text, and it is the commencement of the exploration of the ghosts
in us- those beliefs and opinions that we have inherited and that invisibly
chart the courses of our thoughts, our desires, and our lives. It is when
a text haunts us that we are both ready for and in need of conversation.
Every text we read here is such a haunting text. You can see that if you
ask yourself whether any of them could be written now. The answer probably is that more or less they all could. Insofar as they could be written
now, they are great or our favorites. Insofar as they could not be, they are
ghosts. Haunting texts afford us the opportunity to make visible these most
salient and elusive aspects of ourselves. Yet within this realm of exploration and change, these texts also can be great books, and we can love some
and recoil from others. In fact, the same work can be all of these. Everything
that I have said tonight I have in some measure learned from Augustine.
These remarks are Augustinian. That I am here to attempt this task, I owe
to the role the Confessions has occupied in my life as my favorite book.
Yet what I have learned and gained from them takes its true measure from
my response to those ghosts which this and other ghostly texts revealed
in me. And ultimately the ghostly and otherworldly quality of the text
makes me recoil from it. That recoiling also makes the Confessions one
of my least favorite texts. For though I learn from Augustine's ability and
subtlety, feel encouraged and comforted by the similarity of our purposes,
and see myself for the first time through our differences from him, ultimately I recoil because his world and his God are not mine.
�Human Being, Beast and God:
The Place of Human Happiness
According to Aristotle
and Some Twentieth-Century
Philosophers
Deborah Achtenberg
1
Early in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes human beings
both from plants and from the other animals. Later, he distinguishes us
from the god. How are we different? And, why are these differences important? We are different from plants and non-human animals, not to mention the simple bodies, because, unli!(e them, we can act. Fire must go up
and stones must go down; plants must move by nature to their end; the
other animals must follow their passions. We human beings, to the contrary, can act: we are more flexible; we are not bound by our feelings or
by our end; we move towards what we take to be good. We are different
from the god because, unlike the god's actions, ours is not guaranteed of
success but must, if it is to succeed, be in accord with something outside
ourselves. 1 That something Aristotle calls ntelos" or "end." He also calls
it "nature," "the mean," or "the good." We are in between, then, beings
which have a limit (a constitutive limit or telos) without having action,
Deborah Achtenberg is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Nevada-Reno. This lecture was delivered at St. John's College, Annapolis, in
February, 1988.
21
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
and the one being which has action without limitation: the god is a te/os
without having one; the god's aim, like ours, is for the good; but, unlike
us, the god's every aim meets its mark.
These differences are important because, according to Aristotle,
something's good is its completion and completions of things different in
kind are themselves different. Happiness is the human good, according
to Aristotle. Therefore our happiness will be what completes beings of our
kind, not what completes plants, the other animals, or the god. Human
beings, he says, are distinguished by reason- or logos-based action; every
action is aimed at something believed to be good; but our beliefs may be
false or the relevant ones may fail to inform our passions. The good, then,
is the completion of this our defining function or activity (ergon); it is
the completion, or, we might say, full development, of both intellect and
feeling so that intellect hits the truth and informs feeling. Such developed
intellect and feeling is called virtue. The good according to Aristotle is a
life of activities in accordance with virtue; it is, in other words, a life in
which developed capacities for intellect and feeling flourish.
Recognition that the human good is relative to the human kind is important, then, because it enables us to avoid two common mistakes: on
the one hand, the supposition that we are less than we are and, on the
other, the supposition that we are more. For we tend to reduce ourselves
to the level of plants and the other animals and, at the other extreme, to
raise ourselves to the level of a god; sometimes we give up action and content ourselves with the feeling of the moment, whatever it may be, and
other times we believe our action, just because we choose it, is good. We
give in to our fear, for example, because it is painful to overcome it; or,
we convince ourselves that what we fear should be feared even when the
evidence shows otherwise. We turn in a co-worker we envy, for another
example; then we forget our envy and convince ourselves that it was
righteousness instead.
Contrary to our suppositions, however, we are not the same as the other
animals nor as the god; we can neither cease to follow some logos, nor
in general act successfully without following a logos well. We get angry,
for example, when we think we have been slighted; but our belief may be
false, and if it is, then the anger will disrupt a friendship. We eat, for another
example, because we believe that to do so is pleasant or nourishing, but
if that belief is false- because, say, we've eaten too much- we will suffer
discomfort or pain. Our anger is not like the instinctive spiritedness of
a wolf;' instead, it results from a belief. Our eating is not like the natural
movement of plants, which must send their roots down into the soil and
their leaves up towards the sun; it is governed, instead, by a belief- the
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belief that the food in front of us is pleasant or nourishing. Our actions
are, whether we think so or not, governed by reason (logos); they are not
mere motions; nor are they without external limitation and guide. We do
not move by nature or by instinct (pathos) to the good; instead, we move
towards what we think is good.
For these reasons, human happiness- the full development of our
species-given capacity for intellect and feeling-is not easy. For full development of intellect and feeling is not by nature; instead, it is an accomplishment (ergon).' Nor, however, is it against our nature. Aristotle is neither
a romantic nor a Victorian. He is in between those who would have us
follow our every feeling, and those who would have us act against themthose who would say "if it feels good, do it" and those who would say
"if it feels good, don't do it." For we do not attain happiness by nature,
nor do we attain it by thwarting our nature. Instead, we attain it by developing our nature, and when we develop it sufficiently, what feels good and
what is good are one and the same. This is freedom. 4 For freedom is not
doing what you want, unless what you want and what benefits you are
one and the same. Nor is freedom lack of limitation; instead, it is awareness
of beneficial limitation and accord with it. Such a state, however, is rare.
For the acquisition of first-stage development of our species-given capacity for intellect-informed passion and action- that is, the acquisition of
virtue-is not easy: anyone, for example, can get angry; but to get angry
at the needed time, to the needed extent, at the needed person, and so forth,
is an ergon- an accomplishment, a piece of work. 5
But we don't want to work. Instead, we want to be at work. We don't
want to try, but to do; we don't want to attempt, but to achieve our aim.
What we want, in Aristotle's terms, is energeia or entelecheia, where
energeia means activity or being-at-work and entelecheia means completeness, being-at-end or full development. Unlike plants and the other animals,
we can act; that is, we can both devise and follow plans to achieve full
development; unlike the god, however, our action need not achieve full
development, for our plans sometimes are bad, and sometimes, though
good, do not inform our passions and thus motivate our aims. Human
beings can act, but our action is not "by itself." It succeeds only if it is
in accordance with something else, specificially if it is in accord with virtue. Compared to human beings, then, plants and the other animals are
passive; they cannot act, but can only move. Compared to the god, however,
we are passive. The god is the only being whose action is in no way responsive; it is "by itself'' activity. Our action is in part responsive; it is activity
in accordance with virtue.
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THE ST JOHN'S REVIEW
What, however, is activity in accordance with virtue responsive to? In
general, virtue, whether it be the virtue of a plant, an animal, or a human
being, whether it be a virtue of the body or of the soul, is developed capacity. Simple capacity is the capacity to experience feelings or engage in
actions of a certain kind; developed capacity, or virtue, is the disposition
to experience feelings of that kind or engage in actions of that kind only
when they are beneficial or enabling, and not when they are harmful or
destructive. 6 Virtue, in other words, is the disposition for the good- a
disposition to experience feelings and engage in actions which are beneficial
or enabling and not those which are harmful or destructive.'
Human virtue-virtue of character at any rate-is, according to Aristotle, a disposition to choose the mean. Speaking about the mean,
therefore, must be a manner of speaking about the good. For all virtues
are dispositions for the good. The mean is an analogy taken from
mathematics. If ten is too much and two is too little then six is the mean.
Aristotle is not, however, attempting to rnathematize human affairs. In-
stead, he is using a mathematical analogy in the realm of the qualitative.
He does so also in the Metaphysics: telos, Aristotle's fundamental discovery,
is a qualitative intensifier. To be good is not to be of a certain quality or
kind; instead, it is to be a complete or fulfilled one of a kind, or, simply,
to be complete: a lyre-player and a good lyre-player are not different in
kind, nor are a kitten and a cat.
In the non-mathematical realm of feelings and action, regarding, for
example, courage, recklessness is the excess, cowardice the defect, and
courage the mean. Consider a particular action, such as rushing ahead
in battle. To rush ahead when rushing ahead will lead to disaster is the
excess; the one who does this is reckless. To refrain from rushing ahead
when rushing ahead would lead to victory is the defect; the one who does
this is cowardly. Both to rush ahead when appropriate and to refrain from
rushing ahead when refraining is appropriate is to achieve the mean; the
one who does this is courageous. Consider also a feeling, such as confidence. To feel confident when confidence is harmful- about a rash plan
of attack, for example-is the excess; the one who does this is reckless.
To lack confidence when confidence is enabling- about a well thought out
plan of attack, for example- is the defect; the one who does this is a
coward. Both to feel confidence when appropriate and lack it when its lack
is appropriate is the mean; the one who does this is courageous. It is this,
that is, virtue, which Aristotle calls an accomplishment or piece of work
(ergon): not simply to rush ahead nor simply to retreat, since any normal
person has the capacity to do either, but to rush ahead or retreat when
needed, as needed, where needed, as the logos directs for the sake of the
�ACHTENBERG
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beautiful; not simply to feel confidence nor simply lack it, but to feel confidence or lack it when either is what is needed for the end at hand. The
human being with virtue, then, is disposed to choose the mean; that is,
to experience certain feelings and engage in certain actions only when,
where, and as they are needed. The needed is what is needed for a certain
end; it is whatever is instrumental to or constitutive of it. 8 The needed is
the same as the good.
Choice, too, makes reference to the good. We are different from beasts
and from the god because we can choose and thus act on our choice.
Choice, according to Aristotle, is not mere desire; instead, it is desire which
has been informed by deliberation; if not prevented, it issues in action.
Choice distinguishes us from beasts, as well as from children, in this way:
they simply act on their desires, while we can choose; that is, we can act
on deliberation-informed desires. Deliberation is a kind of thought
(dianoia); specifically, to deliberate is to reflect on which action or state
of affairs is conducive to one of our ends; 9 it presupposes phron"i!sis or
practical wisdom, the perception of some action or state of affairs as one
of our ends. (For example, through phronesis we discover that studying
with a certain person is conducive to wisdom, for we judge this person
to be imaginative and able to stimulate our imagination; then we deliberate
about the means needed to be able to study with him- housing, food,
employment, and so forth)." Since the good, according to Aristotle, is
end- that is, completion, fulfillment, or full development- choice makes
reference to the good. 1b choose is to desire and, if not prevented, do, what
one takes to be good.
Now we have seen that all the important elements of Aristotle's definition of human virtue make reference to telos or the good; for a disposition is a developed capacity, that is, a capacity for the good; choice is not
just desire but deliberation-informed desire, and to deliberate is to see particulars as conducive to an end; deliberation presupposes practical wisdom,
that is, the perception of some action or state of affairs as an end; and
the mean is just that feeling or lack of feeling, just that action or abstention from action, which is needed by some end. All of this is important
because human happiness, that is, the human good, is the full development of this specifically human, not animalic or divine, virtue: neither
beasts nor the god have deliberation or practical wisdom. Human virtue
is developed human capacity; human happiness is a life in which human
virtues flower or flourish; it is a life of activities in accordance with human
virtue.
Consider, then, the place of human happiness. It is in between that
of the beasts and that of the god. We can consider it by considering
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
pleasure. For, importantly, Aristotle's definition of pleasure and his definition of happiness are fundamentally the same." Pleasure, according to
Aristotle, is unimpeded activity of a disposition in accordance with nature.
Since it is unimpeded, it, like happiness, requires virtue. But virtue, though
it is in accordance with nature, is not simply by nature. Instead, it requires
instruction and habituation over the course of a life. Hence, as I've said,
it is not easy.
Keep in mind that the god, according to Aristotle in the Metaphysics,
has the pleasure all the time which we can share only some of the time.
Now we can see why: because the god's activity always has its end, while
our activity attains its end only if it is done in accordance with virtue.
Sometimes it is done in accordance with virtue, but much of the time it
is not. Often we make an effort, but our effort is impeded. Often we try,
but do not do. We try to run the marathon, but our feet get in the way.
We try to play the lyre, but our fingers get in the way. We try to do a
mathematical proof, but instead hit a dead end, when our current stage
of mathematical capacity reaches its limit, or, instead, when we find
ourselves reflecting on the rumbling of our stomach, or about someone
we love, or, worse, someone we hate. Successful activity- energeia- is not
by nature. It is a piece of work, an accomplishment, an ergon. Or, at least,
acquiring the developed capacity and necessary conditions for its exercise
is a piece of work. Once those have been acquired, the actual exercise of
virtue is not work- it is being-at-work, or energeia. Then we don't try, but
do. Then, for a short period of time, our every aim meets its mark. Our
feet are where they are needed when they are needed. Our fingers hit the
right note at the right time. We think, and actually engage the required
object. Then our activity seems, and in a sense is, effortless. For then we
are acting in accord with our developed skills or intellectual capacities.
Virtue of character (ethike aret{j) is required as well, so that our loves and
hates, our fears and desires and wishes, do not get in the way- do not impede us- and, in addition, so that we see, and thus desire, what the situation calls for.
In addition, intellectual virtue and virtue of character require instruction and habituation- instruction for the intellect and habituation for
character- and these require that we are raised in an appropriate city: one
with sufficient land for food, with sufficient trade for necessary goods,
with the right size for easy governance, with an appropriate balance between the rich and the poor to prevent faction, with an appropriate regime
for us to utilize the character of the people, with a sufficient military to
avoid war or win it and so to remain as much as possible at peace, with
the right aims to develop our human capacities. All of these are the condi-
�ACHTENBERG
27
tions of our happiness- of our full self-development, both of yours and
mine, both in Aristotle's time and, as I think at any rate, in ours. 12
Of course, these conditions do not always come about, and even if they
do come about largely, they do not come about completely. Societies are
not perfect; they develop some people's capacities, while leaving the
capacities of others fallow. Even if they do develop your capacities, your
capacities are not limitless. Some are easy to develop; others are much
harder; and the development is preceded by its lack. Pleasure, since it requires virtue, is not easy; instead, it is an accomplishment (ergon).
It is because pleasure" is not easy that we tend to confuse ours with
that of the beasts and with the pleasure accompanying the functions we
share with plants. For these are easier than the pleasures intrinsic to
developed, that is, virtuous, activity. For example, we confuse bodily
pleasure with pleasure entire since it is intense and therefore easy. Bodily
pleasures, of course, are good, but bodily pleasure is the better part of
pleasure only for the other animals. So, too, it is because of the difficulty
of acquiring the pleasure intrinsic to virtuous activity that we seek extrinsic ones, the ones Aristotle calls superficial ornaments. 14 Each virtuous
or unimpeded activity has its own intrinsic pleasure; but activities are very
often left incomplete or unfinished, when we don't have the time or the
resources or the capacity. This is displeasing, frustrating, or even painful;
frustrated activities lack their intrinsic, or natural, pleasure. Then we find
relief in bodily pleasure, since it is easy, and expels our pain. Or we seek
extrinsic pleasures, like excess food or drink, or, for us, television or movies
or video games, since our ordinary activities cannot find their completion.
We are not gods. Our activities often miss their mark. So we seek the
pleasures we share with the other animals, or the pleasure we get from the
activities we and the other animals share with the plants, the vegetative
activities related to growth and procreation, or whatever is largely passive;
we drink something, stuff ourselves, turn on the VCR, and get close; we,
as we say, "veg out." And all of this is because human happiness is in
between- in between that of the beasts and that of the god; in between
non-action and action which is at every moment successful. We can act,
but our action, to be successful, must be responsive, responsive in just the
right way to the object of our action. When we do the needed act, at the
needed time, in the needed place, in the needed amount, and with the
needed aim, then we succeed. When we do so, then we are free, since we
are not impeded on any side, and we are pleased and happy; but to be
able to do so, as we have seen, is a serious, and difficult, accomplishment.
***
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
We are led back, then, to Aristotle's notion of end or telos. Telos means
end or goal, completion, fulfillment, or full development. It is one of the
four causes, the four answers to the question why, discussed in the
Metaphysics. It is Aristotle's fundamental discovery. There is efficient cause,
or the source of motion; material cause, or the out of which; formal cause
or what he calls by the unusual phrase the "what was being"; and final
cause-telos-or the "for the sake of which."
How shall we understand te/os? We can see how necessary it is to
understand it, if we are to understand what we have done so far, since each
of the parts of Aristotle's definition of virtue presupposes it. By te/os,
Aristotle means, I propose, constitutive limit. As the edges of a table not
only limit the table, but constitute it, so virtue not only limits our activity,
but allows it to be, fully, what it is. Tete are contrasted to limits that are
not constitutive, but destructive or disabling: split the table with an ax and
the new limits will not constitute, but destroy, the table; engage the enemy
recklessly and you will not engage the enemy at all, but be defeated by
him. Limits differ; not all limits are destructive or harmful; others are
beneficial. Those which constitute an action or thing are beneficial; they
are its tete.
Consider, for further illustration, an example from a skill, namely, playing the lyre. Is putting your finger on the string constitutive of lyre-playing?
Sometimes it is, and sometimes it is not. Sometimes pressing the string
is lyre-playing; other times, it makes noise. In running, sometimes leaning
forward will enable you to run -will be a constituent of running-and other
times it will cause you to fall. Sometimes speeding up will enable you to
run and other times slowing down will do so. When you fall, you cease
to run, so in that case, leaning back or speeding up, leaning forward or
slowing down, is not constitutive of, but destructive of, running. When
it is the cause of continued running, it is not only that, but also a constituent of running; it is part of the tetos. Or, put another way, then it is
a constituent of what it is to be running.
This latter phrase shows the connection between form and end in Aristotle's metaphysics, and explains why he uses the unusual coinage, the "what
was being" (to ti en einat), as a substitute for form. The "was," here, is
an imperfect, and commentators disagree on just how to take it. They agree,
however, that it refers to repeated action. I propose that the "what was
being" means what something was being all along. When you leaned forward and fell, your intent or aim was not to fall, but was to lean forward
and run. Leaning forward was intended to be running; but, sadly, or
sometimes comically, it was not. When you leaned back and ran, your intent was fulfilled or completed; your leaning back was running all along;
�ACHTENBERG
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it was a constituent of running; running is what leaning back, along with
the other movements made, was being."
Another way to understand telos is as the completion or development
of potential. Virtue, for example, is first-stage development of potential.
When I have, for example, the intellectual virtue Aristotle calls "science"
or episteme, the capacity to demonstrate or give arguments through the
study of logic or analytics, I have developed my latent capacity to demonstrate. The second, or more complete, development of that potential is to
activate that developed potential, that is, to demonstrate. The progression
is capacity, developed capacity or virtue, activity. But this way of understanding telos is just another example of the first way. That is, it is another
example of telos as what constitutes something or as what enables it to
be what it was being, all along, in potential. Acquisition of virtue, Aristotle says in the Physics and De Anima, is not alteration. It is not to become
different or to change kind, though it may involve this. Instead, it is to
develop or complete the kind that something already is.
Telos, then, is not a kind. To talk about telos or completion is not to
distinguish things into kinds or categories, but to distinguish potential from
development within kinds or across them." Tete, in fact, may be very different in kind, as we can see from the example of courage, where the telos
in one case may be to run forward, and in another case to run around,
and in another to retreat. Just as in playing the lyre the telos may sometimes
be to depress the string and other times to release it, so on the battlefield
courage may sometimes require running forward, and other times running
back. Telos, then, is relative- not, as we would say, subjective, but relative
to the context and to kind." As Aristotle puts it, completions of things
different in kind are themselves different.
Since good, according to Aristotle, means te/os, good, too, according
to him, is relative-again, not subjective, but relative to context and to
kind. The Ethics is about the human good and so, as we've seen, it is relative
to the defining human kind or activity (ergon). Moreover, as previously
stated, it is easy for us to misidentify our good with that of plants and
beasts or with that of the god. We might think that the good life is the
life of pleasure, as Aristotle points out in Nicomachean Ethics 1.5. But
that is not the good life for us- not, of course, that pleasure is not good;
pleasures are good, Aristotle says, and the best life and the most pleasant
life are one and the same. But the life of pleasure, by which he means the
life guided by desire alone, is not our good; for our desires do not always
guide us toward what's needed. As our good is not the same as that of
plants or the other animals, so, as we've seen, it is not the same as the
god's. For the god's only good is himself; while the good for us, until we've
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
achieved it, is outside ourself. The god is always complete, while we are
not. We can constrast the beasts, human beings, and the god in this way:
the beasts have a te/os or constitutive limit, but cannot act, since they lack
choice; the god has (or is) activity, but has no telos or constitutive limit,
since the god is at every moment already complete; and human beings are
in between. We have both action and a telos: we are neither as fixed as
the other animals, nor as free as the god; we can act, but our action, in
order to be successful, must be the realization of a constitutive limit.
2
So far I have described Aristotle's account of the place of human happiness in between that of the beasts and that of the god and shown how
that account rests on his metaphysics- on his understanding of human
nature and its full development, and on full development, or te/os, in
general, as the guide and constitutive limit of our aims. I find Aristotle's
account largely persuasive; I do not find the standard objections to it
decisive. As may have been evident to you, however, I have not described
Aristotle's account as he would describe it. Instead, my account of Aristotle
has a point of view. I see Aristotle's ethics from the standpoint of the difficulty of happiness- the difficulty of achieving a life in which developed
capacities for reason-informed passion and action flourish. Specifically,
I see it from the standpoint of the difficulty of achieving this kind of happiness in modern individualist society, a society in which the various con-
ditions which together are required for a fulfilled human life are compartmentalized, and we are thus prevented from attaining our aims-work is
separated from family, politics from business, study from religion and
psychology, and so forth. In addition, I speak from a standpoint which
might be called liberal, or even left, since it begins with the assumption
of the equal importance of full development for all" and with the belief
in the capacity of the group to raise each of its members to a higher level,
their desires to claims of justice," and their capacities to a higher level
of development or virtue. 20
In the twentieth century, two philosophers have gone back to Aristotle's conception of the place of human happiness, the political philosopher
Leo Strauss and the moral philosopher Alasdair Macintyre. Of these two,
Strauss's point of view is closer to that of Aristotle and Macintyre's is closer
to the one which I have expressed, while Strauss recognizes, as I do, the
importance of a metaphysical basis for an Aristotelian account and
Macintyre does not. In what follows, I will give a brief sketch of each one's
return to Aristotelian ethics and, in so doing, begin to make the case for
a return like my own, to a liberal, but metaphysical Aristotelian ethics.
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In "An Epilogue" (1962), Strauss argues, against then contemporary
political science, for the Aristotelian belief in the irreducibility of human
nature. Man, he says, is a being sui generis, not reducible to any other kind.
Contemporary political science reduces man- to a being without latitude;
to a being for whom every stimulus is a value. But man is not such a being. Instead, man is a being distinguished from every other known being
because it posits values. A desire does not make the desired thing a man's
value; for a man may fight his desire or, if overpowered by his desire, he
may blame himself. This shows that the desire does not make something
his value; only choice does this, where choice is not the choice of means
to pregiven ends, but the choice of ends- the positing of ends, or, rather,
the positing of values." By reducing man, Strauss says, the new political
science strengthens the worst proclivities of democracy. "By teaching the
equality of all values, by denying that there are things which are intrinsically high and others which are intrinsically low as well as by denying
that there is an essential difference between men and brutes, it unwittingly
contributes to the victory of the gutter."" These are stirring words. They
are addressed to that within us that seeks something noble, to the ineradicable desire for the high, and they speak about what happens to that
desire and to us when man is reduced to less than he is.
In "Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy" (1969),
Strauss addresses the same problem, this time not in political science but
in contemporary philosophy. He divides then contemporary philosophy
into its two still predominant groups, despite name changes and changes
in views: the positivists and the existentialists, where positivism is the belief
that only scientific knowledge is genuine knowledge and existentialism the
belief that all principles of knowledge and action are historical (where by
"principle" he means "ground" or "basis"). Though these two schools seem
quite different, Strauss points out, they are united by their common rejection of political philosophy. Each rejects the knowability of the good,
positivists because the good cannot be known scientifically, existentialists
because even science is just one form among many of viewing the world,
all equally groundless, all of equal value. The positivists, then, like the new
political scientists discussed in "An Epilogue," would make us less than
we are, for their rejection of the good implies the impossibility of choice.
The existentialists make us more than we are, for though they accept the
importance of choice and action and believe that human beings posit values,
they believe such values cannot be known- that they are the result, instead,
of groundless human choice or of historical fate. Existentialism arises,
Strauss says, out of a desire for a code to live by when the ideals of wisdom
and of rigorous science are separated; that is, when our desire for the good
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is accompanied by the belief that the good cannot be known. Heidegger
is the existentialist Strauss has in mind; he is the center, Strauss says, not
part of the flabby periphery, of the existentialist movement."
As a young man, years earlier, Strauss had already noted this difficulty
in Heidegger's teachings- the problem which arises when the ineradicable
desire for the high is severed from metaphysical or theological ground.
Heidegger, he sensed, "spoke of something of the utmost importance to
man as man."24 He aimed at something important or serious, we might
say. Nonetheless, "What I could not stomach was his moral teaching, for
despite his disclaimer, he had such a teaching. The key term is resoluteness
without any indication as to what are the proper objects of resoluteness."25
It was this moral teaching, Strauss says, which led Heidegger later to side
with the Nazis.
Strauss saw the same difficulty in the teachings of the political philosopher, Carl Schmitt, in the thirties." Schmitt opposes the neutrality of
the modern state, with its low goals (humanitarian-pacifist morality,
comfort-guided economics, or non-controversial technology). In its place
he puts the affirmation of what he calls "the political as such," understood
as the division of human beings into fighting groups-friend-foe groups
always ready to fight. Against neutralist modernity, neutral because
humanitarian and pacifist in character, Schmitt poses the non-neutrality
of the fighting group which, because its members are ready to risk death,
is not neutral, but affirms.
Strauss notes two difficulties with Schmitt's affirmation of non-neutral
politics. First, it is as neutral as the liberalism it opposes. He calls it "liberalism preceded by a minus-sign,''27 or the "affirmation of fighting as such,
regardless of the object of fighting":"
Whereas the liberal respects and tolerates all "honestly held" convictions,
so long as these respect the legal order or acknowledge the sanctity of peace,
whoever affirms the political as such, respects and tolerates all "serious" convictions, in other words, all decisions leading up to the real possibility of war. 29
Second, Strauss notes that Schmitt's affirmation of the political, that
is of fighting, as such, is not consistent, since sometimes he affirms it not
as such, but on the basis of the moral, where morality is understood not
as humanitarian-pacifist but as affirmation of the serious over against the
reduction of life to mere entertainment, to a life, as Strauss characterizes
it, in which man has forgotten what counts.'" Still, though, Strauss says,
even this affirmation of the moral remains neutral. For Schmitt does not
answer the question, what are the proper objects of fighting, or, more
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generally, the question, what is right. That is, Schmitt rejects the neutralization of human beings, but puts groundless affirmation in its place.
To find an answer to the question what is right or good, to the question what is the proper object of our resoluteness, of our ineradicable desire
for the high, Strauss turns to the pre-modern- to the classical philosophy
especially of Plato and Aristotle and also to the Bible; to Athens, as he
calls it, and to Jerusalem, each offering an object for our aims, though
one is found through reason and the other not through reason but through
revelation." According to both, man is justified when he is in accord with
something outside himself: justice is compliance with the natural order
according to classical philosophy; righteousness is obedience to the divinely
established order according to Bibilical religion.
Strauss turns back to these because he believes that what is needed cannot be found in modernity. For, according to him, modernity is united in
its progressive rejection of value. It is, therefore, characterized by its progressive abandonment of that the positioning of which distinguishes human
beings from the other animals. Modernity has, according to Strauss, three
waves: a first wave which, I suggest, we can identify with the first mistake
pointed out by Aristotle, the reduction of the irreducible human kind to
the status of plants and non-human animals; a third wave, which can be
identified with the second mistake pointed out by Aristotle, the error of
raising ourselves to the level of gods; and a transitional second stage, containing elements of both. The first stage he identifies variously with Hobbes
or Machiavelli and the rise of modern science; the second with Rousseau;
and the third with Nietzsche. Machiavelli turns us away from the "ought"
to the "is"; that is, from how one ought to live, to how one does live;
Rousseau identifies the "ought" and the "is," since, according to him, there
is no appeal from the existent general will to some principle or ground
beyond and constitutive of it; and Nietzsche abandons the "is" for the
"ought," or at least for value, since, according to him, all truths are values
and all values are created- not discovered, but created.
Modern science, like Machiavelli, is part of the first-wave move away
from value; for it, too, is founded ou the rejection of the classical belief
in natural ends: ends towards which we and all other beings are directed;
ends specific to each specifically different nature, ours being determined
by our rational and social nature. These ends give all beings, including
human beings, a place within the whole. Man has a place in an order he
did not originate; he has power, but his power is limited; he cannot overcome the limitations of his own nature. 32 Modern science leaves us with
a mechanistic science of nature, thus rendering the question of human ends
always a problem.
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The philosophy of late modernity is no better; for it results in historicism. Hegelian historicism suggests that history is in its final decline,
so it cannot provide the objects to guide our aims. Non-Hegelian historicism
provides us with two choices, a universalist historicism represented by
Marx's vision of a mobile, not deeply rooted, world society dedicated to
the full development of everyone, and a particularist historicism represented
by Nietzsche's anti-egalitarian vision of the man of specialization who is
subject to harsh limitation, against the man who follows goal after goal,
in aimless "full development." The former is the liberal ideal Schmitt rightly
rejected. The latter is akin to the ideal which Schmitt proposed and Strauss
rejected. The one is universalist and peaceful; the other is particularist and
warlike. Each, as we've seen, is neutral, and so cannot provide us with proper
objects. We could be stronger about the particularist ideal and say that
its desire for the high, severed from metaphysical or theological ground,
easily becomes the rule of muscle, or blood, or land. Strauss did have this
in mind about Heidegger, whose unguided resoluteness, according to him,
led directly to his siding with the Nazis in 1933, as I have mentioned before.
Whether the same could be said of Schmitt's affirmation of the serious
understood as warlike and particularist and his becoming a Nazi, I do not
know.
What's needed, then, is a principle or basis on which to judge- between
particular and universal, war and peace. Plato gives us an example of this
in the Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito. The principle- the proper object
of our aims- is the good, understood as wisdom, or human wisdom, and
the apparent means to it, namely, philosophy or dialogue. Socrates does
not commit the injustice of allowing Crito to steal him out of prison. Why
not? Not out of obedience to Athens simply because it is his own. We know
from the Apology that Socrates would disobey Athens in one case, namely,
if he was forbidden by the city to philosophize. Not because Athens is
simply just, that is, in accord with a universal principle, as we know it is
not from the conviction and sentencing of Socrates. Instead, because
Athens, though imperfect, is not wholly bad, but comes close to justiceSocrates was raised and educated in Athens, and allowed to philosophize
for many years. The Crito and Euthyphro remind us that Socrates stands
between affirmation of the particular and of the universal. Crito affirms
the particular- his friendship group, of which Socrates is a member- and
cannot see a more universal entity, Athens and its laws, as the proper object of his affirmation. Thus Socrates must personalize the laws- make
them more particular-to motivate Crito's obedience. Euthyphro, on the
other hand, affirms the universal. In the name of piety he is prosecuting
his father for allowing a killer to die in a ditch. A workman killed a
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workman and Euthyphro's father left him too long in a ditch, where he
died. There seems something inhuman about Euthyphro's unconcern about
the particular-his unconcern about his father-apparently for the sake
of a universal principle, justice. Crito can only help his friends and harm
his enemies; Euthyphro, apparently, stands by a principle no matter who
is hurt. Socrates stands in between: he helps Athens, his own, not simply
because it is his own, but because it is in many important respects, though
not in all respects, good. Awareness of the good, then, not only provides
a basis for judgment; it also is not "absolutist" but allows for ambiguity.
The things around us, as Socrates says in the Republic, tumble about between being and not being, in this case between being and not being just.
According to Aristotle, too, the good provides a basis on which to
judge- to judge regimes or forms of govermnent and to decide between
war and peace. Just regimes are distinguished from unjust ones not, as
we might say, by the consent of the governed, but by rulers who rule not
for their own but the common good, where the good is understood by him,
as we've seen, as a life in which developed capacities of intellect and
character flourish. Without an understanding of a substantive human good
we are left with affirmation of limitation as such or the claim that all limitation is dominance, that is, that all limitation is to be opposed; but opposition to norms ought to be for the sake of something; it ought to be for
the sake of norms which can lead to human development, to constitutive,
not harmful or destructive, norms.
The good also provides a basis for deciding between war and peace:
war is not for its own sake; it is not the end. We would call a man a murderer
who made enemies of his friends for the sake of war, Aristotle says in the
Ethics. Instead, war is for the sake of peace. Peace, too, is not the end,
however; it is itself guided by another criterion, namely, the good life,
understood, again, as a life in which developed human capacities flower."
3
What I have sketched here is Strauss's account of the two schools of
contemporary philosophy, divided by their estimation of human action,
but united by their rejection of the good and by their common origin in
the progressive rejection of the good by modern philosophy and science.
The rejection has three waves: the first turns from the "ought" to the "is";
the second identifies them; and the third replaces the "is" with the "ought"
or at least with value. The result is historicism of two sorts, one affirming
the universal and peace; the other the particular and war. What's needed,
instead, is a principle or ground for deciding between these, the principle
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
which Biblical religion called god and pre-modern philosophers called the
good.
Strauss's writings are an invaluable series of reflections on this modern
trend along with interpretations of the ancient writings which counter it.
His writings have not until recently been much considered by American
professional philosophers, however. There are a number of reasons for this
neglect. I suppose a principal one is simply that Strauss's philosophical
origins are in Continental Europe rather than Britain. American philosophy,
as a discipline, has been and still is principally Anglo-American in content and style, despite its current interest in themes which derive principally from Nietzsche. A second reason is Strauss's perceived political
conservatism. 34
It is right, I believe, to call Strauss a "conservative," but important to
see what that might mean. His is not the extreme conservatism which affirms the particular as such (whether it be race, land, or tradition) or war
for its own sake. His comments on Carl Schmitt demonstrate this, as does
his invocation of the distinction between the ancestral and the good." Instead, he is conservative in his recognition of the need for something to
guide or limit the ineradicable human desire for something high- for the
serious, as he puts it when speaking about Schmitt; for a code to live by,
as he puts it when talking about existentialism; for objects for our
resoluteness, as he puts it when speaking about his early reaction to
Heidegger. It is the fact that this desire, unguided, is dangerous that leads
Strauss to associate what I have called "accord with something outside
ourselves"- the accord with virtue and thus with telos which is required
according to Aristotle for happiness- with the high or noble. Recall that
it was Heidegger's moral teaching-unguided resoluteness-which according to Strauss led him to side with the Nazis. Philosophy, Strauss says,
though privately extreme, must be publicly moderate." This is one part
of Strauss's conservatism.
Another is his thoroughgoing privileging of rank. For a random example, consider this passage from "An Epilogue": the new political science
"must begin to learn to look with sympathy at the obstacles to it if it wishes
to win the sympathy of the best men of the coming generation- those
youths who possess the intellectual and the moral qualities which prevent
men from simply following authorities, to say nothing of fashions.""
Strauss's students extend this privileging. Allan Bloom, in his recent book
on the crisis in American education, The Closing of the American Mind·
How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls
of Today's Students, is not reticent in stating that the students he has drawn
his conclusions about are those who are both talented and well-off. "A
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word about my 'sample' in this study," he says. "It consists of thousands
of students of comparatively high intelligence, materially and spiritually
free to do pretty much what they want with the few years of college they
are privileged to have-in short, the kind of young persons who populate
the twenty or thirty best universities."" The privileging of rank is another
part of Strauss's conservatism.
Recently, however, Alasdair Macintyre, his origins not in phenomenology and existentialsm but in what he calls analytical philosophy, and
his aim not to provide proper objects for the ineradicable desire for the
high but to find a pluralist account of happiness as unity, has, like Strauss,
called for a return to Aristotle. In After Virtue (1981; second ed. 1984),
Macintyre calls for a return to an Aristotelian ethics to rescue us from
the twin evils of end-neutral emotivism on the one hand, and Aristotle's
"metaphysical biology'' on the other." The similarities between these two
different accounts of our current impasse and its origins in the Enlightenment are worth noting.
Macintyre, like Strauss, believes that the West is currently in a dangerous
state, comparable to the period of the decline of the Roman empire into
the Dark Ages. 40 Strauss calls our current state a "crisis": Western man
no longer knows what he wants, Strauss says; for he has lost his faith that
he can know what is right and wrong, good and bad." Macintyre calls
our situation a state of "grave disorder in the language of morality": "we
have-very largely, if not entirely-," he says, "lost our comprehension,
both theoretical and practical, of morality."" He labels that disorder with
the name "emotivism," where by "emotivism" he means the doctrine that
all value judgments, and more specifically all moral judgments, are nothing
but assertions of personal preference or feeling." We live, Macintyre states,
in a specifically emotivist culture. For people now think, talk, and act as
if emotivism were true;" that is, they live, talk, and act as if value judgments
were mere expressions of personal preference. The result of this is that contemporary moral debate is interminable, each side shrilly shouting its moral
claims as if they were transpersonally true, while in fact basing them on
nothing more than personal preference. Thus arguments about war and
peace, abortion and choice, social welfare and capitalist freedom, go on
interminably, without any prospect of resolution.
In addition, emotivism results in a specifically emotivist self, a bifurcated self, divided into two value-neutral parts: one, the organizational self
of bureaucratic man, in whose activities ends are taken for granted and
the means to ends are manipulated; and another, the personal self of private
human beings, for whom values are central, but purely a matter of arbitrary
choice. The emotivist self results from two beliefs, the belief that actions
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
are not value-guided but reducible to mere behavior, and the belief that
roles and traditions are not definitive of who someone is, but mere matters of arbitrary choice. These two beliefs should remind us of beast and
god: the managerial self on the one hand, and the expressive self on the
other.
Like Strauss, Macintyre points out that neither school of contemporary
philosophy can get us out of our predicament. Neither, he says, could even
diagnose it. For analytical philosophers and phenomenologists, though
divided by differences in vocabulary and style, are united in their dedication to description over evaluation, the former to description of language,
the latter to description of structures of consciousness." As the analytical
phllosopher C. L. Stevenson claimed that value judgments like "Thls is
good" simply mean "I approve of this; do so as well,"46 so the existentialist
philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre argued that claims to rational morality were
nothing but the exercise of bad faith by those who were unable to tolerate
the recognition that their own choices were the sole source of moral judgment, and the existentialist phllosopher Nietzsche claimed that would-be
objective moral judgments were just the mask worn by those whose willto-power was too weak for them to assert themselves with archaic and
aristocratic grandeur." Like Strauss, Macintyre sees this existentialist alternative to analytical philosophy as dangerous: the Sartrean existentialist as
well as Nietzsche's Obermensch "belong," he says, "in the pages of a philosophical bestiary rather than in serious discussion."48
Like Strauss, Macintyre finds the origins of our current predicament
in the collapse of the two principal teachings of the pre-modern West: the
rational ethics of Aristotle and the theological ethics of divine law. The
moral scheme of these two teachlngs dominated the European middle ages
from the twelfth century onwards, according to Macintyre. The scheme
has three parts: man-as-he-happens-to-be; man-as-he-could-be-if-herealized-his-le/os; and the precepts of rational ethics for moving from one
to the other. This moral scheme, however, presupposes a number of views
which have been rejected since the Enlightenment: it presupposes an account of potentiality/actuality, of the essence of man as a rational animal,
and of the human telos. For virtues are those developed capacities which
enable us to move from our mere potential to the realization of our essential nature. The precepts of rational ethics are, in other words, teleological,
instructing us on how to move from potency to act, from our potential
to our nature or telos.
Unfortunately, theological ethics has the same scheme: man-as-hehappens-to-be; man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-hls-le/os; and the precepts
which enable us to move from one to the other. The scheme is the same,
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though the precepts are expressions not of teleology but of divinely ordained law. On both accounts, the third element in this scheme-the
precepts-are lost. For Protestantism and Jansenist Catholicism unite with
seventeenth-century philosophy and science in the claim that reason cannot comprehend essences or transitions from potency to act.
Like Strauss, Macintyre sees the Enlightenment rejection of teleology
as progressive, starting with the early Enlightenment's "mechanistic account
of human action"" and ending with Nietzsche's claim that my morality
is only what my will creates:" we must create new tables of what is good,
Nietzsche says; we "want to become those we are-human beings who are
new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves."" It is not hard to see that these two phases, like the first and third
waves of modernity described by Strauss, are the two mistakes pointed out
by Aristotle, one of supposing that we are less than we are, the other of
supposing we are more. For the mechanistic account of human action consists in the belief that human action can be explained wholly in terms of
antecedent, mechanistic causes, and not at all in terms of the end which
we set for ourselves; while Nietzsche claims not only that we set our own
ends, but that in doing so we make those ends good. Mechanists claim
we cannot act, but instead are pushed; while Nietzsche claims our action
is its own justification. One identifies us, if not with the beasts, at least
with mechanism; the other identifies us with the gods. Like Strauss,
however, Macintyre's claim is not that Nietzsche is wrong or that he is
trivial. Instead they both agree that his diagnosis of the ultimate result
of modernity is both apt and profound; it is his prescription which they
reject. They both agree that modern philosophy is, through and through,
incapable of giving ground for value judgments, but deny that this means
we ought to or can create our own values. Instead, each sees Nietzsche's
critique as a critique not of ethics, politics, or rationality itself, but of the
modern understanding of ethics, politics, and rationality." Each thus calls
for a return to pre-modern philosophy, Strauss to (among others) Aristotle,
Macintyre not to Aristotle, but to an Aristotelian ethics.
To do so, Macintyre gives his own Aristotelian account of a virtue. A
virtue, according to him, is a quality whose exercise enables us to achieve
the goods which are internal to complex forms of human activity." He
calls such activities "practices": a practice, according to him, is a coherent
and complex, socially established, cooperative human activity; arts,
sciences, and games are practices, as are politics and the making and sustaining of family life." A virtue, then, is a quality which makes it possible
to attain the goods internal to complex forms of human activity. For example, a chess player who lacks the virtue honesty may win at the game
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of chess by cheating; he thus will achieve a good external to chess, prestige,
for example, or status, or money; he will not, however, insofar as he cheats,
achieve the goods intrinsic to chess: he will not in fact have played a good
game of chess; nor will he have extended his chess-playing skills, nor attained the enjoyment intrinsic to the game of chess itself- its competitive
intensity, for example.
Macintyre's definition of a virtue is, arguably, Aristotelian. According
to Aristotle, a virtue is a disposition to choose the mean, where the mean,
as I have described it, is just what is required for the end in question, and
so could be understood to be what Macintyre has called an intrinsic good.
In addition, the virtuous man, according to Aristotle, does what is needed
or appropriate not out of compulsion or simply from habit, but because
he desires it for its own sake: the courageous man does what is needed,
when needed, and as needed, not for the sake of money, nor simply because
he is angry, but "for the sake of the beautiful," that is, for its own sake.
This is what distinguishes the one who has virtue from the one who merely
has continence: in the virtuous man, desires and beliefs are in harmony,
and the virtuous action is without conflict or regrets; the continent man,
to the contrary, does what he believes is appropriate, but must overcome
a contrary desire in order to do so.
The difficulty, however, is that Macintyre's account provides no way
to distinguish between one who overcomes fears and dangers in battle in
order to enjoy, for example, war for its own sake, and one who does so
in order to defeat a tyrant. Remember that according to Aristotle we would
call the one who would make enemies of his friends for the sake of war
a murderer. His point is that one who fights war not for the sake, ultimately,
of the flowering of human virtue, but for the sake of the enjoyment of
war itself, is not virtuous but vicious. As I have shown earlier, it is the
end, the telos, which, ultimately for Aristotle, determines which capacities
are virtues and which vices: capacities for the good are virtues; those for
what is bad are vices.
Macintyre's account of the end or telos of our virtues is curiously empty.
The good life, according to him, is a unified life- the life of a unified self,
one not bifurcated into the mechanized actions of an end-neutral manager
on the one hand and the expressive life of one who arbitrarily chooses roles
on the other. Instead, it is a life unified by a narrative which connects the
individual's behavior both to his or her intentions and to larger, communal
settings and roles. Action, on this account, is not mechanistic, but guided
by what the actor takes to be his or her end; nor is action wholly selfdetermined; instead, it gets its intelligibility and its identity from the larger
community and tradition of which it is a part.
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Which ends, however, and which community traditions, ought we to
use to organize the narrative of our life, and which ones ought we to avoid?
There Macintyre is silent. But there lies the difference between being happy
and being miserable, between tyranny and just rule, between justified and
unjustified war. For the ends we set, and the traditions we follow and roles
we fill, can lead to full human development, or away from it. Macintyre,
on this point, devolves into a groundless pluralism. There are different
norms which we might pursue, he points out; sometimes, he states, these
different norms may be incommensurable; each makes sense only in its
own context. "The good life for man," he states, "is a life spent in seeking
for the good life for man.'"'
According to Aristotle, however, every action and choice aims at
something believed to be good; aiming at what one takes to be good is
not the distinguishing characteristic of virtuous actions as opposed to
vicious ones; instead, it is aiming at what in fact is good which distinguishes
them. It is in order to help us improve our aim that Aristotle writes the
Ethics itself. His listeners know what is beneath us- the life of slaves or
beasts- and are aiming at the high; they are the aspiring gentlemen of the
day. But, their aims need guidance. Macintyre's positive account, then,
fails, or at least needs to be much further worked out. For, though it allows
that there is distinction between human action and mechanical causation,
it does not give us a guide for our action, and thus becomes a version of
the mistake which he imputes to Nietzsche. Macintyre states the alternatives
in ethics starkly: Nietzsche or Aristotle. It is not clear that his own account describes the alternative which he prefers, however; for intrinsic good
without a guiding aim-energeia without a telos-is not Aristotle at all,
but is Nietzsche.
Macintyre finds himself in this impasse because he rejects Aristotle's
account of human happiness and substitutes for it his own. He does so
for one principal reason: because he rejects what he calls Aristotle's
"metaphysical biology," that is, because he, like the Enlightenment
philosophers he mentions, rejects teleology. As stated earlier, however, I
do not think these objections to Aristotle's ethics are successful. First,
though Aristotle's account does rest on his biology, it does not rest on the
part most commonly, and I think rightly, rejected: it does not rest on the
belief that living beings move by nature towards their end. The ethics
presupposes that human beings have an end; but it denies that we move
by nature towards it: virtue and happiness, according to Aristotle, are not
by nature, as I mentioned before; every action is aimed at something believed to be good, but our beliefs may be false or may fail to inform our
passions.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Second, though Aristotle's account of human happiness does rest on
his metaphysics, specifically on his account of potentiality and completion (dynamis and entelecheia), this part of his metaphysics is arguably
true: it is arguably adequate to the phenomena- to the distinction between,
for example, a blind person and a sighted person with his eyes shut; moreover, the fact that it is puzzling-and I think that it is-does not argue
against its truth, unless someone can show that the real cannot be puzzling.
Third, I deny that Aristotle's account of human happiness- specifically,
his account of the human ergon and its telos-makes human beings more
fixed than they actually are." Aristotle's account of the human ergon, instead of making human beings more fixed than they actually are, locates
the source of our evident versatility: we need not follow our passions, for
example, but may act against them, or even alter our tendency to have them;
the other animals must follow their passions; we, however, can act. 57
Macintyre's Aristotelianism arises not out of reflections on the dangers
of the unguided desire for the high, but on the need to overcome the
fragmented quality of modern life. A virtue, on his account, is a human
disposition which makes a unified life possible. His account is, still, however,
liberal: he wants an Aristotelian ethics which is pluralist rather than exclusive; one which does not claim "institutional hegemony"; one which is
applicable to people who live in different societies and follow different
codes. In this, however, he has gone too far; for, since the good is relative,
it is not vagueness about the good, but the good itself, that is, te/os, which
provides the needed diversity.
Conclusion
We are left, then, with two contemporary Aristotelianisms, one conservative and metaphysical, the other liberal and anti-metaphysical. The
latter is problematic since it falls into one of the two alternatives it was
devised to avoid: it leaves us pursuing arbitrary aims. The former is not
problematic, but partial: accord can be identified with the high, but it can
also be identified with wholeness or unity. Which is the American problem, the uncontrolled desire for the high or the fragmentation of desire,
the tyrant or the "as-if' personality, Alcibiades or Gary Hart? The answer,
I suppose, is both. The two accounts also differ in origin and in aim.
Strauss's origins are in phenomenology and existentialism and in reflections on Nazism and other right-wing teachings; his aim is to find a plausible and efficacious aim for the ineradicable human desire for the high.
Macintyre's origins are in analytical philosophy and in reflections on the
increasing fragmentation of contemporary life; his aim is to find a historical
and pluralist account of happiness as unity.
�ACHTENBERG
43
Macintyre's anti-metaphysical Aristotelianism is not an isolated case.
As philosophers turn increasingly towards the continent, whether to Nietzsche or to Heidegger, their interpretations and revivals of Aristotle do so
too. It began perhaps with Hannab Arendt's attempt, in the fifties, to found
an Aristotelian account of action on natality rather than entelechy (that
is, on our capacity to begin something new rather than on human nature
and its te/os); it continues with Martha Nussbaum's attempt, in the eighties,
to interpret Aristotle's ethics as grounded not in metaphysics or nature,
but in ordinary language; it continues in the current attempts by AngloAmerican interpreters of Aristotle, Timothy Roche and Alfonso GomezLobo, for example, to show that the Nicomachean Ethics does not have
a metaphysical foundation; and, as I've stated, it continues in Macintyre's
ongoing attempt to found his Aristotelian ethics on narrative structure
rather than metaphysical ground.
For those who, like myself, associate themselves both with Aristotle
and with liberalism- that is, both with Aristotle and with the pursuit of
progress and change- these two types of Aristotelian ethics cry out for
a third: for a liberal, but metaphysical, Aristotelianism, the outlines of
which I have only begun to sketch out. It would, first, be an ethics dedicated
to the same goal as Aristotle's: happiness understood as the full development of our species-given capacities for intellect and feeling. It would
presuppose, however, the equal importance of full development for all; this
could perhaps be justified on moral grounds, as it is by William Galston
in Justice and the Human Good, or on practical grounds, as a means of
engendering public spiritedness in the liberal state. It would see the prudent pursuit of this goal- full development for all- as its ground, that
is, as the principle on the basis of which to judge between beneficial and
harmful change. It would recognize, as Aristotle does, self-government,
not big government, as a constituent of, and not just a means to, such
full development, and community as its condition- as Aristotle recognized
the city as its condition in his time- since the liberal state remains largely
neutral about the human good, with state being separate from church, from
economics, and, largely, from culture. It would recognize as well the ambiguous relationship of the liberal state and capitalist economy to such
communities, that the state and economy often destroy communities rather
than sustaining them, by pandering to our desires for passive pleasure on
the one hand and immortality on the other, to our consumer desires and
to our proliferating attempts to overcome death. It would privilege neither
the downtrodden, as much of the American left does, nor the talented,
as does Strauss. It would recognize the capacity of the community to raise
the level of each of its members, their desires to claims of justice and their
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
44
capacities to higher levels of virtue or development; the community, in other
words, would be that particular body, intermediate between state and
family, as Michael Sandel has said, through which our particular capacities,
desires, and needs are raised to the level of the universal, without ever losing their rootedness in the particular: our capacities developed to the extent of their human potential, our desires and needs fulfilled in accordance
with our common hnman nature. It would be a liberalism that would not
deny, in its search for wholeness through community, the need for daring
and risk, but would recognize that risk taken on and for oneself or one's
group can be ennobling, as Michael Walzer has said in his discussions of
the self-management of dangerous businesses." And it would be a teaching
about happiness which could animate a sound pluralism- a pluralism based
not on subjective whim, but on the relativity of good to context and to
character; what is required to develop human capacities varies from place
to place and person to person: sometimes we need to toughen up, other
times to loosen up; sometimes to control our impulses, other times to
discover them; sometimes we need a kick in the rear, sometimes a help
up; sometimes we need sports, sometimes to learn parenting; sometimes
we need great books, sometimes we need therapy; sometimes we need
poliiical participation, sometimes communion with God. The origin of
this Aristotelian ethics would be in American philosophy and reflections
on the fragmented, not to say narcissistic, American self; its aim would
be to identify accord not just with the high bnt also with wholeness. It
is an account that I hope to detail further in the future.
Notes
I.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
Our own end is only outside when we have not achieved it.
Nicomachean Ethics 3.8.
Nicomachean Ethics 2.9.
See Politics 1 on slavery. The slave lacks choice; it is lacking that which
makes him a slave.
Nicomachean Ethics 2.9.
Metaphysics 9.1; Physics 7.3.
Nicomachean Ethics 1.5. I distinguish here so-called final and instrumental good or bad: the beneficial and harmful are final (that is,
intrinsic); the enabling and destructive are instrumental.
Again, instrumental and final good, where final means constitutive,
as I argue below.
Nicomachean Ethics 3.3 1112b; 6.9 1142b.
�ACHTENBERG
45
10. Nicomachean Ethics 6.8 1142a; 6.9 1142b.
II. Pleasure is unimpeded activity of a disposition in accordance with
nature (energeia tes kata physin hexei5s, anti de tou aistheten anempodiston). (This is Aristotle's first definition, Nicomachean Ethics 7.12
1153al4. The second does not conflict with it. 10.4 1174b3l.) Happiness
is activity in accordance with virtue. Virtue is a disposition in accor-
dance with nature (kata physin). So activity in accordance with it is
unimpeded. Therefore, happiness is unimpeded activity of a natural
disposition, specifically, of the disposition to choose the mean or to
hit the truth.
12. The city (polis) does not, and cannot, exist here today. So, some other
condition is necessary for full development, as I state below.
13. And thus happiness.
14. "Superficial ornament" is interpretive. Aristotle says pleasure "hosper
periaptou tinos" (1.8 l099al6). Ross translates this, "pleasure as a sort
of adventitious charm." Irwin translates it pleasure "as some sort of
ornament."
15. That this implies that each of these movements, by being together with
the others, is more than itself- is raised to a higher level of
development- is a reason for beginning to think that Athens and
Jerusalem -that is, hierarchy and equality-are not as separate as they
sometimes seem. Each "low" motion, by being together with the others,
is raised to a higher level.
16. Metaphysics 9.1.
17. For example, running forward is the telos relative to one battle, but
not to another; it is a context-relative good. For another example, intellectual instruction is a good relative to a human being, but not to
a beast or to the god; it is a good relative to kind. There are, also,
I maintain, goods relative to differing character or psychology: some
people need competition; others need cooperation.
18. For this, see William Galston's full development principle in ''Equality of Opportunity and Liberal Theory," in Justice and Equality, Here
and Now (Cornell, 1986), p. 92.
19. See Hanna Pitkin's reference to Joseph Thssman in "Justice: On
Relating Private and Public," Political Theory, August 1981, p. 347.
20. Currently, though, the American left privileges the downtrodden.
Hence, in that sense, my standpoint is liberal, not left, since it privileges
neither the downtrodden nor the talented, as I say below. It includes
some elements from the left, though, specifically, the left suspicion
of the relation between capital and human development.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
21. Leo Strauss, "An Epilogue," in Liberalism, Ancient and Modern, p.
221 (reprinted from Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics, ed.
Herbert J. Storing, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962).
22. "An Epilogue," p. 222.
23. "Philosophy as Rigorous Science ... ," p. 30.
24. "A Giving of Accounts: Jacob Klein and Leo Strauss," The College
(St. John's College), April 1970, p. 3.
25. "A Giving of Accounts," p. 3.
26. "Comments on The Concept of the Political by Carl Schmitt," (1932),
reprinted in Spinoza's Critique of Religion (Schocken, 1982).
27. P. 350.
28. P. 350.
29. P. 350.
30. P. 346.
31. I think it is possible to defend certain principles found in the Bible
without resorting to revelation. As mentioned in a previous note, each
first-stage potential is raised to a higher-stage potential by being
together with other first-stage potentials. This is often true among people: the group can raise its members to a higher level.
32. Leo Strauss, "The Three Waves of Modernity," in Political Philosophy:
Six Essays by Leo Strauss (Bobbs-Merrill, 1975), pp. 85, 87.
33. Nicomachean Ethics 1177b.
34. "The real issue is Strauss's ruthless determination to use these old books
to 'moderate' that idealistic longing for justice, at home and abroad,
which grew in the puppies of America during the years when Strauss
was teaching and writing." M. F. Burnyeat, "Sphinx Without a Secret"
(New York Review of Books, May 30, 1985), p. 36.
35. The City and Man (University of Chicago, 1964); Preface, Liberalism,
Ancient and Modern (Basic Books, 1964).
36. "A Giving of Accounts," p. 4.
37. P. 204.
38. The Closing of the American Mind (Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 22.
39. Alasdair Macintyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, 1981; seconded., 1984).
40. Strauss, "An Epilogue." Macintyre, After Virtue, p. 263.
41. "The Three Waves of Modernity," p. 81.
42. P. 2.
43. Pp. 11-12.
44. P. 22.
45. P. 2.
46. P. 12.
47. P. 22.
�ACHTENBERG
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
47
P. 22; p. 113.
P. 84.
P. 114.
P. 114, quoting Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 335, p. 266.
After Virtue, pp. 22, 114; "The Three Waves of Modernity," p. 98.
P. 191; see also pp. 219, 223.
Pp. 187-188.
P. 219.
As has been argued by, for example, Hannah Arendt in The Human
Condition (University of Chicago, 1958) and by Bernard Suits in
"Aristotle on the Function of Man: Fallacies, Heresies and other Entertainments" (Canadian Journal ofPhilosophy 4, September 1974), p. 23.
57. See my argument in support of this in "On the Metaphysical Presuppositions of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics," forthcoming, Journal
of Value Inquiry, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague.
58. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (Basic Books, 1983).
��Dead Leaves:
Illustrations of the Genealogy
of the Epic Poem
Jonathan Tuck
Poems, like people, have parents-and grandparents-and a whole remote
ancestry of other poems to which they owe their own begetting. Though
poets may try to set themselves up as a second deity, creating from
nothingness with perfect power and freedom, still the poems they make
bear ancestral markings and acknowledge their indebtedness. Each spring
growth of foliage seems to remake the whole world anew; but each leaf
is of a kind-a larger family-and also has more particular origins. The
leaves fall and die, but not before they transmit something of themselves
to their offspring. So too the leaves of a book, pages traced vein-like with
lines of verse, take part in this cycle of begetting. Poems, too, can die to
the world, although not exactly as leaves or people do. Some poets claim
to have made the most permanent of objects, more enduring than bronze
or monuments of stone, exempt from the ravages of time. Such claims are
typically written in dead languages; or in any case they must have for us
a quaint, antique sound. We know better: Words are winged, and if in their
flight they fall on barren soil, nothing dies as fast. Their only chance for
survival, for immortality, lies in their power to propagate.
***
Jonathan Thck is a Thtor at St. John's College, Annapolis. This lecture was delivered
at the Annapolis campus in April, 1988.
49
�50
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
In the Homeric No-man's Land, the space between the two armies, the
Achaian hero Diomedes, son of Tydeus, meets Glaukos of Lycia, a Trojan
ally. Diomedes has just gotten away with assaulting two of the immortal
gods, despite a rebuke from Apollo; but now he grows cautious. He is not
willing to join battle with another divinity, he says, so he prudently inquires about Glaukos' identity and origins. Both the question and the caution that prompts it are surprising to us: Diomedes has been busily
slaughtering scores of others for some time now without any such scruple
or ceremony. In his aristeia, his finest hour on the battlefield, he has shown
a strength that transcends human limitations, and it is the desire to defeat
those limitations that makes men fight at all- so that their glory may be
a song for men to come. Yet now, oddly, Diomedes feels hemmed in by
his mortality. His strange moment of pensiveness in the midst of the battle
prompts his question to Glaukos, and the answer at first shows the same
mood of quiescence:
"Tu&€.i&n J.u:;y<i9u).ts, 'til\ y~::vsftv Epssivstc;;
otTtnsp q>UA.Arov yevsr}, 'tOiTJ oe Kat Uv&pOOv.
q>UAAU '" ~uiv ,. UVE~O<; xa~6.St<; ):BEt, ana M e· u).n
'tTJA.s96roaa qnlst, Eapoc; 0 • E:myiyvs-rat ffip11·
ffi<; &.voprov YEVEij 1\ ~·v !pUEt 1\ s· U1t0A~yEt.
ei &' &9EA.stc; Kat 'tCll1ta Oa:tlJ.lEVUt, O<pp' EU stBUc;
itJJ.E'tEpnv ysvsitv, noA.A.ol OE IJ.tv liv&psc; icraow·
"Great son of l)rdeus, why ask of my generation?
Like to the generation of leaves is that of men.
The leaves are dashed to the ground by the wind, but then the wood
Burgeoning brings forth others, and the time of spring returns.
So with the generations of men: One blossoms, another dies.
Yet if you wish even so to ask and learn the facts
About my family stock, it is known by many men ... "
-Iliad VI. 145-151
Glaukos too seems to be oddly conscious of human insignificance. In
his simile of the leaves, the chiastic order of presentation suggests a difference of emphasis between the life story of the leaves and that of men.
The leaves are first dashed to the ground, but then the wood brings forth
more. New life here follows death; while in the one line devoted to human
affairs the generations of men first bloom and then die. Syntactically the
word &.no).Tjyet gives the line a kind of abruption, since it here lacks its
more usual complementary genitive or participle. In sound, however, it drifts
away into a kind of dying fall, with the repetition of the long 'ay' sound
�TUCK
51
in ft li'unoA.ljyBI. The tone is melancholy and detached. We might even
suspect Glaukos of being afraid of Diomedes and resigned to his own imminent death; certainly he has good reason to be, given what we have seen
of Diomedes' prowess. But the sentiment conveyed by the similitude of the
leaves goes beyond either bitterness or quiescence: It has a kind of noble,
philosophic serenity that makes the passage seem detachable from its context. In a sixteenth-century edition of the poem there might be a little picture of a hand in the margin, with an index finger pointing out the portable sententia. There is a grandeur-in-misery here in being able to be aware
of such things; like Pascal's thinking reed Glaukos seems to be finding his
dignity in self-knowledge. So the shift is especially jarring to us when in
the next line Glaukos says in effect: "But if you really want to know, my
family has a proud history." And then he is off into an exciting account
of the noble feats of his grandfather Bellerophon.
In like manner, we the audience are emotionally whiplashed by the
peculiar ending of the episode. Diomedes announces in tones of delight
that he and Glaukos are ~svot, guest-friends, by virtue of their forbears'
friendly relationship, and he proposes a separate peace: He and Glaukos
will each find other men to kill; with each other they will exchange armor
in token of comradeship. The two men clasp hands, and we share in their
gladness. Here in the midst of the welter of warlike, self-aggrandizing appetites is an island of sublime, heroic good will. Here past friendships mean
more than present frenzy. But we are sadly jolted by the author's last words
in recounting the episode:
But Zeus son of Kronos stole Glaukos' wits away,
for he exchanged with Diomedes his armor
of gold for bronze, for nine oxen's worth a hundred!
(VI. 234-6)
So much for the timeless claims of guest-friendship. Just like Glaukos when
he proceeds to recite his genealogy, Diomedes returns abruptly to the selfassertive world of present needs and desires.
Perhaps we can better understand the back-and-forth movement of this
episode by returning to the image of the leaves and asking the following
odd question: Why does Homer choose to compare men in their generations to leaves specifically? One immediate answer is that he is putting
in .the mouth of Glaukos something very like a pun: to qn)A.A.ov (with an
acute accent and two lambdas) meaning "leaf" is very similar in sound
to to q>ii:\.ov (with a circumflex accent and one lambda) meaning "tribe,
�52
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
race, stock, a group of people with a common origin." From this latter
word comes our Latinate English "phylum," used in biological classification. The word for "leaf" seems to come from the ancient word q>A&ro, "to
teem with abundance," while the word for "tribe" is descended from q>Uro,
"to bring forth, produce, beget, generate." It is hard to doubt that the two
roots are related, if not united, somewhere in their Indo-European past
So Glaukos seems to say jokingly, "Son of Tydeus, why do you ask me
about my yevel\, my family stock? The family stocks of men (<pilA.a) are
dashed to the ground by the wind ... "Only now, in listening, do we realize
that the other word, <puA.A.a, was meant.
But apart from its wit, the connection is very apt. We need not ask
of a man's individual lineage, for men are as multitudinous and as faceless
as leaves on the trees. Yet Glaukos does go on, proudly, to give his
genealogy; men, like leaves, may be many but they are not all the same:
They come in kinds, preserving important distinctions. This opposition
of multitude to orderly variation is shown in another Homeric use of the
pun on <puUa, in Book II of the Iliad. Nestor publicly advises
Agamemnon:
"Marshal your men by tribes [<PUA.a.], by clans, Agamemnon,
oe
so that clan may help clan, and tribe help tribe [Q>GA.a
qnlA.ot<;].
If you do this, and if the Achaians obey you,
you'll know then which of your leaders and men is a coward,
and which is worthy, each group fighting as a unit."
(II. 362-6)
In this passage the word <pilA.a is used three times in the space of two lines,
giving it a memorable emphasis. Nestor's advice is taken, and a bare hundred lines later we hear this:
They stood in the flowering meadow of Scamander,
countless, as leaves and flowers blooming in season.
(II. 467-8)
And later in the same book of the poem, the goddess Iris, disguised as
Priam's son Polites, has this to say to the Thojan assembly:
"Indeed, I have gone many times into manly battle,
but never yet saw such a host, so many.
For they look most like leaves, or the sands of the sea,
as they come to the plain to fight against our city."
(II. 798-801)
�53
TUCK
Thus in a short space we see these two near-homophonic words used to
balance off the faceless multitude of the Achaian forces, like leaves of the
forest, as seen from without, against the orderly distinction in their arrangement by clans, as seen from within.
The simile of the leaves carries within it another pair of opposed, yet
complementary qualities. Glaukos' speech to Diomedes seems to invoke
the cyclical recurrence of the leaves from one spring season to the next.
If we ignore distinctions among individual leaves or generations of them,
it would seem that the generality of leaves is immortal, at least in Diotima's
sense of immortality through successive begettings and substitutions (Symposium 208 a). Yet leaves as individuals are proverbially light and fragile,
playthings of the wind, and nothing can be more final than their individual
death, as Achilles reminds us:
"But this I say, and swear a great oath to it:
By this staff, which will sprout no leaves or shoots
ever again, since it left its stump in the hills,
nor bloom anew, for the bronze blade has stripped it
of leaves and bark, and now the Achaians' sons
bear it in hand as judges while they uphold
the laws ordained by Zeus ... "
(I. 233-9)
When we look at the leaves from the outside, ignoring their several particularities, they seem to go on forever. In choosing to look from the outside, we gain a kind of god-like detachment, but we lose the urgent immediacy, the specialness of a particular set of leaves- the cutting of the
tree up in the mountains, the cruel stripping of the bronze blade. So too
if we look at the lives of human beings in the largest spatial and temporal
context, all single human destinies merge into the continuing story of the
race. Thus we can seem to cheat our mortality, but the eternal life we gain
is a kind of living death; in becoming part of an anonymous multitude
we lose what is specifically valuable in human life. We become vegetables,
machines for eating and begetting. So we must seem to the gods, as we
learn from another of Homer's uses of the emblem of the leaves. In Book
XXI of the Iliad, Apollo answers Poseidon's challenge thus:
"Earthshaker, you would say that I was senseless
if I were to fight with you for the sake of mortals,
those wretched ones, who now like leaves are full
of blooming life, feeding upon earth's fruits,
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
54
but then droop into death. So let us now
quickly leave off our fight; let them decide it."
(XXI. 462-7)
If on the other hand we emphasize a different aspect of the leaves, their
individual fragility and the finality of their passing, we are led inward, into
an autumnal landscape of pathos and regret. So too in the story of humanity, a focus on the particular identities and valuable uniqueness of single
people goes along with an awareness of their inevitable doom. This is the
view we call "tragic"- and in daring to look in this way we assert our own
dignity, our capacity for heroism and self-knowledge. As Glaukos returns
to recount his own particular lineage, as Diomedes returns to the world
of private appetites, war, and thievery, so throughout the Iliad we return
constantly to the pathos of the concrete. In this poem it is the death of
the leaves that is finally the more important. Think in contrast of the
Odyssey, with its emphasis on what endures and is reborn, with its great
image of the bed rooted in the olive tree.
But the power of the simile of the leaves is that it holds in unresolved
counterpoise both views of human experience. Socrates claims that the same
man can write both tragedy and comedy; I claim that Homer is here, with
a kind of perspectivism, writing both at the same time. In its generality,
the simile seems to move above the level of the poem's battlefield narrative,
making us cast our eyes forward and backward in a grand synoptic gesture
of inclusion. But the inclusiveness would not be complete if we lost the
particular diachronic context from which the simile arises. It is this inclusiveness that characterizes the poems we call "epics." Though the human
stories epics tell are fixed at a particular point in history, no human story
of any consequence can be complete unless it is located in the larger world
of space and time that the gods inhabit. Spatially epics go up to heaven
and down into the underworld; temporally they go forward and backward,
even to the beginning and end of human history. Yet they retain a constant
rootedness, a grounding in the singularity of the human actions they tell;
hence the tradition that epics begin and even end in the "middle of things."
Furthermore, they have sometimes been thought of as constituting an encyclopedia of all human wisdom, a compendium of all the !ores and knowbows of different trades and callings, not to mention ethical teachings,
cosmologies, and religious revelation. (This view of the epic poem as a
repository of all knowledge helps us to understand Plato's treatment of
the poets in the Ion and the Republic.) In the most extreme case, a poem
like the Aeneid could be used for divination- the book opened blindly
�55
TUCK
and a finger pointing to a randomly chosen passage. The text so chosen
would foretell the future or give practical advice, as many believed in the
Middle Ages. It is hardly possible to imagine such a practice applied to
the texts of the great lyric or dramatic poems. The sheer size and scope
of the epic itself, as well as that of the subjects it takes for its province,
invite us to treat it as an inspired utterance or sacred book- perhaps even
as a domain coterminous with Nature itself. So the writing of an epic is
an act of enormous audacity, because such a poem aspires to swallow up
all possible experience and hold it in the fixity of a human artifice. It is
the binding of Proteus, or to vary the metaphor, it is a kind of rival Creation. And yet these leaves too must die.
•••
A new generation of leaves, descended from these Homeric ancestors,
springs forth in Book VI of the Aeneid. Aeneas and the Sibyl see the ghostly
images of the dead, gathered at the shore of the infernal river:
hue omnis turba ad ripas effusa ruebat,
matres atque viri defunctaque corpora vita
magnanimum heroum, pueri innuptaeque puellae,
impositique rogis iuvenes ante ora parentum:
quam multa in silvis autumni frigore primo
lapsa cadunt folia, aut ad terram gurgite ab alto
quam multae glomerantur aves, ubi frigidus annus
trans pontum fugat et terris immittit apricis.
stabant orantes primi transmittere cursum,
tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore.
Here a whole crowd came streaming to the banks,
mothers and men, the forms with life all spent
of great-souled heroes, boys and girls unmarried,
youths put on pyres before their parents' eyes:
As many as in the woods, in fall's first cold
leaves drop, or landward from the raging deep
as many birds gather, when the season's frost
drives them across the sea to sunny lands.
They all stood praying to be first across,
and stretched out hands in love of the farther shore.
(VI. 305-14)
The leaves occupy only a line and a half, and the movement of the verse
dramatically whirls them away into the following companion simile of the
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56
birds. This is the effect of the striking elision of the last syllable of the
Latin word for "leaves," folia, after two short syllables with light, voiceless
consonants at the beginning of the word:
-UU-
UU
-UU-U
Lapsa cadunt folia, aut ad terram gurgite ab alto.
'-'
Although the phrase ad terram- "to the ground" or "toward land"-belongs
formally to the second simile, it serves metrically here as the destination
of the leaves' swift motion. In this brief picture we feel powerfully the
ephemeral lightness of the leaves, pathetically helpless against the driving
wind of Virgil's hexameters.
The passage is impressive enough in itself, drawing as it does upon
Virgil's pictorial use of rhythm. But I want to claim much more: The specific
power of the passage comes from our consciousness of the allusion to its
Homeric antecedent in Iliad VI. At this point, remembering the well-marked
dualities in Homer's treatment of the leaves, we expect a second view of
them, returning in the spring after the wind has dashed them to the ground.
Of course we don't get it, and our expectations are powerfully frustrated.
But our continued awareness of Homer's leaves leads us further, to meditate
upon the reasons for this departure from the precedent. In the first place,
Glaukos spoke as he stood in the upper world, on a field of men living
or dying; the Virgilian leaves, however, are compared to the shades of
humans already dead. By setting his adaptation of the leaf-simile in the
underworld, Virgil reminds us of his own spirituality, a spooky otherworldliness in marked contrast with Homer's rootedness in the natural
rhythms of this world. Secondly, we realize that the Homeric completion
of the simile in the more upbeat view of the leaves' renewal does have its
own surrogate here in Virgil's recension of it: The birds, in Virgil's second
simile, are a sort of phantom stand-in for the returning leaves of spring.
Superficially the point of similarity seems to be only the multitude of
fallen leaves or of birds gathering on the ground: We had not thought death
had undone so many. Of course there is a pictorial similarity too: The birds
are leaf-like in appearance, tossed and buffeted by the wintry winds as they
flutter to the ground. But these birds are also gathering for a new flight,
a migration across the water into the sunny warmth of their winter home,
probably in North Africa. In this respect they refer us back to the souls
of the dead, waiting to cross the Styx. But the crucial point, distinguishing
them from the leaves, is that these same birds will presumably return northward with the following spring- not a new generation, as with Homer's
leaves, but these birds themselves. It seems clear that we are being referred
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forward as well, to Anchises' Pythagorean account of the transmigration
and re-embodiment of souls, later in Aeneid VI. The sunny lands of the
south recall the blessed, luminous groves in Elysium, where some fortunate
souls are sent after they "hang suspended in the empty winds" or "purge
their crimes in the vast flood of the sea" (VI. 740-1, where gurgite vasto
is a verbal echo of gurgite ab alto in line 310 of our passage). Virgil seems
to be suggesting, in specific, self-conscious contradistinction to Horner,
that a kind of personal immortality is possible, even if only for a few: not
a derived "immortality" through the survival of one's offspring, but an
enduring self, preserving one's identity and abiding in the land of the blest.
This happy prospect might lighten our prevailing view of the human landscape of labor, mutability, and death; but the few who are to enjoy it must
meet very stringent (and very Roman) ethical standands. The melancholy
longing felt by the others, the fallen leaves, is what Virgil returns to at the
end of our passage, with the sound effects of the justly famous line:
tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore.
So far I've been arguing that Virgil's revision of the leaf-simile works
in a kind of counterpoint with our memory of its Homeric source. There
is even a reminiscence of Homer in Virgil's use of rhythm. I have already
described how the elision at the end of the word folia hurries us from the
dying leaves to the second simile of the birds. Let's look again at the movement of Homer's line:
-
u
u
qn\l.l.a <11.
~ev
,.
u Uju Uliivs~o<; xa~ciot<;
uu II-
u
u
- -
xtst, iil.l.a M S'ul.11
1"TJAB86roaa cpUet.
The shortening of the diphthong, long by nature, at the end of the word
?(Est is a metrical effect known as "epic correption." Here, atypically, the
correption occurs at a bucolic diaeresis- a pause after the fourth whole
foot of the line. We would like to linger at such a marked break in this
breathless-sounding, conspicuously dactylic line, but the shortening of ?(ESt
snatches us up and hurries us along, with marked enjambment, into the
next generation of the leaves. The rhythmic force of this device is exactly
analogous to that of Virgil's elision; and it comes at the analogous moment in the development of the similitude. Our feeling both of the correspondence between the two passages, and of the differences, is thereby
sharpened.
Perhaps I should apologise for dwelling on such small details in these
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Greek and Latin texts. I wanted to illustrate the degree of intimate familiarity that Virgil must have had with Homer's poem, and that he also expects
from the ideal reader of his own revisionist version. We all know about
the large-scale structural ways in which the Aeneid subsumes both the Iliad
and the Odyssey: There are the references to the first lines of both Homeric
poems in Virgil's first line; there are the plot parallels with the Odyssey
in Aeneid I-VI and with the Iliad in VII-XII; there are the close resemblances
of certain characters (Turnus, for instance, to Achilles sometimes, and other
times to Hector). But such detailed imitation, allusion, and pointed variation as I have tried to show go much further: They amount to a constant
pressure, or presence of the older author in the newer. Virgil- surely one
of the most self-conscious poets who ever lived- cannot help but acknowledge his indebtedness to his master; at the same time, by varying the allusion he shows his authenticity and independence. To be writing an epic
at all means to be working in a certain tradition, to be a "son of Homer"
and to admit it. In one sense this admission also grants Homer's implicit
claim to have created a second world in the vastness of his artifice. Pope
made this point memorably in writing of Virgil:
When first young Maro, in his boundless Mind
A work t'outlast Immortal Rome design'd,
Perhaps he seemed above the Critick's Law,
And but from Nature's Fountains scorned to draw:
But when t'examine ev'ry Part he came,
Nature and Homer were, he found, the same.
(Essay on Criticism, 130-5)
But if this should be the last word, then epic would be a Titan that devours
its own children. How can Virgil or anyone else write a second epic with
similar aspirations of inclusiveness? A truly successful epic would exhaust
the conditions for the writing of another such poem. The very power of
Homer's original epic forces Virgil at once to include it and to depart from
it, to struggle against his own roots.
The particular qualities of epic poems make it especially hard to write
in a tradition, and make unavoidable the rivalry between any single epic
poet and his predecessors. I have already mentioned the cosmic inclusiveness
of epic, its encyclopedic quality that seeks to leave no subject matter remaining for any successor. Though epic poems try to embody the whole
of human experience and human history, each one does so from a particular point of view. For epics tend to be "national," to recast history in
terms of the destiny of a particular nation or culture. So to acknowledge
one's epic predecessor is to participate in a rivalry of cultures- Rome ver-
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sus Greece, say, or Christian versus Pagan. Even more problematically, the
poet is not a mere mouthpiece for one historical or nationalistic worldview. It is true that such a view speaks through him; he is a prophet, speaking for another as the word implies, and the "Muse" is an image of the
cosmic providence that seeks, through epic poets, to make itself known
to humanity. But the poet is also engaged in a heroic act of self-assertion,
in daring to take up the task of writing such a work, and as a prophet
of his own Muse he speaks for himself. So the family drama of poetic influence, the Oedipal conflict of the poet with his own forbears, is sharpened
and magnified by the special demands of the epic tradition.
For Virgil, the solution to this predicament is to incorporate or subsume Homer into his own poetic universe. (It is thus that I can speak of
the presence of Homer within the text of Virgil.) His allusion to Homer's
leaf-simile, for example, summons up all the specific affect of the passage
in Iliad VI, where the leaves are made into a powerfully ambiguous emblem
both of the pathos of mortal finitude and of the ways in which the cyclical
self-perpetuation of nature transcends that finitude. Virgil, I say, invokes
all this; and then by subtly varying it, he goes beyond it, projecting this
dual perspective on the natural world into a new dialectic with the realm
of the supernatural. So his poem implicitly claims that it contains and
supersedes the parent poem. Homer's epic inclusiveness aspired to the
swallowing-up of the whole natural world. The Aeneid shares this aspiration but adds to it: In addition to swallowing the primary world of nature,
Virgil claims to have swallowed up the secondary "world" of Horner's poem.
Thus in the theogony of the epic poem, each newly-generated Titan swallows its parents.
I have said that by its nature epic locates present human actions in a
larger historical context; this "epic present" is emphatically the intersec-
tion of past and future. But the heroic act of writing an epic must itself
be located in a similar temporal context, with poetic predecessors and successors arranged in a providential order that sets off the magnitude of the
present poem. Virgil's poetic self-consciousness brings a second, selfreferential story into his narrative: Behind the drama and great labor of
the building of Rome there is the drama and the great labor of the building
of the Aeneid. Each of these two great actions comes from a Greek precedent which it acknowledges, incorporates, and seeks to transcend. Each
action also seeks to project itself indefinitely into the future: The perpetual
glory of the Roman imperium is to be accompanied by the everlasting fame
of Virgil's poem.
But Virgil is sufficiently aware of the necessary mutability of human
affairs to entertain a melancholy scepticism about the staying power, both
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of the empire and of the poem. He expresses his concern about his own
poem's posterity by another use of the image of the leaves. In Book III,
Helenus prophesies to his kinsman Aeneas about the arrival in Italy:
"Arrived there, when you reach the city of Cumae,
the sacred lakes and whispering woods of Avernus,
you'll find the frenzied seer in her deep cave
who sings the fates, and notes them down on leaves.
The songs the lady writes, she puts in order,
leaf upon leaf, and shuts them in the cavern.
There they remain untouched and in their places.
But when a gentle breeze blows in the door,
the hinges turn, the delicate leaves are scattered;
then as they flutter through the cave, she never
cares to replace them or remake her songs.
Unhelped by Sibyl, vistors hate her halls."
(Ill. 441-452)
For this reason, when Aeneas comes in Book VI to consult the Sibyl he
begs her to sing her prophecies herself, rather than entrusting them to the
leaves and making them whirling playthings of the swift winds. He promises to build a temple to Phoebus and Trivia, where a shrine will be set
apart to preserve the Sibyl's written prophecies, with priests as caretakers.
The possessed prophetess, the Sibyl, is here a stand-in for Virgil himself.
Like her, he is divinely inspired; and he is our guide into the underworld
just as she is for Aeneas. That there is a relationship between the Sibyl
and the figure of the poet is also suggested by a verbal correspondence:
In her prophecy the Sibyl says
bella, horrida bella,
et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno.
war, savage war
I see ahead, and Tiber foaming blood.
(VI. 86-7)
In Book VII, speaking in his own voice in the new invocation to the Muse,
Virgil says
tu vatem, tu, diva, mone. dicam horrida bella,
dicam acies, actosque animis in funera reges.
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Oh goddess, guide your seer! I shall sing savage war,
battle-lines, and kings by courage driven to death.
(VII. 41-2)
Here the word vales, "seer" or "prophet," which has been repeatedly used
to refer to the Sibyl, is applied to Virgil himself in his capacity of epic
poet, and he puts into his own mouth an echo of her own phrase horrida
bella, "savage wars." And as Virgil is in some sense the Sibyl, he wonders
if his prophetic poem will in the end, like her writings, become a "plaything
of the winds." The written word is treacherous, and perhaps any such attempt to arrest the flux of experience in the fixity of human artifice is
doomed. Perhaps, as he himself has subsumed and superseded Homer,
some new poet will come and swallow up Virgil's poem too. Th be thus
superseded is not annihilation, but it is a very ambiguous kind of poetic
immortality.
It may be that the golden bough itself serves in part as an emblem for
the contradictions in Virgil's view of his poetic posterity: The bough is
artificial, yet a kind of second nature. It has the durability of metal; yet
it can be plucked and then grows again of itself. To the person chosen to
receive it, it serves as a ticket of admission to the realm that contains the
past, the future, and the ultimate mysteries of human destiny. Yet we
remember that it yielded itself only reluctantly even to the hand of Aeneas;
and if it chooses to deny itself to you, no violence can harvest its riches.
It flashes an eerie glint of gold in the shadowy woods, near the jaws of
foul-smelling Avernus; and its metal leaves give off a tinny rattle against
the wind.
***
The dictionary tells us that it was only in late antiquity that the Latin
word folium, "leaf," was first used to refer to a sheet of paper or page
of a book. As far as I know, the connection between the leaves of the forest
and the human artifice of poetry is first made explicitly by the poet Horace,
a friend of Virgil, in the critical treatise known as the Ars Poetica:
Ut silvae foliis pronos mutantur in annos,
prima cadunt, ita verborum vetas interit aetas,
et iuvenum ritu florent modo nata vigentque.
Debemur morti nos nostraque, sive receptus
terra Neptunus classes Aquilonibus arcet
regis opus, sterilisve diu palus aptaque remis
vicinas urbes alit et grave sentit aratrum;
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
seu cursum mutavit iniquum frugibus arnnis,
doctus iter melius: mortalia facta peribunt,
nedum sermonum stet bonos et gratia vivax.
When at the year's end forests change their leaves,
The oldest fall first; so with the generations of words:
The former die, the newer bloom like boys.
For we and all things ours are owed to death:
The harbors that we build (a royal task!);
The barren marshes, then a place for boats,
Now drained for plowing, feeding farms nearby;
The dams that bend the river's angry course
And save the crops-These mortal works shall die,
Nor shall the grace and glory of discourse live.
(Ars Poetica 60-69)
But though this connection had been made, and though Virgil's Sibyl wrote
her prophecies on leaves, the word itself probably did not have for Virgil
the witty self-reference that its linguistic development, and the predominance of written culture, later made possible. For Dante, the closeness of
the related Italian wordsfoglia, "leaf of a tree," andfoglio, "page in a book,"
makes explicit the doubleness of the drama of the leaves. In the primary
world of nature, leaves die and others succeed them; in the second, rival
nature that is the world of epic poems, what is said to happen out in the
woods can also be referred to the successive generations of pages of verse.
So Dante's use of the image of the leaves is even more explicitly selfreferring, and Dante's poem is even more self-conscious than its predeces-
sors about its context in literary history. It is appropriate, then, that the
family drama of Dante's relation to his poetic father, Virgil, is internalized and made explicit within the poem's narrative: Both "Dante" and
"Virgil" are characters in a poem written by the first man and pervasively
influenced by the second. And their relationship as Dante depicts it certainly reflects the intense ambivalence he feels toward his great forerunner. Virgil is the powerful and beloved guide; but his guidance is fallible
and limited in scope- his pupil will go farther than Virgil can take him.
And the most powerful indicator of all is that Virgil finally is a damned
soul, one of those who have" lost the good of the intellect." As a denizen
of Hell he is made to assist in an extended revisionist reworking of his own
Book VI. Whenever a Virgilian passage lies allusively behind, or within
Dante's text, the implied claim is that Virgil had an inkling, partial at best,
of the authoritative version we get from the younger poet. The movement
is from shadowy types to truth: Virgil went forth into the night, holding
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a lamp behind him to aid his successors. Dante sees more and knows better,
and so now does Virgil- but too late.
It is in this emotionally charged atmosphere that we see, in the third
canto of Inferno, a new generation of the leaves that first grew and died
by the River Scamander, on the fields of Troy. Virgil the guide and Dante
the pilgrim have come to the banks of the Acheron, where Charon, the
steersman of the livid marsh, transports across the water the souls of the
damned:
Come d'autunno si levan le foglie
l'una appresso dell'altra, fin che '1 ramo
vede alia terra tutte le sue spoglie,
similmente il mal seme d'Adamo
gittansi di quel lito ad una ad una,
per cenni come augel per suo richiarno.
Cosi sen vanno su per l'onda bruna
e avanti che sien di 18. discese,
anche di qua nuova schiera s'auna.
As in the fall the leaves are taken away
Each followed by the next, until the bough
Sees on the ground all its despoilments lie,
In that same way the evil seed of Adam
Hurl themselves from the shoreline, one by one
At signals, like a bird called by its lure.
Thus they embark over the dusky waves,
And even before they land on the other side,
Again on this side a new crowd is gathered.
(III. 112-120)
Dante leaves no doubt that he is alluding to the Virgilian passage we
have just examined. The simile comes at the analogous point in the
narrative- an encounter with Charon, a passage over an infernal river into
the underworld. Even the second simile of the birds is included: "At signals,
like a bird called by its lure." But having drawn Virgil's text into his own
poem, Dante proceeds to transform it by a skillful reallocation of emphasis.
The extended treatment of the leaves dwells on the consequence, the result
of their fall: "The bough/Sees on the ground all its despoilments lie." Our
first thought is a kind of pity for the tree that has suffered the plundering
of its spoils. Virgil gave us the pathos and vulnerability of the leaves
themselves, but Dante is here speaking of their source, the tree which is
now denuded. Still, the two passages both seem to be portraying passive
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
victims of the force of another. So we are puzzled and disquieted at the
way Dante's version continues:
In that same way the evil seed of Adam
Hurl themselves from the shoreline ...
The violent contrast between si levan, "are taken away," and gittansi, "hurl
themselves," heightened by the reflexive form of both, makes us doubt the
aptness of the simile. Onr perplexity is increased when we notice a hidden
wit in the use of si levan: Levarsi can mean "to raise or lift oneself up"
as well as "to be taken away." In anticipation of the moral significance
of verticality in the poem, "lifting up" is set in polar opposition to "casting
down." Dante is implying that leaf-like souls, unlike Virgil's passive victims, fall by their own choice in an act of deliberate violence.
It is thus fitting that onr sympathy is diverted, in Dante's version, from
the leaves themselves to the bough of the denuded tree. What is this tree?
We probably think first of the forest of the suicides in Canto XIII of Inferno, where both Pier della Vigna and an anonymous Florentine suicide,
now turned into a bush, fit the picture of the bereaved plant, deprived of
its foliage, staring at the ground. There too the immediate reaction, both
ours and the pilgrim's, is pity. But the word spoglie, "despoilments," is used
in that canto to refer to the bodies the suicides have cast off by their own
act. Along with the pilgrim we must learn the hard lesson that recnrs
throughout the Inferno: The justice of God often does not easily accord
with onr immediate passions of pity and love. Our wills must be shaped
anew. The suicides have offered violence to more than themselves, and we
must look farther to find the tree from which the damned souls, the leaves,
have torn themselves.
In the thirty-second canto of Purgatorio, Dante and Statius are following the great pageant of revelation, including the triumphal car drawn by
the Griffin, symbol of the incarnate Christ:
So, passing through the lofty forest, bare
Through fault of her that trusted in the serpent,
The song of an angel kept our steps in time.
As far as in three shots, perhaps, an arrow
Loosed from the bow would fly, so far had we
Moved on our way, when Beatrice descended.
Then from them all I heard a murmur: "Adam";
And they formed a ring around a tree, despoiled
Of leaves and other foliage in each branch.
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Its living tresses widen all the more
As the tree goes higher; even by the Indians
In their great woods, its height would be admired.
"Blessed are you, Griffin, since with your beak
You pluck not from this tree so sweet to taste;
For later on the belly wrenches from it."
Thus circling around the mighty tree
The others shouted; and the animal twice-born
Cried: "So the seed of all just men is saved."
(XXXII. 31-48)
The Griffin goes on to renew the tree laid bare by the fault of Adam. We
can see that the epithet if mal seme d'Adamo, "the evil seed of Adam,"
in our original passage, was not lightly chosen. These leaves are not
generalized symbols of the condition of mortality; they are particular
reminders of the human act that originated that condition. The emphasis
on "seed" in Jriferno III (Cf. III. 104-5), reinforced by sound effectssimz1mente il mal seme d'Adamo-here finds justification. Though the evil
seeds ironically bear no fruit, cast on the barren ground of hell, the good
seed of Adam is Christ, the first fruits and the seed of all righteousness,
repairing the damage wrought by Adam's fall. By his act the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil is transformed into the great tree that is an
epithet for Heaven in Paradiso XVIII:
l'albero che vive della cima
e frutta sempre e mai non perde foglia.
the tree that lives from its top
and always bears fruit, never losing its leaves.
(XVIII. 29-30)
It seems that we have accounted for Dante's adding to his Virgilian
source the detail of the tree contemplating its own despoliation. In so doing he turns the falling of the leaves into a typological image of the fall
of humanity, and of all nature. Through Christ's saving act, however, the
leaves as well as the fruit are restored to the tree, and so the integrity of
the restored tree is a kind of image of the Incarnation, the marriage of
the human and the divine. These things are known to a Christian through
the revelation of Holy Scripture; but Virgil as a Pagan has had no access
to scripture, and thus he has departed by the time Dante and Statius see
the tree's antitype in the pageant at the end of Purgatorio. Dante the poet's
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
revision of the simile from Aeneid VI shows both the rhetorical power and
the spiritual limitations of the older poem.
Another image of this transformation is Dante's use of Virgil's birds.
We remember that in the Aeneid the birds seemed almost as passive as
the leaves: "the season's frost/ Drives them across the sea." The difference
was that the death of the leaves was utterly final and definitive, while the
flight of the birds left open the possibility of a cyclical return. Dante takes
Virgil's migrating birds and reduces them to one hunting bird, probably
a falcon returning to the falconer's lure. Here is a conspicuous revision
of Virgil, for whom the points of similarity between leaves and birds were
multitude and helpless passivity. Dante's bird is only one, and its passage
is a willed act of obedience to a command. Whose command? Virgil himself
is made to tell us, in his capacity as guide, in Purgatory. Look up, he tells
Dante the pilgrim,
"Turn your eyes to the falcon's lure, whirled round
By the Eternal King, with his mighty spheres."
Then like the falcon, who looks first below
Then turns to his master's call, straining ahead
From craving for the food that draws him thither,
Just so was I.
(Purgatorio XIX. 62-67;
Cf. Purg. XIV. 145-7)
When a soul ordained to bliss or to damnation proceeds to its eventual
resting place, it resembles the falcon heeding the command of the
falconer-that is, God. But unlike the migratory birds of the Aeneid, this
falcon is on a one-way journey, propelled by its own will either for good
or for evil. The damned souls which hurl themselves from the shoreline
are following their appetites into hell, just as the more blessed falcon of
Dante's comparison in Purgatory strains ahead toward the Lord's supper.
Dante's version of the simile implicitly condemns the melancholy quietism
of Virgil, who makes Anchises say quisque suos patimur manis, "Each of
us endures his shadowy doom." Even the damned souls in the Comedia
hurl themselves forward, instead of stretching out their arms in ineffectual longing.
As Virgil revised Homer, Dante revises Virgil. In each case filial piety
toward a literary parent causes the imitation; but in each case the imitated
model is subverted by implicit criticism. By subsuming the source into his
own poem, assimilating it into even small details of the allusive passages
in the text, the succeeding poet suggests the incompleteness of the origina~
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67
now fleshed out by his own still more inclusive epic vision. Virgil's revisionism is sometimes ambivalent: He seems to feel a kind of nostalgia for
the simpler, more naturalistic view of history that he finds in Homer's
poems, but he knows he lives too late to indulge in it. There has been a
tragic fall from naive archaic heroism into the necessity of a political art.
The greater self-conscious artificiality of Virgil's poem is in part an implied celebration of purposive human artifice in the building of Rome, but
also in part an expression of Virgil's regretful awareness of the human costs
of the great enterprise. As we have seen, Virgil's ambivalence emerges in
his prospective view of his own poem's posterity. In casting himself as the
Sibyl, he appropriates to himself the authority and lasting power of divine
inspiration; but in the image of the scattering of Sibyl's leaves he expresses
his worry that the inclusiveness and integrity of his poem will be compromised with the passage of time. Virgil knows that when a poem is subjected to the kind of systematic and intimate textual revision that he himself
performed upon Homer's work, it suffers a kind of diaspora, a tearing
and scattering of the unified imaginative vision of its creator-poet, wind
in the Sibyl's cave. In this Virgil was a true prophet, as we recognize when
we consider his treatment in the Commedia.
In contrast, Dante shows greater confidence in his power to subsume
his predecessor and to preempt any that might come after him. To some
extent this confidence results from his own self-assertive personality; but
it is also the confidence of the Christian humanist that his creed is the
true, valuable, and permanent interpretation of the partial truths of the
ancients. In the measure that Heaven is the True City, "that Rome of which
Christ is a Roman" (Purg. XXXII. 102) which includes, fulfills, and
transcends the Rome that Aeneas labored to build, so the journey chronicled
by Dante is the true Aeneid. All human descents into the underworld are
types of Christ's descent to harrow Hell. All human journeys to beatitude
are types of his resurrection and ascension. Thus a literal truth- the truest
of all truths, for Dante- is incarnated into the ostensible fiction of the
narrative of the Commedia. Dante the pilgrim instantiates Christ by dying and rising with him, as the poem's chronological scheme makes clear.
(Dante descends into Hell on Good Friday of the year 1300 and emerges
on Easter Sunday. See Inferno I. 36f., XXXIV. 68, 112f., and especially
XXI 112-14.) In the same way Dante the poet claims to provide a kind
of incarnation in literary history analogous to Christ's incarnation in real
human history. In the complete interpenetration of Dante's mythos and
his subject, the word made flesh is made word again, as an organizing principle for experience; and then by the powerful immediacy with which it
is made present for us, it is made flesh once again. Christ the Logos is
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
here allegorically a ratio, a master relationship between the human soul
and divinity that is replicated in a kind of continuing proportion by Dante
the pilgrim, by Dante the poet in his retelling, and by us, the readers. The
unity and incorruptibility of Christ himself serve as a kind of guarantee
of the integrity and incorruptibility of Dante's poem. We see this with extraordinary power at the end of the Commedia, where the unity of the
creation is imaged as the cohesion of a book of pages bound together:
0 abbondante grazia and' io presunsi
ficcar lo visa per Ia luce etterna,
tanto che Ia veduta vi consunsi!
Nel suo profondo vidi che s'intema,
legato con amore in un volume,
ci6 che per 1\miverso si squaderna:
sustanze e accidenti e lor costume
quasi conflati insiemt; per tal modo
che ciO ch' i' dico e un semplice lume.
La forma universal di questa nodo
credo ch' i' vidi, perche pili di largo,
dicendo questa, mi sento ch' i godo.
Un punta solo m•e maggior letargo
che venticinque secoli all' impresa
che
fe Nettuno ammirar l'ombra d'Argo.
0 grace abounding, from which I took heart
To fix my gaze upon the eternal light
So long that I spent all my seeing there!
Within its depth I saw that there was gathered
Bound up by love into a single volume
The scattered pages of the universe:
Substances, accidents and their relations,
As if together fused, in such a way
That what I tell of is a simple light.
The universal form of this complex
I think I saw, because now even more
In telling it, I feel my joy increase.
One instant is to me more Lethe-like
Than twenty-five centuries of oblivion
For Neptune, marvelling at the Argo's shadow.
(Paradiso XXXIII. 82-96)
In the phrase "bound up by love into a single volume," the world volume
is used wittily to mean both a book and anything turned-like a sphere,
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for example. The word is used in this second sense repeatedly in Paradiso
(XXIII. 112, XXVI. 119, XXVIII. 14). But the most important preceding
use of volume comes in Inferno I, where Dante also pairs it with amore,
"love."
"Or se' tu quel Virgilio e quella fonte
che spandi di parlar si largo fiume?"
rispuos' io lui con vergognosa fronte.
"0 delli altri poeti onore e lume,
vagliami '1 lungo studio e' 1 grande amore
che m'ha fatto cercar lo tuo volume.
Th se' lo mio maestro e 'l mio autore;
tu se' solo colui da cu' io tolsi
lo bello stilo che m'ha fatto onore ... "
"Are you that Virgil, then, that famous spring
from which pours forth so great a stream of speech?"
I answered him with shame upon my face.
"0 light and honor of all other bards,
Let the great zeal and love avail me now
That long have made me search throughout your volume.
You are my master, my original;
And you alone are he from whom I took
The style whose beauty brings me honor too."
(1. 79-87)
The honorific word volume, applied first to Virgil's work, refers to the
epic inclusiveness that allows him to involve and encompass so vast a world
within his poem. But its last use in Dante's poem, framing the Commedia
at the other end, as it were, shows how much larger a claim he makes for
his own volume. The time-honored image of the "Book of the World" is
here adapted to two purposes: It expresses the sense of integrity and oneness
that Dante the pilgrim perceived in all of creation, with the power of the
vision vouchsafed to him in the highest of the heavens; but it also selfreferentially implies the power of Dante's poem to convey this same sense,
though mediated by language, to his audience. The encyclopedic claims
of epic are made literal.
But at the end of the passage there is a sudden reversal:
One instant is to me more Lethe-like
Than twenty-five centuries of oblivion
For Neptune, marvelling at the Argo's shadow.
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The all-inclusive power of epic has also been internalized and made contingent on the visionary power and articulateness of the poet. If his capacity
for beatitude proves to be fleeting, as is the common case for living human
beings, his volume will be in effect squadernato- scattered in single pages
throughout the universe. Remarkably, however, by locating himself and his
own failure of vision within the narrative, Dante asserts the scope and
lasting power of the vision that he admittedly fails to depict or even evoke
in a lasting way. Unlike Virgil, whose survival and fame seemed to depend
on the continuance of an earthly empire, Dante links his own poem to
the eternal actuality and truth of God's empire. That he is not able to convey it directly somehow guarantees that it is there. This rhetorical strategy
accounts for the great paradox of the last canto of the Commedia: that
in the most successful evocation of divine presence in any work of literature,
the inexpressible is expressed precisely through a failure to express it. Thus
when Dante appropriates Virgil's image of the Sibylline leaves, it has a
quietude and sweetness remote from Virgil's disturbing melancholy. Dante
is here revising and subsuming not only Virgil's poem but his own:
Qual e colui che somn'iando vede
che dopa il sogno la passione impressa
rimane, e l'altro alia mente non riede,
cotal son io, che quasi tutta cessa
mia visione, ed ancor mi distilla
nel cor il dolce che nacque da essa.
Cosi Ia neve al sol si disigilla;
cosi al vento nelle foglie levi
si perdea Ia sentenza di Sibilla.
As is the man who, in his dreaming, sees
And then, the dream past, still its imprinted power
Remains, but all the rest from him is gone,
So too am I now: Almost all the vision
Falls off from me apace; yet there distills
Within my heart the sweetness born of it.
Thus in the sun the snow unseals itself;
Thus in the wind, among the delicate leaves,
The prophecies of Sibyl went astray.
(Paradiso XXXIII. 58-66)
•••
Skipping over three hundred fifty years and some notable episodes in
this family history, we come to a new death of leaves, newly reborn, in
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Milton's Paradise Lost. Satan, cast into hell, rears himself up from the burning lake and struggles massively to the shore.
Nathless he so endur'd, till on the Beach
Of that inflamed Sea, he stood and calld
His Legions, Angel Forms, who lay intranst
Thick as Autumnal Leaves that strow the Brooks
In Va/lombrosa, where th' Etrurian shades
High overarcht imbowr; or scatterd sedge
Afloat, when with fierce winds Orion armd
Hath vext the Red-Sea Coast, whose waves orethrew
Busiris and his Memphian Chivalrie,
While with perfidious hatred they persu'd
The Sojourners of Goshen, who beheld
From the safe shore thir floating Carcasses
And Brok'n Chariot Wheels. So thick bestrown
Abject and lost lay these, covering the Flood,
Under amazement of thir hideous change.
(I. 299-3!3)
I have time only to sketch in the most compressed and cryptic way how
Milton receives and transforms this legacy of the simile of the leaves. Like
Homer he locates the passage generally in a context of huge, heroic battlefield conflict. Like Virgil he compares the leaves in their multitude to the
number of the fallen. Like Dante he gives us the final sight of the leaves
on the ground, in the fallenness of a Christian Hell. And there are numerous
other particular points of allusion as well, to these authors and others,
like the epic poet Tasso, the Biblical narrator of Exodus, and most especially
the prophet Isaiah:
And all the host of heaven shall be dissolved, and the heavens shall be rolled
together as a scroll: and all their host shall fall down, as the leaf falleth off
from the vine, and as a falling fig from a fig tree.
(Is. 34:4)
The richness, the plenitude of this catalogue of allusion testifies to the
inclusiveness of Milton's encyclopedic epic. Yet the sheer range of the field
surveyed, the number of sources invoked, is dizzying to us: The leaves of
these preceding volumes lie as thick as those in Vallombrosa, and we surveying them are like the fallen angels, amazed at the wild declension of images and the change from one to another. The passage becomes a kind
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of labyrinth, as the pun on "amazement" suggests. What are the sources
of our difficulties? Perhaps we can enumerate some.
First, the different sources alluded to are made to work against each
other. Let me give two examples. Vallornbrosa, a pretty rural convent outside of Florence, seems to provide a concrete, naturalistic, this-worldly location for the fallen leaves. That suggests that the simile will be faithful in
spirit to Horner's practice of constrasting the violent scenes of his narrative with incongruously peaceful vignettes of country life. But the place
Vallornbrosa is chosen for the particular reason that its name is significant: It means "Shady Valley," the Valley of the Shadow of Death, an
allegorical landscape like Dante's. Our satisfaction at recognizing this wordplay does not last long. At the end of the line, "Etrurian shades" adumbrates, if l may use that word, the presence of the Etruscan or pre-Roman
ghosts of the Aeneid, in whose underworld there is also a valles umbrosa.
The lineation gives us time to be confused; then the enjarnbed remnant
of the clause makes us realize that the word "shades" refers not to ghosts,
but rnetonyrnically to trees. We are back in the placid natural landscape
again.
A second example: Our awareness of the presence of Virgil and Dante
within and behind Milton's text conditions us to think of spirits waiting
on the near side of a body of water, preparing to cross over. It is on the
hither shore that both Aeneas and Dante the pilgrim stand, contemplating
the numberless dead. But here the simile of Pharoah's chariots ("Busiris
and his Mernphian Chivalrie") chasing the fleeing Israelites (''the Sojourners
of Goshen") leaves us with no firm place to stand: At first we are with
Pharoah, pursuing from the near shore; then, by the magic of a subordinate clause, our perspective shifts to the farther shore and we are with
the Hebrews, looking back. But what we are looking at is the wreck of
Pharoah's army, now not on either shore but scattered in or on the water,
like the fallen angels. The shift from one invoked source to another enforces on us abrupt dislocations in space and time.
Another source of difficulty for us comes from the unique temporal
setting of Milton's story. As his poem goes on to show, the fall of Satan
and the rebel angels helps to cause the fall of humanity and of all of terrestrial nature. Such phenomena as the change of seasons, the corning of
storms, the death of leaves or of any other living thing- all these result
from and instantiate the first corning of death that Milton depicts. It is
thus incongruous for him to use these later, more familiar phenomena in
similes: Th do so is to compare a thing with itself, or a subset of itself,
as if I were to say, "The earth's rotation on its axis is as regular as the
alternation of night and day." As Wallace Stevens once remarked, identity
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is the vanishing point of resemblance. Milton's implicit claim is that the
primary truths of human history, told in his poem, are more intelligible
in themselves than any poetic comparison could make them. At worst,
poetic comparison will mislead us, like the inappropriately tranquil scene
of Vallombrosa. In trying to reduce the subject to the narrow limits of our
fallen human comprehension, poetry causes us to make mortal errors again
and again. The sheer difficulty, the deception and complexity of Milton's
verse are often attempts to make us aware of this repeated process. Even
at best, any statement of likeness would be redundant, strictly speaking.
The originating status of Milton's subject matter is so all-encompassing
that no comparison can be found which is not absorbed into the thing
compared to. Hence no epic simile in the ordinary sense is possible: If the
normal action of the similes is to include other realms of experience in
an epic narrative, here we find that all of those realms are already
automatically included. And so are we, the beholders. The poem cannot
offer us a god-like or privileged place to stand, from which we can contemplate in detachment the unity and comprehensiveness of creation. It
is our very fallenness, our implication in the events narrated, that causes
our difficulties in reading.
Milton's poem thus conspires rhetorically against itself, but only after
disposing of its precursors. We saw Virgil rewriting Homer and Dante
rewriting Virgil; but for Milton there is no single epic forerunner, no fatherly
master-poet to whom he is irretrievably indebted and whose precedent he
must overcome. In place of an intricate counterpointing of two texts, we
get from Milton an all-out assault on what he portrays as a monolithic
tradition of epic poetry. As he claims in the invocation at the start of Book
IX, all conventional heroic narrative is intrisically inferior to the story that
he alone is trying to tell. But he too, of course, is fallen, dependent on
the inspiration of a heavenly muse. His greatest source of information and
also of difficulty is Holy Scripture itself. A revisionist treatment of Genesis
can only dramatize its own futility, and that of all human poetic artifice.
As I've claimed, other epics try to swallow up their predecessors and
preempt their successors. Milton's more radical project is to chop down
the whole family tree, and his own branch with it.
It is somewhat alarming to reflect that he may well have succeeded.
Many literary historians consider Paradise Lost to be the last true epic poem
in Western literature. I do not know whether this is true; if it is not, I am
similarly puzzled by the question of who the legitimate heirs are, in the
generations that follow. But the succession we have seen suggests at least
a direction: inward, away from the narrative representation of physical experience. As the tradition goes on, more of the poem's essential content
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consists, not in its self-containedness as a text, but in its interaction with
its own past and future, The burden of the successor poet is to inherit the
tradition and make it new, to use an intimate familiarity with the work
of another as the new material for a radically originating act. Perhaps this
process can be a paradigm for you and me, not writers of epics but readers
of them. We too must remake the poems we read, approaching them with
qualified piety and then dismembering them, assimilating them into
ourselves. They are the true and valid sources of our self-making, lenses
through which we view the whole of things, tokens of admission not only
into other worlds but into our deep selves, the underworld in which we
learn our destiny. If we don't appropriate what we find in these pages, making them ours by wrenching them out of their own place and time, then
they are dead leaves indeed. But if they find new life in us- if our re-vision
of these received texts becomes a new mode of vision, ours and yet not
ours alone-then we too might be able to see the whole world as one place,
bound up by love into a single volume, for as long as the vision lasts.
Note: Given the nature of my argument, it seems indispensable for me to
acknowledge at least a few of my own literary debts. Anyone who has read the
work of Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom will recognize how deeply and pervasively this essay has been influenced by them. There are brief treatments of the
topos of the leaves in C. M. Bowra's From Virgil to Milton and John Hollander's
The Figure of Echo. I have consciously borrowed several points from R. G. Austin
in my treatment of Virgil. My reading of Dante owes much to Erich Auerbach,
E. R. Curtius, and Charles Singleton; my reading of Milton, to Stanley Fish.
All the translations, however, are my own.
�Commencement Address
Curtis Wilson
Members of the graduating class:
It is an honor to be asked to speak to you on your Commencement
Day. A recent book bears the title How to Survive Education. I haven't
read it, and do not know how it's done; but you've done it, and we con-
gratulate you. I myself, who came here forty years ago next August, have
not quite made it through: I have still the junior and senior language
tutorials to do.
The St. John's program does a lot of stretching and spreading thin.
If a sheet of plastic is stretched to its tensile limit, it is likely that a hole
will open in it here or there. In trying to cover as much as we do, we are
quixotic. Quixoticism has been our keynote from the beginning.
Fifty-one years ago Scott Buchanan and Stringfellow Barr brought forth
on this campus a New Program, dedicated to the proposition that liberal
education is possible. The enemy was the elective system, introduced by
Charles Eliot in his inaugural address as president of Harvard in 1869,
and since then adopted in colleges and universities generally. Before Eliot,
the curricula were all-required, but- and this was Eliot's objection- they
had failed to incorporate the modern natural sciences. Year by year the
natural sciences were transforming the world and our picture of it. Eliot,
by licensing the natural sciences as elective possibilities, aimed to broaden,
deepen, and invigorate education. One consequence, a good one, was that
the universities became nurturers of natural science. Another was that
Curtis Wilson, Thtor and twice Dean of St. John's College, Annapolis, reached
retirement this year. He delivered this address to the graduating seniors in Annapolis
on May 22, 1988.
75
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THE ST JOHN'S REVIEW
liberal education lost its sense of identity and direction. Adding to the muddle were the new social sciences, so-called. College education became a
grab-bag of choices ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Barr and Buchanan set out to do the impossible. We were all, students
and tutors, to become autodidacts, tackling the reading of a veritable
Everest of books. The books were to be chosen for their classic quality,
for being first-rate. The great works of mathematics and natural science
would be included, starting with Euclid and continuing through Newton,
Maxwell, and so on. We would become literate in the classics of the scientific tradition, as well as in the classics of literature and philosophy. In
my one leisurely conversation with Buchanan, in 1965, he wanted to know
how we were getting on with Maxwell and Josiah Willard Gibbs. Gibbs,
if you haven't heard his name before, was a nineteenth-century American,
one of the great physicists. I had to confess that we hadn't managed to
cram Gibbs's works on thermodynamics and statistical mechanics into the
program.
This program that Barr and Buchanan conceived was accused of being Epimethean, medieval, backward-looking. In fact, it was as Promethean
as all get-out. Like John Dewey, Buchanan came from Vermont, and like
him mixed Yankee pragmatism with a visionary dream of what this country could be. He expected the college's new program to become the seedbed of an American Renaissance.
As for the natural sciences, he had the idea of a hands-on approach.
He saw the laboratory as the distinctively modern institution for the acquisition of knowledge; and so he dubbed one whole part of the program
"the laboratory." At different times he considered organizing it round
medicine, or the airplane engine. A good carpenter himself, he wanted the
students to get handy with hammer and saw, plane and drill. And in the
laboratory, both intellect and manual technique were to be brought to bear.
All this was to be done in a marvelously original, eclectic way. For
organizing principles, Buchanan turned to medieval tradition. He had the
library collection reorganized under the rubrics of the seven liberal arts,
so that physics, for instance, came under music. What a librarian's
headache! Buchanan was aiming to tweak all our complacencies.
Of those heady times, which were before I arrived, I have gathered intimations from here and there. One of the earlier tutors told me how, in
the autumn of his first year, his senior math students- all male, of
course-took him to a local pub, sat him down with a beer, and commanded him to stop considering himself responsible for their education.
They were responsible; if they needed help, they would ask for it.
In the middle of the academic year in which I arrived, 1948-49, Jacob
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77
Klein became dean of the College; he was to remain so till 1958. It was
a time of consolidation. A new president, Richard Weigle, proceeded to
put the College on a tenable financial basis. Coeducation was introduced,
a step, it was hoped, in the direction of civility. The faculty, weary of more
chaos than it was comfortable with, became more insistent that students
acquire something more like ordinary competence. As the dean put it, the
glories of fifth-century Athens must now be succeeded by the more
pedestrian achievements of an Alexandrian age. The obbligato of social
revolutionary fervor dropped to a whisper.
From my first decade here what has remained most clearly in memory
are the dean's opening lectures. Huffing, clearing his throat, Jacob Klein
would begin by speaking of the trepidation he felt, in attempting to formulate our task. All knowledge, he would be telling us, was our province,
and to keep the wholeness of it in mind was enormously difficult. For it
was ever our tendency to make ourselves comfortable by limiting the view.
He would speak of the babble and unexamined jargon of everyday
speech. Are we not prisoners to it? In Plato's simile of the cave, we must
somehow be freed of our chains and turn round, looking away from the
shadows to what causes them. Surely there is something right about this
image of education, whatever the mystery or confusion concerning the rest
of the story, the Sun and the upper regions and the fourth part of the
divided line. But what was mainly being impressed on the hearers of those
lectures was a simple idea and a sobering one: the thought that to take
account of the wholeness of things is difficult and demanding.
Of these lectures the one that I remember best was Jacob Klein's final
lecture as dean, delivered in September, 1957. The text has not survived,
but the title was "The Delphic Oracle and the Liberal Arts." It dealt with
the ambiguity of the injunction "Know Thyself."
One meaning is this: Know that you aren't god. Know that you are a
finite, mortal being, dependent on your fellow human beings, prone to error, prone to hybris, the error of overstepping your boundaries. The lesson
to draw is modesty, sobriety, circumspection, a sense for our equality with
our fellows. Th a student this could mean: doing the homework, learning
the paradigms. To a scholar it could mean: getting the footnotes right.
The other meaning rested on the recognition that everything is connected with everything. From the farthest reaches of the cosmos to the
depths of the human psyche, nothing is simply isolatable, so as to be fully
understandable by itself alone. Hence, to know myself, I must know
everything. The quest for self-knowledge is thus inherently incompletable.
But the oracle, under this interpretation, enjoins it.
In what I have been recounting, there is an aspect I do not want you
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
to miss. We at this college are a bunch of crazy autodidacts, holding madly
onto two horns of a dilemma. If you did not quite know what you were
getting into when you first came here, surely the truth has dawned on you
by now.
In the last thirty years the program has not changed in essentials. Some
things we do better. But I myself, conniving with others, have helped add
to the madness, in seeing to it that we get to Maxwell's equations, relativity, and quantum theory. Mature physicists admit to having been discombobulated in their first encounter with these theories. To get them to seem
familiar, the only way is to trace and retrace the routes that have led to
such odd consequences: undulations where there is nothing to undulate,
events strictly correlated yet separated in space, with no message passing
in between, and so on. Imagination has been instrumental in leading to
each such result, but the result transcends and contradicts the imagination. As J.B.S. Haldane put it, the world is not only queerer than we have
imagined, it is queerer than we can imagine. My discomfort over what we
fail to do would be greater if you had not met, at least briefly, with this
encouragement and rebuff to our analogizing.
What I have said is no excuse for remediable faults in the program.
As to what could be improved, I have ideas, and so do some of my colleagues, but our ideas are not all the same. But the main point I have been
making is that the program here is an unfinishable affair.
The remaining words I have for you are by way of homily. To your stack
of books, you must now add what Descartes called the great book of the
world. The image is not in every way apt, but it is preferable to thinking
of the world as an unalterable harsh mechanism, to which you are required
to adjust your misfitting shapes. A book can be read, and that, as you
know, is an active, formative process. 'Ity observing the world; there is much
that is thus to be learnt. But the stance of the altogether detached observer
that Descartes projects of himself is probably neither possible nor really
desirable. A better simile for you is that of organic adaptation. You must
adapt to the world; and, in ways that, to begin with, may not seem as important as they are, the world will have to adapt to you.
For four years you have been discussing works of literature and philosophy, writing essays, analyzing plays and poems and arguments. These exercises have developed in you a number of skills that should be prized:
the habit of listening carefully, of being attentive to a question and seeking out its sharp edge; the habit of readiness to enter into another person's thoughts, and to assume a new intellectual posture in response to
new facts or ideas. Here and there, by bits and pieces, these habits should
prove transferable from one context to another.
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79
For God's sake, don't say, as one graduate put it on a resume a few
years ago, that at St. John's you learned to think. These hyperboles will
harm you. There is no point in merely astonishing strangers with our
strangeness.
Mind that some of our patterns here are all-too-easily turned into
caricature. We inculcate the respect for great books, tbe taking seriously
of the texts we read, as possibly revealing truth. A good habit. Works about
our authors we eschew, telling you that these should not be your authorities,
that you should think for yourselves. A good pedagogical ploy. But it does
not mean that a biography of Cervantes, say, might not reveal something
important about the book begun in the prison of Seville; or that the composition of Shakespeare's audience might not have something important
to do with the composition of his plays and the wondrous mix of the high
and the low that he achieves. Our authors were creatures of flesh and blood,
and their works, in many cases, were prompted by the paradox of real-life
situations. They were not always merely chatting with one another.
We tutors, who are paid, I guess, to defend all these books, are not
to be imitated in all our sophistries. Not everything in the books we defend is defensible. Kant gets from the first to the second Critique by leap
rather than logic. Newton fails in Book I to prove satisfactorily a crucial
proposition on which Book III depends. Not every failure of logic in the
Platonic dialogues is necessarily to be explained away by reference to the
mythos of the dialogue.
Graduates, I gather, tend to become nostalgic for St. John's-style conversations. Well, you can have them again, and better, in new circumstances,
when you have completed more homework. You will need friends, of course,
and to cultivate friends is difficult in this age of endless mobility and of
work-days that stretch on into the night. Don't fail to cultivate friends.
There are conversations waiting out there to take place. It may not be very
easy to find where and when they can occur. Tentatively, you can begin
to take a bit of initiative.
You must find your own footing, your point of vantage and vision,
freed at last from both the comfort and the annoyance of pedagogical
authority. After having been stretched in so many directions, you must begin
to assess, and reassess, where your own redefined center of gravity may
be, and where your powers can take you, and what you can discover.
I wish that we at the College had managed to give more attention to
heuristic. The word comes from a Greek verb. Archimedes used its firstperson singular perfect as he leapt from the bath, on making his great
discovery. To discover is indeed a perfect thing, in the sense that it brings
elements together, makes a new whole. How do you go about making
discoveries?
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There are no very particular rules. In general you need to be asking
a question, focussing on it, wrestling with it. You have to have the bravura
to suppose that the parts of the answer can come together for you. You
have to have faith in your powers. The evidence for there being something
we could call unconscious thinking seems to me very strong, A manifold
of processes must go into the recognition of a face or any other gestalt,
but it seems to come instantaneously. So with the "Aha!" experience of
discovery.
In discovery there is a kind of interweaving of the old and the new,
the Epimethean and the Promethean, the traditional and the innovative.
In learning anything, we learn it less well before we learn it better. Our
ignorance frequently consists in knowing what is not so or not quite so.
Discovery is the finding of the new or the different within the matrix of
what is already present, whether in latent memory or conscious thought.
There is no point in merely clinging to what is past. What you learned
and forgot can come back after years to haunt you, or to fill in the gap
in an uncompleted gestalt. As Buchanan put it, we learn to swim in winter,
and to ice-skate in summer. You must have faith in possibility and in what
is hidden within yourselves. The quest must be to find the question and
to persist in the questioning.
In a book about Chinese brush-and-ink painting, I found some precepts
that are eminently applicable to discovering. Here they are:
Follow tradition in basic design.
For powerful brushwork, there must be ch'i or spirit. The brush should
be handled with spontaneity.
Be original, even to the point of eccentricity, but without disregarding
the li of things (li means principles or laws or essences).
Learn from the masters but avoid their faults.
Now I am supposing- is this a mere academic's dream?- that such rules
are not applicable only to mathematical discovery or originality in painting. The questions to which heuristic is applicable need not be high-falutin
or esoteric. With a bit of good will and heuristic, with patience and pluck,
you might be able to transform the daily routines in schoolroom or office,
or the community for some miles around. Oh, if you must, save the world,
or write another great book! But I have thought it wiser to wish you a
simpler destiny, neither tragic nor comic, but similar to the one that
Odysseus chose at the end of the Republic.
I think I have about finished. Oh yes! do read and re-read some of
Montaigne, when you get the chance.
Such is my homily for you today; it is from the heart. May you fare well,
�-:___ - - -
/
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Two Poems
Going Down the Mountain
The journey down the mountain
Leaves us silent, intent on stepping,
Mule-like and heavily laden,
On the cobbled stream bed that serves as road.
Wind-blown aspens shake and splatter
Gold on the dark mountains- so Zeus
Brought grief to the high-towered girl
In such a glittering shower.
Divine conceptions are just the thing
To bring the whole weeping weight of our
Humanness upon and between us.
We pan where the water still runs,
Recovering what we carry: gold,
Hid in the murk of the ancient clay.
Carolyn Wade Loring, an alumna of St. John's College, Annapolis, taught in the
College in 1987-88.
�83
LORING
To Ella, who died March 16, 1973
The mountains in evening don't keep their distance,
But approach and recede, as if a tired
And heavily breathing animal
Drew one after another its aching breaths,
Until another day's labor was done,
And sleep fell over the whole.
Rain also, beaten by wind
Through the ravaged stonework of our wall,
Pools and sinks and spills down one stone face
To another, and to the gray earth below
Where a lilac, tended three years now,
Chooses, without conviction, to live.
Grandmother: your ironic eyes,
Paler and bluer than water-reflected sky,
Saw all and wondered. Why now,
After fifteen years of grieving,
Is your face as close as the mountains,
Where many animals, in secret, become earth?
Carolyn Wade Loring
�84
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
La Chauve-souris et les deux belettes*
Une Chauve-souris donna tete baissee
Dans un nid de Belette; et sit6t qu'elle y fut,
L'autre, envers les souris de longtemps courroucee,
Pour Ia devorer accourut.
Quai! vous osez, dit-elle, a mes yeux vous produire,
Aprf:s que votre race a t§.che de me nuire!
N'@tes-vous pas Souris? Parlez sans fiction.
Oui, vous l'@tes, ou bien je ne suis pas Belette.
- Pardonnez-moi, dit la pauvrette,
Ce n'est pas rna profession.
Moi, Souris! Des mechants vous ont dit ces nouvelles.
Gr§.ce a l'Auteur de l'Univers,
Je suis Oiseau: voyez mes ailes:
Vive Ia gent qui fend les airs!
Sa raison plut, et sembla bonne.
Elle fait si bien qu'on lui donne
Liberte de se retirer.
Deux jours aprf:s, notre 6tourdie
Aveuglement va se fourrer
Chez un autre Belette aux Oiseaux ennemie.
La voilA derechef en danger de sa vie.
La Dame du logis avec son long museau
S'en allait Ia croquer en qualite d'Oiseau,
Quand elle protesta qu'on lui faisait outrage:
Moi, pour telle passer? Vous n'y regardez pas.
Qui fait l'Oiseau? c'est le plumage.
Je suis Souris: vivent les Rats!
Jupiter confonde les Chats!
Par cette adroite repartie
Elle sauva deux fois sa vie.
Plusieurs se sont trouves qui d'echarpe changeants
Aux danger, ainsi qu'elle, ont souvent fait Ia figue.
Le Sage dit, selon les gens:
Vive le Roi, vive Ia Ligue.
* The Fables of La Fontaine, Book II, fable v. Fables i and ii of Book I, with English i
versions, appeared in the previous issue.
�85
LA FONTAINE-ZUCKERMAN
The Bat and the Two Weasels
A bat rushed headlong into a weasel's nest.
She was not a welcome guest.
The weasel, who for the longest time
Had hated mice, sprang to attack. 'You dare,'
She said, 'set foot inside this house
After your sort have been so hard on me?
Speak without lying: are you not a mouse?
Oh you're a mouse all right, or I'm
No weasel.' 'Pardon me,'
Replied the bat, 'but that's not what I am.
What, me a mouse? I wonder where
You can have heard
Anything so absurd.
Thanks to the author of the universe
I am a bird.
Look at my wings: Long live the race
Of those who cleave the air!'
She reasoned so persuasively
She was set free.
'IWo days later,
Our heedless bat
Barges in blindly at
Another weasel's, an abominator
Of birds. Again her life's in danger:
Mistress Muzzle was just about
Th crush the avian stranger,
When she indignantly cried out:
'What do you take me for?
A bird? But you're
Not looking carefully. What makes a bird?
It is the plumage. I'm
A mouse: Long live the rats!
Let Jupiter confound all cats!'
Thus for a second time
The bat kept death away
With repartay.
People there are who, like the flittermouse,
When threatened know what party to espouse.
As circumstances change, it's wise
To choose which attribute to emphasize.
E.Z.
�-
\~
/
�Book Review
Thomas Flanagan:
The Tenants of Time*
Eva Brann
Here is a book that lives up to its captivating title. For its perspective on
human events is that from which time is most apt to seem like a place,
and a place- here Ireland- seem like a temporal being. It is the perspective of history. It is from the point of view of history that we live "in" our
fixed century as in a dwelling and in our changing nation as in a stream.
Like many good things, the title does double or even triple duty: One of
the deep themes of the book is the tenancy of land, the acute catastrophe
of eviction for the peasantry and the more muted melancholy of sellingup for the landlords. Finally, there is that personal passage of time, that
strange conjunction of public times passing and private days waning, when
the termination of our lease on life is in sight: The title is taken from- or
worked into- a reflection by the most reflective character in the book, the
schoolmaster Hugh McMahon, who says in the very center of the text:
We are all tenants of Time, and whatever it is that reminds us, that thing
we will convict as a murderer, like the messenger bringing bad tidings (428).
Master McMahon hates the testimonials of time's passing, and consequently he himself refuses to testify. Though the kindest of men, he gently
Eva Brann is a Thtor at St. John's College, Annapolis.
* New York:
Dutton, 1988
87
�88
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
and quite informatively stymies the young historian with whose appearance
the book opens. For Hugh himself is not a historian such as would put
the stamp of by-gone on the object of his research, but he is rather an
antiquarian who tries against hope to prevent the Gaelic tongue from passing into history-though he himself had once drilled it out of his pupils.
It is as a reflection on history that I want to recommend The Tenants
of Time to the St. John's community. For a deep doubt concerning the
doability and leachability of history is, as it were, the negative foundation
of our program of study. So we are left to come to extracurricular grips
with the potent impossibility of this discipline. This book, which is at once
about the delusory living, the shifting remembrance, and the abortive
writing of history, might have been made for the likes of us.
Before getting to the thought-provoking gist of this novel-history, let
me say something about how it reads. The novels which best typify their
genre are long and historical. Think of War and Peace and Remembrance
of Things Past. The two, bulk and history, are connected. It is, after all,
the business of narrative prose fiction, as opposed to poetry and drama,
to follow out the setting and circumstances of the precipitating events and
characters in indefinitely ramifying detail until the fiction has been
seamlessly implicated in a public world, the world whose scale is too encompassing to be a fiction. In The Tenants of Time this interweaving is
done to perfection. The historical figures, such as Parnell and Gladstone,
consort so comfortably with the fictional participants that one is pleased
to find them not distinguished by so much as an asterisk in the appended
list of characters. This novel, which is both long (over 800 pages) and
historical, indeed reads in certain respects just like history: It is muted and
intricate, many-faceted, and replete with the sort of scene-setting detail
that only primary research can turn up. It is, even, at first, a little tedious,
as good history often is, with the absorbing tedium of a tale levelly
developed, without the compact actions, the crises, that are the stock-intrade of drama. I think in all the forty-one chapters I received a shock
just once; others may find up to three surprises. This levelling of the
dramatic niveau is carefully devised. Every critical event is anticipated,
"prevented," as the Bible used so aptly to say, approached obliquely by
hints or glancing announcements. Novels are long partly so that readers
may inhabit them during a span of real time not utterly incommensurate
with that of the novelistic events. To make that time seem very long and
yet to make the reader never wish to emerge- that is the quintessential
novelistic art. This book was as hard to take leave of as it took long to read.
But whereas from one perspective we are being drawn into a fabric of
accurately researched detail with its numerous interwoven threads, its clues
�BRANN
89
and knots, from another it is the characters of the novel who start to come
out as people. They begin as alien silhouettes outside the compass of our
care and end up having captured our affection. They are Irishmen, recall,
and each chapter is assigned to one or more of them (and once to a woman)
to report their doings or to record their voices. The latter is most delicately
done. They all sound different and yet, with the sparest use of dialect, just
with an occasional idiomatic turn, they all sound Irish- which is the more
remarkable since this novel was written by an American. My particular
point here, though, is that if the book is devoted to history, the chapters
belong to the people. That turns out to be the crux of this enterprise.
From Homer on, literary works have often been reflexive, that is to
say, about themselves (as the Odyssey is about the telling of the odyssey).
It is only an illusion of recent frequency that makes us think of this mode
as modern. So it is not especially striking for this historical novel to be
about the writing of history. What is remarkable is how reflectively it is
done.
The situation is that in the first chapter-the year is 1904-a rather
prissily conscientious young historian called Prentiss turns up in the town
of Kilpeder in County Cork, to do research toward a book on the abortive
local Fenian rebellion of 1867. In the last chapter he gives up the project
as impossible and takes up the law instead. At the same moment the novel
about the same incident has, of course, come to completion, and what is
it but the desired history? Inference: When history turns out to be impossible, the novel may do its work.
That this upshot is not frivolous appears in the course of the final conversation, when Prentiss lets off a rehearsed epigram. It is aimed at the
converse proposal of certain German historians, to the effect that history
is merely a narrative fiction:
A taste for fiction has always seemed to me the unfailing mark of an imaginative deficiency (816).
This mingy witticism has a small truth in it: A person of perfect imaginative
repleteness could probably find complete satisfaction in such real-world
fragments as make themselves available. But it is evident that the author
of the epigram believes neither with the Germans that historians are a
species of novelist, nor, as Prentiss pretends, that novelists are historians
manques- both rather light-minded notions- but something more subtle,
namely that novelists come to a consummation just when conscientious
historians give up.
�90
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
To appreciate this claim one must ask why, actually, Prentiss does give
up. It is because he finds himself stymied from both sides. On the one
hand, this supposedly compact tale of a temporally and spatially local event
keeps going, as a German idiom so nicely puts it, "from the hundredth
to the thousandth." The ramifications of discoverable fact run wild. On
the other hand, some sources who know won't tell, and what is worse, those
who do tell, generously and intimately, won't tell all, leaving Prentiss with
some all-too-well-formed enigmas, both intimate and public. He is too
much of a historian and too little of a novelist to invent the truth. So he
falls between the stools of too much and too little knowledge, as will, it
is implied, any historian who takes the judgment-seat. The novelist has
the advantage in both realms: He penetrates his characters' privacies, not
because they are his, but because he trusts himself to know what it is like
to be a young man in J(i!peder, because he can see the paradigm in the
person and give individual shape to the specimen. But he also paints the
larger picture more successfully, for where the honest historian is obliged
to seek a pattern-in-chief- Prentiss is all for patterns- the novelist can
represent the oscillations of perspective as the ultimate truth. For example, as their particular messy little uprising of '67 recedes for the four
Kilpeder leaders personally- recedes more and more into nostalgic inconsequences and into shame-faced irritation with its balladistic glorificationthe Fenian rebellion as a whole begins to hang like an ever-darker incubus
over the great historical event of their maturity, the Parnellian Land War.
(In fact the author makes sure that it reaches even into the reader's present,
for he unobtrusively presents the imprisoned Fenians as a pattern for the
LR.A.: The former shivered naked in their blankets rather than wear the
Queen's convict-uniforms, and the same "blanket protest" has been recently
employed by the latter.) And that complex of dampings and reverberations
rings truer than would any assessment on the historical level.
Perhaps it is this licence to write history from the bottom up, or better,
from the inside out, that allows the novelist to consummate his labors, to
achieve a whole, when the wise historian will accept defeat. For whereas
history, having no natural being, becomes amorphous under very close
scrutiny, characters under the novelist's pointed attention gain "a local
habitation and a name." Flanagan's four Kilpeder men are a memorable
set, real friends as much in their untimely distances as in their long-breathed
loyalties. There is Tully, the infinitely charming play-boy, the felicitously
and also fatefully unconforming son of the local "gombeen" man, the
money-lender and merchant prince in whose interest the noble land war
against the aristocracy finally turns out to have been fought. There is his
cousin, Delaney, the heir-apparent in spirit of the Tully ambitions, carried
�BRANN
91
high by his shrewd, fierce energy and brought down by a whole-hearted
passion which exactly parallels that of his hero Parnell. Then there is the
above-mentioned schoolmaster and his remote relative, Ned Nolan, the accredited Fenian commander of the uprising, who turns terrorist. Ned is
a dark, God-forsaken, pure-hearted man whom the others love, and who,
it finally appears, loves them- with fatal results.
What the novelist as historian does particularly well is to build up
through his individual people, somehow, by hook or by crook, an impression of a whole people. Perhaps the Irish are a people whose nature specially
requires slow narrative development, for it is revealed in antitheses: lo-
quacious and inarticulate, soaked in spirits but delicate about its rituals,
strong for brotherhood and ready for fratricide, in turn fanatically renitent and ever ready to turn informer.
Now, one might ask, what is Ireland to us or we to Ireland that we
should steep ourselves in its nature and its history? Well, as I have urged,
The Tenants of Time is almost as much a book about history as of history,
and therein lies its special interest for us. But isn't it also true that any
people that is genuinely what it is (as some are not) can capture our
sympathy- and this one, lovable and damned, more than most? Moreover
there are at present some forty million Irish-Americans: Irish history has
spilled over into American history. The book itself has America as a kind
of resonating background: Like the present-day I.R.A., the Fenians are
partly financed from here, and they are officered by veterans of the
American Civil War. Thus Ned, sergeant of the G.A.R., captain of the
I.R.B., and, finally, retired terrorist, dreams of a little house on the Hudson. America is the place where the Irish, like most of us, have come for
refuge, be it in the notorious "coffin ships" during the potato famine or
by frigates sent to rescue failed rebels. It therefore makes sense that an
American should produce a novel of Ireland, the more so because America
is to history what Athens once was to tragedy: the chosen place of resolutions. It is both moving and right that an attempt to understand Irish history
should be made on the other side of the Atlantic, that ocean whose winds
carry the mists that make Ireland green, and on the note of whose name
the book fitly closes.
��
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Zuckerman, Elliott
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Sachs, Joe
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Zeiderman, Howard
Tuck, Johnathan
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The St. John's Review
Volume XXXIX, numbers one and two (1989-90)
Editor
Elliott Zuckerman
Editorial Board
Eva Brann
Beale Ruhm von Oppen
Cary Stickney
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Subscriptions Assistant
Deirdre Routt
The St. John,s Review is published three times a year by the Office of the Dean,
St. John's College, Annapolis; William Dyal, President; Thomas Slakey, Dean. For
those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $12.00 per year. Unsolicited
essays, stories, poems, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address correspondence
to the Review, St. John's College, Annapolis, MD 21404. Back issues are available,
at $4.00 per issue, from the St. John's College Bookstore.
© 1990
St. John's College. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole or in part
without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Composition
Fishergate, Inc.
Printing
The St. John's College Print Shop
�v ...... Preface
David Lachterman
I . . . . . . The Music of the Republic
Eva T. H Brann
105 . . . . . . Eidos and Agathon in Plato's Republic
Robert B. Williamson
139 . . . . . . What is "The Good" of Plato's Republic?
David Lachterman
173 . . . . . . Imitation
John White
201 . . . . . . A Note About the Authors
�Preface
Although the four essays iu this volume were conceived and generated
on separate occasions, they form, I think, a true collection, and not only
by virtue of their common theme, Plato's Republic.
First, all four authors are "historically" indebted to the speeches (spoken
or wntten) and to the silences of Jacob Klein. The first two writers were
his colleagues, while the third and the fourth were students at St.John's
College during four of the more than forty years Jacob Klein taught there.
The ec·;ays gathered together in this book, however, are not static testimonies
to his ·'influence," but are intended as lively episodes in the continuing,
even
L
nremitting, course of serious reading and education he practiced,
often •n the most playful manner. (The colloquial expression "former
teachcc·" is here, if anywhere, an oxymoron.)
T\.,: Platonic dialogues were his exemplars of that uncanny kinship between nlay and seriousness to which Plato, or a soul-mate, refers in the Sixth
Letter (kai tei tes spoudes adelphei paidiai- 323d). Imitating, or commenting OL. these exemplars, he brought to the awareness of the authors of
these .essays the status of the dialogues as "ethological mimes." Interrogation o ,· the souls and opinions of the interlocutors, with, on a very few
occas: ms, a display of the abrupt "turnabout" (periagoge) in which, according to Socrates (Rep. VII, 518d), the beginnings of education consist,
takes orecedence over any of the putative theses, theories, or systems to
which Platonic thinking was reduced or calcified, as early as Aristotle's
On the Ideas (Peri !dean) and as recently as Hegel and Heidegger.
Noteworthy is the way the comic poets of Plato's age (e.g., Theopompus, Amphis, Aristophon) and their Athenian audiences seem to have been
quite amused by such reductions or by their ascription, in all seriousness,
to Plato; compare, too, the newly discovered papyrus-fragment in which
v
�vi
PREFACE
the dramatic, or miming genre of the dialogues is discussed ( =P. Oxy, 3219).
An exotic modern variant, or obversion, of the same thoughts may be found
in Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols (par. 5): "Socrates was the buffoon who
got himself taken seriously: What really happened there?"
Klein's own account of these "ethological mimes"· is familiar from the
Introductory Remarks to his book A Commentary on Plato's Meno (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965); his renditions ofthe various
modes of Socratic interrogation and its dramatization by Plato are available
in his lectures on the Phaedo, the Ion, and the Philebus (Essays and Lectures, ed. E. Zuckerman and R. Williamson [Annapolis: The St. John's
College Press, 1985]), as well as in his last book Plato's 'Ii'ilogy (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1977). Accordingly a very few comments
should be sufficient here. (For further reflections on some differences between Klein's approach to Plato and now traditional or institutional
fashions, see the review of Plato's Trilogy in Nous 13 [1979], pp. 106-12.)
Emphasis on the dialogues as "ethological mimes," on their dramatic,
sly, convoluted ironies, is not at odds with the presence in those same
dialogues of Platonic "teachings," those teachings with which Klein was
equally preoccupied, especially in his first. book Greek Mathematical
Thought and the Origin of Algebra (trans. E. Brann [Cambridge, Mass.:
M.I.T. Press, 1968]; German original, 1934-1936). The link between that
emphasis and this preoccupation may be stated in the following,
unavoidably truncated, way: that to take the due measure of Socratic interrogations one must reflect deeply on the sources of their governing begin,
nings or archai. Reflection of this sort leads, in turn, to consideration of
the most plausible source of those sources (esp. Aristotle, Metaph. A6,
988a7-14).
Mathematics, especially arithmetic, carries a heavy weight in the bulk
of ancient testimonia concerning the outcome of Plato's reflections on the
governing beginnings and their own sources. Three speculations- not
necessarily shared in full by Klein or by all four authors in this volumesuggest themselves:
(!) If mathematics does play this conspicuous role in Platonic reflection, this is due not to its being a precise technique of problem-solving
or a formal deductive system, but to the way its elements and their connections come home to us as truly ta mathemata, the items we can succeed in understanding by questioning and learning.
· (2) When it is a question of the very first among these first beginnings
or archai, understanding and discursive articulation (dianoia) part company. Reports of Plato's "mathematical" speculations on The One, The
Unlimited Dyad, etc., refer to his "unwritten opinions" (agrapha dogmata);
�LACHTERMAN
vii
rivers of ink have subsequently flowed over these reports. Secretiveness or
esotericism, however, seems less the point than the acknowledgment that
what makes learning always possible is not open to discursive articulation
(either in speech or in writing). Paradoxically, perhaps, the underpinnings
of intelligibility are not themselves intelligible, at least not in any accustomed fashion. When Plato, in the Seventh Letter, speaks of "the weakness
of the logos" (to asthenes tou logou), this is not an index of human finitude
or of the critical limits of reason, but an indication that logos, a collected
tally of the beings that belong together in discourse and learning, cannot
offer a similar reckoning of its own ultimate archai. These make their appearance, if at all, in the interstices of discourse, and with the suddenness
characteristic of recognition as well as of eros (cf. Symp. 2!0e).
(3) Because speculation on the "mathematical" constitution of the
governing beginnings remains tied to concern for the human enterprise
of learning (and of failing to learn), Plato's putative "unwritten opinions"
cannot be divorced from his crafting of psychic characters in words, his
ethopoiia, as the Ancients called it. Ethopoiia, mathematics, and what was
later named "ontology" meet at the point of optimum responsiveness to
the testing demands of Socratic questioning. Souls are all together better
off by virtue of this responsiveness. Hence one version of the probably
legendary inscription over the entrance to the Academy explains "'Let no
one who is not a geometer enter here.' That is, let no one who is unjust
come in here, for geometry is equality and the just" (Cf. Johannes Tzetzes,
Chiliades, VIII, 974-77 [ed. Kiessling]).
The three points just made can also be put somewhat differently. According to an anonymous follower of the neoplatonic school (ca. 6th C.
E.), each Platonic dialogue "is a cosmos," composed of elements at first
hearing motley (poikilos), but finally arrayed decorously with one another
(Anonymous Prolegomena to Platonic Philosophy 16.1-40 [ed. Westerink]).
In the light provided by Klein's own readings we might be tempted to discern
three dimensions of a dialogue such as The Republic, three measures of
responsiveness through which that written artifact is given amplitude and
audibility:
(a) The seeming impromptus of Socrates, the two strangers, and
the other interlocutors, given voice by Plato's ethopoietic art (the dialogue
as eiki5n);
(b) Plato's formal orchestration of these voices, always modulated
to suit the disparate perspectives of his listeners and readers (the dialogue
as phantasma);
(c) The dialogue of the soul with, and within, itself (Soph. 263e),
provoked by Plato's two-fold art (the dialogue as psychagi5gia or maieusis).
�viii
PREFACE
The Platonic dialogue as a "cosmos" takes its proportions from the
interplay of these three dimensions. In sometimes very different ways the
authors of the following essays try to do justice to that interplay and thus
to both versions of Jacob J(lein's teaching.
Eva Brann's "The Music of Plato's Republic" first appeared as a special
supplement to The Collegian (March 1966) before being published in the
inaugural issue of AGON. Journal of Classical Studies (April, 1967). In
it the animated structure of so-called "ring-composition" in early Greek
poetry, or in the design of "geometric" vases, is displayed as the shaping
force of The Republic as well. By exposing the plot of the dialogue she
renews the truth of Aristotle's claim in the Poetics: "The governing principle and, so to say, the soul of the tragic play is the tale it tells (muthos)"
(1450a39). So, among many other things, she shows how the dyad of descent and ascent, far from being merely part of the spectacle (apsis) of the
dialogue, is consubstantial with its primary philosophical themes. It might
be worth recalling that, according to tradition, when the young Plato
mounted the dais to defend the accused Socrates, the dicasts shouted him
down (Kataba, kataba: D. L. 11.41). The Republic, on Brann's reading, is
Plato's Anabasis.
Robert B. Williamson's "Eidos and Agathon in Plato's Republic" was
originally published in Essays in Honor of Jacob Klein (Annapolis, 1976).
In it he moves to the center of the questions elicited by Socrates' talk of
"forms" (eide/ideaz) and of their interconnection under the yoke of The
Good. This movement is promoted by Williamson's thesis that, long before
Socrates introduces "the look of The Good" in Book VI, the divergent opinions about justice expressed in Book I presuppose that one could provide
a set of criteria for being just or doing justly that are "free of all opposition" to one another. The intelligibility of an eidos is, under this aspect,
its capacity to satisfy many, even disparate, criteria (for being just, for being large, etc.), without contradiction. The Good, eluding express accounts
of "What it is," poses multiple quandaries concerning the interrelatedness
of the eide with one another and with their images. Why, in other words,
is there apparently a Whole?
Versions of the third essay, "What is The Good of Plato's Republic?"
were delivered as lectures at Trinity College (Hartford), Haverford College, The Johns Hopkins University, and St. John's College (Annapolis,
November, 1984). Its epideictic form and length have been kept; as a result
arguments are compressed into proposals and the requisite scholarly
references are largely absent. As the chronological and substantive sequel
to the essays by Brann and Williamson, my piece takes for granted much
of what they have already argued. I attempt to find a mean between
�LACHTERMAN
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Socrates' elliptical and his ''daemonically hyperbolic" (Rep. VI, 509c)
statements about The Good. In particular, I undertake to show that
Socrates' management of the conversation from the beginning of The
Republic furnishes clues to some of the characteristics claimed for The
Good. The roots sustaining his persuasive practice may be sought in the
reflections awakened by those claims. Somewhat along the lines of Williamson's (more guarded) description, I suggest that The Good is the omnium
gatherum.
The fourth essay, John White's on "Imitation," was originally presented
as a lecture at St. John's College, Santa Fe, in the Spring of 1987; it has
been modified for publication in this format. In it he studies perhaps the
central paradox of The Republic, one not fully reckoned with in the
preceding essays: A dialogue in which Socrates offers fundamental and
austere arguments against mimesis and mimetic poetry is itself a work of
motley poetry. Does the dialogue's own poetic nature "cancel much that
was said in the first nine books?"
White pursues this question by investigating Socrates' most noble opponent, Homer, especially the Homer of The Iliad. On his reading, The
Republic, like The Iliad, is the forging of a shield; Socrates is a new and
very different kind of Hephaistos. As he suggests at the end of his essay,
The Republic tries to hold together thumos and mind, poetry and
philosophy, the desire for greatness and the desire for truth.
There are, then, many overlappings, even repetitions, to be found in
these studies. Neither historical sequence nor allegiance to Jacob Klein can
fully explain these phenomena. The Republic is a speech about communities
whose very being is in speech. Perhaps, as Eva Brann suggests, the community formed by Socrates, Thrasymachus, Glaucon, Adeimantus, and the
others is Plato's written emblem of what the best communities might look
and sound like. In The Statesman Plato has the Eleatic Stranger say: "Th
be sure, when human beings do things in common it is a pleasure for them
to think similarly" (homonoein; Politicus 260b ). Or, in the Pythagorean
aphorism closing the Phaedfus, "The things of friends are common."
David Lachterman
�The Music of the Republic
Eva T. H. Brann
SURVEY OF ARGUMENTS
I. Mythos
A. The Republic is composed of concentric rings encompassing
a center.
8. The outer ring represents Socrates' descent into the house of
Pluto-Cephalus.
1. The oath "By the Dog'' is an appeal to Hermes the Conductor of Souls.
2. Socrates assumes the role of Heracles, founder of cities.
3. His longest labor is the bringing up of the triple monster
Cerberus- the soul.
4. His greatest labor is the release of a new Theseus.
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II. Logos
A. The second ring represents the founding and degeneration of
cities "in speech" (Books III, IV and VIII, IX).
1. Four cities are founded: the city of demiurges or craftsmen,
of warriors, of guardians, and of philosophers.
2. To these correspond four degenerate forms.
B. These cities are "in speech" only, since they can be neither
generated nor regenerated.
1. The Phoenician tale implies that men can be mined as a
public treasure.
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2. The just city founders on the un-naturalness of human
nature and on the "founding paradox."
3. The degenerate cities themselves are actual, but the argument about them is "detached."
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In Polemarchus's house justice, defined as "doing one's own
business," is the craftsmen's specific virtue.
I. The "demiurge'' is opposed to the "panurge" in all his forms.
2. The inner justice of the philosopher converts this definition into "knowing one's own soul."
3. For the philosopher the argument that justice is profitable
fails.
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III. Ergon
I
In the center of the Republic Socrates founds the philosopher's
city "in deed" (Books V-VII).
I. A public vote forces Socrates to propose his communal
design.
2. Other works corroborate the assertion that the philosopher
city is not identical with the guardian city.
3. Socrates' city in the Timaeus is not that of the Republic.
Th ; paradoxical condition for bringing about the city is that
its founder must already live within it.
I. Socrates lives so as to fulfill this condition.
2. Glaucon has the qualifications of a young ruler.
3. The bodily community of the guardian city is replaced by
a dialogic community.
Democracy, the exact inverse of the just constitution, perversely
proves to be the soil for the just city.
The just city can be brought to life by providing a fitting
macrocosm, as in the Timaeus.
I. Temperance replaces justice in this city.
2. Antiquity in the Timaeus represents spurious actuality.
3. The city of the Laws is non-Socratic.
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IV. Music
A Glaucon's education in Books V-VII is Socratic music.
I. The guardians' training is accomplished by purged trad.itional 'music (Books II and X).
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a. Socrates corrects the myths of gods and Hades but
postpones the correction of the myths of man.
b. The Republic itself exactly obeys the stylistic requirements of "purged music."
c. This music is explicity excluded from the plan of the
philosophers' education.
2. Socrates' new music is "philosophical music."
a. Socrates has spent his life making music.
b. Socratic mimeseis of truth are images rather than myths.
c. Such images are sketched in the soul by long reflection.
d. Socratic images induce a logos, while myths are preceded
~=
e. Socrates fulfills his own requirement that all poets make
an "image of the Good."
f. Socrates corrects the Promethean Myth of Man in the
"cave image."
g. These two images respectively represent the One and the
Indefinite Dyad of Plato's "Unwritten Teachings."
3. His plan for the philosophical education is presented
musically as the "prelude" of mathematics and the "hymn"
of dialectic.
4. The central dialogue is a symmetric texture of images and
their explications and correlations.
B. The discovery of opinion (doxa) is Glaucon's introduction to
philosophy.
I. The outer dialogue requires the "helmet of Hades," which
obviates reputation or "good opinion" (Books II and X),
but the central conversation is governed by "true opinion."
2. Summary of 474-480 (Book V). As "becoming" is between
being and non-being, so "opinion" is between ignorance and
knowing.
3. "Opinion" correspond.s to "spirit," the mean between
"reasoning" (logistikon) and "desire" in the tripartite soul.
4. The /ogistikon, properly called the "calculating power," is
a lesser faculty than "knowledge."
5. After the new division of the soul as an "instrument of
learning" the terms of the "lower" tripartite soul designate
desires.
6. The finer division of the soul by the device of finding "the
middle" is the dialogue's main pre-dialectical exercise.
C. The orator Socrates is elected to defend philosophy before the
democracy (487-505, Book VI).
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I. Adehuantus is the expert on corruption.
2. Socrates, by his images, persuades the many to accept
philosophers as kings.
3. He refuses Adeimantus access to the "highest study," the
Good.
D. Socrates tells Glaucon of the Good in a "true image," the "sun
image."
I. Summary and tables of 506-511 (Book VI). The sun image
is explicated by the Divided Line.
2. This image requires Glaucon to exercise the two lower, "doxastic," powers of the soul.
a. The lower of these, likeness-making and recognizing
(eikasia), known to Glaucon as a game, is Socrates' chief
instrument in this context. The image itself forces
Glaucon to recognize the visible world as a mere image
or likeness.
b. His trust (pistis) in the visible world is shaken and a
belief in the rule of the Good is substituted.
c. Socrates' non-dialectical or "doxastic" presentation of
the Good serves both to avoid misunderstanding and to
instill a kind of artificial recollection in Glaucon.
3. The Divided Line, a figure for knowledge, provides training for Glaucon's power of "thinking."
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a. Dianoia, "thinking things through," involves a higher
eikasia in two ways: Natural objects are here regarded
as images; and analogies are to be made by recognizing
likenesses.
b. The mathematical faculty characteristic of Glaucon, the
dianoia, is discovered by him as a "mean."
c. Socrates particularly invites Glaucon to a dialogue on
number; this passage is the only approach to dialectic
in the Republic.
d. Dialegesthai has three meanings: conversation among
the many, dialogue between a knower and a learner, and
dialectic, the movement of the soul within itself.
4. The mathematical model of proportion (analogia) is fully
exploited.
a. The Good is not a "study" in the usual sense.
b. The absence of the dialectical accounts (log01) of being
is expressed by the absence of definite ratios (logo!) between the line segments.
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c. The "embodied soul" has solidity; the "knowing soul"
is "non-dimensional."
d. Socrates forms four proportions from the Divided Line,
showing Glaucon how sameness of relation runs through
the whole before he knows the parts themselves.
e. This induces Glaucon to trust the bond of similarity
(homoiotes) required for dianoetic ascent, which is by
likenesses.
f. The Good, by exercising a downward eikasia and likening things to itself, makes the ascent possible.
g. The mimetic arts are condemned for usurping the power
of the Good (Book X).
5. The image of the Good implicitly introduces Glaucon to
the fundamental problems of dialectic.
a. The Good has three capacities: as progenitor it fathers
the sun; it is the responsible cause (aitia) of knowing;
it is the ruling source (arche) of being. These are
presented in reverse order of "political" importance.
b. A diagram shows how being is articulated doubly by the
Good, and particularly why becoming is doubly apprehended, namely in sense perception and opinion.
c. The Good is not a differentiating but a binding source,
complemented, the image implies, by a secondary
"dyadic" source.
d. "Likeness," which fails to account for "participation"
within the realm of being, takes the place of "otherness"
beyond being. It is that "bond" by which the whole
becomes one, the bond which the three-term proportion
of the Divided Line expresses.
e. In the dialectic progress from "what each is" to "what
the Good is," the latter is revealed as the order (taxis)
of the "whole," and thus as the pattern of all political
community.
f. The One is treated explicity in no Platonic dialogue, least
of all in the Parmenides.
g. The Myth of Er contains the mythical counterpart of
the sun image - a model of the world within the world.
E. Socrates tells Glaucon of evil in a second "true image," the
"cave image."
I. Summary and table of 514-517 (Book VIII). The cave is
to the upper world as the place of visibility is to the place
of thought.
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2. While in the sun image the places prepared by the Good
for the soul are shown, the cave image shows the actual
dwelling of men; thus the cave image explicity includes ignorance and even deceit. Ignorance, however, corresponds
to non-being.
3. Therefore a different correlation of the images is implicit:
being
becoming
non-being :
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sun image
cave image
intellectual realm
sensible realm
underground realm
4. Non-being is the mother corresponding to the Good as
father.
a. Politics as the dissembling art of managing human
stupidity has a special place in the cave image.
b. The cave as a womb is a figure for non-being, to which
is opposed the realm of being under the sun; between
them lies the road along which "coming into being" takes
place.
c. Socrates identifies the cave as the mortal Hades, the
"sightless place." The backward position of the prisoners
signifies human perversion, which is corrected by the
Socratic "conversion."
d. Socrates alludes to Pythagoras's descent into Hades; in
fact the dialogue itself has the form of a Pythagorean
"recollection exercise."
F. Socrates recites the "hymn of dialectic" for Glaucon.
1. The ascent from the cave represents the road of learning,
which has three parts:
a. "Conversion" is not within the formal plan because it
is, in effect, now being accomplished.
b. The "haul upwards" is effected by Socratic mathematics,
pursued not for its own sake or as giving the order of
being, but as "inverse" dialectic. It consists of the
analytical solution of such problems as the construction
of a hypothetical cosmos according to a purified
Pythagorean mathematical order. Its analytic approach
permits a constant return to its own hypotheses, which
reflect the requirements of the logos.
c. "Dialectic" itself is withheld from Glaucon as accessible
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only by the long path of study; instead its praises are
sung in a "hymn."
d. Having heard the plan, Glaucon, as an initiate of the
mysteries of learning, becomes a fellow law-giver.
2. The ages for study and practice are set out as in a formal
curriculum.
a. The education of the rulers always leads out of the city,
which contains nothing "fair" for them; in it geometry
is substituted for eros.
b. Because of the hypothetical character of "patterns," the
rulers in the Constitution do not study constitutions, but
learn to rule "in the light of the whole."
c. Socrates introduces the dead philosophers as "new
divinities."
d. Socrates has brought up his Theseus from Hades.
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I. MYTHOS
A.
"
Socrates begins most of his investigations not at the center but
at the periphery .... "
At the center of Plato's second longest dialogue, the Constitution
(Politeia), usually called the Republic, there is an ergon, a deed or accomplishment. In order to find this center it is necessary to establish the
periphery. The Republic is composed on the plan of concentric rings; the
themes on the diameter reappear in reverse order as if they were reflected
through a central axis. The outermost periphery is a setting of myth. A
broad inner ring consists of the construction and destruction of the successive forms of a pattern city in "speech," logos. The themes of this ring,
for instance the attack on the poets, are also symmetrical with respect to
the center. This center itself, clearly defined as such by the plan of the
dialogue, presents the actual founding of a city in "deed," ergon. The
Republic, as will be shown, exemplifies the insight quoted above, which
Si2Sren Kierkegaard expressed in his dissertation The Concept of Irony, With
Constant Reference to Socrates (London 1966, p. 70).
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8
B.
I. Anyone who has used an annotated edition of the Republic' will
have read the curious anecdote told by Diogenes Laertius and Dionysius
of Halicarnassus about the beginning of the work. Dionysius reports that
many stories about the care Plato took to "comb and curl" his dialogues
were current, especially one about a tablet found at his death, which contained "that beginning of the Republic which goes 'I went down yesterday
to Peiraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston,' transposed with subtle
variety." We may infer that some special meaning was to be conveyed by
the beginning. Indeed, there is something curious about its style: ancient
as well as modern Athenians·, when they visit their harbor, usually go not
"to Peiraeus" but to the Peiraeus (e.g., Thucydides VIII, 92, 9);' this is
Cephalus's own usage (328c6), and since he lives there he ought to know.
The phrase is to be heard in a special way. Now it happens that the Athenians did hear a certain meaning in this name- it meant the "beyond-land,"
he Peraia, the land beyond the river that was once thought to have separated
the Peiraic peninsula from Attica.' Therefore let us try reading: "!descended
yesterday to the land beyond the river, together with Glaucon, the son of
Ariston ... "; "in order to· offer my devotions," he goes on, "to the goddess ..... " The goddess, we learn at the end of the first book (354all),
L
�BRANN
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is Ben dis, a Thracian stranger identified with Hecate, 4 the guardian deity
of the underworld. Socrates is on his way back up to town when Polemarchus with his companions detains him and presses him to come to his house,
where they find Cephalus, Polemarchus's rich old father, sitting in state.
He is on that "threshold [to Hades] which is old age" (328e6).' As he himself
explains, he scarcely has a body anymore; he is, as his name signifies, a
mere "head"-as Socrates slyly points out, he sits on a head-rest, a
proskepha/aion (328c!). His riches, ploutos (331b7), Socrates suspects, are
his great comfort. A strange light is thrown on him and his house by an
ancient source that reports that he was over thirty years dead at the dramatic
date of the dialogue, namely between 411 and 405 B.C.; his son himself
has only a few more years to live before his death at the hands of the Thirty
Tyrants.' We are in the city of shades, in the house of Pluto.
Socrates takes occasion to refer to this situation throughout the
dialogue, for instance when he declares to Thrasymachus and the others
who are there, in solemnly ambiguous language, that he will not cease his
efforts until he has prepared them "against that other life when, born again,
they may happen to hold such discourse" (498d3-4). And the very figure
for the young guardians of the city which he builds for his audience is
a reminder of the setting: they are to be like watchdogs, who, as true lovers
of wisdom, determine their friends and their enemies by the test of their
knowledge or ignorance of them- they know the art of loyalty. The perverse
pattern of such dogs is Hesiod's hound of Hades, who possesses the "evil
art" (Theogony 770) of fawning on strangers and devouring those at home
in Hades who try to escape. The guardians are tamed and converted hounds
of hell.
2. What is Socrates' business down there? To detect the myth that provides the venerable setting for Socrates' descent it is necessary to go rather
far afield for a moment.
On certain occasions Socrates uses an oath that was evidently considered
in antiquity to be his very own: ''By the dog!"- and in the Gorgias (482b5)
more explicitly: "By the dog, the Egyptian god!"' Socrates uses the oath
twice in the Republic and, as elsewhere, in passages concerned with the
philosopher's part both in human speech and in politics (399e5, 592a7;
cf. Cratylus 4llb3). Who is the Egyptian dog-god on whom Socrates calls?
Plutarch (On Isis and Osiris 368e-f) describes him in this way: He is born
of an underworld mother but nursed by a heavenly goddess and thus
belongs to both these realms; he can see his way both by light and by dark
and therefore has the office of mediating between the upper and the lower
world. His Egyptian name is Anubis, but to the Greeks he is Hermes, the
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MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
Interpreter, the ''psychagogue" (cf. Phaedrus 27Ic!O) who conducts the souls
of the dead and guides those who must descend into Hades while yet alive
(cf. Diogenes Laertius VIII, 31). He is also the bringer of political wisdom
to men (Protagoras 322c2). In particular, Hermes is known as the guide
of the hero Heracles in his famous descent into Hades (Odyssey XI, 626),
and he is often so represented on vases.
Heracles himself is a most versatile hero.' He is the chief founder of
cities- witness the many cities called Heracleia. He is the great civilizer,
"using music" (Plutarch, On Music XL, 4), at which he is proficient, in
this task. He is the guardian of boys' education, the guardian of the
palaestra, and the boys devote their hair to him. He teaches men letters;
Plutarch jokingly calls him "most dialectical" (TheE at Delphi 387d). He
is a partisan of virtue, having, according to a story told by Socrates
(Xenophon, Memorabilia II, i, 21; cf. Plato, Symposium 177b), chosen to
follow Virtue rather than Vice as a teacher because of the happiness
(eudaimonia) she had promised. But Heracles' greatest fame derives from
the deeds or labors imposed on him by the unjust king Eurystheus. These
include the killing of the snake-headed Hydra and of the Nemean Lion;
but his most awesome deed is his descent, his katabasis, into Hades. His
task there is to bring up to the light of day the triple monster Cerberus.
He has Hades' permission to do this, but he is instructed to persuade the
beast and make it more gentle, not to hurt it. On his way into Hades, so
the story goes, he at first forgets his business and allows the shades to detain him in conversation. Before returning, he performs an incidental labor,
a parergon, in releasing Theseus, his emulator and the founder and lawgiver
of Athens who had been chained down in Hades; however, he fails to free
Theseus's companion Pirithous. While in Hades, Heracles is nearly washed
away by the underworld river.
This hero is, as it were, made for Socrates, and Socrates himself makes
the comparison. In the Apology, speaking of his search for a wise man,
he says to the court: "And by the dog, men of Athens-for I must speak
the truth to you- ... those who had the greatest reputation seemed to
me nearly the most deficient ... , so I must show you how I wandered
as if performing certain labors ... " (22al). Every Athenian would of course
recognize the allusion; most translators put it into the text. In the Cratylus
Socrates says to Hermogenes: "You are raising a class of names not to be
despised; however, since I have put on my lion helmet I must not be
cowardly.... By the dog, I am having an inspiration" (4lla-b). Again,
in an interlude in the Phaedo, Socrates explicitly consents to take the role
of Heracles in the battle of argument, with Phaedo taking the role of Iolaus,
Heracles' friend (89b-c). As they talk, Socrates plays with Phaedo's hair:
�BRANN
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as Heracles, the hair is his due, and as Iolaus's friend, the intimacy is hls
right.
There are certain signs and indications that Socrates plays this same
role in the Republic. He "descends" to the land beyond, is caught in conversation in the house of Pluto, and, like the phantom Heracles whom
Odysseus meets on his own visit to the shades- the true Heracles is among
the gods- he tells down there the story of his own descent (Odyssey XI,
601). He first fights the sophist Thrasymachus, who comes at him "like
a beast" (336b5)' and with whom he says he would as soon quibble as "shave
a lion" (341c1). A little before, Thrasymachus, laughing sardanion-"Iike
one doomed," as the scholiast explains the word- had addressed him "0
Heracles! this is that wonted dissembling of Socrates" (337a4). This is, of
course, nothing but a popular exclamation of wonder, but it sounds almost
like the lion's roar of recognition; by the end of the first book the lion
is subdued. And at one point, Socrates refers to the wrong way to kill the
Hydra, implying that he knows the better way (426e8).
3-4. But the longest labor begins after the "prelude" (357a2) of the
first book." In the nine books following, the running motif will be that
old Heraclean theme, the relation of virtue to happiness, which is ever recalled, even in the midst of yet greater matters that are curtailed in its favor
(e.g.,445a, 580b, 608c); this relation is to be examined in a man who is
wearing the Ring of Gyge_s (359dl), and as Socrates adds, the Helmet of
Hades too (612b5), a magic cap that deprives hlm in life of all appearance
and reputation and puts him on a level with the bare, stripped souls in
Hades (cf. Gorgias 523c). In the course of this argument Socrates will indeed teach his audience letters, using the great text of the city to teach
them the small letters of the soul (368d; cf. 402a7). He will also, as we
shall see, found a city. By the "psychagoguery" of his rhetorical music
(Phaedrus 261a, Aristophanes, Birds 1555") he will release his Theseus,
blamelessly confined to Hades (39lc9). But his longest effort will drag to
light a triple monster having, like Cerberus himself, a blush of snakes for
its lower part (590bl). For when he has plumbed in argument the remote
depths of the tyrant's life, Socrates recalls once more "those first words
because of which we are here" (588b2), namely Thrasymachus's claim that
injustice under the reputation of justice is profitable. To conclude the case
against hlm they "model an image of the soul in words" (588bl0). It will,
Socrates says, be a creature such as is found in ancient myth, a Chimaera
or Scylla or a Cerberus, whose nature it is to have "many forms grown
together into one" (588c4) under the outward guise of a man's shape. As
soon as this soul has been hauled up and cleansed of its accretions (611),
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MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
"we have," Socrates says, "discharged ourselves of this argument'' (612a8).
Heracles has delivered Hades from its monster, a deliverance that signifies
that exposure of human nature which is the condition of its rescue. And
he has, incidentally, brought up a young Theseus (the name connotes
nomothesis, law-giving)- Plato's brother, Glaucon.
Having ceased to enact a myth, Socrates closes the dialogue by telling
one, a recollection of one of the "myths which are told about those in
Hades." These are the very myths that keep tormenting Cephal us, because
he is so close to these things (330d7). In it Er, the Pamphylian or "Alltribesman" (614b4), is charged by the souls to carry back to the living the
long tale of their thousand-year journey, of the ascent or descent that is
their reward or punishment. He actually tells only of the end of these
journeys, since, as Socrates significantly observes to Glaucon, who has noW
listened the better part of a day and a night, the story itself would take
"a very long time to go through" (615a5). Socrates ends the dialogue by
urging Glaucon to hold fast to the "upward way" (cf. 514b4), so that they
may do well in the thousand-year journey "which we have just gone
through" (62ld2). He must mean the ascent of the dialogue itself (e.g.,
473a5, 544b2).
This then is the setting of the Republic: Hades with its tales and a
deliverer willing to go down and able to come up- a most appropriate setting, for down there, so it is said, justice is close at hand (330d8, 614c3;
cf. Apology 41a, Gorgias 523, Sophocles, Antigone 451). In recounting the
discourse Socrates will then be playing that "noblest of games": telling
myths about justice and other things" (Phaedrus 276e).
ll. WGOS
A.
1-2. We come now to the arguments, the /ogoi, that form the broad
middle ring encircling the center. Just as the question concerning the connection of justice to happiness is answered by bringing to light the human
soul in its mythical shape, so the soul itself, that is, its formal "constitution," is discovered by raising and taking down cities. This is done "in
speech" (logoi) and not, to use a pervasive Greek opposition, "in deed"
(ergoi, e.g., 382e8, 383a5, 498e4; cf. Laws 778b). Let us first follow how
these cities are constructed in argument.
At the beginning of the enterprise Socrates says: "Come then, let us
make a city from the beginning in argument" (logoi, 369c9; cf. also 369a5,
�13
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472el, 592all). The object is to find the nature of justice by looking at
the largest context to which it is applicable-hence the city founded in
speech will have to be just. Socrates and his interlocutors first found a
community of craftsmen,· workers collected to ply their own trades so as
to supply each other's wants, making the city as a whole, as opposed to
its citizens, self-sufficient (369b). In this city the full political weight of
the Greek name for craftsmen, "demiourgoi" (370d6), "public workers,"
is realized. This city is, as we shall see, the most liberal model from which
to read off the definition of justice that runs through the Republic, but
just as Socrates is about to articulate that definition, Glaucon stops him.
Here, he says, we have a city of pigs (372d4). He means that the citizens'
whole being, like that of pigs, is absorbed in consuming and providing
for consumption-there is no place or leisure for honor and nobility (cf.
Aristotle, Politics l291a18). Socrates, though still maintaining that this is
the "true" .and "healthy" city (372e6), yields to Glaucon, and, giving up
once and for all that self-sufficiency definitive of the natural city (Politics
J253a2), changes the "first city" (373c5; Politics l29la17) by the addition
of luxury and that soldier element which will procure wealth and maintain safety. He assents to the construction of this "fevered" city because
in it one might see "how justice and injustice grow up in cities" (372e5);
this city, then, will somehow contain the seeds of injustice also. He describes
the natures and the training of the soldiers or "guardians," a subject to
which we must return. At the end of this long argument (375-414) Socrates
again reorganizes the city, this time by dividing the "guardians" into guardians proper, older men who rule, and their "auxiliaries and helpers" (414b5),
the younger fighting men. This third, tripartite, city suffices for reading
off the similar constitution of the soul and for showing conclusively that,
as in the city, so in the soul, justice must be profitable. Socrates now considers the positive half of his task finished and is about to go on to investigate how injustice comes about in cities and souls (445-449, Book IV).
He is interrupted. Three whole books (V-VII) intervene, in which a fourth
and very different city is founded. Not until Book VIII does he return to
the argument. In Glaucon's figure, "like a wrestler he assumes again the
same position" (544b5) and goes on to account in order for the four
degenerate cities (544-592). When this argument, the complement to the
genesis of cities, is finished, Glaucon once again refers to "the city that
we have just been founding and that is preserved in speech only, for I do
not think that it is anywhere on earth" (592a!O).
B.
I. Now what is· the meaning of the claim that the genesis of the city,
�,.,
IT
,,
!,
;'
14
MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
or the city itself, is only "in speech"? It means of course first of all that
no actual city of living men comes into being while they speak or as a
consequence of their discourse. But that is mere fact. What is more interesting is that no such city can come to be now or later, by the design
and intent of the argument itself. These word constructions are not "constitutions," the practical patterns for working cities such as Plato and his
pupils were invited to write for Greek cities, nor are they even a model
for such patterns- they are instead contrivances for a different purpose,
and intended to reveal themselves as such." The dialogue conveys this first
of all in one astounding fact: no human being is ever born into any of
the three cities- they cannot regenerate themselves; they are unnatural.
The first city is constituted by the collection, the second by the addition, the third by the division of adults who are all of one and the same
generation; the institution of each city is simply the rearrangement of readymade human material. This is reflected in the actual physical settlement
of the third city, which is, at first, said to begin with the separate encampment of the guardians, who found, as it were, a separate city (415d8, Critias
110c6, Politics 1264a25 ff.); hence the guardians' progeny will be born, quite
literally, outside of the civilian city. Furthermore, this same third city is
later said to be settled by the expulsion of all souls over ten years old
(540e5), a contradiction that reflects the two irreconcilable geneses of the
just city; in the books relevant in the present context the city is understood
as a re-constitution of available communities, while after the central books
it is a radically new institution demanding a radical change in the character
of citizens, to be achieved only by a lengthy process of education; it is a
city essentially of children.
Now the re-constitution that brings about the third or guardian city
in the early books is secured by the circulation of one noble lie, the "Phoenician myth," "our trick," which will persuade "especially the rulers them-
selves, and if not them, the rest of the city" (414cl). To be sure, Socrates
later admits, the founding generation itself can never be brought to believe
the story, but he dismisses this crucial difficulty by high-handedly treating
these citizens as the creatures of this argument that they indeed are: "Let
this matter be left to rumor to carry about as best it can, while we arm
our Earthborn and lead them forth, under the leadership of their rulers"
(415d6). Suppose then that the founding was somehow accomplished and
that the myth was somehow in practice accepted. The citizens would now
believe that their youth and education was a dream; that they were really
formed like metals in the womb of the earth, their mother, who sent them
up fully formed, so that they had never been children; and that tl\ey are
therefore all brothers, though of different metals. Those who have an ad-
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15
mixture of gold must rule and those of silver must assist, for, as an oracle
foretells, the city will fall when a man of brass or iron rules. The purity
of the metals must be carefully preserved, and if a gold or silver parent
has a child with an admixture of brass or iron he must consent to see it
put into a lower class. (For the earth as the common mother of citizens,
see Menexenus 237c, 239a.)
The "lie" in this myth is not that men are of different metals or that
the city cannot survive the wrong kind of ruler-all that is true-but rather
the claim that the citizens have no proper natural birth and no privacy,
that is, no secrecy of soul. Under their flattering epithet "earth-born"
(4!5d7), which intimates that they are Giants, or that they were moulded
by a god, are hidden the claims that they are natural bastards who have
a mother but no father and that their soul can be accurately assayed like
any ore. So too the continuation of the city depends on the citizens' belief
that each generation is newly mined, like a public treasure," from the earthly
element on which the city rests.
But the curious character of this "needful lie" (414b9) is that it catches
up, so to speak, with its perpetrators: the myth must not only somehow
be believed at the outset if the city is to be founded, but it ought in fact
not to be a lie at all, if the city is to breed true. For if men are not born
from a common parent at the right time and with pure souls easily assayed,
the guardians cannot control the new generation and insure the stability
of the city. Its first birth will refute its foundations.
2. The community (koinonia) of women and children, the "source of
the greatest good to the city" (464b5), is intended to achieve exactly this
community of birth. All children born in the same year are to be ignorant
of their parents and are to be called brothers and sisters, although the ignorance will eventually lead to incest (461e2; Politics 1262a35). These
children of the city will be tested and assayed all the time, but one of the
conditions for stability is beyond the guardians' control: the timing of the
mating. For as Glaucon wisely observes, the best are drawn by necessity
to have intercourse with the best, but this necessity is "not geometric but
erotic" (458d5). Yet the guardians' control of breeding is to be precisely
"geometric." The Phoenician myth, in accordance with Phoenician greed
(436a2), makes of men a Plutonic treasure to be dug up and refined at
will; the scientific counterpart of the myth is to consider them a crop to
be sown and harvested in accordance with the heavenly motions.
The geometry of these motions as they affect breeding is, however, not
known to the rulers. In Book VIII Socrates has just resumed the discussion of the degenerate cities when he stops himself and prays to the Muses
�16
MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
to tell him "how discord first arose," an allusion to the Iliad (I, 6) and the
fall of the city of Troy. The Muses' response is a mathematical myth. A
city so constituted as his, they say, can hardly be moved (546al), but since
everything that has a genesis also has a degeneration, the city will not last
forever. Note that in the order of argument the decline in fact follows immediately upon the beginning, with no account of the city's life and history
intervening at all. This end must come (and may, as Aristotle points out,
come on the day after the city's birth, Politics 1316al7) because the rulers'
reasoning, or rather their "calculating power, mixed with sense" (bl) as it
is, will not be able to apprehend the "geometric number" that governs births.
The Muses recite this fabulous number, which in fact no one has ever practically understood. Thus .the generation of rulers is corrupted, and as a
final consequence of their baser metal they neglect the study of music and
themselves lose the power of testing souls. This is the genetic revolution
initiating the declining succession of Hesiod's ages from gold down to iron,
a revolution radically different from the political revolutions the city
undergoes thereafter (Politics 1316a14 ff.).
Human generation is thus an impenetrable mystery, and the city
founders on the rock of the fact of bisexual generation. The human be-.
ing, considered as that unstable union of body and soul, does not run true
to type as does a plant (and, as Aristotle [Politics 1262a] observes, where
a child does resemble its parent in looks, that very fact immediately destroys
the founding illusion of common birth). If it is the nature of each kind
to generate its like, human nature is un-natural; dwarf peas always bear
dwarf peas, but golden parents may bear brass children. This is the insuperable problem that is again attacked in the Statesman. In this dialogue
the Golden Age, the age of the direct divine rule of Cronos, is mockingly
characterized by the fact that men grow directly from the earth and have
no human birth (271), while in the Human Age the proper mixing of human
bents (trop01) by mating is the specifically human object of the political
art (310). Later on Socrates quotes an old phrase" to contrast the city with
non-human nature: "You do hot think," he says~ "that constitutions come
out of 'an oak or a rock' and not out of the characters of those in the
city?" (544d8). Very nearly the same figure is used by Vergil for the human',
race of the Golden Age of Saturn; they are sprung from "trunks of
,
or a rugged oak" (Aeneid VIII, 315): the Golden Age is the age when men
spring up "naturally," like vegetables, and ripen to ineducable childhood. ·•
The dialogue itself tacitly underscores the impossibility of genetic
trol, both at the very beginning and at the end. For of those said to
present in Cephalus's house, five are full brothers, two of them, Gl•mcon,,
and Adeimantus, sons of Ariston, and the three others, Po•lernarctms,
�17
Lysias, and Euthydemus, the host's sons. The conversation itself will show
how the sons of the "Best"- Socrates often alludes to the meaning of the
father's name (e.g., 327al, 368a4)- differ profoundly, and something similar
was known of Polemarchus and Lysias (Phaedrus 257b ). The Myth of Er,
moreover, which concludes the conversation, shows why generation is intractable; human natures are determined not on the hither side of life by
other humans, but in the "divine place" beyond by each soul for itself
(617d6). The coming to be of the city is therefore not in accord with the
coming to be of human beings.
The enigma of regeneration is, however, only secondary to the paradox
of the city's foundation itself. For it seems that only those will be content
to accept this constitution who have accepted the "dye" of its laws (430a3).
The just city can only be realized by its own children; to begin it must
already have begun. We see why the act of settlement itself is so curiously
and doubly contrived: At one time it seems to amount to the separation
of those adults who might be fit to govern and who establish the ideal
city by leaving the real city. But at another time the new city results from
the removal of all adults whatsoever who by this act appear to found a
city of children. This is what is meant by claiming that the three cities that
have been constructed are cities in speech only.
·
3. The degenerate cities that are symmetrical with these three cities are,
on the other hand, all too realizable- indeed, they exist. Socrates underscores this by mentioning, in this context alone, actual Greek cities, namely
Crete and Sparta, the timocracies, the first of the less-than-just cities
(544c3). Yet here too, in a different way, the argument is remote from the
deed.
The argument to which Socrates returns in the eighth book had been
merely initiated at the end of the fourth. Of the five "bents" (trop01) of
the soul, one alone is good while the other four illustrate the multifariousness of evil; to these latter correspond four cities. The interlocutors
have "so far ascended in argument" (445c5) as to stand on a look-out tower
whence to view the manyness of vice. This discussion of vice, when picked
up three books later (544), continues to rise until, having traversed
timocracy, oligarchy, and democracy, the interlocutors finally look down
on the sinkhole of tyranny and the abyss of the tyrant's misery, which is
729 days, that is, two years of continual travel, beneath them (587e). This
is what characterizes all serious discussions of vice: they must certainly
not bring about that of which they speak, but rather become more detached
the closer they come to the truth, just as the best judge of criminals should
have the least experience of crime ( 409a). The effect of this "remoteness"
�MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
18
on the argument itself is that the degeneration of cities is presented as an
inevitable, irresistible, downward progression (which Aristotle finds implausible, Politics 1316a20 ff.), not, indeed, of the natures but of the nurtures of successive generations. Here the argument represents, as it were,
its own impotence- the situation is in actual fact desperate (Seventh Letter 325d ff.); in a few years a fierce battle between the democratic faction
and not one but Thirty Tyrants will be raging about the sanctuary of the
very goddess whose feast is now being celebrated (Xenophon, Hellenica
II, 4, 11), and the tyranny will have destroyed the host's family; while yet
a few years later a temporarily restored democracy will have murdered
Socrates (399 B.C.).
c.
I. The facts of the host family's condition and politics determine the
conversation in yet another and pervasive way. The family ran a prosperous
business in manufacturing and selling shields, and both Polemarchus and
Lysias are known to have been democrats, though, we may suppose, of
a decent and moderate sort. This is the clue to the peculiar treatment of
the virtue that later gave the subtitle "On Justice" to the dialogue.. It is
not usually Socrates' way to inquire whether a thing is profitable or unprofitable before having inquired "what it is" (e.g., Republic 354c, Meno
7lb); but this is just what happens with respect to justice in the latter books
of the Republic. From the second book to the end the question is: Is justice
profitable? The knowledge of what justice is, is assumed. As Socrates,
somewhat to Glaucon's annoyance, insists (432e8), when they come to find
justice in the city they have constructed, they find there nothing more than
they had put in; the city is just because they have made it that way (433al,
443b7). The working definition, which is not the result but the assumption of the argument, is that justice is "doing one's own business and not
meddling" (433a8), a definition they have heard from many others and have
themselves often given.
Justice so conceived is, to begin with, simply the opposite of the literal
understanding of the names for various degrees of wrong-doing. There is
polypragmoneuein (433a9, 443d2, 444b2), literally "much-doing" or being a meddling busybody, and panta poiein (596c2), "doing everything"
or being a jack-of-all-trades- Socrates' favorite description of the sophists'
easy expertise (cf. 397, 596; cf. Sophist 233d9). And worst of all, there
is panourgein (409c5), "being up to anything" or simple shameless
wickedness, the behavior of the man who takes full advantage of the impunity given by Adeimantus's Ring of Gyges, the wily Odyssean wisdom
�19
man of "many bents" (Lesser Hippias 365e2; cf. Phaedrus 27lc2).
:tinsitivelv. justice is acting in accordance with that conveniently ambiguous
eu prattein, either "doing Tight" or "being well," with which the
Rim•u/Jttc ends (463e4, 519e2, 62ld2; cf. Politics 1323b31).
From this point of view the simply just city is, as Socrates himself says,
first, the self-sufficient city of demiurges or craftsmen who both know
to do their own business and do it (372e6, 428bl2). In them virtue
indeed "wisdom," in the good old-fashioned sense in which sophia means
in English used to be meant by "cunning," namely craft and skill,
aretemeans the power to do work, the "virtue" of an agent (cf. 350c4,
. j'""'·· cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1141a9).
We may well ask how a view so practical, almost banal, comes to
underlie the dialogue. It is necessary here to recall that justice in the city
is exposed by finding and analyzing out the other virtues and considering
the remainder (427el3). Thus wisdom is found to be the rulers' virtue,
courage that of the warriors, temperance the agreement of all on who shall
rule (432a). Justice is then found in each class as a remainder: as that virtue by which the class does its own work and nothing else. Now clearly
in this context temperance is somewhat redundant. In fact, when Socrates
turns from the city to the soul he makes no distinction between justice
and temperance (443d4; cf. Laws 696dll, where temperance is called a mere
"appendage," and Charmides 16lb6, where Critias very knowingly, as he
thinks, proposes the present definition of justice as a definition of temperance). We may therefore say that justice, precisely because it is the one
virtue that all three classes possess, stands out as a unique and special virtue for the craftsmen, "the popular and citizen virtue" (Phaedo 82all),
the practical virtue of non-rulers. (In fact, it is pointed out in the Statesman
[307e] that rulers who possess this virtue too literally endanger the city.)
It is the virtue by reason of which each performs "that to which his own
nature is most fitted" (Republic 433a5), by which, we might say, a human
being is ever at his best. In some cases this means quite simply quietly
"minding one's own business," as must the lover of wisdom, for instance,
in acity not fitted to his nature (496d6, Gorgias 526c4). Justice might
therefore be termed the private public virtue, which turns particular natures
to the general account (423d). This is why its presence is the greatest good
and its absence the greatest ruin to cities (443c4-444b8)-it allows the city
to assimilate even those men who are by nature private. (Hegel, in his interpretation of the Republic, which is in this point the opposite of Aristotle's, understands and appreciates justice in precisely such terms, namely
as the integration of the particular as particular, the confirmation of the
individual in the whole, "the being-for-itself of each part"; History of
Philosophy, Pt. I, ch. 3).
�~··
20
MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
This virtue, understood not as a relation toward others but as decently
self-serving self-respect, is therefore quite naturally discussed in these terms
under the roof of the kind of people who would constitute the multitude,
the merchant and artisan class, of the third city. This class would supply
young warriors like the sons of Ariston with their armor and would occasionally send a philosophically disposed son like Polemarchus (cf. Phaedrus
257b4) up into the ruling class. Socrates is speaking that saving "dialect
of democracy'' (Fifth Letter 32ld), which many people think they know
but very few really master.
'I
!
2. But Socrates never allows us to forget that this third city is a dialogical
phantom and that the justice in it is, for all its apparent practicality, a mere
"idol" (443c4). For the true virtue lies not in deeds concerned with the outside but in the inner disposition of the "classes" (gene; d3) of the soul and
their ordering. We shall see that in the case of the true ruler, that is, of
one so "constituted" as to be able first of all to rule himself, the distinction between "his own affairs" and "others' business" vanishes. For him
that which is most common is also most his own "and with his private
affairs he will preserve the common business" (497a5). In him, "doing his
own business" wili be turned into "knowing himself," which means "looking ... at myself, whether I happen to be some beast more complicated
than Typhon [Cerberus's father, Theogony 311] or a gentler and simpler
animal" (Phaedrus 230a; cf. Timaeus 72a5). True justice is concerned with
that in man which is "truly about himself and his own business" (443dl;
cf. Alcibiades Major 130eff.); the true ruler knows not only that he should
do his own business but what it is. In Aristotelian terms, the practical or
moral virtue turns into an intellectual one, in comparison with which the
old justice is "somehow near to the body" (518d!O). This individual
character of justice is one of the reasons why, as we shall see below, the
soul is the one single subject of the dialectical method in the Republic.
3. The "inversion" of justice in the case of the true ruler, in the philosopher king, leads to a curious suspension of the main argument in the
central three books. If justice can only with difficulty be proved to be profitable for the guardian rulers, because of the hard life they lead (419a, 465e4),
for the philosopher kings this proof is altogether impossible. For those
who already consider themselves to be living in the Isles of the Blessed
(519c5), the descent into the city to take office cannot be made to seem
like happiness (519d8), nor can it possibly improve the tone of their souls.
They must be made to enter politics "forcibly" (520e2); in fact their reluctance is a guarantee of their suitability (e4). Glaucon sees immediately that
�21
object of the city constructions that constitute the outer rings
argument, namely that justice brings happiness- an argument still
iUTILchly maintained for the warriors (466b)-has been lost; he wants to
if the philosopher rulers are not being treated unjustly (519d8).
nco·•"·'' answer is an evasion (cf. Politics 1264b16); it is not their hapbut that of the whole city which is to be considered. When all is
and done, the true rulers of the Republic enter politics only out of
gratitude, and simple decency (516c, 520a-e).
III. Ergon
A.
Socrates is about to go on with the investigation of the unjust cities
he is again restrained, as orice before on his way up to Athens (327),
a conspiracy of Polemarchus and Adeimantus (499). After some whispera vote is taken, and the decree that has been passed is announced by
/,)£''.TlLra:;yn1ac:hus (450a3). Thrasymachus represents that "force" (Phaedrus
which boasts of its ability to rouse and soothe the multitude (and
is itself so easily managed by Socrates) and now speaks for them:
Socrates must expand and defend that principle, mentioned before with
conspicuous brevity (424al), which is to give the city unanimity or, better,
a perfectly public character: "Friends own what is common" (499c5). Here
is a new political reading of a current phrase (cf. Lysis 207cl0, Phaedrus
279c6, Laws 739c2), which may mean, significantly, two things: "What a
friend owns is at the service of his friends," or "What friends own insofar
as they are friends is communal by nature." They particularly want to know
about the equality of education for men and women (45lb) and the community of wives and children (457b). Socrates reluctantly complies and
faces the first two of the three waves threatening to overwhelm him (473b6).
When he has faced them, and gone on to describe such a city's relation
to other Greek cities, Glaucon erupts: "But it seems to me, Socrates, that
if one were to allow you to talk about such matters you would never
remember what it is you pushed aside in saying all this, namely this question: Is such a constitution capable of coming into being and in what way
is it possible?" (47lc). And he insists on this question even though Socrates
stalls by getting him to admit that the object of their discourse was the
discovery of justice and injustice and their respective merits, and that the
"city in speech," having served that purpose, is none the worse for being
�"I
''i
22
MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
impractical (473al). But since Glaucon does insist (understandably, we cannot help feeling) on trying out their just constitution as a practical political
pattern, he must not, Socrates stipulates, force him to show that "what
they went through in speech can completely be in deed"; Glaucon must
content himself with as close an approximation as is possible (a5). This
approximation will be reached by making the least possible number of
changes to improve things now done badly in cities, changes that will
amount to a re-founding of the city according to the constitution just
discussed. There may be one or two or more such changes, but in any case
there should be as few as possible (b4).
So Socrates, like Odysseus, meets that third wave which will carry him
to his Phaeacia (Odyssey V, 313, 425). The one thing that must be changed,
he announces solemnly (c2) is this: "Unless either philosophers rule in the
cities, or those who are now called kings and dynasts philosophize genuinely
and sufficiently, and these two-namely political power and philosophycoincide, and the many natures of those who now pursue either way
separately have been excluded by necessity, there can be no end of evils,
my dear Glaucon, in cities, or, in my opinion, in the human race" (ell).
He adds that he cannot see how any other city can be happy in public or
in private.
Together with Glaucon he now prepares the ground for a new, a fourth,
city. It is necessary to show why this "one change" may be said to produce
a new city; is it not merely the third, the guardian constitution, put into
effect? Both Socrates and Glaucon, at least, do seem to regard these two
as different; Socrates calls the guardian city, as opposed to the fourth city,
"the first selection" merely (536c8), and Glaucon refers to the new city as
the bettter of the two (543dl). And rightly so, for as Socrates himself says,
an actual city is never the same as its pattern, its paradeigma (472d9, 473a).
The guardian city and the philosopher city differ, then, as does a realization from its plan. The discourse on the possible city will be, among other
things, a subtle consideration of the relation of pattern to product, of
"theory" to "practice." In its course that which makes the pattern possible
will prove to be that which makes it superfluous: the fourth or philosophers'
city will have no constitution separable from its very life.
2. The philosopher kings, to pursue the difference between the cities
further, can certainly not be regarded as part of the constitution of that
just city which must have been known generally as "Socrates' city." Aristotle,
in his critique of what "Socrates says" in the Republic, mentions the warrior class and the community of women, children, and goods, but omits
all mention of the philosopher kings (Politics 129la20, 1261a4). Aristo-
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23
phanes, too, in The Female Parliament (427), where the community of
goods and women becomes the law of Athens, fails to seize the comic opportunity inherent in the subject of female philosophers. It is likely that
this plaY was written before the Republic, and we may infer that peopleSocrates in particular- had long been talking about such a city. In the
dialogue there are enough passages parallel to the play" to constitute an
acknowledgment to posterity that Aristophanes' women's city is a parody
of Socrates' already notorious city. In fact, the nod to the comedian is explicit, for, in facing his first wave, Socrates remarks that after the men's
part has been played out it is only right to recite "the women's drama"
(45lc2); moreover, in going to meet his third wave he says, as if speaking
from a familiar experience, that "it might overwhelm him with laughter
and disrepute" (473c8).
3. Last and most weighty is the account Socrates himself gives of his
city in the Timaeus when he recapitulates the constitution that he had
presented to his friends in a discourse on the previous day. There is no
reason whatever to conclude that the Republic is that discourse. In fact,
while the Republic is recounted on the day after the Bendideia, the Timaeus,
quite appropriately, takes place on the Lesser Panathenaea, a festival that
occurred two months later, also in the Peiraeus (26e); during the festival
a gown was sent up to Athena "on which the Athenians, her nurslings,
could be seen winning the war against the people of Atlantis" (scholiast
on Republic 327a). Furthermore, the dramatic year of the Timaeus seems
to be earlier than that of the Republic." The city Socrates recapitulates
in the Timaeus is, in any case, not the city of the central books of the
Republic, for, although his account is said to be complete (19a7), the
philosopher kings are omitted; it is rather the "third city" with all its
notorious features. We may infer that Socrates proposed this city on various
occasions and that it was known as "his."
This guardian city therefore differs from the philosopher city as the
best pattern differs from its realization, and, it has now turned out, as the
impossible differs from the possible. Socrates himself explains to Adeimantus, when he asks whether this guardian city they have founded is the city
suited to philosophy, that it is that city in many ways but that in addition
there "would always be needed someone understanding the reasoning
[logos] behind the constitution- that same one who guided you when as
a law-giver you laid down the laws" (497c8). The difference between the
cities is therefore not constitutional, for the older guardians will still rule,
and rule so as to achieve the most harmonious community possible. The
difference is rather in the rulers themselves, in what they know and in what
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MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
they will look to, in their education. We shall see whether this may not
outweigh any more externally obvious formal difference.
B.
I. However, the claim is not that the fourth city is a possible city but
something more dramatic: that it is actual, that ii comes into being while
Glaucon and Socrates converse, that it is a city "in deed," ergi#. According to what has been said, this could happen only if one paradoxical condition were fulfiiled: if there were some one adult who actually lives in
the just city, and who, as a living citizen of the city, can bring up another
within it and so begin the accelerating "cycle" (424a5) of the reciprocating
interplay between the citizens' education and their nature. This founder
must be a first citizen not only in the sense that he possesses what Socrates
calls "the constitution within himself" (59lel, 608bl) but also in the sense
that he has such external relations- natural, as we shall see, to any truly
educated human being (423e4)-as correspond with the constitution of
the third, the fully differentiated just city, and its working counterpart,
the fourth or the "possible" city." What would such a life and such a man
look like?
To begin with, he would have to be brave and a soldier proven in battle, who put the safety of his comrades before his own (Apology 28e, Symposium 220d5), past the age of fighting and over fifty years old (cf. Republic
540a4; Socrates is about sixty), but still spirited in the defense of philosophy
(Republic 536c4), which he had steadily pursued from an apt youth
(Parmenides 130b) to old age. He would have no private possessions
(Republic 337d8, Apology 31c2), bnt would live with .his friends as if all
their goods were held in common (Apology 38b6, Crito 44e, Republic
337d!O). He would regard all promising young men as his sons to the neglect
of his private family, and they would regard him as a father (Apology 3ib4,
Phaedo 60a7, 116a6). When he wished he would possess the persuasiveness
to make gentler the enemies of philosophy so that they would accept its
rule (Republic 354). He would be able to ascend in thought above the city,
leaving his body behind (Symposium 174d5, 220c3). He would be willing,
though not eager, to undertake political tasks (Republic 327, Apology 31c).
He would regard it as part of his charge to select and educate the best
among the young for future rule, and he would prevent them from reaching
too high too fast (Republic 506d7, 533al). Finally, he would possess some
special quality that would hold him to philosophy and protect him from
corruption (496c4). Such a man would fulfill Socrates' last words concerning the possibility of the city, for, without caring in the least whether she
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25
is or ever will be in fact, "he will do her business and that of no other"
(592b3).
The references after each statement above give passages in the Platonic
dialogues where Socrates is so described. He is a man, the dialogues assert,
who is here and now doing the business of the just city. Thus we see that
the sum of Aristotle's criticism of Socrates' city, that its communality is
really not the bond uniting a multitude, but rather the bond of each good
man with every other (Politics 1263a29), is deeply accurate, and what is
more, that Aristotle's politics are ultimately not so very different- "and
friendship seems to hold cities together; and lawgivers care more for it than
for justice" (Nicomachean Ethics 1155a23). The reason that the corporate
genesis of the third, the guardian city, is presented as a insurmountable
dilemma is that that city was never meant to be a self-sufficient body politic,
nor, for that matter, a single soul writ large, but something between thesethat set of relations, correctly called friendship, which is essentially political, as we shall see, and which a philosopher institutes between himself
and his fellow-citizens whenever he is able. And when this kind of man
comes to power, "our constitution, which we have told as a myth in speech,
will achieve its consummation in deed" (501e4). As we shall see, Socrates
is in power.
2. In the same way we must look at the nature and condition of the
youth, whom he will educate to be a helper and auxiliary first and later
a successor and ruler. He will be a young man of twenty (537b8), markedly
spirited (357a3, 44la2, 548d9), and with some experience in soldiering, open
to the influence of music and with a strong bent toward mathematics. Now
this is a picture of Glaucon, "erotic" like Socrates himself (474d4; cf. Symposium 177d8), a young man of about twenty, whose manly courage and
desire for victory are emphasized together with his receptivity to music
(548e5); he has already distinguished himself in battle (368a3), is delighted
by mathematics (528e7, 531a3), and is the son of the "Best" of fathers.
He is therefore quite right to offer himself as a "helper" (474bl; cf. the
"helpers" of the guardian city, 414b5) and to say that "perhaps I could
answer more fitly than another," for he is the reason why Socrates is taking so much trouble on himself (474a5); he is "responsible" (509c3) for
Socrates' overcoming his reluctance to speak on the highest matters. And
we must not forget that as the dialogue closes Socrates speaks to
Glaucon -and him alone-of the "upward road" as if they were again all
by themselves, as they had been when they "came down" at the beginning.
There is some additional evidence in favor of Glaucon as a prospective
ruler. Xenophon (Memorabilia III, vi) recounts a conversation in which
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MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
Socrates persuades Glaucon, who is less than twenty years old and wants
to become head of state immediately, that he knows nothing of statecraft,
nothing of revenues, and nothing of military management, and that he
should perhaps first learn something about these subjects .. Socrates,
Xenophon says, took an interest in Glaucon "for the sake of Plato and
Charmides"; he alone succeeded where everyone had failed, and persuaded
Glaucon to restrain his ambitions until he should have become competent
enough not to make a fool of himself. We see that Glaucon must in fact
have been very interested in politics and that Socrates was known to have
been interested in him. The Republic even contains the counterpart in the
Platonic mode of the Xenophontic dissuasion: Glaucon is persuaded that
the mark of the true ruler is that he has no ambition to rule and despises
the "political life"- the subtlest possible deterrent for a proud young man
(520e4 ff.). Beyond this Glaucon's name had for Plato the tremendous advantage that unlike that of Critias and Charmides it was not tainted with
political crimes. He may have died young, for scarcely anything is known
of him, except that he wrote dialogues (Diogenes Laertius II, 124)- and
was Plato's brother.
3. The philosopher's city is coming into being while Socrates and
Glaucon converse: the primary political act is the "conversion" to a
philosophical education of one youth by one man. Because he engages
in this kind of activity, Socrates can maintain in one and the same dialogue
(Gorgias 473e6, 52ld6) that he is not one of the "political men" and that
he alone in Athens practices the "truly political art." (Plato's own activities
were in accordance with this principle, Seventh Letter 326b ff.) The contrived bodily community of the guardian city (416d) is here converted into
a natural dialogic community. This is by nature a community of two;
throughout the dialogue Socrates has one interlocutor, and when another
enters, it is by way of interruption (e.g., 449bl, 487bl; cf. Gorgias 474a).
But minimal as it is, it is a true community as opposed to the artificial
unity of the guardian city. For the latter is an artificially composed harmony of "one out of many" (423d6, 443el), in musical terminology a
diapason (cf. the dia panton as a characteristic of "otherness," Sophist
253el), an "all-encompassing consonance," but it has no one natural source
and no discernible end beyond subsisting as a unity. There is, as we shall
see, no eidos, no idea of a city, while the community that underlies dialogic
communication is, on the contrary, precisely eidetic and, unlike the guardians' community of bodily goods (416d), indestructible. For the eidos that
underlies speech is not a delicate adjustment of "one out of many" in which
the many constitute and enter into the unity, but an indivisible one "by
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itself'' and opposed to all multiplicity (e.g., 479; contrast the preposition
used for the community of eide: "one idea through many" [Sophist 253d9]
with that used for the relation of many sensible things to their eidos: "many
... under one idea" [Republic 507b6]). The eidos is the "common thing,"
the thing public by nature that belongs to friends. The foundation of the
fourth city, the establishment of that Politeia which is indeed rightly
translated by Republic- that is, Commonwealth- consists in beginning that
dialogue with which any Western education, an education that is the making
of a free citizen, begins. We shall see exactly how Socrates goes about this
founding act. As Rousseau half-truly observes in his Emile, "Plato's
Republic ... isnot a political treatise, as those who merely judge books
by their titles think. It is the finest treatise on education ever written."
c
But first it is necessary to see where and under what circumstances his
foundation takes place.
The conversation of the Republic is held on the day of the Bendideia
in the Peiraeus, the harbor of Athens, which was united with the upper
city by the Themistoclean walls (Thucydides I, 93), so that the dialogue
may be said to take place within Athens. In the mythical dimension this
place is revealed as Hades; in fact it is a turbulent center of Athenian
democracy. The cult of Bendis, a new Thracian import, is itself a symptom of dissolution, "a new workshop of turbulent revelry," as a comic
writer" seems to have described it. Its celebration is to culminate that night
in a torch-race and an "all-nighter" (328a8), an orgiastic affair which the
young men are clearly waiting to join.
Socrates and Glaucon, both citizens of this democracy, will conduct
their conversation, which occupies the central books of the Republic, within
this setting. It is, in a strange way, the right setting, as the dialogue itself
intimates. To show this let us look at the degenerating cities and citizen
souls of Books VIII and IX.
There are four of them, in downward order: timocracy, oligarchy,
democracy, and tyranny (544c). But exactly as in the case of the just city,
the monarchy and aristocracy are regarded as being two names for one
constitution (445d4); so a case may be made for taking democracy and
its inevitable degenerate consequence, tyranny, together (cf. Politics 1292al8,
where democracy is said to be analogous to tyranny; also 1286bl7). For
not only do they in fact alternate with each other in Athens at this time,
but within Socrates' scheme they have this important trait in common, that
they are both less than cities, almost non-constitutions, to which no definite
�. 1:
28
MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
kind of soul corresponds (557cl). This bracketing of the two gives us the
following scheme:
3. monarchy-aristocracy
2. warrior city
l. craftsmen city
0.
I,
I
tl
timocracy
oligarchy
democracy-tyranny,
which conveys a kind of inverse correspondence between the best and worst.
The correspondence of opposites is evident in a number of ways: the just
rulers, especially when the elders of the third city become the philosophers
of the fourth, make no distinction between their own and the public business (497a5), and in a perverted way neither does the tyrant, whose rule
is a private nightmare publicly staged (573, 576b5)- for in private the tyrant
is himself, like his city, almost absolutely tyrannized. Like the just constitution, the democracy contains three classes, which again correspond
inversely: the have-nots in the democracy form the lowest and largest class,
the class most eager for revolution, while in the just city they are in highest
and least class (428e7), the unpropertied class most devoted to the preservation of the city. And again: the ruling class in the democracy cannot
fight because of its luxuriousness (556c8), while those who have that
strength and should be the watchdogs become wolves to the human fold
(415e2, 566a4). These cities then are related by Socrates as extreme opposites
which meet (576d); he even describes them by the same term: the just city
is called "the city of beauty" or "fair-city" (kal/ipolis, 527c2), and so is
the democracy called, bitterly, the "fairest" of constitutions (557c4; the same
of tyranny, 562a4) for the colorful variety of constitutions to be found
within it. All the other characteristics contribute toward putting the citizen
of a democracy into a perverse and yet peculiarly intimate relation to the
just city, but it is this last that makes democracy practically the best base
of Socrates' enterprise. (The ordering of constitutions in the Republic is
made in abstraction from considerations of legitimacy; contrast the
classification of the Statesman, 29ld ff., where democracy is "the best of
all lawless constitutions"; also 303a8; cf. Politics 1289b9. From this point
of view, incidentally, such sub-political democracy is the degenerate counterpart of that Cyclopean pre-political self-sufficiency which must have preceded the cooperation of the craftmen's city; cf. Odyssey IX, 187 ff.) For,
as he tells Adeimantus, it plays host to so many constitutions that "he who
happens to want to found a city, as we are now doing, must go to a
democratic city"; having picked a constitution he likes he may then proceed to settle his own city (557d). This is precisely what Socrates does, who,
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as he himself points out, even while sitting .in an Athenian prison, never
considered leaving a perverse Athenian democracy for a dully decent
timocracy like that-of Sparta or Crete (Crito 52e5); in fact, the perverse
excellence of Athens is epitomized in this- that Socrates is taken seriously
enough to become the center of a public scandal. Socrates' dialogic community is one of the many Athenian constitutions.
D.
!. A consideration of the guardian city as it appears in the Timaeus
will bring out the full force of Socrates' founding act. As we have shown,
two things are required to bring the best city into being as an actual political
body: that the breeding of the citizens should be founded in nature and
that the vicious circle by which the established order makes citizens in its
own image should somehow be broken. These very conditions are fulfilled
in the Timaeus in a way totally different from that of the Republic.
Although the guardian city and its institutions are said at various times
to be according to nature·(e.g., Republic 428e9, 456cl), it is the nature of
the soul that is really meant- a most un-natural nature, as we shall see.
The consequence of this unnatural psychic base is that the city no sooner
ceases to be regarded as a mere pattern and begins to have corporeal life,
than ii enters its road of dissolution. For it, change or "motion" (kinesis)
is always "discord" (stasis, 545d), since "a constitution in agreement with
itself caniwt be. changed" (d3); for it also, motion is unintelligible, since
the question "how ... then does our city come to have changed?" (d5)
is answered only by the inaccessible mystery of the mathematics of birthgoverning celestial cycles (546). Now in the Timaeus Socrates expresses .
precisely this wish: to see his city "put into motion" (19b8), like a person
who sees some fine animals painted or resting and feels a desire to stir
them. His hosts therefore must find a way to move his city without dissolving it. The entertainment that Timaeus, Critias, and Hermocrates provide
for Socrates on the Panathenaea (17al, 26e2), unlike the bitter feast
Thrasymachus serves him on the Bendideia (354a!O, 357a2), is truly amusing for him. They present to him the frame of his picture, as it were, by
providing a mathematical hypothesis (see below IV D 3 a), a "supposed
eidos" (48e6), which will serve as a pattern for that mathematically moving macrocosm into which the harmony of his animated city will fit consonantly. In the Republic the largest context (and that one of strife) had
been Hellas (470e4); now it is the numbered heavens. Whereas in the
Republic the city was a soul writ large, in the Timaeus the city and th.e
soul is a cosmos writ small (24c, 27b, 30d, 42e ff., 69b). The rulers of such
�MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
30
a city would not need to do any intricate geometrizing- contrast the forced,
unnatural imitation of celestial circular geometry in Atlantis with the
natural lay-out of Athens (Critias 111, 113d). Obviously, in this setting the
main political virtue would not be what might be called the "substantial"
virtue of justice, which makes each man true to himself, but rather the
"relational" virtue of temperance, which keeps him in balance, "sound-
minded" (si5phri5n)- "sane." This virtue is understandably dim in the local
context of the Republic, for as Socrates says there (430e6), "temperance
is a sort of cosmos"- an interior adjustment in tune with an outer order
(cf. Theon, Mathematical Matters Useful for Reading Plato, Introduction:
"For the harmony of the cosmos, the good order of the city, and temperance
in private affairs are one and the same").
·
'
2. The city itself they animate by translating it into history. Its citizens
.are indeed earth-born, sown by the twin gods Hephaestus and Athena, she
the goddess of wisdom and war and he the patron of the craftsmen of
the city. To this natural genesis corresponds a natural end: the city sinks
out of sight in a cataclysmic earth-quake (Timaeus 25c7). Socrates had
presented them with a theoretical myth (26b4, c8), and a factual myth,
a tale of antiquity, is the gift they return.
The city of the Republic, on the other hand, is only as old as "yesterday." It too has a source beyond itself, but this source is not within nature,
visible or intelligible, but beyond nature itse/f(540a8). The true ruler must
be in touch with this source- thus the love of attainable wisdom is what
is meant in this dialogue by philosophy (cf. Sixth Letter 323d); Glaucon's
question about the genesis of the best city turns into a question about the
genesis of a philosopher (504b ). Socrates is going to answer this question
with a practical demonstration.
3. Socrates' city, it is necessary to note, is mentioned once more, briefly,
in a dialogue from which Socrates is absent, the Laws (cf. also Diogenes
Laertius III, 52). There an old man, an Athenian stranger of So!onic-as
opposed to philosophic-wisdom (cf. Republic 536d!), sets up, in the course
of a walk through Crete, a "constitution." It is a constitution not only in
the first sense of the word, in which it means the institution of rulers and
ruled as in the Republic, but also in the second sense, namely as a code
of laws for the rulers to administer (Laws 75la). He mentions the guardian city of the Republic in which "friends have all things in common" as
a city inhabited by gods, a "pattern" for his own (739el)-he clearly means
an unattainable and impracticable pattern. The cities he can undertake to
build are only the second and the third best (e5; cf. Republic 445c5, where
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31
the best city is said to be unique, while the degenerate forms are several).
The constitution that is then given, a conflation of monarchy and
democracy (Laws 693d), is meant as a practical political model for actual
cities, and it was in fact so used. This city differs from the best city in
its essential characteristics: property, women, and children are no longer
held in common (740), and a concomitant adjustment is made in the
citizens' and rulers' education, which is no longer "eidetic" but rather
"aisthetic," based on sense experience (817e ff., 967)-it is often observed
that the word "philosophy" does not occur in the dialogue at all.
Now the city of law is discussed in the Statesman, a dialogue where
Socrates is present, and it is evidently discussed in his spirit. There it is
called the "second sailing" (300c2), i.e., that laborious rowing by which
boats are moved when the wind fails (scholion on Phaedo 99c); the phrase
means not "second best," but rather "least worst" (Aristotle, Nicomachean
Ethics 1109bl). The city of law is said to be merely the best of all those
cities which are not true and genuine cities at all but only copies (Statesman
293e3); the "only constitution" is that in which the rulers are men of
knowledge (c6). The Eleatic Stranger, the chief interlocutor, mentions one
aspect of the rule of law that particularly bears on the education of such
men, that is, of philosopher kings, as it is set out in the Republic: Whatever,
he asks, would be the meaning of a mathematics studied according to a
"code of law" (299e4)?- clearly the liberal study of mathematics set out
in the Republic is not appropriate to the rulers in the Statesman. Moreover,
the one hope for the rule of law is, the Stranger says, its meticulous preservation under all circumstances (300c), a demand totally incompatible with
the radical excellence demanded of Socrates' foundation (Republic 50la).
· The practical city, the city of law, is therefore essentially opposed to the
philosopher city. One might say that the former is firmly founded in the
"Cretan" realm of the underworld judges Minos and Rhadamanthus (Laws
624b) while the latter leads ever beyond it.
One more remark on the significance of Socrates' absence in the Laws.
In the Politics Aristotle gives a critique of the Republic, in his usual way
cutting through Socratic "brilliance" and "originality" (1265al2, 129lall)
to reach the sober political content of the dialogue, and consequently stripping away the "extraneous arguments and those about education" (l264b39),
until he finally reduces the Socratic foundation to one law: "that the guardians shall not farm" (1264a9)-and the Spartans have already thought of
that! Thus the Republic is made to emerge as an insufficiently detailed
forerunner of the Laws, while the Laws are regarded as a Republic made
practicable (1264b26 ff.). And Aristotle proceeds to underwrite this interpretation by pretending that Socrates, the man who never left Athens ex- ·
�MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
32
cept on a campaign, is the much-traveled (Laws 639d9) Athenian stranger!
It seems that for him the presence or absence of Socrates determines the
mode of dialogue.
IV. MUSIC
A.
Ia. We shail now show that, like Heracles, Socrates uses music to
"civilize" his young guardian. He uses not the traditional music of the poets
but his own restoration of true music; he shows how to apply seriously
Damon's thesis that a change in the character of a city's music produces
a change in the fundamental laws (424c5). Socratic music is, as we shall
see, philosophical music, the music of truth. Its special force will lie in
this, that its logoi are at the same time erga, this coincidence being precisely
what the poets cannot achieve; they, for all their speeches, leave no true
works behind at all (599b3).
By "music" the Greeks mean whatever activity is under the care of the
Muses, that tradition consisting of the arts and skills which we call "arts
and letters," and among these especially poetry and melodic music. To be
"amusical" is to be an uneducated boor. Accordingly, the upbringing of
the guardians of the third city, described in Book III, is to be "that
discovered over a long period of time," namely gymnastic to strengthen
the body, and music for the soul (376e2) to make it gentle and "wellarranged" (40ld8). But this available music will have to be purified and
purged. Now music is understood to be altogether "image-making and imitative," mimetic (Laws 668a6), so that the purging consists of condemning the poet's false and deteriorating representations especially of gods and
heroes, and of expunging the passages where he "makes images vilely in
his logos" (377el). Children must, then, be. told myths that will be, on the
whole, lies- albeit harmless ones- though they will contain some truths
(377a4). Socrates gives a practical demonstration of this purgation in reviewing passages containing myths- as Aristotle did later, he regards poets
primarily as "myth-makers" (377bll; cf. Poetics 145lb)-harmful to the
tone of the soul. When he has criticized the myths, particularly the Homeric
tales, "about gods ... and demigods as well as heroes and about those
in Hades" (392a4), among them the slanders concerning Theseus's presence
there (391c9), he declines for the moment to go on to correct the myths
concerning men. For these are the myths the poets are worst at telling,
but we cannot correct them until we know how justice works (392b). We
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33
may accordingly expect such a correction of the myths of man later on.
Socrates concludes by requiring not only the poets but all imitative artists
to devote their works to "the image of the Good" (40lb2).
lb. Not only are the stories of the poets, their logoi (392c6), purged,
but their mode of speech, their texis (ibid.),. which corresponds for them
to the modes of melodic music, also comes under Socrates' review. His
remarks make the whole dialogue itself the vehicle of a most fundamental
reflection on the dialogic mode, for the form of the Republic is a subtle
but precise example of the approved texis. Socrates distinguishes two basic
poetic modes. The first of these is straight narration, in which the poet
'himself is speaking directly while his characters speak in indirect discourse;
for example, Homer says that "Agamemnon ... said [t0 Chryses] that
rather than release his daughter he would grow old in Argos with her."
In the second mode the narrator drops out entirely and the characters speak
in their own persons, as in all drama (392d5). Epic represents a mixture
of these two basic styles (394c4). The first mode is honest enough, but
the second mode is censured. It is bad because in it the poet, by hiding
himself, hides the fictional nature of his work and evades all responsibility for its truth, leaving the actor.(or reader) caught in an unwitting imitation. For the actor becomes, as it were, the character-all too often
reprehensible- whose direct speech he declaims. But the guardians should
be allowed to imitate only good men (395d).
The Republic itself, however, has that form which is exactly designed
to provide at once the most complete poetic responsibility, the greatest
mimetic force, and the most worthwhile imitation. For the narrator, Socrates
himself, is always present and responsible, and he keeps himself before us
with the ever-recurring phrases "he said" and "I said" (393cll; contrast
Theaetetus 143c); nor is he an anonymous mouth-piece whose work a reader
reads, as he does the Homeric epics, without ever learning who the poet
was. (We see here, incidentally, one reason why Hesiod, who not only identifies himself but even warns.the reader that his source, the Muses, will
sometimes lie [Theogony 22, 27], is, if less loved, yet more acceptable to
Socrates; Republic 546ei, 607c8). The teller is Socrates, backing his own
words with the acts of his own life. At the same time the words and
arguments are dramatically direct, in the sense that the reader can almost
hear them- he may imitate them in the sense of rehearsing them in his
own soul and trying them out for truth; he can let the logos turn into an
ergon. This text is almost an "unwritten teaching," having overcome the
dead letter. And finally, the Republic as a whole- and this is a feature
it shares with other dialogues- is just the required imitation of the activ-
�34
MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
ity of the "best of men" (Phaedo 118al6); it is Plato's imitation of Socrates,
an imitation that will prove its authenticity by serving the double function
of commenting on the original while representing it. Consequently, we can
distinguish between what Socrates says and what the dialogues say; the
most striking example of this is the Phaedrus, which is so written that,
when rightly read, it casts doubt on Socrates' assertion within it that the
written word cannot teach (274c ff.) We shall see that similar tensions,
similarly inviting to thought, are written into the Republic.
lc. Yet in Book VII, when Socrates revises the guardian education for
the philosopher city, even this purged music is explicitly and emphatically
excluded from the formal plan of education as containing no "learning
matter" (mathema, 522a8, 537; cf. 504dl) leading. toward being. For such
music is merely "ethical" (522a4), i.e., an habituation of the soul that does
not lead to knowledge; it is a training but not an education, a conditioning but not a journey to the source, for "the dialectic pursuit alone travels
in this way" (533c7). Consequently, the musical training is completed very
early and culminates in gymnastics (cf. 376e6, 546d7, S91c5).
2a. We know from the dialogues, however, that there is a music yet
different from both the traditional and the purged music, the philosophical
music mentioned above. Evidently it was Pythagoras who first appropriated
the oldest of the Muses, Calliope, for philosophy. " Socrates gives her,
together with the next sister, Urania, the same office in the Phaedrus, where
Urania watches over those who make stories about the heavens and the
gods, while Calliope cares for those who compose "human stories" (259d6).
And in the Phaedo Socrates tells of a dream that has come to him often
and in various shapes but always with the same message: "0 Socrates, make
music and let that be your work" (60e6); he has always taken this dream
to mean that he should pursue philosophy, that being "the greatest music"
(6la3; cf. Republic 499d4, 548b8).
2b. What then is this philosophical music, this "imitation of inquiry"
(historiken mimesin, Sophist 267e2)? In the passage of the Phaedo quoted
above, Socrates says: "I myself am not a myth-teller" (61b5). This is literally true, for he is not one who makes imitations of what never was nor
will be, producing mere phantasms (cf. Sophist 236c), but he is one who
makes images of what is. We must immediately mention an almost paradoxical exception to this: the logos of the cities built "in speech" is, as it were,
Socrates' own myth; he speaks of ''the constitution which we told as a myth
in speech" (50le4). But otherwise Socrates, although he is willing enough
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35
to act out a myth, avoids telling myths of his own making; the "noble lie"
of the guardians is a myth attributed to the Phoenicians (414c4); that anti,
Homeric Nekyia or Descent to Hades, Socrates' substitute for Odysseus's
false and tedious tale to Alcinous (cf. scholion on 614bl and Note 11), which
closes the dialogue, is attributed to Er and only "saved" by Socrates (62lb8);
in other dialogues too Socrates avoids responsibility for myths (e.g., Gorgias
493, Phaedrus 244, Meno 81). Images, on the other hand, are his very own
mode; as Adeimantus ironically remarks at one point: "It isn't the usual
thing, I suppose, for you to speak through images" (487e6).
2c. An account of how such images as Socrates makes are formed is
given in the Phi/ebus (38e). When someone goes about reflecting much
by himself, many true opinions and accounts become written into his soul,
as by an inner scribe. This scribe is succeeded by a painter who draws images illustrating these inner accounts, and if the accounts are true, then
so are these images.
2d. Socratic images therefore differ from myths in being the direct consequence of an inner argument, and not the persuasive counterpart and
conclusion of a public conversation. When the dialectic attempt has ended,
often in failure, the imagination, as Kierkegaard says, feels fatigued and
reacts: "The mythical is thus the enthusiasm of the imagination in the service of speculation ... " (Concept of Irony, p. 132); the same faculty, in
its vigorous sobriety, produces the images here called Socratic. In their
presentation myths are thus preceded by an argument, as nearly the whole
Republic precedes the Myth of Er, and dialogic passages precede the myths
of, for insta.nce, the Phaedo, the Phaedrus, the Symposium, and the
Gorgias; images, on the other hand, are either actually followed by an explication of the interior argument that went into their making, or they
themselves give plain hints how the participant in the dialogue should reflect
on them. This reflection is of a very peculiar kind, and in inducing it lies
the special strength of the Socratic image: each such effort is accompanied
by a reflection on the effort itself, for to study a Socratic image always
means to study not only its content but the nature of "image" and "imaging" itself. The study of Socratic imagery is then exactly what Socrates
himself says music ought to be: the study of true being and its images;
as he repeats twice, this is one and the same art and effort (402b7, c7).
In Aristotle's opinion the making of such images, which are, as we shall
see, based on analogy, the chief sort of metaphor (Poetics 1457b16),
demands by far the greatest poetic gift, namely "the ability to see what
is like" (1459a8). We shall see that this is also the philosophical gift. In
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MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
Socrates' images the "ancient difference between philosophy and poetry"
(Republic 607b5) is reconciled.
2e-f. Socrates himself fulfills the demand he makes of all poets, which
is to "make an image of the Good" (40lbl). His image of the Good is the
"sun image"· or "likeness" (eikona, 509a9, homoioteta, 509c6), which
dominates the center of the dialogue. It is followed by that example of
a "corrected" Myth of Man which Socrates had before omitted (392a8).
The myth that he chooses to correct, tacitly but devastatingly, is indeed
the most crucial of all stories concerning humans. It is the one dramatized by Aeschylus in the tragedy of Prometheus Bound. It tells how the
treasonous immortal Prometheus gave men fire (252), how he opened their
eyes (447) and made them see, and how he made them come out of the
caves they had been, antlike, inhabiting (452) into the light of day to see
the heavens and to become wise (476). As Socrates re-tells this myth in
his "image of the cave" (Republic 514), it turns out that the fire Prometheus
brought was a counterfeit light (b2); those few who know how to nse it
only abuse it by allowing it to project deceptions (b8); men's eyes are as
blind as ever (515c9); they continue to live deep in a dark cave and their
wisdom is worthless (516c4-7). We might note here in passing that in the
Phi/ebus Socrates intimates that the true Prometheus is Pythagoras (16c),
and that in the Protagorasthe sophist himself, while crediting Prometheus
with having brought the other arts to men, claims that he omitted the
political art, which Hermes brought later directly from Zeus to all men
alike (322c1). 20
2g. The logos belonging to these images is absent in the Republic, but
its terms may be recovered from that tradition dealing with Plato's oral
"Unwritten Teachings," particularly the lecture- or meetings- Concerning the Good (see Note 28). In these terms, the terms of the Academy, the
"image of the Good" represents the One and the "image of the cave" the
Indiifinite Dyad; this interpretation will be pursued below in somewhat
more detail. So much, however, must be said at the outset: While it is a
serious enterprise to attempt to bring out what is in the dialogues without
being written there, it is a very external approach to discover in the texts
some Academic formula, and it is patent folly to think that the wisdom
which never would or even could be written (cf. Seventh Letter 341c-d)
can be recovered by making such identifications. For what is thus recovered
is obviously precisely its dead written image, as found, for the most part,
in Aristotle. For Aristotle, here as always, proceeds soberly and seriously
to profane the Academic mysteries in the interests of formulable truth. The
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37
very "mathematical" nature of the "Unwritten Teachings" supports this
point of view, for it is evidence that there was a live community concerned
with what is learnable par excellence, a group for whom the terms of the
teaching were pregnant with semi-technical meanings, which, bandied about
out of context, become exactly what Plato feared: somewhat fantastic fossils
of truth. Nor does it signify much that Plato himself on some occasion
did speak to the public in the language of the school, giving out such
schematisms as anyone may carry away in his memory or his pocket and
as everyone would have heard of anyhow-or that for some students
"mathematics had become philosophy, although they say that it should
be studied for the sake of something else" (Aristotle, Metaphysics 992a32
ff.). It is, after all, a remarkable fact of the tradition concerning the "Unwritten Teachings" that the doctrine that must have been their central matter, the doctrine concerning the order or taxis of the eide as discovered
by dialectic (cf. Philebus 16d-e), is divulged by no one, not even by Aristotle
(see Note 35).
3. The particular object of Socrates' music in the Republic, which may
be contrasted with the battering ram of his rhetoric in the Gorgias, is to
work a gentle and orderly revolution of the soul in respect to the love of
wisdom. The musical art is the ability to give an inviting preview of the
"marvelous way" that, according to the Seventh Letter (340c3), must be
given to any beginner- it is an art which Socrates once refers to as the
"art of conversion" (518d3). According to the stated plan of the philosophers' education, at twenty those chosen to study begin a formal sequence
of mathematics culminating in a "synopsis" (537c2). At thirty, after another
selection, the young philosophers enter upon the long road of dialectic,
which again culminates in a synoptic vision, that of the Good itself (540a8).
Just as Socrates had first introduced Glaucon to the Good as the "greatest
learning matter" (megiston mathema) poetically, by an image, so he now
sets out the plan of study that will prepare Glaucon to reach the Good
as a "hymn": "Don't we know," he says, speaking of the mathematical
studies they have just surveyed, "that all these things are only the preludes
of the hymn which we must study?" (53ld7; cf. Timaeus 29d5, Laws 722c6).
And a little later, playing on the double meaning of nomos, law or song,
he speaks of the "law which the activity of dialectic fulfills" or the "song
which it performs" (532al). Socrates will not turn this song into expository
prose, since "no longer, dear Glaucon, will you be able to follow ... , for
you would no longer be seeing an image of what we are discussing but
the truth itself, as it appears to me" (533al). Socrates' music, as the art
of conversion, is nothing but the poetic synopsis of the end as well as the
I
I
�MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
38
road of the philosophical education itself. It is designed to turn Glaucon
into the right course by showing him "what the business as a whole is .
. . . For once he hears this, if he is indeed properly philosophical and worthy
of the undertaking- a man divine- he is persuaded that he has heard of
a wonderful way and that right now he must concentrate on it, or else life
will not be worth living" (Seventh Letter 340b-c). So this was the
significance of the omission of music from the plan of education: the very
presentation was itself to be the musical overture to learning. We shall see
that when the object of study is the "highest learning matter" the images
and songs in which it is previewed demand the highest art.
4. Books V-VII, which contain the central images, are again, like the
outer books, roughly symmetrical about the center. Upon the completion
of the just city, culminating in the discussion of the community of women
and children (V, 449-471: VIII, 543a), Glaucon asks his question concerning the possibility of this city. Socrates answers it by introducing the
philosopher kings. This question and its answer frame the center of the
dialogue (V, 47lc-473: VII, 540d; cf. 466d8). The next inner theme is the
definition and- here Adeimantus interposes- the defense, temperament,
and proper age of the philosopher (V, 474b-VI, 502: VII, 535-540). At
the innermost core is Socrates' initiation of Glaucon into the philosophical
education, effected by two great images, the "sun image" and the "cave
image," which are interwoven with explications and with each other, as
shown in the table:
507 a ff. [sun image
509d ff.
explication of the sun image by the
r
I "Divided line"
514a ff.
517b ff.
522a ff
533a ff.
lr
cave image
correlation of the two images
explication of the cave image in the
"plan of studies"
l
·
correlation of the explications of both images.
We have before us a composition of intricate but clear texture.
B.
I. Glaucon's introduction to philosophy will itself have a prelude. He
will discover for himself the meaning of "opinion," doxa.
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39
Opinion in its various meanings determines the musical key of the different parts of the dialogue by its absence or presence. The outer ring of
logoi is explicitly spoken in a signature appropriate to the absence of the
"good opinion" (doxa) of mankind and its homonymous consequence,
"reputation (doxa)." Adeimantus had stipulated at the beginning (Book
II) that the argument about justice must "remove reputations" (367b5),
and Glaucon had provided the magic Ring of Gyges, 21 which will allow
the wearer "to do anything"- that is, to be a complete crook, pan-ourgos,
without being either seen or blamed. At the end of the argument (Book
X) the ring and also the concealing Helmet of Hades, which the argument
had been, so to speak, wearing, can be removed (612b5), for even on the
supposition that the opinion of men carries no weight, justice has been
proved profitable. At the center of the dialogue, however, where an ergon
is set into the logos, the opinion of mankind cannot be supposed away,
for the many will have to be won to some sort of acceptance of philosophy
if anything is to be done.
But it is really as the individual inner source of this public opinion,
as the faculty of the soul Glaucon will soon learn to call doxa, that opinion becomes of overwhelming importance at the center, for both the older
and the younger lover of wisdom. For about the "greatest learning matter" Socrates himself has, as he repeatedly says, only opinion (506c4, e2,
509c3, 517b7, 533a4; cf. Phaedrus 278d), although opinion so well founded
that Glaucon will not be able to follow him without a long course of study.
So also the "interest" on the capital Good, its "child" (Socrates plays on
the double meaning of tokos: child and interest, as in our phrase "bearing
interest"), which he gives to Glaucon, will provide the latter only with opinion. But since the interest is not paid in counterfeit coin and the child is
no bastard (507b5), we may infer thatOlaucon will conceive not false but
"true opinion," and this is the beginning required if positive learning, as
distinct from a preliminary purgative refutation, is to take place. However,
throughout the conversation the Good, that one thing which everyone wants
in truth and without regard to "seeming" (doxan, 505d8), will have to be
approached by opinion: "A man should remember that he is human not
only in his fortune but also in his demonstrative knowledge" (quoted from
On the Good, Vita Aristotelis Marciano 953b, ed. Bekker).
2. As so often in the Republic, the conversation makes its own mode
the object of reflection- in the case of doxa, at its very inception; Socrates'
opinions on the highest matters are prefaced by ~n inquiry into the meaning of opining.
The "third wave" has just closed in on Socrates (Book V, 473c6); he
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MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
and Glaucon must now define the philosopher (474b5). Just as there are
some who desire love, he says, and some who desire honor, there are some
who desire wisdom, and all of it. Glaucon asks whether lovers of wisdom
then include lovers of sights and sounds. Socrates answers with a distinction which he would have difficulty, he says, in getting anyone but Glaucon
to admit (47 5e6): The just and the unjust, the good and the bad, are each
one by itself, but "in communion with deeds and bodies and one another
they are imagined in every way and appear each to be many" (476a4). Now
lovers of sights love-and apprehend- beauty in its manyness and are asleep
with respect to true beauty itself, being unable to distinguish this one from
the many, but the philosopher loves the one true beauty. The "thinking"
(dianoia) of the philosopher is knowing and is to be called knowledge,
gnome, while the lovers of beauty only opine and have opinion, doxa
(476d5), Furthermore, knowledge must be of something which is, and which
is "that which is completely," and which is therefore completely ''to be
known," gni5ston, w~ile "what is not" is entirely unknowable," agniiston
(477al). Now if there is something "between" (metaxy) complete being and
complete non-being, then, as knowledge was said to belong to being and
ignorance (agnosia) to non-being, so to this "thing between" must correspond something that is itself ''between ignorance and knowledge" (episteme,
aiD). This is found to be opinion, having an object and a "power" (dynamis)
different from both knowledge and ignorance (b8; cf. Symposium 202a).
If he and Glaucon can discover what it is that, being more shadowy than
being but brighter than non-being, lies between them, they will have found
"that which is to be opined," the doxaston (478e3). Then they will name
it, "assigning extremes to extremes and means to means" (e4). They will
appeal to the lover of beauty in manyness and ask him if all these things
he loves are not also sometimes ugly, and if the same is not true of things
just, great, or heavy- that they will all be found at some time to be the
opposite, so that they cannot be said to be or not to be one thing or another,
but are tossed about in-between being and non-being. Lovers of such things
should be called "lovers of opinion" and not "lovers of wisdom" (philodoxous: philosophous, 480all). So ends Book V: becoming, genesis, that "inbetween thing," has not been explicitly named, but it will clearly have to
play a fundamental role in Socrates' subsequent presentation.
3. The foregoing argument cannot help reminding Glaucon of an earlier
one (Book IV), in which it had been concluded that cities derive their constitutions from the individual constitutions of their citizens. 22 Socrates had
then asked whether the three capacities of the soul, desire, spiritedness,
and reasoning, belong to three different parts or whether each of these
�41
; belongs to the whole soul (436a8). To show that they are. indeed three
separate parts, Socrates and Glaucon had posited a strict correspondence
, between desires and their objects. If a man wants at the same time to drink
and not to drink because he knows that he ought not to, then his soul must
contain opposing parts: a "bidding" and a "forbidding" part (439c6). There
are then two parts, the rational part or logistikon "with which· a man
calculates" (logizetat), and the desiring part or epithymetikon which is
"unreasoning" (alogiston) and in which desire (epithymia) is located (439d).
Between these two, the "forms" (eide, e2) that are ordinarily recognized,
Socrates inserts a third (e3), the spirited part or thymoeides. Glaucon, obviously listening to the name, thinks that it is more akin to desire than
to reason. But Socrates points out that it can be an "auxiliary" of the reasoning part, since it makes us feel high-minded anger, or thymos (440e). Finally,
these three parts are arranged within us as the "three terms of a musical
proportion" (443d6), and thymos becomes "the in-between power" (479d8),
which, while itself obedient to reason, can in turn govern the body (403d,
4lle6).
Glaucon had therefore been asked long before the present argument
to distinguish the parts of the soul by means of their relative objects and
to understand one of these parts as a mean between two extremes. If we
juxtapose the results of both exercises we get the following result:
BOOK IV
logistikon
thymoeiaes
epithymetikon
BOOKY
gnosis
doxa
(agnosia)
For the middle parts this correlation is indeed tacitly but unmistakably
made in the dialogue. For instance, a chief characteristic of the warriors,
who as a class of the just city correspond to the spirited part of the soul,
is the "preservation of law-abiding opinions" (433c7) within them; in fact,
as Aristotle points out (Politics 1327b40), their thymos is the source of
their discernment. Also, in a limocracy, which represents spiritedness among
the degenerating cities and is emphatically presented as lying "between"
aristocracy and oligarchy (545c6, dl), the chief characteristic of citizens
is love of honor (548c7), which implies an interrelation of the thymos with
the external doxa called reputation.
4. The logistikon, on the other hand, is not quite coextensive with·
gniisis. Here we must stop to observe the name itself. In the traditional ·
double division of the soul into a rational and an irrational part, the first,
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MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
as having "reason" (logos), that is, the power of giving accounts (Nicomachean Ethics, 1102a30), was quite properly called logikon, a term evidently used already by the Pythagoreans. 23 Why then does Socrates call
it the logistikon,.connecting it explicitly with the verb logizesthai, to reckon
or calculate (439d5), rather than ·with the logos of dialegesthai (5llb4,
534c3)? It is because the logistikon is a restricted power, a power of planning, whose specific "work" later turns out to be calculation (cf.
Nichomachean Ethics 1139a13), measuring,. and weighing-in short,
whatever corresponds only to the lower part of the knowing power, to that
power of mathematical thinking which Glaucon will discover later, once
again as a mean between opinion and knowledge; and will learn to call
dianoia. We must remember that the guardians as dog-philosophers have
an admixture of ignorance in their knowing power, since they rewgnize
the city's enemies by the criterion of their own ignorance of them (376bS).
Moreover, their service as soldiers and administrators requires a knowledge
of applied mathematics, an ability to be correct in matters sensual, which
forms a part, although a secondary one, even of the philosophers' education (522c).
The lowest capacity, on the other hand, the epithymetikon, might well
be said to correspond to ignorance in a certain way, since the object of
the first, pleasure, partakes, as Socrates later shows Glaucon, of the object of the second, non-being (585)- though actually "ignorance ... is a
voidness in the condition of the soul" (b3) and no capacity at all.
It follows that the tripartite soul bf Book IV, although it has a coextensive middle part, both begins and ends on a level below the soul described
in the central conversation. How is this new soul to be understood?
5. At the very beginning of the articulation of the first soul Socrates
had warned that nothing accurate could come "from such proceedings"
(methadon, 435dl) and that a "longer and fuller way'' (d3) would be needed,
a requirement repeated at a crucial moment in Book VI (504b2). With the
discovery of doxa Socrates has started Glaucon on this longer way. The
soul that now emerges is the soul as "the organ by which each man learns"
(518c5; cf. 527d8), analogous in its passive openness to an organ of sense.
The parts of this soul are specifically called "powers" (477b, c, e) when
first introduced, and· this describes them completely- they are nothing but
the soul's capability of taking in, without modification, beings of a different degree, of "having ideas" in the original sense; this is why in a crucial
place (5lld7) they can as easily be called "receptivities" (pathemata) in the
soul. Compared to this learning soul, the three parts of the first soul sink
to mere tendencies, dispositions, or appetites (cf. Nicomachean Ethics,
�43
U02b30). Indeed, the alternate name of the logistikon is "the wisdom-loving
part" (philosophon, 586e4), and the love of wisdom is often called an
epithymia, a desire, in the central books (e.g., 475b4, 8; 517b6). And of
course, the very name of the thymos, with its allusion to epithymia, implies a kind of reflexive desire, as opposed to the desire that goes out upon
an object. This means that in a sense allthese parts function as desires,.
as activating human wants, and so it fits very well that the wisdom-loving·
part should not be coextensive with the knowing part, since when the soul
truly knows, it no longer desires the objects of knowledge but has attained
and moves among them (cf. Note 10). Thus, once the learning soul has
come into focus, the terms of the tripartite soul are used mostly to
distinguish' temperaments or ''lovers.". The philosopher, for instance, is
defined by means of a division of men into lovers of erotic pleasure and
wine, lovers of honor, and lovers of wisdom (474c8; cf. 435e7). Again, the
degenerate cities ate characterized by different prevailing appetites, and
when tyranny is discussed the three parts of the first soul are even explicitly connected to three "pleasures" or "desires" (580d). This restlessly desir"
ing tripartite soul is the embodied soul, a monstrous, precariously conflated unity (588d); it turns into a single rising organ of love only at the
sight of beauty (Phaedrus 249d ff.), under the influence of that divine
madness (244} which induces visions of the invisible. In contrast, the increasingly more receptive soul of the center, although still using the senses,
is more nearly the soul by itself, whose oneness, presumably similar to that
of the Whole, is a subject,· as Socrates says, for a more advanced inquiry
(see next section).
·
6. The "division" of the soul is the pre-dialectical "exercise," the gymnasia (Parmenides 135c8, d4, 7), of the Republic. Almost every reference
to the dialectical process of "dividing" refers to distinguishing the parts
or the objects of the soul (454a, 476a, 523a, 580d, 571a-b, 595a-b, 618c).
"Division" or diairesis is not here a very formal undertaking, as can be
gathered from the numerous names given to these parts: eide, gene, mere,
pathe (435b, c, e, 439e, 441c, 443d, 442b, c, .612a5). In the course of the
central conversation a quadripartite learning soul will emerge, but Socrates
indicates that more divisions might be made in a more complete study
(534a7) and that the question whether the soul is ultimately "many or one
in kind" (612a4; cf. 443d7) has not really been settled. An important aspect
of this dialectic exercise is the finding of the "in-between," the metaxy, which
Glaucon immediately recognizes as analogous to the mathematical problem of "finding the mean." The ability to discover means is the chief gift
necessary to the dialectician (Philebus 16el). The soul becomes the object
�MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
44
of this exercise, not only because, as we have seen, the philosopher's version of the definition of justice is "Know Thyself,"24 but also because the
politically indispensable "art of leading souls," rhetoric, depends on a
knowledge of the divisions of the soul (Phaedrus 27ld; in the Republic
Thrasymachus is told to acquire this art-Socrates is teaching him his own
business, as it were). However, the undertaking remains a mere exercise
because, as we shall see, Socrates must exclude true dialectic from the
Republic.
c.
1~2.
Adeimantus, named the "Dauntless," who has heard and is shaken
by every current doubt (cf. 362e, 419a), interposes an objection (487b):
Socrates' argument about the excellence of philosophers is convincing in
words, but in deed everyone knows that these people end up either
scoundrelly or impotent, especially if they keep philosophizing past their
youth. Socrates proceeds to win Adeimantus and the rest of the crowdthere are, besides Glaucon, eight named and several nameless auditors"in deed" (327c, 328b). He does not deny the accusation, but he will justify
his demand for the rule of the philosophers by an image (487e5) and. its.
explication (489a4); the image is that of a mutinous crew and the good
but powerless captain. There follows a series of images that show that the
greatest of all sophists, the Many, is in fact the greatest corrupter of natures,
who corrupts the best most deeply; this Public Sophist is like a great brute
that the little private sophists know how to propitiate (492a-493d). Thus
philosophy is left desolate and any little tinker may, as it were, take her
to wife (495e). There are, however, some good natures who are for various
reasons incorruptible- Socrates here cites as one such reason his own
"divine sign," the daimonion (496c4); when soon after he speaks of a "wellborn and well-bred ethos" (b2) one can scarcely help thinking of the Heraclitean saying that "ethos is a man's daimon" (Diels, Vorsokratiker, Fr..
119). Such a nature will run to shelter as from a storm and will live-and
die-in private. Thus such a man will do great deeds but not the greatest,
which can only be done within a suitable constitution (497a).
Adeimantus's worries about the slanders of philosophy he has heard
are allayed. They return to the question of the possibility of the city, and
now Adeimantus wants to know whether any of the contemporary cities
are suitable to philosophy (497a9). Not a single one, says Socrates (who,
however, as we know, himself lives and acts as a philosopher in Athens),
not even the city in speech that we have just founded, because it too is
deficient without the addition of a man, of a living law-giver (497d)-the
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45
very one they were talking about when Adeimantus interrupted. This man's
main problem will be how philosophy may be pursued in such a way as
not to ruin the city; the solution, as announced .by Socrates, is that not
the young but those advanced in life must most devote themselves to
philosophy. Adeimantus remarks how serious Socrates seems to be here,
but he thinks that most of his hearers will object just as earnestly, and
Thrasymachus most of all. Socrates says reprovingly, "Do not make a quarrel between me and Thrasymachus, who have just become friends- although we were not enemies before'.' (498c9). Thrasymachus approves this
remark by his silence (cf.450a5)_ It is no wonder, Socrates goes on, that
the people are hard to persuade, for they have never seen a virtuous man
rule in a similarly virtuous city. This is why no city or constitution will
ever become perfect until either some necessity forces the lover of wisdom
to take care of the city, or the true eros of philosophy falls on princes.
This may very well happen; in fact it may already have happened if there
is now some "barbaric place" (499c9), or if there ever was or will be a situation, wherC a virtuous man rules: "The constitution we discusSed has cOme
into being and was and will be, whenever this Muse is in power in the city"
(d2). We must.not attack the many, for they will then become gentle and
will believe that no city can be happy which is not painted by an artist
looking "to the divine pattern" (500e3). Such an artist will begin with a
clean slate, painting on it a constitution whose model is both the just and
the beautiful and the temperate itse.lf and the actual condition of men
(50! b), and the many will accept him. So a conclusion has been reached:
Our law-giving is difficult but not impossible (502c).
In this interlude with Adeimantus, Socrates completes the practical
foundation of his city. Having been voted into office, he succeeds by his
oratory in allaying the popular fears of the "philosophical clan" (50!e3);
his persuasiveness is due to his ability to present a persuasive example of
the uncorrupted lover of wisdom- himself. In defending what appears to
both of them a crucial matter, the life-long pursuit of philosophy, he even
becomes, as he himself remarks in retrospect, a spirited orator who speaks
"as an indignant man will" (thymotheis, 536c4). He is anxious for, and
successful in, preserving the peace with Thrasymachus, the single sophist
who represents that brutal public sophist, the people (cf. 336b5). And when
he imagines that their city may at this very moment exist in some barbarian
. spot, we must recall that the dialogue must by now have been going for
well over ten hours; it is night, and we may imagine the barbaric sounds
of a Thracian orgy beginning to penetrate into the house, the celebration
the company had come to attend but which they will now miss as they
sit through the rest of the night under Socrates' spell.
�MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
46
3. Socrates is now actually finished with Adeimantus. He will use him
as an interlocutor only once more, in the discovery of the degenerate cities
(548d8-576bl0), for Adeimantus is the expert on accounts of the worst.
However, they continue a little beyond. Socrates reviews the three waves
he has faced and ends by daring to formulate the "possible city" boldly
in terms of the guardian city: "Guardians in the accurate sense, it must
be ordained, are philosophers" (503b5). These must be at once quick and
gentle and able to undertake. the "greatest learning matters" (503e4). Adeimantus wants to know what these are, and Socrates reminds him of their
former study of the soul and its virtues and how they then said that a longer
road must be taken to reach better things (504e). But what are these things?
Adeimantus asks insistently. Socrates is annoyed that Adeimantus either
does not understand or is trying to make trouble, "since you have often
heard this-that 'the idea of the Good' is the greatest study" (505a2), for
this alone is what everyone wants not in seeming but in truth. Although
Socrates has already said that this Good cannot be either knowledge or
pleasure (505c), Adeimantus presses to be told whether it is either of these
or yet something else. A sarcastic exchange follows, in which Socrates denounces Adeimantus's unwillingness to hear, and Adeimantus scores
Socrates' propensity for repeating the opinion of others (!); this ends in
Socrates' refusing to talk to him about the Good (506cll). Now Glaucon
returns to the conversation and implores Socrates not to stop just as the
consummation of the argument is ahead; they will be satisfied if Socrates
speaks of the Good as he did before of the virtues (d2). Glaucon does not
realize that they have, in fact, already set out on the "longer path."
D.
i
,I
I. Socrates yields to Glaucon. He will speak, though not of the Good
itself but rather of its "offspring," which is most like it (506e). Socrates
reminds Glaucon of the "oft-told" story of the one and the many (cf. 476).
Those many good and beautiful things are seen but not known, while the
thing itself, by which what was many comes "under one idea," is "known"
but not "seen" (507b9). Now the artificer of the senses has made sight the
most costly of the senses, since it needs a "third kind of thing" (el), light,
to work. The sun is he of all the gods in heaven who gives us this light,
and so the "sense" (aisthesis) of sight and the "power" of being seen (e6)
depend on him. The eye is, of all "the organs of sense," "most like the sun"
(508b3). This sun is the child of the Good, a child begotten "analogous
to itself" (bl3). For the Good is "in the place of thought" in relation both
"to thought and to things thought" (nous, noumena, cl) what the sun is
�47
BRANN
"in the place of visibility" (c2) in relation to sight and things seen. Socrates
completes the analogy by likening "that in the soul which knows in this
way" to the eye; as the eye sees things "clearly" (dl) when lit up by the
sun, so the soul knows or merely opines things in the measure that the
idea of the Good gives or fails to give "truth" (atetheia, d5). Glaucon is
amazed. Adeimantus's question is now certainly answered; the Good cannot be either knowledge or pleasure (509a6). Socrates says that there is
yet more to be seen in the image (a9), for the sun provides not only visibility
but also growth and "becoming," genesis (b3), though it is not itself Becoming. Analogously the Good is the source of being, though not itself Being
(b7, 9). This "image" or eikon, which we shall call the "sun image" for
short, is best seen in a schematic sentence:
As the
light
sun
is responsible for giving
So
the
{ Good
visibility
the place of
in
{ truth
vision
to objects of
{ thought
{ thought
clarity
which are therefore perceived with
by the
{ knowledge
eye
becoming
, and is also the source of
{ soul
{ being
This image is now explicated in the "Divided Line." Glaucon is to take
the "double kinds" (509d4), the "visible" (horaton) and the "intelligible"
(noeton), and to cut them, as he would a line, into two unequal parts. Then
he is to cut each section again in the same ratio (d7). Thus he will have,
in the lower part, one subsection related to the other "in respect to clarity
and lack of clarity" (d9) in the same way that images such as shadows and
reflections are related to that of which they are images, namely natural
objects and manufactured things (510a). To this whole lower part belongs
"the opinable" (doxaston, a9). Next, the lower subsection of the upper part
is considered. Here "the soul, using those things before imitated as images"
{510b4), proceeds "from hypotheses" not "to the beginning" (ep'archen)
but "to the end," while in the uppermost section she makes "her way"
�48
MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
(methodon) without any use ofimages but by the "ideas" or eidethemselves
and through them alone, up to the un-hypothetical beginning (b6). Socrates
explains the lower of these subsections in terms of the work of the mathe- .
maticians, who assume certain hypotheses without giving an account of
them and who reach consistent conclusions on the basis of these. In doing
this they may use the "visible looks" of things, but these are not what they
are really thinking about. The true object of their thinking is the intelligible eidos (5lla3), the "look" that "one may see in no other way than by
means of the thinking faculty" (dianoia, al); thus Socrates indicates that
his use of the term eidos is fundamentally ironic. In the top section this
paradoxically named "intelligible look" itself, the eidos noeton, is attained
by "the power of dialectic" (b4), which uses the hypotheses as "hypotheses
in effect" -or "in being." This is a double entendre which means both that
the soul is now aware of the hypotheses as being so far nothing but
hypotheses and that it will now treat them as hypotheses underlying being. And having risen by means of these "up to the unhypothesized, unto
the beginning of the whole," it descends, using nothing sensible, but only
the hypotheses which are now no longer "suppositions"; these are the eide
themselves (b-e). Book VI closes as Socrates assigns four "affections" or
receptive powers (d7) of the soul to the four sections: thought or noesis
to the highest, thinking or dianoia to the second, trust or pistis to the third,
and to the lowest image-recognition" or eikasia; ,these are to be "ordered
analogously'' to their objects (e2). (Noesis, usually "intellection," and nous,
usually "intellect," are here both rendered by "thought" to contrast their
perfect and direct mode with the progressive and intermediary mode of
dianoetic "thinking.") A table (see next page) relating the line to the sun
image will make the correlation clearer.
2a. In presenting the sun image to Glaucon Socrates is requiring him
to exercise his doxa.
Of the two "doxastic" poWers,· the lower, whose pregnant name is eikasia,
and which is thrown in at the very end with conscious nonchalance, will
prove to be the most pervasive of the four "affections."
Ordinarily the verb eikazein means to "imagine," both in the sense of
making an image and likeness, and of discovering a likeness or likelihood;
so it means to compare or conjecture. The noun eikasia means both the
ability to make or see images, likelihoods, and conjectures, and the image,
likelihood, or conjecture itself. For Glaucon the word would probably call
to mind a witty and malicious amusement with which clever people spice
their symposia, called "likenesses" or eikasiai." The game consisted of
representing someone in an image, whereupon the victim might retaliate
�49
Source of the Whole
truth
Idea of the Good
clarity
ideas
thought or
know lege as
exercised in
dialetic
hypotheses
thinking as
exercised in
mathematics
place of
intelligibles:
being
Intelligible
things
---~--------------------- ------------~--
Things of
sight and
opinion
natural and
artifiCial
objects
trust
Sun
place of
visibles:
becoming
recognition
reflections . and making
of images
by making a "counter-image"- or by refusing to play. So Meno tells
Socrates that be appears to be "most like" (80a5) a torpedo fish (while
Socrates ostensibly declines to make a counter-image-of course the whole
dialogue is an unflattering portrait of Meno); and Alcibiades, in the one
true triumph of his life, appearing in the Symposium as the god Dionysus
himself, speaks of Socrates "through images" and compares him to one
of the Sileni in his train, except that, in his image, which is "for the sake
of truth" (215a6), this Silenus is more sober and far more divine than the
god himself. And in Xenophon's Symposium (VI, 8; cf. also VIII, 43)
Socrates curtly forbids the game when the eikasiai threaten to become in-·
jurious and false. Now Socrates is in the habit of introducing great matters u11der the image of a game or riddle (cf. 479bll, 521c5), and Glaucon
will soon see that the "game of images" is an image- arid an example- of
the most distinctive of human faculties.
In the meantime it must startle him to hear "conjecturing" elevated into a power of the soul along with thought itself. But as the meaning of
Socrates' central image penetrates he must notice that this image itself required a peculiar application of his ability to see images. For he is, on the
one hand, intended to imagine by means of the image what the Good is
"like," but he is also, on the other hand, required to recognize simultaneously
�.
il
50
MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
that the sun's world is but a likeness, that his own visible world is a
counterfeit of being. Socrates had in fact prepared Glaucon for the fundamental importance of this power to recognize an image as an image when
he had intimated earlier that to fail to possess it is to be permanently asleep·
to being: "Look, isn't that just what dreaming is: when someone either
in his sleep or while awake regards that which is like to something not as
like but as the same as that to which it is like?" (476c4). In taking in the
sun image, Glaucon then learns to use his eikasia in both of the fundamental senses that Socrates, as the savior of the true and original meaning of
words, has restored to it.
2b. Similarly the next power, pistis or trust, comes into play. For just
as in seeing the sun's world as an image Glaucon has been forced to lose
trust in the visible world, so in seeing the sun as an image of !he Good
and "most like it" (506e3) he acquires a better doxa of this world, a trust
that life and government in the image of the Good are possible here. This
trust is the "eikastic" counterpart of that persuasion to virtue which is the
purpose of Socratic myth-telling (cf. 62lcl, 3). The question "whatever is
the Good itself?" is bidden goodbye for now" (506el), and no explicit dialectical account of the Good is given at all. The Good appears here only as
an object for belief, namely as the motive for study, the end and incentive
to learning and doing. It is "that which every soul pursues and on account
of which it does everything, having a pre-sentiment .that there is some such
thing" (505dll). It is the one same, single, thing which all human acti.on,
be it for show or genuine, intends not in seeming but in being, that which
makes anything, including the virtues, good for us, namely "useful and
profitable" (504a4). What makes the difference between attaining this true
desire or missing it is precisely knowledge or lack of knowledge of the Good
(e2). In that sense only is it the "greatest study," for, as we shall see, in
another sense it is no "learning matter" at all. Nevertheless, the explicit
consideration of the relation that human excellence and the human good
have to the agathon, the good, was dropped as soon as Giaucon re-entered
the conversation (506e); clearly it is a question to be discusseq either very
superficially or only after long preparation (cf. Aristotle, Magna Mora/ia
1182a27, who refers to the discussion of this question in Concerning the
Good).
2c. Perhaps the absence of any direct reflection on the nature of the
Good seems to be in want of some further explanation.
An Aristotelian anecdote about the audience's reaction to Plato's "Lecture on the Good," that half-mythical event when he spoke to the public
�BRANN
51
of the "Unwritten Teachings" of his school, is related by Aristoxenus in
his Harmonic Elements (II, 30), and is pertinent here: "They came, every
one of them, expecting to get some one of the goods considered human,
... but when his reasonings appeared to be of mathematical studies and
numbers and geometry and astronomy and [when he said), at last, that
the Good is the One, I think it seemed to them very strange indeed; and
then some sneered at it and others criticized it. Now what was the reason
for this? That they knew nothing beforehand, but just like intellectuals
(eristik01) were present to lap it up on the strength of the mere name." Now
Socrates himself has several such argumentative types, such "eristics,'' on
his hands- one of them Adeimantus, to whom he is careful to mention
the "idea of the Good" as something Adeimantus has often heard of before,
as something which is a cause of usefulness and profit and without which
a man "cannot have the sentiments of a gentlemen" (505b3). Adeimantus
reacts with a pat, eristic question worthy of the obtuse cleverness of a Meno:
"But you, Socrates, do you think the Good is knowledge or pleasure or
some other thing besides these?" (506b2; cf. Meno 70a); clearly this is a
standard, routine question about the Good (cf. Philebus 19c). Here, Plato,
as is his wont, nobly shows a Socrates wiser in practice than Plato himself
was, for in the two dialogues dealing with the Good, the Republic and
the Philebus, Socrates finds tactful ways to choose his interlocutor and
to bring him along. In the present dialogue he silences Adeimantus by suggesting to him that he has heard it all before- the ritual-like use of the
term "idea of the Good" (505a, 505e, 517b, 526e, 534b), although it is made
clear enough that the Good is not an eidos at all, sounds like a soothing
allusion to current discussions (cf. Epicharmus in Diogenes Laertius Ill,
14, 27). Meanwhile he gently brings Glaucon to face, without taking refuge
in clowning, the "awe-inspiring enormity" (509cl) of this Socratic Good.
But Socrates' indirection is not only a matter of avoiding public
misunderstanding; it also has a positive pedagogic purpose, which is precisely to prevent Glaucon from pouncing precipitously on some bare truths
that might turn his high spirits (cl) into bored sneers. In providing Glaucon
with images to reflect upon, Socrates instills in him a kind of artificial
"recollection" (cf. Meno 81c), which will enable him to "recognize" the logos
whenever he himself should come upon it." This is, after all, what the
effect of any artfully wrought image ought to be- a slow or a sudden dawn'
ing of its logos. Therefore in some way a dialectical account of the Good,
formulable in terms not unlike those of the "Unwritten Teachings," must
be latent here.'' We shall try to work it out.
3a. When Socrates has delivered his sun image Glaucon asks him to
�52
MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
go once more through the "likeness of the sun" (509c5) in order to fill in
whatever had been omitted before. Socrates' answer to this request is the
dividing of the line.
The "Divided Line" is the mathematical figure for an implicit logos
and the possibility of learning what is yet unknown. The choice of a linear
figure is itself meaningful, for the line, as the unique connection of two
point-monads, stands for the closest of all relationships, that of like to
like, of which the knower and the known are the paradigm (cf. Aristotle,
On the Soul, 404b23, citing Plato; Metaphysics 1036bl3 f., on the Pythagoreans); it stands as well for the possibility of incommensurable and hence
irrational, i.e., not directly expressible, relations. Th understand this explication of the sun image, Glaucon will have to exercise his dianoia.
The word dianoia can be used quite generally for what we would call
"mental activity." For instance, Socrates himself says (476d5): "Why may
we not call the mental activity (dianoia) [cf. Sophist 263d] of one who
knows, 'gnomi,' and of one who opines, 'doxa'?" This word, doxa, too,
will be "restored" by Socrates to its full significance. The dianoia, which
goes with the third section from the bottom of the line, is, then, the power
used in thinking or, as the phrase goes, in "thinking things through"; this
thinking is the soul organ's restless scanning of the articulations of being
for distinctions and comparisons. It means attending to, or searching for,
that in things which can be grasped in thoughtful words, such as the Greeks
calllogoi. This scanning involves a higher kind of eikasia, which may be
termed "dianoetic eikasia.m 9 For sensible things, when caught in speech,
reveal themselves as mere imitations of something which the logos is truly
about-as the "visible aspects" (horomena eide, 510d5) copying the true
invisible "looks" (eide) of the thing itself. Likewise in the Phaedo (100a2)
Socrates intimates that those who look at things in terms of /ogoi are Jess
involved in images than those who look at them more literally with their
physical eyes. In the Sophist (26le) it turns out that this is because logoi
are "manifestations" (de/ornata) of being. The natural objects considered
by the dianoia are therefore described primarily as "images"; in the dianoetic
section, the soul proceeds by "using the very things before imitated [i.e.,
the natural objects that were imitated in the lowest section] as images"
(510b4, 5lla7). The originals of these new images are -somehow-caught
in what speech says: recall that the term logos stands for the meaning as
well as for the words that convey it. By entrusting its inquiry to this logos,
the dianoia is, in effect, "supposing" such originals; it is literally
"hypothesizing" them so that they may serve as the basis of all distinctions, comparisons, inferences, and deductions.
Now in an inquiry by means of logo!, certain results turn out to be
�BRANN
53
primary and pervasive (522c8). Among these are the fact that a thing can
always be called "one," and together with another, "two," that counting
seems the inevitable concomitant of naming; furthermore, that in different
things the same shape can be discerned and that it is caught accurately
only in speech and never in a representation. To work out the parts and
interconnections- they seem to be inherently perspicuous- of these objects that speech has discovered, it is necessary to recognize them as pure
and separate, Hence arise the mathematicals, the "objects of study" par
excellence, which form an especially important province of the dianoetic
realm. On the highest level they supply the subjects of that indispensable
pre-dialectical "exercise" in which Parmenides engaged Socrates in his youth
(Parmenides 135e); for the Platonic Parmenides the most important
hypotheses to be investigated are, of course, the two suppositions concerning the "One," namely that it is or is not. However, any common name
is in fact a dianoetic hypothesis as well, and any sentence is a dianoetic
structure- both are worthy objects of study.
3b. If for Socrates, the philosophical poet, the fundamental nature of
the present discourse is eikastic, for Glaucon, the mathematical enthusiast,
it is dianoetic. Summarizing in his own words, but accurately, what he has
learned from the division of the line, Glaucon perceptively brings out a
central fact only implicit in Socrates' words, namely that the objects of
the dianoia are the same as the noeta of the uppermost part-thatthey
are these noeta before that complete logos, which brings the thinker up
to the thing itself, has been reached. In fact, he ends by treating the divided
line as if the whole purpose of the division had been only to set the terms
for defining the dianoia. For, observing that the very name of dia-noia
suggests something in-between, or a mean, Glaucon defines it, in analogy
to his earlier definition of doxa, as "something between doxa and nous"
(5lld4), as the naturally intermediate faculty par excellence (cf. Symposium
202, where Eros as daimon is the corresponding intermediary).
3c. Socrates, of course, depends on the mathematical predisposition
of his.young philosopher-mathematics being after all the young rulers'
childhood amusement-in introducing him to the exercise ofthis, the lower
noetic faculty (cf. 508c4, 509dll). In Book VII, Socrates takes the act of
beginning the long description of the formal mathematical education that
is the "prelude" to dialectic (53ld7) as an opportunity to engage Glaucon
in a serious "methodical" dianoetic exercise. When Glaucon, accurately
recalling the musical education of the guardians, perceptively concludes
that this training cannot be the study that the future philosophers need,
�54
MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
Socrates asks him: "0 my marvelous Glaucon, what would be such a study
... ?" Glaucon eagerly interrupts to ask in turn what study might indeed
remain to them (522b6). Socrates now invites him pointedly to become his
"fellow viewer" (523a7) while, as he says, he makes divisions within himself
about the studies that might lead toward being; he is to "say 'I agree' or
'I disagree,' " watching carefully that Socrates is "oracling" correctly. The
discussion that follows shows Glaucon that arithmetic is precisely the study
wanted, since it is "inviting to the dianoia" (524d3) and "arousing to noesis''
(d5), and that all the best natures should be educated in it-to which his
slyly docile response is: "I agree" (526c7). Socrates proceeds to initiate him
into the very study of "the one and the two and the three" (522c-526c)
that Parmenides had once taught him. This is Glaucon's first and only
step on the dialectical way; here and nowhere else in the Republic is undisguised direct philosophical work done-a "huge work," as he has begun
to realize (5llc3, 53ld5). Glaucon intends to do it seriously, and when
Socrates asks him whether he means to carry on as if demonstrating before
others or in his own behalf, he wants to converse chiefly for his own sake.
But, as Socrates says, suddenly speaking straight out to us beyond the
dialogue, "if someone else should be able to profit in some way, you won't
grudge him that" (528a2).
3d. But why should Glaucon need to be especially invited to this
dialogue, since they are already in the midst of one and have indeed come
precisely, as Polemarchus says in the beginning, to converse (328a9)?
Evidently there are various ways to "converse." In fact, three meanings of
dialegesthai can be distinguished within this dialogue.
First it can mean a conversation in which anyone may and can take
part. This, despite Thrasymachus's efforts to stage an exclusive rhetorical
display, is its meaning in the "prelude" (357a2) of the dialogue, Book I.
It can also mean that "power of dialectic" proper (5llb4, 532d8, 533a8)
in which the logos, the account-giving power, leaves all sense perception
behind and is moved "by the eide themselves," advancing "through them
and into them" (5llcl). This activity is what is imitated by sight (532a2);
as the soul ranges over noetic "sights," as the name eidos, "sight, look,
aspect," indicates, so the eye sees things at once distinct and together. It
is clear that Socrates regards the soul as truly moving (cf. Timaeus 36el)
both upward and downward ouly in dialectic, which is thus repeatedly called
a "way," meaning a pursuit or a method, a "journey'' (533b3, 532el, 3;
533b3, c7; 532e3). In contrast, the conclusive motion of the dianoia is
downward (510b6, d2) as in deduction, that of the lowest power, eikasia,
is back and forth as in comparisons, and the next-to-lowest power, pistis,
�55
' enjoys rarely disturbed rest. In the use of its lower powers the soul is
therefore said to be bogged down and made sluggish (533dl, 61lc). The
cause is its association with the body; the soul is never quick with bodily
life but only with the logos, and its proper motion is a "heavenly journey"
' (cf. Phaedrus 256d8). But this dialectic is only praised in the Republic
(532al); its actual exercise is impossible to one who is not already "practiced" (533a9) in dianoetic studies (and perhaps to any mortal), for dialectic is thought out-thinking itself. And indeed the "propaedeutic" (536d6)
, mathematical studies are carefully trimmed: they exclude not merely all
"banausic," i.e., applied, elements, but also any explicit "eidetic" admix-
ture as well; for instance, nothing is said of Plato's arithmological teaching,
the "eidetic numbers" (cf. Metaphysics 1080a12 ff.), although, as we shall
see, allusions to dialectical terms abound.
There remains a middle dialegesthai, which happens to be the one
characteristic of this central conversation. This is speech between two souls.
Such speech must have a sensible clothing of sound, the audible dialogue.
Such dialogue is strongly distinguished from myth telling and hearing (e.g.,
Protagoras 320c, 3Z4d, Gorgias 523a, Timaeus 26c), since the latter appeals to trust and imagination, while the former involves primarily the
dianoia. For the dianoia supervenes as soon as sense perception is expressed
in words, which inevitably gives rise to dilemma, especially to selfcontradiction (524e3). In supplying hypotheses to solve these dilemmas the
dianoia brings in noeta and thus invites the uppermost faculty of thought,
noesis (523al). In itself the dianoia is the faculty of differences, distinctions, and contradictions. As such it ever ranges betwixt and between and
is called out by human perplexities as well as by mathematical problems
(530b6). Unguided, it can easily become an aporetic or "wayless" affection (524a7). Therefore in such a dialogue one of the interlocutors must
know somewhat more than the other, must have advanced into dialectic,
so that he will be able "to ask and answer most knowledgeably" (534d9,
528b8; cf. Phaedrus, 276e5). In this dialogue with Glaucon Socrates exercises such a superiority even more than usually, since their conversation
is "synoptic" and requires a large foreknowledge. The introduction to
arithmetic mentioned above displays precisely the required relation of the
interlocutors: Socrates makes dialectical divisions "within himself' (523a6),
which he then "shows" to Glaucon (a9), while Glaucon is to look on with
him and to respond to Socrates' affirmations or negations (cf. Sophist
263el2) with his own agreement or disagreement. But this dialogic superiority is evident most of all in the very naming of the powers of the soul with
which Book VI closes. For these powers are, as it were, named from aboye,
from a synoptic point of view. Anyone who has not left the first three sec-
�56
tions cannot possibly know their true names: doxa, as used ordinarily,',
means the faculty of judgment; people rarely think that they have what
to Socrates is "mere opinion," but they think that they know their minds;
in· fact, the various provinces· of the dianoia, such as the arts and
mathematics (5llc6, d3), are particularly highly regarded by their devotees,
as producing nothing less than knowledge (533d4). For Socrates, of course,
the dianoia is below knowledge.
4a. Let us return to the invitation to reflection that is extended to
Glaucon by the sectioning of the realms "as if" they were a line; he must
wonder why, as has been said, the Republic has no dialectical treatment
either of the Good or of the eide under it. This missing logos is, however,
absent in a different way for both of these dialectical objects. Let us begin
with the Good.
The Good has no "place" within the realm of being, for it is "beyond
being" (509b9). Since it is that which is "un-hypothesized" it cannot be
traversed in the same way as the "hypotheses to being," the stepping stones
of the logos (5llb8). Consequently there is in this dialogue no power of
the soul that corresponds to it, as is signified by the fact that it is off the
top of the Divided Line. Although within the context of the imagery of
sight the eye of the soul is said to look at it, a distinction between movement "among" and "through" the eide (510b8, 5llc2) and movement "up
unto" the Good (5llb6, 533c8) is pretty generally maintained; the latter
has about it something tangential and momentary; a glimpse of the Good
is "scarcely" (517cl) achieved. Consequently this beholding is not quite
knowing in the dialectical sense at all, for the "idea of the Good" is the
result not of a unitary act of sight but of "abstracting" and "determining
in logos'' (534b9). Socrates repeats this several times: The Good as responsible source is known only after the eidetic vision; it is known on the
downward return, so to speak, by a syllogismos or collection of logoi, a
logos of logoi (516b9, 517cl}. It is, in effect, the most comprehensive of
all those "collections" (e.g., Sophist 267bl) that follow the "divisions" of
dialectic. The Good, the "greatest study," is a "learning matter" or a
mathema only in a new and strange sense, for it is learned in the movement away from it-to confront the Whole as a knower is to step back
among the parts.
4b. For those realms, however, that are on the Divided Line, the absence
of logoi takes on a different significance and form. It is essential to the
following discussion to recall that the word logos means not only account
or reasoning but also the mathematical relation of ratio, a double mean-
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57
ing of great importance particularly in Pythagorean contexts (e.g., Epinomis
977c3). Now we are told that each of the unequal main sections of the
line is again to be cut "in the same ratio" (509d7), but we are neither given
the ratio itself-we are not even told whether it is numerical or irrational,
i.e., a ratio of commensurable or incommensurable lines- nor are we
definitely told whether the greater or the less of the unequal segments is
to be the upper one (cf. Plutarch, Platonic Questions lOOld). We can conclude nothing except that the two middle segments must be equal, which
means that pistis and dianoia are in some way coextensive. That is indeed
necessary, since the realm of the dianoia uses the realm of natural objects
as corresponding images. 30
4c. This absence of definite ratios is the more noteworthy because for
the earlier tripartite soul the numerical ratios of the parts are, playfully,
given: they form the musical progression of the "highest," "middle," and
"lowest" place in the diapason (443d6; cf. 432a). If the "middle" is here
taken non-technically to designate the mean through which the "first consonances," the fifth and the fourth, are compounded (cf. Nicomachus,
below) then these are as 6:4:3, the three terrns of a harmony, where 4, which
represents the spirited element, the thymos, is a "harmonic mean." (If the
meseis understood as the string of the fourth, then, as Theon, Hiller, p.
62, shows, this ratio can be immediately obtained.) The use of the terms
of the "harmonic proportion," i.e., for b ~ 4, a(6):c(3)::a- b(2):b- c(l), may
have a special significance here. Nicomachus (Introduction to Arithmetic
II, xxvi) says that Philolaos the Pythagorean regarded this proportion as
the "geometric harmony," expressing the cube, which has 12 sides, 8 angles,
and 6 faces, so that its characteristics are given in the terms 6:4:3. The tripartite "embodied" soul is therefore here characterized as the basic solid. Now
Aristotle (On the Soul404bl6 ff.) reports a similar Platonic oral teaching
about the soul. The noetic cosmos, called "the animal itself," arises "from
the idea of the one and primary length and breadth and depth": so that
in respect to the soul, which is similar to that animal, "intellect (nous) is
one; knowledge (episteme) is two, since it is uniquely related to one; the
number of the plane is opinion (doxa); and sense perception (aisthesis)
belongs to the solid." Evidently the Academy too believed that the soul
reaches some sort of solidity as it meets the body.
We may ask further how this dimensional structure is related to the
quadripartite "knowing" soul of the central Republic. Although it is certainly not the same, there is an instructive relation between them which
is best seen schematically:
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58
On the Soul 404b23
I
3
2
no us
episteme
doxa (pistis) }
4
aisthfsis
{
dianoia
eikasia
~
Republic 534a
The dimensional soul will be seen to be the more comprehensive of the
two since it possesses elements for apprehending both extremities of dimensionality, namely unit and body, where the former is the source of the whole
soul, and the latter is its full-grown structure. The soul of the Republic
has, as we have seen, no clear and separate capacities corresponding to
these; furthermore, as the Divided Line shows, it has no dimensional progression, for apprehension of solids occurs in one of the middle sections.
On the other hand, it does have what one might call a certain reflective
depth, which arises from the eikastic reduplication of episteme in dianoia
and of pistis in eikasia that takes place within its two major parts, noesis
and doxa (534a)." In summary, it might be said that the dimensional soul
is all-embracing or cosmic, which is why some can say that "the soul is
the place of the eide" (On the Soul 429a27), while in respect to the soul
that goes with the realms of the Divided Line, it might rather be said that
"the eide are the place of the soul." The soul ranges all over this place,
sometimes settling in one spot and then moving again, remaining always
somewhat a stranger-in accordance with the similarity between knowledge
and the pervasive, piece-meal eidos of otherness described in the Sophist
(257c7).
Later we shall see the significance of the fact just pointed out, namely
that the soul of the Republic is not a cosmic harmony of number ratios.
But if the logoi themselves are absent, this much about them is given:
they are the same throughout, for sameness of ratio defines a proportion,
an ana-logia or "recurrence of logoi." How is Glaucon to interpret the
mathematical fact that is here presented to his dianoia?
4d. We should, first of all, keep firmly in mind that this mathematical
�59
presentation is itself only a simile; Glaucon is to cut the realms "just as"
he would a line (509d6). He has no reason to think either that the realms
of being literally have mathematical ratios to one another or that the inexplicitness of the logos in any way implies that the ratio of any two quantities is indeterminate (as are the greater and the less, a ratio technically
known as "indefinite," aoristos, Metaphysics 1021a4); on the contrary, the
logos here stands for the possibility of articulate human language. Thus
cautioned, let us see what the model will yield.
Immediately after the fundamental division of the line and description
of the lower subsections has been made, Socrates reads off a first proportion (510a9):
opined : known :: images : imaged object
· This proportion announces that the internal relations of the two lowest
are the same as those of the whole, that the relations connecting
whole are mirrored in even its lowest parts. At the very end of the
nividled Line passage he reads off yet another proportion (5ile3):
segments of line : truth :: affections of soul : clarity
which means in mathematical terms that the affections of the soul are
correspondents (Euclid V, Def. 11: Given a:b::c:d, a and c, as well as
and d, are said to correspond) of the realms of being that the line segments
re>>re,;ent. Or, using analogical reasoning- that is, inferring the likeness
correspondents (cf. Metaphysics 1016b34, 1093b18; Topics 108a7)-we
conclude that known and knower are alike (cf. On the Soul, 404b18).
the analogical method brings out the bond that "yokes together with
strongest yoke" (508al), the linking of known and knower by the clarilight of truth; this illumination can bind them because they are both
the Good" (509a3), that "ruling source" of the "community'' of knowns
knowers (cf. Sophist 248all).
And finally, in concluding the explication of both the sun and the cave
Socrates forms two more proportions (534a3):
being : becoming :: thought : opinion
thought : opinion :: knowledge : trust :: thinking : image recognition
first of which signifies that the gradations of knowing are the same
the degrees of being. The last, more extended, proportion displays paricularlv well the force of the mathematical form Socrates has chosen. For
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MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC,
since the affections of the soul are coordinated with linear magnitudes, ,,
they may be "alternated" (Euclid, Elements V, Defs. 12, 3), so that the first
is to be the third as the second to the fourth-and this is exactly what:
Socrates has done here; he has alternated the original proportion of the
segments, so that now
knowledge : thinking :: trust : image recognition
This new form of the proportion draws attention to the close relation of
each faculty in one main segment to the corresponding faculty in the other,
a relation which mirrors that of the main faculties and again that of the
realms of being. The last ratio, which links thinking (dianoia) with image
recognition (eikasia), particularly justifies the notion of a "dianoetic
eikasia," a thinking use of images, while the preceding ratio shows a certain special relation between knowledge and trust, which we experience
in that unassailable finality or incorrigibility, analogous to the selfsufficiency of knowledge, which certain sense perceptions possess (523bl).
Obviously, by using the various Euclidean operations (Euclid V, Defs.
11-18) on these proportions, and by attending either to the sameness of
the ratio relation or to the likeness of the correspondents in the new proportions, it is possible to obtain a variety of illuminating results. That this
would be a legitimate enterprise is shown by the 'ierm Socrates uses when
he dismisses further division of the line lest there be a surfeit of
"multiplicate logoi" (534a7), a punning reference to the "duplicate" and
"triplicate" ratios of the theory of proportion (Euclid V, Defs. 9-10)."
All of these further results would be, however, only the expression of
two fundamental similarities: First is that of the knower and the known,
mentioned above, which Socrates has in mind when he tells Glaucon to
"order them [the affections of the soul] analogously" (5lle2) to the realms
of being; and second is that-really prior-similarity of each degree of
being to the next higher degree. It is by reason of this similarity that the
successive realms of (I) images, (2) natural objects, (3) mathematicals, and
(4) eide are described in turn as (1) "that which is made as something
similar," (2) "that to which it is made similar," and (3) "that which was
before copied and is now treated as a likeness" (cf. 510al0, b4, 5lla7); and
(4) even the eide themselves are, as we learn from other sources, formed
in the likeness of the Good understood as the One (see below), being
themselves each one (e.g., Metaphysics 987bl8 ff. -the formula is on/hen,
being/one.
This four-stepped ladder of similars is what .makes upward transition, ·
i.e., the .dialectical road, possible. It is, we should note, completely ar-
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61
ticulated first in the Divided Line; the sun image has only two undifferentiated realms, the intelligible and the visible. The Divided Line in a certain
way preserves this original homogeneity of the larger realms; images and
natural bodies are not found in differently constituted realms, for both
are sensibles and either have their own body or use an alien one-reflections
themselves are "in water" and "on smooth bodies" (510al)-so that the
difference is not really that between the plane and the solid dimension or
between visible and palpable things. Similarly, hypotheses and eide are
equally intelligibles. What differentiates the realms internally is not, to use
a latter-day expression, a different "material," but rather the reflective
distinction of like to likened and of genuine to counterfeit, which reflects
in the parts of the line the imaging relation of the sun to the Good.
4e. Glaucon will, then, see that the logoi relating certain aspects of
the whole are one and the same throughout, that on account of similarity
or likeness (homoiotes; cf. Sophist 231a7, Statesman 285b6) there is one
logos pervading the whole. In presenting this notion to Glaucon
mathematically, Socrates is signifying that he is presenting him with such
hypotheses about being and becoming as will make thinking itself
possible- and by this he means thinking consistently, namely "in such a
manner that the sameness of logos is preserved" (homologoumenos, 510d2;
cf. Aristotle, Topics 108b8). But if the characteristic dianoetic direction
is downward to conclusions by deductions that win "agreement"
(homologia) because the logoi in different souls have remained in concord,
the discovering dianoia moves upward by an analogia. It is this latter use
that is chiefly required in any search, and is therefore suggested to Glaucon
in this part of the dialogue: "Make an analogy ... " (524d9; cf. 509b2).
An explication of this means of learning is given in the Statesman: When
the teacher chooses some thing about which the learner has right opinion
to "lead him up to" (anagein) as an example, that is, when the teacher shows
the learner a para-deigma, i.e.,. "something to be shown beside" some
unknown, which is able "to lead [the learner] to" (epagein) this unknownthen this unknown may become known to the learner by a recognition of
the analogy (277d9; here Socrates, in the reflexive mode characteristic of
him, explains "example" by giving an example of an example, just as in
the Republic he explains "image" by an image.) The sun, as an image of
the Good, is just such an "example," and since the Good is far above the
sun, the epagoge, the "bringing up," of Glaucon will be a true ascent. In
fact, it will be an ascent-though only provisional-to the source of all
examples, to that paradeigma which is no longer example but exemplar.
We might summarize this exposition from a different point of view by
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MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC-
saying that the Divided Line tells the story of "recollection" mathematically,
by presenting through proportions that "affinity" of all nature (cf. Meno
81dl) which makes it possible to move with a sense of recognition in
unknown places. Aristotle will reduce this upward, or inward, journey to
the "logical" procedure of epagoge or induction, of which he makes Socrates
the inventor (Metaphysics 1078b28).
4f. The first and original affinity, the sun image implies, is that which
the Good as progenitor has with the sun as the offspring made in its image. In other words, the Good itself possesses an image-making power that
it passes down to the eide and that they pass on in turn (cf. Phaedrus
250a6). This "downward eikasia," as it might be called, by making our world
a progression of likenesses, is originally responsible for our own ability
both to make ourselves like to the highest things by homoiosis (500c5,
Theaetetus 176bl) and to recognize likenesses or to make analogies. It is,
we might say, responsible for our "upward eikasia" and for the pleasure
of recognition it gives us (cf. Aristotle, Poetics 1448b8); it is a power so
unobtrusively indispensable that without it we would never "know
ourselves" even in the most superficial sense of having confronted in a mirror our own looks, the eidos of our own face!
4g. We can now see precisely why the criticism of poetry in Book III
turns into that radical "ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry"
(607b5) in Book X. This quarrel, which already engaged Pythagoras, who
descended to Hades to watch Homer and Hesiod suffer for their lies
(Diogenes Laertius VIII, 21), is now given a precise cause. In the light of
the sun image, poets are usurpers and perverters of the power of the Good.
They are more despicable even than that charlatan who, having carried
a mirror through the world, claims to have "made everything" (596c2), when
he has really only borrowed the lowest effects of the power of the Good.
For poets make artificial images, using a perverted power of eikasia, a "low"
(603b4) generation called "mimetic'' or imitative (602all), which produces
images of good and bad things indiscriminately (604el, Sophist 233c; cf.
also 267a) and distracts the listeners from true being (605a9). Such mimetic
products are not natural likenesses but are separated from the true source
of images by the interposition of a human maker, who "makes images
vilely" (Republic 377el). Poetic mimesis makes artificial imitations;" "artists," to speak in modern terms, arrogate to themselves an unauthorized
function of "creativity," while Socratic eikasia makes likenesses in the sense
of observing those that are already there by nature, clothingthem in figures
and putting the figures into words.
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63
sa. We must now go on to see exactly what conjectures about the Good
the sun image allows Glaucon to make on reflection, even though he cannot yet reach a full and sure logos.
In the image the Good is presented in three successive capacities, a triplet
proved to be fundamental by its recurrence in the Philebus (20b8). It is
presented first as the father of the sun (508bl2), then as that which is responsible for knowledge (e3), and last as the source of being (509b7)." The
first of these might be called its cosmogenic function, by which the potent
male Good generates the sun as a male offspring to be lord of the visible
world and an intermediate source of the world of becoming, analogous
to the Good itself as ruler of the world of thought (508c4, 517c3); the obvious question that arises here is whether the sun also has a mother-the
cave image will deal with that. However, although the sun resembles its
maker in its brightness, its continual risings and settings clearly mark it
as a part of the world of becoming and passing away, while at the same
time they bear evidence that the Good is also a source of motion (cf. Alexander on Aristotle's Metaphysics 988all ff., ed. Hayduck, p.59). In its second capacity the .Good is several times called the aitia, the "responsible
cause" (508e3; 517c2), and aitos, "that which is to be called to account"
(516c2) both for the passive state of the so-called nooumena, "beings
known" (508el, 509b6, d8) and for the active knower (508e2), that is, for
the soul in its "act of knowing" (509b6)- this aitia is, however, yet more
beautiful and more honorable than these effects. In its third capacity, the
Good is called king and lord (509d2, 517c4) and arche, "ruling source"
(510b7, 511b7) of the whole, or the "arc he itself" (533c8), "in power and
seniority exceeding the nature of being" (509b9); it gives things both their
"state of being" (to einaz) and their nature as beings or beingness" (ousia,
509b8). The latter two capacities are reduplicated by the sun as source of
sight and becoming.
Socrates presents these functions in the order that will bring Glaucon
up by analogy from the visible many to the invisible one (507b2). In the
order of logical generation, however, the listing should clearly be reversed,
since being itself must somehow precede the confrontation of active and
passive beings and this split must in turn come before the birth of a world
perceptible and perceived by sense. The grandest, most inclusive, most politcally relevant, function of the Good is therefore its rule (arche) over being; next it acts as the "answerable cause" (aitia) for teachers and learners,
while its most private function is that of a father. But in truth neither order
holds, for the Good itself is not hierarchically ordered, being itself the
source and beginning of all order- "the arche itself' (533c8).
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64
5b. The diagram below shows the parts of this order; all its terms except one are taken from the text:
Good
------..
archi
aitia
father
~
~ ';;;wumena
truth
noesis
/'/~'~/arity
genesis doxaston genesis horaton sights sight [dogmata] doxa
This scheme shows the Good as presiding over and bonding a kind of
pervasive duplication: the Good as the reason for knowledge is responsible for the unifying confrontation of knower and known (right side) and
so also for the agent of noesis, the soul (508d4; cf. Sophist 248cll, e ff.).
As direct source, the Good also gives rise to ousia, beingness (left side),
which, by reason of the soul's presence, has a second aspect: it is the "place"
(508cl, 509d2) provided for the soul, the topos noetos, which contains the
"things for thought," the noeta (the -tos ending signifying the capability
of being thought; cf. Sophist 248d4). Finally, as generating source, the Good
puts forth the Sun, a sensible second source that reduplicates the whole
structure of being on the lower level of sense and becoming.
At this point, the diagram brings out an aspect of the sun image that
is of fundamental importance to the human place in the whole. The soul,
which arises in the first instance as a knowing soul (508d6), is in some
way also involved with the world of becoming: some aspects of sense "invite thought" (523bl). Furthermore we do have opinions, that kind of set
mental reaction significantly expressed in the phrase beginning "I feel that .
. . . " Human speech, too, can accommodate itself to becoming, since it
is capable of the same admixture of non-being that gave rise to becoming
(477a; cf. Sophist 260b!O). In other words, the human soul as the moving
agent of knowledge has a faculty, doxa, by which it ranges over becoming
and has a place there. This place contains "that which is to be opined,"
the doxaston, and the name of these things, as apprehended by the soul,
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has been added in the diagram-they are the dogmata, a word denoting
both ordinary opinions (cf. Republic 538c6) and their political counterparts, the decrees and ordinances of the city.
Thus from the point of view of the human soul genesis, becoming,
belongs to being as one of its gradations Gust as the representative of the
Good, the sun, is not above but within this world); hence doxa has a certain kinship with knowledge (Meno 86a). But from the point of view of
the body, becoming is the place of "sense perception," aisthesis (507c4,
e6), and, most characteristically, of "things to be seen," the horata, whose
organ of perception is the eye, which is "most like the sun" (508b3), just
as the soul is like the Good. This is why Socrates has two names, doxaston
and horaton, for the segment and realm of becoming (509d), just as each
human being has two "organs": that "by which" it sees, the soul; and that
"through which" it sees, the eye (Theaetetus 184c6; cf. Timaeus 28a2).
Becoming is then, in a sense, "within" being, not an external accretion to
it (cf. M. Heidegger, Nietzsche [Pfullingen 1961] I, p. 207).
5c. However, seen in another way, the diagram brings out a certain
downward doubling, effecting the differentiation, or rather proliferation,
from one to many that Socrates had recalled when he introduced the image. Whence does it arise? Now although no sourc>' beside the Good is
mentioned, the language of the image persistently implies that something
already there is capable of "taking" the gifts of the Good in various ways.
The Good "provides" (parechei, 503el, 509a7; cf. b3, 517c4) what is known
with that truth of which the things known "partake" (metechei, 5lle3, 4);
it "gives" this power to the knower (508e2), makes intelligibility "to be present" (pareinai, 509b7) in things, and causes being "to be added to them"
(proseinai; b8). One might be tempted to think of some underlying
"material" (with which Aristotle, speaking in his own terms, does indeed
equate that in Plato's teaching which "takes" the Good, Metaphysics
988all), except that the Good does not actually differentiate some available
stuff, but rather binds something disposed to come in a two-fold way. For
instance, just as the "yoke" of light yokes two different things, vision and
visibility (507c6), so the truth is the bond by which the Good binds the
disparate knower and known. This dyadic disposition appears also in other
ways: in the "double eide" (509dl, 4, 6) of the visible and the knowable
(cf. the "two morphai of Parmenides' "double philosophy," Diels, · Vorsokratiker, I. fr. 8, 53 and p. 218, 6) and their two-fold subdivisions (534al),
and in whatever makes "division into two," the complement of making
analogies (534a6), possible. We have here an intimation of that secondary
dyadic principle, so often mentioned by Aristotle under the name of the
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Indefinite Dyad, which in Plato's arithmological teaching is the secondary
arche complementing the Good understood as the One.
Although it is only an intimation, it is one that must attend on any
presentation of the whole, because the second principle has "a certain
likeness to the whole" by reason of which it "contains all things" (Aristotle, Physics 207al9). As Speusippus explains: "For they held that the One
is higher than being and is the source of being; and they delivered it even
from the status of a principle. For they held that given the One in itself,
conceived as separated and alone, without the other things, with no additional element, nothing else would come into existence. And so they introduced the Indefinite Duality as the principle of being.""
This second arche of Being is discovered and described in the Sophist,
in pursuing the source that makes sophistical speaking (commonly known
as "Double Thlk," Dissoi Logot) possible. A difficulty had arisen over the
necessary two-ness of Being. This two-ness had been a consequence of the
very fact that plays so pervasive a role in the sun image, namely that there
is both knowing and something knowable; therefore Being, as known and
knowing, possesses a knowing and living soul and is thus in motion, while
as knowable it is steadfast and at rest (248d ff.). Being was thus both in
motion and at rest, and this resulted in a quandary: Being kept cropping
up in speech as "some third thing" beside these irreducibly separate two,
motion and rest, so that neither of them could be said to be (250b-d). The
solution to this quandary was found in the nature of the Other, which goes
"through everything" (255e3), and has a correlative, the Same. For these
make it possible to say that Being can be both motion and rest, since each
of the two is just what it is by reason of being the same with itself and
is not the other by reason of being other than that other, i.e., by participating
in the Other. In this way the deliverances of speech were justified and the
logos was saved.
The eidos of the Other is described in the Sophist as always relative
(255d), effecting Non-being, which is infinite (256e) and cut up into many
parts (257c). But these are exactly the terms associated by Aristotle with
the Indefinite Dyad (Metaphysics 987b19 ff., 1087b13 ff.)." Plato, he says,
made "the other nature" (cf. Sophist 256el, 257c7) a dyad because the
numbers "outside the first" (i.e., after the One and the Dyad) can be "begotten from her just as from a matrix" (Metaphysics 987b34) by the One as
begetter. The first such definite arithmos is the eidetic 1\vo (ibid. 1082all),
Being (cf. Note 35).
This "two-making" arche is precisely one of those "responsible causes
of division" (Sophist 253c3) which is being sought, and, as has been srud,
it is the source of the possibility of that confrontation between knower
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and known which the Good confirms with its illuminating truth. Clearly,
then, such an arche is in the background of the sun image. We shall see,
however, that in the context of the human good, namely that concerned
with the embodied soul, it will appear not as a second source of being
but as something opposed to that good, as the source of evil. But for the
human knowing soul Socrates has coined a special term- it is "like the
Good," agathoeides, or well-formed (Republic 509a3), and so are all its
situations.
Sd .. We must now take a last looli:-at the role of similarity or likeness
in the sun image, not merely insofar as it permits ascent by analogy, but
as a constitutional principle. In the conversation of the Parmenides- which
is, incidentally, recounted to Adeimantus and Glaucon- young Socrates
had tentatively presented "likeness" as a solution to the problem of
methexis, the "participation" of the many sensible things in the one invisible eidos (132cl2). He thought that the eidemight be "patterns in nature"
(d2), patterns to which "the sensible things become like and hence are things
likened [i.e., copies]"; therefore "their participation in the eideis nothing
but this being made in their image" (d4). Parmenides shows him that his
solution is impossible. The eide cannot be "in nature," i.e., among beings,
as patterns since, likeness being reciprocal, the pattern would be indistinguishable from its copy- both would be like and would require yet
a third eidos above them to be like to (e7). This form of the "third man"
argument (cf. Metaphysics 990b17) amounts to saying that patterns, as mere
patterns, are not necessarily above their copies in the scale of being and
need have no originating power, that they have no nature by and in
themselves, nothing that permits them at once to retain their oneness as
eide and to be a source of manyness- they are not sources. (This same
criticism is in fact made by Aristotle of the Platonic eide, Metaphysics
1079b.) At this stage young Socrates does not even suspect that the problem might have to be considered on a higher level, namely that of the participation of the eide in each other, of the communities they form with
each other, and, beyond that, ofthe whole they belong to altogether (129d6),
and hence he does not see that his eidetic solution might after all be usable.
Yet, as we shall see, there is a place for such a solution.
One aspect of the higher methexis problem, the problem of the several
"communities" that the eide have with each other, was, as we have seen,
considered in the Sophist (254b7), where the solution to the question how
both rest and motion can be was given in terms of the correlative archai
of the Same and the Other. Both of these extend throughout Being, for
by being one and the same with itself each eidos remains integral and in-
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dependent, while by being other than another it becomes so related to that
other, namely as another "other," as to be capable of being together with
it in a "community" (256a!O). That is why Otherness is the bond of Being.
Now if the point of view taken is not within but "beyond Being,"
Likeness performs just such a function as Otherness did within Being, and,
in a way, does so more plausibly. For within Being, the secondary, reflexive eidos of the Other was the source of community, the "bond" that ran
"through everything" (255e3; cf. 253a5, cl), while the primary Same was
responsible for the separate and independent oneness of each being
(254d15). But the bonding of the whole is achieved precisely because of
the Likeness of each thing within it to a pattern beyond and so to each
other thing; it is exactly the failing power of "being like" that manifests
itself within Being as the peculiar effect of Otherness called "being an image of" (Sophist 240a8). The fact is that Parmenides' objection fails as
soon as the pattern is really of a different order and sufficiently beyond
reach, as the Good indeed is: " ... [and furthermore] the Good is not being but yet beyond Being in seniority and exceeding it in power" (Republic
509a3, b8). Note that while it was impossible for Being to be "some third
thing" (Sophist 250b-d) beyond its constituent eide, the Good is to be imagined as precisely such a "third kind" of thing (Republic 507dl, el). From
the highest point of view, that of the whole, not otherness but likeness
is the bond; in terms of the knowing soul, not logos but analog/a is required. It is a token of this that the knowing part of the soul, to which
the Other is compared in the Sophist (257c7), is said in the Republic to
be "like the Good" (509a3).
It is precisely this bond by which the Good makes everything one whose
mathematical image takes the form of a proportion: "And the most
beautiful of bonds is that which makes itself and the things bound together
as much as possible into one. Proportion accomplishes this most beautifully. For when the middle term of three numbers ... is such that as the
first is to it, so it itself is to the last, ... then necessarily all will turn out
to be the same. They will all become one with each other" (Timaeus 31c2;
cf. Metaphysics 1016b34). We can now see a second reason for the equality of the middle sections of the Divided Line: the three-term proportion
(i.e., a:b::b:c) "makes one" or unifies by means of the power of the "inbetween," the metaxy-the Divided Line represents a harmonized Whole.
Socrates had already described and named this beautiful union, the
true home of the philosopher, in that "persuasion to the rule of philosophy,"
addressed to Adeimantus and the others, which precedes the presentatiop
of the sun image to Glaucon (487b ff.). His language then was in terms
of man and god; in keeping with his purpose he gave an anthropomorphic
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view of the realm of being, as it were: "For there is surely no leisure for
him who has his thought truly set on beings to look down into the affairs
of men and by fighting with them to be filled with enVy and malice; but
looking at such things as are ordered and always remain set, and observing that they neither do injustice nor have injustice done to them by one
another, all being set in an ordered whole (kosmi5i) and according to logos,
he imitates these and makes himself as like [to them] as possible.... And
so the philosopher, conversing with what is divine and like an ordered whole,
himself becomes as divine and ordered (kosmios) as is possible for man"
(500c-d). Socrates is throughout employing the word used of the visible
world, cosmos, and the man who becomes like a god is presently called
a demiurge, who, like the divine artificer in the Timaeus, uses a "divine
pattern" (Republic 500e3; cf. Timaeus 28a7) in making his work of art,
the city. We see that the interior order of the world of being is to be imagined as analogous to a cosmos, an ordered visible world, having a taxis,
a hierarchical order. The Good is to be understood as the comprehensive
source of this order, which is here presented in the familiar language of
Pythagorean cosmology: Justice is a reciprocal matter, the parts of the
whole are related "according to logos," that is, as in ratios, and participation in the order is by imitation and likening (cf. Metaphysics 1075al2 ff.).
We may conjecture that this is a popular presentation of that taxis (whose
terms are also borrowed from the Pythagoreans) which supervenes when
the Good is understood as the One, the articulating ailia of the eide, which
makes them what they are (ibid. 988al2), and above all makes of the
"greatest eide," motion and rest-which together form being-the eidetic
7Wo. The taxis that thus arises is that arithmological structure of the eide
which is the prototype of all ordered associations, ordinal and cardinal
(see ibid. 1080a ff.; also Note 35).
5e. Although Socrates had introduced the sun image with a reference
to "the things said earlier [cf. 476] and often spoken of at other times"
(507a7), namely the many and how they participate in the one idea that
is "what is" in these many things (476a7, dl, 507b5), yet within the image
he goes, as we have seen, beyond the oneness of each eidos to a still higher
point of view, the way to, which is sung in the "hymn of dialectic." There
he says that "when someone leaves behind all sense perception to set out
for that itself which each thing is (ep' auto ho estin hekastos), and does
not leave off before he grasps in thought that itself which is the Good (auto
ho estin agathon), then he is at the very end of the knowable" (535a5; cf,
507b5, 7). Now the repetition of the phrase in which "the Good" is
substituted for "each thing" is clearly meant to catch Glaucon's attention
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MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
and to convey to him something- actually the most pertinent thing in the
dialogue- about the nature of the community governed by the Good itself.
For upon having grasped what each thing is in itself, one would expect
to learn what all things are together, and it is in place of this expected phrase
that "the Good" occurs. This sentence then hints how the Good as the
"source of the whole" (5llb7) will have to be understood: it is not simply
a different being but precisely the oneness of all beings (cf. 244e ff.), the
All as that Whole which comprises what each partial whole is as well as
what it is not, that within which different things are at one. It is "the source
which is the Whole" (he tou pantos arche, 511b7; cf. the end of Note 35).
As such the Good is indeed the fit pattern of all community, and in the
Republic especially of the political community: "using it as a pattern"
(paradeigmatl), the rulers are "to order the city and private men and
themselves" (540a9); dialectic turns out to be the-eminently politicalstudy of communities (cf. Sophist 253d). Socrates has, in his own efforts,
not only composed the quarrel between philosophy and poetry, but he also
composed the quarrel between philosophy and politics, for he has shown,
in speech and in deed, that the lover of wisdom best knows and most desires
genuine community.
5f. Nothing more direct is said here or in any other dialogue about
that primary dialectical aspect of the Good-that it is the One (cf. Note
35). However, there is a dialogue in which Adeimantus and Glaucon are
shown (on some occasion that must have occurred after Socrates' death)
the reason for Socrates' silence. This is the Parmenides, in which Antiphon,
their younger half-brother who has given up philosophy for horses (the
dialogue itself shows why such things happen), recites from memorythat is to say, without drawing any consequences- an old conversation.
In it Parmenides performs a demonstration exercise for the then young
Socrates, generously taking his own One (137b4), namely that One about
which he himself says that "it is," while others say that "it is not," and
showing Socrates what follows from either assertion. The dialogue ends- as
some think, too abruptly-with the conclusion that "whether the One is
or is not, it and the others, in relation to themselves as well as to one
another, both are all in every way and are not, and both appear and do
not appear.- Most true" (166c). The dialogue has shown that when the
One is conveyed in speech, as Parmenides' One is capable of being conveyed (cf. Parmenides' own poem: e.g., "it is necessary both to say and
to think ... ," Diels, Vorsokratiker Fr. 6), such speech leads to its own denial
(cf. Philebus 15d), while that denial itself cannot stand firm but leads again.
into its opposite. Everything possible to speech has been said about the
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one and has had the wrong consequences, so that nothing remains for
parmenides but to fall silent. Socrates is listening; he knows that one
hypothesis, the very hypothesis that is not possible to rational speech, has
been omitted, namely that "the One is not one," and that that is the crucial
possibililty (cf. Sophist 258d, where the dialectical equivalent, "Non-being
is," is, with apologies to Parmenides, introduced). "Father" Parmenides,
having confronted his own One in speech and having allowed its difficulties
to emerge, is about to engender a new One in the rising generation. Socrates,
recognizing the ultimate powerlessness of logos to convey this One, which
as a true whole has "parts" (Sophist 244d14 ff.) and "rules" an order, remains silent; for, as far as the greatest matter is concerned, Plato thinks
that "it can never be just said, as are other learning matters (mathhnata)"
but requires long and iptimate intercourse (Seventh Letter 341c5).
5g. One last additional observation: What is characteristically Socratic
about the sun image is that it is reflexive, an image of imaging. But more
than that, in presenting the sun as an image of the whole, it shows not
only how imaging itself is possible, but also how that particular kind of
philosophical imaging which makes the whole reappear within itself is
possible- how we can "see" the Good. This aspect of the imagery of the
Republic is reflected in the central visual image in the closing myth.
The place in the Myth of Er where the souls choose their lives (616b)
is not immediately easy to imagine. There seem to be two irreconcilable
images; " the first one consists of the whole of heaven, which has a shaft
of light passing through it and the earth (b5); the second consists of Necessity sitting at the earth's pole whirling a spindle tipped with a spindle-whorl
that represents a planetary system hung on chains let down from the heavenly light encircling the whole (c4). Now if we recall what a spinning woman
actually looks like, these two disparate images become integrated: Necessity
sits spinning. Between her knees she has a long distaff at the top of which
a cloud of white woot is fastened; it feeds into the thread as it is spun.
This thread is twisted into yarn by the spin of the whorl-weighted spindle,
which is tied to the end of the thread; onto it the finished yarn is wound.
In the figure of the myth the axial shaft of light represents the distaff, the
chain of heaven is the thread that is· being spun, and the whorl of the spindle
of Necessity is a miniature planetary system, an orrery, a model of the
Whole, within whose sight the souls choose their lives.
Thus, finally, the same image, now taken as a mythical, magnified and
other-wordly, complement of the cave image, makes evident the ultimate
position of the human soul as an onlooker and therefore, strangely e~ough,
an outsider, in respect to the whole. This placing of the soul is necessarily
�MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
72
glossed in Socrates' philosophical images, for every effort they are designed
to elicit amounts to a de facto mending of this split.
E.
!. Book VII begins with this invitation to Glaucon: "Now, after this,
liken our nature, as far as-education and the lack of education is concerned,
to the following sort of state" (514al).
The sentence is dramatic. "After this" indicates that what has immediately preceded- that is, Socrates' naming of the affections, the
pathemata, of the soul, the last of which is eikasia (cf. also 51la7 for apeikazein)-is the necessary prelude to what is now to come; the word pathos
has a tragic flavor, and the poetic position of the preposition peri after
its noun is surely meant to enhance this (cf. Poetics 1459a2). Glaucon is
now to use his power of eikasia to see (514al) the dark drama of human
nature under an image. This image will show what human beings are and
do within the whole.
Behold, he says, men living as in a cavelike underground habitation
(oikesei, 514a3) with a wide entrance turned toward daylight. From
childhood on, their legs and necks are fettered so that they can only see
straight ahead but are unable to turn (periagein). Their light comes from
a fire burning behind them. Between this fire and themselves runs a road,
alongside of which a screen wall has been built. Behind this wall men pass
back and forth carrying artificial objects. To Glaucon's exclamation "What
an out-of-the way [atopon] image and what out-of-the-way prisoners"
(515a4) Socrates replies with quiet irony: "Like us" (515a5). And, he goes
on, these prisoners see only their own and each other's shadows, which
are thrown on the wall they face, together with the shadows of the things
carried about behind the wall. If they converse it is about these shadows,
which are as truth to them; the echo of words spoken behind the screen
wall seems to them to be the·speech of these shadows. Now suppose a
prisoner was released and forced to stand up and turn around, and was
compelled to answer questions about the things formerly behind him; he
would be "perplexed" (aporein), his eyes would hurt, and he would regard
the shadows as having more being than the things now before him. And
if someone dragged (e6) him up the steep road and out of the cave by force
to look at the light of the sun, his eyes would be so pained that at first
he could see nothing. But after a while he would be able to see "first"
shadows, "after that" "images" (eidOla) of things in water, and ·"at last"
the things themselves. From these he could raise his eyes to see the moon
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N
the stars at night, when the sun itself is absent. And finally he would
the sun in its own place; after that "he would infer" (syllogizoito) that
snn was "responsible" (516c2) for the seasons and years and was
caretaker of everything. Then if he recalled his former habitation he would
feel that he was now happy. The honors given down there to those who
were good at observing, remembering, and giving oracles (c8) about
shadows would be nothing to him and he would do anything rather than
live like that (e2). But if he had to join the competition, his eyes being
still full of darkness from his sudden descent, he would make himself
ridiculous (cf. 509cl). Men would then say that by ascending upwards he
had ruined his eyes and that it was not right to attempt to go up. And
as for anyone who tried to release another, if they could catch him they
would kill him (517a6).
This image (eikona, 517a8) "must now be attached" to what has been
said before: Glaucon is to "liken" the "situation that appears through sight"
to the cave-like habitation: the power of the sun to the light of the fire,
the forced climb of the prisoner into the light of day to the ascent of the
soul and its vision in the place of thought. In a table:
Good
Dialectic
J
:~g:t
sky
~ natural objects
place of thought
shadows and images
Dragging up
Fire
Sun
screen. wall
place of sight
Conversion { prisoners
shadows
2. This correlation of the sun and the cave images seems, though brief,
explicit enough, from the conjecturing about shadows at the bottom up
to the lovely motion of the soul in the upper realm. Yet a certain reservation is expressed. If you interpret the ascent (anabasis) in the former to
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74
be the upward way (anodos) in the latter, Socrates says, "you will not fail
to fulfill my expectations. But perhaps only god knows if that is what truly
is" (517b4).
Let us look independently at the interrelation of the two images. The
sun image shows how the Good has everywhere prepared places for the
soul to know. There is motion within these places but not straight ascent-'the word anabasis is never mentioned. The cave image, on the other hand,
deals with the actual habitation of human nature, that is, of the embodied
soul, and with the painful steps and stations of its slow ascent. Furthermore, in the first the Good itself is not actually represented but is to be
caught by analogy, while in the second the sun represents the Good and
an underground fire is in turn contrived to repr~ent the sun. This means
that in the given correlation of the images our v(sible world comes, curi.
''·
ously, to occupy different levels:
Sun Image
Cave Image
Being
intelligible r e a / sensible world
Becoming
sensible world
underground realm
Still later in Book VII, after the detailed discussion of the mathematical
arts that are to "haul" the soul toward being, Socrates himself blurs this
correlation and seems to maich the upward trek of the soul into the sun's
world with the raising of the bodily eye, the world outside the cave with
the place of sight (532b6). Furthermore, in the sun image the Good is
beyond the realms of being and becoming, while in the cave image its
representative, the sun, is, of course, within and part of the world. And
finally, while the sun image, as explicated by the Divided Line, refers only
to different degrees of the capacity to learn but not to the incapacity of
ignorance (cf. 585b3), the cave image is explicitly about both education
and lack of education (514a2); it is very much concerned not only with
"mindlessness" (aphrosyne, 515c5) and "want of knowledge" (amathia,
518a7) but even with positive deceit. For those who carry "idols" back and
forth as puppeteers manipulate their "marvels" (thaumata, 514b6-Socrates
plays on the double meaning "puppets : marvels") are indeed engaging in
that complex form of dissembling which the orator shares with the sophist
(Sophist 268b; cf. 260c8).
3. Now at the very beginning of their conversaiion Socrates and
Glaucon had determined that ignorance (agnoia) must necessarily be
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'a";igt1ed. to non-being, knowing (gnosis) to being (478c3), and opinion
to an unnamed intermediate, partaking of both and later identified
becoming. It must be in order to recall this scheme that the main
segments of the Divided Line are at one point called gnoston and dox,
aston (5!0a9). Thus it is obvious that wherever becoming occurs non-being
·is implied. But since non-being is not explicitly named in either of the images, Glaucon should conjecture that it is present somewhere somehow,
in that manner appropriate to "that which is not." The following new correlation, in which the levels of the "sensible world" in both images are made
to coincide, does reveal it:
Sun Image
Cave Image
Being
iritelligiple reaim
Becoming
sensible world ....,.... sensible world
underground realm
4a. To put in a word the effect ol seeing the cave image in this new
juxtaposition with the sun image: the cave image is intended to complete
the image of the Whole, and that requires taking into account human
badness in all its organized obtuseness and assigning it its place within
being~or rather non-being (Seventh Letter 344b; Plotinus, Enneads I 8,
in fact locates evil in non-being). This is why its presentation ends with
a brusque reference to that most telling crime, the execution of Socrates
(517a6). The introduction Of this factor, namely human badness, and its
management, which is called politics, comes out clearly in the table that
outlines the cave image. As opposed to the main segments of the Divided
Line with their two subsections, each realm here has a third part, the screen
wall with its puppeteers in the lower realm· and the starry night sky with
its moon; bright with reflected solar light (cf. 617al), in the world above.
We may interpret the former as representing the politicians with their laws
and ordinances, their "image-making," their dogmata (cf. Statesman 303c).
(Here we must recall that political deceit is practiCed in any city, even in
the just city, though there "nobly"; Republic 414b8; cf. 382d). The latter
will then be their cosmic counterparts, the "laws of nature" (Timaeus 83e5),
which are best studied in the nocturnal sky-although, Socrates thinks,
better yet not studied at all (529a).
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MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
4b. When Socrates first introduced the source of the visible world as
a son, Glaucon had immediately inferred that as a parent the Good was
a father (506e6). The cave image now provides the answer to the obvious
question: Who is the mother? It is Non-being, the realm in which things
are not in themselves but only in relation to another; in the terms of the
Sophist, it is the realm of the Other (257b), whose human effects are alienation and ignorance (Republic 478c3) as well as privacy in the literal sense,
privation. (The Greek word for a private person is "idiot.") These effects
in turn lead to injustice and all sorts of evil (444al, b8). It is not easy to
imagine, for in its elusiveness (Sophist 237bl 0) it is experienced only as
a bewilderment of the eye, that positive apprehension of darkness which
is felt after the descent into the infinity of "human evil" (517d5; cf. 445c6)
so feelingly described by Socrates (5!7e3). The cave represents non-being
under the guise of a womb, where, as in the Phoenician myth (414c), the
"earth-born" race gestates. From the point of view of the human soul struggling with a body and with other men, the Good is at work throughout
the whole only "in a certain way" (516cl) but not directly. For its light never
penetrates into ihe cave, where a counterfeit takes its place; to the lighted
realm of being on which the true sun shines, there is opposed a dark realm
of non-being (cf. Sophist 254a); between these reahus is the steep road along
which men "come into being," the road of genesis or birth. Socrates' cave
is the very image of that "Indefinite Dyad" whose nature is womb-like,
murky, material, un-substantial, bad (cf. Note 35).
4c. Socrates, however, has a figure of his own for such life as goes on
in the cave. Befme, he had forbidden the poets to slander the underworldnow he himself commits such a slander against our earth. Earlier he had
struck a line from the Odyssey (XI, 489), the one in which Achilles as a
shade among shades laments, saying that he would rather be "a serf on
earth slaving for another portionless man" (386c3) than a king among the
dead- now Socrates himself puts this very line into the mouth of the man
forced to descend once more into the cave, our habitation (516d5)!
Just as in the Phaedo there is proposed a place rather to be taken "as
truly the earth" than the hollow in which we live (IIOal), so in the Republic
Socrates points to a place to be taken as truly the underworld, a truly
shadowy and obscure Hades (508c, 517d)-a new realm distinct from the
underworld of myth, the "invisible Hades," the Aides a-ides of after-life,
which is invisible rather than dark, a place pure of all bodily sight (cf.
Phaedo 79b7, 80d5, Craty/us 404bl), a "divine place" (topos daimonios,
614cl). The new Hades is the realm of living souls, Socrates' mortal Hades.
It therefore adds to the "intelligible" and the "visible" place a third, a
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77
"sightless" place (cf. Phaedrus 248 ff. for another such myth concerning
the places for the soul). Its inhabitants live in a dream-like isolation (533b8;
cf. 476c4; cf. Heraclitus, Diels, Vorsokratiker Fr. 89) reminiscent of the
mindless flittings of the shades in the traditional Hades; like the shades
in Hades they are incapable of touching each other (Odyssey X, 494; XI,
204), while some go completely to sleep, having, as Socrates puts it, "arrived in Hades before they have woken up here" (534c7). We may conjecture that Aristotle's own cave story, reported by Cicero (On the Nature
of the Gods II, xxxvii, 95), was a counter-image to combat Socrates' scandalous view. For the inmates of Aristotle's cave, a well-furnished
underground apartment, need only a chance to catch a glimpse of the upper world with its sun by day and its stars in their regular courses by night,
to know immediately that theirs is indeed a world ruled by gods. But this
splendid world, Aristotle, contrary to Socrates, implies, whose divinity is
immediately apprehended by anyone with unjaded vision, is precisely, our
own present habitation, toward whose beauty our senses have grown dull.
What is most characteristic of Socrates' moral Hades is the willfulness
of its inhabitants, who resist and mock their liberator (517a). Again Aristotle's cave image is instructive, for its inhabitants are prisoners by nature
and must wait for the "jaws of earth" to open before they can come up.
But for Socrates' men the way is open; the Good has prepared other and
better places for the soul, and there is no necessity to sit below; they seem
to cherish their chains- in a certain engraving of the "Antrum Platonicum"
(1604 A.D.) the huddled prisoners very tellingly wear no visible chains at
all. Perhaps, then, the most important aspect of the cave is that it is not
a natural cavern but a "cavelike underground chamber" (514a3; cf. Axiochus 371a8), clearly an artificial prison made by men for men. The position of the prisoners itself indicates stubborn perversity; they are facing
the wrong way round and have a perverted vew; that is why they must first
of all be "converted" (518c8), or, failing that, must be dealt with by "persuasion as well as compulsion" (519e4). The cave is the human city always
and everywhere, a prison compound within which true community is to
be achieved only at rare propititious moments.
4d. Glaucon should have no difficulty in recognizing the place. He has
some acquaintance with Pythagorean doCtrine (53la4), and the notion of
the world as a prison and life as a lfving death are both well known
Pythagorean teachings (cf. Gorgias 493a), as is also that of the "descent
into Hades." Pythagoras himself is said to have "told how he descended
(katabas) to look on the way of life of those who have gone below, to see
how entirely different were the lives of the Pythagoreans" (Aristophon in
�MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
78
Diogenes Laertius VIII, 38)." In fact, the dialogue of the Republic as a
whole has a Pythagorean setting, for just as the lectures of Pythagoras
were said to have taken place by night (Diogenes Laertius VIII, 15; cf. the
"nocturnal council" of the Laws [961]; also Plato's "night clock," Athanaeus,
IV, 174c), so it must be well into the night when the central part of the
Republic is spoken. What is more, its very form has a Pythagorean cast,
since it seems to be that of a Pythagorean exercise: it was evidently part
of the discipline of a Pythagorean to attempt, before starting the day, to
"re-collect" within himself in its entirety whatever conversation he had had
the day before." This would provide an additional reason why the dialogue
is told by Socrates as having taken place not just recently, but "yesterday"
(327a1), and would explain why he does not address it to anyone: he speaks
it within and to himself- Plato, even more truly than Alcibiades, can "open
up" Socrates (Symposium 216d6). Certainly if we are to take seriously the
form of the Republic as a report of a conversation that lasted the better
part of a day and a night, we shall find it to be a somewhat incredible
feat, which needs to be accounted for by some such power as a special
mnemonic discipline would give. In the Republic, we may infer, Socrates
is shown as a master of the Pythagorean practice that provided a congenial
discipline or askesis, useful in preparing the soul by a kind of habituation
for that inward recovery of truth. which is given a temporal cloak in the
myth of recollection (Meno 81) and is particularly displayed in
mathematical investigations (ibid. 82; cf. Note 27).
F.
Ia. After the cave image Socrates considers with Glaucon the actual
education of the philosophers. He begins significantly: "Would you like
now to see in what way such men will come to be born [in the city] and
how one will lead them up into the light, just as some [e.g., Heracles '"]
are said to have ascended from Hades to the gods?" (52lcl). The sequence
of learning, which follows closely the "pathos'' of the cave drama, has three
stages: "conversipn" (periagoge, 515c7, 515c8, d4, 521c6), the "haul" toward
being, effected by mathematical studies (mathema holkon, 515e8, 521d3,
527b9, 533d2), and the "divine sights"of dialectic (theiai theoriai, 517d4).
"Conversion" is what we are witnessing in the dialogue itself. Since it
precedes all education and is more the effect of meeting a man than engaging in a study, it is not part of the explicit study plan. Nevertheless there
is an "art of conversion" (518d3). Since this first act is largely a matter
of making the soul recognize the shadows on the wall as mere shadows,
�79
it is clearly an eikastic art, namely Socratic music, the persuasive imagery
of truth. As we have seen, it may be said to take the place of that traditional habituating music used in the education of the warrior-guardians
but so emphatically excluded from the philosophical education (522a4).
Note that in the image, as in fact, the city will try to prevent such conversions and will call them corruptions (517a). It cannot be said that these
philosophers-to-be are born and bred in the just city-their upbringing
seems in fact to be conceived against a hostile background that can hardly
be the education provided by the guardian city!
lb. The long "haul" into the light of day is accomplished chiefly by
the "hauling study'' of mathematics (522c5-53ld6). The program appears
to be that of Pythagorean cosmogenic mathematics (530d8)." In arithmetic,
"that lowly little thing" (phaulon), 42 the "one" and the "two" and the other
numbers are distinguished; in plane geometry the surfaces of bodies and
in solid geometry the bodies themselves are studied; in astronomy bodies
are put in motion; and, finally, the audible relations of moving bodies are
studied in harmonics. In this way the cosmos imaged in the Myth of Er,
with its heavenly bodies giving out a harmony as they revolve, is constructed.
There is only one difference between this Pythagorean cosmos and the
Socratic study, but one so deep that it is very hard to grasp for Glaucon,
who loves physical studies, especially astronomy. He immediately identifies
Socrates' phrase about "seeing the things above" with "looking into the
[sky] above" (529a2), and Socrates has to rebuke him: that kind of
astronomy, the "visible music" of the Pythagoreans (cf. Theon,
Mathematical Matters Useful for Reading Plato, Hiller, 5, 17 ff.), in truth
makes its students "look downward altogether" (a7). Socrates demands that
in the serious study of mathematics, that paradigm of every "learning matter" (mathema), not only all practical applications, but even every suggestion of an admixture of sense experience should be put by, and only those
true motions and numbers and figures which are grasped by the logos and
the dianoia alone should be studied (529b). Glaucon, who follows well
enough the early part of the discussion, which is concerned with
demonstrating the dianoetic power of arithmetic, is somewhat puzzled by
the non-physical "dimensional" studies that follow (526d ff.). For indeed
it is the extended effort of actually doing pure mathematics that is needed
to complete the conversion from sense (533d3), and this is still before him.
Ancient commentators, such as Plutarch, Theon, and Proclus, have a
standard way of referring to the use and meaning of the mathematical
course of the Republic: they simply assert the elevating effects of such
studies. One of the reasons why there should be this effect is of far greater
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MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC ·
consequence than the others, since it amounts to a genuine interpretation
of the sequence of subjects. There is a strong ancient tradition that attributes to Plato and the Academy the theory that the whole of being arises,
as it were, in a mathematical way: From the One and the Indefinite Dyad
spring the Ideal Numbers; from tbese the sequence of dimensions is educed,
until first the mathematical solids are attained; and then the sensible world
itself is brought about"- the "dimensional soul" discussed above belongs
to this context. Now aside from the internal difficulties of this view, which
Aristotle discusses at length in the Metaphysics (1080b24 ff., 1085a8 ff.),
and its essentially stultifying character, there is an almost insuperable difficulty in interpreting the mathematics of the Republic along these lines.
For in the Republic mathematical objects, since they are among the images that reflect the realm of being and comprise the realm of the dianoia,
are fitted into a scale of increasing genuineness, within which they lie between natural object and being. In the theory mentioned, however, the
mathematical structure comprises the whole of things arranged in a scale
of decreasing dimensionality and concreteness. 44
It therefore becomes absolutely necessary to go to the dialogue itself
to see why the young philosophers must study Socrates' mathematics, aside
from its generally purifying effect, which amounts to a conversion of the
merely "embodied soul" into an embodied by primarily "knowing soul"
(527d8). We may expect that, as usual, Socrates is quietly presenting
Glaucon with something astounding.
For it turns out, upon inspection, that the mathematical order Socrates
is talking about is indeed a reflection of being and that this means that
it is an inverse of the realm of being. Glaucon must use his imagination
to see why this is so. A diagram (see next page) picturing the realms of
the Divided Line will show what needs to be seen.
The whole realm of natural objects is here pictured as a cone with the
sun at its vertex. It casts a reflection or shadow (510al) which, like most
natural images (as distinct from more deceptive artificial ones), is opposite
or inverted in relation to the original, and "produces a shape (eidos) that
yields a sense perception the opposite of the usual sight" (Sophist 266c3).
This natural fact may now be applied as imagery to the noetic realm, and
the beings of the uppermost realm may be imagined as reflected by the
dianoetic objects in the same way. In the diagram mathematics is then
represented by an inverted cone having its dimensionless vertex at the bottom (representing the elementary study of the unit) and opposing its base
to that of the conical sector of a sphere (representing being), in order to
indicate both that mathematical objects are only a small part of the
dianoetic images of being and that, unlike mathematics, the dialectic as-
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Intelligibles
Mathematicals
. ----------
Natural objects
"~-
'
''
'
''
''
'
Reflections
cent within being does not end· in an upper limit but culminates in a kind
of source and beginning which is at once central and encompassing. 45
We must now show the meaning of this inversion of the dialectical order
in Socratic mathematics. One observation does, however, already seem warranted: Such mathematics does not lend itself to institutionalization;
Socrates cannot have been announcing the study program of the Academy
(not to speak of a state education), especially since "no one unversed in
geometry" was allowed to enter there, and the members were evidently left
by Plato to engage in all sorts of advanced study with great freedom."
Let us look, then, at the elements of Socrates' presentation in their order.
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MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC .·
To introduce "the study concerning the one" (525a2), Socrates brings
in one finger, a finger that is simply one and seems to:"have nothing contradictory within itself (523d6). In it, sight sees everything ::poured together,"
confused, indistinct, and for this very reason seif-sufficient; the finger is
"absolute" for the sense of sight (524d!O). -But as soon as two other fingers,
one greater and the other smaller than tl;J.e first, are brought in, sight reports
that the first finger is now both great and small, and the other senses will
report similar oppositions. At this point, the soul in its perplexity calls
on the "counting capacity" (logismos, 524b4) and· the dianoia to determine how many objects it is really dealing with, and thus arises the distinction between the visible and the intelligible (524cl3). For the dianoia
separates out the great and the small as being "each one, both together
two" (524b!O), a formula that, though it does not solve the problem, states
it precisely, i.e., "arithmetically": Tho different items, namely the great and
the small caught in speech, can be together in one, namely the physical
finger. "The whole of number" is gotten analogously (525a6)- whenever
something is no more one than the opposite of one (a plurality), it is an
assemblage of so and so many things taken together, and that defines an
arithmos, a "numbered collection."47 The "second" study, which, Glaucon
knows, is "next in succession," is geometry (526c8). After plane geometry,
which is the study of the "second increase" (i.e., the second dimension),
must follow the study of solids taken "by themselves" (528b ). "Fourth"
comes the study of astronomy, which deals with solids in visible motion.
Since there are at least two kinds of motion, a last, sister study is required,
namely harmonics, which is concerned with motions relative to the ear.
In pure harmonics consonant numbers are studied; these are the numerical
relations presented in a theory of numerical proportion dealing with simple and compounded ratios-such relations bear on genesis, as we know
from the "marriage number" (546). At the end of this course, the "community . . . and kinship" of these studies must be grasped, and what is
peculiar to them must be collected (53!d2). This is the basis upon which
dialectic is finally to be laid, "just like a coping stone" (534e2).
The elements of this study in the order in which they appear are, then:
1. the sensible undifferentiated one,
2. the great and small by comparison,
3. the "hypothetical" ones that add up to two, and every other number,
4. the dimensional structure of the mathematical cosmos,
5. the community or cosmos of all these mathematical objects seen
synoptically.
Although the dialectical way is not explicitly described in the Republic
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(533al), we have collected enough of its elements to name them in the order
in which they would become the center of attention:
5. the community or cosmos of eide seen in a preliminary synopsis,
4. the lowest ranks of eide,
3. the eidetic number-assemblages going back up to the eidetic Two
and its constituent eidetic ones,
2. the arche of the Great and Small,
I. the One.
The dialectical objects are, as can be seen, in fact encountered in the
reverse order of those that have the same name in the mathematical sequence. For the mathematical studies ended with a community of moving
and related solids that had first been set out in terms of their elements
of "growth" (the progress of dimensions), then "by themselves" (solid
geometry), and finally in their "consonances" (astronomy and music). So,
in reverse, the dialectician must survey first and foremost the front presented
by those eide closest to genesis in order to distinguish its elements. He must
try to see at once "which kind is consonant with which" (Statesman 285b;
Sophist 253b, where harmonics had just been used as the type of such
knowledge), and whether any elements extend through all the others; "for
he who can see things together is a dialectician" (synoptikos-dia/ektikos). ·
Note that it was precisely the final phase of the mathematical development that provided the required training and testing of the synoptical ability
(Republic 537c)." After this beginning synopsis (of which Socratic music
is a foretaste) it will be possible to see and order the communities of eide
and to rise among these, attaining the larger eide, or gene (Sophist 254d4).
These higher genera contain more of being but belong to smaller- or rather,
prior-eidetic assemblages or numbers. Finally being itself, the greatest
"genus," (genos) (ibid. 243dl), the eidetic Two, will be reached, together
with the two great gene it comprises, rest and motion (ibid. 250; cf. Note
35). At this point it will be possible to recognize that the eide that run
through all the others are beyond Being and ought not to be called eide
but archai. Thus two sources appear beyond the objects that were first the
hypotheses of mathematics and then the beings of dialectic: the Other (ibid.
259a-b ), called by many names, of which the chief are the Indefinite Dyad
and the Great and Small (e.g., Metaphysics 987b20, 1087b5), and the One,
the non-hypothetical "beginning of the whole" (510b7, 5llb7): in the One.
everything again rests without opposition, just as once before, at the beginning of the road and at the opposite extreme of being, the finger combined in fact that which is incompatible in words.
Socrates himself emphasizes the opposite ways of mathematics and
dialectic at crucial points. The segment of the intelligible, he says, is cut
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MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
"in such a way that in one part of it the soul is forced to search from
hypotheses, using the things before imitated as images, and journeying not
toward the beginning (archif) but toward the end, while in the other, the
one that leads toward the non-hypothetical beginning, she goes [up] from
hypotheses and [proceeds] without the images used in the former section,
journeying by means of the eide and through them" (510b; also c, 511a,
533c). The mathematical way is thus in itself a deduction, moving away
from beginnings. But, at the same time, as a learning process, it is an "elevation (epanagogif) of what is best in the soul to the sights seen among beings" (532c5), though, as Socrates gently and tacitly informs a too enthusiastic Glaucon, it is not knowledge of being itself but only an approach
to it (527b9). How can Socrates imagine that these two motions take place
at once? To begin with, Socrates shows no interest whatever in that
straightforward deduction of mathematical fact which is the pride of
mathematicians, and which, because of its logical rigor, becomes for Aristotle the paradigm of "apodeictic," i.e., demonstrative, knowledge (e.g.,
Posterior Analytics 71a3). This form of proof, in terms of which
mathematical systems like Euclid's Elements are presented, is called "synthetic." Socrates, oddly enough, implies that this form of proof is to be
left to all the non-mathematical arts, which deal with "geneses and syntheses" (533b5). His own approach is "analytical" or, what will be shown
to amount to the same thing, "hypothetical" (cf. Phaedo IOOa, Meno 86e).
The discovery of analysis as a formal method of proof was attributed
in antiquity to Plato, who was supposed to have imparted it to his pupils
as a means of finding solutions to problems." As Pappus explains, it differs from synthesis, which leads from agreed-on assumptions to conceded
consequences, in the direction of its motion, "for in analysis we assume
that which is sought as if it had already come about, and we inquire what
it is from which this results, and again what is the antecedent cause of
the latter, and so on, until by retracing our steps we come upon something
already known or belonging to the class of the first principles, and such
a method we call 'analysis' as being 'solution backwards' [anapalin lysin,
i.e., reduction]." Pappus goes on to distinguish two kinds of analysis,
theoretical and problematical; in the former we assume a hypothesis and
trace out its consequences until we come to something admittedly true or
admittedly absurd (the second is what is known as a reductio ad absurdum or negative proof), while in the latter we assume a solution or a construction as if it had been found, and trace out its consequences until we
come to something known to be possible and obtainable, or the reverse.'"
Analysis is therefore a means both of returning to and thus reflecting
on those beginnings that Socrates calls hypotheses (e.g., 510b). It is also
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a means for achieving "agreement" (533c5) concerning the consistent consequences of any "suppositions" (the precise rendering of the Greek plural
of hypothesis) that happen to be offered. Now whether or not Plato was
really first to recognize in this a formal mathematical method, he himself
certainly regarded it as Socrates' very own mode of conversing, which,
"while he is the man he is," remains his only way (Theaetetus 197al)."
For the most striking form of analysis shown in the dialogues, which
people find "not unpleasant" (Apology 33c4), is the reductio ad absurdum, of which the Socratic refutation or elenchos is the great nonmathematical example. It is used for silencing professional "eristics" by
disposing of their dangerous absurdities, and for producing in those who
are wellcdisposed that perplexity of soul which is the beginning of serious
inquiry; its complement is "Socratic ignorance" (Republic 354b9). Accordingly it occurs in the Republic only in the first book, where it is used in
the provoked and forcible conversion of the violent Thrasymachus and as
a "prelude" to the real inquiry (cf. 349al0, 354); thereafter Socrates uses
the gentler way of his analogic "music." We must now see how the
mathematics he proposes is also, in some sense, "analytical," consisting
as it does of "conversion-aiding arts" (533d3).
To begin with, the mathematical enterprise is analytic in the same way
as is any Socratic "search," in which the object is always assumed as
something known of which the consequences will emerge in the course of
the inquiry (cf. Meno 80e ff.). Socrates regards mathematics as just such
a search (e.g., 523a2, 524e5, 528b-c, 53lc6); in fact it differs from any
Socratic conversaiion only in the greater commonness of its objects (522c).
Thus the question "What ever is a finger?" is transformed in the course
of the mathematical inquiry into the question "What ever is the one?"
(523d4, 524e6), and Socrates gets Glaucon to admit that the power of counting finds in a finger opposites that are "each one, both together two,"
precisely as earlier he had gotten him to agree that since the beautiful and
the shameful are opposite, they are "two, and each one" (524bl0, 476a2).
In other words, Socrates is interested not so much in getting on with the
specific mathematical science as in returning again and again to its
hypotheses; a sign of this is the preposterous name he gives to "arithmetic,"
which he calls "the study of the one" (525a2), as if number science consisted of nothing but its beginning principle, that "source of the whole of
number" (Aristotle, Topics 14lb9), which is not even included among the
numbers (cf. Euclid, Elements VII, Defs; 1-2).
But Socrates intends his young philosophers to practice analysis also
in a more technical sense, namely as "problematic" analysis. Each of the
two final, more or less physical, sciences is to be studied, in Socrates' strange
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MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
phrase, by "rising to problems" (530b6, 531c2). To see what the nature and
purpose of such problems is- besides supplanting observation- we must
look at the order of Socrates' mathematical course. Theon, for instance,
observes that non-sensible harmonics, since it is the study of "pure" number
relations, of logoi and analogiai, should naturally follow immediately after
arithmetic in the mathematical order (Mathematical Matters Useful for
Reading Plato, ed. Hiller, p. 17). It is therefore not surprising that Socrates
thinks it necessary to justify his own different ordering with an appeal to
the very men whose preoccupation with matters sensible and experimental he immediately disowns; harmonics is to be understood as cosmic music,
the sister science of astronomy, "as the Pythagoreans say, and we, Glaucon,
agree" (530d8, 53lb7). By accepting this ordering, Socrates obtains a last
propaedeutic study that is at the same time non-sensible and physical,
namely the unheard music of the unseen heavens underlying the "eye's sky"
(Socrates' pun: horatos- ourimos, 509d3).
Now we can see just what it means to "use problems" in astronomy,
"bidding the things in the heavens good-bye" (530b7). According to tradition it was Plato himself who raised that epochal question of astronomical
hypotheses, setting this as "a problem for those interested in these matters: By what hypotheses of regular and ordered motions can the appearances associated with the motions of the 'wanderers' [i.e., planets] be
saved?" (Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle's On the Heavens 292bl0).
The young philosophers will, presumably, work on just such problems,
contenting themselves with "saving," not too exactly, the more basic ap-
pearances such as the daily motion of the stars and the sun. Here "saving"
the appearances means first of all learning to regard them as mere appearances of something more nearly substantial (namely the hypotheses)
and so "bidding them good-bye." Using, then, the visible heavens as a nicely
made but not very important "pattern" (259d7 ff.), they are in turn to make
a construct such as might be "hypothesized as a pattern" (Timaeus 48e5)
by some mythical demiurge who wants to bring our visible world into being. Note that this mythical demiurge is a requirement of cosmic genesis,
since the mathematical hypothesis itself, being no paradeigmatikon aition,
no responsible pattern, i.e., not having the power of a true source, will never
yield the sensible world by itself- there exists no deductive account of the
sensible world from the mathematical cosmos alone."
The profits from working such problems will be many: The students
will learn to make images that will exceed the visible original in truth, that
is, they will learn to make noetic hypotheses about the whole of appearance
and to deduce their consequences; in attemPting to '~save" the appearances
they will learn what a mere appearance really is; and they will get used
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to Jiving with their mathematical cosmos as a preparation for dwelling with
the invisible and bodiless noeta (cf. Sophist 246b7, Statesman 286a5). It
is unlikely that this study will much resemble the spherical geometry
presented in those dull "Sphaerics" (like that of Theodosius) which are supposed to be realizations of Plato's "pure" astronomy. We must rather imagine that the young philosophers will be asked to reflect on matters such
as the true significance of astronomical notions like "obliquity," "error,"
"anomaly," and their opposites. They will find these studies "useful ...
in the search for the good and the beautiful" (Republic 53lc6), since they
concern equality, symmetry, consonance, and order; they will have regained
the world on a higher level. When their time has come for the pursuit of
dialectic, which "takes up (anairousa) the. hypotheses" (533c8), in the senses
both of "removing" them and of "raising" them to a higher mode, they
will "take up" first their hypotheses about the whole, meaning that they
will convert them into that array of lower eide governing the world of appearances and human excellence within it. These are the eide close to the
world, which the dialectician encounters first (500c, 484c-d, Gorgias 508a)
and which, while least in being, are longest in logos (e.g., Statesman 267a-b).
But we are also told, quite incidentally, that static geometry too is to
be pursued in problems (530b6). Here again the order of studies proves
interesting. The geometry orginally proposed was plane geometry (528d3).
Next, Socrates brought in astronomy, but, right away, with an air of
significance, asked Glaucon to "draw back" (528a6), and delivered a speech
in praise of the study of that missing third dimension which seems "not
yet to have been discovered" (b4). Solid geometry, the study between earth
measurement and the motion of the skies, aiming at objects that lie between heaven and earth, is, he implies, in some special way the city's
business; it is a political affair, which ought to be carefully supervised and
which is even less than the other studies to be pursued privately (b6 ff.;
cf. 525c2). He might, however, have stopped himself sooner, for he had
already interrupted the dimensional development of his mathematical
world, in fact at its very beginning, when he had introduced the "second
increase" of plane geometry even though he had omitted any mention of
the first, the linear dimension. The one-dimensional study, however, so conspicuously missing in the Republic, is solemnly introduced in the Laws
(820a-b), where it is presented precisely as the necessary prerequisite of
stereometry, i.e., of solid geometry. It is the study of irrational lines, the
special interest of Socrates' young counterpart Theaetetus (Theaetetus !47d
ff., 144d8), who is also credited with the first cogent presentation of all
the regular solids called "Platonic."" We happen to know what the classical
problem in solids is: it is the problem of doubling the cube, according to
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MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
legend originally raised by Minos, the underworld judge, and later again
by the Delians, whom Apollo had ordered to double his altar, and who
were said to have brought it to Plato for solution." Socrates himself uses
the plane version of this problem to display the natural knowledge of a
slave boy whose education consists simply in knowing Greek, and who
is able to find, under Socrates' supervision, the side of the double square;
it is the irrational diameter, the single mean between the two squares (Meno
82b ff.). We might conjecture that as the doubling of the square, done in
the sand on the earth, is the slave's problem, requiring for its solution only
the learner's nature, so the doubling of the cube, done in the solid world
of bodies, is the citizen's problem, requiring both nature and nurture, and
that it therefore represents practical politics. For stereometric problems are
solved by finding two means, sometimes called "powers" (Theaetetus
147d3), which are in this case themselves irrational, though commensurable
in cube (Euclid, Elements X, Defs. 1-4). Stereometric analysis then
represents the work of finding ways and means to reconcile that which
has no common measure by going into a higher dimension (cf. l!.pinomis
990d8); mechanical, that is, mere de facto, solutions are considered unacceptable. This is perhaps why Socrates mysteriously tells Glaucon not to
allow his children, who will have charge of the city, to be like "irrational
lines" (534d5); he means they should not be like that which has failed to
rise to the higher dimension in which commensurability and consonance
are possible: There is, indeed, something obvious in taking problematic
analysis as the paradigm of practical planning, and, accordingly, Aristotle
in the Nicomachean Ethics compares deliberation to the analysis of
diagrams, for "every deliberation is a search" (1112b20). Such a use of
mathematics. can be quite a dangerous game (as we moderns well know),
but at its best it articulates terms that serve well in the press of action,
clarifying the nature of tricky inquiries and providing models for solving
complex problems (cf. Meno 86e).
Socrates concludes his exposition of the philosophers' mathematical
education by suggesting to Glaucon that "the experts (dein01) in these matters can't seem to you to be dialecticians" (53Id9). This distinction between
mathematicians and philosophers is ever his theme; for instance, he observes
that "inasmuch as they themselves [the mathematicians] don't know how
to use their discoveries they turn them over to the dialecticians to use, if
they have any sense at all" (Euthydemus 290c3). Socrates again has a special
way of characterizing the helplessness of the mathematicians' arts: "They
dream about being, and cannot behold it as if awake, [at least] as long
as they use hypotheses that they leave undisturbed, unable to give an account ofthem" (533b8). For Socrates, mathematics will always remain a
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dreamlike and "phantastic" enterprise. For instance, in the Philebus, where .
in the course of the investigation of the human good he constructs just
such a "bodiless cosmos" (64b7) as was described above, using principles
like the One, the More and Less, and Number (23c), he always attributes
his knowledge of these to a god, a myth, or a dream (16c, 18b, 20b, 25b ).
For him mathematical objects are shadows or reflections on the surface
of being, catching its mere form; they are more immediately accessible to
the human understanding than being itself bur have no substance of their
own. They are interesting only insofar as they are in turn reflected in the
sensible world, which they divide and collect and shape in a less substantial but more general way than can the more numerous, non-mathematical
eide. (These purer eide, caught by human speech, also appear in the
dianoetic realm as hypotheses.) This ordering function in the world is what
gives the mathematicals their special standing as "the middle things"
(Metaphysics 987bl5, 1090b31), differing from sensible objects in being
eternal and immutable and from the eide in having each a plurality of instance (while each eidos is unique). This function is also why their study
is capable of "hauling the soul from becoming towards being" (521d3). The
mathematical part of the dianoetic realm contains, as it were, the ordering
elements, the taxis, of being, where these element,, including shapes and
numbers and their relations, are taken as independent objects, just as reflections and shadows may be regarded as rendering the precise, albeit intangible, shapes of the bodies to which they belong.
It might be useful to give one example of an attempt to "take up" a
mathematical hypothesis in the double sense of canceling it and raising
it into its eidetic original. Out of the many hypotheses of mathematics,
such as units, numbers, ratios, proportions, "the odd and the even.and figure
and the three kinds of angles" (510c4), let us choose the most fundamental objects, the one and the first number, two.
The senses of sight and touch elicit from us merely the words "a finger,"
but in comparison with other fingers, a greater and a smaller, we have to
say of the same finger that it is both great and small. However, "great"
and "small" are opposites and evidently not capable of being simply thrown
together. We therefore say that the finger comprises both of these objects
intended in speech in such a way that they are "each one, both together
two" (524b), i.e., two things at once in the finger; thus arises the first
"multitude composed of units" (Euclid, Elements VII, Def. 2), the number
two. Since each one object of sense includes oppositions "infinite in
multitude," every number can arise in this way (525a); each unit of sense
reveals itself as numerous. Now let the inquiry concern not some unit in
the world of sense, but the greatest single noetic object, Being itself. After
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MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC .
a survey of the possible opinions (Sophist 242b!O ff.,), it is decided that
Being must comprise two "most opposite" eide, Rest and Motion (250a8),
neither of which is by itself Being but both of which are indeed Being.
Hence that Being appears as "a third thing beside these" (b7). If we now
try to apply the hypotheses of mathematical unit and number to these opposites comprised by Being, that is, if we try to "count up" Being, we see
that they are no longer adequate. For to count up units it is necessary that
they should be mere units "capable of being thrown together and indifferent" (symbletai kai adiaphoroi, Aristotle, Metaphysics !08la6), just as
"great" and "small," being both "determinations of size,, are on that common ground indistinguishable and therefore capable of addition (526a3).
But Rest and Motion have no such common ground, being irreducibly different; in the sight of the whole (where there is no relativity of motion)
nothing can be at once at rest and in motion. Furthermore, if we made
such a reduction we would lose exactly what we are after in dialectic, which
is "the thing itself," in its very nature. Being is not, therefore, a counting-
number and the result of adding two mathematical units, but a community
of incomparable eidetic monads, neither prior nor posterior to their
"number," namely Being, the unique Two (ibid. !08la ff.). We can see that
here the mathematical hypotheses of the one and the two, having taken
us up into Being, must themselves undergo a transformation; naturally this
can never be achieved by the dialogues, which do not leave the realm of
human /ogoi and of the dianoia-within speech Being must be put down
as a permanent perplexity (Sophist 250e5), and whatever solutions are offered must be somehow misnamed. For when in the Sophist the problem
of Being, there pointedly formulated in terms of the Not-being of each
of its "constituent" eidetic ones (25ld ff.), is solved by means of "the Other"
and "the Same" (254e ff.), then these two will, when presented in speech,
appear to be hypotheses exactly like the other three eide, Rest, Motion,
and Being. The Same and the Other will therefore be counted with these
three among the five greatest eide (255c), although they have the nature
not of beings but of that which is "beyond being," of archai. In the context of the Republic the more important of the archai in the Sophist is
that whose eidetic name is "the Same." For this is precisely the One, which,
itself beyond all articulation, is both the wholeness of being and the source
of the oneness of each being-that which makes a being "one and the same"
with itself and thus makes it just what it is. Here the mathematical one,
the uncuttable and indifferent minimal (525e ff.), is, as we have seen, the
total inverse of the dialectical One, which is the Whole and the source of
everything (5llb7; on these disparate functions of the Platonic one, see
Metaphysics !084bl3 ff.)."
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91
The central purpose of Socratic mathematics, then, is the examination
of the hypotheses provided by human speech, a reflection about speech
carried on within speech. As so often, Socrates' very example is chosen
to express the reflexiveness of the inquiry, for a finger-is a pointer, and
Socrates is pointing at this pointer. The purpose of such reflection is, in
turn, to bring the soul up to that highest internal "power of conversation"
(he tou dialegesthai dynamis, 533a8; cf. 511b4, Parmenides 135c2). In such
conversation the soul, freed from all the senses (Republic 532a6) and raised
beyond the intermediate dianoetic logoi (cf. Phaedo 99e5), confronts being immediately by means of its own noetic logos (Republic 511b4, 532a7,
534b9, c3), which is simply its power of having a direct relation, a "ratio"
to being.
le-d. The activity of this higher logos, dialectic itself, is beyond
Glaucon's present reach and no part of the preliminary survey. To set out
on the dialectical road would be to see "no longer an image ... but the
true itself' (533a3); the "most serious matters" are withheld from Glaucon,
and so from any mere reader of the dialogue (cf. Seventh Letter 344c).
Instead, Socrates chants his "hymn" in praise of dialectic (532al), and with
that Glaucon must be content. The Republic, in which for pedagogical
reasons philosophy appears as the fulfilled love of wisdom, does not resolve
for us this question: Has even one human, embodied, soul has ever been
able to withdraw entirely into the noetic realm to move "by means of the
eidethemselves through them and into them?" Has even one soul ever addressed itself in wordless speech to invisible sights? Or is the human limit
perhaps reached when, while seriously exercising our power of provisional
thinking and speaking, we have a sudden flash of trust in our own
hypotheses?
Glaucon has now been given the necessary preliminary synopsis
(Seventh Letter 340b8) of these propaedeutic synoptic studies in which the
young rulers are to prove their aptitude for dialectic (537c); he has also
been given an intimation of uliimate sights. After this Socrates addresses
him as a fellow law-giver, while he rehearses with him what he, Glaucon,
would do "if he were ever to nurture in deed those whom he is now nurturing and educating in speech" (534d3, 8, 535a3, 537c9)-that is, what
Glaucon will do once he himself becomes a teacher of rulers. (Here it is
interesting to note that Theon, elaborating in great detail Socrates' allusion to philosophy as an initiation into the mysteries in the Phaedrus [250c],
makes the fourth stage of the initiation, which follows the full vision, the
stage in which the initiate is authorized to transmit his knowledge to others
[Hiller, 15, 1 ff.].)
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MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
Together they review once more the virtues required in the nature of :,
the future philosophers. At this point Socrates again brings up the danger
to the "puppies" (539b6; cf. 498) in taking up dialectic too early. In the
last image of this central conversation Socrates likens them to sons who
on growing up discover that their alleged parents are not their true parents
and wbo, consequently, losing trust, begin to ask questions about the traditions in a "eristic" way and to scorn the laws (539a3). Note that in this
cautionary image the cause of disillusionment in the precocious dialecticians is precisely that Phoenician myth (414c4) which contains the faith
of the dog-guardians! We see that philosophical puppies are both more
acute and more dangerous than full-grown watch-dogs. The philosophical
city, as Alcibiades' mentor well knows, is always playing with fire.
2a. This brings them to the final question, which Socrates obviously
considers of acute importance in the serious execution of his program. This
is the matter about which he had before spoken "as an indignant man will"
(536c4); it is the question of age, the fitting of the progress of study and
practice to human growth.
Its significance can be gauged by reference to the Laws. There, where
the purpose of study is the growth of piety, and its objects are tbe gods
revealed in astronomy (966c) rather than the Good attained by dialectic,
the definite and written assignment of ages to studies is said to be useless
(968d). It becomes feasible -and, because of the dangers of premature
exposure, indeed crucial- only where there is to be a genuine ascent of
the soul. We might say that what Socrates is here talking about is the
"biological" development of the human soul and its proper program of
nurture (Republic 492a). Why this is so sensitive a matter is made plain
in the discussion of the human natures suitable to philosophy that both
immediately precedes and follows the central section on the great images
(490-496, 535-536). Man being a conflation of body and soul, the soul
must, at least in the beginning, live its life in conjunction with the body
and exposed to its influence.. But tbe best natures will also be well set up
in body (535a-b), in addition to possessing vigorously the virtues that are
"somehow close to the body" (518d!O). Such vigor, however, is particularly
sensitive to disrupting influences (491b ff.). The schedule of studies clearly
takes account of this obtrusive parallel life of the body: gymnastics occupies the years of greatest sexual vigor, practical politics the prime of life,
and the later years, when the body fails, while also it is no longer possible
to learn "many" things (536dl), are given to the contemplation of the single
highest thing.
The ages Socrates assigns to each stage of growth (539d8) are best seen
in a chart fitting them to the ascent of the cave image:
�93
BRANN
Sun
Goo·"d'
natural objects
dialectic
shadows
mathematics
50
35 .- 35
Outside
30
till
20
deat h
higher
screen wall
political office
lower
Inside
prisoners
gymnastics
mathematical play
50
17
birth
After fifty, Socrates says, the time has come for the philosophers to
"behold" the Good itself and, using it as a "pattern" (540a9), to order (kosmein, bl) the city and to educate others to live in the city as its guardians.
Thereafter they will spend their lives in philosophy whenever possible, but
when their turn comes they will descend and govern, considering it "not
as something fair but as necessary" (b4).
The last phrase recalls one last time that for the philosophers the chief
thesis of the dialogue, that justice brings happiness, is suspended-they
are just out of mere necessity or, at best, from a Cephalus-Iike sense of
duty owed (cf. 331d2), It also shows why this is: As Aristotle (Politics
1262a35) observes, only incestuous love is not explicitly forbidden in the
"fair city"; all other kinds of lovers are prohibited from being together
because of the disruptive strength of the pleasure involved. The kallipo/is,
the "fair city," has, most deliberately (521a), nothing "fair" for which a
philosopher ntight willingly descend; witness the fact that it is so called
insofar as its citizens study solid geometry (527cl, 528c7). In this city
geometric is substituted for erotic interest (546; cf. 458d5 and Plutarch's
phrase on the ·business of the Academy: "to become happy through
geometry," Dian 14, 2; cf. Epinomis 992a4). Here "love" means primarily
the ascending love of truth (e.g., Republic 490b2), and human eros is
allowed only a subordinate and utilitarian part in it (459-460, 468c; cf.
521b4), though such eros alone can be imagined as sufficiently strong to
bring the philosopher down by his own desire. But it is necessary that the
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MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
commerce of friendship should replace the intercourse of lovers, that private
love should be absent here, where the dialogic community is to be displayed
as the fundamental political community. Thus in the Republic the Good
and not the Beautiful is the theme-correspondingly in the dialogue "About
the Beautiful," set, in contrast to the Republic, without the wails of Athens,
love and philosophy rank above politics (Phaedrus 248d). But Glaucon
receives compensation at another time: it is to him that the speeches made
about eros at that famous symposium are recounted. He hears them in
circumstances that are the direct counterpart of the descent to the Peiraeus
which opens the Republic, namely "going up from Phalerum," Athen's harbor in earlier days (Symposium 172a2, c3).
2b. What is most remarkable about the age chart itself is that the rulers'
education, although initially founded if not in, at least in behalf of, the
city, leads them initiaiiy and recurrently straight out of and beyond it, so
that practical experience comes to them late and episodically. In terms of
the cave, it is conspicuous that no mention is made of a look behind the
scenes of the puppet theater, of something that might be construed as a
political apprenticeship. The counterpart of this lack of practical training
is the absence from their studies of all political theory, of all formulations
that are abstractions from practical polities. In the dialogue called the "Constitution" the study of constitutions is not advocated. The reason for this
is in the nature of such patterns: the pattern of the just city is not an eidos,
a being responsible for what is, but an ideal, significantly located not in
the "hypercelestial place" (Phaedrus 247c2) with the eide, but in the sky
(592b2; cf. 529d7) with Cloudcuckooland. A model, or paradeigma, unless
it be a causative model or paradeigmatikon aition, is only a schema or
a mimesis, having the mode of being of a work of art (50la9, Laws 817b4);
it is not an object of dialectic knowledge. Were it otherwise, nothing would
be necessary for the young rulers but to be trained in the loyal administration of this best constitution; they would undergo "indoctrination," and
the inteiiectuals among them would come to possess what is called an
"ideology." Instead, they are to look to the one effectively responsible pattern, which is that "beyond being"; the political wisdom of the Republic
demands that governing be learned by looking, so to speak, in the other
direction, upward; even in practice the rulers will truly look at affairs "in
the light of the whole" (540a8). The ability to do this, irreplaceable by any
technique or formula, is called human wisdom, phronesis (433dl, 52lb8),
the virtue containing the political virtues (Symposium 209a6). Were it only visible, it would be the loveliest of ail the virtues (Phaedrus 250d5) ....The
best thing is that not laws should be in power but a kingly man with human
�BRANN
95
wisdom" (Statesman 294a 7). The image of a man possessing phronesis at
work, which might be called "Socrates in the city,'' is to be found in
Xenophon's Memorabilia, which is intended to be the practical record, the
reS gestae, of Socrates. Cut off from its philosophical source, phronesis
becomes Aristotelian "prudence," the independent practical virtue of the
politician (e.g., Nicomachean Ethics, 114la30). The different functions of
prudence are a just measure of the distance between the Platonic Politeia
and the Aristotelian Politika.
2c. Having come to the end of life, the philosopher-kings will at last
be allowed to depart permanently to the Isles of the Blessed, and the city
will honor them with memorials and sacrifices- if the Pythia permits, as
divinities (daimosl), otherwise as happy men (eudaimosi, 540cl). Socrates,
speaking from beyond the grave, as it were, is ending the conversation with
a sly reference to himself: he has indeed just advocated (to be sure, with
the permission of the friendly Delphic oracle) the introduction of "other
new divinities" into the city, exactly as the indictment against him was to
state (Apology 24cl; cf. 21a6; he was also, incidentally, honored in Athens
after his own death very nearly as he here prescribes, e.g., Diogenes Laertius, II, 43; cf. also Xenophon, Apology 15). And he has also, outrageously,
implied that to be an eudaimon is a greater thing than to be a mere middling
daimon (cf. Symposium 202el), for to be happy is to live in the mode of
"the happiest side of being" (Republic 526e3), the Good.
2d. And now Socrates and Glaucon are emerging from their deeply
private dialogue back into the context of that city which had been developed
for the whole company, the "city in speech," the just or guardian city.
Socrates himself recalls this city, a revolutionary community of men and
women, by a smiling rejoinder to Glaucon, who had allusively praised
Socrates' ancestral demiurgic skill as a "maker of men-statues" (540c4; cf.
Euthyphro llb9); he reminds Glaucon that he can shape women too, for
they were to share in this city (540c5). Socrates now founds this guardian
city quickly and with charming offhandedness: All inhabitants over ten
years are to be driven out "into the wilds"; this forced emigration will leave
a clean slate for the lawgiver (54lal; cf. SOla).
Glaucon recalls accurately where they had been when they digressed:
Socrates, like the wrestler he is (Heracles, we recall, is the master of all
wrestlers") is to put himself into his former position so as to continue to
wrestle with the account of the city in its degenerating forms.
Socrates, by descending with Glaucon into the mythical setting of the
Peiraic underworld, has shown him that he lives his life as one imprisoned
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MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
in a mortal Hades. But this demonstration is itself a release, the first step
of the rescue; unlike the poets, who fail to wrest from Hades the shade
they desire (Symposium 179d), Socrates, a new Heracles, knows the way
to bring his Theseus back up to the world of light.
Yet Glaucon's later life is almost a blank for us. He seems to have done
little in his time, and no reputation, either good or bad, has survived him;
certainly he founded no new Athens. We may be sure that this fact,
presumably already evident when Plato was writing the Republic, is meant
to reflect on the dialogue. It forces us to ask whether in the face of this
fact the labor of Socrates must not be considered altogether lost. Then
we ought to remind ourselves that while Socrates is speaking to Glaucon,
the dialogue itself is speaking to us. And consequently it may happen that
Socrates' words are "not fruitless but have seeds, whence others arise in
the soil of other souls," so that Plato's "imitation of Socrates" may succeed where he himself failed.
Notes
1. Plato's Republic, ed. B. Jowett and L. Campbell (Oxford 1894) III,
p. 4; The Republic of Plato, ed. J. Adams, 2nd edition (Cambridge
1963) I, p. 1. For a discussion of the "concentric" organization of the
Republic postdating the present essay, see R. Brumbaugh, "A New
Interpretation of Plato's Republic," Journal of Philosophy 64 (1967),
661 ff.
In this essay, all translations are by the author.
2. Liddell and Scott, Greek Lexicon (Oxford 1958), see Peiraieus, p. 1354b.
It is, however, certainly permissible to omit the article, cf. 439e7.
3. Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopaedie der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft (Stuttgart 1937) XIX, i, p. 78.
.
4. Ibid., III, i; see "Bendis" p. 269. The torch race mentioned may be ac- :
counted for by the fact that Thracian Hecate had the epithet Phosphorus, Light-bearer.
'
5. Adams, op. cit. (supra, N. I) I, p. 5.
6. Jowett, op. cit. (supra, N. I) II, pp. 2, 7, and 79, on 368a3.
7. Also Gorgias 461a, 466c; Phaedo 98e; Phaedrus 228b. The scl1toliast
to Wasps 83 says that Sosias is imitating Socrates' oath "by the
Aristophanis Comoediae, ed. Dindorf (Oxford 1837) III, 460; cf.
Gorgias, ed. Dodds (Oxford 1959) p. 262; also Lucian, Ph:ilo.~op•hie'
for Sale 16, who connects Socrates' dog with Anubis, Sirius,
Cerberus.
�BRANN
97
8. Pauly-Wissowa, Suppl. III, see "Heracles," pp. 1007 ff., 1018 ff., 1077
ff.; also Aristophanes, Frogs 108.
9. See Phaedrus 267c9, and Aristotle, Rhetoric 1400b19, on Thrasymachus's notorious violence.
10. Socrates, having completed the refutation of Thrasymachus, begins
anew and in a new mode: "Socrates no longer comes forward with questions in the character of a man who is ignorant ... , but as one who
has already found what he seeks." Schleiermacher's Introductions to
the Dialogues of Plato, trans. W. Dobson (Cambridge 1836), p. 356.
II. Aristophanes actually compares Socrates to Odysseus, another famous
visitor to Hades. But in the Republic the comparison is, if suggested
at all, made to discredit Odysseus. For the Myth of Er is offered as
an improvement over Odysseus's supposedly boring and false "tales
of Alcinous," that is, as a new Nekyia (614b1, see scholia; cf. also
Kierkegaard, Concept of Irony p. 130, note). Furthermore, his soul,
disenchanted with ambition, chooses the perfectly private (620c6), the
most un-Socratic life.
12. E.g., Plutarch, Against Colotes, 1126c-d.
13. Cf. Hippolytus's wish that human generation could be circumvented
and children's seed could be temple treasure to be bought for "gold,
silver, or a weight of brass" (Euripides, Hippolytus 621).
14. The old saying is used by Socrates in a similar way in the Apology
(34d5). He too, he says, quoting Homer, has a family and is not sprung
"from oak or rock," that is, he too has a private genesis. The original
meaning of the phrase, which occurs in the Odyssey (XIX, 163), was
evidently no longer known to the scholiast on 544d8.
15. See Adams op. cit. (supra, N. I) I, pp. 345 ff.
16. See F. M. Cornford, Plato's Cosmology (London 1937), pp. 4-5. For
a totally different point of view and concomitantly different years for
the dramatic date of the Republic, see A. E. Taylor, A Commentary
on Plato's Timaeus (Oxford 1928), pp. 15-16, 45.
17. A similar case is found in Xenophon's Cyropaedia and is expressed
in the apparent lack of a niatch between the title, which seems to promise an account of Cyrus's upbringing by the Persians (!, ii, 2), and
the content, which turns out to be instead the education Cyrus gave
the Persians. This is because Cyrus, whose name means the "Lord,"
is at once the beneficiary and the source of Persian customs;
Cyropaedia therefore means "The Lord's Education" both in the objective and the subjective sense of the genitive.
18. Cratinus, from a lost play, The Thracian Women. The cult of Bendis
evidently was good for comedy; it seems to have been the subject of
Aristophanes' lost Lemnian Women.
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MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
19. SeeR. Hack forth, Plato's Phaedrus, Library of Liberal Arts (New York
1952), p. 118. Plato founded a shrine to the Muses in the Academy
(Diogenes Laertius IV, I; cf. III, 25).
20. An otherwise silly ancient story to the effect that the whole Republic
was stolen from the writings of Protagoras, in Diels, Fragmente der
Vorsokratiker (Berlin 1954) II, p. 265, seems at least to indicate that
on matters political there were points of apparent similarity, probably
equally shocking to sober citizens, between Socrates and the sophist.
21. Glaucon's Gyges story is a witty transformation of Herodotus's version. In the latter, what is right and lawful is for every man to keep
private things private or "to scan his own" (I, 8, 16); this barbarian
counterpart of justice, a sense of shame, is tacitly transformed into
the definition of what is just in Greek cities, namely "to do one's own,"
i.e., to find one's political place. Furthermore the main fact about Gyges'
crime in Herodotus, that he is forced to do injustice precisely because
he is seen in the act imposed on him by the king, is inverted in Glaucon's
story, where by reason of the invisibility afforded by his ring Gyges
becomes a criminal voluntarily and with impunity.
22. Note that in this context Socrates first acknowledges the natural world
as the setting and source of human nature. The character of peoples
is, as in Herodotean ethnology, dependent on the clime under which
they live: Thracians, Scythians, and northerners in general are lovers
of honor, Phoenicians and Egyptians are lovers of money, and the
Hellenes in the middle are lovers of knowledge (435e; cf. Timaeus 24c;
Epinomis 987d). Even the geographic place of philosophy is the center.
23. See Adams op. cit (supra, N. I) I, p. 144, note on 435b).
24. See Charmides 164d5 for Critias's version of the Delphic background
of this saying.
25. See J. Klein, A Commentary on Plato's Meno (Chapel Hill1965), pp.
112-15.
26. See Meno SOc, The Meno of Plato, ed. E. S. Thompson (Cambridge
1961), p. 112.
27. Throughout the dialogue Socrates' reiteration of themes, such as the
"oft-told" tale of the one and the many, as well as the recapitulations
he often elicits from Glaucon, have the effect of making Glaucon
"recollect" (e.g., 507a7, 522bl, 544b4) from time to time the springs
and the course of the argument. This is, obviously, not genuine Socratic
recollection (see above, IV E 4d) but an exercise of that power of
memory which philosophers must possess as part of their natural endowment (535cl). Such memory-recollection (anamnesis) was especially
cultivated by the Pythagoreans: "A Pythagorean man does not arise
�BRANN
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
99
from his bed before he has recollected what happened yesterday. And
he performs the recollections in this way. He tries to recover by means
of the dianoia what he first said or heard ... " (Iamblichus, Life of
Pythagoras 163, 20). The passage goes on to describe the discipline
of completely recalling the logoi and erga of the previous day, a
discipline that was considered part of the training needed for the acquisition of knowledge. It is obviously a technique Socrates himself
had mastered.
The most important ancient reports of the "Unwritten Teachings" are
conveniently collected in K. Gaiser, Platons ungeschriebene Lehre
(Stuttgart 1963), pp. 445 ff. See also J. N. Findlay, Plato, the Written
and Unwritten Doctrines (New York 1974).
Klein, op. cit. (supra, N. 25), pp. 115-25, "The Dianoetic Extension
of Eikasia ."
Klein, ibid. 119 and note 27, where the proof according to Euclid V
of the equality of the middle segments is given.
Cf. Klein, ibid. pp. 191-99 on the "solidity" of the soul in the dialogues.
For further sources on the "dimensional soul" see Gaiser, op. cit. (supra,
N. 28), pp. 545 ff.
See 0. 1beplitz, "Mathematik und Ideenlehre bei Platon," Zur
Geschichte der griechischen Mathematik (Darmstadt 1965), p. 59.
The objects on the Divided Line are only twice referred to in terms
of mimesis (510b4 and 532a2, cf. 507c6).
In the Philebus, the Good as a human good comes to Socrates as a
dream-like reminiscence of a "third thing," other than and above both
pleasure and human wisdom (20b8), i.e., it is a "one" above the other
"two." It has three characteristics: It is "perfect," "adequate," and
"choiceworthy" (20d); its power, again, cannot be "caught" in one idea
but must be captured in three: beauty, symmetry, and truth (65al); their
relation is not unlike that of the three effects of the power of the Good,
namely world, knowledge, and being, in the Republic. Again Eudemus
(Wehrli, Fr. 31; cited by Gaiser, op. cit. p. 480, note) says that Plato
distinguished three ways the Good functions: as productive, as end,
and as exemplary cause; these again correspond roughly to the Good
as father, as end of learning, and as pattern of being. The whole complex is caught in a German word-play: the Good is the "U rsprung,"
that is, the "Ur-sache" of all"Sachen" and their "Sachheit" (M. Heidegger, Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit [Bern 1954], p. 40).
Gaiser, op. cit. (supra, N. 28), p. 531; see F. Cornford, Plato and
Parmenides (New York 1957), pp. 3-11 for further references. For one
playful allusion to the Indefinite Dyad in the Platonic dialogues
�100
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
themselves see J. Klein, "A Note on Plato's Parmenides," in Lectures
and Essays, ed. R. Williamson and E. Zuckerman (Annapolis 1985),
pp. 285-88.
Further terms used of the Dyad in Metaphysics 989bi9 ff.: material,
the great and small, similar to the female, responsible for evil.
For Being as the eidetic 1\vo, see J. Klein, Greek Mathematical
Thought and the Origin of Algebra, trans. E. Brann (Cambridge 1968),
p. 93.
The dialectical name of this or of any other eidetic number is not
given explicitly in any ancient source. On the Good as the "First" and
"the source which is the whole" see Klein, Meno, p. 123 and n. 39.
The homoia and associated terms like paradeigma and analogia, reduced however to mere principles of classification, figure largely in
the work of Speusippus, Plato's successor in the Academy; see PaulyWissowa, III, A. 2, pp. 1641-58. Themistius (Gaiser, op. cit., p. 535)
says that Plato spoke of methexis in the Timaeus but called participation homoiosis in the Agrapha Dogmata.
Cf. Adams op. cit. II, pp. 441, 470 ff.
There is also a curious story about an artificial Hades that Pythagoras
is said to have built- a little chamber under the earth into which he
disappeared for a long time and then ascended, announcing that he
had dwelt in Hades (Diogenes Laertius VIII, 41).
Iamblichus, Life of Pythagoras 165, 12; see Note 27.
See Jowett, op. cit. III, p. 326.
Adams, op. cit. II, pp. 163 ff.
Diogenes Laertius remarks on Plato's special use of the word phaulos,
pointing out that he uses it in the two senses of "simple, honest" and
"bad" (III, 63). Actually, of course, Socrates often uses it ironically
to mean "the great thing that everyone else overlooks."
43. The ancient texts are collected in Gaiser, op. cit., pp. 478-508. The
difficulties in using these sources to reconstruct the A graph a Dogmata
are (I) that they often mention Plato and the Pythagoreans indiscriminately; the longest account (Sextus Empiricus, Against the
Mathematicians X, 248 ff.) even attributes the "dimensional" teaching
to the Pythagoreans alone; (2) that they rarely tell by whom, to whom,
or with what pedagogical purpose such a scheme was proposed.
Aristotle, for instance, refers to the Timaeus in this context (On the
Soul404bl6), which should give one pause-the account there is, after
all, proposed as a myth (29d2). Nor can the frequent references in the
ancient literature to On the Good help here, since no one knows whether
that was a public lecture or a series of lectures or a kind of seminar.
�BRANN
101
In other words, it is not possible to say what Plato himself thought
of "dimensional generation," whether he approved it only for certain
pedagogical purposes or became himself a thoroughgoing Pythagorean.
In any case, since we know that the dialogues often play on certain
differences between the author himself and Socrates, it would, even
if Plato's opinion were well known, still be necessary to investigate
Socrates' understanding of the Pythagorean order within the dialogue
itself.
The locus classicus for such a cosmogenic order is the Epinomis,
a dialogue said to have been tacked on to the Laws by Philip of Opus
(Diogenes Laertius III, 37). Its purpose was to expound that
astronomical theology which was to be the wisdom of the "midnight
council," the rulers of the non-philosophical city of the Laws. Here
the cosmos arises from a continual doubling of the unit, which produces a series of terms, 1:2:4:8, such that each term duplicates the ratio
that the previous term has to the unit. These duplicating logoi express
the relations of the dimensions of the cosmos, from the dimensionless
one, through that doubling of the point which gives rise to the line,
up to the solid that is the cube of the "linear" number two, i.e., eight
(990e ff.). The duplication is to be understood as the effect of the dyadic
arche.
44. Plutarch, in his third Platonic Query (IOOlc ff.), in which he discusses
the (undecidable) qiiestioii which segment of the Divided Line, the uppermost or the lowest, ought to be the longest, attempts to conflate
the opinion that "the dianoia is as nous among the mathematicals,
which are as noeta appearing in mirrors" with the genetic dimensional
theory. The difficulties into which this leads him are instructive. He
first makes Plato induce the mathematical cosmos from the noetic principles: "He leads the noesis concerned with the eide out of its abstraction and separation from body, going down in the order of mathematics
... "; next we reduce that cosmos by abstracting its dimensions until
"we will be among the noetic ideas themselves"; and finally, the sensible world is deduced from these by reading the realms of the Divided
Line roughly downward, as stages of dimensional growth. In this account it is entirely unclear in what way the noeta are the principles
of mathematics on the one hand, and of the sensible world on the other,
and whether the production of mathematicals is the work of human
noesis or of the noeta as sources.
45. A centered sphere (as opposed to Parmenides' partless sphere) seems
at least to convey more of the expressible characteristics of the Whole
than the usual pyramid (cf. Sophist 244e). The center, which in our
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MUSIC OF THE REPUBLIC
diagram marks the end of the dialectic ascent, is, according to Aristotle (Physics 265b4), at once the arche, the meson, and the telos of a
sphere, so that, in a manner of speaking, it encompasses the periphery.
This corresponds to the fact that Glaucon's assumption, that the top
of the dialectic ascent is "a rest . . . and an end" (532e3), is quite
wrong- there stiJJ must follow a syllogismos that takes the argument
back again to the periphery, where the power of the center as cause,
aitia, is first fully apprehended (516b9; this noetic syllogismos, which
is preceded by an ascent, e.g., Statesman 267a4, is not to be confused
with the dianoetic deduction, e.g., Republic 510b5). It is, of course,
convenient that all three of Aristotle's terms are also terms used of
the Good. The radial lines may then represent the indefinite dyadic
source, which is doubly delimited by the center and its periphery to
produce the actual finite sphere of Being. But extended attention to
such diagrams always implies that thought has ceased.
46. See Proclus, Commentary on the First Book of Euclid's Elements, ed.
Ver Becke (Paris 1948), pp. 58-62; on the motto over Plato's
"mouseion": "Let no one unversed in geometry enter here," see Elias,
Commentary on the Categories, Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca
(Berlin 1900) Vol. XVIII, Pt. I, pp. Il8, 13 ff.
Socrates' resistance to the advanced and "technical" study of
mathematics is attested also by the Memorabilia (IV, vii). Xenophon
represents him as advocating exactly the kind of mathematics opposite
to that which he repeatedly insists on in the Republic, namely useful
and applied mathematics, such as earth measurement. But when Plato
and Xenophon differ in a deliberately diametrical way there is usually
a vital point of agreement; here it is Socrates' deep objection to
mathematics as an independent study pursued for its own sake by
private experts, a study that would fit into the "doxastic" rather than
the "noetic" segments of the Divided Line. The very mental virtues
required and acquired by such studies, keenness and sharpness
(Republic 526b, 535b5), are regarded by him with a certain suspicion
because they tend to live in a little soul (519a), and his parodies of
professional talk (527a, 531b) are worthy of a "large-thinking" Swiftean Laputa.
47. See Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought Pt. I, 6.
48. Of course, mathematical studies provide practice not only in what might
be called "cosmic synopsis" but also in that preliminary "synagogif"
or collection (Phaedrus 266b4) which consists in "seeing together and
bringing under one idea things scattered everywhere" (265d3), i.e., in
collecting particulars into one eidos.
�BRANN
49.
50.
51.
52.
103
The necessity of "cosmic synopsis" was emphasized by Speusippus, in whose opinion "it is impossible for anyone to define any of
the things that are unless he knows all the things that are" (P. Lang,
De Speusippi Academici Scrip/is, Fr. 31b.)
Sources in Gaiser, op. cit. (supra, N. 28), pp. 461-67. Aristotle
(Nicomachean Ethics !095a32) furnishes the general background by
noting that Plato was concerned with the direction that the road of
inquiry ought to take, whether toward or away from principles.
See The Thirteen Books of Euclid's Elements, ed. Heath (New York
1956) I, pp. 136-41.
See Klein, Meno, (supra, N. 25), pp. 82-87.
For the Simplicius passage see Gaiser, op. cit. (supra, N. 28), p. 464;
for the ·"pattern cause," p. 480, note; for Theophrastus's comment on
53.
54.
55.
56.
the absence of a deduction of the visible world, pp. 493-94.
See Euclid's Elements (Heath, supra N. 50) III, I ff., p. 438.
See T. L. Heath, A Manual of Greek Mathematics (New York 1963),
pp. 154-55.
Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought Pt. I, 7 C.
Pauly-Wissowa, Suppl. III, p. 1007.
�Eidos and Agathon
in Plato's Republic
Robert B. Williamson
This essay is in two parts. In the first I argue that the "forms" (eide,
ideal) discussed by Socrates in the Republic begin to become intelligible
to us if we think of them as wholes of a certain kind. In so describing
them, l point to several fundamental misconceptions into which the beginning student of Plato may be led and which are sometimes found in
scholarly writings. In the second part I apply the results of the first part
toward an understanding of what is said of the "good" (agathon) in the
images of the sun, the line, and the cave of Books VI and VII.
I. The Objects of Philosophy
After Socrates' long "digression" on war in Book V of the Republic,
Glaucon protests that the company will not release him from his obligation to solve the problem of the possibility of founding in deed the just
city that had been founded earlier in speech (Books II-IV). Socrates reluctantly agrees to ride the third and greate>t "wave of paradox," after warning that "if we do discover what sort of thing (hoion) justice is," we may
find that justice and "the completely just man" are "patterns" (paradeigmata-472c4, d5, 9) which no man or city could perfectly "come to
be" (genesthai- d7). Patterns that are discovered only in speech may,
nonetheless, be those things to which we must first look exclusively
(apob/epontes-c?) if we are to discern how the men and the cities around
us, which imperfectly partake of them, stand in regard to happiness or
its opposite. Is it not the case, Socrates asks, "that it is the nature of acting
(praxis) to attain to less of truth (aletheia) than speaking (lexis)?"
105
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EIDOS AND AGATHON
(472b-473a)'. Whereas Glaucon assumes a perfect familiarity with what
justice and' the just city are (extending even to things Socrates has not
mentioned- cf. 47lc4-e5) and asks only after its possibility, Socrates suggests that the pursuit of the question of possibility may require the reopening of the question "What is justice?" and that the answers to both questions may reveal a disproportion between acting and speaking which is not
simply a matter of fact but is grounded in the "nature" of acting and speaking. This suggestion is fortified by Socrates' initial statement of the third
paradox: The "least change" that would bring any of the existing cities into the form of government hitherto described as just would be that "either
the philosophers rule as kings in the cities or those who are now called
kings and potentates philosophize genuinely and adequately" (473b4-d3).
