1
20
77
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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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Volume 60, Numbers 1 and 2 of The St. John's Review. Published in Fall 2018-Spring 2019.
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Pastille, William
Brann, Eva T. H.
Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
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St. John's Review, Vol 60 No 1&2, Fall 2018-Spring 2019
St. John's Review
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•
SJC
LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE 2016-2017
FffiST SEMESTER
Date
Title
Speaker
August 26, 2016
Mr. Joseph Macfarland
Dean
St. John's College
Annapolis
"Two Good Men in
Aristotle's Ethics, or does
a liberal education
improve one's
character?"
September 2
Mr. Elliott Zuckerman
Retired Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
All in C Major: On the
beginning of Bach's WellTempered Clavier
September 9
Mr. Robert Abbott
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"The Horses of Achilles"
September 16
Mr. Steven Crockett
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"Who should elect the
President?"
September 23
(Homecoming Weekend)
The Parker Quartet
Concert
September 30
Dr. Leon Kass
Professor Emeritus
University of Chicago and
Madden-Jewett Chair
American Enterprise Institute
"The Ten
Commandments"
October 7
Long Weekend
No Lecture
October 14
Dr. Matthew Crawford
Senior Fellow and author
University of Virginia's
Institute for Advanced Studies
in Culture
"Attention as a Cultural
Problem and the Possibility
of Education"
60 College Avenue I Annapolis, Maryland 21401
I 410-263-2371 I www.sjc.edu
�Lecture/Concert Series - First Semester 2016-2017
Date
Speaker
Title
October 21
(Parents' Weekend)
Faculty Panel on Iliad
Book 24
October 28
All College Seminar
November 4
Folger Consort
"Songs of Shakespeare"
November 11
Dr. Jan Blits
Professor
School of Education
University of Delaware
"Deadly Virtue:
Shakespeare's Macbeth"
November 18
King William Players
Perfonnance
November 25
Thanksgiving Holiday
December 2
Michael Grenke
Tutor
St. John's College
Santa Fe
"The Meaning of Rome"
December 9
Dr. Shobita Satyapal
Associate Professor
Department of Physics &
Astronomy
George Mason University
"The Connection between
Supermassive Black
Holes and Galaxies"
December 16 January 8
Winter Vacation
No Lectures
Book 24 of Homer's Iliad
�•
SJC
LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE 2016-2017
SECOND SEMESTER
Date
Title
Speaker
January 13, 2017
Julian Lage - guitar
Fred Hersch - piano
Jazz Concert
January 20
Matthew Linck
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"Thinking about Nature"
January 27
All College Seminar
February 3
Long Weekend
No Lecture
February 10
Howard Fisher
Tutor
St. John's College
Santa Fe
"In Praise of Caloric"
February 17
Richard DeMillo
Mellon Grant Speaker Digital Technology
"A Revolution in Higher
Education: Tales from
Unlikely Allies"
February 24
Elizabeth Yale
University of Iowa
"The Books of Nature"
March 3March 20
Spring Break
No Lectures
March 24
Chester Burke
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"Does a Single Photon
Exist?"
March 31
(Steiner Lecture)
Lydia Polgreen
Steiner Lecturer
The Huffington Post
"American Identity in the
Age of Trump"
60 College Avenue I Annapolis, Maryland 21401
I 410-263-2371 I www.sjc.edu
�Lecture/Concert Series - Second Semester 2016-2017
Date
Speaker
Title
April 7
St. John's College Orchestra
Concert
April 14
Fawn Trigg
NEH Chair
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
with Nicolas Pellon - piano
"On Some Silences in
Beethoven's Piano
Sonatas"
April 21
(Croquet Weekend)
Steven Hancoff (Alumnus)
Johann Sebastian Bach
and The Six Suites for
Cello Solo -A Fanciful
and Extravagant Allegory
April 28
King William Players
Performance
May 5
Reality Show
No Lecture
May 12
Commencement Weekend
No Lecture
�
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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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4 pages
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Lecture/Concert Schedule 2016-2017
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Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 2016-2017 Academic Year.
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Office of the Dean
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2016-2017
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Macfarland, Joseph C.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Abbott, Robert Charles, Jr.
Crockett, Steven
The Parker Quartet
Kass, Leon
Crawford, Matthew
Folger Consort
Blits, Jan H.
Grenke, Michael W.
Satyapal, Shobita
Lage, Julian
Hersch, Fred
Linck, Matthew S.
Fisher, Howard
DeMillo, Richard A.