Philosophers can be philosophers whether or not they are kings; but kings
and men of power, if they are to be such in more than name, must
philosophize (cf. Gorgias 466b4 ff.). The highest activity within the city
will be seen to depend on another activity which does not in turn depend
on it.
Before Socrates can explain his paradox, he must make clear to Glaucon
and the others who the philosophers are. As the name itself says, they are
"lovers of wisdom." The word philosophos expresses no qualification: They
are not lovers of one kind of wisdom as opposed to another- for example,
of Homeric wisdom or arithmetical wisdom. Like all true lovers, they yearn
for all of what they love (474b3-cll), all of that eidos''' (475b5). Glaucon
protests that the title "philosopher" will thereby extend even to the "lovers
of sights and sounds," the philotheamones and phi/ekooi, who travel to
the festivals eager for any innovation and are loath to engage in serious
discussion (dl-el). The "lovers of sights" may include not only the idle spectator but the connoisseur, who perceives that there is more than one way
to write a good tragedy and who resists the attempt to reduce those ways
to a univocal definition of tragedy.' Socrates replies with an argument that
is of decisive importance for the remainder of the dialogue and yet of exasperating brevity: "Since noble (kalon) is opposite to base, they are two."Of course."- "Then since they are two, is not each also one?"- "That
also." -"And the same argument (logos) holds for just and unjust, good
and bad, and all eide: Each is itself one, but by community (koinonia)
with activities (praxeis) and bodies and one another each shows forth itself
as a multitude of appearances (phantazomena pol/a)" (475e9-476a7; cf.
402c2-d2). The philosophers are set apart from the "lovers of sights, the
lovers of arts, and the 'practical men'" in that the latter's concern is with
the many things that are noble, just, or good (ta kala, etc.), whereas the
former are concerned with "the noble itself" (auto to kalon) or "nobleness
itself' (auto kallos), etc., each of which is one (476a9-cl).
�WILLIAMSON
107
The argument as it stands seems purely sophistical: Because justice and
injustice are opposed they are two, and because they are two each is one.
Socrates is not above employing sophistries- the Dialogues abound in
them- but his sophistries differ from those of the sophists proper in that
they are psychagogic, that they suggest the possibility of a redirection of
our thinking. In the rest of this section I shall outline what I take to be
the line of thought suggested by Socrates' argument.
When in our ordinary dealings with men and actions we judge them
to be just or unjust, good or bad, noble or base, we refer to a variety of
more or less clearly articulated criteria. Some of these are developed and
examined in Book I: Justice is repaying one's debts, helping one's friends,
rendering what is due, obeying the laws, etc. And there are more: The
distribution of property may be determined justly by need, desert, ability
to use well, prior possession, the wishes of the previous owner, a tendency
to contribute to the common good, existing legal enactments, etc. Yet there
are many practical cases, pragmata,' in which the application of one or
more criteria excludes the application of others. Xenophon tells of how
the young Cyrus was assigned by his teachers to judge a case between two
boys; the larger boy had found the smaller boy wearing a coat too large
for him, had taken it from him by force, and had given him his own coat,
which had been too small for the larger boy but fitted its new owner perfectly (Cyropaedia I, iii, 16-17). The decision and its aftermath need not
concern us here. The case could be decided in only one of two ways; yet
considerations (of what is appropriate, of voluntary exchange, of the laws,
etc.) could be adduced in support of either alternative. One might, of course,
deny the validity of all but one or a few of the criteria of just decision;
however, the unity of justice that Socrates urges against the "lovers of sights"
is not of that kind.' Rather, it is because either decision will satisfy some
criteria and violate others that we can say of either that it is both just and
unjust. This, however, borders on contradiction, and we must, as Socrates
argued earlier (436b8 f.), distinguish between the respects in which a single
pragma is just or unjust. Pragmata of the sort described by Xenophon
are just in one respect and unjust in another respect and therefore neither
wholly just nor wholly unjust. The distinction, however, is effected not
merely through our concern with the praxis (the actual assigning of the
coats) but through our thoughtful comparing of the criteria of judgment
themselves. That it is just to render to each what is appropriate to his nature
is not a principle that is true for some pragmata and false for others; it
is true for all relevant pragmata, though the pragmata may in some cases
demand the violation of that principle because of the impossiblity of
following both it and some other more pertinent principle.' Our way of
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EIDOS AND AGATHON
calling a pragma both just and unjust presupposes a permanent opposition between the criteria of just and unjust.
Several more steps are wanting before we can speak of the unity of
justice as opposed to the plurality of dikaia, of just things. First, it is a
premise of Socrates' argument that all relevant pragmata are just in some
respects and unjust in others (479a-d). There cannot be a pragma that
satisfies all criteria of justice. If there were, our judgments of pragmata
that are neither wholly just nor wholly unjust could be referred to it as
a standard. But if this premise in its general form is almost baldly asserted
by Socrates in the course of the argument at 479a-d, it is examined
throughout most of the Republic in terms of the specific question, How
do the possible forms of justice and injustice make their appearance in
the succession of cities that come into being in speech and in the corresponding types of human soul? Do Socrates and the brothers in fact succeed in constructing a city and e<;lucating a class of rulers who fully realize
"what justice is"? I think the answer, intended by Plato and his Socrates
alike, is "no." Here I can give only an outline of my reasons for saying this:'
I. The just man is provisionally characterized as one who "minds
his own business" or does those things that are his own (and
not another's), ta hautou prattein (433a ff.). One's own business
is here understood in terms of the art (technif) to which his
unature" is best suited; hence, each man is to practice the one
art that is his own and to abstain from all other arts. This is
possible, however, only if his art is supported by other arts practiced by other men, that is, only if he is a member of a community of artisans. The justice of one man thus becomes the
justice of the citizen, which is essentially partial, determining
him as part of the whole community of artisans. Thus the just
city, in which each man minds his own business, is the just
pragma within which the justices of the citizens find their appropriate places.
II. The just city, however, is a specious whole. First, though each
art requires the support of other arts and hence of a city, it requires the city only in general. The arts do not of themselves
guarantee that particular attachment to "this" city which is
patriotism. This deficiency is most pronounced in the warriors'
art, which presupposes a distinction between friends md enemies
which it cannot of itself draw but which must be supplied by
an education based on stories (mythoz) that are only partly true.
Second, the city is a whole consisting of potential wholes,
the individual citizens (cf. the analogy between the city and the
�WILLIAMSON
109
soul, 434d ff., and the alternative offered to Adeimantus of each
man performing all the necessary activities for himself369e6-370a4). The cohesiveness of the city requires that each
citizen's nature be understood as radically partial. This is accomplished through the identification of nature with aptitude
for a particular art (see esp. 454c7 -d6), an identification that
is in some cases forced and results in the fragmentation or "chopping up" of human nature (cf. 394e8-395b6 and Symposium
223d3-6). Socrates' "well-bred lie" (414b8 ff.) is designed to lend
plausibility to the city's claim to wholeness: The natures of the
citizens are assimilated to their arts (the artisans and their instruments share a common birth-414d5-el), and both nature
and art are generated in the native soil (chi5ra) of the city. Being
a specious whole, the just city is at best an image (eidolon) of
the justice that Socrates now discovers in the soul of the just
man (443c4 f.). ·
III. The formula ta hautou prattein, "performing its proper activities," now applies to each of the three parts of the just soul,
the reckoning (logistikon) part ruling over the appetites
(epithymim) through the assistance of the spirited part (thymos).
The harmony so attained may often depend on the constraining
. force exercised by the spirited part over the appetites, which are
not of themselves disposed toward measure (439d-442b). Further, the just soul described in Book IV needs the external supports of the just city, for it is a justice founded merely on opinion and habit (see esp. 619b7-d5 and 522a2-5; political wisdom
[sophia] is identified in Book IV with good counsel [eubou/ia]428b6-8). If justice is to stand fast (cf. Meno 97d4-98a8), it must
be founded on knowledge. However, knowledge is not a mere
addendum to opinion, leaving its form and content unaltered,
as I shall argue in the rest of this essay. Indeed, it is doubtful
whether the account given in Book IV of the tri-eidetic soul is
at all adequate for the understanding of philosophic knowledge,
which requires a turnabout (periagi5ge) of "the whole soul"
(508c4-9; cf. 6llel-612a6).
IV. The activity of the philosopher-sage, founded on knowledge and
free from inner constraint, now appears to be the wholly just ·
pragma. In the just city, however, the philosophers must be constrained to rule, that is, to do what is not their own business.
Socrates can justify this "injustice" against the best part of the
city only by reminding Glaucon that the philosopher-sages owe
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E/008 AND AGATHON
the city a debt for their education and indeed for thek very
generation (519c8-520el). At the metaphysical peak of theRepublic Socrates is obliged to defend a breach of the principle
of "doing one's own business" by an appeal to the obligation
to pay one's debts- to the justice of Cephalus! The city's justice
(understood as "doing one's own business") is purchased only
with a breach of that same justice in the name of another standard of justice (paying one's debts). The two standards are not
reconciled in practice.
The criteria that are separated by our "thinking them through" (dianoia)
are of a different kind than the pragmata that are referred to them; they
are not analogous to the standard meter, which is like the things of which
it is a measure: an extended body.
A second step is missing, however. Granted that no pragma can be both
just and unjust in the same respect and that from this it follows that justice
and injustice are opposite and separable by our thinking them through,
are we entitled to infer that justice and injustice are each one? May not
the words "justice" and "injustice" refer to two mutually exclusive sets of
criteria, neither of which sets can be reduced to a single common defining
element? But in the very posing of this question we betray assumptions
that are foreign to Plato and are inherited from Aristotle. If Plato thought
of the relation of a superior eidos to the eide beneath it in terms of the
Aristotelian relation between a comparatively undetermined genos (kind)
and the eidethat are determinate actualizations of it, then the chorismos
(separation) thesis leads to insuperable difficulties, as Aristotle argued':
If the superordinate genos is one and separate from its subordinate eidif,
how can it be predicated of the latter in a way that does not destroy its
unity (cf. Philebus !Sa-b)? Further, must not the eideMan, Dog, Horse,
contain each within itself the characteristic of Animal, thus rendering the
superordinate eidos Animal ontologica!Iy and logically superfluous? And,
if the eidos Man includes characteristics of Biped and Animal, how can
Plato insist on the separateness of the eide Biped and Animal, and at the
same time insist on the unity of the eidos Man (Met. H, 6, 1045a14-22)?
These difficulties and more are adduced by Aristotle against the two-fold
claim of separateness and unity. But Aristotle's aporiai themselves depend
on certain assumptions about the Platonic eide: that they are predicated
of one another according to the scheme of genus, species, and differentia;
that the unity of an eidos should exclude any complexity; and that the eide
are irreme\liably separated from one another. Following these assumptions,
we are easily led to conceive of the superordinate eidos as a sort of template
that cannot be put to use, for the eide under it must either always of
themselves or never bear its shape.'
�WILLIAMSON
111
I suggest that the unity of the eidos of justice is not to be expressed
through some formulaic "definition" of justice. Many of the Dialogues,
it is true, begin with what seems a search after a univocal formula that
will serve as an answer to the question ti esti x (What is x?); but those
dialogues relentlessly frustrate that search by the repeated discoveries that
the word "x" is used in a variety of ways. Yet if the search for an answer
to the ti esti question is to make sense at all, if "serious discussion" (to
dia/egestha~· cf. Parmenides !35b-c) is to be possible at all, the "lovers
of sights" must be wrong in their claim that any attempt to understand
any subject matter must dissipate itself into a multiplicity of observations,
however trenchant. Serious discussion and hence the Dialogues themselves
are grounded in the supposition that in matters of our greatest legitimate
concern there is a unity of meaning that underlies the ambiguities of ordinary speech and judgment. Only thus can the Socratic "flight" from the
observation of things to the examination of spoken accounts (/og01) be
justified (cf. Phaedo 99c6-e6). The accidental dramatic structure of the
Platonic dialogue presupposes as the ground of its validity a systematic"
interconnection of the objects of discourse and a pure dialectic that consists, not in a static "gaze" that takes in an utterly simple object, but in
a motion from one of its objects to another. This motion of pure dialectic,
described in Books Vi and VII of the Republic, is associated in the "later
dialogues" and perhaps in the Republic (cf. 454a) with a method of division (diairesis). What seems to be required of the superordinate eide (as
I shall further argue in the next section) is neither a univocal nor an
analogical unity, but a structured unity that includes the subordinate eide
in their systematic interrelations. The question .li esti dtkaiosyne (What
is justice?) must receive its answer, not in a defining formula such as "doing the things that are one's own" (ta hautou prattein), but in a complete
account that encompasses all the valid meanings of justice and vindicates
the presupposition that they are coherently interrelated. (It should be
stressed that the Republic does not provide such a complete account and
thus does not reveal the grounds or lack of grounds for its own guiding
supposition.)
Is there any basis for this presupposition in our ordinary dealings with
issues of justice and injustice? That there is is suggested (but by no means
conclusively) by the way in which we confront situations analogous to that
of the two boys and the coats. In such cases we are unable to apply one
criterion without violating another; we look for the "more just" or "less
just" alternative. In doing so we rank the various relevant criteria, assigning a higher status to one over another. To be sure, our decisions may often
enough be arrived at on the basis of considerations irrelevant to the question of justice and injustice, but by and large each of us lives in accord-
�112
EIDOS AND AGATHON
ance with a hierarchical ranking of criteria: We tend to prefer certain kinds
of legitimate claims over others. These rankings differ from person to person and society to society both in the criteria admitted and in the comparative ranks to which they are assigned. The selection of criteria and
the reasons for ranking them are in almost all (if not all) cases partial.
Such a partial hierarchy of criteria, when it is developed explicitly and
publicly, might well be called an "ideology." Particularly in the past two
centuries, the more theoretically inclined of the "lovers of sights" have
argued that the "concept" of justice vanishes into a multiplicity of ideologies
or, on a less articulate level, "cultures." However, the Dialogues show how
hierarchies of criteria can be put to the test in various ways. Cephalus,
the metic and financier, instinctively gives priority to the virtue of honesty, but he can easily be shown how adherence to honestY in some cases
may require the violation of the principle that one should benefit one's
friends and how the latter is in such cases preferable to honesty. Polemarchus adopts the position that justice is helping friends and harming
enemies, but the first half of his definition becomes trivial when the attempt is made to identify it with a single activity (that of the watchmanthief), and the second half leads to the absurd result that justice is the art
of making men unjust. Thrasyrnachus's identification of the just with
authoritative convention, to nomimon, must be replaced by a notion of
a "superior" who correctly perceives his advantage. In these passages cases
are cited in which several criteria must be brought to bear and the relative
priority of these criteria must be reevaluated. (To take the example of
Cephalus, we normally help our friends- in the ordinary sense of "help"when we repay our debts to them and keep our promises to them; it is
perfectly natural that, given his character and way of life, Cephalus should
treat honesty as the comprehensive form of just dealing, but, as Socrates'
example of the homicidal madman suggests, Cephalus's ranking of criteria
is based on certain assumptions that are normally but not necessarily fulfilled.) In all three conversations, with Cephal us, Polemarchus, and (up
to 343a) Thrasymachus, the need for a reformulation and re-ranking of
criteria is based on the premise, adopted by ordinary opinion and Socratic
dialectic alike, that justice is an excellence, an arete. The complete vindication o( tha( premise, which is the unaccomplished goal set by the
Republic, would require the proof that the criteria of justice are interrelated
in a way that is essentially free of all opposition.
If the foregoing hypothesis is correct, it follows that for Socrates every
(partially) just pragma abstracts from the totality of interrelated criteria
that are "what justice is," 6 eon OtKCUOOUVT]. And if, as Socrates suggests
(596a6 f.), what holds for "just" and "justice" holds for all common names
�WILLIAMSON
113
and predicates, then a pragma "is" in the way an abstraction "is"; its being
is partial and derivative from that which properly and fully deserves the
names applied to it. Thus, to refer to the eide as "hypostatized abstractions" is to overlook that inversion of the ordinary understanding which
is essential to the "Theory of Ideas." The fact that pragmata can be described in a multitude of ways- as just, tall, three, rapid, sitting, speaking,
human, etc.- if anything, confirms rather than obviates their abstractness
for Socrates. Precisely because of its manifo)d character, a pragma can
be both just and unjust, noble and base, good and bad, etc., but none of
these wholly. Being neither wholly what it is called nor wholly not what
it is called, the pragma occupies a middle position between what in the
strict sense "is" and what simply "is not," between "being" (to on) and
"nothingness" (to medamei on) (476e6-477a8).
We misconceive the relation between pragma and eidos (for example,
between something just, dikaion ti, and the just itself, auto to dikaion)
if we assimilate it to the relation between a "particular" or "instance" and
a "universal." Here again we are tempted to Aristotelianize Plato, but the
Dialogues point in another direction. The young Socrates, when questioned
by Parmenides concerning the kinds of things he admits as eidif, approves
such things as one, many, like, unlike, just, noble, and good and confesses
to having doubts about such things as man, fire, and water; but he refuses
to accept certain "ridiculous" things such as hair, mud, and dirt as having
an eidos separate and different from the things with which we deal
(Parmenides 130b-d). Note that Socrates does not deny that the last group
have eide (that is, distinctive "looks" by which each can be recognized and
not confused with the others); he merely denies that their eide are separate
and distinct from them. The suggestion that Socrates rejects the last group
because its members are "unpleasant" or "trivial," though partially correct, is inadequate." In fact, Socrates gives an explicit reason for his rejection: "By no means . . . but these things are the very things we see"
(00/iai-L(i)~ ... uA.:\.iHaU~a 1-LBV YE ii7ttp oproi-LEV, ~ailta Ka\ ElVUl- d3 f.).
What interests us here is the positive implication of Socrates' reason: If
there is a separate eidos of something, then what that something is is not
what we see (or otherwise perceive through the senses) when we look at
it. What that thing is is its eidos, or "looks," and this "looks," according
to Socrates, is invisible (aeides) and accessible only to our thinking (dianoia,
noesis). But this is not the case with a particular or an instance, of which
we can justly predicate the eidos in question. Even of an imperfect instance
of x we can say that it is partly x. Rather, the similes of the divided line
and the cave in Books VI and VII and the account of the three ranks of
craftsmen in Book X describe the relation between eidos and pragma as
I
�114
E/008 AND AGATHON
analogous to that of a visible object and its image on a reflecting surface.
Whatever it is, a mirror-like image of a horse is not a "particular" horse
nor an "instance" of a horse.
We can perceive a mirror-image in at least two ways. (i) Most frequently
we see that it is an image of something else (that it both is and is not what
it is -cf. Sophist 240a7 -c6), although from habit we may say of the mirrorimage, "That is a horse." (ii) Less frequently, we may be "taken in" by the
mirror-image and actually take it to be a horse. Now from a Platonic point
of view, (i) is analogous to the way in which pragmata are understood according to the "Theory of Ideas"; (ii) is analogous to what Plato must have
regarded as the crucial mis-identification of common sense, which reaches
its fullest philosophical expression in Aristotle's identification of hekaston
with to ti en einai (Met. Z, 6). Suppose the mirror of our example could
be replaced by a pan-aesthetic mirror capable of reflecting images not only
of color and shape but of weight, hardness, tone, odor, etc. Then, according to (ii) we could say of the horse-image, "That horse is white," that is,
we could predicate white of it. But this is not necessarily the case with
(i): In a perfectly consistent way-perhaps the most natural way-we could
maintain that to say "That is a white horse" of a mirror-image that is
recognized as such is an elliptical way of saying "That is an image of a
white horse." (Compare "That is Abraham Lincoln" said of the image on
a Lincoln penny.) In this way of speaking, we do not mean to predicate
"white" of the image at all, or, if we do, we are guilty of mistaking the
image for its original. 12
Now, if it should turn out upon sufficient examination that all of our
perceptions are "provocative" of noesis (that is, of a thinking that looks
away from them toward that by which they can be understood to be "what
they are")-if no visible thing is what we see-then the mode of being of
a pragma is analogous to that of an image in our pan-aesthetic mirror.
Instead of referring to them as "abstractions," we may better !ikenpragmata
to reflected images, eikones, which are perspectival, which only partially
reproduce their originals. We ·may thus reserve the term "abstract" for our
perceptions and judgments that have pragmata for their objects, that is,
for our doxai. But whether it is true that all of our perceptions are provocative in this way is perhaps a question that cannot be settled by a single
argument but requires that we consider each type of perception separately."
The imperfection of pragmata resides not so much in their lack of
precision- the objects of pure mathematics are precise, but they are not
eide (see note 20 below)- as in their fragmentary character. Pragma stands
to eidos as non-self-subsistent part to permanent whole. Pragmata may
indeed appear to be wholly what we call them (for example, Cephalus can
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console himself as having lived a "just" life on the basis of honesty alone),
but Socratic examination sooner or later brings to light the contradictions
implicit in those ways of speaking and living that misidentify the part with
the whole. It is this distinction between part and whole that permits us
to speak of a "separation" (chi5rismos) of the eide from pragmata in a way
that eludes Aristotle's charge that the eide are ontologically redundant (e.g.,
Met. B, 2 997b8-l2). In the following section I shall argue that an analogous
separation occurs within the realm of intelligibility.
A final remark. I have described pragmata as images of what they seem
to be, and in so doing I have stressed the point that an image is of something
else. Nevertheless, an image cannot be completely referred to its original;
it must contain or be connected with a third thing which is not simply
referable to the original. Otherwise the image would be no image at all,
but rather apart or privative state of the original (as when we look directly
but nonetheless perspectively at a visible object or when we look at it in
near darkness- cf. 508c-d). The third thing is, of course, the medium in
or on which the image is produced, the mirror in our example. Socrates
frequently refers to media in his references to the relation of the visible
object to its reflections, that is, to the relation holding between the
analogues of the eidos and its pragmata-images." But in the Republic he
nowhere develops an explicit or non-metaphorical account of the medium
in which the pragmata-images of the eide are produced. Instead of the threefold distinction between original ( =eidos), image ( = pragma), and medium,
Book V divides all things into fa onta ( =eide= originals), ta metaxy
( =pragmata=images), and to medamei on (what in no way is). The third
class is not the medium but- nothing at all! Thus, the pragmata-images
are ontologically defined by Socrates as being nothing more than mixtures
of being and non-being. As a result they are distinguished from the eide
only in terms of what they are not; they in fact seem to be no more than
privative states of the eide. Our likening of pragmata to abstractions was
not so imprecise after all.
II. The Greatest Mathema
Just before embarking on a discussion of the education of the potential philosopher-rulers, Socrates reminds Adeimantus of his earlier warning
that their determination of "what justice, moderation, courage, and wisdom
each is" was based .on a tri-eidetic division of the soul and that this division fell short of preCision (akribeia), for which another "longer way
around" (makrotera periodos) was required (504a4-b8; cf. 435c9-d7). Now
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E/DOS AND AGATHON
that they are concerned with the education of rulers "in the most precise
sense" (akribestata), the longer way with its greater precision can no longer
be avoided entirely, though in fact it will be indicated only in outline
(hypographe-504d6). Indeed, the satisfaction with which the company had
earlier accepted the easier and shorter way, which consisted in "moulding"
(plattein) the soul through the use of mythical typoi, now appears to be
a kiud of sloth (rhaithymia) rather than something which might satisfy
them "within due measure" (metriOs). For "a measure of things such as
these which falls short in any way of what is (tou ontos) is not a measure
at all (ou pony metrios)"; "nothing incomplete (ateles) is a measure of
anything" (504bl-c5).
The longer way, if traversed in full, must lead through the mathemata
(things that can be learned and hence understood) to the "greatest
mathema, which is most fitting to the guardians." "Are not the former
things the greatest," asks Adeimantus, "or is there something yet greater
than justice and the things we have described?" (c9-d5). Greater than the
study of justice, which is itself in need of greater precision (d6-e3), is the
greatest mathema-the study ofthe "look" (idea) of the agathon (505a2).
The study of the agathon is the precondition of any accurate understanding of justice, for it is the agathon "by which just things ... become useful
and beneficial" (a3 f.). Unless we know the agathon, whatever else we know
is of no benefit (a6-b3). Yet, as Socrates will more than once insist, "we
do not know it adequately" (a5 f.; cf. 506c2 f., 517b4-7; 532d2-533a7).
We are obliged to consider Socrates' words with the utmost seriousness:
The knowledge and possession of justice (including the justice described
in Book IV) will not advance us in the slightest degree (cf. 505bl: ti pleon
einat) unless we possess and know the agathon, and we do not have this
knowledge (a6-b3). Against this most explicit admission of ignorance must
be weighed all passages that appear to settle the problems concerning justice
(cf. 506a).
Socrates' profession of ignorance is mitigated in three respects. First,
he knows what the agathon is not. The agathon is not pleasure, as the many
believe; nor is it intelligence (phronesis), as those who are more clever
believe. The former are compelled to admit that some pleasures are good
and others bad, and the latter, when asked of what the knowledge which
is the agathon is, sooner or later reveal the circularity of their reasoning
with the answer "the agathon is knowledge of the agathon" (505b5-dl).
These negative results are merely sketched here, for in the sequel Socrates
will show the impossibility of identifying the agathon with anything else:
The agathon will be revealed through a "daemonic hyberbole" to be "beyond
being" (epekeina tes ousias) and thus distinct from any of the things that
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are (509b6-c2). Second, he recognizes that the agathon is "that for the sake
of which every soul does everything it does, divining what it is [its ti einml,
while being perplexed and unable to grasp sufficiently what it is"
(505dll-e2). Whereas there are some men who are content to have only
the appearance of justice (cf. Glaucon's story of the ring of Gyges), no
one is content with anything less than the agatha that are (dS-10). Since
pretence (for example, the appearance of being just when one is not) is
for the sake of some ulterior good, the agathon, as the ultimate reason
for which anything is desired or done, is beyond all pretence, all duplicity,
and, as we shall see, all opposition. Thirdly, although the consideration
of the direct question "What is the agathon?" is too much for the present
inquiry, Socrates will speak of the "offspring of the agathon and its closest
likeness" (ekgonos te tou agathou ... kai homoiotatos ekeinoi- 506d8-e5).
This offspring is the sun, and it is an image of a special kind, for it is
an image which is fathered- that is, in part produced- by the thing of
which it is an image (508bl2). The agathon is known to Socrates at once
through an image and as the generator of an image. Thus, the simile of
the sun should account in part for its.elf, perhaps by illustrating the possibility of images in general.
'
At the basis of the simile is the "agreement" reached earlier that
although we speak of many things that are agatha or kala, we may in these
cases as in a/[ "turn about (palin au) and posit one look (idea) of each,
positing it as being one, and call it what each thing is" (507b2-8, following Adam: see his Appendix VII to Book VI). We thus suppose two "places"
containing two different kinds of "object" for the soul: the "Intelligible
Place" (topos noetos), and the "Visible Place" (topos horatos) (509d2 f.),
the one containing the ideai which can be known through pure thought
(noeisthm) but cannot be seen and the other containing the things that
can be seen (and generally the things perceived by the senses,
aistheta-507c4) but not known by pure thought (507b9 f.). Within the
latter place the various kinds of sensing (aisthesis) are correlated with their
special objects (aistheta): hearing with what is heard, etc. However, in the
case of the "power of seeing and being seen" (ten tou horan te kai horasthai
dynamin) there is need of a "third kind" (genos triton) if there is to be
an actual case of seeing and being seen. This is light, which "yokes together"
the sense of sight and the power of being seen. Of the "gods in the sky"
it is the sun that is chiefly responsible for light and thus for seeing and
being seen "in the most splendid degree" (hoti kal/ista- 508a5). Neither
vision (apsis), _nor the eye, "in which vision occurs," is the sun, but the
latter is "most like the sun" (helioeidestaton) of all the organs of sense.
Further, the sun, being the cause of vision, is seen by "this very thing" that
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EIDOS AND AGATHON
it causes (507cl-508bll). Analogously, the agathon presides over the Intelligible Place, yoking together thought (nous) and what is being thought
(ta nooumena). It "provides the things being known (Ia gignoskomena)
with their a/etheia (their "truth" or "revealedness ") and the knower with
the power [of knowing]" (el-3). It is the cause of episteme and a/etheia,
neither of which is the agathon but which are both "like the agathon"
(agathoeide- 508e3-509a5)."
In addition to providing the conditions for visibility to the visible things
(horata), the sun also provides for their coming into being (genesis) and
growth, though it is not itself genesis. Similarly, the agathon provides the
things that are known not only with their being known but also with their
"being" (on) and "beingness" (ousia), "though the agathon is not beingness
but surpassingly beyond beingness in ancestral rank (presbeia) and power"
(509b2-IO).
The multitude of interpretations of the simile of the sun are sufficient
testimony to the elusiveness if not the inaccessibility of the thought behind
Socrates' words. Yet the importance of the passage for our discussion of
the objects of philosophy requires an effort toward interpretation. Such
an effort must, I believe, depend in large measure on Platonic writings other
than the Republic.
In the second part of the dialogue named after him, Parmenides illustrates for Socrates' benefit the kind of "exercise" that must precede any
serious attempt to "define the kalon, the dikaion, and the agathon." With
the aid of young Aristoteles he examines through a series of "suppositions"
(hypotheseis) the implications of saying that "one" or "many" are or are
not (Parmenides 135c-136b). They begin by supposing that "one is" (hen
esli: or, that "there is one thing"-the expression is, perhaps deliberately,
ambiguous) and by insisting to the fullest possible degree on the meaning
of the word "one" in the expression (137c-142a). The results are forbidding. If the one is simply one (or, if there is only one thing), it cannot
be at all many (or, there cannot be many things). Thus the one cannot
admit a plurality within itself; it cannot be a whole having parts. But neither
can it be one of several beings: that is, it cannot be "other than another"
(heteron heterou-139c3-5, e3). For, if there were another than the one,
the one would be both one and other than another. It would therefore be
not one simply but two, since it would not be one by virtue of its being
other than another and it would not be other than another by virtue of
its being one. Nor can the one admit of any relation to itself, such as
sameness, likeness, or equality, for to say that something is the same as
x is different from saying that it is one. Being neither pros heteron nor
pros heauto, the one cannot admit of relation at alL Therefore, it cannot
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be "said," known, perceived, or opined, for the unperishing quality of logos
is that, sometimes dividing and at other times combining, it causes the
one and the many to become the same (Philebus 15d4-16a3). At best the
one could be named. But even here the difficulty recurs. For either the
name of the one would be distinct from the one and thus in relation to
the one, or the one and its name would be identical. In the latter case the
name would not be a name tinos, of something, not even of itself; it would
be without reference and thus not a name at all (cf. Sophist 244b6-dl3).
Finally, the one is unable to admit the relations older than itself, younger
than itself, and of the same age as itself. It is therefore not in time, and
thus it neither was, will be, nor is. The one does not partake in beingness
(ousia) and "in no way is." 16
To be, then, is to be in relation to something else (pros alia t1)- to make
a difference. Thus, the Eleatic Stranger (parting with his master,
Parmenides) can offer as a "boundary (horos) to distinguish the things
that are" the following criterion: "Everything that possesses any power
(dynamis) of any kind either to work any effect (poiein) in anything of
any nature or to be affected (pathein) even in the slightest degree by the
most paltry thing, though it be only on one occasion, really is (ontos einm)"
(Sophist 247d8-e4) .. We may recognize three elements in the Stranger's
horos: (i) that to be is to be pros alia ti; (ii) that the modes of being pros
alia ti are poiein heteron hotioun and pathein hypo tinos, that is, that they
are aspects of an active-passive relation; and (iii) that a being need not
always be actually pros allo ti but need only possess the power (which will
sooner or later be exercised) to be pros allo ti at some time and in some
way not necessarily predetermined. It follows that no being can be solely
responsible for its own being; its being depends in part on there being
something other than it with which it can at some time or other enter into
the active-passive relation. Being is twofold, and, like the number two (or,
in modern terms, "pair"), it cannot be identified with any one of its
members, though- and here the numerical analogy breaks down- it can
be said that each of its members "is" (cf. Sophist 249d-250d and Klein
GMT, pp. 86 ff.). On the other hand, to be cannot consist merely in being
pros allo ti, for each being would thereby vanish into the others to which
it was related. Each being that "really is" (ontos esti) must be something
(einai=einai tl), that is, it must be what it is in and by itse/J, auto kath'
hauto, and prior to any relation with another being into which it may actually enter (cf. Sophist 252d). Every being is at once kath' hauto and pros
allo ti. Or, to employ terms more familiar to the Sophist, the archai of
being (on) are the self-same (t'auton) and the other (thateron), which "is
always other than another (heteron heterou)" (254d ff., esp. 255cl2-e7).
I,
i
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EIDOS AND AGATHON
The kath' hauto and pros a/lo ti aspects of being are unified (that is,
are aspects of one being) when a being, A, affects or is affected by another
being, B, precisely because A is what it is. It would seem that for Plato
this can occur in two exemplary ways. Either A can be known by B to be
exactly what it is, or A can re-produce itself in another than itself- that
is, A can produce an image of itself, B. For the present, let us consider
the former way, which the Stranger discusses in his critique of the "gods"
or "friends of the ideai." Apparently these were the absolutistic proponents
of the theory of ideai (among whom the younger Plato may or may not
have belonged), who insisted on the kath' hauto aspect of ousia to the extent of denying ousid any active-passive relations (Sophist 248a-c). The
Stranger proceeds to set this right (248d-249b). If, as the "friends of the
ideai'' assert, soul knows and ousia is known, soul must in some sense act
and ousia be acted upon. In the Stranger's terms, soul possesses motion,
kinesis, and ousia is moved, kineisthai, "to the extent that it is known."
Thus, kinesis extends even to the ldeai; if the ideai were entirely unaffected
and simply kath' hauta, they would be unknown and irrelevant to everything
else (cf. Parmenides l33b-l34c), and the supposition that the ideai are
would have neither meaning nor explicative value. On the other hand, nous
is possible only if there is an enduring sameness in its objects, that is, only
if ousia partakes of rest, stasis (Sophist 249b8-c5). Thus, the exemplary
pair of beings, "that which thoroughly and perfectly is" (to pante/os
on- 248e7 f.), is knowing soul co-present (cf. pareinai- 249al) with known
ousia. Both members of this pair participate in differing ways and degrees
in the prime eidetic pair kinesis-stasis, which itself is immediately under
(or is identical with) the genos being (250a-d; cf. Klein GMT, pp. 86-91).
The foregoing considerations permit us to discover the affinity of the
two seemingly diverse statements about the agathon: that the agathon provides the noeta with aletheia and nous with the power of knowing, and
that being and ousia attach to the noeta by the agency of the agathon.
Each noeton is and is one thing (i.e., is a monas-cf. Philebus 15a-b)
because it can "at some time·and in some way" enter into the exemplary
active-passive relation, that is, the knowing-known relation. In "yoking
together" nous and the noeton, the agathon is the source of their (copresent) being. Unlike light, which is a "kind" distinct from the visible objects, aletheia is a property of the noeton. The kath' hauto and pros alto
ti aspects of the being of the noeton are united in its capacity to stand
revealed11 to nous.
The agathon is accordingly the responsible source for the unification
of the two aspects of being and thus of the being of all ontic pairs. Indeed, it would seem that in his oral teachings Plato identified the agathon
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with ''the One," which, along with the "undetermined Dyad," is the ultimate
principle of all that is." It is through participation in the One that every
unit is one and every multiplicity of units is yoked together as a single determinate pair, triad, tetrad, etc. As the source of the unity of all antic pairs,
the agathon-One is itself not a being but "beyond ousia." Or, what amounts
to the same, the agathon-One is the exemplary source of all communities
(koiniiniaz) of relata without being itself essentially related to anything else
(i.e., without itself being pros al/o ll)."
There is, however, a further effect for which the agathon is responsible.
The "offspring" and "likeness" of the agathon is the sun. And since the
sun is responsible for the genesis of visible things, the agathon may be
said to be the "grandfather" of all that exists (or, better, "occurs") within
the Visible Place. But the efficacy of the agathon is here diminished in
two ways. First, the grandfather is a necessary but not sufficient source
of his grandchildren; there must be a separate act of generation on the
part of the son-father. Second, whereas the a/etheia and ousia with which
the agathon provides the noeta are interdependent, the same is not the case
for the visibility and genesis that the visible things receive from the sun.
Earlier Socrates observed that the visible things could have color in them
(and hence occur) without the sun's light, which caused them to become
seen objects (507dll-e5; cf. Note 15). Later, Socrates qualified this by
assigning to the sun the additional office of providing the visible things
with "genesis, growth, and nurture" (509b3 f.). Nevertheless, it seems that
the genesis of the visible things is independent of their being seen, although
their visibility is dependent on their genesis and both are dependent on
the sun. This independence of genesis, however, should not be interpreted
as a mark of its excellence. For genesis is not pros aisthesin dynamei in
the way that ousia is pros noun dynamei, because genesis is already pros
al/o ti. The mode of being of the visible thing is that of an image, which
is always an image of something else, i.e., of what is. The visible thing is,
as I argued in the previous section, devoid of any content, any determinations, that can be called strictly its own. Everything it is is derivative; its
being is that of an other. Thus, it has only one of the aspects of being:
It is pros alios ti without being kath' hauto. Because of this the things in
the Visible Place (wherein exist all cities, including the just city) can be
overlooked, mistaken, and misrepresented; and it is because of this that
they are objects of doxa, which can be either true or false, and of lies,
whether well- or ill-conceived.
The diminutions in the efficacy of the agathon can be further explained
by reference to the similes of the line and the cave. Socrates responds to
Glaucon's request to fill in his account of the two "Places" by asking him
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EIDOS AND AGATHON
to consider a line divided into two unequal parts, which are in turn divided
into sub-parts bearing the same ratio to each other as do the initial parts
(509c-d). The line is first employed as a representation of things seen
(horomena) and thought (nooumena) as they are related in degrees of clarity
(sapheneia) and obscurity (asapheia) (509d8 f.). Subsequently the interpretation splits into two corresponding sides: the things that can be seen
or thought (ta eph' hois, ta noeta-511e2, c6, d2) and the corresponding
"pathemata in the soul" (d7), of which the former are graded according
to their comparative a/etheia and the latter according to their comparative
clarity (e2 f.). (The terms employed shift in the course of Socrates' discussion; for simplicity I have chosen, more or less arbitrarily, a stable set of
terms from among them, capitalizing the names of the major divisions.)
The upper main section of the line represents the Intelligible Place, comprising the Noeta ( =gnosta) on the side of objects and Noesis ( = episteme)
on the side of the affections (pathemata) of the soul.. The lower part,
representing the Visible Place, similarly comprises the Doxasta ( =horata)
and Doxa. The lowest sub-section contains what are, in our ordinary way
of regarding things, images (eikones), for example, "shadows, and then
reflections (phantasmata) in water and on dense, smooth, and bright surfaces" (509el-5!0a3); the sub-section above it is composed of the things
of which the things of the lower sub-section are images (animals, plants,
artifacts, etc.). On the side of the pathemata of the soul the lower subsection corresponds to eikasia, thepathema of the soul when it recognizes
a (visible) image as an image and refers it to its (visible) original; the upper sub-section corresponds to pistis, the trust we ordinarily place in the
visible objects around us, believing that they are exactly what they seem
to be (5!0a5 f., 51lel; cf. KleinMeno, pp. 112-14). Over this twofold region
of Doxasta presides the sun, which, as the simile of the cave makes explicit, casts the variegated shadows and reflections that fill the lowest sub"
section (509d; 5!4b). It is the sun that, along with the surfaces on which
the shadows and reflections appear, is the cause of there being a sub-division
of the lower part of the line.
The agathon presides over the Intelligible Place, which is sub-divided
analogously to the lower part and the whole. The higher and lower subsections are referred, on the part of the soul, to noesis and dianoia respectively. The activity of dianoia characterizes the practice of the geometer,
the arithmetician, and indeed the practitioners of all genuine arts (technaz)
that deal with a special subject matter and call into play the faculties of
calculation and measuring (cf. 602c ff.). Here the "originals" of the lower
section are employed as images of objects within the Intelligible Place"the odd and the even," "the square itself," etc.-that are the proper ob-
'.
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jects of dianoetic concern (510cl-51la2). These latter are "posited" as the
"very foundational suppositions" (hypotheseis auta- 510c6) of the arts,
requiring no further explanation (logos), and serving as the unquestioned
beginnings for the downward (cf. 51la5 f.) progress ofthought toward "conclusions" (epi teleuten-510b6). Contrary to this, thought may make a
radical "turnabout" (periagoge-518c8-9, d4; 521c6) and, treating the
spurious archai of the special sciences as literally "hypo-theseis" (underpinnings, footings), ascend from them by means of dialectic to what is
anypotheton (supposition-free, needing no support-510b7; 51lb6), "the
arche of the all" (he lou pantos arche-51lb7); thence thought proceeds
downwards to conclusions, this time making no use of images, but proceeding only "by means of the eide themselves, through them, to them,
and ending in eide'' (51lb3-c2; cf. 510b6-9). This activity of dialectic, which
is represented by the "psychic side" of the highest sub-division of the line
(noesis), culminates in a synopsis (537c2, 7) of the entire Intelligible Place,
but one that can. be realized only after thought has reached the arche
anypothetos-the agathon.
How is the ratio between the upper sub-sections the same as the ratio
between the lower sub-sections? Both dianoia and eikasia refer images to
originals without reflecting on the ontological status of those originals,
without asking whether those "originals" truly are (whether they truly are
originals, archm). The hypothetical begininings of dianoia are in fact
derivative from higher archai and ultimately from an arche anypothetos;
the archai (;visible "originals") of eikasia are derivative from those
mathemata to which dianoia refers them. Both dianoia and eikasia can
mistake the character of their "originals," assigning to them an independent and primary status they do not in truth possess. Further, how is the
ratio between the upper sub-sections the same as the ratio between the two
principal sections (Horata!Noeta)? The objects of the lower section
(Horata) are images of the objects of the upper section (Noeta) and thus
of a qualitatively similar but ontologically dissimilar kind. Is this the case
for the objects of dianoia and noesis?'" The objects of the two pathemata
are not given distinct names: at most they are given a common name,
hypotheseis, which can be understood in two ways according to the way
in which they are thought." Yet in the simile of the cave Socrates describes
as an image of the Intelligible Place what is literally the case for the Visible Place: The sun (;agathon) casts shadows and reflections (;the objects of dianoia) of the objects ( ;noeta) in the world outside the cave
(516a5-7; 532b6-dl). Does the turnabout from dianoia to noesis correspond to an antic image-original distinction among their common objects?
and, if so, what role does the agathon play in making the distinction
possible?
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E/DOS AND AGATHON
The two characteristics that mark off the many dianoetic arts from the
single noetic art of dialectic (i.e., failure to recognize the derivative status
of their "archai," and the use of visible objects as images) are, I suggest,
essentially connected. the horata ( = gignomena) are perspectives of the
noifta, as I argued in the previous section. Thus, they cannot serve as images of the noeta in the latter's full concreteness; the noeta, if apprehended with the aid of visible images, are grasped perspectivally. This is indicated by the fact that what dianoia takes as its archai (e.g., the odd and
the even) can serve as archai of a variety of special sciences, that is, can
support the application of thought to a variety of distinct subject matters.
The first principles of the special sciences are in fact abstractions (though
in a sense inverse to that of Aristotle's abstracted genos), for, in setting
the noeta into correspondence with visible images and applying them to
a special subject matter, dianoia disjoins the noifta from the totality of
their relations to other noifta. In so doing it fails to deal with them strictly
as noeta. For, if they are truly noeta, it must be possible for thought to
effect its passage from one to another because each is what it is. The dialectical passage from eidii, through eidii, and to eide-if it is possible at allmust be grounded in a systematic interconnection and kinship
(koinonia, syngeneia-531dl f.) among them. Lacking this, the passage from
the known to the unknown must depend on the interconnections that are
adventitiously suggested, recommended, or verified through aisthesis." It
is the presupposition of the dialectical art described by Socrates thai each
noifton must essentially and selectively determine other noeta and in turn
be determined by them (cf. Sophist 252b-e). If the dialectical progression
of pure thought is at all possible- and it must be stressed that no pure
example of dialectic occurs in the Republic, nor, I believe, in any of the
dialogues"- the structure of a noeton must include a reference to other
noeta. Dianoia abstracts from this necessity, separating its supposed archai from their true archai; it thereby fails to grasp them in their true
character of noeta: "They are, however, noeta when associated with an
arche" (Kahat VOl]nJiV OVT(l)V ~BTU Up:;(ij<;- 5lld2).
The divided line image thus allows us to extend the observations concerning pragmata in the first part of this essay to the dianoetic level and
to entertain a conjecture about the relation of "generality" to "specific-
ity," of genos to eidos. According to Aristotle, the move from the more
specific to the more generic is in a direction of increasing povetty and emptiness. The move from "dog" to "mammal" to "animal" is a move away from
an articulated actuality toward undetermined potentiality and ultimately
to a replacement of univocal meaning by analogy. The genos must be actualized in the eidos, which is the true locus of completeness of being
·.;
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125
(entelecheia). In spite of the numerous modifications the Aristotelian account of generality and specificity has undergone, this notion of generic
poverty has characterized most subsequent thinking. "Be more specific"
is a watchword of the clear-headed. But the divided-line image inverts this
progression: to ascend the generic hierarchy is to move in the direction of
increasing richness. Like a number, which binds its units within a higher
unity while holding them apart in their distinctness as units, the superordinate genos preserves the distinctness of its eidetic "units" in its own
meaning. Virtue is the necessary togetherness and interdependence of its
parts- to borrow a dianoetic analogue from the Protagoras, courage
degenerates into a mere image of a virtue when it is isolated from the other
virtues. Generic richness, it seems to me, is a necessary presupposition of
the Platonic method of division (diairesis), which is alluded to by Aristotle and others and playfully represented in the Sophist and the Statesman.
Pure thought can unravel the articulations of the superordinate gene only
if the former are already and always actually present in the latter.
The fire in the cave (=the sun) does two things. It casts the shadows
( = eikones) on the wall of the cave (though here Socraes may have in mind
the fact that a shadow is caused by the blocking of light), and it is the
source of any true understanding of the shadows. Before the prisoners are
freed, they fail to see the shadows for what they are, images. Only after
being shown the fire and the puppets (=the visible originals) and having
accustomed themselves to the sight, can they understand the shadows and
evaluate them as more or less accurate approximations of their originals.,.
Similarly, the pure dialectical progression through the ideai can begin only
after thought has ascended through the hypotheseis to the anypotheton,
the agathon. Thus, we have a third work of the agathon, the comprehensive unification of the noeta into what was later to be called "the kosmos
noetos." The unification of the pros allo ti and kath' hauto aspects of the
being of each noeton is also effected on a purely eidetic level. And, since
dialectic pre-supposes the kosmos noetos, the unification of the noeta is
in some way prior to the unification of the primary ontic pair of knowerknown." Finally, the agathon is the source of the fragmentary unity of
the objects of dianoia, though here the full work of the agathon is blocked
or eclipsed (cf. Phaedo 99d4-el and Archer-Hind's note) by the supposedly
original suppositions of the special technai.
The usual translation of he tou agathou idea as "Idea of the Good"
is misleading, or at any rate ambiguous, for "agathon" has the special meaning "good-for" and is thus closely associated by Socrates with chresimon
(useful) and ophelimon (beneficial). Something is agathon when itis good
for something else, when it contributes in some way to the enjoyment by
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EIDOS AND AGATHON
that other thing of the manner of being most appropriate to it. We have
seen that the agathon makes things "good-for" one another in three ways:
It is the cause of the yoking together of the primary ontic pair of knowerknown; it is the father of the sun, which yokes together seer and seen and
provides for their genesis and nurture; and it is the unsupported source
of the community and kinship of the ideai themselves.
But are these three ways enough? The difficulty I suggested in likening
the agathon to the "grandfather" of the things in the Visible Place now
comes to the fore. At the top of the Visible Place section of the line is
the sun, illuminating the visible originals and in so doing casting images
of them, and at the top of the Intelligible Place section is the agathon,
analogously relating the two sub-sections. But the two major sections of
the line are in the same ratio as their sub-sections; the visible things stand
toward the noeta in the relation of images to their originals. What stands
at the top of the entire line, corresponding to the sun and the agathon and
causing the noeta to reproduce themselves in the Visible Place? It is tempting to say: the agathon itself. But this is nowhere suggested and is in fact
implicitly denied in the cave simile. The objects in the cave (=visible things)
are utterly cut off from the light of the sun ( = the agathon). 1b be sure,
the objects paraded behind the wall are images, and we may speculate that
some of the image manipulators may have discovered their originals in the
world outside the cave. But even this begs the question again, for the reasons
for the ascent out of the cave and the return to it are not clearly set forth
but ascribed to a mysterious and unspecified necessity (cf. biiii-515e6;
anankasai, etc.- 519c9, e4; 520a8). At any rate, human imitations of the
noeta are attributed to ananke (500d4). Yet one of the distinguishing marks
which set the philosopher apart from the multitude is the former's recognition of "how much the necessary and the agathon really (tfii ontl) differ
in nature" (493c5 f.).
Earlier I observed that in the Republic there is no explicit and thematic
discussion of that "in which" or "on which" the images of the noeta occur. In the Timaeus myth a similar omission (though here not complete:
plen bracheon) is discovered to characterize the first part, dealing with "the
things that have been fashioned through nous." A supplementary account,
concerning the "things coming to be through necessity," must be furnished
if the story of the fashioning of the moving cosmos is to be complete, "for
the genesis of this cosmos was generated as something mixed out of a composition of necessity and nous" (47e3-48a2). It is required that there be
a "fresh beginning" as the result of more divisions (esto dieiremene) than
were made before; in particular, a "third genos" in addition to the
paradeigma and the mimema is needed (48e2-49a4). Just as the latter two
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127
played the roles of father and offspring, so must there be a "mother" which
is a "receptacle (hypodoche) of genesis," itself devoid of all forms (amorphos)-the "in which" (to en hol) the gignomena are generated (49a5 f.;
50c7-d4). This feminine principle, strikingly absent from the Republic,"
is not only the "room" (chora) in which generation takes place; it has, prior
to the generative act of the father, a motion or "sway" of its own, the principal effect of which is the separating of dissimilar proto-elements from
one another (52d-53a).
According to the testimony of Aristotle, the receptacle was associated
(though with a difference) with "the great and the small" of Plato's "unwritten utterances" (Physics IV, 2, 209bll-16, 33-210a2). The phrase "the
great and the small" was one of the ways in which Plato described the latter of his two "elements" (stoicheia) or "ultimate sources (archal) of all
things"-the One (;the agathon) and the "Undetermined Dyad" (aoristos
dyas)." Although the Dyad seems to have corresponded in some respects
to the Pythagorean apeiron, it was peculiar (idion) to Plato that he assigned
a fundamental doubleness to it (Met. A, 6, 987b25-27). Indeed, it is
characteristic of the Dyad that it doubles whatever it has "received"; it is
dyopoios, ''two-making" (Met. M, 7, 1082al3-15; 8, 1083b35 f.). Receiving one thing, the Dyad makes a second, an other, and thus corresponds
to the "non-being" (to me on; thateron, "the other") of the Sophist (Physics
I, 9, 192a6-8; Met. M, 2, 1088b28-1089a6; Sophist 257b-259b; cf. Arist.
De Bono fr. 5, p. 120 Ross). The Dyad "makes being many" (Met. M, 2,
1089al9-22) just as the One, being shared in (Met. A, 6, 987b21), confers
unity on being. Together, the One and the Dyad are responsible for all that
is or comes to be, and Aristotle metaphorically likens them to the male
and female agents of generation (988a2-7; cf. Physics I, 9, 192al4). The
"generation" of all things, however, seems to have required at least two
distinct acts. First the eide are "out of the Dyad by participation in the
One," and, second, the aistheta come to be out of the co-operation of the
eide and the Dyad (Met. I, 6, 987b21 f.; 988a8-l4). As in the simile of
the sun, Plato in his unwritten utterances seems to have likened the relation between the agathon-One and the aistheta to that of grandfather and
grandchildren, though here the filial-paternal role of the sun is taken over
by the eide.
Of the many difficulties that attend this cosmogony two are directly
relevant to our theme. First, although an understanding of the agathon
would entail an understanding of one of the necessary conditions for the
pros allo ti aspect of being, it would not explain it entirely. The agathon
yokes together relata into a single relation, but it is not the source of there
being a plurality of relata to be related. The latter is the work of the Dyad.
�E!DOS AND AGATHON
128
Second and more important, the generation of the horata (the lower section of the divided line) cannot be accounted for in terms of the three similes
of Republic VI and VII. A second act of generation is needed, that of the
noeta and the Dyad; and in this case the work of the Dyad seems to be
that of literally "duplicating" the noeta, of producing visible images of
the noeta, which are other than and yet somehow the same as the noeta.
The agathon therefore fails to explicate fully the relation between the two
major divisions of the line and thus fails to explain why the noeta must
cast images of themselves. And, since "the all" (to pan) includes both the
Intelligible Place and the Visible Place, the discussion between Socrates
and the brothers fails to reveal how, or even whether, the all is a whole.
• •
Let us bear in mind that Socrates' discussion of the agathon is based
on the supposition that there is "one eidos ... for each class of many things
to which we give the same name" (596a6 f.)" and that it relies throughout
on images. At best, the discussion employs dianoia to show the need to
transcend dianoia. In fact, Socrates acceeds to the brothers' insistence that
he clarify his intimation of a greatest mathema only after he has warned
them that all he will offer are "opinions without knowledge," which are
"ugly things and at best blind" (506b-c), a qualification that appears particularly ironic in view of the simile that follows. Both the similes in Book
VI and VII and the interpretation offered above fail to tell us what the
agathon is. At best, perhaps, they suggest the doubtful prospects of any
attempt to make the agathon the object of the ti esti question as we ask
it of other things.
NOfES
I. It can hardly be that Glaucon understands the implications of an affirmative answer to this question, some of which will be traced in this
essay. For the present, we may interpret Socrates' words as simply a
statement of the working assumption of all Socratic conversations: The
answers to such questions as "What is x?" are more likely to be revealed through reasoned discourse than through the observation of
pragmata (see Note 4 below). Socrates' assumption would seem to be
particularly apt in the present inquiry, for the just city in speech is
a paradigmatic pragma, which exceeds in justice all "actual" cities.
2. Eidos (plural, eide) primarily means the visible shape or "look" by
which a thing is recognized as being of a certain kind (horse, spear,
noble, etc.). By Plato's time the word's meaning had been extended
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - · ···----
-·-·
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129
to those recognizable "looks" of a thing which are not always visible,
for example, in the Hippocratic writings, where eidos may mean a
symptom (fever, nausea, etc.) whereby we recognize a disease. In the
Dialogues the meaning of eidos is further developed (often through
an analogy with seeing) to that "invisible (a-eides) look" on account
of which the things we perceive through the senses are what they are,
which is itself imperceptible by the senses, and to which we more or
less knowingly refer whenever we recognize the sensible things as being of a determinate kind. See A. E. Taylor, "The Words eidos, idea
in Pre-Platonic Literature," Varia Socratica, 1911, pp. 178-267, and
Jacob Klein's remarks thereon in A Commentary on Plato's Meno,
p. 49 f., esp. note 43 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1965), hereafter referred to as "Klein, Meno."
3. See J. Gosling, "Republic, Book V: ta pol/a kala etc.," p. 120 f.
(Phronesis, Vol. V, No. 2, 1960).
4. Both praxis and pragma convey the general notion of "to bring about,
accomplish, do, act." Praxis specifies the general notion as a process
("doing," "acting"). Pragma (plural, pragmata) signifies that in which
the process named by praxis is brought to completion; a pragma is
something done or brought about or more generally a thing that is
somehow related to praxis. I have preferred pragma to the more general
gignomenon, "what is (continually) coming to be," because the former
term immediately suggests the relevance of the ontological discussions
in the Republic to the practical questions that provoke them.
5. The attempt to reduce courage, moderation, knowledge, etc., to some
single defining criterion is repeatedly frustrated in those Platonic
dialogues traditionally called "aporetic," a term that, if understood in
the sense given to aporia at Meno 84a-c, would properly apply to all
the dialogues. For example, Meno's first answer to Socrates' question
"What is (human) excellence?" consists in an on-going enumeration
of those excellences appropriate to men, women, children, slaves, etc.
(7lel-72a5); it is rejected because it fails to reveal the "one self-same
eidos ... on account of which [the aforementioned excellences] are
excellences" (72c5-8). Meno's second answer, that excellence is "to be
able to rule human beings," would seem to satisfy Socrates' requirement for "one self-same eidos':· however, it fails to extend to slaves
and children, to whom the words "good" or "excellent" may at least
partially apply (73c7-d5; cf. Odyssey XVII, 322 f.). What Socrates
seems to require in his asking of the question "What is excellence" is
an account of excellence that will (I) do justice to the richness of our
experience of the varieties of human types and activities and (2) reveal
�130
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
EIDOS AND AGATHON
the unity within which, as our use of the single word excellence suggests, the various excellences are held together.
Contrast Socrates' condemnation of falsehood as most hateful to the
divine or philosophic natures (382a ff., 485b!O-d2) with his recognition of the need for lies even in the just city.
That there can be no fully justpragma has been most thoroughly and
persuasively argued by Eva T. H. Brann ("The Music of the Republic,"
above) and Leo Strauss (The City and Man, Univ. of Chicago Press,
1964). My own argument is derived in large measure from theirs.
See especially An. Post. II, 6, 92a27-33; Top. VI, 6, 142bll-32; Part.
An. I, 3, 643a1-6; Met. Z, 12, 1037bl3-27; H, 6, 1045a7-22. Aristotle's solution of the problem of the relation between the eide and the
higher genera consists (i) in associating the differentia with the formal, eidos-making (eidopoios) element and the genus with the material
element, and (ii) in denying simple unity to the higher genera. The
higher genus is "differentiated" in the species and is one only by abstraction or analogy (Met. H, 6, 1045a23-25; Part. An. I, 4 passim; Top.
VI, vi, 143b8 f.).
Cf. Eth Eud. I, viii, 1218a36 f., said of the agathon-itse1f, but applicable
to the higher (superordinate) gene(cf. 1217b35-40). An alternative way
of interpretation has been developed by Jacob Klein, who stresses the
divisibility of superordinate eide. In particular, he has done justice to
Aristotle's repeated reference to the "idea-numbers," which contain
units (Met. M, 7-9 passim), by conceiving the superordinate eide as
analogous to numbers. Just as Socrates and Hippias are each one but
together two, so the eidos Being (to use an example from the Sophist)
may be identical with neither of the eideMotion and Rest and yet not
be some "third thing" in addition to them; rather, it may be that Motion and Rest together are Being, that is, that the eidos Being is the
community (koinonia) of Motion and Rest. See J. Klein, Greek
Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (M.I.T., 1968;
hereafter referred to as "Klein, GMT''), pp. 79-99. Those who are
familiar with Klein's "arithmological" account of the eidewill perceive
how much this essay owes to him.
By the word "systematic" I mean to describe the way in which many
parts may belong together in one whole while preserving their integrity
as distinct parts. (Compare Plato's use of systema, "what has been
brought to stand together," at Philebus 17d2 and Epinomis 991e2.) The
reader is warned against that more modern use of "systematic" which
characterizes a way of thinking that sets forth in advance (a prion)
the conditions under which beings may take their places as "objects"
�WILLIAMSON
11.
12.
13.
14.
131
within the totality-actual or progressive-of our experience or
thought.
See W. D. Ross, Plato's Theory of Ideas (Oxford, 1951), p. 169, and
F. M. Cornford, Plato and Parmenides (New York: Humanities Press,
1951), p. 83.
See R. E. Allen, "The Argument from Opposites in Republic V'' (The
Review of Metaphysics, Vol. XV, No.2, 1961), and "Participation and
Predication in Plato's Middle Dialogues" in R. E. Allen (ed.), Studies
in Plato's Metaphysics (New York: Humanities Press, 1965); also H.
Cherniss, "The Relation of the Timaeus to Plato's Later Dialogues"
in R. E. Allen (ed.), op. cit. pp. 370 ff. My example of the mirror image owes much to a similar example used by Allen, who has perceived
more clearly than any other recent commentator that the celebrated
problem of the self-predication of the eide requires a complete reappraisal of the status of predication in Plato's thought. The eidos Man
is "What man is" (ho esti anthri'ipos), and not "a man" (anthri'ipos
tis). Hence, it is correct to say "The eidos of man is man" (not "a man"),
or "The just itself is just"; however, "man" and "just" are not predicated
as properties that the eide have, as in "Socrates is (a) man" and
"Aristides is just." Allen and Cherniss interpret such statements, when
their subjects are eide, as identity statements: "What-man-isis man."
See, however, Klein GMT, pp. 79 ff., for arguments leading to the suggestion (p. 99) that an even more radical re-interpetation of predication is required for the solution of the "methexis problem."
The arguments for the eidein the Dialogues-and there are very few
real arguments for them, if any- are too diverse in form and content
to permit us to extract a systematic account of the population of the
realm of eide. Aristotle lists a number of arguments for the eide but
these lead to divergent conclusions as to the kinds of things of which
there are eide (Met. M, 4, 1079a4-13). The broadest principle is that
which admits a separate eidos corresponding to every common name
(Republic 596a6 f.). But this is proposed as a working hypothesis for
the discussion and not as a final statement on the population of the
realm of eide. Elsewhere the Dialogues suggest the inadequacy of the
principle: There are some eidetic distinctions among things to which
no existing names correspond, and some distinctions made in speech
(e.g., Greek/barbarian) are not eidetic distinctions (Sophist 267d;
Statesman 262a-e).
E.g., the surfaces on which images are reflected in the account of the
lowest level of the divided line (509e1-510a3) and the corresponding
wall of the cave onto which the shadows are projected (515a7); also
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E/DOS AND AGATHON
the surfaces on which images are reflected outside the cave (516a). (The
Greek equivalent of "on" or "onto" is en or eis, "in" or "into.") As
far as I know, Eva Brann was the first to remark on the absence of
any thematic treatment of the medium in which images are produced
and to explore the implications of that omission; see note 26 below.
15. Several asymmetries attend this analogy, and it is proper to mention
them here, though they cannot be accounted for at once. (I) Whereas
the agathon fathers one thing, the sun, which is both like it and that
through which it is known, the sun itself is related in these ways to
at least two different things: the eye is "most like the sun" but not caused
by the sun, and sight is caused by the sun and perceives the sun but
is not said to be like the sun. (II) Both a/etheia, which belongs to the
known, and episteme, which belongs to the knower, are said to be "like
the agathon," but it is not said that what are seen, the horata, are like
the sun. (III) The sun is the cause of seeing and being seen, but it is
not the cause of the power of seeing and of being seen (color is said
to be in the horata whether they are seen or not-507dl2). On the other
hand, the agathon is the cause of the power of knowing. (IV) Light
is the "third kind," which yokes together the powers of seeing and being seen, both of which are distinct from light. The analogue of light
in the Intelligible Place is atetheia (508e6 f., where chiasmus is
employed); but aletheia is said to belong to what is known. Aletheia
is not so much a "third kind" as a property of the noeta which they
possess because of the agathon. To generalize, we may say that in the
Visible Place the three groups {visible object-color}, (eye-power
of vision}, and {sun-light} have a certain independence from one
another prior to the act of vision; whereas in the Intelligible Place the
three groups {nous-power of knowing-episteme}, {noetona/etheia}, and (agathon-a/etheia} are more intimately connected both
by multiple relations of likeness and by the extension of causal relations to the very power of the former to be what they are.
16. 141e7 f: "Is it possible for anything to partake in beingness (ousia) in
any other way than these [sc. past, present, or future being]?" "It's
not possible." This passage, seemingly contradictory to the frequent
ascription in the Dialogues of a timeless being to the ideai (e.g.,
Timaeus 37e), has received a number of interpretations, most of which
depend on interpretations of the intention behind the hypothesis section of the Parmenides as a whole. A possible way of resolving the
contradiction is suggested by my discussion below of the kinesis-stasis
passage in the Sophist. G. E. L. Owen, commenting on the same
passage, observes that the ideai, if they are to be known, must be sub-
�I.
WILLIAMSON
133
jects of both tensed and tenseless statements ("Plato and Parmenides,"
Monist, Vol. 50, No. 3 [1966], pp. 336~40).
17. A!etheia belongs prhnarily to the object and secondarily to judgments
(logOl)-cf. 560b9. It is only with Aristotle, for whom the combination (synthesis) and division (diairesis) expressed by logos are "in
thought (dianoia) and not in things (pragmata)," that aletheia becomes
primarily a property of judgments (Met. E, 4). For its ascription to
objects, "revealedness" is perhaps a better translation of a/etheia than
"truth," with its still enduring Aristotelian connotations. On the other
hand, "revealedness" avoids the perhaps too literal "Unverborgenheit"
of Heidegger.
18. For the identification of the One with the agathon see Met. A, 6,
988a14-17; N, 4, 1091bl3 ff.; also Physics I, 9, 192a15. Aristoxenus recounts a story told him by his master, Aristotle, about Plato's lecture
Peri tau agathou, in which Plato is described as progressively discussing the various mathematical disciplines until reaching "as the limit"
(to peras) the statement, agathon estin hen (Harm. elem. II, 30/1). See
also Aetii, P!ac. l, 7, 31 (Diels, Dox. Gr. 304, 2-5/23-26) and Cyrillus,
Adv. Iibras athei Juliani l, 31, A/B (=Gaiser Nr. 52).
19. See Klein, GMT, p. 98, and Brann, supra, IV 5e. Nor is the agathon
an agathon ti, something good. Hence we are able to understand
Aristotle's denial that Plato admitted among his archai a final cause,
a "that for the sake of which" (to hou heneka) or "the good" (tagathon)
for which genesis and kinesis occur (Met. A, 3, 983a31 f.; 7, 988b5-16):
"Shnilarly those who say that the One or being is of such a nature
[viz. the nature of the agathon -cf. 988b9] say that it is the cause of
ousia, but not that it [i.e., ousia] either is or comes to be for the sake
of this; thus it falls out that they both say and do not say that the
agathrm is a cause. For they speak according to what is accidental and
not simply" (988bll-16). The final cause may be either (i) the ousia
in which genesis or kinesis arrives at a state of completeness, i.e., its
te/os (as is the case with natural processes of growth in which the "formal" and "final" causes coincide), or (ii) some good that can be realized
by means of some process of genesis or kinesis (as is the case with
production of all instruments)- cf. de An. B, 4, 415b2, 20 f.; also Met.
A, 7, 1072b1-3. But the agathon of the Republic meets neither of these
conditions. It is not the ousia which is the formal-final cause of genesis,
for it is rather the cause of ousia and is itself "beyond ousia." Nor
is it some good to be realized through a process of genesis or kinesis,
for it is the cause of all being (and derivatively of all genesis), itself
dependent on no conditions (arche anypothetos). Anything that is a
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EIDOS AND.AGATHON
good (agathon It), including justice itself, is necessarily distinct from
the agathon itself. Thus we may observe incidentally that Socrates' account of the agathon evades both the "naturalistic fallacy" of G. E.
Moore and the more recently advertised paradox of the "selfpredication" of the ideai. [Note: In reference to the passages from the
Metaphysics cited above it is important to bear in mind that Aristotle
is discussing the "archai" of all beings, including the ideai; these archai are for Plato the One and the Dyad (987bl8-22, 26, 33 f.; cf.
l08lal4), which are the causes of the ideai and not the ideai themselves
(988a7-J4). Thus it is not the case that Aristotle "ignores the distinctly
teleological view which Plato expresses in some dialogues" (Ross,
Aristotle's Metaphysics (Oxford, 1924), Vol. I, p. 179), e.g., Philebus
53e-54a, where ousia is identified as the hou charin of genesis. Rather,
Aristotle is concerned with the Platonic archai, which are beyond
ousia.]
20. I do not mean to Imply that all objects of dianoia are objects of noesis.
Indeed, Republic 526a conveys a clear suggestion of the "arithmoi
mathematikoi"- "the intermediates" (fa metaxy) -which hold a position intermediate between the ideai and all countable assemblages of
aistheta: "numbers ... in which the unit is such as [the mathematicians] require, each one equal to every other and not differing in the
slightest, having no parts in it ... , things that can only be thought
(dianoethenat)." Cf. Philebus 56c-e; Aristotle, Met. A, 6, 986bl4 ff.;
N, 3, 1090b35 ff. That the mathematicals are not eide appears from
the following consideration: Each eidos is uniquely what it is (Republic
597c) in contradistinction to the multiplicity of mathematicals of the
same kind. In "two and two are four" it is essential that two units be
added to two other units to yield a four; similarly the statement
'"Itiangles ABC and DEF are equal and their corresponding angles
are equal if they have all three sides equal" is trivial unless triangles
ABC and DEF are other than each other. On the other hand, the objects of dianoia are not exhausted by the intermediates; the mathematician is not only concerned with considering "the triangle ABC" or adding "two units to two units," he also employs definitions of what a
triangle is, what en even number is, etc. On the dianoetic level, however,
these may be thought of as mere properties or attributes of the intermediates; the mathematician, more likely than not, fails to understand them as beings, as noeta.
21. Similarly, Socrates gives the same name, noesis, to both the upper section and the uppermost subsection of the line (51ld8 f.; 534a2; cf.
533e8, where the uppermost subsection is given the name episteme).
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22. Cf. Meno 81c9-d4: "For, since all nature is akin (syngeniis) and the
soul has learned and understood all things, nothing prohibits it, if it
recollects only one thing (what humans call "learning"), from discovering all the rest, if one is manly and doesn't faint in the search." On
the notion of syngeneia as a presupposition of dialectic, see R. E.
Cushman, Therapeia (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press,
1958), p. 50, n. 47, for a list of relevant passages in Plato and his
commentators.
23. The second part of the Parmenides must be ruled out, for the method
is explicitly "hypo-thetical" in the dianoetic sense; nor are the various
hypotheseis ever co-ordinated, and the whole section is introduced as
an "exercise" propaedeutic to the dialectical method (135b-136c). Nor
will the Eleatic Stranger's method of diairesis do, for, quite apart from
the comic shortcomings of its conclusions in the Statesman, it depends
heavily upon sense experience and hearsay (see esp. Statesman
264bll-d9).
24. The cave simile re-introduces the theme of paideia and thereby acquires
an additional dimension, the political (514al f.). Indeed, the cave is
not strictly a (natural) cave, but an "underground cave-like (spiilaiodes)
dwelling" (a3), within which blazes an artificial sun, casting the
shadows of implements and puppets on the facade (katantikry) of the
cave facing the strangers. These implements and puppets are carried
and manipulated by human beings who parade up and down a "way"
(hodos) along a teichion (=the walls of the polis). The "cave" is largely,
if not fully, the work of men; it is the Visible Place as it is revealed
within the horizon of political life. It has two major parts: the more
comprehensive world of the "opinion-makers" (the politicians, p_oets,
rhetoricians, sophists, and- if the city is fortunate- the philosophers)
and the shadowy world of the ordinary citizen whose objects of concern (the gods, things just and unjust, expedient and inexpedient, noble
and base, lawful and unlawful, genuine and false) are transformed,
if not produced, by the men behind the wall.
25. Whatever the nature of this priority may be, it is not, if the present
argument is correct, an antic priority. Nonetheless, the priority of the
unification of the noeta over that of the primary ontic pair distinguishes
Plato from those neo-Platonists (see esp. Plotinus, V, i, 4, 5; VI, vii,
15) who give a slight priority to "pure thinking" (to noein) over "what
is thought" (to nooumenon). (Plotinus, like Kant after him, prefers
nooumenon "what is thought,"- or theOroumenon, gignOskomenon,
etc.-to the more characteristically Platonic noeton, "what can be
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EIDOS AND AGATHON
thought.") As a further instance of the shift of emphasis that
characterizes much of neo-Piatonism see Thomas Aquinas's doctrine
of the "Divine Ideas": S. T., I, q. 15. One may speculate that the roots
of this shift are to be found in the more fundamental shift, made by
Aristotle, from dynamis to energeia as the primary horos of being,
with the consequent denial of the "separation" (chorismos) of the noeta
and thus the need to locate the unity of the genos in abstraction or
in logos (ana-logia)- cf. Plotinus, V, iii, 5; v, I.
26. The most vivid example of the playing down of the feminine is the
"second wave of paradox," the assigning of the same employments to
both sexes. The conventional practice of assigning different tasks to
each sex, Socrates avers, is based on the assumption that each sex excels the other in certain abilities. However, with the exceptions of parturition and wet-nursing, women are in fact surpassed by men in every
employment- even cooking! Thus, there is no reason to assign women
a special province or activity in the city (454d-456a). Woman plays
a distinctive role in one respect: she brings about the decline from the
aristocratic man to the timocratic man (549c-d). Eva Brann first called
my attention to the way in which Socrates' treatment of the feminine
reflects his mythical treatment of the second of the Platonic archai
("The Music of the Republic," supra, pp. 58-61, 64-67, 76.)
27. See Met. A, 6, 987a18-21, b20-22; 988a26; B, 3, 998bl0; M, 7, l081a14
f., b21, 32; 1082al3, b30; 9, l085b7; N, 2, l088b28; !089a35; 3, !091a5;
Physics I, 4, 187a17; 9, 192a7, 11; also Alexander on Met. I, 9, 990b17
and Klein GMT, p. 97 f. In the Republic (524c) Socrates treats the "great
and small" as a determinate pair, of which we may ask the ti esti
question.
28. In the Phaedo Socrates relates how in his youth, wishing to know the
"causes of each thing" and perplexed by such problems as how a unit
and another unit can each be one and yet together become two, he
resorted to the "investigation of nature" (peri physeos historia) and
the teachings of Anaxagoras (96a-97c). Disappointed, he concluded
that his inquiries could be satisfied by nothing less than a knowledge
of "the agathon, which must bind and hold together [all things, hapanta]" (99c4-6). Finding himself inferior to the task and without a
teacher, he decided to abandon the investigation of "the things that
are" (ta onta) and, as a "second best course" (deuteros pious), to "take
refuge in logoi," just like those who fear to damage their eyes by looking directly at the sun during an eclipse and observe it indirectly through
its reflection in water or something else of the sort (99c6-e6). The new
method consisted in "sup-posing (hypothemenos) on each occasion
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137
whatever logos [he] judged to be strongest" and positing (tithemz) as
true or untrue whatever seemed to him to agree with it or not (100a3-7).
Both in the Phaedo "and elsewhere" the guiding supposition is that
"there is something [that is] kalon itself by itself and [similarly
something that is] agathon and [similarly for] all the rest" (bl-7).
�What Is "The Good"
of Plato's Republic?
David Lachterman
I.
Among the Greek comic poets of the Middle and New Comedy Plato's
"Form of The Good" had become a by-word for ludicrous and impenetrable
obscurity. Am phis, in his play Amphicrates, has a slave say to his master,
about to embark on the conquest of a young lady: "What good you expect to get from her, sir, I understand less than I do the Good of Plato."'
Much later Nietzsche indicted Plato for having introduced into European culture "the worst, most long-lasting, and most dangerous" of all
dogmatic errors: the invention of "the pure spirit and the Good in-itself."
Faith in an absolute or other-wordly Good, a faith fed by Plato's rhetoric
and digested into Christianity, inevitably emasculated the will of Western
humanity, according to Nietzsche. 2
What separates the Greeks' mocking mirth from the baleful assaults
of Nietzsche and his progeny is not only time, but a space densely populated
by a variety of discordant interpretations, as though to confirm in this central instance of The Good what Cicero says with terse wisdom about the
Platonic dialogues generally: Quot lectores, tot Platones.
Within this dismaying variety of readings and readers one polarity in
particular brings into a relief a perplexity with which anyone attempting
to give an account of The Republic must sooner or later reckon. To use,
for the moment, terminology drawn from post-Platonic traditions, I shall
call this the polarity between the exclusively ethical (or moral) and the exclusively metaphysical (or ontological) interpretations of The Good.
For the proponents of the first view, Plato'·s concern is with a fundai39
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WHAT IS "THE GOOD"?
mental principle or "norm" undergirding moral and social judgments,
evaluations, and policies, with what one distinguished proponent, Paul
Shorey, called "the [ultimate] authority by which conduct is sanctioned
... the final source and canon of the knowledge of right conduct for all
who go back of instinct and tradition."' On this view-and here its
deliberate one-sidedness already comes into evidence-passages such as
those in which Socrates talks of The Good as supplementing the intelligibles
with being and essence, while itself beyond essence, must be read as merely
the "poetic vesture" or "rhetorical windowdressing" that has to be stripped
away in order to disclose the supposedly plausible core of Plato's ethical
and social "doctrines." (It might also be noted that this first view faces
the ineluctable challenge posed by Aristotle, who remarks in the Eudemian
Ethics: "Even if there were a form or single look of the good, it would
not be of any use for the [humanly] good life or for practical conduct.'"
On the second, metaphysical, view, which one might also be tempted
to call the "Neo-Platonic" view, the ethical and political concerns of The
Republic and other dialogues recede far into the background while The
Good is the source or ground of the beingness and order of what-is holds
center stage. What for the one-sidedly ethical version was "poetic vesture"
is now the naked truth, while, conversely, the sober-seeming teachings about
virtues and politics play the role of propaedeutic enticements towards a
visionary sight of The Good or The One, beyond essence and even being.
In the words of one recent advocate of this Neo-Platonic reading, words
that smack more of P. G. Wodehouse than of Plato: "It is quite inconceivable that Plato's Guardians, having reached the ripe age of fifty, and having studied all the intricacies of mathematics, should be subjected to the
ethical argy-pargy practised by Socrates on young men and boys.'"
Both readings eventually compromise the integrity of the dialogue; that
is, both turn us aside from the ordered multiplicities of the work itself,
a work that is hot a collection of theses, propositions, and supporting arguments presented more geometrico, but an artfully textured re-presentation
of sustained conversation, an icon (or phantasm) of the interlacings of
seemingly living and lived speed. Both readings correspondingly muffle,
when they do not simply dismiss, what The Republic invites us to hearthe baffling connectedness or kinship within living speech of those preoccupations artificially set apart as "ethical" and "ontological."
An ancient commentator captured the sense of what I am suggesting
when he wrote that "the dialogue is a kind of cosmos. For, just in the way
in a dialogue there are different personages, each speaking in character,
so, too, in the entire cosmos there are different natures uttering different
expressions." The same author gives us an even more valuable clue when
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LACHTERMAN
he treats of the inner organization of a dialogue; borrowing from the terminology of the Divided Line he suggests that the problem of a dialogue
is comparable to nous, to insight or direct apprehension, while its arguments
are comparable to dianoia, discursive, sequential reasoning. The former,
nous, "is thought of as the center of a circle around which the arguments
move as a circumference in pursuit of the answer."6 We might infer from
this that by following out these discursive or argumentative motions we
can locate and, in a sense, exhibit, the central point around which they
turn, without being able to render that point adequately in further discursive speech. My attempt to situate The Good at the noetic center of Plato's
discourse will accordingly consist in a series of movements around the circumferences The Good directs and unifies.
II
Socrates' only explicit remarks about the Good-Itself, the Good without
qualification, occur in a digression from a digression in The Republic.
Digressions, in Plato, are never fortuitous or aimless; rather, they aim at
something vaguely or inconspicuously hinted at by the initial lines of discussion. These digressions carry us further and further from the periphery
towards a so-far uninspected and unsuspected center; or, to improve slightly
on this two-dimensional image, the digressions move us from lower to higher
plateaux, where both the stakes and our sights are raised. At the same time,
however-and this must be emphasized quite strongly-what comes into
view only on a higher plateau, or as we move nearer to the center, gains
its focus and clarity primarily against the recollected backdrop of what
preceded it. Hence Platonic or Socratic "conclusions," however exotic, unfamiliar, or ecstatic they may seem at first blush, draw much, if not all,
of their persuasive strength from their responsiveness to questions and issues
raised or implied early on, often in commonplace settings and always prior
to any detailed scrutiny of their ultimate implications.
Socrates, according to Cicero, was the first to drag philosophy down
from the heavens to the earth;' in more Platonic terms, Socratic conversation characteristically, although not invariably, takes place in the city and
in its central places, the agora, for example; furthermore, it takes place
with men whose interests most often lie elsewhere than in philosophy, even
when they are not expressly inimical to philosophy. If Socratic conversation slowly re-ascends from the earth, or the city, to the "Heavens," it takes
its bearings by what has been said and exhibited on Earth, in the realm
a later philosopher will more solemnly baptize "everydayness." A Platonic
argument or proof, such as it is, cannot be understood apart from this
�I
I
I
i
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WHAT IS 'THE GOOD"?
subtle and extraordinarily intricate interplay between the ordinary and the
unexpected consequences or underpinnings of the ordinary. This holds
especially true of Plato's "arguments" concerning The Good, which occur
in a dialogue given its sharpest urgency when Socrates, in Book I, reproves
Thrasymachus in these words: "Do you think it is a small thing you are
trying to determine [namely, the nature of justice] rather than the way to
lead a life such that each of us will live most profitably?" (344el-3).
This suggests that everything Socrates will eventually be made to say
on the topic of The Good, as well as all that we might cull from elsewhere
regarding Plato's further conjectures, are somehow, and in multiple ways,
coupled with this initiating concern. Platonic ontology, or metaphysics,
never loses its purchase on the pre-philosophical, the pre-eminently and
inescapably practical, question of the "best human life." Or, in other words,
the radically unfamiliar continues to be grounded in the familiar, even when
it comes to be seen as the latter's own ground.
To say this is one thing; to see how it is worked out "in practice" is
quite another, frustratingly more difficult matter, even with the benefit of
Plato's artful guidance. What I propose to do is to examine, at first in a
loose and provisional way, four lines of "argument" that make their first
appearance in Book One of The Republic and that lead, obliquely and
hesitantly at the beginning, ineluctably towards the end, to the baffling,
exorbitant suggestions Socrates sets forth in Books VI and VII when The
Good comes under imaginative scrutiny.
These four lines of argument exert the pressure that pushes Socrates
towards those climactic claims; accordingly, we must try to see both how
each one comes onto the stage and how all four come to play their respective roles in an ensemble it will be the business, the power, of The Good
to illuminate and to unify.
I shall call these, for the sake of notional convenience, (!) the argument from appearance and being, (2) the argument from opinion and
knowledge, (:i) the argument from desire, and (4) the argument from the
Many and the One, or from Parts and Wholes, although this fourth line
of argument, as we shall see, is not really "on a par" with the first three,
but rather comprehends or is an ingredient in them all.
The argument from appearance and being makes its first, non-technical
appearance in Book I, in the exchange between Socrates and Polemarchus.
Polemarchus has inherited his father Cephal us's argument that justice consists in paying back what one owes; under Socrates' questioning, he amends
this to read: "Justice is benefiting one's friends and harming one's enemies"
(322d5~6).
�LACHTERMAN
143
After admitting the justice of several criticisms made by Socrates,
Polemarchus is forced to change his tack when he realizes that this definition can lead to benefiting the unjust and harming the just, if it happens
that we are mistaken in our judgment of our "friends," that is, if we
mistakenly consider a friend good and thus deserving of benefit, when
in truth he is bad. Polemarchus then emends his account further, requiring that a friend both seem to be and genuinely be "good" or "useful."
The possible disparity or gap between what something or someone appears to us to be and what that thing or person genuinely is initially has
nothing "metaphysical" about it, at least not in our present, rather narrow
use of that term. Each of us has or will have had the painful experience
of being played false by a seeming friend, of discovering that someone is,
as we say, a uralse friend." Now Socrates does not seize on the distinction
or tension between seeming and being at this point; it will, however, be
revived and expanded when Glaucon and Adeimantus renew Thrasymachus's challenge to Socrates in Book II, demanding a proof that the just
life is to be preferred, even when a man seems to be totally unjust while
being "in reality," as modern idiom would lead us to say, thoroughly just.
The same word in Greek, doxa, means both "appearance" and
"opinion."8 For a man to seem to be just (or unjust) amounts as well to
his being opined or considered to be just (or unjust) by others. It is under
these descriptions that he shows up in the eyes and speech of other persons, even when the descriptions do not "in truth" fit him.
It is by way of exploring and exploiting this familiar experience that
Socrates will later turn the discussion in the direction of the so-called
"forms." Attributions of such features as justice, beauty, and so on, to the
items of our ordinary or workday experience are characteristicallY defective, inasmuch as those items seem to be such-and-such without being suchand-such in a complete and genuine fashion. The descriptions will not "fit"
these item~, or will fit them only partially and imperfectly.
Needless to say, this anticipation leaves open the question of what it
is to be such-and-such altogether and genuinely, and not merely to seem
to be such-and-such.' Furthermore, Socrates' own discussion will force upon
us the even deeper issue: Why is there this discrepancy between appearance
and being? What is the ground of that distinction itself? What is the ground
of the community of what it distinguishes?
(2) The second line of "argument" comes into play in Socrates' debate
with Thrasymachus. The latter has insisted that justice is nothing other
than the advantage of the stronger, that is, justice is another person's good,
not the good of the one who is just. The stronger turn out to be the rulers
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WHAT IS "THE GOOD"?
of cities, who legislate with their own benefit alone in mind; the ruled are
just insofar as they obey the laws made by the stronger. Socrates then suggests the following paradox: If a law commanded by the stronger actually
works out to their disadvantage, then it is just, on Thrasymachus's definition, for the weaker to obey that law, even though in doing so they fail
to contribute to the rulers' good, as the definition requires.
At this moment Thrasymachus adds a "rider" to his definition: Rulers
"in the most precise or accurate sense" do not make a such errors (34lb8).
When an agent in power does make a mistake he is no longer entitled to
the appellation "the stronger" or "the ruler." Consequently, ouly someone
who knows unerringly what his true advantage is, qualifies as a ruler, or
for that matter, as a craftsman, or a wise man. It is Thrasymachus who
uses the Greek word for science or true knowledge, i:nt<HllJlTJ, for the first
time in The Republic.
Since so much hangs on Thrasymachus's definition of justice and on
this "rider" or qualifying clause concerning knowledge-since, indeed, the
rest of The Republic hangs on what he says in these passages- it would
make sense to pay the most careful attention to what is taking place in
this exchange. Let me draw attention to just three aspects of this context:
First, Thrasymachus gives the rest of the dialogue its preeminently
political inflection when he accompanies his initial definition with the
following statement: "Each regime lays down the laws with a vfew to its
own advantage: a democracy lays down democratic laws, a tryanny tyrannical laws, and other regimes do likewise. By so legislating they make it
manifest that what is just for those who are ruled is what is beneficial to
themselves, the rulers" (338dl-4).
Thrasymachus here replaces what he regards as the superficial differences among regimes, that is, among their constitutions, with what he
believes to be a deeper-seated homogeneity or identity: all rulers, under
every sort of constitution, are seeking their own benefit. Accordingly, the
various constitutions- democracy, tyranny, and so on- are merely different
instrumentalities for the achievement of one and the same end. We might
be tempted to say that Thrasymachus is here inventing one version of
modern "political science," which by similarly "objectifying" the regimes
it studies substitutes the homogeneity of power for the heterogeneity of
constitutions. Thrasymachus, at any rate, is candid enough to acknowledge
that, on this reckoning, tryanny is the best regime, since the tyrant has the
maximum degree of power.
It is impossible to understand Plato's political theory, even in the narrowest sense of the term "political," unless one grasps that its guiding intention is to make possible that very discrimination among types of regimes ·
�LACHTERMAN
145
which Thrasymachus's position would have us ascribe to foolish innocence.
To fashion the best city, even if only "in speech," is to present criteria by
which those critical distinctions can be drawn.
A second point. Thrasymachus, as we have just seen, appeals to "advantage." What sort of advantages or benefits does he have in mind? Power,
the absolute power to make others one's slaves, to appropriate to oneself
their property and their bodies, thereby to satisfy one's every appetite with
impunity and abandon, he pronounces "happy and blessed" (344b7).
Thrasymachus, who thinks of himself as relying on nature, turns out
to be dependent on one of the most conventional views of what benefits
an individual. Indeed, his whole presentation raises in acute form the twofold question: What is it for something to be beneficial or advantageous?
And what is the self or person or soul who is thereby benefited? Thrasymachus does not address himself to these twin questions; his words,
however, cause them to hover over the remaining nine books of The
Republic.
Indeed, this helps to clarify the remarkable and often-perceived affinity between Thrasymachus's definition and the definition of justice Socrates
eventually proposes in Book IV: Justice is doing one's own business or
one's own things. As the subsequent argument reveals, everything depends
on coming to know what things are genuinely or in truth one's own, and
hence, on knowing what the self or soul truly is.
Accordingly, the ensuing debate between Thrasymachus and Socrates
is not the debate between radical egoism and selfless altruism; instead,
Socrates will be concerned to show that it is only when the "self" or soul
is brought face-to-face with its true nature and thus with what are genuinely
and knowably its own "possessions" that it ceases to be the "possessive
individual" Thrasymachus simultaneously embodies and applauds.
A third and final aspect, in some ways the most important.
Thrasymachus, as I have already indicated, is the first to mention bncr'tljflt]
in the dialogue, although it would be an understatement to say that he
gives us no clues as to how he understands knowledge or science, apart
from maintaining that such knowledge must be, in principle, error-free and
mistake-proof. Viewed from this perspective, the rest of the dialogue will
consist in Socrates' attempt to display both the necessity and at least the
general contours of the knowledge to which Thrasymachus obstreperously
alludes. Needless to say, neither the contents nor the point of this Socratic
"science" are anticipated by Thrasymachus himself; nonetheless, he accepts
as his own the twin theses that (1) opinions or predictions of what is advantageous are not self-verifying, and that (2) the legitimacy of the rulers'
authority derives from their supposed knowledge of what will genuinely
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WHAT IS "THE GOOD"?
benefit them. Socrates' sketch of the philosopher-kings will incorporate
both theses, with this crucial amendment to the second thesis, that only
what is of benefit to the city as a whole can count, somewhat ambiguously,
as beneficial to the philosopher-kings themselves.
In Book I, however, Socrates does not undertake to display even the
rudiments of the science that will fit these requirements. Instead, he suppresses Thrasymachus's term smmlj~TJ- which occurs only once again in
Book I- in favor of the more familiar term, ~exvTJ, art or craft, and couches
the rest of his "refutation" of Thrasymachus in the language of the "arts."
Many contemporary readers have found Socrates' association of questions of justice and of the virtues generally with questions of the arts and
crafts either appalling or absurd: appalling, if this linkage is read as implying that only those who possess some special technique or expertise can
be "morally" virtuous; absurd, if it is taken to mean that knowing how
to follow the rules of some technical discipline is the same as knowing
that moral obligations must be discharged regardless of anticipated outcome or contingent self-interest. Kant gives expression to this second reaction when he distinguishes between hypothetical, or, as he says,
"technical," imperatives and categorical imperatives. 10
Does ~BXVTJ, as Socrates presents it, lend itself to either of these two
outraged interpretations?" We should keep in mind, first, that the model
of ~EXVTJ that dominates the discussion in Book I will be demoted in importance as Socrates comes ever closer to spelling out what a science or
!\mcnlj~TJ is, just as the sciences, in their turn, will be demoted in rank
when the only genuine science, what he will call "dialectic," comes onto
the scene in Book VII. Socrates' earlier reliance on the ~BXVTJ-model is,
then, a function of its position on the periphery, the outermost circle, of
the dialogue. It might be said to steer thought towards the center without
ever replacing or overshadowing that center.
Nonetheless, the ~exvTJ-model can be seen to be the right or fitting one
at the inception of the discussion if we pay due regard to the following
points:
(a) According to Thrasymachus an art or handicraft is essentially
manipulative of its objectives, the practice of such a craft aims always at
securing benefits for its practitioners. For Socrates, on the other hand, the
practice of an art succeeds as art only to the extent that it gives its objects
their due, that is, only to the extent that the manipulations of art conform
to what the objects themselves require for their own part. The.constitution of an object· of ~SXVTJ dictates appropriate and inappropriate procedures. One cannot build a suspension-bridge out of clay, just as one cannot get the best tone from a Stradivarius violin by banging it against a
drumhead.
�LACHTERMAN
147
(b) Thrasymachus's own phrase "ruler in the precise sense" points
us in this same direction, for the word he uses, O.KptPcO<;, uwith precision"
or "accuracy," belongs to the vocabulary of the crafts, where the noun
&.KpiJ)eta originally designates the result of fitting one thing to another,
for instance, making one piece of wood dovetail with another so that no
gaps are left." An art becomes "precise" only if it takes into account the
nature and limits of its proper objects and this it can do only if it "submits" itself to these objects, tries, in other words, to join itself to them
without leaving any gaps.
(c) Construed in this way, ~EJ(VTJ offers us the first instance of the
human capacity for self-transcendence, that is, the ability to pass beyond
the immediacies of narrower self-interest in order to encounter, in a fitting
way, something other than oneself. TEJ(VTJ, then, is less a matter of following "technical, autonomous rules, and more one of discovering what the
texture of things demands of anyone who sets out to fashion or refashion
things in accordance with a purpose to which they show themselves to be
suited. One might characterize this situation by saying that the artisan,
precisely because he needs these objects for his craft, has to give them their
due; this is the original lesson in the art of respecting, of doing justice
to the Other, even while striving to make it one's own. For Plato, as for
Hegel, eros and science are later and more fundamental lessons in this same
art.
At all events, the theme of knowledge vs. opinion, a theme inaug\]rated
by Thrasymachus's non- or anti-philosophical ambitions, winds its way
through the following books of The Republic; recall, for example, that the
guardians of the luxurious city, soon to be lowered to the secondary rank
of auxiliaries when the philosophers' city is brought into view, are merely
imbued with true opinions, the way a cloth is imbued with a lasting dye,
and that they are called "philosophical" only in the sense of a kind of canine
instinct that makes them friendly to fellow citizens and inimical to strangers.
Let me summarize and at the same time point ahead: The distinction
between opinions that cannot guarantee their own truth and a knowledge
alleged to be incorrigibly "accurate" first comes to hand in Thrasymachus's
speech, in the service of pre- or anti-theoretical purposes; it will be left
to Socrates to articulate that distinction in a more thoughtful way. However,
his articulation will in turn raise the question of the ground or basis of
this distinction itself.
(3) The third line of argument pushing Socrates and ourselves towards
the notion of The Good is what I have called "the argument from desire."
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WHAT IS "THE GOOD"?
I hope to be able to treat this much more briefly, despite its overarching
importance to the entire dialogue.
Let me start by saying that, unlike the first two lines of argument, the
argument from desire is not introduced or adumbrated in the speech of
one single interlocutor; instead, it is implicitly present from the start, in
the following way.
Socrates' initial conversation with Cephalus focuses on the advantages
of old age, more particularly, on the advantages enjoyed when one is both
old and wealthy. Cephalus's recounting of these advantages, from which
the whole debate about justice springs, is at the same time an account of
his life as a whole, or, as we might say, of the point of his life. In all that
follows, the terms of ethical or moral or psychological appraisal, terms
such as "just," "useful," "profitable,"
~'advantageous,"
"desirable," and
"good"- are also or even more fundamentally functioning as terms of
aspiration. In other words, these terms are being used not neutrally, or
as dispassionate, ''third-party," labels for the conduct of others, but as implicit designations for what it is or is believed to be that gives a life and
the activities it subsumes some "point" or "meaning." Conflicts over the
reference and the relative weight of these and similar terms are as varied
and unsurprising as conflicts over what life it is that has true point or meaning. As Aristotle brings home in Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics: Everyone agrees that "happiness" (Euoaq.tovia) is the right name for the life that
they want to Jive; they disagree over which life the name "cuoai!lo:>v" fits
(EN 15, 1095bl4-17).
I want to offer two brief suggestions in connection with this motif:
(i) As I have already implied, these terms of appraisal and aspiration
characteristically have to do with whole lives, rather than with sporadic,
episodic, or atomistically isolated patches of behavior within a life.
This emphasis seems to me central to all Greek ethical thought, whether
we look to Xenophon's rendition of the tale of Heracles, poised at the
crossroads between the Life of Virtue and the Life of Vice, to Aristotle's
reminder, immediately upon giving us his programmatic definition of happiness, that we have to add "in a complete or whole life, for one swallow
does not make a summer" (EN 16, 1098al8-20), or, more pertinently, to
Plato himself, who has Socrates fabricate, at the very end of The Republic,
the Myth of Er, in which denizens in Hades, having reviewed the lives they
earlier led on earth, choose new lives, in toto, for themselves.
(ii) The Socratic argument from desire or aspiration, an argument on
implicit display virtually from the start of The Republic, will be concerned to meet the pre-theoretical question: What way of life has point or sense?
Whereas Cephalus, at the beginning of the conversation, looks back over
I.
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a life already led and then symbolically absents himself, as though the question, in his eyes, is closed, Glaucon and Adeimantus will press Socrates
on this issue with passionate urgency, inasmuch as they have not yet committed themselves utterly to the choices from which the shape of their lives
will grow.
Their more specific demands in Book II show us that two things will
be incumbent on Socrates: He will have to prove (a) that the life that he
takes to make good sense truly does not make sense, instead of merely seeming to do so, and (b) that we have some kind of access to the difference
between the truly good life and the apparently good life; or, in other words,
that we know for sure what differentiates these, rather than having only
opinions on the matter. The interconnections between these two propositions that Socrates has to establish, on the one hand, and the argument
from desire, on the other, begin to reveal in what fashion the set of
arguments leading to the notion of The Good is something more than a
random collection.
(4) The fourth line of thought or argument leading to The Good in
The Republic is not strictly on a par with the first three. It would be much
more precise to say that the argument from Wholes and Parts, Unity and
Multiplicity, comprehends or unifies the first three. Because this is so,
because, that is, this last motif pervades the whole of the dialogue, it would
be exceedingly clumsy and unfitting to discuss it in partial ways, while,
on the other hand, any attempt to speak of it as a whole would amount
to a potentially infinite reiteration of the entire conversation. Let me then
pursue a still awkward alternative; let me try to recollect some of the instances of the motif of the One and the Many in order to see whether they
rest on common ground.
One might say that the dialogue begins on this note- Plato, in the spirit
of playful obliqueness that is his signature, has Socrates confront a group
of men as he returns from the Piraeus. When, at first, he seems intent on
heading back up to the city siraightaway, Polemarchus, one of that group,
reminds him: "Don't you see how many we are?" When Socrates suggests
that he might persuade them to let him go on his way, Polemarchus replies,
"But could you persuade us if we refused to listen" (327b12). In this way
the opening scene contains in germ the major political question of The
Republic: How can a multiplicity of individuals be persuaded to form a
community ·or citizens sharing, in their multiply different ways, a single
purpose?
We might also consider what comes to sight in Book I prior to any
"technical" elaboration suggested later: There are many different desires
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WHAT IS "THE GOOD''?
or aspirations, many different definitions of justice, many different opinions
concerning the best life- the phenomenon of manyness provokes the question whether there is any1hing to unite these many desires, definitions, etc.,
to unite them, not by way of identifying them with one another, at the
price of their relevant and intrinsic differences, but rather by way of bringing
them together, of so fitting them to one another that each has a character
in company with the others that no one of them has on its own.
The pursuit of this goal gains both momentum and clarity as we move
through the successive books of The Republic. Thus, the second, initially
luxurious city, the city led by Glaucon and his ilk, consists of separate
groups who must somehow be "molded" into a unity; the soul has its
separate and often conflicting parts, which have to be brought into a harmonious whole; the many virtues ought not be left hanging loosely together,
as Socrates' sly definition by exhaustion initially suggests, but should rather
be integrated in such a way that each plays its distinctive role only in concert with the rest. Socrates makes the first move in this direction by hinting that justice is not so much the fourth of the four virtues, and hence
on a par with the other three, as it is the virtue that enables the others
to perform their distinctive work. Finally, the many instances and aspects
of, say, justice or beauty, have to be understood as so many perspectival
views or glimpses of a single Form or look, since otherwise the claim that
each is an instance of beauty or of justice would be either unintelligible
or capricious and their ensemble would· be random or fitful.
These considerations will remain "abstract" or merely formal so long
as we fail to see how they are concretely "at work" in Socrates' discursive
practices.
Socrates is presented to us as one capable in deed of "doing justice"
to the partial and thus one-sided opinions, appearances, and desires of
his interlocutors, that is, as one who can find the right or fitting place
for each part so that all can, in principle, be fitted together precisely with
one another. He accommodates disparate theses, not by acknowledging
the right of each man to his own partial opinion, but by showing or suggesting how this disparity is to be understood; in other words, Socrates
works at making plain how a part is falsely inflated into the semblance
of a whole, while, at almost the same time, trying to bring out how the
whole has to find room for that same part, once it has been suitably
deflated.
The city of artisans, which Glaucon, the incarnation of Su~t6~,
spiritedness, renames "the city of pigs," is one example of such a policy,
since it has room only for bnSu~tiu, appetite, one, and only one, part of
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the soul. The two cities that succeed it are meant to put tmeullia in its
place. Socrates' policy of integration is, however, perhaps shown through
his overall response to the definitions of justice offered in Book 1: he
"refutes" them, often with transparently sophistic means, only to recuperate
them as he proceeds. Thus the warrior-auxiliaries act on Polemarchus's
definition of justice as benefiting one's friends-now understood as the
citizens of the just city- and protecting these same friends against their
common and genuine enemies; Thrasymachus's definition of justice as the
other's good, together with his exclusive emphasis on self-interest, are both
rectified and given their due in the official definition of justice as doing
one's own business so as to secure the unity and "health" of the whole
city and the whole soul. Finally, Cephal us's inchoate conception of justice
as making restitution of what one owes is restored to its rightful place when
Socrates compels the philosopher-king to return to the cave of the city for
the sake of paying back the debt he owes it, if not for his true education,
then at least for the nurturing opinions from which his true education is
an ambivalently fitting liberation."
What is Socrates doing in these cases? The unity or whole he is fashioning is an integrative, not an additive whole- a oA.ov, not simply a niiv,
to use the language of the Theaetetus, where this crucial Platonic distinction is expressly drawn (204all). Parts are not simply tacked on to parts,
in linear fashion, but are being made, to the extent this is possible given
the nature of those parts, to dovetail exactly with one another, to fit together
"in the precise sense," 0.Kptj3&c;.
What is it that makes Socrates' success in integrative discourse possible? This question and its most plausible answers take us into the heart
of Plato's thinking and thus within the range of the noetic center around
which the arguments of The Republic revolve.
(I) First, Plato's name for what makes integrative discourse, rather than
additive or eliminative discourse, in each case possible is: the form of
something considered on its own-ai'no <O <!>,where<!> ranges over such
things as Justice, Virtue, and Beauty." A form is not a univocal and
homogenous kind or class, as Aristotle believed it had to be, but a structured assemblage or collection of parts, for which the most reliable icon
is a whole number, an integer, as we nowadays say." Plato thinks there
are forms because he thinks that the disputes and disparities set in motion
when we engage in talk about our most serious concerns and desires both
have a point and point us to something stable; in contrast, the modern
Nominalist, Hobbes or Locke, for example, regards it as the philosophers'
most important task to bring such pointless disputes to a halt.
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152
(2) The Forms, whatever they are, seem to come to light only in the
presence of what Socrates calls eros; the quasi-argument for the Forms
in Republic, Book V, as interpreters tend to forget, begins with Socrates
calling attention to the difference between those who love the whole of
something and those who love only its mutually discrepant or episodic
parts." In the Symposium, Aristophanes characterizes eros as "the desire
and pursuit of the Whole (192e!O). Aristophanes offers a comically
anatomical rendition of that claim; the Platonic dialogues, especially The
Republic, set out its psychic and discursive versions.
(3) The Forms themselves are a multiplicity that needs unity. They, too,
must constitute an integrated assembly or community in which each form
is what it is only by being distinct from other forms. Just prior to his first
mention of The Good, in Book VI, Socrates suggests that justice prevails
among the forms; that is, that each can perform its own task oniy by virtue
of the harmonious ensemble constituted by all the Forms. The question
thereby provoked is: What is responsible for the harmony among the
Forms?
(4) In Books VI-VII Socrates will be made to give a series of indications, often of the most complicated and elusive character, as to the ways
in which something called The Good makes integrative discourse possible
by fitting all the Forms and the knowing soul to one another with the
greatest exactitude or precision. In doing so, or as a result of doing so,
The Good also bears responsibility for the distinctions to which prephilosophical experience bears witness- the distinctions between knowledge
and opinion and between being and appearance, which are, in the end,
two sides of one and the same distinction.
Socrates, by simultaneously studying and encouraging Glaucon to exhibit that most enigmatic and most revealing human activity, learning or
mathesis, will try to bring us to see how The Good can both distinguish
and unite everything altogether. Thus, in learning about learning the soul
will also come to recognize, or so Plato implies, what it is that it really
desires.
These final declarations obviously need to be worked through much
more carefully and in vastly greater detail. In the final section of this paper
I can only try to anticipate some probable results of snch an enterprise.
III.
The four lines of argument and reflection I have been discussing reach
their common destination in Socrates' teasingly oblique, if not opaque,
remarks concerning The Good or "The Idea of the Good" in Books VI
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and VII of The Republic." Let me suggest that the key remark is his very
first one, that The Good is the flB'Y!Cl~ov wiSnwr (504e5; 505a2)-the
greatest topic of learning and study- for the potential guardians of the
Just City. This initial description provides the key to what follows, not only
because the complicity between The Good and mathesis or learning will
turn out to be the heart of the matter, as I shall try to show, but also because
it allows us to anticipate, and make sense of, the tenor and limits of Socrates'
presentation.
Many readers have been baffled or disturbed by Socrates' reticence and
playful evasiveness on the topic of The Good, thinking, understandably
enough, that at this climactic moment of the dialogue, perhaps of his
philosophizing altogether, Plato ought to have had Socrates "deliver the
goods." This expectation, however, is at odds with a crucial feature of
Socratic (and Platonic) teaching, a feature best known to us from the contrast with the teaching of, say, a Gorgias: While the latter purports to
transmit a settled doctrine or technique that it is the business of the disciple to absorb and retain, Socratic teaching is provocative and evocative,
its aim being to turn the soul of the student in the direction of what is
genuinely learnable, so that he may call his own inward resources of
understanding into play." Accordingly, the straightforward presentation
of a doctrine or a technically accessible theory of The Good would have
been singolarly unsuited to the Socratic conception and practice of teaching.
Instead, Plato, with the self-reflexivity characteristic of his writing in
general, has Socrates furnish Glaucon, Adeimantus, and us, his silent but
thoughtful auditors, with a series of provocative indications thanks to which
they (and we) can set about the task of learning what learning requires
when it is most concentrated and self-absorbed. In short, by referring to
The Good, at the outset, as a ~t<iSn~tn, a matter for learning, Socrates puts
us in mind of the one activity through which we can begin to respond fittingly to his subsequent hints and images.
With this in mind we can now turn to Socrates' discussion itself. This
may be divided into three main segments of unequal length: The first contains Socrates' introductory remarks concerning the necessity of coming
to know The Good; the second consists of a sequence of three striking
and deeply inviting images offered by Socrates in response to Glaucon's
demand for clarification: the images of the Sun, the Divided Line, and
the Cave. In the final segment Socrates sets out a program of studies, culminating in dialectic and the apprehension of The Good, which the future
guardians will be made to pursue. The second and third segments thus account, respectively, for the possibility and the actualization of the necessity disclosed in the first segment.
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WHAT IS 'THE GOOD"?
After disposing of two superficial, but enduringly plausible, attempts
to identify The Good with pleasure or with thoughtfulness and knowledge
(506b2-4), Socrates begins to elaborate his initial claim that "if we do not
know The Good, even if we should know other things as well as we possibly
can, nonetheless this is no benefit to us, just as nothing we might possess
is of any benefit to us without The Good" (505a6-bl). His elaboration
goes as follows: "Is it not clear that whereas people would choose to do
and to possess and to be reputed to have things that merely seem to be
just and noble, even though they are not really so, when it comes to good
things, no one is satisfied to possess what merely seems to be good; rather
people seek what really is good and all disdain the mere semblance?"
(505d5-9). Socrates immediately adds that "every soul pursues this and
does everything for its sake, having a presentiment or prophetic mantic
intuition that some such thing really is, although perplexed and unable
to grasp what it is or to achieve the steadfast confidence about it that it
has about other things ... " (505dll-e3).
I have quoted this passage at 505d-e at length, first, because it puts
us on notice that the matrix from which the question of The Good arises
is the soul and its desires and satisfactions, and, second, because in it
Socrates has already started to weave together the first three strands of
argument I distinguished earlier. These two considerations complement one
another, as I shall try to show.
The contrast Socrates draws between the willingness of many people
to be content with the appearance or reputation of justice, etc., and their
unwillingness to put up with merely the semblance of good is not, at least
not initially, a point about transcendent values, moral ideals, or ultimate
sanctions, as many modern commentators assume. Rather, he is making
a more pedestrian, if finally more profound, point about the teleology of
human desiring: The semblance of satisfaction does not count as genuinely
satisfying whatever desire we may happen to have. Consider the case of
a man who bends all his efforts, throughout a lifetime, towards the goal
of acquiring a genuine Rembrandt portrait. Possessing such a painting is
the overriding aim of all his activity, the target of all his aspirations. Suppose, now, that he also knows from the start that the only Rembrandt portrait he will ever acquire will be a "fake," a "forgery"; this knowledge would
surely deprive his life of intelligible sense if he continues to subordinate
everything else to his desire for a genuine Rembrandt portrait. If my overriding aim in life .is to acquire wealth, I do not want to be paid in Monopoly
money, I want the "real thing," "the genuine article." Of course, I can strive
to acquire a bogus substitute, but only if I believe that its possession entails some genuine advantage or benefit. I can, for example, earnestly desire
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to seem to be just, without wanting really to be just, only if I believe that
this appearance will be to my real advantage- that it will afford me genuine prestige, status, power, and so forth, where the latter are believed to
be true goods.
Notice thatin my example of desire, as in Socrates', the twin motifs
of semblance vs. genuineness and opinion vs. knowledge are readily audible. This indicates that the more exotic or remote epistemological and ontological aspects of The Good come into view from the perspective of what
is more familiar or intelligible to us as beings who not only desire, but"
also desire that our desires be truly or really satisfied. The satisfaction of
this "second-order" desire can only come with knowledge of what it is for
something to be "the real thing," uthe genuine article," and with the
knowledge of what things satisfy this condition.
The second main segment of Socrates' discussion of The Good is occupied, as I have said, by three grand and seemingly inexhaustible images.
I would like to propose the following, very provisional, way of understanding their interconnected roles: (1) The image of the Sun pictures the knowing soul yoked together with the items available to its power of knowing,
i.e., the Intelligibles or, more narrowly, the forms." It brings to light the
Good as the ground of the possibility of knowledge in the sense of completely realized knowledge. (2) The image of the Divided Line pictures the
learning soul as it negotiates its way towards the realization or actualization of that latter state. The Line sets out the different ways the learning
soul has of being responsive or open to what comes within its ken; The
Good is responsible here for the fundamental continuity uniting these different responses, these pathemata, as Socrates calls them, as well as their
correlative "objects." (3) The image of the Cave pictures the embodied or
political soul with respect to those conditions of our communal lives that
threaten to make learning and hence knowledge impossible, those conditions that close off the highest or noblest ways the soul has of being open
to the world.
Each image, in its own fashion, offers us a view of a certain whole or
totality articulated into its distinct, yet fundamentally continuous, parts.
Each image is a lesson in contriving, or, better, assembling duly proportioned wholes.
Let me dwell on the first of these, the Image of the Sun, in order to
give some initial substance to this suggestion. Three themes are here brought
to light: first, the relation or relations between The Good and the intelligibles (508a4-c2); second, the meaning and basis of the description
of knowledge and truth as "looking like The Good" (509a3); and finally,
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rey
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WHAT IS "THE GOOD"?
156
~----------------------------------
the claim that The Good begets or generates the Sun as its own proportionate counterpart or analogue (508bl3).
Socrates says that The Good gives to the things intrinsically capable
of being known, the intelligibles or noeta, both their capacity for actually
being known, and their very beingness and essence, while "The Good itself
is not essence, but is beyond essence [ousia], surpassing it in dignity and
potency" (509b9-10). This enigmatic, mystifying statement begins to yield
some of its sense if we read it in light of the comparison or simile linking
The Good and the Sun. Just as the Sun is the source of illumination by
virtue of which opaque physical objects can be seen, so The Good "illumines" through the agency of truth, the intelligibles. Now those physical
objects, thanks to their material constitution, e.g., their solidity and color,
are intrinsically visible, although they cannot be seen "in the dark"- the
Sun's light permits their intrinsic visibility to "flourish." Similarly, The
Good enables the intrinsic knowability of the Intelligibles or Forms to show
itself when in company with the knowing soul. This role of The Good as
an enabling source, a source bringing something's capacity to life, has to·
be kept in mind if we are to understand how The Good also provides the
forms with their being and determinate essence (ousia). If we take it as
a settled matter that, for Plato, the Forms are eternally and are, ipso facto,
eternally Forms, then The Good's provision of etvnt and oua(n- beingness
and essence- cannot mean either that it causes the Forms to come into
being, to ''exist,"or that it causes them to be forms, or, finally, that it bears
responsibility for each Form's being the Form that it is, except in a very
special sense, which I shall attempt to explicate.
This notion of enablement or "empowerment" has in fact been on
display since Socrates' concluding arguments in Book I." A virtue, there
more specifically the virtue of justice, is what allows or enables a thing
to perform its characteristic work, its ergon. If the soul lacks justice, so
Socrates claims, it cannot execute the work for which it is naturally or intrinsically suited. Its capacities are, so to speak, activated by the presence
of virtue.
I want to propose that the same relationship can be seen as obtaining
among the virtues themselves, as well as among the Forms generally. The
Good, in other words, will be the "virtue" of the Forms both singly and
collectively, insofar as it enables each and every one of them to do the
work for which it is suited by its own inherent nature."
In the passage at 500b8-c7 to which I alluded in the previous section,
Socrates points out to Adeimantus that the genuine philosopher will contemplate "those things that are set together with one another in an orderly
way, in a taxis, so that they neither commit injustice against one another,
c
::!
~·
'
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nor suffer injustice from one another, but all hold together in a decorous
way- as a cosmos- in accord with logos." If we also recall the "official"
definition of justice in Book IV- justice is each thing's doing what is its
own- then some features of my proposal will begin to fall into place: For
the Forms to do justice to one another is exactly the same as their forming
or fitting into the taxis or cosmos at which Socrates hints in Book VI.
Each form does its job or plays its part fully or supremely well only in
concert with all the other Forms; the self-sameness of each Form stands
out only against the backdrop of its community with Forms from which
if differs, just as each virtue, each part of the soul, each group of citizens
within the city, works well at what it does only in concert with the other
virtues, parts, and groups. Indeed, the cosmos, the decorous array, of the
Forms, is the model and foundation on which those other harmonies and
constitutions rest.
My proposal, then, is that The Good is not one among the Forms, nor
is it a super-form in which all the others participate in order to gain their
status as forms." Rather, it is the source that enables the Forms to fit with
one another in the way that best suits each and all of them. The Good,
I would want to say, gives the intelligible domain its intactness, its integrity; it enables the ensemble of Forms to be well-formed.
This proposal might also throw light on Socrates' statement that truth
and knowledge are ayu6ost8fi, have the same look as The Good, without
being identical with The Good. Thuth, nA.l\Betn, is just that display of the
domain of Forms in its integrated wholeness, for which light or day-light
is the natural simile. Bright daylight allows us both to single out illuminated
objects and to see them in their togetherness with one another." Knowledge,
or its locus, the knowing soul, when most actively at work, is similarly
the display of its "objects" in their emphatic singleness as well as in their
integration.,. Because both truth and the soul put on a display of the same
sort, they are potentially well-matched with one another; The Good, as
it were, arranges and sustains their match, it causes them to dovetail with
one another.
I come to the last of the three themes I want to emphasize in connection with the Image of the Sun, namely, the role of. The Good as the father
or generative source of the Sun, and, therewith, or derivatively, of the sensible world as a whole. (It is only in the Timaeus, that exotic sequel to
a conversation strangely like The Republic, that Plato gives detailed clues
to how this cosmogenetic function might be understood.) In the present
context, what is of decisive importance is that this generative role links
together being and becoming, intelligibility and genesis, in such a way that
their relationship can be determinately understood. Earlier, towards the
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WHAT IS "THE GOOD"?
end of Book V, Socrates was even bolder: "The forms, although each is
in its own right one, by reason of their community with actions, with bodies,
and with one another, show up everywhere in such a way that each appears to be many or manifold" (476a4-7). This passage, when taken in concert with the claim that The Good begets the Sun, seems to suggest that
sensible particulars are somehow the manifestations of the forms, that is,
that the Forms are in some way responsible for their own incomplete, partial, and, thus, confused and confusing images.
The same three themes I have mentioned- The Good as the source of
the integration of the Forms, the match between truth and the knowing
soul, and the status of the sensible realm as an image of the intelligible
realm- are at work in the second image to which Socrates turns in an effort to enlighten Glaucon, the image of a mathematical line divided twice
according to identical ratios such that the resultant "parts" correspond both
to four ways the soul can respond to the world and to the four domains ·
to which these responses are addressed. If the Image of the Sun affords
us a vision of what it is like to be fully in the know, the Divided Line pictures the soul in the course of coming to know, that is, in the course of
learning.
Let me simply point out three considerations that would need to be
studied and discussed in a fuller account:
(I) As important as the divisions of the Line may be, perhaps more
important than these is the unity or continuity of the Line. The cuts
Glaucon makes leave no real gaps between the segments. This makes it
possible to pass "smoothly" up and down the line."
(2) What guarantees this passage is not just the bare unity of the line,
the fact that it is one single line, but, even more crucially, the inner articulation of the line according to the pervasive relation between images
and their originals: What is initially confronted at a "lower" level, as though
it stood on its own, is seen from the next highest level as a partial image
of a more adequate and more precise original. To negotiate the divisions
of the Line is to become practiced in this motion from image and original
and back.
(3) Finally, Socrates and Glaucon do not merely discuss the Divided
Line; their activities over the course of this discussion exemplify the very
divisions and motions on which their words are focused. Glaucon forms
or entertains an image and then proceeds to train upon it that capacity
called dianoia that does its main business with numbers, ratios, and proportions. Furthermore, his relative ease in discharging Socrates' instructions bears witness to his confidence, his pistis, that nothing will block
his access to the higher divisions of the Line. Finally, as Plato seems to ·
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indicate by making the first word of Socrates' instruction the imperative
N6T]oov-"grasp by Nous," the final and highest capacity-Glaucon from
the first has to take hold of the line in its unity and wholeness, no matter
how precariously, if he is to make sense of the analytical, divisive, actions
he goes on to perform. Mathesis or learning thus involves the union or
interanimation of all four divisions of the Line, that is, of all four modes
of the soul's responsiveness.
I should have liked to go on to fill out the design I sketched earlier-to
comment on the third image, that of the Cave, showing how the puppeteers
within the Cave, the non-philosophical "opinion-makers," past and present, within the city captivate their prisoners by dissembling images that
bear no illuminating relation to their originals. Afterwards, I would have
wanted to move on to the third and final segment of Socrates' treatment
of The Good- the program of mathematical studies followed by training
in dialectic, set out in Book VII. My emphasis would have fallen where
I think Socrates' emphasis does, namely, on the kinship and community
among these studies. The dialectician is, he says, the synoptikos, the one
who can see things in their togetherness. Guided by this indication, I would
have tried to show that coming to know The Good is not a matter of learning something new over and above the antecedent studies; instead, knowledge of The Good consists in coming to see how those studies are akin
to one another, that is, how their order and array constitutes a complete
whole. 26
Accordingly, The Good founds by gathering five versions of community
(Kmvrovio.) in TheRepublic; it seems fitting to name them in descending
order of comprehensiveness: (I) the community of the forms (their ~6.!;1<;,
from which injustice is excluded); (2) the community of the sciences
mastered by the intending philosopher; (3) the community of the soul's
powers or "parts"; (4) the community of citizens in the three political cities;
(5) the community of the participants in that very conversation Socrates
recollects as a whole the day after it took place- the community, in other
words, of which Plato's text, The Republic, is the written image." Although
last in this series, the fifth community is the only one we are in a position
to witness as it comes into being, as, for instance, Socrates eniists the friendship of the hitherto inimical Thrasymachus (498c8-di). Witnessing, listening to the play of speeches in this fifth community is not a passive affair;
their play stands a chance of generating, but not of guaranteeing, a "collectedness" in the auditor's soul. We might be tempted to say that this is
the good of The Republic.
In lieu of these elaborations, let me bring my remarks to something
like a close. Socrates' three images, together with the guardians' program
�160
WHAT IS "THE GOOD"?
of mathematical study, far from digressing from the central "moral"
question-"How should we lead our lives?"-bring us face to face with
at least an outline or adumbration of an answer. Indeed, in his final comment on The Good, Socrates spells this out quite succinctly: At the age
of fifty when the guardians' education is complete, they should use The
Good as a paradigm from which to order-Plato's word is Kocr].LELV, to
make into a cosmos, a "decorous array"- "both the city and its citizens
and themselves. This means that The Good, as the ground of the integrative
ordering of the Forms, serves as the model for political and psychological
integration. Knowledge of the good is what would allow us to lead, or to
aspire to lead, "wholesome lives, lives in which each part- for example,
each desire- is given its due precisely by being fitted together with all other
relevant parts. What The Republic offers us, then, is not a recipe or
mechanically applicable formula, but a format in terms of which we can
understand what it would mean to lead such a life. Plato's "metaphysics"
is, we might say, an ontology of sanity, a metaphysics of wholesomeness.
I hasten to add that Plato is not blithely optimistic over the collective
or the individual prospects of sanity, unlike many later critics who chided
him for lacking "realism." Nor, on the other hand, is he dolefully
pessimistic. As the dialogues and the career of Socrates both seem to show,
the human condition is poised unsteadily on the shifting margin between
comedy and tragedy. The basis for hope may reside in philosophy, which,
by mediating between the comic and the tragic, proves itself to be, in the
words of the Phaedo, "the best and noblest kind of music."
It would be of some interest to compare Platonic "optimism" in its setting with its modern counterpart, the liberal if not wholly liberating belief
in interminable progress, which begins with the satyr-play or opera buffa
known to us as the Enlightenment.
I have, so I recognize, been immeasurably inexact in the remarks I have
made in this paper. Partial consolation comes to me from the recollection
of a deliciously and enlighteningly ironic passage close to the beginning
of Book V of The Republic: Socrates is apparently eager to push on to
the issue of the types of unjust regimes; his audience is more forcefully
bent on hearing him explain his proposals, made in passing, concerning
the guardians' sharing of women and children. Socrates protests, fearful
of the "hornets' nest" the issue will stir up. Then ThrasymachusThrasymachus, whose impatient, precipitate eruption into the conversation in Book I determined its subsequent course, Thrasymachus, who had
demanded from the penniless Socrates a monetary payment should he fail
to define justice- now says: "Do you think those of us who are here came
to prospect for gold rather than to listen to discussions, to /ogoi?" "The
latter," says Socrates, "at least in some measure." "No," Glaucon protests,'
�LACHTERMAN
161
"for those who have reason the whole of life is the measure of such discussions" (449b3-7).
Let me be, if only for a moment, what Hegel says a philosopher should
never be- edifying: It seems to me fitting that we keep this scale of measurement in mind.
NillES
1. The fragment of Amphis's Amphicrates is printed in T. Kock, Comicorum Atticorum Fragmenta (Leipzig, 1880-88), Vol. II, 237. Other
burlesques of Plato's philosophizing are quoted and glossed in Ingemar
Diiring, Herodicus the Cratetean. A Study in Anti-Platonic Tradition
(Stockholm, 1941), pp. 138-43. The two best general treatments of Plato
and other philosophers as targets of vaudevillian satire remain R. Helm,
Lukian und Menipp (Berlin, 1906: Anhang V: "Die Philosophen in
der Komodie') and R. Fenk, Adversarii Platonis quomodo de indole
ac moribus eius iudicaverunt (Jena, 1913). One should, however, recall
that Plato is fully capable of giving tit for tat, as The Symposium
demonstrates.
2. Beyond Good and Evi4 "Preface." Needless to say, this is not Nietzsche's first or his last word about Plato. For two examples, see Nietzsche's early (1864) sketch, "Uber das Verhiiltniss der Rede des Alcibiades
zu den iibrigen Reden des platonischen Symposions," HistorischKritisch Gesamtausgabe, Werke (Munich, 1934, Bd.2, pp. 420-44), and
the transcript of his lecture-course "Einfiihrung in das Studium der
Platonischen Dialoge," Musarion-Ausgabe, Bd. IV (Munich, 1921), pp.
367-443. According to Nietzsche, the essentially poetic Plato was seduced by the legerdemain of Socratic "dialectic."
3. Paul Shorey, "The Idea of the Good in Plato's Republic," University
of Chicago, Studies in Classical Philology I (1895), pp. 187-239. This
"moral" or "axiological" characterization is frequently repeated by
modern interpreters; see, for example, Emile de Strycker, "L'Idee du
Bien dans Ia Repub/ique de Platon," EAntiquite Classique 39 (1970),
pp. 450-67, where The Good is called "le valeur supreme," "the supreme
value." But the very notion of "value" is a distinctively modern contrivance; see the illuminating study by Jean Beaufret, "Heidegger et
Nietzsche: Le concept de valeur," in J. B., Dialogue avec Heidegger,
T. II (Paris, 1973), pp. 182-200. Attention might also be called to the
distinction drawn by the French "Physiocrats" between "biens" (goods)
and "valeurs" (values). The former are inalienable, immobile; the !at-
�f
.
·~
~,'lj
162
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
WHAT IS "THE GOOD"?
ter can be exchanged with and for one another. (Cf. Michel Foucault,
Les Mots et les chases [Paris, 1966], pp. 202-09.) The modern theory
of values is, or so it seems, a surplus product of modern political
economy, projected backwards onto Plato.
Artistotle, Eudemian Ethics !8, 1217b25.
John Findlay, "The Neoplatonism of Plato," in The Significance of
Neop/atonism, ed. R. Baines Harris (Norfolk, Va., 1976), pp. 23-44
at p. 30. For the Neoplatonic identification of The Good with The
One, see the useful study of Carlos Steel, "L'Un et le Bien. Les raisons
d'une identification dans Ia tradition Platonicienne," Revue des Sciences
philosophiques et thlfologiques 73 (1989), pp. 69-85. Plotinus remarks,
however, that The One is unep<iyn6oc;, "beyond the Good," Enneads
VI.9.6, 42.
Anonymous Prolegomena to Platonic Philosophy, ed. L. G. Westerink
(Amsterdam, 1962), pp. 28-35. See, on the topos of a text as a Cosmos,
James A. Coulter, The Literary Microcosm. Theories of Interpretation of the Later Neoplatonists (Leiden, 1976). (Platonic "miming"
should be matched with the cosmopoiesis of the Demiurge.) Whether
all of the Platonic dialogues also constitute a cosmos is considered
by Diskin Clay, "Gaps in the 'Universe' of the Platonic Dialogues,"
Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy,
III (Lanham, Md., 1988), pp. 131-57.
For an ancient, fragmentary, discussion of Plato's dramatization
of Socratic conversation, see Michael W. Haslam, "Plato, Sophron,
and the Dramatic Dialogue," Bulletin of the Institute of Classical
Studies [London], 19 (1972), pp. 17-38, and his edition of the Oxyrhyncus Papyrus 3219 (see Preface, supra., p. i-ii) in Volume XLV of The
Oxyrhyncus Papyri (London, 1977), pp. 29-39.
Cicero, Thsculan Disputations V, iv. On the motif see J. Kerschensteiner,
"Socrates philosophiam devocavit a caelo," in: Festschrift fiir Franz
Egermann zu seinem 80. Geburtstag ... , ed. W. Suerbaum and F.
Maier (Munich, 1985), pp. 41-56.
.1.6~a also means "repute" or "reputation." Reputation is, as it were,
the link between appearance and opinion. On the pre-Platonic,
especially poetic, usage and force of M~n see the difficult but rather
splendid book by Raymond Prier, Thauma Idesthai, The Phenomenology of Sight and Appearance in Archaic Greek (Thllahassee, Fla.,
1989), esp. pp. 36-41.
Cf. Eva Brann, "Plato's Theory of Ideas," The St. John's Review 32
(July, 1980), pp. 29-37.
See I. Kant, Grundlegung der Metaphysik der Sitten, Akademie-
�LACHTERMAN
II.
12.
13.
14.
163
Ausgabe, Bd. VI, p. 222. (Cf. Erste Einleitung in die Kritik der Urteilskraft, ibid., Bd. XX, p. 200 [note], wheFe Kant emends the "problematic
imperatives" of the Metaphysik der Sitten into "technical imperatives,
or "Imperative der Kunst.")
David Roochnik's article, "Socrates' Use of the Techne-Analogy," Journal of the History of Philosophy 24 (1986), pp. 295-310, is a valuable
rebuttal of the conventional complaints against the association of tBXVll
and apetl]. See also Reinhart Maurer, "Der Zusammenhang von
Technik und Gerechtigkeit und seine metaphysische Grundlegung in
Platons Po/iteia," Philosophisches Jahrbuch 82 (1975), pp. 259-84. A
good synoptic study of the semantic interplay between bncrtl\f!ll and
tEXVll is Rene Schaerer's book, 'Emcrtl\f!ll et tBXVll· Etudes sur /es
notions de connaissance et de l'art d'Homere ii Platon (Ma10on, 1930).
On the relation between <'<Kp((\eta and the handicrafts, see D. Kurz,
AKPIBEIA. Das Ideal der Exaktheit bei den Griechen bis Aristoteles
(Giippingen, 1970). Fundamental is J. Klein's "On Precision," in J. K.,
Lectures and Essays, ed. E. Zuckerman and R. Williamson (Annapolis,
1985), pp. 289-316.
Two issues emerge from this conjuncture. First, is rule of the city in
any way the fulfillment of the philosopher's education or nature? AI
Farabi, in The Attainment of Happiness, appears to have given the
most systematically affirmative answer to this question (see AI Farabi's
Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, trans. M. Mahdi [Glencoe, Ill.,
1962], esp. sec. 34, and AI Farabi on the Perfect State. Abfi-Nasr aiFiiriibi's Mabiidi' Arii' Ahl al-Madlna a/-Fiiflila, ed. R. Walzer [Oxford, 1985], pp. 238-50). A more recent case for an affirmative answer
may be found in Joseph Beatty, "Plato's Happy Philosopher and
Politics," Review of Politics 38 (1976), pp. 545-75. Second, what is the
connection, if any, between the philosopher's education to what truly
is and his artful lying to his non-philosophical fellow citizens? In addition to the discussion of the "noble lie" in Rep. III, 414b8-c2 the
key Platonic text is the Hippias Minor, where Odysseus's prowess in
deceitful confabulation appears to excel over Achilles' suppositions
plain-spokenness. It should be noted that artful lying is, in most instances of early Greek poetry, an enviable virtue of the gods and the
Muses. (See, e.g., Hesiod, Theogony 27-28.) The topic of divine and
poetic deceitfulness has been illuminatingly explored by Walther Luther,
"Wahrheit" und "Luge" im iiltesten Griechentum (Leipzig, 1935) and
by Marcel Detienne, Les maftres de verite dans Ia grece archai'que (Paris,
1973).
Essential to an understanding of this recurrent Platonic idiom are the
�164
WHAT IS "THE GOOD"?
studies of Eduard des Places, "ATTO:E et '0 ATTOE chez Platon,"
iu E.d.P., Etudes Platoniciennes, 1929-1979 (Leiden, 1981), pp. 56-59,
and Richard Jauko, "ATTO:E EKEINO:E: A Neglected Idiom,"
Classical Quarterly 35 (1985), pp. 20-30.
!5. That apt8J,t6c; as "positive integer" is an apt entree into the understanding of the cfOI] might be inferred from the fact that it belongs
to a family of words from the same root apt-, probably including
liptcr1oc;, apc11j, apJ.tovia, and iip8pov, all of which point towards
a fitting-together, a suitably collected assemblage or jointure. (Cf.
Pierre Chantraine, Dictionnaire etymologique de Ia langue grecque
[Paris, 1968], T. I, pp. 101-09.) A Greek number, as understood by
Plato and his mathematical predecessors, is an assemblage, not an aggregate. It is, however, quite a different question whether numerical
assemblages are themselves eidetic assemblages, as Aristotle reports
some "Platonists" as having believed (see, e.g., Eudemian Ethics, I8,
1218al5-32; apart from the "classical" discussion in Jacob Klein, Greek
Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra [Cambridge, Mass.,
1968], pp. 79-99, one should consult Samuel Scolnicov, "On the
Epistemological Significance of Plato's Theory of Ideal Numbers,"
Museum Helveticum 28 [1971], pp. 72-97, and Vittorio Hosie, "On
Plato's Philosophy of Numbers and Its Mathematical and
Philosophical Significance," Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journa/!3
[1988], pp. 21-63). One cardinal difficulty facing any such identification of apt8J,toi with clO'l may be stated, in Aristotelian terms, as
follows: If each single clone; (e.g., "Justice") is itself an assemblage
of "units" taking their character uniquely from their conjunction in
that c!ooc;, what sense can we make of the participation of that c!ooc;
in some more comprehensive dOoc; (e.g., "virtue")? Do the "units" of
the former somehow become assimilable to, or comparable with, the
units of other clOT] conjoined in the latter? Questions of this kind seem
to be at the root of Aristotle's reflections on the so-called aot)J.tJ3A!]1ot
apt8J,toi (see Metaph. M6-8, 1080all-1083b23).
At all events, there is nothing in The Republic (or, I think, elsewhere)
to suggest that the lived-domain of the polis, its citizens, and their
virtues could be straightforwardly "derived" from combinations of
"eidetic" numbers or from mathematical numbers at all. When the text
does seem to make such suggestions, as in the case of the notorious
"nuptial number" in Book VIII, the playfulness is almost transparent.
(Cf. Konrad Gaiser, "Die Rede der Musen iiber den Grund von Ordnung und Unordnung: Platon, Politeia VIII, 545D-547A," in Studia
Platonica. Festschrift fiir Hermann Gunder! [Amsterdam, 1974], pp.
L--·----
'.
�LACHTERMAN
165
49-85, and Jean-Fran9ois Mattei, "La genealogie du nombre nuptial
chez Platon," Etudes philosophiques 1982, pp. 281-303.) A similar
playfulness is in evidence in the arithmetical city-planning of Atlantis
in the Critias. The distinction drawn between two varieties of measurement in The Statesman (283c3-287b2), one attuned to "number,
lengths, breadths and speeds vis-a-vis their contraries," the other attuned to "the mean, the fitting, the opportune and the needful (~o
oeov)," seems to give the lie to attempts to extract political and ethical
lessons from the relations among numbers or geometrical magnitudes.
One must, so to speak, await the seventeenth century before Plato's
captious play is taken in all seriousness, as it is in, e.g., William Petty's
Political Arithmetic (London, 1682) or in Erhard Weigel's Philosophia
Mathematica [sen] Theologia Natura/is So/ida (Jena, 1693); Weigel was
one of Leibniz's influential early teachers. Nor is its surprising that
when npt9!!oi are "reinterpreted" as aggregates (as in modern settheory) instead of assemblages, the calculative art of 1>.oywnK1\ replaces
the theoretical science of npt9!!1l~tK1\ (cf. Howard Stein, "Logos, Logic,
and Logistike: Some Philosophical Remarks. on Nineteenth-Century
'Itansformation of Mathematics," in History and Philosophy of
Modern Mathematics, ed. W. Aspray and P. Kitcher [Minneapolis,
1988], pp. 238-59).
16. Salient here is Socrates' earlier exhortation that Glaucon not allow any
"illiberality (nve1>.w9epin) to escape his notice," for "pettiness of speech
(cr!!tKpo1to1>.oy(n) is most contrary to a soul always yearning for the
whole and the sum of the divine and the human" (VI, 486a5 ff.).
Socratic philosophizing presupposes attentiveness to the whole, just
as Aristophanic eros is "the desire and pursuit of the whole" (Symp.
192bl0-193al). This presupposition is given forceful expression in the
Seventh Letter, where Plato claims that "in learning these [sc. excellence
and ignobility] one must at the same time learn the falseness and the
truth of what-is in its entirety (~ii~ o1>.11~ oucrin~ 344b2)." To anticipate:
The Good is what beneficially preserves what-is in its integrity (see
X, 608e and the Ps.-Platonic Definitions 414e9: 'Ayneov ~o ni·nov
cronllpin~ ~oi~ oucrtv, "Good is the cause responsible for preservation
to the beings''). Socrates is made to take up the same theme, in mythical
garb, when he speaks of the misguided search for a new Atlas in the
Phaedo: "The Good and the binding (lltov) bind and hold together"
(Phaedo 99c6).
Whether or not the soul's desire for the Whole is a reliable index
of the being of the Whole is not readily decided. What Plato does
indicate is the difference between Sophistic unthinking or mimetic "pro-
�166
WHAT IS "THE GOOD"?
ductions" of the Whole and Socratic evocations of the Whole (see Rep.
X, 596c2, 598b7, 598d3-4).
17. The lexical variations among aim'> To U.yn86v (e.g., 507a3; 534c4),
T<iyn86v (506el, 508bl3, 518dl, 52la6), and 1\ TOU uyuSoG iota (505a2,
517cl, 526el, 534cl) occasion both uncertainty and speculation. Morphologically interpreted, the last phrase would mean "the vision of
The Good," while TO ToG U.ynSoG d&o~. which never occurs in The
Republic (pace Proc/us, In Rem Publicam, ed. Kroll, 269, 22 f.: oro
e!&o~ -rii>v U.yn8iilv n<ivTrov) would mean "the visage of The Good."
(The Dutch treatise by P. Brommer, Eidos et Idea [Utrecht, 1940], is
the best source of "information" on this matter; see, as well, C. M.
Gillespie, "The Use of e!&o~ and !&En in Hippocrates," Classical
Quarterly 1912, pp. 179-203.) Dramatic context does not appear immediately to discriminate among the three locutions, since, at VII, 534
cl-4, both TTJV TOG uyn8oG i&tnv and nino TO U.yn86v are uttered.
And yet, the appeal to sight is most marked in those passages in
which The Good is to be captured in a vision. (Compare, too, 532c6:
npo~ TTJV TOU O.ptaTOU EV TOt~ QUO\ etnv.) One is tempted to hear in
these appeals an accommodation to Glaucon's fondness for statues
and sculptures (compare II, 36ld5 [Socrates] with VII, 540c4 [Glaucon]
and note that at IV, 420c5 Socrates mentions how unfitting it would
be to paint the most beautiful part of a statue, the eyes, most beautifully, at the expense of the whole). The visual/visionary images of The
Good may, then, be perspectivally adjusted to Glaucon's predilections.
In any case, it is crucial to recall that Socrates' interlocutors, and we,
are listening to his opinion of The Good; sound predominates in
Socrates' staging of his son et lumiere. So, no express mention of The
Good or of its look is made in the discussion of the Line, where
Glaucon's soul is concentrated on the possibility of mobile and comprehensive learning thanks to ;1.6ym. Compare, too, Aristotle, De sensu I, 437a'ff., especially KUTU OUI!~e~!]KO~ 1\t npo~ <pp6VT]OIV fJ UKOTJ
n;\.eiomv OU!!~Ii;\.A,e-rat I'ZPO~ = "Concomitantly hearing contributes
the largest share to thoughtfulness."
Hans-Georg Gadamer has made a valuable attempt to solve the
enigma of Rep. VII, 534b8 (OuKoGv Kat nepl -roG uyn8oG roonu-rro~).
where the Good seems to be on a par with all other etl\11 (see Die Idee
des Outen zwischen Platon und Aristoteles [Heidelberg, 1978], pp.
53-63). Stanley Rosen, in his book Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay
(New Haven, 1969), pp. 171-72, offers an enticing interpretation of
the different nuances of -r&.yn86v and Ji -raG 6.yu8oii iota.
Whatever further speculations this alternating terminology requires
�LACHTERMAN
167
or warrants, we should take pleasure in the following etymological certainties or likelihoods: The English word "good" is from the IndoEuropean root *ghedh, the source as well of English "together" and
"gather" (see Julius Pokorny, Indogermanisches Etymo/ogisches
Worterbuch [Bern/Munich, 1959], I, pp. 423-24). Is there any discernible link between *ghedh and Greek &.ya96<;? While the matter is inevitably conjectural, Maurizio Harari, "Nuova proposta di etimologia
per &.ya96<;, "Athenaeum, n.s. 57 (1979), pp. 150-53, suggests that the
Greek is compounded from the prefix &.ya- (as in 'AyaJ.lBJ.lVOlV) and
the theme *ghedh. This conjecture lies behind my allusion in the
Preface, p. v, to the Good as the omnium gatherum.
Plato, in his turn, has Socrates playfully derive aya96v from
&.yacr~6v, "admirable," in the Cratylus (412c4).
18. For the general theme of dialogic provocations in The Republic and
elsewhere, see Mitchell Miller, "Platonic Provocations: Reflections on
the Son! and the Good in· the Republic," in Platonic Investigations,
ed. D. O'Meara (Wash., D.C., 1985), pp. 163-93. Miller associates the
provocations enacted in the dialogue with the generosity of The Good.
This, essentially Neo-Platonic, motif finds ambiguous support in the
Timaeus, where the Demiurge is said to be <p96vou ... EK~6<;, "without
envy or jealousy" (Tim. 29e). Otherwise, the notion of the generosity,
of self-diffusiveness of The Good, belongs squarely to the later NeoPlatonists' strategic reworking of Plato in a direction that might fairly
be called quasi-Christian or "creationist"; see, e.g., Proclus, In Platonis
Timaeum Commentarii, ed. E. Diehl (Leipzig, 1903-06), I, p. 359: ~6
J.1Bytcr~6v 6cr~tv ou ~6 &.yaBoctM<;, &.A.A.iJ. 'lJ &.ya9oupy6v. (Cf. the insightful article by Jean Trouillard, "Les Degres du 7totciv chez Proclus," Dionysius 1 [1977], pp. 69-84.)
19. The relations between the dianoetic, principally mathemathical intelligibles and the noetic or eidetic intelligibles requires a more exacting treatment, particularly in light of Aristotle's exposition of the socalled "intermediates" (Metaph. N3). For recent commentary, see Julia
Annas, "On the Intermediates," Archiv fiir Geschichte der Philosophie
57 (1975), pp. 146-66, and Richard Mohr, "The Number Theory in
Plato's Republic VII and Philebus," Isis 72 (1981), pp. 620-27.
20. For a comprehensive inspection of the uses of MVUJ.ll<; in Plato, see
J. Souilhe, Etude sur le terme "dunamis" dans les Dialogues de Pia ton
(Paris, 1919). It is noteworthy that, from the start of the discussion
of The Good until the end of Book VII, "MvaJ.tt<; and its relevant
verbal cognates occur twenty-six times. Platonic ouvUJ.lt<; must be
distinguished from Aristotelian MVaJ.lt<; understood as potentiality.
�168
WHAT IS "THE GOOD"?
While Aristotelian Mvu~t' points towards the being-at-work of what
it itself is not yet, Platonic Mvu~t,, at least in The Republic, signifies
an empowering of what counts as its own likeness. In Book I, the empowered epyov is a likeness of the empowering UPE'lj; so, too, in Book
VI, knowing (yviiicn') and truth are look-alikes of The Good, which
enables them to be what The Good is already.
21. From responses to earlier versions of this lecture-text, and in the course
of revision, I have been reminded of certain affinities between my account of The Good and Heidegger's. These, however, do pertain not
to his portrait of Plato as the grand villain of the history of metaphysics
and not to Plato's alleged diminution of ii.A.Jj8Etu to op86'1]', but,
rather, to suggestions and allusions too often dampened by Heidegger's more vocal pronouncements. These affinities are most audible
in Heidegger's lectures, now in the course of publication in the Gesamtausgabe, although they may also be heard in his essay "Piatons Lehre
vom Wahrheit" (1930/1; published 1942).
To be as brief as possible: For Heidegger The Good is "what makes
every idea [Idee] fit and suitable [taug/ich] for being an idea"
(Wegmarken [Frankfurt a.M., 1967], p. 133). This account of The Good
as "das Thuglichmachende schlecthin" ("what fits and enables plainly
and simply,"ibid., p. 134) is amplified in his lectures on the Theaetetus
(=GA, Bd. 34), where, in analyzing the simile of the cave, Heidegger
writes "The highest idea is therefore this power of enpowerment [dieses
Ermiichtigende], the empowerment [die Ermiichtigung] for Being,
namely, that Being is as such [dass es sich a/s so/ches gibt] and, together
therewith, the empowerment of unconcea/edness, namely, that it eventfully occurs as such [dass sie a/s so/che geschieht]" (op. cit., p. 99).
The power granted by The Good is, according to Heidegger, the
power of phenomenality, of apparition: "This [sc. the Idea of the Good]
gives a shine to everything shining and is therefore itself what genuinely
shines/appears, what most shines in its shining/appearing" ("Dieses
bringt jedes Scheinsame.zum Scheinen und ist daher selbst das eigentlich Erscheinende, das in seinem Scheinen Scheinsamste," Wegmarken,
p. 134). This emphasis on the power of apparition brings into its wake
two inseparable issues: (I) Is the apparition (of the other dol]) inevitably
visible? (2) Does this power of apparition itself make a visible appearance? Heidegger, who wants to accentuate the visual character of the
Platonic Et.So,, is accordingly reluctant to take stock of the auditory
register in which the EtOI] make their appearance, both as dol] and
as their phenomena. The passage in Book V, to which I have already
called attention (p. 160), attributes to the "community of [the forms]
�LACHTERMAN
169
with activities and bodies and with one another" their making multiple spectacles of themselves (476a4-7). That these spectacles are principally designated in visual terms is, I think, due to the context, viz.,
Glaucon's comparison of the cptA.6oo<pot to the qnA.oeearwvec; (''the
lovers of spectacles," 475d2); yet Glaucon also aligns the latter with
the cptA.l\Kom ("the lovers of sounds," ibid.). The Good, the visual accents notwithstanding, bears a marked kinship to the Heraclitean logos
as construed by Heidegger: it makes for the collectedness of the etoTJ,
it founds their fantastic community and with it, their singular and
plural ability to "show off" both in their distorted look-alikes and in
their muffled vocal impersonations.(cf. Heidegger, Nietzsche I [Pfullingen, 1961], pp. 541-42).
(2) But, does the Good-Itself "show off," make·a spectacle of itself?
Heidegger rightly sets at the focal point Socrates' characterization of
The Good as <Oil 6v<oc; 10 cpuv6<uwv (Rep. VII, 518c9; see
Wegmarken, p. 134). Heidegger construes the genitive as "partitive,"
i.e., the most apparent/phenomenal among the beings; the Greek permits, if it does not compel, another, freer, reading of the genitive, to
denote "what-is at -its most phenomenal."
The parallel usage of n]v <Oil cpuvot<itou [Stuv] in the summary
of the sun-image (532c5-6) does lend support to Heidegger's construction; however, it must be noted that Socrates' remark at 518c9 is
embedded in a theatrical, spectacular metaphor, matching the
1lEptuyro')'1\ of the soul with the shifting of angular prisms at the wings
of the stage (see Shorey's translation ad foe.). Again we hear an accommodation to Glaucon's love of spectacles. More substantially, The
Good, as the gathering of the etOTJ and their phenomena, is not itself
something to be seen, but what is implicitly acknowledged in all learning (see Note 17).
On Heidegger's failure, or reluctance, to take the measure of Plato's
textuality, see the brilliant study by Phillippe Lacoue-Labarthe, "fypographie," in Mimesis des articulations (Paris, 1975), pp. 167-270. For
Heidegger's reckoning with The Good, see Alain Boutot, Heidegger
et P/aton. Le probleme du nihi/isme (Paris, 1987).
22. The most plausible analytical argument that The Good is the form
of forms, i.e., that participation in it secures to each and every form
certain formal features, is set out in Gerasimos Santas, "The Form of
The Good in Plato's Republic," in Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy,
ed. A. Preus & J. Anton (Albany, 1983), pp. 232-63. It might be observed, however, that nowhere in The Republic is the canonical idiom
of participation, f1E<EJ(EW, used.
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WHAT IS "THE GOOD"?
23. On the "moon" and the "night-lights," which appear to occlude the
radiations of the sun, see Seth Benardete, Socrates' Second Sailing.
On Plato's Republic (Chicago, 1989), pp. '160-61. Mention should also
be made here of the designation of the radiant Good as Knl./.iov ("more
beautiful") than both knowing and truth (508e6); Glaucon replies that
this makes of The Good 'AMr1xuvov K<iAAO~ ("an unmanageable
beauty," 509a6). What is the connection between The Good and The
Beautiful?
In the Philebus Socrates speaks of the power of The Good "taking
refuge in the nature of The Beautijuf' (64e4-5). How is this flight or
seeking of refuge to be construed? Is ~o KUAOV the most phenomenal
spectacle of ~uyu96v, the spectacle most appealing to the human soul?
(Cf. note 21 supra and the discussion in Kyriakos S. Katsimanis, Etude
sur le rapport entre le beau et le bien chez Platon [Lille, 1977], esp.
pp. 89-106.)
24. I put scare-quotes around "objects," since, strictly speaking, there are
no objects for Greek thinkers. "Objects" presuppose·"subjects" and
there are no "subjects," as subjects of knowing or of consciousness,
for Greek thinkers. This familiar, Heideggerian point is given
philological precision in Lawrence Dewan, '"Objectum.' Notes on the
Invention of a Word," Archives d'histoire doctrinale et litteraire du
moyen age 48 (1981), pp. 37-96.
25. The integrity of the Line, prior to and together with its proportionate
segmentation, is rightly emphasized by David Luban, "The Form of
tbe Good in the Republic," Journal of Value Inquiry 12 (1978), pp.
161-68, esp. p. 162: "The Good is the logos, the underlying pattern
of the Line.'' On the discursive, geometrical articulations of the Line,
see, in addition to Jacob Klein's discussion in Commentary on Plato's
Meno (Chapel Hill, 1965), pp. 112-25, the studies by Gregory Desjardins, "How to Divide the Divided Line," Review of Metaphysics 29
(1976), pp. 483-96 and Yvon Lafrance, "Platon et !a geometrie: La construction de !a ligne en Republique, 509d-5lle," Dialogue 16 (1977),
pp. 425-50. The incongruities and inconcinnities that appear to issue
from this articulation. are signaled by Seth Benardete, op. cit., pp.
165-70.
26. The community or kinship of the (mathematical) sciences is the theme
taken up in the (possibly spurious) Epinomis, designed as a sequel to
The Laws, especially under the rubric of the cl~ ... liecr!l6~ (99le5) ..
The author of the Epinomis seems to point to the grand aporia of
dimensional progression at the heart of the Theaetetus, the progression, that is, from the linear to the planar to the solid, mobilized and
�LACHTERMAN
made possible by the power (ouvnJlt~) of proportionality (uvuA.o'Yiu).
On the questions raised by this and cognate passages in the Epinomis
see Leonardo Taran, Academica: Plato, Philip of Opus, and the
Pseudo-Platonic Epinomis (Philadelphia, 1975 =Memoirs of the
American Philosophical Society, Vol. 107).
27. On Socrates' Pythagorean exercise of remembering and reciting the
whole of a previous conversation, see E. Brann, supra, p. 78, and, most
recently, Bruce Rosenstock, "Rereading the Republic," Arethusa 16
(1983), pp. 219-46.
�Imitation
John White
Imitation as a theory of poetry makes its first appearance in the
Republic, where it is used to criticize Homer. As a theme for poetry, it
makes its first appearance in the Iliad. On Achilles' shield "the earth looked
like earth that had been plowed though it was made of gold. Such was
the wonder of the shield's forging"; imitation is poetry's "theory" of the
overwhelming presence of visual art.
Imitation has had a long career in both of these incarnations. As a
theory of poetry it has often been repeated and refuted. As a theme of
poetry it has seized the imagination with great power-Aeneas's looking
at the panels of the Trojan war in Juno's shrine or Keats's looking at an
urn. There are as many poetic imitations of the theme as there are refutations of the theory. In order to understand the fascination of a theme so
imitable or a theory so refutable (and thereby so useful to philosophy and
poetry) one must look at the originals- if the notion of an original is not
out of place here.
Both the Iliad and the Republic-two books whose common concern
is spiritedness (thumos)-are difficult to grasp, but the Republic has a
special kind of difficulty: It is full of questions that turn back upon
themselves and answers that somehow cancel or contradict themselves. For
example, when Socrates throws out passages of Homer and also quotes
him at great length, does he want us to hear Homer or not? Or when
Socrates founds the "best city" on a noble lie and also tells us that the
lie is a lie, does he want to fool us or not?
In what the Republic talks about, justice, we can see this odd canceling right from the beginning. Look at what happens (in Book I) when
justice is first brought up. The first definition of justice is "paying one's
debts and telling the truth"- if someone leaves his armor in our keeping,
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we should return it. But then Socrates and Polemarchus consider a special
case: A friend has given us his weapons; he goes mad, and asks for their
return. We can't return the arms because the friend might injure himself.
So a second definition of justice is given, to take account of friendship:
"Justice is doing good to friends and harm to enemies." Then this definition is criticized and rejected; but we don't return to the first definition.
What are we left with? Do we return the arms or not? There is no third
possibility.
This same kind of difficulty or ambiguity appears in other ways, too.
The style of the Republic would be classified as "decadent": It is a jumble
of other styles, narrative, lyric, and mimetic; it is comic and tragic; the
style is "realistic" to the point of obscuring the difference between history
and fiction, real and ideal. No one style is employed in its purity. Poetry
and the criticism of poetry are combined in a characteristically artful form.
What is it trying to be? Poetry or philosophy? If poetry, what kind?
These difficulties about "style" are present within the dialogue also.
When Glaucon and Adeimantus enter the conversation (in Book II), they
are as much concerned with the proper way to speak about justice as with
justice itself. Glaucon (358a) thinks that Socrates has not really refuted
those who praise injustice; while Socrates may have punished
Thrasymachus- pushed him around in speech, humiliated him- he has
not refuted injustice. Glaucon thinks that no one has praised justice itself,
so he will praise injustice to give Socrates a pattern for the praise of justice.
And for Adeimantus the greatest difficulty with justice comes from those
who praise it. Parents, lawgivers, and especially poets contradict themselves
when they talk about justice; they try to praise justice, but the style of
their praise, their talk of rewards and the afterlife, really praises the seeming, the appearance, of justice. We should seem just to our judges. This
style of praise (justice in an afterlife) conceals envy. It "exhorts one to be
unjust and get away with it" in this life (367b ). Adeimantus says that "of
all those who claim to be praisers of justice-beginning with those who
have left speeches -there is not one who has ever praised justice other than
for the reputation and honors .... But as to what [justice] itself does with
its own power ... , no one has ever, in poetry or prose" adequately praised
it (366c). G!aucon and Adeimantus think that Socrates understands this
kind of difficulty and can give them the proper praise of justice. Do they
want to hear poetry (praising) or its criticism? Do they want poetry or
philosophy? They want both.
So Socrates must do both: He must criticize poetry and be a kind of
poet. Socrates does both of these things in the Republic. And Book X in
particular is the most compact expression of the ambiguity and difficulty
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of what he tries to do-oflooking at questions that turn back on themselves
and answers that somehow cancel themselves. In Book X Socrates gives
his most radical (and annoying) criticism of poetry and also becomes explicity "poetic" in the most irritating way, by telling tales of the afterlife
(in the myth of Er).
Socrates gives three arguments against imitation in Book X. In this essay
I will present them briefly and then examine them by looking at their underpinnings, their assumptions. The result of this application will turn out
to be ambiguous: If Socrates' criticism of imitation succeeds, it succeds
in a perverse way, for it not oniy is an attack on the Iliad but also turns
against, "cancels," much that was said in the first nine books of the
Republic. Socrates' criticism of poetry thereby throws doubt on the unity
and coherence of the Republic itself. Why is Book X there at all? Book
IX ends so beautifully, with the best city a "pattern laid up in heaven";
it is uplifting. Why ruin this ending with the cranky, self-contradictory
character of Book X? While I can't argue for the unity of the Republic
on the level of an opinion- for example, that it is for or against poetry,
for or against some particular definition of justice- I think I can give an
image of its unity, an image that is able to guide us to the interpretation
of some of Socrates' own poetry, the images he makes and the myth he tells.
I. Imitation and the Mirror
In Books II and III of the Republic Socrates had given long sober
arguments against imitative poetry: As far as content goes, poetry tells lies
about gods and heroes; it talks of Hades and the afterlife, thereby undermining courage; its talk is neither "holy nor true" (377b-386b). And finally
(397b ff.) tragedy was exiled for its style: Imitation, where one has to jumble
together "all modes and rhythms," encourages a doubleness or ambiguity
in the character of the citizens; it violates the principle of the city, "one
man, one job."
Now in Book X Socrates returns to the topic. His criticism of imitation this time is both more fierce and more respectful, for he says that
poets "maim the thought of those who hear them," but he also says that
"a certain friendship for Homer, and shame before him, which has possessed me since childhood, prevents me from speaking" (595b). This time
when he criticizes poetry, unlike his earlier criticism, Socrates begins with
an image of the imitative artist, a "wonderful and clever craftsman," and
this image rules and guides the arguments that follow.
For this same manual artisan is not only able to make all implements but
also makes everything that grows naturally from the earth, and he produces·
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IMITATION
all animals- the others and himself too- and, in addition to that, produces
earth and heaven and gods and everything in heaven and everything in Hades
under the earth. (596c)
Socrates tells Glaucon that this is not so wonderful, for he too could make
all these things, in a certain way:
You could fabricate them quickly in many ways and most quickly, of course,
if you are willing to take a mirror [not a glass mirror; their mirrors were
sheets of polished bronze] and carry it around everywhere; quickly you
will make the sun and the things in the heavens; quickly, the earth; and
quickly yourself and the other animals and implements and plants and
everything else that was just now mentioned. (596d)
In Socrates' image of the mirror, _who is the "clever man" and what is his
mirror? I cannot answer these questions now, but I will return to them.
Whatever they refer to in particular, this is the imitative art that is attacked
in the Republic and this is the man who is exiled and replaced.
After making this image, Socrates gives three arguments against imitation. The first concerns the being of a work of art (596a-598b). The second concerns the knowledge that the imitator has (601b-602b). The third
concerns virtue (598e-601b; 603e-606d). The conclusion of these arguments
is that poetry needs an apology in its ancient quarrel with philosophy
(607b). Within Book X this restatement of the exile of poetry forms a transition to the discussion of the immortality of the soul (608e ff.) and the
myth of Er.
Here I will present Socrates' first two arguments- those about the being of an art work and the knowledge it contains. They belong together
because they both rely on the same assumptions and they both draw out
the consequences of the image of the mirror. (I'll turn to the third argument, about virtue, later.)
The first argument is about being. In the case of a bed, there are three
artisans concerned with it and there are three kinds of beds. First, there
is one bed "by nature," which, Socrates says, "a god produced." (Notice
the oddity of this phrase: "the bed by nature.") The god makes only one
bed; if he made two beds, it would come to light that they shared the same
"Form." The god is cailed the "nature-begetter." Second is the craftsman.
He doesn't make the ''Form" of a bed, but he does make a certain bed.
In a sense he is both imitative and productive. Socrates says, "If he doesn't
make what is, he wouldn't make the being but something that is like the
being" (597a). Third is the imitator. He is third because he does not imitate the "Form" of the one bed, as does the craftsman; instead he imitates
what the craftsman has made. Thus Socrates says (598b) that the painter
imitates not "being as it is" but the "looking as it looks" of a thing. He
concludes that imitation is three removes from the truth about being.
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Socrates' second argument concerns knowledge. For each thing, there
are three arts concerned with it: the art of its use, the art of its making,
and the art of its imitation. In the case of a bridle, Socrates asks who
understands it best, who knows what he is talking about when he talks
about bridles. In this case first place goes to the user, because "the virtue,
beauty and rightness of each implement, animal, and action [are] related
to nothing but the use for which each was made, or grew naturally." Second place goes to the craftsman, who will have "right trust concerning its
beauty or its badness" (601e). The imitator has neither knowledge nor right
opinion about the bridle- no one can tell him how to paint because there
is no clear-cut use for a painting. The painter has neither knowledge nor
right opinion with respect to the beauty or badness in anything. He can
only paint what looks fair to the many (602b).
The painter, the imitative artist, gets third place in both of these
arguments. Socrates concludes the arguments this way:
Then it looks like we are pretty well agreed on these things: the imitator
knows nothing worth mentioning about what he imitates, imitation is a
kind of play and not serious; and those who take up tragic poetry in iam-
bics and epics are all imitators in the highest possible degree. (602b)
These two arguments have some assumptions, or hypotheses, as their
underpinnings. The first hypothesis is that "god made only one bed by
nature." Socrates Says:
Do you want us to make our consideration according to our customary
procedure, beginning from the following point? For we are, presumably,
accustomed to set down some one particular form for each of the particular
umanys" to which we apply the same name. (596a).
Only with this assumption can Socrates give his analysis of the being of
an artwork (the three craftsmen) and its knowledge (the three arts). These
''Forms" help his argument in another way: Each argument analyzed an
implement or tool (bed and bridle), a work of craft or technerather than
a natural being. The analysis is impossible if there is an important difference between nature and art. For example, if use is the test of our
knowledge, who is the user of a giraffe or an ostrich such that he
understands them for what they are? This difference (between a natural
being and an artful being) is not a serious problem if we follow Socrates'
image of the mirror, which mirrors implements and animals and gods
equally well. Nor is the difference between nature and art a serious problem if a thing is what it is by "participation" in a ''Form," for then we can
understand the presence or "being" of a thing without reference to the
coming-to-be-the path by which it arrived. We can ignore the distinction
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IMITATION
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between nature and art because the distinction rests on the importance
of becoming, motion.
The second assumption needed for these two arguments .against imitation is that the painter is one of the craftsmen who "mirror" the world,
and that the poet is similar to the painter (596e, 603c, 605a). The arguments
concern painting directly, and we have to trust in the similarity of poetry
and painting in order to connect poetry to the "mirror," the image that
guides Socrates' arguments about imitation.
II. Poetry and Painting: Laokoon
Here I want to examine the second assumption that Socrates makes, the
similarity of poetry and painting. The best examination of the relation of
poetry and painting (and sculpture, too-the plastic arts) is Lessing's
Laokoon. Lessing begins with the Laokoon theme because it exists in two
treatments, an incident in the Aeneid and a sculpture. Laokoon was a Trojan priest who told the Trojans not to bring a piece of sculpture into their
city. It was a wooden sculpture of a horse. 'IWo serpents attacked Laokoon
and his sons for making this warning. In the treatment in the Aeneid,
Laokoon is bitten by a serpent:
All the while his appalling cries go up to heavenA bellowing, such as you hear when a wounded bull escapes from
The altar, after it's shrugged off an ill-aimed blow at its neck. (II, 223 ff.)
In the Laokoon statue, Laokoon is being bitten by a serpent and he is crying out- or perhaps he is calling out, calling on some god, or saying
something. The statue is wordless, so we cannot tell. Laokoon's posture
and the shape of his mouth give this moment of pain a serene greatness
and noble simplicity-a timelessness, a strange and wonderful presence.
This wordless cry is not the awful bellowing of which the poem speaks.
This difference shows Lessing that the way to focus an examination of the
similarity of poetry and painting is to focus on how they express
emotions- in particular, how they portray the experience of pain.
This difference in expression is striking and consistent: If one looks
at Greek poets, there are many examples of heroes and gods expressing
pain with a violence that ruins their "serene greatness" and beauty. When
Achilles first hears of the death of Patroklus, he pours dust and ashes on
his face and "fouls his handsome countenance" (XVIII, 22). Or in one of
the two most terrible and gorgeous moments in the book, when Zeus is
finally faced with the death of his son, Sarpedon, and he cannot save him
again-Zeus has already saved his life twice-Zeus gives up arguing with
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Hera and sits, wordless; Homer says "the father of gods and men ... wept
tears of blood" (XVI, 431).
In general, if one listens to screams of pain in the Iliad, one can see
a progression. Early in the book, the usual way of dying is that a spear
is thrown and it "drives inward through the bone, and a mist of darkness
clouded both eyes and he fell as a tower falls" (IV, 460). As the book goes
on, screams of pain are mentioned as part of the dying. In Book XIII,
when Zeus looks away from the battle, there is more boasting over fallen
enemies, a man roars in pain (393), and another "cried out then a great
cry ... and the spear in his breast was stuck fast but the heart was beating
still and beating to shake the butt end of the spear" (441). A man is struck
between the navel and genitals "where beyond all places death in battle
comes most painfully to pitiful mortals" (568). Another man is struck in
the eye; then his head is cut off, but the eyeball sticks to the point of the
spear and is "lifted high like the head of a poppy" (XIV, 493).
The culmination of this progression of the violent expression (and
presence) of pain is in Book XVIII, the moment that answers to the silent,
bloody tears of Zeus. After the death of Patroklus, Hera sends Achilles
to the wall around the ships. He has no armor. He stands there on the
wall, then goes to the ditch. He is caught between anger and grief. He gives
a great wordless cry, and Athena makes the "unwearied dangerous fire"
of heaven blaze from his head. The cry he gives is "wordless," a piercing
utterance without the possibility of becoming "winged," as words can.
The Greeks were immoderate in their poetry because moderation is not
dramatic. The reason for the serenity of the statue is not the ''moderation"
of the Greeks; the statue is ''moderate" because it is a statue, because of
the limitation of plastic art. The limit and goal of plastic art is physical
beauty and beauty of expression: What is ugly must be veiled and
transformed, and expressions of emotion must be moderated (if we are
to feel something like pity and fear rather than disgust). Since the plastic
arts can portray only one moment in time, they must choose a moment
that most implies the wholeness of an action, and not a moment that expresses it. There is no one moment of expression, for an action is a temporal whole that needs a "before" and an "after," motivation and suffer-
ing, to be complete. The last moment, the suffering and the bellow of pain,
is for plastic art the least useful: The eyeball on the spear becomes disgusting
or funny after a while. So plastic art, when considering an action and its
suffering, must choose the beginning, a moment of transition or choicethe moment where the soul has decided and is just about to move the body.
It may choose the '1ast" moment of Laokoon's struggle only if the struggle is not quite over: We know Laokoon is doomed, while Laokoon is about
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to know and is about to bellow. Of course, plastic art could choose a moment that is somehow eternal- a moment of contemplation or a moment
that expresses the serene self-sufficiency of the gods.
Poetry does not have these limits. In it we can have wordless screams
(which will stand out as wordless) and tears of blood because we do not
see the ugly gaping mouth, and the moment i~ quickly left behind. In
dramatic imitation, the ugly and disfiguring, the natural display of emotion, may and must be shown.
Poetry has a wider range than painting; much that it imitates can't be
given in a painting. For example, consider the gods. To the painter they
are "personified abstractions" who must remain the same, doing the one
thing that is typical of them, if they are to be identified. To the poet these
"personified abstractions," these timeless entities, must act, must enter time,
and therefore they must have various passions and deeds. (Poetry violates
the god's simplicity, 508d.) In poetry there are many moments when
Aphrodite does not act like the abstraction of love, but the painter can't
portray her then unless he adds some kind of label or sign, a non-visual
element that is a s_ubstitute for a name.
If painters try to use Homer's "pictures" as a model, they will face impossible problems. For example, Homer treats of two kinds of beings, visible
and invisible, men and gods. Painters can't do this. When a painting, on
its visible canvas, portrays gods and men together, it ignores the distinction between the visible and the invisible-a distinction that for Homer
is not a matter of sight. Painting lowers the invisible. For example, if one
wishes to paint the battle of the gods and men in Book XXI of the Iliad,
one needs some visual scale of distinction between gods and men- a scale
that tells you this figure is a god and that one is not because (perhaps)
one figure is ten times as large as the other (XVIII, 518). Homer does say
that the gods are "huge." But for Homer this "size" is not physical; the
gods have stature, greatness. A painting would ignore this difference between gods and men by being so literal-minded about the word "huge."
What the visibility of the gods means for Homer is that they are only
visible to men by an increased power of mortal vision, such as Athene grants
to Diomedes. The gods are not invisible because of mists or clouds
(although Homer mentions them, in a painting they would cease being
merely mists or clouds and would become a "sign"). The gods are visible
only to the greatest of the Greeks, and they are never visible to someone
like Thersites. Visibility has little to do with vision, but a lot to do with
the distinction between the great and the ordinary, the serious and the superficial. Homer's gods are related to men, and distinct from men, in this way:
The gods reveal human life by showing its possibilities and limits. They
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are a kind of scepticism and self-consciousness -limits for us that are not
merely "other" than us, as are cats and crocodiles or stars or any of the
many things that different people see as divine. The gods don't "exist,"
but the idea of human life is beautiful and real, and human life is not the
same without these ideas-without this kind of greatness-even if they are
never "real." Only poetry can give us this kind of limit. These gods are
"other," but otherness has a human form. Painting has trouble showing
us the otherness of the gods- this unique combination of otherness and
sameness.
Poetry and painting are different because they imitate different things:
Painting imitates bodies, silent presences whose parts co-exist in time, and
poetry imitates wholes that unfold and complete themselves in time. When
Homer describes an object, he usually gives it only one characteristic (the
hollow ship, the black ship), but he describes actions in greater detail. When
he does describe an object in detail, the description is not visual and it
serves other purposes. Let's consider three examples of Homer's kind of
description, Homer's "pictures," to see how they work and what they are
describing.
The first example is the description of a scepter. Homer gives two
descriptions of it, and we have to look at them together to understand what
he is describing and how he is doing it. When Agamemnon holds the
scepter, this is what Homer says:
Powerful Agamemnon
stood up hol9-ing the scepter Hephaistos has wrought him carefully.
Hephaistos gave it to Zeus the king, the son of Chronos
and Zeus in turn gave it to the courier Argeiphontes,
and Lord Hermes gave it to Pelops, driver of horses,
and Pelops gave it to Atreus, the shepherd of the people.
Atreus dying left it to Thyestes of the rich flocks,
and Thyestes in turn left it to Agamemnon to carry
and to be lord of many islands and over all Argos.
Here is the second description. It is given by Achilles when he holds the
scepter:
This scepter, which never again will bear leaf nor
branch, now that it has left behind the cut stump in the mountains,
nor shall it blossom again, since the bronze blade stripped
bark and leafage, and now at last the sons of the Achaians
carry it in their hands in state when they administer the justice of Zeus.
(XX, 543-48).
And then Achilles dashes the scepter to the ground. Neither description
gives any visual information; each gives a history. But they are descriptions of a sort. Look at the two descriptions simultaneously, as if they were
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side-by-side. One description calls the scepter the work of Hephaistos; the
other describes the scepter as cut from the mountainside by an unknown
hand. The one talks of an ancient possession of a noble house; the other
talks of a scepter destined to fit the hand of anyone who might chance
to grab it. The one talks of a scepter held by one who is monarch over
many islands and over all of Argos; the other talks of justice, then throws
the scepter down. What is being described is not the scepter; the descriptions are giving us the difference between Agamemnon and Achilles.
Second, when Homer doesn't match up two descriptions of an object,
when he does want to describe something that demands a picture, what
does he do? After all, the symbols of poetry are arbitrary and can be made
to represent a body co-existent in space. How do bodies, whose parts coexist, lend themselves to a description? Since the description is in words
and sentences, the description itself must be sequential. This sequence
obscures the co-existence; by the end of the description, the beginning is
forgotten. Speech never achieves the wholeness or "presence" of a paint-
ing. So when Homer is forced to enter the special province of plastic art,
physical beauty and immediate presence, what does he do? How does he
describe Helen? A "direct" description- "eyes like stars, teeth like pearls"can't help being a kind of arbitrary jumble, a mere sequence-why talk
of eyes first? How does Homer give us the experience of her beauty? He
presents her beauty by describing an action: He has Helen come to the
wall, and he describes how the sight of her affects old men (not young ones):
They were seated by the gates, elders of the people.
Now through old age they fought no longer, yet they were excellent
speakers still, and clear, as cicadas who through the forest
settle on trees, to issue the delicate voice of their singing.
Such were they who sat on the tower, chief men of the Trojans.
And these, as they saw Helen along the tower approaching,
murmuring softly to each other uttered their winged words:
"Surely there is no blame on Trojans and strong-greaved Achaians
if for long time they suffer hardship for a woman like this one.
Terrible is the likeness of her face to immortal goddesses.
Still, though she be such, let her go away with the ships, lest
she be left behind, a grief to us and our children."
We don't know what she looks like. When Zeuxis made a painting of this
scene, Helen was the only figure in it-no old men who have "winged
words" and wrinkles. Which is more beautiful: the looks of Helen or the
looking of the old men?
The third example of Homer's descriptions, Homer's pictures of a "body
co-existent in space," is the deepest and most difficult. What does Homer
do when he invades the realm of plastic art itself? What does he do when
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he describes, not just the object of the plastic arts, not just a body whose
parts co-exist in space-what does he do w,hen he describes the imitating
itself?
Thetis of the silver feet came to the house of Hephaistos.
She found him sweating as he turned here and there to his bellows
busily since he was working on twenty tripods ...
[Hephaistos] took the huge blower off from the block of anvil limping ...
He . . . gathered and put away
all the tools with which he worked in a silver strong box.
Then with a sponge he wiped clean his forehead, and both hands
and his massive neck and hairy chest ...
. . . [Hephaistos then] went to his bellows.
He t'!.Uned those toward the fire ...
And the bellows ... blew on the crucibles,
from all directions blasting forth wind to blow the flames high,
now as he hurried from one place to another.
He cast on the fire bronze which is weariless ...
and gripped in one hand
the ponderous hammer, while in the other he grasped the pincers.
And then the labor and sweat disappear.
First of all he forged a shield that was huge and heavy.
Hephaistos made the earth upon it, and sky, and the sea's water,
and the tireless sun, and the moon waxing into her fullness,
and on it all the constellations that adorn the heavens ...
On it he wrought in all their beauty two cities of mortal
men. And there were weddings in one, and festivals.
The people were assembled in the market place.
Around the other city were lying two forces of armed men
shining in their war gear.
He made upon it a soft field, the pride of tilled land,
wide and triple-ploughed, with many plowmen upon it.
And as these making their turn would reach the end-strip of a field
a man would come up to them at this point and hand them a flagon
of honey-sweet wine, and they would turn again to the furrow.
The earth darkened behind them and looked like earth that has been
ploughed
though it was made of gold. Such was the wonder of the shield's forging.
(XVIII, 369-483, selected)
Homer shows the labor of the imitating- he shows the making of the
shield, its coming-to-be- but then the labor disappears into "the wonder
of the shield's forging." And also, in this example of a description, unlike
the other two examples, Homer does give a "direct" description; the shield
is the greatest "presence" in the poem. Many have tried to draw it. But
the things on the shield are in motion, and no human painting or sculpture
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could show that. However, the shield is made by a god, so that there might
be a divine kind of painting that can show things in motion, in their life.
To see what this might mean, we need to think about Hephaistos for
a moment. He is an unusual god, not a god of "serene greatness," for he
limps and sweats and has a hairy chest. He was important to Achilles at
another time, too. When the river Xanthos attacked Achilles and tried to
give him an anonymous death- to bury him in a waste of mud, bodies,
and blood- Hephaistos saved him with his fire. Now, too; with the shield
Hephaistos says that he wishes he could hide Achilles from death and its
sorrow; he wishes it as surely as there will be a shield to wonder at (XVIII,
463). Again Hephaistos uses his fire for Achilles: He makes him a "shield
of wonder" to replace his lost armor, his Uranian armor, taken by Hector
(XVII, 195). This new Olympian armor is forged by a divine art that shows
things in motion, in their life. The divine art that shows things in winged
motion, the art that forges Olympian armor, is poetry.
III. The Third Argument and Its Difficulties
Socrates gives a third argument against mimetic poetry in Book X. This
argument both sums up the earlier criticisms (about being and knowledge)
and goes beyond them. It has two parts; both parts concern "virtue." I'll
look at the two parts separately and make some observations.
The first part of the argument (598e-60lb) says that Homer must not
himself have been virtuous because he did no "deeds." Homer founded
no cities, conducted no wars, and is not credited with any inventions or
devices; he is not famous for a way of life, as was Pythagoras, nor was
he a teacher of virtue. If one has knowledge about virtue, one is more
serious about deeds than speeches and imitations; one would be "more
eager to be the one who is praised than the one who praises" (599b).
Homer's art produced only. a song, so he produced nothing serious, only
imitations of what is serious.
Either to defend Homer or to understand him better, we have to answer
these questions: What was Homer's deed and what "invention or device"
can we credit him with? Herodotus (II, 50-53) says that while Homer (and
Hesiod) didn't invent the gods, he was the first to give them special honors,
arts, names, and genealogies- a "theogony," a coming-to-be. Homer, by
giving deeds, histories, and preferences to the gods, made them into
characters. No longer are the gods merely the subject for. statues and lyric
poems, "timeless" hymns to Apollo or Zeus (this kind of poetry Socrates
allows in his "healthy" city- 372b ). Now the gods are fit subjects for epic,
for mimetic and narrative poetry ("temporal"). But the gods and the Iliad,
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the book where the gods become characters, were not Homer's deed; they
were the "devices" he needed to perform his deed. Homer devised Olym-.
pian armor, the Iliad, for the Greeks to look at, and this kind of looking
produced the Greeks- they were Homer's deed. The Greeks were the kind
of people they were because they had these gods and the Iliad, instead of
cats or crocodiles or statues of U ranian gods.
Homer's deed, this bringing into being of a certain kind of person, has
an odd timelessness for a deed; it is not over yet; it is still present. When
we read the Iliad attentively, we sit, unmoving and wordless, as if chained
to a ohair in a cave of magic; we are aware only of the images before us.
We are not aware of them as images. Instead, the images convince us that
they are real, that our emotions are only reflections of Achilles' wrath and
grief.
Before we look at the second part of this argument, we have to
remember that Socrates is aware of this kind of cave and this kind of defense
of Homer: "Praisers of Homer say that this poet educated Greece" (606e).
He is aware that Greeks have a kind of "noble lie" in their souls, where
they confuse nature and education: "The inborn love of such poetry we
owe to our rearing in these fine regimes" (608a).
So far, in this "ancient quarrel of poetry and philosophy," I see no
decisive advantage for either side. Homer is beautiful if bloody; the images of philosophy ("patterns laid up in heaven'') are uplifting, if a little
cold. But in most ways the quarrel remains a mere quarrel; uo new
understanding has been opened up by either side, nor have new possibilities
come into view for either side.
But now, when Socrates turns to the second part of this argument
against Homer, he turns away from the ''mirror" and an emphasis on the
object of imitation: "Imitation, we say, imitates forced and voluntary actions" (603c). He explicitly goes beyond the limit and assumption of the
first two arguments, the similarity of poetry and painting: "Let's not just
trust the likelihood based on painting; but let's go directly to the very part
of thought with which poetry's imitation keeps company and see whether
it is ordinary or serious" (603c). We are no longer arguing about "truth"
or "being," questions that tend to become the narrowly technical province
of philosophy in its "coming-to-be"- questions and answers that might
be correct but that miss the point; speeches that are true but petty, without
any greatness or "seriousness."
With this new beginning, Socrates turns to the second part of the last
argument about Homer and virtue: Mimetic poetry does not produce
"seriousness" about virtue in the soul of the spectator. He says that poetry
cannot imitate a serious soul, a soul that is restrained, one that is "self-
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same." Poetry must imitate a soul in conflict. When we see tragic suffering, we give ourselves over to it, and so the best part of the soul, the measuring and calculating part, relaxes its rule over the other parts. Here Socrates
says that he makes the "greatest charge" (605b) against mimetic poetry.
This charge is more serious than those "third remove" arguments, those
technical arguments that relied on the "mirror." Socrates says that mimetic
poetry ufosters and waters desires, pains, pleasures, sex and spiritednessthings which ought to be dried up" (606d). Spiritedness, thumos, ought
to be dried up.
Whatever else one might say about this criticism of poetry, one can't
simply disagree with it. After looking at the Iliad with Lessing's help, we
have to agree that the soul without conflict is not dramatic; it belongs on
a pedestal, not in a poem. But we also have to remember, if we are going
to "dry up" thumos, that it was thumos, spiritedness, that made possible
the Republic and its three-part soul by mediating between reason and appetite. This part of the soul, which conflicts with natural desires and goes
beyond them in wanting relishes, made "guardianship" possible, with its
dog-like combination of the qualities of "being gentle to friends and cruel
to enemies" (375b ff.). The "measuring and calculating" part of the soul,
reason, needs a force naturally allied to it, a guardian, if it is to rule the
soul or the city. And if reason can't rule both soul and city, the image that
guides and rules and unifies the first nine books of the Republic is lost:
The image where "the city is the soul 'writ large.' "
This new attack on mimetic poetry involves another surprise for us,
as Socrates explores the restrained self-sameness of soul which poetry cannot imitate. The surprise is the immortality of the soul. .When Socrates
mentions immortality, Glaucon "looks him in the face with wonder" (608d).
The immortality of the soul depends on the soul's simplicity ap.d unity,
its radical self-sameness. If the soul is "simple," how can it have three parts?
When Socrates tries to explain this difficulty about the parts of the
soul (6llc), that up until now the soul had three parts, he says that, so
far, he has been talking about the "looks" of the soul oniy. But such was
his criticism of mimetic poetry in the first two arguments against it, the
ones based on painting and the "mirror" (that poetry talks about "looks"
instead of being). Whatever else we may think about this third attack on
mimetic poetry, these arguments of Book X are also a kind of "canceling"
and "turning against" much that was said in the first nine books-the most
extreme form of the canceling I mentioned at the beginning.
Why is Book X there at all? Book IX ends so nicely, with the best city
as a city in speech, a "pattern laid up in heaven," and there is a review
of actual cities, cities "in deed." The tyrant has been "stripped of his tragiC
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gear" (577a), which allows Socrates to answer the original question about
the relation of justice and happiness: The just man is 729 times as happy
as the tyrant (587e).
I think we can see the reason for including Book X if we look a little·
more closely at the "degeneration" of the cities in Books VIII and IX,
because we can see the return of mimetic poetry despite its exile in Book
III, and we can see the emergence of a special concern with poetry in one
of the cities, a democracy.
Before the "degeneration" begins, Book VII ends with the description
of the best city and the education of the philosopher-kings. Glaucon
recognizes the completion of the discussion when he says, "just like a
sculptor, Socrates, you have produced men who are wholly fair" (540a).
Then the "degeneration" of Books VIII and IX begins with a tragic,
Homeric invocation: "How will our city be moved ... ? Do you want us,
as does Homer, to pray to the Muses to tell us how 'faction first attacked,'
and shall we say they speak to us with high, tragic talk, as though they
.were speaking seriously?" (545d). So the sculptural climax of Book VII
is insufficient; poetry has returned after its exile.
The "degeneration" must bring back mimetic poetry because the
degeneration involves choices and actions. And conversely, the presentation of a variety of cities demands something like a "degeneration." If one
is going to describe various cities, which city does one start with? Without
a principle of order, the cities are a jumble and the description would be
a jumble (as in the problem of describing Helen; eyes or teeth first?). And
not only does the "degeneration" involve a return to mimetic poetry in its
Homeric beginning, but poetry itself enters at one stage of the degeneration, a democracy.
Democracy enters with a kind of flourish because the transition from
oligarchy to democracy echoes the transition from the first city, Socrates'
"city of utmost necessity" (369d), to the "feverish city" in Book II. In Book
II, Glaucon had objected to the simple, unified "pig city" because it had
no relishes, nothing beyond the necessary- not even sexual desire goes
beyond what is economically feasible ("They will have sweet intercourse
with one another, and not produce children beyond their means"- 372b).
Now, in Book IX, in the degeneration from oligarchy to democracy, an
oligarchic father satisfies only necessary desires; he holds down other desires
by force (554a); he is unable to compete for "noble objects" (555a). The
son feels that this is petty, that his father has no generosity or magnificence
or freedom. The son hears "boasting speeches ... persuading [him] that
measure and orderly expenditure are rustic and illiberal" (560c). He has
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a desire for relishes (559a-b ). Again, with democracy as with the fall of
the "pig city,'' many kinds of relishes and imitators are added to the son's
life, but now there is no desire for a katharsis or purging, as there was in
Book II. So the democratic man becomes overwhelmed by his possibilities,
his freedom and his choices.
For this democratic man, freedom of choice depends on the fact that
no particular choice is serious. No choice is serious because no choice closes
off other possibilities; no choice makes him this rather than that. At his
best, he is intrepid and daring- capable of both action and deliberation.
He can love beauty without softness, and he "needs no lying poet" to make
monuments for him; he will make his own (I am thinking of Pericles' praise
of the Athenians in the funeral oration). But at his worst, this is his attitude toward a choice: He says, "Some say it's good, some say it's badeveryone has his own opinion. We won't know until we try it. If it doesn't
work, we'll change it back. Why not? After all, it's not written in stone."
He can experiment with anything because no choice has serious consequences; there is nothing written in stone for him. The democratic man
is a soldier one day, a flute-player the next, a philosopher the next (56lc).
With these superficial choices, choices that don't touch him deeply, he never
actually becomes anything. He doesn't become, for example, a soldier; he
becomes an imitation of a soldier. He does something for a while-he is
even serious for a while- but then he turns away with a kind of forgetting. He turns to another kind of life; but he is always trapped by the
ordinary.
This kind of man can look for some core of humanity, some kind of
brotherhood, a sameness that exists for humans beneath their differences.
But what he discovers is that all human differences and choices are superficial; no choice is serious. Living in a democratic city, he confronts the
variety of human differences and the jumble of choices every day. He sees
that people follow their strongest inclination or ruling passion as long as
it is strongest, and then they change. When he looks at the cities of the
world, he sees the same kind of thing: Democratic cities have democratic
laws, oligarchic cities have oligarchic laws, etc. In each case the strongest
faction makes the rules and defines justice, as long as it is strongest. What
universal justice does he see? What core of humanity? What truth is hidden beneath the overwhelming variety? In each case, universally and
without exception, justice is the interest of the stronger.
Thrasymachus knows this hidden truth, and he reveals the cynicism
and tyranny beneath the surface. No mere "refutation in words" can succeed in dealing with what Thrasymachus says. For while Socrates may be
able to tie him in knots and make him look foolish in Book I, that might
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only be a sign of Socrates' superior strength and skill in arguments; it might
be a sign of Socrates' superficiality that he accepts tbe "truth in speech"
and ignores the truth revealed by deeds- that he is "more serious about
speeches and imitations than deeds." This would only confirm the truth
"in deeds" of what Thrasymachus thinks about the role of strength.
Socrates' victory over him would be a mere "victory in speech." While a
"city in speech," a "pattern laid up in heaven," might be seen to be an uplifting possibility, a mere "victory in speech" here is an awfu~ fearful possibility. Glaucon and Adeimantus know. this. Despite Socrates' victory "in
speech" in Book I, our souls may harbor a "secret lawlessness," an imperviousness to speech: No speech may touch us deeply. Only an impossible
experiment could help us discover this truth about the soul. We would have
to know what the soul would choose if it had perfect freedom and invisibility. Glaucon proposes this: We don't need to know the soul's opinion about
justice, its opinion about what it would do when it has to return the armor or not (for example); we aren't even sure that there is a correct or "true"
answer. But the soul must act- must either return the armor or not. There
is no third possibility. We need a "ring of Gyges," a magical freedom and
invisibility for the soul, to discover the truth about the soul's choosing.
Glaucon and Adeimantus and the democratic man himself need more
protection than has been offered in the first nine books. A democratic man
needs to be protected not just from making the wrong choice about "returning the armor," for example; he needs to be protected from cynicism and
superficiality. Can mimetic poetry do this? Is it "ordinary or serious"
(603c)?
And not only does the democratic man need to be protected from the
possibility of degeneration; philosophy needs to be protected from this
possibility. Is it "ordinary or serious?" (Most of the world thinks philosophy
to be trivial, as Socrates knows.) Is it only "victories in speech," a continuation of the struggle for victory on a different playing field with words
as weapons? Is it a non-serious possibility thrown onto the world's stage
by democracy and its tolerance for non-serious choices? Is it a continuation of the democratic style, a jumbled and decadent style (debate, oration, and argument, both comic and tragic) with a new content? This is
Socrates' question; this is the greatest challenge to mimetic poetry and to
philosophy's "city in speech." This is why Book X is there.
Let's look again at the result of this third argument against imitation.
What Socrates now says in criticism of mimetic poetry is a criticism of
thumos and the three-part soul, and thereby reveals difficulties in much
of what was said and constructed in the first nine books: the-unity of the
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soul and of the city, and the unity of the guiding image of the first nine
books (the city is the soul "writ large"). The unity and coherence of the
book is in doubt. Book X is the most compact expression of this kind of
"cancelation" and turning against itself, because it contains both the most
austere criticism of poetry and the myth of Er.
IV. Katharsis and the Silver Soul
When we read the Iliad or watch a tragedy, we sit absorbed, as if chained
to a chair in a cave. Socrates says we are to leave that cave and its darkness
in order to see the sun and the world in its light. Education and its "purging" (katharsis is the word Book III uses to describe education) are to take
the place of poetry and its katharsis. We are to give up our Homeric, Olympian armor, even though it has somehow made us what we are.
But in this replacement of one katharsis by another, we must first ask
why we are in the position of having to choose between poetry and
philosophy. Why do we need any katharsis at all? What in our souls finds
purification, resolution, unification in response to speeches about deeds?
Socrates has criticized Homer as one who is more serious about speeches
than about the deeds with which they deal. This understanding of
"seriousness" makes us ask why we want to hear speeches about deeds;
why do we want to hear praise of deeds? Why do Glaucon and Adeimantus want to hear the correct praise of justice from Socrates? Why does
the incorrect praise bother them so much?
To answer these questions we need to look at the "silver" soul (thumos),
the kind of soul that Book X wants to "dry up," not the gold or bronze
soul. The Republic asks us to see the limits of this kind of soul, how it
begins in the desire for relishes and ends in the acceptance of a noble lie.
How can we understand the beginning of the silver soul, the desire for
relishes? At the beginning of Book II Socrates constructs a simple, unified
city, a "true and healthy" city. Glaucon says that it has no relishes; it is
a "city fit for pigs"; it is contemptible. What this city needs is a large dose
of luxury, fever. The occupations that are added to this city when it attempts to become worthy of honor are suggestive: hunters, imitators concerned with figure and color and music, poets, rhapsodes, actors, crafts-men for feminine adornment, servants, teachers, beauticians, barbers, and
cooks. Imitators and poets have been added, along with cosmeticians and
barbers.
The silver in our soul asserts itself and becomes visible by having a
certain contempt for mere nature; it does not begin in simple greed or lust.
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It does not want two pieces of meat; it wants one with relish. It does not
want two coats; it wants one coat with a gold braid on it. It does not sexually desire two women rather than one, or two men rather than one; it
wants a sexual object that is "improved": lipstick, jewelry, perfume, or a
bone in the nose and tattoos- anything, it seems, as long as mere nature
is gone beyond, adorned, transformed. The silver soul is willing to pervert
even the apparent naturalness of erotic attraction. The silver' soul is angry
at the pig city and "mere nature." It wants a kind of revenge, because the
soul and its terrible beauty are invisible and unrecognized. There is no
friendship in the pig city, no relation of souls; there is only an economic
partnership (371e). The justice of the artisan- paying debts and telling the
truth, the first definition in Book I- is contemptible. "Paying debts" is
an economic exchange based on bodily needs; it is not a relation of souls.
So the idea of "paying debts" must get some relish; it must be adorned
and transformed by the silver soul, not just "refuted" or thrown out. "Doing good to friends and evil to enemies" adds relish to "paying debts." This
is the second definition of justice in Book I; the definition comes up when
a friend gives you his weapons, then asks for them back when he has gone
mad. The mere idea of "paying debts" can't handle this situation because
it is an economic definition that does not recognize "friendship." Honor
is the just recognition for this doing of good and evil (to friends and
enemies) because honor is payment adorned with relish, praise (as the "good
and the evil" adorn the idea of "debts").
But there is a difficulty with honor as a kind of payment. Although
honor is a reward for the silver soul, how can the soul arrange things so
that honor does not become a mere payment for services rendered? If honor
becomes a payment, the silver soul falls back to the level of a bronze soul.
And a bronze soul can't give honor; it can only give payment, large as that
payment might be. For example, would you return to the risks of war if
you were offered "seven unfired tripods, ten talents of gold, twenty shining cauldrons, twelve horses, seven women of l.esbos, twenty 1\'ojan women,
Agamemnon's daughter in marriage and seven citadels"? Achilles rejects
this offer; it is offered in the spirit of payment; Agamemnon is incapable
of saying "I'm sorry-we were friends and I violated it." (Later, when
Achilles wants to re-enter battle, Agamemnon insists that he first take the
payment: Achilles is desperate for battle in his rage and grief, and he is
supposed to sit down, admire the presents and eat a meal. He begins to
get angry again.) This kind of payment is an insult. "Friendship" is a.relation of souls that replaces the impersonality of an economic transaction,
its "invisibility of soul."
"Friendship" and its recognition are meant to solve this problem of
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"honor as a payment." But the silver soul is caught by envy, by the clash
of honor and friendship. He believes in friendship and is capable of it,
but honor continually tempts him to stand out alone. (Achilles says to
Patroklus, when honor prevents his return to battle but allows Patroklus
to enter wearing his armor, "0 that you and I conld storm Troy together,
by ourselves," hoping for a union of honor and friendship.)
How can the silver soul avoid this clash of honor and friendship and
solve the problem of honor as a payment? Will the payment become large,
in an attempt to present size as the greatness of honor? The silver soul
can get the recognition he deserves only if he elevates another soul above
himself, one who is beyond competing with him, one who is "friendly"
but not a friend, one who is "objective," one who offers nothing useful,
nothing with cash value. Thus the one who gives recognition, speeches of
praise, is elevated above the doer of the deeds. And the one who praises
but is not a "friend" needs knowledge of what is praiseworthy- knowledge
of justice, souls, and speeches. The silver soul, the doer, must elevate the
one who recognizes him- the one who praises, the imitator in speechabove himself in order to recognize himself as elevated above the bronze.
So only a gold soul can understand the silver, giving him the recognition
in speech or song that he deserves. But now the silver soul, besides being
caught on the point of difference between deeds and speeches, is caught
in another clash: What kind of praise? A speech or song? Poetry or
philosophy?
Now let's look at the end of the silver soul. He begins in the desire
for relishes and ends in the acceptance of a noble lie. This is the last and
the highest thing the silver soul does. He takes the first definition of justice,
"paying debts and telling the truth," and now he adorns the last part, the
"telling the truth" part; he decorates it in the same way he adorned "paying debts." He doesn't take "the truth" to be justice. Instead, he believes
a lie, but it is a noble lie, a lie with relish on it. He believes that his education was a dream and that all men are brothers, having Earth as mother.
He believes in the brotherhood of man despite metallic differences (gold,
silver, bronze) that are of special concern to him. So when the silver soul
believes the noble lie, he is not merely taken in and fooled by it; he believes
it in part because it is a lie, a lie (brotherhood, friendship without its passion and particularity) that demands nobility of soul in one who would
believe it; it is an "elevating" lie. The lie is "noble" in another sense also:
It ennobles the soul that believes it ("brotherhood," despite the differences)
because it takes the viciousness from his anger, his criticism of "mere
nature." The silver soul does these two things at once-he believes and he
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overcomes the belief, in the way. that Socrates both censors Homer and
quotes him at length- because the silver soul knows that the unadorned
truth is not worth having.
These are the limits of the silver soul: Because he loves nature, truth,
and justice only when they are adorned and transformed, he must be
transformed, "purged," given a katharsis. But we can't merely do away with
him when we purge the city, for this part of the soul binds together the
other parts, reason and appetite. If we just "subtracted" him from the city,
wouldn't we return to the pig city? The silver soul not only makes necessary
another city, a "best" city, but it also makes possible the coming-to-be of
that city or any city beyond the pig city. (The best city could not have come
into being in the way taken by the pig city, simple addition without subtraction or katharsis; the standard of "usefulness" in the pig city prevents
this-e.g., "To have a city we need a farmer, a carpenter, and we'll add a
philosopher.") In particular, he makes possible the "best city" by his capacity
for the kind of transformation called katharsis. For him, "subtraction" is
addition and transformation.
The silver soul is not only capable of this kind of transformation and
recognition, katharsis, he also demands it. But the recognition that poetry
offers is, Socrates says, "a hymn to tryanny" (586b), for the songs reveal
only the terrible beauty of the soul; they do not recognize its monstrosity.
For example, Oedipus, at the end of the play, asks to be brought on stage
after putting out his eyes. He won't get off the stage despite Creon's urging, and he says, "Apollo did this to me, but I put out my eyes." This line
gathers and repeats what we have felt about him throughout the play, an
alternation of "He is sinned against" (Apollo does these things and Oedipus
suffers them) and "He is sinning" (Oedipus is bringing this upon himself).
And then Oedipus says, "Only I can bear this suffering." The alternation
of pity for him (as a sufferer) and fear of him (as a doer) that we have
felt is collected together: In claiming as his own the suffering that Apollo
inflicts on him, is he active or passive? This deed, turning suffering into
an action and action into a suffering, transcends the alternatives of pity
and fear; instead, Oedipus becomes an object of wonder. Whether he is
right or wrong, good or evil, in what he did is no longer important. He
has a greatness that goes beyond these questions of right and wrong. He
is the object of our looking, our regard, in a new way, and a new kind
of looking is called for. The play is a hymn to this greatness.
Since poetry grasps the greatness of Oedipus's soul but doesn't see its
monstrosity, the play is a "hymn to tyranny." So philosophy and its
understanding of greatness (491a ff.)-not just its understanding of good
and evil- must take the place of mimetic poetry and its understanding of
human greatness. Somehow the Republic must take the place of the Iliad.
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IMITATION
194
~----------------------------------
V. Images
Now we can turn to the unity of the Republic. I promised to make or
discover an image of it. Let me return to two passages I referred to at the
beginning of this essay, the passages from Book X where Socrates made
an image that guided his criticism of mimetic poetry:
For this same manual a,rtisan is not only able to make all implements but
also makes everything that grows naturally from the earth, and he produces
all animals-the others and himself too-and, in addition to that, produces
earth and heaven and gods and everything in heaven and everything in Hades
under the earth. (596c).
You equid fabricate them quickly in many ways and most quickly, of course,
if you are willing to take a mirror [not a glass mirror; their mirrors were
sheets of polished bronze] and carry it around everywhere;,quickly you will
make the sun and the things in the heavens; quickly, the earth; and quickly
yourself and the other animals and implements and plants and everything
else that was just now mentioned. (596d)
Who is this craftsman? It must be Homer. And as for the other questionWhat is that mirror? -look again at the Iliad.
So [Hephaistos] spoke, and left [Thetis] there.
He cast on the fire bronze which is weariless, and tin with it
and valuable gold, and silver.
First of all, he forged a shield that was huge and heavy,
elaborating it about, and threw around it a shining
triple rim that glittered.
He made the earth upon it, and the sky, and the sea's
water and the tireless sun, and the moon ... ,
and on it all the constellations that adorn the heavens ...
On it he wrought in all their beauty two cities of mortal men.
Socrates goes to the house of Cephalus, a prosperous manufacturer of armor, and there he forges a new shield from men with souls of gold, silver,
and bronze. The Republic is that shield, that mirror, which will replace
our Homeric, Olympian armor.
Could anyone really make such a shield in "deeds"? Is such a city possible? This best city is not possible in "deed" partly because it is a "pattern
laid up in heaven," something like a ''Form" -something unique which can't
be imitated without distortion. To found the city, one would need to have
gold separate from bronze or silver, silver separate from gold or bronze.
But in so far as the best city is an image of the soul, all of the metals are
present in each of us. No one could fully enter one of the classes without
doing damage to the wholeness, the tri-partness; of his souL
And even if the best city were to exist, it would degenerate (and this
'.
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195
means that it would inevitably lead to a democracy and its problems)
because of the impossible marriage number (546a), a number that Socrates
constructs and the best city must solve if it is to endure without change.
The impossibility of the marriage number means that the riddle of generation can't be solved: The city can't continue without the founder and his
ability to see clearly the quality of our souls; the founder cannot be "imitated"; he is not a "type"; he is original.
This inevitable degeneration means, on the one hand, that no kind of
soul will be pure; all souls will be at least a bit of a mixture, a jumble.
Even in the best soul there is mixed a deep secret lawlessness, as Glaucon
suspected when he wished for a ring of Gyges. For Socrates says that there
is some ...terrible, savage, and lawless form of desire" in every man if only
in dreams (572b); even the philosopher might dream of incest (57lc).
On the other hand, the necessity for the presence of the founder, the
original, means that the philosopher cannot just "disappear," return to looking at the sun, once he has come on the scene; he cannot disappear behind
a noble lie (i.e., he cannot become an "ideal," a noble lie, for the rest of
human beings in the way that Homer, with the invocation of his poem,
disappears into his style, leaving us alone with the Muse or Goddess).
Whom or what is this new shield designed to protect? What needs and
can use the protection of the impossible city, a city in speech? In general,
the city in speech will try to protect young gold and silver souls from being corrupted, being made cynical and vicious like Thrasymachus, by an
uncritical acceptance of the opinions of the city (49la-495b). The shield
will also work in the opposite direction. It will try to protect the city from
the innocent savagery of unformed philosophic souls (49le) and from the
corrupt savagery of the badly raised golden soul. Socrates points to this
danger most clearly in the Apology, when he makes this prophecy:
For now you have done this to me because you hoped -that you would be
relieved from rendering an account of your lives, but I say that you will find
the result far different. Those who will force you to give an account will
be more numerous than before; men whom I restrained, though you knew
it not; and they will be harsher, inasmuch as they are younger, and you will
be more annoyed. (39c)
This new kind of "shielding" is not equally necessary in all cities. A
golden soul is not the same danger to all cities, nor are all cities equally
dangerous to golden souls (some cities are contemptible-496b; usually
the city ignores philosophers totally). Nor is poetry the same danger to
all cities. Poetry is a particular danger to a democracy because it exaggerates democracy's tendency to tyranny and cynicism; it encourages the
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eros that takes over the soul with its "hymns to tyranny." Poetry is not said
to be a danger to any city other than a democracy. So the shield is designed to protect the soul and the democratic city from each other.
This connection between the new shield and the democratic city allows
us to interpret one final, baffling image of Socrates, and then to look at
the myth of Er. Socrates makes a strange and monstrous image of the soul
in Book IX (588c), an "image of the soul in speech." There is a man outside; inside there is a many-headed beast, a lion, and another man. In this
image of the soul, which of the two men, outside or inside, is the image
and which the original? What unity does this image have, and what does
it mean to make an image of man that includes two images of man, one
being a reflection and purification of the other?
We can understand this image if we think of the relation of the "best
city" and democracy. First, other cities may reflect more correctly than
democracy particular features of the soul and particular understandings
of justice, but only democracy and the "best city" have all the parts of
the soul imaged in some ways- for example, democracy is the only
degenerate city that has philosophy (56ld), even if the philosophy is not
serious. And both democracy and the "best city" degenerate because of
eros: A democracy succumbs to,eros through the tyrannic hymns of poetry,
while the "best city" cannot understand the marriage number and declines.
Finally, for someone who wants to found a city or to understand human
beings, a democracy is the best place to look, for there one will find all
kinds of regimes and all kinds of souls on display (557d). Of all regimes,
on the surface and from the outside, democracy is the most beautiful.
A democracy images the soul, but the parts are all jumbled up. It is
like the "man on the outside," in Socrates' image of the soul. Because of
that jumble, even if democracy is somehow the best city to live in, it is
not the best city to have living in your soul. The "best city," the "man inside" in Socrates' image of the soul, is Socrates' "pattern laid up in heaven"
(592b).
So now, at the end, in the myth of Er, after the return to the criticism
of poetry, Socrates can try to satisfy Glaucon and Adeimantus. When they
began this long conversation, they were suspicious of those who praise
justice-poetry contradicts itself when it tries to praise justice-and they
wanted to hear the correct praise from Socrates. Socrates is ready to give
it to them. He says that "we haven't yet gone through the greatest rewards
for virtue" (608b), and now he will do so, with the immortality of the soul
and the myth of Er. But first he checks with Glaucon: "Will you, then,
stand for me saying about [the just man] what you yourself said about
the unjust?" (613d). Now justice will get back what the argument owes
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197
it, a speech of praise; the argument is able to "pay its debts and tell the
truth"; it can even "do good to friends" whiie harming no one. Glaucon
and Adeimantus are able to hear a kind of poetry praising justice without
being pulled in two directions by it.
The myth of Er has a harmony of philosophy and myth, of thumos
and mind, but the harmony is not complete or "simple." Immortality has
been connected to the soul by the "desire to know" and the unity of soul
that this desire indicates. But the myth of Er cannot be about this simplicity
or this immortality; it cannot be an "uplifting" presentation of philosophy,
an ideal harmony of knowledge and action, deeds and speeches, where
poetry takes the place of philosophy. The myth emphasizes the soul and
its choices, its doings and sufferings, as all myths and mimetic images must.
And so 'the myth introduces faction into the soul, because there is faction
in the soul whenever it comes to deeds, choices (603d). The myth, because
it is a myth, talks about something that may be deeper than knowing, a
choice. And thereby the myth is about another kind of immortality.
This other kind of immortality is a sign and expression of the soul's
ambiguity, its monstrosity, its "un-naturalness." And so there is another
argument for the soul's immortality in Book X (609a ff.), given just before
the argument about the soul's simplicity. The soul is the only thing in nature
that is not destroyed by its "specific evil," injustice (610e). So the soul has
a strength beyond the natural, a greatness beneath the right and wrong
of its· ordinary choices, in its capacity to survive injustices and evil.
The myth is another look at the range of human possibilities and the
spectacle of choice, a look that complements and echoes the first presentation of that spectacle, the democratic man and his possibilities. In the
myth, however, unlike democratic life, choice doesn't occur in the ordinary
course of our lives. Choice takes place in a strange interval between the
time of rewards and the time of ordinary choices, between a time of immortality (relief from the burden of choosing) and the time of mortal life
(the time of confusing choices). In this odd interval between two kinds
of life, the soul comes to a place where all kinds of lives are scattered about,
with no rank or order, in a democratic jumble. And then the soul is asked
to choose. The soul is alone in a special way-no teachers, no parents, no
law-givers, no poets, no philosophers. The soul has put on the ring of Gyges.
·The first man to choose (619b) was a virtuous man in his previous life.
He comes from heaven to make his choice, but he chooses from habit, not
"philosophy." He chooses a tyranny that involves eating his children. Then
he complains about fate, and he blames everything but himself. He probably says "I didn't mean it," and he wishes that this choice were an ordinary choice, one that he could take back. But-and here we start to see
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IMITATION
the soul's monstrosity-he doesn't blame himself. When he blames circumstances, what he is saying is, "If the same 'circumstances came up, I
would do the same thing again." Despite his tragic lamentation, he is accepting his choice and his suffering. ("Apollo did this to me, but I put
out my eyes. Only I can bear this suffering.") There is something not serious
about his tragic suffering; there is acceptance and even a kind of joy ("I
would do it again, in the same circumstances").
The last one to choose is Odysseus. There aren't many lives left, but
he makes a good choice because he has been cured of his love of honor,
a cure in which philosophy was not needed. (The goal of philosophy is
such a cure-521a, 540b, 592a.) The myth again points to a choice that
might be deeper than knowledge. In the way that Socrates has said that
the soul may include some "terrible, savage lawlessness" (572b ), the soul
may also have some "deep, secret attraction" to virtue. After all, Glaucon
and Adeimantus in Book I say that they choose justice over injustice (347e),
but they do not choose from knowledge or philosophy; they are very aware
of the lack of a ground for their choice. There is something about their
nature that strikes Socrates with wonder (368a).
The choice in the myth is a special kind of choice. It is very serious,
because it determines all our other choices. Ordinary choices, the choices
that we make in the course of our ordinary, mortal lives, are imitations
of this one deep choice. We become what we choose here. This choice is
always there, always made again and again, but it is somehow hidden and
forgotten and covered by our ordinary choices. The danger for us that this
kind of choice reveals is not so much that we will make the wrong choicethe first man to choose in the myth of Er, who chose tyranny, once before
had made a good choice, a life of virtue and decency that took him to
heaven, but he chose a life without "philosophy." (Giaucon and Adeimantus may have made this very choice.) The danger is that we'll choose superficiality, a glorious superficiality, out of habit or honor. Our love for images of glorious choices might betray us.
The myth ends with the waters of Lethe and forgetting; the deep choice
and its moment are overcome by forgetting, the triumph of the ordinary
over the serious. And thereby the myth points to something that is deeper
than knowing: forgetting, Lethe, and ordinariness. Socrates says that we
should spend our lives trying to be capable of making that special choice,
trying to be "serious" and awake. Only philosophy and its peculiar· call
to a kind of human greatness can save us from superficiality, can hold
together thumos and mind, poetry and thinking, the soul's beauty and its
monstrosity. This impossible shield holds apart, and binds together, the
democratic city and the "best city"; it gives the soul a "pattern laid up in
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heaven" and allows philosophy to "come on the scene," stepping out of
a mythical past and artfully arranging its own entrance (as Odysseus did
in Phaiakia-Odyssey VIII, 486-IX, 20). The Republic tries to separate
yet hold together and see in one glance the desire for greatness and the
desire for truth.
This shield, the Republic or Politeia, is impossible, as we have seen.
But it is impossible not to ask what it would be like if this harmony of
thumos and mind were possible? If we could connect becoming and being
in the case of this impossible city, what would it be like? (Socrates has
a similar curiosity iu Timaeus 19b). What comes to mind is a passage from
Aristotle's Politics (which in turn reminds me of another passage, Ion 54lb).
After asking "what equipment the best politeia" (or "republic") needs in
order to come to be, Aristotle asks about the citizens: What kind of nature
would they have? He answers this question by looking at the "whole inhabited world" and the cities or Greece:
On the one hand, the nations inhabiting the cold places and those of Europe
are full of thumos but lack mind and skill, so that they are free but lack
political organization and ability to rule. ... The people of Asia, on the
other hand, have mind and skill ... , but lack thumos, so that they are in
continuous subjection and slavery. But the Greeks participate in both
characters ... for they are both spirited and intelligent; hence ... if they
attain politeia [or "republic"[, they are capable of ruling all. (l327b24)
Note
I bave used the following translations: The Republic of Plato, translated
by Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968); Aristotle: Politics,
translated by H. Rackham (London: Harvard University Press, 1959); Lessing's Laocoon, translated by Edwin Allen McCormick (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1962); The Aeneid of Virgil, translated by Allen
Mandelbaum (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971).
�I A Note About the Authors
Eva T. H. Brann, Robert B. Williamson, and John White are Thtors
at St. John's College, Annapolis. David R. Lachterman is a professor in
the Department of Philosophy at the Pennsylvania State University.
Miss Brann is the author of Late Geometric and Protoattic Pottery:
Mid 8th to Late 7th Century RC.: The Athenian Agora (Princeton: The
American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1962); and Paradoxes of
Education in a Republic (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979;
paperback 1989). She is the translator of Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical
Thought and the Origin of Algebra (Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I:r. Press,
1968). Her new book The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance
(Savage, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield) will appear later in 1990.
Professor Lachterman is the author of The Ethics of Geometry: A
Genealogy of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 1989).
201
�
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Zuckerman, Elliott
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
Stickney, Cary
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Routt, Deidre
Sachs, Joe
Brann, Eva T. H.
Lachterman, David
White, John
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The St. John's Review
Volume XXXIX, number three (1989-90)
Editor
Elliott Zuckerman
Editorial Board
Eva Brann
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
Cary Stickney
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Subscriptions Assistant
Deirdre Routt
The St. John's Review is published three times a year by the Office of the Dean,
St. John's College, Annapolis; Donald J. Maciver, Jr., President; Eva Brann, Dean.
For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $15.00 per year. Unsolicited
essays, stories, poems, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address correspondence
to the Review, St. John's College, Annapolis, MD 21404. Back issues are available,
at $5.00 per issue, from the St. John's College Bookstore.
© 1990
St. John's College. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole or in part
without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Composition
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�Contents
1 . . . . . . . Antigone: All-Resourceful/Resourcelessness
Joe Sachs
17 . . . . . . . The Nobility of Sophocles' Antigone
Janet A. Dougherty
33 . . . . . . . Hegel's Reading of Antigone
Patricia M Locke
51 . . . . . . . Idealism, Ancient and Modern: Sophocles'
Antigone and Schiller's Don Carlos
Gisela Berns
61 . . . . . . . George Steiner's Antigones: A Review
Eva Brann
67 . . . . . . . The Problem of Place in
Oedipus at Co/onus
Abraham Schoener
79 . . . . . . . Oedipus the King and Aristotle's List of
Categories: A Note
Chaninah Maschler
83 . . . . . . . Depth and Desire
Eva Brann
Woodcut by Emily Kutter
�Antigone: All-Resourceful/
Resourcelessness
Joe Sachs
This lecture has an ulterior purpose. It is a response to the growing chorus
of voices one hears saying that Sophocles is too difficult for our
sophomores to read. Now in some literal sense this is so obvious that it
hardly needs saying. But some people take it to imply that we ought to
stop reading Sophocles in the language tutorial, and this needs denying.
My own opinion is that Sophocles is too difficult for us not to read: too
good to miss, that is, and completely inaccessible unless one makes the
effort to read his own words. That such an effort made with the minimum
of tools is already richly fruitful is one of the things I hope to show. To
that end I promise that this lecture will be amateurish, in fact sophomoric.
I have no doubt that I will make mistakes that could be corrected by anyone
who has read all the scholarly literature on the subject. I have long ago
made the choice that such correctness is not worth its price. The reading
of Antigone presented here will rest on an elementary knowledge of Greek,
an ignorance of its metrics, a lack of fastidiousness about syntax, and a
heavy reliance on Liddell and Scott. I have had the luxury of being a
sophomore more than once, but my heart is in that tutorial, and I will
never graduate from it. Its very ineptitude prevents glibness, and requires
a slow, stubborn questioning of every word. With Sophocles that is not
Joe Sachs is a Thtor at St. John's College, Annapolis. This lecture was first given
at Brock University, St. Catherines, Ontario, in October, 1988. Translations are
the author's.
�2
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
a bad way to read. It also has the merit that anyone who wants to do it
can do it. It would be a shame to listen to a lecture of this kind and not
join in with it in the question period.
Sophocles never stopped thinking about the Oedipus story. He was in
his nineties when he wrote Oedipus at Co/onus, which he did not live to
see performed. It was about thirty-five years earlier that he wrote Antigone.
The three Theban plays that we possess are not a trilogy nor in any sense
parts of a whole. They are one story told three times from different points
of view. I do not mean that Sophocles used various characters to give subjective colorings to the events, but that he himself saw the essence of the
Oedipus story in three different acts of poetic concentration. I do not think
he changed his mind from play to play about Oedipus or about what made
his story important, though that would be difficult to show. I think he
saw in the story the most important truths about human life, and kept opening windows into it so that the rest of us could see them too.
But the Antigone seems to be far removed from the center of the
Oedipus story. Oedipus is long departed when it begins. His two sons have
tried and failed to share the kingship of Thebes, brought new misery on
the city, and finally killed each other in battle. Creon, who succeeds them
as king, and their sister Antigone respond to this catastrophe in incompatible ways, bringing on fresh catastrophe. And everyone knows that the
heart of this play is the scene in which the two main characters step forth
and debate the principles on which they have acted. The Antigone is a play
about a disastrous moral collision, one neither faced by nor caused by
Oedipus, who is so far in the background that he might be any dead king
who had both sons and daughters.
This is a false picture of the play, but an almost inevitable first picture.
More than other plays, the Antigone tempts us to single-sentence statements
of moral or theme, and that sentence is always about the conflict between
the laws of the city and the demands of private conscience, which listens
to a higher law. I could quote such sentences from various commentators,
but what would be the point? We can all say the same kinds of things
ourselves, and probably have. Whatever else the play may be, it has within
it a philosophic dialogue of undeniable clarity about a genuine and timeless
dilemma. Sir Richard Jebb does not hesitate to conclude that the conflict
of the play is not between people but between abstract principles, and that
Creon and Antigone move us not as themselves but as vivid personifications of duty. I hope this formulation feels uncomfortable to you, but there
is nothing impossible about it. Poetry is not by its nature hostile to rationality, and part of the power of Sophocles' writing is undoutedly an
�SACHS
3
intellectual power. He might, in this one play, have made everything human
and concrete an outer covering for an intellectual problem.
There is a philosopher, Hegel, who saw the intellectual realm as a living drama enacted by the ideas themselves. It is no accident that he loved
the Antigone. In his Phenomenology he sees the play as exhibiting the splitting in two of the ethical world, the destruction of ethical order by the
emergence of an inner contradiction. Antigone and Creon are both right
but also both wrong. Hegel says, "only in the downfall of both sides alike
is absolute right accomplished, and the ethical substance as the negative
power which engulfs both sides, that is, omnipotent and righteous Destiny,
steps on the scene" (#472). In Hegel's account of the play everything accidental and individual falls away from the characters, even though individuality is itself one of the things at issue. But Hegel writes with a depth
worthy of Sophocles, and his approach to the play cannot be dismissed
lightly.
The only way to achieve a truer perspective on the play is to begin looking at its details, but it is worth noting first that there is another philosopher,
of the same stature as Hegel, who seems to see the play in an opposite
way. Aristotle, in his Rhetoric (III xvi 9), criticizes the orators of his time
for writing too exclusively from the intellect, making it impossible for them
to discern or display moral character or purpose. He recommends that they
follow, instead, the example of the Antigone. This is a wonderful passage,
to which I will refer again. For the moment it defines a challenge for us:
to see how what is peculiar to the Antigone is what is specifically moral,
and does not stem from the intellect.
The debate between Creon and Antigone takes place in daylight. It is
important in many ways that the play begins in darkness. Antigone and
her sister Ismene meet outside the city before sunrise. It is an intensely
visual scene, but the pictures are in the imaginations of the two women.
We begin where they do, trying to assimilate the horror of the previous
day, and with Ismene at least, trying to see into another's inner visions.
There are no formulated principles here, no light by which to see one's
way. Ismene asks Antigone where she is in her thoughts (line 42); what
she sees clearly is that Antigone's thinking is spreading the darkness, like
the purple dye emitted by a certain whelk to make the sea murky (20).
This tiny example reveals the whole art of Sophocles, insofar as I can get
hold of it. Where a translation may have Ismene saying "you seem to be
pondering something," the word Sophocles has used for ponder is ka/khainein, not an invented word, but not a very common one either, and one
still heavily laden with its metaphoric origin. The root of the word is the
name of the purple murex, a sea mollusc which clouds the water when
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
it is threatened. Its secretion is the dye used by ancient kings for their royal
purple. The animal itself was therefore valuable, and worth searching for
through the murk. Thus its name came also to mean the searcher, as for
example Kalchas, the seer in Book One of the Iliad. This is Sophoclean
language: concrete, metaphoric, sensuous, and strong. We who do not speak
his language must read whole entries in Liddell and Scott to hear what
his characters are saying, and never be content to pick out one meaning
that seems to fit the context. But there is still another favorite device of
Sophocles in the line. Not only does Ismene say that Antigone is pondering, with a word that carries layers meaning gloom, royalty, and divine
insight; she says it is clear (deloun) that she is doing so. Sophocles loves
to jam together words whose senses clash. "It is clear that you are in a
murky soup of thoughts of royalty and divinity." The introduction of the
word "clear" serves only to emphasize that nothing here is clear. I will note
later some magnificent examples of this trick.
It is in this scene in and about darkness that the themes of the play
are introduced, and they are not law and conscience. The opening line is
Antigone's: 0 koinon autade/phon Ismenes kara, "Shared self-sister, heart
of Ismene." The word autade/phos means prosaically full-sister, daughter
of the same mother as well as father, but this scene, like the whole play,
is so full of the word autos and its compounds that one must, in retrospect
if not from the beginning, hear it as superimposing the meaning self on
that of sister. Similarly, kara, meaning head, or very summit of what someone is, like our use of heart to mean someone's very core, carries the sense
of Ismene's essential self. Antigone is saying "Ismene, what is most you
yourself is also shared, is my self, so fully are we sisters." The two-sided
question -what is shared? and what is oneself?- is the center of Sophocles'
envisioning of the Oedipus story.
Here, at the beginning of the play, the merging of two sisters into one
self is a pathetic illusion. Before the end of the ninety-nine lines Antigone
is telling Ismene she hates her. This moment when the sisters might be loving
and comforting one another becomes a new division and separation, like
that between their brothers. The image which dominates the whole play
is the one which fills Ismene's imagination in this scene. She describes it
twice. "We two were deprived oftwo brothers, dying on one day by a double
hand" (13-14). And again, "two brothers, in the course of one day, selfslaying wretched ones, working out a common doom with mutual hands"
(55-57). It might be a great misfortune that each brother gave the other
a fatal wound, but the special insight that makes this a nightmare vision
for Ismene is contained, in the first telling, in the singular phrase, "a double
hand," and in the second in the reflexive participle, "self-slaying." We are
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seeing a combat to the death fought with a mirror, so that the hand one
lifts to strike the other moves backward to kill oneself. Oedipus lifted his
hand against his father, and destroyed himself. Here that deed is doubled,
as both Eteocles and Polyneices strike what seems to be merely a brother,
but for each turns out to be himself. And now in front of us it begins to
be quadrupled, as the sisters too begin tearing themselves apart. We look
at Antigone, and through two mirrors we see Oedipus. And there is one
more reflected reflection still to come.
But why does Antigone's loving greeting of Ismene turn so quickly into
a hate-filled parting? It is easy to blame Ismene. When Antigone tells what
she intends, Ismene replies that those who are women, weak, and subjects
must yield to those who are men, strong, and rulers (58-64). In response
to these arguments Antigone is splendid. In forbidding burial of Polyneices,
Creon has crossed two boundaries that restrain legitimate rule, into the
properly private (48) and into a realm where only the gods can be listened
to (77). As for his masculine strength, that can be put to the test by anyone
who does not fear death, and when Antigone looks at the image of herself
dying for burying a loved brother, she calls it a beautiful thing (72). Ismene
insists three times that the deed is impossible (79, 90, 92), but Antigone
elegantly and succinctly tells her that there is only one way to know that.
She uses the future perfect: "whenever I have no more strength, I shall have
stopped" (19). In the Rhetoric, Aristotle tells us that Antigone acts not
for the sake of what is useful or beneficial, but for the sake of the beautiful,
out of goodness rather than prudence, and in the Ethics he tells us that
the specific telos, or end, of virtue is the beautiful (III vii). There is no
question here, for example, of any superstitious fear that an unburied
Polyneices will be denled access to the other world, but only a clear sight
that burying him is right, fitting, appropriate, and leaving him unburied
deeply wrong, so that even the sacrifice of another life only makes the whole
picture more beautiful. Antigone is a human being in the fullest sense, one
courageous enough to do what needs to be done out of no practical calculation, for no reason other than that it is right. Her choice is beautiful,
Sophocles' picture of her making it is beautiful, and she is beautiful.
But she is also fierce. The chorus will say she is fierce with her father's
fierceness (471). In the first scene she is merciless with her sister. But worst
of all, she does not listen to Ismene. In the first line, she does not mean:
I see you, Ismene, for what you are and take that into myself as part of
me. She means: I look at you, Ismene, and see nothing but myself. The
two can have a shared self only if Ismene is willing to become Antigone.
If she does not feel the same feelings, Antigone rejects her as no true-born
sister of hers (37-38). But Ismene is no coward, but in fact a true match
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
for Antigone in firmness. If we listen to her we hear not a woman afraid
to act, but one strong enough to endure anything, if she is convinced that
any action will make things worse (39-40). Ismene is frozen in horror before
the image of her brothers, not because blood and death and loss are too
painful for her to look upon, but because they brought it on themselves.
In the speech in which Antigone only hears Ismene saying, let's act like
weak women subjects, she in fact is saying much more, that is much more
important. She asks Antigone to remember their father, not only dead but
having died hated, shamed, and having brought it all on himself, and the
mother who was to that father both mother and wife, the two names twisted
like the noose with which she mutilated her own life (49-54). Now their
brothers have added more horror and shame, and Antigone wants to keep
increasing it until they are all wiped out. To Antigone, all the deaths are
the work of enemies, against whom the family must be defended (9-10).
But Ismene keeps hammering at the fact that everything their parents and
brothers suffered was self-inflicted. In Ismene's view, she and Antigone
have no enemies but themselves. What they need now is to forgive the
beloved dead for their crimes, and be forgiven by them for taking no action (65-67). Antigone's deafness to her sister makes Ismene all the more
insistent, and Ismene's insistence makes Antigone all the more determined.
Like the blows struck by their brothers, every attempt to persuade turns
back on the sister who utters it as a new cause of her isolation.
In the course of this first scene, the most important word in the play
has been introduced and become increasingly prominent. That word is
philia. It means Jove which is not from desire, as eros, nor for all human
beings, as agape, nor between unequals, as storge, but for those who are
like oneself, of one's own kind. It therefore names both the love within
a family and the friendly feeling among fellow-citizens. You have all read
the sentence koina ta ton phi/on, the things of friends are common. Aristotle says in the Politics that the proper work of the lawmaker is to produce
this feeling among all the citizens (II v 6-8). The confrontation between
Antigone and Creon is not between conscience and law, but between philia
and philia.
This is part of the last of the mirror images of which I spoke. But the
word has already come under strain between the two sisters. In Antigone's
mouth philia means that which separates us from them, her immediate
family from everyone else, all of whom are therefore enemies. It is after
Ismene says that there is fault on the side of their family that Antigone
begins to say she hates her (86). Antigone's Jove is conditional, and those
who do not earn it feel her hate (93-94). Ismene's love is unconditional,
no matter what Antigone says or does (98-99). Antigone's words are all
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about philia, and it is genuinely the motive of her deed, but she does not
recognize its presence in front of her. This rejection of her sister's love is
the worst error brought on by the darkness in which Antigone is moving,
and she will pay for it.
Creon, though he acts from calculation and prudence, is looking to
and acting for the sake of the same philia as is Antigone. Like her also,
he has a clouded view of it. His understanding of the friendship that makes
human community possible has an intellectual clarity, and his intentions
are good, but he is acting quickly in a critical situation, and he makes a
bad mistake. The Creon of this play is not the dishonest man he is in
Oedipus at Co/onus. Here he is a fitting antagonist for Antigone in the
stubborn purity of his determination to do what is best. He has inherited
the responsibility for a maimed and miserable city. Though his title to rule
comes through blood-kinship to the ruling family, all of Thebes's long
history of troubles has come from that same family. With the sunrise of
this day, the instant he becomes king, he intends to cut off that family
connection once and for all. His inaugural address to the elders of his city
is meant to show them a genuinely new beginning and show himself as
someone they can trust. They are to watch Polyneices suffer the ultimate
violation, left as a piece of meat for dogs and birds (205-6). They will see
that to Creon this violator of the city is no nephew, but is nothing (182-83).
Creon's true decree is that all bonds of love and loyalty will henceforth
begin with the city; no other bonds precede it, carry over into it, or carry
any weight against it (187-90). When one reflects that the ties within the
Oedipus family are those of a blood-kinship flowing back into itself in
a grotesque way, Creon's attempt to destroy all such ties is understandable.
But as the words for same blood, xunaimon, and common blood, haima
koinon, resound in his speech, we remember that Creon has a son and
that his very name is blood.
But Creon understands philia no better than blood-kinship, and no better than Antigone does. In fact the two misunderstandings of philia are
identical. Just as Antigone has sisterly love before her in Ismene, Creon
has the fellow-feeling of common citizenship before him in the chorus,
and he is equally blind. The chorus, when Creon encounters it, is in the
grip of a strong common emotion which he is preventing from flowing
into action, and he doesn't even know it. For him the sunrise is his entry
into kingship, but for the people of the city it is the moment they discover
that the besieging Argive army has left in the night. Creon is full of his
cleverness in having figured out a way to make them one people again,
and does not see that they are already of one mind, one heart, and one
motion, if he would just leave them alone, if not listen to them and join
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
them. What the chorus wants is to wipe out the war and the fear that have
filled them, with a day and night of feasting, dancing, singing, and
thankfulness to the gods (148-54). Creon is telling them to prolong the
horror by watching the desecration of Polyneices' corpse.
Creon and Antigone are mirror images in many ways. Antigone's imagination in the first scene is dominated by a picture of enemies creeping
up unseen on her friends (9-10). Creon likewise from his first scene keeps
referring to a plot against him fueled by money (221-22, 289-303, 1055).
There is no smallest shred of evidence in the play that this plot exists
anywhere but in his imagination. Both feel the need to act without delay
because of these threats. And having acted, both are inflexible. Creon compares Antigone to the hardest iron, which most easily shatters, and to the
wildest horse, most easily broken by a small bit (474-78), while Haemon
compares Creon to a tree that does not bend in the wind, and so is uprooted,
and to one who keeps a sail too taut, and capsizes (712-17). But the fundamental identity between them is seen in the words which are compounds
of autos. The Chorus tells Antigone that an autognotos orga, a self-willed
temper, destroyed her (875), while Teiresias tells Creon that his authadia,
self-pleasing or self-will, makes him guilty for his own bad luck (1028).
The self-will of Antigone and Creon is the conviction each has of being
the radical originator of his or her own deeds. This is the error of Oedipus.
Oedipus left home to start life fresh, by his own doing. When he lifts
his hand against his father, that is the outward, factual manifestation of
his effort to cut off his own sources and be in the world without
antecedents. Likewise, Antigone must act alone to save the honor of her
family. She cannot run the risk of letting there be any love between her
sister and herself which might dilute her resolution or divert her strength.
The two of them might become a new being, and see the good in some
way other than she sees it now. And likewise Creon as ruler has the whole
world on his shoulders alone. He repeatedly uses compounds of the word
kosmos when insisting that he cannot in any slightest way allow himself
to be ruled by a woman, a subject, or a child (726-27, 734, 746). If the
ruler is ruled there is anarchy (672), and the ordered world is destroyed
(660, 677, 730).
The meeting of Antigone with Creon is thus the confrontation of two
powerful, isolated figures, doing battle for the sake of philia. Faced with
each other, both are at their worst. In their determination to destroy each
other, each destroys himself. The axis of the play seems to me to be the
pair of lines 523 and 524. That is where they stake themselves. Creon has
been arguing that the reverence, honor, and love shown to Eteocles must
�SACHS
9
mean nothing if the same rites are accorded the enemy he lost his life
fighting. Antigone has been replying with immovable certainty that what
Eteocles and all the dead and the gods want is exactly what she has done
(505; cf. 89). They will never agree. Earlier, telling Creon in effect to shut
up and get on with whatever he intends to do, Antigone has said "my words
were born displeasing you" (501). Now, speaking her last words to him,
she says, "I was born not to join in hating but to join in loving." Creon's
last words back to her are, "Well you are now on your way below, if one
must love, love them." Antigone's word symphilein, to join in loving, and
Creon's word phileteon, one must love, are the nooses with which they hang
themselves. Antigone's word is beautiful, but she herself disfigures it.
Creon's word is a grotesque malformation with which not even he can live.
Both Antigone and Creon are far gone in spite when they utter these
words. Antigone is splendid in her courage, but she has been carrying a
contradiction within her since the first scene, and it has now come to the
surface. She has told Ismene that her love is conditional, and that Ismene
has failed to earn it. But she has just explained with scorn that she cannot
make a distinction between her brothers because her love is unconditional.
Which is the truth? At this moment Ismene comes on stage, and all of
Antigone's passionate coldness is turned upon her. Ismene had wanted
nothing to do with the deed, but wants everything to do with the sister
who must now suffer for it. All Ismene's words of desperate love for her
sister are met by Antigone with irony and mockery. When Ismene finally
screams, "Why do you torture me like this, when it does you no good?"
(550), all the fight finally goes out of Antigone. "In pain I am laughing
at you, if laughing is what it is." Antigone makes no effort at reconciliation, but Ismene has stopped her runaway anger. The effect of this stopping is to turn Antigone inward, where she begins facing the death she
has chosen. When she comes back onstage she will be a different Antigone
from what we have seen of her so far.
When Antigone has been led away for now, Haemon enters to plead
for her life. Just as Antigone's anger at Creon missed its mark and hit her
sister, so now all Creon's rage at Antigone lands on his son. In accordance
with his word phileteon, which says that love is a matter of impersonal
necessity, to be arranged by prudent deliberation, Creon first explains to
Haemon that when he thinks well about it he will see that this is not a
woman he wants to love (648-54). But Creon sees with fury that Haemon
fights for, follows, and serves this woman in place of his father (740, 746,
756). Creon knows how to handle proven and incipient treason at one stroke,
as he has done with Polyneices and the city. "Bring her here at once," he
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
says to the soldiers, "and kill her in front of her bridegroom's eyes" (760-61).
Creon has gone momentarily mad, but he has lost Haemon forever. He
is hemorrhaging in front of us, and this wound will not close.
With the device of Haemon's name, Sophocles shows us Creon in confrontation with his own blood. This was already true, more distantly, in
his confrontation with his niece and desecration of the body of his nephew.
And it is a truth implicit in the political principle by which he has chosen
to rule, that only those human bonds will be recognized and honored that
derive from the political one. From the beginning of his kingship, Creon
has been doing violence to himself without knowing it. It must be emphasized that there is no intellectual contradiction here. Creon could live
by his principle if he were a worse man, one whose cruelty was not a
momentary mad impulse but a settled disposition, or if he were a man
of firmer principle, like Brutus, the first consul of Rome, who killed his
own sons for the sake of his city deliberately. But Creon is just an ordinarily
good man, who considers his son and his wife part of himself. By his rules
he has judged Polyneices simply an enemy, with no claim on him or on
Thebes. But in so doing, he has made Antigone a second enemy, on account of sisterly love, and Haemon a third, on account of erotic love, and,
on account of a mother's love for the last of her children left alive, Creon's
wife Eurydice· a fourth. It is not money but love that has produced the
plot against Creon, a widening circle of unruly, ungovernable loves from
which he himself is not exempt. When he returns from seeing his son try
to kill him and then kill himself, to discover that his wife has killed herself,
Creon for the first time sees the truth: "I, I killed you, useless I" (1319-20),
but also "I am dead" (1288), "I am no more than nothing" (1322). His own
self lay outside him, in his wife and son, by way of bonds over which he
had no control. He was not the source of the ordered hierarchy of Thebes,
nor even the free origin of his own life, but part of a shared self, which
he stabbed inward to the heart by striking outward.
There are pictures in the play of lives better ordered. Haemon tells his
father that he can listen to and respect a youth, a woman, and his subjects
and be all the better a father, man, and king (728-29, 737, 739, 741, 749).
The chorus tells Creon that he and his son have spoken well doubly,
mutually (725), even in disagreeing. This means not that these old men
are too witless to make up their minds, but that they see the truth only
in some yielding of both sides to each other. And the loveliest and most
touching moment of the play is Ismene's second entrance. Antigone,
wrapped up in herself, sees only someone who would not act but wants
to share the glory (538-39, 542-43, 546-47). Creon, wrapped up in his mission to restore civil order, sees lsmene's tears, and takes them for an in-
�SACHS
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voluntary confession of treason (491-94). But the chorus, when they see
her, break into a brief lyric passage, the only lines they speak in the play
which are neither dialogue nor part of a full choral ode (526-30):
And now before the gates here is Ismene,
With sister-loving tears dropping down.
A cloud above her brows blood-red
Stains her face,
Wetting a beautiful cheek.
Philadelpha, sister-loving, is here an adjective modifying tears. I remember,
when I first read Antigone with a sophomore language class, asking how
a feeling and its object can be attributed to drops of salt-water. A student
named Ann Tive said simply, "They love her.'' Only the chorus speaks true
words about Ismene, and they are loving words. Though the chorus itself
speaks later of eros keeping watch on the cheek of a maiden, the love present here is not desire, not the remembered lust that moves the old men
of Troy when they look at Helen. These men of Thebes have suffered a
long time for the family of Oedipus, but they love this girl, and because
they love her they can know her. Similarly, in the whole play it is only
Ismene who speaks of Haemon with. love (572). This has confused centuries of editors so much that they often give the line to Antigone, though
every manuscript gives it to Ismene, and it has tempted at least one modern
reader to convict Ismene of desire for her sister's fiance. But Ismene and
the chorus are examples of the ph ilia that the play is all about. They can
love people a step removed from them because they genuinely love those
nearest them.
One of the most striking images in the play is that of Thiresias, the
blind seer. A great point is made of his being led by a boy. He enters with
the words, "Lords of Thebes, we have come a common road, two seeing
out of one" (988-89). Thebes had lords, plural, not a dictator, because
everyone must in some ways be led by others. Later he speaks of things
"I learned from this boy... for to me he is a guide, as I to others" (1012,
1014). Everyone who is unwilling to be led goes astray, misses the mark.
Aristotle's famous word in the Poetics, harmartia, which somehow came
to be misunderstood as a flaw, begins in archery and eventually becomes
the New Thstament word for sin. The English word error has perhaps the
closest range of meaning. Teiresias tells Creon that erring is common to
all human beings (1023-24). That is why he shouldn't be afraid even now
to change his course, but it is also why he should have known in the first
place that Polyneices deserved burial. The city need not have joined in
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the honors, but there is no crime about which it can say that the criminal
went so far astray that even in death he cannot be allowed to be recognized
as human; and that we, the rest of us, are the only ones safely within the
human fold. But Creon's being wrong does not make Antigone right.
Ismene's last speech to Antigone uses the same word, examartia, that
Teiresias will use: "Surely the erring of us two is equal" (558).
Why do all human beings err? The chorus, in the ode pol/a ta deina
(332-83), suggests that the very excellence itself which defines being human
is the source of error. ~~wonders are many," the ode begins, "yet nothing
stranger than a human being walks." Th be human is to find a passage
through anything, sea, wind, or earth, and to find a mechanism to overcome the power of anything, bird, beast, or fish, cold, sleet, or rain. The
characteristic human epithet is pantoporos, all-resourceful, passing through
every obstacle. Antigone has used the verb from the same root in the first
scene to tell her sister, "I will find a way through, heaping up a tomb for
a most loved brother" (80-81). But in one of those magnificent clashings
I spoke of earlier, the chorus's word pantoporos collides with aporos,
resourceless, helpless (360). The meaning of aporos is immediately negated:
"helpless he comes upon nothing that is to be." But the poetic effect of
the line is the shock of hearing pantoporos aporos. In retrospect, or in
reading, the words can be tamed, but the poet is writing for the ear, and
Sophocles' words are wild. Pantoporos aporos cannot fail to confuse, to
disturb. The choral odes are all hypnotic, and this one conveys a dreamlike
sense that the very triumph of overcoming every obstacle is an achievement of helplessness.
That is certainly a description that fits Creon. He becomes the helpless
wreck he is at the end of the play precisely by mastering everyone, overcoming all opposition. In the antistrophe to the pantoporos aporos stanza
the same position has the words hupsipolis apolis, supreme in the city/
without a city. Supremacy destroys reciprocal relations, and destroys the
community. But when the chorus ends the ode in dread of human greatness
it is Antigone who appears before them. Ismene has told her amechanon
eras, ''you lust after impossibilities" (90), and that she is determined perissa
prassein, "to do extravagant things," things that go beyond (68). It is
primarily Antigone who displays the human excellence of refusing to accept
any restraints to her will. Those restraints are outwardly Creon and his
soldiers, but more importantly the inconvenient love and inconvenient
otherness from herself of Ismene. Philia is the power that saves us from
greatness, the acceptance of others into a wider self that can no longer
say "I will not be stopped."
But even though Antigone's defiance earned her death, she does not
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13
in the end go to her death defiant. She has one more scene, and in it she
begins to return out of her isolation. The movement of the scene is difficult to understand, but full of truth. The chorus cries when it sees her
being led to dealh, but conceals its tears in her presence. She asks the chorus
for pity, but it gives her honor instead. She cries out that they are mocking her, and they rebuke her. In response to their rebuke, she begins telling
painful and frightening truths about herself for the first time in the play.
She has finally allowed someone to get close enough to break through her
control. It happens harshly, violently, because she has fought so hard to
make it impossible. As with her sister, Antigone has heaped contempt and
scorn on the chorus to their faces. She was certain she knew what they
thought, and that they kept silent like cowering dogs. It is her ugliest insult: "they tuck their mouths between their legs" (509). Then it was false,
but now they do in fact conceal their honest feelings, because she has been
so unapproachable.
Look at me, she says to them now, going to death solitary, unmarried,
choosing to marry death (806-16). They tell her what she seems to want
to hear: You are glorious, autonomous, not a victim, but alone of mortals
in choosing death (817-22). She compares herself to Niobe, turned into
rock, eternally weeping, and they say, Yes, you are godlike (823-38). This
is when she screams out that she is mocked. She wants not praise for her
solitary courage, but pity for her loneliness, not the glory of Niobe but
the pathos of her unending misery. They tell her everything she is suffering is her own fault: "You went out to the extreme edge of boldness, and
crashed into the high seat of Justice" (853-54). But they immediately soften
their rebuke with the thought that maybe it is somehow her father's struggle that she is paying for. And now the lid that she has kept so firmly on
her feelings is finally off. "You have touched my most painful worries,"
she says: Were my parents monsters? What in the world am I that was born
out of such horror? (857-66). We see now why Antigone erupted into such
violent hatred when Ismene suggested there was something wrong with their
family. It was a hatred of her own uncertainties. Ismene was a self-sister,
one that Antigone was trying to expel from herself.
Antigone's earlier certainty was a forcible effort of will in opposition
to her uncertainty. Then she had said, "I know I am pleasing those whom
it is most necessary for me to please" (89). Now she tells the truth: I nourish,
that is, I work to keep alive, a hope that I will be received with love by
father, mother, and brother (897-99). How is she nourishing that hope?
She has fed it by searching out the final, unassailable reason why she had
to act as she did. These lines which we must now consider are much debated.
Most editors and translators cut them out of the play, or put them in
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
brackets. Sir Richard Jebb gives three reasons for doing so: the lines are
inconsistent with things Antigone has said earlier, illogical in themselves,
and ungrammatical. Yet the lines are in all the manuscripts, and they are
quoted by Aristotle. That the lines are inconsistent with her earlier appeals to divine law is true; she has changed now, and stopped pretending
to be doing a duty. That the lines are illogical is exactly what Aristotle
praises them for; it is here that he says Antigone displays that she was acting not for any benefit but for the beautiful, not out of thought but out
of goodness. That the grammar of the lines is strained is a sign that she
is strained; this is understandable since she is facing death with all her
private nightmares coming to the surface of her thoughts. In the Philoctetes,
Sophocles has the main character go to pieces in front of us, with incoherent
speeches and a long scream. And in the fourth line of this play, Antigone
in her passion says there is nothing without doom that has not come to
her, when what she means would have one less negative in it.
What does she say that so disturbed Jebb and Fitzgerald and others?
She says (904-20) that had it been a child or husband of hers lying dead
on the field she would have left it to rot. She could always get another
husband, or bear another child, but with her parents dead, how could she
ever get another brother? This is a repellent thought, and there is no reason
to think for one second that it is true. Imagine trying to take a child of
hers, living or dead, away from Antigone. We have known her for only
part of a day, but it is still obvious that it would be easier to take a cub
from a lioness or a grizzly bear. Why does she tell so ugly a falsehood?
I think it is an exaggerated way of saying, I buried Polyneices for the sake
of Polyneices. Her brother was irreplaceable, but love knows that every
human being is irreplaceable. At the fringes of thought, Antigone finds
an illogic for what has no logic. The immediate sight of love tells love what
it must do. When Antigone said it was not her nature to share in hating,
but symphilein, to join in loving, that was a smug debater's point against
Creon, and a lie made obvious by the presence of Ismene. But Antigone
now in her weakness and misery has made that claim true. She has let go
of everything but love. The murky soup of divine law, her family's blameless
nobility, and the human joy of overcoming all restraint have now ceased
to cloud her sight. In her imagination now she sees Polyneices as the only
thing in the world that matters, and the claims on her from loving him
as the only ones in the world not subject to conditions.
The important thing about ph ilia is that it is natural, given. We find
ourselves in the world loving others who belong to us and to whom we
belong. What we are is a result of whom and what we love. On the other
hand, the defining characteristic of human being is to accept nothing
�SACHS
15
natural as given but to be always overcoming every obstacle to our purposes or whims. Antigone is glorious in her successful defiance of Creon.
He says, "I am no aner, she is the aner" (484) if I let her get away with
this, but he is already too late. She outshines him even when they are at
a standoff. But she has announced that philia was the end for the sake
of which she had broken all restraints. The deed and its end were incompatible. That is the impossibility Ismene had seen from the first. When
Antigone returns before us on her way to die, she has collapsed under the
weight of the contradictions in her soul. But she has made her final choice.
It is love itself with its passivity and uncertainty that she has chosen, rather
than the glory of being its champion.
��The Nobility of
Sophocles' Antigone
Janet A. Dougherty
When Sophocles first presents Antigone to us, she is already determined
to violate Creon's decree prohibiting the burial of one of her two dead
brothers. Each has just died at the hands of the other in a battle for the
kingship of Thebes. Eteocles has been honored in a hero's funeral for
defending the city. Polyneices is dishonored as a traitor, his flesh cast outside
the city walls to rot and to be devoured by vultures and wild dogs.
This is all the background for the drama that Sophocles gives us explicity, but his Greek audiences were familiar with the story of Antigone's
father, Oedipus, the former king of Thebes. They were aware that his two
sons had quarreled over who was to rule the city after their father's death.
Either Eteocles had refused to step down when his turn to rule alternately
with his brother was complete, or Polyneices, the elder, objected to his
brother's ruling instead of himself. Whichever it was, Polyneices then married an Argive princess and marshaled an army of warriors to conquer
and recapture his city. The play begins at dawn on the day after the Theban
army has successfully repelled Polyneices and his allies. Since the civil war
has ended leaving the two contenders for the rule of the city dead, Creon,
the uncle of Eteocles and Polyneices and, at the time, the next in line to
the throne, now has power in Thebes. In one of his first acts as king, he
has prohibited the burial of Polyneices. When Antigone decides to attempt
to bury her brother, she deliberately defies Creon's decree.
Janet Dougherty is a Thtor at St. John's College, Santa Fe. This lecture was first
delivered at the Santa Fe campus in October, 1986. The translations are the author's.
17
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
In her opening speech Antigone refers to the misery and dishonor that
she and Ismene have suffered, evils that have sprung from Oedipus's slaying
of his father and from his incestuous marriage with his mother. These evils
have, as Antigone sees it, continued into the present. Creon's recent decree
prohibiting the burial of her brother is another in a long line of dishonors
to which she sees no end. She cannot view the decree with the detachment
her sister displays. Ismene expresses the hope and expectation that those
under the earth will forgive her for not risking her life to bury Polyneices.
She believes no woman is capable of resisting the power of the king. In
Ismene's view, Antigone's determination to oppose Creon will surely be
the cause of her death, and thus of another in the series of horrible, untimely deaths that have ravaged the family. For Antigone, in contrast, this
deterntination is the evidence that she is truly well-born. She has no choice
but to seek nobility in death- her formulation is kalon moi touto poiousa
thanein (line 72)-there is no splendor in resigned moderation. Thus, in
a final attempt to persuade Ismene to aid her, she says: "You will soon
show whether you are noble by nature, or a base daughter of a noble line."
Antigone believes that both sisters are noble by birth, and Creon seems
to have ignored the nobility of Oedipus's fantily in dishonoring the corpse
of his son. But Antigone also believes that she and her sister must prove
their nobility by burying him. It would surprise me if it were correct to
call any birth noble, but even if it sometimes is, the births of the children
of Oedipus could not be so called. Antigone is confused when she asserts
that if Ismene refuses to help in the burial of Polyneices, she will prove
herself unworthy of her origin. The same birth that is the source of Antigone's shame seems to provide the basis of her claim to honor, but she
nevertheless recognizes that honor depends upon deeds. In her actions
throughout the play she clings to her place in her tainted family. She hopes
to return to loving intimacy with all of its members in Hades. Her hope
is bound up with her conviction that the family is the source of nobility.
We must try to understand both Antigone's conviction and her hope, for
it is her motives that provide the key to the meaning of the play.
Antigone's preoccupation with her genesis and her expressions of concern for her unburied brother seem to most readers excessive. The intensity
of her feelings is all the more striking given the contrast they make with
Ismene's reaction to Creon's decree. It is not inevitable that a daughter
of Oedipus should feel the dishonor of her brother's corpse so acutely,
for apparently Ismene does not. Ismene's response is reasonable: for one
who wants to live, it makes little sense to court an untimely death for (he
sake of a corpse, even the corpse of one's kin. Ismene at least is able to
envision a life for her sister that is not plagued with the memory of what
�DOUGHERTY
19
happened in the lives of their parents and their brothers. She reminds Antigone that she is engaged to be married to the son of the man who has
just acquired power. Ismene believes that Antigone should ignore the fact
that Creon has handed down the hated decree, and concentrate on happier
thoughts. Why is Antigone so closed to this hopeful attitude of Ismene's?
How can Antigone's sense of her duty to bury her brother outweigh the
love of a man as promising and attractive as Sophocles shows Haemou
to be?
For Antigone, the prospect of marriage must take second place to her
obligation to challenge Creon and to uphold the laws of the gods below.
The conflict between Antigone and Creon is really a conflict over the nature
of the city and its needs. Creon's decree exemplifies his understanding of
the city, and Antigone believes that she cannot live honorably there. I shall
argue that her objection to Creon's city is essentially correct and that, when
she errs in her understanding of herself, her errors are due to her sharing
with Creon certain presuppositions that derive from the legendary founding of Thebes. I shall argue further that the founding of Thebes is a model
for the founding of all cities. The conflict between Creon and Antigone
is, then, a conflict of concern for us all.
Antigone is an imprudent, wrongheaded, and perhaps even mad young
woman. Still, she is extremely impressive in her single-mindedness and in
her firm resistance to the power of the king. No sensitive reader can remain
completely indifferent to her haughty dignity and her determination. Her
insistence that the gods below demand the burial of her brother commands
respect, for we cannot without an arrogance that resembles Creon's dismiss
the possibility that the laws of the gods supersede the laws of the city. But
the first three episodes of the play provide no clear evidence of Antigone's
rightness, and the three choral odes separating these episodes are tauntingly
ambiguous.
The hardest evidence of the views of the gods that Sophocles presents
comes late in the play, in the form of Teiresias's testimony to Creon that
the gods will not accept Theban sacrifice as long as Polyneices' corpse lies
rotting. But he also warns Creon of the anger of the cities whose men fought
with Polyneices: Creon has left their bodies to rot, unmourned, as well.
The anger of these cities may be Teiresias's real concern. If so, Thiresias
is warning Creon that he has been a dangerously incompetent ruler rather
than an impious man. Furthermore, although Thiresias's words establish
that Creon's decree was wrong, they do not clearly support Antigone's
rebellion against it. Before we can clarify and evaluate her reasons for
rebelling, we must see the implications of Creon's distasteful decree.
In Creon's view, it is clear that his responsibility for the safety of the
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THE ST JOHN'S REVIEW
city justifies his ruling that anyone who tries to bury Polyneices' corpse
shall die. But his decree has undermined the distinction between men and
animals by treating a man's corpse as though it were the corpse of a dog,
or worse. Teiresias's speech later in the play allows us to speculate that if
the gods exist and wish to be worshiped, they must have an interest in preserving this distinction. Even before 'Thiresias speaks, we must wonder whether
Creon's decree can be justified. Why not allow the two sisters to bury their
brother's body privately, without honor or distinction? Creon thinks that
if he as ruler does not utterly repudiate even the physical remains of the
traitor, he would himself be wounding the city to its heart.
Polyneices threatened the existence of the city not only in the way that
any belligerent enemy would have, but also, and even more dangerously,
in presenting the example of a man violating the city of his birth. Creon
responds by declaring it a crime to bury Polyneices' body, whether in
Theban earth or anywhere at all. There is no question that Creon recognizes
that he is interfering with the established means of disposing of the dead,
for if he did not, the distinction he makes between Polyneices and Eteocles
would have no force. Clearly, in making this distinction Creon intends to
announce that the traditional practice of ritual burial is not applicable to
the corpse of such a monster as Polyneices. He means to show that one
who fights against his own city not only rescinds his citizenship but also
relinquishes his humanity. Creon sees the city as the necessary basis of
friendship (190). He also considers it to be the source of human life, as
contrasted with the life of mere beasts.
Men and women who do not submit to legitimate rule are beasts; or
rather, human beings are beasts but for their submission to rule. Creon
articulates this view over and over again through his constant use of animal
imagery. Antigone is like a spirited horse (477-79), and so are potentially
disobedient subjects. Ismene is an adder who has sucked out Creon's blood
(531-33). Polyneices may be something worse than an animal, for he "came
to feed on kindred blood" (201-2). Creon retains his use of such imagery
even at the end of the play when he observes that a god " ... drove me
into ways of cruelty, overturning and trampling on my joy" (1273-75).
Maybe even the gods are not fundamentally different from animals in his
view. Creon's understanding of the city as crucial to the distinction between men and beasts helps to explain why, in his opening speech, in stark
contrast with the chorus's account in the parodos, Creon is silent concerning
the victory over the Argive army and ignores the disturbing fact that the
two brothers fought each other to the death. There is not much to celebrate
in the victory of the Theban army in battle if the city is about to succumb
�DOUGHERTY
21
to bestiality. Fratricide seems not seriously to disturb Creon, but the violation of one's city arouses in him all the horror incest can arouse, if not more.
From the start Creon anticipates that someone will try to bury the body
(219; cf. 289 ff.), and he expects this opposition to come from political
enemies, or from others whom they might bribe. We see no evidence that
anyone is jealous of his power. Creon does not expect Polyneices' sisters
to resist him, partly because they are women, and partly because he is blind
to the possibility that, for some, piety and the tie of blood can be strong
enough to overpower even the desire to live.
This is Creon's view. Now let us examine Antigone's.
As Antigone sees it, Creon bears the primary responsibility for forcing
her to violate his decree, for in promulgating it he has tried to transform
an act of piety- the burial of one's own dead- into an act of treachery.
Antigone does not describe Polyneices as an individual, and we have no
reason to think that there is anything beyond the fact that they are brother
and sister to account for the intensity of her feeling for him. The mere
fact of intimate blood relation matters. In Antigone's case the blood tie
is strengthened by her terrible family history, and the weight of that history
is all the more pressing because she feels compelled to bear that weight
by herself. Antigone's birth determines who she is. Even her name, antiagainst or before, plus gone- birth, suggests how overwhelmingly troubling it is to Antigone that she is the daughter of her own brother. As her
name implies, she wants desperately to undo her birth, and at the same
time to seek the root of her family's nobility, indeed all human nobility,
precisely in this disgraceful birth. She cannot reject her own birth, however,
without rejecting human birth itself.
With respect to erasing the shame of her birth, Antigone's thought is
apparently something like this: In correcting the impiety involved in leaving
her brother's corpse unburied she will act honorably (as, she believes,
Oedipus would have done), and at the same time she will replace the
memory of the hideousness of her birth with the memory of her own fine
act. It is she, and apparently not the city, who is concerned with the shame
of her birth, for there is no evidence that it will affect her future position
in Thebes. Furthermore, Antigone demands that in bestowing its honors
the city acknowledge the difference between what is respectable and what
is shameful in itself. She demands that all of Thebes recognize that,
although the circumstances of her brother's death were not praiseworthy,
the city's behavior in failing to bury him is more shameful. Worse, it is
impious.
Antigone's demand that the city see these things is an appropriate
�22
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
demand. But that she must act out her criticism of Creon in a noble death
for the sake of her brother's corpse suggests more: she must compel the
city in general and Crenn in particular to recognize her worth. Antigone
cannot rest in the private assurance that she can distinguish piety from
impiety. Antigone, like Creon, believes that the difference between the high
and the low will dissolve without the city's support. Her piety must be reinforced by the city's standards. It must assure her nobility as well. It is in
making this demand that Antigone's intention goes beyond an attempt to
cope with her personal history, and becomes an attempt to alter human
history generally. Again, to show how this may be I will begin by developing Creon's position. I shall then return to see where Antigone stands.
Creon's primary fear is that human baseness will destroy his city. But
in leaving the corpse that belongs beneath the earth above it, Creon has
confused at least two sources of baseness. A man may be base in that he
lacks the honors a city may grant, and he may be also be base by nature.
That is, he may lack the human qualities that merit honor. Baseness in
the man, as we all know, does not always coincide with baseness in his
position. Moreover, many of our private and physical acts make our kinship
with the animals undeniable, thus casting doubt upon the nobility even
of the supposedly "best" of us. As long as we live, we must accept that
most of our acts are determined by our corporeal nature. To the extent
that these force us to recognize our similarity to beasts, the city attempts
to treat them like corpses: it conceals them from view. Public institutions
like marriage and legal paternity give us a way to veil such acts under the
guise of choice and agreement, and many cities behave as though nobility,
rather than uncivilized, infant human beings, is propagated within certain
families. Corpses, of course, are always unworthy of the honors of the city.
The city has an obvious interest in recognizing that their proper place is
beneath the earth. But Creon considers even burial an honor (time) that
is his to withhold or to bestow. This is his most glaring mistake. Creon
is unaware, or willfully denies, that his city owes its health to a distinction
between the low and the high that is simply human, and thus independent
of any particular ruler.
Antigone responds to Creon's error with a similar error. She too fails
to distinguish between dishonor that derives from something shameful or
disgraceful in itself (aiskhros), and the unjust deprivation of the honors
and offices of the city (hai timat). Or perhaps it is more accurate to say
that she does not even recognize the latter. The gods, and not the city,
preserve the difference between human beings and animals, in her view.
She insists that the city recognize that the commands of the gods below
supplant its laws and its needs. This insistence accounts for the fact that,
�DOUGHERTY
23
even though she is too weak to complete the burial rites for her brother
by herself, she is determined to be discovered in the attempt. Antigone
gets angry when Ismene promises to keep her "crime" secret: she would
prefer that her sister proclaim it out loud.
After Ismene refuses to help her sister, Antigone loses sight of the
distinction between what is merely shameful, or at least unworthy of respect,
and what is impious. For Antigone is weak: she lacks the strength to bury
a corpse properly without help. She never considers calling upon Haemon,
her betrothed, probably because he is Creon's son. Far from being confident that the gods will reward her pious intention and her lonely efforts,
she fears that she has failed altogether. Her incomplete and perhaps ineffectual acts leave her exposed to the charge of impiety. There is no place
in the cosmos she inhabits for generous and forgiving gods.
If it is true that the gods recognize only deeds and not intentions, it
is ultimately impossible to distinguish between what their laws command
and what the city and its laws support, for it is not only isolated women
who need the help of others to act. Without the help of one another, individuals can rarely even survive. When they do, they are generally indistinguishable from beasts. Antigone is consistent in her understanding of the
gods, but her view seems unnecessarily harsh. If the gods take an interest
in humans at all, must not they acknowledge the defects we cannot overcome? Antigone does not consider that the city must fail if it demands
of its citizens all that piety would require, and that even the gods may
recognize this fact. With respect to the city, Antigone is mistaken. To the
extent that the birth of humanity depends upon the city and its diverse
ways of obscuring our bestial character, Antigone rejects and opposes this
birth. She assumes that the family can exist without the city, and in making this assumption, she errs again. But it is not clear that she errs in her
understanding of the gods. What grounds, apart from our wishes, do we
have for believing that they are as generous and as merciful as Ismene
hopes?
Both Creon and Antigone reveal through their behavior that they are
either unwilling or unable to separate what the city considers dishonorable
from what is low or unworthy in itself. The chorus have the distinction
no clearer, for in the first stasimon, where they glorify the various
achievements of man, they repudiate him who fails to honor the laws of
the land. They do not consider that it is sometimes appropriate to question
the validity of a law, and even to rebel. Although they also refer in the
same phrase to "the justice which he has sworn by the gods to uphold,"
there is no evidence that they see the gods as providing guidelines or limits
for human justice. What sort of city would be so sure that the gods always
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
support what the ruler commands? The leader of the chorus does express
dismay to find that Antigone, a woman and a member of the ruling family,
has violated Creon's decree. But no one defends her.
Antigone's behavior reveals that it is in the family that the commands
of the gods, at least those of the underworld, are learned and remembered.
It seems to be especially the gods below to whom the standard of shame
belongs. Experience reveals that human beings develop a sense of shame
nowhere if not in the family. Although Teiresias does not mention it in
his account to Creon of the gods' response to his decree, it makes sense,
I think, to suppose that it is the family who will ordinarily bury their dead
and perform the rituals required by the gods below. But this institution
does more than provide for the disposal of the city's corpses. The passions that allow for one's attachment to others first arise in the family.
Shame is essential to love.
If the city does not recognize both the shame of its citizens and their
private attachments, it becomes an arbitrary order in which all subjects
are slaves. 1b avoid despotism, the city must recognize limits to its authority.
While it imposes a political hierarchy over the hierarchy of the family, the
city must accept the essential similarity of its citizens. That similarity lies
partly in their recognition of the horror of death and of other things even
more horrible, and partly in the fact that each has loved ones by whom
he will be remembered after his death. It is an inevitable fact that these
loved ones can never include the whole city. Those who compose the city,
whether rulers or ruled, are dignified as well as partial in their private attachments, for where we learn shame we also learn awe. In making citizenship identical with humanity, Creon's city both rejects men's need for
privateness and at the same time destroys their ability to look up. He
substitutes force for love, and fear, a bestial emotion, for everything that
would support the noble character a ruler should wish his subjects to have.
Creon ignores all this when he makes his decree. He recognizes only that
no one freely chooses to die.
If all of Thebes has difficulty recognizing a standard for the laws that
is independent of them, this difficulty may stem from the legendary origin
of the city. The original Thebans presumably arose from the earth, their
mother, which Cadmus sowed with the teeth of the dragon he killed. As
legend has it, Ares was the father of that dragon and Athena advised
Cadmus to plant its teeth in the earth. The gods, then, had a part in the
founding of Thebes. More accurately, that founding was based upon a conflict between the two gods-Ares, whose son Cadmus slayed, and Athena,
whose advice he followed. The earth, too, is a goddess; her children are
the ancestors of both Creon and Antigone. The original Thebans are clearly
�DOUGHERTY
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not godlike- most of those who sprang from the earth slew one another.
They are not even fully human, for the human family was not part of
Thebes at its origin. The decrees of the rulers and the conventions they
enforced alone brought the family into being.
While Antigone's resistance to Creon's decree teaches us something
about the family in general, it cannot be denied that hers is no ordinary
family. It is, in fact, more reminiscent of the origin of Thebes than of the
groups of parents and children of which most cities are composed. If the
earth gave birth to the original Thebans, and if all true Thebans arise from
the earth, the city of Thebes can be nothing but a subhuman and incestuous
family. Creon's neglect of the family and all that it stands for implies that
he sees the city as a family, or at least as an adequate substitute for a family.
Moreover, when the leader of the chorus objects that Creon cannot kill
his son's betrothed, Creon responds by remarking that there are plenty of
other fields for Haemon to plow. He speaks as though mere earth were
an appropriate wife for a true Theban. But the citizens of Thebes are no
more able to live decently in a city in which the earth supplants human
mothers than Antigone is. Her inability to tolerate Creon's decree is a sign
of the plight that all Theban citizens ultimately share. Because she alone
understands the plight of the city, she has no city. The daughter of Oedipus
the king stands alone, outside the walls of Thebes.
If the family as we know it owes it origin everywhere to the support
of cities, we must all share the plight of the Thebans, and it is likely that
in our origins we were nothing but beasts. While many species take good
care of their young, they do not have families as we know them. Creon
is correct, then; the city is essential to human life. But government does
not suffice to make our lives human. The city lies between our base beginnings and the gods we revere, and although it can stifle our understanding
of both, it can neither alter our origins nor arouse our awe. Somehow while
providing for the shared life of the community, those who rule must support the shame and the reverence of the individuals who compose it. If
these passions die, the city can count on nothing but fear of death to keep
citizens loyal. In acknowledging the importance of the family, Sophocles
points out a way for a city to support shame and reverence without allowing
private loves and hates to endanger its security. But the task of a ruler in
balancing public against private concerns nevertheless requires a mysterious
skill. Antigone's story reveals only the problem- and Creon's refusal to
confront it.
Antigone upholds the traditional, timeless laws of the gods against
Creon's impiety. More than that, she insists on her attachment to her family
and refuses to be a part of Creon's Thebes. She describes herself as already
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
at home with the dead (590 ff.). Hades is her proper home because the
family whom she cannot forget resides there. This is why she must secure
burial for Polyneices: without it the shade of her brother cannot enter
Hades but must endlessly wander the earth, like a roving beast. Antigone's
attachment to her family is primarily through memory, and so it does not
tie her to the one living member of her immediate family, Ismene, as much
as it does to the dead. Antigone cannot forget whose womb she came from
and which father begat her. She cannot forget that Ismene and Polyneices,
along with the honored Eteocles and even Oedipus himself, came from
the same womb. She cannot forget any of the horrors that stem from the
root of her father, Oedipus, and that apparently will not cease until she
is dead. Her unrelenting memory contrasts notably with the chorus's call
upon Bacchus at the end of the parodos to help them to celebrate the victory of Thebes and "to enjoy forgetfulness."
Antigone's need to remain tied to her family can be restated in the
following terms: Hades is the home of the dead, and she sees it as a home
in which all members of the family may live together in loving intimacy
through eternity. In death, then, there is an acknowledgment that despite
the distinctions among the generations and the difference between the sexes,
each of us alike is held dear. Reverence for one's dead ancestors allows
one to combine respect for the hierarchy among both dead and living family
members with a sense of our unity with them. The family can thus be an
ordered whole in which no one is a slave. Antigone is mad in thinking that
she can enjoy the loving intimacy of the family by joining the corpses of
the dead members of her family under the earth. The family must, of
course, be alive to share in the love that she craves. Still, there is a core
of truth in her feeling.
An Antigone sees it, to marry Haemon and to live in Creon's city would
be to give up her position as daughter of Oedipus, the dead and tainted
but still honorable king, to become Creon's slave. Under his rule, marriage
and childbearing become for Antigone merely bestial acts. This speculation
provides a way to think about Antigone's otherwise bizarre assertion
(906 ff.) that what she has done for her brother she would not have done
for a husband or a child of her own. If the city did recognize the importance of the family and its reverence for the dead, its members could more
easily bear being ruled by one from among them. Even a woman, who
could not participate in ruling in ancient Greece, could remain confident
of her place in a whole bound by blood alone, a tie the city did not create.
Antigone's incestuous family is both her solace and Creon's nightmare.
When the Antigone opens, Creon is no more ready than Antigone herself
to join with the chorus in a Bacchic victory celebration. In his own way,
�DOUGHERTY
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he is as plagued as Antigone by the memory of the horrors of the past.
His assertion that he alone shall determine who is worthy of honor, and
that he shall do so on the basis of the good of the city and on no other,
is in effect a denial that men and women can be well-born, or that they
are honorable before the city metes out honors. As we have seen, it also
implies a denial that human beings in general are well-born in comparison
with beasts. He undoubtedly feels that this view is borne out by the recent
history of Thebes.
Through his slaying of his father and his incestuous marriage with his
mother, Oedipus confused the generations of his family in a way that can
be permissible only in Hades. In doing so he undermined the subsequent
stability of Thebes, for no city can be indifferent to the disgrace of its ruler,
and the troubles Oedipus began continued in the battle between his sons.
Each treated the city as though it were a private estate that he had the right
to inherit. Creon has gone to the other extreme. In his view, anything private
is a threat to the security of the city. The citizens of Thebes must substitute
honor for the friends of the city and hatred for its enemies for their private
loves and hates. But friendship or fellowship (philia) depends not only upon
the security of the city, as Creon argues in his opening speech (187 ff.),
but also upon the dignity of the individuals who make np the city. Antigone feels that she cannot retain her nobility in marrying Haemon as
long as her marriage depends upon submitting to Creon's decree. Similarly,
any lawgiver who seeks to protect fellowship by legislating what citizens
may love and hate will inevitably fail.
When Creon accuses Antigone of challenging his political authority
and his authority as a man (484 ff.), he is not far wrong. The exchange
between Creon and Antigone once she has been brought forward as a
criminal reflects her sense that his politics destroy phi/ia:
Not to join in hating, but in loving (symphi/ein), was I born
she says. Creon responds:
Go down now and love the dead, if it is necessary [for you] to love. No woman
will rule me while I live. (523-25)
Later Creon says to his son: " ... with loathing and as if she were a foe,
let this girl go to seek marriage in Hades" (654). Antigone's death is described both by herself and by the chorus as well as by Creon as a marriage. In fact, in the opening scene Antigone expresses a similar thought
when she tell Ismene that she will lie with her brother, a friend (or dear
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
one) with a friend (73). How defensible we can consider Antigone's morbid
speech here depends npon whether her sense that Creon's sovereignty would
destroy the humanity of personal attachments is justified. Two dramatic
events in the play powerfully reinforce the sense that it is. One is Ismene's
attempt to implicate herself in Antigone's crime and to die with her. Ismene
reveals her despair when she asks Antigone "What life is dear (phi/os) to
me bereft of you?" (535 ff.). However deep the rupture between the sisters,
Antigone is Ismene's only friend in all Thebes. The other event that supports
Antigone's view of Creon's city is Haemon's suicide in her tomb.
Haemon's suicide seems more difficult to account for than Ismene's
offer to die with Antigone, for he seems to have a promising future in
Thebes. He is the son of the present ruler and is also his likely successor.
Why can't he accept his father's suggestion and find another bride? The
first and most important response to this question is surely that Haemon
loves Antigone, but I believe that the full answer lies as much in Haemon's
exchange with his father, just after he has learned that Antigone must die,
as it does in his love for her. In that exchange, Creon virtually outlaws
his son's passions when he accuses him of treasuring a private and indefensible love for the wrong sort of woman. Haemon claims that his knowledge
of the sympathies of the people and his respect for those sympathies
provoke him to try to reason with Creon. But as long as Haemon wishes
his father to free Antigone, Creon hears nothing but disobedience and
treachery in his words. He repudiates Haemon's advice just as vehemently
as he repudiates Antigone's so-called "crime."
The immediate cause of Haemon's suicide is that he has just found
himself trying to slay his father out of anger for the death of his betrothed.
Haemon cannot allow himself to perform such a heinous act any more
than he can bow to his father's will. This shows that Haemon respects the
claims of kinship even when they conflict with his own desires. The son
is about as unlike his father as he could be.
Just as Creon accuses his son of treachery for the sake of a woman,
so he accuses both the guard and Thiresias, and in fact whoever questions
his absolute authority as ruler of Thebes, of seeking to enrich themselves
at the price of the city's good. But it cannot be the case that any personal
interest that is not identical with upholding the security of the city makes
one a traitor. Not all such concerns are petty and unworthy of respect.
Creon's mistake in thinking so blinds him even to his own motives, for
he is surely as interested in his own glory as he is in the welfare of Thebes.
His error, as we have seen, has its base in a misunderstanding of the horror
of Oedipus's history, and its implications for the city. Creon's fate is no
more enviable than Oedipus's own.
�DOUGHERTY
29
Creon repudiates the passions that reside in and preserve the human
family at his personal peril, and in so doing he exposes Thebes to great
danger as well. This becomes clear in the occasion for his dramatic reversal
towards the end of the play (1092 ff.). When Teiresias tells Creon that to
enforce his decree will mean to sacrifice the life of his own son, he is willing
to bow to the traditions concerning death and burial (Jlll-12), but he is
too late. His personal catastrophe coincides with the danger to the city
about which Teiresias has warned him. Thebes has now witnessed the utter
ruin of a second ruler. Sophocles' Greek audience would probably know
also that the cities whose men died in Polyneices' war against Thebes were
already rearming against her. Creon at least may have learned something,
for he cannot fail to associate his neglect of the laws of the gods with his
loss of all who were dear to him. His suffering is pathetic and terrible.
Like Creon, Antigone too suffers a change of heart in the course of
the drama. In her case it occurs just after she has been condemned.
Although she never repudiates her illegal act, she is suddenly overwhelmed
by the terror of sacrificing the life that she has not yet had an opportunity
to live. Her success in performing a rudimentary version of the rites of
burial for her brother is not enough to console her. Indeed, Antigone snaps
at the chorus when, after she has compared herself to a goddess (824 ff.),
they remind her of her mortality (834 ff.). She accuses them of mocking
her, even though only a few lines earlier (828 ff.) they were clearly admiring
her glory. Their admiration looks like mockery to her because, now that
she has confronted the end of her life, splendor in death looks hollow.
In defending the domain of the gods Antigone exaggerates the claims
of the family and denies a place in her soul to the feelings she could have
had for a husband and children of her own. She is forced to expose the
basis of a tradition in the attempt to uphold it. As she does so, she does
violence to herself. In this sense, Antigone lacks self-knowledge, at least
up to the moment when she is condemned, but her imperfect knowledge
of herself is not a "tragic flaw" that makes her deserving of her fate. No
human being can have perfect self-knowledge and Antigone cannot be
responsible for being limited in a way that characterizes all human beings.
Rather, her situation is an extreme version of a plight we all share: never
fully knowing ourselves, we must continually learn about ourselves through
action and experience. Our need for political structures reflects this truth.
So do both our attachments to our families and the traditions that guide
us in giving due recognition to (God or) the gods.
The change in Antigone's tone when she is aware that she is about to
die provides an approach to understanding the obscure passage in which
the chorus tells her:
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Advancing to the furthest limit of courage [or rashness, to thrasos] up to
the lofty throne of justice (diki) you fell, child, hard. You are paying in full
the penalty of the contest of your father. (852-55)
The passage implies something like the following: Attaining the foundation or throne of justice is not the same as living in the most appropriate
way. If we are to live decently, justice must guide the lives of mortals without
being fully disclosed to us. In forbidding the burial of Polyneices Creon
was the immediate cause of the denial of this possibility to Antigone, but
the real source of the problem lies further back- in Oedipus's incest, and
ultimately in the founding of Thebes, or rather, of the city in general.
Creon has denied Antigone the opportunity to live decently by forcing
her to confront a side of human life that cannot be fully reconciled with
the city. There is no way for a city- any city- to acknowledge fully the
reverence of men and women and the sources of their shame. Rulers are
not inevitably as blind as Creon. Still, Creon's errors merely exaggerate
the errors to which all cities in some way fall prey. Lawgivers must claim
that any act they label criminal is worthy of our disdain, and they must
label as such all acts that seriously endanger the city's security. They must
behave as though nothing that conflicts with the good of the city is worthy
of admiration, and as !bough only what hinders the good of the city merits
disgust.
But without Antigone's challenge to the view of the city, none of us
who are citizens can come to see ourselves as we are. For human beings,
self-knowledge must involve knowledge of the irreconcilable aspects of our
natures. The conflict between our animal nature and the institutions that
attempt to civilize or, if that is too hard, to conceal them, is often hard
to ignore. Creon is preoccupied with this conflict. But we sometimes experience an even deeper conflict between the power to sense what is worthy of reverence and of shame, and the advantages, perhaps the obligation, of submitting to standards that do not acknowledge these. The power
to sense what is above us and what is below is simply human. It consists
in a dim awareness of our inhuman origin as well as of our ability to ascend from that origin, an ability that no city, and probably no science,
can comprehend. Because Antigone's madness is this awareness, I cannot
wish her to have been different, however much I pity her fate. Antigone
conveys to us what she knows through arousing our admiration for her
and, at the same time, our pity and even disgust.
***
�DOUGHERTY
31
Sophocles' Antigone is often said to represent the contest between divine
law and human law, but this is an inadequate account of what is at issue.
After all, Creon claims and probably believes that the gods support his
decree. Nor will it suffice to read the play as a working out of the importance of the family weighed against the concerns of the city. For without
the city there is no family, and without the family, no city. The human
family is not simply natural; it needs the city both to bring it into being
and to support it through law. The city, in its turn, must contain many
families so that their members can associate with one another as similar,
if not perfectly equal, beings, and only then can they willingly submit to
one of themselves. How to combine many individuals who are members
of various families into a single whole is the riddle of the city. Creon seems
not to notice that to rule involves offering one's skill as a solver of the
riddle. He cannot even begin to consider its solution.
Both reverence for the gods and the ties of the family must be important
elements in solving the riddle of how a city, which is a collection of many
separate individuals, can be at the same time a whole. The city must respect
the fact that men and women are more than citizens, that in some sense
they are independent wholes. Rulers are reasonable only superficially when
they insist on the debt all men and women owe to the city. They forget
that the city owes its existence to a human insight that no city can fully
comprehend or sustain. Humans are the beings who sense what lies beneath
the earth and what reigns above them. We are the beings who know that
we are neither the one nor the other, that we are by nature in between.
The smooth sailing of the city sometimes depends upon obscuring this
sense in order to support the authority of rulers. Established procedures
and laws must often take precedence over the insights of individuals into
the will of the gods. But no city can long survive without the shame and
the reverence that lie deeper in human beings than does their political
allegiance. I do not have the solution to the riddle of the city, but I can
say this: The power of the sense of shame and of reverence is a power that
we too would be as vulgar and as foolish as Creon to ignore.
I have entitled this essay "The Nobility of Sophocles' Antigone," and
I do mean to call her noble. Through her daring and wrongheaded acts,
she reminds us all of truths that we cannot afford to ignore. Creon's Thebes
did not acknowledge her greatness in risking her life for a principle that
would make her city more human; we must not follow its example. Even
the perturbed passions of a woman may reveal a deep and weighty truth.
If Sophocles had no more to teach us than this, it would be enough to
justify our calling him wise.
��Hegel's Reading of Antigone
Patricia M. Locke
Hegel thought that Sophocles' Antigone was the "most magnificent and
satisfying work of art of [its] kind."' Repeatedly turning to the character
of Antigone in his writings on art, politics, and religion, Hegel showed
a great admiration for her even apart from the play. His lifelong attraction to Antigone led Hegel into conflicting positions related to her role
as a model for feminine life.
We will consider the two main positions Hegel held, and suggest reasons
for the disparity between them. The first view is discussed primarily in
the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and the Lectures on Aesthetics (given
in 1823, 1826, and 1828-29). This aesthetic, or dramatic, reading of the
play focuses on the collision between Antigone and Creon as embodiments
of opposed ways of life. The play hinges on the exploration of the conflict
between elemental oppositions: female and male, divine and human, and
private versus public duties. While the resolution is, according to Hegel,
external, affirming the value of each side, it further shows that a simple
binary opposition has been overcome. The audience has a more complex
realization that each pole needs the other in order to be what it is. Our
heroine has upheld the values of the hearth and the ancestral gods but
suffers for her neglect of the rights of the polis.
Hegel's second position is also found in the Phenomenology of Spirit
and in the Philosophy of Right (1821). It aims at the underlying ethical
Patricia M. Locke is a Thtor at St. John's College, Annapolis. This paper was presented to the Washington Philosophy Club at Georgetown University in March, 1989.
An earlier version was given as a lecture at St. John's College in September, 1988.
33
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
or political meaning of the play. In the earlier work Hegel analyzes the
dnties that flow from the blood ties between brother and sister. In the
Philosophy of Right Hegel concentrates on the relations between husband
and wife as the essential bond that provides a basis for a political order.
It is my contention that this shift from the brother-sister relation to
that of husband and wife is the source of the disparity between Hegel's
views. While brothers and sisters have different functions as male and
female members of their community, they are similarly unself-conscious
in carrying out their tasks. On the other hand, Hegel assumes that in the
case of husband and wife, the man has an independent sense of self while
the woman does not. This assumption is based on the modern concepts
of state and civil society described in the Philosophy of Right. Hegel allows
a development of free self-consciousness to men, while retaining an ideal
of woman as static and ahistorical. This mistake on Hegel's part makes
it impossible to reconcile his aesthetic and ethical readings of the play.
What would salvage Hegel's insights abont the Antigone? If we argue
that Antigone, while fully feminine in character and goals, achieves a sense
of individuality-however limited- by virtue of her actions as an unmarried woman, not merely as Polyneices' sister, then we can claim her as a
dialectical heroine. Antigone's action begins as service for another, but ends
as service for herself. Since she can change, she can remain the magnificent epitome of womankind Hegel imagined her to be.
This essay will examine the aesthetic meaning of the Antigone in detail
and then consider the problems inherent in Hegel's ethical reading of it.
1: Aesthetic Meaning
In the Aesthetics Hegel defines drama as "the presentation, to our minds
and imagination, of actual human actions and affairs and therefore of
persons expressing their actions in words. 'A dramatization' rests entirely
on collisions of circumstances, passions and characters, and leads therefore
to actions and then to the reactions which in turn necessitate a resolution
of the conflict."' There is a dynamic quality to a good drama when the
inevitable collision between opposed characters is anticipated and endured.
According to Hegel, what makes Antigone a good play in a dramatic
sense is the beauty and power of the clash and its resolution. We will examine this collision as it appears in the plot and characterization.
Collisions depend first upon the plot, which is the primary structure
within which the dramatic movement takes place. Creon's edict forbidding
the burial of Polyneices is the presupposition of the conflict. In itself it
is a seemingly neutral command aimed at those who would challenge order
�LOCKE
35
in the polis. However, we hear about this command from Antigone in the
first scene of the play. Coming from this source, the edict is no longer
neutral: it has taken on an ominous cast. The tragedy is fated from this
beginning, when Antigone neglects the warnings of her sister lsmene and
strives to counter what she sees as a violation of a higher, divine order.
Yet one is aware that it is not so simple. As daughter of Oedipus, Antigone
must say "there's nothing grievous, nothing free from doom, not shameful,
not dishonored, I've not seen" (4-5) 3 • She is both innocent and guilty of
the crime she inherits. Antigone has a responsibility towards the polis as
the remnant of its ruling house, and a conflicting duty to her dead brother.
Creon is in a similar position, as both Antigone's uncle and ruler of Thebes.
Thus the situation is full of potential for collision between them and,
ultimately, among their several duties. How can one remain loyal to the
polis and the family in circumstances like these?
The question is a serious one, but one that Antigone does not need
to ask. She feels the compelling claim of the underworld, which grounds
her life. The gods of departed ancestors, of her father, mother, and brothers,
confirm her desire to act. She has no doubt that her action is consonant
with her determinate character and with the will of the gods. Since Antigone has the power to assert the primacy of the family, she rather than
Ismene is the heroine of this play. Ismene pleads with Antigone to remember
that women should not "force law" or fight with men. Antigone will not
compromise her duty to the underworld, and answers harshly that she will
bury Polyneices despite the consequences. Antigone dares the "crime of
piety," and with the act of pouring earth over the body of her brother the
play is set into motion. Her action has a specific aim and expected consequences that reveal the greatness of Antigone's character. She is able to
face death alone, abandoning the wedding plans and the hopes of young
womanhood.
At the same time, the action advances the plot because it demands a
reaction. Creon's expectation that the traitor is male collides with the calm,
knowing demeanor of the violator standing before him. His imagination
is more narrow than Antigone's, since he can envision only profit as a
motive for disobedience. He is confounded by an action based on love.
Their exchange defines the grounds of their differences: One is male, the
other female; one speaks of crime, the other of holiness.
Creon: You are not ashamed to think alone?
Antigone: No, I am not ashamed. When was it shame
to serve the children of my mother's womb? (510-12)
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
They are clearly opposed, even in their ideas about what it is proper
for a woman to do. Ismene's course is proper yet unsatisifying to us. Communal values and the customs that guide everyday life do not set out an
obvious solution to the conflict between Antigone and Creon. What is
criminal to one of the antagonists is pious to the other. I will argue that
the resolution of this dramatic tension lies in Antigone's attempt to find
a connection between these opposing terms. She thinks independently on
behalf of her family. Antigone acts unwomanly and illegally, out of a
woman's loyalty towards her familial gods. In the end her action carries
the double weight of piety and treason.
In his Aesthetics Hegel stresses the importance of action in tragic drama
because it is "with action [that] a man steps actively into concrete reality
where forthwith the most general matters are condensed and confined in
a particular phenomenon."' The step into concrete reality confirms Antigone as one who wills to be who she is. At the same time, Antigone enables
the divine to manifest itself through her. The gods of the underworld are
given concreteness by her willingness to obey them without questioning
the source of the divine laws. Consequently, the most general spiritual
substance appears within a particular visible event. We do not hear soliloquies of doubt, as in Hamlet, for Antigone's action comes naturally to
her. Hegel thinks that the spiritual element in Antigone's act "is perfectly
married and reconciled with the equally justified external aspect, i.e., with
what is seen on stage."5
This tragedy is compelling precisely because what is seen on stage are
self-reliant characters acting out of a particular "pathos" that gives them
each a driving essential power. Each character feels his or her ethical stance
to be internally justified and fully binding. Their views are expressed in
"solid and cultivated objective language," rather than elaborate rhetoric,
for their eloquence is in line with their direct actions. 6 Only that which
is essential to the true character of Antigone is stated. We know very little
about her beyond her terrible lineage. Antigone defines herself at the outset:
"For me, the doer, death is best" (72).
This statement reverberates throughout the whole play, as Antigone
proves herself to be a doer and faces the horror of live burial as her punishment. Creon too experiences the devastating consequences of his actions,
as his niece, his son, and his wife die in rapid succession. These deaths
are dramatically necessary to restore the rights of the gods. Death here
is a negation, or canceling, of the negation that set the play into motion,
the burial of Polyneices.
The opposition of Creon and Antigone is regarded against the
background of the chorus. The choral speeches present the community's
�LOCKE
37
views, alternately commenting on the characters' decisions and placing those
decisions in their proper reference to the gods. Hegel thinks that the chorus,
although it is powerless and afraid of the contradictory gods, is important
as a surrounding universal context for the action. The chorus believes that
Fate destroys people despite their merit, and therefore must conclude that
"any greatness in human life brings doom" (613). Although sympathetic
towards Antigone, the chorus does not offer to help her. The "undercover
talk" in the polis remains undercover because the chorus lacks "the power
of the negative," as Hegel remarks in the Phenomenology. 7 This power
causes changes to occur by negating that which is. Antigone participates
in the movement of negativity when she challenges Creon's law.
In the Phenomenology, Hegel states that the chorus
is conscious only of a paralysing terror of this movement, of equally helpless
pity, and as the end of it all, the empty repose of submission to Necessity,
whose work is understood neither as the necessary deed of the character,
nor as the action of [Spirit] within itself. 8
There are three pertinent interpretations of this dialectical movement.
The chorus sees the hand of Fate, which strikes down even the bravest
heroine. Antigone interprets that fate as her own work, and is therefore
willing to sustain the negative, to hold with the moral rightness of her deed
throughout the play. The third interpretation, held by Hegel, is that we
are witnessing the activity of Spirit.
Spirit, which is difficult to define since it is continually evolving in the
history of consciousness, is here the implicit divinity acting through the
characters. Spirit appears explicitly as the frame within which their actions
have meaning. This frame is language. Thus Spirit is simultaneously in
the foreground and the background of the tragedy.
Spirit joins the three interpretations together. What happens in the play
is equally the work of Fate, of Antigone's will, and of the appearance of
Spirit's power. In this reflective activity Spirit is operating on a higher level
than is immediately evident in the play. The modern dialectical philosopher
is conscious of the interdependence of fate and individual will and of the
universality of their conflict in the life of a person or the life of the human
species. Only with this higher consciousness of Spirit present in the
philosopher can external and internal motivating forces be woven so tightly
together.
Spirit shows itself in a rather limited fashion in the poetic language
of the play, in the chorus as well as the main characters. The choral view
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
is bound to the past. It sees the one-sidedness of Antigone's position, for
its admiration is mixed with criticism of her neglect of Zeus's authority.
Creon too comes in for support and criticism by the chorus. First, he
is praised for upholding law in the daylight world of Zeus, but the fearful
chorus murmurs against him when they consider the dark fate of Oedipus's
house. Creon is as inflexible as Antigone. He will not listen to his son
Haemon, nor consider the feeling of the community when he banishes Antigone to her unusual bridal chamber. He claims that this live burial will
protect him from direct responsibility for Antigone's death, but we know
that such a technical reading of the law will not satisfy the underworld.
The one-sided action of Antigone cannot exist harmoniously with the
equally one-side reaction of Creon. The play turns on our recognition that
these two powers are incomplete without each other. To achieve equilibrium,
Antigone and Creon are destroyed by their complements, which are "intrinsic to their own actual being."' The resolution of the opposition between man and woman is echoed in the union of upper and lower divinities.
Thus the "powers animating action which struggled to destroy each other"
are reconciled at last.
Hegel claims in the Aesthetics that
only with such a conclusion can the necessity of what happens to the
individuals appear as absolute rationality, and only then can our hearts be
morally at peace: shattered by the fate of the heroes but reconciled
fundamentally. 10
There are two components to this reconciliation. First, we must accept
the fate of the heroes as rational, and we must feel "morally at peace."
We come to understand Antigone's death only if we see her initial position as blind towards the claims of public life. Second, we feel a certain
peace when we appreciate Antigone's bravery. She withstood great obstacles
and has given us a sense of the justice of her cause.
Aristotle's notion of catharsis in the Poetics is helpful here. This term
has been the focus of much criticism by commentators on Aristotle. For
the purposes of this discussion, let us adopt a Hegelian understanding of
its meaning. Catharsis is the pleasurable release of tension following pity
and fear. "Pity," Aristotle explains, "concerns the undeserved, while fear
concerns the similar." 11 The play points in two directions, to the past and
to the future. When it points to the past, Antigone's demise is undeserved
and therefore pitiable. She is struck down by fate while demonstrating her
noble character. She is consistent in her loyalty to the underworld, and
therefore suffers rather than learns.
�39
LOCKE
Ultimately, we do not pity her, as we might the helpless Ismene. The
pity for Antigone is canceled when we see her take responsibility for acting. Since she courageously wills her fate, we come to realize that her death
is best. The same character that brought her to an undeserved punishment
can now be seen as blameworthy. From the opening scene of the play, Antigone displays the "hot mind over chilly things" that marks her as the
daughter of Oedipus. Our fear that she will act like her father, listening
to no one as she draws her fate upon her head, heightens the tension of
the conflict with Creon. This fear is relieved when her death extinguishes
the possibility of future repetitions of the shameful acts of Oedipus's house.
Hegel accepts Aristotle's explanation of pity and fear, yet stresses that
in order to be most compelling, the object evoking these emotions ought
to be the power of Spirit. 12 By this Hegel means that our feelings ought
not to be directed only to finite, limited objects, such as the pity one of
Jane Austen's characters might feel for a young woman who has no dancing partners. This kind of sympathy degrades the sufferer to a helpless
victim of sad circumstances. We feel a deeper kind of pity for unwed
Antigone-a pity that recognizes the profound source of her pain.
At the same time, we must acknowledge the rights of the polis, which
also displays the divine substance. The catharsis that alleviates pity and
fear allows this fact to stand forth: The same substance that showed itself
in Antigone's one-sided action appears in harmony with itself when she
is struck down. In Hegel's view, tragedy is at bottom the conflict and resolu'tion of partial expressions of Spirit. Spirit's power is exercised both through
and upon the heroine of this play.
By focusing on the collision between Creon and Antigone and the difficult necessity of its resolution, Hegel locates the dramatic strength of
the play. For Hegel, the question "What makes this a good drama?" must
be answered in terms of dialectical movement through a fearful opposition.
Plot and characters work together to achieve finally a sense of vitality and
completeness.
II: Ethical Meaning
My objections arise when we turn to the ethical dimension of the Antigone. Hegel's interpretation in the Phenomenology is based on the
primacy of the brother-sister relationship, in which the sister's reality is
mediated by her brother. In the Philosophy of Right the stress is laid upon
the husband-wife relationship. This difference reveals Hegel's assumption
that women lack self-consciousness, remaining natural and unchanged even
when they freely enter the agreement of marriage. If one claims that modern
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
marriage originates in "the free consent of the persons . . . to make
themselves one person, to renounce their natural and individual personality
to this unity," then one must accept that a woman attains her "substantive
self-consciousness" when she goes beyond her former unreflective way of
being. 13 Hegel should not ignore the meaning of her choice when he
describes woman's role in the procreative family. In the moment of
accepting the marriage proposal, woman has an active role in her destiny,
which is not mediated by either her birth family or her fiance.
Hegel fails to do justice to the play when he applies modern social structures, such as marriage arrangements, to it. We will review the argument
in the Phenomenology first and then consider the problem in light of the
Philosophy of Right.
A. Antigone in the Phenomenology of Spirit
Hegel's discussion of Antigone in the Phenomenology comes under
the heading "The True Spirit: The Ethical Order." According to Hegel the
play is an example of the way true Spirit makes its appearance after a series
of inadequate attempts. Now Spirit is present in an unmediated form as
the ethos of a people. Spirit, or mind, is the people. Spirit is conscious,
that is, able to make distinctions, but not yet self-conscious. Thus it is
manifest in custom and habit rather than in a rational decision-making
process like the application of Kant's categorical imperative.
At this stage, Spirit is split into content and consciousness. The content is the folk, the entire community. Actual consciousness is found in
individual citizens. The union of their subjective wills with the objective
order ushers in the specifically ethical life of Spirit. Ethical Spirit is "the
good become alive," embodied in human action. 14 Natural activities give
way to a higher second nature, developed through habitual exercise of the
duties appropriate to one's station in the community. This results in a split
in the content, or substance. Ethical Spirit polarizes into two realms. The
first realm is the world of women, a community that is dedicated to the
needs of particular family members, living and dead. The second is the
world of men, which is located in the polis, a community that raises male
consciousness to universal concerns such as laws. The heart of Sophocles'
play is the conflict between male and female worlds. This conflict is inevitable, since people really belong to both spheres and cannot live without
one another.
The family is a distinctly feminine world, for it is women who bear
and educate children, care for blind fathers like Oedipus, and carry out
the final rites for relatives who have died. The ethical substance is here
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41
at its most immediate, close to nature and to the world beyond this life.
Its gods are those of the underworld and of the hearth, and its law gives
primacy to blood relatives. Hegel describes family life as harmonious
because the members together constitute an individual family. They are
not differentiated, nor do they display a struggle for recognition that might
lead to self-consciousness. One can think of parents, children, uncles, and
grandparents as internal organs of the larger familial organism. "Woman"
especially is defined as being-for-another, because her life is dedicated to
the health and perpetuation of this organism. Although she is dependent
by nature, woman turns the givenness of her sex into an ethical ground.
Her being as part of a family does not require self-conscious action in order
to obey the divine law. Woman endows natural activities with a spiritual significance by being a vehicle for mediation. Working through her, "the gods'
unwritten and unfailing laws ... always live, and no one knows their origin
in time" (455, 457). Nature's sensuous immediacy is canceled in this process.
All living things are supposed to grow naturally, but a male child is
trained for a non-natural end. His mother educates him for a mediated
future as a citizen of the city. By becoming a citizen, her son outgrows
her. 15 His new life requires a negation of the immediacy of home life. With
this, the mother has fulfilled her task. The family whole is broken open
because the son makes the transition to the second realm, the world of men.
The young man who enters adult life finds his actual being as an individual. His self-sufficiency in comparison with his family remains
unreflective and is limited by his participation in the city. His needs and
ideas are shared by other citizens, and find their fulfillment in the law.
Law alters the relation to natural desires by introducing a universal element.
The family, for instance, has been shown to be grounded in consanguinity
and structured in an organic way. The family under law, as signified by
marriage rites, is based on a contract between two people of different blood
who henceforth act as if they are of the same blood. Thus the city substitutes conventional bonds between people for the irrational bonds of
nature. Ethical Spirit is conscious of itself and actual in the offspring of
the marriage relationship.
Between them, man and woman share the substance of the ethical Spirit.
This substance shows itself as a natural sexual difference which they raise
to a universal status by accepting their duties established by convention.
Man is the guardian of the state and respects human laws; woman is the
guardian of the home and respects the laws of subterranean divinities. The
movement of man from private to public life is a development towards selfconscious Spirit, as Hegel outlines the process in the Phenomenology. Hegel
concludes:
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
42
Neither of the two is by itself absolutely valid; human law proceeds in its
living process from the divine, the law valid on earth from that of the nether
world, the conscious from the unconscious, mediation from immediacy-
and equally returns whence it came. 16
A dynamic equilibrium is maintained between these complementary
worlds. However, there remains a final task for woman to do. This is to
prepare for the return of man to the immediate realm of nature upon his
death. Although the major portion of his life may be spent in the public
sphere, at its end he comes home. Woman as mother, wife, or sister
transforms the natural process of decay into a spiritual one. This change
occurs as she gives death a religious meaning. Antigone negates the image
of "a rich sweet sight for the hungry birds beholding," as she pours earth
over the body and says the ritual prayers (29-30). The dead person does
not return to the particular phase of his childhood. Rather, his rest as a
completed being-for-itself is marked by simple universality. Her brother
has achieved a stable being; Polyneices has become an ancestor. The family
is preserved after all, in the memory of those who respect their forefathers.
Woman's primary ethical action, preservation of the family, therefore concerns the dead rather than the living.
It is necessary for Antigone to bury Polyneices both to secure the family
organism and to confirm her identity as his sister. Although woman is
unself-conscious in her being-for-her-family, as sister she has an ethical
substance through her brother. (Hegel entirely neglects the sister-to-sister
relationship between Antigone and Ismene.)
A brother is a bridge to the outside world because he can act as a citizen
as well as a family member. Hegel claims that, unlike other relations between men and women, there is little or no sexual attraction between
brothers and sisters. They are "free individualities in regard to each other.""
Yet in regard to the public world, the sister is not a free individuality. Her
consciousness has not been raised, so her life is essentially tied to her
brother's existence.
Hegel's position in the Phenomenology, somewhat modified in the
Philosophy of Right, stresses that the natural bond of consanguinity has
a higher value to woman than the complementary tie between husband
and wife. This value transcends its physical origin because it is attached
to an awareness of individual selfhood. Hegel states in the Phenomenology:
Consequently, the feminine, in the form of the sister, has the highest intuitive
awareness of what is ethical. She does not attain to consciousness of it, or
to the objective existence of it, because the law of the Family is an implicit,
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43
inner essence which is not exposed to the daylight of consciousness, but remains an inner feeling and the divine element that is exempt from an existence in the real world. 1s
These divinities seem irrational by the standards of the daylight world,
particularly because their demands cannot be articulated in the common
language of the polis. (One can see this most clearly in the treatment of
the Furies in the Oresteia.)
Antigone, then, has two sources of self-identity. She can draw on the
deep strength of familial gods, who honor blood and vengeance. She can
call on these divinities without recourse to an abstract confession of faith,
because she does not feel a distance from them that would require a conscious effort to overcome separation. Antigone can act intuitively, with
the power of the furies flowing through her hands.
Antigone draws on a second source of strength as well. Polyneices is
her link to the real world's rational, civilizing effects. Since the Olympian
deities, particularly Zeus, hold sway over the public realm, Antigone must
come to an awareness of their domination through Polyneices.
Perhaps Hegel's interpretation of the sources of Antigone's sense of
self can clarify her strange speech as she is led to her death. She begins:
0 tomb, 0 marriage-chamber, hollowed out
house that will watch forever, where I go.
Th my own people, who are mostly there;
Persephone has taken them to her. (891-94)
Antigone likens the tomb to the marriage chamber in order to stress
that her loyalty remains with her birth family. She dies unwed, because,
as she laments (referring to Polyneices), "In your death you destroy my
life" (871). She has no life left to give to Haemon or to future children.
Since marriage is within the province of the state, in this speech Antigone
asserts that she would not violate its rights if a husband or child died under
similar conditions. Antigone knows the limits and source of her power,
and remains within those limits.
Or does she? Is her choice really right? One must ask these questions
because of the way in which Antigone carried out her duty. At first, no
one knew who buried Polyneices. "The doer left no sign" but the dust covering the body was apparently sufficient to turn the curse (250). Antigone
appeared again in broad daylight, "with the sharp and bitter cry of a bitter bird," to renew the earthen covering. This time she was captured, calmly
admitted her transgression, and came face to face with Creon.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Why did she perform this action twice? Hegel would not claim that
Antigone was trying to be a martyr, or that she was deliberately trying
to undermine the stability of the polis. Rather, Antigone needed to make
her deed known in order to establish that it was not due to fate or nature
or any other external cause. She chose to accept responsibility for the act
in order to vindicate her brother and to bring him to the gates of the underworld in his universal aspect. In Hegelian terms, she showed the spiritual
meaning in the seemingly uncontrollable event of death, but she could do
this only by transgressing the boundaries of her feminine self. She took
on some of the rebellious nature of Polyneices to act for him and, implicitly,
to act for herself as well. It is my view that by doing this Antigone
demonstrated an expanded definition of womanhood.
Antigone has come to a sense of her own integrity, her being-for-self,
as she steps into the public sphere. Since the significant members of her
family are dead, Antigone is her family. Suddenly she appears as an individual. No longer a passive vehicle of the divine, she mediates the upper
world for her family. Antigone is fully conscious that her public act is both
criminal and holy. Although Hegel does not think that women exert dialectical power in the public realm, in the Aesthetics he praises Antigone as
a heroine greater than Oedipus in her consciousness of the double meaning
of her deed. Hegel is unaware of the conflict between his views.
When Antigone moves away from the natural feminine role to engage
in a forceful debate with Creon, he is visibly disturbed by what he sees
as a subversion of his manhood as well as of the state. "I am no man and
she the man instead" (484). Antigone asserts a new power in the political
world by bringing the vocabulary of familial love to bear on legal relationships. This criterion for judging the worth of a law is not appropriate
generally. However, at this moment it reveals Creon's arrogation of power
to himself. He mistook law for justice and the polis for his possession.
Antigone's challenge opens up the seriousness of this mistake. Human
justice, like self-consciousness, is the result of intellectual and political
effort. The struggle to make the concept of justice actual is accomplished
in a specific historical context.
In the play, Creon acts as if the universal powers at work must bow
to his personal concerns. Further, he ignores the crucial foundation of the
polis in the family by slighting proper burial rites for Polyneices and his
sister. Thus neither Zeus nor the underworld deities receive their due.
Antigone's full consciousness of her deed, and her willingness to appear in public to claim her guilt, is likewise undermining the balance of
universal ethical powers. Ethically as well as dramatically, the play requires
the destruction of Antigone and Creon.
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Hegel's position in the Phenomenology is that the duality of male and
female, of polis and family, is universal and unchanging. There is neither
a dialectical sublation of one into the other, nor a higher synthesis. Thus
the resolution of the conflict restores the previous balance of powers.
Hegel does not see Antigone as a character who is both female and
male, political on behalf of her family and herself. There is an unnecessary
rigidity in his interpretation, since it is logically feasible that dialectical
movement can take place within as well as between the distinct roles of
the sexes. Hegel's limited interpretation is further complicated in the
Philosophy of Right.
B. Antigone in the Philosophy of Right
Hegel discusses Antigone in a section titled "Ethical Life," which is
divided into three parts: the Family, Civil Society, and the State. The family,
of course, is Antigone's domain, but it also must be viewed as the immediate
moment in a dialectical movement culminating in the State. It is this movement which puts the life into "Ethical Life." However, actual freedom exists only as an individual's exercise of duty within the boundaries of one
or the other of these communities.
The family under consideration in the Philosophy of Right is both
natural and artificial. It is the natural union of the sexes for the immediate
goal of perpetuation of the species. This is an external tie, which is made
internal through the artificiality of the wedding rite. In the marriage
ceremony, natural sexual differences are overcome by a self-conscious
"union on the level of mind." 19 Marriage is thus an immediate ethical relationship. Since it is established as a universal bond through their promise,
the sensuous aspect (that is, the changeable side of the relationship) is
subordinated to the unchanging ethical substance. Further, the spouses'
natural attachment to their original families is overcome by the trans formation inherent in ''two become one flesh." Thus it is important, in Hegel's
argument, that the man and woman have no close blood relation. The
priority given to natural consanguinity gives way to "artificial" consan-
guinity, even, I would argue, for a woman. In the acceptance of the marriage contract, a woman participates in a concious decision about ethical
matters.
The substance of the new family is love, a "felt unity" of an ethical
kind. This unity is felt rather than thought, so it remains on an immediate
level. This unity is ethical, that is, the "good become alive," because it is
founded on a rational ground. The implicit rational content of the marriage becomes explicit in property and, most importantly, in offspring.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Children have the potential to be free, and through education can fulfill
that potential. They then take their place in the succession of generations,
inheriting property and establishing their own procreative families.
The transition to civil society is caused by the multiplication of families.
The substantial unity of the birth family is lost in this new moment of
particularity. Civil society exhibits the splitting apart of needs and rights.
Private needs concerning private property bring people into conflict. The
universal principle appears only as the necessity that drives men to form
social ties in order to satisfy private economic interests. The interdependence
of one with all is still an abstract universality, for within the association
the universal and the particular are related but not synthesized. Members
have great differences of property and therefore of freedom.
Finally, the state draws together the felt unity of the family and the
economic differentiation of civil society. The state Hegel means is a constitutional monarchy, where the constitution mediates between the particular interests of citizens and the monarch. The conscious unity of various
classes under law signifies an expansion of freedom. This freedom is no
longer abstract, since it is exercised in political rather than simply economic
actions. Citizens find their true selves in political life.
A nation-state of this kind is significantly different from the polis, or
city-state, which is the setting of the Antigone. Hegel thought that the polis
exhibited a harmony of opposite powers, which remained separate from
each other and unaware of their separation.
According to Hegel, the polis is for us a "thing of the past," not to
be desired as a utopian vision for our future. The externality of the bond
between male and female, human law and divine law, is now apparent.
Ethical life of Spirit no longer fits within these bounds, since Spirit has
become more self-conscious in the Christian era. The polis continues to
have meaning for us as an image of political origin in a beautiful ethical
life. That beauty arises from the articulated harmony of Greek art, religion,
and politics. It is this interpenetration of the beautiful and the true that
gives rise to the tragic drama.
And so we return to the Antigone, a play that somehow speaks to us,
even though we find ourselves in a very different political world. In Hegel's
aesthetic interpretation, the character of Antigone remains the same, still
loyal to the gods of the underworld. He has no difficulty in holding Antigone up as a model for womankind to emulate, even though a harmonious
and beautiful existence within modern religious or political life is impossible. His interpretation in the Phenomenology and the Aesthetics respects
the timelessness of Antigone's plight, but this comes into conflict with the
�LOCKE
47
time-bound constraints of the Philosophy of Right. Hegel shows no sign
that he is using the play in different ways in his aesthetic and ethical interpretations. How are we to make sense out of woman as a complement to
man, when man has changed?
The problem can be summarized as follows. Woman, who is associated
with nature, in both the physical and the unreflective senses, is therefore
ahistorical. Man is, according to the Philosophy of Right, a historical being,
associated with self-conscious Spirit through his political activity. In the
play, Hegel argues, we see the equilibrium between the two disturbed, in
a collision that shows the rightfulness of both sides and a catastrophe that
restores justice. The two sexes remain distinct powers, however, and are
unaware of the distance beween them in this restored harmony.
The goal of Spirit is to become what it immediately is: to achieve
harmony as a result of its own self-conscious activity. Its achievement,
rather than a linear progression, can be seen as the closing of circle. On
the level of man and woman the circle is joined only if there is a movement by each out of himself or herself into the other's world. That implies
a negation of the righteousness of his or her position and a finding of
himself or herself in the other. If this is to be a mutual discovery and
recognition, I argue, both woman and man must be able to develop in
self-consciousness.
The shift in focus from the birth family in the Phenomenology to the
procreative family in the Philosophy of Right shows that the selfconsciousness of man has differentiated itself more completely, while the
consciousness of woman has not. Instead of two worlds, private and public,
there are now three: private, social, and political. The social world of
economic life, as well as the political world, are restricted to man. Freedom
and self-consciousness are generated in these spheres, which continue to
rely on the unconscious support of the feminine realm.
It is clear that there cannot be a public realm without a private foundation, but it is questionable whether a class of people-women-must
be limited to the private sphere. The case of slaves is significantly different
from the case of women, so the extension of freedom to slaves is not a
simple analogy for a solution to this problem.
What is the difference? Slaves can be admitted to be men endowed with
rights, when a political community has a sufficiently aware selfconsciousness. Women, however, can never be admitted to be men, even
if they are considered equal persons in the public sphere. According to
Hegel, this is because they are of a different nature. The fundamental
natures of men and women are complementary, Hegel assumes, and distinct
even when fully developed. Men are self-conscious while women are simply
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
conscious. Thus Spirit seems far from its goal of achieving selfconsciousness in the relations between modern men and women.
We who observe the process of self-conscious Spirit struggling to know
itself, we who are in the know as philosophers, must ask whether Hegel
is telling us everything about Antigone. Can she remain still, a medium
for change without changing? Can she be outside the dialectical process?
Has she become, for us, a thing of the past not to be desired?
Our answer to these questions has to be no. When we recall the dynamic
image of Antigone offered in Hegel's aesthetic interpretation of the play,
we notice that she acted quite naturally, that is unreflectively, in carrying
out her duty. Antigone was portrayed as a doer who willed her fate.
Each of her actions was dialectical: each began as a negation and ended
with positive consequences. In remaining unwed, Antigone denied the
possibility of a procreative family of her own. This was in a simple way
a u~eminine action, for it was anti-generation and, ultimately, a withdrawal
of support for the state. Yet at the same time her virginity was a service
to the state, for she prevented Oedipus's fated blood from continuing to
haunt Thebes. Since her loyalty remained with her original family, which
had vanished into the underworld, Antigone found herself acting positively
as an individual in a public arena.
Antigone was a political being in spite of herself. Her last words were
addressed to the leaders of Thebes. There is a shift from the properly
feminine lament for Antigone's lost marriage to the strong declaration:
Look, leaders of Thebes,
I am the last of your royal line.
Look what I suffer, at whose command,
because I respected the right. (940-44)
While respecting the familial gods' "right," Antigone became quite clear
about her political position, as the last voice of the royal house. This position gives her the authority to directly address the elders as witnesses and,
ultimately, as responsible parties in her death.
Hegel neglected this political speech, which is crucial for an understanding of her character. I think that the speech shows that woman is political,
even when her loyalties seem to undermine the stability of the state. I do
not claim that her feminine world is canceled by her appearance in public
life or taken up by this higher realm. I do claim that feminine nature encompasses more than Hegel allows.
Only when we consider Antigone as a dialectical heroine, who changes
as she changes the world, can we continue to hold her as a model for
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49
womankind. Hegel neglects the historical character of human being when
he limits woman to a passive role as the mirror of a specific culture, as
if that were her nature. This oversight results in the contradictions between
his analysis in the Phenomenology and in the Philosophy of Right, which
includes cultural developments of the Christan era external to the original
Greek context.
In conclusion, I think that the polarities between female and male,
divine and human law, home and city, are eternal ones. The possibilities
for collision- and thus for drama- increase as the opposing terms deepen
and subtly shift in meaning. To allow woman to advance in selfconsciousness perpetuates the dynamic tension between the sexes and permits mutual recognition. Unfortunately, it magnifies the tension between
the demands of private and public life.
Hegel's view of woman is unnecessarily limited by defining her only
in relation to men. Antigone breaks through this limited view when she
acts on her own, without her brother or her fiance by her side. She brings
hidden divinities to bear on human affairs, and causes the spectator to
reflect on Hegel's assertion that the true is the whole. Like Antigone, Hegel
is both guilty and innocent of the past he inherits. Human being embraces
them both. In the end, the two of them might echo Teiresias's words:
We two have come one road,
two of us looking through one pair of eyes.
This is the way of walking for the blind. (988-90)
Notes
I. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics, Lectures on Fine Arts, 2 vols., trans. T.
M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 1218.
2. Ibid., p. 1159.
3. Sophocles, Antigone, in Greek Tragedies, vol. 1., trans. Elizabeth
Wyckoff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).
4. Aesthetics, p. 1166.
5. Ibid., p. 1187.
6. Ibid., p. 1214.
7. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1977), para. 734.
8. Ibid.
9. Aesthetics, p. 1215.
10. Ibid.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
II. Aristotle, Aristotle's Poetics, translation and analysis, Kenneth A.
Thlford (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1967), 1453a6.
12. Aesthetics, pp. 1197-98.
13. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1967), para. 162.
14. Ibid., para. 142.
15. Phenomenology, para. 451.
16. Ibid., para. 460.
17. Ibid., para. 457.
18. Ibid.
19. Philosophy of Right, para. 161.
�Idealism, Ancient and Modern:
Sophocles' Antigone
and Schiller's Don Carlos
Gisela N. Berns
Almost at the end of Schiller's Don Carlos, the blind, menacing figure
of the Grand Inquisitor, led by two Dominicans, appears before King
Philipp, the ruler of Spain (V, 10). From the outset, the appearance of the
old priest, which is in answer to the death of Marquis Posa, is foreshadowed
in the ominous presence of Domingo, the King's confessor. An idealistic
fighter for the liberation of mankind from tyrannical rule, Posa had been
murdered for betraying the King's trust. Accused by the Grand Inquisitor
for circumventing the authority of the church, Philipp confesses his
vulnerability to the striking radiance of Posa's character. In his emotional
devastation, the King consents to the sacrifice of Carlos, his only son and
Posa's friend, to the Inquisition.
Almost at the end of Sophocles' Antigone, the blind figure of Thiresias,
led by a young boy, appears before Creon, the ruler of Thebes (lines
988-1090). After the fatal battle between the sons of Oedipus, Creon had
issued an order for burying Eteocles, the defender, but not Polyneices, the
invader of the city. Antigone's attempt to bury her brother had been
punished with her own live burial in a cave outside Thebes. Ominous signs
have stirred Thiresias from his sacrifices to come to warn Creon and urge
him to restore the dead to the dead, and the living to the living.
With reference to his portrayal of the Inquisition in Don Carlos, Schiller
Gisela N. Berns is a Thtor at St. John's College, Annapolis.
51
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
promises to "revenge prostituted mankind" by "striking to the soul of a
kind of man the dagger of tragedy, so far, had only grazed." 1 Compared
to Teiresias, the priest of a natural religion that acknowledges all powers
of the universe as gods, the Grand Inquisitor, in the service of the universal
power of the biblical God, rises to monstrous heights. Devoid of all natural
human feelings, 2 he is the more terrible as he uses the Christian doctrine
of love, consummated in the sacrifice of God's only son on the cross, to
perpetrate death and destruction. The defilement of sacrifices by birds feeding on an unburied corpse makes Teiresias urge Creon to restore Polyneices
to the dead and Antigone to the living. The defilement of the religious and
political atmosphere by a man's claim to freedom of thought makes the
Grand Inquisitor request the life of Carlos in exchange for the death of
Posa, which had been a murder rather than a sacrifice in the name of the
greater glory of the church.' With the same dramatic development, the two
scenes open up very different tragic perspectives: Where the ruin of Creon's
house, though foreshadowed in his increasing blasphemy against Zeus,
comes as a blow of fate, Philipp himself, in monstrous analogy to the Christian God, wills his only son into the murderous hands of the Inquisition.'
The link between Schiller's Don Carlos and Sophocles' Antigone is not
so far-fetched as it might seem. Schiller's translation of scenes from
Euripides' Phoenician Women, a play about the events that occurred before
those portrayed in Sophocles' Antigone, coincides with his Briefe iiber Don
Carlos, written soon after the completion of his dramatic poem.
However tenuous the chronological link between Schiller's reading Antigone and writing Don Carlos might be, what counts is the thematic link.
While Antigone and Marquis Posa resemble each other in their idealistic
fight for principles of a higher order than the ruling tenets of the day, they
are, at the same time, striking examples of the difference between ancient
and modern idealism. Whether systematic, as in his later plays, or sporadic,
as in the earlier ones, Schiller's integration of Greek archetypes into his
own modern historical drama only accentuates the modernity of his work.'
The purpose of this essay, therefore, is not so much to show Sophocles'
influence on Schiller as to explore paradigmatic forms of idealism within
the given contexts of Greek tragedy and modern historical drama.'
Understanding himself as a representative of all mankind, Marquis
Posa, early in the play, tries to inspire his friend Carlos to help in the liberation of Flanders from the tyrannical rule of Spain (I, 2). Feeling responsible
for her family, Antigone, in the opening scene, tries to persuade her sister
Ismene to help her bury their brother Polyneices (1-99). When their
idealistic expectations miscarry, both Posa and Antigone reveal themselves
as heartless fanatics. In the name of an abstract ideal that blinds him to
�BERNS
53
the needs of his friend, Posa exploits Carlos's love for the Queen in order
to further his political goals. For the sake of the dead brother outside the
city walls, Antigone poisons her sisterly love for Ismene with the bitter
shafts of hate.
Though they resemble each other in their expression of idealism, Posa
is concerned about an idea, Antigone about a body. Where the modern
idealist, with a cosmopolitan outlook, transcends all natural and historical
limits, the ancient idealist, with close ties to nature and mythical tradition,
focuses on the family and its conflict with the political order of the city.
As a move in his political game, Posa arranges for a meeting between
Carlos and the Queen in the royal garden (I, 5). Coming upon the queen,
left by Carlos just in time, the King, like the biblical God after the fall
of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, calls her to account for the
absence of her court (I, 6). Appealing to a higher and more enduring law
than Spanish court rules, the Queen tries to defend her womanly virtue.
With a distinction between good and evil that is merely political, Creon
claims the support of Zeus for leaving the body of Polyneices unburied
(162-222). Antigone, after she has been arrested at the burial of her brother
and brought before Creon, appeals to the eternal, unwritten laws of the
gods as safeguards for her action (223-331, 276-581). Like the Queen, later
in Don Carlos (IV, 9, 3759-70), she protests against having to hate where
her heart tells her to love (523).
Schiller's poetic practice, in anticipation of his advice to the modern
artist in Uber die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen, "connects what
nature separated, and separates what nature connected."' In addition to
explicating a character like Antigone in such correlative characters as Posa
and the Queen, Schiller complicates the traces from Greek tragedy with
traces from the biblical tradition. By highlighting the historical world of
Don Carlos with the biblical intimations of man's past perfection in the
Garden of Eden, Schiller contrasts the Greek notion of nature with the
biblical notion of history and thus exhibits the inherently problematic
understanding of man in modern times.
With the biblical intimations of man's future perfection in a world to
come, Posa's vision of the progress of mankind through history dominates
his great audience scene with the King (III, 10). An implicit condemnation
of the King's despotic rule, Marquis Posa's idealistic picture of an age in
which the natural nobility of man will triumph in the rule of reason,
manifesting itself in political autonomy, at the same time affects and disaffects the King. Posa's confession of his love for humanity echoes the
titanic claims of Prometheus. Despite this anticipation of tragedy, it has
a hollow ring against his later inhuman betrayal of the King's trust.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Like Posa in Don Carlos (III, 10), the Chorus in Antigone (332-75)
paints a lofty picture of human nature. With its celebration of man as one
of the awesome things in the universe, the second choral ode describes man's
mastery over nature and his attempt at mastering his own nature within
the framework of nature as a whole. Aware of man's tendency to evil as
well as to good, the Chorus warns of overstepping the bounds of mortality.
Though both Posa and the Chorus recognize the creative power of reason
as the differentia of human nature within nature, the Chorus's stylized ode
focuses on the dangers, Posa's dramatic exposition on the glory of its artistic achievements.' The modern hybris of Posa, the artist, of creating a
world in his own image, seems to consist in his willingness to use men as
material in the process towards the perfection of mankind.'
More human than Posa, Carlos, earlier on, had begged the King to
let him share in the political responsibility for Flanders (II, 2). In a similar
encounter between father and son, Haemon, Creon's son and Antigone's
betrothed, tries to sway his father towards a more lenient execution of justice
(635-765). Though Haemon is more diplomatic than Carlos, their arguments, with comparable effects on Creon (766-80) and Philipp (II, 3; IV,
10), follow the same path.
Though they both fail to bring about a final reconciliation, the two
scenes are dramatic turning points in their plays. But where Haemon's
attempt to mediate between his father and his betrothed provides the axis
of symmetry in Antigone, 10 neither Carlos's emotional (II, 2) nor Posa's
rational (III, 10) appeal to the father and king in Philipp marks the center
of Don Carlos. That distinction is given to the threshold between the King's
lonely search for a human being worthy to be his friend (III, 5) and both
Carlos's and Philipp's own expression of humanity in their generous attitude
towards Medina Sidonia, the admiral returning from the defeat of the
Armada (III, 6-7).
After the fateful conversation between father and son in Don Carlos
(II, 2), strands of conflicting love stories are interwoven with the political
texture of the play. With the connotations of Adam and Eve's expulsion
from the Garden of Eden, Princess Eboli's confession of love for Carlos
(II, 8) in the royal palace (the center of Act II) mirrors Carlos's confession
of love for the Queen (I, 5) in the royal garden (the center of Act I).
Inconceivable for our modern sensibilities, Haemon and Antigone never
even mention each other's names, let alone speak to one another. 11 Only
the Chorus, in a passionate ode following Haemon's appeal to Creon, comments on the universal power of Eros and the disaster it may bring to mortals and immortals alike (781-800).
Revealing the darker sides of an idealism that shuns no human risk,
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Posa finally loses his political game. In a highly emotional scene that echoes
the story of the sacrifice of Christ for the redemption of mankind, he
entrusts the Queen with his legacy for Don Carlos (IV, 21; cf. 3). Though
she is moved by Posa's artistic vision of a future new world, the Queen
cannot help accusing him of willful and inhuman ambition. Faced by death
and by an elusive facet of his own character, Posa, in his last moments
with the Queen, comes to realize something about the simple beauty of life.
In a similar mood, though publicly addressing a chorus of elders,
Antigone mourns her approaching death (806-943). In order to console
herself over losing the light of the sun and her own future wedding day,
she conjures up examples of past heroic deaths. Concerned with her natural
fate, Antigone laments the loss of the sunlight; concerned with the fate
of mankind, Posa reflects on the loss of "two short evening hours" (the
King's rule) for the gain of "a summer's day" (the ascendency of Don
Carlos). In Posa's metaphorical language, the historical progress from the
father's despotic reign to the son's enlightened rule supplants the cyclical
movement of the natural powers of the universe. 12
When they are accused of willfully overstepping the bounds of mortality,
both Posa (IV, 21; V, 3) and Antigone (891-943) speculate about how, under
different circumstances, they might have avoided death. But where Antigone's thoughts revolve around different relationships within the natural
realm of the family, Posa's thoughts involve different constellations of
political power with a view to the fulfillment of human nature through
historical progress.
The hybris of such cosmopolitan usurpation reveals itself in the murder
of Marquis Posa, which is the more terrible as it occurs in the middle of
his farewell to Carlos (V, 3). With his arms around the dead body of his
friend, Carlos, in a stupor, witnesses the King's visit to his prison. The
royal gesture of returning his sword, however, reawakens Carlos's sense of
the King's complicity in Posa's murder. As if to kill his father, but restraining
himself, Carlos strikes a more deadly blow by revealing the story of their
friendship and Posa's betrayal of the King's trust (V, 4). 13
In a similar sequence of events, a Messenger tells of Creon's visit to
Antigone's cave, where Haemon, with his arms around the dead body of
his betrothed, laments their fateful love (1155-1243). Creon's pleading with
his son only provokes Haemon's rage to kill him. When the attempt fails,
he turns his sword against himself and dies, embracing Antigone in the end.
In the Riga version of Don Carlos, the play ends with Carlos's attempt
to kill the King, the Queen's dead faint, and, finally, Carlos's suicide. 14
The King's cry of horror, as it were, echoes Creon's wild lament over his
son's death. Even in the full version of Schiller's dramatic poem, Carlos's
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farewell embrace of the Queen, his disavowal of all passion but for the
memory of his dead friend (V, II, 5315-16), and his gathering the Queen
in his arms at the end, might be seen as a modern transfiguration of the
tragic plight of Haemon and Antigone.
Because it is perpetrated in the name of the Christian God, the King's
final act of delivering Carlos out of the arms of the Queen into the hands
of the Grand Inquisitor far surpasses the horror of Creon's last steps when
he enters carrying the corpse of Haemon into a palace full of woe over
the death of Creon's wife who, on hearing the news about her son, had
committed suicide.
In the conclusion to his reflections on naive and sentimental poetry,
Schiller discusses the difference between the realist and the idealist. More
noble in his actions than in his thoughts, the realist moves within a finite
range of human possibilities. More noble in his thoughts than in his actions,
the idealist reaches for infinite heights of human perfection. 15 This difference, which for him is more pronounced in life than in poetry, Schiller
considers representative for the difference between ancients and moderns.
If this distinction is applied to the poetic figures of Antigone, as ancient,
and Marquis Posa, as modern idealist, their difference can be seen to stem
from the nature of their ideals rather than from the nature of their idealism.
Concerned about the fate of the family and its eternal conflict with
the political order of the city, the ancient idealist orients herself according
to the mythical past. Concerned about the fate of mankind and its temporary conflict with the powers of the earth, the modern idealist orients
himself according to the historical future. This fundamental expansion of
man's horizon from the realm of nature, governed by the principle of
necessity, to the realm of history, governed by the principle of freedom,
allows for a greater complexity of dramatic plot as well as of dramatic
characters.
Almost as a rule, two characters in Schiller's Don Carlos correspond
to one character in Sophocles' Antigone: Posa and the Queen to Antigone;
Carlos and the Queen to Ismene; Posa and Carlos to Haemon; Domingo
and the Grand Inquisitor to Thiresias; and Carlos and the King to the
Messenger. Themes of the Chorus are covered in dramatic exchanges between Posa and the King in one instance, and Carlos and Princess Eboli
in another. ' 6 Only the King and Creon, the realists in both plays, correspond
to one another as single characters.
As a curious addition to the list of comparable characters, no character
·in Schiller's Don Carlos takes on the comic role of the Guard called upon
to bring Antigone before Creon. Created in the image of the biblical God,
and in dead earnest about the infinite aspirations connected with that
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origin, modern man seems to have lost his sense of the salutary function
of comic relief. By sustaining the tragic mood throughout Don Carlos,
Schiller indulges his modern sensibilities and thus contributes to the play's
idealistic grandeur. " In comparison with the earthbound idealism of Antigone, the heavenbound idealism of Marquis Posa truly seems to deserve
that name.
A sober commentary on idealism as a fundamental problem of human
nature in any given age, Schiller's Briefe iiber Don Carlos recognize both
the unique glory and the unique danger of its modern manifestation.
Notes
I. To Reinwald, April 14, 1783.
2. Schiller, Geschichte des Abfal/s der vereinigten Niederlande von der
spanischen Regierung, Einleitung, Schillers Werke, Nationalausgabe
[NA], ed. Lieselotte Blumenthal and Benno von Weise (Weimar:
Biihlau, 1943 ff.), XVII, i, 23; I, NA, XVII, i, 56-57.
3. Schiller, Don Carlos, Thalia-Fragment, II, 6, 2026-31, NA VI, 439;
cf. Geschichte, I, NA XVII, i, 59. With watchwords like "miitterliche
Kirche," ''Vatermord," "Pest," "Verwesung," "l..eichen," and "das Grab
selbst ist keine Zuflucht," Schiller's original portrayal of the Inquisition (Schiller, Siimtliche Werke, ed. Gerhard Fricke and Herbert
Giipfert, 5th ed., Miinchen: Hanser, 1975, IV, 83) umnistakably alludes
to the infamous story of the house of Oedipus.
4. Sophocles, Antigone, 184, 288, 304, 486-89, 658-59, 1039-44, 1063-90;
Schiller, Don Carlos, V, 10, 5261-79; 11, 5367-68; cf. Geschichte, I,
NA XVII, i, 54.
5. See Gisela N. Berns, Greek Antiquity in Schiller's "Wallenstein," Studies
in the Germanic Languages and Literatures, Vol. 104 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1985).
6. Cf. to Siivern, July 26, 1800; to Goethe, April 4, 1797. Exploring a
structural analogy between Sophocles' Antigone and Schiller's Maria
Stuart, Florian Prader (Schiller und Sophokles [Ziirich: Atlantis, 1954,
120]) argues for the poetic effectiveness of Maria Stuart, "gerade wei!
sie nicht griechisch ist und Schiller die dramatisch wirksamen Elemente
der antiken "Ifagodie kunstvoll mitarbeiten lasst, ohne der Nachahmung
verpflichtet zu sein." Objectionable in Prader's notion is merely his
pretense (114), "Der Vergleich mag uns nur zeigen, wie Schiller in seinem
Bemiihen urn die Physik des Dramas so vie! vom antiken Vorbild in
sein eigenes, kiinstlerisches Schaffen aufnimmt, dass von einer Analogie
zu sprechen ist, die dem Dichter wohl nicht bewusst wird."
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7. Schiller, Uber die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen, Letter 26, NA
XX, 401; Uber das Erhabene, NA XXI, 53, "Nun stellt zwar schon
die Natur fiir sich allein Objekte in Menge auf, an denen sich die Empfindungsfahigkeit fiir das Schone und Erhabene iiben konnte; aber der
Mensch ist, wie in andern Fallen, so auch bier, von der zweiten Hand
besser bedient als von der ersten und willlieber einen zubereiteten und
auserlesenen Stoff von der Kunst empfangen, als an der unreinen Quelle
der Natur miihsam und diirftig schopfen."
8. See Schiller's own reflections on the use of the chorus in connection
with Die Braut von Messina, NA X, 7-15, and Ilse Graham, Schiller's
Drama: Talent and Integrity (London: Methuen, 1974), "Element into
ornament: the alchemy of art: a reading of Die Braut von Messina,"
67-90.
9. For a discussion of the questionable character of Posa's idealism, see
Schiller, Briefe iiber Don Carlos, NA XXII, 138 ff.; Uber die
aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen, Letter 4, NA XX, 317; Letter
6, NA XX 328; Letter 9, NA XX, 334-36; Uber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, NA XX, 496-98, 503; cf. Oskar Seidlin, "Schiller:
Poet of Politics," in A Schiller Symposium, ed. A. Leslie Willson
(Austin: University of Texas, Department of Germanic Languages,
1960), 31-40.
10. Their names alone (Haemon/"concerned with blood," Creon/"concerned with power") exhibit the central conflict in Sophocles' Antigone.
II. The line "0 dearest Haemon, how your father humiliates you!" (572),
usually given to Antigone by modern editors, appears in all existing
manuscripts as a line of Ismene. On the emotional shallowness of the
ancients, especially in their portrayal of women, cf. Schiller, Uber naive
und sentimenta/ische Dichtung, NA XX, 432-36, 478, n. I; and to
Humboldt, Dec. 17 and 25, 1795.
12. Schiller, Don Carlos, IV, 21, 4313-14; cf. 4299-301; 3, 3435-39; 6,
3646-50; V, I, 4505-06; 9, 5068-70. See Gerhard Kaiser, "Vergotterung
und Tad: Die thematische Einheit von Schillers Werk," and "Die Idee
der ldylle in der 'Braut von Messina,'" in Von Arkadien nach Elysium,
11-44 and 164-66.
13. Carlos's "Ja, Sire! Wir waren Briider! Briider durch/Ein edler Band,
als die Natur es schmiedet" (V, 4, 4791-92) brings out the crucial difference between Antigone and Marquis Posa. For the inner connection between Don Carlos as "ein Familiengemillde in einem fiirstlichen
Hause" and Schiller's theme of idealism, see Helmut Koopmann, "Don
Karlos," in Schiller's Dramen: Neue Interpretationen, ed. Walter
Hinderer (Stuttgart: Klett, 1979), 99-106.
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14. Schiller, Dom Karlos, NA VII, i, 354-58. For Schiller's dependence on
and independence from St. Real's "Histoire de Dom Carlos," see Gerhard Storz, Der Dichter Friedrich Schiller (Stuttgart: Klett, 1959), 118.
15. Schiller, Uber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, NA XX, 500.
16. Cf. Schiller, Uber die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen, Letter 6,
NA XX, 322-23, 326-27; and lise Graham, "Die Struktur der Persiinlichkeit in Schillers dramatischerDichtung," in Schiller: Zur Theorie
und Praxis der Dramen, ed. Klaus L. Berghahn and Reinhold Grimm,
Wege der Forschung 323 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972), 351, 361-64.
17. It is interesting to note that this is not only a characteristic ofthe young
Schiller. In as late a work as his translation of Shakespeare's Macbeth,
he drastically changes the Porter scene (II, 5). Cf. Uber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, NA XX, 431-35, esp. 433, "Als ich in einem
sehr friihen Alter den letzteren Dichter zuerst kennenlernte, empiirte
mich seine Kiilte, seine Unempfindlichkeit, die ibm erlaubte, im
hiichsten Pathos zu scherzen, die herzzerscheidenden Auftritte im
'Hamlet', im 'KOnig Lear', im 'Macbeth' usf. durch einen Narren zu
stiiren, die ibn bald da festhielt, wo meine Empfindung forteilte, bald
da kaltherzig fortriss, wo das Herz so gern stillgestanden wiire."
��George Steiner's Antigones:
A Review*
Eva Brann
Anyone who has reread the Antigone about as often as is profitable for
the time being might consider turning to this book. The curious plural
of its title is glossed on the cover of the paperback: "How the Antigone
legend has endured in Western literature and thought." While conceding
absolute primacy to the Antigone of Sophocles' play, Steiner brings to
prominence the power of Antigone's story in its apparently inexhaustible
versions. Greek myths, he says, have had an "unbroken authority ... over
the imagination of the West," and among them the Antigone legend is paramount in both shaping and expressing the moral constitution of Western
humanity.
Steiner's thesis is not innocuous. Its explicit consequence is the elevation of Tragedy over Scripture and of Sophocles over Shakespeare. With
respect to the Bible, Steiner asserts, for example, that for German literature
the polla ta deina chorus ("Many awesome things walk the earth, but
nothing more awesome than man," 333 ff.) forms the heart of the "house
of being" (a Heideggerian phrase) much more than does any chapter from
the Luther bible. It is hard to tell how far Steiner means to generalize this
thesis. In Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, to cite a counter-example, the
liberal humanism of the classical scholar Zeitblom pales before the devout
deviltry of the Lutheran musician Leverkiihn. But even if it were only a
literary phenomemon, to me it seems sinister if it is true- as if something
appalling were excessively savored. At any rate, whatever may be the case
*George Steiner, Antigones. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984; Oxford Paperback,
1986.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
for the European continent, for the Anglo-Saxon countries the notion that
Greek myths matter more than the Bible is laughable. But Steiner is an
enthusiast, and his passion is productive enough to make his Hellenic bias
forgivable.
He argues his subordination of Shakespeare to Sophocles more
specifically, by citing Wittgenstein's subversive question: "Was [Shakespeare]
perhaps rather a creator of language than a poet?" The question is meant
to intimate that Shakespeare invented a new species of language but failed
to bring transcendent presence to earth. The index of this lack, which
Steiner connects with Shakespeare's "pluralism and liberality, his tragi-comic
bias," is his intuitive avoidance of myth.
Now it is another of Steiner's theses that "Greek myths are imprinted
in the evolution of our language, and of our grammar in particular," that
"the 'initial' and determinant Greek myths are myths in and of language,
and in which, in turn, Greek grammar and rhetoric internalize, formalize,
certain mythical configurations." "Myths speak themselves in men." For
example, Steiner reads in Narcissus "the long history of the demarcation
of the first person singular, together with the solicitations and menace of
solipsism, of the withering of our utterance to monologue, as these are
latent in the grammar of our ego."
There are two language-mysticisms current that I find-not very
profitably-unsettling because I can't make out what they mean when taken
at their word and because I can't determine whether they are deep or merely
sophisticated. One is the claim that our humanity is linguistic, is not only
enmeshed in, but exhausted by, language- that there is nothing beyond
speech for speech to be about, so that all speech is about speech and speech
is all there is: we are speech. The other is that language speaks, not the
speaker- we may utter sound, but the saying is accomplished by language.
Th these paradoxes Steiner appears to be adding a third: that legends articulate language. To me it seems that to speak responsibly I must believe
that it is I who speaks, and to speak substantively I must think that I speak
about something, and to speak consideringly I must suppose that the tale
is separable from the telling. However, to return to the point: It is in the
light of Steiner's linguistic theory that the demotion of Shakespeare from
poet-the speaker of myth-shaped language-to language-creator-an
autonomous maker rather than a conductor of truthful transcendent
presence-is to be understood. Steiner thinks of Sophocles too as a
humanist, but as one who possesses a pietas, a "haunted humanism."
Sophocles' relation to the gods stands median, between Aeschylus's sense
of neighborhood and Euripides' sophistic uncertainties: For Sophocles the
primal intimacies of god and men have receded, but certain human deeds
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are darkly reminiscent of the scandals attendant on their aboriginal commerce. Clearly Steiner accords more gravity to Sophocles' archaic, primordial "scenes" than to Shakespeare's current human condition. Why, really,
I ask myself.
If I have seemed critical of Steiner's thesis so far, let me engage here
in a belated captatio benevolentiae for him. Steiner has acquired a sort
of anti public, readers who expect from him pretentious verbiage and trendy
interests. Antigones is not like that. The language is often apt and sometimes poignant. At worst there are arresting usages that fail to click and
hyperbolic metaphors that discredit their sentence: Oedipus's attempt at
self-perception is called "an incest more radical than that of blood." That's
verbiage too juicy for credibility.
However, I think I understand the cause of the urge to use strong
language. The reason is that people in their capacity as writers of books
about books- or reviews of books about books- are naturally unsuited
to the invocation of elemental and mighty forces, not being themselves
elemental and mighty, and so they are tempted to reach for language that
is a little beyond their format. In fact, I can't help reiterating here my misgivings about the business of cultivating a taste for tragedy: I think our respectable mission in life is to convert tragedy into comedy, to find happy compromises and innocuous resolutions where we can, and then to give unconvertible tragedy the serious empathy that is its due-short of savoring
it. It must be said in Steiner's favor that he has a high respect for drier
readings of the text than he himself engages in. Above all, his own
understanding of Antigone appreciates that very element in her: the "lucid
dryness" of her ethical solitude, which "seems to prefigure the stringencies of Kant." In fact, Steiner's portrait of Antigone is one of the most
admirable features of Antigones. He dwells on the fact of her youth: She
is a young woman, a girl really, whose pure unseasoned will to extremity,
whose gallant, immature resistance to compromise and resolution, give her
at first a desolate satisfaction that turns finally to doubt and despair. This
description brings home the difference (which readers are apt to forget)
between being a tragic heroine and watching one: what looks like demonic
grandeur from the outside is lonely misery from within.
While Steiner's interests in this book are not trendy, they are contemporary: Antigones is a splendid hermeneutic exercise. Hermeneutics was
once the fairly humble art of interpreting texts, particularly the Bible. When,
in half-conscious rivalry with the scientists, who often spoke of reading
the book of nature, the human world began to be construed as a text,
hermeneutics ceased to be mere philology and became philosophy. An influential work in this philosophical hermeneutics is Hans-Georg Gadamer's
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Truth and Method (1960). It establishes a study called "effective-history"
[Wirkungsgeschichte]. Effective-history, or, perhaps better, actual-history,
traces the effect a text has had through time (what might be called its
longitudinal influence). The hypothesis is that the historical conduit is an
actual constituent of our present readings; we live in a world shaped by
previous interpretations, and a properly self-aware approach to the texts
of our tradition requires the recovery of their earlier receptions- one might
say that books bear the patina of their previous readings.
The Antigones is such a recovery: it traces at once the versions of the
Antigone legend and the fate of Sophocles' play-in fact, the two are inseparable. Antigone appears to be the most rewarding subject imaginable
for an effective-history. Steiner begins his book by showing that between
c. 1790 and c. 1905 Sophocles' Antigone was regarded in Europe as the
work of art nearest to perfection. Hence it inspired not only interpretative
commentary but a vast number of translations, adaptations, retellings,
reversifications, and libretti. In sum, it underwent every sort of attempt
at faithful recovery and originative recapture.
Let me say here that the account of these mutant Antigones, to which
much of Steiner's work is devoted, is absorbing throughout, though two
items might be of special interest to us. First, Steiner gives a long account
of Hegel's passionate preoccupation with Antigone, not only in the
Phenomenology but in works not read in the program of St. John's College. Second, he gives an extended analysis of Holderlin's notorious transla. tion of the Sophoclean text, a poetic tour deforce, extreme and deep, which
would surely have been a center-piece of the St. John's language tutorial
had we chosen to do German rather than French.
To return to Steiner's hermeneutic thesis: As he assumes in particular
that our cultural tap-root is in Athens rather than in Jerusalem, so he posits
in general, explicitly and often, that we have this history effectively in our
cultural sap. It seems to me a dubious assumption. I do think that we absorb opinions from our surroundings, and that the roots of many of those
opinions are to be found articulated in the texts of the program- that is,
after all, a chief reason for a "great books" education. But I doubt that
the sort of "cultural literacy" that Gadamer's and Steiner's thesis implies
can be atmospherically acquired. It is rather the result of a deliberate
classical education of the sort that Steiner tells us he received at the French
Lycee in Manhattan and that I could still piece together at Brooklyn College. This is a pedagogic order that has been disrupted. Present-day
students, by and large, come to Greek texts with a pristine nescience that
brings them- in some respects, I imagine- close to the state of mind that
the barbarians of the ancient world were in when they attended their first
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65
performance of a Hellenic drama. Their cultural history has become as
effectively ineffective for them as it would be if they had none. Consequently they face the textual tradition without tradition. Iu the St. John's
seminar, which is a proving-ground (or rather a disproving-ground) of
hermeneutic hypotheses, the millenia between us and Sophocles are canceled not by a laborious longitudinal recovery but by a simple severance
of the last links in the conduit of time. On the whole, this seems to me
to work very well. I have more faith in the episodic recollections that mark
a renaissance than in the unbroken memory of history.
At any rate, even with its hermeneutic intuition neutralized, Antigones
is full of interest. I would like to conclude with two of Steiner's own reflections, the first his try at an explanation of the unbroken preeminence of
Sophocles' Antigone, the second his own interpretation of the play's
"subterranean" message.
The Antigone, he says, is preeminent because it is the one and only
literary text to express "all the [five] principal constants of conflict in the
condition of man": the confrontation of men and women, of age and youth,
of society and individual, of the living and the dead, and of men and gods.
The play presents each of these as "an equilibrium of fatalities." It is inexhaustible because it is encompassing in its antitheses and evenly poised
in its resolutions. That seems to me a persuasive formulation.
The subterranean significance of Sophocles' play, he suggests, is a judgment on tragedy itself. "Drama," which means literally, "deed," has a built-in
preference for the act over the word, a preference that is a kind of enactment of the opposition so prominent in Greek speech: logOi men ... ergoi
de- "in talk one thing, in actuality another." Steiner suggests that Sophocles
is issuing an implied warning against the domination of accomplished facts
over probing words, against the tragic elevation of Antigone's drastic deed.
I do not know whether Steiner is right in this particular case, but his suggestion points to a paradox that is the saving grace of tragedy in general:
the constitutional inability of even the most artful work to leave intact the
mute uniqueness of the tragic deed.
��The Problem of Place
in Oedipus at Co/onus
Abraham Schoener
The strangeness of this play begins with its name: Oidipous epi Koliiniii.
Let me tell yon what koliinos means: Herodotus and Xenophon use it as
a "heap of stones," but in particular of the stones heaped up in a barrow- a
grave mound. Its sister-word koliine is used by Sophocles exclusively as
a grave mound. It is the word with which Chrysothemis names Agamemnon's grave mound in the Electra. "Oedipus at Colonus" thus means
"Oedipus at the Grave Mound."
When Oedipus and Antigone reach Colonus, the place already bears
this name. A local inhabitant whom they meet at the beginning of the play
traces its name to an ancient knight named "Colonus"; but this etymology
has no support in mythology. There are no tales of this knight's life, but
just the story that he gave his name to the place. It is easy to suppose,
however, that no one would want his or her town known as the Grave Site
or the Corpse Mound; this etymology for the name would have been dismal
and grating. So it is equally easy to imagine how the legend of a founding
knight would arise- a knight who would give the town a glorious and noble
past rather than a morbid and gruesome one.
Yet if we accept this clever and somewhat mean-spirited etymology, we
are still left with a critical question: Whose grave site is it? Whose is the
grave that gives the town its name?
Abraham Schoener is a Thtor at St. John's College, Annapolis. This lecture was
given at the College in the summer of 1990. 'franslations are the author's.
67
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That is easy to answer. When Oedipus reaches Colonus, he says: "This
is my resting place (line 88)." The town has always been named for him;
his arrival finally makes the name true.
The central question I want to pose is about place: What is the nature
of place and places? I don't think I have even the beginning of an answer
to this, but I know where to look. In the Oedipus at Co/onus, we find
ourselves barraged by questions of place: Where are we? Is this the right
place? Is it permissible to tread here? Where will Oedipus's bones rest?
These questions give way to a kind of certainty about place: Oedipus knows
right away that this is the right place; at the end of the play, in an
astonishing reversal, he guides Theseus and his own daughters to the place
where he knows he must die. But this certainty on his part only engenders
more wonder and confusion on our part. We will never know precisely
where Oedipus leaves this world, for he insists that it must remain secret
to everyone but Theseus. In the end this special place becomes a mystery
to us. We get a fascinating description of the general locale from one of
Theseus's attendants. He says that Oedipus stopped at a katarrhakte
hodos- a "path crashing downwards, with its roots in brazen steps sprung
from the earth (1590-91)." Somewhere near here Oedipus disappeared. Now
what kind of place is this, with roots deep into the earth herself?
I. The Pharmakos and the Bounds of the City.
A pharmakos is a scapegoat, someone chosen from among the inhabitants of the city to be driven out in an exercise of purification. Putting
the scapegoat outside will somehow cleanse the city. This does not seem
so strange at all. If we can imagine the scapegoat as the cause or emblem
of the pollution, it seems easy to purify the city simply by removing the
stain. The expulsion of the scapegoat is no more remarkable than any other
form of cleaning. We wash with water, we rinse away the dirt and stain.
The expulsion of the scapegoat is the means of washing the city. The only
problem, I think, comes from trying to determine what counts as outside
the city. Outside the walls? What if there are none-what if they are incomplete or being expanded? Th the edge of the territory? But where is
this? The ritual of the pharmakos thus implies a problem of place. Where
precisely is the city and what are its boundaries? How far must we expel
the pollution before we are clean? And where is the pollution when it is
no longer among us?
The story of Oedipus seems to be built around this problem. He is expelled, as a baby, from the city, stranded on a hlll in uncertain territory,
imported to a new city, not his own; he expels himself from this new city
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in an attempt to avoid becoming a wretch polluted by the stain of his
father's blood; and at the intersection of two roads- in a no-man's land,
neither in one city nor another- he murders his own father. Later, outside
his native city, he confounds the Sphinx, and is installed in the city as king
and savior. He begins his life as a pharmakos, expelled to avoid a stain,
he grows up apolis, without a city, but he reverses these circumstances as
he reaches adulthood. At his acme, he is at the center of a city, the loved
and revered ruler of the land.
But we know that he ends his life as he began it. In Thebes, his proper
home, he is discovered as twice stained: with the blood of his father, the
king,- and with his mother's sex. The city soon recognizes him as the source
of the pollution that is poisoning the city and so he must be driven out.
He is the perfect pharmakos, both the cause and the visible emblem of
the miasma, horribly mutilated by his own hand. And so he begins our
present play a wanderer, an exile- he calls himself apolis, a man without
a city (1357).
Not only is it easy to map Oedipus's life onto the pattern of the pharmakos, but it is easy to explain why the pattern is appropriate. Oedipus
has crossed certain uncrossable lines; he has violated certain inviolable oppositions. The city depends on these two oppositions. It is clear how quickly
all social and political stability would collapse if the young replaced the
old through force and not through time; and if children mated with their
parents and produced offspring who are neither absolutely children nor
siblings. The city depends upon a certain distance between young and old,
father and son, son and mother. Oedipus violated all of these boundaries
and, whether intentionally or not, thus threatened the order and stability
of his city. Whether he was knowing or not, he is stained with his transgression. He plunged himself twice, in different ways, into the forbidden zones
of his parents' bodies; willing, knowing, or not, he is stained by that penetration and there is no cleansing of the stain. This is the pollution, the miasma,
he both carries and represents, and as such he must be driven from the
city. Once he has penetrated these zones, the city is no place for him.
The model of the pharmakos and his stain helps remove a persistent
obstacle to our reading of the play. The pharmakos need not be guilty in
any sense (some cities simply expelled their ugliest inhabitants)-he need
simply carry the stain out. Thus we need not ask if Oedipus was culpable,
knowledgeable, rash, etc.-we need only ask if he was stained, polluted.
I have been polluted in many ways that were no fault of my own but left
me nonetheless polluted. Every time I have stepped in a dog's mess, every
time I have cleaned shellfish, every time I fill my fountain pen: in each
of these cases I have come into contact with something foreign to me-
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the ammoniac redolence of the shellfish or the blue dye of the inksomething that is both foreign and hard to remove. But there are stains
more powerful than these physical nuisances.
It seems to me there are many occasions when we unwittingly cross
certain borders and are marked forever by that crossing- we round a corner in our car and suddenly see bloody corpses strewn about in a horrible
accident. It seems to me that whether Oedipus is guilty of anything or not,
he is stained in just this way. He has been somewhere terrible, much more
remote from the realm of our comfortable daily existence than the smell
of decomposing shellfish is- but now that he has been there, he is forever
marked by what he has seen, known, and felt. That is his stain, that is
the necessity for his expulsion from the city. What he knows and has felt
is simply too terrible for the city to contain.
II. The Re-integration of the Pharmakos.
This understanding of Oedipus's condition seems too easy to me. We
understand the question of his place as a strictly political problem, a problem for the city. We say that Oedipus is properly apolis-an exile without
a city- because his stain threatens the city's safety. We think of that line
in Aristotle-almost a cliche-"the man who can live outside of the city
is either a beast or a god" (Cf. Pol. 1253a29). Fine, we say, Oedipus is both,
cast out, apolis, he is a wretched beast, deprived of all society- but he
is also a god, super-human in what he has done, what he knows, what
he has suffered and endured. The proof of this is surely in his fate: Why
else would he simply vanish, summoned by a god who says "it is time for
us to leave"? His amazing disappearance would then be simply the ultimate
expression of his political position; as a man who is apolis, his proper place
is not with the dead humans below but with the gods above.
This scheme even lets us understand the most remarkable reversal
presented by this play. 1\vo present kings, one fallen one, and one pretender
to a throne all agree that the outcast, the polluted pharmakos, must be
brought back into the city so that it may prosper. This is not hard to gloss.
It means that the city must face and find a place for the terrible things
that threaten it. The city weakens itself by simply banishing all of its threats;
rather it must embrace them. Thus we not only still talk about Oedipus
and other such polluted citizens, but we celebrate them in the poetry called
'fragedy. And Athens, so wise among cities, celebrates these polluted citizens
in a competition presented for the most part at public expense, attended
by the whole city. This tradition thus welcomes the pharmakoi back into
the city and installs them at its heart. The city grows stronger by gazing
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in wonder at the transgressors who threaten it. The secret boon that Oedipus
brings to Athens is thus nothing more than his legend-his mythos-which
now, because of Theseus's good will, becomes public property. By holding
this story in common, rather than expelling and forgetting it, the city
strengthens itself and grows to high health. Athens, the city of tragedy,
rises to its awesome pinnacle; Thebes, who made Oedipus apolis, stumbles
and fades.
The answer to the question about Oedipus's place thus becomes
paradoxical but fruitful. He is apolis and must be cast out of the city; but
precisely because the city must address what is apolis, his story must be
enshrined at the center of the city. His place as murderer is outside the
city; as legend, it must be at its center.
III: The Final Place
I still wonder whether these are the only considerations for our understanding of this question. Must we address the question of place only in
relation to the city? In other words, does the opposition of polis and apolis
exhaust the question of place? As much as I find the scheme outlined above
both helpful and convincing, I stumble when attempting to apply it to this
play. The play certainly has political concerns, but these concerns are confounded by the persistent strangeness of the play.
The root of this strangeness is surely Oedipus's final disappearance.
To make anything at all of it, we will have to return to our initial question
and investigate the nature of the place where he disappears.
In the first sentence of the play, Oedipus asks: "What region or city
of men have we reached?" (1-2). Antigone is his companion and guide,
but before she can answer, he asks her to find a seat for him- "whether
on ground which may be trodden or within the groves of the gods" (9-10).
This opposition is interesting; it already expands the opposition between
city and no-city with which we began. It is also interesting that Oedipus
is willing to accept a seat within a sacred precinct. This seems to indicate
a deep impiety on his part- he is willing to take a possible altar as a resting
place- and thus emphasizes his alienation from the affairs of men. This
also complicates his relation to the gods: not only is he apolis, an exile,
but he is asebes, insensitive to the traditional bounds of piety.
A local resident soon approaches but refuses to answer Oedipus's questions until the wanderer quits his seat; as Antigone suspected, the ground
is sacred. The local says that "it is impure to tread upon it" (37). Oedipus
does not seem shaken by this; after all, impiety is not foreign to him. He
maintains his seat and asks to whom the place is sacred. He learns that
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the dreadful Furies hold it; but the local refuses to call them by that name.
He appeals to two circumlocutions and finally names them as "The Kindly
Ones (Eumenides) who have seen all things" (42).
The play marks a new beginning at this point. When he learns that
the Eumenides hold this place, Oedipus the wanderer suddenly announces
that "he will never leave his seat in this land" (45). Once the local leaves
to consult a higher authority about Oedipus's violation of the grove,
Oedipus addresses the Furies directly and says that Phoebus "spoke of this
place as my rest after a long time-my final place-where I would find
a seat of the dread Goddesses and a resting place for strangers; and there
I should close my miserable life as a boon to my new hosts and a curse
to those who exiled me" (88-93).
This is the first we hear of the prophecy that determines the' rest of
the play's action. Oedipus claims that Phoebus pronounced it years ago
when he first questioned Delphi about his father; it is interesting that
Sophocles makes no mention of it until Oedipus reaches and recognizes
his "final place." But this ancient and personal oracle has been recently
confirmed; both Creon and Polyneices have just had oracles that proclaim
that they will need Oedipus- or his body- in order to triumph in a current
conflict. These oracles differ in one essential feature from Oedipus's: they
all name him as the source of a benefit to whichever land he rests in; his
oracle names only one place, this place, in which he will close his life and
become a benefit to some- his hosts- and a curse to others.
This place is described at length. It is a lush grove sacred to the Furies,
within a larger plot, all of which belongs to Poseidon. The whole plot is
clearly sacred, but only the precinct of the Furies is so holy that it cannot
be entered without impurity. Oedipus eventually leaves this plot at the
behest of the chorus of local citizens; but at the end of the play, he reenters it, this time as his own guide, leading Theseus and his own daughters
to a destination clear only to him. This second time he makes his way to the
down-rushing path and the brazen steps- near which he finally vanishes.
The chorus's songs add to our knowledge of the place. After Theseus
has assured Oedipus that no one will ever dislodge him from this land,
the chorus sings a beautiful song praising their particular location:
Friend- within this land of fair steeds
you have come to the earth's best home-
where birds sing, ivy and vines grow thick, berries flourish, and the sun
always shines (668-80). I will quote the second strophe of this ode verbatim, for it is remarkable:
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There is such a thing as I
Have never heard of in an Asian land
Nor in the great Dorian Island of Pelops: a sprout-
A plant-untouched by hands, self-madeA terror to the spears of our enemiesThat blooms mighty in this land.
I mean the olive with its silver leaves, nurturer of children. (694-701)
This plant, among the lush vines and plenteous berries, makes the
beautiful grove terrible and strange. An olive, untouched by human hands,
self-created- autopoios? An olive that is at once the nurturer of children
and a terror to enemies? This native plant, so similar to th<rwandering
Oedipus, is the surest sign that he has indeed found his proper place.
We must also consider its other chief inhabitants- the gods who hold
it- in order to grasp how this place can be proper to Oedipus. The first
gods are the Furies whose grove Oedipus has violated. They are so awful
that no one in the play mentions them by name; instead they are addressed,
as the first local does, in a series of euphemisms. The central one of these
is of course "Eumenides," "the kindly ones"- a euphemism that is nearly
a lie. The Furies are hardly kindly but vicious in pursuit of their quarry.
They hound murderers, those who, like Oedipus, are stained with the blood
they have spilled- especially those who are stained with their own parents'
blood. Their fury is so extreme and easily kindled that the chorus says:
We tremble to name them
And pass by their grove
Without a glance,
Without a sound,
Moving our lips (without a word) in silent reverence. (128-32)
The chorus makes clear that the Furies' presence in the grove is almost
palpable-as if its members avert their eyes in passing for fear of actually
catching a glance of them. The Furies haunt this land- it is not only dedicated to them but somehow suffused with them. This seems possible for
these awful forces in a way that would not be plausible for Zeus or Apollo.
We cannot imagine them lurking in or haunting a grove-if Zeus or Apollo
were present, he would not only be manifest but brilliant. Such gods could
not disappear if they were present. The Kindly Ones thus give us a small
clue for understanding Oedipus's final disappearance: When things are
terrible, too terrible to gaze at or even mention, then it is somehow all the
more plausible that they are present even if we cannot see them. We are
disposed to believe that such terrible things can haunt and hold a place.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
The chorus repeats that the whole land in which the grove stands is
sacred to Poseidon. We do not imagine his place in the land in the same
way we do that of the Eumenides in theirs. The chorus is afraid of seeing
the Eumenides, but neither it nor the exceedingly pious Theseus ever betrays
any expectation of meeting Poseidon. The land is his, but he is not there.
What does this mean, that this land is consecrated to Poseidon, god
of the sea? There is a hint for us in a common Homeric epithet that the
chorus applies to him late in the play: they call him gaiaochos- the Earth
Holder (1072). Poseidon's waters encircle the Earth and bound it on every
side. But as they circle the earth, they never fall below it nor rise above
it. There are neither subterranean nor heavenly seas. This banality gains
some importance when we consider the remarkable prayer that Theseus
utters after Oedipus's disappearance. The messenger says that he hears
Theseus "reverencing both the Earth and the Olympus of the gods above
at once-in the same word" (1654-55). This opposition between earth and
sky reminds us of Zeus's trilateral division of the world after his ascension
to power; he reserved the sky for himself, gave the underworld to his brother
Hades, and gave the sea to his brother Poseidon. The earth thus seems
to be neutral territory-uncontrolled by any god. But this appearance is
belied by the common ascription of earthquakes to Poseidon: as earthholder, he is also earth-shaker. This suggests that Poseidon's realm is not
the sea alone but the entire surface of this middle realm between Hades
and Olympus. He would be the god who holds not only this sacred land
but the whole Earth, the common land upon which we all walk.
But this formulation cannot be right: we never walk on Poseidon's paths.
Poseidon holds precisely those grounds upon which we cannot walk; he
holds the shifting waters of the sea and the shifting surface of the earth.
His paths are no paths for us and our feet; they are by nature untreadable.
As Odysseus knows full well, Poseidon is the god who makes travel perilous,
progress disastrous. He is the lord whose realm offers no sure step. This
makes him the perfect lord of the land that contains our last mystery, the
down-rushing path.
Sophocles calls it katarrhakte hodos; many translators blanch at this
paradox and call it a "sheer threshold." Katarrhakte can mean "sheer" indeed, but it is usually more forceful than that; it comes from rhasso- to
rush at or strike suddenly. Theseus uses katarhasso ninety ,lines earlier to
describe the action of hail: it strikes you as a result of rushing straight
down. It is the parent of our "cataract," a lovely word for waterfall. Now
it is hard to understand a katarrhakte hodos. It would seem to mean a
path that dashes straight down, suddenly. Because such a path seems like
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no path, some translators offer "threshold."* A hodos always goes somewhere-as indeed this one does; the messenger says that it is rooted in the
earth, in brazen steps. This is still a very strange path; it seems to be a
hole, or a cliff- a sheer drop from the grove to the roots of the earth. Can
we call such a drop a "path"? We could hardly come and go upon it. Though
it seems to go somewhere, it is still impassable. We could not tread on it.
This path is no path.
This is not the first strange path Oedipus has encountered; he killed
his father and thus initiated his pollution at a crossroads where three paths
met at once. These crossroads portended Oedipus's transgressions and
ultimate exile; after Thebes, he became a man of no city, but lived only
on path after path, crossroad after crossroad.
But this last path is not of the same order. It is not simply a path as
opposed to a city; it is not simply ek poleos or apo/is, as were the crossroads.
As we have seen, it is no road at all; it offers no conveyance but only an
abrupt end in itself. In this way this hodos does not recall his status as
apolis; nor does it contradict it. As an abrupt end, it portends Oedipus's
sudden disappearance, rather than his reintegration into the city. This disappearance thus does not resolve Oedipus's place in the city but displaces
it. In a certain sense, it indicates that from now on he is neither apolis
nor empolis but simply without a place. From this moment on, Oedipus
is nowhere.
IV: No Place
The down-rushing path is itself no proof of this. We hear only that
Oedipus pauses at this path, not that he ever embarks on it. But Theseus's
prayer gives us an indication of Oedipus's current place. In the prayer he
"reverences both Earth and Olympus at once- in the same logos." This
suggests that Oedipus is neither interred in the earth nor raised to heaven.
Nor is he in both. The amazing form of Theseus's prayer seems to suggest
a third possibility.
Theseus does not just join Heaven and Earth but he reverences them in
a single logos. This logos must have somehow overcome their differences-
* This translation depends upon reading ados ("threshold") instead of hodos here
in line 57. The majority of the play's manuscripts read hodos, not ados; moreover
ados is a rare form of the word for threshold. This word is oudos; the Form
ados appears nowhere else in tragedy and in only two or three instances in ariy
other authors. This translation thus seems to be prompted more by the paradox
posed by hodos than the textual support for ados.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
or suppressed them. In any case, it has caught these two opposites in a
single logos. It seems to me that this logos could not, any more, refer to
place. I do not know how to think of a place that is neither heaven nor
earth- or one in which the sharp differences between heaven and earth
are not addressed. In fact, it seems to me that this opposition is the very
foundation for any possibility of place. Theseus has seen something that
does not depend on this foundation.
This something is not a Force but another kind of place; after all,
Theseus does not pray to the gods of Earth and Olympus but to Earth
and Olympus themselves. He is praying to two places.
His remarkable vision (so potent that he must shield his eyes) is thus
not of Oedipus's epiphany, or of the angels who escort him, but of the
final place where Oedipus will rest. This place must be as different from
normal places as Oedipus was from normal humans. As we have seen, it
must be no kind of place we could understand. But just as it does not
depend on the fundamental distinctions that organize and delimit our
world, so this final resting place neither replaces Oedipus within the city
nor sustains his exile from it. Rather it leaves the distinctions of the city
behind. As heaven and earth are joined in one logos, so are joined the
fundamental distinctions upon which society depends. As we have seen,
Oedipus first became an exile precisely for transgressing these
distinctions- but in this place, the distinctions are not transgressed but
simply annulled in their conjunction. In this place, unlike Hades or Olympus, borders, boundaries, limits, order are no longer a concern.
One cannot deny the political concerns of this play. We cannot forget
that Oedipus has blessed Athens in a very political way; his place in their
land guarantees that Theseus and his offspring will always hold the
kingship. Does this manifest political legacy threaten the special place
Oedipus has found, beyond political structures and concerns?
No. I think instead, that Theseus's prayer and the place it reveals gently
chastise us- the city and its inhabitants- for some of the effects of our
political concerns. The play insists that Oedipus disappear. Oedipus himself
insists that we cannot know where his grave is; even his daughters are forbidden this knowledge. The grave can have no kolone- no grave barrow.
He forbids us to look on his resting place, but also to search for it or speak
about it. All trace of him must vanish.
His wishes are a clear prohibition against setting up his grave as a heroaltar. He thus prevents himself from becoming a ritual object for the City.
His prohibitions make him neither a presence in the city nor an exile at
its gates; rather they make him a true shade, a vanishing memory, whose
place is nowhere. This willful disappearance denies the eager city its oppor-
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tunity to gaze at him, to wonder at him, to celebrate him- to gather in
the theater and review his tragic fate. His disappearance is meant to deprive
us of the horrible yet fascinating object we love to consider. It is a disappearance that undercuts the very aims and habits of the tragic theater.
The play is so crafty that we too, the spectators or would-be spectators,
are sympathetic to this undercutting. When the chorus in the play first
learn Oedipus's identity, they subject him to a humiliating and prurient
inquiry into his history. Having already won their respect, he begs them
to desist- but they press on. "Did you really kill your father? And these
lovely children- are they ... your sisters?" Oedipus answers truthfully and
concisely. We bristle with rage at the chorus's base curiosity- but whose
curiosity is this if not ours? Confronted with Oedipus's mutilated eyes,
wouldn't we be horrified but at the same time insatiable in stealing glances
at them? Even we spectators can understand his desire to disappear. This
is the desire to retire from the public's insatiable gaze-whether it be
solicitous or prurient. This is the desire to be nowhere- to be neither iu
the heart of the city nor wandering at its borders, but nowhere.
This desire is caught also in the words of the chorus, who utter one
of the strangest yet plainest lines in poetry:
me phunai ton hapanta nikai logon.
Not being exceeds all speech. (1225)
This is the final place Oedipus has found, his sweet end: not in the city,
not outside of it; not even in the play; but beyond all logos- in not being.
��Oedipus the King and
Aristotle's List of Categories:
A Note
Chaninah Maschler
Substance (ousia)
Quantity (poson)
Quality (poion)
Relation (pros tl)
Place (pou)
Time (pote)
Stance (keisthaz)
Condition (ekhein)
Doing (poiein)
Being done to (paskhein)
-so runs the most famous of all lists of categories! How did Aristotle,
or whoever it was that first supplied the list, obtain it? And what are
categories good for?
I believe the most direct route to an answer is to look at a passage in
Sophocles' Oedipus the King.
Jocasta: What made you turn around so anxiously?
*Categories lb25. As the Becker pagination number shows, the treatise on categories
opens Aristotle's works in their standard arrangement.
Chaninah Maschler is a Thtor at St. John's College, Annapolis.
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80
Oedipus: I thought you said that Laius was attacked and butchered at a place
where three roads meet.
Jocasta: That is the story, and it is told so still.
Oedipus: Where is the place where this was done to him? (pou, paskhein)
Jocasta: The land's called Phocis, where a two-forked road comes in from
Delphi and from Daulia.
Oedipus: And how much time has passed since these events? (pole)
Jocasta: Just prior to your presentation here as king this news was published
to the city.
Oedipus: Oh, Zeus, what have you willed to do to me? (poiein)
Jocasta: Oedipus, what makes your heart so heavy?
Oedipus: No, tell me first of Laius' appearance, what peak of youthful vigor
he had reached. (poios)
Jocasta: A tall man, showing his first growth of white. He had a figure not
unlike your own.
Oedipus: Alas, it seems that in my ignorance I laid those fearful curses on
myself ... (poiein)
(lines 727-45, in the translation of Thomas Gould, Prentice Hall Greek
Drama Series, 1970)
Setting chapter iv of Aristotle's Categories side by side with the cited
lines from Sophocles' tragedy prompts the hypothesis that the nine
categories posterior to ousia may at one time have been the formal headings
under which a person charged with the task of finding the unknown party
responsible for a crime of violence was expected to carry on his investigation. As a result of pressing (like Oedipus or the modern investigative
reporter) for answers to the questions
Where?
When?
What did he look like?
How was he attired?
What was he doing?
What was being done to him?
the "first substance" question "Who?" would be tentatively answered, the
indictment drawn up, and the accused party brought to trial.
It is of course true that ordinary discourse, Greek or English, supplies
the small question words that demarcate and orient investigation. Positioning them in a juridic context, which is the effect achieved by dragging
in Sophocles' Oedipus the King, may seem needless. Yet the pathos of the
king's lines at 844 f.If he [the eye witness to the crime] continues still to speak of many, then
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I could not have killed him. One man and many do not jibe. But if he says
"one belted man," the doubt is gone. The balance tips toward me. I did it.*
-is, I think more justly identified when this last hope is seen to be a hope
for mathematical clarity and exactness, for degreeless truth of predication,
as per Categories 6a20 ff., rather than a hope for innocence.
I seem to have reversed my course. Having promised to throw light on
Aristotle's Categories I end up using that little book to highlight Oedipus.
But wasn't it some progress in the other direction to propose, by way
of quoting the exchange of questions and answers between dialogue partners all too well attuned, that the categories are not primarily ontological
pigeon holes, nor semantical pigeon holes comparable to the grammarians'
"parts of speech," but, rather, shared demarcations of investigative
discourse?
If antecedent to asking particular questions about particular things there
were no kinds of questions for an investigator to ask, and if a person who
knows were unaware that what he or she knows are answers to questions
that might be asked of him or her, there could be no investigating or knowing, whether solo or in concert. The categories are, a grid for speech, perception, and thought that makes it possible for questions to be sufficiently
circumscribed for answers to fit them and to allow answers to generate
new questions. Calling them "schemes of predication" (skhemata kategorias
tou ontos) is just another way of saying the same thing.** My suggestion
is, in short, that "predicating" is the answering of an explicit or implicit
question and that "categories" are as much and as little a priori as are
question-types. Further, that the Greek word for "predicating," kategorein,
which bears the sounds of the word for "marketplace" or "town square,"
agora, within it, retains the memory of Jocasta's lines 849-50-"He [the
eye witness] can't reject that and reverse himself. The city heard these things,
not I alone"- the memory, that is, of public declaration. The fact that an
official "accuser," such as were Meletus and Anytus in the Apology, is called
a kategoros further confirms this.
•
A.t~st '!OV
d !-lEV oiJv En
aUtOv dpt9!J6V, oUK Byffi ~Ktavov·
oiJ yO.p ytvou' liv de; ye -role; 1to/...A.oic; iaoc;.
d 15' livop? ilv' ol61;rovov avo~cret, cracpro<;
[843-47]
'oii'' tcr,lv ~151] 'oOpyov e!c; &~t1: psnov.
** See Chantraine, Dictionnaire etymologique de Ia Langue Grecque, volume 1,
p. 392, on echo.
�82
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Where is the gain in having such antiquarian guess work as was just
laid out? Perhaps it will nudge us to think of informative speech as carrying the weight of vouching for what we say.
The question "What are categories good for?" was, even if sketchily,
at least addressed. Notice that this is by no means the same question as
"What is drawing up a list of them, and such charcterizing of them as
Aristotle offers, good for?"- because the latter question is tantamount to
asking, "Why turn tacit into explicit knowing?"
�Depth and Desire
Eva Brann
By an old tradition the first lecture of the year is dedicated to the new
members of our college, to the freshman students and the freshman tutors.
It is a chance to tell you something about the shape and the spirit of the
Program that governs St. John's College-and not only to tell you but
perhaps even to show you.
I think I am right in this spirit when I begin by examining the classname I just called you by: freshmen. A freshman, my etymological dictionaries tell me, is a person "not tainted, sullied or worn," a still-fresh
human being, where "fresh" means, so the dictionary points out, both
"frisky" and "impertinent." Later on in the year you will learn a weighty
Greek word applicable to persons of frisky impertinence. They are said
to have thymos, spiritedness or plain spunk, a characteristic necessary for
serious learning. This spirited frame of mind is perfectly compatible with
being shy and secretly a little scared. In fact, to my mind, it is a sign of
quality in newcomers to be anxious for their own dignity in the way that
shows itself in spirited shyness. It is our business, the business of the faculty
and of the more responsible returning students, to help your spiritedness
to become serious, to emerge from the shyness, whether it be of the quiet
or the boisterous sort; to help you channel your energy into a steady desire
for learning and to direct your boldness toward the discovery of depth,
and, moreover, to help you without leaving you tainted, sullied, and worn
out. I keep saying "help," because although great changes are bound to
Eva Brann is the new Dean of St. John's College, Annapolis. This is the Dean's
opening lecture of the current academic year.
83
�84
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
take place in you in these next years- do but behold the seniors: unsullied,
untainted, unworn, and transfigured- we none of us know who should
get the most credit besides yourself: the Program, our teaching, your friendship, or just plain time passing.
At any rate, the spirit of the college is invested in seriousness, a certain
kind of seriousness- not dead seriousness but live seriousness, you might
say. This seriousness shows itself on many occasions: in deep or heated
conversations in the noon sun or at midnight, in marathons of effort and
in the oblivion of sleep, in devoted daily preparation and in glorious
goofing-off, in the willingness to try on opinions and in the need to come
to conclusions. What does your school do to induce this very particular
kind of seriousness?
When you chose to come to St. John's you were, perhaps, attracted
by the fact that the mode of teaching normal in higher education is quite
abnormal here. I mean lectures. Only one lecture a week is an integral part
of the Program, on Fridays at 8:15 P.M. Now the chief thing about a lecture is that it is prepared ahead of time. For instance, I began working
on this lecture in March. A lecture ought to be the temporarily final word,
the best a speaker has to give you at the moment. It should not matter
whether the surface of the speech is brilliant or drab, as long as it is a
deliberate and well-prepared opening of the speaker's heart and mind to
the listeners. As such it carries authority. These authoritative occasions
are obviously important to the life of the school.
Yet our normal way is not the prepared lecture but the focused conversation, which is effervescent rather than prepared, provisional rather than
authoritative, and participatory rather than reactive. Your tutors will not
tell you but ask you; they will demonstrate not acquired knowledge but
the activity of learning. One reason why the teaching of new tutors- and
some of your classes will be taught by newcomers- is often most
memorable to freshmen is that their learning is genuinely original and keeps
sympathetic pace with yours. There is an irresistible but false local
etymology of the word tutor as "one who toots," perhaps his own horn.
What the word tutor really signifies is a person who guards and watches
learning. We are deliberately not called professors because we profess no
special expertise.
Since you will not be told things, you will have to speak yourselves.
What will you speak about? The Program will ask you to focus your conversation on certain texts- they might be books or scores or paintings.
These texts have been selected over the years by us because they have the
living seriousness I am trying to speak about. To my mind texts, like people, are serious when they have a surface that arouses the desire to know
�BRANN
85
them and the depth to fulfill that desire. Here, then, is my announced theme
for tonight: the depth that calls forth desire.
Th delineate that depth I must once again distinguish our kind of conversation, the kind associated with such texts, from the kind of fellowship
to be found in other places. All over this country, and wherever the conditions for some human happiness exist, there are people who know all there
is to know about some field that they till with a single-minded love. This
is the blessed race of buffs, aficionados, and those rare professionals who
have had the grace to remain amateurs at heart. They study history or race
stock cars or do biology or fly hot-air balloons. My own favorite fanatic
is the young son of a graduate of St. John's. This boy is persistently in
love with fish, with the hooks, flies, sinkers, leaders, reels, and rods for
catching them, with the books for studying them, with the aquaria, ponds,
lakes, and oceans for observing them. When I first met him he looked up
at me shyly and asked if I knew what an ichthyologist was. Since I knew
some Greek I knew the etymology of the word and could tell him that
it is a person who can give an account of fish, so he was satisfied with
me. This boy may have his troubles but he is also acquainted with bliss.