Yale, Elizabeth
Burke, Chester
Polgreen, Lydia
St. John's College Orchestra
Trigg, Fawn
Hancoff, Steven
King William Players
Relation
A related resource
August 26, 2016. Macfarland, Joe. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/2403" title="Two good men in Aristotle's Ethics"><span>Two good men in Aristotle's </span><em>Ethics </em></a>(typescript)
September 2, 2016. Zuckerman, Elliott. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/967" title="All in C Major">All in C Major</a> (audio)
September 9, 2016. Abbott, Robert. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1078" title="The horses of Achilles">The horses of Achilles</a> (audio)
September 9, 2016. Abbott, Robert. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1139" title="The horses of Achilles">The horses of Achilles</a> (typescript)
September 16, 2016. Crockett, Steven. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1097" title="Who should elect the President?">Who should elect the President?</a> (audio)
September 30, 2016. Kass, Leon. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1254" title="The ten commandments">The ten commandments</a> (audio)
December 2, 2016. Grenke, Michael. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1500" title="The meaning of Rome">The meaning of Rome</a> (audio)
January 20, 2017. Linck, Matthew. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1798" title="Thinking about nature">Thinking about nature</a> (audio)
January 20, 2017. Linck, Matthew. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1784" title="Thinking about nature">Thinking about nature</a> (typescript)
February 10, 2017. Fisher, Howard. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1799" title="In praise of Caloric, part one">In praise of Caloric, part one</a> (audio)
February 12, 2017. Fisher, Howard. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1800" title="Entropy, the new Caloric, part two">Entropy, the new Caloric, part two</a> (audio)
February 17, 2017. DeMillo, Richard. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1928" title="A revolution in higher education">A revolution in higher education</a> (audio)
February 24, 2017. Yale, Elizabeth. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1946" title="Books of nature">Books of nature</a> (audio)
March 24, 2017. Burke, Chester. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/2042" title="Does a single photon exist?">Does a single photon exist?</a> (audio)
March 31, 2017. Polgreen, Lydia. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/2043" title="American identity in the age of Trump">American identity in the age of Trump</a> (audio)
April 21, 2017. Hancoff, Steven. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/2657" title="Johann Sebastian Back and The Six Suites for Cell Solo">Johann Sebastian Back and <em>The Six Suites for Cello Solo</em></a> (audio)
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
-
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PDF Text
Text
The St. John’s Review
Volume 59.1-2 (Fall 2017-Spring 2018)
Double Issue
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Panayiotis Kanelos, President; Joseph
Macfarland, Dean. All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to The St. John’s Review, St. John’s College,
60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or to Review@sjc.edu.
© 2017 St. John’s College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
��Contents
Essays & Lectures
We Are, Nonetheless, Cartesians:
A Prodigal Johnnie Reports Back ..........................................1
Antón Barba-Kay
Jacob Klein: European Scholar and American Teacher....................22
Eva Brann
On Negation: Other Possibilities in
Wallace Stevens’s Parts of a World .............................................35
Jason Menzin
“The Student,” by Anton Chekhov:
A Story Told and Glanced At .......................................................55
Louis Petrich
Poetry
Tetrastichs .........................................................................................79
Elliott Zuckerman
Please Note:
This is a special double issue containing both
numbers 1 and 2 of volume 59.
A separate number will not be published
in the spring of 2018.
��We Are, Nonetheless, Cartesians:
A Prodigal Johnnie Reports Back
Antón Barba-Kay
I fancy that every speculative thinker, however solid he may believe the grounds of his
thinking to be, does harbor, somewhere
deep down in him, a skeptic—a skeptic to
whom the history of philosophy looks
rather like the solemn setting up of rows of
ninepins, so that they may be neatly
knocked down! That way of looking at
things is tempting, no more; it is tempting,
and for philosophy it is in a sense the temptation—just as for man in general suicide
is that. It is a kind of suicide, too.
—Gabriel Marcel
It is said that philosophy makes no progress—that its history is a
series of footnotes to Plato, say, or that it is an ever-renewed attempt to find a beginning that cannot be known by being taken
for granted. The remark is sometimes made to rouge over our
blushes at the fact—striking to newcomers—that philosophers
have not been known to settle any fundamental questions once
and for all to everyone’s satisfaction. And yet there is at least one
point to which just about every modern thinker subscribes predictably and monotonously: I mean that Cartesian philosophy has
got it all very wrong.
Descartes was wrong that philosophy should be founded on
a closed set of first principles, wrong to think he could subtract
himself from the world, wrong to imagine himself as a pure
Antón Barba-Kay teaches philosophy at The Catholic University of
America in Washington, DC. This lecture was first delivered St, John’s
College in Annapolis on Wednesday, July 6, 2016.
�2
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 59.1-2 (2017-2018)
monadic subject, wrong to conceive of his consciousness as an
impartial spectator, wrong that we have privileged access to immediate self-knowledge, wrong about qualia making up the stuff
of perception, wrong to try to demonstrate God’s existence on
purely rational grounds, wrong about the separability of mind
from body, wrong in reducing organisms to mechanisms, and
wrong to think that mastery and possession should be our proper
disposition toward nature. There would seem to be a whole buffet
of wrongheadedness on offer here, such that any observer surveying the past three hundred years of philosophical writing at a
glance would be forced to conclude that Descartes was so wrong
about so many things that there could be nothing worth talking
about anymore—at least insofar as it isn’t clear whether there is
anyone still standing who is in need of being disabused.
The reductio ad Cartesium is as characteristic of twentiethcentury phenomenology (which acknowledges Descartes as its
awkward stepfather), as it is of Frankfurt School and post-Heideggerian thinkers who have taken special issue with Descartes’s
Enlightenment view of the unadulterated, monological cogito.