This kind of concentrated bliss we cannot deliver to you, except perhaps
in limited extracurricular ways. Instead we, or rather the Program, will drive
you through centuries of time and diversities of opinion, while depriving
you of the freedom and the serenity to till and to master a well-defined
field of your own choosing. You will study Greek and invest hours in
memorizing paradigms, but your tutorial is not a Greek class- it is a
language tutorial in which Greek is studied only partly for its own virtues,
and partly as a striking and, for you, a novel example of human speech
and its possibilities. You will study Euclid and demonstrate many propositions, yet your tutorial is intended not to make you geometers but to allow
you to think about the activity of mathematics. In short, you will be asked
to read many books carefully and to study many matters in some detail
only to find them passing away, becoming mere examples in the conversation. And these fugitive texts will almost all bear their excellence, their worthiness to be studied exhaustively, on their face, for we try to pick the ideal
examples. This procedure is practically guaranteed to keep you off-balance,
even to drive you a little crazy, since you will not often have the satisfaction of dwelling on anything and of mastering it. How do we dare do this
to you?
Here is a strange but unavoidable fact: Those who plow with devotion
and pleasure and increasing mastery some bounded plot on the globe of
knowledge often undergo a professional deformation. They lose first the
will and then the ability to go deep. Th be sure, specialists are often said
�86
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
to know their subjects "in depth," but that is not the depth I mean. Let
me illustrate with an example I have a special affection for. I began my
academic life as an archaeologist, and the first thing archaeologists do is
to dig deep past the present surface of the earth, or rather they scrape it
away layer by layer. But with every stratum they scrape away they find
themselves at a new surface, the surface of a former age. They poke into
time- a magical enough activity- but they do not pretend to pierce the
nature of things. For example, there would come up from the depths of
a well-shaft an ancient pot. I would catalogue it by naming its form, say:
kotyle, a kind of cup; by giving its dimensions: h. 0.108 m.; diam. 0.135 m;
by describing its proportions: deep-bodied, narrow-footed; by interpreting
the picture painted on it: a rabbit-this is the pot-painter being funnyjumping a tracking hound from behind; by conjecturing about the provenance and the stylistic influences: made in Attica under Corinthian influence; and by assigning a date: third quarter of the seventh century B.C.
Was I required to consider what I meant by dimensions, proportions,
styles, images, funniness, influences, places? Not a bit-that would have
meant time out and profitless distraction from my business, which was
to know all about the looks and appearances of the pottery of Athens in
early times. What this Program of ours offers you is exactly that time out,
and that splendid distraction. People will say of you, when you have
graduated, that you have acquired a broad background. But your education will have been broad only in a very incidental and sketchy waycertainly not in the fashion of a close-knit tapestry that is a continuous
texture of interwoven warp and woof. Many of the books you are about
to read do tie into one another. Sometimes a book written by an ancient
Greek will (I am not being funny) talk back to one written by a modern
�BRANN
87
American, or the opposite- the strands that connect these books seem to
run back and forth and sideways through time. But some books will stand,
at least as we read them, in splendid isolation, and all in all the texts we
study do not add up to a texture of knowledge: There is no major called
"Great Books." How could there be competence in a tradition whose moving
impulse is to undercut every wisdom in favor of a yet deeper one? There
is not even agreement whether this tradition of ours advances or degenerates
with time, whether Its authors are all talking about the same thing, though
in a different way, or in apparently similar ways about quite incomparable
things.
Here is what the books do seem to me to have in common: They intend to go into the depths of things. All the authors, even those subtly
self-contradictory ones who claim that there are no depths but only surfaces, are deep in the way I mean. This desire for depth, then, is what will
hold your studies here together. There is a word for this effort, to which
it is my privilege to introduce you tonight. The word is philosophy. The
term is put together from two Greek words, philos, an adjective used of
someone who feels friendly, even passionate love, and sophia, which means
wisdom or deep knowledge.
When I say that your school is devoted to philosophy, the love of deep
knowledge, I mean that all our authors want to draw you deep into their
matter, whether by words, symbols, notes, or visual shapes. Incidentally,
in a few weeks a lecturer, a tutor from Sante Fe, will come and contradict
me; he has told me that he will say that what we do needn't bear the name
of philosophy at all.
Let that be a subject for future discussion, and let me come to the heart
of my lecture tonight. It is the question what depth is and how it is possible. I think we are all inclined to suppose that literal, actual depth belongs
to bodies and space and that people or texts are deep only by analogy,
metaphorically speaking.
I want to propose that here, as so often in philosophy, it is really the
other way around: it is the body that is deep merely metaphorically, as
a manner of speaking, while the soul and its expression alone are deep
in the primary sense.
Certainly the depth of a body or a space is elusive. If a body has a
perfectly hard and impenetrable surface, its depth must be forever beyond
our experience-a kind of hard, inaccessible nothingness. On the other
hand, let the physical body have a hollow in it-such caves are powerful
allegories of depth and you will in the next four years come across some
famous holes: the grotto of Calypso, the underground chamber in Plato's
Republic, Don Quixote's cavern of Montesinos. Now ask yourself: Where
�88
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
actually is the depth? The containing boundaries of the hollow are all faces
of the body, and no matter how deep you seem to be inside the body, you
are still on its surface, just as I argued before about archaeological
excavations.
Now consider matterless bodies, geometric solids. Euclid says in Book
XI that a solid has length, breadth, and depth, but he gives us no way
to tell which is which: it depends on your perspective- in fact all three
dimensions are lengths delineating the surfaces that he says are the extremity
of the solid. What is inside that solid, what its inwardness or true depth
is, he does not feel obliged to say. These are questions you might want
to raise in your mathematics tutorials: Can one get inside a geometric solid?
How?
Bodies, I am suggesting, are either too hard or too involuted or too
featureless or too empty to have true depth. Only divine or human beings
and the texts they produce- texts made of words, notes, paint, stones, what
have you- can be literally deep or profound. For I attribute depth or profundity to that which is of a truly different order from the surface that
covers and hides it. And it must be the inside and foundation of just that
surface, so that we can gain entrance to it through that particular outside
and through no other. Every depth must be sought through its own proper
surface, which it both denies or negates and supplies with significance:
the surface that hides its own depth is never superficial.
Human beings seem to me the most obvious example of such depth.
All human beings have a surface, namely the face and figure they present.
I personally think that in real life almost all people also have an inside,
their soul, their depth. But there are some famous novels in which characters
are described who are nothing but empty shells. Facades that hide nothing
often flaunt an insidiously unflawed beauty. Against such nearly impenetrable surfaces the people who are attracted break themselves, but if
they do burst through, they fall into an abyss of nothingness.
However, these are fictions, and actual human beings have by the very
fact of their humanity an inner sanctum. We begin by noting, casually,
their face, their demeanor. As our interest awakens we proceed to read more
carefully, to watch their appearance ardently for what it signifies. If we
are lucky, they may open up to us, as we do to them. If we go about it
right, this interpretative process need never come to an end, for the human
inside, or to give it, once again, its proper name, the soul, is a true mystery.
By a true mystery I mean a profundity whose bottom we can never seem
to plumb though we have a persistent faith in its actuality. I think that
for us human beings only depths and mysteries induce viable desire. For
love entirely without longing is not possible among human beings. Many
�BRANN
89
a failure of love follows on the- usually false- opinion that we have exhausted the other person's inside, that there is no further promise of depth.
It is not only in respect to living human beings that depth calls forth
desire. This college would not be the close human community that it is
if you did not get to know some human beings deeply-which is called
friendship. But such love is only the essential by-product (to coin a contradictory phrase) of our philosophical Program, a program that encourages
the love of certain para-human beings. These para-human beings are the
expressions of the human soul, our texts, as well as the things they talk
about.
Let me take a moment to ask whether this particular desire for depth
I keep referring to is common among human beings or even natural. I say
it is absolutely natural and very common. You will see what I mean when
I tell you what I think is the nature of desire. Desire seems to me to be
a kind of negative form or a shaped emptiness in the soul, a place in the
spirit expecting to be filled, a kind of psychic envelope waiting to be stuffed
with its proper contents.
Now take a long leap and ask yourself what a question is. A question
is a negative form or shaped emptiness in the mind, a place in thought
waiting to be filled, a psychic envelope ready to be supplied with its proper
message. Questions therefore have the same structure as desires. In fact
questions are a subspecies of desire: a question is desire directed upon
wisdom or knowledge. Therefore I might go so far as to say that this school
teaches the shaping of desire- because here we practice asking deep questions. Now I think that very many, probably all, human beings would like
to ask such questions if they only knew how. That is why the desire for
depth is both common and natural.
What we most often, or at least most programmatically, ask questions
about are those texts I have been mentioning. As I have intimated, such
a text, particularly a text of words, is a curious kind of being, neither a
living soul nor a mere rigid thing. What a book might be, such that it could
have genuine depth, is a question that should arise over and over again
in the tutorials and the seminars. That books do have depth is shown by
the fact that they induce questions, the directed desire to open them up.
I want to end by giving a sample of a deep text and a demonstration of
the beginning of a reading, a mere knock at its gate, so to speak.
The text is a saying by Heraclitus. Heraclitus flourished about 500 B.C.
He was early among those who inquired into the nature of things, and
he had a contemporary antagonist, Parmenides. Heraclitus said that it is
wise to agree that "All things are one." Parmenides said things that, on
the face of it, seem similar, but whether he meant the same thing as
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
90
Heraclitus, or something opposite or something incomparable- that is a
matter of ever-live debate. In any case, Heraclitus and Parmenides together
embody the great principle of our tradition that I mentioned before; you
might call it the "the principle of responsive differentiation." However, I
shall not try to talk about Heraclitus's actual wisdom tonight; that along
with the previous questions-"What is philosophy?", "What is a solid?",
"What is a cave?", "What is a book?" -I leave to future discussion. I shall
attend only to the preliminaries with which Heraclitus surrounds his
wisdom.
Heraclitus's book is largely lost, though as far as we know it was not
a treatise but a book of sayings. Even in ancient times it had a reputation
for depth; the tragedian Euripides said of it that it required a Delian diverthe divers from the island Delos (which means the "Manifest" or "Clear")
were evidently famous for diving deep and bringing things to light.
The saying I have chosen goes:
001(
&~ou
a'A'AiJ.
~ou
Myou
UKOOOUVTU~
o~o'Aoy&iv oo<p6v &o~tV !:v nciv~a &!vat
Transliterated it reads:
ouk emou alia tou logou akousantas
homologein sophon estin hen panta einai.
On the surface this saying is in Greek and needs to be translated. Since
I have argued that surfaces are, like traditional Japanese packaging, an
integral part of the contents, they must be carefully and patiently undone.
Now to put Heraclitus's Greek into English is, up to a certain point, not
hard. Your Greek manual will tell you about the use of the accusative and
about various infinitives, and your Greek dictionaries will give you the
meaning of "listening," of "wise" (which you are already familiar with in
philosophy), and of "agree."
But then you look up logos. "Logos" is one of the tremendous words
of our tradition, to which it is, once again, my privilege to introduce you.
Without even looking it up, I can give you the following meanings: word
and speech, saying and story, tally and tale, ratio and relation, account
and explanation (that was the meaning which occurred in the word
"ichthyologist"), argument and discussion, reason and reasoning, collection and gathering, the word of God and the son of God. As you Jearn
Greek you will see what it is about the root-meaning of logos that makes
this great scope of significance possible.
But how are you to choose? You are caught in a vicious circle: Unless
�BRANN
91
you know what Heraclitus means by logos you cannot choose the right
English translation, and unless you discover the right English word you
cannot know what he means by his saying. However, sensible people find
ways to scramble themselves out of this bind. Try a meaning that makes
a good immediate sense: choose "reasoning."
Listening not to me but to my reasoning,
it is wise to agree that all things are one.
This yields a saying that is particularly pertinent to us, since it might
be posted over every seminar door. For though we must look into each
other's faces, we must not get stuck on personalities. Each seminar member
has a right to say: "Never mind me, answer my argument." Heraclitus is
introducing a great notion into the Western world here: Not who says it
matters but what is said.
But there is more signifying surface to the saying. Listen to its sound
and notice that in the second line the word homologein sounds like logos.
"Agree" is a good first meaning but it does not preserve the similarity of
sound. Homologein literally means "to say the same." Let me try that, and
for "my reasoning" I will substitute "the Saying."
If you listen not to me but to the Saying,
it is wise to say the same: that all things are one.
Now what sense does that make? What Saying? Whose saying other
than Heraclitus's own? Suppose the translation did make sense, then
Heraclitus is saying that there is a saying that can be heard beyond his
own, a speech to which we must listen, a speaking that it would be the
part of wisdom to echo in what we say. What impersonal speech could
that be? Heraclitus in fact tells us not what the logos is, but what it says,
for he bids us to say the same: "All things are one." What if this saying,
of which no human being is the author, were a power whose saying and
doing were one and the same? What if its speech were an act? Let me play
with a third, somewhat strange, version:
Once you have listened not to me but to the Gathering,
it is wise similarly to gather all things into one.
Here logos is translated as gathering or collection. It is the power that gathers
everything in the world into a unified whole, the organizing power we are
�92
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
invited to imitate by giving a comprehensive account of the universe in
speech. The logos speaks primarily; our logos becomes deep by imitating it.
I think by now the text has begun to draw us through its surface into
its depth. You can see that it demands of you the playful seriousness I mentioned at the beginning, a seriousness that calls out all your capacity for
careful attention to surface detail as well as your willingness to dive into
the depths.
Here I shall stop. But although I am ending, I am not finished- and
neither, of course, are you. If you have in fact listened not only to me but
also to my argument, and if you are possessed by the proper freshman spirit,
now is your moment, the part of the Friday night lecture that is the true
St. John's: the time for questions.
���
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Zuckerman, Elliott
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
Stickney, Cary
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Routt, Deidre
Sachs, Joe
Brann, Eva T. H.
Dougherty, Janet A.
Locke, Patricia M.
Berns, Gisela
Schoener, Abraham
Maschler, Chaninah
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Text
The St. John's Review
Volume XL, number one (1990-91)
Editor
Elliott Zuckerman
Editorial Board
Eva Brann
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
Joe Sachs
Cmy Stickney
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Subscriptions Assistant
Deirdre Routt
The St, John's Review is publishet.·~ three times a year by the Office of the Dean, St. John's
College, Annapolis; Donald J. Maciver, Jr., President; Eva Brann, Dean. For those not on
the distribution list, subscriptions are $15.00 per year. Unsolicited essays, stmies, poems,
and reasoned letters are welcome. Address coiTespondence to the Review, St. John's
College, P.O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404. Back issues are available, at $5.00 per
issue, from the St. John's College Bookstore.
© 1991 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 College Print Shop
�Correction
In the last issue of the Review (Volume XXXIX, number three) the title of the
first essay was printed incorrectly. The con·ect title of the essay by Joe Sachs is
"Antigone: All-Resourceful I Resourceless."
�Contents
1 ...... Bramante and Michelangelo at Saint Peter's
Ralph Lieberman
39. . . . . . Of Lice and Men: Aristotle's Biological Treatises
Linda Wiener
53. . . . . . The God Who Is and the God Who Speaks
Thomas J. Slakey
71 ...... A Meditation on the Present Plight of Philosophy
and the Pursuit of Truth
Monica C. Homyansky
81 . . . . . . Toucan Dreams
James Fox
85. . . . . . St. John's Crossword Number One
Cassandra
��Bramante
and
Michelangelo
at Saint Peter's
Ralph Lieberman
Starting in 1505, and for well over a century after, the church of Saint Peter in
the Vatican was the most important architectural undertaking in Europe. Its
building history is complex, but nothing compared to its diabolically convoluted
design history, which more than one scholar has abandoned in despair. Without
subjecting you to an exhausting presentation of the building's assorted design
stages, I would like to familiarize you with the nature of the problems faced by
the architects of the church, and the architectural historians who choose to study
it.
Donato Bramante was the first architect of new Saint Peter's, but his church
does not exist - in fact a convincing argument can be advanced that it never
did. Nonetheless his first design for it was extremely important. An integral part
of a pivotal moment in Western culture, the Saint Peter's project is a perfect
crystallization of its time, reflecting in its form and scale, among other things, a
dramatic change in the status of the Vatican, a radical break with Christian
architectural tradition, a new attitude toward the Papacy, and a response to the
fall of Constantinople; the design was the culmination of a half century of highly
philosophical architectural theorizing, and the building translated into colossal
scale arrangements that had existed previously only in tiny sketches in which
Leonardo da Vinci wrestled with the most difficult problems of architectural
organization. If we do not consider this complex background, however briefly,
we will misunderstand the building and the accomplishments, as well as the
failures, of its many architects.
Ralph Lieberman is an art historian who lives in North Adams, Massachusetts, and
now teaches at Williams College. This essay is expanded from a lecture first delivered
at St. John's College, Santa Fe, in March, 1988. It will serve as a chapter in a history
of architecture to be called Twenty-Six Buildings.
�2
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
To put the Saint Peter's problem in context, it is necessary to start at the vety
beginning of Christian architecture.
Constantine's first donation to the Church he recognized in 313 was some
imperial real estate at the Lateran. Saint John in the Lateran is the first church in
Christendom and the palace next to it was the first official residence of the Pope
and the headquarters of the Curia. In the course of the Middle Ages, however,
the presence of the Pope notwithstanding, the Lateran slowly yielded its place
as the most important Roman church to the Vatican. There were a number of
reasons for this. One is that the tomb of Saint Peter was a major goal of pilgrims,
and the basilica that enshrines it, built by Constantine a few years after the
Lateran, was the most popular church in the West (Fig. I). The Lateran, on the
other hand, was simply the cathedral of Rome, and could boast nothing to rival
the grave of Saint Peter. Another reason is that the Lateran, on the eastem edge
of the city and well outside the center of the great imperial capital even in
Constantine's day, was farther still from the center of the small town to which
Rome shrank in the Middle Ages (Fig. 2). As the city slowly contracted westward
.77-+ .· ..·::
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(Fig. 1) St. Peter's around 400 (after Krautheimer).
�LIEBERMAN
3
Saint Peter's
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Pantheon
~mperial
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Palatine
City Walls
city Gates
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(Fig. 2) Map of Rome showing the Lateran and the Vatican.
into the bend in the Tiber near the Pantheon, just across the river from the Vatican,
the Lateran was increasingly remote, Saint Peter's more and more convenient.
For much of the fourteenth century the Popes lived in Avignon, and without
the Papal presence the eclipse of the Lateran was accelerated. When the Popes
were firmly re-established in Rome about 1420 the Lateran was still their home,
but in the late 1440s Nicholas V officially moved the Papal residence, which in
effect meant all the apparatus of Church administration, to the Vatican. Saint
�4
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Peter, as the founder and first leader of the Christian community in Rome, was
the first Pope, and the decision of Nicholas V reflects a strong feeling that the
most appropriate headquarters for the Popes was at the Saint's church.
With the Pope and the Curia permanently established next door, Saint Peter's
became the Papal palace church. By 1450 the Constantinian basilica was nearly
1100 years old; fifteenth-century surveys of the building revealed weakened
masonry, subsiding foundations, and walls tilted out of plumb. Furthermore, the
church had no choir- only an apse extended beyond its transept- and was
therefore quite old-fashioned (Fig. 3). In the 1450s Bernardo Rossellino began
a project for Nicholas V that was to strengthen the Constantinian church, and
bring it up to date, by jacketing the entire building with new walls, constructing
a larger transept, and adding a choir (Fig. 4 ). Three walls of the enlarged transept
and new choir were to stand outside the old basilica, so work could be started
without requiring the destruction of any part of the Constantinian church. We
can see what was built of the Rossellino project in drawings by Maerten van
Heemskerck that show new Saint Peter's under construction in the early 1530s
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(Fig. 3) Plan of Saint Peter's (after Krautheimer).
�LIEBERMAN
5
(Fig. 5). In an unanticipated way the Rossellino transept and choir were to be
determining factors in the design of new Saint Peter's, for the need to make
economical use of available foundations established the dimensions of parts of
Bramante's plan (see Fig. 12).
Work on the Rossellino project ceased with the death of Nicholas V in 1455;
it was taken up again briefly under Paul II in the late 1460s, but most of the Popes
who reigned for the half century after the death of Nicholas V preferred to
concentrate their major building efforts on improvements to the Vatican palace,
and put off dealing with Saint Peter's because it was going to be extremely
expensive, and meant tampering with the Constantinian church.
Julius II, elected in 1503, was not a man to tum from hard challenges; he
thought in very grand terms and he refused to recognize financial limitations.
Around 1505 he decided not to bother repairing or modernizing Old Saint Peter's,
ordered the demolition of Constantine's church, and commissioned a new one.
Driven by an ambitious vision of Papal Imperialism, Julius had as his determined
policy the expansion of the political sway of the Papacy, by the sword if need
•
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(Fig. 4) Rosselli no project for remodeling of Saint Peter's
(alter Heydenreich).
�6
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
(Fig. 5) Saint Peter's under construction. Drawing by Maerten van
Heemskerck. Berlin-Dahlem Museum.
(Fig. 6) Istanbul. Hagia Sophia. Exterior.
�LIEBERMAN
7
be, and he saw himself, by no means inaccurately, as the equal of any European
king or emperor. In his reign it was understood that in selecting for himself a
Papal name unused since the mid-fourth century, one that inevitably evoked the
Caesars, Julius was making a declaration of his ambitions. And he wanted the
new Saint Peter's, and for that matter the entire Vatican complex, to be the
unambiguous architectural expression of papal power and authority. There had
been no comparable imperial church construction for nearly a millennium, not
since Justinian's Hagia Sophia (Fig. 6) was built in the 530s. Behind Julius II's
Saint Peter's project there may in fact be the specific influence of Hagia Sophia:
not its form, but its scale. Constantinople had fallen to the Ottoman Turks in
1453, and Hagia Sophia, the largest building in the world, and surely also the
most splendid (Fig. 7), was quickly converted to a Mosque and lost to Christianity forever. It would not have been out of character for Julius II to think that
the honor of possessing the biggest building in the world ought to be restored to
the Church, and that such a building should be in Rome, over the tomb of the
Apostle charged by Christ to found the Church. That the Apostle's church was
also the Pope's was a factor as well, for Julius II identified with Saint Peter's in
a particularly strong way. He had in mind for himself a very elaborate tomb,
commissioned from Michelangelo in 1505, that was intended to stand prominently in the building that was to be his own tomb church as much as Saint
Peter's. Furthermore, it may be that with the fall of Constantinople and the end
of the Roman Empire in the East, Julius felt that the mantle of Constantine, as
well as that of Saint Peter, now rested on his shoulders; by totally replacing one
of the two great Roman churches founded by Constantine, Julius quite strategi-
cally put himself in a small club of imperial church builders.
In many respects the razing of Old Saint Peter's was one of the most fateful
steps ever taken by a Pope. It would be too much to contend that it provoked the
Reformation, but the sale of indulgences to raise money for the ruinously
expensive project antagonized many people, Luther chief among them, and the
increasingly worldly concerns of the Imperial Church, of which new Saint
Peter's was the symbol, inspired the Protestant revolt.
For the design of his new church Julius called on Donato Brarnante. Bam
near Urbina around 1444, Bramante was originally trained as a painter, but we
know little of his early career. By the late 1470s he was in the employ of the
Duke of Milan, and he remained in that city working as a painter - and
increasingly as an architect- until1499, when the French attacked and occupied
the city, bringing to an end the brilliant Milanese court.
Bramante is first documented in Rome in 1500, painting a fresco in the
Lateran. Very soon, however, he turned his attention exclusively to buildings,
and in the years from around 1501 until his death in 1514, he became the most
important architect in the capital.
�8
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
(Fig. 7) Istanbul. Hagia Sophia. Interior.
Nothing in Bramante's Milanese work prepares us for what he built in Rome.
In fact, his emergence as the first great High Renaissance architect at the age of
nearly sixty is one of the major surprises of the epoch. The change in Bramante's
style is often cited as evidence of the power of Rome to stimulate creative artists
and bring out their potential. Had he never come to Rome, Bramante would have
remained a second-rate Milanese architect; in the last fifteen years of his life,
which he spent in the ancient capital, he established, if he did not invent, the
High Renaissance architectural style.
�LIEBERMAN
9
(Fig. 8) Rome. San Pietro in Montorio, Tempietto.
The surviving building with which Bramante gave the clearest evidence of
his new style is the so-called Tempietto (literally "little temple") at the church of
San Pietro in Montorio (Fig. 8), on the spot long thought, inconectly, to be the
place of Saint Peter's martyrdom. It is worth a careful look.
Composed of a two-story domed cylinder surrounded by a single-story
colonnade, the Tempietto is characterized by a bold new treatment of volume.
Niches with scallop-shell inserts reveal the thickness of the cylinder walls. The
dome that caps the cylinder is raised on a drum in an arrangement that has no
precedent in ancient round temples with colonnades. The architect appears to be
thinking here of a miniature Pantheon atop a circular Roman temple, for the drum
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
10
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�LIEBERMAN
11
(Fig. 10) The Tempietto in a circular courtyard (after Bruschi).
of the second story of the Tempietto is approximately as high as the radius of the
hemispherical dome, the proportions found at the Pantheon. The powerful
interpenetration of the cylinder and the colonnade gives the Tempietto a new and
dramatic sculptural mass, its elements conceived as fully three-dimensional
solids.
As it appears today the Tempietto does not reflect Bramante's intentions either
accurately or entirely, in part because it has been changed (the dome now has a
higher profile than it did originally, and the present lantern is a seventeenth-century addition that is out of keeping with the rest of the building), and in part
because the little temple itself is only the hub of a project that was never
completed. In 1537, nearly twenty-five years after Bramante 's death, Sebastiana
Serlio published a plan of the Tempietto (Fig. 9) that shows it surrounded by a
circular courtyard in which he says Bramante intended it to stand. There was to
have been a ring of columns, half again as thick as the columns in the Tempietto
and therefore higher in the same proportion, that lay on the same radii as the
columns of the temple itself; niches in the encircling wall correspond to those of
the Tempietto. The circular courtyard may be considered the Tempietto turned
inside out; the play of mirrored forms that enclose space on the one hand and
shape a solid object on the other, would have made the completed project
astonishing (Fig. I 0).
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
12
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(Fig. 11) Leonardo da Vinci. Drawing of churches with circular plans.
Paris, lnstitut de France.
�LIEBERMAN
13
The courtyard that appears in Serlio 's plan would not fit in the space between
the Tempietto and the flank of San Pietro in Montorio, which makes one wonder
whether it could ever have been a real project. It is impossible to determine now
what Bramante 's expectations were: perhaps he made a complete design although he knew from the stat1 that only its central element could be built. On the
other hand, as we shall see, it would have been in character for him to expect
that someday the church would be tmn down to make room for his courtyard.
While the influence of ancient Roman buildings was surely important in the
development of BratUante's style after 1500, it does not explain everything, for
his works in the papal city depend in important ways on ideas he brought with
him from Milan, ideas that must have their origin in Leonardo da Vinci's musings
on architecture. In the years that Bramante was in Milan, Leonardo was also
there, engaged in a number of projects, some architectural, for the Milanese
Dukes, and it is beyond doubt that the two men knew each other well. Leonardo
intended to write a treatise on architecture, and for years he collected his
thoughts, making notes and drawings of various building types for it. Certainly
it was he who pondered the possibilities of the centrally planned church more
thoroughly than anyone before him, and in scores of drawings he indulged his
imagination with elegant anangements unassociated with any actual architectural projects (Fig. II). The nature of Leonardo's contribution to the growth of
Bramante 's ideas about architecture is difficult to establish with certainty, but an
excellent case can be made for its having been fundamental. Before Bramante
went to Milan, he seems to have cared little about architecture, and there is no
evidence that he worked at it in any way. After sixteen years in the company of
Leonardo, Bramante was a busy architect. When he left for Rome he was fully
primed with Leonardo's profound ideas; in the Tempietto, and in Saint Peter's,
Bramante reveals himself to have been more than just the principal beneficiary
of Leonardo's thoughts: it fell to him to serve as the instrument of their
realization. In Rome Bramante had a fundamental advantage over Leonardo, the
one thing without which even the greatest architectural ideas are still-born: the
opportunity to build.
When Julius II selected Bramante to design the new church of Saint Peter he
brought into his service an architect who understood his vision. The two men
were ideally suited to each other; a pontiff who was prepared to tear down the
great Constantinian basilica found an architect who was not the least bit sentimental about hallowed buildings or doubtful about the wisdom of replacing
them. A contemporary satirical poem has Bramante trying to convince Saint Peter
to authorize the demolition of Heaven so it could be reconstructed more commodiously and in a better style. In fact Bramante's wild enthusiasm for tearing
down old buildings and constructing new ones in a more lavish and up-to-date
manner outran what even Julius was prepared to do at the Vatican; when the
architect suggested that the bones of Saint Peter be relocated so the new church
�14
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
could be positioned more favorably on the site, the Pope drew the line. Although
Bramante was sometimes reckless in his hurry to replace old buildings with new
ones- several of his buildings, Saint Peter's in particular, had to be strengthened
considerably as work progressed, and some of them actually suffered partial
collapse- his haste reveals the feverish energy and eagerness for the transformation of the Vatican that characterized the ten-year reign of Julius II, who was
notorious for wanting everything done immediately. It was in this hot-house
atmosphere that the High Renaissance style matured; in the same years that
Bramante was at work on Saint Peter's Michelangelo began work on the tomb
of Julius II, then painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and Raphael painted the
Vatican Stanze.
Julius II and Bramante were both over sixty when they began to collaborate
on the new church, and they knew that elaborate and expensive projects such as
theirs had a way of being altered as time went by. Each, for his own personal
reasons, therefore felt the necessity of making a bold and ilTevocable start at
Saint Peter's to guarantee that subsequent generations would be unable to
abandon their grand plan. The start they made was surely dramatic - and if
nothing else the demolition of the Constantinian basilica guaranteed that there
would be a new church- but it failed in its specific aim, at least from the point
of view of Bramante, for the design of the building was altered frequently while
it was under construction, and what was finally finished in the 1620s bears almost
no resemblance to his original project.
Bramante's Saint Peter's is enormously difficult to study in detail. This is not
simply because the church does not exist. Nor is the obstacle that construction
had advanced only very little before both the architect and the patron were dead
and the project altered, for this would not necessarily prevent us from considering
their intentions. The problem is that the architect seems never to have had an
exact and definite idea of what he was going to do, or what he would be permitted
to do. After building had begun Bramante frequently changed his mind (or was
told to change it), modified his earlier ideas, altered the design, and offered new
solutions to the Pope. Although something about the form and character of the
new church was clearly implied at the beginning of its construction, much was
also left vague and unspecified. As a result, students of the most ambitious of all
Renaissance architectural projects must deal with a bewildering welter of ideas
and conflicting interpretations of Bramante's intentions; the fact that many of
them are mutually exclusive is no argument against their authenticity, for the
evidence is clear that the architect tried out many ideas, and when one talks about
"Bramante's design" for Saint Peter's one must be prepared to be asked "which
one?" I shall deal here primarily with his first plan; even though Bramante was
forced almost immediately to give it up, it is more interesting and important than
any subsequent version. While many of its details are vague, it has a significant
place in Renaissance architectural thought.
�LIEBERMAN
15
By the end of the fifteenth century there was a thousand-year-old tradition of
church building in which longitudinal and central plans had firmly fixed places.
As early as the fourth century, domed central-plan churches, which tended to be
much smaller than longitudinal ones, were associated with places of martyrdom
or burial. For parish churches and cathedrals, on the other hand, where the
primary concern was to house a congregation, there was a clear preference for
longitudinal forms.
In the fifteenth century central plans became popular among architectural
theorists for philosophical reasons. Alberti suggested that the circle could be used
to serve as a symbol of the divine in Christian buildings, suggesting that "Nature
delights principally in round Figures," as proof of which he cites the Stars (by
which he means the Sun and Moon) and birds' nests, among other things. Circular
plans nevertheless remained extremely rare, but a centrally planned building may
also be polygonal, or have four equal short arms extending from a crossing that
is usually, but not always, covered by a dome, an arrangement known as a Greek
cross. While the four arms of such a church conespond roughly to a nave,
transepts, and choir of a longitudinal church, their equal size, and the relatively
greater importance of the crossing, give both the plan and the interior of a
centralized church a very different character. In a longitudinal church the
worshiper is drawn down the longer axis and the primary ceremonial approach
to the altar is clearly established, with the clergy in the choir and crossing and
the congregation in the nave. In a Greek-cross church, on the other hand, the
worshiper is not directed in the same way; the interior is perceived equally no
matter which ann is entered, and no major processional axis asserts itself.
The centralized plan was understood to be completely compatible with
Christian theology, in fact to celebrate God in a more direct and obvious way
than was possible in a longitudinal church. Proponents of this view rejected the
notion that the altar should be as far from the church entrance as possible because
God is infinitely far from us, arguing instead that it should be placed at the center,
just as God is at the center of the Universe, with all things emanating from him
and all things returning to him like the radii of a circle. In the late fifteenth century
and the first years of the sixteenth, the central plan was so popular, and so
enthusiastically regarded as the most perfect form of Christian church, that it is
unthinkable that in 1505 Saint Peter's could have been designed according to
any other plan. At the same time, however, there was another highly significant
factor that bore on the choice of plan for new Saint Peter's: Old Saint Peter's.
The church that Julius II tore down had been built to house a major burial
site, but rather than a centralized domed structure Constantine's architects
had designed a longitudinal basilica, positioned so that the Saint's tomb lay
on the chord of the apse, with a transept to accommodate crowds of visitors
(see Fig. 3). It was likely the Emperor's concern to enshrine the spot quickly
and economically that resulted in the choice of a timber-roofed basilica, a
�16
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
much simpler sort of structure than one with a dome, and one that allowed a
large area to be enclosed at relatively low cost. By the time Julius II
demolished Constantine's church, the longitudinal basilica, originally selected for practical considerations, had been firmly identified with Saint
Peter's for over a thousand years, and the ground it covered had become
sacred. Furthermore, there were hundreds of ancient graves in the church; for
several centuries after it was completed Old Saint Peter's served as a covered
cemetery, and by the late Middle Ages was so crowded with the bodies of
Christians who wished to lie near the Apostle that further burials were
permitted only in exceptional cases.
That the most important Christian tomb in Rome had been covered by a
longitudinal church rather than a dome was a rather anomalous situation, and for
more than a century it resulted in strong disagreement over the form the new
church was to be given. Bramante's first designs for Saint Peter's called for a
... ,
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(Fig. 12) Plan showing Constantin ian Saint Peter's, the Rossellino
choir and transept, and a centralized plan for the new church
(after Metternich).
�LIEBERMAN
17
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(Fig.13) Bramante. Drawing for Saint Peter's. Florence, Uffizi.
centrally planned church, and in favoring such a building he was following the
Christian tradition of domed churches over tomb sites as well as contemporary
ideas about religious architecture that had developed in the course of the
Renaissance; but there were others- the Pope apparently among them- who,
no matter how strongly drawn to a centralized church, felt that new Saint Peter's
had to have a longitudinal plan because the Constantinian church did. With the
dome of the new church to be centered over the Saint's tomb, even a very large
centralized building could not cover all of the original nave; ground once within
Constantine's church would therefore lie outside the new one (Fig. 12). Extending one arm of the new church to form a nave would, on the other hand, cover
all the old ground, and Bramante was under great pressure to build a longitudinal
church. He tried to resist that pressure, however, and from the time construction
on the church began until his death, he continued to hope that the church would
be a Greek cross.
Bramante began the construction of the new church in such a way that he
never really committed himself to a longitudinal plan, first building the parts that
would be included whichever form the church ultimately took. The essential
feature of the new church was the huge dome over Saint Peter's tomb. The first
elements to ris'e were the four crossing piers that carry it, and then these had to
be connected by arches (see Fig. 5). This was required whether the building
would be perfectly centralized, or its eastern arm extended to form the nave of
a longitudinal church. The fact that at a certain point after construction began
�18
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Bramante increased the size of the piers and changed the design of their elevation
does not indicate anything about the plan he hoped to see at the church.
There are three pieces of direct evidence that serve us in reconstructing
Bramante's first project for Saint Peter's. The first is a half-plan drawing in the
Uffizi in Florence, known from its catalogue number there as Uffizi I (Fig. 13):
the only sheet generally accepted as by Bramante's own hand.
The second source of knowledge about Bramante's initial intentions - a
medal by Caradosso struck to commemorate the laying of the cornerstone in
April, 1506 (Fig. 14)- is the pJimary means we have for establishing how the
exterior of the new church was to look. In the reduction of the huge building to
an image only a few inches high, much was surely simplified and lost, but the
medal shows a building that corresponds quite closely to Uffizi 1 in the projection
of the anns of the cross beyond the square fmmed by the corner towers, the
free-standing piers between the towers and the anns, and its general propmtions.
The third major visual source is a pair of woodcuts in Serlio's treatise that
shows Bramante's dome in plan and elevation (Figs. 15 & 16). Bramante is
supposed to have said that at Saint Peter's he wished to place the Pantheon (Fig.
17) over the vaults of the Temple of Peace -by which he meant the coffered
(Fig. 14) Caradosso Medal.
�LIEBERMAN
19
15. Plan of Bramante's dome for Saint Peter's. From Serlio, Cinque
Libri deii'Architettura.
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�20
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
(Fig. 17) Rome. The Pantheon.
bane! vaults in the side bays of the Basilica of Maxentius (Fig. 18). The dome
of Saint Peter's was to be almost exactly the diameter of the Pantheon, and
therefore the biggest built in nearly fourteen centuries. From Serlio 's illustration
it is clear that the architect had the form of the Pantheon quite specifically in
mind, for his dome is essentially the Pantheon with its rotunda ringed with
columns, a lantern placed on its top, and raised high in the air on the crossing
piers. To some extent the design of Saint Peter's is an enlargement of ideas we
have already noted in the Tempietto (Fig. 8), where Brarnante placed a miniature
Pantheon on a circular colonnaded temple.
That Brarnante and Julius II would feel themselves in competition with the
Pantheon is understandable, for the awesome Hadrianic temple was the greatest
ancient building to survive the Middle Ages, and a Pope of imperial ambitions
who used architecture to express the power of the Church would inevitably think
of trying to surpass it. If Julius had in mind a building that would also outdo
Hagia Sophia, it would have been in keeping with his personality to think of
killing two birds with one dome.
When Bramante's autograph drawing is doubled (Fig. 19), the result is a plan
based on a Greek cross contained, except for the apsidal ends of each arm, within
a square. In the four corners, formed by the central cross and the circumscribed
square, are pmtial Greek crosses of a design quite similar to the central one,
�LIEBERMAN
21
(Fig. 18) Rome. The Basilica of Maxentius.
(Fig. 19) Central plan based on doubling of Uffizi 1 (see Fig. 13).
�22
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
(Fig. 20) Raphael. School of Athens. Rome. Vatican Stanze.
square bases for bell towers, and niches open on the exterior of the church. The
plan is very elegant, and the way in which the smaller crosses are placed in the
angles between the anns of the central one is extremely well worked out. While
there were a few Greek-cross churches built in the last decades of the fifteenth
century, none ever looked even remotely like this plan. Bramante 's inspiration
must have been Leonm·do, who frequently sketched central-plan churches with
superbly interlocking architectural forms (Fig. 11).
A visitor to the church in the Uffizi 1 plan would have been in a space
composed of roughly identical units that grow in size toward the center, with the
main cross more than twice the size of the four partial ones. A similar sort of
arrangement is to be found in the design of the Tempietto, where the careful
scaling of the columns of the temple itself and those of the circular colonnade of
the courtyard established compelling resonances between identical forms of
changing size. At the Tempietto it was carried out on a minute scale, at the Vatican
in heroic proportions. In one the forms expand toward the center, in the other
they expand toward the edges- but both are based on the smne idea.
We do not have much direct evidence to suggest how Bramante intended to
articulate the interior of Saint Peter's, but there are echoes of his ideas in Raphael's
School of Athens (Fig. 20), painted in late 1509 or 1510, when Brarnante was hard
at work on the church. The architect appears on the right side of the fresco as Euclid,
holding compasses and leaning over a slate (Fig. 21). Raphael was a friend, and
perhaps a kinsman, ofBramante, and would succeed him as architect of Saint Peter's,
�LIEBERMAN
23
(Fig. 21) Raphael. Schoof of Athens, detail. Rome. Vatican Stanze.
�24
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
(Fig. 22) Michelangelo. Plan for Saint Peter's.
(Fig. 23) Bramante. Drawing for Saint Peter's. Florence, Uffizi.
�LIEBERMAN
25
so he was surely well-infmmed about Bramante 's ideas. Vasari goes so far as to say
thatBramante himself designed the background architecture in the School ofAthens,
but even if he did not, there is little doubt that the deep space covered by a coffered
barrel vault with a large dome over the crossing reflects Bramante's thoughts about
the church interior.
The most startling thing about Uffizi I is that no large church could ever have
been built according to it. While it has a lacy openness that is very appealing in
a design on paper, with virtually every bit of solid masonry hollowed out by
niches and thinned to an extreme degree, it is the plan of an impossible building.
The four central piers were intended to support a dome as large as the Pantheon,
but they could never have done any such thing. Even Serlio, the first and most
enthusiastic publicist of Bramante 's ideas, had to allow that the design of the
crossing piers and dome was not a very great one, saying that it would have been
better to build it on the ground than on piers connected with arches. Nothing
suggests the weakness of Bramante's church so clearly as a comparison of Uffizi
1 with Michelangelo's plan (Fig, 22); the proportion of solid to space makes the
point better than words can. Yet Bramante's plan is much more interesting that
Michelangelo's. If architecture is an art of the possible, then Bramante's design
is absurd; but if architecture is understood also as an abstract discipline of which
the fruits must not necessarily be physically possible to be great, then the Uffizi
I plan is one of the authentic masterpieces of Renaissance thought. In the
superbly coherent interlocking of its principal forms, in the careful shaping of
its supporting units to the spaces they create, in the clear hierarchy of its interior
voids, in the tense balance between the main cross and the slightly smaller square
that nearly contains it, and in the penetration of the exterior by niches between
the apses and the corner towers, Bramante 's plan is a triumph of the imagination.
The most influential element in Bramante 's plan was the design of the four
main crossing piers. Their shape was very carefully studied by Bramante. A
drawing in Florence (Fig, 23) shows that he worked on them on a survey of the
Constantin ian basilica and the Rosselli no choir. Bramante 'spiers are remarkably
effective in achieving the transition from the crossing to the dome, and they were
recognized as a major contribution by all the architects who subsequently worked
on the church, Although it was necessary to strengthen them, their basic form
was consistently retained. Even Michelangelo, who radically altered virtually
everything that was left of Bramante 's design in the late 1540s, did not modify
their plan appreciably.
For a reconstruction of how Bramante intended the exterior of the church to
look we do not have nearly as much to go on as we would like. While Uffizi 1
is fascinating for its organization and sense of developing spaces, what we can
determine of the elevation atop it is another matter. Perhaps the architect's
reputation suffers because the Caradosso medal (Fig. 14) is an inadequate means
to convey to us his ideas for the outside of the church, but even allowing for the
�26
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
(Fig. 24) Agostino Veneziano. Engraving after Caradosso Medal.
impossibility of showing Bramante 's scheme in a very small relief, the medal
presents a building one would not particularly wish to see full size. While the
idea of the Pantheon raised high in the air is very interesting and was eventually
to prove effective, Bramante's organization of the forms that were to have held
it up is not compelling. From the medal, or engravings made after it (Fig. 24), it
is clear that for the exterior of the building his imagination had failed him, and
he could only think in terms of stacking elements one on top of another. This is
most apparent in the ends of the arms, particularly where the half dome over the
apse is fitted under a pediment, its lantern breaking into the triangle above. The
medal shows one of the arms seen straight on, and in this view the array of domes
and half-domes of three different sizes is out of control, especially where the
domes over the subsidiary crosses seem squashed between the corner towers and
the main arm.
�LIEBERMAN
27
The odd dichotomy between Uffizi I and Bramante's elevation reveals
that while he could draw superb designs and marshal spaces in a powerful
way, he was not equally capable of arranging the solids that create them. The
tightly interconnected and related interior spaces do not translate well into
exterior volumes, and had it been built according to Bramante 's intentions,
Saint Peter's would have been a rather unsuccessful building from the
outside. It is my somewhat heretical view that Uffizi I is brilliant because
Bramante had Leonardo's ideas to go on, while for the elevation of the
building he was on his own. This is to assume that Leonardo, who never got
to build any of his circular designs and therefore never had to work out the
elevations over his sketched plans, could have solved the problems to which
Bramante was unequal. I am persuaded that such an assumption is warranted:
Leonardo could accomplish virtually anything he set his mind to.
Nothing reveals the problems of studying Saint Peter's as clearly as the fact
that a plan preserved by Serlio, who attributed it to Raphael (Fig. 25), is very
close to a drawing attributed to Bramante 's circle (Fig. 26) that appears to show
his second design for the church. This design, still in some respects close to
Leonardo, is not nearly so striking as Uffizi I, and the addition of colonnaded
ambulatories around the ends of the arms is the first step in what was to be a
steady process of obscuring the great coherence of the original idea.
When Bramante died in 1514 the construction of Saint Peter's had still not
progressed to the point where a final decision about the plan had to be made, and
disagreement over a centralized as opposed to a longitudinal church continued.
But that was not the only problem. Because Bramante's design was structurally
inadequate, and had to be strengthened by thickening many of its elements, the
proportions of the building began to go awry, and the architects involved with
the church realized that its interior was not going to be very effective. Several of
them struggled bravely to organize the huge building, but there was nobody
gifted enough to accomplish it; some of the ideas that were suggested are the
clearest imaginable evidence of a severe crisis of inspiration, if not of brains.
Bramante was succeeded as chief architect of Saint Peter's by Raphael, but
other architects also submitted designs for the church. Raphael, probably under
pressure, accepted what it seems Bramante never would, and planned a Latincross church. The design that is preserved by Serlio shows that Raphael simply
added a long nave to one arm of Bramante's second design (Fig. 27), to which
he may have contributed. At the same time Giuliano da Sangallo suggested more
radical changes by offering a plan that preserves the Rossellino choir and retains
the transepts from Bramante's design and adding a nave (Fig. 28). Giuliano's
nephew, Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, contemplated extending the church
by the addition of a long nave with a line of domes, at the same time retuming
to something closer to Uffizi I for the transept arms and choir (Fig. 29).
�28
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
(Fig. 25) Design for Saint Peter's. From Serlio, Cinque Libri
deii'Architettura.
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.
(Fig. 26) Circle of Bramante. Plan for Saint Peter's. Collection of Mr.
& Mrs. Paul Mellon.
�29
LIEBERMAN
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(Fig. 27) Raphael. Plan for Saint Peter's. From Serlio, Cinque Libri
deii'Architettura.
�30
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
(Fig. 28) Giuliano da Sangallo. Plan for Saint Peter's.
Florence, Uffizi.
(Fig. 29) Antonio da Sangallo the Younger. Plan for Saint Peter's.
Florence, Uffizi.
�LIEBERMAN
31
(Fig. 30) Antonio da Sangallo. Plan of Saint Peter's. Engraving.
1 1) H. \I .\
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(Fig. 31) Antonio da Sangallo. Facade elevation of Saint Peter's.
Engraving.
�32
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
When Raphael died in 1520 Antonio da Sangallo the Younger became chief
architect. After a period of uncertainty, he anived at a longitudinal design that
was for nearly two decades the official one. Of this we know rather a lot, for
plans and elevations of it were engraved and published (Figs. 30 & 31 ), and a
huge and very detailed model of it was constructed (Fig. 32), no doubt in an
attempt to bind future generations unalterably to the design.
Sangallo's plan shows Bramante's original piers much thickened, and ambulatories around the transepts and choir that are a variation on Bramante's second
plan. Sangallo tried to preserve the feeling of a centralized church at the same
time he extended one arm to form a nave, for the mass and scale of the building
is greatest in the area where Bramante's first project would have stood, but the
arrangement is not very compelling. The nave is narrower than-the crossing, and
the nave dome therefore smaller than the crossing dome. Perhaps Sangallo was
thinking of Bramante 's sequence of similar shapes that grow larger toward the
crossing, but this plan is not particularly exciting.
A glance at Sangallo's model makes it clear that the difficulty of treating a
large extelior was not a problem for Bramante only. Sangallo too was unable to
exercise control over large exterior forms, which he tended to trivialize by
(Fig. 32) Model of Antonio da Sangallo's design for Saint Peter's.
Vatican Museum.
�LIEBERMAN
33
coveting them with story upon story of columns. As we were with the Bramante
design, here too we should be grateful that the church was never completed
according to the Sangallo scheme.
Sangallo's assistant at Saint Peter's, Baldassare Peruzzi, seems to have been
unhappy with the official design, and constantly studied the various problems
connected with the building. He probably considered more possibilities than any
other architect involved with the church. Although he seems to have hoped to
re-establish the Greek cross, Peruzzi also considered longitudinal groin-vaulted
plans similar to Roman baths (Fig. 33), or vaulted and lined with colonnades like
some Roman basilicas (Fig. 34), or combinations of vaults and domes (Fig. 35).
There is no clearer indication of the difficult situation in which architects of the
1520s, '30s, and early '40s found themselves than the Pemzzi drawings; the
official Sangallo plan was very unsatisfying, but nobody knew what to do about
it.
In an attempt to establish his design for all time, Sangallo spent a lot of time
and money on the model, but work on the church itself did not progress very far,
and as most of the work since the start of constmction had been done around the
crossing, there was still nothing to constitute an irrevocable commitment to a
longitudinal plan.
At the death of Antonio da Sangallo in 1546, Michelangelo received the
appointment as chief architect of Saint Peter's, and with him the church finally
acquired an architect with a vision monumental enough to cope with it. Neither
Bramante nor those who worked on the church in the thhty years following his
death had a clear idea how to combine huge scale and the classical orders;
Michelangelo did. As a sculptor he was the only person capable of achieving the
gigantic form of David, and as a fresco painter the only one whose visionary
figures could grow to fit the dimensions of the Sistine Chapel. In his dramatic
simplifications of Saint Peter's and the enlargement of its elements to suit its
size, Michelangelo reveals the same ease with heroic proportions he had already
demonstrated in two other media.
When he arrived at Saint Peter's Michelangelo was seventy-one, and without
question the most authmitative artist alive. He did not like the Sangallo design
at all- he dismissed the complex interiors as places in which cut-purses would
lurk and nuns be raped. Furthe1more, he loathed Bramante, and was still nursing
a grudge against him in the early 1550s, nearly forty years after his hated rival's
death, when he told his biographer Ascanio Condivi that it was Bramante who
had thwarted his plan for the tomb of Julius II, and who had gotten the Pope to
force the painting of the Sistine Chapel on him. Confounding the expectation
that he would seek to obliterate every trace of Bramante at Saint Peter's,
Michelangelo insisted that the idea of a central plan had been a noble one, and
managed, by the authority of his views, to get a succession of Popes to agree to
reinstating it. Furthermore, he was granted a privilege extended to none of his
�34
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
(Fig. 33) Baldassare Peruzzi. Drawing for Saint Peter's.
Florence, Uffizi.
(Fig. 34) Baldassare Peruzzi. Drawing for Saint Peter's.
Florence, Uffizi.
�LIEBERMAN
35
(Fig. 35) Baldassare Peruzzi. Drawing for Saint Peter's.
Florence, Uffizi.
predecessors: permission to tear down some of what had already been constructed. He had no patience at all with the fussy design into which Sangallo had
weakened Bramante's ideas, and removed the outer walls of the ambulatories
around the ends of three of the mms. With a single stroke of the brush he filled
in the rings of their ineffectual interior piers (Fig. 22), fusing them into exterior
walls and imposing clarity on the arms of the cross.
Michelangelo made his greatest contribution to Saint Peter's on the exterior,
where he supplied the monumentality of vision necessary to make mere size
effective (Fig. 36); Sangallo's tiers of columns were replaced by a single gigantic
order, and the mass of the building revealed by carefully controlled layering of
nearly sculptural forms (Fig. 37).
The history of Saint Peter's before Michelangelo demonstrates that it is one
thing to revive the classical orders and decide to build the world's largest church,
quite another to fuse those two aspirations in a coherent and effective way. It
took more than forty years for the Popes to find an architect who instinctively
knew the appropriate way to use a revived classical language on a colossal
building. Michelangelo's predecessors at the church, even the most gifted of
them, could merely build big; he solved the problem of Saint Peter's because he
could think big.
�36
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
(Fig. 36) Rome. Saint Peter's. Exterior.
Despite his preferences, and the fact that it was he who saved Saint Peter's
from almost certain disaster, not even Michelangelo could establish the central
plan irrevocably; the determination to see all the ground of Constantine's church
covered would eventually prove too strong. Perhaps if Michelangelo had lived
to be 150 he might have seen the church completed beyond the practical
possibility of alteration, but he died too young, in 1564, a few weeks short of
eighty-nine, leaving the attic, the dome, and the facade of the church unfinished.
In the decades that followed, Michelangelo's design for the attic was changed
by Pirro Ligorio (see Fig. 36) and the shape of the dome by Giacomo della Porta.
The commitment to a central plan held for a while, but resistance to it grew
steadily, and because of this very little work was done on Michelangelo's facade:
no sense putting up something that would have to be torn down in the event that
the final decision favored a longitudinal church. After nearly a hundred years,
then, the plan of the church was still being debated.
�37
LIEBERMAN
(Fig. 37) Rome. Saint Peter's. Exterior.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
38
The matter was finally resolved in the second decade of the seventeenth
century when Carlo Mademo extended the east arm into a banel-vaulted nave
with three aisle bays (Fig. 38), but not to the glory of anyone. As it now stands
Saint Peter's is not on the whole a great church, for it shows too clearly the
debates and uncertainty that marked its long building history. But parts of it are
surely great; the two geniuses who presided there- one in person, the other in
spirit -left their marks. Michelangelo's is much easier to find, but buried deep
in the heart of the crossing is still to be discerned a distant echo of Leonardo's
extraordinary visions.
(Fig. 38) Plan of Saint Peter's.
�Of Lice and Men:
Aristotle's Biological Treatises
Linda Wiener
As a student studying to be a biologist and an entomologist, my only contact with
the biological writings of Aristotle were brief and generally disparaging comments made at the beginnings of my textbooks or at the beginnings of lecture
courses by my professors. They presented Aristotle as a rigid thinker who was
generally wrong and who singlehandedly prevented progress in biology for over
a thousand years with the weight of his authority. I was teaching the freshman
laboratory as anew faculty member at St. John's College in Santa Fe when I first
came into contact with some actual writings of Aristotle. I was very impressed
by the few passages from Parts of Animals that we read there. This stimulated
me to embark on a further study of Aristotle's biological treatises. After more
than a year of this study, I find that I am not in agreement with my biology
textbooks and professors, but am more inclined to agree with the following
statement by Charles Darwin. This comes from a letter that Darwin wrote to
William Ogle upon reading Ogle's then new translation of Aristotle's Parts of
Animals. Darwin wrote: "From quotations I had seen, I had a high notion of
Aristotle's merits, but I had not the most remote notion what a wonderful man
he was. Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different
ways, but they were mere schoolboys to Old Atistotle."
I suggest that these very different opinions of Aristotle's biological writings stem from the fact that Darwin had actually read some of them, and my
Linda Wiener is an entomologist who is now a Tutor at St. John's College, Santa Fe.
This lecture was delivered at the Santa Fe campus in February, 1987.
�40
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
biology teachers were working with received opinions. I find it difficult to
believe that a practicing biologist would be unimpressed with the scope and
quality of Aristotle's achievements as a biologist. What I would like to do in
this paper is give the reader an introduction to the contents of Aristotle's
biological treatises, as well as an appreciation of their significance, both from
a modern perspective and from the perspective of his own time, and comment
on how knowledge of the biological writings can help us understand the rest
of his philosophy.
Why should I believe that the biological wlitings are so significant? Fully one
third of the surviving works of Alistotle are biological. These include three major
treatises: Histmy of Animals, Parts of Animals, and Generation of Animals. In
addition, there are some minor biological treatises: Progression of Animals,
Motion ofAnimals, and a collection of short works called the ParvaNatura. Also,
both De Anima and the Physics contain much biological material. There are
references, by Aristotle himself, and other classical authors, to a number of
additional treatises which have since been lost. These include works on plants,
nutrition, and diseases of animals, and a large illustrated atlas of animal anatomy.
I am going to concentrate on the three major treatises here. The contents of
these works overlap quite a bit, but in general, in Histmy of Animals Aristotle
sets out the facts about animals, their parts, their food, and their ways of life. In
Parts of Animals, which is more conectly called the Causes of the Parts of
Animals, Aristotle attempts to account for why the parts of animals are as we
observe them to be. This is largely a physiological work. Generation of Animals
is just what it sounds like, a work on animal reproduction.
On first reading these treatises, I was struck by the diversity of the material
they contained. These works are filled with an enormous number of facts about
all kinds of animals, some of which are correct and some not. They contain some
extremely impressive analyses of biological problems, such as his masterful
argument for epigenesis in book II of Generation of Animals. They also contain
some sloppy and ill-considered arguments, e.g., he reasons that flies have two
wings because they are smaller than other insects and do not need four wings to
fly (PA 682b I 0). 1 The facts blatantly do not support this assertion. There are also
a large number of passages that are so corrupt that it is difficult, if not impossible,
to recover Aristotle's meaning. In fact, the material in these treatises is so rich
and so varied that it is hard to comprehend and analyze them in any neat way.
People who wish to discredit Aristotle as a biologist can flip through these
treatises and come up with some truly horrendous errors. One of the worst is the
statement, repeated several times, that human males cannot reproduce until the
age of twenty-one. I can't imagine why he would make this claim. However,
there are also facts for which Aristotle was ridiculed for two thousand years
before it was discovered that he was actually correct. An example is his descrip-
tion of a kind of catfish which he calls a glanis. In this species the males incubate
�WEINER
41
and guard the eggs. This animal was thought to be pure fiction until Louis Agassiz
rediscovered the species in 1857 and named it Parasilurus aristotelis.
One cannot really judge a biologist by counting up how many facts he got
right and how many wrong. It is much more useful to look at what Aristotle saw
as his task, what sort of assumptions he made, and what it was that he actually
did.
Perhaps the most important thing he did was to collect an enormous number
of facts about animals. Most of these facts did not come from his own observations; he got them by consulting the experts. The experts in this case were hunters,
fishermen, trappers, bee-keepers, horse trainers, chicken fmmers, and anyone
else whose livelihood depended on an intimate knowledge of the ways of
animals. Aristotle recorded what he was told, sometimes commenting on or
checking the accuracy of the facts himself, but often simply recording them.
Aristotle even includes observations on the friendships and hostilities between
different species of animals from what appears to be a soothsayer's catalogue of
animal behavior in the ninth chapter of History ofAnimals (608b27 ff.). He does
not discount the testimony of persons who have practical experience with
animals, even when the information appears questionable. Better to record such
information and later prove it wrong than fail to obtain it at all. Aristotle is not
completely gullible. In the case of Ctesius, a traveler to the Indies who returned
with many fabulous tales about animals, Aristotle records what he says but notes
that Ctesius is "no very trustworthy authority" (HA 608a8).
A second source of facts comes from Aristotle's own observations. It is not
always possible to be certain which observations are Aristotle's own; however,
one can often be reasonably certain from the context of the remarks. Aristotle's
observations are characterized by being detailed and precise. Some of these
observations are of animals in their natural habitats, but most of his own work
is in the area of dissections. He seems to have dissected at least eighty-five or
ninety different species of animals. Many of them were invertebrates, organisms
that were largely unknown in his time. His dissections are also noteworthy for
their precision and detail. I find his embryological work to be especially remarkable. Consider the following account of ovoviviparous reproduction in the
smooth shark:
The so-called smooth shark has its eggs in between the wombs like the
dog-fish; these eggs shift into each of the two horns of the womb and descend,
and the young develop with the navel-string attached to the womb, so that as
the egg-substance gets used up, the embryo is sustained to all appearance just
as in the case of quadrupeds. The navel-stting is long and adheres to the under
part of the womb (each navel-string being attached as it were by a sucker),
and also to the center of the embryo in the place where the liver is situated. If
the embryo be cut open, even though it has the egg-substance no longer, the
food inside is egg-like in appearance. Each embryo, as in the case of quadru-
�ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
42
peds, is provided with a chorion and separate membranes. When young the
embryo has its head upwards, but downwards when it gets strong and is
completed in fmm. (HA 565b2-13)
The observation that young sharks are born alive is marvelous in itself; the
further observations that these creatures first develop from an egg in the womb,
and then attach to the womb itself, and further develop like the young of
mammals is truly extraordinary. I am often amazed at what he could see without
a microscope, although he frequently complains, especially in the case of insects,
that the parts are just too small to be accurately observed.
Aristotle was far more than just an observer. He had a set of a priori principles
which helped to direct his observations and questions about animals. Perhaps the
one mentioned most frequently is "Nature never does anything without a
purpose." If this is so, it is always correct to ask the question "why" about
anything that is observed. Aristotle's questions range from the seemingly trivial
(what is this part for?) to the most important philosophical questions (how is
animal motion related to the motions of the heavenly bodies?).
A second principle that is frequently mentioned in the treatises is "Nature
does the best she can under the circumstances." Nature has to work with matter,
which can be notoriously intractable. One might theorize that an animal that had
to protect itself from predators should have sharp horns and teeth, large claws,
great strength, speed, and intelligence. However, when we look at animals, this
is not what we see. What we see, and what Aristotle also saw, was that animals
generally have only one major means of defense. Natufe has only a certain
amount of matter to work with in each animal and must distribute it as best she
can. In Aristotle's words, "Nature takes from one thing to give to another." Thus,
he notes, we find that bulls have large horns, but only have teeth in one jaw. The
matter that would ordinarily have gone into making the second set of teeth goes
into the horns instead (PA 664a2).
One might think that each organ should have only one function if it is to
perform that function with maximum efficiency. However, when we look at
animals we see that very often one organ serves two or even more functions. For
example, the human tongue must be used for both tasting and speaking (PA
650al). Again we see Nature making certain compromises.
A third major principle in these treatises is that "one cannot make general
statements without first doing an exhaustive investigation of the facts." It is this
principle that Aristotle uses most to bring his predecessors to task. His predecessors in natural philosophy include Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Democritus and
other atomists, and Plato's writings in the Timaeus.
None of these philosophers did anything like an exhaustive investigation of
the facts, although some did make certain observations. In fact, Aristotle did not
�WEINER
43
always follow this principle himself, though he recognized its importance and
achieved much through its use.
Some statements of other philosophers were rather easy to disprove with
simple observations. For instance, Plato says in the Timaeus (70c7) that we take
in food through the esophagus and water through the windpipe. Aristotle points
out that this could not be so because simple inspection of the parts involved shows
that there is no passageway from the lungs to the stomach and that fluid clearly
comes from the stomach in the case of vomiting, and therefore both water and
food are taken in through the esophagus, which does afford a passageway to the
bladder (PA 664b8-19). Plato also states in the Timaeus (7ld) that the gall-bladder
is present for the purpose of sensation and to irritate the area around the liver and
make it congeal. Aristotle points out that this could not be true because deer don't
even have gall-bladders and some mice have them and some don't, and in the
case of sheep it depends upon where you look. Sheep in Euboea don't have
gall-bladders and sheep in Naxos have such large ones that "foreigners who
sacrifice there think it a sign from heaven rather than a natural phenomenon" (PA
676b30 ff.). Aristotle stresses that it is necessary to investigate many individuals
and even many individuals from different populations before one can make
general statements about animals.
Let us look at several examples of Aristotle at work on biological problems.
Near the beginning of History of Animals Aristotle states that "to begin with
we must take into consideration the parts of man." He gives two reasons for this.
The first is practical. "Just as all countries reckon other currencies in relation to
their own, because it is most familiar, so we should judge other animals in relation
to ourselves" (I-IA 49lal9). The second is that "man is most according to nature
of all the animals'' because in him ''upper and lower have the same meaning as
when they are applied to the universe as a whole" (J-IA 494a26). He then gives
an exhaustive inventory of the external anatomy of man. Next he turns to giving
an inventory of the internal anatomy of man. Here he runs into some problems
and we see that he is capable of rather easily glossing over a difficult issue. He
states that the internal parts of man are to a very great extent unknown (because
human dissections were not permissible) and so we must know the internal
anatomy of man by reference to other animals that are like us (I-IA 494b21-24).
Not surprisingly he makes many errors in this section. Some of his statements
are true of dogs but not of humans. Interestingly, a few statements are true of the
human fetus but not of the adult, suggesting that Aristotle must have dissected
an aborted fetus.
Next he sets out to do just what he stated, compare other animals to humans.
This is not a very difficult task when dealing with other mammals, nor is it
especially difficult when dealing with other vertebrates, such as birds and fish.
All these animals have backbones, hearts, livers, mouths, etc. It is relatively easy
to recognize the different parts and name their functions. However, one runs into
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ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
real difficulties when dealing with the invertebrate animals. At first glance, a
head louse, clam, or sponge does not seem at all like a human. It is this difficulty
that led Aristotle to develop one of the most important concepts in biology the distinction between homology and analogy.
Homology is what Aristotle refers to as the "difference of the more and the
less" (PA 644b 15). It is a similarity of structure, but a difference in bodily
qualities. The hair on a dog is homologous with the hair on a zebra; the fingernails
of a human are homologous with the claws of a dog. Analogy is a similarity of
function with no similarity of structure. The skeleton of a human and the shell
of a clam are analogous. The skeleton of a human serves to support the body, to
protect the internal organs, and to provide a place for muscle attachment. The
shell of a clam serves all these functions as well, but does not look anything like
a human skeleton, and is on the outside rather than the inside of the animal.
Aristotle can be rather bold with his analogies. For instance, he says that the
earth is for plants what the stomach is for humans. He explains that the roots of
plants take up nutrients and distribute them to the rest of the plant. The earth
contains nutrients in a form that plants can utilize. Humans must first process
their food into a usable form. The food we eat is first digested in the stomach,
and then our blood vessels, which are like the roots of plants, can take up these
usable nutrients from the stomach and distribute them to the rest of the body (PA
650a20-34).
No biologist today would say that man is the standard to which all other
animals should be compared. However, this belief served Aristotle well, even if
it occasionally also led him astray. In fact, Aristotle's views about man's
relationship with the rest of the animal world enabled him to make certain
observations that were not repeated until this century simply because of the way
modem scientists and philosophers regarded man. Far from denying that other
animals used tools or language, Aristotle noticed, e.g., that nightingales have
something like a language (HA 536bl8) and that woodpeckers sometimes use
tools to split nuts (HA 614bl4). He seemed to take delight in finding these
man-like qualities among the lower creatures.
Aristotle believed that all nature was akin because all living things have souls.
Plants have only nutritive soul, they can grow and reproduce. Animals have
sensitive soul in addition to nutritive soul. They have at least the sense of touch,
and may have one or more of the remaining four senses. Humans are distinguished by also having rational souls. He was convinced that organisms like
scallops and jellyfish had sensation, and therefore were animals. He was led by
this conviction to look for ce1tain features in them. For instance, he was sure that
jellyfish, like humans, must have a way of taking in food and getting rid of
wastes, a reproductive system, and a heart and circulatory system, or something
analogous to these. He looked for and often found these systems in invertebrate
animals even though they appear very different from the analogous systems in
�WEINER
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the human body. Occasionally he "found" things we now know are not actually
present, such as a dorsal nerve chord in insects (they actually have a ventral nerve
chord which he missed).
Aristotle had some favorite animals which he returns to again and again.
These are the cephalopods (octopus, squid, cuttlefish, and paper nautilus), the
cartilaginous fishes (sharks, skates, and rays), and the bees. Why was he
particularly fascinated with these creatures? I believe it is because all these
animals share certain features with humans which they do not share with other,
more typical members of their groups. Octopuses have brains, clams do not.
Sharks bear their young alive, most fish lay eggs. Bees not only build the complex
architectural structures we call hives, they also have a beautifully organized
political system in which there is never any dispute over who rules and who
works. In fact, Aristotle says that the bees have something divine about them
(GA 76la8), a statement he otherwise makes only in the case of man.
A second, and at first glance rather puzzling, example of Aristotle's work on
a biological problem is his conviction that the heart is the seat of sensation and
intelligence. Most of Aristotle's contemporaries, including Plato, held that the
brain had this function. But Aristotle had his reasons.
In his observations of the chick embryo he noticed that the first organ seen
was the heart, already beating on the third day (PA 666a20). The heart could be
seen pumping blood to the rest of the body. In this way the heart certainly seems
primary; the brain does not develop until much later. He further noticed that it is
only the parts of animals that are supplied with blood that have sensation (HA
489a26). Fingernails lack both blood and sensation, and so does the brain (PA
652bl-6). The thought of the blood flowing from all the sense organs into the
"common sense" in the heart, which he speaks of in De Anima (lll, ii), must have
been very strong to him. It was difficult for Aristotle to believe that the bloodless
and sensation-free brain could really be the seat of reason and sensation.
He did not see the brain as a useless organ. In fact, he connected it intimately
with the heart and believed it functioned as a cooling organ for the rest of the
body (PA 652b16 ff.). If something went wrong with the brain, it would affect
the heart and cause a malfunction.
He had other reasons as well. He had dissected many invertebrate animals
and noticed that they generally had something analogous to a heart and blood,
but lacked a brain (PA 652b26). He noted that certain invertebrates, particularly
bees and spiders, certainly had intelligence, but he claimed they did not have
brains. They do have hearts. He noted that when animals were sacrificed they
often had lesions or tumors in the brain and other organs, but not in the heart.
However, when an animal died naturally and was dissected it was often found
to have something wrong with its heart. Thus, any damage to the heart seemed
fatal, thought this was not true of the brain (PA 667a34 f.).
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ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
For all these reasons Aristotle held that the heart was the seat of sensation and
intellect. I do not believe that he convinced his contemporaries, but neither could
they reply to his objections.
The last example is a problem Aristotle struggled long and hard with: the
reproduction of bees. The bees have been a serious problem for biological
themists from Aristotle's time through the present, and they are certainly very
odd animals.
To give some idea of what Aristotle was up against, I will relate some facts
we now know about bees. There are three castes in a bee colony. The queens are
female and do all the reproduction for the hive. The workers are all sterile females
and do all the work; they gather nectar and pollen, build the hive, take care of
the queen and the young, and guard the hive. The third caste are the drones, which
are reproductive males. They are produced only at the end of the season, and
their only function is to mate, after which they die.
New queens are also produced only at the end of the season. The new queens
and drones go on a nuptial flight. Mating takes place high in the air and is not
something that can be observed. Each queen mates only once in her entire
lifetime and can store and use the sperm from that one mating for the rest of her
life, which may last eight or ten years.
In humans, half the chromosomes come from the mother and half from the
father. Among these chromosomes are two that are called sex chromosomes. An
"X" is always received from the mother and either an "X" or a "Y" from the
father. If the newly fertilized egg is "XX," it will develop into a girl, if "XY" it
will develop into a boy. This is how sex is determined in all mammals. It works
differently in bees. When a queen wants to produce a female, she lets some sperm
through when an egg is in the reproductive tract. The fertilized egg will be "XX,"
a female. However, when she wants to produce a male, she doesn't let any sperm
through and lays an unfertilized egg. It is "XNothing" and develops into a male.
Aristotle didn't know all this, but he consulted the beekeepers. Some of them
told him that bees didn't reproduce at all. They said that the reason bees visit
flowers so frequently was that they were collecting their young and taking them
back to the nest (HA 553al9). Aristotle did not believe this. Some of the
beekeepers told him pretty much what I have just related, that the queens and the
workers are female, the drones male, and that the queens did all the reproduction.
Aristotle didn't believe this either (GA 759b5).
Given his views of a woman's virtues and role in society, he was not very
much inclined to conclude that these beautifully organized societies that he
admired so much were ruled by females. Also, in his observations of animals he
noticed that it was the males which had weapons for defense, and if the females
had them at all, they were considerably smaller than the males' (GA 759b6). In
the bees, the queens and the workers have stings and the males are defenseless,
�WEINER
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leading him to believe that the queens, which he calls either kings or leaders,
were male.
Aristotle reasoned further. Nobody had ever seen bees mate. Maybe the
leaders are neither male nor female, but hermaphroditic. He knew of some fish
that were apparently hermaphrodites (GA 759b26-32), so why not bees as well?
This theory presented two problems. If the leaders are hermaphrodite, then what
function did the drones have? If nature never does anything without a purpose,
what was the purpose for the drones? Also, hermaphrodite fish produce other
hermaphrodite fish just like them. Like produces like. This did not seem to be
what happened in the case of the bees. It seemed that the leaders were producing
both new leaders and workers, like producing unlike.
After many pages of struggling with this issue, Aristotle concludes that the
leaders are neither male nor female, that they produce both new leaders and
workers, and that workers produce the drones. This is reasonable, because in the
absence of the queen workers will sometimes lay unfertilized eggs, which
develop into drones (HA 553a30).
After reaching this conclusion, Aristotle makes the following statement:
This then appears to be the state of affairs with regard to the generation of
bees, so far as theory can take us, supplemented by what are thought to be the
facts about their behavior. But the facts have not been sufficiently ascertained;
and if at any future time they are ascertained, then credence must be given to
the direct evidence of the senses more than to theories - and to theories too
provided that the results which they show agree with what is observed. (GA
760b28 ff.)
This is a very strong statement. It epitomizes the Aristotelian spirit of
biological investigation. However, what modem biologists have received of
Aristotle's work is not the pages of struggle which went before his conclusion
nor the strong statements of doubt which often come after, but the conclusion
itself. And, as we all know, Aristotle was wrong about the reproduction of bees.
Hence his undeservedly low reputation amongst today 's biologists.
I don't wish to praise his work to such an extent that I ignore its deficiencies.
Certainly many of his theories have been proven wrong, e.g., spontaneous
generation. Some seem hopelessly naive and deserve the obscurity into which
they have fallen, e.g., his explanation that the heart is on the right because the
right is better than the left. Many of his facts have been corrected, although he
knew this would happen as more observations were made. However, there is still
something to be gained from reading Aristotle's biological works today. Many
of his suggestions and theories are incisively reasoned and have stood the test of
time. Others, having long lain in obscurity, seem very fresh and promising today.
It is here, in the biological writings, that we can really see Aristotle at work.
He does not seem uncomfortable with his lack of knowledge and understanding.
�ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
48
In fact, he seems to delight in the wealth of contradictory information, the many
unknowns, and the loose ends. He sometimes suggests four or five possible
solutions to a difficulty and then leaves the problem for future investigators to
solve. We see him working on a problem from many angles: dissecting and
observing animals, collecting writings from the past, consulting experts, and then
reasoning through the whole question. He is comfortable and confident with this
work.
From a modem perspective, Aristotle seems justified in his confidence.
Almost every major principle of biology which can be discovered using one's
hands, eyes, and mind is found in the biological treatises, sometimes in a very
sophisticated form. These include principles of animal organization, development, evolution, and ecology.
Aristotle was not an evolutionist. Some of his predecessors, particularly
Empedocles, did espouse theories that sound somewhat like modern mechanistic
evolutionary thought. However, Empedocles' theory was based more on a poetic
vision than on biological observation.
Aristotle has often been brought to task for changing others' opinions to fit
his system. Here are some lines from Empedocles often construed as supporting
a theory of organic evolution:
There budded many a head without a neck, and arms were roaming shoulderless and bare, and eyes that wanted foreheads drifted by. (Fragment 57)2
In isolation wandered every limb, hither and thither seeking union meet.
(Fragment 58)
But now as God with God was mingled more, these members fell together
where they met, and many a birth besides was then begot in a long line of ever
varied life. (Fragment 59)
Here is Aristotle's restatement of Empedocles' ideas in a discussion of explana-
tion in the natural sciences:
Hence, why should not even bodily parts like teeth have developed in the
necessary course of nature- sharp front teeth suited for the tearing of food
and flat back teeth suited for the crushing of food? May they not have been
produced, not to some end, but by coincidence? And may it not be so with
all bodily parts supposedly having some inherent end or purpose? Those
organic structures, then, which came into the world as if they had been
produced to some end, survived because they had been automatically
organized in a fitting way; all others, like the rnan~faced offspring of oxen
in the theory ofEmpedocles, have perished and continue to perish. (Phys.
198b28-30)
�WEINER
49
This statement sounds more modern and certainly has a more definite
meaning than Empedocles' poetry. Aristotle has rephrased it in such a way that
he can discuss something definite. He goes on to criticize Empedocles on the
grounds that eyes, shoulders, etc., must be part of a whole integrated organism,
and cannot live separately.
However, it is in Aristotle's treatise that we find the observations and
principles necessary to support modern evolutionary theory. These include the
very important distinction between homology and analogy discussed earlier. He
also made some outstanding observations of embryo development in which he
noticed that embryos can first be recognized only as animals, later still as
members of particular species, and lastly as unique individuals of those species
(GA 736a35). These observations are identical with those that support the modern
principle that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.
Aristotle was the first to recognize many significant ecological principles. He
wrote about animal territoriality and accounted for why and how various animals
establish and defend tenitories (e.g., HA 613a8 ff.). He made observations about
the distribution and abundance of animals in different environments (e.g., HA
543b24, 605b28), and noted their various reproductive strategies. For instance,
he remarked that some animals, especially fish, lay literally millions of eggs,
which are mostly destroyed or infertile (GA 755a33). This strategy is compared
to that of sharks, in which a few large young are produced after incubation in a
womb (HA 571a). The two reproductive strategies are referred to today as rand
K selection.
He also spoke of the dangers of overpopulation. He mentioned the destructiveness of overfishing and of dredging for shellfish (HA 603a). All these
principles are familiar to ecologists and environmentalists today.
Despite the errors, uncertainties, and unknowns, Aristotle was able to discern
important patterns in the natural world. His achievement as a biologist is
genuinely impressive from a modem perspective. It was no less impressive in
his own time.
He differed fTom his predecessors in several impmtant ways. He was intensely involved with the study of many individual organisms at a time when
sweeping statements about species and biological principles were the rule. He
was interested in the individual animal because it is only in an individual
organism that one can see all of the forces of nature working together. When
final, formal, efficient, and material causes converge just the way they should,
the result is an individual louse, or goldfish, or human. The individual is the only
thing that actually exists. Species and other groups lack material cause, and are
only abstractions (PA 64lal9 ff.).
A second important distinction between Aristotle and the other natural
philosophers was that Aristotle used the knowledge of the common people to
great advantage. It is not an exaggeration to claim that his achievement rests, to
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ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
a very great extent, on the enormous amounts of information that the common
people were able to give him.
He also had a great deal of faith in the common sense of people in general.
For instance, when he speaks of animal classification, he clearly prefers the
groupings that the mass of people use to those devised by theorists (PA 643b 15).
Most people divided animals into the major groups which we refer to today as
mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, etc. The theorists of Aristotle's time devised
dichotomous classification schemes which, for example, first divided animals
into tame and wild, then into land and water, etc.
Aristotle pointed out that such schemes would only obscure real patterns in
nature because some birds are land animals, some are water animals, and some
are both. Also, domestic animals are often found in the wild (PA I,ii). It is true
that the folk classifications made certain enors, classifying bats as birds and
whales as fish, but these errors were easily corrected by Aristotle. The overall
scheme of the common man's classification was sound.
The third feature that distinguishes Aristotle is that he got physically involved
with his subject, performing dissections and field observations. The importance
of this should not be underestimated. Anyone who has ever attempted to dissect
a frog or cat in biology class knows that there is an art to it. One must train one's
hands and eyes. It requires practice and dedication to become proficient, and all
evidence suggests that Aristotle was a master of this craft. He got to know his
subject with an intimacy which his contemporaries and predecessors never
experienced.
How is it that Aristotle was able to approach the study of biology in this new
way? It is known that he came from medical families on both sides and that his
father was court physician at Macedon. Certainly he had some medical training
and his writings show a familiarity with the medical literature and techniques of
his time. A physician must have many of the skills we see Aristotle employing
in his studies of animals. He may have theories about the course of a disease or
causes of illness, but he knows that each patient is unique and must be treated as
an individual. "For the physician does not cure 'man' except in an incidental way,
but Callias or Socrates or some other called by some such individual name, who
happens to be a man" (Met. 981a17). Clever theories alone do not cure patients.
A physician must look, listen, touch, and think when treating a patient.
Add this practical medical background to twenty years at Plato's academy
and we can see how a man with Aristotle's intellectual breadth and depth was
able to address questions of natural philosophy fruitfully and at many different
levels.
At the most basic level he describes parts of animals and asks what they are
used for. He also deals with questions which are a step more abstract, e.g., the
grouping and classification of animals. However, his biological studies also led
him to the highest and most difficult philosophical questions, such as the nature
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51
of the soul and the causes of animal and heavenly motions. Aristotle was able to
make biology into a respectable study in its own right as well as establish it as
an important philosophical discipline.
We can see Aristotle employing the methods that were so successful for him
in biology in other disciplines as well. In the Politics we see him reviewing
various utopian theories (Bk. II), but finally saying that what is needed is to see
how things actually are. He collected 158 constitutions of states as well as the
oral laws and customs of numerous tribes. He used these as the source of facts,
as the actual individual things, which he could study and analyze along with
theories (Bk. Ill).
Again, in the Ethics we see him going to the beliefs of the people as the
starting point of his investigation of proper human behavior (e.g., EN 1098b23).
He quotes common aphorisms and uses these as the basis from which to reason
about ethics. Once again he was able to tap and use to advantage a source of
information and inspiration which was largely ignored by philosophers.
His accustomed empirical approach gets him into trouble when he tries to
account for such physical phenomena as bodies falling through various media
and the movement of objects that have been thrown or shot. If one were to do as
Aristotle suggests in the Physics and throw a rock into the air ten thousand times,
the same thing will happen every time. No new information will be learnt about
the laws of falling objects. The method of investigation that has proven fruitful
for these sorts of phenomena is to throw the rock into the air once or twice, time
it, perhaps take a strobe photograph, and then go inside and write an equation
that describes the rock's movements. These phenomena do not offer the kind of
complexity or abundance of information common in biological problems. They
require a rather different art, that of mathematization, which Galileo and others
discovered many years later.
One can't throw a chicken into the air and then go inside and write an equation
for it. In fact, to this day it is wmthwhile for biologists to watch chickens. In
contrast to the movement of rocks through the air, there is still much to learn by
simply watching the movements of birds. There is almost always something more
to learn from dissecting ten more squid or spending ten more hours watching a
flock of geese. It seems that biological and physical phenomena require rather
different means of investigation.
It is certainly true that Aristotle was interested in answering the most sublime
sort of philosophical questions through his biological studies. However, he spent
the bulk of his time asking the most basic questions about animal anatomy and
behavior. There are not many people who would dissect dozens of squid simply
to answer these sorts of questions. There is a wonderfulness about the animals
themselves that repeatedly brings one back to them. They are worthy of study in
their own right and for their own sakes.
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ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Aristotle recognized this quality in animals. He wanted to convince his
students of the worthiness of studying the natural world. It is not often that we
see Atistotle waxing eloquent in his treatises. Thus, this passage from Parts of
Animals I,v is particularly remarkable. I will end by letting Aristotle entice all of
you into the study of biology with some of the same words that he used with his
own students some 2300 years ago. He tells a story about some visitors who
wished to meet Heraclitus:
... and when they entered and saw him in the kitchen, warming himself at the
stove, they hesitated; but Heraclitus said "Come in; don't be afraid; there are
gods even here." In like manner, we ought not to hesitate nor to be abashed,
but boldly to enter upon our researches concerning animals of every sort and
kind, knowing that in not one of them is Nature or Beauty lacking.
*****
Notes
1. The following abbreviations are used: PA, Parts of Animals; HA, History of
Animals; GA, Generation of Animals; EN, Nichomachean Ethics; Phys.,
Physics; Met., Metaphysics. Translations from PA and GA are from the Loeb
editions (Harvard University Press); those from HA are from the Oxford
edition (Clarendon Press).
2. Translations from Lombardo, S., 1982. Parmenides and Empedocles: the
Fragments in Verse (San Francisco: Grey Fox Press).
�The God Who Is
and the God Who Speaks
Thomas J. Slakey
0 my soul, seek not immortal life, but exhaust
the realm of the possible.
- Pindar, Third Pythian
For whose sake is it that the proof is sought?
Faith does not need it; aye, it must even
regard the proof as its enemy.
- Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific
Postscript
Introduction
Discussions of the existence of God meet with resistance from, so to speak, both
the left and the right. On the "left" are those from Pindar through Hume and Kant
and beyond, who tell us to confine our reason to those matters within our reach,
namely practical affairs and empirical science. On the "right" are those Christians, and many other devout believers, who tell us that arguments for God's
existence can only undermine proper reverence toward God, that the appropriate
response to God is not argument but worship.
Nevertheless there are within the Bible itself suggestions of a kind of
inference from the physical universe to the existence of God, as in Psahn 19: l,
"The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his
handiwork." 1 St. Paul expands this notion. He says that the Gentiles should have
known better than to worship idols.
For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown
it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely,
his etemal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have
been made. So they are without excuse. (Romans 1: 19-20)
Thomas Slakey is a Tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis, and former Dean. This
lecture was first delivered at St. John's College, Santa Fe, in January, 1989. In April,
1986, an earlier version was submitted to the Basic Issues Forum at Washington and
Jefferson College, in a call for papers on the Existence of God.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
54
The crucial claim here is that invisible things, ta aorata (translated "his
invisible nature") can be seen in things made, if those things are properly
understood, that is, so to speak, seen with the mind's eye, nooumena kathoratai.
(RSV translates this phrase merely as "clearly perceived.") St. Paul is asserting
that the Gentiles should have been able to infer the existence of an invisible God
from the visible things around them.
On the other hand, the Psalmist and St. Paul, and I would say all other writers
in the Bible, take for granted not only that God exists but also that He is a person
who acts, and who sometimes acts in our world. Nowhere in the Bible is the
existence of God questioned. Even Job, who suffers terribly at the hand of God,
never questions whether God exists. Rather Job questions only whether God is
just:
It is all one; therefore I say, he destroys both the blameless and the wicked.
When disaster brings sudden death, he mocks at the calamity of the innocent.
The earth is given into the hand of the wicked; he covers the faces of its judges
-if it is not he, who then is it? (Job 9: 22-24)
Even the fool who says in his heart, "There is no God" (Psalm 14: I), is really
only questioning whether God will punish those who do abominable deeds, as
becomes clear from the context.
Thus even though in the Bible itself there are suggestions of inferences to the
existence of God, those inferences are made by those who do not need convincing
that God exists, unlike the contemporary context of this lecture, where the
existence of God is widely questioned and is usually held to be a matter of
something called "faith." In the Bible "faith" does not mean belief in the
existence of God, but means trust in God's promises. Thus Abraham is the model
of faith because he believed God's promise of a son in his old age, a son who
would be the father of a mighty race (Genesis 15: 5-6). Throughout the centuries
of oppression and exile, "faith" meant trust that eventually God's promises would
be fulfilled.
A similar difficulty besets those Christian writers, such as Thomas Aquinas,
who have constructed philosophical arguments for the existence of God. Though
Thomas is often careful to distinguish matters of faith from matters of reason,
and though he holds that the existence of God can be rationally demonstrated
without reliance on revelation, nevettheless throughout the Summa Theologiae,
on almost every page, he mixes references to both pagan and Christian authors.
Thus when he argues not only that the existence of God can be known through
reason, but also that God is a person, that He is just and merciful, that He created
the universe and provides for it, that He knows each of us as an individual, and
so on, it is extremely difficult to separate the sources of his arguments, and to
�SLAKEY
55
know to what extent he could have reached such conclusions had he not grown
up with a constant experience of the Scriptures and of daily prayers.
We do, however, have some clues. We have the results, in Plato, Aristotle,
and Plotinus, of a long tradition of philosophical speculation which strove to
reach the divine. Although this speculation itself began in the midst of a powerful
tradition of very personal gods, gods with human faces, gods to whom one prayed
and who answered prayers, sometimes by themselves descending from Mount
Olympus to a battlefield where they deflected spears, healed wounds, and even
fought directly, nevertheless Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus largely left behind
such apparently primitive and merely poetic notions. Thus Plato's "Good" is
strictly impersonal (see especially Republic VI, 504-11), and in his account of a
fashioner of the world, that "Craftsman" is described as at best having a certain
likelihood (Timaeus, 29). Aristotle's First Mover is an object of love and
veneration, but itself knows nothing of us and does not act in our world; its only
object of thought is itself (Metaphysics, XII, 9, 1074b 33-34). Plotinus's One has
some relation to our world but only through a series of intermediaries (see, for
example Enneads V, para. 6).
This lecture consists offour parts. I first consider attempts to speak about God
as Transcendent Being, the God who is. I next consider attempts to speak about
God as Himself speaking to us, the God who speaks. Thirdly, I consider to what
extent these two different attempts are compatible. Finally I briefly consider
prayer, the action by which we speak to God.
Part I. God as Transcendent Being
Instead of beginning with any of Thomas Aquinas's well known "five ways"
of demonstrating the existence of God, I want to start out from his discussion of
"The Names of God," that is, from the way in which we human beings speak
about God. 2 Following Aristotle, Thomas holds that all our knowledge, and the
language we use to express it, derives from sensation and therefore from our
experience of physical things in the world around us. How can any language so
derived be applied to God?
Thomas distinguishes words that are applied to God "metaphorically," as in
"God is my rock" or "God is a lion," from words that are applied to God
"properly," such as "good" and "living" (Q.13, a.3). Although our understanding
of"good" derives from, for example, good human beings, and our understanding
of "living" from, for example, plants and animals, Thomas claims that the
perfections signified by these words are not limited to bodily things, whereas
"rock" and "lion" specifically mean something bodily. Therefore when "rock"
and "lion" are applied to God, it can only be in some metaphorical sense. A word
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like "rock" is not only learned from bodily things, but it points precisely to the
bodily aspect of what it names. Hence when it is applied to God the meaning can
only be by a kind of implied comparison, as to suggest that God's protection is
firm and unchanging. "The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer"
(Psalm 18:2). On the other hand, a word like "good," even though it is learned
from its application to, for example, good food, good tools, and good men, has
a meaning that can be separated from those bodily things and applied "properly"
to God, that is, as if it belongs to God and is not merely applied to Him by
comparison with some bodily thing.
Thomas goes even further. He makes the bold claim that words like "good"
not only properly apply to God but apply to Him "more properly than to creatures
themselves, and are said of Him primatily" (Q.13, a.3). How can this be? The
best explanation comes from Plato, from the ladder of love in the Symposium
(210-12), even though Thomas did not have this passage available to him and
knew Plato's writings chiefly as they came to him through St. Augustine,
pseudo-Dionysius, and others. Socrates says that we can ascend from the love
of a single beautiful body to the love of beautiful bodies generally, then to the
beauty of souls, then to the beauty of those customs and laws which bind men
together in cities, and then to the beauty found by study and speculation. Finally,
those who ascend the ladder in the right way will be struck with wonder as they
see
... the final object of all those previous toils. First of all it is ever existent and
neither comes to be nor perishes, neither waxes nor wanes; next, it is not
beautiful in part and in patt ugly, nor is it such at such a time and other at
another, nor in one respect beautiful and in another ugly, nor so affected by
position as to seem beautiful to some and ugly to others. Nor again will our
initiate find the beautiful presented to him in the guise of a face or of hands
or any other portion of the body, nor as a particular description or piece of
knowledge, nor as existing somewhere in another substance, such as an animal
or the earth or sky or any other things, but existing ever in singularity of form
independent by itself, while all the multitude of beautiful things partake of it
in such wise that, though all of them are coming to be and perishing, it grows
neither greater nor less, and is affected by nothing. (21 0-11) 3
Even though our experience of beauty begins from particular physical things,
and even though the word "beautiful" is leamed from those things -beautiful
flowers, beautiful houses, beautiful women, beautiful days - the word itself
leads us beyond them to a beauty that is in no way deficient and in no way
changes. The word itself suggests that the beautiful things we see "partake" in
such a beauty, that is, that their beauty is not truly their own but something shared
from some higher source, which Socrates calls "beauty itself' (auto to kalon,
211 d) or "the divine beauty" (to the ion kalon, 211 e).
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In the Phaedo (74a-75c) Socrates argues the even stronger thesis that words
like "equal," "just," and "good" not only lead us beyond sensible things around
us, but could not have been derived from those things, and in the Theaetetus
( 185-86) he argues a similar strong thesis with regard to "being." But for Thomas,
and for my present pmpose, the weaker thesis is sufficient, that words like "good"
point beyond our world to something higher and that they are applied more
properly to it than to anything we can perceive with our senses.
This thesis is in turn the root of Thomas's doctrine of "analogy," a doctrine
based on Aristotle's Metaphysics, Book IV, Chapter 2, even to the use of
Aristotle's example of "healthy." A certain diet might be called "healthy" and a
urine sample might be called "healthy," each by relation to "healthy" as applied
to a living animal, the diet as the cause of health and the urine as the sign of
health. Any such "analogous" use of a word always points to some one primary
meaning. Similarly a word like "wise," as applied to creatures, points beyond
creatures toward God, "in whom all the perfections of things preexist excellently" (Q.13, a.S).
The most important such concept will be the concept of being itself. God
exists in the fullest possible sense. He never came into existence, He never
changes, and He will never go out of existence. It is simply His nature or His
"essence" to exist (Q.3, a.4). We, on the other hand, are born, we are constantly
changing physically, emotionally, and mentally, and finally we die. We exist only
in some lesser sense.
Elsewhere in the Summa, Thomas discusses the widespread custom among
religious peoples of making offerings or "sacrifices" to God or gods:
Nat ural reason tells man that he is subject to something higher, because of the
deficiency which he feels in himself, so that he needs to be helped and directed
by something higher. And whatever that is, it is what among all men is called
God 4
Thomas is here describing what I would call the fundamental religious sensibility, the sense most men have had in most times and places that man "is subject
to something higher." It is the sense most profoundly resisted by Nietzsche,
Sartre, and others. On the other hand it finds a new contemporary expression in
the sense of obligation toward preserving other species of animals and plants,
whenever that obligation is understood not merely as serving human purposes,
but as respect or "reverence" for species that have evolved over millions of years.
It found expression among the Romans in the concept of pietas, which extended
from duty to family, through duty to country, to duty toward the gods. The hard
question is whether the religious sensibility is reliable, especially if it points
beyond the physical world toward a Being which transcends that world. The hard
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question is whether one can move from our sense of God and our language about
God to the conclusion that God exists.
Thomas makes this very move in the fourth of his "five ways." Let me quote
the argument in full: 5
The fourth way is taken from the gradations which are found in things. For
there is found in things something more and less good, and true, and noble,
and similarly with other qualities of this sort. But more and less are said of
different things according as they differently approach some maximum, as
more heat more closely approaches maximum heat. There exists therefore
something which is truest, and best, and noblest, and consequently maximum
being, since maximum truths are maximum beings as Book II of the Metaphysics says [Chapter 1, 993b 28-31]. But what is said to be maximum in any
genus is the cause of all things in that genus, as fire, which is maximum heat,
is the cause of all heat, as is said in the same book [lac. cit., ll. 24-25]. Therefore
there exists something which for all beings is the cause of being, and of
goodness, and of any perfection whatever. And this we call God. (Q.2, a.3)
This passage is fraught with difficulties. To start with, there is the confusing
example of heat. The point of the example is not to suggest that any kind of
quantitative variation points to a maximum, but to find a case where differences
of degree do point to some outside source of the quality mentioned. Consider
stones in the shade and in the sun. The stone in the sun is hotter than the stone
in the shade. The gradations of heat in the stones suggest that the heat derives
not from the stones themselves, but from something else, such as the sun. The
sun is "maximum heat" in the sense that it is a source of heat, a cause of heat, in
things like stones.
Can this example be applied to the kind of qualities Thomas here has in mind,
namely "the good, the true, the noble," and other qualities of this sm1? To focus
on the example of "good": Is the goodness of things such that it suggests an
outside source, a maximum goodness? Consider first things good as means to an
end, such as good tools. Clearly their goodness derives from the ends they serve.
Consider next things good as ends in themselves, such as good human beings. Is
their goodness their own? Is it partial, temporary, and constantly changing? Does
it point to a "maximum goodness" that could be the source of goodness in other
things, a goodness that is complete, permanent, and unchanging?
We are back in the Symposium and the Phaedo. We start from experience of
things in the world around us and from language and thought that develop in
relation to those things. We experience "goodness" as embodied in physical
things. But the experience itself, and the language and thought that express it,
drive us beyond physical things to something that transcends the kind of realities
we directly experience.
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It is far beyond the scope of this paper to defend such reasoning against
practically the whole of modern philosophy. Kant states the essential point of
difficulty succinctly in the Critique of Pure Reason, with regard to the principle
of causality:
This principle is applicable only in the sensible world; outside that world it
has no meaning whatsoever.... The principle of causality has no meaning and
no criterion for its application save only in the sensible world. 6
We can, however, briefly examine Kant's objection in relation to an argument
combining the first and second of Thomas's five ways, an argument derived from
the extended argument in Aristotle's Physics VIII. Basing himself on the obvious
phenomenon of "motion" or change in the physical world, Thomas asserts that
since nothing simply changes of itself, whenever anything does change, we look
for a source or cause of change. Moreover, there could not be an infinite series
of such causes or the result would never occur. 7 Therefore there must be a first
cause of change. It does not cause itself to change, since this would contradict
the whole thrust of the argument. Rather it is unchanging, an "unmoved mover"
(Q.2, a.3).
Kant does not challenge the principle of causality as applied to the physical
world. He grants that whenever something changes within the physical world,
we do in fact look for a cause of change. The principle of causality is in fact a
principle of investigation within the physical world. Kant's objection is to
extending that principle toward something beyond the physical world. When we
do so, we argue for the existence of something whose nature is totally different
from anything we observe or even "can" observe, something that produces
changes without itself changing. Kant claims that the principle of causality so
extended is not merely unreliable but "has no meaning whatsoever."
But Kant's objection cuts two ways. While restricting the principle of causality to the physical world, and therefore to the strictly "scientific" investigation
that it expresses, Kant leaves a question that physical science cannot answer,
namely the question about the origin of the physical universe as a whole.
Whatever scientific cosmology tells us must start from a certain given state of
matter or energy. Is it unreasonable to suggest, though not in a strictly "scientific"
way, that something must have given rise to that state in this first place, and that
it must be of a nature totally different from the matter and energy that "science"
can measure?
Let me turn also briefly to Thomas's fifth way, which is taken from the
presence of purposeful order in natural things:
For we see that some things which lack cognition, namely natural bodies, act
toward an end; which is apparent from the fact that they always or frequently
act in the same way so that that which is best may follow; whence it is plain
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that they reach their ends not by chance but intentionally. But those things
which lack cognition do not go toward an end unless directed by something
which knows and understands, as the anow is directed by the archer. Therefore
there is some intelligent being by whom all natural things are ordered toward
their ends; and this we call God. (Q.2, a.3)
This argument was widely regarded as conclusive through the eighteenth and
early nineteenth century, and has since been equally widely regarded as refuted
by Darwin. The crucial point in the argument is, however, not simply the
appearance of orderly structures in natural organisms, but the fact that orderly
structures are repeated "always or frequently" in the same way. In his discussion
of chance in Physics II 5-6, Aristotle makes it a defining property of chance that
there is an appearance of order, as when a tripod tumbles down stairs and lands
on its feet in an appropriate place, as if it was placed there on purpose (197b 17).
Hence it is not the appearance of order that argues against chance, but the regular
recurrence of order.
Aristotle himself entertains the Darwinian hypothesis:
... if a man's crop is spoiled on the threshing floor, the rain did not fall for the
sake of this - in order that the crop might be spoiled - but that result just
followed. Why then should it not be the same with the parts in nature, e.g. that
our teeth should come up of necessity- the front teeth sharp, fitted for tearing,
the molars broad and useful for grinding down the food- since they did not
arise for this end, but it was merely a coincident result; and so with all the
other parts in which we suppose that there is purpose? Whenever then all the
parts came about just what they would have been if they had come to be for
an end, such things survived, being organized spontaneously in a fitting way;
whereas those which grew otherwise perished and continue to perish ... 8
Aristotle here argues that the Darwinian hypothesis is insufficient because,
for example, the teeth "either invariably or normally come about in a given way"
(198b 35). Aristotle could perhaps accept Darwin's analogy between natural
selection and the controlled breeding of animals, but he would still argue that
some explanation is needed for the nearly uniform succession of characteristics
from generation to generation. This is the fact that Darwin takes for granted both
with respect to natural selection and to controlled breeding.
On the other hand, Thomas's argument is subject to a different objectionone of two that he himself raises against the general conclusion of the whole set
of five ways, the conclusion that God exists- namely that if there is a God, and
if He produces order in things, and if He is also good, how can there be so much
evil? Thomas's reply to this objection is drawn from Augustine: God would not
allow evil "unless He were so omnipotent and good that He can make good even
out of evil" (Q.2, a.3, objection 1 and reply). It seems to me that on this particular
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point the evidence can only be moot. Much that is good and beautiful in the world
might suggest that there is a benevolent deity ordering the universe, but then one
has to confront that conclusion with evil and suffering.
Moreover, Aristotle himself does not argue from order in nature to the
existence of an intelligent being outside of and ordering nature. He assigns the
order in natural things to nature itself (physis), as a principle working within
things (192b 22). And this suggests the second objection that Thomas himself
raises against the conclusion of his five ways:
... What can be completed through fewer principles does not occur through
many. But it seems that everything which appears in the world can be
completed through other principles, supposing that God does not exist .. , (Q.2,
a.3, obj. 2)
Thomas replies only that "everything in nature reduces also to God, as to its first
cause" (Q.3, a.3, reply to obj. 2).
On this general conclusion also, the evidence seems to me to be moot. I
certainly cannot claim to have proved the existence of God. Yet I have argued
that much in our experience drives us toward something beyond physical things.
We like to scoff at medieval man, who was so arrogant as to place himself at the
exact center of a rather small universe. Is it any less arrogant for us to think that
we are the highest form of life in an infinite universe? Or that if there are other
intelligent beings, they have brains and bodies something like our own? Is it
unreasonable to suppose that there might exist a Being utterly different from
ourselves and from any physical thing, eternal and unchanging? Is it unreasonable to think of that Being as the "cause" of the universe we know, however much
we have to strain the word "cause"?
Part II. God as Speaking to Us
In Part I we followed Socrates' progress from seeing beautiful things to a
vision of beauty itself. Moreover it should be noted that the metaphor of the
Platonic eidos, which comes from a verb meaning "to see," is visual, a "form,"
whether seen with the eye of the body or the eye of the mind. Though spoken
oracles play a prominent role in Greek religion, Plato's own progress toward God
is primarily through sight.
Throughout the Bible, on the other hand, God is heard:
Now the Lord said to Abraham, "go from your country and your kindred and
your father's house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you
a great nation ... " (Genesis 12: 1-2)
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Though God's power is often visible, and though visions occasionally reveal
something of God, as in Isaiah 6: 1-3, and Revelation 4: l-11, it is primarily
through a voice that God is known, whether that voice is heard directly, as by
Abraham, or indirectly, through a prophet.
The voice speaks in a human language, but Abraham never questions whether
the voice he hears is the voice of God. Even when the voice commands the
murder of Isaac, the child of the promise, through whom Abraham was to be the
father of the Lord's chosen people, Abraham proceeds without hesitation to the
execution of the divine command, at least so far as the extremely spare account
in Genesis tells us (22: 1-4 ). Most often the later prophets also simply state, "Thus
says the Lord." How Abraham and the prophets know that it is the Lord who
spoke to them, we are not told. They simply know. It is perhaps impossible for
one who does not share such an experience to enter into it. The certainty
possessed by Abraham and by the prophets can only remain mysterious. And
even though it has become almost fashionable for contemporary Christians to
hear the voice of the Lord, their certainty must also remain mysterious.
On the other hand, when Moses hears the voice from the burning bush, he is
given a sign of divine presence, since the bush, though it is burning, is not
consumed (Exodus 3: 2-3). When the Lord orders Moses to speak to the children
of Israel in His name, Moses asks for a sign, and the Lord gives him three: the
rod that can turn into a serpent and then back into a rod, the hand that can tum
leprous and then be healed, and the Nile water turning into blood (Exodus 4:
1-9). And though the Pharaoh's magicians themselves perform such wonders,
greater wonders follow which they cannot match, so that finally even they say,
"This is the finger of God" (Exodus 8: 19).
Similarly, in the time of Elijah, when worship of the Baals was overwhelming
the worship of the true God, God sends a sign of fire (I Kings 18: 20-40). And
in the gospels, Jesus is shown to be the messenger of God by the signs that he
works. When Jesus brings to life the son of the widow of Nain, men exclaim, "A
great prophet has risen among us!" and "God has visited his people!" (Luke
7: 16). When the Pharisees accuse Jesus of blasphemy for presuming to forgive
sins, Jesus says, "But that you may know that the Son of man has authority on
earth to forgive sins"; he then said to the paralytic, "Rise, take up your bed and
go home" (Matthew 9:16). Elsewhere Jesus says, "These very works which I am
doing, bear me witness that the Father has sent me" (John 5:36), and finally he
even says, "Even though you do not believe me, believe the works" (John I 0:38).
A long line of rationalist critics has attacked such miracle stories in the Bible,
such stories of "signs" and "works," first by challenging their credibility and
second by challenging their importance to the central religious message of the
Bible. The first challenge is beyond the scope of this paper, but let me speak to
the second. Consider the relevance of miracle stories to the belief in a personal
God. By a "personal" God I mean a God who acts, following the root sense of
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the word persona as deriving from the mask worn by a stage actor. How are we
to conceive of a personal God if not in somewhat human terms?- a God who
speaks, a God who chooses, a God who does things, in short, a God who acts.
Furthermore, why would we say that God is acting if it were not for events called
"miraculous," that is, "wonderful," "remarkable," events so extraordinary that
they seem to exceed the possibilities of"natural" causes and effects? Such events
suggest the direct intervention of a God who chooses in a particular instance to
act in an unusual way. I do not assert that the belief in a personal God could arise
only in the context of such stories, but it is at least clear that such stories have
had a prominent part throughout the world in traditions about personal gods or
God.
On the other hand, even in the story of Elijah, after the episode of the
miraculous fire in I Kings 18, there is the remarkable passage in I Kings 19,
where Elijah seeks God on Mount Horeb. At first there was a mighty wind,
... but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the
Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord
was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice. (I Kings 19: 11-13)
It is in that still, small voice that the Lord speaks to Elijah. Also when Jesus is
asked for a sign, he refuses to give it, saying, "An evil and adulterous generation
seeks for a sign" (Matthew 12:39).
Finally, it must be said that miraculous signs are relatively rare, even in the
history described in the Bible. From Abraham through the life of Jesus, that
history extends over a period of perhaps 1800 years. Only at very infrequent
intervals are miraculous events repmted. More often God is described as acting
through natural causes, such as disease, and through human instmrnents, especially through foreign rulers and their armies. This is the way in which God first
destroys the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and then restores the exiles. For
example, in Isaiah 41 the reference is to Cyrus, King of Persia, who conquered
Babylon and allowed the Jews in Babylon to return to Jerusalem:
Who stilTed up one from the east whom victory meets at every step? He gives
up nations before him, so that he tramples kings under foot.. .. Who has
performed and done this, calling the generations from the beginning? I, the
Lord, the first, and with the last; I am he. (Isaiah 41: 2-4)
As Isaiah understands it, God has arranged for Cyrus to conquer Babylon and
thereby set free His own chosen people. Thus for most people most of the time,
not only in our own world but in the world of the Bible, God's hand is not
apparent. Men must believe that God is acting even when He is hidden. However
terrible the sufferings of the chosen people at the hands of Egyptians, Philistines,
Assyrians, and Babylonians, the children oflsrael must believe that God is active,
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
perhaps punishing them for their own sins. They must believe that the promises
of special protection and a unique destiny made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob
will somehow be fulfilled.
Part III. God as Both Transcendent and Speaking
Isaiah's view of history has further implications, staggering implications, and
Isaiah himself does not hesitate to draw them. The God who hears the prayers of
the children of Israel and who frees them from exile is not simply a local god,
powelful in the region of Jerusalem. He is a God who uses distant nations and
peoples as His instruments. He is in fact the Lord of the whole earth and even of
the heavens, because he brought them into being.
Why do you say, 0 Jacob, and speak, 0 Israel, "My way is hid from the Lord,
and my right is disregarded by my God?" Have you not known? Have you not
heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary, his understanding is unsearchable. (40:
27-28)
For thus says the Lord, who created the heavens ... who fotmed the earth and
made it. .. "I am the Lord, and there is no other." (45:18)
Thus we get that double aspect of the Bible which makes for both its difficulty
and its power. On the one hand, God is, if it is not blasphemous to say so, in some
way like the gods of Homer. He speaks to men in a human voice, He knows
individual men by name, He hears their prayers and acts to help them. On the
other hand, God does not have parents, like Homer's gods. He does not reside
on Mount Olympus. Instead, when Solomon builds the first magnificent temple,
he says in prayer,
But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest
heaven cannot contain thee; how much less this house which I have built. (I
Kings 8:27)
And there are many other passages that emphasize how mysterious God is. His
act of making is simply by a spoken word:
And God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. (Genesis 1: 13)
His knowledge is beyond our comprehension:
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Even before a word is on my tongue, lo, 0 Lord, thou knowest it altogether.
Thou dost beset me behind and before, and layest thy hand upon me. Such
knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain it. (Psalm 139:
4-6)
God is unchanging:
Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hast formed the earth
and the world, from everlasting to everlasting thou art God. (Psalm 90:2)
Fidelity to the Bible demands fidelity to the God who both speaks to Abraham
and exists from everlasting to everlasting. The conflict is not between the God
of the philosophers and the God of the Bible. Our difficulties in speaking about
God do not arise just from philosophical speculation but arise within the Bible
itself. The God of the Bible is a person who acts, but in a way different from any
action we know. God acts without Himself changing:
Every good endowment and every perfect gift is from above, coming down
from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to
change. (James 1:17)
Finally God exists in a way different from anything we know. When Moses
asks God to reveal His name, God answers in words variously interpreted as "I
am Who I am," "I am what I am," or "I will be what I will be" (Exodus 3:14).
Thomas takes these words as saying that God's nature is to exist. All other things
have a partial and borrowed existence. God alone simply is (see Q.3, a.4: Q.l3,
a.ll). Any other conclusion would imply change in God and would violate the
conclusion of the five ways, that God is the source of all change but is Himself
unchanging. For Thomas the Bible and the philosophers here come together.
We saw in Part I that Thomas argued that words like "good" could be properly
applied to God, and even more properly to God than to things around us. Thomas
acknowledges, however, that the modum significandi, the "way of signifying,"
of such words is different when applied to God (Q.13, articles 3 and 6). Thomas
is referring, I think, to the same point as in his claim that existence belongs to
God by nature. Any qualities we ascribe to God, such as goodness, must also be
His by nature. To be God is to be good. Moreover, it is even misleading to think
of "qualities" ascribed to God. Like existence, goodness is God's nature. God is
utterly one and utterly undivided (Q.3, articles 3, 6, and 7). Our language,
however, is developed from things that are divided, things whose qualities are
not identical with their natures. A human being may or may not be good, and if
he is good, goodness is not identical with his nature. Therefore the "way of
signifying" of "good" is different when applied to human beings and when
applied to God.
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Thus our language is constantly straining. Thomas says that we attempt to
speak about God by using two very different kinds of words: abstract words, to
signify His undivided nature, and concrete words to signify what Thomas calls
"His subsistence" (Q.l3, a.l, reply to obj.2). Thus we use abstract words in
sa)ring that God is Goodness and Wisdom and Truth, and we use concrete words
like the Tetragrammaton, a proper name, and words like "The Lord" and "He,"
to signify that God is, "if it is permissible to speak in this way, an individual"
(Q.l3, a.ll, reply to obj.l) Thomas recognizes strain on both sides, both when
speaking about God as goodness and when speaking about God as an individual.
The strain also shows when Thomas attempts to ascribe intellect and will to
God. The divine intellect never learns anything, or comes to know anything. God
simply knows. Like any qualities we ascribe to God, His act of understanding
must be considered as simply what He is, eternally and unchangeably (Q.l4, a.4).
Similarly God's act of choice must be understood as simply what He is, eternally
and unchangeably (Q.l9, a.l). All the actions of God described in the Bible must
be understood as identical with His nature even though manifested to us in time
as distinct events.
How can an unchanging God hear and answer prayers? In attempting to
answer this question, Thomas refers to God's actions in the natural world. Just
as God's action as primary cause does not remove the whole order of secondary
causes that function as instruments in God's hands, so God can use even our
prayers as contributing to the effects that follow (Q.23, a.8).
How then can our prayers, or indeed any of our actions, be freely perlormed
by ourselves? Here again Thomas relies on the conception of primary and
secondary causes, and on a distinction among secondary causes. God effects
some things through causes that act without thinking, like falling rocks and rain,
and some things through causes that think, deliberate, and decide. God's action
as primary cause does not change the nature of those secondary deliberating and
deciding causes. To say that men deliberate and decide is to say that they are free
(see Q.22, a.4).
But still, even if we are "free" in the sense that we deliberate and decide, are
we "free" in the sense that we could have acted differently than we do? If all our
actions go back ultimately to God as first cause, is it not God who ultimately
decides? And if so, why has not God made me better than I am, and made me
act better than I do? In considering these questions, St. Paul, who stressed at the
beginning of Romans that man can approach God through reason, later in the
same letter stresses the limits of reason. Paul discusses God's choice of Jacob
over Esau, of Jews over Gentiles, and finally of some for the grace of Christian
belief. Paul says that God
... has mercy upon whomever he wills, and he hardens the heart of whomever
he wills. (Romans 9:18)
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The question immediately arises for Paul:
Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will? (Romans 9: 19)
Paul's reply is as follows:
But who are you, a man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded says to
its molder, "Why have you made me thus?" Has the potter no right over the
clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for beauty and another for
menial use? What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his
power, has endured with much patience the vessels of wrath made for
destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for the vessels of
mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory, even us whom he has
called, not from the Jews only, but from the Gentiles ... (Romans 9: 20-24)
In dealing with man's relation to God Paul is driven to consider man as a lump
of clay in the hands of God, the potter. The metaphor is not Paul's own. It is
suggested by Genesis 2:7, where God makes man from the dust of the earth, and
it is used by both Isaiah and Jeremiah as an image of God's relation to his chosen
people (Isaiah 29:16; 45:9; Jeremiah 18: 1-11). But as Paul goes on, he breaks
off in mid-sentence. He does not even finish stating his question, let alone answer
it. He gets led away into his favorite theme, that God's salvation extends to
Gentiles as well as Jews. The question as to why God chooses some Jews and
not others, or some Gentiles and not others, is not even stated in a grammatically
complete sentence.
Unsatisfactory as Paul's reply is, I believe that no Christian writer has
improved upon it. Dante says that even the blessed in Heaven who see God face
to face will not understand why God has chosen one particular man for a certain
grace and not another (Paradiso, Canto XXI, 52-102). This is the unfathomable
mystery that lies at the heart of man's relation to God. I do not wish to explain
away this mystery. I wish only to say that the mystery arises not from philosophical speculation alone, but from the Bible itself. The God who speaks to Abraham
is also the unchanging creator of all things.
Part IV. Prayer: We speak to God
I have stressed throughout the difficulty we have in speaking about God, and
even the apparent contradictions toward which we are led. If this were mathematics, the contradictions would force us to reject the hypothesis from which the
contradictions arose, but the language of mathematics is more adequate to its
subject matter than the language of theology. Even the language of physics is not
fully adequate to its subject matter, for example, to the phenomena of light. The
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
difficulties of reconciling wave and particle hypotheses of light are well known,
and yet we neither ignore the phenomena nor reject altogether the language of
wave and particle. 9 If in physics, should we not in theology strive to be true to
our experience, and frankly acknowledge the difficulties to which it gives rise,
without expecting that the strains on our language will ever entirely disappear.
Such strains need not be destructive of religious belief, provided they help us
realize the infinite distance between our speech and the reality it attempts to
reach. Isaiah says, "Truly, thou art a God who hides! thyself, 0 God of Israel"
(45: 15), and Thomas prefaces his long discussion of the existence and nature of
God, a discussion that includes the five ways of demonstrating the existence of
God, with the statement that we can not say how or what God is, quomodo sit,
but only how or what He is not, quomodo non sit (Introduction to Q.2).
Kierkegaard stresses two dangers for Christianity, which can perhaps be
considered as dangers for religious belief generally. One is conventional Christianity, being a Christian simply by birth or upbringing because one lives in a
"Christian country" like Denmark, and never making Christianity one's own. 10
The other danger is characterized as "superstition" and "fanaticism." By these
words Kierkegaard means thinking that one can reach "objective truth" about
Christianity, that one can know the truth about Christianity in the way that one
knows simple and obvious facts. 11 Tills implies superstition, because it lowers
God to something within our grasp. And it implies fanaticism, because the fanatic
will think that everyone should believe in precisely the way he does and will be
intolerant of those who do not. The protection against both dangers is the conect
understanding of "faith." If we realize that our belief in God is a "leap" beyond
our ordinary knowledge, we will realize also that the habits of our family and
nation are not enough to sustain our belief, that our belief demands strenuous,
constant, and lifelong effort. Our sense of the mystery of God will also protect
us against making God less than He is, and against hostility or contempt toward
those who cannot make the leap of faith.
I contemplate the order of nature in the hope of finding God, and I see
omnipotence and wisdom; but I also see much else that disturbs my mind and
excites anxiety. The sum of all this is an objective uncertainty.... If I wish to
preserve myself in faith I must constantly be intent upon holding fast the
objective uncertainty, so as to remain out upon the deep, over seventy thousand
fathoms of water, still preserving my faith. (Postscript, p. 183)
I do not know whether anyone in our time and place can return from Kierkegaard's
conception of faith, where even the existence of God is a matter of faith, to the
Biblical conception of faith, which applied only to God's action, to His fulfillment
of promises, to His response to prayer. But then as now those who pray cannot be
convinced that their sense of speaking to God is merely an illusion. I do not here
refer to prayers offered on public ceremonial occasions, prayers couched as ad-
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SLAKEY
dressed to God but often really exhortations addressed to ourselves. I speak of
prayers that are genuinely spoken to God.
In the European languages that distinguish between familiar and formal
address, God is addressed with the familiar fonn, as in French with tu instead of
vous. That is, Frenchmen address God in prayer with the word used toward close
friends, not with the word used toward superiors. The same was true in English
when "thou" and "you" reflected a similar distinction, and when English religious usage was first established. Unfortunately, by a curious reversal, the use
of "thou" now seems to many English speakers appropriately formal in English
prayers, and the use of "you" excessively familiar, so that the direct and
immediate sense of intimate friendship with God is now less explicit in our
language. But though the beginning of wisdom is fear of the Lord (Proverbs I :7),
and though much can be said of the majesty of God and the mystery of God, and
of the believer as "out upon the deep, over seventy thousand fathoms of water,"
one can still pray with the Psalmist:
One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in
the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord,
and to inquire in his temple. (Psalm 27:4)
As Augustine expressed it,
Thou hast made us for Thyself, 0 Lord, and our hearts are ever restless until
they rest in Thee. (Confessions, I, I)
That rest begins in prayer.
*****
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Notes
1. All quotations from the Bible, unless otherwise noted, are from the Revised
Standard Version.
2. Summa Theologiae, I, Q.l3, Marietti edition (Rome, 1950). All translations
are my own.
3. The Symposium, translated by W. R. M. Lamb, Loeb edition (London, 1953).
4. Summa Theologiae, Second Part of the Second Part, Q.85, a.l.
5. For an extended and excellent discussion of the "fourth way," see R.
Garrigou-Lagrange, 0. P., God, His Existence and His Nature (St. Louis and
London, 1934), Vol. I, pp. 302-45.
6. Page B637 in the Norman Kemp Smith translation (London, 1953).
7. It should perhaps be noted that the infinite regress Thomas and Aristotle
"reject" is not an infinite regress in time. Neither Aristotle nor Thomas saw
anything impossible in an infinite series of father and sons extending
backwards in time. Aristotle in fact held that the world had existed through
infinite time and Thomas held that there was nothing impossible in such a
supposition, even though we believe from revelation that the world has
existed only for a limited time. The infinite regress both reject is an infinite
regress of causes where each cause depends on the one before it, as for
example if a stone is moved by a stick, the stick by the hand, the hand by a
muscle in the arm, the muscle from energy from food, etc. If such a series
does not reach a beginning, the final result will never occur. (See Q.46, a.2,
especially reply to objection 7.)
8. Physics II, 8, 198b 22-32, Hardie and Gaye translation in the Oxford edition,
as selected in The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York, 1941). Darwin
himself quotes this passage as having "shadowed forth" the principle of
natural selection (The Origin of Species and the Descent of Man) [Modern
Library, New York, no date, p.3]).
9. See Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science (New York, 1961), pp. 293-305.
10. Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript, translated by David F.
Swenson and completed by Walter Lowrie (Princeton, 1968), p.19, pp.
29-50.
11. See the Postscnpt, pp. 32, 35, 325.
�A Meditation on the
Present Plight of Philosophy
and the Pursuit of Truth
Monica C. Hornyansky
This is what I think should properly be called an occasional paper, because it was
occasioned by two recent experiences - one the invitation to be part of a
symposium of ex-students of a university department of philosophy, and the
other my reading of Richard Rorty's recent book, Contingency, Irony, and
Solidarity. As ex-students we had been asked to contribute a meditation on the
future of philosophy at the turn of the millennium: We should consider where
we were, if anywhere, in our own philosophical thinking, and at the same time
consider where philosophy itself might be heading at the turn of the millennium.
And Rorty's book had just forced me, as a teacher in a Great Books program, to
rethink the claim, which such a course implicitly makes, that some books,
including philosophical works, have a lasting validity and authority, for although
Rorty acknowledges the social usefulness of literature, he concedes enough to
the deconstructionist temper of the time to throw doubt on the possibility of valid
public criticism. Both occasions, then, imply some kind of crisis in thinking is philosophy in trouble at the end of this century, and if so, why? And do any
books have the kind of lasting relevance that makes them worth reading for what
they intend to say, rather than as a kind of Rorschach test or trainer of individual
subjectivity?
These questions, I think, require a theoretically founded response, and as a
Sartre scholar I shall couch mine in terms of Sartre's theory of value, the most
recent and perhaps the last consciously comprehensive such theory. So what I
shall do first is give a brief picture of the way in which, some fifty years ago now,
Sartre both understood and responded to these questions, and then I shall consider
whether Rorty's response is an overreaction which risks throwing the baby
Monica C. Hornyansky teaches in the Department of Philosophy and the Great Books
Seminars of the Liberal Studies Program at Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
(mainly the philosophical, but also the critical, pursuit of truth) out with the
bathwater (metaphysics).
My preliminary response to the first question -Is philosophy in some
kind of crisis?- is that I think perhaps it is, but only because philosophy is
always in trouble, as a special case of what Sartre called "the desire to be
God." In his book Rorty argues that philosophy has been haunted by a Drang
nach Metaphysik, and in particular by a hopeless quest for a founded ethics
which would solve the tension between private autonomy and the requirements of citizenship. I shall come back to Rorty later; what I want to say now
is that if we take what he says at face value, we would have to admit that
while his diagnosis is plausible, his solution- which amounts to substituting
literature and idiosyncratic commentary for philosophical analysis or description - would mean the end of philosophy as it has been classically
understood.
First of all, then, Sartre's use of the phrase "the desire to be God" easily
accommodates philosophy as merely a special case of that desire, which he
thought was a universal human condition, the result of the fact that consciousness
and the world we are conscious of are both run through and through with
contingency. Our reaction to the fact that contingency prevails in eve1y aspect
of our day-to-day experience leads to misgivings about the past, nervousness
about the future, and anxiety in the present, to overstate the case but make it in
short order. The constant questions, What do I think? What shall I do? Wbat
should I think? What should I do?, are the questions that have no necessary
answers for us, leaving us with an ineradicable desire for some sense of a
necessary structure for existence - the forms of culture we arrive at are
manifestations of this primary need to endow our actions with necessity, and our
understanding with certainty.
Sartre summed up this ontological predicament in the phrase "the desire to
be God" because it is our religious imagining of what God is like that expresses
most clearly the values we would like to have ourselves as a nature, or to find
embedded in the world. They are the values that would, if we had them, put our
constant questioning of ourselves to rest, and give us a quiet conscience, because
they would be inarguably necessary. Isn't this what God is like after all? He
creates everything, knows everything, and does what he wills knowing that it is
good. This is our idea of what it would be like to have a self-sufficient and
self-satisfied consciousness, and this, Sartre thought, is the source of all the
conventional, religious, societal, personal, aesthetic, and philosophical values
through which we attempt to symbolize that consciousness.
So now, back to philosophy - we can see that the values the philosophical
enterprise has promulgated in the Westem tradition are par eYcellence manifestations ofthe desire to be God. As an escape from contingency, philosophy has
been drawn from the beginning by the lust for metaphysical necessity, rational
�HORNYANSKY
73
certainty, or final definitions of the good. If you think "lust" too strong a word,
remember the siren song that Odysseus heard - "no life on earth can be hid
from our dreaming" 1; philosophy has always dreamed of precise, necessary, and
complete truth, as the fulfillment of its values.
We have tried to achieve this with endemically inadequate means. Logic,
observation, imagination fail to reach the ideals of rational certainty, consistency,
and wholeness which would satisfy our epistemological longing.
But perhaps, one might think, all those attempts to find foundational truths
and deductive consequences of foundational truths are in the past, and the
twentieth century has been exempt from all that. Thanks to Kant on Reason and
the Ding an sich, Kierkegaard on Hegel, and Nietzsche on any number of things,
the skeptical antithesis has been thoroughly aired.
Of course this is true, but the fact is that it is still aired from the point of view
of philosophers, whose besetting problem is the desire to be God in his epistemological aspect. So Kant still insisted on the a priori, Kierkegaard on the
exigencies of the Eternal, even Nietzsche on the overman and an eternal recurrence of the same. And still in our century desperate measures have been taken.
In spite of what Nietzsche from time to time said about language, there has been
on the one hand the idea that language is a system of logical relations or a body
yielding empirical reliability, and on the other hand, in Heidegger 's thought, the
claim that man, as the shepherd of Being, enfolds Being in speech- in itself a
wonderful metaphor, but is it true?
Well, while the ideal of rational certainty, whether produced by idealist
construction or empirical observation, was still the form in which philosophers'
desire for divine justification was accepted and practiced, there was no crisis.
And while language served as the empirical body or the locus of wisdom, the
evil day for philosophy was staved off. But now at the end of the century we do
seem thoroughly to have absorbed - after all, Rotty includes it in his title what Satire thought of as his great discovery in the 1930s, the pervasive
contingency of everything in our experience. What Sartre feared then- Simone
de Beauvoirdescribes him nervously scanning a book ofL€vinas, rnutteting that
his fhunderon contingency had been stolen- has become belatedly true: Almost
everyone thinks everything is contingent and has forgotten or never noticed
Satire on the subject. Now contingency is all about us, we are in the age of the
paradigm shift and the deconstruction of metaphysical thinking. Read Kuhn, read
Derrida, read, in patticular, Richard Rorty's new book, to which I now retum, as
apparent evidence that philosophy is getting over the desire to be God, epistemologically defined.
Rorty proposes that the word he would like to use for the hitherto foundational
thinkers, i.e., philosophers, is "theorists," because philosophy has given up or
should give up the attempt to think metaphysically, or to anive at what he calls
a "final vocabulary" for the description of basic concepts such as the good and
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the self, what I have been describing as the peculiarly philosophical form of the
desire to be God.
Let me quote part of Rorty's discussion of the new kind of philosophizing
that he recommends in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity:
Hegel's criticism of his predecessors was not that their propositions were false
but that their languages were obsolete. By inventing this sort of criticism, the
younger Hegel broke away from the Plato-Kant sequence and began a tradition
of ironist philosophy which is continued in Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida.
These are the philosophers who defme their achievement by their relation to their
predecessors rather than by their relation to the truth. 2
Would Hegel have thanked Rorty for this recommendation, I wonder? After all,
he said that philosophy wasn't philosophy if it was content to remain in the
contingent. However, let's concede for the moment that Hegel started this
movement towards the substitution of, as it were, reference to the words of others
for reference to a putative truth. Rorty emphasizes his view of this when he
substitutes for Hegel's notion of "dialectic" his own, as follows:
I have defined "dialectic as the attempt to play off vocabularies against one
another, rather than merely to infer propositions from one another and thus as
the partial substitution of redescription for inference. 3
Furthermore, Rorty does not think of his definition of dialectic as being
particularly foreign to Hegel's practice, for he adds:
... Hegel's so-called dialectical method is not an argumentative procedure or
a way of unifying subject and object, but simply a literary skill - skill at
producing surprising gestalt switches by making smooth rapid transitions
from one terminology to another.4
It is this manipulation of vocabularies that Rorty now recommends as a prime
philosophical method, especially as he is mostly concerned with the unbridgeable gap as he sees it between the ethics of the person and questions of public
justice. Rorty divides philosophers according to which of these is their major
topic; paradigmatically Nietzsche is interested in the individual, Dewey in the
social. He suggests that the former are in particular the practitioners of an ironist
philosophy on the following understanding of the difference between metaphysical theorizing and ironism:
For the ironist theorist, the history of belief in, and love of, an ahistorical
wisdom is the story of successive attempts to find a final vocabulary which is
no mere idiosyncratic historical product but the last word, the one to which
�HORNYANSKY
75
inquiry and history have converged, the one which renders further inquiry and
history superfluous. 5
On the other hand, he says:
The goal of ironist theory is to understand the metaphysical urge, the urge to
theorize, so well that one becomes entirely free of it .... The generic trait of
ironists is that they do not hope to have their doubts about their final
vocabularies settled by something larger than themselves. 6
But these general requirements ofironist theory seem to have resulted, in Rorty's
account of Derrida, in what he himself calls "private fantasy." He praises the
later Derrida for increasing the bounds of "possibility," for having created a new
kind of philosophical thinking, especially in his book Envois. And this is what
Rorty says about that book:
The later Derrida privatizes his philosophical thinking, and thereby breaks
down the tension between ironism and theorizing .... Falling back on private
fantasy is the only solution to the self-referential problem which such theo-
rizing encounters, the problem of how to distance one's predecessors without
doing exactly what one has repudiated them for doing.?
So perhaps it is the case that late twentieth-century writers are proving Sartre
wrong -for if what Rorty says about Derrida is true, and he approves it, then
he certainly advocates giving up, and has himself given up, the desire for rational
certainty about necessity as an intellectual form of the desire to be God. That is,
the anti-principles, as it were, of paradigm shift and intertextuality are to be
pressed to show that because there is no way in which we can preserve a reference
to reality (for all the usual reasons) we should give up on truth itself as a
regulative ideal.
So now I come to my principal objections to Rorty's position, and will
describe both how Sartre recognized the problem and how he went about solving
it. My objection to Rorty's view of what he calls "ironist" philosophy- that is,
a philosophy fully conscious of its own tentativeness, and the so-called intertextuality that he praises in Derrida- is that although it does not claim to have
abandoned the ideal of truth to reality as the touchstone of philosophy as opposed
to art or to mythos, it is close enough to doing so to intensify the present
difficulties of philosophy to the point of crisis.
It is here, as is rather usual with philosophy, that a quite sensible ape1-,·u is
being elevated into a principle, just because at least one of those desideratacertainty, consistency, completeness - is still exerting its siren call. Ironically
enough, the idea that contingency is the order of reality apparently obliges the
ironist to such diffidence of his ability to say anything true about reality that he
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
must retreat into "private fantasy," an idiosyncratic expose of his relation to the
philosopher against whom he measures himself. Here then we have perhaps
nothing more than another example of the tendency of philosophers to inflate a
partial truth and tly off with it into a larger sublunacy.
Let me oppose to those who are happy in, even advocate, taking refuge in private
worlds, George Steiner, lectming in Cambridge several years ago, on what he called
Real Presences. 8 In the literary context he ctiticizes deconstmctionist method as
illegitimately claiming to be the equivalent of the texts which occasion it. But he
insists that there is a difference- not the shot silk of DeiTida 's dijf<france, but an
ontological difference- between an original work of art and any criticism of it or
any loosely related associative ramble through the critic's or the author's psyche,
however well-stocked. He is pmticularly incensed at a teacher's judgment, which he
quotes, that to read Derrida on Rousseau was more interesting than to read Rousseau
himself. What Steiner insist<> is that the text is substance, and commentary on it
accident; to maintain otherwise is, he says, "a perversion not only of the calling of
the teacher, but of common sense where common sense is a lucid, concentrated
9
expression of moral imagining." So here Steiner is insisting on an ontological
difference - an instance, perhaps, of what Rmty would call "a final term" between a work of literature and a work of criticism.
What I want to consider now is the question, What would be the equivalent
distinction one would make in philosophy, whether we call it theorizing or
whatever we call it? The equivalent distinction would be, I think, that philosophy
aims at saying something true about reality, leaving aside whether it is a truth of
coherence or of correspondence; the distinction would still be between logos as
a rational account and mythos, or the goal that Rorty thinks is satisfactory, that
is, the defining of one's thought not against a putative truth, but against the
thought of one's predecessors. Taking Steiner's cue, one who wished to make
the distinction between philosophy and Ratty's ironism would insist- and here
I return to Smtre- on the difference Sartre notes between God's creation and
our own, that it is there whether we will or no (or as Sartre argues the point at
the beginning of Being and Nothingness, the being of appearances is indeed
being, it is not itself appearance). This implies a strong denial of the pervasiveness of what postmodernists call simulacra - the ubiquity of likenesses,
imitations of imitations, in all cultural manifestation, there being no original
bedrock of"presence"; we are never, according to this vision of the world, in the
presence of being rather than of symbol, sign, or word.
Now I would like to retum to Sartre's descriptions of God, especially those
in his Cahiers pour une Morale, to see whether there is any way of bridging the
gap between philosophizing in the old sense, and theorizing in the Rortyan sense,
since Rorty is undoubtedly right to insist that the old metaphysical longing must
be abandoned - I am not defending it. The question for me is only, must we
then just retreat into p1ivate worlds more like belles lettres than like philosophy
�HORNYANSKY
77
(or literature, which claims, as Thucydides claimed for his History, to be "a
possession for ever")?
Sartre believes that God the creator is just as much of a metaphysical illusion
as God the all-knowing, but that that illusion - one of our most strongly
imagined myths - does have importance for us. Indeed Sartre recommends a
threefold reflection on God's creativity in order that we may discover what it
means for our understanding of ourselves and human existence. Such a reflection
would, he thinks, first, reveal creation "under the activities of appropriation and
identification 1110 - that is, it would show that we ourselves ought to appropriate
and identify with our own creativity; second, it would clarify the distinctions
between the metaphysical myth of the Creation and creativity as an ontological
structure of our own; and third, it would lead us to use the myth as a guiding
thread to interpreting the meaning of that structure: What do we imply about
ourselves in inventing the myth of God the Creator?
What Sartre immediately points out as he pursues this reflection is that the
first thing we have to acknowledge is that we are not the inventors of the
contingent world into which we erupt as consciousnesses, and so ours is always
a dependent creation, accidental upon the substantiality of the natural world into
which we are born. So although our secondary task of creation is not one about
which we have a choice~ the human world exacts our shaping just because of
its inherent contingency~ nevertheless we have to take account of the inalterable aspects of the natural world just because we are not its creators. Isn't there
here, then, in substituting God's creativity for his knowledge, a value for
philosophers? And isn't it something they have been in the process of integrating
into their epistemological theory for a couple of centuries, ever since Kant made
his fruitful use of the imagination as the condition, through the schema, both of
knowledge and of art?
This matter of the adoption of the idea of imagination into the philosophical
armamentarium is worth a detour, as an example of how we might interpret our
own creativity as underlying the myth of Creation. It was one of Sartre 's avowed
methods to take a word that was not particularly precisely defined and use it as
an instrument of thought in the sense that its metaphorical properties could be
exploited to throw imaginative light on something hitherto obscure~ this is how
he used the word "nothingness" to throw light on the consequences of consciousness. So in a way he himself was an exemplum of what Rorty recommends, that
a theorist express his originality in the invention of a vocabulary to say what is
new in his thought. But the common-sense aspect of this is that the less he invents
the better, if the resultant thought is to be understood and incorporated into the
thought of an age, rather than degenerate into a recondite vocabulary that risks
never gaining public cunency. A very few neologisms arrived at methodically
can wrench the mind into a new way of thinking and with a minimum of
disruption of the normal vocabulary. Here lay part of Sartt-e 's genius. And Kant
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
did something like it with the word "imagination" itself, when he expanded its
creative function in a philosophical context in the Critique of Judgment. Rorty
acknowledges this in his book, and points out how Coleridge took off from Kant's
theorizing, thus showing, incidentally, that here philosophy fecundated literature, rather than the other way round.
Taking Sartre as the theorist of contingency, then, I want now to see how
many of Rorty's desiderata for a late twentieth-century practice of ironist
theorizing have already been supplied by Sartre, and very nearly in the spirit of
irony which Rorty recommends but with an important difference. This is a
particularly interesting exercise because Rorty himself calls Sartre a metaphysician, and therefore dismisses him a priori from the roster of ironists. Rorty says:
A metaphysician like Sartre may describe the ironist's pursuit of perfection as
a "futile passion," but an ironist like Proust or Nietzsche will think that this
phrase begs the crucial question. The topic of futility would arise only if one
were trying to surmount time, chance, and self-redescription by discovering
something more powerful than any of these. For Proust and Nietzsche,
however, there is nothing more powerful or important than self-redescription.11
Now my intention in pointing out what I believe are misapprehensions in this
little excerpt is not to accuse Rorty, but to make clear that Sartre was already
there as a theorist of time, chance, and self-redescription, and yet managed to
combine these facets of his philosophy with a desire to come to grips with the
real as the reference point of his thinking. He was not content with truth as- to
use Rorty's intriguing phrase- "a fuzzy but inspirationalfocus imaginarius." 12
First, Sartre described the individual as "a futile passion" for exactly the same
reasons as Rorty ascribes to himself- in Sartre 's terms, because the desire to
be God is a futile aim for an inescapably contingent being. The whole idea of
describing the ontological origin of human values as "the desire to be God, is to
highlight this as the temptation to metaphysics which, if accepted unreflectively,
is an invitation to futility. And he offered an alternative, just as Rorty does, of
self-redesc1iption, which would do full justice, however, to the unique individuality of persons as a reality of experience. It was not that Sartre was hoping to
find something more powerful than self-redescription, nor did he claim to be
doing more than giving the fullest description of human existence that he could.
He managed this specifically philosophical aim- of giving a general description that accounted fully for the unique individuality of persons- by contrasting
the ontological given of human existence, the fact that we are conscious bodies,
with the situational individuality of each person. In Being and Nothingness he
devoted long passages to the description of consciousness as a product of
temporality, chance, and self-redescription, and he described in some detail a
hermeneutic he called comprehension, which amounts to the self-redescription
�HORNYANSKY
79
of a reflective ironist. In particular, the space he devoted to the idea of "the
situation" covers the contingent emergence of consciousness from the contin-
gency of non-conscious being, i.e., the natural world. He pointed out as well that
the concept of God as causa sui was incoherent, since all it showed was that if
God existed he too would be contingent. I don't know what more would fulfill
Rorty's requirements for an ironist theorist.
But this all shows also, I believe, how Sartre differs from the ironist in not
giving up on the main philosophical job - that is, of producing an account of
reality which aims to be true in a philosophical sense, i.e., one that is reasoned,
evidential, and general. But Sartre would not happily have accepted the term
ironist for his advocacy of increasingly conscious self-redescription. Sartre
distrusted irony because it leads to a reductive attitude towards reality that
emerges typically in a withdrawal of commitment, and I believe that this would
apply no less in the philosophical commitment to truth as an ultimate aim of
thought, than it would in any other sphere of what Steiner calls "moral imagining," and specifically, for Sartre, in a morally committed literature. I would say
I sense this withdrawal of commitment in Rorty's description of truth as a "fuzzy
but inspirational focus imaginarius," although his position on the relation between public solidarity and private existence leads him to a liberalism much like
Sartre's. Where Sartre bases his ethics on the idea of the preservation of freedom,
as an ontological condition that applies to all persons, Rorty bases his on the
public fact of pain as the criterion of harm. And Sartre would identify the
metaphysician Rorty wants to leave behind as the man in bad faith because he
believes that his own prejudices are founded either in the past or in heaven, while
the man of good faith is always conscious that he is the origin of his values, and
therefore fully capable of the ironist stance Rorty advocates. But according to
Sartre, the problem is that the ironist tends to be paralyzed by his double vision
and to rest idle rather than commit himself in directions that may turn out to be
mistaken. He risks being a theoretical Hamlet, whose theorizing is without
practical effect either on himself or his world. Sartre as a moralist holds that
action in the world requires of the ironist that he consciously and fearfully unify
his double vision from time to time, that while irony is the inevitable point of
view of the fully reflective individual, it is something that he must be able to put
aside if he is to take his place as co-creator in his contingent world, in whatever
sphere he acts. And what he creates is not a pretext for intertextual commentary,
but his own existence as both individual and citizen, and whether he is a
philosopher or a writer, or whatever he is. So it is here that my reservations as a
result of reading Rorty's book crystallize. Rorty distinguishes between the
skeptically ironist activity of the philosopher as essentially local, even private,
and thinking about questions of public justice, which he thinks are influenced
more readily by literature because it can arouse and widen our sensitivity to the
suffering of others. The implication that sympathy is the basis of moral concern
�80
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
and that imagination is the form of consciousness through which it is activated
I do not quarrel with. But that philosophical imagination is to abandon its goal
of general, evidential truth as the ideal challenge to philosophical imagination is
the sticking point of my disagreement. To those for whom the complexities and
difficulties of human existence cry out both for explanation and for action,
pondering the interplay among individuality, creativity, and the world as given
is still as much a task for the evidence-gathering, generalizing, theory-making
mind of the philosopher as for the particularizing, situation-making mind of the
story-teller; and recognizing the end of metaphysics does not entail the decay of
philosophy, any more than of criticism, into relations among texts and private
fantasy rather than relations among beings and to the real, however inadequately
and tentatively defined.
*****
Notes
I. Homer, Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Doubleday Anchor
Books, 1963), p. 215.
2. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, (Cambridge University Press,
1989), pp. 78-79.
3. Ibid., p.78.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., p. 125.
8. George Steiner, Real Presences, The Leslie Stephen Memorial Lecture,
1985 (Cambridge University Press, 1986).
9. Steiner, Real Presences, p. 16.
10. J.P. Sartre, Cahiers pour une Morale (Paris: Gallimard, 1983),
pp. 530-31.
11. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 99.
12. Ibid., p. 195.
�I
Toucan Dreams
James Fox
The Zoo at the Sault had a pygmy elephant, Archibald, named in memory of a
local high-school basketball player. Although at only five foot two he was not as
big as a buffalo, Archibald was the brightest resident. He could count to five and
he knew a couple of simple card tricks that he learned when he traveled with a
magic act.
"All right, Archie, what do I have in my hand?" the clown would ask. "Is it
an ace or a deuce?"
The elephant would shake his head and take a card out of the clown's sleeve.
Always it was the ace.
On gloomy Saturday afternoons I spent many moments watching Archibald
eating hay and dusting himself. I loved his rough, hairy sweet smell, but there
was more to him than aroma and card tricks. Archibald took an interest. When I
talked to him about my loneliness and fears, he looked back at me with baleful
eyes and sometimes shook his head. I felt understood.
That's one of the reasons why I loved our local zoo. It's gone now, but I still
think about it. The zoo was converted into a mental institution in 1977, and I
have no desire to ever return: caged people are not nearly as interesting as caged
animals.
It was hardly a zoo at all, I suppose, but our town was proud of our skimpy
herd of mangy buffalo, our curious caribous, our single lame kangaroo. The
buffalo and the caribou no longer graze in front of the scraggly white birch trees
at the front of the zoo, nor are there visitors who pass them by in favor of the
more exotic animals inside.
Pierre, the six-foot alligator, swam in a small moat most of the time. Sometimes he lay on the cedar wood bank dreaming. He must have been dreaming-
otherwise, why would he have been so still for so long with his eyes half open?
James Fox is a free-lance writer and photographer who lives in Northampton,
Massachusetts.
�82
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Someone once started the rumor that "Lucky Pierre" was no longer a living
exhibit because he had been stuffed. However, one day Pierre slowly dragged
his tail over the sand bar and ascended a log. I stood amazed. He pointed his
snout at a small moth that floated above his nose. The alligator opened his jaws
and waited for the moth to settle. The insect fluttered just out of snapping range
and then flew up to the glass ceiling. Pierre waited patiently for his prey to return.
When I left the reptile house, PietTe's jaws were still open and they probably
stayed open for hours.
The special exhibit of three exotic birds included Maurice the full-grown
toucan, a scruffy myna bird named Harry, and Mr. Lee, the ostrich. Mr. Lee was
less intimidating than Maurice.
"Hisssss," I hissed at Mr. Lee. "Whissssst! Look out, look out! Your house is
on fire ... Run, run!" And he ran. The next time I saw him, I apologized to Mr.
Lee, and he ran away.
Maurice, the yellow-black-backed toucan greeted visitors at the entrance of
our little zoo with his terrible whistle- "Hello, Ha-a-a-a-a-r-ry!"
It was impossible to have a real conversation with him, but I tried. "Welcome
to the zoo at the Sault!" I said, mimicking his birdie voice. Maurice cocked his
head and looked at me sidewise and shifted a little on his perch.
"Wanna talk dirty?" I asked falsetto. Maurice seemed to nod, but even then I
knew that in cmrupting him I would also be corrupting myself.
In May the wild geese return to the northland to settle for a brief time in their
old nests on the tundra, but the second smallest zoo in the world is no longer at
Sault Ste. Marie. I wish visitors could still encounter my dear friend Archibald
who, although only a pygmy pachyderm, sees us as we truly are. They would
also discover Pierre in his watery den waiting forever for feeding time- a pound
of ground chuck or just a foolish carp, what does it really matter?
They would see only part of Mr. Lee, whose head is buried in a gopher hole.
And if they were lucky they would meet Maurice, still shifting back and forth
on his stick, making those ridiculous steamboat whistles. But who truly understands the secret of a toucan's heart?
I sometimes wondered what happened after all the people went home and the
zoo was closed for the night. Other children dreamed about ax murderers in the
house or imagined the creaking tread of ghosts coming up the stairs or planned
how they would win at cats-eye marbles the next day. But I was not normal. I
spent most of my free time at the zoo.
I used to fall asleep dreaming about night life at the zoo in Sault Ste. Marie:
Somebody had to say good night to the animals. Somebody had to feed all tln·ee
snakes. Somebody had to water the small African elephant and pet him gently
on his trunk. Somebody had to comfort Mr. Lee, the nervous ostrich. Did the
animals really fall quietly to sleep?
�FOX
83
There were old stories to tell, grievances to vent. Only old Pierre the alligator
fell asleep when they turned the lights out, but he was usually dreaming about
his next carp or about the good old days in Belize.
What did the animals think about when they were alone in their cages? I
imagined myself being invisible and staying inside the zoo after they have locked
the doors and gone home. Just me and my friends. I am standing next to Mr. Lee
when suddenly he looks up into the sky and I follow his gaze. Canadian geese
heading south in the long V formation. Honk-honk-honk. I can just make out
their forms against the darkening sky. I have never before watched geese with
an ostrich by my side. Mr. Lee is fascinated. He makes a small gurgling noise in
his throat.
Does he want to fly with them down across the gulf of Mexico and then skirt
the isthmus of Peru and fmally to bear north-north-east all day and night until at
last they arrive in Egypt where Mr. Lee sees for the first time the tombs of the
fallen pharaohs? ... Of course, maybe he was just curious about an unfamiliar
noise in the sky.
Pierre remains stationary in his moat, neither nocturnal nor diurnal. I have
come to believe that he is just an unambitious alligator. But what if! were invited
to read his mind? ... Something terrible is coming out ofa cave, a komodo dragon
breathing fire and green smoke. Pierre holds his position. The dragon comes up
to Pierre and hideous gas pours thmugh his nostrils. There is a hiss and his
forked tongue flickers a challenge at the peaceful reptile. The alligator suddenly
springs forward and the battle begins...
The dream fades and Pierre stirs his tail in the brackish water full of cmp
parts.
What about Maurice the toucan?What are his nights like when the zoo is dark
and the wild life begins? During the day he was a shy clown, tilting his head and
rolling his eyes, and making that loud, almost terrifying whistle. But he is more
of a deep-feeling bird than that brainless myna bird would ever be. Like Pierre
I think he remembers life in the savage, joyous tropical rain forests and never
really made a spiritual connection with the town of Sault Ste. Marie. At night in
the almost empty bird house, I believe his shrill ear-splitting whistle is transformed into a mournful serenade about missed opportunities and painful memories of his young birdhood.
It is my belief that when my soul returns to a new life in a different form, I
will be given a place in the exotic bird house. I will share my space with some
newly acquired hummingbirds. On cloudy nights I will look up through the
skylights and my caged heart will soar with the geese returning south again to
their winter home. I can hear them calling: "Come away - come away with
me."
And I will.
*
��St. John's Crossword Number One
by CASSANDRA
Introduction
This is a British-style cryptic crossword. Examples are published in the U.S.A.
in Atlantic, Harper's, and Games Magazine. Every clue contains two elements
in random order: a literal definition and a cryptic indication based on word-play.
Some typical word-play types are the anagram, component parts, sound-alike,
word within word, hidden word, and word reversal, or a combination of these.
Examples of the cryptic part of the clue:
Tries a lot, gets mixed up (anagram= ARISTOTLE)
Thus, boxes (component parts= SO-CRATES)
Sound of artifical digit (sound-alike =PLATO, i.e. PLAY TOE)
College official swallows bug (word within word= DANTEAN, i.e.
ANT in DEAN)
Lurks within some novice (hidden word= MENO)
Backward (reversal= DRAW)
Thus, full clues based on some of the above might read:
Philosopher tries a lot, gets mixed up (9)
Pull backward (4)
College official swallows bug belonging to poet (7)
NOTE: The answer to 5 down is an unusual proper noun.
Senders of the first three correct solutions opened at random (on a date six weeks after
the mailing of this issue) will receive book tokens worth $35 at the St. John's College
Bookstore. Address solutions (photocopies accepted) to Crossword Number One, St.
John's Review, St. John's College, P.O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404.
�ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
86
Across
1. Sicilian eccentric reads about
sound of bell (l 0)
6. Put money on a Spartan Number
Two? (4)
9. A measure against intemal progress (7)
10. Push Attila into the street (5)
11. Crest of free gravity and energy
(5)
12. Offshoot of Niobe's first offspring (5)
14. Relationship between small mammal and Gadfly victim (5)
16. Age of empty electron shell (3)
17. One foredoomed to die
wretchedly in Great Book (7)
19. Deduce number of Book of the
Dead (7)
22. Shakespeare's work encountered
setback with vermin (7)
26. Tough problem: leading the
French, or sitting back in the bath?
(7)
27. Hydrogen-like residue (3)
28. I complain about famous motherin-law (5)
29. Second addition to weekly magazine: back issues (5)
32. Note about a 55-gun salute (5)
34. Take Virgil's things and start
again (5)
35. Rave about two forms of egoclothing (7)
36. In ancient house, third son (4)
37. Man embittered by dog-filth
gone astray (l 0)
Down
1. A mother is primal parent (4)
2. Cold Lucretian greetings in
shadow realms (5)
3. Nine bad rhetoricians beginning
to get spiritual (5)
4. Crops up when ancient uncles
take bit of work to heart (7)
5. Belonging to constellation that is
about opposite the zenith, in the as~
cendant (7)
7. Big circle, a torque with a twist
(7)
8. Ptolemy displays anomaly of star
and moon with some hesitation ( 10)
10. Part of letter bums up (5)
13. Fix one's appearance, very soft
around the edge (5)
15. How one might use tin cups in
Hamlet? (10)
18. High points for country digestw
ing opening of Persuasion ... (3)
20. And not some other Austen
novel's start (3)
21. Clean-up time for spout (5)
23. Criminal's usual practice: begin~
ning when nightlight goes out (7)
24. Be headless chauvinist (5)
25. Still life: fee not high, they say
(7)
26. More trouble under the head of
Euclidean demonstration (7)
30. War story: flanks take initial
damage (5)
31. Part of 22 ac. seen, heard (5)
33. Star with tritium core can have
stupefying effect (4)
�CASSANDRA
87
�����I
j
j
j
j
j
j
�
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Zuckerman, Elliott
Brann, Eva T. H.
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
Sachs, Joe
Stickney, Cary
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Rout, Deirdre
Lieberman, Ralph
Wiener, Linda
Slakey, Thomas J.
Hornyansky, Monica J.
Fox, James
Cassandra
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The St. John's Review
Volume XL, number two ( 1990-91)
Editor
Elliott Zuckerman
Editorial Board
Eva Brann
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
Joe Sachs
Cary Stickney
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Subsc1iptions Assistant
Louis Lucchetti
The St.John's Review is published three times a year by the Office ofthe Dean, St. John's
College, Annapolis; Christopher B. Nelson, President; Eva Brann, Dean. For those not on
the distribution list, subscriptions are $15.00 per year. Unsolicited essays, stmies, poems,
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 $5.00
per issue, from the St. John's College Bookstore.
©1991 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 College Print Shop
��Contents
St. John's "For Ever"
Charlotte Fletcher
m
Editor ',s Preface
IV
Author's Preface
I
One: King William's School
and the College of William and Mm-y
15...... Two: An Endowed King William's School
Plans to Become a College
29. . . . . . Three: King William's School
Survives the Revolution
43. . . . . . Four: 1784: The Year
St. Jolm's College was Named
59. . . . . . Five: John McDowell, Federalist:
President of St. John's College
69
Notes
87
Results of St. John's Crossword Number One
89. . . . . . St. John's Crossword Number Two
Trout
��Editor's
Preface
Charlotte Fletcher was the Librarian of St. John's College from 1944 to 1980.
The five essays that appear in this issue are somewhat revised versions of essays
that were first published separately in the Maryland Historical Magazine, as
follows:
"1784: The Year St. John's College was Named."
Vol. 74 (1979), pp. 133-51.
"King William's School and the College of William and Mary."
Vol. 78 (1983), pp. 118-28.
"King William's School Plans to Become a College."
Vol. 80 (1985), pp. 157-66.
"King William's School Survives the Revolution."
Vol. 81 (1986), pp. 210-21.
"John McDowell, Federalist: President of St. John's College."
Vol. 84 (1989), pp. 242-51.
We thank the Mmyland Historical Magazine for permission to reprint them. It
is, we think, useful to have them all within one set of covers.
E.Z.
iii
�I
Author's
Preface
There was a time when those of us who were expected to answer queries about
the early history of St. John's College depended on undocumented histories and
on two articles by Tench Francis Tilghman that appeared in the Maryland
Historical Mal',azine in June 1949 and June 1950. Tilghman's book, The Early
History of St. John's College, was not published until 1984. He refers often to
the Archives of Maryland, the Minutes of the Visitors and Governors, the
Maryland Gazette, the Maryland Senate Journal, and the House Journal. His
research led him to question the connection between King William's School
and St. John's College. He found no answer to the persistent question of why
St. John's was named St. John's; nor was he sure about the details of John
McDowell's early appointment to the faculty and the presidency of the College.
He raised questions that I hoped to answer.
During the tricentennial celebration of Anne Arundel County in 1949, Mr.
and Mrs. Robert G. Henry had allowed the College to exhibit a series of letters
written by John McDowell that were among the Goldsborough papers at "Myrtle
Grove." (There was no McDowell correspondence in the College archives.)
Later, at the time of the constitutional bicentennial in 1976, I was ei1couraged by
Rebecca Wilson, then Director of Public Relations at the College, to wiite an
article on McDowell; and in the summer of 1977 President Richard Weigle
granted me two months' leave from my library duties for research and writing.
I found that the project was more extended than I had anticipated. Before I
could understand the circumstances leading to the appointment of McDowell I
had to know more about the politics of his era. For background I read Douglas
Southall Freeman's biography of George Washington. Cumulatively, through
day-by-day entries, Washington emerges as a man head and shoulders above his
contemporaries. I chose to adopt Freeman's technique of examining day-by-day
accounts. I read the Maryland Gazette and the house and senate journals covering
the days of the November 1984 session of the Maryland Assembly when St.
IV
�PREFACE
v
John's was chartered. These and the letters of Rev. William Smith were major
sources for my first article: "1784; The Year St. John's College was Named."
Again I found that I needed to search more deeply in order to answer the
questions I had about John McDowell. In particular, I had to know more about
King William's School. The results of this research were published in my next
three m1icles: "King William's School and the College of William and Mary";
"King William's School Plans to Become a College"; and "King William's
School Survives the RevolUtion."
By the time I wrote the fifth article, "John McDowell, Federalist: President
of St. John's College," I knew that it was the Rev. William Smith who brought
to fmition fifty years of attempts to found a Maryland college. He wrote the
charters of both Washington College and St. John's College. McDowell had
attended the College of Philadelphia when Smith was its provost, and it was the
Philadelphia connection that was crucial in bringing McDowell to Maryland.
I am grateful to the helpful staff of the following libraries and archives: the
St. John's College Library; the Maryland State Archives; the Historical Society
of. Pennsylvania Archives; the Archives of the Histmical Collection of the
Episcopal Church; the Maryland State Library; the Archives in the Swemm
Library of the College of William and Mary; the Archives of Nimitz Library,
U.S. Naval Academy; the Garrett Library of the Milton Eisenhower Library of
the Johns Hopkins Univer~ity; and the Archives of the Library of Congress.
For their critical comments in the preparation of the essay on the naming of
the College I am grateful to Eva Brann, Mmy Fletcher, Phebe Jacobsen, Mildred
Trivers, Margaret Ross, Harriet Sheehy, Allison Karslake, and Kathryn Kinzer.
For clitical comments while I prepared the other articles I am grateful to Mary
Fletcher, James Tolber1, and Phebe Jacobsen.! thank Nancy Jordan for her skill
and care in typing four of the manuscripts. I especially thank Elliott Zuckennan,
who suggested publishing the five essays together and who carefully edited them
into a consistent whole; and Christina Davidson, whose skills in graphic design
and word processing helped produce this issue of the St. John's Review.
Charlotte Fletcher
Annapalis, May I 991
�p
"•
E
/
I
//_
I
<)
(Fig. 1) Counties of Maryland and the Pennsylvania Border. The three westernmost counties, Washington, Allegany, and Garrett, were not incorporated until
1776, 1789, and 1872 respectively.
�One:
King William's School
and the College of
William and Mary
Long after Maryland was chmtered by Lord Baltimore, its English overlords
continued to treat Maryland as if it were part of Virginia. For example, in the last
decade of the seventeenth century, officers of the Crown and the Church helped
found a college in Virginia named William and Mary and a free school in
Maryland named King William's School. By charter William and Mary College
was given the entire revenue from a one-penny tax on every pound of tobacco
exported from both the Maryland and the Virginia plantations to countries outside England, Wales, and Scotland; no portion of the tax upon what
Mmyland's plantations produced was reserved for a free school in Maryland.
According to Maryland's Governor Francis Nicholson and Rev. Thomas Bray,
the Bishop ofLondon's Conmtissary for Maryland, the college in Virginia should
be of great benefit to Maryland youths who wanted a higher education. At the
time the two institutions were founded, some members of the General Assembly
shared this expectation, an expectation that was never fulfilled. It was many years
before a restored proprietary government in Maryland awarded the Atmapolis
free school a revenue comparable to what the Crown had given William and
Mary College in perpetuity by charter.
In 1632 King Charles the First carved two ribs from Virgirtia north of the
Potomac and gave them to Cecilius Calve1t, second Lord Baltimore, who called
the territory Maryland in honor of Queen Hernietta Maria. It became a home for
families of Calvert's own faith, the Roman Catholic, and of many other sects. As
early as 1671, Calvert proposed that a college be founded within the province of
Maryland, but his proposal foundered in an overwhelmingly Protestant lower
house of the Assembly- the upper house, or Council, appointed by the Proprietor was wholly Catholic- on the question of whether instruction should be
Catholic, Protestant, or both. 1
�2
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Twenty years later, when a royal governor, Francis Nicholson, who was a
strong Church of England man, urged the Assembly to build a free school and
both houses agreed - though they insisted that they wanted not one free school
but many free schools - there was no controversy. An Act of Assembly in 1692
had excluded Catholics from both houses and had also imposed a tax on all free
holders to support the Church of England throughout the newly drawn parishes
of the province. 2
Free school did not mean "free education; it meant a school that made its
students free by giving them a liberal education. 3 The Act that founded King
William's School (1696) described free schools as places where Latin, Greek,
Writing, "and the like" would be studied, for the "Propagation of the Gospel,
and the Education of the Youth oftltis Province in good Letters and Manners,"
with "one Master, one Usher, and one Writing-Master or Scribe." 4 In 1700 Bray
reported that the free school already slatted in Annapolis was also teaching
"arithmetic, navigation, and all useful learning." 5 It was the intention of at least
two officials of the Crown and Church, Nicholson and Bray, that some youths
educated in Maryland's free schools be further educated at William and Mary
College in studies preparing them for ordination as priests in the Church
of England. Indeed, Govemor Nicholson sought moral and financial support for
Maryland's first free school by praising the noble example set by the college in
Virginia "now vigorously carried on," saying "We ... in assembly attempted to
make learning a handmaid to devotion and founded free schools in Maryland to
attend their college." 6 On his visit to Maryland in 1700 after the Annapolis
school had begun, Bray went even further in confirming this, saying its purpose
was chiefly to prepare those youths who wanted to study divinity at William and
Ma1y College. 7 All early American colleges began as free schools, or with a free
school attached, to prepare boys for life and college studies. The grammar school
which was the beginning of William and Mary College was also called a free
school.
Rev. James Blair was founder of William and Mmy College and Commissary
for the Bishop of London in Virginia. Blair lived in Virginia from the time of his
appointment until his death, whereas Rev. Thomas Bray, Commissary for Maryland, spent only one year in his province. But despite his short stay the General
Assembly remembered him gratefully for the magnificent library of eleven
hundred books which he collected and gave them in 1699, and for the good men
he sent to fill the pulpits in Maryland's newly established churches-' As founder
of the first missionary societies in the Church ofEngland9 his influence extended
far beyond Maryland. The Book of Common Prayer adopted by the American
Episcopal Church in 1979 includes his birthday (February 15) with those of saints
of the early church for special celebration.
Yet Bray was visionary in the extreme in 1700 when he wrote the Bishop of
London from Maryland that youths educated in the Annapolis school who later
�FLETCHER
3
studied diviuity at William and Mary College could then be ordaiued by the
Bishop of London's suffragan "residing in the province." 10 Americans would
have no bishop in the Anglican succession, or any other, until after the Revolu-
tion.11 Moreover, Kiug William's School, chmtered in 1696 in Maryland, and
Willimn and Mary College, chartered iu 1693 in Virginia, would not develop
hand iu hand as Nicholson and Bray imagiued; each would develop according
to the style of its native province.
Although there were many differences in both style and substance between
Maryland and Virginia, there were many similarities at the time their first
educational institutions were founded. Both were founding new capital cities-
Williamsburg in Virginia and Annapolis in Maryland. Both had royal governors
-Sir Edmund Andros and Francis Nicholson served in tum as governor of each
colony. Both had economies based on the production and sale of tobacco. Both
chose to name their infant schools after the Crown, hoping for a royal blessing
in return. So similar seemed Maryland and Virginia to the Lords of Trade iu
London that they counted them as one plantation growing tobacco to produce
taxable wealth for the Crown. Siuce the twenty-fifth year of the reign of Charles
the Second (1673), Maryland and Vrrginia had been linked together in a levy of
one penny per pound upon tobacco exported to places other then England, Wales,
or the town of Berwick on Twede, an exportation very aptly called the "side
trade.'" 2 If the Lords of Trade linked Maryland and Vrrgiuia together as one
plantation, it is not surprising that the Lords of the Church, specifically the Lord
Bishop of London, viewed them as one field under his care, and, furthermore,
thought one college would do for both.
However, demographic and geographic differences did exist. Maryland had
the most diverse population of all thecolonies 13 while Virginia was settled almost
entirely by members of the Church of England. Until Maryland's political
revolution of government (1688-92), the colony was open to Catholics, Quakers,
Anglicans, and dissenting Protestants, and in 1649 it became a r'efuge for a group
of Puritans from Virginia fleeing a wave of persecution which followed the
execution of Charles the First and the accession of Cromwell. To accommodate
the Puritans Lord Baltimore urged the Mmyland Assembly iu 1649 to adopt the
famous Act of Toleration, and the Assembly complied. In that smne year the
Puritans left Virgiuia and settled iu Maryland at Severn, in an area that would
become Anne Arundel County. In 1650 they were able to elect two members to
Maryland's lower house. Even so they turned violently against the proprietary
government, hastening its overthrow. It is said that St. Anne's Church iu Annapolis grew slowly because of the many dissenting Protestants living in the parish. 14
This meant that St. Anne's for many years had a small congregation and that its
Rector had time to serve also as Master of King William's School. In any case,
King William's School had a succession of Rectors of St. Anne's as Masters.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
In the extent and configuration of their lands, Virginia and Maryland were
conspicuously different. Virginia was not only vastly larger- and therefore
wealthier- but her territory except for one small section all lay west of the
Chesapeake Bay. Mmyland 's much smaller area straddled the Bay, and her ten
counties in 1695 were located five on the Eastern and five on the Western Shore.
So whenever legislators voted according to their regional interests, a consensus
vote in favor of collective action was hard to achieve. Governor. Nicholson, an
able career administrator, comPlained "G-, I know better to Govern Virginia &
Maryland than all the Bishops of England, if I had not hampered them in
Mmyland & kept them under I should never have been able to have governed
them." About this remark Rev. James Blair commented in a letter to the Bishop
of London: "I don't pretend to understand Maryland but if I know anything of
Virginia they are a good natured tractable people as any is in the world. " 15
Just as these differences were reflected in the character of the two provincial
governments, so too they influenced the development of the two educational
institutions. They did indeed spring from a common heritage in the same decade;
they did indeed enjoy alternately the leadership of governors Nicholson and
Andros, and they were promoted by the Church of England at the time of their
founding. But from then on they were distant cousins. By charter William and
Mary was named for a reigning couple; King William's School for the King only,
Queen Mary having died in 1694, a year after the Virginia college was chartered.
The sponsors of William and Mary College specified in their charter the revenues
they expected the King to give them as endowments. Rev. James Blair traveled
to England with charter in hand, where friends persuaded him that in addition to
a Master and Usher even the Grammar School would need a President to
discipline Masters and Scholars 16 Whereupon he added paragraph 3 to the
Charter, naming himself President for life. He appealed to a sympathetic and
charitable Queen Mary, who got him an audience with the King. He petitioned
William on bended knee and received almost all he asked for. Petitioners for
King William's School, on the other hand, did not present their charter in person
and requested not specific endowments but ones "conformable" to those given
by charter to the college in VIrginia. The King lent his name and that was all.
Yet even the magnificent royal endowments that William and Mary College
was fortunate enough to receive proved inadequate to create a college. In addition
to the duty on the side trade, they included accrued money from quit-rents, the
"profits" from the surveyor general's office, and twenty thousand acres of land.
Forces in the Virginia Assembly thwarted Blair's efforts; his zeal was taken for
ambition (they thought he wanted to become a bishop), and as head of a college
faction he fought the royal governors as well as the House of Burgesses to gain
the support William and Mary needed to become a college. Until the "college"
acquired six professors in addition to the President, power of administration and
all its property was vested in the nineteen trustees. When its faculty developed
�FLETCHER
5
to this size, then "according to our Royal Intent ... the said Manors, Lands,
Tenements, Rents, Services, Rectories, Annuities, Pensions, and Advowsons of
Churches, [etc.]" should be made over to the President and Faculty. After the
transfer, the President and Faculty could elect one of themselves to the House of
Burgesses,l7 a parliamentary representation like that allowed the colleges at
Oxford and Cambridge Universities. When the school thus attained college
status, Blair's power, as~ consequence, would be further increased, a develop-
ment the Burgesses postPoned as long as they could. In 1727 an Usher was the
sole teacher in the Grammar School. Later there was a Master, an Usher, and a
Writing-Master.
President Blair had special difficulty in collecting the one-penny duty on the
side trade. Partly it was the fault of Queen Anne's War- pirates ravaged the sea
and trade with England's enemies was viltually impossible. The duty originated
in "An Act for the Encouragement of the Greenland and Eastland Trades, and
for better securing the Plantation Trade" passed by Parliament in 1673. It was
reserved for the use of the Crown. Bray had investigated its availability when
looking for funds to support the Church in Maryland, only to find that it had
already been given to the college in Virginia. 18 When King William and Queen
Mary bestowed the duty upon William and Mary College by charter, it was
on condition that the college pay the salary of its collectors out of the
revenue collected. 19 On several occasions President Blair solicited the help of
the Mmyland Council to further the collection.
His first solicitation came in 1695 as a directive from the Commissioners of
the London Customs House. It asked Maryland's Governor and Council to
reduce by fifty percent the fee given to Maryland Collectors (it had already been
reduced in Virginia), and to abolish the Office of Comptroller and Surveyor since
the Govemors of William and Mary intended to audit the accounts themselves
and thus save all profits for the college 20
The Council's response is unknown, but the directive cert<iinly reminded it
that Maryland's planters were being taxed for the benefit of the Virginia college.
Not entirely convinced by Nicholson's glowing account of its vigor, two Councillors asked Governor. Andros how the college was progressing. The first, Col.
Henry Coursey of Talbot County, remarked to Governor. Andros that he hoped
the college would be of great help to Mmyland youth, and Andros had replied,
"Pish, it will come to nolhing." The second, Philip Clarke of St. Mary's County,
reported that Govemor. Andros had said to him, "I suppose this College is to
teach Children their A.B.C." The reason given in Council for Sir Edmund's
barbed remarks was that President Blair had preached a sermon saying that
"those who withdrew back & did not forward their helping hand towards the
Building of the College would be damned," a remark that had offended the
Governor. 21
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
This incident suggests the striking difference in the styles affected by the
founders of King William's School and those of William and Mary College.
Trustees in Maryland, often falteringly, worked through the ordinary channels
of the Assembly, responding to built-in tensions between Council and purse-conscious lower house, Govemor and Assembly, Eastern Shore and Western Shore,
country patty and Am1apolis party, and the still unresolved conflicts among the
various sects in the Province)n contrast, the ever vigilant Rev. James Blair in
Virginia initiated all the action. He led a college faction which fought the House
of Burgesses, the Governor, and even the trustees and clergy, to make his college
a reality; and, when they did not cooperate, he called down the wrath of God
upon them. In his often pious but autocratic way, he fulfilled the dream of his
life and built a splendid college for Virginia. It can be said of the founders of
both institutions that they adhered valiantly to their respective goals of founding
free schools in Maryland and a college in Virginia.
Fresh from the experience of founding William and Mary College, in October
1694 Governor. Nicholson, when first addressing the Mmyland Assembly then
sitting in St. Mary's City, urged them to found an educational institution which
he termed a free school and offered a generous gift towards its support. Members
of the lower house subscribed generously also, saying "Doubt not that every well
minded person within this province will contribute the same. " 22 The Council,
too, contributed. Nicholson read them the charter of William and Mary College,
suggesting that they draw up a supplication "to present tl1eir Sacred Majesties
for the Erecting the said free-school confonnable as near as may be to the said
Chatter. " 23 Both houses insisted, and indeed persuaded Nicholson, that free
schools should be established throughout the counties as well as at ArundellTown on the Severn where the seat of government would move in the following
year.
No text has survived of that portion dealing with establishment of free schools
in "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning & Advancement of the Natives
of the Province" passed in 1694 in response to Governor Nicholson's initiative,
but its contents are known. 24 It called for the founding of a free school on the
Western Shore at Severn (Annapolis had not yet been founded) and on its
successful operation another at Oxford on the Eastern Shore; then, in each of the
counties as means permitted. This basic mandate would be repeated in the Act
which did survive, that of 1696, and would be adhered to by the legislators until
county schools were actually funded in the Act of 1723. But that part called the
"Advancement of Natives of this Province," requiring that all provincial jobs not
appointed by the Crown be filled by natives of at least three years' residence,
was not reenacted until 1704.25 Both Nicholson and the Assembly realized that
local schools were needed to fit native-born men for the offices of church and
state.
�FLETCHER
7
The Act of 1694 was weak in that it did not mention trustees to cany out its
purpose. Recognizing this weakness the Council asked the Assembly what was
to be done with the money already levied for the maintenance of a free school
or schools. 26 Should it not be used to build a small school and maintain a
schoolmaster? Having no trustees it could deploy to engage architects and
builders, or to select a schoolmaster, the lower house prudently replied, "Resolved that the money thereby raised should be kept in Bancke."27 Eager to help,
the Bishop of London had already sent a schoolmaster named Andrew Geddes
to the Province. Unprepared to receive him, the Assembly first assigned him as
a reader in a vacant church, and then dispatched him to William and Mary
College until a schoolhouse could be built in Maryland. No more was heard of
him.Z8
Finally the Council and lower house together wrote and enacted an "Act for
Establishing Free Schools" of July 1696. 29 In its petitionary preamble it thanks
the King "for his royal benediction to our neighboring colony [Virginia] ... in
your gracious Grant and Charter for the propagation of the College" and asks
him to extend "your Royal Grace and Favour to us your Majesty's Subjects of
this Province, represented in this your Majesty's General Assembly thereof." It
is clearly stated throughout that all the enactments are proposed "with the Advice,
Prayer and Consent of this present General Assembly, and the Authority of the
Same." It politely informs the King of the Assembly's intent but nowhere
pretends, as the charter of William and Mary does, that the enactments originated
with the King. The royal "we" appears in every paragraph of the charter for
William and Mary College, usually as "we have granted'' or "we grant." It is a
fiction which the General Assembly in Mmyland did not employ.
Like the charter for William and Mary College, Maryland's "Act for Establishing Free Schools" required that there be eighteen to twenty trustees who
should elect a rector from among themselves each year to serve as chief officer.
In the corporate title of both, the trustees were called VisitorS and Governors.
Unlike the charter for William and Mary, the Act provided that whenever one or
more of the trustees "shall die or remove himself and Family out of this Province
into any other country for good and all," he should be replaced by "one or more
of the Principal and better Sort of the Inhabitants of the said Province." The
charter for William and Mary College, on the other hand, appointed its trustees
"for ever" with "perpetual succession," offeling no process for removal if they
left the Province. First among the group named as trustee was "our trusty and
well-beloved Francis Nicholson, our Lieutenant-Governor in our colonies of
Virginia and Maryland," who remained a trustee for many years after Blair had
ousted him as governor of Virginia because there was no means of lawfully
removing him as trustee of the college. Needless to say, when certain men were
named trustees for ever, Blair had not anticipated that Nicholson would become
his enemy; and when Blair was tenured as President for life, Nicholson had been
�8
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
equally naive. Blair, of course, had thought the "for ever" would last only a few
years, believing that the school would quickly develop into a college when the
Statutes called for in the charter would be written, vesting power and all property
in the President and Faculty. However, that day, when the school was finally
awarded college status through the enacting of the Statutes by the Assembly, did
not arrive for more than thirty years.
In September 1696 the lo,wer house of Mmyland's General Assembly instmcted the Sheliffs throughout the pmvince to collect all subscriptions, and
commanded the trustees with all convenient speed to meet together and treat with
workmen (a bricklayer had just arrived from Philadelphia) to agree upon a
building proportionable to the tobacco and money subscribed. 30
Four years later the schoolhouse was built. 31 On 7 May 1700 ten of the
original nineteen Visitors and Governors named in the Act of 1696 met with the
Bishop of London's Commissmy, Rev. Thomas Bray, during his visitation to
Maryland. After filling county vacancies on the board occasioned by death or
departure of trustees from the province, ''they proceed to know what money is
raised toward building the said Schools [schools in the counties]." 32 Representatives of all eleven counties were present except those from Anne Arundel and
St. Mary's. Two Cantabrigians were among the completed board membership of
1700: Robert Smith was a graduate33 and newly appointed Col. Thomas Greenfield had attended Cambridge University. 34 Six were members of the Governor's
Council, who, acting as Visitors and Governors, agreed upon compensation due
the free school because of occupation of a schoolhouse room by the Council (no
quarters had been provided them in the new state house).
Six years later the Rector and the Visitors and Governors were to demand
payment from the Assembly for past rent, claiming that an agreement to that
effect had been made on 3 May 1700. 35 Undoubtedly in 1700 the Council thought
their occupation a temporary anangement but were nonetheless uncertain of its
·
propriety, for on 13 May 1701 they said to the lower house,
Whereas the free school wee now sit in hath been built in great measure by
the Subscriptions of Severall private psons well affected to that good Designe,
who arc desireous to see the good ef:Tect thereof, It is recommended to your
house to consider how the best use may De made of the sayd house, it being
now finished, And also that you will take care to provide some convenient
fitting place for his Majesty's Council to sitt in in Assembly time for the better
dispatch of business. 36
The lower house made no effort to provide other quarters for the Council. But
four years later a majority of the house, like the Council, believed that the "good
Designe" for free schools was jeopardized by rental of the schoolhouse for
government use. The house felt it necessary to enact a bill on 30 September 1704,
reaffirming its support for free schools, which read, "the petitionary Act to
�FLETCHER
9
establish ... free schools is declared to be in full force to all Intents construccons
and purposes." 37 Its good intentions, however, were defeated by events. On 17
October 1704 the new state house burned, and hence the occupation of the
schoolhouse not only by the Council but also by the Public Library (the Bray
Collection) [Fig. 21 and by the public records was prolonged until another state
house was built in 1711.
(Fig. 2) Three books from the ''Public Library," housed in the King William's
schoolhouse from 1700 until 1786. Many books in the collection are embossed
De Biblioteca Annapolitana on the front cover and Sub Auspiciis Wilhelmi Ill on
the back. The volume of Chrysostom shown in the center was consulted by Bishop
John Carroll and partially translated by John Shaw. Known as both the Annapolitan Library and the Bray Collection. (Courtesy of St. John's College Library,
on deposit at Maryland State Archives.)
Meanwhile, in Virginia, Rev. James Blair was having his own troubles. The
side trade was hampered by Queen Anne's war against France. From what little
trade there was, President Blair wanted more levy money than he was receiving.
He did not hesitate in August 1704 to ask the Governor of Maryland "to quicken
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the Collectors in making up their Accounts of the one Penny ... and to take Bond
from the said Collectors to the College for their Answering." The Council replied
that "they do think the Collectors have already given Bond Sufficient to Answer
the said Duty. " 38
It is possible that the Customs Collectors had little incentive to gather the duty
after President Blair appropriated the fee they ordinarily received for their
trouble; and Maryland had litlle interest in helping collect a levy from which it
derived no benefit. It was difficult enough for the Councillor-trustees to rally
support in the lower house for the free school in Annapolis, which the counhy
party viewed as operating at county expense. In addition to Blair's disappointment over the small amount of revenue coming from the one-penny duty, disaster
struck his college on 29 October 1705. Fire destmyed the college building, which
was sheltering both the House of Burgesses and the college grammar school. The
college then had no building at all- to occupy itself or to rent out- until it
built a new one more than ten years later.
King William's School also waited more than ten years to gain full possession
of its schoolhouse. A kind of stalemate existed between the trustees and the lower
house, which refused to pay fair rent for the schoolhouse. Finally, in 1706, the
trustees took a firm stance, saying they would either receive fair rent or sell. This
brought the lower house around. The deal struck for rental of the whole building
must have been agreeable to both parties,39 trustees and legislators, for they do
not discuss it again until 1709, when the Council complained to the lower house
that an open chest standing in the free school porch "is exposed to the Weather
so that several Certificates of Land ... are damnified and spoiled. " 40 Once more
the lower house was dilatory; two years later the same complaint was lodged.
The completion of the state house in 1711 relieved the situation, for in it a Council
office was provided.41
Presumably there were a master and scholars meeting elsewhere in Annapolis, as the lower house mentions them in connection with their use ·of the Public
Library.42 The first master whose name we know was Rev. Edward Butler, who
began teaching some time before 1710. From that year until his death in 1713
he was both rector of St. Anne's and master of King William's Schoo1. 43 In 1711
the Committee of Aggrievances of the Assembly reiterated the desire of each
county for a free school of its own:
It is humbly offered by this Committee as an Aggrievance that the Country
receives no Benefit by the Duties paid for the Maintenance of the free School
and they pray the House to consider whether the present Governors and
Visitors of the free School apply the Money arising by Virtue of such Duties
according to the Act for that Purpose made and whether the said Governors
and Visitors have any Right thereto. 44
�FLETCHER
II
In answer the House suggested in November 1713
that forasmuch as most of the trustees in the Act named are dead and departed
the present Rector, Govemor and Visitors be such with the Addition of one
out of those Counties where there are none already. The Money now in the
Treasurers' Hands belonging to the ffree Schools be called in and let out on
good land security.... That the Accounts of the ffree Schools be yearly laid
before the House for their inspection.45
To this Capt. Jones, for the trustees, readily replied that "the Number of
Governors and Visitors is already compleat ... but Cecil, Charles and Somerset," and as for the money in the hands of Col. Smithson, Treasurer of the Eastern
Shore, who by his own admission is "very aged and crazy," they would ask for
land security (which they got by way of a farm in Dorchester County named
"Surveyor's Choice"), and they would "alwaJ's be glad to shew the Gen.
Assembly the Accounts of their Proceedings." 4
When John Hm1 anived from England in 1714 as the first royal governor
since 1709- the President of the Council had acted as governor from 1709 to
1714- he circulated a questionnaire prepared by the Bishop of London to the
clergy asking among other things about the education of Maryland children. It
revealed that "the case of schools is ve1y bad, Good Schoolmasters are very much
wanting." 47 This, of course, was what the country party had been saying for
years. Governor Hart noted the lack of schools in his first address to the Assembly
on 5 October 1714:
Providence in his bounty has blessed the Inhabitants of this Province with
a numerous Issue but It is a deplorable Ret1ection that no better Provision is
made for the Education of your youth, there being but a slender support for
one School on the Western and none on the Eastern Shore of this so wide a
bay.
I do eamestly recommend this Gentlemen to your Consideration being a
Duty incumbent upon you as you will acquit yourselves to God & the Queen
like good Fathers & good subjects. 48
Queen Anne died within the year. Her successor, George the First, restored
full prop1ietary power to Charles Calvert, fifth Lord Baltimore, age fifteen, who
had Lord Guilford as guardian. Young Charles had been raised in the Church of
England, his father having converted, and was acceptable to the Protestant
government of Maryland.
In a new optimism which followed the restoration of 1715, the rector and the
Visitors and Governors of the Free Schools redefined their purpose, "the Ends
for which we were incorporated," and stated their claim to certain properties long
ago bequeathed them. They also asked to be enabled by law to conduct business
�12
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
with a quorum of five trustees present, it being difficult, they said, to assemble
a majority of their members at any one time from the distant counties. 49 Their
well expressed determination was matched by suitable legislation passed in
1715, vesting in them and ..their Successors for ever, a certain lot of Land in the
City of Annapolis, and an House thereon erected, commonly called the Kentish
House; and impowering the said Rector and Visitors more easily to transact the
Business of the said Free-Sch.ools.''50
In addition, at a meeting of the Visitors and Governors in May 1715, Thomas
Bordley, "speedily designed on a voyage to England," was commissioned "to
use his Endeavors to invite & Procure some Discreet & learned person ... as an
Usher at the said schools ... that he may Expect upon Vacancy of Provost Master
thereof to be propos' d in his Place, or otherwise to be Master of another
Freeschool erected on the Eastem Shore." 51 We know that Bordley did their
bidding because Governor Hart wrote Bishop Robinson in 1717 that "Mr. Wamer
who behaves himself with Prudence was on the first meeting of the Visitors of
the Free Schools, admitted as Usher to the School of Annapolis." 52
All these were forward steps in the development of King William's School,
but its means of suppmt were still slim. For twenty-two years the Council had
not officially questioned the fairness of the one-penny-per-pound tax from the
side trade going in its entirety to the college in Virginia. It was the Crown's to
give. But as trade increased after 1714 and Maryland had desperate need for
additional funds to develop schools, members of House and Council naturally
wondered why all the levy should go to Virginia when it came from tobacco
raised partly on Maryland plantations. The question was first raised in the
Council, where the most eminent of the provincial attorneys sat, on 24 March
1715.
On that day Charles Carroll, who had been appointed by Charles, Lord
Baltimore, "our chief Agent, Escheator, Naval Officer, & Receiver General of
all our Rents, Fines, Fmfeitures, Tobaccos or Moneys for Lands, etc.," brought
instructions from the King to Governor Hart. Members of the Carroll family were
held in high esteem by the Calve1ts, who had entrusted their business to them for
several generations. The royal instructions began thus:
First. You shall give directions & take especial Care that John Hart, Esq.
Deputy Governour of our Province of Maryland do the first place inform
himself of the Principal 'Laws relating to the Plantation Trade Viz ...
. . . An Act for the incouragement of the Greene land and Eastland Trades;
and for the better secureing the Plantation Trade. 53
At the reading of the instructions Governor Hart was less concerned about
the King's communication than he was about the fact that Mr. Carroll, a Catholic,
refused to take the oath of abjuration required of all men holding provincial
�FLETCHER
13
offices. Deeply disturbed that the Lords Baltimore and Guilford would employ
someone as Naval Officer in violation of the act that established the Protestant
religion in Maryland, he publicly considered resigning as governor. This was the
year the King of France recognized James the Pretender as true King of England
and some Maryland hotheads shot off a cannon in honor of the Pretender's
birthday.54 Fear that there were Jacobites among Maryland's Catholics caused
Governor Hart's unease apd distraction. Had he studied the Act made in the
twenty-fifth year of the Reign of King Charles the Second as instructed by the
King, he might have more quickly become sensitive to the fact that the ancient
linkage of the Mmyland and Virginia plantations gave the duty entirely to
Virginia. But instead of questioning the levy, Hart quarreled with Charles Carroll
and throughout 1717 continued to exhort the Assembly to find means to provide
better for the education of Mmyland children. It required an aggravation of
another sort to focus his attention on the lack of generosity shown Maryland by
the Crown: the erection of a beautiful college building for William and Mary in
Williamsburg, 55 a visible monument to the extraordinary generosity of the
Crown toward that college.
Conscious of the splendor of the building, in 1719 Hart admitted to the
Assembly "your abilities [your wealth] do not come up to your desire for that
laudable end [to build schools]." 56 By this time fully informed about the law of
the tobacco trade which had enriched William and Mary College, he was
persuaded to ask the Lords Baltimore and Guilford to beg a fair share of the
King's bounty for Maryland schools:
The good People of this province [he wrote them] have paid Large Sums
of money towards the Encouragement of Learning there [William and Mary
College] which the Distance of the Place And the Great Charge of Schooling
Children hath made altogether useless to us; For such psons as are of Ability
to Defray such Charge choose Rather to Educate their Children in Great
Britain.... We are humbly of Opinion ... that we should have Some share
in his Royall Bounty Toward the Support of a Free School already Built at
Annapolis and that the one Penny p pound to be Collected within this Province
... might be applied to the use and Support thereof. 57
The Proprietors received the royal answer in April 1720. It was negative.
Governor Hart was sony to report to the Assembly that they "can have no
Expectation of benefit from the Duty ... having Setled the same for ever on the
College of Virginia."58 But in the October 1720 session of the Assembly the
Lords Baltimore and Guilford suggested that a moiety of the 3" per hogshead of
tobacco the Assembly allowed Governor Hart should be applied to the school at
Annapolis, a proposal the lower house agreed to.
In his speech of 1717 Govemor Hart had said, "The Province is now in the
most happy Condition that ever it was since the first Settlement." 59 Such a
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
change for the better can be detected in the temper of the Assembly Proceedings.
The lower house now acted, whereas it fonnerly had found legalistic reasons for
saying no. In 1720 arrangements were made to finish a room for the Public
Library, 60 and the Committee of Accounts wa<; ordered to pay the Rector and the
Visitors and Governors of the Free School the sum of eighty-six pounds, thirteen
shillings and four pence cunent money for the rent of the schoolhouse, which
they did without demur. Twen,ty-five years after the chartering of King William's
School it.;; schoolhouse was tenanted by the school master and its rooms were
available for classes. Furthermore, the lower house acted favorably on a petition
from Michael Piper,61 Master of the Free School at Annapolis, asking that
"vacant ground lying between the School House and the Stadt House be granted
him for a small Garden." 62 We know also that an usher was at the school. By
1721 King William's School had attained the desired stability described by its
charter- one master, one usher, and an annual income of one hundred and
twenty pounds for their support, and one hundred scholars more or less. By
charter this was the signal to establish schools in all the counties. Enough had
been collected for that purpose from an "Imposition on Sundry Commodities
exported out of, and other imported into, this Province, which has succeeded
with such desired Effect." "An Act for the Encouragement of Leaming, and
erecting Schools in the several Counties within this Province" was passed in
October 1723, naming seven Visitors in each county to receive funds and to build
and organize a school in each. 63
The fund was divided into twelve parts for the twelve existing counties, to
build a school near the center of each. King William's School did not share in
this distribution. Besides the schoolhouse and the Public Library in its charge, it
had enough income to survive from the moiety of the three pence allowed
Governor Hart and from vmious taxes, 64 rental properties, gifts, and legacies.
Now that the counties had the means to develop free schools of their own, the
country party no longer jealously watched how the trustees of King William's
School expended public funds, thus allowing them a free hand to develop the
Annapolis school.
�Two:
An Endowed
King William's School
Plans to Become a College
In 1732 King William's School received an adequate, though not princely,
endowment. This was fortunate because a few years earlier it had lost all support
from provincial taxes. The endowment was a legacy of young Governor Benedict
Leonard Calvert, who willed the school one third of Ills estate. At mid-century,
legislation to develop the Annapolis school into a college, and to establish
another college on the Eastern Shore, was introduced in the General Assembly.
King William's School was chartered by an act of 1696. 1 It was planned that
a school should be founded on the Eastern Shore at Oxford, Talbot County, after
King William's School became self-supporting. And after that, one at a time, free
schools should be established in the other counties of Maryland.
However, no county schools were fmmded under the act of 1696. They were
not established until thirty years later by an act of 1723,2 wltich divided into
twelve equal parts all the monies collected since 1696 for the benefit of public
schools. County school boards were appointed to serve in "perpetual succession"
like the Rector and Visitors and Governors of King William's School. They were
directed to use their portion of this money to purchase one hu:n,dred acres for a
schoolhouse and for support of the masters. King William's School did not share
in this distribution, nor did it receive any portion of the annual taxes eatmarked
thereafter for public schools. Although sometimes called the Annapolis Free
School, it was quite distinct from the county school called Anne Anmdel County
Free School established under the act of 1723.
A majority in the Assembly wanted local schools inrmediately. But a minority
continued to trunk that the one-school-at-a-time procedure outlined in the act of
1696 would build better schools. Those who wanted a college or two for
Maryland favored the earlier act. They thought that to distribute limited public
funds for education among so many schools would give none of them enough
support to develop into the kind of good school the province needed for its youth.
Young Benedict Leonard Calvert, governor of Maryland from 1727 to 1732,
belonged to this group and on 18 March 1728/29, wrote antiquarian Thomas
�16
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Heame at Oxford University that "wee have here settled a fund for a free school
in the several12 counties." But he said there would be a better chance for "Real
Success in Education" if the limited funds had been spent on "our two older
foundations," i.e., the school in Annapolis and the one proposed for Oxford by
the Act of 1696, where there were accommodations for "Boarding Scholars." 3
Soon after his arrival in Maryland in 1727, Calvert "in tender Consideration"
of an application from the lo)'ler house, gave to the county schools half of the
three-pence-per-hogshead t~ reserved for the governor's use. 4 This was the
revenue that Governor Hart gave King William's School in 1720. The act
renewing the revenue in 1723 provided for its expiration in 1726.5 Loss of the
revenue from this tax almost wrecked King William's School.
The funds were sunk, the School had soon decay' d
Unless supported by thy [Govemor Calve1t's] Bounteous Aid,6
rhymed poet and schoolmaster Richard Lewis. For what Calvert ahnost destroyed with his left hand, he saved with his right by seeking private benefactors
to aid the Annapolis school.
Governor Calvert's "Bounteous Aid" came as one third of his worldly goods,
which he, mindful of failing health, bequeathed King William's School in a will
written just before he sailed for England in April 1732. 7 Benedict Leonard
Calvert, great-grandson of Charles I and the Duchess of Cleveland, and younger
brother of the fifth Proprietor, Charles, Lord Baltimore, was only twenty-seven
years old when he became Governor of Mary land. According to two discerning
friends, he was scholarly and generous. Thomas Hearne, older than Calvert, had
corresponded with him ever since Calvert's student days at Christ Church
College, Oxford, in 1717. During his years in Maryland Calvert enjoyed the
company of a contemporary, Richard Lewis, a poet and schoolmaster, who had
entered Balliol College, Oxford, in 1718. Hearne often mentions Calvert in his
famous diary, 8 Lewis writes of him in his occasional verse. Both mention the
Annapolis School.
Hearne confessed that he had tried to persuade Calvert to stay in England
rather than go to what Calvert in his previously mentioned letter called an
"unpolished part of the Universe." But while saying this, Calvert sent to Hearne,
as if to show that conditions were changing in Maryland, a copy of Richard
Lewis's translation of Holdsworth's Muscipula: the Mousetrap, 9 recently printed
on Maryland's new printing press. In the preface, Lewis called himself"one who
is engaged in teaching Language"; Calvert described him as "a man realy of
Ingenuity, and to my judgment well versed in Poetry." Though he was best known
as a nature poet, 10 his occasional verses are of interest because they tell of
Calvert's intention to build a college in Maryland. Of the bequest to King
William's School, Lewis writes,
�FLETCHER
17
The Gift he gave was small to what his :Mind
Had to advance good Literature design' d,
His pow'rful Entreaties would have mov'd
His Noble Friends who useful Learning Lov'd,
To build a College, where our Youths might find
Instruction to Adorn each studious Mind;
And for their Use his B~lOks were all Design'd. 11
"His Books" refers to Calvert's well-stocked library, which it is believed Lewis
consulted while preparing annotations to Muscz]JUla. Evidently Calvert had
intended to give his library to the college.
Lewis is commonly thought to have written Proposals for Founding an
Academy at Annapolis. 12 Its author sounds like an experienced language teacher
when he says Greek and Latin are often taught in a way "too dry, laborious &
discouraging to the Capacities of Boys" and proposes that a better method be
adopted for the Academy.
Lewis, if he is the author, proposes a faculty composed of a senior Lecturer,
or Regent, "who shall be Professor of Divinity, Moral Philosophy & the Classics:
a Master and sub-master or Usher who could teach the Classics, a Writing Master
competent in Mathematicks, and an English Master who would also teach
reading and Accounts." The author suggests that the Regent and the Greek master
in the Academy be "clergymen as best qualified for Instructing the Young
Gentlemen designed for Holy Orders," and he clearly means clergymen of the
Church of England. Yet he recommends that "none of the Youth of this or the
neighboring Provinces, of what Opinion soever they may be in Religion, shall
be excluded from the Benefit of receiving their Education here, on Account of
their Dissenting from the Establish'd Church." This liberality toward nonChurch of England youth was later stated in much stronger language in the
non-sectarian charters of Washington College and St. John's College of 1782 and
1784.
In conclusion the author writes,
the Proposer. ... is ready to attend Either of the Honourable Houses when
Call'd upon, with all Integrity and Submission, being Prepar'd, as they shall
Judge proper, to Enlarge or Contract the Design, and Accomodate the Whole
to the Circumstance of the Province; The Genius of Whose Youths He has
Remarked to be nahirally Very Good, and Capable of great Proficiency by a
Suitable Cultivation.
This last remark suggests again that Lewis, a teacher in the Annapolis school and
therefore familiar with the abilities of Maryland youths, was the author of the
Proposals.
�18
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Unfortunately, the Proposals to Found an Academy at Annapolis, was never
introduced in the Assembly. The untimely deaths ofthe two men who would have
been its most likely proponents may explain the failure: Calvert died at sea on I
June 1732 and Lewis died two years later in 1734.
Without the income produced by Calvert's bequest, King William's School,
as Lewis wrote, might indeed have "sunk." Until the Revolution it comprised
seven-eighths of the school's ,entire income, 13 not counting fees received from
students. In his will, Calvert. required that sound investment be made of the
inheritance, that it
be put out at Interest upon good Security ... towards the payment of the Salary
or Support of the Master or Masters Usher or Ushers of the said School. And
to no other purpose whatsoever. ... If it should ever happen a Master of the
said School should be wanting during the space of one whole year, so that
children cannot be taught instructed educated at least as well as usual ... it
be paid to the church wardens & vestry of St. Anne's Parish . .. to apply in
the purchase of a Tract of Land ... for the use and benefit of the Minister of
the time being and his Successors of St. Anne's Parish. 14
The poverty of St. Anne's Parish helped make it possible for King William's
School to operate continuously. St. Anne's Parish had no rectory for its clergy to
occupy. The parish, being small, offered a meager living to its rector from the
tobacco tax of "40 per poll." 15 This was recognized as early as 12 July 1709,
when "the Governor and Council recorded that the Annapolis palish was deliberately made small so as to entail a minimum of parochial work for Commissary
Bray [who had an additional salary], but that this arrangement provided such a
small income that the governor had difficulty in keeping it supplied." 16 Years
later, in 1754, Governor Sharpe described the living as scarcely a decent
subsistence because of the "Dearth of provision, Fireing & Family necessaries,
which the lack of glebe land and a rectory provide." 17 For these reasons, it is
likely that between 1732 and 1759, some, if not all, of the rectors of St. Anne's
also served as masters of King William's School, living in the schoolhouse
quarters and, as masters, receiving some additional income from Calvert's
bequest. If this was the case, it was fortunate for the school, because the clergy
were well-educated and the school therefore never wanted for masters. 18
In 1754 Governor Sharpe wrote Lord Baltimore suggesting that money be
raised to build a rectory for St. Anne's Palish according to a plan like that
proposed in 1724 by Rev. James Henderson, acting commissary: money should
be accumulated by not appointing a rector for St. Anne's for a number of years. 19
And indeed, between 1754 and 1759, St. Anne's had no rector, but was served
by a vicar only, Rev. John McPherson. The money saved was used in 1759 to
build a rectory at 217 Hanover Street, which was the home of St. Anne's rectors
untill885. 20
�FLETCHER
19
After receiving Calvert's legacy in 1732, King William's School was independent of provincial funds. But the county schools, supported by the tax dollar,
were at the mercy of the Assembly. In 1740 they lost the revenue from half of
the three-pence-per-hogshead tax, 21 and it was never replaced. A bill of 1742 to
restore the revenue failed by a vote in the lower house of twenty-seven to eight. 22
Throughout the 1740s Assembly sessions were bitter confrontations between the
lower house, which claimed an exclusive right to initiate money bills, and the
governor, who demanded money for defense. Finally in 1746 Governor Bladen
pressed too hard for funds to support His Majesty's troops in King George's war
against the French and their Indian allies. In retaliation, the lower house withdrew
all funds for the completion of the governor's house begun in 1733. As a result,
it stood half-finished without a roof, slowly decaying, until renovated and
completed as an academic hall for St. John's College in 1789. 23
A frequent turnover of masters during the 1740s shows that the county schools
suffered from loss of revenue. In 1745, 1746, and 1747, tmstees from Anne
A1undel, Calvert, Prince George's, Queen Anne's, and St. Mary's counties
advettised for many months for qualified candidates. 24
Elsewhere in the colonies during the decades of the thirties and forties, people
were expetiencing a moral and spiritual uplift known as the Great Awakening.
Three colleges claim that they were established as a result of the moral enthusiasm of the period: The College of New Jersey (Princeton) in 1746; the Academy,
College and Charitable School of Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania) in
1750; and King's College (Columbia) in 1754. Maryland was stirred in its own
way by what Samuel Mmison describes as "aggressive missionary work by the
Church of England, and a quiet but pervasive growth of liberal Christianity." 25
Social clubs like the famed Tuesday Club and a newly founded Masonic lodge
flourished in Annapolis and were part of the liberal movement. Members of the
Tuesday Club contributed toward the Talbot County Charity and Work School,
founded to educate poor black and white children in useful trades by a fellow
member, Rev. Thomas Bacon. 26 Both he and Rev. John Gordon?' who left St.
Anne's Parish in 1749 for St. Michael's Parish, Talbot County, belonged to the
Tuesday Club. They and Rev. William Brogden, rector of All Hallow's Parish,
Anne Arundel County, preached sermons in St. Anne's Church before the Society
of Free and Accepted Masons of Annapolis at celebrations of the two St. John's
days: Gordon on 25 June 1749 and Bacon on 25 June 1753, the feast day of St.
John the Baptist. Rev. William Brogden preached before them on the feast day
of St. John the Evangelist on 28 December 1749.
But Annapolis's social clubs are more famous for their fun and ftivolity than
for their moral uplift and good works. Thanks to the historian of the Tuesday
Club, Dr. Alexander Hamilton, we have a picture of the King William's schoolroom where the predecessor of the Tuesday Club met weekly. 28 It was called the
Ugly Club.
�20
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
According to Hamilton's history
what chiefly gave this Society the name of the Ugly Club was the squalidness
of the Room, where they sat, and held their meetings, it being a large ghastly
apartment, of an old Building made use of for a School Room. The plaister of
the walls and Ceiling was much decayed and cracked, moldy, dirty, and several
places fallen off. Around the walls were many names engraved and done with
Ink, Chalk, and marking Stolle, and some human faces and figures of a strange
wild fancy with monstrous noses, unconscionable mouths, and horrid staring
eyes. The Ceiling was smoked in several places with a candle, and very much
gamished with cobwebs, and the Clay nests of worms and wasps. Many panes
of Glass in the windows were broke and cracked, the window sills and shelves
covered with dust, which had been collecting there for half a century. The
floor was squalid, full of spots and plaistered in many places with daubs of
dirt, collected from chaws of tobacco, and such like plastic substances, which
having been stood upon, adhered, and in a manner grew to the planks. The
furniture of the Room consisted of a parcell of old forms and desks, which
Served the members of the Club to sit and loll upon. There was only one
antiquated elbow chair, which was Set apart for the president of the Club.
Thus was it Solely upon account of the Slovenliness of the members (who
looked when met like a parcel of ragged philosophers), their affectation of
odd gestures, and dirtiness and unseemliness of the Club room that this Society
had tbe name of the Ugly Club, not from any bodily deformity in tbe members
themselves, for, in that respect, some of them were proper enough men, and
tollerably well made.
Among the members was Mr. Pedanticus,
a man of letters, having for some time exercised the office of Schoolmaster
for the City of Annapolis, and exerted himself to admiration, in that conspicuous station. He was remarkable for wearing dirty linnen nightcaps in summer,
and greasy worsted Ditto in winter.... He was an Hybemicum by birth, and
was pretty well stocked in the sort of modest assurance which is reckoned
peculiar to that nation. He had a particular tum to mechanics, and made such
great strides toward the discovery of the perpetuam mobile and the longitude,
that it is thought by many competent Ju~ges, had his means or purse been
sufficient, he would have effected them both. Like others of his profession he
was positive, dogmatic and Imperious, treating all persons, as if they were his
pupils or Schoolboys, much given to dispute, and always sure he was in the
right, and Commonly needed to get the better of the argument, by ~uoting
Greek and Latin authors, which few or none of the Club understood. 2
But contrary to Hamilton's comical descriptions and lampoons, many of tbe
discourses at the weekly meetings of the Tuesday Club were far from nonsense.
Smoothum Sly, Esq., was Rev. John Gordon, whose discourse on 5 April l746
�FLETCHER
21
(Fig. 3) The Ugly Club, predecessor of the Tuesday Club, meeting in the King
William's schoolroom in the early 1740s. Garrett Manuscript no. 1. (Courtesy of
John Work Garrett Library, the Johns Hopkins University Library.)
"was upon Civil Government, and had the approbation of the Club in general,
excepting his honor the president, who alledged he spoke too much in favor of
popular liberty." 30 On 16 August 1748 Gordon was high steward and therefore
entertained the Club in his home, which was the schoolhouse. 31
By 1747 the Assembly had mended its ways somewhat. After two decades of
debate it passed an act for "amending the Staple Tobacco for preventing frauds
in his Majesty's Customs and for limitation of Officers' Fees," 32 imposing
regulations and inspection on the tobacco trade. These were necessary to raise
the quality of Maryland tobacco, to make it competitive with the Virginia leaf,
�22
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
which was already under stlict regulation. Hoping to prevent the exportation of
"bad and trash tobacco," the act set up numerous inspection stations at ports on
the Chesapeake and its tributaries. In that same year the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle temporarily ended the conflict between England and France in Europe and
concluded King George's War in America. With the coming of peace, trade was
resumed with the continent, where Maryland's famous Orinoco tobacco was
always in demand.
The Tobacco Law and peace raised hopes such as those expressed in an essay
written in 1747 entitled "On the Means of Improving the Trade." 33 The author
recommended that two ports be established, one on each shore of the Bay, to
draw the grain ttade. He predicted that these two potts would soon become "Seats
of Learning as well as of Commerce." For, he continued, "Athens was the Center
of the Commerce as well as of the Literature of ancient Greece."
Seemingly the author's dream was shared by the trustees of King William's
School, who readied themselves to play a leading role in making Annapolis a
center of colonial learning. They gained permission from the Assembly to sell
"ce1tain lands and houses belonging to the free-school in the city of Annapolis
called King Williana's School," which brought in little rent, and 650 acres in
Dorchester County, which brought in no annual profit and on which they had to
pay quit rent. The Assembly required that any money realized from the sales
must be invested "on good security" and bring in annual interest for suppmt of
the masters. 34 But having gained the necessary permission, the trustees were in
no hurry to sell.
Evidently, they were awaiting the outcome of an action just begun in the May
1750 Assembly, whose purpose was to found two colleges with funds acquired
through confiscating the property of the county schools. It was necessmy first
for the lower house to be polled on the question "Whether the County Schools
will be suppressed, in order that a sufficient Fund may be raised for establishing
a School, or College, on each Shore of this Province." Thirty-five rriembers voted
in the affirmative, seventeen in the negative. 35 Just before adjournment the lower
house appointed a Committee on Ways and Means and ordered that the proposed
bill, when ready, should be published in the Maryland Gazette during the summer
recess.
The bill as published abrogated the Act of 1723 and proposed to replace
county schools with "One good ... school for the Western Shore which should
be King William's School with such succession of Rector, Governors and
Visitors as directed by the Act of 1696," and one "good ... school at ... on the
Eastern Shore."
The firstmasterofKing William's School should have a master's degree from
Oxford University, and the first master of the Eastem Shore school should have
his from Canabridge University, each to be appointed by the vice chancellor of
his university, and the vice chancellors would, for the "Time Being" serve as
�FLETCHER
23
chancellors of the two Maryland colleges. Two Maryland boys, designated
Calvert's Scholars, should be educated gratis and be recommended for holy
orders in England. "Money arising by ... the Sales of the Land and Chattels
belonging to the County Schools shall be ... applied by the said Rector, Governors and Visitors of either School respectively to build suitable and proper
Houses ... all such Buildings shall be of Brick or Stone, with shingled Hip
Roofs, and but one Story High ... Three Rooms to each School ... to be
denominated First, Second and Third Schools." Standards were set for promotion
within the vmious schools. For example, no boy should be admitted into the First
School until he had read Tully and Horace in Latin and gone through the Greek
Grammar, Homer, Theocritus in the Greek likewise. 36
According to this bill, King William's School was to develop into a "good
school" or college, under the same board that had continued in perpetual
succession since appointed by the Act of 1696; and another "good school" or
college was to be established on the Eastern Shore, whose location and governance were not stated in the proposal. This bill, however, was never introduced
in the Assembly.
By 1750 wheat was becoming an important Maryland export. Many Mm·yland planters followed their grain northward to Philadelphia, causing Chestertown, on the way to Philadelphia, to enjoy a prosperity beyond that of Oxford to
the south. One of the attractions of Pennsylvania's capital city was the Academy
of Philadelphia, which opened January 1751 to teach
Latin, Greek, English, French, and GennanLanguage; together with History,
Geography, Chronology, Logic, and Rhetoric; also Writing, Arithmetic, Merchants Accounts, Geometry, Algebra, Surveying, Gauging, Navigation, Astronomy, Drawing in Perspective, and other mathematical sciences; with
natural and mechanic Philosophy, etc., agreeable to the Constitutions heretofore published, at the Rate of Four Pounds per Annum and twenty Shillings,
Entrance. 37
The exodus of Maryland youths to the Academy, and later to the Academy
and College of Philadelphia, became so great between 1751 and 1754 that it
occmred to one "Philo Marilandicus" that the money Maryland youths spent in
Pennsylvania for their education could build colleges on both the Eastern and
Western Shores of Maryland, or at least one in Annapolis.
He wrote:
On Enquiiy, it has been found that there are (at least) 100 Mmylanders in the
Academy of Philadelphia, and it is experimentally known, that the annual
Charges, for Cloaths, Schooling, Board, etc. etc. etc. amount (at least) to 75£
Maryland Currency, 50£ Sterling, for each Youth educated. Hence it is evident,
that if this Practice continues but 20 years (at the moderate Computation of
�24
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
5000£ Sterling per Annum), there must be remitted from Maryland for the
Benefit of the Pennsylvanians, the round Plumb, or Sum of One Hundred
Pounds Sterling. Besides this 'tis well known, that vast Sums are every Year
transmitted to France, etc. for the Education of our young Gentlemen of the
Popish Persuasion, etc. Tho perhaps superior Politics, Interest and Influence
may render the saving the Money in the latter Case (entirely lost to the
Province), impracticable, yet cettainly our Protestant Patriots might contrive
Ways and Means for keeping within Maryland, Cash advanced (as aforesaid),
for the Use of Pennsylvania, by establishing a College on each Shore, or one
at Annapolis, at which (if duly cheaper, and more conveniently accomodated,
and at the same Time) the Cash expended, would still circulate within the
Province. If you think these Hints deserve public Consideration, by inserting
them in your next, you will oblige,
Yours etc
Philo Marilandicus 38
Philo Marilandicus did not go unanswered. On reading this letter in the
Maryland Gazette, Richard Brooke responded with an argument in favor of one
college only. If youths of both shores were educated under one roof, he wrote,
they would contract friendships which would wipe out some of the ancient
jealousies between the inhabitants of the two shores; if one college only, it would
certainly be at Annapolis, where Gentlemen have frequent opportunities to see
their children while attending the Assembly and Court. To satisfy those who
objected to Annapolis for moral reasons, sirice towns have disorderly elements,
good regulations should be enforced. But if a town was considered too objectionable a situation for a college, it could be placed on the opposite shore of the
Severn.
Brooke, a Protestant heir to "certain lands, which are detained from him by
the Jesuits," suggested that the Jesuits be divested of their land, which could be
sold to produce revenue for a college. "Here then," he wrote, "we· have found a
Fund equal perhaps or very near equal to a genteel Endowment for one College,
but by no Means of two." In making this suggestion, to avoid any insinuating
aspersions on his character, he made "a public Renunciation of any Right to those
Lands." 39
The lower house did indeed write a bill to divest the Jesuits of their lands 40
- not to build a college, but to pay Maryland's contribution to frontier defense
in the French and Indian War. Since the foe was Catholic, some men feared that
Maryland's Catholics might aid the enemy. The upper house, however, rejected
the bill.
But in answer to Philo Marilandicus and others who wanted a Maryland
college, and who expressed their desire in terms advantageous to Maryland's
wealth, Governor Sharpe replied in May 1754. He was aroused to action by the
sight not only of the thriving college in Virginia, but also of the flourishing
�FLETCHER
25
Academy and College of Philadelphia where many Maryland youths were
spending Maryland cash. Speaking before the Maryland General Assembly in
1754 he said,
Shall I also take the Liberty of intimating what a considerable Benefit must
accrue to the Inhabitants, and what Honour must redound to yourselves, from
the Foundation of a more perfect and more public Seminary of Leaming in
this province; a Scheme this long since put in Execution among our Neighbors,
to whom our Youth are still obliged, much to the disadvantage and Discredit
of this Province, to recur for Liberal education.
If the Assembly could not be shamed into founding a college, Governor
Sharpe held out a carrot: "From my knowledge of what vast Pleasure and
Satisfaction his Lordship receives from being able to contribute, and promote,
the Reputation Honour and Prosperity of his Province, I will presume to
encourage you to expect something more than his bare approbation of such a
Proposal." 41
In spite of placing little trust in "more than bare approbation" from the
Proprietor, the Assembly responded to the governor's plea by again introducing
a college bill, this time an .act to establish one college, not two. Just as in 1750,
proponents called for a vote on the question "Whether the Fund now appropriated
for the several County Schools, and the money which may arise in the Sale of
the Land and Houses, which appertains to the several County Schools, be applied
toward the Erection of One public Seminary for Learning within this Province,
or Not?" Again, it was resolved in the affirmative, with thirty-eight ayes and
thirteen nays. It was then ordered "That the Committee of Laws do make an
Enquiry into Ways and Means to raise a Fund, for the Establislunent of One
Public Seminary for Learning in this Province and repmt the same to the
House." 42
Taxes already levied for the benefit of the county schools were the following:
"twenty shillings per Poll on Irish servants being Papists, and on Negroes; the
Duty of six pence per barrel on tar and twelve pence on pitch; and twelve pence
on Port." The Committee recommended two more- one on feny licenses and
another one penny per gall<?n on all rum and wine. They also included the annual
income received by King William's School from the bank stock bought with
Calvett's bequest, ground rents on lots in Annapolis, and what could be realized
from the sale of the Dorchester fmm. They thought that the total amount would
"be sufficient to defray the Annual Expense of a College." In addition, they
calculated what the sale of county school property would bring. But they did not
suggest selling the King William's schoolhouse, which "yonr Committee apprehend ... may be converted to some Public Use." 43
This last remark has caused some speculation. One historian has called it "an
innuendo doubtless full of significance." 44 This may be so. But on the face of it,
�26
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
it sounds more like a redundancy than an innuendo. The schoolhouse, from its
completion in 1701, had known public use- by the Council, the Records
Office, the Provincial Library, the church, the clubs.
In a final vote on 28 May 1754 a majority of one in the lower house voted
not to refer the bill "For the Erection of One Public Seminary for Learning within
this Province" for consideration in the next Assembly. Eighteen members from
the Eastern Shore counties voted for consideration; eighteen men from the
Western Shore counties voted against consideration in the next session. The
deciding vote was cast against by the Speaker, Philip Hammond, from Anne
Arundel County. The two Annapolis delegates present, Walter Dulany and
Alexander Hamilton, voted against, as did three delegates from Anne Arundel
County. Four delegates from Kent County voted for; the Talbot delegation split.45
All this suggests that the bill of 1754 favored an Eastern Shore location -in all
probability Chestertown, not Oxford- rather than Annapolis, where King
William's School would have been developed into the Seminary. 1f this was the
case, the innuendo may have been a recommendation that the King William's
schoolhouse, like the county schools, should be sacrificed for the development
of one seminary. The trustees of the county schools, like those of King William's
School, had been appointed in perpetual succession 46 Undoubtedly, they wanted
equable representation on the governing board of the new seminary, along with
the trustees of King William's School. An acceptable governance of the one
seminary obviously had not been worked out. Furthermore, the bill proposed in
1754 did not carry out the intention of the two earlier acts for the encouragement
of learning, both of which were committed to the establishment of county
schools.
In May 1754 Governor Sharpe wrote Lord Baltimore that the session just
concluded had not been a propitious time to introduce "the scheme your Lordship
was pleased to intimate for compleating the Governour's House." It had indeed
been another unproductive session, producing no constructive legislation for
defense or education. The lower house had again proposed the unthinkable, that
the tax on ordinaries be diverted from the proprietor's income to the support of
troops.47
Yet, when sympathetic to a cause, the Assembly could find solutions. News
came in July 1754 that young Lt. Col. George Washington (age 22) and his
Virginia militia had surrendered to the French and their Indian allies. Governor
Sharpe wrote Lord Baltimore, "Govemour Dinwiddie renewed his solicitation
for our assistance .... By this I was induced to meet our Assembly on the 16th
Instant & prevailed them so far as to send up a bill for supporting the Virginians
with 6000 pounds." 48
The lower house raised a significant portion of this amount by placing a surtax
on ordinaries. Their attempts to attach the base tax on ordinaries, which the
proprietor claimed as his own, had failed in the past. Thus they considered the
�FLETCHER
27
passage of the surtax a signal success, for they had been led to believe that the
proprietor considered not only the base tax on ordinaries, but any tax on
ordinaries as a source of revenue, his peculiar preserve. Their success proved to
be a step in the right direction toward financing a college.
During the visit of a victorious Washington to Annapolis thirty years later,
the lower house chartered St. John's College, having chartered Washington
College in Chestertown two years before. Included in the St. John's charter was
a tax on Western Shore ordinaries to provide revenue for its support.
��Three:
King William's School
Survives the Revolution
King William's School in Annapolis, where many generations of boys quietly
received an education in the eighteenth century, labored under inescapable
administrative, financial, and political problems. It was govemed by trustees
appointed in unbroken succession from its founding in 1696 until 1786, when
they legally changed its name to Annapolis SchooL They appointed masters and
"ushers" (assistants), and directed disciplinmy action until 1789, when Annapolis School became St. John's College. Unfortunately the school's journal of
1
proceedings and book of accounts have not been found. However, the Proceed~
ings of the General Assembly record what legislative action was taken in behalf
of the school, and the published letters of Governor Horatio Sharpe and a few
Gazette notices add commentary. Together, these records document the continuous operation of the school until St. John's College opened.
Nineteenth-century histories of King William's School are not continuous
nmTatives 2 Yet they satisfied those who held the popular view that St. John's
was founded as King William's School in 1696 until several mid-twentieth-cen-
tury historians, 3 troubled by gaps in these early histories, doubted its continuity
and overlooked the role its trustees played in establishing St. John's.
This, the last of three articles on King William's School, covers the years
between 1755 and 1786, when five college bills were introduced in the Assembly
during the brief peaceful interludes between French and Indian frontier wars,
and following the repeal of the Stamp arid Townshend Acts before the American
Revolution. This article relates a history of continuous operation during years
when King William's trustees dreamed of developing their school into a college.
Seven bills to found a college in Maryland were written before the Revolution. The first of these, ordered by the Assembly in 1750, was never introduced
in that body, perhaps because it was grandiose in some of its recommendations.
The next college bill (1754), like that of 1750, proposed that county schools be
confiscated, an unpopular notion. Also it was unclear about whether the one
college (the bill of 1750 had proposed two colleges) was to be located on the
�30
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Eastern or Western Shore, thus pleasing neither shore. It did not pass the lower
house. A third bill (5 May 1761) failed in the lower house; a fourth (6 May 1761)
and a fifth (1763) were killed in the upper house. The sixth and seventh (1771,
1773) were riders on money bills. The upper house killed the sixth but approved
the seventh, which" Govemor Eden sighed into law on 21 December 1773,
affixing the "Great Seal with wax appendant." 4
All bills written to estaplish a Maryland college before the Revolution
provided for the incorporation of King William's School into a new college
entity, a fact lending credence to the sign on the St. John's Annapolis campus
today, "St. John's College, Founded as King William's School in 1696." Each
time a college bill was introduced in the Assembly, King William's board would
strengthen its financial situation in order to employ another usher or hire a more
able master, thereby making the school a firmer foundation for the college. For
example, in 1750, when the first college bill was being discussed, the board
gained permission to sell its unproductive real estate and to reinvest on good
security to bring in annual interest.
When the first college bill was proposed, Rev. Alexander Malcolm,5 a gifted
mathematician and musician, was Rector of St. Anne's (1749-1755). He was a
teacher before he carne to Annapolis and after he left. In all probability he taught
at King William's School and lived in the schoolhouse quarters where some of
the other rectors had lived after 1732 (between 1755 and 1759, while saving
money to build a rectory, St. Anne's had no rector, employing a vicar who was
Jess expensive). If Malcolm was indeed master of King William's School, he was
the last master before the Revolution who was also Rector of St. Anne's. The
college bill of 1750 in fact had intimated that one man should not be both rector
of a parish and a schoolmaster, stating that the head of neither of the proposed
colleges shall "officiate in any church living in the province."
After 1755 King William's had a succession oflayteachers. No longer sharing
a teacher-priest with St. Anne's after Malcolm left, King William's for a few
years may have pooled resources with Anne Arundel County School to support
a master and an usher in the King William's schoolhouse. 6 In 1755 John
Wilmot, former master of Anne Arundel School but now master at King
William's, advettised for students, calling.the school by the long-accepted name
"Free School," and by a name not formerly used, "Public School." 7 Wilmot
taught arithmetic, geometry, gravity, surveying, navigation, and Italian (or
double-entry) bookkeeping.' His assistant, William Clajon, taught the Latin,
Greek, and French languages. 9
In 1757 Ciajon advertised that he was offering to teach a new subject, English
grammar, saying, 10
The Subscriber having by a great Application acquired a reasonable Knowledge of the ENGLISH GRAMMAR, he proposes to Teach the same at the
�31
FLETCHER
FREE SCHOOL of Annapolis. Those Parents who cannot afford their Children spending several years in the learning of Greek and Latin, may by this
Proposal procure to them the only Benefit commonly expected from these
Languages, THE LEARNING OF THEIR OWN. Besides, their Daughters
can as easily enjoy the same Advantage. As he does not take upon himself to
teach English Pronunciation (which will be taught as usual by Mr. Wilmot)
he hopes no judicious Person will make any Objection to his being a Foreigner;
and that, as his Proposal i.s of a self-evident Advantage to Youth, he will meet
with good Encouragement. His terms are very moderate, being only Thirty
Shillings, additional to what is allowed to Mr. Wilmot.
William Clajon
N.B. This will make no Alteration to the Price given me for Teaching French,
Latin and Greek. 11
Even more interesting than that a foreigner would teach English grammar
was his invitation to daughters to study at King William's School. Clajon enjoyed
some success: his role at the Free School expanded while that of Wilmot became
the "subject offalse mmors." 12 By 1759 Wilmot had opened a school at the head
of South River, the same year Isaac Dakein began his nine years ( 1759-1768) as
King William's schoolmaster.
The decade of the sixties in the eighteenth-centmy colonies was turbulent,
like the sixties of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and like them changed
America. Taxes were the issues in the 1760s- independence became the issue
later. Matyland's proprietor refused to allow the large revenue from ordinary
licenses to be appropriated by the lower house to finance the French and Indian
wars or to go toward the establishment of a college. He claimed it as personal
income. Proprietor and king alike exacted taxes on trade, and Marylanders
increasingly realized that such levies prevented the growth of h·ade. Until the
Stamp and Townshend Acts, these taxes exceeded those paid by two neighboring
colonies, Virginia and Pennsylvania. Matyland 's sluggish economy gave the
majority country party in the lower house reason to challenge the prerogatives
claimed by the proprietary. Governor Sharpe's inability to force the lower house
to appropriate revenue for defense prompted the proprietary to write Sharpe that
"Scarce any one End of Government is answered." 13 Sharpe found some solace
in the bond of freemasonry, which he, the proprietor, and his "enemies" in the
lower house respected. 14
A third college bill, introduced on 5 May 1761, unfortunately affronted both
the proprietary and country parties. It offended the proprietary by recommending
that the unfinished governor's mansion be renovated as the college building, and
by appropriating the fees from ordinary licenses to support the college. On the
other hand, it offended the country pmty by again proposing that county school
property be confiscated to pay for the renovation of the mansion as a college
�32
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
building. Many parents in the counties wanted to retain their local schools. In
1763 two new county schools were established in Frederick and Worcester
counties. The counties were also offended by the proposal that the present
trustees of King William's School be the total governing body, thus abolishing
their county school boards. On a final vote the entire bill lost, seventeen votes to
fifteen. 15
True friends of a college, ,however, did not accept defeat. The following day
(6 May 1761), Charles CaiTo II the Banister, a trustee of King William's School,
introduced a fourth college bill. Unlike its predecessor, it did not threaten county
schools. Instead, it recommended a lottery to raise money to renovate the
governor's mansion as a college building; and it further provided that "one
representative of each county ... be named a Visitor with those at present of
King William's School," thus giving the country party a share in the governance
of the college while preserving the board of King William's. Like the preceding
bill, Canoll's recommended that revenue from ordinary licenses support the
college. It received a resounding affirmative vote, twenty to twelve, in the lower
house. 16 Even George Steuart, a pror)rietary man representing Annapolis, voted
for it though it proposed appropriating the revenue from ordinary licenses.
Sharpe defended Steuart's defection, saying that had Steumt not voted as he did
"his Constituents ... should have rejected him at the next election." 17 Although
some members of the upper house also wanted a Maryland college, they knew
that Lord Baltimore would not allow such "a strip of his right" and therefore
killed the fourth bill.'"
Clearly Sharpe was impressed by the size of the vote for founding a college.
Believing that an excellent school was needed in Annapolis, he sought support
from private benefactors. He wrote the executor of Benedict Calvert's estate in
August 1763 that a Mr. Hunt had power of attorney from Visitors of the Free
School in Annapolis "to receive what money you shall be pleased to pay him for
the use of the said School":
Nothing remains for me but in the name of the Visitors to retum you thanks
for what you have done and intend to do for the Advancement of the School,
to which I have for my part engaged to contribute Ten pounds a year during
my Residence here as Governor.... it is i·eally to be lamented that while such
great things are done for the Support of Colleges and Academies in the
neighbouring Colonies there is not in this [province] even one good Grammar
School. I should be glad if either by Donations or some other method the Fund
or annual Income of our School in this City could be augmented so as to enable
us to give such a salary to a Master & Usher as would encourage good and
able men to acl in those capacities. 19
At the same time these efforts were being made to develop King William's,
efforts continued to establish a Maryland college. In 1763 the fifth college bill
�FLETCHER
33
was introduced by a lower house committee headed by James Tilghman and
composed of members of both parties. Despite the bipartisanship, it proved
another unacceptable bill. It, too, recommended that license revenue from
ordinaries be appropriated to college use. Worse, it proposed the use of an even
more contested revenue- three thousand pounds from the balance in the Loan
Office- to renovate the govemor's mansion. The upper house said the balance
should be used to discharge the debt owed to veterans of the French and Indian
wars. Therefore, although it wanted to establish a college, it referred the bill "to
a distant day for mature consideration." 20
Alarmed by the growing sentiment in the Council for a college, Sharpe
warned the proprietary "that there is a majority even in the upper house that think
the Ordynary Lycence Fines could not be applied to a better purpose [than to
build a college]," and urged, "if you see it in a light at all different from what it
has hitherto appeared to you ... send further instructions." 21 Unfortunately the
proprietor had not changed his mind.
As late as February 1765 Frederick, Lord Baltimore, adamantly refused to
give up the "privilege of Granting and Regulating Ordinaries," which he called
the "very essence of my Prerogative." 22 And Sha1pe himself expressed reservations about giving away the unfinished governor's mansion for a college. He
wrote, "it would really be a pity to give it entirely up, especially as I think it very
probable that the Assembly will some time or other refuse to pay a Governor's
Rent for him & alledge that it was for many years the Custom here & is still in
Pennsylvania for the Proprietary to accomodate his Lieutenant-Governor with a
Mansi on." 23
In 1764 an epidemic of smallpox gave Sharpe an excuse for not calling the
unco-operative Assembly to its regular session. But in his wisdom, at its request,
he called a special session to elect delegates to a congress in Boston to protest
the Stamp Act Eight other colonies sent delegates, But the governor of Virginia
refused even to call a meeting of the burgesses to elect delegates, On 30 May
1765 Annapolis was "thunder struck" by the arrival of Captain Joseph Richardson on the ship Pitt bearing news that the king had signed the Stamp Act on the
twenty-second of March. 24
A new generation of leaders emerged in the sixties composed of men who
had enjoyed a liberal education, By far the largest number had either graduated
from, or studied at, the College of Philadelphia- at least thirteen from the
college and many more from its academy. 25 In 1761 St. Anne's inducted its first
native-born priest, Rev. Samuel Keene, a 1759 graduate of the College of
Philadelphia, who served as rector until 1767, A year later Rev, William
Edmiston, another 1759 graduate of the College of Philadelphia, replaced the
scandalous Bennet Allen, a favorite of Lord Baltimore, as St. Anne's rector.
Edmiston stayed until 1770, Vestries in Virginia often called College of Philadelphia graduates before Maryland vestries could persuade Lord Baltimore to
�34
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
appoint them. 26 Three of this new generation were elected to the lower house,
where they relentlessly challenged prerogatives claimed by the proprietor:
Thomas Johnson, who studied law in Annapolis with Stephen Bordley, was
elected in 1762: Samuel Chase, educated by his father who was a graduate of St.
John's College, Cambridge University, was elected in 1764; and William Paca,
who graduated from the College of Philadelphia in 1759, was elected in 1767.
A fourth, Charles Carroll of C;mollton, who was educated at St. Orner's, France,
and at the Middle Temple, London, was barred from elective office because he
was a Catholic but joined them in their political demonstrations. All four men
belonged to the Sons of Liberty, a group formed in Boston to protest the Stamp
Act.
Lord Baltimore's favorite revenue source became a casualty of the storm
raised by that measure. Paca, Chase, Johnson, and Canoll led "out-of-doors"
protests that upset Daniel Dulany of the Council, a constitutional lawyer. He
thought action through legislative channels more proper. With three other
members of the Council who favored establishment of a college- Francis
Jenckins Henry, Henry Hooper, and Charles Goldsborough- Dulany prepared
and signed a brief addressed to Lord Baltimore that challenged the proprietor's
right to exact fees from keepers of inns and ordinaries. It said that the monarch
who had given him his charter had no such right under common law. Between
the expiration and the renewal of a statute to regulate ordinalies, they had often
operated under common law (1766 was between statutes). Therefore, the propri·
etor could not collect license fees until the Assembly passed the necessary
statute. 27 Convinced by this argument, or more likely by the force of events, Lmd
Baltimore relinquished his claim to revenue from this source. 28 The lower house
was then free to appropriate it to some provincial use.
If those who wanted a college in Maryland were heartened by this victory,
they were soon disappointed. The lower house did not then appropriate the
revenue to establish a college but used it for general purposes instead, leading
some men to think that members of the lower house were more interested in
testing the prerogatives of Lord Baltimore than in founding a college.
At the end of the sixties local school boards throughout the province tried to
improve existing schools. Negotiations led to the merger of some county schools,
a strategy that aimed to produce larger incomes and attract better teachers. In the
seventies three mergers were accomplished: Somerset and Worcester County
Schools into Eden Academy (1770); St. Mary's, Charles, and Prince George's
County Schools into Charlotte Hall (1774); and Calvert County School into
Lower Marlborough Academy (1778). 29
In 1766 King William's trustees advertised for "An usher capable of teaching
the English language, Writing, Surveying and Arithmetick," 30 while searching
for a person to replace Isaac Dakein, whom they had fired 31 Daniel Dulany (his
brother Walter was a trustee of King William's, and both brothers had sons of
�FLETCHER
35
school age) talked with a Mr. Davidson, hoping he might "be got for the
Free-School of Annapolis," and that "a subscription [might] be obtained that
would give him a reasonable support." He also mentioned a Virginia clergyman,
saying, "I am very much induced to think that all who have sons to educate here
have great interest in his settling in Mmyland." 32 This was Rev. Jonathan
Boucher, who was then operating a school in Virginia and who would later
become Rector of St. An!le's (1771) and conduct a small school in Annapolis.
But neither he nor DavidSon became master of King William's School.
It was clear that the school needed more income to attract a good master. So
after many years the trustees sold a twenty-year lease on Kentish House in
Annapolis. 33 And on 6 May 1769 Horatio Sharpe, Benedict Calvert, Charles
Carroll, Walter Dulany, John Ridout, Thomas Johnson, and Nicholas Maccubbin,
"Rector, Governors, Trustees and Visitors of the Free School of Annapolis called
King William's School," signed a deed of sale conveying their farm called
"Surveyor's Forest" in Dorchester County to Andrew Skinner Ennalls. 34
No record reveals who followed Isaac Dakein as Master of King William's
School. But many Annapolis schoolmasters were advertising for students in the
Gazette. Among them, Thomas Ball held classes at the Free School, where in
September 1769 he lost five textbooks. 35 He may have been master.
Aware of the repeated efforts to found a college, Governor Robert Eden, who
had replaced Governor Sharpe in 1769, told the Assembly that year that he
wanted "a well founded Provision for a more liberal institution of Youths to be
established." 36 Two years later the lower house approved a means to finance
one. Since no new college laws were introduced, one may presume that the
general provisions of Carroll's bill of 6 May 1761 prevailed. They were the
following: one college, reconstruction of the governor's mansion in Annapolis
as a college building, dissolution of King William's School and transfer of its
funds upon the opening of a college, and a college governing board composed
of the "present" King William's School trustees plus one representative from
each county.
The sixth attempt to finance a college (1771) appeared in the last paragraph
of "an Act for the Emission of Bills of Credit." It appropriated $42,666.67 to be
accumulated from interest on bills of credit to be issued, the money to be locked
as received in iron chests. This appropriation was approved in the lower house.
But the upper house, in evident pique because it had not been consulted
beforehand, killed the entire bill. It said that if the upper house was not allowed
any say in the disposal of money got from the issue of bills of credit, the lower
house might also exclude it "from considering what system of Instruction and
Enforcement of Discipline would be most proper." 37 Two years later, however,
it voted affirmatively for the same bill it had rejected in 1771. On 21 December
1773, Govemor Eden affixed his signature and the "Great Seal with wax
�36
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
appendant" upon "An Act for the Emission of Bills of Credit." 38 The sanguine
expected a Maryland college to be founded within a few years.
Again the trustees of King William's readied themselves to play a full role
in the governance of the anticipated Annapolis college. Their Register, John
Duckett, advertised for a master, an usher, and a scribe, their appointments to be
effective April 1774. The master was offered "an annual salary of fifty-five
pounds sterling ce1iain and five pounds currency to be paid by each scholar in
the latin school"; the usher "thirty pounds sterling cettain and two pounds
cunency paid by each scholar"; and "a scribe who can teach English, writing
and aritlunetick, six pounds sterling with every advantage alising from the
scholars he instructs and libe1ty to make his own bargain with their parents." In
addition, the master was promised a comfortable apartment in the schoolhouse. 39
A master was soon appointed, but the school still advertised for an usher and
a sc1ibe in April, indirectly reminding applicants that according to Maryland law
only members of the Church of England were "properly qualified." (A Somerset
county advertisement explicitly stated this requirement. 40 ) Since many of the
competent schoolmasters in America were Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, Maryland.
schools suffered because of this prejudicial law. (After the Revolution, John
McDowell, a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian and a graduate of the College of Philadelphia, would be appointed the first president of St. John's.)
Throughout 1773 the Assembly kept a jealous eye on the King William's
trustees, even though the school was supported by private contributions and an
endowment. It enacted a curious bill voiding any gift that would enlarge the
school's annual income beyond £200. The "Act of 1696" had allowed £120 for
support of a master, an usher and a scribe; the Assembly in 1773 recognized that
now much more income was needed, but thought there was a limit. Perhaps it
sensed that the trustees were overambitious to govern the hoped-for college and
felt it necessary to curb the trustees' efforts. On the other hand, this act strengthened the role Annapolitan trustees could play in the management of King
William's: it empowered seven of them to act if prior notice of meetings was
given to those who resided in Annapolis and to any others temporarily there at
meeting time. 41
In October 1773 William Eddis wrote a friend in England that the Assembly
had "endowed and founded a college for the education of youth in every liberal
and useful branch of science ... to be conducted under excellent regulations."
The next October he wrote that the brig Peggy Stewart had been burned with all
its cargo of tea in the Annapolis harbor. In September 1775 he was "almmed by
the beating of drums and a proclamation for the inhabitants to assemble at the
Libe1ty Tree" and resolved to compel all Loyalists to quit the city. No such
resolve was promulgated but by the fall of 1776 he and Governor Eden had left
Mmyland.42 Two months earlier the Free School building had become a military
hospital. 43
�FLETCHER
37
After independence, the General Assembly continued to control Maryland
schools. The Constitution of 1776 required all men in positions of public trust,
including school trustees, to take an oath of allegiance to the new state, an oath
many refused to take. As a result the King William's board and many county
boards were decimated. To reconstitute the King William's board, the Assembly
in 1778 declared that "from the absence of some, disqualification and resignation
of others ... it would be )egal for three tmstees [of King William's School] to
meet together, consult, direct and manage the affairs of the said school and
execute the several powers and authority ... as the whole of them together."
These three trustees were instructed to meet before 15 July 1778, to elect the
number of visitors required by charter and to take the oath of fidelity to the state.44
Four of the trustees who had signed the deed of sale for Surveyor's Forest in
1769 had taken the oath: Charles Carroll the Barrister, Thomas Johnson, Nicholas
Maccubbin, and John Ridout. At least three of them in all likelihood appointed
the new members necessary to reconstitute the board as instructed by the
Assembly.
Within two years hopes for a college were again dashed. In 1780 the state
confiscated all money· accumulated in the locked iron chests as directed by "An
Act for the Emission of Bills of Credit" (1773) to pay for "a just war." 45 The
Assembly promised that the $42,666.67 intended for the establishment of a
college would be replaced as soon as possible after the return of peace. In the
same year legislators passed a law to regulate ordinalies, effective for seven
years, empowering the state to collect licen~e fees and impose fines for breach
of law. 46 (A restatement of this law in 1784 would give tllis revenue by charter
to St. John's forever.)
Finally, in 1782, the General Assembly chartered a Maryland college. But it
was on the Eastern Shore. Under the mastership of Rev. William Smith, former
provost of the College of Philadelphia, the Kent County Free School had
attracted over one hundred students. Its board (with Smith as chairman) had
collected subscriptions worth £5,992. On the strength of this success, it had
petitioned the Assembly to charter the school as a college, to be called "Washington College." According to the charter, one trustee was to be elected from
each group of subscribers who together pledged £500; later the St. John's charter
included a like plan, except that groups pledging £I ,000 selected trustees.
The Washington College charter proposed that a Western Shore college
should also be founded to form, with Washington, one state university. 47 Accord-
ingly in 1783 Governor Paca asked the General Assembly to give special
attention as soon as peace was established to the support of "Religion and
Learning." 48 After the signing of the Treaty of Paris in January 1784 the King
William's trustees, and others, anticipated establishment of a Western Shore
college. Undoubtedly they hoped that it would be located in Annapolis. In August
1784 the King William's trustees announced that the new master, Rev. Ralph
�38
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
(Fig. 4)The Reverend William Smith, first provost of the College of Philadelphia,
first president of Washington College, and president protem. of St. John's at its
opening. Engraved by John Sartain in t880, from the original portrait by Gilbert
Stuart, painted 1800. (Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania.)
Higginbotham, "will open a school for the education of young gentlemen in the
Greek and Latin languages, preparatory to their entering college." 49 On 3
December 1784 a group met in Annapolis to promote a Western Shore college
and choose six subscription agents, three clergy and three laymen, to prepare a
bill for founding a college. This bill would be the college charter.
Although many legislators were ready to found a Westem Shore college as
part of a University of Maryland, it was necessary to persuade them to fund it.
The three clerical subscription agents who framed the St. John's charter (Patrick
Allison and John Carroll besides Smith) wrote as a provision that the college
would receive £1,750 annually from the state. They gave secondary importance
to acceptance of the governor's mansion offered by the state, should the college
settle in Annapolis. Since some delegates wanted the college located in their
home districts, the agents may have thought it politic- as well as just- to
postpone the choice of location until the number of trustees required to constitute
a board was elected from the Western Shore county subscription lists. They did
�39
FLETCHER
provide that the choice of a college site should be the first order of business once
a duly constituted board was seated. If the board chose Annapolis, it could then
accept the mansion as a college building. The charter set a deadline of 1 June
1785 for the election of thirteen trustees who were to meet and decide upon a
location of the college by l August of that year.
The charter establishing St. John's College was entitled "An Act for founding
a College on the Western :'Shore of this state, and constituting the same, together
with Washington College on the Eastern Shore, into one University by the name
of the University ofMaryland." It passed the House of Delegates on 30 December
1784. Paragraph 22 amended the act for licensing ordinaries passed in March
1780, stating that "the money hereafter collected from ordinary licenses on the
Western Shore (with the exception of the city of Annapolis and Baltimore), shall
... be subject to the orders of the visitors and governors of St. John's College."
This revenue, with that from several other taxes, would compose the £1,750
yearly income the charter promised.
Despite such care not to offend the counties and Baltimore, opposition
developed as soon as the appropriation for St. John's became known and a similar
but lesser one (£ 1,250) was committed to Washington College in the sarue
session. A "Planter" complained in the Maryland Gazette that the "state is
burthened with two thousand five hundred pounds per year for ever for the
support of two colleges, where gentlemen's children are to be educated at the
public expence." An able rebuttal argued that in 1773 "An Act for the Emission
of Bills of Credit" had appropriated $42,666.67 or £4,000, for the establishment
5°
of a seminary but that "the calamaties of war rendered it necessary to unlock the
chest, but with a solemn pledge ... that the money should be replaced as soon
as possible and applied for a seminary of learning." The writer had carefully
calculated that if that money had been invested, it would by 1785 have yielded
at least £3,000 a year.
Thus it appears ... that the college laws are not any new burden on the
people, but only a wise and easy provision for the payment of interest on an
old debt ... and when every other Debt was to be funded and provision made
for the payment of interest till the capital on it be discharged it would be very
unjust that the Debt for the rising generation, our own children and posterity,
though one of the oldest, and contracted at the commencement of the war,
should alone remain neglected ... and ... the taxes imposed are not any
except on those who choose to pay them. 5 1
It took longer than expected to collect subscription lists totaling £1 ,000 each,
and to elect the thirteen trustees. So the 1 August deadline passed without the
choice of a college site. Contingency plans offered by the charter for selecting a
site were not adopted but a bit of advice was that "In the meantime the said agents
shall with all diligence increase the number of subscriptions."
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
In November the agents asked the Assembly to give them until March 1786
to elect the requisite trustees and begged it to allow the following alterations in
the charter provisions for setting up a working board: that seven (instead of
thirteen) trustees elected by I March 1786, plus four agents, be allowed to choose
a college site, if seven of these eleven agreed on a place; and that nine trustees
elected by 1 March 1786 be empowered to conduct college business. The
Assembly approved these altyrations. 52
Like other subsCiibers King William's was allowed one trustee of its choice
for each £1,000 it pledged to St. John's. Unlike other subscribers it did not make
its pledge to the subscription agents, but waited until it could negotiate the terms
of its conveyance with a St. John's board, as one corporation to another. And
before making its pledge, it would ask the St. John's board to grant certain
concessions.
On 28 February 1786, in the presence of five agents, nine men elected by
subscribers were seated as trustees of a St. John's College board. By a cha1ter
amendment, nine were enough to conduct business. But instead of voting as a
first order of business on a college site, they considered a "Proposition laid before
the Visitors and Governors by the Rector and Visitors of Annapolis School [King
William's School] in pursuance of 'An Act of Assembly for Consolidating the
funds of King William's School with the funds of St. John's College."' A
committee representing King William's School requested that the "two trustees
they were entitled to elect by virtue of the two thousand pounds they were
prepared to pledge immediately, be sworn in as visitors on the St. John's board
in time to vote on the location of the college." The committee requested also that
"until the college shall be compleated," the school trustees might withhold the
residue of their funds (more than £1,000) to maintain their school, now called
the Annapolis School. "But they thought that whenever they subscribed it, they
should be entitled to the election of another trustee." TI1e St. John's board granted
the King William's board both these requests, but refused a request that would
allow an Annapolitan donating £1 ,000 to fill any St. John's board vacancy that
might occur in the future. 53 Awaiting decision from King William's on these
terms, the St. John's board adjoumecl until] March.
King William's and St. John's could profit from each other's assets. King
William's had long wanted to grow into a college, and St. John's, like all other
early American colleges, realized that it had to be founded upon a grammar
school. But it was prudent for King William's, obliged as it was to conduct a
school for Annapolis youths, to require some indication that the college would
settle in Annapolis before parting with its prope11y. The college, on the other
hand, had left the question oflocation undecided until the subscribers had elected
a sufficient number of trustees to constitute a board. The state, on its part, had
offered four acres of ground on which the unfinished governor's mansion stood,
if the college settled in Annapolis. There was a least one other town contending
�FLETCHER
41
for the college, Upper Marlborough, situated near the center of the Westem
Shore, a trading market for tobacco where occasional theatricals and fall and
spring races were held. But in 1786 the town had neither church nor county
school. King William's board had £2,000 in cash, which, if subscribed, would
entitle it to elect two trustees to join the nine already seated on the St. John's
board. Two of these, John Claggett and William Beanes from Prince George's
County, might be expect\'d to vote for Upper Marlborough. The other sevenWilliam West, Nicholas Canoll, John H. Stone, Richard Ridgeley, Thomas
Stone, Samuel Chase, and John Thomas- were likely to vote for Annapolis.
The King William's board apparently tested St. John's when it insisted that
its two trustees be seated before the college site was voted upon. Such a
postponement suggests a breach of the charter- unless in fact a merger was
contemplated. King William's had fmfeited its chance to seat its appointees with
the first nine trustees by not making its pledge to the subscription agents, who
would have conducted an election for the two trustees in time to seat them with
the other nine. Five of the nine trustees had to agree to the postponement, or
charter variance, to pass it. If at least five voted aye, then the King William's
board could anticipate that these five plus its two would ensure a decisive vote
for Annapolis. (Later balloting revealed that actually seven of the original nine
trustees favored Annapolis.) The St. John's board acceded to King William's
request that it be seated before voting on a site, and King William's dropped its
request that future vacancies on the St. John's board be filled with Annapolitans.
King William's was mainly concerned that the college settle in Annapolis. It
expressed no reservations about the way the St. John's board was constituted:
both St. John's and King William's boards appointed new members in "perpetual
succession." And the two King William's appointees who joined the original nine
St. John's tmstees could expect to participate in the choice of thirteen other
tmstees to complete a board of twenty-four.
Further protection of King William's interest was included in the "Act of
Consolidation" of 2 March 1786. It proposed a split of the King William's
corporation into two pmts: one part to become St. John's College on 1 March
1786, the other part to operate the Annapolis School until the college opened. If
the terms under which King William's conveyed its funds and property to St.
John's College should be violated, then the Rector and Visitors of Annapolis
School could sue to retrieve the funds and property, and the governor and council
of Maryland were instructed to reconstitute the King William's board, which
would resume its trust "to fulfill the intentions of the founders and benefactors
of the said school, in advancing the interests of piety and leaming." 54
The merger greatly pleased Rev. William Smith, the most energetic of the
subscription agents. Smith had canvassed for subscribers during January and
February, had taken an active part in King William 's-St. John's negotiations, and
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
viewed the cuhnination of his mission as reason for triumph and relief. He wrote
on 5 March:
I have been but two Nights in my own House for these 4 weeks past, & am
just returned from a Journey of at least 300 miles, which became necessary in
the final establishment of our Colleges, & opening the Western Shore one
(called St. John's) which is QOW fixed at Annapolis, & everyThing on my Part
as an agent appointed by Law for founding & opening it, is now happily &
successfully finished, the Subscription being above 12000 pounds beside the
public Endowment of 1750 pounds per annum.55
Of the £12,000 that Smith mentions, King William's would contribute at least
one fourth. Moreover, the college had no life until the two corporations merged;
no business was conducted until the St. John's board had accepted the terms
submitted by the King William's board and those contained in the "Act of
Consolidation." Of the two institutions, King William's was the viable one in
1786, the flourishing preparatory school ready to grow into a college. Furthermore, it was imbued with an almost century-old determination to survive. By
necessity and by design, St. John's College built upon King William's School.
�Four:
1784: The Year St. John's College
Was Named
A Western Shore college was chartered by the Maryland General Assembly in
late December 1784 and given the name St. John's College. Contemporary
records do not reveal how and why the name was chosen.
If the Col1ege was named for a saint there are three strong contenders. First,
there is St. John Chrysostom. In 1807 he was a favorite of two of the College's
early graduates, John Shaw and Francis Scott Key (class of 1796), who were
young poets with literary ambitions. Chrysostom, the "golden-mouthed" Bishop
of Constantinople, was like a muse to John Shaw. "By the blessing of St.
Chrysostom," he wrote Francis Scott Key on 24 January 1807, "as I am in great
haste, and in no less need for our Saint's assistance, I hope you have not forgotten
our plans, but will soon be ready in the litany, 0 Sancte Chrysostome! ora pro
nobis. I have examined the college library and find many valuable books in it.
There is an edition of Chrysostom in twelve volumes, three of which are
wanting .... " 1
After 1870 John the Evangelist was generally accepted as the favored saint.
Assuming this in a dedication speech at the opening of Woodward Hall on 18
June 1900, John Wirt Randall commented that the Evangelist's name was
particularly appropriate for an educational institution because his was a name
"suggestive more than that of the other apostles of the relation between a scholar
and a teacher." 2 St. John's College at Cambridge University was indeed named
for the Evangelist. Randall knew this and also that a college historian of the 1870s
had claimed that certain unnamed 1784 incorporators had attended St. John's
College, Cambridge. For this reason, it was believed, the Annapolis college had
been named "St. John's" after the Cambridge college. 3
In 1894 Bernard Steiner introduced another theory about the origin of the
College's name. He wrote: "Other authorities say the name [St. John's] was given
in compliment to the Masonic fraternity then very strong in Annapolis." 4 It is
true that the seal of St. John's College, as well as that of Washington College,
founded in 1782, bears a Masonic symbol. It is also true that the old Masonic
�44
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
lodge of Annapolis, warranted by the St. John's Grand Lodge of Massachusetts
in 1750, was a St. John's lodge. It was a "modem," i.e., descended from the Grand
Lodge of England (founded 1717). Other Maryland lodges of the colonial period
were chartered by the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania and were "ancients," or
Ancient York Masons. It was customary to call all local lodges that were
warranted by Grand Lodges by the generic name, St. John's lodges 5
But if the College was nap1ed in compliment to a "masonic fratenrity then
very strong in Annapolis," as Steiner suggested, a third saint, John the Baptist,
could have been the one honored in the naming of the College. The Masons
honored two St. Johns, John the Baptist and John the Evangelist.
Steiner's statement is also unclear in its reference to an active Masonic
fraternity because the old Annapolis St. John's Lodge was moribund after 1764. 6
Yet many Masons visited Annapolis in the revolutionary period. They came from
the counties of Maryland and other states of the Confederation to attend the
Continental Congress, the General Assembly, and the General Courts. They
included officers in the Maryland Line7 and other distinguished military figures.
Moreover, throughout the state new "ancient" lodges were being wananted
under the Pennsylvania Grand Lodge; and members of "modern" lodges who
wished to enter into the mysteries of Ancient York Masonry were being "healed."
Two Masons in Kent County were active in promoting Ancient York Masonry
in Maryland during the 1780s: they were Rev. William Smith and Peregrine
Leatherbury, who had been among the incorporators of Washington College in
1782.8 The year before, Smith, the Grand Secretary of the Pennsylvania Grand
Lodge, had digested and abridged an Ahiman Rezon, or book of Masonic
constitutions, for the Pennsylvania Grand Lodge. Published in 1783, it was a
guide to Masons on moral conduct and discretion, and laid out an orderly
procedure to be followed at lodge meetings. Repeatedly, it designated the two
St. Johns' days, that of the Baptist on June 24 and of the Evangelist on December
27, for special business and festive occasions. 9 But it offers no inforination about
the Masonic symbols used in Europe and America on official seals like those of
Washington and St. John's colleges.
Two books on European Masonry of the period, however, do offer examples
of Masonic symbols used as teaching devices. A famous old Russian Mason in
Tolstoy's War and Peace described one to Piene Bezuhov when he instructed
him in the mysteries of Masomy. The old man pictured a mount raised stone by
stone by succeeding generations, on which the temple of wisdom, or Solomon's
temple, was erected. 10 This description was an aid in identifying the device
adopted for the St. John's seal; a count of the layers of stones in the pile numbers
seven, the usual number of steps leading up to Solomon's temple and a number
corresponding to the seven Masonic virtues. On the St. John's seal a man
climbing aloft carries aT-square. 11
�FLETCHER
45
(Fig. 5) Seal of St. John's College adopted in 1793 to imprint the diplomas of the
College's first graduates.
(Fig. 6) Seal of Washington College adopted at its opening in 1782, showing three
stars symbolizing the three Masonic degrees of St. John's Masonry. (Courtesy of
Washington College.)
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Another book about European Masonry of this period, Jacques Chailley 's The
Magic Flute: a Masonic Opera, 12 is replete with illustrations of Masonic devices.
Washington College adopted one that shows a shield hung from a column: three
stars on the shield symbolize the three Masonic degrees of St. John's Masonry,
apprentice, fellow-craft, and master mason. Key-like tools hold garlands of roses
as a drapery above the column to celebrate the enthusiasm that brought about the
founding of the college. A picture in Chailley's book 13 identifies these tools as
miniature trowels used in Masonic rites to "seal" the mouths of initiates, i.e., to
remind them of the first Masonic virtue, discretion, or the keeping of secrets.
The date on the Washington College seal, 1782, commemorated the year
when that college was founded- a time when two well-established Masonic
lodges were flourishing in Kent County. 14 If the St. John's seal had been likewise
dated with the year when it was chartered, its seal might also constitute evidence
of a Masonic fraternity in Annapolis in 1784. But the St. John's seal is dated
1793, the year when the Board of Visitors and Governors ordered that a seal be
designed and executed to imprint diplomas for the College's first graduates. 15
Coincidentally, it also commemorated a significant date for Annapolis Masonry.
In 1793 the Amanda Lodge No. 12, an "ancient," was founded, creating a
brotherhood of Annapolis Masons to help lay the cornerstone of the new capitol
at Washington in November 1793. 16 The Masonic device on the St. John's seal
dated 1793, then, does not refer to a Masonicfratemity in Annapolis in the 1780s
and does not substantiate Steiner's theory.
Yet a Masonic enthusiasm was promoting education throughout Maryland in
the 1780s. In 1784 the imminent creation of a Western Shore college was greeted
with fervor by Freemason William Smith in his introduction to An Account of
Washington College. The preamble of the Charter of 1782 published therein
described an eventual state university comprised of a Western and Eastern Shore
college united under ''one supreme legislative and visitatorial jurisdiction."
Smith's uplifting and inspiring introduction was written in the spirit ofthe times:
... For however flattering it may be to consider the growth of these rising
states as tending to encrease the wealth and commerce of the world; they are
to be considered in another more serious view, as ordained to enlarge the
sphere of HUMANITY. In that view the great interest of civil LIBERTY, the
parent of every other social blessings, will not be forgotten. . . . We must
regard the great concems of religion and another world. We must attend to the
rising generation. The souls of our youth must be nursed up to the love of
LIBERTY and KNOWLEDGE; and their bosoms warmed with a sacred and
enlightened zeal for every thing that can bless or dignify the species .... 17
In the same spirit~ wishing "to attend to the rising generation" and to found
a university~ a group of gentlemen met in Annapolis to promote a Western
Shore college on 3 December 1784. They ordered
�FLETCHER
47
that the reverend John Carroll, W1lliam Smith D.O. and Patrick Allison, D.D.,
together with Richard Sprigg, John Steret and George Digges Esquires, be a
committee to complete the heads of a bill for founding a college on the Western
Shore, and to publish the same immediately, with a proper preamble for taking
in subscriptions . ...
Accordingly, by December 16 the text of "A Draught of a Proposed Act,
Submitted to Public Consideration, for Founding a College on the Western Shore
of This State, and for Constituting the Same, together with Washington College
on the Eastem Shore, into One University, by the Name of The UNIVERSITY
OF MARYLAND" was released to the public18
One subscription list was actually filled by December 16. Known as the
Annapolis list, it bore signatures of sixty-two subscribers who pledged a total of
£2703. Those who pledged were planters, legislators, state officials, a banacksman, a silversmith, a carpenter, a clergyman, a tavern-keeper, a barber, a sea
captain, and all the merchants of Annapolis.
The six men ordered "to complete the heads of a bill for founding a college
on the Western Shore" were to be known as "subscription agents." They were a
clergyman and a layman from each of the three major religious denominations
in Maryland, the Roman Catholic, the Presbyterian, and the Protestant Episcopal.
Of these men only William Smith was from an Eastern Shore county.
The Draught borrowed large portions of the Washington College charter of
1782 but added a new preamble and plan for electing members to the Board of
Visitors and Governors. Much else was left out because, as they explained, it
would merely repeat similar articles in the Charter of 1782. 19
A letter written by William Smith dated 16 January 1785, told how in early
December he had been called "in Conjunction with two Clergymen of other
Denominations ... to draft the University Law which we happily did with great
Unanimity." 20
While "happily" drafting the "Proposed Act," the subscription agents expanded paragraph 9 of the Charter of 1782- which read "youth of all religious
denominations shall be freely and liberally admitted ... according to their merit
... without requiring or enforcing any religious or civel test"~ by adding
"without urging their attendance upon any particular worship or service, other
than what they have been educated in, or have the consent and approbation of
their parents or guardians to attend." Apparently the authors of the text, which
finally became the Charter of 1784, intended that students should enjoy religious
liberty and that the college would nurture students in their own faith, for as John
Canoll said, it was "an intended stipulation that provision be made, from the
College funds, if necessary, to procure all of them opportunities to frequent their
particular forms of worship." 21
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
48
To this paragraph on civil liberty in the Draught, the Charter of 1784 added
an introductory clause for emphasis, saying that the college would be established
"upon the following fundamental and inviolable principles"- and made several
other changes as well. Where the Draught had read "upon the most liberal and
catholic plan," the Charter of 1784 omitted the word "catholic." 22
William Smith explained the necessity for omitting "and catholic." The word
"catholic," he wrote, "altho.ugh intelligible enough to many, yet it is not
approved by many others, on account of the vulgar application to one particular
church." 23 He continued to use it in his own letters, however, in its all-embracing
sense. When the Charter of 1784 was finally enacted, he proudly commented
that "Maryland has been among the last of the States in her Provisions for
Learning; but none of them can boast so noble a Foundation as her University
now is. " 24
In May 1783, eighteen months before the passage of the Charter of 1784,
William Paca and his Council sent a message to the General Assembly recommending that the legislature give special attention to two issues as soon as Peace
was firmly established: "Trade and Commerce" first, and then "Matters of so
high Concernment as Religion and Learning.''
For the latter they recommended "Public support for the Ministers of the
Gospel," which the Maryland Bill of Rights allowed, and, acknowledging the
strong public encouragement given Washington College as shown by the
Zeal of the Eastern Shore for the Advancement of Learning that of Sum of
five thousand pounds which the Act required ... has been nearly doubled in
less than One Year,
they trusted that
the General Assembly will think this College deserving of their further
Attention and favors, and will extend their Views to the establishing and
encouraging other Seminaries of Learning in this State. 25
As a matter of fact, the three clergy agents who were commanded in December 1784 to "complete the heads of a bill for founding a college on the Western
Shore" had been engaged in "Religion and Learning" all their lives. All were
teachers and educators. John Carroll was a graduate of St. Orner's College in
France and of the Jesuit academy at Liege, Belgium; he was a priest and a teacher
at the Jesuit college in Bruges, until the Jesuit order in Belgium was suppressed
by papal bull in 1773. In 1784 he was organizing the American Catholic Church.
Patrick Allison, a graduate of the College of Philadelphia and later a teacher
there, came to Maryland in 1764 to become pastor of the Baltimore Presbyterian
Church for the remainder of his life. And last, there was William Smith, a
graduate of the University of Aberdeen, the young Scotsman whom Benjamin
�FLETCHER
49
Franklin had recruited to develop the Philadelphia Academy into a college; he
had been the teacher of Natural Philosophy and provost of the College of
Philadelphia from the time the College was chartered in 1753 until the revocation
of its charter in 1779. In 1784 he was rector of Chester Parish, Kent County, and
president of Washington College, as well as a leader in the fonnation of the new
Protestant Episcopal Church. 26
All three were polemipists who wrote pamphlets, letters to the newspapers,
and petitions to the Assembly on behalf of their particular churches, sometimes
attacking one another. Though sectarian interests divided them, the rise of
Freemasonry may have created a climate that allowed them to work in concert
for the advancement of learning. John Carroll indeed described a new kind of
religious freedom in America following the Revolution:
in these United States our Religious System has undergone a revolution if
possible, more extraordinary, than our political one. In all of them free
toleration is allowed to Christians of every denomination; and particularly in
the States of Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, a communication of all Civil rights, without distinction or diminution, is extended to those
of our Religion. This is a blessing and advantage, which it is our duty to
preserve & improve with utmost prudence. 27
Either Freemasonry or the Spirit of '76, or both, created such a climate. In
the fall of 1784 John Carroll was replying to a "Letter to the Roman Catholics
of Worcester," which was published in three different issues of the Maryland
Gazette 28 after having been printed as a pamphlet in Philadelphia the previous
winter. The author, Charles Wharton, his cousin and an ex-Jesuit, had recently
joined the Protestant Episcopal Church. In the "Letter" he explained to his former
congregation in Worcester, England, the doctrinal reasons for his leaving the
Roman Church. All three parts are scholarly, referring often to the church fathers,
and especially to St. John Chrysostom, who he claimed supported his Protestant
view of the Scriptures. Carroll, a convinced Catholic, took the opposite view and
refuted this argument in a pamphlet, "An Address to Roman Catholics on
Wharton." 29 He quoted from the volumes of Chrysostom that he found in the
"public library" in Annapolis. 30 Responses from Catholic readers assured him
that he had succeeded in reaffirming their faith. When Wharton published
another letter, "To the Roman Catholics ofMaryland," 31 Carroll refused to reply:
"I shall forbear reviving a spirit of controversy, least it should add fuel to some
spark of religious animosity." 32 CaiToll was eager that Catholic youths and
teachers seize the opportunity offered them by the Maryland colleges. 33
Patrick Allison, on the contrary, was far more contentious in 1783 and 1784
because he saw a concerted effort to set up a new established church in Maryland.
Along with Anabaptists, Methodists, Quakers, and Roman Catholics, he continued to smart from having been taxed for the support of the Church of England
�50
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
in Maryland before 1776. Immediately after Governor Paca's address in May
1783, he began writing a series of articles in the Maryland Journal against the
tax proposed to "support the ministers of the Gospel." Allison thought the tax
could only benefit the new Protestant Episcopal Church, which had been designated heir to all real property of the old established Church of England. Moreover, because its membership and property already exceeded that of the other
sects, the tax would extend its ,influence out of all proportion to that enjoyed by
the others, and, indeed, lead to a new church establishment. To prevent such a
development he suggested that former Church of England property be divided
among all the sects who had paid a church tax before the Revolution. 34
The first of Allison's aiticles (published 15 July 1783) attacked the clergyman
nominated by the Maryland Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church to
become the first bishop of Maryland, William Smith. Allison used his rapier pen
exuberantly:
Nor is it my wish to disturb the reverend Dr. S. in his retirement from the world
and the things of the world, where he is inhaling copious draughts of sublime
contemplation, purifying himself by a course of mental recollection, contrition, and extraordinary devotion, for the mitred honours to which he is
destined. 35
Smith took no lasting offence at Allison's attack even though it may have
been one of the factors influencing the church to reject him as a candidate for
bishop. Smith was perhaps toughened by years of controversy in Pennsylvania
before corning to Maryland. In 1758 and 1759, while William Paca and Patrick
Allison were attending the College of Philadelphia, Provost Smith was jailed by
the Pennsylvania General Assembly on a charge of libel but with the backing of
the hustees of the college had continued to conduct classes and to function as
provost while in jail. 36 An appeal to the King freed him but did not endear him
to the Assembly: they already felt threatened because of Smith's efforts to
promote the Church of England in Pennsylvania. Finally, in 1779 when they
revoked the charter of the College of Philadelphia, he was ousted as both provost
and teacher. He then migrated to Chestertown and started a school. This school
merged with the Kent County School and Under his direction grew in size and
importance to the point where its trustees petitioned the General Assembly of
Maryland to charter it as Washington College. 37
It seems most unlikely, however, that Smith, the Freemason, would have
suggested the name "St. John" to honor a Masonic fraternity in Annapolis at the
time when the Draught of a Proposed Act was being written: He would have been
afi·aid that such a suggestion might destroy the "great Unanimity" that the
committee was enjoying. Furthermore, though many Catholics, and notably John
Carroll's brother Daniel, belonged to the Masons, Carroll would have had a deep
�FLETCHER
51
personal aversion to them, for they had played an active role in the suppression
of the Jesuits in Europe. But while he would not have chosen to honor the
Masons, most likely he would not have objected to naming the College after his
patron saint (who was one of the "Johns"). Allison, however, actually expressed
his personal distaste for Masonry when he ridiculed Smith's participation in
Masonic purification rites. 38 Moreover, the Presbyterians (like the Jews) consider all members of a cpngregation saints, and they scarcely ever name their
institutions after any sairit except St. Andrew and St. Giles. Those two agents,
then, Carroll and Allison, would certainly not have suggested the name "St. John"
to honor the Masons.
On 24 December 1784, ten days after its publication in Annapolis, the
Draught of a Proposed Act appeared in Baltimore's Mmyland Journal. Six days
later a revised version that incorporated hitherto unpublished sections borrowed
from the Charter of 1782 was enacted by the House of Delegates. It included
provisions for collecting revenues through licenses and taxes on the Western
Shore for the support of the College39 and outlined a policy for the governance
of a University of Maryland. Where blanks had been left in the Draught for
insertion of a name, "St. John's College" now appeared. The action was a fait
accompli at the time the bill was introduced, for the Journal ofthe House reported
neither motions nor discussion regarding the College's name.
Neither the Mmyland Gazette and theM my/and Journal, nor the Journals of
the Senate and the House of Delegates for the November 1784 Session of the
General Assembly, explain what happened. Some special influence was at work
in Annapolis during the last week of December 1784.
While Governor Paca spent Christmas at Wye Hall on the Eastern Shore, the
General Assembly convened every day including Christmas and Sunday in
Annapolis. Two major pieces of legislation that he had recommended in the
message of 1783 were slated to come up during his absence. One bill embodied
the interests of "Trade and Commerce"; the other, the interests of "Religion and
Learning." Although promotion of the second, the "University Law" (St. John's
College), began early in the session, action on it was delayed until the report
from a conference of Maryland and Virginia legislators concerned with "Trade
and Commerce" was pushed through the Assembly on December 27.
The Journals of the House and Senate report that General Washington and
General Gates mrived in Annapolis on December 22. On the same day the
following Maryland commissioners were appointed by the Assembly to confer
with the Virginia delegation: Senators Thomas Stone, Samuel Hughes, and
Charles Carroll; and Delegates John Cadwalader, Samuel Chase, John DeButts,
George Digges, Philip Key, Gustavus Scott, and Joseph Dashiell. George Washington- now the sole Virginian, for General Gates had fallen ill on anivalwas chosen to chair the Conference.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
The Senate and House Journals give the barest facts about the Conference,
and the newspapers less. A letter from George Washington, in Annapolis, to the
Marquis de Lafayette in Paris on December 23, is more descriptive:
You would scarcely expect to receive a letter from me at this place. A few
hours before I set out for it, I as little expected to cross the Potomac again this
winter, or even to be fifteen f11iles from home before the last of April, as I did
to make a visit in an air-balloon in France. I am here, however, with General
Gates, at the request of the Assembly of Virginia to fix matters with the
Assembly of this State respecting the extension of the inland navigation of
the Potomac, and the communication between it and the western waters; and
I hope a plan which will be agreed upon, to the mutual satisfaction of both
States and to the advantage of the union at large .... 40
On December 22 five days of unremitting labor began for all the conferees.
If there were any parties, balls, or dinners given in honor of Washington between
December 22 and 29, 1784, in Annapolis, the Maryland Gazette failed to report
them. Near midnight on the 28th Washington wrote James Madison at the
Legislature in Richmond: "It is now near 12 at Night, and I am writing with an
Aching Head, having been constantly employed in this business since the 22nd
without assistance from my Colleagues, Genl. Gates having been sick the whole
time, and Colo. Blackburn not attending .... " 41
The Journals of the House and Senate, however, do reveal one strange hiatus
in these five days of intense legislative effort. On December 27 the commissioners who were preparing a Potomac bill introduced their report in the House of
Delegates and received a first and second reading early in the rooming session
(only nine dissenting votes were cast). From the House the bill was taken to the
Senate, where it was read and ordered "to lie on the table" until the Senate
reconvened at five o'clock for a "post meridiem" meeting. The House followed
suit and also adjourned for a "post meridiem" meeting, to begin a half hour later
than the Senate's.
When the Senate reconvened at five o'clock the Potomac bill entitled "An
Act for Establishing a Company for Opening and Extending the Navigation on
the River Patowmack" had a second reading; the Senate then concurred with the
action taken by the House and adjourned, probably no later than six o'clock. The
House had reconvened at half past five, and since they had no busine.'>s to transact
-their meeting had apparently been called so that they would be on hand if
needed by the Senate -had adjourned forthwith.
The Potomac bill thus passed both Houses on 27 December 1784, the Festival
Day of St. John the Evangelist, the anniversmy celebrated by all Freemasons.
On the following day, December 28, the Senate resolved "that an attested copy
of the act ... be transmitted to Gen. Washington and Gen. Gates ... signing by
the governor will be complied with when he returns to town."
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53
On December 29, the House proceeded to take action on the second major
bill of the session, the "University Law," which was submitted by gentlemen
whose names were on a list of Annapolis subscribers dated 16 December 1784,
begging that the General Assembly enact legislation to establish a Western Shore
college 42
Like the Draught of a Proposed Act which headed all the subscription lists,
the Charter of 1784 allowed one vote toward election of a Visitor and Governor
to each subscriber of nine pounds or more on any list totaling one thousand
pounds. Other provisos in the Chmter for electing members to the Board of
Visitors and Governors differed in some significant respects from those in the
Draught. Where the Draught specified "person or persons" as sources from
whom the agents might solicit conttibutions, and who might form a class of
subscribers who could elect one board member, the Charter of 1784 adds "bodies
politic and corporate"; 43 and where the Draught said the last seven members
elected to the Board to complete an aggregate of twenty-four "may be chosen
from this or any part of the adjacent states," the Charternarrows the geographical
field to "any part of this state." The first seventeen members in both documents
are required to be residents of the Western Shore.44
These are among the "considerable alterations" to which William Smith
refen·ed in a letter to Rev, William White in late December 1784:
Considerable alterations were made in the plan first settled by Mr. Carroll, Dr.
Allison and myself, respecting the nice provisos amongst different denominations in proportion to their subscriptions. The paper was printed off before
I came over. But I was told by Carroll of Carrollton, Mr. Sprigg, etc., that the
alterations were made in concert with Dr. Allison. I am satisfied, as I hope all
our society will be, with the plan as it now is, and as I would have agreed it
should originally have been, as I know that a few grains of mutual confidence
and benevolence among different denominations of Christians. will be better
than splitting and torturing a design ofthis kind with all the provisos possible .
. . . CaiToll of CatTollton, Mr. Digges, etc. have subscribed liberally, as it is
expected the rest of that society will do. 45
During his less than peaceable sojo1,1rn among the Quakers in Pennsylvania,
William Smith had very likely Iemned to call all denominations "societies," a
term used by some denominations but very seldom used by the Episcopalians
and Catholics to whom he referred in this letter. For example, the rapidly growing
denomination of Methodists called themselves "members in society" and their
congregations "societies" as late as 1857. 46 During Chtistmas 1784 they were
organizing the Methodist Episcopal Church at a conference in Baltimore, declaring themselves independent of the British Conference in the choice of their
bishops and superintendents; they were also laying plans to found a college of
their own to educate their youth.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
In response to the request of the Annapolis subscribers the House of Delegates
on 29 December 1784 proceeded to order a committee of seven men- Samuel
Chase, George Digges, Allen Quynn, Nicholas Can·oll, John Cadwalader, David
McMechen, and Gustavus Scott- to prepare and bring in a bill for "Founding
a college on the Western Shore of this State." Chase, Digges, Cadwalader, and
Scott had been on the committee to confer with Washington on the Potomac bill;
all but Scott and Cadwalader were signers of the Annapolis subscription list dated
December 16. The very next day they were ready with the bill.
The Journals reveal no additions or conections to the bill as introduced on
December 30. The name "St. John's College" as well as any other changes made
in the Draught must have been agreed on beforehand. The only recorded
discussion or motions on the House floor while the Act was under consideration
came from jealous Baltimore town delegates. They proposed that some of the
proceeds collected in Baltimore from the taxes and licenses designated for the
support of the college be returned to Baltimore. When the question on the total
bill finally carne- no changes had been made in the text introduced by the
committee- there were 33 yeas and 18 nays.
The nays came from the counties farthest removed from AnnapolisHarford, Cecil, and Washington Counties; the Eastern Shore (they already had
a college) and southern Maryland delegates were almost to a man in favor. The
one Baltimore delegate who voted yea was David McMechen, a Freemason.47
One year before (23 December 1783), when Washington had resigned as
commander-in-chief before the Continental Congress in Annapolis, the Mary-
land House of Delegates had sent him the following message:
having by your conduct in the field gloriously terminated the war, you have
taught us, by your last circular letter, how to value, how to preserve and to
improve that liberty for which we have been contending. We are convinced
that public liberty cannot be long preserved, but by wisdom, integ.rity, and a
strict adherence to public justice and public engagements. The justice and
these engagements, as far as the influence and example of one state can extend,
we are determined to promote and fulfill; and if the powers given to congress
by the confederation should be found to be incompetent to the purposes
of the union, we doubt not our constituents will readily consent to enlarge
them ... 48
Proud to have enlarged the powers of the Confederation by the expeditious
passage of Washington's Potomac bill, the Maryland legislators named the
Westem Shore college for the day when his bill was enacted, the Feast Day of
the Evangelist. (If the Eastern Shore had not already preempted the name for
their college, "Washington" might have been a natural choice for the Western
Shore college.) Not only was it a day that they had enjoyed in the company of
�FLETCHER
55
their former commander-in-chief, but it was a day that would have had special
significance for Washington the Freemason.
George Washington, private citizen in 1784, would have observed the Feast
Day of the Evangelist. Young George had been initiated as a Mason in the Lodge
at Fredericksburg on 4 November 1752. He attended various Masonic functions
while commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, notably the celebration of
the anniversary of the Evangelist in Christ Church, Philadelphia, on 28 December
1778, when William Smith preached the sermon. On 23 December 1783 the
brethren in the Alexandria Lodge had sent greetings to him on his return home,
which he had acknowledged on 28 December as "Yr. Affect. Bro' & obed' Serv'."
These were not Christmas greetings that were being exchanged: they were the
customary exchange of greetings between Masons on the anniversary of the
Evangelist-December 27. On 24 June 1784, the anniversary of St. John the
Baptist, another festival day observed by the Masons, Washington was invited
to dine with Lodge No. 39 in Alexandria. He had replied, "I will have the honor
of doing it." Minutes of Lodge No. 39 for that day record
The Worshipful Master Read to the Lodge a most instructive lecture on the
rise, progress & advantages of Masonry & concluded with a prayer suitable
to the occasion. The Master & Brethren then proceed'd to Jn° Wise's Tavern,
where they Dined & after spending the afternoon in Masonick Festivity,
returned again to the Lodge room. The Worshipful Master with the unanimous
consent of the Brethren, was pleased to admit his Excellency, Gen1Washington
as an Honorary Member of Lodge No. 39. 49
Two months after his visit to Annapolis in December 1784, on 28 February 1785,
Washington walked in a procession of Freemasons at the funeral of his friend
William Ramsay.
Moreover, Maryland Masons were particularly in the habit of observing the
St. Johns' days with festivities. According to Edward T. Schultz, "it will be
observed how scrupulously our Brethren of Maryland in the early times observed
the Saint Johns' days and the custom was continued as we shall see by the Lodges
in the jurisdictions for many years.''50
It is possible that the Maryland General Assembly returned for a "post
meridiem" meeting on 27 December 1784, which adjourned in favor of an
evening dinner to celebrate the festival of the Evangelist with Freemason George
Washington. The Journals of the House and Senate show that they did adjourn
and reconvene in the evening, probably for a joint affair. The House had
completed its business for the day; there was no reason for them to reconvene at
half past five, one half hour later than the Senate had scheduled their evening
meeting, unless it was to participate in some sort of event with members of the
Senate, after the Senate had concurred with the House's action on the Potomac
bill. The Senate reconvened at five o'clock. An hour would have given them
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
ample time to read the Act and concur- no debate or voting was required for
this. Their business could have been finished easily by six o'clock- in time for
a St. John's dinner. The "post meridiem" meeting scheduled by both Houses on
27 December 1784- a rare event in the recorded history of the two Houses indicates some special circumstance.
Another possibility is that a festive dinner was held during the afternoon
recess even though a majority of the legislators were not Masons. Ce1tainly a
number of them were Masons. Yet even those who were not accepted Masonic
rituals. Masonry provided an accepted ceremonial in the young republic; Washington, for example, as well as many other prominent men, was buried with
Masonic rites.
Nonetheless, in spite of much interest in Freemasonry in Annapolis during
the 1780s there was no active Annapolis lodge in 1784. But gentlemen of the
town enjoyed several social and literary clubs, notably the Hominy and Tuesday
Evening Clubs, where subjects of literary and philosophical interest- and
Freemasonry perhaps- were discussed by "enlightened men." The counties of
the state and Baltimore, on the other hand, had only their Masonic lodges for
fraternal occasions and for intelligent conversation.
Also, Washington, the Freemason, was aware that a Western Shore college
was being founded as part of a University of Maryland; he knew that an Act for
establishing it would be introduced after he left Annapolis. Just a week later, on
5 January 1785, he wrote Samuel Chase, a member of both the committee to
confer on the Potomac bill and the committee to present the Charter of 1784 to
the House of Delegates, that
the attention which your assembly is giving to the establishment of public
schools, for the encouragement of literature, does them great honor: to
accomplish this, ought to be one of our first endeavours; I know of no object
more interesting. We want something to expand the mind, and make us think
with more liberality, and act with sounder policy, than most of the States do.
We should consider that we are not now in leading strings. It behooves us
therefore to look well to our ways. 5 1
Washington was clearly interested in~ the grander scheme of which the
Western Shore college was a part- the University for "the encouragement of
literature"- and his letter showed that he must have talked about the bold
scheme with Samuel Chase and perhaps others.
When eleven members were finally elected to the Board of Visitors and
Governors in early 1786 from the various classes of subscribers, the Board was
duly constituted. Under the date of21 March 1786 they published the following
notice: "the subscribers of St. John's College, by order of the visitors and
govemors, are hereby requested to make their first payment to the subscriber,
treasurer to the college, on or before the first day of June next. [signed]
�FLETCHER
57
BENJAMIN HARWOOD."52 Previous to this, all notices published by the
subscription agents had been addressed to "subscribers of St. John's or the
Western Shore College." ln the notice dated 21 March 1786 "Western Shore
College" was omitted, and "St. John's College" appeared in roman type, alone,
for the first time.
"St. John's College" became the corporate name when enacted in the Chatter
of 1784. The tradition promulgated in 1870, which said that the college was
named by its incorporators after an English institution, had little basis. If
honoring a noted English college had been the reason for calling the Annapolis
college "St. John's," few of the Maryland populace would have been pleased so
soon after the conclusion of a bloody war with Britain.
In 1971 the Board of Visitors and Governors of St. John's College, Annapolis
and Santa Fe, were persuaded that prospective students and donors were repe11ed
by the name "St. John's College," and they considered adopting a secular name
instead. 53 At this time, President Richard D. Weigle searched the student rolls at
St. John's College, Cambridge- and also those at St. John's College, Oxford
-'-to discover which men associated with the 1784 incorporation had actually
registered there. Evidently the generally accepted theory that the Annapolis
college had been named after St. John's College, Cambridge (or Oxford), which
went unquestioned for many years , reflected the anglophilia of the 1870s rather
than the sentiment of 1784, which was anglophobia. For no names of men
directly tied with the founding of the Maryland college were found.
Then, as a preliminary step in effecting a change in name, a committee ofthe
Board sent a questionnaire to all alumni, students, and faculty to gather their
reactions. Response from the group was overwhelmingly in favor of continuing
to operate as "St. John's College," a name now rich with associations gathered
over the years, including the 1937 adoption of a curriculum nationally known as
the St. John's Program. 54 The Board proceeded no further.
In 1786 the name already had strong associations, and the first Board of
Visitors and Governors continued to use it. They did not revert to "Western Shore
College," or any other name, although through process of law they could have
done so. Indeed "St. John's College" proved so acceptable that it prevailed
through the first stormy half-century of the college's history, and long after
participants in the naming had died. But no one had bothered to record the
circumstances from living memory. Records show, however, that a remarkable
legislative performance did take place on the Feast Day of St. John the Evangelist, 27 December 1784, when on behalf of their good friend, George Washington,
Maryland legislators enacted the first piece of cooperative legislation among the
various states in the Confederation following the definitive "Treaty of Peace."
They were naturally proud of a name which reminded them of that day, and they
adopted it for the new college several days later.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Thus, even though there are no contemporary records stating why the college
was called St. John's, one could infer that it was in honor of the Evangelist.
Coincidentally, it was in compliment to the Masonic fraternity of Annapolis in
1784. Perhaps some few were reminded of the Cambridge college as well,
although no contemporary record suggests this.
It is hard to understand why a cloud of mystery has ever since enveloped the
circumstances of the naming;' But if Masons were responsible, one could expect
secrecy about their role. Discretion, the keeping of secrets, is the first of the
Masonic virtues.
�Five:
John McDowell, Federalist:
President of St. John's College
In the spring of 1790 Professor John McDowell was the dark horse among
possible candidates for president of St. John's College. The college trustees had
advertised that they prefen-ed "a Stranger or some Gentleman of Great Character
from Europe." On 5 May Rev. William Smith wrote Rev. William West, chairman
of the trustees, that if such a candidate offered himself, he might not "suit the
American Genius." (Smith, now provost of the University of Pennsylvania, had
presided as president pro tern. at the opening of St. John's the previous November.) "I have the interest of that Seminary [St. John's] and its future success much
at Heart . ... were I not too advanced in years, I am not certain whether I might
not have offered my Services once more as head of one of the Maryland
Seminaries [he had been Washington College's first president] .... but my
Family is attach'd to Pennsylvania." Taking himself out of the race- and
disparaging the notion that a "Stranger" or'' Great Character from Europe" was
preferable to a qualified native- Smith opened the field to McDowell of the
St. John's faculty." It would have been well," Smith continued," if the Assembly
had restored the Funds previous to an Election [of legislators]." 1 How each
election would affect their funding wonied the trustees too.
Although it was a common practice among trustees of their era to appoint a
distinguished clergyman of their own denomination (a majority of the St. John's
trustees were Episcopalians) to head their colleges, they acted othetwise. Being
politically enlightened, they demonstrated in 1790 that the college was open to
students and faculty of all denominatons as their charter stated. They passed over
Rev. Ralph Higginbotham, rector of St. Anne's Church, also on the faculty,
although his profile nearly matched their ad. He was an Anglican clergyman from
Waterford, Ireland, educated in Europe. There is no indication that he wanted to
be president. They appointed a Presbyterian, John McDowell, president of the
College, and a Catholic, Bishop John Carroll, chairman of their board.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
The trustees were honored to have Carroll join their ranks. He was America's
foremost Catholic educator as well as America's first Roman Catholic bishop.
He represented a prominent Maryland family who had promoted the College.
McDowell, on the other hand, had no prominent family connections in Maryland.
His Maryland fliends consisted of alumni of the College of Philadelphia, where
he taught without professorial rank after his graduation, and colleagues from
Cambridge, where during the preceding seven years while teaching school he
had prepared for admission to the Dorchester County bar. For five years he had
practiced law in Dorchester County. Presented with these modest credentials, the
St. John's trustees relied on a judgment fanned during his year on the faculty,
that McDowell "suited the American genius" and could head the college. "The
vote being unanimous was not a little flattering," wrote Charles Goldsborough
in congratulation. "I always was sure that the delay ... would, by extending your
acquaintance among the Trustees, ensure it [the presidency] to you." 2
The tmstees and McDowell shared an enthusiasm for the federal Constitution
just adopted but they did not share a common background. The trustees had
grown up in well-established tidewater communities on the Chesapeake near
pmts where English vessels routinely docked. John McDowell had grown up in
a landlocked valley where the Scotch-Irish settlers often took the law into their
own hands. He was born in 1751, the second son of John and Mary Maxwell
McDowell's twelve children, on a fann near Marks in Peters Township, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. It lay in the Great Cove under Pamell Knob of
the Tuscarora range. From age five to age twelve he lived intermittently within
a stockade around the West Conococheague Prebyterian Church called White
Church. The stockade protected families from Indians on the rampage during
outbreaks of the French and Indian wars. Fires set by Indians twice burnt his log
home to the grmmd. 3
During such turmoil he learned to read, write, and figure, all the while being
taught the tenets of his Presbyterian faith. TI1e New England Primer and P;ke's
Arithmetic would have been his texts. According to a grand-nephew, "he was
early taught the Bible, the 'Shorter and Larger Catechism,' and the 'Confession
of Faith' ... these of themselves being good training for the young mind." 4 For
three years he attended John King's L-atin school, until King's sister was
massacred and her horne, which served as the schoolhouse, was bumt (1763).
King then left Conococheague for the east 5
Reading, and lessons learned in the church, the field, and at the crossroads
rounded out McDowell's education. According to a Presbyterian historian, at age
ten, during a Presbyterian prayer session when the frontier was under siege, John
experienced a conversion. 6 He also leamed from working in the fields, for
surveying was a school in mathematics for many colonial youths. After the
Pennsylvania-Maryland boundary dispute was settled, his father employed surveyors to prepare a valid deed for the Pennsylvania Land Office to replace the
�FLETCHER
61
warrants under which his grandfather had settled in the 1730s 7 John may have
learned his geometry and trigonometry by participating in the survey. He learned
principles of economics, such as what is a fair price, at the crossroads in Marks,
where pony trains carrying goods from the east filed through on their way west.
Here frumers, millers, and hunters bartered their grain, flour, and skins for
manufactured goods. They lived in a subsistence economy without money. They
were landlocked between ~he east and west branches of the Conococheague
Creek, whose beautiful swift rapids powered their mills but were not navigable.
Early experience in barter trade left him with an appreciation for money- not
just for what it could buy, but for its convenience. In later years he often acted
as broker for his planter clients in Maryland who needed to borrow between
crops. He was shrewd in the investment of his own money.
When McDowell was seventeen his former teacher, John King, visited West
Conococheague on the eve of his ordination to the Presbyterian ministry. He had
just won a degree in theology from the College of Philadelphia. The elders of
the White Church - John McDowell's father was one of them - persuaded him
to become their pastor8 They had had none since 1757. Not only did John King's
example encourage McDowell to enter the College of Philadelphia, but King
served as an intermediary between him and the college authmities to assure them
of the youth's competence. Since McDowell's parents had no money to pay his
college tuition, anangements were made for him to tutor less advanced students
in exchange for his tuition and board. John King's classmate, John Montgomery,
a member of the college faculty, sponsored McDowell, guaranteeing that his
tuition would be paid quarterly."
McDowell entered the College of Philadelphia in the fall of 1768, the first
youth raised on the frontier to be admitted. Throughout the year Provost William
Smith and Professors Ewing and Williamson on the college faculty joined other
mathematicians and astronomers in America and Europe in prep~rations for the
observation of the Transit of Venus to take place on the third of June. The first
number of the American Philosophical Society's Transactions published their
remarkably accurate calculations preliminaty to and during the Transit. Three
years later at commencement John McDowell gave the English oration entitled
"On the Advantages of studying History." Soon after graduation in Smith's
absence McDowell conducted the provost's class in natural philosophy, assisted
with the apparatus by David Rittenhouse. Three members of the Class of 1771
joined the faculties of three colleges founded after the Revolution: Samuel
Armor, vice president of Washington College; Robert Davidson, acting President
of Dickinson College; and John McDowell, president of St. John's College. Like
his classmates McDowell fought in the Revolution. Unlike them he served as a
private (until he became ill), not an officer. One classmate, Samuel Hanson of
Maryland, served as a surgeon on Washington's staff. 10
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
After the Revolution, by 1782, four of McDowell's classmates but not
McDowell had completed graduate studies to qualify for professorial appoint·
ments, graduate studies at this time being the three professions of medicine, law,
and theology. Because of a weak voice McDowell felt himself unfit for the
ministry. When Judge Robert Goldsborough, whose nephew Charles was
McDowell's student at the University of the State of Pennsylvania (successor to
the College of Philadelphia.), invited McDowell to read law in his Cambridge,
Mary land office, McDoweil seized the opportunity. To support himself while
preparing for the bar, McDowell conducted a school in Cambridge. In 1783 he
was admitted to the Dorchester County bar and in 1784 to the Franklin County
bar in Pennsylvania (Franklin had been carved from Cumberland County and
included Peters Township). But he chose to stay in Dorchester, where he soon
had a lucrative law practice and many congenial friends. 11
Meanwhile in Annapolis King William's School and the newly chartered St.
John's College had merged. In March 1786 one of the King William's School
trustees, Alexander Contee Hanson (brother of McDowell's deceased classmate,
Samuel Hanson), joined the college board. He was promptly appointed to a
committee authorized to "contract for the repair of and addition of two wings to
Bladen's Folly, with sanguine expectations that in less than twelve months ... a
grammar school will flourish within these walls." 12 For three years efforts to
open the college stalled while Hanson contributed a series of articles to the
Mmyland Gazette against the emission of paper money and, under the pseud-
onym "Alistides," rallied support in Maryland for the ratification of the U.S.
Constitution. Hit by the depression, subsclibers to the College were unable to
pay their pledges. After ratification of the Constitution, which prevented state
governments from printing paper money, the economy improved.
In the spling of 1789 the trustees of St. Johu's had resources enough to appoint
two professors and to open the College. They offered the professorship of
mathematics to John McDowell and the professorship of languages to Rev.
Ralph Higginbotham, and ordered that two rooms in Bladen's Folly be made
ready for classes. 13 (They never added the wings proposed earlier.) Following a
visit to his parents McDowell appeared before the trustees in August to accept
his appointment. Several weeks later he: wrote his father from Cambridge, "I
have determined to remove to Annapolis. At present I expect it will be about the
middle of November.... I shall ... have the satisfaction of being near my
friends and hearing more frequently from them." 14
The friends he referred to comprised a group of 1ising young Federalists. All
had been members of the lower house or senate. Three had been delegates to the
Convention that ratified the U.S. Constitution. Four would be elected to Congress, two received high federal appointments and two became governor of
Mary1and. 15 They conversed and conesponded with each other, commenting on
the Declaration of Independence and its endowing all men with the right to life,
�FLETCHER
63
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; they noted that black slaves among them
had been awakened politically and would inevitably demand their freedom. 16 In
the November 1789 Session of the Maryland Legislature, Nicholas Hammond
introduced "An Act to Promote the Gradual Abo1iton of Slavery," only to arouse
such an uproar in the Assembly that it tabled the bill. A determination to preserve
the federal union silenced even those bold enough to speak about the certain kind
of property that genuinely embarrassed them, and they foresaw the struggle for
its abolition ahead. Of these friends William Tilghman and William Hindman
manumitted their slaves by their wills. 17
Almost as soon as McDowell arrived in Annapolis his friends one by one
moved away. In 1790 John Henry left Annapolis for the U.S. Senate. By 1800
both William Vans Murray and William Tilghman were gone, Murray to the
Hague and Tilghman to a federal judgeship in Peunsylvania.
For a decade the College flourished. Until1800 the College attracted students
from all over Ma1yland and many from out of state. Eighteen students enrolled
from McDowell's old home, Dorchester County. 18 One August day he accompanied sixteen-year-old Robert H. Goldsborough, then in his junior year at St.
John's, to his home "Myrtle Grove" in Talbot County, arriving "well, tho' a little
fatigued as the Sun became very watm. " 19 Spring of 1791 was a season for a
great celebration when President George Washington visited the campus. In May
1793 the College publicly examined the highest classes in the mathematical and
philsophical schools, giving "convincing proof of the great exertions of the
faculty on behalf of those committed to their care." 20 Nonetheless, in 1793 the
House of Delegates voted to withdraw all appropriations from Maryland's two
colleges, which, they said, educated the sons of rich men at the expense of those
less well-to-do who would really benefit from the establishment of local schools.
In defense of the colleges (St. John's and Washington College), Nicholas
Canol!, chairman of the St. John's board, questioned the worth of the county
schools that had been established by an act of the Assembly in 1723. "No great
benefits ... were delived from the free-schools formerly established," he main-
tained.Z1 While it was true that many of the county schools established by the
Act of 1723 did not survive the Revolution, Maryland's determination to have
local schools had begun in 1694 and the first academy, King William's School,
was chartered in 1696.
Federalists in the senate were conciliatory in their defense of the colleges,
advising delegates that "We shall be at all times willing to concur in any well
digested plan for establishing schools, in order to place education within the
reach of every citizen of this state and render it more diffusive through all classes
of society."22 ConcuiTence between the two houses eluded them, however, as a
core of moderate Federalists in the senate was replaced by more rigid party
members, and a growing representation from Republican Baltimore Town and
the western counties gained strength in the lower house. Rancor between the two
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
(Fig. 7) John McDowell (1751-1820), painted by Robert Field. Collection at Mrs.
Clyde Gritten. (Courtesy at Mrs. Griffen and the Frick Art Reference Library, New
York, #4421.)
parties was further exacerbated by differences of opinion over who was the
enemy, England or France. In 1801 McDowell, missing his friends and weary of
the turmoil, offered his resignation. The trustees persuaded him to stay on as
necessary to the college's survival, though he knew that it was only a matter of
a few years before the college's entire funds would be withdrawn:
In 1806 St. John's lost its yearly income. It also lost McDowell. Two trustees
at the University of Pennsylvania who had been one class below him at the
College of Philadelphia, Judges William Tilghman and Nathan Levy, persuaded
him to become professor of Natural Philosophy and then third Provost of the
University. Impressed by his success at St. John's, they hoped that he could infuse
the spirit of the old College of Philadelphia into the University.
Before leaving Annapolis McDowell wrote Judge Tilghman that he wanted
to take Joseph Williams, a black boy, with him to Pennsylvania, where by law
no slaves could be imported. He wanted to take him, McDowell explained, "both
on his' account, and on my own." He would manumit him but could he have him
bound for seven years. 23 Joseph went with him to Philadelphia, and later, when
Joseph had been left "to his own discretion," McDowell wrote that he would "be
glad to hear he has made good use of the libe1ty he has." 24 Once in Philadelphia
�FLETCHER
65
McDowell was guardian for Charles Goldsborough's two daughters while they
attended Mrs. Garland's School. Their father wrote them not to become "too fond
of pleasure and amusement for country Ladies." He also counseled them as how
best to write their school reports, saying that "when you begin to write, the Book
should be put by, and the composition should be produced from the reflection,
and reasoning of your mind." 25
At the commencement in 1807 the University of Pennsylvania confened an
honorary doctor of laws degree on McDowell. After three years as provost, he
resigned because of ill health. He spent 1811 and the years of the War of 1812
in Franklin County among relatives. He practiced law again, but he missed
the company of friends he had enjoyed in Cambridge, Annapolis, and Philadelphia. He remained a confirmed Federalist in Republican Pennsylvania,
agreeing with Maryland's three congressional representatives (his friend,
Charles Goldsborough, was one of them) that the United States should not
have declared war against Britain, calling it "this wicked and impolitic war
[that will] ... end in the ruin of our unhappy country which begins to feel the
heavy curse of bad rulers." 26
(Fig 8) William Tilghman (1756-1827), painted by Charles Willson Peale. (Courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.)
�66
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
The trustees of St. John's never forgot him. Encouraged because the legislature appropriated $1,000 per annum to St. John's and $25,000 per annum for the
support of public schools, and by the election of a federalist governor, they
invited McDowell to return as president. He did not retum on their first invitation
(1812), but when they asked him again in 1815 he accepted. Rev. Alexander
Conlee Magruder, chairman of the board, gave Bishop Kemp the good news that
"Dr. McDowell has agreed to take charge of the college." 27
Settled once more in Annapolis, he soon regretted his retmn. "I always
considered the revival of St. John's from its miserable ruins, as an expetiment,
the success of which was very doubtful," he wrote. "However, as I promised to
give what assistance I could towards it this winter, I consider myself bound to
make every exertion I can in so laudable an undertaking, for it is generally felt
and confessed that a good Seminary is much wanted in this state. Yet from the
Legislature such is the state of parties, we can have no expectation of assistance,
though each may confess it ought to be afforded .... But there is no contending
against time, and the undertaking is now, I fear, too arduous for me." Even more
discouraged by February 1816 he wrote, "TI1is place is as different from what it
formerly was, such are the deteriorating effects of democracy, that I feel my
attachment to it much diminished." And in December he concluded that "St.
John's seems hopeless".
The following fall the Federalists elected a governor by a majority of one, a
majority managed by bringing a Federalist legislator to the Assembly on a
stretcher. "Such is the spirit of party that prevails," wrote McDowell of their
antics, "and which I was sorry to find [also] in our board of Visitors and
Governors which ought to be free of its baneful influence." Not only had the
Assembly done nothing for the College but "the citizens and trustees, who are
so immediately and deeply interested in the success of the College, have been
very deficient in their exertions to promote it." 28
As early as July 1816, Magruder realised that McDowell's "advanced age and
ill health will prevent him from continuing long in the College." 29 Other trustees,
too, were disheartened by the lack of support from the Legislature and in 1817
the board in despair tentatively closed it. Thanks to a rallying of alumni support
the College was able to reopen in 1818. In December of that year the Federalists
elected their last governor, McDowell's friend, Charles Goldsborough, who in
his inaugural address spoke of the huge state deficit resulting from the late war.
He then spoke of "the great advantages once experienced from the Seminary
long ago established at the seat of government ... as particularly deserving of
regard." But, he continued, "at this time ... the funds of the state do not admit
of an extension of pecuniary aid to purposes of education, beyond the existing
appropriations. ''30
Meanwhile McDowell spent some portions of Goldsborough's term at the
governor's home "Shoal Creek" outside Cambridge. From there he wrote Judge
�FLETCHER
67
Tilghman in March 1819, "When I left Philadelphia I had no intention of
spending the winter here. But I have spent it, not unpleasantly, nor altogether
unprofitably. I have read a good deal ... and amused myself by teaching and
grounding Mr. Goldsborough's son in the rudiments of the Latin language." In
April 1820 he wrote, "My time has been fully occupied in teaching and reading,
particularly Greek of which I have become fonder than of any other study." 31 In
late fall he was at his si~ter' s home in Mercersburg, where he died on 22
December 1820.32
·
McDowell's reappointment had accomplished little toward reorganizing
the College. His return and subsequent departure, however, aroused alumni
to come to the aid of their College. Francis Scott Key and Senator Robert H.
Goldsborough gave orations that echoed passages from McDowell's commencement address to their class in 1796. With others they organized an effective
Alumni Society by the end of the 1820s. 33
In his commencement address to the Class of 1796 McDowell had said:
The end of education is to direct the powers of the mind in unfolding
themselves, & to assist them in gaining throughout bent & force, to teach it
rather how to think .. , than what to think. ...
To gain a complete knowledge of science, or indeed of any one branch of
it dming the short time, which is spent at a college, is not to be expected. An
acquaintance with its general principles & such an improvement of the mental
faculties, as will facilitate a further progress in them ... is all that ought
reasonably to be expected.
I shall ... indulge the pleasing hope, that you will continue to cultivate a
general acquaintance with letters, and devote a part of your time to the
generous purpose of improving and enlarging your intellectual powers for
their own sake .... For the liberal student should enrich his understanding by
collecting ideas on all subjects, & these acquisitions, which he makes in other
pursuits, will often fumish him with useful helps, for the further prosecution
of his own particular one ....
I hope you will always treat [the Christian religion] with due reverence &
attention, that you will make it the subject of fair & candid discussion but
never of ridicule & contempt. ... One branch of moral science is by peculiar
necessity entitled to your attention. As_ we live in a country, where the law
ought to govem, & where every citizen is directly or indirectly a legislator,
the principles of law & government ought to be well understood. Impressed
with a proper idea of the difficulty & importance of legislation, I hope, you
will labour to build on the foundation already laid, a super structure of political
knowledge, which will render you eminently useful to your country & enable
you on all occasions to promote its real interest & happiness. 34
McDowell, an advocate for a stronger federal government, regretted that the
Federalists resorted to such antics in order to stay in power. He was also impatient
�68
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
with the stalemates that blocked action in a two-party legislature. As a more
democratic Maryland evolved, thanks to a two-party system that forced the
sharing of power, he saw old honored ways and institutions like the colleges
suffer. But students who had been taught by him that they lived "in a country
where the law ought to govern, where every citizen is ... a legislator" were
equipped to survive in the new order. Some alumni always sat on the college
board of trustees. When the cpllege again received state aid, the trustees decided
to devote all that aid to scholarships for worthy candidates selected by Maryland
senators, a practice long continued. In the mid-twentieth century the college
admitted blacks and then women. In his day McDowell, the Federalist, was a
pundit to many and a scholar of national stature. He was a student of the liberal
arts and of public affairs until his death.
�NOTES
Notes to One
1. Basil Sollers, "Education in Colonial Maryland," in B. C. Steiner, History
of Education in Maryland (Washington, D.C., 1894), p.l5. Contributions to
American Educational History no. 19.
2. "An Act to Establish the Protestant Religion," variously amended until
finally signed by the Crown in 1701 under the title "An Act for the
Establishment of Religious Worship in the Province According to the
Church of England."
3. Sollers, p. 20 n.
4. "Act for Establishing Free Schools" [1696]. In Archives of Maryland
19:420-30 (hereafter referred to as Archives).
5. Sollers, p. 22.
6. Thomas Fell, Some historical accounts of the Founding of King William's
School, and its subsequent establishment as St. John's College (Annapolis,
1894), p. 8. See also Sollers, pp. 19, 20.
7. Sollers, p. 22.
8. Archives 19:252. Known as the Annapolitan Library, it was the most extensive of the libraries sent by Dr. Bray to the colonies. Called by him a
"Provincial Library" to distinguish it from the parish libraries, it was
collected to cover universal knowledge. Along with the Fathers of the
Church, Boyle, Descartes, Hobbes, and classical authors are included.
Accepted by the Assembly for the free use of the people, it was called the
"Publick Library." From the possession of King William's School, in whose
schoolhouse it was placed on arrival in 1700, it has descended to St. John's
College, Annapolis.
·
9. The Society for the Preservation of Christian Knowledge and the Society
for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.
10. Sollers, p. 22 n.
11. Colonies where the Church of England was established were no more
anxious to have resident bishops than the Congregationalist northern colonies. A bishop had direct communication with the Crown and was both
politically powerful and expensive to support. After the Revolution when
state constitutions had separated church and state, churches that were
episcopally organized, like the Episcopal, Roman Catholic, and Methodist,
elected bishops.
12. William Stevens Perry, ed., Historical Collections Relating to the American
Colonial Churches (Printed for the Subscribers, 1878), 4:59.
13. Lois Green Carr and David William Jordan, Maryland's Revolution of
Government 1689-1692 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), p. I.
�70
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
14. Ethan Allen, Historical Notices of St. Anne's Parish in Anne Arundell
County, Maryland: Extending from 1659 to 1857, a period of 208 years
(Baltimore: P. des Forges, 1857). In MHS Archives.
15. J. E. Morpurgo, Their Majesties' Royall Colledge: William and Mary in the
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centw·ies (The Endowment Association of the
College of William and Mary, Inc., 1976), p. 50.
16. Commissary James Blair to Gov. Francis Nicholson, 3 December 1691, in
William and Mary College Papers, Folder 7 (College Archives, Swem
Library, College of William and Mary).
17. The History of the College of William and Mary (Including the General
Catalogue)from its Foundation, 1660 to 1874 (Richmond: J. Randolph &
English, 1874), pp. 37-47. For text of the charter see "Charter granted by
King WilHam and Queen Mary for the founding of William and Mary
College in Virginia," in Henry Hartwell, James Blair, and Edward Chilton,
The Present State of Virginia, and the College (Charlottesville: Dominion
Books, 1694 ), pp. 72-94. "To the end that the Church of Virginia may be
furnished with a Seminary of Ministers of the Gospel, and that the Youth
may be piously educated in Good Letters and Manners, and that the Christian faith may be propagated amongst the Western Indians, to the Glory of
Almighty God, to make, found and establish a certain Place of universal
Study, or perpetual College of Divinity, Philosophy, Languages, and other
good Arts and Sciences, consisting of one President, six Masters or Professors, and an hundred scholars more or less, according to the Ability of the
said College, and the Statutes of the same to be made, encreased or changed
by certain Trustees nominated and elected by the General Assembly." The
Statutes could not be written until six professors were in place, which was
not until 1727.
18. Perry, 4:59.
19. "Charter ... for William and Mary College."
20. Archives 20:341, 342.
21. Archives 20:235, 237.
22. Archives 19:36, 49.
23. Archives 19:51.
24. "An Act for the Incouragement of Learning and the Advancement of the
Natives of this Province," in Archives 19:49, 100, 101.
25. See Sollers, pp. 21, 22.
26. Archives 19:276, "Imposition upon Ffllrrs and Skins to be Imployed for the
maintenance of a ffree school or schools," passed October 1695.
27. Archives 19:252.
28. Archives 19:447,463,492,493. See also Sollers, p. 21.
29. "Act for Establishing Free Schools" [1696].
30. Archives 29:287.
31. M. L. Radoff, Buildings of the State of Maryland in Annapolis, Publication
of Hall of Records Commission, 1954.
32. "Annapolis, May the 7, 1700. At a Meeting of the Governors and Visitors
of the Free Schools." Bray ms. in Sion College Library, London. Copy in
Library of Congress. Trustees present: Col. Charles Hutchins (Dorchester),
�FLETCHER
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
71
Robert Smith (Talbot), Thomas Tasker (Prince George's), Col. John Addison
(Somerset), Maj. Edward Dorsey (Baltimore), Maj. William Dent (Charles),
Col. John Thompson (Cecil), Lt. Col. Thomas Ennalls (Dorchester), Lt. Col.
Thomas Smith (Kent).
Carr and Jordan, p. 278.
E. C. Papenfuse, A. F. Day, D. W. Jordan, and Gregory Stiverson, A
Biographical Dictionary of the Maryland Legislature, 1635-1889 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins( University Press, 1979), 1:374.
Archives 26:602.
Archives 24:179.
Archives 26:361. "An Act declaring the Peticionary Act relating to the
ffree-holders[!] to be in force."
Archives 25:179.
Archives 26:616.
Archives 27:428.
Archives 29:66.
Archives 29:297.
Ethan Allen, p. 41.
Archives 29:159.
Archives 29:287.
Archives 29:299.
Perry, 4:76.
Archives 29:452.
Archives 30:41,42.
Archives 36:498-500.
"At a meeting of the Rector, Governors and Visitors of the Free Schools
held in the city of Annapolis on Tuesday the 6th of September anno Domino
1715." Fulham Papers, reel!, vol. 2, nos. 221-22, in Library of Congress.
Present: Rev. Joseph Colbatch, Rector, the Governor, Hon. Samuel Young,
Hon. Philemon Lloyd, Rev. Henry Hall, Rev. William Hinderforch, Mr.
William Bladen.
52. Gov. John Hart to Bishop Robinson, 20 June 1717. Fulham Papers, reel 1,
vol. 2, nos. 227-28, in Library of Congress.
53. Archives 39:386, 387. See also Great Britain, Statutes ~f the Realm, 1819,
vol. 5 (25 Carolus II, chap. 7, p. 793.)
54. Archives 30:373.
55. Archives 33:354; Morpurgo, pp. S8c64.
56. Archives 33:370.
57. Archives 33:629. See History of William and Mary, pp. 83-84, for list of
students before 1720.
58. Archives 34:11.
59. Archives 33:59.
60. Archives 34:95.
61. Also Clerk or Registrar of St. Anne's Vestry. See St. Anne's Parish, Vestry
Minutes, 1713-67 (in Hall of Records), p. 117. Mention of the scholars at
King William's are so few that the following paragraph has interest: "It is
the desire of the Minister, Vestry and Church wardens now mett together
�72
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
that the School Master of Annapolis and the Charity Boys upon the Foundation of the Schoole of Annapolis be permitted during the vacancy of the
Assembly consent to Sitt in the Front seat joining the back door, till such
time as further provision can be made for them." 5 Dec. 1721, p. 123.
62. Archives 34:302.
63. Archives 34:740-46.
64. For summary of taxes levied for benefit of free schools see Oswald Tilghman, History of Talbot County, Md. 1661-1861 (Baltimore: Williams &
Wilkins, 1925), pp. 462-65.
Notes to Two
1. Thomas Bacon, Laws of Maryland (Annapolis: Jonas Green, 1765), chap.
vii. Chaps. 12 and 13 of the Act of 1696 established an Oxford and county
schools but were superseded by the Act of 1723.
2. Archives 34:740-46 (Act of 1723).
3. Benedict Leonard Calvert to Thomas Hearne, 18 March 1728/29, in
"Calvert Memorabilia," Maryland Historical Magazine, 11:282 (hereafter referred to as MHM). "Wee have here settled a fund for a free school
in the several 12 Counties, which have mostly masters, but I think the
Province too young for such a separated Scituation of Studies; I would rather
the funds appropriated for these 12 schools were settled on our two older
foundations, viz., one a free school at Annapolis and at Oxford, a convenient
Town over our Bay. I should then hope for some real success of Education
amongst us; two schools well provided of Masters were better than 12
indifferently suited with one each, and inconvenient for Scholars, there
being no Towns or accomodation for Boarding Scholars, where those 12
schools are fixed."
4. Archives 36:357.
5. Archives 24:70; 36:551; Bacon, chap. xv.
6. Richard Lewis, "Verses To The Memory of His Excellency Benedict Leonard Calvert." Ms. in Nimitz Library, U.S. Naval Academy.
7. Bernard C. Steiner, "Benedict Leonard Calvert, Esq.," in MHM 3:192-200,
339-41.
8. Thomas Hearne, Remarks And Collections, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1885-1921). Passages relevant to Calvert are in "Calvert Memorabilia," MHM 11:282-85, 339-41. In 1703 the Bishop of London tried to
persuade Hearne to emigrate to Maryland to oversee the libraries given by
Dr. Bray. Hearne refused. Later he twice refused offers to become librarian
of the Bodleian.
9. Edward Holdsworth, Muscipula: The Mousetrap, or The Battle of The
Camhrians And The Mice, translated into English by R. Lewis (Annapolis:
William Parks, 1728). Reprinted in MHS Fund Publication no. 36, "Early
Maryland Poetry," pp. 57-102.
�73
FLETCHER
10. J. A. Leo Lemay, Men of Letters in Maryland (Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press, 1972), p. 150. For life and works of Lewis see pp. 126-84.
11. Richard Lewis, "Verses ... ".
12. Archives 38:456-61
13. Archives 50:491. The Committee of Laws reported to lower house 21 May
1754 that interest on Calvert's Donation was £37 ten shiilings sterling;
ground rents on houses in Annapolis 4.0 pounds sterling. The five hundred
acres in Dorchester br,ought in no rent and cost ground rent; it was not sold
until 1769.
14. Wills, Anne Arundel, 1732, 20:496, 498, in Maryland State Archives. For
accounting of American estate, see Executor Edmund Jennings Testamentary Bond, etc. Anne Arundel, 1732-34, box 37, folder 41; Additional
Account 4 September 1753. In 1763 Gov. Sharpe wrote Calvert's brother,
Caecelius, the English executor, to send the residue of what was owing King
William's School still held in the estate of Jennings, who had died in
England in 1756.
15. Archives 6:54, 55. Every freeholder was taxed 40 pounds of tobacco for
support of the Anglican clergyman of his parish. This was commonly
expressed as "40p per poll."
16. Nelson Richtmyer, Mmy/and's Established Church (Baltimore: The Church
Historical Society for the Diocese of Maryland, 1956), p. 42.
17. Prior to Calvert's gift, St. Anne's Vestry Minutes record several attempts to
provide decent housing for the rector, Samuel Skippon. The church wardens
neither repaired two old parsonage houses nor built a new parsonage (MHM
7: 167). After Skippon 's death in 1724, Rev. James Henderson, commissary
of the Anglican Church on the Western Shore, proposed to the vestry that
he and the neighboring clergy "serve the Parish for the present year in the
best manner they can on condition that his Excellency the Governor and the
rest of the Vestry do agree that the 40p poll for the present year be apply'd
toward purchasing glebe land and improving the glebe for the use of the
present Incumbent and his successors" (MHM 7: 178).
18. But in the next meeting of the vestry, 11 February 1724/25 candidate who
had received the "bounty as a schoolmaster in Philadelphia" (Richtmyer,
p. 193) was presented to them. His qualifications and their need must have
coincided. Their reply was "Forasmuch as the Reverend John Humphreys
is willing to reside among us, we readily accept his offer, and desire that his
Excellency the Governor will induct him into this Parish" (MHM 7:269).
The money saved through using the services of neighboring clergy after
Skippon 's death was given him to defray "his Charges in Removing his
Family to this City," and was not used to build a rectory. It is clear that they
did not provide a place for him to live, because two years later in September
1726, Humphrey "acquainted this Vestry that he stands indebted for House
rent twenty-four pounds currency" (MHM 7:279). He asked the church
wardens to beg help "from the several parishioners toward Discharge of the
Rent." On 4 August 1730 he was granted permission "to remove the house
he built on the glebe lot," presumably at his own expense (MHM 8:157).
a
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
74
It is very likely that Rev. John Humphreys was both rector of St. Anne's
and master of King William's School after Michael Piper died, and that he
occupied the schoolhouse living quarters after 1730. By education and
experience he was well able to hold both offices. The next rector, Rev. James
Stirling, a poet and playwright, stayed only from 1739 to 1740, in which
time Charles Peale was a master of King William's School. There are several
hints that Rev. John Gordon, who became rector in 1745, lived in the
schoolhouse quarters. Three times during his incumbency- 1 July and 18
August 1746 (MHM 9:50, 51) and 10 November 1747 (St. Anne's Vestry
Minutes, p. 302)- the St. Anne's Vestry met in the schoolhouse. More
significantly, he was host of the Tuesday Club in the schoolhouse. He, too,
was well prepared by education to teach as well as to preach. See note 31.
19. Archives 6:54, 55. See note 17 for Henderson's proposal.
20. William F. Paynter, St. Anne's, Annapolis, History and Times (Annapolis:
St. Anne's Parish, 1980), pp. 21, 22.
Archives 40:271
Archives 42:344, 354-55
Radoff, pp. 77-80.
Maryland Gazette 7 Nov. 1745; 21 Aprill747; 27 Sept. 1747; 2 June 1745.
Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 150.
26. For the life of Bacon see Lemay, 303-42, and Tilghman, 1:272-300; 2:47795.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
27. For the life of Gordon see Mary M. Starin, "The Reverend Doctor John
Gordon, 1717-1790," in MHM 75:167-91.
28. Alexander Hamilton, "History of the Ancient and Honorable Tuesday
Club," opp. 118, ms. no. 2, John Work Garrett Collection, Milton S.
Eisenhower Library, the Johns Hopkins University Library.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
Ibid., pp. 119-23.
Ibid., p. 249.
Ibid., p. 368.
Archives 44:595-638.
Gazette,9, 16,23,30Dec.1747.
Archives 46:485, 486.
Archives 46:384, 385.
Gazette 1, 8 Aug. 1750.
Gazette 27 Feb. 1751.
Gazette 21 March 1754.
Gazette 16 May 1754.
Archives 50:514-19.
Archives 50:472, 473.
Archives 50:482, 483.
Archives 50:490-92.
44. Archives 50:xxii.
45. Archives 50:506. Alexander Hamilton was Grand Master of the Annapolis
A. F&M Lodge as well as president of the Tuesday Club.
�FLETCHER
75
46. Archives 34:388.
47. Archives 6:56.
48. Archives 6:79, 80.
Notes to Three
1. "A Journal of the PrOceedings of the School" and "Book of Accounts" of
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
King William's School are referred to in a suit brought by St. John's College
to recover back rent and interest from the King William's School lease of
Kentish House in 1769. See Chancery Records, March 1830, pp.l41 ff.,
215-54, in Maryland State Archives.
See Visitors and Governors of St. John's College, An Appeal to the People
a/Maryland, Annapolis, August 1868 (Annapolis: Robert F. Bonsall, 1868):
Sollers in Steiner; Thomas Fell, Some Historical Accounts of the Founding
of King William's School and its Subsequent Establishment as St. John's
College (Annapolis, 1894); and "Establishment of a College," Archives
56:lxvi-lxviii; 58:lv-lviii; "Schools," 58:liv-lv.
George H. Callcott, A History of the University of Maryland (Baltimore:
Maryland Historical Society, 1966), chap. 1; Morris Radoff, "King
William's School," in Buildings, pp. 43-46; Tench Tilghman, "The Founding of St. John's College," MHM 44:85·92.
Archives 64:242-53.
Malcolm may have helped write the college bill of 1750 (Gazette 8 August
1750); later the trustees of Queen Anne's County school dismissed him as
master for writing a too elaborate curriculum. He was calledPhilo-Dogmaticus in the Tuesday Club (an earlier master of King William's School was
called Mr. Pedanticus in the Ugly Club). He was Sharpe's appointee to the
Commission on Boundaries to supervise the laying of the Mason-and-Dixon
Line between Maryland and Pennsylvania because he was the ablest mathematician in Maryland (Archives 9:471,466, 224, 233; 14:556). He was the
author of A Treatise of Musick, Speculative, Practical and Historical (Edinburgh, 1721); A New System of Arithmetick, Theoretical and Practical
(London, 1730); A Treatise of Bookkeeping . .. in the Italian method of
Debtor and Creditor (London, 1731). For the most complete account of
Malcolm see The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London:
Macmillan, 1980) 1:568. See also Lemay.
Gazette 1 and 8 August 1750.
Gazette 20 Nov. 1755.
Gazette 10 May 1759.
Gazette 20 Nov. 1755.
Clajon was undoubtedly aware of the curriculum taught at the Academy of
Philadelphia, where the English "tongue" was taught grammatically and
as "a language." Benjamin Franklin, "Proposals Relating to the Education
of Youth in Pensilvania," Philadelphia, 1749, in Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1959- ), 3:395-421.
�76
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Franklin quotes copiously from John Locke's Treatise of Education, and
William Fordyce's Dialogues. See also William Smith, A general Idea of
the College ofMironia (New York: J. Parker and Weyman, 1753).
Gazette 28 Aprill757.
Gazette 10 May 1759.
Archives 9:375 (Calvert to Sharpe 17 March 1760).
Archives 9:402,277,438-39. Realizing that Sharpe was very much hurt by
the scolding proprietary letter (seen. 13), Lord Baltimore sent an appeasing
gift, a snuff-box bearing a Masonic device on its lid, a representation of
Solomon's Temple. Sharpe hoped the gift "would convince at least one of
my Enemies here who will see it and know from whom it come that all
Attempts to prejudice me in his Lordship's Opinion have been very unsuccessful." Undoubtedly there were freernasons in the lower house who were
pressing for the two great interests of the lodge, the promotion of commerce
and the education of the rising generation. Perhaps some of his enemies
attended the Annapolis St. John's lodge, which was active throughout the
middle sixties, years when the brigantine Free Mason lay between voyages
in the Annapolis dock.
Archives 56:488-94.
Archives 56:496, 497.
Archives 9:523.
Archives 9:545. Lord Baltimore emphatically said he would not allow such
a "strip of his right."
Archives 14:114 (Sharpe to Calvert, 21 August 1763).
Archives 58:309,310, 393; 4:402-4.
Archives 14:152.
Archives 14:194.
Archives 14:152, 153.
Gazette 30 May 1765.
Thomas Harrison Montgomery, "List of Scholars Entered at the Academy
and College up to and Including the Year 1769," in A History of the
University of Pennsylvania from its Foundation to A.D. 1770 (Philadelphia:
George W. Jacobs Co., 1900) pp. 530-54; see also University of Pennsylvania, Biographical Catalogue of' the Matriculates of the College, 1749-1893
(Philadelphia, 1894 ).
Rev. Jonathan Boucher scorned the education received in American colleges. Of the College of Philadelphia and Princeton he wrote, "they were
the chief nurseries of all that frivolous and mischievous kind of knowledge
which passed for learning in America .... They pretend to teach everything,
without being really competent to the teaching of anything .... Their chief
and peculiar merit was thought to be in Rhetoric and the belles lettres ...
Hence in no country were there so many orators, and so many smatterers."
Virginia, according to him, was more guilty of appointing them as their
rectors than Maryland, for "in Virginia the clergy were elected by the
vestries ... in Maryland, they were in the prerogative of Lord Baltimore.
But even in Maryland, congregations had influence on governors." Jonathan
�FLETCHER
77
Boucher, Reminiscences of an American Loyalist (New York: Kennikat
Press, 1967), p.!Ol.
27. Archives 32:145, 146. Daniel Dulany was from Annapolis. The other three
were from the Eastern Shore: Henry (Somerset County), Goldsborough
(Dorchester), Hooper (Dorchester, member of county school board, bequeathed ten pounds to King William School); see Papenfuse, et al., vol. 1.
See also Archives 14:126 ("No Right without a Remedy").
28. Archives 14:327, 328,,
29. Steiner, p. 42.
30. Gazette 22 May to 9 Oct. 1766.
31. See Gazette 7 Nov. 1768 for account of firing ofDakein. He and Rev. Bennet
Allen learned that the Dulanys intended to replace them both with Rev.
Jonathan Boucher, who could serve as both rector of St. Anne's and master
of King William's. In defending Allen, Dakein thought he was defending
Lord Baltimore's prerogative to appoint the clergy. The Gazette refused to
publish Allen's unsigned letters delivered by Dakein. So the story of their
troubles first appeared in the Pennsylvania Chronicle. Dakein lost his job,
and Allen, who was thoroughly disreputable but had Lord Baltimore's
backing, was awarded Maryland's most lucrative parish, in Frederick.
32. Daniel Dulany to Walter Dulany, 11 Oct. 1767 (Dulany Papers, MHS 1264).
33. Gazette 20 April 1769. An Act of 1750 gave them permission to sell.
34. Land Records of Dorchester County, Old no. 23, 1768-1770, pp. 228-92. An
earlier attempt to sellS May 1764 failed; see Chancery Record 14:215 ff.
35. Gazette 6, 14 Sept. 1769. Books lost: Ferguson's Lectures on Astronomy
and Philosophy; A Volume of Projectiles; Mather's Young Man's Companion; The Seaman's Calendar; Seaman's Daily Assistant.
36. Archives 62:4.
37. Archives 63:34, 35.
38. Archives 64:242-53.
39. Gazette 18 Nov. 1773.
40. Gazette 7 Apri11774, 26 May 1768.
41. Archives 64:379, 380 ("An Act for King William's School' in Annapolis").
42. William Eddis, Letters from America (Cambridge :Harvard University
Press, 1969).
43. Gazette 31 July 1776.
44. William Kilty, Laws of Mmyland (Annapolis: Frederick Green, 1799), 1
(June 1778), chap. 5, "Supplementary Act to the Act Entitled 'An Act for
King William's School in Annapolis 1696."'
45. Kilty, I (1780), chap. 5, "An Act for calling out of circulation the quota of
this state of bills of credit issued by congress, and the bills of credit emitted
by act of Assembly."
46. Kilty, I (1780), chap. 24, "An act for licensing and regulating ordinaries."
47. William Smith, An Account of Washington College in the State of Maryland
(Philadelphia: Joseph Cruikshank, 1784).
48. Archives 48:408, 409.
49. Gazette 26 August 1784.
�78
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
50. Kilty, 1 (Nov. 1784), chap. 37, "An Act for founding a college on the
Western Shore and constituting the same, together with Washington College
on the Eastern Shore, into one University by the name of the University of
Maryland."
51. Gazette 21 April 1785; see also "An Act to provide a permanent fund for
the further encouragement and establishment of Washington College," in
Kilty (1784), chap. 7.
52. Kilty (1785), chap. 2, "A supplement to the act entitled An 'Act for founding
a college on the Western Shore, etc."'
53. St. John's College, Minutes of the Board ofVisitors and Governors, 28 Feb.,
I March 1786 (in St. John's Archives).
54. "An Act for Consolidating the Funds belonging to King William's School
in the city of Annapolis with the Funds of Saint John's College: in Laws of
Maryland made and passed at a session of Assembly 1785 (Annapolis:
Frederick Green), chap. 39.
55. William Smith to Hon. Thomas Willing, Esq., President of the Bank of
America, 5 March 1786, William Smith mss., vol.l, no.lOl, Archives,
Historical Collection of the Episcopal Church, Austin, Texas.
Notes to Four
1. Poems by the late Doctor John Shaw, to which is prefixed a Biographical
Sketch of the Author (Philadelphia and Baltimore, 1810), pp. 92-93. A short
essay on the "Eloquence of St. Chrysostom: with a translation of a homily
on patience" was published by Shaw in Port Folio, n.s. 3, no. 2 (1807), pp.
17-19.
2. Memorial Volume: Dedication Ceremonies in Connection with the Formal
Opening of the Henry Williams Woodward Hall at St. John's College,
Annapolis, Md. (Annapolis, 1900), pp. 30, 31.
3. Steiner, p. 103 n.
4. Ibid.
5. Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed., s.v. "Freemasonry"; Coil's Masonic
Encyclopedia, s.v. "St. John As a Generic Term and As a Lodge Name";
Edward T. Schultz, Histm·y of Freemasonry in Maryland, 4 vols. (Baltimore:
Mediary, 1884), 1:389-90.
6. One Hundredth Anniversary, 1848-1948, Annapolis Lodge No. 89, A.F. and
A.M. (Annapolis, n.d.), pp. 12, 13.
7. Generals Otto Holland Williams, John Swan, Mordecai Gist, Major
Archibald Anderson, Capt. Stephen Decatur, Commodore James Nicholson,
Col. Nathaniel Ramsey; see Schultz, 1:97-106. General Lafayette also
visited Annapolis many times.
8. Schultz, 1:382,393,396,397.
�FLETCHER
79
9. William Smith, Ahiman Rezon, Abridged and Digested, As a Help to All
That Are, or Would Be Free and Accepted Masons (Philadelphia, 1783), pp.
62,65,66,67,80,82,83.
10. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (New York: Modern Library, 1931), pp. 323-36.
11. Motto encircling the St. John's seal: "Est Nulla Via Invia Virtuti" (No way
impassable to courage). There are seven Masonic virtues: (1) discretion, the
keeping of secrets; (2) obedience to the higher authorities of the order; (3)
morality; (4) love for· mankind; (5) courage; (6) liberality; and (7) love of
Death. See Tolstoy, p. 331.
12. Jacques Chailley, The Magic Flute, a Masonic Opera: an lntopretation of
the Libretto and the Music (New York: Knopf, 1971), pl. 35, p. 130.
13. Coil's s.v. "St. John."
14. Lodge No.6 in Georgetown on the Sassafras and Lodge No. 17 at Chestertown were founded in 1766.
15. St. John's College, Minutes of the Board of Visitors and Governors, 2 July,
1793: "Resolved: that Bishop Carroll, Bishop Claggett, Mr. Nicholas Carroll, Dr. Scott, Mr. John Thomas, Mr. Jennings and Mr. Hanson, or any three,
be a committee to attend at any time, when requested by the principal for
the purpose of superintending a private examination of such students as shall
be candidates for the first degree to be conferred, at a commencement to
take place in November next." "Resolved: that the said committee be
authorized to procure for the board one common public seal and likewise
one privy seal with such devices and inscriptions as they shall think proper;
the particular uses of the said seals to be hereafter ascertained, fixed and
regulated by this board."
16. One Hundredth Anniversary, pp. 13, 14.
17. Smith, An Account of Washington College, p.2. Compare with Pierre
Bezuhov's speech to the Petersburg lodge in 1809 (Tolstoy, p. 405).
18. Gazette 16 Dec. 1784.
19. For text of the Washington College charter of 1782 see Smith, Account pp.
5-14. Hereafter Washington College's charter will be cited as Charter of
1782; "Draught of a Proposed Act ... "will be cited as Draught or Proposed
Act (Gazette 16 Dec. 1784); the Act bearing the same name as the Draught
will be cited as the Charter of 1784, or the University Law (Laws of
Maryland, Made and Passed at a Session of Assembly Begun and Held at
the City of Annapolis, on Monday the first of November, in the Year of Our
Lord One Thousand Seven Hundred and Eighty-Four [Annapolis, 1785],
chap. 36).
20. William Smith to William White, 26 Jan. 1785. The Right Reverend William
White Papers, val. I, no. 56, Archives Historical Collection of the Episcopal
Church, Austin, Texas.
21. The John Carroll Papers, ed. Thomas O'Brien Hanley, 3 vols. (Notre Dame,
1976), 1:158.
22. Charter of 1782, paragraph 9:" ... and youth of all religious denominations
and persuasions, shall be freely and liberally admitted to equal privileges
and advantages of education, and to all the literary honors of the college,
according to their merit, and the standing rules of the seminary, without
�80
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
requmng or enforcing any religious or civel test whatsoever upon any
student, scholar or member of the said college, other than such oath of
fidelity to the state as the laws thereof may require of the Visitors, Governors, Masters, Professors and Teachers in Schools and seminaries of learning in general" (Smith, Account, p. I 0).
Draught: "First, That the said intended college shall be founded and
maintained for ever upon the most liberal and catholic plan for the benefit
of the youth of every religious denomination, who shall be freely admitted
to the equal privileges and advantages of education and to all the literary
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
honours of the college according to their merit, without requiring or enforcing any religious or civil test or urging their attendance upon any particular
religious worship or service, other than what they have been educated in,
or have the consent and approbation of their parents or guardians to attend:
nor shall any preference be given in the choice of a principal, vice-principal,
or any professor or master in the said college on a religious score; but merely
on account of his literary and other necessary qualifications to fill the place,
for which he is chosen," (Gazette 16 Dec. 1784).
Charter of 1784:"II. Be it enacted, by the General Assembly of Maryland
That a college or general seminary of learning, by the name of Saint John's,
be established on the said western shore, upon the following fundamental
and inviolable principles, namely; first the said college shall be founded and
maintained for ever, upon a most liberal plan, for the benefit of youth of
every religious denomination, who shall be freely admitted to equal privileges and advantages of education, and ,o all the literary honours of the
college, according to their merit, without requiring or enforcing any religious or civil test, or urging their attendance upon any particular religious
worship or service, other than what they have been educated in or have the
consent and approbation of their parents or guardians to attend" (Laws of
Maryland. 1785, chap. 36).
Smith to White, 26 Jan. 1785. Speaking of opposition to the Religious Bill
in the General Assembly of 1785, Smith wrote "some men who call themselves Christians,- but I need not tell you, seem never to be Pleased with
any Thing however Christian, or however Catholic, where their Numbers
will not enable them to be the sole or chief Directors .... "In passing it is
interesting to note that the word "Christian" never appears in either the 1782
or 1784 charter.
Smith to White, 26 Jan. 1785.
Archives 27:408-9.
For Carroll see John Carroll Papers, 1:xlv-li; for Allison see John H.
Gardner, Jr., First Presbyterian Church of Baltimore ... (Baltimore, 1966)
and William B. Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit, 9 vols. (New York:
Carter, 1857-69), 3:257-63; for Smith see Horace W. Smith, Life and
Correspondence of the Rev. William Smith, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1879),
I :22-28; 2:18-23, 34, 35, 2 vols. in I (reprint New York: Arno, 1972).
John Carroll Papers 1:80,81.
Gazette 30 Sept., 7 Oct., 21 Oct. 1784.
John Carroll Papers 1:82-143.
�FLETCHER
81
30. John Carroll Papers 1:112: "I procured a friend to examine the edition of
Chrysostom's work belonging to the public library in Annapolis." The
"public library"- known today as the Annapolitan Library or the Thomas
Bray Collection- is in the possession of the St. John's College Library and
is on deposit at the Maryland Hall of Records on the college campus. These
are the volumes referred to in John Shaw's letter 24 Jan. 1807 (see note 16).
31. "To the Roman Catholics of the State of Maryland: Especially Those of St.
Mary's County," Gazette 25 Nov. 1784.
32. John Carroll Papers 1:191.
33. John Carroll Papers 1:185, 186. Carroll wrote to Father Eden at the
Academy of Liege, April 1785: "Do you know any young men of improved
abilities and good conduct, capable of teaching the different branches of
science with credit and reputation? It is now in contemplation to establish
two Colleges in this state, open to Professors and Scholars of all denominations, and handsome appointments are to be annexed to the professorships.
To me it appears, that it may be of much service not only to Learning, but
to true Religion, to have some of these Professorships filled by R. C. men
of letters and virtue; and if one or two of them were in orders, it would be
so much the better.... "
34. MarylandJoumall5 July 1783, "To the Public"; 28 Oct. 1783, "To the Han.
the General Assembly"; 26 Nov., 7 and 14 Dec. 1784, "To the People of
Maryland"; 28 Dec. 1784, "A Design to Raise One Sect of Christians above
Another." A restatement of these articles may be found in Allison, Candid
Animadversions, cited in note 35.
35. Patrick Allison, Candid Animadversions on a Petition Presented to the
General Assembly of Maryland by the Rev. William Smith and the Rev.
Thomas Gates, First Published in 1783 ... by Vindex (Baltimore, 1793), pp.
iii-v, 1-16.
36. University of Pennsylvania, Minutes of the Trustees of the College, Academy, and Charitable School (Wilmington, 1974), p. 91: "The Assembly of
the Province having taken Mr. Smith into Custody, the Tru$tees considered
how the inconvenience from thence arising to the College might be best
remedied, and Mr. Smith having expressed a Desire to continue his Lectures
to the Classes, which had formerly attended them, the Students also inclining rather to proceed on their Studies under his Care. They ordered that the
said Classes should attend him for that Purpose at the usual Hour in the
Place of his present Confinement.,.
37. H. W. Smith, 2:34, 35.
38. Schultz, 1:382-93: "When Bro. Smith removed to Maryland, he was the
Grand Secretary of the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania, and as all Lodges of
Ancient York Masons in Maryland were under the jurisdiction of the Grand
Lodge of Pennsylvania, he was active in his official and other Masonic
duties. The Lodges which had existed in Maryland prior to the introduction
of the Lodges by the Ancients, were held under the authority of the Moderns,
or other branch of the Masonic fraternity, and as these had now no ruling
head in America, many of their members sought admission into the Ancient
York Lodges. Brother Smith, and Brother John Coats, a Past Deputy Grand
�82
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Master of the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania, who also resided at the time in
Maryland, were deputed by the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania on the 2nd of
September, 1782, to take to their assistance such true brothers as they might
see proper, and enter into the mysteries of Ancient York Masonry any
respectable Modern Masons in Maryland who might desire to be so healed
... "See also Allison, p.3.
The sources of revenue are similar to those enacted for Washington College
in "An Act to Provide'' a Permanent Fund for the Encouragement and
Establishment of Washington College," Votes and Proceedings of the House
of Delegates for the State of Maryland (Annapolis, 1783-85), pp. 15-18.
Writings of George Washington, ed. John C. Fitzpatrick, 39 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1931-44), 22:17,18.
Ibid., 22:20.
Walter Bowie, James Brice, John Bullen, John Callahan, Charles Carroll of
Carrollton, James Carroll, Nicholas Carroll, John Chalmers, J. Chase, Samuel Chase, Abraham Claude, John Davidson, George Digges, Joseph Dowson, Joseph Eastman, Joshua Frazier, Thomas Gates, Alexander Golder,
John Graham, T. Green, William Hammond, Alexander Hanson, Benjamin
Harwood, Thomas Harwood, Wi11iam Harwood, Samuel Hughes, Daniel of
St. Thomas Jenifer, Thomas Jennings, John Johnson, Rinaldo Johnson,
Philip Key, James Mackubin, Nicholas Mancubbin, George Mann, David
McMechen, John Muir, James Murray, Ben Oake, Aquila Paca, William
Paca, George Plater, Edward Plowden, Allen Quynn, James Reid, Christopher Richmond, Abasalom Ridgley, JohL Roger, Richard Sprigg, Charles
Steuart, James Steuart, John Steuart, William Steuart, J.D. Stone, Thomas
Stone, Michael Taney, Alexander Travers, James Tro(?), Charles Wallace,
James Williams, Nathaniel Yates. Annapolis Subscription List, 16 Dec.
1784, in St. John's College Archives.
Draught: "Thirdly ... agents ... are hereby authorised and made capable to
solicit and receive contributions and subscriptions ... of any person or
persons, bodies politic and corporate, who may be willing t.o promote so
good a design."
Charter of 1784: "III.... and they are hereby authorised to solicit and
receive, subscriptions and contributions . , . of any person or persons, who
may be willing to promote so good a design."
Draught and Charter of 1784: "Secondly, there shall be a subscription
carried on in the different counties of the western shore, upon the plan on
which it hath been opened, for founding the said college; and the several
subscribers shall class themselves, according to their respective inclinations, and for every thousand pounds current money which may be subscribed and paid, or secured to be paid, into the hands of the treasurer of the
western shore, by any particular class of subscribers, they shall be entitled
to the choice of one person as a visitor and governor of said college .... "
The addition of "bodies politic and corporate" allowed the King William's
School to give £2000 and to qualify as two classes of subscribers, each of
which could elect a member to the Board of Visitors and Governors of St.
John's College.
�FLETCHER
83
44. "Draught of a Proposed Act," Gazette !6 Dec. 1784: " ... and provided
further, that is in three years from the first day of June 1785, there shall not
be twenty-four visitors and governors chosen as aforesaid by classes of
subscribers of one thousand pounds, each class; the other visitors and
governors being not less then eleven duly assembled at any quarterly
visitation, shall proceed by election to fill up the number of twenty-four
visitors and governors, as they shaH think most expedient and convenient:
provided nevertheless/that seventeen of the said visitors and governors shaH
always be residents on the western shore of this state, but that the additional
visitors and governors (to make up and perpetuate the number of twentyfour) may be chosen from this or any part of the adjacent states, if they are
such persons as can reasonably undertake to attend the quarterly visitations,
and are thought capable, by their particular learning, weight, and character,
to advance the interest and reputation of the said seminary.... "
Charter of 1784: "IV.... Provided always, that seventeen of the said
visitors and governors shall be resident on the western shore of this state,
but that the additional visitors and governors (to make up and perpetuate
the number of twenty-four) may be chosen from any part of this state, if
they are such persons as can reasonably undertake the quarterly visitations,
and are thought capable, by their particular learning, weight, and character,
to advance the interest and reputation of the said seminary."
45. H. W. Smith, 2:249.
46. The History of American Methodism, 3 vols. (New York, 1964), 1:222.
47. Schultz, 1:105.
48. Votes and Proceedings of the House of Delegates of the State of Maryland,
1783-85 (Annapolis, 1785), p. 73.
49. William Morley Brown, George Washington, Freemason (Richmond: Garrett and Massi!, 1952), p. 332.
50. Schultz, I :76-78; and Gazette 29 Dec. 1763: "Tuesday last, being St. John's
was observed by the Brethren of the Ancient and Honarable Fraternity of
Free and Accepted Masons with great order and decency."
51. Writings of G. W. 22:25-27.
·
52. Gazette 30 March 1786. For earlier notices to subscribers see Gazette 9 June
1785 (no name at all, only reference to the Act); I Dec. 1785; 12 Jan. 1786.
First eleven members of the Board of Visitors and Governors who were
elected March 1786: Thomas Claggett, D.D., and William West, D.D.
(Episcopal clergymen, who would later be elected bishops); subscribers on
the Annapolis list of 16 Dec. 1784: Nicholas Carroll, John H. Stone, William
Beans, Thomas Stone, Samuel Chase, Thomas Jennings, A. C. Hanson, John
Thomas (a Quaker), and Richard Ridgeley.
53. Robert Reinhold, "For Relevance, the Students at St. John's College Turn
to Galileo," New Yark Times, 18 Oct. 1971, p. 39.
54. St. John's College, Minutes of the Board of Visitors and Governors, 12 and
13 May 1972. A branch college, St. John's College, Santa Fe, New Mexico,
was founded in 1963.
�84
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Notes to Five
1. Rev. William Smith to Rev. William West, 5 May 1790, Maryland Diocesan
Archives on deposit at the Maryland Historical Society (hereafter MDA).
2. Charles Goldsborough to John McDowell, Shoal Creek, 22 November 1790
(St. John's College LibraJY ).
3. Biographical Annals of Franklin County, Pennsylvania (Chicago: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1905), pp. 82, 83.
4. John M. McDowell, "John McDowell, LI.D., First President of St. John's
College, Annapolis, Maryland; Third Provost of University of Pennsylvania," in Old Mercersburg, by the Woman's Club of Mercersburg, Pennsylvania (New York: Frank Allaben Genealogical Co.,l912), pp. 69-71; and
Stevenson Whitcomb Fletcher, Pennsylvania Agriculture and Country Life,
1640-1840 (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission,
1950), pp. 496-97.
5. Alfred Nevin, Churches of the Valley, and Historical Sketch of the Old
Presbyterian Congregations of Cumberland and Franklin Counties in Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: James H. Wilson, 1852), p.l09.
6. Sprague, Vol. 3, p. 188.
7. Bureau of Land Affairs, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Warrant 81 (survey of
23 acres, 27 May 1767; survey of 158 acres, 17 March 1767).
8. Nevin,pp.lll, 112.
9. University of Pennsylvania, Biographical Catalogue, p.13, and Montgomery, p. 544. Between 1771 and 1774 Montgomery was rector of St. Anne's
Church in Annapolis.
10. See University of Pennsylvania, Minutes of the Trustees of the College,
Academy and Charitable Schools, 1749-1851, p.33; University of Pennsylvania, Biographical Catalogue, pp.l7-18; and Pennsylvania Archives, Fifth
Series, 8 vols. (Harrisburg, 1906), 6:271, 281, 316.
11. See McDowell, passim.
12. Gazette 10 May 1786.
13. St. John's College, Minutes of the Board of Visitors and Governors, 17861825, 19 November 1790, St. John's College Archives.
14. John McDowell to William McDowell, 4 September 1789. In Gratz Collection, case 71, box 14, Historical Society of Pennsylvania (hereafter HSP).
15. Charles Goldsborough (congressman and governor); John Henry (U.S.
senator); William Vans Murray (congressman and ambassador to the
Hague); and William Tilghman (chief judge, third judicial circuit).
16. See, for example, Gov. John Henry, Letters and Papers (Baltimore: George
W. King, 1904), pp. 26-27.
17. Papenfuse, et al., 1:396-97, 445; 2:834.
18. They were Thomas Hayward, Thomas Shaw, Henry Steels, Hall Harris,
Christopher Harrison, Joseph Richardson, Howes Goldsborough, William
Lockerman, William Shaw, William Sanders, John Sanders, Henry Maynadier, John G. Harrison, Robert Goldsborough, William Goldsborough,
�FLETCHER
85
J. Campbell Henry, and John Shaw. See St. John's College, Matriculation
Book, 1789-1860.
19. Judge Robert Goldsborough to Charles Goldsborough, 27 August 1795,
MDA.
20. Gazette 23 May 1793.
21. Votes and Proceedings of the Senate ... November Session 1793, p.42.
Journal of the Proceedings of the House of Delegates ... November 1793
(hereafter JHD), p.l20.
22. JHD 1794, p.84.
23. Manumission of Joseph Williams, Gratz Collection, ABC, HSP. McDowell
to Tilghman, 8, 16, 22 December 1806 and 9 March 1807.
24. McDowell to Rev. William Rogers, 20 December 1810, no. 671, University
of Pennsylvania Guide; McDowell to Rogers, 30 January 1811, Gratz
Collection, case 7, box 14, HSP.
25. Charles Goldsborough to Elizabeth and Anna Maria Goldsborough, I April
and 14 May 1809, John Lweeds Bozman Papers, Library of Congress.
26. McDowell to Tilghman, 25 December 1815 and 15 February 1816, Tilghman Papers, box 22, HSP. McDowell to Robert Henry Goldsborough, 27
December 1816, Goldsborough Papers, Myrtle Grove.
27. Alexander Contee Magruder to Bishop James Kemp, 29 June 1815, MDA.
Kemp was offered the presidency of St. John's in 1807 but he refused,
choosing instead to head an academy in Cambridge. See Kemp to John
Trippe, 13 March 1807, MDA.
28. McDowell to Tilghman, 25 December 1815 and 15 February 1816, Tilghman Papers, box 22, HSP; McDowell to Robert Henry Goldsborough, 27
December 1816, Goldsborough Papers, Myrtle Grove.
29. Magruder to[?], II July 1816, MDA.
30. Gov. Charles Goldsborough, Executive Letter Book, 1819-34, pp. 47-48,
MSA.
31. McDowell to Tilghman, 23 March 1819 and 6 April 1820, Tilghman Papers,
box 24, HSP. See also Robert H. Goldsborough to William Hemsley, 8
January 1810, Goldsborough papers, Myrtle Grove: "My sOns are now with
Dr. McDowell and have been at Shoal Creek for a week."
32. McDowell left an estate worth $40,000 to brothers, sisters, nephews, and
nieces, and his scholarly books to the University of Pennsylvania where one
volume survives in the rare book room: Hemy Pemberton, A View of Sir
Isaac Newton's Philosophy (London, 1728).
33. See Francis Scott Key, A Discourse on Education Delivered in St. Anne's
Church, Annapolis, After the Commencement of St. John's College, February 22d, 1827 (Annapolis: Jonas Green, 1827), pp. 33, 34; and Robert Henry
Goldsborough, Address Delivered Before the Alumni of St. John's College
at the Annual commencement on the 22 February, 1836 (Annapolis: Jonas
Green, 1836).
34. St. John's College Archives.
��•
Results of
St. John's Crossword Number One
For Crossword Number One the three winners of $35 book tokens, redeemable
at the St. John's College Bookstore, are:
Tracy Cobbs, Martselle, AL
Steven Epstein, Saratoga Springs, NY
Elsie Roberts, Rhodesdale, MD
The winners were selected at random on July 8, from among thirteen entries.
The editor wishes to inform the readers of the Review that he is not Cassandra.
Nor is he Trout.
Solution to Crossword Number One
��St. John's Crossword Number Two
"Canonic Eponyms"
By TROUT
In this puzzle there are nine answers for which no clues are given. (That there are
nine of them provides an allusion for those who were students at the College
before 1972.) They are all of a type, and must be deduced from the cross-checked
letters and from the hint in the title. There is also a connection with the fourth
essay in this issue. AU clued answers, except one proper but common noun, are
in Webster's Ninth Collegiate DictionaJ)'·
For explanations of how to solve cryptic clues, new solvers are referred to the
preface to Crossword Number One, in the previous issue. Once again, there will
be three prizes of$35 book tokens redeemable at the St. John's College Bookstore,
the winners to be chosen at random from among the entries.
�90
ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Down
Across
6. Taxmen following letter lead to
native rulers (5)
L Cherry swallowing it was
cheating (6)
10. Capital has fifty less after new
moon makes limited mental illness
3. Radioactive old boats are places
to socialize (7, two words)
(9)
.
12. Answer back with a bit of
temper and sound hoarse (7)
14. General assembly from ample
numbers (6)
15. Causes theories (4)
17. Inside tour in Albania is the
place to go (6)
19. The Spanish last month has no
time for the Hebrew last month (4)
20. A nasty thing in man's attire
never at first seems to be a woman
(7)
4. Trunk of middleman with gold
and thanks (5)
5. Adults mad about point are
honored (7)
7. Very small, to say the least (7)
8. Arab enters church for language
group (7)
9. Multiple choice of colors (3)
13. Woman of letters (5)
16. Unite wrongly and divide (5)
18. Two of our dead return without
right (3)
23. Experienced one's voice (in
principal) (5)
22. Cunning boy! (3)
24. Steadily reflects openings (5)
27. Plant pouch in God's acre (3)
26. Solid mistakes? Or fallacies? (5)
30. Rodent found in 'Toad Row,'
misplaced (7, two words)
29. Tricky wicket not kosher, again
(5)
33. Pitcher's stat points nullify an
effect (5)
25. Transfer down and strung up (5)
31. Ingredients of Bacardi act near
the heart (7)
35. The French, only part demon,
are yellow (5)
38. Cuniculum is for weight (7)
32. Hard going after top brass is a
certainty (5)
33. That is retumed around virtue
for superannuated tutors (7)
40. A worm turns. Hallelujah! (4)
34. Second person is star, we hear
42. One leaves a debt, Father, for a
sheep (6)
37. Organ was melancholy (6)
43. Result of thesis-writing shows
in immorality (4)
41. Cooperative in Russia, later
disjointed (5)
44. Undergarment's a little black (3)
45. To spoil liquor is the limit (6)
46. This time the Frence stand by
for the Scotch sign (7)
47. Mineral yields prophet in the
time of end (9)
48. Penetrating accent (5)
(3)
�TROUT
1
91
2
4
3
5
12
14
15
16
20
19
23
24
25
29
30
27
26
31
32
34
33
36
35
38
37
39
42
40
41
43
45
46
47
48
17
22
28
8
11
13
21
7
10
9
18
6
49
44
��
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<em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College. All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to </span><em>The St. John's Review</em><span>, St. John's College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or via e-mail at </span><a class="obfuscated_link" href="mailto:review@sjc.edu"><span class="obfuscated_link_text">review@sjc.edu</span></a><span>.</span><br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> exemplifies, encourages, and enhances the disciplined reflection that is nurtured by the St. John's Program. It does so both through the character most in common among its contributors — their familiarity with the Program and their respect for it — and through the style and content of their contributions. As it represents the St. John's Program, The St. John's Review espouses no philosophical, religious, or political doctrine beyond a dedication to liberal learning, and its readers may expect to find diversity of thought represented in its pages.<br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> was first published in 1974. It merged with <em>The College </em>beginning with the July 1980 issue. From that date forward, the numbering of <em>The St. John's Review</em> continues that of <em>The College</em>. <br /><br />Click on <a title="The St. John's Review" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=13"><strong>Items in the The St. John's Review Collection</strong></a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Sachs, Joe
Stickney, Cary
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
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Fletcher, Charlotte
Trout
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<em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College. All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to </span><em>The St. John's Review</em><span>, St. John's College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or via e-mail at </span><a class="obfuscated_link" href="mailto:review@sjc.edu"><span class="obfuscated_link_text">review@sjc.edu</span></a><span>.</span><br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> exemplifies, encourages, and enhances the disciplined reflection that is nurtured by the St. John's Program. It does so both through the character most in common among its contributors — their familiarity with the Program and their respect for it — and through the style and content of their contributions. As it represents the St. John's Program, The St. John's Review espouses no philosophical, religious, or political doctrine beyond a dedication to liberal learning, and its readers may expect to find diversity of thought represented in its pages.<br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> was first published in 1974. It merged with <em>The College </em>beginning with the July 1980 issue. From that date forward, the numbering of <em>The St. John's Review</em> continues that of <em>The College</em>. <br /><br />Click on <a title="The St. John's Review" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=13"><strong>Items in the The St. John's Review Collection</strong></a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Williamson, Robert B.
Hunt, Jack
Sachs, Joe
Kalkavage, Peter
Woodard, Joseph Keith
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Smith, Brother Robert
Cassandra
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The St. John's Review
Volume XLI, number one (1991-92)
Editor
Elliott Zuckerman
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Beale Ruhm von Oppen
Joe Sachs
Cary Stickney
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Jack Hunt
'
The St.John's Review is published three times a year by the Office ofthe Dean, StJohn's
College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President; Eva T. H. Brann, Dean. For those
not on the distribution list, subscripti9ns are $15.00 per year. Unsolicited essays, stories,
poems, 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 $5.00 per issue, from the St. John's College Bookstore.
© 1992 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 College Print Shop
��Contents
1 . . . . . The Body Electric
Howard Fisher
39. . . . . . The Education of Te1emachos
Amy l}pfel Kass
61. . . . . . The Least Deceptive Mirror of the Mind:
Truth and Reality in the Homeric Poems
Carl A. Rubino
75 ...... What is a Book?
Eva T. H. Brann
89 ...... Poems
J.H. Beall
Sandra Hoben
Kemmer Anderson
97
Re-Reading:
A Note on Ibsen and Wagner
Elliott Zuckerman
101 ..... Solution:
St. John's Crossword Number Two
Trout
103. . . . . . St. John's Crossword Number Four ·
Captain Easy
:
��I
The Body Electric
Howard Fisher
I. Does the electric eel shock itself?
In the dialogue Me no, that otherwise unmemorable character establishes his own
lasting memorial by creating one of the most memorable similes in all the
dialogues of Plato: Socrates, he says, is like the torpedofish (Figure 1) whose
shock plunges his prey into a stupid paralysis.' Meno calls the simile his "little
jest"; and while Socrates does agree to accept the supposedly playful image, he
makes one qualification:
If the totpedo tOtpifies itself while making others totpid, then I may be
compared with it; otherwise not?
FIGURE 1: Torpedo-fish (alter Grundfest)
Howard Fisher is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. This lecture was given at
the College in October, 1991, to mark the bicentennial ofFaraday's birth, on September
22, 1791. Figures 1-4 are by John Langley Howard. They are reprinted with permission
from the article "Electric Fishes," by Harry Grundfest, in Scientific American, October,
1960, p.122.
�2
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Torpidity in the fish's victim represents the perplexity and ineptitude displayed by one who, like Meno, has been forced under Socmtic questioning to
acknowledge his own ignomnce. Thus the turn Socrates gives to Meno's simile
means, first of all, that Socrates paralyzes his respondents not through mastery
but through deficiency: through the same mortal ignorance that Meno has been
brought painfully to face in himself.
But scarcely concealed beneath Meno's by now brittle jocularity lies another
element, and a disturbing one. Meno's image of Socrates is 1ife with allusions to
the magical and supernatural. He declares that Socrates is "bewitching" him with
"spells and incantations," and that in any other city Socrates would be condemned as a "wizard." This more sinister theme casts Socrates as other-worldly,
with an inhuman and perhaps unnatural power over men, as the weird powers of
the torpedo-fish set it apart from more conventional carnivores. Socrates' correction of the simile thus has a second meaning also: If the torpedo-fish is subject
to the same power that it itself exercises, then the fish is part of the natural order;
and its power is likewise a natuml, not a magical one. 3 Similarly, the Socratic
power that derives from knowing that one does not know-a power to neutralize
conventional opinions and break their merely habitual hold over us-will be a
human, not a diabolical, power. So much so, for Socrates, that to love wisdom
rather than dogma, to be philos sophoi, is to exercise the very paradigm of human
powers.
But does the torpedo-fish torpify itself? Is the creature an exemplar of
diabolical power, as in Meno's simile, or of activity according to nature, as in
Socrates'? And we might frame a similar question about any of the other animal
species with well-developed electric organs who hunt their prey seemingly
Zeus-like, hurling down potent electric blasts upon their doomed victims-the
Raia or electric skate (Figure 2), the Malapterurus or electric catfish (Figure 3),
and the Gymnotus or so-called "electric eel" (Figure 4 ).4 Does the electric eel
shock itself? That is the question we shall regard as having been suggested by
Meno's simile and Socrates' reply. But it reflects a larger question: What is the
relation in nature between an agent and its own power?
In November of 1838 Michael Faraday, the great experimentalist and natural
philosopher, reported to the Royal Society on "the character and direction of the
electric force of the Gymnotus.''5 Faraday had long been trying to obtain an
electric eel [1752]; 6 and in August of 1838 a certain intrepid Mr. Porter succeeded
in bringing one to London from South America, where it had been captured five
months before. Porter sold the creature to an establishment in Adelaide Street
whose proprietors generously made it available to Faraday for such scientific
researches as should be consistent with "a regard for its life and health" [1754].
This was not Faraday's first encounter with animal electricity. He had in 1833,
some five years before, established the probable identicality of all forms of
�FISHER
3
FIGURE 2: Raia (after Grundfest)
FIGURE 3: Ma/apterurus (after Grundfest)
FIGURE 4: Faraday's Gymnotus,
the modern Electrophorus (after Grundfest)
�4
TIIE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
electricity, including animal electricity;7 and in 1814-15 he had assisted Humphrey Davy in tests, at that time inconclusive, to see whether the shock of the
"electric fish" could decompose water. 8
Faradity's reports to the Society from November 1831 on, along with other
writings, were republished by him in a collection called Experimental Researches in Electricity, a project that was to grow to three sizable volumes by
1855. The Experimental Researches is a remarkably dialectical book in which
topics persistently appear and reappear, developing often in new and surprising
forms that both draw from and contribute to other, at first seemingly disparate,
investigations. The researches are chronologically organized into twenty-nine
numbered "Series"; and while each Series has an identifiable area of inqniry,
multiple strands of tributary or even tangential investigations are continually
encountered and freely admitted to the narrative. In fact, rather than call these
narrative units merely "series," I prefer to think of them as comparable to the
sallies of Don Quixote. They are exploratory journeys, sometimes into new,
sometimes repeatedly into the same territory; and in them the protagonist appears
to exert only a moderate effort to shape or regulate the adventures that ensue.9
Also available to us is Faraday's laboratory Diary, a no less remarkable
production, in which his laboratory work is recorded sequentially and in complete detail for a span, seldom interrupted, of forty-two years. Not everything in
the Diary could possibly be suitable for publication, of course, but it is amazing
how much of the Diary did find its way into papers and letters and thence into
the Experimental Researches. I will occasionally refer to the Diary for some
items Faraday did not publish.
Faraday's 1838 Gymnotus report makes up the Fifteenth Series of Experimental Researches, and I am delighted to be able to say that in it Faraday actually
touches on our question-whether the electric eel shocks itself. True, he mentions it only in passing, and his answer-that "the animal does not apparently
feel the electric sensation which he causes in those around him" [1772]-is only
a guess. 10 But it is rather charming that Faraday should raise the question at all.
Indeed the entire Gymnotus report is charming, with its description of the fish
and its history, its inclusion of part of a letter from Humboldt on proper care and
feeding ("cooked meat, not salted"), and even the delightful sketch, which we
shall return to later, of the Gymnotus in his tubu (Figure 5).
Repeatedly in Faraday's report we find signs of a wondering and appreciative
eye for the striking and exotic in nature. Faraday calls the Gymnotus "this
wonderfnl animal" [1769]; and the word "wonderful" actually begins the paper.
But what is the source of Faraday's wonder, in which presumably we too are to
share? Is it exclusively the animal's strangeness and mystery-that, as Meno
intimates, it goes somehow beyond the bounds of ordinary nature? Or is Faraday
capable, and are we, of bestowing wonder on other than the spectacular and the
�5
FISHER
16
17
15
14
19
11
10
FIGURE 5: (from ERE)
arcane? 12 Faraday characterizes the wonder he has in mind at the outset of his
paper:
Wonderful as are the laws and phenomena of electricity whim made evident
to us in inorganic or dead matter, their interest can bear scarcely any comparison with that which attaches to the same force when connected with the
nervous system and With life ... [1749]
Clearly the interest raised by animal electricity is not that it goes beyond
nature. Rather what is compelling here is precisely the conformity between
Gymnotns's living power and the more prosaic electrical phenomena associated
with inorganic bodies. 13 Electrical powers formerly thought to be confined to
"inert" matter are here seen to be exercised by living beings also. Such a
communion of powers holds promise for the expansion of our existing
knowledge-a promise Faraday is all the more keen to acknowledge because its
importance has not been widely appreciated:
�6
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
[T]hough the obscurity which for the present surrounds the subject may for a
time also veil its importance, every advance in our knowledge of this mighty
power in relation to inert things, helps to dissipate that obscurity, and to set
forth more prominently the surpassing interest of this very high branch of
Physical Philosophy. [1749]
This is a statement about the order of discovery in nature. Faraday here notes
that advances in our understanding of ifwrganic powers will shed light in turn
upon living processes. Later in the paragraph, Faraday voices his belief that we
are "upon the threshold of what ... man is permitted to know of this matter." I
take seriously the qualification: permitted to know. The promise of animal
electricity has nothing to do with forbidden knowledge, wizardry, or things
unnatural. Faraday seems to affmn that, just as inorganic forces lie well within
the domain of standard science, so an understanding of living forces stands as a
merely more distant, but assured, prize.
Yet Faraday's mention of the "surpassing interest" of animal electricity
presents animal processes as more than mere extensions of inorganic ones.
"Surpassing" interest suggests almost a reverse order of discovery: that exercise
of a power by a living being may prove to be visible and intelligible in ways that
power exercised by inert matter alone is not. I see two areas in particular where
animal electricity might prove to be especially illuminating.
First, in animal electricity we have an instance of one identical power
exercised both by living and nonliving agents. The baffling relation between an
agent and the power it exercises may be more accessible when it is viewed in the
comparison between a living and a nonliving system; and if so, knowledge of
the animal may contribute as much to our knowledge of the inorganic system as
the other way around.
Second, a living creature's ability to respond to and alter its environment by
intention or habit adds a new interpretive dimension to the animal's electrical
relations with its surroundings. The general relation between an agent and its
surrounding medium may therefore stand forth more pointedly when exemplified by a Jiving agent. In fact I will argue that the electric fish does become for
Faraday an explanatory image for inorganic agents, and particularly for the
magnet.
If the new knowledge intimated by animal electricity is, as I said, not an
uncovering of things hidden and forbidden, it must be a knowledge of things
which are already there to be seen, but which we have not yet learned to see. 14
Knowledge of this sort will therefore in large measure consist not in the content
but in the mode of vision-or one might say, in rightness of vision. 15 In the case
of Gymnotus, gaining such orthoscopy begins with the quest for an adequate
image of the fish himself. Much of Faraday's activity in the Fifteenth Series is
concerned with bringing this image to light. Faraday's experiments with
�FISHER
7
Gymnotus are as much concerned with eliciting images of the animal as with
establishing factual information about him.
Besides Faraday's own experiments, conventional anatomy plays a role in
originating the elements of the Gymnotus images. For example, Faraday is aware
that the electric organ tissues are of muscular derivation; he cites Geoffroy St.
Hilaire, who classifies them not with the organs of higher life functions but
among "the common teguments" 16 [1789]. What this means is that the fish's
elecbic apparatus is comparable in its office to any of the ordinary muscular
organs, for example to the locomotory structures, the fins.
Gymnotus's anal fin, which runs some 4/5 of the length of the body, is that
animal's principallocomotmy organ (see again Figure 4). The fish propels itself
forward or backward by sending a sinusoidal wave in the appropriate direction
along the fin. But obviously the fin achieves nothing except when the fish is
surrounded by its watery medium. Likewise for land animals; hands and feet
achieve nothing in the way of locomotion except in reaction to a resisting
medium or surface. 17 Bearing that in mind, I hope you will not think it too fanciful
of me to suggest that, from a locomotory point of view, the medium ought to be
counted as part ofthe body. Faraday, I hasten to say, makes no such interpretation
of the mechanics of animal locomotion. But elecbically, at least, his researches
with Gymnotus will conbibute to a new image of body, extended continuously
throughout the medium and contiguous with all other bodies through its own
activity. The Body Electric will possess a distinctive shape and will call for new
principles of anatomy.
II. The Expetiments of 1838
Faraday's experimental exercises with Gymnotus fall into two classes. The
first of these may be called "identity" experiments. In them, Faraday confirms
through his own work the conclusion he had reached in 1833 when surveying
the investigations of others: the animal's elecbicity is identical to all other
elecbicities in its panoply of effects-physiological, magnetic, thermal, chemical, and so on. Some of his methods are new, 18 but the experimental aims of the
"identity" exercises in 1838 are unchanged from those he had reviewed in 1833.
The second exercises are wholly new. Faraday characterizes them as "experiments relating to the quantity and disposition of the elecbicity in and about this
wonderful animal" [1769]; I will call them simply the "disposition" experiments.
The two classes of experiment are different not ouly in their objectives but in
the rhetoric they bring to the animal's elecbical powers. The bringing forth of a
phenomenon in the distinctive forms given by experimental apparatus is a
rhetoric, just as certainly as Meno's verbal portrayal of Socrates in the form of
the torpedo-fish was rhetoric. We can see something of the rhetorical difference
�TIIE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
8
between the "identity" and the "disposition" exercises by examining their
respective apparatus. Faraday describes three kinds of what he calls "collectors,"
with which to sample the fish's electric action:
(1) The hands. Here the experimenters 19 subject themselves to shock through
their unprotected hands, either grasping the fish directly or immersing the hands
at various locations in the water. Employing their own bodies as experimental
apparatus, the investigators stand in the most intimate possible relation to the
object of their study.
(2) The "disk" collectors. Here the investigators make their hands only the
indirect recipients of the shock by grasping the handles of a pair of disk-shaped
copper conductors (Figure 6) and disposing the disk ends variously about the
fish's watery element and on his body. These instruments give increased precision of placement, but to some extent their inte!JlOsition mediates between the
investigator and the shock received [1760].
(3) The "saddle" collectors. Here the hands are replaced altogether by a pair
of copper straps, which Faraday sometimes insulates [1759] with rubber jackets
(Figure 6). Instead of being hand-held, the saddle collectors sit astride the fish
and are wired directly to other indicating devices [1761-66]; and thus the
investigator is placed at still greater removal from the direct electrical effect.
f
.
-~
1
....
"!
·3~
Zj.-
FIGURE 6: Disk and saddle collectors (from Diary)
�FISHER
9
In this short catalog we find an order of increasing sophistication of apparatus
(from bare hands to specialized clamps), together with a corresponding regression of the observer from the locus of action. Most of the "identity" experiments
make use of the saddle collectors; thus the investigator in the identity experiments makes only minimal ingression to the scene of action. He does not
generally place himself in direct relation with the fish's power, but rather with
apparatus that displays concomitants of that power.
The "identity" experiments propound a rhetoric of mobility. In them tile power
is conveyed away from' the fish and its habitat. It is separable and has a nature
of its own that is studied independently of the fish and in comparison to other
"electricities," similarly abstracted from their respective sources. Gymnotus's
power can be transferred through conductors to other venues, where it proceeds
to display the same phenomena of magnetic action, chemical action, shock,
spark, and so on, as do conventional electricities. Not only is this power
qualitatively identical in its effects but quantitatively too: the ratio between its
magnetic and chemical efficacies is consistent with the ratio Faraday had
established in 1833 for Voltaic electricity [1770].
It is fair, I think, to say that the "identity" experiments are more concerned
with the electricity than with the fish. Insofar as these exercises portray the fish
at all, they represent him as just another electrical source; and hence two images
sttaightaway emerge in close succession, both of which focus on the source
aspect of the animal: Gymnotus as Leyden Jar, and, alternatively, Gymnotus as
Voltaic Battery. Both these images are explored in a sequence of experiments
that establish the quantity and intensity of the animal's electrical shock.
FIGURE 7: Faraday's discharge arrangement (from Diary)
�10
TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Faraday's procedure for establishing quantity amounts to a sort of practical
pun on the Leyden jar image (Figure 7). He substitutes for the fish in water two
brass balls bearing insulated wires, which latter can be connected at will to a
Leyden battery of well-documented dimensions [1770, 291]. He also includes a
length of wetted string in the circuit to lower the intensity of discharge below the
sparking point-for he has already found that Gymnotus's electrical intensity is
too low for a spark to appear, except under the most favorable conditions
[1766-67]. The Leyden battery is then given its maximum charge. When it is
subsequently discharged through the brass balls into the water a shock is felt,
"much resembling that from the fish." Faraday continues:
I think we may conclude that a single medium discharge from the fish is at
least equal to the electricity of a Leyden battery of fifteen jars, containing 3500
square inches of glass coated on both sides, charged to its highest degree.
[1770]
Judged by the quantities of electricity typically employed in electrostatic
experiments, this would be a considerable dose,20 but one also well within the
capabilities of a few moments' action by a large Voltaic battery. Quantitatively,
then, both the Leyden jar and the Voltaic battery serve equall ywell as preliminary
images for the fish qua electrical source. But it is important to appreciate that
they are images; Faraday certainly does not expect to find either capacitative or
Voltaic structures anatomically present within the animal, and there is no
question of his taking either of them as a literal explanation. For one thing, neither
image can be easily fitted to the animal's ability to deliver a series of shocks in
rapid succession [1771]. Basically, the problem is that neither image allows for
an "on-off' switch.2 1
Such a failure to articulate the animal's ability to control its action would be
fatal to a hypothesis, if that were Faraday's aim. But Faraday is pursuing an
image, not a hypothesis; and therefore in his subsequent exercises with Gymnotus he will continue to call upon laboratory devices like the Leyden jar as
metaphors.22
Earlier investigators had sought to solve the mystery of auimal electricity by
a more literal appeal to some sort of internal battery in the fish. 23 In 1775 Henry
Cavendish had constructed a model torpedo-fish out of shoe-leather. He
equipped the model with a pair of metal plates which, suitably situated, and
energized by a Leyden battery, served as the "electric organs" of his imitation
Leviathan.24 But as his drawings show (Figure 8), Cavendish strove for a measure
of verisimilitude in shape as well as material that Faraday evidently regarded as
wholly beside the point.25 Now there is no doubt that to be able to interpret the
electric fish as containing a source analogous to a Voltaic cell or Leyden jar would
be of much explanatory va1ue;26 and it might even seem to advance a more
unified view of nature by reducing two apparently different electrical sources to
�FISHER
11
~
c
F
D
G
...
N
,,
E
~~---··
B
FIGURE 8: Cavendish's "torpedo"
oneP But Faraday's conception of the unity of natural forces is more sophisticated than any merely reductive program. His view is relational, rather than
reductive: he will strive to explicate a nature whose unity lies in the interconvertibility of forces, rather than in anything so literal-minded as trying to find a
Voltaic cell, or any other laboratory device, hidden within every electric source.
The problem with images of source as such is that they focus on the agent to the
detriment of the activity; they tend to represent an "active" source in isolation
from a "passive" object. Images capable of integrating the agent and its own
power must be sought through a different kind of experiment.
We may therefore tum to the second class of Faraday's Gymnotus exercises.
The disposition experiments are carried out almost entirely either with the
unaided hands or with the hand-held disk collectors. These are mapping experiments; they employ a rhetoric of residence. In contrast to the identity experiments, the fish's power is not here conveyed to a remote observer; rather the
observers make full ingression to the scene of action and quite literally immerse
themselves in the place of habitation of the power. 28
�12
Tiffi ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
A rhetorical contrast between the identity and the disposition exercises is
thus evident: the identity of the power is established by removing it from its
place; the disposition of the power is studied by ascribing it to its place. The
contrast is not absolute, of course. On the whole, though, the experiments of the
Fifteenth Series exhibit two different aims, two different rhetorical dimensions,
and eventuate in two different kinds of image-the image of electrical source,
which we have just discussed, and the image of system, to which we now turn.29
By "system" I think Faraday means to identify not only an interdependence
of relations, but also an allied' condition of activity: something like Aristotle's
"housebuilder building," 30 which is an agent at work and in an essential relation
of doing with the surroundings. 31 This is an image which, if it does not actually
unify the doer with the deed, at least minimizes their mutual alienation.
Faraday departs in several ways from what had been customary in work with
electric fishes. He consistently treats the animal and its surroundings as essentially related, not isolated aspects of the survey. As one sign of this, not one of
his experiments calls for removal of the fish from the water [1758]. This is in
marked contrast to the traditional torpedo-fish researches, which frequently
emphasized the strength and quality of shocks delivered to a handler by a fish
held in the air?2 Certainly Faraday's refusal to do likewise was in part a reflection
of concern for the welfare of the animal [1754]; but it may also indicate that his
view of the fish-and of "agents" in general-was already one which strove for
unity in the treatment of agent and medium.33 If so, it would follow that a study
of the animal in its accustomed medium would better reveal the nature of its
characteristic action. While this principle is not exactly the same as that of the
animal ethologist, nevertheless we shall find that the fish's habitual behavior will
provide rich guidance to Faraday in the interpretation of its electrical activity.
A survey with the hands gives the most comprehensive picture of the state of
Gymnotus's body at the time of shock. A single hand placed anywhere on the
fish's body feels only a feeble disturbance during a shock, and then only in the
partofthehand that is actually in the water [1774]. Twohandsplacedatthesame
spot, or even laterally opposite each other, give the same weak result [1773].
But two hands placed axially, along the the body of the fish, transmit
considerable shock, often "extending up the arms, and even to the breast of the
experimenter." Within limits, the greater the longitudinal distance between the
hands, the greater the shock [1776]. Maximum shock is received when the fish
is grasped with one hand just behind the head and the other about six inches from
the end of the tail [1760].34
Manual survey of the water reveals a similar continuously electrified condition in the surrounding medium. One hand placed in the water, or two hands
placed together, delivers at most a sensation of tingling-Faraday calls it "the
pricking shock" [1781]-and only in the part immersed. But two hands placed
�FISHER
13
apart transmit strong shocks up the arms if their line of separation is parallel to
the fish, as 10-11 or 14-15 (see again Fignre 5); if perpendicular, however, as
12-13, then only weak sensations in the immersed portions of the hands.
When several colleagues take part together, the shock is felt simultaneously
at all locations, though with diminishing severity at increasing distances from
the center of the fish. Thus at 10-11 the shock is strong, at 14-15 less strong, at
16-17 very feeble, as also at 18-19 [1777-81]. The occnrrence of simultaneous
shocks throughout the water shows, what is probably no surprise to us, that
discharge occnrs throughout all the snrrounding medium. Amazingly, this was
still a live question for Faraday in the Diary! On October 16, 1838 Faraday had
written:
Now endeavd to ascertain whether three or four persons, each fanning a
separate circuit, could be shocked at once and without touching the fish; i.e.•
whether the discharge is in every direction through all the surrounding water
or other conducting matter. (Diary, 5017)
If, as is not the case, shock did occnr in only one part of the medium or along
only one path at a time, we should probably be led to seek in the medium some
process comparable to a spark, for it is characteristic of the spark that it tends to
establish only one path at a time between the same points [1407ff.]. What would
this amount to but invoking an image of Gymnotns as Zeus the Thunderer, who
can throw his fiery bolts to one place, and spare a neighboring place, as he sees
fit? I had myself, if you recall, casually voiced that simile at the beginning of
this talk. But the differentially electrified state of the water, clearly revealed by
the occnrrence of simultaneous shocks, completely overthrows any thunderbolt
image. It is now abundantly clear that Gymnotus does not "throw" a bolt of power
to a particular place, independently of neighboring places. Whatever the fish
does, it must energize the water as a whole.35 My Zeus-simile, therefore, was at
least as rash as Meno's Torpedo-image. But I thought it would make a sufficiently
harmless beginning provided I abandoned it at an appropriate time, which I now
do. Possibly Meno thought the same.