But this anti-Cartesian impulse has been even more evident in
Anglophone philosophy, taking its cues as it does from late
Wittgenstein, who directs so much of his laconic ingenuity
against what is usually identified as the Cartesian view of consciousness. There is virtually no one writing about philosophy of
language or philosophy of mind who disagrees with the substance
of Wittgenstein’s criticisms. And yet one opens up just about any
subsequent book in this vein—by Sellars, or Rorty, or Dennett,
or Ryle, or Nagel, or Searle, or McDowell—and sure enough the
doornail has been resurrected, the dead horse is propped up and
flogged with relish as if for the very first time. Attend almost any
academic conference on an epistemological theme, and you will
hear Descartes mentioned as a foil to the true view being advanced with a frequency that would make for a decent game of
bingo, if it did not partake of the regularity of law. I add to this,
finally, that I have been surprised by the animus with which most
of my students treat Descartes. They tend to find him smug, glib,
and bratty, almost always returning the favor by letting him have
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BARBA-KAY
3
it in the most peevish and conceited manner. Or rather, I would
be surprised if I did not take care to remember the hysteric
falsetto that I felt myself adopting toward him when I first read
him at St. John’s. Bacon was a magnanimous humanitarian,
Machiavelli inspired giddy admiration, Montaigne had his salty
candor, but Descartes I held responsible for every modern perversion. My question, then, is why this is so, what is it about
Descartes that gets our goat? Why can’t we get over him?
Now, there are of course many ways of being wrong. There
are authors whom we honor with perennial disagreement; we remain interested in their mistakes because we acknowledge that
being dead wrong is harder than being half right. And so,
Anaxagoras or Lucretius or Spinoza will continue to have a home
among our philosophical counterfactuals, as thinkers who have
staked out a wrong—but nonetheless basically and fundamentally
wrong—position, a fixed Charybdis with respect to which all
other positions must navigate. Philosophers are, on the whole,
trying to stake out the middle ground of justice between extreme
positions, and so those who have argued that there is no such
thing as middle ground (between the mind and the body, say)
cannot but continue to figure in such discussions. Our disagreement with Descartes has something to do with this, but I don’t
think it’s enough to account for the allergic obsession with which
we seem to return to him. I have known no one to get his or her
dander up on account of Anaxagoras.
Descartes also figures disproportionately in our imagination
because we understand him to be one of the fathers of the modern
scientific method. Any throat-clearing prefatory to discussing the
history of science and technology therefore feels compelled to
take its bearings by him—just as any book on the history of painting starts flexing its erudition with those obligatory couple of
paragraphs about the caves at Lascaux. What’s more, by routinely
taking Descartes to be such a father figure, we acknowledge how
much of his practical project has gone exactly according to plan.
No one disputes the fact that he was a gobsmackingly gifted
mathematician, for instance, or that his mechanical, anti-teleological interpretation of nature proved a necessary condition of
�4
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 59.1-2 (2017-2018)
modern industrialization. We only worry about the scientific mastery and possession of nature because it is a fait accompli and it
is no great strain to see the trade-offs. All the same, it is both as
scientists and as philosophers that we continue to try to worry his
views out of ours; and if this is so, then I want to say that it is for
parallel reasons—that despite our best efforts to refute his philosophical views, we remain, nonetheless, and in decisive respects,
Cartesians. As Wittgenstein says: it is as if a certain picture of
the world holds us captive.
But before saying what I take to be the most distinctive aspects of this picture and why we can’t seem to exorcise it from
consideration, here is my (very un-Johnnie-like) disclaimer: I will
be more concerned in what follows with relatively conventional
Cartesian views—views routinely ascribed to Descartes—than
with scrupulous attribution to his work, because part of what I
take to be most remarkable about our widespread view of Cartesianism is how impervious it is to questions about what the historical Descartes might have actually thought. It seems at least
likely, to take one example, that Descartes was not the grossest
kind of mind/body substance dualist—I have seen many diligent,
knowledgeable scholars at pains to argue so. And yet this is
treated as irrelevant outside such localized discussions: as soon
as anyone brings up dualism, you can brace yourself for the requisite, tendentious summary of Descartes’ views. This will annoy
anyone who has taken some trouble over his words, of course,
but it should also alert us to the fact that Cartesianism has a sort
of life of its own. I do not say that Cartesianism has nothing to
do with the texts of Descartes. But we should be interested in the
fact that its mistakes have not been straightforwardly rectified by
quoting chapter and verse. It is because Cartesianism does not
(exactly) exist, that, for some reason, we have had to invent it.
In what respects, then, is Cartesianism still intimately ours?