But if Zeus the thunderer is banished from the scene, another, even more
potent image for the fish emerges. Gymnotus is presented as an agent that
occupies space through its peculiar action:
[A]ll the water and all the conducting matter around the fish through which a
discharge circuit can in any way be completed, is filled at the moment with
circulating electric power. [1784]
The fish is here seen as the bearer of an action that fills space. Or, since
Faraday's images generally tend towards the concrete,36 this one too develops
specificity. It will become an image of Gymnotus as Magnet.
�14
TIIE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
III. The Fish as Magnet
Results from the manual survey are rough, fragmentary, and highly dependent
on the ability of individual investigators to correlate their respective impressions
of the animal's shock. Faraday emphasizes that a general pattern becomes
evident only after many repetitions of such observations [1782]. But something
more than repetition is needed to integrate those experimental "soundings" of
the fish's neighborhood into a coherent, readable pattern. Faraday relies heavily
upon the pattern of magnetic lihes offorce surrounding a bar magnet to provide
the schema for such an integration. With the aid of the magnetic pattern-the
one he will in later years name the "sphondyloid" [3271]-Faraday has no
difficulty integrating the coarse survey results into a shape that closely resembles
that distinctive figure. He gives a small sketch in the Diary (Figure 9).37
FIGURE 9: (from Diary)
�15
FISHER
In the Experimental Researches Faraday verbally notes this resemblance to
the magnet [1784] and virtually invites the reader to make a similar diagram for
himself; yet Faraday does not publish any such drawing-neither the sketch from
the Diary nor any other. I think his reluctance to present this most important
image visually in a published paper may arise just because the manual survey is
so coarse [1782]. Any sketch could only be, as the sketch in the Diary is, an
"artist's rendition"-a vehicle for the imagination, perhaps, but not a depiction
offacts. There are in fact no lines visible about the fish; Faraday is appealing to
the magnet, in which tlie lines are visible,38 in order to make visual sense of the
fish. Gymnotus is represented both in thought and in experimental practice by
the metaphorical image of Fish as Magnet. Not that Faraday thinks Gymnotus
exercises the same kind of force as the magnet does, but it imposes a comparable
geometry of action upon its surrounding neighborhood. Faraday takes as an
image for the fish, then, not a picture, but rather the magnet itself.
Though he is a powerful proponent of the imagination, I sense in Faraday a
persistent reluctance to picture its contents. 39 Pictures, it almost seems, are for
him Sacred to Fact; when imaginative constructs are to be conveyed, Faraday
employs his incomparable gift for verbal narrative instead. It is that language
that now takes on the burden of presenting a further imaginative integration of
additional aspects of the fish. The narrative vehicle Faraday chooses here is a
particularly striking one. In one brief but dramatic incident the fish begins to
develop interpretive independence from its new-found image "as Magnet."
Gymnotus had performed a maneuver which, by Faraday's account, is so
transparent and readable, the fish might almost be said to have presented its own
interpretive image.
The Coiling Incident
We have been considering the electric eel as maintaining a fixed, straight,
bodily posture. But as the fish will sometimes bend itself .from side to side,
Faraday describes the effects that such inflections of the body would be expected
to have upon the external distribution of the shock. "[1]he lines of force ... ,"
he says, "vary ... in a manner that can be anticipated theoretically" [1783]. First,
he explains, a handler who grasped both head and tail of the bent fish would feel
a reduced shock, because the shorter water path created by the mutual approach
of head and tail permits a greater portion of the force to pass through the water;
less, therefore, up the arms. But for that very reason, he continues (Figure 5),
... with respect to the parts immersed, or to animals, as fish in the water
between 1 and 7, they would be more powerfully, instead of less powerfully,
shocked. [1783-Faraday's italics]
�TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
16
As we soon discover, a bending, or rather coiling, maneuver by the fish was not
hypothetical but had actually taken place. I hardly know whether the following
incident attracts more interest from an electrical, or from an ethological, point
of view. Here it is; Faraday is the narrator:
This Gymnotus can stun and kill fish which are in very various positions
to its own body; but on one day when I saw it eat, its action seemed to me
peculiar. Alive fish about five inches in length, caught not half aminute before,
was dropped into the tub. The Gymnotus instantly turned round in such
manner as to form a coil inclosing the fish, the latter representing a diameter
across it; a shock passed, and there in an instant was the fish struck motionless,
as if by lightuing, in the midst of the waters, its side floating to the light The
Gymnotus made a tum or two to look for its prey, which having found he
bolted, and then went searching about for more. A second smaller fish was
given him, which being hurt in the conveyance, showed but little signs oflife,
and this he swallowed at once, apparently without shocking it The coiling of
the Gymnotus round its prey had, in this case, every appearance of being
intentional on its part, to increase the force of the shock, and the action is
evidently exceedingly well suited for that purpose, being in full accoodance
with the well-known laws of the discharge of currents in masses of conducting
matter; and though the fish may not always put this artifice in practice, it is
very probable he is aware of its advantage, and may resort to it in cases of.
need. [1785]
For this incident, too, Faraday had made a sketch for himself in the Diary that
does not appear in the published paper. I give it here in two forms. Fignre lOb is
Faraday's original sketch. In Fignre lOc I have filled in the path of concentration
of force, at least as implied by its deadly effect on the prey.40 There is probably
no particular efficacy in delivering the shock through lines of force that run, as
they do here, transversely to the length of the prey; but it is true that, in this
position, the prey is intersected by the rnaximmn nmnber of lines.41
~
©~
(b)
(c)
(pj
(jJ
?"
?" =---
(a)
FIGURE 10: The coiling incident (from Diary). (a) hunting; (b) coiling;
(c) showing implied pattern of the lines of force (see text)
�FISHER
17
An important stylistic feature of Faraday's account of the coiling incident is
his effort to convey what is evidently for him the preeminent readability of the
fish's behavior.42 The theme of concentration of the ambient power is evidenced
by the unusually sudden and intense convulsion delivered to the prey-emphatically conveyed in Faraday's phraseology: "in an instant ... struck motionless,
as if by lightning ... ."Electrical readability in this episode derives also from
the volitional readability of the coiling gesture. Since Gymnotus's shock is
generally for the sake of killing his prey, a gesture that enhances his habitnal
hunting behavior implies also an enhancement of lethal power-hence a concentration of force onto the prey. That the animal must bend its own body in order
to effect an apparent focusing of its external power suggests, if it does not actually
imply, a definite though flexible structure in the external action,43 itself a kind
of body or extension of body; a body, moreover, whose substance is not matter
but force. Once again we have occasion to reject the image of Zeus and his
thunderbolt: Gymnotus's shock is to be viewed not as a separable armament, but
as a functional extension of the body. It is not a weapon wielded, but a limb
employed.
The twin anatomical principles of this new body are contiguity and coherence.
In contrast to the specialized organs, ligaments, and conduits of a physiological
body, in this new Body Electric action is everywhere. It is voluminous and fills
space, yet is not contained either by a membrane or a vessel. It is shaped, but not
by a container-rather by its own relations of equilibrium. It is, in 1838, an
admittedly enthusiastic and somewhat fantastic metaphor; yet by 1852 Faraday
will be speaking essentially the same language-honed, disciplined, and enriched by a series of brilliant magnetic researches-about the lines of magnetic
force, that most profound, pervasive, and fertile of all his images.
The element of animal readability appears also in another fish story that we
find only in the Diary. Faraday does not rehearse that anecdote in so striking a
fashion, but the episode is visually almost as suggestive as the coiling incident:
A live gudgeon was put into the water [with Gymnotus]. Perhaps he was
shocked now and then, but he was not killed and eaten. Indeed he must have
had shocks frequently while we were at work.
At last he took up his position, very frequently, with his nose close to and
opposite the nose of the Gymnotus and remained there. Now this is a place of
no discharge, and probably the fish found that out; but at the sarue time, it is
the place of feeding for the Gymnotus if he had been hungry, and it would
appear that this may be a natural provision to drive his prey towards his head
and mouth. (Diary 5052-53)
Although the coiling episode is by far the more dramatic, I would say that
both vignettes point in the direction of a developing "self-interpretive" animal
character. Purposiveness was paramount in the interpretation of the coiling
�18
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
episode. In the Diary incident, too, an element of voluntarism plays an interpretive role. The small gudgeon appears by its choice of swimming position to
indicate an electrical null point in the region about Gymnotus. This is not new
information, even supposing that Faraday has rightly interpreted the smaller
fish's action; for he has already gathered (through the manual survey) that the
region of the mouth is "a place of no discharge." Nevertheless the smaller fish
provides confirmation of that condition spontaneously, almost "at a glance,"
while the survey pattern had \O be pieced together from individual observers'
reports. Thus the incident spells another advance in representational integration.
IV. The Magnet as Fish
The course of development of Faraday's interpretive images is always a
dialectical one, laced with tension and reversals. In the case of Gymnotos he
began with tentative representations first as Voltaic cell, then as Bar-magnet.
These images were, it seems, necessary first stages in the attempt to visualize
Gymnotus's peculiar activity. Yet they were no sooner invoked than revised, and
fmally surpassed.
The increasing interpretive independence of animal electrical action, gained
largely through the interpretive role of such volitional actions as Gynmotus's
"coiling," comes to a brief but instructive culmination some fourteen years later
in which the fish not only frees itself from the magnet-metaphor but actually
inverts it. In June 1852, Faraday will bring forth his most profound and comprehensive interpretation of magnetic power in the great essay, "On the Physical
Character of the Lines of Magnetic Force.'>14 There he will argue that the lines
of magnetic force are not merely representative symbols but real structures
physically present in all the materials through which they mn, structores present
even in so-called "empty space." But when Faraday expounds the magnet under
this view he uses, besides the Voltaic battery, also the electric fish as one of his
explanatory images, thereby placing the fish prior in explanatory order to the
magnet!:
The magnet, with its surrounding sphondyloid of power, may be considered
as analogous in its condition to a Voltaic battery immersed in water or any
other electrolyte; or to a gynmotus or torpedo, at the moment when these
creatures, at their own will, fill the surrounding fluid with lines of electric
force. [3276]
In 1838 the image was Fish as Magnet; in 1852 the image is Magnet as Fish.
How did the electric fish, which formerly had been interpreted by the magnet,
come to be the interpreter of the magnet?
�FISHER
19
When Faraday introduces this reversal of images in the 1852 essay, his
immediate topic is the external geomelfY of the magnet's power. But beyond that,
Faraday is concerned to convey his sense that the exterior action of the magnet
represents an integrally shaped, and quantitatively defmite, physical structure.
It is in this service that the electric fish is called to the scene. 1iue, Faraday had
revealed the definite quantity of magnetic action during the previous year
through the phenomena of the Moving Wire [3109]; but it was the early studies
of the Voltaic cell, and e;;pecially the Gymnotus mapping exercises of 1838, that
had given the first intimations of a power that fills up its medium, and whose
exterior action bears an essential relation to the interior condition of the agent.
In order to convey his vision of the magnetic lines of force in 1852, Faraday
describes typical methods for making visible the lines of electric force45 about
an immersed voltaic battery [3276]. These procedures are virtual recapitulations
of the 1838 Gymnotus exercises! For example, he describes how the Iiues of
electric force may be probed with the galvanometer; for if its leads are dipped
into the conducting fluid the instrument will show deflection when the line
joining its collector ends is parallel or oblique to the lines of electric force, but
shows no deflection when at right angles to those Iiues. This exercise rehearses
the earlier Gymnotus mapping, both with hands and with the disk collectors
[1775-81]. He describes also an electrochemical direction-indicator for lines of
force, which recalls the role of electro-decomposition in establishing the direction of Gymnotus's discharge46 [1763]. Each of these exercises draws on earlier
imagery from the Gymnotus mapping experiments to articulate the physical
occupation, by means of external action, of the medium surrounding an agent.
Another element in the 1852 reversal of images is Faraday's appreciation of
shape and proportion in magnetic systems. Variations in form of the magnet, it
is clear, correspond to the coiling configurations of Gymnotus. Faraday will
devote five full pages"7 of the 1852 essay to a lovingly detailed exposition of the
changes in external disposition of magnetic power that result when a bar magnet
is bent, stretched, or squeezed out of its original proportions. All the diflerently
shaped "atmospheres" of magnetic lines of force shown here (Figure 11 )48 are
in that essay revealed as derivatives and variants of the standard "sphondyloid"
shape.
Recognition of the generic topology of magnets depends heavily on the study
and interpretation of magnets fabricated in a variety of shapes, and upon the study
of changing conditions in the surrounding medium (such as the approach and
attachment of"keepers" or other susceptible bodies).49 From the mutual relations
thus revealed between the magnet's shape and the external disposition ofits force
arises Faraday's magnificent vision of the essential equality and necessary
connection between the "inner" and "outer" action of a magnet:
�20
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
FIGURE 11: (from ERE) Magnets of various shapes.
�FISHER
21
The physical lines of force, in passing out of the magnet into space, present a
great variety of conditions as to fonn ... [T]he form of the magnet as the
source of the lines has much to do with the result; but I think the surrounding
medium has an essential and evident influence ... [3275]
But the Gymnotus had bent and "distorted" itself in the course of its habitual
movements fourteen years earlier, and in its natural predatory activity it presented itself in multifarious electrical relations to other animals in the surrounding medium. Gymnotu~'s habitual behavior thus had occasioned the direct
display of much the same topology for the animal that artifice and more
ingressive experimentation later make evident for the magnet. The animal's
habitual action was at the same time a heuristic, self-interpretive action. In the
1852 essay Faraday reflects:
When, therefore, a magnet, in place of being a bar, is made into a horseshoe
form, we see at once that the lines of force and the sphondyloids are greatly
distorted or removed from their former regularity; that a line of maximwn
force from pole to pole grows up as the horseshoe form is more completely
given; that the power gathers in, or accumulates about this line, just because
the badly conducting medium, i.e. the space or air between the poles, is
shortened A bent voltaic battery in its surrounding medium, or a gynmotus
curved at the moment of its peculiar action, present exactly the like results.
[3282]
The efficacious relation between shape of external action and shape of the
body proper can be read more surely in the magnet, thanks to Gymnotus's having
already called that vision forth for itself fourteen years before.
In another area too the electric fish achieves a degree of interpretive
self-evidence that will render it, for a time, prior in explanatory order to the
magnet. In his 1838 report Faraday is much impressed by the relation offitness
that he finds between Gymnotus's electrical characteristics and the conductivity
of its freshwater medium [1786-87]. As we saw when considering the identity
experiments, when compared to electrostatic laboratory devices designed for use
in air the quantity of the Gymnotus discharge is relatively high and the intensity
low. Such animal electric apparatus is well suited to electrify fresh water, a
moderately good conducting medium. The organs are useless in air, since they
cannot develop sufficient intensity to throw air into a conductive state. If the
animal is nonetheless induced to discharge in air, as Faraday will have gathered
from Cavendish's researches50 as well as from electrical theory, the electricity
passes either to a restraining handler, or over the animal's own body surface. It
is not clear whether Faraday knew, or suspected, that the Torpedo, whose
saltwater medium is an even better conductor than fresh water, has lower
intensity and higher quantity of shock than Gymnotus.51 But he certainly seems
to have grasped a consistent relation between the medium and the inherent
�22
TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
character of the electric power. I can best express that relation by constructing
the following table:
Plate Machine
Gymnotus
Torpedo
(single tum)
Quantity of discharge
low
high
very high5 2
Intensity of discharge
high
low
very low
Conductivity of medium
poor
(air)
good 53
very good
(saltwater)
(freshwater)
Comparing Plate Machine, Gymnotus, and Torpedo
To Faraday, for whom such fitting relations between creatures and their
habitats signify God's wisdom [1786], a connection between the physiology that
generates animal electricity and the conducting ability of the medium through
which it is discharged cannot be accidental; an image of the electric animal as
agent must then be integral with the image of the animal's exterior powers.
Faraday could not hope to achieve a fully integrated vision of Gymnotos's
internal and external action in 1838,54 but the animal did at least define no less
than such a view as the goal. Thus the criterion of an integrated vision of agent
and act, even though not yet realized, is already available and familiar when, in
1852 and earlier, Faraday finds himself reflecting on the significance of the
closed lines of magnetic force and on other circumstances that incline him to
consider"this outer medium as essential to the magnet" [3277; Faraday's italics],
and that "the space or medium external to the magnet is as important to its
existence as the body of the magnet itself'' [3284].
The 1852 reversal of explanatory order thus stands as a confirmation, albeit
a retrospective one, of some of the intimations of intelligibility and readability
in animal powers that Faraday is responding to in his 1838 Gymnotus report. The
promise held out by animal powers cannot claim finality, for the earlier image
of Gymnotus falls far short of the later vision of the magnet in comprehensiveness and depth. The magnet especially benefits from a view of its interior
that is made possible through the action of the Moving Wire, while no comparable interior view can be secured for the electric fish. Nevertheless Gymnotus
may be credited with presenting a more accessible starting point for the ultimate
vision than the magnet itself could provide. Its "promise" might best be described, therefore, as inviting or even instructional. Gymnotus's contribution to
the elucidation of the magnet does not consist of data, perhaps not even of
concepts. It provides rather a concrete object which both invites and serves as
the practice ground for a kind of thinking that will ultimately be demanded by
the magnet. The Gymnotus in his tub becomes a school for interpretation. Or if
not a school in its own right, Gymnotus surely qualifies through its naturally
heuristic activities as a constituent tutorial within-to use Faraday's own phrase
�23
FISHER
of 185!-5Z-"nature's schoo1."55 The brief image reversal in 1852looks back
over a long period of schooling for the image of the magnet.
V. "The very flrst that I would make"
I said earlier that in 1838 the Electric Eel appeared to Faraday to exhibit the
agent-power relation in a way that held promise for solving the riddle of the
"on-Dff' mechanism, tlie activation and cessation of power. That question is no
less than the problem of will in animals, and the problem of fore;• in agents
generally. And though I do not think Faraday can claim very much progress on
the question, he does have one thing to say about it, a rather strange and
fascinating thing. Whatever it means to exercise a power, Faraday will conclude,
such exercise must represent a conversion offorce.
Faraday was always reluctant to accept mere correlation as the content of any
law of nature; rather, a causal content was to be sought.57 For example, the
relation between the current induced in a moving wire, and the number of lines
of force cut by the wire, was for him not just a law of constant ratio but an instance
of conversion offorces; in 1852 he would characterize that current as "the full
equivalent" of the force that is exerted in the place through which the wire had
moved [3270]. And in 1857 he would criticize the gravitational inverse-square
law, not for inaccuracy of the ratio but for the incoherence, as he thought, of a
law that merely correlates change in force with change in distance--it ought
rather to couple the change in gravitational force with some equivalent and
opposite alteration. The "changing" gravitational action would then be seen as
either a transfori1Ultion of force or a displacement of force from one arena to
another.
These examples are from the 1850s; but even prior to the Gymnotus
researches Faraday had opposed theories in several areas at least partly on the
grounds of a similar incoherence. Since 1834 he had repeatedly objected to the
theory of the so-called "contact force" in the Voltaic cell-and he would in
January 1840 deliver almost the fatal blow to it.58 The contact force theory held
that whenever dissimilar materials came into contact their junction became the
seat of an electromotive force; this in torn gave rise to an electric current, which
would continue so long as the contact was maintained. The problem with contact
theory was that it took the fact of juxtaposition for the cause of the power.59 As
Faraday would later characterize it,
It is assumed by the theory that where two dissimilar metals (or rather bodies)
touch, the dissimilar particles act on each other, and induce opposite states. I
do not deny this ... But the contact theory assumes that these particles, which
have thus by their mutual action acquired opposite electrical states, can
�24
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
discharge these states to one another, and yet remain in the state they were
frrst in, being in every point unchanged by what has previously taken place. 60
One can almost hear Faraday's indignation as he recounts this crucial and
offending credo of the contact theory-that an agent can exercise a power, yet
be itself unaltered by that exercise! In expressing the objection Faraday does not
anticipate a principle of conservation of energy. 61 To be sure, the contact force
theory does violate conservation of energy; and the recognition, both of that fact
and of the conservation principle itself, would eventually put an end to the
contact force as a viable theory. But Faraday's principle here is nota quantitative
but a formal one: an entity that undergoes no change itself is incompetent to have
an action ascribed to it Such an entity may be, as Faraday says, a partial but not
a full cause.62 A truly causal theory disdains mere correlation of entities; instead,
it shows that cause and effect are equivalent; 63 and it is obvious that an absence.
of change cannot be equivalent to a deed.
A model for the kind of theory Faraday does recognize as causally competent-in contrast to deficient theories like that of the "contactforce"-is seen in
his own treatment of the Voltaic cell, which he had advanced in the Eighth Series
(April1834). Here was a comprehensive chemical theory, built on the principle
that each quantity of electric action of the Voltaic cell represents the displacement
and transformation of an equivalent chemical action within the cell [919].
What Faraday's theory dictated for the Voltaic cell will become his paradigm
for all action. To "exercise a power" will come to mean, primarily, to convert or
transform a power.64 And if to exercise a power means the conversion or
transformation of something actual, rather than the actualization of something
potential, then the power so exercised is not specifically the agent's but nature's;
and the agent is only, as it were, the locus of the conversion. 65 Such Aristotelian
language is of course not Faraday's, and at the time of the Gymnotus researches
such a view is as yet by no means a paradigm with him. But the vision does at
least allow him to appreciate that the agent-power relation probably involves a
condition of equivalence; and that in turn shonld help explain why Faraday finds
the volitional activity of animals so promising: the "on-off" cycles of animal
electrical action provide an opportunity for studying conversion that inorganic
forces, which are always "on," do not permit. Admittedly, that opportunity is in
1838 quite an abstract one; but it is based on a very influential principle. In the
realm of nature, at least, we are all inclined to think that conting-to-be from
something is more knowable than always-having-been.66
Approaching volitional electrical action as a phenomenon of conversion at
least points us beyond the "on-off switch" image, which as we saw earlier is just
not conformable to animal physiology. Instead of a switch that "blocks the way,"
like a door or a drawbridge, Faraday will seek a process when he looks for an
on-off device.67 And, as ever with Faraday, he conceives the search as a matter
�FISHER
25
for experiment At the very end of the Gymnotus report he proposes a series of
experiments whose immediate aim will be to study the conversion relations·
between "nervous force" and electric force, but whose overall purpose is to make
a further step towards illuminating the agent-power relation.
The electric organs' anatomy, their susceptibility to fatigue, and especially
the constant direction68 of the current they produce-all, Faraday says,
... induce me to beJieve, that it is not impossible but that, on passing
electricity per force through the organ, a reaction back upon the nervous
system belonging to it might take place, and that a restoration, to a greater or
a smaller degree, of that which the animal expends in the act of exciting a
current, might perhaps be effected. [1790]
Faraday has in mind no less an attempt than to recharge the fish! He readily
admits that such a proposal may seem a very wild idea [1791]. It is wild, to be
sure; but perhaps not wildly wild. As Faraday noted earlier, the electric organs
are not vilal organs like brain and heart; they are rather like fin and foot Their
office is not essential to the very being of the animal. The experiments Faraday
proposes might be delicate and difficult-but in attempting them he would not,
at least, be mucking about with life. That force, it seems, Faraday does regard as
surpassing our experimenlal art He says:
that exertion [ofnervous power] which is conveyed along nerves to the various
organs which they excite into action, is not the direct principle of life; and
therefore I see no natural reason why we shouldnot be allowed in certain cases
to determine as well as to observe its course. [1791; Faraday's italics]
I note that in the Diary Faraday is uncertain whether there may be an opposite
current within the fish, to correspond with the current externally (Diary, 4956).
In the published report, however, he insists that there must be some internal
process, equivalent and opposite ("from the tail to the head") to the external
current [1772].69 Faraday's allusion to an opposite internal process seems to have
fostered a myth which continues to be propagated by commentators since
Maxwell. There is a widespread impression that Faraday's idea is to send a
reverse current through the electric organ and restore the nervous energy of a
fatigued animal in the same way as we recharge our automobile batteries.70 True,
a storage battery is recharged by passing through it a current in the reverse
direction to that which the active battery provides. It is what used to be called a
secondary device, since to be activated at all a cbarging current had originally
to be supplied to it from some primary source, as a well pump supplies a water
tank. Hence the name, "storage" battery; and for us the popular, automotivelyderived metaphors of "recharging one's batteries" and "reftlling one's tank"
convey just about the same image of ftlling up an empty container.71
�26
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
But there were no storage batteries in 1838. Faraday's Voltaic batteries were
primary devices. "Recharging" them meant dumping out the used electrolyte and
replacing it with fresh. Faraday would have been familiar with varieties of a
rudimentary secondary cell, principally Ritter's.72 But that cell had so little
storage capacity it is hard to believe it could have served as a leading metaphor
in the kind of restorative experiment Faraday is contemplating.73 In any case,
Faraday's own words just do not seem to describe a reverse current; or they are
at least ambiguous enough to fllake the question of direction debatable.
In the Gymnotus paper there are three passages touching on the direction of
Faraday's proposed fish-recharging current; there are none in the Diary. I have
already cited the first passage, at [1790]:
... on passing electricity per force through the organ, a reaction back upon
the nervous system belonging to it might take place ....
Must "per force" necessarily mean "backwards?" I see no reason to think so. The
remaining two passages are at [1792-93]:
If a Gymnotus or Torpedo has been fatigued by frequent exertion of the electric
organs, would the sending of currents of similar force to those he emits, ... ,
in the same direction as those he sends forth, restore him his powers and
strength more rapidly than if he were left to his natural repose?
Would sending currents through in the contrary direction exhaust the animal
rapidly?
I do not see how this wording can be taken otherwise than to suggest that Faraday
expects a current in the usual direction through the organ ("in the same direction
as those he sends forth"), not a reverse current, to have a restorative effect on the
animal.
If then, as I think, Faraday clearly proposes aforward current for rejuvenation,
he cannot be viewing either Gymnotus or the restorative process under the image
of a Voltaic battery. Forward current through a Voltaic cell would not only fail
to recharge it but would exhaust the cell even more quickly. But an application
of force in the "forward" direction is exactly how we do restore a degraded
bar-magnet! A weakened magnet can be returned to strength by placing it
"
FIGURE 12: "Charging" a magnet
�FISHER
27
between the poles of a strong magnet in its normal direction-that is, the
direction in which the magnetic lines it sends forth shall consist with the lines of
force imposed by the strong magnet (Figure 12).
As I described earlier, the image of Fish-as-Voltaic-cell was explored in the
identity experiments, while the image of Fish-as-Magnet had emerged tbrough
the disposition experiments on Gymnotus. Now Faraday seems to be following
the magnet-image, abandoning the metaphorical Voltaic cell, as he contemplates
the proposed restorative experiments. Yet if so, what reason is there to favor the
one over the other? Externally, after all, they are identical; both the magnet and
the Voltaic cell imply the same geometry of lines of force in the surrounding
medium. And if, as we admitted, it is difficult to conceive how the Voltaic cell
could be "turned on and off," there is no less of the same difficulty with the
magnet.
But as sources ofpower the two images show a radical difference- The Voltaic
cell must eventually become exhausted and fail. Even a rechargeable secondary
cell acts by gradually consuming a fixed quantity of chemical action. Is that not
the lesson of Faraday's celebrated law of electro-chemical proportion?74 The
chemical battery is 1/Wrtal. A magnet, by contrast, does not languish in any
comparable sense. Magnets can be damaged, destroyed-as Aristotle would say,
tbrough bia, violence. But how different this is from the Voltaic cell, whose
activity and 11Wrtality are realized together! In the magnet we find no reservoir
to be exhausted, no life's course to be run.75
Might Faraday have seen in the magnet a disposition of power more nearly
approaching to an image of life? Might the proposed direction-protocol in the
restoration experiments reflect a conviction, or even a suspicion, that living.
power cannot be imaged according to a logic of finitude and rationing? Still, if
Faraday ever did entertain such leanings, there are ample indications that he also
resisted them, especially as a younger man.'6 Nor was the magnet's mode of
exerting its power a problem Faraday would ever sufficiently clarify to his own
satisfaction.77 The whole picture of Faraday's view of living pliwers remains far
from clear; so I must be content to offer the suggestion as my own "wild idea"
in homage to Faraday's earlier one [1791). Yet there is another indication that
disposes me to take it seriously. Faraday's closing words in the Fifteenth Series
characterize his proposed restorative experiments this way:
Such are some of the experiments which the confonnation and relation of the
electric organs of these fishes suggest, as being rational in their performance.
and promising in anticipatioiL Others may not think of them as I do; but I can
only say for myself, that were the means in my power, they are the very first
that I would make. [1795)
The very first experiments that he would make-this from one of the most
celebrated experimentalists of the day! That is extraordinarily urgent language,
�TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
28
it seems to me. The urgency may, for all I know, arise for Faraday from strictly
mundane considerations and may not reflect a particularly intense interest in
living powers at all. Nevertheless, a topic more deserving of Faraday's pressing
attention than mortality in nature. I cannot imagine.
***
APPENDIX: QUANTITY OF GYMNOTUS'S DISCHARGE
The Leyden battery to which Faraday compares the fish's discharge comprises 15 jars, 3500 square inches of glass, coated on both sides, "charged to the
highest degree" [1700, 291]. Forty turns of Faraday's large plate electrical
machine will "fufly charge" 8 of the jars [363]. Therefore it should take about
75 turns to charge the 15 jars fully.
As indicated by a ballistic galvanometer deflection of 5.5 divisions (22\ a
voltaic arrangement of Zn-Pt wires held in acid for 8 beats of his watch (a little
over 3 seconds) produces the same quantity of electricity as 30 turns of the
electrical machine [363, 364, 370].
But he finds it would take some 800,000 times this quantity to decompose 1
grain of water [861]. Since, in modern units, 96,500 coulombs will decompose
9 grams of water, therefore 695 coulombs will decompose .0648 gram (= 1 grain)
of water. So 30 turns of the plate machine produce 695/800,000 or .00086
coulomb. Hence the 75 turns that fully charge Faraday's Leyden battery represent
about .00218 coulomb.
WORKS CITED
Agassi,Joseph(197!):FaradayasaNaturalPhilosopher, Chicago and London.
Bence Jones, H. (1870): The Life and Letters of Faraday, 2 vols., London and
Philadelphia. Cited as L&L.
Cantor, Geoffrey N. (1985): "Reading theBookofNatore," in Gooding and James
(1985), 69-81.
Cavendish, Han. Henry (1776): "An Account of some Attempts to Imitate the
Effects of the Torpedo by Electricity," Phil. Trans., 66 (1776), 196-225, and
Maxwell (1879), 194-215. Reference is made to the Maxwell edition.
Davy, Sir Humphrey (1828): "An account of some experiments on the Torpedo,"
Phil. Trans., (1829), 15-18.
Davy, John (1832): "An Account of some Experiments and Observations on the
Torpedo," Phil. Trans., (1832), pp.259-78.
_ _ (1834): "Observations on the Torpedo, with an account of some additional
Experiments on its Electricity," Phil. Trans., (1834), pp. 531-50.
�FISHER
Faraday, Michael (1839-55): Experimental Researches in Electricity, 3 vols.,
London. Cited as ERE followed by paragraph number (in square brackets) or
volume and page number.
(1852a): "On the Physical Character of the Lines of Magnetic Force,"
Phil. Mag., June, 1852, and ERE ill, 407-37.
- - : - - (1852b): "On the Physical Lines of Magnetic Force," Proc. Roy. Inst.,
June 11, 1852 and ERE III, 438-43.
--~ (1854): "On Mental Education," lecture given at the Royal Institution
on 6 May 1854; in Lectures on Education, Parker and Son, 1855 and ERCP,
463-91. Reference is made to the ERCPreprint.
---=-=(1857): "On the Conservation of Force," Proc. Roy.lnst., February 27,
1857, 352 and ERCP, 443-63. Reference is made to the ERCP reprint.
--:;-~ (1858): "On Wheatstone's Electric Telegraph's relation to Science
(being an argument in favour of the full recogrtition of Science as a branch of
Education)," Proceedings of the Royal Institution, 2 (1854-58): 555.
--::;-,---; (1859): Experimental Researches in Chemistry and Physics, London.
Cited as ERCP followed by page number.
--:;-__.,.(1932-36): Faraday's Diary, being the various philosophical notes... ,
7 volumes and index, London. Cited as Diary followed by paragraph number.
Fisher, Howard(1979): "The Great Electrical Philosopher," The College, 31 (July
1979), 1-16.
Gill, T. H. (1864): "Second Contribution to the Selachology of California,"
Proceedings. Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, 1864 (May),
147-51.
Gooding, David (1980): ''Metaphysics vs. Measurement: the Conversion arid
Conservation of Force in Faraday's Physics," Annals of Science, 37 (1980),
1-29.
--=-(1982): "Empiricism in Practice: Teleology, Economy, and Observation
in Faraday's Physics," Isis, 73 (1982), 266,46-67.
-::---::-_(1985): "In Nature's School," in Gooding and James (1985), 105-35.
Gooding, David and James, Frank A.J.L., eds., (1985): Faraday Rediscovered,
Macmillan, 1985 and American Institute of Physics, 1989.
Gray, Sir James (1968): Animal Locomotion, Norton.
Grundfest, Harry (1960): "Electric Fishes," Scientific American 203 (October
1960), 115-24.
Grzimek, B., ed. (1974): Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia, New York, Van
Nostrand.
Heilbron, J. L. (1982): Elements of Early Modem Physics, Berkeley.
Levere, T. H. (1971): Affinity and Matter: Elements of Chemical Philosophy
!800-1865, Oxford.
Maxwell, James Clerk, ed. (1879): The Electrical Researches of the Honourable
Henry Cavendish, Cambridge, 1879 and London, 1967.
Simpson, Thomas K. (1970): ''Faraday's Thought on Electromagnetism," The
College, 22 (July 1970), 6-16.
Williams, L. Pearce (1965): Michael Faraday, A Biography, London.
--=-=-
29
�30
TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Notes:
1. Meno 80a.
2. Meno SOc. The play on he narke and narkan corresponds to "torpedo" and
"torpid," which are similarly related. Compare Faraday's literal use of the
verb "astonish" in connection with the electric eel's shock in ERE [1788]:
"he [the electric eel] has quickly shown his power and his willingness to
astonish the experimenter."
3. Self-susceptibility is a mark of natural activity in Aristotle's comparable
image for nature in Physib II.8 (199b30): "a doctor doctoring himself."
4. Gymnotus, from gymno- + notos: "naked back"-it has no dorsal or ventral
fins. The term "electric eel" is a misnomer, as the animal is not, taxonomically, an eel (Anguilla). What is more, the animal formerly called Gymnotus
has since been renamed Electrophorus in accordance with a proposal by
T. H. Gill (1864). Although G. electricus was still being promulgated in the
1904 edition of The Cambridge Natural History, vol. 7 (copyright 1895),
the term Gymnotus no longer refers to Faraday's animal, but refers to a
weakly-electric member of the gymnotoidae (Grzimek 1974). I will follow
Faraday's taxonomy. (My thanks to Dr. Stanley H. Weitzman of the
Smithsonian Institution for the reference to Gill.)
5. Phil. Trans., November 1838; ERE, Fifteenth Series. Here, as elsewhere,
Faraday uses the word "force" in a sense much broader than the strictly
mechanical one. In an 1858 addendum to his "On the Conservation of
Force," he will explain: "What I mean by the word 'force,' is the cause of
a physical action; the source or sources of all possible changes amongst the
particles or materials of the universe" (ERCP, p. 460; Faraday's italics). I
shall follow that same usage in this talk.
6. All references in square brackets are to paragraph numbers in Faraday
(1839-55), cited as ERE.
7. ERE, Third Series, January, 1833. But Faraday's connection with animal
electricity in this project was limited to reviewing the researches of others.
The Diary also records exercises with frogs and fish in 1831 and 1832; but
in these the animal is the detector, not the source, of electric action.
8. Davy (1828). An account is given in Williams (1965), p. 37.
9. A comparison with Don Quixote is not idle. Not only do the two books make
comparable demands on the reader, but Faraday and the Quixote character
can be compared in interesting ways. If one views Don Quixote as having
a quest-say, to right the world's wrongs-Faraday also has an aim: to bring
to light the powers of nature (Simpson 1970). But I think it would be truer
to say that Quixote has chosen a life rather than a quest; and Faraday, too,
I think of as a man who has chosen a certain life's activity because it is a
worthy life, and not primarily for the sake of solving a certain problem or
achieving a set goal.
10. In a Diary note of December 19, 1833, Faraday notes that the Torpedo is
insensitive to its own electricity, though susceptible to current from a Voltaic
�FISHER
11.
12.
13.
14.
31
battery. But he thinks he could devise an arrangement by which the
Torpedo's shock would be directed back to itself! (Diary, 1200).
The fish is 40 inches long, the tub is 46 inches in diameter and is filled with
water to a depth of 3.5 inches-the minimum depth that will permit the
Gymnotus to keep itself entirely submerged [1755, 1773].
For a character who can take delight only in things exotic, consider the vapid
triumphalism of Hamlet as he exults in the things undreamt of in Horatio's
philosophy. Man delights not him, nor woman neither; and the natural world
is but a depressing, unweeded garden. Yet how high-spirited and full of
banter he is in the presence of the Ghost! (l.v, II.ii, I.ii)
Compare Faraday (1858): "The beauty of electricity, or of any other force,
is not that the power is mysterious and unexpected, ... but that it is under
law, and that the taught intellect can even now govern it largely. The human
mind is placed above, not beneath it ..." Cited in Williams (1965), p. 341.
Seeing is something that has to be learned. Compare Faraday (1854): "the
mind has to be instructed with regard to the senses and their intimations
through every step of life" (p. 466); and: "we frequently have to ask what
is the fact?-often fail in distinguishing it,-often fail in the very statement
of it,-and mostly overpass or come short of its true recognition" (p. 469).
15. Faraday's emphasis on the visual as the paradigm for understanding is well
known. But an unusually explicit identification of experiment as corrective
to vision is revealed in his prescription that "all cases [of the subject under
investigation] should pass in review, and be touched, if needful, by the
lthuriel spear of experiment." Faraday (1854). It is in Milton's Paradise
Lost (IV.810-19) that the disguised Satan is revealed in his true shape by a
touch of the angel Ithuriel's spear.
16. "Tegument" = integument: covering, sheath, hide, husk. Even Dr. John
Davy, who emphasized histological dissimilarities between electric organs
and muscular organs, thought it likely that the electric organs were functionally integrated with contiguous muscle sheathes, generating electricity
when compressed by the latter. Davy (1832), esp. pp. 269 and 276.
17. We seldom think to take this perspective, though it expresses the soundest
physics. Gray (1968) does so explicitly in his engaging statement of
Newton's Laws of Motion in biological terms. For example, the First Law:
"If an animal is to move its body by its own unaided efforts, it must elicit
a force from its external environment ..."
18. For example, the ingenious method used to obtain the spark [1766]-a
forerunner of the automotive "viQrator" spark coil. (Subsequently Faraday
obtained the spark directly.)
19. Faraday's need to make siroultaneous multiple observations dictated his
recruitment of additional participants. The Diary's lists of colleagues present on various days include such names as Cowper, Daniell, Gassiot,
Wheatstone, and Young.
20. It is the charge delivered by 75 turns of Faraday's large plate electric
machine, or about 2 millicoulombs (see Appendix). Less than half this
amount-that is, the charge of only 30 turns-is the quantity Faraday refers
to in the Seventh Series as "sufficient if passed at once through the head of
�32
TIIE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
a rat or cat to have killed it" [860]; and again, more "than any man would
willingly allow to pass through his body at once" [873].
21. In the Diary (4968) Faraday emphasizes the "important fact" presented by
this series pattern. The Leyden jar image has an additional difficulty, for
the discharge time of a Leyden jar into a good conductor is extremely short;
having discharged once it could not reasonably be expected to discharge
again without some restorative process. Whatever that process might be, it
is utterly unexplained by !he metaphor of the Leyden jar itself. The Voltaic
battery is capable of delivering great quantities of charge over long periods,
but for it, too, there is sfill no obvious "on-off switch." Fifty years later
Maxwell, who delighted in taking such metaphors literally (never forgetting, however, that they were metaphors), would suggest "a Voltaic battery,
the metals of which are lifted out of the cells containing the electrolyte, but
are ready to be dipped into !hem." Maxwell (1879), p. 436. Note the element
of bodily motion ("ready to be dipped") in Maxwell's image.
22. Compare Agassi (1971), p. 307: "There is little doubt ..• !hat in some sense
Faraday used laboratory tools such as condensers and magnets as symbols
in his thinking.''
23. In a letter to Benjamin Franklin, also communicated to !he Royal Society
on July 1, 1773, John Walsh had apostrophized !he Torpedo as an animate
Leyden jar ("animate phial"). Another comparison, this one non-electrical,
was to a rack of musketry! Quoted in Maxwell (1879), p. xxxv.
24. Cavendish (1776). To call Cavendish's procedure "literal" is not to deprecate it. For him such literal mimicry had the wholly appropriate purpose of
advancing as a hypothesis that the Torpedo's power was electrical-an idea
then widely viewed as impossible. See Heilbron (1982), p. 233 and Maxwell
(1879), p. xxxvii. Maxwell also implies !hat the fastidious style of lhese
demonstrations reflected more the limitations of some among the audience
!han !he quality of Cavendish's own lhought.
25. In order for Cavendish to argue from same effect (quality and magnitude of
shock) to same cause (electricity), he had to insure that all other factors,
including the form and material of the replicated body, were as invariant as
possible. But Faraday, having already established !he identity of animal
electricity and Voltaic electricity, could regard most of Cavendish's imitative details as inessential.
26. Faraday himself had been quick to notice indications of a Voltaic analogy
in 1833; in the Third Series he had suggested !hat !he repeated discharges
of Torpedo ~~resemble" those of a Voltaic arrangement rather than a Leyden
apparatus. But this was no attempt to decide between competing hypotheses;
he insisted that "in reality, there is no philosophical difference" between the
two cases [359].
27. Note that this would be a "reduction" not of electricities-animal and
Voltaic electricity had already been shown to be identical in 1833-but
rather of the animal and Voltaic sources.
28. David Gooding (1985), pp. 122-23, points out !hat "Faraday's method of
active exploration made variations of a property with position all important
... Like an explorer of geographical territory, Faraday occupied !he very
�FISHER
33
space filled by the forces he was investigating." Gooding cites the famous
Cage of 1836 as the culminating instance of Faraday's occupying that space
"with his person as well as his instruments!' The Gymnotus survey is a
somewhat less spectacular, but equally clear, instance.
29. Although the term "system" may now strike us as a bit anachronistic,
Faraday seemed to like it and would eventually give it star billing in the
interpretation of the magnet, as in the opening sentence of Faraday (1852b):
"That beautiful system of power ... "
30. Physics Il.3, Metaphysics IX.3.
31. Cf. Aristotle: "Cau~es which are actually at work and particular exist and
cease to exist simultaneously with their effect, e.g . ... that housebuilding
man with that being-built house" (Physics 195b18, tr. Hardie and Gaye).
32. See, for example, Johu Walsh to Benjamin Franklin, July 1, 1773, excerpted
in Maxwell (1879), p. xxxv; Cavendish (1776); Johu Davy (1832), p. 262
and (1834), pp. 545-46.
33. Compare Gooding (1980), p. 9, who holds that by 1836 Faraday's assumption of an essential relation between force and a reacting environment had
attained "the status of a principle." Admittedly, another factor might also
have helped to shape Faraday's experimental policy with Gymnotus: while
the Torpedo produces only about 35 volts, a large Gymnotus develops up to
650 volts at 1 ampere. To an animal handler out of water, such capability
would present questions of personal safety!
34. Cf. Diary 4939.
35. A trace of the Diary's doubt on this point perhaps survives in ERE where
Faraday considers the possibility that the animal might "direct" its power
by activating its electric organs separately [1782]. But such selective activation of organs, like the "coiling" behavior to be discussed below, could
at most only introduce a change in the pattern of the whole, not an electrification of one region independently of neighboring regions.
36. Gooding (1985), p. 133, n. 4.
37. Diary 5041 (October 22, 1838).
38. The magnet's lines are "visible" eithe~ through the use of iron filings [114n.]
or by tracing the course of a small magnetic needle. They are not, of course,
visible in the sense of being "luminous" (see Faraday's footnote to the title
of the Nineteenth Series), nor as in the Kerr effect, which Faraday had
repeatedly and unsuccessfully sought to achieve.
39. The curved lines of force in electrostatic induction are not depicted (see
Plate VII in the Eleventh Series), because they can only be inferred-though
the inference is certain. For a similar reason Faraday will not draw lines of
;
force within the body of a magnet, even though the Moving Wire detects
both their existence and their quantity there (see the figures to [3093-3118]
in the Twenty-eighth Series). In connection with one topic only, that of
magnetic conduction, does Faraday relax this self-restraint. The figures to
[2807-21, 2831, 2875] explicitly depict the expanded or compressed course
of lines within dia- and paramagnetic bodies. Perhaps Faraday means to
offer some justification for taking this liberty when he cites the motions of
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
34
the bodies themselves as "proof' of the concentration or dispersal of the
lines [2844].
40. The visualization also relies on Faraday's having identified the neck and the
region six inches from the tail as the places of concentration of force at the
body (seep. 12, above). While the superficial appearance of the body is a
closed ring, from the point of view of its action the fish's shape is none other
than that of a horseshoe-magnet!
41. Maxwell notes a report which would suggest that, if anything, the transverse
position is least deadly to the victim: "Du Bois Reymond . .. found that
Malapterurus was very ~lightly affected by induction currents passing
through the water of his tub, though they were strong enough to stun and
even kill other fishes. When the induction currents were made very strong,
the fish swam about till he had placed his body transverse to the lines of
discharge, but did not appear to be much annoyed by them., Maxwell
(1879), p. 437.
42. We may take note of some other evocative elements in Faraday's language.
The fish is highly characterized, mainly through Faraday's vocabulary of
gestures: "instantly turned round . .. ," "made a turn or two to look for its
prey ... ," "went searching about for more." There is no stalking, no catand-mouse game. Gymnotus is efficient, insouciant. There is a strong
Biblical flavor to the language at several points, particularly the phrase, "in
the midst of the waters. "The pace of narrative halts suddenly to contemplate
the struck fish, "its side floating to the light"-a respite which Gymnotus
does not participate in!
43. Earlier in the same year (1838), Faraday had discussed a comparable
instance of constancy in structure coupled with variability ofform (Gooding
1985) in the disposition of the "striations" that made up the electrical hrush
[1449].
44. Phil. Mag., June 1852; ERE ITI, pp. 407-37 [3243-99]; or Faraday (1852a).
45. We would say "current flow"; but Faraday employs a terminology that does
not carry the, to him, dubious electric-fluid connotations of "flow."
46. But the 1852 decomposition method is far more elegant, being manifest on
a small plate or ball that is introduced into the medium itself; It is thus a
true "disposition" exercise, in the sense of the Gymnotus experiments. Note:
Faraday does not give his usual paragraph citation When discussing these
exercises; are they recorded in the Diary?
47. [3282-90]; from the middle of ERE III, p. 428 to the middle of p. 433!
48. ERE, Vol. ITI, Plate III.
49. More fundamentally, of course, it depends on the quantitative measurements
made possible by the Moving Wire; see Fisher (1979).
50. Cavendish (1776), p. 205.
51. A suspicion at least as to intensity could have been suggested by his having
obtained the spark, though with great difficulty, from the Gymnotus's
discharge; whereas there were no confirmed reports of spark from the
Torpedo; cf. J. Davy (1832), pp. 261-62 and (1834), pp. 54546.
52. If, indeed, Faraday suspected Torpedo's ranking with respect to quantity.
�FISHER
35
53. Though today we seldom think of fresh water as a "good,. conductor, that
was Faraday's epithet [1786].
54. But see ahead, on the proposed "restorative" experiments.
55. Gooding (1985) gives the origin of Faraday's phrase as well as a beautiful
analysis that respectfully but effectively penetrates that naive metaphor.
Nevertheless, I think there is much to be gained from applying the image,
in its own terms, to Faraday's work; the present study attempts to carry out
that approach.
56. See above, note 5.
57. Cantor (1985), p. 74, n. 27; p. 77.
58. Rejection of the "contact force," at least as a sufficient theory of the Voltaic
cell, is expressed in ERE Seventh Series [872] and throughout the Eighth
Series. His 1840 criticism in ERE Sixteenth and Seventeenth Series was
"almost" fatal, since probably no argument against the contact force hypothesis could be fatal without a theorem of conservation of energy.
59. As though we were to identify the electric lamp's switch as the cause of the
light-ignoring the electromotive source of power!
60. ERE Seventeenth Series, January 1840 [2066-67]. Faraday's italics.
61. Faraday (1857). Williams's discussion of this unconventional paper makes
it clear that Faraday's principle is not that of conservation of energy, and is
not intended to be; Williams (1965), p. 457.
62. That is, roughly, it may be a necessary but not a sufficient condition. Faraday
(1857), ERCP p. 445.
63. Faraday (1857), ERCP pp. 445, 447, and related passages on pp. 449-50,
452.
64. See the opening paragraphs of Faraday (1857).
65. In 1852 Faraday will bring the magnet under this view; the iron material
will become not the seat of a specifically magnetic force but only, as we
will discuss later, "the habitation of lines of force" [3295]. See note 77,
below.
66. As an indication of how thoroughly Faraday shared that inclination, note
that as late as 1857 he will even invoke a fictive coming-to-be of the
gravitational force, because such a fiction makes Newtonian gravity theory
thinkable-and its causal inadequacies evident! Faraday (1857); ERCP,
p. 448. His argument is a reductio: If the gravitating power of a body
changes with distance, then it also changes with the creation or annihilation
of another body; nor can the latter "change" be distinguished from the
former. But the latter change is creation de novo, which (excepting divine
creation) is absurd. The objection, as Faraday continually stresses, is not to
the descriptive accuracy of the gravitational inverse-square law, but to its
pitiful lack of causal content.
67. Maxwell will one day show that even a "switch" is to be understood as a
process; his displacement current permits equation of the decaying current
as the switch opens to the electric field buildup across its terminals. Yet
Faraday has already in the Twelfth Series broached a related conception
(January, 1838-a few months prior to the Gymnotus report): "The water is
�36
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
... a bad conductor and a bad insulator; but what it does insulate is by virtue
of inductive action ... " [1345; my italics].
68. In the Diary by far the single most-repeated exercise on Gymnotus is that
of establishing the direction of its current, which is externally from (posi-
tive) head to (negative) tail (Diary 4949-61, 4969-76, 5013-16, 5031,
5035-36).
69. Interestingly, he appears to allow an "equivalent" process that is not necessarily simultaneous with the discharge. But if the equivalent process is not
simultaneous, some medi~ting state of tension would have to intervene-a
"zoOtonic state"?
·
70. See, for example, Maxwell (1879), p. 436; Williams (1965), p. 364. It seems
that these expositors have been influenced by an image of battery recharging, and have supposed Faraday to have been thinking in the same image.
71. Note that these metaphors also pertain to the emotions, or"nervous energy."
72. See ERE First Series [77], in which Faraday refers to articles by Mariani
and others in Annates de Chimie, XXXVffi. Faraday's own investigation
into the peculiar behavior of "interposed plates" in electrochemical troughs
disclosed them to be a kind of secondary cell. See ERE Sixth Series [660]
and Eighth Series [1003-33], and especially [1035, 1040-41].
73. Neither is the Leyden jar a suitable image, since in being charged it literally
stores electricity, which is not to be supposed for a fish. The "storage cell"
converts electricity to chemica/force during recharge, which is at least more
conformable to an animal image.
74. ERE Seventh Series.
75. Pearce Williams thinks this is a problem for Faraday's magnetic theory:
Faraday would eventually abandon a proffered analogy between magnet and
Voltaic pile for lack of any identifiable magnetic energy source to corre-
spond to the chemical power expended in a Voltaic cell; Williams (1965),
pp. 452-53. But as touching the proposed experiments on Gymnotus's
nervous force I can see the contrast between Voltaic cell and magnet as a
source of as much inspiration as frustration.
76. In an early lecture (to the City Philosophical Society?), the young Faraday
had characterized life as merely a prolonged chemical reaction:. However,
contrast" the far more sympathetic passage in On Some Points of Magnetic
Philosophy (1854): "(A]ll natural forces tend to produce a state of rest,
except in cases where vital or organic powers are concerned; ... as in life
the actions are for ever progressive, and have respect to a future rather than
a present state ... so all inorganic exertions of force tend to bring about a
stable and permanent condition, having as the result a state of rest, i.e., a
static condition of the powers" [3318].
77. The relation between an agent and its power assumes, for the magnet, the
form of this question: What is the relation between the magnet and its own
lines of force? But the nature of that connection will remain a continuing
mystery to Faraday. He does coin a remarkable metaphor for it; in 1852 he
describes magnets as "the habitations of bundles of lines of force" [3295],
but this colorful language does not take us very far. It particularly fails to
distinguish the relation that lines of force bear to their "habitation" from the
�FISHER
37
relation they may have with any chance conductor. Why is it that, when the
"habitation" moves, its lines of force move with it, following the iron or
other material to its new location; but when materials, not magnetized in
themselves, are waved about in the vicinity of a magnet, the lines of force
suffer only temporary deflections while the invading material passes among
them and spring back to their former positions when it departs? In fact
Faraday introduces the "habitation" metaphor not intending to elucidate the
agent-power relation, but simply to bring home that we can, from the mutual
motions of magnet~, frequently infer the motions of their corresponding
lines. He had himself drawn such inferences in his interpretation of attraction and repulsion between para- and diamagnetic materials in a common
magnetic field [2844]; see note 39, above.
�38
TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�I
The Education of Telemachos
Amy Apfel Kass
What is it that moves u~ in a great book? According to Samuel Butler
it is not the outward and visible signs of what we read, see, or hear, in any
work, that bring us to its feet in prostration of gratitude and affection; what
really stirs us is the communion with the still living mind of the man or woman
to whom we owe it, and the conviction that that mind is as we would have our
own to be. All else is mere clothes and grammar. 1
Butler was reflecting on Homer's Odyssey and for this book his remarks seem
especially apt. True, the Odyssey invites us to participate in a world alien to our
sensibilities, a world in which heroic he-men perform seemingly impossible
feats, a world populated by strange gods and goddesses, demons and enchantresses, who come and go as they please, victimizing or protecting people
for no apparent reason. But all this is ouly "clothes and grammar." The Odyssey
is essentially a story about Odysseus, the much-turned, much-traveled, man of
many ways, and about his effort to achieve home. Thus, it speaks to pressing and
persistent human concerns about the meaning of home and what it takes to make
a home a home. Through Odysseus's many struggles and his own bittersweet
homecoming, Homer shines his light on what each of us must necessarily and
continually undergo as we try to gain a home for ourselves in an inhospitable
world. Indeed, upon reading and re-reading Homer, one comes to feel like the
rebellious child who in his infmite wisdom and confidence strikes out on his own
only to discover just how smart his parents have become.
This brings me to the aspect of Homer's broad subject that I want to take up
with you this evening. The question is this: What does it take for children to
accept their parents? More specifically, How does Homer show us what it took
for Telemachos to accept Odysseus? While these questions may seem, at first
glance, peripheral to Homer's main concern in the Odyssey, I offer this preliminary reflection as a defense: If Telemachos-Odysseus's only son and only
heir-{!oes not fully and knowingly accept his father, could we say that
Amy Kass is Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. This
lecture was delivered at St. John's College, Annapolis, in November, 1991, on Parents'
Weekend.
�40
TIIE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Odysseus's homecoming is complete? My thesis can he simply put: Facing
Telemachos and gaining his acceptance is Odysseus's most decisive and important battle; how this battle is won is the story-behind-the-story of the homecoming
of Odysseus. To support this thesis, we shall take a close look at selected
thoughts, deeds, and utterances in the Odyssey, first, at its start-in Ogygia, on
Olympus, and in Ithaka-then, later, during the various stages ofThlemachos's
own odyssey, Telemachos's education. My argument will be long, for which I
apologize in advance, but in order to understand and appreciate the education of
Telemachos and his ultimate reconciliation with his father, one must first look
at the beginning to establish Telemachos's initial disposition and attitude.
I. Obstacles to Homecoming: Setting tbe Plan
The wish so close to the heart of every hero in the Iliad-to be forever ageless
and immortal-is the opportunity offered to Odysseus as the Odyssey hegins.
The narrative proper opens as follows:
Then all the others, as many as fled sheer deslruction,
were at home now, having escaped the sea and the fighting.
This one alone, longing for his wife and his homecoming,
was detained by the queenly nymph Ka!ypso, bright among goddesses,
... desiring that he should be her husband. (L 11-15)
[E]ver with soft and flattering words she works to
chann him to forget Ithaka; and yet Odysseus,
straining to get sight of the very smoke uprising
from his own country, longs to die... (!.56-59)2
What an odd situation. A generation has passed since Odysseus last touched
Ithaka, ten years since the sack of Troy, seven years since he arrived on Kalypso's
island. "[A]ll the others, as many as fled sheer destruction," were home at last,
but, as we know, there weren't very many who came safely back. Odysseus, too,
knows this well-he alone of all his company had survived. Odysseus also knows
that the dangers he faced from the Cyclopes, from the Laistrygonians, and from
Scylla and Charybdis, to recall but a few, were mere appetizers to the feast of
troubles he could expect from the suitors back home in Ithaka. Further, he knows
that even were he to slaughter the suitors, his triumph would be fleeting, for
afterwards another long journey awaits him. Teiresias had spared him no details
when they spoke together in Hades.
Few of us, looking out over such a past or into such a future, would long to
leave the luxuriant island of Kalypso, that perfectly ordered paradise of beauty
and comfort. Few of us would long for rocky lthaka, or for growing sons, or for
aging wives, or for ailing fathers, or for crushed kingdoms, if an ageless and
�KASS
41
beautiful goddess beckoned. Few of us would give up immortality for a few more
months of worldly power. Few of us would ever long to die. Not so Odysseus.
Why not? What does he want? What is the vision that animates him?
A legend, though not recounted in either the Odyssey or the Iliad, proves
helpful:
When. .. the Greeks began to organize themselves for their Trojan expedition,
they drafted all the chieftains to join them with their men, ships, and supplies.
But Odysseus, ruler of Ithaka, in the prime of young adulthood, with a young
wife and a baby son, was anything but enthusiastic about going to war. When
the delegates of the Greek states arrived to assess the situation and to compel
Odysseus's compliance, he malingered, faking insanity. The emissaries-
Agamemnon, Menelaos, and Palamedes-fonnd him ploughing with an ox
and an ass yoked together, and flinging salt over his shoulders into the furrows;
on his head was a silly, conically shaped hat, as usually worn by Orientals. He
pretended not to know his visitors and gave every sign that he had taken leave
of his senses. ButPalamedes suspected him of trickery. He seized Telemachus,
Odysseus's infant son, and flung him in front of Odysseus's advancing plough.
Odysseus inunediately made a semi-circle with his plough to avoid injuring
his son-a move that demonstrated his mental health and made him confess
that he had only feigned madness in order to escape going to Troy. 3
Odysseus, here depicted as the first draft evader, seems to have cared deeply for
his son. He went off to war, but not willingly. At Troy, as we see in the Iliad, he
was indispensable to the Achaians and, as we hear in the Odyssey, "he sacked
Troy's sacred citadel." He was counted among the heroes, but he shared neither
their virtne nor their vision. Ever mindful of where he was, and of who he was,
Odysseus never lost his head. And he never forgot his home, not even on the
battlefield. To his warrior colleagues, he was known as the son of the hero
Laertes, but to himself, he was always the "father ofTelemachos," the young son
whose name can mean "far away from battle," whom he had left behind. The
vision that animated him long ago, and seems still to animate him as he sits on
Kalypso 's island, was less the solo fight in war that would win for himself and
his father great glory and immortality, and more the shoulder-to-shoulder fight,
the Laertes-Odysseus-Telemachos figh~ we witness at the very end of the
Odyssey, the fight which secures his home, now and for the future, against outside
disturbers.
Odysseus, like the heroes, is ever mindful of mortality, but unlike them, is
willing to affirm it. Odysseus's legendary plough is a fitting symbol of his
awareness and acceptance of the "unrolling destiny" of human beings which sees
"the next generation as an extension of one's self."4 It is this awareness that
makes possible, but also problematic, his homecoming. Even though the gods
are willing to work out his homecoming, it will be no easy task, not mainly
because of Poseidon, but for another, more delicate reason.
�42
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Having informed us that the year has come round for the homecoming of
Odysseus, and that his enemy Poseidon is temporarily "out of sight" and "out of
hearing," our narrator moves abruptly io the council of the gods on Olympus
where Zeus is holding forth. We anticipate reflections about Odysseus. Instead,
Zeus, we are told, was "thinking in his heart" not of Odysseus, but of "blameless
Aigisthos." And, remembering him, he speaks forth as follows:
"Oh for shame, how the mortals put the blame upon us
gods, for they say evils come from us, but it is they, rather,
who by their own recklessness win sorrow beyond what is given,
as now lately, ... Aigisthos married
the wife of Atreus' son, and murdered him on his homecoming,
though he knew it was sheer deslruction, for we ourselves had told him, ...
not to kill the man, nor court his lady for maniage;
for vengeance would come on him from Orestes, son of Atreides,
whenever he came of age and longed for his own country.
. . . And now he has paid for everything." (!.3243)
Zeus speaks about homecoming, but not about Odysseus's. Rather, he dwells on
Agamemnon's aborted homecoming and its terrible consequences: The lover
Aigisthos, despite the warnings of the gods, wooed Agarnenmon's wife, then
murdered Agamemnon, and was finally killed himself when Agamemnon's son,
Orestes, carne of age. Zeus's speech introduces the Oresteia story which serves
later as a prod for Telemachos (Orestes is held up as model for him by Athene,
Nestor, and Menelaos), as a vindication of Penelope (whom we are meant to
compare with Klytaimestra), and as au invitation to compare Odysseus and
Agamemnon, as well as Aigisthos and the suitors. Seen in this light, Zeus's
speech is, as several critics have argued, generally programmatic for the epic,
taken as a whole.5 But it also has a more specific function in its particular context.
Though he speaks about Agamemnon's disastrous homecoming, for which
Aigisthos bears responsibility, Zeus is "thinking in his heart of blameless
Aigisthos." Zeus implies, through this epithet, that Aigisthos might have killed
Agarnenmon because of the crimes of Agarnenmon's father, Atreus, against
Aigisthos's own father, Thyestes. Aigisthos was, like Orestes, animated by the
desire to avenge crimes against his father and, as such, was blameless. While his
fate vividly shows the results of ambition, it also underscores the brutalizing
effects of smouldering resenbuent and its imperviousness to reason or persuasion. Taming the son's ambition and overcoming his resenbuent seem indispensable if the father is to gain his home. It is especially this thought, I would suggest,
that truly sets the program for the epic. The plan set out immediately after Zeus
speaks draws on this insight, though we must travel far to make it apparent.
Mter Zens, Athene is the first to speak. Like us, she had eagerly awaited a
speech about Odysseus and is somewhat annoyed by the digression. She says:
�KASS
43
"... Aigisthos indeed has been sll'llck down in a death weII merited.
Let any other man who does thus perish as he did.
But the heart in me is tom for the sake of wise Odysseus,
... But you, Olympian,
the heart in you is heedless of him. Did not Odysseus
do you grace by the ships of the Argives, making sacrifice
in wide Troy? Why, Zeus, are you so harsh with him?" (1.46-48, 59-62)
Athene readily agrees tjlat Aigisthos got what he deserved, but that is beside the
point. Odysseus is blameless; he is not getting what he deserves. Why does Zeus
continue to trouble him? Zeus, in responding, denies the allegation. He asks, "My
child,... How could I forget Odysseus the godlike, he who is beyond all other
men in mind, and who beyond others has given sacrifice to the gods, who hold
wide heaven?" (1.64-67). Zeus shifts the blame to Poseidon, but nevertheless
agrees to help. Stiii, he conspicuously postpones any decision about how he will
help. In the meantime, Athene says she wiii go directly to Ithaka to "stir up" the
son of Odysseus, Telemachos: she will have him summon the Achaians to an
assembly, and then travel to sandy Pylos and to Sparta "to ask after his ...
father's homecoming, if he can hear something, and so that among people he
may win a good reputation" (I.94-95); she will prompt Telemachos to become
both a hearer and a subject of speeches and stories. Zeus, remaining silent, neither
dissents nor consents. Athene's pnrpose is not yet his own. It will take yet another
assembly of the gods to win his full participation. Why? If the point is to bring
Odysseus home, why proceed in this roundabout way? Why does Athene urge
this plan? We must look in on Ithaka and, especially, on Telemachos and the
suitors, to find out.
II. Telemachos Among the Suitors
Athene promptly enacts her plan. "[S]he bound upon her feet the fair sandals,
golden and immortal, ... caught up a powerful spear, edged with sharp bronze,"
and disguising herself as a friend, Mentes, she "descended in a flash of speed
from the peaks of Olympos, and lighted in the land of Ithaka, at the doors of
Odysseus, at the threshold of the court" (1.96-97, 99-100, 102-5). Leaping over
the dunghill, she enters the gates. Here, in the middle of the afternoon, she finds
108 grown men mindlessly amusing themselves with games while their hardworking heralds and henchmen are preparing massive quantities of food and
dtink. No one notices her arrival. Telemachos is first to note her presence:
Now far the first to see Athene was godlike Telemachos,
as he sat among the suitors, his heart deep grieving within him,
imagining in his mind his great father, how he might come back
�44
TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
and all throughout the house might cause the suitors to scatter, nd hold his
rightful place and be lord of his own possessions.
With such thoughts, sitting among the suitors, he saw Athene
... the heart within him scandalized
that a guest should still be standing at the doors. (1.113-24, emphasis added)
Homer's description of the scene and, especially, of Telemachos invites the
popular conclusion that, despite his twenty years or more, Telemachos is still a
mere babe-passive, young, and immature. He sits among the suitors, but he is
not of them; though physically present, he remains psychically absent. Brooding
and forlorn, he dreams of his "great," his wonderful and godlike, father, who will
come one day and set things right, his father, the heroic superman, who will
suddenly fly in from afar to save what is rightfully his, Telemachos included.
Telemachos is impotent and weak, will-less and powerless, and all too ready to
yield and submit, all too eager to project his childhood still farther into the future.
But this common impression of Telemachos cannot be the whole story. First,
though he is seemingly a merely passive daydreamer, Telemachos is certainly
not witless. The most common name-epithet for Telemachos is Telemachos
pepnumenos: to be pepnumenos is to be of sound understanding, shrewd, and
sagacious. True, this epithet, prominent from the start of the Odyssey, may
describe Thlemachos's potential rather than his state when the poem begins. Still,
if such potential exists, can we so readily believe that Telemachos is simply the
egoless and unreflective boy his outward passivity might suggest? He may draw
faulty inferences or conclusions, but no doubt his mind is alive, wondering, and
perhaps even calculating.
Second, Telemachos has lived in the city, close to his mother, for almost
twenty years; for most of that time there has been no other parental presence, not
even a grandparent: Odysseus's absence drove away also his parents-Antikleia,
Odysseus's mother, perished long ago, out of grief and sorrow for Odysseus
(XI.202-3); Laertes, Odysseus's father, abandoned the city long ago, likewise
out of grief and sorrow, and now roams his estate, like one of the slaves, sleeping
in the dirt next to the fire, or alone on "fallen leaves in piles along the rising
ground" (XI.l90-95). Would not a child, even a dull child, resent the man whose
absence caused such misery?
Third, weknowthatever since the suitors arrived, even Telemachos's mother,
Penelope, has become more distant, more self-absorbed. Telemachos surely
notices her odd behavior: her courting and uncourting of the suitors--Jlhe sends
them messages and makes promises by day but weeps by uight; her weaving and
unweaving of the shroud-sbe weaves by day and then unweaves by night; her
concern and unconcern for Telemachos himself--Jlhe is shocked and horrified
to learn that Telemachos has gone abroad but is unaware of his departure until
someone tells her, more than a week after the fact (IV.703). Telemachos must
feel himself ignored and abandoned.
�KASS
45
But, one might argue, there were always, at hand, the trusty Eurykleia,
nursemaid to both Odysseus and Telemachos, and the ever faithful swineherd,
Eumaios, to prevent resentment or hard feelings and to soothe the child, even
when he became a young man. Surely they could and no doubt did tell
Telemachos stories about how his exemplary father, the sceptered king, the king
of kings in Ithaka, was a man of ready heart, and, as ruler, both kind and gentle,
his very thought schooled in justice, stories about how Odysseus inspired loyalty
and trust in others. No doubt such lovely images and stories, one could argue,
might have comforted and assuaged any hard feelings.
Given what we know of the state of things in Ithaka, however, snch a
suggestion is unconvincing. If the ways of Odysseus were indeed exemplary,
inspiring gratitude and faithfulness, why do the nobles gather daily in the palace,
holding Penelope, the servants, and even Telemachos himself hostage? Why do
their fathers and grandfathers, the other kings in Ithaka who kuew Odysseus
firsthand, support such behavior? Such questions would very likely present
themselves to pepnumenos Telemachos.
Finally, and most important, we observe Telemachos's own disparagement
of songs or stories. In conversing with Athene (disguised as Mentes),
Telemachos's criticism of the suitors betrays his own sentiments. He says, "Dear
stranger, would you be scandalized at what I say to you? This is all they think
of, the lyre and the singing" (!.158-59). Yet, when Penelope asks Phemius, the
bard, to cease from singing the song of the sad return of the Danaans, Telemachos
adopts the suitor's attitude: "There is nothing wrong in his singing the sad return .
. . People, surely, always give more applause to that song which is the latest to
circulate among the listeners. So let your heart and let your spirit be hardened to
listen" (!.350-53). Although he denounces the suitors, and even claims to be
scandalized by them, with respect to songs, at least, Telemachos seems to share
their outlook-songs or stories are not bonds to the past but mere objects of
consumption.
We are now inclined to suspect that Telemachos's identification with the
suitors might be very great indeed. Telemachos is twenty years old. The suitors,
probably not very much older than he, have been in his house for more than three
years, ever since his own manly powers began to burgeon. As Homer remarks
several times, Telemachos "sits among the suitors." Everywhere else in Homer,
critics have noted, "orientation in space"- where one places oneself, how one
moves, the gestures one makes-is an expression of psychological condition;
space is "invested with spiritual quality."' Might not the same be true here?
If so, Thlemachos's apparent grief and passivity reflect more than a longing
to be saved by his heroic, godlike father. One needn't be a Freudian to think that,
after twenty years absence, Telemachos might well regard his father as a rival,
especially with respect to the affections of his mother. It seems hard to avoid the
inference that Telemachos must, in no small part, identify inwardly with the
�46
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
suitors. But what this might mean requires us to look more closely at the suitors
themselves. Who are they? What do they want?
III. The Soul of !he Suitors
The presence of the suitors in Odysseus's palace is, at least from one point of
view, quasi-legitimate. Much depends on the status of Odysseus. If Odysseus is
dead, their presence is, if not 1ltogether justifiable, at least excusable? But even
this concession to the suitors assumes that they are indeed suitors, that is, men
who have come to court Penelope, seriously to press their suit for her hand in
marriage. This assumption proves doubtful on closer inspection.8
When they speak before others, in public, the suitors insist that they want to
marry Penelope. In the public assembly, in Book Two, for example, Antinoos
vigorously insists that neither he nor the rest of the suitors will go back to their
own estates "until [Penelope] marries whichever Achaian man she fancies"
(ll.l26-27). Enrymachos echoes the same sentiment: It is Penelope, he argues,
who "makes the Achaians put off marriage with her, while we, awaiting this, all
our days quarrel for the sake of her excellence, nor ever go after others, whom
any one of us might properly marry" (II.204-7). But though their public speech
throughout points in this direction, their private speech points in another.
In Book Sixteen, when they return after their futile attempt to ambush
Telemachos, the suitors, we are told, "went in a throng to the assembly, nor did
they suffer any of the young men or any of the elders to sit with them"
(XVI361-62). Antinoos leads them on:
"... [L]et us surprise [Telemachos] and kill him, ...
. . . and ourselves seize his goods and possessions,
dividing them among ourselves fairly, but give his palace
to his mother to keep and to the man who marries her. Or else,
if what I say is not pleasing to you, but you are determined
to have him go on living and keep his father's inheritance,
then we must not go on gathering here and abundantly eating
away his fme substance, but,from his own palace each mao
must strive to win her with gifts of courtship; she will then marry
the man she is fated to have, and who brings her the greatest presents."
(XVI.383-92, emphasis added)
Here, in closed session, the suitors reveal, as they bear witness against themselves, their own unambiguous criminal intentions. Their presence in the house
has only secondarily to do with their wooing of Penelope. If the only, or even
the main, concern of the suitors were to win Penelope, they would do so, as
Antinoos here suggests, from their own homes. Their feasting in the house of
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Odysseus is directed, ultimately, against Odysseus himself, his possessions and
his power, and hence, immediately, against Telemachos, his would-be heir.9
Once we see clearly their criminal intentions, many of their other remarks
take on more sinister meaning. In Book One, for example, Antinoos, taken aback
by Telemachos's first daring speech, says: "I hope the son ofKronos never makes
you our king in seagirtlthaka. Though to be sure that is your right by inheritance"
(!.386-87). In the Ithakan assembly in Book 1\vo, Leokritos says that even if
Odysseus returned "his ,wife would have no joy of his coming... but rather he
would meet an unworthy destiny" (II.249-50). And, later, in Book Twenty-one,
when the suitors, one after the other fail to string the bow of Odysseus,
Eurymachos speaks for them all when he says:
''Oh, my sorrow. Here is a grief beyond all others;
it is not so much the marriage I grieve for, for all my chagrin.
There are many Achaian women besides, ...
but it is the thought, if this is true, that we come so far short
of godlike Odysseus in strength, so that we cannot even
string his bow...." (XXI.249-55)
The suitors clearly want to defame and destroy Odysseus; they want to take
his place. They do not envy Odysseus his kingliness-his "thoughts schooled in
justice," his gentleness, his ability to rule fairly, or even the faithfulness of his
beautiful and prudent wife. Rather, they envy him his power and his strength,
which they lry, metaphorically, to gather to themselves by eating up his substance, and by trying to kill his son Telemachos. The suitors are "civilized"
cannibals who, like their soul-mates, the Cyclopes, would assert brute force in
place of kingship. They look to nothing beyond themselves, respect nothing that
carne before themselves, honor nothing above themselves. Forever whiling away
their hours playing games, stuffing their faces, drinking and whoring, they are
neglectful of time, past and future. They consult ouly their own most pressing
and immediate needs and desires.
In relrospect, Telemachos's initial remark to Athene, a propos the suitors'
consumer-like attitude toward song, tells the whole story: asPhemios, "who sang
for the suitors, because they made him," played his lyre and struck up a song,
Telemachos, we recall, remarks, "Dear stranger, would you be scandalized at
what I say to you? This is all they think of, the lyre and the singing" (!.154-59).
If human beings are by nature rational beings, that is, beings with logos, clearly,
for Homer, the highest and most proper use of speech is the telling of stories.
Further, it is in their attitndes toward stories that the souls of human beings are
most clearly revealed. To put it succinctly, if somewhat formulaically, no stories,
no memory; no memory, no sense of time; no sense of time, no respect or aidos;
no respect, no kingship; no kingship, no city. Not accidently, in Homer, to have
the mind of a king is tantamount to being a host of strangers. The suitors'
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
perverted attitude toward songs or stories points directly to their shamelessness
with respect to slrangers, and, finally, to their criminal desire to dethrone
Odysseus and to overturn the city. But, as we have already seen, Telemachos,
despite his apparent shame and alleged hatred of the suitors, fundamentally
shares their attitude toward songs. We can now give a fuller account of
Telemachos's inner state, and the difficulties it might pose for the homecoming
of Odysseus.
IV. Telemachos, the Suitors, and the Council of the Gods
It goes without saying that Telemachos is neither fully conscious of the
ambivalence he might feel toward Odysseus, nor fully aware of the extent to
which he may share the suitors' outlook. But given what we have observed about
Telemachos, we cannot overlook his, at least partial, identification with the
suitors and, hence, his own possibly criminal intentions. Recall the initial
description: ''Telemachos... sat among the suitors, his heart... grieving within
him, imagining ... his great father, how he might come back, and... cause the
suitors to scatter, and hold his rightful place and be lord of his own possessions"
(1.113-17, emphasis added). Might not anotherreading, very different from the
one offered earlier, equally fit this description? Telemachos, like the suitors,
longs to replace Odysseus, but knowing that such a place is surely not his
"rightful place," and that Odysseus's "possessions" are not his for the taking, his
heart "grieves within him." He bitterly dreams about his "great," that is, his
powerful and mighty, father who abandoned him long ago, and about how he
will return and reclaim what is rightfully his, scattering all the suitors, himself
included.
On the earlier reading of Telemachos's state, feelings ouly of personal
impotence and weakness were present, with Odysseus cast in the role of god or
heroic savior. On this reading, dreams of personal potency and vitality are also
present, and Odysseus appears as a rival king. Where we earlier saw
Telemachos's desire to prolong his childhood, we now see a somewhat guarded
and guilty awareness of patticidal desires. While the first portrait suggested
will-lessness, ego-lessness, and readiness to depend on others, to submit and
yield in order to avoid trouble, the second suggests will-fulness, concern with
identity, readiness to stand independently, to assert himself, even to court trouble.
Though the sentiments point in opposite directions-the one to cowardice, the
other to pride-though the longings they reflect are logically incompatible, does
it not seem likely that both may co-exist within Telemachos 's troubled soul and
inform his self-understanding?
If so, Telemachos faces a frightful dilemma. For if Telemachos is himself a
suitor, albeit one with a conscience, can he ever wholeheartedly welcome back
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his father? Conversely, if he looks only to his father for his own salvation, can
he ever realize his wish to stand on his own two feet? Longing for his father
makes it impossible for him to act at all; resenting his father and longing to
replace him make it impossible for him not to act. Telemachos's habitual grief,
his immobility, and his inertia manifest this dilemma and the division within his
soul. Indeed, his frank and obviously bitter admission to Athene, that he does not
know whether he really is the son of Odysseus-"My mother says indeed I am
his. I for my part do not know" (1.215-16)-demonslrates emphatically his
ambivalence. 10 Telemachos, it seems, like those other sons, Aigisthos and
Orestes, has -at least in part- a resentful, vengeful soul.
We are now in a better position to make sense of the odd sequence of Zeus's
reflections and Athene's plan narrated at the beginning of the Odyssey. Since
homecoming is neither an heroic deed that one can freely choose and perform
by oneself, nor a trial that one must endure and suffer through alone, it stands to
reason that if Odysseus is to have his homecoming, others must play their vital
roles. Just as one must recognize in oneself one's own vulnerabilities and
dependencies in order to seek home, so one must depend on others to achieve it.
Odysseus must depend on the acceptance of the Ithakans to resume his kingship,
on Penelope to resume his place as husband, on Laertes to resume his relation as
son, and on Telemachos to resume his relation as father. Perhaps this is what
Odysseus is contemplating as he sits, impotent and forlorn, on Kalypso's island,
looking out over the waters, shedding tears, "longing to die."
Of the relations Odysseus must resume to gain his homecoming, his relation
with Telemachos, it would seem, must surely be primary. For Odysseus's
kingship cannot be secured if he has no heir, nor, we imagine, can he live again
easily with his wife, if their ouly child has psychically, if not literally, unsonned
himself, or, even worse, if he must lose or even kill his son in order to regain his
home. Neither, we imagine, can he face his father, Laertes, his still living past,
if he knows there will be no future. But, for the many reasons we have suggested,
the impediments to Odysseus's reunion with Telemachos are great. Telemachos,
unlike Aigisthos, for example, the subject of Zeus's reflections, cannot be relied
upon to act, uneqnivocally, for the sake of his father: Odysseus is to Telemachos
as both Thyestes and Agamemnon combined were to Aigisthos. Is it any wonder,
then, that it takes more than one council of the Gods to arrange the homecoming
of Odysseus? Doesn't the failure of the gods to assuage the heart of Aigisthos
provide fair warning of the difficulty of the task at hand? Is it any wonder that
Athene proposes and enacts, with Zeus's tacit consent, the plan that she does, a
plan that begins with, and ultimately depends on, Telemachos? Is this not why
the Odyssey begins with the Telemachy?
In Telemachos, then, as another meaning of his name-"final battle"-suggests, Odysseus faces his most decisive battle. Ready to sail home at the outset
of the narrative, Odysseus must first await and then assist in the radical reorien-
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TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
tation of Telemachos: Telemachos must learn to beat down his own worst fears
and resentments and to moderate his own ambition; he must learn to see the home
of Odysseus as his own, not to conquer but to inherit, and not to inherit passively,
but actively to preserve and perpetuate; he must learn to see Odysseus neither as
a god or heroic savior, nor as rival, but as a man and as his father. The radical
reorientation, or education, of Thlemachos bears the burden of much of the
narrative that ensues. It proceeds in two stages: In stage one, Telemachos is
brought into consciousness o~ himself as the son of Odysseus, largely through
speeches and stories (Books I to N and Book XVI); in stage two, he comes to
accept the responsibilities incumbent upon him as the son of Odysseus, primarily
through deeds (Books XVI to XXIII).
Stage one culminates in the moment that Telemachos allows Odysseus to
come into his embrace; stage two cuhninates when Telemachos voluntarily goes
forward in his father's footsteps and under his guidance, when father and son
fight shoulder-to-shoulder, first against the suitors, and later, with Laertes,
against their kin. Together, both stages fulfill Athene's announced plan. Though
we cannot here review every step in the education of Telemachos, I shall try in
the last section to make vivid some of its major moments.
V. The Education of Telemachos
Like his father's travels which they seem so closely to imitate, Telemachos's
travels take him far from home, exposing him to things he had never experienced
before. But, at the same time, they also bring him, psychically, closer to home.
Visiting the cities of men and learning their minds-.seeing the world withoutenables Thlemachos to see also himself within. As one student of the Odyssey
put it, Athene exposes Telemachos to things she knows "will bring out certain
traits and responses in him which he will recognize as having come from his
father Odysseus.'' 11 Telemachos's travels, then, hold up a mirror to his own
Odyssean soul. Books I to IV abound with examples. Let us look at a few.
His "travels" begin even before Telemachos steps out of his own home in
Ithaka. Knowing full well that cultivating the capacity to be a host of strangers
is tantamount to cultivating the capacity for kingship, Athene descends on Ithaka
in a foolproof disguise. Her sudden arrival immediately initiates Telemachos's
physical and psychic journey away from the suitors, and soon from his mother
as well. Abandoning his habitual lethargy and his place among the suitors,
Telemachos gets up and goes to meet Athene, offers her food and drink, and then
speaks to her privately, "apart from the others" (I.132). Even before he asks after
his guest's identity, he draws attention to the scandalous behavior of the suitors
(1.158-62) and articulates his own helplessness and hopelessness (1.163-68).
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Athene's very presence engenders the initial journey toward self-recognition.
Her subsequent technique takes him still further.
As Norman Austin has observed, Athene proceeds dialectically, posing tactful
but pointed questions out of "feigned ignorance." She enacts the part of "the
skillful psychotherapist who forces her patient to verbalize, and thereby creates
in him the psychological readiness for action." 12 She compels Telemachos to
bear witness against himself and, hence, further to confront his own situation.
But the main point of hyr method is made clear only as she departs:
After maintaining her disguise throughout the scene, Athena metamorphoses
into a bird and flies away. .. We are told that Telemachos at once recognized
that his visitor had been a deity... Telemachos has [thus] been given his first
lesson in discernment. .. His powers of observation [are made] to penetrate
disguises, to distinguish the genuine from the spurious. 13
As we all know, it is precisely this power of discernment, often manifest as
circumspection, sometimes as irony, that especially characterizes the family and
friends of Odysseus, but above all, Odysseus himself. Athene, then, brings
Telemachos into closer relation to Odysseus, frrst, by "sharpen[ing] his inner
vision," and then, through her act of self-revelation, by turning his "discerning
eye on the external phenomena around him." 14
Telemachos is a quick Ieamer. He absorbs and immediately applies the lesson,
making manifest, by doing so, his close resemblance to his family: In reply to
the suitor's inquiry about the identity and mission of his guest, he devises a
plausible, yet deceitful response; indeed, he lies three times in succession.
Further, he immediately assumes an authoritative postnre: He summarily dismisses his mother when she tearfully complains of the singer's song, and he tells
the suitors of his intention to put an end to their rapacity. Both his mother and
the suitors, we are told, stand back in amazement and, we must imagine,
Telemachos probably does also. But more important than. these immediate
effects, the powers tapped by Athene give Telemachos the courage to heed her
instructions-to go abroad in search of news of his father and to assume a more
active and assertive role at home. In carrying out these instructions, he further
perfects his own Odyssean powers, and, in this way, is brought more vividly to
recognize his kinship to Odysseus.
The travels abroad bring Telemachos face to face with the world of his father.
From Odysseus's friends and admirers-Nestor, Menelaos, and HelenTelemachos acquires close knowledge of a world he never knew. In Pylos and
Sparta, where these heroes of old still live and re-live their stories, he sees people
weep as they tell of their beloved companion, Odysseus the king, Odysseus the
warrior, and most especially Odysseus the able and cunning strategist.
In each place, Telemachos first listens attentively and later speaks, first
hesitantly, then with growing confidence. In each place, he is immediately
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
recognized as the son of Odysseus, by the likeness of his feet, of his hands, of
his glancing eyes, his head and his hair, and, most significantly, by the likeness
of his words. In each place Telemachos weeps, first for his owu impotence, then
for his father. In each place he becomes progressively stronger, more selfpossessed, more clever, more independent, and, in Sparta, very confident that
Odysseus is still alive and, very likely, already at home. 15
Recall, for example, the very tactful, utterly plausible, but completely false,
excuse he gives Menelaos fo~ leaving Sparta: Telemachos, the young man who
thinks about little besides his home and family, says, "I could well be satisfied
to sit here beside you for a year's time, without any longing for home or parents
... but by now my companions in sacred Pylos are growing restless" (XV.SS91 ). Recall the wish he expresses to Menelaos, that aniving in lthaka he might
find Odysseus, which wish, in turn, prompts the bird omen, which Helen
interprets to mean that Odysseus was already at home (XV.l55-60, 171-78).
Recall his decision to risk incurring the wrath of Nestor by going directly
home-he neither stopped to give Nestor greetings from Menelaos, as he had
promised, or to bid him farewell in person. Athene 's instructions, it seems, have
forced Telemachos to develop Odysseus's own greatest virtues-resourcefulness, prudence, tact, self-control, and a keen sense of timing.
No longer hopeless and helpless, well aware of his own identity as kin to
Odysseus, confident in his growing powers, Telemachos sails home again to
Ithaka. Thougb we, the readers, deligbt in Telemachos's achievements and
appreciate the signs of his increasing self-recognition and empowerment, we
must wonder, now more than ever, whether Athene's careful ministrations won't
backfire. As this first stage of Telemachos's education nears its completion, we
wonder whether the ground that has been so successfully laid for the recognition
and reunion of this son and his father won't collapse nnder its own weight. Is
there any reason to believe that the changes wrought in Telemachos haven't
further fueled his resentment, and, even more, armed his ambition? The culminaling scene of this first stage of Telemachos's education, the reunion of
Telemachos and Odysseus, warrants our close attention and, unfortunately,
supports our fears.
It is early in the morning. Odysseus, newly returned to Ithaka but disgnised
as a beggar, and Eumaios, the swineherd, are preparing their breakfast inside
Eumaios's hut. Suddenly, as if from nowhere, Telemachos appears. Amazed,
Eumaios runs out to greet him, and embraces and kisses him "as if he had escaped
dying." In a burst of weeping, Eumaios speaks: "You have come, Telemachos,
sweet light; I thought I would never see you again" (XVI.21-24). Telemachos,
away, we presume, for little longer than a week, is welcomed by Eumaios, "as a
father, with heart full of love, welcomes his only and grown son ... when he
comes back in the tenth year from a distant country" (XVI.l?-19). We imagine
Odysseus, inside the hut, is listening attentively. The two, Eumaios and
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Telemachos, now go into the hut, and for the first time in twenty years Odysseus
beholds Telemachos, and Telemachos, Odysseus. The two sit close together, in
silence, and they eat. The silence must be deafening. ForifTelemachos has really
absorbed Athene's lessons, and we have eve1y reason to believe he has, surely
clever, perspicacious Thlemachos must immediately penetrate the disguise of the
man before him. The conversation that ensues must be excruciatingly difficult
for both son and father.
Telemachos addresse,s Eumaios and seems pmposely not to ask who the
stranger is, but rather where he carne from, how the sailors brought him to Ithaka,
who the sailors were. Ewnaios responds with a story about the stranger's origins
and wanderings, but, most emphatically, with a command: '"I put him into your
hands now. Do with him as you will. He names himself your suppliant" (XVI.6667, emphasis added). The tone of Telemachos's answer no doubt smprises
Eumaios, as much as it reveals to us the depth of his own ambivalence.
"Ewnaios," he says, "this word you spoke hurt my heart deeply. For how shall I
take and entertain a stranger guest in my house? I myself am young," he says,
retreating at least in speech, to his own impotent past, "and have no faith in my
hands' strength to defend a man, if anyone picks a quarrel with him." He blames
his own impotence, in part, on his mother: She "ponders two ways, whether to
remain here with me, and look after the household, keep faith with her husband's
bed,... or go away at last with the best man of the Achaians who pays her court
in her palace." Though he offers to outfit the stranger with clothing and weapons,
he says he wants to do so in order to send him on his way. Concluding, he again
draws attention to his own incapacity: "I will not Jet him go down there and be
where the suitors are, for their outrageousness is too strong and I fear they may
insult him, and that will be a hard sorrow upon me and a difficult one for even a
strong man to deal with" (XVI.69-89).
Odysseus, sure! y recognizing that Telemachos knows who he is, responds, as
we might expect most any father would, first with grief, then disbelief, then with
some instruction. He tries, as Athene had earlier, by asking questions, tactfully
and hopefully to appeal to Telemachos's own better nature:
"Dear friend, . ..
you eat away the dear heart in me, as I listen
to what you tell of the suitOrs and their reckless contrivings
inside your palace, against your will, when you are such a one
as you are.Tell me, are you willingly oppressed by them? Do the people
hate you throughout this place, ...
. . . Do you find your brothers wanting? ...
I wish that I were truly as young as I am in spirit,
or a son of stately Odysseus were here, or he himself might
come in from his wandering. ... If such
things could be, another could strike my head from my shoulders
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
if I did not come as an evil thing to all those people
as I entered the palace of Odysseus, the son of Laertes.
And if I, fighting alone, were subdued by all their number,
then I would rather die, cut down in my own palace,
than have to go on watching forever these shameful activities, ...
(XVI.91-107)
Odysseus's speech does not promptly have the desired results. In responding,
Telemachos does affirm, as he hadn't before, that he is the son and heir of
Odysseus--"[11he son of Kr6nos," he says, "made ours a single line. Arkeisios
had only a single son, Laertes, andLaertes had only one son, Odysseus; Odysseus
in tum left only one son, myself' (XVI.ll8-20). He acknowledges that he has
friends among the people. But he insists, again, on his own helplessness:
"Odysseus... left only one son, myself, in the halls, and got no profit of me, and
my enemies are here in my house, beyond numbering ... [and] my mother...
does not. .. make an end of the matter" (XVI.ll9-29). And moreover, now, in
addition, Telemachos blames the gods. It seems that for Telemachos to accept
his kinship, he must forfeit his manhood; he cannot accept his father as father,
but only as a conquering hero, a hindrance and rival to his own empowerment.
In what follows, however, Telemachos acts with confidence, and shows that
his speech of impotence was largely a pose. He commands Eumaios to go to the
city to tell Penelope of his safe return. As if taking her cues from Telemachos,
Athene transforms Odysseus into the resplendent hero Telemachos had envisioned, and she summons Odysseus to reveal himself to his son. Telemachos is
caught off guard. Astonished by the transformation, he first averts his eyes and
then, taking Odysseus to be some god, begs him to be merciful. Odysseus now
speaks with great restraint and, we imagine, with great pain: "No god. Why take
me for a god? No, no. I am that father whom your boyhood lacked and suffered
pain for lack of. I am he" (XVI.l87-89). Then, holding back no longer, the tears
ran down his cheeks and he kissed his son.
Telemachos's disbelief persists. Odysseus, painfully, repeats himself:
"Telemachos... No other Odysseus than I will ever come back to you... [H) ere
you see the work of Athene... who turns me into whatever she pleases"
(XVI.202-4, 207-8). Recognizing Telemachos's own pain, Odysseus neither
dissembles nor forces himself on Telemachos. He makes no demands. He speaks,
then he sits down and waits. Finally, Telemachos
folded his great father in his arms and lamented,
shedding tears, and desire for mourning rose in both of them;
and they cried shrill in a pulsing voice, even more than the outcry
of birds, ospreys or vultures with hooked claws, whose children
were stolen away by men of the fields, before their wings grew
strong; such was their pitiful cry and the tears their eyes wept.
(XVL214-19)
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This very moving moment does not, however, complete our quest For though
Telemachos now openly acknowledges that Odysseus is Odysseus, and though
he has allowed Odysseus in1D his embrace, in the conversation that follows he
makes even more vivid his deep ambivalence and irresolution about his own
sonship. When Odysseus eagerly proposes plotting revenge on the suitors,
Telemachos responds with doubt and cunning: "What you have spoken of is too
big; I am awed" (XVI.243-44). Even though he is more aware than ever before
of Athene's guardianship, and of his father's own powers, and of his own great
abilities, Telemachos is 'strangely not ready to join. His pose of impotence is a
mask for his ambivalence, not about the likelihood of success but about its
desirability.
Odysseus now faces his most difficult and delicate trial: He must encourage
his son to assume his manhood, knowing full well that it may rob him of his own.
And so begins stage two of the education of Telemachos. This time Odysseus,
not Athene. is "Mentor."
Like Athene's educational strategy, Odysseus's trusts largely to the psychological impact of exposure to difficult and trying circumstances. Thlemachos, as
before, will be made to assert his authority as host, but this time he will do so,
purposefully and consciously, on behalf of his father. He will be made 1D exercise
his own great Odyssean capacities for cunning and self-contrul, just as Odysseus
would exercise them: Telemachos must pretend that he doesn't know the
stranger; he must stand still and hold back as others taunt and ridicule and throw
things at his father. And he must do all this precisely for the sake of Odysseus.
If the success of a teacher is in the performance of his students, then Odysseus
cansurelybeproud.ForfromthemomentOdysseus,disguisedasabeggar,enters
his palace, Telemachos acts coolly, efficiently, and competently. But, as we all
know, following the directives of others, however proficiently, seldom reveals
the heart. Though the trials he is made to endure may have been necessary, they
were not yet sufficient. Telemachos's true willingness to accept himself as son
and heir becomes manifest only when he departs from his father's directives and
takes initiative himself. Nowhere is this more evident, or more threatening to
Odysseus, than in the contest of the bow. Here, Odysseus's fate comes to rest
entirely in Telemachos's hands.
It was Penelope who had proposed the contest of the bow to the suitors,
promising to marry the man most able 1D string Odysseus's bow with the greatest
ease, and to send an arrow through twelve axes. Both the bow and the contest
had been Odysseus's trademarks in Ithaka, as the suirors well knew. It was,
therefore, the perfect test, and, for a young man, the fitting rite of passage.
Penelope had conceived the plan the evening before, during her long conversation with the "stranger" Odysseus; Odysseus, self-confident, had given it his full
approval. But when Penelope, after much weeping and hesitation, produces the
bow, and invites the suitors to enter the contest, and Eumaios, following
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Penelope's command, places the bow and the gray iron before the suitors,
Telemachos-quite on his own and without foreknowledge of the plan-steps
forward to take command. Disrupting the timing, and, seemingly calling
Penelope's bluff, he propels the situation toward its crisis.
While the suitors stand round, each gazing hopefully at the bow, Telemachos,
witlessly laughing, bursts forth: "Come, you suitors," he yells, "since here is a
prize set out before you, a woman; there is none like her in all the Achaian
country, neither in sacred PyJos nor Argos nor in Mykene, nor here in lthaka
itself, nor on the dark mainland .... Come, no longer drag things out with delays,
nor turn back still from the stringing of the bow... "(XXI.l06-12). Telemachos
abruptly announces that he too is willing to enter the contest, and claims that
should he win, he too will be entitled to the prize: "If I can put the string on it
and shoot through the iron, my queenly mother would not go off with another,
and leave me sorrowing here in the house; since I would still be found here as
one now able to take up his father's glorious prizes" (XXI.116-17). Telemachos's
own words seem to hurl him further onward, for immediately after speaking he
"sprang upright," set the axes, dug the trench, drew the chalkline, and stamped
down the earth, all, we are told, properly and orderly, and very mnch to the
amazement of those present, for he had never seen it done before. Then, standing
on the threshold, he went and tried the bow.
Telemachos's witless levity may be his most artful disguise, as Norman
Austin has suggested: "No more appropriate irony (acting the child, harboring
the thoughts of the adult) could be found." 16 But, I think, much more likely, it is
the spontaneous and effusive response of a man, suddenly abundantly aware that
everything he ever wanted is now within reach. Now he can claim all that is
"rightfully" his. Now he can show both himself and the world his own strength
and power. Now he can take his revenge--{)n the suitors, on his mother, on his
father. No doubt Penelope waits and watches apprehensively-and so do we. But
no one could be as apprehensive or as helpless at this moment, or as magnificently self-controlled, as Odysseus.
"Three times [Telemachos] made [the bow] vibrate, straining to bend it, and
three times he gave over the effort, yet," the poet pointedly tells us, "in his heart
[he] was hopeful of hooking the string to the bow and sending a shaft through
the iron." Finally, "pulling the bow for thefourth time," we are told, "he would
have strung it, but Odysseus stopped him, though he was eager, making a signal
with his hem!' ( XXI.125-30, emphasis added). Though Telemachos desists on
a paternal glance, he submits not from weakness but from strength. Now knowing
that he could string the bow, he no longer feels compelled to do so. Having finally
realized his own manhood and felt his own power to equal his father, Telemachos
can now freely and generously acknowledge and accept his father's lead and
authority-perhaps because he recognizes that it was his father's self-control
�KASS
57
which had enabled him to gain his moment of triumph, and even more, because
the triumph is clearly acknowledged in his father's signal.
Immediately, without resentment, as if on cue, Telemachos joins the plot with
his now characteristic Odyssean cunning and dissembliog: "Shame on me," he
says, " 'I must be a coward and weakling, or else I am still young, and my hands
have yet no confidence to defend myself against a man who has started a quarrel.
Come then, you who in your strength are greater than I am, make your attempts
on the bow, and let us finish the contest'" (XXI.130-35).
Telemachos's silent assent to Odysseus's silent signal is his true embrace of
Odysseus. All the events that ensue make abundantly clear his respect, his loyalty,
and his proud affection. One moment especially stands out. After each of the
suitors, in turn, tries, unsuccessfully, to string the bow, blaming their incompetence on Apollo, they try to postpone the contest. But at this moment the stranger,
Odysseus, begs for a chance, and Penelope comes forward in his defense. When
the suitors strenuously object, Telemachos again takes command. He reiterates
his claim that he has "the power in the household," and, as he had done once
before, sharply urges Penelope to attend to her own work. But this time, though
he challenges his mother's authority, Telemachos, quite vigorously, takes up her
cause:
"My mother, no Achaian man has more authority
over this bow than I, to give or withhold, at my pleasure;
not one of those who are lords here in rocky Ithaka,
not one of those in the islands off horse-pasturing Elis;
no one can force me against my will; if I want, I can give it
to the stranger as an outright gift, to take away with him... "(XXL344-49)
Now Penelope, Odysseus, and Telemachos are, in Homer's word
homophrosyne; they all think alike in their thoughts. Moments later, Telemachos,
over the objections of the suitors, has the bow delivered to Odysseus. Assured
of the futnre, Odysseus can now reunite past and present. Odysseus, now truly
home, proceeds to string the bow and reclaim his house. And Telemachos,
knowing, at last, that he is able to fill his father's shoes, with his father's
blessings, gladly takes his rightful place as next in line.
�TIIE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
58
Coda
The Odyssey ends, we recall, as grandfather Laertes, father Odysseus, and
son Telemachos go forth to face the grandfathers and fathers who would avenge
the terrible death of their sons. No doubt the wrath felt by these avenging fathers
was fueled by their own deeply felt guilt. Was it not their own indifference to the
outrageous exploits of their growing sons that won them these sorrows? No doubt
a terrible blood bath would have ensued had Athene not intervened. But she did,
and we rest content thinking' that with the pledges sworn to by both sides, and
Odysseus's reunions completed, Odysseus's home is secure now and for the
future.
So ends the poem. But as we all know this end does not mark the absolute
end of Odysseus's travels. Teiresias had foretold and Odysseus had repeated to
Penelope the tale of the journey that still remained. It is to be, recall, a solo
journey to a far-away, landlocked place, where there are people living who know
nothing of the sea, not its food, its ships, not the "well shaped oars which act for
ships as wings do" (Xl.l25). Odysseus is to carry his own oar to this land, which
he will recognize when another wayfarer, meeting him on the road, mistakenly
calls his oar a winnowing fan. Once there he is to plant his oar and render
ceremonious sacrifice to Poseidon.
We may speculate, fruitfully, I think, about where this land is, how long such
a journey may take, what the planted oar might mean to these landlocked folks,
and so on. But given our concern this evening, it occurred to me that encoded in
this last, rather obscure adventure, may indeed lie Homer's deepest reflection on
fathers and sons, or more generally, on parents and children. I asked myself this
question: Given all that has happened, would it not have made more sense for
Homer to have had Odysseus give his well-shaped oar, that artful reminder of
his own manhood and wanderings, to his own son Telemachos? Apparently not.
Why not?
If the telos of Homer's poem is the completed home, that is, the home that is
secure now and in the future, Homer seems to be suggesting that for a home to
endure, parents must be ever vigilant. They must watch their children, of course,
but they must especially watch themselves. They must desist, as we have seen
Odysseus do, from asking their children tQ accept them, but, more iroporlantly,
they must desist from foisting on their children their own hopes and dreams and
ambitions. Parents may continue to live in their children, but they cannot live
through their children. They must inspirit and gnide their children, school them
in their ways and traditions, give them encouragement and time-Homer never
excuses Odysseus's absence-but they carmot put their own well-shaped oars
into the hands of their sons or daughters. The life they have given can replace,
but it cannot repeat their own. Having prepared the way, we parents must allow
the next generation to carve their own oars, to navigate their own waters, even
�KASS
59
as we hope that their journeys will resemble our own. A very hard lesson, indeed.
Even Odysseus must be coaxed.
If this speculation is true, then it would seem that the real education of
Telemachos has only just begun.
***
Notes:
1. Samuel Butler, The Authoress of the Odyssey (New York: AMS Press, I 968),
p.279.
2. Homer, Odyssey, translated by Richmond Lattimore, (New York:Harper and
Row, 1977). All Odyssey citations are from this translation, except where
otherwise indicated.
3. Cited in Heinz Kohut, "Introspection, Empathy, and the Semi Circle of
Mental Health," International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 63 (1982) 404.
(There is one allusion to the embassy in the Odyssey at XXIV.l!S-19.)
4. Ibid.
5. Cf. Edward F. D' Arms and Karl K. Hulley, "The Oresteia-Story in the
Odyssey," Tra:nsactions and Proceedings, American Philological Association, 77 (1946) 207-13
6. Norman Austin, Archery at the Dark of the Moon (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1975), p.I02. Austin continues his argument as follows:
"Man's movement, his gesture even, is a declaration of that harmony
between inner and outer. Gesture is space invoked, space imitated. Going
eastward or westward, upward or downward, left or right, is a physical act,
but an act significant of a person's character or emotion. It is because space
has quality that we are entitled to find significance in Achilleus' gesture
when he hurls the royal scepter to the ground and sitS down himself
(ll.l.245-46) or to assert that when Agamemnon sits down to deliver his
apology to Achilleus his posture is as important as his utterance (ll. 19.77)."
Austin cites Odysseus's father, Laertes-his ragged clothes, his abandonment of the city, his preference for ashes and leaves, or for decay and
dissolution-as the "clearest example" of this phenomenon.
7. This is the view set out by, among others, Norman Austin in "Telemachos
Polymechanos," California Studies in Classical Antiquity, Vol.2, 1969, p.47.
8. See Agathe Thornton, People and Themes in Homer's Odyssey (Dunedin:
University of Toronto Press, 1970), especially, Chapter VII. "The Suitors,"
pp.63-67. Though the inferences I draw are my own, the discussion of the
suitors that immediately follows draws heavily on Thornton's observations.
9. Cf. Thornton, op.cit., p.64
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
10. It is, in general, the case that in the world according to Homer, to be in the
dark about who your father is is to be in the dark simply-disoriented and
without hope. See, especially, Homer's simile at V.394-99.
11. Mary Hannah Jones, "A First Reading of the Odyssey," in Prize Papers, St.
Joho's College, 1977-78, p. 62.
12. Austin, "Telemachos Polymechanos," op.cit., p.53
13. Ibid., p.53
14. Ibid.
15. In an effort to emphasi~e the apparent changes in Telemachos and the
moment of his meeting With his father, I have shortchanged the "schools"
that were Sparta and Pylas. It is surely no accident that Athene sent
Telemachos to these places in particular. For no doubt pepnumenos
Telemachos is made far more aware of his geographical and paternal origins
by the very fact that each place and its presiding figure(s) is so different
from the other, and so different from lthak:a. Let me collect here just a few
of the more salient differences.
Sandy Pylos, where 4,500 residents congregate, at day break, near the
shore to offer a ceremonious sacrifice of 81 bulls to Poseidon, stands in stark
contrast to the rich, inland plains of horse-pasturing Sparta, and both stand
in stark contrast to rocky Ithaka. In Pylos, where men live piously and
simply and, seemingly, mostly outdoors, old Nestor presides. In Sparta,
where one's attention is drawn to the lavish interiors, to the abundant wealth
and beauty of the palace-Telemachos mistakes the palace for the home of
Zeus himself-Menelaos and Helen preside. In Pylos, where every visitor
provides a fresh occasion to show one's gratitude to the gods, men celebrate
the past and look forward to the future: Nestor is always flanked by his six
sons and companions. In Sparta, where every visitor provides a fresh
reminder of the miserable origins of Trojan War, men look only to past pain
and seemingly have no future: though Helen and Menelaos are celebrating
a marriage-their only child, Hermione, born before the war, is about to
marry Neoptolemos, Achilles' son-the departure of Hermione further
highlights the emptiness, indeed, the sterility, of their home. Though he
hears tales of Odysseus' heroic virtues, he also hears tales about the difference between Odysseus and his heroic counterparts, tales which, no doubt,
spark Telemachos' special interest. In Pylos, for example, Nestor's tale
about the strategy he urged_ at the end of the war invites Telemachos to think
about the difference between Nestor and Odysseus as counsellors.
Menelaos's and Helen's tales of Odysseus' enormous capacity for selfcontrol make evident, by contrast, their own deficiencies. See, especially,
Austin, Archery at the Dark of the Moon and George E. Dimock, The Unity
of the Odyssey (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1989) for
a more extensiVe discussion of the "schools" of Pylos and Sparta.
16. Austin, "Telemachos· Polymechanos," op.cit.
�The Least Deceptive Mirror
of the Mind:
Truth and Reality
in the Homeric Poems
Carl A. Rubino
I
At the climax of hls encounter with the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, the
strange and annoying Nazarene called Jesus introduces the matter of truth: "I
was born and I carne into the world to bear witness to the truth, and everyone
who sides with the truth hears my voice" (John 18.37). Pilate's well-known
response belies his frustration; "What is truth?" he asks, and quickly turns to
leave the room. Pilate seems well aware that a discussion of truth between him
and Jesus would involve the sort of "cultural confrontation" that any Roman
administrator who wished to succeed could ill afford.
Had Jesus and Pilate been Westerners of a more recent stamp, they might have
engaged in a discussion of the notions of transparency and fullness. That most
exemplary Westerner, Erasmus, who falsely claimed to hail from Rotterdam,
makes his heroine Folly pay heed to-and at the same time undercut-the ideal
of transparency. "Folly speaks," and she informs us that "speech is the least
deceptive mirror of the mind."1 We also expect what is true to be complete; we
demand fullness; when we swear in court, we promise "to tell the truth, the whole
truth, and nothing but the truth." Consider the hearings on the Watergate scandal
or the more recent Iran-Contra affair. Both were replete with demands for and
promises of "full disclosure."
Some have come to associate the demand for transparency with what they
call the "correspondence theory of truth," where it is a matter of accurate
representation. If! say "It's raining outside" when it is actually sunny, I have not
represented reality but masked it; my words do not correspond to what is really
Carl Rubino is Professor of Classics at Hamilton College. He was a tutor at St. John's
College, Annapolis, in the academic year 1988-89, and at the Graduate Institute in the
summer of 1990.
�62
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
happening out there. In its extreme fonn, the correspondence theory takes ideas
as copies of objects and words as copies of ideas. Fullness, on the other hand, is
associated with the "coherence tl1eory of truth." Here it is a matter of getting
everything to hang together, and there is no truth shmt of the whole truth.' Thus
the slick lawyer of television and films or the tough detective-novel cop will try
to knock holes in a suspect's story; find the places where the story does not hang
together, and the whole false tangle will unravel just like Penelope's web, that
delaying fiction ultimately unmasked by the truth-hungry suitors (Od. 2.85-110).
Here we must note an important corollary: Even though someone might be telling
the truth, even though what he or she says is "what really happened," if that
person is unable to tell it coherently, in the proper style, it can and often will be
taken as falsehood, as all those bumbling victims of fast-talking lawyers can
testify.
The notion of uuth as coherence is the one we often invoke in attempting to
explain how works of art-fictions all---<:an somehow be true. When we gaze
with wonder upon the awesome splendor of Michelangelo's David, for example,
we do not expect the statue merely to correspond to what a human male body
actually looks like. If we want to see "real bodies," all we have to do is look at
one another; there is no need to contemplate great works of art. What we really
expect from Michelangelo, or from any other artist, whether painter, sculptor,
writer, or composer, is that the work cohere in a way that pleases, moves, and
inspires us. Works of art, even so-called realistic works, do not merely correspond
to reality; on the contrary, they transfonn reality, investing it with a marvelous
luminosity, and the mode of transfonnation is their superior degree of coherence.
Speaking from another point of view, we might associate transparence with
candor and fullness with spontaneity. Although such associations serve to
demonstrate that it is ultimately impossible to maintain our distinctions absolutely, since the meanings of candor and spontaneity often overlap, we can still
perceive the distinction if we remember that a candid person is someone whose
words clearly reflect his thoughts, while it remains true that at least one phrase
associated with spontaneity is "He simply blurted it all out."
II
In any case, everyone would probably agree that both candor and spontaneity
are obvious characteristics of"the best of the Achaeans," Achilles. At the opening
of the l/iad he enjoins a fearful Calchas to "tell it like it is" (1.74-91), and he
insists upon "speaking his mind" to a resentful and angry Agamemnon who is
yet quite willing to compromise (examine 1.116-20 and 140-47, lines too little
noted by commentators). It is difficult to imagine a hero like Achilles not saying
what he means; and it is this attitude as much as Agamemnon's arrogance that
�RUBINO
63
brings on the crisis ofthelliad. To reach the accommodation advocated by Nestor
(1.254-84), compromise is necessary; as Nestor says, it is better to listen to reason
and take advice. For Nestor it is a question of compromise between manly
prowess on the one hand and political authority on the other. Unfortunately, all
such compromises require a certain softening or blurring of what one sees clearly
as hard truth; and Achilles simply will not modify his position or mollify his
words. Agamemnon is well aware of this; he notes that even though the gods
have made Achilles a great warrior, they have not given him the right to hurl
insults (1.290-91).
'
Achilles himself makes his attitude quite clear during the embassy's visit in
Book Nine. Immediately after Odysseus has conveyed to him the generous terms
of Agamemnon's peace offer, he responds with these frank words:
I owe you a straight answer, as to how
I see this thing, and how it is to end
No need to sit with me like mourning doves
making your gentle noise by turns. I hate
as I hate Hell's own gate that man who hides
one thought within him while he speaks another.
What I shall say is what I see and thiok.
(9.309-14) 3
The fault that Achilles hates, saying one thing while thinking another, is of course
the very opposite of candor and spontaneity; the liar does not display what is in
his mind but rather disguises it. For the liar, speech is not Folly's bright mirror
but the means par excellence to keep one's thoughts in the dark. Yet we should
note that in this case at least Odysseus's intentions are not only honorable but
also transparent. Like his companions on the embassy, he wishes to effect a
reconciliation between Agamemnon and Achilles, and he makes no secret of that.
It is because he wishes so ardently for that reconciliation that he omits from his
report of Agamemnon's offer, which is otherwise repeated in all its detail
(9.122-57 and 9.264-99, mutatis mutandis), the part that Achilles would have
found unpalatable:
Let him be subdued!
Lord Death indeed is deaf to appeal, implacable;
of all gods therefore he is most abhorrent
to mortal men. So let Akhilleus bow to me,
considering that I hold higher rank
and claim the precedence of age.
(9.158-61)
�64
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
For those tough words, Odysseus substitures the following pitch:
Even if you abhor
the son of Atreus all the more bitterly,
with all his gifts, take pity on the rest,
all the old army, worn to rags in battle.
These will honor you as gods are honored!
And ah, for these, what glory you may win!
Think: Hek(or is your man this time: being crazed
with ruinoUs pride, believing there's no fighter
equal to him among those that our ships
brought here by sea, he 'II put himself in range.
(9.300-306)
As always, Odysseus is very shrewd. Insread of offering Achilles an exhortation
to obedience, he appeals to his feelings for his fellow warriors, to his obsessive
desire for honor and glory, and to his competitive inslincts, his insistence upon
being Number One.
Unfortunarely, the tactic does not work, perhaps because it is so very transparent. Achilles is not obtuse, and he knows that something is wrong with
Odysseus's report. He guesses wrong about what Odysseus has done, accusing
him of not being lransparent when Odysseus is in fact not being forthcoming, is
simply withholding an important part of Agamemnon's message and replacing
it with something he thinks Achilles would rather hear. Of course, Achilles' error
is minor and is perhaps best defined as misplaced emphasis, not only because
withholding can be described as lack of candor, but also because everyone knows
that the Odyssean personality is willing and able to violare the canon of
lransparency when that seems necessary. Ullimarely, therefore, Achilles is perfectly correct: Achilles is the opposite of the man who glories in the nighttime
sneak-attack on the Trojan camp (Book Ten, the Do/oneia) and who stoops to
use the poisoned arrows mentioned by Athena, his equally non-lransparent
alter-ego, in this instance disguised as Mentes (Od. 1.260-64). No, Achilles is
once and for all the ideal slraight shooter and slraight talker. The kind of hero
exalted in the Iliad purports to be a man of action, not a man of words (listen to
Hector at II. 20.366-68, 20.430-37, and 22.279-82; there is also Aeneas at II.
20.244-58), but when he does use words, lie remains absolutely faithful to the
canons of lransparency and fullness. He makes every effort to say what he means.
It is worth taking a leap across the centuries to the hero whose k/eos aphiton
is celebrared not by Homer but by Plato. Socrates, well-known for his obstinate
insistence on speaking the truth, recognized his kinship with the great hero of
thelliad.ln answer to those who would reproach him for putting his life in danger
by such behavior, Socrates speaks as follows:
�RUBINO
65
On your view the heroes who died at Troy would be poor creatures, especially
the son of Thetis. ... he made light of his death and danger, being much more
afraid of ao ignoble life aod of failing to avenge his friends .... The truth of
the matter is this, gentlemen. Where a man has once taken his stand, either
because it seems best to him or in obedience to his orders, there I believe he
is bound to remain and face the danger, taking no account of death or anything
else before dishonor.4
There it is: death before dishonor, standing up for what you believe, maintaining
one's position at all costs, that stubborn, almost pigheaded insistence on never
letting up, never softening your position, never giving any quarter to your
unfortunate opponents. The best of the Achaeans and the best of the Athenians
are two of a kind!
III
The Odyssey, on the other hand, is at one with its protagonist in consistently
sliding off course, consistently denying the value of candor and spontaneity,
emphasizing in their place the non-transparent face of language and the uses of
withholding the truth. 5 The much-discussed Cyclops episode will have to do its
duty once again, since it offers a splendid example of my point. That episode, as
we all know, is replete with deception. Consider, for example, Odysseus's
passing out of the cave hidden under the ram's belly. It is marked throughout by
insincerity. Odysseus ignores the urgings of his men, who wish to steal some
cheeses and run, then to come back later to drive out the lambs and kids; he insists
that they wait and try to talk the Cyclops, whom he imagines he can cast for the
role of sucker, out of some gifts, relying on good old xenie, one of the greatest
ruses of the confidence-man (Od. 9.224-30).6 When the Cyclops fmally returns
to his cave, Odysseus confronts him with a failed masterpiece of the swindler's
art:
We are from Troy, Akhaians, blown off course
by shifting gales on the Great South Sea;
homeward bound, but taking routes and ways
uncommon; so the will of Zeus would have it.
We served under Agamemno~ son of Atreus-
the whole world knows what city
he laid waste, what armies he destroyed.
It was our luck to come here; here we stand,
beholden for your help, or aoy gifts
you give-as custom is to honor strangers.
We would entreat you, great Sir, have a care
for the gods' courtesy: Zeus will avenge
the unoffending guest.
(9.259-71)
�66
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
That seems a fairly windy speech for Odysseus. His initial tactic is to impress
Polyphemus with some pretentious name-dropping, the kind of thing that the
gullible always go for. Thus we get mention of Troy, of Agamemnon and the
great fame he and his comrades won there, and of Zeus himself, who is supposed
to have arranged our hero's visit to the Cyclops's island. Roughly midway
through this valiant effort, however, we can see Odysseus changing course as he
sees from the expression on the Cyclops's face that the intended victim is not
buying his line. Thus at line 266 Odysseus makes a sudden detour into religious
discourse, turning himself and his men from big-time conquering heroes to abject
suppliants whose safety now depends upon the protection of Zeus: "Zeus-you
know the one I mean, Zeus xeinios, the one who takes care of strangers and
suppliants" (270-71). For all his fear, however, Odysseus is still after those gifts,
and it is to the Cyclops's credit that at least he does not fall for this.
The episode is also marked by the withholding of truth. In that splendid pun
on outis Odysseus both withholds his real name and gives the Cyclops a name
that is not transparent, that is at odds with reality, that does not correspond with
his real name. In the end, as the reaction of his fellow Cyclopes forces Polyphemus to see, outis is no name at all. This brilliant piece of linguistic chicanery,
worked out at the expense of the unfortunate and ignorant Cyclops, who insists
upon taking people at their word, is a perfect encapsulation of the Odyssean
attitude toward language, truth, and reality. But we should not be too eager to
condemn our wily hero as a villain and a cad. Even though we must constantly
recall that it is Odysseus who is telling this story and thus manipulating us as
well as the Cyclops,? we must also remember that in situations such as the one
Odysseus describes here, telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth, remaining faithful to our beloved ideals of candor and spontaneity, would
lead to unmitigated disaster. Indeed, the Cyclops episode contains an extremely
telling point against spontaneity. After the Cyclops has made his first meal of
Odysseus's companions, washing down their flesh and bone with plenty of good
fresh milk, he falls asleep right in front of the terrified survivors. Odysseus tells
us what happened next:
My heart beat higb now at the chance of action,
and drawing the sharp sword from my hip I went
along his flank to stab him where the midriff
holds the liver. I had touched the spot
when sudden fear stayed me: if I killed him
we perished there as well, for we could never
move his ponderous doorway slab aside.
So we were left to groan and wait for morning.
(9.298-306)
�67
RUBINO
The sudden fear that prevents the mmder of the Cyclops is prompted by a truly
inspired "second thought" and by typically Odyssean presence of mind. Where
most people, Achilles included, would have killed the sleeping giant in a bmst
of unrestrained spontaneity, Odysseus hangs on grimly, waiting for the main
chance, as always. Where we would have perished, gasping for our last breath·
and lamenting our lack of forethought (much as Achilles bemoans his inability
to foresee the arranged death ofPatroclus), Odysseus remains alive to pursue his
homeward journey.
Returning to the question of candor, to the matter of Odysseus revealing his
name when he is asked for it, we should remember thatin the end he does indeed
give that name to Polyphemus, using the full-dress version.
Kyklops,
if ever mortal man inquire
how you were put to shame and blinded, tell him
Odysseus, raider of cities, took your eye:
Laertes' son, whose home's on Ithaka!
(9.502-5)
That extremely rare example of Odyssean "full disclosme," uttered at an equally
rare moment when our calculating hero gives way to passion, proves catastrophic
for Odysseus and his men, for it allows the wounded Cyclops to identify his
tormentor to Poseidon, who consequently undertakes the hounding of Odysseus.
We must conclude, then, that in the Odyssey candor and spontaneity are not
highly valued as tools for survival.
Language as a disguising medium is vitally important to Odysseus throughout
his travels, but it is no less important after he returns to Ithaca, a place now
dominated by the dangerous suitors and their allies. Here, once again, telling the
unvarnished truth would have been foolhardy and suicidal. The suitor Leokritos
puts the matter quite well in Book Two, as Telemachus is preparing to go in search
of news about his father. The loyal Mentor has attempted to arouse the Ithacans
against the suitors, and Leokritos replies on their behalf:
Suppose Odysseus himself indeed
came in and fouud the suitors at his table:
he ruight be hot to drive them out. What then?
Never would he enjoy his wife againthe wife who loves him well; he'd only bring down
abject death upon himself against those odds.
(2.246-51)
Odysseus simply cannot confront the suitors directly. Where Penelope once
wove her web to deceive and delay the suitors, Odysseus must now weave his
own web of falsehood and lies. Where Penelope's clever strategem ultimately
�THE ST. JOHN•s REVIEW
68
failed. Odysseus must develop a wimring strategy, for he is playing for iufinitely
higher stakes-his life. Like the contest Odysseus the bowman announces at the
opening of Book Twenty-Two, and unlike the aristocratic contests of the
Phaeacians in Book Eight or the decadent dalliance of the suitors with the bow
in Book 1Wenty-One, Odysseus's game upon his return to Ithaca is from start to
finish an aethlos replete with afe, one in which the losers will really and truly
be blown away. 8 If Odysseus loses this one, he will die. It is therefore no accident
that Books 13-21 display the art of deception raised to its highest level, and
Aristotle has good reason to shy that "Homer more than any other has taught the
rest of us the art of framing lies in the right way.''9
IV
It is not difficult to see that Odysseus must lie if he is to survive. Yet there is
much more to it than that. Odysseus is frequently described as an "outsider," and
this notion proves crucial for understanding the relation of language, truth, and
reality in the Odyssey. The plain fact is that it is far easier for insiders to tell the
truth and to be believed than it is for outsiders to do so.
When it is a matter of simple statements of fact, such as my earlier example
"It's raining outside," verification presents no difficulties. Whether or not the
person who makes such a statement is known or unknown to us, all we have to
do is look outdoors to determine whether he is telling the truth. But reflect on
the fact that if we know and trust the person who makes such a statement, if he
is an insider, we do not take the trouble to check; we take him at his word. This
becomes especially significant in matters where verification is not so easy, where
we are compelled to take people at their word.
In such cases we take a much closer look at that word, and the criterion for
judging truth or falsehood is almost exclusively coherence. We tend not to
believe people who rave or babble. The form of presentation becomes crucial. If
something sounds true, we tend to take it as true. This may seem quite simple
and obvious, but it is not, for the canons of coherence and thus of verisimilitude
are not universal but culture-bound. What seems raving or babbling in one culture
may make perfect sense in another; what ma)<:es sense, what hangs together, what
seems true can vary from culture to culture.10 It follows that outsiders will have
difficulty getting believed in such situations, for they will have difficulty producing the required sort of coherence. This explains why the slick lawyer can
victimize the innocent, truthful, but uneducated witness. Such a witness cannot
meet the required standard of coherence. It also lies behind Pilate's refusal to
discuss the truth with Jesus. The jaded Roman is very well aware that the canons
of truth for himself and the strange foreigner standing before him are so different
�69
RUBINO
that such a discussion would either be impossible or too dangerous to risk, since
it would gravely threaten the accepted cultural norms and divisions.
Not only do the words uttered by outsiders fail to cohere in the proper way;
often those outsiders are not permitted to cohere, since they are not part of the
group whose norms they must satisfy. Thus outsiders often have great difficulty
being taken seriously, getting others to examine the !ruth-value of their words.
Take, for example, Thersites (fl. 2.211-77), the quintessential outsider despised
by both the aristocrats and the troops. What he says to Agamemnon in the
presence of the Achaeans is not very different from what Achilles says in Book
One and is considerably less insulting; furthermore, his statements can be
defended as being quite lrue. Yet he is beaten and ridiculed. He is an outsider;
he is not part of the leadership. Thus he has no right to speak the !ruth, and his
words will not be heeded. The opposite is true for Achilles, the very incarnation
of the hero, the indispensible warrior, the ideal Achaean. He can say anything he
pleases, since his place is at the very center of the group, whose embodiment he
is. Insiders like Achilles and Agamemnon can trade the most vicious insults and
accusations while still remaining accepted members of the group; in Book
Nineteen, justa few days after their acrimonious quarrel, they are reconciled and
all seems forgotten. The insider can say almost anything, the outsider almost
nothing.
Odysseus is always aware of this restriction; thus he always plans his
utterances with extreme care, knowing that his ouly chance lies in producing a
coherence so superior that it compels others to give him a hearing. His carefully
contrived, intricate webs, those marvelous Odyssean texts-remember that our
word text comes from the Latin word for weaving-ensnare Nausicaa, inducing
her to provide him with the all-important entree to the people who count in
Phaeacia; they buy him the time he needs to size up the situation at Ithaca; they
give him the opportunity to set the unfortunate snitors up for the kill; and, most
important for my purposes here, they create and maintain among the Phaeacians
that feeling of kinship with Odysseus that guarantees their promise to deliver
him safely home to Ithaca. Enthralled by Odysseus's tales and obviously hoping
for more, Alcinous reiterates his promise to arrange our hero's conveyance.
Our friend
longs to put out for home, but let him be
content to rest here one more day, until
I see all gifts bestowed. And every man
will take thought for his launching and his voyage,
I most of all, for I am master here.
(11.350-53) 11
�70
TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
v
Lucian, who claims for himself the ability to relate intricate and well-embroidered lies in a plausible manner, informs us that our "guide and instroctor" in
this sort of thing is Horner's Odysseus, who bamboozled the simple-minded and
gullible Phaeacians with those tall tales ofhis. 12 But perhaps Lucian has not given
sufficient credit to Alcinous and his court. Arete's interruption of Odysseus's
narrative (11.336-41) makes it clear to her fellow countrymen that they ought to
judge their guest favorably oil the basis of his narrative. Speaking to Odysseus
a few lines later, Alcinous himself expands upon this notion:
As to that, one word, Odysseus:
from all we see, we take you for no swindlerthough the dark earth be patient of so many,
scattered everywhere, baiting their traps with lies
of old times and of places no one knows.
You speak with art, but your intent is honest.
The Argive troubles, and your own troubles,
you told as a poet would, a man who knows the world.
(11.363-69)
Alcinous emphasizes the coherence, the verisimilitude, of Odysseus's narrative,
not its correspondence to reality. He and his fellow countrymen "believe"
Odysseus because his narrative displays morphe, the kind of coherence that
demonstrates that he-like them-is a man of good sense, phrenes esthlai
(11.367), the phrase Fitzgerald renders as "honest intent." The compelling
quality of Odysseus's narrative, which does after all deal with events that most
sophisticated audiences would take as "fictional," binds him closely to the
Phaeacians and at the same time serves to distinguish him and his gracious hosts
from that large, amorphous, and anonymous mass of outsiders. It is they, not us,
who tell lies; it is they who are not to be trosted. The compelling coherence of
Odysseus's narrative, its IIWrphe, accomplishes the essential metamorphosis,
transforming him from outsider to insider, moving him right to the center of the
group.
Alcinous's comparison of Odysseus to an epic poet reveals even greater
insight into the matter. Odysseus is believable and trostworthy because his
narrative coheres in a way that satisfies its audience's expectations and canons
of coherence, i.e., because it is art, superior fiction, successful poii!sis. The
Phaeacians come to accept Odysseus because they recognize him as a great artist,
a world-class storyteller. It is his marvelous artistic ability as a spinner of words
that enables him to survive his journey horne from Troy and the harrowing time
with the arrogant suitors, to overcome the dangers posed by alien cultures and
by decadence within his own culture. In this sense, paradoxically, Odysseus
�RUBINO
71
stands as a powerful proof that great art transcends cultural boundaries and is in
some sense universal.
One final paradox. In the end, Odysseus's narrative, for all its marvelous
coherence, artifice, and art, turns out to be gorgeously transparent as well. With
an important qualification: it displays not so much the truth of what is related
but the character of its immensely skillful narrator. Thus Aristotle is right once
again. TheOdysseyisindeedastory aboutcharacter(Poelics 1459bl2-16). Upon
reflection, then, Odysseus's words do indeed become the least deceptive mirror
of his mind, an extremely accurate reflection of what he is. But what is he? Wbat
do we mean by character, mind, or the self? For Aristotle character is something
we create for ourselves by the choices we make throughout our lives. Contemporary thinkers have also given much attention to the question of character and
the self. In the opening pages of his Mythologiques, Levi-Strauss states that
"unlike philosophical reflection, which claims to go back to its own source, the
reflections we are dealing with here concern rays whose only source is hypothetical," that emanate from a virtual focal point (unfoyer virtue[)P After observing
that the structural method employed by Uvi-Strauss "aims at preventing this
virtual focus from being made into a real source oflight, " 14 Paul de Man extends
Levi-Strauss's analogy lD literature and its "source":
The "virtual focus" is, strictly speaking, a nothing, but its nothingness concerns us very little, since a mere act of reason suffices to give it a mode of
being that leaves the rational order unchallenged. The same is not true of the
imaginary source of fiction. Here the human self has experienced the void
within itself and the invented fiction, far from filling the void, asserts itself as
pure nothingness, our nothingness stated and restated by a subject that is the
agent of its own instability. 15
We need not go quite so far in the direction of nihilism to agree that what we call
the self or our character is truly something we create for ourselves. It is an
invention, a fiction, a poiesis. Despite the many constraints placed upon us by
nature and human society, we are very much our own creations, and what we
make of ourselves as human beings is up lD us. Indeed, nature, of which we are
a part and whose processes are part of us, challenges us to become fully ourselves.
If the Odyssey is a poem that satisfies our hunger for both coherence and
transparency, a poem that is rich in truth, that truth remains the truth of fiction.
And although fiction too has its constraints, its truth remains the truth that saved
Odysseus and the only truth that can set us free.
�Tiffi ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
72
Notes:
1. Praise of Folly, trans. B. Radice (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971),
I and 5, pp. 63 and 67.
I am grateful to audiences at Brown University, the University of California, Santa Cruz, the University of Southern California, and the University
of California, San Diego, for their helpful remarks on earlier versions of
this paper.
2. I am indebted here to SO!l)e unpublished remarks of Richard Rorty, made in
response to a paper of mlne delivered at Princeton University on April 10,
1976.
3. Translations of Homer are by Robert Fitzgerald: Iliad (Garden City: Anchor/Doubleday, 1974); Odyssey (Garden City: Anchor/Doubleday, 1961).
Readers are, of course, strongly urged to examine Homer's Greek.
4. Apology 28b9-d9, trans. H. Tredennick (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,
1969). To those who would argue that II. 1.188-222, where Athena intervenes to prevent Achilles from drawing his sword against Agamemnon,
suggest that Achilles may not be quite so spontaneous as I have maintained
here, it may be replied that the need for Athena to intervene serves to
demonstrate my point. Without her intervention, Achilles' inability to curb
his "natural impulses" would have led to disaster.
5. See Ann L. T. Bergren, "Odyssean Temporality: Many (Re)Tums," in Carl
A. Rubino and Cynthia W. Shelmerdine, eds., Approaches to Homer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), pp. 38-73. There are, of course, many
other parts of the Odyssey that could have served my analysis here. Book
Fourteen, for example, shows Odysseus constructing an elaborate skein of
falsehoods to get the desired results from Eumaeus, who, unlike Polyphemus, turns out to be no fool. Especially interesting here are lines 156-57,
where Odysseus, about to tell his false story, echoes the very words of
Achilles at II. 9.312-13: "I hate as I hate Hell's own gate," he says, "that
weakness that makes a poor man into a flatterer."
6. See Norman Austin, "Odysseus and the Cyclops: Who is Who," in Rubino
and Shelmerdine (above, note 5), pp. 3-37.
7. Ibid.
8. See E. D. Francis, "Virtue, Folly, and Greek Etymology," in Rubino and
Shehnerdine (above, note 5), pp. 74-121. See also William F. Wyatt, Jr.,
"Homeric "ATH," AJP !03 (1982), 247-76.
9. Poetics 1460al9-20, trans. I. Bywater (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924).
10. See John Peradotto, "Odyssey 8.564-571: Verisimilitude, Narrative Analysis, and Bricolage," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 15 (1974),
803-32. See also his Man in the Middle Voice: Name and Narration in the
Odyssey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
II. See Od. 7.308-28 and 8.536-86. See also Peradotto (above, note 10),
Bergren (above, note 5), and James M. Redfield, "The Economic Man," in
Rubino and Shelmerdine (above, note 5), pp. 218-47.
�RUBINO
73
12. True Story 1.2-3. See 1(. 2.484-92 and Hesiod, Theogony 26-28. See also
Pietro Pucci, I-/esiod and the Language of Poetry (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1979) and "The Language of the Muses," in
Wendell M. Aycock and Theodore M. Klein, eds., Classical Mythology in
Twentieth Century Thought and Literature =Proceedings of the Comparative Literature Symposium, XI (Lubbock: Texas Tech Press, 1980), pp.
163-86.
13. The Raw and the Cooked, which is vol. II of Introduction to a Science of
Mythology, l, trans .. J. and D. Weightman (New York: Harper and Row,
'
1975), p. 5.
14. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1971; reprinted, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 11.
15. Ibid., p. 19. In a book that points us towards Derrida and "post-structuralism," the Sartrean echoes of such statements come as a surprise.
�74
TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�I
What is a Book?
Eva T. H. Brann
It is our tradition that the first lecture of the year should be dedicated to our
freshmen. They have newly joined a community whose program of learning
centers on the scheduled reading of a pre-set list of books and on the twiceweekly discussion that takes place in the seminar. They have come to us chiefly
because that is what we do here. I have read each of their applications, and I can
vouch for the fact.
Then what sort of impression will I be making on them if I ask an absurd
question like "What is a book?"-and ask it in public? Don't we, known to the
world as a Great Books College, know what a book is, even what a great book
is?
I was friends once with a little boy (we are still friends, but he is a big strapping
lawyer now, a public defender, no less) who told me he was making a rocket to
send into space. Because proper adults like to annoy little children I asked him
"What do you mean, space?" He looked at me in big-eyed amazement (he was
used to grown-ups having more answers than he had questions) and said
incredulously: "Don't you even know what space is-you know, outer space?"
So don't I even know what a book is, a great book?
Well, I do and I don't. I don't say that to create confusion. Contrary to what
some of your upper-class colleagues may try to tell you, confusion is not our
business, but rather clarification, partly because clear-headedness is one condition of open-mindedness. Aslowly developing, limited clarity of mind does seem
to me to be our business.
Nor, for that matter, is reading books our primruy activity, or even thinking
about them. Our primruy purpose is, in my opinion (I say "in my opinion"
because not everyone agrees) to reflect, which means literally "to bend (our
thought) back"-on itself and on ourselves. When you leave us in four years you
may well have chosen a career. The word "career" is related to "car" and connotes
This lecture, delivered in September, 1991, was the Dean's opening lecture of the
academic year.
�76
TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
taking off on a track, straight, speedy-and upward, we hope. The years immediately before you are, on the contrary, years ofleisure, of slow progress in a
rising circle (such as is called a spiral), of reviewing your points of origin-one
of which is yourself-from different vantage points. It is significant that we never
ask you to "take a comse" but always to "be in a tutorial." We invite you not to
course along a set track of organized knowledge, but to be active in a community
protective of learning wherever it goes, even when it goes in circles. That,
incidentally, is why your tea9hers are not called professors but tutors. These are
both Latiu words. A professor is "one who speaks out assertively in public," but
a tutor is "one who safeguards and watches" over things. A tutorial, then, is a
safe haven for learning with fifteen or so members, one of whom is the special
guardian of learning.
It is often said that there is yet another presence in the tutorial or the seminar,
the one that brings us together, the true guide and teacher, namely the great book
being studied. We often say that, and I think it is true. Not for nothing does our
college seal display seven books.
Let me take out a minute here for an interjection. You may be surprised by
my vehemence, but I want to warn you of what seems to me a very bad blight.
Countries, congregations, colleges-all have their verities, truths they keep
telliug about themselves. When a truth has been told and heard very often, it
loses, by a very natural process, its sap and its savor. Then there is a type of
person who concludes that because the truth has lost its savor for them, it is
unsavory, and they affect ennui and disdain toward it. They think the truth is flat
and falsified when it is their souls that have gone flaccid. I am not speaking of
those who vigorously oppose the truthfulness of the truth; they are the tonic that
keeps truths healthy. lam speaking of people-ourselves in certain moods-,-who
let the soul slip from the words they speak and then blame the words. The cure
for this condition seems to be to cultivate the habit of reverence. By reverence I
here mean the disposition to grant at least provisional significance to words and
sayings from which the meaning seems for the moment to have withdrawn and
to have become remote. The next step is then the effort to recover that meaning.
In that spirit I say that great books are om teachers, and this lecture is one
attempt to recall the meaning of this truism.
�BRANN
77
There is a man-you will spend much of your year arguing with him-who
intimates that it is foolish to talk about the quality and purpose of a thing before
asking what it is. In the manner of this man Socrates let me then put my title
question, to which we all know some obvious answers that turn increasingly
unobvious under reflection: What is a book?
Books as Bodies
A book appears to be, to begin with, a bodily thing. In an old college film,
which I hope you get to see sometime, there is a dorm sequence of a student
shouting upstairs to her friend: ''11rrow me down my Iliad." Down comes the
Iliad. Or it might have been her Paradise Lost, I've forgotten. Is the Iliad then a
thing subject to gravity, gaining distance as the square of the time? Is it her Iliad
or Homer's Iliad or Achilles' Iliad? Where is the place of this Iliad? In a book,
in the rhapsode's literal line-by-line memory, in the student's impressionistic
memory, nowhere, in Troy, in Hades? I say Hades, because as you will soon read
in the Odyssey, it is to the blood-drained invisible underworld that you must go
to learn the great tales on which poetry works. Again, when is a book's time of
being? When the story called the Iliad happened, in the twelfth century B.C.?
When it was told, in the eighth century B.C.? When an Athenian commission
first produced an official written version, in the sixth century B.C.? Or whenever
Johnnies read their seminar in the twentieth century, or, for that matter, in 1808
when the freshmen of this college (then called the "noviate class") first read
Homer-in Greek? (T. F. Tilghman, The Early History of St. John's College in
Annapolis, p. 36.) Or whenever Homer's poem is at work influencing lives, as
the vision of Achilles once, in the fourth century B.C., drove Alexander the Great
to the deeds that made him so?
Or is it whenever the Iliad stands on a shelf waiting to be opened? In that
most thought-provoking of children's books, Michael Ende'sNeverending Story,
the boy Sebastian, about to open the magical book he has stolen, says to himself:
I would like to lmow what actually goes on in a book as long as it's closed.
. . . One has to read it to experience it, that's clear. But it's already there
beforehand. I would like to know, how?
These are tricky perplexities that push themselves forward when you approach this book-thing with questions such as Whose possession? In what place?
At what time? Let me nonetheless stick for a while with the crudest set of
solutions, those that take a book as a physical object.
�78
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Paul Scott, the author of the Raj Quartet, the work I think of as the most
considerable novel of the time between the Second World War and our present,
was much impressed by the following prosaic account of what it is to be a book:
A small hard rectangular object, whose pages are bound along one edge into
fixed covers and numbered consecutively.
(On Writing and the Novel, p. 211, quoting Bergonzi)
As I flesh out this bare-bones definition of a bound paper book, do, please,
compare what it means to read such a book with the unrolling of a papyrus scroll
on the one hand, and the scrolling of a computer display on the other.
Books, says the passage, are small and hard, which means they are safely
carried hither and thither and can even be thrown down the stairwell. As
sophomores you will read Augustine's autobiography, in which he confesses first
his life of sin and finally his conversion to faith. He tells how his landlord let
him use the garden of the house Augustine was renting, and there he and his
friend one day carried a book, or codex, as Augustine calls it, which means a set
of wooden tablets, a sort of proto-book. It was not just any book, but a codex
apostoli. It was a pari of the The Book, to bib/ion, in English, the Bible. (Let me
take out a minute to say that the Greek word bib/ion means a thing made of biblos,
which is the word for papyrus, while papyrus itself comes into English as paper.)
Augustine was, at that time, in great agony over his sins and his doubts.
Suddenly, in the garden, he heard a child's voice saying over and over in a
sing-song tone: "Tolle lege, to/le lege," ''Take it and read it, take it and read it."
So he took the book and read what he found, and at that moment it was, as he
says in his beautiful Latin:
Quasi luce securitas infusa cordi mea, omnes dubitationes tenebrae
diffugeruut. (Corifessions VIII, 12)
"As if a light of assurance had poured into my hear!, all the shadows of doubt
fled away." If the book had not been in the garden there might have been no
voice, or if there had been a voice, Augustine would not have heeded it, or if he
had heeded it, he would have had nothing to take up and read. And he would
have missed the moment that made him, his conversion. It is because books are
portable that the ready reader can sometimes come on the word fitly spoken
To descend from the solemn to the ordinary: the bound paper book can be
carried about more conveniently than most other containers of valuables except
wallets-in a pocket, handgrip, or knapsack, to bed, bathroom, beach, or waiting
room. How many of you spent months in high school carrying around a book
until the time was ripe, and you took it and read it?
�79
BRANN
Besides being small and hard, the book of the definition is normally rectangular. Its rectangularity betokens the self-effacement of the visible layout of the
text. Let me explain.
There is something called pattern poetry. An example is the Mouse's sad Tale
in Alice in Wonderland, which looks like what it sounds like, a tail. You see here
only the tail end of the tale:
'Snch a
trial
dear sir,
With no
. jury or
JUdge,
would be
wasting
our breath.'
'I'll be
judge,
I'll be
jury,'
Said
cunning
old Fury:
'I'll try
the whole
cause,
•nd
condemn
you
to
death.'
This sort of innocent typographical game, a kind of printed calligraphy, has,
I should tell you, recently been used as a jumping-off place for grave reflections
on the latest of intellectual revolutions. A famous French intellectual has said:
Thus the calligram aspires playfully to efface the oldest oppositions of our
alphabetical civilization: to show and to name; to shape and to say; to
reproduce and to articulate; to imitate and to signify; to look and to read.
(Michel Foucault, This is Not a Pipe, p. 21)
The traditional book, it is true, suppresses the looking in favor of the reading.
It is rectangular because it breaks the narrative into optically convenient and
semantically arbitrary stacks of lines. In some traditions these are arranged
horiwntally, in some, like the Chinese and Japanese, vertically; some are read
from left to right, and some like Hebrew, from right to left so that the book begins
where an English book ends. The earliest Greek writing is sometimes read back
and forth, which is called boustrophedon, meaning ox-turning, as in plowing. I
�80
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
am sure that all these conventions carry significance with them. For instance, the
fact that Western readers' eyes survey the page in the plane of the horizon back
and forth, while Oriental readers move their head vertically as though noddingthere must be some meaning in that.
Next, Scott's quotation says that the pages of a book are numbered consecutively. This pagination is, so to speak, the street address of the narrative. That
address system makes it possible to revisit locations in a book. For worthy books
are meant to be read in a double way, so that the first reading is somehow already
the second reading. One way' is to follow the stacks of lines and the sequence of
pages straight through. Of course, while we are barging on with the inexorable
clock-say it is 6:30 on a seminar night-the time of the narrative warps back
and forth. For example, the centerpiece of the Odyssey, Books IX through XII,
where Odysseus turns poet and tells of the len years when he seemed lost to the
world, is all flashback; it is only with Book XIll that we return to the present of
the story.
But there is a second way to scramble the time of reading. It is made possible
by the fact that a book is a bound stack of numbered pages. That means you can
put slips of paper or fingers in the pages you have passed. As a visible, weighty,
numbered thing, a book is all there at once, and we can treat all its tale or
argument as simultaneously accessible.
Literary theorists have in fact invented a word for the writing that fully
exploits the non-linear property of the book format. They call it "spatial" prose.
(J. Frank in Spatial Form in Narrative, 1977.) It is spatial because it depends on
continual back-reference, on always holding the text present, as if it were all
there simultaneously just as space is-while time is always either gone or yet to
come. It seems to me that the physical format of the bound book invites the writer
to make spatialist demands on the reader. That does not mean that authors who
may not have been writers at all, like Homer, or who wrote in scrolls that show
only one place at a time, did not compose spatially. All great texts demand
continual back-reference, but book texts make it mechanically easier. The
theorists I have mentioned thought that the so-called "Modernist" writers, above
all James Joyce, were peculiarly spatial, but you will see that every Platonic
dialogue (for example) requires you to refer back all the time-a demand which
you cannot, of course, fully meet until you have studied your way through the
text once. We might conjecture, on the other hand, that a people that values time
and its sacred cyclical order might keep its scripture in scrolls, as do the Jews
their Torah.
The other place where events that are strung out in time are kept simultaneous
is memory. A book is indeed a memory analogue: an external memory. This
seems to me a wonderful thing.
The last dialogue and the last book you will read this year-in May when all
reading is a drag-is called the Phaedrus. In it Socrates will claim that any
�BRANN
81
written text is pernicious because it can't answer back when questioned, and also
because it acts as a pharmaceutical pacifier: It keeps you passively reminded and
prevents you from being actively mindful (275). Readers of dialogues might
point out to Socrates that the texts in which he appears do answer back, and
readers of books might say that a paginated book does keep us actively casting
back and forth.
Finally, a book, in Paul Scott's quotation, is bound along one edge between
fixed covers. This physical fact means that books have spines; they are upright
vertebrates. They normitlly stand on shelves next to one another. (I can't help
telling you that in my private library at home only the books I respect stand np;
the indifferent ones have to lie prone on the top shelves.) Only the spine shows,
so a book is known by its backbone. That fact in turn means that a book is
identified by author and title. In antiquity titles were evidently not always given
by the author. Who knows whether Homer would have called his song about the
wrath of Achilles after the name of Hector's city? Or what Aristotle wonld have
called his lectures on being, later called by the ambiguous title Metaphysics,
meaning either "the book that follows the Physics" or "the subject matter beyond
nature"?
In modem times, on the other hand, titles are almost always carefully crafted
armouncements of the author's intention, and they are the first thing to think
about as soon as you have finished the book once. Some titles reveal, some
retract, some complement the contents of the book. For example, as a rising
senior you will spend a glorious summer with Tolstoy's fourteen-hundred-page
novel entitled War and Peace, of which 1340 pages are devoted to war and sixty
to peace. What did Tolstoy mean by his title? Did he mean that those last pages
of peaceful family life, the so-called First Epilogue, have as much gravity, as
much cosmic significance, as all the turmoil that went before? I think so, but you
may find that your seminar divides around that question, which is made more
interesting by the fact that the Russian word for "peace" also means "world."
*
That concludes my unpacking of the definition of a book as a small hard
rectangular object, made of paginated leaves bound along one edge. So far the
answer to the question "What is a book?" has amounted to this: A book is the
kind of artifact we call a medium. It is made to mediate a text to us.
In his Physics Aristotle will observe a fundamental twofoldness in the human
world. Some things in it grow, or at least move by themselves, and these, he says,
are natures. Other things are made by a human being out of some material
according to a plan, and these we call artifacts. (I might say, incidentally, that
one of our modem perplexities is our capability for turning natures into artifacts.)
Now to figure out what a natural being or what a given artifact truly is-a house,
a marble image, a tool-is complicated enough. But to think about the kind of
�82
TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
artifact called a medium requires special subtlety. For a medium is meant to come
between the receiver and the source in such a way as to convey a message while
being itself overlooked. Telescopes, telephones, television sets, whose names
mean respectively things for scanning objects that are far off, for hearing voices
that are far off, for seeing images produced far off, are not the focus of the user's
interest when they are transmitting, and go dead or empty when not in use. But
as the book is not a medium that plays or replays some performance far off in
space or even in time, so it is not like a tape or disk that goes inactive after it has
been played. Sebastian's question-What goes on inside a book when it is
closed?- is not purely phantastic; even an unread book seems to have a sort of
secret vitality just because its text is all latent significance-imageless squiggles.
I ask the seniors if there has been a single seminar book in your three years here
that would gain very much from being illustrated. The solemn last paragraph of
Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit speaks of Spirit in time as presenting a
languidly moving "gallery of pictru·es." Ask yourselves, when you come to it,
whether you would wish someone to take Hegel at his word and produce an
illustrated Phenomenology.
In the image-smashing distmbances of late antiquity, the icono-clastic opposition to depictions of God and Christ was countered by the notion of a "Pauper's
Bible." Religious images, the iconophiles argued, are scripture for the illiterate.
Perhaps they should have conceded that for those who can "take up and read"
the written word is antagonistic to depiction, because pictures fix the narrative
in its flow, specify its intimations to the imagination, and rivet the eye on the
page. In shor~ illustrations turn a book from a medium into a presentation. They
capture the imagination and thereby drain the word.
I have only mentioned book illustrations to set off the peculiar wonder of the
verbal book as a medium-body, a medium that harbors its content without
presenting it-I mean, as I said before, that we are not caught by images, and we
read right past the print presented on the page. To me there is something elusive
and mysterious about this unpresented yet ever-present life of books which
makes the question what happens within them permissible and plausible. Of
course, I am too much of a coward seriously to propose that arguments go on
developing and characters go on conversing all over my library-and yet! And
yet-they do seem to have done just that from reading to reading. The mystery
here is that of mental life encased in a hard rectangular object.
A book, then, is a peculiar kind of medium, a medium not unlike a vessel of
the spirit-that is what makes it understandable that people might kiss a book or
swear on it or carry it always along. Yet although it is a peculiar medium, it is
still a medium. Being a medium means that it mediates between senders and
receivers, in this case, between the writers and the readers. Let me start with the
readers, since that is what we are-and there are, thaak heaven, more of us than
of them.
�83
BRANN
Readers as God-Parents
I call this section oflhe lecture "Readers as God-Parents" because I will later
liken writers to parents. A god-parent is the sponsor of a rite of spiritual
regeneration; a reader sponsors the rebirth of the book-body's soul. The first step
toward this revival is, of course, to tum the spatially all-present text back into
real, live, passing time.
There are many perplexities and complications in the conscious reading of a
book. The study of these problems is called "hermeneutics," named after Hermes,
the god of messages. It seems to me far more important to read books than to
engage in this study. I once offered a preceptorial on it which left us all unclear
whether anyone could in fact read a book. Let me proceed on the sensible
hypothesis that books are readable.
Then the first practical observation to be made is that there are different kinds
of books, and they should be read differently. It would be plain eccentric not to
quote from Frances Bacon's essay "Of Studies" here;
Some Books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be
chewed and digested; That is, some Books are to be read only in parts; others
to be read but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence
and attention.
Let me give you examples. Some people will be outraged right away and that
was part of my pleasure in writing this lecture.
I. Mysteries. When you are about to invest a portion of your life in reading
one-on the hypothesis that you will get to be eighty and that it takes three hours
to read the mystery, that would be .0000042 of your life, but these things add
up-do the following. Tom to the denouement and find out whodunnit. If you
still care to read the book, start at the beginning. Otherwise, forget it.
2. Scholarship. Read the preface. If it is clear what will be proved and why,
go on. Otherwise, forget it.
3. Minor novels. Apply the sortes Biblicae, an old mode of reading. Sortes is
a Latiu word for "chances." "The chance of the Bible" is exactly what Augustine
was bidden to take when he was told to "take up and read." If the passages you
find at random are entrancing, begin at the beginning. Otherwise, forget it.
Notice that these kinds of books are not the ones you will read for seminar,
though it is true that one of the novels on our list is, among other things, also
a murder mystery-Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov; however, that is
scarcely a minor novel.
Notice also that the books we do read for seminar all have one thing in
common: None that I can think of has an index, at least not one made by the
author. Why do great books have no index? Because you are bidden to read them
�1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
84
whole and as a whole at least once, from their pregnant beginning to their
well-delivered end. Because you are not to look up subjects that interest you or
follow through topics you specialize in. Because understanding is not an encap·
sulated result but a way, the way through the book. Because a book of stature,
be it philosophy or fiction, is not about-round-and-about-something, but is
the presentation of a matter most adequate to it in the author's judgment. (I might
say, incidentally, that Hegel gives similar reasons for arguing, in the long and
famous Preface to his Phenof!1enology, that prefaces are impossible.)
When you are reading a book for the second time you may want to do the
following to the text, provided you own the book bodily. You may want to take
a marker of the color children use when they draw the sun, and highlight
passages. How is highlighting compatible with reading the whole well? It seems
to me to be permissible for four reasons:
I. Some writers occasionally stop to put their whole meaning in a nutshell.
Whether you have come on such a nugget, you cannot really know until you have
read the whole book. If you mark a nutshell for yourself, then, when you come
on it again, you can crack it and re-develop for yourself the argument, which is
all there, in nuce. An example of this sort of nutshell is Kant's epigram, in the
Critique ofPure Reason (B75): "Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions
without concepts are blind." Whenever you recall that sentence, you can recover
the whole Critique for yourself.
2. Often you will notice, some time into the book, that a motifkeeps recurring
and that you must at some point collect its incidences and figure out its meaning.
An example is the returning vision of large blueness in War and Peace.
3. A third case of occurrences inviting highlighting is the significant mystery.
A book will say things that you don't yet understand, that are pregnant enigmas
for you, and that you want to talk about in seminar. One example for me is the
second half of the fourth tine of the Jliad:
.•• Ll.t{)~
o' ~'t£Ae!em ~OUA:f\
... Dios d' eteleieto boule
. . . and the plan of Zeus was fulfilled.
What plan? When fulfilled? That is the puzzle dominating the epic.
4. Last among the occasions for highlighting that I can think of are the
passages of personal import-those that penetrate to your heart and you want
never to lose, the ones you keep to yourself or show to close friends. I won't give
an example now, but I will tell some, if asked.
Let me say it again: Highlighting, whether in sky-blue ink or sun-yellow
marker, is for the second reading. I think that though the books may look defaced
when you are finished, the writers are rejoicing in your reading of them, be they
still on earth or in either of the other places. That brings me to the author.
�BRANN
85
Writers as Parents
We speak of "Homer's gods." "Homer's gods," we might say, "are frivolous
creatures--just compare the lightness of their invulnerable immortality to the
gravity of his death-expectant heroes." Homer's gods, Homer's heroes, Homer's
Iliad: How is the author related to the book? Auctor means literally "progenitor,
parent." And like a child, the book goes forth into the world, sometimes falling
into hands the parent may shudder at.
But like a good parent, the author knew that this would happen and gave the
offspring what it needs in order to be on its own: self-sufficiency, a certain
repleteness. Here is what I mean.
In the course of the year you will be writing at least five small papers in your
language tutolial and several more in your other classes. On some of these you
will have conferences with your tutors. Your tutor will ask: "Wbat are you saying
here, what did you have in mind?" And you will tell all the things that you thought
but failed to say in your paper. That is what distinguishes an accomplished writer:
the ability to make the book independent, to turn it loose, to find a way to get the
reader to ask not "Wbat was the author thinking?" but "What is the book saying?"
Annie Dillard, a very fine contemporary writer, who has thought much about
composing a book, says in her book The Writing Life (p. 4): "Process is nothing;
erase your tracks." She is attacking a current school of writing teachers who exalt
process over product, writing exercises over perfected expression. Here you will
almost never be asked to write merely for the sake of writing. We take a leaf, so
to speak, from the books of real writers and ask you to think about a matter that
really does make you think, and then to say on paper, as perfectly as possible,
what you have thought. That is what the authors of our books have done-they
have thought and found the right words. "Thought" is a noun, but it is also the
past form of the verb "to think." Thought is thinking that has been done, thinking
perfected. So Annie Dillard should not have said "Erase your tracks" but "Absorb
your tracks; make your product point the reader to your tracks." For writing is
thinking frozen in its tracks by speech, speech crystallized so as to make the point
of origin visible within. A book is a translucent product containing its process.
That is how Homer's Iliad can become our Iliad. It preserves within it the world
that Homer meant with each word he said. (Incidentally, it is because we want
you to write papers somewhat as real wliters write them-first think, then
say-that you will have such a devilish hard time writing, but at least the task
will dignify rather than degrade you.)
So no more than we ask your parents what they meant by producing you, need
we ask what Homer meant in his epics. The offspring in both cases are amply
provided to speak for themselves. Or rather, you are amply provided to read it.
Even the Iliad, the one that is not a matelial thing to own, is yours, the reader's.
�86
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
You bring it to life, melt its frozen state. Again I quote from Bacon, this lime
from his Advancement of Learning (Bk.l):
But the images of men's wits and knowledges remain in books, exempted
from the wrong of time, and capable of perpetual renovation. Neither are they
fitly to be called images, because they generate still, and cast their seed in the
minds of others, provoking and causing infinite actions ami opinions in
succeeding ages: so that, if the invention of the ship was thought so noble,
which carrieth riches and c~)lnmodities from place to place, and consociateth
the most remote regions iri participation of their fruits, how much more are
letters to be magnified, which, as ships, pass through the vast sea of time, and
make ages so distant to participate of the wisdom, illuminations, and inventions the one of the other?
Now the notion that you bring the hook to life seems to be close to the claim
of a currently very busy school of thought: that the reader is the author. But what
I mean is in fact a world apart from the notion that you may tease the text into
any meaning your brilliant wit devises.
On the contrary: it is the book's will, not yours, that is to be done. There is a
book by Joseph Conrad (whose novella "The Heart of Darkness," to my mind
the greatest short story of our century, you will read as seniors). The book is
called The Mirror of the Sea. It tells of the difference between going to sea in
sailing vessels and on steamboats. A steamboat plows through the water; it
conquers the ocean. Its progress is mechanical, though its route is willful. The
sail ship on the other hand respects its element and responds to its every
indication. From departure to landfall, it is engaged in a fierce and loving battle
with the sea. Its course is contingent and its arrival uncertain. A great writer, to
extend Bacon's nautical figure, provides a book that is more like a sea for sailing
than an ocean for steaming.
And that brings me to my final reflection, on the greatness of hooks. Before
I finish let me say that I know full well that I have been speaking in similes and
metaphors and that I expect to be held to a more literal account in the question
period.
Greatness in Books
St. John's is known as a "Great Books College," and, as I said early on, I
know from your applications that you came because you want to read hooks that
raise you rather than demean you.
Mr. Curtis Wilson, a retired tutor who was twice dean of the college, used to
wish that we would stop talking of"the hundred great books," and instead speak
of "some very good books." I agree with "some," but, though I see his point-
�BRANN
87
greamess is not a very sensible sort of classification-I can't quite agree to
dropping "great," not at this moment in America.
To begin with, I want to prognosticate that the more books you read, the more
you will find that there is greatness, that it is an emergent quality that some books
just have, and that each reading confirms. The community that has in common
the reading of these books and the acknowledgment of their greatness is bound
by two powerful bonds: first, the fact of a shared judgment, competently come
by and continually confirmed, and second the fact of a practical willingness to
revere what is high, a willingness expressed in a daily schedule of study.
Some of you may know that nowadays these are fighting words in academe.
How, they ask, can any communal judgment have been fairly arrived at when
we are a people divided by a diversity of hopelessly opposed interests-who are
playing, as they say, a zero sum game? How, again, can any one human
expression be higher than another, when every text is a testimonial to some
human condition, and the tradition of chosen books merely represents the
winner?
In other words, the present trend is to want democracy without commonality
and equality without excellence. To me the wish seems outrageous-and again
I am yours to question in the question period-but doubly outrageous because
it contains the seed of a fair dream. The fair dream is that the human being in us
should be universally respected and that all our works should be universally
appreciated. The forced version is that we should live in a society in which,
without admitting a common humanity, every last group discrimination based
on extrinsic properties, such as race and sex, is outlawed, while all intellec1nal
discriminations based on intrinsic criteria of quality are proscribed as having
ulterior motives.
Let me offer two rules for choosing books to read that take some account of
what is fair in the desire for universal appreciation.
Here is Law One of the Discriminating Reader: Devour everything you can
swallow with relish, indiscriminately. Test texts as I recommended before, but
give everything a try. There are dozens of wonderful genres and fine works
within them: science fiction, utopias, and fantasy; children's, ethnic, and
women's literature; westerns, adventures, and thrillers; book reviews, political
flyers, and literary criticism. (If you come to see me in my office I will be
delighted to tell you my loves and hates in each category. I also know a lot of
rather pleasing trash, including comic books.)
Law Two of the Discriminating Reader then goes as follows: Read only a
limited number of books, perhaps a hundred and twenty or so; discriminate
severely; while attending to a text allow a little voice on the sidelines to say:
"This is great and worthy of my best time; that is not."
�88
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Far from being at odds, Law One and Law Two are complementary. Obeying
the first shows you to be a lover of books, a bibliophile; obeying the second
makes you a student, a reader.
But how will you judge that a book is great? I had a teacher, forty years ago
in Brooklyn College, who said that some books made her hair stand on end, and
they were great. Much as I like this criterion, which, I have since discovered,
was not original with her, I see some flaws in it. But there are many other
diagnostic marks, signs and indices of greatness, that people have listed, and we
might talk about them in the question period. Let me add to that multitude one
observation of my own, which does not so much pick out greatness as distinguish
greatness in works of fiction from greatness in works of reflection:
In a great epic or drama or novel, if any word were different, the tale told
would be other than it is; in a great philosophical treatise, every sentence could
be paraphrased and the truth told would be the same.
To make myself clearer, let me take the counter-example, that of lesser books.
A mediocre novel tells a tale coarse-meshed enough, with characters grossgrained enough, to be equally presentable in language only approximately
equivalent. A mediocre piece of philosophy, on the other hand, can't be told to
its advantage in other terms: It is ali idiosyncratic jargon and its ordinary
language paraphrase puts it to shame. That is why trying to say exactly what the
book says in another way is the useful initial exercise in seminar when the work
is philosophical, but is love's labor lost when the work is fictional. And that is
why it is usually harder to read a novel than it is to read a philosophical
text-except perhaps when that text is also a drama. I am referring to the Platonic
dialogues, the first of which you will be reading right after Homer. They are the
hardest of all, since they are philosophical plays-you will decide whether
tragedy or comedy.
Let me end, if not conclude. My question for myself and for you was: "What
is a Book?" My answer was: It is a specialkindofbody made to be inhabited by
a curious kind of frozen but fusible soul, a body fit to mediate its own peculiar
life. It has a parent, the author, who equips it with all it needs to live on its own,
and god-parents, readers, who can revivify its printed life. The books that realize
their book nature most perfectly may be called "great," and it is from these that
we at St. John's College have selected a number for study. Both because it is a
strenuous and wearing business to be constaritly in their presence, and for reasons
of inclusive humanity, it is good to read many lesser books as well.
Have I answered the question I posed for us? Not remotely. Let us try again
in the question period.
�Poems
J.H. Beall
Sandra Hoben
Kemmer Anderson
J.H. Beall is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis, and an astrophysicist. His latest
published collection of poems is entitled Hickey, the Days. Poems of Sandra Hoben, a
graduate of the College, have appeared in the Partisan Review and the Antioch Review.
Her volume of poetry, Snow Flower, was published by the Westigan Press. Kemmer
Anderson, an alumnus of the Graduate Institute, teaches English in Chattanooga.
�90
THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
Foxfire
J.H.Beall
A foxfire scattering of stars
and a lone planet hang low
over the nqrtheast, where the wind
comes from, down like a coyote,
nose down, its warm tongne licking
a chill out of the earth, the dawn's
chill of stiff awakenings after
the night's dancers, their supple sweat,
the way it loves its body, then sinks
into salt rest. The earth last
night sank so, its blush and rose
twilight giving up the light so well
that those in their houses walked out
into the roads and yards, arms folded
their skins flushed with an excitement
drawn of this pink light, and discussed
it-not the coyote's old trail
they stood on, but the huge
evanescent cathedral of light
that reared before them like a great
dancer, his headdress streaming
its eagle wildness, while they talked
their awe of its wordless beauty.
The subtle dawn, alone with foxfire,
now reclaims. It licks the wounds
that words have made in us, that we
in that first step down made of ourselves.
�POEMS
91
Wendy
J.H. Beall
At first each day she expected
at the window a faint tapping
not Unlike the new bud tossed
in a spring breeze, its index
prodding quizzically the cold, flat pane.
But different-night again
come alive. Then the years
like a mist obscuring
softened the longing pain, and she
wondered that it might have been
a dream. Her husband held her
and she woke as a princess
whose cheeks like pink blossoms
held a living promise: children
and her father's house. Where
after many years the tapping
came again late one night,
and perhaps because of the nature
oflove or the imperative of dreaming .
instead of rebuke she opened wide
the windows and gave her children to it.
�92
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Republic
(for William)
J.H. Beall
I recall you when the sentences
were not of silence, your eloquence
not a single stare. How one time
in a fit of humor at the pique
of au adversary, aside in my
cramped kitchen, you confided,
"I think I'm beginning to get through
to him." Always. The apologist
for another's ignorance. In the way
you smile now, you apologize
for my own at not being able
to enter into that world
where the mind flickers shapes
into existence, a dark theater
not unlike a cave you try
to climb out of, we try
to climb out of. What I want
to say is theater, really. Yearning
for a time when my life played
grandly upon the stage, the wall
of your memory-Nicholson
on that promontory for example
kneeling before the old, silent
father's fierce, blank gaze
(the hardest piece being the future)
tears on his face as he says
"auspicious beginnings-we both know
I was never really that good, anyway."
�93
POEMS
Leda and the Swan
Sandra Hoben
It so happens
she wasn't totally
averse to the situation.
She was walking along
the marshy edge of the pond, glad
to be away from the company of men.
She noticed things
that had escaped her for monthsthe ducks with brown and white feathers,
uniform as men in tweed suits,
and others, a flash of emeralds
at the throat. She'd been told
that with birds, fue male
wears rouge and diamonds.
How do they do it?
A pillow fight when the seam suddenly rips,
and at other times more like fish,
swimming past each other, never touching.
Engrossed as she was
she didn't notice
the swan gliding up to her,
his wings held heart-shaped,
one foot cocked over his back,
the other a rudder.
Then he stood in front of her,
stuck out his belly, and flapping his wings,
drew himself up to his full bird heighta bit ridiculous.
But he had no choice.
She lifted her arms, and he was in them.
�94
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Like the Inhabitants of Plato's Cave
Sandra Hoben
Like the inhabitants of Plato's cave,
my son, il) his third month,
is more interested in the shadow
of his hands than in his hands themselves.
He holds them up to the light
and watches the dark shapes fonn
as creatures march to join him,
facing forward, some whirliog and homed.
Once, in the beginning, my milk gave out
and he cried all day for the pain and injustice
I'd brought him to. That night
I curled around him, he turned
inside me once again, and we rocked.
The lamp burned behind us:
two Indonesian puppets cast on the wall.
But today when he cries, I give the pram a shake
and flip through his birth pictures,
those images of him naked and streaked
with my blood, throwing open his arms
and all his fingers against the harsh light.
It calms me-and therefore himto try to make out the figures:
the nurse's ann like a branch shading him,
the doctor's face as the scale tips.
Then they stapled shut the slash
across my belly with little hinges,
holding the rest of the dark inside me.
�POEMS
95
Parallel Lines
Sandra Hoben
By definition, parallel lines never meet. This fact makes it possible for
bird cages to exist, and jails of all sorts, railroad tracks, picture frames,
director'schairs. And v;e can walk to the store and back, water the garden,
watch the shadows lengthen on the lawn.
But parallel lines meet at infinity, which makes it possible to get to
Chicago, build fires, tame animals, and we have eggbeaters, hammocks,
the hulls of ships. We can tune banjos, swim, read books more than once;
folk dances can be passed down, and rings.
If parallel lines meet at infinity, it is also true they never meet;
conversely, if they do not meet at infinity, it is also not true they never
meet. And so we are lonely and confused, our dreams have coins in them,
our pets die. There are eclipses, earthquakes, falling stars. And although
we can see the spiral within shells and the delicate double circle within
flowers, we will never understand what we already know, and, even if we
did, there would be nothiog we could do about it.
�96
TIIE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
The Iliad of Assateague Island
Kemmer Anderson
Fog dissolves the form of horse into sand
and night at Assateague Island, but I
still hear the sound of snort and stomp on land.
Waves of hoofbeats trample around my eye
steering chariots through the press of shields
as I sleep by the beached black ships from Crete.
Drugged with a vision of Mountlda 's fields,
a warrior calls for immediate retreat:
I am sick of words, tactics, and command.
The olive boughs of home brush through my dreams
with a need to reap what I understand:
nothing in war is ever as it seems.
�Re-Reading:
A Note on Ibsen and Wagner
Elliott Zuckerman
Recently, in preparation for a seminar, I returned to The Wild Duck, a play that
I last read and discussed almost forty years ago. At that time, my Cambridge tutor
was an Ibsenite, and in his presence we subscribed to the view that Ibsen was a
dramatist of the highest rank-a view expressed during the same era by Una
Ellis-Fermor in the introduction to her translations for Penguin, where we can
still read, mentioned as a matter of course, that Ibsen was one of the five greatest
playwrights in history. The others, I suppose we can rightly assume, were the
Greek tragedians and Shakespeare, and about them almost everyone will agree.
But these days there seems to be doubt about Ibsen as the fitting fifth. At St.
John's College he has been only an intermittent visitor to the reading list, whereas
Racine and Moliere are central in the language tutorial. My candidate for the
fifth position would be Moliere, if only in order to have a representative of
Comedy-not the Shakespearian romance but the unalloyed comedy that is rarer
and harder to invent. But even where Ibsen is accepted into the Pantheon, be it
of five, six, or seven, he is the only one there who is in danger of being considered
old-fashioned. There is some significance in the fact that the great playwright
who is fading also happens to be the most recent.
My tutor had written a book about Ibsen's dramatic technique.' The thesis
was simple: that in order to get at the full meaning of Ibsen's dramas one had to
attend carefully to the stage directions. The characters are presented "not only
through the dialogue but also through the suggestiveness of visual details
contained in his visually important stage-directions, which so many producers
have perverted ... always to a play's detriment" (p. 11). That Ibsen attached
prime importance to the visual and directorial details is persistently documented,
not only in the texts themselves but in Ibsen's instructions to the producers of
the early productions and, above all, in the many drafts of the plays, where one
• John Northam, Ibsen" s Dramatic Method: A Study of the Prose Dramas. London:
Faber and Faber, 1953.
�98
TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
can trace the evolution of those details. He was scrupulously attentive to such
matters as the placement of the white shawl in Rosmersholm, and there is much
to be learned from how Hedda Gabler wears her hair.
Such attention to the telling detail that is simultaneously realistic and symbolic seems to me to be Wagnerian. It was Wagner, after all, whom Nietzsche
called the supreme miniaturist. Given the size and length of the music-dramas,
Nietzsche probably intended to sound paradoxical. But seldom did Wagner allow
the sweep to override the mmnentary. I have in mind not Wagner's peremptory
stage-directions so much as that staple of his technique which is their aural
counterpart, the famous leitmotivs, the musical phrases that underline and
interpret the action at every moment. At their most obvious they have been
accused of merely duplicating what we already know-as in the well-known
remark, variously attributed, about idiots presenting their calling -cards in person.
At their most subtly effective they themselves constitute the true action and the
most interesting ideas-as in the third act of Tristan, where it is in the orchestral
interweaving of the significant musical phrases that we apprehend the remarkably descriptive self-analysis of the delirious lover. Each wave of the everdeepening self-discovery is set in motion by a fragment of the Old Tune, played
originally on the English Hom. Overtly the Tune is a mournful reminder that
Isolde's ship has not yet been sighted; but it is also used as a melismatic bridge
to Tristan's childhood, in the contemplation of which he realizes that the brewer
of the love-potion was none other than himself.
I wanted Ibsen's visual details to work as well as Wagner's musical details
do when they are at their best-to seem natural, as they do for Tristan and for
his blood-brother Amfortas, and not mechanical, as they often are for the Gods
of Rheingold and even for the ordinary people in Meistersinger, that most
breathtakingly complex but also most factitious (and least funny) of great
operatic comedies. Both playwright and music-dramatist had something like a
"system" for putting together works that could sustain a long evening (or many
long evenings), and systems are more likely to reveal a mechruiical than an
organic configuration.
What seemed to me to be the weakness of The Wild Duck was the obtrusiveness of its central symbol, the bird itself. There is something arbitrary in
furnishing the Ekdal household with a loft containing a wounded duck, along
with other birds and some rabbits, in an artificial forest of old Christmas trees.
Yet once the image is embraced-with, perhaps, the palliative observation that
the play is foreshadowing the final plays, which are explicitly and therefore
acceptably "poetic"-all the other images fit neatly into the central pattern. The
duck, that is to say, is uncomfortably necessary for the motion of the machine.
Among the other images, I am thinking particularly of one that I had not
properly attended to in my original reading. In the first act-the only act that
does not take place in the Ekdals' apartment-the comfortably furnished study
�WCKERMAN
99
of the Werle household is provided with "lighted lamps with green shades, giving
a subdued light" In contrast we can see further within to another room, "large
and handsome," which is "brilliantly lighted with lamps and branching candlesticks."
The green lampshades are missing from the first draft When Ibsen added that
important detail, he was visually reinforcing the connection between the first act
and the last Once we know the play and start it again, attentive to the greenish
light and noticing which of the actions and conversations go on in its shadow,
we realize that the peivading color of the Ekdal loft is being significantly
adumbrated from the outset By the end of the play we have connected the
first-act green with both the green of the "forest" in which old Ekdal goes
hunting-the abode of the wild duck-and the green of the sea, from the depths
of which the duck had once been rescued. Since almost every other image of the
play is related to that forest and that sea, the green shade can prompt any number
of green thoughts. In the setting of Act Five, for example, the "wet snow [that]
lies upon the large panes of the sloping roof-window" places the Ekdal studio
plainly under water. Both the framing acts are imaginatively submarine, and the
complex interrelatedness of the images does much to justify the arbitrariness of
the central symbol.
My sense of that arbitrariness was anyway diminished by the seminar
discussion. In response to the opening question-which was really an expression
of my doubts about the duck-someone reminded me that within the play (so to
speak) it was, after all, the Ekdals themselves who had invented their unlikely
attic; the loft and its inhabitants were projections of the Ekdals' strange and
self-deceptive psyches. The symbol seems less mechanical when one emphasizes
not the playwright's imposition into the play but the apt inventiveness of the
characters within it
There is an intellectual pleasure, albeit a minor one, in tracing and contemplating these visual and verbal interconnections. And because there are few
productions of Ibsen these days, and they seldom, so far as I know, follow his
visual prescriptions, we can only indulge in the pleasure by imagining his settings
while reading, helped, perhaps, by my Tutor's handbook. Those who enjoy the
musical equivalent of such tracing and contemplating are by no means similarly
deprived_ In addition to the music, available with an ease that the builder of
Bayreuth could scarcely have foreseen, the Wagnerian decades left us a legacy
of handbooks and commentaries, all for the delight of those devotees whom
Nietzsche ungenerously called Educated Philistines. To follow the mirrorings of
the motives is dazzling, and one is overawed by an appreciation of the master's
control of his system. Hence there is a danger. Seldom ·do such maps of
interconnections encourage one to delve downward from the motives, even in
such seminal places as the Prelude to the Ring, where the long-sustained major
triad should lead to questions not only about the myth that follows but about the
�100
TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
nature of music itself. If the motion is merely lateral, one is condemned to the
surface.
If the Ibsen industry had ever matched the Wagner industry, then by now the
greens and the forests, the snows and the seas, the towers and the tarantellas,
would be as thoroughly codified as the swords and the dragons, the Desire for
Dominion and the Redemption through Love. But the visual and even the verbal
are never so powerful as the musical, and Wagner knew what he was doing when,
in his search for control of a vast audience, he enlisted the arsenal of tonal music.
At first his talent for music seemed slim, but it was expanded to greatness by the
demands of his genius. Had he been unable to commandeer the effectiveness still
latent in the language of Beethoven (and of Chopin and Liszt), Wagner's genius
would have been a great deal less than Ibsenian.
For decades the music-dramas have easily withstood the stylized productions
that ignore the prescribed pictures, or place the drama within some entirely alien
setting, usually to make a political point. Ibsen caunot survive comparable
treatment, for the settings that carry the symbolic weight are the counterpart not
of Wagner's settings but of his music. Ibsen in the Round is not the equivalent
of a Ring enacted on discs and slabs; it is like Wagner reorcheslrated or even
reharmonized. And just as no director, however self-centered, is allowed to
tamper with the music of Wagner-it is, indeed, held to be more inviolable than
even Mozart's and Verdi's, where the separable numbers can be omitted or
re-arranged-so no one ought to change the settings of Ibsen. Though he was
deprived of their sunlight, Ibsen, like his contemporaries Monet and Cezanne,
knew precisely where to place his colors.
�I
Results of St. John's
Crossword Number Two
On the next page is the solution to Crossword Number 1\vo, "Canonic Eponyms," by Trout. The nine clueless answers are various Saint Johns. The allusion
for older alumni was to Nine St. John's, a dorm building that used to be on St.
John's Street. The fourth of Charlotte Fletcher's essays was about the naming of
the College. All the names are to be found in a Martyrology, along with the
Catholic Encyclopedia and Butler's Lives.
There was only one submission, a correct solution solved jointly by Ann
Martin and Meredith Gardner. For this prize the amount of the book token is
increased to $50. Number 1\vo was a hard one. Number Fow·, by a new compiler,
Captain Easy, is easier. There is more cross-checking than is usual in such
puzzles, but the Captain hopes you enjoy the clues.
The solution to Crosswonl Number Three will appear in the next issue, along
with the announcement of the prize-winners.
�102
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Solution to Crossword Number Two
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�St. John's
Crossword Number Four
"Famous Pairs"
By CAPTAIN EASY
At the asterisked numbers, no clues are provided. The answers fall into five pairs
that have something in common. The clued answers include nine (or ten) words
that should be capitalized, a German word and a French word (both well known),
and two common acronymic abbreviations. As usual, three book tokens of $35,
redeemable at the College Bookstore, will be awarded to the first three correct
solutions opened at random. The date for the opening is a month after the mailing
of the issue.
�104
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Across
5.
11.
13.
14.
Shiner sounds earnest (6)
Tune arrangers have it (3)
Tutor, return the bow (3)
I can make a fuss when
raised (4)
16. Listlessness is current, righthand man comes back (6)
18. I sold broken images (5)
19. Ungulate takes a trip (5)
21. Lengthen likewise (3)
22. Study, replace the extremes
with aural ease (5)
24. Revelation in one book or
another (5)
25. Exploits in various essential
ways (5)
31. Spout "Raven!" (3)
33. Is this how we now refer to
connected twins? (4)
34. A band-Wagner's starts in the
Rhine (4)
35. Perhaps Grecian, but run
badly (3)
38. A bird-a loud bird (4)
40. Rising for a degree (10)
42. Whatever way you look at it,
he's essential (4)
44. Set disheveled Cockney
hairdo (5)
45. Follow the Development with
some more capital (5)
47. The element is Back Bay (3)
52. Iu retrospect, let Siegfried
display spirit (5)
54. Disconcertingly loud, the
Spanish in the practise of
swordplay (6)
56. Flyer in the afternoon (4)
57. St. John's College is not in this
league (3)
58. One is confused for an
eternity (3)
60. Sat on a mistuned Hammerklavier, for example ( 6)
Down
2. Stock rush (4)
3. Lake loses energy, flows back
in rage (3)
4. Pater, a movement in art (4)
5. A resort in southern
Penosy lvania (3)
6. Louis, perhaps, or I? (3)
7. State missing a brave (6)
8. Leap tlu·ough the stable tours
oddly (6)
9. YY (a clever clue) (4)
10. Decline tax in No. 3, reversed (9)
12. Funny priest, most ready
to eat (6)
14. A,noble number (5)
15. Victory mirrored in Peking (4)
17. Take a walk at the Albert
Hall? (9)
19. At first the unusual notes evoke
a melody (4)
23. A sound an sich (4)
26. Me? Prof? Err? Confound it, I
did! (9)
27. Ben sound like that woman (3)
29. Anooying horse (3)
30. Hope and Crosby went there in a
trio (3)
32. Big Bird, headless author of Treatises is back (3)
33. Etta's London showplace (4)
36. The Persian Milhaud (6)
37. It's OK in the Savoy (4)
40. Seed begins growing, drops (5)
41. Start "Singing in the Rain"
-it's sweet (6)
43. Can't see the color (4)
46. Emphatically, put down the
cheap wine (British) (5)
48. Ballet painter is backward,
incomplete, and elderly (4)
50. It can be square and lame (4)
�CAPTAIN EASY
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Down (continued)
51. League of Nations, in a dumb
location (4)
53. Tube, a southern source of
power (3)
54. Genetic and misdirected (3)
55. Eighty yards of worsted
pasture (3)
����
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<em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College. All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to </span><em>The St. John's Review</em><span>, St. John's College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or via e-mail at </span><a class="obfuscated_link" href="mailto:review@sjc.edu"><span class="obfuscated_link_text">review@sjc.edu</span></a><span>.</span><br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> exemplifies, encourages, and enhances the disciplined reflection that is nurtured by the St. John's Program. It does so both through the character most in common among its contributors — their familiarity with the Program and their respect for it — and through the style and content of their contributions. As it represents the St. John's Program, The St. John's Review espouses no philosophical, religious, or political doctrine beyond a dedication to liberal learning, and its readers may expect to find diversity of thought represented in its pages.<br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> was first published in 1974. It merged with <em>The College </em>beginning with the July 1980 issue. From that date forward, the numbering of <em>The St. John's Review</em> continues that of <em>The College</em>. <br /><br />Click on <a title="The St. John's Review" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=13"><strong>Items in the The St. John's Review Collection</strong></a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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The St. John's Review, 1991-92/1
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Zuckerman, Elliott
Brann, Eva T. H.
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
Sachs, Joe
Stickney, Cary
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Hunt, Jack
Sachs, Joe
Fisher, Howard
Kass, Amy Apfel
Rubino, Carl A.
Beall, J. H.
Hoben, Sandra
Anderson, Kemmer
Trout
Captain Easy
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Volume XLI, number one of The St. John's Review. Published in 1992.
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The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_41_No_1_1991-1992
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<em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College. All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to </span><em>The St. John's Review</em><span>, St. John's College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or via e-mail at </span><a class="obfuscated_link" href="mailto:review@sjc.edu"><span class="obfuscated_link_text">review@sjc.edu</span></a><span>.</span><br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> exemplifies, encourages, and enhances the disciplined reflection that is nurtured by the St. John's Program. It does so both through the character most in common among its contributors — their familiarity with the Program and their respect for it — and through the style and content of their contributions. As it represents the St. John's Program, The St. John's Review espouses no philosophical, religious, or political doctrine beyond a dedication to liberal learning, and its readers may expect to find diversity of thought represented in its pages.<br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> was first published in 1974. It merged with <em>The College </em>beginning with the July 1980 issue. From that date forward, the numbering of <em>The St. John's Review</em> continues that of <em>The College</em>. <br /><br />Click on <a title="The St. John's Review" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=13"><strong>Items in the The St. John's Review Collection</strong></a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
Sachs, Joe
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Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Hunt, Jack
Sachs, Joe
Kraus, Pamela
Allanbrook, Wye J.
Smith, Edward C.
Allanbrook, Douglas
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The St. John's Review
Volume XLII, number one (1993)
Editor
EllfDttZuckerman
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
Joe Sachs
Cary Stickney
John Van Doren
Robert B. WU!tamson
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Jack Hunt
The St. John's Review Is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's
College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President; Eva T. H. Brann,
Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $15.00 for
three Issues. Unsolicited essays, stories, poems, 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
$5.00 per Issue, from the St. John's College Bookstore.
© 1993 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 CoUege Print Shop
�Please note that this year, and for at least one year more, the
Review wlll be appearing semi-annually rather than three times
a year. Subscriptions wlll of course be adjusted so that what was
a year's subscription will still entitle the subscribers to three
Issues.
�Contents
1 . . . . . Seeing Through the Images:
Eva Brarm's World of Imagination
Dennis L. Sepper
21 ..... Joseph and Judah
Chantnah Maschler
41 ..... What is a What-is Question?
Joe Sachs
57 ..... "Words Should Be Hard" (Poem)
Elliott Zuckerman
59 ..... Anselm's Proslogion and its
Hegelian Interpretation
Adriaan Peperzak
Translated by Steven Werlin
79 ..... The Dialectic of Love in War and Peace
Randolph Perazzini
105 ..... Two Poems
Moira Russell
107 ..... Two Reviews
Eva T. H. Brann
111 . . . . . Crossword Contests
Decorations by M. C. Dodds
��Seeing Through the Images:
Eva Brann's
World of Imagination
by Dennis L. Sepper
At the outset of The World of the Imnginotion: Swn and Substance,•
Eva Brann explains how the project of the book originated:
In 1he Western tradition 1he imagination is assigned what might
best be called a pivotal function. It is placed centrally between 1he
faculties and intermediately between soul and world. Thus it bo1h
holds the soul together within and connects it to the objects
wi1hout. Yet the treatment given this great power even by habitually
definitive authors like Aristotle or Kant is tacitly unfinished, cursory, and problematic. The imagination appears to pose a problem
too deep for proper acknowledgment. It is, so to speak, 1he missing
mystery of philosophy. It was both 1he mystery and its neglect that
first drew me to 1he subject. (p. 3)
In the Preface Brann lists other motives for her Interest in Imagination. Beyond the odd neglect of Its mysteries by philosophy there Is
the recent vogue of imagery studies in cognitive psychology; her love
of fiction and the attendant wonder about how words are turned into
Imaginings; and "the doubly and triply enigmatic magic of the Imaginative life," the encompassing motive that led to the desire for a "delineation of the inner space into which the mental imagery Is, as it were,
• Eva T. H. Brann, The World ofthe Imagination: Sum and Substance (Savage,
Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991), x!v + 810 pp. References to It are
indicated in 1he tex! by page numbers enclosed In parentheses. The book Is
now avallable in paperback.
Professor Sepper is In 1he Department ofPhllosophy of the Universlzy of Dallas
in Irving, Texas.
�2
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
painted, and a theory of Its reflection In the material Images of the
arts, particularly In paintings" (4).
These motives In effect articulate the structure of the book. Part
One Is dedicated to the history of philosophers' attempts to explicate
Imagination, Part Two to the chief phenomena and topics pursued by
twentieth-century psychological Investigations; this leads to Part
Three, In which Brann presents a three-fold logic/ ontology of Images
as real, mental, and Imaginary. Part Four treats questions of literary
Imagination; Five, the spaces of perceptual experience, of geometry and
physical modeling, and of the painter's Images. The last major division,
Part Six, discusses Imagination as worldly and world-making, especially In Its theological, public-political, and affective character, that
Is, In those aspects that direct It to life In a many-dimensioned world
of feeling, thought, and action.
Not the least of the book's achievements Is to organize a vast
amount of Information and literature that might otherwise scare off
beginning researchers, or, what would be worse, might lead them to
concentrate prematurely on just some part. The problem is that In
studies of Imagination a single approach cannot stand for the whole,
and the various contributions are so diverse and fragmentary and tend
to make so many presuppositions that one is In constant danger of
not even glimpsing the whole.
Yet anyone who has tried to assemble literature on the Imagination
knows that, at least at first glance, imagination appears to be among
the least neglected of subjects. Judging from the frequency and
prominence with which "Imagination" and Its related forms appear in
the titles of books and articles one Is tempted to say that it Is a very
popular topic. But by looking Into the contents we more often than
not find that these works are not really about Imagination In any
lmporlant sense. The problem Is that "Imagination" In the late twentieth century Is an attention-getter, a word loaded with almost wholly
positive overtones. It strikes us with admiration for artistic creativity
to read of the Imaginative VIsion of poet X or sculptor Y; we experience
anticipated satisfaction that a philosophic work brandishing Imaginative Reason will overcome the mincing small-mindedness of rationalism. We inwardly assent when anyone urges the cultivation of our
powers of Imagination, and we are easily brought to marvel at the
Imaginative Intensity of children, who (we believe) are richly endowed
with it. Yet If we were asked to give a reasoned argument for such
Impulses, we would probably discover that behind them lies less a
concrete understanding of what Imagination and Images are than a
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vague yearning for creativity, for visionary power, for transcending a
too mundane reality.
The historically minded will recognize traces of Romanticism In
these twentieth-century Impulses. To identifY them Is not to dismiss
them as false, however. Indeed, Brann, having taken a jaundiced view
of Romanticism, nevertheless remarks In the very last section of the
book ("Coda," p. 790) that "sober romanticism" Is a "perfectly acceptable term" for the "life centerecj on the imagination" that she proposes:
"a life in which the imagination is suspect except as it is seconded by
reflection and fulfilled in action, a life in which the imagination is not
worshiped as an autarchi!' source but understood as the enigmatic ·
conduit of visions."
The philosophical basis of The World of Imagination Is most concisely expressed in the Preface:
This book is frankly writien par/1 pris. It has a multiple thesis. Its
parts are these: There is an imagination; it is a faculty or a power;
spectfically it is a faculty for internal representations; these representations are image-like; therefore they share a certain character
with external images; in particular, like material images, they
represent absent objects as present; they do so by means of
resemblance. (5)
The sobriety of the romanticism announced in the coda Is grounded
here. The power or faculty called "imagination" Brann understands as
not essentially creative but recreative, or, more accurately, representational by way of resemblance. The object of imagining Is mental
images, which are like publicly visible Images. Accordingly, a great
deal of the book js devoted to understanding the power of imagination
by concentrating on the objectofthat power, on images, more precisely
on visual images. This Is true to the degree that at times it Is the image
even more than the imagination that is the real subject-matter of this
study.
But simply quoting from the beginning and end ofa book can falsifY,
subtly or worse, the meanings of an author. With Eva Brann's book,
we would thereby overleap the accomplishment of the nearly eight
hundred intervening pages: a compendium of the history and the
phenomena of the imagination, along with a significant attempt to
penetrate philosophically and psychologically the nature of images
and the power that produces them. The "sober romanticism" that she
espouses on page 790 Is hardly meant as a slogan, since every word
of her description has a qualification distilled from the preceding
investigation. Imagination is as central as the Romantics thought, but
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4
JOHN'S REVIEW
not autonomous or autarchic, because It Is In need of being thought
out and sometimes lived out; and though It "sees," the source and
nature of the seeing Is puzzling, even mysterious.
1.
The positive notion of Imagination as creative Is a legacy of Romanticism, yet not just that, for although the precise filiations and Influences are In dispute there Is an ancestor tradition that goes back to
Neoplatonlsm and to the ecstatic and prophetic Imagination of medieval Islamic thinkers like Averroes; It passes through the Italian
Renaissance and Dante, for whom altafantasia and altotngegnoreach
to the threshold of divine illumination. Indeed, this tradition directly
enters Romanticism through F. W. Schelling's appropriation of
Giordano Bruno.
A Platonic origin for this tradition might at first seem an unlikely
prospect, especially if we are mindful of the apparently devastating
critique of mimetic art at the conclusion of the RepubUc, where Images
are described as several times removed from truth because the maker
of Images deals In derivative simulacra rather than ultimate reality.
Still, from other passages in the RepubUc (and elsewhere In the
dialogues-for example, In the Sophist), especially from the question
that occurs to many readers-by Book Ten of the RepubUc If not
sooner-of whether It Is not possible after all for artists to have direct
access to the Ideas, there Is justification for a more positive Platonic
conception of Imagination. From the simile of the Divided Line above
all: for although images strictly speaking appear on the lowest of Its
four divisions (images of physical things, the physical things themselves, the mathematlcals, and the Ideas), the different levels serve as
images or representations of one another, and there is in general an
ontological relationship of Imaging that ties together the line as a
whole. Viewed from this perspective the Divided Line shows not the
unreality of Images but the ontological dynamics of Imaging and the
sharing of reality on many levels that characterize the Good (for which
the Line itselfis an extended image). If Plato presents images variously
as intrinsically false, as representing an Other, and as standing for
the whole of reality, it is not surprising that quite different notions of
Imagination can claim descent from him.
In contrast, Aristotle has a more carefully circumscribed understanding of images and imagination, also more narrowly psychological; yet because of a crucial provision In the psychology they play a
central, indeed essential, role in human knowing and being. In the
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third book of De Anima he remarks the existence of phantasia, a power
of soul that retains the effects (or aftereffects) of sensations in the
absence of the sensed objects. A little later, after his discussion of
agent and potential intellect, he makes an astounding and pregnant
claim: that there Is no thinking without phantasms. We also find out
that phantasms are Important to the practical life. since desire often
aims at Its object through their Intermediacy.
On the one hand it is easy to understand the point of these
affirmations. The Aristotelian conception of knowing has us derive
everything Intelligible from the sensible, and accordingly Imagination
can be seen as a middle power which is not dependent on the
immediate presence of sensible objects and which can perform a kind
of distillation of what individual sensations have provided. On the
other hand, Insofar as we conceive the best human activity as the
contemplation of the highest, noncorporeal being, and insofar as
understanding is in and through noncorporealintelligible species, the
doctrine that all thinking requires phantasms seems to tie thought
too closely to a remnant of the physical realm.
In later Greek and Latin Antiquity and in the Islamic and Latin
Middle Ages Aristotle's discussions of imagination, common sense,
and memory were gradually expanded Into a doctrine of internal
senses having corporeal locations in the brain (specifically in the
cerebral ventricles, that is, the four spaces or chambers within the
enfolding hemispheres of the brain). Any simplified presentation of the
internal senses doctrine risks distortions and historical falsifications,
not just of the exact delimitation of their functions but even of their
names; here It Is enough to say that the internal senses accounted for
the common field of sensation where the deliverances of the different
sense organs are compared and contrasted (the common sense), for
the various functions of remembering and recalling contingent experience (memory in general), for the ability to recall and recombine
tmages (under the names tmagination and phantasia), and even for
the mind's ability to perform a first classification or identification of
individuals under universal terms (called cogitation or estimation).
These internal, organically located, protocognltive powers served the
preparation and perfection of the phantasm that Aristotle had identified as necessary for thought.
Until the early seventeenth century this schema was a staple of
psychological theory so widespread that It is virtually Impossible to
find theories of Imagination that are independent of it; for the same
reason it is usually impossible to trace the particular sources of the
schema that actually influenced individual thinkers. By the end of
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
that century, however, it had vtrtually disappeared. It was replaced In
large part by doctrines of Impressions acquired through external and
Internal processes conceived In accordance with the new science, and
by the various corresponding doctrines of ideas. In the Cartesian and
generally rationalist traditions the Imagination and memory, closely
tied as they are to the senses, are understood as tending to obscure
the truth-which Is, after all, proper to Intellect. Indeed, one can no
longer depend on images as having any cognitive reliability whatsoever, since they can easily represent nonexistent things, and since
even when they do represent an existing thing there Is no Intrinsic
assurance that they actually resemble it. In the empiricist traditions
the recombtnative capabilities of Imagination and memory constantly
threaten to tum cognition Into fantasy. Imagtnation and memory must
preserve the origtnal sense Impressions as unchanged as possible and
must reproduce, compare, and associate them accurately If error Is to
be avoided.
The powers of phantasia, imaginatio, and the other tntemal senses
were thereby divided and redistributed within a new natural scientific
framework, and from this division and redistribution was born the
modem conception, or rather conceptions, of Imagination. Insofar as
imagination simply reproduced, usually In weakened form, the deliverances of the senses It was Imitative; Insofar as it divided and
recomposed those deliverances It was in danger of leading the mind
away from truth Into fantasy. Even the empiricist thinkers who taught
that all thinking was to be understood In terms of impressions and
Images had to find ways of distinguishing some cognltively reliable
remnants from what was merely fanciful (when they did not ultimately
surrender to the apparent impossibility of finding such reliable remnants). What these modem developments left us with was the division
oflmagination tnto receptive and productive kinds: receptive imagination provides building blocks for thinking and understanding, whereas
productive Imagination makes fancies. The latter might offer entertainment but not objective truth; the former, although It yields materials for cognitive constructions, Is no longer based on an intelligibility
or transparency of phantasms that would allow one to posit a resemblance to existing things, much less abstract from them an tntelligible
species. Thus did modem philosophy both cognitively and ontologicaliy devalue the image and the power of productng it. Even in thinkers
for whom the Imagination plays a crucial role, or where a slgntflcant
attempt has been made to overcome the dichotomy of productive and
reproductive imagtnations-I am thinking especially of phenomenology and Kant-lmagtnation Is as much taken for granted as explained,
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so that the reader Is left with the work of sorting out not just the details
oflts operations but also its foundational principles.
2.
I offer these historical remarks not as anything new; the reader can
find a much more detailed and historically thorough account (though
without my emphasis 'on the doctrine of internal senses) in the first
part of Brann. Rather, it is here, in these Platonic and Aristotelian
origins and the modem transformation, that we can quickly gain a
sense of the range of issues raised and touched by imagination:
cognition, creation, art, error, human psychology, the nature ofbeing.
And it is here that one can gain a sense of what Brann has set out to
do and what she has in large part accomplished: to give a view of
imagination and its images at once ample and focused, at once rich
and common-sensical, so that we might defend imagination against
the slights and belittlements that obscure its powers of enabling
human beings to inhabit a world, as well as against the exaggerations
that posit it as a faculty of world-making.
Influential streams of twentieth-century philosophy and psychology deny the very existence of imagination, in method when not in
fact. 'I)rpical here would be Gilbert Ryle's denial of internality in The
Concept ofMind, which treats imagining as a kind of make believe, a
role-playing that does not entail mental images; and, in psychology,
behaviorism and the streams within cognitive psychology that propositionalize imagination. The approach of the final chapters of Part
One and that of Part Two is largely determined by this negative
philosophical and psychological background. Brann's goal is to show
that the experimental evidence rigorously gathered by psychology in
the past decades provides solid support for affirming the existence of
images.
The ''hard data" about imagining that Brann presents will have to
be accounted for by any future theories. Those unfamiliar with the
experiments will be fascinated, and every other reader will be impressed by the quantity of literature that she has mastered. In one
experiment, for example, subjects are presented with pictures of
three-dimensional solids and asked whether they represent the same
solid differently oriented or two different solids. The response time
turns out to be proportional to the amount of mental rotation at a
constant rate that one would have to execute in trying to make the
pictured objects coincide. This and similar experiments strongly
suggest that the subjects are not merely sorting propositions but
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
having and manipulating mental images. In another experiment the
subject Is instructed to study line-drawings of different-sized animals
drawn so as not to strtctly preserve their relative slzes (for example, a
rabbit would be middle-slzed rather than tiny In comparison with an
elephant). The subject is then told to imagine the pictured animals in
the space In front of him or her, getting closer and closer, until the
image begins to overflow the edges of the subject's field of Imaginative
space. Finally, the subject 1,; asked "to take a 'mental walk' toward the
images and to place a real'trtpod at that distance from a real wall at
which they judged the Imaged animal to be" when the overflow
occurred. 'The result was that the various distances at overflow were
roughly proportional to the real-life slzes of the different animals"
(244). Again, the Image-thesis is consistent with the experiment In a
way that propositions are not; moreover, the experiment shows that
Imaginative space has a basic resemblance to perceptual space and
that familiar Images have a strong connection to the knowledge and
memory of real relations In the world of experience.
Given this kind of data It may be hard to conceive that some
theorists dispute the existence of images and reduce them to propositional form. Accordtng to proposltionalism, when we describe ourselves as having Images, we mean nothing more than that we are
disposed to utter a not necessarily well-ordered set of statements
describing properties that we interpret as belonging to an Image. If I
say that I am Imagining my son asleep, I am perhaps actually
predisposed to make statements like "His eyes are closed," 'The
blanket is gathered up around his chest," 'The muscles of his face are
relaxed and he looks angelic," and so forth. All the apparatus oflogic,
sets, and linguistic theories assists this proposltionallzation of imagination.
The reason that this kind of theory has plausibility is doubtless
that for most people dayttme imagination is typically not very vivid
and distinct; furihermore, as imaginative attention shifts, one image
is very easily displaced by another Image or image aspect, or even by
a "statement." For example, I cannot say that when I first thought of
my son sleeping I visuallzed the blanket, the relaxed muscles, and the
like. First I sought to conceive an appropriate object of Imagining,
settled upon my son, then his sleeping-but only at this point did I
tum to images, and even then the Images (if such exist) were progressively adjusted by my attention and interests. My search was more
logical-discursive than imagistic. And once I settled upon my son with
eyes closed and blanket drawn up to his chest, I did not immediately
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picture the blanket that is his favorite--indeed, I did not picture it at
all until I was already writing this sentence!
Brann ably takes sides on the argument between imagists and
anti-imagists while being fair to both. The lesson that she draws from
the experiments and the theorizing of psychological science is not so
much that the existence of mental images is proved as that they make
very plausible the claim, advanced as well by common sense, that we
reaUy do imagine images. Western philosophy and science have almost
always associated ima'ges with the channnels of sense, so insofar as
we can show that Images as Imagined are governed by principles and
parameters found In sense we have good grounds for the existence
thesis. Although expedients might be Invoked to save propositionalism, they would be ad hoc and would have to appeal to yet deeper
mechanisms to account for the temporal functioning of imagination.
in cases like these--they are abundant-the advantage is overwhelmingly with common-sense folk psychology, which "naively" holds that
Imagining really does involve having mental images.
3.
In the first part of her book Brann reviews the opinions of the learned
on imagination; in the second part she establishes the existence of
Images. She goes on in the third to describe their nature. Part Three
presents the logic of images-which is simultaneously the ontology of
images-according to three kinds: real images (that is, real depictions
of real objects), mental images (unreal pictures of real objects), and
imaginary images (mental images of unreal objects).
"Real" is not intended approvingly, nor Is "unreal" derogatory.
Brann takes the real In a (Latinly) literal sense, as meaning
'"thinghood,' and material thinghood at that" (387). The metaphysics
of the image as founded in the principles of Otherness and Sameness
is explained by following Plato's Sophist. As usual Brann does. not
brush aside the unresolved difficulties of the argument and acknowledges that, as so often in the controversies about imagination, we are
faced with another divide on the question of existence of"such beings
as Images, meaning that some things, natural and artificial, display
the look of other things without being as fully what those others are"
(395). Her positive thesis, once the kind of being that resembles
another is affirmed, Is that we can develop a significant understanding
of a logic of pictures and picturing. Not a theory of picturing in
language (language is assertive, pictures are not), but in Images,
pictorial images.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
10
This logic has boih Internal and external aspects. Internally an
image has truih-value, because It can reveal someihing about what it
depicts and can correctly correspond to ihe visual facts; yet to be fully
true !he picture must be not just shown but also asserted, even if only
by having a title. Pictures always have a point of view, whereas
statements are not ordinarily perspectival-ihey try to state simply
how things are In lhemselves. Propositions follow syntactical rules,
but !here are no such rules for pictures; ''whatever markmaking Is
physically possible and cru1 gain acceptance is allowed" (40 1). Pictures
do not have discrete and countable subjects and predicates; ihus it Is
often not easy to say what a picture Is "about." Propositions use
general names, whereas ihe figures of a picture are always concrete
and determinate and usually lnok Uke somelhlng. Propositions are
digital, pictures are analog. Propositions can be put togeiher by
determinate connectives, but ihe concatenation of pictures Is much
more open-ended and indeterminate In meaning. Moreover, pictures
cannot be negated per se,lhat Is, one cannot concretely and positively
Image negations and contradictions.
Externally Brann argues for a syncretism oflheories ofhowplctures
represent originals. She presents four major lheories concerning lhe
object of representation: lhe causal (referring to lhe history of production),ihe aulhorial (referring to Intention), !he inferential (emphasizing
lhe pictorial competence of ihe observer), and ihe projective (basing
Itself on a lheoryofhowihe original is projected against a background).
Theories of ihe representational relation Itself she schematlzes Into
lhree types: lhe make-believe, based on socially established and
internalized rules of language use, ihe denotative, which holds !hat
pictures refer to originals as words do to lhlngs (symbolism), and lhe
resemblant, which comes In varieties speclfied according to ihe many
ways of producing resemblance. The overriding concern of her argument, however, is not to be eclectic but to showihat, once ihe existence
of images is affirmed and !heir resemblance to some original acknowledged, !here Is ample space for all ihese different lheories to make
!heir specific contributions to understanding images and imagination.
4.
Parts One lhrough Three of The World of Imagination move from
general philosophical iheorles of imagination lhrough psychological
lheories and phenomena to a logic of the nature of Images. Once it is
established that Images are and what !hey are, Parts Four lhrough
Six discuss ihe evocation, lhe making, and the use of Images In lhe
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context of their spaces and their capacity for allowing us to re-view or
re-envislon the world. Part Four examines the relations between
language and Images In epic, poetry, novels, myths, and fantasy; Part
Five, the Inner space of Imagining, the space of geometrical envisioning
and physical modeling, and the aesthetic space of painting; and Part
Six, the functions of imagination In theology, In private and public
visions and memories, and In Its attachment to place and to feeling.
The first three parts display Brann's deep sense of objectivity. She
submits herself to the task that the subject matter Imposes and carries
It out with energy, care, and fairness. In the last three we witness In
addition the stronger emergence of her philosophical and even personal preferences (though, as she grants at the beginning of the book,
her taking of positions Is implicit all along). But this hardly Impairs
the book's value. The discussions of literary, aesthetic, theological,
and political uses of Imagination are indeed shaped by her experience
and preferences, but few readers will be able to pretend to anything
ampler or deeper. Even where one can quickly think up alternative
emphases and different examples, the occasions are rare that she can
be accused of onesidedness.
In reading many passages I could not help feeling admiration for
the beauty and rightness of Brann's description. Her evocation of the
scene In the Odyssey In which Penelope Interviews the still-disguised
Odysseus Is a brief masterpiece of engaged Interpretation that
illustrates with supreme clarity the theoretical point that passages of
literature must often be pictured in order to be appreciated.
Yet It Is precisely when Brann so strongly emphasizes the primacy
of visual Images that I begin to feel an uneasiness. Not that she
oversimplifies things. For example, the scene from the Odyssey Is not
used to prove that literature simply translates seen things Into words
while reading does the reverse. As she remarks at the end of the first
chapter of Part Four:
So far In this chapter I have been concerned with literary Imagining
as It has Spectftcally to do with envisioning, be It of the figures or
the structure of a text. The objection will be raised that the "literary
Imagination• has other, more peculiarly literary function$, particularly the narration of events and the development of the Inner
characteristics of people, places, and objects. I readily grant that
all these are the business of Imagination In the wide sense. My
project In this book Is, however, to atlend to the imagination In Its
root-sense, as visual Imitation. That is why the power of verbal
Imagining to Imitate, within Its limits, the visual world, real or
Imaginary, Is here the center of attention. (486-87)
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TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
The "root-sense" of visual imitation, she also contends, Is connected
to "a temperamental leaning toward the spatial aspects of literature,
toward a panoramic visual contemplation In preference to an essentially temporal narrative development, [wWch] ... betoken[s] a sort of
pre-political conservatism, conservatism In the literal sense, a liking
for the timeless looks of things" (486).
I noted earlier that In some ways this book Is more about Images
than about Imagination, T/tf! World ofimages rather than Imagination.
One can, I tWnk, take Issue with this "temperamental leaning'' and
assert that in Its enthusiasm for Images as timeless looks it underplays
something else that Is Important. In the ordinary sense of the word,
Imagination has more to do with the power of Imagining than the ol?fect
of Imagining; !tis the use of Images, not having them, thatls crucial,
and In use Images or phantasms (to use the ancient term) are not
Intrinsically more spatial than temporal. An animal that can retain
and recall visual images, the fixed looks of things, does not thereby
become an imagining animal. Having such a power Is a material
condition of Imagination, but one also has to add to It a formal cause,
the ability to take an image as an image. That means that a being
unable to take an Image as an Image would have hallucinations, not
Imagination. Such a creature would have the capacity for seeing but
not for recognizing a difference between appearance and reality, or
between original appearances and their reactualization.
Imagination is therefore a way of taking Images. What a visual
Image Is Is a semblance of a sensation (It Is sensation-like without
being a sensation). Although one might well grasp a great deal more
from the example of visual images than of other kinds, this taking of
a semblance as a semblance Is not Intrinsically visual. My memocy of
a tune Is a semblance of a sensation just as much as a remembered
image of my father's face, as Is also an imagined utterance of a
sentence like "I can Imagine someone speaking, even myself, as easily
as, perhaps more easily than, I can conjure up a picture of a face."
The Intentional act Is as crucial as the phantasm. Imagination, to
exist, requires both; or rather It requires the semblance of sensation
taken as semblance. This taking of the semblance occurs against the
background of the organic being's experience and so at least in this
sense shares In temporality.
The tradition that extends privilege to the visual sense as the
paradigm of sensation Is highly plausible, of course, and as long as
one maintains the spirit of analogy between visual and nonvisual
imagination the paradigm Is quite legitimate. This tradition has a
decided advantage thatls already indicated in the title ofBrann's book:
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the images of vision present us not merely with images but with a
context as well, with the background of the visual world. Things seen
and things visually Imagined appear withto a space, a context, a
world. Taste, smell, and touch cannot provide anything comparable.
Sound can; an argument can be made, however, that It provides a
world that Is not sufficiently determinate. A forest at dawn Is rich In
sounds, but the majority of what would be present to vision Is silent
and so does not appear. On the other hand, sound is in some cases
too close to the nature rof Inward experience to allow a detachment
sufficient for Imaging. Music appeals to a memoxy for sound, but
(apart from madrlgallsm and program music) It does not per se Image
anything. Still, a remembered tune does resemble and Image the
original performance.
At the outset Brann noted that she was excluding from treatment
nonvisual and In particular auditoxy lmagexy (13-14). The grounds are
several. Audltoxy lmagexy may Involve "an actual performance, a
voiceless exercise of the larynx, a physiological, not just a neurological
event." Auditoxy lmagexy Is non-mimetic and temporal, but It also has
a spatiality about It (I presume this means that any lessons it might
teach can be approached through the more intrinsic spatiality ofvisual
imagexy). The lmagexy of sound has been less well studied than the
visual; and treating It in any detail would end by raising even harder
enigmas than are dealt with In the existing book (14-15).
Putting aside the last point, one might well find the others arguable. (a) That the auditoxy is so close to actual performance may mean
that the auditoxy Is closer to being part of the external world and the
active life than is the visual; but then an ampler treatment might have
helped illuminate the transition from mind to world that is important
to all the practical uses of Imagination highlighted in Parts Four and
Six. (b) Sound Is as much a part of dreams and hallucinations as Is
sight, and It Is at least conceivable that lmaglnaxy conversation Is
more our constant companion In evexyday life than Is lmaginaxy
picturing. (c) Perhaps the salient point about the near-performance of
auditoxy Imagining is that It ordinarily Is inhibited; moreover, given
Brann's penchant for allowing common sense Its due I don't see why
the neurological situation or brain state ought to carxy much weight
in deciding what Is proper to Imagination. And (d) not evexy auditoxy
imagining can be conceived as an Incipient performance, for although
I may Inhibit humming the four-note theme of Beethoven's Fifth
Symphony when It comes to mind there is no way that I can give a
laxyngeal performance of the many simultaneous Instrumental voices
that I can, with effort, put before my mind. Indeed, it seems likely to
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
me that for the average person engaged In daytime Imagining It is
easier to produce vivid sounds than vivid sights.
Excluding sound Images because they are Intrinsically temporal
and derivatively spatial, whereas visual images are the reverse, also
appears problematic. One of Brann's chief witnesses is Kant, who
although he gave priority to temporality In actual experience claimed
that temporal consciousness has space as an ultimate condition (94;
cf. 586). Brann's discussiqn of this essential point seems unjustifiably
thin. And well it might. as dependent as It is on Kant's "Refutation of
Idealism," a passage added in the second edition of the Critique ofPure
Reason. This is not the place to argue Kant Interpretation; still. one
needs to point out that Kant apparently sensed the weakness of this
argument even as the second edition was In press, since he inserted
emendations In the preface. Moreover, the controlling element of the
argument Is the contention that "all determination of time presupposes something permanent in perception" (Critique of Pure Reason,
B 275); for Kant this permanent thing has to be outside consciousness,
since the concept of substance is based solely on matter (B 278). It is
thus not spatiality thatls atlssue but enduring substance. Some Kant
scholars consider this passage to be in tension, If not contradiction,
with the rest of the Critique; but, putting that aside, it Is clear that
there are many unresolved problems susceptible to attack. One might,
for instance, side with Descartes against Kant (and Brann) and argue
that the first experience of permanency comes In the discovery of the
self-evidencing reality of one's self In the failed attempt to doubt one's
own existence.
It is not my Intention to side with Descartes or to imply that Brann
has gotten Kant wrong, for I believe that the Issues are still open and
perhaps not even adequately understood. Nevertheless, it seems to me
that the temporality ofimaglnation and the imaginative role of sounds,
and especially oflanguage, need fuller attention. Here the better guide
is likely to be Hegel's Phi.Wsophy of Mind (the third pari of the
Encyclopedia ofPhi/osophical Sciences), of which Brann remarks that
"there is no assessment of the Imaginative function in the work of
knowing that is as grand and yet as just" (1 07). I would add: not simply
in the work of knowing, but also in the work of re-envisioning and
re-forming the world, In that temporal playing out of possibilities
which is the subject of the second half of her book.
Hegel's treatment of imagination culminates in language. Language
as spoken is a phenomenon that is in many ways as rich as the visual
Imagination, and one can argue that some of the phenomena that
Brann deals with, In particular literary imagination, are inconceivable
�SEPPER
15
without it. I would contend that reading is not primarily a function of
visual imagination but of aural instead. An obvious rejoinder would
be that language is too closely involved with concepts to represent
imagination in its simplest form. Yet the visual image as timeless look
seems to me too simple to rise fully to the reality of imagination.
Indeed, I think that the "timelessness" is the result of abstraction
rather than an essential character of imagination. To illustrate by a
contrast of images, the fundamental object of imagination is less like
a timeless picture than a "film clip," from which we derive the
possibilities of both a static spatiality and a connected temporal
development.
Let me suggest here that the genus of imagination is the repotentiation of appearance. I apologize for this ungainly phrase, but at least
until we have a more naturalized, habitual way of speaking about it
something like this will have to do. The term does not in itself imply
representation; representation is one of the basic functions of imagination, but it is not exclusive to it, and representation itself falls
into the larger class of this repotentiation of appearance. The notion
includes both the origin in appearance and the power to re-evoke the
appearance in implicit or explicit relationship to an original real-world
object or to other appearances. In this sense the phantasm of which
Aristotle spoke is not simply a recalled or regenerated sense-image,
much less just a visual image called to mind in the absence of a sensed
object, but an enriched and prepared intermediate originating in
sensation and developed as an intention and an occasion of thought.
From this position one might eventually proceed to conclusions like
these: Although the Romantics were wrong in asserting that imagination made worlds, it is true that it can rehearse worlds, and that this
rehearsal is for the most part in Implicit comparison with the world of
existence. The images we form are like transparencies that can overlie
the world, or they are projections that tske the real and extrapolate
potentialities that are not, or not fully, realized. And it is precisely
because of the resemblance function of images that the work of the
imagination does not need the constant presence of the plane of
reality, because it carries significant, even essential elements of that
world with it. A reader of Brarm's Conclusion will recognize that this
is precisely where she arrives, the conclusion with which she tskes
the sum and identifies the substance of imagination. Here I could not
agree with her more. It is a real (and in some ways pioneering)
achievement to have structured the book so that every chapter is
interesting in its own right while helping to build up the final thesis
that is so briefly stated in the Conclusion. (I in fact recommend that
�TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
16
readers tum to It Immediately after finishing the introduction). Imagination understood and shown as a transparency laid over reality
more adequately approaches the essence of the matter than the
vartous philosophical and psychological traditions have managed In
more than two thousand years.
5.
Even ifBrann's use ofKant is questionable, his argument nevertheless
points In the right direction: that experience presupposes the existence ofwhat endures. What endures seems to me not so much matter
or space as world, which is precisely Brann's ultimate frame of
reference for imagination. The world, In turn, is the rather mysterious
unity of a manifold that has the dimensions of both space and time.
And spatial images, to give Brann her due, have the advantage of
embodying a multitude of determinate relations simultaneously
withtn a relatively fixed framework or space that Is a surrogate for the
real world.
Nowhere does this aspect of Brann's argument appear more
strongly than in Pari Five, "Depletion: The Theater of Imaging." It
begins with the assertion of an Inner vision (intuition) that has as its
field of play Inner space, which comes In three versions, the perceptual, the geometric, and the Imaginative. They are spaces that possess
strong analogical and logical connections to one another.
Perceptual space Is closely tied to perceptual memory, the most
basic form of reproductive imagination; the second, geometric one Is
a place of attenuated perceptions where "the deliverances of direct
vision and the insights of the Intellect find each other" (598). Brann
contends that It Is the three-dimensional Euclidean form of geometric
space that Is the space of our mathematical imaging; It Is contingently
three-dimensional (stnce we can in prtnciple conceive that there might
well have been more or fewer dimensions to our spatial experience),
but essentially Euclidean. This contention, far from expresstng another temperamental preference, is based on a mathematical principle: among the many geometries for which we have consistent
mathematical systems, only Euclidean space preserves proportionalIty between similar geometric figures, or rather it is only In Euclidean
space that geometrical slmilartty is possible. Imaging based in resemblance could have no other kind of geometric and experiential field.
And It Is on the basis of a space that preserves proportional relations
that we can build physical models crucial to the natural sciences. The
�SEPPER
17
richness of analogical relations that it preserves even allows us to use
spatial images to model the realm of the mental.
Part F1ve further defends the thesis that imaging is based on
resemblance by arguing that pictures and paintings are imitations of
mental images, imagination-images. The thesis is developed chiefly by
way of claiming that "the great occidental and oriental traditions [of
painting] seem to be at heart phenomenalistic" (670). Paintings simultaneously simulate their objects and reveal them. Paintings are thus
"doubly images: They are physically based images of mental originals,
which are in turn memory-images of real or fictional originals," a state
of affairs that "permits the most straightforward account of the enigma
of painting: that a loss in verisimilitude is often a gain in verity" (673).
In a book that is full of moments of beauty one of the most beautiful
is the example that follows, the Old Stone Age cave paintings of
Lascaux, which provide "a psychological training ground for the right
responses to vital appearances by means of vivid visual imagery. If
so-if it was in fact vital that these apparitions should live in memory-their unsurpassable beauty turns out to be of the essence. If
beauty is indeed in essence memorable visibility, the magic of such
visions is not primitive but primordial" (675).
Parts Four and Six are so detailed in their historical accounts and
so rich in their panorama of phenomena of the imagination that they
deserve an extended treatment all their own. Here I will note simply
that the example ofLascaux embodies a principle repeatedly exemplified there, that in literature and in the various public and private uses
of imagination we see displayed its power of re-envisioning the world.
And at the heart of this principle is the basic phenomenon of imagination, transparency, to which Brann devotes her attention in the
conclusion.
She begins with an epigraph drawn from Victor Hugo: ''The universe
is an appearance corrected by a transparence" [773). Brann's initial
comment ls worth quoting in full:
In the philosophical part of this study I considered the productive
function of the imagination in constituting a koowable world, and
in the psychological part I reviewed Its reproductive role in cogoitively indispensable processes of visualization. I went on in the
logical part to analyze the constitution of images, and in the literary
and spatial parts I returned to the imagination as a power for
picturtog words and a capacity for shaping configurations. But the
last part was largely devoted to the Imagination as a world-making
agency. This activity begins to an Inner space with visitations rather
than exertions: it Is antecedent to the "labor by which reveries
become works of art," in Baudelaire's words. To this internal,
�1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
18
unlabored work of the imagination can be attributed our most
specifically human mission: to remake the world imaginatively. An
ortginary, world-constituting imagination plays its role in the blind,
arcane abyss beneath consciousness. The artful, poetic imagination
is embodied In overt, visible works before our eyes. But the worldrevising, world-emending imagination of which I am here speaking
projects an Inner world onto the external environment and elicits a
second appearance from the visible world. This imaginative world
is neither so interior as, to lack visibilily nor so external as to be
devoid of soul. (774)
,
To change the image but not the point, one might say that imagination is always at least implicitly biplanar: it sees one thing as a
projection of another, either in the same space of experience (for
example, when we project a sphere onto a plane in three-dimensional
Euclidean space) or between different spaces (when we project a
geometrical schematlzation of a physical situation, or when we analogize an intellectual process with corporeal images). In this sense it
does not matter what the nature of the image is, so that its being
intrinsically either spatial or visual Is not essential to its imaginative
use. What does matter is that one Is able to move in and between both
the planes.
6.
Although I take exception to the central preference in Brann's conception of Imagination, and though there are many particulars with which
I might quarrel in an even more extensive discussion, I can nevertheless say that these things do not greatly affect the value and importance of the book, for four reasons. First, as I remarked earlier, the
vtsual image, more readily and more fully than other kinds of image,
carries with It the possibilities of the world of appearance. Second,
whatever the status of the visual image, most of the claims Brann
makes about imagination are analogically transferrable to nonvisual
and extravisual Imagining. Third, her argument and tone are models
of moderation; she does not push arguments further than they can be
legitimately carried, and she remains fatr even in refutations. Fourth,
the book demonstrates the author's constant skill at making the
phenomena of image and imagination shine through the words so that
readers might see them for themselves.
This "Praise ofthe Imagrnation," as the Preface calls it, amply fulfills
the threefold result Brann hoped for: it is a book to read for the
�SEPPER
19
attraction of its matter, a compendium to consult for Information, and
a text for study in a course or seminar (4-5). Doubtless there will be
further disputes about its value and completeness In this or that
respect, for Instance whether the seven exclusions she made---some
"regretfully, others with unregenerate glee"-were all justified
(postmodem interpretations, the traditions of the Near and Far East,
imaginings produced by hallucinogens, the imagination of occult pmctices, political and commercial image-manipulation, non-visual imagery, and the psychodyniunlcs of image-formation and -connection); but
it is also beyond doubt that concerning the topic imagination the work
will serve as a source-book, or rather the source-book, for the next
generation.
It will not be a bad thing if people look upon The World of the
Imagination: Swn and Substance as a kind of resource or reference
work, something that its length alone assures. But it would be a shame
if its compendiousness deterred them from actually reading it. By just
consulting it or scavenging they would miss the best part: that in
attempting a genuine conspectus of images and imagination, the
author has synthesized her experience, the experience of a lifettme.
The result manifests what can be called by no more appropriate name
than wisdom. Let us be grateful for it; let us profit from it, so that we
might ultimately experience and know those insights of imagination
that (to quote Brann's concluding works) "convey at each return a
coalescence of meaning and appearance that the ever-available external phenomena forever lack," that "shape the imaginative life as a
prelude to action, an incitement to reflection, and an intimation of
paradise" (798).
�20
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�I
Joseph and Judah
Chaninah Maschler
.. .It cannot be but an industrious and judicious
comparing of place with place must be a singular
help for the right understanding of scriptures.
George Herbert, The Country Parson.
This lecture Is a brief commenl:aty on Genesis, chapters 37-50. These
fourteen chapters! hold the story of Joseph and his brothers, how
they, who were the twelve sons of Jacob by four different women (see
e.g.46:8), became the Children of IsraeJ,2 ancestors of the collection
of tribes who, as the next four books of the Pentateuch will show, after
four hundred years of slavery In Egypt (Exodus 12:40; cf Genesis
15: 13) and for1y years of wandering In the desert (Numbers 14,
Deuteronomy 1:3) became constituted as one people under one law. 3
What I chiefly hope to show Is how the concluding chapters of
Genesis4 comment on the conditions for Israelite and-who can
tell?-perhaps, eventually, human, solidarity. What! value In the story
Is Its truthfulness. The over-all message seems to be this: There Is no
"final solution" to the problems of human rivalry and envy. But the
reason for this tendency to human strife Is not that hule ("matter" or
"mother") Is refractory, but that hunian beings are. There may,
nonetheless, be '1nterim solutions." Acknowledging the need that
human groups have of both a Joseph and a Juda!I Is among these
Interim solutions. 5
Before proceeding to some comments on this text, I had better
remind you of the outline of the story.
Joseph-the first-born, 6 long-awaited,7 son of his father's favorite
wife, Rachel, the woman his father Jacob had loved at first sightS-is
so much hated by his ten half-brothers that they mean to kill him. By
a curious series of accidents, Joseph does not die. Instead, he Is sold
Into slavery In Egypt. In Egypt, he starts out being a house slave to
one of Pharaoh's courtiers, Potiphar by name. But before long Joseph
rises to a position not unlike that which he had held In his father's
house, second In command, becoming steward to Potiphar and superChan!nah Maschler Is a Tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. This lecture
was giVen at the college In November. 1992.
�22
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Intending all the doings on Potiphar's estate (39:4).
Potiphar's wife develops a fancy for the handsome Hebrew slave9
and trtes to seduce him (39:7). Joseph resists her (39:8-10). Mme
Potiphar, unsurprisingly, denounces Joseph to her husband for attempted rape (39: 16-18). Very suprlslngly, Potiphar, Instead of having
Joseph executed, or at least mutilated, puts him In jail (39:20). In jail
too Joseph finds favor with his superior, the chief jailer. Joseph again
becomes the second In command (39:23).
While Joseph Is thus ihcarcerated It happens one morning, three
days before Pharaoh's birthday, that Joseph notices that two fellowprisoners, men who had previously been highly placed courtiers to
Pharaoh but who had fallen out of favor, namely, His Majesty's Chief
Cup-Bearer and His Majesty's Chief Baker, look downcast. When
Joseph asks the jailed courtiers what Is troubling them they report
that they have dreamed dreams and feel the lack of an onelrocritic.
Joseph,while disclaiming expertise In the matter of dream Interpretation (what he says Is: "Don't Interpretations belong to God? Tell me,
please," 40:8), construes the dreams as foretelling that both men's lots
are about to change-the Chief Cup-Bearer will In three days be
restored to favor and resume his task of handing the cup to Pharaoh;
the Chief Baker will In three days be beheaded. What Joseph foretells
comes to pass: Pharaoh uses the occasion of the royal birthday
festivities, which call for a gathering of all his court, to reinstate his
butler and to execute his baker.
Two full years after the reinstatement of the butler and the execution of the baker, thus on the night preceding the royal birthday and
the attendant festive gathering of the court, Pharaoh himself dreams
a dream:
He was standing beside the Nile, when out of the Nile came seven
cows, handsome and sturdy, and grazed In the reed grass. But right
behind them, seven other cows, ugly and gaunt, came up out of the
Nile ....And the ugly gaunt cows ate up the seven handsome sturdy
cows. Then Pharaoh awoke.
He went back to sleep and dreamed a second time: Seven ears of
grain, solid and healthy, grew on a single stalk. But close behind
them sprouted seven other ears, thin and scorched by the east wind.
And the seven thin ears swallowed up the seven solid and full ears.
Then Pharaoh woke up: It had been a dream.
(Throughout this lecture I use E. A. Speiser's translation, slightly
modiljling It on a few occasions, the one exception being Judah's
speech In chapter 44, where I use the translation of Eric I.
Lowenthal.)
�MASCHLER
23
When, the morning after, none of the courtiers, not even Pharaoh's
wise men, are able to interpret Pharaoh's dreams, the Chief CupBearer recalls how, while he was out of favor and In jail, a young
Hebrew fellow-prisoner had explained the fates which his own and the
Chief Baker's dreams foretold (41:9-13). Pharaoh straightaway commands that the Hebrew youth be rushed from his dungeon. Barbered,
bathed, and clad In decent robes, Joseph appears before Pharaoh,
hears Pharaoh tell the dreams, Interprets them to mean that God Is
by their means foretelling what He Is about to do-namely. sending
seven years of agricultural plenty followed by seven years of dearthand advises Pharaoh to act providently:
"Let Pharaoh... seek out a man of discernment and wisdom and
place him In charge of the land of Egypt. And let Pharaoh take steps
to appoint overseers for the land so as to organize the country of
Egyptfor the seven years of plenty. They shall husband all the food
of the good years that lie immediately ahead, and collect the grain
by Pharaoh's authority, to be stored In the towns for food. And let
that food be a resetve against. .. the seven years of famine .... "
Joseph's advice is taken, the whole court assenting, and Joseph
himself becomes, now for the fourth time, and humanly at the highest
rank, second In command.
"1 place you In charge of the whole land of Egypt." With that Pharaoh
removed the signet ring from his hand and put It on Joseph's hand.
He then had him dressed In robes of fine linen, and put a gold chain
about his neck. He also had him ride In the chariot of his second
In command, and they shouted "Abrek" before him. (41:37-43)
As Joseph foretold, so things turn out. The seven years of plenty
come and during this time Joseph has the over-abundant Egyptian
grain crop gathered In storehouses (41:47ff). Next comes the cycle of
dearth. Famine has struck the land of Egypt and along with It all of
the eastern Mediterranean, including the land of Canaan, where
Joseph's father and brothers dwell. Somehow, Joseph's father, Jacob,
learns that Egypt (normally the region's breadbasket) Is supplied with
foodstuff. Jacob therefor!) sends ten of Joseph's brothers, all except
his full brother, Benjamin, down to Egypt to buy provisions for the
family. The brothers succeed In their mission, returning home to
Canaan with food stores.
However, for reasons which the brothers could not fathom, the man
In charge of food distribution, whom we, the readers, know to be
Joseph, but who was identified by the awe-struck brothers as "the
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
24
man who Is lord of the country," had kept one of the ten, Simeon with
him In Egypt. The viceroy, Joseph, detained Simeon, In Egypt as a
hostage, ostensibly to test the truth of the story which the brothers
had told when he, Joseph, falsely accused them of having entered
Egypt as Canaanite spies rather than as members of a famine-struck
household. When the viceroy, that Is, Joseph, tormented them with
his false accusation, the bewildered brothers had replied:
"No, my lord, truly yow; servants have come to procure food. All of
us are sons of the same man ....Your servants have never spied ....
We, your servants, are twelve brolhers, sons of a certain man in !he
land of Canaan; the youngest Is today with our falher and anolher
one is not."
Only if the nine brothers return to Egypt with that youngest brother
who, they said, remained In Canaan with thetr father, only then would
the viceroy release their other brother, Simeon, whom the viceroy had
chosen to serve as a hostage and had bound before their eyes (42:24).
(Simeon, you may recall, had long ago been a ringleader In a terrible
deed of violent revenge motivated by "righteous Indignation," the
massacre of the people ofSchechem, whose Prince had raped Simeon's
sister Dinah. See 34:25, 30,31.)
As the famine persists In Canaan and grows more severe, Jacob
urges his sons again to descend to Egypt for rations. Judah reiterates
(43:3) what Jacob's sons had told their father earlier (42:29fi): Only If
Benjamin, Joseph's full brother, Is with them will the viceroy grant
them an audience, release Simeon, and meet their request to be sold
food. Jacob, who had, apparently, not been willing to put Rachel's
second son, Benjamin, at risk for the sake of perhaps freeing a son of
Leah, Simeon (cf 42:38), now that all stand to die of starvation,
consents to having Benjamin go down with his other sons (43: llfi).
The nine, along with Benjamin, appear before Joseph for a second
time. They are received with exquisite courtesy. Simeon Is brought out
to them (vajotseh alehem et shbnon, 43:23) enttrely unharmed. Mysteriously, they are treated as honored house-guests of the viceroy, who
dines In the same room with them, although at a separate table
(43:32). Still more mysteriously, the brothers' order ofbtrth Is known
to the steward and they are served accordingly, except that Benjamin's
food portion Is five times as large as that of any one else. No wonder
that the brothers get rip-roaring drunk at that meal (last half verse of
ch.43)!
Next, Joseph instructs his steward to ffil the brothers' sacks with
as much food as they can carry, to return each man's money, and
secretly to stash Joseph's, the viceroy's, silver goblet in the mouth of
�MASCHLER
25
Benjamin's bag. The brothers set out early the next morning to
re-ascend to Canaan. But before long the Steward overtakes them and,
as he had been instructed by his master, Joseph, he demands to see
the brothers' bags and, still following instructions, says to the brothers:
"Why did you repay good With evil? It [viz. the goblet you have stolen]
is the very one from which my master drinks and which he uses for
divination. You have done a base thing." (44:lft)
The brothers are, of course, completely mystified by this accusation.
As for the goblet, it proves to lie where it had been put, in Bet1iamin's
bag.
Earlier, in perfect confidence of their innocence, the brothers,
under Judah's leadership, had sworn that, should the goblet be found
in any of their bags, the one whose bag held the cup would be ready
to die and the remaining ten would become slaves to the viceroy. When,
under the steward's escort, the brothers re-enter Joseph's house and
re-encounterJoseph, Judah re-affirms this oath, except that he tries
to erase the death penalty for Benjamin. Joseph releases the brothers
from this vow, demanding only that Benjamin stay. The rest of them
may depart, With all the food, for Canaan.
All are silent, except for Judah, Jacob's and Leah's fourth son
(29:35), neither a first born With a firstborn's rights and responsibilities for leadership, nor a last born (vs. 30:17 ff), as was Benjamin, and
as Isaac, the brothers' grandfather, and Jacob, the brothers' father,
had been.
Judah requests of the viceroy that he be accepted as Benjamin's
placetaker. The speech in which he makes this request has an
overwhelming effect. Joseph can no longer contain himself. He sends
his Egyptian attendants out of the room, bursts out crying, and says
to his brothers:
"I am Joseph. Is my father really still allve?... Come closer to me... .!
am Joseph, whom you once sold to Egypt.. .. But do not worry now
or reproach yourselves for having sold me here. It was really God
who sent me here in advance of you as an instrument of survival.... Hurry back, then, to myfttiher and tell him, "Thus says your
son Joseph: God has made me lord of all Egypt; come to me Without
delay. You will live in the land of Goshen, where you will be near
me-you and your children and grandchildren, your flocks and
herds ....There I will provide for you.... "
With that he flung himself on the neck of his brother Benjamin and
wept; and Benjamin wept on his neck. Then he kissed all his
brothers, crylng upon each of tbem; only then were his brothers
able to talk to him. (45: 1-14)
�26
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Joseph's brothers and father, along with their wives and children
and livestock, come to settle in the Goshen region. Pharaoh has not
only given permission that the Jacob clan reside there but takes an
Interest In the clan's well-being; In fact, It Is at Pharaoh's command
that Joseph furnishes his brothers with Egyptian wagons that will
ease the clan's relocation. Once the brothers, their wives, and their
children, along with Jacob their father, have arrived In Goshen,
Pharaoh even honors Ja<;ob with a court audience. In every way our
story seems to have a happy ending:
The dreams of lordship which Joseph had dreamt at the very
beginning of our story (37:5-ll), when he was a youth of seventeen,
after his father, by giving him that princely robe (37:4), had made
manifest that he had chosen to elevate Joseph above his brothers,
have been borne out.
Jacob, the man who, at his mother's urging, had tried to acquire
his brother's first-born rights by stealth (chs. 27 and 25), and who
must, or ought (cf Hosea 12:4, Jeremiah 9:3), to have Interpreted the
suffering that thereafter befell him as deserved, lives to regain and
bless his favorite son and even meets and blesses the grandsons by
Joseph (47:29fl), finds out that his worries about Simeon, or perhaps
rather, his apprehensions that Simeon's brothers are guilty of having
sold one ofthelr own Into slavery, were unfounded, and dies peacefully
In bed (49:33). (By his sufferings I mean: the substitution, In the
marital bed, of the elder for the younger and beloved sister; the death
In childbirth of the woman he loved (ch. 35); the loss of Joseph-the
son who, in Jacob's Imagination, was his true firstborn (30:25,26).
being the firstborn by the wife so greatly loved that a seven-year
indenture as bride-price seemed to him but a few days (29:20); the
nagging suspicion that nine of his sons had sold their brother Simeon
into Egyptian slavery for food; the agonized waiting for the return of
Benjamin.)
Through Joseph's foresight and careful management, both his own
family and the population of Egypt are preserved (ch. 47).
But how can a story such as I have just told have a happy ending?
True, we have all the preceding stories ln the book of Genesis to show
that rivalry and envy need not lead to murder, as It did In the case of
the first pair of brothers, Cain and Abel: Abraham's firstborn.
Ylshmael, and his younger brother Isaac bury their father Abraham
together (25:8fl); the battle Esau plans against his younger twinbrother Jacob (33:1) Is staved off (33:10); earlier, Abraham had
providently prevented war between his own and his nephew Lot's
households (ch. 13); and even Laban and his son-In-law and nephew
�MASCHLER
27
Jacob and their households become, in a manner of speaking, reconciled (ch. 31). Yet deciding to split and make a treaty, which Is what
happens In most of these cases, Is not amity and peace. It Is truce and
avoidance, a "holding operation."
To see whether and how something better happens In the case of
Joseph and his brothers I want to look more narrowly at three
sentences(!)a statement by the Biblical narrator about Joseph and about his
brothers,
(2) the request of Judah already alluded to, that he be allowed to
go surety for his brother Benjamin, and
(3) a question asked by Joseph of his brothers and, I think, himself.
(1) The statement by the narrator occurs In ch. 42, vs 7, In the
context of the brothers' first meeting with Joseph In Egypt, after they
had spent some twenty years or so believing him dead or disappeared.
The narrator reports:
When Joseph saw his brothers, he recognized (vqjakirem) them, but
made himself unrecognizable (vajitnakef) to them and spoke
harshly to them.
The root of the words I pronounced just now in Hebrew is repeated:
When Joseph recognized his brothers (vqjakef) while they failed to
recognize him (lo hakiruhu), he was remtoded of the dreams he had
dreamt about them and said to them: "You are spies. You have come
to look at the nakedness of the land."
When the brothers, poor yokels, staunchly deny that they are spies,
Joseph repeats his accusation:
"Yes, you have come to look at the land in its nakedness." What's
going on here?
·
It is altogether according to expectation that the brothers should
fail to perceive the seventeen-year-old father's pet whom they had put
In an empty desert watering hole some twenty years earlier in the
grandly dressed and probably enthroned viceroy of Egypt. Nor is it
strange that Joseph, contrariwise, seeing the ten of them together,
dressed as he remembers his kinfolk to dress and speaking In the
language of Canaan on which he had himself been raised, should
recognize his brothers. So our lexically economical text can be presumed to dwell on the root of the Hebrew word for "recognize,"
"discern," "identify," and, perhaps (see Brown, Driver, Briggs p. 648
top), "foreign," "strange," for reasons beyond the reported fact.
�1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
28
This same root, nkr, occurs twice, and at crucial places, elsewhere
In our text. It figures In the vignette at the end of our story's opening
chapter, ch. 37, when the brothers arrange for a messenger to bring
Joseph's blood-stainedcoatof distinctioniO to his father, so as to trick
the father into saying and believing that Joseph had been tom to
pieces by some wild beast (see 37:32 and look before and after). The
other spot where It occurs Is Inch. 38 (vss 25,26 to be exact}, the odd
episode about Judah and his widowed daughter-In-law, Tamar.ll
Spelling out the full meaning of this fact Is too large a task for me. I
do, however, want to use the fact that the thematic root, nkr, as used
In these two other places, Involves some sort of trickery; I also want
to use the fact that In the two locales just indicated some sort of coming
to one's senses, acknowledging of a wrong, seems to be lnvolved.l2
The present question is, what does It mean, psychologically, to
report (as does the narrator In the King James version) that Joseph
"knew" his brothers but "made himself strange unto them." The
blatantly false accusation that his brothers are spies comes to our aid.
Isn't It obvious that Joseph rather than his brothers Is doing the
spying?
He does so at great length. First he incarcerates the brothers
together (42: 17}, commanding that one of them be freed to return to
Canaan so as to fetch the youngest brother, Benjamin, whom they
had mentioned when the viceroy grilled them. One brother Is to be
released, the remaining nine are to stay in Egypt until the released
one returns with Benjamin. Joseph gives the brothers three days to
moan and bicker over who Is to stay, who to leave, meanwhile availing
himself of the opportunity to listen in on their conversation. ln the
course of these three days he overhears his brothers saying:
... but we are guilly concerning our brother [though we are Innocent
of the charge of spying], In that we saw his soul's distress when he
pleaded with us but did not listen. (42:21)
In addition, Joseph learns that the ten had not been an undifferentiated troop of enemies, since he overhears his eldest brother, Reuben's,
exclamation:
"Didn't I warn you to do no wrong to the boy? But you would not
listen. Now comes the accounting for his blood. • (42:22; cf 37:22,
37: 29,30)
I imagine that it was as a result of what he has thus found out that
Joseph changed his command: Nine are to return to Canaan while one
Is kept In Egypt as a hostage (42:19).
Throughout the three days Joseph spoke to the brothers via an
�MASCHLER
29
Interpreter, so that they are not aware that the viceroy is spying on
them.
When Joseph changes his mind about how many are to stay In
Egypt and how many are to return to Canaan, the narrator quotes
Joseph as having said "I fear God .. .," which jerked me Into realizing
that one man could hardly have carried enough food back to Canaan
to keep the father, the women, and the little ones back home alive,
and made me aware that Joseph's first command was, from a practical
point ofview, more than lll-considered. Are we meant to condemn him?
· Only on rare occasions does the narrator in Genesis tell us outright
which of two or more competing characters to side with. (To my mind,
this Is one of the attributes of the book which equips It for being
torah-instruction: We are called upon to judge, but the more we study
the narrative, the less confident we feel that we know enough about
fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers justly to appraise their
character and conduct. Every new connection we make between this
verse and that seems to change meanings and motives.) Thus In the
present instance the narrator seems to leave the reader free to follow
the Impulse of feeling sorry for the brothers and critical of Joseph.
Joseph, after all, Is perseveringly manipulative, playing with, indeed
tormenting, his brothers In Incident after incident; playing even with
his father, since he has the money with which the brothers paid for
foodstuff put back Into their sacks, so that their father may well have
been led to believe that they had sold their brother Simeon Into slavery
(cf 42:35,36). The fact that the narrator tells us (42:24) that Joseph
absented himself to cry when he overheard Reuben's speech (and thus
found out that at least one of his brothers had tried to protect him),
does not necessarily alter one's atlltude. It Is not Inconceivable to me
that someone who enjoyS lording it over underlings should weep while
playing some cat-and-mouse game with them. Yet when one looks
back at the preceding chapter everything begins to look different.
There, In chapter 42, we were told that Joseph had married Into
high Egyptian society, had acquired a new, Egyptian, name, and that
he called his firstborn son Menasseh "because God has caused me to
forget my hardships entirely and all my father's house" (42:51).
Clearly, It Is Joseph's Intention to separate himself from his past, no
longer to be his father Jacob's son but to become fuJJy Egyptian. When
the brothers appear before him, they and his past are invading this
carefully contrived new life of Joseph's. He feels spied on, naked,
vulnerable, when suddenly they stand before him. When he catches
himself being, after all, unable to forget his father's house, this may
well have been a shaming realization. Only thus can I explain Joseph's
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
shocking locution "you have come to look at the nakedness of the
land." Therefore, when Joseph, In 42:25, ordered his servants to
return the money with wWch his brothers had paid for corn, It was
probably not In order to mystifY them or to alarm Ws father (though
this was the effect, see 42:28,35,36). Rather, Joseph, who seems so
much In control, Is making a private, only half voluntary, gesture,
whose meaning he only half-knows, a gesture of making a distinction
between the rest of the hungry and his own hungry brothers. The free
gift of grain Is a token of kinship.
There Is, however, only one person in his father's household who
Is entirely unsullied with responsibility for the crime committed
against Joseph, thus fit to be loved unreservedly, Ws younger brother
Benjamin. The sons of the concubines Bilhah and Zilpah, with whom
Joseph prior to age seventeen used to go sheep-herding, probably
hated him as much as did Leah's sons, since the enigmatic verse 37:2
(about Joseph's being a tattle-tsle) probably applies to them. Joseph
must have realized tWs. AB for Reuben, though Joseph had wept upon
hearing how this oldest brother and arch rival had tried to protect him
(42:24 after 42:22), upon reflection Joseph may have believed that
Reuben was merely trying to re-lngratiate himself with Jacob after the
unsavory episode of his sleeping with his father's concubine Bilhah
(35:22; cf 1 Kings 2:13 ff and Solomon's reply In vs. 22). Simeon and
Levi, next after Reuben In the order of birlh, had proved by the
vengeance they took for the rape of their sister Dinah to what extremes
of violence their pride could lead them. Joseph must have supposed
that, as at Schechem so In Dothan, Injured pride drove Simeon and
Levi to murderous hatred. And as for Jacob, Joseph must have come
to realize In the course of all those years since he was seventeen, when
his father publicly declared his choice ofJoseph for' the leadership role ,
of fir:;;t born by giving Wm that coat of distinction and provoked not
only those dreams of Joseph's but Joseph's teUing his brothers what
he had dreamt, that Ws father was much to blame for what happened
thereafter.13 Only Benjamin, memento of their common mother Rachel,
Is a kinsman altogether free of blame. No wonder, then, that Joseph
Is obsessed with the idea of getting Benjamin to join him In Egypt.
Let this suffice, for the time being, as commentary on the first
sentence.
(2) I turn, next, to the second of the three sentences I promised to
discuss, namely, Judah's request in ch. 44 vs 33. It runs as follows:
"Please, let your servant [I.e. Judah] stay as servant to my lord
lnsteadof(tru:hath) the boy [ie. Benjamin], let him be his placetaker,
but let the boy 'go up' with his brothers.
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31
The long address of Judah from which I culled this sentence (the only
long speech in Genesis) Is what released Joseph to make himself
known (httvada) to his brothers (45: lft). How difficult this moment was
for Joseph is, perhaps, shown by the narrator's telling us:
"And there stood no man with him when Joseph made himself
known to his brethren." (45: I end)
I do not believe that the narrator is merely repeating the information
that Joseph had sent all his Egyptian attendants out of the room when
he broke down in front of his brothers and said to them:
"I am Joseph. Is my father [really] still alive?"
Postponing a reading of Judah's speech in its entirely, I turn to the
third sentence on which I promised to comment, namely, Joseph's
question. In the ultimate chapter of the Book of Beginnings Joseph
asks (50: 19):
"...Am I In God's stead?" 14
The story of Joseph and his brothers, and thus the book of Genesis,
might have ended with chapter 48 (Jacob's adoption of Joseph's two
sons and the transfer of the one piece of real estate in Canaan that
Jacob holds in his own name, viz. Schechem, to Joseph); or, conceivably, with chapter 49 (holding the so-called "blessing" of the twelve
tribal fathers along with Jacob's charge that he be buried to lie with
Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebeccah, as well as with Rachel's
sister, Leah. in the ancestral burial cave of Machpelah, rather than
with Rachel, on the road to Bethlehem; cf35: 19,20). Instead, the book
of Genesis closes with chapter 50. This chapter begins by telling us of
· · the elaborate, Egyptian-style (see 50: 2, 50: 11) funeral rites for Jacob.
Only fairly late in the chapter, In vs. 50:8, 12-14, are we advised that
Joseph's brothers are members of the mourning party for their father
(as Ylshmael had been part of the mourning party for Abraham in vs.
25:8 and as Esau had been part of the mourning party for Isaac In vs.
35:29).
We are thus somewhat prepared for the fact that in vs. 50:15 the
brothers fear, in spite of the grand reconciliation between Joseph and
his brothers that had been descrtbed in ch. 45, that now that the
protecting presence of Jacob, their common father, is no more, Joseph
will get even with them. The brothers therefore send a messenger to
Joseph whom they have instructed to say to Joseph:
"Your father gave this command before he died: 'So shall you say
to Joseph, "Forgive, I urge you, the crime (pesha) of your brothers,
and their sin (chatatem), although they did eVil to you."'"
�1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
32
Mter the messenger Is through speaking, the brothers themselves
approach and, saying
"Now, then, forgive, please, the crime (pesha) of the bondsmen of the
God of your father... ;
they throw themselves down before Joseph and declare
"Behold, we are your boJ;!dsmen."
When Joseph, In reply, says to them,
"Don't be afraid. For am lin God's stead?"
I Imagine he Is, first of all, commenting on the discrepancy between
the brothers' declaring themselves "bondsmen to the God of Joseph's
father" and their simultaneously offering themselves to this father's
son as "his bondsmen." That these two masters-the God of Israel on
the one hand and Pharaoh or Pharaoh's place-taker, Joseph-are
separate and distinct the Book of Exodus will show at length (cf
Leviticus 25:42, the restrictions upon enslavement of an Israelite by
an Israelite; also Leviticus 26: 13).
Second, I Imagine that something Is being said (either by Joseph
or by the text) about the true locus of forgiveness. Human beings are
not the ones either to give or to withhold forgiveness, not even when
they have personally been wronged. As Ifto emphasize this, the Mosaic
code contains procedures which remove the burden (and the light) of
forglvlng from human beings. Someone meditating on Leviticus 5:202615 might even want to go so far as to say that here lies an
Insufficiently explored "way" towards recognizing the reality of God:
Faith would thus be tantamount to believing .In' the· possibility of
altering the meaning of a person's or a group of people's past, a faith
that would set one free to conduct oneself In that hope.
But I also wonder whether, when Joseph, through the question he
addresses to his brothers-"Am I In God's stead?"-denles his own
divinity, and tries to reassure his brothers that the evil which they
Intended against him was or became Intended by God towards good
(50: 19,20), he Is realizing that his own passions too have been turned
towards good by a power beyond himself. His earlier disdain for and,
later, rancor against his brothers, the rush of love for Benjani!n, the
!-told-you-so, resentful, and burdened showing off to his father16_all
this too was being used by God for good. For example, as a result of
his manipulating his brothers In that deeply ambivalent way which I
tried to describe earlier, all his brothers, not only Juda!I, have proved
their solidarity with one another. This, perhaps, is why, as our text
�MASCHLER
33
has It, Joseph Is now able to speak to his brothers' hearts (50:21 end;
contrast this with the end of 37:4?).
The Bible recognizes. It seems to me, that "playing God" (as Is
ahnostnecessarilythe temptation of a solitary leader, and as may have
been Joseph's penchant In particular) can be guarded against only If
there Is atleast one other human being with whom authority is shared,
or who has gifts the leader lacks and needs, or who serves as his critic.
Locke seems to have perceived this when he slyly reminds Flhner, the
author of Patriarcha. a political tract In defense of perfectly centralized
royal power, that according to the Bible, a child Is under the authority
not only of Its father but of Its mother as well (see e.g. Leviticus 19:
1-3). I wonder whether Judah serves In this capacity In our story.
You will remember that It was Judah's speech, In ch. 44, that
released Joseph to declare himself to his brothers. Let me recite his
speech to you:
"Let your servant, I beg, please have a word in private with my lord.
Do not be angry with your servant for you are as Pharaoh. My lord
asked his servant, 'have you a father or a brother?' We said to my
lord, 'We have an aged father, and there Is a little son of his old age;
his brother is dead, and only he Is left of his mother so that the
father dotes on him. •Yet you said to your servants 'Bring him down
to me that I may set my eyes upon him.' We told my lord 'The boy
cannot leave his father; for If he should leave his father, he would
die. • But you declared to your servants 'Unless your youngest
brother comes down with you, you shall not come before me.' When
we returned to your servant, my father, we reported my lord's words
to him. Our father said to us 'Go back and bring us some food.'
Then we told him 'We cannot go down; only If our youngest brother
. . . Is with us, can we go; for we shall not be allowed. to see the man If
· our youngest brother Is not with us. • But your servant my father
said to us 'You know that my wife bore me two sons. One left me,
and I said, he must have been tom to pieces! neither have I seen
him since. If you tske this one from me as well, and he meets with
disaster, you will send my white head to Sheolin grtef.' Now then,
please, let your servant remain as a slave to my lord Instead of the
boy, and let the boy go up with his brothers. For how can I go up
to my father If the boy Is not with me? I could not bear to witness
the evil that would overtske my father. (Ertc I. Lowenthal translation, pp 97-101, TheJosephNarrat!veinGenesls, Ktav, New York,
1973.)
The most Immediate effect on Joseph of Judah's speech was, I
Imagine, that It triggered awareness In Joseph that he had allowed his
yearning for Benjamin to overwhelm aU other considerations, that he
had allowed himself, in effect. to become his .ftd;her's rival for
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
BeiJJamin's consoling presence; that, knowingly and unknowingly, he
had-In scheming to get this brother by his side-been avenging
himself not only on his brothers but also on his father. The effect on
us, the readers, Is harder to describe: Look again at the speech and
notice, for example, how the possessive adjectives "your," "my," and
"our" are being used. What Is uncanny about the speech Is its
detailed, Imperturbable, exactness, Its objectivity about every Item
In the family's history. There Is no rancor or regret, no emotional
complexity even, In Judah's quoting Jacob as having said, to Judah,
his legitimate son,
"You know that my wife bore me two sons .... •
(as though Leah had never been a wife to Jacob, and as though her
six sons counted for nought; compare the narrator's switches from
"his sons" to "Joseph's ten brethren" to "Benjamin, Joseph's brother"
to "his brethren" to "sons of Israel" in the early verses of chapter 42;
notice also how Jacob answers Reuben in 42:38: "My son shall not go
down with you; for his brother is dead, and he alone is left.") Nor is
there any self-dramatizing when Judah says, simply, that, quite apart
from having solenmly sworn to go surety for Benjamin (erawon), he
could not bear to see the effect on Jacob of losing Benjamin, so that
life as a member of the Jacob clan would be impossible for him were
he to return to his father without Benjamin.
Hear now how Judah spoke to his widowed daughter-in-lawTamar,
in chapter 38, when he found out that he had wronged her:
"You are in the right rather than I."
Judah makes no atlempt to excuse or justify himself but acts in the
light of his new knowledge: His twin-sons (Perez and Zerah) by Tama.t
are accepted by him as legitimate placetskers ofJudah's deceased sons
Er and Onan (see 46: 12), but Judah henceforth abstains from sexual
intimacy with Tamar. Such inthnacy between a father- and daughterin-law Is, of course, forbidden in the sexual code of Leviticus 18.
Let me add one further detail to the characterization of Judah. It
is hidden away in that amazingly packed opening chapter 37.
Long ago, Jacob had sent Joseph off from Hebron, Abraham's site,
to his brothers at Schechem, probably on a mission of reconciliation.17
A mysterious man, encountered by Joseph while he is looking for his
brothers, advises Joseph that his brothers and their herds have left
Schechem for Dothan. Before he gets close to the brothers they catch
sight of him and conspire to kill him.
They said to one another: Here comes that master dreamer! Why
�MASCHLER
35
don't we klll him now and throw him tnto one of the pits? We could
say that a wild beast devoured him....When Reuben heard this, he
tried to save him from their hands .... "Shed no blood" Reuben told
them. "Just throw htm tnto that pit, out there tn the desert, but
don't do away with him yourselves•-his purpose betng to deliver
htm ... and restore htm to his father. So when Joseph reached his
brothers, they made Joseph strip off his coat of disttnction (ktoneth
passtm) ... seized htm and threw him tnto the pit. They sat down to
their meal. Looking up, they saw a caravan of Ishmaelites comtng
from Gilead ...bound fur Egypt.
Then Judah [seetng the caravan] said to his brothers, "What would
we gain by killing our brother and covertng up his blood [I.e. killing
htm without actually spilling his blood, namely, by letttng htm die
tn the pit]. I say, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites....After all, he is
our brother, our own flesh." His brothers agreed. Meanwhile [however] Midiantte traders passed by, and they pulled Joseph up from
the pit. 1hey sold Joseph to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of
silver.
Reuben's plan had been to free Joseph from the dried-up watedng
hole. I Imagine Judah had figured this out for himself. But Judah,
sizing up the situation more accurately than his elder brother, knew
that it would be hopeless for the two of them-Reuben andJudah-to
protect Joseph against the other eight, or to escape their notice. Under
the circumstances, selling Joseph to the Ishmaelltes was a good plan.
Judah Is prevented from canylng It out because, so I Imagine (on the
advice of Lowenthal), Joseph's cries from the pit have been heard by
the band ofMidlanlte traders, so that the latter rather than Joseph's
brothers became the ones to "profit" from selltng Joseph Into Egyptian
slavery.
Thus Judah's, like just about everyone else's, planned action tn the
Joseph story, becomes deflected .from tts intended course.IB Yet this
should not prevent us from recognizing that Judah, though very
different from Joseph-not Irresistibly handsome, not first or last
born, not equipped to dream up long-range designs, not a charmer of
the great-has attdbutes of character befitting a leader. Even Jacob
must have recognized this when, In 46:27, he Is reported to have "sent
Judah before him unto Joseph to show the way to Goshen" (ve-et
jehudah shalach lefanav eljosefl-horot lejanav goshena. ... )
That verse carries much weight with me: First, because our enttre
story is about sending and being sent, especially, about sending and
being sent ahead of others. Second, because It seems confirmed by
whatJacoblssupposedtohavesaidofJudahandofJosephlnchapter
49, where he foretells the twelve tdbal fathers' fates. Of Judah Jacob,
In 49:8, says:
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
"It is you whom your brothers Will praise."
Of Joseph he says, in vs. 49:26 end:
•... One set apart from his brothers" or, perhaps, "the prince among
his brothers."
As If to spite the fact that Jacob's adoption of Joseph's sons Menasseh
and Ephraim In the chapter preceding this Patriarchal blessing seems
to show that th.ejlrst-bom()fRachelremn.inedJacob's "elect, • the book
of Deuteronomy, in having Moses mention Judah next after Reuben
(33:7), quietly differs In Its judgment, as does Chronicles 5: l. This
leads me to wonder whether those who preserved our story may,like
me, have had complicated reservations about identifYing Joseph as
our story's hero. Were It the case that Joseph, In 47:18 till the end of
the chapter, Is serving his master Pharaoh too weJI,19 the narrative
might bear the tmplication that Joseph, In serving as a functionary
for the Pharaoh's turning free Egyptian peasants into tenant farmers
(albeit tenant farmers who retain four fifths of the yield of the land and
their own work) Is partly to blame for the future enslavement of the
children oflsrael.
•••
Notes:
l. In the synagogue reading-cycle they are divided into the four
weekly "portions": vayeshev=37:1-40 end; mlkkets =41:1-44:17;
vaylggash =44: 18-47:27; vayyechi =47:28-50:26. Readers unfamiliar With the synagogue articulation of the Bible text may like
to look at the Soncino Press edition of the Pentateuch, edited by
J. H. Hertz. That edition also gives the "portions" from the Prophetic Writings read inlmediately after the recitation of the Pentateuch portion, called "haftarah" =conclusion. The rabbis
responsible for selecting the hqftarah must have had reasons for
juxtaposing a particular prophetic With a particular pentateuch
portion. For example, I am Impressed by the fact that they chose
to have the second portion of the Joseph story, 41:1-44:17,
followed up by the story of the judgment of Solomon in 1 Kings
3:15-4:1. I Imagine the rabbis were Inviting the congregation to
think of both Joseph and Judah as being "tested," as were the two
mothers In the judgment of Solomon story. And when they selected
1 Kings 2:1-12 as "follow up" to 47:28-50:26, they must have
wanted the congregation to meditate on Jacob's "last wlll" side by
�MASCHLER
37
Side with David's. One reason for my reporting this sort of information is that only thus, through examples, can I convey that
Bible exegesis "sub specie unitatis," as I defended it in an earlier
essay ('Thinking about the Garden Story"), and practice It here,
Is not, or need not be, opposed to higher Bible criticism. Only if
multiple authorship deprives the Bible of all authority, only then
must one choose between exegesis and documentary hypothesis.
Since, however, the authority of the Bible is no greater and no less,
for me, than the authority of our entire multi-stranded, tensionfilled, Intellectual, legal,and moral tradition, the respect for the
text which prompts me to exegetic endeavor is not only compatible
with but calls for individual judgment and choice in the present.
2. For the change of name, and its Import, see ch. 32, especially vss.
27 - 29; there Jacob, on the night before meeting his estranged
brother Esau, wrestles with a man who blesses him and changes
his name from Jacob (heel) to Israel (god-wrestler), meanwhile
refusing to disclose his own identity. Notice the strange echo of
this episode In Rachel's words, at 30:8, when her maid Bilhah
conceives a second son, whom Rachel calls Naphtail. See e.g.Exodus 12:40; cf Genesis 15:13.
3. Deuteronomy 29:9ff; 31:9ff; see also Deuteronomy 17:14ff, especially vss 18 - 20: "...When he has ascended the throne of the
kingdom, he shall make a copy of this Torah in a book at the
dictation of the Levitical priest. He shall keep it by him and read
from It all his life, so that he may learn to fear the Lord his God
and keep all the words of this Torah and observe these statutes.
In this way he shaU not become prouder than his feUow country
meri...
4. Plato's Laws, N, 720c.
5. The historic fact, if it be one, that the Joseph story's poising of
Judah over against Joseph is connected with the rivalry between
the royal House of David (the Southern Kingdom of Judah) and
the royal House of Saul, the Benjamlte (the Northern Kingdom) is
not only compatible with but commentary on the moral that I
draw.
6. 30:22ff.
7. 30: Iff; Barren Rachel so much envies her fruitful sister Leah that
she longs for death. Desperate for children, she gives Jacob her
maid-servant Bilhah to wife so that whatever children may be born
of that union will legally rank as her own, through adoption.
Through her maid-servant, Rachel acquires two sons, whose
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
names (Dan and Naphtali) commemorate her rivahy with her
sister. Finally Rachel herselfbecomes pregnant and bears Joseph.
Immediately after the birth of Joseph, Jacob leaves his father-Inlaw's homestead and returns to Canaan to establish a separate
household of his own (30:25).
8. 29:9; 29:16-20.
9. Joseph, as far as I know, Is the only man In the Pentateuch who
Is called handsome-jafe toar vifeh mareh=of beautil'ul form and
fair to look upon (39:7). Since the same phrase Is used to describe
his mother Rachel (29: 17), Joseph may have looked like his
mother. Perhaps Rachel, In tum, looked like Jacob's mother
Rebeccah, who-being Laban's sister-was Rachel's aunt. Jacob,
you will remember, had been his mother's favorite whereas Jacob's
twin brother Esau had been his father's favorite. Cf David in l
Saniuell6:2-ruddy-complexioned, with fine eyes, fine to behold;
Absalom in 2 Samuel 14:2-praised for his beau1y; Saul, in l
Samuel 9:2, praised for his tallness.
10. K'tonet passim. I call this mysterious, conceivably many-colored
or embroidered, tunic a "coat of distinction" because the same rare
word is used at 2 Samuell3:18, to refer to the princess Tamar's
garment.
11. CfRobertAlter, TheArtofBiblicalNarrative(Basic Books, 1981).
I was both thrilled and (such Is vani1y) disappointed that Alter
noticed the verbal (and more than verbal) echoes of 37:32f (Zoth
matsanu.. Haker-na hak'tonet, bincha ht 1m lo. Vqjakirah. Vajomer:
k'tonet b'nL Chajah raah achaltehu. Tarof toraf Jose.Jj In 38: I7
("And she said: Will you give me a pledge-eravon? ....And she said:
Discern (Haker-na] please, to whom the signet, the cords, and the
staff belong [le mi. ha chatometh, etc.] And Judah acknowledged ...
(vajakerjelwdah]" and In 42:7ff. Fully to appreciate these verses
requires that one put them together with one another, and with
Judah's pledge, in 43:8ff, to be placetaker (eravon) for Benjamin,
and with his living up to this trust In vss 44: 18ft', and (finally) with
the nine-for-one, one-for-nine, and one-for-one games that Joseph
plays with his brothers.
All-Important though It Is for us, today, to discriminate between
a mere symbol or pledge on the one hand, and the moral and legal
category of serving as stand-in for one's brother, friend, or fellowhuman being on the other hand, I nevertheless believe that the
passages to whose vernal linkage I am calling attention are
ultimately connected with Abraham's substitution of a ram for
�MASCHLER
39
Isaac, Isaiah's song of the suffering servant, and Freud's entire
theory of dream interpretation. Substitution, and coming to one's
senses, orfailing to, upon recognizing what is being substitutedfor
what and why, or failing to seems to me to be the over-arching
theme. On the motif of suretyship, see the Appendix to Benjamin
Nelson's The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal
Otherhood (2nd ed., University of Chicago Press, 1969)
12. I imagine that Jacob's refusal to be consoled over the supposed
death of Joseph is not altogether unlike AchUles' mourning for
Patroclus: Jacob must have realized that he is partly responsible
for Joseph's "being tom."
13. Cf. Deut. 21:15ff: "If a man have two wives, the one beloved and
the other hated, and they have borne Wm children, both the
beloved and the hated; and if the firstborn son be hers that was
hated; then it shall be, in the day that he causes his sons to inherit
that which he has, that he may not make the son of the beloved
the firstborn before the son of the hated, who is the firstborn. But
he shall acknowledge the first born, the son of the hated, by giving
Wm a double portion of all that he has, for he is the firstborn of
his strength, the right of the firstborn is his."
14. Cf 30:2, Jacob's angry reply to Rachel's "Give me children or else
I die." Substitution-of a husband or a ruler for God, of a coat for
a man's corpse or for the man, of a signet, cord, and staff for their
owner, of one Israelite for another-appears to me to be one of the
major themes of our story. Indeed, Benjamin Nelson, in the
appendix to The Idea of Usury, points out that within Jewish
tradition the Joseph story became the emblem of the obligation
that any Israelite be willing to serve as stand-in for his fellows.
15. "If anyone sin and commit a trespass against the Lord, and deal
falsely with his neighbor in a matter of deposit or of pledge or of
robbery or have oppressed his neighbor or have found that which
was lost and deal falsely therein and swear to a lie, in any of all
these that a man does, sinning therein, then it shall be, if he has
sinned and is guilty, that he shal; restore that which he took by
robbery or the thing which he has gotten by oppression or the
deposit which was deposited with him or the lost thing which he
found or any thing about which he has sworn falsely, he shall
restore it in full and add the fifth part.... and he shall bring ...a ram
without blemish from his flock .... for a guilt offering to the priest
and the priest shall make atonement for him before the Lord and
he shall be forgiven ...."
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
16. I am thinking of Joseph's second dream, how In It his father, the
sun, and his mother, the moon, along with his eleven stellar
brothers bow down before him, he alone being the same Inside
and outside the dream, unsubstituted for; furiher, I am thinking
of his telling this dream, not only to his brothers but also to his
father, who rebukes him (37:10,11). I am also thinking of his
outrageous Insistence on flaunting his status as ihe father's
favorite when he wears that coat of distinction while supposedly
sent on a reconciliation mission to his brothers (37: 14ff; 37:23).
Finally, I am thinking of the message which, at 45:9ff, Joseph
commands his brothers to give to his father: "Hasten ye, and go
up to my father and say to him: Thus says your son Joseph. ..."
17. I owe the suggestion that this was a mission ofreconciliation (along
with a number of other details In my commentary) to Eric
Lowenthal (11te Joseph Narrative in Genesis, Ktav, New York.
1973), though his over-all reading of the Joseph story Is rather
different from mine. Such an Interpretation of what is going on In
37:13 requires that one take stock of the fact that If Jacob had
merely wanted news about ihe flocks he could easily have sent a
servant, that the trip, from Hebron to Schechem, is long and
perilous, and ihat "sending" and "being sent" are !hematic to our
story. This means that I readvs. 37:13in the light of Exodus 3:10.
18. CfProverbs 16:9 ("Man plans his journey by Ws own wit, but it Is
the Lord who guides his steps"), 20:24 ("It Is the Lord who directs
a man's steps; how can morlal man understand the road he
travels?"), and the Player King's lines In Hamlet Act iii scene 2. The
passages from Proverbs are also cited by Gerhard Von Rad, "Die
JosephgescWchte," BibUsche Studien, 5 (Neuklrchener Verlag des
Erziehungsverelns GMBH, 1964). On what this implies, namely,
a double causality, human will and divine redemptive will, see
Maimonldes' Guide to the Perplexed in ii, 48 and Malmonldes'
"Letter on Astrology," Lerner and Mahdi, Medieval Political Philosophy: A Sourcebook (Cornell, 1963).
19. CfExodus 22:25, Deuteronomy 23:20, Numbers 18:21, Deuteronomy 10:9
I
�I
What is a What-is Question?
Joe Sachs
Once when I was talking to a senior about possible topics for his essay,
he looked around, leaned forward, slid his eyes left and right, dropped
his voice, and said "I'm thinking about writing on ... Wlttgensteln."
That was the most dramatic occasion on which I've been made aware
of a rumor that seems to circulate among some students that there Is
a secret, wicked doctrine that Is concealed from them by some
unknown authority, because to reveal It would be to unmask the fact
that Plato has been refuted. For, so the story goes, Wlttgensteln refuted
Plato.
Now to make the last sentence have any meaning at all, one has to
take the name Plato as shorthand for "Plato's theory of forms." And
what is that? Our dean once gave a lecture called "Plato's theory of
forms," and pointed out that, If the phrase was to refer to anything
that could be found In the clialogues, every word In it, except "of,"
would need to be changed. Let us see what Wlttgensteln's famous
refutation actually refutes. It consists In arguing that the various
things we call games are not all alike. One of them might resemble a
second In some characteristics, but have clifferent characteristics In
common with a third, with pairs of games overlapping in many diferent
ways, so that some two might have no characteristics In common at
all, except for membership In the same extended farnlly. You have your
brother's nose, he has your mother's eyes, she has her grandfather's
forehead, and so on. You are all Smiths, but "Smith" is not a word
with a single meaning. There are people with the Smith chin, others
with the piercing Smith gaze, but there Is no Smithness, and you
would never be tempted to think there was. All there Is that belongs
to all the Smiths Is an array of family resemblances.
Now If Meno had only had the chance to hear talk of family
resemblances, as he had heard about effluences, the clialogue that
Joe Sachs Is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. This lecture was delivered
at the college in Santa Fe In Aprll of this year and In Annapolis in May.
�42
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
bears Ws name could have been over ln lhree pages-or could lt? How
would we decide when we had a llst of all the relevant characteristics
of all the tWngs called virtues, to be sure there were none common to
them all? And why, when Socrates gives two examples of definitions
of shape (75b, 76a), does he not llst characteristics at all, but set the
thing he's defining as a whole ln relation to something else? And have
you noticed that Socrates never asks a question llke "what is a game?''
He often refers to a game called draughts, which footnotes tell us is
something like checkers, but only as a way of sharpening by contrast
the meaning of the thing he is interested in at any time. And in the
Lysis, in which some friends have been wrestling, he does not use the
occasion to ask about wrestling or playing, but about friendshlp.
There is a memorable occasion ln the Parmenides when the old
phllosopher tells the young Socrates that he is not yet completely
ph!losophlc (130e), just because he wants to inquire not about dirt
but about the just and the beautiful. By that standard, Socrates at
the age of seventy had still not grown up as a philosopher. Plato never
stated a theory of forms for Wittgenstein or anyone else to refute, but
Socrates often resorted to the hypothesis that there are invisible looks
that belong to intelligible things. If we want to understand what he
meant, we have to pay some attention to when he turned to this
hypothesis, how he followed it up, and what he was looking for on
such occasions. Wittgenstein and others like him tell us to look to the
use of a word, if we want to find Its meaning. Socrates uses the word
etdos only when he has ftrst asked what something ls, and he does
not ask that question Indifferently about anything and everythlng. We
have to ask, what guides the asking of the what-is question?
But where should we begin? You have read dialogues that take aim
at virtue, rhetoric, and justice, to mention only the first lhree on the
list. But something odd happens in each of them. The inquily aimed
at virtue seems to concentrate instead on what learning Is, the one
that asks about rhetoric shifts to a relentless asking of the question,
what ls the best life?, and the tmmense dialogue about justice seems
to encompass everything In the world, but especially the question of
what would be the best possible education. Like our own seminars,
the conversations of Socrates never seem to keep to the opening
questions, so before we've gotten anywhere with the question of what
Socrates chooses to ask about, we already have to worry about why
hls questions don't seem to stick. Like the statues of Daedalus that
Socrates mentions near the end of the Meno (97d-e), they seem to get
up and run away, though perhaps they do not altogether escape, but
try to lead us somewhere.
�SACHS
43
This fact, that Socrates' own what-is questions always tum out to
be about something else than the thing they were first asked about,
Is to me the most Important and revealing thing about them. We Will
return to this soon, but first it turns out that the easiest place to begin
looking at the what-Is question Is in a dialogue in which Socrates does
not lead the discussion. In that dialogue there is someone else who
has a methodical way of proceeding with such questions, and he never
lets the original topic run away, but keeps battering at It so directly
that it Is soon Impossible to tell what It Is. I am speaking of the Sophist
, a dialogue in which the Eleatic Stranger learns before our eyes how
to ask what something is, not by witnessing or Imitating Socrates, but
by the reliable method of trial and error. He starts out the dialogue as
a disciple ofParmenldes, and in the course oflt discovers, and displays
to us, that Parmenldes was wrong about who and what are most truly
philosophic.
In the first half of the dialogue he presents the orthodox
Parmenldean line, that there Is a universal method for getting knowledge, applicable indifferently to any topic, that cares no more about
the art of the general than about the art of removing lice (227a-b).
Topics of inquiry do not count for philosophy; logical structures do.
Philosophic discipline requires purging ourselves of any motive to care
about any one thing more than any other. Once we are pure, disembodied logicians we can begin to learn. Now you may think this Is what
Socrates himself says In the Phaedo , but one shouldn't decide too
quickly what It means to say that philosophy Is nothing but the
practice of dying and being dead (64a). For one thing, in both the
Symposium and the Republic, Socrates likens philosophy to erotic love
(210a-d, 474c-475c). But one only needs to take one step back from
the Phaedo Itself to see that even there the questions about philosophy, dying, and being dead are not dispassionate but urgent ones.
Socrates rebukes his friends for their grief over his dying (117c-e), but
that Is only because he wants to harness all that powerful feeling to
what he.calls keeping the logos alive (89b). Phaedo reports that those·
present were never far from laughter or tears, and spent the whole day
in the grip of an unaccustomed experience he calls wonder (58e-59a).
The philosophic approach of the Eleatic Stranger Is too methodical,
too patient, too relentless to let wonder or desire get in Its way.
The Stranger has a technique for moving from a word to the thing
meant by It (218b fl), a universal strategy for capturing what anything
is, the method of division. It begins by casting a net, finding some
general class of things that the looked-for thing must necessarily
belong to. Then, to shift the metaphor, it begins quartering the field,
�44
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
always dividing the class before it in two. Why should there not
sometimes be a division into three parts? Because the power of logic
is greatest where contradictories are concerned. The two parts of any
division must be made in such a way that anything in the world must
be found in one or the other of them. Black and white is an inappropriate division of colors, but black and not-black form a pair of classes
that include everything there is, not even restricted to colors, since
there is no possible middle ground between them into which anything
could slip. To locate anythihg in one side of such a division, it is only
necessary to assure oneself that it cannot be in the other side. In
practice one might fail to make all divisions exhaustive and mutually
exclusive, but it is never a very difficult matter to correct them. The
method is as simple as it is universal. And if something is in the
original class, and repeatedly narrowed down into smaller and smaller
sub-classes, mustn't one eventually reach a class that includes it and
nothing else? I think the answer has to be yes: the Stranger's method
is infallible. But one only needs to read the dialogue to see that the
Stranger's method fails. How can this be? We have just endorsed the
law of contradiction, and now we find that something infallible fails.
The problem, though, is not a collapse of logic, but a misapplication
of it. Doctors can't be expected to make shoes, and logicians are not
philosophers. The ancient Eleatic school and the modem analytic one
are victims of the same mistake.
The Stranger's method of division is too logical in the sense that it
is nothing but logical. It is a mechanical repetition of a logical
procedure; point it in a new direction and start it up again, and it will
grind on to a new conclusion. Ask it which of the two conclusions one
should choose, and it is silent, because it can only get its teeth into
contradictory alternatives, but its own products can never contradict
one another. The infallibility of the method is its vice, because it will
always succeed in telling you what something is, no matter how often
it has already given you different answers to the same question. I will
remind you what the sophist turned out to be: he was a hunter of the
children of the rich, a businessman who trafficked in wisdom as either
a manufacturer, traveltng merchant, or local retailer, a professional
athlete whose sport was debate, and a purifier of souls, who opened
the posssibility of!earning by refuting the mistaken opinion of knowledge. The Stranger calls this result unsound (232a), but it is not
mistaken. My summary of the six definitions already shows how to
reduce them to four, since the retailer, traveling salesman, and
manufacturer differ in only incidental ways, and perhaps we could get
them down to three by saying that hunting for customers is subordi-
�SACHS
45
nate to the purpose of transacting business with them, but now we
are stuck. The sophist has to make money out of his teaching, has to
be able to win arguments, and has to have an effect on his students
that changes the opinions they already had. But what is he really
after-money, victory, or the betterment of his students? Tell me
please, by logic alone, how to answer that question. In fact I already
went outside the bounds of the Stranger's method when I said that
the first four definitions could be reduced to one because they all had
the same purpose. End~ and means can be distinguished by human
beings, but not by means of logic.
From the standpoint oflogic, it has to be purely arbitrary to decide
whether the sophist is most properly considered a businessman, an
athlete, or a healer of souls. From the standpoint of anyone who might
consider entrusting the education of a son or daughter to him, it is
the only question that matters. ''What Is a sophist?" is not answered
by a list of characteristics that specify membership in classes. It is
only answered when we know which of those characteristics govern
the rest, and make someone a sophist. How do we decide that? I don't
know of any recipe, and I don't see how any answer to the question
can be without risk of error. We have crossed over from the safe domain
oflogic to something called philosophy, and we have done so at exactly
the same place that the Eleatic Stranger did. Not only was a swarm of
definitions of one thing an unsound result, but the sixth definition of
the sophist in particular outraged the Stranger as a human being
(23la). It seemed to give the sophist more honor than he deserved. In
trusting his own desire to do justice, the Stranger abandons his
principle that the method of the logos must honor lice-pickers and
generals equally. He understands that abandoning his neutrality
means giving up Parmenides as his spiritual father (24ld), and that
plunges him into the deepest questions about being and not-being.
The dialogue seems to tell us that we can't find out what anything is
unless we are willing to ask-that means abandon all our present
opinions about-what everything is.
Let us step back and try to understand what has happened. Does
the what-is question ask for a definition of a word? If so, there could
not be so much at stake in asking it, and there would be nothing wrong
with arbitrarily picking one definition out of many as long as everyone
involved in the conversation understood it and agreed to it. But the
Stranger made clear from the beginning that the point was not to draw
lines around a word but to leave the word behind and find the thing
meant. The definition is what makes the thing what it is. That in turn
means that there must be something else involved with the thing on
�46
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
which we focus the question. We think of a definition as an identity,
a group of words that can be substituted for a single word, but in the
dialogues of Plato the what-Is questions that are asked are always
looking beyond the things asked aboutto their rootedness In the whole
of things. What defines virtue? Not any group of words, but the nature
of human beings. And what defines the sophist? According to the
Stranger, when he has broken loose from Parmenldes and is free to
be Socratic, It Is the nature of being itself, an irreducibly twofold
structure that allows for the possibility of Images. The Socratic what-Is
question Is always the question about how things are, asked In so
radical a way that It permits no ready-made opinions to remain as
crutches.
Now it is possible to arrive at this kind of questioning from any
starting point, but it is also easy to see why Socrates only asks the
what-is question about certain kinds of things. There has to be some
issue that matters enough to us to make It worthwhile to call Into
question all the safe opinions on which we base our lives. Parmenides
had It exactly backwards when he told Socrates that philosophy
requires a studied indifference to its topics. Philosophy can only be
about what matters to us. This also explains a common phenomenon,
that the asking of the what-Is question makes other people laugh.
Martin Heidegger, at the beginning of a book called What is a Thing?,
suggested that philosophy could be defined as that at which menial
servants laugh. The snobbishness of his remark is out of place and
obscures his Insight. Someone who does not care about the thing In
question can't see the point of suspending his prejudices, and he is
as likely to be a professor as a servant. But it Is even more important
that this very laughter wears two faces, for It need not be the smug
self-congratulation of the unexamined life, but can also be the spontaneous childlike delight we all take In the sudden appearance of
wonder.
Indifference seems to be the only reaction one cannot have to a
philosophic question, If one Is aware of it at all. And the fear that the
presence of desire will destroy our "objectivity" Is misplaced. First of
all. In the new landscape opened by the experience of wonder we lose
the familiar landmarks by which our desires are ordinarily steered.
What we thought we wanted may lose Its appeal. Achilles and Priam
gaze at each other In wonder, and no longer wish each other dead.
Second, the power of wonder takes us beyond vanity, so that selfishness itself can make us give up cherished but worthless opinions.
Gorglas and Thrasymachus, two of the vainest humans one could
Imagine, become absorbed in following the arguments of Socrates and
�SACHS
47
each spends a long time willing not to be the center of attention. And
finally, objectivity is static, while desire is dynamic, so if philosophy
Is an activity In which we can be changed, only desire can set It In
motion and keep It In motion. In Plato's portrait of him, the old
Parmenldes Is reluctant to get Involved In a philosophic discussion,
and compares himself to an old racehorse with no desire to run, and
to an old man falling In love, with no desire to feel desire (137a).
Now there Is another character in the dialogues who Is even less
able to move and change than is Parmenides, and whose very name
means standing-still or staying-In-place, and this Is Meno. Let us look
at the Meno to see an example of how Socrates asks and answers a
what-Is question. That's right, I said "answers," and I am not referring
to the lame conclusion that virtue comes by divine lot. Socrates himself
discounts this result as one In which no trust can be put because It
evades the true question about virtue (lOOb). All the energy of the
dialogue is In Its first half, before Meno finally and irrevocably digs In
his heels (86c-d). !tis in that first half of the dialogue that I claim that
Socrates in fact answers the question about virtue, not by giving it a
genus and specific difference or any such neat package that we can
thoughtlessly carry away, but by sketching a first approach to an
answer that would carry the inquiry to a new plane if anyone paid
enough attention to notice It, and made enough of an effort to follow
It up. Of course Meno Is not the person to do either of those things,
and no one else present steps forward, as often happens In other
dialogues. But the dialogue remains alive for us to enter into, and
when we have gotten past our first exasperation over the fact that
Socrates won't tell us anyihing, but only ask more and more questions
and claim total ignorance, we can begin to notice that he does make
some dtrect assertions.
One of the strongest of these occurs just before the discussion
breaks down, and Socrates says he would fight for it in word and deed
(86b-c). That Is the conviction that Inquiring all by Itself makes us
better and braver people. Doesn't that have to mean that self-directed,
philosophic learning is at least one way that at least some virtues are
acquired? Now that may seem to be a weasely, Meno-like claim that
falls to tell us what virtue is, but let's look more closely at exactly what
Socrates says. He says that by believing one needs to Inquire after the
things one doesn't know, we are better, more man-like, and less inert.
There are three surprising words here that probably don't quite match
your memory of the passage. Socrates does not say that the belief in
question leads us to become better, but that merely believing It, we
already are better. But in what respects, exactly, are we better? Now
�48
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
all of you know that the topic of the dialogue, virtue or excellence, is
arete, and that it is related to the words aner, man, and andreios,
manly or brave. But Socrates avoids by a fraction of a milllmeter saying
that believing in the need to inquire makes us more manly, andreioteros; instead, he uses the word andrikoteros, more man-like. And
finally, the second way that we are better is by being less inert, less
argos. You may recall that in the Odyssey, Odysseus has an old dog
named Argos, who recognizes him after his twenty-year absence. If
you are like me, you wonder, when you read it, why Odysseus's dog
has the name of Agamemnon's city, but it doesn't. Argos is a common
adjective meaning lazy, a contraction of a-ergos, inert.
So while it is surprising that in the mere believing of something we
are already better people, these are two very weak sorts of goodness
that Socrates gives us credit for. We are less like lumps of rock, and
more nearly resemble men. But even this approach to virtue has
far-reaching implications. F1rst, what does masculinity have to do with
virtue? Just because a connection between them is built into a
language, no speaker of the language is compelled to accept it, but to
Meno that connection is the whole story. Meno's various efforts to say
what virtue is add up to a fairly simple and coherent picture. Virtue
in its strongest and most proper sense can belong only to men, and
to them only in the prime of life and when not enslaved (7le); these
manly fellows have the power to help their friends and hurt their
enemies, for what else is human excellence but the ability to rule other
people (73c-d)? He later adds that the man of virtue will help himself
to gold and silver, as well as to honors and offices, since these are the
beautiful things that give delight (77b, 78c-d). But instead of admiring
this lovely picture, Socrates keeps raising picky objections. The most
persistent one is whether any action can be good without temperance
and justice (73a-b, d, 78d), but the first one is whether a woman who
acted in the same way would be any less excellent than a man (72d-e).
Meno, when compelled to, pays lip service to both of these pieties, but
never shows any sign of believing them. But it is equally clear that
Socrates is talking about a simply human excellence that has no bias
toward the male. His claim is an equal-opportunity insult: none of us
knows how to live well. When he says we need to be more man-like he
means more like human beings. We are none of us what we are born
to be and meant to be.
Now I am not claiming to get all this out of one slightly unexpected
adjective, but that adjective confirms a theme that is present in most
of the dialogues. Socrates is always comparing the virtues to humble
arts like shoemaking. This makes some people climb the walls, notably
�SACHS
49
Callicles in the Gorgias (490e-49la). Why is Socrates so insistent
about this comparison? We come into the world without shoes, as
Socrates himself displays, but we are not condemned to go barefoot
and vulnerable If someone has taken the trouble to develop the
capacity to fit us with shoes. Shoemaking is in us as a possibility, but
it takes work and at least a little thought to get it out into the world.
I think the meaning of Socrates' constant comparison is this: If we
thought even as much about how we ought to live as the shoemaker
does about how to protect feet, our lives would be revolutionized. We
have to work to become what we are by birth and by tight, and it is
only in a minority of people who excel the rest of us that we even see
what a human being is. And that is the reason for Socrates' faint praise
when he says that believing in the possibility of!earning already makes
us more nearly human. Without that belief we are as inert as rocks,
as static as Meno.
Meno does explicitly deny that learning is possible (SOd), and he is
literally motionless. He repeats in the center of the dialogue the same
words he had flung at Socrates at the beginning, as though no
conversation had gone on at afl. How like some people we afl know,
Meno is, and how like ourselves. Between his repetitions a spectacular
event has taken place, but spectacles no more than arguments have
power to move him. If he had been sharp enough to see what Socrates
was doing in the slave-boy scene, Meno would have been moved to
anger. Socrates dangles in front of Meno a nonsensical concoction
about priests, priestesses, and reincarnation,just because that's what
it takes to get him interested in anything, which drops out of the
dialogue with hardly a trace, but what Socrates shows to Meno is living
proof that his slave is a better man than he is. Meno is immune to the
insult, but we are meant to look at him and at his slave, and to wonder
at the sight of a world turned upside-down. Socrates shows us that
the splendid Meno is not as much of a human being as is some
nameless piece of property that he owns and orders around. Now I am
not claiming that the slave is a model of excellence. All he does is try
to understand something, recognize that he doesn't, and try again,
and all Socrates claims is that this is a motion away from the inert
and toward the human. The understatement is breathtaking, and is
typically Socratic. Remember that the two arts Socrates most often
praises and recommends as models of the virtues are shoemaking and
medicine, and that Socrates himself has no use for either of them. But
even that much art would mend our lives.
Let us sum up what this reading of the Meno amounts to. It says
that virtue is activity that brings out our properly human capacities,
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
that learning either is that activity or inevitably accompanies it, and
that merely believing that learning is necessary and possible is the
start of the acquisition of virtue. What would Socrates say about this
formulation? He has in fact given us a standard to test it by, in his
two sample definitions of shape as the only thing that always turns
out to follow along with color, and as that to which a solid reaches, or
the determining boundary of a solid (75b, 76a). He tells Meno he would
love to hear even that sort of statement of what virtue is, and ours
does in fact resemble it. It appears that virtue is the only thing that
always turns out to accompany learning, and is that toward which
human activity reaches, the determining boundary of human nature.
This sort of answer is nothing one can rest with; in fact it is a destroyer
of rest, an invigorating answer that won't let us stand still. But it
explains why the clialogue that asks what virtue is dwells on what
learning is. And it gives us more ammunition to understand Meno
himself.
When Meno won't pause even for a second to think about the
definitions of shape, Socrates accuses him of hubris. Now the root
sense of this word applies to a horse that won't accept confinement.
Any question Socrates asks, anything definite that needs to be thought
about, Meno jumps over like a fence. He will not stay within any
determining boundary that would permit learning, and therefore
inevitably stays within his ignorance. And twice later (SOB, 81E),
Socrates calls him panourgos, someone who will do anything, in the
sense of stop at nothing, a shameless and unscrupulous man. When
Meno wants something, he takes the shortest route to it, without
stopping to wonder what he does to himself in the process. So he
misses the mark of properly bounded human activity on both sides:
in doing anything he can do nothing. He is panowyos and argos at
the same time, since he has not begun to think about which desires
he ought to satisfY, and has left himself helpless in the one arena in
which his boldness and eagerness would have been of some use to him.
The clialogue is so far from falling to say what virtue Is, that it says
it in a strong positive statement of conviction by Socrates, in the
negative example of Meno, the tiny beginner's example of his slave,
and, we have to add, the ever-present positive example of Socrates
himself. But none of these are explicit statements. Why is the clialogue
so indirect, inexplicit, and tantalizing? The fact that it is never
straightforwardly explicit means that we readers have to do all the
work, though Plato has handed us all the necessary tools. In the case
of this clialogue, we will only see what it says virtue is Ifwe begin enact
it ourselves, to learn it without being instructed. I said earlier that the
�SACHS
51
what-is question is never about a word. To anyone who has experienced such a question, the suggestion that it asks how a word is used
Is simply childish. We looked at one side of the what-Is question when
we saw that It asks how a thing Is defined, how It fits In with all that
Is. But It Is equally true that the very asking of such a question begins
to define us, to shape us and work us into new beings, launched into
learning.
But we seem not to .have said anything about the eidos of virtue.
At Meno's first attempt to speak about virtue, Socrates told him to
keep an eye on some one look that is the same In all virtues, however
many and various they might be. We have gotten as far as to say that
vtrtue always has the look oflearnlng, and to see that learning Itself
does not look like Meno's ability to quote from teachers and poets, but
does look like his slave's honest puzzlement and at the same time like
Socrates' energetic questioning. But this Is far from being able to see
what makes all virtue what it is. We are about as far along that road
as the slave-boy Is in geometry. Socrates describes that condition as
being on the borderline between knowledge and opinion, in just the
way we are at the moment we are awakened out of a dream (85c). The
slave, and we, could easily go back to sleep. In the Republic especially,
Socrates keeps cautioning that philosophy is a long road and hard
work (435d, 504b-d, 515e). The dialogues as a whole are only concerned with Its first step, the transition from sleep to waking, and they
do have the amazing power to set us in motion, but where we go after
that Is up to us.
But we can sketch out some directions we might choose to take.
For example, how should we think of the relation between a broader
form such as virtue and a narrower one such as justice? This probably
sounds like a silly question. Virtue Is obviously a genus of which
justice is one species; broad classes contain all sorts of smaller
sub-classes. But It is not a good idea to be hasty In matters of this
sort, and what seems obvious here is not at all necessary. The idea of
classes is one of the ways that logic can trlvialize philosophy. It is
precisely the mistake of the Eleatic Stranger to think that what is
looked for by the what-Is question can be trapped In classes without
being understood. The sophist does belong to the class of hunters,
and to that of salesmen, and to that of athletes, and so on, but that
is just the trouble. Every characteristic he has assigns him to some
class, and every one of them says something about him, but that
doesn't mean we can assume that they say what he Is. Some of those
classes he belongs to are merely parts of what he Is as a sophist, and
others are Incidental to what he primarily Is.
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
But suppose we found some characteristic or cluster of them that
was both necessruy and sufficient to his being a sophist. Because of
Its necessity, every sophist would have to be In that class, and because
of Its sufficiency, everything In that class would have to be a sophist.
You will be surprised to hear that this Is not good enough either. It
would give us a test by which we could unfailingly Identify sophists,
but It still might not reveal what they are. How Is that possible? Think
of any proposition In Ew;lid about triangles, the more obscure the
better. I choose I.20, but' any one will do. In any triangle, two sides
tsken together in any manner are greater than the remaining one. Now
because this Is a proven proposition, It Is necessruy, and If Its steps
are reversible, which I think they are, It Is also sufficient to determine
a triangle. So as a good logician, I define trisngle as that of which two
sides tsken together In any manner are greater than the remaining
one. This Is an Infallible marker for a class that contains all triangles
and only triangles, yet It completely misses the point of defining
something, which Is to reveal what It Is.
.
In order to think about anything worthwhile, we have to abandon
the picture of classes nested within classes, and both Plato and
Aristotle In fact did that. Plato really did have a theory of forms, but
It Is nothing like what Is meant by virtually everyone who uses that
phrase nowadays. The thing that Wittgensteln is said to have refuted,
Plato had already refuted, In a more complex way. Plato's own theory
arose out of difficulties like the one I mentioned a moment ago: How
should we think of the relation between virtue and virtues? In the
Protagoras, Socrates asks whether justice, moderation, and so on are
not lnstsnces of virtue but parts of one whole, as the mouth, nose,
eyes, and ears are parts of one face (329d). And this Is a common
theme In the dialogues, as Socrates always seems to force people,
against common sense, to conclude that courage or justice or temperance Is Impossible In Isolation from the rest, and from wisdom. They
are as different from one another as eyes are from a mouth, and putting
them together does not blend them into a homogeneous mixture. Why
then shouldn't someone be brave while being unjust, intemperate, and
stupid? But If Socrates' suggestion Is tempting to you at all-If you
suspect that real bravery Is possible only In someone who Is just and
temperate and wise-then you have a tough problem on your hands.
It used to be called the problem of the one and the many. Aristotle
reports that Plato solved It by postulating that each form Is put
together In the way a number Is (Metaphysics 987b 21-2). Four Is not
something that belongs to each of Its units, but only to all of them
together. But the forms are not mathematical numbers, with identical
�SACHS
53
units, but are complexes of other forms, each distinct from the rest,
but impossible outside the complex. That means we can't stmply add
up wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice, because none of them
is anything at all in isolation from the rest. Wherever courage, say, is
found, virtue as a whole is already in play. But we can't get at virtue
itself, apart from the virtues, because it is nothing but the being-together of them all.
We know about this theory of Plato's only because Aristotle tells us
about it, and because that permits a kind of hindsight to be applied
to a few very obscure passages in the dialogues. Jacob Klein and
Robert Williamson have been inspired to make partial reconstructions
of it. • I mention it only to show that the technical and labortous side
of philosophy is as much a field for tmagination and wonder as is the
beginning of philosophy, when the what-is question first takes hold.
And I can report on yet another road one might take in the same
pursuit. Aristotle follows his teacher's lead in many more respects
than is usually seen, but in this one he charts a new course. It begins
with the observation that we call something medical, for example, in
a vartety of ways (Metaphysics, Bk.IV, ch. 2). There is a medical knife,
a medical book, a medical degree, a medical procedure, and a medical
person. Only in the last case is the word used in its prtmary sense, as
indicating the presence of a certain kind of knowledge and skill. The
knife is an instrument of that skill, the book one of the causes of it,
the degree a sign ofit, and the procedure an act or effect ofit. Whenever
something other than a human being is called medical, it is meant in
a dertvative sense that points to the primary one. This structure of
meaning operates everywhere, and again, Aristotle is not interested in
the way words are used, except as a pointer to the causal structure of
the world. And yet again, it is not the structure ofspecies within genus
within higher and higher general classes that reveals anything about
the world, but a more complex and intimate pattern that could never
be found by logic alone.
For example, in the Metaphysics, Aristotle asks a question he says
was asked in ancient times and must always be asked and struggled
with (l028b 2-4), what is being? By the end of the seventh book of
that work, he has determined that being is meant in its prtmary and
• Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Tiwught and the Origin of Algebra (M.I.T.
Press, 1968), Ch. 7, c. Robert B. Williamson, "Eidos and Agatlwn In Plato's
RepubUc," In FourEssays on Plato's "Republic, "Vol. XXXIX (1989-90), numbers
1 and 2, of this magazine.
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
proper sense only of animals, plants, and the cosmos as a whole. They
are the only things that are in their own right, and everything else is
in some way derivative from them. Now this goes far beyond anything
present in linguistic usage. Language doesn't even know that it is
saying "being" in more than one way, but misleads us by appearing
to collapse them all into one. Aristotle is correcting the language by
discovering complexity where it suggests simplicity. Hls thinking is
moving entirely among the things at which language points, and points
in an inadequate way. Butit is a much greater step to single out active,
organized, self-maintaining wholes as the only things in our experience that display being as such. Language claims that title equally
and indifferently for tables, rocks, flowers, wood, bones, and all sorts
of other things that Aristotle thinks are only beings of the second rank,
beings-by-courtesy, derived from and dependent on those few things
that are always at-work-staying-the-same. Butwhatlfthe true beings
themselves have sources and causes? If they do, then the same pattern
continues, and even the primacy beings in our experience are derivative beings in the true order of things. This is exactly what Aristotle
concludes, as he follows the causal order upward to forms, and then
to the being-at-work offorms, and fmally to the divine intellect. Being
is not the class that includes evecything indifferently, but the activity
that proceeds from one source to the organized whole of all things.
Beings belong to a complex pattern that points to the highest being.
Now this pattern of one primacy meaning that governs the rest is
found everywhere in Aristotle's writings, but even it does not serve as
a method of lnqutcy for him. When he asks, in the NicomacheanEthics,
what is the good?, he seems to conclude that the various goods are
not linked by derivation from one primacy good, but are all the same
by analogy (1096b 27-30). That means that the human good has to
be a separate topic of lnqulcy, not found by derivation from a higher
good. Thomas Aquinas, lncidentslly, uses the word "analogy'' to refer
to the other pattern of meanings derived from one primacy instance, ·
but for Aristotle it makes a great difference which of the two patterns
is at work. For example, when we speak of a healthy diet, we mean
one that contributes to the health of an animal; it is not the diet but
the animal that can be healthy ln the primacy and governing sense.
But suppose we speak of a healthy society? Do we mean one ln which
the people are physically fit and free of disease, or one in which the
people co-operate in a way analogous to the parts of a healthy animal
body? The former would be a case of meaning by derivation, the latter
one of meaning by analogy. Aristotle's inquiries are guided by the
�SACHS
55
things for which they are looking. and do not seek to fit those things
into ready-made patterns of any kind.
In fact, in the Physics there is yet a third and most surprising
structure, that has only recently begun to become evident to me.
Aristotle asks what motion is, and gives an answer that applies to four
kinds: change of being, qualitative change, quantitative change, and
change of place. The definition seems to apply most directly to the first
two kinds. but the Physics Is organized around a progressive narrowIng down of all change to change of place, as the primary motion. The
number of kinds of motions is reduced In stages from four to three to
two to one. But the primary motion involves the least change, while
the primary change is the one that turns out to be least properly called
a motion. Change and motion name the same four kinds of action in
two opposite ways, so that the upward scale of motions is ·.he
downward scale of changes, with birth and death at one enr'. and
change of place at the other. This in tum reflects the twofold nature
of nature, as life and cosmos, in which Aristotle permits both sides to
be primary at the same time. One recent book about the Physics claims
that the early definition of motion Is discarded when the later books
are reached, but in fact that understanding of change In terms of
potency and being-at-work remains dominant, even while the motion
that displays it least Is being found to be the primary motion. in the
eighth chapter of the last book of the Physics there is a final demonstration of what Is wrong with Zeno's paradoxes that brings the
definition of motion to the forefront, and shows that all motion must
be understood as change, even at the limit of mere change of place,
and that all change must be rooted in the potency that goes with the
nature of some being. The meaning of motion, and its relation to
change, are imbedded in the way this world is organized. To get the
structure of meaning straight is to come into sight of the way things
are. In this case that produces a paradox beyond any that Zeno
imagined, a structure in which two things are simultaneously prior to
and derivative from one another.
So what is a game? Perhaps there is some common element present
in everything we call a game. Perhaps there is not, and they only share
a set of family resemblances. I can't work up enough interest in the
topic to form an opinion about it. All I can say is that, as far as my
own experience goes, there is no what-Is question there at all. But
what is virtue, or motion, or the good, or being itself? Reading Plato
and Aristotle has made it obvious to me that these are questions I have
a stake in pursuing, and has drawn me into the pursuit. The briefest
of sketches have shown us four different structures by which the one
�56
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
thing asked about might be related to the many things called by Its
name, none ofwhich Is as crude as either of the two alternatives about
games. To recapitulate them: the one thing In question might be
composed of the very things that are derived from It; It might be the
primary Instance to which all the others point; It might be an Internal
relation, present In the many things by way of analogy; and It might
be part of a bi-polar relationship, In which It and something akin to It
jointly govern a group of things that bear both of their names.
Aristotle's lnqulrles along the path of the what-is question are so
diverse, and the theory he attributes to Plato Is so unexpected, that
we are in no danger of becoming Platonlsts or Aristotelians. Even If we
wanted to, where Is the method to follow, or the procedure to Imitate?
Philosophy of a Platonic or Aristotelian kind Is nothing but activity
stimulated by the what-Is question, opened and re-opened In wonder,
led by desire, full of hard work but more enlivening than tiring, offering
not doclrlnes and dogmas but wide-open possibilities, as broad as the
human capacities we are so likely to leave unused and Inert.
�Words Should Be Hard
Words should be hard to come across,
As odd ones are in ancient manuscripts.
Let's take the appellation of your lips.
It shouldn't be reachable with ease. We first
Should have to search, and even then
Be sent from stem to root in the lexicon.
As for the kiss itself, the elusive bird
Should lurk in the glossary of highly
Irregular verbs. For, after all,
As the antic distich says, it's in that act
That the soul (poor thing) desires to cross over.
Elliott Zuckerman
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TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�Anselm's Proslogion
and its Hegelian Interpretation
Adrtaan Peperzak
translated by Steven Werlln
To Paul Ricoew-, as a sign
ofgratitude and admiration.
1. Hegel on Anselm
St. Anselm is the only philosopher of the middle ages whom Hegel
discusses seriously in his lectures on the history of philosophy. Hegel
also devotes important pages to Anselm in his lectures on the philosophy of religion, especially in the Introduction to the main part-which
deals with religion that is Christian or "absolute"-where he explains
the credo ut intelUgam (I believe in order to understand).' There are
two main reasons for Hegel's interest:
(1) In contrast to those of his colleagues in theology and philosophy
who proclaim at every turn that the human mind cannot know God,
let alone prove his existence, Hegel believes that genuine faith does
not merely permit, but even requires, the believer to seek to understand rationally what he believes.
(2) According to Hegel, Anselm's proof of the existence of God,
presented in the Proslogion, is an expression--clumsy though it might
be-of the heart of all philosophy and all theology that deserves to be
called an absolute science.
It is more than probable that when Hegel dealt with the argument
that Ansehn makes in the Proslogion he had not read the whole book,
and so did not know the chapters, so important for understanding the
book, In which the author sets out, In a prayer, the emotional context
This essay is a translation of ..Le proslogion d'Anselme apres Hegel, .. which
appeared in the Archivio di Filosojla, Anoo LVIII (1990).
Adriaan Peperzak holds the Arthur J. Schmitt chair in Philosophy at Loyola
University of Chicago. Steven Werlto, an alumnus of St. Joho's College,
Anoapolis, Is his sludent.
�60
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
within which thought must move in order to att:am a cert:am understanding of God. In fact, all the quotations that Hegel offers to his
students are taken from Tennenman's History of Phllosophy. That
book makes no clear reference to the Indissoluble union between the
religious sentiment, expressed in chapters 1, 14, 16-18, 22, and
24-26, and the work of the understanding presented in the context of
prayer. Without a sense of that union, Hegel interprets the Proslogion
as though it were a thematic discourse, comparable to the philosophical treatises of modems such as Spinoza, Leibnlz, and Kant.
But the Hegelian interpretation is dominated not only in its form,
but also in its content, by the perspective of eighteenth-century
philosophy, notably by Kant. Hegel does not give a precise analysis of
the concept that Anselm starts out from, namely id quo malus cogitarl
nequit (that than wWch a greater cannot be thought). instead, Hegel
declares that concept to be equivalent to a number of different
expressions: to "the concept of the most perfect" and "the universe of
reality'' (der Inbegri.ff der Realttl.it and das Allgemeine der Realitdt)expressions which suggest the omnitudo realitatts (totality of reality)
of Leibnlz and Kant-and, on the other hand, to "the thought of a
highest" (der Gedanke eines Hochsten) and to "the Wghest thought"
(der hiichste Gedanke).
But even if Hegel did not know the framework that Anselm introduces his argument within wWch there is nevertheless a surprtsing
resemblance between their conceptions of what Hegel calls the "proofs
of the existence of God." Hegel tells us, in Ws Lectures on the Proofs of
the Existence of God, that any such proof is nothing but a way of
conceptualizing "the rising of the Spirit towards God" (ein denkendes
Au.ffassen dessen. was die Erhebung des Geistes zu Gott ist).2 In trying
to take in what is true in the various proofs, Hegel starts from Christian
faith, just as Anselm had, in order to comprehend what that faith has
testified. For Hegel, if the attempt is to succeed, the comprehension
that it reaches must include the necessity of its conclusion, and to ·
this end, the hypothesis the conceptualization starts from must show
itself to be a self-evident truth. For him, Anselm's great discovery is
that the content of the concept from which he deduces the necessary
existence of God does not have any foundation except itself. Even If it
is only taken as the thought of a hypothetical possibility, it imposes
by its own force the necessity of what it hypothesizes. The belief In the
existence of God, which, as an empirical fact, is prtor in time to the
deduction of that existence, is no longer required for knowing that God
exists as God. The proof shows Itself to be a proof a priori, a deduction
of the necessary implications of a pure concept. The task that then
�PEPERZAK
61
remains is the deduction, from the concept of God, of a subjective and
historical expression, which is the Christian faith. Such a deduction
will also show that the initial concept Is at the heart of that emotional
faith which Is prior in time to its assumption.
In fuct, Anselm's argument contains all that is necessary for a
complete philosophy: the concept of the perfect, or of God, is nothing
but the concept of the Logos (or of "the Logical"-das Logische-as
Hegel often says), which includes within itself all being and all thought.
The argument, which can rightly be called "onto-logical," is only a way
of proving that the Logos, or God, is the absolute identity of thought
and being, the first and the last, the foundation and the end of all that
is and all that is thought.
For Hegel, like Anselm, faith has an emotional side. But Hegel goes
much farther than Anselm, thinking as he does that the essence of
faith lies in its emotional form and that its contents are identical to
the theological science that one discovers in transforming emotional
adherence into rational knowledge. Although the truth of reason does
not depend on faith, faith is not superfluous: insofar as humans have
knowledge, they must also express truth in the emotional side of their
lives. A complete philosophy would also have to undertake analyses
of the representational, imaginary, and narrative dimensions offaith,
but in order to be brief I limit myself to its emotional aspect.
Like Hegel, Anselm trusts the power of reason to advance the
understanding of what he believes. We shall see, however, that he is
also convinced that there is an insurmountable gap between God as
he reveals himself through a living faith and God as he Is known by
rational thought. Anselm believes that reason can shed light on faith
because he accepts reason as a human means of deepening "the
elevation of his soul in faith towards God." Indeed, reason can
appropriate certain aspects of faith through the clarification of faith
by concepts. And yet, Anselm never uses reason to oppose what he
has received as the truth from the faith of the religious and historical
community that he is at home in.
Hegel does not oppose faith to reason either. He too is convinced
that they cannot contradict each other. He depends on what he calls
a "faith in reason" (Giaube an die Vemtmftl,3 which pretends to more
than Anselm's confidence in reason does. From Anselm's perspective,
we might say that Hegel bets on two different sorts offaith: a faith in
God and a faith In the Reason of Logic. For Hegel himself, however.
these amount to only one faith. God is the Logos; Reason, understood
rightly. is God. Faith is only a temporary way of atiaching oneself to
the truth of the Logos, a truth which better manifests itself when one
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TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
has understood that the Logos is the "only necessary" thing. Because
religious faith is only reason, as expressed in the human psyche, not
yet "elevated" to the level most adequate to Spirit, Reason is the
supreme measure that faith is subject to. The Logos thus controls and
judges all religious faith, including the faith of the absolute, or
Christian, religion. 'The elevation of the spirit to God" must obey
logical necessities if it is to be fully worthy of God and humanity.
The concept that Anselm begins from in the second chapter of the
Proslogton and that Hegel takes to be the concept of the highest
perfection, is understood by Hegel as the abstract concept of the
absolute: the concept of the idea insofar as this latter is the original
identity of thought and being. His love for Anselm's argument is
understandable: by means of an analysis of the abstract concept of
perfection, the argument shows that the highest thought, the thought
of what is most universal, implies being. Thought and being are, then,
just two aspects of the One, which is also totality. The thought of
perfection is the Infinite. It encompasses not only all finite beings and
thoughts, but also the pseudo-infinite that most theologians contrast
with it. Despite certain blunders, a monk of the middle ages-which
were, for Hegel, very obscure-had surpassed Kant in affirming with
all lucidity the central truth of absolute Idealism: in the identity of
thought and being, the Logos is the Infinite and the Perfect. The Idea
of all ideas, the Essence of all that is, is not surpassed by anything or
any thought. It exists as the beginning and the end, as the meaning
of all that is and is thought.
For Hegel, there are two weaknesses in Anselm's effort:
(l) An adequate proof of his thesis would start either from thought
and show that it includes being or from being and show that it
necessarily implies thought. The difference between the two paths is
the difference between the a priori and the a posteriori proofs of the
existence of God. In either case, the proof would have to begin with
the most objective and necessary sense of thought or being and not
with a particular instance, whether subjective or otherwise contingent. Anselm starts out from the subjective consciousness of a certain
individual who thinks the notion of perfection. He does not begin with
the Logos as it displays itself in a Logic that is universal and necessary.
(2) Anselm limits himself to a phenomenological perspective, but
Hegel shows clearly in the Encyclopedia that such a perspective is not
sufficient for proving that the secret of the universe consists in the
self-realization of the absolute as the spiritual identity of subjectivity
and objectivity. Only (onto)logy, a logic which encompasses all that is,
can prove the thesis which Anselm sketches out in the Proslogion.
�PEPERZAK
63
2.Anselm
Now that we have seen how Hegel transforms Anselm's argumentum
untcum into a foreshadowing of post- and anti-Kantian idealism, let
us now see what we can learn from Anselm htmself.
Any interpretation of the "single argument" must begin with a
correct grasp of the framework It exists In, its text and its contexi; so
I will consider these at length. First, I will consider the title of the
Proslogion. It means "allocution," as Anselm remarks in his preface.
He contrasts this aUoqutum with the soliloquiwn. or soliloquy, of the
Monologion. The Proslogion Is thus neither, like the other book, the
meditation of someone "who would seek what he does not know by a
reasoning in the silence of his interior," nor is It a theological or
philosophical treatise. It is a speech addressed to someone. In fact,
the Proslogion Is addressed to many people. Like all writing, it is
addressed to Its readers. This direction is barely mentioned by Anselm.
Anselm also speaks, In many passages, to his soul (anima mea), to his
heart (cor meum), or to the "little man" (homunclo) that he Is. But the
principal addressee is, however, one who is continually present as
though he were someone who hears and intervenes, without making
a sound. It is God-Deus meus, my God, or Dominus meus, my Lord,
or simply Til. The frequent repetition of meus in Deus meus and
Dominus meus shows that the connection which binds Anselm to "his"
God is more intimate than the relation between a philosophical mind
and a theme that it might try to comprehend. The relation between
the writer of the Proslogionand the heart that he exhorts or reproaches
seems to create a distance between the texi and Anselm htmself, but
Anselm undermines this impression by directing himself primarily to
God and by constantly identtJY!ng htmselfwith his soul and with the
homuncio to whom he addresses htmself. The book, oriented as It Is
from the beginning towards God, is a prayer that Anselm's heart
directs towards "his God." All of the arguments and all of the analyses
that arise In the texi are presented as parts of a long prayer, one that
tolerates no distractions.
This prayer is a direct and an utterly natural expression of faith. It
is not subjective-if that word means "arbitrary." On the contrary,
Anselm appeals, in describing its content, to what has been transmitted to him by the historical community that calls itself the "Christian
Church." In Chapter Two he says "credimus," or "we believe." This
community had, In its thousand years, borrowed from the languages
of many cultures in order to translate and interpret the heritage of its
�64
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
faith, a faith which was not particular to any of those cultures, but
was strong enough to redeem them all. One of these languages Is the
language of Hellenistic onto-logy, translated into Latin, which Anselm
found in the works that he read In his abbey. He uses that language
when, after the Invocation at the beginning of Chapter Two, he
reformulates the rock of the Christian faith: "Grant that we might
understand, as much as you think It beneficial, that (quia) you are,
as we believe it, and that you are what (quod) we believe. Now, we
believe that you are something (aliquid) than which one can think
nothing greater."
If we take the understanding (intelllgere or intellectus) that Anselm
seeks to be a synonym for "wisdom," then the prayer seems to carry
on a biblical tradition that is expressed, for example, In the wisdom
literature and in many of the psalms. Anselm then changes the "You"
(credimus te esse) into a "something" (aUquid) that one can only "think"
(cagitare). Is this not a metabasis eis allo genos, a change of kind?
Hasn't Anselm left the biblical tradition in order to adandon himself
to the pagan world of Greek philosophy? Are we confronted once again
by the insurmountable difference between the God of Abraham and
the God of the philosophers?
Anselm's Intent is to show that the God of faith Is the one and only
Lord and God, and that all the value of our life and our Intellect
depends on this single God. Anselm uses a reason that has been
educated by certain great Greek thinkers in order to "understand a
little" (aUquatenus inteUfgere, Chap. 1) that God is what he Is, but he
always maintains his radical and intimate connection with the emotional fountain that springs from desire and hope, and Is the fruit of
religious maturity.
Anselm would firmly deny that there could be a contradiction
between the God of faith and the God of philosophy. He often warns
us not to overestimate the power of the intellect, yet he never deprecates the gift of reason through which man Is seen to have been created
in the image of God.
Although the beginning of the second chapter might suggest that
the faith that Anselm starts from Is a belief in a doctrine composed of
true propositions, this Is not the case. Uke the pistis which Paul
speaks of, Anselm's faith (fides) is, from the start, an utter abandonment and a complete confidence. By God's grace, faith engages the
believer in the practice oflove on the basis of gratitude and joy in hope.
In faith, a life Is seized by an orientation that becomes both a habit
and a disposition of the soul and the body. "God" is thus the name of
the Unique One who orients, penetrates, supports, and consoles even
�PEPERZAK
65
before granting a clear consciousness of what he Is bringing about in
the soul.
At the same time, a living faith inevitably deploys Itself in all the
essential dimensions of the human being engaged by It, and so also
In the Intellect, which Is, in Itself, an inclination towards more light.
An authentic believer Is engaged by his faith in an effort to comprehend
what he lives, having received and understood that faith in the
community which heed~ its tradition. Every authentic believer tries In
this way to gain a certain wisdom. If he has learned methods of
reflection, If he has, for example, studied Neoplatonic treatises, he
uses the practical techniques found in those works, orienting them
according to the wisdom that all faith hopes to blossom into. The
Christian faith has never required that the believer be intelligent, or
that he dedicate himself to philosophical or theological studies. Just
like the blind and the deaf, those who are not intelligent are called to
essential wisdom. But if an authentic believer is authentically philosophical, It Is Impossible for his philosophy to be isolated from what
constitutes the deepest Inspiration of his life. His faith inevitably seeks
an understanding of itself along the path of ontology.
The orientation of a life that seeks God, an orientation grounded In
belief and in love, Is thus the moving force of, and the condition for,
the philosophical investigation Anselm proposes to us. The Investigation is not an autonomous enterprise, because belief and love not only
precede it, but also accompany it and support it. It is therefore natural
that the long chapter that opens the investigation consists of a prayer
in which "my whole heart" (totumcormewn) asks God to help, to teach,
to illuminate, and to renew the man who looks up, from his miserable
state of ignorance, in order to see whether, in hope, his God will grant
what he desires. Anselm's project Is In no way apologetic: neque entm
quaero inteUigere ut credam (for I do not seek to understand in order
to believe); he hopes only to acquire or receive a certain understanding:
credo ut inteUigam.
In concentrating on a philosophical task within a prayer, Anselm
tries to link two fundamental attitudes: the more radical of the two Is
that of the faith in which he finds himself naked before the face of his
God. The other Is that of someone who reflects upon God by seeing
him through a thought In which he appears as a theme or an object.
The stake In the enterprise-and this is the stake in all theology that
Is not atheist-Is to know whether these attitudes can be combined.
Anselm's wager Is the hypothesis that the philosophical intentaccording to which God Is manifest as a thought, as something said
thematically----<:an be integrated Into the Intent of prayer. If he sue-
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
ceeds in it, a believer who is (also) a philosopher will have expressed
his faith by speaking to God about God himself, offering to him the
perspective, the presuppositions, and the means of phtlosophy. Philosophy will have lost its autonomy, but it will have been saved by its
integration into the prayer which fulfills its purpose. While seeming
to reduce God-in the course of his allocution-to a theme, or to
something said, Anselm continually calls him ''You," "my Lord," and
"my God." He speaks to Gqd and offers to him what he thinks of him,
submitting whatever he thinks he knows to God's ultimate judgment.
Anselm's understanding is thus determined by desire and expectation;
he knows and feels that even when his understanding Is made
thematic, his thought Is drawn, guided, and Illuminated by the You
that hears it. The investigation is an exercise in Speaking. and, insofar
as grace has preceded his faith, that Speaking is first and foremost a
way of responding to the one who is his Ufe. The wisdom that he
prepares is discovered to be a gift that fulfills a vision at the heart of
faith. He seeks a concrete knowledge instead of the abstract consciousness and near-Ignorance from which he staried. The God whom
he believes in grants him food for thought. He grants him to think that
very God. As a beginning, God grants him to think God in the form of
a concept that scarcely reveals the tnfinite richness ofwhat he "always
already" is for the heart and the soul of the believer.
The living faith in God is not only the point of departure; it is also,
roughly spreaking, the criterion that allows one to judge whether the
Investigation effectively reaches its end. Faith guides reason all along
Its path. It is, for example, very clearly evident in Chapter Fourteen.
Having proven that God exists as omnipotence, life, truth, justice,
mercy, goodness, and etemi1y themselves, Anselm must note to his
regret that this God, God as (re)presented in the fullest of concepts,
does not correspond to God as he appears prior to all philosophy and
thanks to the experience of faith. The gap between the truth of God
revealed in faith and the truth of God thought by reason Is the gap
between the hidden wisdom of an emotional adjustment to the God
whom one can call "Tu, Deus meus," and the lucid concept of certain
contours of God-a concept that has nonetheless not yet reached its
full completion. Faith is not prevented by any lack of speculative
brilliance from guiding and evaluating the results of philosophy,
whose inner logic obeys only Itself. Without faith, philosophy cannot
find God, because it lacks the perspective and the orientation through
which it can knowwhat direction to search in. Without faith, It cannot
even construct Its initial concept. Without that concept, however,
there can be no beginning and no proof.
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The movement that begins In faith and strives towards a more
illuminated faith here is a process by which an abstract concept
becomes concrete and "fulfills" itself little by little. Where does this
movement lead? Chapters Fourteen and F1fteen show that the doctrine
that can be deduced from the starting point does not so completely
fulfill the concept that the God of thought can be recognized as the
true God of faith.
When Anselm asks, in Chapter Fourteen, whether his "soul" has
found what it sought oy means of the deduced concept-that is, to
know God as it knows him by a faith that has not yet been transformed
Into ontological understanding-he notes that it has not: "that which
Is the highest of all beings, beyond which nothing better can be
thought, which Is life itself(tpsa vita),light, wisdom, goodness, eternal
blessedness, and eternllyutterly happy, and who Is all this everywhere
and always,"ls not the God that the prephilosophical faith recognizes
as its God, the God it prays to and depends upon as Its "creator and
recreator." This discovery plunges the disappointed soul into a crisis,
as much emotional as Intellectual.
The disappointed soul must learn to accept two things If it is to
overcome the depression that threatens It: (l) that the ontological
argument has made the soul see something of its God-"the soul sees
you in a way" even If "It does not see you such as you are" (sicuti es)and (2)-that even this "something," which becomes more visible through
the course of twelve chapters,is still an abstract thought. The logic that
has been uncovered has not yet reached the sense in which the soul
feels that God Is truth and goodness, etemily and blessedness.
The second movement of the Prosl.ogion (Chap. 16-26) Is a new
attempt to identify the God of philosophy with the God offaith. Though
Anselm strongly afllrms their thorough ldentily, he acknowledges In
the last chapter that the utter lucidi1ythat belongs to faith In reference
to Itself remains an ideal that will not be realized on earth. Anselm
seeks the reason for the gap between the two ways In which God
reveals himself In the wretched fate of men as the Inheritors of a
heritage of sin. The tradition of evil (starting with Adam and Cain) that
cuts across the tradition of faith (starting with Abel) plunges us into
a darkness of Ignorance and deformily that we are unable to depart
from entirely. This is to say that we all, believer and unbeliever, carry
the opposite of wisdom at the heart of our existence. We are all fools.
instpientes. We all tell ourselves In our hearts, In one way or another:
Non est Deus. "there Is no God."
What prevents the insipiens from becoming sapiens, or wise?
Anselm asks himself this question at the end of Chapter Three,
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
immediately after he has set out the core of his single argument, thus
surrounding that argument between two quotations of the fool who
says in his heart that there is no God. The fool hears with his ears and
grasps with his consciousness the thought of something than which
nothing greater can be conceived, but he does not realize what this
thought necessarily includes. The concept with which Anselm tries to
formulate the core of what "we believe"-abstract and enigmatic as
that concept is-does not stand, for the fool, as a thesis that affirms
the proposition that existence is contained in the essence signified by
the words he has heard. The fool grasps the (pseudo)definition of God,
but he cannot pass from the reference it contatos to the thing to which
it refers.
Why not? What prevents him from making that transition? If
Anselm is right in saying that the transition is logically impeccable, it
would seem that the fool lacks Intelligence or logical ability. Butifthat
Is where the obstacle lies, then we would have to say that all atheists
are bad at logic and that all those believers who do not see the logical
necessity of the argument are just as foolish and stupid (stultus et
lnsipiens, Chap. 3) as the fool who says there Is no God. In Chapter
Four, which explains why the fool, even while truly "thinking," says
In his heart there Is no God, Anselm makes a distinction that Is already
evident between "thinking the word (voX) that signifies a thing (res)"
and "comprehending what the thing Is," but he does not say why the
atheist Is stupid and foolish enough to deny the connection between
the two. Immediately after his "explanation," however, Anselm thanks
God for having given to him what he sought: the understanding of the
concept that he previously had possessed by faith alone. Thanks to
divine illumination, a "little man," full of darkness, understands that
the abstract concept IQM demands that one transform It Into a phrase
affirming the existence of what Is thought or represented in the
concept. • Apparently, logic alone does not suffice in order to pass from
the abstract concept to the evidence of a concrete thought. But why
Is the the fool unable to pass from the nearly empty concept of God to
Its merely partial fulfillment? What experience or motivation does he
lack?
If we can suppose that the fool is not only the atheist that we find
outside of us, but Is also someone living In our heart, then the answer
to the question seems to be found in the first chapter of the Proslogion,
*IQM is an abbreviation of id quo malus cogitari non potest (that than which a
greater cannot be thought). [Translator]
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where Anselm asks God to grant him the right orientation, the attitude
that will allow him to progress from a blind faith to one that has been
illuminated by the comprehension of its contents. Without God's
assistance, man Is bent over (incW"Vatus) so that he cannot look above.
Anselm writes, "I am not able to look [anywhere] but down" (Chap. l);
without the illumination that comes from the face of God, the eyes of
man remain blind. That Is why the writer asks: "Lift me up, until I am
able to direct my gaze above. •
What humans lack, What prevents them from using philosophical
reflection to Intensify and elucidate their faith In God, is a perspective
that distinguishes between the high and the low, and looks upon the
being of the world In the context of that difference. Instead of speaking
of high and low, one could also speak of more and less, of smaller and
larger, or of better and worse. The need for such a perspective is
evident In the initial concept that Anselm uses to tty to condense the
heart of faith so that It can be thought by anyone. The formula of the
IQM has no meaning-what It Is trying to say cannot be grasped-if
the one who hears It or speaks it does not presuppose that the universe
of being can and must be thought within an ultimate dimension
characterized by the possibility of a gradation In the greatness of
beings. Only then can beings be compared to one another. Anselm's
ontology presupposes both a comparison of different dimensions of
the universe of being and an intuition of the directions In which one
might encounter the greater and the less.
The meaning of "greater" and "less" is not very clear, but it Is In any
case far removed from the emphasis on quantity characteristic of
modern science. If we speak, like many of the commentators, of
qualitative differences, It is a little bit clearer; at least we are made to
see that matus and minus are, In relation to being, supposed to point
to something about value. A reading of all those passages In which
that most fundamental presupposition appears confirms that rnatus,
as It is used in the IQM, refers to what has more value. It Is a synonym
for melius (better). In fact, as early as Chapter Three, without giving
any argument, Anselm passes from the concept of matus In the IQM
to that of melius. He writes: Si enim aliqua mens posslt cogitare aliquid
melius (For if some mind could think something better...) This latter
concept will dominate the rest of the Proslogton.
The perspective that the whole argument rests in Is thus one in
which God is sought by starting from a universe characterized by a
ladder of beings arranged according to their greater or lesser "value,"
"goodness," or "greatness." God is not sought within this universe:
that would be to think him as a being within a dimension that
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
encompasses him. It would then be possible to think of something
greater or to identitY hlm with the totality of all the degrees of being,
that totality which-even If It Is something---surely Is not God. What
Is sought Is something that separates Itself by a "not" from what
thought can (re)present to Itself of what Is greatest.
If this manner of approaching the universe of beings Is a condition
sine qua non for grasping the meaning of the abstract concept that
Anselm offers us, one can understsnd what the fool would need In
order to follow Its deduction. It Is not that the nonbeliever lacks logic,
but that he has no sense of what Is high and what Is low. His world
does not point towards summits, because It Is filled with Indifference.
Neither the nonbeliever's world, nor the nonbeliever himself, has a
radical orientation that directs his life, his actions, and his feelings
towards the height that can awaken, or has already awakened, the
most radical human desire.
Who would not here be reminded of Plato? For him, not only the
psycne and the poUs, but the whole cosrrws, appears as a wonder
within a dimension greater and higher than the essence and the being
of ideas-within the dimension dominated by the agathon. The
agathon Is neither a being nor an essence, nor an idea among the
Ideas, nor the greatest nor the highestldea. It is the Good itself, beyond
the whole gradation of beings, outside of the totality of the gradual
differences that can be compared. All of Plato's work Is likewise set In
a "space" oriented by what Is low and what Is high. To understsnd It
one must discover the meaning and the necessity of the references
expressed by words like "€KE'ia<" (up there) and "€rrtKnva" (beyond). To
understsnd It Is to know-or at least to surmise-what the upward
orientation that results from true eplstrophe demands.
Just like the sophist and the tyrant, the fool cannot discover the
true Good because he Is not looking In the right direction. He does not
love the Good, and does not recognize what Is better even when It Is
presented not just In an abstract concept, but concretely. That Is why
he understsnds the IQM as an indifferent thing ''without any [real]
meaning" or "as having a foreign meaning," a meaning that deforms
what the concept says (Chap. 4). He does not follow the dynamism of
the concept, and he denies what It suggests, because his way of being
In the world Is not religious. Bent towards what Is below, he is not
open to the light that comes from above.
But are we not being unjust when we accuse the atheist of
indifference and Insensibility to the degrees of difference between the
better and the worse? It goes without saying that the atheist whom we
are speaking of does not coincide with some one who pronounces the
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words "there Is no God," anymore than someone who says the contrary
would thereby already be a believer. But even If we only speak of those
who say In their hearts that God Is an illusion or a pseudonym for
some finite thing, It would be unjust to pretend that they do not have
enough taste or culture to distinguish the degrees of a long ladder of
value or being. What they deny Is not that there is a multitude of
degrees of quality, but that there exists a single "thing" beyond all that
can be thought to be exceedingly great and good. They admit the
possibility of something better, but not of the Good Itself. Ansehn
wrestles with their quite civilized relativism when he identifies what
exceeds any possible maximum ofbeing and goodness with what exists
independently as the absolutely Good that all the degrees of goodness
and being, including all possible maxima, depend upon. He presupposes not only a ladder from what Is lowest to what Is highest-a chain
that may be without definite endpoints--but also an attraction exerted
by what escapes all gradation, the non-graded that Is beyond what Is
Infinite In a merely finite way, the Good beyond all that Is. The
philosophical enterprise presents Itself as an attempt to reconstruct
the orientation that the heart and soul of the believer experience In
faith and because of faith. This reconstruction will not succeed If the
endpoint of the orientation Is not present both In the perspective In
which, and In the movement by which, thought finds itself, In hindsight, to have been guided and transformed. The logical task that
Anselm tries to explain must be sustained by what Is at least a seed
of wisdom. Otherwise, the Initial foolishness will prevent one from
perceiving and feeling the rightness of the logical passage that transforms the abstract concept of the IQM into the affirmation of a
proposition that sets out Its existence. Logic alone Is not enough; an
orientation and a movement that Is prelogical, a good destre and the
attunement of emotion-or a certain faith and hope-are necessary
above all.
The whole ProslogiDn Is the deployment of an emotional certainty
that becomes conceptually conscious ofltselfbymeans of an (onto)loglcal strategy. That Is why Its second half, beginning after the disappointment expressed In Chapter Fourteen, Is dedicated to a deepening
of the discovery In two respects:
(1) The prayer becomes more Insistent, giving free rein to the
fundamental sentiments that testifY to the proximity of a God who
seems far away because even someone bathed In his light cannot not
see him completely.
(2) The discovery that the light of God, as It Is In Itself, Is "too much
for me" (nbnia miltq and "inaccessible" (Chap. 16) develops into an
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72
amendment of the formula from which the investigation had started.
Anselm writes, ''Thus, Lord, not only are you that than which one can
think nothing greater, but you are something greater than can be
thought" (Chap. 15). Even so, this correction does not abolish the
initial formula, because the new "definition" can be justified rationally
by the original formula. lf God were not great enough to exceed all that
can be presented or represented in human thought, then human
thought would still be able. to think such a thing, and God would not
be IQM (Chap. 16).
.
Thought can thus think something beyond all that enters into it. It
can think beyond what it thinks, beyond all the beings and all the
ideas, beyond the being of beings itself, beyond the universe of being,
ErrE~enva
Tiis oVcrtas.
We must conclude, then, that the true sense of the initial abstract
concept of God is not yet evident in Chapters Two and Three. Nor is
it present in Chapters 4-13, where God is understood as truth and
goodness, eternal and omnipresent, the source of all that is true and
good, etc. A truer grasp requires one to open one's soul to a reality
that surpasses what can be thought.
Can one experience this reality? As the end of the Proslogion proves,
there is a joy (gaudi:um) that makes it evident that one can. The path
that Anselm pursues is not, however, the path of a purely emotional
experience-though such a path would also be possible-but that of
an (onto)logical investigation sustained and guided by such an experience. That is why, after a long prayer that constitutes a new
departure, Anselm goes on to deepen the provisional outcome of his
investigation by making a new appeal to the concept than which
nothing better can be thought (Chap. 18). ''The second sailing,"
however, which is the task of Chapters 18b-26, does not bring much
new knowledge. Instead, it reenforces, unifies, and simplifies aspects
deduced in the course of the first part of the book, by insisttng that
God is not the highest, the best, the being that is superior, the most
lasttng and the most extended being, but extra omne tempus, metaphorically "outside of time" (Chap. 19), and ante et ultra omnia,
metaphorically "before" and "beyond" everything (Chap. 20). The
"presence" of God (Chaps. 20, 22) is a presence that is utterly unique
and not temporal in any sense. It is thus no longer a presence, a here
and now, opposed to the past and the future. The eternal presence of
God differs as much from the present, which is opposed to the future
and past within temporality, as transcendence differs from the totality
of beings. ''You alone, Lord, are what you are, and you are who you
are" (Chap. 22). The "Greek" question as to the being of God seems
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here to coincide with the question of God's presence as It was revealed
to Moses and was known to Ansehn as Ego sum qui sum. At the same
time, the expression ''you are who you are" seems to allude to the word
by which Jesus ventured to identify his omnipresence in history as
EyW djlL, or "I am."
The deepening of the argument, which occupies Chapters 15-26,
culminates in a formula that attempts to summarize the essence of
God in the truest and simplest manner, a formula found In Chapter
Twenty-three. It Is a formula whose radiance the three last chapters
celebrate: "God Is the good Itself." At the same time, if one would like
to know what this divine good means, one must not only know all that
has been said about its existence, its properties, and Its unique
essence, but also that It Is a trl-unlty of truth and love. Or, to
summarize it in an (onto)logical manner, which does not, however,
exclude allusions to the NewTestsment: God Is the Good thatis simple
and uniquely necessary, the one and total perfect good, the only tWng
that is good. To say It with Ansehn and Plato, God Is the Good.
3. Ansehn against Hegel
The reaction that Ansehn would have had to the Hegelian Interpretation can now be summarized as follows:
(1) The faith that seeks to understand neither wants to nor can
abolish itself as the foundation of the meaning ofllfe and of thought.
It can tWnk of itself as something more than an expression of a
speculative truth-an expression that is perceptible, Imaginary, and
emotional-and It would like to do so because to reduce It to such an
expression would remove its character as a face-to-face encounter
with God. In the faith that Is understood as an encounter, the soul
lifts itself up to tell God all that It has grasped of him. But It knows
all the while that it has grasped only a little compared to the inaccessible light that the soul feels Itself to be enveloped in, even though It
cannot see that light.
(2) God Is not the identity of being and thought that encompasses
all things, but the Unique One, which, of course, contains the fullness
of being and the good, but In a way that separates it from what exists.
Thanks to creation and re-creation, God is known. The ascent towards
the absoluteness of God Is, In effect, the heart of human being and Its
logos, and thus the source of all other truths. But it Is not an idea: it
leads and judges the whole history of the Intellect, because It precedes
and exceeds reason by an adherence that Is older and more prophetic
than reason. TWs adherence, manifest In love and In hope, Is as
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'IHE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
different from any (onto)logical comprehension as God Is different from
the ideas and beings of speculative thought.
4. Two Remarks
In the course of the analysis I have just given, Plato and Hellenistic
Neo-Platonism have been present in the backround. In fact, many
aspects of the Proslogion show more affinity with Platonic inquiries
that they do with the Hegelian system. In particular, that idea of the
ayae6v which occupies the center of the RepubUc seems very close to
the bonwn that dominates the Proslogion. Uke Plato's Good, the God
of the Proslogionls before, outside of, and beyond (epekeina, ante, and
ultra) the universe ofbeings. Anselm's God rules, as the absolute end,
not only the desire that Initiates the whole search and the entire
process of the Investigation, but also the entire universe, In relation
to which he Is the one who "gives." One could multiply the structural
parallels between the Proslogion and the Platonic works, or also the
works of Plotinus, but It is also necessary to say that there Is a certain
affinity or convergence even with respect to their contents. It is no
surprise that many Fathers of the Church thought that Plato had read
Moses and that God had sent him to the Greeks In order to prepare
them for a more authentic revelation.
However, a comparison of the Investigations undertaken by Plato
and Anselm would require that the words In which they are written
be understood apart from the context of the life and the culture In
which each Investigation had Its expression. Thus Anselm's Good Is
not the sun of Plato's aesthetic-religious universe. In Plato's cosmos,
where wonders both mortal and divine show themselves in the
illuminated space between heaven and earth, the Good shows Itself
In the beauty of essences, the excellence of communities and of
individual human beings, the nobility ofworks, and the natural justice
of a good education. The idea of KaAoKayaela does not leave room for
the Good to manifest Itself as a personal being who can hear or forgive.
Also, the meaning of"giving" is determined as an anonymous source
of light, which neither hears nor speaks. The whole ethic of the polis
and the human psyche is dominated by an admiration for the way in
which their excellence unfolds in a beautiful life. Arete Is above all the
success of being In the various forms of well-proportioned harmony.
The Good Is identical with Beauty. Neither a thing nor a person, the
Good-and-Beautiful Is the anonymous beyond without a face. The
destiny of all being Is to fulftllltself as the wonder that at its core, In
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the "idea," it is. It must shine forth in order to let the idea, which is
also the ideal, become manifest In the splendor of the phenomena.
For Anselm, bonwn. the Good, is heard, received, and felt in a
different way. When he says to God: "You are nothing other than the
unique supreme good... " (Chap. 22) or 'This good, it is you, God the
Father..." (Chap. 23), he is attempting to make the name "good"
coincide with the true name of God. In calling God "good," he expresses, first of all, biblical reminiscences, and not so much the
concepts of agat/wn and bonwn he had received from the tradition of
the noble pagans. This is evident, for example, in Chapters 8-11, in
which the first stage of his onto-theo-logical discovery of God reaches
Its culmination: the mercy that seems so difilcult to reconcile with
justice Is surely an aspect of God inherited from the biblical tradition
and not from Plato, whose aesthetic ethic does not exclude the worst
cruelties towards weak infants, the handicapped, criminals, and
barbarians.
It Is, at the same time, remarkable that, In his prayer, Anselm does
not address himself to God by calling God bonwn or summum bonwn.
His preferred vocative Is "Lord" (Domine), but he also, though less
often, calls God altissime Domine, bone Domine (Chap. 4), Domine
Deus, Dominus meus et Deus meus, Deus meus, and Deus meus et
Dominus meus. Only once does he call to God with the words 0
trrunensa bonttas (Chap. 9), but In every case It Is the word Tu or es
that accompanies these names, and what Anselm asks for and destres
is to see his God face to face. God, the creator who has "formed" and
reformed all, to whom all being and all knowledge is indebted for what
It is, evidently does not allow himself to be thematlzed as an Idea or
as something said. EVen the most beautiful words, like "good," cannot
name him for one who is striving to maintain a face-to-face connection
that allows one to address him with the pronoun Tu.. Saying ''you"
affirms God in an act of speaking and prevents one both from reducing
God to a theme and from trying to circumscribe God within a dogmatic
thesis. In using the second person singular pronoun, Anselm distinguishes himself not only from Plato, but also from his own argument. That God Is the Good, and even Goodness Itself (bonttas ipsa),
is an expression that belongs to the genre of thematic discourse.
EVerything must be done to furnish this concept with a way to enter
Into the full richness of biblical heritage and the whole spiritual
experience of Christianity, but the truth of speaking to God will never
be able to coincide with the truth of a phtlosophical reflection, which
treats that truth in the third person, reducing it to an object, as great
and as supreme and as infinite as one would like to make it. The
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'IHE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
language of (onto)logical discourse results in a provisional name or
pronoun, a pseudonym rather or a pro-pronoun of God. The Good of
the Platonic tradition has served Anselm, as It can sttll serve anyone
who, belonging to another tradition and history, has received and
acquired another sort of knowledge of God, made up of faith and of a
desirous intimacy In hope.
The second remark I would like to make concerns the ambiguity,
no doubt Inevitable, of onto-logical language. It Is evident in the
Republic, where Plato Is careful to separate the Good itself from the
whole collection of beings, even whlle, in the very same context, he
treats the Good as an "idea," calling It "the idea of the Good," and
presenting the knowledge of the Good as an ideal knowledge.4 The
Good cannot be what Is beyond (hrEKEtva), it cannot be transcendent
or infinite, and at the same time be an idea. It cannot even be the idea
of the summit. As Plotinus saw very well, the One is absolutely
separate from the totality of beings or ideas. Although Anselm too
knows very well that God is neither a being nor the being of the totality
of beings, he also juxtaposes an insistance on the fact that God is
outside of (extra), before (ante), and beyond (ultra) the universe, with
expressions that call God the highest good (summwn bonum), the end
of a ladder of values. If we wanted to discuss Heidegger's rough and
cavalier critique ofwestern ontology, It would not be difficult to defend
Anselm, with other thinkers from Plotinus to Malebranche, against it.
We might insist, for example, on the meaning of the formulas "the
truth itself," "the good itself," or "the essence Itself." We would have to
acknowledge that even the Initial concept that the whole argument of
the Prosloglon Is based upon yields itself to two different interpretations. IQM can be understood as an indication of what does notln any
way belong to the ladder of gradations. But one can also read it as
that which is the greatest of all fmite beings. Anselm might reject the
second Interpretation by arguing that one can think something greater
than the entirety of all finite beings, but the atheist could answer
him-andnotjustthe atheist, but many believers would do it too-that
he commits a petitio principii, since the possibility of an idea of the
infinite Is not given as Immediately and rationally evident.
But this is to begin a new reading, a re-reading of the Proslog!on
from the point of view ofits logic. Wbatl have tried to show is, however,
that a reading that restricts itself to the logic of the argument is a second
reading, because it requires first of all that one explain how the sense
of the words of the "onto-logical" argument, is experienced, perceived,
and lived by the author. This could not be done without a clear
consciousness of the intimate connections between the (onto)logical
�PEPERZAK
77
argument and the religious experience that Is Its dynamic and prophetic support.
Let us come to a close by saying that on the basis of a discipline,
one many years long, of religious life-a discipline above all emotional
and meditative-Anselm did not think It necessary to explain at length
that the td quo malus non cogitar! potest ls neither an id, nor the
greatest of all beings, nor universal being, nor the history of being or
beings. It is the horlzon which rules all other horizons (and above all
that of the finite, the temporal, the historical, and the Intentional). For
one who admits the possibility of thinking God, that horlzon is the You
to whom all being and the experience of thought belong .
•••
Notes:
1. G.W.F. Hegel, Geschtchte Der Phtlosophte 19 (XV), pp. 164-69, and
Vorlesungen iiber dte Phtlosophte der ReUgfon. Gloclmer 16 (XII) pp.
214-18.
2. Gloclmer 16 (XII), pp. 392 and 399.
3. See Hegel's Berlin Inaugural speech of October 22, 1818, in Berliner
Schrlften 1818-1831, Hamburg, 1956, p. 8-9.
4. Plato, Republic, 509b and 517c.
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THE ST. JOHN"S REVIEW
�The Dialectic of Love in
War and Peace
Randolph Perazzini
Although he dreaded nothing so much as ridicule, Tolstoy never let
that stop him from adopting positions and doing things that, even to
a sympathetic eye, make him look ridiculous. At the age of sixty-one,
for Instance, having recently fathered his fourteenth child, he became
convinced that Jesus wanted everyone to be celibate; and to the deep
humiliation of his wife, Sonya, the man who had long sung the praises
of married life and childbirth wrote and published The Kreutzer
Sonata, a novel which denounces marriage as "legalized prostitution."
If universal celibacy were to make the race extinct, Tolstoy wrote, he
would have "no more pity for these two-footed beasts than for the
icthyosaurus,"l but he realized there was little danger of that. Celibacy
was "an ideal to strive for," but only a few individuals would be able
to regain such innocence. Unforlunately for him, Tolstoy was not one
of those few: for at least ten years after The Kreutzer Sonata, his diaries
and his wife's chronicle the frequent demands of his passion that left
her increasingly ashamed and estranged, but invariably left him
cheerful and animated.
It would be a mistake to think that such contradictory behavior
(verging on hypocrisy) was a product of Tolstoy's old age, after his
famous conversion. That conversion only gave him slightly different
terms in which to express the dilemma that he embodied his whole
life. On the one hand, Tolstoy was a darling of nature, blessed for more
than eighty years with robust health, strength, appetites and the
capacity to satisfy them. He was wealthy, high-born, brilllant, and
talented. He could play like a cliild and talk with peasants as easily
Randolph Perazzini delivered this lecture In Santa Fe In September, 1991, and
in Annapolis in September, 1992. At the time he was a tutor at the Santa Fe
campus.
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1HE Sf. JOHN'S REVIEW
as he could concentrate on intellectual matters for twelve hours at a
stretch and publicly stand up to the Tsar and the Holy Synod.
On the other hand, Tolstoywas a prophet possessed by a God whose
love Is embodied In every manifestation of life. From his earliest days
he was often filled with a sense of love that made all things one, and
he longed to melt permanently Into the whole.2 Because life Is the gift
of God, Tolstoy was convinced that living Is a matter of the utmost
moral seriousness. Anything less Is a desecration. He regarded ideas,
therefore, as vain trifles tmless they were carried and lived to their
limits. As a young man he could not study Stoicism without subjecting
himself to physical duress; in old age he could not believe in moral
purity without embracing celibacy, poverly, and asceticism.
in War and Peace, written at the prime of his life, we have Tolstoy's
attempt to show how human life-lived In the flesh, organized into
societies, and conditioned by ttme--ls our access to God's blessing.
Throughout the novel, Tolstoy contrasts two ways of living. One
way, which we see most blatantly in Napoleon and the old Prince
Bolkonsky, Is rooted in the natural order. It starts from the premise
of an autonomous and sufficient self, and seeks harmony by imposing
the selfs image, order, or will onto the world. For Tolstoy, all such a
person really does Is look at himself; his actions, however gratifying,
are cut off from life and bound, therefore, to be fruitless. In building
his life on the self, moreover, such a person Is building on the most
uncerlaln of foundations, because at some moment each of us will
die-inevitably, irrevocably, and alone. And if I am the basis of
everything, my death means the annihilation of the universe. (Tolstoy
was so terrified by the possibility of such meaninglessness that a few
years after finishing War and Peace, when by all outward signs his life
was at Its richest, he couldn't undress alone for fear that the sight of
his belt would tempt him to hang himself.)
The other way of living, which Kutu2ov and Platon Karataev exempli(y, Implies an Immaterial order Tolstoy calls the ''whole." This kind
ofllfe takes for Its premise the infinite web of relations which sustains
all things moment by moment. Its kind of harmony comes when we
are most deeply Involved in what we're doing: at such moments, we
forget about ourselves and become one with the activity or person at
hand. Such lives usually go unnoticed, like Captain Tushin's heroism
at the Battle of Schon Graben, but it is here, Tolstoy Insists, that life
Is affirmed and history given content. By opening themselves to what
life offers, such people experience God's love in the flesh and spirit so
that it passes through them like wine through water. 3 They come to
fruition through the unfolding of God's providential scheme, and they
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81
are redeemed from the horror of death and awaken Into cahnness and
peace.
That sounds very nice, butlt's not so simple-not In War and Peace,
and certainly not In the dilemma of Tolstoy's own life. Our experience,
after all, Is absolutely personal: that Is to say, every one of us has his
or her own life which no one else can ever experience, and every one
of us cannot help feeling ourself to be free and autonomous. Since God
has given us this life with Its consciousness of freedom, it must be for
our good. To think otherWise, for Tolstoy, Is blasphemy. So there must
be a right way to be a self, without which love is Impossible; by the
same token, since a self Is essential, being self-less Is as dangerous
as having the wrong kind of self. The love which animates Tolstoy's
universe, then-or rather, the human way for that love to be knownIs dialectical: It requires constant efforts to heighten the self so that
the self can be thrown away. The more we have In us to throw away,
the greater our joy and the more worthy we are of the whole which,
like a parent, is waiting to catch us.
In the stories of Nlkolay Rostov and Prince Audrey Bolkonsky, we
see the transformation of egoists Into people who love. Prince Andrey4
arrives at an unconditioned and undialecticallove which is, perhaps,
closer to the divine, but which can only be realized In death; Nlkolay
finds a human love that roots him In the flesh and the cycle of
generation while gracing him with the touch of spirit. With his
Insistent egoism and unceasing aspiration after the truth. Prince
Audrey is more like Tolstoy, but the commonplace Nlkolay is his hero.
In the stories of Princess Marya, Pierre, and Natasha, on the other
hand, we see characters with an Innate tendency toward the whole
develop the kind of selves which allows them to live happy and fruitful
lives-the kind Tolstoy's God Intends them to live-In spite of the
sufferings they undergo during the novel and, by implication, after its
end.
Nikolay and Prince Audrey each enter the army to be a hero. Their
ambition assumes they can use events to magnlty themselves In order
to exert power over others. Prince Audrey wants to command the
Russian army and defeat Napoleon, while Nlkolay only wants to make
the Emperor love him. Thinking as they do, they understand events
In reference to themselves, a ridiculous delusion In people so Inconsequential, but a frightening one In a Count Rostopchln or a Napoleon.
At the beginning of their careers, however, both Nikolay and Prince
Audrey undergo an experience which begins to show them what's
wrong with a life aimed at self-aggrandizement. Because Enns Bridge
Is the novel's first battle scene and a paradigm for all the others, in
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the interest of time I'll speak just of it and leave aside the mission to
Vienna which begins Prince Audrey's education.
Before Nikolay comes under fire for the first time at Enns Bridge
(II, 5), he has ''the happy air of a schoolboy called up before a large
audience for an examination in which he feels sure he will distinguish
himself. •5 He has been embroiled in a dispute with his commanding
officer and expects the skirmish to vindicate him against "his enemy,•
the colonel. Since the whple point of the battle, he imagines, is to awe
his enemy with his courage and make him seek reconciliation, when
the hussars are finally sent onto the bridge, he rushes far ahead
"thinking that the farther he went to the front the better" and has to
be called back. He is confused because "there was no one to hew down
(as he had always imagined battles to himselij," and he is unprepared
to take part in what's really happening since he has not brought a
torch, not expecting to be sent to do something as unheroic as burn
a bridge. He has nothing to do but stand there waiting to be kllled.
Mter the man next to him is shot, Nikolay sees the sky, 6 "calm" and
"deep," and has a sudden glimpse of his connection with It and ofthe
fragility ofllfe: "'In myself alone (he thinks) and in that sunshine there
Is so much happiness ... Another instant and I shall never again see
the sun, this water, that gorge!'"
That insight makes him realize how much he loves life, but as soon
as the danger is over, his egoism reasserts itself, and he misinterprets
his feelings to mean that he is a coward. Because he can only conceive
of the world in relation to himself, Nikolay cannot seriously regard the
possibility of his own destruction; he only Indulges in self-gratllYlng
images of getting what he wants by dying romantically. His behavior
here and later atAusterlitz (not to mention his brother Petya's heroism)
demonstrates that a way of life aimed at enlarging the self by Imposing
it on others is incoherent: it encourages recklessness under the name
of colU'age, and it demeans the normal and healthy desire to live by
calling it cowardice. On the other hand, the part of Rostov that
recognizes his connection with the whole of God's creation, symbolized
by the infinite sky, realizes that life is a blessing which it is sacrilegious
to squander.
Nikolay's mistaken conclusion suggests a consequence of egoism
that is deadly in the moral sense as well. To sustain the delusion that
the world is an object for the aggrandizing selfto impose on, the egoist
not only cuts himself off from reality by regarding events in reference
to himself, but sooner or later he has to betray his own humanity as
well. In its most extreme form we see Napoleon and Count Rostopchin,
self-deluded actors trapped in the isolation of their own madness, who
�PERAZZINI
83
are so far lost to human feeling that the one measures greatness by
the number of corpses left on the battlefield, and the other incites a
mob to murder a helpless youth "for the public good" (993). But even
its less extreme forms are deadly: thewaxen-facedPrince Vasili spends
the novel "like a wound-up clock" saying things "he did not even wish
to be believed" (4), while Boris Drubetskoy overcomes the "feeling of
horror at renouncing the possibility of real love" (609) in order to marry
Julie Karagina's estates and forest.
Nikolay also betrays himself, though he is such a novice at egoism
that his case is more silly than repulsive. Although the Battle of Schi\n
Graben is an important Russian victory, it is a humiliating fiasco for
Nikolay, who falls off his horse, sprains his wrist, and has to run from
the French like "a hare fleeing from the hounds" (201). Poor Rostovl
From the affair of the stolen purse to the hapless cavalry charge,
nothing in his military career has happened the way it was supposed
to. He has given up a peaceful, happy life among people who love him
to live in wretched conditions and let people he doesn't even know try
to kill him. And most confusing of all, everyone else seems to think
this is perfectly natural. So Nikolay goes along, betraying himself by
living as if what he knows to be false were true.
Appropriately enough, his self-betrayal begins with a lie. When he
visits his old friend Boris (III, 6), Nikolay begins the story of his
experience at Schi\n Graben intending to tell the truth, "but imperceptibly, involuntarily, and inevitably" he turns itinto a self-glorifYing cliche.
In the middle of his story, Prince Audrey comes in and immediately
recognizes that Nikolay is lying. Confused and embarrassed, Rostov
falls silent and then tries to pick a fight with him. As he rides back to
his regiment later, however, something in Nikolay's heart whispers
that he has lost touch with himself, for "he felt with surprise that of
all the men he knew there was none he would so much like to have
for a friend as" Prince Audrey.
By now, Prince Audrey has also had enough experience to doubt
his own illusion of heroism, but since he is more self-reliant that
Nikolay, he has not fallen into such an easy trap of trying to deny what
he knows. His egoism is a more integral part of his character and his
self-delusion runs deeper than Nikolay's. He will shed it gradually as
he matures, like something foreign to his nature, but Prince Audrey's
progress toward love will be stymied again and again by a self-delusion
that is each time harder to recognize: it takes death finally to free him
of egoism.
A revelation at the Battle of Austerlitz sweeps aside his egoism's
first illusion. PrinceAndrey anticipates it the night before (III, 11) when
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
he recognizes the "dreadful" character of his egoism: that he would
trade everyone dear to him for "a moment of glory, of triumph over
men." And the proud young man who slouches In the best drawingrooms with his eyes contemptuously half-closed Is honest enough to
admit that his aspiration springs from a pathetic longing to be loved
by anyone, by the cook and the coachman. Nonetheless, PrlnceAndrey
wants nothing but glory. By compelling the love of others through an
act of astounding heroism. he wants to share with everyone what Is
absolutely personal and unshareable-the sense, which Tolstoy
thinks we all have, especially when we're young, that there Is something tenibly special and precious about me, and that Ifeveryone knew
me as I do, from the Inside, they couldn't help but love me. Prince
Audrey's longing for glory and power is his soul's attempt to break out
of the Isolation of being an autonomous self by sharing that self with
the whole world.
Of course, he has It backwards. Now, and for most of the novel,
Prince Andrey is so deeply Impressed with the experience of being
himself that he cannot remember that the other person Is also unique
and precious to herself, that she has "other human Interests entirely
aloof from his own and just as legitimate as those that occupied him"
(785). 7 The first step toward learning that Is to recognize the InsignifIcance of the self and the peace and happiness of being embraced by
God. That Is what happens to him on the field at Austerlitz (Ill, 13),
where Prince Andrey gets the moment of glory he wanted. His heroic
charge before the eyes of his surrogate father, General Kutuzov,
prevents the outright capture of the Russian army with Its commander-in-chief and even wins the praise of his false Idol, Napoleon.
And having gotten what he wanted, Prince Andrey gets shot and sees
how worthless It is: all that running, shouting, and fighttng over sticks
and dirt, driven by fear, anger, and "paltryvanity." Notonly''grealness"
but even life and death fade to Insignificance before "the lofty, justB
and kindly sky" which contains the whole of creation, and whose "quiet
and peace" is ready to penetrate anyone who will only look up. And
because life has been freed of the terrible burden of having to be
significant enough to withstand the fact of death, Prince Andrey can
see it for what it really Is: a free gift, the kiss of God,9 and therefore
something "beautiful."
By the time Pierre visits him two years later, Prince Andrey Is living
at Bogucharovo.IO He seems to be living according to ideas derived
from his vision at Austerlitz-the same ideas that Pierre wllllater learn
In prison and that Tolstoy himself fully agrees with. Uke the people
who flee Moscow In 1812 not from self-conscious patriotism but only
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85
because "it was out of the question to be under French rule" and, by
doing so, actually "carry out the great work which saved Russia"
(929-30), Prince Andrey lives only for himself: that is, he devotes his
attention to the things which are of immediate concern to him, not
trying to direct the course of life, but only to live the best life he can,
avoiding evil.ll He lives by ali the right Tolstoyan ideas-and Tolstoy
shows that he's terribly wrong, because his ideas have grown not from
the love which connects him to the whole, but from the despair of
disappointed egoism. If the world were a machine that we could
comprehend, the rightness or wrongness of an idea would determine
its truth or falsity. But for Tolstoy the world is a miracle, infinitely
beyond our comprehension, so truth is to be judged not be ideas, but
by the state of the heart which holds them.
Events in the novel suggest how the right ideas can be wrong.
Because he acts only for himself, Prince Andrey institutes all the
reforms which the self-consciousness of Pierre's benevolence prevents
him from accomplishing. And we are free to believe that by freeing his
serfs and building them schools and hospitals, Prince Andrey improves the material conditions of their lives. But because he thinks of
peasants as objects to be disposed of according to economic principles,
not as human beings to involve himself with, his reforms can do
nothing to improve the moral quality of their lives. Events in the novel
may suggest that Prince Andrey was right in thinking that such
improvements would even harm the peasants (417). Is it merely a
coincidence that in all of Russia (at least as portrayed in the novel)
only the peasants at Bogucharovo betray their homeland in 1812 by
rebelling against their countrymen and siding with the French? And
if we are not meant to contrast them, why does Tolstoy include the
incident in which Marva Kuzminichna, the Rostov housekeeper, gives
twenty-five rubles of her own money to a young, unknown relative of
her master's who shows up during the abandonment of Moscow to
ask for help (980)? fl'olstoy couldn't know it, but there is a sharp
contrast between the rebellion at Bogucharovo and the way the
peasants on his estate, Yasnaya Polyana, acted during the Revolution:
armed with axes, pitchforks, and scythes, they fought off the Communist-led "expropriators" and saved his house from being burned. 12
Tolstoy himself had been dead for seven years by then.)
After Austerlitz, Prince Andrey cannot hold on to the incomprehensible something he saw in the sky which made the insignificance of
life a blessing, but he can remember well enough the nothingness of
human affairs and the paltriness of the individual self he is still
trapped ln. It takes Natasha to restore that vision. When he first sees
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
her running and laughing across !he driveway at Otrodnoe (VI, 1).
Prtnce Andrey feels "a pang," and for only the second time In !he novel,
he remembers !hat other people have lives of !heir own, lives which
are separate from his but capable of being "brtght and happy" nonetheless. Later, he overhears her rapture with the moonlit night. These
two brtef encounters with !he spontaneous joy she takes In !he world
outside herself arouse in Prtnce Andrey "an unexpected turmoil of
youthful thoughts and hopes" which convince him !hat his life is not
over. His emotions, Tolstby tells us, are connected to "all the best
moments of his ltfe," but he still doesn't know how to feel !hem except
in terms of his aggrandizing self. So when he decides to end his
self-imposed exile, Prtnce Andrey thinks, "'It is not enough for me to
know what I have In me-everyone must know it: Pierre, and !hat
young girl who wanted to fly away Into !he sky. everyone must know
me, so !hat my life may not be lived for myself alone while others live
so far apart from it, but so that it may be reflected In !hem all. and
!hey and I may live In harmony!"' (462-63).
Prtnce Andrey's delusion !hat !he way to make !he world harmonious Is by projecting his Image onto It is no different from !he lie which
Napoleon gives to justttY !he Invasion of Russia. namely, !hat Europe
would have been blessed by unity and peace under his benevolent rule
(91 0-11). The monstrous arrogance of !he assumption !hat he had !he
rtght and the wisdom (let alone !he power) to annul !he cultural and
political herttage of centuries and to dictate to millions of people how
!hey must live helps us to see !hat it is actually Prince Andrey who
first betrays Natasha.
That may take some explaining. Let me star! by returning to Prince
Andrey's "best moments," which Tolstoy identifies as "Austerlitz with
the lofty heavens, ... Pierre at !he ferry, (Natasha) thrilled by !he
beauty of !he night., and !hat night itself," and "his wife's dead
reproachful face" (462). Why Is !hat one of his "best moments"? The
answer, I think, Is suggested by Prince Andrey's explanation of the
effect Natasha has on him after they become reacquainted at !he ball.
Listening to her sing, he almost weeps because of a ''vivid sense of !he
terrible contrast between something infinitely great and indefinable
within him and !hat narrow and physical something !hat he, and even
she, was" (512).1 3 In other words, Natasha makes him feel constantly
what until now he has felt only In his "best moments,'' !he awesome
and incomprehensible condition ofbeingboihan embodiment of God's
Infinite and eternal love, and an individual human being who dies.
Natasha has !he same effect on him as "!he lofty, just. and kindly sky":
she makes his deluded aspiration for power and eminence vanish like
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87
the morning fog. But just as he could not hold onto the sky after
Austerlitz, so now he cannot matotato both sides of the dialectic. Once
again he comes down on the side of the self, and the separate and
limited world he thinks he can know and control.
Perhaps Prince Andrey throws away his chance for happiness with
Natashajust because he loves her as he has never loved anyone else.
It's not until he has been mortally wounded at Borodino, some nine
months after their engagement is broken off, that he first Imagines
how things felt to her. 'He realizes then that he had never considered
her character and needs, never "pictured to himself her soul," and so
only then does he feel"the cruelty of his rejection of her" (1023). Like
Napoleon, who regards the war as a "personal struggle between
himself and Alexander" (972), Prince Andrey seems to see his engagement to Natasha as a contest between himself and his father. Having
projected onto her the image of"some ideal love" (858) that has nothing
to do with who Natasha is, he agrees to the test ofher constancy which
his father demands. But by treating her as an object to hang his
self-gratifying fantasies on, Prince Andrey betrays her Individual
dignity and worih, the value which being an embodiment of God's love
Imparts to each of us. And by thus betraying her, he betrays his own
"best moments." And that may be precisely what he's after.
The egoism which Infects Prince Andrey's attitude toward Natasha
shows itself in his behavior. First he abandons her abruptly for three
weeks without telling her that he will be out of town; the Irony of his
having gone to seek his father's approval for marrying makes
Natasha's pain over this unexpected rejection more poignant to us.
Then he does not try to make Natasha's entry into his family less
difficult by telling Marya of his happiness and winning her support;
instead he annoimces his engagement in a letter to her from Europe
asking her to intercede with their father, which he should know will
only make his sister's life more miserable. Is it any wonder that Marys
Is predisposed against Natasha when they meet? Worst of all, after
their engagement Prince Andrey insists that Natasha suspend her life
for a year while he goes on what should be their honeymoon trip
without her. Starving for the love he has withheld, she finally tries to
run away with Anatole Kuragln, and Prince Andrey Is free to return to
the hopelessness and self-pity he seems to relish. The inviolability and
dominance of his Individual self have been preserved. Rather than
accept her In all of her otherness, he has remained committed to his
idea of how she should be. And if the cost of doing so is bleak despair,
a loss of faith that makes him a living corpse and the universe
something Indifferent and alien, so much the better. For how else can
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
he prove to himself how noble he Is than by the exquisiteness of the
pain he feels at the meaningless joke the universe has played on him?
Egoism leads Prince Andreyto throwaway his chance for happiness
with Natasha, and aristocratic pride leads him to throw away his life
at Borodino. But the Instant before the grenade explodes, all his
self-defenses fall away, and he realizes once more that he loves "'this
grass this earth, this air"' (904). Later In the operating tent, softened
by the memory of"all the best and happiest moments of his life" (907),
he catches up with his eneniy, Anatole, groaning and sobbing painfully
after his leg has been amputated; and suddenly Prince Andrey Is
overwhelmed with "ecstatic pity and love ... for his fellow men, for
himself, and for his own and their errors" (908). Tolstoy means us to
see that Prince Andrey and Anatole really are the same, for they both
treat Natasha with the same self-centered disregard. That one of them
Intended to marry his plaything Instead of discarding her only makes ·
his cruelty the more perverse; It doesn't lessen her pain one whit, any
more than all of Napoleon's noble Intentions, even If they were true,
would make the thousands of victims any less dead. In a world where
our actions affect other people, good Intentions can be a dangerous
kind of self-congratulation, when what's really needed Is to open
ourselves to what life offers, the painful no less than the pleasant, so
that we can come to our own fruition in God's providential scheme.
In order to celebrate life this way, the egoist needs to deepen his
sympathies and feel his limits so that he can find peace In his
underlying identity with the rest of humanity, each of whom also
embodies God's love. Recognizing others as such, he can then rejoice
In the surface differences which reflect the Infinite power and richness
of that love. To deepen his sympathies, Tolstoy suggests, the egoist
needs to suffer. Only then, unable to Ignore his own mortality, is the
sense of his uniqueness softened enough for him to realize that others
have also had the same experience, and to feel toward them as he feels
toward himself. To know his limits, the egoist needs to stretch them:
that Is, with all his efforts to strive for grealness, honor, and wisdom,
and by so doing to learn how powerless, ephemeral, and Ignorant he
actually Is. This Is part of what I meant when I said that the dialectic
of love demands that the self heighten itself In order to throw Itself
away. F1nally, to rejoice In the otherness of people, the egoist needs to
feel the assurance of being loved and to find some particular other
who calls his soul without trying to own it.
Prince Audrey's revelations at Austerlitz and Borodino both occur
under the Influence of Intense physical pain, and Tolstoy explicitly
connects the two phenomena. When he wakes up on the field at
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Austerlitz, Prince Audrey's "first thought" Is: "'Where Is It, that lofty
sky that I did not know till now, but saw today? And I did not know
this suffering either. Yes, I did not know anything, anything at all till
now"' (312). And his repeated disappointments as he aspires toward
the wrong things-glmy, power, social reform, romantic love, and
finally a kind of Satanic hopelessness--are all lessons In the insufficiency of the self which the obstinacy of his egoism makes necessary.
But what Is it that calls his soul?
Just before Natasha is returned to him {XI, 15), Tolstoy tells us that
"all the powers of (Prince Audrey's) mind were more active and clearer
than ever." He distinguishes between "human love" "which loves for
something, for some quality, ... purpose, or ... reason," and "divine
love" ''which Is the very essence of the soul and does not require an
object." Human love is conditioned and speclflc. It joins particular
individuals, each of whom is defined In pari by what he or she honors
and contemns, and the regard each feels for the other Is at least parily
the consequence of who that other person Is. Human love, therefore,
requires us to be worthy of being loved, another reason we heighten
the self In order to love. So, for example, Nikolay realizes in the F1rst
Epilogue that his habit of hitting peasants is a moral failing which
demeans him for Marya's love, and he tries to change it.
Divine love, on the other hand, Is absolute. Like the sky whose
justice and kindliness is that It overarches the whole world equally
and without distinction, divine love derives from a source infinitely
beyond creation. All of the distinctions and judgments that we have
to make to live in our world are trrelevant to it. 'To love everything and
everybody and always to sacrifice oneself for love (Tolstoy writes)
meant not to love anyone, not to live this earthly life" (XII,4). So Prince
Andrey "unconsciously detaches himself' from the world. For a time
after Natasha returns to him, "love for a particular woman ... (binds)
him to life," but with that binding come '1oyful and agitating thoughts"
which prevent him from feeling the ecstatic love that graced him in
the operating tent.
Prince Audrey's "last spiritual struggle between life and death"
occurs in a dream, and divine love wins out. By the time his sister
arrives two days later, Prince Andrey shows a greater insight Into
others than he has ever had before. With his egoism gone, he understands Marya's unspoken thoughts and motivations and wants to do
what will comfort her. But It is dreadful for her to be with him because
he understands not from sympathy-not, that Is, from Inside a self
that feels--but from some great spiritual height from which he has to
make a conscious and reluctant effort to concern himself with human
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TiiE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
interests. By the time Prince Andrey dies, Natasha and Marya both
know "that this had to be so and that it was right."
Whatever his death means for Prince Andrey, for Marya it is in
painful contrast to that of their father, who fmaily opened his heart
on his deathbed and offered her the love which he spent his life trying
to hide. His life was poisoned before the novel opens when the mad
Emperor Paul exiled him to his estate; although the next Emperor,
Alexander, has long since rescinded the edict, the old Prince's egoism
keeps htm imprisoned in the country. To annul his banishment, he
exiles the world instead: by his will alone, he deludes himself, is his
life determined. And in order to insure that he is never hurt again, he
tries to regulate every detail of the life on his estate. But the old Prince
is in a state of permanent rage because he knows that all of his efforts
must fail. He can never be in control of his life because everything he
does is a desperate reaction to his fear of death; and he can never be
impervious to pain because he loves his children, especially the
Princess Marya. So the more he loves her, the more miserable he
makes himself, and her.
Because human love connects us to someone who will die, it is a
constant and inevitable threat. The only way to be secure from loss,
grotesquely enough, is to be already dead. Until then, the egoist makes
every effort to imitate the dead-imprisoning his emotions in codes of
behavior which regulate the self as if it were a machine, starving them
by trying to restrict his encounter with what life has to offer. Although
the old Prince has nothing but contempt for Prince Vasil!, their
respective worlds ofBald Hills and Petersburg are invariably described
as mechanical and lifeless. He in the personal sphere, Prince Vasil! in
the social, and Napoleon in the historical are all extreme examples of
the blasphemous incoherence of a life based on the delusion that the
self is autonomous and sufficient.
But because the old Prince does love, Tolstoy finally absolves him
of egoism and, by so doing, begins Marya's redemption as well. She
does not need to soften the self until she can feel her connection to
the whole. On the contrary, she needs to develop enough respect for
her self to participate in the dialectic of love. For all their apparent
differences, Marya is her father's daughter. Her most cherished hope
is also the hope she most fears and suppresses, that some man will
love her with an "earthly love" (237). To her horror and shame, "all the
personal desires and hopes that had been forgotten or sleeping within
her" reassert themselves after the old Prince's stroke (X, 8). Though
she accuses herself of wishing for his death, her father knows better.
By thanking her for the years of sacrifice and devotion and begging
�PERAZZINI
9I
her forgiveness, the old Prince Implicitly acknowledges the naturalness and legitimacy of her hopes. Princess Marya could not have loved
her father with such patient devotion and understanding If she did
not want so badly to love and be loved. It Is love which makes us
capable oflove: as Natasha will later say about her cousin Sonya, "To
him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be
taken away'" (1275).
As If to confirm the rightness of Princess Marya's hopes, as soon
as her father Is dead Tolstoy sends Nikolay Rostov to rescue her from
rebellious peasants. Though he once wanted to be a hero, Nlkolay's
military career has been composed of the "simple and agreeable" (715)
banalities of regimental life punctuated by personal failures at Schon
Graben, Austerlitz, and Tllslt. As a result, he now has the stature to
perform the most heroic act In the book without even noticing it. He
is so outraged by the peasants' refusal to let Marya escape the French
that, unarmed and alone, he overcomes the entire village. Time and
fox-hunting have taught him to throw himself Into the moment so that
he acts with undoubted conviction and his attention completely
absorbed in the matter at hand. Nikolayalso overcomes Marya's heart,
just in the moment of Its greatest trauma and anguish, because here,
too, he forgets himself listening to her. But love Is dialectical: so
because the self which he forgets Is generous and honorable and
knows what It feels like to love a parent, the consideration he shows
her is as sympathetic and comforting as it Is sincere. Although she
feels ashamed of having fallen In love with a man who may never love
her just days after her father's death, Marya relishes her feelings for
Nikolay and never tries to fight against them. She has begun to learn
that life gives her a right to be happy: the self must be nourished by
love if It is to give itself In love. Perhaps this Isn't always the case.
PerhaRS some rare people have spiritual gifts so high that they can
•
sustain themselves indefinitely on the mere hope oflove. Perhaps. But
poor Sonya, the "sterile flower' (1275) of the book, is Tolstoy's portrait
of what happens to an ordinary person who lives on hope too long.
Fortunately, life fulfills Marya's hopes. The lesson of self and
happiness that she begins to learn when she meets Nlkolay, she
finishes learning from his sister Natasha. The "tender and passionate
friendship" (XV, 1) which grows up between them after Prince Audrey's
and Petya's deaths helps each of them develop the particular kind of
self she needs: Marya's "life of devotion, submission, and the poetry
of Christian self-sacrifice" helps Natasha to acquire the moral ballast
she lacks, while Natasha's "belief In life and Its enjoyment" helps
Marya to overcome her BolkonskY habit of denying herself happiness.
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Two actions late in the book show that Princess Marya has developed
the respect for self which makes her happiness in the First Epilogue
possible. F1rst, she must let the dead bury the dead, and give her
blessing and encouragement to the awakening love between Natasha
and Pierre. Then she must act for her own happiness by practically
proposing to Nikolay when his misguided honor threatens both of
them with loneliness and separation.
The friendship between Marya and Natasha is one example of the
miracle of love, which brings happiness and life out of suffering and
death. That power is central to the stories of Pierre and Natasha which,
taken together, symbolize the redemption of Russia through the fires
of war. Like Marya, both of them have such a strong, innate tendency
toward the whole that they lack selves in some crucial way. Natasha
(whom I will not have time to discuss in this talk) has to develop the
moral depth to recognize what's worth giving herself to and what isn't,
while Pierre will never find what his heart wants until he throws away
the false selves he has accepted and becomes as a little child.
Early in the book, Anna Mikhaylovna leads Pierre up the back stairs
of his father's mansion, directs him in the performance of various
rituals whose significance he does not understand, and insures that
he is successfully inltiated into a new world, membership in which
brings a new identity. As a result of her sponsorship, the illegitimate
Pierre is transformed into the Count Bezukhov, 14 heir to one of the
greatest fortunes in Russia. By presenting the scene through Pierre's
naive eyes, which observe the literal events without understanding
whattheymean or what's at stake, Tolstoy emphasizes how completely
disconnected Pierre is from the events that are shaping his fate. But
unlike Nikolay at Enns Bridge,I5 Pierre misunderstands events by
disregarding hlnlself. He doesn't realize that he is the issue, that Anna
Mlkhaylovna and his cousin are fighting to secure or steal his inheritance. Pierre is so unassuming that he has no real self. Appetites he
has aplenty, along with sudden passions, a hear! full of kindliness,
and a head confused by windy abstractions. But he has no spectfic
convictions or aspirations, no particular loves (even deluded ones)
which could help him choose which appetites to foster and which to
restrain, which career to follow, how to understand the intentions and
character of others, what to give his hear! to. As a result, the events
that happen inside hlni are just as mysterious and alien as those that
happen outside of him. Whether it is the way he becomes Count
Bezukhov or Helene's husband, whether it is the lust which makes
him prey to her or the fury that drives him to shoot her first lover,
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93
Pierre always feels that these things "had to be" (80) and "could not
be otherwise" (222).