The clearest way in which Descartes continues to have a hold on
our thinking is that he is the first philosopher to insist on reasoning as an individual dislocated from a tradition of thought. He is
the first to make the claim that everything worth knowing can be
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BARBA-KAY
5
worked out methodically and self-evidently by the projected light
of one’s own analysis. Any thinker amounting to anything has of
course found him or herself somehow at odds with tradition. But
Descartes’s discussion in the Discourse of his teachers and the
academic curriculum at La Flèche is not so much an argument
with tradition, or a criticism or purification of standing opinions,
as an out of hand dismissal of the possibility that convention
could have any bearing on the task of knowing the truth. Poetic
fables, he says, are full of exaggerations, oratory is nothing but
the prettification of rigorous thought, the moral writings of the
ancient pagans are “magnificent palaces that were built on nothing but sand and mud” (5),1 and theology is pointless because
salvation is either available to all without study or beyond anything that any amount of study could hope to establish. All of this
is striking less for what Descartes says than for what he thinks
goes without saying. When he then says of philosophy that “there
is still nothing in it about which there is not some dispute, and
consequently nothing that is not doubtful;” he does not even feel
the need to defend the glorious havoc contained in that single
consequently. The same goes for the habits and customs which
he purposes to extirpate from his mind: “the mere fact of the diversity that exists among them suffices to assure one that many
do have imperfections” (8), there being “one truth with respect
to each thing” (12). That these are breathtaking non-sequiturs
should not obscure the fact that they are hugely attractive ones,
and that we risk misunderstanding both Descartes and ourselves
so long as we do not acknowledge the full strength of that attraction, and continue to look for its sources.
Surely what is most attractive about his position is its promise of original and pristine certainty, his adoption of a stance anterior to and abstracted from any particular context of experience
from which to judge truth or falsity. Let me begin by saying what
I take to be insightful about this direction of approach. The main
1. Page numbers are keyed to Discourse on Method and Meditations
on First Philosophy, translated by Donald Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998).
�6
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 59.1-2 (2017-2018)
questions of the Meditations are the programmatic questions of
modern philosophy. What can I know, and how can I be sure of
it? What difference do I make to the objects of my experience
and thought? I open my eyes and the world seems to show up effortlessly, a spectacle articulate and whole. Descartes’s experiment in doubt is meant, on the contrary, to call attention to the
sense in which what I witness is not simply self-standing, but
something that can only take place where I freely work to sustain
it. I must be party to my experience in order for it to be constituted as experience at all. Everything that lies in my thinking
must be doubtful—subject to the possibility of being doubted—
because it is a condition of its being thought that I own and affirm
it. Experiencing something thus means that I am in some sense
at work at implicating things in, and explicating them according
to, a woven whole of conscious expectation. Descartes goes so
far as to doubt the most basic truths of mathematics, not because
there is any real likelihood that they are false in themselves, but
because it is not inconceivable that I may slip up every time I add
two to three (61), which is meant to emphasize that even the most
basic arithmetical operations work out by being kept in mind. To
the extent that I can then imagine willfully abstaining from the
activity of discriminating and articulating the world as mine, to
the extent that I can hold all of my experience in abeyance, the
world collapses in on itself, an abyss opens up beneath my feet.
The malevolent genie personifies this possibility of existential
vertigo, in which doubt unfixes all things because there is nothing
not affirmed by me that could steady them. The one intact, unshakable point that cannot even be subject to doubt is therefore
that very activity of my conscious intending. I am a thing unlike
any other because in some sense I carry the very weight on which
I stand, I bear the full weight of the world—even if I can only be
sure of myself so long as I continue to catch myself in the act.
This thought experiment undeniably shows us several aspects
of what it means for us to have the world in view. It throws into
relief that objects of experience are only fully realized because I
mind them; that my attention lends a hand to constituting the tissue of ordinary experience; and that the thought of a world must
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always be coupled to the thought of its nothingness. But
Descartes’s errand is more ambitious than this, since, once he has
taken it apart, he then aims to piece the world back together on
his own terms, which is to say, in no uncertain terms. The connection between what can be absolutely evident to me and what
is self-evident is crucial here. The one discipline that impresses
Descartes at school is mathematics—less for what it has
achieved, he says, than for the kind of certainty it promises; the
clarity and certainty that are supposed to govern his inquiry in
the Meditations are therefore cast with an eye to that peculiar pattern. Since mathematics has always been regarded as the learnable and knowable discipline par excellence, this could hardly be
called a bad choice. For mathematical clarity to be our wholesale
guide to knowing as such, however, Descartes must conflate what
is knowable with what is self-contained in its own deduction—
that is, with what I am always in the position to recognize as selfevident. To set all of our knowledge on such footing, we must
each of us take up a position in which everything must be knowable in advance of our experience, in which to know means to be
certain, and in which what is not certain is demoted to arbitrary
and optional. I am asked to take up an autonomous position, a
vantage beyond belief, before which the objects of my thinking
are arrayed and assessed, before being assented to. My knowledge is the absence of mind—nowhere and no one in a position
to see it all.
It is this flattering affinity between what I am always in the
position to know and mathematical clarity that underpins the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity that has made up
our epistemic bread and butter ever since. These are not
Descartes’s explicit terms, but this casual and widespread way
of approaching inquiry undeniably has roots in something like
the Cartesian identification of truth with a specific experience of
certainty. What is objective is what cannot be denied without contradiction, what would be the case if I did not know it, what is
valid for all times and places, and so what must be impersonally
assessable and deducible. It is the realm of necessity, best exemplified by our usual deferential attitude toward mathematics and
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the sciences; it is the knowable as such that leaves no room for
doubt. Outside this impersonal I, however, there is a subjective
remainder—ambivalently understood as a domain of arbitrary
preference and convention, but also as a domain of pure privacy
and inner freedom, a place sealed and secret, from which I cannot
be shaken and to which I may always retreat, if I should be so
minded. It is the disengaged mental retina, the fixed point from
which I invest what is not objective with my own meanings, and
at which every man is for himself and on his own.
This is an admittedly unsophisticated and flat-footed version
of a picture that I find to be widely prevalent among my students,
though I also think that one need not squint too hard to see variations on this theme as the common guiding thread of modern philosophy. Whether in the form of Spinoza’s distinction between
natura naturans and naturata, or in Hume’s between relations of
ideas and matters of fact, or in Kant’s scission of nature from freedom, or Hegel’s counterpoint between what is ‘in itself’ and what
is ‘for itself,’ or more proximately in the Nietzschean or Weberian
opposition of facts to values, it is clear that the attempt to render
philosophy into a quasi-scientific a priori body of knowledge has
had the effect of sharpening under its pressure a corresponding
view of our inner freedom as a naked power of self-possessed
willing lying beyond the appeal of ordinary, shared reasons. For
every Descartes, there has then followed a Pascal.
This is an imprecise generalization, of course, but if anything
like this dialectic between necessity and freedom underlies our
picture of the world, then it would help to explain why our thinking somehow continues to circle back to Descartes. Perhaps the
most striking feature of the Cartesian project—which is to establish the full truth to one’s own satisfaction—is that it has the effect of forcing all its opponents to adopt it. Once Descartes has
withdrawn from the premises of ordinary shared experience, the
only strategies for flushing him out are to question the soundness
of his premises, to note the ways in which his position does not
itself acknowledge its historical debts, or to point out all the ways
in which his position of radical doubt would be incoherent in
practice. These might, in fact, be the only logical responses open
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to us. But they are responses that, Gorgon-like, turn us into the
kind of skeptic that we take ourselves to be trying to undermine,
because we feel we must turn to a priori thinking and presuppositionless logical analysis in order to refute him. This is what I
have found most striking in the classroom: because Descartes has
denied or removed the shared bases of ordinary experience, we
feel forced to take up a position somewhere on the unmediated
poles of subjectivity and objectivity—both of which in fact take
for granted the Cartesian picture of a fully self-constituting and
autonomous beginning to knowledge. We find ourselves having
to reason at him rather than with him, because we tacitly accept
his opening claim that there is no we who could reason in common. It is half way through Meditation III, only after Descartes
has established the existence of God, that he claims to prove that
he is not alone in the world (74), but it is a strange discovery for
him to make, since he has addressed his spiritual exercises to us
all along. Cartesian thinking is cinematic: it is a condition of our
witnessing it that we be excluded from its proceedings.
In what sense can objectivity be a Cartesian innovation,
though? It is clear that philosophy has always and everywhere
sought to describe what is permanently and universally true—as
Nietzsche put it, philosophy’s demand of itself is that it become
timeless. But it is equally clear that other analogous distinctions—between human and divine knowledge, say, or between
convention (nomos) and nature (physis)—are by no means congruent with the way in which we contrast subjectivity to objectivity. To take up the second example: physis in ancient
philosophy is something like a transpolitical domain subtending,
and prior to, any particular human arrangement. But it refers, on
the one hand, to a reality that is found variously embodied in
(rather than separated from) those arrangements, and, on the other
hand, to an ordered whole that is neither apodictically reducible
to, or immediately transparent to, discursive analysis. As Plato
shows in the Timaeus, the attempt to generate the order of the
world from the measurement of harmonious ratios results in a
leftover interval that balks the intellect’s designs to tidy it up.
Physis hides. She will not fully yield herself to logos.
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That this can no longer be our picture of the world—that our
universe is no longer cosmic, so to speak—should not prevent us
from realizing that communal friendship held a central place in
pre-modern philosophy, the very absence of which marks our
own somewhat impoverished oscillation between subjectivity
and objectivity. The Platonic Socrates is entirely at home using
the most cynical maneuvers of logical jujitsu, but he usually reserves those moves for his arguments with the sophists. In his
discussions with more generous interlocutors, he tries to establish
the kinds of philosophical affection (both for the truth and for his
fellows in speech) that distinguish him from the sophists he otherwise so much resembles. Similarly, we can hardly underestimate the importance of the first person plural in Aristotle. He
understands that the deepest truths are somehow already present
within his students’ ways of speaking and acting; starting from
shared conceptions, he works to deepen their understanding.
When he notes near the beginning of the Ethics that mathematical
exactness is not an appropriate standard for ethical investigations
because different inquiries are measured by different kinds of
precision, we register our distance from him by his deadpan indifference to justifying this assertion. And yet what kind of Cartesian argument could ever sufficiently establish such an
assumption? It is exactly at this point that we are hostage to the
demand for clarity and certainty, because the latter criteria are always in the position to undercut any such shared understanding.