Pierre's self-betrayal is also marked by a lie-he tells Helene he loves
her when he doesn't-and he, too, consents to live as if what he knows
to be false were true. Not surprisingly, he soon finds his life loathsome.
The blessings of youth, health, marriage, riches, and position become
so many curses, and the only thing that Pierre owns is his torment.
With no basis from which to judge, all actions become indistinguishable
and meauingless. "'What is bad? (he asks himself after the duel) What
is good? What should one love and what hate? ... All we can know Is
that we know nothing. And that's the height of human wisdom"'
(378-79). Once again we see that ideas alone are Insufficient to contsin
truth or falsity: without a self to ground It, Socrates's most powerful
insight becomes a cry of despair.
Pierre and Prince Andrey are the chief representatives of the
opposite poles of human experience which the dialectic of love brings
together, so Tolstoy is careful throughout the novel to syncopate and
Invert their stories. Prince Audrey begins In disappointment and rises
to the height of military glory before his first revelation embitters his
life; Pierre begins by being raised to the pinnacle of worldly success,
which collapses under him, plunging him Into the belly of despatruntil
he Is plucked out by his first revelation (V, 1). It comes to him after he
has been emotionally and spiritually wounded at the duel. He meets
Joseph Bazdeev, an old man with "bright eyes," who persuades him
not with words but with "the calm firmness and certainty of his
vocation, which radiated from his whole being," that God exists, that
He is in every manifestation ofllfe, and that He is to be "apprehended,"
therefore, not by "lntellect"16 but by living. Connected for the first time
to another human heart, Pierre feels "a joyful sense of comfort,
regeneration, and return to life."
Prince Andrey loses his first revelation by getting the ideas right
while forgetting the vision of the sky which animated them; Pierre, on
the other hand, hangs on to the faith that can redeem him, but so
clutters it with vague and far-fetched ideas that it does him no good.
He confuses Bazdeev's spiritual truth with the Freemasonry he practices. Like Princess Marya, Pierre has so little respect for himself that
he consistently assumes that truth and goodness are to be found in
"the far distance" (1226), in lofty abstractions and vast goals. Although
Bazdeev tells him what he later learns In prison, "that God is here and
everywhere" (1226), Pierre cannot hear it yet because without a self
there is no here, so God must be everywhere else. Thus he misses the
principal aim which attracted Bazdeev to Masonry. Instead of trying
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
to apprehend the mystery of an immanent God, Pierre gets lost In
words and turns God Into the Architect of the Universe, who plays a
kind of numerological hide-and-seek with the world.
Pierre misses the second aim of Masonry as well, the purification
and regeneration of the self, because his contempt for self leads him
to think It can be transformed with a wish. This shows not only how
little Pierre knows himself, but also how easily self-lessness falls Into
the same complacency anq hypocrisy that beset egoism. For all his
longing for the good, Pierre spends most of the novel leading a
dissipated and profligate life wWch at one point becomes so bad that
even his Incestuous, adulterous wife is embarrassed by it.
Having missed the first two alms of Masonry, he has no chance of
contributing to the third, the Improvement of mankind. Rightly understood, this aim Is the consequence of the first two: when a person
who works unceasingly on purifYing himself touches another whom
he recognizes as another embodiment of God's love, the other has the
chance to know love. Only thus can he be "Improved." But without a
self from which to feel the humanity of others, Pierre can only
understand the third aim as an Invitation to make people the objects
of his self-conscious benevolence. Like Prince Andrey, Pierre does not
establish a human relationship with Ws peasants, as Nikolay does In
the First Epilogue. Instead, Pierre Is content with staged receptions
where he Is pleasantly embarrassed by the sight of his own good
Intentions. The only effect his "benefits" (411) bring Is to make the
peasants'life harder: In order to build the brick schools and hospitals
he has ordered for their good, the serfs' manorial labor has been
Increased. A life based on the obligation of self-sacrifice for the sake
of others turns out to be as Incoherent as one based on self-aggrandizement. The problem, then, Is not In the content of the aim-not In
egoism or self-lessness-but rather in the attempt to reduce life to a
program based on one pole of human experience. Morality Itself
becomes Immoral when It hardens Into a prescribed code.I7
Freemasonry entangles Pierre In another fu.lse identity added to the
one Anna Mikhaylovna gave him. After the first flush of enthusiasm,
he fmds that Ws life Is more loathsome than ever, only now he's better
at running away from it. He doesn't begin to find hiniself until he
. discovers that he has fallen in love with Natasha (VIII, 22). Actually,
Pierre has always loved Natasha, but It takes the shock of sympathy
when he feels her shame and anguish after betraying Prince Andrey
and attempting suicide to make him realize it. By feeling the pain of
someone else's limits and failures, Pierre can forgive himself for his
own failures and propose to her although he Is already married. If he
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95
were free, he tells Natasha-that is, if he had not married a woman he
knew to be stupid and immoral-he would marry her on the spot. But
since he Isn't free, he has nothing to gain from his declaration. For
Tolstoy, the absence of personal motive Is the touchstone of sincerity,
and so Natasha takes it, responding to the first gift of love she has
received In over a year with "tears of gratitude and tenderness." Freed,
at least In spirit, from the consequences of his self-betrayal, Pierre
rushes outside where he sees "an immense expanse of dark starry
sky" crowned by "the enormous and brilliant comet of 1812." Feeling
the connection between the comet and "his own softened and uplifted
soul," Pierre feels for the first time the sacredness of his own life.
Now that something outside himself has called his heart, Pierre sees
that the questions he has tormented himself with are trrelevant to the
all-engrossing activity of living. He becomes obsessed with the idea of
throwing himself Into the general catastrophe which the French army
Is bringing to Moscow: "He now experienced a glad consciousness that
everything that constitutes men's happiness-the comforts of life,
wealth, even life Itself-Is rubbish It Is pleasant to throw away ..."
(840). Though he doesn't understand It yet, Pierre recognizes that only
by ridding himself of everything extraneous and abandoning himself
to the terrible force of the whole can he find the self that can love and
be loved by Natasha.
So he goes to Borodino, where the "terrible stormcloud" he has been
desiring ''with the whole strength of his soul" (836) engulfs him. In the
novel's greatest Irony, Tolstoy sends Nikolay shopping for horses and
keeps Prince Andrey on the sideline, reserving for the civilian Pierre
the honor of defending his country in the great battle before Moscow.
He ends up at the Knoll Battery, ''which the French regarded as the
key to the whole position," but which Pierre assumes to be "one of the
least significant paris of the field ... just because he happened to be
there" (884-85). The stormcloud does indeed burst, nearly killing him:
dazed and terrified, Pierre jumps up and runs back toward the battery
and Into "a thin, sallow-faced, perspiring man In a blue uniform" (889).
Instinctively they grasp each other by the throat, surprised, frightened,
unsure who Is the captor and who the prisoner. By restricting the
portrayal of actual battle to this one Incident, the novel implies that It
Is here, far from Napoleon and Kutuzov, unconcerned with heroism,
honor, or fatherland-here, where men are most free because they are
concerned only with themselves at that very Instant-precisely here,
where the battle Is reduced to the smallest possible unit, that history
happens. And because In that instant Pierre's grip Is tighter than his
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
opponent's, the Russians recapture the Knoll, win the Battle of
Borodino, and destroy Napoleon's army.
Pierre, of course, never knows that Tolstoy has emblematically
fulfilled his Insane delusion ofbeing L'russe Besulwf, the one destined
to end Napoleon's career. That is to say, he never realizes that by living
up to the demands of his own private life which bring him to Borodino,
he has done his part to defeat Napoleon. Nor does he realize that he
has discovered freedom, though In a dream the night after the battle,
Bazdeev tells him, "'To endure war is the most difficult subordination
of man's freedom to the law of God"' (941). But Pierre does come to
understand it In prison, under the Influence of his final sponsor,
Platon Karataev. Piaton 18 is the only sponsor that Pierre himself seeks
out. He begins his search when he throws away the identity Anna
Mikhaylovna gave him and runs down the same back stairway which
she had conducted him up. Then he forgets his mad plan of killing
Napoleon to abandon himself once more to what life offers, the chance
to save a child and defend a young woman. Arrested, tried, and sent
to a firing squad, Pierre achieves the sacrifice he has been longing for.
Faced with imminent death, he, too, discovers that the self is an
absolutely personal locus of "memories, aspirations, hopes, and
thoughts" (1068) whose existence Is precious only to himself and
depends entirely on an Impersonal and Incomprehensible whole.
As it turns out, the whole has sent him there to witness executions,
not to be executed himself. But Pierre's sacrifice Is complete nonetheless. Everything In his past life-"his faith In the well-orderingl9 of the
universe, In humanity, in his own soul, and in God"-has "collapsed
Into a heap of meaningless rubbish" (1 072). Suffering, it seems, is just
as necessary to the self-less, not to deepen his sympathies, but to
teach him that the self is precious precisely because It Is finite and
his alone.
Once again Pierre Is redeemed from despair, this tinle through
Platon Karataev, whose ''well-ordered arrangements" (1073) as he
prepares for sleep begin to restore "the world fuat had been shattered
... in (Pierre's) soul with a new beauty and on new and unshakable
foundations" (1076). From a simple peasant Pierre learns that fue self
exists most truly when it is absorbed in the moment-by-moment
encounter with God's love, which we call Ufe. Furthermore, because it
Is life which makes everything precious, it cannot be burdened or
trivialized wifu an "aim" (1226). Life is its own "aim." 1hat, Pierre
realizes, is true autonomy and the best evidence that life is sacred. He
was wrong-headed to try to embrace the whole with vast aspirations
and abstract philosophies, when all the time "the great, eternal, and
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infinite" (1227) is here, In you and me, In daily life, If only we will look
at it. This discovery makes Pierre "much simpler" (1228), his servants
say, much more natural and direct.
Pierre also learns that because the encounter with the divine which
constitutes our true self is absolutely personal and immediate, we
live free from the causality of external conditions and time past. That
he experiences freedom in battle and discovers it in prison confirm
what his dream told him: that human freedom exists in the momentby-moment encounter with a context over whose course we have no
control.
Pierre learns these things by suffering the hardships of a month in
captivity. The "Christian"20 life that Pierre learns from Platon is very
similar to the divine love Prince Andrey discovers. Like that love, the
love Platon exemplifies is entirely impersonal. Tolstoy writes:
"Karataev had no attachments, friendships, or love, as Pierre understood them, but loved and lived affectionately with everything life
brought him in contact with, particularly with man-not any particular man, but those with whom he happened to be" (1078). It is
important for Pierre to discover this kind of love because through it
he learns to rejoice in the infinite variety and otherness of people.
But the problems which unconditioned love raises do much more
than that. Pierre recognizes "that in spite of Karataev's affectionate
tenderness for him ... he would not have grieved a moment at parting
from him" (1078). And because he learns to feel the same way about
Platon, Pierre is able to turn away from him moments before he is shot,
in order to keep his own attention focused on living. Tolstoy says that
Pierre's behavior expresses "the full strength of life in man and the
saving power he has of transferring his attention from one thing to
another" (1177). This incident and Tolstoy's explicit approval may well
be the most troubling thing in the book, for It flies In the face of every
morality based on love as well as the natural compassion even Platon's
dog shows. And to make matters worse, Tolstoy seems to confute the
lesson of Pierre's prison experience, which taught him that intellectual
activity distracts from the immediate encounter with life which is
freedom and happiness. We should open ourselves to what life has to
offer, the novel has often implied, the painful as well as the pleasant.
But Pierre prevents himself from realizing that Platon has been shot
by counting the number of three-step units to Smolensk, as frivolous
a use of rationality as one could imagine. And Tolstoy approves.
Tolstoy makes Platon's death as troubling as he can, I think, to
insist upon two important points. The first is that any system of
thought and behavior, including the one presented in the novel,
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
reduces life from a miracle to a machine. So, for Instance, although
he Is convinced that self-forgetfulness is the key to effective and
meaningful action, Tolstoy also knows that it is only Intermittently
possible, and sometimes the very worst way we can act. Pierre forgets
himself and abandons himself to the moment when he realizes that
he is not a spectator at Borodlno. Just as he had volunteered to supply
a thousand men because he was swept up by "the necessity of
undertaking something and sacrificing something" (840), so now he
suddenly volunteers to bring ammunition for the gunners. He runs
toward the ammunition wagon, but the habit of self-doubt makes him
pause-and saves his life when a shell hits the wagon (889). If he had
acted like a good Tolstoyan, he would be dead. Again, Tolstoy is tireless
In his insistence that unless we are firmly grounded in the common
and personal interests he calls "real life" (457), our lives will be empty
and futile. At the same time, however, he also knows that ''real life" Is
the most unreal thing of all, that the only thing real is the incomprehensible something which Prince Andrey discovered In the sky. We
cannot help but make systems of thought and behavior: It Is the
essential activity of human life to understand the truth and act in a
way that acknowledges the moral significance of our existence. But
heaven help us, Tolstoy Implies, if we should come to believe the
systems we make, If we should mistake them for the life they try to
describe.
The night after Platon's death, Pierre has a dream (XIV, 3) which
justifies his heartless turning away in terms of the "divine love" that
Platon represents. It tells him that the selfs first duty is to preserve
itself, for "while there is life there is joy in consciousness of the divine,"
and "to love life is to love God." Tbe primacy oflife comes from Its being
sacred, but Its primacy does not excuse us from risking our lives when
the situation warrants it. In fact, there seems to be something crucially
important about facing death, not as a distant abstraction but as an
immediate possibility. To express this complex responsibility we have
toward life, the dream repeats "the same thoughts" It brought him the
night after Borodino: "Harder and more blessed than all else Is to love
this life In one's sufferings, In one's Innocent sufferings." Then, as if
to reward Pierre for having put life's claims first, the dream passes
Into a vision ofhow the soul does not die, but only returns to the whole.
Unconditioned love Is not really heartless In turning away: since Platon
continues in the whole, it's only the delusion that we are separate and
personal selves which makes his death seem sad. "How simple and
clear It Is," Pierre thinks In the dream, comforted.
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When he wakes up moments later, however, Pierre still cannot face
Platon's death. And this, I think, is the second point Tolstoy means to
drive home: delusion though it is, we encounter God's love as separate
individuals. The whole may be what's true, but it's not where you or
I live. The vision leaves us dissatisfied. Pierre's dream sounds remarkably like Prince Andrey's thoughts moments before his dream, the one
in which death wins out over life. Perhaps it is a greater spiritual
achievement for Prince Andrey to choose the whole, or for us to be
comforted by the visiort of Platon 's returning to the whole, but Tolstoy
doesn't seem to think so. He calls Prince Andrey's thoughts "too ...
brain-spun" (1090). In choosing life-individual, human life, however
much of a delusion it is-we are committing ourselves to being
dissatisfied With the comfort ofknowing that we Will dissolve back into
the wholec We are committing ourselves, that is, to a sentence of death
in all its dreadfulness. And to recognize the sacredness of life under
those conditions, "to love this life in one's ... innocent sufferings" is
"harder and more blessed than all else." Divine love redeems Pierre,
then, by teaching him how to turn away from suffering and death, not
from callousness but from understsnding and faith. It teaches him,
we might say, the lesson of Job.
Pierre having chosen "this life," Tolstoy sends Russian partisans to
attack the convoy the next morning and free the prisoners. It is during
this action that fifteen-year-old Petya Rostov becomes a hero: like his
brother Nikolay at Enns Bridge, he rushes ahead of everyone-but he
is killed. Petya's death is not necessary to redeem Pierre from captivity
or to free his country of the French. It kills his mother spiritually and
hastens his father's death, but It restores Natasha to life by re-awakening the love in her which seems to have died with Prince Andrey. It
is the way of life to bring all things to an end, and to make all endings
someone else's beginnings. So it is in the novel, and so it Will be With
this lecture-after a brief epilogue.
Near the beginning of this lecture I said that Tolstoy regarded ideas
as vain trifles unless they were carried and lived to the extreme. That
was true of his convictions about moral purity and art, and it's
certainly true of his theory of history, which is nothing but the dialectic
oflove writlarge. It is not enough, for Tolstoy, to have explored a vision
of the relation between self and whole as it exists In one time. If that
vision is true, Tolstoy seems to believe, It must also inform the relation
between self and whole through time. The mechanical notion that an
individual causes an historical event derives from the egoistical delusion that the world is an object for the self to act upon. Because the
world is a whole comprised of separate beings, each of whom has the
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legitimacy and value of embodying God's love, the relationship between leaders and the people has to be reciprocal, dialectical. We make
them possible, Tolstoy insists, and they are the means by which we
acquire a societal and historical self. Cause-and-effect is fine for
billiard balls, but it is blasphemous to think of ourselves that way.
But even extending the dialectic of love to apply to history doesn't
take it far enough for Tolstoy: near the end of the Second Epilogue he
expands the context once again and applies his vision of the relation
between self and whole wliJtout regard to time, in the metaphysical
discussion of free will and necessity that ends the book. If life is its
own "aim," being gifted with life confers a kind of autonomy on each
of us-the autonomy of making our own life what it is. Not that we
have any conirol over the conditions around us or the sequence of
events that happens to us; but rather, we make our life in a moral
sense by lransforming, moment by moment, the things life offers us
into our life. By the same token, since life is the whole, the course of
events and the conditions within which we live grow from it without
regard to what we want, expect, or need. As tiny parts of the whole,
we do help bring these events about, but never as we intend and
always in ways that we cannot realize. Necessity and freedom, then,
are also dialectically related: neither can exist without the other.
Whether or not Tolstoy is justified in applying the dialectic of love
to these larger and larger contexts, the book that comes of it is like
some vast symphony that takes a single theme and explores it,
develops it, lransforms it until it reaches monumental proportions.
For all of its heterogeneous material and hundreds of characters, War
and Peace embodies a remarkably single vision: that love embodies
itself in separate beings whose vecy separateness not only makes
possible the recognition of the whole, but also animates the universe
by making it inevitable that that recognition will be forgotten and
recalled endlessly.
�PERAZZINI
101
Notes:
l. Henry Troyat, 'Iblstoy, trans. Nancy Amphoux (Garden City: Double-
day, 1967), 499.
2. When Tolstoy was five, his older brother Nlkolay told him about a
magical green stick on which a secret was written that would end
disease, anger, and misery; the stick was buried in a forest on their
estate, and Its discovery would make everyone love each other as "ant
brothers." In his Mef11Dirs, written seventy years later, Tolstoy writes:
"The ideal of the 'ant brothers' clinging lovingly to one another only
not under two armchairs draped with shawls but of all the peoples of
the whole world under the wide dome of heaven, has remained
unaltered for me. As I then believed that there was a little green stick
whereon was written something that would destroy all evll in men and
give them great blessings, so I now believe that such truth exists
among people and will be revealed to them and wli1 give them what It
promises." By his own wish, Tolstoy Is buried where the green stick
was said to be hidden.
3. I owe this lovely image to Emily Bronte. Catherine Earnshaw uses it
in Chapter 9 of Wuthertng Heights.
4. It's worth noting, I think, that Tolstoy always calls him "Prince
Andrey, • using his full formal name to suggest the dominance and
tenacity ofhis egoism. He is the only character that Tolstoy so names.
5. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Louise &Alymer Maude, ed. George
Gibian (New York: W.W. Norton, 1966), 1079. All future references
will be placed within square brackets in the text When quoting more
than once from a particular scene, I will give book and chapter
references once rather than repeat what is often the same page
number.
6. The Russian word, nebo, means both "sky" and "heaven. •
7. Thlstoy measures Prince Andrey's progress from egoism to love by
repeating four s!mllar moments. The first time Prince Andrey realizes
that others have their own legitimate life Is the night before Austerlitz,
when he has a momentary glimpse of what it must have felt like to
his wife, Use, to be pregnant and dumped so lovelessly in the country
with his father and sister. The second time happens as he is driving
toward the house at Otrodnoe (VI, 1) and sees Natasha for the first
time. The painful sight of a life so "bright and happy" (It must also be
"foolish." he assures himself parenthetically) and so "separate" from
his begins his return to life. The third time (from which this quotation
is taken) is in 1812; visiting Bald Hills after It has been abandoned,
he sees two peasant girls running away with green plums they have
taken from his orchard, and wishes them well. The last time Is when
he is thinking about "human" and "divine love" after Borodino and
understands what things must have felt like to Natasha; moments
after this insight, the real Natasha returns to him. Each time his
insight Is deeper and more explicit, and his sympathy fuller.
�102
TiiE ST. JOHN'S REViEW
8.1 have changed the Maudes• translation here. They call the sky
"equitable, • but spravedlin!lf (related to pravda, "truth, justice") really
means "just" in the sense of impartial, equitable, or fair.
9. I wish I could take credit for this Image, but in fact It belongs to
Luciano Pavarottl, who used It to describe his vocal talent.
10. The name of Prince Andrey's estate, Ironically enough, means something like "enchanted by God" (Bog and charovat?
11. Tolstoy's idea of the right way to live sounds like the just life in the
Republic, both in its analogical, social manifestation and Its real,
moral sense: "Thus, Glaucon, it was after all a kind of phantom of
justice-that's also why It was helpful-its being right for the man who
ts by nature a shoemaker to practice shoemaking and do nothing else,
and for the carpenter to practice carpentry, and so on for the rest...
And in truth justice was, as It seems, something of this sort; however,
not with respect to man's minding his external business, but with
respect to what is within, with respect to what truly concerns him and
his own. He doesn't let each part in him mind other people's business
or the three classes in the soul meddle with each other, but really sets
his own house in good order and rules himself; he arranges himself,
becomes his own friend, and harmonlzes the three parts ... • (443c-d,
translation by Allan Bloom) In What Is Art?, written three decades
after War and Peace, Tolstoy develops an aesthetic vety much like
Socrates' in Books II-III and X of the Republic.
12. Troyat, op. cit., 731.
13. I have changed the Maudes' translation again. Neopredelimyj, which
they translate "illimitable, • is more strictly "indeterminable" and
"indefinable. • Tbe word they translate as "limited" is uzkij, "narrow. •
And telesn!lf means "physical" and "corporeal" more than "material.•
Tbe adverb beskonechno, "infinitely," is the same word which Prince
Andrey repeatedly uses about the sky.
14. Pierre is the only character in the novel whose name changes, from
"Monsieur Pierre" to Count Bezukhov, then to "the man who does not
give his name," and finally back to Count Bezukhov-but a different
person from the first time he bore that name. I take this as a literal
sign that he spends most of the novel discovertog his self.
15. Tolstoy uses mlli!aty imagety more than once to associate Pierre's
experience as he is maneuvered into marriage with Nikolay's early
mlli!aty experience. Most important is the dreadful "line" (199, 200,
225) each has to cross: on this side is life, safety, and what they have
been; on the other side is uncertainty, pain, and death. Each has a
sense that just by having crossed that line, he will be Irrevocably
changed.
16. The Maudes use "reason, • but the Russian, wn, is not quite so specific.
It means "mind, brains, wit, intellect. •
17. Tbe failure of Pierre's religiosity anticipates the contradictions that
would embitter the last thirty years of Tolstoy's life, after his conversion. Not only did he welcome the role of spiritual leader to the
�PERAZZINI
103
disciples his Chrtstian anarchism attracted, but as the "apostle of
love• he quarreled with every frtend he ever had, especially his wife
Sonya, whom he refused to see on his deathbed.
18. The name Is, Indeed, the Russian form of Plato (and the word
tolstyj--remarkable colncidencel-means "thick, heavy, stout, fat•). In
Anna Karentna, another peasant named Platon sparks the religious
conversion of the autobiographical character Levin.
19. The Maudes translate this "right-ordering,· but the word,
blagoustrqjsbJo, Is the same word that Tolstoy uses on the next page
to descrtbe Platon's way of preparing for sleep. The Maudes translate
the second appearance as "well-ordered," and I have adopted this
phrase for both.
20. In Russian, the word for "peasant" (krest:Janin) differs only slightly
from the word for "Chrtstian• (xristtonln). Platon himself makes the
pun which associates the two.
�104
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�I
Two Poems
Moira Russell
Illusory
jar Vmcent Van Gogh
So much sadness, even when there is so much yellow in the world.
yellow past sun, past joy. past comfort,
yellow as a quilt for the eyes, yellow as an explosion.
I can't tell you when it was I first knew
that there was no blackness in the world-not even in night;
that there was always a hint of color, a saving grace,
hiding deep somewhere within the blackness.
The stars bum yellow. white, blue-red and gold.
so there Is only red-blue darkness. yellow blackness. Illusory.
Even in eyes' pupils.
the gateway to darkness.
live yellow sparks. In the beginning there was yellow.
not sun yet, nor even light.
color without form,
wriggling and kicking In God's hand, like an infant.
its color yelling out
like an infant's first squall; then as it lit up to white
and then burnt down to deep tawny lions gold
God smiled at yellow. the very first of all his children; he knew
that he had created as he had wanted to.
Moira Russell attended St. John's College in Santa Fe and was graduated from
the Universlt;y of Delaware in 1992. She lives in Albuquerque.
�1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
106
Strange Me~?ting
Often I imagine
my two grandfathers, never knowing
each other In llfe, ,somehow meeting.
Different ends
of the same spectrum, cruelly, they'd talk
of what they held In common:
money, whiskey, women, death.
Yet even there
they are dMded-take whiskey: one lived In Prohibition,
a dapper bootlegger, a dandy;
one lived in endless poverty,
violent llfe and violent death, a powder-monkey
working with dynamite all day
and coming home and making moonshine, bragging
that his "likker" was as powerful-he'd drink-no,
better.
Their lnfluence on me
is so powerful
it is unseen; like the moon
pulling on creatures deep within the sea,
like hidden water
running through the earth, their blood,
oil and water, runs uneasily In my veins,
never mlxlng, yet mlxed In me,
powering this hand that writes of their imagined meeting,
strangers in name, but uni1y In heredity.
�I
Two Reviews
Eva T. H. Brann
Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander and 'The Ionian
MissiDn, New York: W. W. Norton (1970, 1981).
Cynthia Ozlck, 'The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories, New
York: E. P. Duttoq (1983).
This time I want to commend to the attention of the community a pair
of books that belong to a series, and a collection of stories. The series
and the collection are connected by nothing but their Incongruity.
Among the many reminders to us that we do not live In the very best
of all possible worlds Is the fact that the texts that edlty do not
Invariably delight and the tales that are salutary to the soul do not
always give the most pleasure. I do think the well-balanced reading
life should range over both extremes. Here, then, Is an example of
each, one a realistic British sea-romance and the other a theological
Jewish fantasy.
For the adults among the readers of the Hornblower books who
have longed for one more adventure there is relief: Patrick O'Brian's
fifteen-book Aubrey-Maturin series, the best fighting navy novels I
have ever read. (Consider that Joseph Conrad writes about commercial vessels, though he wouldn't have liked so crass a way of putting
it.) Like the Hornblower novels, this series follows the rocky rise of Its
hero through the navy list durlng the Napoleonic wars. Unlike the
Forester stories, this series Is an entertainment meant for grownups.
The way I went about It was to get the first and the eighth volume,
Master and Commander and 'The Ionian MissiDn. I mean to get the
fifteenth as soon as It Is available In paperback, and then to fill In
haphazardly, as If picking up occasional tales about a familiar setting
and Its likable Inhabitants.
To me the chief delight of these books Is the sea talk. The special
vocabularies of all the honest trades-so antithetical to jargon-are
always wonderful, but among them the speech of sailors Is most
wonderful. For one thlng, It is vigorously poetical and exuberantly
traditional; for another, !tis an essential part of the working life of any
boat-skippers who can't rely on the crew to know the language of
their orders might as well go and do It themselves (which Is what my
skipper, Bert Thoms, our tutor who died In 1978, would often have to
�1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
108
do). Naturally not everybody Is so fond of sailing speech. In the opening
chapter of the voyage to Brobdingnag, Swift Inserts a sardonic halfpage of nautical gibberish-at least, I think It must be that. O'Brian,
on the other hand, Is persuasively professional, and there are sometimes whole pages oflanguage that I can't make heads or tails of but
In which I have utter faith. For example, Captain Jack Aubrey has just
set his Sophtes old-fashioned spritsail topsail. edging away another
half point:
At the taffrail Mowett was explaining the nature of this sail to
Stephen, for the Sophie set It llytog, with a jack-stay cltoched round
the end of the jib-boom, havtog an Iron traveller on It, a curious
state of affairs In a man-of-war, of course.
Well, of course. Like most members of this community, I don't like
being subjected to Insignificant speech even If! can divine Its Intention
very well, but I love listening to significant speech though I don't
understand a third of it.
The other objects that are lovable about these books are Its Captain
Jack Aubrey, called "Goldilocks" behind his back by the crew, and his
friend, the ship's surgeon Stephen Maturln, a hopeless sailor and an
Indefatigable naturalist. In fact, the most horrifying engagement In the
books Is the mating of a pair of praying mantises observed by Stephen,
a mating that Is carried on undeterred by the fact that the female Is
the while systematically dismantling her mate. The beauty of It Is that
In this romance the Incident Is a metaphor for nothing at all-just a
well-observed piece of natural history.
Young Jack as well as middle-aged Jack Is fattish and blond, daring
and cautious, insubordinate andTorylsh, moody and exuberant, naive
and cunning, childlike and commanding, bearlike and delicate. Although he makes love In ail ports, he is altogether present only In two
places. One Is the quarterdeck of his sloop Sophie (and later of his
frigate Swprise) before and In battle, the other Is in the captain's cabin,
sawing away at his fiddle In concert with friend Stephen's cello. They
both know the mUsic of the "London Bach." As It happens, Stephen
has come across the fact that "Bach had a father," and has brought
some of father Bach's scores on board. Playing them reveals a side of
the amateurishly musical Jack that realigns his figure from lovable to
moving.
There Is, of course, third among delights, lots of naval action:
chases, engagements, sllpplngs-away, bombardments, hoardings,
love trysts In exotic ports-and very little pretense of plot otherwise.
Years of pleasure!
•••
�BRANN
109
ConseiYatively speaking, one might say that the people in Cythia
Ozick's book, particularly In the title story, "The Pagan Rabbi" (1966),
are not outdoor folk. The nearest the rabbi comes to the ocean Is
sewer-straddling Trilham's Inlet Park, off Long Island Sound (I have
reason to think) but not to be found on the going map of New York
City and environs. Here he hangs himself with his prayer shawl from
the young oak with whose roving splrlt he has fallen In love. Hence
the tale Is fantasy, but it Is dead serlous fantasy. In the epigraph of
the story, taken from the Talmudic Ethics ofthe Fathers, Cynthia Ozick
announces the danger that drives Rabbi Kornfeld to his death:
Rabbi Jacob said: "He who Is walking along and studying, but then
breaks off to remark, 'How lovely Is that tree!" or 'How beautiful is
that fallow fieldl'--8crlpture regards such a one as having hurt his
own being.•
This saying speaks to me because I was brought up the other way
around, to think that total absorption In Inward talk while walking
through a fallow field-or a field of corn in tassel-is a sin against
nature.
Kornfeld's embittered widow suspects him of studying nature-botany, perhaps mycology. But those Baconlan distractions are not his
undoing. He develops a mad and beautiful theory of"free souls." Only
the human soul Is Irremediably Indwelling. The souls of natural
beings, of trees and animals, can roam free, leaving the natural body
at peace, allowing It to see, to witness, to confront Its own soul. What
has captivated the rabbi is not the science of nature but the souls of
nature: water and wood nymphs. the visible spirlts of myth. In the
feiYently God-involved mode of a piously sedentary learned Jew he
has surrendered to paganism-to open-eyed wandering about (he
joins a hiking club), to visible splrlts (he begins by descrying a naiad
and ends by embracing a nymph), and to the supersession of God's
will by the free Imagination (he thinks that If Moses had told the
Hebrews of the doctrine of "free souls" they would have preferred to
stay enslaved In Egypt while letting their souls wander at pleasure In
Zion).
No one in this story Is lovable or even pleasant, not the runaway
rabbi, not the bitter rebbetzin, nor the bookseller who tells the
tale-not even, or least of all, the rural spirit that seduces him, for In
love-battle with a Jew, the nymph proves to be a demon. But they are
all reenacting an old and deadly serlous antagonism, and thus they
command respect.
�llO
TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�I
Results of
Crossword Number Four
Solution to "Famous Pairs" by Captain Easy
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The winners of the $35 book tokens, redeemable at the St. John's
College Bookstore, are:
Jerry Bains, Phoenix AZ
Christopher Lee, Portland ME
Steve Stalter, Topeka KS
The solution and the names of the winners of Crossword Number
Five will appear In the next regular Issue.
�112
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Crossword Number Six:
"Poreus"
By Cassandra
Answers to ten clues, marked by asterisks, are to be decoded phonetically before entry Into the •diagram.
Across
I. Composer reverses role
as young knight (8)
*4. To flout reality, conceal
what Is bizarre (5)
7. Spawn of vile animals,
Initially (3)
10. Meat for least Important
or most Important man?
(4)
*12. Once started, wandering
nude takes right path (8)
*13. Give us any new order,
then rescind It (5)
14. Make candy money (4)
16. Regular fee sent directly
to Pole (4)
18. Sewer with top off reveals
water (4)
19. Hydrogen works when
used for making beer (4)
*20. Unknown artist and
celebrity finally join
forces to produce kind of
picture (1-3)
21. Give authority to put In
combination of French
and English (6)
24. Left gun out-it's found
In chest (4)
25. Half-Japanese car game
(3)
*26. Expense Is nothing like
Latin song (6)
27. To claim as one's own,
put pointless pointer on
entry (8)
Down
*I. How to address Turkish
governor: "Do as I say!" (4)
2. Possessed, found In part
of Hell (3)
3. Dancing girl and fat
treatment (7)
*4. Place for products of
burning, like hightension beam (7)
5. Following bad pun?
There's nothing in It (4)
6. Sneer about birds (5)
8. Extra room for tenth
British monarch (5)
9. Poor leaderless seminar
must stay put (6)
*1 0. Avoid taking trick-or,
taking fifty, avoid giving
enough money! (9)
11. Began bad ode about
writer (6)
*13. Linger longer to display
old-fashioned corset (7)
14. Ethical maxtm starts
from the lips (5)
*15. Where to dispose of what
Is finished-and ruined,
you tart! (3-4)
17. Money Is corrupt heart of
despot (4)
22. Metal beast (3)
23. Organ froduces soundyes? (3
�CROSSWORD
1
113
3
2
9
8
7
4
110
6
111
12
13
14
15
17
16
18
19
21
20
24
26
5
23
22
25
(2.7
As usual, three book tokens of $35, redeemable at the College Bookstore
(Annapolis), will be awarded for the first three correct solutions opened
at random eight weeks after the mailing of this issue. Marl< envelopes
" Crossword No. 6."
��
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Zuckerman, Elliott
Brann, Eva T. H.
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
Sachs, Joe
Stickney, Cary
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Hunt, Jack
Sachs, Joe
Sepper, Dennis L.
Maschler, Chaninah
Peperzak, Adriaan
Perazzini, Randolph
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The St. John's Review
Volume XLII, number two (1994)
Editor
Elliott Zuckennan
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
Joe Sachs
Cary Stickney
John. VanDoren
Robert B. Williamson
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Richard Schmidt
The St. John's Review Is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's
College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President; Eva T. H. Brann,
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.O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD21404-2800.
Back issues are available, at $5.00 per Issue, from the St. John's College
Bookstore.
©1994 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 College Print Shop
��Contents
1 ..... Introduction
5 . . . . . Torah and Logos
David R. Lachterman
27 ..... Autonomy and Authenticity:
How One Becomes What One Is
Daniel W. Conway
41 ..... The Eleatic Stranger's
Socratic Condemnation of Socrates
Jacob Howland
61 ..... The Myth of the Reversed Cosmos
in Contemporary Physics
Pierre Kerszberg
81 . . . . . Nietzsche, Solitude, and Truthfulness
Gregory Schalliol
95 . . . . . From Rationalism to Historicism:
The Devolution of Cartesian Subjectivity
Carl Page
113 . . . . . Hegel on Time
Eva T. H. Brann
137 . . . . . A Bibliography of the Writings
of David R. Lachterman
Compiled by Brian Domino
��Contributors
Eva T. H. Brann is the Dean of St. John's College, Annapolis. She
is the author of many essays and books, among them Paradoxes of
Education in a Republic (University of Chicago Press, 1979) and The
World ofimngination: Swn and Substance (Savage, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield, 1991).
Daniel Conway currently teaches at the Pennsylvania State University, where he is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Director of the
Center for Ethics and Value lnqulcy.
Jacob Howland is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tulsa. He studied with David Lachterman at Swarthmore
College as an undergraduate, and at the Pennsylvania State University, where he received his Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1987. His book, The
Republic: The Odyssey ofPhilosophyrecently appeared in theTwayne's
Masterwork Series (New York: Twayne, 1994).
Pierre Kerszberg is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of The Invented Universe,
which appeared in 1989 with the Oxford University Press.
Carl Page is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Emocy University.
He was a student of David Lachterman at the Pennsylvania State
University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1987. His book, Philosophical
Historldsm. will appear this year with the Penn State Press.
Gregocy Schalliol studied Philosophy at Yale College (B.A.). Northwestern University (M.A.), and the Pennsylvania State University,
where he received his Ph.D. ln 1987, under the direction of David
Lachterman. He is currently Assistant Professor of Classics and
Philosophy at the University of South Dakota.
��I
Introduction
The essays collected in this special issue of the St. John's Review are
dedicated to the memmy of David Rapport Lachterman, who studied
at St. John's College from 1961 to 1965. At the kind Invitation of the
editor, we have solicited memorial essays from several of David's
former students and colleagues. These essays reflect not only the
range and breadth of David's scholarly interests, but also the scope
of his influence on those who knew and loved him.
David Lachterman was born in Alabama in 1944, and he spent his
formative years in Falls Church, Virginia. He was admitted to St.
John's College at the age of sixteen, and he completed his brilliant
career of undergraduate studies four years later; he was awarded
highest honors in the College. Upon completing his studies at St.
John's, David pursued graduate studies in Philosophy and Classics
at Harvard University and Oxford University. He received his doctorate
in Philosophy in 1984 from the Pennsylvania State University. David
taught Philosophy and Classics at Syracuse, Swarthmore, and Vassar.
At the ttme of his death In 1991, he was Professor of Philosophy and
Classics at the Pennsylvania State University.
David was known throughout the world as a scholar of extraordinary breadth and versatility. Fluent in eight languages, he was
considered an expert In such diverse fields as Ancient Philosophy and
Classics, Jewish and Arabic philosophy, the history of mathematics
and the exact sciences, modern philosophy, German Idealism, renaissance Platonism, literary criticism, and postmodern thought. His
many lectures and essays reflect the unparalleled range of his erudition and scholarship. Although diverse and far-reaching, David's
intellectual interests centered on a common theme and project: he had
embarked upon an ambitious genealogical analysis of modernity,
hoping eventually to articulate a unified, definitive account of the
epoch as a whole. In 1989, he published an enormously influential
book with Routledge, The Ethics of Geometry, which not only traces
the transformation of ancient to modern mathematics, but also locates
in this transformation the roots of modern philosophy. At the time of
�2
TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
his death, David was preparing a sequel to The Ethics of Geometry,
which he had provisionally entitled The Sovereignty ofConstructlnn.
We begin this Issue of the Review with a transcription of one of
David's most famous lectures, 'Torah and Logos." In this lecture,
David tnvestlgates the real and perceived tensions that obtain between
the Hebrew concept of torah and the Greek concept of logos. As David's
opening remarks Indicate, this lecture represents his life-long attempt
to reckon (and partially repay) his debts to his teachers and students.
Although well known to many of David's friends, colleagues and
students, 'Torah and Logos" has never before appeared tn print.
In "Autonomy and Authentlcl1y," Daniel Conway challenges the
popular reception ofFrledrich Nietzsche as a teacher of autonomy and
the champion par excellence oflndlvldual authenticity. Conway argues
that the familiar exhoriatoryrhetorlc ofN!etzsche's post-Zarathustran
writings Is tempered by an equally promtnent critique of voluntarism,
which calls tnto question the very possibility of autonomy and authenticity. Nietzsche's model for "How one becomes what one Is" thus
Involves elements of volition and cognition, of self-creation and selfdiscovery.
Jacob Howland next takes up the question of the ambiguous nature
of the philosopher. In his essay 'The Eleatlc Stranger's Socratic
Condemnation of Socrates," Howland undertakes an Investigation of
the Eleatlc Stranger's famous condemnation of Socrates tn Plato's
Sophist. While critical of the Eleatlc Stranger's verdict, Howland
concludes that it nevertheless captures the paradoxical nature of the
Socratic philosopher.
Pierre Kerszberg too addresses the myth of the reversed cosmos,
illuminating Plato's cosmology In the light of contemporary physics.
In his essay 'The Myth of the Reversed Cosmos In Contemporary
Physics," Kerszberg demonstrates that contemporary physicists attempt to fix time's arrow in a prospective direction, even though the
laws of nature are perfectly consistent with the position of time's arrow
In a retrospective direction. Plato's myth of the reversed cosmos
furnishes clues that help us to recover a sense of human life within
any abstract reconstruction of experience.
Gregory Schalliol next tnvestlgates the complex relationship of the
philosopher to the human community. Taking as his point of entry
Nietzsche's complicated praise of solitude, Schalliol excavates the
paradox that underlies the philosopher's attempts to found communities and societies. In order to prepare oneself for the founding labors
of philosophy, Nietzsche argues, one must retreat tnto solitude and
husband one's strength and vitality. As Schalliol points out, however,
�INTRODUCTION
3
this sort of solitary self-transformation serves to distance the philosopher further from those tndividuals who are likely to constitute any
human community.
In his essay "From Rationalism to Historicism," Carl Page charts
the dialectical relations that obtain between the positions of rationalIsm and historicism. Expostng the supposed oppositions between
rationalism and historicism as merely apparent, or dialectical, tn
nature, Page unearths the,common root from which these disparate
plants have grown and bloomed.
We would like to express our gratitude to the St. John's Review for
affording us the opportunity to honor David Lachterman In such an
appropriate forum. In particular, we would like to thank Elliott
Zuckerman, who worked tlrelesslywith us to brtng forward this special
edition of the Review. On behalf of our fellow authors, we present these
essays in the memory of our friend and colleague, David Rapport
Lachterman.
D.W.C.
P.K.
State College, PA
"'* * * *
To the essays introduced above, we have added Eva T.H. Brann's
essay on Hegel and Time, also presented in honor of David Lachterman.
E.Z.
�4
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�Torah and Logos
I
David R. Lachterman
Evety speech has a long ancestry, even if it was composed for a novel
occasion. It may help to clarify my purposes In today's speech If I say
a few words about Its genealogy and genesis. Its remote ancestor was
my undergraduate teacher, Simon Kaplan, a learned and pious man.
I recall vividly the day he admonished me In a thick Russian accent-!
can't successfully mimic It: "Mr Lachterrnan, you spend all your time
with the Greeks, none with the Jews." Although he prepared a reading
list of traditional Jewish authors for me, It was many years before I
undertook to read the list. I was, however, able to repay a small portion
of the extravagant favors he did for me, as teacher and as friend, by
helping Wm with the English translation of Hermann Cohen's Religinn
of Reason, a book about wWch I shall have more to say later.
The more proximate ancestor of today's speech was the presentation of some similar remarks to a group of Jewish undergraduates of
Swarthmore College, who had decided to read and discuss Jewish
works. Remembering Simon Kaplan's admonition, I chose four sample
classical texts, In the hope that one or more would capture their
imagination.
I should tell you that that presentation had two by-products. First,
the students voted unanimously to read and discuss Portnoy's Complaint Instead of The Guide of the Perplexed. Second, some years later
I met two of the students In that original audience who were then
college teachers themselves and, strangely, recalled the talk I had
given, under the title 'Torah vs. Logos." One was sure that I was
defending Logos; the other was equally convinced that I was on the
side of Torah. Accordingly, I have altered the title of my talk today to
'Torah and Logos."
My title, 'Torah and Logos," expresses a duality, a tension between
alternatives wWch I take to be decisive for Jewish, and perhaps not
only Jewish, identity, or self-understanding. This same tension Is also
conveyed by the better-known historical phrase "Athens and Jerusalem," the two cities symbolizing pWlosophy and exact science on the
one hand, and the Biblical teacWngs on the other. As Hermann Cohen
�1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
6
wrote In reply to an open letter published by Martin Buber: "as
ardently as I feel 'from Zion comes forth the Torah,' so do I feel with
equal earnestness 'from Hellas, that Is, from Greece, comes forth
science.•"
Let us look at this contrast more closely. IfTorah means In Hebrew
"teaching" or "Instruction," thanks to the Greek translation, the
Septuagint, it has come to be understood as Nomos, as Law. Logos Is
the most many-sided and essential of all Ancient Greek words. The
word Is, of course, well known to all of us thanks to Its presence In
our word "logic" and In the family of English terms ending In "-logy":
"biology," ''psychology," "anthropology," for lnstsnce, to say nothing of
"technology'' and "ideology." It Is hardly an exaggeration to say that
the self-understsnding of modern Western man, to the extent that It
Is Inseparable from the sciences and the technical endeavors made
possible by the sciences, still carries the seal of the Greek experience
of lngos. The Greek dictionary will tell you that lngos can mean, among
other things, sentence, speech, discourse, reason, and reasoning, as
well as the rational pattern brought to light by speech and reasoning.
It signifies, In general, the power and the products of Intelligence and,
more specifically, a telling account that tallies with the real nature of
things.
The first thing to be stressed here is that the exercise and pursuit
of lngos, of a true account of the world, Is "autonomous"-that is, it is
a law unto Itself, or, put differently, It acknowledges only those "laws
of reason and reality" it can discover under its own power, without
guidance or control by anything or anyone else. This already brings
Into view the fundamental contrast between Greek philosophy and
traditional Jewish belief, a contrast made clearer by the following two
anecdotes:
The most lmportsnt Greek philosophical work prior to Socrates is
the poem by Parmenides entitled "Truth." It begins with a scene of
"revelation" in which a mysterious and anonymous goddess puts forth
for Parmenides' benefit a doctrine of what truly "Is," as distinct from
what merely seems to mortal men to be. At the crucial turning-point
In her speech she addresses these remarkable words to him:
But you must test by logos the very controversial proof arising from
what I say [Kptvm 8€ MywL noXU&!jpLv lX<rxov <e E!1E8<v i>'l8eVTa].
What this means Is that human reason is and must be the touchstone,
the final criterion, of the veracity of what the goddess "reveals."
In starkest possible contrast stsnds a traditional story about the
giving of the Torah to the Jews. According to this story, to be found in
�LACHIERMAN
7
the S!fre on Deuteronomy, God went from nation to nation offering to
each his "teaching," his commandments, with the promise to show
special favor to the nation that accepted his covenant. Each nation,
In turn, requested to hear what these commandments were, before
deciding whether or not to obey them. Each, In turn, having heard
God's commands, found reason to reject the divine offer. Finally, God
turned to the Jews, who Immediately replied, "We shall do and we
shall hearken" (kol asher 4Jhber adonai na'aseh ve-nishmtt, see Exod.
24:7). That Is, the commitment to obedience Is prior even to the
knowledge ofwhatwill be commanded; God's authority, as manifested
In the very fact that He has revealed himself, eliminates both the
necessity and the possibility of questioning Divine commands, of
weighing by human reason whether or not these commands are
sensible or feasible.
So, the first contrast Is that between the autonomy and independence of logos, and the authoritativeness of Divine Revelation: When
God commands Abraham "Take now thy son, thine only son, whom
thou lovest, ... even Isaac, ... and offer him ... for a burnt offering" (Gen.
22:2), Abraham rose early tn the momtng to do God's will; when
Socrates is told by Chaerephon that the Delphic Oracle has declared
that no one In Athens is wiser than he, he promptly makes the oracle
a junior partner, so to speak, in a Socratic dialogue, questioning and
analyzing what could have been meant by that statement, convinced,
from the starl, that the statement, as It stands, Is dubious and
probably false. Socrates'wily daimonion, the surrogate for oracles and
their gods, Is worlds apart from Abraham's simple reply to the divine
nomination," 'Avraham': 'hineni"'-"Here I am" (Gen. 22:1).
A second contrast Is closely associated with the first: No Greek
thinker believed that logos Is easily discovered or achieved; coming to
knowledge of the world's rational nature rather involves an arduous
struggle to surmount Ignorance and misguided preconceptions, particularly those underwritten by prevailing and authoritative opinions,
the shared consensus of the community. If comprehensive wisdom,
sophia In Greek, Is always the goal of rationalinqutry, the movement
towards that goal can only be called phi/osophta, the love of wisdom,
where It Is understood that love arises from a distance between the
lover and the target of his love. It Is characteristic of the best among
mortal men that they seek wisdom, not that they already have It or
can readily secure it.
What the Bible calls hokhnwh, the Hebrew term for wisdom, Is a
rather different matter. Divine Wisdom expresses ltselfin the "statutes
and ordinances" (huqqim ve-mishpatim) transmitted to Israel by Moses
�8
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
from Mt. Sinai; human wisdom consists in the unwavering fulfillment
of these commands-"Observe therefore and do them," Moses says In
Deuteronomy 4:6, "for this Is your wisdom and your understanding
[btnah) in the sight of the peoples, that, when they hear all these
statutes, shall say: Surely this great nation Is a wise and understandIng people."
While It would be false to say that wisdom, according to the Bible,
Is effortlessly achieved, It is true that wisdom Is always available If a
pious Jew makes the effort to grasp and to put into practice what God
has authoritatively demanded from him. This seems to be the basic
teaching of the famous lines from the Book of Proverbs concerning
hokhmah;
Trust In the Lord with all thy heart
And lean not upon thine own understanding.
In all thy ways acknowledge Him
And He will direct thy paths.
Happy Is the man that flndeth wisdom...
Her ways are ways of pleasantness
And all her paths are peace.
She Is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her
And happy Is evezy one that holdeth her fast.
(Prov. 3: 5-6; 13-18)
This Biblical version of ''wisdom," as conformity to, and confidence In,
God's understanding of the world and of man, circumscribes the
horizons of human "inqulzy," both practical and theoretical.
This remains the case, or so I suggest, even In the so-called
Wisdom-or saplential-literature in the Torah and the non-canonical
books where Greek Influence has long been suspected. and where
hokhmah Is personified much In the way sophia. Is personified In
contemporaneous Greek writings. To cite only a single example, from
the apocryphal First Book ofBaruch: 'Wisdom was God's possession,
but he gave her to his servant Jacob. This [i.e., Wisdom] is the book
of God's eternal law; to follow it is life, to abandon It, death." A constant
refrain in the Wisdom literature, canonical and non-canonical, Is the
line from Psalm lll: 'The fear of the Lord is the beginning ofWisdom"
{tehilia.t hokhmah yir'at adonaQ.
Once again the contrast with the Socratic tradition Is strikingly
salient. In a medieval Arabic manuscript recently edited by L.V.
Berman and IlaiAion, the spirit, If not the letter, of the original Greek
tradition is finely captured. 'The indications which point to the fact
that philosophy is better than religious law [shmi'ah) are many... first:
the perception of things by wisdom [hilanah) comes about through
�IACHTERMAN
9
their natures, whereas their perception by religious law comes ihrough
their appearances."
Plato calls the summit and goal of practical inquiry, Inquiry into
the best human life, the Good, or the look of the Good; he maintains
that the Good is the greatest subject of study, perhaps only dimly
glimpsed at the climax of relentless philosophical investigation. The
Bible, on the other hand, declares "It has been told thee, 0 Man, what
Is Good" (Micah 6:8). As for, theoretical inquiry, the Greek philosophers
were In constant search 'after the first or primordial principles of
reality, the archai The traditional Jewish attitude Is nicely illustrated
by a Talmudic discussion provoked by the question why the ftrstletter
of the first word of the first verse of the Torah, naroely, bereshit, "in
the beginning," is not aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet,
but beth. Since everything In the Torah Is there according to divine
plan, this departure from mathematical symmetry must carry some
message: since the design of the letter beth points ahead to what
follows rather than back to what, so to speak, preceded God's decision
to create the universe, the alert reader is aware that Inquiry into those
ultimate matters Is pointless and perhaps contrary to divine Intention.
This attitude Is further illustrated by the following passages: ''Whosoever reflects on four things, It were better for him if he had not come
Into the world-what is above, what is beneath, what is before, and
what Is after" (Haglgah 2: 1 of the Mishnah); and 'The process of
creation may not be expounded before two" (Haglgah 116).
What matters are the human actions required by the covenant
sealed at the foot of Sinal. Moses was allowed to see only the "backside" of God-which the tradition interprets as the Divine attributes
of action-justice, charity, compassion, and so on, which are the
exemplars of appropriate human behavior.
Much more needs to be said about both of these contrasts. However,
I am obliged to pass on to one further theme that additionally
complicated and, at many times, embittered the encounter between
Athens and Jerusalem, between Logos and Torah.
For Jewish tradition itis not divine revelation pure and simple that
claims authority over autonomous human reason, but divine revelation given uniquely to a particular people at a particular place and
time. The uniqueness of the revelation given at Sinai goes hand in
hand with the doctrine that the Jews are "the chosen people," "the
'pick' of humankind," as Yehuda Halevi will write. Outside the perspective of traditional Judaism, this doctrine often appeared to express the intolerant and Intolerable "excluslvism" of the Jews, their
�10
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
willful separation from the unanimously, or at least widely, shared
convictions and preoccupations of non-Jews.
Once again the contrast between Jewish religious belief and Greek
philosophical attitude could not be more pointed. Logos has no
particular "place"; it is not the possession of a particular people. We
traditionally speak, therefore, ofthe wt!versalismofGreekph!losophy,
at least in respect to its highest intentions. A contemporary of Plato,
the orator !socrates, makes the general point quite clearly when he
writes:
Those who share in our education have more rlght to be called Hellenes
[Greeks] than those who have a common descent with us.
Socrates himself more than once calls attention to his disregard of
place, his "outlandishness," as we might say. While Socratic conversations begin in a particular place with particular persons, their aim
Is to outstrip and leave behind the contingencies and limitations of
their particular origins. For the Jew, on the contrary, even in a
condition of actual dispersion and exile, religious belief and practice
make constant reference to an otiginal place: "If I forget thee, 0
Jerusalem, let my tight hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember
thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth: if I prefer not
Jerusalem above my chief joy." Whether being the Chosen People is
Israel's burden or its glory, in either case, the covenant with God
implies a special relationship, not shared by other peoples. In particular, the "ceremonial observances" commanded by the Torah are the
outward symbols of the inward obligations impressed on the Jewish
soul by this covenant.
Needless to say, believing Jews have never been oblivious or
insensitive to the competing demands of particulartsm and universalism. Let me simply mention two fundamental ways in which this
competition makes itself felt in the Jewish tradition itself.
What the Hebrew Bible calls "the end of Days" will be the reign of
universal justice and universal brotherhood. This profoundly wtiversalisticvlslon of the Messianic times Inspires the well-known lines:
"On that Day, the Lord shall be One and His Name shall be One." And
yet, according to the teaching of the prophets, Jerusalem will be the
focal point of the Messianic future and the non-Jewish nations will be
under the dominion of the restored Israelite kingdom. Maimonides, in
the final section of the Mishneh Torah known as "laws of Kings and
Their Wars," emphasizes that all the commandments of the Torah,
including the law of animal sactiftce in the Temple, will be obeyed in
the days of the Messiah.
�IACHTERMAN
11
A second instance is the doctrine of the "Sons of Noah" and the
so-called Noachide commandments. The Talmud discusses at some
length the moral and social duties God requires of all mankind as
such, even without the benefit of more detailed revelation. The Rabbis
specified seven such "commandments for the sons of Noah," including
the prohibition of homicide and adultecy and the establishment of
courts of justice or bet din. Then the question arose whether those
who obey these Noachi<Je commandments, the "pious among the
peoples of the earth," as they are called, merit eternal life, or "the world
to come" ('olam ha-ba), as do Jews who fulfill aU the commandments
of the Torah. Maimonides, In his authoritative code, makes a significant distinction at this point. If a man performs the Noachide commandments because of a decision of reason, or from purely human
ethical conscience, he "has no share In the world to come." Only If the
non-Jew respects those commandments as testifYing to the existence
and following from the will of God are his actions meritorious. We can
conclude that Biblical morality, even in Its minimal form, presupposes
both the existence and the self-revelation of the Biblical God. As
Nietzsche was to see with overwhelming clarity: when the God of Sinal
Is presumed to be dead, "evel}'thlng Is permitted." Furthermore, to
quote Emil Fackenhelm: "If revelation must go, with It must go any
possible reUgious justification for the existence of the Jewish people.
In the absence of a binding commandment supernaturally (that Is,
exira-rationally) revealed to a particular people, It makes as little sense
to have a Mosaic religion for the Jewish people today, as, say, a
Platonic religion for the modem Greek nation."
Fackenhelm's analysis demonstrates how the two lines of reflection
and opposition I have been pursuing ultimately converge: traditional
Judaism presupposes the miracle of an historically particular revelation, while classical Greek philosophy Insists upon the universality of
the conclusions reached by natural reason. If I have today a thesis, or
better said, an hypothesis, It would be: "Extremes diverge."
I have deliberately set out the contrasts between reason and
revelation, universalism and particularism, In an exlreme manner so
that the seriousness of the debates these themes generate can be fully
visible. In any case, I hope that what I have said so far begins to throw
some light on a characteristically fierce and exaggerated exclamation
made by Splnoza, of whom I shall have more to say later: ''The Jews
despise philosophy."
A recent author, Jacques Derrida, attempts to respond to this
------'*, only to widen its form, Its heart-wrenchingness. In the
context of Levlnas, Derrlda writes: "Are we Jews? Are we Greeks? We
*The manuscript has the Greek word B~Epvw, which is a mistranscription. IE.Z.J
�12
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
live in the difference between the Jews and the Greeks. which is
perhaps the unity of what is called history. We live in and of differences, that is, in hypocrisy." Or as Joyce put it in Ulysses: "Jewgreek
is greekjew." The two terms meet. Or do they meet?
The tensions and polarities I have been discussing first became
historically prominent in the Hellenistic period of Judaism, the period
in which the successors of Alexander the Great exercised political
control over the Jews livl!lg in Jerusalem and Judaea. The historical
sources reveal, in a remarkably prophetic way, a pattern of cultural
and intellectual confrontation that will define the situation of European Jewry for the next two millennia. The Greeks were both characteristically curious to explore the claims of Jewish monotheism and
prompt to assimilate what they had learned to their own tradition. The
Jews, on the other hand, displayed a marked ambivalence which, in
the end, led to exireme social disruption: some Jews, especially those
from the upper levels of society, were eager to imitate the institutions
of their Greek masters, to establish schools of the liberal arts and
gymnasia along Greek lines and to endorse the identification of the
Biblical God with the Greeks' Zeus Xenios, "Zeus who is hospitable to
strangers." Other Jews were much more wary, especially when they
realized that this cultural assimilation was not simply a matter of
abstract ecumenicism, but entailed, as well, the abandoning of religious practices sanctioned and demanded by the Torah. Thus, even
an otherwise sympathetic Greek observer of Jewish belief found
reason to denounce the "misanthropic and xenophobic life" of the
Jews, while, at roughly the same time, other Greeks were praising the
Jews as "a nation of philosophers" because of their adherence to the
unique (celestial) God. Some of the ambivalence marking this epoch
is shown in an old' tradition which makes Pythagoras, Socrates, and
Plato acquainted with the Torah, from which the "Lion's share" of
Greek philosophy was allegedly taken.
This conflict came to a head in a relatively brief period, from 169
to 167 B.C., when the pro-Greek party within the Jewish community,
the "Hellenizers," as they were called, made common cause with their
Greek masters, to the point of requesting from the king, Antiochus IV,
a decree suppressing the practice of Judaism. This event directly
provoked the Maccabean revolt, which Jews commemorate in the
Hanukkah ("dedication") festival. This festival recalls the day (25th of
Kislev, 164 B.C.E.) of the cleansing of the Temple, the destruction of
the pagan altars on the same day on which pagan worship had been
instituted three years before. Originally called Suklcot (''Tabernacles of
the month ofKislev"), it is now celebrated with eight days of kindling
�J.ACHIERMAN
13
the lights. The record of this revolt is punctuated by expressions of
extreme distress at the willingness of fellow Jews to be "seduced by
the flattery of those who violate the covenant," in the words ofthe Book
of Daniel (11: 32). Clearly it was the lingering and painful memory of
this period that inspired a later Jewish writer, in 65 B.C., when yet
another civil conflict had been ignited between Hellenizers and traditionalists, to say, favoring the traditionalists:
Cursed be the man who rears a pig and cursed be those who instruct
their sons in Greek wisdom (hokhmah yevanilj.
We could compare the same point as made in another Rabbinic source
(Baba1onfan Ta/m.Jd, Menahot, 99b [? ed.D. with a cbarncterlsticTalmudic pose.
The lessons of these initial encounters between Athens and Jerusalem are many and multiply ironic. Chief among them: the price
exacted for acknowledgment of what was distinctive in Jewish thought
proved to be nothing less than the abolition of its very distinctiveness;
the edict prohibiting Jewish worship in Jerusalem aimed at having
"Jews forget the law and do away with ail their holy ordinances," as
the apocryphal First Book of the Maccabees puts it.
Once Jewish monotheistic belief had been recognized as rational
(i.e., "logical") by the Greeks, it was generally expected that the Jews
would free this belief from its entanglement with the particularistic
claims and rituals underwritten by the revelation on Sinai. The
Hellenizers within theJewishnation draw the general implication: "Let
us go and make a covenant with the Gentiles [that is, the Greeks]
round about us, for since we separated from them many evils have
come upon us."
At all events, the pattern established during this period, as I
suggested earlier, preoccupied and fascinated Jewish thinkers thenceforth. Needless to say, the Alexandrian Greek empire as such soon
vanished from the scene of world history; the imperialism of Greek
logos continued to hold sway, especially after it had been juxtaposed
to, or absorbed within, Christianity. Let me simply allude to two key
instances of this state of affairs:
Hegel, whose ambition was to articulate nothing less than the
universal and unique logos of the whole of reality, including the reality
of human self-consciousness and human history, experienced Judaism, especially the perpetuation of the Jewish people in the modern
age, as a "thorn in his side." Modern Judaism, in his eyes, is an
anachronism for two interrelated reasons:
(l) While Jewish monotheism affirms the universality of the One
God, the God of heaven and earth, Jews simultaneously believe that
�14
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
God's "real work" consists only In maintaining the "external, political,
ethical existence" of one people. This "particularism," according to
Hegel, is overcome by the historical advent of Christianity and its
universalistic gospel.
(2) Secondly, what Hegel regards as the cultic form of Jewish
religious existence is exhausted in unwavering and unthinking obedience to positive, God-given laws.
This "positivity'' of the,Mosaic law, as he calls It, leaves no room for
the exercise of rational freedom through which all human beings
secure moral dignity. The Jews play the role of slaves to God their
master. Hegel here follows St Paul, for whom the "law of the heart"
overrides the written law of the Torah.
I do not have time, on this occasion, to enter into the complex
history of the interpretation of, and practical response to, Judaism
furnished by Hegel's real and self-styled disciples. In the name of a
"humanized world of liberated men" to be achieved in the near future,
Feuerbach, Arnold Ruge, Bruno Bauer, and Karl Marx felt themselves
obliged to comment, If not to reflect, on the contemporary social and
political situation of the Jews in Christian Europe. One quotation from
Marx's essay "On the Jewish Question" will have to suffice here as an
indication of the principal direction their comments took: "In the final
analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind
from Judaism."
However, even In the absence of overt, external conflict, the "civil
war" between Athens and Jerusalem, between universal reason and
particular revelation, was reenacted time and again within the soul
and Intellect of individual Jews. Is this an eternal fratricidal conflict,
or a battle of shadows in a hall of mirrors?
I won't venture to answer this question. In place of an answer I shall
offer today very brief portraits of four thinkers-Yehuda Halevi,
Baruch Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, and Hermann Cohen-whose
responses to the dilemmas I have been discussing are exemplary:
"exemplary" not in the sense of furnishing cut-and-dried solutions,
but in the sense that their life-work exemplifies, In very different ways,
the intensity and poignancy of the issues they had addressed, and
that we continue to address. They are, in the most exacting sense of
the term, our contemporaries. A thinker of high caliber is never
content to have the calendar or accidents of birth determine his
partners in dialogue; the only relevant criterion is the seriousness with
which others have argued their positions, whether they did so yesterday or a thousand years ago.
�IACHTERMAN
15
Let me, then, turn to the earliest of the four thinkers whose works
are so many concrete variations on the general theme with which I
began: Torah and Logos.
Yehuda Halevi
Yehuda Halevi, born In Spain In the eleventh century, was the
greatest lyric poet of the Jewish Medieval period. He was also the
author ofa most remarkable work, TheBookoftheKhazars, a dialogue
between the king of the Khazars, a powerful tribe in the Southern
Caucasus which did In fact convert to Judaism, and representatives
of pagan philosophy, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. The dialogue
begins when the king has a dream In which he Is told: 'Thy way of
thinking Is Indeed pleasing to the Creator, but not thy way of acting."
The king summons the spokesmen of the four traditions so that he
might learn how to change his way of acting and begin leading a
"God-pleasing life."The emphasis falls, from the first, on right practice
rather than on accurate theory.
The king Is dissatisfied with the speculative accounts offered to him
by the Aristotelian philosopher, the Christian, and the Moslem. He
had not even Intended, he says, to speak with a Jew, since he was
"aware of the Jews' reduced condition and narrow-minded views, as
their misery left them nothing commendable." However, once he
decides to talk with the haver, the scholar, he is greatly surprised to
hear him begin, not with a statement of belief In a Creator of the world
or with a discussion of those attributes of God that serve as universal
evidence for every believer, but rather with the declaration: "I believe
In the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who led the children of Jacob
out of Egypt with signs and miracles ... who sent Moses with His Law
and subsequently thousands of prophets, who confirmed His Law by
promises to the obedient and threats to the disobedient."
The haver's starting-point contains the key to Halevi's fundamental
teaching: It is continuous tradition and not reason or argument that
serves as "evidence" for the existence of the Biblical God and as the
basis of faith. According to Halevi, there Is an unbroken chain that
links the Patriarchs to the contemporary Jew, thanks to the continuous teaching and Interpretation of the Torah. What was first a matter
of direct personal, usually auditory, experience for the Jews at Sinal
Is now a matter of knowledge based on that uninterrupted tradition.
The persuasiveness of this sort of knowledge, Halevi claims, does not
fall short of the original, firsthand experience.
The arguments of the philosophers, on the contrary, are only
satisfactory In part and are, as Halevi says, "still much less capable
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
16
of being proved." Tradition Is decisive and authoritative where speculative reason is incomplete and uncertain.
This leads to a second aspect ofHalevi's fundamental teaching: The
king of the Khazars is only fully persuaded at the end of the third book
of the dialogue, In which the haver has expounded in considerable
detail the ceremonial laws of the Torah. Thus, what seems to stand
furthest apart from the necessary conclusions of autonomous reason,
what appears to be solely; a reflection of historical and local contingencies-sacrifices on the altar, the wearing oftejllllmand fringes, and
so forth-proves to be, according to Halevi, the unique and unambiguous route to piety and justice. We could interpret this to mean that
the terms of the covenant between God and the Laws are not discretionary, that is, the pious man cannot pick and choose among the
Divine Commandments, eliminating those that do not answer to the
criteria of purely human reason. "Covenantal existence," to use
Fackenheim's phrase, gives man's life a total sense which the flawed
and incomplete demonstrations of reason cannot rival.
At all events, this brief summary explains, I hope, Halevi's general
position in regard to the "Greeks," as expressed in the poem which
concludes The Book of the Khazars:
See, yea. see my liiend, and avoid pilfalls, nets and snares. Let not Greek
wJsdom entice thee, which has no fiuit, but on\y blossoms... Ifyou listen
to the misleadiog words of its adepts, built upon frail fuundatlons, thou
wilt tum awaywith aheartemplyandfuint, andamouthfullofdross and
thorns. Why should I seek crooked ways, and forsake [the Torah] the
mother of paths?
Spinoza
I now leap from Yehuda Halevi in the eleventh and early twelfth
centuries, to Baruch Spinoza in the seventeenth. In my judgment one
cannot find a more potent symbol of the conflicts I have been trying
to describe. This might be brought home by the following reflections:
while the names ofHalevi, Malmonldes, Mendelssohn, and Cohen, to
mention only these, are likely to be familiar to serious students of
Jewish thought, Spinoza Is surely known to, and usually studied by,
everyone acquainted with the history ofWestem philosophy. Because
he Is the most prominent philosopher of Jewish origin, his views on
the nature and shortcomings of Judaism have always been especially
Interesting to Jews and non.Jews alike.
Moreover, one episode In his career continues to be the focus of
general attention. On July 24, 1656, a herem, a sentence of excom-
�LACHTERMAN
17
munication and anathema, was pronounced against Spinoza by the
elders oftheJewish congregation ofAmsterdam. In part this document
reads:
May he be cursed in the day and cursed in 1he night, cursed in his lying
down and cursed in his rising up. Cursed in his going for1h and cursed in
his coming in; and may 1he Lord not forgive Wm...
The force of emotion IIJanlfested here is matched by the heart-felt
attempts made by many modem "enlightened" Jews to have the
excommunication lifted. Hermann Cohen, for example, responded,
negatively, to one such attempt by German Jews In the early twentieth
century; but as recently as 1948 David Ben-Gurion campaigned to
have the ban annulled.
What Spinoza signifies or symbolizes Is, for me at least, rendered
most Impressively and poetically In a scene in Isaac Bashevls Singer's
greatest novel, 'The Family Moskat:
His hero, Asa Heshel Bannet, the son and grandson of Chasldic
Rabbis, Is shown arriving from cosmopolitan Warsaw in the remote
provincial town of Teresphpol Minor. He steps from a third-class
compartment of the train dressed in a flimsy gabardine jacket, carrying a cheap basketin place of a leather suitcase. "In his pocket," Singer
writes, "rested a worn volume, 'The Ethics of Spinoza In a Hebrew
translation."
All of the conflicts and tragedies of Asa Bannet's subsequent career
are prophetically crystallized in tWs initial image. For example, when
he returns to his native village and confronts his pious grandfather,
he is told:
·
Good night. A simple life, I tell you, that's the best. No questions,
no pWlosophy, no racking your brains. In Germany there was a
philosopher and he philosophized so long 1hat he began to eat grass.
What is it in Spinoza's thought that has evoked such extreme and
extremely disparate responses? What accounts for his becoming so
apt a symbol of the lacerating tensions within the soul of the modern
Jew?
Asa Bannet carries with him a copy of Spinoza's Ethics; however,
it is in another book, The Theological-Political Treatise, published
anonymously in 1670, that Spinoza sets out his position vis-a-vis
Judaism most trenchantly. In the present context I can do little more
than state thatSpinoza's chief targets are the twin pillars of traditional
Judaism as it was understood both by Spinoza himself and by his
�18
'!HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Jewish forebears: the doctrine of revelation, on the one hand, and the
doctrine of ceremonial or ritual obligations, on the other. Splnoza
carries out this attack In the form of an htstorlcalinterpretatlon of the
Torah; what has since Ws day become a familiar and commonplace
program of scholarship was in his day a radical innovation-namely,
the effort to understand the Bible as the product ofhuman, not divine,
authorship. taking stock of all the uncertainties, ambiguities, contradictions. and "ulterior motives" to be expected In any work produced
by human hands-in this case, many different human hands.
This historical approach to the Bible had, for Splnoza, as It does for
many of his present-day heirs, two major consequences:
(1) First, nothing In the Bible can be taken as evidence of Divine
Revelation, since, after all, the deeds and the speeches ascribed to God
and to the patriarchs, Moses and the prophets, were "Invented" or
"concocted" by other human beings, more particularly, by human
beings who addressed their readers' primitive Imagination, not their
mature pWiosophicalintelligence.
Furthermore, miracles are as such impossible since they would
Interrupt the completely deterministic order of nature which Spinoza
believes has been put beyond question by the modern science of
physics.
(2) Second, the human, all-too-human, authorship of the Torah
furnishes a new, more sophisticated explanation of the "ceremonial
laws," the statutes and ordinances commanded from Sinal. The
rationale behind these is narrow, and above all political: the priests
of the original state of Israel used them to secure or to enforce social
unity and ethical unanimity among Its citizens. This consideration
permits Spinoza to argue that once the Jews were exiled from the land
of Israel the Mosaic laws lost their binding force.· In particular, the
Jews no longer have any justification for remaining "a nation apart"
from the Gentile majority.
In the light of these two implications of Spinoza's re-interpretation
ofJudaism it Is scarcely surprising that his co-religionists were deeply
offended. As one seventeenth-century reader was led to say about the
Theological-PoUtical Treattse,lt Is a work "forged In Hell by a renegade
Jew and the Devil."
Moses Mendelssohn
I come now to the tWrd of my four "exemplary" thinkers. Moses
Mendelssohn, who lived from 1729 to 1786, has been plausibly called
"the first modern Jewish pWlosopher," or, even more Incisively, by the
poet Heinrich Heine, "the Jewish Luther." His writings, but even more
�IACHTERMAN
19
strikingly his career as a whole, Ulustrate the precarious position of a
Jewish thinker In the modern era. For Mendelssohn was, above all, a
"child of his age," and his age was the age of the Enlightemnent. The
centralclalmoftheEnlightenmentwasthathumanreason,oncefreed
from the shackles of external authority, both theoretical and Institutional, could define and eventually achieve moral and political goals
which all mankind would spontaneously endorse. "Progress," progress
sponsored and promoted by reason, by logos, alone, became the
watchword of European thinkers In the eighteenth century; It was this
watchword that gave life to the notion of "universal tolerance" embraced by the "progressive" thinkers of that era.
Mendelssohn seemed to his Christian contemporaries to have
arrived providentially on the scene, Inasmuch as he was aJewwhose
philosophical work fell squarely within the compass of the Enlightenment program. It Is impossible to read eighteenth-century accounts
of Mendelssohn without detecting again and again the note of surprise
that accompanies the praise bestowed on his achievements: that a
thinker of Jewish birth and commitment could prove so "reasonable,"
so much In harmony with the agenda of the Enlightenment, seemed
to underscore and confirm In practice the theoretical postulate of
universal tolerance. Accordingly, Mendelssohn was welcomed Into the
"Inner circle" of Christian progressives (although his nomination to
membership In the Prussian Academy of Sciences was vetoed by
Friedrich Wilhelm the First, then King of Prussia).
Mendelssohn won his special standing in the eyes of European
Intellectuals In large measure because his Jewish origins did not
appear to affect his philosophical opinions. The God whose existence
he set out to prove (for example, In his book Morgenstunden) is not the
God who revealed himself on Sinal, but the necessary deity at which
unaided natural reason arrives when It considers the contingent
character of the world. Similarly, the principal moral teachings of the
Bible are truths which each and every person will accept if reason Is
allowed to take Its natural course.
And yet, Mendelssohn remained sentimentally or emotionally a
Jew. In doing so he exposed himself to a curiously, If not predictably,
baneful process that led from "universal enlightenment," through the
social and political "emancipation" of European Jewry, to the seemingly rational demand for Jewish assimilation, that is, conversion. A
Christian Interlocutor, Lavater, decided to challenge Mendelssohn's
enduring commitment to Judaism directly; he asked him either to
refute publicly certain arguments In behalf of the compelling superiority and rationality of Christianity or, in case he found them lrrefut-
�20
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
able, to become a Christian himself. Mendelssohn, unable to turn
aside from this explicit challenge, eventually wrote his major work in
religious philosophy, significantly entitled Jerusalem
In this book Mendelssohn shows himselfto be a disciple ofSpinozawhose "pantheism" he elsewhere esoterically abjured-in at least one
decisive respect. The particular "laws and ordinances" issuing from
the revelation on Sinai and thereby setting Jews apart from non-Jews
still have an instrumen14! and transitory value, even if they lack an
absolute and transhisto'rical value: the threat of "polytheism and
anthropomorphism," in a word, "idolatry," is a genuine threat, at least
so long as all men are not equally enlightened:
genutoe theists must maintain some kind of unity among themselves, in order to prevent the forces of darkoess from trampltog
everythtog underfoot.
Adherence to the ceremonial laws is thus a symbolic and, as it were,
political act designed to uphold the claims of reason against the
challenge of unreason, even though the advocates of reason recognize
that these ceremonial laws are not in themselves reasonable. Thus, in
the end, Mendelssohn's account of the place of Judaism differs only
in detail and emphasis from that furnished by his Christian admirer
Lessing, whose seminal tract, The Education of the Hwnan Race,
consigned Jewish beliefs to a primitive and long outmoded stage in
the progressive history of rational mankind.
Let me try to summarize what we have learned from these first three
exemplary thinkers:
Yehuda Halevi tries to demonstrate that the superiority of reason
over tradition is indemonstrable; hence, the only trustworthy basis for
a "God-pleasing" life is the tradition which demands fulfilhnent of
"statutes and ordinances" on the grounds that Divine revelation shows
these to be obligatory.
Spinoza, having tried to cut the ground from beneath the very
notion of revelation, rejects the possibility that such particularistic
"statutes and ordinances" could be binding on the free and rational
mind.
Mendelssohn attempts to fmd some middle ground between these
two extremes; the particularism of the ceremonial laws is justified only
as a "holding action" against the threat of irrational idolatry; when the
latter is irreversibly defeated, the non-moral or ceremonial "statutes
and ordinances" will no longer be valid.
�IACHTERMAN
21
Hermann Cohen
I have left myself little time to discuss Hermann Cohen in any but
a superficial way. The following reflections will have to suffice. Cohen,
who was born in 1842 and died in 1918, lived an uneventful life as far
as external episodes are concerned-for most of his adult life he was
an exceptionally prominent professor of philosophy, first in Marburg
and then in Berlin. Inwardly, his life was a single dramatic event, an
"inner dialogue between. his philosophy and his religion, between
reason and piety," as his English translator, Simon Kaplan, has
written. Let me quickly examine each of these aspects of Cohen's
career. He owed his prominence chiefly to his work as an interpreter
of Kant's philosophy; his commentaries on Kant's major texts became
the basis for the so-called Marburg School ofNeo-Kantianism, which
had a wide influence in academic philosophy until it was sublated by
Heidegger during the 1920s. His commitment to Kantianism was
buttressed by an equally deep interest In Plato, especially in Plato's
theory of forms and his conception of mathematics. According to
Cohen, Plato's Forms are anticipations of Kant's notion of the ideas of
reason which serve as regulative hypotheses in the sciences; the
Forms understood as such hypotheses provide the motive-power for
open-ended "research programs" directed upon the discovery of the
ultimate principles of reason and, hence, of reality. !tis apparent that
Cohen annuls any significant differences between Plato and Kant, or,
more generally, between the ancient and the modem versions of
rationalism.
Plato and Kant thus share the merit of establishing philosophy on
a purely scientific basis. Science, for Cohen, means a thoroughly
rational account of the universal and necessary principles underlying
all domains of human activity, scientific activity, sense, ethical activity,
and, finally, aesthetic activity. "Universalism" and "rationalism" are,
for Cohen, the two sides of a single coin. Only what reason, acting
autonomously, comes to certify as true carries validity for all human
beings without exception; In science, necessary laws of nature; in
ethics, moral imperatives commanding the respect of every rational
agent. This Is the thesis that sustains Cohen's own "system of
philosophy," which he articulated In an Imposing trilogy: The Logic of
Pure Cognition, The Ethics of Pure WUl, and The Aesthetics of Pure
FeeUng.
Cohen was, at the same time, a deeply committed Jew. Unlike
Mendelssohn, however, Cohen was not content to relegate his JudaIsm to the domain of sentiment; on the contrary, at the heart of his
philosophical labors Is his attempt to demonstrate the fundamental
�22
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
identity between the teachings of Plato and Kant, on the one hand,
and the teachings of Judaism, especially prophetic Judaism, on the
other. He pursued this first attempt In a pair of important essays, 'The
Inner Relations of Kantian Philosophy to Judaism" and 'The Social
Ideal in Plato and the Prophets," and then in his crowning work, The
Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism His efforts towards
this goal are marked by a characteristic generosity of spirit; thus,
Cohen acknowledges and then discounts Kant's insistence that the
"euthanasia" of Judaism Will benefit all people, "not least the Jewish
people Itself." Similarly, Cohen treats Plato's "elitism," that Is, the
claim that not all men are equally qualified to become philosopherkings, as a contingent defect In Plato's system, easily corrected by
reference to the moral egalitarianism of the Biblical prophets.
Cohen's undertaking brings him face to face with both of the
essential tensions I have been trying to explore with you today: the
conflict or apparent conflict between reason and revelation, and the
discrepancy between what Is universal to all human beings and what
Is particular to one group of human beings. His own sense of these
tensions arises In the form of the question: What place Is there,lf any,
for religion within the system built up by autonomous reason? Kant's
work, "Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone," thus serves as the
prototype for Cohen's "Religion of Reason out of the Sources of
Judaism."
Cohen came to see that systematic philosophy, precisely In virtue
of its universal validity, leaves out of account the individual as such.
This can be seen most readily In the domain of ethics-the moral
duties endorsed by reason apply to all rational agents alike and make
no distinction among individuals . To quote Simon Kaplan once again,
"the general law of duty falls helpless and silent in the presence of the
individual with his Imperfections and frailties, confusions and fears."
The task of religion is to establish and to make meaningful a direct
connection between each individual and the ideals of moral selfperfection by which we measure and suffer over our moral shortcomings. Moreover, this connection must be such that from it the
individual can discover or rediscover the universal application and
truth of those moral ideals. These thoughts are at the root of Cohen's
central concept of the "correlation" between man and God: On man's
side, correlation takes the form of repentance, the acknowledgment of
transgression and the desire for forgiveness; on God's side, correlation
means God's promise to redeem the individual, to cleanse him of his
sins and fulfill his desire for self-perfection. In the language of
Leviticus: ''Ye shall be holy, for I the Lord thy God am Holy." (Lev. 19:2)
�IACHIERMAN
23
Furthermore, the individual who recognizes this correlation between
himself and God is at the same time conscious that the God who
promises Wm salvation promises It to mankind as a whole, that God
treats all individuals In the same way and requires that they treat one
another In accordance with the twin demands of love and justice.
In fact. correlation, far from being an Isolating and ultimately
egoistic relationsWp Is, in Cohen's argument, the source of the discovery that all men are my fellow-men, rather than those who merely
share the world with me in· a contingent and meaningless way. Thus,
the individual's love of God must express Itself concretely as his love
and devotion to his fellow-men, or, In other words, the search for
perfect social justice Is equivalent to the worship of God. The exemplary Instance of the fellow-man is the poor man, whose poverty Is
undeserved; consequently, social justice entails the abolition of poverty.
TWs is the foundation of Cohen's abiding loyalty to non-communist
socialism.
These arguments lead Cohen to "resolve" the fundamental tensions
within Jewish thought; his solutions would command respect and
deserve the closest study even If they should prove, In the end, less
than fully persuasive. I can only mention his proposals here:
(1) Revelation Is not a single episode that occurred at Sinai; it Is, In
Cohen's words "the creation of human reason" itself; that is, the
capacity that distinguishes humans from animals and makes them
receptive to uncompromising ethical demands. Consequently, the
particular "statutes and ordinances" announced In the Torah have, at
best, a secondary status; the progress of human reason over the
course of histo:ty justifies their reform or even, as In the case of animal
sacrlftces, their elimination. The insights of reason, not ceremonial
duties, bear witness to the "correlation" between man and God.
(2) Analogously, Israel's election, its status as "the chosen people,"
In no way licenses Jewish self-righteousness or pride. Instead, the role
of the Jews Is to suffer In behalf of the truth of monotheism, to ''pass ·
through history like a Job" as Cohen writes, suffering not In punishment for Its sins, but In order to keep alive the hope and the promise
of the ultimate redemption and unity of all mankind.
The particular condition of the Jews Is that their historical mission
has universal significance. Cohen took seriously the words of Balaam
In the Book of Numbers: Israel "shall dwell alone and shall not be
reckoned among the nations" (Num. 23:9) and on this basis he
opposed Zionism. The dtaspora, the loss of political nationhood, is the
only appropriate condition for a people whose destiny Is to symbolize
the trans-national brotherhood of all peoples. The Messtanlc age,
�24
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
which was for Cohen the central notion of prophetic Judaism, is the
goal of historical existence in its entirety; "the unity of humankind,"
Cohen argued, "Is the eternal value of the human race," for this human
unity Is the best possible Image of the unity and uniqueness of God
himself. Cohen followed Kant In describing the achievement of this
Messianic age as an "Infinite task." Progress toward It Is never-ending.
I will have done Cohen and his themes a grave injustice If my sketch
has left you with the Impression that he was simply an academic or
scholastic thinker interested In system-building for Its own sake.
First of all, the dilemmas to which Cohen wanted to make a
systematic response are real and deeply embedded in the history of
Jewish thinking. Secondly, the central position of the individual,
particularly the suffering individual, in Cohen's religious philosophy,
exempts him from the kind of charge a Klerkegaard, for example,
lodges against the Hegelian "system." It cannot have been mere
accident that Cohen's most ardent and most thoughtful student was
Franz Rosenzweig, frequently and rightly called the "Father of Jewish
Existentialism." Furthermore, Cohen is extraordinarily sensitive to the
living forms ofJewish religious practice; you need only read the pivotal
chapter on the significance ofYom Kippur, The Day of Atonement, to
become convinced of this. Here, as elsewhere In the Re1igionofReason,
his writing displays a singular beauty, beauty of the sort achieved only
when the whole soul is engaged with and by the most vital questions.
I have conscientiously refrained from offering an explicit assessment of Cohen's ambitions, since my aim was rather to bring to light
the concerns to which those ambitions were addressed. It would be
extravagant simply to apply to his work the phrase he used to
characterize Kant's Religion Withtn the Limits of Reason Alone-a
"gewagtes Spte~" "a daring game"-just as It would be Insufficient to
point to the fact that Cohen's rejection of Zionism, in the name of the
universal mission of Judaism, went hand In hand with his belief,
expressed in 1907, that "Germany... Is the motherland of culture for
European Jewry In general."
Nonetheless, it seems to me appropriate to conclude by delineating,
in the sketchiest way, the lines of inquhy one might take If Cohen's
hypotheses were to prove artificial or Inadequate.
To free Jewish "particularism," "parochialism," of the onus history
has Imposed upon it, one would have to show either that the Greek
understanding of universal logos is Itself parochially or specifically
"Greek" or that the genuine universalism of Greek logos underwent a
profound transformation when it was wedded first to Christianity and
then to modern science. The modern version of W1iversal rationality
�LACHTERMAN
25
may tum out to be indistinguishable from a kind of totaUtartanism in
which the particular, far from being reconciled to, and within, the
whole, is irrevocably canceled.
The first line of potential inquizy still assumes the superiority of the
claims of reason, whether Greek or modem, over the claims of Biblical
piety and observance of revealed commandments. A second line of
inquizy would have to confront their respective merits. One path it
might follow is to explore the differences between the eros of which
Plato speaks-an eros whfch leaves behind both fellow-men and the
institutions they share, as it moves towards knowledge of the Beautiful
Itself-and the love, ahavah, of which the Jewish tradition speaks.
Cohen himself makes this love the central theme of his religious
philosophy: 'The love of God must unif'y all the things and all the
problems of the world." Or, in the words of the seventy-third psalm:
"But as for me, the nearness of God is my Good."
�26
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�Autonomy and Authenticity:
How One Becomes What One Is
I
Daniel W. Conway
y<voL' olos <out f.La6wv-
Become who you are.
-Pindar, Pythian Odes, II, 73
Nietzsche's fascination wilh Pindar's Imperative endured throughout
his entire productive career. He toyed wilh variations of !he slogan,
placed it in !he mouth of his "son," Zaralhustra, and recommended it
fondly to Lou Salome just before !heir final estrangement. I Nietzsche
lhought so Wghly of his borrowed maxim !hat he Inscribed his
"autobiography," Ecce Homo, wilh !he subtitle, Wieman wird, was
man ist (How one becomes what one Is). Despite Ws fascination wilh
!his cryptic teaching, however, Nietzsche offers his readers very little
in !he way of illumination, and he neglects to explain how exactly one
sets out to "become what one is."
Nietzsche's uncharacteristic silence has heightened, ralher !han
dampened, !he enlhuslasm of Ws readers for !his cryptic slogan.
Perhaps no olher philosopher is so warmly received as a champion of
autonomy and aulhenticlty, and !he "existential" Nietzsche, originally
lionized by Anglophone readers in !he fifties and sixties, is In fashion
once again. Various Ingenious Interpretations have been advanced
recently of Nietzsche's Pindalian motto, and readers once again view
him as a laconic guide in !heir own quest to become what they are. In
!his essay I would like to temper somewhat !he enlhuslasm for
Nietzsche's call to aulhenticlty, by drawing attention to several
counter-currents resident wilhin his lhought. While Nietzsche is
widely hailed as t!Ie champion par excellence of aut!Ientic!ty, he also
stands as one of t!Ie greatest critics of voluntarism. In light of t!Iese
counter-currents, It would appear t!Iat "how one becomes what one
Is" Is a matter that lies largely beyond one's control.
�1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
28
Nietzsche's Critique of Autonomy
The term "autonomy" rarely appears in Nietzsche's postZarathustran writings, and never with reference to his own moral
philosophy. This absence Is surprising not only because Nietzsche
wrote in the shadow of Kant and German Idealism, but also because
his books apparently promote a moral "ideal" that bears at least a
family resemblance to autonomy. Nietzsche routinely praises triumphs
of self-command, self-legislation, self-overcoming, self-mastery, selfreverence, self-control, and self-creation. He is widely received, especially within the tradition of existentialism, as the champion par
excellence of self-reliance and autonomy, of the willful creation of an
authentic self. 2 Nietzsche translates Kant's Injunction to unite subject
and sovereign In a kingdom of ends Into a more lyrical call for the
Integration of creator and creature within a single soul:
In man creature and creator are united: in man there is material,
fragment, excess, dirt, nonsense, chaos: but in man there is also
creator, form-giver, hammer-hardness, spectator-divinity, and seventh day. (BGE 225) 3
Despite such familiar sentiments, however, Nietzsche has good
reason to resist both the term "autonomy" and the concept Itself,
especially as a normative moral ideal, for he has no means of verifYing
the authenticity (or inauthenticlty) of any given se!f.4 He consequently
does not exhort his readers toward authenticity, and he furthermore
constructs a compelling case against the promotion of autonomy as a
normative ideal. While Nietzsche occasionally deploys a strongly
voluntaristic rhetoric, the ideal of self-creation that is popularly
atiributed to him Is simply incompatible with the diminished volitional
resources of late modernity. The frustrations of Nietzsche's own life
and career vividly demonstrate the futility of the voluntaristic ideal
popularly ascribed to him.
Part of the confusion here is attributable to Nietzsche's designation
of himself as an "Immoralist," as a philosopher who takes his stand
"beyond good and evil." While this designation perhaps suggests that
Nietzsche has somehow freed hlmselffrom the Western moral tradition, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, if we view
autonomy as a departure from, or transcendence of, conventional
morality, then the case of Nietzsche militates against the promotion
of any such normative ideal. Nietzsche indicates that the achievement
of autonomy is simply incompatible with his historical situation:
We have been spuo into a severe yam and shirt of duties and cannot
get out of that-and in this we are "men of duty," we, too. Occasionally,
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29
that Is true, we dance In our "chains" and between our "swords";
more often, that Is no less true, we gnash our teeth and feel
impatient with all the secret hardness of our destiny. (BGE 226) 5
The mysterious "philosophers of the future" may succeed in achievIng (and promoting) genuine autonomy, but Nietzsche and his fellow
"free spirits," Imprisoned In the heteronomy of conventional morality,
can do little more than rattle about in their chains.
The primary problem with autonomy as a moral ideal lies In the
difficulty involved in verifyfug its supposed achievement. This problem
derives from the more basic problem of veriJY!ng the authenticity of
any "ideal" self advertised as "higher," or more "genuine" than one's
current, empirical self. Any alternative "!"with which one might come
to identifY Is always Itself a product of the same historical conditions
that produced one's current self. The idea that one can adopt a
verlflably genuine or authentic self, upon which the ideal of autonomy
Is founded, Is philosophically indefensible. Nietzsche consequently
rejects the pursuit of autonomy, as well as the distinction between
"authentic" and "empirical" selves, upon which It trades.
Nietzsche's readers often point to Toward the Genealogy of Morals
as advocating a recovery of the natural, Instinctual self whose repression represents the opportunity cost ofhuman civilization. He speaks,
for example, of the "splendid blond beasf' within us as a "hidden core
[that] needs to erupt from time to time," and as an "animal [that] has
to get out again and go back to the wilderness" (GM 1: 11). While the
philosophical anthropology articulated In Essay II of the Genealogy
may appear to disclose a primal animal nature that might somehow
serve as a stsndard of authenticity, the Genealogy also reveals that
such a "nature" (If Intelligible at all) is forever lost to us, by virtue of
our irreversible acculturation. Nietzsche ridicules the Stoics for wantlng to live "according to Nature" (BGE 9), and he argues (ostensibly
against Rousseau) that any attempt to identifY the authentic self with
the noble savage resident within oneself Is hopelessly romantic,
Implicating one In "the return to nature in tmpwis naturalibus" (TI 9: l;
cf. 9:49).
From a Nletzschean perspective, then, it comes as no surprise that
self-proclaimed champions of autonomy-Rousseau, Kant, Rawls,
Rorty, et al-fail to proffer a non-circular method of Identifying a self
that Is more genuine, more real, or more authentic than the empirical
self that one currently Is. The achievement of autonomy Is either
Impossible (as Hegel argued against Kant), or political (as In the social
contracts drawn up by Rousseau and Rawls). or trivial (as promised
by the currently popular strategy of narrative re-description). 6 These
�30
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
strategies succeed only in steering agents toward those "techniques
of the self' (to borrow Michel Foucault's termF that more closely cleave
to a specific cultural or political ideal. Such "techniques of the self'
may secure for their practitioners various rewards and privileges, but
they do not deliver their practitioners to genuine autonomy. Philosophers and moralists generally praise certain individuals as "autonomous" not because they are genuinely autonomous, but because their
heteronomy instantiates favored political ideals. Nietzsche thus contends that genuine autonomy is not a moral ideal at all, for
"'autonomous' and 'moral' (stttUch] are mutually exclusive" (GM 2:2).
What is usually called, and applauded as, "autonomy" is in fact the
antithesis of genuine, supra-moral autonomy. Self-proclaimed champions of "autonomy'' in fact want nothing to do with genuine. supramoral autonomy, and they have rigged their respective social contracts
in order to ensure that "autonomy'' conforms in practice to conventional morality.
Nietzsche thus exposes autonomy as a disguised moral ideal, which
trades on the misleading promise of freedom from all ideals. Like all
ideals, autonomy functions to constrain moral development rather
than to promote its unbridled development. Here it is imporiant to
bear in mind that Nietzsche's celebrated "immorallsm" constitutes
precisely his opposition to aU ideals. Nietzsche views idealism in any
form as "cowardice," as a "flight from reality'' (EH:destiny 3), for ideals
necessarily place pre-established constraints on the forms of life that
might emerge. "All idealism," Nietzsche maintains, "is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary'' (EH:clever 10). As an "immoralist," Nietzsche refrains from proposing a single ideal in accordance
with which all must be domesticated, and he Instead encourages an
untamed proliferation of rare and exotic individuals. 8 Nietzsche's
general aversion to idealism thus places him in opposition to the
philosophical ideal of "autonomy'' as well, for the pursuit of one's
authentic self necessarily devaluates the embodied, non-autonomous
self that one currently Is.
Nietzsche's critique of autonomy is linked inextricably to his diagnosis of modernity as an age beset by advanced, irrecuperable decadence. The feats of self-transformation required to deliver one to
autonomy are simply incompatible with the diminished vitality of the
age. Nietzsche does not indicate whether autonomy was attainable In
bygone ages, but he makes it quite clear that the achievement of
genuine autonomy outstrips the residual vitality of agents representative of late modernity. What modernity calls an "individual," the
pride of the Enlightenment, Is nothing more than a "moral milksop,"
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31
a domesticated animal that has internalized the demands of culture
and consequently operates under the illusion of self-legislated freedom. If we measure ages by "their positive strength," then "that
lavishly squandering and fatal age of the Renaissance appears as the
last great age; and we modems ... appear as a weak age" (TI 9:37). Even
the "sovereign individual," who possesses "the right to make promises,"
owes his "rare freedom" to his "conscience," which, Nietzsche shows,
is itself an implant of socially enforced heteronomy (GM 2:2). The
conscience, a fiercely vigilant homunculus that relentlessly reckons
one's debts and obligations, represents the final-and most forbidding-barrier to genuine autonomy.
Nietzsche snickers at the idea that the right to make promises
stands as evidence of genuine autonomy, for he views the conscience
as the internalized, mnemonic distillation of socially enforced punitive
and carceral practices. Whereas the noble savage and blonde beast
require sturdy cages or constant external surveillance, "men of conscience" are sufficiently disciplined to police themselves. The closest
thing we know to genuine, supra-moral autonomy is not the debt-paying,
promise-keeping, originally positioned author of the social contract,
but the criminal, the monster devoid of conscience. Nietzsche defines
"the criminal type" as "the type of strong human being under unfavorable circumstances: a strong human being made sick" (TI 9:45). Manu,
the architect of the Hindu caste system, understood the need both to
exclude the chandalas and to render them politically impotent, lest
their exclusion strengthen and embolden them (TI 7:3).
Under the Influence of Christianity, the institutions of Western
civilization have for the most part implemented what Nietzsche calls
"moralities of taming" (TI 7:3). Social practices of self-formation have
succeeded in sickening (and thus domesticating) those individuals
whose "virtues are ostracized by society." The conscience thus prevents individuals from straying far from the internalized norm, and
the institutions of modernity marginalize or stamp out those rare,
exotic plants that do manage to blossom. On a rare occasion, however,
"a man proves stronger than society: the Corsican, Napoleon, Is the
most famous case" (TI 9:45). Napoleon thus represents the closest
approximation known to Nietzsche of genuine autonomy, for Napoleon
approached the task of lawgiving (relatively) unconstrained by conscience and tradition. He consequently describes Napoleon as a
"return to Nature," which he defines as
an ascent-up into the high, free, even terrible Nature and naturalness where great tasks are something one plays with, one may play
with. (TI 9:48)
�1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
32
Self-creation vs. Self-discovery
Nietzsche's critique of autonomy thus furnishes us with an insight
Into what he does not mean by human flourishing. The determination
of a positive account of human flourishing is complicated, however,
by Ws apparent recommendation oftwo separate models ofself-perfection.
AB we have seen, he is best known for apparently promoting a volitional
model of self-creation that entrusts the project of self-perfection to the
will. Speaking on behal,f of his unknown "friends," he proclaims,
We, however, want to become those we are-human beings who are
new, unique, Incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create
themselves. (GS 335)
Nietzsche tends to convey this model of self-creation through a
cluster of aesthetic metaphors. In an oft-cited passage, he recommends the project of self-creation by issuing an "Imperative" to fashion
one's life into a work of art:
To "give slyle" to one's character-agreat and rare art! It is practiced
by those who survey all the strengihs and weakoesses of their
nature and then fit them Into an artistic plan until everyone of them
appears as art and reason and even weakoesses delight the eye.
Here a large mass of second nature has been added; there a piece
of original nature has been removed-both times through long
practice and daily work at it. (GS 290)9
This strongly voluntaristic model of self-creation Is further reinforced by Nietzsche's apparent ridicule of the Socratic/Enlightenment
ideal of self-knowledge, which presupposes that some inert self lies
waiting to be discovered. Nietzsche counters the Delphic injunction
by calling into question the verypossibilily of a definitive self-knowledge:
"Everyone is most distant from himself." All who try the reins know
this to their chagrin, and the maxim "know thyselfl" addressed to
human beings by a god, is almost malicious. (GS 335)
The "object" of self-investigation continually changes as a result of
the Investigation Itself: "Learning changes us; It does what all nourishment does wWch also does not merely 'preserve'-as physiologists
know" (BGE 231). Every gain In self-knowledge contributes to who or
what one is, thus continually displacing one's "true" self and indefinitely postponing a conclusive self-discovery. Proponents of this volitional model ofNietzschean self-perfection thus conclude that because
no inert self lies waiting to be discovered, it must be the case that we
create ourselves.ID
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33
For all the textual support in its favor, however, this model of
self-creation fails to capture Nietzsche's account ofhuman flourishing.
First of all, the project of self-creation runs aground on the shoals of
idealism. Any attempt to fashion a more authentic self necessarily
involves a flight from the emptrical to the ideal. The detennination
that one's empirical self is inadequate, unsatisfactory, or defective
implicates one in the metaphysics of morals that Nietzsche's "immoralism" ostensibly opposes. Second, this model of self-creation is overly
voluntaristic, for it fails to take into account the general limitations of
one's creative capacities. One does not "become what one is" simply
by dint of an act of will, and to preach otherwise verges upon crue11y. 11
For these reasons, perhaps, Nietzsche also promotes a cognitive
model of human Jlourtshing, which sanctions a process of self-discovery.
Especially in his post-Zarathustran works, he cautions against the
misleadingly voluntaristic model of self-creation for which he is currently hailed, warning that
at the bottom of us, really "deep down," there is, of course, something unteachable, some granite of pure splrituaijatum, ofpredetermioed decision and answer to predetermioed selected questions.
(BGE 231)
Nietzsche's fatalism, which plays an increasingly important role in
his post-Zarathustran writings, thus mitigates the optimism and
exuberance conveyed by his rhetoric of self-creation. 12 This "spiritual
fatu:rri' comprises those intractable, relatively permanent elements of
one's identity that one cannot readily change. It is crucial that we
discover this spiritual jatum, for It effectively restricts the sphere of
self-overcoming, thereby limiting the range of selves we can become.
On this strongly cognitive model, the task of self-overcoming will
apparently require a healthy reverence for that jatum within oneself
that proves resistant to aesthetic rehabilitation. Nietzsche consequently proposes amor faii as his "formula for greatness in a human
being" (EH:clever 10).
While Nietzsche may appear simply to vacillate between these
models of human flourishing, his actual goal is to propose a synthesis
of the two. His term for this composite model of human flourishing,
which combines elements of both self-creation and self-discovery, is
self-overcoming. Describing his resistance to the powerful influence
on him ofWagner, he writes,
You want a word for lt?-If I were a moralist, who knows what I
might call it? Perhaps self-overcoming (Selbstaujhebung].-But the
philosopher has no love for moralists. Nor does he love pretty words.
(CWP)
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
One "becomes what one is" by overcoming oneself, which involves
elements of both cognition and volition.
As we have seen, Nietzsche's readers cusiornarily define self-overcoming
through a process of elimination: authentic selfhood is a matter either
of creation or discovery, and we have good reasons for eliminating one
of these options. Proponents of the model of self-creation, for example,
arrive at their determination of Nietzschean self-overcoming not by
way of actually creating themselves, but by way of their doubts
concerning the possibility of self-discovery. It is Nietzsche's intention,
however, to expose the distinction between self-creation and self-discovery
as sheltering a fulse dichotomy.I3 One "becomes what one is" only by
combining elements of cognition and volition, discovery and creation.
If, as David Lachterman suggests, "construction is the mark of modernity,"14 then Nietzsche is sinmltaneously representative of modernity and resistant to it. While his voluntaristic rhetoric suggests the
construction of selfhood, his fatalism recommends the discovery of the
self.
The composite nature of self-overcoming is crucial to Nietzsche's
program of political education, for only the combination of self-creation
and self-discovery engenders the cruelty-both to oneself and to
others-that ensures the nomothetic impact of self-overcoming. On
their own, self-creation and self-discovery both fail to fascinate and to
arouse. Both are eminently safe (and fatuous) strategies for "becoming
what one is," and they are likely to seduce no one.I5 Only the volatile
mixture ofvolition and cognition, which the philosopher's experiments
cruelly detonate, can engender that dimension of Dionysian excess
that simultaneously galvanizes and jeopardizes the economy of the
soul. This potentially mortal expenditure in turn guarantees the
self-intlicted violence that others find so compelling, so erotic. In order
to become nomothetic, and thus political, a strategy of self-overcoming
must combine elements of both volition and cognition.
Genealogy and Self-overcoming
Nietzsche's composite model of human flourishing is embodied in
his practice of genealogy, which combines invention and discovery to
deliver a compelling account of how he has "become what he is." For
example, Nietzsche's account in the Genealogy of the "slave revolt in
morality'' is best understood as both an Invention and a discovery; It
Is neither purely fictitious nor adequately supported by empirical and
historical evidence. It combines Nietzsche's indefensible, pre-genealogical
prejudices with a plausible "scientific" account of the historical trends
that inform modernity.
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35
Nietzsche's own quest to "become what he is" exemplifies a type of
life informed by genealogical self-knowledge. We might think of genealogical self-knowledge as a by-product of genealogical investigation
In general, or as the dividend that accrues to the self-referential
Implications of one's investigations. Genealogical self-knowledge combines elements of both volition and cognition, thereby eliding any
sharp distinction between self-creation and self-discovery. By the time
one gains genealogical Insight Into "oneself," this cognitive act has
already reconstituted-and thus postponed-one's self. In fact, it is
this admixture of creation and discovery that propels the self ahead
of one's investigations ofit. The more directly one seeks self-knowledge
through genealogical investigation, the more certsinly one ensures the
failure of this quest, especially if one assumes that the self is an inert,
fixed datum awaiting discovery.
Nietzsche thus begins the Genealogy by pre-emptively dashing any
lingertng hope that his investigations might unearth a genuine, authentic self:
We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge-and with good
reason. We have never sought ourselves-how could It happen that
we should ever find ourselves?...So we are necessarily strangers to
ourselves, we do not understand ourselves, we have to misunderstand ourselves, for us the law "Each Is furthest from h!mseli"
applies to all eternity-we are not "men of knowledge• with respect
to ourselves. (GM PI)
Paradoxically, then, genealogy yields a type of self-knowledge, but
only to those genealogists who do not directly seek it. Through
genealogy, Nietzsche himself becomes what he is, even If there is
nothing that he is.
Much of the self-knowledge gained via genealogical investigation Is
negative, as one becomes gradually disabused of the prejudices one
previously harbored about oneself. Nietzsche ridicules the "pride" of
the "English [sic] psychologists" who preceded him, for it prevented
them from subjecting their own methodological "idiosyncrasy" to
critical scrutiny (GM 1:2). Genealogy liberates one not from the past,
but from certain oppressive or counterproductive interpretations of
the past that presently hold one captive. Genealogy does not banish
the contingency of one's historical development, but it transforms
"mere" contingency into an intelligible-and thus Interpretable-condition of one's identity. One remains a creature born of contingency,
but genealogy can "redeem" this contingency by Uluminatlng alternative (and potentially enabling) accounts of the past
�1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
36
By exposing the contingency of the dominant "techniques of the
self," genealogy liberates one (in theory) from calcified conceptions of
the limitations and possibilities of human "nature." Genealogy
re-acquaints one with the plasticity of the human soul and thus
reclaims an expanded range of self-overcomings. Of course, whether
or not one is practically free to implement these genealogical insights
is another matter. In addition to disclosing historical contingencies,
genealogy also reveals the historical sedimentation that encrusts
contingency in quasi-necessity. For example, while the Genealogy
reveals that the hegemony of the ascetic ideal is, strictly speaking,
contingent, Nietzsche harbors no hope that he might somehow exploit
this historical contingency to enshrine an alternative ideal. The political significance of Nietzsche's genealogy of morals thus lies not so
much in its (dubious) account of the development ofWestern morality
as in its exemplification of an alternative ascetic practice that may
succeed in inoculating us against the redemptive metaphysical yearnings thatthreaten our demise. Nietzsche's achievement of genealogical
self-knowledge, a goal he attains but never pursues, exemplifies a
model of self-overcoming that is consistent with the depleted volitional
resources oflate modernity.
Resistance and Self-experimentation
The goal of self-experimentation is neither to overthrow the ascetic
ideal, nor to reverse the advance of decadence, but to illuminate and
implement "forgotten" techniques of the self. These experimental
techniques of the self must remain irreducibly ascetic in nature, but
they may afford a greater, or variant, range of affective expression than
more familiar techniques of the self. Convinced that what passes for
autonomy is simply socially rewarded heteronomy, Nietzsche rails
against those elements within himself that most closely correspond to
socially inscribed ideals:
What does a philosopher demand of himself first and last? To
overcome his time in himself, to become "timeless." With what must
he therefore engage in the hardest combat? With whatever marks
him as a child of his time. (CW P)
Nietzsche thus places himself in opposition to modernity as a
whole, and he resists his age by resisting its reilections within himself.
The point of Nietzsche's combat is not to eliminate those elements of
his identity that "mark him as a child of his time," but to digest them,
to incorporate them within the "manifold whole" of his self:
�CONWAY
37
Facing a world of"modern ideas" that would banish everybody into
a corner and "speciality." a phUosopher...would be compelled to find
the greatness of man, the concept of "greatness," precisely in his
range and multiplicity, in his wholeness In manifoldness. He would
even determine value and rank in accordance with how much and
how many things one could bear and take upon himself. (BGE 212)
One "becomes what one is" not through the castrative practices
sanctioned by Western morality, but through a constant process of
Incorporation and Integration. From this resistance of one's age
emerges a self that is not newly created, but newly configured.
Which selves should the philosopher embody? While all techniques
of the self are equally heteronomous, some will prove more advantageous in the pursuit of some pragmatic end. Nietzsche, for example,
is intent on discovering those "techniques of the self' that will prove
most resistant to the advent of the ''will to nothingness"; he consequently privileges those ascetic disciplines that promise to retard the
deterioration of the affects. Since he does not know a priori which
specific ascetic practices will be least threatening, he resorts to
self-experimentation. Nietzsche thus probes the resiliency of decadence, implementing and embodying selves that accommodate an
Increasingly greater range and depth of affective expenditure. He
"guesses what remedies avail against what is harmful," a gambit that
proves that he "has turned out well" (EH:wise 2). If successful in his
guesses, he may seduce other fellow travelers to their "forgotten" next
selves, and perhaps help them to resist their own decadence. If
unsuccessful In this guessing game, he may reinforce the hegemony
of the ascetic ideal and thus inadvertently hasten the advent of the
''will to nothingness."
Nietzsche consequently combats danger with danger. He can offer
no assurance that self-experimentation-either as a general strategy
or in his own specific experiments-actually succeeds in retarding
decadence. It may be, as he suggests in his more pessimistic moments,
that the project of resisting the decadence of modernity is simply futile.
Or it may be, as he suggests in his more exuberant moments, that
philosophers can successfully wage war with their age and thus resist
those strains of idolatry to which they are most vulnerable. All he
"knows" from his genealogy of morals is that the available range of
selves has been artificially and dangerously circumscribed in late
modernity, and that the predilection for self-destructive technologies
of the self threatens the very survival of the will. Nietzsche thus hopes
to contribute to a proliferation of rare ·and exotic selves whose identities he cannot begin to predict. In this respect, his experiments
represent a desperate gamble, for he may contribute to the production
�1HE ST. JOHN"S REVIEW
38
of frightening monstrosities. It Is perhaps fitting, then, that Nietzsche
announces, "It Is only beginning with me that the earth knows great
politics" (EH:destiny 1).
"'"'"' * *
Notes
1. Nietzsche closes hJs letlerofJune 10, 1882, with the sentence: "Pindar
sagt einmal, 'werde der, der du bist!'" Friedrich Nietzsche, Sil.mtllche
Briefe, Kritische Studienausgabe in 8 Bi\nden, ed. G. Colli and M.
Montinari (Berlin: Walter deGruyter/Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag,
1986), Vol. 6, #239, p. 203.
2. For a thorough reckoning of Nietzsche's debts to Kant, and of his
Influence on the development of existentialism, see Frederick Olafson,
Principles and Persons (Baltimore: Johos Hopkins University Press, 1967}.
3. With the exception of occasional emendations, I rely throughout this
essay on Walter Kaufmann's translations and editions of Nietzsche's
books for Viking Press/Random House. Numbers refer to sections
rather than to pages, and the following key explains the abbreviations
for my citations. BGE: BeyondGoodandEvil; CW: TheCaseofWagner;
EH: Ecce Homo; GM: Thward a Genealogy of Morals; GS: The Gay
Science; TI: 'livilight oftl-.e Idols.
4. On the relationship between autonomy and authenticity, see Agnes
Heller, A Philosophy ofMorals (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).
5. This confession of heteronomy appears under the title "We Immoralists!"
6. Richard Rorly claims to borrow and adapt from Nietzsche the idea that
one achieves autonomy by fushioning for oneself a "final vocabulary"
that differs in some way from the "final vocabularies" one has inherited.
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1989), ch. 5. Rorly's use of the term "autonomy," however,
carries a positive rhetorical charge that his model of self-creation has
not earned. If, as Rorly believes, one is obliged to create oneself from
the existing vocabularies of one's historical epoch, then either everyone
is autonomous or no one is. Since original self-creation is ruled out by
Rorly's historicism, he has no defensible means of distingUishing
between those who achieve autonomy and those who do not. In order
for Rorly to propose autonomy as an ideal achieved by some, but not
all, he must suspend his historicism and appeal to some metaphysical
standard whereby genuine autonomy can be distingUished from
"mere" reflections of the historical epoch in question.
7. Foucault explains his interest in techniques of the self in an interview
entitled "On the Genealogy ofEthics: An Overview ofWork in Progress,"
�CONWAY
39
collected in The Fbucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon,
1984).
8. Nietzsche distinguishes himself from the "whole European and American species of libres penseurs," who "still believe in the 'ideal.'"
Declaring himself "the first Immoralist," Nietzsche thus implies that
immoralists no longer want "to 'improve' humankind, in their own
image" (EH:um 2).
9. Although readers often treat this passage as decisive, as representative
of Nietzsche's mature thought (see Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Ufe
as Literature [Cambridge: Harvard Universlly Press] p. 227), Nietzsche
subsequently abandons (or transforms) this Apollinian model of selfperfection. In his post-Zarathustran writings he applauds "the constraint of a single taste," but only insofar as it enables the soul to
accommodate that dimension of excess that Nietzsche associates with
the Dionysian. Strictly two-dimensional, self-contained souls attest to
an irreversible dissipation of will, to an irrecuperable advance in
decadence.
10. Rorly apparently derives his account of self-creation from his antiessentialism and historicism. Because no authentic self exists to be
discovered through cognitive processes, he reasons, the self is therefore a construct (see Chapter 2). Rorty's reasoning is valid, of course,
only in the event that his guiding disjunction-discoveryvs. creationis both exclusive and warranted.
11. I develop this point further in my essay "Disembodied Perspectives,"
Nletzsche.Studten, Band 21, 1992, pp. 281-89.
12. Nietzsche's revision of the motto he adopts from Pindar perhaps reflects
this growing emphasis on self-discovery. "Become who you are"(GS 270)
is replaced by "Become what one is" (EH). See also GS 335.
13. Nehamas claims that Nietzsche never decides between the discovery
of truth and its invention (p.234). In his account of the "aestheticism"
he ascribes to Nietzsche, however, he leaves litile room for self-discovery, and he ventures no sustained account of the cognitive component
of self-overcoming.
14. David R. Lachterman, TheEthlcsofGeometry:AGeneakJgyofModemity
(New York: Routledge, 1989), especially Chapter One.
15. 'Ihis would be fine with Rorly, who confines the pursuit of self-perfection to
the private sphere precisely so that it will not spill over into the public
sphere, where It may cause harm to others. In keeping with the tenets
of his "liberal ironlsm," Rorlywould rather forego the potential benefits
of a self-perfection that exceeds the bounds of the private sphere than
endure the lnev!tsble harm it would cause. "Cruelly Is the worst thing
we do," he maintains (p. xv), and any incursion into the public sphere
of an individual's private pursuit of self-perfection Is potentially cruel.
�40
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
�The Eleatic Stranger's
Socratic Condemnation of Socrates
I
Jacob Howlandr
(Note: The following article concerns a topic, the philosophic trial of
Socrates, that was first suggested to me by David Lachterman tn an
Honors semtnar he taught on Ancient and Medieval Political Philosophy at Swarthmore College in the Sprtng ofl979. I studied with David
throughout my undergraduate years and wrote a Ph.D. dissertation,
also on the philosophic trial of Socrates, under his supervision at Penn
State. David Lachterman is truly the father of my logos, but is
responsible, like Socrates' gods in the RepubUc, only for the good in
it. My gratitude for his gifts as a teacher is inexpressible, but I cherish
most of all the memory of his friendship.)
In order to understand the Statesman one must begin by noting Its
central position In the heptalogy 1heaetetus, Euthyphro, Sophist,
Statesman, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, a dramatically and substantively unified series of dialogues that depicts the last days of Socrates .I
Socrates' encounter with the Eleatic Stranger occurs on the day
followtng the prellmtnary proceedings of his public trial. While Plato
leads us up to these proceedings In the Euthyphro, he substitutes the
Sophist and Statesman for the judicial hearing that takes place tnside
the Stoa of the King Archon. This narrative substitution confirms
Socrates' initial suspicion that the Stranger has come to condemn him
(Soph. 216a-b). Yet Socrates himself invites a philosophical version of
the public indictment by asking the Stranger to speak about the
natures of the sophist, statesman, and philosopher (Soph. 216d217a). tn the Sophist, the Stranger sets out to substantiate the
Intertwined accusations of bad theoriztng and bad citizenship that
together constitute the charge of sophistry he brings against Socrates. 2
The ensuing philosophic drama Is not without twists and turns. In
the Statesman, the Stranger seems to retract the accusation of bad
theorizing tn the course of formulating that of bad citizenship. This
retraction Is connected with changes In the manner or method of his
inquiry that serve to establish his own Socratic character. Most
This paper was orl~y delivered at the Third Svmposium Platonicum of the
International Plato Sociecy, held in August of 1992 in Bristol, England.
�42
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Important, the Stranger mirrors Socrates' Impure and prophetic dialectics In reorienting the process of diaeresis with a great myth that
emphasizes phronesis and the concept of due measure. Yet the
Stranger's acknowledgment ofhls philosophical kinship with Socrates
does notamounttoacqulttal on the charge of sophistry. The Stranger's
final position seems to be that the philosophical goal of phronesis Is
accessible only through Socratic inquiry, but that Socrates' own
practice Is deficient In phronesis precisely to the extent that his
unrestrained devotion to Inquiry unravels the bonds of political community. The Stranger's verdict Is thus disturbingly ambiguous. Socrates turns out to be a sophist just to the extent that he embodies
pure philosophic zeal. Put another way, the most perfect available
instance of the eidos or genos "philosopher" is no longer a philosopher.
Conversely, the genuine philosopher falls short of the perfection ofhls
own eidos by suppressing his own philosophical nature: he forgoes
the full acquisition of phronesis In the name of phronesis Itself. The
philosopher Is thus a radically paradoxical being: he Is the being whose
proper understanding of his own nature leads him to retreat from his
own nature, or who becomes what he Is only In being less than what
he Is. The Stranger's philosophical parricide of Parmenides (Soph.
241 d), which was deemed necessary to capture the sophist, seems
also to have anticipated the essential negativity whereby the philosopher evades eidetic definition.
I
Who, or what, Is Socrates? The heptalogy frames Its focal question
In political, religious, and theoretical terms. Socrates begins the
Theaetetus by identi(ying himself as a patriot who feels care and
friendship for his fellow Athenians (Tht. l44d), yet he narrates the
dialogue to Euclldes from his prison cell. He also Intimates in the Crlto
that his true home Is Hades. 3 Is Socrates at home or a stranger In the
Athenian political communlty?4The ambiguous character of Socrates'
devotion to elenchic discourse increases our perplexity. At his public
trial he offers the story of Chaerephon's visit to Delphi as proof of his
piety, but then explalr)s that he Immediately set about trying to refute
the oracle (Ap. 20e-2lc). Socrates proclaims his Delphic or Apollonian
moderation (Ap. 23a-b], but the "terrible eros' for naked dialectical
exercise to which he admits In the Theaetetus (l69c 1) Is nothing If not
extreme. And while Socrates asserts in the Apolngy that he Is concerned above all with virtue (Ap. 29d-30b], In the Theaetetushe speaks
ofhls philosophic eri'>s as a disease and accepts Theodorus's comparIson of him with certain savage and monstrous criminals (Tht. l69a-b).
�HOWLAND
43
Is Socrates a model of aidEs or hubris (cf. Soph. 216a), moderate
humility or extremism, healthy virtue or criminal sickness?
Socrates' association with the god Apollo, whose arsenal includes
afflictions as well as cures, underscores the religious dimension of the
problem he poses to his fellow citizens. In the Phaedo, Socrates
compares himself with the swans who serve Apollo (Phdo. 84e-85b),
but in the Apology he associates himself with the gadfly, a species of
pestilence (Ap. 30e-3la). It is unclear whether Socrates is a heavensent blessing (cf. Ap. 30a),or a plague upon the Athenians. This issue
is raised most sharply by Socrates' proposal to the judges that he be
boarded in the Prutaneion, as befits one who has greatly benefited the
city (Ap. 36d-e). Socrates' proposal seems implicitly to suggest that he
may serve the community better in death than in life, for meals at the
Prutaneion were also granted to the phannakoiwhowere to be expelled
from the city during the Thargelia, a festival of civic katharsis in which
the Athenians cleansed themselves of religious pollution. It seems
more than coincidental in this connection that Apollo presided over
the Thargelia, and that Socrates was supposed to have been born on
the very day of this festival. 5
The virtually inseparable themes of political infection and religious
impurity are connected with further ambiguities that center upon
Socrates' strange combination of knowledge and ignorance. In the
Th.eaetetus Socrates paradoxically presents himself as a midwife of the
soul who is himself utterly Inexperienced in giving birth to wisdom,
but who Is nevertheless capable of judging the wisdom of the offspring
of others (Tht. 150b If.). Socrates Is thus apparently both less than
"the god" to whom he owes his maieutic art and more than human,
for he asserts that "human nature is too weak to grasp an art of
whatever it is Inexperienced" (Tht. 149cl-2).6 A positive Image of the
power of philosophic anticipation or foreknowledge presupposed by
Socratic Inquiry Is furnished by the association throughout the heptalogy of Socrates with prophecy. 7 In the Th.eaetetus, however, the
paradox noted above Is presented In a distinctly negative light. The
Issues of aidos and Impurity arise here once again: Socrates admits
to Theaetetus that their manner of conversation has been "shameless"
(anaides) and "Impure" (me kntharos), and that they are consequently
"no good" (phauloq, since "We've said thousands of times 'We
recognize' and 'We don't recognize,' and 'We know' and 'We don't know,'
as though we somehow understand one another while still being
Ignorant of knowledge" (Tht. l96dl0, el-5; l97a4). Although the
context of these remarks may strike the reader as narrowly theoretical,
this passage foreshadows Socrates' perception of the Stranger, who
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
appears to him to be a "refutative god" come to punish him for being
poor (phaulos) in speeches, much as Zeus the god of strangers is
shown by Homer to exact retribution from men who lack aidos and
are marked by hubris (Soph. 216a-b). In thus linking his theoretical
impurity and shamelessness with the theme of arrogance and injustice toward gods and men, Socrates anticipates the Stranger's own
strategy in exploring the most perplexing question of all: Is Socrates
a philosopher or a sophist?
II
In the Sophist the Stranger progressively hunts down Socrates,
although he urbanelyforbears mentioning the old Athenian by name.8
The Stranger's criticism of Socrates emerges most clearly in the sisth
diaeresis of the sophist, which ostensibly defines "the sophistical art
that is noble In kind" (Soph. 23lb). The first cut of this diaeresis allows
the Stranger to identif'y his own philosophic method as a branch of
the separation of like from like, as opposed to the discrimination of
the worse from the better by the art of purification (he kathartike)
wtthin which he locates Socrates' practice of removing by means of
refutation the vain conviction of wisdom that impedes genuine learning
(Soph. 226b ff.). The Stranger's attempt to define Socratic sophistry is
nevertheless itself an act of political as well as theoretical purification, 9
as is evident from his suggestion that we fail adequately to guard
against the savageryofthe sophist in assigning him the honor properly
accorded to the philosopher (Soph. 23la). 10 Because it seeks to draw
fixed distinctions between contrary formal elements that do not
combine with one another, the method of bifurcatmy diaeresis that
the Stranger employs throughout the Sophist and in the first third of
the Statesman seems to offer a promising way in which to isolate the
impure element of sophistry,II Yet Socrates' Impure practice of philosophical purification Itself promises to resist unambiguous classification. The results of the sisth diaeresis are therefore problematically
mixed. The Stranger ultimately suggests that Socrates is noble insofar
as purgative refutation is in fact prerequisite to the acquisition of
wisdom (Soph. 230d-e), but that he is a sophist because-in spite of
his claim to be a philosophical midwife-he lacks the positive ability
to replace refuted opinions with more adequate teachings. Specifically,
Socrates suffers from what the Stranger later characterizes as "some
ancient and uncomprehending Idleness among men of old regardtng
the diaeresis of gene according to eide" (Soph. 267 d5-6) .12 The method
of diaeresis, the Stranger Implies, would allow Socrates finally to
overcome the theoretical impurity atiaching to his knowledge of
�HOWLAND
45
Ignorance. Yet It must be emphasized that in the sixth diaeresis the
Stranger does not adequately distinguish his philosophic method from
Its Socratic rival, for In order to give the nobility of Socratic refutation
Its due he Is forced to combine the separation of like from like with
the discrimination of the better from the worse. It appears that
philosophy cannot isolate the mixed eidos of noble sophistry without
being compelled to share In it. The Stranger is thus himself open to
the charge of theoretical impurity when judged according to his own
practice of eidetic divlsiori. 13
The sixth diaeresis explicitly affirms the philosophical value of
Socratic refutation while criticizing Socrates' lack of a positive philosophical method. There is, however, an Implicit criticism of Socratic
refutation that comes to light when we compare the actual results of
his philosophical practice with the Stranger's description of these
results. While the Stranger asserts that those who have been purged
of seeming-wisdom by noble sophistry "are harsh on themselves and
grow tame before everyone else" (Soph. 230b8-9), all evidence-IncludIng Socrates' own remarks to Theaetetu&-suggests otherwise. 14 The
Stranger Is uncerialn whether human beings are tame or wild, and
specifically whether Socrates is a gentle dog or a vicious wolf (Soph.
222b, 23la; cf. Tht. 169a-b). The latter question is surely connected
with the Issue of Socrates' effect upon those who undergo his refutations: he claims to have made Theaetetus "tamer" (Tht. 210c3), but
exposure to Socratic dialogue seems generally to make men more
savage. As we shall see, the Stranger develops this implicit accusation
of bad citizenship In the Statesman. Yet he also abandons the accusation of bad theorizing set forth In the sixth diaeresis, in that he
comes to acknowledge that Socratic Inquiry Is necessary for the
acquisition of positive philosophic Insight. Let us now see how Socrates himself motivates the Stranger's partial recantation of the charge
of sophistry. IS
III
The Stranger Is of course not alone in critically questioning the
political implications of Socratic discourse. In the conclusion of the
Clouds Arlstophanes seems to predict that the Athenians, aided by
their gods, will punish and perhaps execute Socrates for the rough
treatment they have suffered at the hands of youths who have spent
time with him.l 6 At his public !rial Socrates numbers Arlstophanes
foremost among his first accusers, and the links forged by the comic
poet between Socratic sophistry. harshness, and savagery seem to
stand behind the Stranger's philosophical indictment as well.l7 The
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TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Stranger's teaching is connected with that of Aristophanes also
through the political image of weaving first introduced by the manly
woman Lyslstrata, the character that best exemplifies within the
dramatic universe of Aristophanes the balance between courage and
moderation recommended by the Stranger himself. IS Unquestionably,
however, It is the Stranger-at least prior to his telling the myth of the
reversed cosmos-who bears the clearest resemblance to
Aristophanes' Socrates. Both of these dramatic characters employ the
technique of diaeresis, utllize the relative measurement exemplified in
mathematics to the exclusion of due measure "relative to the becoming
of the mean" (PoL 284cl, d6), pay equal attention to things big and
small but seem to ignore (if not to disdain) the intermediate domain
of human things, and obfuscate the distinction between men and
animals.19
This ambiguity ofldentities is nothing new in the heptalogy. Indeed,
upon meeting the Stranger Socrates assumes that he is in disguise,
and goes on to emphasize the many apparitions of the philosopher
(Soph. 216a-217a). Furihermore, the Stranger cannot convict Socrates of sophistry without establishing Ws own philosopWcal credentials. I have suggested that he did not succeed in doing so in the
Sophist These reflections help us to understand, first, that Socrates
is Implicitly criticizing the Stranger when at the beginning of the
Statesman he chastises Theodorus for supposing that the relative
worih of human souls is susceptible to mathematical measurement,
and second, that when he goes on to emphasize the importance of
refamiliarizlng ourselves through speeches with those who are akin to
us in soul Socrates Is implicitly challenging the Stranger to remove
his sophistical disguise of eplstemic precision and disclose the proper
measure of self-knowledge (PoL 257a3-8, 258a2-3). 20 This, I submit,
Is just what the Stranger proceeds to do.
IV
The Stranger responds to Socrates' challenge by setting forth a
series of divisions that exemplifies the shortcomings of bifurcatory
diaeresis with regard to the knowledge of human things. As Mitchell
Miller observes, the definition of the object of statesmansWp as a
cousin of the pig or a featherless biped (PoL 264e-266e) Isolates the
kind or class of man without revealing "the essential cilaracter-the
eidos In the fullest sense of this term-of man.''2 1 In particular, these
definitions overlook the power of logos without which neither political
community nor philosophy could come to be. 22 The absence of logos
helps to explain why eros and thwnos possess merely physiological
�HOWLAND
47
significance In the divisions, and so cannot serve as differentia of the
human specles.23 Yet it has also been argued that the unique "potentiality" or "freedom" of man eludes definition via an enumeration of
formal elements, and In particular that such elements can express
human erotic or thumotic striving only Insofar as they are employed
as Images of that which man In his Intermediate condition aspires to
be, I.e., that which he literally Is not but nevertheless Is like. 24 When
applied to the human soul the method of diaeresis freezes that which
Is essentially In motion, for it seeks to replace the fluid relationship of
likeness with a rigid opposition between what man is and what he Is
not. While diaeresis masks the ambiguous Intermediacy of the human
soul, poetic eikasia uncovers it. 2 5 These arguments are in my view
confirmed by the Stranger's subsequent use of mythical Images to
express the uniquely unfinished, open, and malleable nature of the
human aniroal.
The Stranger's employment of a prophetic myth to correct the base
results of a technical treatment of the human soul should be compared
with Socrates' similar conduct In the Phaedrus. 26 AB in the Phaedrus,
talk about the souileads to non-certifiable, "Inspired," or theoretically
impure discourse about the Whole.27 Just as the myth will serve as
the basis for subsequent divisions (PoL 268d-e). human life must be
guided by Intelligent Insight into the contexts of speech and deed, or
what the Stranger will call phronesis. Phronesis is not diaeresis-for
It is knowledge not of eide, but of due measure-yet the Stranger
Indicates that It must guide diaeresis. 2B If further confirmation of the
Stranger's kinship with Socrates is needed,ltls provided by his explicit
identification of philosophy with the acquisition of phronesLs by means
of Socratic dialogue. In the reversed cycle of the cosmos-the era of
Cronos---philosophlzing would amount to "learning by Inquiry from
every nature whether each with its own kind of private capacity was
aware of something different from all the rest for the gathering and
collection of phronesis" (PoL 272c2-4). The residents of the reversed
cycle, however, are able directly to observe the model of phronesis
provided by their divine shepherds, whereas In the current cosmic
cycle-the era of Zeus-these divine caretakers have withdrawn (PoL
272e-273a) and our perceptions of the fitting, the opportune, and the
needful bear the Impress of cultural history. To acquire phronesis in
the current cycle therefore Involves more than gathering together
perceptions: it requires that one critically sift through opinions In
order to separate that which is justified by nature from that which
rests upon nomos alone. Furthermore, In the current cycle logos Is
restricted to human beings, and the potentially dialogic diversity of
�48
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the many species of animals is narrowed to the diversity of the families
or kinds of human souis. In sum, one might say that the philosophical
zoology of the reversed cycle fmds its cosmic counterpart in a distinctly
Socratic anthropology.
Given that phronesis is the power by which humans are to govern
themselves in the current cycle, the myth would seem to vindicate
Socratic philosophizing both theoretically and politically.29 Yet the
paradoxical ambiguity that is associated with Socrates throughout the
heptalogy attaches to hirh here above all, for the myth uitimately
suggests that Socrates, like his Aristophanean double, pays insufficient attention to the human origins and the human context of his
own philosophical activity. In particular, his refusal to allow anything
but death-and perhaps not even death (cf. Ap. 4la-c)-to lirhit his
dialogical pursuit of phronesis effectively ignores the distinction between the human beings among whom he lives and their brutalized
cosmic twins.
It would appear that philosophy in general, and Socrates in particular, could not exist during the reversed cycle. 30 For one thing, eros
and thwnos seem to require as a spur to activity the harshness of
nature that emerges only at the beginning of the current cycle and
that compels human beings to attend to their literal and metaphorical
nakedness, the vulnerable condition of their psyches as well as their
bodies.sl Necessity now forces us to weave protective webs of myth as
well as defences for the body. The "indispensable instruction and
education [paideusls]" and the arts of survival that enable us to do so
are said to be gifts of the Olympians (PoL 274c5-d2). but the active
involvement of gods in the current cycle conflicts with the Stranger's
mythical cosmology. Stories about philanthropic gods are presumably
an essential component of the indispensable paideusis to which the
Stranger refers. 32 Socrates, however, seems curiously unaffected by
current psychological and physiological exigencies. Like a resident of
the reversed cycle he is protected by a datmOn, disdains warm clothing
(including woven wool), and sees no conflict between leisurely inquiry
and the unrelenting pace of work and political life. 33 Most irhportant,
he treats others as if they were as independent and thick-skinned as
he himself is. 34 Socrates' philosophical anthropology involves the
persistent attempt to think ex arches, or to uncover the beginnings of
the human things (Tht. 15ld, 200d). According to the Stranger,
however, our natural beginnings are so harsh as to be humanly
unbearable. It is not sufficient to say that Socrates forces his interlocutors to strip off the covering of nomos that protects them from this
harshness (cf. Tht. l69a-b). because the Stranger later suggests that
�HOWLAND
49
the soul itself is a web of natural elements woven In accordance with
nomos. 3 5 In unraveling this interior web, the Stranger Implies, Socrates upsets the psychic and political balance of moderation and manliness at which statesmanship aims above all, and thereby exposes
human beings to the pre-political savagery of their own unbridled
lhumos."6
v
There can be no doubt that the Stranger has Socrates in mind when
he later argues for the absolute authority of the rule oflaw as a "second
sailing" in the absence of a god-like king who possesses phronesfs.3 7
Socrates' own second sailing Involved a tum toward logoi for the sake
of protecting the soul from damage resulting from a direct confrontation with physical nature (Phd. 99d-e), but Socratic logos conflicts with
the analogous defensive function of nomos. The employment of phronesis conflicts with Its fullest acquisition. Judged by the myth of the
reversed cosmos, the philosopher Is not a god, for his own being Is
characterized by an internal tension and opposition that resists logical
resolution. Rooted as it is In the nature of the cosmos, this paradox
is inescapable. sa
*****
Notes
l. Except where the context indicates that I am discussing the character
of "Socrates" in Aristophanes' Clouds, all references in this essay to
Socrates are to the "Socrates" of the Platonic dialogues.
2. The notion that Plato presents a philosophical version of Socrates'
public trial in the Sophist and statesman has been advanced most
recently by Cropsey (1986). Similar views may be found in Benardete
(1983), Klein (1977), Miller (1980), and Rosen (1983). One should
observe that the intertwining of Socrates' public and philosophical
trials reconfirms the dramatic and substantive integrity of the heptalogy. It is clear over the years he was composing these dialogues. Plato
was always guided by a sense of the unity of these concurrent trials:
in dramatic time the intervals between these dialogues consist of a few
days, a day, or, in the case of the transition from the Theaetetusto the
Euthyphro, perhaps only minutes. Speculation about the order in
which the dialogues of the hepialogy were composed Is therefore
irrelevant to the study of Socrates' philosophic trial. Most Important,
the Socrates who argues with Euthyphro, addresses the jury of
Athenians, and discourses with friends in his prison cell is for our
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'IHE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
purposes the same Socrates as the one who meets the Stranger.
Chronological speculation is in any case open to serious criticism: See
Howland (1991).
3. See Crt. 44a10-b2 with Strauss (1983) 55.
4. This question is raised at the very beginning of the heptalogy by Implicit
contrast between the condemned Socrates and the wounded Theaetetus, whom Eucl!des deems kalos k'agatlws (Tht. 142b7). Compare
Euthyphro's initial uncertainty about whether Socrates is pursuing or
meeting an indictment (]futhphr. 2a)-an uncertainty hat Is borne out
by the accusatory tone of Socrates' defense speech in the Apology.
5. One should also note that "the yearly theoria to Delos which delayed
the execution of Socrates must have taken place in Thargel!on, the
month of the Delian Apollo" (Thesleff [1982)26 n. 24). On the practice
offeeding and keeping the phannakoi in the Prutanelon, see Ar., Eq.
1405, together with the schollast on Eq. 1136. Socrates' blrthdate Is
recorded at D!ogenes Laetius 2.44. This evidence is cited in Jane
Harrison's useful discussion of "The Pharmakos," in Harrison (1955)
95-106. Compare the treatment of the Thargel!a in Moulinier (1952)
94-99 and of purification in Burkert (1985) 75-84. The expulsion of
pharmakoi at the Thargel!a amounted to the removal beyond the
borders of the city of a contaminating poison, pestilence, or sickness,
with the result the old life of the city could begin anew after this
pllrifYing separation. According to Harpocration (cited at Moulinier
[1952) 95 and Harrison [1955) 102). Istros traced the origin of the
Thargel!a to a crime committed against Apollo by an individual named
"Pharmakos. • For a stimulating discussion of Socrates as phannakos
see Derrida (1981) 128-34.
6. Quotations in English from the Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman will
be drawn from Benardete 1983), with modifications where appropriate.
Benardete discusses the present ambiguity in his commentary on the
Theaetetus in the volume cited above, I. 99-100.
7. Socrates' prophetic character Is alluded to at Tht. 142c, Euihphr. 3b-c,
Ap. 39c, Crlto 44a-b, and Phd. 84e-85b. Yet his powers of divination
are apparently not flawless: he seems to miss the mark in predicting
that younger and harsher men-men whom he is allegedly restraining-w!ll besiege the Athenians after the execution (Ap. 39c-d). In
particular, neither Plato nor Xenophon fits this mold.
Socrates raises the theme of philosophic prophecy frequently in the
Platonic corpus: compare especially Phdr. 242c with Resp. 505d-506a
and Symp. 21 Od ff. An account of the central importance of this theme
in the Republic may be found in "Sun, Line, and Cave: Philosophical
Imagination and Prophecy." ch. 9 of Howland (1993).
8. Theodorus's comment that the Stranger is more "measured" (mett6teros)
than Socrates suggests It is partially supported by the Stranger's own
�HOWLAND
51
reluctance to act in a way that is axenon kai agrion, "unbecoming a
stranger and savage" (Soph. 216b8, 217e6-7). Perhaps the fullest proof
of the Stranger's philosophical moderation lies in his measured criticism of Socrates in the Statesman (see below).
Socrates is arguably meant to appear under the penultimate cut of
the dialogue's first diaeresis of the sophist, in which the erotic and
gift-giving branch of private persuasion is ranged against the wageearning branch (Soph. 222d-e; cf. Tht. 187c), and among the moneylosing practitioners of reristic discourse in the final cut of the fifth
diaeresis (Soph. 225d; cf. Tht. 195c). And the Stranger seems finally to
have captured Socrates in the sixth diaeresis (226b-23lb), and in the
dialogue's seventh and last definition of the sophist as an ignorant and
ironic imitator of Virtue "who in private and with brief speeches
compels his interlocutor to contradict himself' (Soph. 268b3-5). (In
numbering the diaereses of the sophist I have followed Sayre [1969].)
9. Cf. Pol. 268cl 0, where the Stranger states that the goal of the inquiry
is to show forth the statesman "pure and alone" (katharon monon).
10. This is why (in spite of his later claim that diaeresis must honor all of
the arts on an equal basis [Soph. 227b.] the Stranger says that the
angler is one of the "trivial things" (tOn phaulOn) in comparison with
the "greater things" (ton mek:lzoniin) among which he numbers the
sophist (Soph. 218d8, e3). The sophist is represented as a wild beast
(Soph. 218d3, 226a7, 235al0) and a fugitive who seeks out dark
regions (Soph. 254a4-6), while the philosopher inhabits the brilliant
region of the divine (Soph. 254a8-bl).
11. An especially useful discussion of bifurcatory diaeresis may be found
in Miller (1980) 16-33.
12. Cf. Sayre (1969) 151 fl. Scodel observes that in the sixth diaeresis
"[Socrates] is denied the ability to distinguish like from like" (Scodel
[1987] 39).
13. Insofar as Socrates' sophistry is connected with his ignorance of the
method of diaeresis, the criticism contained in the sixth diaeresis is
deficient also in that the Stranger fails to define the method that
Socrates lacks. As Scodel notes, the division oflike from unlike is a
part of the art of seperation "which remains completely undefined so
that we can only speculate about its contents" (Scodel [1987] 38).
Consider also Scodel's comment on Soph. 226a6-8: "If the principle of
grasping a dejlniendum 'with both hands' or sides of a division is not
limited arbitrarily to species ... the result will be that the dejlniendum
can be located properly only after a comprehensive division of reality"
(Scodel [1987] 39).
14. Tht. 150e2, 15lc4-7. Consider in this connection the recommendations of "Protagoras" concerning how Socrates could get his interlocutors to blame themselves, and not him, for their own perplexity (Tht.
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TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
168a). The harshness of Socrates engenders Is evident also in the
warning of Anytus in the Meno (94e-95a) and his successful prosecution. Cf. also Socrates' reference to harshness at Ap. 39d2.
15. Rosen is half right in suggesting that the statesman constitutes the
Stranger's recantation of the refutation of Socrates he presents in the
Sophist (Plato's Sophist, 28, 308). Rosen's suggestion is modified by
Dorter, who asserts that the statesman "is not a recantation in the
sense of a rejection" (Dorter [1987] 106 n. 5). Dorter argues that the
Stranger's eventual abandonment of bifurcatory diaeresis in the
Statesman Is consistent with his employment of this method as an
instrument of Socratic pedagogy. A similar argument is presented by
Miller, who maintatos that blfurcatory diaeresis "overcomes" itself
once It has served its purpose as "an initial help in attuning us to
kinds" (Miller (1980) 79; cf. 16-21. 30-33, and 74 ff.). Both of these
studies help to show that the Stranger has a Socratic sense of due
measure with regard to the concrete requirements of philosophic
pedagogy. The present paper, however, argues further that in the
Statesman the Stranger condemns Socrates in accordance with the
standard of due measure Itself.
16. The fate of Socrates is discussed in Kopff (1977). Kopff finds a
historical parallel to the ending of the Clouds in the fifth-century attack
on the Pythagoreans of Croton, who were trapped and burned in their
house.
17. As Aristophanes underscores by abundant reference to dogs and
chickens, Socrates ignores that wWch elevates human beings above
animals (Nub. 3, 226, 491, 660-67, 810, 847-51, 1427-31). The bonds
of affection and frlendsWp are absent from the Socratic universe:
Socrates Is a harsh master to his students, whose condition resembles
that of captive, ill-treated beasts (Nub. 184-86). After studytng with
Socrates, Pheidippides defends his violent treatment of Ws father by
arguing that humans differ from beasts only In that they Write decrees
(Nub. 1429).
Nussbaum (1980) connects the Stranger's description of the purification of seemtog-wisdom at Soph. 230b. with Arlstophanes' characterization of Socratic practice in the Clouds, and she contrasts this
practice with the traditional, paternal kind of education described by
the Stranger at Soph. 229e-230a (Nussbaum [1980] 43, 74; cf. 81,
where she states that Aristophanes attacks Socrates for "Ws lack of a
positive program to replace what he has criticized").
18. Compare Pol. 279a ff., 309a-c, and 311a-c with Ar., Lys. 568-86.
Lyslstrata's bold plan to end the war by seizing the Acropolis and
withholding sex from the men calls for a striking combination of
andreia and sophrosunii. While she is a clever and ambitions thinker
who like Socrates deprives herself of sleep in order to think her big
thoughts (Lys. 26-27, Nub 420; cf. Plato, Symp. 220c-d), Lyslstrata
�HOWlAND
53
subordinates her "manly" ambition to the "womanly" goals of peace,
domesticity, and the pleasures of the body. She realizes the political
goals of both Artstophanes and the Stranger in that she causes the
armor-making of Hephaestus to serve the weaving of Athena (cf. Pol.
274c, 311b-c).
19, Diaeresis: Consider Socrates' injunction to Strepsiades at Nub. 740-42
("Cut open your thought finely and think about your troubles by little
bits, dividing and examining the correctly [orthos diatron kai skopon]").
Mathematical measurep1ent: Socrates spends his time engaging in
astronomy and geometiy and in such activities as devising methods
to measure the jumps of fleas and the anus of the goat. (Nub. 144-173
with the reference to a compass [dlabeten] at 178). 1be quasi-mathematical character of bifurcatory diaeresis emerges at Pol. 262b, when
the Stranger advises Young Socrates to employ the principle of halving
or "cutting through the middle." Cf. Darter's claim that "the method of
division [by bisection] makes use only of relative measure" [Dorter
[1987] 112), but consider also Miller's observation that "the notion of
halving involves more than the mere quantitative equality of extensions" insofar as "halving entails finding contrartes" (Miller [1980]
20-22 with 126 n. 14). Big and small: compare Socrates' equal interest
in minute vermin and the heavenly bodies with the Stranger's comment that diaeresis gives equal honor to the louse-catcher (I) and the
general (Soph. 227b; cf. Pol. 226d)-a distinctly apolitical perspective
that pays no heed to measurement according to "the mean, the fitting,
the opportune, and the needful" in human life (Pol. 284e6-8). Socrates'
tmpression that the Stranger "looks down upon" (kathoran) human
beings (Soph. 216b3) may be compared to with Strepsiades' impression
that Socrates, who first appears suspended in a basket, "looks down
upon" (hyperphronein) or "despises" the gods (Nub. 226, cf. 1400). Men
and antmals: on Socrates see above, note 17. The Stranger's falls
adequately to distinguish men from beasts in the first thtrd of the
statesman (see below).
Plato's Socrates, on the other hand, clatms to be exclustvely
concerned with human virture (Ap. 30a-b), suggests to the Athenian
judges that he alone lives a life fit for a human being rather than an
animal (Ap. 38a with 30e-31a), is especially interested in disputes that
cannot be settled by the techniques of relative measurement (Euthphr.
7b-d), and explicitly dissociates himself from the pursuits attributed
to him by Artstophanes (Ap. 19c, 23d). Cf. the story Socrates tells at
Phd. 96a-99e about how he became aware of the inadequacy of
exclustvely mathematical and physical explanation ofhuman phenomena. Socrates' tongue-in-cheek account in the 7heaetetus of how the
true philosopher "flies, as Pindar puts it, 'deep down under the earth'
and geometriclzes the planes, 'and above heaven' engaging in astronomy" (Tht. 173e5-6) both flatters Theodorus and underscores the
�54
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
difference between his own activity and that of his Aristophanean
counterpart (cf. Nub. 171-173, 187-194). It worth noting that the
theoretical man described by socrates, unlike Socrates htmself, cannot
tell whether his neighbor is "a human being or some different nursling"
(Tht 174b3).
20. Theodorus associates htmself with the Stranger by posing as a
merchant of his teachings (Pol. 257a3-5; cf. Soph. 223c-224d). Socrates makes it clear in the first tine of the dialogue, however, that the
conversations of the Thii!aetetus and the Sophist have been worthwhile
prtmartly because they have provided an opportunity for gnorisis,
"getting to know" In the sense of "becoming familiar with" other souls
(Pol. 257al-2; cf. the reference to anagnorisis at 258a3). His criticis~TI
of Theodorus (which Scodel also understands to be directed to the
Stranger: Scodel [1987] 44 with n. 38) thus suggests a clistinction
between the Stranger's methoclical ii!plstemii of souls and what Griswold, in a stmilar context, has called Socratic "gnosis." See Griswold
(1986) 261 n. 23: "I would use 'gnosis' because Socrates, following the
Delphic oracle, speaks of the need 'gignoskein' himself (not
'epistasthai').
Miller observes that Socrates' mention of anagtwrisis recalls the
test of kinship between Odysseus and Penelope and Odysseus and
Laertes in the Odyssli!y (Miller [1980] 6). These probable allusions are
prepared by Socrates' earlier association of the Stranger with
Odysseus, both when he encounters the Cyclops while shielded by
anonymity and when he enters his own home disguised as a beggar
(Soph. 216a-b; cf. Homer, Od. 9.269-71 and 17.485-87). Plato's philosophical employment of the Odyssean subtext of homecoming thus
supports the prececling interpretation of the opening tines of the
Statesman. (The tmportance of this subtext for the heptalogy as a whole
is indtrectly suggested by Alrivie [1971].)
21. MU!er (1980) 32.
22. The Stranger htmself underscores this omission when he imagines
that Young Socrates' separation of human beings from beasts might
be disputed by "some other animal that possesses phroniisis," and that
the statesman will have to defend his claim to rule against those of
thousands of other herd-nurturers (pol. 263d3-4. 268b-c).
23. The pairing of men with pigs on the shorter road recalls Glaucon's
"city of pigs" (Resp. 372d), whose inhabitants are distinguished by
inhuman deficiencies of eros and thumos.
24. See Griswold (1989) 148-49, Benardete (1963) 200 If. Miller notes that
man's uniqueness poses a special problem for bifurcatory cliaeresis,
for there is no positive contrary corresponding to human intelligence
in some other class (MU!er [1980] 32).
�HOWLAND
55
25. According to Benardete, "the Stranger mathematizes poeby: he employs a dianoetic analysis in a region we believe to be the preserve of
eikasia....The likeness and unlikeness of an image is not the otherness
and the sameness of a magnitude, and hence an image's relation to
what is imaged eludes a method that is most at home with magnitudes
and numbers." Cf. his discussion of man as •dziion simply," whose
"nature in its artfulness can imitate or discover lhe likeness to himself
in any kind" (Benardete [1963[ 200, 217). The myth of the reversed
cosmos indicates that Ol)l' very survival depends upon this polymorphism, which finds its first expression in the indispensable technai
associated with Prometheus, Hephaestus, Athena, and the gods and
goddesses of agriculture (Pol. 247b-c).
26. The palinode of the Phaedrus is Socrates recantation of his first,
shameful speech (Phdr. 257a). Similarly, the Stranger allows diaeresis
to disgrace itself by failing to show forth the statesman (and, by
implication, the human herd) "pure and alone" (katharon nwnon: Pol.
268cl0), so that shames in the face of its impure and base results
becomes the motive for the subsequent mythical ascent he recommends (Pol. 268d2-3; the myth will allow for an ascent ep' akron: Pol.
268el).
27. Cf. Griswold (1986) 65 ff. On the prophetic character of the myth, cf.
Miller's comment the "the Stranger seems to give up self-accountable
analysis for the posture of the inspired seer" (Miller [1980] 36). Only a
god could know everything that is asserted about the cosmos in the
Stranger's myth.
28. Cf. Griswold (!989) !55: "It seems that the mean must change relative
to the context. The 'anangkaia ousid (238d8) is not an Idea or Form,
or even an eidos in the Eleatic Stranger's sense. What counts as the
'mean' will depend on the situation; it will be what is timely, suitable,
appropriate for the occasion. And in this sense the mean may be said
to 'become.'" Rosen notes that whereas "phronesls sees individual case
as it is, "diaeresis, like nonws, gathers together many individual cases
under a common stamp" (Rosen [! 979] 69; cf. Pol 258c4-6)
29. Phroneslsis the powerbywhich the cosmos steers itself in the current
cycle (Pol. 269d1). The parts of the cosmos must imitate the whole in
ordertng their own movement "in exactly the same way [houtO de kata
t'auta] ...by a similar conduct [honwias agi'iges]" Pol. 274 a5-b1; cf.
274d6). Yet the phronesls of the cosmos evidently differs from that of
human beings. While the cosmos strtves in ordertng itself to adhere
precisely to the instructions of the demiurge (Pol 273b1-3), humans
possess various technical skills (Pol. 274c-d) but lack precise instructions of a comprehensive sort. Phronesls must consequently be acquired empirically, and in particular "gathered" through inquiry.
30. Cf. Griswold (1989) 151, and Rosen (1979) 79: "we may fmd it easy
enough to conclude that in the absence of memory, experience, Eros
�56
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
and work, there can be no philosophy." In the Apology, Socrates
implicitly compares himself to heros, dia1TID11eS, and mules, all ofwhich
are generated from the Intercourse of different species (Clay [1972]).
Such mixed beings could not exist In the reversed cycle of the cosmos,
since generation Is then asexual (PoL 217a-b; cf. Benardete [1963]
1970.
31. Here agaln Plato seems to have borrowed from Arlstophanes. Consider
the attempt In the Plutus of Penla, "poverty" or "need" (as opposed to
ptocheia or abject beggary), to prove to men "that I alone am the cause
of all good things fur you, and that you live through me" (Plut. 468-470).
Central to her argument is the clalm that "If wealth [Plutus] could see
again and distributed himself equally, no one among human beings
would pursue either technl! or sophia" (Plu. 510-512), with the result
that human life would be miserable. One should also note that In the
Symposiwn Eros Is sald by Socrates to be the offspring of Penla and
Poros (Symp. 203b-c).
32. Cf. Rosen (1979) 83. The myth of the reversed cosmos even seems to
soften traditional paideusis Insofar as it rules out the possibility of
strife between the gods and divine hostility towards humans, In fact,
the myth adheres to two fundamental theological principles that
Socrates sets forib I the Republic in the course of reforming the
traditional stories about the Olympians and their progenitors: that
gods are "not the cause of all things, but of the good things," and that
"they are neither wizards who transform themselves, nor do they
mislead us by lies In speech or In deed" (Resp. 380c8-9, 383a3-5). The
Stranger teaches that the most divine things remaln always the same,
that gods do not oppose themselves or one another In speech or in
deed, and that "all beautiful things" come to the cosmos from Its divine
composer, whereas It owes to the disorder Intrinsic to Its corporeal
element "everything that comes to be harsh and unjust In heaven" (Pol
269d5-6, 269e7-270al, 273b6-cl).
33. As a prophetic power that Informs him when It is necessary to keep
silence or refraln from action, Socrates' datmonion provides purely
negative or defensive guidance (see Ap. 31 c-d and Tht. 151 a with Phdr.
242-c, Ale. I 103a, Theag. 128d, Euthd. 272e, Resp. 496C). Insofar as
Socrates Is cared for by his own private da!monlon, his situation
resembles that which would be enjoyed by the sole living member of a
particular species during the reversed cycle. On the appropriateness
of the weaving of wool garments as a political analogy, see Benardete
(1963) 221, and Griswold (1989) 152: "Woolens are necessary when
nature is most hostile, in bitter wlnter.... Political science is the art of
defending the citizens from a fundamentally hostile nature." Griswold
reasonably concludes that phroniisis is essentially conservative and
defensive: "It is the knowledge of what to do and when In order to keep
the polis safe" (Griswold [1989] 152).
�HOWlAND
57
Leisurely philosophical ioquily would have no political consequences in the reversed cycle, nor would the concept of the opportune
or critical moment (ho kairos) seem to be applicable during that era.
In spite of the contrast he sees between the tempo of philosophical
discourse and the press of political business (Tht. 172c ff.), Socrates
is ultimately forced to acknowledge the lack of leisure imposed upon
him as a consequence ofhis own speeches (Ap 19a, 24a. 37a). On these
issues consider the iosights ofBenardete (1980) I. 129-30.
34. Socrates' paradoxical combioation of self-sufficient toughness and
sociability, together with many of the ambigUities connected with him,
are contaioed ioAlcibiades' image of him as a satyr (Symp. 215a ff.).
35. Socratic phUosophiziog is also closely associated with strippiog io the
Clouds (Nub. 177-79,497-98,719,856-59, ll03, 1498), io which the
removal of clothiog underscores in particular Socrates' reduction of
human beiogs to animals. Compare the metaphorical significance of
the theme of strippiog io Book 5 of the Republic. On the role of nomos
io the fabrication of the soul, consider the Stranger's paradoxical
comment that citizens must be "nurtured through las [dia nom5n] to
grow accordiog to nature [kata phusin]" so as best to weave together
the "warp" of andreia with the "woof' of soplrrosWle (Pol310a2).
36. The Stranger says that the latter imbalance concerns "the greatest
thiogs." and attributes to It "the most hateful sickness of all for cities"
(Pol. 307d7-8: cf. 307e-308a). At PoL 301e7-3lla2, he states that "the
single and whole work of royal weaviog" Is "never to allow moderate
characters to stand apart from the manly, but by tampiog them down
together by means of shared opiolons and honors and dishonors and
reputations [doxals] ... to entrust to these io common the offices of rule
in cities ...
The potential from human savagery Is just below the surface io the
myth of the reversed cosmos, particularly in the three myths to which
the Stranger alludes io his preamble (PoL 268e-269c): the stories about
Atreus and Thyestes, earth -born men, and life in the Age of Cronos.
Vidal-Naquet comments on the brute force associated with earth-born
generations, discusses at length the ambiguous mixture of peace and
savagery (iocludiog cannibalism) associated with the Age of Cronos,
and aptly notes that "Plato did not have to mention those strange
'shepherds,' Atreus and Thyestes. nor was e obliged to recall the
miracle !hat had taken place io favor of the organizer of a cannibalistic
feast" (Vidal-Naquet [1978] 136). The Stranger says that upon the
withdrawal of their divioe caretakers such beasts as were "harsh io
their natures" became "savage" (Pol. 274b6-7}, and we can assume that
the same was true of highly spirited human beiogs. Cf. the Stranger's
comment that the manly nature who is untamed by the political are
of weaviog will "iocline toward some kiod of bestial nature" (PoL
309e2-3).
�58
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
37. Pol. 300c2; cf. 294a, 301d-e, 303b. Dueso (1992) has shown that at
Pol. 299b-d the Stranger Intends to defend Athenian democracy
against the consequences of Socratic InqUiry. The reference to adolesch!aat Pol299b7 should be compared with Soph225d10 and 7ht.
195c2. Cf. Griswold's argument that according to the Statesman
"pol!tlkii episteme and the Virtues will best flourish in the context of a
democracy ruled by law• (Griswold [1989] 162), together with the
related analysis of Crosson (1963).
Secondary Works Cited
Alrlvie, J.-J. 1971. "Les prologues du 7heetete et du Parrnen!de," Revue
de Metaphystque et de Morale 76: 6-23.
Benardete, S. 1983. 7he Being of the Beautt:fiJl: Plato's Theaetetus,
Sophist, and Statesman. Chicago, 1983.
- - . 1963. "Eidos and Diaeresis In Plato's statesman," PhUologus 107:
193C226.
Burkert, W. 1985. Greek Religion. Trans. John Raffan. Cambridge,
Mass .. 1985. 75-84.
Clay, D. 1972. "Socrates' Mulishness and Heroism,· Phronests 17: 53-60.
Crosson, F. 1963. "Plato's Statesman: Unity and Pluralism,· New Scholasticism 37: 28-43.
Cropsey, J. 1986. "The Dramatic End of Plato's Socrates,• Interpretation
14: 155-75.
Derrlda, J. 1981. "Plato's Pharmacy," In Dissemination, trans. Barbara
Johnson (Chicago, 1981): 63-171.
Dorter, K. 1987. "Justice and Method in the Statesman, •InJustice, Law,
and Method in Plato and Aristotle, ed. Spiro Panagiotou. Edmonton,
1987: 105-22.
Dueso, J. 1992. "Pol!tico (299b-d) y Ia condena de Socrates." Paper
delivered at the Third Symposium Platonicum, August 1992, In Bristol,
England.
Griswold, C. 1986. Self-Knowledge in Plato's Phaedrus. New Haven,
1986.
- - . 1989. "Politike Episteme In Plato's Statesman," In Essays in
Anclent Greek Philosophy ill, ed. John Anton and Anthony Preuss
(Albany, 1989).
Harrison, J. 1955. Prolegomena to the study of Greek Religion, 3rd. ed.
New York, 1955. (Original ed. 1922).
Howland, J. 1991. "Re-Reading Plato: The Problem of Platonic Chronology," PhoeniX45.3: 189-214.
- - . 1993. Plato's Republic: The Odyssey ofPhUosophy. New York. 1993.
�HOWLAND
59
Klein, J. 1977. Plato's Trilogy: Theaetetus, the Sophist, and the Statesman. Chicago, 1977.
Kopff, E. 1977. "Nubes 1493 ff: Was Socrates Murdered?" Greek, Roman
and Byzantine Studies 18: 113-22.
Miller, M. 1980. ThePhUosopherinPlato'sStatesman. The Hague, 1980.
Moullnier, L. 1952. Le pur et l'tmpur dans la pensee des Grecs d'Hornere
aArtstote. Paris, 1952.
Nussbaum, M. 1980. "Aristophanes and Socrates on Learning Practical
Wisdom," ln Artstophanes: Essays in Interpretation, Yale Classical
Studies 26: 43-97.
Rosen, S. 1983. Plato's Sophist: 'TheDramaofOriginalandimage. New
Haven, 1983.
---. 1979. "Plato's Myth of the Reversed Cosmos," RevrewofMe/aphYslcs
33: 59-85.
Sayre, K. 1969. Plato's Analytic Method. Chicago, 1969.
Scodel, H. 1987. Diaerests and Myth in Plato's Statesman. Goettingen,
1987.
Strauss, L. 1983. "Plato's Apology of Socrates and Crtto," ln Strauss,
Studies in Platonic Political PhUosophy (Chicago 1983), 38-66.
Thesleff, H. 1982. Studies in Platonic Chronology. Helsinki, 1982.
Vidal-Naquet, P. 1978. "Plato's Myth of the Statesman, the Ambiguities
of the Golden Age and of History," Jownal of Hellenic Studies 98:
132-41.
�60
'IHE ST. JOHN"S REVIEW
�The Myth of
the Reversed Cosmos
in Contemporary Physics
Pierre Kerszberg
In the celebrated collection of essays that he was offered on the
occasion of his seventieth birthday, Einstein discusses a certain
number of criticisms leveled against the theory of relativity and its
interpretation in a particularly sharp manner. His reply to a famous
contribution by Kuri Giidel is certainly one of the most interesting in
this series of original arguments. For in this reply, Einstein confesses
that Giidel's insight forces him to think again about the problem that
most seriously disturbed him at the time of establishing the theory of
general relativity; he admits that he then failed to resolve the problem
completely.
This problem is the following (Einstein 1949, p.687). A and B are
two sufficiently close world-events, separated by point 0 at which the
light-cone is issued. The world-line BA is time-like, that is, it is a path
along which, from the standpoint of relativity physics, it is possible to
have a chain of events causally related to one another (fig.!). Now,
Einstein asks, would it make any sense to constrain
•A
I
I
I
I
I
I
0
Figure 1
I
I
I
I
1 Jl
physical action even further than just requiring it to lie within the
light-cone? In particular, is there any justification for demanding that
the world-line be provided with an arrow, constraining B to be before
0 and A afier 0, against the inverse possibility that A be before 0 and
�62
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
B after 0? There would be no need for explicitly making such demand
if physics was still Newionian, for in this physics any arbitrary pair of
evenis has an intrinsic, absolute temporal order. But in the special
theory of relativity, the light-cone structure emerges on the basis of
facts of velocity (namely, the constant velocity of light in all inertial
frames of reference), not of time alone. Therefore, the theory by itself
cannot answer the question of temporal connectibility: Is it actually
asymmetrical in this theory? Whatever answer might be given to this
question, it would give time a status that cannot easily be related to
the already acquired concepts of relativity physics. One such concept
is space. The special theory was first constructed on the basis that
there appears to be simply no way of determining by experimental
means that space is isotropic (symmetrical) with respect to the velocity
of light (see for instance Goldberg 1984, pp.104ff). Einstein stipulated
such symmetry in order to obtain a meaningful definition of simultaneity. Could we proceed to the inverse stipulation of asymmetry in the
case of time, or should we look for empirical evidence to support it?
Special relativity is silent on this issue. Does the general theory of
relativity contribute to the answer? According to Einstein, there will
be essentially two types of answer that bear upon whether or not such
asymmetry makes physical sense at all. (i) In the operational sense of
the theory of relativity, which already formed the basis for the denial
of absolute simultaneity at a distance, the test of temporal asymmetry
depends on the possibility of sending a light signal passing through
or in the neighbourhood of 0; if it so happened that the signal could
travel from B to A but not from A to B, then, as Einstein writes, "there
exisis no free choice for the direction of the arrow." (ii) By contrast,
the asymmetry makes no physical sense if there exisis a series of
evenis that can be connected by time-like world-lines such that (a)
each event of the series can be said to comply with a temporal sequence
in the sense of (i); (b) the series is globally closed in itself. For in the
latter case, Einstein goes on to say, "the distinction earlier/later is
abandoned for world-poinis which lie far apart in a cosmological
I
/
,
I
io
Figure2
I
\
\
\
'-
�KERSZBERG
63
sense" (p.688). F1nally, Einstein comments, it would be "Interesting to
weigh whether these [cosmological solutions] are not to be excluded
on physical grounds," assuming that the sole physical basis for
ascertaining asymmetry remains the propagation of a light signal.
In his own paper for the Einstein volume, GOdel (1949) had
discovered just such a solution. (For a general discussion, see
Horwitch 1987, pp.ll1-28.) This Is a homogeneous universe obeying
the laws of general relativity, In which the local times of the observers
who move with galaxies cannot be fitted together into one universal
temporal order. In this model, it is theoretically possible to travel into
any region of the past or future and back again.
In passing from physical sense to physical nonsense in his
examination of temporal connectibility, Einstein asks us to believe
that the enigma of asymmetry arises In conjunction with the transition
from a local to a global system. From this point of view, the question
of whether time Is asymmetrical in the theory of relativity Is supposed
to be reducible to questions of the kind: What are the conditions
required to make such a transition from the local to the global? What
Is It that must be postulated for preserving physical sense throughout?
The essence of Godel's metric of space-time is that the aggregate of
local past/future distinctions associated with the observation ofllghtrays does not automatically constitute a global past/future distinction. But the failure to obtain such a distinction Is independent of
something like a crucial experiment that would be proposed to decide
In favor of or against asymmetry. Thus, It would be certainly absurd
to try to tell experimentally (for Instance by monitoring a light-signal
over very large spatia-temporal intervals) when, as the separation
between two events grows larger. event A as "after" (or "effect," in the
language of light-signals) turns into "before" (or "cause") of event B.
Given this predicament, Einstein seems to be of the opinion that the
absence of an earlier/later distinction at the global scale, which makes
no sense, occurs only as a special case to be discarded without
touching upon the foundations of the theory, a violation of the
otherwise accepted asymmetry as a general case.
On the other hand, GOdel believes that the breakdown does make
sense theoretically, precisely because only a practical impossibility is
available. His calculations showed that the velocity required in order
to make a complete circuit In time In his model must be at least 1/-./2
that of light, which he found to be virtually forever beyond technological means. From this the theoretical conclusion follows: "it cannot be
excluded a priori, on the ground of[ this] argument, that the space-time
structure of the real world is of the type described" (GOdel 1949,
�64
'IHE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
p.561). Now, one would like to think that the more standard models
of the relativistic universe, in which there is a globally distinguished
direction for the arrow of time, are independent of practical restrictions
of that sort. This, however, is not quite the case. indeed, Giidel argues,
in those models where an absolute time function can be defined, the
actual existence of an objective duration depends on the determination of the mean motion of matter in each region of the universe. Yet,
only approximations to this concept can be obtained, and moreover
the particular configuration of the universe at any time remains
contingent (p.562). Thus, asymmetry as a general case could be
dropped altogether.
There is a substantial historical and conceptual background behind both Einstein's and Giidel's arguments. In trying to excavate it,
the broader significance of the time-reversible nature of the Jaws of
modern mathematical physics will emerge. I shall take Einstein at his
word and look at the premises of general relativity of a most general
character. They reflect just how much the theory was built on a
problem that was not completely solved.
1. Time andfreedom
To begin with Einstein's position: Do we have sufficient reason to
accept as the source of evidence for the general (local) case the
propagation of a fastest possible signal? As it turns out, it is not at all
certain that temporal priority could ever be derivable from tests of
causal connectlbility such as the sending of a signal. How is the
sending of a signal between two events to verilY the Jaw of causality,
which, as general law, tells us that certain classes of events can be
connected by using a certain general rule? The very knowledge that
such an event is causally related to such other event already requires
some knowledge of the spatiotemporal features of the events, if only
to pick them out (Griinbaum 1973, pp.190-1; Sklar 1985, p.253].
Einstein seems to imagine some kind of "pre-temporal" situation in
which observers know supposedly nothing at the outset as to which
of the two events precedes the other. But this situation does not
support the argument in favor of asymmetry, because it ignores that
observers are then allowed too much freedom Their very choice of a
pair of events conditions the subsequent belief that the directedness
of the arrow of time could not but be fixed in a certain way. Arguably,
the consideration of when a past event is converted into a future event
was ruled out precisely because of this pre-determination. The relationship of observers to an already constituted world that is there
before them cannot be ignored, since it is precisely this "before" that
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Informs them on the minimum of spatiotemporal properties needed In
order to relate events of this world to one another.
To be sure, Einstein is not unaware that such an argument from
the pre-temporal to the temporal will not quite exhaust the question
of the direction of time's arrow in the theory of general relativity.
Indeed, there is something more in this part of Einstein's reply. He
explains that what is essential to the phenomenon of the one-sidedness
of time can be brought out by way of an analogy: "the sending of a
signal is, in the sense of thermodynamics, an irreversible process, a
process which is connected with the growth of entropy (whereas,
according to our present knowledge. all elementary processes are
reversible)." The reference to thermodynamics reveals what Einstein
actually has in mind when trying to secure the asymmetry of time In
every part of the universe. For thermodynamics offers another basis
to solve the problem of how to link the local to the global. The global
direction of time can be established entropically inasmuch as it is
subjected to statistical data; the elementary (local) processes remain
reversible because they remain well below the threshold at which
statistical data become significant. Now, what is it that Einstein
actually wants when he requests that such a threshold be abolished
in some future theory. so that entropy could be directly inspected even
in the case of a pair of events? Is it in this way that his imagined
pre-temporal situation will become the sought-for proof In favor of
asymmetry as a general case? As long as causality was not identified
with the growth of entropy, It could readily be confused with temporal
priority itself; but now, the argumentls Intended to derive the temporal
properties of events from a wholly "a-temporal" situation. To be sure,
the knowledge required to establish the entropic features of a pair of
events would be again the same as the knowledge needed for Classes
of events. But this would now be harmless, since what we want to
prove, i.e., some statement about the direction of time, Is not preempted by premises which concern entropic states. However, If the
sending of a signal is subjected to such Irreversibility, It would seem
that the new situation Is completely deprived of any means of making
the point. For by contrast with the previous situation, the observer
loses a minimum of control. Not enough.freedom Is allowed, because
the sending of a signal from A to B is not even a possibility to be
discarded by experiment. It could be ruled out of existence only by
virtue of the law of causality Itself, which is now a law about entroplc
states, not about the direction of the arrow of time. In conceding to
the world that it is already there before them, the observers can only
establish certain ways of verifYing properties which are not purely
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
temporal; these temporal properties are manifestations of some other,
necessarily "deeper" feature of the world.
This fundamental inadequacy of our understanding of time for the
postulation of its directedness prevents Einstein from formulating a
demonstration of impossibility. A demonstration of impossibility was
the core of the theory of special relativity, in which faster-than-light
particles were ruled out of existence by virtue of the principle of
relativity. In the case of the direction of the arrow of time, a demonstration of impossibility'Is needed in order for the freedom of action of
observers to be fixed within the practical limits of their possible
actions. Einstein's opinion that the puzzle is not solved may be
expressed by opposing two types of observers' relation to the world: (i)
actively intervening in the course of events that are qualified as purely
temporal; (li) being dragged passively by the course of events that are
not purely temporal. When Einstein argues that the earlier/later
distinction is lost in the cosmological solutions in which the series of
events is globally closed, his reference to thermodynamics testifies to
his referring to sense (ii). That is why it is questionable whether, on
Einstein's own terms, the postulated asynnnetry should ever be lost.
In Giidel's solution, a traveler who follows Ws time-like world-line
never meets a point at which the direction assigned to time is reversed.
Rather, Ws world-line is always oriented toward a locally definable
future; in this solution, the problem of temporal priority is thus
supposed to be already solved at the local scale. It is only in a
non-orientable space-time, which Giidel's is not, that it should be
possible to change a forward light-cone at a point into a backward
light-cone without modifying the timelikeness of the vector. The case
discussed by Einstein is one in wWch the fact that the future may be
present in the past, or even act upon it, does not modify the distinction
earlier/later, because the possible overlap past/future.is not sufficiently constraining to determine any change in the past. For a change
to occur, some active intervention on the part of the observer is
required. But the threshold at which such action has any detectable
effect cannot be fixed unless we know what freedom the observers
have.
Giidel's aim is precisely to show that a well-defined type of action
is necessary for the paradox to occur. He writes that if someone were
to travel into the past of those very places where he has himself lived,
"he would find a person who would be himself at some earlier period
of his life. Now he could do something to this person which, by his
memory, he knows has not happened to him" (p.56l). Thus, the action
required in order for the paradox to arise is a contingency that implies
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67
an actually living person capable of memory, not just a physical
apparatus capable of recording a certain number of data according to
a pre-determined sequence. More recently, Hawking and Ellis have
developed GOdel's argument in a more radical way. They justify the
anathema of closed time-like curves by claiming that "the existence of
such curves would seem to lead to the possibility oflogical paradoxes:
for, one could imagine that with a suitable rocketship one could travel
round such a curve and, arriving back before one's departure, one
could prevent oneself from setting out in the first place. Of course there
is a contradiction only if one assumes a simple notion of free will; but
this is not something which can be dropped lightly since the whole of
our philosophy of science is based on the assumption that one is free
to perform any experiment" (1973, p.l89). They seem to think of the
ruling out of closed time-like curves as definitive; that Is, in our
context, their argument works as the demonstration of Impossibility
that was vainly sought for by Einstein. Now, the freedom to perform
any experiment anywhere at anytime cannot possibly reflect the doing
of an ordinary living observer, and yet Hawking and Ellis assume what
they call a "simple" notion of free will. The observer's freedom of action,
together with its contingencies, is now radicalized to the point of
allowing him to wipe out the very possibility of memory. There is no
doubt that more than an ordinary notion of free will is necessary before
the desire to perform an action against his own capacities to memorize
can be imputed to an observer. From the point of view of the formally
universal requirements of physical laws, the freedom to perform any
experiment is restricted to the repeatahill.ty of similar experiments.
But as repetition of the same, experimentation takes place in a world
which can, as a matter of fact, be dead. In trying to harmonize such
formally universal requirements and the materially particular requirements of free action, what Hawking and Ellis's argument actually
emphasizes (even if they don't use a consistent notion of living
freedom) is that a world without at least a trace of living memory
cannot meaningfully be "there" in the first place.
2. Time and action
Historically speaking, modem physics emerged in the seventeenth
century from what was then thought to be a successful demonstration
of impossibility against reversed action. The physical problem bequeathed by the Copernican argument in favor of the earth's rotation
was that the earth should be conceived as a natural clock, wWle in
Greek cosmology tWs function was fulfilled by the uniform revolution
of the stars. (Aristotle made the point that since a circumference has
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
no definite beginning, middle, or end, the movement of rotation of the
stars "Is stationary and motionless in one sense, and moves continuously In another"-Physics 265b, p.401.) Now, If the time-reversible
character of the latter revolution can be accepted without difficulty, a
problem arises in the case of the earth's rotation precisely because of
the earth's "corruptibility" and contingency. In particular, the phenomena having a direct incidence on ordinary life are not reversible.
Thus Galileo could do little more than mock the suggestion, which
according to his records \vas made in his own days, that "after a short
time the mountains, sinking downward with the rotation of the
terrestrial globe, would get into such a position that whereas a little
earlier one would have had to climb steeply to their peaks, a few hours
later one would have to stoop and descend in order to get there" (1967,
p.330). Could the continuouslyforwardflowoftime built in the earth's
clock be responsible for such reversed action? Galileo thwarts this fear
by using the concept of homogeneous/isotropic space and the concomitant equivalence of up and down. Once this new concept of space
is accepted, it does not matter whether the earth as clock moves
backwards or forwards.
This example illustrates how, when conjoined with Euclidean
space, the time-reversible character of the earth-bound laws of modem physics saves this physics from collapsing in the face of evidence
borrowed from ordtnary life. Why, then, should this same character
become a problem in the context of global relativity physics? Special
relativity had already destroyed the objectivity of simultaneity at a
distance, that is, the notion of a same instant at two different points.
Why would it not also criticize the notion of a unique direction of time.
that Is, the objective sequence of different tnstants at a point? As it
turns out, the special theory does not really have the means to do so.
By objectivity is meantspatio-temporal coincidences; the theory allows
for a direct, non-obstructed access to these coincidences only (Sklar
1985, pp.268-88). But both general relatMty and classical thermodynamics
are based on a union of space and time which is supposed to absorb
the directional properties of time.
Classical thermodynamics lent itself to the first, and probably also
the most accomplished, attempt to reconcile the universal (absolute)
form of the laws of nature and the particular (contingent) content of
the material universe. Consider the conflict that results when the form
of the Newtonian laws of motion (which claim no preferred direction
of time for individual particles) is confronted with the actual existence
of large aggregates of particles as described by the laws of thermodynamics.
Potncare (1893) formulated the following theorem: Any mechanical
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69
system of motions possessing finite energy confined to a finite volume
will return infinitely often to a state infinitesimally close to any past
state. Such a violation of the monotonic behavior of the universe as
predicted by the second Jaw of thermodynamics would be extremely
improbable, because the recurrence time for a system turns out to be
fantastically large. However, if the system referred to in Poincare's
theorem can be identified with the whole universe, time travel in
relativity physics would appear to be a special case of a more general
situation, in which not just observers but the universe itself returns
to its own past. In an attempt to interpret this result, which pre-dated
relativity physics, Boltzmann wrote these famous lines with a view to
rejecting the assumption that the universe is at present in a very
improbable state:
One can think of the world as a mechanical system of an enormously large number of constituents, and of an immensely long
period of time, so that the dimensions of that part containing our
own "fixed stars• are minute compared to the extension of the
universe; and times that we call eons are likewise mioute compared
to such a period. Then in the universe, which is in thermal
equilibrium throughout and therefore dead, there will occur here
and there relatively small regions of the same size as our galaxy (we
call them single worlds) which, during the relatively short time of
eons, fluctuate noticeably from thermal equilibrium, and indeed the
state probability in such cases will be equally likely to increase or
decrease. For the universe, the two directions of time are indistinguishable, just as in space there is no up and down. However, just
as at a pariicular place on the earth's surface we call "down• the
direction toward the center of the earth, so will a living beiog in a
particular time interval of such a single world distinguish the
direction of time toward the less probable state from the opposite
direction (the former toward the past, the latter toward the future).
(1964, pp.446-47)
The perfect overlap between the form of the laws (that +t is
indistinguishable from -t, just as up and down are equivalent) and
their content is achieved as a result of the universe being globally dead,
that is, in steady state thermal equilibrium. By virtue of its enormous
dimensions in both space and time compared with any local system,
the universe is globally deprived of memory.
Through its application to such a global system as the entire
universe, relativity physics has moved in the direction of the other
interpretation, lending support to the view that the whole universe is
a very improbable state. in special relativity the universe does not
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
seem to lose a memory of Its past. The young universe can always be
present to any reference frame, since time will run more slowly on
faster-moving bodies and tn more tntense gravitational fields. In
relativistic cosmology, the theory of a dynamic (expanding) universe
has been developed tn such a way that all physical action, Irrespective
of the particular reference frame, will recombine In a past which,
however remote, can always be assigned. A metric for the universe
(the so-called Robertson-Walker metric) which will not constantly
change by virtue of the expansion (or any other large-scale dynamic
behavior of the universe) Is found in such a way that Its most general
form Is compatible with the equations of motion (Friedmann's equations) and the natural hypotheses of homogeneity and Isotropy:
where R Is the radius of curvature of the universe, and K defines the
geometry. Clearly enough, the global geometric structure can be fixed
only if all events are already synchronized in some way. That Is, the
geometry fixes the increase or decrease of the coordinate distance
between two events if and only If these are located on a surface of
contemporary events. A principle of causality governs the behavior of
all world-lines In accordance with this requirement: this is the Weyl
principle, which stipulates that at any potnt of space-time all worldlines form a bundle of divergtng geodesics from a common potnt In the
past. All light-cones of all observers thus tend to refocus In some sort
of super light-cone Issued from an event at the remotest past; as a
potnt of absolute coincidence, this event fixes the natural synchrony
of all clocks In the universe.
·
Wbat Is the status of such a world surface of contemporary events
that can tnflate or deflate in accordance with some specifiable physical
parameters (such as matter density)? In special relativity, the relation
of simultaneity Is not transitive: If Pi is simultaneous with P2 relative
to an Inertial system A, and P2 simultaneous with Ps relative to an
Inertial system B, Pi cannot be simultaneous with Ps relative to any
of these tnertial systems. If, in the notion of "deterrntned reality," we
want to include the temporal relation, then it seems inevitable that we
should also relativize this notion of determined reality in some way
(see the discussion In Sklar 1985, pp.289-304). But the prtnciple of
causality tn relativistic cosmology bears the stamp of an interesting
retreat before the far-reaching Implications of this relativity. In order
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to preserve the possibility of an absolute (unchangeable) metric for
dynamic solutions, a kind of transitivity at the global scale is retrieved,
and thus a rather classical sense of determined reality reappears at
that scale. However, in order for this transitivity to remain physically
mearringful in the relativistic context, the follOWing fundamental
hypothesis ofspecial relativity must also be preserved: the spatlo-temporal
intervals relative to an inertial system are only functions of the
intervals of the same events relative to another inertial system and the
relative motion of these twO systems. This is nothing other than the
hypothesis of space-time homogeneity. Before this hypothesis could
be adopted as the basis of our best kinematics of space-time (special
relativity), physicists faced the following alternative: (I) reject the
pre-relativistic concept ofsimultanelty for non-coincident events; (II)
adopt some version of the "compensatory" theories designed by Lorentz, in which the impossibility to observe the effects of some
postulated reality such as the ether was ascribed to "secondary''
effects, independent of the reference frame. Global transitivity seems
to compel us to fall back on a compensatory theory of a unique kind:
the observed motion of the galaxies is only an appearance which
masks a deeper, yet unobservable reality, namely, an "ether" in motion
(represented by the function R(t) in the Robertson-Walker metric) with
respect to which galaxies are "at rest."
On balance, then, the relationship between classical and relativity
physics can be reconstructed something like this. The Einstein-Glide!
debate forced us to ask: What Is the temporal structure of the world
which corresponds to our picking out an event (or pair of events) from
among any series of events, and to what extent is this structure
dependent on whether or not the world in which we actually live is
already constituted?Three cases present themselves. (i) Newton: if one
event Is picked out, a space can be assigned to It, all the points of
which are contemporary with the event; (II) Special relativity: this is
possible only if the inertial reference frame is speCified; there exists a
set of events simultaneous with the one picked out relative to this
frame only; (iii) General Relativity: it could be wholly impossible to
foliate space-time into successive surfaces of contemporary events
even relative to one observer; this would be the case if the space-time
did contain closed time-like curves. The return to transitivity in
standard relativistic models of the universe is a response to this threat.
A Cauchy surface on a space-time allows for the definition of a global
time function f which assigns to each event a pair of real numbers (x,y)
such that f(y) Is larger than f(x) each time a signal can propagate from
x toy. In order for a space-time to have such a surface, It is sufficient
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
that any time-like continuous world-line crosses it only once. If the
initial condition of the world can be specified on that surfuce, its whole
past and Its whole future can be specified too, if at least the laws of
nature are deterministic on the large scale.
3. Two times, two worlds
From the foregoing comparison between special relativity and
standard relativistic cosmology, it appears that the latter Is formally
a compensatory theory; this pre-relativistic feature is the price to pay
for ruling out closed time-like curves. Nowadays, however, physicists
agree that this standard form of cosmological model may be itself
inadequate to represent the very early stages of the universe's existence. Recent work in theoretical physics has focused on the initial
condition being the beginning of the world itself, not just an arbitrarily
selected surface of contemporary events (see Penrose 1989). The
direction for the time's arrow could be fixed if the universe were
conceived as having started In a state of thermal equllibrium which
still corresponded to a very low total entropy. The argument is that
the then small size of the universe placed a very low ceiling on the
maximum entropy it could have; at the big bang the universe was not
in a state of maximum entropy though it was in thermal equilibrium.
AB the universe expands very rapidly in the early stages of its evolution, the expansion rate exceeds the rate at which the system is able
to evolve back to a state of equilibrium, in obedience to the second law
of thermodynamics. AB the rate of expansion slows, however, the rate
at which the universe approaches thermal equilibrium once more
exceeds the expansion rate. In the terms used In reference to
Boltzmann: the size of the universe at the beginning is so small that
It may start In thermal equilibrium (a dead state). and yet, since Its
later evolution (expansion) Is completely determined by the initial
state, It Is capable of retaining the memory of Its past. The loss of
memory begins only well after expansion has set in, as evidenced by
the occurrence of horizon effects (the speed of expansion may ultimately exceed the speed of light). However, again by virtue of the
Poincare theorem, the universe must finally go back to Its initial state,
at least If It is a closed system such that the expansion may not
continue indefinitely. The peculiar mystery of the Initial state, which
Is a death state combined with further evolution, Is particularly
Intolerable when one investigates what happens when the universe
begins to contract. Supposing that the universe has then reached its
maximum entropy, this entropy will get progressively smaller as the
universe contracts. It must be admitted that, If the directional prop-
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73
erties of time are grounded in entropic states, the direction of time will
be reversed in the contraction era. But the events surrounding the
turnaround are fraught with a paradox, in relation to both physical
events and living beings.
Penrose has described the absurdities of this situation for physical
events: "What does the light do when it starts going the wrong way?
...Willlight rays diverge from a source prior to the turnaround, and
then miraculously reconverge on some point after the turnaround?"
(1986, p.41). Penrose uses the expressions "prior" and "after," as if the
premise concerning one cosmic time (against which the sequence of
events is organized) were absolutely untouchable. However, if the
universe had reached thermic death at the end of the expansion era,
the conflict between the two worlds would be even deeper, because we
would have to account for two sequences of events which are not
necessarily symmetrical to one another. Penrose overlooks this completely when he goes on to consider the paradoxical phenomena in
connection with living creatures. He uncritically supposes that some
creatures would live one part of their life in the expansion era, and
another part after the turnaround. With these two distinct, yet symmetrical populations, we have the following paradox. The "contraction
people," as he calls them, "will remember things that happened in
what, from our perspective, Is their future. If they were to be told things
that had happened in what we would regard as their past, ...what
would then prevent them from choosing to do something different?"
(pp.41-42). For instance, imagine information put by us in a container
that would last through to the contraction period; the contraction
people could then use it to do something about their future. On this
account, we could even go one step further and conceive that, in the
normal expanding universe, in deciding to do something freely, we, as
it were, only remember the future. But the premise of the whole
argument was that entropy determines the arrow of time, that is, this
direction is caused by some physical action relative to very large
aggregates of particles. How come we should now find it puzzling that
the freedom of choice for a characteristically small number of living
creatures will interfere with an otherwise deterministic universe?
The beings living in two worlds with inverse time direction are
somewhat analogous to Maxwell's demon, who could supposedly use
intelligence to influence the statistical distribution of velocities in two
different parts of a sealed box containing gas in equilibrium. Through
operation of a trap door placed in the hands of a diabolical creature,
the temperature of the two halves would become unequal with no
expenditure of energy. In 1929, Szilard was able to prove that no
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
violation of the second law of thermodynamics is involved here,
because the work to be performed in order to discriminate between
the fast and the slow particles always outweighs the work that can be
performed by exploiting the temperature difference created by the
demonic activity. That is, intelligence is not synonymous with absolute
freedom to do anything; it is itself a significant part of the natural
stream of phenomena. Why could we not argue, then, that in the case
of Penrose's contraction people, the cost of implementing the strategy
of informing these people of their future will exceed the possibilities
of doing anything about it?
The above-mentioned absurdities have prompted Penrose to reject
standard cosmological theol}' altogether. But he Is not willing to alter
anything in the premise that time should keep the same direction up
till the "end." He believes that the premise Is warranted by means of
his hypothesis of "gravitational entropy." In the initial singularity,
such gravitational entropy was zero, that is, the gravitational part of
the entropy (space-time structure) was not thermalized at all (1989,
pp.328-45). But gravitational entropy would start to build up continuously as the universe expands, until a final singularity which would
be highly inhomogeneous and anisotropic. In other words, Penrose
claims to have accounted for the unique direction of time throughout
the evolution of the universe, independently of any possible contraction era. Just like Einstein, he hopes that a forthcoming theol}' will
do the job of consolidating what is at present a speculation only; this
theol}' is quantum gravity. This similarity In Einstein and Penrose's
positions cannot be mere chance. They are both using a hypothesis
to be consolidated by a future theol}'. instead of posing it as an
independent justification to be Investigated on its own merits. The
strategy seems to be the price that physical science has to pay for
including living consciousness within the stream of nature. We are
therefore justified in trying to oppose a purely metaphysically
grounded argument about the very meaning of such inclusion.
In fact, GOdel already did something like this when he justified the
philosophical background of his model with a closed time-like curve.
The model turns out to be a representation of a philosophical position
about time. He claims that special relativity in Its original meaning,
undistorted by cosmological constraints, tallies with Kant's remark
that the vel}' perception of change presupposes the particular constitution of human sensibility, namely, time as pure form of intuition;
time constitutes the necessary "screen" through which phenomena
are given to us. Any form of cognition which is not constrained by this
"screen" would also be deprived of the perception of change as a global
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property of the world. GOdel argues that beings co-extensive with the
Minkowskl space-time of special relativity, in which time is absorbed
In the space-time continuum, are living this non-specifically human
life referred to by Kant as an Jrrepresentable sensibility (Giidel 1949,
p.557n). But on the other hand, Giidel goes on to point out, "the
concept of existence ... cannot be relativized without destroying its
meaning completely" (p.558n). Is this not what Kant seems to be doing
when he speaks of putative beings with other forms of cognition?
Giidel's model forces us to ask the following question: Are the intuitive
world (In which a "simple" notion of free will is assumed) and the
relativistic world two different worlds, or do they both derive from a
unique world? In the former case, the kind of intuition prevailing in
the relativistic world would be simply irrepresentable, and the
paradoxes of time travel would simply reflect the irreducibility of the
constructed world of relativistic cosmology to human sensibility. In
the latter case, the paradoxes discussed by both Giidel and Penrose
occur because the intuitive world In which we actually live could never
be done away with: It is this world which, however obscure it may still
be, continues to fix the very meaning of existence in the first place.
4. nvo times, but only one world
Penrose has Investigated a case of "objective" reduplication of the
world, without taking Into account some of the natural limitations of
life and their subjective foundation in existence. Following Giidel. we
shall take the word '1dealism" to mean a manner of representing the
world that includes the non-relativizability of existence; and we shall
ask whether there is ultimately an idealistic sense in which we could
think of the reduplication of the world. Our clue is thatit is not possible
to derive the subjective perception of such objective states as entropy
(I.e., entropy states as the "cause" of our sensing the moving on of
time) by bestowing an immediately cosmic significance upon human
subjectivity and free will. The inclusion of the potentialities of free
human subjectivity in the natural world, whether of immediate intuition or of constructed theory, does not allow us to separate these
potentialities from that which Is universally given, as If they could be
temporarily suspended and then re-activated-for example, during
the examination of the fictional case of time travel. If, however, the
fictional observer cannot be dispensed with In the elaboration of
"normal" physical theory, then both worlds (intuited and constructed)
must be stretched In tandem beyond their respective ltmits. This
requires an exercise of reasoning that takes us outside both "natural"
and "relativistic" life. In our present context, this implies that a
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1HE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
contracting universe is still worth Investigating, even if we accept the
conclusion of physics that such life involves thermodynamic contradictions.
Interestingly enough, Plato presents In the Statesman such an
exercise of rational thought, when he deals with various ancient
legends in which the question Is "how the sun and the stars rose In
the west and set In the east" (269a). The point Is to reflect on the
general principle common to these various ways of thinking about the
reversed cosmos.
According to these legends, the present configuration of the heavens is the result of such a reversal following a divine action. The world
Is something mechanical Inasmuch as it participates in bodily nature;
Plato seems to view it as a sort of spinning top. Circular motion has
been Imparted by the divine being to the body of the universe, because
this motion Is what differs least from the motion of a body poised on
a single point; the latter is the only motion that contains in itself the
very principle of motion. The actually existing universe is, as far as
embodiment permits, the closest possible resemblance to the principle
of motion. But such closeness Is not a continuous gradation from the
less to the more. Rather, the world is the product of a logic ofless and
more. This is made evident by the retrograde motions of the planets,
which are Irregular in appearance only, not in reality (Laws 821 b822c). The world Is thus a stage of reciprocal action of opposites, not
a continuous gradation to the model of perfection, which explains that
divine action Itself is subjected to constraints. First, as a principle of
motion, the divine being would contradict itself If, of its own accord,
It were to change the direction of the motion of the universe; secondly,
since motion In its own being is one, there cannot be two principles
of motion affecting each other, as if two Gods were to oppose one
another. The only remaining hypothesis Is that the mechanical world
Is something like a spring tightened by the divine being, but "there is
a time, on the completion of a certain cycle" (269c), when, left to its
own devices, it begins to revolve in the opposite direction under the
action of its own impulsion. As long as It is guided by the divine power,
the world "receives life" from it (270a), but as a living creature It
exhausts Itself, and, once the maximal concentration of forces has
been reached, It declines toward a state of no motion. Plato assumes
that the direction of revolution defines the direction of time, but he
obtains a much higher degree of asymmetry between the two worlds
than In any of the contemporary speculations. For what is not
indifferent to the direction of time is the age of those who live in this
world (270d): all beings have this In common that, whether they grow
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older or younger, they are bound to die (270e), but of course in the
case of those who grow younger, it means stmply disappeartng from
the face of the earth after reachtng the stage of a newly born child. The
question is now (27lc): Given that the reversal must take place after
some time in both worlds (+t and -t), to which ofthe two worlds do we
belong now? The clue is provided by the fact that the people of the
reversed cosmos have no memory at all, even though they were born
old (272a); they let themselves live, as it were, because the earth gives
them spontaneously an abundance of fruits, without farming. This is
a time-reversed world in which, however, there appear none of the
paradoxes generally associated with it Oike the many fragments of
broken glass that spontaneously rush together to form an ordinary
glass). Such a paradox-free world is achieved by taking into consideration the absence of memory among the people in the reversed world;
in fact, by virtue of what we have called above the irrepresentable
sensibility of people having no (or another) perception of change, It Is
enough to postulate the absence of communication between the two
worlds. As it turns out, we are told tn due course that this stage of
spontaneous generation is the stage "in which God superintended the
whole revolution of the universe" (27lc). Plato goes on to speculate
that a sudden shock, like a mighty earthquake (273a). preceded the
return to the world in which we live now. But as the world becomes
master of itself, and God lets it go, It is also tncumbent on its parts to
grow and generate of themselves (again, as far as they can). Ultimately,
we have the followtng asymmetry between the two worlds. In the
reversed world, inert matter generates, so that people can be viewed
as earth-born creatures (27lb). But in our world, the principle oflife
cannot be other than life itself. What differentiates the two worlds is
that, in the case of the reversed revolution, the mere flow of time affects
inert matter, and this is sufficient to explaln the course of events; whereas
tn our world (273c) the action oftime is only responsible for the tnexorable
growtng offorgetfulness, so thatftnallywe can only attend to the universal
rutn of the world as a whole and tn all of its parts.
Even though Plato's argument is completely independent of physIcal theory, it remains quite relevant to our context because it develops
the tmplications of what is probably the highest thtnkable degree of
tnteraction between mind and body, free action and embodiment
(270e). It does so without relytng on a future physical theory which
would mitigate the natural deficiency of our present knowledge: Plato
argues that the mythical character of the argument makes up for the
absence of a "satisfactory reporter of the desires and thoughts of those
times" (272d). When the changed direction of time is understood to
�78
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
affect both the nature and the very possibility of representation, it
makes no sense any more to speculate on the possible encounter of
an observer with himself at different times of life. In particular,
imputing to the "contraction people" the desire to do something about
their own future, when they take cognizance of it by some means,
assumes the existence of a universal and unchangeable means of
communication extending to both worlds. Plato warns us that when,
after the turnaround, all things changed, they could only imitate the
condition of the whole t.\niverse, which In this Instance is consistent
with an lrrepresentable mode of conception and generation (274a).
The pure passage of time can thus only explain a reversed world, In
which nothing motivates the need for superintendence of things by
people (what we call "science"): not only do they have no memory, but
they have certainly no reason to change their destiny since their food
Is growing spontaneously.
From this point of view, Godel's argument about the practical limits
preventing an observer from visiting his own past earns a valid
speculative foundation. But what does mythical speculation have to
do with contemporary cosmology? The myth is a particular type of
historical discourse, while we would like to think of our cosmological
theory as a perfectly rational way of making up for the deficiency of
sensible representation. In historical discourse, the actions of the
actors are reconstituted from the consequences that these actions
gave rise to; freedom is ascribed to the actors only In reference to a
forward-looking project that reached, or failed to reach, our own
present. Inasmuch as this project "speaks" to us In some way, that is,
insofar as it makes sense at all, we must be able to transpose ourselves
Into the past situation; historical understanding requires a minimum
of such fictive participation in order to be meaningful. Thus, it is
certainly not the exclusive privilege of "another" world, for Instance a
world In which the direction of time Is reversed, to require fictive
participation In order to lend Itself to a minimum of Intelligibility; this
requirement Is proper to all understanding dealing with time. My own
past existence becomes other, enriched by a future which was then
nothing. To be sure, the universe which is described and explained In
cosmological theory Is wholly constructed, so that it does not really
have an intuitive plausibility In terms of situations that could be lived.
Why, then, should we refuse that, In the case of time travel as with all
other Imaginable situations, judgment can result only from the consequences of certain actual actions? Time travel may still be compatible with our best theories of relativistic cosmology, but instead of
throwing light on the ultimate origin of physical action, It reveals once
�KERSZBERG
79
more how and why this origin remains occulted by the massive
evidence of our own lives.
* * * *"'
References
Aristotle. The Physics. Vol. 2. Trans. P. Wicksteed and F. Comford.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957.
Boltzmann, L. {1964). Lectufes on Gas Theory {1896-98). Trans. S. Brush.
Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
Einstein, A. {1949). "Remarks to the Essays Appearing In this Collective
Volume." In P. SchUpp, ed., Albert Einstein: Phdosopher-Bcientist.
LaSalle, IL: Open Court, pp. 663-88.
Gallleo, G. {1967). Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
{1632). Trans. S. Drake. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
GMel, K. {1949). "A Remark about the Relationship between Relativity
Theory and Ideallstic Philosophy. • In P. Schilpp, ed., Albert Einstein:
Phaosopher-sctentist. LaSalle, IL.: Open Court, pp. 567-662)
Goldberg, S. (1984). Understanding Relativity. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Grunbaum, A {1973). PhaosophicalProbtems of Space and Time. 2nd ed.
Dordrecht: Reidel.
Hawking, S., and G. F. R Ellis {1973). The Large-scale structure of
Space-Ttme. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Horwitch, P. {1987). Asymmetries in Ttme. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.
Penrose, R {1986). "Big Bangs, Black Holes and 'Time's Arrow.'" In The.
Nature ofTtme, ed. R Flood and M. Lockwood. Oxford: Blackwell.
Penrose, R {1989). The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers,
Minds, and the Laws of Physics. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Plato. The statesman. Trans. B. Jowett. Vol. 3. New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1885.
Sklar, L. (1985). Phdosophy and Space-Ttme Physics. Berkeley: Univ. of
California Press.
Szilard, L. (1929). "On the Reduction of Entropy of a Thermodynamic
System Caused by Intelligent Beings.· Zeitschrift.fiir Physik 53, p.840.
�80
THE ST. JOHN'S REVlEW
�Nietzsche, Solitude,
and Truthfulness
I
Gregory Schalliol
In 1886, after completing Beyond Good and Evil early in the year,
Nietzsche composed prefaces for new editions of five earlier works. In
the first-for Hwnan, AU Too Hwnan-he reviews his life and proposes
the following self-diagnosis:
And in fact I myself do not believe that anyone has ever before looked
into the world with an equally profound degree of suspicion [tiefen
Verdachte] ... and anyone who could divine something of the consequences that lie in that profound suspiciousness (tlefen Verdachte],
something of the fears and frosts of the isolation to which that
unconditional dispartty ofviEw condemns him who is infected with
It, will also understand how often, in an effort to recover from
myself, as it were to induce a temporary self-forgetting, I have
sought shelter in this or that-in some piece of admiration oremnlly
or scientiftcallty or frivolity or stupidity; and why, where I could not
find what I needed, I had artificially to enforce, falsify and invent a
suitable fiction for myself...What I again and again needed mostfor
my cure and self-restoration, however, was the belief that I was not
thus isolated, not alone in seeing as I dld ... 1
The "suitable fictions" he so needed as antidotes to his "profound
suspiciousness," he confesses, were first his admiration of
Schopenhauer and Wagner, and then the very "free spirits" for whom
that book was originally written in 1878-free spirits invented "as
compensation for the friends I lacked.''2 Nietzsche thus admits his
early inability to endure the solitude born of exiraordinary suspiciousness, and when total isolation threatened, the need to invent companions. He justifies this self-deception as "cunning in self-preservation,"
which allowed him to survive "the luxury of my truthfulness
(Wahrhaftigkeitl.'' 3 And after reminding us that life lives on deception,
as his case presumably has proven, he Immediately assures us that
he now sees actual free spirits coming Into being and proposes to
accelerate their genesis by describing their paths. The psychological
evolution described in what follows4 is clearly autobiographical. The
�82
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
core of this evolution is the "great liberation" which occurs after the
soul has encountered "a sudden terror and mistrust (Argwohn] ofwhat
Is loved" In one's youthful obedience. The soul matures when It
comprehends the aim of that liberation as the necessary prerequisite
for self-mastety. Nietzsche sees himselfbecoming one of the free spirits
he had to Invent eight years earlier, and his writing serves to encourage
the growth of such spirits. What he described in Thus Spoke
Zarathustra with the image of the ''Three Metamorphoses"5 is retold
here as direct autobiography.
But this celebration of Imminent psychic health raises many questions. On the surface, It suggests that Nietzsche has overcome his
solitude by his catching sight of and encouraging future "free spirits"
like himself. Schopenhauer and Wagner will soon be replaced by more
worthy companions. But since Nietzsche clearly describes himself as
one of these nascent free spirits, this proclamation also suggests the
conquest of his solitude by becoming a free spirit himselfwho no longer
needs companions. In the former case, Nietzsche's health depends on
his effective Interaction with the human community. He is the political
activist who sets out to transform the real world In order to secure a
healthy community for himself and others. But In the latter case,
Nietzsche's health depends on effective interaction with himself alone.
He Is the solitsry wise man who transforms himself In order to find
nourishment In seclusion. Which of these Is Nietzsche? Moreover,
what sense can be made of a "truthfulness" which sanctions
self-deception In psychic therapy? These are the questions I propose
to examine In what follows, for they will force us to consider the
philosopher's relationship to the human community and to truthfulness.
I begin with Nietzsche's self-professed "truthfulness." This was
presumably the result of his "profound suspiciousness" which, like
the ideal of scientific lnqulty he inherited, demanded that all convictions "descend to the modestyofhypotheses."6 Suspiciousness of such
severity not only threatens evety conviction, including those concernIng friendships; It also Inevitably questions Its own value. As he had
suggested In The Birth of Tragedy, the ultimate outcome of Socratic
questioning Is that logic finally "bites Its own tail."7 The questioner Is
forced by his own profound suspicion to include himself In the
questioning. But when suspicion questions the legitimacy of suspicion, It generates Its opposite, for the question Itself presupposes that
questioning is not under suspicion. Moreover, given the apparent
utility of Ignorance In so many situations, the unqualified goodness of
searching for truth-the consequence of suspicion-Is not self-evident.
�SCHALLIOL
83
Science thus exposes Itself as mere faith-indeed, as that ancient
Platonic and Christian faith that "truth Is divine."8
Suspiciousness of such depth thus seems to subvert itself. It
exposes Itself as a servant of the unsuspicious-the Irrationalthereby refuting the apparent Platonic-Socratic suggestion that reason rightly rules the soul. This ultimately Irrational quest for rationalIty-what Nietzsche came to call "the will to truth"9-was a puzzling
phenomenon. On the one hand, Its self-subversiveness suggested Its
unreliability as permanent psychic nourishment; 10 on the other, Its
endurance In Nietzsche and the European civilization he inherited
suggested a certain utility.ll In the second preface he wrote in 1886
-this one for a new edition of The Birth ofTI-agedy-Nietzsche called
this "frightful and dangerous" matter "the problem of science itself,"
which he had already formulated In that work sixteen years earlier. 12
He recognized even then, he says, that "the problem of science cannot
be recognized in the context of science."13 Only by looking at science
from another perspective-first art, then Ufe-can one hope to judge
Its worth, for science subverts itself when It engages In honest
self-evaluation.
Indeed, Nietzsche had already ventured a judgment of science from
the perspective of "life" in that early work. Socratic rationalism, he
suggested, may well have distracted the human willfor centuries from
losing its "lustfor life ."1 4 Thls salubrity of the will to truth Is a recurring
theme In Nietzsche's later writtngs.I 5 But the will to truth also risks
being "a concealed will to death" 16-the latest version of the "ascetic
Ideal" which seems destined to destroy Its carriers but may infect and
thereby exterminate everyone else In the process. 17 To avoid the latter
possibility, one must recognize the pursuit of truth for what it really
Is. Once this Is accomplished, one lives more "truthfully" than one had
previously under the illusion of the will to truth. Hence, Nietzsche can
say that Zarathustra Is "more truthful than any other thinker" and
that Zarathustra's doctrine alone "posits truthfulness as the highest
vlrtue.•Is In this way he acknowledges how "even we seekers after
knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians" still honor truth;
this Is "to what extent we, too, are still plous.•I9
Truth thereby becomes an ambiguous term. Nietzsche Is more
"truthful" because he recognizes the inherent contradiction In the
search for "truth" pursued by others. His Insight bespeaks a superior
psyche capable not just of articulating a world, but of comprehending
Its own articulation of the world as part of the whole. The possession
of this greater self-knowledge would presumably benefit this psyche's
efforts to care for Itself. If the pursuit of truth serves the Irrational,
�84
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
then psychic health would seem to require that the irrational obtatn
Its due. Without this vigilance, the pursuit of truth could destroy Its
hosts, for the unconscious drive to ascertatn what is other than oneself
might paradoxically force the investigator to conceive of himself as
Insignificant. Self-debasement of this kind, however, contradicts and
may thereby destroy the self-preservation or -cultivation which
Nietzsche takes to be the trademark of the Irrational ground oflife. 20
If that original impulse of life Is weak, it Is unable to rise above this
trap, becoming what Nietzsche called the "modern" soul, which "says
Yes and No In the same breath"21 and needs deception In order to
sustain the contradiction. But if the original instinct Is strong, it will
rescue Itself from the trap and learn to pursue truth not from the
perspective of science, but from the perspective of life. This Insight
liberates Nietzsche, for this evidence of his superior constitution
encourages him to venerate himself, diminishing his need for external
Idols, whether actual or Imaginary. He becomes the consciously
self-affirming soul which did not previously recognize Itself in Its
various operations. 22 Nietzsche no longer needs worthy companions
to stimulate him to life, for he has discovered he Is worthy of himself.
With this liberation, the "profound suspiciousness" which led
Nietzsche to this Insight Is transformed into a profound gratitude
working in the service of conscious self-promotion. 23 Pronouncing
itself healthy, this liberated psyche recognizes that the cosmology it
has just outgrown was sick, so it begins the experiment of comprehending the cosmos in a completely different-perhaps opposite-way
than it had been conceived earlier. Because unhealthy cosmology had
forced the individual to debase himself in the effort to apprehend an
external realUy, a healthy cosmology would have to glorify the individual In the comprehension of reality. This soul thereby creates a
metaphyslc,24 transforming philosophy Into the production of an
exuberant artist glori(ying himself. 25 Science Is no longer somber but
"gay," for instead of debasing himself in the investigation of the whole,
the investigator confirms himself in everything. 26 Moreover, truth
becomes whatever he can incorporate Into this metaphysic which
reflects his health. The suspiciousness which once drew Nietzsche
toward despair now exercises Itselfjoyfully as it destroys the hypocritIcal metaphysics of self-debasement in the act of "revaluating all
values" for the honest metaphysics of self-veneration.
But Nietzsche's new "truth," like any good therapy, is not universally applicable. It is true for his kind of soul-the soul whose
instinctual strength prevented It from acquiescing in the self-destructive
trap of the will to truth. But it is not "true"-indeed, it Is probably even
�SCHALLIOL
85
deadly-for the soul whose Instinctual weakness prescribed the will
to truth as desperate medication to stave off Its Inevitable self-destruction.27
Nietzsche's "revaluation of values" is necessary because the liberation
which convinces him of the heterogeneity of the human species takes
place In an egalitarian age which has long ago abolished all but one
universal therapy for the perverted egoism of"last men." He must find
a salutary diet for his aristocratic health, and that requires the
exposure of the prevailing morality and the reconstruction of a new
•
one.
Yet this new suspicious/ grateful soul, which dares to ask "'Can aU
values not be turned round?"'28 strikes us as lacking suspicion toward
itself. Therein lies the supposedly healthy self-deception of the liberated Oberrnensch. who no longer wants "to see everything naked"29
and recognizes "not to indulge In psychology and curiosity In the wrong
place."30 As Nietzsche said with respect to his own past: life "wants
deception, It Uves on deception. "31 The higher man "knows" he can
remain healthy only as long as he does not really question the health
of his own Instinct, because he is now convinced that such self-doubt
-at least in himself-is ultimately only a passing stage to self-glorification.
Wherever he turns, he sees only a radical egoism, even In the attempts
to curtail or doubt that egoism. The soul which truly venerates itself
exploits everything that Is "other" for its own benefit, so It must
conceive of life as "essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of
what Is alien and weaker."32 Lacking all self-suspicion, this soul, like
a healthy aristocracy, "accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of
untold human beings who,for its sake, must be reduced and lowered
to Incomplete human beings, to slaves, to instruments."33 Nietzsche's
overcoming of his self-doubt becomes self-detfication.
What sense does it make to speak of"health" for such a soul? Where
is the "truthfulness" of one who no longer doubts himself? These
categories still make sense, I suggest, If one considers whether
Nietzsche has attained a successful medical evaluation of himself. As
with any medical diagnosis, Its truth must be determined by the
success of the prescribed treatment. Nietzsche prescribes for himself
the "revaluation of all values"-the comprehensive reconception of
human life based upon the radical selfishness he sees as the essence
of his health. If he can carry it out-If he can Uueit-then one can say
that Nietzsche has made a true diagnosis, for the ultimate standard
for truth here is life, not logical consistency. To be sure, reason and
logic are still Important Instruments which can serve this healthy
psyche by helping it articulate a cosmology consistent with itself. If
someone ''with opposite intentions and modes of Interpretation" from
�86
TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
traditional ones Is able to explain the whole as will to power,34 he
thereby strengthens the suspicion that the cosmos is "in all eternity
chaos"35 which Is receptive to his radically egoistic drive to appropriate
It intellectually for his own glorification. Nietzsche's view of himself
and the cosmos as will to power Is "true" as long as he can sustain his
belief in them. But to sustain this belief. he uses reason to articulate
a new cosmos which at least superficially confirms his insight.
To this extent Nietzsche's thought is personal psychiatry. He dares
to heal himself, for first sUspiciousness, then pride, prevent him from
trusting any other physician. Yet while he seems to be focused on
himself as his primary object, he publishes his therapy for all to read,
with frequent suggestions that he hopes to Influence others. 36 Surely
It Is one thing to tend to one's own psychic health and quite another
to try to change the world. However, a suspicious soul will not rest
content with medical treatment carried out only in its head. It will, I
suggest, demand to see Itself confirmed In concrete life, for otherwise
It would still suspect that it might be living a dream. But since
Nietzsche's healthy living opposes the foundations of modern European civilization, he would see his health confirmed only If European
civilization crumbles as he lives, that Is, only If egalitarian society
would give way to an "order of rank" consistent with his view of healthy
life. In Nietzsche's case, therefore, personal psychiatry naturally leads
to political revolution by the demands of truthfulness. To refrain from
testing his therapy would be psychiatric pretense. To carry out the
test risks the transformation of the human world.
This explains. I suggest, why someone so devoted to his private
well-being was equally devoted to the publication of his self-analysis.
It also explains why the author of so self-absorbed an autobiography
as Ecce Homo could also call himself "the man of calamity" whose
truths would explode the culture of his day, for "it is only with me that
the earth knows great politics. "37 Moreover, it explains how the central
concepts of "eternal recurrence" and "will to power" are depicted In
Nietzsche's writings both as personal psychological tests for a true free
spirit and as political weapons for clearing away obstacles to the new,
great health. 38 The instruments he has used for his personal therapy
will, if they are trustworthy, confirm his health when employed on
others, for an essential part of his self-evaluation is that the weak
Instincts opposing htm are themselves sick and on the verge of
collapse. His writings will provide the catalyst:
A pessimistic way of thinking and doctrine-an ecstatic nihilism
-can under certain circumstances be indispensable precisely for
the philosopher-as a powerful pressure and hammer with which
�SCHALLIOL
87
he breaks and removes degenerate and dying races In order to make
way for a new order of life or to implant in what is degenerate and
wants to die a longing for the end... 39
This means that the confirmation which Nietzsche seeks through
the community is hardly the companionship of like souls, but rather
the service their subjugation or demise can provide in confirming
himself. The whole of European civilization becomes the laboratory
subject of his grand experiment. If his revaluation of values succeeds
In concrete reality, his relative health is confirmed, for he will have
shown not only that he could think himself the center of the whole,
but also that life permits him to be the center. At the same time,
however, his success would confirm neither a universal truth nor a
utopia. If life "permits" him to be its center, then life has no abiding
structure independent of a will which creates its center. The health of
Nietzsche's radical egoism will depend on his confirmation that there
is no opposing ''world" which will resist his will. Perhaps the best way
to test this hypothesis is to attempt a revolution which tries to
implement the opposite of the status quo. 40 If the same cosmos
permits opposite orders, then there is some evidence to suggest that,
in fact, the whole is "in all eternity chaos" and that "my" will is
supreme.
According to this analysis, Nietzsche's ultimate psychic health lies
In the solitude of a god toying with the universe. His frequent references to multiple "free spirits," "new philosophers," and "immoralists"
make sense from a psychiatric perspective as uses of the royal we
through which Nietzsche stimulates his own psychological evolution.
They make sense from a political perspective only if they are recruitment devices for semi-sympathetic soldiers Nietzsche needs to implement his experiment, promising an aristocracy while his own radical
egoism demands a monarchy. 41 Likewise, passages which suggest his
concern for the fate of the human species42 more likely show his
concern for his own fate, even though they, too, could serve to
persuade aristocratic humanists to join his revolutionary guard.
Nietzsche is the lone warrior whose health will ultimately be confirmed
if the world accedes to his experiment. This marriage of personal
solitude and confident political efficacy is particularly evident in Ecce
Horrw, written shortly before his collapse. There Nietzsche explains
how proper it is that none of his contemporaries understands him,
even though these same ideas will soon produce an unprecedented
upheaval of contemporary culture.43 It is precisely these often perplexing juxtapositions of solitude and social conscience, or scientific
�88
TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
modesty and self-deification, which make sense once we see that
Nietzsche is testing the health of radical egoism.
But must suspiciousness-and its outcome, truthfulnes&-inevitably lead to profound solitude of this kind? If it must, the consummate
philosopher is condemned to isolation. What of those who clalm to
practice truthfulness but refrain from or stop short of self-deification?
Nietzsche, I suspect, would say such men delude themselves. But does
it not make sense to ask at the vety beginning whether Nietzsche's
trademark-his profound suspiciousnes&-is not already a symptom
of an incurable disease? Suspiciousness already presupposes a particular "self' alienated from a usually hostile "other" and which
thereby presumes that this selfs well-being comes at the expense of
the other. Even though Nietzsche clalms to analyze himselfwisely, he
does so from the tainted perspective of a self which is already confidently opposed to the world. In this respect, his examination resembles the mistake he warned of concerning the evaluation of science
from the perspective of science.44 Even if science or suspiciousness
can only be evaluated from a more primordial perspective called "life,"
there Is no more primordial perspective from which to evaluate life,
for that Is the inarticulate ground of all evaluation. Life's Immediate
appearance In a human being Is instinct, so Nietzsche's conception of
Instinct-first as self-preservation, then as self-cultivation-is his
conception of life. But that Is not a determination he has articulated
from a more primordial standpoint, for there is no ji.Jrther standpoint.
It Is the immediate understanding of life one would expect from life
which has already articulated itself into a particular "self' opposed to
a hostile "world," i.e., Into a radically egoistic cosmology. Even when
such a self cialms not to know Itself and to be dutifully carrying out
experiments of self-d!scovety, the mere willingness to risk "the sacrifice of untold human beings" In such an experiment betrays an already
confident egoism. This Is why the seemingly extraordinaty transformation of Nietzsche's profound suspiciousness into the universal
gratitude of "amor jatt'4 5 is, In the end, so easy. Both psychological
Inclinations stem from a radically egoistic cosmology in which a
particular "self' is opposed to a homogenous "world." In the one case,
the world is uniformly hostile; in the other, uniformly nutritious.46
If this is true, then Nietzsche never truly examines life, for he cannot
know whether his powerful egoism is a paradigm or a perversion of its
inarticulate origin. But if the origin is inarticulate, he can reverse the
technique of traditional medical treatment. Rather than modiJY!ng the
constitution of the patient to conform to the pre-given order of the
encompassing cosmos, Nietzsche reconstructs the cosmos in order to
�SCHALLIOL
89
have it conform to the pre-given constitution of the patient. Whether
he himself is a perversion or a paradigm of life thus never comes into
question; it is enough that he is alive. 47 His truthfulness thus rests
on a primordial ignorance-a paradoxical will to truth which spurns
self-evaluation precisely because it has reasonably concluded that
self-evaluation is impossible. Lacking self-evaluation, this particular
self lives by becoming the author of the cosmos, and its truthfulness
is ultimately tested by whether it succeeds In its attempt to live the
life of God. We cannot help wondering, however, how wise this wise
ignorance Is which tries to confirm the possibility of radical egoism
when Its very confirmation would make it unintelligible. Nietzsche's
veneration of himselfwould reach its consummation only if the cosmos
proves to be pure chaos and he can become God for a time. Whatever
proud mastery this might demonstrate in the face of other human
beings, it must ultimately demonstrate insignificance In the face of an
eternally and chaotically changing cosmos which ultimately consumes
all of its children. 48 Nor can one learn much from or relish one's
experiments If one knows he carmot even live to see their results, as
Nietzsche knew.49 The life Nietzsche proposes requires a seemingly
incredible marriage of discursive sobriety and Inarticulate forgetfulness-a consciousness which both knows and forgets that It is
perpetually deceiving Itself. It is surely open to debate whether
Nietzsche was successful in actually living such a live with success.
Nonetheless, as Nietzsche himself demonstrates, this is a possible
articulation of life.
The purely personal foundation of Nietzsche's thought, however,
permits us to consider an alternative "truthfulness" which Is worthy
of that name but does not entail self-deification and thereby utter
solitude. If there Is ultimately no perspective from which we can
discern the character of life other than life, which by definition is
Inarticulate, then one can ask from one's own lnnnediate understandIng of life whether life Is not something other than mere will to power.
One can imagine, for example, a soul characterized by wonde,ao rather
than suspicion or gratitude. 'Wonder," like these Nletzschean alternatives, might imply an articulation of life into an individual psyche as
"self' opposed to everything else as ''world." But whereas suspicion
and gratitude already imply a confidence in the specific character of
this separation, wonder does not. This self, unlike Nietzsche's, might
be uneasy with Its articulated role in the cosmos, as reflected perhaps
In Its perpetual willingness to reconsider its own legitimacy. 51 It may,
for example, be uncertain about its detachment from everything else
which has been separated from It as "other." It may also not know
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
with confidence where domination, servitude, or some other response
to the "other" is appropriate. This uncertainty may stem not just from
the restlessness It feels from betog unable to articulate Its origin, but
also from an inkling that life may not be a monistic force, but perhaps
a composition of heterogeneous forces, among which one discerns,
say, a will to power and a will to death. Wonder might well become
either suspiciousness or gratitude, presumtog that one's Immediate
understanding of life might change as one lives it. Nietzsche, In other
words, Is an eternal possibility In such a soul.
The truthfulness of a soul marked by wonder, however, would be
exemplified not in Its confident daring to confirm Its own detachment
from the world, but in Its reluctsnce to conclude that it must be so
detached or that otherness Is homogenous and so calls for a uniform
response from the self. Therein lies the possibility of friendship with
or willing subservience to another-possibilities precluded from
Nietzsche's radically detached self. This self, in all truthfulness, could
respond to otherness by trying to nourish a parity between self and
other, by acknowledging Its humility to the face of the other, or even
by extinguishing Itself In favor of the other. But because It, too, finds
Itself detached from all others, any community It pursues will never
have the confident stability of an unconscious community which was
never articulated into separated egos. Moreover, since this self still
questions how heterogenous the world might be, It will not just ask
whether what looks like selflessness might not be concealed egoism;
It will also ask whether what looks like self-deification may not be a
concealed will to death-a self ultimately seeking to dissolve Itself In
chaos through Its attempt to replace God.
A true Nietzschean would surely respond that all of this Is already
a symptom of the will to power. Self-consciousness, by Its very nature,
is an egoistic act, and the selfs attempt to distinguish "hostile,"
"beneficial," and "neutral" strains in the cosmos Is Itself also a sign at
least of self-preservation, If not self-cultivation. I would not deny that
these things are true-to a point. Self-consciousness is Intelligible only
through the distinction, and hence "self-preservation," of the self from
what Is other. Wonder, like Nietzschean suspiciousness and thankfulness, Is relatively egoistic when compared to articulations of life In
which an unconscious community emerges as a self distinguished
from Its world. But apart from such a possibility, which also constitutes an alternative to Nietzsche, I propose that there can be an
intelligible articulation of life in which a particular self Is separated
from the world but which is not merely a confirmation of radical
egoism. Such a self, for example, could consciously extinguish Itself.
�SCHALLIOL
91
A radically egoistic self could not. Conscious suicide for Nietzsche is
impossible, for as he is so fond of pototing out, the soui conscious of
its egoistic supremacy transforms everything else toto nourishment
for its own growth. 52 But one could Imagine a soul characterized by
wonder reaching the conscious conclusion that it was a perversion of
the whole and hence would extinguish itself. Moreover, a soui defined
by wonder might articulate otherness not to venerate itself, but
perhaps to venerate itself along with others or to venerate another
above itself. Indeed, the Jlldividuation of self Is a necessary prerequisite not just for radical egoism, but also for conscious friendship and
devotion to another. But all of these are possibilities, I suggest,
because each reflects a possible articulation of the toarilculate origin
Nietzsche called life.
If articulation is a product of life, then the attempt to learn how to
live life properly by first articuiating it is illusory. As I suggested above
concerntog Nietzsche, the only way to test one's understanding of life
under these circumstances would be to try to live it. The suggestion
that one couid judge one's own understandtog of life by comparing it
to that of another will not help, for the willingness even to entertain
the authority of another, as Nietzsche's case makes plain, is already
a reflection of one's understanding oflife. 53 His refusal to acknowledge
any authority for his own life other than himself has its antipodes in
the unconscious community in which one member never questions
the obedience or the authority of another. But somewhere between
these extremes is an understanding of life from which both of these
others are visible, though not clearly thereby accessible-a place
where solitude and community both lure a self uncertain of its very
self-articulation. Recognition in the reverse directions, however,
seems less likely. The unconscious member of a community will find
an Isolated self pitiful. The radical egoist, who cannot see any other
strand oflife through the monotonous darkness (or brightness) of will
to power, will denounce all entertainment ofheterogenous possibilities
as hypocrisy. Yet despite all of Nietzsche's claims about the difficulty
of solitude, the homogenous cosmology behtod it suggests a simple
and uniform life once the difficult initiation is over. An understanding
oflife which lies suspended somewhere between the will to power and
the will to death, on the other hand, may present a much harder task
-a task requiring the greatest struggle to avoid permanently succumbing to one of Its two equally necessary but equally inadequate
monistic intoxications. From this perspective, might not even
Nietzsche appear to be undisciplined?-Or lazy?-Maybe a hedonist
In disguise? To live this other life well, one might say, is "to be schooled
�TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
92
In the abridgment of ambition,"54 as long as it is understood that this
"schooling" Is no mere training of the Intellect. To claim authorsWp of
the dualism which fires this life is to fall into Nietzsche's Intoxicating
monism. Rather than abridged, ambition is there deified. To abdicate
authorship of it, on the other hand, is to tiy to retrieve the intoxicating
monism of innocence. Rather than abridged, ambition Is there extinguished. Each of these alternatives might be a life which we could say
one might live "truthfully," If we only acknowledge thereby that it is
one of the possible ways· in which life actually articulates itself. But
Its relative blindness to the other possibilities banishes it, I would say,
from philosophy.
*****
Notes:
I. HA Preface§ l. Citations from Nietzsche's published works In this paper
are coded by title abbreviation and corresponding book and/or section
abbreviation and/or number. The title abbreviations are: (Bl:J The Birth
of'Iragedy, (UM) Untimely Meditations, (HA) Hwnan,All-Too-Human, (D)
Daybreak, (GS) The Gay Science, (Z) ThUB spoke ZarathUBtra, (BGE)
Beyond Good and Evil, (GM) On the Genealogy ofMorals, (C11(] The Case
ojWagner, (I1) Twilight of the Idols, (A) The Antichrist, (EH) Ecce Ho111D,
(NC11() Nietzsche Contra Wagner. I generally follow Kaufroann's translations of BT, GS, Z, BGE, CW, TI, A, EH, and NCW, and Hollingsdale's
translations of VM, HA, and D. Citations from the unpublished frag-
ments are my translations, indicated byWwith the division, notebook,
and fragment number as they appear In Nietzsche Werke (1967 II.) and
are reprinted In Siimt!iche Werke (1980).
2. HA Preface § 2.
3. HA Preface § l.
4. HA Preface § § 3-8.
5. z. 1.1.
6. GS§344.
7. BT§ 15.
8. GS§344.
9. ZII.12.
10.BGE§ l.
1l.BGE§24.
12.BT Preface § 2.
13. Cp. D Preface§ 3.
14. BT§ 15.
�SCHALLIOL
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
93
Cf. GS § 110; Zll.l2; BGE § 24.
GS§ 344.
GMIII § 14,25,27.
EH "Destiny" § 3.
GS§ 344.
GS § 110.
CWEptlogue.
TWs Is the ultimate meanlng of the subtitle for the autobiograpWcal
Ecce Homo--''How One Becomes What One Is." Cf. EH "Clever"§ 9.
23. This gratitude Is most evident throughout EH and Is the natural
consequence of someone who has learned "to crave nothing more
fervently" than the eternal recurrence of all thlngs (GS § 341).
24. GS§347.
25. Zll.l2; BGE§ 211; WVll 38(13); GS § 347. The unpublished fragment
cited here is particularly il!umlnating, given its position ln this notebook next to the famous fragment which was published at the end of
The Will to Power. The three notes Vll 38(11)-38(13) suggest the logical
connections between solitude, the will to power, and "noble" philosophy.
26. GS§ 324
27. BGE §§ 30,43. For the portrayal of the will to truth as desperate
medication, see GM ill.
28. HA Preface § 3.
29. GS Preface § 4.
30. BGE § 270.
31. HA Preface § 1.
32. BGE § 259.
33. BGE § 258.
34. BGE§22.
35. GS § 109.
36. Recall the ambiguity between solitude and community ln the first
quotation of the paper.
37. EH "Destiny"§ 1.
38. For the former, cf. GS § 341 and Z lli.2. For the latter, see especially
WVII25(227), 26(376), 35(82).
39. wvn 35(82).
40. In this regard, the wordlng of BGE § 22-the first explicit "prose"
account of the will to power in Nietzsche's published works after Its
"poetic" lntroductlon ln z-ls very Ulumlnating.
41. Cp. Rosen (1989).
42. Especially ln GM I and Ill.
43. EH"Books" § 1, "Destiny" §1.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
94
44. BT Preface § 2.
45. EH "Clever" § I 0.
46. Seen in this way, Nietzsche embodies the repudiation of what he
exposed as "the faith in opposite values" which made all previous
metaphysics dogmatic. Cf. BGE § 2.
4 7. Cf. HA Preface § 1.
48. As Rosen (1989) points out (p.198), Nietzsche cannot himself avoid
the nihilism he imputes to his adversaries.
49. Cf. A Preface; EH "Books" § I.
50. Cp. Plato, Theaetetus 155d2-4.
51. Consider Socrates' observation that he continues to wonder whether
he Is a beast or not (Phaeclrus 230a).
52. Hence, as Nietzsche makes clear In GM, the last men are committing
suicide unconsciously.
53. Therein lies, I suspect, the significance Socrates sees In one's preference for conversation (dialegesthai) or display (epideixasthai) when
speaking to others. See, for example, Gorgias 447a-c and Prol:agoras
336a-d.
54. Lachterman (1989), p. vii.
WORKS CITED:
Kaufinann, Walter, ed. & trans. Basic Wrttings of Nietzsche. New York:
Modern Library, 1966.
_ _ _ _ _ _ .The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Viking Press, 1954.
Lachterman, David R. The Ethics of Geometry: A Genealogy of Modernity.
New York and London: Routledge, 1989.
Nietzsche, Frtedrich. Daybreak. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
-=-:--:-:c:-:--·· The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Katifinann. New
York: Vintage Books, 1974.
--::---::--:-.,..---· Hwnan. All Too Human. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
--=--:--:::-c:::· Silmtliche Werke (Kritische Studienausgabe). Edited by
Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter,
1980.
---:-::-:---:--· Werke(Kritlsche Gesamtausgabe). Edited by Giorgio Colli
and Mazzino Montlnari. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1967 II.
Rosen, Stanley. "Nietzsche's Revolution." In The Ancients and the Modems:
Rethinking Modernity. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989.
�From Rationalism to Historicism:
The Devolution
of Cartesiap Subjectivity
Carl Page
Cartesian rationalism and Enlightenment conceptions of reasonwith their universality, foundationalism, immediacy, and absolutism
are commonly taken to be opposed to late modern and post-modern
historicist interpretations of human understanding, interpretations
that emphasize contingency, finitude, mediacy, and the impossibility
of closure. The contradictions, however,lie only on the surface. As the
flower contradicts the bud (to recall an Hegelian image), so too does
historicism contradict the rationalism that precedes it. They are in
fact dialectical siblings, far too perfectly opposed to one another not
to be related. My aim in what follows is to show the matrix from which
they both spring, and thus to establish the meaning of their deep
consanguinity.'
I
At first sight, no two dispositions could seem more different than
the hyper-rationalism of Descartes, who seeks to render the motions
of his mind perfectly transparent and impervious to the effects of
history, versus the hyperpragmatism ofhistoricist thinkers who would
reduce their minds to vortices in an historical flux. 2 It could be said,
following a lead Descartes himself provides in the youthful notebook
entries marked O!ympica, that Cartesian philosophy has an Olympian
spirit.s As a genus, ali Olympian philosophies aspire to actual transcendence of mortal parochiality and subservience. Descartes is
therefore a paradigmatic Olympian. Yet Olympian aspirations do not
all have to be funded by the same source. Part of what I want to show
is the continuity between Descartes's rebellious, titanic desire to take
the Olympian heights and the equally titanic and hubristic assertion
that the heights are unpossessible in principle and therefore the
unworthy or foolish objects of mortal aspiration and endeavor.
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'!HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Descartes's own supreme confidence In a nouum organum, a new
Instrument for the realization of universal and primmy science, now
seems hopeless to his historicist descendants, but the reconception
of rationali1y on which it was based has, despite the disillusionment,
remained In place, having followed a devolution that spells out In the
medium of history an Intrinsic instabili1y at the heart of Descartes's
origlnalinstauration. The most recent and ultimate outcome of tbat
primal disequilibrium is contempormy historicist philosophy.
Several outward signs of the inner, dialectical relationship maybe
observed.
Both Carteslanlsm and historicism are revolutionmy. Just as
Descartes seeks a radically new beginning for all responsible thought,
so too does philosophical historicism define the essence of all responsible thinking In accord with its own axioms. This Is more than
renovating the edifice of philosophy; it Is an attempt to build It anew.
Philosophy's non-historicist past must either go or be transformed
completely because itls mistaken about reason's perfection, i.e., about
tbe best mode of reason's operation. Likewise, scholasticism was to
be replaced by free-thinking, authori1y and prejudice by lucidi1y and
self-possession. Both historicism and Cartesianlsm are deflationmy,
exclusive, and aggressive, and botb presume that a mistaken philosophical ethos renders all its possible fruits corrupt.
While relying In their revolutionmy mode on being doctrines of
reason's self-knowledge, In their more specific character they are
doctrines ofreason's epistemic self-assurance. Cartesianism sets Itself
the task of showing how representational contents of the mind construed as modifications of a stream of consciousness can count as
genuine knowledge, historicism that opinions generated within a
contingent historical process of tradition can do the same. As doctrines of reason's self-assurance both visibly labor at tbe question of
justif'ylng objectivi1y, at getting beyond whatever Is merely idiosyncratic in the circle of subjective ideas. That circle Is in tbe one case
bounded by the ego cogitans and in the other by received opinion in
the human communi1y at large, the latter being an example as it is
now said of lntersubjectivi1y.
Their revolutionmy zeal follows from the combination of having
identified a fragili1y in reason's adequacy and claiming to possess the
perfect instrument or attitude for dealing with it. In the latter respect,
historicists are more anxious about assuring themselves and their
fellows of their philosophical virtue than Descartes ever was. The
problem of reason's self-assurance is dealt with In the same general
way. Having given an account of what constitutes reason's operation,
�PAGE
97
both go on to make procedural recommendations for overcoming or
compensating for reason's constitutional infirmities. Thus Descartes
promulgates a method, historicists discuss canons of hermeneutics
and the structure of practical rationality as they vouchsafe theoretical
ends. In both cases a technique, an artful procedure is being put
forward as the necessary supplement to ensure reason's perfect
operation.
These are outward signs that Cartesianism and philosophical
historicism belong to the same Gestalt des Bew!jf3tseins, the same
"configuration of consciousness." The remainder of my essay speaks
in more detail to the character and historical trace of this shared,
underlying configuration.
II
Auroral modems were impressed anewwith the rational seductions
of the mathematical. Enthusiasm on this score amounts to a renaissance of the pagan delight In theoria and esteem of the liberal (as
contrasted with mechanical or banauslc) arts. Even more Impressive
was the cognitive power unleashed by the reinterpretation of mathematical understandtog in symbolic rather than eidetic, schematic
rather than eikonic, terms. This generated a noetically much wilder
sort of enthusiasm, stimulated by the joys of constructive mastery and
a vision of completeness.4
The urge to Cartesian mastery is an urge to total rational autonomy
that calls not only for a reconstruction of all one's opinions from the
ground up, but also for a repudiation of all one's preceptors as well.
Tutelage is a compromise, whether It be to nature as the given or to
the possibly good habits toculcated by family, by teachers, and by
tradition. On this basis, modern philosophy becomes a story of the
intellect militant, an imperialism of the mind convinced that the way
to Its perfection lies through an exquisite self-sufficiency-a convenient ideal, stoce It starts out in such solitude and alienation. As
Leibnlz insightfully observed, Descartes had the vanity of wishing to
be a solipsist. Yet this ideal of human reason's self-sufficiency Is not
confined to Descartes's single, meditating self. Likewise, the lntersubjective community of philosophical historicists would for the sake of
their hermetic self-satisfaction throw any philosophy hintiog at Olympian aspiration into the abyss where all devils belong. The call for
solidarity, as if it were the highest philosophical virtue, is Cartesian
solipsism In intersubjective drag.
Descartes's philosophical justification of his mathematically inspired rationalism Is, by consensus, inadequate. Dissatisfaction with
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Cartesian dualism is but one rather superficial sign, related to which
are more specific doctrinal problems about the status of Imagination
In Descartes's overall account. 5 Another sign Is the contemporary
w!lllngness to forego certainty altogether as a noetic standard, thus
protecting all understanding from the Cartesian Anxiety of supposing
that if certainty cannot definitively be established, allis lost to chaotic
Ignorance. a Perhaps histoty's judgment on the score of Descartes's
philosophical adequacy would not especially disturb him, since It has
also cast a definitive vote against Aristotelian physics-the practical
result he hoped to effect with his Meditations. Either way, the philosophical problems of justification left over from the postulation of
symbolic mathematics as a paradigm for theorizing haunt Descartes's
sober confidence In the control that he trusts hlmselfto be capable of
exercising over his own Imagination. Descartes cannot guarantee the
identity of Eudoxus ("sound-minded" or "renowned") with Polyander
("evetyman"), as the consummation of their mutual search for truth
(The Search for Truth, II 400 ff.). 7 That Descartes himself was well
possessed of noetic sophrosyne cannot be disputed. The question is:
why self-control, rather than rapture? What justifies the autonomous,
model-theoretic operation of reason as a way of epistemic knowing?
Such was the question Kant posed as a critique of pure reason.
It is sometimes thought that, in comparison with Kant's sophisticated demand for self-criticism, Descartes's rationalism either neglected the issue or naively left it up to some dubious theology. In fact,
Descartes perfectly well appreciated the sort of question on which Kant
based his whole undertaking. In the eighth rule of the Regulae,
Descartes talks of"lnvestigating evetytruth for the knowledge ofwhich
human reason is adequate" (I 30) and revealing "what is human
knowledge and what is Its scope" (I 31).
If there Is any Immediate difference with Kant, it is a difference in
tone. For Descartes, the critical enquity ls a crowning survey of
reason'snative domain rather than a determination ofboundaries that
reason is by nature prone to transgress. He is optimistic: "It should
not be regarded as an arduous or even difficult task to define the limits
of the mental powers we are conscious of possessing ... Nor is it an
immeasurable task to seek to encompass In thought evetytblng in the
universe, with a view to learning In what way particular things may
be susceptible of investigation by the human mind" (Regulae, I 31).
Kant on the other hand pessimistically describes critique as "a call to
reason to undertake anew the most difficult of all its tasks, namely
self-knowledge" (A xi). 8 It is difficult, according to Kant. because
reason as he Interprets it is constantly prone to seek more than noetic
�PAGE
99
sobriety permits, is constantly prone to lose itselfin SchwiirmereL The
critique of pure reason is an attempt rationally to deduce tbe noetic
moderation Descartes possessed by nature, deployed wltb tact, and
only partially managed to account for in philosophical speech.
Such differences of tone aside, tbe deep agreement between Kant
and Descartes on the nature of human reason is nonetheless evident,
botb In tbe project of determining In advance reason's general Illness
for knowledge and in tbe furiher projective hope tbat the domain of
rationally certifiable knowledge may also be completely surveyed In
advance. "Nothing In aprloriknowledge can be ascribed to objects save
what the thinking subject derives from Itself. .. pure reason .. .ls a quite
separate self-subsistent unity, In which ... every member exists for
every other ... consequently, metaphysics .. .is capable of aqulrlng exhaustive knowledge of Its entire field" (B xxiii). A more straightforward
statement of the hypostasis of theoretical reason could hardly be
Imagined. Pure reason Is a system with Its very own architecture (B
860); tbe knowledge It makes posssible is open to methodical and
complete survey. Kant thus interprets, alongwltb modems before and
since, the theorizing mind as an independent source of cognitive
content-knowledge from out of pure reason. Moreover, by being
reason's own possessions and constructions, the conditions for such
representations are entirely available to reason's self-analysis. This Is
tbe use Kant makes of the lwnen natw-ale. There are no shadows In
the transcendental domain, save the possible exception of that dark
and to us "hidden root" that the transcendental synthesis has in
imaglnation.9 The possibility of complete critique follows from the
homogeneity of tbe aprlori domain.
The aftlliation between Kant's image of pure, autonomous, self-crttical
reason and Descartes's mathematical paradigm may be discerned in
Kant's analysis of modem science's cognitive success. A century after
Newton published his Philosophiae Natw-aUs PrincipiaMathematica In
1687 (ever since an epitome) Kant published the second, B-edition of
his Krlitk der reinen Vemunft. He Introduces it by asking why metaphysics or First Philosophy (which, for him, includes ontology, cosmology, psychology, and theology), unlike logic, mathematics, and
now physics or Second Philosophy, has not yet found its way to the
secure path of science. He proposes to repair the deficiency by
re-construlng metaphysics In light of the conditions that make tbe
established sciences possible. Paramount amongst those conditions
Kant identifies conceptual domination of the given through the aprlort
projection of rational order, as opposed to passive reception of what-
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TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
ever unsystematic clues nature might deign to furnish. In the controlled experiments of Galileo, Torrlcelli, and Stahl. he writes:
a light broke In upon all students of nature. They learned that reason
has Insight only Into that which It produces after a plan [Entww:Jl of
its own, and that it must not allow itself to be kept, as It were, In
nature's leading-strings, but must Itself show the way with principles
of judgment based upon fixed laws, constraining nature to give
answers to questions of reason's own detennlnlng. (B x!il)
The Kantian notion of a plan or project (Entwur.Jl of reason Is the
proximate progenitor of theory In the modern sense, that is, of theory
as a rational construct or model. It Is also one of the ancestors of all
our contemporary philosophical talk of frameworks, conceptual
schemes, and hermeneutics. What distinctively marks Kant's picture
Is the presupposition that knowledge is gained in proportion to how
well nature answers to laws of reason's own Independent devising.
Thatls, reason decides in advance what could be the rational structure
of the world, and then nature answers yes or no.
This really Is, as Kant proclaims, a Copernican revolution. It
amounts to radically relocating the source of the order characteristically revealed by theoretical knowledge. All theoretical understanding
depends on a trans-empirical moment for the conversion of the
empirical and the merely general into eplsternic cognition. That moment Is traditionally described In terms of the universality, necessity,
and primacy that mark the first principles (archai) or causes (aitiaq of
the things themselves. Such order as successful science may reveal
thus derives from the link between phenomena and their real causes,
a link which reason may discern with varying degrees of perspicuity.
According to Kant's conception on the other hand, all possible forms
of system, order, and structure belong first and In advance to reason.
In a word, Kant's word, all order belongs to reason apriorL On this
alternative, science's systematic or universal character originally derives not from things but from possibilities legislated entirely by
self-contained, independently operating human reason. The world of
experience does not announce a cosmos to whose structure human
reason reaches out. Instead It announces a disarray of discrete points
of Information that can and must be mastered with the aid of our
rational templates. Such laws as nature then appears to follow are not
so many clues to the actuality of her primary causes but so many
schemes for organizing our apprehension of their ontic effects.
On the basis of what starts out as an observation about the origins
of objectivity in the positive natural sciences and Is later worked out
�PAGE
101
In detail as the structure of eplstemic objectivity In general, Kant
proposes that "we must therefore make trial whether we may not have
more success In the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects
must conform to our knowledge" (B xvl). The hypothetical analogy Is
the cornerstone of his critique. Supposing an analogous function of
the intellect at the level of what he calls "experience" (Erjahrung), Kant
undertakes to dissect the framework that Is created, not by self-conscious
theoretical production but by the subconscious, or what Kant calls
the spontaneous, world-constituting activity ofVerstand This dissection Is to lay bare Its entire cogoltive potential and therewith the limits
of specifically human knowledge. This can be thought of as an analysis
of the deep structure of the ego cogltans: "I have to do with nothing
save reason itself and its pure thinking; and to obtain complete
knowledge of these, there Is no need to go far afield, since I come upon
them within my own self' (A xlv).
So set up, the critique of theoretical reason Is two-tiered. It is
committed, first, to analysing the logic of knowing, and thence to
demonstrating both the exhaustiveness and necessity of that logic.
The structural analysis of objectivity Is not Itself the critique but
merely an instrument of the philosophical account of reason which
shows that theorizing must occur and can only occur In accord with
that particular apparatus. In the Critique of Pure Reason, those
demonstrations are to be effected through the Transcendental Deduction and the Transcendental Dialectic respectively. Thus, Kant seeks
thoroughly to rehabilitate reason's natural, metaphysical urges to
transcend what Verstandmakes noetically possible.
Although Descartes constantly remarks on the prudence of setting
our hopes In manifest accord with our often Infirm powers, Kant's
systematic humiliation of reason's natural pretensions Introduces a
strongly deflationary element into the modern picture of theorizing
reason. To be sure, Kant tries to hold on to the justifiability of
contentful universal knowledge-how are synthetic aprlortjudgments
possible?-wWle yet abandoning the Olympian moment, the knowledge of things In themselves. This abandonment Is captured In his
Image of "the territory of pure understanding":
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 Wm in enterprtses which he can never abandon
and yet Is unable to carry to completion. Before we venture on this
sea... It will be well to begin by casting a glance on the map of the land
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
which we are about to leave, and to enquire, first, whether we cannot
in any case be satisfied With what it contains. (B 294)
Kant's fear-mongering here Is rhetorically continuous with
Descartes's Invocation of an Evil Demon, yet with the difference that
Kant proposes no retrieval ofwhat lies beyond the immanent structure
of human understanding. He calls It land, but the map is really a map
of the Inner logic of a radically temporalized ego cogiians. Kant's
exhortation at the end of the passage anticipates all subsequent forms
of pragmatic, historicist admonishing to make do With the level of
cognitive achievement supposedly vouchsafed by finite, human powers alone. His warnings against speculative metaphysics may be
correlated with historicism's abuse of all philosophy that has an
Olympian spirit, and In giving up the Olympian moment Kant sets the
stage for the historicization and relativization of all possible transcendental structure. As Nietzsche so wisely prophesied: '1f Kant ever
should begin to exercise any wide Influence we shall be aware of it In
the form of a gnawing and disintegrating scepticism and relativlsm.'>IO
The heart of Kant's transcendental strategy is the hope of being
able to discern In the spontaneous, apriori construction of experience,
parameters that stabilize the possibility of universal and primary
knowledge. Kant's own metaphysics of experience, however, is but one
interpretation of this stabilizing structure. Gadamer's phenomenology
of tradition and Roriy's version of the conversation of mankind, for
example, are others. Read abstractly, an analysis of the conditions for
the possibility of knowledge could as well describe some ancient
endeavors as well as modem ones. The real change is written into the
notion of knowledge itself, whose order now in principle belongs to
reason construed as a self-contained entity with its own substructure,
rather than to the realities which it is reason's whole, derivative
essence to work at revealing.
As it happens, Kant's critique has been found as philosophically
wanting as Descartes's meditations. Outwardly, the rejection has
likewise been expressed as a dissatisfaction with dualism, In Kant's
case the dualism of noumena and phenomena. Inwardly, misgivings
have arisen on two fronts. First, they have been occasioned by worries
about the apparent parochiality of both the logic and the conceptions
of space and temporality on which Kant bases the contentful aspects
of his transcendental argumentation. Second, the Inferences of the
Transcendental Deduction and the Transcendental Dialectic have not
been entirely convincing. Kant has been criticized, therefore, not so
much for supposing an implausible and undefended analogy between
metaphysics and positive science, between First Philosophy and all
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103
that Is later than first, as for falling to notice that the constitution of
positive objectivity might well occur in more than one way, thus
determining quite different worlds (though with the same old surface
Irritations of the organism as ever). From this train of thought follow
books like Nelson Goodman's Ways of Worldmaking and all the
fascination with the possible incommensurability of Kuhnlan paradigms.
The metaphysics of human experience seems less and less to be
governed by laws whose necessity can be guaranteed. illtimately,
philosophical historicism comes to suspect that autonomous human
reason possesses no universals, tacitly or otherwise, that it can
responsibly call its own-a not unreasonable conjecture, ifindeed time
is the form of all possible representation (B 50). Both transcendental
idealism and historicism, however, suppose that rational order, such
as it be, nonetheless derives In the first place from productive or
spontaneous human ingenuity.
The transcendental turn entrenches the hypostasis of theorizing
reason. By seeking a systematic account of all that could possibly
belong to reason apriori, the critical philosophy Is the Cartesian
paradigm applied to the question of reason's self-knowledge. What
Kant calls his Copernican revolution, the move already evident in the
gesture of Cartesian mastery, whereby the human mind controls all
the possibilities of order, is both so rationally satisfYing and so visibly
successful that modern philosophy is still exploring the paradise it
builds, the island of mortal truth. It does so in the shadow of a general
philosophical responsibility to questions of justification which remain
in place Irrespective of attempts to redefine their specific meanings.
To stay on the island of truth, to be assured of knowledge, philosophical thought must discover the rules for the direction of its mind, its
regulae ad directionem ingeniL On this point, Kant refines Cartesian
method into architectonic, setting up the task of discerning the tacit,
objectivity-conferring parameters of reason's operation.
III
In the philosophy of this century, the stabilizing parameters of
reason's spontaneous and Inventive activity have been sought less in
the metaphysically perplexing inwardness of the single, Cartesian
subject or the phantasmagoric depths of the transcendental ego as in
the outward, trans-individual, ordered realities oflanguage and world.
Both language and world stand for well-structured domains that
belong to us in familiar ways; they are domains of lntersubjectivity.
Whether they be analyzed phenomenologically, fundsmental-ontologically,
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1HE ST. JOHN"S REVIEW
or analytically, their place at or near the center of contemporary
philosophy follows from their being such promising examples of
immanently accessible frameworks, apparently capable of disciplining
otherwise idiosyncratic constructions. Wittgenstein and Husser!
nicely lllustrate the more recent form of modem philosophy's congenltallmmanentism.
The linguistic tum is not of course all Wlttgensteln's fault. To trace,
In the cases of Frege and Russell, the Inner links between their
conceptions of mathematics on the one hand, and philosophy as the
logical analysis of!anguage (the means of representation) on the other,
would supply an important supplement to my account of modern
philosophy's early debt to Its mathematical paradigm. For present
purposes, however, Wlttgensteln's philosophical value as a representative of the linguistic tum Is twofold. First, he brooded over the
relation between the tum and philosophy's self-understanding, passIng on to his followers the fruitful, if Incomplete, Image of philosophy
as therapy or witch-doctoring (a function that Socrates was not above
engaging). Second, he pushed the question of!ogical form's origin. The
essentially Kantlan project of the Tractatus was a critique of reason,
based on the claim to have unearthed the ultimate logical structure
of all possible representation. Later, Wlttgenstein became dissatisfied
with his formal analysis and sought the parameters of representation
In the givens of ordinary linguistic behavior. The mysteriousness of
Tractarlan objects was left behind in favor of the salience of what is
observably done with words.
As he ponders the operational contexts of meaningful language use,
Wlttgensteln conceives objectivi1y In terms of his famous "languagegames." A language-game is the context governing the posslblli1y and
lntelllgiblli1y of linguistic transactions. The basic conceptual advantage of referring to them Is to get away from the picture of language
as a mentalistic template, possessed as a whole and in advance by
evety competent speaker. At this point, hope of discovering the unique
transcendental apparatus, the hope that led him to boast in the
Introduction to the Tractatus that he had found "on all essential
points, the final solution of the problems," has been abandoned and
Wittgensteln becomes a proto-historicist. Language-games happen to
be relatively local, while the most comprehensive context for all
linguistic activi1y Is called a Lebensform. What generates either
Lebensjonn or language-game remains undiscussed, indeed undlscussable: "what has to be accepted, the given, Is-so one could say
-fonns ofUje." 11
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105
On this view (reminiscent of Collingwood). the structure of human
understanding is adrift at the roots. There is no more reason to
construe or pursue experience according to one game or form of life
as opposed to any other. The realization of games and forms is at best
a matter of history, at worst a matter of whtm. Wittgenstein htmself,
however, is, like all defenders of retail sanity and interim stability,
optimistic: "ordinary language is all right." Yet phllosophy cannot step
outside of those ordinary bounds. 'The results of phllosophy are the
uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense and of bumps
that the understanding has got by running its head up against the
limits oflanguage" (PI § 119). Reason must learn to see how chtmerical
is the hope of making final sense of the pageant offates and decisions
written into its language-games. In a radical obversion of the experience of wonder, Wittgenstein's attempt to make do with intertm
stability leads to the declaration: "since everything lies open to view
there is nothing to explain" (PI §126). Others wonder, though, that
anything lies open to view at all.
The transition from the early to the late Wittgenstein is a microcosm
of late modem philosophy in general. In following his path from
transcendental confidence to chastened pragmatism, Wittgenstein
illustrates the same movement that runs in its broadest sweep from
Descartes and Kant to Gadamer and Roriy. The modem motif, formal
transcendentalism to historicist relativization, repeats Itself in
Husser!, a thinker whose Cartesian pedigree is as clear and distinct
as these things can be. Nonetheless, by the time Husser! arrives at
the notion of the Lebenswelt that appears in the work just before his
death, he finds htmself treading on historicist ground.
There has been much discussion of how history comes to figure as
a fundamental probleminHusserl's later philosophy, notwithstanding
the inconclusiveness of his few and late texts on the Lebenswelt and
its historicity.12 Two things, however, are clear.
First, Husser! accepted historicity as a prtmordial phenomenon
that constituted even the matrix of philosophical reflection. 'We must
engross ourselves in historical considerations if we are to be able to
understand ourselves as philosophers and understand what philosophy is to become through us."l 3 The theoretical ground of this
procedural directive had already been articulated in the Cartesian
Meditations: "the ego constitutes himself for htmself in, so to speak,
the unity of a 'history."'14
Second, Husser! was not by temperament inclined to convert the
acknowledgment of historicity into a doctrine of radical historicistic
finitude: "for the sake of time we must not sacrifice eternity." He
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TifE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
affirmed the possibility of an absolute moment, a moment of "perfect
Insight" (CES 71), "a critical over-view which brings to light, behind
the 'historical facts' of documented philosophical theories and their
apparent oppositions and parallels, a meaningful, final harmony''
(CES 73). Hegelian as it sounds at first, Husser! prefers to emphasize
the meantngfulness of trying to transcend the historical matrix over
actually doing so. Hence, he views philosophy as an "Infinite task"
(CES 72), though an Infinite task whose telos remains perfectly
Intelligible and entirely worthy of struggling to realize. His Englishspeaking counterpart in this respect was Peirce.
The problem bequeathed by the tandem conviction of historicity's
primordiality and philosophy's atemporal ideals is whether its two
parts can really constitute a unity. Husser! only began on such a
question, but his path from the hope of establishtng presuppositionless, i.e., perfectly clear, science to the perplexities of historical
relativlzation is a matter of observable record and makes my present
point. The phenomenological technique of "bracketing" or the epoche
is yet another version of the hypostasis of theoretical reason as well
as a self-conscious return, of course, to rational autonomy tn its strict
Cartesian form. Husserl's gambit is to do as much philosophical
analysis as possible within the structure of the immanently accessible
contents of consciousness, while not yet confronting the questions of
justification head on. As the origins of sophisticated eidetic structures
are chased down within the stream of internal time-consciousness to
the level of the Lebenswelt, they start to look less like atemporal
universals and more like the sedimentations of historical activity.
Husserl's ultimate problem is that an egocogitans bounded essentially
by temporality runs the risk of having the sedimentations withtn Its
consciousness reduced to noetic mud.
That both Husser! and Wittgenstein followed the logic of this
devolution testifies less to error than to philosophical conscientiousness. They followed with great consistency the implications of presuming order to be an Immanent possession of human consciousness. In
this regard, both have therefore contributed to the acute critical
awareness that marks the recent, self-conscious phase of philosophical historicism. Contemporary historicists have in various ways
latched onto language-games, forms of life, and the Lebenswelt in
order to help make sense of tnterim stability. History as the accumulation of cognitive practise becomes the court of appeal for justifYing
the rational procedures by which opinions are elaborated and evaluated. Cartesian universalism has disappeared, yet the assumption
that cognitive order arises originally from the projections of human
�PAGE
107
Inventiveness remains, embodied In the hope of trying to discover
objectivity somewhere In the stories of Ingenuity's often unconscious
exercise.
History In this sense Is the last resort for Cartesian subjectivity
because the measure of certainty or the constructive mind's
self-transparence reaches a limit there. As a forum for the realization
of human Imagination, history remains certain to the extent that we
can know exactly what we have done. This Is more plausible In the
domain that is the history of our thoughts than It Is In the domain
that Is the Wstory of our deeds. Yet, to see with the same lucidity
beyond the traces of our noetic Ingenuity, to see beyond to why it
works, to what it might mean, to how it might be good, requires a level
of insight historicism declares Impossible.
IV
Descartes's original legacy was twofold: an Image of reason's potency and an ideal for its perfection. The devolution of Cartesian
subjectivity Is a tale of disillusionment with the latter, played out on
the stage of the former, a stsge contemporary philosophy has not yet
quit. Methodically achievable, ordered Insight Into all that is possible
to know has been given up as the vision of reason's telos, but human
reason as an independent, self-ruling, Inventive source of all possible
noetic order Is the abiding Cartesian legacy, a legacy that the success
of symbolic mathematics and the physics based on it gives no lnunediate reason to suspect of counterfeit.
Reason's primary mode is busyness in the work-shop of its own
bright ideas, figuring out possibilities. Those constructions are, in
turn, supposed to be fully Intelligible in themselves. Moreover, the
activity producing them Is held to be governed by laws, Intrinsic to
reason, yet no less legitimate as guides to knowledge of what is. This
amounts to a hypostatic self-involution that both frees the mind and
sets the task of supplementing its free-play with assurances as to the
possibility of cognitive achievement. Descartes's own confidence In his
sound-mindedness and ability to get outside the circle of his virtuosity
did not pass on to his epigones. Yet, so compelled have they been by
the Image of autonomous reason, they have remained within that
circle, terrorized by hyperbolic doubt and cleaving to the preferred
Immanence of consciousness's subjective clarity before itself. The Evil
Demon that so Interfered with Descartes's meditating mind has now
been reincarnated as radical historicity. It is the power that Interferes
with contemporary minds, differentiating them so completely as to
make any universal remainder impossible. But historicity in this sense
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
is a ghost too, like "!he phantoms and empty images which appear at
night in !he uncertain glimmer of a weak light" (The Search for Tiuth,
u 408).
At its most significant level, Cartesian subjectivity involves no
mysterious substances, no metaphysical commitments except !he
reality of self-conscious human souls seeking understanding. It is a
self-effected abstraction and a wholly understandable one. All lheoretical stances must be abstract because reflection is not life, and all
lheoretical stances are understandable as attempts to see !he good of
lhings, life included, whole and clear. Cartesian subjectivity is a
lheoretical stance distinguished by the emphasis it places on !he
clarity characteristic of symbolic mathematics, an emphasis !hat
readily, !hough not necessarily, generates !he hypostasis of theorizing
and !he ideal of complete rational autonomy.
This emphasis is intrinsically unstable, for !he clarity of even the
symbolic domain is not a perfect guide to fully justified knowledge, not
even to malhematics, let alone metaphysics. Malhematical clarity has
origins necessarily obscure to !he symbolic imagination or, in other
words, less is available to certification by !he lwnen naturale !han
modem philosophers have been prone to fancy. The imperiousness of
clarity in !he sense of exact identification as a standard for knowledge
is reflected in various attempts, driven by a sense of !he lacuna just
mentioned, to reduce all definitions in malhematics to convention and
all axiomatics to purely formal systems. But no such reduction can
be total. This factis very nicely revealed by !he limitative results of !he
GOdel incompleteness proofs and !he Lowenheim-Skolem lheorem.
There is no formalization of !he satisfaction relation. The interpretation of structure is not effected by more structure.
The misplaced hope of somehow managing a complete reduction to
what !he mind can exactly specify inevitably leads to deforming !he
critical question of justification towards letting a phenomenology of
rational procedure suffice. Hence all !he contemporary discussion of
rationality, so often at !he expense of trulh. But !his is to neglect !he
question of how warrants are warrants of knowledge, of why being
rational guarantees noetic success. Whatever else it does, Kantian
critique at least reveals !he philosophical sense and necessity of such
questions. Nolhing practical hinges on !heir neglect, but !hey are an
intrinsic part of !hat "most difficult of all reason's tasks, namely
self-knowledge" (A xi).
Descartes was a pWlosophical hero in the eternal battle against !he
twin evils of self-satisfied dogmatism and skeptical despair. For !hat
he is to be honored. Unfortunately, the establishment of Cartesian
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109
subjectivity sets us up for philosophical paranoia, for being tempted
to set aside nous and to seek perfect reasonableness in the exactitude
with which we can certify the contents of our minds as Its contents.
There Is rationality within the circle of ideas to be sure; it simply Is
not whole. The attempt to make It do for the whole ofbelng reasonable
becomes canonized in the Kantian project of critique, but this strategy
soon begins to fall apart under the creeping realization that purely
autonomous human reason operates by no parameters that can
responsibly be regardedfas at once proper to It yet, at the same time,
universal. Once Ingenuity cleverly undoes the supposed necessity of
Cartesian method and the Kantian transcendental apparatus, It Is not
long before it begins to seem that there Is no choice but to make do
with the less than methodical ways by which we happen to rule our
minds, with the less than necessary history that has shaped up our
ability to construe experience.
Historicists take the devolution of Cartesian subjectivity to be a
revelation of reason's wholesale and Inevitable Inadequacy to first
principles. On the other hand, those whom Socrates called the "friends
of the forms" take that same history to be a reductio ad abswdwn of
the original hypostasis whereby thinking became a kind of self-Involved
making. According to the Socratic-Platonic view, once we take serious
aim at giving a lngos there is a sense In which our minds are no longer
our own.
,., * * * *
Notes
l. Those familiar with David Lachterman's work will recognize that my
proposed topic elaborates one of the themes raised by "Descartes and
the Philosophy of History," IndependentJownal ofPhllosophy 4 (1983);
31-46
2. Although historicism has several distinguishable meanings, for the
purposes of this essay I confine myself to the specifically philosophical
form that has emerged in the last few decades or so. Philosophical
historicists include Hans-Georg Gadamer, Richard Rorty, Michel
Foucault, and Alasdair Macintyre. Quentin Skinner, Charles Taylor,
Hilary Putnam, Bernard Williams, and Joseph Margolis might also be
mentioned as favoring kindred views. For a careful account of
historicism's several senses, see chapter one, "From the Logic of
History to the Historicity of Reason," in my Philosophical Historlctsm
and the Betrayal of First Philosophy (Penn State Press, forthcoming).
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
3. A selection of Descartes's Olympica are avallable in John Cottingham,
Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, Th.e Philosophical Writings of
Descartes, 2 Vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversUy Press, I985), pp.
4-5. The Olympica ostensibly have a rhapsodic, enthusiastic quality.
For an account of their rationalist subtext see Richard Kennington,
"Descartes' 'Olympica,"' SocialResearch28 (I961): I7I-204.
4. The relationship between modernity and philosophical interpretations
of mathematical understanding is a large and fascinating story to
which I have barely alluded here. Indispensable texts for the study of
this question include: Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing? tr. W. B.
Barton Jr. and Vera Deutsch (Lanham: University Press of America,
I985 [1967]); Edmund Husser!, Th.e Crisis of European Sciences and
Transcendental Phenomerwlogy: An Introduction to Phenomenological
Philosophy, tr. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
I970); Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of
Algebra, tr. Eva Brann (Cambridge: MIT Press, I968), and Jacob Klein:
Lecture and Essays, ed. Robert B. Williamson and Elliott Zuckerman
(Annapolis: St. John's College Press, I985); David Lachterman, The
Ethics of Geometry: A Genealogy of Modernity (New York: Routledge,
I989).
5. Dennis L. Sepper, "Descartes and the Eclipse of the Imagination,"
Journal of the History ofPhUosophy 27 (1989), 379-403, and "Imagination, Phantasms, and the Making of Hobbesian and Cartesian Science,"
TheMonlst71 (1988): 526-47; W:ronique F6ti, "The Cartesian Imagination," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 46 (1986), 63I-42;
Stanley Rosen, "A Central Ambiguity in Descartes," in Th.e Ancients
and Modems: Rethinking Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press,
I989), pp. 22-36.
6. The phrase "Cartesian Anxiety" was coined by Richard Bernsteta in
Beyond Objectivism and Relativism Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, I983).
7. Rene Descartes, Th.e Philosophical Writings of Descartes, tr. John
Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I985).
8. Im1nanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Norman Kemp Smith (New
York: St. Martin's Press, I965).
9. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 4th edition,
enlarged, tr. Richard Taft (Bloomtogton: Indiana University Press,
I990).
I 0. Friederich Nietzsche, "Schopenhauer as Educator" in Untimely Meditations, tr. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
I983), p. 140.
II. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd edition, tr. G.
E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, I958), p. 226. Henceforth PI.
�PAGE
111
12. An extensive literature includes: David Carr, Interpreting Husser!:
CriticalandComparativeStudies [The Hague: Martlnus Nijhoff, 1987),
and Phenomerwlogy and the Problem of History: A Study of Husserl's
Transcendental Phenomerwlogy (Evanston: Northwestern Universi1y
Press, 1974); Hwa Wol Jung, "'The Life-World, Historici1y, and Truth:
Reflections on Leo Strauss's encounter With Heidegger and Husser!,"
Jownal of the Brttish Society for Pherwmology no. 1, 9 (1978), 11-25;
James Morrison, "Husserl's 'Crisis': Reflections on the Relationship of
Philosophy and History," Philosophy and Phenomerwlogical Research
37 (1976-77); Hehnut Wagner, "Husser! and Historicism," Social Research39 (1972): 696-719; Paul Janssen, Geschichteundi..ebenswelt;
einBeitrag zar Dtskussion von Husserls Spiitwerk (Den Haag: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1970); LudWig Langrebe, Phiirwmenologie iind Geschichte
(Giltersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1968), several essays from which are translated in The Pherwmerwlogy of Edmund Husser!, ed. Don Welton
(Ithaca: Cornell Universi1y Press, 1981); Paul Rlcoeur, Husser!: An
Analysis of His Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern Universi1y
Press, 1967); Aron GurWitsch, "'The Last Work of Edmund Husser!,"
Philosophy andPherwmerwlogicalResearch 16 (1955): 380-99.
13. Edmund Husser!, The Crtsis ofEuropean Sciences and Transcendental
Pherwmerwlogy: An Introduction to Phenomerwlogical Philosophy, tr.
David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern Universi1y Press, 1970), p. 391.
Henceforth CES.
14. Edmund Husser!, Cartesian Meditations, tr. Dorion Cairns ('Ibe
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), p. 75.
15. Edmund Husser!, "Philosophy as Rigorous Science," In Husser!:
Shorter Works, ed. Peter McCormick and Frederick Elliston (Notre
Dame: Universi1y of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 193.
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�Hegel on Time
I
Eva T. H. Brann
This note is written in memory of David Lachterman, who was an
alumnus-using the term in its fullest significance-of St. John's
College, Class of 1965, when I was a young tutor. He was In my classes
only In his junior year: In a preceptorial entitled 'The Fragments of
Parmenides and Heraclitus," and In the mathematics tutorial, where
texts are studied that would continue to preoccupy David, texts
pertaining to early modem mathematics and physics. Over his four
years In .Annapolis, we did, however, see each other continually and
for various purposes. He was editor of the student journal I advised,
we read together, and we discussed his annual essays. We continued
this friendship sporadically but persistently over all the places where
he spent his life.
An Inquiry into so crucial a question as that of time In Hegel's
system would have been welcomed by him, whether or not It told him
anything new. And he would have liked the fact that it was meant to
help students.
This paper on time in Hegel's texts Is conceived in three paris. •
I. I will begin with an exposition of the paragraphs on time in
Hegel's Philosophy ofNature (<Jl 257-61). The exposition Is meant to be
helpful to a reader new to this text. The first and central paragraph Is
very difficult; In fact Heidegger Intimates that It might have no
"demonstrable sense" (Being and Time <Jl 82a). Of course, no Hegelian
meaning is ever demonstrable. It can be followed out in thought as it
unrolls, but in a dialectical rather than a demonstrative mode. What
I mean Is that we can allow the concepts In question to develop their
Implications, but that when we participate In this spontaneous motion
we are not driving home an argumentative conclusion in which some
propositions entail others.
• I want to thank my colleague Peter Kalkavage for his cUscerning aitique of this paper.
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'!HE ST. JOHN"S REVIEW
Consequently an exposition of a stretch of Hegelian dialectic will
employ less argument and more quotation, paraphrase, and illustration. In the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, of which the
Philosophy of Nature Is the second, middle part (1830, with later
additions from lecture notes by Hegel and students), Hegel usually
begins with a succtoct and purely conceptual text, which is then
sometimes expanded In Remarks and Additions. The best an explatoer
can do Is to choose key sentences, resay them to various ways, and
finally find an illustrative figure. It follows that the explanation might
be longer than Its text, though somewhat easier. But It will also be a
ktod of degradation of Hegel's endeavor, for It will re-present the
concept In figural garb, Imaginable schemata, and Intuitions, and
such representations (Vorstelhmgen, Enc. <J[ 3) are mis-representations. They are not what Hegel means, and the reader should see them
only to un-see, to think them. Representational thinking Is falsifYing
even in our case, the case of Nature, where the Idea, the cosmos of
thought, appears "as totultion" (AnschaUU11g, Enc. <J[ 244; last paragraph of the Logic). For Nature Is still the Concept, and to be intuition
Is not the same as to be intuited. Concepts are always to be conceived
(Koyre, p. 280).
Thne, It will turn out, Is a kind of intuiting, todeed the matrix of
all intuiting, but it is not therefore to be Intuited, that Is, looked at,
rather than thought out. The moving pictures that Hegel himself
suggests to Illustrate the emerging determinations of thought are only
concessions to our ordinarily representational minds, and our real
effort must be, as I said, to make these sensuous fixities evanesce,
leaving their conceptual life behind.
Nonetheless, in the realm of Nature concepts are somewhat more
legitimately Intuited than In Logic; at least the recovery of the concept
from the figure Is less wrenching. The broad reason is that In Nature.
the Idea gets away from itself and sets itself up for betog "looked at"
-an-geschaut
There is something very unclear In what I have just said. How do
we deal with the claim that to Nature the Idea is Intuition? When the
Idea of Logic turns itself into Nature, who Is left over to think Nature?
Of course, we, the readers, are left over. In studying the science of
logic and the philosophy of nature we ourselves are not, In that respect,
Concept and Nature but we are recapitulating their development. We
are asked to watch from the outside the birth of our thought, our world
and ourselves. Hence each moment of the development Is an autonomous activity and also our thinking. In the case of Nature, this dual
character means that we think about Nature conceptually while
�BRANN
ll5
participating In Nature's lntuitivily. Thus we can at once think time
and illustrate that thought with our temporal experiences, both
physical and psychological.
There Is a less approachable difficulty, beyond the present exposition In scope: the turn of Logic to Nature. Through this turn thought
becomes spatial, and on the plausibility of the transition depends the
answer to the question of questions: How can thought contact the
extended world? If Hegel's transition is properly dialectical the great
mystery of the Idea become Nature, of the Incarnation, is solved. If,
on the other hand, the transition Is an abrupt leap Into a new realm,
from thought to non-thought, the old quandary stands. Hegel himself
seems to Intimate that there Is such a leap, that the Idea does not just
pas&-thoughtfully-into Life, but resolve&-willfully-to release Itself
freely out of Itself as Nature, Its image or "counterfeit" (Wiederschein,
Enc. 'JI 244; F1ndiay, p. 270). If the transition is indeed abrupt. then
· we have a problem that will show up mostlmmediately In the Hegelian
genesis of time: If nature Is abruptly the other of thought, where does
its conceptual motion come from? In particular how will utter otherness, Space, generate the primeval self, Time? But more of this below.
II. The second part of the paper will consist of a brief Inquiry Into
the reason why, within the System (the account of the developing
concept), time first appears In Nature, that is, In the Philosophy of
Nature, andwhereelseitmlghtbeexpectedtoappear-iniheEncyclopedia
or out of it. In particular I shall argue that Hegel's natural time, a
narrowly abstract concept, is not different from the much grander
Time of the last chapter, called "Absolute Knowledge," of the Phenomenology of Spirit. In an anticipatory word: Natural time, or Negativity
in Extension, is identifiable with phenomenological Time, or Spirit in
the World.
III. In the third part I shall, ftoally, attempt a brief critique of two
readings of Hegel's passage on time that are given in two books: Martin
Heidegger's Being and Time (1927, 'JI 82) and Alexandre Kojeve's
Introduction to a Reading ofHegel(Eighth Lecture, 1938-39). Heidegger
criticises Hegel as standing in the "vulgar" tradition that interprets
time as an aggregate of nows. Kojeve praises Hegel because his
primary temporal phase is the future. I shall argue that, to begin with,
Hegel does not understand time from the aspect of its phases at all,
but that, if any phase is primary, it is the past of psychological time
set out in the Philosophy ofMind ('ll 450 ff.)
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TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
I. Time in Nature
Logic presents the development of the Idea, or the concept-world,
In Itself, in Its own element, in thought. Nature is the same Idea in the
form of Its own Other, or Other-being (Anderssein). It is the idea as a
negative of itself(<][ 24 7). As David Lachterman puts It, the Idea "begins
[its career in the sciences of the real] by exfoliating Itself into external
Nature" (p. 154).
There seem to be tw:o moments in the Otherness of Nature. First
it is simply thought negated, non-thought. And then, more determinately, it is externality, outsideness. The Idea outside Itself Is not
another Idea negatively signed, the non-A of the A, but a true Other.
For just as the Idea in Itself expresses its self-involvement in conceptuality, so this Idea for itself-the Idea in a confronting modeexpresses its alienation from Itself as self-externality. But the Idea that
is external to Itself is in itself external; it has a new feature: spatiality.
<][ 254. The common name for abstract self-externality is Space.
Hence the Philosophy ofNature begins with space. Ideal or mere space
Is the first determination of nature as "the abstract generality of its
being outside Itself," its "immediate indifference." As such Space is
continuous; no parts are missing and none are discernible; thought
has no foothold yet. What is being conceptualized is the traditional
understanding of space as "parts outside parts," or continuous extension.
What is all-important here is that space precedes time in thought.
Space is the absolutely least mediated (which means least thoughtdeveloped) appearance of nature. Hence space antecedes both world
and soul. It is neither a receptacle for matter (Tlmaeus) nor a form of
human sensibility (Critique of Pure Reason), but a dialectical beginning: thought gone outside Itself as the thought of outsideness. (In
Hegel's earliest philosophy of nature, Jena 1803-4, time precedes
space, Harris, p.244. The Jena systems are not taken into account
here.)
<][ 255. Space has internal differences, indifferent, qualityless
differences-the three directional dimensions. They remain in space
and are intrinsically indistinguishable from it, and from each other.
<][ 256. But it develops also qualitative differences, its own negation,
the same dimensions as generative of volume. The negation of space
is a point. For the point is not space, not extended or continuous. Yet
as the negation of space It remains spatial. Thus It cancels Itself and
In getting away from itself it becomes a line. A line is the extensivity
or spatiality of the point. And thus on to the ideal volume, a delimited
part of space (<][ 25 7).
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******
Now enters time. Time is once and for all a dialectical second. It Is
the negation of space and therefore forever space-related. Or, more
purely, more conceptually, spoken: Time is the first mediation of
outsideness.
In view of the Importance of the dialectical order, !tis useful to set
out the dialectical framework of the Philosophy of Natw'e. It Is, of
course, a major triad of moments: Mechanics, Physics, Organics.
Mechanics, the moment in which time appears, is nature as implicit.
Here externality Is merely ideal; nature Is apart or asunder without
any explicit unity ofform. Here space develops time, and both together
place. At this stage arise motion and then matter. (Note, once again,
the order.) The eventuation of matter Is the dialectical passage into
reality, and It Is somewhat like that of Concept to Nature: "inconceivable for [undialectical] understanding" ('l[ 261). In any case, It Is
outside my present scope.
'l[ 257. The point that, as related to space, developed into volume
also appears as Itself indifferent, that Is, unrelated to the quiescent
next-to-one-anotherness of space. It marks Itself off: 'Thus posited for
Itself, Itis time" (die Zeit). Note well: not a point of time, but Time itself,
not a now in time, but a principle of time. That the point Is "posited"
''for Itself means only that, In the usual dialectical movement, It
becomes thought-determined (or mediated) as an other. But because
the point negates the indifference ofspace in the sphere of self-externality,
It leaves space, In Its inert side-by-sideness by the way. Thus arises
time as distinct from space, as the other of space.
'l[ 257, Addition. Space Is mere quantity: All Its parts, even the
termini, subsist-have only relative being-on the same footing. That
Is its defect. Its negativity Is Ineffective since It keeps falling indifferently apart: ''Time is precisely the existence of tWs .perpetual
self-cancellation." Here "difference has stepped out of space"; the
point has actuality. Whereas In space, which is externality through
and through, difference is always attached to the other, time Is the
"negation of negation," the "self-relating negation." It negates the
indifferent negations of space and therefore becomes actually distinct
from space. Space Is "paralysed"; time is difference In Its living unrest.
These are the dialectical terms regarding time In nature. What is
meant?
Let us recall briellywhatnegativity is. It Is the Inner life of concepts,
their motion, through which concepts determine themselves by reachIng beyond themselves to their negative. What makes dialectic selfgenerating Is that conceptual thought spontaneously out-thinks Itself,
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goes beyond itself. Indeed, the German word for concept says as much,
for Begrijffirst meant "periphety," and an encirclement determines
inside and outside almost simultaneously.
Hegel says clearly that space itself goes outside itself to make the
transition to time; the transition is not made subjectively by us. That
transition is logically primeval in the sense that it has occurred in
thought before we came on the scene. We must therefore think the
beginning of our habitation before even in thought it has developed
subjective thinking. We··must think through space to time, not from
its outside but from its inside. Hegel's formula for this development
from space to time as we follow it is that "the truth of space is time."
Truth for us is what is not immediately known but has been thought
through; truth in the concept itself is what it eventually returns to
after having been driven by its own life beyond itself. in thinking space
through in its own terms we must refrain from "pictorial thtnklng,"
from representing a model of space to which we then also add the
dimension of time: "Philosophy fights against this 'also."' But I think
we cannot help using some representation.
Imagine then, the life of a point In space. It rejects the indifferent
difference that It possessed as a part of the paralytic continuum and
raises itself out of space. For it Insists on its own qualitative negativity
and so It overcomes or negates Its indifferent spatiality. I propose that
the meantng for us of this formal event Is: Space develops glimmers
of consciousness. For us to thtnk of space means to represent to
ourselves a wide field In which, willy-nilly, some location holds our
attention. But our attention wanders, from this point here to that point
there. 'Time is spacing" (Derrida, p.43). By that "here-there-there"
space calls forth time. It Is, one might say, the space-point's capability
of being attended to. Space attended-to generates, or more radically,
is time. This representation of the relation of time to space is humanly
plausible, I think. But what happens when we are out of the picture,
when there Is no one to do the attending? I thtnk we must, by hook
or crook, picture the same situation minus the observer. Now space
localizes Itself, points pick themselves out 'and up: "Time lifts up
space," as Derrida puts It (p.43); relever, "tore-lift," Is his translation
of Hegelian aujheben,literally "to lift up," as well as "to save" and "to
cancel." Space, although it is the other of thought, is enough of a
relative to thought to wish to come to life, to differentiate itself. And
space actively differentiated Is certatnly unthinkable without time, if
time is understood as the differentiation of difference, or variability in
extension.
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But how to grasp the notion that this activated space is time? Well
what else would It be? Whence would time be added? Time Is nothing
but space beginning to come alive, becoming self-conscious as it goes
forth on the road of recollecting Itself out ofits alienation from thought.
Wby space becomes time through its points, why time is to be
conceived as the punctuation of space, was one question. Another
might be: Which point is time? This point, that point, any and all
points? Hegel says in a general singular: "Negativity, as point, relates
itself to space" (<Jl257). Eventually time must, no doubt, acquire "the
points of time," the nows. But, I think, the general point of space In
which time originates is not a now or a here, not a here-and-now. It
Is the abstract principle of time. Hence even the picture without
persons was misleading: Even in Its own terms, space Is not yet
punctuated but has only developed to the point of being capable of
punctuality; it is in principle punctual.
<Jl 258. Space sprawls while time is "the negative unity of
self-externality." Space, whose parts are each outside its indistinguishable other, has developed an opposing unifying principle. Wbat,
next, Is meant by unified different difference In the most abstract,
formal sense? It Is becoming, In which being and Its own not-being
are transiently at one. In becoming, differences are ever self-canceling.
Here we are asked to recognize the formal identity of time and
becoming. This becoming is not, however, the mere logical category of
Becoming, the unity of Being and Nothing (Logic <Jl 88). Becoming In
externality Is directly intuited: angeschaut. looked at. Here we are
certainly asked to think of time in a Kantian mode, from the point of
view of a cognizing subject: Time is adumbrated as becoming in the
Intuitional mode of representation, of Vorstelhmg (Philosophy ofMind
<Jl 446 If.). Time, one might say, Is the as yet unfulfilled condition of
having something placed innnedlately before us, an unfilled form of
sensibility.
<Jl 258 Remark. As Hegel puts it, "Time, like space, is a pure form
of sense or intuition," "the non-sensuous sensuous." But whereas
space Is confronted as an object, time is abstract subjectivity, in
principle the same as pure self-consciousness. It Is the I, I, I, the
monotonous continuum of mere self-awareness. Because of the abstractness, time is, for all its punctuality,like space, continuous. Thus
begins, so to speak, the corning-to ofNature-rightaway,ln the second
dialectical phase.
How did we get from time as becoming-in-space to time as
self-consciousness? Their formal principle is identical, that of double
negativity or self-negation. But this identification can also be made
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Intuitive by an exercise of abstraction: Take from self-awareness all
that is diversified and inward and you are left with something pure
and external. One might call that product of negative intuiting an
external subjectiv11y. As Hegel puts It: "pure being-witbln-self as sheer
coming-out-of-self."
It Is useful to point out here that the human subject is, in fact,
described in terms identical to the "external subject," time, namely in
the Aesthetics (Third Part, Third Section, Second Chapter, lc, p. 277).
The subjective inwardness of a listener-the topic is music-Is there
charged with doing exactly what the point did in nature: It "eradicates
the indifferent side-by-sidedness of the spatial and draws its continuity together into a point of time." In this psychic context that point is
the now. Later In the chapter (2a, p. 283) time is the negative
externality; "as canceled asunderness, [it Is[ the punctual, and as
negative activity [I tis] the canceling of this point of time for another ..."
Here, in the psychic realm, Hegel Insists on two simultaneous
negations: The point eradicates the indifference of extended space by
concentrating It into a time-point. But It also negates Itself as this now
in favor of the next now. In nature, however, the flux of nows Is
derivative from the first negating activity.
The danger in trying to get at time through abstractive intuition is
the false representation of time as a container in which things come
to pass and to pass away. Not so: "Time Itself is the becoming, ... the
actually existent abstraction." The real that fills time Is, of course, in
a sense distinct from time but it is also identical. For like time It lives
in the element of self-externality. It is limited, and so negated by an
other: 'The abstraction of this externality and unrest of its contradiction is time Itself."
Note that whereas In<][ 257 the self-negativity or thought-likeness
of time was emphasized, In the Remark on <][ 258, Its still strong
space-likeness is brought out.
Here, by way of contrast, Hegel enters the eternal Concept or Idea,
which is outside the power of time. Or rather, it Is beyond the restless
Imperfection of time. The Concept has this relation to time: It Is totally
what time Is prevented from being by Its birth In externality-negative
through and through, having completely brought all determinations
within. The Concept is neither an abstraction from time nor "out of'
time. Indeed !tis "out of' nothing but totally Inside Itself. Noris It after
time as a futurity.
Eternity and Nature are more extendedly considered in <][ 247,
Addition. The most illuminating sentence says that Nature Is essentially related to a Ftrst, and that First is the Idea or concept-world. For
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Nature Is the Idea in the form of the Other. Hence Nature Is not
eternal-temporal as a Standing Now, though It Is temporally Infinite,
and It is not eternal-uncreated for it has its own "before."
'I[ 258, Addition. Hegel reiterates that time is not a something or a
power, but only the "abstraction of destruction." It is not because they
are In time that things perish; time is their perishableness. He gives
an Ironic account ofthe now: It has a tremendous right-that of being
nothing individual. But of course it Is not universal either. It "struts"
momentarily and "falls Into dust. "The universal of the now is duration.
In duration the now-process is canceled, and what Is universal, that
Is, identical in all the nows, prevails. But this extended status is only
relative. If everything stood still, even our imaginations, there would
be no time. However, things are finite and do change. The reference
to our representational faculty, Intuitive mind, will reveal its significance In Part II of the paper.
Hegel returns to eternity. Eternity Is not the universal now of
duration but absolute Presence. It is not duration in extension but,
so to speak, duration "reflected Into self' or self-collected, when all
process has come to completion and Its phases are fully present.
Two beings are out of time: the best and the worst. The worst is
relatively out of time. It endures. Such is space and the now, universal
duration itself, for these are too abstract to live. Such also Is Inorganic
nature and static ari, like the pyramids. The best is out of time In
truth: the Idea, Spirit. These transcend time because they are themselves the Idea-the First-of time. In the world the truly alive, an
Achilles, an Alexander, die: only the mediocre endure.
In this Addition Hegel chooses to speak of time as destruction, as
Chronos devouring his children. But it is the destructiveness of life,
negativity at work. It is therefore identical with fruition. To pass away
In time Is to have lived out the Concept.
'I[ 259. Hegel finally comes to the phases of time, which are the
dimensions of present, future, past. He connects them formally to the
moments of becoming. They are "the becoming of externality as such,"
meaning that we are to conceive how externality, being what It is,
becomes temporal, namely in terms of becoming. Recall that In formal
Becoming, Being passes over-logically-into Nothing (and Nothing
reciprocally into Being). Hegel deliberately determines at first only the
Now and leaves the other phases for the Addendum.
In this passing Into each other the different moments vanish "into
a singularity," and this is the Now. It is exclusive of these moments
and yet continuous with them; Indeed it is nothing but their vanishing
Into each other. What this means Is that Becoming, In being tempo-
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
ralized, or better, externalized, begins by collapsing its two logical
moments into one: the Now both is and is not; it is separably formed
yet belongs to the universal Now. It is a singularity because it is an
individual differentiated from Its universal, but an unstable one
because of its evanescent, dual nature.
<[ 259, Remark. This Now has affirmative being insofar as it is
distinguished from the negative moments of past and future. In
nature, ''where time is a Now," the other two dimensions do not
properly exist. Insofar as they do, they are space, for space is negated
time, as conversely, time was negated space. In other words, time gone
and time to come In nature mean having left or having not yet arrived
somewhere. We are coming close to the concept of place and motion.
It is only for the soul, for the subjective representational mind referred
to above, that the dimensions exist in their difference: In remembrance
and in expectation.
Hegel now launches Into an attack on mathematics similar to the
one in the Preface to the Phenomenology ofSpirit. The point is to show
why time, the moving externality, has no extensive science, though
space, the paralyzed externality, does. The reason is, of course,
precisely that space has three-dimensional configurations which hold
still. Time, when similarly paralyzed by the understanding, is reduced
to the repeating unit, to arithmetic.
<[ 259, Addition. The other two dimensions arise when the unity of
becoming is seen under two opposite aspects. Ifbelng is the foundation
and non-being secondary, we have passing-away, or rather "passedaway," "in Hades," Past. The past has been actual, as history or nature,
but It is posited under the category of non-being. For the Future the
reverse holds: "Non-being is the first determinant while being Is later,
though of course not In time." From this point of view the present as
middle term Is the Indifferent unity of the preponderant moments of
past and future: It Is, because the past is not, and It Is not, because
the future is. The present Is an indtfferent unity because In It neither
being nor non-being is the determinant, and it Is a negative unity
because it lives by the no-longer and not-yet of the other phases.
The determination of the phases completes the positing of the
content of the concept of time for Intuition, namely as real becoming,
or becoming-In-externality.
********
Space was what is often called the thesis of the mechanical triad,
and time the antithesis. The reunion of both, their synthesis, finally
yields what the point rising out of space had only adumbrated: The
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here-and-now, space-time, or Place-and right away, with only a
momentary lag, Motion and then Matter, the real filling of space.
'll 260. The dialectical moments so far are these: Space in its
indifferent asunderness was the concept of Otherness in itself or
Implicitly. Time was its truth, the same concept thoughtjoritself. Now
time collapses back Into space because the unity of the negated point
does not hold. For as becoming it is constituted of opposing moments
that cancel each other. The point cannot maintain Its exclusive
negativity and finds ltselfback in space, so to speak. But tWs returned
point is now posited, that is, thought through and made explicit. It is
at once in and for itself. It is a point that much the richer in
determinations or, as Hegel says, concrete. This concrete space-time
point Is Place (Ort).
'll 260, Addition. The exposition of the concept of duration as nearchangeless time already presaged the collapse. For time, In the
absence of change, Is not concentrated somewhere in space but is
indifferently everywhere and nowhere, and that indifference Is just
space. The point becomes, as we saw, universal. It Is always but also
everywhere Now.
'll 261. Place Is the slngularlzation or individualization of the
durational universal. Place Is the posited identity of space and time.
If you think it through, to be now is to be here and to be here is to be
now. But this Identity is also contradictory: Insofar as place Is a
singular here It is so only as a spatial now. Hence the spatiality of
Place is indifferent, and external to it: "Place is simply the universal
Here" (Addition). Any particular place negates itself and might as well
be another place. ''This vanishing and self-regeneration of space in
time and time in space .. .ls Motion." Humanly understood, the intuiting
mind turns every point of attention into a place, but no abstract place
offers a way to hold the attention, so that the indifferent here is
immediately turned into a passing now. Place Is the reciprocal relation
of space and time, and that is just what motion is: Now here, Now
there.
'll 261, Addition. The essence of motion is "to be the Immediate unity
of Space and Time," such that time now has real existence In a space
truly differentiated by it. In motion, time and space first become
actual; this means that what they are in concept and what they are
in appearance coincide. In motion we first legitimately intuit the time
and space we have previously only conceived. Nature is beginning to
be animate: ''Time is the purely formal soul of Nature .. ,"
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Here ends the exposition of time in nature. If time, as the abstract
principle of life in space, is the formal soul of Nature, we might expect
It to reappear in the subjective soul of Mind. And so It does.
II. Time in Soul and World
The next project after the exposition of time In nature Is to figure
out whether the time that occurs in other contexts-either within the
System developed in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences or
without, especially in the Phenomenology of Spirit-is the same as or
different from the time of Nature. The question arises because on the
face of It they certainly sound different: "Time [is] the negative unity
of self-externality" (Philosophy ofNature)-''Time ... Is the existent Concept itself' (Phenomenology ofSpiri(j. I will argue that time is one and
the same in all of Hegel's thematic passages, though the dialectical
stages are different. The possible value ofthis inquiry cannot, however,
be in the claim itself, which is apt to meet little resistance, but it is
merely in the descriptive comparison offered.
Where does time appear In the Encyclopedia? Not in its first part,
the Science ofLogic. For there the Concept is developed as it is In itself,
immediately. That is not to say that the Logic is not full of mediation.
Indeed, it belongs to the course of the dialectical development to unfold
every conceptual simplicity, to interpose thought between every category and itself, to make its truth explicit. But throughout the Logic the
Concept that is being drawn out stays nevertheless entirely in its own
element, the ideational realm. No thought of anything other than
thought is at horne here. Since time develops from space, and space
is the Other of thought, it stands to reason that time should not appear
in the Logic. Its ideal prototype, however, does appear: Becoming. And
it appears roughly in the Logic just where time enters in Nature-In
the very first dialectical triad. (In fact, Becoming in Logic Is its triad's
third stage, whereas time in Nature is the second stage of its triad.
However, Hegel calls time the truth of space, and the moment of truth
is usually the third.)
It is a useful thought-exercise to consider, staying within speculative philosophy, what might be the alternatives to Hegel's development. (By staying within speculative philosophy I mean to exclude
views like Heidegger's, where human temporal existence rather than
ideal being stands at the beginning of the philosophical analysis.)
The chief dialectical alternative would seem to be to put Otherness
right within the idea-world as an arche, a ruling principle. Then time
becomes a mere epiphenomenon of change in the phenomenal world,
which change is the reflection of the activity of Otherness in the ideal
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world. This Platonic way, set out in the Sophist, has the following chief
consequence. Since Otherness I~ not one idea alongside the others,
but is by its nature dispersed through them all (254 If., 258d), it has
no dialectical progression to be mirrored in the phenomenal world; it
has no history. Consequently phenomenal time, natural or human, is
non-directed and unhistorical There is neither the bad infmity of
mathematical linear time, nor good infinity, the fulfillment of time in
history by the negation of every finitude. When Otherness is an arche
in the ideal world, there willbe no rational temporality either progressive
or just linear-only cyclical returns. That is one way to see why it is
importsnt that Time as a principle of Otherness be absent from the
Logic.
We have seen that time makes its appearance in the very first triad
of the Philosophy of Nature; it is Hegel's main thematic passage on
time, for here time begins. It appears right after space. The secondness
of time is its second most important feature: Time is space, while space
is the alienated concept, non-thought. The most importsnt feature is
that time is the first appearance of negativity in Nature, the first
glimmer oflife-in-the-world. So Nature is, abnost from the beginning,
temporal, dialectically alive, though in a spiritless way. Hence it can
work itself up to organic nature, to the living body ready to receive its
cognizing soul.
The third part of the System set out in the Encyclopedia is the
Philosophy of Mind (better, Spirit: Geist). In Nature, the Concept had
reached its perfected external objectivity (<Jl 381). Now Spirit comes
into being as the truth of Nature; Nature is the presupposition which
has disappeared into Spirit. In Spirit the Concept outside itself as
Nature returns for a reunion with itself. Spirit appears first as simple
immaterial nature: the Soul ('![ 388). One might say that it is a first
subjectivity, still close to nature. In Hegelian dialectic .the major
junctures always connect and separate what is closest and farthest.
Thus the subjective soul is most opposite to animate nature and yet
very close to it.
When does time enter the sphere of subjectivity? If we search, in
a perfectly mechanical way, for the dialectical analogue to Nature we
find a disquisition on the soul in its physical alterations and on the
natural ages of man ("Anthropology: the Natural Soul: Physical Alter·
ations," '![ 396). In the next phase, "The Feeling Soul,"we find not time
but an apology for its absence: Time arises with recollection, and
recollection requires self-consciousness. For without a consciousness
of self, the individual is a deep featureless mine, a treasury in which
memories "are stored without existing" ('![ 403).
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Time comes Into its own as subjective human time with the
development of "recollection." The German word is, felicitously,
Erirmerung, "lnwardization" (<J[ 452). We are still within "Subjective
Spirit," the first moment of the triad comprising the Philosophy of
Spfrtt.
Here Is how time, the external subjectivity of nature, becomes
Inwardly, mentally, subjective: Memory swallows, so to speak, original
intuitions, that is, sense Impressions, with their space and time
attached. We remember'objects and events as somewhere and somewhen. How we hold natural time within is a problem treated most
notably by Augustine and Husser! (Confessions, Bk. XI, Chs. xxvl! ff.:
The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, Section Two). It
is a problem that Hegel does not broach.
The attachment of the internalized intuition to external space and
time is, in any case, only a passing moment. The time- and spacebound picture, the photographic Impression, is only a brief first step
(<j[ 455).
"Intelligence" is Hegel's name for cognizing Spirit. Here we might
adopt one usual translation for Spirit-Mind-which happens to be
most applicable for this stage, the stage of representational cognition.
Intelligence Imposes its own space and time. Or, better, in absorbing
Intuitions it attends to them, recollects them, and in so attending, it
becomes their place, their space-and-time. The pictures of memory
adopt the subject's time, and their existence is In it, whatever their
external time may have been. Succinctly: the attending intelligence is
the Inner space and time of intuitions (<J[ 453).
Consequently the Intuitions of memory become contextless and
Isolated. The original intuitions were bound to natural time and place,
but their memory can be formed anywhere at any time. Moreover,
intelligence can forget, relegate wholly to the past, what it deems
unworthy and also fix In memory what It chooses for survival. Of
course, It pays for the Imperishableness of its memory-intuitions by
a loss of clarity and freshness. The time of intelligence, Hegel observes,
is the opposite of natural time in this. that the richness of original
Intuitions abbreviates their external time for the subject, while the
richness of Images expands their Internal time.
Recollection ("lnwardization") proper occurs when a picture is
referred to an intuition, such that several particular intuitions are
subsumed under one picture as a sort of universal. This reference
permits intelligence to recognize feelings and Intuitions "as already its
own" (<J[ 454). Here arises the Now and the Past for a subject. For. cued
by an externally present Intuition, the recollected Intuition is confirmed
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127
as having had existence. And the synthesis of this intuition recollected
as exlslentwith the present internal image is a re-presen111.tion properan inner presence reconfirmed as existent, an internal presence.
Of course, each such recognition also confirms the depth, the dark
pit, where the past lives ('li 454). Recall that in natural time the
temporal phases remain formal and do not reach existence ('li 259,
Remark). That existence has now been supplied to the past through
the recollection of the subject.
It can hardly be said that subjective time has been either essentially
defined or dialectically dertved. At best we can say that in the System
it makes its appearance just where it should.
Hegel does distinguish subjective time from external time by one
word: !tis universal. Instead of the abstract linearity and particularity,
the ever-collapstng here-and-now to which natural time tends, the
time of the mtnd holds its moments together. Each tnternalized
intuition is, as a picture, liberated from its temporal particularity and
able to serve as a universal, a recollectible reference. Perhaps we might
say-though Hegel does not-that subjective time is representational
mind, the power to bring and keep memory pictures before itself as
quondam intuition.
The dialectical connection with natural time would be as follows.
In the Philosophy of Nature time was expounded as "a pure form of
sense or tn tuition ('li 258)." It is the most rudimentary case of a selfthe self-distinguished potnt-confronting an external object. Thus it
is recognizably the primitive prototype of the intuition that starts mtnd
on the way to cognitive representation. That later tntuition has,
tnstead of ideal externality, a space-time that is sense-ffiled.
For tn the Philosophy of Mind intelligence begtns by deftntng the
immediate contents of its feelings as outside itself and projecting them
into external space and time, the two forms tn which the mind becomes
intuitive (anschauend). In mere intuition we are outside of ourselves
in the two forms of asunderness ('li 450). It is the "tnwardization" of
these forms that yields, as was said, recollection ('li 451). In capturing
Nature, the Spirit internalizes time and negates the externality that
space-born time could not escape in nature.
The passage in the Aesthetics (p. 277) cited above corroborates the
connection, though it reverses the order of exposition. There inwardness, as the prospective subjective unity, the active negation of
indifferent next-to-one-another subsistence, Is for a moment abstractly empty, merely marking itself off from the object. But it
immediately cancels this abstract confrontation to produce itself as a
true subjective unity. Then come the crucial sentences: ''The same
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1HE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ideal negative activity In its realm of externality is time." ''I is in time
and time is the being of the subject itself."
Dialectically, time has appeared as an abstract form in Nature, and
has been differentiated into objective and subjective time in Subjective
Mind. There remains the dialectic third (Logic 'li 163), the individualization of time. We might expect to find it in Objective Mind or Spirit
proper. And so we will, as History ('li 548-49). In history subjective
mind enters the world; it becomes world-mind, and its time worldtime, explicit but not merely extended, in the intuitable world but not
merely external. However, the exposition is spare.
We find more in Reason in History ('The Progression of World
History"): "It is in accordance with the Concept of Spirit, that the
development of history falls into time" (p. 153). For the connection that
events which we see as positive have to non-being, to the possibility
that their opposite might be-that is time. Time is the abstractly
sensual, which means that it is both for thought and for intuition. So
both conceivable and visible change are time. Change in nature Is a
-sometimes cyclical-monotony; change in Spirit is always a progress
since the Concept itself develops. But the higher figures of the Spirit
are produced by the reworking of the lower figures, which then cease
to exit. It is through time that this conceptual sequence appears.
"World-history is thus in general the display or exposition (Auslegung)
of the Spirit in time, as In space Nature displays itself' (p. 154).
It might seem that Hegel has here forgotten that the same negating
form of sense was already active in Nature (cf. Kojeve, p. 133). What
Is missing in Nature, though, is the part of memory that makes the
science of History possible. Nature Is capable of repetition
(Wiederholung) but not of recollection. In that sense time leaves space
behind.
I think that the stasis of nature in which the individual changes,
but never the species, would have been maintained by Hegel even In
the face of an established theory of evolution, since he regards long
duration as equivalent to stasis ('li 258, Addition; but see Findlay, p.
274; Kojeve, p. 146).
And as time was the subjective mind in Its phase so Time is the
Spirit tn its phase. Time and thought are the same negativity: 'Thne
is the corrosiveness of the negative, but Spirit is itself in the same case
-it too dissolves all determinate content" (p. 178).
The book tn which this Identification of Time and Spirit Is made tn
all its grandeur, most starkly and insistently, is the Phenomenology of
Spirit. The reader meets it first in a passage quoted above from the
Preface: "As for time .. .it is the existing Concept itself' ('li 46). Here it
�BRANN
129
Irrupts into the text out of context, so that a certain commentator, to
whom nescience Is second nature, takes It for a witticism.
The fuller, climactic passage comes from the last chapter, "Absolute Knowledge":
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 Concepr. that is, has not annulled Time. ('l[ 801}
Let me turn aside for a moment to the question: Why does time
make Its grandest appearance In a book that Is not strictly speaking
Inside the System that sets forth the development of the Concept? The
answer lies In the project of the Phenomenology, which is to tell the
story of the Concept from the point ofview of advancing consciousness
recollecting the moments of the Concept (Hyppolite, p. 7; Verene, p.
3). Now this recollection (Er-Innernng), mentioned on the last page of
the Phenomenology, Is a version, raised to the second power, of the
category familiar from the Phiiosophy ofMind, the one that generated
the past as an Intuitable phase of time. Within the System, as set out
In the Encyclopedia, time is sparsely and formally treated at the
beginning of the major phases and then goes underground. It is
absorbed into events as a merely formal motor of change. At the end
of the Phenomenology time Is again brought back to light and spoken
of humanly and dramatically. It Is not conceptually developed-"Time
is the Concept that is there" is not a dialectical exposition-but Instead
It is retrospectively presented. In this book the Concept itself and its
Intuitable motor, Time, is recollected, so that time Is viewed from Its
own beyond, from a point where all is Past. This grand Recollection is
an exaltation of the smaller recollective moment In the Phiiosophy of
Mind when human time came Into being. In short: In the Phenomenology time gains grandeur from the fact that it is thought as fulfilled
and thus ended, and it regains humanity from the fact that it is all
past, all for our Recollection.
It remains to state briefly what is said of time In "Absolute
Knowledge" and to show how even this Time Is formally and really
identical with the time of the System. Spirit, as the Concept-in-theworld, as self seeking itself in Nature, Is by its very meaning there,
outside In space, Intuitable: "It is [to begin with] the outer, Intuited,
pure Selfwhich is not grasped by the Self, the merely Intuited Concept"
('ll 801, adjoining the quotation above). Therefore Spirit is formally
identical with Time, "the Concept that Is there." Or, speaking figuratively, Spirit must appear In time. For recall that time was from way
�1HE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
130
back reflexive negativity at work on its own externality-dialectic
active in the element of otherness. Even at the end Hegel does not
forget that time, no matter how rich its determinations have become,
is, to begin with, pure intuited concept (<Jl80l).
Time must come to an end, namely when its negating activity has
mastered its own alienation: When the Concept "grasps itself it sets
aside its time-form." Time is therefore the destiny of the unfulfilled
Spirit, not as a destination before but as a direction within-toward
that complete self-recognition which is Science (<JI80l).
Here, too, Time is the "I=I" that it already was, abstractly and
rudimentarily, in Nature (Enc. <JI258, Remark). For "I=I" is the formula
of self-reflection (Pherwmenology <Jl803), which for the time-point was
called self-related negativity. This movement, whether of the abstract
point or the concrete Self, always means that a thought that has
denied itself has gone on to recognize itself in the denial. It follows that
such a self-superseding thought "has to be expressed as Time."
The burden of the last two pages of the Phenomenology (<Jl 807 -8)
regarding Time is this: The externallzation of the Spirit into an
intuitable Time-Self, its emptying itself into Time, is a self-negation.
Hence just as negating time conquered its space, so negating Spirit
now conquers its Time. Thus Spirit redeems the "sacrifice" implied in
its externalization, its Incarnation.
********
Is the Time of the Phenomenology the time of the Encyclopedia?
Heidegger answers this question incidentally but sufficiently during
his critique of Hegel's concept of time (Being and Time <Jl82b, p. 435).
Spirit can appear in time (or as Time) only on the basis of what
Heidegger considers an empty formalism: the identity of the formal
structure of Spirit and Time as negation of negation. That formalism,
recall, defmed time from its origin as the self-relating negativity of the
spatial point (Enc. <Jl257, Addition). Heidegger scorns the abstractness
of the conceptualization. But it Is this vety abstractness that allows
time toremaln self-identical through Its whole development. Moreover,
though abstract, the determination Is not empty. Negation of negation,
doubled negation, or self-related negativity-these are all terms for a
completed cycle of thought, a small token of achieved selfhood.
********
To recapitulate. Hegel views time under three formal aspects:
l. As dialectic motor: Under the aspect ofits dialectical activity
time is negated negation;
�BRANN
131
2. As abstract Concept: Under the aspect of its formal determination It Is Intuited Becoming;
3. As eternal Idea: Under the aspect of its annulment, Itis absolute
Presence (Enc. 'l[ 258, Addition).
It Is also useful to tabulate the four contexts in which time Is
developed:
0. In Logic as abstract Becoming;
1. In Nature as externalized becoming;
2. In Subjective Mindras Internalized Intuition;
3. In Objective Spirlt as the Concept in the world.
Are these the aspects and contexts of one and the same Time?
Absolutely. It Is In the very nature of time as a force of negation that
it must appear differently In different phases. For It Is Itself change,
and Is changeless only under the aspect of eternity. Since It Is neither
receptacle, nor flux, nor substrate, nor measure, nor any other
accompaniment of events, since it Is nothing more or less than the
finitude, the Incomplete determinacy of things-for their temporality
Is their objective determination (Enc. 'l[ 258, Additlon)-tlme will
perforce participate In their variability. Indeed It is their variability.
And so it must appear under as many different guises as there are
categortes of change.
III. The Phases Emphasized by Heldegger and Kqjeve.
In accordance with their different agendas in reading Hegel,
Heidegger and Kojeve insist on different phases of time as prtmary in
the texts. The one brings forward, with disapproval, theNow; the other,
with approval, the Future. I shall trY to show why neither of these
emphases does Hegel justice.
A. The Now Is, according to Heldegger's exposition In Being and
Time ('ll 82a), the ground of Hegel's interpretation of time. Heidegger
Is eager to show that Hegel remains entirely within the "vulgar"
tradition started by Aristotle, In which time is understood as a linear
series ofleveled-out Nows.
To make this point, Heldegger seizes on the central understanding
of time as the negation of negation, particularly on its moment of origin
out of space, when the point negates the Indifference of space and
elevates itself Into time (Enc. 'l[ 257). Insofar as this argument has any
demonstrable sense, Heidegger says, It must mean that each point
posits Itself as a Now-Here, Now-Here, and so on.
Similarly his Interpretations of Hegel's second view of time as
Intuited becoming (Enc. 'll 258) Is that It reveals time as understood
prtmartly from the Now. For "becoming" means transition from being
�132
TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
to nothing and from nothing to being. And "intuited" means notthought-out, simply presented to view. But the being of time Is the
Now, and the Now as always no longer Now can just as well be
conceived as non-being. So when these concepts are intuited In
extended nature, the two opposite moments of becoming appear
equally as Nows, and their extended succession as a mere Now-series.
At least that is what Heldegger seems to mean insofar as his argument
has any demonstrable sense.
Heldegger concludes by reinforcing his point from the passages
where Hegel speaks of the "enormous right of the Now" and where he
also refers to time as the "abstraction of consuming" (Enc. <J[ 258,
Addition). This last Is the "most radical formula for the vulgar experience of time." (See also Reason in History, p. 178, on devouring and
corroding time.)"
In rebuttal: Regarding the space-negating point, I have tried to
show that it does not jump out as a "here-and-now'' In the first
Instance, for it becomes a Now-here only afterwards, when it returns
Into space as place. The first dialectical motion yields only a phaseless
punctuality, a standing out from space that Is the mere possibility of
attracting attention.
Regarding "Intuited becoming," Heidegger begs the question, for
his exposition asswnes that the Now Is the being of time. What Hegel
actually says Is merely that time is the being which, insofar as it is, is
not and Insofar as It Is not, Is (Enc. <J[ 258). And that Is, formally,
Becoming. His analysis of temporal becoming is In fact such that the
Now is only the indifferent unity of non-being and being, the moment
of intuited becoming In which neither the one nor the other predominates. Heidegger has confused the phenomenal now with this dialectical moment. The dialectical Now is by no means primary. Moreover,
becoming cannot really be Intuited until there is reality, thatls, matter.
Up to that point It Is only the form of lntuitability. But once the real
enters, time vanishes Into things: 'Things themselves are the temporal" (Enc. <J[ 258, Addition). So there is not a trace of a linear Now-series
In the text. In fact, Hegel makes it clear that the point of time is not,
as are the points of space, amenable to homogenized serialization and
to meaningful quantification.
Regarding Hegel's ironic reference to the "enormous right" of the
Now that "struts Its stuff'' (spreizt sich auJl, he Is saying precisely that
the Now always bites the dust; it has no being.
In fact, Hegel does not, I have argued, originally construct time
from Its phases at all. He prepares them through primary Becoming,
which contains rudiments of past, present, future. But even on this
�BRANN
133
formal level the Now is secondary, for it is only the indifferent unity of
that Becoming, called coming-to-be, in which Being is the (logical)
starting point upon which Nothing supervenes with the reverse Becoming, called passing-away, in which Nothing (logically) precedes
Being. He does say that in Nature time is Now, but that phrase Is
merely meant to underscore the fact that the phases of time, past,
present, future, do not exist before there is subjective mind.
Finally, regarding the ''vulgar" notion of time as a devourer, It Is,
of course, only a figure for Spirit's eating out of the substance of the
world, its progressive resorption of Otherness. Hence the difference
between Hegel and Heidegger is surely not one between vulgarity and
originality. It concerns rather the relation of Spirit to Time and
Existence (Dasein). Heidegger says, correcting Hegel: "'Spirit' does not
first fall into time but exists as the primordial temporalizing of temporality" ('ll 83b, p. 436). (Hegel. it happens, had not said of Spirit that
it "falls" into time, but had used that phrase of the development of
history, Reason in History, p. 153.) For Hegel the Concept passes out
into Nature and then, through or as time, starts its slow return journey
-whose later stages it travels as Spirit-from being-there (Dasein) in
the world to being back with itself, canceling and also keeping Its
worldly existence in order to enter a new existence, a new world
(Phenomenology, last page). For Heidegger, on the other hand, not
thought but human existence is primary, and it comes to an end but
not to a consummation; for him the final negation is not a fulfillment.
That is the crux of their difference.
Derrida {1982) mounts a fundamental critique of Heidegger's
representation of Hegel's understanding of time as vulgar.
B. The Future is the primary phase of time in the Phenomenology
according to Kojeve in his Introduction to the Reading ojHegel (Eighth
Lecture; he was evidently inspired by Koyre's account of the Jena
systems, p.28l). Historical time, the time of most interest to Hegel, "is
characterized by the primacy of the Future." In pre-Hegelian philosophy, Kojeve claims, time was directed from the past through the
present to the future; this is, I think, false for Christians like Augustine. For Hegel the order is Future to Past to Present (p. 134).
Kojeve comes to this conclusion because he interprets time from
the point of view of the chapter "Lordship and Bondage" in the
Phenomenology (N A). There Desire is the dialectical motor, and Desire
causes action "in terms of what does not (yet) exist-that is, in terms
of the future." The Desire of this chapter is the desire for social
Recognition, and this desire engenders History. When it is satisfied
Time and History cease, as does the Future.
�1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
134
The Present, Kojeve adds, Is the real, spatial moment. Desire Is
related to It negatively, since it is the locus of Its dissatisfaction. The
Past, having been equally negatively formed, determines the quality
of the Present (pp. 135-36).
Kojeve's emphasis on the future Is not so much false in the letter
as somewhat off the spirit of Hegel's texts.
To begin with, Hegel himself does not emphasize the future. We
would not expect him to. For one thing, the dialectic motion is not
primarily drawn on from 8.head by the future satisfaction of desire. It
Is rather driven from within by the self-assertive pressures of implicitness. But even if each concept-moment Is to be thought of as big with
being-to-come, this being is not future-being, but the Concept Itself,
whose moments are emerging from ideality Into existence. The Concept is a timeless plan; when it enters into existence it is merely
repossessing the world, not goading it on. Secondly, it Is only the past
of which there Is phenomenological or historical knowledge. The
science of the Concept in existence (=Time) is History. The science of
the Concept not yet or no longer In existence Is Logic. There is no place
for a Hegelian futurology. And third, from the point ofview of"Absolute
Knowledge" the future has been entirely resorbed; what is left Is only
Recollection of the past figures of the Spirit.
Broadly speaking, It is the Marxism ofKojeve's interpretation that
induces him to put the future forward. For, like Heidegger, he wishes
to emphasize human finitude, whereas Hegel thinks that knowledge
can be absolute and infinite, in the sense of all-inclusive. Now to a
dissatisfied finite being, the temporal future Is the only locus of hope.
But to the Infinite Spirit, the completed and recollected Past Is the
prelude to the Absolute Present and Presence.
*****
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Der jnnge Leibniz I, by K. Moll. The Review of Metaphysics 33:2 (1979),
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Emotion, Thought and Therapy, by Jerome Neu. The Review ofMetaphysics
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and Karlliied Griinder. Archiv fi1r Geschichte der Philosophie 61:2
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Plato's TrUogy: "Theaetetus, The Sophist, and The statesman," by Jacob
Klein. Nous 13:1 (1979), 106-12.
Spinozas allgemeine Ontologie, by Konrad Hecker. The Review of Meta-
physics33:1 (1979), 177-78.
Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry, by Bernard Williams. studla
Cartesiana 2 (1981), 195-201.
The History ofSkeptfcism.fromErasmus to Spinoza, by Richard H. Popkin.
The Review of Metaphysics 34 (1981), 155-58.
The Radical Spinoza, by Paul Wlenpahl. Review ofMetaphysics 35 (1982),
476-79.
Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meanin9, Vol. l, by G. P. Baker and P.
Hacker. Philosophy and Rhetoric 15 (1982), 212-14.
Platon et l'Idealisme AUemande, by Jean-Louis Viellard-Baron. Clio 12:4
(1983), 389-95.
Plato's Philosophy of History, by Daniel A. Dombrowski. International
Studies in Philosophy. 16: I (1984), 84-86.
Vico and Marx: A.fftnities and Contrasts, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo. New VICO
Studies 2 (1984), 114-18.
Max Scheler. Person and Se!f'Value, ed. M. Flings. Canadian Philosophical
Reviews 8:5 (1988), 190-93.
The Discouse ofModernism, by Timothy J. Reiss. Philosophy and Rhetoric
21:1 (1988), 69-72.
Artstote et la question du monde: Essai sur le contexte cosmologique et
anthropologique de !'ontologie, by Rem! Brague. The Review of Metaphysics 43:2 (1989), 387-90.
Contingency, Irony, and Solidority, by Richard Rorty. Clto 18:4 (1989),
391-99.
Plato, Derrida, and Writing, by Jasper Nee!. Philosophy and Rhetoric 22:4
(1989), 310-13.
Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, ed. by Sander L. Gilman,
Carole Blair, and DavidJ. Parent. Philosophy andRhetoric23: 4 (1990),
325-28.
Histortsches Worterbuch der Phaosophie, Bde. 5-6, ed. by Joachim Ritter
and Karlfiied Grilnder. ArchivfilrGeschichteder Philosophie72 (1990),
86-90.
�DOMINO
141
Moses Maimonides and His Time, ed. by Eric L. Ormsby. Review of
Metaphysics 44:1 (1990). 157-60.
What Reason Demands, by Rudiger Bit1ner. 'The Review of Metaphysics
44:2 (1990), 403-6.
?Historisches Worterbuch der PhilosopWe, Bde. VII, by JoacWm Ritter,
ed. Archlv fiir Geschichte der Philosophte [forth].
?Interpreting Malmonides. Studies In Methodology, Metaphysics, and
Moral Philosophy by Marvin Fox. Review of Metaphysics [forth].
?Platonic Plely: Philosophy and Ritual in Fourth-Century Athens, by
Michael L. Morgan. Ancient Philosophy [forth].
Key
• = probably correct, but unable to verifY
? = probably does not exist I've check all the issues of the journal in
question for 1988 to the present. The entry also does not exist on any
of the dozen databases consulted.
Compiled by Brian Domino
�142
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
���
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Zuckerman, Elliott
Brann, Eva T. H.
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
Sachs, Joe
Stickney, Cary
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Schmidt, Richard
Sachs, Joe
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Schalliol, Gregory
Page, Carl
Domino, Brian
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The St. John's Review
Volume XLII, number three (1994)
Editor
Elliott Zuckerman
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
Joe Sachs
Cwy Stickney
Jolm VanDoren
Robert B. WilliamSon
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Gjergjt Bojaxhi
The St. John's Review is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's
College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President; Eva T. H. Brann,
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.O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800.
Back issues are available, at $5.00 per issue, from the St. John's College
Bookstore.
© 1994 St. John's College. All rights reserved; reproduction In whole or
In part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Prtntlng
Marcia Baldwin and The St John's College Print Shop
�This is the last issue to be published under the editorship ofElliott
Zuckerman. The new editor of the Review is Pamela Kraus, also
a Tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis.
�Contents
1 . . . . . Telling Lies
Eva T.H. Brann
17 ..... A Biological Theme in Aristotle's Ethics
Jolm White
45 . . . . . Where Is Greece?
Radoslav Datchev
65 ..... Two Poems by Sandra Hoben
67 ..... Book Review:
Two New Books by Alumni
Eva T.H. Brann
75 ..... One Man's Meter
Elliott Zuckerman
93 . . . . . Results of Crosswords
Numbers Five and Six
97 . . . . . Crossword Number Seven:
"Let's Be Liberal"
EZRA
��Telling Lies
I
Eva T. H. Brann
The first lecture of the school year Is, by an old tradition. dedicated to
that portion of the college new to this Friday-night ritual, the freslunen
among us. Yesterday, Thursday night, you participated In the first of
many seminars where you yourselves do all the talking. Tonight you
are present at the onlyweekiy event where someone else gets to speak
to you, a dean or a tutor or a visitor. One thing stays the same. Whether
you are speaking or listening, you are Intended to hear and to judge.
Although you may have allowed the talk of the world to persuade you
that "being judgmental" Is a social sin, judgments are what you are
Intended to render- on the words of others, though above all on your
own.
For example, this lecture Is entitled "Telling Lies." "What," you are
Intended to ask yourselves, "Is she up to?" Is she going to start us off
here by giving lessons In lying? Or, what Is worse, by preaching
honesty to us, good people all? If she Is so preoccupied with telling
lies, that's perhaps what she does.
And In fact I have already engaged In false speech. That "old"
tradition of dedicating this opening lecture to you, the freshmen - I
made It up myself and It Is only three years old. To recognize this and
similar lies you have to know some facts, and to judge their seriousness you have to have some appreciation of rhetoric.
For the bravado of rhetorical overstatement seems to be a species
of the so-called white lie. Perhaps such a colorless lie Is better than a
blazingly scarlet one, perhaps it Is not. You will spend time In the
language tutorial distinguishing and analyzing the rhetorical deceptions of!anguage and formingjudgments about them. To top It off, for
your last seminar, not only of your freshman year but again of your
senior year, you will read a dialogue by Plato, the Phaedrus, In which
questions of love, rhetoric, and truth are Intertwined. Unfortunately,
the knowledge that initiates you Into judging speech cannily can also
be construed as lessons In lying - an uneasy fact to which I shall
return.
But I have put the cart before the horse. Before you can judge
whether an utterance Is a lie, you have to be able to discern what It
means: meaning first, then judgment. For example, what does 'Telling
Lies" mean? Does It mean "what sort of a topic Is Telling Lies' for an
This was the Dean's opening lecture for the academic year 1993-94.
�2
TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
opening lecture? or does it mean "uttering untruths," as in "She stands
up there and keeps telling lies"? Or does it mean "revealing," as in
"Achilles' lies are always telling lies, since they tell us a lot about him"?
In order to establish possible meanings you have to know some
grammar. You have to know that "telling" can be a gerund, and then
"telling lies" is a subject to be talked about, or a participle, and then
"telling lies" is something a speaker does. Or "telling" can be an
adjective modifying "li~," and then "telling lies" are lies that tell you
something. 'Telliog lies" is in fact a pun, and puns exploit the
squlrminess of language, while gr.ammar nails down the choices. You
will be studying a great deal of grammar In your language tutorial. (If
that prospect does not delight you, do but consider that grammar is
etymologically connected to glamour, a most telliog relation.)
There is one more study that completes the traditional trio making
up the art of language. Besides grammatical regularity and rhetorical
effect you will also be studying logical validity. I shall return to the
relation oflogic to lying later.
All three studies are intended to make you canny and witting
hearers and speakers, able to discern meaning imd judge truth, to
have your wits about you. You will need these skills here, becauseyou
have joined a community that engages in a very peculiar activity. We
ask after truth. We ask whether the books we read contain something
true, and we ask on occasion not only what truth herself might be,
but also what the truth is, independently of books. I will say something
later about the reasons why It is unusual for a college to admit these
questions after truth and what the conditions are that make them
possible.
Whatever the conditions, let me point out one consequence of trying
to live In a truth-seeking community. Members of such a community
should probably try not to tell lies. It Is conceivable that there might
be one who earnestly seeks the truth for himself while determinedly
telling lies to others. But such a person is probably a loner, not a friend
among friends.
Let me give you two reasons that may be new to you why members
In any intimate community, such as ours, should be truthful with
each other.
We are able to tell lies because we who speak are encased in a
cocoon, in our opaque body. Some people think that they can see
through others and that others are transparent to them, but where
they think they see through our exterior as through a pane of glass
they are in truth apt to be looking into a mirror. There are no certain
somatic signs oflylng. The nervous reaction to being suspected Is not
�BRANN
3
discernibly different from that of being guilty. Consequently even lie
detectors are known to be unreliable. The human carapace Is really
Impenetrable.
Now when people live as closely together as you will on this campus,
a certain decent distance is essential to comfort. You will not want to
observe each other too penetratingly. But a bodily presence that hides
a lie draws attention, and a face suspected of being a fa~ade Invites
searching curiosity. Telljng lies In close quarters Is a temptation to
breached privacy and to sorry Involvements. Under these circumstances there Is no harm that Is not compounded by lies.
The same mortal sheath that hides thoughts can be used to express
them. I say "can be used" because every adult expression is part
performance. A small, close,lively community acts at its best like those .
revolving stone-polishing cylinders that take off the rough edges and
bring out the natural markings of a piece of rock. Those markings
represent the personal rhetoric, the gestures and the diction, that a
community of learning brings out in people. It is a curious fact that
adult nature has to be brought out by polishing.
Consequently there Is nothing straightforward about uttering which literally means "outerlng" -your meaning. Some of you may
think that spontaneity and sincerity are natural and therefore easy
and that controlled expression is hypocrisy, an elderly vice. I think
Intended spontaneity is a self-contradiction, and sincerity is a sappy
virtue, the virtue of Insisting on being always one's - possibly
reprehensible- self. And Isn't it a strange fact that people indulging
in natural expression tend to look dramatic and self-dramatizing to
their neighbors?
So I think I need to say something in favor of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy
derives from the Greek work for actor, hypokritiis. It Is a necessary
part of adult conduct because it prevents something worse. Hamlet
urges his adulterous mother to "assume a virtue, If you have it not"
(III. iv, 158). She Is to make a pretense of purity so that it might turn
Into truth. There Is a stage of badness beyond being bad, and it is not
caring how one looks. Hypocrisy. they say,ls the compliment vice pays
to virtue.
There is another similar word that brings out my point. The word
"person" comes from the Latin persona. an actor's mask. A person is
a being behind a mask, a self-made fa~ade through which come
utterances. The lower animals at least do not seem to have such
masks, because they have no conduct, only behavior. Perhaps one
should say that they are masks, masks through which nature expresses herself. But we have masks, and we conduct ourselves. I mean
�4
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
that there can always be at least a brief check between our impulse
and our expression. Horner uses a wonderfully apt figure: ''What word
has escaped the barrier of your teeth!" one person will say to another,
implying that the words should have been held back. We can maintain
silence, and we can shape our speech and its expressive accompaniments. In fact we cannot do otherwise, for all human conduct is a kind
of self-presentation, and being natural is a great feat. (A sociological
classic on this subject is, Erving Goffrnan's 'The Presentation of Self in
Everyday Life [1959[.) ·
Suppose I am right in intimating that learning to be oneself, to be
a person in a community, is an arduous work of mask-making,
requiring much biting back of words, some white lying, and continual
attempts to find expression that Will do justice to one's meaning. Then
to derail these efforts at sculpting one's own expressive persona by the
strong jolt of a crude lie would be a clime against your own developing
personality, particularly when you have looked someone in the eye
and sworn that what is about to come out of your mouth is the truth.
In Robert Bolt's play about Thomas More, A Man for aU Seasons,
Thomas says:
When a man takes an oath, Meg, he's holding his own self in his
own hands. Like water. (He cups his hands.) And if he opens his
fingers then- he needn't hope to find himself again. (Act Two)
So these are my two arguments - I don't think they are preachments - against outright intended lying. Telling such lies prevents
intimacy and wrecks self-formation.
There are plenty of authors who disagree with me in both directions.
Kant, whom you will read in your junior year, will condemn every kind
of lie, from the whitest social lie to the heroic lie told to protect an
innocent life. For lying, he says, is "the obliteration of one's dignity as
a human being" ('The Metaphysical Principles ofVirtue, 429). He thinks
so because he thinks that the Will to communicate our thought is part
of what it means to be a person, and thus to misuse speech is to
abrogate our personality, to undo the intention of our own rational
will, which must be to utter truth.
There are, on the other hand, authors who advocate lying like hen.
Machiavelli advises his prince to be like a fox and to deceive when it
is to his interest ('The Prince, Ch. XVIII). Rousseau blithely confesses
that he often lied from embarrassment just to keep the conversation
going. In fact, he does talk a suspicious Jot about lying, in his Reveries
of a Solitary Walker (Fourth Walk), a book we don't read. Nietzsche
inveighs against veracity as the impossibly naive Wish to come clean,
�BRANN
5
to expose oneself, and he praises the bracing tonic of a falseness
perpetrated without guilt (The Will to Power, 377 -78).
For my part, I am not entirely persuaded by Kant's absolutism and
more than a little repelled by the others' equivocations.
There is, happily, an author who seems to me to speak sweet
reason, and that is Thomas Aquinas, who treats of lying in a book of
which you will read parts next year, the Swnma Theologica (II, 2, ques.
110, art. 4 ff.). He gives various useful classifications of lies and
concludes that not ail lies are mortal sins, sins that ental! damnation.
Lies that injure God and your neighbor are mortal, but lies told with
no intention contrary to charity, are not. This judgment leaves room
for white lies and seems to me pretty good for practical purposes.
(Practical lying is treated by Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public
and Private Life [1978[.)
But it was not really my purpose to talk about the practice of lying,
either whether to do it or how to go about it. What! want us to consider
is the theory of!ying: What are the conditions of human nature and
the world that make lying possible?
It seems to me that the inquiry Into telling lies is particularly
appropriate to a school devoted to the truth. You will discover in the
next four years that the most convenient access to the house of truth
is often through the back door. The assumption in the back-door
approach is that truth precedes falsity, that it is the original positive.
Our language seems to imply the priority of truth, since we speak of
untruths but not of unlies or unerrors. Yet, your reading will often
take the back-to-frontway: In Homer and Tolstoy, War precedes Peace.
In Dante and Milton, Hell comes before Heaven, and Satan, the lord
of lies, comes before God, the fountain of truth. In Plato, error
explicates knowledge. And In Aristotle, art elucidates nature.
Before I proceed to lies, I want to pause a moment to reinforce the
claim that in this school we seek truth. Of course that is not the only,
or even the first, Interest we have. We also acquire skills and learn
arguments and even gather some facts. But we do have a remarkable
hypothesis. We ask ourselves and each other: "Is what I am reading
true? Should I let it enter my life or must I fend it off?" Here are two
special conditions that support our search for truth. One is that we
are not ashamed to be discovered in error. When I say ''we," I mean
we - tutors along with students. We go so far as to regard the
recognition of ignorance in ourselves as a high achievement. The other
condition is that we admit no institutional truth, no authoritative
dogma. If we had the truth, we would not need to inquire about it.
�6
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
This hypothesis of ours is peculiar and hard to defend. At most
academic Institutions the professors deny It and take precautions
against it; they bracket the question of truth and set it aside. They
have good reasons: They think many old books by now have historical
Interest only, treating by-gone problems and providing "Irrelevant"
answers. They think it is a sort of Intellectual tactlessness to get too
close to students' lives In the classroom, and they distrust the
authority such Inquiries, might give the professor who directs them.
They think there Is no fried public meaning In texts, that the meaning
Is construed anew by each reador, and often they also think that a
question after the truth Is In principle nonsense, because truth Is a
private or senseless notion.
All of you will be corning to grips with some of these notions right
in the seminar. For example, you will be tempted to say that a
proposition is "true for me," if not for another, and then you will have
to consider whether the word "true" can be used In that way. Meanwhile we will ask you to act provisionally on our hypothesis that truth
may be pursued, to be shamelessly open to the pursuit, to trust your
tutors as fellow learners, to work at discovering the meaning of a book,
and to treat authors as fellow human beings who raise questions you
can care about. In short, we will ask you to engage In what Francis
Bacon calls "the inquiry of truth, which is the love-making and wooing
oflt" ("OfTruth'1.
By way of beginning the inquiry Into telling lies as a prelude to
searching for truth, I want to add a classification of lies to those given
by Thomas Aquinas: Some lies are subjective, others are objective.
The subjective lie is the one Kant defines and proscribes so absolutely: willful, intentional falsehood. Your straight basic liars intend
to tell lies and know they are doing it. But there is also the objective
lie, an unintentional falsehood, a failed willingness to tell the truth.
Being willing to tell the truth but failing at It is usually called being in
error. At this point I might be accused of the rhetorical trick of
metonymy, a figure of speech In which the speaker confuses species
and genus. For here the genus seems to be the False and the species
seem to be the Ue and the Error. An error Is not really a kind of lie,
but one of two parallel species of the False, the Unwitting and the
Witting Falsehood. Errors are all the unintended misses of targeted
truth: mistakes, rnls-speakings, misjudgments, rnlsperceptions.
Now there will be a man, the guardian angel or perhaps the goblin
of your first year, Socrates, who will claim that Ignorance, and
therefore error, is the genuine or "true lie" in the soul (RepubUc 382b).
He is helped in saying so by the fact that in Greek the word for error
�BRANN
7
and lie is the same. It Is pseudos, which you know, for instance, in
the word pseud-onym, a false name. But he also really does mean to
identity lie and error, and his thinking is roughly like this: He will try
to persuade you that effective virtue is a kind of knowledge. If he is
right. then it is at least likely that ignorance Is a kind of vice, and that
the particular ignorance manifested In error is not far from the vice of
lying. After having studied some logic in the sophomore year you will
be able to show diagrammatically that these consequences are not
logical entallments butjust thought-possibilities.
If you find reason to accept them, then there is no truly unwilling
falsehood; our errors become our responsibilities, and we are charged
with exorcising the unwitting lie in the soul. This Ignorant lie Is what
I call the objective lie.
Socrates has something to say not only about the untold lie hidden
in the soul but also about the outward telling oflies. There is a dialogue
we don't read, called the Lesser Hippias, so called because it is the
shorter of two dialogues featuring a sophist called Hlppias. Sophists
figure in many of the Platonic dialogues, above all In the dialogues
called 'Theaetetus and Sophist, In which Plato deals respectively with
error and the possibility oflying. I can tell you that no book has affected
me more than the Sophist.
A sophist is the most fascinating creature In the world, and Plato
Is never through with htm. The sophist has a name that begins with
the word for "wise," sophos, and ends In -ist, a suffix that denotes an
Imitator and an operator. For Plato ordinary sophists are wise guys,
smart and dumb at once, by profession evasive, tricky, and deceitful,
though sometimes in person endearingly naive. The sophist extraordinaire Is Socrates himself, a canny wise man, whose mode is Irony,
a wily sort of self-deprecation that Aristotle does not hesitate to classit'y
among the lying deviations from truth (Nicomn.cheanEthics II, vii, 12).
Now In the dialogue Socrates carries on with Hippias, two characters that will soon be very familiar to you come on the scene: Achilles
and Odysseus. Hlppias, who can quote Homer, cites passages to show
that Achilles is a true and simple fellow, who tells Odysseus that he
hates lies worse than hell (IUadiX, 312). Odysseus, on the other hand,
Is a habitual teller of lies. The two men differ as truth-teller differs
from liar. Now comes Socrates to prove that Achilles sometimes tells
lies. For example, he informs Odysseus that he will leave Troy so that
"on the third day he would come to fertile Phthia," his home - and
yet he makes no move at all to go. Hlppias objects that Achilles tells
untruths unwittingly, while Odysseus lies by design. Socrates then
tricks Hlpplas into admitting that it is the person with the more
�'!HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
8
capable soul, the one who knows exactly what he Is doing, who Is best,
and that therefore the voluntary liar Is better than the unwitting teller
of falsehoods. The claim that the true lie Is a kind of guilty Ignorance
Is here complemented by the not altogether playful assertion that the
truer and more genutoe person Is the liar who knows the truth and
determines not to utter it. Athena, the goddess of wisdom, agrees with
Socrates' estimation of Odysseus, for she declares her love and loyalty
to him as a cunntog knave and a witting liar (Odyssey XIII, 287 ff.).
Not only, I conclude, i~ the silent lie In the soul to be held against
us as a weakness because it betokens a culpable Ignorance, but the
utterance of a lie confirms our strength, because It presupposes
knowledge of truth. As Nietzsche puts It: 'The recognition of reality...
has been greatest exactly among liars" (Will to Power 378). More
generally, anyone who grants the possibility of!ytog reveals a commitment to the existence of truth.
With subjective and objective lies established, let me now list the
rubrics of conditions that make the telling of a lie possible. I will read
them off before explaining them:
·
I. Will
II. Knowledge
III. Negation
N . Necessity
V. Freedom
I. First, then, for a lie to be told there has to be the will. This Is the
main condition for the pure subjective lie. Perhaps will Is too strong a
word, since much lie-telling results not so much from strong choice
as from a weak willingness. In the lingo of this decade: We give
ourselves permission. Sometimes lytog Is even a mere default position
of the will. But one way or another the capacity for choice, for letting
the words escape from the barrier of our teeth, is involved. What the
human willis, and how the will comes not to will, are a long story for
another night.
Of course, as I have said, the exterior has to cooperate: The body
has to be opaque and the world obtuse. If every lie caused our noses
to grow proportionately, or If a spade when falsely called a shovel
protested loudly, we would In time lose the will to lie.
II. Second, for a lie to be told there has to be, as I have Intimated,
knowledge. As Socrates shows, a liar has to know the truth, all sorts
of truth. but particularly the truth about words. Otherwise the uttered
lie may be a false lie, an unwitting truth. uttering unwitting truth Is
just what happens to Achilies, when he says that on the third day he
will come to Phthia but stays In Troy. He does not know the truth of
the name of his all-too-attainable home. The knowledge of such truth
�BRANN
9
is called "etymology," and etymos Is a Greek term for word-truth.
Socrates has such knowledge. For In prison two nights before his
execution he dreams that a beautiful woman quotes Achilles' words
to him (Crito44b), and he clearly knows what "coming to Phthia" must
mean. It means death, for Phthia means "Land of the Dead," from the
verb phthinein, to destroy (H. Frisk, Griechisches Etymologtsches
Woerterbuch II, 1015).
You have to know both what is the case and what you are saying
to tell a proper lie. They say there are no atheists In the foxholes of
war, and there are surely few relativists among the true tellers oflles.
Consequently, as I have said, this condition for lying Is an odd cause
for cheer: Every telling of a lie Is a reaffirmation of the possibility of
truth.
III. The third and central of my five conditions for telling lies Is a
human capacity, which Is an Incapacity as well. I will call it the power
of blind negation.
In the dialogue the Sophist that I mentioned before, the main
speaker (not Socrates) says:
To believe or to say the thlngs that are not~ that Is, it seems, the
lie arising in the mind and in words. (260c)
More than two millennia later Captain Gulliver Is, in the course of
his travels, set ashore by his crew of mutineers in a land governed by
noble horses who call themselves Houyhnhnms. The land also harbors
some savage, repulsive two-legged ape-like creatures, theYahoos, with
whom the horses identifY Gulliver, calling him their "gentle Yahoo."
Gulliver tries to give his equine master an account of the mores of the
European Yahoos, but the noble horse Is hard put t<i comprehend the
Yahoo custom of telling lies, which is, Gulliver notes, "so perfectly
understood, and so universally practiced among humari creatures."
The noble horse calls it "saying the thing which is not," to him a most
self-defeating use of speech.
By this testimony, we may begin to define lying as saying the thing
which is not. So, of course, Is speaking in error, as Socrates had
already Intimated In the dialogue on error that precedes the Sophist,
the Titeaetehts (199d; see also Aristotle, Metaphysics 10llb27.)
In fact, in logic the two falsehoods are indistinguishable. For logic
abstracts from what Is called the pragmatic aspect of speech, the
internal intention and the social use. I might put it this way. In the
full human context, lies have something Infernal about them; they are
under Satan, the prince of lies and of denial. In the bright and
weightless realm oflogic, denial is a mere squiggle or "curl"('-')-just
a symbolic operator. It Is defined by a table of so-called truth-values.
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TiiE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
("Value" In logic as In life denotes an arbitrary as opposed to an
intrinsic worib.) If a proposition, little p, is assigned !be truib-value
T, then squiggle-p (·-vp) is F, false, and conversely. T and Fare mere
symbols; T has no prtmacy over F and imparts no particular significance to a proposition. (While It is !be case !bat logicians ibink about
what truib is, they do not feel equally obligated to ibink about what
is true, !bough it may be finally tmpossible to separate the iwo
questions.)
Now in real life people do not talk "propositionally"very often, except
in courts of law, under cross-examination: "Is it or is It not the case
!bat your mother told you someibing significant? Just answer yes or
no, please." In ordinary speech !be negative does not stand outside an
Impregnable proposition but Invades it and is deeply implicated in it.
Traditional logic does In fact recognize iwo additional possibilities for
the position of !be negation. Textbooks on logic seem quite unamazed
by these possibilities, which !bey bliibely declare to be equivalent (e.g.
I. M. Cop!, Introduction to Logic, p. 223), though iboughtfullogiclans
have had ibeir preferences. In what follows, S stands for the subject,
capital P for !be predicate of a proposition. We can say:
l. S (is not) P. Here !be proposition itself. internally, is said to have
the "quality" of being negative or positive: Achilles is-not a liar. Some
auibors maintain that ibis form alone Is correct because logical quality
belongs strictly to the copula connecting !be subject and !be predicate
(Marltaln, FormoiLogic, p. 110). I ibink that view is too restrictive.
2. S is (not P). Whether !be speaker Is telling !be truth or a lie, this
form posits a "!bing !bat is not": Achilles is a non-liar. It therefore
supports the doctrine of lies adopted by the Sophist and the
Houybnhnms.
3. Not (S is P), i.e . .v p. The negative is outside the proposition: It
is not !be case !bat Achilles is a liar. This is how the modern logic
called propositional places !be negative, !bough !be !bought goes back
to !be Stoics and to Abelard (W. and M. Kneale, The Development of
Logic, p. 210). Here the whole proposition is externally negated.
Thereallifedifferencesamongibethreeformsareremarkablewhen
!be logical bones are fleshed out wiib meaning. For while the negative
!bat has got Inside !be sentence wreaks havoc ibere wiib meaning,
!be denial of !be whole proposition leaves it intact, as putting a
negative sign before a number leaves It Its absolute value. Look at the
example of the truibful Achilles, !be unwitting liar.
Early on, In !be first book of !be Iliad (352). we see him wiibdrawn
from his friends, weeping on !be shore and calling his mother.
"Moiber," he says, addressing her plainly and Intimately; "Moiber, you
�BRANN
ll
bore me to be short-lived"; the Greek word is minnnthindos- minutelived. The son states it, and the mother confirms it: Achilles will die
soon. Now listen to a later episode. In the ninth book (410) Achilles
tells Odysseus, who has come to talk him into returning to the battle,
that his mother - she is now grandly "the goddess, silver-footed
Thetis"- has said that he has a choice of two fates. He can go home
and forego fame or stay and die soon gloriously. Unless mother and
son have been talking behind our backs, Achilles is engaging in sheer
hopeful invention, attributing it to his divine mother. And fmally, in a
still later passage in the sixteenth book (51) he answers the concerned
and suspecting question of his friend Patroclus, whether his mother
had told him something from Zeus: "Neither do 1 care about any oracle
that I know nor has my mistress mother [as he now calls her formally
and coolly] told me anything from Zeus." This answer betokens what
we like to call "going into full denial." Note the progressluenegation of
the truth. At first Achilles admits the hard fact: I and my mother both
know 1 shall die young. The second version is: My mother has told me
that! have a choice of fates. Here Achilles begins to say "the thing that
is not": SIs not-P. For he does not deny that his mother has been in
communication with him, but he undoes and denies her message. And
third he says: It is not the case that my mother has told me a thing.
Now he is denying the whole proposition: not (S is P). This is not
altering the message and saying the thing that is not. This is a more
radical lie, that of denying blindly that anything whatever has been
said. Such is the progress and the pathos of Achilles' peculiarly telling
lies, lies that reveal the young warrior's fear of facing death.
Let me step back for a moment. It seems to me that we can think
more than we can say. The papers you write this year will probably
demonstrate that fact. We can also say more than we think. Some of
your colleagues in seminar will seem to you to give examples of that
fact. Moreover, while the world contains more things than we can
enumerate, it is also true that we can say what corresponds to no
thought and no thing. We can speak without meaning. The word can
become footloose.
One good example of a word rattling around by itself is the
pseudo-name by which Odysseus introduces himself to the Cyclops,
No-One (Outis, IX, 364-412). The poor monster literally does not know
what he is saying when,· having been brutally blinded by Odysseus,
he calls on his neighbors for help. Who has hurt you, they ask, and
he answers "No One." Nor do they know what they are saying when
they go off shouting something to the effect: "Well, if no one has hurt
you, you must be sick. Go see a doctor." For in conditional contexts
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TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the form otitis turns Into me tis, which means again "No one," but it
also sounds like metis, which means "cunning, craftiness": "Cunning
has done you in, go see a doctor" - that Is what the Cyclopean
neighbors truly but unwittingly say.
But particularly to my point are the words no and not and the
prefixes Wl and non. The first philosopher, Parmenides, said that
"neither could you know that which Is not (for it is impossible), nor
could you say It" (Diels Fragment 2). I think he holds too nobly simple
a view of speech. I agree that It Is not possible to think what Is not.
The intellect is Incapable of the p.ure negative. When it tries to think
not or non or unIt always finds Itself attending to something different
or other rather than to nothing. For example, Un-rest is not No Rest
but Motion, and Non-being Is not Nothing but something Different or
Other. I think that In perception too there is never nothing but only
difference. Even the Imagination cannot practice negation effectively.
For an Image of the Imagination may be nullified, as a stamp is
canceled so that Its value Is gone- yet its face, though smudged, Is
not obliterated. In the imagination and In visual thinking- which is
what we mostly do- negated being nearly always has a positive look.
Denial produces a murky or perhaps a monstrous shape, but never a
nonentity.
In speech alone can we say the negative and for a moment really
mean nothing. It is, I think, this potent Incapacity that makes lying
possible. So let me sketch out for you how telling lies seems to me to
come about as a product of negating speech and defective will.
There is a crucial moment- for Achilles it comes last, but often it
is first- when we say a blind and ignoble no to the truth, when we
will to tell the lie. The proposition that we know to be true remains
untouched but we determine In our hearts to reject it, ignorantly and
uncircumstantially: "Not (SIs P)." The hero decides to mamtain: "It is
not the case, Patroclus, that my mother confirmed my pending death"
-without thought for the consequence to the Interior of the sentence.
We say no and think nothing constructive, only "I shall not tell the
truth whatever follows." Our two strange negative capacities for
exercising an Infirm will and for uttering an unmeaning word come
briefly but momentously together.
In the second and third moment the negation Invades the sentence
and begins to generate meaning. Perhaps it first attaches itself to the
copula so as to disjoin subject from predicate: Achilles and his death
are not to be conjoined In speech. But eventually the negation ends
up attacking the predicate Itself; S Is not-P: My mother told me not
what you all think, Odysseus, but something else, that my death is
�BRANN
13
still my choice. That "not" when stuck to the predicate no longer
betokens pure blinding negative non-truth, but signals an alternative
to the truth, a positive invention; the lie goes out of control and
becomes baroque. Here cross the activities of telling lies and telling
tales. Both tell the thing that is not.
Let me conclude this section on lies and negating language by
reminding us that except for the willing, all I said holds also for error:
Lies differ from errors only in beginning wilfully and then sliding out
of control, while errors begin inadvertently and then settle in. I cannot
resist adding that telling lies is also close in form to asking questions.
A lie is in fact a kind of inverse question. For a question is a directed
receptivity, a shaped expectation of a truth as yet unknown. And a lie
is a directed rejection, a determined negation, of a truth already
known. Since we are a school for questioning, lies, the diametric
opposite of questions, would seem to be, on occasion, a proper
preoccupation for us.
N. I would phrase the fourth condition of lytng, necessity, in this
way: We can lie because we must lie. I am thinking not ofthe subjective
pseudo-necessity of lying from fear or need, but of unavoidable
objective lytng. If human speech is to be efficacious it must accommodate itself to a world about which it is, as I have already intimated,
simply not possible to speak with total truth.
Let me quote an author of the junior year with whom I maintain a
-necessarily one-sided but cordial-friendship, Jane Austen. She
says:
Seldom, vecy seldom does complete truth belong to any humao
disclosure; seldom cao it happen that something is not a little
disguised or a little mistaken. (Erruna, Ch. 49)
It is an ever-rewarded effort to try to tell the truth, but to tell the
whole truth is beyond our cognitive abilities and to tell nothing but
the truth is outside of our linguistic equipment. Anyone made to swear
to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is being
asked to stretch it.
We cannot utter exactly what It is we think because the qualil'ying
internal histocy behind evecy thought is enormous. It cannot be put
in finite words. Similarly we cannot tell all that we perceive, because
the world's space Is indefinitely extended and infinitesimally detailed,
and In addition every spatial point has behind it an infinite history in
time.
The case is not entirely hopeless and offers no excuse for not trying.
Our cognitive constitution, our capacity for speech, and the external
world all do seem to be to some degree geared to each other. OL
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
attention highlights parts of the world that seem to be meaningful
wholes. The parts of speech seem to fit the behavior of the world, and
the words oflanguage seem to be able to collect items scattered widely
In space. Sometimes many things can be said "In a word." The
constitutional limitation on our truth-telling, our necessary objective
lying, is therefore also an incitement to subjective truthfulness, to the
effort to do what we can with such telltog speech as we have.
V. There Is, finally, fl fifth condition, freedom, the condition for
telling true lies of a marvelous sort. Here Is an activity in which the
reckless will, the footloose word, and the feckless world Intersect. This
activity produces the freely willed lie called fiction (feigning wonderful
worlds in words) or poetry (making splendid fabrics out of words).
The notion that fiction and poetry are a kind of lie is attributed to
Socrates, and you will hear him say so when you read the dialogue
called the Republic (Bk. II). Yet it was not a philosopher who first
published this slander, but a poet, Hesiod, Homer's younger rival, for
whom we have no time in the program. He takes seriously what Homer
takes lightly: the aboriginal birth of the gods and the daily work of
men. This peasants' Homer tells how the Muses spoke to him, a
shepherd of the wilderness, and said:
We know how to tell many lies that are similar to true words, and
agato, when we wish, we can utter true things. ('Theogony 27-28)
These are wonderful lines because they introduce a distinction into
the truths that are opposed to lies. There are what I will call worldtruths, alethea, and there are word-truths, etyma, the term I mentioned before, the one that goes into the word etymology. Hesiod's
Muses tell lies that are stmilar to true words. These are the free lies I
am talking about: words freely chosen to tell lies that are true to the
world of words. How Is it possible that such liberated lies should
acquire the force of a peculiar and special truth? The answer is to a
strange capacity we share with the world, the power of entertatotog
certato half-existences called images. But like the will, the tmagination
Is a mystery for another night.
I am nearing the end, and your turn to express your judgments of
my lecture tn your questions for me Is about to come. Let me, on the
way out, return once more to the second hero of this lecture, Odysseus.
When he is about to become the teller and poet of his own travels, he
Introduces and reveals himself in this fashion to the Phaeacians, who
will be the first folk to hear his odyssey:
I am Odysseus Laertides; I am the preoccupation of mankind for all
my deceits ... But I dwell in lucid (eudeie[os) Ithaca (IX, 19-21).
�BRANN
15
Telling false lies and telling true lies, telling lies from necessity and
for pleasure, Odysseus attains the sunlit clarity of the home he loves.
Not, I think, the worst way to home In on truth!
But there is a better way still, Socrates' way: the unwillingness to
tolerate the unwitting, untold lie In the soul, and the wit and wisdom
to transmute the unavoidable lying of any utterance li:tto the telling
lies that reveal truth.
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�A Biological Theme
in Aristotle's Ethics
I
John White
Before we look at Aristotle's discussion of virtue- before we can look
at any discussion of virtue - we have to look at an inquiry about
virtue. The first inquiry about virtue begins this way:
Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue can be taught, or is it
acquired by practice, not teaching? Or if neither by practice nor by
learning, does it come to mankind by nature or in some other way?
The dialogue Meno begins with that question. Socrates never
answers it. Socrates doesn't even take the question seriously. The
content of the question is serious, but beneath the words is an attitude
which is not serious. Meno's attitude is not the openness of seeking,
but is in fact the opposite: "answering" and the closedness of habit.
By ignoring Meno's question, Socrates shows that he has no respect
for questions as such. When Meno asks Socrates a question (75d),
Socrates says that there are two ways to respond. If he thought the
question was argumentative, he would say "Prove me wrong." If he
thought the question was genuine, he would try to answer it. Socrates
begins to make us self-conscious, aware of the attitudes that underlie
our questions.
Socrates also makes us self-conscious and critical about answers.
Meno (76d-e) likes the definition of color in terms of "effluences" and
"pores" (cf. Phaedo96e). But Meno here submits to a style of answering
(a "tragic style," 76e) because he is used to the words; he has no
insight. The occasion of this superficiality in Meno is Gorgias and his
ability to answer questions. Gorgias has given Meno a habit of
answering "fearlessly and magnificently'' because Gorgias lets anyone
ask him questions, and he is never at a loss. It has been a long time
since anyone asked him anything new (Gorgias 448a). Because of this
habit, Meno's opening question is not serious as a question.
We can see naivete and lack of seriousness in the attitude behind
Meno's question when we learn that he is not prepared for Socrates'
answer, "1 don't know." Meno is baffled by it. He cannot take it
John White is a Tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. This lecture was first given
at the College in Santa Fe, in Februruy, 1990.
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
seriously because he cannot take seriously the ignorance that seeking
implies. Attitudes collide in this dialogue (and in Gorgias too). There
is no disagreement about substance between Socrates and Meno.
What is at stake in the collision is seriousness. Which is more serious:
answering or asking?
In this struggle between question and answer, Meno will "lose." He
loses not because he is wrong but because the attitude behind his
questions makes him unprepared for what now happens, after
Socrates' admission oflgnorance. When Socrates said "I don't know,"
Meno thought that Socrates was admitting failure. But Socrates'
ignorance was for himself the occasion to ask a question. Meno has
never heard a question like the one Socrates now asks and he does
not know what to do with it. The question Socrates asks, "What is
virtue?" is Socrates' own discovery, and it makes him "like nothing in
the ancient or modem world" (Symposium). He discovers the question
"What is?"
"What is?" is a universal question and can be asked about anything
(Meno74b). But even though the question can apply to anything, it is
not a success when we ask it about a technical matter, seeking the
answer of an expert. Ignorance about technical things is ordinary. But
If the question is asked about what we think we already know,
something we know just by living in the human world, then the
question has enormous power. For example, I think I knowwhat virtue
is, and Socrates must be using trickery. But If I know, why don't I
know that I know? Why am I not even more knowledgeable about my
own possession of knowledge than I am about its content? And If
Socrates is right and I don't knowwhat virtue is, something even worse
and more embarrassing has happened: I don't know that I don't know.
My real ignorance is not about virtue; my ignorance is about my own
self and what I know. The absence of that knowledge is now painfully
present to me.
Socrates completes this riddle of self-knowledge with the slave boy.
When the slave boy thinks he knows, Socrates shows him that he
doesn't; when the slave boy thinks he doesn't know, Socrates shows
him that he does. Whether or not I know what virtue is, I am ignorant
about myself. We become self-conscious and aware of ourselves in a
new and baffling way. Socrates tells a myth of reminiscence (8lb;
Phaedo 73a ff.) along with the slave-boy play. The myth says that the
soul is immortal. Originally it knew all things, but it has forgotten
them. Learning Is recollecting. Whether the myth is true or false,
whether learning turns out to be teaching or recollecting, I have
learned things- haven't I?- so why don't I know the answer to this
�WHITE
19
question about learning? Whether the myth is true or false "objectively," itis still true. The myth turns knowledge and ignorance upside
down.
Meno sees the slave-boy play and agrees that an inquiry about
virtue is possible. But then he returns to his opening question (How
does virtue come to us?). The "forgetting" part of the myth is no longer
mythical. Maybe the slave-boy episode "proves" recollecting; maybe
not. But forgetting is right there in front of us. Forgetting is deeper
and truer than remembering; it is the unknown basis of human
self-knowledge. Even if someone "proves objectively" that learning is
not recollecting, the shock of recognition we feel at forgetfulness ignorance not about things but about ourselves - would not be
overcome. No "objective" proof or knowledge can deal with this problem. To be human is to be forgetful.
The changes brought about by Socrates' question and the myth
cannot be reversed or ignored. There is no return to the situation
before this question was asked. For example, although Meno (or Polus
or Callic!es) may eventually discover arguments to prove the truth of
his belief about virtue or justice, his belief would no longer be a belief
but the conclusion of an argument. After his proof he might think that
he is back where he was before Socrates intruded, since only the form
of his belief has changed while the content has not. But mere change
of form brings other changes with it, because the change in form is a
change in one's self-understanding. Knowledge goes inside and invades the privacy of a person. Since people's beliefs are disappearing
as beliefs, Socrates' question makes people fear that they are "disappearing" somehow. For example, when Polus talks to Socrates in the
Gorgias, what he discovers about himself is not just that Socrates is
somehow stronger than he is, but that Polus is unknown to Polus.
Polus has within himself beliefs that are different from what he thinks
he believes. Polus discovers that he is unknown to himself, and the
person he believed himself to be begins to disappear.
One becomes aware of one's self as !tis by itself, as "numb in tongue
and soul" (SOb). One's ordinary"social" or "political" self fades into the
background. Naivete and worldliness begin to change places. Now we
are not in the position to judge the relative merit of answers. The
question has somehow begun to "measure" us or do something to us.
Asking is more important and serious than answering; what looked
like a form of activity is a form of passivity. Being numb is waking up.
Ignorance is interesting and deep; silence is eloquent.
Socrates' question reveals naivete or superficiality in people, rather
than mere mistakes. But being naive is worse than being wrong in
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Athens (and in freshman seminar, as most of us discover to our
discomfort; we have opinions that aren't even good enough to be
wrong). We are shown to be frivolous and superficial because we are
full of "opinions" In an uncritical, naive way. We weren't aware that
we could understand all our opinions as "answers to questions." We
are shown something that is "prior" to our opinions: Since an opinion
is an answer, surely the question is prior? Our opinions are seen to
be "answers" to questions that we are no longer aware of having been
asked. We have forgotten how these opinions became part of us. We
have forgotten a state of ourselves prior to "answers" and opinions, a
pre-existent state behind the self we are aware of. Our naive selfawareness Is an astounding kind of forgetting. We have become what
we are, in our ordinary and everyday understanding of human life and
human beings, by this forgetting. Only forgetfulness makes us appear
transparent to ourselves, whereas a few minutes conversation with
Socrates might tum all this upside down. The "what is" question rules
all of this.
The "what is" question Is prior to any discussion because It reveals
"presuppositions" that underlie discussion. There can be no discussion without this new kind of Inquiry. Moreover, besides being prior
to any discussion about anything, the ''what is" question appears to
be the question- a question that must not only be asked first, it must
also be answered before any other questions can even be asked.
Answers to other questions presuppose an answer to this question.
Other questions, Insofar as they are questions, presuppose this
question.
So, on the one hand, how could this question conceal anything?
"What" could be hidden by asking "what Is"? Nothing that Is a "what"
could be concealed by this question. Thatis, nothing that can be asked
about can be hidden by the question. And on the other hand, how
could there be any other question that does not conceal this question
within Itself simply by being a question? That Is, how could there be
a question that has no ''what," that Is not "about" anything? This
question Is the question. So, In fact, actually and beneath the surface,
this question Is the only question one hears, If one listens seriously to
questions as questions.
I began with Meno because It is presentln the NichomacheanEthics
in many ways - questions from Meno are sometimes repeated,
sometimes even parodied. The most obvious difference between the
attitudes of the two books Is that Aristotle's Ethics shows respect for
"answers" as such (e.g., he says the young can gain from listening to the
opinions of elders even when they can't argue for them or explain them).
�WHITE
21
If Aristotle wishes to praise habit- even to go so far as to talk of
something like a "habit of thinking" (Meta. 993b 15) -we want to be
sure that he understands Socrates' question. We have to acknowledge
the force of Socrates' question. There is no return to the uncritical
acceptance of habit, unless one can believe in self-conscious naivete.
Socrates has discovered the question and a new, disorienting seriousness. The Platonic dialogues, by their very form, enshrine questions
and the seriousness of an unappeasable longing.
On the other hand, Aristotle seems to respect the form of an answer.
Aristotle certainly appears as if he has all the answers. And if he
doesn't have the answer, or tf he usually has two or three possible
answers, at least the form of seriousness that underlies "answering"
might come to light. Aristotle is in pari a return to Gorgias, in style
and content.
But if Aristotle is going to do anything "new" - and a return to a
prior position is new if the return is not naive and uncritical- he has
to show how inquiry has presuppositions that could not be discovered
by asking "what is." Inquiry must have presuppositions that cannot
be discovered by asking questions. If an inquiry and the "what is"
question can discover all presuppositions (even their own), then
inquiry can always be deepened and it has no limits. Aristotle has to
show that there are presuppositions that are concealed by asking this
question. He will do so.
Presuppositions
When we attend to the content of what we are saying, we assume
things on the level of "It goes without saying," things obviously true
but not explicitly stated. We do not say all that we mean. We can say
all that we mean only by attending to the form of what we say. A
particular form of saying, "argument" or "proof," is a standard by
means of which these hidden steps come to light as gaps. The search
for presuppositions looks for logical steps that have been skipped. And
the "obvious but hidden things, " things at the edges or borders of our
attention, once discovered and explicitly stated, are no longer "obviously true" [and true because obvious). They cannot be taken for
granted; they have to be argued for. Once a belief has been questioned,
the question takes root. Beliefs can never again "go without saying"
(RepubUc539b-c). And when these beliefs have been stated and argued
over, It doesn't matter if the argument Is successful or not. If you can
prove the belief, the belief is no longer held as a belief but as a
conclusion; if you can't prove the belief, it remains suspended in the
field of explicit attention. You might then decide to call it an axiom or
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
postulate, but these names mean only "the assumed part of a system
of proofs." The form of the belief has changed; Its form Is now
determined by its role in a system of proofs.
TWs kind of presupposition, an unexpressed or hidden content, is
brought to light by a ''what is" question and the reflection it Involves.
The presuppositions we discover are things necessary if we want to
prove something, If we want to be able to think it rather than feel it or
sense it or point to it. This search turns all beliefs into propositions
- conclusions or axioms of a system of arguments.
Within any proof system, there can be many proofs of the same
theorem; no proof is unique. (Even if there Is only one proof, Its
attachment to the theorem Is not unique.) A proof can show only the
truth of a proposition about an object, Its possibility or Its thinkability.
Logical presuppositions reveal how the truth of a proposition Is
possible. In the search for presuppositions we might uncover the
"being" of something in the sense of "being-true." But odd as this
sounds, this kind of being and this kind of inquhy are not what we
need.
To put the claim In Its boldest form: the search for logical presuppositions assumes that we are looking for the truth. But we are not
lookingforthe truth. Philosophy as the search for truth Is not what we
need. Aristotle says:
As for being in the sense of being true ... falsity and truth are not in
things, but in thought- for example, it Is not the good by itself that
Is true, nor the bad by Itself that is false. As for simple things and
that whatness of them, not even in thought Is there truth and falsity
of them... We must leave aside being in the sense of being true ... ;
it does not make clear any nature of being as existing outside.
(Metaphysics 1028a2)
Odd as it may sound, the kind oflnqulry that seeks the truth cannot
uncover the light kind of presupposition. There Is another group of
presuppositions -not of the "truth" or "possibility" of an object, but
presuppositions oflts actuality. Thatls, what things are presupposed
If something Is to be perceived as well as thought, to be "meant" by
speech/thinking as well as to be "present" to perception (to be present
as "particular" for perception as well as "universal" for thought or
speech-De Anima 417b20)? To be a tode tt. a ''this-there"? (See
Husser!, Ideas #14.) What are the presuppositions if something Is to
"be there" rather than "be true"?
If we want to search for "a nature of being as existing outside," we
need a new understanding of whatness and a new way to think it.
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Thinking about actuality Is different than thinking about possibility,
even though the actuality of something does not differ from Its
possibility in any determinate way (i.e .• a determinate difference is a
something, a "what"). For Aristotle, the difference in the kinds of
thinking appears In the difference between mathematics and physics.
Knowledge In physics, to be actual knowledge of the actual, has to
grasp the difference between actuality and potentiality.
We need to compare IJlathematical and physical thinking about a
thing. in one sense we are far from the Ethics. But if we tmderstand
the different ways mathematics and physics think of their objects, we
might be able to understand the ethical difference between the old and
the young- the young are good at mathematics and abstractions but
are not good at ethics (also physics and biology - "concretions,"
specifications).
The mathematical way of understanding the being-there of a thing
(tode tt) begins this way:
If the place of each body Is what primarily contains it, it would be
a boundary; so ... the place of each body is Its form or shape, by
which [It] is bounded ... But Insofar as place Is regarded as the
Interval of the magnitude, It would be the matter of a body... , and
this Is what is contained or limited by the form ... Now such are
matter and the indefinite ... (209b2)
If we think about a thing mathematically, we speak of a border or
edge as the limit of the thing. A thing, a "this-there," is "there" within
its borders, Its limits. We understand the spatiality, the being-there,
of a thing as the limit oflts extension, as the "outside of what is Inside"
a thing. Shape is the fundamental idea. For mathematics, the "being
as existing outside" -borders and edges as part of the outside - is
not part of what a thing is. Mathematical objects exist only in their
definitions, their explicit content. The definitions have to be "clear and
distinct" because they are the beginnings of a proof (rather than an
action; Physics 200a24).
But if we think of a thing physically, the place of a thing is neither
its form nor its matter, because they don't exist apart from the thing,
while the place of the thing can exist separately (209b22). So the way
that physics understands a thing's place, the thing In its existence, is
as the "boundary of that which contains" (212a20). For physics, "If a
thing ls somewhere, ... both the thing Itself is something and also
something else is outside of It (209b33). We do not want "clear and
distinct" ideas here. We need ideas with messy edges- a thing and
also something else outside It - In order ·~o make clear "being as
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TIIE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
existing outside." We need ideas that have a "beyond" as part of them.
For physics the place of a thing is not the same as its shape. Now the
boundary of a thing does not belong to it but to its surroundings; it is
the limit as belonging to the outside.
Now "the limit of what contains and what is contained coincide.
Both are limits [the same limit in fact] but not of the same thing. The
one is the form of the thing; the other is the place of the containing
body" (2llbl3). For mathematics the limit belongs to the inside as the
limit of extension, of the non-dynamic occupation of space. But for
physics the limit or border beloJJ.gs to the outside because it is the
outside which contains the motion of the thing. For mathematics, the
border is the "outside ofwhat is inside"; for physics, place is the "inside
of what is outside" a thing, the container of motion, for only then is
location actuaL and physics thinks about things as actualities.
The difference between shape and place, potentiality and actuality,
does not exist for mathematics. Since "no interval exists [between] the
body which is enclosed by the border" and the border (2llb7), there
is no quantitative, mathematical difference between the mathematical
and physical understanding of the being-there. There is nothing for
mathematics to think about. Mathematics can't think about the
difference between itself and physics, so mathematics can't understand itself. (But physics can.) For example, in a tank of water the
cubic foot in the middle has boundaries geometrically, but this
boundary cannot belong to what physically contains the cubic foot,
because the contained and the container are continuous. If the parts
were separate but in contact, as they would be if a cube of ice sat on
a table, the cube would have a place. Aristotle says that the first
example, the water, is potential place; the second is actual place. Place
makes clear these dynamic relations of containment:
The locomotion of physical bodies and simple bodies ... makes it
clear not only that a place is something, but also that it has some
power. For each of these bodies travels to its own place, some of
them up and others down ... Now such directions ... do not exist only
relative to us ... By nature ... each of these [sets of directions] is
distinct; for the up direction Is ...where fire or a light object travels....
as if these directions differed not only In position but In power.
Mathematical objects ... are not In a place, and with respect to
position it is [only] relative to us that they have a right and a left;
so the position of [mathematical objects] has no nature but is only
conceived [by the soul]. (Physics 208b9)
Mathematical objects have right/left, etc.. only by convention,
whereas physical elements have these distinctions "Inside" them-
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selves, as principles of their motion or of their rest: up/down is not
only true about the motion of fire and earth as described from the
outside, it is also true for them on the inside. And in cases of rest, an
ashtray is on the table while a balloon is nnderthe ceiling- a dynamic
relation to what contains it.
There is a further stage to the analysis of the being-there of
something. There is also a sense in which elemental bodies (like
mathematical shapes) have the directions only by convention. Elements such as fire or earth are never fully "there" in their place
because they are at rest by constraint or they are part of a whole. But
for living things the situation is different: "Above and below belong to
all living things, plants as well as animals". Sometimes the difference
is in function only, sometimes in shape as well" (285al5). The study
of actual things, beings, is itself most actual when we look at living
beings and the way in which they are "there":
Above and below, right and left, front and back, are not to be looked
for in all bodies alike, but only in those which, because living
[besouled]. contain within themselves a principle of motion; for in
no part of an inanimate object [without soul] can we trace the
principle of its motion. Some do not move at all, whereas others,
though they move, do not move in every direction alike. Fire, for
instance, moves upward only, earth to the center. It is in relation
to ourselves that we speak of above and below or right and left in
these objects. But in the objects themselves we detect no difference.
[That is, the "body" of fire or earth is mere extension, whose parts
differ only in geometrtc location. The parts of an organic body differ
in function, so the spatial relation of the parts to each other is
imporiant.]
This is a pari of biology, for in living creatures it is obvious that
some have all these features - right and left and so forth - and
others some, whereas plants have only above and below. Each of
the three pairs Is In the nature of a principle. These three-dimensional differences may reasonably be supposed to be possessed by
all reasonably complete [teleios] bodies. Their nature as principles
may be defined with reference to motions ... Growth is from above,
locomotion from the right, the motion which follows sensation
[appetite] from in front (since the meaning of"front"ls that towards
which sensations are directed). (On the Heavens 284bl4-285a26)
"Being as existing outside" is present in a new way: the three
dimensions of space are not merely true about a "complete" organic
body; they are also true for it. A living, sensing body has all three sets
of oppositions always significantly true about its spatial presence
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TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
wherever it Is- e.g., it can never be "up" nor can it move "up" in the
way fire does because an animal's position Is not indifferent to
right/left, etc., as Is the position of fire. This means that space Is
organized as being "around" the living body (and. thereby space and
place start to become "environment"). In animals, back/front,
right/left, up/down are three sets of spatial opposites related to and
radiating from a "Here," an origin (arche). In an animal, to exist, to
be-there, is to be "Here",(Progress. 707a7).
The new distinction of front/back, which allows all three sets of
oppositions to be actually distinct and which unifies them in a "Here,"
depends on sensation and the way that the animal exists in the world
In order to sense things. The physical presence of an animal, given In
sensation for the one doing the sensing, Is not the relation of "place"
or "a thing and also something else outside," but a new relation that
contains and goes beyond them.
In sensation. the spatial relations are changed, but the change is
subtle. Since "sensation consists In being moved and acted upon" (De
Anirria 416b32), physical presence and contact (having the same
border or limit) Is necessary (touch is the primary sense, 413b9), so
one might think that "place" is sufficient. In fact, in touch the physical
contact and the sensation seem to be the same thing (unlike vision,
where I see things at a distance). While the physical contact in
touching is mutual (my hand Is in the same kind of contact with the
table as the table Is with my hand), the sensation rejects the mutuality
of physical contact: I sense the table and It does not sense me. The
word "external" in the context of "sensation of external objects" (and
the meaning of "being as existing outside") cannot be the kind of
externality that objects have In the Physics, where objects are external
to each other mutually and dynamically in the relation called "place."
The sensed body is external because it Is sensed. In sensation, even
In touch, my body is not present as a body (which it surely is and has
to be for the possibility of sensation). Rather, In sensing the table, my
body "mediates" between me and the table. My body is the transparent
medium of my presence (Parva Naturalia 436b8): "the faculty of
sensation has no actual but only potential existence" (De Anirria
417a2). When I sense something, I do not sense the thing directly
(without my body as a medium), nor do I sense the medium directly
- I do not sense my hand touching the table. When I see something,
my body Is not present as a visible object. My body Is present in vision
as a "point of view." The "Here" of my body is present in sensation as
a perspective; "Here" becomes a "from over Here." I see something from
a perspective (from over Here), and I am aware of this perspective (my
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Here) as one actual out ofmany possible perspectives. The perspective,
the "from over Here," is what makes vision a sensation rather than a
thought. The perspective is the "particularity" of sensation (De Anima
417b20). Sensation senses particulars, but not because particulars
are what Is "really there."The.particulars that are present in sensation
are "the one actuality out of many possibilities"- a One out of Many,
a One against the background of a Many. This "One out of Many" is
present In sensation as th.e perspective, the "from over Here" (existing
outside the "Here," a difference that Is not mere otherness), the "One
actual out of Many possibles."
In addition, when one analyzes the spatial existence of the animal
body, the form of an animal is not "shape" in the mathematical sense,
because organic bodies are not geometric forms, are not an arrangement of surfaces in space to be reduced to an arrangement of elemental
particles (Driesch, Science and Philosophy of the Organism, p.8).
Organic bodies have "non-homogenous parts" such as face or hand or
foot (Parts of Animals 640b20). These parts are united (and distinguished) by their functioning, and they do not exist independently of
the whole. Because these parts are not quantitative parts, an organic
body is not the sum of its parts. Because the parts are unified by their
functioning together with each other, the spatial relation (and distinction) of the parts to each other is essential to what their whole is. The
three spatial dimensions are most clearly present and articulated in
human beings because humans are "most in accordance with nature"
(706al9). 'The principles 'up' and 'front' are in humans mostin accord
with nature and most differentiated." (In four-footed animals, "up" and
"front" are not differentiated. Humans and birds have the differentiation [706a26;706bl2].)
Organic form Is expressed by the functional relations of the parts
to each other reciprocally. But there is also a function for the whole
(Parts 645bl5). Thereby a living body is related to space in a new way.
The being-there of an active animal is not grasped by "place" nor by
the "from over Here" of sensation. The active body is located and
spatially unilled only as "Here" in this new sense, as the origin (arch£)
ofits actions, and the surrounding space has afunctional organization
with respect to the living body; right/left, up/down, front/backthree sets of opposites related to and radiating from a "Here" which,
as a beginning of action, is also a "Now." We live in anticipation of a
future.
Because "form" takes on this new, functional meaning for organic
bodies, functions and motions take on a new significance. Not only is
the organic whole different from its elemental matters and "homage-
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
nous parts" (where the whole is the sum of the parts); the living being
is even opposed to its own matter, its physical nature (and this means
that elemental nature is not "natural" in the ruling sense):
Loss of power is contrary to nature. All instances of loss of power
are contrary to nature, e.g., old age and decay, and the reason for
them is probably that the whole structure of an aniroal is composed
of elements whose proper places are different; none of its parts is
occupying its proper plitce. (On the Heavens 288b5)
Because organic forms are ultimately built from elemental matters
(like fire and earth), they consist of contraries, motions in opposite
dtrections. There is no special "elemental matter" for organic forms,
so their form insofar as it is organic is not a static "shape." Organic
form is an achievement.
Wbat is it that holds frre and earth together [in a living body] when
they tend to move in opposite directions? [Their bodies] will be tom
apart, unless there is something to prevent it... (De Anima 416a5)
Form is not something an animal has so much as it is something
an anhnal does to keep from being tom apart. The animal body
demands effort and action from within for the motions which produce
and sustain it. The adult organic form is produced by growth. Once
grown, the living body is not in a state of rest, because the living body
is always being "tom apart." The state of rest (no growth) is another
set of form-producing motions (DeAnima416blO). Rest involves the
metabolic replacement of cells which age and decay, the healing of
cuts and fighting of disease (259b9). A part lost in a struggle may
regenerate. If regeneration is not possible, the anhnal might compensate for the loss by the functional reorganization of the remaining parts.
The animal cannot save the whole as a sum of parts, but it might be
able to save the whole as a function.
We are in a realm of "ideas with messy edges," where we wish to
see something as well as think it. Mathematical thinking, with its
"clear and distinct" definitions, cannot grasp actual beings, rather
than possibilities, because the distinction between potentiality and
actuality doesn't exist for mathematical thinking. The distinction is
"there" only if we are "there" as the relation of perceiving and speaking.
We should not seek a defioition of everything, but should also perceive
an object by means of an analogy. As that which is awake is to that
which is asleep -let "actuality" sign!Jy the first term of such relations
and "potentiality" signify the second. (Metaphysics 1048a34)
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These beings are "there" if we are there as the relation of perceiving
and speaking. The perception or knowledge of these living beings Is
actual only If we are already "internally related" to the object. This Is
odd language. I will try again.
The actuality of a thing Is different from its possibility (and the
difference Is not a mathematical difference) If the thing is in-between
what Is eternally necessary and what is accidental, chance - most
clearly If the thing Is a living, mortal being. The "in-between" Is
perceived as an in-between thing (living but mortal) only if the knower
Is of the same kind. The knower is internally related to, while also
distinct from, the thing known. This sameness of knower and known
Is a relation deeper than knowing, if knowing is the knowing of
whatness, because this sameness Is not the logical identity of A=A.
This sameness makes the relation of knowing possible as an actuality.
Knowing is now possible as an actual knowing of the actual. Perception
is recognition (Ethics ll39al0). A look at the study ofbiologywill make
this clearer.
A condition for understanding biology, a presupposition whereby
we do not "see" something unless we are internally related to It, where
perception Is recognition, Is indicated by Aristotle in the following line
of thought. There are two kinds of works of nature: those which come
Into being and perish, and those which do not perish. The Imperishable are divine, but we have few opportunities to study them because
there Is little evidence available to our senses. We have better information about mortal things because we live among them. Our knowledge of mortal beings is greater "because they are nearer to us and
more akin to our nature," and that is compensation for the relative
Inferiority of the object. Knowledge about mortal things Is one we get
from the "tnside" as It were, betng mortal ourselves. Knowledge of
mortal beings is not available to someone outside the mortal situation,
to someone who is not "there." The prime mover does not contemplate
the world nor does he know other beings. In his "thinking of thinking,"
animals are not "there" for him.
The more usual pre-conditions for understanding biology come up
in the more ordinary discussions. When people discuss a science of
animal life (paraphrasing and re-arranging Parts 639b20 ff. and
Physics l98b10ff.), they divide into two parties. One group wants to
talk about a creating god or demiurge behind the being of animals.
The other group wants to talk about matter and chance combination.
Biology turns into theology or physics. It looks as if biology must begin
with one of these two presuppositions, for they are the only possible
presuppositions here.
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
But, according to Aristotle, either presupposition makes the actual
subject disappear, Life may be more "thinkable" with either presupposition, and the science of biology may be more understandable as
a science, but neither "life" nor "biological knowledge Is any more
actual. If we look at the world "objectively" and see only the parts that
are Immortal, parts whose mere possibility means actuality, the
eternal actualities of matter or god, we would not be able to see animals
or plants a tall, the living/ dying beings, the beings whose "being-there"
is a set of motions, a function, a doing. We can "see" this in-between
possibility (between necessity ami chance) in all things that grow:
When we say that nourishment is necessruy, we mean "necessary"
in neither of the former modes, but we mean that, without nourishment, no animal can be. This is "conditional necessity" or "hypothetical necessity." (Parts ofAnimals 642a8)
"Hypothetical necessity" -another idea that is unclear and indistinct, that appears to combine opposites. But it does make the
actuality of a living being more understandable.
For example ,look at the rabbit. There is no "transcendental deduction" of a rabbit; lt is not "necessary." A rabbit does not have to be the
way it is: there are many kinds of animal life. A rabbit's kind of life is
conditional or hypothetical; it has to be "given." But, on the other
hand, there is a kind of necessity to the rabbit. If there are going to be
rabbits, they"make sense" in a particular way. For example, !fi try to
"improve" a rabbit by adding a better weapon - by giving it fangs I see that, for the actual possession of such large teeth by a rabbit, I
have to make another change: the jaw has to be larger. If the jaw is
larger, then the neck has to be stronger and heavier. If the neck is
heavier, then the front limbs have to be stronger to support the larger
mass. With a heavier head and neck and front limbs, the rabbit won't
be able to hop; it will need a new way to move. And it needs a new way
to nourish Itself; the rabbit is no longer an efficient eater of grass. If
its nourishment changes, chemical changes will be necessary- a new
set of digestive enzymes, a new Immune system that recognizes the
new parts as "same" rather than "other," and so on. So there is a
necessity that follows the "hypothetical" glvenness of any one function
and animals are eternal "in the manner which is open to them."
Of the things which are, some are eternal and divine, others admit
of being and now-being... Being is better than non-being, and living
than not living. These are the causes on account of which the
generation of animals takes place, because since the nature of a
class of this sort is unable to be eternal, that which comes into being
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is eternal in the manner that is open to it. Now it is impossible for
it to be so numerically, since "the being" of things is to be found in
the particular, and if it really were so, then it would be eternal; it
is, however, open to it to be so specifically [in eidos]. That is why
there is always a class of men, animals and plants. (Generation of
Animals 731 b25)
Animals as a whole are not necessary. Because there are many
species and many ways ofliving, no particular way is necessary. But
there is a necessity in the unity of the parts because of the relation "if
this particular way of eating, then this particular way of walking." All
of these hypothetical statements have attached to them an "in order
to survive." There is no other ground of necessity here. The rabbit is
not "necessary," but this particular group of properties and weapons
and organs "makes sense" under the conditions oflife, if the rabbit is
going to survive, if its own survival is an issue to it. There is no way
to imagine an improved version of an animal. Although animals are
not perfect or divine, somehow they are "at an end." There is no good
for them that is beyond them. There is only life, "this" kind of life. All
animals are intelligible in this way: whale, shark, hawk, cockroach,
horse, tiger, bower-bird - even such pieces of apparent whimsy as
the fringed lizard and the ostrich (a parody of a human face with its
eyelashes and almost-binocular eyes; Its tiny wings; its legs which
bend the wrong way- Prog. Animals 714al8). It looks like a parody
of human form because both humans and birds have "top distinct
from front" (706a26).
Nature makes nothing without purpose but always with a view to
what is best for each thing within the bounds of possibility,
preserviog the particular essence (to tt. en einai) of each. (Frog. of
Animals 708a11)
In the theoretical sciences we begin with "what always is" and
Necessity [Parts 639b23-640a4). But in the knowledge of nature, the
sciences of the actual. we cannot begin with what always is. If we
begin with "what always is," the implicit temporality ofthe statement
would misrepresent living nature. Aristotle says that in natural science we do not begin with "what is" but "what will be' (Parts 639b23).
In the sciences of the actual, of living things which become and are
themselves, we have to begin with a beginning, with "what wiU be" or
what is going to be, a goal or project, a future, an actual possibility,
an aiming. Life is something that is never simply possessed but is
always the object and product of our continual effort, always the
future, because of mortality. Life always has the real possibility of
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TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
being "torn apart." This Is why biology and science of nature cannot
study "abstractions" (64lbll). Nature makes things for a purpose,
things that have a future built Into their present because they have
mortality built ln. The existence of these things Is not merely an "is."
If we are to have a science of biology, "what Is" needs temporal
qualifications because the present of living beings is not a simple "is."
Because we must begin with ''what will be" In the study ofliving beings,
their present Is the past of that future, a ''what was to be," to ti en
einaL
The reason why earlier thinkers did not arrive at this method of
procedure was that in their time there was no notion of to ti
en einai
and no way of dividing/deftotng betng. (Parts 642a26)
In ethics also the future Is built Into the present - a possibility
opened up by life Itself - In two important ways. In choice: what
distinguishes choice (proaires!s) from behavior that Is voluntary (atres!s)? Animals and children have voluntary behavior, an idea that Is
needed in biology as the complement and completion of "form."
Pro-aires!sls the future thatls builtinto decisions made In the present.
A decision is always made in the present, but moral virtue and
character allow us to pre-make our choices, to choose the kind of
choosing we will do, to put an atres!s before the atres!s, a pro-aires!s,
to begin with the beginning of actions (the beginning as the archei. to
make present choices the "past ofaji.Jture." This possibility- of deeds
needing both a beginning and an origin, arche - is groWlded by the
other crncial idea of ethics, habit, hexis (which comes from the future
tense of echo).
To say that "Perception is recognition" means that the outer, what
Is seen, Is the expression of the Inner and cannot be seen or understood without the looker, looking at the outside, Inwardly being the
same as the observed, having a "key'' or lexicon to decipher or translate
the outer as a sign of the Inner. This means that when we look at an
animal, we are looking at Form. not geometric shape, and the motions
that we see are not motions but actions, behavior. This kind oflooking
Is as actual, as real, as the animal we see because looking also Is an
action of a living being, not the "objective" observations of "consciousness." When I go to the Washington zoo and look at the hippopotamus
or the giraffes or Mark, the kodiak bear, I become aware of my own
looking. To look at these antmals you have to sit down and give yourself
a long time. As you watch them move around, you feel your inner pace
changing, slowing down. And the animal begins to appear. The animal
has been "there" as a shape, but now It begins to "be there" as a form,
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a functional whole, a being-there that Is for Itself a Here, a center. Its
motions begin to appear as behavior emanating from a center, as
action with an origin (archii). The animal and the seeing come Into
being along with each other and for each other. They are equally
present to each other. Looking Is a kind of attunement.
Of these two Ideas, form and action, form Is the one that Is usually
emphasized In biology - especially prominent In the readings and
dissections of Freshman laboratocy. But the idea of action Is equally
Important because It completes the biological understanding of form.
Form only appears as something expressed by actions. A form Is a
functional whole, actual when functioning. A hand severed from the
body is no longer a hand.
Action, choice, appetite, voluntary behavior- these are biological
ideas that are taken over and completed In the first half of Aristotle's
Ethics, the part about moral virtue. If these ideas belong to both biology
and ethics, then ethics is able to understand moral virtues on their
own terms and not tum them into intellectual virtues. Aristotle's
Ethics, in its ablllty to understand moral virtue, knows that the
problem of virtue is not to make us "act rationally,'' but rather almost
the opposite: How can the intellect become part of human virtue
without undermining moral virtue even while attempting to support
It (Magna Moralia 1182al5; cf. Republic 365a5). Intellect is a danger
because it destroys the innocence necessacy for moral virtue by
encouraging the self-consciousness that drives inqulcy. The danger
represented by the Intellect Is countered and overcome by the most
extraordinacy and deep thing about human beings: forgetting. The
Meno discovers and wonders at this forgetting. Aristotle's Ethics uses
forgetting In the form of habit to let self-consciousness and the intellect
disappear into the background.
Now we will look at the first part of the Ethics, moral virtue and Its
aesthetic/religious climax In "greatness of soul." Moral virtue culminates In this virtue because moral virtue begins with the problem of
the relation of virtue and self-consciousness in the desire for honor.
In Book I (1095bl5), Aristotle says that men of action agree that the
practical human good Is honor. But the desire for honor reveals the
difficulty of being virtuous and knowing that you are virtuous at the
same time.
Honor seems too superficial [to be the practical good for man, even
though men of action pursue it] ... slnce It appears to depend on
those who confer it rather than those upon whom it is conferred ... Men's motive in pursuing honor seems to be to assure
themselves of their own merit; they desire to be honored on the
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TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
ground of virtue. (!095b25) Tbose ...who covet being honored by
good men [rather than powerful men], and by persons who know
them, do so from a desire to confum their own opinion of themselves; so these like honor because they are assured of their worth
by their confidence in the judgment of those who assert it.
(1159a20)
In ethics as well as biology there is also a privileged state for
observation, a mature state, in which seeing and being seen are most
actual. The young cannot understand the science of ethics, nor are
they capable of ethical action- they cannot see or be seen here. Only
the mature human Is capable of understanding and performing action,
behavior that springs from character.
Animals and the young are not capable of ethical action; their
behavior is only ''voluntary," a biological character. Their behavior
does not spring from a fixed disposition, from character. They live in
a "Now" of acting, and thereby they are closer to the internal and
external conditions of doing. They are not yet separated and isolated
from the conditions. Proairesis, the way a mature being chooses, is
not made simply in the Now; It is made before the moment of decision,
never simultaneously with it. It endures into the present moment
because of training and habit, and It allows us to have character.
Animals and the young do not have character. Their lives aren't
temporally integrated; the "before" (and "after") are not part of the deed
for them. "Action" and "character" are the two ideas we need In order
to enter ethics. These notions (and "choice") are not simple. We will
look at their roots and growth briefly.
The young are good at mathematics. (There are youthful prodigies
In mathematics, music, and chess, sciences that are "abstract.") But
"mathematical speeches have no ethos (custom, habit),. since they do
not involve any choice [proairesis]. For they do not have 'that for the
sake of which'" (Rhetoric 1417al9). In mathematics there are no
decisions that involve the separation or opposition of means and ends.
There is no ambiguity or tension (a possibility opened up by the
opposition of form and matter in biological form). All decisions and
actions within mathematics are determined by knowledge of the
object. There is no need for a choice which can be justified only by the
character of the subject.
A human understanding of human beings begins when we recognize ambiguity and tension. We first meet this tension in our
youth, the tension between thinking and feeling. The young excel
in mathematical thinking; in action, the young are led by their
feelings. The difference between these two faculties, thinking and
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feeling, characterizes young people. Mathematics and rhetoric (usually
in the form of music) are their possibilities. Morally, the young are
capable of startling amounts of generosity and terri1YJng amounts of
self-righteousness. Youth is a time of either/or: something is either
precise or imprecise, thinking or feeling, right or wrong.
The young are wrong. But I want to qualify this. Their mistake is
not a "logical" mistake. Their mistakes shows vitality, the presence of
a particular form of life, youthfulness. If we look at a ''youthful"
question about thinking and feeling and say, ''You'll grow out of It" or
"Just do It; don't dither about it so much," we would be making
another kind of mistake, the mistake of being old. Age tends toward
Impatience and coldness. Tension withers because feeling withers
(their friends often are useful to them rather than pleasing 1156a25). An impatient intellectuality gets stronger. Habit begins to
suffocate nature.
This youthful mistake is just the first form of the human problem
- relation of emotions and intellect, nobility and justice. This ambiguity, first present in youth, continues. There are many ambiguities
or tensions in the Ethics. Choice is the fullest expression of this tension
and unity. Choice, proairesis, Is "either thought related to desire or
desire related tp thought; and man, as an origin of action (archei, is a
Wtion of desire and inteUect" (1139b3). Moral virtue is a habit of
choosing, a Wtion of desire and principle- "if choice is something
serious" (1139a24).
The answers for which Aristotle is famous or notorious are very
often a paired set of two answers (thoughtful desire or appetitive
thought, the actuality of a potential, hypothetical necessity, etc.).
Sometimes they seem to be merely lwo opposites just stuck together.
With these answers, one sometimes feels that one is just hearing the
question again (Is motion an actuality or a potentiality? What is it in
its self-same simplicity?) What is good about this kind of answer, even
though it can't be separated from its context like a mathematical
theorem, is that it tries for visibility as well as thinkability. Such an
answer is really and obviously connected to the question; the answer
doesn't destroy the question. The answer is often only the "mature"
form of the question, where a question in its maturity is the answer
in its freshness.
The "paired set" of answers that holds together the science of ethics
appears when "the good for man" is first investigated. When Aristotle
asks "What is the good for man?" he gives two answers. The good for
man Is both "Happiness" and "the function of man, which is doing
virtuous acts." Despite ''virtuous action" being the explicit content of
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TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the book, it is not the most Interesting and serious question of the
book, which Is, what Is the relation of these two answers?
"Happiness" as the goal of human action makes sense as a theory
of human actions when one looks at the variety of human actions and
tries to fmd a common goal. But it Is too general to be practically
useful; It cannot be "aimed at"; there is no goal for striving, no future,
In it. The other answer, "the function of man, doing virtuous acts," is
very practical and can c~rtainly be a goal for aiming and striving, but
It Jacks the confident self-consciousness that goes with happiness.
Aristotle says that the two answers are related by ''visibility" or
explicitness (1097b24; cf. 1107a28): Doing vtrtuous acts is an explication or specification ofhappiness. This, "specification, actualization,
application, becoming visible," is the center of moral virtue and the
key to understanding choice as the relation of thinking and feeling.
On the one hand, ethical action is the specifYing of the general rule,
where the general rule gets applied. On the other hand, ethical action
is where very specific doings and happenings get generalized, get a
general and universal character- where "this act" becomes a "noble
act" and where "this person" gets character. Character gives our
actions a universally recognizable quality, and we are able to appear.
Action
So we will look at action and habit briefly. Then we will look at the
climax of moral virtue In "Greatness of Soul."
An action is not merely doing something. That kind of doing is best
exemplified by making. In making (producing an object by labor or
craft) the end of the doing lies outside of the doing. The maker doesn't
appear in the thing made- at least he doesn't appear as a doer with
character; he appears as skillful or clumsy.
Actions allow me to appear as a doer, as having character, as being
a source of the shape of the doings. The soul must actively appear in
Its actions; it must not disappear as it disappears into the object of
labor or of knowledge. The moral good as giving a shape to doings is
"something to aim at" in my actions rather than something to know.
If the vtrtuous action Is given by a rule specifYing what to do, then
vtrtue is actual as virtue when the rule is followed because it is a rule.
The character that would appear would be a person who Is a rule-follower,
someone with a compulsive personality disorder. If I want to become
just actually- not merely "do the just thing," mere behavior - I do
not want to go to someone who knows what justice is and is able to
tell me the correct thing to do. Because he is able to do that, my action
would not have an "aiming." My action would be mere doing and would
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not point beyond Itself. If I myself want to become just, I want to see
someone who is aiming at justice. He Is the only one useful to me
because I want to see his aiming, his action. Aiming presents the
person and the goal, character and virtue, as distinct and yet related.
Aiming presents the universal and the specific at the same time, so I
can look at an action and separate the Important from the unimportant parts- the just part from the merely specific parts of the action.
This separating is the Part of the doing that makes it mine. With the
separating, I come on stage pointing: "There, that is what's just or
noble to me." We want to see In actions their aiming rather than their
"knowledge of the whatness" of justice so we can see the hidden part
of an action, the pro part of pro-oiresis. Aiming is both the specifYing
of the general and the generalizing of the specific.
Virtues, as objects of"aiming," are one pole of the relation of aiming.
Virtues themselves have a certain relational structure. They are not
simple positive presences. They are a mean between two extremes, a
not-this and not-that, a doubled negation. This structure, a mean and
extremes, is a necessary feature of an object of choice qua choice, i.e.,
as something aimed at. If I look at a portion of food, I might observe
Its properties and weigh it- i.e., treat it as an object of knowledge.
Butlfl am to choose or reject it, it must be either just right, too much,
or too little. It is Imprecise mathematically but is something appealing
to me. The mathematical value of the mean can change, if I go on a
diet. What formerly appeared to me as "just right" now appears as "too
much." But the mean/ extremes structure ls still there. It Is a universal
structure of object of choice.
Practical wisdom first appears to us as paired sets of opposites
without a mean, a large dose of the kind of answer that Aristotle often
gives. These generalities often make sense as a reflection about human
action, but there Is little hope of using them as a guide to action. When
I was growing up, my grandmother would watch me do something and
say "Haste 111akes waste." Then she would watch me again and say "A
stitch in time saves nine." I should not be "Penny wise and pound
foolish." However, I should remember that "A penny saved is a penny
earned." This aspect of growing up Is maddening and hilarious- was
she trying to help me or drive me crazy? Eventually, a way of doing
things begins to appear, almostofltself-amean, a waythatls "mine."
There Is no way that Is "the" way (universal) nor Is there a way that Is
"merely mine" (specific), but there Is "my way" ofbelng temperate, "my
way" of doing the general goals. The mean and the "mine" of character,
the universal and the specific, come into being at the same time.
The goal of training Is not mere behavior but a stage where the
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
boredom and the struggle recede into the background because of
habit, allowing for a new possibility, action and character.
Choice is a more certain sign of character than is action (Ethics
llllb4). While a choice is made before the moment of doing and
choice is made possible by ptior training, choice is more visible after
the moment of doing, when someone reflects on what they did and
shows regret or satisfaction. Afterwards they claim the action as their
own or reject it; they ('how whether or not they meant it (rather,
whether they now intend to mean it). We have all received apologies
along the lines of ''I'm sorry, if you were offended. But! had a bad day,
too much to drink," etc. You are seeing the choice made again, but
not under the pressure of ctrcumstances. As the qualifications to the
apology pile up, the deed and its circumstances as a whole are being
chosen tight now. The pro part of the pro-airesis appears in thought
about the deed afterwards. This thinking takes place at the edge of
the moment of action. It is the transition from the general to the
particular (and also the reverse). The present moment, the moment of
doing, is the past of a future. It is a reflective affirmation of what we
approved of in advance, in deliberation. Before the deed, the object of
choice or voluntatiness is too general, a mere rule, and it needs
specifYing, shaping. After the deed, the deed by itself was far too
specific (was the sneeze part of the deed or not? the color of my shirt?)
so the "factual" doing needs shaping, a separation of the important
from the unimportant. I as a doer need to be sorted in the same way,
Important from unimportant. Choice does this; it both chooses and
recognizes (as Its own- ''Yes, that's what I meant") the shape of the
action. Without those two kinds of shaping and specifYing, there are
no actions. There is only behavior, mere voluntary happenings without
shape. Proairesis allows me to "make an appearance" in the world as
a doer, a source and origin of action. Without character. deeds have
a beginning- a unique place in the series that is physical time- but
they have no otigin (arche).
The climax of moral virtue is a virtue called "Greatness of Soul."
What this person sees in his aiming is not so much a mean between
two extremes but the distinction between the important and the
unimportant, the great and the petty. He has a reflective and poetic
grasp of deeds. This man is the climax of the imprecise side ofvtrtue,
for we know that he is idle and slow to act, but we don't know what
he does, only that it is great.
Aesthetically and religiously, however, he is very precise. He has a
deep voice and walks slowly. He likes beautiful and useless things.
(He himself is beautiful and useless for the most part.) He is worth the
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greatest of external goods, honor- the kind of honor we offer to the
gods as a tribute. He Is moderately pleased with honor from "serious"
people, but no honor Is adequate. He does not care much even about
honor. It is "small" to him because he Is aware of the greatoess of his
own soul and its worth. Human life itself is not too "serious" to him.
In this he approaches the insight given later In the book, that "it is
absurd to think that political knowledge or prudence Is the most
serious kind of knowledge, inasmuch as man is not the best thing in
the universe" (ll4la20j. He has insight about limits and transcendence. To understand Wm as a limit- that he is worth th~ greatest
honor but he doesn't pursue honor; that honor is small to him, but
he deigns to accept It from serious people despite its inadequacy we have to remind ourselves of the difficulties moral virtue and
self-consciousness have with each other.
In Book I (and again in Book VIII) Aristotle said that although men
of action pursue honor, honor is superficial. Honor is superficial
because It has a hidden part, a choice hidden underneath the surface
choice ofhonor. "Men's motive In pursuing honor seems to be to assure
themselves of their own virtue." Men pursue honor because of a
weakness or difficulty with self-consciousness, self-knowledge.
Later in Book I (llOlblO), Aristotle distinguishes honor from
praise. When we praise just men, we approve of their actions. But
when we praise the gods, it is absurd that they be measured by our
standards, but this Is what approval is. So when dealing with the gods
(or godlike people), we give them honor. Honor here Is not an occasion
for self-knowledge in the one honored, but In the one doing the
honoring. Honor is a recognition of our own incapacity to recognize
the worth of the virtuous soul. The man of greatoess of soul, In his
self-knowledge and his worth, his grasp of the limits of honor, and as
a occasion for our self-knowledge, Is godlike. He is an aesthetic and
religious climax.
When Hobbes looks at ancient thought, he doesn't think that It was
''wrong." Hobbes doesn't even ta:ke It seriously. The ancients don't
understand the problems deeply enough. They are superficial because
they are "uncritical" - naive - about thinking. The mind can't be
objective or find truth without some preliminary critical work.
First, ancient thought uncritically and naively believes that we can
begin to think without understanding language first and without
getting true defmitions. Words in their daily use appear to have their
meanings "simply there," as the diagrams of Euclid are simply there,
open to vision with nothing hidden, nothing in;tplicit, ,noth.lng. prec
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
40
supposed. But this is a deception. Words are not simple presences.
Words do have a natural core of meaning, but they also have an overlay
of the accidental, an historical accretion of evaluative judgments
(which often can be traced back to Artstotle). Hobbes gives an analysis
of the word "tyranny" as an example. The natural part of a word's
meaning has to be separated from the historical part before we can
think without hidden prejudice.
Second, the other source ofthe,anclent's naivete and superficiality
was their religion.
There is almost nothing that has a name that has not been esteemed
by the Gentiles as a god ...The Gentiles make images and statues so
that we might stand in fear of various objects of devotion: [the
Gentiles have worshipped rivers, trees, mountains,] men, women,
birds, crocodiles, snakes and onions ...
Ancient religious thought concerns poetic fancies, mere "figures of
honor." A plurality of gods Is needed to express their love of comparing
and competing. Even the Prime Mover in Artstotle's Metaphysics is
"prime" rather than "only." He is the chief or first mover rather than
a god beyond comparing. The hidden presence of polytheistic religion
makes Artstotle's philosophy an unsystematic doctrine of separate
essences or actualities or substances. The only thing that is striking
about his thought is his use of "insignificant speech" and self-contradictory defmltions. Aristotle fools no one who can listen deeply to
speech and hear what is being said. (Hobbes is a great translator, able
to hear beneath the surface of words.)
The Bible, whether true or false, makes it possible for us to be
"deep," serious and rational in a way that was not possible for the
ancients. Monotheism is not truer than polytheism. Monotheism is
more rational than polytheism because It allows us to be more serious
and rational.
Both ways of being uncritical make ancient thinkers naive. This
naivete shows up as an inability to see through the deceptions of honor
and its poetry, the mists with which honor hides and decorates the
ordinary, the natural. Honor decorates and hides nature and natural
justice at every opportunity. Hobbes exposes honor continually. For
example, even laughter is unmasked as being a kind ofhonor, "sudden
glory." Aristotle's Ethics Is impossible because it tries to hold together
honor (nobility) and justice.
The particular book that Hobbes takes as a standard- to show us
a new sense of seriousness, a way to see the world and people not
hidden by honor -Is Job. There the world is filled with figures of power
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and pride: lioness, raven, wild horse, ox, vulture, and leviathan. The
strangest being on God's list is the ostrich. It doesn't even care for its
eggs. God says it is the silliest animal. But the ostrich, despite its lack
of seriousness, rises up and outruns the horse, that figure of pride
and courage in war. I look at the animals and I see that I am not the
most serious thing in the universe, but I do belong in it- I do belong
to that series of beauty and power, where power is justified by Its
serious beauty. But then I look at the ostrich. It is almost insulting.
It Is In bad taste, an aesthetic mistake, to put the ostrich on this list.
The other way in which Job turns against ancient standards and
makes them look naive and not serious is its ending. If the ancient
pagans had written Job, they would not have written that short,
annoying ending, where Job gets everylhing back and gets a new
family. They would not have allowed such a spiteful, mocking turn of
the religious against the aesthetic. They would not have allowed such
a short ending to overbalance the long beauty of Job's suffering. The
disproportion of the length and content of the ending is as if, at the
end of Oedipus at Colonus, Apollo would come on stage and say, "On
second thought, never mind." Oedipus would have been furious. This
book should end with Job repenting. His suffering is justified aesthetically because he suffered beautifully, fearlessly, and magnificently.
Job would have greatness of soul and belong In the world with
leviathan and the crocodile and the hawk and Oedipus.
But the book doesn't end there, nor did God end creation before
the ostrich. Not only does Job get a replacement family, he loves them.
How can he love them so simply? It is disloyal to his first family and
his own suffering at their loss. If Job forgets his own suffering and its
magnificence - if he does not respect his own suffering - how can
we take him seriously? Ifwe can, Job is something stranger and deeper
than Oedipus.
Endings
There Is no one way for me to end these thoughts. I have two
endings. One is "philosophic." The other is an aesthetic and religious
image.
First, the philosophic ending. Suppose that Hobbes is wrong about
Aristotle. Suppose that Aristotle i1> right about actuality and that
speech, when It tries to talk about fundamental things, is at best a
kind of pointing or aiming. Suppose that circular and self-contradictory words are designed to bring out this pointing, that they are not
"insignificant speech," as Hobbes claims, but speech transcending its
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
limits. Suppose that Hobbes's criticism is the thought of a prosaic
man, one who clings to the ordinary because of fear and a lack of
vitality, one who admires the orderly but slavish East (and Egypt) over
the disorderly freedom of Greece.
Even if all that were true, thtngs that cannot be clearly said, things
that can only be pointed at, tend to disappear in the course of time;
and we are not even aware of their disappearance. We repeatAristotle's
definitions. Unlike Euclid's definitions, which do not wear out so
easily, the words become more familiar, more ordinary, the basis of a
"habit of answering fearlessly and magnificently" rather than the
"actualization of knowing."
This wearing out or mortality of words makes us desire something
more than mere knowing from philosophy and its interpreters, something more poetic and aesthetic than mere concepts. What we want is
to regain the freshness or immediacy that was there in the original
pointing. We want the aiming, the striving, the pointing from the
philosopher. What we need from philosophy is not so much "knowledge of what is" as the recovery of that lost sense of being, of actuality,
that drove the inquiry before there were answers, the actuality of the
attitude behind the knowledge that knows the world. But philosophy
must resist this wish to be uplifting. Poetic talk about seriousness and
pointing can have an empty depth, an intensity without content. This
depth is not distinguishable from superficiality. Philosophy must
beware of the desire to be exciting.
The most important look at choosing and the effort to understand
it is in Exodus (18). Jethro visits the children of Israel at their camp
in the wilderness after their escape from Egypt. Jethro is the priest of
another religion or sect (a priest ofMidian; he is Moses' father-in-law).
Before the escape, God said that He intended to bring Israel out of
Egypt in order to prove to them he was their god and also, at the same
time, to prove to Pharaoh that he was the god. But it is impossible to
do both, especially at the same time. God has to be either the God of
Israel or the god of all. His choice of Israel is a rejection of Pharaoh.
Both Pharaoh and Israel will think that Lord is Israel's god and not
Pharaoh's god, hence not the god. Jethro, being neither Pharaoh nor
Israel, might be in the best position to understand what has happened.
He listens to the story and he does understand. He says, "Now I know
that the Lord is greater than all gods." The story worked somehowGod did do both things at once, to be both "the" god and "this" god.
The particularity of Lord's choice does not undermine his universality.
Jethro somehow understands this. He sees that Lord is the god, the
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only god who is a god, because He makes choices, not in spite of His
choices. Lord, instead of having the Impassive universality best expressed by a statue, makes choices and performs actions. He is a living
god.
Once Jethro has seen that Lord is the god and has chosen Israel,
how could Jethro not stay with Moses, taking a new family and
religion? But, unlike Job, he can choose to return to his old life. Jethro
offers a sacrifice and goes back to his own country. He goes back to a
mistaken religion and empty ceremonies, back to what is now merely
"his own," one actuality among many possibilities that are false maybe even irrelevant. What can the life he chooses mean to htm?
Although Jethro knows that Lord is the god because of His choice, the
god is not his god. God did not choose him. God did not even reject
him.
A Note on Sources:
Kurt Goldstein, The Organism
Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon ofLife
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure ofBehavior,
Sense and Nonsense, The Primacy ofPerception
Erwin Straus, Essays in Phenomenological Psychology
Leo Spitzer, Essays in Historical Semantics
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'!HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�I
Where Is Greece?
Radoslav Datchev
EUROPE
A
L
I
s
I
A
B
I mean the question of my title literally. To find Greece on the map is
what I would like to try to do tonight. And I think that this Is worth
talking about, because, it seems to me, It Is not at all clear which map
Is the map to check. Worse, it seems to me that even if we had the
right map, It still wouldn't be clear how to identity Greece on it.
A modern map wUl not do. The Greece that we care about, the
Greece of Homer and Plato, of Sophocles ·and Aristotle, is separated
by an abyss of discontinuity from the Greece that we would find on a
modern map. It has to be an old map: ideally, a contemporary map.
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TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Now, an old map means Ptolemy. Ptolemy wrote a Geography, and
just as astronomy for the next thirteen centuries meant Ptolemy's
astronomical treatise, geography meant Ptolemy's Geography. For the
next thirteen centuries if anyone wanted to draw a map or to travel
far afield, they turned to Ptolemy. But we would be researching the
maps of Ptolemy in vain. Greece is not one of the thousands of names
on these maps. There is no Greece on Ptolemy's maps.
Ptolemy is all tables, charts, and maps. But there is another
geographer, Strabo, who wrote a voluminous descriptive Geography a
little over a centmy before Ptolemy. Can Strabo help?
Strabo speaks of the Greeks all the time. But according to his book
there are Greeks in Rome and there are Greeks in Spain, and also in
Africa, in Asia Minor, in Phoenicia, even in India. Something seems to
be wrong.
One thing that is certainly wrong is the time. Ptolemy and Strabo
lived in Roman times, five to six centuries after the time of Aeschylus
and Socrates, of the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars. It seems that
we should turn to Herodotus and Thucydides rather than Ptolemy and
Strabo.
But again there is a difficulty. Without hindsight we simply cannot
extract a map from Herodotus and Thucydides. There is no reasonable
way to draw a map based on identification of places by "further and
above," "notfar from," or "they sailed for three days." We need latitudes
and longitudes to draw a map, and we have no latitudes and longitudes
before Strabo and Ptolemy.
So I have compromised. My map is drawn from Ptolemy and Strabo.
I have done my best, however, to reduce it only to what is explicitly
mentioned in Herodotus and Thucydides.
It is a map of the world. The world is divided into three parts:
Europe, Asia, and Libya. On the fringes is the Ocean, the river,
according to Homer, that encircles the land, but whose existence
Herodotus doubts. In the middle of the land, as its name still indicates,
is the Mediterranean, the sea which the Romans of Ptolemy and
Strabo's time called mare nostnun. our sea, and which the Greeks
before them called simply ecimcma, simply the sea.
And just as the map is a compromise, so is this lecture. It is a
compromise between what Ptolemy says geography should be, and
what Strabo says that it should be. Ptolemy begins his Geography by
saying that geography, being the business of the mathematician,
should represent the whole known world exactly. Strabo begins his
Geography by saying that geography, being the business of the
philosopher, should serve the study of the art of life. So I have tried
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47
to follow Ptolemy's dictum and stick to maps and, possibly, exactness.
But towards the end of the lecture I have taken Strabo seriously, too,
In order to see whether geography may tnrn out to be philosophically
significant.
But first, how do we find Greece on this map of the world?
In no Greek book Is there a hint of an entity, political, economic, or
religious--of an institutional entity of any kind-demarcated and
denoted as "Greece." As a matter of fact, the very word "Greece" occurs
seldom in Greek books.' Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle,
Strabo, all talk instead, almost eJtclusively, about "the Greeks."
We need a criterion, then, to identifY the Greeks, to identifY in this
manner the place where the Greeks lived, and thereupon, perhaps, to
say that this is Greece.
Now the question of who the Greeks are is explicitly addressed in
a famous passage in Herodotus (VIII, 144). The Athenians are speaking
to some Spartan envoys. We cannot submit to the Persians, the
Athenians say, because we are Greeks, we are one in blood and one
In language; the shrines of the gods belong to all of us in common,
and the sacrifices are In common, and there are our common habits
and our common customs.
Blood, language, the shrines of the gods, sacrifices, habits, and
customs. This Is what Herodotus says the Greeks share. Are these the
criteria we need?
We can discard blood, habits, and customs out of hand. For are the
Greeks who build bridges for Xerxes and lead him through the
mountain passes, are these Greeks in the Persian army of the same
blood, habits, and customs as the three hundred Greeks who fight,
all by themselves, several hundred thousand Persians at Thermopylae? We see in Herodotus half the Greeks allied with the Barbarian
Persians against the other half. In Thucydides, too, we see half the
Greeks against the other half eagerly slaughtering one another. We
could see in later times half of them again, with Philip the Macedonian,
subjugate the other half. And still later, we could see half the Greeks
join the Romans against the other half. Needless to say, the halves in
all these Instances do not coincide.
How are we to reconcile this picture of Greeks endlessly killing
Greeks, relentlessly slaughtering and enslaving one another, with the
notion of common blood, habits, and customs? It seems that to
understand the Greeks who were constantly warring against Greeks
as an ethnic unity, as an entity with common upbringing and common
practices, we first need to know who the Greeks are. Blood, habits,
customs, seem to be part of the riddle of where Greece is, not part of
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the solution.
And unfortunately, so are the rest of the criteria suggested by
Herodotus: language, the shrines of the gods, and sacrifices. Shrines,
gods, and sacrifices, or what we would generally and misleadingly call
the religion of the Greeks, are simply phenomena too unstable to
provide a meaningful guide for identifying the Greeks. The Olympian
pantheon included several dozens of gods of several generations.
Different gods were venerated differently and to a different degree in
different paces. A countless number of heroes were honored with
shrines and sacrifices locally. Rivers and trees and winds were venerated. Ancestor worship, always of course local, was central to their
beliefs. The hearth of each house was sacred.
Then again, none of these cults and practices were exclusively
Greek. Greek shrines seldom shunned Barbarians when they brought
appropriate gifts to their divinities. Apollo's Delphi had no qualms
about quietly siding with the Persians when the threat. of being burnt
down became too real. And If their rites were open to the Barbarians,
so were the Greeks open to Barbarian rites. Allen gods and their cults
were routinely adopted, and among these were some of the most widely
venerated. Dionysus and the Bacchae, for Instance, are of Eastern
origin, the Orphic mysteries ofThraclan. Plato's RepubUc, by the way,
begins with the return of Socrates and Glaucon from the festival of a
newly introduced Thracian goddess. Religion, again, is part of the
problem, not of the solution.
And finally, so Is language. We know the neighbors of the Greeks
almost exclusively from Greek sources. Lydians, Carlans, Phryglans,
Scythians, Persians, speak in Herodotus and Thucydides nothing but
Greek. We do know that they had distinct languages. But the degree
to which the Hellenization of thelr habits, upbringing, blood, and
language stems from our sources, or is rather a matter of fact, is in
each case an extremely difficult question.
Indeed, it was a question which the Greeks themselves found very
hard to answer. There is a story in Herodotus about a Macedonlan
king (V, 22). The Macedonians, apparently, spoke a Greek dialect,
participated eagerly in the Greek wars, and sacrificed to the Olympian
gods. They shared, it would seem, language, habits, and gods with the
Greeks. Still, when the king tried to take part once In an Olympic
footrace restricted to Greeks, he was asked to prove that he was not
a Barbarian. And a century and a half later, when Philip, Alexander
the Great's father, threatened to conquer the Greeks (the Greeks, that
Is, who had no doubt about themselves being Greek), Demosthenes,
the Athenian orator, argued at length that Philip was a Barbarian (PhiL
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3,31). And Demosthenes had to pay for being wrong with prison, exile,
and eventually his death. He had to pay because Philip and Alexander
settled the question by conquering the arguing sides, both those who
took the Macedonians seriously when they claimed to be Greek, and
those who did not.
Instead of one more or less clearly demarcated language, we see
Greek as numerous dialects blending into one another, not always
mutually comprehensible, gradually merging into Barbarian tongues,
borrowing heavily from them. Language, too, is part of the problem:
knowing who the Greeks are is more likely to help in the examination
of whether a dialect is Greek or not, rather than the other way around.
All along I meant by "Greeks" and "Greece" what in Greek itself is
''EAAT)VES and EMus.
In Homer EAA<is is an alternative name only of the region ruled by
AchU!es (IL II, 683; Od. XI, 496; etc.), and the 'EI.AT]v<s are just one of
the numerous tribes whose leaders besiege Troy. Later 'E!.Ms came to
mean the North of the mainland as a whole and as opposed to the
Peloponnese peninsula as a whole. Still later, 'EI.AT]v<s became the
generic name for all the traditional Dorians. Ionians, Aeolians, and so
on, but why 'EI.AT]v<s came to be the common name, rather than some
other, is obscure. It was already obscure by the time of Herodotus and
Thucydides, who could only derive the name 'EAA<is from a myth about
a legendary descendant of the man who survived the deluge (Her. I,
56; Th. I, 3).
The etymology may be obscure but by the fifth century, by the time
of Herodotus, Thucydides, Aeschylus, and Socrates, the name is
employed routinely.
Herodotus, for instance, begins his Histories by saying that he
wants to record the deeds of Greeks and Barbarians. Thucydides
begins the history of the Peloponnesian War by introducing the war
as the greatest turmoil ever to befall the Greeks and even some of the
Barbarians. Both historians speak of the Greeks all the time, without
much ado, In a matter-of-fact kind of way, apparently with no doubt
that their audience would knowwhat they mean. And so do Aeschylus,
Sophocles, and Euripides. To speak of the Greeks, In short, has
become commonplace.
And here Is an instance of how Aeschylus speaks of the Greeks.
The king in The SuppUants (913-15) scolds the Egyptian herald: You
Barbarians, the king says, you Insolently bother the Greeks, you do
nothing right, you stand upright in nothing. Is the poetry and the
passion of Aeschylus, a veteran of the Persian War himself. overdoing
the opposition Greeks/Barbarians?
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
In both Herodotus and Thucydides the Greeks are always very
explicitly meant in opposition to Barbarians. Persians, Egyptians,
Lydians, Scythians do not seem to be names on the same level of
generality as the name "Greeks." They seem to belong to sub-classes
of the class Barbarians, rather like the Athenians and Spartans, or maybe
the Dorians and lonians, who are sub-classes of the class Greeks.
The opposition Greeks/Barbarians seems to signify a division that
goes deeper than geography, a division of the world as a whole, of
nature, of cjJims. Listen to Plato in the RepubUc (470c): Barbarians and
Greeks are enemies by nature, cjJvon, Plato says. Or to the Statesman
(262d). The stranger from Elea is illustrating a dichotomy. He says it
is like dividing the whole human race into two by separating the
Greeks from all other races, which are countless in number and have
no common blood or common language, and giving them the name
Barbarians, as if they were all of one kind. Aristotle is, as usual, even
blunter. He says in the PoUtics (l252b5-9) that among Barbarians
there is no difference between the female and the slavish, because
there is no ruler by nature (cpvcm) among them, and they are all a group
of slaves, male and female. That is why the poets say that the Greeks
should rule the Barbarians, because the Barbarian and the slave are
by nature (cpvcm)one and the same.
cpvan, "by nature," recurs in these passages. The distinction
Greeks/Barbarians is by nature. It is on the level of distinguishing,
say, plants from animals.
It is worth noting also that the usage of "Greeks" and "Barbarians"
becomes common in the years of the Persian conquest of Asia Minor
and the invasion of Europe afterward. The oldest surviving tragedy,
and the only one based not on myth but on experience, The Persians
of Aeschylus, abounds in appreciation of the Greeks and wonder at
the hubris of the Barbarians. And the oldest clearly pejorative use of
"Barbarian" is in Heraclitus (fr. 107), who was a Persian subject all
his life. The rise of Persia, a threatening alien force nearby, apparently
strengthened the sense of unity of the Greeks and presented the
distinction Greek/Barbarian as more than ethnic, as Implying a
judgement of value, good and bad, as well.
Greeks and Greece, then, are first of all a cultural denotation-"cultural" in its most general, broadest, and vaguest sense. "Greeks," as
the Greeks used the word, is not on the level of generality of, say, our
Brazilians, Canadians, or Pakistanis. It is closer to what we mean by
Christian or Muslim, but that would be misleading by implying religion
too strongly. It is closest, perhaps, to whatever it is that we mean when
we speak ofWestern civilization, for instance. But even this would be
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Inadequate. The distinction Greek/Barbarian Is a distinction by nature, <jliJon, a division of the world as a whole, of the cosmos rather
than just the surface of the earth. Plants are different from animals,
gods are different from men, and so too the Greeks are different from
the Barbarians.
Can geography, then, describe a cosmic distinction; {:an It describe
the division of the world as a whole into Greeks and Barbarians?
Well, in a vague way t:pe distinction is also cultural. And culture
does leave tangible remains. Books, for Instance. Then, even though
Jacking criteria to !dentllY the Greeks, we can try to compile a Jist of
the places where, according to the Greek books, the Greeks lived, and
we can put these places on the map. And a picture-a more or less
clear geographical picture-may emerge.
This is what I have done with my map. I have marked some 75
places which seemed to me to have the strongest claim of belonging
on a map of Herodotus' and Thucydides' time. These are the major
participants in the two wars, the Persian and the Peloponnesian. I
have also put on the map the places associated with the authors and
characters of our great books: their home cities, the cities where they
were active, and the cities where they died. I have also marked places
like Cyrene In \'lorth Africa, and Massalia In the Far West, which are
often mentioned as comparable In size to the two largest Greek polels,
Athens, and Syracuse in Sicily. Athens and Syracuse, and perhaps
Cyrene and Massal!a, should have had populations of over 200,000
each, a respectable number even today. I have also put on the map
the chief sources of the main commodities that Greek cities exchanged, grain and slaves, most of them on the Black Sea. Slaves from
these regions, where the stupidest people in the world Jived, according
to Herodotus (N, 46), had very high reputation. I have also marked
Tanais and Emporiae, the cities at the far points, East and West, of
the Greek world. There are reports of cities even further away, on the
Atlantic, for instance, but those are most probably spurious.
And It seems that a very clear picture-geographical pictureemerges. What these places seem to have in common Is that they are
all on the Mediterranean coast. Greece appears to be the Mediterranean coast.
There are exceptions, but very few. And Ignoring for the moment
Sparta, the quintessential land power of Greece, and Boetia and
Thessaly, the picture of Greece as the sea coast, as the littoral, seems
to me compelling.
And we shouldn't find this surprising at all. The Greeks were a sea
people. I don't know of any other people whose epics are so closely
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
linked to the sea. The invading army In the IUad stays on its ships for
ten years, and it is a catalogue of ships. of course, that lists all its
contingents. And Odysseus wanders for ten years at sea, not on land.
Herodotus calls the Barbarians landlubbers. And there is the
famous passage (VIII, 61) where Themistocles proudly says of the
Athenians, who have just lost all their land and all their shrines to the
Persians, that as long as they have two hundred ships they have land
and they have a polis greater than anyone's. There is the story also of
Xenophon's Anabasis (N, 7). An army of Greeks, over ten thousand
strong, was stranded in Barbarian territory, in the heart of Persia.
After an ordeal of many months through a thousand miles of desert
and mountains, having left thousands of def).d behind, Xenophon
suddenly heard the soldiers cry ea.wuoal eawuoal They had seen the
sea. And having seen the sea, they were finally home, right there, on
the Black Sea coast. It becrune a catchphrase. Like "Know yourself,"
which became attached to philosophizing, eawoua! eawoaa! came to
mean that after a long and dangerous journey one was finally home.
I should mention that the Greeks never built roads. There are
incredible instances. Sybaris, a city in the West, founded a colony on
the opposite side of its narrow peninsula. But close interchange
between the two cities did not make them use the convenient valley
that connected them, rather than the sea route around the peninsula,
which was dozens of times longer, more dangerous, and more expensive.
They did not build roads, but ships the Greeks built by the hundred.
Their triaconters and pentaconters were unmatched in the Mediterranean and the Greeks' domination of the seas was taken for granted
by their neighbors until Roman times. And I can't help mentioning
that in the Politics (1256a35) Aristotle lists the five ways of obtaining
a livelihood as farming, animal husbandry, hunting, fishing, and-of
all things-piracy. Some people, Aristotle adds (1256b2), are engaged
in two employments: a farmer may also be a hunter, and a shepherd
also a pirate. Piracy was so trivial that a contract between two cities
has survived, regulating-not outlawing but regulating~piracy.
There is no phenomenon di:;;playing the ties of the Greeks to the
sea in a more powerful way than their colonization. "Colonizat:on" Is
the name given to a huge wave of resettlement, of founding cities along
the Mediterranean coast, which began In the middle of the eighth
century and did not subside for two centuries.
Colonization is well documented. Founding a city was an important
event, important enough to record on stone, and to celebrate and
remember for a long time afterward, On the criterion of memory nnd
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records, no event was comparably important in the first couple of
centuries of Greek history: not wars, not building, not poetry. The
oldest and most abundant dates are the foundation dates of cities.
Herodotus, Thucydides, Strabo abound in information on how and
when cities were founded.
We know today of some seven hundred Greek cities, ten times the
number I have on the map. What I render here as "city" is In Greek
n6Ms, of course. And these n6/.ns were all independent cities. And the
substantial majority of them were founded after 750, in the age of
colonization.
It was a huge wave. By 750 Greeks Inhabited the Southern Aegean
coasts. Two centuries later, by 550, by the time the Persian threat
appeared in the East, the Mediterranean coast was crowded with
Greeks.
Why in the world did the Greeks colonize the coast?
The Greek word for what we call colony is O.notKla, a home that is
away. It was always meant in opposition to lJ.llTp6noMs, the mother-city.
Here is how a mother-city founded a home away.
First, as with everything that really mattered, a god was consulted,
usually Apollo at Delphi. If Apollo was interpreted to promise success,
a leader, called olKwTJ\s, a founder of a home. was appointed or
sometimes chosen. The colonists were usually volunteers. But not
always. Sometimes they would be drafted. In either case they were
people with little or no land in the mother-city. More often than not,
they were only men. and they were young, the sons of landowners
rather than landowners themselves. Numbers were usually in the
hundreds. They knew where they were going. When Apollo was asked,
he was asked about a specific place, a place rumored to offer a good
location. Then they sailed off and they settled.
Settling meant distributing the arable land in the colony fairly,
building temples of the gods, establishing local government, and
building houses, usually in that order. Sometimes additional colonists
might join them. Usually, local women would be heavily relied upon
to insure the procreation of the colony.
Other than marrying local women, relations of the colony with the
native people were limited. With very few exceptions, the Greeks just
didn't bother with regions where they expected to meet resistance.
They chose sparsely populated areas where the native people, even if
they wanted to, could not resist the heavily armed, technologically
superior Greeks, secure on their ships for as long as needed. Settlement in Carthaginian territories was attempted once, for instance. It
met with disaster, however, and Apollo was not tempted again to send
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TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
colonists there. The Greeks stmply left alone the heavily populated
and armed coasts of Phoenicia, Egypt, and Carthage. AB Thucydides
says, the Greeks never left their home to conquer other people [I, 15).
Colonization, apparently, he did not think of as conquest.
The ties of the colony with the mother-city tended to be symbolic.
As a sign of independence the founder of the colony, the olKtonjs, was
venerated, rather than the mother-city's hero. Even though in war a
colony tended to ally itself with Its mother-city rather than against it,
a generation or so after foundation, with its ethnic mix likely to be
already different, it became a full4ledged polls. In Thucydides, Nicias,
the leader of the Sicilian expedition, argues that amidst alien and
hostile people the Athenians can only survive as a polls; without a
polis they will fail [VI, 23). And we know that when Corinth tried to
meddle in the affairs of Its colony at Corcyra [I, 34), the Corcyraeans
turned to Athens for help. We were not sent out to be the slaves of the
Corinthians, they said, but to be their equals. The Athenians found It
convenient to agree, and so the Peloponnesian War began.
There is something de!YJng belief in Greek colonization. Mlletus, an
Ionian city of perhaps forty thousand, is reported to have sent out
ninety colonies. Even if this is an exaggeration, cities of two to three
thousand people are known to have founded colonies. What made
these tiny independent cities found other independent cities at the
opposite end of the world?
Lack ofland is the answer ofThucydides (I, 15). The pressure of
insufficient territory, says Plato [Leg., 708b). Were the Greeks really,
in the course of a couple of centuries, continuously lacking land,
continuously under the pressure of insufficient territory?
Well, the Greeks were certainly an agricultural society. Selfsufficiency, explicitly meaning food, was the ideal for a polis from
Hesiod to Aristotle. The Greeks lived off the land, and considered
commerce and the trades, as Aristotle says in the PoUtics [l258bl-8),
dishonorable and unnatural. Piracy may have been a natural way to
earn a living, commerce and the trades were not.
But land was not just a means of livelihood and not just a means
of production. In a lengthy discussion of wealth and properly in the
PoUtics (1256al-8b9), Aristotle does not once mention land among the
objects of acquisition and wealth. Properly and wealth meant movable
things to Aristotle--chattel, slaves included, but never land. Land was
something more than property, actually much more. It was where the
bones of ancestors were burled, and the bones of ancestors, as in the
Oedipus at Colonus, were sacred. Numerous gods dwelled in the land.
It constantly gave birth to gods, to rivers and trees. The land was a
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goddess herself, the mother, in Heslod (Th 45), of all gods.
In very few cities was It lawful to buy and sell land. land had strong
ties to the community, to the polis as a whole, stronger indeed than
Its ties to whoever happened to work it. In the rare Instances when It
was lawful to sell land, foreigners were explicitly prohibited from
buying it. And foreigners here means not Barbarians (such a thought
would be a sacrilege) but alien Greeks, Greeks from outside the
community, citizens of o):her poleis, the so-called llETOLKoL, those who
have come home, but are-as the word Implies-not home.
Like the old man Cephalus In the beginning of the RepubUc, these
llETOLKOL, aliens, sometimes lived for generations In a city and sometimes amassed substantial wealth. They still could not marry a citizen,
and they could not own land. Aristotle, a wealthy llETOLKOS' In Athens,
could not own his own school, the Lyceum.
Tied by deep tradition to the land, citizenship was jealously
guarded. There was no naturalization; one had to be born of citizens
to be a citizen. Pericles, the leader of the most permissive of democracies among the Greek poleis, Introduced a law revoking the citizenship of those who had one rather than both parents Athenian. In
enforcement of the law, five thousand llETDLKOL were sold Into slavery
(Plut., Per.).
In this sense, colonization, being acquisition of land, was also
acquisition of sovereignty. The perception of lack of land was also a
search for a stronger hold on one's bond to a city. The perception of
opportunity more than the pressure of circumstances made colonization an unabated wave.
That colonization was perceived as an opportunity rather than an
escape Is strongly suggested by the fact that the Greeks expanded
overseas rather than inland: that they preferred to sail into the unseen
rather than fight their way against the neighboring Barbarians. With
Themistocles, who believed that as long as the Athenians had 200
ships they had land, the Greeks felt certain that the sea would give
them land, somewhere. Inasmuch as they really needed land, they met
the challenge extensively: the thought of trying to increase productivity or perhaps to exploit part of the citizenship, notions economically
as sound as there are, never seems to have occurred to anyone as an
alternative to colonization. Land, in this sense, was a means, not an
end. It was a means to acquiring a city.
I have spent all this time talking about colonization in an effort to
present it as a unique phenomenon, as something pertaining uniquely
to Greeks.
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'IHE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
In a broad and vague way it can be said that all more or less
homogenous, organized, and dense centers of population have always
tended to expand. In particular, all ancient civilizations, empires,
societies-whatever we may have to call them-did expand. None of
them expanded by sea.
Egypt filled the valley of the Nile and stopped on the borders of the
desert, remaining for the last 5,000 years one of the most densely
populated regions on Earth. The tiny warlords of Sumer in Mesopotamia expanded northward along the Tigris and Euphrates, and so did
the Assyrians and the Babylonians after them. The settlement of
Phoenicians overseas at Carthage remained an Isolated affair, and it
was only after the appearance of huge numbers of Greeks In their seas
that the Carthaginians were provoked into consolidating their position
in the Western Mediterranean.
The very fact that the Greeks found the Mediterranean coast
available for colonization also shows the uniqueness of Greek colonization. Egyptians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Carthaglnlans, had remained, essentially, closed within their lands-landlubbers,
essentially.
It Is probable that their environment-long, dented coastline,
countless islands, dearth oflarge fertile valleys-made the Greeks turn
to the sea rather than inland in search ofland. But colonization seems
to suggest that the ties of the Greeks to the sea were deeper than just
being a response to natural limitations. Colonization was the foundtng
of cities, hundreds of independent poleis, not just a movement of
populations. The ties of the Greeks to the sea were motivated politically, religiously, and culturally as much as they were the result of
natural pressure. Their will, rather than nature, seems to have given
the Greeks the direction and limits of their expansion.
But I still have to address the question of the exceptions to the
image of Greece as exclusively the Mediterranean littoral: Sparta; the
home country ofHesiod and Plutarch, Boeotia: and Thessaly, the land
of wealth and horsemanship, where Meno hailed from.
Thebes, the main center of Boeotia, is some thirty miles north of
Athens. North of Boeotia along the Aegean coast Is Thessaly. And still
further north, also along the coast, is Macedonia.
Now tn Greek usage the further north you went, the farther away
you were from culture. "Boeotian" came to mean in Greek, as It has
come to mean in English, too, uncultured, dull and stupid. As to
Thessaly, when Socrates laughs at Meno in the beginning of the
dialogue because the Thessalians have suddenly become wise next to
being famous for horsemanship and wealth, he is belaboring a joke
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that was already in the language. And, of course, north ofThessaly
one doesn't even know whether one is in Greece anymore-one Is In
Macedonia.
Boeotia and Thessaly remained for a long time loose and rather
disorganized confederations of tribes rather than poleis. Boeotians
and Thessalians lived In villages, not cities. They had no ships and no
determined governments to oppose the Persians. Spartans and
Athenians and Corinthiai)s had to defend them. They never sent out
colonies. And having said all that, I should mention that Boeotians
lived within twenty miles of the sea, and Thessalians within thirty.
Sparta, the quintessential land power, the unchallenged master of
the land battle, seems to defy the picture of the Greeks as sea people.
The Spartans not only lived inland, they were peculiar In every respect.
The only polis with mandatory education, with state-regulated marriage, with both persistently authoritarian and at the same time stable
government, with restricted access to sacrifices and rites, with prohibition of individual ownership of practically everything, the Spartans
were universally recognized by the Greeks themselves as different.
But curiously both Herodotus and Thucydides speak of "the
Lacedaemonians and their allies" rather than the "Spartans" when
recounting battles. A common expression In Xenophon and Aristotle
as well, "the Lacedaemonians and their allies" appears to be a cliche.
Who are the Lacedaemonians, then, and who are their allies?
Lacedaemonians were the inhabitants of Laconia, the region surrounding Sparta. And It turns out that the cliche Is correct; it turns
out that the Spartans rarely, if ever, went to war as Spartans alone,
as an army of the ten thousand citizens only. They would rather go
into battle taking along the inhabitants of Laconia, the so-called
rr<plmKoL, those who lived around the home. The rr<plmKOL were Greeks
like the Spartans. They had no polis of their own, however, and the
Spartans decided for them who their enemies were.
Laconia, the country of the rr<plmKoL, is actually a sea country, a
long and narrow valley on the Peloponneslan coast. Is there in this
fact a hint that Sparta may not be so detached from the sea as it
appears?
Sparta came to dominate the Peloponnese peninsula after a series
of wars during the seventh century with Argos, the ancient city of
Agamemnon. In the course of these wars the Spartans subjugated
Laconia, and most Importantly they gained control over the three main
openings of the peninsula to the sea, Pylus In the west, the island of
Cythera in the south, and Praslae In the east. In Thucydides those
three are the main objectives of the Athenian offensives, and the
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1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Athenian capture of two of them, Pylus and Cythera, in the first phase
of the war, created panic tn Sparta.
These, and a few other ports in the Northern Peloponnese, were
consistently the "allies" of the expression "the Lacedaemonians and
their allies." Sparta, it turns out, was the land power that it was by
being secured by sea. Needless to say, the Spartans always maintained
control over many ships tn the ports of their allies, and, like the
maritime poleis, sent out dozens of colonies.
And, once again, Sparta, too, is less than twenty miles from the sea.
I am tempted also to note that Sparta's most memorable victories, in
the Persian and in the Peloponnesian Wars, were decisively and [even
if with unmatched heroism) unambiguously lost on land, and won
eventually at sea-when the Persian navy was destroyed first at
Salamis and once again later off the coast of Asia Minor, and when
the Athenians firstlostmore than 200 ships in their Sicilian expedition
and later 171 more ships in the Northern Aegean. Reduced to a
handful of ships, the Athenians capitulated.
Sparta, Boeotia, and Thessaly were socially, politically, and economically an aberration among the Greeks. A fossil of an earlier ethnic
distribution, they preserved a vanishing tradition which was struggling (in the case of Sparta successfully) against new times. To
Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle, Boeotia and Thessaly
appeared simply primitive. Sparta, on the other hand, both when they
admired it and when they criticized it, reminded them of the East, of
Persia and Egypt. And this is, probably, how we should see Sparta as
well: as marginally belonging to Greece, or, perhaps better, as belonging to an earlier age of Greece. Notably, there are no Spartans among
the authors of our great books.
There is one last place that I would like to mention: Arcadia, still a
byword for shepherds, peace, and tranquility. Arcadia is in the middle
of the Peloponnese, in the heart of the Greek landmass. In the time of
Herodotus and Thucydides it was inhabited by mountain people, wild,
speaking an incomprehensible tongue, eaters of acorn, Delphi's Pythia
called them (Her. I,66). In all their countless wars, their neighbors,
and Sparta among them, avoided the Arcadians. When they wanted
to fight each other, they circumvented Arcadia. Arcadians lived in the
mountains until the fourth century, when Thebes, having for the first
time in memory defeated the Spartans on land, decided to create in
Arcadia a buffer between itself and the Spartans. The Thebans herded
the mountain people tn the middle of Arcadia and forced them to live
in a big city, and that's what they called it: Megalopolis, the big city.
Polybius, the third Greek historian, was born in Megalopolis a century
�DATCHEV
59
later. But the age of Megalopolis, of Arcadia and big cities inland, was
not the age of Greece anymore. Even though he wrote in Greek,
Polybius wrote about Rome.
It seems, then, that geographically it should be claimed that Greece
Is not just on the Mediterranean coast, but in a very strong sense is
nothing but the coast, nothing but the littoral of the Mediterranean,
which the Greeks called 96.N1aaa, the sea.
We should probably i.qlaglne Greece as seven hundred small islands. Or, perhaps better', as three concentric circles: the sea in the
center, the land, and the ocean-or rather the unknown-outside. On
the Inside of the land, on the coast of the sea, lived the Greeks; inland,
blending Into the unknown, outside, lived Barbarians. It is a simple,
symmetrical picture of a simple and symmetrical world, similar to the
depletion on the shield of Achilles. And It Is a very Platonic picture,
too, and also Aristotelian, of circles and symmetry.
This Is the geographical answer that I have to the question where
is Greece. And for only a few more minutes I would like to say what
this picture suggests to me.
I will begin with a few numbers. A difficult estimate derived from
limited data suggests that In the fifth century there were some seven
to eight million Greeks In the world. This Is seven to eight million
people distributed along a coast over 10,000 miles long. And the
distance between the southwestern end of the Mediterranean and the
northeastern end of the Black Sea is, as the crow flies, well over 3,000
miles, more than the distance between New York and Los Angeles.
Now, these seven to eight million Greeks lived in at least seven
hundred, and possibly many more, independent cities. The average
number for the population of a polis is in the range of. say, less than
10,000. Plato recommends 5,000 households as the optimal number
(Leg .. 740e). The Greeks, then, lived in tiny communities, miles away
from all other Greek communities, isolated from April until October
by long and treacherous sea passages. From October until April, when
navigation was Impossible, they were totally cut off. They lived on
islands surrounded by the sea and Barbarians.
It seems to me an unbelievable picture. What motivated these
people? What sustained them in their tiny isolated communities?
What made them fiercely independent? What made them belong to
some abstract unity of Greeks whom they seldom saw and seldom
heard from?
It seems to me that the uniquely Greek phenomenon of the polis Is
the answer to these questions.
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TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
micra rr6Ais <jloon <crTlv, Arlstotle says in the Politics (1252b31), each
polis is by nature. And a couple of lines later he repeats and adds: mt
b /ivepwrros <jlucrn rroXLTLKI>v (<\)ov, not only Is the polis by nature, but
man also Is by nature a polis animal (1253a3). A man without a polis,
Aristotle continues, Is either a beast or a god (1253a29).
We should take Aristotle seriously when he claims that each city is
<jluan, by nature. And we should probably refuse to translate rr6Ais.
Like Myos, it does not se,ern translatable.
But we could, perhaps, approach the polis by following the Greek
words. There Is one root that kept recurring among the Greek words
that I had to mention, the root -oLK-, as in oLKos, one's horne. A colony
Is arroLK(a, a horne away; the leader of a colony is an olKcanjs. a founder
of a horne; the resident aliens are f!ETOLKoL, those who are at our horne;
Sparta's subordinate people are the rr<plmKoL, those around the horne.
The dwellings of the gods are olKlm; to inhabit a place is ocK<'w; from
Horner to Thucydides all Greece happens to be called o\Kla. And to live
In a city Is avvmKtw, to share a horne; to be a citizen is awocKos; and
auvocKLa Is synonymous with polis.
This Is what a polis is. It Is home.
There was no distinction In the polis between being a citizen,
rroXl TT)S, and taking pari in politics, as the word still indicates. If a city
had a popular assembly, It was exactly that, the assembly of all
citizens. There was no distinction between being a citizen and being
a soldier. Anyone under stxty procured his own arms and served,
period. I don't know of a record of anyone who ever refused to serve.
Aeschylus served, Sophocles led an army, Thucydides led a navy,
Socrates was famed for his courage In battle. There were no priests In
the cities either. Attending to the gods, taking care of shrines, sacrifices, rites, even discussion of religious dogma, were trivial matters,
open to everyone as a matter of course, or rather as matter of nature,
<J>oon.
The polis had no institutions, in short, that were religious, political,
educational-no Institutions of any kind, no archives and no bureaucracy. Armies were put together as circumstances required. Children
were taught whatever the father's appreciation of tradition suggested.
Religious ceremonies were organized by whoever could afford it.
Legislation was initiated by real or contrived emergencies; there was
no body sitting in sessions, making laws.
The idea of rights of the individual as opposed to the polis would
be a misunderstanding. The notion of criminal prosecution, for Instance, was never born in the polis. As In the trial of Socrates, an
individual had to Initiate a case of supposed violation of the body
�DATCHEV
61
politic. The notion of someone detached from the polis. opposed to it.
independent from It, suggests to Aristotle not individual rights but a
beast or a god.
Even in what we would think as economy, the polis as a home
motivated the citizens. Which Is what the word implies anyway:
otKovof1la is house management. Aristotle says in the Politics (1258bl)
that In obtaining property only taking care of one's home is honorable,
any kind of trade outsid~ the home Is unnatural and disreputable.
Surprisingly perhaps from our point of view, the rich bore almost
exclusively the financial burden of the city. They were required to build
and maintain the ships of the city, to organize Its religious festivals,
to support public building. The poor were maintained at public
expense, and proving need was less Important than proving citizenship In order to quality. Dealing with money, profit, Increasing production, remained matters alien to the polis, and if they nevertheless
occurred, they were the doing of aliens.
If It overgrew Itself, a mother-city simply built a new home, an
lmocKla. And like a true home the polis made one feel Intimately
belonging-cozy, I suppose, may be the right word. In the Crito,
awaiting his execution in prison, Socrates speaks of Athens with a love
that seems to transcend philosophical arguments.
Well, If the polis was home, there were about 700 of them. Geographically they had no center. Geographically the center of Greece
was In the sea. Greece was nothing but periphery geographically,
many homes without a center.
The history of Greece begins with the foundation dates of independent cities. And I don'tknow of any other culture whose written history
begins with anything but a succession of kings.
In Egypt, in Mesopotamia, in Persia, in the Mycenaean civilization
before Greece, there always Is a very strong center: a palace or a
temple. To one degree or another this center dominates the lives of
everybody within its reach. Religiously, the center has prerogatives
over the relationship of the community with the divine. In Egypt, in
Sumer, In Assyria, the ruler Is a direct descendant of the gods,
god-like, and all too often god himself. Politically, within the reach of
the center, there are only different levels of the ruler's dependents.
They work his land, they owe him their labor and the food that their
labor grows. They owe him their lives as a matter of course.
Even the little writing that was done In the East was all done In the
palace, on the order of the palace, and for the sake of the palace. No
writers' names survived in the East because there were no writers in
the East, just scribes. The largest collection of writing that has been
�62
TiiE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
unearthed there, some 20,000 clay tablets, contains Inventories,
ordinances, messages to the gods, and not much else. The collection
was tn the center, of course, in the palace of the Assyrian king
Ashurbanipal.
If the Greek polls had a center at all, it was the lryopa, the place
where the assembly of the people took place. The market-place also.
And from ayopa a verb developed: ltyop<vw, to speak In the assembly,
and generally to speak. No wonder that books could be bought In the
agora. The book of the philosopher Anaxagoras is the oldest book
reported, by Plato in the Apology: Sold cheaply, too.
This apotheosis of the Greeks is leading toward freedom, of course.
Having no political, no religious, no economic, no cultural center of
any kind, feeling at home in their tiny cities, the Greeks discovered
freedom. They are slaves to no one, no one rules them, the Chorus
answers in The Persians (243) when the Persian queen wonders who
the Greeks are. Not tied to the land, if they felt uncomfortable In their
surroundings, they just sailed away and founded a new home for
themselves. Not tied to a divine court and Its rule, they began
questioning the divine, questioning nature itself, proving theorems,
and so on. The fact that the Greeks discovered freedom, I take it, is
all around us.
But freedom is EA<uB<pla In Greek. And <A<ulkpla has also the
disturbing meaning of manumission, of letting a slave go free.
If the Greeks discovered freedom, this Implies that no one was free
before, not even pharaoh, owntng all Egypt. Thinking of philosophy,
mathematics, things like that, we can probably appreciate such an
idea. But If freedom is also necessarily In opposition to slavecy, does
that mean that the Greeks discovered slavecy, too?
I think that it does.
The rise of the polis was typically accompanied by legislation
against debt-bondage. Outlawing debt-bondage was the cornerstone
of Solon's laws, for instance. Debt-bondagewas the practice of offering
oneself, one's own person, as security on a Joan. Default, then, meant
bondage. Debt-bondage remained trivial practice In the East and
contributed substantially to creating populations that were tied to the
land as a group.
The abolition of debt-bondage in the Greek polis enhanced enormously the privilege of being a citizen. It created the unprecedented
phenomenon of poor but free people, for instance. But it had the effect
also of robbing the citizens, more or Jess all of them landowners, of an
easy opportunity to labor Jess than their fields demanded. The solution
was chattel slavecy.
�DATCHEV
63
The image of the Greeks as slave-owners should not be exaggerated.
The polls was never anything but a community of small-holders. But
the more a small-holder perceived himself as superior to Barbarians,
and the more he appreciated the superiority of his ships, sword, and
ideas, the more likely he was to own a slave or two.
And not having obedient subjects to build pyramids for it, the polis
kept its projects small. But still, It did have some projects, and since
the citizens were busy discussing public matters in the market-place,
the polis relied more and more on slaves for Its projects. Athens
maintained no standing army, but had a police force of a thousand,
all of them Scythian slaves, replenished as need required. The citizens
abhorred the idea of taxes, and being the government themselves,
taxes no one but aliens. The treasury of a big polis like Athens, then,
had to rely on the production of public mines worked by tens of
thousands of slaves. All record keeping, temple maintenance, harbor
repairs, construction of new walls, was done by slaves.
Enslaving entire populations and conquering other peoples might
not have appealed to the citizens of the polis. But they discovered
chattel slavery, the counting of a few men or women among one's
belongings, and they appreciated it enough to make it trivial.
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle take slavery for granted. Aristotle also
takes It to be by nature, <f>uaEL. But there are more disturbing instances.
In his Ways and Means (IV, 13-32), Xenophon proposes that the city
of Athens purchase enough slaves (three per capita, to be exact) and
put them to work in mines so as to ensure free maintenance for all
Athenians. Athenians then, whether merchants or philosophers (V,
3), Xenophon says, would be happier.
There Is also a speech by Lysias (24.6), the orator ridiculed in the
Phaedrus, In which a poor fellow argues In the popular assembly that
he deserves free maintenance, on the grounds that he Is not rich
enough to buy a slave.
How well the discovery of chattel slavery was liked may be judged,
perhaps, by the letter that a few centuries later a minor philosopher,
Libanius, wrote to the Roman authorities (Or. 31.11). He asked for
money, pleading the poverty of the scholars in his school, who could
barely afford, he said, three slaves each.
So when Plato and Aristotle suggest that philosophy requires
leisure, this may be a disturbing thought.
But I don't want to finish on this gloomy note. Both Plato and
Aristotle suggest also that curiosity is the source of philosophy. And
I'd rather finish with an image of curiosity. It is the Image I have of
Heraclitus of Ephesus, one of the first philosophers.
�64
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
We know little of Heraclitus. He wrote no books, it seems. He had
no students. He avoided the market-place. He never married. He never
left Ephesus. So what did he do?
Heraclitus is the first philosopher who survived in a number of
fragments-131, most of them complete sentences. And among
Heraclitus' seventy to eighty sentences the names of three contemporaries of his are mentioned, Pythagoras among them. Now how in the
world did Heraclitus ge,t to know of his contemporaries?
The sea was the only medium of communication, of course.
Ephesus was an importsnt city of perhaps thirty thousand. But how
many ships would dock at the self-sufficient Ephesus every year, April
through October? Ten? Maybe twenty? Just possibly thirty? Now, how
many of these ships may have come from another self-sufficient city,
Croton, at the other end of the world, in Italy, a city of hardly more
than twenty thousand, where Pythagoras had established his school?
One every year? One every ten years? One during Heraclitus' entire
lifetime? And could any ofthe sailors, or more likely pirates, could any
of them really have known, or cared about, Pythagoras?
The only way that I can imagine is a Heraclitus obsessed with
curiosity. A Heraclitus talking to every sailor on every ship. Going from
sailor to sailor, instructing them one by one to ask any sailor, in any
port where they might stop, and to ask them, too, to ask other sailors,
so that if any of them happen to come to Ephesus, they might know
something, anything, to tell Heraclitus.
I Imagine Heraclitus sitting on the docks, staring into the distance.
�1 Two Poems by Sandra Hoben
Odysseus and Calypso
He didn't go willingly. He laughed
when she suggested building a raft
and sailing back to Ithaca;
and poured more wine,
stoking the fire, which cast
their shadows on the thick rugs.
He had everything: a goddess,
her fertile island, the sun
coming out of the sea each morning
like a small aruma! searching
for food. The nlghts were endless,
her body stronger than a man's.
Suspending himself above pain and death,
he drank her immortality and looked out
over the sea through her gray eyes.
He stood speechless while she
hacked down her favorite grove,
lashed the logs together then pointed
for him to board and sail alone
across the infinite sea with a few meals
of water and dry bread,
to live out the last painful years
as king of a land that didn't need him,
beside a woman with liver-colored spots
on her hands, her memory fading
like clothes hung so long in the harsh Aegean sun
that she no longer knew his name.
�TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
66
St. John's College
That's where we should have met,
thirty years ago. The worst
that could have happened! would have rolled away from you
to light a cigarette.
Or beat you at a game of chess.
And though you wouldn't have inhaled,
we could have tried a little dope:
We could have read Marx together
and Hobbes, and while we wouldn't have understood
taxes yet, we could have explored together
the idea of taxes.
Sandra Hoben, a graduate of the College, has published a volume of poetry, Snow
Flowers, with the Westigan Press. These poems are from her latest colfection, Stage
Money, which was a fmalist in this year's Brittingham Prize at the University of
Wisconsin Press. Her poems have appeared earlier in the Review.
�Book Review:
Two New Books by Alumni
I
Eva T. H. Brann
Neal 0. Weiner. The Hannony ojthe Soul: Mental Health and Moral
Virtue Reconsidered. Albany: State University of New York Press.
1993.
Grant P. Wiggins. Assessing Student Peiformance: Exploring
the Purpose and Ltmits of Testing. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass
Publishers, 1993.
Yielding to the influence of our context-conscious age, I sometimes
play the game - to my credit be it said, half-heartedly- of trying to
ferret out the facts of authors' biographies from their writings. In the
case of the two books here to be reviewed I think I could have guessed
that they were alumni of St. John's or some similar school (a small
field), even if I had not koown both of them as students.
I am not sure the college can claim credit for the virtues the books
seem to me to have in common, those the Greeks called sophrosyne,
"sound rnindedness," and phronesis, "mindfulness,"- sanity and
thoughtfulness. There is, however, a mode of inquiry they share
that is recognizable as an Intended result of the Program. In both
books the intellectual tradition Is employed to sustain as well as to
subvert the current condition. Both authors move fluently across
the mU!ennia and use their learning to appreciate and to criticize
the present situation. To put it more sharply, both authors appear
on the surface to be attuned to the going pieties In their area of
interest, and both tactfully turn them upside down to effect an
adaptive recovery of old truths.
There is one more rare excellence both books display for which the
college can take little credit - more's the pity. Both are written in
humane, communicative, and vigorous English .
•
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
68
Neal Weiner's Hannony of the Soul offers a "reconstruction" of
ancient virtue for modern life. It seems, as a matter of fact, to fit Into
a current tendency of which Alasda!r Mcintyre (who lectured in
Annapolis some years age) Is a leader. There Is now a trend to recover
antique conceptions of virtue as a counter both to the rule-governed
rationalistic morality of modernity (p. 14) and the groundlessness of
postmodernlty. But Weiner's book Is the least tendentious imaginable.
Though he takes respectful account of current writing, his book is
manifestly the issue of intensely personal experience and reflection.
It Is the vety opposite of an inteHectual exercise in staying current.
Not that it Is unduly personal - It preserves a dignified distance of
tone. The resulting combination of palpable personal conviction and
presentational prudence is one of the attractions of the book.
The mode of inquity Weiner has chosen is expressive of these
characteristics. He presents a strong, even repulsive thesis, "the worst
possible news for the human spirit." He posits it, however, not In the
mode of a thesis but of a hypothesis, a conjecture or likelihood whose
consequences are to be worked on an "as if' basis. The conjecture is
that
human consciousness is a thoroughly natural thing and that we
are mere parts of nature, not as different from the rest of animate
nature as it has flattered us to think. (p. I)
The project then becomes to find a way to reconcile our brute nature
and our human goodness, or, in more conventional terms, to compose
the notorious fact-value opposition. The bridging notion will be the
"harmony of the soul." It is a theoty of human health as psychological
balance, such that even under merely natural conditions, that is to
say, in the absence of any transcendence, "only the best would follow."
One way to put Weiner's aim is this. He wants to test an understanding
that construes human nature as continuous with the whole of nature,
requiring no extrinsic teleology to define its proper goodness. The
naturalistic term for "good" is, of course, "healthy." Weiner wants to
see if he can delineate a sound-mindedness whose picture jibes with
ordinary notions of goodness.
This endeavor Is carried out in three parts of geometrically ascendIng lengths, ''The Body," ''The Soul," and ''The Good."
Physical health is understood as an evolutionary and social adaptation of a functionally integral body to Its tasks. Health Is therefore
relative to situation, but in a given time and place It Is a knowable
entity. "It Is a tattered, empirical Ideal, but autonomous and natural"
(p. 37).
Psychic health Is, again, a vety broadly conceived sort of functional
�BRANN
69
ideal, the soul In a condition of balanced adequacy. I would like to
point out here that it takes some courage these days to use the word
"soul" In a publication expecting to be taken seriously by the philosophical and psychological professions. As Bruno Bettelheim pointed
out a decade ago in Freud and Man's Soul (1983), Freud's English
translators betrayed his humane intentions by systeniatically erasing
the original German references to soul in favor of the more technicalsounding "psyche" or the, more intellectual-sounding "mind." Weiner
Is doing a good deed of terminological recovery in his bold use of the
word soul. Like Freud, Weiner intends to strike a tone of humaneness;
like Freud he intends no overtone of transcendence; like Freud he
evades an essential definition. The Index will send an interested reader
to whole sections and then to "Human Nature" and "Self." I found
nothing explicit.
My guess Is that Weiner would say that it is pure Platonic prejudice
always to demand to know what an entity is before being willing to be
told how It functions well. And I would agree, but with the proviso that
to go along with this book for the practical wisdom it offers is to
reconfigure It from a pure inquiry Into a handbook, an enchiridion in
the antique sense, that is to say, a book prescriptive of conduct. I mean
that not as a criticism but as an admiring observation.
In respect to "soul" Weiner considers first behavior, then motivation. Under the naturalistic hypotheses the central motivational mechanlsm is pleasure, which Is, in certain circumstances, the relief of
pain. Pleasure is presupposed to be harmoniously related to naturally
and socially adaptive behavior. By and large, well-functioning feels
pleasant. We are naturally sound and originally well.
"What then makes an individual sick?" Weiner's answer seems to
me to be at the credal heart, as it is at the literal center, of his work.
Mental sickness Is anxiety.
Anxiety, objectless fear and indeterminately directed worry, is
recognized by Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger as the mark of Cain
branding modernity. Weiner takes his analysis of this illness largely
from Freud, and then proceeds, In the name of moral responsibility,
to stand Freud's concept of the unconscious on its head.
Anxiety Is, more specifically, self-condemnation on a level too deep
for self-conscious recognition. Hence the concept of anxiety requires
an unconscious to which guilt-inducing experiences are relegated or
"repressed." Weiner accords Freud's unconscious the "purgation,
simplification and resurrection" It needs (p. 86). Instead of being
understood as a demon-like alien agency or place within us, that is,
topologically, the unconscious is taken as an evidential fact, phenom-
�TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
70
enologlcally. It is not placed as a power within the soul but observed
as a
commonplace phenomenon. It can be understood as nothing more
than the familiar but puzzliog mental state called "self-deception."
(p. 88)
Here then Is the bridge between pathology and responsibility. The
Freudian unconscious w:as a moral convenience, a locus of self-serving
Ignorance. Weiner's resurrection ofa harmonious soul returns responsibility for self-knowledge to the.conscious individual. In particular,
all the neurotic or false or dysfunctional pleasures which, being
intended to relieve anxiety. constitute mental illness, become accessible to self-therapy [p. 147).
Once again, Weiner has emphatically sidestepped a foundational
question, this time the question of the existence of self-condemnation
as a deep and determinative human affect (p. 84). Not everyone's
Introspection will yield the same sense of the cause of anxiety. For my
own part, I am convinced that guilt-feelings are the residue of wilfully
unexpiated guilt, and that at some point we are meant to decide either
to rectif'y our post-original sins (mostly stupidities) or to fold them
away in our memory of exhausted facts. Yet also once again, there is
much to be learned by going along, particularly In the last long section
on the Good, where the practical, prescriptive conclusions are drawn.
Weiner now Introduces another and a very sensible hypothesis, that
of"rough decency" as a basic inclination of human nature to compassion. It is not a rational moral principle but a psychological, affective
force, "a part of the original configuration of pleasures (p. 115). This
pre-rational morality (to employ a contradiction In terms) is identified
by Weiner with ancient- Aristotelian- virtue, for like virtue It has
a structure conformable to mental health, as vice has to" illness.
Weiner urges a tum away from rule-ridden legallstic morality and
a return to spontaneous psychological virtue. All that Is needed to
achieve "the union of spontaneity and goodness" [p. 125) that Is true
happiness Is to rid ourselves of anxiety, so that "primitive virtue" that
Is, rough decency, may surface.
The task that then remains Is to establish and to trace out naturalIstic routes first to self-knowledge (with its concomitants. freedom and
conscience) and finally to ethical knowledge. Under the naturalistic
hypotheses, self-knowledge is knowledge of one's own true desires, and
ethical knowledge is not primarily dialectical but persuasive. Weiner is
here preaching what he has all along practiced. The final chapter, in
which these points are made, Is much richer in observation and
analysis than this summary conveys.
�BRANN
71
Anti-foundationallsm Is yet another tendency of the day. Weiner's
approach Is In this spirit In a double sense. He presents as an exercise
In the "as If' mode reflections that tum Into the most earnest practical
- In fact thempeutlc - prescriptions. And he invites us to assume,
without theoretical underpinning, the existence as well as the meaning
of a number of entitles, for example, the soul. primitive virtue, and,
above all, nature. In the context of the Harmony of the Soul nature is
represented most poignantly In the human being by the body, and
the body is a moral presence as desire - as the collection of what
are called the "bodily desires," which Is really the collection of all
desires Insofar as they stem from the natural forces that have made
us. Whoever understands these desires ... is thought to possess a
kind of knowledge worth calling "wisdom." (p. 7)
And this is surely a perfectly sensible, but not at all a necessarily true,
version of human nature, whose glory it may well be that it is fundamentally unharmonious. At any mte, the point is that Weiner evades
all foundational claim-making and argumentation In order to get the
sooner to the coherent and healthful consequences of his hypotheses
and its attendant assumptions. It Is the sound-mindedness of this
enterprise that is its justification.
One last tiril.e it must be said that Weiner has adopted a mode
without joining a trend. What I mean Is that, far from displaying a
postmodem taste for groundlessness, he has simply chosen a fitting
way to communicate the reflective and wise result of a vital personal
experience.
Neal Weiner is Professor of Philosophy at Marlboro College tn
Vermont. He graduated from the Annapolis campus in 1964.
•
Public preoccupation In education used to change with the generations, every quarter century or so. Then every decade brought a new
issue. And now a novel notion agitates the educational establishment
quinquennially. The current obsession is "assessment," and though
the excitement may pass, its Institutional residue Is bound to last quite
a while. Among the hypotheses of the assessment movement are these:
(1) This country needs the kind of education that results in nationally
assessable outcomes. (2) Assessing students improves institutions
from primary school to college. There is a great likelihood that under
the coming assessment regime schools of all degrees will become more
homogenized, but there Is no assurance that they will become better.
A lay person would have thought that to improve education one would
�72
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
first of all address the learning of students. Such approaches are,
however, always small-scale and consequently maladapted to the
Intentions of a regulative bureaucracy. They seem to have receded Into
the background In the current preoccupation with "accountability."
Having read my ill! of the periodical literature on the subject, I
would have expected the worst of a whole book on assessing student
performance. Grant Wiggins's book is, It turns out, a glorious disappointment. He shows how assessment can be a benign and even
necessary element of learning.
The title of the first, introductory, chapter sets the tone. One of its
sections is called "Assessment versus Testing" (my italics). Let me
quote some key sentences:
Assess is a form of the Latin verb assidere, to "sit with." In an
assessment, one "sits with" the learner. It Is something we do with
and for the student, not something we do to the students [p. 14] ....
The assessor tries to ferret out all of what the student knows and
can do by various means [p. 16] .... At the very least, assessment
requtres that we come to know the student In action [p. 17].
Wiggins's chief complaints against testing as the main instrument
of assessment are that tests tailor the task to the tester's need to get
a score and that they are systematically unresponsive to the individual
learner. What Wiggins Is mindful of- and what educational officialdom is unmindful of - Is the educational function of assessment
properly understood as that attentiveness to students' learning which
emphasizes overt production of some sort, that is, daily performance.
Tests subvert this function In a way Wiggins feels entitled to regard
as immoral. The main issue of the Introduction Is therefore the
morality of testing. The reason that tests are dubiously moral is
Kantian. They invariably treat the child as an object; they show it
disrespect,
because a test, by Its design, is an artifice whose audience is an
outsider, whose purpose Is ranking, and whose methods are reductionist and Insensitive. (p. 7)
The Introduction consequently ends with an "Assessment Bill of
Rights" that details the rubrics of respect for students. Its nine articles
can be summarized by saying that assessment should be as humane
In the largest sense as possible. I might go so far as to offer our oral
examinations, especially the senior essay oral as an exemplification
of the ode of assessment Wiggins's Bill of Rights calls for: a worthwhile
common Inquiry In the course of which, under the guidance of models
of excellence, the student gets to take up questions, justit'y answers,
�BRANN
73
and hear contrary opinions. (I must, however, report that Grant has
told me in a private letter that he missed detailed feed-back while he
was a student, and he may well be light. Sometimes our watchful
non-intervention goes over Into simple slackness. )The second chapter
asks: "Assessment of What?' Recalling the horrible example of Meno,
the memorizer, Wiggins delineates a liberal sort of!earhlng that is the
opposite of thoughtless mastery- if there Is such a thing. Thoughtful
mastery Is the object of sound assessment, but It Is evident that there
are dilemmas here, and Wiggins makes them explicit. For example,
liberal learning requires not only skill but also what Wiggins calls
"intellectual character," very nearly what Aristotle would call "Intellectual virtue." Intellectual character includes both discipline and independence. It ought therefore to be assessed in ways that are "enabling,
fatr, and responsive." Wiggins accords such modes of examination In
the title of "Socratic tact." He concludes with nine Postulates of
thoughtful assessment, which include detailed desiderata: Students
should have a chance to justifY their understanding. They should be
presented with good models and feed-back, and be judged by non-arbitrary criteria. They should engage In self-assessment, and be performers and not mere spectators of! earning. They should develop their
individual ''voice," and be assessed through their questions as well as
their answers. They should be encouraged to articulate critically the
limits of the theories they have learned, and have their intellectual
virtue taken Into account.
The remaining six chapters amplifY these ideas through an abundance of conceptual explications, applicable experiences, and imaginative examples.
Assessing Student Perjo1TTI1Jllce Is therefore an eminently practical
book. Grant Wiggins understands what the educational establishments seems to be professionally prevented from apprehending- that
with respect to humane learning, efficiency is the enemy of practicality.
How I wish that this book might gain some influence!
Grant Wiggins is the president of the Center on Learning, Assessment and School Structure (CLASS), a non-profit organization In
Geneseo, New York. He graduated from the Annapolis campus In
1972.
�74
THE ST. JOHN"S REVIEW
�I
One Man's Meter
Elliott Zuckerman
Part 1
I spent much of my high-school and college years in the noisy and
uneven trains of the Interborough Rapid Transit System. The full
name, as you have just heard, constitutes a good line of iambic pentameter
with a feminine endtng-the Interborough Rapid TrW!Sit System-but
it was nevertheless known for short as the I R T. Accordtng to an
antiphonal ditty that is now known only by agtng New Yorkers, the I
R Twas, along with its sister subway, the B MT, one of the routes on
which you Could Not Get To Heaven.! The New York City subways did,
however, take you anywhere else that could conceivably be of tnterest.
The borough I commuted from was Brooklyn, where I dwelt tn a
neighborhood called Crown Heights. My streets were just to the west
of the area that has recently been in the news. My neighborhood was
identifiable as the location of Ebbets Field, whose outfield was visible
from the roof of my apartment house, and the Brooklyn Museum, on
whose imposing frieze I first encountered the names and figures of
Socrates, Zoroaster, I..ao-Tse, and Saint Paul.2 Behind the Museum
stretched the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. It was there, in the appropriate setting of nature controlled and manicured by artifice, that I began
to read poetry. More accurately, I should refer to what! did as intoning
verse--for the poets I recited more or less out loud were Edgar Allan
Poe, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and others more noted for what
was glibly called the "music" of their verse than for what was, with
111is was the Homecoming Lecture in Annapolis on October 1, 1994.
1
The B M T, of course, provided the first and famous verse:
Oh you can't get to heaven
On the B MT
FortheB MT
Will be emp TEE...
but at least in my linguistically advanced crowd other verses were composed, the
point of which was that they were pointless.
1-here was no guide to pronunciation, and some of my initial construals have
remained with me. I remember wondering about the chiseled U in HAMMVRABI.
They were all, I realize now, law-givers, prophets, and founders of religions. On the
main building of the nearby Gardens were inscrtbed botanists, some of them
obscure. I kliew foreigners who found it characteristically American to label
buildings in that way, like our preference for written-out road signs instead of the
international symbols, and our invention of the talking T-shirt
�TilE ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE REVIEW
76
like glibness, called their "thought." They tended to have three names.
I Intoned another poet, also not of the highest rank, but quieter and
less ornate. Within the Garden there was a particularly pleasant
section that was known until the end of 1941 as Japanese. As part of
the War Effort it was renamed Oriental. It featured an avenue of
flowering cheny trees. I think of It now as having been metrical-which
is to say that the trees were planted equidistantly from one another.
The distances had once ,been measured by the planter and could still
be paced out by the walker. If the rows had been wider apart and
repeated, It would have qualified "san example of the best of all those
groves In which we show our agricultural talents: the orchard. The
orch-yard is a kind of orchestra, and the orchestra was, as you know, the
space where the members of the Greek Chorus danced. When they recited,
the chorus members probably stood apart from one another at equal
Intervals, like the living pillars In Baudelaire's natural temple-articulate
evergreens In a pine-forest, or perhaps columns In a man-made space,
like those, striped In red and white, that support the arches In the Grand
Mosque at Cordoba. Trees and columns and arches: as the language of
art-criticism reminds us, we can look at rhythms as well as hear them.
But when looking we have to keep our eyes open and our heads still.
At the time of my intoning I took the cheny trees In Brooklyn to be
indistinguishable from those that had been the subject, fifty years
earlier, of a famous poem by A. E. Housman. Hot;sman does not
describe his trees; the poem depicts nothing except their color and
something akin to the rhythm of their arrangement. 3 The titleless
stanzas come early In the collection named for an anonymous and almost
featureless Shropshire Lad, and meant, I think, to be spoken by one:
[l]
Loveliest of trees, the cheny now
Is hung with bloom along the bough.
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
5
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
9
And since to look at things In bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cheny hung with snow.
3
Housman's poem is of course very much better than what at the time was the
world's most famous poem about trees, which happens to be in the same meter and
to have the same rhyme-scheme as Housman's, and also starts out with the notion
of loveliness, but goes on to say too much about its tree, for each image contradicts
the others. Some of the worst poems in our language have been inspired by dendrophilia.
I knew the song-setting ofJoyce Kihner's 'Trees," often sung at our piano. I therefore set
Housman's poem to music, without knowing that other poetic and musical teenagers
had also done so. My setting was for tenor and piano.
�ZUCKERMAN
77
Housman devoted most of his scholarly life to producing an edition
in five volumes ofManilius, a Latin author who has never made it into
a list of Great Books. In spite oflong years of careful and presumably
brilliant emendation, Housman described his subject as "a facile and
frivolous poet, the mightiest facet of whose genius was an eminent
aptitude for doing sums in verse." The middle stanza of the poem
before us could easily represent Housman's bid for the same distinction in English. 4 Soon we shall look at the prosody of that stanza.
Meanwhile, I do hope that the meaning of it does not have to be
explained. Just in case the first couplet of the stanza presents a
difficulty, the second couplet says the same things again. The poem
used to be set as a high-school test of reading comprehension. The
question about the middle stanza was "How old is the poet?"
Before we look at metrical details, I should say that I find that the
only question of semantic interpretation lies in the fmal word of the
poem, and even there I may be seeking out ambiguity. Do we take
"snow" as an easy figure for the stuff of white blossoms, or does it refer
literally to snow? When reading the poem aloud I had to choose
between these interpretations-! chose the first-for they require
different patterns of intonation for the final line, and it is impossible
to straddle them. Here are the two interpretations:
(1) Premise: The cherries are in bloom. Second premise:
I have only fifty years left. The conclusion: I'll go look at
them.
(2) Premise: The cherries are in bloom. Second premise:
I have only fifty years left. The conclusion: I'll go look at
the trees in the winter, too.
The second interpretation, with real snow, requires the emphasis on
the final word:
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
But the first interpretation is much the likelier, as well as being the
'1: recently came across a stanza recorded about 1615, probably decades older, in
which Tom o 'Bedlam recites the following madness:
Of thirty bare years have I
twice twenty bin enraged,
& of forty bin
three tymes fi:fteene
in durance soundlie caged ...
The alignment is meant to reflect the view that the verse is a proto-limerick, b,
the third and fourth lines are set as a single third line, the resemblance to Howe
even more stron@y suggests that there is a history of what could be called artthm~.w~.
quatrains in English.
�78
TilE ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE REVIEW
less fancy. It Is, in fact, of some Interest that the plainer reading is the
one that takes the ambiguous word .figuratively. But it Is hard to work
up much more Interest in that final word, largely because both
Interpretations rest on an assumption that is psychologically unlikely.
I wonder how many twenty-year-olds who .are expecting a normal
life-span are likely to be seriously worried that they don't have all that
many years left for looking. It is granted that most of the lads in
Housman's Shropshire <tre destined to die young. But in the case of
the cherry-tree watcher I fail to find room for irony in his confidence
that he will enjoy a full sevenf¥ years. If I am missing something
Important about the poem, I hope someone will set me straight, for
the poem ought to mean more than I have mentioned. Not only did the
poet place it second In his collection, but it has since been included
In any number of anthologies.
Meanwhile, if it is only the end of the poem that provides any
ambiguity of meaning, It Is interesting that It is also only there that
the poem reaches-or succumbs to---<:omplete metrical regularity.
Only there do both rhyming lines have four full iambs:
v/c'lv
tv;
About the wo6dlands I will go
T6 se/ th~' ch/nj htkg vXth sn6w.
The entire third stanza would be perfectly regular if it weren't for the
line that begins with the word "fifty," lacking an opening upbeat:
Xnd s{nce t!5'Jo6k !it th{ngs \h b!oo"m
/.v/vlv/
Fifty sprmgs are little room ...
We do leave a little room for that missing upbeat, of course. It Is one
of the truths about rhythm that we can't utter a downbeat without a
preceding upbeat, just as we can't exhale without inhaling first. 5 Still,
It does matter a little whether or not the upbeat Is actually sounded.
That It Is not sounded here places emphasis on the word "fifty," just
as, at the same place in the second stanza, the word "twenty" Is
emphasized. Our other number, "seventy," on the other hand, acquires its distinction from the extra syllable that must unobtrusively
be slipped In, "seven" being our only disyllabic digit. If there is
undeniably a music of numbers. there is also a music of the names of
numbers. Making poetic capital of the equation Twenty plus Fifty
5
1 have eschewed the terms "arsis" and "thesis," which have hopelessly exchanged
meanings at varlous times.
�ZUCKERMAN
79
equals Seventy may rival In Its way the profound judgment, In the
realm of philosophy, that Seven and Five equals Twelve.
What happens at the lines beginning with "twenty" and "fifty" Is not
the same as what happens at the beginning of line five:
Now of my threescore years and ten ...
-I am assuming that "Now" takes an opening stress. But that line
does have Its full quota of '>Yllables. It is just that-as is very often the
case In iambic lines-the' opening iamb (da-dwn) is replaced by a
trochee (da-dum). We are still given the material for saying the iamb
"now of" Any handbook about meter will tell you when an iamb is
replaced by a trochee. What is at the same time never made explicit,
and what I ask you to observe now, Is that the stress remains in the
same place. When one stresses the downbeat of the trochee "now," the
stress occurs right where it would have occurred on the word "of," if
one had chosen to say an iambic "now of"
The lack of clarity in this example Is owing to the fact that one can
also say "now of" or, to put it another way, that the metrical shift Is
not sufficiently clear-cut. When contemplating this weakness, I was
forced back over the rest ofthepoem, and discovered that semantically
the "now" that starts the second stanza uncomfortably repeats the
"now" that ends the first line. Should we suspect the earlier "now" of
being necessary for the salre of the rhyme? And is the second "now"
supposed to be wavering between the temporal and the resumptive?
These doubts serve to show that metrical questions often lead to fresh
questions about content.
In any event, let me switch to another couplet where an opening
iamb has been converted to a trochee, this time unambiguously. Here,
In the same meter (and coincidentally with a similar rhyme) Is a
couplet of Andrew Marvell's:
[2]
My vegetable love should grow
V~stf~ thi:in /mpires and more slow...
We are concerned only with the first halves of the lines. Later we'll
pick up on the secondary stress that amusingly extends the adjective
''vegetable." Right now we are listening to the assertive trochaic
conversion that begins the second line. If the line had opened with the
regular lamb, It could have gone like this:
�80
THE ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE REVIEW
[3]
My vegetable love should grow
v I
1\S vast
1.}
as
I
~mplres ...
When ''as VAST' is changed to ''VASTer" we do not lose any syllables,
and to my sense of rhythm the ''VAST"in "VASTer" is In the same place
as the "VAST' In "as VAST." Since this Is one of my main points, I'll
say It still another way: The ''VASr' of ''VASTer" Is still on the
downbeat, and we breathe or think an unspoken upbeat for It, just as
we did In the Housman poem for "fifty" and "twenty." The only
difference between the defective lines and the line with the reversal is
In the number of syllables between the initial downbeat and the next
stress.
It should be helpful to compare all the lines in question. For the
sake of the timing, in each instance I Include the preceding line:
[4]
(a) And since to look at things in bloom
FiftY' sprfugs are little room ...
(b) My vegetable love should grow
V
/
V I
As vast as Empires,
and more slow ...
(c) My vegetable love should grow
)
\)
\]
!
V:l.ster than :gmpires, and more slow...
(d) Fffty'spdngs ...
As v.ist \is tmplres .. .
V~ster thll.n tmplres .. .
(N6w l>'f
rriy threL.)
Marvell's couplet was not chosen at random. Soon afterward in the
poem there are some famous lines that ask to be compared with
Housman's:
[5]
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine Eyes, and on thy Forehead gaze.
Two hundred to adore each Breast:
But thirty thousand to the rest ...
The numbering here is beyond arithmetic; and there is more than
�ZUCKERMAN
81
hyperbole in the unexpected geometric leap.
But we must return once more to the Housman poem, because we
have not yet reached the beginning of it. We started with the final word,
a kind of rhetorical climax, such as it is. But metrically it is the very
opening of the poem that is most memorable. It is, in fact, so arresting
that it sustains the rest of the poem, and carries it right into the
anthologies. Nothing later on matches the musical call-to-attention.
The poem starts out with a metrical conversion of the "vaster than"
or "Now of my" sort. But when we count "loveliest" as trtsyllabic, then
there are not two but three unstressed syllables between the downbeat
and the next stress:
I v v
I
Nowofmythree ...
[6]
L6've-ii'-¥st .\'f tre/s ...
Since the scansion requires that there be only two, we can reduce the
middle syllable to a semivowel:
v
I v
I
[7] LOve-lyest of trees ...
But whether it be a trochee or a dactyl, "loveliest" stands in place of
the lamb asked for by the meter, as the meter might be in the following
line, where I have kept the final sound of "loveliest" but stressed the
syllable:
u
I v
I
[8] Tlie best of trees, the cherry now ...
Move from there to this mis-stressed version-to hear what's happening we must dare to distort:
v
I v
I
[9] Love(l)yest of trees ...
And from there to the correctly stressed but disyllabic
[10]
Lov/(l)y~st &tre/s ...
-which corresponds to "Now of my three", and finally to the poem
Itself:
[ ll] Love-li-est of trees ...
�82
1HE ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE REVIEW
Substituting for the standard meter
[12]
ulululul
we have not simply the still usual
[13]
IuuIuIuI
but the remarkable
[141
IuuuIuIuI
Part II
In everything that has been noted so far I have taken for granted
an underlying meter, which was easy to deduce even though the poem
begins Irregularly. Here it is represented on the page-it can be spoken
using "da" for the unstressed and "dum" for the stressed syllables, a
familiar "da-dturi':
[151
uI u I u I uI
ulululul
ulu/u/ul
ulululul
Four lines ofverse with four stresses in each line. Notice that I have
represented the stresses as equidistant on the page-as though
charting an avenue of trees-and suggesting that the soundings of
them should be equidistant In time, Isochronous or Isochronal. I am
representing the meter itself, not any particular rendition of a verse
that is, as we say, In that meter. Even the rendition of the meter in
nonsense-syllables is already a particularization, for those syllables
aren't entirely tuneless. The stresses are the same-though the placement of the short syllables Is not the same-as they are in the couplets
of four-beat nursery rhymes:
[16] One, two, buckle my shoe.
Three, four, knock at the door ...
Or, if you consider those lines not four-beat lines but pairs of two-beat
lines:
[17] Eeny, meeny, miney, mo ... _
Or, If you think we're being Irrelevantly trochaic:
�ZUCKERMAN
83
[18] One, two! One, two! then through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack. ..
Remember that the opening numbers here are meant to be a pair of
iambs, 6 and we're back to Housman's meter. !tis hard to recite nursery
rhymes or comic ballads without showing the isochronality of the
stresses. But the stresses can be spaced similarly evenly in more
solemn verse, even though the performance need not be quite so
Insistent.
Taken alone, without considering the meter of the rest of the poem,
the opening line of Housman's poem could easily be construed as
having five stresses, with an official stress on the third syllable of
"loveliest":
[19] Love-li-est of trees, the cherry now ...
If we provide the line with a sounded opening upbeat, we have a full
and normal iambic pentameter, the staple meter for English poems
that are neither nursery, comic, nor ballad-like:
[20] The loveliest of trees, the cherry now...
In an idle moment I have gone on to stretch the other lines of
Housman's quatrain into pentameter, as in example 21. The expansion of line three-the standing in tears-owes something to the
sadness of Ruth in the Ode to a Nightingale; and in line four I couldn't
help completing for the celibate Housman the tncipient suggestion of
marriage. It Is in anticipation of such desecrations that I chose a
mediocre poem to work on. Yet there really Is no good reason why we
shouldn't perform such experiments on the most sacred passages of
poetry, just as we can profitably tamper with the tunes of Mozart and
Bach, hoping to understand how they work or come closer to spotting
where the mystery lies. Anyway, a well-made melody can easily survive
a temporary dislocation:
[21]
The loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is pendulate with bloom along the bough
And stands In tears about the woodland ride
Wearing a bridle white for Eastertide.
A good deal that Is new emerges simply from the change In meter
Itself. Notice, for example, that with a bit more formality of expression
we would be bordering on the end-stop couplets of the eighteenth
century. Which is to say that now the tendency Is to walt at the end
6
Compare the separate stresses-"one,two,"-in example 16 with the iambic "one·twosn of example 18.
�84
TilE ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE REVIEW
of each line-to wait metrically, for what amounts to the beat of a sixth
stress. It is as though the stresses asked to be paired. When there are
four in aline, as in Housman's tetrameter, we can go straight on. When
there are five, the fifth stress expects its silent partner, a sixth. You
may feel that I have exaggerated the defmite counting-out of all this.
But I hope It will at least be granted that each meter has Its own
character.
Partm
That meters have their own character is one of the main points of
this lecture. The other is that once a meter is established, the metrical
stresses in each line have what may be thought of as their established
places. I would like to examine each of these assertions a little further.
For the first, let us return to the established meter of the Housman
poem, which is pictured back in Example 15. But this time, Instead
of expanding into pentameter, let us subtract, starttng with the
omission of the last foot of the even lines:
[22]
uI uI u I uI
ululul
ulululul
ululul
Now we have the most common of ballad meters, most common in
both popular ballads and literary imitations. Housman himself seems
to have preferred this form, a preference not surpristng In a poet who,
when asked about his influences, listed not only the songs of Shakespeare but Heinrich Heine and the Scottish Border Ballads. About this
meter let me call your attention to somethtng so obvious that It Is
seldom registered in the discussion of verse. It Is that we still have the
same lengths-tn musical terms, the same number of measures-as
we had tn the sixteen-foot meter. No doubt there are many ways a
reader or reciter can perform a common ballad. There is one way,
however, that is rhythmically impossible, and that Is to go right on
from the short line to the next without a pause, as in this rendition of
Example 22:
ulululul
u I u I u I (go right on)
ulululul
ululul
There are annoying people who sometimes showup at song fests. After
one phrase of the song seems to them to end, they begin singing the
�85
ZUCKERMAN
next phrase without waiting for the first phrase really to finish, without
waiting the amount of time required by the meter-as though the
musical time was in session only when the tune of the song was
actually being sounded. I think even those people feel compelled to
walt the required foot-length at the end of the second and fourth lines
of the meter In Example 22.
Let's attach the meter to a poem. Though I was tempted by some
rousing ballads-and even by a purple cow-l owe It to you at last to
give you something better. So here's one of the most beautiful lyrics
in the language, Wordsworth on the loss of Lucy:
[23] She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love:
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
-Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.
She lived unknown, and few could know
.When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and oh,
The difference to me!
It has some kinship with the Housman poem. There is something
that borders on counting, and, although there are two similes, they
are confined to the middle stanza. The last stanza is iroageless, and it
is one sign of its beauty that when speaking it we want to leave a lot
of space. Space and silence are required by the plainness, and by the
combination of exclamation and understatement:
[24]
But she is in her grave-and ohThe difference-to me-
When contemplating the pauses in the poem, one should distinguish
between those that belong to performance and those that are requi]'ed
by the meter. What, for example, allows us to postpone the last foot of
the next-to-last line?-so much so that a listener might mistake it for the
opening of the final line? And what has happened to the second stress
in the final line, the metrtcal stress on the last syllable of the word
"difference"? Where are the stresses In that poigoantly laconic ending?
�86
THE ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE REVIEW
For now, let us continue with the subtraction from the original four
times four. This time we'll end every line with a rest, and for the
embodiment In a poem we can return to Housman, who, in a famous
Shropshire lament, has lost not one Lucy but a whole crowd of lads
and maidens, all of them nameless:
[25[
With rue my heart Is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.
By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.
As with most ofthe poems that take me back to the Botanic Garden,
it would be morally useful to analyze the factitiousness of the sentiment. How seriously are we to take the difference between the fate of
the boys and the fate of the girls? But in this lecture I only have to
note the metrically Important fact that we still have sixteen feet per
stanza-that now every line carries a rest. One could easily be driven
to some theory about the evenness or dupleness that we seem to
require In ourverse-meters,justas we do in our dances. But whenever
I delve Into that matter, I rediscover the truths that we walk with two
feet, and that two is an even number.
There's not enough time to ring aU the changes of what happens
when we leave off various measures ofthe original quatrain. So far we
have looked only at 4-4-4-4, 4-3-4-3, and 3-3-3-3-but those combinations do underlie most of the great ballad-like poems in the language, whether by Wordsworth, Blake, Emily Dickinson, or one or two
others. But I can't resist listing one more, the fairly unlikely 3-3-4-3:
[26]
u I u I u I (u ll
u I u I u I (u I)
ulululul
u I u I u I (u ll
.;:
Now put that into measures with a triple beat, whether you want to
call the result anapestic (uul) or dactylic (fuu) or related to that foot
known as the amphibrach, a stressed syllable between two unstressed-ulu-which for me always summons up the vigor of
Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony. Here is the new quatrain:
�ZUCKERMAN
~n
87
uluuluulu~l~
u I u u I u u I u (u I ul
uluuluuluulu
u I u u I u u I u (u I u)
We now have a meter in what amounts to six-eighths time-a meter
that tends to be comic. To make it fully so, we'll leave out two shorts
In line three:
[281
uI uuI u uI u
uluuluulu
uluul uluul
uluuluulu
Even though I haven't mentioned a Man from Calcutta or the Countess
Lupescu, I hope you recognize the form, which Is that of the Limerick.
It Is usually laid out on the page like this:
[291
uI u uI uuI u
uluuluulu
uluul
uluul
uluuluulu
But that Is merely a convention to show the rhyme, which could have
remained Internal. There Is really nothing metrically five-like about
the Limerick; as we have just seen, It Is simply a variant of a
fundamental four-times-four, which also hems in most of our favorite
melodies. The same 'scaffolding holds up a poem by Edward Lear, a
· ballad by Jerome Kern, Schiller's Ode to Joy, and Beethoven's Ode to
Joy.
PartN
I promised to return to Marvell's line about his "vegetable love,"
when I said that the meter Informs us that the word "vegetable" has
four syllables with a subsidiary stress on the third. Even If we choose
not to emphasize the secondary stress, the meter still should prevent
a reading of three Isochronous stresses, like this:
[30]
Myv~g(e)table Jo've should grbw...
What's wrong here Is not that there are only three enunciated stresses,
but that they are in the wrong place. They should not be equidistant
�1HE ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE REVIEW
88
from one another. but In an Isochronous set of four stresses they
should occupy positions one, three, and four:
[31[
My veget-a-ble love should grow...
1
(2)
3
4
The nature of my assertion will be clearer if we expand to the
ten-syllable line. It Is anyway In the realm of Iambic pentameter that
the controversy usually takes place.
Some years ago an Influential critic of rhetoric and myth wandered
Into the field of prosody and observed that a great many lines of iambic
pentameter have only four enunciated stresses. The observation was,
of course, right. and It happened that he could adduce as examples
the opentng ltnes of the most famous speech In Shakespeare. Here It
is, with that critic's stressing:
[32]
I
I
!
I
To be or not to be: that is the question.
Wh{ther 'tis n6bler in the mfud to su'ffer
I
/
I
I
The shngs and arrows of outrageous fortune ...
In the first ltne one may prefer, for existential reasons, to retain the
metrical stress on the second statement of the infinitlve-''To be or not
to be"-but certainly in the second and third lines there is no spoken
emphasis on "in" and "of." These lines, then, not only have four
stresses each, but those stresses group Into pairs on both sides of a
central unstressed preposition. Let me add to the collection an equally
well-known line of Pope's:
[33]
The proper study of mankind is man.
Although there can be little controversy about how many stresses
there are, there should be greater attention paid to where they are. By
where I do not, of course, mean which syllables, but how those
stressed syUables accord with the stresses of the Wlderlying meter. By
now you should have predicted that I will maintain that the meter
should prevent the performance of four equidistant stresses tn the
pentameter lines. Listen to what I consider the wrong reading of
Example 32-the reading implicitly recommended by the misguided
critic, using four equidistant stresses:
�ZUCKERMAN
89
1
To bt or n6t to be, tM t Is the qu/stion
Whither 'tis n6bier in the mfud to s&'trer
The sJ(ngs and £rrows of outra'geous f6'rtune ...
And even, encouraged by what I hope is an anachronistic pronunciation of the chief word:
The pr6per stt{dy of m£nklnd Is mk..
The stresses should not march as though they were one, two, three,
and four In a four-stressed line, but as though they were at positions
one, two, four, and five of a line that leaves room for the central stress
even when It Is not uttered:
[34[ (a)
To b( or neSt to be (/) that Is the qu(stion.
Whether 'tis n6bler (/) In the rnfnd to stltrer
The srfugs and okrows (/) of outrfgeous fo'rtune ...
(b)
The pr6per stddy (/) of manklhd is mhn.
(c)
I
I
"'
.I
I
The pr6per study of mankind Is man.
The pentameter of Shakespeare and Pope-and Milton and Wordsworth and Keats-normally counts out a single short syllable In each
foot; the meter Is not purely accentual but what is called accentualsyllabic. You will note that reading pentameter lines with four equal
stresses Ignores this fact. Shakespeare and Pope are not Imitating the
meter of Beowulf, nor do they anticipate the sprung rhythms of Gerard
Manley Hopkins.
One final example. This time it is Macbeth, beginning to contemplate the parade of his magnificent despair:
[35]
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow...
If you choose to stress only the three tomorrows, there are still,
between each pair of stresses. silences that are as strong as stresses.
Indeed, I hear a certain advantage In articulating all five stresses of
the pentameter:
[36]
Tombrrow kd tomdrrow kd tom6rrow...
�1HE ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE REVIEW
90
When properly stressed, the little word "and" can be the most weary
of common words. It can also connect worlds of hopelessness. as lt
does here and (say) at the dead center of Wagner's Tristan.
PartV
In speaking this lecture I have used certain nonsense-syllables
when I wanted to conve:\f the meters without the words that embody
them. I didn't always know in advance what syllables I was going to
use. Recently I have found myself suggesting to the next generation
that some linguists ought to do a study of the syllables people use for
such renditions. And while they are at It, they can do the same for the
related renderings of the motifs of music:
ba-ba-ba-bwn
da-da-dum da-da-dum da-da-dah-dum
La-da-dee-dah-dum-da-dee-dah dee-dun?
Actually there would be at least two branches of that study. one of
vowels, the other of consonants. It Is a rich field, and, so far as I know,
It Is quite untilled. Such studies would Inform us about the nature of
language itself, and about the character of individual languages-not
to mention the tnsight tnto a person's psyche. Is the subject labial or
dental, and what childhood doings determined the preference?
All that the syllables for conveying meter really needed to convey
was stress, and not even degrees of stress but simply whether or not
a syllable is accented. It turns out that the differentiations ofverse are
far simpler than those of prose, where, according to most analyses, we
need four degrees of emphasis In order to convey the significant
contours of syntax and meaning. The merely binary difference between
syllables tn verse-all we need to know is whether the stress Is on or
oJf--can be viewed as representing a selection and stylization of the
more complex elements of ordinary language.
The analogy can be carried through. The poetic foot can be regarded
as a simplified and stylized all-purpose word: each carries only one
main stress, but In the case of the word the placement of that stress
Is harder to specifY. The poetic colon Is comparable In turn to the
phrase, and the poetic line Is the stylized analogue of the sentence.
7These three sets of syllables were sung, respectively, to the opening motif of
Beethoven's Fifth, the opening of Mozart's Fortieth, and the big tune in the second
movement ofTchaikowsky's "Pathetlque."
�ZUCKERMAN
91
And so on to the longer forms, via the stanza of verse and the
paragraph of prose. And tn every comparison the element on the metlical
side is easier to discern and less ambiguous than the prosaic parallel.
More to the point of this lecture, it has been observed that the
stricter isochrony of the stresses of verse is a stylization of the
tendency to equalize the stresses tn our speech. If you have any doubt
of that tendency, then listen to the stress patterns of the responsive
readings in church and SYT~agogue, or at any occasion where a number
of people are asked to recite in chorus not verse but heightened prose.
Or, to take a slightly different turn in this quick comparison ofverse
and heightened prose, consider a formal recitation of this well-known
bit of our prose tradition, which I have suggestively re-aligned:
We hold these truths to be self-evident
That all men are created equal: that
They are endowed by their creator with
Certain unalienable rights; that among these
Are life, and liberty, and the pursuit
Of happiness ...
To get my five and a half lines of rather good blank verse, I may have
had to be a bit Yeatsian in the line containing the "unalienable rights," 8
but otherwise all I did was add a single "and."
If the reading of prose benefits from knowtng the parts of speech
and where the jotnts are, it is a small wonder that the attention to
metlic elements should improve one's performance of verse. Everything artistic seems to me to benefit from having been put into a
roughly suitable Bed that may seem to some to be Procrustean. The
freedom of the dance is derivable from the discipline of rigid and
sometimes awkward exercise. One of the most flexible and emotional
sopranos of our century used the word "straight-jacketing" to describe
the first stage of studying a new role-the phase when she was learntng
exactly what the composer wrote. And we have a wealth of statements
by poets themselves about the importance of the underlying symmetlies--even the underlying monotonies-of verse. T. S. Eliot spoke
famously of the life of verse as a contrast between flux and what he
called Fixity. We can't notice flux without the help of that fixity. And
stnce I have fallen tnto the sententious mode, and wish at least to be
classically sententious, I'll remind you that the river we can't step into
twice is the same river.
But too much attention has been paid this evening to the performer.
&yry thinking a stress on the fifth syllable of "unalienable," and a reversal of the
proper stressing of "among."
·
�92
1HE ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE REVIEW
The chief reason for attending to the details of meter should be not
performance but plain knowing. Among performers there may even be
some merit In the common sentiment that attention to the mechanical
might subvert the natural, and that the metronomic can stifle rhythm.
But I believe there is no room at all for that sentiment when It comes to
our more Important business, wWch we engage In not as performers but
as students. As students we leave beWnd the sentimental notion that
dissection means murder, and that "analysis" can kill the "creative." The
attempt to force a phrase Into a pattern, whether It fits or not, is bound
to be revealing. And, as I said earlier, I have yet to find a good poem or
piece of music that doesn't survive such fittings with a newly noticeable
richness. The workable criterion for a poor poem or piece Is that It fails
to withstand the rough treaiment the analysis calls for.
Everything that is rhythmic or melodic or poetic must have an
Ingredient that is rational and logical and subject to some sort of
simple numbering. The word "meter" carries that truth, along with
that other apt word for lines written in feet, the word "numbers" itself.
I recently picked up what turned out to be an Informative book on
the various dances used in the music of Bach. I must say I was
surprised and then puzzled by a sudden caveat in the book's introduction. The authors (there are two of them) say it byway of what they
call" a personal word of advice." I have as much trouble with the word
"personal" there as I have with the advice itself, which is that they
urge their readers "not to Intellectualize rhythm."They go on to explain
that "many problems arise when rhythm is analysed as a thing to be
understood by the mind, rather than as an activity perceived primarily
by the body and only secondarily by the mind." I find myself ballled
by an epistemology that has the so-called body somehow making sense
of tWngs before the so-called mind is brought into play. I am also
annoyed by the easy invocation of the buzz-word "Intellectualize,"
which depends for its pejorative effect upon the just barely justified
foolishness that hovers over the noun "intellectual."
But most of all I am taken aback by the objection that in the course
of analysis "many problems might arise." That analysis should uncover difficulties Is surely something to be welcomed-which is my
way of reminding you that the main reason for lectures given in this
room is to introduce the Question Period. Notice that I called It by what
I believe to be Its proper name: the Question Period, not the Question
andAnswer Period. Perhaps I can re-assert an old tradition by putting
It into a line of iambic pentameter:
It isn't Q and A but just plain Q.
�I
Results of
Crosswords Numbers Five and Six
The winners of the $35 book tokens, redeemable at the St. John's
College Bookstore, Annapolis, are, for #5:
Larry S. Davis, Austin, TX
Peter Norton, Acton, MA
Geoffrey Rommel, Oak Park, IL
for #6:
Nathaniel Cohen, Washington, DC
James Craig, Havre de Grace, MD
Jean Stephens, Annapolis, MD
�94
TIIE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Solution to Crossword Number Five
(' ' [Sins] of Omission' ' )
1
A
2
v
3
A 14 p._
I
L-
Be
0
N E:
y
N
5
v v s
c..
6£
10
9
v y M
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11
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e
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13
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s
21
20
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14
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A
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16
19
12
v
23
0
I
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...,-
27
L
E
L
A- M B
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18
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22
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I
0
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24
26
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y
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£
7
D
Editor's Note:
When I was editing the solution, it seemed to me that one of the
seven deadly sins appeared twice-as AVARICE and as GREED-while
GLUTTONY was omitted. I consulted "Cassandra," who said that
GREED stood for GLUTTONY. I detect the influence of the British usage
of the adjective "greedy."
�CROSSWORD
95
Solution to Crossword Number Six
C'Porcus")
A c.
3
5
4
6
E: L Cl R I R u E
8
9
10
11
7
p 0 R K p {<..
0 v A A I< A
13
12
J) E" R L p A s 0 N
0 N
1£
2H
w
14
16
15
M I N -r M p
17
18
p I:: R A I
0
u E
P- E
)<
24
As L
26
L 0
N NH 0 p
11
J)
22
E p IJ I
25
u
uT
Editor's Note:
Porcus"=Pig
I N
0
~
19
21
20
s -r
N G 6 D I
-r
0
e
s
23
E
y
27
Latin
A R R 0 G A I
1E
�Crossword Number Seven:
"Let's Be Liberal"
By EZRA
The six solutions without clues share a conunon theme. The puzzle
contains three acronynl.s and an unusual spelling at 24A.
ACROSS
1. Cheerleaders have It according to commanding officer and nurses found in
some mills (11)
8.Anclent enemy departs,
fooled (3)
11. Unending worry? Rebound
with a forward direction (5)
13.To the Romans, Jesus was
among their main rivals (4)
14. Place to wash a brass bass
(4)
15.Curt western lawman Is a
descendent of Muhammad
(6)
17.Bug detected in the colic
(abbreviation and word) (5)
18.Do you know what comes
after pro and con? (4)
19. Fixes radios (4)
21.Even stake on outcome of
bout (abbreviation) (3)
22. Gale blows one end to the
other making French equal
(4)
24. Stitch a Ramadan veil for
variant concubines or
Turkish city (5)
26. Bore coffin (4)
27.Giver of oneself and
Wurllixer? (two words) (10)
29. By virtue of being at heart
the same (3)
30. French well operates the
first half of every other year
(4)
31. Oddly, tonite is still explosive (3)
33. It's a nuisance to take a
half-step back and a halfstep forward (4)
34.Author Bagnold returned
to eat (4)
35. Up to the time that they
returned Illuminated (3)
36.Alien switches sides In femInine ending (4)
38. Cyclone's eye is a nuclear
spiral (3)
39.Prude, grief stricken, Imagined with anticipation
(10)
40. Look with desire at dance
turns (4)
41. Profane rancher backing
stadium (5)
43. Vocals are ... are unusual?
(4)
.
45. Family finds rich cloth
without starting south (3)
48. Tsongas' troubled end or
Reagan's last comeback, either one is an unexpected
obstacle (4)
50. Better to marry than to ...
be a Scottish stream? (4)
51. The Aegean coast Is in a
region I adore (5)
53. Wrinkled mother fell back
in pit (6)
54.Eastern religion lacks
quiet: In the beginning was
the word from a division
problem (4)
55.C m tee (4)
56. Poles are a trap (5)
57.Drag back abandoned,
careworn crone (3)
�97
CROSSWORD
II"
or
rr
"
"
II"
w
["
II<'
["
p
pr
11~
p,-
I"'
I"
pr
11~
rw
I"
I"'
II"
,-,-
II"
.
II"
II~
DOWN
1. Upset dupe with the hollow
stick (5)
2. Foretell WJC era (7)
4. Widespread flare-up of fire
(4)
5. Heard choice word about
mineral (3)
7. Feel splenetic compound of
half sulfur, potassium (4)
8. Final notice: love stung (4)
9. Dull? Trace skull fractures
(10)
lO.Abandoned a Kennedy underneath of sun in Spain
(9)
12. Hope is embraced by the
foremost of willing hearts
(4)
14. In Boston, error makes
copies black (5)
16.Wanderlng players in
street, they are high In Las
Vegas (9)
25. Undisguised pleasure In
contemplating the beautiful but disheveled maid
with soldier's chow (I 0)
26. Early Christian saint suffered pain, bore up (two
words and number) (10)
28. Crank fastener (3)
32. Identify game In which it
becomes you. Just the opposite! (3)
37. Emotional shocks drain energy from destabilized amateurs (6)
39. Quietly transcendental, a
negation (5)
·
42. For example, the last shall
be first In as many generations (4)
44. Without starting up flipped
over (5)
46. Nine Inches missing from
front end of brand-new
ruler (4)
47. In Greece, I bit (4)
49. In re: coast revision - sea
sound out (two words) (2-2)
52. Grp. of physicians wet
nurse (3
Note: A larger version of the Crossword Grid appears on the next page.
�98
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Let's Be Liberal
BY EZRA
I"
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Zuckerman, Elliott
Brann, Eva T. H.
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
Sachs, Joe
Stickney, Cary
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Bojaxhi, Gjergji
Sachs, Joe
White, John
Datchev, Radoslav
Hoben, Sandra
EZRA
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Text
The St. John's Review
Volume XLIII, number one (1995)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
James Carey
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
Joe Sachs
John VanDoren
Robert B. Williamson
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Gjergji Bojaxhi
The St. John's Review is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's
College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President; Eva T. H. Brann,
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.O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404·2800.
Back issues are available. at $5.00 per issue, from the St. John's College
Bookstore.
©1995 St. John's College. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole or
in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
Marcia Baldwin and Th.e St. John's College Print Shop
�With this issue begins Forewords, containing the editor's notes
and comments, to appear occasionally.
�Contents
Forewords
John Keats' Bicentennial
Essays and Lectures
1 . . . . . Dyn:;tmical Chaos:
Som'e Implications of a Recent Discovery
Curtis Wilson
21 . . . . . Tragic Pleasure
Joe Sachs
39 . . . . . Faustian Phenomena:
Goethe on Plants, Animals,
and Modern Biologists
John F. Cornell
59 ..... 'I Have Become a Problem to Myself':
Augustine's Theory of Will
and the Notion of Human Inwardness
Lester Strong
Book Reviews
71 ..... T.S. Eliot: The Varieties of
Metaphysical Poetry
Cordell D. K. Yee
85 . . . . . Vikram Seth: A Suitable Boy
Eva T. H. Brann
91 ..... Jorge H. -Aigla: Karate Do and Zen
James Carey
95 ..... Jacob Howland: The Republic
Carl Page
Crossword Contest
100 ..... Solution to Crossword Number 7
"Let's Be Liberal" by EZRA
�1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
�I
FOREWORDS
John Keats
1795- 1821
As we note the birth of John Keats we inevitably remember his death. IDs
robust gifts, both personal and poetic, destined him for extraordinary
achievement, but the frailty of his physical constitution guaranteed that
we would never know the full reach of his potential. Even those who have
faulted his character in some respects-one thinks of Matthew
Arnold-have acknowledged overrtding virtues to which his letters attest,
letters which T. S. Eliot has called "the most notable and most important
ever wrttten by any English poet." In poetry, from the earliest his aims
were high-he took Milton and Shakespeare as his teachers-and his
assimilation and progress was swift and sure. By the time of his death,
at age 25, if he had not mastered the long, heroic poem, or found a
successful dramatic mode, he had written a heady body ofwork, including
odes that are among the greatest in the English language: "Ode to a
Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Ode to Psyche," and 'To Autumn."
Ambitious, and gifted, and cruelly short-lived, on the one hand he is
sometimes apotheosized, along with others of his generation, as a luminary in the typical mythology of Romanticism; on the other hand, he is
sometimes delivered into the pathos of his biography. These are ways of
disappearance to which he would not willingly succumb. Ufe is not, he
wrote, "a vale oftears," but "a vale of Soul-making." The making of Keats'
soul required the making of poems. It has been said that he alone among
the poets of his era sought "to escape from self-expression into Shakespearean impersonality." Thus we best honor Keats where we least find
him-in his poems.
The time of his birth and of his last days, the time most like a recurring
paradox he thought upon, the time of the writing of the great ode to that
time, autumn was Keats' season. The ode 'To Autumn" contains no "Cold
pastoral," but is a meditation upon nature's fullness. Fruition and death,
twin fuces of life, are poised in their togetherness and held beautifully
before us. There is no moment of disillusion, nor is there any "irritable
reaching after fact & reason." There is hardly any movement in this
intensely replete, serene poem. Partly for this reason, even some who
know that poems are not statements think that this poem, though "nearly
perfect," has "little to say." But on the matter of the poem, Keats has
captured the essentials both in substance and tone. Poet, nature, and
poem are one.
�\
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1.
\
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�Dynamical Chaos:
Some Implications of a
Recent Discovery
Curtis Wilson
lVIy subject is a peculiar behavior of dytmmical systems that has come
to be recognized only during the last thiriyyears, In i975 James Yorke
christened this behavior chaos~pethaps a misnomer. Chaos is a
dteek word that has no plural. Since Besiod it has meant the nether
abyss, the first state of the utilverse, or tdtal disorder. 1'he dynamical
behavior that James Yorke called chaos is order and apparent randoitihess lhtertwined.
A dynamimtl system is~ what? How abtlut this? It is a set of entities
that lhterad so as to undergo a development The erttities could be
plartets or billiard balls: maybe cardiac muscle fibers or neurons: maybe
even bidders on the New York stock Exchartge: but let that go. In my
illustratltms, the components will be chunks of matter, unbesouled.
1'o umlerstand why dynamical chaos was recognized only recently
takes a bit of mathematical i:mckgrourtd. Mathematically, dynamical
systems are represented by dliferent:it.il equations, Differential equa"
lions are distinguished by containing instantaneous rates of change,
velocities, say, ot accelerations. Now empirically you cannot measure
an l!tstantaneous rate of chartge, but only chart!Jes over firtite intervals
of time, A differential equation, therefore, is a hypothesis. 'I'll veri:ly the
hypothesis you must first solve the equation, or l!ttegrat& it. 1'hat
means, you must somehow eliminate the rate or rates of change, artd
obtaltl the value of the dependent vatiable~whkh is what you ru-e
interested in~as a function of the Independent variable, which is
usually time. 1'hus you will have a relation you cart cheek empirically.
Procedures ftJr solving a good many differential equations were
Wtlrked outin the seventeenth and eighteenth Cetlturies. 1'he solutions
turn 011 what Is called the ftmdamental theorem of the calculus,
disMvered by Newton and Leibniz. 1'he procedures, like the differential
equatitJns, assume that time is ctlntinuous.
Not all dlffere11tial equations are thus soluble "analytically," as we
say. it may be impossible to disentangle the dependent variable from
its rate of change: or, if there is more than one dependent variable, to
Cuflis Wllsort is Tutor ffimetltus at St. John's
Ca11~g~.
�2
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
disentangle these variables from one another. Then you can't arrive
at a formula giving each variable as a function of the time.
All linear differential equations are soluble. In these equations, the
dependent variables and their rates of change occur only to the first
power, and don't multiply one another. An equation in just two
variables occurring only to the first power can be graphed as a straight
line; hence the name linear.
But there are nonlinear. differential equations, in which some of the
dependent variables, or their rates of change, are raised to powers, or
multiply one another. Some of these equations are analytically insoluble.
In fact most dynamical systems in the world can be modeled
accurately only by nonlinear differential equations, most of which are
insoluble. It is dynamical systems modeled by such differential equations, nonlinear and insoluble, that exhibit the behavior that James
Yorke called chaos. Here a small change in the independent variable
can produce a sudden large change in a dependent variable. Such
phenomena, we're told, flourish in nature; for instance, in the dripping
of a faucet.
How can insoluble differential equations be studied? The chief way
is by what is called numerical integration. This differs from the
analytical integration I previously spoke of, which relies on the fundamental theorem of the calculus. In numerical integration the independent variable is not varied continuously; instead, it is increased
by finite jumps. Starting with certain initial values of the variables,
numerical integration assumes that the initial rate of change remains
constant for some small, finite interval, say a second, and on that
assumption computes the values of all the variables at the end of the
second. Then with the new values it goes on to compute the values of
all the variables at the end of the second interval. And so on. The
procedure is not strictly accurate. But if the intervals are made small
enough, it can give a good idea of what is going on; it can even, in
many cases, be made to yield predictions as accurate as the observations.
The first large-scale numerical integration ever performed was carried
out in 1758, to compute the return date of Halley's Comet. It took six
months' work by three people, morning, noon, and night. Their final
prediction was a month off, and even then they were lucky, because their
computation contained some partially compensating errors.
Recognition of the chaos named by James Yorke came only in the
decades since 1960, with the development of high-speed electronic
computers that could carry out numerical integrations no one had
previously thought practical.
�WILSON
3
I am going to now illustrate this kind of dynamical chaos, and to
talk about some of its characteristics. My interest in this subject arose
because for some years I have been pursuing the question of how
planetary astronomy became a precise predictive science, and since
1980 it has become apparent that planetary astronomy involves
James Yorke's chaos.
This chaos limits predictibilty. Philosophers, I suspect, should
learn about it. New perspectives open up if we recognize how widespread it is. More on this later.
I begin with the simple pendulum. It consists of a heavy bob,
suspended by a weightless, inextensible thread-mathematical physicists love to invoke such things. If we draw the bob aside and let it go,
it oscillates back and forth. Let me derive its equation of motion and
show it to be nonlinear (Figure 1).
We measure e, the departure of the thread from the vertical, in
radians, defined as arc-length divided by radius. So the arc-length will
be given by the radius-arm, or length of the thread, here 1, times e. In
the science of dynamics as founded by Galilee and Newton, we are
interested in accelerations, that Is, rates of change of velocity; velocity
itself being a rate of change of position. Acceleration is thus a rate of
change of a rate of change. In our case, we are interested in the
acceleration of the bob, hence of its position as measured by the arc 1•e.
But 1 is a constant; so the acceleration we are Interested In is 1 times
the acceleration of e, which I write as theta with two over-dots, 1i.
The reason the bob accelerates Is that it Is pulled downward by
gravity. The acceleration of gravity at a given spot on the Earth is a
constant, which we call g. But the bob cannot go straight down, with
the acceleration g, because it is suspended by the thread. To find how
much of g accelerates the bob along its path, we "resolve" g into
components, one in line with the thread-this component merely tenses
the thread-and the other component at right angles, along the path
(Figure 2). The latter component is g • sin e. Our equation is then:
C\·8"C\
v=TSlTiv,
Figure 1 ·
Figure 2
,.
�4
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
where, remember, the double over"dot means acceleration, radians
per second per second.
I say that this equation is nonlinear. Sine 9 is given by an infinite
sertes-I will not prove this, please take it on faith:
• • •
If only the first term were present, we would have a linear equation.
But there are higher powers, going on forever.
Now it turns out that this nonlinear equation is soluble. I Will not
wnte down the solution, which is somewhat complicated. It implies
that the pendulum is not isochronous: Wider-angled sWings take a
little longer. Galileo, gazing at the suspended lamps tn the Cathedral
of Pisa, guessed the pendulum was isochronous, and wanted so much
to believe this, that he never made the simple expertments that would
have shown this assumption false.
Of course, the simple pendulum is apgroXimately isochronous, for
small-angled sWings, Suppose that 9 is 6, about 1/10 of a radian. In
the sertes expansion for the sine, if the first term is 11 10, the second
term iS 1/6000. We can choose to ignore it, along with all the higlier
terms. That is called lineariZing the equation, Mathematical physicists
have been doing it for nearly three hundred years, in order to obtain
neat, soluble equations. The hope is always that the linearized equations give good enough approximations, And so they do, When the
system iS close enough to a stable equilibrium.
Suppose, then, we limit our simple pendulum to swings of 6° or
less. The effects of nonlinearity Will be present, but tiny. And now let
us introduce a perturbation, When the word perturbation is used, we
mean that there is some motion we can regard as fundamental, anti
some other tiisturbtng motion that is superimposed. The Earth's
motion is controlled primarily by the gravitational action of the sun,
but it is perturbed detect<lbiy by the Moon, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn,
and so on.
Suppose the point of suspension of our pendulum is put into a
small osdliation, tn the very plane in which we first set the bilb to
oscillating. We couiti use a crank mechanism for this. Let the arnpli"
tude of this perturbing motion be a sm<111 fraction of the length of the
pendulum. Let the pertod of the forcing motion be one we can vary:
call itT. And suppose we set T to be somewhere neat the period of our
�WILSON
5
linearized simple pendulum, whith I shall call T0 • To is given by a
fonnula some of you have learned, 2it times the square root of 1 over g.
The equation of motion for the new set~up, which I Will not Write
down, is not soluble analytically: it Will not yield a formula for a as a
function of time. But a numerical integration can be carried out. John
Miles ofUCSD did this in 1984, 1 to determine the position of the bob
ench time the perturbing motion reaches the righthand end of its
range. starllilg from below To. he increused the period T of the
perturbing motion. At a' certaln point, the motion of the bob, in Its
original direction of motion, which I Will call the x~direction, became
unstable. But meanwhile there were two possible motions that were
stable~motitms that included a sideways Mmponent, a y~component.
The motion of the bob made a gradual transition to one or the other
bf these stable motions.
When T=0.9924T0 , the position of the bob each time the perturbing
motion comes to the righthund limit of its excursion moves irt this
figure (Figure 4). You probably wunt to ktiow what the whole motion
of the bob is. It is in a slowly rotating ellipse With slowly Varying axes.
But let me focus solely on the position of the bob et~ch time the
perturbing motion reaches the righthand end of its runge. tfTis 1.0 i 50
T0 , our point moves in u doubled curve (Figure 5): whut is called a
bljllteatlnrt hM occurred. A small quuntitutive change has produced n
sharp quulitative chlillge. td the period be inctensed so that T is
1.02131'0 (Figure 6): unother bifurcation has occurred. A cascade of
futther bifurcations occurs, as 't is intreased. When we teach 1' =
L0225Tb (Figure 7). the figure appears smudged, With muny pt~ths
Close together. The pattern, if accumulated over a long enough time,
appears to be symmetric With respect to the x~axis, although the bob
may spend substantial intervals In either the top or bottom hillf of this
pattern, trMsferring from one to the other at seentlngly random times.
Figure 3
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
6
Random is-what? The word comes from old French randir, to run
or gallop; the French knight, having donned his armor, and drunk
certain flagons of wine, was hoisted by crane onto his horse and
galloped about the field, doing random mayhem. The Anglo-Saxon, by
contrast, wore bearskin, drank mead, and on the battlefield went
berserk, a word meaning bearskin. To define random mathematically,
is something else again. Perhaps we can say what it is not. If our
pattern were two or more periodic motions superimposed, it would be
what is called quasi-pertodic; if the periodic motions were incommensurable, there would be no exact repetitions, but the motion would
not be random or chaotic. But our motion does not look quasi-periodic,
with those sudden shifts from one part of the pattern to another.
Figure 4
Figure 5
''
2.5
~
0
/,
0
-2.5
•
7.[,
2.>
c9
0
4r/l
4xjl
T = 0.9924 To
T = 1.0150 To
Figure 7
Figure 6
''
~
~
-2.5
4zfl
T =1.0213 To
/,
,,
.
"
-2.5
4z/l
T = 1.0225 To
I.
'·'
�WILSON
7
Let's tum to an actual physical experiment. Al Toft, assisted by Otto
Friedrich-machinist and carpenter for the laboratory-made this pair
of double pendulums in tandem, in accordance with a description
given in the American Journal of Physics in 1992 2 (Figure 8). Each
double pendulum consists of an upper and lower part, turning on
bearings, so that the friction is small. Each pari of each double
pendulum, both the upper and the lower, has its own natural period
for small-angle oscillatiqns. The situation for the lower pendulum is
similar to that of the p'erturbed simple pendulum I previously described. But now the perturber (the upper part) is itself significantly
perturbed; we have what is called feedback, circular causation.
The two double pendulums are identical twins. They are mounted
together on a sturdy support, so that neither will influence the other.
If I start one of them in an oscillation, the other does not pick up the
motion. If! start both together in a small oscillation, they play together
nicely (Figure 9).
With a large initial displacement, however, the pendulums don't
stay together (Figure 10,11). Nor, if we try the experiment over again,
does either do exactly what it did the first time. I hope this surprises
you. Before trying to account for it, let's see how we might show
quantitatively that the repetition isn't exact. We could use a rigidly
mounted electromagnet to hold the pendulum in a fixed initial position, to the side. Suppose the switch releasing the pendulum started
a stroboscopic flash camera, that took photos every 25th of a second.
On each exposure we could measure the angular deviations from the
vertical of the upper and lower paris. Then we could proceed to
compare different trials. This has actually been done.
In explaining this, I shall introduce a bit of the relevant mathematics. Take a look, for just a moment, at the differential equations of the
double pendulum (Figure 12). On the lefthand side, on top, you see
liJ, the angular acceleration of 81, the deviation of the upper pendulum
from the vertical. And below, on the lefthand side of the second
equation, you see 82, the angular acceleration of 82. the deviation of
the lower pendulum from the vertical.
Figure 12
~I
~2
g(sin .12 cos(.lt1)- /L sin .1,)- (12 0 l
+I, Ui
cos(.lt1))sin(.lt1)
11 (/L- cos (dt1))
2
g/L(sint1 1 cos(.lt1) -sinii2 )+(/LI 1 Ui
+I,Ul
12 (/L- cos 2 (.lil))
cos(.lil))sin(.lt1)
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
8
Figure a
Figure 9
Swing it low - Little Difference
Photography by Mr. John Bildahl
�9
WILSON
Figure 10
Figure 11
Swing it high- Big Difference
�lO
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
On the righthand sides you see a number of constants: g, 11. and
h. the lengths of the two parts of the pendulum; p, the ratio of their
masses. Also involved are sines and cosines of the two angles, and
also of their dtfference, 1\.6; these are variables. And two more variables
are i)Jand Sz, the momentary angular velocities of the upper and lower
parts of the pendulum. Both lit and 1lz thus depend on four variables,
e1 and ez. 1lJ and ih
The equations are not .soluble; we can't get separate formulas for
the two angles, as functions of time. But our system at any moment
depends on the four variables 6t, 62, 6t and ez. In the 1830s William
Rowan Hamilton proposed representing the evolution of such a system
in hyperspace, with a number of dimensions equal to the number of
variables on which the state of the system depends. Then a point in
this space would correspond to a momentary state of the system, and
a succession of points, or trajectory, would show how the system
develops. The space is called phase space. In our case, the space is
four-dimensional, and you can't visualize it. You can nevertheless
conceive it without contradiction. In the 1890s Herrrt Potncare undertook to study insoluble, nonlinear differential equations, by examintng
the ensemble of possible trajectories in phase space.
In our case, let's consider a few trial runs with our double pendulum, say four, and compare the points in phase space at the successive
moments when the photographs are taken. For a given moment, the
potnts in the four different trials will not be the same. There will be a
"distance" between any two of them, and we can get numbers for these
distances, using the four-dimensional analogue of the Pythagorean
theorem; that is, we take the square root of the sum of the squares of
Figure 13
4
Q
x
0
o
••
•..
"'
"'P"•tion bot"""'n trU.i> t •nd J
tri.lls 2 •r>d J
S<por•tionbttwornlri.ll• 1 •nd 4
"1'"""'" he!W<'<n Ul>ls 2 and 4
.. porolion betw .. n tfi•ls J ond 4
.. p•r•rion b<twe<1> num<ncol tri•ls
. . porotionbelw~n
Time (setonds)
"
"·'
�WILSON
ll
the components. In this figure (Figure 13). the experimental separations are plotted for the first half second. The solid line was obtained
by numerical integration of the differential equations, using two
slightly different sets of initial conditions. The separations increase on
the whole. That the separations have downswings at certain places is
due to the fact that, at the end of each swing, when the lower pendulum
is starting down again, it pulls down on the upper pendulum, and this
is a relatively stable situation.
A statistical study of'these numbers shows that, on the average,
the separation increases geometrically. Suppose the initial separation
between two trajectories in phase space is IVCo. Then the separation
at timet is
where e is a constant greater than 1, and ).. is a positive constant,
called Lyapunov's exponent, after the Russian who first discussed its
import. The separation doesn't just increase by the same additive
increment in each unit of time, but gets multiplied by the same factor,
so that the increase is exponential.
Of course, our data is only for the first half-second. Strictly speaking, ).. should be determined as a limit as t goes to infinity. But you
can't get funding for experiments that long. The chaos is apparent,
but is it real? How explain it?
First, however, what does a positive '/.. do to prediction? Recently it
has been shown that the long-term orbital evolutions of the inner
plants, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, are characterized by positive Lyapunov exponents. For instance, certain perturbations of the
Earth are in near resonance with its annual motion, in close analogy
with the case of our perturbed simple pendulum; and the same kind
of chaos results. Now we never know, with infmite precision, where a
planet is. By numerical integration it has been shown that initial
uncertainties for the Earth increase by a factor of 3 every 5 million
years. An initial error of 15 meters produces an error of 1.5 million
kilometers after 100 million years.
Yes, we'll all be dead, but my concern is a theoretical one, about
the nature of our knowledge. Can we understand a little better what
this chaos is, and whence it comes?
Back to phase space and another of Poincare's new techniques.
Here (Figure 14) is the four-dimensional phase space of our double
�12
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
pendulum, somehow represented in a pseudo-diagram; q1 and qz are
the coordinates, in our case angles, and PI and pz are the corresponding momenta, products of velocity and mass. The presentation of the
equations of dynamics in terms of the p's and q's is due, once more.
to William Rowan Hamilton. H, called the Hamiltonian, is the energy
of the system, expressed in terms of the p's and q's. We'll assume for
the present argument that His a constant: H=H (pJ. pz, q1. qz) = const.
In the pseudo-diagram H is represented as a surface; but it is really
a hypersurface in four-diffiensional space; the pseudo-visualization is
only to help you identify the terms I am using.
The constancy of H will allow us to express pz as a function of pJ,
qJ, and qz: pz = pz(pJ, qJ, qz). We can thus consider the projection of
any possible trajectory in the four-dimensional phase-space onto a
three-dimensional volume. That projection will contain all the information that the four-dimensional trajectory contained. The reduction
in the number of dimensions brings us back to somethingvisualizable.
Poincare carrted the process a step further. If the trajectory is
bounded-doesn't go off to infinity-then its projection in the threedimensional space will intersect some plane in that space repeatedly,
say the plane qz = 0 (Figure 15). Such a plane is called a Poincare
surface of section. What sort of pattem will the intersections make?
In the 1960s two astronomers, Henon and Heiles, were studying a
nonlinear differential equation intended to model the motion of a star
around a galaxy. They used numerical integration to find successive
intersections of the star's trajectory with a Poincare surface of section.
When the energy of the system was relatively small, the intersection
lay on certain distinct curves (Figure 16). With an increase in energy,
the pattem became this (Figure 1 7). There were still islands where,
for certain initial conditions, the trajectory remained on nice curves:
Figure 14
Figure 15
�13
WILSON
but otber trajectories proved to be chaotic, giving seemingly randomly
placed intersections. When tbe energy was increased still furtber, tbe
islands disappeared (Figure 18).
The motion is deterministic; tbat is, given tbe state of tbe system
at any moment. tbe equation of motion determines its state at tbe
moments tbat follow. The initial conditions detennine a position and
a velocity, and tbe equation of motion tben determines an acceleration.
Given position, velocity, and acceleration, tbere is only one way to go.
But tbe resulting pattein looks crazy. Again I ask, how should we
understand tbat?
Consider a plane of section witb tbe dimensions p and q; suppose
the successive points of section are confined to the unit square (Figure
19). A tbeorem in Hamiltonian dynamics says that, if tbe energy of a
dynamic system remains constant, tbe volume occupied by tbe a!·
lowed trajectories is also constant. But in truly chaotic dynamics, tbe
trajectory never retums to the same point, or even to any identifiable
curve. The volume of allowable patbs gets dispersed, mixed up witb
bubbles of tbe unallowable.
Some Russian matbematicians have sought to describe tbis mixing,
using a cocktail shaker, rum and cola. Sorry, we're stuck witb their
noxious example. Initially, tbe rum and cola are separate. Mter a few
Figure 16
Figure 17
Figure 18
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
14
shakes, if we imagine the cola as divided up into moderately small
cells, we find some rum in each cell. Later, the subdivision can be
made finer and finer, with each cell containtng some rum. This is called
a mixing transformation. Some dynamical systems have been proved
to evolve in this way, for instance a gas consisting of spherical elastic
molecules. Nearby possible trajectories necessarily spread apart, defocus. But because their energy is finite, they don't go off to infinity,
but get folded back into 1;he same space. The rule is Stretch and Fold.
It may be characteristic of chaotic dynamics generally. For illustration,
I shall present a particular mixing transformation, called the Baker's
Transformation (Figure 20).
Let the square, as of it were dough, be first squashed down tnto a
rectangle twice as long and half as high; then let the right half of it be
set atop the left half. We get back a square. What happens to a point
(p,q) within the square? Both p and q are numbers between 0 and l.
By squashing, all p's are doubled; but then, by the operation of placing
the right half atop the left half of the rectangle, the p's that became
greater than 1 are reduced again, by subtraction of the unit 1, to
numbers between 0 and 1. We can write this: p -> 2p (mod 1).
As for the q's, if our q was in the left half of the original square, it
is simply halved: q -> q/2. If it was in the right half, after halving it
we add 1/2: q -> q/2 + 1/2.
Figure 19
Figure 20
0
0
�15
WILSON
It will be helpful to think about p and q as written in binary notion,
so that each p and q will be written as, first, a zero, followed by a binary
point (replacing our decimal point), followed in tum by a string of zeros
and ones, infinitely long. All numbers between 0 and I can be written
thus. 0.1 means 1/2, 0.01 means 1/4, 0.001 means 1/8, and so on.
We use powers of 2 instead of powers of 10. Let our initial p and q be:
where the letters with subscripts are zeros and ones. Now a neat thing
about binary notation is that multiplying by 2 just amounts to shifting
the binary point to the light, whlle dividing by 2 just amounts to
shifting it to the left. If our initial point was in the left half of the square,
then PI was 0, and after the squashing, the transformed p will be
O.p2p3p4 ...
But the same result holds if our initial point was in the light half of
the square, for then p 1 was 1, and after the binary point is moved to
the right, 1 must be subtracted. In successive transformations p will
become
and so on.
What about the q's? If our original point was in the left half of the
square. then we want thP, halved value of q, which is
O.Oq1q2qs ....
I have moved the binary point to the left one place. If our original point
was in the light half of the square, then q first gets halved, but we
must add 1 /2 when the light half of the rectangle is put atop the left
half. Now, in this case PI was 1, which in the first binary place after
the binary point, means 1/2. So the transformed q can be written
O.p!q1q2q3 .... Actually, this works for q's in the left half of the original
square as well, for there p 1 was 0. A little reflection will show you that
the succession of transformed q's will be
O.p!q1q2 ... O.p2p1q1q2 .. O.psp2p1q!q2 ... , and so on.
As the successive pairs of transformed p's and q's emerge, the
important digits, the digits up front, come from ever farther to the light
on the original coordinate p. Initially, they looked insignificant. Yet
however far to the light they were ortginally, they become crucial as
the returns continue. The sensitivity to initial conditions is infinite.
Suppose, though it is empirically impossible, that we knew our
initial p and q exactly. The differential equation for the motion is not
soluble; our only resource is numerical integration, for which we tum
�16
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
to a high-powered computer. The computer, however high-powered,
cannot give us the chaotic trajectory precisely. That is because it is a
finite-state machine. It cannot accept a number expressed by an
infinite number of digits; it automatically rounds it off. With our p's
and q's undergoing a mixing transformation, the rounding, after a
while, will be disastrous; we will lose essential information. Whether
the p or the q, at some later stage in the succession of transformations,
starts with a 0 or a 1 will be as uncertain as the toss of a cotn.
Let me now, by way of conclusion, state some thoughts as to the
import of noniinear dynamics.
1. According to Laplace, wrtting in 1814:
An intelligence that knew, for a given instant, all the forces
by which nature is animated, and the respective situation of
all the beings that compose it, if it were vast enough to subject
these data to analysis, would embrace in a single formula the
motions of the largest bodies of the universe and of the
smallest atom; nothing would be uncertain to it, and the
future, like the past, would be present to its eyes. The human
mind, in the perfection that it has been able to achieve in
astronomy, presents a pale image of this intelligence. 3
Laplace is expresstng a universal determinism, which he equates
with predictability. Such a determinism. presenting the world as a
closed causal network. has often been taken as a dogma of science;
but its universalism appears to make the activity of the scientist
unintelligible.
Voltaire swallowed the doctrine whole:
everything [he wrote] is govemed by immutable laws ...
everything is prearranged ... everything is a necessary effect.. ..
There are some people who, frightened by this truth allow half
of it ... There are, they say, events which are necessary and
others which are not. It would be strange if a part of what
happens had to happen and another part did not.. .. I necessarily must have the passion to write this, and you must have
the passion to condemn me; we are both equally foolish, both
toys in the hand of destiny. Your nature is to do ill, mine is
to love truth, and to publish it in spite of you. 4
Post-Newtonians, impressed by the success of the new dynamics,
did not consider that the new methods might prove limited in scope.
The success of this dynamics was a success in solving linearized
differential equations. The world was taken to be an integrable system,
�WILSON
17
each variable being finally expressible as a function of time, independent of the others. So the world would be made up of non-interacting Leibnizian monads, each experiencing its own private cinema,
the harmony between them divinely preestablished.
This view, I say, was mistaken, because the differential equations
required to model processes in the real world are mostly nonlinear,
and most nonlinear differential equations are insoluble. It is from
insoluble, nonlinear differential equations that dynamical chaos
arises. Here determinism and predictability part company; Laplace's
demon, to do what he required of it, would need to compute with
numbers that it would take an infinity of time to write down. Successive approximations, which are the human way, wouldn't suffice.
I have spoken so far as if of a closed dynamic system, insulated
from the rest of the universe. But mixing systems such as I have
described are hypersensitive to initial conditions, and therefore hypersensitive to tiny perturbations. The flash of an electron in a distant
star may affect our mixing system. The intelligence that Laplace
imagined, however vast, being yet discursive, will suffer from overload.
If there is a God that knows the future, it is by means inscrutable to
human reason.
2. I want now to go beyond chaos. There is more to nonlinear
science than chaos. As we have seen, the chaos we have been
concerned with is not simply disorder; it is approached in an orderly
way; it is describable in a coherent way. Can nonlinear dynamics lead
to more interesting sorts of order? In fact, in dissipative systems far
from equilibr1um, new and surprising kinds of order arise. Some of
these are described in the book by Prigogine and Stengers entitled
Order Out of Chaos, cited above.
An example. The Benard instability is due to a vertical temperature
gradient set up in a horizontal liquid layer. The lower surface is heated
to a given temperature, higher than that of the upper surface. Thus a
permanent heat flux arises, from bottom to top, and for a low temperature gradient, this occurs by heat conduction alone, while the
Figure 21
Figure 22
iiii
0000
�18
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
liquid remains at rest (Figure 21). But when the imposed gradient of
temperature reaches a certain threshold value, a convection involving
the coherent motion of ensembles of molecules is produced. Millions
of molecules move coherently, forming convection cells of a characteristic size (Figure 22). At higher temperature gradients there occur
periodic fluctuations in temperature and in the spatial arrangement
of the cells; finally there is turbulent chaos, which, again, is not
without its order.
Similar kinds of order arise in dissipative chemical systems. With
reactants entering and products leaving, the system may organize
itself spatially, or may come to act like a chemical clock, beating
rhythmically. Such coherent behaviors on the macroscopic level do
not appear to be reducible to the dynamics of atoms and molecules.
We have what may be called emergence.
3. According to a fairly broad consensus among scientists today,
living things are among the entities that have so emerged. We are, in
some sense of the word "are", stardust. Living things are complex,
dissipative structures, to some extent self-regulating, but maintained
ultimately by the flux of energy from the sun. If the geological
time-scale is represented as a thirty-day month, then life appeared in
the oceans by the fourth day, but became abundant only on the
twenty-seventh. The first land plants and the first vertebrates appeared on the twenty-eighth day; most of human culture appeared
only in the last thirty seconds. All this, at least up to the last thirty
seconds, is understandable in terms of evolution by random variation
and differential reproductive success.
Living things are not only embedded in the surrounding geological
world, but by their activities they have altered that world; at an early
stage, for instance, ancient relatives of present-day algae produced
the oxygen of the atmosphere. In various degrees, living things have
a circumscribed autonomy; it is wider for those with homeostasis of
the blood, wider still for those who can reason before reacting. These
are beings with desires, aims, purposes. The world lines of such
semi-autonomous entities, with their separate agendas, may intersect. A man goes to the agora, in the case imagined by Aristotle, and
meets someone who owes him money. Neither planned this encounter;
it is by chance. Species migrate or spread, encounter one another,
interact, find new ecological niches.
A world evolving through chancelike encounters, in which new
entities emerge in time, including intelligent beings, is unintelligible
if, with Leibniz or Voltaire or Laplace, we take that world to be an
integrable system. In an integrable system, the mere reversal of
�WILSON
19
velocities sends time backwards. There is no essential distinction
between future and past. The smoke can go down the chllnney and
reconstitute the firewood.
Why can it not? In the middle of the nineteenth century the law of
entropy was discovered: in any closed system, a certain mathematical
function tends to a maximum, and there is thus a fmward direction
to time, diametrically opposed to the backward direction. This law is
of everyday use in physi~s and chemistry, to predict the outcome of
experiments. But it contradicts dynamics, if the world of dynamics is
an integrable system. Physicists like Boltzmann sought to derive the
law of entropy from dynamics; irreversibility from reversibility. By the
1890s it was clear that it couldn't be done; a statistical or probabilistic
assumption, distinct from the dynamics, was necessary. Chance had
to be assumed to be real. This is an empirical assumption, warranted
by experience. Probability theory, at its core, is an empirical science,
which assumes the future to be different from the past.
Also toward the end of the nineteenth century, the American
philosopher C.S. Peirce suggested that the dissipative tendencies of
entropy could be balanced by the concentrative effects of chance.
Chance can have an integrative role, in the emergence of new entities
like us. Thus dissipative processes intertwine with integrative ones.
Nowhere is this more the case than in the activity most distinctive
of humans, that of learning and communicating. It is not possible
without a functioning brain, dependent on a flux of energy; the
reactions involved are dissipative and therefore irreversible. When we
learn a Greek paradigm, we change the physiology of the brain. We
learn not as beings detached and separate from the world, but as parts
of it, by engaging in activities of exploration, hypothesis, construction,
testing. Here there is an interplay between chance and reason. And
this is especially true in learning about nature: such learning requires
that we enter into a dialogue with nature. Thus I think that Einstein,
when he sought a vision of the world from totally outside it. and denied
the reality of time, was mistaken.
The perspective I am suggesting leads to a new respect for nature,
of which we are not the overlords but in which we are both embedded
and emergent. In this perspective, there are no guarantees; we live in
a chancy world. Nevertheless, a qualified hope is rational. Human
knowledge increases, not always steadily, sometimes by surprising
zigzags or even reversals; but the trend is unmistakably incremental.
It is not a deductive chain. It is a rope, no single strand of which is,
by itself, of incorrigible strength; but different strands, by pulling
against one another, constitute a fabric stronger than any of its parts.
�20
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
In this lecture I have sought to signalize a mistake into which
dynamicists and philosophers of the past three centuries fell, imagining the world to be an integrable system. The biological perspective I
have been sketching can be a corrective. Our survival depends on
recognizing and respecting our own complexity and that of the nature
in which we are both embedded and emergent.
According to rabbinical commentary, the first word of Genesis,
Berechit, means not "In thf beginning," but "In a beginning." Twentysix attempts, say the rabbis, preceded the present Genesis; all ended
in failure. Holway sheyaanod, exclaimed God as he created the world:
"Let's hope that this time it works."
*
*
*
*
Notes:
l. Physica 11D (1984). 309-323 (North Holland, Amsterdam).
2. "Chaos in a Double Pendulum," AmericanJoumal ofPhysics 60, (June
1992). 491-99.
3. P.S. Laplace, EssaiPhilosophique sur Les Probabilites (Paris: Courcier,
1814). 2-3.
4. Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique, quoted in I. Prigogine and I.
Stengers, Order Out of Chaos (New York: Bantam Books, 1984) 257.
[Note: The foregoing text is identical with the lecture delivered on 7 October
1994, except for two paragraphs relating to incomputable numbers, which I
have deleted. Questions raised in the question period by Michael Comenetz led
me to recognize that these paragraphs were dubious.]
�Tragic Pleasure
(A lecture on Aristotle's
Poetics
with excerpts appended)
Joe Sachs
Aristotle's Poetics is a much-disdained book. So unpoetic a soul as
Aristotle's has no business speaking about such a topic, much less
telling poets how to go about their business. He reduces the drama
to its language, people say, and the language itself to its least poetic
element, the story, and then he encourages insensitive readers like
himself to subject stories to crudely moralistic readings that reduce
tragedies to the childish proportions of Aesop-fables. Strangely,
though, the Poetics itself is rarely read with the kind of sensitivity its
crttics claim to possess, and the thing crttlcized is not the book
Aristotle wrote but a cartcature of it. Aristotle himself respected
Homer so much that he personally corrected a copy of the lliad for his
student Alexander, who carried it all over the world. In his Rhetoric
(III, xvi, 9), Aristotle crtticizes orators who wrtte exclusively from the
intellect, rather than from the heart, in the way Sophocles makes
Antigone speak. Aristotle is often thought of as a logician, but he
regularly uses the adverb logikos (logically) as a term of reproach
contrasted with phusikos (naturally or approprtately) to descrtbe
arguments made by others, or preliminary and inadequate arguments
of his own. Those who take the trouble to look at the Poetics closely
will find, I think, a book that treats its topic appropriately and
naturally, and contains the reflections of a good reader and charactertstically powerful thinker.
The first scandal in the Poetics is the initial marking out of dramatic
poetry as a form of imitation. We call the poet a creator, and are
offended at the suggestion that he might be merely some sort of
recording device. As the painter's eye teaches us how to look and
shows us what we never saw, the dramatist presents things that never
existed until he imagined them, and makes us experience worlds we
This lecture was delivered at Santa Fe and at Annapolis in the Summer of 1994. It
could not have been written without a number of things I learned from Bill O'Grady,
both before and after his death. The memory of things he said is still a living guide
to learning. -J.S.
Joe Sachs is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis.
�22
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
could never have found the way to on our own. But Aristotle has no
intention to diminish the poet. and in fact says the same thing I just said,
in making the point that poetry is more philosophic than history. By
imitation, Aristotle does not mean the sort of mimicry by which Aristophanes, say, finds syllables that approximate the sound of frogs. He is
speaking of the imitation of action, and by action (praxis) he does not
mean mere happenings. Aristotle speaks extensively of praxis in the
Nicomachean Ethics. It is ,not a word he uses loosely, and in fact his
use of it in the definition of tragedy recalls the discussion in the Ethics.
Action, as Aristotle uses the word, refers only to what is deliberately
chosen, and capable of finding completion in the achievement of some
purpose. Animals and young children do not act in this sense, and
action is not the whole of the life of any of us. The poet must have an
eye for the emergence of action in human life, and a sense for the
actions that are worth paying attention to. They are not present in
the world in such a way that a video camera could detect them. An
intelligent, feeling, shaping human soul must find them. By the same
token, the action of the drama itself is not on the stage. It takes form
and has its being in the imagination of the spectator. The actors speak
and move and gesture, but it is the poet who speaks through them,
from imagination to imagination, to present to us the thing that he
has made. Because that thing he makes has the form of an action, it
has to be seen and held together just as actively and attentively by us
as by him. The imitation is the thing that is re-produced, in us and
for us, by his art. This is a powerful kind of human communication,
and the thing imitated is what defines the human realm. If no one
had the power to imitate action, life might just wash over us without
leaving any trace.
How do I know that Aristotle intends the imitation of action to be
understood in this way? in De Anima, he distinguishes three kinds
of perception (II, 6; III, 3). There is the perception of proper sensibles----colors, sounds, tastes and so on; these lie on the surfaces of
things and can be mimicked directly for sense perception. But there
is also perception of common sensibles, available to more than one of
our senses, as shape is grasped by both sight and touch, or number
by all five senses; these are distinguished by imagination, the power
in us that is shared by the five senses, and in which the circular shape,
for instance, is not dependent on sight or touch alone. These common
sensibles can be mimicked in various ways, as when I draw a messy,
meandering ridge of chalk on a blackboard, and your imagination
grasps a circle. Finally, there is the perception of that of which the
sensible qualities are attributes, the thing-the son of Oiares, for
�SACHS
23
example; it is this that we ordinarily mean by perception, and while
its object always has an image in the imagination, it can only be
distinguished by intellect, nous (IJI,4), Skilled mimics can imitate
people we know, by voice, gesture, and so on, and here already we
must engage intelligence and imagination together. The dramatist
imitates things more remote from the eye and ear than familiar people.
Sophocles and Shakespeare, for example, imitate repentance and
forgiveness, true instances of action in Aristotle's sense of the word,
and we need all the human powers to recognize what these poets put
before us. So the mere phrase imitation of an action is packed with
meaning, available to us as soon as we ask what an action is, and how
the image of such a thing might be perceived.
Aristotle does understand tragedy as a development out of the
child's mimicry of animal noises, but that is in the same way that he
understands philosophy as a development out of our enjoyment of
sightseeing (Metaphysics I, 1). In each of these developments there is
a vast array of possible intermediate stages, but just as philosophy is
the ultimate form of the tnnate desire to know, tragedy is considered
by Aristotle the ultimate form of our innate delight in imitation. His
beloved Homer saw and achieved the most important possibilities of
the imitation of human action, but it was the tragedians who refined
and intensified the form of that imitation, and discovered its perfection.
A work is a tragedy, Aristotle tells us, only if it arouses pity and
fear. Why does he single out these two passions? Some interpreters
think he means them only as examples-pity and fear and other
passions like that-but I am not among those loose constructionists.
Aristotle does use a word that means passions of that sort (toiouta),
but I think he does so only to indicate that pity and fear are not
themselves things subject to identification with pin point precision,
but that each refers to a range of feeling. It is just the feelings in those
two ranges, however, that belong to tragedy. Why? Why shouldn't
one tragedy arouse pity and joy, say, and another fear and cruelty?
In various places, Aristotle says that it is the mark of an educated
person to know what needs explanation and what doesn't. He does
not try to prove that there is such a thing as nature, or such a thing
as motion, though some people deny both. Likewise, he understands
the recognition of a special and powerful form of drama built around
pity and fear as the beginning of an inquiry, and spends not one word
jusW'ying that restriction. We, however, can see better why he starts
there by trying out a few simple alternatives.
Suppose a drama aroused pity in a powerful way, but aroused no
fear at all. This is an easily recognizable dramatic form, called a
�24
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
tear-jerker. The name is meant to disparage this sort of drama, but
why? Imagine a well-written, well made play or movie that depicts the
losing struggle of a likable central character. We are moved to have a
good cry, and are afforded either the relief of a happy ending, or the
realistic desolation of a sad one. In the one case the tension built up
along the way is released within the experience of the work itself; in
the other it passes off as we leave the theater, and readjust our feelings
to the fact that it was, after all, only make-believe. What is wrong with
that? There is always pleasure in strong emotion, and the theater is
a harmless place to indulge it. We may even come out feeling good
about being so compassionate. But Dostoyevski depicts a character
who loves to cry in the theater, not noticing that while she wallows in
her warm feelings her coach driver is shivering outside. She has
daydreams about relieving suffering humanity, but does nothing to
put that vague desire to work. If she is typical, then the tear-jerker is
a dishonest form of drama, not even a harmless diversion but an
encouragement to lie to oneself.
Well then, let's consider the opposite experiment, in which a drama
arouses fear in a powerful way, but arouses little or no pity. This is
again a readily recognizable dramatic form, called the horror story, or
in a recent fashion, the mad-slasher movie. The thrill of fear is the
primary object of such amusements, and the story altemates between
the build-up of apprehension and the shock of violence. Again, as with
the tear-jerker, it doesn't much matter whether it ends happily or with
uneasiness, or even with one last shock, so indetenninate is its form.
And while the tear-jerker gives us an illusion of compassionate
delicacy, the unrestrained shock drama obviously has the effect of
coarsening feeling. Genuine human pity could not coexist with the
so-called graphic effects these films use to keep scaring us. The
attraction of this kind of amusement is again the thrill of strong feeling,
and again the price of indulging the desire for that thrill may be high.
Let us consider a milder form of the drama built on arousing fear.
There are stories in which fearsome things are threatened or done by
characters who are in the end defeated by means similar to, orin some
way equivalent to, what they dealt out. The fear is relieved in vengeance, and we feel a satisfaction that we might be inclined to call justice.
To work on the level of feeling, though, justice must be understood as
the exact inverse of the crime-doing to the offender the sort of thing
he did or meant to do to others. The imagination of evil then becomes
the measure of good, or at least of the restoration of order. The
satisfaction we feel in the vicarious infliction of pain or death is nothing
but a thin veil over the very feelings we mean to be punishing. This is
�SACHS
25
a successful dramatic formula, arousing in us destructive desires that
are fun to feel. along with the self-righteous illusion that we are really
superior to the character who displays them.
The playwright who
makes us feel that way will probably be popular, but he is a menace.
We have looked at three kinds of non-tragedy that arouse passions
in a destructive way. and we could add others. There are potentially
as many kinds as there are passions and combinations of passions.
That suggests that the theater is just an arena for the manipulation
of passions in ways that are pleasant in the short run and at least
reckless to pursue repeatedly. At worst. the drama could be seen as
dealing in a kind of addiction, which it both produces and holds the
only remedy for. But we have not yet tried to talk about the combination of passions characteristic of tragedy.
When we tum from the sort of examples I have given, to the
acknowledged examples of tragedy, we find ourselves in a different
world. The tragedians I have in mind are five: Aeschylus, Sophocles,
and Euripides; Shakespeare, who differs from them only in time; and
Homer, who differs from them somewhat more, in the form in which
he composed, but shares with them the things that matter most. I
could add other authors, such as Dostoyevski, who wrote stories of
the tragic kind in much looser literary forms, but I want to keep the
focus on a small number of clear paradigms.
When we look at a tragedy we find the chorus in Antigone telling
us what a strange thing a human being is, passing beyond all
boundaries (lines 332 ff.). or King Lear asking if man is no more than
this, a poor, bare, forked animal (Ill, iv. 97ff.). or Macbeth protesting
to his wife "I dare do all that may become a man; who dares do more
is none" (I. vii, 46-7). or Oedipus taunting Teiresias with the fact that
divine art was of no use against the Sphinx, but only Oedipus' own
human ingenuity (Oedipus Tyrannus 390-98). or Agamenmon, resisting walking home on tapestries, saying to his wife "I tell you to revere
me as a man, not a god" (925), or Cadmus in the Bacchae saying "I
am a man, nothing more" (199). while Dionysus tells Pentheus "You
do not know what you are" (506), or Patroclus telling Achmes "Peleus
was not your father nor Thetis your mother, but the gray sea bore you,
and the toweling rocks, so hard is your heart" (lliadXVl, 33-5). I could
add more examples of this kind by the dozen, and your memories will
supply others. Tragedy seems always to involve testing or finding the
limits of what is human. This is no mere orgy of strong feeling, but a
highly focussed way of bringing our powers to bear on the image of
what is human as such. I suggest that Aristotle is light in saying that
�26
THE ST. JOHN'S REVJEW
the powers which first of all bring this human image to sight for us
are pity and fear.
It is obvious that the authors in our examples are not just putting
things in front of us to make us cry or shiver or gasp. The feelings
they arouse are subordinated to another effect. Aristotle begins by
saying that tragedy arouses pity and fear in such a way as to culrrtinate
in a cleansing of those passions, the famous catharsis. The word is
used by Aristotle only the .once, in his preliminary definition of tragedy.
I think this is because its role is taken over later in the Poetics by
another, more positive, word, but the idea of catharsis is important in
itself, and we should consider what it rrtight mean.
First of all, the tragic catharsis rrtight be a purgation. Fear can
obviously be an insidious thing that underrrtines life and poisons it
with anxiety. It would be good to flush this feeling from our systems,
bring it into the open, and clear the air. This may explain the appeal
of horror movies, that they redirect our fears toward something
external, grotesque, and finally ridiculous, in order to puncture them.
On the other hand, fear rrtight have a secret allure, so that what we
need to purge is the desire for the thrill that comes with fear. The
horror movie also provides a safe way to indulge and satisfY the longing
to feel afraid, and go home afterward satisfied; the desire is purged,
temporarily, by being fed. Our souls are so many-headed that oppo·
site satisfactions may be felt at the same time, but I think these two
really are opposite. In the first sense of purgation, the horror movie
is a kind of medicine that does its work and leaves the soul healthier,
while in the second sense it is a potentially addictive drug. Either
explanation may account for the popularity of these movies among
teenagers, since fear is so much a fact of that time of life. For those of
us who are older, the tear-jerker may have more appeal, offering a way
to purge the regrets of our lives in a sentimental outpouring of pity. As
with fear, this purgation too may be either medicinal or drug-like.
This idea of purgation, in its various forms, is what we usually mean
when we call something cathartic. People speak of watching football,
or boxing, as a catharsis of violent urges, or call a shouting match
with a friend a useful catharsis of buried resentment. This is a
practical purpose that drama may also serve, but it has no particular
connection with beauty or truth; to be good in this purgative way, a
drama has no need to be good in any other way. No one would be
tempted to confuse the feeling at the end of a horror movie with what
Aristotle calls "the tragic pleasure," nor to call such a movie a tragedy.
But the English word catharsis does not contain everything that is in
the Greek word. Let us look at other things it rrtight mean.
�SACHS
27
Catharsis in Greek can mean purification. While purging something means getting rid of it, purifying something means getting rid of
the worse or baser parts ofit. It is possible that tragedy purifies the
feelings themselves offear and pity. These arise in us in crude ways,
attached to all sorts of objects. Perhaps the poet educates our
sensibilities, our powers to feel and be moved, by refming them and
attaching them to less easily discernible objects. There is a line in The
Wasteland, "I will show you fear in a handful of dust." Alfred Hitchcock
once made us all feel a little shudder when we took showers. The poetic
imagination is limited only by its skill, and can tum any object into a
focus for any feeling. I suppose some people tum to poetry to find
delicious and exquisite new ways to feel old feelings, and consider
themselves to enter in that way into a purified state. I have heard it
argued that this sort of thing is what tragedy and the tragic pleasure are
all about, but it doesn't match up with my experience. Sophocles does
make me fear and pity human knowledge when I watch the Oedipus
Tyrranus, but this is not a refinement of those feelings but a discovery
that they belong to a surprising object. Sophocles is not training my
feelings, but using them to show me something worthy of wonder.
I believe that the word catharsis drops out of the Poetics because
the word wonder, to thaumaston, replaces it, first in chapter 9, where
Aristotle argues that pity and fear arise most of all where wonder does,
and fmally in chapters 24 and 25, where he singles out wonder as the
aim of the poetic art itself, into which the aim of tragedy in particular
merges. Ask yourself how you feel at the end of a tragedy. You have
witnessed horrible things and felt painful feelings, but the mark of
tragedy is that it brings you out the other side. Aristotle's use of the
word catharsis is not a technical reference to purgation or purification
but a beautiful metaphor for the peculiar tragic pleasure, the feeling
of being washed or cleansed.
The tragic pleasure is a paradox. As Aristotle says, in a tragedy, a
happy ending doesn't make us happy. At the end of the play the stage
is often littered with bodies, and we feel cleansed by it all. Are we like
Clytenmestra, who says she rejoiced when spattered by her husband's
blood, like the earth in a spring rain (Agamemnon 1389-92)? Are we
like !ago, who has to see a beautiful life destroyed to feel better about
himself (Othello V, i, 18-20)? We all feel a certain glee in the bringing
low of the mighty, but this is in no way similar to the feeling of being
washed in wonderment. The closest thing I know to the feeling at the
end of a tragedy is the one that comes with the sudden, unexpected
appearance of something beautiful. In a famous essay on beauty
(Ennead I, tractate 6), Plotinus says two things that seem true to me:
�28
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
"Clearly [beauty] is something detected at a first glance, something
that the soul...recognizes, gives welcome to, and, in a way, fuses with"
(O'Brien translation, beginning sec. 2). What is the effect on us of this
recognition? Plotinus says that in every instance it is "an astonishment,
a delicious wonderment" (end sec. 4). Aristotle is insistent that a
tragedy must be whole and one, because only in that way can it be
beautiful, while he also ascribes the superiority of tragedy over epic
poetry to its greater unity and concentration (ch. 26). Tragedy is not
just a dramatic form in which some works are beautiful and others not;
tragedy is itself a species of beauty. All tragedies are beautiful.
By following Aristotle's lead, we have now found five marks of
tragedy: (1) it imitates an action, (2) it arouses pity and fear, (3) it
displays the human image as such, (4) it ends in wonder, and (5) it
is inherently beautiful. We noticed earlier that it is action that
characterizes the distinctively human realm, and it is reasonable that
the depiction of an action might show us a human being in some
defmitive way, but what do pity and fear have to do with that showing?
The answer is, I think, everything.
F1rst, let us consider what tragic pity consists in. The word pity
tends to have a bad name these days, and to imply an attitude of
condescension that diminishes its object. This is not a matter of the
meanings of words, or even of changing attitudes. It belongs to pity
itself to be two-sided, since any feeling of empathy can be given a
perverse twist by the recognition that it is not oneself but another with
whom one is feeling a shared pain. One of the most empathetic
characters in all literature is Edgar in King Lear. He describes himself
truly as "a most poor man, made tame to fortune's blows,/ Who, by
the art of known and feeling sorrows,/ Am pregnant to good pity" (IV,
vi, 217-19). Two of his lines spoken to his father are powerful evidence
of the insight that comes from suffering oneself and taking on the
suffering of others: "Thy life's a miracle" (IV, vi, 55), he says, and
"Ripeness is all" (V, ii, 11), trying to help his father see that life is still
good and death is not something to be sought. Yet in the last scene
of the play this same Edgar voices the stupidest words ever spoken in
any tragedy, when he concludes that his father just got what he
deserved when he lost his eyes, since he had once committed adultery
(V, iii, 171-4). Having witnessed the play, we know that Gloucester
lost his eyes because he chose to help Lear, when the kingdom had
become so corrupt that his act of kindness appeared as a walking fire
in a dark world (III, iv, 107). There is a chain of effects from
Gloucester's adultery to his mutilation, but it is not a sequence that
reveals the true cause of that horror. The wholeness of action that
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29
Shakespeare shapes for us shows that Gloucester's goodness, displayed in a courageous, deliberate choice, and not his weakness many
years earlier, cost him his eyes. Edgar ends by giving in to the
temptation to moralize, to chase after the "fatal flaw" which is no part
of tragedy, and loses his capacity to see straight.
This suggests that holding on to proper pity leads to seeing straight,
and that seems exactly right. But what is proper pity? There is a way
of missing the mark that js opposite to condescension, and that is the
excess of pity called sentimentality. There are people who use the word
sentimental for any display of feeling, or any taking seriously of feeling,
but their attitude is as blind as Edgar's. Sentimentality is inordinate
feeling, feeling that goes beyond the source that gives rise to it. The
woman in Dostoyevski's novel who loves pitying for its own sake is an
example of this vice. But between Edgar's moralizing and her gushing
there is a range of appropriate pity. Pity is one of the instruments by
which a poet can show us what we are. We pity the loss of Gloucester's
eyes because we know the value of eyes, but more deeply, we pity the
violation of Gloucester's decency, and in so doing we feel the truth that
without such decency, and without respect for it, there is no human
life. Shakespeare is in control here, and the feeling he produces does
not give way in embarrassment to moral judgment, nor does it make
us wallow mindlessly in pity because it feels so good; the pity he
arouses in us shows us what is precious in us, in the act of its being
violated in another.
Since every boundary has two sides, the human image is delineated
also from the outside, the side of the things that threaten it. This is
shown to us through the feeling offear. As Aristotle says twice in the
Rhetoric, what we pity in others, we fear for ourselves (11.5 1382b 26,
II.S 1386a 27). In our mounting fear that Oedipus will come to know
the truth about himself, we feel that something of our own is threatened. Tragic fear, exactly like tragic pity, and either preceding it or
simultaneous with it, shows us what we are and are unwilling to lose.
It makes no sense to say that Oedipus' passion for truth is a flaw,
since that is the very quality that makes us afraid on his behalf.
Tragedy is never about flaws, and it is only the silliest of rnistranslations that puts that claim in Aristotle's mouth. Tragedy is about
central and indispensable human attributes, disclosed to us by the
pity that draws us toward them and the fear that makes us recoil from
what threatens them.
Because the suffering of the tragic figure displays the boundaries
of what is human, every tragedy carries the sense of universality.
Oedipus or Antigone or Lear or Othello is somehow every one of us,
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
only more so. But the mere mention of these names makes it obvious
that they are not generalized characters, but altogether particular.
And il we did not feel that they were genuine individuals. they would
have no power to engage our emotions. It is by their particulality that
they make their marks on us, as though we had encountered them in
the flesh. It is only through the particulality of our feelings that our
bonds with them emerge. What we care for and chelish makes us pity
them and fear for them, ;md thereby the reverse also happens: our
feelings of pity and fear make us recognize what we care for and
chelish. When the tragic figure is destroyed it is a piece of ourselves
that is lost. Yet we never feel desolation at the end of a tragedy,
because what is lost is also, by the very same means, found. I am not
trying to make a paradox, but to desclibe a marvel. It is not so strange
that we learn the worth of something by losing it; what is astonishing
is what the tragedians are able to achieve by making use of that
common expelience. They lilt it up into a state of wonder.
Within our small group of exemplary poetic works, there are two
that do not have the tragic form, and hence do not concentrate all their
power into putting us in a state of wonder, but also depict the state
of wonder among their characters and contain speeches that reflect
on it. They are Homer's Iliad and Shakespeare's Tempest. (Incidentally, there is an excellent small book called Woe or Wonder, the
Emotional Effect of Shakespearean Tragedy, by J. V. Cunningham.
that demonstrates the continuity of the traditional understanding of
tragedy from Arts toile to Shakespeare.) The first poem in our literary
helitage, and Shakespeare's last play, both belong to a conversation
of which Artstotle's Poetics is the most prominent part.
In both the Iliad and the Tempest there are characters with arts
that in some ways resemble that of the poet. It is much noticed that
Prospera's farewell to his art coincides with Shakespeare's own, but
it may be less obvious that Homer has put into the Iliad a partial
representation of himself. But the last 150 lines of Book XVIII of the
Iliad desclibe the making of a work of art by Hephaestus. I will not
consider here what is depicted on the shield of Achilles, but only the
meaning in the poem of the shield itself. In Book XVIII, Achilles has
realized what mattered most to him when it is too late. The Greeks
are dliven back to their ships, as Achilles had prayed they would be,
and know that they are lost without him. "But what pleasure is this
to me now," he says to his mother, "when my beloved fliend is dead,
Patroclus, whom I chelished beyond all fliends, as the equal of my
own soul; I am bereft of him" (80-82). Those last words, as our dean
once pointed out in a lecture, also mean "I have killed him." In his
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desolation, Achilles has at last chosen to act. "I will accept my doom,"
he says (115). Thetis goes to Hephaestus because. in spite of his
resolve, Achilles has no armor in which to meet his fate. She tells her
son's story, concluding "he is lying on the ground, anguishing at heart"
(461). Her last word, anguishing, acheuon. is built on Achilles' name.
Now listen to what Hephaestus says in reply: ''Take courage, and
do not Jet these things distress you in your heart. Would that I had
the power to hide him fqr away from death and the sounds of grief
when grim fate comes to him, but I can see that beautiful armor
surrounds him, of such a kind that many people, one after another,
who look on it, will wonder" (463-67). Is it not evident that this source
of wonder that surrounds Achilles, that takes the sting from his death
even in a mother's heart, is the iliad itself? But how does the iliad
accomplish this?
Let us shift our attention for a moment to the Tempest. The
character Alonso, in the power of the magician Prospero, spends the
length of the play in the illusion that his son has drowned. To have
him alive again, Alonso says, "I wish/ Myself were mudded in that oozy
bed/ Where my son lies" (V, i, 150-2). But he has already been there
for three hours in his imagination; he says earlier "my son i' th' ooze
is bedded; and/ I'll seek him deeper than e'er plummet sounded/ And
with him there lie mudded" (III, iii, 100-2). What is this muddy ooze?
It is Alonso's grief, and his regret for exposing his son to danger, and
his self-reproach for his own past crime against Prospero and
Prospero's baby daughter, which made his son a just target for divine
retribution; the ooze is Alonso's repentance, which feels futile to him
since it only comes after he has lost the thing he cares most about.
But the spirit Ariel sings a song to Alonso's son: "Full fathom five thy
father lies; I Of his bones are coral made; I Those are pearls that were
his eyes;/ Nothing of him that doth fade/ But doth suffer a sea
change/ Into something rich and strange" (I, ii, 397-402). Alonso's
grief is aroused by an illusion, an imitation of an action, but his
repentance is real, and is slowly transforming him into a different man.
Who is this new man? Let us take counsel from the "honest old
councilor" Gonzalo, who always has the clearest sight in the play. He
tells us that on this voyage, when so much seemed lost, every traveller
found himself "When no man was his own" (V, i, 206-13). The
something rich and strange into which Alonso changes is himself, as
he was before his life took a wrong tum. Prospero's magic does no
more than arrest people in a potent illusion; in his power they are "knit
up/ ln their distractions" (III, iii, 89-90). When released, he says, "they
shall be themselves" (V, i, 32).
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
On virtually every page of the Tempest, the word wonder appears,
or else some synonym for it. Miranda's name is Latin for wonder, her
favorite adjective brave seems to mean both good and out-of-the-ordinary, and the combination rich and strange means the same. What
is wonder? J. V. Cunningham describes it in the book I mentioned as
the shocked limit of all feeling, in which fear, sorrow, and joy can all
merge. There is some truth in that, but it misses what is wonderful or
wondrous about wonder. ,.It suggests that in wonder our feelings are
numbed and we are left llmp, wrung dry of all emotion. But wonder
is itself a feeling, the one to which Miranda is always giving voice, the
powerful sense that what is before one is both strange and good.
Wonder does not numb the other feelings; what it does is dislodge
them from their habitual moorings. The experience of wonder is the
disclosure of a sight or thought or image that fits no habitual context
of feeling or understanding, but grabs and holds us by a power
borrowed from nothing apart from itself. The two things that Plotinus
says characterize beauty, that the soul recognizes it at first glance and
spontaneously gives welcome to it, equally describe the experience of
wonder. The beautiful always produces wonder, if it is seen as
beautiful. and the sense of wonder always sees beauty.
But are there really no wonders that are ugly? The monstrosities
that used to be exhibited in circus side shows are wonders too, are
they not? In the Tempest, three characters think first of all of such
spectacles when they lay eyes on Caliban (II, ii, 28-31; V, i, 263-6),
but they are incapable of wonder, since they think they know everything that matters already. A fourth character in the same batch, who
is drunk but not insensible, gives way at the end of Act II to the sense
that this is not just someone strange and deformed, nor just a useful
servant, but a brave monster. But Stephana is not, I think, like the
holiday fools who pay to see monstrosities like two-headed calves or
exotic sights like wild men of Borneo. I recall an aquarium somewhere
in Europe that had on display an astoundingly ugly catfish. People
came casually up to its tank, were startled, made noises of disgust,
and turned away. Even to be arrested before such a sight feels in some
way perverse and has some conflict in the feeling it arouses, as when
we stare at the victims of a car wreck. The sight of the ugly or
disgusting, when it is felt as such, does not have the settled repose or
willing surrender that are characteristic of wonder. "Wonder is sweet,"
as Aristotle says (Poetics 1460 a 18).
This sweet contemplation of something outside us is exactly opposite to Alonso's painful immersion in his own remorse, but in every
other respect he is a model of the spectator of a tragedy. We are in
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the power of another for awhile, the sight of an illusion works real and
durable changes in us, we merge into something rich and strange, and
what we find by being absorbed in the image of another is ourselves.
As Alonso is shown a mirror of his soul by Prospera, we are shown a
mirror of ourselves in Alonso, but in that mirror we see ourselves as
we are not in witnessing the Tempest, but in witnessing a tragedy.
The Tempest is a beautiful play, suffused with wonder as well as with
reflections on wonder, bu,t it holds the intensity of the tragic experience
at a distance. Homer, on the other hand, has pulled off a feat even
more astounding than Shakespeare's, by imitating the experience of
a spectator of tragedy within a story that itself works on us as a
tragedy.
In Book XXN of the lliad, forms of the word thambos, amazement,
occur three times in three lines (482-4), when Priam suddenly appears
in the hut of Achilles and "kisses the terrible man-slaughtering hands
that killed Ws many sons" (4 78-9), but this is only the prelud< to the
true wonder. Achilles and Priam cry together, each for his ow grief,
as each has cried so often before, but this time a miracle happens.
Achilles' grief is transformed into satisfaction, and cleansed from his
chest and his hands (513-14). This is all the more remarkable, since
Achilles has for days been repeatedly trying to take out his raging grief
on Hector's dead body. The famous first word of the Iliad, menis,
wrath, has come back at the beginning of Book XXN in the participle
meneatnon (22), a constant condition that Lattimore translates well
as "standing fury." But all tills hardened rage evaporates in one
lamentation, just because Achilles shares it with his enemy's father.
Hermes had told Priam to appeal to Achilles in the names of his father,
his mother, and his child, "tn order to stir his heart" (466-7), but
Priam's focussed misery goes straight to Achilles' heart without diluting the effect. The first words out of Priam's mouth are "remember
your father" (486). Your father deserves pity, Priam says, so "pity me/
with him in mind, since I am more pitiful even than he;/ I have dared
what no other mortal on earth ever dared,/ to stretch out my lips to
the hand of the man who murdered my children" (503-6).
Achilles had been pitying Patroclus, but mainly himself, but the
feeling to which Priam has directed him now is exactly the same as
tragic pity. Achilles is looking at a human being who has chosen to
go to the limits of what is humanly possible to search for something
that matters to him. The wonder of this sight takes Achilles out of his
self-pity, but back into himself as a son and as a sharer of human
misery itself. All Ws old longings for glory and revenge fall away, since
they have no place in the sight in which he is now absorbed. For the
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
moment, the beauty of Priam's terrible action re-makes the world, and
determines what matters and what doesn't. The feeling in this moment out of time is fragile, and Achilles feels it threatened by tragic
fear. In the strange fusion of this scene, what Achilles fears is himself;
"don't irritate me any longer now, old man," he says when Priam tries
to hurry along the return of Hector's body, "don't stir up my heart in
its griefs any more now,/ lest I not spare even you yourself' (560,
568-9). Finally, after they. share a meal, they just look at each other.
"Priam wondered at Achilles,/ at how big he was and what he was like,
for he seemed equal to the gods,/ but Achilles wondered at Trojan
Priam./ looking on the worthy sight of him and hearing his story"
(629-32). In the grip of wonder they do not see enemies. They see
truly. They see the beauty in two men who have lost almost everything. They see a son a father should be proud of and a father a son
should revere.
The action of the iliad stretches from Achilles' deliberate choice to
remove himself from the war to his deliberate choice to return Hector's
body to Priam. The passion of the iliad moves from anger through pity
and fear to wonder. Priam's wonder lifts him for a moment out of the
misery he is enduring, and permits him to see the cause of that misery
as still something good. Achilles' wonder is similar to that of Priam,
since Achilles too sees the cause of his anguish in a new light, but in
his case this takes several steps. When Priam first appears in his hut,
Homer compares the amazement this produces to that with which
people look at a murderer who has fled from his homeland (480-84).
This is a strange compartson, and it recalls the even stranger fact
disclosed one book earlier that Patroclus, whom everyone speaks of
as gentle and kindhearted (esp. XVII, 670-71), who gives his life
because he cannot bear to see his friends destroyed to satisfY Achilles'
anger, this same Patroclus began his life as a murderer in his own
country, and came to Achilles' father Peleus for a second chance at
life. When Achilles remembers his father, he is remembering the man
whose kindness brought Patroclus into his life, so that his tears, now
for his father, now again for Patroclus (XXN, 511-12), merge into a
single grief. But the old man crying with him is a father too, and
Achilles' tears encompass Priam along with Achilles' own loved ones.
Finally, since Priam is crying for Hector, Achilles' griefincludes Hector
himself, and so it turns his earlier anguish inside out. If Priam is like
Achilles' father, then Hector must come to seem to Achilles to be like
a brother, or to be like himself.
Achilles cannot be brought to sucb a reflection by reasoning, nor
do the feelings in which he has been embroiled take him in that
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direction. Only Priam succeeds in unlocking Achilles' heart, and he
does so by an action, by kissing his hand. From the beginning of Book
XVIII (23, 27, 33). Achilles' hands are referred to over and over and
over, as he uses them to pour dirt on his head, to tear his hair, and
to kill every Trojan he can get his hands on. Hector, who must go up
against those hands, is mesmerized by them; they are like a fire, he
says, and repeats it. "His hands seem like a fire" (XX, 371-2). After
Priam kisses Achilles' h'}nd, and afier they cry together, Homer tells
us that the desire for lamentation went out of Achilles' chest and out
of his hands (XXIV, 514). His murderous, man-slaughtering hands
are stilled by a grief that finally has no enemy to take itself out on.
When, in Book XVIII, Achilles had accepted his doom (115), it was part
of a bargain; "I will lie still when I am dead," he had said, "but now I
must win splendid glory" (121). But at the end of the poem, Achilles
has lost interest in glory. He is no longer eaten up by the desire to be
lifted above Hector and Priam, but comes to rest in just looking at
them for what they are. Homer does surround Achilles in armor that
takes the sting from his misery and from his approaching death, by
working that misery and death into the wholeness of the iliad. But
the iliad is, as Aristotle says, the prototype of tragedy; it is not a poem
that aims at conferring glory but a poem that bestows the gift of wonder.
Like Alonso in the Tempest, Achilles ultimately fmds himself. Of
the two, Achilles is the closer model of the spectator of a tragedy,
because Alonso plunges deep into remorse before he is brought back
into the shared world. Achilles is lifted directly out of himself, into the
shared world, in the act of wonder, and sees his own image in the
sorrowing father in front of him. This is exactly what a tragedy does
to us, and exactly what we experience in looking at Achilles. In his
loss, we pity him. In his fear of himself, on Priam's behalf, we fear for
him, that he might lose his new-won humanity. In his capacity to be
moved by the wonder of a suffering fellow human, we wonder at him.
At the end of the iliad, as at the end of every tragedy, we are washed
in the beauty of the human image, which our pity and our fear have
brought to sight. The five marks of tragedy that we learned of from
Aristotle's Poetics-that it imitates an action, arouses pity and fear,
displays the human image as such, ends in wonder, and is inherently
beautiful-give a true and powerful account of the tragic pleasure.
*
*
* * *
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Excerpts from Aristotle's Poetics
Ch. 6 A tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious and has
a wholeness in its extent, in language that is pleasing (though in
distinct ways in its different parts), enacted rather than narrated,
culminating, by means of pity and fear, in the cleansing of these
passions ... So tragedy is "1" imitation not of people, but of action, life,
and happiness or unhappiness, while happiness and unhappiness
have their being in activity, and come to completion not in a quality
but in some sort ofaction ... Therefore it is deeds and the story that are
the end at which tragedy alms, and in all things the end is what
matters most...So the source that governs tragedy in the way that the
soul governs life is the story. 1149b23ff
Ch. 7 An extended whole is that which has a beginning, middle
and end. But a beginning is something which, in itself, does not need
to be after anything else, while something else naturally is the case or
comes about after it; and an end is its contrary, something which in
itself is of such a nature as to be after something else, either necessarily or for the most part, but to have nothing else after it...lt is
therefore needful that well-put-together stories not begin from just
anywhere at random, nor end just anywhere at random ...And beauty
resides in size and order ... the oneness and wholeness of the beautiful
thing being present all at once in contemplation .. .in stories, just as in
human organizations and in living things. 1450b25ff
Ch. 8 A story is not one, as some people think, just because it is
about one person ... And Homer,just as he is distinguished in all other
ways, seems to have seen this point beautifully, whether by art or by
nature. 145lal6
Ch. 9 Now tragedy is an imitation not only of a complete action,
but also of objects of fear and pity, and these arise most of all when
events happen contrary to expectation but in consequence of one
another; for in this way they will have more wonder in them than if
they happened by chance or by fortune, since even among things that
happen by chance, the greatest sense of wonder is from those that
seem to have happened by design. 1452alff
Chs. 13-14 Since it is peculiar to tragedy to be an imitation of
actions arousing pity and fear ... and since the former concerns some-
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37
one who is undeserving of suffering and ihe latter concerns someone
like us ... ihe story ihat works well must ... depict a change from good
to bad fortune, resulting not from badness but from some great error
of someone like us, or else better raiher ihan worse ... One must not
look for every sort of pleasure from a tragedy, but for ihe one native
to it. And since it is ihe pleasure ihat results from pity and fear ihat
makes ihe work a tragedy, and ihe poet needs to provide ibis pleasure
by means of imitation, it. is evident ihat it must be artfully embodied
in ihe actions (and not rely on visual effects). 1452b30ff, 1453b5
Ch. 16 The best sort of revelation in a tragedy is one ihat arises
from ihe actions ihemselves, ihe astonishment coming about ihrough
ihings ihat are likely, as in ihe Oedipus of Sophocles. {A revelation,
as ihe word indicates, is a change from ignorance to knowledge, ihat
produces eiiher friendship or hatred in people marked out for good or
bad fortune. The most beautiful of revelations occurs when reversals
of condition come about at ihe same time, as is ihe case in ihe
Oedipus.-Ch. 11) 1455bl7, 1452a30
Chs. 24-5 Wonder needs to be produced in tragedies, but in ihe
epic there is more room for that which confounds reason, by means
of which wonder comes about most of all, since in ihe epic one does
not see ihe person who performs ihe action; ihe events surrounding
ihe pursuit of Hector would seem ridiculous ifiheywere on stage ... But
wonder is sweet ...And Homer most of all has taught ihe rest of us how
one ought to speak of what is untrue ... One ought to choose likely
impossibilities in preference to unconvincing possibilities ... And if a
poet has represented impossible ihings, ihen he has missed ihe mark,
but ihat is ihe right ihing to do if he thereby hits the mark that is the
endojthe poetic art itself, ihatis, if in ihat way he makes ihat or some
oiher part more wondrous. 1460al2ff; 1460b23ff.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�FAUSTIAN PHENOMENA:
Goethe on Plants, Animals, and
Modern Biologists
John F. Comell.
When Faust strikes his deal with Mephistopheles, it is neither for mere
material gain nor for romantic conquest, nor even for power or
knowledge. It is for experience without end.
If I to any moment say:
Linger on! You are so fair!
Put me in fetters straightaway,
Then I can die for all I care!
(Faust L 1699-1702) 1
The challenge is at the heart of the Faustian legend for Goethe. The
desire to reach a point exceeding all hope of further striving is the most
diabolical desire he could imagine. It is mere love of one's own past
achievement-self-complacency. And in self-complacency man essentially delivers his soul to death because he gives up the devotion to
forward movement which is life. He renounces the very thing existence
asks of him, awareness of himself through increasing awareness of
the world. Goethe himself never rested in the struggle to unfold the
forms within and to understand the forms without In old age he even
jested that his soul deserved other embodiments in which to continue
its ceaseless activity.2
But Faustian striving was not for Goethe only an archetypal human
theme. He beheld the same soulful drama throughout the plant and
animal realms, too. The drive to excess, the restlessness for change,
the blind impulse toward a fuller existence that might finally attain a
novel form-these were also manifest in organisms of every kind. And,
as a naturalist who had rejected the special creation of species and
genus, Goethe could speculate that a continuous creative "urge" 3 in
organisms had even given rise to their diversity of kinds.
The present essay will look with Goethe at plants and animals with
this Faustian theme in mind. This is no idle literary exercise. For the
important contention of his biological essays is that an upspringing
movement is essential to all the phenomena of life. Moreover, he
argues that a dispassionate contemplation of living things reveals
John F. Comell is a tutor at the Santa Fe campus of St. John's College.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
such vital striving over and above the functions necessary to survival.
This is one of the essential principles of the philosophical study of
organisms for Goethe. Unfortunately the practical and technological
interests of biologists increasingly distracted attention from this possibility. Many of his contemporaries already theorized, like ours, about
the organism as a conglomerate of mechanical processes, thus highlighting instead its susceptibility to ever more refined human control.
Goethe does not concede. however, that advanctng analysis of the
organism into simpler inorganic components must shed light on its
essential activity as a living whole.
Whoever wants to know and write about
A living thing, first drives the spirit out;
He has the parts withio his grasp,
But gone is the spirit's holding clasp.
(1.1936-9)
This does not mean that he actually posits a mysterious force to unite
the constituents discoverable by histology and biochemistry and so
on. He supposes no ultimate explanation of the organism in terms of
its parts or its whole. The aim of his biological method is simply to
study vital phenomena at the level of the active, already organized
being. He thus attends to properties overlooked by analytic methods,
the most important of which properties is the upward-driving urge,
discemible in both plants and animals, iotensified and extended in
manifold ways. His studies in "morphology" (as he called them) thus
represent avant la lettre a phenomenology of nature, an investigation
of the life-world independent of both traditional metaphysics and the
apparatus of experimental science. Perhaps it goes without saying that
these studies can help us appraise our conventional scientific conceptions of life that may rather mirror a technological mastery of the
organism. In any case I shall suggest a few comparative observations
along that ltne.
Let the plant and animal heroes come onto the stage.
To begin with Goethe's most famous character, the plant. The
unfoldiog of the plant's life is narrated tn the relatively popular
Metamorphosis of Plants of 1790 4 Its general theory of plants is
well-known enough to be subject to a common misconception. It is
often reduced to the doctrine that the organs of the annual plant are
io essence the same: the sepals (or the segments of the calyx holding
the flower), the corolla (the petals of the flower), the nectaries, and the
reproductive parts are in fact transformed leaves, reshaped to suit
their various functions. (Charles Darwin in the Origin of Species
�CORNELL
41
speaks of this doctrine as "familiar to almost everyone".) 5 The idea of
such homological relation among the plant's organs is an important
morphological insight that Goethe advanced. But it had been foreshadowed by earlier botanists, as he acknowledged (paragraph 4). 6
What is more remarkable in his account is how these form-elements
of the plant betray the direction of its ·movement, its "striving" toward
the flowering stage. For instance, Goethe devotes a whole chapter to
something seen in many, garden plants, that as the leaves ascend on
the stem they become more "developed"-more richly veined, more
notched and elaborate in pattem (Plate 1). This differentiation of form
may well be explained by intemal functions, for example, the refinement of the plant's saps (par. 39), but that in no way compromises the
fact that the phenomenon of growth follows a single apparent direction.
Other little irregularities in the plant's organs reveal how distinct
their forms may be from purely functional features. The forms of some
organs "anticipate" those higher up in the plant's ascent. The calyx,
or cup that holds the floral corolla and is ordinarily green, sometimes
takes on the coloring of the petals " ... at the tips, margins, back, or
even over its inner surface while the outer surface remains green. And
always we see a refinement [of form] associated with this coloration"
(par. 40). Goethe cites numerous morphological disruptions of the
supposedly strict functional series of appendages, and shows how a
sequence of form-elements may only by degrees achieve some functional organ. (par. 75, 83. Plate 2 shows marigold seeds making up
such a sequence.) Perhaps one remarkable instance he cites will
illustrate just how powerfully form can supervene function, and
express the weird upward striving of the plant. In a tulip, a stem-leaf
can rise to new heights and participate dramatically in the overall
pattem of the floral petals. "Such a leaf-petal," he observes, "is half
green, and divided into two parts, the green half being related to the
stem remaining attached to it, and the colored part being lifted up with
the corolla." (par. 44). Goethe supervised the drawing of a colored plate
to document this extraordinary but telling occurrence (Plate 3).
Goethe is showing not just the plant's composition from leaf-like
elements, but a powerful "urge" throughout its growth as these parts
successively appear. The ascending forms of the organs suggest the
plant's thrust beyond vegetative activity. Repetitive foliar growth
(which can be made indefinite by overfeeding) is progressively left
behind for the higher stage of sexual reproduction (par. 30). According
to another paper, he experimented with preventing the plant's elaboration as it grows from node to node and puts out a new leaf at each
step 7 He could continually produce near identity in every nodal
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
42
1) Sa pi us saponaria
after DeCandolle
arvensis
~~~It·~
pluralis
2) Fruit of marigold,
after Gaertner
3) Tulip with
extraordinary leaf-petals
Plates 1·3 appear courtesy of Ox Bow Press, Woodbridge, Connecticut.
�CORNELL
43
segment and every new leaf (and thus prevent the normal foliar
refinement) simply by detaching every new shoot and replanting it in
soil. Thus he showed that the graded elaboration up the stem is
intrinsic to the plant's accumulation of the nodal series. In the life of
the complex single being, development appears to be necessary.
Botany demonstrates what Faust feels.
Goethe also inquired into how these stages of transformation arose,
but in doing so stayed clqse to an intuitive sense of life. Noticing that
the plant-organs developed in an alternating sequence of expansions
and contractions-expanded leaves, contracted sepals, expanded petals, contracted sexual organs, expanded fruiting organs-he naturally
asked what two forces struggled back and forth within the plant to
produce this rhythmic alternation of outward form. On an anatomical
level, Goethe could discern a related duality in the plant's two chief
tissues, the spiral vessels (or tracheids, usually on its periphery) and
the vertical fibre (in the interior) 8 But again the overall effect invites
another description: everything takes place as if two creative sources,
the male and female poles in the vegetative system, generate the
individual's growth by their opposition, in dialectical steps up a
"spiritual ladder" (par. 6). For the plant no less than for Faust, "two
souls abide" within its breast (1. 1112).
Goethe's nature-researches not only advance careful comparative
observation of living things but also typically reflect on the human
relation to them. Both moments together constitute his practice of
biology. This becomes particularly vivid in his zoological notes and
essays. Enter the artimals.
Goethe recogruzes a hidden similarity between plants and animals.
"Scarcely distinguishable" in their rudimentary stages, plants and
animals have taken opposite courses of development, plants toward
fixity and security, animals toward mobility and freedom. But fundamental to both, he explains, is the serial homology of their component
parts, the regular repetition of form elements-be they leaves, a sequence of nodes along an extended stem, the series of vertebrae in the
skeleton, or the segments of insects and crustaceans. (The serial
aspect of some invertebrate forms are evident in Goethe's own drawings, Plates 4 and 5.) But as with the plant, the animal form is raised
above a series of similar structures. Its differentiation admits of
degree: "The more imperfect a creature is, the more do these parts
appear identical or similar to each other and the more do they resemble
the whole. The more the creature is perfected, the more dissimilar its
parts become .... Subordination of the parts betokens a more perfected
creature."9 (By perfection, Goethe only means this morphological
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVJEW
44
distinction, and not any natural hierarchy: elsewhere he speaks of the
"so-called" perfected animals, sogenannten vollkommenem Tieren.) 10
In some animals, looking at their skeletal structure, an excessive
vitality is expressed by the sertes of caudal vertebrae which repeat
indefinitely and taper off. The tail, he observes, "may be considered as
suggesting the infinity of organic existences." In other cases, structure
supervenes on this repetitive growth. There is a "curtailment," for
example, in the snake's,.transformation into a long-legged frog. 11
Thus, compartng the general appearances of skeletons, we interpret
forms as elaborated upon ortginal serial processes.
In vertebrate zoology, because of the extensive reshaping of sertal
elements, the pattems of bones built up are more prominent than the
sequential foundations. Such visible pattems have been known since
Artstotle as anatomical "types." The typological approach to animal
forms is now discredited by historians ofbiology, who associate it with
a metaphysical interest in "Platonic" ideas. Yet one must be wary of
cartcaturtng typologists as idealists whose cherished types dissolve
once we recognize the flux of evolutionary change, the phases of which
are not all represented in extant species. The point of Goethe's typology
was not to establish any abstract animal ideas. 12 His ortginal report
on morphological types (1 795) stressed the practicality of establishing
a lexicon of basic pattems: the construction of general types would
organize new osteological data and facilitate the advancement of
science.
13
In fact, Goethe did not imagine the type as static. Like Faust, a type
is not permitted to rest thanks to the tension of forces within and
without. "What has been formed," he wrote later in an introduction to
his morphological papers, "is instantly transformed, and if we would
arrive, to son1e degree, at a vital intuition of Nature, we must strive to
keep ourselves as flexible and pliable as the example she herself
provides.'' 14 Perhaps Goethe implies that were we less rtgid we might
discem his hints at organic evolution? As the plant is compelled to
elaborate leaves up the stem, so the animal cannot remain fixed but
must evolve and differentiate into a multiplicity of genera. Significantly, the animal's bUnd drtves-the strtvings of instinct- havea major
role.
Among Goethe's zoological studies, one on rodents shows well how
he conceives evolution. Like the premier French anatomist Georges
Cuvier, he focuses on the rodents' powerful teeth. Their well-developed
upper and lower incisors offer an extreme example of how determined
animals are by their mode of feeding. Full of nervous, gnawing energy,
rodents take nutrttion to a Faustian excess: their teething, he says, is
�CORNELL
45
"vehemently compulsive, unintentionally destructive.'' 15 It is also
creative. Cuvier had noticed that rodents' incisors could develo&
monstrously, especially if unopposed by the teeth above or below.
Goethe sees them as conditioned more deeply by dental excess. He
contrasts their overactive incisors with the balanced set of teeth
possessed by carnivores, and considers how their gnawing gives rise
to a "capricious" range of forms. As the rodents' superfluous energy
is redirected toward the l;msiness of life, it fills various needs such as
making dams or burrows and storing food. Gradually the rodents
explore the main options for adapted living, which their generic forms
represent by striking parallels. Rats correspond to carnivores, hares
to ruminants (for lagomorphs were then classed as rodents), beavers
are swinish swamp-dwellers, and squirrels and flying squirrels parallel the apes and the bats respective!y17
Goethe's essay on rodents pauses to contemplate the common
squirrel with its capacity to stand upright. In quadrupeds, he notes,
the general tendency is that the posterior parts raise themselves above
the frontal ones. The contrary frontal elevation occurs in such "capital"
animals as the lion and elephant, whose heads are further emphasized
by ornament. He calls this elevation a "striving" (using the Faustian
word Bestreben). 18 Now among the rodents, he notices, it is the
ape-like arboreal acrobats, the squirrels, that have approximated an
upright beartng. They grasp small nuts and spruce cones with skillful
hands and, as they play mischievously with their food, we take
particular pleasure in watching them. Then Goethe imagines something like the rodents' social history.
[Gnawing] promotes a superfluous consumption of food for
the purpose of materially filling the stomach and might also
be regarded as continuous exercise, a restless urge to be
occupied which may ultimately lead to destructive fighttog ...After satisJY!ng immediate need to the liveliest way, they
would still like to live in more secure plenty. From this arises
the gathering-drive and the handling of materials which
might appear to be very similar to deliberate ariisiry. 19
Of what use to serious science is this reflection on the squirrel as
mirror of our own activity? First, with respect to the problem of upright
posture, note that although it represents a "contrary" tendency in
nature, a redirection of life's impulses, Goethe does not hold frontal
elevation to be especially rare. The upward tendency has a parallel in
members of several orders of animals; the urge it represents is not
restricted to human beings or even to primates. One might object that
�46
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
this is some kind of anthropomorphic reading of other forms, but I
believe this objection will not stand. The fear of anthropomorphism in
studying nature assumes a fundamental separation of human essence
and experience from the rest of the world. On that assumption, human
activity is a prohibited model for interpreting animals, which must
rather be understood in the presumably non-anthropomorphic terms
of mechanism, along with the rest of nature. But Goethe, without
repudiating mechanism, Jets us glimpse nature's unity precisely by
generalizing the human way of being. We are literally on more equal
footing with other animals, but without (so to speak) a loss of standing.
The story of rodents' behavioral evolution similarly affirms our
solidarity with other beings. The perpetually nervous rodents, as
Goethe describes them, display greed and warlike habits and even
invent something like the arts. This is Goethe's version, or better, his
inversion, of sociobiology, his way of seeing the naturalness of our
"cultural" activity. Animals remote from human beings are beset with
similar blind drives which open up similar outlets, elaborated in
different degrees. It is noteworthy that he remains silent about mechanistic or teleological causes of these developments while illuminating
their connection with the animals' exuberance of life. For him the most
striking principle of animal behaviors is not "behind" the outward
phenomena, in the hereditary substance privileged by twentieth-century sociobiology. Nor, in the teleological sense of cause, is the
essential thing about animals the urge to disseminate genes through
reproduction, as sociobiology teaches under the influence of Darwin
and Malthus. There is excess in nature, but why confine its expression
to reproductive competition? Goethe does not so underestimate the
kinship between human beings and other organisms. If we reduce
human beings and all animals to reproduction machines, we miss the
analogical fact that hyperactivity and conflict might engender new
exertions of animals' energy. A rechannelling of animal force "upward,"
toward expression in art, might occur in squirrels no less than in
humans.
Scholars tell us that Goethe was not an evolutionist, that species
transformation was for him an absiract relationship rather than a
principle of genealogical kinship over time. They do not find in his
works a discussion of particular phylogenies linking living and fossil
species, nor do they find reference to evolutionists such as Lamarck
or Robinet. 20 But take care: the most convinced evolutionist cannot
necessarily offer convincing phylogenies. (Darwin did not, and Goethe
wrote decades earlier.) Further, it is known that Goethe sometimes
endorsed evolution with intimate friends; and in writing on evolution-
�47
CORNELL
.,..._....
...
114 I Pt
"':
;.,,~
4)
5)
Segmentation in insect
and crustacean,
by Goethe's hand
6)
3-toed and 2-toed Sloths_, or
Ai and Unau, from the
English edition of Cuvier
�48
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
ary speculations by Kant and Eduard d'Alton, he alluded to his own
belief in species descent. 21 Delicate public treatment of sensitive
subjects was a matter of principle for Goethe. He followed what he
called "the higher maxim of pedagogy: not to disturb children or the
un[educated] and half-educated in their reverence for higher things. "22
Was the poet merely judicious about the topic of evolution? We have
seen, I think, that Goethe's scientific writing is many-layered-provocative rather than demonstr.ative. Always the playwright, he does not
force ideas on his audienc~ but lets them consider implications of the
dialogue, the action, and the scene. Yet there is more than circumstantial proof of Goethe's evolutionist inclinations. Let us tum to an
essay where he in fact indulges in phylogenetic speculation, speculation leading even to the genesis of human beings.
In the middle of an essay on "Sloths and Pachyderms" Goethe asks
permission to resort to "poetic" expression, necessary (he says) to
reach where prose may not. He launches into an evolutionary fable.
The story begins With a "colossal spirit" [ungeheuerer Geist]. specifically a beached whale, a mammalian fish out of water. The animal
regrets its uncertain fortunes even as it begins to settle in its swampy
home: "... it feels as if it belongs half to earth and half to water." Its
inner turmoil passes "through whatever filiation" to its descendants,
who, having made their way into a drier, less confusing environment,
still do not develop harmoniously. As if vexed by some former constraint, as if impatient to exercise some freedom, they stretch out their
limbs and grow claws "... almost Without limit." These new beasts-the
sloths-are a genus in which Goethe recognizes a counter-spirit or
contrary-spirit, an Ungetst. But they are destined for "something
more," only temporarily unable to manifest it in its "principal appearance" [Haupterscheinung]. Gradually, the more integrated members of
the sloth genus, the species called the Unau, raise themselves to a
more versatile level of animality, and enter the scene as the highly
mobile apes. The story closes With a quick but arresting phrase. Still
referring to the great destiny of this animal spirit as yet unfulfilled,
Goethe concludes, "... and among the apes surely there are a few that
might show the way to it" ("man denn unter den A.ffen gar wahl einige
23
findet, welche nach ihm hinwetsen mogen").
Clearly Goethe's fable of the evolution of a spirited ape entails other
than literal meanings. The natural images not only hint at our origins
but also invite us to consider what new self-knowledge such conjecture would afford. Indeed his images tell a Faustian tale: painful birth
and ambivalence about life, slothful inactivity and Withdrawal from
the task of adapting to reality, unproductive vexation and finally, the
�CORNELL
49
beginning of a resolution, intense activity that realizes the potentials
hidden within. Further, as with Goethe's rodents, what at first seems
like monstrosity turns into creativity. The whale's maladjustment
presses him on, by stages, to a nobler destiny. 24
But in addition to these meanings, notice a particular scientific
sense in Goethe's tale. His ancestry for anthropoids suggests a
Faustian career by incorporating real zoological problems. Why the
whale and the sloth as h,uman progenitors? What links them in the
naturalist's mind? Both these animals are among the most extraordinary: they have proven especially hard to classify scientifically. Only
in modem times has the whale been made a mammal. In evolutionary
discussions during the past century, scientists have doubted whether
this superbly adapted sea creature, without hind legs, could possibly
have descended from a four-legged land dweller. Even today the
classification of whales is in dispute. Despite the taxonomic trouble
they have made, the whales' social structure and high intelligence
have always been admired. One hardly needs reminding that the
cachelot, the blunt-headed sperm whale, was a spiritual adversary of
seafaring mankind at the tum of the nineteenth century. Cuvier's
English editors record the sperm whale's bloodthirsty tyranny of the
sea and its vindictive pursuit of prey. This behavior, they say, "... has
scarcely any parallel in animated nature"-an ironic phrase, as they
later mention the notorious excesses of the whaling industry. 25 The
sperm whale and man are natural Faustian animals.
The sloths are also great eccentrics in biology, animals that, like
whales, have defied the authority of European classifiers. Cuvier called
them "imperfect and grotesque" because they violated his rules about
how the parts of animals should be functionally correlatedl 26 The
tree-hanging sloths, neither lovely nor lively, were also thought to lead
a painful existence, which Goethe concedes in attributing to them a
negative spirit. His claim that they are destined for something more,
alluding to their almost human form, is not so far-fetched. Some
species of sloth, after all, are good swimmers and have dexterous
hands. One can see the anthropoid bearing of the sloths pictured in
the English edition of Cuvier (Plate 6).
In brief, the ancestors Goethe selects for humankind have surprising zoological credentials. Sloths and whales are outstanding as the
natural rebels of nature, and as outlaws to scientific legislation. Their
conspicuous place in the human family tree accounts then for the
evolution of the human species with its own ambiguous stance In the
world. For Goethe, all life is at odds with mere being, all organisms
�50
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
overreach themselves. But even this excess exceeds itself in the case
of our anthropoid precursors.
We have arrived with Goethe at the human animal. We may turn
now to the question of how not just biological phenomena but biological practice itself reflects the Faustian theme. Let us bear in mind the
historical uniqueness of Goethe's biological work, the audacity of his
integration of a science of organisms with a poet's vision of life. Wh!le
his researches have appealed to philosophical scientists-T. H. Huxley,
Claude Bernard, and Freud-and to ph!losophers such as Hegel and
Nietzsche, they did not advance the progress of quantitative and
experimental biology. Goethe's place in the history of life science is
what he might have expected. He is history's deviant-not the sloth in
his genealogical tale, but perhaps the Leviathan on the shore who,
wh!le not in his proper milieu, is an enormous creature all the same.
One may appreciate better the role of this strange giant in biology
by comparing him to another towering naturalist, Charles Darwin.
Indeed, by comparing Goethe with the greatest evolutionist since his
time, both of their enterprises might come into clearer focus. So, too,
might the Faustian d!lemma of contemporary biology.
Let us begin the comparison by citing Goethe's most "Darwinian"
text. He penned this speculation at the age of sixty:
The skeletons of some marine animals show plainly that, even
while fashioning these, Nature was already feeling her way
toward the higher idea of land animals ... ! would call them
marvelous, these transitions in nature, if in nature the marvelous did not happen to be universally common ...You can
imagine Nature standing at a gaming counter, as it were,
constantly shouting "Double" and continuing to play with her
winnings in all her domains with unfailing luck ad infinitum.
The stone, the animal, the plant-after a number of such lucky
throws they are all put at stake again; and who knows but
that man himself is not in his turn just another throw for
higher winntngs?27
The theme of "chance" is not prevalent in Goethe's biological
writings. But if chance is understood as what appears in creation
without design, it is certainly consonant with his idea of evolution. It
is consonant with the idea of nature experimenting with so-called
monstrous forms, blindly groping toward possibly higher destinies.
On the other hand, we discern something "Goethean" in Charles
Darwin's eloquence about the natural world. Recall how in the Origin
ofSpecies Darwin holds nature to be a tense harmony of sublime forces
superior to, and in a sense wiser than, human beings. He tried to
�CORNELL
51
establish the doctrine of natural selection by analogy from the inferior
methods of man's selective breeding. A deductive argument for natural
selection from wild populations alone was not conclusive. One needed
to see something about creative processes in order to imagine natural
creation as a whole. In the Origin, Darwin applied what we know about
making domestic breeds (e.g., greyhounds, wolfhounds, dachshunds)
to nature's "making" of species. One can find in his notes and
published pages other analogies from human artistry to nature's
process of creating. 28 Darwin the fertile theorizer, who piled up
insights in his notebooks and artfully sifted his best ideas, knew
something about the process of intellectual creation. It occurred to
him that nature's mode of creation, natural selection, is like all
ingenuity, a testing and refinement of half-conscious and unaccountable effusions. 29 From this perspective, Darwin's doctrine seems closer
to Goethe's Faustian theme: both would capture that blind purposiveness and creativity that makes nature the model of human ari.
This is not the place to show that the inspiration of the "romantic"
strain in Darwin might be traced ultimately to the German poet. 30
The history of science makes clear in any case that a difference
between the two nature researchers becomes far more important.
Natural selection is simple and universal mechanism, grounded positively in studies of plant and animal population. What Darwin called
his "long argument" of the Origin of Species inaugurates a new era in
life science, one based on natural selection, while there is nothing in
Goethe to compare. But this points us to a deeper disagreement, a
philosophical disagreement between Darwin and Goethe that sometimes surfaces in contemporary biology.
The disagreement has to do with the representation of nature not
just as universal mechanism but as any totality at all. Goethe's
researches, although consistently suggestive, were never systematized, his essays were not organized into a whole. The unity of living
nature remained an intuition that did not attain the architectonic
structure of positive science, according to the imposing Newtonian
model. Goethe mistrusted the Newtonian precedents for systematizing
researches into generalized, mathematics-like doctrine. 3 His biological writing thus reflected what he once said about dramatic composition-that it should have significant general features,
incommensurable, however, in representing the whole, so one is
drawn to study it again and again. 32 With all his Faustian urge to
understand life, Goethe supposed one limit in our quest for science:
every all-embracing scheme of natural history must be premature.
�52
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Darwin's metaphysical preconceptions denied this. Heir to the
Newtonian legacy that Goethe renounced, he supposed that some
simple, general law of natural genesis would eventually link all
particular biological problems. This supposition was grounded in
liberal theological belief. To Darwin it was reasonable to posit a God
creating through general laws in contrast to multiple, miraculous
creations. (I acknowledge in passing the historical irony: one of the
founders of agnostic scie¥ce was himself decisively influenced by
monotheistic creed.) A scientific natural history, more or less Newtonian, might then be possible. If one could present a new observational
law, a mechanism producing new species from old, the essential
phenomena of natural history might follow from this law of creationby-genealogical-descent. (This would become the main strategy of the
Origin of Species.) This metaphysics of Darwin's had momentous
consequences for his interpretation of his eventual discovery. When
he discovered the "natural selection" of organisms' individual variations through their life-and-death struggles, he understood this
process as no mere conditioning principle, no mere constraint on
whatever should evolve, but as the hidden creative law he was
seeking. 33 Natural selection seemed to be creation's supreme law also
because special creationists had stressed organisms' specially designed adaptations-and Darwin could reinterpret the feats of special
design as so many means of survival acquired through ages of
environmental pressure. He could interpret them as all acquired
through one simple law. 34 The theological presuppositions about
universal adaptation and universal law had reduced the vast problems
of evolution to one apparently solvable form.
Darwin's work developed in the open-air traditions of geology and
field natural history which studied the environmental contexts and
reticular interdependencies of living things. But under the shadow of
the theology of law and adaptation, the recognition of all meanings of
organic diversity was simply not possible. Morphological patterns or
tendencies in evolution, if decipherable through the comparison of
forms, could not impinge on a theorizing that concentrated on adaptive
success. As Darwin worked out his theory, he relegated part of
Goethean morphology-e.g., the theme of serial patterns and their
differentiation-merely to the list of evidences for evolutionary descent
(and indirectly for natural selection). 35 He classed other morphological
phenomena with the facts of organic variability, again a demotion
since variation was deemed consequential only if it led to adaptational
advantages. 36 In the end, Darwin's view of nature paralleled closely
that of the agricultural breeders whom he studied. For the breeder
�CORNELL
53
sees in the wealth of plant and animal variation not data of natural
history with interesting connections among other phenomena, but
accidental possibilities to be used or eliminated. Darwin regarded
organic variation as "accidental" only after turning to the breeders and
adopting the idea of a selective agency external to the organisms and
responsible for their evolutionary changes. 37 The extravagant multiplicity of nature thus receded as an essential fact when reduced to the
problem of more trivial vapation, that is, when a technological attitude
was imported into theoretical biology. The present-day marriage between biology and genetic technology dates from the reliance of the
Origin of Species on agricultural breeding.
By contrast, Goethe's phenomenological biology did not strive to
formulate one mechanism producing organic diversity, let alone one
aligned with human technique. He kept his distance from theology
and technology and all simplifying principles alien to the multiplicity
of beings. The comparative method assumed that the astonishing past
and present diversity of beings might teach us something about the
laws of these possibilities of life that a generalized mechanism, based
in the universal necessity of survival, could not. Goethe would have
seen the philosophical Iisk in minimizing the actual profusion of
nature's products by modeling It on accidental varieties and Individuals of a species. On the contrary, did he not thematize excess even in
particular living beings? His reluctance to assemble a complete doctrine of nature suggests a further point: Is not the ongoing investigation of visible growth processes and forms logically prior to the final
explanation of the evolution of these processes and forms? Comparing
phenomena could still lead to evolutionary stories, but they would be
stones told In a spirit of conjecture and even irony, whose plots would
involve the specific characters of the organic protagonists. The power
of a method like Darwin's, on the other hand, was also the problem
with it: it could prejudge the significance of all phenomena according
to its global type of Insight. The differences of species could not make
a lot of difference If the last word on their appearances was their
submission to a single law. 38 We might discern the meaning of the
Many only If they are not effaced to nothingness by the One.
Goethe admitted that Interpreting nature required method, and
that method In turn implied bias. The act of theorizing was like
creating the scene of a play where some truth is put In the spotlight
and some recedes into the background. 39 He thought that biological
researchers In particular would concede the infinite superiority of
Nature's resources to their own Ingenious ideas.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
54
When a man of lively intellect first responds to Nature's
challenge to be understood, he feels irresistibly tempted to
impose his will upon the natural objects he is studying. Before
long, however, they close in upon him with such force as to
make him realize that he in tum must now acknowledge their
might and hold in respect the authority they exert over him.
Hardly is he convinced of this reciprocal influence when he
becomes aware of a twofold infinitude: in the natural objects,
of the diversity of life and growth and of vitality interlocking
relationships; in himself, of the possibility of endless development through always keeping his mind receptive and disciplining it in new forms of assimilation and procedure. 40
The receptive biological mind had to appreciate a variety of methods
even if it devoted itself to one. Students of biology were to be like so
many Fausts, together pursuing a many-sided experience oflife. With
a plurality of approaches and viewpoints, enlivening particular inquiries even through conflict, 41 biology would not attach its fortunes to a
single doctrine of the organism. As in Faust's original bet, theorists
might seem to reach that "fair moment," the final vision of truth. But
then they might only have succumbed to the self-satisfaction that is
the essence of Mephistophelean temptation.
Faust does not give up easily. He learns that the instrumental magic
of Mephistopheles has its limits, and he will not be constrained to that
circle. At a crucial point Mephistopheles reluctantly acknowledges the
higher powers of the "Mothers," the possessors of the secrets of form
and transformation. He tests Faust's true mettle, describing to him
the vast void and terrible solitude he must brave in order to reach their
heathen dwelling. Faust dares to abandon his demon and take the
lonely route. For Goethe, the philosophical biologist cannot renounce
his Faustian desire. He cannot ignore the mystery of organic forms,
resting content with their physical mastery. The daring student of the
multiplicity of living beings might say, like Faust about to travel to the
goddesses of form,
All right! We'll try it out! In what you call
Sheer nothingness I hope to find the All!
(11.6255-6)
"'
"'
*
"'
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Notes:
1.
J. W. von Goethe, Faust, Part I and Part II, trans. Charles E. Passage
(New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 61. Hereafter references to Faust
appear without footnotes, with part and line number simply.
2. J. W. von Goethe, Conversations withEckermann (1823-1832), trans.
John Oxenford (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984). 233.
·'
3. On the difficulties of oUr linguistic terms for expressing life's essential
powers, see J. W. von Goethe, ''The Creative Urge," (Bildungstrieb) in
Goethe's Botanical Writings, trans. and ed. Bertha Mueller (Woodbridge, Connecticut: Ox Bow Press, 1989), 233-4.
4.
Goethe, 'The Metamorphosis of Plants," in Mueller, 31-78. References
will be to Goethe's paragraph numbers.
5. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, (London: Murray, 1859),
436.
6. Goethe's predecessors here were N. Grew and C. F. Wolff. See Agnes
Arber, The Natural Philosophy of Plant Form (Darien, Conn.: Hafner,
1970). 40.
7.
J. W. von Goethe, "Vorarbeiten zur Morphologie," in Die Schrijten zur
Naturwissenschafi, ed. by Dorothea Kuhn (Weimar: H. Bohlaus Nachfolger, 1964), vol. lO (series not complete), 56-59.
8.
Goethe, 'The Spiral Tendency," in Mueller, 127-130.
9.
Goethe, "Formation and Transformation," in Mueller, 24.
10. Goethe, "lnwiefem die Idee: SchOnheit sei Vollkomrnenheit mit
Freiheit," in Kuhn, 10:125.
ll. J. W. von Goethe, "Concerning Types To Be Established for The
Facilitation of Comparative Anatomy," in A Source Book in Animal
Biology, ed. by Thomas Hall (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1970). 67.
12. E. Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1950); R. H. Brady, "Form and Cause in Goethe's Morphology,"
and T. Lenoir, "The Eternal Laws of Form: Morphotypes and the
Conditions of Existence in Goethe's Biological Thought," both in
Goethe and the Sciences: A Re-Appraisal ed. by F. Arnrine, F. Zucker,
and H. Wheeler (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1987).
13. Goethe, "Concerning Types," cited in Note ll. For a modern assessment of type as an irreducible principle, see 0. C. Reippel, Fundamentals of Comparative Biology (Boston: Birkhauser Verlag, 1988).
�56
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
14. Goethe, "Formation and Transformation," p. 24. On Goethe's dynamic
notion of type, see also Brady, "Form and Cause In Goethe's Morphology," p. 274.
15. J. W. von Goethe, "Die Skelette der Nagetiere," in Die Schrijten zur
Naturwissenschajt, ed. Dorothea Kuhn (Weimar: Bohlaus Nachfolger,
1954), 9:377.
16. Georges Cuvier, AnimalXingdom., ed. by Griffith, Smith, and Pidgeon.
(London: Whittaker, 1827), 16 vols., 1:190.
17. Goethe, "Die Skelette der Nagetiere," 376-7.
18. Ibid., 375.
19. Ibid., 377.
20. D. Kuhn, "Goethe's Relationship to the Theories of Development of
His Time," in Goethe and the Sciences, 14-15.
2l.lbid., 10-12; Goethe, "Intuitive Judgement," Goethe's Botanical
Writings, 232-233; and "Die Faultiere und die Dickhautigen," 246-7.
22. Goethe, Diary, April 24, 1831, cited in Goethe: Wisdom and Experience, selections by Ludwig Curtius, trans. by Hermann Wiegand. (New
York: Pantheon, 1949), 197.
23. Goethe, "Die Faultiere und die Dickhautigen," 248.
24. Goethe's whale is a likely progenitor of the estranged water-animal
Nietzsche takes as our grandparent in the Genealogy of Morals, II, sec.
16.
25. Cuvier, Animal Kingdom, 4:473.
26.lbid., 3:261.
27. Goethe to Falk, June 14, 1809, cited In Goethe: Wisdom and Experience, p. 90.
28. Darwin Notebooks pp. (orig.) M 69, 154e: N 14, 36, 94, MacCulloch
11. See Charles Darwin's Notebooks, 1836-1844, transcribed and ed.
by P. Barrett, P. Gautrey, S. Herbert, D. Kohn, and S. Smith (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987).
29. This indeed was William James' reading of Darwin. See Robert
Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind
(Chicago: University of Chicago, 1987), 431-440.
30. A book that initially fired the young Darwin up Into a "burning zeal"
to contribute to science-he says in his Autobiography [The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, ed. Nora Barlow. (London: Collins, 1958),
�CORNELL
57
67-8]-was an account of nature-explorations by one of Goethe's
closest scientific admirers. The book was the Personal Narrative of
n-avels by Alexander von Humboldt, and it gave Darwin one of his
models for a poetic amd speculative natural history. See Alexander
von Humboldt, Personal Narratives of n-avels to the Equinoctial Regions of America during the Years 1799-1804 (London: Longman,
1821-1829) 7 vols., especially val. l. Like Darwin later, Humboldt
takes nature and art as fundamental categories, and emphasizes the
superior majesty of nature over civilization. He also makes analogical
connections among particular facts to raise them into general ideas,
and keeps in the reader's view the human relation, the "dramatic"
relation to the physical world.
3l.J. W. von Goethe. Theory of Colors (Cambridge: M.l.T. Press, 1970),
p. xl.
32. Goethe, Conversations withEckerrnann, (1823-1832), 307.
33. See J. F. Cornell, '"God"s Magnificent Law: The Bad Influence of
Theistic Metaphysics on Da.IWin's Estimation of Natural Selection,"
Journal of the History of Biology 20, (1987): 381-412.
34.lbid., 397-398.
35. Darwin, Origin of Species, chapter XVII!, especially p. 435.
36. Origin of Species, e.g., pp. 146. 149, 153, 436.
37. Darwin"s NotebookE, orig. p. 111-112. SeeJ. F. Cornell, ""Analogy and
Technology in Darwin"s Vision of Nature,·· Jour. ofHist. Biol. I 7 ( 1984):
323.
38. Darwin's Notebook B. orig. pp. 207, 231-2. It appears that (at a point
before hitting on natural selection) Darwin saw evolution embracing
a plurality of goals; so the question may be whether the English
naturalist tradition tumed this plurally-purposed evolution into an
illusion overcome with the theory of a rigorous selection. Yet how is
adaptation manifest as an extravagant diversity of adaptation, if
diversity is not itself an essential principle in nature?
39. Goethe, Theory of Colors, x1vi.
40. Goethe, "Formation and Transformation," 21.
4l.J. W. von Goethe, "Principes de Philosophie Zoologique discutes en
Mars 1830 au sein de l'Academie Royale des Sciences," in Die Schriften
zur Naturwissenscha.fi, 10, esp. pp. 324-325.
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TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�'I Have Become a Problem to
Myself': Augustine's Theory
of Will and the Notion of
Human Inwardness
Lester Strong
The theory of will has been discussed in many contexts, among them
religion (Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, and other Christian thinkers).
deterministic philosophy (Hobbes). psychology (Nietzsche), and modem physics (Bergson), each containing its own presuppositions and
each relating will to other areas connected with its own field of interest.
In this essay I would like to examine will as discussed by Augustine,
which means an examination of will in the light of such notions as
moral choice, sin, and redemption, cast against the background of a
world created. by a Deity who is also the lawgiver and judge of his
creation.
Why Augustine? Because his discussion of will was pivotal in the
Western philosophical approach to the subject, and ultimately in the
Western approach to understanding what it means to be human. In
his complex theory, developed as it was over a long period of time, in
a variety of circumstances, and with different purposes in mind, the
problem of human inwardness ftrst emerges philosophically and there
occurs, as I shall later indicate, an important shift in the Western
intellectual outlook.
The concept of will was introduced in late Classical antiquity
through the Stoics, whose philosophy, like most philosophies before
it. was based on a tradition at least as old as Pythagoras-the notion
that "the real is the rational." This meant that in Stoic ethical theory
the will was the rational will, for in the hierarchy of mental faculties
as the Stoics (and earlier philosophers) conceived them, reason was
at the pinnacle and was therefore the essential expression of human
nature in the moral realm. At the beginning of the fourth book of his
Discourses, Epictetus says: ''That man is free, who lives as he wishes,
Lester Strong (SF'68) has lived and worked in New York City since 1968 as a writer
and editor. The original version of this essay was written for a philosophy seminar
in the History of Will given by Hannah Arendt at the Graduate Faculty of the New
School for Social Research in New York during the early 1970s.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
who is proof against compulsion and hindrance and violence, and
whose impulses are untrammelled, who gets what he wills to get and
avoids what he wills to avoid." 1 For the Stoics, the will, the power of
"getting and avoiding," was omnipotent in its own domain, totally free
from all outside interference in seeking to fulfill the good of the
individual. The problem for Stoic philosophers was to determine by
reason-the power of discrimination-the exact limits of the domain of
the will, so that within th<;m each person could successfully set about
securing serenity and happiness.
Augustine too, early in his career as a Christian thinker, seemed
to hold a similar position. In his dialogue On Free Choice ojthe Wi!1, 2
written between 388 and 395 A.D. to refute the Manicheean doctrines
with which he had earlier been associated, he argues that, because
the human will is omnipotent in regard to choice in the moral sphere
of the created world, it alone is responsible for both the existence of
evil and the fulfillment or frustration of the tndividual's happiness.
However, later, in his disputes with the Pelagians, he argues that,
because the will is in bondage to sin, the individual requires the grace
of God both to will rightly and to achieve happiness and and salvation.
The two positions of free will and the will's bondage to sin seem
contradictory, for on the first hypothesis the individual should merit
salvation or damnation, happiness or unhappiness, on the basis of
the will's free choice alone, while accordtng to the second no one
should be held responsible for acts committed by a faculty restrained
from willing the good by its bondage to the law of sin. And yet it is
significant that Augustine never repudiated either doctrine. Indeed,
tn the Retractations, written in 425 to 437 near the end of his life, he
held that both are necessary for the correct, i.e., the Christian,
interpretation of human nature and the relationship of human beings
to God. But what can have led him to adopt such a stand?
For Augustine, the validity of his polemics against the
Manicheeans and the Pelagians was evident: the truth, through God's
grace, has been revealed to him. If reason is confounded, reason itself
is at fault, not the divine truth it finds untntelligible. His arguments,
indeed, were of secondary importance to him, for regardless of contradiction, the truth had been been revealed and had to be proclaimed.
But there must have been something within Augustine's experience
that prepared him to accept what was for him the truth of divine
revelation. In the Retractations he mentions God's grace, "by which He
so predestines who the elect shall be that He even prepares the will of
3
those among them who are already making use of their free choice.''
But how does this preparation manifest itself? In the following pages
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61
I shall analyze Augustine's arguments concerning will in such a way
as to lay bare the presuppositions and attitudes upon which they were
founded. By doing so, I think there can be discovered a phenomenon
of human experience in which as a touchstone of Augustine's (and
Christianity's) interpretation of human reality, both freedom of choice
and the will's bondage to sin are revealed to cohere and even support
each other.
What specifically, then, does Augustine say of the will? Why does
it exist and how does it function in its freedom and unfreedom?
A reading of Augustine's various writings on the will, especially of
On Free Choice of the Will, indicates that will is the mental faculty by
means of which individuals choose and are able to live and act either
rightly and honorably or wrongly and sinfully. As Augustine states,
"without it men cannot live rightly" (OFC, Book 2, I, 5). Will therefore
grants individuals the ability to choose for themselves between good
and evil. Within the hierarchy of goods available to them from without,
individuals remain morally free, that is to say, responsible, agents.
They freely choose their own manner of living and thus freely merit
happiness or unhappiness and the divine judgment of salvation or
damnation:
Thus it is no wonder that unhappy men do not attain what
they want, that is, a happy life, for they do not also will to live
rightly-a thing which accompanies the happy life, and with
which the happy life can be neither merited nor attained by
anyone. The etemal law ... establishes with immutable frrmness the point that merit lies in the will, while happiness and
unhappiness are a matter of reward and punishment. (OFC,
Book 1, XIV, 101)
Merit lies in the will. Granting the hypothesis of creation, from
this view of the individual and his or her relationship to the world and
God the notions of responsibility and freedom follow quite logically.
On the one hand there is the created world, a hierarchy of goods
ordered according to eternal and divine law ["that law by which it is
just that everything be ordered in the highest degree" (OFC, Book 1,
VI, 51)] and the divine justice andjudgmentimplied by the existence
of eternal law. On the other hand there are human beings, creatures
of free will whose freedom consists in their ability to order their own
lives as they so choose. The freedom is not completely unbounded in
that they can only choose from among those goods presented to them.
For example, they cannot choose nonexistence over against existence
since nonexistence is not a created good; rather they can only choose
�62
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
among vartous kinds of existence-peaceful, unpeaceful, happy, unhappy, wise, or foolish. Nevertheless, their freedom of choice is such
that people can willingly sin or remain righteous, can choose lower
goods as opposed to higher, can fail to order their lives to that degree
consonant with their nature or can seek the best order possible.
Nothing it would seem, therefore, can abrogate the free wiil of the
individual. "For what lies more truly in the power of the wiil than the wiil
itself?" (OFC, Book I, XII, 1;!6). The wiil alone wills itself to wiil, and nothing
can force it to wiil against its own wishes. And if the wiil itself is
responsible for whatever sin or evil there is in the world, that is, if it is
the cause of all turning away from the higher (eternal) goods to the lower
(temporal and therefore corruptible) goods, the individual is accountable
before divine justice because he or she is free to make choices.
The above delineation of the nature of the will was drawn from
Books 1 and 2 of On Free Clwke of the Will, and, although based on
a Christian outlook, agrees with the Stoic emphasis on freedom of the
will. Yet when we tum to Book 3 of On Free Choke and to relevant
passages from Augustine's later works (for the purposes of this essay
to the Confessions and The Trinity), a quite different and in many ways
more complex position emerges. Wholly inconsistent with free will, it
is rather in line with Paul's statement in Romans 7:15: "For I do not
do what! want, but! do the very thing I hate" (Revised Standard Version).
A good transition to this different view is found in Book 3, where
Augustine writes, "When we speak of the will that is free to do right,
we speak of the will with which man was (first) made" (OFC, Book 3,
XVIII, 179). The doctrine of free choice, then, is only one aspect of
human existence in the moral sphere, for there is also a sense in which
the will is not free. Complementing the doctrine of free will is the
doctrine of original sin, humanity's fall from perfection and the
consequent need of divine grace for redemption and salvation. From
the discussion of the freedom to choose between good and evil, and
thus the implied responsibility of the individual, we must tum to a
discussion of the inability of the individual to will the good, and thus
the implied bondage to the law of sin.
The most graphic presentation of Augustine's arguments for the
will's lack of freedom is perhaps found in the account of his conversion
in Book VIII of his Confessions. 2 There we find Augustine in conflict,
tom between his wish to become a Christian and his inability to
renounce his former mode ofliving. This is a hiatus in Augustine's life.
He has overcome the intellectual obstacles on the journey to his
conversion and has acknowledged all of what he considers to be the
truth of Christian teaching. But he cannot achieve the final step. He
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63
is held down and chained to his past as if all his intellectual understanding were of no importance whatever.
The climax of this inner battle occurs one day when he is sitting
with a friend in a garden. In his agony he tears his hair, beats his
forehead, begins to cry. Going off alone, he throws himself on the
ground and prays to God for an end to his misery, when suddenly,
from a neighboring house, he hears a child saying, "Take up and read;
take up and read." Returning to where his friend sits, he takes a
volume of Paul, opens it, and reads the first passage his eyes encounter: "Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in strife and envying; but
put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh,
in concupiscence" (Romans 13:13. King James' Version). Instantly,
"by a light as it were of serenity suffused into my heart, all the darkness
of doubt vanished away" (C, Book VIII, XII, 29), and Augustine finds
that through the intervention of divine grace the long-hoped-for
conversion has taken place.
Reflecting later on this day, Augustine tries to understand the
nature of the will as it manifested itself in this event. "Whence this
monstrousness?" he asks, "and to what end? The mind commandeth
the body, and it obeys instantly; the mind commands itself, and is
resisted" (C, Book VIII, IX, 21). If Augustine could tear his hair, beat
his forehead, and throw himself on the ground in such a way "that
command is scarce distinct from obedience," why could he not freely
will his conversion?
The problem as Augustine understands it lies in the fact that, as
a "son of Adam," he has inherited a blemished will. Because of original
sin, the will is divided against itself:
It commands itself, I say, to will, and would not command,
unless it willed, and what it commands is not done. But it
willeth not entirely: therefore doth it not command entirely.
For so far forth it commandeth, as it willeth: and so far forth
is the thing commanded, not done, as it willeth not. For the
will commandeth that there be a will: not another, but itself.
But it doth not command entirely, therefore what it commandeth, is not. For were the will entire, it would not even
command it to be, because it would already be. It is therefore
no monstrousness partly to w111, partly to nil!, but a disease
of the mind, that it doth not wholly rise, by truth upborne,
borne down by custom. And therefore are there two wills, for
that one of them is not entire: and what the one lacketh, the
other hath. (C, Book VIII, IX, 21)
�64
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Human beings are subject to the struggle between opposing Impulses
of a divided will. Individuals cannot will the good because the "disease
of the mind" called sin divides them against themselves.
But what does this dividedness mean in terms of the functioning
of the will itself? In Book XI of The Trinity, 2 Augustine states that the
will functions as a kind of unifier, which it does by fixing the attention
of the mind upon an object. Thus light enters the eye In a purely
mechanical manner, but the person sees, that is, becomes aware of
the object presented, because the will fixes the attention of the mind
upon it. In the moral sphere, where the attention is fixed upon goals,
the will attaches the individual to the good, and should ultimately
allow one to ascend to God, who Is the source of absolute good, truth,
and being.
The Inner force by means of which the will accomplishes Its work
is love 4 : "But we must remain in this (good) and cling to it by love
[dUectione), that we may enjoy the presence of that from which we are,
In the absence of which we would not be at all'' (T, Book 8, 4, 6). It
follows, then, that sin represents a rejection oflove In its highest sense
and a fall into imperfect forms of Jove-into lust [libido]. for example,
which Augustine characterizes at one point as "blameworthy desire"
[improbabanda cupidite) (OFC, Book 1, IV, 28). This means, finally,
that sin is the rejection of God, for according to 1 John 4:8, "He who
does not love does not know God; for God Is love" (Gr. agape; Lat.
caritas) (Revised Standard Version).
The blemished will, the will of natural human beings after the Fall,
cannot will the good because, having rejected God, it has rejected the
principle of love which would allow It to unite with and "cling" to the
good. From the, for Augustine historical, fact of humanity's Fall, the
bondage of the will to sin is the theoretical correlate. Love for Augustine
is essentially the experience of oneness with the object loved, a binding
together which involves a respect for the beloved's rights and wishes
to the degree that they become one's own rights and wishes and which
Is achieved through a reciprocity 1n the love relation. The blemished
will, though, constitutes a denial of reciprocity because it sets Its own
desires apart from and above those of the beloved. For example, the
lusting will desires to possess even at the expense of the individual or
object possessed.
It is here that we meet the contradiction in the will that defines it
as blemished since it divides it from Itself. The blemished will, just
because It Is will, whose Inner force is love, expresses some form of
love, and indeed this must be so since it is merely blemished and not
nonexistent. Even lust is a form of attempted oneness with another,
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65
no matter how misguided or blameworthy the attempt may be. The
blemished will wishes to unite with the good, but cannot do so. It tries
to love, but is too much in bondage to its own dividedness to succeed.
It pulls itself both ways, and the result is perpetual struggle. And so
love must be bestowed on it from without and grace it with the only
experience which can free it from its bondage and make it whole.
Augustine cannot freely will his own conversion, but must accept it
as a gift from God.
As is evident. the irrgument for the individual's need of grace
proceeds from a radically different perspective than the argument for
free choice of the will. Whereas in the latter people confront the moral
universe as free agents and sponsors of good or evil, in the former they
find themselves in their most intimate experience already determined
by evil intentions and acts. The one position emphasizes the presence
of freedom, while the other emphasizes its lack. Each seems incompatible with the other, for if the will is free it cannot be in bondage,
and vice versa.
And yet for Augustine freedom and unfreedom were related
aspects of willing, and not only in the historical, sequential sense of
the Biblical account of Adam's and Eve's disobedience to God and the
consequent blemished freedom each later generation has inherited.
Original sin is the theory that accounts for an experienced fact; it is
the Apostolic interpretation of the Genesis story, the reading of which
convinced Augustine and other Christian converts of the truth of
Scripture. But this conviction must have arisen from a prior experience of a phenomenon in the human realm that reveals the factual
interrelationship offreedom and unfreedom which the theory is meant
to explain. Augustine substantiates the claim that freedom and unfreedom are interrelated experientially in his Confessions when he
writes:
Therefore was I at strife with myself, and rent asunder by
myself. And this rent befell me against my will, and yet
indicated, not the presence of another mind, but the punishment of my own. Therefore it was no more I that wrought it,
but sin that dwelt in me: the punishment of a sin more freely
committed, in that I was a son of Adam. (C, Book VIII, X, 22)
And in another passage he writes, "For the law of sin is the violence
of custom, whereby the mind is drawn and holden, even against its
will; but deservedly, for that it willingly fell into it" (C, Book VIII, V,
11). The reality of human freedom and the reality of human unfreedom
�66
THE ST. JOHN'S REVJEW
are experienced as a unity, the manifestation of one involving the
manifestation of the other.
But where does the unifYing experience lie? It is not found in a
feeling of spontaneous freedom, for by the very terms of Augustine's
understanding of humanity such a feeling can never occur: The
individual after the Fall, the individual in bondage to sin, is a divided
self and trapped within the split, unable to feel the wholeness and
integrity of being that spontaneity Implies. Nor can the experience be
found in the feeling of bohdage alone, for without some feeling of
freedom, bondage could never be recognized. The experience, therefore, must lie In some phenomenon the occurrence of which reveals
the actuality of human freedom despite the feeling of bondage and
coercion and yet which exhibits the actuality of bondage beyond the
feeling of freedom that is the precondition for the recognition of its
presence. And that phenomenon, I think, is the experience of guilt.
In what manner does guilt manifest both freedom and unfreedom?
The relationship is difficult to articulate, for by analyzing the components one risks losing the sense of the integral feeling itself. Guilt is
essentially an awareness that one has committed or desired to commit
an act of intended harm toward another and the wish to make amends
for it-more, to erase the intention as though It had never existed.
Looking back toward the former intention, the guilty individual says,
"I am responsible for the act or desire: I wanted to harm another, but
need not have wanted to." At the same time, the person asks him- or
herself, "If! need not have wanted to harm another, why then did I do
so? I did so because I was coerced into my decision by the evil
intentions themselves." Guilt presupposes both one's freedom (and
consequent feeling of responsibility) and one's lack of freedom (and
consequent feeling of coercion). In some manner guilty individuals feel
both that they freely chose to intend harm and that they could not
have so chosen unless those intentions had coerced them into it. They
feel at once the sponsor and victim of their evil intentions. And without
the presence of both feelings, the sense of guilt would not arise.
On the other hand, the guilty individual also actively wishes to
make amends for those former intentions. Such a wish involves a hope
to return to the situation that prevailed before the decision was made:
a hope to heal the breach that has sprung up between oneself and the
person one intended to harm and a hope to heal the breach that the
decision and resultant guilt have caused in oneself. It is in this context
that phrases such as "make one's peace with someone" or "make one's
peace with oneself' are used. But to make one's peace in either sense
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67
is to escape one's feeling of guilt since it is guilt that maintains the
feeling of breach.
This aspect of guilt thus reveals the presence of freedom, for the
guilty individual is at last free of the former evil intentions. It also
underlines the presence of bondage, however, for the person can only
be absolved by the injured party. "Why not now? why not is there this
hour an end to my uncleanness?" asks Augustine shortly before his
conversion occurs (C, Book VIII, XII, 28). Guilty individuals cannot
absolve themselves becau~e the feeling of guilt itself pronounces them
unfit to do so. Although they are free of their earlier intentions, they
still feel sinful. The feeling of freedom, therefore, merely serves to
underscore the actuality of bondage.
Guilt, then, is both a judgment (a self-judgment, as it were) of
responsibility and a recognition of bondage-the two conditions from
which Augustine argued for the freedom and unfreedom of the human
will. It demonsirates human accountability before the law and the
need for redemption and grace, which is the message of Chiistianity
as Augustine construed it.
But although I have discussed guilt mainly in terms of occurrences
between human actors, this was not the only moral sphere against
which Augustine earned out his own discussions of freedom, unfreedam, and sin. Nor did he have in mind the purely legalistic sphere
within which guilt denotes the simple determination that someone
indeed committed an act with which he or she has been indicted. "But
Thou, 0 Lord my God, hearken; behold, and see, and have mercy, and
heal me, Thou, in whose presence I have become a problem to myself;
and that is my infirmity" is the way Augustine expresses it in his
CorifessiDns as he surveys the inextiicable tangle of good and evil in
his life (C, Book X, XXXIII, 50). This passage points to the Chiistian
notion of universal guilt, 5 or the individual before the bar of his or her
own conscience and his or her very existence decreed in need of
salvation and justification.
It is here, I think, clothed in the language of theology and born
out of the intensity of ills religious expeiience, that Augustine's
discussion of will discloses its wider significance. "And heal me, Thou,
in whose presence I have become a problem to myself": with these few
words Augustine lifts the inner, specifically human realm of existence
into a new kind of prominence.
Inwardness is, of course, as old as self-reflective humanity itself,
and its lise as a theme of thought can be traced back from Augustine
through Paul, through the Greek poets and dramatists, through the
Book of Job and other Jewish Biblical stones, and perhaps even
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
further through more ancient writings. It is the problem of the
individual's relationship to him- or herself in the world, or rather the
relation between that part of the individual which lives in the world
(physical and social) and relates to the world's demands and that part
which stands free, which contemplates, criticizes, perhaps even approves of and loves the worldly creature, but which stands apart from
it. Inwardness, then, is precisely the realm of human freedom and
unfreedom par excellence,, the domain beyond politics or physical law
in which individuals discover whether they are free or not, and in what
manner they can act on that freedom if it does exist. It is this complex
inner realm to which Augustine refers when he writes of the struggle
between the parts of the blemished will, and never before had it been
given such philosophical importance.
What shift in intellectual outlook did his concern with inwardness
introduce? I spoke earlier of the traditional notion that "the real is the
rational." Augustine's theory, however, breaks with that tradition, for
in fallen humanity, human beings unhealed by the gift of grace, reality
is also the irrational, the divided and conflicted inner self with all its
contradictory desires and needs; and feelings such as guilt, despair,
or love are its "signs and portents," the careful study of which reveals
the metaphysical condition of being human. If previous thinkers
emphasized reason as the essential characteristic ofhuman existence,
as the distinctive feature by which humanity's place in the world is
defined, Augustine focused on the inner relationship of the individual
to him- or herself, with all its conflicts and dividedness, as the essence
of humanity. That essence might be distorted for Augustine because
in his view humanity is fallen. But inwardness for him was still the
central locus from which emerges the definition of what it means to
be human. 6
Karl Jaspers wrote, "The self-penetration that set in with
Augustine continued down throu~h the Christian thinkers to Pascal,
to Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche." But indeed, the influence of his
self-penetration, and of his manner of self-definition, has been felt in
circles far wider than those of strictly Christian or philosophical
thinkers. For example, it marks the difference between the Orestes of
Aeschylus, whose experience of guilt for murdering his mother the
playwright portrays as an external flight through the world pursued
by vengeful Furies, and the tormented heroes of Kafka's novels and
stories, whose external surroundings have become reflections of the
self-vengeance meted out to them by their own guilty consciences; in
a less somber mood, it marks the contrast between an Odysseus
seeking to escape the enchantments of Circe, and a Don Quixote
�STRONG
69
willingly trapped in the illusions of his own imagination. Whether one
agrees with Augustine' religious convictions or not, his discussion of
will has had a decisive impact on intellectual attitudes. "I have become
a problem to myself." With the birth of Augustine's perplexity, Western
humanity's method of interpreting itself enters a new phase .
• • • •
Notes:
l. Arrian's Discourses on Epictetus, trans. P. E. Matheson, in The Stoic
and Epicurean Philosophers (New York: Modem Library, 1940), p. 406.
When I speak of similarities between Augustine's arguments and Stoic
theories, I refer solely to their common conviction that the will is free.
Augustine did not agree with the related Stoic doctrines of Fate and
apatheia (suppression of the passions) and in fact vigorously denounced them.
2. Quotations in English from Augustine's writings used in this essay
are taken from the following three works: On Free Choice of the Will,
trans. Anna S. Benjamin and L. H. Hackstaff (Indianapolis: The
Library of the Liberal Arts, 1964); The Corifessions of Saint Augustine
(New York: Airman! Classics, 1969); and The 1Tinity, trans. Stephen
McKenna (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1963).
Because Augustine's works have been published in so many editions,
quotations are referenced in text not by page numbers, but instead
by the letters OFC, C, or T, respectively, followed by book, chapter,
and section numbers.
3. Quoted as part of the Appendix to the Library of the Liberal Arts edition
of On Free Choice, p. 152.
4. A small library of articles and books could be cited on Augustine's
philosophy oflove. Not only is the subject very complicated, but in his
writings he often uses different terms to mean approximately the same
thing (i.e., caritas and amor Det1, or sometimes the same term in
different contexts to carry different connotations (i.e., amor sui, or
self-love, which can be viewed either positively or negatively). In regard
to this essay, the highest or purest kind oflove would be that signified
by the Latin term caritas, or the Greek agape (in English "charity"),
used in 1 John 4:8 to mean divine love. This divine love is the power
by which the world is brought into harmony with itself and with God
("ordered in the highest degree"). For Augustine, all other forms oflove
have a relationship to caritas, no matter how evil or misguided they
may be, because everything that exists has a relationship to God.
DUectione, derived from the Latin term dUigere, has a positive conno-
�70
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
tation, meaning love in the sense of "to esteem highly": libido and
cupidite, both negative in connotation, are disordered (overly possessive or greedy) forms of love. Whenever I use the word "love" in the
essay, I mean it in the highest sense of "charity."
This note and the discussion of love in the essay's main text are
based mainly on two sources: Karl Jaspers, Plato and Augustine (New
York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962). pp. 95-99; J. Burnaby, Anwr
Dei: A Study of the Religion of St. Augustine (London: Hodder, 1938).
pp. 85-179.
5. Kierkegaard comes to mind immediately when one speaks of universal
guilt, or as he terms it, "essential guilt." But the notion runs throughout Christian theology and thinking. "In the state of sin, the guilt
remains as a permanent awareness of willful disorder, viz., the willful
'separation from God ... "' [The New Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. VI (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), p. 854]. In the state of sin, therefore,
individuals live with the permanent awareness of a breach with God
and thus a breach in the foundations of their own being.
6. Augustine expresses this metaphorically in his well-known phrase
pondus meum amor meus ("my weight is my love"): "The body by its
own weight strives toward its own place. Weight makes not downward
only, but to his own place .... My weight, is my love: thereby am I borne,
whithersoever I am borne" (C, XIII, IX, 10). Augustine never denies the
importance of reason, and in many instances explicitly says the
human soul is the rational soul. But when the topic of humanity's
place in the world is under consideration, it is the will that is most
important, with love as its motive force.
7. Karl Jaspers, Plato and Augustine, p. 119.
�The·Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry:
The Clark Lectures at Trinity
College, Cambridge, 1926, and
the Turnbull Lectures at the
Johns Hopkins University, 1933.
by T.S. Eliot.
edited by Ronald Schuchard.
Harcourt Brace, 1994, 343 pp.
Cordell D.K. Yee
T.S. Eliot's reputation as a literary critic rests largely on a few of his
essays. His most widely read essay is one of his earliest, ''Tradition
and the Individual Talent," which first appeared in 1919. In it Eliot
exhibits his skill at phrase-making, particularly in making the claims
that poetry is an escape from personality and from emotion, and that
the object of literary study is the poetry itself. These two claims have
exerted a powerful and lasting influence on the study of literature, at
least in the United States. Despite the various waves of critical fashion
that have come and gone in the past few decades, attention to the
poetry itself, explication of text, still predominates in the undergraduate teaching of literature. Literary works are studied apart from other
kinds of works-this in accordance with Eliot's notion that they
comprise a monolithic but dynamic whole, a tradition.
It is customary to divide Eliot's career into two phases-his modernist phase and his post-conversion phase, which begins some time
after 1928 when he, an American raised as a Unitarian, declared
himself to be "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglocatholic in religion." 1 The influence of ''Tradition and the Individual
Talent" has led to some neglect of Eliot's later critical writings. Eliot
is remembered most for a kind of formalism, impersonalism, and
anti-historicism, all somewhat revolutionary in the academic world of
the early twentieth century. The moral and religious emphasis of his
later essays-for example, The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) and
Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948)-is often regarded as
Cordell D. K. Yee is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis
�72
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
retrogressive, anti-modemist, even counter-revolutionary, in that it
seems to repudiate Eliot's earlier insistence on the autonomy of art.
The publication of Eliot's eight Clark lectures, delivered at Cambridge
University in 1926, may force some revaluation of Eliot's critical
work-as Ronald Schuchard, the editor of the lectures, suggests. The
lectures show that Eliot's critical thought, even rather early in his
career, resists easy reduction into a set of "-isms."
The subject of the lectyres is metaphysical poetry. The term is
usually applied to sevente.!nth-century English poets like John Donne,
but Eliot seeks to extend its application to Dante in the thirteenth
century and to Charles Baudelaire and Jules Laforgue in the nineteenth. The lectures are an exploration of the ways in which it makes
sense to bring such different poets together under the same rubric.
Eliot recognizes the difficulty of his enterprise. Midway through the
lectures, Eliot says that the term metaphysical poetry escapes precise
definition. Nevertheless, he does identifY what he considers the key
characteristic of metaphysical poetry. Such poetry fuses thought with
feeling: "it elevates sense for a moment to regions ordinarily attainable
only by abstract thought, or on the other hand clothes the abstract, for
a moment with all the painful delight of flesh" (55) 2 · Here Eliot extends
to intellectual statements his notion of the "objective correlative," once
described as a concrete image-"a set of objects, a situation, a chain
of events"-that serves as the formula for a particular emotion· 3
Intellectual statements can also be translated into sensible form, thus
enlarging the world of sense. An illustration of this is Donne's "fusion
and identification of souls in sexual love" (54). Donne affords access to
the immaterial through the sensible; he is able to feel an idea so as to
make it yield its emotional equivalent. Thus one cannot think with Donne
unless one can feel with him: "In order to get the full flavour out of Donne,
you must construe analytically and enjoy synthetically" (124).
The rationale for Eliot's emphasis on the fusion of thought and
feeling is his belief that a precondition for great art is an alliance of
poetry and philosophy: poets at their best have a role in the life of the
mind. It is thus no surprise that Eliot's varieties of metaphysical poetry
tum out to be products of similar historical circumstances. They all
appear against a background of coherent systems of thought, or at! east
fragments of such systems. For Dante it is Thomist-Aristotelian
thought. For Donne it is "the fragments of every philosophical system
and every theological system up to his own time" (203), but primarily
Jesuitism and Calvinism. For Laforgue it is Arthur Schopenhauer and
Eduard von Hartmann. Differences in intellectual background account for the stylistic variations in metaphysical poetry:
�YEE
73
the acceptance of one orderly system of thought and feeling
results, in Dante and friends, in a simple, direct and even
austere manner of speech, while the maintenance in suspension
of a number ofphilosophies, attitudes and partial theories which
are enjoyed rather than believed, results, in Donne and in some
of our contemporaries, in an affected, tortuous, and often
over-elaborate and ingenious manner of speech. (120)
The stylistic differences show up most clearly in the poets' handling of
figurative language. Dante's similes and metaphors have a "rational
necessity": "the adjectives are chosen as they might be in a scientific
treatise, because they are the nearest possible to approximate what he
is driving at" (120-121). With Donne and those like him, the characteristic device is the conceit, the intricate development of an image or the
juxiaposition of discordant elements. Conceits entail risk since they can
lead to a loss of the clarity and precision achieved by Dante: a conceit is
"the extreme limit of the simile and metaphor which is used for its own
sake, and not to make clearer an idea or more definite an emotion" (138).
Conceits, however, can be used as a crtterton of excellence. They often
involve a fusion of thought and feeling. As Aristotle suggests in the Poetics
and Rhetoric, good metaphors have clarity, sweetness, and strangeness:
to metaphorize well means to contemplate likenesses between things.
Metaphysical conceits, at their best, lead to a strange sort of beauty: 'To
contemplate an idea, because it is my idea, to observe its emotional
infusion, to play with it, instead of using it as a plain and simple meaning,
brings often curious and beautiful things to light, though it lends itself,
this petting and teasing of one's mental offspring, to exiremities of
torturing oflanguage" (85).
The peak of metaphysical poetry is represented by Dante: he
"always finds the sensuous equivalent, the physical embodiment, for
the realisation of the most tenuous and refmed intensity . . . of
experience" (57). With Donne, there is some decline in quality, because in Donne there is no structure of thought. Mter Donne, poetry
progressively deteriorates because of what Eliot calls a "disintegration
of the intellect." Poets no longer try to develop both thought and feeling,
but emphasize one over the other. Not until the nineteenth century in
France are poets seen working to right the imbalance.
The brief literary history that Eliot offers is notable for some of its
omissions: Homer and Shakespeare, to name only two. 4 Eliot concedes that not all great poetry is metaphysical, but in explaining the
omissions, he says that metaphysical poetry was an impossibility for
the ancient world, and that Shakespeare was not philosophical. Eliot
�74
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
perhaps had second thoughts about such claims. Shortly after delivering the Clark lectures, Eliot judged them as "full of hasty generalisations[,] unsubstantiated statements and unverified references," and
written in an "abominable" style. It is not hard to justifY this judgment.
The lectures were composed in haste and suffer occasionally from
a lack of focus and clarity, desJ?ite Eliot's profession of Cartesian
strivings to be clear and distinct. The major points of the individual
lectures are not always qbvious, and the course of the lectures does
not always conform to Eliot's announced purposes. For example, in
one lecture Eliot proposes to discuss "the studies of Donne and their
influence upon his mind and poetry" (67). The lecture does give an
account of some of the authors and subjects Donne read in, but their
influence on Donne is hardly illustrated. Eliot says that Donne is to
be distinguished from the writers of the Middle Ages, but by the end
little light is shed on how Donne belongs to his own time and not to
the Middle Ages. What Eliot presents are some generalizations: for
example, that Donne "read a great deal without order or valuation"
and that he "thought in a spasmodic and fragmentary way when he
thought at all" (83)-all this without recourse to Donne's writings,
poetry or prose. Along the way, Eliot gets sidetracked by scholarly
debates and quibbles, despite his statement that he is attempting not
a work of scholarship, but of literary criticism.
As criticism of Dante, the lectures elaborate on what Eliot had said
in an essay dating from 1920. There Eliot refers to Dante's comprehensiveness and his success at making the intellectual perceptible.
He also hints at some similarities between Dante. "the great master of
the disgusting," and nineteenth-century French poets like Baudelaire:
''The contemplation of the horrid or sordid or disgusting, by an artist,
is the necessary and negative aspect of the impulse toward the pursuit
of beauty. "6 Eliot began to compare those French poets to the "school
of Donne" in ''The Metaphysical Poets," an essay dating from 1921.
But as far as I know, it is not until the Clark lectures that Eliot links
Donne directly to Dante to form a line of metaphysical poetry.
As criticism of English metaphysical poetry, the Clark lectures do not
go much further than the 1921 essay. There Eliot had already drawn
attention to the use of conceits by seventeenth-century English poets,
proposed fusion of thouglit and feeling as a gauge of literary merit, and
posited his theory of the dissociation of sensibility, which, according to
Eliot, has hampered poetry since some time in the seventeenth century.
In addition, some of the explanations and analyses in the earlier essay
are unsurpassed in the lectures. A case in point is Eliot's treatment of
�75
YEE
this line by Donne from 'The Relique": "A bracelet of bright haire about
the bone.'' 7 In the lectures Eliot says that this line
is an example of those things said by Donne which could not
have been put equally well otherwise, or differently by a poet
of any other school. The associations are perfect: those of
"bracelet", the brightness of the hair, after years of dissolution, and the fmal emphasis of "bone", could not be improved
upon. (125-126)
In the essay less seems to say more. Alter observing that "some of
Donne's most successful and characteristic effects are secured by brief
words and sudden contrasts," Eliot goes on to say that in the line
quoted above "the most powerful effect is produced by the sudden
contrast of associations of 'bright hair' and of 'bone. "'8 Eliot's account
in the lectures, though lengthier, omits mention of what makes the
line striktng (beyond the incongruity between a grave and a bracelet
of bright hatr)- the sudden contrast of associations: for example,
softness versus hardness, warmth versus coldness, life versus death. 9
At other places in the lectures Eliot does not take the time to discuss
the workings of the imagery. It is almost as if the lectures presuppose
knowledge of the essay.
All this is not to say that the lectures are not worth reading. They
are, though not primarily because of what Eliot says about Dante,
Donne, Richard Crashaw, Abraham Cowley, Baudelaire, Lafargue, or
any of the other poets he treats. The lectures do hold some interest
for what they reveal about Eliot. Eliot was notorious for his reticence
and coyness about himself and his work, but there are places in the
lectures where Eliot's dry humor comes through, as in this belittling
remark about Crashaw:
Subtract from Donne the powerful intellect, substitute a
feminine for a strongly masculine nature, posit a devotional
temperament rather than a theological mind, and add the
influence of Italian and Spanish literature, take note of
changes in the political and ecclesiastical situation in England, and you have Crashaw. (162)
The mathematical form of this statement-it is phrased in part as a
subtraction problem-follows its function, to diminish Crashaw's reputation. Eliot himself may also be a target here. He may be engaging in
self-parody, making fun of his efforts to raise criticism to a science.
Despite this apparent gibe at critical pretension, the value of the
lectures does lie partly in the illustration of critical practice. In them
�76
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Eliot attempts to practice kind of criticism he advocates in essays
published in the wake of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent." These
essays qualifY, if not repudiate, the earlier essay's claim for the
autonomy of literature. In "Hamlet and His Problems" (1920) Eliot at
first seems to uphold this claim: "Qua work of art, the work of art
cannot be interpreted; there is nothing to interpret; we can only
criticize it according to standards, in comparison to other works of
art." 10 Insofar as criticiSJTI involves comparison of works of art, the
study of literature seems 'to be an autonomous activity. Eliot, however, adds that "for 'interpretation' the chief task is the presentation
of relevant historical facts which the reader is not assumed to know."
This statement seems to call for some historical research, but Eliot
does not elaborate. In "Metaphysical Poets" Eliot gives an example of
how historical facts can be used-he relates historical circumstances
to literary style. 'The Function of Criticism" (1923) re-affirms the use
of history: a critic must have a "highly developed sense of fact." A
critic's function is not to interpret, to communicate his understanding
of a work, but to compare and analyze works and to furnish readers
with facts they "would otherwise have missed." Fact cannot cormpt
taste; at worst it can gratifY a taste for history "under the illusion that
it is assisting another." 11
In the Clark lectures, Eliot enlarges the scope of criticism further.
He says that a critic cannot afford to study literature in isolation:
The literary critic must remain a critic of literature, but he
must have sufficient knowledge to understand the points of
view of the sciences into which his literary criticism merges.
You cannot know your frontiers unless you have some notion
of what is beyond them. (226)
Eliot admits that his expectations of critics are formidable. For a
model he looks to Aristotle, the "only writer who has established a
literary criticism which both sticks to the matter in hand and yet
implies the other sciences." Unfortunately for the modem critic,
Aristotle is a model that cannot be equaled, because his comprehensiveness, "in the expanse of modem science and knowledge," is
impossible (226). Nevertheless, in the lectures Eliot tries to practice
what he preaches: on the poetry, he brings to bear history, philosophy, and even psychology. An understanding of Donne's poetry, he
says, depends on some understanding of what Eliot, for lack of a better
word, calls "personality" the very thing that a poet is said to extinguish
in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent." The impersonality he advocated in that essay might apply to practicing poets, but can be
�YEE
77
jettisoned when it comes to criticism. Eliot's polymathic view of
literary criticism precedes by more than a half century the rise of the
interdisciplinary study of literature in the form of the "new historicism," which does not seem quite so new, especially in light of the
Clark lectures. In the lectures Eliot has clearly departed from the
formalist emphases of the New Criticism, and it has taken some time
for literary critics and scholars, in the United States at least, to come
to a similar view.
Eliot's attempts to exp'and the domain of criticism help to make
clear his place in the Western literary tradition. A tendency of recent
scholarship has been to elide Eliot's differences from his predecessors,
for example, the Romantics. Eliot's focus on emotion and feeling in
'Tradition and the Individual Talent," for example, might suggest that
Romanticism had influenced him more than he thought. That may
be so, but to be influenced by Romanticism does not necessarily make
one a Romantic. Influence, as Eliot points out, does not preclude
revolt. Eliot's addition of thought to feeling typifies his reaction
against Romantic notions about poetry, especially as exemplified by
Wordsworth's famous and still influential formula that poetry is the
"spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." Poetry, for Eliot, as he
makes clear in the lectures, is not simply a matter of emotional
expression. At its best it also involves intellectual effort and struggle.
By widening criticism's scope, Eliot seems to be trying to emerge
from the shadow of Matthew Arnold, whom he faulted for not being
enough of a critic. Eliot took issue specifically with Arnold's tum
toward politics, and implicitly with Arnold's much-maligned "touchstones"-specimen passages quoted with the expectation that their
value required little or no elucidation. Arnold represents a danger for
Eliot: his advocacy of treating poetry as poetry could lead to another
version of Arnold's gem-studded crtticism. In the Clark lectures Eliot
frequently resorts to Amoldian touchstones, trusting that lines from
Blake, for example, will appear unpoetic, or that lines from Crashaw
will obviously lack intellectual effort.
Nevertheless, Eliot does succeed in going beyond Arnold's dictum
to see "the object as in itself it really is." On the whole, the lectures
succeed in illustrating Eliot's fusion of the critical and the creative-a
rejection of Arnold's separation of the two. His juxtaposition of Dante
and Donne is bold, conceited even. Some of his critical claims serve
to illustrate poetic technique. They reveal Eliot to be a practitioner of
what might be called "metaphysical criticism." In the Clark lectures
the form of Eliot's criticism follows that of his subjects.
�78
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
The lectures are useful as criticism in yet another way: they help
one to understand Eliot's own work. Nowhere in the lectures does Eliot
mention self-commentary as an aJm explicitly or even implicitly. But
as Eliot was fond of repeating, a poet does not always understand his
own purposes, is not always the best judge of his work. This applies
also to the poet-critic.
Eliot was too self-effacing to say so, but his poetry up to the time
of the Clark lectures fits !)is characterizations of metaphysical poetry.
In "The Metaphysical Poets" he says that modern poetry must be
difficult, for precisely the same reasons that Donne is difficult. In his
own time Eliot perceives a background of disorder:
Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity,
and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined
sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The
poet must become more and more comprehensive, more
allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if neces-
sary, language into his meaning. 12
Eliot's championing of Donne has an ulterior motive. By claJming
Donne for the "direct current of English poetry," Eliot tries to make
his own place in that current, or in more contemporary terms, he
attempts to re-form the canon. Like Donne, Eliot is conceited. The
opentng lines of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," in which the
evening sky is compared to "a patient lying etherised upon a table,"
are as incongruous with their context as what one finds in Donne.
Also like Donne, Eliot is sometimes given to obscurity and displays of
learning. The best example of this is The Waste Land whose allusiveness, indirectness, and comprehensiveness are apparent from a glance
at the references in Eliot's notes. A defense of Donne fro~ charges of
excessive ingenuity and erudition is thus in effect a self-defense. A
statement Eliot made in 1942 lends support to this view:
the critical writings of poets, of which in the past there have
been some very distinguished examples, owe a great deal of
their interest to the fact that the poet, at the back of his mind,
if not as his ostensible purpose, is always trying to defend the
kind of poetry he is writing, or to formulate the kind that he
wants to write. 13
In the Clark lectures Eliot is engaged in the activities of defending and
formulating. He uses Donne to defend the kind of poetry he had
written. In Dante he begins to see the kind he wants to write. His
elevation of Dante's poetry seems to have led him to search for the
�YEE
79
intellectual order he saw behind Dante. Eliot thought that he had
located it in "anglo-catholicism," and this changed the character of his
poetry. To appreciate the change, one needs only to compare Four
Quartets with The Waste Land.
Eliot said that poets do not seek to become great, but simply to
make a contribution. In the Clark lectures, however, we see Eliot
himself striving covertly for greatness, placing himself in the company
of Dante, Donne, and Baudelaire, and setting the terms for the
comparison. What Eliot Wl'ote in "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
applies here: "No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning
alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his
relation to the dead poets and artists." 14 One of the functions of
criticism, Eliot says, is to help decide what is useful. Understanding
Dante, Donne, and Baudelaire, Eliot implies in the Clark lectures, is
useful for understanding his own work. If one function of criticism is
also to help us read better, the Clark lectures seem to fulfill that
function best with the works of their own author.
Eliot had intended to rework the Clark lectures into a book entitled
The School of Donne, but did not get around to it. Perhaps it is more
accurate to say that he did rework the lectures, not tnto a book, but
into shorter essays. Eliot later published essays on Dante and
Baudelaire, which expand on generalizations made in the lectures.
The essay "Dante" (1929) develops further the notion that Dante is a
model of precision, clarity, and intensity. The essay "Baudelaire"
(1930) takes up the moral theme introduced at the end of the Clark
lectures, where Eliot suggests that a renewed interest in questions of
good and evil contributed to the metaphysicality of nineteenth-century
French poets. The essay discusses Baudelaire's moral preoccupations, arguing that his sense of evil implies good. It also commends
Baudelaire for elevating imagery of the "sordid life of a great metropolis" to the ''first lntens!ty." 15 As in the Clark lectures, Eliot seems to
be defending his own work, poems such as "Preludes" and The Waste
Land, which employ images of the sordidness of metropolitan life, and
in which a sense of evil might be said to imply good.
In 1933 Eliot revised and condensed the Clark lectures into the
Turnbull lectures, given at the Johns Hopkins University and now
published together with the Clark lectures. In the revised lectures he
is more forceful in advocating a historical approach to literature, but
is less sanguine about the certainty attainable by the critical enterprise. There are also foreshadowings of later essays: in the Turnbull
lectures Eliot speaks of poetry as "incantation," looking forward to his
interest in the music of poetry-a contrast with his earlier focus on
�80
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
imagery. He also speaks of metaphysical poetry as "civilised poetry,"
a shift in terminology that looks ahead to his essay "What Is a Classic?"
(1944).
By the time of this essay, "metaphysical" had long been superseded
by another term of approbation, "classic." The classic has the same
characteristics as the metaphysical: universality, comprehensiveness, and fusion of thought and feeling. In addition, Homer and
Shakespeare, just as th~y were not metaphysical, are not classic
either. Now, however, Eliot is better equipped to state his reasons:
their societies were not "mature." He had argued in earlier writings
that the worth of a poet's work should be measured by the greatness
of the underlying philosophy: Shakespeare's age was not a mature
time for philosophy. Eliot had also stated that literary criticism was
only the beginning of the study of poetry: it should be completed by
criticism from a "definite ethical and theological standpoint." 16 In
Shakespeare's work Eliot has trouble detecting a deep religious sensibility. This limited religious sensibility is a sign of the fragmentation
of common culture in Europe since Dante's time. Eliot's interest in
the historical background of literary production might seem to imply
a denial of the possibility that poets can transcend their historical
circumstances. This denial might seem consistent with Eliot's earlier
statement that poets surrender themselves to their tradition and with
his preoccupation in his own poetry with the problem of transcending
time. But the denial is only apparent.
Eliot's excursion into literary history in the Clark lectures leads him
not to critical relativism, but to some criteria of poetic worth. Literatures develop and mature. As a result, literary works can be ranked.
"A mature literature," Eliot was to write later, "has a history behind
it"-history defined as "an ordered though unconscious progress of a
language to realize its potentialities within its own lirnitations." 17 In
anticipation of this later formulation, the Clark lectures show that
historicism need not mean neglect of questions of value. For Eliot,
history does not provide grounds for forsakingjudgments of value, but
constitutes a basis for standards of transcendent value. Eliot is a
historicist, but his historicism is in the service of classicism.
This all-too-brief survey of Eliot's later criticism should suffice to
show how regularly Eliot retumed to the Clark lectures. With the
lectures out of view, the issues and themes taken up in the later essays
seem newer than they would otherwise: Eliot appears to be dealing
with fresh thoughts. With the lectures in view, Eliot's criticism seems
more static and richer than it once appeared. It seems doubtful that
he ever really belonged to the period of the New Criticism, though he
�YEE
81
may have helped to initiate it. 18 If in moving beyond formalism,
literary critics and scholars of the last three decades or so had thought
they were leaving Eliot behind, they were wrong. Eliot had already
gone beyond formalism and been where they are now. Literary theory,
it seems, is still trying to catch up with him. 19
*
*
*
*
Notes
1. T. S. Eliot, For LancelotAndrewes: Essays on Style and Order (London:
Faber & Gwyer, 1928), ix.
2. All parenthetical page references are to the work under review,
Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry.
3. Eliot, "Hamlet and His Problems," in his The Sacred Wood: Essays on
Poetry and Criticism (7th ed. London: Methuen, 1950), 100.
4. Another omission is non-Western literatures. It is not clear whether
Eliot believed metaphysicalit;y belonged exclusively to Western poetry,
but it is clear that Eliot valued his reading in Eastern literature: "I am
not a Buddhist, but some of the early Buddhist scriptures affect me
as parts of the Old Testament do" (The Use of Poetry and the Use of
Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England
[Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933], 82). In After Strange
Gods, a piece noted more for intolerance than for tolerance, Eliot wrote
that his study of Sanskrit and Patanjali's metaphysics at Harvard had
left him "in a state of enlightened mystification." He also professed
"the highest respect" for the Chinese mind and Chinese civilization:
at its highest Chinese civilization has "graces and excellences which
may make Europe seem crude." He noted a current fashion for
Confucius, observing that linguistic and cultural distance made it
difficult for a Westerner to understand his philosophy. (See After
Strange Gods: A Primer of Modem Heresy [London: Faber and Faber,
1934], 40.) In later years Eliot seems to have changed his mind about
the accessibility of Eastern works to Western readers. In Notes
towards the Definition of Culture he writes of the influence of the
poetical translations from the Chinese made by Ezra Pound and
Arthur Waley; they "have probably been read by every poet writing in
English." Western literature may constitute a unity, but not one cut
off from the East. Through interpreters "specially gifted for appreciating a remote culture, every literature may influence every other." (See
Notes towards the Definition of Culture, in Eliot's Christianity and
Culture: "The Idea of a Christian Society" and "Notes towards the
Definition ofCulture"3 [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968],
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
191.) Those who seek refuge in Eliot from multiculturalism probably
ought to look elsewhere.
5. In fairness to Eliot, it should be pointed out that he composed the
lectures under trying circumstances: he was not in the best of health,
and he was experiencing marital difficulties.
6. Eliot, "Dante," in his The Sacred Wood, 169.
7. John Donne, 'The Relique," l. 6, in Herbert J.C. Grierson, ed .. Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921). 21. Eliot used this anthology as
a source of examples for the Clark lectures. AB Schuchard documents in
his footnotes to the Clark lectures, Eliot frequently did not transcribe his
examples accurately. In one case, he miscopied "thee" as "tree," so that
two ltnes from Abraham Cowley's ode, 'To Mr. Hobs," become: "1 never
yet the livtng soul could see./ But in thy books and tree" (196).
8. Eliot, 'The Metaphysical Poets," in his Selected Essays (new ed. New
York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1950). 242-243.
9. But in neither the essay or the lectures does Eliot mention how
alliteration helps to unite the disparate elements.
10. Eliot, "Hamlet and His Problems," in The Sacred Wood, 96.
11. Eliot, 'The Function of Criticism," in Selected Essays, 19-21.
12. Eliot, 'The Metaphysical Poets," in Selected Essays, 248.
13. Eliot, 'The Music of Poetry," in On Poetry and Poets, 26.ln 1961 Eliot
said that in his early criticism he was "implicitly defending the sort of
poetry that 1 and my friends wrote." See his To Criticize the Critic and
Other Writings (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965), 16.
14. Eliot, 'Tradition and the Individual Talent," in The Sacred Wood, 49.
15. Eliot, "Baudelaire," in Selected Essays, 377.
16. Eliot, "Religion and Literature," in Frank Kermode, ed., Selected Prose
ofT.S. Eliot(NewYork: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; Farrar, Straus and
Gtroux, 1975), 97.
17. Eliot, "What Is a Classic?" (1944), in his Poetry and Poets (London:
Faber and Faber, 1957). 55-56.
18.ln 1956 Eliot declined to take credit for the New Criticism: "1 fall to
see any critical movement which can be said to derive from myself,
though 1 hope that as an editor 1 gave the New Criticism, or some of
it, encouragement and an excerise ground in The Criterion." See Eliot's
essay, "The Frontiers of Criticism," in On Poetry and Poets, 106.
�YEE
83
19. I will cite one example of the Eliotic tincture of some current literary
theory: "there can be no general theory of canon formation that would
predict or account for the canonization of any particular work, without
specif'ying first the unique historical conditions of that work's production and reception. Neither the social identity of the author nor the
work's proclaimed or tacit ideological messages definitively explain
canonical status" (John Gu!llory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of
Literary Canon Fonnation [Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1993]. 85). This seems . to be a more Latinate version of much of what
Eliot says in "What Is a Classic?" I don't think that I have caught up
with Eliot either, since I am hardly as comprehensive as Eliot would
have demanded. But I owe thanks to members of a preceptorial in the
fall of 1994 for helping me make up some ground.
�84
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�A Suitable Boy: A Novel
by Vikram Seth.
(First published in India in 1993)
Harper Collins, 1993, 1379 pp.
Eva T. H. Brann
What are book reviews for? Some are to vent righteous spleen-a
scribbler has wasted our time, and here is the moment for revenge.
Some are to establish superiority-what an author has made a critic
can now break. Some are to whet the appetite-a writer has captivated
our attention, and now we want to entice others into the same
delighted captivity.
It is this third motive that causes me to report on my recent reading
of A Suitable Boy by Seth (pronounced to rhyme with "gate" or "great").
To persuade one's friends to read even an ordinary-sized novel is a
responsibility. They part with some of their money and invest some of
their life. But here is a huge book, a three-weeks' book for a gulping
reader like myself, or a three-months read at a more moderate pace.
I will venture to attempt to snaffle you into it, and upon my head be it.
Moreover, while you are at it you might as well, I suggest, read
Seth's two earlier books, From Heaven Lake (1983) and The Golden
Gate (1986).
From Heaven Lake is, as far as I know, the latest in that proud
procession of"making it to Lhasa" books. I have a love for.trave1 books
which has become a passion since I spend most of my life in an office.
[fhis passion is aided and abetted by one of our alumni, Jerry Caplan,
A'73, with whom I exchange title for title and sometimes book for book.
In fact, From Heaven Lake went out to him yesterday.) Among travel
books I read most avidly the Tibetan type, for the intrepidity required
of the travellers, for the stupendousness of the Himalayan "Roof of the
World," for the romance of the real Shangri-la, for the mystery of
forbidden Lhasa, for the grandeur of Potala Palace, for the strange
plausibility of Buddhist practice, and-this reading is in a different
key-for the pathos of the destruction wreaked on this vulnerably
beautiful civilization by the Communist Chinese in the sixties. Before
getting back to Seth, I cannot resist here recommending the Tibetan
books of Alexandra David-Neel. the most adaptable, courageous,
Eva T. H. Brann is Dean at St. John's College, Annapolis.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
86
learned and funny member of that astounding tribe of women travellers who for three centmies now have been making distant worlds
unsafe for officialdom.
Seth's Tibet book makes delightful reading, but l mention it here
really mostly because on occasion it breaks into verse. Such occasional verse foreshadows his next book and first novel, The Golden
Gate: A Novel in Verse. (Versification is, it seems, a different art from
poetry; Seth has also published two books of poems, one of them called
The Humble Administrator's Garden, which I have not read.) The
Golden Gate is a California novel-and thus for us orientals a kind of
travel book-written entirely in an iambic tetrameter stanza with a
complex rhyme scheme borrowed from Johnston's "luminous translation" ofPushkin's Eugene Onegin. (On Seth's versified recommendation I bought it, and spent several happy nights discovertng that the
Russian national epic is, of all things, witty.)
"A Novel in Verse" may sound unlikely if not repellent. Seth reports
attending a party
Hosted by (long live) Thomas Cook
Where my Tibetan travel book
Was honored
and an editor
seized my arm: "Dear fellow,
What's your next work? "A Novel... Great!
We hope that you, dear Mr. Seth-"
"... In verse," I added. He turned yellow.
In fact, it turns out to be more readable than many a prose novel, and
for all its playfulness, quite moving. It also seems to me to prefigure
one of the qualities that makes A Suitable Boy so engaging a work-involvement. I mean that each of the cast of characters is involved with
all the others, in selies or in parallel, in accordance with the recognized
register of traditional and contemporary "relationships"-lover, exlover, divorced lover, paterfamilias, materfamilias, counsellor, physician, husband, wife, fliend, fellow-demonstrator, support-giver, and
suitor, unsuitable or suitable. The verse novel and the prose novel-A
Suitable Boy is subtitled A Novel as if to set it off from The Golden
Gate-have this feature in common, that the author has an easy
command of every local tradition and every latest trend, yet presents,
for all his huge absorptive virtuosity, no superciliously scintillating
comedy of manners, but a warm, even loving, account of the human
�BRANN
87
nodes in which these conventional relations terminate, in California
or in India.
Why, besides the reason given, is A Suitable Boy subtitled A Novel,
I keep wondering. What else could it be? Well, judging by its length,
it my be taken for another Anglo-Sanscrit epic. (There is actually such
a book by Shashi Tharoor, a very funny book full of English and
Sanscrit literary allusions, called The GreatlndianNovel, 1989, based
on and named after the JVahabharata.) Or it might be read as a social
history oflndia, (Seth did do a lot of research) or as seven novels bound
in one (Seth had actually planned a series of novels covering half a
century). In fact, it is all of these. But it is, I suppose the author meant,
above all and unabashedly a novel at a time when the novel has been
pronounced a finished genre. Critics have remarked that Seth is quite
unaffected by this news and that he is determinedly unexperimental,
just as if straight novel-writing were still an option.
Here I cannot resist recurring to a favorite observation of mine, a
secret by now so open that the critics have begun to bruit it about. It
is a fact designed to make those of us who wield English As A Second
Language proud and pleased. The English language is about the nicest
thing that happened to us immigrants. It is the thing we gained,
whatever else we lost, and now our debt is being repaid. For while the
language and its literature is under assault by popular carelessness
and intellectual wilfulness in its home countries, the fom1er margins
are coming to the rescue. The most agile, handsome, freshly traditional
Engiish is being written by bilingual authors at home in Chinese,
Japanese, Arabic, and Hindi-to name some I know, by Timothy Mo,
Kazuo lshiguru, Tayeb Salih, and Vikrarn Seth himself. They display
an unselfconcious sense of possession and an unabashed English
literacy. (The character who seems to represent Seth himself in the
book, the eligible young writer Amit Chatterji, has it said of him that
"Jane Austen is the only woman in his life," and Amit himself excuses
the over-a-thousand page novel he is writing by reference to Middlemarch-now on our program, I am happy to· say.) And their novels are
full of novelistic invention-so rich in current content. who cares if the
form be passe.
I have heard, and could in any case have guessed, that the use of
English is a fiercely touchy issue in India, but while the nationalists
and intellectuals argue, the writers write. Seth went home to live with
his family in New Delhi to write his novel, and it appears to me to be
an Indian Novel. At least I seemed to learn a lot about a time in India
of special interest to me, the years 1951-52, half a decade after
Independence and Partition. As readers of my reviews in this journal
�88
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
may recall, I am a great admirer of Paul Scott's Raj Quartet, and Seth's
period falls between that work and its sequel, Staying On. (I hope one
day to learn what Seth thinks of this predecessor work, which he must,
somehow, have taken into account. There is, for example, an invented
city, Brahmpur, in Seth's book, of which "a few misguided souls"
assert that its name means "the city of illusion and error;" such a city
name, Mayapore, also occurs in Scott's Jewel in the Crown.) But then
agaln A Suitable Boy is an.Anglo-Indian novel, and the mode of being
Indian that several of its protagonists display is to out-English the
English. This mode may seem shameful or comical to people devoted
to ressenttment, but to me the point is that these devotees to anglicization succeed so well. Their English is pleasantly and playfully
correct, they have appropriated Shakespeare, and they can quote
more English poets than I have even heard of. ''They," of course, means
Seth himself, whose gift for language play is marvelous. Indian English
is many-voiced, and Seth renders the variants with affection. There is
the nonchalant idiom of the Oxbridge graduate, the just-off diction of
the Midlands university student, the over-correctness of the hometralned official, and, most delightful, the inspired solecism of the babu,
the Hindu clerk. A family retalner, Biswas Babu, has a genius that
way: "a different kettle of tea," advice that "runs off your back like
duck's water," and "commenstruable" for "commensurable." The most
hilarious passages in an often very funny book are Seth's renditions
of the English verses written by the members of the Brahmpur Literary
Society.
The authmial voice is, in contrast, smoothly unobtrusive, to let the
various flavors of spoken speech come out. Seth, wisely, makes no
concessions to the non-Indian reader's ignorance of the ordinary terms
of Indian life, such as titles or colloquial terms like angreziyath,
evidently something like "anglomania". (This guess was confirmed by
a friendly functionary at the Indian Embassy.) In particular, there is
incessant reference to delicious sounding but image-void foods and
drinks. What for example, might a gulabjumam be? A sweet, it is clear
and appetizingly gloppy-sounding, but made of what? So, like life, this
novel requires us to live with and around these terminological mysteries. No doubt a future edition will give in and supply a glossary.
Besides the pervasive comedy of language, the book has some
lovably, comic characters. If you like the literature of the Jewish
Mother, you will love emotive Mrs. Mehra, whose daughter, Lata, is
the heroine of the book, the one for whom "a suitable boy" is to be
found. There is also an irresistible child. (To me the presence of such
a personage, like Petya Rostov in War and Peace, is the penultimate
�89
BRANN
test of an author's skill.) His name is Bhaskar Kapoor. and he is Lata's
little nephew. He is a mathematical monomaniac. For example, here
his favorite uncle. Maan, is taking his leave:
'Bye. Maan Maama ... oh, did you know that if you have a
triangle like this, and if you draw squares on the sides like
this, and then add up these two squares you get a square,'
Bhaskar gesticulated. 'Every time.' he added .
..
'Yes. I do know that.' Smug frog, thought Maan. ·... Do you
want a good-bye sum?'
We would have to invent an AP Freshman mathematics tutorial for
that little genius.
This same Bhaskar nearly dies. This is a novel of ordinary life, and
mostly of middle class life at that. Seth has a gift for making the
narrative run along like a colorless stream of water with a constant
rippling of events. again like life. And then suddenly. and yet again
like life. a torrential disaster comes rushing down. There is the horror
at the Pul Mela. the venue of a great Ganges festival, where crowds
panic, a thousand are dead in a quarter of an hour, and Bhaskar's
hand slips "digit by digit" out of his mother's grasp. The reader, this
reader at least. immersed tn the stream of action thinks. "Oh no, not
Bhaskar!" and an instant later, stepping outside. "Must he-Seth-do
that to us?"
Seth's ability to build up a catastrophe. be it for a crowd or for a
character, by a slow-rising of the narrative flow. to write a tempestuous
episode. and then, as happens in life, to let it die down and stream
away. is remarkable. Equally accomplished is his weavtng of the web
of involvement I spoke of before.
There are four families: the three Hindu clans, the private middle
class Mehras. the political Kapoors. the literately chattertng, coupletmaking Chatterjis, and fourth. the demoted, post-Independence nawabs. the Muslim Khans. The Hindu families are related to each other
by marriage and to the Muslims by friendship. The author has kindly
supplied a family chart.
The bar to tnterreligious marriage is one of the novel's lines. In a
bookstore, Lata meets a handsome young Muslim. "the most unsuitable boy of all," Kabir. She is flipping through Tennyson and he
recommends to her Courant and Robbtns (a delightful all-purpose
mathematics text which we once used in the junior mathematics
tutorial). Passionate love develops. but ultimately. by her own will. she
yields to her mother's wishes. It is neither tragedy or sudden glory,
�90
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
and it reminds us that a novelist's proper function is to make the
non-tragic and the inglortous, that is, ordinary life, deeply satisfying.
Other issues are unobtrusively broached: the obsessive intra-Indian color consciousness, the unextirpated caste system, the struggles
of the energetic commercial classes (we learn a lot about the shoe
trade), the ramshackle and rambunctious new democracy, and the
tenacious struggle of an old religion against modem imputations of
superstition. The point is ,that it is all done through the lives of people
who are knit into a network of blood and social and emotional
relations. Seth's control, his ability to yield to his characters the
freedom to be, while keeping them enmeshed each with all, is what
seems to me his main novelistic virtue, over and above even his
linguistic and observational virtuosity.
To the West, India seems infinite, but A Suitable Boy is only long.
Seth by craft has managed to impose closure on his temporal slice
through her enormous life-though, happily, without foreclosing a
continuation, in Indian fashion. The versified table of contents ends
with a half-promise:
The curtain falls, the players take their bow
And wander off the stage-at least for now.
�Karate-Do and Zen:
An Inquiry
by Jorge H. -Aigla
Do Press, 1994.
James Carey
This book deals with the question of how Zen Buddhism as a practice
can be realized in a setting which might at first glance seem altogether
antithetical to it. The author, Jorge H. -Aigla, has been practicing the
martial arts for the past 25 years, and is currently ranked fifth Dan
(i.e., holds a fifth degree black belt), master instructor, in Wado Ki
Kai Karate- Do, a style of Shoto Kan Karate-Do. His famfiiartty with
the martial arts is broad and deep. After practicing medicine in San
Francisco for six years, he joined the teaching faculty of St. John's
College in 1985. Over the past decade he has offered free classes in
Karate-Do to interested members of the college community. During this
time he has also read widely and has deepened his understanding of
Eastern and Western thought. His book is a readable, intelligent account
of both the spirttual roots and the physical principles of Karate-Do.
Most people in this country think of Karate only as a bare-handed
fighting method of Asian migin. Few, even among its practitioners.
think of it as a Do. The Japanese word "Do" is derived from the Chinese
word "Dao'' (sometimes spelled "Tao''). and is conventionally translated
as "way". Karate- Do might then be construed as a way oflife infused
with the principles of Karate. This formulation is insufficiently exact, for
almost any set of principles, drawn from any sources however dubious,
could be said to constitute a way of life, for better or worse. But Karate,
along with several other Asian martial arts and activities such as
calligraphy, flower arrangement, and the tea ceremony, is held to be a
means of access to and a wakeful participation in the Way, the latter
being understood as an impersonal and underlying, though largely
concealed, principle of harmony immanently governing the world.
Karate-Do and Zen- An Inquiry elucidates the concept of the Way,
which is of Taoist origin, in relation to the Buddhist concept of
emptiness (Sunyata). Mr. Aigla presents a thoughtful account of how
an individual who would take his bearings by these concepts should
regard himself in relation to the environing world, and to his fellows
Mr. Carey is a tutor at St. John's College in Santa Fe and coordinator for the new
Graduate Program in Eastern Classics. He has been a practitioner of Genji Kai
Karate for the past eight years.
�92
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
In particular. Sunyata as a principle applicable to man means primarily emptiness of ego, absence of self-centeredness. In the course of
practicing a martial art one discovers that solicitude for the self Is a
gross Impediment, most conspicuously In those situations where it
might have seemed least dispensable. Indeed, the very expression
"self-defense" Is misleading, certainly as a name for the goal of
learning a martial art, since focussing on the self Is a principal
hindrance to proper execution of the movements that comprise the
art. The more one forgets 'oneself and allows these movements to take
on a life of their own, to happen automatically, so to speak, the greater
one's prospects of achieving technical proficiency and, paradoxically,
the greater one's prospects of successful self-defense should the
extreme situation arise In which one is forced into a fight.
Karate-Do, as an attunement to the Way, comprises specific features that are unique to It and to a few other martial arts. One of these
is the Kata, which is a form, a set of movements and techniques
performed in a prescribed sequence. Each style of Karate has Katas
that are unique to it, though there is considerable overlap, and the
number of Katas included in the different styles varies widely. Some
Katas are quite old. There is nothing comparable to them in Western
boxing or wrestling, or in Western sports generally. The closest parallel
could be found in gymnastics, although there the order of movements
is not entirely prescribed. The foundations of any Kata are the basic
techniques: blocks, strikes, punches, and kicks, executed from a
variety of stances. Mr. Aigla laments the custom in many schools of
rushing the beginning Karateka (or practitioner of Karate) from these
basics into Kata. "Basics are never to be quickly gotten over with: they
are to be gone through patiently and with full commitment; they are
to be lived "(p.55). Only if a Kata is fmnly grounded in the basic
techniques can it be performed with spirit. As the Karateka becomes
more and more experienced in the performance of a given Kata, he
reaches a point where the movements begin to come of their own
accord. "When a Katais well done it actually ends up being embodied
in the practitioner: a Kata is said to be learned only when it is done
with full spirit and emotional content. I say the Karateka 'does a Kata';
it would be just as accurate to say that 'the Kata does the Karatekd
by carrying him through its movements" (p.56). After many years of
practice, "the Karateka realizes that the rhythm and timing of the
particular Kata seem to spring out of the Kata itself: the Kata is
teaching itself' (p.62). Since the movements of the Kata are the very
ones that would come into play in a combat situation, the Kata is
�CAREY
93
properly performed with gravity as well as with spirit. "Kata is the
heartbeat of Karate -Do, one indispensable way into the Way." (p.65)
It should go without saying that the true Karateka hopes that
actual combat will never take place. He is deterrn1ned to stay out of a
fight at almost any cost, though he has developed the confidence that
if he is forced into one he will give a respectable account of himself
and his art. In place of fighting, the Karateka engages in Kumtte, or
controlled sparring. Wh~ther the Kumite is highly formalized and
prearranged or whether it is "free," the Karateka, as Mr. Aigla stresses,
must regard his opponent not as an enemy but as a "partner," and
the exchange of techniques as a kind of"conversatlon." Kumite "is one
of the highest and most beautiful forms of intercourse, conversation,
and empathy; it requires care, restraint, and acknowledgment of
another's humanity" (p. 74). Contrary to the common impression, the
genuine Sensei, or instructor, is not someone at whose feet disciples
reverently sit as recipients of an esoteric teaching delivered from on
high. In spite of the formality that reigns in the Do-jo, the Sensei is a
partner in the learning that takes place. He learns with his students
and from them. Nowhere is this fact more conspicuous than in Kumite
between Sensei and aspirtng Karateka.
AB Mr. Aigla insists, the goal in Kumite is never to hurt the
opponent. Indeed, since self-mastery is the central goal of Karate, the
real opponent is ultimately oneself. Even if and when forced into an
actual combat situation, the Karateka is obliged to use no more force
than is needed to convince his assailant of the pointlessness of further
aggression. Karate-Do is essentially an ethical Way, and the formal
Katas habituate the Karateka into this ethical Way. "Karate-Do is
moral training as well as physical conditioning" (p.l8). Mr. Aigla notes
that most Katas begin and end in exactly the same spot, even though
the intervening motions have coursed widely from this spot. He
interprets this as embodying the Zen Buddhist conception of the
identity of beginning and end. "Katais mora! geometry" (p.61). Approprtately, the sign of accomplishment in Karate is the belt, its color
indicating the rank attained by the wearer. "A belt crosses the tanden
or hara-the belly. It envelops and supports the moral center of the
practitioner" (p.l45). These quotations give one a sense of the prevailing tone of Karate-Do and Zen.
Mr. Aigla treats a variety of other features of Karate with the same
sensitivity and perspicacity that characterize his treatment of Kata
and Kumite. Among these are the way in which the Karateka is to
regard the Do-Jo, or training hall, the bow and what it signifies, and
the Kiai, which is the charactertstic shout that takes place at certain
�94
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
points in the performance of a Kata and during Kumite. Mr. Aigla's
treatment of the Kiai draws from his extensive knowledge of anatomy
and physiology. Without attempting to give a comprehensive physiological account of all the remarkable things a trained Karateka can
do, Mr. Aigla refutes the more preposterous claims that have been
made by instructors who in their zeal to attract students overlook the
fmdings of basic physics and biology. In fact, Karate-Do and Zen is
unusual among books in the martial arts in its combination of
scientific learning and detachment, on the one hand, and openness
to experiences that do not yield to a reductive analysis. on the other.
At the conclusion of a scientifically compelling account of how even
slightly built Karatekas are able to concentrate an exceptional amount
of power in their techniques, Mr. Aigla offers some intriguing suggestions on the physiology that lies behind the increase in power contributed by the KiaL But, conceding that these suggestions are highly
speculative, he concludes, "this augmentation of power comes from
Mushin [no mind] during a true and deep Kiaf' (p.l38). Earlier in the
book Mushin has been described as a "mode and type of emptiness."
(p.57) and as a deep "mystery" that defies logical analysis (p.58).
Karate-Do and Zen contains, as a corollary to the Buddhist principle of Sunyata, an argument against the substantial identity of the
mind over and against the transient biological processes that constitute the body. The arguments and the evidence Mr. Aigla adduces
against "mind-body" dualism, drawn largely from the experience one
has of being a "creature of movement," are provocative and illuminating. Even intractable dualists, such as the Wliter of this review, have
to concede that none of the traditional philosophical conceptions of
the mind-body relationship, from the more subtle accounts one finds
in Greek antiquity to the cruder (and justly parodied) "ghost-in-amachine" models of early modern philosophy, render altogether comprehensible the intimacy of this relationship.
Mr. Aigla has written a book that is informative and balanced. It
is replete with specific references to authors read on the program at
St. John's, and is written virtually in the form of a continuous
conversation with them. The book constitutes a bracing response to
those who are inclined to deride the body as a mere appendage to the
intellect. particularly those by whom the body is alternately despised,
pampered, and debauched. The author makes a compelling case for
how the discipline of the martial arts can assist in habituating
"creatures of movement" into inner harmony, integrity. self-mastery,
and generosity. Karate-Do and Zen-An Inquiry admirably conveys the
ethos of Karate at it is best.
�The Republic: The Odyssey
of Philosophy
by Jacob Howland
Twayne's Masterwork Studies no. 122
(New York: MacMillan, 1993). xiv + 187.
Carl Page
Each volume In the Twayne's Master Studies offers a "lively critical
reading of a single classic text." The readings are Intended to be
Introductions, aimed principally at undergraduates but also at anyone
looking for an Informed yet uncluttered guide to entering-or re-entering-the essential plain of thought in a classic work. Jacob Howland's reading of Plato's Republic does the job splendidly. It is concise,
readable, and animated by a deep grasp of the dialogue as a whole,
brimming over with discussable topics and Inviting elaboration at
every tum. As is fitting for such an Introduction, not everything the
author might have said has been said. Howland has admirably
balanced authorial restraint and pedagogical provocation, without
falling into over-simplification and without patronizing his audience.
In all likelihood there is no comprehending Plato's Republic in a single
book, but Howland leaves no doubt that he has his finger on its pulse.
I know of no other book devoted to the Republic that so straightforwardly furnishes a healthy orientation to Plato's philosophic intentions. It will be of unqualified interest both to first-time students of
the Republic and to their teachers. Yetlt will also intrigue those looking
for further, responsible light on apparently well-worn paths. A most
inviting, helpful reading.
What sort of background material is appropriate for approaching a
Platonic dialogue? Howland deals with the issue straightforwardly and
sensibly. There is a chronology of Plato's life and works (pp. xl-xiv).
detailed in precisely the way beginning readers want and need. The
book proper begins with a short chapter on cultural context (pp. 3-9)
whose topics are: (1) the contest (agon) regarding the best life, (2) the
unique character of the polis, and (3) the dangerously fruitful tensions
associated with the love ofhonor and striving for excellence. Howland's
sense of context is thus far from historicist; it is topical and thematic,
Carl Page is a tutor at the Annapolis campus of St. John's College.
�96
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
therefore useful. This observation applies throughout. Three further
chapters-also short, informative, and cleaving to essentials-address
the intellectual, critical context of Platonic writing (pp. 10-31). Remarks on the Republic as political philosophy precede a discussion of
Aristophanes' contemporary challenge to Socratic philosophizing,
Aristotle's qualms about Socratic extremism, and Karl Popper's wellknown if misconceived diatribe. This puts the topics of sophistry and
political responsibility on the table. A brief section on poetry and
tragedy follows, with special reference to Nietzsche and a mention of
recent scholars such as Martha Nussbaum (The Fragility of Goodness].
In all cases, Howland uses the familiar names to raise and represent
deep, pervasive themes evident in Plato's own work. A chapter on
Platonic dialogue as philosophic drama completes the orientation. It
emphasizes how the poetics of the Republic explicitly and self-consciously draw from tragedy, comedy, and epic all at once, permitting
eros and order, irony and death to become commensurable in the
genre of Platonic dialogue, a genre akin, perhaps, to the all but lost
form of the satyr-play (p. 31).
The Republic emerges as an artwork whose supporting web is drawn
directly from the practical, political realities of the ancient polis and
from the theoretical, intellectual concerns of a literate culture intensely aware of the dynamic, unstable relations between speech
(logos) and deed (ergon). It is far from spectatorial, accidentaL uncommitted; it enters fully-armed into the agon for wisdom, challenging all
previous authorities from Homer on. The tapestry of allusion that gives
so much body to the dialogue, therefore, is essential to its purpose-a
tapestry that Howland's reading makes both compelling and unavoidable.
His subtitle-The Odyssey ofPhilosophy-points to a central motif
of Plato's tapestry: "the homeward quest of Odysseus is woven into
the dialogue as a mythical subtext ofits philosophic action" (p. 32).
meaning that "philosophy ... attempts a kind of 'homecoming' for human beings-not a literal, physical homecoming but a metaphysical
homecoming of the soul" (p. 49). Such homecoming gets its sense from
an embattled estrangement caused by "the multifarious attractions of
full-blown erotic liberty," against which "Socrates must defend both
philosophy and justice" (p. 39). The outwardly political problem of
justice cannot but return to the problem of intelligently rectil'ying
desire. Howland places emphasis on the latter throughout.
More specifically, however, Odysseus's own famous voyage is directly reflected into many details of the text (pp. 4 7 -54). The framework
has three main parts: (1) Odysseus's fantastic adventures amongst
monsters, goddesses, and dead souls (cf. books 1-5). (2) his sojourn
�HOWLAND
97
with the Phaeacians "whose nearness to the gods and freedom from
cares, pain, and toil betoken their distance from things human" (p.
47) (cf. books 5-7), and (3) his retum to the real potis of Ithaca (cf.
books 8-1 0). The three waves that mark the apparently digressive
transition from the severe, purged version of the city-in-speech of the
earlier books to the Kallipolis of the middle books mark "a transition
analogous to that undergone by Odysseus when ... he leaves Calypso's
island cave" and is even~ually thrown up onto the sands of Scheria.
The parallel is suggestiVe. Calypso enchants, yet Odysseus cannot
hide his human longing, just as the purged city attempts but fails to
draw a veil over eros. Yet Kallipolis, too, is defective. It is defective in
direct proportion to the ways that the fantastic kingdom of the
Phaeacians cannot be the real kingdom of Ithaca-an incommensurability implied by the permanent isolation of the Phaeacians after
Odysseus's visit. ''The Phaeacian rulers Alkinoos and Arete-King
'Mighty Mind' and Queen 'Virtue'-provide a Homeric analog to the
humanly impossible hegemony of intellect and virtue in the Kallipolis"
(p. 53). The impossible Phaeacian monarchs are the paradigm of
Socrates' Philosopher King. Socrates, in contrast, "is far closer to the
roving, polytropic Odysseus" (p. 117).
Howland's commentary proper begins at chapter 6, "A Host of
Challenges" (pp. 56-76). He reads the wonderful drama of book 1 with
fine attention to detail, interpreting its development as a display of the
"birth of philosophic discourse" (p. 77), inflected by the as yet unexamined tensions and relations between virtue, eros, spiritedness
(thumos), poetry, and skill or art (techne). Glaucon's interruption at
the beginning of book 2 brings to the fore the problem of "the tyranny
of desire" (pp. 79-84), seconded by his brother's moral indignation (pp.
84-86), a ragged reflection of virtue's discipline. Kallipolis, on the one
hand, and the purged city of the militarized Guardians ("the City of
Adeimantus"), on the other, will become coordinated with the two
brothers in a hunt for the polity that combines the moderation of
Adeimantus's first approximation ("the City of Pigs") and the humanity
of Glaucon's ("the Feverish City"). The fundamental tension is eros vs.
education: "insofar as eros is tyrannical and unjust, it must be
subdued by the city; insofar as it is essential to being human, it must
be nurtured" (pp. 92-93).
The main constructive part of the city-in-speech (roughly, books
3-6) is a ''Tale ofTwo Cities" (pp. 94-118), told as asortofAristophanic
comedy against the epic backdrop already explicated. The tragic
perspective will be integrated later as Kallipolis unravels (cf. RP
8.545e). Adeimantus's city of dyed-in-the-wool Guardians seems to
�98
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
tame Glauconian thumos, but evidently falls to educate potentially
philosophic eros (pp. 94-104). It is not even clear that Guardian dogs
might not yet still be wolves, an instability flagged by the expulsion of
divinely inspired poets and the political need for Noble Lies. Polemarchus's interruption, at the beginning of book 5, on behalf of ordinary
sexual eros and its natural, familial attachments prompts the second
phase of Socrates' epic comedy, an essay in the suppression of "erotic
necessity" (RP 5.458d). "Necessity is precisely what Socrates, with
Promethean arrogance, attempts to overcome in the Kallipolis" (pp.
111-12). Beauty and sex are sundered, as Socrates argues custom
away in favor of nature. Auxiliary Guardians tum into beasts, bred
like the dogs after which they were oliginally modeled, and by the time
Socrates is done with Philosopher Kings they have correlatively turned
into abstract, all but motionless and certainly anerotic gods.
With the image of Philosopher Kings, Socrates has provoked in
Glaucon a culiosity about the nature of philosophy. But the image is
a piece of philosophic poetry, a comic mask, whose partial truths need
fuller explication. Howland thus turns to the different style of imagery
presented in books 6 and 7. The images of Sun, Line, and Cave
"illuminate the 'wandering,' stliving character of Socratic philosophizing" (p. 118). They embody the resources of"Philosophical Imagination
and Prophecy"-the subtitle to Howland's chapter 9. His reading of
these much discussed passages keeps philosophic eros and Socratic
craft (poiesfs) in view throughout. The account of the Divided Line
draws heavily on and duly acknowledges Jacob Klein's Meno book,
while Howland offers his own, relatively extended interpretation of the
Cave in terms of"what could be called the locatedness-within-detachment of the human place" (p. 133). In his lich account, Howland shows
how that predicament is differently approached by the philosopher.
the prophetic poet, and the sophist, a reading that lays the foundation
for appreciating the deep kinship between poetry and philosophy in
particular. For although eikasia ("Imagination") Is necessary for philosophic education, its work belongs to poetry: "the responsibility must
lie with prophetic imagemakers. whose craft reflects and preserves
within the tradition at least some part of the truth about the noble,
the just, and the good" (p. 142).
A final chapter deals bliefly with the dissolution ofKallipolis, a tale
showing that "although our erotic natures bear the impress of custom
and convention they are never wholly mastered by nomos" (p. 150).
The emphasis then falls on the Myth of Er, in particular on the "lottery
of lives," which makes about as clear as can be "the superficiality of
all nonphilosophical 'education'" (p. 151).
�HOWLAND
99
Most students reading the Republic for the first time-though not
only they-are puzzled, not to say frustrated or even outraged, by the
mounting oddities and ironies of the city-in-speech as Socrates and
company move from the City of Pigs through to Kallipolis. Justice does
not seem to get satisfactorily defined, as the reader is led to believe it
might, and Socrates, so skeptical and liberal in other dialogues, seems
distressingly sanguine, paternalistic, and even patronizing in his
apparent political recom!Jlendations. Howland's treatment forestalls
these problems, by simply and convincingly revealing how to begin
reading a text as peculiar as Plato's. He shows how to take seriously
the dialogue's playful, shimmeringly variegated (potkilos) exteriors
without losing sight of its thoughtful interiors. All summaries and
introductions run risk of becoming cartoons, but this is not the case
here. Thoughtful readers are initiated into the demands of Plato's
unique art. From there they may proceed to the hard work of making
Platonic insights their own.
�Results of
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They have won $35 credits at the St. John's College Bookstore.
The crossword contests have now come to an end.
�101
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Kraus, Pamela
Brann, Eva T. H.
Carey, James
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Bojaxhi, Gjergji
Sachs, Joe
Cornell, John F.
Strong, Lester
Yee, Cordell D. K., 1955-
Page, Carl
EZRA
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The St. John's Review
Volume XLIII, number two (1996)
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
Gjergji Bojaxhi
The St. John's Review is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's
College. Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President; Eva T. H. Brann,
Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $15.00
for three issues, even though the magazine may sometimes appear
semi-annually 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.O. Box 2800; Annapolis,
MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available. at $5.00 per issue, from
the St. John's College Bookstore.
©1996 St. John's College. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole
or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
Marcia Baldwin and The St. John's College Print Shop
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�Contents
Essays and Lectures
Hegel's Logic of Desire
Peter Kalkavage
1
An Ennobling Innocence: . . . . . . . . . 21
The Founding of Socrates' Republic
David Lawrence Levine
The Past-Present
Eva T. H. Brann
. . . . . . . . . . 39
Interpreting Genesis Through
The Foundational Symbols of
Earth, Water, and Air
Harvey L. Gable, Jr.
. . . . . . 55
Book Reviews
A Handbook That Provides No Help
. . . 79
William Packard's A Poet's Dictionary
Elliott Zuckerman
Theater and Polity . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
Mera Flaumenhaft's The Civic Spectacle
Arlene W. Saxonhouse
The Human Sense for Justice
. . . . . . 101
Clifford Orwin's The Humanity ofThucydides
Henry Higuera
��Hegel's Logic of Desire
I
Peter Kalkavage
There is such divine hannony in the realm oflifeless
nature, why this discord within the rational?
Schiller, The Robbers
To open the pages of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is to enter a
labyrinth. The Minotaur of these regions, the Demon of Difficulty,
haunts every chamber. The difficulty of Hegel is both legend and
cliche. It tends to be so great and so persistent, so much a part of
how Hegel thinks and speaks, that we rtsk losing our way at every
tum. Early on, Hegel tells us that the Phenomenology chronicles no
mere path of Cartesian doubt but a way of despair. And yet, how little
he seems to realize that his book, intended as a ladder to the absolute,
is itself a way of despair for the would-be reader.
This essay is an introduction to the Phenomenology ofSpirit. I shall
try to provide a thread to guide us through Hegel's labyrinth. The
center of this labyrinth is the self; it is the point around which
everything else in the Phenomenology tums. The word "spirit" or Geist
that appears in the title, a word that also means "mind," is just
this-the condition of fully developed selfhood. Hegel's book tells us
how this condition is achieved. In his commentary on Hegel, Alexandre Kojeve begins with the following definition: "Man is self-consciousness." My efforts take their cue from this definition and are devoted
to an exploration of what Hegel means by the self.
For the most part, I will be dealing with the chapter on self-consciousness. But before plunging in, I want to say a word about the
Phenomenology as a whole and discuss a few of Hegel's basic terms.
The Phenomenology belongs to a quartet of greatest works on the
theme of education. The other three members of the quartet are
Plato's Republic, Dante's Divine Comedy and Rousseau's Emile. Despite their profound differences, these works have important similarities. For one thing, each reflects on education through some
over-arching story or muthos. In the Republic this muthos is the
Peter Kalkavage is a tutor at the Annapolis campus of St. John's College. This essay
was first delivered in lecture form on the Annapolis campus in March, 1995.
�2
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
founding ofthe best city in speech; in the Divine Comedy it is Dante's
journey to God; in Emile it is Rousseau's fiction of playing governor to
a child not his own by nature. In the Phenomenology, too, education
is not simply talked about but presented as a drama or story. It is the
story of how spirit, which for Hegel is somehow both human and
divine, struggles to attain self-knowledge. Another similarity is that
each of these stories is a tale of liberation. Each tells of how man is
freed from some bad qnd enslaving condition~from either a cave, or
a dark wood, or the coiTupting influence of society or, in the Phenomenology, from what Hegel calls "natural consciousness." Finally, and
most importantly, each work in the great quartet explores the relationship between reason on the one hand and action and passion on
the other, between man as a thinker and man as the being who acts
and feels.
Hegel educates the reader by initiating him into the minds of others.
To use a metaphor that occurs in the final chapter, the Phenomenology
is a picture gallery (492). * It presents us with a colorful array of human
characters or types. Hegel calls these types "shapes of consciousness." These shapes are the phenomena or appearances for which the
Phenomenology seeks to provide a logos or reasoned account. In the
course of the book we encounter all manner of characters, much as
we do when we read the Platonic dialogues or when we journey with
Dante through his three-fold cosmos. We meet the scientist and the
warrior, the Stoic and the Sceptic, the unhappy consciousness and
the beautiful soul. Sometimes we meet characters lifted from the
realm of fiction: Faust, Karl von Moor, Don Quixote, Antigone and
Rameau's crazy nephew. All have their place within Hegel's picture
gallery; all are stages on the way to the fully developed selfhood of
spirit.
The single most important feature of this array of human types is
that each embodies or personifies a specific claim to know. This claim
is put forth by the character as unquestioned and unqualified, in other
words, as absolute. Absolute knowing is not just in the final chapter
but permeates the whole. It is present in all the preceding chapters,
present not as genuine absolute knowing but as the unsubstantiated
claim to know absolutely, that is, divinely. This clalm to absolute or
divine knowing Hegel calls "certalnty." Hegel's phenomenologist is a
combination of impersonator and spy: He must infiltrate all these
appearances of absolute knowing, enter into the spirit of their characteristic certainties, and expose them for what they are-mortal
shapes or, to use one of Hegel's most beloved words, moments. The
shapes that come before the phenomenologist, the shapes he has
* Numbers in parentheses refer to page numbers in the Miller translation, from
which I have occasionally departed.
�KALKAVAGE
3
critically "taken on," are self-refuting; they are consumed in the very
process of articulating themselves. In the course of witnessing this
process, a process Hegel calls "experience," the phenomenologist sees
something positive: He sees the logical order of generation by which
one shape gives birth to another. In this way he reconstructs the path
that leads to genuine absolute knowing, to the truly divine.
Hegel tells us in the Introduction that the Phenomenology depicts
the education of natural/ consciousness as it "presses on to true
knowing"(49). The Phenomenology is not about the education of single
human individuals. As we shall soon see, the individual is at the heart
of what Hegel's book is all about; nevertheless, no single human
individual traverses the stages of consciousness. becomes a Stoic at
one point in his life and gets converted to scepticism at another. It is
mind or spirit in its universality, what Hegel provocatively calls "the
universal individual''(l6). that makes the transition from stage to
stage. The universal individual manifests itself in the valious epochs
of world history, epochs summed up by the characters I mentioned
earlier: Antigone, for example, sums up one aspect of Greek ethical
life. while Rameau's nephew sums up the perversity of the modern
world of culture. The individual reader, to be sure, goes through all
the stages; but he does so from the standpoint of "true knowing," that
is, dialectical knowing. He enters into the labyrinth of each mode of
certainty vicariously, playfully. He does not lose his way-at least, he
is not expected to-and he does not share the self-ignorance and
self-deception of that mode. As Hegel tells us in the Preface, philosophy in the form of science has already come on the scene. In tracing
out the logical thread that runs through all the shapes of consciousness, the reader vindicates what he already possesses rather than
learns what he did not know. Education in the Phenomenology. then,
is the education not of conscious individuals but of consciousness, of
universal mind struggling to know itself. What, then, is consciousness? Clearly, we must ask this question if we are to understand what
Hegel means by self-consciousness.
Consciousness for Hegel is any mode of thinking that is characterized by a strict distinction between a thinking subject and an
external object. "External" here means "external to thinking." Consciousness is the subject-object opposition. It is inwardness that is
outer-oriented, outer-directed. Ordinruy sense experience offers a
simple instance of consciousness. I see an apple before me. It is one
thing; I am another. My gaze is directed, vector-like, away from myself
and towards the apple. This is the attitude of consciousness. Consciousness does not give subject and object, perceiver and apple. equal
�4
THE ST. JOHN'S REVJEW
weight The apple is there, it exists. It would be there if I weren't
looking at it The apple is assumed by the attitude of consciousness
to be the real, the substantial, the true, while the light of consciousness that falls on the apple is assumed to have nothing to do with the
apple. In short, consciousness does not merely perceive the object
but values or esteems it insofar as it is an object; and furthermore. it
values or esteems it at the expense of the conscious subject. This may
be termed the prejudic~ of consciousness.
To educate natural Consciousness is to lead it out of this prejudice
that "holds up" objects and "puts down" subjects. Natural consciousness is man in an intellectual "state of nature." In this state he
identifies the true with the natural. Now "natural" here means more
than the apples that exist outside the perceiver. It refers to anything
that is assumed to have either an immediate existence or an immediate
truth. "Natural" means "logically undeveloped." It refers to anything
that is assumed to be true simply and solely on the grounds that it is
given. This realm of the natural as the mind's undigested "other"
includes not only sensuous givens like the apple but also, and more
interestingly, intellectual givens like innate ideas, intellectual intuition,
the categorical imperative and conscience. Man can even adopt this
natural atiitude towards himself He can think of himself as having a
fixed "nature" llke the apple, a nature that is simply given. Dialectic
in the Phenomenology is the logical process by which the immediate
is mediated or thought through, As the systematic destruction of all
givenness, it embodies Hegel's attack on the merely naturaL
Consciousness, for Hegel, is the human condition from a certain
point of view. It is a divine condition, too, a mode in which God as
universal mind appears on earth, appears in and through man: but
for now I want to focus on the human side ofHegel's man-God identity.
In the condition of natural consciousness, man finds himself thrown,
unaccountably, into a whole world of extemal objects. This world
includes laws, customs and prohibitions as well as apples. In his
natural or pre-educated condition, man regards all these things not
only as objects over and against him but also as objects over and above
him. With all their apparent determinateness and solidity, all their
naturalness, they lise up before man llke an overbearing autholity
figure. The attitude of natural consciousness makes the world seem
that way, invests the merely given with authoritativeness.
With these observations we begin to see the moral dimension of the
Phenomenology. Natural consciousness is man's cave and dark wood,
his condition of bondage. The education of this consciousness is the
path by which man becomes fully himself or free, free of the tyranny
�KALKAVAGE
5
of nature and all the undigested othemess that nature implies.
Dialectic, as the mediational process by which all givenness is destroyed, is not only the path to the true; it is also the path to man's
highest good in the form of freedom. As we shall see, this good can
be attained only on the basis of a revision of how we understand
human desire. Consciousness must get beyond merely looking at the
apple: It must eat the apple and then suffer the consequences. This
is what happens at the level of self-consciousness.
The chapter on self-conSciousness is the most important as well as
the most dramatic in the whole Phenomenology. It is the point at
which the book finds its center and true beginning. The three preceding stages of sense-certainty, perception and understanding, important and interesting as they are, form but the prologue to Hegel's
impelial theme of the self. Now the whole Phenomenology is the study
of the human-divine spirit in the mode of consciousness, spirit or mind
caught up in the subject-object opposition. That is why every character in the book is said to be a shape of consciousness. But the three
opening stages represent consciousness in its narrower sense. Here
the thinking subject places the truth squarely in a non-thinking
object: sense-certainty in the sensuous This, perception in the thing
and its properties, and understanding in force. These stages are
objective, not only because they locate truth in an object but also in
the colloquial sense: They are objective in the sense of being detached
or uninvolved. The subject here merely "takes" its object. The subject
is neither practical nor productive; it neither acts nor makes. Nor is
the object in any way a reflection of the thinking subject: . It neither
lives nor thinks. The "cool" detachment of these modes of certainty
stands in sharp contrast with the "heat" of self-consciousness. Selfconsciousness is passionately involved with its objects. As we see
from the opening "fight to the death," its very first manifestation is
that of extreme violence. When self-consciousness bursts upon the
scene in the Phenomenology, it does so like Alcibiades in the Symposium-drunk, tyrannical and full of a truth it does not understand.
The key to the self-consciousness chapter, and indeed to Hegel's
book as a whole, is the violence with which self-consciousness first
appears. This violence exerts its influence over all the characters we
meet in the chapter, not only the warrior and the lord, but also the
Stoic, Sceptic and unhappy consciousness. Hegel's technical word for
this violence is negativity; the experiential word for it is desire. In the
introductory section entitled 'The Truth of Self-Certainty," Hegel tells
us: "Self-consciousness is desire"(l05, 109). The remainder of my
essay is an effort to understand this sentence.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVJEW
In order to get at why self-consciousness is violent. let us ask a
more basic question: Wbat does Hegel mean by the self? Towards the
end of the Phenomenology, Hegel utters a surprisingly helpful answer
to this question. He says: "The 'I' is not merely the self, but the identity
of the self with itself"(489). The self, in other words, is a relation, the
relation of identity. More precisely, it is the act of self-relation. One
is tempted to coin the verb "selfing." The self is not something I have
but something I do;. and this doing is what I most deeply am.
Ordinarily, when I refer to my self, I refer either to my body or to
something mysteriously lodged in or attached to my body. I treat the
self as though it were an object that is simply there-like the apple.
To recall the three stages of consciousness, I treat the self as though
it were a unique This that detles language, or a thinking thing with
properties, or a psychic force. For Hegel all these ways of thinking
about the self belong to natural consciousness, the condition of
bondage from which philosopher and non-philosopher alike must be
delivered.
Self-consciousness is the spelling out of selfhood as the act of
self-relating. It is the experience of what it means to say, not just "I"
but "I am myself." Self-consciousness is the so-called "law of identity,"
"A=A," that has "bubbled up" to the surface of human expe1ience in
the form of "1=1." My selfhood, my act of relating myself to myself, is
the law of identity brought to life. For Hegel, this act of self-relating is
negative or self-contradictory. The reason is that, in being aware of
myself, I hold myself before myself: I am both subject and object. To
pursue the spatial metaphor, I generate an inner "distance" between
myself and myself. In logical terms, I generate the condition of
selfothemess. Were it not for this self-otherness, I could not be
self-aware. But clearly I cannot stop at this moment of distance or
self-otherness, for then I would not be aware that what I hold before
me is myself. In order to be aware of myself as identical with myself,
I must generate a distance and overcome that distance in one and the
same act. Self-consciousnesss is this single act: it is the experience of
being at once self-same and self-other. We have here the paradigm of
what Hegel calls determinate negation. This is negation that preserves
what it negates. In being self-conscious, I negate my simple or
immediate self-identity, my naturalness, and simultaneously negate
the negating. Determinate negation is negation with a positive result.
In this case the result is-me as a self-conscious individual. All this
explains why the "law of identity," "1=1," is an incomplete or what Hegel
calls "abstract" truth. It is incomplete because it conceals and even
seems to deny the moment of self-otherness, without which my
�KALKAVAGE
7
selfhood would be impossible. To be grasped in its wholeness, and
therefore in its truth. self-consciousness must be regarded as the
unity of the self-same and the self-other. If the logical dissonance
within this unity ever came to be resolved in the sense of obliterated,
if logical dissonance were like musical dissonance, I would cease to
be self-aware, I would cease to be.
Earlier I sald that self-consciousness was the spelling out of what
it meant to say "I am myself." What are the moral consequences of
defining man as self-conSciousness, as the being who says "I am
myself'? To address this question, we must bring in one of the most
important terms in Hegel's book-individua1ity. The chapter on selfconsciousness is Hegel's exploration of what it means to be an
tndividual. "I am myself' is the maxim of individuality, the claim that
captures the individual's certainty of himself as an inward or self-relating being. No one who utters this sentence or hears it uttered can
fail to note its assertive, even militant tone: "I AM MYSELF." "I am
myself' is not a mere proposition, the mere statement that I happen
to be identical with myself, but an affirmation, an act of will. In saying
"I am myself," I stand up for myself; I affirm the value and dignity of
my being not just human but this human, my value and dignity as an
tndividual. Furthermore, I assert that this value and dignity derive
from my ability to say "I am myself," that is, from the sheer fact of my
inwardness or self-consciousness. In saying "I am myself," in affirming his individuality, man says: "I am an end and not a means, a whole
and not a part-and I am to be respected as such." In short, this
self-affirmation, this battle cry of the tndividual, is man's ·:declaration
of independence." It is man's unwillingness to bow before any authority other than himself.
The willful or militant character of "I am myself' brings us back to
the violence that defines self-consciousness. The violence we witness
in Hegel's drama derives from the fact that self-consciousness, as
Hegel tells us, is desire. What, then, does Hegel mean by desire? And
why does desire serve to define self-consciousness?
Like every other character in the Phenomenology, self-consciousness starts out in the condition of mere certainty, as an unsubstantiated claim to absolute knowing. Here the self is certain, not of
external objects but of itself. The most immediate or natural form of
this self-certainty is egotism or amour-propre. Hegel's technical term
for this egotism is "simple being-for-self'(ll3). At this primitive level
of selfhood, the individual is all wrapped up in his own utterly private
perspective on the world. He is, in the colloquial sense of the word,
subjective. Because of his intense concentration on his exclusive
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
selfhood, the individual is at war with the whole external world, at war
with otherness. As consciousness, the self was mesmerized by the
apparent solidity of external objects. This worship of objects vanishes
with the individual's certainty of himself. To be sure, the external
world is still there; but it has been demoted. No longer a regulated
cosmos of independent beings, the world is now fuel for the engine of
selfClove.
This negative attitude towards externality or otherness is what
Hegel means by desire: Self-consciousness is desire because, in the
condition of radical egotism, self-certainty at its most immediate level,
the individual asserts himself at the expense of the world. I return to
the apple of my earlier discussion of consciousness. As a self-conscious individual, I no longer want to look at the apple; nor do I want
to understand the natural laws by which the apple grows or falls to
the ground. I want to eat the apple. The desire to eat the apple, as
Hegel sees it, does not derive from my hunger for apples. It derives
instead from my belief, my certainty, that I am substantial while the
apple is not. I set out to eat the apple in order to prove that this is
the case, to demonstrate my being and its nothingness. We recall
Hegel's praise of the animals in the sense-certainty chapter: "They do
not just stand idly in front of sensuous things as if these pos·sessed
intrinsic being, but, despairing of their reality, and in complete
certainty of their nothingness, they fall to without ceremony and eat
them up"{65). Self-consciousness is deeper than consciousness because it knows the wisdom of the animals: it knows that objects are
insubstantial. But, as we shall see, it is also more deeply tragic. In
seeking the annihilation of the world, in giving way to desire, self-consciousness kills off the necessary condition for self-fulfillment.
Hegel's logic of desire is clearly a radical departure from how we
ordinalily think about desire. Desire in its ordinary sense is positive
and other-directed. By this I mean that it is the desire for something,
and that it is the desire for something other than myself. The ordinary
view is echoed and elaborated in various ways by Plato, Aristotle,
Aquinas and Dante. Hegel inverts the two characteristics of desire in
its ordinary use. Desire for him is negative and self-directed. It is
negative because it is the impulse to destroy rather than to acquire;
it is more like hatred than love. And it is self-directed because the
whole point of all this negativity is the selfs affirmation of itself. A
necessary consequence of this inversion of desire is a radical shift in
the meaning of a final cause. Man, for Hegel, is not evoked, called
forth, by some being outside him, neither by the Platonic forms nor
an unmoved mover nor the grace-bearing Beatrice. He is driven from
�KALKAVAGE
9
within, impelled by his very self-certainty to seek the truth of that
certainty through antagonism towards the external world. What man
strives for, desires in the broad sense of the term, is not an object other
than himself, nor a divine condition to which he aspires without ever
attaining, but his own full self-expression. Man, for Hegel, is his own
end. This autonomy first shows itself in man's radical egotism, his
simple being-for-self.
·Desire as the will to negate is most clearly present in the fight to
the death, with which the drama of self-consciousness begins. The
individual in his condition of amour-propre fmds himself in a world
that includes, not only external objects but also other self-conscious
individuals, other beings who say "I am myself." From the individual's
perspective, these other individuals must be "phonies"-thieves and
usurpers of the sacred pronoun "I." Now, certain as he is of his own
selfbood, the individual is also aware that that's all he has-mere
certainty, the untested assurance that he is the legitimate bearer of
the name "I." Out of this awareness is bom the individual's insecurity
and his need to "prove himself." In Hegel's language, he is driven to
raise his mere certainty to truth. Positively, he must prove himself to
himself. show that his self-certainty is even more important than his
life. Negatively, he must destroy the merely apparent or false selfhood
of his opponent, who, we must remember, is also driven to prove his
self-worth.
To say that self-consciousness is desire is to say not only that the
self wishes to destroy but also that it thrtves on what it destroys. If
the object were irrevocably consumed, consumed once and for all, the
self would have nothing to "feed off." Since self-consciousness derives
its sense of self from the negation of an other, the other must somehow
be preserved even as it is destroyed. In the very first experience of
self-consciousness, the individual realizes that killing one'S opponent
is ultimately unsatisfying, that what he really wants is recognition.
The individual who fights for recognition desires to annihilate the
otherness of his fallen opponent. He wants to deprive the other self
not of his life but of his selfbood and individuality, his right to say "I
am myself." He does so by making the other individual his slave. The
warrior at this point loses his nobility in becoming a lord. He is now
"free" to indulge his lower desires: He can eat the apple pie that the
slave has made. But the slave, precisely through his subservience to
his master in the form of work, rises above his master. He does so
because his condition of servitude, not to mention his overwhelming
fear of violent death, has stifled his former will to destroy, his former
desire. The apple pie may he food to the master, but to the slave it is
�10
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
a work of art, an independent thing that the slave makes but is not
permitted to consume. In the independence of the thing, the apple
pie, the slave sees the embodiment of his own independence as a
maker or producer. The pie is not just the product of his work but
the objectification of the slave's act of working, the slave's investment
of himself in an external object. The lord, on the other hand, remains
in his condition of desire. Partly, this is because desire, once gratified,
only repeats itself. I eat the pie, and an hour later I am hungry again.
The result of giving in to desire is just the reappearance of the desire.
But even more importantly, the lord can hardly derive much satisfaction from the recognition that comes from a debased human being, a
being who lacks independence. The mastery of other selves is necessarily self-defeating.
The initial war of the selves cannot help but remind us of Hobbes's
state of nature. Hegel appropriates Hobbes's view that man is by
nature competitive or warlike and gives it a logical grounding, that is,
a grounding in the logic of selfhood. What for Hobbes was a fact-the
first fact-of human nature, is for Hegel the logically necessary
outcome of the selfs dialectical identity, its dissonance of"same" and
"other." The individual is by nature at war with other individuals
because, as a self-consciousness, he is at war with himself. Earlier
we saw how selfhood for Hegel was the unity of the self-same and the
self-other. The clearest indication that I am a divided being is the fact
that I am alive; I am a self-consciousness sustained by and rooted in
an organic body. My body is an "other" that is at the same time also
myself. It is also that aspect of my existence that does not have to do
with dignity and worth. At its most immediate and therefore most
violent level, self-consciousness, since it is obsessed with self-sameness as the sole basis for its absolute worth. is at war with its own
body and life. It feels its manhood undercut or rendered questionable
by its animality. That is why the waning individual risks his own life
in seeking to destroy the life of the other, why the fight to the death is
combat rather than murder.
The dual or self-divided nature of the self has profound consequences for the desire for recognition. For many authors, pagan and
Christian alike, this desire, so closely connected with amour-propre,
is held in low esteem. Perhaps the author who puts the desire tor
recognition in its worst light is Rousseau. For Rousseau this desire is
not natural to man but artificial: It is aquired as a result of man's
membership in civil socierty. Towards the end of the Second Discourse
we are told that whereas natural or savage man lives "in himself,"
societal man "is always outside himself and knows how to live only in
�KALKAVAGE
II
the opinion of others." Against Rousseau, Hegel upholds the inherent
goodness of the desire for recognition. He does so by making it literally
and necessarily the case that man lives "outside himself." In the fight
for recognition, this other who stands before me, strange to say, is
myself. As Hegel tells us early in the chapter, self-consciousness "has
come outside itself' as an opposition between two tndividuals (111).
Self-consciousness is one universal self actually divided into two
individual selves. This numerical duplication is the selfs inner dissonance made actual in the external world. If indeed the other
individual is my own selfbood thrown out in front of me, then my fate
as an individual is utterly bound up with the fate of this other. I no
longer have the option of saying: "It doesn't matter what other people
think of me; I know my own worth." Such "self-esteem" that seeks to
do without the esteem of others is meaningless: it is a falsification of
one's own individuality. Hegel gives cognitive value to recognition:
The violent desire for recognition is in fact the first or most immediate
manifestation of my desire to complete my vision of myself in this other
individual, to reconcile the two warrtng aspects of my own se!fbood
through a reconciliation with this externally existing, actual other.
The desire to be known by another is in fact my desire to /mow myself
in the context of a human community. What the combatants do not
yet know-because they have not yet experienced it-is that genuine
recognition comes about only if it is reciprocal or shared, only if the
one who recognizes me is not a slave but my equal. Nevertheless, fuis
later, mature stage cannot be attained without the oliginal violence:
Progress for Hegel is made not through smooth degrees, nor through
the tempering of extremes, but through the pushing of extremes to
their logical and self-defeating conclusions. The Hobbesian state of
war, the violence of desire, is the very principle of man's education
and refinement.
The negative spirit of desire continues into the second section of
Hegel's chapter, the section entitled "Freedom of Self-Consciousness."
The Stoic, Sceptic and unhappy consciousness are all instances of the
will to negate the world in order to affirm the self. On the surface, the
Stoic seems to be motivated by will rather than by desire. The Stoic
affirms himself. He does so not in the external world-for that is the
place of suffering-but in the unperturbed realm of thought. The
stubborn inwardness of the Stoic, his will to be himself regardless of
what happens to his life in the external world, is what makes the Stoic
violent or, in Hegel's technical meaning of the term, desirous. Scepticism is the truth of Stoicism because it unleashes this violence. The
Sceptic actually carries out the destruction of the world that the Stoic
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
implies and presupposes but is too noble to carry out himself. In the
move from Stoic to Sceptic, arguments replace platitudes. Through
his endless paradoxes, the Sceptic shows that the external world is
riddled with contradiction, that it is altogether tnsubstantial.
Hegel's account of the Stoic is two-fold: lt consists of both praise
and blame. The Stoic's freedom is abstract, just as his talk about virtue
is empty. But the Stoic seeks to express himself and his freedom in
the realm of pure thtnktng, thinking that is no slave to pictures or
images. This bond with pure, pictureless thinking does more than
ennoble the Stoic; it also makes him the precursor of philosophy in the
form of system, tn particular the precursor of the science of logic.
Unfortunately, the Stoic resolves to "think positive"; he disdains the
negative activity that alone could give his thinking and freedom some
filling or substance. The account of the Sceptic is similarly two-fold.
The Sceptic frolics tn negation and so holds in his hands the key to the
divine logos. He, too, is a precursor of sorts. The problem is that the
Sceptic, who is a child at heart, frolics rather than thinks; he does not
see the determinate or positive character of his randomly produced
negations but delights in negation for its own sake.
We TIO'?f come to the crowning moment of the chapter, to the
character Hegel dubs "the unhappy consciousness." It is extremely
important here to remember where we are in the dialectic of
self-consciousness. As I mentioned earlier. self-consciousness, like
every other shape in the Phenomenology, starts out in certainty and
ends up in truth. The truth always contradicts the original certainty.
The unhappy consciousness, in other words, is not merely the last
character in the chapter but the negative truth of self-consciousness
as a whole, the truth that undermines the original effort at self-affirmation. The individual started out as a proud warrior. He wanted
to prove that he was simply for himself, that he was "the genuine
article." In the course of Hegel's drama, the warrior falls; he is reduced
to the status of the humble Christian, who lives only for Another. The
wnour-propre or egotism that fueled the whole project of self-affirmation
at this point is transformed into the obsession with annihilating
amour-propre, into the hatred of self-interest. the desire of desire. The
violence of desire, formerly directed towards the extemal world, is
now tumed back on the self; negativity is now self-sacrifice, and
self-certainty self-condemnation.
The unhappy consciousness emerges from the dialectic of Scepticism. The Sceptic is self-contradictory. On the one hand, he says,
"All things are relative"; on the other, he puts forth this teaching as
absolute truth. This contradiction reveals that there are in fact two
�KALKAVAGE
13
modes of thinking, two selves, within the Sceptic. One self is defined
by its contact with unchanging truth; the other self is defmed by
thoughts that constantly fluctuate and contradict one another. Now
the Sceptic, in his childish way, keeps going back and forth between
these two selves. He is a unity of opposites, but he does not know
that he is a unity of opposites. The unhappy consciousness is the
explicit awareness of this unity within opposition. It is, to quote Hegel,
"the consciousness of Ot;leself as a doubled, merely contradictory
being"(l26). Ever since sense-certainty, the force of contradiction has
been at work in every shape of consciousness. But only now does a
shape actually experience contradiction as such. That is why the
unhappy consciousness is unhappy. not because there is something
outside it that it wants and cannot get, but because its "inside," its
very se!fhood, has been divided and set at variance with itself. To be
unhappy, for Hegel, is to be "not oneself."
Hegel's account of unhappiness is logically complex. It is also
steeped in Christian imagery. I will here confine myself to showing how
Hegel's sentence, "Self-consciousness is desire," continues to be operative. Desire comes up in the unhappy consciousness in three guises.
The first I've already mentioned. Since it is painfully aware of its own
egotism or "sinfulness," the self is continually "down on itself"; it
desires to be rid of its self-love, which it identifies with the unessential
or fickle aspect of its being. Secondly, there are, of course, all those
desires it is seeking to negate, desires that it considers "dirty." But
the third guise of desire is the most interesting and important. This
is the longing for union with the one true Self, the "infinite yeaming,"
as Hegel calls it, for God. This is the first time that God comes up in
the Phenomenology, although, to emphasize God's function in the
argument, Hegel prefers to call Him "the unchangeable."
Man started out in the self-consciousness chapter wanting to affirm
himself as an individual. He tried to validate his self-certainty by
negating the world. In the unhappy consciousness this negativity, the
violence of desire, circles back on the self. But in this reflexive and
self-defeating moment, desire has accomplished something: It has
generated the new experience of infinite yearning. To the unhappy
consciousness, this yearning is directed towards God as the sacred
Other. The unhappy consciousness is the lover, and God the beloved
object. What the self longs for is to be with God in some hoped for
beyond. In other words, the unhappy individual labors under the
illusion of natural consciousness; he is enchanted with some immediate given, in this case, a timeless and infinitely remote God. What
the unhappy consciousness regards as an infmitely remote object is
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
really the divine or unchangeable aspect of itself. This follows from
the defmition of the unhappy consciousness. The unhappy consciousness is a mortal self and a divine self in one and the same
consciousness; or, as Hegel puts it, it is "the unity of pure thinking
and individuality"(l30), where thinking is my self-sameness or divinity, and individuality is my otherness and mortality. If rightly understood, the divine is not a beloved object but man's own selfhood in its
purely divine aspect,, the moment of man's selfhood that is purely
self-same. What the self-consciousness chapter dramatizes, then, is
the logical generation of the divine nature out of the human, the
generation of the universal self out of the particular. It shows us how
man, for Hegel, is the father of God.
What, then, is the true nature of the infinite longing for God? It is
what we have seen all along as the abiding goal of human striving:
Man's inner compulsion to be himself, to be fully htmself. What the
unhappy consciousness interprets as man's erotic longing to be with
God is in reality man's will to be God, the individual's \vill to be
universal. Self-affirmation, having fallen to the ground, rises up
again, this time at a new and higher level, a level that is not characterized by desire. Hegel's name for this higher level of self-affirmation
is-reason.
In spite of its many subdivisions, the Phenomenology as a whole is
composed of only three main parts: Consciousness, Self-Consciousness,
and a third part, which Hegel leaves untitled. Consciousness, we
recall, was the self's fascination with objects. The apple was an object
of intellectual reverence rather than something to eat. At the level of
self-consciousness, the individual regarded the apple only as food,
regarded the whole external world with all the other sgJves in it only as
fuel for the engine of self-love. At Hegel's third level. the individual stops
trying to destroy the world in order to afiirm himself. Here the
individual allows the world to be substantial. He sets out not to destroy
the world but to find himself in it. to give worldly substance and solidity
to his otherwise abstract and purely subjective selfhood.
In this third and untitled part of the Phenomeno1ogy, the longest
part by far, man's quest for selfhood is completed. Man becomes
complete when the logical implications of his self-identity rise to the
level of conscious experience, when man is explicitly or actually what
he is implicitly or in his concept. But what is man implicitly? What
is man's concept? This we have already seen in the earlier account of
self-identity. Man as self-consciousness is the unity of the self-same
and the self-other. Man is the being w~jo beholds himself. How, then,
is man to experience himself for what he is? What can it possibly
�KALKAVAGE
15
mean to experience the determinate negation that is logically inscribed
in man's self-awareness, in man's concept?
With these questions, I reach the last leg of my journey through
Hegel's labyrinth. Consider the title of Hegel's book: The Phenomenal·
ogy of Spirit. Phenomena or appearances, whatever else they may be,
are outward or showy, while spirit is inward and deep. To give a
phenomenology of spirit, then, is to give a reasoned account, a logos,
of what it means for spitit to appear, what it means for the inner to
make itself outer, for the deep to be showy while still remaining deep.
For Hegel, the inner and the outer, self and world, are both necessary
to the full expression of selfhood. That is why desire failed. It failed
because the individual wanted to affirm himself at the expense of the
world. If there is no world, or if the world is just a vale oftears, then
there is nothing solid, nothing objective, in which I might contemplate
my worth, in which I might behold myself. Just as consciousness, in
its unreflective piety towards objects, lost sight ofthe true goal, so too
does self-consciousness in its effort to destroy objects. Complete
selfhood demands that the purity of thinking and the showiness of the
world somehow come together, come together in a way that is not a
mere contradiction or dissonance, as it was for the unhappy consciousness. In the account of natural consciousness I gave at the
beginning of this essay, I laid particular stress on the tyranny of the
external world. But that is not the only tyranny that besets man in
his quest for selfhood. There is a worse monster than the extemal
world. This monster is man's fascination with his own spirituality or
inwardness, man's tendency to become~a beautiful soul.
The beautiful soul is a more deeply tragic version of the unhappy
consciousness. It is also more perverse. The unhappy consciousness
was a lover; it longed for union with an infinitely remote God. The
beautiful soul, too, is a lover, but not of an object. It is in love with
its own inner purity, in love with itself as the Holy of Holies. Whereas
the unhappy consciousness distanced itself, infinitely, from the one
true Self, the beautiful soul identifies with this Self, with God in all
His purity. The unhappy consciousness found itselfhopelesslyworldly
and carnal; the beautiful soul, on the contrary, foreswears the world
and the flesh. Regarding itself as "too rich for use, for earth too dear,"
it treats itself as though it didn't even have a body. In Hegel's
characterization, "It lives in dread of besmirching the splendor of its
inner being through action and existence"(400). Having turned its
back on the world, the beautiful soul simply dies for want of a life. It
vanishes, Hegel says, "like a shapeless vapor into thin air"(400).
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
The beautiful soul dies because it throws away the self-otherness
that is necessary to man's self-identity. Man cannot be fully himself,
cannot behold himself, unless he somehow preserves the world that
stands before him as his "other," comes to regard that world as his
"significant other." To fulfill the destiny of his self-otherness, man
must become reconciled to the world's externality. Man's inwardness,
his spirituality, must somehow come to terms with the outward and
showy realm of action p.nd existence.
The phenomenon of reconciliation is the climax of Hegel's story of
consciousness. At this point God comes on the scene, not as an
infinitely remote beyond, but as a living presence within a community
of selves, as the spirit of that community. The last two chapters on
religion and absolute knowing are Olympian reflections on the relation
between God and time; they stand above the "way of despair," the
Golgotha, which the Phenomeno1ogy attempts to give rational or
scientific form. In this last moment of the phenomenological journey,
two individuals confront one another, as they did in the earlier fight
to the death. One judges; the other is judged. The judging individual
has become enchanted with his own moral austerity, his moral purity.
He has looked upon the Gorgon's head of pure spirituality and has
been tumed to stone. His stoniness takes the form of condemning
others who are not pure like him, the Napoleons of the world, who
have "sold out" and traded in their purity of soul for outward show
and worldly preoccupation. The self-righteous individual judges the
other to be immoral, not because that other has done something
wrong, but simply because he has done something, because he has
allowed himself to have an outward existence and a concern for action,
because he is worldly or secular. To the judgmental individual, this
worldliness is the greatest betrayal of which a human being is capable,
the betrayal of the sacred inwardness that alone makes us worthy of
respect. The judge judges the other to be a hypocrite, someone who
claims to be spiritual or inward but in fact prostitutes this inwardness
by worldly action and concern. The judge is the Napoleon of pure
morality, the emperor of inwardness. He is also a hypocrite, an even
bigger Tartuffe than the individual he judges. The reason is that
judgement, which for Hegel must take the form of outward speech, is
itself an act, a moment of entrance into the external and secular world.
The judge cannot pass judgement on the other individual without
becoming like him. He cannot denounce hypocrisy and also remain pure.
Reconciliation occurs when both individuals admit to being worldly
and in that sense the betrayers of spirit. Each must confess his
worldliness. This is clearly a much more dramatic and difficult
�KALKAVAGE
17
moment for the judge, since he has to sacrifice his purism, abdicate
as the emperor of inwardness. As the judge confesses his own
hypocrisy and forgives the hypocrisy of the other, he gives his blessing
to the secular world he once had cursed. In this moment of reconciliation, each self sees itself in the other and admits to this seeing. Now
hypocrisy is self-otherness: it is the knowing concealment of one's true
selfhood, in particular, the concealment of one's worldly self-interest
and amour-propre beneatl;:t a pious "front." When each self admits to
seeing itself in the other, self-otherness, the moment of self-identity
that had been denied for the whole course of the book up to this point,
at last receives its due. The long-suppressed self-otherness rises to
the surface of human experience. The most important feature of
reconciliation is the change that takes place in the relation between
self and world. With the confession of self-otherness, the external
world ceases to be the inimical "other" over and against the self; it is
now the horne of spiritual manifestation, the place of God.
Reconciliation, for Hegel, is a human experience with a conceptual
or philosophical meaning. Much more is going on in this phenomenon
than the individuals involved realize. In the act of forgiveness, the
hard heart melts. This softening of the hard heart is, in truth, a
dialectical or intellectual accomplishment. The softening of the heart,
the loosening of hard being-for-self, is the feeling of dialectical fluidity,
the feeling of thinking. Now it is the peculiar power and sublimity of
reconciliation to retain past enmity as something that has been
overcome. In other words, reconciliation is the experience of determinate negation, negation that preserves what it destroys. In this feeling
of determinate negation, man can experience, at last, the complete
unity of his self-identity, the being-together of the self-same and the
self-other. In the section on revealed religion, Hegel gives us his
definition of spirit. He says: "Sptrit is the knowledge of orteself in the
externalization of oneself; the being that is the movement of retaining
its self-identity in its othemess"(459). This is precisely the condition
that has been dialectically generated in the phenomenon of reconciliation. In the confession ofhypocrisy, the two selves "come out" of their
private selves, become external to themselves while remaining inward
or spiritual beings. There is now mutual recognition of selfhood,
unlike the one-sided kind we had earlier. The individuals here have
experienced the divine in time: They have become reconciled, not only
to one another but also to the universal self that the individual self
had unhappily fathered.
All this, we must note, takes place in and through language. For
Hegel, the inner must become outer. The inner is by definition the
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
drive or compulsion to be an extemalized inner, an inner that has
some substance to it. The self-righteous judge must not simply think
his condemnation of the other; he must utter it, indeed, throw it in
the face of the other individual. So too, in the moment of reconciliation, the two hypocrites must confess their hypocrisy openly to one
another.
Now language plays a central role throughout the Phenomenology.
Even sense-certainty, 1J.P to a point, speaks. But language acquires a
special importance in the context of reconciliation. For Hegel, language is not 1nere communication but spiritual or intellectual presence. In Hegel's words, it is "the being-there or existence of
spirit"(395). Simply put, language is the outward expression of inward
thought. When I speak, I translate my inwardness into something
outer and real. I make my thought present for my listener and also
for myself. Language is thought standing in its own presence, thought
that beholds itself as thought. But this outward expression is not a
direct and smooth translation of the inner into the outer; it is not
without its moment of conflict. To speak is to betray a thought. In
uttering a thought, I betray it in the negative sense that I tum against
my own dear inwardness and hand it over to its enemy-the extemal
world. To speak is to act. Now comes the magic oflanguage, the magic
that distinguishes language from every other human action. Even as
I betray my inward thought by making it outer, I turn against this very
betrayal and defeat the "bad effects" of externality: I betray my
thought in the positive sense that I express or reveal it as thought. In
other words, language, the quintessential act of man. is the most
immediate, most obvious instance of spirit as Hegel defines it-the
retaining of inwardness in the very act of externalization. Like forgiveness, language is the overcoming of betrayal in its negative sense.
Reconciliation is for this reason not just an instance of Speech but the
logic of the very act of speaking brought to the level of experience.
In the phenomenon of reconciliation man experiences his true
identity, experiences himself as the dialectical unity of same and other.
But man is not fully himself for Hegel until he gets beyond this
experience and thinks his identity, until he thinks the reconciliation
of opposites at the level of pure conceptuality-thought without
pictures. This is the level we reach in the final chapter on absolute
knowing, the level Hegel calls science. At this level, mind, having been
purged of all naturalness or anti-mind, wins the condition of complete
self-identity and freedom. Mind is free to be itself, to lead the life that
is completely its own. In the Phenomenology, man does not simply
come to know the truth; he comes to know that he is the truth. He
�KALKAVAGE
19
comes to know that his concept as a self-conscious individual is
identical with the Concept, with the divine intelligibility, the divine
1ogos, that steers its way through all things. This divine 1ogos, the life
of pure intelligibility, is embodied in the magnificent Science of Logic.
By entering into this life of the mind, man enjoys the divinity that is
inscribed in his self-consciousness. In the spontaneous unfolding of
what Hegel calls the Concept or Notion-Hegel's analogue to the Platonic
Good-man enjoys the very principle of his cherished freedom and the
pure play of his self-identitY. He is transported to the true heaven.
But the divine life of thinking does not spring full-blown from the
head of the philosopher. For Hegel, philosophy in the form of science
is the product of history, the product of human self-identity working
out its many contradictions in time. The Phenomeno1ogy is the history
of consciousness, the history of man as a thinking being, put into
rational form; it is time looked at from the standpoint of mind. The
world for Hegel is not a cave from which the philosopher tries to escape.
For one thing, he cannot escape. As we hear in another work, The
Phitosophy ofRight: "Each individual is in any case a chitd of his time;
thus philosophy, too, is its own time comprehended in thoughts"
(Preface). But more importantly, the true philosopher will not want to
escape. AE the friend of reason, he will acknowledge that the world in
its historical unfolding, the outer world of action and struggle, is
precisely the path along which wisdom is attalned, or rather, generated out of man's self-conciousness. To be rational, for Hegel, is to give
the external world its due, while still revering the inward purity of
thought. It is to acknowledge the world as the home of thinking. This
acknowledgement is the wisdom at which Hegel's book aims. In the
Phenomeno1ogy the philosopher "recollects"-to use Hegel's word-the
laborious process that gave rise to the philosopher's own act of
thinking. As phenomenologist, the philosopher returns, knowingly, to
his prephilosophical origins. He enacts what might be called intellectual gratitude, gratitude towards Time as the mother of Wisdom.
I now take my leave of Hegel's labyrinth; I bid farewell to all its
monsters and heroes. Hegel ends on a grand theological note. He speaks
of time as the Place of Skulls, where spirit suffers and reveals its glory.
My clostog note will be far simpler. Hegel cautions us in the Preface about
our enchantment with things uplifted and remote; he warns philosophy
agalnst ingratitude toward its worldly orgins. This warning is echoed by
Zarathustra, whose plea captures the spirit of Hegel's Phenomenology:
"I beseech you, my brothers, remainfaithjUL to the earth"
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�An Ennobling Innocence
The Founding of Socrates' Republic
David Lawrence Levine
Even the wolf... Phaedrus, has a
tight to an advocate, as they say.
Plato, Phaedrus
Practical wisdom makes provisions
to secure theoretical wisdom.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
The Greeks were superficial ... out
of profundity.
Nietzsche, Joyful Wisdom
I
l. The Deed of Book I
The Republic opens with an act of force.' Socrates is prevel)ted from
returning to Athens, restrained by the others to remain below and join
them in viewing a novel religious procession after dinner (I 327a-8b,
V 450a, VII 514a-515c; cf. X 614e). He cannot prudently protest. He
is outnumbered. But nor, they say, will they listen to him. Polemarchus challenges Socrates to prove stronger than they are (I 327c; cf.
34lb, V 449b, 450a, 45lb, 474a, VI 500d, 509c). The community of
interlocutors here constituted is initially founded on force, the fundamental fact of politics.
Nevertheless Socrates will try to persuade them of an alternative
course of action (I 327c, II 357af.). Otherwise he will have to pay the
penalty of being ruled by lesser men than himself (I 347c). It is the
task of the wise ruler to seek to transform the city based on force into
one based on speech (if only on myths and noble lies). This is no
different for a founder of a community of discourse than for a founder
of cities. The primary task of Book I of The Republic, then, is the
foundation of a human mutuality based on an openness to speeches
David Levine is a tutor at the Santa Fe campus of St. John's College. This essay
was originally presented as part of a series of faculty colloquia at Oklahoma State
University (1984). A revised form was delivered at St. John's College, Santa Fe, in
the summer of 1995.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
(logical moderation).' Socrates' efforts toward this end, however. are
complex and, on the surface, quite puzzling.
2. Thrasymachean Justice
Following the discussion of Polemarchus's common, partisan
understanding of justice as "helping one's friends and harming one's
enemies" (I 33ld-336a, N 442e). Thrasymachus, no longer able to
restrain himself (cf. I 352c). protests that Socrates' view renders one
defenseless and vulnerable. Harming one's enemies, according to
Socrates, was said to be incompatible with justice. Far from sometimes
having to inflict harm, as Polemarchus thought, justice should seek
to make us all better.
"Hunched up like a wild beast," Thrasymachus flings himself into
the discussion ready "to tear [the interlocutors] to pieces" (I 336b). It
would appear that Thrasymachus is himself an enemy of logos and
that Socrates is up against a "wild beast" (cf. III 4lld-e, VI 493b-c,
496d). But are Socrates and his city in fact as defenseless as Thrasymachus presumes? Socrates made it plain in the foregoing that one
sometimes misidentifies one's enemies (I 334cf.; cf. VI 498c-d). The
question arises what fitting response there is to a Thrasymachus.
As the Greek proverb has it, Socrates has had his eye on the wolf
all along (I 336d; cf. III 416a, VIII 565d-566a, IX 576d). One could even
say that his "nonsensical" and "foolish" argument with Polemarchus
was designed in part to incite this wolf. Socrates knows Thrasymachus. 3 He now appeals to him on the (false) grounds that they,
Socrates and Polemarchus, must have been incompetent." They need
rather to learn from someone who "knows," correction and betterment
being the fitting punishment for mistreatment of arguments. Thrasymachus at first understands this to be yet another case of injustice
on Socrates' part. Socrates, he thinks, is being his usual self, deliberately evasive and disingenuous; he misleads the argument at will. 4
That's "the habitual irony of Socrates" (I 337a)! Thrasymachus thinks
he knows with whom he speaks.
Surprisingly, Socrates' insistence that the just punishment for
ignorance is correction through learning is accepted byThrasymachus
(along with some added compensation), For all his supposed wildness,
is Thrasymachus more moderate and tractable than the city of Athens,
the city that not only accused but convicted and sentenced to death
this man who appears to shrink in the face of hurting anyone, even,
it would seem, his real enemies?5
�LEVINE
23
Thrasymachus is willing at least to teach the transgressor a lesson,
if not of the sort that would make the deficient Socrates better. He
says: "Now listen ... the just is nothing other than the advantage of the
stronger" (I 338c; cf. III 412d, IV 442c). This rightly famous statement
is definitive. But Socrates knows that it needs a closer look.
3. The Elicitation
The manner of eliciting Thrasymachus's fuller understanding is
surprising. Socrates' method involves us in an unusual course of
reasoning. To begin with, he seems to insult Thrasymachus's and our
intelligence by introducing an apparently inappropriate counter-example: Poulydamas the pancratist. Because the latter is strong and
eats great quantities of meat, does this mean that we too, the weaklings, must eat large amounts of meat? An oblique example to be sure,
but one that makes plain the distinction between equalitarian and
distributive justice. Thrasymachus seeks unequal treatment.
In his defense Thrasymachus makes it first appear that he holds a
common view. one shared by many: govemments are the expressions
of the strongest group (a theory of comparative legitimacy). However,
in such a view, all govemments are equally legitimate. Were this his
real opinion, Thrasymachus would be a defender of the legal and the
status quo.
To make it clear that this is not so, Socrates reverts to the problem
of mistakes earlier raised in connection with Polemarchus's·understanding of justice. Thrasymachus is no less prone to trip over this
than Polemarchus, for neither considers adequately the role that
knowledge must play. Thrasymachus is led to make the extraordinary
claim that he intends "the ruler in the precise sense" only, that is, one
who not only intends but achieves his own benefit. Socrates cannot
but wonder what is at the heart of this understanding of human
excellence.
Indeed Thrasymachus now insists on this "precise" ruler. The
presumption implicit in the notion of the precise sense is that oftotal
mastery: the perfect ruler, infallible, simply does whatever he or she
thinks. But taken in this way, the ideal of pure action, of acting out
one's intentions faultlessly, is dangerously ambiguous. 6 Present in
Thrasymachus's formulation are the ideals both of the philosopher-,
king (the knowledgeable ruler) and the tyrant (the knowledgeable
exploiter) (1336a, II 36lb, III 409c-d, V 477e, VII 517c, 518d-e, 519a).
Though abstracting from the problem of the imprecision of the
world-one of the fundamental political problems is precisely that
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
people do not know their own good, their own advantage, with
precision-this formulation will require that we rethink our ambiguous thoughtfulness.
To b1ing the problem ofThrasymacheanjustice to a head, Socrates
introduces the analogy of the arts. Now art might be seen as concerned
with its object exclusively, other interests being inessential and ancillary. As such, an art can be understood (ambiguously) to "rule over"
its subject matter. Tflis Thrasymachus readily concedes, but in so
doing he does not realize that the notion of selfless dedication entailed
in such a view leads to the opposite of his real intention. Add to this
Socrates' hasty generalization-"there is no kind of knowledge that
considers or con1mands the advantage of the stronger, but rather of
what is weaker and ruled by it" (I 342c)- which in tum is hastily
generalized still again as "therefore ... there isn't ever anyone who holds
any position of rule, insofar as he is ruler, who considers or commands
his own advantage" (I 342e), and we have a conclusion that confounds
not only Thrasymachus, but us as well.
Unable to see his way clear of this thicket of tacit presuppositions
and hasty generalizations, Thrasyrnachus resorts to defamation of
_character: the sniveling Socrates must have been overprotected by his
wet-nurse (I 343a). Of all men, he would appear to be ignorant of what
in Thrasymachus's view-and not only his-is the most significant
fact of life: the fundamental difference between the shepherd and the
sheep. It is clear to everyone who has not lost his good sense (I 348d)
and his way amidst the tangle of abstract arguments that the shepherd
fatten3 his sheep for slaughter, for dinner and for his and his master's
bank account, in short "for his own advantage."
While appearing blind, Socrates' obtuseness yet forces Thrasymachus to be more explicit. Indeed, only now is the latter candi(l. As
Socrates suspected all along, Thrasymachus here admits that it is
rather injustice that leads to happiness: justice only leads to "getting
less" (I 343d). Not the higher ground of comparative governments,
then, but the lower ground of acquisitiveness and "getting more"
(pleonexia) recommends his view.
By leading Thrasymachus to think that justice understood as an
art can only serve the good of that over which it is an art "in the precise
sense," Socrates has forced him to say what he really thinks but had
been reluctant to put into words (cf. I 336c and 338b). Thrasymachus
now declares: "as I have said from the beginning"-that is, as he has
secretly thought and intended from the beginning-injustice is "freer,
mightier, and more masterful than justice" (I 344c). This is his final
word. So, having made known his "better opinion" (I 337d), and with
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25
no further sense of obligation to the others (I 344e), he prepares to
leave this community of discourse.
4. A Questionable Analysis
The justice of Socrates and the others, however, prevents Thrasymachus from leaving (cf. I 327a-c). The question of injustice after all
is not an indifferent one (cf. IX. 545f.). Tyranny is a deep human
temptation (the dialogue proper is framed by the question of tyranny,
cf. II 358-367, IX 57lb-d, 592b, X 615a-6b, 618a, 619a, b-d). Behind
our uncertain conviction that justice is a good lies our experience and
doubts to the contrary-, as well as the indiscriminateness of our desires
(cf. I 347e, II 359bf., IX 572b, 588c-9a). 7 Socrates is especia.lly
concemed with the effect that such praise would have on Glaucon and
the others (I 34 7 e). He must do what he can.
Socrates begins his exposition by pointing up a contradiction that
follows from Thrasymachus's newly revised view. The secret admiration of the unjust man clearly violates their earlier agreement to think
of the artisan in Socrates' precise sense. Precise speech divorces the
other-concern of the arts from the accompanying self-concern of the
artisan. Moreover, it makes it appear that the former cannot be a
means to the latter but is exclusively an end in itself. By appearing
blind to what in Thrasymachus's view is man's underlying essence-his acquisitiveness and desire for more-Socrates again flabbergasts his interlocutor.' He perplexes him still further when he
makes it appear that the sought after offices of the rulers are not only
not choiceworthy in themselves but actually onerous burdens, the
precise opposite of what Thrasymachus holds. Socrates' arguments
are stunning; the wolf ceases to howl.
Yet the claims for injustice, though silenced for the moment, have
not in fact been refuted (II 358-367). The question remains whether
" ... the life of the unjust man is [indeed] stronger than that of the just
man" (I 347e). Socrates therefore undertakes to counter this.
In Thrasymachus's view what we call justice is, quite frankly, a kind
of "noble innocence." By contrast, injustice is "prudent counsel" (I
348c; cf. X 598d). The implicit equation here of the unjust with the
good and the wise needs to be put into question. Socrates does this
by interpreting him to mean that "the unjust tries to get the better of
the like and the unlike" (I 350b), therewith highlighting its implicit
claims to domination. With the very questionable, indeed false, premise that "each is such as those of whom it is like" (I 349d)-because
this looks like a good argument surely does not mean that it is a good
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
argument (cf. V 476c)-along with the ambiguous use of the expression "to get the better of," Socrates manages to invert the matter and
conclude that "the just man is like the wise and the good and the
unjust man like the bad and the unlearned" (I 350c). Again the very
opposite of what Thrasymachus holds is made to appear to be so.
Thrasymachus, silenced again, now sweats, indeed even blushes. 9
He feels what he cannot see for himself, the lack of sufficiency of his
views. But the cause pf the reddening is not logic, the victory not one
of reason. He blushes because he has been defeated by rhetoric, by
his own craft. Thrasymachus has been given a taste of his own justice
and he doesn't like it. The "advantage of the stronger" all of a sudden
doesn't feel like justice to him (cf. IX 582a). Nevertheless we witness
a surprtsing reversal of aggression. Thrasymachus surrenders. From
now on, he says, he'll just "nod" like an old woman listening to tales
(I 350e).
This is not the end of Socrates' logical rapaciousness, however. Next
he considers whethe_r injustice is "more powerful and mightier" than
justice (I 35la). Shunting the question of the injustice of others from
view, Socrates points out that injustice seems to lead to "factions,
hatreds and quarrels." In light of this it would appear that an unjust
society is inherently unstable, indeed bent on self-destruction. Applying this to an individual, it would seem to follow that injustice renders
one "not of one mind with himself" and "unable to accomplish
anything" (I 35le-352a). History notwithstanding, the unjust would
seem to be intrinsically ineffective. Tyrants are not capable of the
enslavement of whole peoples. Indeed it appears to be a logical
impossibility.