It is Descartes’s innovation, then, to deny any implicit
“we”—a first person plural opening up upon the world—as a necessary or helpful middle term between my thinking and the objects of experience. His project is to dissociate friendship from
reason and to seek knowledge without community. Mathematical
precision is therefore paradigmatic of its aspirations for good reason: it seems to admit no ambiguity, seems to be independent of
historical circumstances, and seems to proceed on premises that
cannot be denied without contradiction. Agreement or disagreement do not seem to touch its truth. Mathematics is no respecter
of persons (you may depend on it). And again, mathematics is
bewitching to the extent that it promises to take the measure of
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the world prior to encountering it—hence the notion of a method
or an instrument of investigation that, once established, will be
able to generate results algorithmically and impartially. The
mathematization of nature gives us mastery over it—it affords us
vast powers of prediction and control even as it narrows the scope
of what we care to attend to. But applying such a common denominator to philosophical inquiry reduces it to only two areas
of discussion—that to which I am forced to acquiesce and that
which I am free to dispute. To the extent that I insist on being a
pure subject, I also insist on making the world purely subject to
me. If, however, there are forms of knowledge we can only know
by holding things in common—as we do in friendship or faith or
trust or loyalty or love—and if we take their pledges seriously as
more than private stimuli, then there is a whole set of goods that
are unavailable to Cartesian thinking, forms of knowledge whose
inside-out, rather than outside-in, character is checked from the
outset by the Cartesian demand for certainty. There may be
strength in numbers, but it is a strength that can lift you no higher
than yourself.
I want to indicate here—too hastily, perhaps—some of the
ways in which the Cartesian fascination for impregnable speech
has shaped modern philosophy. If it is the promise of disembodied speech to settle matters somehow in advance of knowing
them, then it cannot be surprising if there has been special hell
to pay in political and moral reasoning. The very project of the
classical contract theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—attempts to deduce the legitimacy or illegitimacy of a certain state of affairs by specifying the beginning point of all
possible human arrangements—obeys a Cartesian impulse to
project a point of fixed certainty into the world (although in this
domain it is Hobbes rather than Descartes who counts as the first
Cartesian). The state of nature served as a quasi-geometrical postulate from which, once accepted, certain prescriptive conclusions could be drawn. With some contemporary exceptions (like
Rawls), it is true that this approach was later abandoned under
pressure from historicist criticism. But nineteenth- and twentieth-century historicism itself obeys a neo-Kantian, and so quasi-
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scientific, impulse to read our historical formation as an a priori
schema governing all possible human experience. Historicism is
also Cartesian, therefore, in the sense of attempting to settle the
fundamental, constraining forms of human knowledge in advance
of any particular experience of them.
But if the issue of historicism has lost some of its urgency
since the end of the Cold War, I would ask you to consider what
we mean by morality. The term, understood as a system of prescriptions stipulating right conduct, is a modern one, itself a result
of the Enlightenment attempt to bring mathematical precision to
bear on our conception of the good. Aristotle’s Ethics and its medieval appropriations are not systems of morals (like Kant’s and
Mill’s), because they do not conceive their project as establishing
the goodness of certain practices and habits from a position outside of themselves. Nothing in Aristotle answers to this description. Our contemporary notion of morality, on the other hand,
aims at scientific rigor precisely to the extent that it purports to
deduce our duties from infallible rules—in other words, to specify how we ought to act regardless of our particular attachments
and responsibilities.
This apparent rigor has done very little to win the kind of
widespread consensus that might have been expected from it.
Moreover, it funnels ethical conversation into an adversarial, winner-take-all pattern. Most of my class discussions on ethical matters take the form of a predictable tug-of-war between “you’re
bad for judging others” and “I am entitled to my opinion that others are bad,” because everyone has independently realized that
the best strategy is to ask one’s opponent to define his or her
terms, and then to disparage those definitions in order to stalemate whatever may be supposed to follow from them. This strategy is not good enough to win any arguments, but it is a surefire
way not to lose any either. (The expectation of absolute moral
certainty thus goes hand-in-hand with relativism.) The underlying
Cartesian assumption is that a winning argument is one that no
one could reasonably find fault with, when in fact the predictable
outcome of such reasoning is dilemmatic casuistry about, for in-
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stance, how many innocent people to rescue from hypothetical
runaway trains. Even where we do share a general postulate—
say, that human beings are ends in themselves—it is by no means
clear that a notion of such generality could univocally help us
make an a priori judgment between competing kinds of goods.
In addition, Hume’s, Kant’s, and Mill’s moral visions continue
to rely on, in more or less obvious ways, the sensibilities of decent, Protestant, liberal citizens: that is to say, they all claim to
give contextless grounds for already existing forms of conduct.
This reliance is even clearer in Descartes’s list of practical
maxims in the Discourse—don’t mess with the law, stick to your
guns, control your desires, play to your strengths—which sound
little better than the avuncular therapy of self-control offered by
Polonius when contrasted with the rigor that Descartes otherwise
brings to bear on scientific matters. It is true that he presents his
maxims as provisional; they are designed to be cast off once he
has built his system of knowledge from the ground up. But his
subsequent silence on this point is therefore eloquent, as is his
affinity (along with that of many modern moralists) to ancient
Stoicism, which was the first philosophical school to preach withdrawal from the world and a steady diet of sour grapes as the
means of attaining happiness. Again, if to know is to be certain,
then I can be certain of my own pleasure (as Descartes might say)
or perhaps even of my duty (as Kant might say), but it is precisely
the character of this certainty that prevents my thinking from taking place somewhere in particular or inhibits my attending to
common cares and thoughts. So long as I try to reason my own
way into the world, I will not know exactly what to do with you.
I realize that I am myself running the risk of sounding reductionist and skeptical, since I might seem to be asserting that there
is no such thing as truth in moral matters except through some
sort of wishful or willful consensus. But that is precisely the
shape that Cartesian certainty forces on us, whereas I am trying
to call attention to differences between Cartesian and other forms
of disagreement. Neither antiquity nor the Middle Ages were conspicuous for their concord, respect, and unanimity—in philoso-
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phy or in any other area of life. It may be that the very opposite
is true and that quarrels are fiercest among brothers, as Aristotle
says. But it is also clear that most of the ferociously sectarian disputes about philosophical principles in Europe and the Near East
up to, and perhaps even including, the Reformation were understood as differences within and about a shared conception of the
world. And I am tempted to call this a kind of friendship—a commitment to common goods of thought. It is, in contrast, one of
the marks of our continuing dependence on Cartesianism that we
feel the need to reason from scratch, and that this need in turn
shapes the forms of speech that are available to us. Such forms
are by no means inadequate in all respects. Like a searing fire,
they dissolve and clarify, even if they cannot establish or sustain.
But so long as we understand philosophy as clinically disengaged
thought, we will continue to prize guarded and ungenerous forms
of speech that pretend to a scientific certainty they cannot achieve
(e.g., scholarship), we will continue to disagree about first principles erratically and without end, we will continue to excel only
at the philosophical genre of critique, we will continue to be
tempted toward forms of irrationality as the only exits from a stifling objectivity, and we will continue to find ourselves stuck at
Cartesian square one. Square one is no doubt a fine square. But
if a conversation is such that I can always undercut an argument
by refusing my agreement—if that is the exemplary form of critical thinking—then no conversation can exceed my current view
of how things stand. You are only right for all I know.
Accusing contemporary philosophy of solipsism will perhaps
seem strange, since the theme of intersubjectivity has been all
the rage for two centuries and counting. But I take this to be yet
another case in point—and a good example of how Cartesianism
unleashed caustic powers of analysis that we have not been able
to put back in the bottle. Descartes was the first to formulate what
has since been called the “problem of other minds” at the end of
Meditation II, in a passage where he looks out on a busy street
and questions his usual assumption that those moving figures are
people. They might, he says, be no more than automata draped
in hats and coats. Following Descartes’s lead, the “problem” of
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other minds has been understood as this: How can I justify my
inference that you have a mind no different from mine when it’s
clear that no amount of raw sense data could ever sufficiently
warrant it? It is worth noting that Descartes does not even register
this as a special problem, nor did any major philosopher in history up to and including Kant. The deduction and explanation of
intersubjectivity has, by contrast, been one of the main preoccupations of every single major post-Kantian thinker—from Fichte
through Husserl and Wittgenstein and Habermas—all of whom
have sought to establish intersubjectivity as a distinctly nonCartesian form of knowledge.
I do not say that we have learned nothing of value from these
attempts, but it may be that what we have learned has been in the
way of hungry people reasoning about bread. In other words, it
is worth asking what we think we have to prove, or why we continue to feel as if there is a problem that needs addressing, when
no one seemed to feel such a need until the mid-1790s and when
even now there is almost no one arguing the contrary. The very
term ‘intersubjectivity’—a barbarous neologism for what used
to be called philia—suggests that our solution only replicates the
problem, insofar as it represents an attempt to maintain an attitude
of impersonal detachment in my description of the most personal
of experiences—namely, what you mean to me. ‘Intersubjectivity’ has become a bit of fashionable jargon in philosophy much
like ‘interdisciplinarity’ is in education: both words elicit a buzz
of self-congratulation all around, even as they affirm the terms
that cause the very problem they are supposed to overcome. Both
of them take for granted from the outset a situation in which subjects or disciplines are atomic units in need of combinination.
And yet, if your recipe calls for oil and water, chances are you
will never end up with a solution. Intersubjectivity promises to
be an endless though limited subject of discussion for philosophy
not simply because we have discovered in ourselves over the past
two centuries unprecedented capacities for alienation and loneliness, but also because we formulate the discussion in the wrong
kind of speech for the experience it purports to get at. We expound in monologue on the great benefits of dialogue. Said an-
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other way: the problem of other minds is not a problem except
when it is formulated in terms that assume a fundamental difference between what is absolutely certain (my mind) and what is
qualitatively less certain (you out there), so that, like most other
problems of a Cartesian pedigree—like the relation of mind and
world, mind and body, reason and experience, freedom and nature, and so forth—it can neither overcome nor be satisfied by
the dualistic terms in which it is asked.
One recurring feature that vitiates from the outset Cartesian
questions such as these is the accompanying sense that the question
proscribes a personal middle term between the proposed extremes,
a term that, before Descartes, constituted the common ground I inhabit with others because we share a world. Just as Descartes prizes
mathematics because it admits of no shades of certainty, so too the
criteria of clarity and certainty mute the sense that I should accept
common practices and concerns as the best starting point for my
thought. As Descartes says in Meditation IV: “I have been so constituted as a kind of middle ground between God and nothingness,
or between the supreme being and non-being” (82): that is, there
is nothing outside me to break the fall between certainty and ignorance. The absence of this middle term then finds literal, and striking, expression in Descartes’s view of the soul.