Socrates' amazing resourcefulness-his word wizardry-proves too
much for Thrasymachus (and us?). If Thrasymachus was compliant
before, he is totally acquiescent now. The wolf bares his belly. Recognizing Socrates' logical ravenousness, Thrasymachus concedes yet
again: "Feast yourself on the argument, for I won't oppose you ... " (I
352b). He is defenseless (an oblique proof that tyrants are inefficacious?). Yet he should oppose Socrates. That there is some measure
of disorder among thieves surely does not mean that thieves are totally
ineffective. Socrates has only shown that it is not the injustice in the
"precise sense" that Thrasymachus imagines. This is hardly decisive
(as Socrates admits at I 352b-c, 11 361 a).
The banquet and the feasting are not quite over, though. "Come ...
fill out the rest of the banquet for me," is all the word-weary Thrasymachus can now muster. His innermost thoughts have been made a
meal of. The last argument in this three-course dinner concerns the
�27
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question whether the unjust "live better." "They look as though they
[do] ... ," Socrates grants (I 352d; cf. II 358-367, III 379c, X 613a). His
reply tums on the meaning of the middle term arete, or excellence.
Socrates would have it that each species, indeed each functioning
being, has a special "work" (ergon) that "one can only do with it or best
with it." Indeed the soul has its excellence as well. The good life, then,
is not possible without it. Therefore the life of injustice cannot be better
than that of justice. ClearlY the argument rests on ambiguity: the
ambiguity of "the good life" and of excellence itself. w
After such a dizzying argument, Thrasymachus can only hope that
Socrates' logical indulgence is at its end, that he has had , as he says,
" ... his fill at the festival of Ben dis" (I 354a). Socrates' eagemess has
led him to giuttony, however. Indeed he even regrets what he has done:
I am like the gluttons who grab at whatever is set
before them to get a taste of it, before they have in
proper measure enjoyed what went before ... I have not
had a fine banquet, ... it's my own fault ... " [I 354b; cf. I
337a, 340d, II 357a, 358b, Ill 413b).
Above all, the question of the supelimity of justice to injustice
remains. The claims for injustice are only further accented by Socrates' own actions. Hasn't Socrates unjustly treated the arguments,
unjustly treated Thrasymachus?
II
5. Socrates' Self-indictment
What is one to conclude from this strange business? Socrates was
indiscriminate, Thrasymachus undiscriminating. Socrates' own selfassessment is categorical: "as a result of the discussion, I know
nothing" (I 354c). This is neither modesty nor irony. Indeed the fearful
prospect presents itself that we are in an even worse position with
respect to the question of injustice than when we began (as Glaucon
and Adeimantus see well, II 357a).
Thrasymachus was light: Socrates feasted himself on the arguments. And although it was the case that he saw what Socrates had
done to the other interlocutors better than he was able to see what
Socrates did to him, still it was true, as Thrasymachus observed,
Socrates did not come out from behind his questions (cf. I 338b). And
if one can infer the intention from the result, one might suspect with
Thrasymachus that Socrates was bent on victory and advantage after
all. This supports the popular suspicion of Socrates' dialectic as
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
essentially dissembling and destructive. But do Thrasyrnachus and
the populace know Socrates?
This master of the logos and of question and answer astonished us
with his numerous fallacies and paralogisms, yet he was victorious.
(If we could offer a casual list, it would include: oblique examples,
deflecting abstractions, rampant ambiguity, obtuseness, evasion of
the issue, and, for want of a better phrase, preposterous counterfactualism.) Although e)ements of his arguments were defective, the
argument proved overwhelmtng as a whole (cf. VI 487b-c). We cannot
avoid the conclusion that Socrates not only knows rhetoric in the
abstract, but that he is a master of it in practice. 11 Horrible to think,
he knows how "to make the weaker argument the stronger." This
disappoints our modem expectations. We would rather have seen
Thrasyrnachus defenseless before the onslaught of a rapier-like and
trenchant logic. 12 This wasn't what happened. Thrasymachus "was
tom to pieces" (cf. I 336b) to be sure, but he is a victim of his own
sophisticated trade.
This is potentially disillusioning. We are made to wonder about this
figure before us. Was the respect we had for Socrates not based on
careful insight into who he is? He used word wizardry: he violated
logical rules. The question is what he does with this ambiguous
knowledge. Has he committed an act of injustice? If so, should we not
join with the people of Athens and indict Socrates for-sophistry? But
"like" is not the same as "is," no matter what Socrates may have said
earlier to the contrary (cf. V 476c, X 596e, 598a, 60lb, 607a).
6. Prelogical Prologue
Indeed before we condemn him, let us recall the cin:;umstances and
context of the discussion. At the very outset of the dialogue. we
encountered the basic fact of political life: force. There it was made
clear that unless people are willing to listen, force will rule unchallenged. In this way we were brought to realize too that a community
of discourse should never be taken as a preexistent given, for it is not
"by nature" but is a human accomplishment and as such is precartous. A community of speech is always vulnerable to deteriorating into
a community of force. Logos, then, is not the uncontested ruler of
human affairs. There are preconditions to its holding sway. Socrates,
then, has first to attempt to lay the foundations of an altemative, more
rational and juster community.
And it was the figure ofThrasyrnachus, more than any ofthe others,
that threatened the openness and mutuality necessary for discussion.
�LEVINE
29
·Thus, before Socrates could persuade Thrasymachus of any
truths-and before logic in its refined and schematic forms could have
any approprtateness and reasonable effectiveness-the "wild beast"
either had to be done away with (cf. the treatment of Cephalus) or
"tamed" (cf. I 354b, V 470e). Socrates chose the less violent, altemative
course. He knows Thrasymachus (cf. I 327c, VI 498c-d). But even so,
one does not, indeed cannot, tame with logic those who do not listen.
In this political sense, logic is not an independent science, nor is it
first in the order of human things. Even it presupposes the political
arts.
13
We need, then, to acknowledge the political function of speech, the
founding function of speech above all. Without it there exists no arena
for dialogue or for thought. A contextiess speech falls to communicate;
"mere words'' do not speak "to" anyone. It is thus a very great reduction
to think that logos can be properly translated by "reason" or "logic."
There is more to logos than in our overly abstract and reductively
narrowed sense of philosophy.
Otherwise, we will not be able to see that, despite the "blunders,"
what is enacted here is a just logos in deed. Book One ofThe Republic
is precisely what it is, the first and preparatory book to that which
follows. As such it is also an indispensable prtmer in political founding.
7. The Logos of Force
One may object that Socrates has gone too far in his forceful
"taming" ofthe "wild beast." Even accepting the necessity of moderating and taming that which, if given enough rein, would overthrow the
very basis of the life of dialogue, we might yet regret that the vital
Thrasymachus has not only been logically reproached but, further,
denatured and incapacitated (cf. VII 519e, IX 590c-d).
Such a view rests on an underestimate of opinion. Despite the fact
that Socrates everywhere insists on a distinction between opinion and
knowledge, it is yet a significant misunderstanding to think that for
him opinions are ever "mere opinions." Although knowledge has "a
greater reality" (V 477e-8a), opinions should not be discounted to the
point that we no longer see their consequential natures and human
or political significance. Above all, they are not a thing of the mind
alone, confined to some restrtcted sphere of self-relation called "subjectivity" and thus a matter of "personal perspective" with no beartng
on life and action. The medium of the polis and of human life is opinion.
We are doxic beings.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Opinions, then, are not disengaged abstractions but first of all
expressions of a particular opiner. Truly candid opinions {those not
interposed to camouflage our secret thoughts). once elicited, are
revelations of the being of the speaker, who he or she is. We choose
what we think; we act out what we think; we live what we think; we
are what we think (the multiple difficulties therewith notwithstand·
ing). Opinions define the person, then. They are formative-preform·
ing, informing, transforming, deforming-and thus they bespeak and
perform a life (IX 574d). Socratic discussions seek to go to the quick
and expose the deeper "logic" beneath: the defining logos of a soul,
and thus constitute a philosophical psychoanalysis ("the art of creep·
ing into souls": IX 576a·7b, 578d, 579e; cf. VI 500d).
Thus it is not a matter of abstracted definitions, but of the lives
they bespeak-here the secret admiration for the tyrant-that needs
to be our principal focus. And it is this "opinion," given its potential
for immoderation and anti-political "getting more" (a more serious
form of ravenousness) that has to be called up short, not for Socrates'
"advantage," but for the community of those around him, especially
the young Glaucon. Beneath the appearance of a defense of what is
properly "one's own," the city. is hidden Thrasymachus's profound
longing for that which would ravish the city. an offensive and glutton·
ous self-assertion (a more serious form of dissembling). It is thus just
punishment and necessary corrective therapy that such persons be
stunned, deflated, and dispirited, at best as a preliminary step toward
their improvement, but if not as a way of preventing harm to others.
And this is what Socrates seeks to do at every turn by demonstrating
that not only is Thrasymachus wrong but the very opposite of what
he says is true.
Despite the fallacies, can such a therapeutic and prudential1ogos 14
be considered unjust. indeed illicit? At the very least: it is dedicated
to the well·being of "that toward which the art is directed" and thus
epitomizes the true art of the guardian "in the precise sense. " 15 The
just guardian, we learn later, cares for the city as a whole (V11 519d·e,
IX 586d·e). Is this the "foolish shepherd's art" of which Thrasymachus
was so contemptuous?
8. Socrates' Contrariness
Socrates then is not simply being contrary. True, everytimeThrasy·
machus asserted something, Socrates sought to "prove" the very
opposite, 16 and this even if it meant proving the contrary of what
everyone knows to be true. The term "contentious" thus fails to
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31
describe his activity. Socrates appeared to deny the importance of
such central issues as self-defense, human error, and self-interest for
this discussion of justice (and by extension for political philosophy).
He began by appearing to deny the right of self-defense. He seemed
to deny the traditional conviction that the city must protect itself and
restrain, indeed punish, wrongdoers. The ever-present threat of external enemies did not ever seem to warrant doing them harm. From this
it appeared that there was, no such thing as a just restraint. This rightly
tnfuriated Thrasymachus's sense of order (if only that of the rule of the
stronger), for such a view undermines the security of any city.
Then Socrates proceeded to deny the political importance of human
error (despite 1334cfand 339bf, VI and VII). The discussion of the arts
"in the precise sense" eclipsed the matter of misjudgment and errancy.
Would that errors were not a serious problem and we did not have to
pay for the consequences of people's mistakes.
But above all, the discussion of the arts and their total dedication
to that toward which they are directed eclipsed the fundamental
question of self-interest. The result was that human acquisitiveness
and pleonexia were rendered secondary in this, a discussion of
political philosophy. The human being was equated with the artisan
and thus. confined to a single, selfless interes tin the good of his subject
matter alone. There are numerous consequences of such a simplification of human intentions (IX 57lb, 572b, 573a, 588b-589b), but by
far the most significant is the apparent denial of any human desire
for domination (cf. X 615bf. and 619bf). He denied, on the· one hand,
that rule could ever be to anyone's advantage and thus was not
choiceworthy, and on the other hand, that rule, if ever secured, could
ever be harmful. Sheep are not ever the victims, in short, of anyone's
self-interest. As such he totally obscures what in Thrasymachus's
view, and not only his, is the fundamental fact of politics. Such, then,
were Socrates' arguments.
Thus the question emerges, why would anyone interested in political philosophy ever want to consult The Republic? Why such political
innocence, if not blindness? 17 The answer is not simple. Formally this
is the price one has to pay for premises that demonstrate that injustice
is not simply to be equated with worldly wisdom or human excellence
of any sort, that human history and experience notwithstanding,
injustice is not mightier than justice but is the opposite, impotent and
incapable of wreaking havoc on us all (II 358b, 367d-e, III 392b, V
472e, VI 497c, X 612c). This is a comforting thought, worth hanging
one's hopes on (II 368b). The overall effect of this section, then, is to
quiet our concems about the injustice of the world and to temper our
�32
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
political ambitions to get for ourselves what we would not, in our
unjust world, otherwise receive. Is this not an act of justice in its
noblest, if innocent, sense?
But our first response may not be adequate. If we look at the
dramatic argument as a whole, and not simply at some abstracted
segment. we see that Socrates, far from denying these things, has in
fact defended himself quite well (V 464e), that he has ensured that his
greater self-interest not be denied, all in his overall attempt to forestall
the destructiveness of human error. To illustrate how the deed may
well be different from the word, let us recall the logos that seemed to
argue against any restraint, even a just restraint. Was not its effect
an exemplification of the proper exercise of such restraint? Wasn't its
intent to restrain logically Thrasyrnachus's excessive readiness to
inflict harm on others and dominate the discussion? Indeed its
consequence was the total suppression of his dialogic ambition or
thumos. Thus only on the surface did the logos make it appear that
political life is to be disarmed and rendered vulnerable. The deed
makes manifest what the words shrink from overemphasizing for fear
of fanning the indiscriminate fires of righteous indignation. 18 The
argument at its core and taken as a whole is fully cognizant of the
need for a just restraint but aware also of the possible abuse to which
such a conviction could lead in the hands of some. Justice is more
than right arguments or over-generalized principles.
9. Frtendship and Community
Socrates knows Thrasymachus. Above all he knows that he is not
an irreconcilable opponent (V 470e, VI 498c-d). Thrasymachus, a
professional rhetorician, is open to, indeed vulnerable to logos. Socrates has thus sought to tame him with words. Once confuted, the
beast grew gentle. Thrasymachus is thus susceptible to a persuasion
of a higher sort than brute force, susceptible therefore to an act of
helping and moderating justice (V 47la, X 599c-600e, 604c-d).
Because of this, Socrates tn this case could defend himself without
hurting others (cf. VII 525b). Justice, then, is not a matter of the
extremes, "helping one's friends and harming one's enemies." Socrates
demonstrates a third possibility (1327c): he tums an apparent adversary into a potential, if precarious, compatriot (Vl 498c-d, 598d).
Sophists are not always the unalterable opponents of the city they are
sometimes made out to be (cf. VI 492a). In some cases there is an
alternative.
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33
The capacity of speech to influence others is thus broader and more
mantfold than we are accustomed to grant. As we saw, it is not the
trenchant cutting of an incisive logic but that of his own craft that
brings about the reversal. Though self-conscious, Thrasymachus is
not fully self-knowing. Despite his profession, he does not realize the
full potency of logos. Above all, he does not realize that questions can
be as devastating as any authoritative declaration: they may not have
the face of wolfish boldness. yet they can go for the jugular.
What is undeniable about Socrates' peculiar manner of speech and
argumentation is that it opens up opinions and reveals their innermost
intentions. He brings the interlocutors to say what they think but
would not otherwise say, and to say what they did not expressly think
but harbored deep within. He pries open what is sealed with embarrassment, lack of candor, self-ignorance, or by our numerous mechanisms for not facing ourselves or the truth. His irony, his feigned
obb.:;seness, his purported incompetence, his exaggerated self-depreciation, all serve as negative pressure, so to speak, to force into the
open those cherished and protected self-defining opinions that we
would prefer remain behind the scenes. Such a diagnostic logos is
worth our attention.
Such an exposition, then, is undertaken by Socrates, also in the
interests of friendship or justice (1 35ld, X 62lc). This is not sufficiently appreciated. The most unexpected and significant event of the
whole of The Republic is Thrasymachus's staying and growing involvement in the common task of disclosing this complex thing called
justice. Logos has had a moderating effect even on him and has thus
made it possible for him to become a participating member of the very
community that he earlier sought to abandon, if not also to dominate
(cf. I 336d, V 450h, VII 52la, X 600d). This is both good for him and
for those around him. For now, this city won't have this wolf threatening its fold (III 415e-6a, V 450c).
10. Socratic Justice
It is thus the case that throughout the discussion Socrates' phronesis and justice is more outstanding than his truthfulness. The reasons
begin to emerge.
Above all we recall the lesson of the discussion with Cephalus.
There it becomes plain that simple truthfulness fails to fulfill the
greater demands of human responsibility. Simple truthfulness can be
indiscriminate and lead to harm (V 459c-d). Opinions, too, can be
harmful, as we saw from the exposition of Thrasyrnachus's secret
�34
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
intention. If arete follows logos, then discretion is the better part of
nurture and politike. Socrates' argument was thus at pains to conceal
wherein danger was to be found. The action of the conversation
exemplifies the broader notion of justice and responsibility implicit in
Socrates' criticism of Cephalus's traditional view. Justice is surely not
something that can be indifferent to human consequences.
So too, we see that the careful notion of justice implicit in Socrates'
actions is imbued witl;l the positive element of Polemarchus's definition of justice. Socrates seeks to help his frtends and not let them
harm themselves (nor does he precipitously and falsely judge as an
enemy one who isn't [Ill 414b, V 450 a·b, 45la, 470b·c, Vl 498d, IX
589e, X 62lc]). It was for their well-being that Socrates obscured the
problems of human nature and power {or in the modem sense, of
politics as such). He- has· sought to prevent the excesses of an
unreflective self-interest and partisanship, that is to make his friends
and us better, not worse.
And, lastly, in seeking the true advantage of those over whom he
rules in speech, and not his own advantage narrowly conceived, he is
the just ruler "in the precise sense" (cf. Vl 503b). Thus he even fulfills
the unintended truth ofThrasymachus's definition. In every way that
the discussion considered in short, Socrates' logos is a just speech.
The price of such justice, however, is not small; his cause for
dissatisfaction is genuine. The gain is not small either. His salutary
distortions allow those present to think of politics, not in its most
reduced form as a matter simply of self· preservation (cf. VIII 547e)-a
negative and defensive form of politics (realpolitilc)-but in a positive
and formative way, as the precondition of human excellence. By
obscuring the threat from without and from within, we can now look
undistracted to ourselves and consider what is necessary, not simply
for survival, butfor higher human accomplishments (a partial antidote
to cynicism. estrangement, and disaffection). Socrates' discussion
with Thrasymachus thus shows that. while he is not blind to the truth,
neither is he blind to the good.
Book One of The Republic is thus an act of political justice as well
as political founding. Socrates has laid the foundations for a commu·
nity of speech and human excellence (VI 540a·b, X 613d). As part of
its founding and refounding, a city requires the continual reintegration
of centrtfugal individuals. Polemarchus, in contrast to his father, has
stayed, and so has, to our great surprise, Thrasymachus. Though not
disposed to at first, people have been opened up and are listening.
They can now become participating citizens of their community (i.e.
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35
are properly politicized). We are in the company, after all, of the sons
of the Best (VI 500d)."
But even more than that has been accomplished. By eclipsing
certain issues for now, Socrates has simplified and moderated the
participating reader's thumos; by pricking our logical interest, he has
at the same time engaged our thumos (IX 58la, 586d). Ever since we
too have been committed to the perpetuation of this community of
speech (cf. V 450a-b). The )1igh art of the founder, psychagogia or the
leading of souls, works its' powers on us as well (VI 500d, VJI 519c-d,
X 599c-600e, 604c-d). 20
Notes:
1. All quotations are from The Republic of Plato, translated by Allan
Bloom, (New York, 1968). On the title see; The Repubtic I 348c; also II
377d et passim, 378d; lit 409a and VII 539a. This interpretation has
sought to follow the commentators in the dialogue, Socrates, Glaucon,
Adeimantus, and even Thrasymachus, noting their dissatisfaction
with the course of the discussion in particular (I 337a, 340d, 341b,
354b, II 357a, 358b, III 413b). Our premise is Jacob Klein's insight
into the mimetic character of the dialogues: a dialogue about justice
has also to be an instance of justice. Cf. Aristotle, Poetics l447b9-l0;
Klein, A Commentary on Plato's Meno, (Chapel Hill, 1965), pp. 3-31;
Leville, "Plato's Arithmological Order of Being," The Southwestern
Joumat of Philosophy, XI (Summer 1980). pp. 109-128.
2. This community at the very least needs to be one that will free Socrates
from the restraints of others and at its best do justice to his and our
natures (VI 497).
3. By contrast, Channides and Critias, far less dedicated to speeches,
are not so resistible, and thus their dialogic future (the one to be
numbered among the Ten of the Piraeus, the other among the Thirty
Tyrants). Cf. Channides 157c, 176d; Levine, "Tyranny or Ignorance:
On the Enigma of Socrates," Essays inHonorojRobertBart, (Annapolis). 1993, pp. 143-154.
4. Cf. The Republic III 394d where Socrates says ambiguously that he is
following wherever the argument, compared to a wind, leads. But an
unpredictable wind can in no way serve as an image of logical
necessity or of prudential guidance. Openness to new implications is
not the same as insight therein.
5. Apotogy of Socrates 18a-19a.
�36
6.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
That this is an exaggerated response, Glaucon makes plain at II 36la.
7, Cf, TheRepublicX619b-d.
8. The distinction between a self-interested and a selfless or otherdirected art is odd (I 345d-7b). How can one serve one's own interest
without doing something in particular? Thus, although they are
distinguishable in speech, are they separate in being?
By distinguishing the art of moneymaking or the wage-eaTiler's art,
Socrates does acknbwledge that there is at least one self-interested
art. Moreover, as the city in speech is constructed, there is not a
separate sub-class of moneymakers, but all artisans are "wage-earners." And given the extraordinary restrictions placed on the guardians
(above all V 457d-47ld), one comes to see that one of the foremost
problems dealt with by the founders is the self-interest of all the
citizens. The soul, uniquely self-relating, is an essentially self-referential, if not also a self-interested being. While a complicating factor,
the issue is thus unavoidable (cf. III 409d-e, 4llc, lV 430e-2b;
Timaeus 98a, Phaedrus 245c-6d, Laws X 895e).
The introduction of the distinction does invert Thrasymachus's
self-priority, making what he thinks primary, self-interest, supplemental at best to the non-self-serving aspect of the arts, that for him
are but the means to his securing his advantage.
9. Blushing might be thought the quintessential self-reflexive human
act. Is it not Montaigne who gives us the epigram, "Man is the animal
that blushes?" {Nietzsche's Zarathustra also says that "Man is the
beast with red cheeks.") While this moment of uncontrollable selfdemonstration shows that Thrasymachus is no more than a man, the
question remains how deep and defining his or anyone's sense of
shame is. Is it more than a momentary or situational reddening?
10. The latter pervades The Republic, The question from the very beginning
has been the question of arete: whether natural individual perfection
is the same as moral or political excellence, especiaily conventional
moral excellence.
11. Socrates' persuasion is not simply for the sake of victory, omarnent
or self-aggrandizement. His rhetoric is rather in the service of his
newly founded community. Above all it isn't blind to the consequences
of its speech {I 33lc). His is a mode of political discourse that first
seeks to establish the conditions on the basis of which something like
a responsible "rational speech" can have a place in human affairs.
One may object to such an instrumental {prelogical} use of speech.
But does the means negate the end? And is a city of force preferable
to a more refined community?
12. This hope has led to a scholarship of rationalization or an attempt to
justify and validate invalid and uncogent arguments, a modern ver-
�LEVINE
37
sian of the ancient skill. Is not one of the principal functions of logic,
though, the identification of the weaker argument as weaker?
13. If changing a soul is not the same as refuting an argument, if Socrates
is genuinely concerned with his interlocutors and not simply with
their abstract "positions," and if those with whom he speaks aren't
listening (I 327c) and aren't tnterested in "the choice oflives" (I 344e,
X 608b}, then "logical refutation" amounts to "smoke and non-sense"
(IX 58ld). Socrates' response, his elenchus, has to find a different
mode of access, one that makes dialogue-a community of speechpossible in the first place (IX 582a), Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics,
VI 1145a6
14. On the therapeutic logos, see The Republic II-III, X 608a. It is difficult
for some to allow that Plato is practicing what he has his character
Socrates recommend (cf. III 387c).
15. Compare the discussion of"the true political artist" at Gorgias 521c.
16. Cf. Symposium 214d; Klein, J., Greek Mathematics and the Origin of
Algebra, translated by E.Brann, (Cambridge, 1968) p. 97 (alsop. 95).
17. Cf. Callicles' criticism of philosophy as politically naive (Gorgias 486f.).
18. To pacifY the overly aggressive is not the same as passivism. Hence
Socrates understands Thrasyrnachus's criticism of the dream of the
latter as dangerous. He proceeds stepwise: first tame the wild, then
enlist the moderated, and only thereafter can one prepare the judicious use of what otherwise would be reckless.
19. Hegel too has seen that the face of the dialogue is a problem, although
his account is quite different. For him The Republic is an atavistic
document: "the want of subjectivity [in The Republic with its "denial
of individuality"] is really the want of [subjectivity in] the Greek moral
idea" Lectures on The History ofPhilosophy, translated by Haldane and
Simson, (Lcndon,1892; 1968), vol. II 113-114; also "Preface," The
Philosophy of Right, (Oxford, 1967), p.10. However, as he also recognizes with notable penetration, the introduction of the sophistic
principle of individuality comes with great risks (Lectures on the
History of Philosophy, I 365, 373, 354-5, 433; also Philosophy of
History, New York, 1956, pp. 265, 269). As a result, one might for good
reasons not want to overemphasize and promote it. Hence the extraordinary care with which Socrates treats Thrasyrnachus.
20. Everybody who will listen has remained. Those who were problematic
have been tamed~a wonderful, if improbable, outcome. Justice based
on a just rhetoric has brought about an uncommon harmony and
friendship (I 351d, 369b, N 443d). But a city based on friendship is
not the typical political community. For this reason, it is emphasized,
we are tn the company of "the sons of the Best" (cf. II 368a, N 427c, V
450d, 479a, IX 580b-c, also I 338d, 351d, II 381d, V 477d, VII 536e).
�38
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Plato thus poses the prospect that one can be civilized and political
without becoming slavish (cf. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, sect.
11).
2l.Alexandre Kojeve's claim that "history" is the perfecting, i.e. moderating, influence on the tyrant thus appears dangerous wishful thinking
(".Tyranny and Wisdom," in Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, New York, 1963
pp. 143-188). That the tyrant will not remain an island of self-seeking
unto himself but ~11 submit to others for "recognition" is a hopeful
sentiment. It is optilnistically rendered here but not borne out by the
rest of the dialogue. Thrasymachus does seek reputation and recognition. But were it not for Socrates' skill, it would only fuel his desire
for mastery. A more extreme case is Critias in the dialogue Channides.
The historical figure's "tyrannical procedures"~Kojeve's value-free
euphemism for the tyrant's cruelty-are adopted without reservation
precisely because others always remain a means to his private
advantage.
Ifhistmyis allowed to judge for us, then we do not judge for ourselves.
"Liberty is endangered when its power finds no obstacles which can
retard its course, and give it time to moderate its own vehemence"
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, translated by Reeve and
Bowen, (New York, 1945), p. 260. Dialectically put: has it not been
the sad history of those who have allowed the tyranny of the actual
that it led ineluctably to the actuality of tyranny?
�I
The Past-Present
Eva T. H. Brann
Tonight I want to state, and even to overstate, what I believe to be a
tnlth about the Program of St. John's College. What makes the tnlth
worth considering is that it goes against the plain appearances and
against what people, quite understandably, say about us.
I want to state this truth especiaily for the freshmen, the newest
members ofthe college, who might be surprised to hear it. And I want
to overstate it, because a sharp finite pronouncement is probably the
most productive prelude to the chief part of any Friday evening, which
is the question period. It is then that I can modifY, qualifY, perhaps
even retract what I am about to say. But before I state my truth, let
me say something to the freshmen about all such opinions. Many of
you have probably already guessed that this Program of learning is
like an iceberg, which has a visible tip that swims along on a
subaquatic mass nine times the size of the visible part. It is perfectly
fine and profitable to attend entirely to the brilliant tip, to study the
superlative books and acquire the liberal skills set out in the Program.
But some of you will wish to dive from time to time into the murky
depths to inspect the contestable theory that supports the Program.
The statement I am about to propose belongs to this netherworld.
I say that as students of the St. John's Program we have no interest
in the Past. None. What I mean is that care for the past is not one of the
features that makes this curriculum what it is meant to be. This school
has no institutional interest in what has gone by and passed away. You
might say that we let bygones be bygones. I assert this in the face of the
obvious fact that almost all our books, scores, theorems, and experiments
have authors that are, as human beings, long dead and gone.
When I say that we do not care about the past I am not particularly
thinking of the fact that we do not study history as a field. After all,
we do not study any of the other normal university disciplines either
-sociology, geology, psychology. We do read the two authors who are
generally agreed to be the founders of history. However it is not clear
just how much interest these writers had in the past. Herodotus
The Dean's lecture was delivered on September 2, 1994, al the Annapolis campus
of St. John's College
�40
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
introduced the word history, historia, for his composition concerning
the Persian War, but the Greek word means primarily an inquiry. It
has the same origin as the verb for knowing: a histor is someone who
knows, not necessarily things remote in time. Even when it is taken
in the current sense, history has a relation to the past which is anything
but straightforward. After all, History with a capital H, that is, the
public memory of events in the past, comes into being after history with
a small h, the work of reconstructing the past, has been done. Some
people go so far as to claim that historians in telling their plausible and
timely tales do not reconstruct so much as construct the past, so that
the past is an invention ofthe present. I might say that I cannot quite
believe so extreme a claim, because I know of some histmians who are
less truthful than others and therefore of others who are more truthful
in trying to determine the deeds done (these are called facts) and the
times assigned to them (these are called dates). Facts and dates form,
of course, the skeleton of history. I do believe that something definite
in fact happened at a certain date, but I doubt that it is in principle or
in practice possible to find out what that was, and I am pretty sure that
it ought not to be our business here to learn what others thought
happened or to try to find out for ourselves. The reason is that the
recovery of the past from its fragments is a practically infinite and
intellectually tricky task that requires a completed liberal education.
In short, you learn to do it in graduate school.
Yet, as I said, the fact that we have no department of history, or
that some of us have misgivings about the relation of history to the
past that was (meaning the past that really was and is really gone). is
not what makes me say that we have no interest in the past.
Nor could I possibly say that as private persons many of us lack
interest in the past. Many of us are ardent time-travelers. We like to
go sight-seeing in temporally distant places. For example, in my free
time I like to read about the Aztecs of Mexico and the Incas of Peru.
Part of that interest is, to be sure, intellectual and is closely connected
to the fact that I function in a program that deals exclusively with the
Euro-American West, so that any light that is thrown on this tradition
immediately draws my attention. In the case of the Aztecs and the
Incas it is the evidently irresistible potency of the West, the power to
conquer, to coopt and to corrupt that is sometimes luridly and
sometimes tragically illuminated. I have in mind the awful fates of
those two great kings, Montezuma of the Aztecs and Atahualpa the
Inca. Both of them-canny, sophisticated potentates-gave themselves, like rabbits frozen in a trembling panic, into the treacherous
hands ofthose two conquistadores Cortez and Pizarro, whose scruffy,
�BRANN
41
diminutive bands had only a few horses, a few guns, limitless greed,
and impregnable faith in the Cross, to oppose to the two huge
magnificent royal armies. Naturally I would like to know, if history can
tell me, why the West always conquers and conquers so completely
that all resistance assumes the means and terms of its enemy.
But learning lessons, if there are any, is not my best reason for
reading books of history. Mostly I want to see new worlds. No city,
except perhaps Athens, has a more beautiful past behind its ugly
present than Mexico City. Bernal Diaz, the soldier-chronicler of the
Conquest. who rode with Cortez, says this of ancient Mexico City,
Tenochtitlan, set in a great lake covered with floating gardens:
When we saw so many cities and villages built in the
waters of the lake and other large towns on dry land,
and that straight, level causeway leading into Mexico
City, we were amazed and we said that it was like the
enchanted things related in the book of Amadis because of the huge towers, temples, and buildings
rising from the water, and all of masonry. And some
of the soldiers even asked whether the things we saw
were not a dreaJTI.
The book of Amadis, Juniors will know, is the romance that inspired
Don Quixote.
The hanging city ofMachu Picchu, a fortified outpost of the Inca empire,
rediscovered accidentally in 1911, also has a weird and wonderful beauty,
which I simply have in my mental picture book of ancient marvels.
And that seems to me to be the main attraction of the past- that
it adds worlds to my world, and bygone beauties to a present diminishing in beauty. It does so much as does fiction, only with the
strangely moving modifier of real past existence. I read history dutifully for information, I consult historians somewhat skeptically for
illumination, but I am in the past unclitically as in a romance, like
Bernal Diaz when he saw Tenochtitlan. For the past is primarily a
place (we will see that all talk of time is infected by spatial metaphor),
a romantic place, as the present is prosaic and the future uncanny.
Perhaps we can talk about this claim, that the past is the place of
romance, in the question period.
II
This might be a proper spot to collect the reasons I can think of
why anyone should, and why many of us do, care about the past, if
not as students and tutors in the Program, then as human beings.
For the two are not entirely coincident.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
1. Well, then, I have just mentioned the romance of time travel. I am
persuaded that all devoted archaeologists and historians begin as
temporal romantics, though it is their professional obligation not to
let on. When, some thirty-six years ago, I was a practicing archaeolo·
gist-which means someone who gives an account of very old things
-I was not too young and naive to get pleasure from watching each
of my revered elders in the excavation at Athens talking in carefully
damped scholarly prose about the particular period for which I well
knew each cherished a hopeless passion. It was like listening to a
lover giving a disingenuously objective account of the one face about
which that is really impossible.
2. A second reason why people do care about the past is, as I have
already mentioned, that they hope to learn its lessons. Sometimes they
mean to use the past to lay the past to rest, for it is said that those
who are ignorant of the past are doomed to repeat it. One book of
essays we study, the Federalist Papers, is full of such a use of the past.
The eighteenth paper, for example, written by James Madison, is a
study of failed Greek confederations, intended by horrible counterex·
amples to point the way to a successful federal structure. In other
words, the past can be used like our personal memory, as the
depository of accumulated experience.
3. For some, the past is treasure trove and the way to it a treasure
hunt. The origin of archaeology was largely in grave robbing and gold
digging.
4. Eventually the passion for lost beauty and lost treasure turned into
a sober science of carefully recorded diggtng below ground and meticu·
lous mapping above ground. The passion of discovery and acquisition
yielded to the more temperate but equally tenacious passion for detec·
tive·like tnduction, and for accuracy, cataloging, and tabulation.
As the past below the earth is carefully brought up and recorded,
so the past above ground is carefully preserved and restored. Time·
reservations, such as Williamsburg, are established somewhat in the
same spirit as that in which in Victorian times the woman of the house
would maintain a "good" parlor-a place protected from the wear and
tear of daily life.
Thus nostalgia is legitimized by academic discipline, and the past
is ·preserved in a form more pristine than it had as a present.
5. A peculiarly contemporary way of dealing with the past is to put
energy not into digging out the roots of the present but into inventing
them. Such inventions are platn lies, told by people, usually profes·
sors, who should and do know better, to people who have no way to
�BRANN
43
be critical-told for dubiously therapeutic reasons. The people who
participate in these self-deceptions tend to understand that the
passage of time confers honor and that the past plays a role in
establishing what is nowadays called "identity.''
6. On the opposite end with respect to motive and honesty is an
academic way of occupying oneself with the past that is exemplary in
its rigor. It is represented by the university discipline called "history
of ideas." Here past and bygone notions evoke a meticulous reconstructive interest, and are objectively reported as beliefs that used to
be believed. I have always been puzzled by the strong attraction of so
bloodless an activity.
7. A last, and to my mind best, way of having close relations to the .
past that I have observed is the way of revival, rebirth, recovery,
renascence. It is an act of pure imaginative vitality, of which the
greatest histmical example is the period called the Renaissance. Its
mode, which can be reactivated anytime, and certainly right here and
now, is to attempt to revivifY a golden antiquity while succeeding in
bringing to life a resonant modernity.
Each of these ways ofbeing involved with the past has its dangerous
and debilitating aspects. The romantic attachment to the past, which
is called nostalgia, is a form of sentimentalism. The lessons of history
teach everything and nothing. The earth's treasures are no longer for
the taking, and robbing graves is in most countries plain illegal. The
exact recording and reconstruction of the relics of lost worlds imposes
an abstracted rigidity on the messy life that was. Self-invention with
respect to the past is also self-delusion. The meticulous study of
superseded opinions is even drearier than the trendy courting of
current ones. There are two ways of mummifYing the past: by not
letting it die and by not letting it live.
On the other hand, to be disconnected from the past is also a
pathology. A human being that lives merely in the present is less than
Euclid's point that has no parts-it is a dimensionless being that lacks
even a location. For such a memoryless being has no path behind, no
human lineage .. It seems to me part of our human location in the world
to feel sometimes some sorrow at all the worlds that are lost and gone
and some elation at all the civilizations to which we are heir. This
function of pity and love for the sheer goneness and absence of
previous worlds and people, a sense not so much of personal as of
generic loss, seems to me a necessary part of one's humanity .
Therefore I do think we ought to be sometimes somewhat in love
with what I shall call the past-perfect, the past that is finished, has
passed away.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
III
I think the time has come to analyze more soberly what is implied
in caring about that past-perfect, that fmished past. In all such caring,
this seems to me to be the essential element: The past is the temporally
absent. As students are not usually marked absent from a class in
which they have not been previously present, so absence in time
implies an earlier presence. The future is not. to my mind, temporally
absent, because it h&sn't yet been present. Therefore the essence of
caring about the past-perfect is a relation, be it of love, hate, or
fascinated indifference, to what was. "Was'' is the past tense of "is."
"Was" is an "is" that is no more. (Let me interject here the thought
that "no more" need not mean "nevermore," for I am not at all sure
that the adage about not turning the clock back is true. I think we can
turn the clock back at a blink ofthe will. It is only a question of cost.)
"Temporal" as in "temporal absence" is the adjective formed from
time. To think about the past it is thus necessary to think about time.
I have read an estimate of the number of publications conceming
time: Since 1900, there have been 95,000 books, and since 1990 well
over 90,000 articles. Of these writings I've read perhaps forty-five,
among them the eight or nine that seem to matter most. They do all,
apparently, agree about this-that time has two major aspects: Now
and Then. They also agree that Then in tum has two aspects: Before
and Mter Now or Past and Future. Beyond these three aspects or
phases of time, Present, Past, and Future, everything is debatable.
The Now presents a set of puzzles first set out by Plato in the dialogue
Parmenides. The order of importance of the phases, the direction in
which they advance, the substantiality of time itself, the relation of
time to soul-these and many more issues are treated by Aristotle,
Augustine, Plotinus, Kant, Hegel, Husser!, and Heidegger. Most of
these you will in fact read in the next four years. What I will say tonight
will be almost culpably sketchy.
And first I have to observe once more, without stopping to dwell on
the reason, that it is practically impossible to speak of time and its
phases without using spatial metaphors. The past particularly is in
its very name metaphorical, for "past" is related to "pace" or step, and
to "passage" or a going by; past means, as I have said, by-gone.
Let me now give you the features that I think of when I reflect on
the meaning of the word "past."
l. It is one of three times or phases of time "in" which an event can be.
Notice the space-like location of events implied by the preposition "in."
�45
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2. It is what was. Notice the apparently unavoidable contradiction of
the tenses used in this description.
3. It is present for us in two ways, externally and internally. Notice
that the past is present for us as memory (an insight I have borrowed
from Augustine's Confessions), and that memory has two storage
spaces, so to speak. One is in our souls. It is described beautifully by
Augustine as a "spacious and infinite inner sanctum" (X, 8). A being
without such an inner rodm is one for whom nothing has significant
connotations or imaginative penumbras.
The other memory space is outside. It consists of all the testimonials, be they writings or objects, that have survived into our present
as evidence of past life. As I have already said, it seems to me that a
person who has no knowledge of these reminders of our human
antecedents is an unanchored and untethered being.
4. My fourth and final feature of the past is the one I have just
mentioned: the gravity of our attitude toward it, whether it is to be
deliberate denial, laborious reconstruction, shameless invention, nostalgic luxuriating, or free appropriation. Notice the implication that
our position with respect to the past is at some point a most deliberate
choice with wide consequences to our life.
IV
I now feel entitled, and perhaps even obligated, to say outright how
I think we should bear ourselves toward the past and how We should
live with it.
There are past-related pathologies that seem to me particularly
sick. One is the condition of those people, descrtbable as galvanized
zombies, who live in a frantic present, without a moment's collected
contemplation. This mode is practically definitive of contemporary
life. The other is the luxuriating nostalgia of Poe's Raven, who croaks
"Nevermore." This mode is practically definitive of romanticism.
For my part I think the past is indeed a place in which to take refuge
when it is necessary to pull back, to contemplate life and mull things
over. The present is the phase for brisk deliberation, decision, and
action, for being in that sleepwalking state in which we do, more or
less surefootedly, the one thing needful just now. In visiting the past,
whether in books or places, we get longer, more serene views.
In the past too the open-ended passage of moments turns into
completed tales, from anecdotes to myths.
In it, moreover, are to be found the models for our actions and the
patterns for our demeanor, without which it is impossible to shape a
distinctive self.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
46
And finally the past is to be appreciated as a double source of
dimensionality, a source of solidity and ghostliness at once. For, as I
have already intimated, it is the past that adds a dimension to the
here and now, which would otherwise be a mere momentary facade,
a painted curtain stretched over nothingness, floating into a shapeless
future. It is the past that gives this moving front of present appearances some sense of solidity, of having endured and betnghere to stay.
The ghostliness I pave mentioned is really the same effect tn a
different mood. When I was in Japan I saw in the enclosures of
Buddhist temples trees with prayer strips affixed to the branches,
fluttering in the wind. So also memories of the past attach themselves
to places and flutter about them, giving them an attendant ghostly
life. To be sure, not all locations are equally good ghost-catchers-for
example, to my mind, this auditorium is not as good at it as our Great
Hall over in McDowell.
v
Now I want to recall to you the claim that set me off. paradoxically,
on this praise of the past. The claim is that whatever attachment we
do and ought to have to the past privately, as students in the St.John's
Program we have none whatsoever. It is a claim I mean to argue even
in the face of the fact that we study hardly any contemporary book or
subject, and that almost everything we pay attention to is rather old
-or as Francis Bacon says, very young, since the older a production
is, the closer it is to the childhood of humanity.
To develop my opinion, I want to put before you, and to distinguish,
three terms. They are History, Tradition, and Past. I don't feel much
obligation to define them here. When people say "Define your terms,"
they usually mean to turn a conversation into a debate. But although
I am putttng forth my claim with a certain panache, I would like it to
be the beginning of a conversation rather than an argument. So I shall
offer a mere collection of the connotations that I personally intend,
first putttng some prelimtnary effort into distinguishing these terms.
I have already said something of the Past. The past, I say, is what
is absent tn time, bygone. It is a kind of folk wisdom that the past
was, meaning that it is a bygone present, and that it is therefore in a
way that neither the moving now nor the unhappened future is .
. History, of which I have also spoken before, is the deliberate
account given of selected past events or conditions by historians,
whom we may call public memory-experts. History depends on the
fact that human affairs assume distinct shapes, either as discrete
notable events like revolutions or as continuous but noticeable con-
�47
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ditions like social movements. History with a capital H is reconstructed in histories with a lower-case h by means of written and
tangible testimonials. The writing of history is therefore, as I said, a
research activity, and its study from books requires the experience
necessary for a critical review of the use to which the testimony is put.
All writing of histories that 1 know of rests on the faith I have already
mentioned, that human time on this earth organizes itself into discernible entities that hape some relation of cause and effect. This
fundamental axiom of all History is no stronger than a hypothesis
because, since events are always demonstrably unique, no one is in
a position to show for sure that a given outcome was lawfully caused
by a given antecedent. You might call this historian's faith a post hoc,
ergo propter hoc disposition. This Latin tag means: "After the event
and therefore because ofit," and we all tend to believe it. I'll give you
two personal examples: I ardently believe that I could be bam in
Europe only because Leonidas and his three-hundred Spartan held
Thermopylae for a while against the Persians, and I ardently believe
that I could flourish in America only because Abraham Lincoln was
president when the Union was threatened. But who could prove that?
The deeds that make up History are alive insofar as we feel their
effects reaching into the present and dead insofar as the sheer increasing weight of intervening human moments push them tnto the ineffective distance. Since the fall of Troy in 1183 B.C., 100,189,872,000
seconds have gone by-and anyone who has ever had a sharp pain or
keen sorrow knows what a second is, each an etemal moment. Most
of History is truly gone by, only dimly and diffusely related to our lives.
The historical past is prologue but not present.
VI
So we are left with the third term, Tradition. The word literally
means a "handtng down" of the past to the present. Often it means
ritual that has been taken over and respected because it has long been
established; thus Shakespeare speaks of"respect, tradition, form and
ceremonious duty" (Richard II, III, ii. 173). There is however, another
strong and significant usage. The word is often used of the literary
and textual tradition, the set of books that have survived because
people have respected and protected them and have handed them
down, mostly in those book-reservations called libraries. This tradition includes only a small part of the writtngs of the past. We can hope
that it is an advantageously sifted past, and that the best books are
the ones that survived, but we cannot be sure. For example, of
Sophocles' 123 dramas only seven are extant, one eighteenth of the
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
output of Athens's central tragedian. From the vicissitudes of war,
like the-allegedly-accidental burning of the huge library at Alexandria during Caesar's siege of the city in 48 B.C., to the deliberate
torching of books conducted by the Nazis in Berlin in 1933, from the
mildew of forgotten trunks to the acid bum that is eating up old books
in contemporaxy libraries, circumstance has played a large role in the
selection of the written tradition, since it is handed down physically.
That we are lucky both in the losses and in the survivals, that what
survives is both the best and somehow coherent, is a faith, a reasonable faith we have in the discrimination and care of our predecessors.
In sum, we believe that the past has preserved for us plenty of great
books, and they seem to speak to each other.
How does this tradition of texts, be it texts of words, or mathematical
symbols, or musical notes, differ from the other remains of the past?
Let me use as an example our own McDowell Hall, the pride of the
Annapolis campus. Our Director of Admissions, John Christensen,
probably the faculty member best known to the freshmen, has put
together a handsome and informative volume about this "historical"
building.
McDowell was begun in the 17 40s and by 1799 it housed all the
functions of St. John's College, which had been chartered in 1784. In
1909 it was burned down to just above the first story. The then-principal,
Dr. Fell, wrote that the students "ruined their suits of clothing to save
the building and its contents." This dreadful catastrophe inspired
some dreadful student poetry about old McDowell, who, it was written
in the yearbook, "has perished in the flame ... and she's nought now
but a name." Which was as wrong as the poem was bad, because she
rose, like a phoenix: from the ashes, to be continually used as our main
building. In 1989 McDowell was again gutted, this time for a deliberate and beautiful renovation and modemization.
Here is the contrast between our building and our books, the
contrast that is relevant to my point: We can modernize old buildings,
install new operational systems, modifY unsafe or inconvenient features. We cannot do that to our books. Modem paraphrases or
bowdlerized versions will not give us new improved up-to-standard
texts, but travesties. Secondly, we can live comfortably and purposefully in our building without understanding it, or with only a dim sense
of esthetic satisfaction, yet without knowing the underlying construction or even seeing the elegantly rational hierarchy of its elevation. But
we can't live with our books unconsciously. Everything depends on
maximum awareness of detail, structure, purpose. A dim sense of a
great text is almost a contradiction in terms.
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Therefore, the books of the past differ from the buildings of the past
in the manner of their renovation-the renewal of the books excludes
comfortable remodeling and trouble-free use. We have to do it their
way. They would seem to impose their past on us.
VII
But actually the case is just the opposite. Because we have to
engage the books of the tr'lldition as they are and with all our available
awareness, they are notin the past, but in the present. There are not.
except in incidentals, bygone. What they say to us is what they have
always said, and they say it now and always now.
There is the simple past, the once-and-for-all past, which is absent
except in memory or in monuments. But there is also a past which
may be named after the grammatical tense from which I took my title:
past-present. It is a nice fact that there are certain verbs in English
as well as in Greek that display this past-presence dramatically. The
English "can" as in "I can" is actually a past from a verb meaning to
know, as in "cunning," or German, kennen. Past knowing is present
power; to have learned is to be now able. Similarly, the Greek verb
for "I know," aida, is a past form of the verb for seeing; to have seen
is now to know. That is what the grammarians call the past-present.
It brings a past form into the present tense.
The tradition, as I understand it, does the same. It presents a past
thatis not absent but present- if we let it be. I can think of a powerful
image for what I mean. When Odysseus goes into the undetworld the
diaphanous shades flutter about him and cannot attain to living
presence until he lets then drink from the pit of sacrificial blood (Book
XI). The books are, with our encouragement, capable of taking life.
VIII
To understand the tradition of books consciously as I have delineated it, you have to be willing to entertain a very powerful-and very
controversial-set of beliefs. There is, I hasten to add once again, also
the possibility of just reading the books receptively. It is perfectly
profitable, and even sound, for students to read thoughtfully without
reflecting very often on the conditions for reading. But you might want
to consider them sometimes, so here are the beliefs that I think
support the idea of the tradition as a past-present.
First: I think that, in order to believe that there is a past that is
present, you have to believe in the unity of literate humanity. You
have to imagine the thinking and writing human species as living
below the threshold of natural evolution and also as standing in some
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
part outside the vicissitudes of history. For example, I believe that a
certain young man called Glaucon, one of Plato's older brothers, if he
were present tonight, might be puzzled and disgusted to see a female
in unbecoming dress address the public and utter decided opinions.
But although he might not get over the indecency of it in one lifetime,
I believe this time-immigrant would undergo the same naturalization
as does a contemporary space-immigrant. He would pick up our
customs and prejudic\'s and begin to be involved with us. He might
even enroll in the Graduate Institute. His intellect would be engaged
even tf his sensibilities continued to be outraged. My guess is, he
would imperceptibly become acclimatized until he loved this place
better than that time and could bear to return to Athens only in the
manner of a loquaciously superior tourist, as happens to most of us
immigrants when we try to go "home."
So much the more readily would his quicker and deeper younger
brother be naturalized, especially since he would already have understood, and as I think, respected, democratic life. For he had observed
that the kind of free discussion concerning the choice of a way of ltfe
and of a political constitution that his Socrates carries on, happens
naturally in democracies (Republic VIII, 557). So conversely, since we
can readily imagine him thinking with us, we can pick up his writings
and think with him. For these writings are meant to be ahistorical in
the sense that we can, in imagination, discount historical circumstance. Of course old books will refer to past prejudices and preoccupations, but we, by trying to understand what it means to be
prejudiced and preoccupied, will soon learn to read around what is
simply past in old books.
Second: A closely related belief maintains that we have not only been
the same rational species throughout recorded time, but that we do,
in fact, have the same preoccupations, the same queStions as even
our remotest ancestors, provided only the level of formulation is deep
enough. We must feel a little queasy at the sanctimonious superiority
with which people who think they preeminently tnhabit the present
condemn the opinions of people who lived in the past. But let me
choose items on which positive contemporary opinion probably really
is on safer moral ground, say, the position of women, the exposure of
children, the owning of human chattel. We do, whatever our local
conclusions may be, at the least share the questions (perennial
questions, as they are rightly called) concerning human equality, the
right to ltfe of the very young, the inalienable freedom of individuals.
These problems you will recognize as not dated at all.
�BRANN
51
But the argument that we are, at least in our questions, alike
through time, could be tumed against the tradition. If at a level
properly established nothing changes, neither human nature nor
human preoccupations, why bother with older, Jess accessible versions? If concems are perennial, why not seize hold of them in the
present from?
Third: Yet two additional beliefs address this reasonable point. One
is the belief hom of experience, which I for one hold with equal
amazement and fervor, that there is a palpable distinction between
good and great. Good books are written all the time and they lean in
fuendly fellowship on their great relatives. But those great ones are
few and far between. There seem to be times, to be sure, when they
are bunched together. It is probably that inexplicable fact, that
miracle of history, that makes us think of centuries as if they were
breeding grounds: the fifth century B.C. for Parmenides, Aeschylus,
Sophocles, Euripides, Socrates, Plato; the sixteenth century for
Luther, Bacon, Shakespeare, Galileo. But however they seem to be
bunched or strung out on the tablets of time, these writers are rare
and-I will say this most controversial thing-absolutely great. As you
know, this faculty, your tutors, claims for itself-some might say
arrogates to itself-the judgment and the choice of books. We have
many gross and subtle criteria, which we might wish to discuss in the
question period. The first one for me was formulated by the teacher
who introduced me to Homer and won me for Classics, back in
Brooklyn College in 1950. I recall a student asking her in a bright
and impertinent tone-we were a bright and impertinent lot-what
made her know a great book, and she said in the throwaway voice of
utter conviction: "It makes my hair stand on end."
One answer, therefore, to the desirability of taking up books
ostensibly written in the past is that the tradition is a very slowly f.tlling
treasury. We are too poor in the present to be able to afford the loss
of this inheritance.
Fourth: But one more belief, complementary and even antithetical, is
needed. When the past is regarded as presenting unique and irreplaceable treasures to the present, one dimension of human thinking
and imagining is disregarded. We live, as I said before, at the front of
a facade of time, a facade propped up and given solidity by the past
behind it. It is not that we need to think of the past as determining
our thinking. Thought is by its nature capable of thinking anything
at any time. Yet it is a fact, perhaps a paradoxical fact, that we live
with inherited opinions. It is a paradoxical fact because most opinions
are held thoughtlessly; they are unthought thoughts. It is a very
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVJEW
different thing to inherit a book and to inherit an opinion, not only
because the books reach much farther back than the opinions, but
because the books become ours only by an effort of appropriation,
while the opinions are what we effortlessly just have. They are part
of that ever-advancing, ever-changing facade called the present.
There is no denying that the facade progresses, not necessarily in the
optimist's sense of getting better but in the neutral sense of going on.
For while the questiops may stay recognizably similar, the answers
change drastically, by creeping evolution or abrupt revolution. Yet it
seems that the more radical a new departure in thought is intended
to be, the more it is shaped by its origin, be it through the precise
contradiction involved in a sharp rejection, through the careful reconstnlction required by a conscious recovery, or through the conversational continuity encouraged by a receptive response.
It follows that the tradition, as I understand it, is for us not only a
treasure house for any time but also a key to our specific present
condition, to our understanding of private and public humanity, of
nature and of divinity. One way or the other-as suppressed antithesis, as deliberate reacquisition, or as conversational partner- it props
up our present, and on our knowledge of it depends our critical
appreciation of our time.
I speak of time, but, really, time, datable time, has little to do with
it. I can think of several ancient authors who are nearly two millennia
away from us in time, but two seconds away from us in thought-two
seconds being what it takes to conceive a tremendously new idea. The
order in which these authors appear probably matters but not the date
of their birth, just as in our thinking the sequence of conception, the
genesis of understanding, is significant, but very rarely the exact time.
This notion of mine, that order matters but not dates, is, I must tell
you, pagan; in fact it seems to me to be the gist of Paganism. It is
therefore highly debatable, and I hope we will talk about it in the
question period.
In any case, the point I want this notion to reinforce is that
absorbing the tradition is not the same as studying history or caring
about the past. For we study these books not insofar as they tell us
of bygone times but because they tell us of the present. They are not
absent in time, as is the past, but present (and perhaps even out of
time altogether). They are the past insofar as it is present; they are
effectively present; they are in the terms of the title of my lecture, the
PAST-PRESENT.
But that is not quite the last word. The books of the tradition, our
books, become present, as I have said, only when we let them. We
�BRANN
53
revivifY them and make then vital. Therefore they stand by us and
speak as does that shade in Hades whom Odysseus calls ""the prince
of those with gift of speech.'" It is the seer Tiresias, and he pleads:
Let me but taste of blood, I shall speak true.
(Odyssey XI, 96, Fitzgerald)
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�Interpreting Genesis Through the
Foundational Symbols of
Earth, Water, and Air
Harvey L. Gable: Jr.
There have of course been many commentaries on or readings of
Genesis, but while much progress has been made in identii'ying source
material and refining etymological precision, it remains an open
question what the book as a whole is intended to be about. I am
speaking here of the intention of the compiler in choosing to select,
edit, and arrange the selections as he has done, since ultimately it is
this and not the sources of the original fragments, or even their original
meaning, which is cogent. 1 While a definitive answer to this question
may be impossible, there are certain "structuralist" principles of
interpretation which can give us some insight into the kinds of
elements that hold these stories together. 2 As I will show in this essay,
if we regard the second Genesis creation story (Gen 2:4ff), which
describes the construction of man, as setting the terms by which the
book is to be read, we can see the subsequent stories as something of
an owner's manual, describing how and how not to opel-ate this
mechanism that God has created, but left us to run.
The second creation story focuses on man as a composite being,
structured from three basic elements: earth, water, and air or breath,
each of which has its symbolic meaning. It is essential to remember
this simple recipe for making a man, since in all the pre-patriarchal
stories of Genesis 1-11, whenever the creature, man, malfunctions,
the fault can inevitably be traced to an excess or deficiency of one of
the three elements in his mixed nature. These stmies operate consistently, I will argue, on a cause-and-effect model, each describing an
imbalance of earth/water/air and showing its consequences. Taken
together, they make a point about who man is and what he must do
to remain balanced and healthy; they also define an ontological system
which, in the second half of the book (after chapter 11), becomes the
implied backdrop against which the lives of the Patriarchs are played
out. In this second section, the characters and the landscape are more
life-like but the issues at stake are still those defined by the act of
creation in Genesis 2.I argue, in other words, that the central question
Harvey L. Gable, Jr. holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and has taught
at Chicago and the U.S. Naval Academy.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
of Genesis is "what is man?" and the answer is "a creature formed of
earth, water and air"-an answer that has significant moral and
historical consequences.
Chapters 1-ll: Eden and the Fall
For man, the first consequence of his mixed nature is instability:
he has been concocted from three essentially incompatible things
which only the grace of God can keep in harmonious balance. A second
consequence is that man feels blood-kinship with earth as well as with
things of the air. An ignorant man, not aware that earth is only a
secondary manifestation of God, is likely to regard himself as a child
equally of father God and mother earth-with, perhaps, even a
stronger tie to mother than father. Together these two consequences
make sin inevitable: man is inherently unstable, and he is weighted
toward the material. 3 Genesis is remarkably thorough in describing
each possible kind of imbalance, but this material weight is the primal
fault, and the most common.
Man's !Adam's] original sin takes exactly this form: God commands
"no" from above, while the snake/earth says "yes" from below. One
offers the fruits of the spirit; the other, the fruit of earth. God's voice
here is the voice of air or spirit in this oppositional sense, but more
correctly it is the voice of balance: He enjoins man to live on the earth,
but to avoid being fully absorbed by it; the tree at the center of the
garden provides an "other," a kind of spiritual navel which balances
the purely material with the anti-material. Kept sacred, as God has
enjoined, the idea of the tree permeates all physical things with a
spiritual awareness: each bite of allowed fruit reminds man that other
fruit is not allowed because of a law other than the merely physical
law. In this sense the tree acts as a link binding heaven to earth, much
as, in man, water binds earth and breath. The call of the earth, of the
serpent who is mere formed' earth and of the tree that is also earth, is
the call to forget this sacred navel, to cut the umbilical cord as it were,
and declare that all is earth-that the other world is a fiction. 4
The question remains: why does this tree, sprung from the earth,
promise knowledge of Good and Evil? The traditional explanation that
Good and Evil refers to sexual knowledge or sexual shame is inadequate, since man was commanded at creation to be fruitful and
multiply. We notice, too, that Adam and Eve do not hide from each
other, but from God. Adar (among others) argues that the words "good
and evil" "lend themselves to interpretations other than moral; they
allude to the ability to distinguish between pleasant and unpleasant,
between useful and harmful. "5 Read in this way, God's prohibition
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against eating the fruit amounts to saying "so far, you have known
only pleasant earthly things, but if you eat from this tree you will learn
that earthly things can also be unpleasant." Eating the fruit provides
this experience because disobeying the prohibition creates these
unhealthy material things: The balanced system in which material
things were suffused with a spiritual presence becomes unbalanced
when man chooses to break the spiritual connection with God. In effect
the act closes the navel (or· severs the umbilical cord) through which
true life flowed into material objects, leaving the material world dried
and unhealthy. This transformation occasioned by man's choice
explains why there is confusion in the text about whether there is one
tree or two: The tree that gives knowledge of Good and Evil is the Tree
of Life, the navel through which Life flowed into the world. Man's
decision to cut the link makes that tree unavailable to him in the
future. I said above that Genesis operates on a cause-and-effect model,
and this case is a perfect example: The sentence by which God
excludes man from further contact with the Tree is not so much a
punishment as a verbal recognition of the inevitable consequences of
what has been done.
Likewise the curses or punishments meted out to man are really
the predictable results of the imbalance that he has created. First, a
separation from the spiritual: God, once their companion, must now
seek them out. Second, an excessive identification with the physical:
They became aware of their nakedness. Third, and most significant,
their earthly encrustation creates a barrier against the entry of spirit
into the world of flesh. For woman, bringing a new soul into the earth
is no longer an act of joy but one of great effort and pain. Likewise for
man in his sphere, cultivation of the earth, the creation of new life
requires great effort. Adam's curse, "In the sweat of thy face shall thou
eat bread" (3: 19) really encapsulates the meaning of the Fall. Water
symbolizes God's blessing, and here it has been withdrawn (or ra!he~,
refused): the luscious garden is replaced by arid desert, and man must
now supply the missing fluid with his own sweat, and replace the
missing fecundity with his labor. In effect Adam's sin has partly
reversed the creation, and unmixed what God had mixed. Thereafter
Adam must do the mixing himself: Only through his own hard labor
will his earthy nature be "cultivated" sufficiently to receive the blessing
again and bear fruit. Presumably the slowly diminishing life spans of
the patriarchs are also an indication that the life-giving spirit is
receding from earth.
Scholars have argued that in the Biblical context "nakedness"
usually means something akin to "lacking all possessions"; "not
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
sexuality at all but a state of defenselessness and helplessness,
without possessions or power. "6 Eating from the tree leaves man naked
in this sense; He is uncomfortably exposed and dispossessed, poised
between God's order which he has rejected and a new matertal order
uninformed by God's spirit, from which he is also alienated because
he no longer possesses it through the spirtt but merely lives in it as a
discrete object. The new awareness that Adam and Eve gain is a
product of redefining themselves as purely physical beings, mere
naked and helpless animals. In this sense the Fall is that moment
when the earth/water I air balance is 1\rst tipped and man remakes
God's creation into an earth-dominated mixture. This understanding
of the Fall, or something quite like it, was shared by "many of the early
kabbalists," who, according to Paul Morns, "understood that before
Adam's sin there was as yet no material world at all .... Adam was a
wholly spirttual being and his exile from the upper world represents
the beginnings of corporeal existence. "7 This kabbalist reading portrays Adam as one who "misperceived the nature of the Godhead and
took the Shekhinah [the divine presence on earth] to be the Godhead
itself," and that therefore "this is the esoteric meaning of the commandment not to 'eat' of the Tree of Knowledge, that is, not to cleave
· to the Shekhinah alone." 8 My argument would suggest that Morris (or
the kabbalists) are overstating the case, since the Fall is not from spiiit
to earth but from a balanced state of earth/water/air to an earth·
dominated imbalance. Nonetheless, the kabbalist reading provides
historical precedent for reading the events in the Garden in this way,
and also reinforces the sense of this text as a philosophical allegory of
the highest order.
Cain and Abel
In Cain and Abel are displayed humanity's old (and potentially
recapturable?) self, which is eventually slain by the new self. Abel, as
a keeper of sheep, is living the role of an Eden-dweller, whose job is
to have dominion over the creatures of the earth; in Cain we see the
new man, the "tiller of the ground" condemned to struggle, with only
partial success, to bring back some semblance of the old balance,
endeavortng to wrestle God's blessing from the earth which used to
bear it spontaneously in abundance. He is one, in other words, who
struggles in vain to infuse his earthy self with a spiritual nature and
so achieve a sustained balance. He fails, as his nature dictates, and
in the process becomes a worker against God's balance, spilling the
life-giving fluid from his brother's vesseL He acts, apparently, from
sheer frustration at his now less prtvileged position. This frustration
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59
may also explain his decision to become a citydweller: The city is man's
attempt to recapture Eden, insofar as it represents comfortable life
without the need to wrestle sustenance from the ground. 9 The Cain
story shows how man, once unbalanced, becomes a dangerous d.estabilizing force that tends to spiral further out of balance.
Cain's punishment is again less of a curse than a predictable
consequence of his actions. God does not abandon the gift of life but
hears its voice calling to him "from the ground"; his waters descend
and then retum to him but are never lost. But for Cain the seminal
blessing of water, once squandered, cannot be recovered again, and
so "when [Cain] tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto
[him] her strength" (4: 12). His sin is similar to Onan's: He lacks a
proper sense of the sacredness of God's gift of life. w Henceforth Cain
lives in the city, which may be thought of as the grossest of gross earth,
the land on which no water of God's blessing falls, and no spirttual
life can spring forth. The children of Cain become, typically, those who
have no contact with the living earth, but instead make their living
manipulating the dead matertal world: Tubalcain, for example, "an
instructor of every artificer in brass and iron" (4;22). ''And predictably,
Cain's lack of balance only engenders further imbalance, as subsequent generations become increasingly perverse in a similar vein.
The sanctity with which God has invested life, the mark of Cain,
becomes for Lamech a mere excuse for taking life casually.
Conversely, the competing line of man, which descends from the
better-constructed Seth, is able to maintain the balance of Eden
longer; they "walk with God" (5:24) as men did in Eden. But of course
even in this line of descent, the inherent balance of earth, water, and
spirit is precarious.
The Nephilim
This disturbing incident, in which "the sons of God" breed with the
daughters of men to create a super race whose spirits contend with
God (6: 1-4) is best understood (as are all these incidents) in conjunction with its immediate consequence, the flood. In terms of the
earth/water I air balance, the problem being addressed here is plain
enough: A race of men have surreptitiously enriched man's mixture,
filling him with more spirtt than is allowable." The result is not a race
of spiritual men, as we might expect, but a race who have contempt
for the earth, as Cain had contempt for the spirit: men of great
dating-the "men of renown" of classical antiquity who love glory and
not men. That this is a problem of improper mixture becomes apparent
in God's solution, the flood. Bearing in mind that water symbolizes
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
God's grace, the glue which binds earth and air together, we can see
the flood as an effort to separate earth and spirit, to pull apart what
has been joined, by injecting an excess of water to lift the breath from
earth: "All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in
the dry land, died" (7:22). God unmixes the three ingredients of life so
that he can mix them again in proper balance. This plan would seem
to be undercut by His mercy to Noah, but it is in this mercy that we
see the unsolvable problem inherent in man's mixed nature. Noah is
a 'just man and perfect in his generations" who "walks with God" (6:9);
presumably God recognizes that in Noah the best possible mixture
already exists. Yet Noah still displays in his seed the chronic instability-an instability that is apparently simply inherent in the mixture.
Only the grace of God, actively sought and given, can hold the balance
in harmony.
One might ask, why did God not withdraw his blessing? i.e., why
was the catastrophe not a drought rather than a flood? On the one
hand the flood provides an image of God's active power, rather than
his passive disapproval. His grace actually lifts the breath out of man,
a case of active intervention· rather than passive neglect. Yet at the
same time this image of an active God is:also nicely consistent with a
cause-and-effect model, showing excess answered with excess: The
spiritual excess of the Nephilim is answered with a flood of God's
power I grace, which it cannot withstand. Since all the cases of abuse
and punishment in Genesis rely on a principle of natural reaction, it
seems reasonable to suggest that the influx of floodwaters is a natural
consequence oftoo great an influx of spirit: that opening the gates of
heaven too widely (cf 7: 11). the Sons of Heaven have generated
unexpected consequences.
The Drunkenness of Noah
After the flood, the inherent instability of man is demonstrated
again in Noah's drunkenness. The incident may be regarded as an
echo of the Eden story. Noah's drunkenness iS a kind ofFall: He drinks
of the fruit of the vine and, like eating the fruit of the Tree, the act
brings shame into being in the new world. Indeed we sense in the line
"Noah began to be a husbandman" (9:20) an echo of the curse of Adam
creeping into Noah's perfection. Noah's son Ham reaps the consequences of this inherent sin-perhaps, we feel, unfairly. But this is an
ontology of cause and effect, not of legalistic punishment: "If thou
doest not well, sin lieth at the door" (4:7). The story of Noah's
drunkenness does not deal directly with images of earth/water/air,
but it clearly begins to focus on the implications of this model. On every
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61
occasion for sin we face the choice of Adam, to respect the father and
so reassert the balance of spirit, water and earth. or choose to treat
the Father as merely another man or even an object, and so assert a
purely material ontology. In creational terms. we might think of reality
like a cake: Each act either whips air into the batter making it lighter
and more savory, or draws air out, making life dry and unpalatable.
The Tower of Babel
The Tower of Babel story describes a third kind of imbalance
different from Cain's contempt for the spirit or the Nephilims' contempt for earth. Here there is contempt for the water of God's grace.
In this tncident, mankind attempts to forego grace. the normal glue
that unites spirit and earth, and instead build a man-made union in
a gross physical way, using "slime" to unite earth and heaven via a
tower. This "slime" is an earthy and polluted form of water: God's
grace, not in its pure form but as given to man and then contaminated
and misused by him. The project can be seen as an effort to recreate
Eden on a secular basis, since the tower will replace the function of
the Tree in Eden as the central navel uniting heaven and earth. By
uniting individual men (bricks of earth) into a whole, they hope to
reach heaven: in other words, to create a purely material religion, a
humanist philosophy "blessed" by the "slime ... The error here is similar
in kind to the original sin of mistaking a secondary manifestation of
God (there, earth; here, water) for an independent force. Of course this
attempt by man to recreate himself according to his own- recipe is
doomed, because there is no glue that will bind the two radically
different substances of earth and spirit. except the purest form of God's
grace. The consequences of the attempt are predictable: The glue fails,
the unity collapses. and its pieces are flung abroad with a force
proportional to the great height it had reached. The central point of the
story is not. as so many perverse commentators have argued, that God
is "inimical to the laudable human striving for progress."" The real
moral iR man's perversity. God is both wise and kind: His recipe for a
man cannot be improved upon, and He has repeatedly warned us that
it is dangerous to try. Yet we insist on doing so.
Chapters 1-11
The first eleven chapters of Genesis, then. show us the various
possible kinds of human imbalance, and their consequences. They
also implicitly defme the proper balance that should be maintained.
This information can be summed up in two propositions: first, we must
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
accept that our nature is a perfect yet always potentially unstable
mixture of three elements. We must accept that it is perfect. because
any attempt by us to adjust God's mixture results in a free fall spiral
of ever-worsening consequences; We must accept that it is always
unstable, because only our act of will-our willingness to "walk with
God"-can keep the mixture in balance. Secondly, we must understand the unique role that God's grace plays as the water that binds
the two halves of our,nature together, and also realize that our fallen
nature makes it difficult for this fluid to do its job properly. Because
we are fallen we must work to maintain the balance: We must plow
and work our earthy nature, struggling to mix the waters of grace into
them. In other words, our plight as men in the material world is the
plight of a people in the desert: To live we must dig; we must break
beneath the hard crust of a dead material world to find the blessed
waters of life beneath.
In this way the moral system constructed in chapters 1-11 is
transformed into a landscape agalnst which the Patriarchs play out
their lives; the story of survival in the desert becomes also the story
of spiritual struggle. Nowhere is this more clearly evident than in the
story of Abraham and Lot.
Abraham and Lot
The story of Abraham and Lot parting ways (chap. 13) is a fable
about how one perceives the world, and the consequences of that
perception. The story juxtaposes two styles of choosing, based on two
differing assumptions. Lot, faced with the choice between the fertile,
well-watered plains of Jordan and the arid regions of Canaan, naturally chooses the former. His choice is logical, and seems acceptable
within the structure of the metaphor of balance as well: The well-watered plain suggests a land blessed by God. As far as.we know Lot is
an unexceptionable man; but as with all these stories, we see after the
fact, in the consequences of his action, the mistake he has made and
the flaw that it reveals. Lot's choice betrays that he still has what we
may call an Edenic mind, relying on God to rain blessings down for
man to enjoy in leisure. The space that he chooses is charactertzed by
this attitude. The cities of the plain, Sodom and Gemorrah, are
populated by those who share the curse of Cain: they do not dig the
earth, but irresponsibly exploit the blessings given by God.
Abraham, by contrast, does not appear to favor either fertile or arid
region. The excellence that distinguishes Abraham from Lot is not one
of faith, as is so often argued. Lot questions God's choice of destination
when he is warned away from Sodom, certainly: but Abraham and
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Sarai laugh at the absurdity of God's promise to give them a child, and
Abraham also argues with God when the fate of Sod om and Gemorrah
is at stake. Worst of all, Abraham repeatedly doubts God's power to
fulfill His promise of seed, even jeopardizing the future of the promise
by attempting to pass off his wife as his marriageable sister." Faith is
not the issue between Abraham and Lot, but rather the fact that
Abraham has absorbed the lesson taugbt by Genesis 1·11, while Lot
has not. Abraham understands the curse of Adam: he knows that the
world is a desert, that the true water must be found beneath the
surface, and man must struggle to find it.
The differing fruits born to these two attitudes become apparent in
the stories that follow, in which Abraham and Lot come to be opposed
in various ways: Abraham becomes a mighty prince, Lot a captive slave
(14; cf Ham); Abraham is given land, Lot has his land destroyed;
Abraham's wife bears fruit, Lot's wife dies. In every case Abraham
ripens while Lot withers. The difference is water. Abraham was given
a desiccated land in which to dwell and a wife who is dried up ["it
ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women" (18: 11); "who
would have said with Abraham, that Sarah should have given children
suck?" (21:7)], but God's hidden waters revivi:fy both land and wife.
Lot's experience is the opposite: Living in a well-watered land he makes
no effort to dig beneath the surface. The earthly waters give him no
sustenance, and his wife, once fertile, is dried to a pillar of salt. The
choice that Lot's wife makes when fleeing Sodom emphasizes this
family flaw; she must choose between looking up the mountain toward
the face of God, or looking down longingly at the pleasures of the flesh.
She chooses the latter, and as a result the water of blessing is lost:
She becomes a dry pillar of salt. Her choice echoes the choice of her
husband, and that of the original sin; it reveals an i:mbalanced soul
weighted dangerously toward the physical. Abraham prospers and Lot
suffers based solely on their willingness to "walk with God," in the very
technical sense defined in chapters 1·11: accepting the
earth/water /air balance that God has ordained, and cultivating a
receptivity to the fecund waters He offers. The same angels bring
waters of life to Sarai and fiery death to the cities of the plain. It all
depends on how one greets them. 15
The Lives of the Patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac
The lives of the Patriarchs all follow a common pattern, the point
of which is to take men who may, at first, resemble Lot more than
Abraham, and train them to live a life of balance in which earth is
softened with water, and suffused with air/spirit.ln other words they
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
must be "rebom" into the kind of understanding that Genesis 1-11
implicitly urges us to have, in which we die to the Eden mentality of
privilege and enter tnstead into the post-lapsarian or "desert" awareness of precarious balance held in equilibrium by an ongoing act of
the will. Each patriarch must learn for himself that the physical world
is dead and attachment to it leads to death, while true life is found in
cultivating our earthy nature to receive spiritual force into it. The point
of this exile into the desert is to enable a retum-not to the mundane
family home, but in the larger sense to the state of Eden, now redefined
16
in terms appropriate to a spiritual rather than a physical awareness.
The story of Abraham begins with a call to material glory. Abram
will become a great nation (12:2) and will be given a land to inhabit
(12:7). From a purely literary point of view this promise motif becomes
a cruel but sometimes quite amusing joke, as Abraham again and
again fulfills God's conditions, only to have additional conditions laid.
Harold Bloom calls this relationship "a cruel pattem of power.'o~ 7 This
process of divine backpedaling reaches the level of absurdist theater
by chapter 17, when God again renews his promise to Abram, but
demands that the poor fellow change his name (17:5) and circumcise
himself and all his followers (17: 10-12). At the end of his life Abraham
is still wandering, still waiting for the promise to be fulfilled.
From a more sympathetic point of view, however, we can see that
God has a purpose in his backpedaitng, which is to make Abram into
a digger of wells. To move him forward from the man he was, who
presumably would not have answered any call but one promistng
material wealth, to one whose promised land is a purely inward,
spirituai garden. This process is not rigid, but for all the Pairiarchs it
tends to involve certain typical elements: an early demonstration of
spiritual proclivity; a rituai death in which he dies to his old life and
is bam to a new one; a vision or drean1 in which he concretely
experiences the reality of another world; a period of apprenticeship
during which he makes mistakes but progresses toward spirituai
understanding; and typicaily, a finai demonstration of his achieved
prowess.
That Abram was strongly predisposed to this spiritual outlook is
evident when he and Lot part ways, the second incident recorded after
his call. That he still requires an apprenticeship period is demonstrated by the first recorded incident, his joumey into Egypt, when he
allows his wife to be wooed by Pharoah in a botched attempt to avoid
unpleasantness. The awareness that Abram shows here, one that
gives priority to physical security and the experiences ofthe moment,
is directly opposed to the awareness that God is trytng to teach. We
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see that higher awareness demonstrated in Abram's vision, in chapter
15. This eerie incident, in which God [again] reasserts His promise,
begins with a ritual sacrifice during which Abram is thrown into a
trance-state:
And he said, Lord God, whereby shall I know that I
shall inherit it?
And he said unto him, Take me a heifer of three years
old, and a she goat of three years old, and a ram of
three years old, and a turtledove, and a young
pigeon.
And he took unto him all these, and divided them in
the midst, and laid each piece one against another:
but the birds divided he not.
And when the fowls came down upon the carcasses,
Abram drove them away.
And when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell
upon Abram: and lo, a horror of great darkness fell
upon him. 18
In that trance, Abram has a vision:
And [God] said unto Abram, Know of a surety that thy
seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs,
and shall serve them, and they shall afflict them
four hundred years ...
But in the fourth generation they shall come hither
again, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.
And it came to pass, that, when the sun went down,
and it was dark, behold a smoking fumace, and a
buming lamp that passed between those pieces.
(15: 13,16-17)
It is of course significant that God reveals to Abraham that the nation
of Israel must pass through the same ritual pattem of death (or
"descent" into Egypt) and rebirth (retum) that each individual patriarch must undergo. But for Abraham the real significance here is the
opposition between real life and dream/ spirit life. It is here that God
first begins to show his intention for Abraham, by essentially inviting
him to take up residence in an altemative reality. God is saying to
Abraham: "ignore what your senses tell you to be true: the truer reality
is within." Of course the promise of land does eventually come true (if
not exactly in the terms that Abraham originally understood); but it
is also clear that the retum to Eden (which is ultimately what the
Promised Land represents) will not take place on the physical plane,
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but must take place as a spiritual journey undergone inwardly. 19 By
luring Abram from his old ways with the ever-receding promise, God
is effectively training him to live, not for immediate gain in the material
world, but for the relationship with God, the locus of which is another
world.
There then follows a lengthy apprenticeship period, in which Abraham absorbs this lesson. His main problem, the area in which his faith
seems weakest, is the most material of areas, reproduction. This is no
doubt the reason behind the pact of circumcision: Circumcision marks
the organ and serves as a reminder to Abraham and his descendants
that the sexual function too is dedicated to God's purpose-a lesson
that he is nonetheless slow in learning. Sexual misconduct is the most
common sin in Genesis, and the result is always, of course, renegade
or "unbalanced" offspring whose hand is set against the Hebrews (e.g.
16:11-12; 19:36-38.)
In this context the culminating event of Abraham's life, the "sacrifice" of Isaac, can be seen as a metaphor for Abraham's final triumph
over his physical self. Abraham shows that he is not attached to the
physical, not even the most cherished of physical things, representative of the most uncontrollable of human instincts, reproduction.
However, read as an injunction to absolute faith, Abraham's willingness to sacrtfice Isaac is a troubling incident, one that no reasonable reader could endorse, since to do so would serve to justifY the
most horrible acts of zealotry. Instead I would argue that the incident
serves as the symbolic culmination of Abraham's life because it
demonstrates Abraham's knowing acceptance of God's balance.
Whereas before Abraham had doubted the efficacy of God's waters in
what appeared to be a purely material world (how can God wet the
womb that Earth has dried?) he now knows their power: For the mock
sacrifice of Isaac to make moral sense, Abraham must be fully aware
that Isaac will not die, despite the material appearance to that effect.
In other words Abraham's experience should not be summed up in
the words "God gave, and God can take; my own heart's desires are
meaningless," but rather "I know God's waters are upon my son, he
will not bum." (cf. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in Daniel3.) In
this way the incident can be seen as a parallel to the death of Lot's
wife. As that incident shows, it is up to man to maintain the balance
of earth/water/air by an act of will. If his attention wavers, as Lot's
wife's did, he will lose the blessed waters, and so burn.
Presenting the incident in these terms, we can also begin to see a
second function of the incident. It is not only Abraham's last act, but
Isaac's first, a kind of rite of initiation in which Isaac is shown the
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truth about man. The sacrifice by fire is an image of desiccation: of
God forcibly removing the blessing waters, and the ritual of "trial by
fire" to which Isaac is subjected is a way of showing the boy how fully
he is dependent on the blessing. It is God's way of holding the boy over
the fire, like Jonathan Edwards's sinners in the hands of an angry
God. ln this way the boy learns, through ritual instruction, what his
father learned through experience. This sense of passing on a spiritual
tradition is present throughout the story in Abraham instructing the
boy how to conduct himself.
Indeed arguably, Isaac's initiation is the centra[ focus of the story
(despite the narrator's-perhaps inserted?-commentary to the contrary.) Every other story in Genesis couples an event with its consequences in order to make its point. If this story is about Abraham then
it is unique in that there are no recorded consequences for Abraham.
But there are consequences for Isaac. It seems likely, at least, that the
seemingly unique incident of the sacrifice might be the cause of the
equally unique life lived by Isaac, the only Genesis patriarch who does
not have a problematic apprenticeship in his relationship with God.
Isaac's rich spiritual life is beautifully summed up in one sentence:
"And Isaac digged again the wells of water, which they had digged in
the days of Abraham his father" (26:18). Isaac's spiritual precociousness is also indicated by the fact that he is named by God in the
womb-rather than initiated later into full Patriarchal status with a
new name, as Abram and Jacob are. Perhaps the memorable experience of being held over the fire by God, and understanding in a
palpable way how essential the blessing is to man's existence, has left
Isaac in need of no further instruction.
Other parallels within the lives of the Patriarchs also support this
interpretation. Each Patriarch in Genesis must undergo a rite of
passage (exile or ritual death) before achieving spiritual maturity.
Joseph's is the purest case of the pattem: Before he can begin his
spiritual joumey he must be cast into the pit, left for dead, and then
brought up again. This ritual death releases him from the old life and
into a new one. 2° For Jacob and Abraham, exile from home performs
this function: They must leave all they know-" country ... kindred ...
thy father's house"- and begin anew, eventually achieving a new
identity marked by a new name. For Isaac this transformation occurs
instantaneously in one act of ritual violence. He is jolted from his old
life into a new one by an abrupt combination of ritual death (being
held over the fire). spiritual vision (he communes with God on the
mountaintop, perhaps for the first time); and accelerated apprenticeship (leaming the ritual from his father, by preparing for his own
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physical death). Thus Isaac is pushed through all of the necessary
stages of development in a single incident, and we may regard him as
spiritually mature from that point onward (although he does repeat
his father's sexual error in the episode with Abimalech; chapter 26).
Jacob
For Jacob the symbolic descent and rebirth follows a lengthy arc
of exile and retum, but the same goal is achieved through the same
means. Jacob's early life and his struggles with Esau may reasonably
be compared with Abraham and Lot, and the point is similar. God
chooses the boy predisposed to spiritual things and cultivates his
understanding, while the more physical of the two is allowed to sink
deeper into his earthiness. To them that have, more is given. {The root
of Jacob's naiile, which means "heel," comes from the Hebrew verb "to
follow," suggesting, perhaps, among its other connotations, that he is
a natural follower on the path.) This distinction also operates on the
telltale sexual level as well, Esau choosing two nearby, and presum·
ably attractive Hittite women, while Jacob chooses a more distant
mate suitable for perpetuating the blessing. Like Isaac before him,
Jacob finds his beloved by a well, symbolizing that she is an appro·
priate mate in the truer reality, and a spiritual resource.
Following demonstrations of his spiritual propensity Jacob then
undergoes a ritual death, in which he is expelled from his horne. The
double explanation of his departure, that he is forced to leave because
he stole the blessing (27:41·45) or that he leaves in peace with his
father's blessing to get a suitable wife (28: 1·4) are really one in the same
from the point of view of the characteristic structure: He is forsaking
the old life of"country, kindred, and father's house" to enter a new life
driven, ultimately, by the desire for a relationship with God.
Jacob's departure is immediately followed by a dream vision similar
to Abraham's:
And Jacob went out from Beersheba, and went
toward Haran.
And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried
there all night.. ..
And he dreamed, and behold a ladder was set up
on the earth ....
And behold, the Lord stood above it and said I am
the Lord God ...
the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give
it....
(28:10·13)
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The dream/vision is intended to draw Jacob into the altemative
reality, as it did Abraham. This vision reveals an inner Eden where
once-sundered heaven and earth are reconnected (here by a ladder
rather than a tree.) But Jacob is not yet prepared to live in such a
world. The experience exacts only a tentative commitment of future
interest from him. And, as with Abraham, it is an interest based on
material gaJn: "If God will be with me, and will keep in the way that I
go, and will give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on./ So that I
come again to my father's house in peace; then shall the Lord be my
God .... " (28:20-21.) There follows a long and, it would seem, largely
unsuccessful apprenticeship period in which Jacob's primary interest
appears to be the acquisition of women and property-indeed, having
taken up Esau's blessing he seems to have also assumed his personality, no longer a "plain man, dwelling in tents," but a rough adventurer. Within the context of the larger metaphor however, we can see
the change as positive: Jacob has outgrown his anachronistic Edenic
consciousness in which he expects to be blessed withoUt eaming it,
and adopted a post-lapsarian (or "desert") mentality in which, Adamlike, he labors to extract blessings from the land, and, metaphorically,
to spiritualize his rough earth. The penultimate scene in his story, in
which he spends an entire night wrestling with God, finally managing
to extract a blessing, suggests the same motif of an essentially earthy
nature struggling to achieve some spiritual insight. While Jacob never
reaches the goal of full integration of earth and spirit that was held
out to him in his ladder dream-never regains Eden-he doeS. manage,
in his own way, to make a retum of sorts to the gates of the garden,
in his reunion with Esau. This encounter has all the elements of the
Cain and Abel conflict: two jealous brothers, a disputed blessing,
long-simmering resentments. But Jacob manages to rever$£ the decline of that second fall, making correct choices where Cain (and Jacob
himself in his earlier manifestation) had made wrong ones: Cain was
jealous of the blessing his brother had received; Jacob offers his own
blessing back agaln to his brother (33: ll "Take, I pray thee, my
blessing that is brought to thee.") Cain is ungrateful for the blessings
he has received; Jacob is thankful, despite his long suffering ("because
God hath dealt graciously with me,"), and Jacob is satisfied with his
lot ("I have enough"); Caln lacked respect for the spirit within Abel;
Jacob regards his brother's face as equivalent to the face of God ("I
have seen thy face, as though I had seen the face of God," 33:10); and
therefore is happy when that face is pleased ("thou wast pleased with
me.") Jacob has achieved an impressive degree of spiritual success.
But his iriumph is not complete; he has reversed the historical decline
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of man back to the gates of the Garden, but is unable to press further,
into the New Eden.
Joseph
The story of Joseph again follows the same pattern, but with a twist
in the return: Rather than being gathered unto his fathers, Joseph
gathers his father unto him. As in the case of Abraham and Lot, and
Jacob and Esau, Joseph's story begins with a distinction being made
between the spiritual tendencies of the special son, and his more
worldly brothers. Joseph has the power of prophetic dreams. This
power occasions some pride on his part and jealously on the part of
his brothers (reiterating the Cain motif again), which sets the stage
nicely for the next step in the pattern, the ritual death in which the
hero is ostracized and humbled. In this case, as with Isaac, the ritual
death almost becomes a literal one: He is thrown into the pit, and his
brothers report him as dead. The coat of many colors serves as a
literary device to provide proof of the dead one's identity, but it also
makes a significant point about the arena in which God's chosen ones
should seek glory, and why the Patriarch must die to this world. The
same point is made also at the end of the story, in the wonderful scene
in which the old shepherd Jacob stands before Pharoah on the throne
(47:7-10.) In this single image of spiritual wealth facing material
wealth, much of the message of Genesis is encapsulated. Only here,
perhaps, do we begin to see the artistry of the text in drawing us into
its own world-view: Absorbed in the drama of the Patriarchs' quest we
had never stopped to think how ordinary these men appeared to their
fellows at the marketplace, or along the road. The scene of Jacob before
the throne of Pharoah jolts us into the awareness that despite the
promises of land and great nations, these material th.ings are not at
all what God's promise is about. The patriarchs are not kings of
government or commerce, but of an inward land.
Like Isaac, Joseph needs only one hard demonstration to learn this
lesson well. After his ritual death Joseph passes easily into his new
life, never again displaying the slightest degree of pride or resentment.
Whatever his circumstances, life is all one to Joseph, in a way that
reminds one of an eastern swami. Whether servant. prisoner or ruler
of all Egypt, he never changes, and never displays any attachment
whatsoever to his material surroundings. Although the text never
expltcWy says so, his equanimity must result from his firrn foundation
in the alternative reality of dreams. Knowing what the future holds,
and that it is ordained by God, he is at peace with both appearances
and reality.
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In this sense Joseph is already possessed of the Promised Land, a
new inward Eden which is his true home, no matter what his outward
circumstances may be. Like the original pre-lapsarian state, this new
Eden is characterized primarily by balance, in two senses: His spirit
is completely at peace, and his nature is a balanced mixture of earth,
water and breath, according to the original recipe. That is, his physical
life is fully permeated by spiritual awareness, as rich soil is permeated
by water, and so is fertile ground for fruits of the spirit. When Jacob
summarizes his son during his deathbed blessing, this image is
exactly the one that he chooses: "Joseph is a fruitful bough, even a
fruitful bough by a well; whose branches run over the wall. .. " (49:22).
Judah
Like Isaac, Joseph has a very brief apprenticeship and a lengthy life
of grace. His final test (which like Jacob's, involves overcoming the Cainite
desire for revenge agalnst his brothers) is largely a perfunctory exercise,
and is really less of a test for Joseph than an initiation for Judah, in
which Judah must prove himself by offering his body as a saclifice to
redeem Benjamin. In this way the incident is structurally similar to
Abraham's binding of Isaac: The final test in which the Patriarch proves
his own excellence also serves as an initiation for his protege.
Judah, however, disturbs the pattem of succession that has been
so consistent throughout Genesis and also undermines Joseph's
stature when, in the final verses of the book, he appears to take the
prominent place, even above Joseph, in his father's blessing: Judah's
prominence may be, as some have argued, simply an insertion to
adjust the text to later historical reality. Or, perhaps, it is not
necessarily inconsistent with the message of Genesis as a whole, since
Judah's reign is in the temporal world, as a "law-giver," while Joseph
reigns in the higher world of dreams. But it is also true that it is from
Judah, not Joseph, that the most prominent line of descent comes.
The line of Judah results in both David and Solomon (1 Chronicles 2).
and Christ (Matthew, chapter I). Judah hardly seems to be an
exemplary Patriarch, however, and the details surrounding his progeny is also troubling: The line is perpetuated through a woman
previously married to two of Judah's sons, who poses as a harlot to
become impregnated. We can only conclude that this complex story
is meant to impress us with the lengths to which God is forced to go
to keep the Hebrew lineage pure, in the face of man's lack of cooperation. Purity is essential because those lineages that have strayed too
far from God's balance cannot be rebalanced, and will only serve to
unbalance others. When Joseph marries an Egyptian (given to him
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not by God but by Pharaoh). and Judah marries a Canaanite woman,
the purity of the line is in jeopardy, but despite all, God manages to
remove any obstacles and unite Judah with a Hebrew woman.
From the Chiistian point of view, which asks us to explain Judah's
as the lineage of Chiist, we can argue for Judah's greater worth in
light of the fact that he offers his body to redeem Benjamin from the
bondage of sin, lest his father be saddened by the loss. The language
here is strongly evocative of Christ's mission: "Now therefore," Judah
tells Joseph, "I pray thee, let thy servant abide instead of the lad a
bondsman to my Lord; and let the lad go up with his brethren./ For
how shall I go up to my father, and the lad be not with me?" (44:33-34).
Such a reading of Judah's role may disrupt the neat narrative pattern
of Genesis, but fulfills the larger message of the book. Since the trend
from Abraham to Joseph has been to replace the lure of mateiial gain
with that of spiiitual wealth, Judah's life story could profitably be seen
as the fulflllment of that trend, the first stage in a new order tn which
men live not for their own gain but for the good of others. This is an
appealing readtng, and has only one source of lingeiing doubt. Since
Joseph's experience is arguably also one of sacrificing himself for
others ("God did send me before you to preserve life," 45:5). it is
difficult to see how Judah's sacrifice takes precedence over Joseph's.
But perhaps the fact that Judah appears to be the lesser man may
really be the point. The shift from Joseph to Judah does seem to
suggest almost a changing of the guard. Perhaps it is most profitable
to see Joseph as the last of the great "demigod" patiiarchs and Judah
as the start of a new era, in which the best of men are good enough,
but none too good by Patiiarchal standards. This idea is supported by
the metaphors of Jacob's fmal blessing. While Joseph is called a
"fruitful bough by a well" (49:22). Judah is a "lion's whelp," one who
"binds his foal unto the vine, and his ass's colt unto the choice vine"
(49: 9, II). The metaphors suggest a piimary quality about Joseph's
spiiitual life that is missing in Judah: Joseph has his roots sunk
directly into the waters of life, while Judah is merely tethered to the
vine whose roots feed on these waters. Judah has access to these
life-giving waters only in adulterated, second-hand form, through the
fruit of the vine. (Here, as in the story of Noah's drunkenness, fruit
evokes the taint of the Fall.) The same point is latent in the image of
Judah as a lion crouched over his prey: Judah's blessing is a secondhand sort-life drawn from another life, not anginal in itself.
The overwhelmtng preponderance of evidence, then, seems to mark
Jacob's blessing as a turning point in the history of God's chosen
lineage, tn which the generation of Patriarchs has ended, to be
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replaced by a race of "law-givers," men whose most direct access to
God is through the letter, and not the spirit. Speaking of himself to
his brothers, Joseph says "God did send me before you to preserve
life," words that are perhaps meant to link his activities to that of the
last great member of an earlier race, Noah. Their roles are certainly
similar. Noah collected the animals to preserve them from a flood;
Joseph collects the grain (epitomized as seven fat cows in Pharoah's
dream) to preserve life from drought. But the most important similar·
ity, perhaps, is that both'men are the last of a past, greater race, a
superior generation who "walked with God."
For in fact, the God of Genesis is a receding God. In Abraham's day
God spoke to Abraham as man to man, even coming to his tent in
human form (18:lff) and debating with Abraham and his wife. By
Jacob's time God comes in dreams only, speaking, indeed as man to
man, but only in the visionary state, and never as a physical presence.
(I assume that Jacob's wrestling match with God occurs within a
vision.) Joseph, despite the many blessings he receives, and despite
his great wisdom and insight, never sees God or speaks face to face
with him, or even hears his voice. For Joseph, God comes only veiled
in prophetic dreams. Unmistakably God is receding fi:·om the world in
Genesis. The reason appears to be that He came here only to lead his
people out. He was active in men's affairs when He needed to be, during
man's infancy when man was not able to maintain the earth/water I air
balance himself. But He has receded as men begin to learn the secret
themselves. This is not to say that He is no longer available to men,
but rather, that he is available through different channels, and that He
typically does not come to us, but waits for us to find the way to Him.
Notes:
1.
"One should not think," writes Von Rad, "that the many individual
traditions about the patriarchal period in circulation came together
by themselves into such an artful and theologically deliberate composition." (Gerhard Von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary, Philadelphia:
Westminster Press, 1961, p. 159.) On the issue of source research,
Van Rad asks rhetorically "What is the content of chapter 22 if the
narrative no longer legitimizes the abolishment of child sacrifice?
What is the meaning of chapter 28 ... if the narrative no longer legitimizes the sacredness of Bethel and its customs?" The answer, of
course, is that they mean what the compiler has designed them to
mean within the larger context of the work.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
See also Zvi Adar, The Book of Genesis: An Introduction to the Biblical
World (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press of Hebrew Univ., 1990). p. 9ff:
"Even on the assumption that the Book of Genesis is composed of
different elements, it is clear that they have been blended into one
integral whole."
2. By "structuralist" I mean, here, a way of reading that begins by first
considering the internal ontology of the text, rather than, say, its plot
or characterization, on the assumption that the meaning of characters
and events deperid significantly on their ontological ground. This
analysis is accomplished by considering the specific meaning of
particular images (or words or ideas} first within the structure of the
text as a whole, rather than in their discrete contexts: In other words,
I assume that certain words can take on special meanings in a text
because of the way they are used. This is similar in many regards to
traditional interpretive reading, except that in locating these "special"
meanings this method does not distinguish between "real" objects and
images in the text: It doesn't matter whether the water is real water
or metaphorical water, or even water used as a metaphor by a
character and hence doubly removed from "real" water. I am concerned, instead, with what water means to the author of the text.
Presumably, such knowledge is indispensable if one is to understand
the full meaning of a sentence like, for example, "And Isaac digged
again the wells of water, which they had digged in the days of Abraham
his father" (Genesis 26: 18).
In some texts, of course, this method of reading will yield little of
interest. It is most useful in texts that have a strongly symbolical bent,
and it is especially appropriate for a text like Genesis, which claims
to speak about the Word become concrete reality in Creation, and
which claims a special status for itself as a living Word: In Genesis,
matertal substance is more than mere substance, and metaphors are
always somehow more than just metaphors, because in the ontology
of the living Word all ideas are really both metaphor and substance.
Under such circumstances, it would be a mistake not to read the text
with an enlightened disregard for the boundary between symbol and
reality,
3. The one really significant difference between Adam and Eve is seen
here, in the degree of their closeness to the Earth/Mother principle.
In the second Creation story (2:22 ff) Eve is said to be made from a
rib of Adam's; she is therefore presumably embedded one level deeper,
as it were, in the material Creation, and so is one step further removed
from the breath that originally gave Adam life.
In the same vein, it is significant that Eve is described as being
"made" rather than "created." The first· creation story (Genesis 1)
draws a significant distinction between those things that God created
(i.e., ex nihilo) and those he made: For example, the first appearance
of a "moving creature" (1: 20-21) is described as an act of creation,
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but subsequent different forms of that original concept are described
as being "made." It seems likely that the making of Eve in the second
creation story is designed to follow this pattem. This fact can be
interpreted in two ways. It could be argued simply that Eve is a
subsequent production in the same line, and so would naturally be
"made" and not "created." But the more traditional view would suggest
that Eve has contact with God mostly secondartly, through Adam, and
the fact that she is made from Adam's substance, rather than simply
made, would seem to support this idea. The point of this hierarchy is
presumably to maintain a family structure headed spiritually by the
husband~to make him the broker through which the female receives
God's blessings. It must be said, however, that ultimately the impact
of this male-female difference on the larger picture is fairly minimal:
The spiritual health of both male and female depend on the same
things, only the norm would be for the female to access those things
primarily [or partly] through her husband.
4. The idea of the tree as navel, derived here from the imagery of joined
opposites that is characteristic of the earth/water /air imagery in
Genesis, may in fact have deep roots in early cosmological conceptions. See for example, Shemaryahu Talman, Literary Studies in the
Hebrew Bible: Form and Content, (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press of
Hebrew Univ., 1993) pp. 50 ff, 'The 'Navel of the Earth' and the
Comparative Method." Talman points out that "the representation of
the world in the form of a human body, a disc, or a square whose
center is marked by a tall mountain which represents its navel, is
prevalent in the mythical traditions of many cultures." In Genesis 2
of course we are dealing with a tree rather than a mountain, but other
imagery in Genesis, notably the tower of Babel and Jacob'S dream of
the ladder, suggests that the Biblical cosmology may well implicitly
assume the idea of a lost "navel" connecting heaven and earth.
5. Zvi Adar, An Introduction. p. 25. This reading is based on a comparison with li Samuel 19:36 (and other passages): "] am this day
four-score years old, can I discem between good and bad? Can your
servant taste what I eat or what I drink?"
6. Jonathan Magonet, "The Themes of Genesis 2-3," A Walk in the
Garden: Biblical, Iconographic and Literary Images ofEden, ed. by Paul
Morris and Deborah Sawyer, Joumatfor the Study of the Old Testament, Supplemental Series 136, (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1992) p. 43.
7.
Paul Morris, in Morris and Sawyer, Walk, p. 130.
8.
Ibid, p. 135.
9. Robert Sacks, A Conunentary on the Book of Genesis. Ancient Near
Eastern Texts and Studies Volume 6 (Lampeter. U.K.: The Edwin
Mellon Press, 1990) makes an interesting point regarding Cain's
frustration and his inability to accept his new status: "Cain's decision
to return east establishes a pattem which will be followed throughout
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the whole of the book. ... there is something radically wrong with going
east, insofar as it is a partial retum to Eden. Those men who do so
will all tum out to be cowards. It is a manifestation of man's attempt to
return to Eden rather than to face the world as it lies before him" {p. 43).
10. Onan spilled his seed upon the ground rather than sowing it in his
brother's widow, as his father (Judah, and, arguably, God) had
commanded, because he "knew that the seed should not be his"
(Genesis 38: 9). This is a waste of God's gift of potency, as Cain had
wasted his brother's life-blood. In the context of the earth/water /air
imagery, this curious incident of Onan's disobedience also has overtones
of an incestuous and idolatrous love of the earth/mother {again like Cain,
who is the earthy brother): His effort to inseminate the earth directly
seems to suggest, through impious parody, an attempt to usurp God's
power to make the earth fecund by wetting it. Like Cain, he fails to see
that there is no way but God's way to be fruitful and multiply.
11. Umberto Cassuto, among others, hypothesizes that "Cain" refers to
a tribe "designated by the name Cain, or by the appellative Kenite,
which is mentioned several times in Scripture .... The name of the tribe
indicates that it was engaged in metal work .... Hence the tribe of
Kenites was utterly despised in the eyes of neighboring tribes, just as
in Arabia today the wandering tribes of smiths are held in utmost
disdain by the Arabs" (A Commentary on the Book of Genesis,
Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1961 p. 180).
The mention of "such as dwell in tents, and of such as have cattle"
in the list of Cain's descendents has seemed inconsistent to many
critics. Isaac M. Kikawada and Arthur Quinn (Before Abraham Was:
The Unity of Genesis 1·11, Nashville: Abington Press, 1985) make a
fairly convincing stab at explaining this apparent enigma. The word
translated as "cattle" here is Miqneh, which means "a living possession
... [for which] the possessor has legal title as he would for something
commercially bought." (p. 56). Such a word, they argue, would be
inappropriate to describe the relationship that Abel had with his
animals, and suggests that Cain's descendents are the originators of
commercial farming.
12. See Von Rad (Genesis) p. 110: "Because of the union of these heavenly
beings with earthy women, God's spirit and life-giving power entered
mankind far beyond the original design at creation."
13. Calum M. Carmichael, "The Paradise Myth," p. 47 of Morris and
Sawyer, Walk.
14. Various explanations of these sister/wife incidents have been advanced, but the undeniable fact is that whatever the intended point,
even the participants recognize that Abraham is not protecting his
wife's body and so his own future progeny as he ought to do.
15. Since both Abraham and Lot are shown entertaining the angelic visitors
(chapters 18 & 19), it seems likely that we are meant to locate
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significant differences in the styles of their hospitality. The differences
between the two are subtle but consistent. Abraham sits in the door
of his tent, Lot at the gates of Sodom; both first offer water to bathe,
rest, and later food, but Lot's offers seem frenzied ("he pressed upon
them greatly," 19;3) and more designed to impress ("he made them a
feast"); Lot insists that they "tarry all night" (19;2), while Abraham
asks only that they tarry until their hearts are "comforted "(18;5); and
of course Lot's entertainment draws significant interest from his
neighbors. Most importilJltly Abraham seems to know who his guests
really are, while Lot apparently does not. Taken together these details
suggest a distinction consistent with the rest of the story: Abraham
is a thoughtful man of spiritual insight, a man who minds his own
business but is also concerned about others. Lot is more interested
in worldly pleasure, and in impressing others. What, after all, can
have been his purpose in sitting at the gate of Sodom, if not to mind
other people's business, and to intercept interesting-looking strangers
to entertain?
16.See Paul Morris, "Exiled from Eden," pp. 117-166_ in Morris and
Sawyer Walk: According to the Midrash, "these 'histories' ... are
focussed on the punishment of exiles and the overcoming of such
pnnishment {'retums') ~Israel's sin and exile are a reiteration of
Adam's sin and exile ~".
17. Harold Bloom, ed., Modem Critica1 Interpretations: Genesis. (NY:
Chelsea House Publishers, 1986) p. 4.
18.15: 8-12. E. A. Speiser (The Anchor Bib1e: Genesis, Garden City, NJ:
Doubleday & Co., 1964, pp. ll2ffl among others, notes that this is a
contemporary covenant ritual, in which the parties to a contract
incant formulas inviting the powers that be to split them asunder like
these beasts should they breech their promise. Since God is the
promiser here, the lamp and fumace that pass between the pieces of
carcass {15: 17) suggest the physical presence of God. Possibly in this
context we are meant to think of the fire as separating the two halves
of the beasts~a negative image of God's water which would normally
hold the two halves of the creatures together. In any case the image
of split halves as a punishment is quite appropriate in light of other
similar imagery in Genesis .
19. See Von Rad, Genesis, p. 158: "the fulfillment of this promise lies
beyond Abraham's own life, and it is scarcely thinkable that the
Yahwist considered it as fulfilled in his day."
20. See James S. Ackerman, "Joseph, Judah, Jacob," in Bloom, Interpretations, p. 103: "The brothers see Joseph coming and ambiguously
refer to him as "ba'al of the dreams." This means something like
"hotshot dreamer"; but the allusion to Ba'al~the Canaanite vegetation God who annually descends into the pit and then arises~under
scores the mythic descent pattem of the hero."
�78
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�A Handbook
That Provides No Help
Elliott Zuckerman
I have read a good number of books about poetic devices, and from
almost all of them I have learned something new, usually about some
· detail or distinction in the realm of rhetoric. But the account of verse
itself will typically sbike me as unclear and incomplete. On those rare
occasions when I can piece together a clear and coherent account of
the meters of English, I am relieved, for at least I can begin to consider
the differences between the author's views and my own. But most of
the time there is no theory of verse discoverable amidst the comments
on random details and the vague waving in the direction of pieties
about poetry in general. And so my reading of books about verse, even
those considered important and definitive, has been an unrewarded
search for how the author would answer this or that clear question.
Although they call themselves prosodists, most of the authors do not
seem to recognize that the theory of verse, like the theory of meter in
music, is a bounded subject requiring decisions about how to read
and scan and count. and that it is not for nothing that poets once
talked of "measures" and "numbers."
Recently I came across a handbook in paperback that I had
somehow missed when it first appeared in hard cover. The author is
William Packard, who (according to my brief researches). has been a
professor of poetry at New York University and edited a magazine -for
some years in New York but later in Maine-devoted to what he calls
the craft of poetry. The Poet's Dictionary: A Handbook of Prosody and
Poetic Devices was published in 1989 by a reputable publisher and
reissued in paperback in 1994. * It carries a foreword by the poet and
prosodist Karl Shapiro, who himself wrote one of the standard
handbooks of the sixties; and there is a blurb on the cover of the
paperback -placed in quotation marks but unatbibuted, like a sign
in a supermarket-asserting that "both novice and professional poets
and all afficionados [sic] of verse should rejoice over" the book. (The
mis-spelling might serve as a warning to readers who still expect
accuracy in such details.) Although I am something more than a novice
poet yet not a professional (whatever that may be), I do, I think, qualiJY
*The Poet's Dictionary: A Handbook of Prosody and Poetic Devices (Harper & Row,
1989). HarperPerenniel Paperback Edition, 1994.
Elliott Zuckerman is Tutor Emeritus at St. John's College.
�so
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
as an aficionado of at least some kinds of verse. But far from pleasing
me, the book made me indignant -indignant enough to write this
unsolicited review. I do thtnk that the best reason for writing criticism
is to call attention to a good book that might otherwise be overlooked.
But sometimes a review has to be written as a waming against a
presumed authority who misleads and misinforms.
I
Like many handbobks, this one is written in short titled articles
arranged alphabetically. There are about a hundred and ten articles-from ACCENT to ZEUGMA-in a little more than two hundred
pages. I like to read such books by starting with one ariicle and then
going on to wherever the references lead me. In this case I started at
the beginning, because the article on ACCENT promised to lead me
right away to the important entry called METER. It is in METER that the
ktnds of feet are briefly defined, and illustrated with passages of verse.
I deduced from the brief naming and illustration of the kinds of feet
that the author seemed to subs crtbe to a fairly common view of how
to expound meters, which I call the Substitution theory. An iambic
tetrameter, for example, in its simplest fonn will consist of four clear
iambs. Then for any iambic foot (but particularly the first in the line)
another kind of foot can be "substituted." In my opinion, this theory
is by no means so straightforward as it sounds. It almost invariably
ignores the question of where the stress of the substituting foot lies
in relationship to the stress of the hypothetically underlying foot. To
put the important question slightly more generally: Does the theorist
subscribe to a more or less isochronous placement of the stressed
syllables? Are the stresses more or less equidistant in time?
Let's take as an example the simplest case. The most common
"substitution" that occurs 1n English iambic verse is the use of a
trochee in the opening foot:
The Gods, that mortal Beauty chase,
Still in a Tree did end their race.
Apollo hunted Daphne so,
Only that She might Laurel grow.
In these couplets from Marvell's "Garden," the second and fourth
lines display an opening inversion. And perhaps that is all that needs
to be said about the scansion-unless one ventures into the realm of
interesting prosodic questions, which, in my opinion, begins with the
question of where the stresses of the trochees lie in relation to the
stresses of the underlying iambs. Should we, that is to say, posit an
isochronous, or evenly spaced, set of stresses, which underline both
�ZUCKERMAN
81
the regular meter and the meter that is vaned with so-called substituted feet? Are the stresses on "Still" and the first syllable of "Only" in
the same place (so to speak) as the stresses on "Gods" and the second
syllable of "Apollo"?
Let me repeat these questions with reference to a purely metrical
schema. Here is a representation of the underlying iambic tetrameter,
the regular meter that is unchanged in lines one and three:
ulululul
And here is the common variation in which a trochee replaces the first
iamb, as in lines two and four:
luululul
Now if the stresses are meant to be more or less equally distant from
one another, the two lines would line up in this way:
ulululul
luul u I u I
-which is what I think happens metrically. Of course there are
prosodists who refuse to posit isochronous stresses at all, and although I think they then have a great deal of trouble defining what
they mean by meter, I welcome learning of their refusal, because it
clalifies where they stand.
I would, with some interest, have started to search for Mr Packard's
views about this question, but I was stopped short by certain details
in his exposition that were misleading about far simpler'- matters. I
quickly began to see that questions about isochronism were far too
subtle for this book, and that innocent readers were in danger of being
confused by statements and examples about elementary definitions.
Consider the first example given to illustrate the trochaic, which is
from the first act of Macbeth, a witch speaking:
I'll drain him dry as hay:
Sleep shall neither night nor day
Hang upon his penthouse lid;
He shall live a man forbid:
To be sure, once it gets going the meter here can be called trochaic;
but with all the clear and even sing-song trochaic tetrameters to
choose from, why use one that begins with an iamb, in a line that is
plainly iambic? Even the subsequent lines are not lucid examples, for
in this meter the row of trochees is catalectic, or missing the final
unstressed syllable. Lines two, three, and four look like this:
luluful
�82
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Are those four trochees wHhout a tail, or are they four iambs without
a head? But that is hardly a question one should have to begin with
when simply being shown what a trochee is. Anything from Hiawatha
would have made the point impeccably.
Mr Packard's second example of the trochaic is King Lear's line of
culminating negatives:
Never, never, never, never, never!
Here are five incontrovertible trochees, but in a line that I and others
have used often enough to display the painful distortion of five iambs
into their opposites. To be sure, the suggestion that there is something
metaphorical of Lear's despair in the very prosody of the line would
seem high-powered in the context of simply introducing the trochee
as a foot. So why choose this example, which, for any reader who
knows that it comes from a context of iambic pentameter, brings up
questions far in excess of the matter at hand? As blank verse, for
example, the line could be construed as five iambs with a feminine
ending and misstng the first upbeat-a five-footed equivalent of the
ambiguity in the previous example.
Mr Packard's illustrations of the spondaic likewise skips over
essentiai aspects of the definition, while at the same time prompting
perplexities for which the reader has been given no preparation. The
first example is once again from Macbeth -I am not questioning the
quality of the examples, only their illustrative adequacy:
Out, out brief candle ...
These are not clear spondees at all. In the context of blank verse there's
no reason why the first "out" shouldn't be taken as an upbeat to the
stronger second. Or, to put it another way, this "spondee" could be
construed as an iamb in which the light syllable has been "promoted"
to almost equai status with the stressed syllable. But nowhere in the
book is there the slightest mention of the useful idea of the promotion
or demotion of stresses. The question of the relation of the spondee to
an underlying iamb arises in full force with Packard's next example,
a famous one from Paradise Lost:
Rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens, and Shades of Death.
Here at least I can (with no help from the teacher) pair up the first six
monosyllables into three iambs-or I suppose I should say three
spondees that are substituting for the iambs-and then be left at the
end with two incontrovertable iambs: "and Shades/ of Death." Not a
bad example at all, if only the reader had been told what to look for:
�ZUCKERMAN
83
certamly better than Mr Packard's third and last example of the
spondaic, from Ginsberg's Howl:
I saw the best minds of my generation ...
The only presumed spondee I can find here is "best minds"; but if I
construe the line (or fragment of a line) according to traditional
scansion and discover that it falls (not surprisingly) into blank verse,
it turns out that "best" and "minds" belong to different feet:
I saw I the best/ minds of/ my gen/ er·a/ tion
And if I don't scan the line tn any traditional way-and one might well
question whether an introduction of the standard feet ought to use
lines, or part of lines, from free verse-there's not much point in the
close analysis offeet at all.
It is something of a give-away that Mr Packard follows his brief
exposition of the various kinds of feet with a note of warning, along
with quasi-scriptural quotations from Shelley and Emerson and Col·
eridge which really have very little relevance to his warning. Here's
what Packard himself says:
No matter how adept one becomes at metrical scansion,
one should remember that poets have always insisted
that the intuitive music of poetry must come first.
It is hard to know how "tntuitive music" might differ from any other
music of verse, but the connotation seems to be that_ something
intuitive must be better than something that sounds as mechanical
as "metrical scansion." There is anyway little danger that a reader of
this book will become adept at scanning, mechanically or otherwise,
since nowhere in the book are there indications of how to scan
according to any clear set of rules.
II
So far I have complamed of theoretical vagueness and misleading
examples-not quite enough to precipitate an extended attack. But it
was not long before I met the first of the many expositions that display
deep-seated misunderstandings. The unlikely location was the section
on RHYME--and I say unlikely because tn my experience there is not
much that can go wrong when expounding something so straightfor·
ward. Packard has no trouble distinguishing tersely between mascu·
line and feminine rhymes: he gives examples of each, and tells us that
the masculine rhyme falls on the last syllable of the line and the
feminine on the next-to-last. So far so good.
�84
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
He then introduces a poem of Herrick's that "altemates masculine
and feminine rhymes ... until the final couplet, which employs a monosyllable masculine rhyme." Anyone who knows the usage should know
what to expect: a poem in which a couplet the two lines of which end
in one kind of rhyme, the masculine, is followed by a couplet whose
lines end in the other kind, the feminine, and so on in alternation:
mmffrnrnff.... Such altemation happens to be the staple prerequisite
for all rhyming in French verse (where of course a fmal schwa-like
"silent e" provides the second syllable of the feminine rhyme). and
because of the altemation it can safely be said that the totality of
French verse displays an equal number of each sort of rhyme. In
English, however, such strict altemation is rare, and I looked forward
to seeing it done by Herrick. Instead this is what Packard quotes:
A sweet disorder in the dresse
Kindles in clothes a wantonness:
A Lawne about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction:
An erring Lace, which here and there
Enthralls the Crimson Stomacher:
A Cuffe neglectful!, and thereby
Ribbands to flow confusedly:
A winning wave (deserving Note)
In the tempestuous petticote:
A careless shoe-sbing in whose tie
I see a wild civility:
Doe more bewitch me, then when Art
Is too precise in every part.
Anyone acquainted with the stmplest facts of rhyming can see that atr
the rhymes here are masculine. There is indeed something going on
that is worthy of comment-and not easily noticed unless one starts
looking for what aspect of the rhyming Mr Packard could possibly be
pointing to. It seems that in almost all the couplets except the last,
the first syllable of the rhyming pair happens also to be a monosytrabic
word, while the responding syllable of the rhyming pair is the final
syllable of a polysyllabic word. When Packard asked us to notice
altemating masculine and feminine rhymes, I could only take that to
mean altemating pairs of such rhymes, for we all know (and I think
he knows elsewhere) that it is nonsense to speak of a single stressed
syllable as "rhyming" with a disyllabic combination of stressed-andunstressed (or stress plus enclitic). Moreover, even if what happens
in the Herrick poem could be called a sort of unusual rhyming, then
the "rhymes" called feminine would have to be characterized as doubly
�85
ZUCKERMAN
feminine, for the stressed syllables are followed by not one but two
unstressed syllables. Packard's confusion is deeply embedded, for the
"rhyme" that he refers to is that of a stressed syllable with the second
of two unstressed syllables. But Herrick's rhymes are not "dresse" and
"wantonnesse," etc., but "dresse" and "nesse," "thrown" and "on,"
"there" and "cher," the second of each pair counting as a masculine
single stress, just like the first-and indeed there is an over-rhyme in
the case of"tye" and "ty," an identity of sound of the sort that is sought
after in French but discouraged in English.
Another way of putting all this is to acknowledge that all the lines
are in the same meter, an iambic tetrameter (in which, as we have
already noticed, the opening foot can be a trochee, as in lines two and
four). Hence the rhyme, is always the eighth syllable, regardless of
whether that syllable is a single word or the last syllable of a polysyllable. Nowhere is there a ninth syllable (necessarily unstressed) to
provide a feminine ending, and if there were such an ending there
would of course have to be a pair of them to make a rhyme. This is a
wordy way of putting things, and I used to think of such matters as
too obvious to be written out-before I encountered the strange
mistakes of Mr Packard. Imagine the perplexity of some beginner who
thought he grasped the easy distinction between masculine and
feminine rhymes and then was presented with the Herrick example
and its introduction.
III
It is under the entry ALEXANDRINE that Mr Packard makes his
worst set of mistakes, and shows that his confusion about English
verse is matched by his confusion about French verse, despite the fact
that the book includes many examples of his translations of the
French masters. Right away we are told that in the classical French
alexandrine-which is, of course, to French verse what iambic pentameter is to English-there is a caesura that divides the line into two
half-lines "of three feet each on either side."
I remember when, during my first encounter with French verse, I
tried to read the French alexandrine as though it were pretty much
the same as the English; it seemed reasonable enough to do so: there
are six syllables on either side of the pause, and since the hemistich
often enough had its stresses-different, of course, from English or
German stresses, but still discernible-on a combination of the second
and the sixth, or the fourth and the sixth, it was possible to pair up
the six syllables as iambs. This: • • I • • I, and this: • • • I • I, could
both be read as • I • I • I. But I was disabused soon enough, most
immediately by the sort of line I had to call "anapestic":
�86
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
••I ••I
As an example of that sort of line, I'll use one that Mr Packard himself
quotes elsewhere in his book, displaying as usual his taste for great lines:
Je levis, je rougis. je palis
a sa vue ...
No amount of wishful scanning could force the two trisyllable divisions
of each hemistich into three disyllabic feet. This line from Phedre also
happens to be the line'that is cited in the article on the ALEXANDRINE
in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics, where there is a correct
reference to "the fluid 4 accents ... " of the French line. Mr Packard even
quotes the evidence against his own statement right after he makes
it, for there he gives us the inevitable opening lines of the play:
Le dessein en est pris: je pars, cher Theramene,
Et quitte le sejour de l'aimable Trezene.
Dans le doute martel dontje suis agite,
Je commence a rougir de mon oisivete ...
Although there are some half-lines in this speech (the second half of
line one, for example) that could, for speakers of English, fairly
naturally be construed as having three iambs, I should think that
there is strong enough evidence here against the notion that anything
like three feet can generally be found. The most common forms of the
hemistich show two stresses-on syllables two and six,
Je pars, cher Theramene
Et quitte le sejour
or furee and six-what I have called the "anapestic" hemistich:
Le dessein en est pris
De l'aimable Trezene
or four and six. (In the hemistiches quoted, those ofthe first two lines,
note the chiasmus.) When the hemistich is the first half of the line,
the sixth syllable is the stress preceding the caesura; in the second
half, it carries either the masculine rhyme-syllable or the stressed
syllable of the feminine. And with this way of putting it, there is no
need to speak of "feet" at all.
But Mr Packard's misconstruction of French verse is merely a
prelude to some deeper confusion about the scansion of our native
tongue. Although the English Alexandrine has the same name as the
French, it is something quite different: an iambic hexameter, with the
usual break after the third iamb:
u I u I u 1. u I u I u I
�ZUCKERMAN
87
After translating the Racine into fairly wooden but correct English
alexandrines, Mr Packard summons an authority:
C. S. Lewis in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century ... explains the departure in English from the
neoclassic conventions of the alexandrine ...
Since the only "neoclassic convention of the alexandrine" so far quoted
or referred to is that of the French classical drama, the reader may be
understandably puzzled to'hear that sixteenth-century English poets
departed from the practice of the French poets of the next century.
But in the passage that Mr Packard is quoting, C. S. Lewis is clearly
making a general comparison of the two alexandrines, French and
English; tf there is a chronological reference, it must be to the French
alexandrines ofthe sixteenth-century poets.
The quotation of Lewis goes on:
The medial break in the alexandrine, though it may do
well enough tn French, quickly becomes intolerable in
a language with such a tyrannous stress-accent as
ours: the line struts. The fourteener has a much pleasanter movement, but a totally dtfferent one; the line
dances a jig, Hence in a couplet made of two such
yoke-fellows we seem to be labouring up a steep hill in
bottom gear for the first line, and then running down
the other side of the hill, out of control, for the second.
A new term has been introduced, the "fourteener," that has no entry
of its own tn Mr Packard's dictionary. What he says about it here, in
the article on the alexandrine, is entirely wrong. He quotes a Spenserian stanza, and tells us that the final line is "a loose alexandrine, or
what Lewis calls a 'fourteener. "'
Now the alexandrines that end the Spenserian stanza are always
easily scannable iambic hexameters. After the first eight lines of
pentameter, the line with the extra iamb serves to give the reader a
sort of shove into the next stanza-a little push that is, I should think,
needed by readers of The Faery Queen. What Mr Packard calls a "loose"
alexandrine seems to be one in which the caesura is not strictly in the
middle of the line, like the one he quotes:
Of huge Sea monsters, such as living sence dismayd.
Whether or not one wants to call this line loose, there are clearly no
more than the correct twelve syllables. Such lines are emphatically
not what Lewis, or anyone else, would call a "fourteener," which (not
surprisingly) is a line that has fourteen syllables, or seven disyllabic
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
88
feet. In the Princeton Encydopedia it is discussed under the heading
HEPTAMETER. and is clearly no more related to the English alexandrine, or hexameter, than the pentameter is. The three long iambic
lines are of course quite different in character. The longest, the
"fourteener," is usually criticized as "monotonous"; it is the meter of
Chapman's Iliad, and may be the reason why (as someone once joked)
that book can't be read, by Keats or anyone else, much beyond one's first
looking into it. But gi.yen a pause after the fourth foot, the fourteener
reveals itself as one of the most common meters in our language-that
of the ballad, or the Common Measure of the hymnbooks:
ujujujujujujuJ~
uju/ujuj
ujujuj
The kind of "couplet" that C. S. Lewis is referring to is clearly not,
as Mr Packard has it, a mixing of mid-caesura alexandrines and what
he calls "loose" ones, but a coupling of alexandrtnes with fourteeners,
or, to give them the names that show their kinship, of iambic hexameters and iambic heptameters. In its day the coupling was nicely called
"Poulter's Measure," after the presumed practice of poulterers to give
twelve eggs in the first dozen and fourteen in the second. Princeton
quotes an example from Fulke Greville, one in which he turns into
trochees the opening iambs in both lines, as well as the line after the
caesura of the hexameter:
Silence augmenteth grief, writing increaseth rage,
Staled are my thoughts, which loved and lost the wonder of our age.
IV
In the space of a page. Mr Packard as been wrong on many counts.
He has unci early distinguished a "loose alexandri:Oe." incorrectly
identified it with Lewis's fourteener. despite the obvious difference in
syllable-count, and shown his ignorance of the existence of Poulter's
Measure. As to the first, I have so far assumed that by "loose" Mr
Packard simply means that the caesura is placed not strictly after the
third foot. But in the rest of the article, even that becomes unclear.
After quoting the Spenserian stanza. Mr Packard quotes a sonnet from
Astrophet and Ste11a, telling us that there "Sir Philip Sidney used loose
alexandrines." It is not clear from that locution whether he means that
all of the lines or only some of them belong to the category: as it
happens. twelve of the fourteen lines are strongly stopped strictly in
the middle, and only one line-it happens to be the first-is interestingly divided otherwise: 2 - 2 - 2:
�ZUCKERMAN
89
Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show ...
The next "loose" alexandrine that Mr Packard quotes-the last line of
one of the (Spenserian) stanzas of Keats's "Eve of St. Agnes"-conforms
to the definition, for the caesura is a syllable late:
Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith.
-but the line of Dryden quoted next and also called "loose" has the
caesura in the middle:
But mellows what we write to the dull Sweets of Rhyme.
Perhaps a few additional sentences could have cleared up such
ambiguities. But the matters about which Mr Packard was plainly
wrong clearly required apology and revision, not republication five
years later in paperback.
v
So far I have discussed only two or three of the entries in this
dictionary. A selective miscellany of other references will show that it
is wrong or misleading almost everywhere. In the following lines of
Desdemona's, we are told that lines 3 and 5 and 6 are hexameters:
My noble father,
I do perceive here a divided duty:
To you I am bound for life and education;
My life and education both do learn me
(5) How to respect you; you are the lord of duty;
I am hitherto your daughter. But here's my husband,
And so much duty as my mother show'd
To you, preferring you before her father,
So much I challenge that I may profess
Due to the Moor my lord.
But lines three and five are clearly pentameters that require only a
minimum of elision-"I'am" and "you'are"-and even line six is more
easily scannable as a extrasyllabic pentameter. The hexameter always
seems to be a source of trouble in this book, but Mr Packard goes on
to tell us something else: that "Lines 1 and 10 are foreshortened lines."
Nowhere in the book could I find out clearly what he means by
"foreshortened," but surely in the context of this quotation the reader
ought to be reminded that line one completes the end of the preceding
speech, and line ten is completed by what follows.
No era of English verse is left unmarked by error, confusion, or
neglect. We are told that in Beowulf "there is usually a single
alliteration in each line"; but putting it that way hardly suggests the
�90
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
known pattern in which there is alliteration of three of the line's four
strong stresses. There is no mention of the question of the "silent" e's
in Chaucer, and the opening line of the Canterbury Tales is given in
one of its versions, without the instructive inclusion of the other. A
version of one of the Psalms is given as an exan1ple of Free Verse, but
without any mention of how the lines of the Hebrew are organized. The
Limerick is more or less rightly introduced as an anapestic meter,
but-without any wqming apart from saying that it is the "earliest
record of the form"_:_the first example rtngs out with dactyls and
ian1bs:
Hickory dickory dock
The mouse ran up the clock
The clock struck one
The mouse ran down
Hickory dickory dock.
Poe's "Raven" is the example of octarneter, but there is no mention
there or anywhere else of the concept of dipodic verse, in which
trochees or iambs are construed as pairing up to form double feet of
four syllables. Poe's line:
Once upon a midnight dreary, while 1 pondered, weak and weary,
is probably too ponderous to be construed as anything other than
eight trochees. But there are trochaic octameters that can be fairly
schematized as four "feet" looking like this: uu/u. Such dipodic verse
is the staple of Victorian comic verse:
This particularly rapid unintelligible patter
Isn't generally heard, and if it is it doesn't matter.
Many years of reading manuals of meter and poe"tic rhythm have
taught me that it is better to begin the study with comic verse. or
so-called Light verse, and then work one's way to the freer forn1s. just
as the analysis of a subtle minuet or a grand symphonic waltz
movement might best begin with a study of the mere formalities of the
dance itself.
VI
The poem "Sprtng and Fall" of Hopkins is wrttten with four stresses
in each line, without regard to the unstressed syllables. Sometimes
the n1eter may coincide exactly with a traditional trochaic tetran1eter:
By and by, nor spare a sigh
�ZUCKERMAN
91
And sometimes the line has to be marked with special accents that
show where to fmd the stresses that would otherwise be unknown or
ambiguous:
Ali. as the heart grows older
(with accents over the vowels of"Ah" and "as"). In the opening couplet,
the second line is traditionally trochalc, but the first line requires extra
notation:
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
(with accents over the vowels in the first and third syllables of
"Margaret," to show the odd double stress on the name of the child
addressed). In his brief discussion of "sprung rhythm," Mr Packard
gets that first line wrong:
Margaret, are you grieving ...
(with accents over only the first syllable of "Margaret" and on "are").
Now it is of some help to be told to stress the questioning verb, but
surely it is the stressing of the last syllable of the girl's name that we
must be specifically told to do. By omitting that accent-mark, yet
retaining the now unnecessary mark on the opening syllable, Mr
Packard's version seems to prescribe the very reading that Hopkins
had to warn us against, the "normal" reading of only one stress on the
name, hence only three stresses in the line. If Mr Packard's accent-marks represent a printer's error, then of course it ought to have been
corrected when the paperback was issued. But his brief description
of the Hopkins technique suggests that he did not understand what
was going on). "Sprung rhythm," he says, "counts the number of
stresses per line as normally sounded in everyday speech .... " I think
the experience that most people have with the technique is that they
don't "get" the line until they find the right syllables to stress (and,
correlatively, those syllables that have to be glossed over); and that,
far from always being the stresses of ordinary speech, we sometimes
have to be specifically told to stress what would ordinarily be an
unstressed syllable-as we are throughout "Spring and Fall."
VII
Mr Packard has an entry for PROSODY itself. most of which is taken
up by a quotation of someone else. The statement is so uninformed
and so tasteless that I wonder why anyone would choose to quote it.
Here's Mr Packard's reason:
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
In addition to the introduction of entirely new elements into contemporary prosody, there has also been
a radical revision of the way traditional prosody is
viewed. Thus Michael Moriarty, the poet and actor,
described his own approach to prosody in an NYQ
Craft Interview.
The New York Quarterly is the magazine that Mr Packard founded and
edited; itfeatured in~erviews with contemporary poets, and with those,
like Mr Moriarty, who combined poetry with other pursuits. In fact,
Mr Moriarty begins by telling us what he does, and what his various
activities have in common:
The basic common denominator I have through writing poetry, prose, or acting, is music ....
The pleonastic diction and the unbalanced syntax remind us that this
is part of an interview, presumably recorded as spoken:
And that's my own approach, my only aesthetic now. With
each breath either of prose or of poetry there are certain
principles of balance to music. Then, no matter what's in
it, I never question its integrtty or its authenticity...
I'm not sure what the antecedents are of "that" and "it," but the display
of fashionable vocabulary is exhilarating-almost as exhilarating as
the outrageous historical sketch that follows:
And, the more I look at the world through musical
terms, the more I shed outwom modalities, outwom
paradigms. And, as example: the diatonic system in
Bach's time reached its highest level-then it had to
be re-examined, and so the Romantics and the twelve
tone series came along, and their creators said: "I don't
care what people say; certain notes can live together
and ought to live together." And they've proven that
point well. And the same thing exists in plays and
exists in life, like living in New York City. New York is
a perlect example where not only certain notes can live
together, but certain people can live together brushing
elbows every day ....
Packard and Moriarty have performed a service for me, for their
writings have removed whatever vestige remained of my wish to retum
to New York City.
�ZUCKERMAN
93
VIII
It occurred to me to look up the original reviews of the Packard
book. The only one I could easily find was in Choice, where there are
brief reviews to aid librarians. Here are the last two sentences of that
review:
Reliability and authenticity are hallmarks of this dictionary. which deserves strong recommendation for
both public and academic libraries. It should also be
on tbe desk of all teachers of literature.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�Theater and Polity
I
Arlene W. Saxonhouse
When we go to our local Vldeowatch or Blockbuster and rent, let's just
say Lawrence Olivier's Henry V or Kenneth Branagh's version of the
same play-or perhaps even Batman Forever-and then bring the
tapes home to watch of our own VCR, with or without friends and
family, we are participating in a mode of activity that began more than
two-and-a-half millennia ago in rustic festivals of ancient Greece.
From those festivals emerged the dramatic form that makes us
observers of actions that we know are representations of actions that
may or may not have taken place as we see them performed. Whether
we watch videotapes or a theatrical production, we know that what
we observe is not what we observe, that we are seeing people who are
not the people (or the animals) that they portray. While we watch this
fantasy world, we engage ourselves in it, and we make it real by the
very process of watching-looking upon the actors as if they were the
people they portray.
The Greeks watching the drama of the Oresteia or the Oedipus
trilogy or the Bacchae knew that they were not seeing Agamemnon,
or Oedipus, or Dionysus. They were seeing representations of those
individuals, men with masks to hide their true identities: by those very
masks, the actors confirmed that they were not the individuals they
were portraying. And yet, "fear and pity" filled the spectators as they
observed events whose representations were performed ~n a defined
stage, employing defined conventions. The characters whose faces
appear on our television sets via the VCR are the same. The actors
may no longer wear masks, but we know that they are not the
characters they portray: while we watch the screen, though, they are
real. We allow illusion to control us and, most important, as Mera
Flaumenhaft develops in The Civic Spectacle*, her elegant study of the
theater and the polity, we allow those illusions to educate us.
Two central themes run through Flaumenhaft's work: first, the
community that is (or is not) created among those sharing in the
illusion of theatrical performances and second the educative role of
these shared (or not shared) illusions. The history that she traces
takes us from the profoundly political, community-building experiences of Greek drama to the isolated individual experiences of the
* Mera J. Flaumenhaft, The Civic Spectacle: Essays on Drama and Community
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. 1994).
Arlene W. Saxonhouse is James Olin Murfin Professor of PoliUcal Science at the
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVJEW
contemporary movie houses and theaters, with their dimmed lights
and their seats all facing forward towards the stage or screen with the
consequence that we have little sense of the others who share the
experience with us. Through a focus on four different plays, Aeschylus's
Oresteia, Euripides' Bacchae, Machiavelli's Mandragola, and Shakespeare's Henry Vas interpreted in the movie versions by Olivier and
Branagh, Flaumenhaft explores the different political (or non-political)
teachings that emergeJrom each production, teachings that must be
directly related to the context in which the play is produced. Thus, we
move with her from the ancient amphitheater where the plays are
performed by actors with their masks, where from sunrise to sunset,
the entire city watches, to the living room where, with a few others or
perhaps alone, we observe at close range faces that reveal the psychological drama of characters the actors are representing. From a public
grandeur and speech, from a political community observing the
exploration of the principles of justice, of membership, of order, we
end up in a private, intimate world of personal pain, anguish, and, on
occasion, joy.
Flaumenhaft begins this joumey with an essay on the Oresteia. For
those of us saturated with the 0 .J. Simpson trial that was performed
almost daily on the TV screen, Flaumenhaft's discussion reminds us
of the very important connection between theater and the judicial
system. Her discussion focuses on how the trilogy captures the
emergence of the polis in the process of making justice visible. By
bringing the execution of vengeance, the execution of justice, out of
the hidden recesses of the house into the open forum of the polity,
theater becomes the model for the trial. Flaumenhaft's analysis made
this reader, at least, a bit more tolerant of the events which took place
in the Los Angeles courtroom. A trial is a form of theater and, as the
Oresteia illustrates, we should be thankful. Through the theater /trial,
the public community becomes invested in the exercise of justice, we
share in a "common looking," and thus we share in the transition made
so many centuries ago when the execution of justice moved from the
responsibility of the kin of injured to the polis, when the political
community on took the task of remedying harms committed.
The trial as portrayed on the Attic stage or on our televisions is the
retelling of the story, a re-enactment of what was. We may find some
of the stories more petty than others, we may prefer that the story deal
With kings and queens caught in webs of cosmic necessities to stories
that deal with jealous, abusive husbands, but the publicity of both
tums audiences 1n to communities grappling with the necessity of
justice, with understanding the meaning of evidence, of motives, of
�SAXONHOUSE
97
passions, of human desires-and the need for public institutions to
address these issues. The trial as theater and the theater as trial draw
us together and as the play-(trial-)watchers we are united and educated in the ways of justice.
To discuss one of the greatest pieces of Western literature and the
0 .J. Simpson trial in the same paragraph may perhaps seem an act
of sacrilege, but Flaumenhaft's book is constantly taking us persuasively from the ancient st~ge of our world, showing us the continvities
and the differences, helping us reflect on the cultural significance of
modern festivals and even of scripts without page numbers (p. 78).
Even though we no longer sit on the stone seats from sunrise to sunset,
we engage in the activity that began in the Greek amphitheater and
the variations that we have brought to that experience reveal much
about who we are and what our politics has come to mean.
Flaumenhaft's discussion of the raw and difficult to watch Bacchae
continues her theme of theater as a community of voyeurs, but in this
essay Flaumenhaft points more powerfully to the differences with
modem theater. We are reminded of how theatergoing in ancient
Athens was a civic festival. However much we may advertise "festivals"
today, a Shakespeare festival at Stratford, a Shaw festival at Niagara,
and so forth, in no way do these festivals capture the experience of
parading by torchlight through the city in politically defined divisions
in honor of the god of the theater and/or the city. But it is not only
the differences between ancient and modern festivals the at interest
Flaumenhaft. Through an analysis of the Bacchae she illustrates how
that particular tragedy is a commentary on the community activity
entailed in going to the theater in the ancient world. "In the theater,
spectators must face what is mixed and mingled, mangled and impure" (74). The boundaries that defme where the citizens and spectators march in the parade, where they sit when they are in the theater,
how they vote (or do not vote) as citizens, appear, under the influence
of Dionysus, the god of the theater, permeable and uncertain.
Dionysus wanders through the drama taking place before the
audience, breaking down all distinctions between male and female,
god and human, animal and human, city and country. Pentheus, the
ruler of Thebes, whose body is to be tom to pieces and gnawed upon
by his mother, tries ineffectively to affirm distinctions, political
boundaries between cities, between male and female, between free and
impiisoned. Those boundaries charactertze the city and are essential
for the functioning of the political unity. But the theater, already
questioning the boundaries between what is real and what is illusion,
forces the audience to acknowledge how boundaries are constructed
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
and not natural, how the orderly procession that preceded the performance is a human assertion of st:Iucture against the formlessness
of the very god of the theater. Yet, in the theater, "looking together,"
as Flaumenhaft points out, "they can face what, if experienced first
hand or seen privately, might destroy their humanity" (77).
It is precisely this "looking together," so emphasized in Flaumenhaft's argument, that enables the many gathered to become and
remain one together, a r.ity, even as they observe a fractured world on
stage. Modem dramatic productions, often drawing from ancient
themes, point as well to a fractured world. It is world view that,
Flaumenhaft suggests, builds of the cubist artists' representations
"unbounded by frame or linear, articulated forms" (77), but the
modem dramatic performances lack the unifying context of the
Dionysian festival, the insistence the we "look together," that we
remain a city while observing a "mangled" world. Modem drama thus
re-enforces the chaotic world rather than controlling it.
The experience of play-watching is quite different when we consider
Machiavelli's comedy the Mandragola. It is not performed before the
citizens of a polis or the random audience of the modem theater. Its
political role is not to unity- or create a political community out of the
spectators. Performed in private, before a small group of young man,
the Mandragola is a subversive work not only in that it shows the
pleasing victory of what conventionally would by called a sin (adultery)
and praising that victory for making so many happy by it. It is even
more subversive, Flaumenhaft suggests, by the very fact that as a play,
it draws those watching it psychologically into the action. As such, the
members of the audience become co-conspirators with the actors,
subverting traditional political, social and religious values and delighting in the victory of that subversion.
The private comic theater is didactic, but not as traditionalists
might like. Flaumenhaft cites Bacon's claim that "poesy" teaches us
about the world as it ought to be and that history teaches about it as
it is. Flaumenhaft's argument is that the Mandragola performs just
the role that Bacon assigns to history, but the play goes even beyond
the didactic role of history of showing us the world as it is. It draws
the spectators into the subversive role that Machiavelli seeks to teach
to the young. These young men, so educated, will be able to transform
society according to Machiavellian principles. Drawn into the conspiracy they will cast off conventional assumptions and move forward
according to the Machiavellian teachings they have learned from the
comedy, teachings ever so much more acceptable when we as specta-
�SAXONHOUSE
99
tors have been co-opted to applaud their success in a comedy than
when we are confronted by their harshness in The Prince.
In her last chapter Flaumenhaft helps us understand how play
watching has changed in the modem day as she explores the different
textures of the two movie versions of Shakesperare's Henry V, a play
that. with its chorus, is explicitly self-conscious about its role as
representational. In particular, Flaumenhaft develops the differing
political contexts as a way, to illuminate the different aims of the two
directors-one eager to draw together a nation during wartime and
the other addressing an audience disillusioned by war after Vietnam
and the Faulklands. In Olivier's version we see the director aiming to
draw together a war-weary nation. The ambiguities to which Shakespeare's Henry V alerts us, about war itself. about nationhood and
national unity, about friendship and its relation to political responsibilities are muted by Olivier so that the king's exhortations to battle
for the glorious English nation can speak sincerely and directly to the
modem Englishman and urge him, as Henry had urged his man, to
go "once more unto the breach" (145). The director's role is here a
political one and those seetng the movie, captured by the brilliant
colors, motivated by Olivier's forceful portrayal of Henry, are swept up
by the patriotic, ennobling power of the play.
Not so with Branagh's version. The ambiguities of Shakespeare's
play are ever present; the uncertatnty of whether the war is justified,
the anguish of sendtng men to their death for a nation that may itself
have no legitimacy other than force, all these questions play vividly in
the close-up portraits of Branagh's face. Psychological introspection
marks this Henry produced for a population still struggling to make
sense of senseless wars. However much beauty and eloquence mark
Olivier's Henry, his movie seems dated and stilted at the end of the
century. It shone on screens before television brought tape'd versions
into our living rooms. The Branagh version, while certainly more
powerful on the large screen, does not suffer in the intimacy of the
living room. As a psychological tale of a king's anguish, it captures
the individual anguish that we too must suffer and that we sometimes
must cause others to suffer. As such, Branagh's version eschews the
political power of the other works Flaumenhaft has discussed and, as
such, captures the decline of the "civic spectacle" into a private.
internalized, and perhaps even isolating experience.
Flaumenhaft never lets us forget the didactic role that the theater
plays, but real strength of this book lies in the insistence that we can
only understand that didacticism if we attend to the context in which
we are observers of representations. That context reminds us, the
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
observers, the producers, the directors, that representation is a
political act-whether we talk explicitly about what appears on stage,
the VCR, or in the retelling of stories in the courtroom. And as a
political act, it can build or it can undermine community, it can train
leaders as in the Mandragola or it can turn an almost random mass
into a nation as in Olivier's Henry V. Flaumenhaft's book keeps us
wonderfully alert to how much we can learn about ourselves, about
others, about the nature of communal life by studying the politics of
play watching.
�The Human Sense for Justice
I
Henry Higuera
Clifford Orwin is a political theorist who has written several articles
on Thucydides. With The Humanity ojThucydides*, his first book on
the subject, he establishes himself as one of the most solid and
profound political interpreters of Thucydides. Orwin makes the case
more compellingly than any other recent critic that Thucydides is an
original political theorist as well as an historian. Thucydides does not
have a theory about the best regime in the style of Plato's Republic or
Laws or Aristotle's Politics. Nor does he expound theories of the human
soul or the cosmos and work his way from these through ethics to
political norms. Nonetheless, Orwin persuasively argues that his work
is a penetrating examination of the limits of reason and the meaning
and status of justice.
In arguing that the History focuses on justice, Orwin must combat
the notion that Thucydides is only interested in "causes," i.e. nonmoral explanations. In perhaps his most crucial discussion Orwin
builds an intriguing case that the famous passage at !.123 about the
"cause" of the war should be translated as follows: "As to why [the two
sides] broke the treaty ... the truest a11egation (prophasin), although
least conspicuous in speech, I hold to be that the Athenians by
becoming great and provoking fear in the Lacedaemonians compelled
them to resort to war. As for the grievances ]aitiai ]openly spoken on
either side, ... they were as follows" (32: emphasis in original). In other
words, translating this passage as being about "the truest cause" of
the war versus the "pretexts given out" for it is a serious mistake.
Prop has is means "accusation" or "casus belLi" rather than "cause."
Aitia means "blame" before it means "pretext." In this passage Thucydides is talking about the blame for the war.
But, in a further twist, Thucydides is here silent as to whom the
truest allegation fingers as the culpable party. Is it the Athenians for
expanding, or the Spartans for acting on their fears? Thus this
statement actually sets up a mora[ problem about blame, and it is the
task of the rest of the history to solve it. In the greatest war known to
Thucydides, which side had justice on its side, and why?
Now this interpretation of 1.123, while impressively grounded in
both Greek and Thucydides' own usage, is based on a silence rather
*Clifford Orwin. The HumaniLy ojThucydides (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University
Press, 1994}
Henry Higuera is a tutor at the Annapolis campus of St. John's College.
�102
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
than an explicit utterance. Accordingly one wishes that Orwin had
discussed at greater length why Thucydides is so muted in setting up
the problem, and in general one wishes that Orwin had provided more
analysis ofThucydides' rhetoric. His not doing so seems to result from
the very tight focus in his book on the difficult lessons Thucydides
wants to teach his n1ost perceptive and persistent readers, rather than
the effect he wants to have on the general reader. Still, this latter is
itself an ilnportant topic, and one feels somewhat deprived at not
having Orwin's take on these matters.
At any rate, according to Orwin the History addresses the problem
of true blame for the war primarily through an examination of what
he calls "the Athenian thesis." This thesis is a novel justification for
the Athenian en1pire, and indeed for any aggressive imperialism, via
"a particular interpretation of fimperialisnl] as disclosing a natural
necessitl.)" (86). !fit is right, the Athenians are exculpated for expand·
ing, and thus for the war. It is first propounded by the Athenian envoys
at Sparta just before the war and is repeated with important variations
at Dehum, at Melos, by Diodotus before the Athenian Assembly, by
Alcibiades at Sparta, and by the Athenian Euphemas and the
Syracusan Hermocrates in Sicily. At Melos it is made to include the
clairn that this compulsion justifies imperialism even in the eyes of
the gods, who "would not be so inconsequent" (106) as to punish a
con1pu!sion which they must recognize in themselves. By Alcibiades
it is further widened to include individuals.
To show that Thucydides takes the problem of justice so seriously
in his work, Orvvin must do so in his own. OIWin defends and criticizes
the Athenian thesis with admtrable intelligence and honesty. He has
a positive revulsion against an unthinking acceptance of justice; he
appreciates how cheap, i.e., unjust, that ultimately is. Again and again
one must adn1ire how he refuses easy ways out. He dOes not give up
on justice in a smug way after detailing some problems with it, nor
does he neglect to discuss difficulties after his most impressive
vindications of it. Three examples must suffice here to give some sense
of the range and seriousness of Orwin's discussions.
First, many have seen that the Athenian speeches at Sparta and
Melos, if taken to their logical conclusion, lead to Alcibiades: to
competition within the city and the destruction of the common good.
Many accordingly take Alcibiades as a refutation of the Athenian
thesis. But Orwin argues that this is a non sequitur. These speeches
might be right; if so, then Alcibiades and others like him are ine\~table.
The deleterious effects of Alcibiades' frankness about his opinions are
real enough. But again, the harm his frankness did was not in turning
�HIGUERA
103
all Athenians into versions of himself but in making the populace
distrust him more than was reasonable. This mistrust reflects a
political and theological conservatism deeply rooted in the nature of
the many.
Second, Orwin refuses to regard either the plague or the Sicilian
disaster as divine retributions. His discussions of these are very
complex and evenhanded, but he ultimately argues that the few
explicit things which Thucydides says about them are determinative;
and, as he shows, these go against regarding them as punishments.
He says dryly, "The sequence Melos [Book V]/Sicily[Books VI-VII] is
poetic, that is, more beautiful than true" (1 I 1). In fact, Orwin argues that
it was the Athenians' very piety that caused the Sicilian disaster-first
in turning from Alcibiades to Nicias, and then in the fatal delay of the
retreat from Syracuse.
Finally, Orwin gives due prominence to the moral debunking of the
Spartans' justice which Thucydides carries out-their behavior at
Plataea and during the siege of Melos, and above all their subjugation
of the Helots. He shows admirably how consistent these phenomena
are with the fact that the Spartans are extremely just and moderate
much of the time.
Ultimately, Orwin argues, much of the Athenian thesis is left
standing. As a whole, however, it meets an ironic fate, for Diodotus
and Hennocrates see things in it which, on one level, stand it on its
head. It is not true that cities pursue imperial imperatives out of
necessity. By natural necessity cities pursue what they take to be
imperial imperatives; and cities are, by that same necessity, very
foolish in interpreting those imperatives. Imperialism is a natural
compulsion for cities; but so is folly, the illusion that one is justified,
and the further illusion that one's justice guarantees one's success.
These last two illusions are cherished by the Athenian many, as
Thucydides states in connection with Sicily. They even affect the
envoys to Melos, as Orwin argues persuasively in a very sensitive
interpretation of their contempt for Sparta and their annoyance at the
Melians for refusing to be talked into surrendering.
Full understanding of the Athenian thesis leads to appreciating the
difference between true compulsions and the illusory yet irresistible
ones that always accompany the true ones. It destroys admiration and
eros for imperial cities and is ultimately incompatible with an intelligent individual's dedication to empire. Still, it mutes moral indignation
at the spectacle of imperialism. One cannot blame either Athens or
Sparta for causing the war, although one also cannot admire either
one very much for fighting it.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVJEW
Probably the most challengmg part of the book (a frustratingly brief
part) is Orwin's discussion of domestic politics. Domestic politics is
where justice is supposed to reveal its power and attractiveness and
indeed to reveal just what it is. Thucydides' position in general,
according to Orwin, is that the human sense of justice is not merely
conventional or artificial. Even the most dartng Athenians cannot
shake the feel1ng that freely-chosen and active concern for other
people's well-being is one of the noblest things and is also somehow
demanded of us-that it is justice, in short. But according to this part
ofOrwin's book, domestic justice forThucydides is not an absolute or
categorical imperative. It can be outweighed by other goods. Above all,
far from being master over our bodies, domestic justice depends on
them: 'There is no greater political misfortune for human beings than
to be freed from the constralnt posed by their bodies .... Society proves
to depend more fundamentally on our hopes and fears for our bodies
than ... on our capacity to overcome these" (182).
The hun1an sense for justiCe is also flexible: it can be changed under
pressure of necessity. That does not change the justice of the case,
however; Thucydides is not a relativist. Under necessity. as in the
plague or in stasis (civil strife), we lose our healthy feel1ng for justice
and honestly regard as noble what truly is not. Plague and stasis are
not uniquely revealing conditions for Thucydides the way the war of
all against all is for Hobbes: they are political pathologies and produce
pathological moral reactions.
What is the source of the healthy, correct feeling? Thucydides,
Orwin seems to indicate, gives no answer but human nature, because
he believes that there is no other powerful entity in the universe which
cares about justice the way we do. Perhaps the austerity of this
position is one reason why Thucydides has not be~n considered a
political philosopher. Most people who think that justice lacks cosmic
support conclude that it is artificial (i.e. cultural) and/or 1llusory: It is
much more picturesque to speculate about entities which support
justice, and, if one cannot find any of these, it seems deeper to reject
any stable standard of justice. Thucydides merely insists that healthy
human beings will always respond to what even the most hardened
Athenians did: that it is somehow demanded of them to make exertions, freely, for others. History, not metaphysical speculation, teaches
us this.
History also teaches us that some human beings achieve this
freedom or mastery over compulsion; Orwin cites Diodotus, for one.
The admiration people have for their cities is a confused divination of
truly admirable but very rare people. Hence the importance for Orwin
�HIGUERA
105
of to euethes, "noble guilelessness," and to po1ytropon, Odyssean
wiliness, the two virtues which suffered the most during the civil strife.
These old virtues are real. Thucydides' regret at their destruction by
stasis is genuine and deep. In their nobility they are akin to justice:
They can both help one rise above compulsion. Justice and freedom
are not wills o' the wisp; they are "demanded" of us in the sense that
we can all sense our inferiority to those fortunate few who possess
them. Hence, too, in the final analysis Athens really is higher than
Sparta. Sparta represents compulsory law-abidingness masquerading
as the whole of justice. Athens aspires to the real thing and is more
likely to exhibit it in her flnest individuals.
The Humanity ofThucydides is much too compact and some of the
explications just given are uncomfortably co'!iectural and vague. Still,
the book amply rewards extra effort in trying to understand it. Orwin is
trying to teach readers what he thinks Thucydides has taught him about
justice: The confrontation he sets up between us and one of the greatest
of all political thinkers is immensely challenging and enriching.
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<em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College. All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to </span><em>The St. John's Review</em><span>, St. John's College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or via e-mail at </span><a class="obfuscated_link" href="mailto:review@sjc.edu"><span class="obfuscated_link_text">review@sjc.edu</span></a><span>.</span><br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> exemplifies, encourages, and enhances the disciplined reflection that is nurtured by the St. John's Program. It does so both through the character most in common among its contributors — their familiarity with the Program and their respect for it — and through the style and content of their contributions. As it represents the St. John's Program, The St. John's Review espouses no philosophical, religious, or political doctrine beyond a dedication to liberal learning, and its readers may expect to find diversity of thought represented in its pages.<br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> was first published in 1974. It merged with <em>The College </em>beginning with the July 1980 issue. From that date forward, the numbering of <em>The St. John's Review</em> continues that of <em>The College</em>. <br /><br />Click on <a title="The St. John's Review" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=13"><strong>Items in the The St. John's Review Collection</strong></a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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The St. John's Review, 1996/2
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1996
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Kraus, Pamela
Brann, Eva T. H.
Carey, James
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Bojaxhi, Gjergji
Sachs, Joe
Kalkavage, Peter
Levine, David Lawrence
Gable, Jr., Harvey L.
Saxonhouse, Arlene W.
Higuera, Henry
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Volume XLIII, number two of The St. John's Review. Published in 1996.
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St. John's Review
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The St. John's Review
Volume XLIII, number three (1996)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
James Carey
Beale Ruhm Von Oppen
Joe Sachs
john Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Gjergji Bojaxhi
The St. John's Review is published by the Office of the Dean, St.
John's College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President; Eva T.
H. Brann, Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions
are $15.00 for three issues, even though the magazine may sometimes
appear semi-annually 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.O. Box 2800,
Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available, at $5.00 per
issue, from the St. John's College Bookstore.
©1996 St. John's College. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole
or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
Marcia Baldwin and The St.John's College Print Shop
��Contents
Forewords.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Occasional Speech
Dedicatory Toast: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
The Opening of the Greenfield Library
Elliott Zuckerman
Essays and Lectures
Meno's Paradox and the Zetetic Circle .
] on Lenkowski
Sun and Cave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Eric Salem
7
.29
On Some Texts of Bacon and Descartes . . . . . . . 51
Andre Lalande
Translated by Pamela Kraus
Poetry
Four Poems
Andrew Krivak
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Reviews
Recollection and Composure
Douglas Allanbrook's See Naples
Eva T. H. Brann
. . . . . . . . . . 81
Reason's Parochiality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Carl Page's Philosophical Historicism and the
Betrayal of First Philosophy
Richard Velkley
To See the World Profoundly: . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
The Films of Robert Bresson
Shmuel Ben-Gad
��~
Forewords
St.John's College inaugurated its 300th anniversary year this past
May at the dedication of the Greenfield Library on the Annapolis
campus. To mark our anniversary, this issue of The St.John's Review
includes Elliott Zuckerman's dedicatory toast on that occasion. Mr.
Zuckerman's toast praises the library as a residence for the spirit of
the College-the spirit of books.
The spirit of books, in which and by which we learn, is given us
through their authors, and so it is appropriate to note another anniversary this year, the 400th birthday of Rene Descartes. Descartes is
often referred to'as a "founder" of modern thought. Here we reprint,
in translation, Andre Lalande's 1911 essay comparing excerpts from
the Discourse on Method to passages from earlier writings of Francis
Bacon, Descartes's near contemporary. Striking similarities between
them suggest that Descartes learned and benefitted from the books
of Bacon.
��j.· Dedicatory Toast:
~ The Opening of the Greenfield Library
Elliott Zuckerman
It is an honor to represent the Faculty with a dedicatory toast to the
Greenfield Library. By doing so I serve as successor to our late
colleague Hugh McGrath, who spoke at a similar consecration in
1969. Between the two events there is an obscure verbal connection
of the sort that I can't resist reporting. Many of us here, when we
think of Hugh McGrath, will also think of Falstaff, a role that Hugh
famously played in the early seventies. And when we thinkofFalstaff
we might remember one of the most beautiful details that Shakespeare tells us about him. It is that at the end of his life "he babbled
ofgreen fields."
The obese corrupter of the young may have ended his days with
pious thoughts about lying down in the green pastures of the twentythird psalm. A further detail about Falstaffs death leads us back not
to the Bible but to another of our great bibliographical beginnings.
He seems to have left this world gradually, from the bottom up: first
his feet turned cold, and then his knees, and so on upward-like
Socrates. I wonder whether Shakespeare wanted us to look for further
similarities between the two great teachers. And as I do that wondering, I realize that I am asking a question about a fictional character
who was based on a real person, a real person who was probably
fictionalized, and a playwright about whom we know practically
nothing and yet everything that is worth knowing.
This speech may not have begun so far out in left field as it may
seem. For a few years after the performance of Shakespeare and the
rededication of Woodward Hall, in another part of the campus, the
Admissions Office came up with a new way of enticing prospective
students to St. John's College. They announced that "the following
teachers will be returning to St. John's next year," and by the teachers
they meant, of course, an array of great authors. One of the versions
of the announcement is still being sent to prospectives. It appears at
the top of a large page, usable as a poster, that shows an attractive
collage of pictures of those returning teachers-poets, philosophers,
�4
THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
and scientists. There are forty of them-I counted them myself. Most
of the pictures are reproductions of formal portraits or contemporary
drawings or etchings; but the ancient sages appear in the traditional
likenesses of sculpted busts, and, at the other extreme, there are a few
who are recent enough to have faced the camera.
As I looked at those faces, I began to think of what such a school
might be like. Think of having a teacher as amusing as Chaucer or as
articulate as Jane Austen or as clear and complete as Saint Thomas.
Think of being able to report to your friends what Montaigne had to
say this morning in Tutorial. Think of trusting the lab experiments
to Faraday himself, with or without a lab assistant. Imagine a paper
conference with the author of Middlemarch. Picture being badgered
to perplexity not by some neophyte imitating the Socratic Method,
but by the Silenus himself.
On the other hand, what ifimmanuel Kant himself were the only
source of enlightenment about the Transcendental Unity of Apperception? What would it be like to find oneself in a Seminar whose
leaders were Nietzsche and Wagner? What if Baudelaire were to take
an interest in what goes on in the dormitories. And would anyone
ever be able to recover from a Don-Rag Committee that included,
say, Calvin and Sigmund Freud?
Yes, we are fond of making lists of our ideal faculty. I remember
one such list of teachers which, because of an inadvertence, began
with the name 'job." I saw it for the first time, significantly enough,
on aT -shirt. Such a slip could only have occurred in a place where
we claim as our faculty not only the authors of books but the books
themselves. When I used to be asked what I teach, I would often avoid
a hard answer by saying that "the Books are the Teachers." The very
brochure that contains the pictures of all the teachers begins with the
assertion, in large letters, that "Great Books Make Great Teachers"
-and the writers of the Admissions Information are to be commended, for nowhere can I find a numbering of the Books. Although
for purposes of quick characterization we probably have to identify
St. John's as the Great Books School, we should, I think, refuse to
refer to the Hundred Great Books. For once we number the books
we are only one step away from Numbering the Ideas.
�ZUCKERMAN
5
Now "Job" is not only the name of a book but the name of its chief
character. And that suggests another group that has a claim to faculty
status, the very characters, fictional or semi-fictional, whose actions
sustain our interest and teach us what we ourselves might very well
be like. So now we have three sets of teachers: the authors, the books,
and the characters, and often enough-as we saw in the instance of
Falstaff and Socrates and Shakespeare and the Psalms-there is a rich
interrelationship among them. When we talk about Dante, do we
mean the Italian poet, or do we mean the Pilgrim who takes the
journey, or are we referring to the Comedy that got to be called
Divine? The players in Part. II of Don Quixote have read Part I and
are aficionados of the adventurer. The Platonic dialogues bear names
just as young men bear names. And think of those characters who
have separated themselves from the books they first appeared in, to
become perpetually available for purposes of example or comparison
and even gossip. Penelope and Natasha as wives. Cleopatra in a barge
and Huck Finn on a raft. Dimitri, Ivan, and Alyosha. Mister Moneybags and the Man with the Large Soul.
There are certain practical advantages in having as one's teachers
books, and their authors and characters. They do not have to be fed,
and the only new clothing required is an occasional rebinding. We
usually remove their jackets. Only when they get very old or very
decrepit or very precious do we have to place them in the glass cases
of a retirement home. Otherwise, no salaries, no health insurance,
no social security.
They do, however, need a place to stay-and now, two thirds
before the end of this little talk, you see where it has been heading.
For almost a century Woodward Hall housed our teachers well.
Through all the renovations, and repaintings, and extensions, and
deepenings, we had learned to love that abode. We had gotten to
know where everyone lives. Often enough, the catalogue could be
skipped, and we could go straight to a dwelling in the shelves.
Right now I can imagine myself standing at the entry of the King
William Room and knowing exactly what line I should follow in
order to get to Homer, or Sophocles, or Sappho. We all have known
where we could find Vico, or Pico, or Tycho. We will never forget
the cluster of shelves that provided us with Hegel and Schlegel and
�6
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Schiller and Schilling and Schopenhauer and Schleiermacher. We
liked the search for art books where they dwelt, according to size, in
two tiers of apartments. We knew the order of music books from
A!lanbrook to Zuckerkandl. Sometimes we took out a book so
persistently that its habitual home became a shelf in our study at
home. But thanks to Call-in they periodically had to visit their proper
place, however briefly, like expatriots renewing their passports.
We knew where to hide for uninterrupted reading, and where to
read for the purpose of being seen. There were straight chairs and
armchairs and upholstered chairs that we could sink into, sometimes
unto threatening depth. There were desks and tables and carrels.
There were shelves of new books, and books newly acquired, and
there was access to an inner sanctum of books whose virginity was
reserved for a particular reader. There were places to talk and places
where talking was forbidden. Nowhere was there background music.
Above all, there were nooks and corners and alcoves and berths and
cubbyholes.
I have been praising the old in order to express our hope for the
new. For at last the time came to Move House. Our teachers were
transferred in sacks across the expanse of lawn, and it is fitting that
the' day ofthe moving turned out to be a celebration of our sense of
community. For along with those sacks, and along with the friendly
spirit that transported them, I hope all the strengths and delights of
the old library were transferred too.
I do not know the new building yet, but it seems to be happily
provided with surprising vistas and interesting alcoves. There will be
places to work and places to study and places to read. What is most
important will not change. We'll still be learning from the books and
the characters, and the great teachers will keep on returning to St.
John's College in a form that we can take out and take home, well
into the next century-or, as we can say at this privileged time, into
the next millennium.
Now at last you can raise your imaginary glasses. The Tutors and
their colleagues toast the Teachers and their entourage, at the Green
Fields of their new Place of Meeting.
�j
Meno's Paradox and the Zetetic Circle
!i
Jon Lenkowski
Author's Prefatory Note
This essay has undergone a number of metamorphoses over the
years. It first saw the light of day in the mid-seventies as a small part
of a chapter of a dissertation which, alas, never got finished. It was
initially excerpted and presented as a lecture to the philosophy club
at Rutgers University, where I was teaching at the time, and it was
subsequently presented a couple of times in Annapolis as a summer
lecture both before and after I came to teach at the College in 1979.
In 1980, I completely reworked the lecture and rewrote it in German
to present at a philosophy colloquium at the University ofKonstanz,
Germany. The present text is based on the German version and was
presented as a formal lecture in Santa Fe in 1988 and in Annapolis in
1989. I am particularly indebted to my colleagues, Lawrence Berns,
Robert Druecker, and Stewart Umphrey, for reading the German
version and offering discerning comments. Despite revisions great
and small, the fundamental ideas of the essay have remained unchanged for over twenty years. Since in recent years "revision" has
meant little more than changing a word here and there, it seems time
to let go of it.
Introduction
The following is intended to be a contribution to the theory of
science, widely construed, and to be, more particularly, a contribution to the theory of inquiry.
When one speaks of science, one should keep in mind that, despite
the peculiar technologization of contemporary science (by which I
mean the natural sciences and all those disciplines which have sought
to copy them) the very notion of science is itself ancient; in fact it
cuts across the division between antiquity and modernity. From this
perspective, a theory of science would mean a 9EmpEtV bttcr~iJfl.TJS
�8
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
-a looking at or inspection of science-which entails the finding of
a position from which science can best be observed and questioned.
In our time particularly, there seem to be a number of competing
claims to have found just the appropriate point of view. Accordingly,
I would ask whether each and every theory of science is a philosophy
of science. All such attempts at a theory of science, however diverse,
are rightly called "metatheoretical." But perhaps not every
metatheoretical examination of science is a philosophy of science.
Under metatheory generally, I would distinguish at least the four
following orientations: First, the positive clarification of the presuppositions, the methods, and the objectives of the sciences; here I
would also include any positive logic of science. Secondly, an examination of the sciences from the viewpoint of what is called the
"history of ideas." Such an examination focuses on historical presuppositions for scientific development, historical reasons why science
developed-rightly or wrongly-in this or that direction, etc. Here
the clarification is far more historical than critical. Thirdly, when it
is undertaken from various political standpoints or postures,
metatheory becomes a critique of ideology. Here, although critical,
the criticism is focused much less on the question of truth, than on
the supposed political presuppositions which serve as the context
within which the particular content of science has been devised.
Fourthly, what I would call in the most precise sense a philosophy of
science-by which I understand an investigation which opens up
problems of a most fundamental kind. Here, in modern times, I take
Johann Gottlieb Fichte as the paradigm. In a writing which appeared
in 1794 entitled Uber der Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre1 ("On the
Concept of the Theory of Science"), in which he was still occupied
with the question of whether a theory of science was even possible,
he posed to himself four absolutely fundamental problems which
blocked the path to a theory of science that would be secure. Fichte
well understood (as had Aristotle most unmistakably in ancient
times, in Metaphysics, Book B) what the very first step toward the
establishment of science must be, namely, the uncovering, the opming up, and the laying to rest of absolutely fundamental problems
which would otherwise remain hidden and, as such, would establish
science in name only. This very first step I would call a philosophy
�LENKOWSKI
9
of science, which I understand, following Fichte, to be a prolegomenon to a theory of science proper. It is in this spirit that I present the
following essay.
Meno's Paradox and the Zetetic Circle
At SOdS Meno responds to Socrates' invitation to join with him at
last in the search for then' Ecr·n-the "what is"-of virtue or human
excellence (apE'tTj):
Kat 'tt va 'tp6nov I; TJ't'l\crn~. ili ~mKpa'tE~, 'to\l'to o J.1 il
otcr8a 'tO napcmav on £cr'ttv; no'lov yap iliv ouK otcr8a
npo8EJ.1Evo~ i;TJ't'l\crEt~; fi Ei Kat on JlUA.tma EV'tDXOt~
au'ti[>, 11:&~ dcrn O'tt 'tOU'tO £crit v 0 cru OUK filiT]cr8a;
But in what direction will you inquire, Socrates, about that
cifwhich you do not know at all what it is? For what sort of
thing, of all those you do not know, will you put forth and
search after? Or, even ifyou did happen upon it, how would
you know that thiswas the very thing you did not knoW.
Trying to put an end to the inquiry, Meno unknowingly puts his
finger on the very thing without which inquiry would not b~ at all
possible. Howcould one inquire, except by being in some way already
"in touch with"-"in contact with" (the word is 8tyyavro, 8tyE'lv) 2
the object of inquiry?
Every inquiry necessarily proceeds within a horizon of familiarity.
The peculiarity of the "what is" question in particular (as here in the
Meno) is highlighted by the fact that each interlocutor, when asked,
seems to, or presumes to already know the answer to the question,
and is quite baffled to discover he really doesn't. It is only on the
basis of what I will call this "prethematic familiarity" with something
that it ever becomes possible to thematize it and make it the object
of inquiry. At Republic VII, 524c, Socrates says:
Sight too saw large and small...although not separated but
mixed together .. .In order to unmix them, intellect ( v6T]crt~)
is also compelled to see (tliE'i:v) large and small, although
not mixed together but separated and distinguished-just
the opposite of what sight did ... Isn't it therefore from this
�10
THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
that it first occurs to us to ask: what are the large and the
small? [italics mine]
The context comprising prethematic familiarity, on the one hand,
and inquiry, on the other hand, is a peculiar context, for it puts us in
relation to the object in two contrary ways at once. More particularly,
the possibility of inquiry presupposes our both knowing and not
knowing something at the same time. To reply to this simply by
saying that in one sense we know and in another sense we don't, does
not solve the difficulty; it rather emphasizes it. For now we want to
know: How is it possible to know in one sense and not know in
another sense the same thing at the same time? This circle of inquiry
presents to reflective understanding a genuine difficulty which cannot
be removed simply by pointing to Meno's obviously eristic argument.
fu the dialogues present it, the "what is" question is the paradigm
of inquiry. An understanding of the "what is" question would therefore seem to demand an understanding of this seeming paradox.
Whatever else it might mean, this prethematic familiarity implies
a relation between thinking or understanding and the object thought
or understood; and insofar as this prethematic familiarity is to serve
as the ground of inquiry, it must be understood as a relation in which
the object is already there for us in a very peculiar way. It would have
to be there under two aspects at once, for we must both "have" the
object already and yet see the necessity of searching after it. But
doesn't this present a problem? Mter all, if one has this prethematic
familiarity with something, why should the question ever have to be
raised about it? Why should an inquiry into it ever become necessary?
Why should there ever be a "question" at all? To understand how
this can happen, we must first understand the peculiar way in which
the object is there for us in that primary horizon of familiarity. To
say that the object would have to be there under two aspects at once
is to say that it would have to present itself as both incomplete and
complete, as both that which is anticipated and the fulfillment
thereof. But wouldn't that mean that the object has to be at once two
objects? And if the fulfilled object were given at all, how could the
inquiry into it ever begin, since the zetetic goal would be there
�LENKOWSKI
11
beforehand? And yet, if it were not given in this double way, no
inquiry could ever begin.
On the other hand, if the burden of difficulty were thought to lie
on the side of thinking, i.e., if inquiry were to be understood as our
"moving closer" to the object, the same problem arises, for why
would there be a desire to close the distance, unless both the starting
point and the goal were presented at once? The object would have
to present itself as at once both "far away" (else the inquiry would
have nothing to overcome) and "close" (for the inquiry could not
begin unless it presupposed its goal). But then the goal must be given
already. And then, again, why should the inquiry ever begin?
The further we think in this direction, the more does the phenomenon of inquiry take on the aspect of a circle. An integral and
essential part of that circle is the horizon of familiarity, which
presents to us a puzzle which we must work through in order to come
to an understanding of what inquiry is, what it involves, and how it
can be at all possible.
In modern times it is above all Heidegger who has squarely faced
the problem posed by the circle of inquiry-the zetetic circle-and
who has acknowledged the essential role that the horizon of familiarity plays in it. Let me, accordingly, turn to an examination of his
account of it.
In the Introduction to Sein und Zeit', there occurs a section
entitled "The Formal Structure of the Question of Being" (S.Z. pp.
5-8). Heidegger begins here by saying that in order to see the
distinctive character of the question of being, it is first necessary to
briefly explain what belongs to any question whatsoever. In other
words, this section about the structure of a question is offered as a
preliminary to his investigation of the question of being, the question
of what being is, or what "being" means. It seems to me-and I hope
to show this in what follows-that all of what Heidegger says here
about questioning in general, is preeminently true of the Socratic
"what is" question in particular, and that what he says in this section
about being in particular is equally true of all those eidetic wholes
(o:&. e'io11) taken up by the "what is" question in the Platonic dialogues.
�12
THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
Heidegger then goes on to distinguish four essential moments;
1. The guiding factor, contributed beforehand by what is sought
(die vorgangige Lei tung vom Gesuchten her)
2. What is asked about (das Gefragte)
3. What is interrogated (das Befragte)
4. What is to be discovered or found out (das Erfragte)
I shall now consider these four moments in a somewhat different
order and, in so doing, I shall go somewhat beyond Heidegger's own
presentation of them.
First, every question has what is asked about (das Gefragte )-its
theme or topic, the object which is a problem for it, and which must
therefore be questioned. It is this which in fact evokes (or, perhaps,
"forms") the question in the first place. The very questioning posture arises out of one's comportment to this object.
Secondly, every question has what is to be discovered (das Erfragte )-its anticipated answer, its goal. The very posing of a question
is at once the anticipation of its answer. Were there no cognizance
beforehand of this goal, no question would ever get formulated. The
very formulation of the question derives from the kind of answer
which is anticipated, derives from a precognition of what the answer
would have to be like; and this in turn derives from a precognition of
the problem-character of the object. If the object is an unclarity, the
kind of answer sought will be a clarification, and the question will be
formulated accordingly. If the object is a puzzle, the kind of answer
sought will be an unravelling, and the question will be formulated
accordingly-so inseparable are what is asked about and what is to be
discovered by the asking. This means that in the very formulation of
the question, the direction is already anticipated from which the
answer will come. In other words, there is already anticipated what
would count in ea~h case as cognitive adequacy. The formulation of
a question carries with it certain expectations.
Thirdly, every question has what is interrogated (das Befragte )-that to which the question is posed, that which is asked
concerning what the question asks about. This is that to which the
questioner turns in pursuit of the question. This moment is necessary in order that the question begin to move; and the choice of this
�LENKOWSKl
13
element is not at all arbitrary, but is determined by one's precognition
both of the object and of the anticipated answer. Where one first turns
is never merely by chance, but is dictated by an understanding of the
problem and the goal.
Fourthly and lastly, every question is guided beforehand by what
is sought. It is this fourth moment of the structure of the question
which is most puzzling, and yet it is this which unifies the three other
moments. In fact, it supplies the question as such with its integral
wholeness, for it is only under the condition that there is this
pre-given guidance that the following become at all possible: First,
that the object questioned about and what is to be discovered are
related as they are-and as they must be in order for there to be a
question at all. This fourth moment is not the same as that second
moment (viz. what is to be discovered), though it could be confused
with it, since both moments seem to imply a teleological structure to
the question; rather, it is in a sense the relation between the first and
the second moments, between what is asked about and what is to be
discovered. That is, it is not itself the goal, yet it relates the goal to
the beginning of the quest.
This pre-given guidance makes possible, secondly, that there is
any sense of where to turn to pursue the question. How could one
know to what to pose the question, were this not dictated and guided
by an understanding of the relation between the object and the goal?
And, thirdly, it makes possible that the question itself ever gets
posed in the first place. The very posing of the question is at once
the awareness of the problem-character of the object; but this awareness is possible only in light of an awareness, however dim, of that
object as complete or without the defect. Thus the posing of the
question is at once the recognition of the relation between the object
and the goal, which relation guides the formulation of the question,
as well as the direction the question is to take.
Let us listen to what Heidegger himself has to say about this fourth
moment, keeping in mind that, althpugh his own interest is in the
question of being, what he has to say may be of a more general
significance:
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THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
Questioning, as a seeking, must be guided beforehand by
what is sought. The meaning of being must therefore be
in some way already available to us. As already suggested,
we already move within an understanding ofbeing. Out of
this understanding grows the explicit question about the
meaning of being, as well as the movement toward its
concept. We do not know what "being" indicates. But
already, when we ask, 'Whatis being?', we are within an
understanding of the "is"-without, however, being able
to fiX conceptually what the "is" means. We do not even
know the horizon within which we ought to grasp and fiX
that meaning. This vague, everyday understanding of
being is nevertheless a fact.
Even if this understanding ofbeing may vacillate and come
and go, and even border on the merely verbal, the very
indefiniteness of this familiarity with being is itself a positive phenomenon, which demands clarification. (S.Z. pp.
5-6)
I would argue that all of what Heidegge'r says in this passage about
being is fully applicable to virtue as it is presented in the Meno, as
well as to those other eidetic wholes taken up by the "what is"
question in the other dialogues. Let me repeat just a part of this
passage:
Questioning... must be guided beforehand by what is
sought. The meaning... must therefore be in some way
already available to us ...we already move within an understanding...
I have already tried to indicate the necessity of what I've called the
"horizon of familiarity" within which alone any question can be
posed. There must already be a prethematic understanding of what
will become the object of the question, else the question could never
come to have an object-which is to say that the question would
never come to form itself. The entire posing of the question, arising
as the explicit expression of the problem-character of the object, takes
its bearings from this prethematic understanding. This prethematic
understanding may long remain inaccessible and thus inexplicit; and
the recognition of its problem-character depends on one's first
�LENKOWSKI
15
finding access to it. The transitiOn from this initial access to the
recognition of its problem-character-or, to use the language of the
Cave in the Republic, the transition from the shadows taken naively,
as independent, to the recognition of their mere shadow-character,
their dependence-though never simply automatic, never guaranteed, can occur only within the context of the Socratic conversation,
But none of this would be possible, failing that ever-present horizon
of familiarity. May I remind you that, for his conversation with the
slave boy, Socrates stipulates only two conditions: (1) that he has not
learned geometry, but (2) that he knows and speaks Greek. This
second condition is of supreme importance, because it means that
the boy has with Socrates a common world of experience (at least on
the pre-philosophical, human level) and it guarantees that the boy is
already familiar with squares and sides, though he may never in his
life have given a moment's thought to them.
Heidegger says:
We do nor know what "being" indicates, but already when
we ask, "what is being?" we are within an understanding of
the "is"-without, however, being able to fix conceptually
what the "is" means.
Can we fail to be reminded here of Meno's own response to his
torpor? He says: "Indeed, I have so often given so very many
speeches about virtue ... however I am now absolutely unable to say
what it is" (80b2-5). Meno, "numb and speechless," continues to
talk about virtue-not, of course, that he continues to give "official"
opinions about it (he is now bereft of these); but he still moves within
that everyday horizon of familiarity with virtue. His official opinions
can be taken from him, but this prethematic understanding of virtue,
which is quite different from those opinions and is yet their ground,
is something of which he can never be dispossessed. An extension
ofthe image of the midwife in theTheaetetus should make this clear.
Theaetetus must be "delivered" of his opinions, which suggests
that he is to be understood as a mere "carrier" or "bearer." In the
preliminary conversation with Theodorus, Socrates shows a much
keener interest in Theaetetus's father (144b8), than in Theaetetus
himself This signals what is to be his main interest in the midwife
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
passsage: Theaetetus, the "bearer," has been "impregnated" by
Theodorus and others. In order to gain access to these "fathers,"
Theaetetus (the "mother" who has nurtured these opinions) must be
made to give them up. He has been impregnated with opinions about
knowledge; they have been implanted in his "psychic womb," if I
may extend the figure. This "psychic womb" is his prethematic
understanding of what knowledge is. This is the only medium in
which those opinions could possibly take root; and this remains,
however many opinions he might be delivered of. This, like the
womb, is essentially his; it cannot be taken from him. Like the womb,
this prethematic understanding is "covered over" by the opinions (or
"offspring") which take root in it, covered over in such a way,
however, that the prethematic understanding becomes hidden from
himself, that the two become indistinguishable, that he naively takes
his own opinion to be the essential "what is." It is this very prethematic understanding, then, that guides the formation of opinion
which becomes superimposed upon it. In the same way that the
shape of the developing foetus is in some way guided by the shape of
the womb, so is the shape of whatever opinion is formed or implanted, guided by the "shape" of that prethematic understanding.
Thus it is that, no matter how extreme, or peculiar, or wrong one's
opinion about the "whatness" of something might be, it has always
recognizably something to do with that whatness-it is never absolutely
wrong; no matter how violently we might disagree with a Thrasymachus or a Callicles, we recognize clearly that his opinion arises out
of the same context of understanding as ours, that we are both talking
about what is essentially the same thing. It is this prethematic
understanding, this horizon of familiarity, which is the same for
everyone-for thought or intellect as such-that accounts for this.
The "therapeutic" function of Socrates' midwifery, then, is to remove
these opinions and thus lay bare that prethematic understanding, to
give one access to it for the first time, and that's the same as to say that
its function is to give one the opportunity to see for the first time the
merely doxic character of one's opinions, i.e., the difference between
the essential "what is" of something and one's opinion of it.
But what exactly is it that one then has access to when one has
access to this prethematic understanding? Or, to formulate the
�LENKOWSKI
17
problem from a slightly different point of view: Where does this
abandoning of one's prior opinion leave one? Ideally, not with
another opinion to replace the first one. Ideally, it leaves one with
nothing-but with a "nothing" that is a "determinate nothing." It leaves
one not with a void, but with the determinate absence of opinion.
Thus I would argue that it is not Socrates' sting, but Meno's own
emptiness that is his torpor. And it is just this absence of opinion
that is at once the raising of the "what is" question. Socrates' insistence that he and Meno now (i.e., once Meno has confessed his
emptiness) inquire jointly into what virtue is-that this joint inquiry
is now finally possible-shows just how closely connected are this
emptiness and the asking of the "what is" question. And this remains
true even ifMeno's own confession of emptiness can finally be taken
seriously only on the most superficial level.
Accordingly, one can translate the image of the Cave in the
following way: Strictly speaking, the transition is not from shadows
to things which would then replace those shadows; rather, it is from
shadows unrecognized as such, to shadows taken as shadows; more
literally, it is from a dependent reality unrecognized as such, to the
recognition of its dependence-character-i.e., to the recognition that
it depends on something else, whatever that something else may be.
In any case, it would be "the real," if only for its priviledged independence. But can it be determined any more concretely than that?
Can we answer the question: What is it?
We can better appreciate the difficulty this latter question presents
by recognizing that the independent is not given in the same way as
what depends on it is given. If it is only the dependent (even once
recognized as such) that one actually has before oneself, then how,
in what manner, is that on which it depends "given" (as it must be,
in order to be at all aware of the dependent character of the dependent)? Or, to ask the question differently: If the overcoming of
opinion is tantamount to the recognition of the essential difference
between knowledge and opinion, what is the character of one's
relation to that knowledge which one is now "aware of'? How is one
now aware of that knowledge, since one surely does not yet "have"
it? To answer this, we must see that a complete translation of the
image of the Cave necessitates an inversion of the relation between
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THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
the eikastic image and the presently beheld "reality"-i.e., a reversal
of our understanding of the direction in which eh:acria, imagemaking, the lowest section of the divided line, operates.
But first, a slight digression. In his commentary on the Meno<,
Jacob Klein coins the very happy expression, "dianoetic.eh:acria" to
designate a specific, higher function of eil<:acria. Ei.Kacria itself
names not merely our ability to see shadows and other such images,
but rather our ability to see images as images, to construe images to
be images, to construe them, therefore, as dependent. !nttvOta,
discursive thinking-the third part of the Divided Line (Republic
VI)-in reflecting on the visible and patently "real'' things of the
world, may at some time begin to give up the trust (1ticrn~) which it
ordinarily invests in them. When this happens, liuiv01ahas already
put eiKacria to work on its behalf, turning all the visibles into
"images" of something more real, i.e., into that kind of being that is
dependent on something else.
I will now go on to use this expression, "dianoetic eixacria "in a
slightly different way, which extends or at least varies Klein's use of it.
Dianoetic eiKacria reaches not backward or downward, but "forward" or "upward," and "brings together" the present opinion, now
suspended, and that on which this opinion depends. Or, we could
say, it brings that on which this opinion depends down to bear upon
this opinion, Republic, Book VI, SlOb sq., makes this clear: The
recognition of a D1t68ecrt~, a supposition, as a U1t68ecrt~ is the recognition of its dependence on a beginning (apxl]) which is really a
beginning, a "beginning free from hypotheses." These apxai are
identified at 511c6 as the VOTi~&, the thinkables or intelligibles.
Now, the Divided Line is presented to us in such a way that we
are naturally led to see its uppermost part, called "intellection"
(v6'l]crt~ Bk. VI, 511d8 sq.) or, later on, "knowledge" (e1ttcr~ill!Tt Bk.
VII, 533e8) as the last stage in one's ascent, indeed, as a way of
thinking and, correlatively, as a realm of objects (the VO'l]~&.),.which
is quite remote and difficult to gain access to. This must, of course,
be an accurate portrayal of philosophic or reflective thinking, insofar
as it traverses what the Republic calls the "upward way" to a genuine
apx11' and then descends again "through etli'l], ending in etli'l]." But
surely this can't be the whole story, for what about everyday thinking?
�LENKOWSKI
19
In terms of the Divided Line, everyday thinking is still thinking, and
would therefore have to be at least dianoetic. But it can't be only that.
All thinking, of whatever sort, embodies and is guided by the
7tpamxt apxm (first principles), expressible technically as laws of
identity, non-contradiction, excluded middle, etc. But more particularly, all thinking embodies and is guided by ever so many abstract
concepts, whether these are general concepts (such as "man," "dog,"
"color," "spatial form," etc.) or purely formal concepts ( such as
"thing," "property," "object," "relation," "whole," "part," etc.).
Thinking can't occur without these concepts, though their role and
function is for the most part inexplicit, nonthematic, much like the
slave boy's understanding of squares and sides. This is, then, what I
meant by saying that the image of the Divided Line must be reversed.
Mental activity as such, always and from the beginning, is not only
dianoetic, but noetic as well, at least to the extent that dianoia must
have noetic underpinnings. This may be suggested by Plato himself
when, later on in Bk VII (534a2), he extends v61]<H<; to designate the
entire upper half of the Divided Line. Aristotle also seems to suggest
this at the end of the Posterior Analytics, Ch. 19: He shows that
knowledge of first principles comes, not through definition or demonstration, but only, and in an originary way, through intellection
(vo\l<;). The reason, of course, is that both demonstration and definition have to start somewhere. Otherwise stated: all discursive,
dianoetic activity of thought presupposes and rests on vo\l<;, on an
original v6T)crt<;, since all thinking discourses from something and
about something.
Thus, in revealing opinion as mere 06/;a, dianoetic Eil<:acrla
performs another, important, correlative function: It brings to us, to
our awareness, the VOT)'tov,i.e., that itself on which the dependent
depends. A passage in the Phaedo (72e) is helpful here: In perceiving
a likeness ofSimmias (e.g., in a picture), one is led automatically to
Simmias himself on whom the likeness depends. Thought brings
Simmias himself (av1:o\l 1:t[Lf1tOD) to mind, brings Simmias himself
to bear on the likeness of Simmias, and it is just this that makes us
see the dependent character of the likeness.
But does dianoetic Eilmcrla thereby bring to us thisVOT)'tOV fully
clarified, transparent, articulated and therefore understood? No.
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THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
What it brings to us is rather a prefiguration, or, better, an adumbration of the vorn:6v. I hesitate to call this adumbration, which is, after
all, something noetic, by the misleading term "image," though it is
based on this function of EiKacr\.a; let me instead call it a "noetic
schema." In choosing this language I am trying to be very cautious
about the way in which I think EiKacria is at work here; but the
language might also suggest something along the lines of Kant's
Schematism, especially ifwe consider his own example of the dog. You
will recall that in the Critique of Pure Reason the schematism is
introduced to solve a very particular problem, viz., how empirical
intuitions (i.e., experiences of concrete objects) can be referrable to
concepts, since intelligible concepts and sensible appearances are
utterly alien to one another. s It is the schema, as a special function
of imagination (Einbildungskrajt) that allows me to say that this fourfooted animal in front of me looks like the concept"dog." The schema
is not an image; it is rather the rule of the imagination which tells me
how to construct the image.
Perhaps this is also true in the example of Simmias. Perhaps the
picture of Simmias leads thought to form an image or schema of
Simmias himself, which mediates the picture and Simmias himself-a schema derived from Simmias himself and containing schematically those features of Simmias himself not adequated by the
picture. So understood, the schema or image would contain schematically the requirements of adequation tailored to the particular
defects of the picture.
This noetic schema is the schema of the requirements of the truth.
It seems to be in this way that that on which the dependent depends
IS gtven.
Let me return now to the other formulation of our question: If
the overcoming of opinion is tantamount to the recognition of the
difference between knowledge and opinion, how-in what manner-is one now aware of that knowledge, since one surely does not
yet "have" it? One now has that knowledge only adumbrationally or
schematically, i.e., in becoming aware of the defect of one's opinion,
one is at once becoming aware of what the requirements of the truth
would be. In becoming aware of the disparity between knowledge
and opinion, one is necessarily becoming aware of the knowledge-
�LENKOWSKI
21
character of knowledge. And that means that one has fallen into the
following paradox: One's knowledge that one doesn't have knowledge entails knowledge of what that knowledge is. This is the paradox
of knowledge of ignorance, or: Socratic ignorance which is identical
with Socratic wisdom. This paradox is the true perplexity and is thus
the beginning of philosophy. 6
It is the noetic schema, and not the fully articulated V01)~6v that
dianoetic EiKacria brings to bear; and it is as noetic schema that the
V01)~6v receives its most rudimentary and primary thematization.
But the noetic schema is itself only an adumbration, a mere "outline"
(~{mos). One has it, but what exactly is it that one has? To ponder
this is the "what is" question; and one will continue to pose it to
oneself as long as this aporetic attitude is sustained. It is only within
this "outline" that the "what is" question can genuinely arise.
Thus, one's prior opinion is replaced, but not by another opinion;
it is replaced by the noetic schema, which is at once a demand. The
bare recognition that there is such a "thing itself' (viz., the V01)~6v)
on which the dependent depends, immediately raises the question,
What is it? More precisely stated: this question raises itself, forms
itself.
The "what is" question is the philosophical question·par excellence, for it is the questing after the "real itself' on which the
dependent depends. Thus it is significant that Aristotle in Metaphysics Z, 1030a18-27, identifies the "what is" question as a question (~6
~i f.crn) with oucria.
Let me now return to my earlier question: What exactly is it that
one has access to when one has access to one's prethematic understanding? It is what I have now referred to as a noetic schema. This
is the demand for inquiry, for it is the posing of the "what is" question.
I have characterized the noetic schema as an adumbration, a mere
"outline." If it is to be identified with this prethematic understanding, then it is that "outline" or "horizon"within which we move
and think. It is from this that our thinking takes its bearings; we can
never move beyond the boundaries of this horizon.
Earlier I claimed that in order for our prethematic familiarity to
serve as the ground of inquiry, the object must present itself to us
initially in a paradoxical way, i.e., it would have to be understood as
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THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
double in character, since it would have to be there for us at once as
both anticipation (else the inquiry would have no beginning) and
fulfillment (else there would be no motivation forthe inquiry). This
necessarily double character of the object seemed to be both the
condition for inquiry as well as that which would make the inquiry
impossible, hence the paradox. But I now notice that a "noetic
schema" is a "pointing," and a pointing which is at once both ends of
the arrow, the "from which" and the "to which"; and that means: not
a single moment 1 but rather a "context" or "span," in which the two
essential moments of the anticipating and the anticipated are at once
present. To put this into Socratic language: the recognition of the
dependent as dependent is tantamount to a real change in the object,
such that the object is now no longer a mere unitary moment, but is
itself now opened up into a context or span in which the two essential
moments of dependent and ground are at once present. The picture
of Simmias, taken as a picture, seems to exemplify such a span. This
context or "span" or horizon would therefore be the noetic schema,
which is the same as the horizon of familiarity.
The object understood in this way as double-not that there are
two objects, but that the object itself has a "structure" or is a "span"
with two essential moments-can now help us to understand how
the inquiry can be guided beforehand by what is sought. For if it is
the object understood in this way that one has access to, when one
has access to that prethematic understanding, then I think I begin to
see how that prethematic understanding not only makes it possible
to begin an inquiry, but also makes it necessary. We can now
understand the way in which that prethematic "contact" (Stl;t<;,
Styeiv) functions as a demand, such that it not only provides the
zetetic object, but also provides the necessity of, or motivation for,
the zetesis. If VO'l]crt<; is understood as that "contact" (St/;t<;) which
mind (voil<;) always has with theVO'l]'tOV, and if that very "contact" is
understood as this demand, then otavotu, of which zetesis is a
precise expression, is the acceding to the demand posed by v61]crt<;,
understood as this "contact." It is, incidentally, tempting in this
context to ask of otavota: To what does the ota refer? Does
Republic VI, 511c1-3 help us with this? The text reads: ".... but by
means of ELO'l], it (viz., the upward way, now moving downward)
�LENKOWSKI
23
goes through EtliTt, to dliTt, also ending in EtliTt" Does the liux of
liu'tvota then refer to the dliTt? If so, it means that mind relates to
the very same thing (viz., the VOTt~6v) in two quite different ways-as
VDTtcrt<; (viz., as that unthematic contact, which is a demand) and as
liuxvota (viz., ~s the acceding to that demand).
Thus would this prethematic understanding account for how the
inquiry could, as it must, be guided beforehand by what is sought.
That this would be necessarily true not only of that paradigm of.
inquiry that Socrates constantly recommends to us, i.e, that which
would begin once all the opinions have been cleared away, but also
of the more negative, and, in the dialogues, certainly more usual,
elenchtic inquiry, should seem clear from the fact that the recognition of the error of a given answer has to take its bearings from
something.
There is, however, a further problem: Even if this prethematic
understanding is the horizon within which the inquiry occurs, and
even if this accounts for how the inquiry could be guided beforehand
by what is sought-if our access to that prethematic understanding
is itself the posing of the "what is" question, then the problem arises:
How can the inquiry ever begin? In whot direction could you move?
To ask this question, "In what direction could you move?", refers
us back to the remaining moment, to what is to be interrogated (das
Befragte). I will say in passing, though I will not dwell on it, that
Heidegger himself, in add-ressing this moment of the question's
structure, breaks out of the zetetic circle and in so doing destroys it.
This he does by not identifying this moment absolutely wi1\h the
other three. I.e. with this moment he turns away from Sein (Being)
to Dasein (human being), from the theme of the question to the one
who poses the question in the first place. This move is, of course,
connected in Being and Time with Heidegger's own particular brand
of transcendental philosophy. I.e, the transcendental move here is
from the question-as-posed, to the structure ofDasein as the condition for the posing of the question. Yet from the point of view of my
own particular interest in the.structure of inquiry, I view this move
as one which leads us away from an understanding of the zetetic
circle. I will try to provide something of an argument for this claim
in what follows.
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THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
To see that the zetetic circle is a necessary circle is to really
understand what the horizon of familiarity implies. I therefore
understand all four moments to be absolutely and uncompromisingly identical. In the case of virtue, e.g., what is asked about is virtue
itself; and what is to be discovered is what virtue is, i.e., virtue itself.
In identifYing absolutely these two moments, das Gefragte and das
Erfragte, I am, of course, denying any difference in itself between
virtue itself and what virtue itself is, i.e., its meaning or sense. As far
as I can see, the eidos "virtue itself' is nothing but a meaning or sense.
What guides the whole inquiry from the outset, what gives the
whole inquiry its bearings, its sense of direction, is virtue itself. And
finally, what is interrogated is necessarily virtue itself. Why? Because
it is only virtue itself that could possibly tell us what it is. It is
important to see that, while it is Meno who is put on the spot, Meno
is not the one interrogated. Hence Socrates' invitation to Meno to
join with him in interrogating virtue together, an invitation which I
believe to be genuine, despite Socrates' divination of the utter intransigence of Meno's soul.
It is this uncompromising identity of all four moments that keeps
the circle absolutely closed, and which therefore raises again the
question, How can one inquire? It essentially raises this question
because, if the question consists of only four structural moments, and
if these four moments are identical, then the question would seem
always to remain motionless, for there does not seem to be any
possibility of going anywhere. There is a passage in theMeno (79b-e)
which makes this problem utterly clear: Socrates chides Meno for
always responding in terms of the parts of virtue, when what is asked
for is virtue as a whole. He asks: "But do you think someone could
know what is a part of virtue, without knowing virtue itself?" (79c8).
Meno does not think so. Socrates then says: 'Well, then, oh best of
men, you must not think that while still inquiring into the 'what is'
of virtue as a whole, that you will be revealing it to anyone by
answering in terms of its parts, or in terms of anything else of that
sort-for it will be necessary to return again to the same question:
What do you say this virtue, which you are talking about, is?-or do
I seem to you to be saying nothing?" (79d5-e3). Meno answers:
"You seem to me to speak rightly."
�LENKOWSKI
25
From the point of view of the whole-part relation, then, the
problem is the following: The "what is" question asks about something as a whole. And in light of what I have said about the structure
of the question, we are, and must be, already in possession of that
whole. How, already having that whole, could we begin to pursue
it? The only other possible way of inquiring into the whole seems
to be by way of an examination of its parts or exemplifications. But a
knowledge of the parts or exemplifications as parts or exemplifications presupposes a knowledge of precisely that whole of which they
are parts or exemplifications, and the turn to them can therefore be
made only in light of a prior understanding of the whole, which
means that an inquiry into the whole, by way of the parts, is inadmissable. And yet this seems to be the only possible way, unless we
address ourselves directly to the whole itself. But how, if we already
have the whole, could we ever begin to pursue it? If this circle is a
completely closed one (and, after all, there is no such thing as an open
circle), then one implication or consequence of this is that, in just
the same way that one cannot escape it or get out of it, so also there
is not, and cannot be, any access to it from the outside: Insofar as one
already has a world and, correlatively, a mental life, one must always
be already within this circle. 7 In other words, the phenomenon of
the circle bespeaks a contact (Oi.~tS) which exists from the very outset.
Can we ever overcome this apparent immobility which the zetetic
circle seems to entail without destroying in the process its necessary
circularity? Socrates' own answer to this question in the Meno is that
all learning is really something called "recollection" (aVUJ.!V110'tS).
He says: " ... as all nature is akin ... there is no difficulty .. .learning out
of a single recollection all the rest, if one is manly and doesn't get
tired of searching" (81d1-5). This seems to mean that, insofar as our
thinking is led to turn inward toward its own proper objects (the
V011'ta), which objects are always at our disposal, always there for us,
it is also led to the possibility of paying attention to, and following up
on, the ways in which these V011'ta point to other such V011'ta, and
ultimately to all other such V011'ta, all of which are already really at
our disposal, really there for us. Through an effortful turning inward,
an effortful focussing of attention, our prethematic contact (ei.~tS)
with the proper objects of our thinking can be made thematic. We
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THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
are always "open" to these objects, and we are always open to the
"paintings" that they have to one another. In pointing to one another
they show themselves to be interrelated systematically and to constitute a whole, a noetic or eidetic realm, and this too is something we
are always open to. In other words, in our turning inward, our
dianoetic posture, guided by v6rtcn<;, is always one of openness to
the whole. This is what the zetetic circle leads us to see.
It is the Socratic paradox of knowledge of ignorance which reveals
that inquiry is a necessary circle; for this self-aware knowledge of
ignorance exhibits a "contact" with the V01)'tU, a contact which is
always there and can never be broken. And it is, in turn, the zetetic
circle, precisely because it is completely closed, that leads us to
characterize all learning as recollection, and thus reveals to us our
openness to the whole.
Notes
1. Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Ober den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehr~ in
Fichte's Werke, Bd. 1 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1971) 55sq.
2. Although it never once occurs in Plato, Aristotle does occasionally
(cf.Meta. 1051b24, 25; 1072b21) use this happy word to designate
the relation between intellection and the intelligible. It has the
advantage over such words as A.aflfl&.vnv, which Aristotle also
occasionally uses to designate this relation (e.g.Anal. Post. B,
93b15), that it is neutral with respect to the direction of the activity
involved. Whereas A.af.tfl&.vnv (literally, "to grasp") seems to
suggest that intellect is "active" upon its "passive" objects, a Bi~t<;
indicates merely "contact" or "being in touch with."
3. Martin Heidegger. Sein und Zeit (Tiibingen: Niemeyer, 1963).
4. Jacob Klein. A Commentary on Plato's Meno (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1965) 112 sq.
�LENKOWSKI
27
5. Immanuel Kant. Critique of Pure Reason Trans. by N. Kemp
Smith (London: Macmillan, 1963) 180-187.
6. This is something I attempted to work out in detail in an essay
published earlier in this journal. See my "The Origin ofPhilosophy," St.John's Review, xxxvii, no. 2&3, Spring, 1986, pp. 81-92.
7. Just how one comes to "have" a "world" at all is a problem that
goes well beyond the scope of this present inquiry. It is a concern
central to the phenomenological philosophy ofEdmund Husser!,
and no one interested in the problem can afford to ignore him.
While all of his writings touch on this theme in one way or
another, it is most prominent in the following works: 1) Erfahrung und Urteil (Hamburg: Meiner, 1972); English translation
Experience and Judgment, Trans. J. Churchill and K. Arneriks
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973); 2) Ideen zu
einer reinen Phiinomenologie und phiinomenologischen Philosophie,
Zweites Buch: Phiinomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution
(Haag: Nijhoff, 1952; 3) Analysen zur passiven Synthesis (Haag:
Nijhoff, 1966).
�28
THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
�~ Sun and Cave
~
Eric Salem
For Charlie
Introduction
Near the end of book five of the Republic, and at the very center
of the dialogue as a whole, Socrates makes his famous-or infamous-claim: "Unless the philosophers rule as kings or those now
called kings and chiefs genuinely andadequately philosophize ... there
will be no rest from ills for the cities, my dear Glaucon, nor I think
for human kind, nor will the regime we have now described in speech
ever come forth from nature, insofar as possible, and see the light of
the sun" (473d).
Fortunately for us, Glaucon and Adeimantus have the courage to
call Socrates' bluff. They demand that Socrates justify this claim and
he does, over the course of more than two books. In the middle of
his justification, between his account of the nature of the philosopher
and his account of the education proper to him, Socrates sets out
three strange and strangely haunting images. In the image of the
good, he posits a sun-like source that somehow yokes together
knower and known, and calls this source the good or the idea of the
good. In the image of the cave, he describes our nature and condition
in light of that source. In the image of the divided line, Socrates
characterizes the ascent to the good and the human powers required
for that ascent.
I want to think about-.or rather to think through-these images,
by first raising and then attempting to answer the questions about
them that I suppose any serious reader of the Republic would raise.
Eric Salem is a tutor at St. John's College, Armapolis. This essay is a slightly revised
version ofa-lecture delivered at Annapolis and at the Thomas More Institute in Nashua,
N.H. Quotations are from the translation by Allan Bloom, Basic Books, 1968.
�30
SALEM
Now doing this, confronting Socrates' images on their own terms,
will require me to abstract, for the most part, from the context I have
just sketched out. However, I want to urge you to keep this context
in mind. In particular, I urge you to keep asking yourselves what
light Socrates' images might shed on his central claim that the
philosopher is the solution to the problem of human community. I
myself will turn to this question at the end of my essay. There I hope
to show you that Socrates' strange and apparently apolitical images
form the true center of the Republic. That is, I hope to show you that
Socrates' images are the key to understanding why and in what sense
the philosopher should rule.
I. Questions
Socrates introduces his image of the good in book six with the
claim that the good is the chief and universal object of human desire,
that it is "what every soul pursues and for the sake of which it does
everything" (505d). Very near the end of book seven, while describing the final stages of the philosophers' education, Socrates further
claims that the good, once known, can serve as a pattern or paradigm
for the life of a man or a city: "Lifting up the brilliant beams of their
souls, they must be compelled to look toward that which provides
light for everything. Once they see the good itself, they must be
compelled, each in his turn, to use it as a pattern for ordering city,
private men, and themselves for the rest of their lives" (540a-b).
I find neither of these claims about the good particularly problematic. The claim that everyone somehow desires the good is at any rate
a familiar Socratic dictum, and one that seems to be amply borne out
by the drama of the Republic. Glaucon's longing to see the conversation continue, Cephal us's willingness to absent himself from it,
even Thrasymachus's angry wish to put a stop to it-all seem to be
rooted in a desire to secure the good for oneself. The drama of the
Republic also seems to support the claim that the good could serve as
a pattern for human action. For instance, viewed in retrospect,
Glaucon's desire to know whether justice is good can be seen as a
desire to know the good so that he might shape his life in accordance
with it.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
31
What I find puzzling, then, is not these claims themselves, but the
relation of the good as Socrates describes it to them. It would be one
thing if the good were, say, pleasure or knowledge. (These, by the
way, are the alternatives that Socrates explicitly rejects just before he
begins his own description.) I can easily convince myself that pleasure is what everyone desires most, and on some days I can almost
convince myself that the same is true of knowledge. I can also see
how thinking that either pleasure or knowledge were the chief good
would shape and inform a life. But what of the good as Socrates
describes it?· What would it mean to take what yokes together knower
and known as a pattern for the life of a city or a man? And even if
someone could do this, what sense could it make to say that it is the
chief object of desire for anyone "much less everyone"?
In different ways these questions both concern the applicability of
Socrates' image of the good to ordinary human concerns. Both
questions arise because Socrates' image confounds our ordinary
sense of what should count as an answer to the question, "What is
the good?" My next question is of a different sort. It concerns the
very existence of the good as Socrates describes it. As you may
remember, that description draws heavily on an analogy with sight.
Seeing and being seen, Socrates observes, differ from, say, hearing
and being heard in a decisive respect. Hearing, the capacity to hear,
depends only on the presence of something to be heard for its
completion, and vice versa. Put someone who can hear in the presence of a sound; he will hear and the sound will be heard. But put
someone with good eyes in a darkened room full of the most brilliant
colors and nothing will happen. Seeing and being seen depend on a
third thing or rather on two things: light and a source of light. So,
too, Socrates claims, in the case of knowing and being known. The
capacity to know and the capacity to be known depend on an external
source for their completion; this source, this yoke, as Socrates calls
it, is the good or the idea of the good.
Yet why, we might ask, should we suppose that knowing is
sight-like rather than hearing-like? Mter all, as Socrates himself
admits, seeing is the exception and hearing is the rule. That is, in
nearly all cases-and I suppose he is thinking particularly of smelling,
touching and tasting-no third thing seems to be required for the
�32
SALEM
completion of a capacity to do something and the corresponding
capacity to suffer. Why, then, does Socrates insist on putting knowing in the class defined uniquely by sight rather than in the common
class-the economy class-characterized by hearing? Is there some
feature of our experience which would allow us to infer that there
must be some mediating principle between knower and known? If
there is, Socrates does not mention it. Do we perhaps encounter this
principle directly in the ordinary course of our learning and knowing? Again, if we do, Socrates does not say so-and in any case, if
we did, it is difficult to see why he would resort to an image to bring
that principle into view.
Socrates' silence about this most basic matter is baffling, and our
bafflement can only increase as we enter further into the details of
his image. For Socrates does more than merely posit a principle that
mediates between knower and known. He likens the ability to see
to an overflow dispensed to us by the sun, and draws the corresponding consequence for our ability to know: the good is not only a
necessary condition for our knowing, but the very source of our
capacity to know. He then goes on to make parallel claims about the
objects of our knowledge. He likens the truth to light, and makes it
somehow a feature of those objects: "[T]herefore say that what
provides truth to the things known and gives the power to the one
who knows is the idea of the good" (508e ). And then, as a final step,
he claims that the good is responsible for the very existence of the
things we know: "[T)herefore say that not only being known is
present in these things as a consequence of the good, but also
existence and being are in them besides as a result of it" (509b ).
It seems to me that each of these additional features of Socrates'
image is worthy of question. I, at any rate, would have liked to hear
some reason given for each of them, some reason that is not dependent on the initial (and questionable) analogy with sight. However,
once again, this is just what Socrates does not provide. Yet suppose
we were to accept, in principle, every detail of Socrates' image of the
good. Suppose, that is, that we were to admit, as genuine, the
possibility that knower and known are yoked together by some
external source, that the knowable things are always aglow, lit up by
that source, and that we as knowers are somehow akin to these things
�THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
33
by virtue of our common heritage. It seems to me that just here we
encounter a difficulty at least as great as any I've described. We need
only reflect on our own experience as learners and knowers.
On balance it seems to me that we know-really know-very little
and that what little we do know we know only as the result of great
and unremitting labor. The things most worth knowing are not
luminous, not to us at least. Perplexity with respect to them is for
most of us the most we can manage, and in truth most of us prefer
the dull comfort of well-worn opinion to knowing that we don't
know. Is there room in this world of ours for the good as Socrates
imagines it? Is there room in Socrates' sun-drenched world for the
darkness of our own experience as knowers? It would hardly seem
so. And yet, the picture I have just drawn of our condition as learners
and knowers is largely in accord with another picture put forward by
Socrates, his image of the cave. The human-all-too-human preference for opinion over perplexity, the painfulness of that perplexity,
the arduousness of any ascent to true knowledge-these are all
features of Socrates' own image. To say that Socrates' image of the
good is not in accord with our experience is to say that it is not in
accord with his own image of the cave; it is perhaps to say that Socrates
is not in accord with himself. Are we willing to say this? Is there
some way to reconcile the two images with one another?
Here is a possible solution. Someone might argue that Socrates'
image of the good is meant only to characterize us and the world as
it is for us as knowers. But we are not simply knowers. And our
capacity to know is continually distracted, continually drawn away
from its proper objects by other parts of the soul, by what we like to
call our passions. As a consequence, we find ourselves bound in
darkness, our knowing part forced to content itself with shadows
rather than substance, with mere images of things rather than the
things themselves. Thus, according to this argument, there is no
important sense in which the image of the good is at odds with the
image of the cave. The one simply describes our initial-and for
most people, normal-condition; the other, the condition to which
we should aspire.
There is, I think something to be said for this argument. Socrates
himself seems to say that distraction is at the root of our ignorance
�34
SALEM
in these lines from his description of the cave: "[B]ut the present
argument indicates that this power [to know] is in the soul of each,
and that the instrument with which each learns-just as an eye is not
able to turn toward the light from the dark without the whole
body-must be turned around from that which is coming into being
together with the whole soul until it is able to endure looking at being
and the brightest part of being. And we affirm that this is the good,
don't we?" (528d) Still, the very way in which Socrates makes his
point, his spatial metaphor, points to the inadequacy of the solution
I have just sketched out. If coming to know is a matter of turning
around, if it somehow involves directing our vision aright, then there
must be parts of the world which are dark, dark beyond any human
making, and these dark regions must be somehow populated by
shadows, again not of our making. In short, although our ignorance,
the human condition, has something to do with the condition of the
soul, it also has to do with the condition, indeed the very structure,
of the world.
This is what I mean when I say that the image of the cave and the
image of the good are at least apparently at odds with one another.
The ordinary sun is sometimes present, sometimes absent. It rises
and sets. Here we have a perfectly satisfactory explanation of ordinary darkness. But the sun as good never sets; the lights are always
on in the world disclosed by Socrates' image of the good. How, then,
are we to explain the presence within it of the shadow-filled darkness
of the cave? Once again we must ask: Is there some way to bring the
images of the sun and cave together, a way that will also point us
toward answers to the other questions we have raised? Let us see.
II. Image and Original
Let us reflect, for a moment, on one obvious feature of Socrates'
image of the cave. The shapes which the inhabitants of the cave
delight in observing are shadows. What difference does this make?
What is a shadow? In the image of the divided line, Socrates puts
shadows first in his list of natural images; he thus suggests that
shadows constitute the lowest order of images. This seems reasonable. The shadow of a face reveals far less about a face than, say, its
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
35
reflection in still water or in a mirror. The shadow of a thing reveals
only the boundary of a thing. The interior of the thing, its texture,
its depth-all these are absent from the shadow. The darkness which
forms the interior of a shadow itself seems to be an image of its lack
of revealing power. And yet a shadow is an image. To know the
boundary or limit of a thing is to knciw something of that thing. The
inhabitants of the cave thus encounter the things that truly are in a
peculiar fashion. They dwell-we dwell-among the shades of things.
Here is something else that might seem to distinguish shadows
from other types of images. A shadow can only exist if at least three
other things are present. There must be a thing to be shadowed.
There must be light. And the light must be directed light: It must
stem from a source or at least a finite number of sources. Otherwise
the light will not be blocked and no shadow will be produced.
How peculiar are these conditions to the kind of images we call
shadows? (I am speaking here of natural images, the sort that Socrates
associates with the first level of the divided line, and by natural images
I mean not images of natural things, but images that do or can arise
without human intervention.) Clearly all images presuppose originals: an image is always an image if something. And clearly all visual
images presuppose light. By this I do not mean that there must be
light for them to be seen, though this is of course true. I mean that
light produces-or at least co-produces-say, the reflection of a tree
in water. Now it is less clear in such cases than in the case of shadows
that all visual images are also dependent on a source. On a cloudy
day, when light is diffuse, there are no shadows, but one can still see
reflections in water. Still, without a source oflight to be diffused, no
reflection can exist.
What, then, of images which are neither visual nor manmade? Do
they also depend for their existence on the equivalent of light and
sources oflight? Let me answer by turning the question around: Are
there such images? We can be deceived-or deceive ourselves-about the things we touch and hear and taste: we can mistake
the voice of an enemy for the voice of a friend; a bitter medicine can
be disguised by the taste of honey. But it is one thing to say this and
another altogether to say that there are natural images in the world
of smells, tastes and so on. My sense is that there are none or none
�36
SALEM
worth mentioning, and my guess is that Plato and Socrates would
agree with me. (I might mention here that in the Sophist, the only
dialogue I know of in which an explicit distinction is made between
natural and manmade images, the only examples given of the first
class are visual [Sophist 266b-c ]. Likewise in the divided line image.)
On the other hand, the world is full of visual images that are not
of human making. In fact, it is precisely when the conditions for
seeing things are most fully satisfied-when the sun is at its brightest
and things seem to be aglow of themselves-that the world is most
full of such images. Where there is sun, there is shade. And the
converse is also true-where there are natural images, where there
are shadows and reflections, there must be sun or at least some source
of light. Perhaps we can now see another reason why Socrates puts
shadows first on his list of natural images: They may -reveal least
about the things they image, but they are exemplary in the way they
display the dependence of such images on a source of light.
No doubt you have already seen where I mean to go with this
argument. The more we think about images-natural images-and
the conditions for their existence, the less strange at least two of
Socrates' claims sound. We wondered earlier why Socrates chooses
to liken knowing and being known to seeing and being seen and why,
in particular, he insists that knowing and being known depend t;pon
some external source, namely, the good. In a somewhat different
context, we found ourselves wondering how Socrates can both claim
that such a source exists and claim that most men spend their lives
absorbed in the play of shadows not of their own making. But if
within what we ordinarily call the world, ifwithin the world ofvisible,
tangible, audible things, all natural images depend for their being on
some third thing, beyond their originals and beyond those who perceive them, and if, in addition, things in what we ordinarily call the
world are themselves images of purely intelligible objects, then it
makes sense for Socrates to suppose that there must be an external
source of these images as well, a source other than those who perceive
them and other than their intelligible originals. Moreover, if within
what we ordinarily call the world, images arise only in those contexts
where the perception of the original also depends on an external
source (as in the case of sight), and if, furthermore, in these contexts
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
37
the source of the image is always also the source of the perceiving
and being perceived of the original, then it makes sense to say that
knowing and being known, intellection and intelligibility, depend on
a source external to themselves and it makes sense to say that this
source is the same as the source of the images we take to be things.
In short, the relation of seeing and being seen does make sense as a
paradigm for the relation of knowing and being known. It makes
sense to suppose that knowing and being known depend on an
external source-that is to say, it makes sense to suppose that the good
exists-and it also makes sense to suppose that this source is the very
source of what we ordinarily call the world. The cave is the offshoot,
the inevitable byplay, of the illuminating activity of the good. The
shadow-play that surrounds us, the unintelligibility that suffuses the
lives of most of us most of the time, is simply the price-high, but
non-negotiable-that must be paid for supreme intelligibility.
Clearly there are a number of "ifs" in this argument that require
further examination. What's more, there is at least one crucial
condition for the production of shadows that I have glossed over
entirely, a condition that strongly suggests that life in the cave is the
offspring of more than one parent: no shadow can exist in the
absence of a surface upon which it is cast. I haven't mentioned this
condition until now-and won't mention it again-because to consider it adequately would take us too far afield: at the very least we'd
have to think about the correspondence between the wall of the cave
and what's called the Other in the Sophist and variously called
Mother, Nurse, Receptacle and Place in the Tirnaios. Rather than
take upon myself this limitless task, I propose to spend much of my
remaining time looking closely at two of the assumptions I have made.
III. Poetry and Mathematics
The first supposition I want to look at is the claim that the things
around us, which most of us take to be freestanding, are themselves
images of intelligible originals ([loeta), that is, ideas or forms (fide).
Now since Socrates so frequently and so freely employs this supposition in the Republic and elsewhere, and since in certain dialogues,
notably the Parrnenides, the supposition appears to lead to great, if not
�38
SALEM
insuperable difficulties, we might expect to find a proof of it somewhere in the dialogues. But to my knowledge no proof of the
supposition is to be found, if by a proof is meant an attempt to reason
one's way to it from grounds that are prior to and clearer than it. I
can think of two reasons why this might be so.
First, it is at least suggested in certain dialogues that, however
problematic the supposition of intelligible originals may be, that
supposition is what first makes reasoning (and hence proving) possible. Or, as Parmenides puts it to the young Socrates, just after
subjecting the ideas to a devastating critique, anyone who denies the
ideas " ...will have nowhere to turn his thought," for that denial will
" ... utterly destroy the power of conversation" and hence philosophy
(135b-c). In other words, the ideas or forms are the always problematic, yet ever indispensable condition for the possibility of serious
inquiry. About them the philosopher could say: Can't think with
them, can't think without them.
A second reason for the avoidance of any attempt at proof emerges
from Socrates' own image of the cave. Life in the cave is so absorbing-our devotion to shadows is so complete-that the effects of the
cave linger long after an initial turning around. Witness the desire of
the man who's been turned around to flee back to his state ofbondage
and witness his tendency to regard what he's seen as less true, less
revealing, than the shadows he loves. Given this state of affairs, it is
difficult to see how a general proof, however certain, would do any
or at least much good. What seems to be needed instead are illuminating experiences, paths by which the potential learner might gradually find his way from the shadows he finds so absorbing-that is,
from his everyday experience of the world-to the intelligible originals upon which they depend.
What experiences are likely to provide this much-needed illumination? Socrates points to one answer through his image of the
divided line. Let me remind you of some of the details of that image.
Socrates has Glaucon cut a line unequally. He then has him cut each
of its parts in the same ratio as the whole was cut. (Thus A+ B:C+ D
:: A:B :: C:D) Socrates goes on to assign certain kinds of beings and
certain powers of the soul to each of the produced segments. The
larger segments produced by the first cut (that is, A+B and C+D)
�THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
39
correspond respectively to what is intelligible and what is visible. Of
the four segments produced by the second set of cuts, D corresponds
to the natural images we spoke of earlier, C to the things of which
these images are images, B somehow to mathematical objects, and A
to the forms themselves.
THE INTElliGIBlE
Forms
A
THE VISIBLE
Mathematical
Objects
Things
'
c
Images of
Things
0
Now perhaps the first thing we should glean from this image is
the following: To say that C+ D:A+ B :: D:C is to say thatthe visible
world has to the intelligible world the same relation that ordinary
images within the visible world have to their visible counterparts.
This is, of course, just the claim we are examining, the claim that the
things around us are somehow images. The second thing we should
notice is that B has to A, mathematical objects have to the forms or
eide~just this same relation. They are, in other words, the intellectual
equivalent of reflections or, perhaps better, shadows. Socrates partly
unpacks and partly amplifies this thought in his discussion of the
divided line.
Mathematicians and their objects have a curious relation to objects
in the visible world. As Socrates says, "Don't you know that [the
mathematicians] use visible forms and make their arguments about
them, not thinking about them but about those others that they are
like? They make arguments for the sake of the square itself and the
diagonal itself, not for the sake of the diagonal they draw and likewise
with the rest. These things that they mold and draw, of which there
are shadows and images in water, they now use as images, seeking to
know those things themselves, that one can see in no other way than
with thought" (510d-e).
Mathematical objects thus occupy an intermediate position between the eide or forms and things in the world. Like the eide they
are accessible only to thought. And yet the mathematician is constantly forced to see things in the world as images of them in order to
�40
SALEM
make the mathematical objects accessible to himself. They may be
mere images or shadows of the things that truly are. Still, shadowy
though they may be_:or perhaps precisely because they are shadowy-they. seem perfectly suited to introduce the learner to the
intelligible realm. Itiscfor this reason that Socrates goes on, in book
seven, to make the first education of the philosopher kings a mathematical education. For it is precisely through the study of mathematics that we first come to see the shadowy, the image-like character of
the things about us.
Or at any rate, mathematics is one way. I think that Socrates'
account of mathematical experience is right on the mark. One cannot
study mathematics seriously without at least wondering from time
to time whether the objects we draw and count-and by extension
all things insofar as they possess shape and number-are not images
of objects accessible only to thought. And yet my sense is that there
are other ways of arriving at this thought, and that Socrates knows it.
I will have occasion to speak about these alternatives later. But first
I need to address at some length a second sticking point in the
argument I sketched out earlier.
Someone might be willing to agree with Socrates' claim that the
things about us are somehow images. He might also be willing to admit
that the things about us can only be images if there exists some source
external to the originals of those images, an image-casting source. But
this someone might deny that the source is the good as Socrates
describes it and might also deny that the originals of the images we see
are the forms or eide-on the grounds that Socrates himself does!
For Socrates makes the shadows on the wall of the cave images of
artificial things carried about by human beings and he has them projected on the wall, not by the good itself, but by a firewithin the cave.
What are we to make of these peculiar features of Socrates' image?
What are the artificial things here? What is the fire? And who are the
human beings? I think it is very hard to say. At one point Socrates
himself interprets his image as follows: "Well, then, my dear Glau~
con, this image as a whole must be connected with what was said
before. Liken the domain revealed by sight to the prison home, and
the light of the fire in it to the sun's power" (517a-b). Ye'nhis
interpretation is very ~trange. How can Socrates suggest that we see·
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
41
only shadows or images of the things illuminated by the ordinary
sun? Whatever the status of the visible things turns out to be, we see
those things directly, don't we?
Another interpretation of this peculiar middle realm comes to
mind when we begin thinking, for instance, of Socrates' criticism of
Homer and other poets in books two and three of the Republic. There
are certain human beings-we might call them image makers or
opinion makers-who so dominate our thinking, our imagining and
our lives that we might almost be said to inhabit worlds of their
making. We can certainly be said to live in their shadows. What we
cherish and revile, what we weep about and laugh at-all are governed by the images they put before us. Might such men, poets of
the first rank and perhaps founders and great statesmen as well, not
be the human beings who occupy this middle realm? Indeed,
couldn't this be why Socrates himself suggests that we see only
shadows or images of the visible things-that we never see even such
things directly? The extraordinary influence of, say, Homer on our
thinking about moral and political affairs seems clear enough: I, for
one, can never think about courage and honor without being haunted
by the figure of Achilles. But in a certain sense that influence seems
to be equally present in our viewing of natural things: Who, having
read Homer, can look at the Mediterranean and not see wine or look
at the sunrise and not see rosy fingers?
If everything we see we see through the eyes of such image makers,
if the world is image for us in this sense, then much of what I've
been saying thus far would seem to be simply false. There might be
a good which somehow yokes together knower and known, but it
would not also be responsible for the images we take to be true things.
The casting of shadows would be a merely human affair. Moreover,
the very existence of the good would seem to be called into question
by this reading. At any rate, my attempt to argue from the image-like
character of the world about us to the existence of the good would
seem to have been misguided. Must we draw these consequences?
Or is there some way to incorporate what I am calling the middle
realm of Socrates' image into those earlier arguments about the good?
I think there is such a way, and I think that Socrates himself points
to it several times in the course of book seven. The first hint comes
�42
SALEM
at the very beginning of the book. Here Socrates notes, as if in
passing, that the entrance to the cave is both large and "open to the
light across the whole width of the cave" (514a). I take this curious
remark-echoed in myth of the Phaedo, where the many hollows or
caves are said to be more or less open to the surface of the true
earth-to mean something like the following. The light of the good
may not make its way into the cave; it may not be directly responsible
for the shadows we see or for our ability to discern them. And yet
the cave is not altogether closed to the light, not a self-enclosed,
self-contained whole. It is somehow open to the light, and open to
it at every point. Perhaps it would not be going too far to say that the
light of the good is potentially present throughout the cave, in this
sense: Every image, every shadow, is potentially an occasion for the
ascent from cave to sun. Less metaphorically, every opinion or image
put before us by the opinion or image makers, once seen as an
opinion or image, can be an occasion for the ascent to true knowledge.
Why this should be the case Socrates hints at elsewhere in book
seven. First, he suggests that the objects carried before the fire should
not simply be regarded as originals of the shadows that most men see.
They are themselves images. Indeed, at least some of the words that
Socrates uses to describe them-andrias, zoon (man-image, animalimage) and later agalma (image of divine being)-seem to underscore
just this, to emphasize that each object carried before the fire points
beyond itself, to some further original, presumably to some intelligible object (514c-515a; 517d-e). Moreover, Socrates suggests that
what holds for the objects carried before the fire holds for the fire as
well. For instance, in the very passage in which he identifies the light
of the fire with the sun's power, he claims that anyone who sees the
idea of the good must conclude that "this is in fact the cause of all
that is just and beautiful in everything-in the visible it gave birth to
the light and its sovereign, in the intelligible, itself sovereign, it
provided truth and intelligence" (517c). Again, in the passage I have
already cited from the end of book seven, Socrates seems to claim
that all seeing, all discerning-even the discerning of shadows that
takes place in the cave-ultimately depends on the light of the good:
the good is "that which provides light for everything" (540a).
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
43
If the originals of the shadows in the cave are themselves images
of the eide, and if the fire, the shadow-casting and shadow-discerning
source, is itself derived from and an image of the good, then it makes
sense to say that an ascent from cave to sun can begin anywhere.
What's more, it becomes possible to return to a modified version of
our initial conclusion that sun and cave form an elemental pair, with
each implying the existence of the other.
The modification consists, in effect, in the admission that the good
is not directly responsible for the shadows that surround us. The good
is present in the cave by proxy, as it were; it is present-somehow-in
the image-casting activity of image makers. Does this suggestion
make sense? Let me be clear, first, about what I do not mean to say.
I do not mean to say that the shadow casters portrayed by Socrates
knowingly imitate the good. Nor do I mean to say that the quasioriginals with which they cast shadows are known by them to be
images of the truly knowable things. On the contrary, I think we
are meant to see that most image makers are unwitting mediators
between the sun and the cave. A sign of this is the fact that the
human beings in Socrates' picture-! mean the ones who carry
objects before the fire-neither look at nor tend the fire. Instead
they scurry about, shifting their image-producing images from place
to place. The very condition of their activity-which is also the
condition of the activity of the prisoners in the cave-is as unknown
to them as it is to their prisoners
If the image makers portrayed by Socrates are not knowing mediators, in what sense can they be said to mediate? Perhaps this
question can best be addressed by way of another image, that of the
mathematicians of the divided line. As we saw earlier, Socrates
suggests through his image of the divided line that mathematical
objects must be regarded as shadows or images of the eide. Let me
now add to this that Socrates emphasizes in his discussion of the
divided line that the mathematicans, like the image makers, tend not
to be aware of this: They treat images of theeide as originals. Strange
as it may sound, this would seem to mean that when the mathematician inquires, say, into the relations between figures or between
numbers, he is in fact engaged unawares in a purely formal study of
the possible relations among the forms. In other words, something
�44
SALEM
like the possible structures of the eidetic realm are made visible in
shadow form in the more or less accessible speech of the mathematicians. Now, might something similar be said of those we've called
image makers? To found a regime or to craft a great poem is to
fashion a comprehensive vision of what is just and unjust, beautiful
and base, good and bad. But to do this, I am suggesting, is to figure
in speech a possible configuration of the eidetic realm; it is to make
visible the boundaries or limits, the shadowy outlines, of the just, the
beautiful, the good.
Perhaps you find disturbing my suggestion that poetry and mathematics are closely related. I find it a little disturbing myself. Still, my
sense is that Socrates means us to see their kinship with one another.
In fact my sense is that he means us ro see that the third section of
the divided line and what I have been calling the middle realm of the
cave are images of the same place, the proper home of mathematicians
and poets alike. Ifl am right about this, the occupational disease-or
rather, temptation-of those who dwell within this region would
seem to be the temptation to regard their activity and their objects as
freestanding, as originals, rather than as the images they are.
Let me explain why I speak here of an occupational temptation
rather than a disease. In part it is because Socrates himself seems to
envision the possibility of a mathematics that knowingly points
beyond itself, that invites its students to reflect on its formal foundations even as it moves them forward. That is, the harshness of his
critique of mathematicians at the end of book six seems to be offset
by his suggestion in book seven that mathematics is a necessary
preparation for the study of dialectic and the ascent to the good. But
in the end it is the figure of Socrates rather than his description of a
quasi-dialectical mathematics that inclines me to use the language of
temptation rather than disease.
What I mean is this: My sense is that if the Socrates of the
dialogues belongs anywhere on the divided line, it is on the third
level, with the mathematicians and the image makers. We rarely, if
ever, see him engaged in the pure dialectic he associates with the
highest!eve! of the divided line. And we certainly see him producing
a great number of images. Consider the evidence of the Republic
alone. The bulk of the dialogue is an elaborate image of a city, which
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
45
we are meant to see at the same time as an image of the soul. It
ends-after a harsh criticism of image making-with another elaborate image of the soul and its choices. And right at the center of the
dialogue Socrates sets out the very images we have been considering.
It is these images, above all, which display the possibility of a knowing
mediation between sun and cave. For here we see Socrates making
and conveying images-two of them "poetic," one, mathematical-which are intended precisely to point Glaucon and us beyond
the realm of images and human image making. The images of
Socrates announce themselves as images; they are transparent in the
highest degree. Such images could only be the work of a man aware,
supremely aware, that his image-making activity was itself an image
of a more fundamental, more original activity.
I will have more to say about Socrates a bit later. In particular, I
will want to bring the figure of Socrates to bear as we circle back to
the first set of questions I !raised about the good, namely, how the
good as Socrates describe~ it could be the good for us and could
furnish a paradigm for human action. But before we can treat this
first set of questions, we must return to Socrates' own characterization of the good.
IV. Weaving Together
We would do well to remind ourselves at the outset that the feature
of the good we have been focusing on for some time, its image-casting
power, is not at the heart of Socrates' description here. It is certainly
mentioned: the Sun, the image by which we are to glimpse the good,
is called "the child" as well as "most like" the good it images (506e).
But as I said, image-casting is not at the center of Socrates' description.
What is? The good yokes; it gathers; it brings things together-this
seems to be its primary feature. Now thus far we have been supposing
that the gathering of the good is limited, that knower and known are
the only things it brings together. But Socrates says nothing here to
make us think that he means to restrict the gathering power of the
good to this relation alone. And indeed, later on, as he attempts to
describe what it would mean for someone to dwell outside the cave,
he insists that the good is not only "in a certain way the cause of all
�46
SALEM
those things that the man and his companions had been seeing," that
is, somehow the source of shadows in the cave, but also "the source
of seasons and of years [outside it]," that is, the overarching source
of order among the intelligible objects (516b). The good, we must
now understand, is responsible for all collectedness, all being together, within the intelligible realm. It brings together knower and
known; but it also makes the known, the realm of intelligible objects,
a realm, an articulated whole rather than a heap of objects
What does the word "whole" mean here? The word "yoke," used
by Socrates in various forms three times in the course of his image,
might seem to imply the violent imposition of order, subjugation.
But this is clearly not Socrates' meaning (or, at any rate, not his
primary meaning). The good is a ruling source, anarch£, but its rule
is not arbitrary. Rather, as the example of knower and known makes
manifest, the good brings together, not indifferent elements, but
things that belong together. In other words, the collections it produces
are well-ordered collections, and the good is a source of wholeness in
at least this sense.
There is, however, another and perhaps more fundamental sense
in which the good is a source of wholeness. Once again, it is the
relation of knower and known that points the way. It is not the case
that the power to know is, as it were, somewhat better off for being
conjoined with a knowable object. On the contrary, the power to
know is, is wholly itself, only in the presence of what is knowable.
Or, as Socrates himself observes, the power to see is barely distinguishable from blindness in the absence of illuminated objects. In
other words, the very identity of the power to know would seem to
depend on its bei11g joined with a knowable object-and the same
might be said of the knowable object. Perhaps this is why Socrates
insists that the good is in some way responsible for the very existence
of knowable objects: In bringing knower and known together, in
making a pair of them, it makes each one just the one that it is. The
good, in this sense, might also be called the same, the source of all
identity-and indeed this may be just the name that is given to it in
the Sophist, in a discussion where the community and integrity of
the eide is at issue.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVJEW
47
Let me close this section by pointing out a final sense in which the
good is a source of identity. I have just suggested that the good is
such a source insofar as it brings together things that can be fully
themselves only in being together. But Socrates' image suggests that
the good is also the source of the very power of such things to come
together, and that it acts as a source by granting those things a share
of its own being. This is made particularly clear in the case of the
knower; through the analogy with sun and sight, Socrates characterizes the power to know as an overflow and gift of the good. That
a strict parallel to this is intended in the case of the objects of
knowledge becomes clear when we see that light-that is, truth-is
not here a medium through which we see. Instead the good "provides
truth to the things known" (508e). The eide do not simply reflect the
light of truth; they are radiant. They shine forth with a light that is
somehow their own. In the end, the yoking together with which we
began may amount to this: Out of the fullness of its being, the good
renders each being in the intelligible realm fit for the activity and
community which complete it.
Where are we in this picture? In what sense can this good be said
to be our good? And what would it mean to take this good as a
pattern for our lives or the life of our city?
Let me venture a first answer to the first of these questions.
Suppose we were all, at bottom, lovers of wisdom. Suppose the
longing at the bottom of all the great variety of human longing were
a longingto dwell, somehow, among the most knowable objects.
Then it seems to me that there might be two senses in which the
good would be our good. It would be the very condition for the
activity we prized most. For it would be that which fits us for the
activity of knowing and makes our objects fit to be known. That is,
the good would be the most beneficial or most needful thing, the
good for us in this sense. But as the source of the knowability, the
truth, the radiance, of the knowable things, the good would itself be
the most knowable, most radiant, hence most alluring of the knowable things. It would be the chief object of human desire, the good
for us in this sense.
It would be, that is, ifwe were all at bottom lovers of wisdom. But
are we? Would Socrates say that we are? His image of the cave would
�48
SALEM
seem to suggest that we are not. It is true that the inhabitants of the
cave take a certain delight in discerning and distinguishing the
shadows before them. Indeed, this activity of discerning and distinguishing seems to be in some sense at the center of their lives. And
yet, the violence with which they resist being turned around toward .
the truly discernible and distinguishable things suggests that something else, some other desire, is at the core of their being.
Not all human beings, then, are lovers of wisdom, and yet I still
think it can be said that the good is somehow the good for us. First
I must tell you what I think does lie at the core of human desire: I
think it is the desire to be complete, either by being a whole on one's
own or by participating in a larger whole. It seems to me that this
desire for completion is, for instance, the thread that binds together
the two great speeches about love by Socrates and Aristophanes in
the Symposium: The philosopher and the poet disagree about what
constitutes and makes possible human completeness; they do not
disagree about the depth of the desire for it. It also seems to me that
this desire is at the root of the resistance of the inhabitants of the cave
to being turned around: the cave is a dwelling, an oikesis; to give up
the cave is to give up a kind of home; it is to give up a kind of being at
home in the world (514a). Finally, it seems to me that this desire is just
what the image makers in the cave are serving and satisfYing through
their images. The image makers are ."t bottom homemakers. The
visions embedded in their poems and law, the visions of what is good
and evil, noble and base, right and wrong-these visions give order
to the lives of men. They make a common life possible. They make
human being a being together; it is no accident that the word nomos,
usually translated as law, also means song and at bottom means
distribution and order.
Do we not see just here at least one sense in which the good is
somehow our good, and at the same time glimpse an answer to our
other question, namely, how the good could serve as a pattern for
human and political action? The image makers are unwitting images
of the good in a double sense. As makers of images they imitate the
image-casting power of the good, and in this very activity they imitate
its community-making power. But in so doing, in making dwelling
places for men, they make possible-or at least aim to make possi-
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
49
ble-the satisfaction of what I am suggesting is the deepest human desire,
the desire to be whole or complete. The good, and such men as imitators
of the good, are good for us in just this sense.
But of course most human communities fall short. Most men
may find them homey enough to resist the ascent to the good. But
they fail to find in them the full satisfaction of their desire for
completeness. Thrasymachus's violent rejection of the claim that justice
is good, that being just is to one's advantage, is one sign of this lack of
satisfaction. The terrifYing tale ofpolitical strife and disorder that forms the
backdrop for the Republi£ -a tale narrated in part by Thucydides--is
another: Just think of what happens in Corcyra. As Socrates himself says
in the passage with which I began this essay, "there is no rest for ills for the
cities, my dear Glaucon, nor I think for human kind ... "
Of course, Socrates goes on to complete this sentence by suggesting that
the ills of cities and mankind could be put to rest if only the philosophers
were to rule. We are now in a position to see what this would mean. The
philosopher, taking as the model for his activity as king the very thing that
makes possible his activity as a lover ofwisdom, would order the citizens of
his city in accordance with their natures. He would yoke them together
both by casting before them the right images and by rendering each of them
fit for the activity proper to his nature. In so doing he would bring to fruition
the definition ofjustice arrived at in book four: Each citizen would mind
his own business--literilly, do his own thing;-and in doing them achieve
the satisfaction ofbeingonewith himself in being one with the city
Now I say "would" here because by the end of book nine Socrates
and Glaucon see:n to have abandoned the possibility that such a city
could ever be founded "in deed." The pattern for it, Socrates says, is
laid up in heaven. Perhaps a man who looked to it could "found a
city within himself on the basis of what he sees" (592b). But the city
he spent nearly six books of the Republic talking about is just this, a
city in speech. In other words, the true city, the true community, is
the heavenly community presided over by the good; It is the community of the eide-or perhaps the community of the eide in communion with the one who knows them. Such a knower might be able
to shape his owh life and his own soul in the image of that city. But the
�50
SALEM
possibility that a human community might arise that was more than
the merest shadow of the true city-this possibility has been abandoned.
At any rate this is how things look ifwe focus only on the argument
of the Republic. If we look to its drama-and above all if we look to
the figure of Socrates himself-we see something quite different.
For in the Republic we see Socrates founding not one but two cities
in speech. There is the city he talks about with Glaucon and others.
But there is also the city--or at least the community-that arises in
the course of the talk about it. Here, as elsewhere in the dialogues
and like the dialogues themselves, Socrates is at work as the visible image
of the good, uniting within his own person, the person of the
philosopher, the powers of weaving together and image making
delimited in the Sophist and the Statesman. He gathers up and
distinguishes the young men around him, taming Thrasymachus,
spurring Glaucon andAdeimantus on, helping each to find his proper
place and work within their city in speech. He does this in part by
collecting and distinguishing in speech the forms of things, by
practicing the art of dialectic. But Socrates' casting forth ofwondrous
images lies at the center of his gathering, and at the center of these
images stand his images of sun and cave. Here his intellect, itself the
overflow from the sun's treasury, becomes the fire that illuminates
the cave. Here he lets the young men sitting around him see, if only
for a moment, what it would mean to stand up, turn around, and
make their ascent from the cave. If, then, we turn the words of
Socrates' central claim into a question, if we ask whether the "regime
traversed now in speech" can ever "blossom forth and see the light
of the sun," we can say ''Yes"-it can, it has, because the philosopher,
for a time, has become king.
�~
On Some Texts of
~ Bacon and of Descartes
Andre Lalande
It is common knowledge that Francis Bacon coined numerous philosophical aphorisms, such as the adage, "Knowledge is power," or the
saying admired so by Leibniz: "A little science removes us from God;
much science brings us back to Him." It is less known that we find
in his writings, "Man is a god to man" 1 before finding it in Spinoza,
and that Danton owed to him the celebrated saying, "Boldness, again
boldness, boldness always. "2 I presume that an attentive reading of
Descartes, of Pascal, ofMalebranche, ofLeibniz, would show them
to be even more nourished by his works than is generally supposed.
Without a doubt, Cartesianism handles the edifice of the sciences in
a way contrary to Bacon (at least to begin with, because Descartes
recognizes that very quickly it is necessary to proceed toward causes
from effects; and Bacon, on the other hand, makes all the rest of the
sciences depend on physics); but in the critique of previous philosophy, in the epistemological idea of the relation of the mind to things,
in the very plan of this edifice of the sciences which they traverse
differently, the resemblances remain close and numerous. The aim
of this note is to select from the Discourse on Metlwd alone (and
without doubt incompletely) the passages which appear to show
either a certain familiarity or a curious conjunction with the works
of Bacon. It seemed to me that it would be useful to collect these
comparisons, because they are not indicated in any of the annotated
editions of the Discourse that I have had in my hands; 3 nor in the
preface which M. Fowler has put at the beginning of his great edition
of the New Organon-a preface heavily documented, in which a
whole chapter concerns the Baconian influence, and where he has
brought forth much evidence-he cites but two small passages of
Translated by Pamela Kraus.
�52
THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
Descartes relative to "Verulamius," taken from letters to Mersenne
of 1631 and 1632.
For greater convenience I arrange these extracts in two columns.
Words from the context necessary for understanding the text are
added in square brackets.
1. Good sense is the best distributed thing in the world ... the diversity of our opinions does not arise
because some of us are more reasonable than others but solely because we direct our thoughts along
different paths and do not attend to
the same things .... The greatest
souls are capable of the greatest
vices as well as the greatest virtues;
and those who proceed but very
slowly can make much greater progress, if they always follow the right
path, than those who hurry and
stray from it. (I, 1)
1. For my method of discovering
knowledge places men's natural talents almost on a level, and does not
leave much to their individual excellence, since it performs every-
thing by the surest rules and
4
demonstrations.
(Novum Organum, I, 122)
But of these three, prudence and
soundness of direction,-that is,
the pointing out and setting forth of
the straight and ready way to the
thing which is to be done,-must
be placed first .. For the cripple in
the right way (as the saying is) outstrips the runner in the wrong. (De
Augmentis, ESH N, p. 284) 5 {ESH II,
2,p.486}
In fact, as is clear, the more
active and faster a man is, the further astray will he go when he is
6
running on the wrong road. Nov.
Org. I, 61).
�LAlANDE
53
2. I knew that ... memorable deeds
told in histories ... help to shape
one's judgment... that poetry has
quite ravishing delicacy ani sweetness; that mathematics contains
some very subtle devices which
serve as much to satisfY the curious
as to further all the arts and lessen
man's labours; that writings on
morals contain many very useful
teachings and exhortations to virtue; that philosophy gives us the
means of speaking plausibly about
any subject and of winning the admiration of the less learned; that
jurisprudence, medicine, and other
sciences bring honours and riches to
those who cultivate them. (I,7)
2. Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtile;
natural philosophy, deep; moral,
grave; l~c and rhetoric, able to
contend.
For I have no wish to prevent
those arts and sciences that now
flourish from providing food for
argument, adornment for conversation, employment for professors
and from being a source of profit to
those in business. (Nov. Org. , I,
128.)
3. [O]ne who is too curious
about the practices of past ages usually remains quite ignorant about
those of the present .... those who
regulate their conduct by examples
drawn from these works are liable
to fall into the excesses of the
knights-errant in our tales of chivairy, and conceive plans beyond
their powers. (I, 8)
3. [T]hat learning doth soften
men's minds, ... in making them too
curious and irresolute by variety of
reading, ... or too immoderate and
overweening by reason of the greatness of examples, or too incompatible and differing from the times by
reason ofthe dissimilitude of exampies; or at least that it doth divert
men's travails from action and business .... ( The Proficience and Advancement ofLearning, I in Francis Bacon: A
Selection of His Works ed. by Sidney
Warhaft, Odyssey Press, 1965, pp.
205-6) {ESH III, p. 268}.
�54
4. I compared the moral writings
of the ancient pagans to very proud
and magnificent r.alaces built only
8
on sand and mud. They extol the
virtues, and make them appear
more estimable than anything else
in the world; but they do not adequately explain how to recognize a
virtue, and often what they call by
this fine name is nothing but a case
of callousness, or vanity, or desperation, or parricide (I, 10).
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
4. So have these writers set forth
good and fair copies, and accurate
draughts and portraitures of good,
virtue, duty, [and felicity, as J true
objects [ for the will and desires to
aim at J. But though the marks
themselves be excellent and well
placed, how a man may best take
aim at them; that is, by what
method and course of education
the mind may be trained and put in
order for the attainment of them,
they pass over altogether, or slightly
or unprofitably (De Aug. VII, 1;
ESH V, pp. 3-4) {I, p. 713}.
Notwithstanding (to return to the
philosophers), if before they had
come to the popular and received
notions of virtue and vice, pleasure
and pain, and the rest, they had
stayed a little longer upon the inquiry concerning the roots of good
and evil, and the strings of those
roots; they had given in my opinion
a great light to those questions
which followed; and especially if
they had consulted with the nature
of things, as well as moral axioms,
they had made their doctrines less
prolix, and more profound; (De
Aug. VII; ESH V, p.6) {I, p. 716}.
�LALANDE
55
5. And it was always my most earnest desire to learn to distinguish the
true from the false in order to see
clearly into my own actions and pro ceed with confidence in this life. (I,14)
Cf [I] had acquired some general notions in physics .. .I believed
that I could not keep them secret
without sinning gravely against the
law which obliges us to do all in our
power to secure the general welfare
of mankind. (VI, 2)
5. For my part at least, constrained as I always am by the desire
for truth, I have committed myself
to the uncertainties, difficulties and
loneliness of the ways ... to the end
that I may provide, at last, more
trustworthy and safe guidelines for
present and future generations.
(Nov. Org., Preface to Magna Instauratio, p. 13) {I, p. 130}
6. [T]here is not usually so much
perfection in works composed of
several parts and produced by various different craftsmen [masters]
as in the works of one man. And
... since the sciences contained in
books ... is compounded and
amassed little by little from the
opinions of many different persons,
it never comes so close to the truth
as the simple reasoning which a
man of good sense naturally makes
concerning whatever he comes
across. So, too, I reflected that we
were all. children before being
men ... it is virtually impossible that
our judgements should be as unclouded and firm as they would
have been if we had had the full use
of our reason from the moment of
our birth... (II, 1)
6. The variety of errors and the
unity of truth compete. (Masculine
Origin ofTime). {III, p. 535}
No one has yet been found of
such steady and strict purpose as to
decree and compel himself to
sweep away common notions and
speculations, and to apply his understanding, swept clear and level,
to a fresh study ofparticulars. Thus
it is that human reason, as we have
it, is nothing but a medley, an unsorted collection, a mixture of
chance and credulity, along with
notions we imbibed as children. 9
(Nov. Org. I, 97)
�56
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
7. But regarding the opinions to
which I had hitherto given eredence, I thought that I could not do
better than undertake to get rid of
them, all at one go, in order, to
replace them afterwards with better
ones, or with the same ones once I
had squared them with the standards of reason. I firmly believed
that in this way I would succeed in
conducting my life much better
than if I built only upon old faundations ... (II, 2)
Cf. below: ... to avoid precipitate conclusions and preconceptions. (II,7)
7. There was thus but one course
left, namely to try the whole matter
afresh with better means of support,
and to bring about a great Instauration of the arts and sciences and all
the learning of mankind, raised
upon the proper foundations. (Nov.
Org. "Francis ofVerulam, .. " prefacing The Great Instauration, p.3 {I,
p. 121}
Another error is an impatience
of doubt and haste to assertion
without due and mature suspension
of judgment.... if a man will begin
with certainties, he shall end in
doubts, but if he will be content to
begin with doubts, he shall end in
10
certainties
(The Proficience, I,
Warhaft, p. 233-34) {ESH I, p.
461-2}
8. [I]t would be unreasonable for
... an individua1 to plan to reform a
state by changing it from the faundations up and overturning it in order to set it up· again; ...
These large bodies are too dif -·
ficult to raise up once overthrown,
or even to.hold up once they b'egin
to totter, and their fall cannot but be
a hard one. (II, 2) Cf. VI, 2.
8. In affairs of state, change, even
if for the better, is suspect because
of the disturbance it brings, since
civil affairs rest on authority, consensus, reputation and opinion, not
on demonstration; whereas arts and
sciences ought to be like mines,
loud on every hand with the sounds
of new operations and further pro 11
gress. (Nov Org., I, 90 ) See also,
Essays, XXIV.
�LALANDE
57
9. [A] majority vote is worthless as
a proof oftruths that are at all difficult
9. For in intellectual matters it is
the worst omen of all that an idea
to discover; for a single man is much
commands general consent, except
in sacred matters and in politics,
where there is the right- to vote.
more likely to hit upon them than a
group of people. (II, 4)
For, as I said earlier, nothing pleases
the multitude, unless it strikes the
imagination, or ties up the understanding in knots of common notions12 (Nov. Org., I, 77).
10. But in examining further [the
arts or sciences which seemed
ought to contribute something to
my plan] I observed with regard to
logic that syllogisms and most of its
other techniques are of less use for
learning things than for explaining
to others the things one already
knows or even, as in the art ofLully,
for speaking without judgement
about matters of which one is igno-
rant. And although logic does contain many excellent and true
precepts, these are mixed up with so
many others which are harmful or
superfluous that it is almost as difficult to distinguish them as it is to
carve a Diana or a Minerva from an
unhewn block of marble. (I1,6)
10. And this art which I present ... is
a kind oflogic, though the difference
between it and ordinary logic is great,
indeed immense. For the ordinary
logic professes to devise and prepare
means to help the understanding;
and in this one respect they agree.
(The Great Instauration, "Plan of the
Work" Nov. Org. p. 19) {ESH 1,
p.135}
For in the ordinary logic almost
all the. work is performed around
the syllogism .... For although no
one can doubt that propositions
that agree on a middle term agree
also with each other (this being a
mathematical certainty), neverthe-
less there is this underlying deception, that the syllogism consists of
propositions, propositions of
words, and words are tokens and
symbols of notions. Therefore if
the very notions of the mind ... are
defective ... then everything collapses. (Ibid., p. 19-20) {p.136}
�58
11. In doing this I was not copying the skeptics, who doubt only for
the sake of doubting and pretend to
be always undecided; on the contrary, my whole aim was to reach
certainty-to cast aside the loose
earth and sand so as to come upon
rock or clay. (III, 6)
Cf. above, citation 7: But regarding the opinions to which I had
hitherto given credence ...
THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
11. It will be thought... that I support a kind of suspension of judge ment, and reduce the matter to
Acatalepsy. What in fact I have in
mind and propose is Eucatalepsy; for I
do not disparage the sense, but help
it; I do not disdain the understanding,
I govern it. (Nov. Otg., I, 126).
But no one should disapprove of
such a suspension of judgment in a
teaching that asserts, not that nothing
can be known at all, but that knowledge is only possible by following a
certain method and path; and yet
halts for the time being at certain
degrees of certainty for help and support until the mind may arrive at an
explanation of causes on which it can
13
stand. ( Great lnstauration "Plan,"
p. 29) {ESH I, p. 144}
�LAlANDE
12. But the most remarkable of
all these facts [the action of the
heart on the blood] is the generation of the animal spirits: like a very
fine wind, or rather a very pure and
lively flame, they rise continuously
in great abundance from the heart
to the brain, passing from there
through the nerves to the muscles
and imparting movement to all the
parts of the body. (V, 8)
59
12. The other difference between
the spirits is, that the vital spirit has
in it a degree of inflammation, and
is like a breath compounded of
flame and air... (The History of Lift
and Death, part 2; ESH V, p. 323)
{ESH II p. 215}
But this spirit, whereof I am
speaking, is not a virtue, nor an energy, nor an actuality, nor any such
idle matter, but a body thin and
invisible, and yet having place and
dimension, and real 14 (Ibid., p.321)
{p.213}
The spirits are the agents and
workmen that produce all the effects in the body. (Ibid. , p. 268)
The pulse of the heart and arteries
in animals is caused by an endless
and alternate dilatation and contraction of the spirits.
The voluntary motion likewise in
animals, which (in the more perfect) is performed by the nerves,
seems to have its root first in the
compression and then in the relaxation of the spirits. (The History of
Dense and Rare, Ibid., p. 358) {ESH
II, p. 263}
�60
13. This shows not merely that
the beasts have less reason than
men, but that they have no reason
at all. ( V, 11)
[I]t is nature which acts in them
according to the disposition of their
organs. In the same way a clock,
consisting only of wheels and
springs, can count the hours and
measure time more accurately than
we can with all our wisdom. (Ibid).
THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
13. For the sensible soul-the
soul of brutes-must clearly be regarded as a corporeal substance, at-
tenuated and made invisible by
heat; a breath (I say) compounded
of the natures of flame and
air. .. clothed with the body, and in
perfect animals residing chiefly in
the head, running along the nerves,
and refreshed and repaired by the
15
spirituous blood of the arteries;
(De Aug., N, ch, 3; ESH, N, p. 398)
{I, p. 606}
For this soul is in brutes the prin-
cipal soul, the body of the brute
being its instrument; whereas in
man it is itself only the instrument
of the rational soul, and may be
more fitly termed not soul, but
spirit. (Ibid.)
�LAlANDE
14. Mter that I described the
rational soul, and showed that, unlike the other things of which I had
spoken, it cannot be derived in any
way from the potentiality of matter,
but must be specially created. And
I showed how it is not sufficient for
it to be lodged in the human body
like a helmsman in his ship, except
perhaps to move its limbs, but that
it must be more closely joined and
united with the body to have, besides this power ofmovement, feelings and apPetites like ours and so
constitute a real man. (V, last para.).
C£ Treatise on the Passions, Part I.
61
14. Let us now proceed to the
doctrine which concerns the Human Soul...The parts thereof are
tvvo; the one treats of the rational
soul, which is divine; the other of
the irrational, which is common
with brutes. I mentioned a little
before ... the two different emanations of souls, which appear in the
first creation thereof the one
springing from the breath of god,
the other from the wombs of the
elements. (Ibid) {p. 606-7}
With regard to the doctrine concerning the League or Common
Bond between the soul and body, it
is distributed into two parts .... [so
the description of this league ... consists .. of two parts] namely, how
these two (that is, the Soul and the
Body) disclose the one the other,
and how they work the one upon
the other.
The latter branch of the doctrine
of the league ... considers either how
and how far the humours and tern -
perament of the body alter and
work upon the mind; or again, how
and how far the passions or apprehensions of the mind alter and
work upon the body. (Ibid IV, 1;
ESH p. 375; 377) {p. 583; 584}
For there are many and great excellencies of the human soul above
the souls ofbrutes, manifest even to
those who philosophise according
to the sense. Now wherever the
mark of so many and great excellencies is found, there also a specific
difference ought to be constituted;
(Ibid., IV, 3; ESH p. 397) {p. 605}
�62
15. Here I dwelt a little upon the
subject of the soul, because it is of
the greatest importance. For after
the error of those who deny
God ... there is none that leads weak
minds further from the straight path
of virtue than that of imagining that
the souls of the beasts are of the
same nature as ours ... But when we
know how much the beasts differ
from us, we understand much bettcr the arguments which prove that
our soul is of a nature entirely inde pendent of the body, and consequently that it is not bound to die
with it. And since we cannot see any
other causes which destroy the soul,
we are naturally led to conclude that
it is immortal. ry, last para.).
THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
15. Let there be therefore a more
diligent inquiry concerning this
doctrine; the rather because the imperfect understanding of this has
bred opinions superstitious and
corrupt and most injurious to the
dignity of the human mind, touching metempsychosis, and the puri fications of souls in periods ofyears,
and indeed too near an affinity in all
things between the human soul and
the souls of brutes. (Ibid., ESH, p.
398) {p. 606}
�LAlANDE
16. [I]n place of this speculative
philosophy which is taught in the
schools, one could find a practical
one, through which, kno·Ning the
63
16. Now of this philosophy Aristotle is by universal consent the chief,
power and actions of fire, water, air,
yet he left nature herself untouched
and inviolate, and dissipated his energies in comparing, contrasting, and
stars, the heavens and all the other
analysing popular notions about her.
bodies that surround us as distinctly
(Cogitata et visa translated as: Thoughts
and Conclusions, in The Philosophy <if
Francis Bacon, ed. Benjamin Far-
as we know the different crafts of
our artisans we could use this
knowledge in the same way for all
the purposes for which it is appropriate, and thus make ourselves, as
it were, masters and possessors of
nature. (VI,2)
rington. Chicago, 1964. p. 83)
{ESH, III, p. 601}
Now the only true and proper
goal of the sciences is to bring new
discoveries and powers to human
life. (Nov. Org. 81)
For the end I propose for my science
is the discovery not of arguments but
of arts; (The Great Instauration, "Plan,"
p.19) {ESH!p.135}
For man is only the servant and
interpreter of Nature and he only
does and understands so much as
he shall have observed, in fact or in
thought, of the course of Nature;
more than this he neither knows
nor can do .... So it is that those tvvo
objects of mankind, Knowledge and
Power, come in fact to the same
thing, and the failure of works derives mostly from ignorance of
causes. (Ibid. p. 29) { p. 144}
And for its value and utility it
must be plainly avowed that that
wisdom which we have derived
principally from the Greeks is but
like the boyhood of knowledge, and
has the characteristic property of
boys: it can talk, but it cannot generate, .. .In the mechanical arts we
do not find it so; they, on the contrary, as having in them some
breath oflife, are continually growing and becoming more perfect
(The Great Instauration, "Preface" p.
8) {p. 125}
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
64
17. This is desirable not only for
the invention of innumerable devices which would facilitate our enjoyment of the fruits of the earth
and all the goods we find there, but
also, and most importantly, for the
maintenance of health, which is
undoubtedly the chief good and the
foundation of all the other goods in
this life. For even the mind depends so much on the temperament and disposition of the bodily
organs that if it is possible to find
some means of making men wiser
and more skilful than they have
been up till now, I believe we must
look for it in medicine. (VI,2)
17.
[T] here is one thing still
remaining, which is of more conse -
quence than all the rest;-namely,
a true and active Natural Philosophy for the science of medicine to
be built upon (De Aug., IV, 2; ESH
IV, p. 390) {I, p. 598}
For the physicians prescribe
drugs to heal mental diseases, as in
the treatment of phrensy and melancholy; and pretend also to exhibit
medicines to exhilarate the mind, to
fortifY the heart and thereby confirm the courage, to clarity the wits,
to corroborate the memory, and the
like ... The root and life of all which
.
.
.
prescnpts 16 ... constst Ill t h at o f
which we are speaking, namely the
sympathy of the mind with the state
and disposition of the body (Ibid.
IV, 1; ESH, IV, p. 377) {p. 584}
And therefore the poets did well
to conjoin music and medicine in
Apollo; because the genius of both
these arts is almost the same; for the
office of the physician is but to
know how to stretch and tune this
harp of man's body that the harmony may be without all harshness
and discord (Ibid. IV, 2; ESH, IV, p.
380) {p. 588}
�LALANDE
18. It is true that medicine as currently practised does not contain
much of any significant use; but
without intending to disparage it, I
am sure there is no one, even
among its practitioners, who would
not admit that all we know in medicine is almost nothing in comparison with what remains to be
known, and that we might free ourselves from innumerable diseases,
both of the body and of the mind,
and perhaps even from the infirmity of old age, if we had sufficient
knowledge of their causes and of all
the remedies that nature has provided (Ibid.).
I will say only that I have resolved
to devote the rest ofmy life to nothing
other than trying to acquire some
knowledge of nature from which we
may derive rules in medicine which
are more reliable than those we have
had up till now (VI, 12).
19. Those who gradually discover
the truth in the sciences are like
people who become rich and find
they have less trouble making large
profits than they had in making
much smaller ones when they were
poorer. Or they may be compared
with military comrrianders, whose
forces tend to grow in proportion to
their victories ... (VI, 4).
65
18. Medicine therefore (as we
have seen) is a science which has
been hitherto more professed than
laboured, and yet more laboured
than advanced; the labours spent on
it having been rather in a circle, than
in progression (De Aug., N, 2; ESH
N,p.383) {p. 590}
I will divide it into three parts,
which I will term its three offices;
the first whereof is the PreseiVation
of Health, the second the Cure of
Diseases, and the third the Prolongation of Life (Ibid.)
[This third part] .. .is new, and
deficient; the most noble of all. For
if such a thing may be discovered,
the business of medicine will no
longer be confined to humble
cures, nor will physicians be honoured only for necessity; but for a
gift to men-of earthly gifts per17
haps the greatest ...
(Ibid.; ESH,
N,p.390) {p. 598}
19. [O]nthecontrary,Iwhoconsider the mind not only in its natural capacity but in its connection
with things, cannot but believe that
the art of discovery may grow with
the number of new discoveries.
(Nov. Org., I 130).
�66
20. I do not wonder at the absurdities attributed to al1 the ancient
philosophers whose writings we do
not possess; nor do I conclude from
these attributions that their
thoughts were highly unreasonable. As they were some of the best
minds of their time, I conclude that
their thoughts have been misrepresented (VI, 6)
THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
20. And therefore the greatest
minds in every age have doubtless
felt their force; ... and as a result, any
more exalted reflections that may
have gleamed forth were straightway buffeted and extinguished by
the winds of popular opinion. The
result has been that Time, like a
river, has brought down to us the
light and inflated, while it has sunk
the weighty and solid. (The Great
Instauration, Preface, p. 10) {ESH I,
p. 127}
21. We see too that it has almost
never happened that any of their
followers has surpassed them; They
are like the ivy, which never seeks
to climb higher than the trees
which support it, and_often even
grows downward after reaching the
tree-tops (Ibid.).
21. [A] II the tradition and succession of schools represent only the
characters of master and pupil, not
of inventors or those who bring any
distinction to things already invented .. .In fact, they sometimes
flourish most under their first
authors, only to decline thereafter. .. For it is hardly possible at one
and the same time to gaze with admiration upon authors and to excel
them, knowledge being like water,
which does not rise higher than the
level from which it descended. (Ibid.
p. 8-9; 11) {p.126; 128}
These sentence by sentence comparisons give a less clear idea of
he relation between Bacon and Descartes than can a parallel reading
>f their works. Often a paragraph of the latter appears as a vigorous
ummary, with a development which is richer but more diffuse and
~ss coherent than that of his predecessor. Such is the case, for
xample, with chapters ofDe Augmentis, N, 2, on medicine, or VII,
, on ancient morals. Likewise paragraphs 2 and 6 in the sixth part
f the Discourse on Method are comparable taken as a whole to the
�LALANDE
67
general "Preface" to the Great Instauration. I have limited myself, in
the case of these similarities, to citing some characteristic sentences.
Similarly, because I did not find in the Discourse on Method a text
of some few lines to which to oppose them, I had to leave aside the
repeated declarations in which Bacon insists on the unity of science.
It would have been necessary to transcribe extensively, in order to
place in parallel columns, the whole plan of the sciences which
occupies paragraphs 2-4 of the fifth part. But since nothing is more
familiar than this idea, which some have even wanted to make a
discovery proper to Descartes! 8 I will cite here only the Baconian
texts which fit with it.
"And generally let this be a rule; that all divisions of knowledges
be accepted and used rather for lines to mark or distinguish, than
sections to divide and separate them; in order that solution of continuity in sciences may always be avoided. For the contrary hereof has
made particular sciences to become barren, shallow, and erroneous;
not being nourished and maintained and kept right by the common
fountain and aliment."19 (DeAug., IV, l; ESH, IV, p. 373) {I, p. 580}
* *
*
"And therefore the speculation was excellent in Parmenides and
Plato (although in them it was but a bare speculation), 'that all things
by a certain scale ascend to unity.' So then always that knowledge is
worthiest which least burdens the intellect with multiplicity; and this
appears to be Metaphysic, as that which considers chiefly the simple
forms of things (which I have above termed forms of the first clasi0 );
since although few in number, yet in their commensurations and
co-ordinations they make all this variety." (Ibid, III, 4; ESH, IV, p.
362) {pp. 567-8}
* * *
"However, let no one expect much progress in the sciences-especially in their practical aspects-unless natural philosophy is extended to particular sciehces, and particular sciences in turn lead back
�68
THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
to natural philosophy. This is the reason why astronomy, optics,
music, many of the mechanical arts, medicine itself and, more
surprisingly, moral and political philosophy and the logical sciences
all lack depth .... Small wonder, then, that the sciences fail to grow, cut
off as they are from their roots. (Nov. Org.I, 80)."
I believe that in works of Descartes other than the Discourse on
Method one would find material for analogous comparison. The
celebrated comparison of the system of the sciences to a tree is found
in De Augmentis.21 The notion of the simple natures, explained in the
Regulae, in particular in Rule XII, recalls very nearly the use of this
expression in the second book of theNovum Organum, and the theory
which is connected with it. And I have already noted, in a previous
work, a text from this very rule which reproduces almosf word for
word a passage from Valerius Terminus. The analogy is all the more
curious as this passage is precisely the statement of the method of
geometrically interpreting sensible phenomena, which holds such a
great place in the Cartesian philosophy at the epoch of its full
development. Is this a simple coincidence? Or can one allow that
Descartes had knowledge, in manuscript form, ofValerius Terminus,
which was only published in 1734 by Robert Stephen in The Letters
and Remains ofLord Chancellor Bacon? Certain scientific works, at this
epoch, circulated in more or less faithful copy, often fragmentary,
before passing on to press. Or still yet, must one see in this method
of geometric translation, an idea transmitted orally from the one to
the other? When one remembers what discussions the concern with
the experiment at Puy de Dome gave rise to, one feels less inclined
to resolve the matter easily.
It will be noted on the other hand that the Valerius Terminus is not
only a first sketch of the New Organum,22 but also marks a time-unhappily indeterminate-when Bacon was attached to the idea of a
universal mechanism in a much more radical way than he was in his
later works; he even sees in it at that time a sort of philosophic secret
which one should communicate only advisedly and under all sorts
of reservations. It is not that he ever returned to "pure" philosophy,
nor that he had put into doubt the value of his interpretation of
�LALANDE
69
natural phenomena; quite the contrary, in the Latin text ofDe
Augmentis, published in 1623, he introduced a sign of this attachment, which does not exist in the Advancement of Learning of 1605
(perhaps in virtue of the same esoteric principle) and which presents
color as having "form," understood in the last analysis as a certain
figured disposition of material elements. It is impossible, as I have
tried to show elsewhere in detail, to be content with the classic
prejudice, in great measure founded on misinterpretations and on a
partial reading of his writings, which makes Bacon a continuer of
scholasticism, a strangerto the great mechanistic idea which was then
at the point of taking over the direction of the sciences. I will recall
only the importance which at all times in his life he attributes to the
progress of mixed mathematics. All that one can legitimately presume
of him is that, as he advanced in age, he saw in the mechanical
interpretation an ideal less near, less immediately realizable, than he
had thought at the beginning. Perhaps also he feared imitating the
defect with which he had reproached the ancients, that of formulating ex cathedra a definitive theory of nature. There is much, in his
work, of that which will be called later a "positivist spirit," less
attached to conclusions than to method. Descartes, a more absolute
character, believed he could reveal the secret of the world in a
categorical fashion; but it is precisely here that discredit came to his
system, and almost to his name, in the very period which was the
most inspired by his epistemology.
P.S. I reproduce here below, to spare readers whom this question
may interest the research, the passage of the Rules and that of the
Valerius Terminus to which I made allusion above:
"So what troublesome consequences could there be if-while
avoiding the useless assumption and pointless invention of some new
entity, and without denying what others have preferred to think on
the subject-we simply make an abstraction, setting aside every
feature of colour apart from its possessing the character of shape, and
conceive of the difference between white, blue, red, etc., as being like
the difference between the following figures or similar ones?
�70
THE ST. JOHN'S REVI.EW
The same can be said about everything perceivable by the senses,
since it is certain that the infinite multiplicity of figures is sufficient
for the expression of all the differences in perceptible things." 23
"All bodies or parts of bodies which are unequal equally, that is in
simple proportion, do represent whiteness ...Absolute equality produceth transparence; inequality in simple order or proportion produceth whiteness; inequality in compound or respective order or
proportion produceth all other colours, and absolute or orderless
inequality produceth blackness; which diversity, if so gross a demonstration be needful, may be signified by four tables: a blank, a chequer, afret, and
a medley; whereof the fret is evident to admit a great variety."24
[M. Lalande's article appeared in Revue de metaphysique et de morale
v. 19 (1911): 296-311. All tra;,_slations of The Discourse on Method are
from The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, v. 1, trans. by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987). Citations are by part and paragraph
number. TranslationsfromNovum Organum are fromNovum Organum With Other Parts of the Great Instauration, trans. and ed. by Peter
Urbach and John Gibson (Chicago: Open Court, 1994). Citation
is by Part and Aphorism number. Other citations, unless otherwise
indicated, refer to The Works ofFrancis Bacon ed. by James Sped ding,
Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Den on Heath (London, 1872),
hereafter abbreviated ESH. References to the English in parenthesis
by volume and page number; citations following, in braces, are to the
�LAlANDE
71
Latin, cited by Lalande. I wish to thank Mr. Chester Burke and Mrs.
Irena Datchev for their help.-Trans.]
Notes:
1 "Tantum sane ut merito hominem homini Deum esse, non
solum ex auxilio et beneficia, sed ex status comparatione dici
possit." Cogitata et Visa, ESH, III, p. 611. Ex status comparatione,
as is clear from the context, is applied to that which man owes to
humanity taken as a whole, that is to say, to the progress of
civilization. [Since "the whole substance of the Cogitata et Visa is
reproduced in the first book of the Novum Organum" (ESH, I, pp.
78-79), here follows the relevant passage in translation from that
work: "... the difference [between the life of men in "the most
civilized province of Europe, and in the most savage and barbarous part of New India"] is so great as truly to justifY the saying
'Man is a god to men,' not only for the help and benefits he can
bring, but also by comparing their conditions."-Trans.]
2 Mter reminding us of Demosthenes' saying that the first quality
of the orator is action, the second, action, and the third, action,
Bacon adds: 'Wonderful like is the case of Boldness in civil
business; what first? Boldness; what second and third? Boldness."
Essays, XII. ["Of Boldness." The French cited by Lalande in the
text is as follows: "De l'audace, encore de l'audace, toujours
l'audace."-Trans.]
3 Charpentier, Brochard, Landormy.
4 Cf. also, II, 12, [Discourse on Method-Trans] the example of the
child who, having calculated a sum, knows as much about it as
anyone. "In short, the method which instructs us to follow the
correct order, and to enumerate exactly all the relevant factors,
contains everything that gives certainty to the rules of arithmetic."
�72
5
THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
[The work referred to here is the 1623 De Dignitate et Augmentis
Scientiarum. Lalande refers to the work as De Dignitate; I have used
the more familiar designation, DeAugmentis, i.e., The Advancement
ofLearning. This writing is a Latin translation and expansion of a
work published in 1605, in English, usually referred to as The
Proficience and Advancement of Learning-Trans.]
6 The metaphor is found already in Seneca, De vita beata, 1. Many
similarities between Bacon and Descartes must derive from common readings.
7 I cite the Essays according to the Li'tin text titledSermonesfideles,
which is the final form Bacon gave them. But was this Latin text
published separately before the edition of Opera moralia et civilia,
produced by Rawley in 1638? This is doubtful. [Here·follows the
English text, cited above -Trans.] Baudoin, who made a French
translation of the Essays in 1619 under their first form, published
a second edition in 1626 conforming to the text of 1625, and a
third edition in 1633.
8 Cf. "Francis ofVerulam reasoning thus with himself...," prefacing
the Great Instauration: "[T]hat entire human reasoning that we
apply in the investigation of Nature is poorly put together and
constructed, but is like some magnificent great pile without any
foundation." Novum Organum p.3. {ESH I, p, 121}
9 Bacon opposes to this a few lines further the following: "But if a
man of ripe years, unimpaired faculties, and a mind well purged
should apply himself afresh to experience and particulars, from
him we can expect better things." See the last lines of part 2 of
the Discourse: "I thought I ought not try accomplish it until I had
reached a more mature age than twenty-three, as I then was, and
until I had first spent a long time in preparing myself for it. I had
to uproot from my mind all the wrong opinions I had previously
accepted, amass a variety of experiences to serve as the subject.
matter o[ my reasomngs .... "
�LAlANDE
73
10 It was already the opinion of Gassendi (De logicae finae, chap. vi)
that the destructive part of philosophy is the same in Bacon and
in Descartes.
11 It is necessary to note that in Novum Organum I, 127, Bacon
declares that the method is applicable in principle to the moral
sciences- Logic, Ethics, Politics, no less than to the sciences of
nature. But this is not otherwise in Descartes: "[P]eoples
who ... have made their laws only in so far as they were forced to
by the inconvenience of crimes and quarrels, could not be so well
governed as those who from the beginning of their society have
observed the basic laws laid down by some wise law-giver." II, 1.
12 This is evidently in Bacon an echo of Seneca, De vita beata, 2:
"Human affairs are not so happily ordered that the majority prefer
the better things." The psychological explanation of the matter is
only added to it.
13 Cf. The whole Scala intellectus where Bacon explains in what
respect his doubt resembles that of the sceptics, and in what it
differs. (ESH, II, pp. 687-89).
14 There exists a first kind of spiritus in all chemical bodies (spiritus
mortua/is, or spiritus crudus); it plays a role analogous to that of
matiere sub til in Descartes; furthermore, there exists a second kind
in living bodies (spiritus vivus, or spiritus vitalis). Hist. vitae et mortis,
Canon IV, (ESH, II, p. 214) [English translation in ESH V, p. 322
-Trans.].
15 Bacon indicates further on that this doctrine is that of Telesius
and of his disciple, Doni us. It would be interesting to know if
Descartes knew them directly. Elsewhere Ellis remarks that with
regard to Doni us, the affirmation is not at all exact, and that in
reality, in a discrete manner, he rejected the rational soul altogether. (ESH I, p. 606, n. 1).
�74
THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
16 This phrase ends an enumeration of ritual prescriptions, ancient
or Christian, which have the purpose, according to him, of acting
on the dispositions of the soul through the medium of the body.
The end of the paragraph is dedicated to showing that this
dependance does not disprove immortality of the soul.
17 In the remaining part of this chapter, he develops at length "all
the remedies with which nature has provided us." Cf. also The
History of Life and Death
18 'We can no longer deny, in an age when we aim at the constitution
of a general physics, that Descartes, the great geometer who
discovered the principle of the unity of mathematical methods,
was also the great speculative physicist who, the first since the
schools of antiquity, gave us a glimpse of the unity of the physical
world and taught the meaning of a mechanical explanation of
phenomena." Renouvier, "La physique de Descartes,"Critique
philosophique, 3e annee, I, p.2
19 Natural philosophy or physics. Cf. Descartes: "Thus the whole
of philosophy is like a tree. The roots are metaphysics, the trunk
is physics, and the branches emerging from the trunk are all the
other sciences, which may be reduced to three principal ones,
namely medicine, mechanics and morals." Principles, Preface,
para. 12. In the passage cited, Bacon intends medicine and the
"knowledge of ourselves."
20 These "forms of the first class" are all the "schematisms" or
"motions," as Bacon has just said in the previous paragraph; and
he adds " ... (like letters of the alphabet) are not many and yet make
up and sustain the essences and forms of all substances." On the
true meaning of form in Bacon, see Quid de mathematica, vel
naturali, vel rationali, senserit Bacon Verulamius. Latin thesis, Paris,
Alcan, 1889.
�LAlANDE
75
21 "But since the divisions of knowledge are not like several lines
that meet in one angle; but are rather like branches of a tree that
meet in one stem (which stem grows for some distance entire and
continuous, before it divide itself into arms and boughs); therefore it is necessary before we enter into the branches of the former
division, to erect and constitute one universal science, to be as the
mother of the rest, and to be regarded in the progress of knowledge as portion of the main and common way, before we come
where the ways part and divide themselves." De Aug. III, 1; ESH,
IV, p. 337 {ESH I, p. 540}. It is true that in this passage the
common trunk is not physics but First philosophy, a kind of
metaphysical logic oflittle interest.
22 The complete title is: "Valerius Terminus of the Interpretation
of Nature, with the annotations of Hermes Stella."
23 Rules for the Direction of the Mind, XII
24 Valerius Terminus, XI, (ESH, III, p. 237) [In Lalande's text there
follows a French translation of this passage.~Trans.]
�76
THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
�77
KRNAK
Pluck it, and the initial conditions result
in a pattern on the string, moving back
mid forth in waves.
Nor can I walk.
I move back and forth in waves between
the places I have charted and the seawall.
Height, breadth, depth, length and frequency...
The seawall. At the water's edge I saw
what the symbols meant, shown how in nature
the equation balanced first, long before
the sciences forced their rule. I remembered,
and I have taken for my creed that
... the directions in which nature allows us movement
can be described in mathematics like a name in stone.
I believed I understood then. I understand now.
When we walk we measure our steps
like a child with two cups strung
window to window.
When we swim we kuow
the waves that emanate from the face with their
brief sections of order hold a power prophets
have watched dwindle in exhausted ripples
from Beth-zatha pool.
What nature has allowed
is still etched in the stone of our mathematics.
Conditions I once described in strides
return unadulterated by my steps.
So I am deriving the wave equation still,
for my behaviour betrays suspicion
of descriptions, solutions, and time.
�78
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Approaching Inertia
Solstice, Christmas, Saint Sylvester,
Epiphany-they're all behind us,
and the days keep stretching longer
by unreadable degrees.
This is the lag time, the motionless
long haul, the case of cabin fever,
at one time meditative,
conducive to work and sobering,
but now gone on too long.
The year begins to write itself
into a thirteen line sonnet,
five feet short of a final couplet
and one lasting impression of loss.
It is as quiet here as the streets
on New Year's day, but not from any
touch of mine. This end that feigns
beginning is the worst culprit,
tiring right from the start, like waking
up with unresolved trouble
on the mind, motes in one eye,
boards in the other, indifference
(the rule) stirring halfWay between
bed and the bath, where the honest
mirror flicks back the truth that Newton
failed to see, but the steam engine
and a snowing paperweight
proved centuries later: You can't
get something for nothing. And what
is given up falls short of every
need. What makes the train budge?
Who lifts the stone?
The heat that rises from the log
consumed to ashes now is gone,
and nowhere is there more created
to replace it. I don't dream
oflistless whiskey rocker porches,
but I don't favor the cold. And I
believe a man should be allowed to fear.
�KRNAK
79
Always After Shooting
Always after shooting we return
by way of the barn that blazed the summer
our cousin and his wife-to-be loved,
smoked, and slept, and brought down everything
around them in ashes. They got out,
singed and frightened, but the animalscows, chickens, rabbits and a goat-burned,
and I can't say if our uncle ever thought
his gtandson was an even trade.
The man broke away from the family
like the stones on the wall along the drive.
The fields gtew head high, went to seed,
spilled, and were left wild. Only Matthew
and I ever step foot on this land anymore,
and then only to empty shotgun shells
into skeet and boxes propped against
the rise above the pond.
Some years ago,
in the fall, we unloaded our chambers
into a flock of passing doves and brought
down three (one we had to shoot again).
The exhausted sky kept echoing the blasts,
and the gtound seemed to cringe each time
we took a step toward our kill. We reached
the carcasses that were· strangled deep
within the gtass from the momentum of their
fall, and with a barely audible "christ"
from underneath our breaths we started kicking
dirt and the remains into a hole
we dug with our heels. Then we walked out.
As we passed the charred foundation walls
of the barn, I thought about the night
of the fire, and the fragile balance
of the living on this farm, tipped
so easily with a dirty finger.
It was a while before we went back,
but we did. The fields and gtass gtew thick
�80
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
enough in one month to cover up our
old paths. Animals carried away the rest.
�j
~
Recollection and Composure
Eva T. H. Brann
Douglas Allan brook came to St.John's, Annapolis in 1952, in hi s early
thirties . It was here that his two sons were born, Tim othy and John,
to whom this memoir* is dedicated. Here he has been teaching for
four and a half decades, here he composed his musical oeuvre, and
here too, seemingly out of the blue, he wrote an accornplished
autobiographical book. In it he ref1ects urt Lhc difference between
composing music and recollecting a life:
It is a consolation that in music there are no pcop le, no facts,
no places, nor is there, in any comprehensible way, any
meaning, while in our own stories we arc stuck with
intractable memories which only the holdest fiction can
unite into a whole. When a piece of music is composed, it
is complete, all wrapped in a tight cocoon, awaiting its
release into the sunlight of performance. For the listener
it is a portable memory that can be run through again and
again, a vicarious and safe experience, so utterly uitlerent
from the course of a life, which seems hardly a whole ,
composed as i~ is of pathos and shameful bits, of brief joys
played out agamst the backdrop ohvars and politics (p . 41).
It wa~ at_this college, then, that the composition, the cocoonin g,
not of ~m hfe but of a decade of his life, was accomplished and here
that thts one decade was fitted into the whole and made "a portable
rnemory" for the reader.
This p~ace, the college, is mentioned only twice in passing as an
obscure httle safe-harbor whose life, looked at from a distanct::, is
bizarre and out of the way: "When work and marriages and children
begin, the lights dim, the landscape becomes habitual" (p. 2G7). Such
dimming is a phenomenon familiar to everyone whose life has been
front-loaded by history. All that matters seriously, all day-hy-day
responsibilities and permanent attachments, extensive in time and
local in place-the "long plateau" (p. 268) of human reality- arc
muted compared to the vivid flashings of retrospection into a more
Eva T. H. Brann is Dean at St. John's College.:, Annapolis.
*See Naples: A Memoir by Douglas Allanbrook, A Peter Davison Book, liou~hton
Miffiin Company, New York and Roston, 1995, 269 pp.
�82
THE ST.JOHN'S COLLEGE REVIEW
intense and dangerous time. Yet it is in this relative safety of habitual
reality that imagination and memory accomplish their joint work of
fixing the throng of memories into this one memoir. Here experience
is recollected if not in tranquility then at least in domesticity, the
evidently transferable craft of composition is perfected, the private
readings and the public studies that give memory a frame are pursued.
The book acknowledges this ordinary and orderly ground of its
genesis tacitly but to my sense powerfully.
The decade so emblazoned on the composer's memory is that of
his twenties, his European years. He was a gifted, already welltrained and well-read, receptive and very young American, abroad in
a frightful war and again in a post-war time that was especially golden
for Americans. Whether he found himself in a hell or in an idyll, this
musician, as soldier and veteran, allowed things to happen to him.
Hence the surface texture of the book is thick-woven not only with
incidents, involvements, and vignettes, but also with returns, resolutions, recursions, delightfully trivial and heartrendingly significant:
On the troop transport to Mrica, Private Allanbrook's cherished
watch, his father's gift, is stolen, only to be miraculously retrieved by
a protective buddy at a crap game inland from Oran. A repulsive
fascist major provokes his own bullet-riddled death while in bed with
his mistress, and his wife later turns up, the keeper of an open house
for Allied officers, as the neighbor of the writer's Florentine friends.
There are parallel river and bath idylls, classical in their nude disportings, in Texas and in Tuscany. There are the three cosmopolitan Fates
that preside over the Fulbright Fellow's return, his Neapolitan landladies: the Vesuvius-hating Hungarian witch, the Polish snob, and
the desparate and decent Swiss spinster, Erika of fond memory.
Then there are the deeply wished for resolutions and recursions.
For eighteen years, back in Annapolis, the composer has carried a
restless guilt for the abrupt dumping of Laura, his "Neapolitan Bette
Davis," a high-strung and wilful girl, who was superseded by his
wife-to-be, the placid nymph, Candida. Finally he sets forth to seek
out Laura's solid and straight sister, who puts two decades of doubt
to rest with the casual and candid words: "She had a bad character,
you know. We were so afraid you would marry her!" (p. 42).
�BRANN
83
But above all, there is the ever-returning sight ofVesuvius erupting and the sound of Leonard calling.
Is this book a memoir or a fiction, then? It is a work of genuine
memory, such as is possible for those to whom life is an occasion for
art, for life always supplies amenable incidents to its receptive composers. Does the consummating imagination rectify or falsifY? The
question is pitched too low: The imagination actualizes the merely
real; it makes a fact into an event.
Nonetheless, this book is a prodigious feat of detailed memory.
No doubt this or that aide memoire was to hand: regiment~! records,
maps, perhaps letters, but much of the work has the bright clang of
exactly recalled fact.
Particularly notable is the musician's remembering ear for the
ritualistic obscenity and pungent accuracy of G. I. speech. Here is a
caution to stay out of the shipboard crap game, given to young
Allan brook by the protective Sergeant Kovacs: " ... You'd be skunked
and them punks would find some way to screw you once they seen
your honest little puss (p. 91)." The reader will find said visage on
the frontispiece and take the sergeant's point. It should 'be noted that
the writer's own cadences can be eloquent and his turns mordantly
witty: "Carnal knowledge of our own likely demise ... became part of
our soul's equipment" (p. 127).
The order of telling mimes the associations of memory, whose
contiguities are not of time but of theme. One might say that the
format is Proustian, were it not, for all its artfulness, far less contrived.
For example, one of the most tpemorable incidents is the officer's
gazelle hunt in Mrica before the Italian invasion, to which Private
Allanbrook is detailed as liaison with the Arab guide. The o(ficers
blast away from jeeps with Browning automatic rifles (a weapon no
good in true combat), and the telling of the slaughter immediately
puts the writer in mind of a later gratuitous lethal sport, the gunning
down of an escaping carabiniere sergeant running like a rabbit before
some Partisan boys and Allan brook's own fellow-soldiers.
But the memory does not only project the present onto the future.
It also paints a backdrop of history for the current event. The hated
Colonel Fry has established regimental headquarters at the Cistercian
Abbey ofFossanova, where there is also a field hospital in which very
�84
THE ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE REVIEW
young soldiers lie dying, and that brings to mind a different death:
Here Thomas Aquinas ended his life, having lived it.
For me the most moving overlay of remembered and present
sights occurs one hazy morning, when the regiment, having stumbled (among the first to arrive) into Rome by night, sleeps by the
Tiber, and the soldier wakes up to see across the river the sepia print
of Castle Sant' Angelo that hangs in his parents' living room in
Melrose. Everyone of a certain age knows that print and can envision
that veduta, in which the Eternal City is seen through a mist of home
and history class.
For all the artful interleaving of time, the central sequence of
events largely occupies the middle six chapters of the book's ten:
induction, training, passage, the Italian campaign, and its often
bloody aftermath. The mood is stark and darkly comic, and this part
of the account has more the air of factual truth. The reason is that
here the memoir serves as memorial for the many dead fellow
soldiers and for a few good officers.
Douglas Allanbrookwas a real soldier, who earned the four stripes
of a staff sergeant, was not above coveting the six of a master sergeant,
and took a proper pride in his bronze star medal. His loyalty is with
the men and his perspective that of a GI. It is the strong bond of the
faithful and friendly "we" (p. 78), for Allanbrook the Intelligence and
Reconnaissance platoon to which his able map reading assigned him.
His soldier's honor is that ofloyalty to his friends. The one circumstance that exhausts his always liberal sympathy is the German
POW's ready and detailed betrayal of their comrades' positions.
Their incomprehensible lack of honor taints all Germans for this
soldier who has no independent conception of Nazism.
The account of the campaign, otherwise so grim, abounds in
affectionate portraits of all his American fellow-soldiers, each a
highly personal realization of a recognizable ethnic and local type.
It is also suffused with a kind of abashed pleasure that this nearsighted, slight, musical, well-read youngster takes in the affectionate
esteem of his buddies.
But then there are the "them,"-a rogues' gallery of stupid, bigoted, pathetic, posturing officers, not least among them the General
Clark who got them to Rome first-at a terrible cost in casualties.
�BRANN
85
The redeeming figures are some fatherly, competent noncoms, and
the ami-hero, the trusted and sidelined Major Melcher, "a prudent
manager, not a 'leader'; but all of us, in a pickle, would h ave chosen
to follow him and not our fearless colonel" (p. 168); the colonel goes
on to become a general, while the major is kept on, humiliated, after
returning from a three-day breakdown. This is a passage that should
be requi red reading in the services' leadership courses.
Though the horror of the march through Italy does not abate;
because the protective carapace of body and soul wears ever thinner
and never thickens with time , there are redeeming moments of wild
absurdity and comic relief. One is particularly close to my heart
because I recognize it. A package reaches Allanbrook i11 a cold
Christmas season on the Apennines, sent by his mother who is a
teetotaler. It is a moldy fruit cake with a bottle of Scotch secreted
within; no sooner was it sent than she grew anxious lest he get drunk
and wander into enemy lines . My brother was also a foot soldier,
who uncannily resembled Dougla..<> in point of youth, slightness of
build, near-sightedness, musicality, literariness, and in winning the
affectionate regard of his buddies-and even as I write I hoid in my
hand the very same combat infantryman's badge that Douglas is
wearing on the frontispiece. I sent him-was he stationed in Panama
or already fighting in Korea?-a similar camout1aged package (only
it was gin) and then worried similarly about the effects.
Another saving grace was music, both as a respite from war and as
a way to male friendship and female companionship. At the infamous gazelle hunt, the cultivated Arab guide discovers Allanbrook
reading an inscribed Stravinsky score sent by his legendary teacher,
Mlle. Boulanger, and a sudden friendship flares up. Wherever a
piano is to be found, Bechstein or unstrung upright, the Gl goes
straight for it, carried out of the present by the music, but not entirely
unaware of the eclat produced by a creditable rendition of the
Waldstein played by one of the uniformed liberators better knov·lll
for their high spirits than their cultivation.
For all the interludes, death is eve r-present in this central section
on war and therefore, unavoidably, present in the framing sections
on peace. The book is not only a memorial to the many dead but also
an exorcism, half a century later, of some particular ghosts . It appears
�86
THE ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE REVIEW
to have succeeded at least in dispersing a recurrent nightmare: like
a Charon forever ferrying but never successfully landing the dead on
the far side of the Styx, the dreamer sails back and forth to Naples on
the Atlantic betwixt wake and sleep, war and peace, quick and dead;
he feels himself to belong in some part of body and soul to the world
of the dead.
The book has a noble dust jacket, maroon, black and gold, framing
a painting of Vesuvius erupting some century and a half before the
writer's first sight of it. That is how the book begins: Private
AJlanbrook and his friend whom he alone calls Leonard-given
names are rare in the army-together on the deck of the troop
transport, watching an obliging Vesuvius erupting and further illuminated by the brilliant crisscross of anti-aircraft fire. Leonard and
Jack, the radio repairman's bosom buddy, are the first "definite
killings" (p. 135) of the platoon, shot by a distinguishable enemy,
dead early, got at from behind. Vesuvius flaring up and Leonard
calling to. AJlanbrook to come in the night-these are the visual and
auditory images that haunt the book. They are signals from the
undercurrent offeeling on which all the incident is borne along. The
feeling is regret, the regret of insufficient response. Rich as the book
is in involvements and affairs, strong as its young protagonist was in
event-eliciting receptivity, it is this sense of incomplete love that
moved the writing of the memoir and tethered its memories: "Remorse was the fixative" (p. 103), but, the writer asks, for what? Was
it all in the imagination? There is so powerful, so near-theological a
sense of the sins of omission-moral sloth, apathy, narcissism, "communion ... rejected" (p. 104)-notjust toward this friend but toward
other friends and lovers, men and women, that the question is rightly
set aside. No baseless regrets for fancied young failures could have
given the book its poignant gravity.
Although the dates are deliberately out of order, there is a clear
temporal progress to the tale. It is to be found in the three successive
completions of the title "See Naples." First: See Naples-and Die;
that is in 1944when Vesuvius is the gate to living hell and likely death.
Second: See Naples-and Live; that is in 1952, when Vesuvius greets
the Fulbright Fellow returning to the golden and event-laden time
that post-war Europe could then offer a young American in Naples.
�BRANN
87
Third: See Naples-and Recollect; those are the ensuing four decades
of revisiting in search of resolution and remembrance lasting until the
final composition of the memoir and the achievement at least of
resignation and lucidity: "I see Naples clearly now I am old" (p.268.)
Yet there is a hint of further consolation. In his forties, the
revenant, on his way back from the settling of Laura's ghost, made a
pilgrimage to Elea, the city of Parmenides. And, by one of those
felicitous coincidences of his life, he overhears on the beach what he
is listening for, a message of Being. A teacher walks to and fro with
his pupil, discoursing, it seems, ever more emphatically on "essere"
(p. 44). This event is recalled at the close of the book:
What a solace it would be if some timeless essence, clear
and lucid, were standing in back of our time-ridden
lives, if all of our shifting loves were grounded in some
apprehensible reality (p. 266).
The sentence is written, to be sure, in the conditional mood, but
the book itself sounds a more affirmative music. For it intimates that
some like solace may be found in artfully composing the passages of
life into a "coherent and passionate whole" (p. 41).
�88
THE ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE REVIEW
�i
~
Reason's Parochiality:
On Carl Page's Critique ofHistoricism
Richard Velkley
I
That human reason is in some sense parochial cannot be seriously
doubted. Carl Page's thoughtful and significant book, Philosophical
Historicism and the Betrayal of First Philosophy* takes on the task of
defining that sense through a careful critique of one of the most
prominent philosophical tendencies of the past century: the assertion
of reason's radical parochiality as historical.
Before examining his argument, I note some of reason's parochialisms. The limiting qualifier "human" signifies that we know we are
not divine reasoners, while the sort of reason we possess may or may
not be akin to that of other beings as yet unknown to us. One of the
great puzzles is how a power that has a grasp on universality manifests
itself so locally in the universe. Why do only some beings possess it?
Why these rather than others? And why as species with a plurality of
members? Such questions relate to the problem of understanding the
human being as a whole: How do this being's peculiar rational
powers belong essentially (if they do) to its peculiar sentient, living,
and bodily aspects? Neither ancient nor modern philosophy has
answers to these questions. Aristotle tells us that we are wholes and
yet the principle of this wholeness is very elusive: Are the ends of
humans as living beings and the ends of thought the same ?1 The
question "What is the origin of this peculiar human kind?" cannot
even be asked on the basis of his metaphysics.
The "return to the ancients" is a siren song that may deafen us to
the relevance of modern physical, biological and evolutionary inquiries to these questions. The relevance of such "empirical" investigations points to a certain importance of history for philosophy, as well.
Since "nature loves to hide," the outcome of natural inquiries is
unforeseeable. The uncovering of nature's secrets has been crucially
Richard Velldey is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Stonehill College.
*The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995.
�90
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
assisted by advances in techniques of widening human powers, the
"technology" affording otherwise impossible access to Jupiter's
moons, viruses·, X-rays, quantum effects and black holes. No doubt
the Baconian and Cartesian revolutions have in a fundamental way
altered irreversibly our account of nature; but the alteration is not the
result of philosophical thought alone. The unanticipated and indeterminate course of human discovery (which may at some point
include the encounter with other intelligent forms oflife) is a form
of human history projected by modern principles. There has to be a
certain rightness in the claim that Plato could not see some truths
relevant to understanding our situation, and that time itself limits
knowing. But perhaps "history" in the historicist sense of the context
of moral and political beliefs dominant at a given time is not the most
pertinent consideration. One suggestion, which may even be not
un-Platonic in spirit: The fluctuating natural order of galactic expansion and contraction may be seen as a sort of instrument for extending
human insight about nature, a Technik der Natur. If the natural order
is not simply permanent and regular, can there be an absolute divide
between nature and art? Veritas filia temporis. 2
The Socratic turn to logoi, the phenomenological examination of
the human lifeworld, the articulation of enduring features of human
experience, will not solve the problem of the biological localization
of reason, although such inquiries are necessary to prevent reductionist and narrow views of the explanandum, human reason. This
points to another dimension of the parochiality of our reason (with
which I end this preliminary meditation). Human reason pursues,
and in a sense thus already possesses, certain kinds of wholeness that
have no evident parallels in natural processes. This pursuit of wholeness (or eros) is available to us only on the phenomenological level;
the Socratic question is how that pursuit relates to "the whole" as
such. Humans are fated to try to understand themselves and all beings
in the light of wholes that exist only in speech or in the idea, thus in
the light of what humans qua natural arenot. 3 The turn to thelogoi
then is not merely provisonal, since it is only through them that the
never-to-be-realized character of human reason comes into view.
When, how, and even whether the self-understanding of reason will
become part of a complete account of nature is a Socratic question
�VELKLEY
91
still alive in contemporary debates about whether and how "objective" natural sciences can account for the "subjective" realm of
consciousness. One must start with an acceptance of a difference
(perhaps never to be bridged) between consciousness and other
natural phenomena, for if the former had no ontological peculiarity
there would be no puzzle needing a solution~
Both of these points (the investigation of nature as an indeterminate, open-ended history, and the problematic relation between
human self-awareness and accounts of nature) bear a great deal on
the theme of Page's book, Philosophical Historicism. The progressive
and "revolutionary" character of modern scientific inquiry has certainly promoted modern accounts of human reason as historical. But
at the same time, the turn to history that is characteristic of thought
called "historicist" is motivated in good part by a desire to protect the
human experience of moral and political life from disruptive intrusions from that science. It has done so in accordance with doubts
about the groundability of this experience in accounts of nature. I
shall return to these considerations later in this review.
II
The parochialism of reason stipulated by philosophical historicism
(henceforth PH) is not a statement of aporia (such as the problems
of the relation of reason to life and the body) but an attempt to resolve
the question of the ends or purposes of human reason. Its solution
however generates newaporiai. The stipulations are familiar: human
reason is limited to the hie et nun, it cannot transcend the contingent
temporal starting-points of inquiry, and thus it is "differentiated by
history without remainder" (Page, 44). PH insists on reason's inevitable temporal parochiality or historicity. Hence PH must regard the
tradition of First Philosophy (henceforth FP) as in pursuit of
chimerae, for FP is based on "the conviction that the human intellect
is in principle and by nature adequate to reality and its primary
principles," i.e. principles of a transtemporal order (3). Besides such
primacy, FP upholds the noetic ideals of universality and Socratic
self-knowledge. Yet PH is the heir of this tradition insofar as itoffers
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a comprehensive critique of reason's powers. Indeed it is the direct
successor to the modern critique of reason which rejects the possibility of noetic adequacy to reality, but retains allegiance to FP's
search for a universal self-accounting of reason. The critique of
reason retains the ideal of reason's noetic adequacy to itself
Unlike the pre-Hegelian critique of reason, PH temporalizes the
categories of the understanding thus historicizing Kant's quaestio juris
(59-60, 117); all the same it undertakes a comparable 'justification"
of reason (52-55). Page on a number of occasions employs the
expression "the spirit ofFP," as distinct from FP proper, to indicate
points of contact between PH and FP (preeminently in the case of
Heidegger; see 128, 143). Thus PH is not a mere break with FP, but
an internal betrayal, claiming to provide a genuine renovation (not
dismissal) of philosophy. Page puts his leading question as follows:
"As an interpretation of the relationship between historicity and
reason, the single most important question PH must face is that of
its adequacy as an account of human reason's actuality" (6). Here is
a difficulty: if PH should happen to have an adequate account of
reason, would it not be genuine FP (indeed, the only true FP)? And
if its account is inadequate, then why is it a "betrayal," rather than
just an imperfect form of FP?
Page precedes his account and critique of PH proper with a
review of other varieties of the "historicist gesture": Karl Popper's
account of historicism as the "demonization of history," the conditioning of cultural knowledge by history in the classical historicisms
of Friedrich Meinecke and Ernst Troeltsch, and Karl Mannheim's
sociology of knowledge. None of these doctrines is genuine PH
since their particularist or procedural approaches to history do not
undertake to show (or in Popper's case, to criticize) the conditioning
of all powers of reason by history. Page's aim in presenting them is
to underline the self-conscious comprehensiveness of genuine PH,
of which three recent representatives are closely scrutinized: Joseph
Margolis, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Richard Rorty. A general critique of PH as self-refuting emerges from this examination. Yet
behind these figures looms the great figure of Martin Heidegger; to
him Page must turn for a "rehabilitation of historicism's motivating
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insights" (128) of which Page intends to make a "determinate negation" preserving what is valid in PH (6, 128).
Still further behind Heidegger is Hegel, the second figure of the
"rehabilitative" inquiry which closes the book; these two thinkers
offer "the most powerful ontologies of historicity that have been
elaborated to date" (132). Notably Page's review of genuine PH does
not include discussions ofDilthey and Nietzsche, who surely belong
in a complete account. This is because Page in fact does not seek to
give a full genealogy; Page's purpose is strictly philosophical, and his
choice of figures is made for the sake of his. argument. The focus on
Hegel and Heidegger is adequate, in his view, to disclose the motives
of historicist ontology. But a study of Nietzsche can shed invaluable
light on some basic motives; I shall say more on this later. And as a
smaller cavil, I think some of the space accorded to the unphilosophical historicists (Meinecke, Troeltsch, Mannheim) might justly
have been allotted to Dilthey, as the leading figure in the methodological debates about natural science andGeisteswissenschaften. For in
his "typology of world-views," Dilthey clearly discloses the practical
motivation for the turn to historical Grundwissenschaft: the failure of
natural science to offer accounts of human purpose or visions of the
ends oflife.
Page adduces three recent figures (Margolis, Gadamer, Rorty) as
evidence for the "emerging consensus" in Anglophone and Continental philosophy around "the conviction that what is now called
practical rationality is the ruling form of all human understanding
and that its virtues are the highest virtues of the intellect" (47). In the
Anglo-American scene the primacy of practical rationality runs
through anti-foundationalist accounts of knowledge (H. Putnam, C.
Taylor), Nco-Aristotelian classical scholarship (M. Nussbaum),
Kant scholarship (0. O'Neill, S. Neiman), and ethics (B. Williams,
A. Macintyre), although historicist approaches are not the rule in
these areas. Kant, pragmatism, and (and only once mentioned by
Page) the later Wittgenstein's view of language as the repository of
cultural practices determinative of meaning, are pervasive sources,
probably more than major historicist philosophers. Indeed it may be
said that PH is a more radical version of a much broader tendency.
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III
With his three figures as his departure-point, Page develops subtle
variations on the theme of PH's self-refutation. Contrary to the
explicit conclusion of reason's inevitable parochiality, PH's mode of
arguing is a comprehensive rational self-account, without which it
cannot present a binding limitative thesis about knowledge. But if
reason is necessarily constrained by contingency, it should be unable
to make universal claims about such constraint. Or to use words ofEmil
Fackenheim cited by Page, "the reduction to historicity, were it total,
could not come to consciousness" (108). The fact that PH has "no right
to its universal idiom" (110) precipitates the freefall into nihilism so
evident in Rorty's writing, where the only constraints on thought arise
from the "vocabularies" we happen to use. Ifthis is all we have, how can
Rorty say others should alter their vocabularies to suit his? More
moderate "conciliatory pragmatists" like Margolis wish to assure
thought of a common "interim stability" without reduction to chaos,
but lacking any grasp of the universal they cannot carry this off
Yet Page does not finish off PH as quickly as this suggests.
Interestingly, he does not pursue the suggestion of Strauss that PH
must implicitly, to avoid blatant self-refutation, assume a quasiHegelian absolute moment of comprehensive insight. But he attributes to PH a more subtle third possibility, a Kantian type of strategy
which I believe is more to the point. PH need not, it seems, grant a
special exemption giving knowledge-status to its own universal claim
if that claim presumes only that the universal constraint on reason is
intelligible, while not knowable. The universal claim is then a "regulative ideal" grounded not in theoretical insight but in alleged practical necessity. There is then no outright self-contradiction in PH if
it makes a "distinction between the historicist scenario and human
knowledge of the scenario" (93). Inevitable parochiality militates
against universal knowledge-claims, but not against universal practical-regulative claims. Surely something like this has to be the ground
for the striking fact that historicists have not been much disturbed by
all of the talk since Husser! of their apparent self-refutation. But this
does entail that ultimately PH is based on a "leap of faith" to its
universal claim (96).
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This "practical faith" at the basis of PH is a fatal weakness in Page's
eyes. His argument against it, at one point, is similar to Hegel's
argument against Kant's claim that practical reason has primacy. In
other words, Page is at times inclined to refute the claim that rational
necessities are available to us through self-knowledge without noetic
adequacy to reality. Indeed Page's strong sympathy for Hegel is quite
apparent. Hegel's thought, of course, is not an instance of PH since
he regards reason's historical parochiality as only provisional. Hegel,
unlike PH, has more right to the universal idiom that stipulates
reason's being conditioned by time and history; he has a metaphysics
of time that can undergird such an idiom. Absolute knowing avoids
the vitiating effects of inescapable contingency. As when Hegel
criticizes Kant, Page argues against PH that its assertion of a limit to
reason implies that it knows something beyond that limit. Or, limitdrawing implies a metaphysical stance (absolute knowledge of reason's nature) that PH tries, at the same time, to disavow.
But perhaps the real point is this: One cannot allege the necessity
of a universal practical-regulative idea without having some knowledge of reason as requiring it. This knowledge (contra Hegel) may
imply only knowledge of some feature of human reason without any
more comprehensive metaphysics, thus without absolute knowledge
of human reason. But it is knowledge of a universal all the same, and
to rely on it contradicts historicist claims of pervasive contingency.
PH, it could be said, inconsequently grafts a universal Kantian
regulative idea on unrestricted cultural relativism. Its alleged "leap of
faith" is a practical ideal that makes sense only as a rational insight
about reason's nature, which PH should be unable to allow itself. On
the other hand PH will not refute itself if it makes a true leap offaith
with respect to something radically particular (insight about particular deities, say). But then it will also not be a philosophical doctrine
about knowledge and reason.
N
In my view the most interesting and effective part of Page's
account of PH is his challenge to it on the non-Hegelian ground
(without any move toward FP as the claim of noetic adequacy to
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reality) that it simply misrepresents human reason. The critique is
grounded in self-knowledge. At these points Page indicates that the
issue revolves around the practical imperative' governing PH and
distorting reason's potentiality. What is that imperative? Injunctions
against trying "to escape history" come up most frequently (50, 66,
71). These are related to calls to "avoid fatuous abstractions of
rationalistic and transcendental thinking" (84) and to proposals for
"taming reason" in its drive for metaphysical knowledge (77). Gadamer states the broad theme with learning and eloquence when he
counsels philosophical thinking to strive for "the sense of what is
feasible, possible, correct, here and now," in connection with the
Enlightenment's misguided critique of prejudice (63, 68).
Such pronouncements show that recent manifestations of PH
continue the efforts ofVico, Hume, Burke and Herder to reconcile
theory and practice by appeals to the primacy of custom, tradition,
and folk-wisdom against the disruptive speculations ofFP. In reality,
those efforts were continuing the modern cause of Bacon and
Descartes by other means: to bring philosophical speculation
down to earth through harnessing theory to the relief of man's
estate. The reaction in many eighteenth century authors against
the new mathematical natural philosophy and attendant distortions
of moral and political discourse was not, however, a rejection of
the basic universalist and humanitarian telos governing modern
philosophy. By attempting to make that project politically more prudent
and "responsible," thinkers like Hume and Burke turned to "history"
as the proper realm of action, the true "home," for human reason.
A further element in PH since Hegel, however, is the absorption
of the Idealist notions of freedom originally inspired by Rousseau,
with their claim to satisfy the deepest longings of FP. Absolute
unity and totality of knowledge is, in Kant's formulation, attainable
only through an account of reason as the spontaneous power of
self-determination that projects ultimate ends. This emphasis on
freedom as the only possible source of ends is what gives the postIdealist tradition of PH its particular radicality and stringency, and
what enables it to pose as the "renovation" of philosophy: practical
reason is the true metaphysics. Hegel is the figure who brings this
new account of freedom as the highest point of metaphysics into full
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identity with history as the self-development of Geist. Thus in his
account of political life as Objective Spirit or Sittlichkeit, Hegel
reconciles the counterrevolutionary critique of "abstract thinking"
in Burke and others with the revolutionary implications of autonomy
in Rousseau, Kant, and Fichte.
To draw together these historical reflections, one could say that
historicist thinking arises out of a twofold failure in the original
modern effort to reconcile theory and practice, centering on its
account of nature: The new account of nature failed as a basis for
"phenomenological" accounts ofhuman moral-political practice and
discourse, and it failed as a source of "metaphysical" concepts of
ultimate ends for reason. Both failures could be viewed as teleological
deficiencies in the modern account of nature.
While Page does not explore this philosophical background to
speculative Idealism, the reconciliation of theoretical reason with the
requirements of practice is central to his reading of Hegel. This
philosopher "seeks to reconcile reason's moment of negativity, its
infinite freedom from the given with the bounds ... of the here and
now"(155); Hegel confronts the "uncanny restlessness" of reason,
"the immediate negativity of reflective, critical intelligence" that
"produces a sense of homelessness" (161). By embedding critical
reason in an historical context it cannot transcend, and arguing that
spirit gradually evolves a context for complete self-knowing, Hegel's
doctrine produces a profound sense of reason being at home in the
world. Unlike PH, which ties reason inescapably to contingency, the
"noetic adequacy" of Hegel's logic can consistently ground the coincidence of reason and history. Page all the same questions that claim
to adequacy, or Hegel's assertion of knowing that philosophy is
necesarily concordant with the fate of the political community in
which it arises (199-200).
This critique of Hegel brings to the fore the heart of Page's
argument with PH. This is not PH's self-contradiction, or its failure
to attain a noetically adequate account of reality. What PH shares with
Hegel (who lacks PH's metaphysical weakness) is the effort to
domesticate the infinity of reason. On this issue even Hobbes has
things better, for he grasps the character of human "rational imagination" distinguishing it from animal sensitive imagination: "the
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ability to picture as yet unrealized possibilities" (110). Drawing the
same lesson about reason from mathematics, Page argues that it is
"incoherent to combine finitude as inevitable parochiality with the
capacity to envision a totality of possibility" (111-112). But another
aspect of infinity comes into focus, for which Plato, not Hobbes, is
the authority, when Page asserts "there is no escape from the imperative toward illumination, toward seeing by the light of the Good"
(123); simply to think the better "is to have an idea that creates an
infinite distance, since the good thus becomes intelligible" (153; also
79). In sum, reason and speech institute a human distancing on the
world which in principle has no limits. Such potential for distancing
is never exhausted by the concrete actualizations of reason in history.
The "betrayal of First Philosophy" is, it turns out, PH's evasion-for
the most part-of this potential, not its rejection of metaphysics of
first causes of being.
Indeed, if I understand Page correctly, this infinity of reason is
incompatible with attaining the ideal of noetic adequacy to reality.
The version ofFP Page defends is hence not "Platonistic," but more
truly Platonic (131, 154) .5 This enables Page to speak highly of claims
in PH about "the hermeneutic character of human experience, the
openness of inquiry and the nonalgorithmic character of progress,
the value of discourse's nontheoretical ends, and the rationality tacit
in tradition" (128). In the final analysis, Page is actually closer to
Heidegger than to Hegel. Page thus credits Heidegger with having
an acute sense of the negativity of reason or the radical freedom of
philosophy, which places Heidegger poles apart from Gadamer's
"good-natured optimism" about philosophy's accommodation with
the present. Heidegger is more Socratic in avowing an element of
irremovable homelessness in reason (150-155).
Yet Heidegger also is not true to his own insight when he insists
on "fated" constraints over reason's openness, such that man as the
site of Being's dual concealment-unconcealment loses any destiny
of his own in Heidegger's later thought (152). Page expresses admiration for Being and Times transcendental regress to the conditions
of experience in the temporality of care, but questions the move
already in this work toward regarding all objects of care as finite,
temporal and mortal (147-149). Why must Heidegger suppress the
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infinity of reason with the demand that every chosen fate be "local"?
Heidegger encounters a clash of two imperatives: the infinite striving
for the Good (the imperative to question the given), and the refusal
to escape history (the imperative to affirm the given). His choice
finally is for the second. What is the ground for that choice?
In my estimation the sentence that sheds most light on this matter is
Page's reflection (with reference to Plato's Phaedrus) that Heidegger
"reserves for philosophers the role of poet-prophet, following essentially in the footsteps of Nietzsche, who conceived the strategy of
hiding philosophy's negativity in art.Amorfoti is the evident progenitor of Gelassenheit, though it serves a more vigorous sense of
purpose" (152). This suggests that the deepest (hence less prevalent)
level of PH is not the turn to practical reason that evades the infinity
of reason, but the turn to art that would both transform and conceal,
but not deny, infinity. Nietzsche and Heidegger suppose that only
as poetic can philosophy be at home with homelessness, with philosophy's radical freedom. The parochiality of poetic dwelling is then
the necessary mask (but not the whole point) of philosophy; the
philosopher sees through and past this mask in the very act of
assuming it. Yet one may still inquire: is then the philosopher-poet's
insight not universal and in the spirit of First Philosophy?
Notes:
1. See S. Rosen, The Question of Being: A Reversal ofHeidegger (New
Haven, 1993), p. 37: "Strictly speaking, Aristotle's doctrine of
thinking casts no light on how individual human beings ('substances' in the earlier terminology) are able to cognize the forms
that (in some sense or another) are universally enacted, not by
their particular intellectual faculties, but Gy the propertyless or
formless nous."
2. See G. Gentile, Giordano Bruno e il pensiero del Renascimento
(Florence, 1925), 224-248; Machiavelli,Discorsi I, 3; Bacon,Novum Organum I, 84; Kant, Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des
Himmels, III; compare with Plato, Statesman 268d-274e. From
Fontenelle'sDigression sur les anciens et les modernes(1688) Gentile
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100
quotes a passage that shows how such reflections may relate to
later notions ofhistory as self-actualizing Weltgeist: "U n bon esprit
cultive est, pour ansi dire, compose de tous les esprits des siecles
precedentes; ce n'est qu'un meme esprit qui s'est cultive pendant
tout ce temps-!a."
3. L. Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, 1953), pp. 145-46:
"Human nature is one thing, virtue or the perfection of human
nature is another. The definite character of the virtues and, in
particular, of justice cannot be deduced from human nature.
Human nature 'is' in a different manner than its perfection or
virtue."
4. See amongmanyT. Nagel, "~ubjective and Objective," in Mortal
Questions (Cambridge UK, i979);]. Searle, Mind, Brains, and
Science (Cambridge MA, 1984). For recent entries in this debate,
see H. Putnam's review of Galen Strawson,Mental Reality, in
London Review of Books, 18/3 (8 February, 1996).
5. Also as regards the ideal of noetic self-adequacy, Page might
acknowledge more difficulty in its attainment on non-historicist
grounds. For some thoughts on this see P. Dews, "Modernity,
Self-Consciousness and the Scope of Philosophy: Jiirgen Habermas and Dieter Henrich in Debate," in The Limits of Disenchantment: Essays on Contemporary European Philosophy (London, 1995).
�i._·_
~
To See The World Profoundly:
The Films Of Robert Bresson
Shmuel Ben-Gad
Learning to see-habituating the eye to repose, to
patience, to letting things come to it; learning to
defer judgement, to investigate and comprehend
the individual case in all its aspects. This is the
first preliminary schooling in spirituality...
Friedrich Nietzsche
That a filmmaker can lift us to these levels of
contemplation and speculation is proof of that
filmmaker's greatness.
Andrew Sarris
Despite awards and high critical praise, the films of French minimalist Robert Bresson are screened much more rarely in the U.S. than
those of many other directors of art films. However, there seems to
be something of a Bresson boom oflate.In 1994,L'Argent (1983), an
adaptation of a Tolstoy short story, became available in subtitled
video; that was followed by Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945),
based upon a work by Diderot, and Lancelot duLac (1974) in 1995;
and in 1996 we have seen the similar release of Une Femme Douce
(1969). He has made fourteen films in all, among which are two
based upon works by Dostoevsky and two upon works by Georges
Bernanos. He first attained his mature style in his fourth film, Diary
of a Country Priest (1950), a style which he refined until it reached
rarified heights in L 'Argent.
What sets Bresson's work apart from that of virtually every other
director is his insistence on filming only "real things." As he himself
has written in his Notes sur le Cinematographe(1975), "To create is not
to deform or invent persons and things. It is to tie new relationships
between persons and things which are, and as they are." (Italics are
Shmuel Ben-Gad is a librarian at George Washington University and the author of
"Robert Bresson: A Bibliography ofWorks By and About Him, 1981-1993," which
appeared in the Bulletin ofBibliography.
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in the original.) His minimalism is really a way of not "deforming"
reality but of allowing us to concentrate on the real persons and things
he presents to us. Indeed his films are a series of images of remarkable
purity. Because he eschews mood music, as well as expressive camera
angles and movements, and pares away inessential elements from his
compositions and dialogue, he achieves what he calls "insignificant
(non-significant) images."
Wyndham Lewis can, I think, help us understand what this means.
In his book Men Without Art, Lewis defends what he calls an "external"
approach to art, in particular, to literature. He writes that if authors
who relate their narratives internally-that is, by letting readers "into
the minds of the charatters" (like James Joyce or Henry
James)-were painters, their works would consist of "plastic
units ...suffused with romantic coloration." They would be overcharged with literary symbolism; their psyches would have got the
better of their Gestalt-the result a sentiment, rather than an expressive form." These imagined paintings by James and Joyce are the
exact opposite of Bresson's films. In Bresson's minimalistic stylization-which is nothing if not rigorous form-there is an intense
concentration on essential images but no symbolism, no romanticism, no spectacle. Instead, carefully chosen, spare images follow one
upon the other and affect one another. It is precisely through this
method that Bresson's rigorous formalism is ultimately moving. He
achieves emotional resonance not through expressive "coding" or
rendering of images that provide the audience with cues both for
interpreting and reacting to the images, but through a cool yet
intense presentation of uncluttered compositions of images and
natural sounds in a certain order.
Br.esson also insists on realism in a less subtle way, namely, in his
avoidance of acting. He does not use actors, and refers to the people
who appear in his films as "models." Through extremely precise
direction of speech, movement, and gesture, and also much repetition before shooting scenes, he manages to have his models move
and speak in an automatic way, that is to say, without attempting
either to project or suppress emotion. \lllhile Bresson recognizes the
legitimacy of acting in the theater, he does not approve of it in films,
where he regards it as "inventing" or "deforming" persons. According
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to him, it violates the particularity and purpose of the cinema-the
most realistic of the arts-which is to show realities. Turning to his
"Notes" once again, we read: ''What our eyes and ears require is not the
realistic persona but the real person." And again, concerning models:
"Movement from the exterior to the interior. (Actors: movement from
the interior to the exterior.)" Acting is the projection of simulacra of
emotions that the actor does not feel. It is a simulation meant to make
visible and obvious what the character is supposedly thinking and feeling.
There is a credibility to Bresson's models: They are like people we meet
in life, more or less opaque creatures who speak, move, and gesture.
Bresson believes, and I concur, that the words he has his models utter
and the movements and gestures he has them make in an automatic,
non-intentional way, invariably, if subtly, evoke human depths because
the models, after all, are human beings. Acting, on the other hand, no
matter how naturalistic, actively deforms or invents by putting an overlay
or filter over the person, presenting a simplification of a human being and
not allowing the camera to capture the actor's human depths. Thus what
Bresson sees as the essence of filmic art, the achievement of the creative
transformation involved in all art through the interplay of images of real
things, is destroyed by the artifice of acting. For Bresson, then, acting is,
like mood music and expressive camera work, just one more way of
deforming reality or inventing that has to be avoided
Bresson's filmic universe is one of real, simply presented persons,
objects, and sounds (no one uses the soundtrack more effectively
than he), and each thing that is observed or heard is granted its own
integrity; yet it is also wrapped up in the same mysterious realm as
all the other items. It is a part of the genius of Bresson, through his
composition of images and ordering of their presentation, that he
discovers and captures the subtle strangeness of the mundane. His
spare presentation of objects manages to reveal their essences and the
mystery attached to them. As a whole, the universe he presents is a quiet,
austere, mysterious one with the pervasive mysterious atmosphere
evoked by the lack of acting and also ofany other clues to, or explanations
of, psychology and motivation, as well as by the remarkably unyielding concentration on bodies and objects. His universe seems cold
and indifferent and also pregnant with possibilities, dominated by
fate and with room for human freedom. It is, in fine, as ambiguous,
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THE ST.JOHN'S REVIEW
because as opaque, as the people in his films. In its ambiguity it is
both frightening and awe-inspiring. Regarding story line, unlike
Antonioni and the later Godard, Bresson's films have strong plots,
although they are presented elliptically. Yet, ultimately, plot is in
service of the minimalistic style, not vice versa.
While recognizing full well that Bresson's films are not at all
didactic, it seems to me that in them Bresson provides us with a way
of seeing, of relating to, the world. Bresson's filmic art, in fact, is a
way of seeing. Whatever his personal belief concerning what may lie
behind the images the world presents to us (and Bresson, a Christian,
presumably believes in invisible realities as do, among others, more
traditionally-minded Jews), in his films he has a profound respect for
this "surface", if you will, of r eality. That his austere, "external," and
1
minimalistic style creates films of such passion (however restrained)
and authentic interiority indicates, it seems to me, the only way for
us to try to understand the world, to try to see it most profoundly.
We do this not by avoiding or annihilating or even seeing through
the images the world presents to us; we do it, on the contrary, by
paying the closest attention to those images, by concentrating on
seeing them with supreme clarity, and by doing so without any prior
assumptions, which tend to cause us to discover only what we already
think we know. (In an interview in which he discussed his deliberate
decision not to explain, or even hint at, motivations and psychology
of characters in his films, Bresson acutely remarked, "The psychologist discovers only what he can explain. I explain nothing.")
Bresson's art has often been called "spiritual," but I am inclined to
think of it as highly materialist in that, as I have noted, it is most
respectful of material reality. (What I mean may be illustrated by a
notable instance in which his adaptation of the plot of his source
material coincides with his materialist techniques. In the novel
Diary of a Country Priest by Bernanos, the central character has a
religious vision while walking alone. Shortly after that he faints and
is assisted by a girl from his catechism class. In his film version,
Bresson conflates the two incidents so that a vision never occurs. The
priest faints and thinks he is having a supernatural visitation, but it
turns out to be the girl kindly helping him in his need.) We know
what ·we see. The more intensely and clearly we see, the more deeply
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we know. What I call Bresson's materialist art, with its emphasis upon
unadorned, undramatized images, is very far from a playful postmodern celebration of the superficial that provides striking images
and spectacles in order to tease or overwhelm the visual sense. Rather,
his precise, ordered presentation of carefully chosen and composed
non-significant images invites the viewer to what Andrew Sarris calls
"contemplation," though not a contemplation of vague, spiritual
notions. It is rather, at least at first, of physical realities like faces and
hands, doorways, and axes. If anything-"spiritual" or otherwise--exists beneath or behind material reality, if physical reality is
in fact a surface, then the only possibility ofknowingthis other reality
will be through a profound gaze at this surface. I want to be clear
·here that I am not claiming, or even trying to describe or explicate
Bresson's own philosophy. It may be that he thinks the only way to
indicate supernatural realities in filmic art is through an intensely
materialist method, but believes some other ways of perceiving such
realities exist in life. Yeti believe that a work of art does have a certain
autonomy from its creator and thus I am trying here to understand
and explicate what Bresson's films show us as films, not what
Bresson the man may believe.
In Bresson's films (and the purer his art has become the more this is
true) persons and objects are neither explained nor interpreted; nor is
the universe which comprises them. We are presented tales whose
meanings are left as unexplained as are the motives of the people in
them. As Tom Milne, the fine English film critic, has said of one of
Bresson's greatest films, Une Femme Douce, "By the end, in a sense, one
is no wiser than before. Was it because he [the husband]loved her too
much or too little, because he gave her too little money or too much,
because he felt she was too good for him or not good enough? The
extraordinary thing about the film is that any or all of these interpretations can be read into it ... " (This first of his films in color is based
upon a Dostoevsky tale which deals with the suicide of a young wife)
I have said that in my opinion Bresson's films provide us with a
way of seeing, of relating to the world, and I have already discussed
what I think that way of seeing is-namely, careful, contemplative
attention to the essence of physical realities without prior assumptions.
But relating to reality, as shown in Bresson's films, also involves, I think,
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
clearly recognizing the deeply enigmatic nature of what is real. To
interpret is to impose meaning rather than to perceive it. I dare say
that in Bresson's filmic universe there are no interpretations, only
facts; in it, to perceive is to become aware how enigmatic is the
universe and the human beings who dwell therein.
In addition to being considered a spiritual director, Bresson is also
considered a dark, pessimistic one (and this is not, of course, a
contradiction). The obvious reason for this is that conventional
happy endings are rare in his films. Yet it seems to me that his
rigorous minimalism and materialist method, which amazingly yield
the most credible sense of mystery, are also causes. In an interview
Bresson replied to the characterization of his films as pessimistic by
saying, "The word 'pessimis~' bothers me because it is often used
instead of the word 'lucidity'.' Many people are uncomfortable with
lucidity. Many wish to interpret the sense of all-encompassing
mystery in Bresson's films as intimations of an invisible reality
behind the material universe and thus as offering hope. Yet I think
it must be recognized even by such viewers that, if indeed there are
such hints of the invisible in the films, both the hints and the realities
are grand and awesome, not mawkish or easily comforting, and that
the way to knowledge of them can be quite terrible. It is a widespread
and natural phenomenon for people to seek some escape from
materiality and its concomitant, death, and to look for hope in
spiritual realities. But, in my opinion, to avoid materiality in this
search is to fall into sentimentality at best and lunacy at worst. (It is
interesting, at least for me, to recall that in the Jewish religious
tradition speculations about redemption are quite varied but that one
of them, and it is perhaps the oldest, portrays redemption in rather
material terms: Jewish sovereignty over the entire Land oflsrael and
the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem.) Bresson's art, it seems
to me, is rooted in the material and lucidly recognizes the importance
of this "surface" of reality. It recognizes the resulting inescapably
enigmatic nature of the universe to human beings. Bresson, an artist
of the very highest order in my judgement, does not offer meanings,
explanations, or answers but rather lucidity, reality, and profound
mystery. Indeed I am bold to say that Bresson's films are not merely
the most lucid made, they are, in essence, lucidity itself.
�
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The St. John's Review
Volume XLIV, number two (1998)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
James Carey
Beate Ruhm Von Oppen
foe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Anne McShane
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 semi-annually rather than three times a year. Unsolicited essays,
stories, poems, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address correspon~
dence to the Review, St. John's College, P.O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD
21404-2800. Back issues are available, at $5.00 per issue, from the St.
John's College Bookstore.
©1998 St. John's College. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole or
in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
MarCia Baldwin and The St. fohns College Print Shop
��Contents
Essays and Lectures
Infinite Reflections
1
Peter Suber
Euripides among the Athenians .
61
Michael Davis
Ugolino's Tale: .
Eating the Flesh
83
Victor Lee Austin
The Comedy of Christian Existence:
On Kierkegaard' s Resolution of
Hegel's Paradox
97
Johann A. Klassen
Reviews
Making the Consititution
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
Robert A. Goldwin's From Parchment to Power
Murray Dry
�I
I
�i
~
Infinite Reflections
Peter Suber
Galileo' s Paradox
Here's a paradox of infinity noticed by Galileo in 1638. It seems
that the even numbers are as numerous as the evens and the odds
put together. Why? Because they can be put into one-to-one
correspondence. The evens and odds put together are called the
natural numbers. The first even number and the first natural
number can be paired; the second even and the second natural can
be paired, and so on. When two finite sets can be put into
one-to-one correspondence in this way, they always have the same
number of members.
Supporting this conclusion from another direction is our intuition that "infinity is infinity," or that all infinite sets are the same
size. If we can speak of infinite sets as having some number of
members, then this intuition tells us that all infinite sets have the
same number of members.
Galileo' s paradox is paradoxical because this intuitive view that
the two sets are the same size violates another intuition which is
just as strong. Clearly, the even numbers seem less numerous than
the natural numbers, half as numerous to be precise. Why? Because we can obtain the evens by starting with the naturals and
deleting every other member. Needless to say, when we delete
every other member of a finite set, the result is a set which is half
as numerous as the original set.
If the evens and the naturals were finite sets, then these two
verdicts would form a strict contradiction. If two finite sets can
be put into one-to-one correspondence, then they have the same
number of members; but if one can be produced by deleting every
other member of the other, then they do not have the same
Peter Suber is Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College.
�2
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
number of members and cannot be put into one-to-one correspondence. So do we have a strict contradiction here?
The evens and the naturals are not finite bur infinite sets. By
this I only mean that counting them one at a rime will never cqme
to the end; there is no greatest even number, and no greatest
natural number.
At this point let's intr6duce the technical term cardinality to refer
to the number of members in a set. For example, the set of fingers
on one hand has cardinality five. The set of faces on Mr. Rushmore
has cardinality four. The set of Stooges has cardinality three.
In the language of cardinality, we may say that any two sets that
can be pur into one-to-one correspondence are equal in cardinality;
they have the same number of members. This is easily verified for
finite sets, and we will regard it as the definition of equal magnitude
for infinite sets. Using the same language of cardinality, our intuition
has given us two additional propositions: (1) that all infinite sets are
equal in cardinality, 1 and (2) that if one set can be obtained by
deleting members of another, then they have unequal cardinalities.
The latter verdict can be paraphrased rhus: some infinite sets have a
larger cardinality than other infinite sets, or not all infinite sets are
equal in cardinality. Therefore, these two verdicts of intuition directly
contradict one another and cannot both be true.
Let us introduce one more technical term, our last for a long
rime. One set is a subset of a second set if all irs members belong to
the second set. It is a proper subset if all irs members belong to that
second set and if it omits or excludes some of the members of that
second set. The evens are a proper subset of the naturals because they
form a .subset of the naturals which omits some naturals, namely,
the odds. The set of Moe and Larry makes a proper subset of Stooges
because Moe and Larry are some bur not all the Stooges; they omit
a Stooge, namely, Curly. With this terminology, we can offer one
more paraphrase of the second verdict of intuition: a set must have
a larger cardinality than irs proper subsets.
If we add Curly to the set of Moe and Larry, then the set grows
in cardinality from two to three, What would happen if we added
�SUBER
3
the odd numbers to the set of the even numbers? Would the set
grow in cardinality, or would it retain the same cardinality as the
set of evens alone? This is the original question in a new form.
Thefirst verdict of intuition says no; all infinite sets are equal in
cardinality, so adding the evens to the odds would not increase
cardinality. The second verdict of intuition says yes, for this
verdict is just another way of saying that adding new members to
a given set, and especially adding an infinite number of new
members, will always increase cardinality.
So which verdict is correct? Before we answer this question,
note that we cannot have it both ways. Either all infinite sets are
equal in cardinality, or all infinite sets have a larger cardinality
than their proper subsets, but not both. Therefore, the truth on
this question will violate at least one of our intuitions. For my
purposes here, this lesson is at least as important as the mathematical details of the correct answer, for it implies that we should
not trust our intuitions in this domain, nor should we expect to
confirm mathematical results about infinity with our intuitions.
Some true results will violate our intuitions and some false results
will be ratified by them.
Now we can point out that both the verdicts ofintuition are false.
First, it is false that all infinite sets are equal in cardinality. We can
prove that some infinities are larger than others (for example, see
Theorems 3, 4, 5, and 16 in the Appendix). Second, it is false that
all sets have a larger cardinality than their proper subsets. We can
prove that some additions to a given set, even infinite additions, do
not increase the cardinality of the given set (for example, see
Theorems 1, 2, 7, 14, 15, 19, and 22 in the Appendix).
In his original statement of the paradox, Galileo did not use the
even numbers; he used the perfect squares, 0, 1, 4, 9, 16 .... 2 Like
the evens, this set is infinite and the set of its natural number
omissions is also infinite. But it seems much less likely than the
even numbers to equal the naturals in cardinality because, as we
move along the series of squares, the interval between members
becomes increasingly large. In fact, as we move outward the ratio
�4
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
of perfect squares to natural numbers approaches zero. The evens
never peter out, but the squares become infinitely sparse.
Nevertheless, we can put the natural numbers and the perfect
squares into one-to-one correspondence. Every distinct natural
number has a distinct perfect square; and every distinct square
number has a distinct natural number as its square root. Hence every
member of one sequence has a unique counterpart on the other,
and vice versa. (The same is true of the evens and the naturals.)
This fact is the key to the solution. If the two sets can be put into
one-to-one correspondence, then they have the same cardinality, by
definition. One intuition ratified this result (namely, that all infinite sets are equal in cardinality) and one opposed it (namely, that
all infinite sets have a greater cardinality than their proper subsets).
Both intuitions are false in general, but one was accidentally true in
this case. The lesson for intuition is: get used to it.
Galileo' s paradox is paradoxical only in the weak sense: it
violates our intuitions. It is not a contradiction. It is weird and
amazing; it is literally counterintuitive; bur it is not contradictory.
We were able to choose between the competing intuitions and
eliminate the appearance of contradiction once we held fast to the
definition of equal cardinality for infinite sets provided by the
principle of one-to-one correspondence.
This innovation is due to Georg Cantor, as is set theory itself,
the theory of infinite sets, and the modern concept of infinite
cardinality. Cantor lived from 1845 to 1918, and worked out his
theory of infinite sets from roughly 1870 to 1895. Cantor's verdict
is that the set of even numbers, the set of odd numbers, the set of
perfect squares, and the set of all the natural numbers have the
same cardinality. The key to this solution is simply to define equal
cardinality through one-to-one correspondence, and then to show
that these sets can be put into one-to-one correspondence with
one another. Similarly, we can prove that some infinite sets have
a larger cardinality than others by showing that they cannot be
put into one-to-one correspondence.
�SUBER
5
You may know that many mathematicians and philosophers
have objected to the very idea of a completed or actual infinity, as
opposed to a potential infinity. Cantor's mathematics, however,
boldly posits complete infinities. The natural numbers make a
potential infinity when we think of counting them out, and never
coming to an end; we could always add one more and keep going.
They constitute a completed or actual infinity when they are all
bundled together and said to form a set of some definite cardinality. Cantor not only flew in the face of the traditional objection
to completed infinities, he used completed infinities in the form
of infinite sets as an intrinsic part of his solution to the classical
paradoxes of the infinite.
There are many other classical paradoxes of the infinite. But
Galileo' s is enough to get us started. The infinite has been a
perennial source of mathematical and philosophical wonder, in part
because of its enormity-anything that large is grand, and provokes
awe and contemplation-and in part because of the paradoxes like
Galileo's. Infinity seems impossible to tame intellectually, and to
bring within the confines of human understanding. I will argue,
however, that Cantor has tamed it. The good news is that Cantor's
mathematics makes infinity clear and consistent but does nothing
to reduce the awe-inspiring grandeur of it.
I'll offer reflections on just a handful of the specific questions
mathematicians and philosophers have asked about infinity over
the centuries. Has modern mathematics allowed us to speak
coherently of "complete" or "actual" infinities, as opposed to
merely "potential" ones? Is the very idea of an infinite set (which
can be put into one-to-one correspondence with some of its proper
subsets) self-contradictory? Can infinite collections can be "imagined" or only "conceived" or not even that? Do we have an idea
of infinity or only the idea of finitude and its negation? I will
discuss how we go about "unlearning" some intuitions, cultivated
in our experience of the finite, which make some consistent and
demonstrable results about the infinite literally counterintuitive.
Finally, I will examine why the deep explorers of the infinite, even
�6
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
in its strictly mathematical forms, recurringly find it to be (in
Kant's term) sublime.
If I could presuppose that all of you knew the basic theorems
of Cantor's transfinite arithmetic, then this essay could either be
shorter or' deeper or both. But I don't want to spend my time
summarizing them for you in place of the fascinating philosophy
that reflects upon them,; My solution is to summarize only a few
of the mathematical proofs about infinite sets, and otherwise to
refer to the basic theorems without proof. I will will leave in an
appendix all the theorems I cite and their proofs.
Contradictory or Counterintuitive?
Cantor forces us to see that the intuitive notion of a set's size is
ambiguous. When we say that one set is smaller than another set,
we might mean two distinctly different things. First, we might mean
that the "smaller" set is a proper subset of the "larger" set. Second,
we might mean that one set has a smaller cardinality than the other
set in the sense that one-to-one correspondence between them fails.
These two notions of size are distinct and independent. A set
may be smaller than another set by one measure and not smaller
by the other measure. Galileo' s paradox is a perfect illustration.
The set of perfect squares is a proper subset of the set of natural
numbers; in that sense it is a "smaller'' set. However, the two sets
can be put into one-to-one correspondence; in that sense, it's not
smaller at all but the same "size."
With finite sets, these two notions of size always and necessarily
agree; that may be why they are so easy to confuse with one
another when we are dealing with infinite sets. I believe that all
the classical paradoxes of the infinite rest on just this confusion
of the two notions ~fa set's size, a symptom of the unwarranted
eJ<pectation that infinite magnitudes should behave like finite
magnitudes. The classical paradoxes set up two infinite sets which
are unequal by one test, but equal by the other, and present this
counterintuitive but consistent possibility as a contradiction or
impossibility. The classical objections to completed infinities3 rest
�SUBER
7
on the same confusion. Those who argued that completed infinities are self-contradictory appeal to the apparent contradictions
contained in the classical paradoxes like Galileo' s. When we
recognize the two distinct and compatible notions of size which
are at work in these paradoxes, then, we show that the apparent
contradiction is not a real one, we dissolve the paradox, and we
answer the objections based on it against completed infinities.
To repeat, then, for the sake of explicitness: Cantor's solution
to Galileo' s paradox is that the set of perfect squares and the set
of natural numbers have the same cardinality even though one of
these sets is a proper subset of the other.
It follows-have courage!-that some infinite sets can be put
into one-to-one correspondence with proper subsets of themselves. This can never happen with finite sets. But it happens, for
example, with the natural numbers and its proper subset, the even
natural numbers, and again with the natural numbers and its
proper subset, the perfect squares.
The very idea that a set can be put into one-to-one correspondence with one of its proper subsets is deeply counterintuitive. If
you're feeling a barrier of resistance, this is probably the cause.
For example, an infinite set with this property will not grow in
cardinality as we add members to it, one at a time (see Theorem
7 in the Appendix), and will not shrink in cardinality as we
subtract members from it, one at a time (see Theorems 8 and 9 in
the Appendix).
For the sake of future discussion, let us say that a set that can
be put into one-to-one correspondence with at least one of its
proper subsets is self-nesting. (Unfortunately, mathematicians
have given no name to this property, so I have to invent one.)
Self-nesting sets seemed impossible or contradictory as soon as
they were conceived. In the sixth century, John Philoponous of
Alexandria argued that if the world were infinitely old, then an
infinite number of months would have passed. But thirty times as
many days would also have passed. But either the infinite number
of months and the infinite number of days are equal or unequal.
�8
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
If equal, then in our terms the infinite set of past days is self-nesting and can be put into one-to-one correspondence with its proper
subset, the infinite set of past months. If unequal, then there
would be· infinities of different sizes. Because Philoponous
thought both options contradictory, he concluded that the world
must be finitely old. 4
Cantor's theory faced,intense opposition in the late 19th century,
from mathematicians as well as from philosophers and theologians.
It wasn't just denied and disbelieved; it was hated. Yet despite this
heat, no opponent of the theory has been able to show that selfnesting is contradictory for infinite sets. The objections that selfnesting is contradictory for finite sets, or counterintuitive for
infinite sets, are clearly beside the point. Today, Cantor's theory is
standard mathematics even though there are still a few holdouts.
Beyond consistency, it has the virtue of eliminating the apparent
contradiction from puzzles like Galileo's paradox.
When a theory with these virtues is opposed by intuition, the
remedy is not to deny the theory but to unlearn our old intuitions.5 In the task of re-educating our intuitions, I've found three
·
strategies to be helpful.
First, study the proofs for the basic mathematical results. When
your intuition is opposed only by someone' s say-so, like mine or
a teacher's, then intuition can easily win-and perhaps in that
case, it ought to win. When it is opposed by an articulate chain
of reasoning, then it starts to give-and it ought to give.
Second, remember that our intuitions were cultivated by our
experience of finite sets: sets of fingers, sets of coins, sets of people.
And for finite sets, self-nesting is a flat contradiction. When we
deal with infinite sets, we must accept the fact that most of our
"common sense" or "rules of thumb" will either be inapplicable
or false, evolving as they did for the more tractable domains of
finite experience. This is not a license to disregard or negate our
intuitions, which are often valuable clues to mathematically coherent theories. It is simply a reason to put them to one side when
�SUBER
9
they conflict with a consistent theory supported by strong proofs
which solves otherwise insoluble mathematical problems.
In the same vein, it is helpful to remember past cases in the
history of mathematics in which we mistook counterintuitive
ideas for contradictory ones. The preeminent examples are incommensurable quantities and instantaneous velocities; however, we
could also cite negative numbers, the denial of Euclid's parallel
postulate, and, more recently, incomputable numerical functions.
With the passage of time, the acceptance and utility of these ideas
have only increased, and their consistency has been more firmly
and clearly recognized, while the opposing intuitions have faded
away with the world-views which cultivated them.
Third, remember that our intuitions would not be satisfied any
better by rejecting Cantor's self-nesting solution to Galileo's
paradox. If we didn't accept Cantor's view that Galileo's two sets
had the same cardinality, then we'd have to accept the view that
they had unequal cardinalities. But this result would contradict
the intuitive principle that one-to-one correspondence establishes
equal cardinality. When we are at an impasse for intuition, then
intuition is no longer a helpful guide, since it pulls as much (or
as little) for one side as for the other. That is when we should be
looking for another guide, not clinging to the guide which has
disqualified itself.
Imagination v. Conception
We've seen that intuition disqualifies itself in this domain by
endorsing contradictory conclusions. Cantor's conclusions are rigorously proved, and so far (despite some strenuously motivated
effort), rigorous proof has not endorsed contradictory conclusions
about the infinite. This is one good reason to prefer proof to
intuition. The distinction between intuition and proof as reasons
for accepting a theory, and the inadequacy of intuition for dealing
with the infinite, ·have many consequences for the philosophy and
mathematics of the infinite. For example, even after acknowledging
the consistency of Cantor's theory, many people will still insist that
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
we know nothing about infinity. What they seem to mean is that
knowing requires some intuition, imagination, or visualization.
I think I understand the origin of this objection, but I also
believe it is easily answered. Just as our intuitions about sets,
subsets, and cardinality are cultivated by finite sets, where selfnesting is impossible, our ordinary knowledge of objects is limited
to finite numbers of objects of finite size. (In a moment I will look
at the question whether we ever experience anything that is truly
infinite.) We can vis.ualize objects of finite size and we can
visualize finite numbers of them. This means that virtually all of
our ordinary knowledge of objects is accompanied by this possibility of visualization. It's natural that we would come to expect
that anything we can know, we can also visualize.
Even if this expectation is legitimate for the finite, it is entirely
illegitimate for the infinite. Just as intuitions cultivated for the
finite are likely to be inapplicable or false of the infinite, so is the
expectation that we be able to visualize.
Descartes asks us to imagine, that is, visualize, a chiliagon or
1 ,000-sided regular polygon. 6 Can you do it? Try it right now.
Chances are, you are either visualizing something like a· 20-or
30-sided polygon and pretending it has 1,000 sides, or you are
visualizing a circle and pretending the sides are too small to see
with your mind's eye. We know exactly what a chiliagon is; we
can even compute the interior angle of its sides and, for a given
edge, its area and perimeter. But we cannot visualize one.
One reason I like Descartes's example is that it is finite. Philosophers who think the infinite utterly beyond human understanding often fail to notice that their arguments, once made
specific, also apply to very large finite magnitudes as well. We
cannot visualize infinitely many cherries in a tree, but neither can
we visualize a billion. Does that disqualify us from using billions
intelligibly and accurately?
To Descartes, the chiliagon thought-experiment proved that we
have at least two avenues to knowledge: imagination (which I've
been calling visualization) and conception. We can conceive the
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chiliagon, although we cannot imagine it. Once it is pointed out
with a concrete example like the chiliagon, this is undeniable and
we start to see other examples everywhere. To Descartes, the
distinction is more important in theology than in mathematics.
The greatest obstacle to true faith, he thinks, is the attempt to
imagine God when we can only conceive God.?
Let me return to set theory. The power s;t of a given set is the
set of all its subsets. For example, ifi have a set of Three Stooges,
then its power set is the set of all the subsets of Stooges I can make
from that set of three. There is the set {Moe, Curly}, the set {Moe,
Larry}, and the set {Curly, Larry}. There is also the set of {Moe}
alone, {Curly} alone, and of {Larry} alone. For technical reasons,
we say that every set is a subset of itself, and the null set is a subset
of every set. Hence we throw in {Moe, Curly, Larry} and {} to
boot. This makes eight. Any set of three objects-any set with a
cardinality of three-will have a power set of cardinality eight.
We can imagine-visualize-ma~y methods for systematically
drawing out all the subsets of a given finite set. These methods will
be extremely cumbersome for sets of cardinality 1,000, say, but each
method contains an algorithm that we can visualize working out.
Contemplate the set of natural numbers. Here is a set of infinite
cardinality. What is the cardinality of its power set?
We saw that the evens had the same cardinality as the naturals,
despite appearances to the contrary. We might cautiously generalize that all infinite sets have the same cardinality, but here we
find a counter-example. Cantor found an elegant proof that the
power set of any set, finite or infinite, possesses a greater cardinality than the original set; this important result is simply called
Cantor's Theorem.
It has a short proof of marvelous beauty. The proof is negative,
which means that Cantor assumed the negation of his conclusion
and derived a contradiction from it. Since the theorem works for
any arbitrary set, let's apply it to the set of natural numbers. So,
to set up the negative proof, let us assume that the set of natural
numbers and its power set have the same cardinality. If so, then
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
they can be put into one-to-one correspondence. Let us suppose
we have done so (even though we have no idea how to do so).
Now, by hypothesis, each natural number is paired with exactly
one set of natural numbers, and vice versa. Some numbers will be
paired with sets which happen to contain them. For example, 2
might be paired with the set of even numbers. Let us call such
numbers happy, and all other numbers sad. Now the set of all sad
numbers is a bona fide set of natural numbers, and so has been
paired with some natural number in our infinite list of correspondences. Let's say it has been paired with x. Is x a happy number
or a sad one? At this point, I know you'll start to get a little dizzy.
That's good; it means you're following along. If x is sad, then
because it has been paired with the set of sad numbers, it has been
paired with set that includes it; but that means it would be happy.
But if x is happy, then it would be a member of the set to which
it has been paired; but because it has been paired with the set of
sad numbers, that means it would be sad. Hence, if x is happy,
then x would be sad, and if xis sad, then x would be happy. Our
assumption implied this contradiction, and so must be false. But
to deny our assumption is to conclude that the set of natural
numbers and its power set have different cardinalities. (See Theorem 4 in the Appendix.)
In my view, there are two great counterintuitive results in the
mathematics of the infinite. The first is that some infinite sets are
self-nesting. (It turns out that all are; see Theorem 10 in the
Appendix.) The second is that some infinities are larger-have a
greater cardinality-than others. (See Theorems 3, 4, 5, and 16
in the Appendix.) Now we have seen proofs for both results. The
first was proved by one-to-one correspondence, the second by a
technique that has been called diagonalization.
Cantor's Theorem is not very remarkable if we think only of
finite sets. Ofcourse for every finite set the power set is bigger than
the original. But for infinite sets Cantor's Theorem is the astounding proposition that for every infinite cardinality, there is a larger
one-namely, the power set of the first one. So if the cardinality
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of the set of natural numbers is one infinite number, and the
cardinality of its power set is a distinct, larger infinite number,
and the cardinality of its power set is a distinct, larger infinite
number, then it's clear that what Cantor has really proved is that
there exists an infinite sequence of infinite cardinal numbers.
Of this remarkable theorem and its remarkable proof, David
Hilbert said, "This appears to me to be the most admirable flower
of the mathematical intellect and one of the highest achievements
of purely rational human activity."
Infinity as a Positive Idea
Let us grant, then, that imagination and intuition are too feeble
to grasp infinity. It does not yet follow that conception is strong
enough, or indeed that any human faculty is strong enough. We
might understand infinity the way medieval Christian philosophers thought we understood God: via negativa, that is, by understanding what God, or infinity, is not. For example, I know what
it is like for a row of trees to come to an end. This exemplifies my
concept of finitude. Ifi say that an infinite row of trees is just like
the finite row "except that it never comes to an end," then I am
merely negating my concept of finitude.
Descartes, again, thought we did have a positive idea of infinity-three centuries before Cantor. This was important to him
because he thought that finite human resources could not suffice
to give us the idea of infinity, and therefore that the idea could
only have been given to us by an infinite being; in short, it was
part of another of his arguments for the existence of God. 8 He has
two theses here: first, that we do possess a positive idea of infinity,
and second, that we could not have obtained this idea from our
own finite experience or creativity. If both are true, this would be
important for just the reason he thought. But are they both true?
In a moment I will take up the question whether we ever
experience anything infinite. On the question whether we know
infinity positively, or just via negativa, Descartes is very short. He
argues that he would not know that he is finite or imperfect unless
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
he had prior, positive ideas of infinity and perfection.9 There are
many follow-up questions a skeptic would like to ask at this point,
but Descartes does not pause for them.
Descartes does pause to ask himself the question: Is it possible
that I am an infinite being, don't know it, and could therefore be
the source of my idea of infinity? 10 Although this is a terribly
interesting and important question, he is also very short with it.
After a brief!ook, he answers like Steve Martin in a Saturday Night
Live routine, "Naaaa!'
Etymologically, the word "infinite" is "non-finite." This supports that view that perhaps finitude is the primary notion here
and our concept of infinity is the negation of our concept of
finitude. But we can't get any mileage from etymologies in this
inquiry. Etymologically, the word "independent" is "non-dependent" as if unfreedom were the primary concept and freedom
derivative. But the word "unfreedom" is "non-freedom" as if
freedom were the primary concept after all. Similarly, the continuum is one of the premier examples of infinity in mathematics,
but it differs from other infinities like the rational number series
in being "unbroken" or "without gaps." This suggests that we only
know the continuum via negativa, by negating the idea of gaps;
but etymologically the terms "continuous" and "discontinuous"
suggest the opposite, that continuity is the primary concept here.
More telling than etymology is this exercise: define finitude. I
often teach a course at Earlham with a unit on the mathematics
of infinity, and every now and then I'll throw "finitude" or "finite
set" onto a quiz, as a term to define. Invariably, students lose more
points trying to define it precisely than they do when defining
various infinite cardinalities.
Do try this one at home, however. Define finitude with clarity
and precision. There are ways, even brief ways, but they usually
don't occur to people with no training in mathematics.
Infinity, by contrast, at least since Cantor, is easy to define with
clarity and precision. Remember that Cantor proved that some
infinite sets are self-nestin~, or can be put into one-to-one corre-
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spondence with at least one of their proper subsets. It's not hard
to prove that all infinite sets, in fact, are self-nesting. (See Theorem 10 in the Appendix.) And we already knew that only infinite
sets are self-nesting, or that no finite sets have this property.
Consequently, we can define infinite sets as just those which are
self-nesting. Correspondingly, we can define finite sets as just
those which are not.
Note the neat turning of tables here. Infinite sets have the
positive property of self-nesting; finite sets do not. Finitude is
defined via negativa. 11
Charles Peirce, in 1885, and Richard Dedekind, in 1888,
proposed to define infinity through self-nesting. 12 According to
this proposal, we don't know that infinite sets are self-nesting
because of some proof; we know it because infinite sets are defined
as those which are self-nesting. However, we tan prove that the
Peirce-Dedekind definition is equivalent to a more traditional one
by which we know infinitude rather than finitude via negativa, l3
and for me that fact makes the controversy about logical priority
or primacy merely scholastic.
What is not merely scholastic is that we have now reduced the
question whether we have a positive idea of infinity to the question
whether we have a positive idea of self-nesting. I suggest that we
do have such an idea, or can, if we study Cantor's transfinite
arithmetic. In my own experience, to understand self-nesting at
all is to understand it positively. I'm quite sure I don'tunderstand
it via negativa or as the negation of something else like "the failure
or impossibility of self-nesting." The failure or impossibility of
self-nesting definitely carries for me the status of a derivative idea,
one that never comes to mind when I think about self-nesting
unless I make a great effort.14
I realize that my reason derives from my experience putting sets
into one-to-one correspondence with proper subsets of themselves, and studying the works of others who have done the same;
therefore it begs the question somewhat. I'm saying that if you
study the mathematics of infinite sets, this positive idea will come,
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
although perhaps not quickly or in a form you could communicate
easily to those who have not undertaken a similar study. But if
you haven't studied Cantor this looks like hand-waving. I know
that cultists of every stripe say virtually the same thing: study' the
book of our inspirational founder and you too will see the light,
and until then shut up with your criticisms.
So let me try to do,·better. I think I can show that we have a
positive idea of infinity, in the form of self-nesting, and even that
self-nesting can be made somewhat intuitive or visualizable. I owe
the following idea to Josiah Royce, !5 one of the first philosophers
to make use of Cantor's mathematics. Imagine a perfect map of
England, say, somewhere in London. By a "perfect" map I mean
one which shows not only the cities and roads, but also the houses,
furniture, pennies behind the sofa cushions, bacteria, quarks-in
fact, every last particle of matter. Now if the map is perfect in this
sense, and if it is located in London, then somewhere on the map
there will be a perfect image of the map itself. Again, by "perfect ·
image" I mean that every detail of the outer map will appear on
the inner map. But if this is true, then like a hall of mirrors the
map within the map will also contain a perfect image of the map,
and so on ad infinitum.
To use Royce's term, the map will be self-representing. Of course
we can't actually make such a map, and it is useful to think of the
reasons why. One obstacle in our way is the fact that the pixels we
must use are larger than the smallest particles of matter we wish
to represent. It may seem that this fact would not stop us from
making a perfect map of England, but only require that the map
be larger than England. But if the map were larger than England,
then it could not be located inside England, and therefore could
not be self-representing or "perfect" in our sense.
Another obstacle in our way is that we can only arrange a finite
number of pixels to make a picture. Such a 'finitist' map could be
self-representing only imperfectly; if it didn't represent London
as a mere dot, it would represent the map within London as a mere
dot, or the map within the map within London. With only a finite
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number of pixels to use in composing our picture, we will inevitably run out of pixels before we run out of information. This
would not be a problem with an ordinary or non-self-representing
map. If we had as many pixels at our disposal as there are quarks
in England, then we could (in principle) arrange them to make a
perfect map of England down to the quark level-even if the
resulting map were larger than England. But once the map itself
is put inside England and becomes one of the landmarks to
represent on the map, then to be perfoct the map would have to
be perfectly self-representing and therefore infinitely nested; suddenly the number of pixels needed rises from finite to infinite.
Now what if we could make a picture using dimensionless
points as pixels, and use an infinite number of them? It is strange
and wonderful that Leibniz posits just these two conditions in the
Monadology (1714). In that work he outlines a new atomic theory
in which conventional atoms are replaced by monads, "the true
atoms of nature."l6 Monads differ from conventional atoms in
many ways, but the most important for our purposes is that they
have zero size. They are dimensionless points. And of course there
are infinitely many of them. This allows a set of monads to
represent England perfectly even if there are infinitely many
particles smaller than quarks which would have to appear on the
map. It also means that in Leibniz' s world it is physically possible
for some chunk of matter to achieve perfect self-representation,
the way England does in Royce's scenario. It might contain within
itself a perfect representation of itself, and hence an infinite series
of nested microcosms. But it might do better still: it might be a
perfect representation of the universe as a whole, including itself
as. one of the parts, and therefore contain infinitely many nested
perfect representations of itself and the universe. Leibniz thought
this was not only possible, but that every chunk of matter of every
size is a perfect mirror of the universe, of itself, and of all the other
perfect mirrors, in just this wayY
You don't have to agree with Leibniz that the world is really set
up this way-however, if truth is beauty, and beaury truth, then
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
there is a lot to be said for the idea. You only have to admit that
you grasp his theory, or Royce' s. 18 If you do, then you grasp the
essence of self-nesting, which is the essence of infinite cardinality.
You need no longer approach it via negativa.19
Do We Experience Anything Infinite?
So we agree with Ddscartes that we do possess a positive idea
of infinity. If Descartes is correct in his second thesis that we could
not have obtained the idea from our finite experience and creative
resources, then we feel the pressure he felt to posit an infinite
being. So let us face directly the question whether we experience
anything infinite.
The words "infinite" and "infinity" are often used loosely in
street English to suggest that we do experience infinites. For
example, we may say that a film is infinitely clever, a coral reef has
an infinite variety of wildlife, a spouse has infinite patience, or
that a vinyl upholstery cleaner has infinitely many applications.
(That's why it's called a miracle product.) Before cameras were
automated, they had a focal-length setting called "infinity," presumably for photographing the arrow Lucretius shot into the edge
of space. In these cases we speak loosely, and "infinity" means very
many or very large, perhaps indefinitely many or large. 20 On a
clear day the sky may seem infinitely deep, but it's really just a
wild blue yonder-an indefinitely deep "out there." 21
Do we ever experience something which is literally infinite? If
time, space, or matter are infinitely divisible, then to experience
a finite chunk of any one of them is to experience its infinity of
parts. Having said this, I would like to put to one side the question
whether time, space, or matter really are infinitely divisible. Not
only is it very thorny, it is unnecessary to answer the question on
the table. For even if time, space, and matter are infinitely divisible, we experience their infinite parts bundled into chunks most
of whose parts are indiscernible to us. When a movie runs at 24
frames p~r second, it appears continuous, its separate frames
indiscernible to us. We certainly experience 24 chunked frames,
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but not the 24-ness, or even the finitude, of the chunking. Once
the eye is fooled into seeing continuity, the number of frames per
second could increase to a billion, or to an infinite number, and
we would not notice the difference. 22 This is the sense in which
we could experience something infinite without experiencing its
infinitude. Similarly, if time, space, and matter were continuous
and infinitely divisible, ,then the spectacle of life would be like a
movie run at an (uncountably) infinite number of frames per
second; but while we would experience expanses, durations, and
objects with infinitely many parts, but we would not experience
the infinitude of those parts.
As the movie shows, the same is true offinite divisibility. If my
car has (say) 5,000 parts, I experience it as an object with many
parts; but I don't experience the 5,000-ness of the parts.
Motion seems to introduce new issues. If I open a pair of
scissors and close them again, then the blades produce an infinite
number of different angles, and in a sense I saw them all. But when
we think about it we realize the we are dealing with the same issues
all over again. First, an infinite number of distinct angles is
produced only if time and space are both continuous; if either one
is composed of irreducible quanta, then only a finite number of
angles is produced. Second, even if time and space are continuous,
and the angles infinite, we don't experience the infinitude of the
angles. This is shown by the fact that we cannot tell from the
experiment whether time and space are continuous; that is, we
cannot tell whether we saw an infinite or merely a huge finite
number of distinct angles.
Similarly, if space is continuous, then walking any distance at
all is to traverse an infinity of spatial units. Or if time is continuous, then it is to traverse an infinity of temporal units. But even
if so, we only experience the chunked, finite meter we traversed,
in the chunked finite second, not the infinitude of dimensionless
points inside them.23
When Descartes said we experience nothing infinite, I think he
meant that we see nothing infinite in any given scene, and nothing
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
infinite in a lifetime of scenes. But how do we know this? Because
we only live a finite time? Actually, it depends on how you count.
If you count in years or months or days or seconds, then yes, the
duration of our lives spans only a finite number of those units.
But if we divide time into dimensionless points, such as points on
a time line, then we live an infinite number of them-and we
would still do so even if we lived for only one second.
The same holds spatially within a given scene. Whether a scene
is finite depends on how we divide it. No panorama covers an
infinite number of miles or meters or nanometers. But every scene,
even a pinhead, covers an infinite number of dimensionless points
of space. Hamlet was thinking of something else at the time, but
he made this point very well when he said, "0 God, I could be
bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space .... " 2 4
Still, while the spatial points would be infinite, our experience
would never notice or recognize their infinitude.
Past time might be infinite. But even if it is, living in the present
would be like treading water over an infinite depth. We would not
experience the infinitude except in the form of buoyancy-which
could, of course, have a finite explanation. The time in which we
exist may rest upon, and be continuous with, an infinite prior
time, but we will never know whether this is so simply from our
experience of present time.
Performing an infinite number of tasks in finite time has always
been a mathematician's dream. If I could count one· number in
half a second, the next number in the next quarter second, the
next number in the next eighth of a second, and so on, then I
could count an infinite number of numbers in one second flat. So
far nobody has managed to pull this off. However, a mathematician at Bell Labs, named Peter Schor, has come close by showing
that the kind of parallelism possible on a quantum computer is
indefinitely large if not infinite.25 We could in effect perform an
infinite number of simultaneous computations using only finite
hardware, allowing us to compute otherwise intractable functions.
Schor proved that quantum indeterminacy makes this kind of
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parallelism mathematically possible; but notably, it has not yet
been realized in a physical machine.
An analog signal as opposed to a digital signal contains an
infinite amount of information. But when we make an audio
recording of a single piano keystroke, the digital nature of the
molecules of air carrying the waves, and the digital nature of the
molecules of the magnetic coating on the tape, mean that we can
preserve and send to the ear only a finite subset of the information
which the keystroke would have registered in a continuous medium. 26 And even if we could hear the note played back after being
perfectly recorded in a continuous medium, we would at best hear
an analog signal with an infinite amount of information in it; we
would not experience the infinitude of that information.
This is precisely why Leibniz posits a continuous medium (a
plenum of monads) rather than discrete molecular air to mediate
causal influences like the propagation of sound waves.27 Leibniz
thinks we are continuously bombarded by an infinite amount of
information from the universe at large, and that we register all of
it, although not all of it consciously. This is his famous doctrine
of minute perceptions.28 Without going into its details here, we
can at least see that it unabashedly implies that we do experience
something infinite; in fact, we do so continuously.
Until we got to Leibniz, there was a pattern in these examples.
There are several ways in which the objects or theaters of our
experience might be infinite. But we can't tell from our experience
whether they are or are not infinite, and this means at the very
least that we don't experience their infinitude. By positing minute
perceptions, Leibniz posits the experience of infinitely faint influences. He admits, even insists, that not all of these experiences are
conscious, 2 9 but likewise insists that without them conscious
experiences would not exist, just as finite line segments would not
exist without their constitutive dimensionless points.
Elegance is the chief reason to believe Leibniz's theory. After
positing an infinite number of infinitesimal monads a priori,
Leibniz surprises us by making the theory remarkably subtle and
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
adept at explaining the world and experience. If Kant is right,
however, we should hesitate to affirm or deny infinities a priori.
In Kant's diagnosis, Leibniz fell victim to a natural, even
rational temptation. It's extremely tempting to think that time,
space, and matter really are, in themselves, apart from the limitations on human knowledge, either infinitely divisible or finitely
divisible. We may not,know which one they are, and we might
not perceive their internal infinitude if they are infinitely divisible,
but they must really be one way or the other. Kant argued that
this is a mistake; in fact, this assumption leads to a special kind of
contradiction which he called an antinomy,3° It also leads to
contradiction or antinomy to assume that past time is really either
infinite or finite, or that space is really either infinite or finite.3 1
There are two reasons, briefly, why these assumptions lead to
contradiction: first, they treat the world as a thing in itself, rather
than as a phenomenon partly constituted by the act of knowing
it; second, they are a priori claims, based on no empirical evidence,
and the opposite a priori claims are equally compelling to reason.
Kant concludes that to avoid these contradictions, we must regard
the extent of space, the depth of past time, and the divisibility of
time, space, and matter as indeterminate. We know them as far as
we have inquired into them, and tomorrow we may know more.
We must speak of the world (time, space, matter) as growing in
extent, duration, and divisibility as we find it to be larger, older,
or finer; to say that the world consists of something in and of itself
which fixes its size, age, and ultimate particles is a demand of
reason but ultimately a contradictory one. This is one place where
reason must be reined in, disciplined, or subject to critique.
What follows from all this is, for Kant, the strange-sounding
doctrine that in its spatial extent, temporal duration, and material
divisibility, the world is neither finite nor infinite.3 2
For myself, I find that I am attracted to the view that time and
space are continuous; at the same time I suspect that the question
whether time and space are continuous cannot be settled empirically. When I am inclined to soar in the sky of unfettered conjec-
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ture, I am attracted by the elegance of Leibniz' s theory of minute
perceptions, which arguably follows from the view that time,
space, and matter are continuous; when I am inclined to discipline
my conjectures and hold them inside the bounds of verification,
I heed Kant's admonition. I'm no closer to a resolution than this.
So if we have a positive idea of the infinite, how do we obtain
this idea? We make this question harder to answer, not easier, if we
say that the world is neither finite nor infinite, or that if it is infinite,
then w<:: do not experience its infinitude. My disappointing, pedestrian answer is that we may not possess the positive idea of infinitude
until we study self-nesting, and during that study, we get the
positive idea of infinitude from the exercise of putting an infinite
set into one-to-one correspondence with one of its proper subsets.
This exercise, I should add, is a finite experience. We take the first
few even numbers, 2, 4, 6 ... for example, and pair them off against
the first few natural numbers, 1, 2, 3 .... We know that each
sequence is rule-governed, because we know exactly how to generate
the next member of each. Hence, we know that the nth member of
one sequence will have a partner in the nth member of the other,
no matter how large n is, or no matter how far, out we take the
sequences. This is the finitistic way to put infinite sets into one-toone correspondence. But if one set is the proper subset of the other,
then we have established self-nesting, which is impossible for finite
sets. Until we undertake this exercise, and think about what it
means, our notion of the infinite may well be nothing more than
the negation of the idea of finitude.
While we do not experience the infinitude of time, space, or
matter, even if they are infinite in extent or divisibility, neither
do we experience large finite magnitudes. I've seen estimates of
the number of sub-atomic particles in the universe which range
from 1065 to 10 8 5. But to be conservative, let's say that nothing
in the universe, including the universe itself, has more than 10100
parts. The name for 10 100, or 1 followed by 100 zeroes, is a googol.
So even if there are more than googol of ultimate particles, it's fair
to say that no collection of physical objects that we have ever
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THE ST. JOHN"S REVIEW
experienced-grains of sand on a beach, snowflakes in a storm,
stars in the sky-has more than a googol of members.33 If true,
then we did not obtain our idea of a googol from experience. But
it does not follow that we must posit a very large finite being-Googolzilla-to be the source of our idea. We know exactly
what a googol is as a concept, even if we have never experienced
it manifest in a sensatidn or image. We can list the million natural
numbers which are its closest neighbors, we can do arithmetic
with it, and we know infallibly whether an arbitrary natural
number is larger or smaller than it. If we may export the lesson of
this to the infinite, then we may suggest that while we have no
experience of the infinitude of anything, we have a perfectly good
concept of infinity, and that the ultimate explanation of this fact
lies not so much in anything special about infinity as in the
distinction between concepts and images.
The Sublimiry of the Infinite
I am profoundly grateful that understanding infinity does not
deprive it of its majesty. If the infinite were only interesting
because of the paradoxes it generates, and the absorbing academic
issues raised by the need to resolve them, then it would not be
studied any more than self-reference, a prolific but more pedestrian engine of paradox. But the infinite is also majestic, one might
say infinitely majestic.
An hour under a clear sky at night, looking up, gives some sense
of this. The depth of space is a wild blue yonder, not a true,
perceived infinity. 34 But it inspires contemplation of the true
infinite, and the slightest brush with that idea is breathtaking,
invigorating, expanding, lifting, calming, and also agitating, alluring, and also distant and magnificently indifferent. One reason to
study mathematics is that you can get these feelings in broad
daylight or indoors.
There are many ways to become precise about these feelings,
and many ways to praise al)d honor the infinite. I'd like to use
Kant's term: it is sublime.35
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25
Just for comparison, Cantor had a different set of numinous
feelings about the infinite. He was not only a great mathematician,
but a very religious man and by some standards a mystic. Yet his
mysticism was supported by his mathematics, which to him was
at least as strong an argument for the mathematics as for the
mysticism.36 Apart from claiming divine inspiration for his work,
we don't know exactly what spiritual views he linked to his
mathematics, but his theorems37 give support to the following.
Measured in meters, we are tiny specks compared to the universe
at large. But measured in dimensionless points, we are as large as
the universe: a proper subset, but one with the same cardinality
as the whole. Similarly, measured in meters, we may be off in a
corner of the universe. But measured in points, the distance is
equally great in all directions, whether universe is finite or infinite;
that puts us in the center, wherever we are. Measured in days, our
lives are insignificant hiccups in the expanse of past and future
time. But measured in points of time, our lives are as long as
universe is old. We are as small as we seem, but simultaneously,
by a most reasonable measure, coextensive with the totality of
being in both space and time. This is truly (as Blake put it) "[t]o
see the world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold
infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour."3 8
Kant's theory of the sublime does not rest on these Cantorian
theorems. His chief thesis for our purposes is that, "That is sublime
in comparison with which everything else is small. "3 9 Clearly the
infinitely large is a perfect fit for this definition.4D
The sublime is not an easy notion, and the best approach to it
may be via negativa, showing how it differs from something
familiar, the beautiful. Sticking only to those differences which
bear most on the sublimity of the infinite, Kant says that the
beautiful concerns a bounded object while the sublime object can
be unbounded; the beautiful is compatible with charms while the
sublime is not; the beautiful attracts the mind while the sublime
both attracts and repels it; and the beautiful "seems as it were
predetermined for our power of judgment" while the sublime is
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
"incommensurate with our power of exhibition, and as it were
violent to our imagination, and yet we judge it all the more
sublime for th:at,"41
The infinitely large meets these criteria almost by design. The
infinitely large is unbounded, incommensurate with our powers of
imagination, and to engage and satisfY us it no more needs charm
than spring water needs sugar. It is so large that some of its proper
subsets are just as large, a property shared by no finite magnitude.
What triggers the feeling of the sublime most is immensity.
Immensity in turn makes us feel a tension between two aspects of
ourselves. On the one hand it makes us feel the inadequacy of our
senses and imagination. On the other it makes us feel that there
is more to us than senses and imagination, whose adequacy cannot
be brought into question by immensity, no matter how spectacular or infinite. This second dimension of ourselves is not conception but moral vocation. While physically the immensity dwarfs
us into insignificance, this very fact highlights that within us
which is not dwarfed. As long as we are physically safe when
viewing the sublime immensity, Kant argues, it helps us know our
moral dignity and nonphysical invulnerability undiminished,
even accentuated, by our forceful acknowledgement of our physical smallness and frailty.42
Conclusion
Properly understood, the idea of a completed infinity is no
longer a problem in mathematics or philosophy. It is perfectly
intelligible and coherent. Perhaps it cannot be imagined but it can
be conceived; it is not reserved for infinite omniscience, but knowable by finite humanity; it may contradict intuition, but it does not
contradict itself. To conceive it adequately we need not enumerate
or visualize infinitely many objects, but merely understand selfnesting. We have an actual, positive idea of it, or at least with
training we can have one; we are not limited to the idea of finitude
and its negation. In fact, it is at least as plausible to think that we
understand finitude as the negation of infinitude as the other way
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27
around. The world of the infinite is not barred to exploration by
the equivalent of s,ea monsters and tempests; it is barred by the
equivalent of motion sickness. The world of the infinite is already
open for exploration, but to embark we must unlearn our finitistic
intuitions which instill fear and confusion by making some consistent and demonstrable results about the infinite literally counterintuitive. Exploration itself will create an alternative set of
intuitions which make us more susceptible to the feeling that Kant
called the sublime. Longer acquaintance will confirm Spinoza' s
conclusion that the secret of joy is to love something infinite.43
Mark Twain came to love mathematics as an adult and always
regretted that he didn't have a stronger foundation for it. He once
said that if he could live forever, he'd spend 8,000 years studying
mathematics. I've never been able to decide whether this remark
shows his wit or his weak foundation in mathematics. If he could
live forever, then he could spend infinitely many years studying
mathematics, and have infinitely many years left over for other
pursuits. That's the way I'd like to do it.
Bibliography
Blake, William. The Viking Portable Blake. Ed. Alfred Kazin. Vtking Press, 1946.
Cantor, Georg. Contributions to the Founding ofthe Theory of Transfinite
Numbers. Trans. Philip E.B. Jourdain. Dover Publications, 1955. (franslation originally published 1915.)
Copeland, Jack. Artificial Intelligence: A Philosophical Introduction. Basil
Blackwell, 1993.
Dauben, Joseph Warren. Georg Cantor: His Mathematics and Philosophy of
the Infinite. Princeton University Press, 1979.
Dedekind, Richard. Essays on the Theory ofNumbers. Trans. Wooster
Woodruff Beman. Dover Publications, 1963. (Translation originally published 1901.)
Dedekind, Richard. Was sind und was sollen die Zah!en? 6th ed.,
Braunschweig, 1930 (original1888).
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Descartes, Rene. Philosophical Essays. Trans. Laurence J. Lafleur. Bobbs-Merrill,
1964. (Discourse on Method, originai1637;Meditations, original1641.)
Fraenkel, Abraham A. Abstract Set Theory. North-Holland Pub. Co., 1953.
Hofstadter, Do.uglas R. Giidel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. Basic Books, Inc., 1979.
Galilei, Galileo. Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences. Trans. Henry
Crew and Alfonso de Salvio. Dover Publications, 1954 (original trans.
1914; original work 1638.)
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of]udgment. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Hackett
Pub. Co., 1987 (original1790).
Kant, Immanuel. Critique ofPure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith.
St. Martin's Press, 1968 (original1781).
Kant, Immanuel. Foundations ofthe Metaphysics ofMorals. Trans. Lewis
White Beck. Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1959 (original1785).
Kant, Immanuel. Observations on the Feeling ofthe BeautifUl and Sublime. Trans.
John T. Goldthwait. U niversiry of California Press, 1960 (original 1763-64).
Keyser, C.J ., "Charles Sanders Peirce as a Pioneer," Galois Lectures (Scr.
Math. Library, No.5, 1941) 87-112
Kleene, Stephen Cole. Introduction to Metamathematics. North-Holland
Pub. Co., 1988 (original1952).
Kleene, Stephen Cole. Mathematical Logic. John Wiley & Sons, 1967.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. New Essays on Human Understanding. Trans.
Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett. Cambridge University Press, 1981
(original1704).
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Philosophical Papers and Letters. Ed. and
Trans. by Leroy E. Loemker. D. Reidel Publishing Co., seconded., 1969.
(Discourse on Metaphysics, original 1686; Monadology, original 1714.)
Lloyd, Seth, "Quantum Mechanical Computers," Scientific American, (October 1995), pp. 140-145.
Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Peter H.
Nidditch. Oxford University Press, 1975 (original1690).
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29
Maar, Eli. To Infinity and Beyond· A Cultural History ofthe Infinite. Princeton University Press, 1991 (originall987).
Moore, A.W. The Infinite. Routledge, 1990.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers. Ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul
Weiss. Vol. III, 1933.
Pickover, Clifford A. Keys tq Infinity. John Wiley & Sons, 1995.
Royce, Josiah, "The One, The Many, and the Infinite," Supplementary
Essay in his The World and the Individual, First Series, Dover Publications,
1959 (original!899), pp. 473-588.
Rucker, Rudy. Infinity and the Mind: The Science and Philosophy ofthe Infinite. Birkbiiuser, 1982.
Rucker, Rudy, "One of George Cantor's Speculations on Physical Infinities," Speculations in Science and Technology, (October 1978) pp. 419-421.
Schor, Peter, "Algorithms for Quantum Computation: Discrete Log and
Factoring," Proceedings ofthe 35th Annual Symposium on the Foundations
of Computer Science, IEEE Computer Society, 1994, pp. 124ff. This paper
is available by FTP from the menu of papers at the Quantum Information
Page, http://vesta.physics.ucla.edu/-smolin/.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Edward Hubler. New American Library, 1963 (originai!600).
Spinoza, Benedict. Ethics, Treatise on the Emendation ofthe Intellect, and
Selected Letters. Trans. Samuel Shirley. Hackett, 1992. (Treatise, original
date unknown, posthumously published; Ethics, originall675.)
Vilenkin, N. Ya. In Search ofInfinity. Trans. Abe Shenitzer. Birkbiiuser,
1995.
Notes
I. Locke argued for this verdict of intuition thus: "[I)f a Man had a positive
Idea ofinfinite ... he could add two lnfinites together; nay, make one Infinite
infinitely bigger than another, Absurdities too gross to be confuted." Locke,
Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), 222.
2. Galilee, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences (1638), 31-33.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
3. Here I mean the classical mathematical objections. In this paper I put to
one side theological objections such as that completed infinities contradict
the doctrine that God is both infinite and unique.
4. See Moore, The Infinite (1990), 48. Many ancient and medieval scholars,
however, accepted the view that infinite sets permit self-nesting; Kleene,
Mathematical Logic (1967) 176,n.l21 cites various authors who point to
Plutarch in the first century of the common era, Proclus in the fifth, Adam
of Balsham in the twelfth, and Robert Holkot in the fourteenth.
5. When a theory of lesser virtue is opposed by intuition, the remedy is not
as clear. For example, when Zeno argued through his four paradoxes that
motion and change were impossible, and hence illusory, his conclusions were
opposed by everyone's intuitions about the realiry of motion and change. In
this case it's not clear whether we should trust Zeno's logic more than our
intutions, or vice versa.
6. Descartes, Meditations (1641), 126-127 (Meditation VI).
7. Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637), 28 (Fourth Discourse); see also
his Meditations (1641), 64, 69, 71, and 73.
8. Descartes, Meditations (1641), 101-102 (Meditation III). Note that this
argument would work just as well with very large finite magnitudes.
9. Descartes, Meditations (1641), I 02 (Meditation III).
10. Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637), 26 (Discourse IV), and Meditations (1641), 103.
II. Descartes, who thought we had a positive and not merely a negative idea
of the infinite, draws the same conclusion: "(M]y notion of the infinite is
somehow prior to that of the finite .... " Descartes, Meditations (1641), 102
(Meditation III).
12. Peirce, Collected Papers (1885), 210-249, 360; and Dedekind, Essays on
the Theory ofNumbers (1888), at p. 109 (theorem 160). Bernard Balzano
may have been the first to suggest this idea in his Paradoxien des Unendlichen,
§20, published posthumously in 1851.
13. For a proof that the Peirce-Dedekind ("reflexive") definition of infiniry
is equivalent to a more traditional ("inductive'') one, see Fraenkel, Abstract
Set Theory (1953), 41-42.
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31
14. One might argue that "the failure ot impossibility of self-nesting" is
simply a negative way of describing Euclid's positive principle that the whole
is always greater than its (proper) parts, and that therefore the idea of
self-nesting is equivalent to the negation of the positive Euclidean idea. While
this is true, it remains the case that self-nesting, at least after Cantor, has taken
on a positive life of its own and may be thought in its own terms, directly,
and no longer as the mere failure of the Euclidean logic of parts and wholes.
15. See Royce, "The One, The Many, and the Infinite,'' (1899), esp. 503-507.
16. Leibniz, Monadology (1714), §3. For Cantor's physical speculations on
similar topics, including his views on mass-monads (which were infinite but
not continuous) and aether-monads _(which were infinite and continuous),
see Rudy Rucker's translation of Cantor in Rucker, "One of George Cantor's
Speculations on Physical Infinities," (1978). Cantor's views are briefly summarized in Rucker, Infinity and the Mind (1982), 90.
17. Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics (1686), §§8-9, 14, and Monadology
(1714), §§62-68.
18. Leibniz is not alone in arguing for the truth of this vision, as opposed to
its mere possibility or consistency. Royce, "The One, The Many, and the
Infinite," 538-554 argues that the entire "realm of reality" is a self-representing system, just like England conceived as the home and subject of its
own perfect map.,
19. The positive idea of self-nesting not only frees us from the indirectness
and incompleteness of knowing infinity via negativa, but as a bonus it
decisively answers one line of objections to the idea of a completed infinite.
This line of objections asserts that the very idea of a completed infinite is
unattainable by finite human beings, or incoherent and conti'adictory, or
meaningless. The positive idea of infinity, if it exists and we possess it, and
its consistency, are standing refutations to this line of thought.
20. The examples show that sometimes we want terms ofindefinite largeness
rather than infinitude. That is why the American Indian expression that a
promise will hold as long as the grass grows and the rivers flow is more
accurate and credible· than a declaration for eternity, even if it is still an
overstatement.
21. When Kant speaks of the human person as a being of "infinite worth,"
is this another figurative or exaggerated use of the term "infinite"? A tool may
be used as a means to an end, and nothing more, without violating its dignity;
the reason is that a tool has only "finite worth." As Kant is wont to say, a tool
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
has a price, while a person has a dignity. Kant, Foundations (1785), 53. If we
measure the "worth" of these entities with a unit of finite size, such as the
dollar, then the tool has finite worth. But it's not clear whether the person
has infinite worth or whether the person is beyond measure the way she is
beyondprice. To say that a person is worth an infinite number of dollars may
be as much a category mistake as to say she is worth a finite number of dollars,
and just as far from capturing Kant's meaning: This is why I don't use the
human person as an exarriple of something we experience which is literally
infinite.
22. At 18 frames per second, old silent films look jerky. The jerkiness alerts
us to the fact that we are viewing a rapid succession of frames, not a
continuously changing image. But our abiliry to discern !/18th second
intervals of time, and see the jerks, is not the same as the ability to discern
that we are seeing 18, rather than 17 or 19, frames per second. It is, however,
enough to tell us that we are experiencing a finite number of frames per
second. But once the speed increases to the point where the jerkiness
disappears, and the appearance ofcontinuity sets in, we cannot know whether
the underlying pace of frames is infinite or finite but huge.
23. Several of Zeno' s paradoxes of motion are best solved by using the
commonplace notion of the calculus that we can traverse an infinite number
of spatial units in a finite time. Note, however, that those who object to the
use of completed infinities cannot answer Zeno in this way, for it is to appeal
to a completed infiniry of spatial units successfully traversed.
24. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2.258. The quotation continues: "... were it not
that I have bad dreams."
25. Peter Schor, "Algorithms for Quantum Computation: Discrete Log and
Factoring," (1995). See also Seth Lloyd, "Quantum Mechanical Computers," (1995).
26. One unexpected reason why this matters is that if potential brain inputs
through the senses are only finite, then artificial intelligence is defmitely
possible; that is, we could in principle create a computable function which
duplicated the brain's operation flawlessly. Whether AI is possible when
potential brain inputs are infinite is still unsettled. See Copeland, Artificial
Intelligence (1993), pp. 233-238.
27. Leibniz, Monadology, §§8, 61-62.
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28. Leibniz, New Essays, 53-58.
29. In my view, Leibniz is the first thinker to posit unconscious experience.
It is important, then, that his theoretical motivation is not to explain
memory, dream, or neurosis, but the infinitely small sensory influences which
constitute all sensation and the infinitely large number of sensory experiences.
30. Kant, Critique ofPure Reason (1781), B.462.
31. Kant, Pure Reason, B.454
32. Kant, Pure Reason, B.533. The world would be either finite or infinite if
it were a thing in itself, B.532. Here is one way to paraphrase Kant's view
here. There is no empirical way to ascertain whether time and space are
infinite, or whether time, space, or matter are infinitely divisible. So on
empirical grounds we can say neither that they are infinite nor that they are
finite. To try to decide these questions on a priori grounds is precisely what
leads to contradiction. Hence, on a priori grounds as well, we can say neither
that they are infinite nor that they are finite.
33. Even if this is not true of a googol, it is true of 1Ogoogol The point is that
there is some large finite number which is larger than the cardinaliry of any
collection we've ever experienced.
34. Kant, Critique ofjudgment (1790), 124: "[T]he infinite .. .for sensibiliry
is an abyss." C£ pp. 115, 130.
35. In this section I will speak only of the infinitely large.
36. See Dauben, Georg Cantor (1979), 288-291; 294-297.
37. See Theorems 12, 13, 18, 20, 21, 23, and 24 in the Appendix.
38. William Blake, Auguries ofInnocence, lines 1-4, in Viking Portable Blake
(1946) 150. Also see his Marriage of Heaven and Hell: "If the doors of
perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of
his cavern," ibid. 258.
39. Kant, Critique ofjudgment (1790), at p. 105. The italics are Kant's.
40. Kant, judgment (1790), 114: "The infinite, however, is absolutely large
(not merely large by comparison). Compared with it everything else .. .is
small"-at least if "everything else" is limited to finitely large objects. Here
Kant mistakenly assumes that all infinities are equal, a common mistake
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
before Cantor. If one were larger than another, then the latter, although
infinite, would indeed be small in comparison with something. In Kant's
defense we may offer Moore's view that Kant was one of the first thinkers to
acknowledge that it is no contradiction to suppose that one infinity can be
larger than another; Moore, The Infinite, 90. (Moore does not make clear on
which passages in Kant he bases his reading.)
41. Kant, judgment (1790}, 98-99. In an earlier work Kant says the sublime
brings "enjoyment" bur sometimes with "horror," while the beautiful is a
"pleasant sensation but one that is joyous and smiling"; "[n]ight is sublime,
day is beautiful"; the sublime "moves," the beautiful "charms"; the face of a
person feeling the sublime is "earnest, sometimes rigid and astonished" while
the face of a person experiencing the beautiful shows "shining cheerfulness
[and] ... smiling features"; Observatiom on the Feeling of the BeautifUl and
Sublime (1763-64), 47.
42. These mixed feelings are in tension. Unlike the beautiful, the sublime
does not yield pleasure. Because the mind is both attracted and repelled, it
responds more with admiration than liking, which Kant calls a "negative
pleasure," judgment, 98; c£ pp. 129, 131. It includes a note of displeasure, with
our inadequate sensory and imaginative resources, pp. 114, 116, leading Kant
to call it "a pleasure that is possible only by means of a displeasure," p. 117.
43. Spinoza, Treatise on the Emendation ofthe Intellect, 235.
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~ Appendix:
~
A Crash Course in the Mathematics oflnfinite Sets
Don't be surprised if this is easier than you thought. Set theory
requires no algebra or calculus. It is much more primitive than those
branches of mathematics, and rests on very simple notions. Moreover, the proofs will be unusually short and uncomplicated.
What will be difficult? Most of the results we will prove depend
critically on those that came before; but I cite the needed prior
theorems by number to make this kind of back-tracking easier.
The notation may be new, and for many people unfamiliar notation raises the hair on the back of the neck. But most of the
notation may be ignored; I include it mainly so that if you read
further on this subject, you will be equipped. I honestly don't
think the compressed exposition needed for a crash course increases the difficulty-in part because I've been more longwinded than most mathematicians, and in part because some
compression and conciseness helps keep all the relevant ideas in
the head at the same time; which aids comprehension. Some of
the proofs, short and simple as they are, will make you dizzy. But
that's part of the amazing phenomenon to be savored, not a
difficulty to lament.
To begin:
Almost a definition. Intuitively, a set is a collection of elements.
• The intuitive notion of a set leads to paradoxes, and there is
considerable mathematical and philosophical disagreement about
how best to refine the intuitive notion. Fortunately, none of the
disagreements or refinements matters for our purposes here. I only
bring up this complexiry so that you'll accept the intuitive notion
in place of a refined definition for the purposes of this crash course.
•
Notation. When we want to list the members of a set, we use curly
brackets. So if set S contains elements A, B, and C, then we say S
={A, B, C).
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
• The nul! set is the empty set or the set with no members. Notation:
0. Hence, 0={}.
Abbreviation. For ifand only ifi will sometimes write simply
iff
Definition. Set A is a subset of set B iff all the members of A are
also members of B.
• Notation. A
~
B.
• It follows from this definition that every set is a subset of itself.
Definition. Set A is a proper subset of set B iff all the members of A are
also members of B, but not all the members of B are members of A.
•
Notation. ACB.
•
It follows from this definition that no set is a proper subset of itself.
Definition. The cardinality of a set is the number of members it
contains.
• Notation. The cardinality of setS is lSI. For example, ifS ={A, B,
C), then ISI=3.
•
Hence while S is a set, lSI is a number. When S is an infinite set,
lSI will be an infinite number.
• Technically, lSI is a cardinal number, as opposed to an ordinal
number. This doesn't matter for what follows, but it might help
you remember the term cardinality. A cardinal number answers
the question how many? An ordinal number answers the question
which one? Natural numbers are used both ways in different
contexts. For example, 3 is used as a cardinal number when we say
there are "three blind mice" or "three bags full," but it is used as
an ordinal number when we say "the third pig built with brick"
or "curtain number three." Sets have cardinality, that is, size or
magnitude: they have some definite number of members. But they
do not have ordinality: their members are not in any particular
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order; for example, {A, B, C) = {B, A, C). In this brief exposition,
I introduce the mathematics of infinite cardinal numbers and
ignore the infinite ordinals.
Definition. Two sets can be put into one-to-one correspondence iff
their members can be paired off such that each member of the first
set has exactly one counterpart in the second set, and each member
of the second set has exactly one counterpart in the first set.
•
Notation. If sets A and B can be put into one-to-one correspondence, then we say A"" B.
Putting two infinite sets into one-to-one correspondence is an
infinite task, and we don't pretend that we can do it (that is, finish
it) in finite time. To show that an infinite set, like the even
numbers, can be put into one-to-one correspondence with another, like the odd numbers, we need only produce a rule-governed sequence for each set which runs through the members
without omission or repetition, for example, 2, 4, 6 ... and 1, 3,
5 .... If we can do so, then we know that the nth term of one sequence
will have a counterpart in the nth term of the other, and vice versa,
guaranteeing one-to-one correspondence all the way out.
We will soon see that there are infinite sets larger than the set
of natural numbers (Theorem 3 below), and for them no such
sequences can be constructed. However, for cardinalities of that
magnitude, most of our proofs will show the absence or failure,
rather than the presence, of one-to-one correspondence.
Definition. Two sets have the same cardinality iff they can be put
into one-to-one correspondence; or, if A""B, then IAI=IBI.
• This definition applies to infinite as well as to finite sets.
• It follows from the last three definitions that set A has a larger
cardinality than set B iff both (I) a proper subset of A and the
whole of B can be put into one-to-one correspondence, and (2)
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the whole ofA cannot be put into one-to-one correspondence with
any proper subset of B.
Definition. The power set of a set S is the set of all the subsets of S.
•
Notation. The power set of S is *S.
•
For example, if S ={A, B, C), then *S = {{A,B,C}, {A,B}, {A, C),
{B,C}, {A}, {B), {C), 0}.
• The power set of a given set always contains the given set itself and
the null set.
•
Note that while the members of S may be any sort of things
(bugles, baseball teams, Byronic poems), the members of *S are
other sets.
•
j*Sj is the cardinality of the power set of S. As you can see from
the example above, when S has 3 members, then *S has 23 or 8
members. In general, when S is finite, then j*Sj = 21s1.
• We will ass.ume the power set axiom, i.e. that all sets have power sets.
Reminder. The natural numbers are the whole positive numbers (somerimes called the "counting numbers"), including zero: 0, 1, 2, 3 ....
•
This is really a definition, bur by calling it a "reminder" I'm hoping
to get on your good side.
• Notation. The set of natural numbers is designated by N.
•
Notation. The number of natural numbers is designated by \'{ 0 •
"\'{" is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, pronouncedAleph.
"\-{ 0 " is pronounced Aleph-null or Aleph-nought. We will justifY
the zero subscript when we prove that no infinite set has a smaller
cardinality than the set of natural numbers (Theorem 6).
•
Hence \-{ 0 = jNj, by definition.
•
Now you know how many natural numbers there are:\'{,. Bur this
is not profound. So far we've only invented a name (numeral) for
the number of natural numbers.
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Definition. A set is countable iff its cardinality is either finite or
equal to ~ 0 • A set is denumerable iff its cardinality is exactly ~ o.
A set is uncountable iff its cardinality is greater than ~ O·
• The null set is countable. The finite set, {A, B, C}, is countable. The
infinite set, N, is countable and denumerable. Sets with a larger
cardinality than N are uncountable.
Definition. A transfinite number or transfinite cardinal is the cardinality of some infinite set.
•
If we use the term "infinite" in a restricted and precise way, then
"transfinite" is just a synonym for it. We could avoid fancy new
terms to prevent confusion. However, "infinite" has many impre-
cise and non-technical uses-for example, the infinite setting on
a camera's range-finder-so it often helps to use a technical term
to avoid ambiguity.
Reminder. The integers are the natural numbers plus their negative
counterparts, ... -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3 ....
·• Notation. The set of integers is designated by Z.
Reminder. The rational numbers are the integers plus the rational
fractions (those which can be expressed as the ratio of two integers).
• Notation. The set of rational numbers is designated by Q.
•
For example, 0.75 is a rational fraction because we can express it as the
ratio of two integers, namely, 3/4. Therefore it is a rational number.
• The irrational numbers are the fractions that are not rational
numbers, both positive and negative. For example, we can prove
that pi (3.14159 ... ) cannot be expressed as the ratio of two integers.
Therefore it is an irrational number.
Reminder. The real numbers are the rational numbers plus the
irrational numbers.
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THE ST. JOHN"S REVIEW
Notation. The set of real numbers is designated by llt
We started with the natural numbers, then added infinitely
many negative whole numbers to get the integers, then added
infinitely many rational fractions to get the rationals, and then
added infinitely many irrational fractions to get the reals. It's
tempting to conclude that with each infinite addition we increased
cardinality, or in short:
INI < IZI < 101 < IIRI
But is this true? Here we encounter one of the first points at which
the mathematics of the infinite violates our intuitions. If each
addition did increase cardinality, that would violate our sense that
"infinity is infinity"-or that all infinite sets are equal in cardinality. But if any of these additions did not increase cardinality, that
would violate our sense that the cardinality of a set grows when
we add members. Before we learn the truth, and see how it violates
our intuitions, it's wise to remember that its negation would also
have violated our intuitions. At the very beginning, therefore, we
should not demand conformity with our intuitions so much as
clear definitions and rigorous proofs.
Foreshadowing. Both the intuitions mentioned in the preceding paragraph are false. (I) Not all infinities are equal in cardinality, and (2)
some additions, even infinite additions, do not increase cardinality.
The string of inequalities, INI < IZI < 101 < IIRI, is also false.
Theorem I. The set of integers has the same cardinality as the set
of natural numbers, or
INI = IZI.
• Proof If we try to list the integers, we note that they trail off with
three dots in two directions: ... 3, 2, 1, 0, 1, 2, 3.... Left in that
form they would be hard to put into one-to-one correspondence
with the natural numbers. But if we alternate one positive and one
negative integer, then they form a single infinite sequence, 0, 1,
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-1, 2, -2, 3, -3 ... , and we can easily put them into one-to-one
correspondence with the natural numbers, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 ....
This method of alternating the members of two infinite sequences in order to make a single sequence is called interlacing.
Cantor used it often and so will we.
Theorem 2. The set of rational numbers has the same cardinality
as the set of natural numbers, or INI = 101.
•
It's much harder to find a method for putting the rational numbers
into one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers than it
was for the integers. The reason is that the rational numbers are
dense, that is, between any two of them there is a third. For
example, between 123/987 and 124/987 there is 123.5/987,
which resolves into 247/1974. This means, in fact, that between
any two there are infinitely many others. It also means that for any
given rational number, there is no such thing as the next greater,
or the next lesser, rational number. But Cantor found a very clever
method for laying out the rational numbers so that they can be
put into one-to-one correspondence with the naturals.
•
Proof The following table shows Cantor's method for putting the
rationals and naturals into one-to-one correspondence:
Denominators
I/1
2/1
311
4/1 ...
112
212
3/2
412 ...
I/3
2/3
3/3
4/3 ...
I/4
214
3/4
414 ...
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
The two shaded axes list all the possible natural number numerators, and all the possible natural number denominators. The
interior part of the table uses the axes to compose all the rational
fractions, which are all the rational numbers. Now we read off the
rationals in this order: starting with the 1/1 in the upper left
corner, we move right to 2/1, then diagonally down and to the
left, then down, then 'diagonally up and to the right, and so on,
eventually passing through every cell in the grid. The first 10
numbers in our journey are: 1/1, 2/1, 1/2, 113, 2/2, 3/1, 4/1, 3/2,
2/3, 114 .... But as the following table shows, this sequence can be
put into one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers:
Rationals
l/1
Z/1
1/Z
l/3
2/Z
3/1
4/1
3/Z
Z/3
1/4...
Naturals
0
I
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9...
This method of enumerating the rationals includes each rational number more than once. For example, it will include 111,
2/2, 3/3 ... , each of which is equal to 1. In fact, every rational
number will be represented infinitely many times. Technically,
this violates the conditions of strict one-to-one correspondence.
But in fact we can leave the duplicates in the enumeration without
harming the proof, for we are then proving that the rationals plus
the duplicates is still no greater in cardinality than the naturals.
This means that the rationals are at most as numerous as the
naturals. We already know that the rationals are at least numerous
as the naturals (because the naturals are a proper subset of the
rationals}. Therefore, the rationals are exactly as numerous as the
naturals.
(Can you see why if some setA is at least as numerous as another
set B, and at most as numerous as B, then it must be exactly as
numerous as B?)
In Theorems 1 and 2 we saw that two kinds of infinite addition
to an infinite set did not increase the cardinality of the original
set. But we cannot generalize too quickly and say that such
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additions will never increase the cardinality of the original set.
Our next theorem shows that some sets can indeed be larger than
the natural numbers, and in Theorem 16 we will see that the
additions to the naturals required to generate the real numbers do
indeed create an uncountable set.
Theorem 3. The power set of the set of natural numbers has a
greater cardinality than the set of natural numbers, i.e. it is
uncountable; or I*NI>INI.
• Proof We give a negative proof, and assume that the natural
numbers can be put into one-to-one correspondence with the sets
of natural numbers. Let this hypothetical pairing off be represented by the leftmost two columns of the following table.
The nat. nos. in 1-1
correspondence with the
sets thereof
(hypothetically)
0 ..... evens
1 - odds
2 - evens
In the shaded row of the table we again enumerate the natural
numbers. The "yeses" and "noes" in the body of the table below
them tell us whether the natural numbers in the shaded row above
them are members of the sets to the left of them. For example, take
the "yes" which appears in italics. It is in the column of natural
number 1, and in the row of the set of odd numbers; it says "yes"
because 1 is indeed a member of the set of odd numbers. In this
way, we represent every set of natural numbers (down the left
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
column) as an infinite string of "yeses" and "noes." Conversely,
we can read any string of"yeses" and "noes" as code for a particular
set of natural numbers.
From the "yes" in the upper left corner of the block of"yeses" and
"noes," move diagonally downward and to the right, following the
arrows. Toggle eacl?- "yes" we encounter to a "no" and vice versa.
The resulting infinite string of" yeses" and "noes" is demonstrably
different from every row of the infinite table, for it differs from the
first row in the first term, from the second row in the second term,
and so on. When we read it as set of natural numbers, the set it
represents is for the same reason demonstrably different from every
set yet listed on the table. But this contradicts our assumption that
we had exhaustively listed and paired off all the sets of natural
numbers. Therefore our assumption is false, and the natural
numbers cannot be put into one-to-one correspondence with the
sets of natural numbers.
We're almost done. If the naturals and the sets of naturals cannot
be put into one-to-one correspondence, then one has a larger
cardinality than the other. The power set of the naturals must have
the greater cardinality, for one of its proper subsets, {{0}, {1}, {2},
{3} ... }, can be put into one-to-one correspondence with the naturals, 0, 1, 2, 3 .... Therefore there are more sets of natural numbers
than natural numbers.
This technique of moving down the diagonal of a table, changing every row in some way, and thereby constructing a new item
which differs from every row in some definite respect, is called
diagonalization. It is one of Cantor's most ingenious methods for
gaining leverage on infinite sets. We'll use diagonalization often.
To establish Theorem 3, we used a negative proof In a negative
proof we assume the negation of the desired conclusion and show
that that assumption leads to a contradiction; then we conclude
that assumptions is false, which is the same thing as to conclude
that the desired conclusion is true. It is a special case of the rule
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of inference, called modus to/lens, by which we infer that any
statement that implies a falsehood is false. Since it is so hard to
grapple with infinite sets directly, negative proofs are common in
this branch of mathematics. However, the most important skeptics of Cantor's results, called intuitionists, refuse to use negative
proofs in dealing with infinite sets-although they are willing to
use negative proofs in'' other areas of mathematics. The issue
between Cantor and the intuitionists is whether this refusal is
arbitrary, or whether we should distrust negative proofs in those
domains where there is no possibility of verifYing our results
through intuition.
Theorem 4. The cardinality of the power set of an arbitrary set has
a greater cardmality than the original arbitrary set, or I*A!>IAI.
• This is called simply Cantor's Theorem. It generalizes the previous
theorem, in which we proved that the power set of a particular set,
N, had a greater cardinality than the original. The present theorem
is trivial for finite sets, but is fundamental for infinite sets.
• Proof LetA be an arbitrary set of any cardinality, finite or infinite.
Again we supply a negative proof, and assume that the members
of A can be put into one-to-one correspondence with the subsets
of A. Take any one of the supposed ways of pairing off the
members of A with the subsets of A. Let us say that if a member
of A is paired with a subset of A of which it happens to be a
member, then it is happy; otherwise it is sad. LetS be the set of sad
members of A. Clearly S is one of the subsets of A. Therefore S is
paired off with one of the members of A, say, x. Is x happy or sad?
If x is happy, then x is a member of the set to which it is paired,
which is S, but that would make it sad. If x is sad, then x is not a
member of the set to which it is paired, which isS, but that would
make it happy. So if xis happy, then it is sad, and if it is sad, then
it is happy. Our assumption implies a contradiction and is therefore false. So the members of A cannot be put into one-to-one
correspondence with the subsets of A.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
But if A and *A cannot be put into one-to-one correspondence,
then they cannot have the same cardinality. If so, then the larger
one must be*A, for A can be put into one-to-one correspondence
with a proper subset *A. For example, if the members of A are AI>
A,, A3 ••• , then they can be put into one-to-one correspondence
with this subset of*A: {{A1}, {A2}, {A3} .•• }.
Many profound consequences follow directly from Cantor's
theorem. But we make the most important of them explicit in the
next theorem.
Theorem 5. If S is a set of any infinite cardinality, then its power
set has a greater infinite cardinality, or I*SI>ISI.
• This follows directly from Cantor's Theorem (Theorem 4). Cantor's theorem applies equally to finite and infinite sets; this corollary focuses on the important consequence for infinite sets.
•
If we follow die notation for finite sets, and say that a set of
cardinality a has a power set of cardinality 2•, then this theorem
asserts that 2' >a, for each transfinite cardinal a.
•
This theorem asserts that for any infinite cardinality, there is a
larger infinite cardinality, namely, the cardinality of its power set.
Hence, there is an infinite series of infinite cardinal numbers. We
will meet some of the infinite cardinals larger than N shortly.
• This theorem also implies that, for every set, there is a greater set.
It follows that there is no set of all sets, or no set of everything.
It follows from Theorem 5 that "infinity" is not synonymous
with "totality," a clarification which alone dispels many of the
ancient conundrums and paradoxes surrounding the infinite.
Speaking of the infinite series of infinite numbers which Cantor
proved to exist, David Hilbert said (in 1910) that, "No one shall
drive us from the paradise which Cantor created for us," and (in
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1926), "This appears to me to be the most admirable flower of the
mathematical intellect and one of the highest achievements of
purely ration~al human activity."
Now that we have proved there is an infinite series of infinite
cardinals, it is well to prove that \'{ o truly designates the smallest
of them.
Theorem 6. No infinite set has a smaller cardinality than a denumerable set, e.g. the set of natural numbers.
• Proof LetS be a set of any infinite cardinality. Clearly we may take
away one of its members, call itS~> without emptying S. We may
take another, S2 , and another, S3 , and so on, each time without
emptying S. In this way we may carve out a denumerable proper
subset from S, namely, {S~> S2 , S3 ••• }. But S had any infinite
cardinality. Hence all infinite sets have at least one denumerable
proper subset. Hence the cardinality of a denumerable set is not
greater than any transfinite cardinality; or, it is the smallest transfinite cardinality.
We know from the proof of Theorem 6 that every infinite set
has an infinite proper subset which consists of the original set
minus denumerably many members. This fact has a beautiful
implication. If the "largeness'' of an infinite set is measured by its
cardinality, then the smallest infinite set is a denumerable set or
one with a cardinality of\'{ o. But if the largeness of an infinite set
is measured by the largeness of its proper subsets, then there is no
smallest infinite set: they nest downward ad infinitum without
ever losing infinite cardinality.
\'{ o designates the cardinality of the natural numbers by definition, which is demonstrably the smallest infinite cardinality
(Theorem 6). This justifies the zero subscript. \'{ 1 is by definition
the next greater infinite cardinality after \'{o, just as \'{2 is by
definition the next greater cardinal after \'{ 1, and so on. As we will
see in the section on the continuum hypothesis below, even though
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
there is an infinite series of infinite cardinals (Theorem 5), it is
impossible to say, in standard set theory, which one of them is l:{ 1,
which one is l:{ 2, and so on.
Theorem 7. A denumerable set plus a new member is still denumerable, or l:{ o+ 1= l:{ O·
• Proof If we add element A to the set of natural numbers, giving
us {A, 0, 1, 2, 3 ... }, then the resulting set can still be put into
one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers. A would be
paired with 0, 0 with 1, 1 with 2, and so on.
• As a corollary it follows that we may add a second member, and a
third, and so on.
integer n.
•
l:{ o+2=l:{ 0 , l:{o+3=l:{ 0 , l:{ 0+n=l:{o for every positive
In fact we may add denumerably many new members, A, B, C ...
to the original denumerable set without increasing its cardinality.
The enlarged set, {A, B, C ... , 0, 1, 2 ... }, can be put into one-to-one
correspondence with the natural numbers if we interlace its members thus: A, 0, B, 1, C, 2.... (See Theorem 1.) Therefore,
l:{ o+ l:{ o= l:{ O·
Theorem 8. A denumerable set may have denumerably many
members removed (in certain ways) without reducing the cardinality of the original set.
• Proof We need only regard the given denumerable set as two
denumerable sets interlaced, then 'unlace' them, then discard one
of them. If {A" A2, A3 ... } is the original denumerable set, then we
can separate out the set of even-numbered members, {A2 , ~.A,; ... },
from the set of odd-numbered members, {A" A3 , A5... }, each of
which is denumerable. If we discard one of the resulting sets, the
other one has the same cardinality as the original.
• Note that this theorem only applies to the removal of certain
denumerable subsets from a given denumerable set. For if the
denumerably many members we subtracted happened to comprise
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the entire membership of the original denumerable set, then
clearly the result would not be a denumerable set. So we cannot
conclude in general that l-{o-l-{o=l-{o.
Theorem 9. If we remove denumerably many members from an
uncountably large set, the result will have the same cardinality as
the original.
• Proof Let U be any uncountably large set. We know from Theorem 6 that U has at least one denumerable proper subset, say D.
And we know from Theorem 8 that we can remove denumerably
many members from D, in certain ways, without reducing the
cardinality ofD. If we do so, then we thereby remove denumerably
many members from U without reducing the cardinality ofU.
Theorem I 0. Every infinite set can be be put into one-to-one
correspondence with at least one of its proper subsets.
•
Proof Let S be a set of any infinite cardinality. If S is. countable,
then Theorem 8 tells us that we may produce a proper subset of
S without reducing S's cardinality. But ifS and that proper subset
have the same cardinality, then they can be put into one-to-one
correspondence. If S is uncountable, then we have the same result
using Theorem 9 instead of Theorem 8.
• Together with the trivial truth that no finite set can be put into
one-to-one correspondence with any of its proper subsets, this
theorem establishes the important result that all and only infinite
sets possess the property that they can be put into one-to-one
correspondence with at least one of their proper subsets. It follows
that this property is a necessary and sufficient condition for being
an infinite set.. It may therefore be taken as the defining condition
of infinite magnitude, and its absence as the defining condition of
finitude.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVJEW
Definition. Let us say that a text is a finitely long string of symbols,
whose symbols are chosen from a finite set (or alphabet).
•
For our purposes here we needn't even say that the string conforms
to the rules of some grammar. When interpreted, the text may be
a name, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter, a book, or a library.
Theorem II. There are only countably many texts.
•
Proof By definition there are only finitely many symbols in the
"alphabet" from which we may compose texts. List them exhaustively in any order. To the first symbol, assign the numeral "10."
To the second, assign the numeral "100." To the third, assign
"1 000" and so on. In general, to the nth symbol in the alphabet
we assign the numeral in which" 1" is followed by n zeroes. Now
in each text, replace the symbols with their corresponding numerals. Concatenate the numerals so that, for example, "1 0 100 1000
10" becomes "10100100010." We now have a method for converting every distinct text into a distinct natural number. But there
are only ~ o natural numbers. Therefore there are at most ~ o texts.
This theorem has deep consequences. We will soon prove
(Theorem 16) that there are uncountably many real numbers. But
by the present theorem, there are only countably many names for
anything. Hence, only a countable subset of the real numbers can
be named. Or conversely (by Theorem 9), uncountably many real
numbers cannot be named.
This theorem also means that there are at most countably many
theorems in any axiom system (in which theorems are finitely
long). But we know from Theorem 3 that there are uncountably
many sets of natural numbers. If there is at least one truth of
number theory for each set of natural numbers (e.g. that some
number n belongs to that set), then there will be uncountably
many truths of number theory. Therefore, there are uncountably
many more truths of number theory than there are texts. It follows
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that every axiom system intended to capture number theory is
doomed to incompleteness.
Theorem 12. The number of points on a finite line segment is the
same as the number of points on an infinite ray.
C
D
A/
B
• Proof Let segment CD be parallel to ray AB. From point C we
can draw a line through any point of AD, except D itself, and the
line we draw will intersect AB somewhere; in this way we can pair
any point on AD with exactly one point on AB. Conversely, from
point C we can draw a line through any point of the ray AB, and
the line we draw will intersect AD somewhere; in this way, we can
pair any point onAB with exactly one point on AD. But this means
the points on AD, minus D itself, and those onAB can be put into
one-to-one correspondence. Hence they contain the same number
of points.
We have yet to say how many points are on AD (minus D itself)
or the infinite ray AB, but we know it will be some infinite
cardinaliry. Now since any infinite cardinal plus one equals the
original infinite cardinal (Theorem 7), we may add back the point
D, which we omitted above, without changing the cardinaliry of
the set of points on the segment.
Theorem 13. The number of points on a finite line segment is the
same as the number of points on an infinite line.
• The proof is a simple variation on the proof for Theorem 12.
Imagine the mirror image of the figure used in Theorem 12 (a
"backward Z"), with a new point, D', to the left of C, and a new
point, B', to the left of A. We would then prove that rwo line
segments (AD and AD') together contain the same number of
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
points as the infinite line. But the two line segments together make
one longer, though still finite segment. Therefore, the number of
points in a finite segment equals the number of points on an
infinite line.
Definition. The number of real numbers is the same as the number
of points on an infin'ite line; or in the jargon, the numerical
continuum has the same cardinality as the linear continuum.
•
Notation. Let c (lower-case "c'' for "continuum'') designate the
cardinality of the continuum-or equivalently, the cardinality of
the set of real numbers. Hence c = iJRI by definition.
Theorem 14. c+c =c.
• Proof One finite line segment of arbitrary length has c points
(Theorems 12 and 13). A second of arbitrary length has c points.
Together they make a longer, though still finite line segment,
hence one which has c points.
• Therefore we have as corollaries, 2c = c, 3c = c, and nc = c for every
positive integer n.
Theorem 15.
l'{o • c =c.
• Proof Think of an infinite line as marked off into unit segments,
like a ruler. Clearly the segments could be put into one-to-one
correspondence with the natural numbers. Hence there are denumerably many, or \-{ 0 , such segments. But from Theorem 13 we
know that each segment has c points. But the whole line also has
c points (by definition of c). Hence the whole line has as many
points, c, as the number of segments, \-{ 0 , times the number of
points per segment, c.
Theorem 16. The· set of real numbers is uncountable, or
•
Equivalently, this theorem asserts that c > \-{ 0 •
IIRI > \'{ o.
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• Proof Again we use a negative proof. Assume that the real
numbers can be put into one-to-one correspondence with the
natural numbers. Take the set of real numbers between 0 and 1.
Express terminating decimal fractions as non-terminating decimal
fractions; for example, 0.5 becomes 0.4999 .... Now under our
assumption pair off the natural numbers with the reals between 0
and 1, thus:
0 1 2-
O.d d d d ... where dis some digit
O.d d d d .. .
O.d d d d .. .
Now starting with the upper left d, move diagonally down and to
the right, changing each d we encounter to some other digit-for
example, incrementing it by one, and changing 9 to 0. In this way
we construct a new decimal fraction which is demonstrably nowhere on our list, for it differs from the first one in the first decimal
place, from the second in the second place, and so on. But this
contradicts our assumption that we have exhaustively listed all the
real numbers between 0 and 1. Therefore the assumption is false
and the reals cannot be put into one-to-one correspondence with
the naturals. But the reals are at least as numerous as the naturals
and cannot have the smaller cardinality. Therefore, the cardinality
of the set of real numbers is greater than the cardinality of the set
of natural numbers.
Now we have only to prove that the number of reals between
0 and 1 is the same as the number of all the reals. But this follows
directly from Theorem 13.
Theorem 17. The power set of the set of natural numbers has the
same cardinality as the set of real numbers, or
I*NI=IlRI= c.
• Proof We know from the proof of Theorem 3 above that every set
of natural numbers can be represented as a denumerable string of
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
"yeses" and "noes." These denumerable strings, in turn, can be put
into one-to-one correspondence with the denumerable strings of
"1 's'' and "O's." These strings, in turn, can be put into one-to-one
correspondence with the real numbers between 0 and 1 if we put
a decimal point at the lefi: end each denumerable string of 1's and
O's, and regard the r~sult as a fraction in base two. (We can purge
this set of numeral strings of repetitions without reducing the
cardinality of the set; if you don't believe me, see the post-script
below.) Finally, these real numbers between 0 and 1 can be put
into one-to-one correspondence with all the reals, as we saw in
Theorem 13.
•
Post-script. To convert a string of 1's and 0' s into a binary fraction,
just tack a decimal point (or a zero and then a decimal point) onto
the lefi: end. For example, Ill 000 ... becomes 0.111 000 ... , which
equals 112 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 0/16 + 0/32 .... Some of these fractions
will equal others, for example, 0.1000 ... = 0.0111.. .. (For clarity,
remember that in base 10, 0.5000 ... = 0.4999 ... , as we saw in
Theorem 16.) There are at most countably many such repetitions.
We know this because if we take all the fractions which consist of
"000 ... " at some point in their expansions, and cut off the trailing
zeroes, we will produce distinct, finite strings of 1's and 0's. But
there are at most countably many such finite strings, according to
Theorem 11. Now we know from Theorem 16 that there are
uncountably many r.eal numbers between 0 and 1. Hence to delete
the countabiy many repetitions would leave us with the same
uncountable cardinality we srarted with, according to Theorem 9.
•
Remembering that INI=~o (by definition), we may use the notation introduced in Theorem 5 to restate this theorem thus: c =
2" ~ o (which means 2 to the power of ~ 0).
Theorem 18. The set of points in a square has the same cardinality
as the set of points on one of its edges (namely, c).
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• Proof We know from Theorems 12 and 13 that the number of
points in a finite line segment is c. Now we need only show that
the number of points inside a square is also c. First, think of left
and bottom edges of the square as collinear with the x andy axes
of a Cartesian coordinate system. Every distinct point inside the
square, therefore, hasa distinct pair of real numbers to identifY it;
one is its position on the x axis, the other its position on they axis.
Now interlace these two numbers as we did in Theorems 1 and 7.
For example, if the x axis position is 0.125000 ... and they axis
position is 0.333 ... , then interlace these two decimal fractions digit
by digit to make 0.1323530303030 .... We now have a single real
number, rather than a pair of real numbers, to correspond to each
point inside the square. Each of these new, interlaced numbers is
a real number between 0 and 1. We know from Theorem 16 that
there are at most c of these. But since they correspond to the points
inside a square we also know that there are at least c of them.
Therefore, there are exactly c of them.
•
Intensively for the three years from 1871 to 1874 Cantor labored
to prove this theorem false. Then he surprised himself by proving
it true. "I see it, but I don't believe it," he wrote to Dedekind.
Theorem 19. c • c
=
c.
• This theorem follows directly from Theorem 18.
• AB corollaries of this theorem, we have c • c • c = c, and c • c • c •
... • c = c, or in short, c•
=
c when n is any positive integer.
Theorem 20. The set of all points in a cube has the same cardinality
as the set of all points in one of its edges (namely, c).
• The proof is a simple variation of that for Theorem 18. In fact, it
is equivalent to one of the corollaries of Theorem 19. Each point
inside the cube will have three coordinates, not two. Hence we
interlace three decimal fractions, not two. The rest of the proof is
the same as for Theorem 18.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Theorem 21. The set of all points in an infinite plane has the same
cardinality as the set of all points in a finite line segment (namely, c).
• Proof Think of the plane as marked off into an infinite number
of square cells, like graph paper. First we show that there will be
denumera:bly many, or ~ 0 , such square cells. Pick one cell arbitrarily, and number jt 0. Go to the cell above it and number that
cell 1. Go one cell to the right and number it 2. Continue in this
way to circle the "0" cell. The result will be a spiral which would
eventually cover the plane. Yet each cell con tams a natural number.
Hence the cells and the natural numbers can be put into one-toone correspondence. Second we note that each cell contains c
points, under Theorem 18. Therefore, the number of points in
the infinite plane is the number of cells, ~ 0 , times the number of
points in a cell, c (by Theorem 18), which we know is equal to c
(by Theorem 15).
Theorem 22.
~o·~o = ~o.
• The proof of this theorem was already encapsulated in the proof
of Theorem 21 when we showed that there were denumerably
many, or ~ 0 , cells in the infinite graph paper of the Euclidean
plane. But another way to ascertain the number of such cells is to
take the product of the 'length' of the plane (in cells) and the
'width' of the plane (in cells). But the plane is ~ 0 cells 'high', and
~o cells 'wide'. Hence the number of cells is ~ 0 ·~ 0 ; however, we
already know the number of cells (from Theorem 21) to equal ~o.
Theorem· 23. The set of all points in infinite, 3-dimensional,
Euclidean space has the same cardinality as the set of all points in
a finite line segment (namely, c).
• The proof is a variation on that of Theorem 21. We divide the
space into cubes, rather than the plane into squares. Our spiraling
path which puts the natural numbers into one-to-one correspondence with the cubes will be more complex, but perhaps you can
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visualize it. The rest of the proof is the same, except that we use
Theorem 20 rather than Theorem 18.
Theorem 24. The set of all points in ~a-dimensional space has the
same cardinality as the set of all points in a finite line segment
(namely, c).
• Proof If the set of all points in 3-dimensional space is c3, then the
set of all points in ~ 0-dimensional space is cA ~ o. But under
Theorem 17, the latter number equals (2A~··,)A~ 0 , which in turn
equals 2A(~ 0 •~ 0 ), which (by Theorem 22) equals 2A~ 0 , which
(by Theorem 17) equals c.
Definition. The continuum hypothesis (CH) asserts that there is no
cardinal number a such that ~ 0 < a < c.
• Since by Theorem 17, c =I*NI=IIRI, we could use any of the latter
two expressions in place of c in stating CH.
•
From CHit follows that the next largest transfinite cardinal after ~ o
is c. Hence it also follows that c ~ ~I· Since we already know (from
Theorem 17) that 2A~ 0 = c, CH allows us to say that 2A~ 0 = ~ 1 •
• The commonly heard assertion that c = ~ 1 assumes CH. The
widespread acceptance of the assertion by mathematicians therefore attests to the general acceptance of CH in the profession.
(Without CH we have essentially no idea which Aleph corresponds to c, and we would know the cardinality of the naturals,
integers, and rationals, but not the cardinality of the reals.)
• Cantor formulated CH, and spent the last years of his career
unsuccessfully ttying to prove it. His failure obsessed him and
caused recurring bouts of serious depression. To prove or disprove
CH was the first problem on David Hilbert's famous 1900 list of
important unsolved problems in mathematics.
• Similarly, attempts to prove or disprove CH, or to prove it undecidable, consumed most of Kurt Giidel's 36 years at the Institute for
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Advanced Study. But he did produce an important partial proof
In 1938, Godel showed that CH cannot be disproved from the
axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel (ZF) set theory, the closest thing we
have to "standard" set theory. This meant that the negation of CH
(notation: ~CH) could not be derived from the ZF axioms. And this
in turn entailed that CH could be assumed and used in standard set
theory without introducing any inconsistencies which were not already there. Godel in effect proved that CH was as harmless as the less
exotic propositions which already comprised set theory; that is the
main reason why most mathematicians accept CH today.
•
In 1963 Paul Cohen showed thatCH cannot be proved from the
ZF axioms. Together, Godel and Cohen's results show thatCH
is independent of the ZF axioms: neither it nor its negation can be
derived from them. Among other things, this means that CH is
undecidable in ZF. After Euclid's parallel postulate, CH was
probably the first major conjecture to be proved undecidable by
standard mathematics. Its independence also means that ~CH is
just as consistent with standard set theory as CH irsel£ This has
allowed set theorists to develop set theory with and without it, just as
geometers can develop geometry with or without Euclid's parallel
postulate. Set theory with ~CH rather than CH is usually called
Non-Cantorian set theory.
Definition. The generalized continuum hypothesis (GCH) asserts
that 2A IS,; IS, 1 for every positive integer a.
• When a;O, GCH yields the ordinary CH.
• GCH implies that, starting with IS 0, we can march through the
transfinite cardinals with the power set operation, and will not skip
any. It follows that for every infinite setS, if IS I; IS"' then I*SI;IS.,.,
or that the only transfinite cardinals are INI, I*NI, I**NI, I***NI, ....
Bibliographic note. Most of the theorems and proofs in this crash
course were discovered by Georg Cantor (1845-1918) and publish-
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ed in a series of monographs starting in 1870. He published two
summary statements of his results in 1895 and 1897, which have
been translated into English by Philip E. B. Jourdain as Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers, Dover
Publications, 1955. My exposition of Cantor's results is indebted
to three more recent authors: Stephen Cole Kleene, Introduction
to Metamathematics, North-Holland Pub. Co., 1952; Abraham
Fraenkei,AbstractSet Theory, North-Holland Pub. Co., 1953; and
Geoffrey Hunter, Metalogic, University of California Press, 1971.
List of symbols and abbreviations with the page numbers of their
first occurrence.
{... }, set brackets, 35
0, the null set, 36
iff, "if and only if," 36
£, subset, 36
C, proper subset, 36
ISj, cardinality of setS, 36
A"" B, one-to-one correspondence, 37
*S, power set of setS, 38
N, the set of natural numbers, 38
~ o, Aleph-null, the number of natural numbers, 38
'l. the set of integers, 39
IQ. the set of rational numbers, 39
JR. the set of real numbers, 40
c, the cardinality of the continuum, 52
x"y, xr or x to the power of y, 54
CH, the continuum hypothesis, 57
GCH, the generalized continuum hypothesis, 58
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�~ Euripides among the Athenians
~
Michael Davis
According to Aristotle, Euripides appears to be the most tragic of
the poets. 1 Since "plot is the first principle and like the soul of
tragedy," and the most beautiful plots involve reversal and recognition, and, in the best of these, recognition comes to be "from
the events themselves," it is not surprising that Aristotle should
cite the plot of Euripides' Iphigeneia among the Taurians as exemplary.2 The "most tragic of the poets" perhaps ought to have
written the best of the tragedies, and the Iphigeneia appears to be
Aristotle's candidate. Yet Aristotle also says that in the most
beautiful tragic plot a better-than-average man moves from good
to ill fortune. 3 In the Iphigeneia, Athena arranges things so that
all ends happily for Orestes, Iphigeneia, and even for the captive
Greek women who make up the chorus. Is this a movement from
good to ill fortune? How can this play be the best of tragedies?
How can it be a tragedy at all? Of course, not having read Aristotle,
Euripides may have been ignorant of what he was supposed to do.
But didn't Aristotle read Aristotle? How could the celebrated
celebrator of plot have been so filled with praise for a tragedy with
the story of a fairy tale? That "Iphigeneia among the Taurians is
usually regarded as an exceptionally well-made play, more transparently coherent and unproblematic than, say, the kindred
Helen or Ion" only deepens the puzzle. 4 An unproblematic and
coherent tragedy is only problematically tragic.
The Iphigeneia among the Taurians opens with a speech in
which Iphigeneia reveals that she, presumed to have been sacrificed by Agamemnon at Aulis so that the Greeks could sail against
Troy, was in reality whisked away by Artemis at the last minute
Michael Davis teaches philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW.
and replaced by a deer. Iphigeneia was brought to Artemis's
temple in Scythia among the Taurians (the present day Crimean
peninsula), where either the goddess or Thoas, the local king, (the
Greek admits of either reading, 34) made her priestess and responsible for preparing human victims for sacrifice. Iphigeneia has just
had a powerful dream in which, once more in her room at Argos,
she was awakened by an earthquake and ran outside, only to see
her home collapse, At the end one pillar alone remains standing.
Auburn hair grows from its top, and it speaks in a human voice.
Iphigeneia then sprinkles it with water, as she does in her office
as priestess to prepare victims for sacrifice. She now interprets this
dream to signifY the death of her brother Orestes. In the mean
time, Orestes and his cousin and brother-in-law, Pylades, arrive
on the Taurian shore where they have been sent by Apollo to steal
the statue of Artemis from the temple and take it to Athens.
Success will release Orestes from his labors; he will no longer be
pursued by the Furies for the killing of his mother (1453-56).5
After conducting a ritual funeral for the "dead" Orestes,
Iphigeneia is brought a report that two men have been captured-she does not yet know that they are Orestes and Pylades.
Iphigeneia is to prepare them for sacrifice. A long scene follows
in which she first discovers the prisoners to be Argives, questions
Orestes about affairs at Argos, and offers to free him if he will
carry a letter to someone there. He agrees on the condition that
not he but his friend Pylades be the one to go. When Iphigeneia
makes Pylades swear an oath that he will deliver the letter, he asks
what he is to do if it is lost at sea. Iphigeneia makes him commit
the letter to memory, and in the process its addressee (Orestes)
and its content (that she was not really sacrificed) are revealed.
Pylades immediately meets the conditions of his oath by handing
the letter to Orestes, who reveals who he is and offers some proofs.
How all three will escape is now the problem. Iphigeneia determines to tell Thoas that Orestes and Pylades are matricides who,
before being sacrificed, must be purified in sea water, as must the
statue tainted by their touch. After using her authority to ensure
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63
that everyone else, will remain indoors, Iphigeneia takes Orestes,
Pylades, and the statue of Artemis down to the sea, They are about
to escape in Orestes' ship when the wind turns against them,
Thoas is just sending men for their recapture when Athena intervenes. She instructs Orestes to set up a new temple of Artemis at
Halae (on the island of Euboea) where each year a ritual human
sacrifice will be performed-hosias hekati (for the sake of the
holy). Iphigeneia is to become the priestess at Artemis's temple at
Brauron (about twenty miles from Athens on the shore across the
gulf from Halae); when she dies she will be buried there and
offerings will be made to her of the fine clothing of women who
have died in childbirth. The Greek slave women who have made
up the chorus will also return home (which may be Delos, the
island on which Apollo and Artemis were born-1 094-111 O).
Thoas agrees because to disobey a god is crazy, and so, with the
possible exception ofThoas, all live happily ever after. Or do they?
At some level Iphigeneia among the Taurians is clearly about two
things-the difference between Greek and barbarian and the
significance of human sacrifi~e. The first word of the play is Pelops,
the name of an ancestor to whom Iphigeneia traces the origin of
her Greekness. Tantalus, king of Lydia and Pelops's father, was
said to have murdered his son and served him to the gods as dinner
in order to test their divinity by seeing if they could discern that
they were eating human flesh. All the gods but Demeter knew
immediately; she, apparently brooding over the loss of
Persephone, was inattentive and took a bite of shoulder. Tantalus
was punished severely. The gods reassembled the pieces of Pelops
(with an ivory shoulder) and brought him back to life, after which
he went to Greece, married Hippodamia of Pisa, founded the
Peloponnesus and fathered Atreus, father of Agamemnon.
Iphigeneia thus begins the play by reminding us that Greeks were
originally Asians, albeit Asians reassembled as a result of a divine
rejection of human sacrifice. The Iphigeneia also begins by reminding us that beneath the problem of human sacrifice lies the
still darker problem of cannibalism. Sacrifices to an Olympian god
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
involve offering the fat and bones of the sacrificed animal to the
god but eating the meat. 6 Iphigeneia repeatedly understands the
distinction between Greek and barbarian in terms of human
sacrifice even though the originator of her line served his son to
the gods for dinner (386-91), her grandfather similarly served his
brother's children to him out of revenge (179-90, 811-17), and
her own father meant"to sacrifice her to Artemis as the price for
setting sail for Troy (6-27, 203-228). The chorus, too, emphasize
their exile from Europe (135) to barbaric Asia (180). And Thoas
distinguishes barbarians from Greeks on the grounds that no
barbarian would dare commit matricide (1174).
According to an ancient law in the city where "barbarian Thoas
is lord among the barbarians," Iphigeneia now prepares for sacrifice any Greek man who comes to the Taurian land.? She calls it
a festival "only the name of which is noble (kalon)." Out of fear
she remains silent as to the rest-the unspeakable things done
within the temple (28-41). Later Iphigeneia doubts that the gods
could demand such sacrifices and even doubts the stories about
her ancestor Tantalus. 8 It must be "those killers of men here" who
attribute their own baseness to the goddess (385-91). Just before
putting her escape plan into action, Iphigeneia prays to Artemis:
Mistress {potnia), who saved me in the glens of Aulis
from the terror of a hand of a murderous father9, save
me also now as well as these men; or because of you
the utterance of Loxias is no longer true for mortals.
But kindly (eumenes) go from a barbarian land to
Athens. For it is not fit for you to dwell here when
you have a happy city available.IO (1 082-88)
Were Artemis, who once saved Iphigeneia from being sacrificed, to
be perfectly consistent she ought to save her now as well. It is because
they practice human sacrifice that the Taurians are not fit to keep
Artemis's temple. Iphigeneia effectively identifies the barbarity of the
barbarians with the fact that they practice human sacrifice.
On the other hand, presumably because she is a Greek, she finds
the suggestion terrible (deinos) that she and Orestes, as visitors,
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kill a host/stranger (xenophonein) even to effect their escape
(1021).1 1 And yet Iphigeneia initially characterized her own art as
killing strangers (xenoktonon, 53). Of course, this means that she
has been killing Greeks. Iphigeneia seems to think it less barbarous to kill her own who are strangers than to kill strangers who
are her own.
Given the importance of human sacrifice in the play, the
ambiguiw surrounding its practice by lphi:geneia is doubly puzzling. Beginning with her interpretation of her dream, she regularly collapses the distinction between anointing those who are
about to be sacrificed and actu41ly killing them. She says her art
is to slay strangers (53), even though others in fact cut rhe throat
of the sacrifices .. But is even this true? The queerest of the puzzles
of the play emerges in Iphigeneia's conversation with the herdsman from whom she hears ofthe capture of Orestes and Pylades
and to whom she says that "never yet was the altar of the goddess
made red with streams of Greek blood" {258-59). In her dream,
Iphigeneia makes much of the auburn (xanthas) hair that grows
out of the cornice of the one pillar that remains standing after the
fall of her ancestral home (52). In the immediate sequel, Pylades
remarks that the cornice of the altar is auburn from blood- (73).
This would seem to settle the matter, and yet directly after
Iphigeneia makes her puzzling rem_arks about never having spilled
Greek blood, the herdsman introduces into his story the fact that
the capture of Orestes and Pylades occurred near a shelter for those
fishing for porphura, the fish from which purple dye is made (263),
and then goes on to tell of how they sounded an alarm by blowing
on kochloi, shellfish from which purple dye is also made (303). All
of this might be thought to be included only for adding local color
to the description were it not for the fact that in the Iliad (17.361)
and in Aeschylus's Persians (317) porphureos refers to the color of
blood stains. We thus have a blood stained altar (73), a claim that
no blood has been spilled (258-59-this seems to follow from the
fact that the ancient law specifies the sacrifice of Gree\<: men) and
finally the gratuitous introduction of material for making dye the
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
color of blood (263, 303). We seem to be meant to wonder
whether the human sacrifice practiced by the Taurians might be
an elaborate hoax.l2
That said, we must immediately answer that this cannot be.
Iphigeneia· has a letter written for her to Orestes by a captive who
pitied her and held that the law, not her hand, was responsible for
his death. This can only be the law that prescribes the death of
Greek men. So one Greek at least has died. Euripides seems to
have made it impossible for us to solve this difficulty on the level
of the plot. On the one hand, and contrary to our initial impressions, no sacrifice has been performed; on the other hand, at least
one sacrifice has been performed. But perhaps the contradiction
is the point. By being made to wonder whether a human being
has been sacrificed, we are made to wonder what it would mean
for a human being to be sacrificed. When Agamemnon sacrifices
Iphigeneia he is fullfilling an oath to sacrifice "the most beautiful
thing a year would bear" (23), much as Abraham is told to sacrifice
his "only son Isaac, whom [he loves]." 13 Human sacrifice has
meaning insofar as we are offering up our ownmost-what is of
the greatest importance to us. Piety demands that the gods be
given what we value most. A lamb may be dear, but a human being
is more dear. Understood in this way, killing one's child is a sign
of great piety. At the same time, the very moment a human being
is placed on the sacrificial altar his humanity is diminished. It is
for this reason that Euripides has Iphigeneia go voluntarily to the
altar in the Iphigeneia at Aulis (1368-1401) and in this play has
her stipulate that Orestes and Pylades must be untied before they
can be fit sacrifices (468-71). An unwilling human sacrifice strips
a human being of humaniry. Still, even a willing sacrifice involves
a devaluing of the worth of a human being.
On the one hand, the greatest piety requires human sacrifice;
on the other hand, to sacrifice a human being is to render it less
than it was-no longer the greatest sacrifice but just another
animal to be burned and eaten. The gods place an impossible
demand on us. No sacrifice is sufficient unless it is a sign that we
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67
give what is most our own, and yet in the act of sacrificing it, our
own ceases to be our own. 'The Iphigeneia among the Taurians is
ambiguous with regard to the question of human sacrifice because
human sacrifice is, by its very nature, ambiguous. To perform it
is not to perform it; human sacrifice is impossible.
The Iphigeneia begins by acknowledging that what was thought
to be a human sacrifice was not; at the last minute a human being
turned into an animal. The Greeks, altogether unaware of the
change (perhaps human flesh tastes like venison), have to be
taught its significance. This play, the instrument for their education, will make them fully Greek. Iphigeneia herself still confuses
the intent, acknowledgement, or meaning of sacrifice with the act
itself. She does not carefully distinguish her office from that of
those who cut animals' throats, and she assumes that, because her
dream showed her performing the rites ofher,office over what she
took to be Orestes, this is tantamount to the death of Orestes. She
never hears the chorus's account of Zeus's amusement when the
young Apollo comes (o demand that Earth, from whose daughter
Themis Apollo had seized the oracle at Delphi, be forced to stop
supplying dreams as an alternative to sacred oracles for "articulating the things before and the things after-whatever was to
happen" (1264-65). If it is characteristic of Greeks to worship
Olympian gods, this seems to mean distinguishing between dream
and reality.
Not sufficiently understanding the distinction berween the
significance of a deed and its reality, Iphigeneia makes a typically
barbarian mistake; it is as though everyone were like Thoas, whose
name describes· his most significant feature-as though the swift
of foot were all named Swift, and all Carpenters were workers in
wood (2, 31-33). It is probably significant that neither the verb
sCmainiJ, "to signifY" or "give signs," nor any word cognate with
it appear in the Iphigeneia until line 1203. Thereafter, they occur
eight times. 14 At the beginning of the play Iphigeneia characterizes
her art as the killing of strangers-she is defined by where she is,
and, accordingly, Greeks are strangers. By the end of the play she
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
resists Orestes' suggestion that they kill Thoas in order to escape
because it is terrible to kill strangers (1021). Only by thinking of
herself as a stranger in the land in which she lives can Iphigeneia
understand the distinction between significance and reality.
But by distinguishing the meaning of a deed from its reality
might it not be possible to preserve the lofty piety of human
sacrifice without indulging in the low savagery of the deed? "For
the sake of the holy"-hosias hekati (1461 )-would then take on
its idiomatic meaning, "for form's sake." The Iphigeneia, which
is, after all, about thwarted human sacrifices, would in reality be
about the superiority of ritual, fake sacrifices.
That Euripides has the duality of reality and significance in
mind is also clear from our first glimpse of Orestes and Pylades.
As the two enter cautiously, Pylades twice speaks of looking
around in a double way.
I am looking (horo), and in turning my eyes in every
direction, I am inspecting (skopoumai). (68)
But looking round with my eye (egkuklounta ophthalmon), I must inspect (skopein) well. (76)
Pylades tacitly distinguishes between seeing what is present and a
metaphorical seeing that involves understanding the meaning of
what one sees. Similarly, when the herdsmen first encounter
Orestes and Pylades, while there is no argument with respect to
what they see, there is an important disagreement about what it
means. To some the strangers are gods (daimones, 267) or images
(agalmata, 273) ofa god; to others they are simply wayward sailors
(276). This duality gets resolved only in madness or in dreams.
For Orestes, who mistakes the dogs and cattle of the Taurians for
the Furies (whose sounds are said to be mimemata of the sounds
of cattle and dogs, 293-94), and Iphigeneia, for whom anointing
her brother is killing him, vision is not double.
Had Orestes made the distinction between ritual and reality,
he might have understood Apollo's instructions quite differently.
We do not know the precise words of the oracle, only Orestes'
versions of them:
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DAVIS
You said for me to come to the boundaries of the
Taurian land where your sister Artemis has altars, and
to take the image (agalma) of the goddess which those
here say fell into this temple from heaven. (85-88)
There, sounding a voice from his golden tripod, Phoebus sent me here to seize the image (agalma) fallen
from Zeus and set it in the land of Athens. (976-78)
It is possible, of course, that Apollo told Orestes to go to Scythia
to fetch his sister, which in Greek might be indistinguishable from
the sister. 15 Both Iphigeneia and the agalma of Artemis fell from
the sky (29). This ambiguity is perfectly expressed at the end of
the play when, to effect their escape, Orestes lifts Iphigeneia into
his ship while she is holding the agalma of Artemis (138185)-the act of rescuing Apollo's sister is the same as the act of
rescuing his own sister. Agalma has a variety of meanings in Greek
(delight, honor, glory, gift, image, statue, etc.), as Euripides
reminds us when he has one of the herdsmen, upon first seeing
Orestes and Pylades, suggest that they are agalmata of Nereus
(273). They are surely not thought to be statues hut rather
something like favorites. Used in this way, Iphigeneia could easily
be understood as an agalma of Artemis. Of course, were she simply
an agalma of Artemis, she would be little more than a statue. As
priestess, she performs the duties of her office, but she asserts her
humanity by doubting her patroness, blaming Artemis's "sophisms" in accepting human sacrifices while keeping from her altars
any who are stained by murder or by touching a woman in
childbirth or a dead body (380-83). A human being can no more
be an agalma than a sacrifice. Iphigeneia is and is not an agalma
of Artemis. None of this ambiguity gets through to Orestes,
however. He thinks only that he has been sent to fetch a statue;
finding Iphigeneia is a stroke of luck, but it does not occur to him
to see one event as an image of the other. Neither Orestes nor his
sister sees double.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Yet there is reason to believe that for Euripides seeing double
is the defining feature of human beings. Iphigeneia begins the play
by lamenting the death of her kin, Orestes. Although she can
scarcely have known him-when last she saw him he was an
infant-·Iphigeneia places all her hopes in Orestes. Accordingly,
he is her friend in name only; before she learns Orestes' name she
is content to see him die. On the other hand, Orestes and Pylades
are philoi in a deeper sense. The herdsman reports that while the
Taurians attacked the mad Orestes, Pylades protected the dear
man (phi/on andra) at the risk of his own life (310-14). This
account leads Iphigeneia to assume that the two are "a pair of
brothers [born] of one mother" (497). Orestes responds that they
are brothers in love (philothi) but not in blood (498). The
friendship of the two men is confirmed when, having been offered
a chance to save himself by taking Iphigeneia' s letter to Argos,
Orestes wants Pylades to go in his stead because he is his philos
(597 -608). Pylades, lamenting this as misfortune ("unenviable is
the death of friends to friends," 650) wishes to die with Orestes,
for he is his friend. It would be shameful for him to do otherwise
(674-86). Orestes replies that this would pain him even more; he
asks Pylades to suffer the shame of abandoning him so that he,
Orestes, will not have to suffer it and calls Pylades the dearest of
his friends (philtaton ...phil8n, 708). Friends seem to be those who
identifY their friend's good with their own; they are as one.
Why has the Iphigeneia suddenly become preoccupied with the
issue ofphilia-kinship or friendship? For Orestes to love Pylades
as a brother is possible only because Pylades is not his brother.
Philia in the highest sense can become manifest only when two
human beings bound together by mutual consent behave as
though they had been bound together by something altoghter
beyond their consent, like birth. And yet to be bound together by
necessity is precisely not to be friends. At its most powerful, will
appears to be necessity, at which point it ceases to be will.
Accordingly, in the Iphigeneia, the word daimon and words compounded from it are used sometimes to mean fate or destiny (157,
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202-4) and sometimes god (267, 391, 570).16 Orestes says he and
Pylades are brothers in love but cannot mean what he says, for,
were they brothers, there would be nothing special in behaving
like brothers. But philia is special. Its metaphorical meaning is
thus the measure of its real meaning. Metaphorical brotherhood
is real philia. It requires that we understand ourselves as being
something we are not in~ order to understand what we are; we must
see double. Significance (the two are brothers) must be at odds
with reality (the rwo are not really brothers) to be the measure of
reality (we might say of two brothers that unlike most brothers
they are really brothers).
At first it seems as though the metaphorical level of our lives is
interpreted in terms of a more fundamental reality, but the metaphor turns out to be the reality of our lives. Ritual is not a
reminder of a deeper reality; it constitutes a "deeper" reality that
it then interprets. The plot of the Iphigeneia serves as an example.
Iphigeneia overinterprets her dream to mean that Orestes is
dead-she cannot know that he is the last male of her family since
she neither knows that her father is dead (543-45) nor that Orestes
was the last of her mother's children (compare 917-19). She then
stages a funeral during which she sprinkles libations, cries and
would put her auburn hair on his tomb if she could (158-78). Her
misinterpretation of the dream thus leads to a ritual that could
itself be the meaning of the dream. A dream is interpreted as a
ritual which is then interpreted back into what it is a ritual of.
Iphigenia says that a dream about sprinkling libations over a pillar
with a red top is an image of her doing her priestly function, and
so represents death. This then causes her to perform a ritual burial
that can, in,turn, be understood as the true meaning of the dream
she first interpreted-she saw herself sprinkling libations over
Orestes, who is really alive.
Fraternity among real brothers could show itself only after the
rejection of the blood bond that ties them together; fratricide is a
perhaps exaggerated version of this rejection of the merely animal
connection. But in the Iphigeneia, to be willing to kill your brother
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
seems to be the prerequisite for loving him simply as a human
being, for only in this way can you be sure that you love him for
himself and not because he is your brother. The plot of the
Iphigeneia reflects this difficulty. Iphigeneia literally comes to
know her brother as her own by planning to kill him,l7 But she
also demands that Orestes separate himself from one who is
phi!taton philfJn for the sake of his own escape (595). To know
what you love you must forsake it, and yet to forsake it is to deny
your love. Friendship no less than piety makes impossible demands on us and for the same reason. The significance of both
depends on a reality that undermines their significance.
Iphigeneia among the Taurians is a story about what happens
when the reality of things is replaced by their significance. The
fundamental "fact" of the play is that although Iphigeneia did not
die at Aulis, the Greeks were allowed to sail to Troy. The Trojan
war required not her death but its significance-something like
acknowledging the harsh cost of war before going to war. 18 Ironically, a real sacrifice would not serve this purpose so well. Ritual
forces us to acknowledge that we are really concerned with the
meaning of the action we are imitating, not its reality. By separating the significant from the real, it forces us to acknowledge the
presence of the significant within the real. It is like dreaming,
which seems almost a natural ritual-an experience of the separation of experience from reality that induces us to look for a
meaning within reality,l9 The Taurians seem to have sacrificed
strangers before Iphigeneia dropped into their midst (39), and it
is not clear that they sacrifice only Greek men since Iphigeneia is
told to prepare for the sacrifice of Orestes and Pylades before she
asks what land they have the look of (241-46). What is clear is
that the Taurians have come to interpret their practice as just
reprisal for Agamemnon's "sacrifice" oflphigeneia at Aulis (33639). But once a practice is acknowledged to exist for the purpose
of expressing something else-not simply the hatred of strangers
but the symbolic avenging oflphigeneia-then it no longer really
has to be done. If the practice has as its purpose to make a point,
�DAVIS
73
then there would be no reason why in any particular case you
couldn't just let a Greek or two go. But if one, why not all? The
symbolism, not the deed, is what is important.
Greeks differ from barbarians in that they are aware of this
primacy of significance. In the Iphigeneia, Euripides experiments
with the complete rationalizing or Hellenizing of the Greeks; the
play is a declaration of their utter independence from Asia. For
there to be no stain of savagery on the Greek war against Troy (the
deed that more than any other constitutes them as a people), the
sacrifice of Iphigeneia has to be denied (for the same reason,
Iphigeneia is moved to deny the story of Tantalus and
Pelops-386-390). If Iphigeneia was not killed, then the murder
of Agamemnon was not justified, and if Clytemnestra was altogether in the wrong, Orestes was altogether right. The Tantalids
begin to look squeaky clean.
Still, there are problems. The play begins with a reference to
the origin of the Greeks in Asia; these Greeks-Iphigeneia, Orestes and Pylades-institute a plan designed to free them, like
Pelops, from Asia. The scheme involves the sort of untrustworthiness that Iphigeneia attributes to Greeks (1204) and the messenger
to women who happen to be Greek (1298). This is no idle charge.
Iphigeneia's escape plan involves taking advantage of the Taurians' naive piety. 20 But to use the purification of the statue of
Artemis as a ruse to reach Orestes' ship means that they do not
treat the statue as a sacred object. What they do reminds us of
what Artemis did at Aulis; both involve manipulating the holy for
ulterior motives. There are several other events of this sort in the
play. When Iphigeneia realizes that she lacks away 0fbeing certain
that Pylades will take her letter to Argos, Orestes asks her what
she is perplexed about (amechanein, 734). She asks that Pylades
swear an oath. Pylades does (749), but then says that they have
forgotten something (753), to which Iphigeneia replies that it
doesn't matter because they can just swear a new oath (754). Oaths
are apparently subject to ongoing revision at the convenience of
the oath taker. Here the gods are no more than devices-mecha-
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
nai. But when god becomes a deus ex machina used to extricate
characters from difficult situations, it is not really any longer a
god to be worshipped. Does the substitution of a deer for
Iphigeneia at Aulis demonstrate the power of Artemis or her
irrelevance? To understand Artemis as an agalma one must understand the power she has. For that she must be taken deadly
seriously; she must be' thought real. But then she will no longer
be understood as an image-as what she stands for. The significance of Artemis is at odds with her reality or power; she both
does and does not want to be called by the name Artemis. Perhaps
the tragedy of the Iphigeneia among the Taurians is that its "happy
ending" points to the vanishing of the sacred. The triumph of
guile or significance (Greekness) means that all constraints are
negotiable. Ritual seems at first to establish the primacy of significance over reality, but it is a curiously insignificant significance.
Ritual preserves the significance of something done without
preserving the doing itself. The blood on the knife of the rite
performed at Halae each year stands for human sacrifice without
being human sacrifice. Ritual is pure significance, but once the
actual doing is taken away, it risks losing its significance. It is
initially done hosias hekati, for the sake of the holy, but it ends by
being done hosias hekati, for form's sake. It is done because it is
done. The very end of the Iphigeneia points to this problem. The
escape of Iphigeneia, Orestes and Pylades is about to fail when
Athena saves them. But if now, why not at the beginning? All the
action of the play is rendered meaningless in light of the end; it is
simply for form's sake. The knife is at their throats, but Athena's
intervention deprives it of reality. Had they known she would save
them, their efforts would have been like the ceremony at Halae, a
ritual, but that is to say tongue in cheek-for form's sake. The
cleverness of the Greeks thus threatens to undermine the very
meaning that distinguishes them from barbarians. The Iphigeneia,
as the story of the complete triumph of ritual and Greekness, is
thereby also an account of the death of Greekness.
�DAVIS
75
This dependence of the Greek on the barbarian comes out in a
curious way after Iphigeneia discovers that Orestes is her brother
(869-99). She first tacitly compares her daring in almost sacrificing Orestes to the daring of her father (862, 869) and later to
Orestes' own daring in killing his mother (924) and then laments
Orestes' present plight.
By discovering what way (poron) for you, away from
the city will I send you back again from murder to the
Argive fatherland before sword comes near to your
blood? This, this, unhappy soul, you must discover.
Will you go overland, not by ship, but by swiftness of
foot? Then you will draw near to death, marching
through barbarian tribes and ways that are not ways
(hodous anodous). Yet going through the narrows
(stenoporou) of the dark rocks is a great journey for
escapes by ship. Wretched me, wretched me. With
respect to these things, who, what god or mortal or
what of the unforeseen, by finding a way out of
trouble (poron aporon) will bring to light a release of
evils for the only two offspring of Atreus? 2 1 (876-99)
The issue is how to leave Asia and the barbarians behind. Orestes
cannot go by foot for that would take him through barbarian lands
where there are ways that are not ways-hodous anodous. Now,
anodos means not only no way but also a way up. So the barbarian
way is both a dead end and an ascent. Similarly, when Iphigeneia
asks what god, mortal or whatever of the immanifest things will
find a way out of the problem, "way" is poros and problem is
aporon-lack of a way. 22 Without realizing it, Iphigeneia thus calls
for a wayless way. She asks for a solution to their problem which
in not being a solution will provide a solution and likens this to
making a way up, an ascent, out of the non-way of the barbarians.
But this is just a description of a peculiar kind of ritual-tragedy.
The aporon of the barbarian, when displayed and made self-conscious, becomes the poros of the Greek. What seems no way is
really a way up. The experience of the savagery of human sacrifice
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
by way of ritual is like the experience of tragedy. Tragedy civilizes,
for to be civilized is to be a ritualized barbarian.
Tragedy sketches a problem, an aporia, in all its intractabili~y.
Then it represents it in such a way as to make the experience of
the problem a solution. Yet the success of this procedure is
incomplete. Insofar as tragedy, as play, undermines the seriousness
and reality of what it is about, it tends to commit suicide and thus
paves the way for forgetting the problem that it describes. It is like
ritual cut free from the reality of which it was an image; its
Greekness is so complete as to be utterly non-barbaric. But a
problem that has come to be a solution soon ceases to be understood as a problem and therewith ceases to be a solution. When
we become convinced that the irrational attachment to family is
a necessary feature of human nature (we all have mothers), it
becomes something evetyone has to "cope with." Yet then it no
longer has a sufficiently powerful hold on us to make possible a
tragedy based on it and revealing it. When Oedipus and Electra
simply need therapy to take care of the complexes bearing their
names, tragedy is no longer possible. But when tragedy is no
longer possible, these complexes are no longer intelligible. Perfect
Hellenization is thus impossible; to be Greek means to retain the
memory of what it is to be a barbarian. The Iphigeneia begins with
a reference to Pelops and constantly reminds us of the Greek
origins in Asia. We are all lapsed barbarians.
The plot of the Iphigeneia among the Taurians presents the
replacement of actual human sacrifice by ritual sacrifice. 2 3 This
involves the movement from Scythia to Athens, from Asia to
Greece. The action of the play is made possible by Iphigeneia' s
clever use of the agalma of Artemis to effect their escape. The
significance of the change involved in this ruse is made·manifest
in the expression hosias hekati; what was for the sake of the holy
gradually becomes for form's sake. On one level, the Iphigeneia is
a story about the superiority of Greeks to barbarians. Euripides
celebrates the fact that, unlike barbarians, Greeks recognize common humanity; they do not sacrifice human beings. Instead, they
�DAVIS
77
ritualize such behavior, distilling its significance-the sacrifice of
what is most dear-into non-barbaric action. On a deeper level,
however, the Iphigeneia points to the fragility of all ritual. Its
success is its failure, for insofar as it suppresses its barbaric origin
it becomes unintelligible. Accordingly, the Iphigeneia provides
accounts of the forgotten "realities" at the source of at least three
Athenian rituals. 24 Orestes tells Iphigeneia that when he stopped
over in Athens he was not denied hospitality, but, because the
Athenians did not wish to drink from the same cup as a matricide,
each man drank from an individual small cup. He says that this
has since become a rite at Athens-the Choes, or pitcher feast
(947-60). At the end of the play, when Athena instructs Orestes
and lphigeneia on what they are to do, she is in fact offering
accounts of already existing rituals at Athens. She speaks directly
to Orestes (1446), telling him to hear her epistolai-her message.
The word can also mean letter and was used by lphigeneia to
describe the message written for her by the Greek whom she
sacrificed (589). What might the two "letters" have to do with
each other? Iphigeneia' s says that she did not die; her sacrifice was
only an illusion-a symbol. Athena directs Orestes to establish a
symbolic Taurian land in Athens. He is to set up a temple at Halae
for the statue of Artemis, who will henceforth be called tauropolos.
This was an epithet of Artemis at Athens prior to the Iphigeneia
among the Taurians; it could mean either "worshipped by the
Taurians" or "hunting bulls." Starting with an already existing
temple, Euripides settles the ambiguities surrounding it and provides a story to give it significance. Similarly, although with a
significance less obvious, Athena instructs Iphigeneia to become
a priestess at Artemis's temple at Brauron. When she dies,
Iphigenia will be honored with agalmata-the finery of women
who have died in childbirth. This, too, seems to be an existing
ritual for which Euripides is creating a "reality."25
Euripides has thus written a tragedy that restores an awareness
of the original reality to rituals that have become so much for
form's sake that it is no longer clear why they are practiced. But
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
if the reality underlying ritual is its barbaric origin, it would be
fair to say that Euripides' tragedy rebarbarizes rituals that have
become so civilized as to cease to be significant. In fact, this is
what the whole of the Iphigeneia is meant to do. Tragedy is a ritual
restoration of the reality that underlies ritual. This is the truly
distinguishing characteristic of the Greeks. They do not simply
shake hands; they prdvide stories adequate to restore our awareness that shaking hands was originally a sign that men thereby are
refraining from drawing their swords. If this is not to be simply a
bit of quaint, antiquarian knowledge, these stories must reproduce
the fear that swords might indeed be drawn. They must rebarbarize us. Similarly, the ritual of human sacrifice at Halae is unintelligible apart from the terror of human sacrifice that a tragedy
like the Iphigeneia is meant to inspire.
Isn't this still a happy ending? Tragedy goes one step beyond
ritual. In this play, Euripides provides an imaginary context for
an existing ritual so as to rebarbarize us in thought, and thus in
reality civilize us. He provides a model for bringing together
reality and significance by providing us with a poetic (that is to
say, false) reality to bolster the significance of the rituals of our
day to day life. Tragedy reveals to us the phusis underlying our
nomos, and by doing so causes us to wonder again at what we have
come to take for granted. For, as Aristotle says, "the lover of myth
is somehow a philosopher." 26 As a result, we get knowledge without
suffering-a perfect coincidence of significance and reality.
In the end, however, even this solution is incomplete. On the
obvious level, Athena's intervention is not simply a happy ending
because Iphigeneia is not allowed to go home. She and Orestes
must remain separated. Orestes was sent to the land of the Taurians to accomplish two things that looked like one thing. He was
to rescue his sister and ste~l the statue of Artemis. Reality and
significance were adroitly confused. In the end, the statue of
Artemis, the image of the sister, is to be housed in a temple at
Halae where a ritual is conducted each year. A man will be brought
to the temple as if to be sacrificed, and when the knife is brought
�DAVIS
79
near his throat a drop of blood will be drawn hosias hekati. This
ritual, a fake, is meant to remind us of the significance of human
sacrifice. Iphigeneia, the real sister, will, on the other hand, be
housed at Brauron, across the Euboean Gulf from Halae. After her
death, ritual offerings will be made to her to acknowledge the real
sacrifice that mothers make so that their children can be born. In
the first ritual, the death is intended but unreal; in the second it
is unintended but real. The first ritual is used to make the
significant real; the second is used to make the real significant.
While the two are similar, their separation at the end of the play
suggests that Euripides knew that the togetherness of reality and
significance would mean the disappearance of both. In the end,
tragedy, too, is a ritual, the significance of which must be lost in
time. Iphigeneia among the Taurians is Euripides' self-consciously
imperfect attempt to provide a ritual for its renewal. Perhaps this
is why Aristotle called him the most tragic of the poets.
Notes
I. Aristotle, Poetics, 1453a29. Quotations from the Poetics are from Aristotle: Poetics, ed. D.W. Lucas (Oxford: 1986). Translations are my own.
2. Aristotle, Poetics 1450a38-39, 1452b30-31, 1452a16-17 and 1455a16-19.
3. Aristotle, Poetics 1453a7-12
4. See Christian Wolff, "Euripides' Iphigeneia among the Tauriam: Aetiology, Ritual, and Myth," Classical Antiquity, 1112 (1992), 307.
5. The play thus constitutes a correction ofAeschylus'sEumenides (967-75).
6. See Hesiod, Theogony 507-560 and Jean-Pierre Vernant, "Greek Relig!on," in Religions ofAntiquity, ed. Robert M. Collier (New York: Macmillan,
1989), 176-81.
7. All quotations from Iphigenia among the Tauriam are from Euripidis
Fabulae, ed. J. Diggle (Oxford: 1986), Vol. 2. Translations are my own.
8. Our surest source for the story of Tantalus and Pelops is Pindar (Olympian I) who relates it, like Iphigeneia, only to deny that it could be true of
the gods.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
9. Patroktonoswith the accent on the antepenultima is a genitive and means
"of a father who kills." Patroktonos with the accent on the penultima means
"father-killer."
10. In the plural potnia (potniaz) is often used to refer to the Furies (Sophocles' Oedipus at Co/onus 84; Herodotus Inquiries 9.97) who, of course, are
given the name Eumenides or Kindly Ones in Aeschylus's play of that name
when they acquiesce in the aquittal of Orestes and take up residence at
Athens. Here Iphigeneia urges her potnia Artemis to be eumenh and take up
a new home in Athens. The plot of the Iphigeneia makes clear that Orestes
has not yet been cleansed. Euripides means to revise Aeschylus's version of
the story. Orestes has not yet come to terms with what it means to have killed
his mother for killing his father for killing his sister. Iphigeneia remains as
unfinished business since Orestes seems to have taken her death rather lightly.
Another Fury has to be made kindly. Aeschylus and Euripides seem to agree
that this is what distinguishes Greeks from barbarians.
11. This is, of course, a version of the issue of the status of strangers at stake
in the Trojan war.
12. It is worth remembering that on the level of theatrical representation
they are, of course, certainly a hoax.
13. Genesis 22.2
14. They are twice urrered by Thoas describing Iphigeneia's activiry (1203,
1211), twice by Iphigeneia (once referring to implements of purification-1233, and once bidding that a messenger be sent to what she now
refers to as the polis-292) and four times by the messenger reporting the
deeds of their escape to Thoas (1305, 1312, 1372, 1410).
15. Moses Hadas, Introduction to Classical Drama (New York: Bantam
Books, 1966), 108.
16. At 1486, Athena tells Thoas that "necessiry is stronger than both you and
the gods.~'
17. When she is finally convinced of who he is she says, Most dear one
(philtatos), nothing else, for you are most dear (philtatos). I hold you, Orestes,
darling, far from Argos our fatherland, dear one (philos) (827-30).
18. Euripides thinks through a parallel problem in the Helen where we are told
that not Helen but her name (43) or her phantom or eidOlon (582) wentto Troy.
She spent the whole war in Egypt. So not the realiry of Helen, but her
meaning-her beaury-was what was necessary to launch a thousand ships.
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81
19. See 1234-82.
20. See also Euripides' Helen 1049-66.
21. There is yet another puzzle here. How can Iphigeneia say here that they
are the only two remaining and fourteen lines later (912-14) ask how Electra
is doing?
22. This seems to be a refleqion by Euripides on Sophocles' Antigone 353-75.
See also Seth Benardete, "A Reading of Sophocles' Antigone: l," Interpretation
4/3 (Spring 1975), 193-96.
23. The problem is actually somewhat more complex since all sacrifice is
ritual. The Taurians do not simply kill their enemies; they make such killing
symbolic. Ritual sacrifice is thus twice removed from the "real." This would
have to be the case since barbarians, as human beings, would have to in some
sense see double.
24. See the whole of Wolff s "Euripides' Iphigeneia among the Taurians:
Aetiology, Ritual and Myth," for a discussion of these three.
25. There is another strand of the play that needs to be thought together
with the questions of barbarism and human sacrifice. When Iphigeneia says
that she and Orestes are the last of their family (898), she forgets Electra,
about whom she moments later will inquire (912-14). If she suspects that
Electra has married-indeed, that is Orestes' response to her inquiry
(915)-then perhaps this accounts for her curious omission. Electra is no
longer a part of their family. Marriage (in which Artemis has some interest)
would then have something to do with a woman sacrificing herself for the
sake of children. Iphigeneia, of course, came to Aulis thinking that she was
to be married to Achilles. Does Euripides mean to connect human sacrifice
to a woman's position in marriage?
26. Metaphysics 982b18-19.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�i
~
Ugolino's Tale:
Eating the Flesh
Victor Lee Austin
In the penultimate, thirty-third canto of the lnftrno, Dante hears
the story of a man whom he met at the conclusion of the thirtysecond-a man who was gnawing the head of another man come
'1 pan per fome si manduca, "as bread is chewed for hunger"
(32.127). 1 It is difficult to overstate the dramatic powers of the
poet who unveils this hideous yet fascinating sight just as one
canto comes to its end, then allows the thirty-third not to be the
last (as it will be in the higher worlds), but adds one further canto.
In that extra canto, there lies the center of darkness, the center of
gravity, the heart of Hell: three-faced but one-headed, Satan
eternally champing upon, and flaying with his teeth, three traitors
forever trapped in his mouths. Behind lies most of Hell; above it,
earth; and on the other side of earth, Purgatory. And "above" it
all, Paradise.
This man chewing the head of another is placed in that deepest
and smallest circle of hell, the "well" reserved for traitors. Here
there are four subdivisions, subcircles for those who treacherously
betrayed (1) kindred, (2) country, (3) guests, and (4) lords and
benefactors. This man is in the second. The poet has him reveal
his name, but permits him to leave obscure the sense ofhis betrayal
of his country.
Tu dei saper ch'i'fui conte Ugolino,
e questi e l'arcivescovo Ruggieri:
or ti diro perche i son tal vicino.
Che per l'effitto de' suo' mai pensieri,
fidandomi di lui, io fossi preso
e poscia morto, dir non e mestieri.
Victor L. Austin is rector at The Episcopal Church of the Resurrection, Hopewell
Junction, New York.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Thou hast to know that I was Count Ugolino, and this
the Archbishop Ruggieri; now I will tell thee why I am
such a neighbour to him. That by the effect of his ill
devices I, confiding in him, was taken and thereafter
put to death, it is not necessary to say (33.13-18).
Modern scholarship, as summarized by Charles S. Singleton, has
identified a triple pohtical betrayal by Count Ugolino: of his
political party, the Ghibellines; of the rival party, the Guelphs,
who had entrusted him with the rule of the traditionally Ghibelline city of Pisa; and of his own grandson, a rising Guelph
politician in Pisa. The political intrigue was complex. At one
point, Ugolino, who was sharing rule of the city with his grandson
Nino Visconti, plotted with Archbishop Ruggieri to have Nino
driven out of the city. Ugolino diplomatically left the city so as to
be away when the plan was executed. Ruggieri invited him back,
but would not let him claim total rule. When Ugolino brought
his thousand soldiers within the city, the Archbishop incited the
crowds against him. Ugolino, with two sons and two grandsons
(not including Nino}, was imprisoned in the tower in which he
eventually died. 2
All this goes unsaid, lurking behind Ugolino's words to Dante,
that of this it is not necessary to speak. That of which Ugolino
does speak, and speak with singularly moving passion, is of the
manner of his death, contrived it seems by the archbishop whose
head he is now gnawing. He and his four "sons"-for so he calls
them, although two of them were grandsons, and all of them were
older than depicted3-had been locked in the castle for "many
moons"4 when he had a dream (apparently shared by his "sons")
of being chased and eaten by hounds. The next day they heard the
door to the tower being nailed shut; no food was brought to them
that day, or the next, or ever again. The dawning of their realization that they will starve to death is hauntingly told by the poet,
who shows the children offering their own flesh to their father out
of pity for him. Padre, assai ci fia men doglial se tu mangi di noi:
tu ne vestisti! queste misere carni, e tu le spoglia. "Father, it will give
�AUSTIN
85
us much less pain, if thou wilt eat of us: thou didst put upon us
this miserable flesh, and do thou strip it off' (33.61-63). Ugolino
berates the "hard earth" for not having opened and swallowed
him. On the fourth day, the first son died with words which have
been heard to echo Jesus' cry on the cross, thus also echoing Psalm
22: Padre mio, chi non m 'aiuti? "My father! why don't you help
me?" (33.69).5 By the sixth day, all four sons were dead. Ugolino
concludes his tale:
... ond' io mi diedi,
gia cieco, a brancolar sopra ciascuno,
e due dl li chiamai, poi che fur morti.
Poscia, piu che 'l dolor, pot! 'l digiuno .
. . . whence I betook me, already blind, to groping
over each, and for three days called them, after they
were dead; then fasting had more power than grief
(33.72-75).
And, finished speaking, Ugolino seizes again the skull of the
archbishop, and resumes champing with strong teeth, like a dog
on a bone.
Ugolino has voiced the longest speech of the Inferno, an uninterrupted seventy-two lines, and what is striking about them is
their power to take us far from the charge of his betrayal of his
country. Like Francesca and Ulysses, the two earlier characters
who uttered extended speech, Ugolino seems to step out of the
precisely defined circles and subcircles of punishment.6 Working
from within the poem and not as modern historians, we must
accede to the rightness of the divine justice that has placed him
here, and, consequently, we are not permitted to wonder if,
perchance, Ugolino had a sly and undisclosed motive of drawing
us to pity his placement in hell. Indeed, Ugolino does not bemoan
his eternal destiny in the nether well. If he accepts God's justice,
why should we question it? Yet it is to pity that we are moved-we,
and with us Dante the character, who, in the next dozen lines,
cries out against the injustice of Pisa and asks why mercy could
not have been shown at least to the children.
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Yes, we are moved to pity, to identifY with Ugolino locked in
the castle with his children; we are forced to imagine what it would
be like to starve to death and, in the process, watch one's children
also starve; we can't forget the child's offer of his own flesh-a
horrible thought which, nonetheless, will not leave the mind. We
see the blind U golino grope over the corpses of his children for
two days. And we understand why, at such extremity, a man might
well succumb to the eating of his children's flesh. As Dorothy L.
Sayers translates the line: "Then famine did what sorrow could
not do." 7
Yet here we come to what John Freccero has described as "a
scandal in the history of Dante criticism."8 For with vehemence
and near unanimity, modern critical scholars deny that this line
means that Ugolino resorted, in his great extremity, to cannibalism. Sayers's gloss on the line is pure brevity: she says simply, "i.e.
kill him." The 1900 Dent edition notes that verse 75 "has given
rise to much controversy" but immediately adds: "The meaning
obviously is, not that Ugolino was forced by the pangs of hunger
to feed on the bodies, but that hunger brought about his death."9
And Singleton, perhaps the most esteemed modern commentator,
writes to the same purpose:
Some commentators have held the curious view that by
this last line of Ugolino's narrative Dante meant to
imply that the count, in the extremity of starvation, did
actually attempt to prolong his life by feeding upon the
bodies of his sons, as they had begged him to do while
they were yet alive (vss. 61-63)-that "hunger" prevailed over "grief" in that sense. But such a view of the
meaning here is hardly worth a serious rebuttal. I 0
But to say "obviously" and to call something "curious" is not to
make an argument; one feels that Singleton's dismissal could
profit by being a more reasoned and less ex cathedra utterance. 11
John Ciardi, at least, feels an argument is called for. Translating
the line as, "Then fasting overcame my grief and me," he writes:
�AUSTIN
87
i.e., He died. Some interpret the line to mean that
Ugolino's hunger drove him to cannibalism.
Ugolino's present occupation in Hell would certainly
support that interpretation but the fact is that cannibalism is the one major sin Dante does not assign a
place to in Hell. So monstrous would it have seemed
to him that he must certainly have established a special
punishment for it. Certainly he could hardly have
relegated it to an ambiguity. Moreover, it would be a
sin of bestiality rather than of fraud, and as such it
would be punished in the Seventh Circle.I2
But Ugolino could have committed cannibalism yet be punished
for treason; indeed, there may be a deep connection (unexplored
by Ciardi) between the two. And let us remember the true picture
that Ciardi delicately describes as Ugolino's "present occupation":
he is gnawing the flesh of the archbishop, "as bread is chewed for
hunger." There are other supports for the interpretation of cannibalism that Ciardi does not mention. One is Ugolino's dream, in
which "the wolf and his whelps" (called later "the father and his
sons") are chased by hounds; growing weary, their flanks were
"torn by the sharp teeth" (33.28-36). Although Ugolino takes the
dream as prophetic, he may miss its point when he sees it as
foretelling their death-and not as a warning of something worse
having to do with the ripping of flesh with teeth.13
Cannibalism is also suggested by dramatic location. In Canto
33 we are in the canto which in the later books will tell the
summit: in Purgatorio, the earthly paradise; in Paradiso, the beatific vision of God. Here it is a negative summit, we might say,
although still one canto shy of the dread vision of the negative
trinity. I believe that Canto 33 is best understood as a foreshadowing of that dread vision.
In the ultimate canto of the Inferno, as we have already noted,
the three-faced single head of Satan is beheld in the vision of
eternal chewing upon the basest traitors of all time. This occurs,
we might say, at the "bottom" of the universe-literally, at the
center of the universe's gravity. Superimposing this vision upon
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Ugolino would suggest that Ugolino's story takes us, somehow,
to the "bottom" of things. While it would be dreadful to watch
one's children starve and then to die of starvation oneself, utterly
hopeless and helpless to save them, still it would be even worse so
to lose control of one's appetites in that extremity that one even
ate the flesh of one's children. That second reading, suggested by
the numerous literary devices already noted, thus corresponds
with a psychological understanding of what it means to plunge to
the "depths" of evil, to the "bottom" of reality.
By such a path the reader is brought to face a consequence
which the critics, with their denials, avoid facing. It is literary
identification: to look at the Ugolino horror and say, as in another
context St. Francis did, "There but for the grace of God go I." Or
as the Greek said, "I am human, and therefore nothing human is
alien to me." If the reader, hearing Ugolino's story, is moved to
pity, the reader must realize that even the eating of one's children's
flesh is not an alien depth.
Nonetheless, it is a depth to which the critics are apparently
unable or unwilling to descend. One wonders how far they have
followed Dante into Hell. And here John Freccero offers his most
startling thesis: that the critics' own struggle with Infirno 33.75
becomes a revelation, for us, of the significance ofUgolino' s story.
Take the children. We have noted already that Dante combines
Ugolino's sons and grandsons into "sons'' and presents them as
younger than they were. The poet thus accentuates their youthful
suffering. Freccero leads off his essay with the observation that the
suffering of children is "the most radical instance of the irreducibility of evil." 14 Dante's recasting of the historical facts thus
encourages us to think of children's suffering in general. The
opposite of that is the blessed children enjoying the presence of
God, children who, when Dante sees them, will raise for him the
questions of divine justice (Para. 32.40ff.), and who, Freccero
notes, are in "a structurally corresponding place" to the children
of Ugolino-the penultimate cantos of their respective canticas.
�AUSTIN
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What is the significance of the suffering of children? In Dante's
cry against the city of Pisa, following Ugolino's speech, he says
the children should not have been killed for their father's crime:
Che se '! conte Ugolino aveva voce
d'aver tradita te de le castella,
non dovei tu i figliuoi porre a tal croce.
For if Count Ugolino had the fame of having betrayed
thee of thy castles, thou oughtest not to have put his
sons into such torture (33.85-87).
He condemns the city for putting the children to such a "croce":
the poet as traveller through Hell connects the suffering of children with the cross.
Indeed, as Freccero suggests, the language used for these children
throughout is christological. 15 Their suffering is a cross. The first
one to die asked his father words like those of Jesus on the cross:
Father, why don't you help me? And earlier, seeing their father bite
his hands for grief, they offered him their flesh. Freccero:
It must not be supposed that the allusions to Christ's
passion are merely pietistic embellishments to contrast with the infernal horror story; they are in fact the
key for the whole dramatic interpretation. The point
of the language here is that the suffering of the children is of a sacred order, carrying with it a redemptive
possibiliry.16
But that "redemptive possibility" is precisely what Ugolino
rejects. When his sons offer him their flesh (as quoted earlier)... Padre, assai ci fia men doglia
se tu mangi di noi: tu ne vestisti
queste misere carni, e tu le spoglia.
-Ugolino calms himself, so they won't become more unhappy (he
says), and for two days they all remain mute. Ugolino's senses are
dying, one by one: when the door is nailed, he becomes stony within
(33.49); when his sons make their offer of flesh, he turns distant
and silent; by the last one's death, he is blind (33.73). These are
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signs, for those who have eyes to see and a heart not of solid stone,
of spiritual vacuiry. Freccero maintains that "there can be little
doubt that [Ugolino] is condemned by Dante not only as a traitor
but also for his inability to grasp the spiritual meaning in the letter
of his children's words." 17 That inability is itself a kind of treason.
And as Ugolino takes his children's words literally, so do the
critics take his words' only to the letter. He does not say he ate
their flesh; Dante does not say so; why should we believe it? Yet
much that is of importance in human life, as in divine, cannot be
said; and much that could be said is better left unsaid. Francesca's
speech-the first of the extended tales of which Ugolino's is the
third and last-begins with the love which binds her to her lover
for eternity, then describes how they fell in love.
Noi leggiavamo un giorno per diletto
di Lancialotto come amor lo strinse;
soli eravamo e sanza alcun sospetto.
Per piu fiate li occhi ci sospinse
quella lettura, e scolorocci il viso;
ma solo un punto fu que! che ci vinse.
Quando leggemmo il disi'ato riso
esser basciato da cotanto amante,
questi, che mai da me non fia diviso,
!a bocca mi bascio tutto tremante.
Galeotto fo 'llibro e chi lo scrisse:
que! giorno piu non vi leggemmo avante.
One day, for pastime, we read of Lancelot, how love
constrained him; we were alone, and without all suspicion. Several times that reading urged our eyes to
meet, and changed the colour of our faces; bur one
moment alone it was that overcame us. When we read
how the fond smile was kissed by such a lover, he, who
shall never be divided from me, kissed my mouth all
trembling: the book, and he who wrote it, was a
Galeotto; that day we read in it no farther (5.127-138).
This is the conclusion of her speech, a conclusion so powerful that
it made Dante faint with pity; yet what has she said? "[T]hat day
�AUSTIN
91
we read in [the book] no farther." She gives no details of passionate
embraces, no details of the outcome (besides the earlier indication
that they were killed together). For those who have eyes to see and
a heart to feel, the letter leaves much unsaid.
The critics, who are not so hardened as to be unable to grasp
Francesca' s meaning, yet stumble over the same literary device,
reticentia, 18 when used'by Ugolino. If it is the case that he is
condemned, as Freccero believes, for his failure to grasp the
redemptive possibility in his sons' words, what is that failure? It
is, first, his failure to see their Christ-likeness. Their innocent
suffering puts a spiritually-attuned person in mind of the Cross.
They offer him their flesh; one dies with an echo of Psalm 22 on
his lips. But what is the "redemptive possibility" contained in this?
Freccero suggests we recall another instance in which an offer
of flesh was taken literally-and rejected. The account is found in
the sixth chapter ofJohn's gospel. Jesus has fed the multitude from
five loaves and two fish, an event which John does not call a
miracle but a sign (6: 14). In the ensuing dialogue Jesus chides the
crowd for not seeing the sign (6:26). There is an escalation on
each side, as Jesus makes increasingly exalted claims for his authority while his interlocutors seem to misunderstand him more and
more. Finally Jesus says,
Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of
the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life
in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has
eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day
[6:53-54; RSV].
This is a typically Johannine incident. Jesus speaks of spiritual
truths, while those who hear him make the mistake of taking him
literally. Like Nicodemus, who queries how he, a grown man, can
possibly reenter his mother's womb; like the Samaritan woman,
who chides Jesus for offering her water when he has no bucket and
nothing to draw with; here, in John chapter 6, the people somehow
imagine Jesus is telling them they must flay his flesh and sink their
teeth into it. But unlike the Samaritan woman (and possibly unlike
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Nicodemus too), many of these people refuse to see beyond the letter,
and their refusal causes them to abandon Jesus (6:66). AB Paul says
of written law, so may we say of literal interpretation generally: "the
letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life" (2 Cor. 3:6; KJV).
So when he heard these words, "Father, it will give us much less
pain, if thou wilt eat of us," the count "calmed" himself, "in order
not to make them more unhappy," and spoke no words "that day
and the next." He sees only the literal fact of their unhappiness, and
sees no possibility of lessening it through speech or action-or
prayer. He draws into himself, calming himself so as to reveal to
them nothing by expression or motion or verb. He does not see the
innocent offer of a way of"much less pain," a way ofhope; the letter
appalled him, and he remembered not the story of his savior.
It was not U golino' s last chance to show some iota of faithfulness
to the saving story. The silence which he had brought upon their
room is broken on the fourth day by his first son to die, who asks
him why he won't help him. Even Ugolino's withdrawal has a
spiritual significance; even his failure can find a parallel in the story
of redemption. His son suggests that he see himself as the distant
Father of the dying Son; but Ugolino's heart is hard, and the letter
kills. Within five days he is doing that unspeakable act concerning
which he said to Dante, "fasting had more power than grief."
Far above this bestial scene, Francesca and her lover are blown
in the winds. They are in Hell, apparently, because of their belief
in the futility of resisting love's passion (v.l 00-1 07). But they are
in the uppermost parts of Hell, I believe, because of their capacity
to read the spirit in the letter. As Francesca tells it (see page 90
above), they fell in love while reading; the lettura (translated
"reading,'' cognate to lettera, '<letter"). "urged'' their eyes to meet
(which of course it did not do literally); the book became "a
Galeotto," i.e., a go-between. 19 Thus Francesca explicitly describes a process whereby the letter was transcended by the human
spirit, and although she is in Hell (for not every spiritual interpretation leads to Paradise), she nevertheless soars over those who are
chained by the letter.
�AUSTIN
93
What is at stake in the Divine Comedy is nothing less than the
possibility of being human. Dante's geography shows that for
most of us (those of us who are not great pagan philosophers) there
is no stationary middle ground between bestiality and divinity;
every human spirit is moving either downwards by heaviness to
gravity's center or upwards by light to the rose of Paradise. It is
perhaps a prosaic conclusion, to realize that Satan does not preside
over hell with wicked enjoyment of shrieks and wails and gnashing
of teeth. T. S. Eliot admitted, "I tend to get from Dante the
impression of a Devil suffering like the human damned souls." 20
Eliot did not like that impression, feeling that Satan's suffering
should be different in kind; he suggested, however, with sure
instinct, that one can understand the end of the Inferno by turning
to the end of Paradiso.
For by the time we reach the end of Hell three strands of
thought have come together: treason, cannibalism, and (perhaps
to our surprise) literalism. The traitor succumbs to cannibalism
because he hears his sons literally and is deaf to the spiritual
suggestions in their words. The reader who does not see this,
through a failure to attend to the spirit, reenacts Ugolino's error
and thus moves towards that which is not seen. But the reader
who sees with the spirit and the heart sees indeed cannibalism and
feels-in the midst of the horror-pity, and in that pity moves in
the opposite direction. As treason denies the soul and as cannibalism takes man as meat, so literalism takes the letter without spirit.
When we come to these lowest depths, the depths of Hell, human
beings are nothing but meat and bone for chewing. The spirit has
gone out of the letter.
If we turn upward from this tiny dark pit to the vast heavens,
we see that the opposite of cannibalism (and of treason and
literalism) is communion. Here the children rejoice together
beyond all possibility of suffering. Here, in communion, saints
and angels are united in an expansive symphony which has countless variations but no treachery. The spirit gives life. The anti type
of the Trinity, three-faced but single-headed Satan, yields to the
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
positive vision of Paradiso 33: the Trinity beyond glory, containing in super-luminescence a glorified human figure; the Trinity
whose life is given to us by means of a sign when we eat the Son's
flesh "as bread is chewed for hunger," the Son who once asked his
Father why he had abandoned him.
Notes
1. All translations from the Infirno in this paper not otherwise attributed
are from the 1900 edition (reset 1932) published in London by J. M. Dent
& Sons Ltd; the translation therein is J. A. Carlyle's as revised by H. Oelsner.
Quotations from the Italian are from Charles S. Singleton, trans. and
commentator, Dante Alighieri: The Divine Comedy: Infirno, vol. 1 [Italian
Text and Translation], corrected edition, Bollingen Series 80 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1977).
2. Charles S. Singleton, trans. and commentator, Dante Alighieri: The
Divine Comedy: Infimo, vol. 2 [Commentary], corrected edition, Bollingen
Series LXXX (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977) 607-612 (note
on 33.17-18).
3. This is attested by many commentators. See for instance Singleton,
comment on 33.38, p. 614.
4. 33.26. Singleton dates their imprisonment in the tower from late July
to their death in early February. See also, comment on 33.26, p. 613.
5. Both Singleton and John Freccero (but none of the other critics consulted
for this paper) note the parallel with Christ's words.
6. John D. Sinclair writes insightfully in elaboration of this point. "The
famous Ugolino episode ... stands in marked and intentional contrast and
correspondence with Francesco's stoty in the fifth canto, hers the record of
a great love, his of as great a hate. Her love and his hate hold her to her lover
and him to his enemy forever in an association which makes their last earthly
memories an eternally present agony; each 'speaks and weeps together', and
the companion of each suffers· in a silence which adds strangely to the
poignancy of their stories. These two episodes, with that of Ulysses in the
twenty-sixth canto, are the greatest examples of dramatic imagination in the
whole poem. Francesca, Ulysses, and Ugolino each tell their own rales, of
love, of daring, of agony and hate, and in each case, by the power of
�AUSTIN
95
imaginative sympathy, Dante penetrates to the heart of the sinner so that his
sin is forgotten and he is, as it were, restored for his sheer human worth to
the human fellowship." To this insightful commentary I would offer but a
slight disagreement. Although Sinclair describes Ugolino's tale as a record
of a great hate, it strikes me, on the contrary, as a poignant interlude ofspeech
within an eternity of hateful gnawing upon his enemy. Ugolino's tale is so
remarkably free of his hatred that the reader easily forgets the archbishop
under his jaws. John D. 'Sinclair, trans. and commentator, The Divine
Comedy of Dante Alighieri, vol. 1, Infirno (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1939; reprint, 1961), 415
7. Dorothy L. Sayers, trans., The Comedy ofDante Alighieri: Hell (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1949), 33.75, p. 280.
8. John Freccero, "Bestial Sign and Bread of Angels," in his Dante: The
PoeticsofConversion, ed. RachelJacoff(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 153. This essay was first published in Yale Italian Studies
1 (1977): 5 3-66.
9. Infirno, The Temple Classics, trans. ]. A. Carlyle, rev. H. Oelsner
(London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1900; reset, 1932), p. 380.
10. Singleton, p. 617.
11. Joseph Gallagher first drew my attention to John Freccero's remarkable
essay that refutes Singleton. Joseph Gallagher, To Hell & Back with Dante
(Liguori, Mo.: Triumph Books, 1996), 61.
12. DanteAlighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. John Ciardi (New York: W.
W. Norton and Company, 1977), 175.
13. See Freccero, 160-161. Below we will take up the theme ofUgolino's
literalism and its role in his damnation. The image in the dream was not
unusual: wolf-hunting was common in Dante's day and place. Singleton,
Infirno, vol. 2, 613 (commentary on 33.28-36).
14. Freccero, 152.
15. Freccero, 156. Even the language by which Ugolino calls his dream a
prophecy-"it rent for me the curtain of the future" (33.27) -might suggest
(since the future is suffering, the cross, "croce") the rending of the temple
veil at the crucifixion. So Freccero, 160.
16. Freccero, 156-157.,
17. Freccero, 158.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
18. See Freccero, 162.
19. Singleton, Inftmo, vol. 2, 94-95 (commentary on v.137).
20. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, new ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
Company, 1950), 212.
�The C:omedy of, Christian. Existence:
On Kierkegaard s Resolution of
Hegel's Paradox
I
Johann A. Klaassen
Cet homme est occupe d'un probleme
auquel il revient comme une mouche:
toutes ces choses opposees, il voudrait qu' elles se touchent
quandm~me.
II voudrait que ce Dieu qui les a faites
tout juste au milieu d' elles s'arretecet homme qui infiniment s' entCte,
c' est Ia poete.
- R.M. Rilke, "L'Homme Ent~te"
There is an important sense in which humor or comedy must
interact with our religiousness, if we are to remain religious past
a certain point in the development of our culture. Hegel thought
that the category of the comic must come before Christianity
could be fully realized, because the comic pointed out to people
the absurdity of our religious expectations: we can't expect our
God to have a human form, or, in fact, to be individuated in any
meaningful sense. For Hegel, the comic insight implies what kind
of God exists: it finally leads Christianity to realize that the
community of believers is God. I will begin with an examination
of Hegel's notion of the development of a truly Christian consciousness, and show that Hegel's version of Christianity develops
out of his view of the paradoxes presented by his contemporary
religion and society. Hegel responded to these paradoxes by attempting to defose them by asserting a larger unity into which they
Johann A. Klaassen is a graduate of St. John's College, 1992. He is completing a
Ph.D. in philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, specializing in ethical
theory and moral psychology.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
all fit harmoniously-ultimately, a Universal Spirit in which we
all take part. In contrast, while for Kierkegaard the comic is a
prerequisite for spiritual maturity, it does not lead to religiousness.
To be able to see the contradiction implied by our conceptions of
God and religion not as a tragically harmful incommensurability,
but, instead, as a beautiful separation, is to have a Kierkegaardian
sense of humor; to become a Christian is to be willing to be
regarded as foolish. And so for Kierkegaard, the comic is an
indication of the individual's maturity, and ability to accept the
paradox of his relation to God: the comic is only possible when
we have understood the meaning of the absurdity of our religion,
and the God it rests on. Thus, after looking at Hegel, I will turn
to an examination of Kierkegaard's view of the Christian spirit,
and show that Kierkegaard, presented with much the same societal
conditions, responded to the paradoxes of individual existence by
celebrating them, declaring them to be the ultimate goal of the
existing individual, the "Absolute Paradox" of his Philosophical
Fragments. In this essay I do not hope to give a full and perfect
characterization of the religious understandings of either Hegel or
Kierkegaard, as either task would probably require several volumes;
instead, I explore the essentials of Hegel's and Kierkegaard' s understandings of the religious, and of the relation of the religious to the
comic (and related notions like humor and irony). I hope to show
that Kierkegaard, noticing the emphasis Hegel places on comedy,
picks up the same notion, turns it inside out, and takes aim at
"speculative thought" and its systematic Christianity, using the comic
to point out the existential chinks in Hegel's systematic armor.
Hegelian Christianity
The Unhappy Consciousness appears at the end of Hegel's
section on self-consciousness in his Phenomenology of Mind 1 as
one of the survivors of the struggle for recognition, having passed
through the moments of Stoicism and Scepticism. As a form of
self-consciousness, the Unhappy Consciousness recognizes that it
is both immediate and mediated, that it bears both essential and
�KLAASSEN
99
inessential moments within itself, that it is simultaneously
particular and universal; but it does not yet understand how it
can contain both these moments explicitly and without contradiction. It learned from Stoicism that it was essence, the
immediate, particular Ego; from Scepticism it learned that
everything other than thought is dubitable, that everything
external to the immediate Ego is inessential, and that the
universals of knowledge themselves were dubitable. Stoicism
was comforting to self-consciousness, in that its self-understanding was strong and stable; Scepticism was disconcerting, in
that it called into question almost everything, including that
former stability. And the self-consciousness which tries to hold
these two forms together is the Unhappy Consciousness, made
unhappy by its understanding of its own predicament:
In Stoicism, self-consciousness is the bare and simple
freedom of itself. In Scepticism, it realizes itself, negates the other side of determinate existence, but, in
so doing, really doubles itself, and is itself now a
duality .... Hence the Unhappy Consciousness, the Alienated Soul which is the consciousness of itself as a
divided nature, a doubled and merely contradictory
being. (no6, pp. 250-51)
Because it knows itself in its self-contradiction, the Unhappy
Consciousness attempts to clarifY for itself its own essential nature. Seeing in itself the "aimless fickleness and instability" of the
alterable ('!"205, p. 249), it attempts to define itself in those terms
by casting the unalterable out into "the remote beyond" ('!"212, p.
255), hypostasizing that unchangeable as God.
The Unhappy Consciousness is, therefore, led to religiosity in
an attempt to rectifY its own internal conflicts of reason. But
because this God is imagined by the particular consciousness, the
Unhappy Consciousness, it is taken also to be a particular consciousness, though one which bears the universality and immutability the Unhappy Consciousness found within itself. Thus, this
God retains the particularity of the Unhappy Consciousness:
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the unchangeable consciousness also preserves, in its
very form and bearing, the character and fundamental
features of diremption and separate self-existence, as
against the particular consciousness. (,.212, p. 254)
This absolute particulariry, while impossible to avoid, does not
serve the purpose for which it was imagined; that is, the "image"
of an immutable particular existing "over against" the Unhappy
Consciousness does not serve to unify the incompatible aspects of
the self-consciousnes of the Unhappy Consciousness. On the
contrary, it does not bring the infinite, the unchangeable, any
closer, but serves, in fact, only to push it further away, further into
the "beyond." The Unhappy Consciousness's only response is to
attempt to negate its direct bonds with the God it has imagined,
and to take up the notion of the immutable in particular
form-that is, as an embodied self-consciousness like itself:
the direction its effort henceforth takes is rather that
of cancelling its relation to the pure unchangeable,
without shape or embodied form, and of adopting
only the relation to the unchangeable which has form
and shape. (,.213, p. 255)
This is the Christ, the mean proportional between God and Man;
in this form the unchangeable comes into contact with the Unhappy Consciousness. But because the Unhappy Consciousness
has not yet reconciled itself as a thinker with pure thought, it can
come no closer to the unchangeable than this kind of mediated
contact; moreover, because of the way in which it originated in
consciousness, the Christ must be "a thing of the past, something
that has been somewhere far away, and absolutely remote it
remains" (n14, p. 255). As a consequence, the Unhappy Consciousness cannot completely reconcile its rwo essences, and takes
up a stance of emotional reverence toward the Christ, as its symbol
of the immutable:
it takes up toward its object an attitude which is not
that of thought; but rather ... it, so to say, merely gives
itself up to thought, devotes itself to thinking, and is
�KlAASSEN
101
the state of Devotion. Its thinking as such is no more
than the discordant clang of ringing bells, or a cloud
of warm incense, a kind of thinking in terms of
music ... Hence we have here the inward movement of
pure emotion.{'!"217, p. 257)
Moving through this stage of devotion {with its passive reflection),
a state of extreme activity {with its frantic attempts at constructing
the unchangeable), and a life of asceticism {which reflects on every
activity, only to reveal "a personality brooding over itself' ('!"226,
p. 264)), the Unhappy Consciousness comes to need another
mediator, one to take the place of the Christ who was too far from
the Unhappy Consciousness to bring it into contact with the
immutable God. This new mediator is the Church: the Unhappy
Consciousness
puts away from itself... the substance of its will, and
throws on to the mediating term, or the ministering
agency, its own proper freedom of decision, and herewith the guilt of its own act. This mediator, being in
direct communication with the unchangeable Being,
renders service by advising what is just and right.
('!"228, p. 265)
Having given up its freedom to choose and to act, the Unhappy
Consciousness gives up also its material wealth and even its claims
to understanding its religious experience. But in thus relinquishing all claim to anything which might be considered its own, even
its own self-consciousness or Ego, 2 the Unhappy Consciousness
puts off that unhappiness-in relinquishing its particularistic
claims to all things, it has gained the union with universality which
it sought from the first.
For giving up one's own will is only in one aspect
negative; in principle, or in itself, it is at the same time
positive, positing and affirming the will as an other,
and, specifically, affirming the will as not a particular,
but universal.. .. Hence its will certainly becomes, for
consciousness, universal will, inherent and essential
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will, but is not itself in its own view this inherent
reality. ('230, pp. 266-7)
The consciousness that has passed through the moment of unhappiness comes to place itself in the cradle of the community, in the
embodiment of Rational Spirit; but it does not yet understand that
it is the community that bears the important ingredient of its happiness, nor that its own reason drives the reality of even the community,
and is, therefore, not yet in possession of Absolute Knowledge.
The structure of the religious experience of Unhappy Consciousness first appears in a clear formalization in '210 (p. 253)
of the Phenomenology:
The first unchangeable is taken to be merely the alien,
external Being, which passes sentence on particular
existence; since the second unchangeable is a form or
mode of particularity like itself, it, i.e. the consciousness, becomes in the third place spirit (Geist), has the
joy of finding itself therein, and becomes aware within
itself that its particularity has been reconciled with the
universal.
This statement implies a pattern of development which the U nhappy Consciousness follows in its search for reconciliation with
the unchanging universal. This pattern shows how the understanding of Christ as a mean proportional mediates between the
radical particular and the immutable; in the particular's search for
self-understanding, it places the universal outside itself in an
abstract God who is beyond its reach (and presumably also its
comprehension). But in its recognition of Christ's (impossibly,
Kierkegaard will say) combining universality-his Godlinesswith particularity-his Humanity-it comes to understand that
a reconciliation between the unchangeable and the changeable is
possible; however, as a "thing of the past," the Christ is "absolutely
remote" ('214, p. 255), and the particular self-consciousness is
left without a connection to God. Its response is to turn over every
aspect ofits life to the mysteries of the Church, to entrust its future
to the community of believers, but without the understanding of
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that community as a rational community, as a form of Spirit. In
consequence, the religious spirit that helps the Unhappy Consciousness transcend its unhappiness falls short of full self-consciousness, though it introduces "the idea of Reason" (~230, p.
267), and makes possible (and necessary) further development.
As the Unhappy Consciousness appears out of the bankruptcy
of the conflict between Stoicism and Scepticism, so also what I
will call Hegel's Christian Consciousness takes its start from the
spiritual wastes of the Greco-Roman Pantheon. The "perfectly
happy consciousness, that of comedy" (~752, p. 752), has served
a vital purpose: in its application of the rational categories of
thought to the sphere of the divine, comedy "removes the contingency of shape and form from the divine Being ... [and]lifts these
into the simple Ideas of the Beautiful and the Good" (~746, p.
747), showing that the divine must be purely self-consciousness,
which religious consciousness has required since the Unhappy
Consciousness lost itself in the Universal. That is, the Unhappy
Consciousness is able to give itself up: in its relinquishing its
particularistic claims, "self-consciousness empties itself of itself
and makes itself into the form of 'thing,' or makes itself universal
self' (~755, p. 755). But the Unhappy Consciousness cannot yet
understand the converse: Reason, through the medium of Comedy, is required to show how the substantial (and thus thing-like)
conception we have of divinity "empties itself of itself, and becomes self-consciousness" (~755, p. 755). Moreover,
It is thus that self-knowing spirit has arisen; it has
arisen through the knowledge of immediate consciousness ... The immediate inherent nature of spirit,
which takes on the form of self-consciousness, means
nothing else than that the concrete actual world-spirit
has reached this knowledge of itself. It is then too that
this knowledge first enters its consciousness, and enters it as truth. ('757, p. 757)
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And with this new self-consciousness of Comedy and Reason, the
"spirit"3 has become capable of renewed reflection on the divine
Being, and on its own religious consciousness.
With the appearance of a strictly self-conscious spirit, the
Christian Consciousness is able to reform its idea of divinity: "In
this form of religion the Divine Being is ... revealed. Its being
revealed obviously consists in this, that what it is, is known"
(F59, p. 758). When the Unhappy Consciousness projected its
God out beyond its own comprehension, into a completely alien
"other," it "concealed" a very important aspect of the divinity, its
direct relation to the consciousness; as Terry Pinkard puts it,
Our conception of ourselves as thinking, acting agents
did, [Hegel] thought, commit us to an ontology of the
divine, but this was satisfied by seeing God as the human
community organized into religious communities. 4
Or, in Hegel's own words,
Spirit is known as self-consciousness, and to this selfconsciousness it is directly revealed, for it is this same
self-consciousness itself. The divine nature is the same
as the human, and it is this unity which is intuitively
apprehended. ('l759, pp. 759-60)
God is recognized in the human community, in the Spirit of the
religious community- but this is not, unfortunately, explicit for
that community. The spirit of the Christian Consciousness, deriving as it does from the aesthetic consciousness of the religions
of art, is still caught up in the representational mode of thought,
"picture-thinking" (despite the wisdom of comedy), and as a result
draws a standard picture of an external God, a God with particular
(though, paradoxically, universal) existence of its own. Again the
Absolute Spirit in the form of this God is set up over against the
particular human self-consciousness; again the Christ is taken as
the mediation between the universal and the particular. But, in
this instance, the Christ's mediate form is closer to the truth of
his immediate origin, and thus also closer to our own:
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this unity of being and thought is self-consciousness
and actually exists; in other words, the thought-constituted unity has at the same time this concrete shape
and form of what it is. God, then, is here revealed, as
He is; He actually exists as He is in Himself; He is real
as Spirit. ('!761, p. 761, my emphasis)
The unsuccessful mediation that dashed the hopes of the Unhappy
Consciousness has been transcended, and the Christian Consciousness finds in this existing Christ the embodiment of the
"hopes and expectations of preceding ages" ('J761, p. 761)-that
is, the particular Christian Consciousness sees in the Christ a
picture of itself as the absolute universal. With the death of this
individual Christ, then, the Christian Consciousness seems to
undergo a period of confusion, in which the idea of the Christ
must be transformed: for at the death of the mediator between the
particular consciousness and the universal spirit,
a consciousness which sees and hears Him by sense, is
one which is itself merely immediate consciousness,
which has not yet cancelled and transcended the disparateness of objectivity, has not withdrawn it into
pure thought, but knows this objectively presented
individual, and not itself, as spirit. (!763, p. 763)
In order to place that into the Spirit which the Christ exemplified,
the Christian Consciousness has, in fact, to do the seemingly unthinkable: it has to dethrone that very Christ who was until recently its
only contact with the universal it seeks. As Kojeve puts it,
Christian Man can really become what he would like
to be only by becoming a man without God-or, if
you will, a God-Man. He must realize in himselfwhat
at first he thought was realized in his God. To be really
Christian, he himself must become Christ.5
In other words, the Christian Consciousness must come to see the
historical Christ simply as a manifestation of his own communiry' s spirit, as a "God-Man" far out of his own proper time-frame,
since "the authentic teachings of Jesus of Nazareth amounted to
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the rejection of the metaphysics that it took philosophy [and
religion] about 2,000 more years to formulate for itself." 6 And in
doing so, despite the seeming blasphemy, the Christian Consciousness must implicitly place himself in the center of the
spiritual community, and understand himself in terms of the spirit
of the church:
Spirit remains the immediate self of actual reality, but
in the form of the universal self-consciousness of a
religious communion ... it is not the individual subject
by himself, but the individual along with the consciousness of the communion, and what he is for this
communion is the complete whole of the individual
spirit. ('!763, p. 763)
And in the course of this process, the Christian Consciousness has
replaced the transcendent God with the immanent community of
believers, and placed itself solidly in the center of that community;
in finding its position in the universal, the community, this particular consciousness gains also its "identity." Kojeve comments,
In its perfection, the [existential] ideal reveals itself
through the idea of Individuality-that is, of satisfaction by the real or active synthesis of particularist and
universalist tendencies of human existence.?
But despite this conclusion, the Revealed Religion falls somewhat
short of Absolute Knowledge, primarily because of the limitations
imported into the self-understanding of the Christian Consciousness by his imaginative rendering of the ideas of religion: that is,
because the Christian Consciousness mediates the self-understanding afforded by religion through "picture-thinking," it falls
short of pure self-consciousness (see ~765, p. 763). The abstract
moments of the development of the religious consciousness, portrayed in the medium of representation, take those vety representations to be accurate depictions-the spirit of the religious
community mistakenly takes those pictures for the immediate
content of its religion. The picture thinking of the Christian
Consciousness brings it, therefore, to the brink of Absolute
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Knowledge, but cannot take it any farther: not until the Christian
Consciousness has reached that stage
where the absolute Substance is not intuitively apprehended but conceptually comprehended and where
consciousness is for itself brought to the level of its
self-consciousness. ('!765, p. 764)
can it be said to possess Absolute Knowledge, and the ability to
understand the process of development which it has gone through.
The developmental structure of the religious experience of the
Christian Consciousness is much like that of the Unhappy Consciousness: both originally take the standpoint of the particular and
set themselves in artificial opposition with the universal, then find
that the meditation of the Christ allows an insight into the unity of
these seemingly disparate concepts, and come to a recognition of
that unity in themselves. But where the Unhappy Consciousness
was left with a kind of happy unfreedom, in giving its all to the
religious community, the particular Christian Consciousness finds
itself in a true reconciliation with the universal community. Here,
as in the Unhappy Consciousness, the Christ acts as mean proportional between Man and God; but while the Unhappy Consciousness could not grasp the mediation, the Christian Consciousness
can, though only pictorially, as embodying the Spirit of the religious
community. And in thus coming to terms with the universal as the
community's spirit, the Christian Consciousness comes to the truth
behind Absolute Knowledge, though unconsciously.
In the last chapter of the Phenomenology, Hegel presents the
final version that the self-conscious self-knowledge discovered in
Revealed Religion takes. The spirit of the community finally
begins to take the lesson of Comedy seriously, to cast away the
"picture-thinking" that has held it back; removing the pictorial
element from the pattern drawn up by the Christian Consciousness's understanding of its development, the Individual comes to
see that not only is this pattern the content of religion, but also is
the essence of itself, of Spirit.
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Thus, then, what was in religion content, or a way of
imagining (Vorstellen) an other, is here the action
proper of the self.. ..
This last embodiment of spirit-spirit which at
once gives its complete and true content the form of
self, and thereby realizes its notion, and in so doing
remains within its own notion-this is Absolute
Knowledge. ('!797-98, p. 797)
In Kojeve' s words,
Perfect Man-that is, Man fully and definitively satisfied by what he is-being the realization of the
Christian idea of Individuality, the revelation of this
Man by absolute Knowledge has the same content as
Christian Theology, minus the notion of transcendence: it is sufficient to say of Man everything that the
Christian says of his God in order to move from the
absolute or Christian Theology to Hegel's absolute
philosophy or Science. 8
In Absolute Knowledge, Spirit thus finds itself in its own roots,
discovers that it is necessary to bear this very Knowledge in order
to explain its existence; and the search for an answer to the question
"What is Absolute Knowledge and how is it possible?" shows itself
to be "a kind of 'self-bootstrapping,' self-grounding activity."9 In
coming to the end of the Phenomenology, we come again to the
beginning; as Hegel says in the Preface ('16, p. 79), "the general
idea of what is to be done, if it precedes the attempt to carry it out,
facilitates the comprehension of this process." And indeed, as
Kojeve notes, "Hegel starts with Spirit, which he says is a 'result"'10-so the selfcc~nscious self-understanding, the Absolute
Knowledge for which the search of the Phenomenology is carried out,
is to be understood as guiding the action from the beginning. And
this Absolute Knowledge reaches back through the rest of the book,
through the history of forms of consciousness presented there, and
discovers itself everywhere: every mediation and transcendence
along the way is an image of this Absolute Knowledge.
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For Hegel, the great failing of the Christian Consciousness, the
one thing that has kept it from being Absolute Knowledge, is its
inability wintegrate the wisdom of the comic: although the comic
consciousness pointed out that while divinity must be purely
self-consciousness it need not have any substantial being, it need
not take the form of a Divine Being. Thus, while the Christian
Consciousness intuitively recognizes its God in the Spirit of the
community, it continues to expect its God to appear as some
individuated existence, perhaps even as an "old man in the sky";
this pictorial representation keeps the Christian Consciousness
from fully realizing the self-consciousness which was its goal. As
Mark C. Taylor says,
The development of Greek religion culminates in
dramatic comedy for which "actual self-consciousness
exhibits itself as the fate of the Gods." Hegel maintains that the comic denial of the [objective] reality of
the divine is at the same time the affirmation of the
absoluteness of the self)!
It is only when the Christian Consciousness has come to "conceptually comprehend" this, the lesson of comedy, that it can attain
that self-consciousness which it seeks, discover the truth of its
religion, and gain Absolute Knowledge.
Kierkegaardian Christianity
Kierkegaard' s version of the ideal form of the Christian religion
is far from Hegel's, though it bears some striking resemblances,
and is formulated in anti-Hegelian terms- the vety titles of the
two works in which he most fully develops his views, the Philosophical Fragments and its Concluding Unscientific Postscript, express his rebellion against Hegel's "systematic" presentation of
religion as a part of human "science." Where Hegel wanted
religion to be one of the three highest forms of Knowledge (the
others being art and philosophy), Kierkegaard places religion
completely outside the realm traditionally claimed by "objective"
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Knowledge. Similarly, when his philosophical task is to define
truth, Kierkegaard identifies it not with any objective correspondence between thought and being, but with subjectivity; in fact,
Kierkegaard thinks that any real definition of truth
must also contain in itself an expression of the antithesis
to objectivity... Here is such a definition of truth: An
objective uncertainty, held fast through the appropriation
with the most passionate inwardness, is the truth, the
highest truth there is for an existing person.l2
Therefore, that seemingly self-contradictory belief which the existing individual takes up most passionately, with which his very
existence is most intimately connected, is the "highest" kind of
truth available to any human being. In the same way, Kierkegaard
rejects Hegel's "objective" approach to religion as well, preferring
the subjective: "there is not a question of the truth of Christianity
here .... No, the question is about the subject's acceptance of it"
(CUP, p. 129).
And Kierkegaard goes on to link this subjective definition of
truth with Christian faith, to identify them in a very strong sense:
But the definition of truth stated above is a paraphrasing of faith .... Faith is the contradiction between the
infinite passion of inwardness and the objective uncertainty. (CUP, p. 204)
The objective uncertainty Kierkegaard refers to here-is the uncertainty we must have about the existence of God: for although he
believes we have some knowledge of God (through revelation),
that knowledge cannot help us to prove God's existence. This
objective uncertainty leads us from this simple paradox to what
Kierkegaard called the "Absolute Paradox" in Philosophical Fragments. Because God is that which is "absolutely different" from
any human being, we can gain no knowledge of God through our
own efforts.
At this point we seem to stand at a paradox. Just to
come to know that the god is the different, man needs
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the god and then comes to know that the god is
absolutely different from him. 13
While the existence of God is not in itself paradoxical, the existing
human individual's relation to that divine (and therefore utterly
different) existence is paradoxical-but nonetheless absolutely
necessary.l4 To make this even more paradoxical, we may conceptualize that paradoxical relationship in existence as a human individual: we need only think of the Christ, the "eternal, essential
truth," as an existing human being, to find the relationship of God
to humanity in its most paradoxical form. Thus, Kierkegaard' s
Absolute Paradox is
that God has come into existence, has been born, has
grown up, etc., has come into existence exactly as an
individual human being, indistinguishable from any
other human being. (CUP, p. 210)
The existing human individual can react to this paradox in two
ways: either the individual understanding is willing to accept this
paradoxical relationship to the paradox, and takes up the attitude
of faith, or it is unwilling to accept this relationship, and takes up
the attitude of "offense" (PF, p. 49).15
Here Kierkegaard and Hegel differ dramatically: in their responses to this paradox, Kierkegaard turns down the path of faith,
while Hegel opts for .a sort of offense. 16 Hegel's Unhappy Consciousness is, in subjective terms, caught right here, at this paradox; because it cannot conceive of the Christ except as something
"absolutely remote," it stops trying, putting its emphasis on its
relationship to the Church, the community of believers. Hegel
correctly identifies the difficulty inherent in the Christian religion-faith in an "impossible" Mediator-but responds to this
difficulty by attempting to make it easy, by inserting a "new kind"
of Reason and the wisdom of comedy, to show the Unhappy
Consciousness that Reason and the Spirit can combine to transcend this "seeming" Paradox. The "objectivity" of Hegel's system
forces the Unhappy Consciousness to look "beyond" the Paradox,
to look for the underlying unity that will remove the under-
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standing's stumbling block. The Unhappy Consciousness's turn
toward the community of believers is completed, and God is
redefined as the Church; described by Hegel now as the "Christian
Consciousness," it feels better, for it has traded the terrible,
incomprehensible Paradox for something it can understand. In
fact, however, by placing its trust in the objective, the Unhappy
Consciousness has isolated itself from the very possibility of
decision, since
As soon as subjectivity is taken away ... there is no
decision whatever, whether on this issue or any other.
All decision, all essential decision, is rooted in subjectivity. (CUP, p. 33)
In contrast, Kierkegaard thinks that we must be willing to
accept the Paradox wholeheartedly:
If the paradox and the understanding meet in the
mutual understanding of their difference, then the
encounter is a happy one, like erotic love's understanding-happy in the passion to which we have as
yet given no name. (PF, p. 49)
The name for this passion, as we have already seen, is faith. Faith
is the ultimate conflict between the understanding's struggle to
comprehend and the absolute intractability of the Paradox; the
subjectivity of the individual is fully expressed in the passionate
grasp, and the Paradox is the height of objective uncertainty. In
fact, Kierkegaard says,
Subjectivity culminates in passion, Christianity is
paradox; paradox and passion fit each other perfectly,
and paradox perfectly fits a person situated in the
extremity of existence. (CUP, p. 230)17
It seems to me that Kierkegaard's faith is, then, at least similar to
what the reaction of the Unhappy Consciousness might have been
if it had not been trained to look for a new level on which all
paradoxes are consistent-if the Unhappy Consciousness were not
a part of Hegel's system. In Kierkegaard' s view, Hegel's focus on
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the objective truths of Christianity (whether the Christ ever
actually lived, whether we could prove the existence of God, what
properties the Christian God possesses) obscured his view of the
subjective problem of Christianity, how the individual can relate
to the religion:
the issue is not about the truth of Christianity but
about the individual's relation to Christianity, consequently not about the indifferent individual's systematic eagerness to rearrange the truths of Christianity
in paragraphs but rather about the concern of the
infinitely interested individual with regard to his own
relation to such a doctrine. (CUP, p. 15) 18
So Kierkegaard places all the emphasis on the subjective relationship between the existing individual and the Paradox, the
eternal existing in time; but this faith, this holding to the objective
uncertainty with the infinite passion of inwardness, is not something easily done. On the contrary, it is difficult and fraught with
"risk"; because faith requires objective uncertainty,
if I want to keep myself in faith, I must continually see
to it that I hold fast to the objective uncertainty, see to
it that in the objective uncertainty I am "out on 70,000
fathoms of water" and still have faith. (CUP, p. 204)
That is, Kierkegaard thinks it would be vety easy for the existing
individual to give in to his (Hegelian?) Reason's pressure to
attempt a proof of God's existence, to attempt to come to an
understanding of the existence in time of the eternal. It takes all
of the individual's subjective passion to resist that urge, and
remain at risk; but "without risk, no faith" (CUP, p. 204). To
resist the urge to employ our rational understanding in our relationship with the Paradox is, in fact, to "believe against the
understanding" (CUP, p. 565), and is absolutely vital to the
continued faith of the believing individual: as speculative understanding is concerned with calculating objective probabilities, the
subjective individual who has chosen the path of faith
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is always in mortal danger in that the collision of the
infinite and the finite is precisely a mortal danger to
one who is composed of both. The believer cares so
little for probability that he fears it most of all, since
he knows very well that with it he is beginning to lose
his faith. (CUP, p. 233)
The difficulty the existing individual necessarily confronts in
trying to hold on to faith in the face of rational desires to
understand makes becoming a true Christian nearly impossible, in
Kierkegaard' s view:
To become a Christian then becomes the most terrible
of all decisions in a person's life, since it is a matter of
winning faith through despair and offense .... By Baptism,
Christianity gives him a name, and he is Christian de
nomine; but in the decision he becomes a Christian and
gives Christianity his name. (CUP, p. 372-73)
For Kierkegaard, then, Christianity (that is, true Christian faith)
is more than just a belief in certain propositions about a man called
Jesus. As the definition given earlier implies, the "contradiction
between the infinite passion of inwardness and the objective
uncertainty" is a state of being an "existence-contradiction and
existence-communication" (CUP, p. 383),19 something which can
be described, talked about, but never explained in the Hegelian
sense. Though it is to be a communication, it cannot be a direct,
objective communication, and must be subjective and indirect;
hence "Objectively the emphasis is on what is said; subjectively the
emphasis is on how it is said" (CUP, p. 20).20 And though it is in
some sense a state of being, it is also not a static state that is reached
once and for all: although the moment of decision in favor of faith
seems like a final step, it is in fact only the beginning of the
constant struggle to live in accordance with the decision, as
the subjective "how" is transformed into a striving
that is motivated and repeatedly refreshed by the
decisive passion of the infinite, but it is nevertheless a
striving. (CUP, p. 203)
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The infinite passion of acceptance of the Absolute Paradox which
constitutes faith is difficult to achieve, and difficult to maintain
once achieved. It requires an infinitely passionate belief in the
complete isolation of the existing individual from God, and at the
same time a similar acceptance of the actual mediation of the
Christ-and, thus, the distance from God to humanity is not
cause for tragic moaning, but is a separation which makes possible
all the beauty and majesty of the Christian religion. As Mark C.
Taylor describes it,
The sheer facticity of the God-Man establishes Christ
as "an exclusive individual man ... from whom all are
closed off." Yet precisely this splendid isolation enables the God-Man to illuminate the nature of spirit
and the distinctive character of human existence.Zl
In Kierkegaard' s view, as in Hegel's, comedy is a requirement
for the expression of the ideal religiosity; but for Kierkegaard,
rather than playing any kind of necessary part in the development
of our attitude toward God or the community of believers, comedy is an indicator of the depth of inwardness, the spiritual
maturity of the existing individual. The strength of subjectivity
that the true Christian faith requires as a foundation, a prerequisite for the inner striving of faith, is also the foundation of
comedy-and of a sense of the relation between the comic and the
tragic, which Kierkegaard calls humor. 22 "Humor is the last stage
in existence-inwardness before faith" (CUP, p. 291), Kierkegaard
says, though it "does not have anything to do with the decisive
Christian category of becoming a Christian" (CUP, p. 602). It is
the stage of existence that Johannes Climacus (Kierkegaard' s
pseudonym) claims for himself: "I...am neither a religious speaker
nor a religious person, but just a humorous, imaginatively constructing psychologist" (CUP, p. 483).
Comedy is a reaction to be expected in two very different
circumstances. On the one hand, to the faithful individual the rest
of the "Christian" world, taken as a reflection of the Hegelian
religiosity, will be comical: that is, if the faithful individual sees
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another among the crowd of nominal Christians trying to relate
himself to an objective certainty, trying to believe in some set of
official Church doctrines, especially if that individual is actually
trying to believe with the passion he needs for true faith, that
unfortunate individual
becomes comic. He becomes comic not because he
is infinitely, inipassionedly interested-this is indeed the good thing about him-but he becomes
comic because the objectivity is incongruous with his
interest. (CUP, p. 43)
And, in fact, Kierkegaard says, "everyone is comic who is not
infinitely, impassionedly interested and yet wants people to think
that he is interested in his eternal happiness" (CUP, p. 54-55).
On the other hand, those nominal Christians will find the truly
faithful individual comical, in that the faithful insist on keeping
their eyes on the Paradox, and refuse the comfort of the systematic
release from paradox, for "wherever there is contradiction, the
comic is present" (CUP, p. 514)-but Kierkegaard replies, saying
"Christianly understood, the boundary of Christianity is to become a fool in the world" (CUP volume II, p. 157), reminding us
of Paul's injunction to the Corinthians: "We are fools for Christ's
sake." 23 But this vision of the faithful individual as comic is
immature, and to call it comic is in fact not warranted: since
Kierkegaard thinks "the comic is rooted in the mis-relation of the
objective" (CUP, p. 55), in such a case it is again the nominal
Christian, attempting to base his Christianity on objective speculation, who is truly comical. Since he agrees with Aristotle that
"the comic is painless contradiction" (CUP, p. 514), Kierkegaard
claims to know that the continual, difficult striving of the faithful
individual makes him a victim of suffering, and therefore an example of the tragic, not of the comic. That is, Kierkegaard thinks
that the comic is excluded in religious suffering, that
it is inaccessible to the comic, because suffering is
precisely the consciousness of contradiction, which
therefore is tragically assimilated with pathos into the
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religious person's consciousness, and thereby the
comic is excluded. (CUP, p. 483)
But a sense of humor is compatible with Christianity, indeed
necessary to the development of an appropriate depth of spirit.
And although humor in itself is not necessarily Christian, the
humorist is vety close to becoming a Christian, since he
joins the conception of God together with something
else and brings out the contradiction-but he does
not relate himself to God in religious passion .... He
changes himself into a jesting and yet profound transition area for all these transactions, but he does not
relate himself to God. (CUP, p. 505)
The humorist is intellectually mature enough to see the futility of
objective thought, and has given himself over to the subjective,
but has not (yet) made the full turn from the external and objective
to the internal and subjective. 24 A Kierkegaardian (non-Christian)
humorist, then, is continually looking back over his shoulder at
the past (no longer a part of himself) and at others (in no way a
part of himself)-if he were to turn his attention to the future,
and to the inner, he might indeed become a Christian, 25 but there
is no Hegelian "necessity" to make him do so, since there is
nothing untenable in such a way of life. "The comic is always a
sign of maturity," Kierkegaard says, and a sign "that a new pathos
is beginning" (CUP, p. 281)-a pathos that makes possible the
inward turn required for the infinite inwardness of Christianity.
Conclusions
Both Hegel and Kierkegaard considered comedy to be an
important part of their religious thought, as we have seen. Hegel
placed the vety possibility of a self-conscious self-understanding,
"Absolute Knowledge," in the care of the comic by making comedy a necessity for the development of the Revealed Religion. That
is, the Unhappy Consciousness's nearsighted vision of an individuated God could only be overcome, and the revelation occur,
through the comic juxtaposition of human and divine-without
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that comic bridge, humanity and the divine could not have
touched, and an irresolvable contradiction would have held us all
back from the "scientific" system Hegel delineates. But since
comedy came along and showed humanity that divinity was in fact
its own production-as is anything which claims universality26-Hegel's Unhappy Consciousness can make the Absolute
turn, and place on himself (in the form of the Absolute Spirit) all
the divinity formerly predicated of God.27 Kierkegaard was confronted with a similarly sticky situation, which he termed the
Absolute Paradox: the eternal Son of God being embodied in time.
But instead of trying like Hegel to overcome this contradiction,
Kierkegaard grasped the paradox firmly, placing the treasure of
Christian faith in its keeping, and guarded it jealously from the
invasive and destructive tendencies of a Hegelian, objective reason. For Kierkegaard, the comedic character of the Absolute
Paradox is not enough in itself to raise human consciousness into
religion. While comedy is certainly a necessary step to attaining a
religious-specifically a Christian-consciousness, Kierkegaard
insists that comedy be leavened with an understanding of the
tragic to create a new perspective, the "humorous." And humor is
the final stage before Kierkegaard' s version of true Christianity, a
necessary way-station of his religious dialectic, from which one
who wishes to discover real faith must eventually depart.
Kierkegaard' s rejection of Hegel's systematic religion has rwo
main parts. First, Kierkegaard explains and justifies a willingness
to live with the sort of contradictions that Hegel seeks to transcend. We find explicit contradictions difficult to work with, but
we do it all the time-living in a complex world, we are capable
of acting despite the paradoxes of freedom and determinism, for
example, or the conflicts between our principles and our practical
needs. Perhaps Kierkegaard' s passionate embrace of the Absolute
Paradox indicates that he takes Kant's "antinomies" more seriously than Hegel. Where Hegel wants a systematic rational capacity to explain even those things which are founded on nonrational
paradoxes, Kierkegaard recognizes that reason has limits-and
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argues that passion does not. Second, Kierkegaard lays an emphasis on the personal dimension of religious experience, a dimension
which Hegel cannot account for. Since in Hegel's system the
religious is identified with the Spirit of the community, and is
thus objectified and unparadoxical, we can perhaps see why
Kierkegaard thinks that "Hegel and Hegelianism are a venture in
the comic" (CUP, p. 34n). That is, since the individual who is
truly concerned with his relation to the divine should (in
Kierkegaard's eyes) exert himself to be at the height of subjectivity,
infinitely impassioned, with respect to the Paradox, any train of
thought that insists that the best way to further that effort is to
appeal to objective speculation must be absolutely comical. For in
becoming objective, the individual must necessarily lose sight of
his own individuality, must place himself completely in the "universal" category of humanity. 28 But it is exactly this loss of
individuality that Kierkegaard bemoans, and, thus, pursues Hegel
with the hue and cry of humor and comedy:
It is from this side that an objection must first be made
to modern speculative thought, that it has not a false
presupposition but a comic presupposition, occasioned by its having forgotten in a kind of world-historical absentmindedness what it means to be a human
being ... what it means that we, you and I and he, are
human beings, each one on his own. (CUP, p. 120)29
The whole speculative project, then, becomes comically impossible; as Niels Thulstrup puts it, "speculative thought ... belongs in
a museum for comical and useless discoveries."30
Finally, let me just remark that while Kierkegaard's criticisms
of Hegel's speculative theory of religion seem to me devastating,
I am uncomfortable with parts of his own subjective system. For
example, I think Robert Manning is right to question
Kierkegaard's Christianity for its odd stress on pain and loneliness:
"Kierkegaard' s deformed view of himself and his melancholic
isolation from others caused him to have a deformed view of
reality, other people, sociality, and Christianity which must be
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criticized."31 Perhaps if Kierkegaard's views could be tempered,
their extreme individualism mixed with a touch of sociality,
without taking them back to a watered-down Hegelianism, the
result might be a vety human and accessible version of the Christian religion.
Let me end with a claim of Anti-Climacus, another of
Kierkegaard' s own pseudonyms: "it is certain and true that the
first one to come up with the idea of defending Christianity in
Christendom is de facto a Judas no. 2."32 Although we certainly
ought not to identify the views of Johannes Climacus and AntiClimacus, in the face of Anti-Climacus's assertion we must question Kierkegaard' s view of his own project in Philosophical
Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Would he want
to characterize himselfas "another Judas"? Or is Kierkegaard using
humor against his own readers in this juxtaposition of pseudonyms? Perhaps being a subjective, humorous Judas isn't so bad,
compared to being an impersonal, objective Hegelian.
Notes:
I. G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J.B. Baillie (New
York: Harper Torchbooks, 1967), ~206, p. 251. Future references will be
made in tbe text.
2. See '229, p. 266: "It has the certainty of having in trutb stripped itself
of its Ego, and of having turned its immediate self-consciousness into a
'thing', into an objective external existence."
3. For a good understanding of Hegel's notion of "Spirit," see Terty
Pinkard, "The Successor to Metaphysics: Absolute Idea and Absolute Spirit"
The Monist74 (1991):309. "Spirit is thus not a metaphysical entity of which
we are all parts but rather a certain relation among people tbat structures and
mediates tbeir self-understanding. Put another way: Spirit tbus is just the
human community developing in histoty... [it] is that developing conceptual
space within which individuals situate themselves and to which they assume
particular stances.''
4. Pinkard, 321-22, my emphasis.
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121
5. Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reoding ofHegel trans. J .H.
Nichols, Jr. (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 67.
6. Pinkard, 321.
7. Introduction, 72-73.
8. Introduction, 73
9. Pinkard, "Idealism, Historicism, and Reason" Unpublished paper,
1993, p.7.
10. Introduction, 153.
11. Mark C. Taylor, journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1980), 110.
12. Sonen Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical
Fragments (hereafter CUP) trans E. H. Hong and H.V. Hong, vols. 1 and 2
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), vol. 1, 203. Further
references will be made by page number in the text; all are to vol. 1 unless
otherwise noted.
13. S0ren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments (hereafter PF), trans. E.H.
Hong and H.V. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985),
46. Further references will be made by page number in the text.
14. See, for example, CUP, 209: "if the individual, existing, does not lay hold
of the truth in existence, he will never have it."
15. journeys, 258. "The Absolute Paradox occasions an absolute decision by
posing an absolute either-or. Either believe or be offended. From the Christian perspective, this crucial decision is of eternal significance."
16. PF, 52-53.
17. CUP, 199: "At its highest, inwardness in an existing subject is passion;
truth as a paradox corresponds to passion, and that truth becomes a paradox
is grounded precisely in its relation to an existing subject."
18. Niels Thulstrup Kierkegaard's Relation to Hegel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 371: "Kierkegaard's aim in the Postscript .. .is to
answer the quesrion of how evety single individual can enter into the correct
relation with Christianity."
19. Relation, 378: "The central point of Christianity is paradoxical ... it is not
any doctrine in the speculative-philosophical sense ... but it expresses an
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existential contradiction, namely, that an existing man's eternal salvation is
worked out in time, through the fact that he relates himself to something
that paradoxically has become historical, together with the fact that Christianity is communication of existence (Kerygma, as it is frequently called
nowadays), i.e., it causes one to participate in the_true existence ... "
20. See also Judge Wilhelm's advice in Kierkegaard's Either/Or (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), Vol. 2, 167: "What is important is
not so much to choose the right thing as the energy, the earnestness, and the
pathos with which one chooses."
21. Journeys, 132.
22. CUP, 292: "What I properly call humor... [is] an equilibrium between
the comic and the tragic."
23. I Corinthians 4: I 0.
24. Louis J. Pojman, The Logic of Subjectivity: Kierkegaard's Philosophy of
Religion (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1984), 8: "The
significance of humor, then, is to show just how impoverished finite reason
is, to laugh at all man's attempts by his understanding to scale the heavens.
Secondly, it has a positive function of opening a person to accept the reality
of paradoxical truth, and ultimately to acceptance of the highest paradox of
all, the paradox of the Incarnation. Thus humor is the road to salvation."
25. CUP, 602.
26. See ~747, pp. 748-49: "It is the return of everything universal into
certainty of self, a certainty which, in consequence, is this ... complete loss of
substantial reality on the part of what is alien and external. Such certainty is
a state of spiritual good health and of self-abandonment thereto, on the part
of consciousness, in a way that, outside this kind of comedy, is not to be
found anywhere."
27. Relation, 375. In Kierkegaard's view, "Speculation, by denying the
absolute difference between God and man, wishes to abolish the paradox and
therewith that on which Christianity stands or fulls."
28. Relation, 374: "The subjective thinker must, in the final analysis, interpret the whole speculative endeavor as a comical attempt to do what is
impossible for the existing human."
29. See also CUP, 124-25.
30. Relation, p. 379.
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123
31. Robert John Scheffler Manning, "Kierkegaard and Post-Modernity:
Judas as Kierkegaard's Only Disciple" Philosophy Today 37 (1993): 146, and
the note on p. 152.
32. S0ren Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, p. 87; quoted in Manning,
"Kierkegaard and Post-Modernity," p. 133.
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�i
~
Making the Constitution
Murray Dry
As Residential Scholar of Constitutional Studies at the American
Enterprise Institute, Robert A. Goldwin, author of the volume
under review, and former dean of St.John's College in Annapolis,
has organized and led a number of conferences on the American
Constitution with scholars and practitioners, including judges,
elected officials, and journalists. This book, which began as an
examination of how the first Congress passed a bill of rights,
became a meditation on constitution-making, a subject of widespread interest today. As an explanation of what happened and
why it happened, I think Goldwin has it right and that he has
written a book that "constitution-makers" today and students of
American constitutionalism should read.
Goldwin cautions his readers that his book "differs in important respects from most others that deal with the making of the
Constitution" (p. 6). For one thing, Goldwin thinks that it is
necessary to describe "the great constitutional controversies that
raged during the ratification process" (p. 5). Hence, he begins his
story with the final days of the Federal Convention and the
Framers' decisions regarding the transition from the existing
Articles of Confederation to the new Constitution. Goldwin's
narrative highlights James Madison's statesmanship. The Father
of the Constitution, who initially opposed a bill of rights, later
came to reconsider his position in light of his understanding of
what was necessary to make the Constitution acceptable to the
great majority of his fellow citizens. He then rallied a reluctant
Robert Goldwin, From Parchment to Power: How james Madison Used the Bill of
Rights to Save the Constitution, (Washington D.C.: AEI Press, 1997).
Murray Dry is a Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science at Middlebury
College, Middlebury, VT.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Federalist majority in the first House to pass a bill of rights
without in any way altering the governmental structure or powers
provided for in the Constitution. This is where Goldwin's book
differs from Robert Rutland's, The Birth of the Bill of Rights, a
standard work on the subject. Goldwin is right to highlight
Madison's open-minded reconsideration of the issue and his ability to persuade reluctant Federalists to join him in supporting
most of his proposed amendments. At the same time, Goldwin
reminds us of the role of chance in ratification of the Bill of Rights.
Thus, constitution-makers today will be well advised to study this
book, in order to understand both how constitutions can be made
to secure a people's freedom and how those with political responsibilities need to respond prudently to changing circumstances.
The book's nine chapters are divided into three parts, with a
concluding Reflections section to each part. Part One covers the
ratification of the Constitution, from the last days of the Federal
Convention, when the transition questions were taken up in
detail, through the ratification by eleven states, all except North
Carolina and Rhode Island. Part Two starts with Madison's
reconsideration of the bill of rights question, prompted in part by
popular support in Virginia and throughout the country, as well
as by Jefferson, who made the case for a bill of rights in letters he
wrote to Madison from Paris. As a result of this reconsideration,
Madison introduced amendments to the Constitution in the
House on June 8, 1789. Part Three covers how Madison went
about steering the individual and collective popular rights amendments through the House while successfully resisting those
amendments aimed at weakening the federal government in relation
to the state governments, which the Anti-Federalists favored.
By starting where he does, Goldwin is able to show how the bill
of rights issue arose in the Federal Convention and then in the
ratification debate. Of course, a more obvious division would have
been to move from the Federal Convention to the Ratification
debate and then on to the First Congress. Or, by covering the
transition questions in the Federal Convention together with the
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127
ratification process, Goldwin could have provided a two-part
narrative: from the ratification of the Constitution to the making
and ratifYing of the Bill of Rights.
Instead, Goldwin puts his chapters on Madison changing his
mind (chapter 4) and Madison's speech to the House accompanying his proposals (chapter 5) together in the central part of the
work. Moreover, chapter five, entitled "To Introduce the Great
Work: Congressman Madison Takes the Floor," occupies the
central place in the book. Goldwin has thus arranged his material
in order to highlight Madison's achievement.
Goldwin first quotes from Madison's speech to show that he
was responding to what he regarded as the earnest concerns of
friends of the Constitution and that his expectations for a bill of
rights were moderate. Then Goldwin identifies Madison's addressees and explains his purpose.
He was not speaking to those one would think of as
his opponents in Congress, nor was he seeking to
convert the Anti-Federalist members of Congress to
becoming friends of the unamended Constitution. He
addressed, instead, those who one would think would
be his allies in the Congress-those who, in agreement
with him supported the original Constitution and
opposed efforts to alter it. He sought to explain to
them that their opponents, those who wanted to make
changes in and additions to the Constitution, could
be divided .... His analysis was that the popularsupport could be stripped away from the Anti-Federalists
by offering not what their spokesmen sought-radical
alterations in the Constitution-but rather only explicit assurances on the 'great rights of mankind,' and
that that could be accomplished without altering in
any way the powers of the new government (p.82).
In addition to describing Madison's prominent role in bringing
the Constitution to life, Goldwin helps his readers appreciate the
element of chance in politics. During the ratification struggle, for
example, Jefferson's presence in France as America's Ambassador
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
was fortuitous. Jefferson lent support to the movement for a
second convention, by urging four states to withhold their votes
for ratification until the others agreed on a bill of rights and on a
term limit for the president. Had he been in Virginia at the time,
Jefferson's influence might have been significant enough to force
a second convention, which would have produced either a weaker
federal government or no agreement at all (pp. 61-62). Goldwin
relates the story of Governor George Clinton's delay in communicating to New York's legislature a letter from Governor Edmund
Randolph of Virginia, concerning support for a second convention. Randolph then had Clinton's reply delivered to the Virginia
legislature. However, it was not read until a day after Virginia's
convention had ratified the Constitution. Following his source,
Goldwin believes that if the letter had been received earlier, the
two states would have cooperated and "a second convention prior
to ratification would then have been inevitable" (p. 43). Goldwin
also describes the important John Hancock-Samuel Adams proposal in the Massachusetts Ratification Convention; by supporting "recommendatory amendments" rather than "conditional
amendments," these two Federalist leaders attained an unqualified
ratification (pp. 40-41). With that action as a precedent, all
subsequent states ratified unconditionally (p. 47).
In his coverage of the closing days of the Federal Convention,
Goldwin relates how the Framers dealt with five obstacles to
ratification:
• the amending provision in the Articles of
Confederation
• the instructions from the Continental Congress
establishing the convention
• the Continental Congress itself
• the state legislatures
• three prestigious dissenting delegates
Today, these issues would be identified as "transition issues."
(Such issues were as important then as they were during the recent
revolutions in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.)
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Goldwin describes the solutions as well as what he calls some
"evasions" (p. 19). The amendment provision of the Articles of
Confederation required the consent of the Continental Congress
and of each of the state legislatures. But the Convention's transmittal letter called on the Continental Congress to send the
proposed Constitution on to the states without voting on it, with
directions that each state legislature have elections for a ratification convention to meet. The ratification article provided that
the Constitution would come into being when nine states ratified
it through these conventions. In addition, the instructions from
the Continental Congress were arguably breached by the Federal
Convention since the meeting was "for the sole and express
purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation," and the proposed Constitution did more than that. Goldwin points out that
many of the Framers thought that Congress's limitation on the
means contrasted with its expectation that the revisions would
"render the federal constitution adequate to the exigencies of
Government & the preservation of the union" (p. 17). The
Framers, especially Madison, regarded the Convention's work as
the equivalent of a constitutional revolution, and hence it was
essential from a juridical perspective to have the people elect
delegates to a convention to deliberate and vote on ratification.
The proponents of the Constitution were not above trying to
make their action appear unanimous, even though many framers
left the Convention early because they disapproved of the work,
and three others-Randolph, George Mason, and Eldridge
Gerry-refused to sign the document. Still, the Constitution
contains the words "done in Convention by the Unanimous
Consent of the States present ... " (p. 27). Goldwin explains that
the state legislatures allowed the Continental Congress to follow
the instructions of the Federal Convention because the states had
little confidence in the Congress (p. 30).
In his reflections on part one, Goldwin notes that this robust
political activity
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
all occurred before the Constitution was ratified. What
this means is that these familiar American political
habits were not originally developed and ingrained in
the American character by the Constitution. They
existed in full force before the Constitution existed.
The genius of the Framers was in writing a constitution that capture,d American democratic politicking as
it was practiced, designing institutions and a structure
of society that would perpetuate, not redesign, the
way Americans were already constituted (pp. 49-50).
This reminds one ofTocqueville's remarks about America having
enjoyed the benefits of revolution, meaning the historical absence
of hereditary institutions, without having to have undergone a
revolution. Today some call it American exceptionalism, and on
that basis liberal, democratic constitution-makers today cannot
simply follow an American script. On the other hand, America's
constitution-makers did not act as rigorous democrats when they
provided a complex structure of government, including legislative
bicameralism, a unitary executive with a share in the legislative
power, and an independent judiciary. Goldwin's point about
American politics is that republican or popular government requires familiarity with and an interest in political activity.
In Part Three of the book, Goldwin describes how Madison
finally succeeded in getting enough Federalists in the House to
engage the subject of a bill of rights. This includes an account of
how Madison, who proposed "interweaving" the amendments
into the Constitution, relented when he met with strong opposition to this from Roger Sherman and others (p. 1 08). On the other
hand, Madison refused to allow any amendments that would
weaken the new federal government. These included: a proposal
for "instructions" for members of Congress, which implied issue
by issue control-by the state legislatures over the Senate and by
the people over the House-with recall if necessary (pp. 114-124);
a motion to add the word "expressly" to what became the tenth
amendment; limitations on the tax power or the power to raise an
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131
army; and annual elections for senators as well as state legislative
control of federal elections (pp. 129-134).
These amendments were either voted down decisively after full
discussion or they were summarily defeated. Goldwin discusses the
recall debate in chapter six and the debate on the other amendments
in chapter seven, entitled, '"Those Solid and Substantial Amendments,' All Defeated." He calls part of that chapter "What the
Anti-Federalists Were For,'' which is the tide of Herbert]. Storing's
book-length essay on Anti-Federalist thought. (It is published
separately in paperback and also as volume one of his seven volume,
The Complete Anti-Federalists, [Chicago: University of Chicago
Press; 1981].) Goldwin explains the purpose of those amendments.
The intention was to alter radically the structure of
government established under the Constitution, and
the thrust of the proposed provisions was to transfer
power from the several branches of the federal government back to the states. What these alterations were
thought to have to do with the security of the rights of
individuals is an important clue to understanding the
fundamentals of the Anti-Federalist position (p. 131).
The Anti-Federalist leaders who supported these "solid and substantial" amendments feared that without them a consolidated
national government would develop, weaken the relatively small
and homogeneous states, and thereby destroy republican government. Earlier, Goldwin drew on Madison's writings in the Federalist and his letter to Jefferson to explain the novel character of
the Constitution; it provides for a strong republican government
over an extended territory with a diverse population, to provide
for the requirements of defense and to check the republican
disease of majority faction (pp. 62-7 4). Goldwin's account thus
clarifies the differences between the two kinds of amendments.
After defeating the Anti-Federalist amendments, Madison still
has to gain enough Federalist votes for his fmendments to carry
the House by the requisite two-thirds vote! And then he has to
persuade Federalists in the several states to support the amend-
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
ments and to persuade others to do so (chapter 8). Goldwin
includes, "as an instructive example of this effort," an exchange
between Madison and Richard Peters, the speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly. Peters playfully chides Madison for proposing
amendments "to the Machine before it is known whether it wants
any'' (p. 146). Goldwin explains that when Madison referred to
"the nauseous project 'of amendments," he meant the "frustratingly slow legislative process," not the amendments themselves
(pp. 147-8). And then Goldwin quotes extensively from a letter
Madison sent to Peters to provide him with the necessary arguments in support of ratification of the amendments. After beginning with his own qualified support ("provision in favr. of
essential rights is a thing not improper in itself and was always
viewed in that light by myself'), Madison provided six other
reasons, which Goldwin describes as "of a markedly different
character, all designed to appeal directly to the inclinations and
needs of a practical politician" (p. 149). The gist of the other
reasons are that adoption of the amendments "will kill the opposition everywhere" (p. 150). Goldwin reports that while Peters
feared that the concessions would not satisfy the Anti-Federalists
and therefore wanted Madison to use the Federalist majority to
silence them, Madison saw "the amending project ... as an opportunity to diminish divisions and generate unity and therefore as
an essential part of the constitution-making process" (p. 151).
In his reflections on Part Two, Goldwin critically discusses
Rutland's contentions that Madison was mistaken not to support
a bill of rights when George Mason suggested one toward the end
of the Federal Convention and that Madison only changed his
mind when he realized that he would have to support a bill of
rights to get himself elected to the House of Representatives in
1789 (pp. 96-7). After quoting from Madison's Federalist expressions about the need for a republican government to provide
checks against the majority, Goldwin quotes the following argument for a bill of rights from Madison's letter to Jefferson of 17
October 1788:
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The political truths declared in that solemn manner
acquire by degrees the character of fundamental maxims of free Government and as they become incorporated with the national sentiment, counteract the
impulses of interest and passion (p. 99).
Goldwin, who provides many instances of Madison's qualified
support for a bill of rights, calls this Madison's only statement of
unqualified support. Madison came to understand, Goldwin
argues, how a bill of rights can make a positive contribution to
freedom in a republican form of government. The Bill of Rights
can become "a force potentially more powerful than any majority
because it involves a profound commitment of 'the whole people
of the United States"' (p. 99). Of course this can only happen if
the bill of rights provisions are rightly constructed, if they do not
in any way revise or weaken the structure of the new government
and its powers. Rutland, according to Goldwin, does not appreciate this point (p. 101), and, as a result, his presentation has
Madison simply bowing to public opinion. According to Goldwin, however, "[t]he significant truth about Madison and public
opinion and the Bill of Rights is that when Madison spoke, the
people listened. And they revised their views" (p. 102).
The difference between Goldwin and Rutland on the Bill of
Rights concerns more than the relative contribution of Madison
versus public opinion, however. It also concerns the relationship
between the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Goldwin follows
Storing in emphasizing the significance of what was excluded as
well as what was included in the Bill of Rights (p. 83). Before
Madison took charge, the opponents of the proposed Constitution controlled the bill of rights issue. They were using it to call
for a second convention, with a view toward revising the structure
and powers of the federal government. After Madison took control
of the issue, he limited the amendments to statements of rights of
the people against government and he kept out all revisions of the
Constitution's structure and powers. That is the meaning of the
Goldwin's subtitle, "How James Madison Used the Bill of Rights
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
to Save the Constitution." Rutland, who notes in the essay
Goldwin discusses that "there is ... much truth to the argument that
the Constitution is a living, breathing document," limits his
examples to the Bill of Rights, or individual rights against government. And in another place, Rutland writes: "Fortuitously separated from the original Constitution, these ten amendments in
time became the most admirable aspect of American law-making"
("The First Ten Amendments," in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of
the American Revolution, ed. by Jack P. Greene and J.R. Pole,
Cambridge, MA and Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1991, p. 274.) For
Rutland, while the Federalists gave us the Constitution, the AntiFederalists and/or the people gave us the Bill of Rights. For
Goldwin, this introduces a false dichotomy. The Bill of Rights
completes the Constitution by making it acceptable to large
majority of the American people. The Bill of Rights, by making
mention of the people's rights and their powers (the latter in the
Tenth Amendment), "closes the parentheses," opened by the
Preamble, "thereby portraying a constitution-making people that
would be worthy of the republic they founded ... " (p. 184). Thus
Goldwin presents his interpretation of the parenthesis image
Storing used in "The Constitution and the Bill of Rights," "the
seminal essay that led me to write this book" (p. 184).
I think that Goldwin's disagreement with Rutland allows us to
appreciate what might be called our continuing constitutional
responsibilities. Rutland's remarks about a "living constitution"
were made in a context indicating that he favored the twentieth
century development toward increasing judicial protection of
individual rights. As Goldwin presents it, Madison's constitutionalism does not necessarily rely on judicial activism for the
people to secure their rights. The original Federalist position,
articulated by Hamilton in Federalist 84, was that "the constitution, if adopted, will be the bill of rights of the union." For
Goldwin, the Madisonian position combines the original Federalist position, which emphasizes the entire structure of government, with a statement of the people's rights and their powers.
�DRY
135
So, short of revolutionary action, how do the people preserve
their rights and their powers? For Madison, who authored a
"Memorial and Remonstrance" to preserve religious freedom in
Virginia in 1785, and the Virginia Resolutions and Report to
preserve federalism and freedom of speech in 1799-1800, the
people can preserve their freedom through public addresses on
political matters and by their suffrage. I think Goldwin favors
this approach himself (seep. 175 and note 35, and p. 183). And
yet Madison gave as one reason for a bill of rights that the judiciary
would thereby be made "a bulwark against abuses of the executive
and legislative branches" (p. 93). Madison, incidentally, got this
from Jefferson, who mentioned it to him in his letter of March
15, 1789. This means that Madison and Jefferson were aware of
the effect the Bill of Rights could have on judicial power. They
did not favor it, nor did they favor, as it turned out, a liberal
construction of the enumerated powers of Congress. Debate over
the scope of Congress's powers has been revived lately, which
means that judicial power recently has been active in support of
federalism as well as individual rights.
What would Madison make of our constitutionalism today?
And what should we make of it in light of Goldwin's fine study
of Madison's constitution-making? I think Madison would first
note some significant changes from his time to ours: the American
polity is larger, more democratic, and more diverse; as a result it
is more tolerant of diversity and its people have come to rely on
big government. Taking account of these changes, which he
might praise in part and criticize in part, Madison would conclude
that we will need the assistance of all branches of government as
well as a public-spirited people to maintain our freedom.
�136
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
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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
McShane, Anne
Sachs, Joe
Suber, Peter
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Klassen, Johan A.
Dry, Murray
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The St. John's Review
Volume XLIV. number three ( 1998)
Editor
Pame/4 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
Anne McShane
The St. John's Review is published by the Office of the Dean, St.
John's College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President;
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per issue, from the St. John's College Bookstore.
©1998 St. John's College. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole
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ISSN 0277-4720
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��Contents
Essays and Lectures
Prelude to Vocation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Marilyn Higuera
How We Do Things With Words:
An Introduction to Wittgenstein . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
John Verdi
Ptolemy's Truth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
David Stephenson
Reviews
A Forgotten Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Lucio Russo's La rivoluzione dimenticata
Curtis J#lson
Measured Passion, Golden Rationality . . . . . . . . . 117
Eva T. H. Brann's The Past-Present
Ronald Mawby
Mimesis on the Treacherous Slopes:
Joyce's Commitment to Community
. . . . . . . 127
Cordell Yee's The Word According to James Joyce
Albert Wachtel
��t
Prelude to Vocation
Marilyn Higuera
George Eliot's panorama of life in and around the small town of
Middlemarch, England in 1829 opens with a short Prelude. These
lyrical paragraphs are not a summary of some "offstage" event in the
lives of her characters that would be helpful to know before the reader begins the story proper; in fact, no character from the ensuing
story is even named. Nor are these opening words an apology or
admonishment spoken directly to the reader as reader by the author
as author. Instead, they consist of three paragraphs which articulate
a general problem, albeit dramatically and with vivid examples anc\
rhetorical flourishes. This Prelude is our first exposure to a voice we
will hear continually throughout the book: the voice of George Eliot
as thinker.
Her first words are a rhetorical question:
Who that cares much to know the history of man,
and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the
varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt at least
briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa. .. ?
Eliot, of course, tells us what she wishes us to know of St.
Theresa's story and engrafts her interpretation of Theresa's motives
and heroism. She asks her musing question in ordel;' to prepare us to
be the right sort of audience. Without lecturing us, she reminds us
that we ought care about the history of man, for it reveals something
of, man's nature. Immediately, we are drawn into the philosophic
activity of this careful observer. Later in the book (Chapter 11, p.
Marilyn Higuera is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. This is a version of a lecture delivered
in Annapolis on January 10,1997 and in Santa Fe on January 23, 1998.
�2
THEST. JOHN'S REVIEW
65)1, Eliot will compare herself to Herodotus and call herself a
belated historian (Chapter 15, p. 96),
In her opening, rhetorical question, Eliot specifies her interest in
history as "how the mysterious mixture [of man] behaves under the
varying experiments of Time:' Time is to be regarded as a scientist,
establishing the conditions and variables under which man operates
and then observing the results. Eliot, too, can be likened to a scientist, establishing conditions and variables and watching them work on
her characters. But, of course, she doesn't really "watch them work on
her characters"; she crafts the characters and their responses.
In the second paragraph of the Prelude, however, we have a clue
as to Eliot's own view of her scientific role. She tells us in passing
that "common eyes" are not always able to penetrate the roiling surface of events, Sometimes, heroic internal struggles issue in no wellshaped event or deed. More properly than an historian, Eliot can
transform our "common" eyes into acute instruments of intelligence
by illuminating the definite thoughts and motives of her characters
and by permitting us to witness private debates and emotional consequences. The historical imagination may help us understand "how
triumphant opinions originally spread-how institutions arosewhat were the conditions of great inventions, discoveries or theoretic conceptions;' 2 but Eliot's literary effort is to school our sensibility to the tragedy imbuing some of the most ordinary interchanges
(experiments) of our lives.
Before we let her educate us, however, let's linger over the opening
sentence of the Prelude and those "varying experiments of Time:'
Eliot means more than simply that different circumstances reveal
different aspects of man's nature. She has in ll;lind a mutual dependence between these circumstances and his nature. As she says in the
Finale (p. 577), "there is no creature whose inward being is so strong
that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it:' Such interrelatedness further obscures the enigma of man's "mysterious" animal yet moral nature. Simultaneously, it increases the importance of
the "experiments of Time." For, as Darwin says, "when we regard
�HIGUERA
3
every production of nature as one which has had a history... how far
more interesting... will the study of natural history become." 3
Darwin's theory of evolution was just being formulated in Eliot's
era. She read The Origin if Species when it was first published in 1859
and again some years later; she had previously read Darwin's predecessors Lamarck, Chambers, and Spencer, and was already intrigued
by what was then called ~he Development Theory. Eliot began writing Middlemarch in 1870, long after these controversial ideas had first
engaged her considerable intellectual energy.4 She was keenly aware of
evidence that different situations and environments pressure an
organic being in different ways, that natural selection may continually be on the lookout to capitalize on the variation ever-present in the
species. You will note that, in the third paragraph of the Prelude,
Eliot speaks of the "limits of variation" being wider than one might
think in the nature of women. The title of the first chapter of
Darwin's book is "Variation Under Domestication" and the title of the
second is "Variation Under Nature:'
Eliot claims that the hidden variation in women's souls prevents
us from treating their "social lot" with "scientific certitude:' At first,
one might think Eliot thus distances herself from Darwin, who was
a new sort of scientist. However, instead of eternal species and fixed
laws of nature, Darwin had conjectured that "we shall never, probably, disentangle the inextricable web of affinities" connecting various
· organisms (Origin, p. 415). Images of the web, its radiating threads,
and entanglement pervade Middlemarch as well as The Origin if Species, 5
serving in both texts as a model for reality with two problematic features. The first is that individuals, while the most important element
of creation, are not strictly separable from, and indeed are quite limited by, their environment. The second concerns our limitation as scientific observers; we observe only a small slice of the present, which
masks the tree. of the history of descent. Both Eliot and Darwin see
threads of connection that radiate out through space and time in
such a way as to make interpretation and storytelling an endless. and
uncertain activity.
�4
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
However, Eliot's most profound explorations take place on a different plane from Darwin's. Already in 1856, several years before she
began to write Middlemarch, in her essay 'The Natural History of
German Life;' Eliot asserted that
the conditions which society has inherited from the
past are but the ,manifestation of inherited internal
conditions in the human beings who compose it; the
internal conditions and the external are related to
each other as the organism and its medium, and
development can take place only by the gradual consentaneous development of both.6
Though Darwin's speculations comprehended the entire community of living creatures and embraced eons of historical development,
he was more concerned with physical changes of the species, changes
that could be gleaned from the fossil records (such as bone structure
alterations, the presence of a predator at a certain period, radical
alteration of the climate). Eliot, on the other hand, speaks of "soul"
in the Prelude. She envisions as severe a pressure on the soul, from
the social and cultural practices and habits into which one is born, as
Darwin hypothesizes concerning the geographical-ecological constraints on a given individual. Her interest perhaps determines her
formulation of man's nature as a "mysterious mixture" in the beginning of the Prelude. An individual's nature was something of a mystery to Darwin as well, but Eliot's emphasis on the "mixture" is further amplified in the succeeding image of young St. Theresa and her
brother as helpless as two fawns, "but with human hearts:' Eliot's
extension of the Darwinian problem of the struggle of an individual
nature, replete with soul and heart, born into an inhospitable environment receives its fullest exploration in Middlemarch.
In the Prelude, St. Theresa is spoken of as a type: "Many
Theresas have been born:' Eliot explores the conditioning and limiting imposed on an individual type from outside, the adaptation of
�HIGUERA
5
the self to the constraints of the social order. Eliot applies Darwin's
metaphor of the polity of nature7 to the polity itsel£ The models of
behavior evolved by a society, the premises of the local religion, technological advances, the responses of the social group to political
change, all make forceful appearances in Middlemarch, a book which
culminates with the thought that the "medium" in which St. Theresa
and Antigone accomplished their "ardent deeds" "is forever gone"
(Finale, p. 577). The "gradual action of ordinary causes" (Eliot's own
description of Middlemarch in an 1871 letter to her publisher) forces
major compromises by her two central characters.
These characters, Dorothea and the young Dr. Lydgate, are both
instances of the particular type Eliot distinguishes in the Prelude, the
St. Theresa type, namely, the ardent character, passionate to act upon
.d
an 1 eal. Every word .h ere, " ard ent," "'deal" and " act," becomes a
1
,
recurring motif in Middlemarch. For the moment, I would like to give
some depth to the first of them.
I want, then, to understand the "ardently willing soul" in paragraph 2 of the Prelude. Only the very best characters in this book are
"ardent": Dorothea, Lydgate, and, occasionally, Will. (Caleb Garth is
once called "ardent" in his generosity toward young Fred, revealing
Eliot's admiration for this down-to-earth character.) "Ardent" is a
word derived from the Latin ardere, meaning "to burn:' This etymological derivation is vivified in the Prelude by Eliot's description of
Theresa's "flame" burning up the chivalric romances of her time. We,
too, connect this word "ardent" to the fiery passion a lover may feel
for the beloved or, by extension, the words uttered by such a lover; we
may even use it to describe someone's pursuit of a goal when it is particularly single-minded and feverish.
Eliot is using this word "ardent" a little differently, for she means
it to describe a nature such as Theresa's and Dorothea's and Lydgate's.
Dorothea is introduced to us as "open, ardent, and not in the least
self-admiring" (p. 3); again, Eliot says, "The intensity of her
[Dorothea's] religious disposition, the coercion it exercised over her
life, was but one aspect of a nature altogether ardent, theoretic, and
�6
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
intellectually consequent. .. " (p. 17). What does it mean for a nature
to burn with desire? Eliot most certainly does not mean that such a
nature will fix easily and quickly on the first object which presents
itself and pursue it heatedly. We have only to read the first book of
Middlemarch and become acquainted with Dorothea ( in all her youthful, faintly ascetic Puritanism) to realize she is not such a monster as
that. For Eliot, the ardent nature is one that reaches beyond its very
self, and therefore its desire is not, strictly speaking, a desire to possess. What sort of desire is it then? Let us turn to the writings of St.
Theresa and her confessor and friend, St. John of the Cross, for a
glimpse of such desire.
They are, in their own words, expounders of "mystical theology."
Perhaps it would be helpful at this point to remark on the great tradition of religious mysticism which views the soul's relationship to
God as best expressed by the relationship of a bride to her bridegroom. The Song of Solomon can be and has been read as expressive of
this relationship. Both St. John of the Cross and St. Theresa continue this tradition of interweaving the romantic yearning for the beautiful beloved with the soul seeking fellowship with God. St. Theresa
repeatedly speaks of Christ as her Spouse.8 St. John of the Cross
refers to the Holy Spirit as his Spouse. Let me give some examples of
how very seriously these two authors employ the image of erotic love.
This flame of love is the Spirit of its Spouse-that
is, the Holy Spirit. And this flame the soul feels within it, not only as a fire that has consumed and transformed it in sweet love, but also as a fire which burns
within it and sends out flame .... And this is the operation of the Holy Spirit in the soul that is transformed in love, that the acts that He performs within it cause it to send out flames, which are the enkindling of love, wherein the will of the soul is united,
and it loves most deeply, being made one with that
flame in love.9
�HIGUERA
7
And St. Theresa tries to articulate how the Prayer of Union with
God can captivate and enthrall the soul:
Have you not heard concerning the Bride.... That
soul has now delivered itself into His hands and His
great love has so completely subdued it that it neither
knows nor desires anything save that God shall do
with it what He wills.10
Or St. John of the Cross again (p. 41),
... the copiousness and abundance of (the soul's)
glory and delight. .. is the greater and the more tender
when the soul is the more fervently and substantially
transformed and centred in God. This is something
much greater than comes to pass in the ordinary
union of love, because of the greater fervency of the
fire, which here, as we say, gives forth living flame. For
this soul, which is now in such sweetness and glory,
and the soul that enjoys only the ordinary union of
love, are in a certain way comparable respectively to
the fire of God. ... For the soul in this state is like a
furnace enkindled, the vision whereof is, as we say,
the more peaceful and glorious and tender in proportion as the flame of this furnace is more vehemently
enkindled than common fire.
Perhaps, the intensity of the passion here and particularly the
representation of the illumination of the soul by God as the ecstasy
of erotic love is startling. (A moment's reflection, though, can trace
this idea as descended from Augustine and Plotinus, who were themselves altering Plato's picture of eros as the force pulling us toward
truth itsel£) I believe this eros for the divine is precisely the conception which moved Eliot when shaping Dorothea's "ardent" nature.
�8
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
The preceding passages reveal people capable of great passion, a passion the essence of which is glimpsed by most people only in sexual
relations. St. Theresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross long to be
consumed by God in a union of perfect Love. They are willing to die
to themselves and allow God to live through them. Although the
object of their love is transcendent, higher than any human being,
they view their love as ~kin to the longing of a man for a woman.
Probably, such yearning to be absorbed into another's essence is
infrequently felt even in relations between the sexes. Romantic love,
however, what we might call "being in love," does seem to me to have
that paradoxical desire for self-forgetful union at its center. For
"being in love" comprises more than a desire to possess; it is an
attraction felt by one whole person-mind, body, soul-for another
whole person. Calculations concerning needs and wants fall away in
the face of a being who embodies the good and beautiful.
Perhaps no human beloved can sustain being the vehicle of
goodness for long, and perhaps no human lover can sustain surrendering his identity-even to God-for long. But, in the Prelude,
Eliot urges us to reflect on the consequences of Theresa's "rapturous
consciousness of life beyond self' Theresa's moments of union with
God actively drew her away from herself even when the ecstasy had
subsided. They were a call from the divine, or-in the very oldest
sense of the word-a vocation. In her vocation, Theresa was both
ardent and dynamic. She was passionate, not only to experience the
joys of the other world, but to do God's work in this world:
love for God does not consist in... enjoying those
consolations and that tenderness which for the most
part we desire and in which we find comfort, but in
serving Him with righteousness, fortitude of soul
and humility. 11
In this spirit of service, of dying to her own will and following
God's will, St. Theresa reformed the Carmelite order of nuns; her
�HIGUERA
9
effort was to reject the comfort of a large and pleasant convent, to
reinstitute the strict Rule of living that had been mitigated by papal
authority, and particularly to embrace a life of absolute poverty,
denying concern even over necessities.
After this exploration of the Theresa-type, we can now deepen
our understanding of the problem of the Prelude. We have before us
a character longing to be transformed by a knowledge of the good,
yearning to transform .the p~ssibilities for life in society, yet
enmeshed in a Darwinian web where change usually occurs "by the
accumulation of innumerable slight variations" and there can be "no
great or sudden modification" (Origin, p. 444). Yet the model of St.
Theresa affords hope that under certain propitious circumstances of
the local ecology, the heart and soul can find some satisfying work to
accomplish. I am ready now to turn toward the story proper and see
how Eliot elaborates this problem.
In Middlemarch, the character Dorothea is not a member of a religious order, experiencing rapturous union with God. Still, Dorothea
is first shown us denying herself things: in Chapters 1 and 2, she has
"conscientious qualms" concerning the horseback riding she loves,
and Eliot's ironic voice informs us she "always looked forward to
renouncing it" (p. 3, also p. 10); Eliot gently mocks Dorothea's hesitation in renouncing her mother's jewels in Chapter 1, and portrays
her as momentarily deluding herself that her delight in the jewels is
"mystic religious joy"; Chapter 2 finds Dorothea fending off a charge
that she is fond of "giving up" in general. The triviality of these
denials might be saved by some encompassing scheme (some of St.
Theresa's denials were not more grand), but our reaction to these
renunciations is governed by Eliot's own ironic verdict on p. 2 that
Dorothea is "likely to seek martyrdom, to make retractations, and
then to incur martyrdom after all in a quarter where she had not
sought it:'
The difference between St. Theresa and Dorothea can be seen
clearly. Dorothea is flailing about, trying to figure out the right thing
to do. She has some vague feeling that self-denial is good, but she has
�10
THEST. JOHN'S REVIEW
no trustworthy guidance from anyone concerning what should be
denied and what embraced, nor any framework that tells her what
end these denials serve.
In the Prelude, Eliot tells us that Theresa's religious ideals "perform[ ed] the function of knowledge:' Since Eliot refers these ideals
to a "coherent social faith;' she must be referring not to Theresa's
direct revelations from God but to her self-confessed dependence on
guidance from priest-confessors, fellow nuns, fellow believers.U In
Eliot's time, no religion can adequately substitute for knowledge. To
find a true vocation (where now the word means only a directionnot necessarily from God-to a special work in life), Dorothea needs
some doctrine so firmly supported by a worldly structure that it can
manifest itself in society as powerfully and actively good. None of
the formal churchgoing and empty bickering about prevenient grace
in the town of Middlemarch can contend for this ideal. There, the main
import of religious sentiment seems concerned that "religion does
not require you to make yourself uncomfortable" (p. 340, see also p.
12); "the great safeguard of society and of domestic life was, that
opinions were not acted on" (p. 3). Such hollow reverence offers little to Dorothea in her struggle to find the "fullest truth, the least
partial good" (p. 141).
How can Dorothea channel her passion for divine goodness,
when the divine has no obvious manifestation? Lacking any liberating educational experience that might turn her to philosophy, the
nearsighted Dorothea turns toward her most obvious vocational
option. Almost inevitably, Dorothea's first marriage assumes the
aspect of religious fervor; her aim is to serve Casaubon, as maid if
necessary. Yet Dorothea dreams of being a secretary and even a kind
of graduate student to his professorial wisdom. Marriage is the one
model of fruitful self-denial that Dorothea has acquired. Dorothea
knows, however, that for marriage to be a vocation, lifting her life out
of the common and into a higher sphere, the man into whose life she
will be absorbed must be "above [herJ in judgment and in all knowledge" (Ch. 4). Only then will the self-denial be "glorious piety" (p.
�HIGUERA
11
4). She thinks, mistakenly as it turns out, that Casaubon's religious
connections and his scholarship concerning "the key to all
Mythologies" will unlock the secret of a good life.
But we would be wrong to picture Dorothea's relation even to
Casaubon as academic or abstract. Her connection with him is felt in
every fiber of her being. She "would have kissed Mr. Casaubon's
coat-sleeve, or... caressed his shoe-latchet, if he would have made any
other sign of acceptance than pronouncing her, with his unfailing
propriety, to be of a most affectionate and truly feminine nature ... "
(p. 138). Dorothea's nature requires that she make some such quixotic attempt to dedicate herself to a flesh-and-blood Dulcinea. In the
absence of direct revelation, she must reach out with affection to a
real person, and hope that the affection will carry her towards an
ideal directing her actions in this world.
During the course of her misbegotten marriage, Dorothea treads
a steeper path of self-denial than she had ever dreamed. She had
thought that she would be devoting herself to Casaubon's projeCt,
sacrificing only such dubious pleasures as dinner parties and interest
in fashion. When Dorothea's Dulcinea is recognized for the peasant
girl she is (i.e., Casaubon's empty pretentiousness and icy heart are
unmasked), duty becomes Dorothea's goal. But the word "duty" does
not, I think, adequately capture the transformation of Dorothea's
vocation. As she grows aware of Casaubon's limitations-his ignorance of certain advances in German scholarship, the empty,
labyrinthine corridors of his mind, his neurotic and unending organization of information never culminating in actual authorship, his
pathetic fear of criticism-she does not become bitter in her disillusionment. Instead, a new world opens up to her.
We do not immediately appreciate the vistas that are revealed to
Dorothea. For the new world she gains presents itself first as
Casaubon's dark, enclosed one. Dorothea has to surrender her
assumption that religious scholars have the wisdom to guide one to
virtuous action. Her solitary cry of faith (p. 190) is muted to a modest hope that the mere desire for the good may help fight evil (p. 270).
�12
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
With no direction and little idea where to turn, she admits she hardly ever even prays after her disenchantment with Casaubon (p. 271 ).
In a book endowed with four different clergymen as characters and
an ever-present tension between Puritans, Methodists, Catholics, and
Calvinists, Dorothea's initial confidence in the power of religion to
do good in society simply evaporates. The previously noted absence
of a coherent social fai.th and the debunking of impartial Biblical
scholarship leave Dorothea stranded.
Thus stymied, the passion Dorothea had dedicated to her marriage and the pursuit of wisdom manifesrs itself as anger. Dorothea's
anger flares rather often; it is the obverse side of her ardency.
However, Dorothea's "ideal was not to claim justice, but to give tenderness" (p. 140). She repeatedly reaches beyond her very real anger
and repulsion. She becomes, not without tremendous effort and cost,
able to feel what Casaubon feels, to understand and pity him. Only a
nature longing to bury irself in the good could, at the very moment
when soul-hunger for knowledge is being stifled and affectionate
overtures are being rebuffed, ardently transform wifely duty into tenderness and pity.
The narrator betrays no trace of irony in her treatment of
Dorothea's renunciation of claims here, only admiration for her
"noble habit of soul" (p. 295) and faithful, loving compassion.
Dorothea's sacrifice for Casaubon is infinitely more serious than her
giving up of horseback riding or jewels-involving as it does a relinquishing of the just claims of a wife to respect and consideration
from a husband. Her self-repression now is founded on the very real
needs of another soul, needs which Casaubon has not even articulated to himself but which the narrator penetrates and Dorothea intuits. This sympathetic connection to another human being is new to
Dorothea. We readers, who have been continually exhorted by the
narrator to sympathy for the full spectrum of characters, recognize
this triumph over the self as a partial substitute for the failed quixotic attempt Dorothea has made to imitate St. Theresa.
In short, Dorothea matures morally. Without any authority to
�HIGUERA
13
obey, she is thrust upon her own resources. In the beginning of the
book, these resources were only able to dire£t her to establish a school
for the children in the village, to improve the design of cottages for
the poor. In the throes of her disappointment with Casaubon, a
whole different arena for doing good has opened to her. Mr.
Casaubon's "small hungry shivering self" has presented itsel£ mutely begging for sustenance, She realizes that misery of the soul can be
every bit as painful as hunger and cold, and she experiences the desire
and ability to assuage such pain.
Later, after Casaubon's death and her discovery of her own love
for the much younger and more romantic Will, this new power of
charity is dramatically and fully explored in Dorothea's intervention
to save Lydgate's marriage. At a time when she believes the man she
loves, Will, has betrayed her with Lydgate's wife, Rosamond, she
conquers despair, sets aside her own loss and determines to think
what Rosamond thinks, feel what Lydgate feels, and try to find some
influence, using sympathetically the wisdom hard-won from her first
marriage. Eliot conveys the power and magnificence of this action.
In a passage St. Theresa herself might have written, Eliot tells us
that Dorothea "yearned towards the perfect Right, that it might
make a throne within her, and rule her errant will" (p. 544). She cannot think of the "piercing trouble" that must be assailing the
estranged couple without abandoning her pride and attempting a
self-forgetful rescue.
.
In this novel, sympathetic action is more effective than rational
argument. Consider Farebrother's indifference to Lydgate's vote,
Caleb's rescue of Fred from the dangers of becoming a clergyman,
Farebrother's assistance to Fred in wooing Mary, Lydgate's support of
the publicly shamed Bulstrode, and Mrs. Bulstrode's loyalty to her
husband. The strange concept of sympathy as a vocation begins to
dawn on the reader. Perhaps instead of Theresa's faith in God and
Church, some moral guidance can be found in "an extension and
intensification of our sympathetic nature:' 13 Eliot formulates
Dorothea's progress as follows:
�14
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
all this vivid sympathetic experience returned to her
now as a power: it asserted itself as acquired knowledge asserts itself and will not let us see as we saw in
the day of our ignorance. (p. 544)
Dorothea's newfound "knowledge" issues in a concrete good: she
does indeed save Lydgate's and Rosamond's marriage. She doesn't
wholly transform it from the miserable, empty union it is; in the
Finale, Lydgate employs the metaphor of the basil plant for
Rosamond, revealing that he thinks she is flourishing on the brains
of his corpse. Still, the marriage bond is never violated and they are
able to cultivate a family as well as most couples. We, who have stared
with Rosamond and with Lydgate across the intervening abyss, are
sensible of the great feat Dorothea's sacrificed pride and pitying fellowship has accomplished.
Yet Eliot admits in the middle of Dorothea's glorious scene of selftranscendence with Rosamond that Dorothea was guilty of her "usual
tendency to overestimate the good in others" (p. 551). Dorothea rightly has faith in Lydgate's integrity and insight into the tragedies of his
career and marriage, but her "believing conception" of Rosamond's
inner, natural pity for her husband's plight is wholly inaccurate. This
error is not as grave as Dorothea's earlier decision to commit hersel£
out of compassion for Casaubon, to a life of sifting heaps of fruitless
papers after he died. However, the "knowledge" infused by sympathy
is shown to provide dubious guidance. Readers have been taught,
through Casaubon's Key to All Mythologies, to be suspicious of binding
theories which might direct one's actions-but the absence of one is
also problematic.
Earlier, I discussed Eliot's serious skepticism concerning our ability to untangle the numerous threads of causes and effects at work in
a given individual. In Dorothea's actions, Eliot confronts the likelihood that even the least egoistical person will misread the individuals surrounding her, and so be "feeling with" a partly imaginary construct rather than a real soul. Even in Dorothea's relations with
�HIGUERA
15
Casaubon, where intimacy produced a fine attunement to his nervous
susceptibilities, she remained blissfully ignorant of his baser motives
for extracting her blind promise to do his bidding from beyond the
grave. When Dorothea steeled herself to submit to the grasp of this
dead hand, Eliot even faced the possibility that sympathy will urge
unreasonable and meaningless devotion to a task with no useful
shape in the world.
Fortunately the reader's shudder of dread was brief, since
Casaubon had already died at the moment of Dorothea's decision. But
Eliot must want us to contemplate the tragic spectacle of a fine soul
achieving nothing but sympathy. Eliot admires "magnanimous acceptance of privation or suffering for ourselves when it is a condition of
good to others;' 14 but she lets us know that she is aware of its limits.
On a grand scale, such active fellow-feeling might reestablish a moral
community, but in an individual case, only the very temporary easing
of a rather puny heart's agony may result. Such chilling emptiness
makes it hard to consider sympathy itself a true vocation. Nonetheless,
in the later instance of communion between the two women,
Dorothea's selflessness and her noble expectations do work to dissolve
Rosamond's previously impermeable egotism and elicit some reflexive
sympathy. Considering Rosamond's self-righteous and self-serving
character, Dorothea's action constitutes true power. Even if we have
qualms concerning the ephemerality of Dorothea's effect and her misplaced sympathy, her generosity with Rosamond is her highest moment
of vocation in the novel and we momentarily soar with her above the
stultifying constraints of the town of Middlemarch.
Immediately after this triumph, Dorothea and Will build the
foundation for their marriage, a foundation which ends rather ominously with Dorothea's words, "and I will learn what everything
costs:' She is speaking of money, but we may wonder about her soul.
We must now ask how much this second marriage satisfies Dorothea's
ardent nature, how much it is a vocation. I have highlighted three
aspects of ardency: passion, self-denial and the pursuit of good works.
Dorothea does love Will. His open kindness has been like water
�16
THEST. JOHN'SREV1EW
in the desert to her. Their exchanges during her disillusioning honeymoon in Rome resulted in a teary-eyed communion of souls that
formed an oasis of goodwill for her in the middle of her barren marriage to Casaubon. Her childlike friendship with Will then metamorphosed into a yearning of heart that we cannot help but feel is a
deeper love than she harbored for Casaubon. Rather than seeking in
Will a potential father qr teacher-as she did in Casaubon-she and
Will stand with hands clasped, like two children (p. 559). This is
progress. Thus, when Celia makes one last attempt to reason
Dorothea out of marriage to Will, Dorothea does not even try to
explain herself; she merely says that to understand how this union
came about "you would have to feel with me" (p. 567). No theory
urges Dorothea toward this alliance, only genuine emotion.
Dorothea's real passion for Will provokes the renunciation of her
widow's fortune. But this renunciation is not clearly an ardent submergence of self in the good. From the beginning, she has viewed
Casaubon's money as a reponsibility rather than a desirable possession. True, Dorothea must give up her opportunity to do whatever
good such money might accomplish. Dorothea:s choice of marriage
over philanthropy may even seem a rejection of her ardent pursuit of
the fullest good But Eliot makes this renunciation rather less stressfUl than it might have been, since Dorothea's project to found a community of agricultural workers has already been advised against (p.
527). At the moment of decision, Dorothea is unclear about the role
of money in doing good in the world. Hence, we find her reading
books on political economy just prior to her final interview with Will
( Ch. 83). Perhaps it is Will's romantic nature, rather than the elusive
knowledge of political economy, that can widen Dorothea's vision of
what it means to do good in the world.
Can Dorothea's second marriage be a river in which the current
of her ardent soul might flow freely? But I've claimed that their love
would have to fUel a certain kind of spiritual passion, the spark of
which ignites Dorothea's persistent question "What could she do,
what ought she to do?" 15 For a nature such as Dorothea's, love should
�17
HIGUERA
clarify what constitutes virtuous activity. Can Will function as some
new, less illusory, Dulcinea for Dorothea?
Does Dorothea see in him a vision of nobility and beauty? I
think not. After Casaubon's providential demise, Eliot described
Dorothea's feelings towards Will with a story about a princess.
If a princess in the days of enchantment had seen a
four-footed creature from among those which live in
herds come to her once and again with a human gaze
which rested upon her with choice and beseeching,
what would she think of in her journeying, what
would she look for when the herds passed her?"
(p.
372)
This story tells us much about Dorothea's affections. They are
born of her loneliness and isolation in the world and of Will's
delight in her heart and soul. But Eliot relegates Will to being a member of the herd at the same time that she allows him to establish an
especial understanding with Dorothea.
Will does worship her (p. 152). But she must scold him even during their last interview, which begins as a final "Goodbye" though it
advances toward romantic resolution ( Ch. 83). He complains about
the painfulness of separation; she tries to lift his eyes to some higher goal. He whines that she doesn't know how painful it is for him;
she gently reminds him (and us if we need it) that she has all too
recently known exactly what it feels like to be completely alone in the
world, tactfully referring to the fact that she had discovered
Rosamond and him in compromising circumstances. When she privately buried her love and hopes, she "wished to acknowledge that
she had not the less an active life before her" (p. 545). In comparison
with her noble act in the midst of gut-wrenching agony, Will's lack
of direction and motivation seem pathetic. He is incapable of
Dorothea's selfless devotion to the good; he is only capable of worshipping it in her.
�18
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Still, the ability to recognize Dorothea's "genius for feeling
nobly" is a rare virtue in the book. We readers are relieved to see
someone respond to her inner greatness, Only Will and Lydgate, and
perhaps, for a brief moment, Rosamond, penetrate Dorothea's austere exterior and high-flown "absurdities" (p. 40), and Lydgate's eyes
are opened to Dorothea's fineness only after his painful misjudgment
concerning the feminine excellence of his wife. Most characters view
Dorothea merely as having capricious "notions"; at best they indulge
her, at worst condemn her. As I near the end of my inquiry into vocation, though, I am looking for more than awareness of Dorothea's
potential, Dorothea needs a beacon to follow and an opportunity to
shine hersel£ Is there enough quality in Will to illuminate "the higher inward life"?
Dorothea does impute more goodness to him than is really
there, and this tendency of hers to expect goodness and nobility
from others can itself work upon another to "baptise and consecrate" him into purity and rectitude (p. 532), So Dorothea can work
some kind of good upon WilL Then perhaps, even if Will cannot give
her "a binding theory which could... give the remotest sources of
knowledge some bearing on her actions" (p. 58), she has truly found
a vocation.
In a sense, she has. In the Finale, having become absorbed into
Will's life and being every bit as dedicated to him in marriage as she
was to Casaubon, Dorothea has a life with the requisite passion and
selflessness. Moreover, her influence has generated a desire in Will to
do some good in the world. This last goal has been a problem all
along, though. Is Dorothea better off now than when she designed
cottages? She seems to have given responsibility for finding particular work to Will. Now, Will becomes an "ardent" public man in the
Finale, working for political reforms, The transfer of Dorothea's
adjective to him elevates his own, and hence Dorothea's, potential for
a vocation.
Unfortunately, Eliot has undercut the effectiveness of political
reform in the noveL Not only has Mr. Brooke's political campaign
�HIGUERA
19
provided some slapstick comic relief in the novel, but provincial
Middlemarch has repeatedly shown itself resistant to all change not
directly connected with its pocketbook. Again, some of the more
humorous scenes in the book depict townspeople evaluating the newfangled doctor or landholders discussing the pernicious effects of railroads on the ability of cows to calve. While we hear several times of
distant revolutionaries, w~ see labourers armed with pitchforks driving
away those representatives of modernity, the railroad agents (p. 384).
In fact, Middlemarch is so resistant to change that the refoFmers of
the novel-Lydgate, Will, Dorothea-finally flee to London.
Eliot has chosen to set Middlemarch thirty years before the date of
authorship, in times of a great national struggle leading to the dissolution of Parliament and the passage 'of a Reform Bill which radically altered the extent of the franchise. One reason Eliot has selected
this time period is that she can remind us periodically how hopeful
those bygone activities were and how cynical the ensuing results have
made us. Thus, the "beneficent activity" that fills the lives of Will
and Dorothea in the Finale does not have much grander effect than
Dorothea's cottage-designing had earlier in the book. Indeed, at the
very moment when Eliot bestows "ardent" work on Will in the
Finale, she remarks that "in those times ... reforms were begun with
a young hopefulness of immediate good which has been much
checked in our days:' We infer that his activity has not produced
much satisfying fruit. Intervention in the laws which mold the medium of society may indeed result in progress, but the pace of that
progress will proceed at near Darwinian slowness.
More troubling even than the smallness of Will's political effect
is the weakness of his will. He stumbles into a political career while
lingering in Middlemarch and hoping for the occasional ray of
Dorothea's warm presence. He begins by saying "Why not?" to politics, then develops "as ardent an interest as he had ever given to poetic metres or medievalism" (p. 318). It seems he can only be an "ardent
Will" with Dorothea to support him. His vocation depends upon
her faith in him.
�20
THE ST. JOHN'S REVJEW
If Will is a channel for Dorothea's ardency, and to some extent I
think he is, the channel's course is determined in large part by
Dorothea herself.-in the absence of any clearly defined purpose. She
has the satisfaction of "rul(ing) beneficently by making the joy of
another soul" (p. 249), but she never has an epic accomplishment
comparable to St. Theresa's. Nothing emerges to take the place of
convents for Dorothea. Eliot does not mean us to see Will as an adequate substitute for a "coherent social faith:' Even if his head sprinkles sunbeams throughout the book,16 he is no god. And the clearest
sign of that is that he has no proper activity. Instead of depicting a
freely flowing current of ardency for Dorothea, Eliot's image of
Dorothea's nature at the end of the book is that of a river, or rather
a Brooke, which cannot be entirely dammed up; it seeps through in
"incalculably diffusive" little rivulets of charitable action.
Eliot intends us to see. this ending as a "tragic failure," even
though she has made us feel relieved that Dorothea marries Will and
even though she has opened our eyes to the "divine efficacy" of small
acts of fellowship. In the end, Eliot's recognition of other cases presenting "far sadder sacrifice[s ]" than Dorothea's only reinforces the
verdict that some life force has indeed perished even in Dorothea's
case. From what perspective can we truly see Dorothea's wistful contentment as tragic?
We must keep St. Theresa well in mind, I think. Eliot's hardest
task has been to depict a Theresa-like nature which is not allowed to
manifest itself at work. Eliot has, I think, succeeded in stimulating
our imagination to a keen vision of the possible sweeping effect of
the current of Dorothea's soul if allowed to gather up material and if
given a course towards the good. Perhaps then we may feel this ending as tragic, even if the tragedy concerns society more than
Dorothea. Middlemarch is not a tale of extreme suffering, but of an
unavoidable waste of the finest part of the human spirit. What is
Eliot's purpose in trying to give us a semi-historical perspective that
mourns the passing of certain possibilities? Clearly Eliot is not call-
�HIGUERA
21
ing for a reinstitution of some Golden Age of St. Theresa. Is she
hoping to motivate some social reform which would provide new
opportunitiess for the grandeur of a noble woman to express itself?
What would the opportunities be?
Now, many occupations are scrutinized in Middlemarch. I've discussed the limited possibilites of politics already, one of the occupations which Eliot considers at least a bit worthy. The only decent
clergyman in the book would rather be studying bugs. Businessmen
provide some of the crudest types, with Bulstrode's particular combination of business and religion providing an anti-paradigm. Caleb
Garth's "religious" (p.173) pursuit of the skillful application of labor
(he is an estate-manager) is "sublime" (p. 173); but his business has
failed shortly before the book opens (p. 160) and he is helpless in his
distress over the mismanagement of his neighbor's lands (p. 279).
Of the doctors in the town, only Lydgate is not altogether a common country doctor. Only he has "an intellectual passion" (his is for
anatomy), and only he has a "moment of vocation" (p. 98). He is
presented as no mere academic, but one pursuing "the most direct
alliance between intellectual conquest and the social good" (p. 99).
Despite Eliot's passing note that Lydgate is putting his question
"What was the primitive tissue?" (p. 102)-out of which the various
organs are compacted-in the wrong way (Hooke coined the term
cell in 1865), surely his recognition of primary webs (echoing as it
does the narrator's own emphasis on webs), his variation of perspective through observation of patients and research with a microscope
(also echoing the narrator's technique of shifting focus), and his
longing to demonstrate the more intimate relations of living structure and "help to define men's thought more accurately after the true
order"-surely all these are praiseworthy. However, even here, where
Eliot dearly admires his intentions and methods and even has some
hope for real progress, limitations are overwhelmingly present.
We can convince ourselves that Lydgate's little "spots of commonness" regarding women and furniture are separable from his research
�22
THEST. JOHN'S REVIEW
project; but the outcome of his project is dubious anyway. Besides
the warning about the wording of his question, many everyday pressures threaten Lydgate. He has bargained with the devil, in the shape
of the powerful banker Nicholas Bulstrode, even before he succumbs
to Rosamond. His fellow doctors and the patients themselves are
stubbornly resistant to innovation; out of loyalty and long-familiar
habit, they are as likely as not to disregard Lydgate's advanced remedies. The success Lydgate has with a few patients may be as fatal as
failure in the conservative and jealous town of Middlemarch ( c£ Ch.
45). Finally, as with politics, the narrator cynically comments,
"Perhaps that was a more cheerful time for observers and theorisers
than the present" (p. 101).
I'm afraid no character in Middlemarch seems to have a vocation
with much more potential for radical effect than Dorothea's sympathy. But action is important in this book. Eliot takes as a grand
accomplishment Theresa's reformation of the Carmelite. order into
the Discalced (barefoot) Carmelites. Though the Discalced
Carmelites cultivate the contemplative life in all its aspects, their dedication to the otherworldly is ignored by Eliot. She stresses only the
self-transcending action and the potential for self-transcendence
transmitted to others. The highest life for any Dorothea ought be a
life of action, improving the lot of others in this world.
Now, sympathy does not, stricdy speaking, qualifY as active work.
It may well be a mode of doing work, or a prerequisite for the work
of a reformer to take root. But I don't see how one can view sympathy
as an octupation. In that sense, Dorothea's entire history is but a prelude to vocation. Casting about for an example of active, hopeful work
in the novel, I turn finally to the narrator hersel£ Certainly, Eliot herself is a strong presence in the novel Middlemarch. My meager abilities
could not encapsulate the subdeties of her role even if I were at the
beginning of this exploration rather than the end. But I would like to
sketch my reasons for thinking the narrator is fulfilling a real vocation.
Eliot weaves into her plot commentaries on her characters, commentaries on human nature in general, and direct exhortations to the
�HIGUERA
23
reader. Examples of her attempts to involve and educate us, directly
and indirectly, abound. Let me illustrate first with a passage concerning the local busybody, Mrs. Cadwallader. Eliot pens another
paragraph (p. 39) beginning with a rhetorical question, this time asking, "why on earth should Mrs. Cadwallader have been at all busy
about Miss Brooke's marriage?" She notes that a telescope following
Mrs. Cadwallader's comings and goings and trained on her features,
that is, tracing her current history, would never reveal the causes of
her interests. Eliot continues,
Even with a microscope directed on a water-drop we
find ourselves making interpretations which turn out
to be rather coarse; for whereas under a weak lens you
may seem to see a creature exhibiting an active voracity into which other smaller creatures actively play as
if they were so many animated tax-pennies, a stronger
lens reveals to you certain tiniest hairlets which make
vortices for these victims while the swallower waits
passively at his receipt of custom.
Eliot is clearly more interested in defining her relationship to us
than in analyzing Mrs. Cadwallader. Unseen worlds surround us,
worlds which may only be accessible to us with the aid of art, be it
the technology of telescopes and microscopes or the wisdom of an
imaginative experiment. Even then, the art may not penetrate to the
ultimate causes. But any interpretation which attributes independent
activity to a creature has not magnified its view sufficiently.
Eliot often informs us we might not understand events properly
without her. She not only interprets events in the book, but regularly makes us aware that she is so doing, insisting that we would misapprehend her characters if she gave us only a certain strength lens to
peer through. Yet she is the person in charge of the lenses. She must
want us to cultivate a certain kind of circumspection.
This thought is borne out in my second example, where Eliot
�24
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
explicitly cautions us against a "too hasty judgment" of the numbingly cold pedant Casaubon, whose most fervently amorous words to
his fiancee Dorothea concerned her "elements both solid and attractive, adapted to supply aid in graver labours and to cast a charm over
vacant hours:' Eliot urges us to consider that he too is the "centre of
his own world;' with dreams of genius, fears of failure, and consuming needs. Mysteriously,,she accomplishes the Herculean task of stirring our sympathies for Casaubon while consistently judging him
nevertheless to be a twisted, arid soul, inhabiting the catacombs of
once-potent traditions which move him not at all. Eliot's question
this time, "., , but why always Dorothea?" (p. 192), places us in an
uncomfortable position. We have been made to understand
Casaubon as a vampire draining Dorothea of her lifeblood, as a
demythifying pigeonholer, paranoid of all criticism, and as a man
incapable of the smallest signs of affection. Now, Eliot makes us see
the insurmountable barriers he would have to face in order even to
lay a reassuring hand on Dorothea's arm; she forces us to experience,
from the inside, his crippling anxieties; we suffer the intensity of his
longing for respect from the intellectual community. Casaubon's soul
is not a pleasant place to visit, hut even more disconcerting than its
ugliness is the fact that we can feel at home there.
In addition to fulfilling the usual tasks of a narrator, this oneoften by bringing to bear a wealth of scientific information, poetic
sense, and history-forcefully propels us into foreign perspectives.
She appeals often to us, urging us to reflect on our reactions, criticize them, possibly alter them. She continually exhorts us to be more
sympathetic. Most novelists want readers to feel connected to their
characters. Eliot's narrator reaches even beyond the book, though.
Her educative task includes getting us to perceive sympathy as a
moral act, in our lives as well as in our reading.
Hence, her continual irony is calculated to tell on us as well as on
a character-as when we learn that, "In his closest meditations the
life-long habit of Mr. Bulstrode's mind clad his most egoistic terrors
in doctrinal references to superhuman ends:' We smile in safe superi-
�HIGUERA
25
ority, but the smile fades to a grimace with the narrator's next generalizing sentence, "But even while we are talking and meditating about
the earth's orbit and the solar system, what we feel and adjust our
movements to is the stable earth and the changing day" (p. 364). We
understand that we are not so safe from this charge of hypocrisy. The
narrator's generalizations have the overarching purpose of making us
at least as morally matur~ as Dorothea! as able as she finally is to see
the lights and shadows on another's life. Hence, she tells us, "We are
all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed
our supreme selves" (p. 146). Eliot is not merely reflecting what is; she
is attempting to re-form us at the deepest level.
Her aim requires more than that we merely look at a person or
event from many different points of view; else we might turn into
Mr. Brooke, always going into everything, but never too far. When
Eliot obtrudes herself in Chapter 27, she relates a scientist-friend's
account of the phenomenon that random scratches on a mirror will
appear to be arranged in concentric circles whenever and wherever a
candle is held against it. She moralizes: "The scratches are events, and
the candle is the egoism of any person.... "That is, any individual's
interpretation will mislead, and it will mislead precisely because personal desires and prejudices will attribute causes and tendencies
where there are none.
This narrator vibrates between exhorting to sympathy and executing judgment. We are called to understand the sources of human
action and yet condemn all egoism as we do. The potential in politics and science for reshaping our lives and communities so as to
lessen the general misery of our lot, this potential, can only come to
fruition when we have a disposition not just for improvement in general but for self-sacrifice towards the benefit of particular persons
and particular social duties. While sympathy itself may not qualify as
a vocation, writing a novel which transforms "the frozen stare with
which we look at our unintroduced neighbour" (p. 64)--that I think
does quality as a full-fledged vocation. In this theater of action, jolting readers out of self-absorption and cultivating judgment of
�26
THE ST. JOHN'S REVJEW
motives and ends, through the widespread reading of a morally
responsible novel, radical change may be possible. Eliot, at least, has
a vocation for an heroic achievement; she finds her "epos" in reforming novel-readers' sensibilities.
Notes
All Middlemarch citations are from the Norton Critical Edition
(New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1977).
1.
George Eliot, "Leaves from a Notebook;' Essays of George Eliot,
edited by Thomas Pinney, (New York: Columbia University Press,
2.
1963).
3. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (New York: Penguin Books,
1983), p. 486. All Darwin citations are from this edition.
For a fuller discussion of the influence of Darwinism on Eliot's
writing, see Gillian Beer, Darwin's Plots (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1983).
4.
George Eliot, Middlemarch (New York, NY: W. W. Norton &
Company, Inc., 1977), pp. 41, 64, 80, 96, 102, 124, 208, 238, 280, 290,
5.
304, 343, 350, 426.
George Eliot, "The Natural History of German Life;' Essays of
George Eliot, edited by Thomas Pinney (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1963).
6.
7. See Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (New York: Penguin
Books, 1983), pp. 132, 147-148, 150-154, 156, 162-3.
See, for example, St Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, translated and edited by E. Allison Peers (New York: Image Books, 1961), pp. 50, 117, 122.
8.
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HIGUERA
9. St. John of the Cross, Living Flame of Love, translated and edited by
E. Allison Peers (New York: Image Books, 1962), p. 33.
10. St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, p, 109.
11. St. Teresa of Avila, The Life
of Teresa of Jesus,
translated and edited
by E. Allison Peers (NewYork: Image Books, 1960), p. 131.
12. See The Life
of Teresa of jesus, pp. 105-6, pp. 220-221.
13. George Eliot, "Worldliness and Other-Worldliness: The Poet
Young," Essays of Geo'J:e Eliot, edited by Thomas Pinney, (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1963).
14. Ibid.
15. George Eliot, Middlemarch (New York, NY: W. W. Norton &
Company, Inc., 1977), p. 17. See also pp. 52, 58, 189, 190, 199, 251! 329,
338, 556.
16. Ibid., pp. 142, 145, 250, 254.
�28
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�t
How We Do Things With Words:
An Introduction to Wittgenstein
John Verdi
Ludwig Wittgenstei~ was born in 1889 and died in 1951. * He
believed that a serious philosophical work could be written consisting of nothing but jokes. I'm sorry to say that my lecture won't be
like that, but I have included a few jokes in it. I hope you notice
them. Which reminds me of the time Wittgenstein was attending a
lecture by a famous linguist at Cambridge. The lecturer was telling
the audience that while most languages have single words for the
affirmative and the negative, and most also use the double negative
as an affirmative, no language uses the double affirmative as a negative. To this Wittgenstein is reported to have said, "Yeah, yeah:' He
also believed that a serious philosophical work could be written
which consisted entirely of unanswered questions. His second
major work, Philosophical Investigations, on which I shall spend all my
time and yours, contains 784 questions, of which only 110 are
answered, and 70 of the answers are meant to be wrong. I'm happy
to say that my lecture will not be like that. Wittgenstein's style, however, is essentially dialectical, in a Socratic sense. That is, it is full of
supposings and questionings, not questions and answers.
Wittgenstein believes that the nature of the problems he considers
compels "us to travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross in
every direction" and that the best he can present is "a number of
sketches of landscapes... made in the course of these long and
involved journeyings." (PI, p. ix) His thoughts are better explored in
the dialectic of conversation than in the monologue of lecturing,
*I would like to thank Mr. Radoslav Datchev for his many helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.
John Verdi is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. This is a revised version of a lecture given at
Annapolis, Sept. 20,1997 and at Santa Fe, April24, 1998.
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THEST. JOHN'S REVIEW
and so I hope you will recognize that I offer you now both an introduction and an invitation,
The lecture comes in three parts. Part One is on language.
Wittgenstein believed that language could be compared to an ancient city,
a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new
houses, and of ,houses with additions from various
periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of newboroughs with straight regular streets and uniform
houses. (PI, 18)
About this city it is difficult to command a perspicuous, surveyable view. Consequently maps of its streets and terrain can be
hopelessly misleading, directing us one place while leading us to
believe we are somewhere else. We have no need for such maps in
ordinary discourse, for we generally know our way around. But it is
our fate to persist in drawing maps while we are enmeshed in the
"labyrinth of paths" (PI, 203) which is our language. One of these
misleading maps is constituted by a large part of the field of psychology, about which I'll speak in Part Two of the lecture. "In psychology," he says "there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion" (PI, 232), as when psychologists attempt to get dear about
what consciousness is, or thinking, or willing by studying the mind
and its contents or the brain and nervous system. Part Three of the
lecture is on philosophy. Philosophical problems, he says, have the
form: "I don't know my way about" (PI, 123). They arise when language is "like an engine idling, not when it is doing work" (PI, 132).
In Part One I present what I think is the core of Wittgenstein's
insight, and in Parts Two and Three some of its implications.
Wittgenstein once said that while he was not a religious man, he
could "not help seeing every problem from a religious point of view"
(Rhees, p. 94). Behind much of what I say lies my attempt to understand this remark and how it might help us discover what
Wittgenstein's place can be in our lives as a community of learners.
�VERDI
31
Part One: Language
What is the connection between language and reality? We all suspect that this question has no simple answer, but one picture might
come to mind. It is one which Wittgenstein himself cites at the very
beginning of the Philosophical Investigations, and it comes from St.
Augustine's Confessions. While it is a picture to which Augustine likely did not fully ascribe, if we consider what he says in an earlier book,
On the Teacher, it presents a tempting view of the way language originates and how it operates. Augustine is describing how he must have
come to learn language as an infant. He writes:
When my elders named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and grasped
that the thing was called by the sound they uttered
when they meant to point it out. Their intention was
shown by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples: the expression of the
face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other
parts of the body, and the tone of voice which
expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard words
repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learned to understand what objects
they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to
form those signs, I used them to express my own
desires. (I, 8)
Augustine's words give a particular picture of human language,
namely, that the individual words in a language name objects, perhaps
also actions and qualities, and that sentences are combinations of such
wo rds. '" ds such as "soon," " not," "perhaps," take care o f t h emse1
vvor
ves.
In this picture of language Wittgenstein finds the root of the beliefs
that every word has a meaning that is correlated with the word and that
�32
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the meaning is the object for which the word stands or an intermedi-
ary between the word and the object, such as a thought or idea.
To contrast with this image of language, let us place ourselves in
a simple situation. Let us imagine that I send someone shopping.
I give him a slip marked "five red apples:' He takes
the slip to the, shopkeeper who opens the drawer
marked "apples"; then he looks up the word "red" in
a table and finds a color sample opposite it; then he
says the series of cardinal numbers-I assume he
knows them by heart-up to the word "five" and for
each number he takes an apple of the same color as
the sample out of a drawer.-It is in this and similar
ways [Wittgenstein says J that one [actuallyJ operates
with words.-"But how does he know where and how
he is to look up the word "red" and what he is to do
with the word five"'?- Well, I assume that he acts as
I have described. Explanations come to an end somewhere.-But what is the meaning of the word "five"?
-No such thing is in question here, only how the
word "five" is used. ( PL 1)
In this example Wittgenstein turns our attention to the possibility that the meaning of a word is the use we make of it, not some
object or intermediary to which the word refers. "For a large class of
cases-if not for all-the meaning of a word is its use in the language:' (PI, 43) The word "five" in the example is not used like the
word "red:' The shopkeeper does not consult a sample with the word
written on it. "Red" is not used like "apple;' for there is no sample
for "apple" as there is for "red:' These three simple words, "apple;'
"red;' "five;' begin to show us how words function in a variety of
ways, and that to imagine a "meaning" for each word apart from its
uses in particular circumstances is to misconstrue how language
works. Wittgenstein rejects any question about what the meanings of
�VERDI
33
these words might be apart from their uses. Such questions already
presuppose a certain view of what gives words their value. Instead,
Wittgenstein invites us to "think of words as instruments characterized by their use" (BB, p. 67).
Think of the tools in a tool-box. There is a hammer,
pliers, a saw, a s,erewdriver, a rule, a glue-pot, glue,
nails and screws.-The functions of words are as
diverse as the functions of these objects. (PI, 11)
And no one use characterizes all words. When we become confused about the meaning of a word or the sense of a sentence,
Wittgenstein wants us to ask: "on what occasion, for what purpose,
do we say this? What kind of actions accompany these words? ... In
what scenes will they be used, and what for?" (PI, 489)The variety of
the purposes for which we use words is bounded only by the variety
of human activities in which language plays a part.
The kinds of things we do with words, and the contexrs in which
we do them, Wittgenstein calls language-games. Wittgenstein hopes
the image of the game will give us a perspicuous view of parts of language, and emphasize features of language the importance of which
he believes is frequently overlooked. He means to "bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of a language is a part of an activity,
or a form of life" (PI, 23 ). Wittgenstein did not believe language was
a game; our linguistic activities are less trivial than games because of
the way they are interwoven into our lives. But he did think that we
could achieve some measure of clarity about language by comparing
it to games. Let's consider along with Wittgenstein the game of chess
to help ascertain some of the features of language he wants us to see.
We play chess according to rules that determine what moves are
permitted. They allow us to play the game, but not necessarily to play
it well, because they do not tell us what moves are best. The rules tell
us how the individual pieces can move, something which cannot be
determined by an examination of the shapes of the pieces or their
�34
THEST. JOHN'S REVIEW
places on the board. The pieces are defined by their use, by their role
in the game. (One would not say, for example, "I know what the
bishop does. Now tell me what it really is.") In language, too, rules of
what he calls grammar widely considered determine the limits of
what it makes sense to say. They demarcate the region of the sensible, in which the activities of language can take place, in which we can
actually do things with 'Yards. The functions of individual words and
sentences can be determined only by observing how they are in fuct
used in the various neighborhoods of our language, and in what circumstances and for what ends we use them.
Chess can be taught and learned, and in the process of teaching,
it must be possible to correct the learner, to tell him, for example,
that a pawn that has reached the last row cannot be promoted to a
king ( BB, p. 67), or to remind him that a bishop cannot jump over
other pieces. These are not moves in the game, though one might
imagine a variant of chess in which these moves were allowed. It
would then be for experience to tell us if such a game was worth playing, but it would no longer be chess. We teach and learn language,
too. We correct children when they say ungrammatical things, in the
narrow, school-book sense of grammar, as when in a sentence the
subject and verb don't agree in number. We also correct them in other
contexts when they speak ungrammatically in that wider sense of
grammar. For example a child who awakens in the morning and says
he was on a ship during the night might be told that he'd had a
dream, and he quickly learns to append "I dreamt" before such statements. We might suspend this rule of saying "I dreamt:' (We could
imagine children doing this as a kind of game: "Where did you go
last night?") The context would then make it clear that their travels
were dream travels and that they were not speaking nonsense.
Whenever Wittgenstein uses the word "grammar;' he generally means
it in this wider sense, into which are incorporated the circumstances
in which something is said. A sentence, therefore, may be grammatical in the narrow sense, but not grammatical in the wider sense.
Which reminds me of the man who came running into his doctor's
�35
VERDI
office, dragging a friend by the wrist, saying, "Doctor, doctor, I think
I have Parkinson's disease-and he has mine!"
Chess is also autonomous. That is, we are not tempted to think
that we must point outside the game to its meaning. If you follow
rules other than those of the game, you do not play chess badly (as
you might cook badly if you follow cooking rules other than the
right ones). You simply do not play chess (Z, 320). And this might
have consequences. Language, too, Wittgenstein wants to say, is
autonomous. It requires no justification. We do' not read its rules off
from nature. In that sense they are arbitrary. If you follow ru1es other
than those of your language, you do not say something wrong, but you
might say something nonsensical, or you might say nothing at all. But
to call the rules of our language arbitrary is not to say they are whimsical or pointless. To call them arbitrary is to say that "the aim of
grammar is nothing but that of the language" (PI, 497). And while
the rules for describing reality may be determined by convention, the
description of reality is determined by reality.
Among the many games that people play other than chess, we
find board-games, ball-games, card-games, Olympic games, related in
various ways, with various concepts of winning, various rules of what
is permitted, various contexts in which they are played and with various pieces of equipment. The multiplicity of language-games is no
less; Wittgenstein mentions the following:
Giving orders, and obeying themDescribing the appearance of an object, or giving its
measurements-
Reporting an eventSpeculating about an eventForming and testing a hypothesisPresenting the results of an experimentMaking up a story, and reading itPlay-actingSinging catches-
�36
THEST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Guessing riddlesMaking a joke; telling itSolving a problem in practical arithmeticTranslating from one language to anotherAsking, thinking, cursing, greeting, praying. (PI, 23)
These language-gaf\les, and myriad others, belong as much to
"our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing" (PI, 25).
And so the observation and description of language-games, if it is
sensitive and detailed, can constitute a study of human life
(Malcolm, p. 77).
At this point someone might quite properly object. "You take the
easy way out."
You talk about all sorts of language-games, but have
nowhere said what the essence of a language-game,
and hence of language, is: what is common to all
these activities, and what makes them into language
or parts of language .... " And this is true .... I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all,-but
that they are related to one another in many different
ways. And it is because of this relationship ... that we
call them all language. (PI, 65)
Just as we shall find no one thing common to all games on
account of which we call them all games, so, too, the various boroughs of language need share no common feature. We see instead "a
complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing"
(PI, 66). Wittgenstein characterizes these similarities as "family
resemblances," because the resemblances between members of a family in build, eye color, gait, temperament and so forth, also overlap
and criss-cross in the same way. Games-and language-games-form
such families.
�VERDI
37
The concept of language-game is central to Wittgenstein's thinking. Understanding what a piece in chess is requires understanding
the whole game, the rules defining it, and the role of the piece in the
game. So, too, we might say that the meaning of a word is its place
in the language-game, and it is its use in a language-game that
breathes life into a word, much as a hand can do work only while it
is attached to a living body.
We can also recognize in music many of the features of games
which Wittgenstein finds important to understanding language.
Different forms of music (such as Gregorian chant, harmonic,
twelve-tone, raga) are defined in part by rules which circumscribe the
bounds of the musically possible. These rules can be taught and
learned, and mistakes can be made and corrected. Music rules can
also be stretched, and new forms of music invented, though perhaps
not at will. Individual notes or groups of notes derive their meaning
from their use in the piece, and from the context in which they
appear. The same note might be heard as the tonic in one measure,
the dominant in another, as the beginning of a twelve-tone row or its
end, and so forth. Music, too, is autonomous. A melody or a piece
of music does not derive its musical meaning from something outside. When we attempt to bring someone to understand a musical
theme, or how to play a piece better, we do not point to some thing
or idea outside the music, but rather say things like: "'At this point
of the theme, there is, as it were, a colon; or 'this is ... the answer to
what came before"' (BB, 166) or "tell yourself it's a waltz and then
you will play it correctly" (PI, 167). Wittgenstein would like to say
that what the melody tells us is itsel£ but in order to understand the
melody, one must already be familiar with music. "Understanding a
sentence is much more akin to understanding a theme in music than
one may think" (PI, 527). When we are tempted to say that understanding a sentence points to a reality outside the sentence, we should
instead say, '"Understanding a sentence means getting hold of its
content; and the content of the sentence is in the sentence'" (PI, 167).
But just as we cannot get hold of what it is for a piece to be a bish-
�38
THEST. JOHN'S REVIEW
op in chess, or a tone to be a dominant in music without already
knowing chess or music, so, too, must we already be masters of alanguage before we can understand a sentence. And when we do understand, it is not because we see how the sentence points away from
itself. but because we know how it is used, which is to say, what we
can do with it.
By directing our att,ention to the analogy between language and
games and other rule-directed human activities, Wittgenstein emphasizes the social aspect of language, just as he emphasizes its pragmatic
aspect by comparing words with tools. At root these are the same,
though they provide different views of the functioning of language
in our lives. In an effort to explore language's social side and its
implications, Wittgenstein draws us more deeply into the problem of
what it is for someone to follow a rule. Games, music and language
are all rule-governed human activities, and their social character ties
up in important ways with rules. Following rules is involved in every
important activity in which human beings are engaged, in every activity in which there can be correct and incorrect ways of doing things.
Wittgenstein's discussion of rules leads him to talk about what
understanding a rule is and eventually to his extraordinary claim that
a private language is impossible. I'd like to follow this trail for the
next few minutes.
Is what we call 'obeying a rule' something that it
would be possible for only one man to .do, and to do
only once in his life? (PI, 199)
Wittgenstein's question, like all of his questions, is conceptual, that
is, grammatical in the broad sense and not empirical. He is not asking something like, is it possible for only one man, and only once in
his life, to swim the Atlantic? Rather, he's asking, does the concept of
"obeying a rule" make sense if applied just once? Wittgenstein
answers himself as follows:
�39
VERDI
It is not possible that there should have been only one
occasion on which someone obeyed a rule. It is not
possible that there should have been only one occasion on which a report was made, an order given or
understood; and so on.-To obey a rule, to make a
report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are
customs (uses, institutions). (PI, 199)
Kant makes a similar observation about promises in the
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. A universal law that dictated that
I could break my promises whenever it was to my advantage to do so
"would make promising... itself impossible" (55/422). Under such
conditions no individual, no matter how sincere, could promise anything because the institution of promising could itself no longer
exist. Obeying a rule is such an institution.
What goes on when we learn rules and then follow them? Is a
rule a kind of "mental mechanism" that goes through.its motions
whenever it is, turned on? Or is it an abstract entity that already contains all possible workings-out, as we might imagine an algebraic
expression to be? Or does following a rule consist in intuiting what
your teacher wants you to do, as when you continue a number series
correctly? Wittgenstein rejects all three of these accounts. Instead, he
proposes that we think about reading as an example of rule-guided
activity. He has in mind what we might call "automatic reading;' that
is, reading in which comprehension of the text is not important, not
the sort of reading we encourage at St. John's. In this way one could
be said to read a language one does not know, say ancient Greek, once
one has mastered the sounds of the letters, diphthongs and accent
marks, even before one has learned any grammar or vocabulary.
Reading in this way seems to be rule-guided. Not just any sounds I
utter will be correct, but only those which are connected in some way
with the written words on the page. The possibility of making mistakes and of being corrected makes sense here, as it does in learning
how to play a game. But exactly in what way must the written words
�40
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
and the sounds I make be connected for it to be correct to call what
I am doing "reading;' in the sense of "rendering out loud what is
written or printed'? When one reads, says Wittgenstein,
his eye passes... along the printed words, he says them
out loud-or only to himself; in particular he reads
certain words l;>y taking in their printed shapes as
wholes; others when his eyes have taken in the first
syllables; others again he reads syllable by syllable,
and an occasional one perhaps letter by letter.-We
should also say that he had read a sentence if he
spoke neither aloud nor to himself during the reading but was afterwards able to repeat the sentence
word for word or nearly so-... Now compare a
beginner with this reader. The beginner reads the
words by laboriously spelling them out.-Some however he guesses from the context, or perhaps he
already partly knows the passage by heart. Then his
teacher says that he is not really reading the words (and
in certain cases that he is only pretending to read
them. (PI, 156)
Wittgenstein tells us that if we focus on the reading of the beginner, and .use it to determine what reading consists in, we may be
inclined to say that reading is a "special conscious activity of the
mind:' But Wittgenstein does not want to say this. "The same thing
may take place in the consciousness of the pupil who is 'pretending'
to read, as in that of the practiced reader who is 'reading' it. The word
'read' is applied differently when we are speaking of the beginner and of
the practiced reader" (PI, 156). Still, we are tempted to go on and say
that if the difference between the two is not in some conscious activity, then it must be in an unconscious one, two different mechanisms to
distinguish reading from not reading. "But;' Wittgenstein replies,
"these mechanisms are only hypotheses, models designed to explain,
�VERDI
41
to sum up, what you observe" (PI, 156). They are nothing that we can
know and consequently they can never be used to teach someone how
the word "reading" is used. This is to say that they cannot figure in
the concept of reading.
Wittgenstein's interlocutor persists. "But isn't that only because
of our too slight acquaintance with what goes on in the brain and
nervous system?" (PI, 158) If we knew more, we'd be able to say,
"Now he has read this and now the reading connection has been set
up:' But ask yourself, how much do you know about these things?
Aren't you approaching the concept of reading with certain requirements, such as that whatever connection is set up between the printed word and the read word spoken out loud must be a connection set
up inside the person doing the reading, a mental connection? If you
are wearing an analog watch, not a digital one,
try this experiment: say the numbers from 1 to 12.
Now look at the dial of your watch and read them.What was it you called "reading" in the latter case?
That is to say: what did you do, to make it into reading? (PI, 161)
Wittgenstein wants to answer this question by saying that "nothing
else happens when we say the [numbersJ than just saying them while
looking" at the numerals on the watch face (BB, p.149). It is not necessary, he thinks, that certain peculiar experiences more or less characteristic of reading take place while we are reading. I might be tempted
to say that when I am really reading, "the words I utter come in a special way" (PI, 165). But in what way? "Read the letter A.-Now, how
did the sound come?-We have no idea what to say about it" (PL 166).
The difference between reading and not reading does not lie in
conscious or unconscious mental processes. It does not lie in states
of the brain and nervous system. For Wittgenstein the difference lies
in the circumstances that make it correct in the one case and incorrect in the other to say of someone that he or she is reading. If read-
�42
THEST. JOHN'S REVIEW
ing is a rule-governed activity, like playing games, speaking, playing
music, it must be possible to teach someone how to do it. This means
it must be possible to correct his mistakes when he is wrong, to
encourage him when he is doing well, and thereby to teach him not
only how to read, but what reading is. And the possibility must also
exist for vagueness in the application of the rules, and for situations
to arise in which we WO!Jld not know what to say about how the rule
is to be applied. An inexact rule is not necessarily an unusable one, as
when I instruct someone to "stand roughly here" (PI, 88). Any social,
rule-governed activity hangs on what the person does, not on what he
feels or what he thinks he is doing. In teaching someone how to read,
we never point to our head or his and say, this is reading. We never
correct what might be going on in his consciousness or his brain. We
correct what he says, and we do so in the context of particular circumstances. If we know that Mr. Smith has never before seen the
Greek alphabet, yet on the first day of class can recite the opening
lines of the Iliad in perfect Greek, while his eyes run across the lines
of printed text, we know he is not reading. But we know this not
because we have special access to his mind, but because we know he
has never before studied Greek. That is, we know something about
his life, about his education and experience, not something about his
present mental state, which justifies us in saying, "He is only pretending to read:' What we might have been tempted to take as a mental activity (that of "reading" or "pretending to read") Wittgenstein
suggests we see as a public condition, available to all, because it is a
rule-governed public activity, and rules are teachable and learnable.
We might say that concepts, like people, require society.
Still you might object that automatic reading cannot be the paradigm of rule-governed activity. Following a rule often (and perhaps in
the most important cases) entails that we also understand the rule before
we can follow it. We are inclined to say that without understanding,
we are no better than mindless machines that act in a regular way.
Wittgenstein agrees that there is all the difference in the world
between saying a sentence with understanding and saying it without
�VERDI
43
understanding, but in what does the understanding consist?
Wittgenstein says that understanding is neither a mental nor a physical event, process or state, though there may be "more or less characteristic accompaniments or manifestations of understanding" (PL 112).
Wittgenstein offers at least two arguments for his claim that
understanding is no sort of mental or physical phenomenon. First,
no mental or bodily phenomena are necessary to my understanding a
word, a sentence, a mathematical formula, any more than they are
necessary for my understanding how to play chess or the piano. For
example, let's suppose that in order to understand a sentence one
must first have some kind of mental image. We might say that this
image serves the function of connecting the sentence to the world.
Wittgenstein writes:
Supposing I teach someone the use of the word "yellow" by repeatedly pointing to a yellow patch and
pronouncing the word .... I make him apply what he
has learned by giving him the order, "Choose a yellow
ball out of this bag." What was it that happened when
he obeyed my order? I say "possibly just this: he heard
my words and took a yellow ball from the bag:' Now
you may be inclined to think that this couldn't possibly have been all, and the kind of thing that you would
suggest is that he imagined something yellow when he
understood the order, and then chose a ball according to
this image. (BB, pp. 11-12)
Wittgenstein then asks, is imagining the yellow also necessary
when we command him to imagine a yellow patch? "Would you still
be inclined to assume that he first imagines a yellow patch, just understanding [theJ order, and then imagines a yellow patch to match the
first?" ( BB, p. 12) Wittgenstein does not deny that we sometimes do
imagine colors, shapes, and so forth when we understand a sentence,
but such imaginings are not necessary to the concept of understanding.
�44
THEST. JOHN'S REVIEW
One might understand without having any mental images at all, or any
other kind of experience which could constitute the understanding.
Neither are such phenomena sufficient to my understanding a sentence. Any image might cross my mind or I might feel something
when I hear or read a sentence, yet still not understand what I have
heard or read. Wittgenstein says:
Suppose that a picture does come before your mind
when you hear the word "cube;' say, a drawing of a
cube. In what sense can this picture fit or fail to fit a
use of the word "cube"? (PI, 139)
The picture alone lacks what we might call its method of projection,
that is, a rule which would connect the image with the use of the
word "cube:' The image alone cannot tell us how it is to be applied,
and according to Wittgenstein it is no more sufficient grounds for
saying "I understand" than would be a drawing or a model in front
of me.
What is essential is to see that the same thing can
come before our minds when we hear the word and the
application still be different. Has it the same meaning
both times? I think we shall say not. (PI, 140)
What, then, does Wittgenstein say understanding· is? When do
we say of someone that he or she understands? Wittgenstein wants
us to keep in mind that the word "understand" is itself teachable
and learnable, and that a learner (or even a fluent speaker) can make
mistakes in applying it and be corrected. Understanding a word signifies an ability that manifests itself in three ways: in how one uses
the word, in how he responds to its use by others, and in how he
shows others its use (Glock, p. 373). Understanding a sentence is an
ability to do something, such as get a yellow ball when asked, recite
the alphabet, continue a number series, translate a Greek passage,
�45
VERDI
help carry on a discussion in seminar. Understanding a language is
knowing what expressions of the language mean, knowing how to
use them in accord with the rules for their use. This entails knowing the difference between right and wrong ways of using words,
and in this sense understanding is an ability to do something in
accordance with rules.
But you might say this still does not sound like enough, for mere
acting in accord with a rule cannot be equivalent to following a rule, and
if the difference between the two does not consist in what goes on in
the mind or brain, then what is the difference? Anything that acts in
a rrgular way acts according to some rule, even if it acts without understanding, as perhaps the heavenly bodies do. To address this concern
Wittgenstein calls our attention to the social nature of language and
other rule-governed activities. We use rules as standards of correctness
in practice. The relation between a rule and what counts as following a
rule is given by how we employ the ru1e, how we would explain or
justif}r our use of it, how we wou1d teach it or learn it or correct misapplications of it.
A rule for the use of an expression and the acts that
[followJ it are not independent of each other, but two
sides of the same [conceptual] coin, two aspects of a
practice. ... There is no such thing as a rule without a
technique of application that is manifest in action
.... The phenomenon of language is part of the web
of human action and interaction the world. It presupposes as its stable framework certain pervasive regularities of the physical world and of human nature.
Understanding a language is not a mental state but a
capacity or array of capacities to employ symbols in
accord with rules in a myriad of speech activities. This
conception of language as Praxis, this emphasis upon
the primacy of the deed is a fundamental aspect of
Wittgenstein's philosophy. (Hacker, p. 250)
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THEST. JOHN'S REVIEW
It recalls the line from Goethe's Faust: "In the beginning was the
deed:' ("Im A>ifang war die Tat" Part One, line 1235)
All this may be true, you say, but you still have not told us what
account Wittgenstein gives of the importance of thought to language?
Language isn't simply rule-following language-behavior, which this
emphasis on action might lead one to think. What about my inner
life, my thoughts, feelings, hopes? These are mine and Wittgenstein
hasn't yet told us how language as action can have any connection to
them, or how we can talk about them at all.
Wittgenstein considers this a very serious question and his
response lies at the core of his reflections on language, psychology
and philosophy. He writes:
[ C]ould we... imagine a language in which a person
could write down or give vocal expression to his inner
experiences-his feelings, moods, and the rest-for
his private use?-Well, can't we do so in our ordinary
language?-But this is not what I mean. The individual words of this language are to refer to what can
only be known to the person speaking; to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot
understand the language. (PI, 243)
The question can be put this way: how can we ever come to talk with
one another about our sensations-about our inner life in all its
complexity-if they are truly mine and if language is concerned
about what we all can share, as Wittgenstein has implied? For isn't it
obvious ·that I cannot express what is inner by means of words whose
meaning relies entirely on what is outer? Wittgenstein believes these
deep concerns rest on a deep misunderstanding of how we actually
use words. In his argument against the possibility of private language
he uses pain as an example, but he means to include sensations in
general, visual impressions (PI, 277), imaginings (PI, 280), states of
mind and mental processes (PI, 290, 305-6).
�VERDI
47
Wittgenstein believes that certain conceptions of self-consciousness and the mind, and especially knowledge of other minds, are
incoherent and that their incoherence rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of the way language works. The assumption that the primary purpose of words is to name and of sentences to describe
undermines our attempts to understand "mental phenomena" when
we engage in philosophical speculation about them. We are led by
similar forms in the way we speak in different areas of language into
insisting on a contrast between "inner" and "outer:' We unthinkingly consider the former to be analogous to the latter, without frrst
understanding the "grammar" of expressions about "inner" and
"outer:' We thereby unwittingly let ourselves be led into confusions.
Wittgenstein begins by asking his interlocutor
in what way are my sensations private?--Well, only I
can know whether I am really in pain; another person
can only surmise it.-In one way this is wrong, and
in another nonsense... It can't be said of me at all
(except perhaps as a joke) that I know I am in pain.
What is it supposed to mean-except perhaps that I
am in pain?
Other people cannot be said to learn of my sensations only from my behavior,-for I cannot be said
to learn of them [at all]. I have them. The truth is: it
makes sense to say about other people that they
doubt whether I am in pain; but not to say it about
mysel£ (PI, 246)
Wittgenstein here says that if by "private" I mean that I have a
knowledge of my sensations available only to me, and that others
only surmise or infer my sensations while I can know them, then I have
committed a grammatical or conceptual error. If it makes no sense
for me to say I doubt that I am in pain, then it makes no sense for
me to say that I know that I am in pain. Where there can be no
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
grounds for doubt, neither can there be grounds for knowledge, says
Wittgenstein, and he believes our ordinary way of speaking confirms
this. He does not suggest that we revise the way we speak about
doubt and knowledge, but rather he describes what he takes to be the
actual uses of the words, or what the concepts of doubting and
knowing consist in. We, too, would recognize this if we paid attention to how we ourselves use the words in ordinary discourse, and
how we might teach others how to use them or how we correct them
when they are wrong. (Even the skeptic does not teach his young
child, "Perhaps that's a chair:') Words are learned within families in
conjunction with contrasting words, and while the head of a coin
may be forcibly separated from the tail, the result is only to remove
both pieces from circulation.
While language is doing its work-while we are at work with
it-we generally do not make such mistakes, except as jokes. Which
reminds me of this exchange between Blondie and Dagwood:
Blondie: Oh, I feel so blumpy today!
Dagwood: "Blumpy"? That word's not even in the dictionary!
Blondie: That's because no one has ever felt blumpy before!
(Fann, p. 109)
As soon as I disengage the gears and allow the engine to idle, I am
tempted to imagine that when I have a pain I possess something no one
else can have access to, and that in a sense my entire inner life is available only to me for my own viewing. But "no one can have my pain" is
a rule of grammar, just as is "no one can play solitaire with a friend:'
A thought that has probably occurred to most of you at some
time or other offers another avenue of approach to clarifying the
relationship of language to our inner lives. Wittgenstein lets his interlocutor say the following:
The essential thing about private experience is really
not that each person possesses his own exemplar, but
�VERDI
49
that nobody knows whether other people have this or
something else. The assumption would thus be possible-though unverifiable-that one section of
mankind had one sensation of red and another section another. (PI, 272)
Wittgenstein believes thatthis tempting suggestion of the unverifiable
possibility of an inverted spectrum is not empirically false, but conceptually incoherent. He thinks that he recognizes in it a paradigm for
the bewitchment that can be worked on our intellects by language, and
by theories of language. To understand why the possibility of the
inverted spectrum is no possibility at all is to have acquired a perspicuous view of one part of the landscape of our language, and thereby
to find rest from a whole host of temptations that can be forced on
us by grammar when we let language take a vacation.
But surely it makes sense to say that the road sign that I see as
green you see as red? After all, I can imagine the same sign as being
red, and when I do, I am imagining what you are seeing. Of course
we can never know this, because,. we both learned to use color words
in basically the same way, and so we now both call that sign
"green." Wittgenstein says this is as if "when I uttered the word I
cast a sidelong glance at the private sensation, as it were in order to
say to myself: I know all right what I mean by it" (PI, 274). But
"imagine someone's saying: 'I know how tall I am!' and laying his
hand on top of his head to prove it" (PI, 279). Children sometimes
do just this until they learn that they really have not shown how tall
they are at all by this act, for we make no use of a concept of "private height," which each person might have for himself and which
is independent of measured height. The claim that my private sensation of green can be known only by me is analogous to the claim
that I am this tall, and like that claim is not in dispute because it is
a misuse of language.
Wittgenstein continues:
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Look at the blue of the sky and say to yourself "How
blue the sky is!"-When you do it spontaneouslywithout philosophical intentions-the idea never
crosses your mind that this impression of color
belongs only to you. ... And if you point at anything
as you say the words you point at the sky. (PI, 275)
But how is it even possible for us to be tempted to
think that we use a word to mean at one time the color
known to everyone-and at another the "visual
impression" which I am getting now? (PI, 277)
The temptation arises in part because of misleading analogies
in the forms of our expressions. If we allow ourselves to think of
"attending to a sensation" as an inner pointing (as one might consider introspection to be an "inner inspection"), we might then
begin to mix the rules of one language-game with those of another. We do after all often direct our attention to things people point
out to us. Even the phrase "direct your attention to" leads us to
think of attending as having a direction. If in attending I am pointing, then by attending I can name, and thereby give my sensation a
place in my private language. And so Wittgenstein's entire account
turns on the impossibility of my pointing to my sensation for my
own use. We can point to someone else, the traffic sign or the blue
sky with a finger, but attending to our sensation is not a kind of
pointing. For Wittgenstein my effort to point to my private sensation is no effort at all, because what it is to point takes its meaning
from its use in our language, the language which I learned by being
taught by others and which in its everyday use is governed by rules
of correctness. The view that words stand only for things or ideas
lies behind the inverted spectrum puzzle. If my private sensation is
a something, then I ought to be able to give it a name. I can point
to the pain in my foot, can't I? Yes, we do talk that way, but we also
�VERDI
51
say, "my foot hurts" or "it hurts me there:' Once we remind ourselves of the different ways we talk about sensations (and by extension about the vast panorama of our inner life), we will be less
inclined to consider them objects to which we can privately point,
which can be privately named, and which can take their place in a
private language.
Wittgenstein compar~s the idea of a private sensation to a box
with something in it. He says:
Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we
call it a "beetle." No one can look into anyone else's
box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only
by looking at his beetle.-Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his
box.-But suppose the word 'beetle' had a use in these
people's language?-If so it would not be used as the
name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in
the language-game at all; not even as a something: for
the box might even be empty... .That is to say: if we
construe the grammar of the expression of sensation
on the model of "object and name'' the object drops
out of consideration as irrelevant. (PI, 293)
Here, the beetle is analogous to a sensation, and to have a beetle
in a box is to have a sensation. When we are tempted to say that the
sensation must be something that we have, we ought to remind ourselves that we have thus far said nothing, unless we go on to say what
is involved in this having. It is "as if I were to say of someone: 'He
has something. But I don't know whether it is money, or debts, or an
empty cash register'" (PI, 294).
Wittgenstein believes a private language makes no sense even if I
am concerned simply about talking to mysel£ Our inner life is essentially shareable, and it can be ours only if it is possible for us to share
it with others. The real incoherence of the private linguist is that he
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THE ST. JOHN'SREVIEW
cannot achieve what he thinks he is achieving, namely, referring (even
for himself) to a private sensation (or private inner life). Hegel
expresses a similar insight in the opening section of the Phenomenology
if Spirit, "Sense-Certainty," which is
a view of our awareness of the world according to
which it is at its fullest and richest when we simply
open our senses... to the world and receive whatever
impressions come our way, prior to any... conceptual
activity. (Taylor, pp. 140-1)
When the subject of sense-certainty is asked to say what he experiences, however, he finds that his attempts are empty. If he tries to
speak of the "here'' and "now" that he is experiencing, not even he
.
,
h tmse If can k now w h at h e means by "here," " now," and "I" un1ess h e
means something universal, beyond the immediate place, moment
and person. The particular gives way to the universal, because as the
inexpressible, the particular is nothing other than the untrue and irrationaL Wittgenstein puts it this way:
'I' is not the name of a person, nor 'here' of a place,
and 'this' is not a name. But they are connected with
names. Names are explained by means of them. It is
also true that it is characteristic of physics not to use
these words. (PI, 410)
I want to leave Part One of my lecture with some questions
which Wittgenstein himself asks and which I shall leave unanswered.
1. "The purpose of language is to express thoughts:... Then what
thought is expressed, for example, by the sentence 'It's raining'?" (PL 501)
2. "We do not say that possibly a dog talks to itsel£ Is that because
we are so minutely acquainted with its soul?" (PI, 357)
�VERDI
53
3. "'But doesn't what you say come to this: that there is no pain,
for example, without pain-behavior?"' (PI, 281) '"Are you not really a
behaviorist in disguise?"' (PI, 307)
4. "Make the following experiment: say 'It's cold here' and mean
'It's warm here: Can you do it?-And what are you doing as you do
it? And is there only one way of doing it?" (PI, 510)
5. "Imagine that you were in pain and were simultaneously hearing a nearby piano being tuned. You say 'It'll soon stop: It certainly
makes quite a difference whether you mean the pain or the pianotuning!-Of course; but what does this difference consist in?"
(PI,
666)
6. "How should we counter someone who told us that with him
understanding was an inner process?-How should we counter him
if he said that with him knowing how to play chess was an inner
process?" (PI, p. 181)
7. "Describe the aroma of coffee.-Why can't it be done? Do we
lack the words? And for what are the words lacking?" ( PL 610)
Part Two: Psychology
In this section I want to discuss briefly two concepts, thinking
and imagining. They serve to illustrate how Wittgenstein's conception
of meaning as use and his consequent radical revision of the innerouter dichotomy overcome obstacles to understanding and clearer
thinking. The section on imagining also contains some remarks about
experimental results in modern cognitive psychology.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Thinking
Wittgenstein launches us into his discussion of thinking by this
exchange with his interlocutor.
In order to get clear about the meaning of the word
'think' we watc~ ourselves while we think; what we
observe will be what the word means!-But this concept is not used like that. (It would be as if without
knowing how to play chess, I were to try and make
out what the word 'checkmate' meant by close observation of the last move of some game of chess.)
(PI, 316)
When one looks at the last move in a chess game one is in a sense
seeing a checkmate. But there is much else that one has not seen if he
observes only this last move. He witnesses something the meaning of
which he can not know, because he witnesses only it, and not the context in which it occurred, the chess game. We cannot get clear about
what thinking is (that is, how the word "thinking" is used) by any
sort of introspection, but only by broadening our study to include
the circumstances in which we use the word and related words. Nor
would we follow the production process of a hammer to learn how a
hammer is used, or observe a piece of cheese to see how the price of
cheese rises.
Thinking forms a family of concepts with various meanings.
Wittgenstein says:
Remember that our language could possess a variety
of different words: one for "thinking out loud"; one
for thinking as one talks to oneself in the imagination; one for a pause during which something or
other floats before the mind, after which, however, we
are able to give a confident answer. One word for a
�55
VERDI
thought expressed in a sentence; one for the lightning
thought which I may later "clothe in words"; one for
wordless thinking as one works. (Z, 122)
What thinking is not, Wittgenstein believes, is some sort of accompaniment to thoughtful activities.
While we sometimes call it "thinking" to accompany
a sentence by a mental process, that accompaniment
is not what we mean by a "thought." (PI, 332)
If thinking and speaking stood in the relation of the
words and the melody of a song, we could leave out
the speaking and do the thinking just as we can sing
the tune without the words. (BB, p. 42)
But can't I do just that? Can't I think without speaking? I often
know in an instant what I want to say, but the saying of it takes
much longer than my prior thinking did. Wittgenstein agrees that
we can think without speaking, even to ourselves. But this does not
imply that thinking is necessarily a mental process, one which may
or may not accompany other processes like talking. He asks us to
ask ourselves, when would we say of someone or something that he
or she or it is thinking? How would we teach someone the rules for
using the words "thinking" and "thought"? Not by pointing to a
mental activity, distinct from other kinds of activities. Wittgenstein
gives us this rule of thumb to use whenever we are tempted to think
that there must be a mental process of thinking: substitute for
"thinking" or "thought" the expression of the "thinking" or
"thought" (BB, p. 42). This is not to say that a thought is identical
with its expression, say a spoken sentence, because we do speak
thoughtlessly, as when we read aloud automatically, or while thinking about something else. Wittgenstein says, however, that "speech
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
56
with and without thought is to be compared with the playing of
music with and without thought" (PI, 341). When I play a piece of
music with thought, there may be no "thoughts" accompanying my
playing. But my playing can be described in ways that playing without thought cannot. ("Notice how he phrased that passage to bring
out its connection with the opening theme:') To say I played the
piece with thought is t9 say something about how I played the piece;
that is, thinking has an adverbial character. My actions are described
as expressing thought, just as my gracefulness is expressed in my
dancing and my anxiety in my pacing.
It is true that we often speak as though thought and speech were
rwo separate activities, that we might do the one without the other as
we might hum the tune of a song and not sing the words. "Think
before you speak!" "What I just said didn't quite express my
thought:' "The English language uses words in the order in which we
think them." (BB, p. 148) What "accompanies" speech in those cases
might be modulation and tone of voice, certain gestures. But we are
not tempted to call them the "thinking:' No, what allows me to say
of someone else that he is thinking includes what he is doing now,
what has led up to it, what he would be willing to say when asked
what he was doing, and so forth. The psychologist who hopes to
learn more about thinking by asking people what goes on when they
think, or by observing their reactions to certain kinds of problems,
or by studying brain activity while people are thinking has involved
him or herself in a hopeless conceptual muddle. We discover more
about what thinking is by reminding ourselves what we mean when
we say that someone is thinking.
Imagination
The imagination appears to be a more fruitful landscape than
thinking for the work of the psychologist, in part because of the
existence of mental images, which seem to be entities that in some
way or other can be observed. The topic of the imagination is a vast
�VERDI
57
one, and if you really want to sink your teeth into the meat of it, you
ought to read Eva Brann's book, The W<Jrld of the Imagination. I shall here
lay out once again, this time for the concept of mental images, what
I think the implications are of considering the meaning of a word to
be its use, and the consequent impossibility of private language.
Wittgenstein says this about the imagination and images:
One ought to ask, not what images are or what happens when one imagines anything, but how the word
'imagination' is used. But that does not mean that I
want to talk only about words. For the question as to
the nature of the imagination is as much about the
word "imagination" as my question is. And I am only
saying that this question is not to be decided-neither for the person who does the imagining, nor for
anyone else-by pointing; nor yet by a description of
any process. [The question, What is the imagination?] asks for a word to be explained; but it makes us
expect a wrong kind of answer. (PI, 370)
When we think about how we use words connected with imagining, Wittgenstein believes we discover that when we imagine something, we do not have an image that is just like a physical picture, only
private rather than public. Nor is imagining a case of non-sensory
perception.
Wittgenstein does not deny the existence of mental images or
deny that we can see things· iq the mind's eye. He does, however,
deny that we do the same sorts of things with mental image words
that we do with sense-perception words or with picture words. We
play different language-games here, but ones that he says "hang
together:' (Z, 625) The imagination does not require mental images,
even when I imagine something that I might express in a rough
drawing. That is, I might draw something from imagination that is
in no sense a copy or a likeness of any image I might have in my
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
mind. I might have no image at all in my mind. Regardless of
whether or not someone had a mental image, we would still say that
his drawing came from his imagination. It might in fact turn out
that having mental images facilitates doing certain things for some
people, such as making drawings. But the absence of those images
would have no effect on our rule-governed employment of the conu.
.
.
,
cept, tmagmatmn.
Wittgenstein says that images are not just a private sort of physical picture. The concepts of "mental image" and "picture" are not
alike, though they are intimately connected. We do not see, look at
or observe our mental images. This is not an empirical remark which
experiments might someday disprove, but a conceptual one, one
about how we speak and think about pictures and mental images. I
can look at a photo of McDowell Hall, I can look at the same photo
again, or look at it more closely or under different light. But only as
a sort of joke would I say I was doing any of these things with my
mental image of McDowell Hall.
Another difference between pictures and mental images is what
it means to say that a picture or a mental image is the same as it
was, or identical to another picture or image. We say about a picture, perhaps a photo, "that it remains the same not only on the
ground that it seems to us to be the same.... In fact we shall say
under certain circumstances that the picture hasn't changed
although it seems to have changed (BB, p. 171). We say it hasn't
changed because we know something about how it has been kept,
how photographic images fade over time, and so forth. This, of
course, doesn't prevent us from talking about imagining the same
thing from one day to the next or saying things like: "A picture of
him swam before my mind:' But from such usage we should be slow
to infer either that pictures can swim or that images are pictures.
"In part of their uses the expressions '[mental] image' and 'picture'
run parallel; but where they don't the analogy which does exist
tends to delude us" (Hallett, p. 372).
Imagining is also unlike seeing for at least two reasons. First,
�VERDI
59
-
r:::::: -...
-...J
......
.....
......
images are voluntary, says Wittgenstein, while sense-perceptions are
not. He says
[w]hen we form an image of something we are not
observing.... The coming and going of the pictures
is not something that happens to us. We are not surprised by these pictures, saying "look!" (Z, 632)
While we don't always succeed in conjuring up the images we
want, "trying to imagine something which isn't present" makes sense,
while "trying to see something which isn't present" does not make sense.
Second, because images are voluntary, they tell us nothing that
can be true or false about the world; that is, they have no cognitive
content. Some experiments by psychologists might be construed as
indicating that Wittgenstein was simply wrong about this. I want to
talk a bit about one of these experiments to give you an idea of the
sort of very influential work many psychologists and other cognitive
scientists have been doing in recent years and to try to interpret their
results in the light of what I have presented as Wittgenstein's thought.
Roger Shepard published a study in 1971 on the speed of mental
rotation of figures. The subjects were shown pairs of drawings such
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
as those you see below and asked whether or not the two were different views of the same shape. Shepard varied the angular distances
between the two figures so that some were only a few degrees different, while others much more. He then measured how long it took
people to tell whether the two figures were the same or different.
What he found was that these reaction times were proportional to
the angles which separated the figures. It took twice as long to decide
that one figure was the same or different from the other if the angle
of separation was twice as great. Many studies have produced similar results, some even providing evidence for "inertia" and "momentum" effects (Freyd, 1989). Other experiments seem to indicate that
mental images take place in a mental medium which possesses texture
and boundaries.
Shepard's results have been interpreted to mean that subjects
rotate a mental image through mental space in a way remarkably like
the way a real figure might be rotated through real space in an effort
to solve the problem. Mental images, it seems, can tell us something
about the world. How might we understand these experiments?
Wittgenstein believes that his own work is entirely descriptive, not
explanatory, because his interest lies not with phenomena, but with
concepts, that is, with the workings of our language. The problems
that engage him "are solved, not by giving new information, but by
arranging what we have already known" (PI, 109). This implies that
questions like "Can mental images tell us anything true or false about
the world?" will not be answered by experiments such as Shepard's, but
by reminding ourselves how we use words like "mental image:'
You ought to object immediately. For don't we come to know
more about moving bodies through observations of bodies in
motion, and electricity by observation of the phenomena of electricity? We don't explore how we use the words "motion" and "electricity" in our language in order to understand what motion and electricity are, do we? We do experiments. Shepard's work is no different
from Galilee's and Faraday's, except in the objects he studies, you
might say.
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61
Wittgenstein might respond like this. Philosophical or conceptual problems are in principle immune to solution by means of advances
in science. The sciences either employ the concepts which create conceptual perplexity (such as "seeing" and "thinking") and hence presuppose an understanding of them, or they create new, different concepts (such as "force" and "electron") which tend to bypass the puzzle, not solve it, and may perhaps even generate further conceptual
questions (Hacker, p. 157). The sciences do make new discoveries,
and add to human knowledge about the world both by revealing new
objects and properties hitherto unknown and by providing new
explanations of hitherto inexplicable phenomena. But they are not of
use in resolving conceptual problems, which, according to
Wittgenstein, arise from the workings of our language and are
resolved only within language.
Wittgenstein would say that Shepard's experiments reveal a deep
conceptual confusion. "The existence of the experimental method
makes us think we have the means of solving the problems which
trouble us; though problem and method pass one another by" (PI, p.
232). While the physicist observes and reports on the phenomena of
that which he is investigating, the psychologist observes human
behavior, for example reaction times and verbal reports, not mental
images. But, you might say, scientists often draw conclusions about
what can't be seen from what can be seen. They devise experiments to
trick, cajole, or torture nature into revealing its secrets. William
Harvey, for example, by his experiments on the heart and blood,
could come to know what he could not see, namely, that the blood
circulates through the veins and arteries. And Galileo could discover
the acceleration of a freely falling body, which he could not measure
directly, by using inclined planes to slow the acceleration to a measurable rate. And so, even though the psychological experimenter can't
see his subjects' mental images, this should be no reason for thinking
that he cannot learn new facts about their nature. But, Wittgenstein
might say, a mental image, like a pain, cannot be observed because it
is not the kind of thing about which it makes sense to say one
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
observes it. It is unobservable not because it is too small, or hidden,
or goes by too quickly, but because the grammar of the expression
"mental image" is not the grammar of any word referring to an
observable object, Our concept of mental image, Wittgenstein
believes, precludes its being the subject matter of any scientific experiment which purports to explore its nature. Many of the problems in
the study of the mind, ~uch as those of consciousness, thinking, and
willing are not empirical at all, but conceptual. The psychologist
must know what he is looking for before he can know where to look.
This requires first of all asking questions like, how does one learn to
talk about mental images, and what applications do we make of
words like "image" and "imagination"? For only then shall the psychologist know what a mental image is. Wittgenstein believes he will
then no longer be faced with questions like, do mental images exist
and what are they like? Rather the psychologist will be more concerned with the causes and effects of mental images. (It might be of
interest to discover, for example, that whenever people have a certain
mental image, their blood pressure drops. This would be a useful
result.) I'm reminded of the time that Meno and Socrates met one
another outside the baths in Athens.
Socrates: Hello, Meno! Have you taken a bath?
Meno: Why, Socrates? Is one missing?
What then makes an image of him into an image of him? That is,
what connects the image with that of which it is an image?
Wittgenstein's oblique reply is, "Not its looking like him" (PI, p. 177).
The same question applies to the expression "I see
him now vividly before me" .... What makes this
utterance into an utterance about him?-Nothing in
it or simultaneous with it ([orJ "behind it"). If you
want to know whom he meant, ask him.... His answer
[will] be decisive. (PI, p. 177)
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VERDI
I imagine McDowell Hall on fire and someone asks me how I know
it is McDowell Hall. Couldn't it be some other building very much
like it? The question makes no sense in this context. If I show a
friend a photo of one of my identical twin brothers and tell him it
is a picture of my brother Homer, he can ask me how I know it is
Homer and not my other brother, Vergil. When I tell him that I took
the picture, the matter i~ settled. But if I say that I am imagining my
brother Homer, then his question, how do you know it is Homer and
not Vergil you are imagining?, makes no sense. I cannot answer simply, it looks like Homer, because it also would look like Vergil, if it
"looked like" anyone at all. Not even God, could he look into my
mind at that moment, would be able to tell of which brother I was
thinking. Yet no one would question my authority in this matter.
What makes the image into an image of him, Wittgenstein says,
is "perhaps what I later [say or do]" (Z, 14). This could include
descriptions I might give or drawings I might make about the image.
Such descriptions can even simply take the place of the image. No
image carries along with itself a reference to that of which it is the
image. The image becomes an image of something determinate only
by what we say and do, that is, by becoming part of our language and
our form of life.
Part Three: Philosophy
Philosophical questions and problems, says Wittgenstein, like
many of those in psychology, arise largely through a misunderstanding of how language works. They are "linguistic" or "conceptual"
problems, which is not to say that they are silly or unimportant.
These problems
have the character of depth. They are deep disquietudes;
their roots are as deep in us as the forms of our language and their significance is as great as the importance of our language. (PL 111)
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TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Wittgenstein believes that "a main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of the use of our words"
(PI, 122). And because philosophical problems have the form "I don't
know my way about" (PI, 123), it is precisely the perspicuous representation of how we use words that is of fundamental significance to
any effort to answer philosophical questions and to solve philosophical problems. We are led to philosophical problems when we confuse
the forms of our expressions with their uses. "Words like 'thinking'
and 'thought' alongside words denoting (bodily) activities, such as
writing and speaking make us look for an activity... corresponding to
thinking" and to a product of thinking analogous to the products of
writing and speaking. "When words in our ordinary language have
prima facie analogous grammars we are inclined to try to interpret
them analogously" (BB, p. 7). Similarly, for each substantive we tend
to seek a substance and so are led to ask, for example, "What is
length? What is meaning? What is number?" instead of "How are
lengths measured? What is an explanation of meaning? How are
numerical expressions used?" (Hacker, p. 169)
Related to this source of confUsion is our, tendency to mix up language-games. We might imagine, for example, that certainty, be it about
the weather, a geometrical proo£ or my own pain is the selfsame concept, and differs only in degree in these cases. Instead, we ought to consider it to be more like the concept of winning, as we find it in football, in chess and in solitaire. We also easily succumb to the temptation
to project grammar onto reality, and to think of words as names and
sentences as descriptions. It is a short step to the conceptual confusions of psychology, where "I" becomes the name of a person who has
privileged access to his own mental objects, states, and events, which he
then describes when he says "I have a pain;' "I am anxious;' "I am
thinking:'
What Wittgenstein offers to help solve these problems is "not a
philosophical method," but "methods, like different therapies" (PI,
133). For "the philosopher's treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness" (PI, 255). That is, if we consider what
�VERDI
65
Wittgenstein is doing also to be philosophy, then the Wittgensteinian
philosopher's task differs in important ways from that of most of his
predecessors. His job is to "to show the fly the way out of the flybottle" (PL 309). The fly-bottle is a humane apparatus for catching
flies. The fly is drawn in through a hole in the bottom of a bottle by
means of beer which sits in a trough surrounding the bottle. The fly
thereafter flies only upw;:~rds or sideways, n~ver down, and is effectively trapped in the bottle, which has no other opening. This could
be Wittgenstein's inversion of the allegory of the cave in Plato's
Republic. The new philosopher's job is to lead us out of this prison,
which consists of philosophical problems and questions themselves.
How does the Wittgensteinian philosopher liberate us?
Wittgenstein's approach is like that of Socrates in that both attempt
to bring people to remember what they have forgotten, since it is still
somehow present in them. Both try to elicit from others the consequences of their own words, and both frequently do this by asking
questions. But Wittgenstein's philosopher treats this illness of chronic forgetfulness by assembling reminders of how we actually use
words and what we do with them in ordinary language. He says:
"When [someoneJ use[s J a word-'knowledge; 'being; 'object; 'I'... and tr[iesJ to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask
oneself: is the word ever actually used this way in the language which
is its original home?" (PI, 116) We might say that according to
Wittgenstein, "it is the whole of philosophy to realize that there is
no more difficulty about time than about [a] chair" (L, p.119).
This image of philosophical problems as a kind of forgetfulness
that must be treated with aids to remembering reminds me of the
Meno. But first let me tell you about a conversation between two boys
in a comic strip. The first says: "Everyday I ask myself those age-old
philosophical questions-Who am I? Where am I? Why am I here?
That, my friend, is philosophy:' Whereupon his friend responds:
"Sounds more like amnesia" (Fann, p. 108). Meno poses a famous
paradox about coming to know anything: if I don't know what I am
looking for, how can I recognize it when I have found it? And if I do
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
know, why do I need to look for it? As a solution to the paradox,
Socrates suggests that in a previous life we learned all things and that
in our present life what appears to be learning is really recollection of
what we knew but have forgotten. Wittgenstein is saying something
similar. Birth may be a protracted process: we are perhaps not fully
born until we have mastered our native language. The time before our
birth, that is, the time b~fore this mastery is achieved, is the time during which we were learning how to talk, when we first learned how to
do things with words. Later, especially when we philosophize, we
tend to forget what we know and need to be reminded of it. Once we
are, the problems which trouble us dissolve. We once again can operate with words according to their true grammar, which expresses the
essence of things. The consequence of this Wittgensteinian dialectic
is to lead us out of the fly-bottle of philosophical problems and
questions and restore us to our ordinary ways of speaking. Imagine
that you are trying to describe in words to a friend how to do a dance.
At a certain point in the description you get stuck-you just can't
remember if the left foot or the right foot moves at that moment.
The answer to the question will come as soon as you grab a partner
and do the dance. Wittgenstein might say that philosophical problems come on the scene whenever we stop dancing, that is, whenever
we stop using words in their ordinary ways.
This, however, shouldn't lead us to think that philosophical questions and problems are avoidable. Most of us cannot spend all our
time dancing; we find other activities attractive, too. And sometimes
using words in extraordinary ways, like in poetry, is just what we want
to do. It is also instructive to ask what use a word has in a particular
author, which may not be an ordinary use. But to someone enmeshed
in a philosophical problem it is never a useful answer to say simply:
we don't talk that way. Wittgenstein puts it like this:
You must not try to avoid a philosophical problem by
appealing to common sense; instead, present it as it
arises with most power.... Philosophy can be said to
�VERDI
67
consist of three act!VIttes: to see the commonsense
answer, to get yourself so deeply into tne problem
that the commonsense answer is unbearable, and to
get from that situation back to the commonsense
answer. ( BB, pp. 108-9)
Wittgenstein always ~ried to work his way into and through a philosophical problem with his students, which is reminiscent of a Zen
master's technique (Fann, p. 104). D. T. Suzuki writes:
Before you have studied Zen, mountains are mountains
and rivers are rivers; while you are studying it, mountains are no longer mountains and rivers no longer
rivers; but once you have had enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and rivers are rivers.
Wittgenstein also believes that the work of the philosopher is
descriptive, not explanatory. He says that "philosophy simply puts
everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For
what is hidden ... is of no interest to us" (PI, 126). The descriptions
Wittgenstein gives of how we use words are not meant to be even hints
of explanations, nor calls for scientific clarification. Wittgenstein is
interested not in causes, but in reasons, because he is concerned not
with phenomena but with concepts. Causes can be discovered by
experiment, but reasons cannot.
The descriptions Wittgenstein paints are attempts to provide
overviews of the landscape of language, surveyable representations
which help us find our way about. In a sense his work is aesthetic: he
draws our attention to certain features of language, and places things
side by side so as to exhibit these features. The hoped-for result is a
change in the way we view things. Goethe attempts something similar
in his essay and poem on the Metamorphosis of Plants, with which
Wittgenstein was familiar. Goethe's fictional primordial plant is an
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
archetype by means of which he hopes to understand all plants. He
thereby achieves an overview that he hopes will bring us to see plant
development differently, but which eschews all discussion of causality.
It is time that I bring the lecture to a dose and return to a remark
of Wittgenstein's I cited at the beginning. Wittgenstein said that he
was not a religious man, but that he could not help seeing every problem from a religious point of view. What did he mean by "a religious
point of view") Three of Wittgenstein's favorite authors, those to
whom he turned again and again, were St. Augustine, Kierkegaard
and Dostoevsky. (He is reputed to have known The Brothers Karamazov
almost by heart.) All three share a conviction in the importance of
what cannot be said, a conviction Wittgenstein himself expressed when
he was young and which remained with him, I believe, until his death.
He agreed with Kierkegaard that the most impottant things are best
shown, not said. "If only you do not try to utter the unutterable,
then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be-unutterablycontained in what has been uttered!" (Engelmann, 9) Of his own work,
Wittgenstein writes:
Where does our investigation get its importance
from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it
were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of
stone and rubble.) What we are destroying is nothing
but houses of cards and we are dearing up the ground
of language on which they stand. (PI, 118)
Next to this we may juxtapose Kierkegaard's remark from one of
the short discourses.
It is true as the understanding says that there is nothing to wonder at, but precisely for this reason is wonder secure, because the understanding vouches for it.
Let the understanding... dear the ground, then won-
�VERDI
69
der comes in in the right place, in the changed man.
(cited by Drury in Fann2, p. 70)
The changed man is one . who now sees differently. At the
moment Augustine hears the voice of a child as a ~omrnand from
God, while in the world everything remains the same ind nothing has
changed, for him everythjng has changed, nothing remains the same.
He is a changed man. As Socrates first taught us. there is no prescribed set of rules for bringing someone to see differently. For
Wittgenstein the religious point of view is the one which approaches a philosophical problem with the belief that its solution lies in
radical re-collecting ar1d re-visioning. The new vision is not a truth
to be proved any more than faith is taking someone's word for it, even
God's. And our new eyes cannot be given to us by another, and certainly not by any book. Schopenhauer, whom Wittgenstein read early
in life, puts it this way:
When we read, someone else thinks for us .... [W]hen
we read, the work of thinking is taken away from us
.... In addition to this, is the fact that thoughts
reduced to paper are generally nothing more than the
footprints of a man walking in the sand. It is true that
we see the path he has taken; but to know what he saw
on the way, we must use our own eyes. (Parerga and
Paralipomena, Chapter 24, Number 291, translated by E.
F. J. Payne)
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Some questions for Part Two
1. Is it a fact of experience that trees and stones are not conscious?
2. Why can I interrupt your thinking, but not your believing?
3. "Does it make sense t\) ask, 'How do you know that you believe?'and is the answer: 'I know it by introspection'?" (PI, 587)
4. Why can I not be mistaken about my intentions, but can lie about them?
5. "Why can't a dog simulate pain? Is it too honest?"
(PI,
250)
6. "We say a dog is afraid his master will beat him; but not, he is
afraid his master will beat him tomorrow. Why not?" (PI, 650)
7. "Why does it sound odd to say 'For a second he felt deep grief'?
Only because it so seldom happens?" (PI, p. 174)
8. Why can I play-act fear, but not hope? "Is hope a feeling?"
(PI,
545)
9. "One can imagine an animal angry, frightened, unhappy, happy,
startled. But hopeful? And why not?" (PI, p. 174)
10. "Why can a dog feel fear but not remorse? Would it be right to
say 'Because it can't talk'?" (Zettel, 518)
References
Wittgenstein's Works
Philosophical Investigations. NY: Macmillan, 1958. (PI)
Blue and Brown Books. NY: Harper and Brothers, 1958. (BB)
Zettel. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970. (Z)
Lectures, 1932-1935. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. (L)
�VERDI
71
Secondary Sources
Baker, G. P. and Hacker, P. M. S. An Analytical Commentary on
Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1983. (Baker)
Engelmann, Paul. Lettersfrom Ludwig Wittenstein, with a Memoir. Translated
by L. Furtmuller, edited by B. McGuinness. Oxford, 1967.
(Engelmann)
Fann, K. T. Wittgenstein's Conception of Philosophy. Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1971. (Fann)
Fann, K. T. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Man and His Philosophy. New Jersey.
Humanities Press, 1967. (Fann2)
Freyd, J. "Dynamic Mental Representations:' Psychological Review, 94
(1989)
Glock, Hans-Johann. A Wittgenstein Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
(Glock)
Hacker, P. M. S. Insight and Illusion. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1986. (Hacker)
Hallett, Garth. A Companion to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. (Hallett)
Malcolm, Norman. Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View? Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1994. (Malcolm)
Rhees, Rush ( ed). Ludwig Wittgenstein, Personal Recollections. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1984. (Rhees)
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�t
Ptolemy's Truth
David Stephenson
Ezekiel saw the wheel, way up in the middle of the air
A wheel within a, wheel, way in the middle of the air
-Traditional spiritual
Aristotle splits the world in two: heaven and earth. This is not a
matter of religious belief, but merely of observation. Above us in the
sky bright objects describe circular paths near whose center we dwell.
Every night the circle is completed as the stars return along their
courses. But here near the surface of the Earth things head downwards or sideways, and for the most part in paths as straight as possible, as if trying to arrive at their goal by the quickest route. Whereas
whatever we kindle into light soon burns out, heavenly lights appear
to last forever. Whatever moves on Earth is born, changes shape and
size, ages, and dies; above the clouds sameness and permanence rule.
Thus it is hard to imagine our being made of the same stuff as the
stars, or of responding to the same causes, for our modes of motion
and existence are very different-so different that the sublunar
sphere we inhabit is connected with those overhead only by our
thoughts and imaginations.
And yet there are reasons to hope that the heavens are not so alien
as to escape understanding altogether. For one thing, a few of those
"stars" do exhibit a more erratic progress along their orbits than do
the majority, as if they had wills of their own like ours. They are
called "planets" because of their tendency to wander in their traces,
sometimes falling behind the crowd, and at other times catching up.
Indeed, the first kind of explanation of their wandering must have
David Stephenson is a tutor on the Annapolis campus of St. John's College. This lecture was
delivered at Annapolis, April 4, 1997.
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THEST. JOHN'S REVIEW
ascribed some of our own terrestrial willfulness to the celestial, and
hence allowed one to hope that those shining beings might regard us
with greater affinity and affection than can the rocky, gassy masses lit
by the hydrogen bomb we think nowadays has usurped those gods:
the cold reflections of an indifferent fire.
But even in Aristotle's time, one who sought patterns among the
stars by careful observation of their courses over months and years
could see more of rule than whim in their careers, a rule based on
recurrence, and hence on the period, on the circle. Ptolemy puts it
thus: "it is first necessary to assume in general that the motions of the
planets... are all regular and circular by nature... and their apparent
irregularities result from the positions and arrangements of the circles
on their spheres through which they produce these movements, but no
departure from their unchangeableness has really occurred in their
nature in regard to the supposed disorder of their appearances:' That
is, appearances are deceiving: the mind must see behind planetary
meandering to the perfect circles out of which it is composed. I say
"must;' for, according to Ptolemy, this hypothesis of regular circular
motion is the only one that willleadlls to the "study of things which
are always what they are;' that is, to changeless truth itsel£ and this
truth, he assures us at the very beginning of his treatise, is the aim of
astronomy, as it is of every science worthy of the name.
One might even say that Ptolemy's principle is what allows his
science to gain the clarity of mathematics, which is largely absent
from Aristotle's description. For the astronomer builds his orbits
not only out of circles, but out of circles rotating uniformly about
their centers. The uniform angular motion now can represent time
itsel£ and thus subject moving things to the static science of
geometry.
Once we insist on looking behind appearances, however, certain
terrestrial things, too, reveal rational forms of motion to someone
properly prepared to look for them. The discovery attributed to
Pythagoras that simple numbers underlie harmonic combinations of
tones could well have been the absolute beginning of natural philos-
�STEPHENSON
75
ophy, since, like Ptolemy's circles, these numbers imply a form and
measure accessible to reason underlying the sefming randomness of
narure. It is no accident that Plato's Timaeus, although primarily an
astronomer, sings the diatonic musical scale of Pythagorean numbers
into his myth of the creation of the entire universe, including the
Earth and us its inhabitants in his melody. Ptolemy himself did write
a very Pythagorean treatise of music, but it is separate from his System
of the World, because the srudy of music begins in the sublunar sphere,
and the world of circles he sees only in the heavens.
Examples of such terrestrial harmonics lie ready to hand in the
form of most musical instruments, even the most primitive.
Examples of bone flutes have been found in burial sites preserved for
twenty thousand years: hollow tubes pierced by holes spaced with at
least approximate arithmetic regularity. And if one just compares the
lengths of pan pipes-one of the simplest and oldest of instruments-it is hard not to notice the harmonic proportions they
exhibit. They are even more apparent in the musical divisions of a
string stretched on the frame of a harp, guitar, or violin, and hence
manifest themselves in the construction and use of modern as well as
ancient instruments.
It is part of my task to show how far beyond the seemingly specialized sphere of music these harmonics can reach, and to connect
them more clearly with Ptolemy's circles. From the vantage point of
Ptolemy or the Pythagoreans, mathematics can find its proper place
within narure, and itself reveals truth to us through geometry and
number. Thus arises the famous "quadrivium" of learning: astronomy
gives the sky a geometry and sets it spinning; music embodies arithmetic in the vibrations of earthly elements.
Ptolemy & Pythagoras: The Joining of the
Celestial and Terrestrial
Whenever Ptolemy discovers an anomaly in the motion of a
star-a deceleration or acceleration that apparently destroys the con-
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
stancy of its intent-his hypothesis stands ready to explain away this
irregularity. Upon examination, each anomaly reveals its own period
to which Ptolemy can ascribe a circle. By combining these circles he
obtains the erratic courses we observe. But the hypothesis takes several possible forms.
Either we are not really at the center of a star's circular course,
so that uniform progre~s looks more rapid to us when the star happens to sweep closer to us; or its circle rides upon another circle, so
that the combination of the two simple circular motions together
make up the irregular one we see; or the uniformity with which the
star describes its circle cannot be judged with respect to its own
center, as one would normally do, but only with respect to some
other point. The first of these forms is known as the "eccentric"
hypothesis; the second the "epicyclic" hypothesis; the third the
"equant." Ptolemy expresses indifference about which form to
choose, especially with respect to the first two-they are equivalent:
we have neither the means nor the need to choose between them.
He is not interested in some imaginary mechanics that could push
the planets along their paths, but only in finding explanations that
will arouse what is divine in our own minds. Any of the three will
cause us to think beyond superficial appearal}ces. It is hardly necessary, therefore, for Ptolemy to adopt a different manifestation for
each anomaly. Nevertheless, when a planet, such as Mars, exhibits
three anomalies, he grants it all three types of explanation, one for
each: an eccentric, an epicycle, and an equant. It seems strange at
first that he should prefer variety to uniformity in his explanations,
and this preference inspires speculation. I will return to it later and
speculate.
But the three forms of explanation are not perfectly equivalent.
Epicycles are obviously more adaptable than either of the others,
since epicycles can rotate in directions the same as or opposite to
their deferents. Moreover, epicycles can be added on to epicycles, so
that there is no end to the number of anomalies that could be produced in one composite motion by the repetition of this single
�STEPHENSON
77
hypothesis. One can imagine a chain of circles riding on circles riding on circles... ; and ultimately be moved to ask whether any motion
whatsoever could be analyzed into such a concatenation.
Ptolemy does not link epicycles into such a chain, but
Copernicus does, and before Copernicus others, like Oresme, sometimes adopted the epicyclic hypothesis exclusively as. the most flexible one. For consider: any error which recurs can be assigned to a circle with the appropriate period and size; if another error remains
after this supposition, tack on another circle; should this too fall
short, add another, and so on. A nonrepeating error, of course,
would not submit to this kind of synthesis, but, then, exactly because
it does not recur it would be considered accidental to the natural
motion that we are trying to explain. Thus such a singular astronomical phenomenon as a comet or a nova or a meteor would most likely have been ascribed to atmospheric accidents: to the sublunar
sphere and the notoriously capricious whims of the weather. The
celestial world was the world of rule and order, and hence of regular
cycle and recurrence.
Nevertheless, such circles can illuminate terrestrial phenomena
as well if they recur periodically, even those which seem to have no
connection with the sun or stars: the pendulum; the vibrating
string; the sounding tube of air in an organ pipe or a trumpet.
When a single circle does not suffice we can superimpose others to
represent and explain these motions as closely as we please. Of
course, the circles usually appear in the form of sine waves, but
what else is a sine wave but the shadow of a rotating circle stretched
out uniformly along a straight line? Take the straight line as a portion of a very large circle, and you have adopted a procedure 'very
much like Ptolemy's to some earthly phenomena. Add a series of
sine waves in much the same way as Ptolemy's successors tack on
epicycles and you have a complex vibratory pattern like that present in a musical sound.
But harmonics arouse the understanding in another way as well,
even before they are formed into music. In the vibrating string, arith-
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
metic complements Ptolemy's geometry. The circles of musical vibration are not just chosen randomly for the sake of explanation; they
are related to one another as simply as are the counting numbers,
since they correspond to the subdivision of the string into whole
numbers of parts. Each fraction produces a musical interval: half
sounds the octave; a third adds a perfect fifth; a quarter, a fourth; etc.
The existence of thes~ intervals in a tone has long been apparent,
even before physics confirmed their significance. An attentive ear can
pick out in a single musical tone the array of pitches that have combined within it, a plurality that most often we ignore as such, preferring to think of it as a whole with harmonic parts. But through
analysis we discover the simple ratios essential to the connection of
these component vibrations, ratios that once more confirm the
Pythagorean faith, by joining number to the Ptolemaic patterns of
shape and motion.
There are two impediments in the way of the full pursuit of this
Pythagorean principle. First of all, it seems perhaps too limited.
Remarkable as is its discovery of discreteness within the continuum,
of number at the heart of our physical science (which otherwise
seems more subject to geometry than arithmetic); wonderful as is its
implicit synthesis of Ptolemaic circles and musical sound, and hence
of the celestial and terrestrial worlds, the phenomena that immediately reveal such a natural unity are few, and seem to be limited to
those connected to music. The second difficulty could have been
anticipated by Ptolemy: time inevitably figures into terrestrial phenomena. The stars' motions show no obvious signs of decay; Ptolemy
sees them as eternal. But musical and other movements we see near
to hand always die. If Ptolemy's celestial mathematics is to be
brought down to Earth, there must be some way of adapting it to
earthly dissipation.
The extension of the Ptolemaic and Pythagorean projects to a
natural world not obviously musical has been accomplished only in
the last few centuries, as part of the project of mathematizing nature
to which Newton gave such an impetus with his Principia. Newton
�STEPHENSON
79
and all reputable scientists at least since the time of Kepler and
Galileo disagree with Ptolemy in one important respect. No, I do not
mean in their belief that it is the Earth rather than the Sun that
moves; I mean in their conviction that the stuff of the Earth and the
stuff of the planets or stars is not essentially different. It is a pity that
they all abandoned Ptolemy's search for circles along with his geocentric bias. Otherwise, . someone might have anticipated Joseph
Fourier in his discovery that Ptolemy's circles might not only guide
the heavens, but motion on the Earth as well-in the form of sine
waves. A straight, curved or arbitrarily zigzag course all can emerge
from a combination of sine waves.
Now wait! Would anyone seriously suggest that a straight line
could be formed from curved ones? Yes, this is exactly what Fourier
did. Or rather, with even greater generality, he claimed that any shape
whatsoever, even one drawn freehand, even one with certain gaps and
disconnections, can be built out of a series of sine waves, that is, ultimately, out of circles: not just little bits of circles that might look
straight, but a whole chain of circles rotating at different rates and of
different sizes; and all complete, so as to leave sinusoidal traces in
their wakes. This is Fourier's Theorem.
The resemblance between the sums of sines and circles raises the
question: to what extent can we consider Fourier to be Ptolemy's heir
and disciple?
Fourier
Fourier was interested in a very earthly problem: how do we
understand the way in which heat flows in bodies? Nothing to do
with the heavens, where heat must travel in a different way, because
of the emptiness of space; nothing apparently to do with music
either. Fourier, like virtually everyone since Newton, followed
Newton's footsteps. When a force acts on a mass it accelerates proportionately, says Newton, and this acceleration is derivative from
distance traveled in time. Unravel the acceleration equation and you
�80
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
will be able to find where the body will be at any time. Physics thereby becomes a problem in mathematics.
Even though heat cannot be said to move like a Newtonian
mass, nor be subject to Newtonian force, Fourier adopted the basic
procedure that physics has derived from Newton's more geometricseeming model, viz., cast all motion into the mathematical form that
the calculus calls a "gifferential equation;' and then "solve" this
equation. That is, in this case, the fact that the rate of heat transfer
between bodies is proportional to the difference of their temperatures-which can be verified by experience-is sufficient to determine an equation describing the instantaneous flow of heat in any
body generally. To find the temperature anywhere in a particular
body, we need to know its shape and the manner in which it is heated or cooled, and then solve the general equation with these conditions in mind.
The problem of time's decay he resolved very simply. One can
maintain the temperature differences in an object artificially until the
flow of heat setdes down into a steady state. Then focus on the now
unvarying temperatures as functions of position within the object.
Factor temporal cooling back in again after the spatial analysis is
complete, if you wish to.
Fourier's analysis depends gready on a device he inherited from
medieval philosophers like Nicolas of Oresme.
Whilst the temperatures are permanent and the
source [of heatJ remains, if at every point [of a mean
plane in the object-a ring in this case J an ordinate
be raised perpendicular to the plane of the [object],
whose length is proportional to the fixed temperature
at that point, the curved line which passes through
the ends of these ordinates will represent the permanent state of the temperatures, and it is very easy to
determine by analysis the nature of this line.
�STEPHENSON
81
That is, the curved line formed in the imagination out of the
parade of temperature within the object discloses what Oresme
calls "the quantity of this quality:' What is so original and illuminating about Oresme's procedure is that all kinds of problemsespecially problems in the physical world-become by this means
problems in a special geometry: the geometry of representation. It
is a geometry that we tend to assbciate with the name of Descartes,
but perhaps owes even more allegiance to the world of Galileo,
whose constructions sometimes resemble those of Oresme very
closely. In the geometry of representation, lines stand for and measure nongeometric quantities, and the geometric relationships
among these lines tell us facts about objects that have nothing
directly to do with their geometry, facts normally couched in the
language of velocity, or heat, or power. It has its roots, of course,
in the physical treatises of Archimedes, and even in Book V of the
Elements. But under the aegis of more recent mathematical techniques, and especially of the calculus, representative figures introduced virtually a new science. A geometric construction such as a
tangent now acquires a meaning very different from its meaning in
the world of Apollonius or Euclid, a meaning that depends on
interpretation of its geometry.
So when Fourier discovers that "a curved line arbitrarily drawn"
can be built out of an infinite series of sines or cosines, his discovery reaches far beyond the topic of heat. It encompasses anything at
all that can be represented by such a curve. Nevertheless, Fourier
must have drawn his initial inspiration in large part from the analysis of the vibrating string, in which representation and portrait coalesce in the same figure.
The vibrating string had been the subject of great interest and
even hot debate for nearly a century before Fourier began to work on
heat. Two very different solutions had been proposed. Fourier chose
one, and then had to defend himself against the advocates of the rival
solution. He did so by showing that the two solutions, for all their
differences in appearance, were in fact equivalent.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
What do these two rivals look like? Euler and d' Alembert insisted that any function whatever will satisfy the differential equation for
the string, provided that its argument have the form, x-Wt or x+wt.
Daniel Bernoulli cited aural evidence to support his claim that the
function must be a series of sine (or cosine) waves, independent of
time, each of them corresponding to a harmonic component within
the musical timbre.
'lj!(x,t) = F(x-wt)-F(x+ wt)
(1)
'lj!( x,t) = (a 1cosx + a2cos2x + a 3cos3x
+ a4 cos4x + .. , )sin cot
(2)
Euler's equation describes waves of arbitrary shape moving to the
right and left along the string; Bernoulli's an accumulation of simple
waves in the form of cosine curves which do not progress either right
or left but only grow and diminish periodically. Euler and
d' Alembert cite visual evidence; Bernoulli, musical experience. The
first solution seems too general; the secon'd too specific. It is hard to
see how two such different kinds of function could solve the same
problem. Hence the debate, which engaged many mathematicians of
that time. Fourier's choice of Bernoulli's solution, when the same
equation turned up in his analysis of heat flow, inevitably thrust him
into the same fight. Consequently, the Parisian Academy of Science,
dominated as it was by members of the opposing sect, summarily
rejected his first memoir on heat. It took fifteen years to win acceptance for his theory.
But Fourier's defense of the sine series did more than exonerate
Bernoulli, it also unconsciously restored Ptolemy's vision to science.
For a sine wave, we have already shown, is a kind of rolling image of
a circle (not of a rolling circle-that would be a cycloid-but of the
displacement of a point on a rotating circle stretched out along a
time-line1). While this is not precisely Ptolemy's scheme, it shares with
Ptolemy one essential point: all motions can be derived from uniform
�STEPHENSON
83
circular motions by simple superposition. And rc. recasting Ptolemy's
by
project in the form of functions and equations;J'ourier enabled himself to prove what Ptolemy seems to have believed, though without
proo£ namely that any i:urved line whatsoever can be constructedfrom the sum of
circles of the appropriate size moving at the appropriate rate. So the demonstration of this proposition makes Fourier not only Ptolemy's heir, but his
champion as well, assuming for the moment that Ptolemy would have
considered such demonstration as grist for his celestial mill.
Fourier's Theorem may be stated in the form of an equation,
<j>(x)
= a1sin(x) + a2sin(2x) + a3 sin(3x) + ...
(3)
where the function, <j>, is arbitrary. It may even correspond to "a
curved line arbitrarily drawn;' according to Fourier. The range of x
for which this equivalence holds is also arbitrary, though if <I> is not
itself periodic, the series will match it only over some finite interval.
We can substitute cosines for sines, or include both kinds of trigonometric functions without changing the essential nature of this series,
provided only that we alter the numerical coefficients, a1, a2, a3, ...
appropriately.
In its formulaic form, however, the proposition may look more
daunting than it is. Let me therefore make full use of his liberty of
graphical representation to illustrate its meaning. The equation above
will exhibit several of its features clearly in graphical form. Thus, each
sine term in the series has its own wave, with loops increasing in number as the multiple in its argument, and size as its coefficient. The sum
itself is the sum of all the ordinates of each of the component sines
to form the ordinate of a composite curve, and it is this curve that
Fourier says will match that corresponding to the function <j>.
Consider the example of the musical string from Fourier's point of
view. It may be sounded by plucking, that is, by being drawn up at one
point and releasecl. The initial shape of this string, therefore, would be
a triangle, and this triangle must itself therefore be one of the shapes
that can be synthesized out of sine waves.
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THEST. JOHN'S REVIEW
1.5
0.5
.25x
0
.75x
F~.l
1.5
Fig.2
1.2
1•
Fig. 3
�STEPHENSON
85
Let us begin the synthesis. The loop of a single sine wave approximating this triangle obviously falls short in the middle and exceeds
at each side. (fig. 1) Add in a second sine wave of one third the wave
l~ngth and see how much closer to the triangle this composite has
become (fig. 2).
Note how the approximation improves with' the addition of
another of one fifth the }"ave length (fig. 3). Now the algebraic representation of what we have just done is as follows,
sin(x)- (1/32 )sin(3x)
+ (1/52)sin(5x)- ... ,
(4)
which clearly reproduces the form of sine series projected by
Fourier's general equation (3). But in this example another feature of
Fourier's series emerges with remarkable clarity: not only are
Ptolemy's circles contained within it in the form of sine functions,
Pythagoras's numbers also ornament its expression. Here one only
sees the odd numbers, but other curve matches include the even as
well. Let me, to commemorate this ancient insight, call any series of
whole number multiples of a variable a "Pythagorean series:'
For an equation describing the shape of a plucked string such a
harvest of harmonic numbers may not be surprising, since
Pythagoras anticipated this aspect of Fourier's theory in a musical
context. Yet once we recall that the triangular shape we have been
approaching with our series can measure the intensity of many different physical quantities-including the temperatures at the end of
a heated bar, for example, which is a problem specifically probed by
Fourier-then the true compass of his theorem should reveal itsel£
Fourier becomes more than usually rhapsodic in describing this theoretical transformation of heat into music:
The problems of the theory of heat present so many
examples of the simple and constant dispositions which
spring from the general laws of narure; and if the order
whieh is established in these phenomena could be
�86
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
grasped by our senses, it would produce in us an impression comparable to the sensation of a musical sound.
He seems to have united the astronomical and musical spheres,
and extended the domain of both to the entire physical world.
Functions and the Infinite
To explain the nature of Fourier's argument in more detail, I must
examine two concepts essential to it, If there is a convincing purely
geometric argument that any line whatever can be formed from the
sum of an infinite number of circles, I do not know it, and Fourier
relies on the concepts of "infinite series" and "fimction" for his proo£
There is a long and interesting history connected with these ideas,
Return for a moment to the quarrel among Fourier's predecessors
over the mathematics of the vibrating string. Much more was at stake in
this debate than just the phenomenon of vibration itsel£ Euler claimed
that <I> could be any function whatever, even a discontinuous on~ whereas
Bernoulli's appears to be as continuous as the sine waves that make it up.
But with continuity the very meaning of the word "fimction" comes into
question if it is to replace line and figure as the central object of mathematics. Ever since Leibniz first used the Latin junctio with a special significance, this substitution has been a noticeable tendency in that science,
In his early works the term retained a geometric character, and
included lines, such as tangents and perpendiculars to tangents under
the same rubric. But later Leibniz seems to have forgotten these early
experiments with the term, or else decided that its true sense emerged
more in algebraic expression, Towards the end of his life, he goes so
far as to claim that it was the very concept of function that completed the Cartesian revolution, by extending geometry into a region
that requires the differential calculus to complete it:
Now it certainly never entered the mind of any one else
before Leibniz to institute the notation peculiar to the
�STEPHENSON
87
new calrulus by which the imagination is freed from a
perpetual reference to diagrams, as was made by Vieta and
Descartes in their ordinary or Apollonian. geometry;
moreover, the more advanced parts pertaining to
Archimedean geometry, and to the lines which were called
"mechanical" by Descartes, were excluded by the latter.
But now by the calrulus of Leibniz the whole of geometry is subjected to analytical computation, and those transcendent lines that Descartes called mechanical are also
reduced to equations chosen to suit them, by considering
the differences [differentiaeJ dx, ddx, etc., and the sums
that are the inverses of these differences, as fimctions of
the x's; and this, by merely introducing the calrulus,
whereas before this no other fimctions were admissible
but x, xx, x3, vx, etc., that is to say, powers and roots.
This excerpt comes from a work called Historia et Or(go Calculi differentia/is, that is "the History and Origin of the Differential
Calculus:' It was written towards the end of his life by someone purporting to be a friend-but most probably by Leibniz hirnself.-to
defend him against the accusation of plagiarism made by Newton
and his followers. Much is said in this interesting-if polemicalwork about the significance of Leibniz's notation (the d's and elongated s's still in use today), about the relationship between the finite
and the infinitesimal, and about the various mathematical insights
Leibniz claims to have discovered during his life. The question of
who best deserves credit for the discovery of the calculus is an interesting one, but outside my purpose. Whether or not it decides this
issue, the Historia does articulate some of the ideas that (though from
hindsight, to be sure) Leibniz considered to have been essential to the
development of the new science. Among these ideas, his insistence on
the importance of replacing geometry with symbolic or algebraic
forms dominated the calculus for the next two centuries, centering
around the function concept original to him.
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TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
But the most striking phrase in the portion of Leibniz's defense
which I have just quoted is the claim that by his notation "the imagination is freed from a perpetual reference to diagrams:' What, afi:er all, is
wrong with diagrams? A mathematics textbook without a single picture
is a bleak landscape indeed to the beginner. Nevertheless, many textbooks
and treatises have prided themselves on just such pretended purity.
Now we do .not havr to look very far to find philosophers as well
as mathematicians who distrust the senses. To rely on notoriously fallible organs to decide matters of consequence is to build our scientific
house on shifting sand. Nevertheless, I do not think that it is just a
moderns preference for logical purity that moved him to propose his
notation. Leibniz loves logic and symbolic language, yet it is not so
much their rigor that delights him, but rather their power to reach
broadly to the whole universe of mental objects. He does not worry so
much about the senses deceiving us, as about them limiting us. For
Leibniz did not attend to the rigor of his calculus even as much as
many of his contemporaries would have liked. There are times when he
blatantly calls his differentials "infinitely small;' and then, apparently
unsure of their status as such, claims that anyone who wishes can give
them finite magnitude, for it is only their proportion that matters.'
I wish I had the time to say more about Leibniz's calculus; to examine, for example, his claim that "the infinitely small" is "a kind of useful fiction"; the implications of admitting fiction into the realm of
mathematics, and the ways in which fiction might fit into his general
philosophy. But this pursuit would distract us from my present goal,
which is to explain how Fourier might be said to fulfill Ptolemy's project, and how the concept of "function" plays a role in his argument.
Without pictures, what can we rely on? Logic and magnitude: the
correlation of quantities. These are the province proper of the function. Even so, it took a long time for it to rid itself of some unexamined mathematical traditions it had inherited from geometry and even
from algebra. It took a long time for someone like Bolzano, for example, to realize that the continuity of a function need not and should
not presuppose the same kind of intuitive "betweenness" as did the
�STEPHENSON
89
continuity of a line. It took a long time for someone like Fourier to
decide that a function need not be the expression of a single, simple
law, that a function could be made up out of other functions, even an
infinite number of them.. For Fourier to complete his argument, he
had to make room for an unlimited number of sines or cosines.
Series give us a way of embracing the infinite as old as the ages
of Euclid or Aristotle. O~e can, says Aristotle, divide a line infinitely in potentiality but not in actuality. That is, we can imagine the operation
of dividing-say bisecting-a line as a repeatable process. We do not
have to stop and ask for new instructions at every division, since the
instructions are always the same: just keep on dividing by two. If
Achilles can't catch the tortoise it is only because he traps himself
mentally in such endless bisections. But our own failure ever to reach
an ultimate half becomes transformed into a triumph over the infinite by the very uniformity of procedure and our certainty of being
able to make the remaining pieces of our line as small as we please by
continued subdivision. Inability to know the infinite dissolves into
perfect comprehension of any step along the way.
A familiar example from geometry is Euclid's filling of the circle.
Take a regular polygon inscribed within it, he says. It will occupy most
of that circle. If we double the number of its sides it will increase in
size, but never become larger than the circumscribing circle itsel£
Nevertheless, he establishes by careful reasoning, a sufficient number
of doublings must bring us closer to that circle than any given magnitude. Hence another potential infinity arises, a sequence of essentially identical operations by which a polygon draws ever closer to the
circle without surpassing it. And in the ratio and number books he
also confronts infinity: there are an unlimited number of primes;
ratios are the same when the infinite sets of equimultiples of their
terms always bear the same relationships to one another.
But let us be precise. Euclid never uses such language. The number
of primes he proves to be greater than any given number. The equimultiples of the Fifth Definition of Book V are "any;' not "every"
equimultiple. The "infmite" is not a noun. It is not even an adjective.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
90
"Greater (or less) than any given magnitude" is the phrase that recurs
where we are tempted to read "infinite:' As Aristotle says, there is no
actual but only a potential infinite. Thus an "infinite series" would be
a misnomer for Euclid or his predecessors and successors. Much is
concealed by the ellipsis or the "etc:' when we see a series written so
provocatively with their aid: "1 +2+3+4+5+6+7+ ... etc:' But the misnomer and the deceptive language gained advocates nonetheless.
The contemplation of the potential infinite in the form of a
repeated operation might give us hope of demonstrating Fourier's
Theorem. Numbers are not the only possible components of infinite
series. Since we want to add circles or sine waves, we will have to
move up from numbers to functions. But before we do so, please note
one characteristic of the examples given so far that we should not
take for granted: we have embraced the infinite in the form of a
repeated process but we should not therefore tacitly believe that the
operations must always be of the same kind. A difficult quantity like
Jt can often be approximated by a series that seems to build rationally. Leibniz was so proud of his discovery of the series:
:n:/4 = 1 - 1/3 +
1/5 - 1/7 + 1/9 - 1/11 + ...
that he called it numerus Dei without a hint of any arrogance: "the number of God:' Yet a decimal expression for Jt is itself an "infinite series":
3
+ 1/10 + 4/100 + 1/1000 + 5/10000 + 9/100000 +
...
and no sequence of its digits will ever repeat continually. It should
remain a question for us whether every "infinite series" can be recast
into a repeating form.
The Proof
Armed with functions and a grip on infinite series we can at least
sketch Fourier's proo£ Without invoking many of the technical tools of
�STEPHENSON
91
the integral calculus, we can glimpse its power through the graph of a continuous fUnction. Fourier himself relies on this imagt,. Now look again at
the series (3) that he claims will approximate any function whatever:
<j>(x) = a1sin(x)
+ a2sin(2x) + a3sin(3x) + ...
All that distinguishes, one Fourier series from another is the size
of the coefficients a1, a2, a3,••. of the sine (or cosine) terms. His
demonstration, therefore, depends on the assurance with whicll these
numbers can be found for any gi~en function. Now multiply both
sides of this equation by some one of the sine terms, and integrate
the product between 0 and :n:. A small bit of labor in the fields of the
calculus will convince you that every term on the right will become
zero except the one corresponding to the particular sine we have chosen. That is,
the integrated series reduces to the following simple equation:
J;(x)sin(nx)dx = anf: sin2(nx)dx =an :n:/2
which tells us that any coefficient an is proportional to a definite
integral based on the original function, <j>, and a sine. Since <j> is arbitrary, you might think that we can say no more until we know its specific form. However, Fourier thinks of a definite integral as a number that can measure the area surmounted by a curve. If <j> is any drawable function whatever, he says, multiplying its values by the simultaneous values of a sine function in Cartesian fashion will not destroy
its ability to defme areas. And that is all we need to know to be convinced that the definite integral exists, that it equals some real number, and therefore so does the coefficient proportional to that integral. That is, a Fourier series for any sucll function can be established
even without actually calculating its coefficients. The existence of the coefficients guarantee the validity of the series, so to speak.
This concludes the only truly technical part of this lecture. From
this sketcll of Fourier's argument I hope you can gather at least this:
any drawable function whatever, any function whose graph is made up
�92
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
of continuous pieces (and that includes most functions you can
name, and most that you can't) can be approximated as closely as you
please by a Pythagorean series of sines or cosines with numerical
coefficients (see fig. 4, below).
Before I conclude with some speculations about the greater significance of their work, let me compare and contrast the ancient and
the modern champion of circles. Both find an underlying simplicity in
nature in that form, but they do not regard this simplicity In exactly
the same way. For Ptolemy the hypothesis of circular motion amounts
to a necessary condition for knowledge. He never draws the orbit of
a planet that results from the compounding of circles. A separate consideration of each anomalistic circle will give us a glimpse of the
divine, he believes, and so lead us into the Platonic world of Being and
Truth. Fourier makes no such declaration of faith. Unlike Ptolemy he
is interested in the paths and shapes corresponding to functions.
Circles confront him from within the phenomena willy-nilly, or rather
spring unexpectedly from the mathematical analysis of these phe-
X
�93
STEPHENSON
nomena. He seizes the opportunity to generalize this analysis far
beyond its origins in the study of heat; however, he insists that "the
profound study of nature is the most fertile source of mathematical
discoveries" because it excludes "vague questions and calculation without issue:' The very first phrase of Fourier's Treatise is, "Primary causes are unknown to us:' I do not know whether Ptolemy would share
this declaration of ignorance without qualification, or disparage
"vague questions" as impatiently as Fourier, but he does not attempt
to find the source of the celestial movements he describes so carefully. Despite his introductory homage to Aristotle, who devoted a good
part of his Physics and Metaphysics to the discovery of causes on Earth
and in the sky, Ptolemy seems content with the analysis of the form
of those motions. Both he and Fourier ultimately rejoice somewhere
just short of cause, in the knowledge that the world is fruitful in ideas,
and hence will lead us to pursue the truth. However complicated the
analysis which discovers them, the outcome raises our sights in a satisfying way. But is there more to circles than meets the eye?
Aristotle again: Circles of Thought
One of Aristotle's deepest insights illuminates the edge of his
physics. The circular motion of the heavens--of the starry sphere that
bears day and night in its revolutions, he says, can rise only out of the
desire for knowledge. There is a connection at its periphery between
the world of nature and the world of thought, and the longing of the
one for the other moves it. But since truth has no direction, the only
kind of movement appropriate to such a desire is circular: rotation,
movement in place, which is both motion and motionlessness.
Can we take Aristotle's vision seriously? There is, after all, no
edge to our universe, so we have been told. Nor can Copernicus's
arguments fail to persuade us that the stars do not really revolve
around us. Nevertheless, that thinking does involve a circular motion
of some kind, and that it can move the world: these are both propositions that I think can and should be defended.
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THEST. JOHN'S REVIEW
The latter is obvious. Thought changes things. We see that in most
of the objects around us, and in ourselves. "All men desire to know;'
and that desire moves us to explore and build and observe and draw
and measure and calculate and read and write and tame and talk. It's all
very unnatural, if by "natural" I mean merely the thoughtless spread of
matter and energy. But once a being capable of thinking begins to act
on nature.and on his O!Vn nature, then the whole world changes.
You might want to object that I have distorted Aristotle's conception, that he intended the stars rather than us to be moved quite
literally by their lust for truth. That is why they circle so swiftly:
because they are the closest to and have the clearest perception of
knowledge. But I do not think that Aristotle meant the stars to be so
separate from us. Of a different stuff, yes, one that does· not impede
their vision and their action as much as ours does. But it is not just
the distant stars that are spun by the unmoved mover, it is the world
as a whole. After all, the circuit that brings round the same constellations every night also brings us cycles of the suns warmth and light
that inspire all living creatures to birth and growth. The "world as a
whole'' includes the sublunar sphere, which, even if it itself does not
rotate, does participate in the desire that continually brings everything capable of embodying a specific virtue and excellence into the
maturity that realizes those ideals in a cycle of life.
I do not mean that Aristotle believes in progress beyond the individual, except incidentally. That is, the "world as a whole'' does not get
any closer to the object of its desire. He can see no providence in history. Perhaps that is because the ttuth is infmitely far away or infinitely
rich, so that whatever knowledge we human beings acquire is insignificant with respect to what remains to learn. Or perhaps Aristotle is a historical pessimist: whatever progress our race achieves is bound to be
undone by war or some other disaster. Or perhaps the bits of knowledge that we acquire and pass on to our heirs does accumulate, but this
accumulation does not count as progress, because it does not change our
essential nature. Whatever the explanation, it is clear that the world both
moves continually and stays the same. That is why its motion is circular.
�STEPHENSON
95
But even without these arguments from Nature, one might be persuaded that thought in itself requires a kind of circular inotion, especially if by "thought" one means self-conscious thought. There may be, as
Aristotle insists, a kind of thought that does not move at all: contemplation, the present enjoyment of truth known and grasped in itsel£ The
embrace of such moments, when for an instant we glimpse the truth,
and which Aristotle calls t)le most divine and happy activity possible, is
VO'I]O't~ voflcrero~ What better circularity could be found than such an
expression, "thinking of thinking;' even if it is not a moving circle.
Most of our thinking does move-from step to step in an argument, from one perception or apperception to another. Each of these
steps should form a unit, a momentary resting place like the primary
one of contemplation. But the motion of a whole argument also does
close upon itself the way a circle does. Any sentence ends with.a period, that is to say it is periodic, and to utter a meaningful sentence is
to "have in the beginning the end in mind;' as Aristotle says.
Sentences necessarily mirror thought; some would even say that we
think in sentences. Speech, therefore, corroborates the claim that even
discursive thinking is a circular motion.
The self of self-consciousness, or of self-evidence are one and
the same. Even when we engage in the deepest kinds of thinking,
when we "lose ourselves," the unity of self accompanies the activity.
You need not attend consciously to the self that thinks for it to be
present and for it to take part in forming the thought, in making it
one thought, your thought. The same circularity that is evident when
we do contemplate ourselves is always there at the periphery, if not
in the center, of our thinking.
Ptolemy claims that the study of the stars will bring us closer to
"the things that are always what they are:' Aristotle's metaphysics
should make it clear why movement in circles forms a necessary part
of this dialectic. By analyzing the motions of the planets into component circular motions, we expose the nature of thinking itself, and
thereby bring nature and humanity together into a single science. A
book or a lecture becomes a world, with its own intellectual stars and
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
planets, and the world becomes a dialogue. Each moment in this
dialectical chain is a tiny mental circle, adding to and correcting the
scientific legacy and conversation that precedes it.
What does science look like through Ptolemy's eyes? An endeavor
to discover thought in the universe, that is to say, ultimately: objects of
contemplation. To find a simple circle of movement within the celestial manifold is to focu$ on the truth that causes that movement, and
it is always the pleasant reward of our effort to dwell with that truth
until some other anomaly beckons us to find its center and compass.
Fourier's world appears both similar to and different from
Ptolemy's. Circles churn beneath its surface, and numbers as well, and
it is through these that our understanding comes to understand, much
as Ptolemy says. But for Fourier the process is essentially infinite: the
truth lies not within these units of thought, as it does for Ptolemy, but
in the whole that we can never reach but always approximate. The
musical tone that led him to his theorem requires such an infinity: the
ideal vibrating string pulses simultaneously in all its infinite parts.
The vibrating string is not yet music, only musical: the promise of
music. Thus perhaps Fourier's world is a world still to be composed
and never finished, whereas Ptolemy faces us immediately with the
true and changeless world behind appearances at each moment of discovery. Since nature mirrors the world of thought for both these men,
however, the science of circle and synthesis, of trial and error, of hit
and miss and correction, of guess and refmement always reaches
beyond physics into the realm of everything that thought can touch.
Notes
1. The "sine curve" in its first incarnation was called "companion to
the cycloid:' C£ Roberval.
2. This is almost exactly the procedure of Newton, who recommends
a kind of imaginary microscope in lemma VII of his Principia to display the relationship of vanishing quantities.
�t
A Forgotten Revolution
Curtis Wilson
This book is about the mathematics, science, and technology of
the late fourth, third, and second centuries BC. In its detailed argumentation, it challenges many long and widely held views. Its thesis
is extraordinary.
The "forgotten revolution" of Russo's title signifies nothing less
than the first emergence of science, both exact or deductive science
and experimental science. It took place, according to Russo, not in
modern times but in the Hellenistic Age, with the work of Euclid,
Aristarchus, Eratosthenes, Ctesibius, Herophilus, Archimedes,
Apollonius, Seleucus, Hipparchus, and others. Conventionally the
Hellenistic Age has been dated from the death of Alexander in 323
BC to the conquest of Egypt by the Romans in 30 BC, but in science,
according to Russo, it may be said to have essentially ended by 145
BC, the year in which Ptolemy VIII, for political motives and possibly
as an agent of Roman policy, systematically destroyed the Greek scientific community in Alexandria (see Polybius, History, XXXIV, 14).
A 180-year efflorescence of science, virtually extinguished not only as
an historical phase, but also in historical memory: such is Russo's
theme. Fragments of and clues to this efflorescence survived, but
often distorted by later misinterpretation. The science of the 17th
century, according to Russo, came about in considerable measure as
a recovery of Hellenistic science.
Prongs of this thesis that may astonish are the following. Russo,
while granting that articulate rationality was an achievement and
legacy of the Greeks of the 5th and 4th centuries BC, and that this
rationality was an essential element in Hellenistic science, argues that
Lucio Russo, La rivoluzione dimenticata. Milan: Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 1996.
Curtis Wilson is tutor emeritus at St. John's College.
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it evolved into exact science only in the time of Euclid. (This claim
presupposes Russo's definition of "exact science," which I'll come to
shortly.)
Secondly, exact science according to Russo emerged out of the
interaction of Greek rationality with the technical cultures of the
empires that Alexander conquered-above all the Egyptian empire.
Egyptian technology at the time, an affair of lore and tradition that
had accumulated over centuries, was superior to Greek technology.
Alexander's aim was to Hellenize the world. In the newly conquered
empires, as ruled by him and after his death by his successors, Greek
intellectuals were put in administrative roles. Under the beneficient
reigns of Ptolemy I Soter (ruling from 323 to 283 BC) and Ptolemy II
Philadelphos (ruling from 283 to 246 Be), Greek administrators were
challenged to rationalize and improve upon the technological
processes they were required to supervise. Russo sees the invention of
both exact and experimental science as a response to that challenge.
Thirdly, according to Russo, as the Romans, scarcely out of barbarism and totally ignorant of science, conquered the Mediterranean
world, the maintenance of scientific culrure became increasingly difficult and finally impossible. The transmission of scientific culture by
oral instruction was thus interrupted; and when post-Hellenistic
writers like Vitruvius, Plutarch, Pliny the Elder, and Seneca came to
write of science and scientists, they failed to understand the terminology and methodology of the Hellenistic works that had come
down to them, and remained largely ignorant of their true mathematical and experimental content. It is a mistake, in Russo's view, to
paint a picture of a unified Greco-Roman culture, as Plutarch did in
his Parallel Lives.
To argue for such a sweeping thesis, Russo has to be a textual
archaeologist, a detective who ferrets out and connects together a
multitude of small dues. There is much in his book that is admittedly conjectural; much that the reader may wish to investigate further. In the following, I give references to relevant pages to help the
reader in locating the pieces of Russo's argument referred to.
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An early question must be: What does. Russo mean by "exact science"? His definition is rather restrictive (p. 31f£). "Exact science;' as
he proposes to use the term, has to do not with concrete objects of
the real world but with specific theo'retical entities, for instance angles
and segments in geometry, or temperature and entropy in thermodynamics; these do not exist in nature, but are cultural products, originating in human activity., The theories of "exact science" have a rigorously axiomatic-deductive structure; they start from a few fundamental enunciations (postulates or axioms or principles), and deduce
consequences from them by strictly logical inference. Expertise in a
theory of this kind means being able to 'pose and solve exercises or
problems formulated within th~ theory's ambit, and agree on the correctness of the solutions; the existence of such expertise is an identifying characteristic of "exact science:' Finally, applications to the real
world are made possible by "rules of correspondence" between the
entities of the theory and concrete objects. Technology and exact science, in Russo's understanding, are distinct bu1; go hand in hand.
Is there a documented use of "exact science" in classical, preHellenistic times? Russo says No (p. 39). Eudemus, a disciple of
Aristotle, wrote a history of geometry (known only through references to it by Proclus in his commentary on the first book of Euclid's
Elements), in which he assigned the discovery of certain geometrical
theorems to earlier thinkers (p. 51£). For instance, he makes Thales
the discoverer of the theorem that triangles with one side and the
adjacent angles equal are equal, because Thales is said to have used
this proposition to calculate the distance of ships observed at sea.
But, counters Russo, one could use this proposition, accepting it as
true, without having formally proved it. More generally, Russo
doubts there was a motive for demonstrating apparently obvious
truths (like the equality of vertical angles, or the equality of the
halves into which a diameter divides a circle, "theorems" that
Eudemus also assigns to Thales) before it was discovered that deductions could lead to quite unsuspected truths. The deduction of theorems probably began in Plato's time, but the notion of a unified
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axiomatic-deductive system hadn't yet solidified (p. 55). None of
Euclid's five postulates is attested in pre-Euclidean geometry, nor are
there any alternative sets of postulates documented as having been set
forth before Euclid (p. 65).
It is thus Russo's view that one author, Euclid, with a unitary
aim, put together Euclid's Elements, which became the paradigm of a
deductive system for a\1 succeeding ages. But he suspects that the
text as we have it contains interpolations. Among these may be the
definitions of u point," uline," u straight line," u surface;' and u plane
surface" at the start of Book I, which possibly stem from Hero of
Alexandria, of the first century AD (pp. 235-44). These definitions
are "realistic;' implying the existence of their objects in the world,
rather than nominal like the other definitions of Book I. Euclid,
Russo believes, had a "constructivist" rather than a "realistic" conception of his geometry (pp. 71-75). The first three postulates state
the allowable operations: to draw a line from any point to any point,
to extend the line, and to describe a circle. These operations are the
clear and explicit transposition to the level of mathematical theory
of the operations normally executed on papyrus, using pen and ink,
straight edge and compasses. To be sure, there is an enormous difference between mathematics and engineering design; but the postulates "model" what the actual instruments do, so that it is perfectly
clear whence the postulates derive and what the "rules of correspondence" are that permit the mathematics to be applied. By means
of his unitary starting point and strict adherence to deduction, the
mathematician becomes independent of both philosophical speculation and immediate engineering concerns (p. 57). But the relevance
of mathematical science to engineering applications, Russo believes,
was something Hellenistic society was unlikely to let the mathematician forget.
According to Russo, it is an indication of Euclid's constructivism
that he uses the term <IT\JlELOV (sign, mark, token) for "point"; the
earlier term had been <nt'YJ.la. The latter term, Russo states, has like
the Latin punctum the realistic sense of a prick or stab, whereas a
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01)fJ£tOV or sign is a cultural construction or an interpretation of one
thing as meaning another. Archimedes, Apollonius of Perga, and
apparently Hipparchus continued to use 01)flEtov for "point:' but in
the post-Hellenistic period there was a rerum to the earlier term with
its realistic connotation (pp. 72-73).
Another indication of Euclid's constructivism is that all entities
in the Elements are constr';'cted on the basis of the initial postulates
(pp. 73-74). His inclusion of the fifth or parallel postulate among his
postulates, without any attempt to demonstrate its truth or otherwise
comment on it, is consonant with a high level of sophistication. He
had evidently found the postulate to be necessary for the derivation
of the properties of the figures constructed. His formulation of the
posrulate is sparing, ascetic; it does not speak of infinity ( c£ pp. 61,
331). The ascetic choice of basis suggests an artfulness that has
reached mature self-awareness, that knows it can proceed only by
construction.
But what about the often alleged 'platonic' inspiration of Euclid's
Elements? Let us distinguere, as the schoolmen used to say.
Mathematicians, in pursuing their deductions, discover truths hitherto unsuspected. One such discovery was that there were five and only
five of the so-called 'platonic bodies; the convex polyhedra that the
Demiurge in Plato's Timaeus uses for the imagined construction of
the universe. Do such 'platonic bodies' have an "independent existence," whatever that might mean? Not independent of the constructivist starting point, if Russo is right. He is urging that the
Hellenistic mathematicians were conscious, and perhaps even proud,
of their independence of metaphysical speculation.
At the same time, Russo believes, they were sharply aware ofthe
engineering relevance of their propositions. Euclid's Elements had widespread application to the solution of architectural and engineering
problems. The standard method for solving a problem was to dra'f a
diagram, and apply the propositions of Euclid's Book II (which
Russo, like Heath, calls "geometrical algebra"). The method can be
comparable in accuracy with the slide rule, the standard engineering
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calculative device before the age of the digital calculator. The modern
complaint about the ancient'aesthetic' preference for straight lines and
circles is thus, according to Russo, badly misplaced (pp. 57-60). In the
technological context in which Russo places it, the constructivism he
sees in Euclid's Elements fits comfortably. Russo finds evidence of the
same constructivism in Apollonius of Perga (pp. 72, 113-14).
Russo's sense of tl,e technological context is supported by the
surviving Hellenistic mathematical treatises that are explicitly concerned with sciences we would call "applied." Euclid's Optics is a
deductive science having to do with visual perception, and permitting
the quantitative determination of the apparent sizes of objects seen
from a given distance and given standpoint (pp. 79-83). The fUndamental 'elements' to be considered here are il\vet~, straight lines collocated in a cone with apex at the eye. It is by considering how
objects are placed in this cone that we understand how they appear
perspectivally. The term OIJIEt~ in Euclid's treatise has usually been
translated "visual rays:' Beginning in the fourth century AD, we find
complaints about Euclid's claiming that vision occurs by visual rays
issuing from the eye, rather than by rays of light entering the eye. But
this, says Russo, is misinterpretation. Euclid is not proposing a physical cause of vision, but a geometrical theory of how things appear,
which requires a consideration of the visual cone, the Oljlet~ or lines
of sight with apex at the eye. The use in paintings of geometrical
rules of perspective is documented for Euclid's time, but not earlier;
geometrical perspective was rediscovered during the Renaissance in
the context of an interest in Hellenistic culture (p. 81 ).
The treatise "On the equilibrium of plane figures" by
Archimedes (ca. 287 BC- 212 Be) gives us what we call the "law of the
lever;' and shows how to determine the "centers of gravity" of variously shaped plane figures (pp. 91-94). Archimedes' choice of "plane
figures'' rather than "weights'' is perhaps a way of insisting on the
quantifiability of his subject matter. In this treatise he lays the basis
for the determination of the "mechanical advantage" of simple
machines, making possible the quantitative design of machines for
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the lifting of a given weight through a given distance with the avail"
able force. Aristotle had asserted that a single rna!"' could not move a
ship; a century later, Archimedes showed how by an appropriate
machine the single man could do it. Don't believe, says Russo, the
picture that Plutarch gives us of Archimedes as an otherworldly theorist; Plutarch was writing two and a half centuries after Archimedes
was killed by a Roman soldier, and knew little or nothing of
Archimedes' mathematics.
Similarly, Archimedes' treatise "On Floating Bodies'' laid the scientific basis for naval architecture, leading, according to Russo, to a
major increase in size of ships (pp. 94-97, 125-27). Other Hellenistic
sciences had similar engineering relevance: hydraulics, for instance,
for the delivery of water under pressure to elevated citadels as in
Pergamon (pp. 130-33); and catoptrics for the construction of parabolic mirrors, employed in the lighthouses that now came to be built
in the larger ports of the Mediterranean, including the great lighthouse on Faro in the harbor of Alexandria, one of the seven wonders
of the world, projecting a light that could be seen for 48 kilometers
(pp. 127-29).
The Hellenistic Age, Russo believes, saw an unprecedented
development and application of technology. He reviews the evidence in his Chapter 6 (pp. 179-200); it comes mainly from administrative records and twentieth-century excavations. A good deal of
it was assembled by Rostovzev in the early decades of this century
(see his Social and Economic History ?f the Hellenistic World, Oxford, 1941).
The early Ptolemies energetically pursued a policy of increasing
agricultural production. The areas cultivated under royal control
were increased by the draining of swamplands and the irrigation of
the edges of the desert. New machines, with iron parts (possibly
including geared wheels, which are first documented for this time),
were introduced for the raising of water and the sowing and reaping
of grain. New kinds of wheat were imported; old and new kinds
were hybridized. That this policy was successful is suggested by the
following facts (p. 190):
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(a) In late Pharaonic (pre-Ptolemaic) times, the population of
Egypt is estimated at three million.
(b) In 1836 it was estimated that the agricultural lands of Egypt,
if utilized to the maximum, could support a population of eight million; by 1882, ·as a result of economic reforms, the population of
Egypt had increased to 6,800,000,
(c) Alexandria, fo4nded by Alexander in 331 BC, had in .50 BC
about 500,000 inhabitants; it was the largest city in the Mediterranean
world. In the first century AD, the population of Egypt was estimated on the basis of fiscal records to be 7,500,000.
And Egypt during the Hellenistic period not only consumed
grain but exported it on a large scale, along with many industrial
products such as glass, ceramics, paper, textiles, perfumes, and pharmaceuticals (pp. 190-95).
Economic prosperity led to a large increase in wealth, not only of
the Hellenistic rulers but of an expanding middle class. In the first
century BC Diodorus Siculus described Alexandria as "the first city
of the world, by far superior to all others for elegance, size, riches and
luxury:' Its broad avenues were illuminated by lamps throughout the
night; its houses were supplied with running water; its theaters and
baths provided entertainment and recreation, All the genres of painting that would later be developed in the 17th century-portraiture,
landscapes, still-lifes-appeared here in the third century BC.
And by royal policy scientific research was richly supported. The
Ptolemies created at Alexandria the Museum, the first public institute of research known to history (p. 182). There, just as at our
Institute for Advanced Study, meals were served in common, and
mathematicians and scientists exchanged ideas. At the disposition of
the Museum's guests was the famous Library. Ptolemy II
Philadelphus not only bought books from merchants but requested
copies of new books from all the states with which he had diplomatic relations. Ships docking at Alexandria were required to list all
the books they carried and to allow them to be copied. Within a few
decades the Library contained a half million books. A separate sec-
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tion of the Library was open to the public, constituting the first public library. Pergamon under the Attalid dynasty (263 - 133 Be) followed similar policies, instituting a library and art collection, and
fostering interchange of ideas between mathematicians, scientists,
and engineers. At Antioch, too, mathematical and scientific research
was supported under the Seleucids.
In the sciences of .hydrostatics, hydraulics, and pneumatics,
experimentation was a prerequisite for formulating postulates or
principles, since the latter did not emerge as obvious truths from
ordinary experience. Again, in the breeding of plants and animals,
experimentation was the only avenue for advance. Active experimentalism, according to Russo, emerges naturally out of a constructivist
"exact science;' self-consciously pursued.
Russo makes much of the experimentation of the anatomist and
physiologist Herophilus, active in Alexandria at the start of the
Hellenistic period (pp. 154-69). He it was who first introduced the
taking of the pulse as a diagnostic procedure. For this purpose, an
accurate clock was required. At just this time, his associate at the
Museum, Ctesibius, had modified the ancient clepsydra or water
clock by making it a constant-level device (by means of constant
inflow combined with an overflow trough), so as to insure a constant
pressure on the water issuing from the orifice at the bottom (pp. 12122). This orifice was lined with gold or gemstone, to avoid corrosion
or incrustation. The water issuing from it was collected in a second
receptacle and measured by a float that moved an indicator over a
graduated scale. With such an instrument Herophilus determined
average pulse rates for persons of different ages.
Herophilus dissected human bodies and carried out physiological experiments. A century after Aristotle had declared the function
of the human brain to be that of cooling the blood, he had recognized it as the central organ of the nervous system; and by experiments (perhaps on condemned prisoners-horrible thought!) had
distinguished the motor and sensory nerves issuing from the spinal
cord. He had discovered the reticular structure of the retina, sug-
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
gesting the discrete nature of the visual receptors; and this discovery
may underlie Euclid's assumption, in his Optics, of a discrete set of
0\j/Et<; as forming the cone of lines of sight. Denying the adequacy
of ordinary language-an adequacy on which, according to Russo,
Aristotle had depended-Herophilus invented special names for various anatomical organs that he discovered, such as the epididymus
and the Fallopian tubes; many of these organs would. be rediscovered
only in the 16th century.' Galen (second century AD) expressed disapproval of Herophilus's raising strong objections to every proposed
cause of a physiological phenomenon, then proceeding to make use
of such causes; to Galen these actions seemed self-contradictory. In
Russo's view, Herophilus was merely being critical and self-aware in
his use of hypotheses (pp. 165-66). The school of Herophilus persisted into the first century AD, but was then extinguished amidst
growing incomprehension of Hellenistic science.
Russo's account of Hellenistic astronomy (pp. 99-109, 251-84) is
not the least daring of his reconstructions. Only two works. of
Hellenistic astronomy, both minor, have come down to us:
Aristarchus's On the Dimensions and Distances of the Sun and the Moon, and
Hipparchus's commentary on Aratus's poem Phenomena. Neither tells
us anything about the motions of the Moon or planets. But a passage of Archimedes's Sand-Reckoner states that Aristarchus (fl. 280-264
BC) had produced "demonstrations of the [planetaryJ phenomena:'
Plutarch (first century AD) in his De facie quae in orbe lunae apparel states
that Aristarchus had sought to "save the appearances'' by assuming
the Earth to have motions of rotation and revolution; Aristarchus's
theory was evidently heliocentric. This theory appears to have made
little immediate stir, and it has been generally assumed that it
dropped out of sight for 1800 years, until revived by Copernicus. Not
so, says Russo.
One myth to be rejected is that Aristarchus, because of his heliocentrism, was accused of impiety; the story comes from a misreading, by the 17th-century philologist G. Menage, of a passage in
Plutarch's De facie (pp. 104, note 101). That absolute rest is not
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detectable by observation was a commonplace among Hellenistic
writers: Euclid ·in his Optics states that the appearances of motion
depend solely on relative motion between observer and object
observed; a similar statement by Herophilus is reported by Galen;
and Lucretius in De rerum natura makes much of the same point.
Heracleides of Pontus and others in the fourth century BC had proposed accounting for the daily apparent westward motion of the stars
by assuming an eastward diurnal rotation of the Earth; such an
assumption already challenges the naive belief that we can observe
absolute rest, since it implies that the inhabitants of Mediterranean
cities are being whirled eastward at. speeds of around 1000 km/hr.
Mathematicians, being constructivists, would not have made a realistic or exclusive claim for the heliocentric theory; its excellence for
them would have been in the elegance with which it accounted for the
appearances. Archimedes mentioned Aristarchus's heliocentric theory
without raising physical objections to it.
We know that Archimedes constructed a planetarium; its design,
Russo argues, must have been essentially heliocentric. Cicero saw it
two centuries later, and said of it that "the invention of Archimedes
is to be admired in that he thought out how a single conversion could
reproduce dissimilar, inequable, and contrasting motions" (p. 104).
Cicero's stress on the unicity of the
11
conversion," Russo urges, is
incompatible with a mechanism of Ptolemaic type; it suggests a single center about which the revolutions occur. Assume a mechanism in
which all planets revolve about the Sun in the same direction; to show
what the appearances would be for a terrestrial observer it would suffice to hold the Earth fixed while the 'conversion' continued. Another
planetarium is credited to Posidonius of Rhodes (first century Be),
and Russo believes that it, also, is likely to have been heliocentric in
the sense just explained. By contrast, an apparatus of the type
described in Ptolemy's Planetary Hypotheses, incorporating a totally separate epicyclic mechanism for each planet, would be difficult to construct and unrevealing as an object of contemplation.
Russo believes the Hellenistic scientists went beyond the mere
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
proposal of a heliocentric scheme, to a consideration of mechanical
concepts that would be compatible with it. Let me cite some key
pieces of the evidence he brings to bear.
Hero of Alexandria, now dated to the first century AD, is viewed
by Russo as reflecting Hellenistic ideas and discoveries. In his
Mechanica (I, iv, 20-21) he announced: "We shall demonstrate that
weights placed on a fric~ionless plane can be moved by a force smaller than any given force:' The demonstration consists in approximating the horizontal plane by means of a series of inclined planes with
ever smaller inclinations (pp. 251-52). Here we would seem to be
close to Galileo's experimentation with inclined planes, and to the
modern idea of inertia, according to which a body set in motion continues its motion without the application of force. This discovery
crucially depends on the recognition of friction as a force that under
ordinary terrestrial conditions brings motion to a stop.
That gravicy causes acceleration was well-known to the ancients,
including Aristotle. Strato of Lampsacus (d. ca. 270 BC), successor of
Theophrastus as head of the Peripatetic school in Athens, according
to a report of Simplicius (commentator on Aristotle, fl. ca. AD 530),
noted that this acceleration was observable in a stream of falling
water, which after a certain point in its fall breaks into
separate drops. In the pseudo-Aristotelian Mechanical Problems (not
datable, but presumably late- or post-Hellenistic), immediately after
the explanation of the parallelogram rule (for what we would call the
vectorial combination of motions), it is observed that a point moving in circular motion is subject to two simultaneous displacements:
one described as according to nature ( Kma (j>ucrtv ), along the tangent, and the other contrary to nature (napa (j>Ucrtv ), directed to the
center (Mechanical Problems, 849a, 1417).
Plutarch's De facie is a dialogue in which one of the interlocutors
takes the side of the mathematicians while the other opposes the
mathematicians' "paradoxes." According to the first of these interlocutors, "Certainly the Moon is kept from falling by its own motion
and the rapidity of its rotation, just as objects in a sling are kept from
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falling by circular motion. In fact, motion according to nature guides
each body, unless it is deviated by something else. For this reason the
Moon does not follow its weight, because it is equilibrated by the
effect of the rotation:' Plutarch's source evidently assigned weight
(heavine~s toward the Earth) to the Moon, and appears to have had
a dynamics based on the principle of inertia. Russo (pp .254-55) gives
evidence tending to date the theory reported by Plutarch to the time
of Hipparchus (second half of the second century Be).
A passage in Seneca's Naturales quaestiones, VII, xxv, 6-7, can be
interpreted as expressing the same theory, but now extended to all the
planets: "We have met with those who say to us: You err in judging
that any star can stop in its path or go in reverse; the celestial bodies
cannot stop or turn away; all advance; as they are once launched, so
they proceed.... Should they be stopped, the bodies now conserved
by their regular motion would fall the one on the other. What is then
the cause why some seem to turn back? A falling in with the Sun, and
the nature of their circular paths, so positioned as for a certain time
to deceive the observers, impose the appearance of slowness on them.
Thus ships, although moving under full sail, yet seem to stand still."
The passage, Russo admits, may allow of a non-heliocentric interpretation, but he believes the heliocentrism of Seneca's source is
detectable in it. And that source may well have been Hipparchus, who
may also have been the source of the mathematical "paradoxes" discussed in Plutarch's De facie. Pliny in his Natura/is historia (II, 95) says
that Hipparchus had an ingenious theory for explaining planetary
motions, and laments the failure of anyone to exploit the Hipparchan
legacy.
Archimedes's discovery of the buoyancy principle, Russo argues,
made Aristotle's theory of gravity untenable (p. 273). The discovery
showed that there was no such thing as absolute lightness, opposed to
gravity. All terrestrial bodies are heavy, but bodies float in water or rise
in air because they are less dense. In face of this discovery, Aristotle's
theory of the elements becomes unsustainable, and a major reason for
supposing celestial bodies qualitatively different from terrestrial ones
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
is removed. In his treatise on floating bodies, Archimedes derives the
sphericity of the ocean's surface from the symmetry of gravity about
the Earth's center. Later, as reported by the historian Diodorus
Siculus, it was suggested that the Earth was initially fluid, and that the
Earth's spherical form is the result of the gravity of its parts. The
apparently spherical forms of the Sun and the Moon were explained
in the same way; thus Plutarch in his De facie reports the notion that
the Sun draws to itself the parts of which it consists, just as the Earth
does (p. 274).
According to the geographer Strabo (first century BC ),
Eratosthenes (third century Be) objected to Archimedes' claim that
the form of the oceans was exactly spherical; the tides, he believed,
were due to the Moon's attraction, which thus altered the spherical.
form (p. 275). Also according to Strabo, Seleucus, a mathematician of
the first century BC, studied the tides of the Arabian Sea, and found
an annual cycle: the two daily tides differed maximally in size when
the syzygies (full or new moon) occurred in the solstices (in midwinter or summer), and differed least when the syzygies occurred in
the equinoxes (in spring and autumn). The effect suggests that the
Sun's attraction as well as the Moon's is involved in producing the
tides, and that the effect of these bodies is maximal when they are at
the zenith or the antipodal point (see Appendix).
Pliny in his Natura/is historia (II, 212, 213, 216) seems to be referring
to Seleucus when he says that the Moon and Sun cause the tides, and
mentions that the difference between the two daily tides becomes nil
at the time of the equinoxes. He also remarks on the retardation of
the tides with respect to the positions of the Sun and Moon: a
remark that makes sense only in the context of a gravitational explanation. That Seleucus believed in the Earth's motion is shown by a
passage in Plutarch's Platonicae quaestiones ( 1006 c), where he mentions
the idea that "the Earth was projected, not confined and stable, but
revolving and rotating, as successively affirmed by Aristarchus and
Seleucus, the first only assuming it by hypothesis and Seleucus rather
proving it:' Russo's suggestion is that Seleucus based both his theory
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of the tides and his proof of the heliocentric theory on the hypothesis of a gravitational interaction with the Sun (pp. 276-78 ).
Hipparchus (second century BC) was a younger contemporary
of Seleucus, and according to Strabo accepted Seleucus's findings
on the tides (p. 278). Hipparchus is known from Ptolemy's Syntaxis
to have discovered the precession of the equinoxes, determined the
distance of the Moon as, 59 Earth-radii from the Earth's surface (a
good value), and developed an accurate theory for the Sun's motion,
and a theory giving accurately the Moon's positions in the syzygies.
From other sources we know that Hipparchus wrote on gravity, and
Russo is of opinion that Hipparchus's theory was one of universal
gravity, in which the Sun kept the planets in their circular courses
by attracting them out of their inertial paths.
Of the several items of evidence that Russo assembles in support
of the idea that such a theory had been developed in the late
Hellenistic period, I shall cite only one, a passage from the De arcbitectura of Vitruvius, a Roman engineer of the first century BC. The
passage (in De arcbitectura IX, I, 12-13; Russo, p. 267) is obscure; Russo
assumes that, like much else in Vitruvius, it stems from a Greek
source (possibly Hipparchus), one that Vitruvius found difficult to
interpret. Here is the translation of the passage given in the Loeb
Classical Library:
... the mighty force of the Sun extending its rays in
the form of a triangle draws to itself the planets as
they follow, and, as it were curbing and restraining
those which precede, prevents their onward movement
and compels them to return to it and to be in the sign
of another trigon.
Perhaps it will be asked, why does the Sun cause
delay by these heats, in the fifth sign away from itself
rather than in the second or third? I shall therefore
explain how this seems to happen. Its rays are spread
out in the firmament on the lines of a diagram of a
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
112
triangle with equal sides. Now each side extends neither more nor less than to the fifth sign...
This text, it will be granted, is not very illuminating. Russo believes
that the meaning of the original Greek passage can be reconstructed
if we realize that Vitruvius's signum, by which he seems to understand
a zodiacal sign, can h:)ve been his translation of the Greek word
OTIJ.lEtOV, and further that the ordinal numbers "second;' "third;' and
"fifth" would in Greek be expressed by the second, third, and fifth letters of the Greek alphabet, B, r, E. On this understanding, we can
suppose that the original Greek passage had to do with vertices of .triangles labelled "point B;' "point r;• and "point E." (In another passage at IX, vii, 3, Vitruvius shows that he did not understand OTIJ.!E'iov
in its technical geometrical sense as a point: he gives "signum et littera
C" apparently as a translation of "O'l]jlEtOV r;• taking 011JlELOV to
refer not to a point but to the concrete letter written on the page.)
H
E
A
B
�WILSON
113
The original diagram, as Russo envisages it (Figure 1), would
have the Sun (H) at the center, and the planet initially moving Ka'ta
~ucnv along the straight line AB but being drawn back rcapa ~uow
toward the Sun, and so arriving at r rather than B; the same composition of motions would be repeated in the next adjacent triangle, so
that the planet moving ;>.long ril would .arrive at E rather than Ll.
Thus the Sun, by pulling the planet toward itself, would cause it to
follow a circular path, and the intent of the diagram would be to
show how the circular orbit is produced dynamically. Russo believes
that we can see here the foundation of celestial mechanics, eighteen
centuries before Huygens and Newton.
It is generally maintained that Ptolemy's Syntaxis rendered earlier
works on astronomy obsolete, so that they ceased to be copied (see,
e.g., Toomer, Ptoltmy's Almagest, p. 1). This view, according to Russo,
gives too little weight to the interruption of an active astronomical
tradition between the time of Hipparchus and that of Ptolemy. In
the Syntaxis, the last observation of Hipparchus cited is dated 126 BC,
and the next astronomical observation cited, taking them in chronological order, is an observation of the Moon by Agrippa dated AD
92--an interruption of 218 years. According to Russo, Ptolemy's
adoption of Aristotelian 'realistic' cosmological premisses, as in his
insistence on the Earth's being at rest at the center of the cosmos, is
evidence of a deep gulf of incomprehension separating him from his
Hellenistic predecessors. Russo derives a similar conclusion from
other aspects of Ptolemy's work (pp. 259-62).
(Russo has given his reconstruction of late Hellenistic astronomy in a lengthy article in English published in Jilstas in Astronomy,
vol.38 (1994), 207-48: "The astronomy of Hipparchus and his time: a
srudy based on pre-Ptolemaic sources:')
Russo's book is a multiply-pronged argument with many parts,
and it is impossible here to give anything approaching a thorough
review or critique of the whole. It is to be hoped that an English
translation will soon appear, and lead to detailed assessments of the
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THEST. JOHN'S REVIEW
several parts of Russo's argument by competent specialists. Here a
few general conclusions will be ventured.
If Russo is right, the mere survival of some books into the postHellenistic period was not sufficient for the maintenance of an ongoing scientific and mathematical tradition. Pace Hegel, the choice of
books for copying and preservation showed little in the way of geistreich intelligence; one has only to think of Heiberg's accidental discovery, in 1906, of a palimpsest giving Archimedes' On method to know
that important works did not necessarily survive. Science itself was a
fragile growth, dependent on oral tradition and financial support
from beneficent rulers. Such bits of Hellenistic science as made their
way into the works of the literati of the imperial age were transmitted
only in distorted or ambiguous form.
If Russo is right, Hellenistic science discovered many experimental facts and reached many deductive conclusions that have previously been regarded as special achievements of modern science as founded in the 17th century by Galileo, Kepler, and Descartes. The
assumption, often made within the St. John's community, that modern science presupposes certain philosophical doctrines first articulated in the 17th century, thus comes into question. The question
deserves the radical inquiry called for in a recent lecture at the
Annapolis campus (Grant Franks, "'Everything Aristotle Has Said is
Wrong': The Authority of Texts and How We Got This Way;'
February 6, 1998).
As we have seen, Russo attributes to his Hellenistic mathematicians a self-conscious, methodological constructivism, leading them
deliberately to avoid "realistic" definitions. Is the attribution of so
sharply defmed a methodological stance to ancient authors-whose
statements about methodology, if any, have not survived-an imposition of modern views? In a recent article Russo has argued in detail
for the hypothesis that Euclid's first seven definitions are an interpolation, perhaps due to Hero of Alexandria ("The Definitions of
Fundamental Geometric Entities Contained in Book I of Euclid's
Elements," Archive for History of Exact Science 52 (1998), 195-219); and I
�WILSON
115
believe he has made a cogent case. He is himself clearly a passionate
methodological constructivist. He views the widespread realistic
acceptation, in the schools and in the press, of such concepts as "elementary particle" and "black hole;' as a transmogrification of science. I am inclined to agree: we understand these concepts only when
we understand both that and how they are human constructions. But
had the Hellenistic mathematicians and engineers arrived at so
sophisticated a view? I believe it is a fascinating possibility, worthy of
our consideration.
See Appendix next page.
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A
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
endix
Why do successive tides at the solstitial syzygies differ most in
height, while those at the equinoctial syzygies differ least? Russo
gives the explanation on p. 277, note 139, Suppose the Sun to be initially at the zenith of a point A on the Tropic of Cancer, while the
Moon is at the zenith of a point B on the Tropic of Capricorn (see
Figure 2). If we ignore the delay of the tides, we can say that there
will be high tides at A and B. Twelve hours later, the Earth will have
rotated through 180°, carrying the meridian CEB into the position
formerly occupied by the meridian AE'D; we shall have high tides at
C (not B on this meridian as twelve hours earlier) and at D (not A
on this meridian as twelve hours earlier). Thus in the solstitial syzygies the point of high tide on the meridian CEB shifts from B to C
and back again; and the point of high tide on the meridian AE'D
shifts from A to D and back again, At a particular point on the
Earth's surface like A, successive tides will therefore differ in height.
In the equinoctial syzygies such a shift does not occur, because the
Sun is aligned with the Equator, and the Moon is either accurately so
or not more than 5° off the Equator,
N.P.
c
A
E'
E
B
D
M
S.P.
Figure 2
s
�t
Measured Passion, Golden Rationality
Ronald Mawby
The Past-Present is a welcome collection of thirty-one writings by
Eva T. H. Brann. Ms. Brann has been a tutor at St. John's College for
four decades, and served as dean of the College from 1990 to 1997.
The title, unexplained in the book, presumably has two senses. The
minor sense is personal. These writings, some from twenty-five years
in the past, continue to express Ms. Brann's present views. The major
sense refers to her stance toward books that are both old and great.
Ms. Brann, the very type of a civilized mind, resembles in one respect
that least civilized fellow, Huckleberry Finn, whose interest in Moses
vanished with the discovery that Moses had been dead a considerable
long time, for Huck "don't take no stock in dead people:' Ms. Brann's
professional career might seem to have consisted mainly in taking
stock in dead people, but the truth is othetwise. In a recent essay in
this journal Ms. Brann stated that as a student of the St. John's program she has no interest in the past at all. "For we study these books
not insofar as they tell us of bygone times but because they tell us of
the present. They are not absent in time, as is the past, but present
(and perhaps even out of time altogether). They are in the past insofar as it is present; they are effectively present; they are ... the PASTPRESENT" (St. John's Review, 43, 2, p. 52, 1996). What is properly
ancient is not old in years but antecedent in the order of things, and
by delving under the world that is merely current we meet with
shades from the past who, for a potion of lifeblood, will presently
speak and lend the world within and without a "well-defined significance" (p. 339).
The present volume is so striking in its variety that the only
direct way to convey its contents is to list them. The collection is
Eva Brann, The Past-Presmt, Edited by Pamela Kraus (Annapolis, MD: St. John's College Press, 1997).
Ronald Mawby teaches at Kentucky State University, Lexington, KY.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
divided into eight sections. The first, "On Prose and Poetry;' contains an essay on the poet of the Odyssey, a loving articulation of the
perfections of Jane Austen, an interpretation of the manifold silences
in Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn;' and an exposition of the artistry
of Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice:' The second section, "On
Philosophical Texts and Subjects," contains five essays. The first
argues that Socrates' offensive defense in the Apology is intended by
Plato to display Socratic philosophizing as a dangerous activity at
once enticing and publicly indefensible. The next, called ''Plato's
Theory of Ideas;' traces seven paths-excellence and commonness,
speech and dialectic, answers and questions, opinion and knowledge,
appearance and being, same and other, original and image-all of
which lead to the eidos. The following two-part piece describes a cluster-concept Ms. Brann calls "Philosophical Paganism;' whose features "make a plausible and intellectually attractive whole" which is
"in very sharp opposition to a number of current views" (p. 129).
Paganism combines the following features: a conception of knowledge as having a present object and images as having being through
their originals; the will downplayed in favor of habit and intellectual attention; a philosophical divinity that neither creates the world
nor issues commands to it, but that is a lure for thought; a view of
human goodness in terms of personal virtues rather than universal
morality, and a sane inwardness of thoughtful passion rather than
subjectivity emotionally expressed; communal life, with a distinction
of public and private, as the locus of happiness; and a conception of
time as an inessential, derivative aspect of human life (p. 123 and p.
129). A companion essay on "The Roots of Modernity" argues that
certain characteristically modern themes are derived from a Luciferic
twist or "perversion" of the Christian notion of creation. "Kant's
Imperative" tries to help us understand what Ms. Brann suspects we
can neither accept nor forget-the Categorical Imperative. "The
Second Power of Questions" surveys the conceptual landscape of the
realm in which questions are raised about questions. The last essay in
this section is an illuminating reflection on the terms of its title,
�MAWBY
119
"Intellect and Intuition:' The third section, "On Political Texts and
Subjects;' consists of a rhetorical analysis of an address by James
Madison against the entering wedge of a religious establishment. The
section "On Current Issues" contains musings on gender considered
as an essential accident of humankind, a tiny (two page) essay on taking offense, a discussion of whether liberal education and multiculturalism are friends or en,emies, and a piece containing a dozen preconditions and precepts for a way of reading whose gently hortatory
effect may bring some student of literature back from fashionable
ways of treating books toward "mere reading:' The five essays on
"The College Community" include a commencement address, three
Dean's opening lectures entitled "Depth and Desire;' "Telling Lies;'
and "Why Read Books;' and a "Statement of Educational Policy"
that gives an excellent account of the radical practices of St. John's
College. The "Reviews" section brings to our notice books by contemporary writers Paul Scott, Patrick O'Brian, Cynthia Ozick,
Vikram Seth, and Douglas Allanbrook, and reviews the film High
Noon. Five other pieces, categorized as "Occasional" or "Ceremonial;'
include an imaginative speculation on the consequences for human
experience of living extraterrestrially in a confined space, and a piece
for students culminating in the claim that "odyssey" is the proper
name for the life of learning.
The list of writings suffices to show the sweep of Ms. Brann's
odyssey of learning, though my brief annotations fail to suggest the
rich perceptiveness and vivacity of her travelogues. This book contains many wonderful things. The unifYing thread is the quality of
mind of the author, which despite the variety of subjects is in a certain sense everywhere the same. Ms. Brann is a lover of the logos, and
these writings are permeated by a measured passion and golden
rationality. They are knowledgeable, masterfully self-aware, generous,
and lucid. Whitehead remarked that style is the ultimate morality of
mind, and Ms. Brann's style is scintillating-it emits quick flashes of
insight, of formulation, of pixie humor, that sum up to a luminous
glow. She is a delight to read. That emphatically affirmed, I wish only
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
to add some desultory comments on the sources of that satisfaction,
I notice first that Ms. Brann's view of thinking as attentive receptivity leads her to respect the integrity of her topics. Topics are not
sealed apart, but each is conceived distinctly enough so that it can
have real relations with others. Often those with a dominant interest
use an essay on one subject as an occasion to pursue another. Ms.
Brann's intellectual passjon is polymorphous enough to let each topic
be what it is and not another thing.
Her writings are, in the main, essays of elucidation, and one general comment to be made is that they elucidate. Whether she is propounding the perfections of Jane Austen, or cataloguing various
approaches to questions and questioning, or defining the St. John's
educational policy through sixteen statements of what it is not, or
explaining why Gary Cooper's marshall is a fit mate for Grace Kelly's
Quaker in High Noon, Ms. Brann sheds light.
The light she sheds is not idiosyncratic, but the broad-spectrum
illumination of a common understanding greatly enlarged.
Mathematician Mark Kac distinguishes the ordinary genius from the
magician. The workings of the magician's mind are incomprehensible
to us-his ways are orthogonal to ours. The ordinary genius, in contrast, is what you or I would be, if only we were many times better
than we are. Ms. Brann stands to us as an ordinary genius. These writings will not, I think, turn your life upside down, or wrench you into
a new world of thought or feeling (although if you think the Western
tradition began with Descartes, you will discover a new world). Ms.
Brann provides what is very rare, the perfection of the common
undersranding. Where we have muddled heads and awkward tongues,
she is clear and articulate. She is more intelligent, more widely and
deeply read, more adept at discerning differences and collecting similarities than most of us, and commands a deft and spirited pen that
can say what she sees. Although, unlike her, I am not properly civilized, she and I share many presuppositions and preoccupations, so I
often found reading her essays to be like talking with a better version
of myself, in which what in my mind is inchoate is set out in lively
�MAWBY
121
and lucid fashion. Ms. Brann clearly expresses what I vaguely glimpse,
and observations that with me are scattered and schematic are developed by her into a rounded and orderly array, so that when we
approach the same topic in the same way her results are finer, fuller,
and crisper. It is a little disheartening at first, but that soon passes
into gratefUl pleasure.
Her general method is that recommended by T.S. Eliot, namely,
to be very intelligent. This intelligence is remarkable for its selfawareness. Part of the pleasure of reading these writings derives from
the sense that Ms. Brann knows what she is doing. She is mindful of
language, being especially attentive to the largess of meaning lying on
the skin of phrases that we often hurry over. Ms. Brann savors them,
and a characteristic of her elan is to use such linguistic unburied
treasures to make penetrating observations. For example, she writes
that one danger of literary explanations is that the critic drags the
author down to his own level, and concludes "to make something
plain is to flatten it out:' Again her playfulness delights when she
writes of the carping that goes over too well in conferences "devoted to cutting edges and similar dangerous devices;' or when she
organizes an essay around the precise ambiguities of the phrase
"telling lies:'
Ms. Brann's self-awareness extends to her practices and presuppositions. In "Plato's Theory of Ideas;' for example, she begins by
warning us that this apparently respectable topic is completely
wrong-headed, for the doctrine is not Plato's but Socrates', the
notion is not a theory but a hypothesis, and the term 'idea' is misleading for the 'invisible looks' in question. Thus she reforms her
topic into' "Socrates' hypothesis of the eidos" and gives us the impression that, whether what she says about the hypothesis of the eide is
right or wrong, she knows what she is about. Likewise when writing
about that intellectual cloud-formation or configuration of features
that she calls philosophical paganism, she warns the reader about the
dangers of taking in the wrong way such fabricated terms, and thus
by defining its limits justifies her procedure.
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THEST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Every lover of the logos knows that all things work within limits, and the limits of these writings are mainly those intrinsic to their
genre. Most were originally given as lectures to undergraduate audiences, and that format imposes restrictions on where one can start
and where one must stop. These writings are jargon-free attempts to
help us think from wherever we happen to be into the midst of
things, and are more often orienting first words than final ones. Ms.
Brann excels at sorting out. She sifts our common experience and her
considerable learning and incisively sets up alternatives. But it is
sometimes frustrating when she breaks off before the end-I wish I
could have been at the question period after the lecture to hear her
extend, supplement, or revise. I will give one example. Near the end
of the lecture on the hypothesis of the eidos, she admits that the doctrine of images as interweavings of being and non-being "in no wise
solves our greatest problem: how the eidos drops down from the context of being to become entangled with non-being in a new and
world-making way-how there can be an eidos incarnate" (p. 114).
Now I am not one to deny that all things end in mystery, but if we
are offered a hypothesis put forth to make phenomena intelligible,
and we find that the hypothesis makes it unintelligible that there be
phenomena at all, what should we think? I am sure Ms. Brann would
have something to say about this, and, as I said, that she does not is
in part because she cannot tell us everything she knows in sixty minutes. Also, of course, Ms. Brann may be like the rest of us-regarding the ultimate issues she may not know either, and what we cannot
speak about we must pass over in silence. In any case in this collection, while Ms. Brann returns from her odyssey with charts that mark
the trouble spots, ultimate difficulties are more often noticed than
thoroughly explored.
The lack of closure in some of these essays seems to be in part
also a consequence of Ms. Brann's philosophical predilections. Ms.
Brann is in her own terms a philosophical pagan, a lover of sights and
images. To exaggerate a truth, she acts in order to see, rather than seeing in order to act. For the philosophical pagan life connects with
�MAWBY
123
thought by enabling us to peer over the rim of the world into a timeless realm of beautiful sights. For Ms. Brann, imposing a resolution
before the ideas resolve themselves is willfulness, an egocentric distortion that signals a refusal to take thought seriously. Thus she exhibits
to an unusual degree the intellectual virtue of fairmindedness and the
Socratic wisdom of knowing what one knows, with its concomitant
just apportioning of credence to what the evidence warrants. In consequence, though many positions are taken, many fundamental questions are left open.
Let me briefly contrast this with a non-pagan option, in part to
clarify Ms. Brann's views by the contrast, in part because of the
intrinsic importance of the issue, and in part out of "sheer honest
contrariness" (p. 191 ). I£ following Aristotle, we have enough ambition to attempt to live in accord with the divine element in us, we
immediately face the question of the nature of divinity. For the
philosophical pagan the divine element is perfect awareness of what
is first in being. For the Jews and Christians and their modern transmutated offspring, the divine element is creativity. As Goethe's Faust
translates the opening of the Gospel of John, "In the beginning was
the act." For the pagan, method refers primarily to an open pathway
into a pre-existing domain. For the nonpagan modern, method refers
to a prior plan of action designed to bring about a result. If the modern inherits from Christianity the notion that salvation is a matter
not of obedience to a Law, but of right belief somehow freely chosen, and right belief results from thinking, then the one thing needful is rules for the direction of the mind. For the modern, thought
connects with life by illuminating the present moment of decisive
choice. Aquinas writes in a discussion of faith,
Now the intellect assents to a thing in two ways. First,
through being moved to assent by its very object...
Secondly, the intellect assents to something, not
through being sufficiently moved to this assent by its
proper object, but through an act of choice, whereby
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
it turns voluntarily to one side rather than the other.
(Summa Theologica, II-II, Q. 1, Art. 4)
The speculative pagan admits only the former mode of assent as
proper to the intellect. The deliberative modern admits both as proper to the soul due to our invincible ignorance of what we would need
to know to act with perfect awareness. To remain suspended in matters of deliberation is nb virtue-to be lost in thought is to be lost.
When our apprehension of the proper object is inadequate for the
matter to resolve itsel£ and we must nevertheless decide, we impose
our resolve and choose one way or another, knowing we are acting
beyond our knowledge and holding conclusions so drawn as defeasible. What in speculative matters is unintelligent dogmatism is in matters of action integrity. From the modern viewpoint, then, to leave
certain fundamental human questions open seems like vacillation,
which, however attuned to the shifting look of ultimate things, looks
like a refusal to take thought seriously. The modern grows restive when
a pagan companion seems to be diverted into Lorus-land, captivated
by multifarious beautiful visions.
Ms. Brann grows restive, and rightly so, with claims to creativity
which amount to the production of novel trivialities. She thinks, and
rightly, that most efforts to be up-to-date end in being swept along
in a "thoughtless thought" that is too shallow even to be wrong. She
prefers the radical quest that leads to the "dearest freshness deep
down things" (Hopkins) and finds or seems to find or supposes that
as one goes deep down one meets the fresh appearance of an ancient
thing. Great books of the past can be present because, as Pound says,
literature is news that stays news.
I have only to add that the The Past-Present is by no means a complete collection of Ms. Brann's essays. Each of the eight sections concludes with references to further writings, which I hope will be collected in future volumes, for essays like these are to be celebrated. Ms.
Brann prefers clarity to obscurity, happiness to sorrow, knows that a
well-ordered soul is essential for good living, and awakens in us the
�MAWBY
125
pleasure that Aristotle defines as the "movement by which the soul as
a whole is consciously brought into its normal state of being:' If in
life's strange fascination she emphasizes the fascination rather than
the strangeness, if her gracefulness entails avoiding awkward tip-toe
stretches toward what we can barely discern, and if by my lights she
fails to take time seriously, well, these are deep matters, and a cloud
which to one glance looks like a weasel seems to another very like a
whale. Ms. Brann is one from whom we can learn much, and a mere
reading of The Past-Present both instructs and delights.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�t
Mimesis on the Treacherous Slopes:
Joyce's Commitment to Community
Albert Wachtel
There is real significance to Cordell Yee's The Word according to James
Joyce. He sets out to prove what no one would deny, that there is a
large representational element in Joyce's fiction, but his argument
leads him to a powerful insight: that the world of cooperative scholarship responding to the difficulty of understanding Joyce (the
accompanying pettiness and backbiting do not alter the fact) can be
seen as part of the author's contribution to harmony in the world.
Yee credits scholarship of the eighties for what was known from
the start about Joyce's work, that it draws from both high and low culture and that one of its unique qualities is its fidelity to the everyday.
By November of 1923, T.S. Eliot was praising Joyce's special way
of combining the high and low as a "mythical method:' Jung, less
felicitously but more viscerally, praised U~sses as a tapeworm that
consumes contemporary life, the resultant waste being the text of the
novel. Joyce's use of popular fiction has been obvious since the narrator of "An Encounter" mentioned stories of the Wild West and the
boy of "Araby" found "paper-covered books" in his house. Molly
Bloom's pleasure in soft pornography, Leopold's morning reading
and newspaper, and Gerty MacDowell's style of thinking leap from
the pages of· U~sses with the message that popular culture has a vast
influence on our lives. But the dependence of people of the eighties
on those who preceded them, whether Yee is aware of it or not, is
part of the large picture of cooperation to which he ultimately
comes. Moreover, he performs a service to Joyce studies and our fragCordeiJ D. K. Yee, The Word according to James Joyce: Reconstructing Repmmtation, (Lewisburg: Bucknell
University Press, 1997).
Albert Wachtel teaches at Pitzer College, The Claremont Colleges, Claremont, CA.
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THEST. JOHN'S REVIEW
mented world in undertaking to explore the importance of,a selection of works from the high culture canon to the study of Joyce.
Great literature, Yee recognizes, like great science, is not great because
it experiments; it is great because its experiments have yielded
insights into our condition. To Yee's credit, he wants to explore "signposts" for "understand[ing] the issues raised" by Joyce's work. Yee's
responsible "contextu~st and historicist" commitments are welcome, and his reaching out to the community of scholars for acceptance-integral to his vision of what Joyce's oeuvre sets out to accomplish-may well be among the~ most significant contributions to
Joyce studies that The Wclrd according to James Joyce makes.
His "intentionalist" ambitions are less impressive, resulting in
pages of what Yee himself elsewhere labels "literary source
hunt[ing]:' as if the biographical tics that may have contributed to a
passage were its literary significance. Yee should have looked more
broadly at the canon. It has been clear since Homer and the Hebrew
prophets asserted that a god spoke through them that, as D.H.
Lawrence affirmed, tellers are less trustworthy than their tales.
Stanislaus Joyce's contention that his brother wrote stories to learn
from them is a version of the same affirmation. Unfortunately, Yee
seems unaware that texts can have certifiable intentions of their own
of which their authors may or may not be consciously aware. But it
is also true that Joyce was a most self-conscious writer, and to the
extent that Yee desires to discover Joyce's artistic, as distinct from narrowly personal, intentions his project can be endorsed; He believes
correctly that Joyce's works have significant constructive things to say
about human life and life in the modern world, that, if a deconstructor, Joyce is also a discoverer of truths, of moral, psychological,
and philosophical insights.
Yee's inquiry into Dubliners lacks the unrelenting dedication that
might open previously unnoticed routes of access. He does not
attempt to uncover the economy by which, say, simony, gnomon, and
paralysis are conceptually and psychologically related to each other and
fundamentally elucidate "The Sisters;' the first of the stories.
�WACHTEL
129
Apparently unaware that he is undergirding the "antirealists" (Yee's
term for deconstructors) he means to counterbalance, he accepts the
easy out of believing that the three are not vitally related but rather
intentionally introduce "uncertainty:' (How they relate and function
with a kind of scientific certainty in the story can be found in my
1992 book, The Cracked Lookingglass.) Still, in an effort to stay his direction, Yee competently r~views some meanings of the words and
attaches them to characters in Dubltners and life in Dublin. He also
has useful things to say about "Evelyn," "The Dead," and
"Counterparts:' He sees the word as it is used in Dubliners as both
representational C' mimetic, or u imitative/' a use described in
Aristotle's Poetics) and exhortatory ("deliberative, speaking urges:' a
use described in Aristotle's Rhetoric), a mirror with a purpose, and
thus opposed to what "antirealists" claim to find in it.
In A Portrait '!f the Artist as a Young Man, Yee reminds us, Joyce adds
internal mimesis to his imitation of the physical world, mirroring
not only people and their actions in the external world but the consciousness of the characters, their emotions and thought, which,
using Aristotle and quoting Aquinas, Yee ties back into things, '"of
which thoughts are likenesses:" That inward mirroring also characterizes the narrative of stories in Dubliners is also true, of course, and
it is also true that Tolstoy, unnoticed by Yee and many other contemporaries, dubbed the hardly revolutionary approach "infected"
writing, a more descriptive term than "Uncle Charles principle:' But,
certainly, one of the signal features of A Portrait is that its narrative is
alive with the mental and emotional states of the characters perceiving the world, and, Yee asserts, the inward, mirroring is accurate.
On the other hand, Joyce brought a distorted mirror to bear
on Urysses, Yee recognizes. He provides no profound payoff for the
observation (the why is insufficiently explored), but it is certainly
accurate, and Yee suggestively brings S.H. Butcher's commentary and
translation of Aristotle's Poetics, which Joyce owned, to bear on what
Yee claims to be Joyce's Aristotelian conception of music.
Bringing Butcher into the game to balance Walter Pater, whose
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
prose anticipates contemporary logorrhea, is itself a service to interpretation, Having performed it, Yee slides back into repeating the old
saws of interpretation, The linguistic architectonics of Oxen of the
Sun "imitate... the development of a foetus;' he points out, as if such
merely factual observations add to our store of understanding. Yes,
Mrs. Purefoy is giving birth, but how does Joyce's so-called imitation
of gestation increase our wisdom?
There are other small-scale mistakes, Yee thinks, for example, that
Odysseus wrestled with Proteus, when it was Menelaus who did so,
He asserts that Einstein can be understood in mathematical terms
but not in language, when mathematics is itself a language and
Einstein goes a long way to making his theories accessible in everyday language in Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, to which Yee
himself alludes. More dangerous is Yee's assumption that an aesthetically important feature of representation is to be found in Joyce's use
of his fiction to "settle some scores" against personal enemies. Aware
that he is in perilous territory in thus relying on the author's life to
support the thesis that Joyce's fiction is representational, Yee asserts
that "no opposition exists" between "self-referentiality, or self-reflexivity, and extratextual referentiality:' But the assertion does not
change the facts, as Yee himself implicitly recognizes when, in his
reconsideration of Dubliners, he recognizes Little Chandler's failure in
"A Little Cloud" to write poems that are "extratextual" in their "referentiality"-about the grimy children of the street, for instanceinstead of creating self-referential, self-indulgent imaginary reviews
that praise the poet for his unwritten poems.
Self-indulgent exercises by a vexed writer fit cheek by jowl with
such neurotic and infantile behaviors. Not only does Yee (with the
saving admission that other interpretations exist) reduce the Finnegans
Wc!ke fable of the "Mookse and the Gripes" to an allegory of Joyce's
vexation with Wyndham Lewis, but he sees Joyce's life, not as a
source, but as the subtext of Ulysses-this rather than the implicit
lives of the characters, what I like to call the fictional base of the day's
events, including accidents which, because they affect the characters,
�WACHTEL
131
become psychologically causal despite their chance origins (" psychocausal;' I like to say) in the characters' lives, illustrating a like
process in our world.
What Yee has to say about Joyce's appreciation of Ernest
Fenollosa, on the other hand, tied as it is to the author's process of
creating the work, makes good sense. Yee's book is a useful biographical supplement for ~tudents of Joyce, shedding light on the
author's creative process by recalling some of the readings, some of
the personal vendettas, some of the relevant personal writings, conversations, and experiences that contributed to the creation of the
fiction.
The Word being more about Joyce's commitment to "imitating"
the "real world" in some permutation of Aristotle's conception of
the terms than about elucidating any profound insights that Joyce's
fiction contains, its survey of imitation in Joyce leads to no overarching insight. Yee turns instead to the issue of imitation as other
Modernists conceived of it. His argument here is supported by
telling quotations from some of Eliot's and Ezra Pound's and
Fenollosa's famous and not-so-famous essays. In a world that has
had almost a century to digest and amend the work of Ferdinand de
Saussure, there is a certain naivete in Yee's use of terms like signifier and signified. "What the poet as scientist strives to do is to dose
the gap between word and object, between signifier and signified," he
writes, as if words referred directly to concrete objects rather than
the ideas of such objects as well as utterly abstract ideas(the words
for which Pound counseled poets to avoid). But Yee's realization that
Eliot and Pound shared with Joyce a sense that poetry, "like science,
has an empirical basis" and Yee's further claims that William Carlos
Williams and Marianne Moore expressed related visions are undeniable.
Yee's concluding "Apologia" is in part a mystery. Why does he
find it necessary to defend, as if it were already being counter
attacked by "adherents of antirepresentationalist readings;' his presentation of Joyce as a flexible evolving writer grounded in empiri-
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
cism? And how does he manage to move from the recognition that
empirical observation is a central characteristic of Joyce's work to the
unnuanced claim that Joyce "adhered to scholasticism"? However
that may be, there are some constructive observations along the way.
Yee's treatment of the argument between Bloom and the Citizen in
Ulysses, preceded by Bloom's misreading of "Blood of the Lamb" has
some merit. It vaguely harks back without reaching it to my recognition in The Cracked Lookingglass that Bloom, a modern day Christ, is a
greater Odysseus, one who tries to bring vision to a Cyclops instead
of blinding him. Moreover, the chapter ends usefully.
Yee's observation that Joyce seeks to "reshape his audience;' that he
"perceives his audience as multiple, not individual, and reading as a
communal .. experience" is empirically sound. It takes the lot of us to
come to terms with Joyce's oeuvre-its breadth, complexity and profound importance for our lives-and in the process we find ourselves
united in ways that transcend differences in interpretation. Cordell Yee
has made a significant contribution to this important work.
�
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The St. John's Review, 1998/3
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1998
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Kraus, Pamela
Brann, Eva T. H.
Carey, James
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
McShane, Anne
Sachs, Joe
Allanbrook, Douglas
Higuera, Marilyn
Verdi, John
Stephenson, David
Wilson, Curtis
Mawby, Ronald
Wachtel, Albert
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Volume XLIV, number three of The St. John's Review. Published in 1998.
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St. John's Review
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