I am not sure whether Descartes is rightly called a dualist—
certainly there are passages in the Meditations and in his correspondence with Elizabeth that suggest he was aware of the
difficulties entailed by the view that thinking things are substantially different from extended ones, and that the two may also interact. (Of course, realizing that you have a problem and wishing
that you did not have it don’t add up to not having it.) What seems
true of both the Cartesian picture and of its Kantian successor it
is that the mind/body distinction is produced under the pressure
of locating the certainty that I am intelligent and free within the
certainty that there is no object of experience that is not material.
This is no longer the same kind of question that generates the
parts of the soul in Aristotelian or Platonic psychology or in their
Christian descendants. Many of these earlier views include a third
part of the soul between reason and desire—a part that is charac-
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teristically human by virtue of being responsive both to reason
and desire, a part that is also (and not incidentally) represented
as the seat of our social spirit, the power of soul by which we can
take things personally. It is precisely this third, mediating part—
the part by which we are understood to be attached to others—
that is done away with by the Cartesian picture of the soul. The
distinction between mind and body is thus the distinction between
subjectivity and objectivity concretely instantiated within our
own selves.
A final passing note on how this missing personal middle has
affected even the most rarefied metaphysical questions: One
would think that if anything is objectively the case, it is questions
about being as such. And yet it is owing to Descartes’s polarization of subjectivity and objectivity that the notion of epistemology as a specialized, delimited discipline exists in contrast to
ontology. It was the Cartesian inspiration of early modern epistemology to focus more precisely on the conditions of possible
experience by surrendering the assumption that the world is intelligible in itself. This approach gave us what is valuable in Kant,
Nietzsche, and Heidegger, while simultaneously making inescapable the question, In what sense can things be said to be
both knowable and “outside” the mind? Ancient and medieval
metaphysics were by no means widely shared social attitudes,
and yet their stance toward their objects of inquiry was nonetheless personal, both because they understood inquiry into being
also as inquiry into the divine, and because knowledge of the
whole was understood as a kind of communion within which that
whole knew itself to be completed.
I have doubtless already said too much, or tried to. My main
point has been that our continued attraction to being repelled by
Descartes has less to do with the fact of his having formulated
some set of terms or themes or questions that we are still concerned with, and more with his having established a certain
stance toward philosophical speech that continues to reassert itself within our attempts to deny it. Quasi-scientific speech—contextless speech treating philosophical questions as problems to
be mastered once and for all from an ex ante position—is in fact
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a form of deeply skeptical speech, and so long as we understand
it as the only mode of philosophical speech, then we will continue
to fall back into the reductive, dualistic terms of the questions
framed by Descartes. It can be no accident that it has been one
of modern philosophy’s main post-Cartesian aims to mortify
skepticism once and for all. Indeed, it is only in modern philosophy that skepticism has been felt to be a real threat, rather than
a crank position held by unwashed men living in barrels. Fear of
skepticism is a sure mark that you have set out to reason on your
own: as you tighten the demands of certainty, you are gripped by
doubt. As you sharpen the light of clarity and distinctness, the
shadow of doubt lengthens and lengthens; and if you will be
guided only by your own self-evident terms, if there is no middle
term between absolute certainty and error, then any misstep
threatens to bring the world crashing down, and you will surely
encounter skepticism at every turn.
Skepticism’s lesson, however, is that the truth is more than
a matter of words, since it is not in speech that the most aggressive skeptic will meet his match. The cure for skepticism has always been the same. You provoke the skeptic to act—you ask
him to go outside for some fresh air or, if you must, beat him
with a stick—in order to show him that he is incoherent in deed
and so to ask him to rejoin a common world larger than his way
of thinking can conceive. This is sometimes felt to be a kind of
concession of defeat on philosophy’s part—as if the need for action here showed that reasons just come to an end—whereas it
should help us realize that reasons may sometimes outstrip arguments. If, that is, what is most distinctive about Cartesianism
is its posture of voluntary neutrality, its attempt to specify the
only kind of answer that would satisfy it from the outset, and if
that feature thereby marks it as skeptical, then we should also
not expect for it to yield to strictly theoretical answers. Heidegger may help us see how Cartesianism is merely one historical
episode within a larger philosophical arc, and Wittgenstein may
convince us that if only we talked long enough about Cartesianism we would be cured from the supposition that there is anything left to talk about. And yet so long as we think the limitation
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involved is logical or discursive, we do not possess the right kind
of response.
For this reason I do not take Cartesianism to be exclusively—
and perhaps not even primarily—a theoretical problem or error.
A first step in escaping its attraction is to rediscover forms of reasoning in common, to realize that friendship is essential to clear
thinking. The kinds of goods that Cartesianism cannot see—
goods requiring belief, trust, and shared conviction—are not ersatz reasons, nor do they lend themselves to proof if we do not
lend ourselves to abiding by and in them. It is true they are subject to groupthink abuses to which we are highly sensitive. But
they are goods of knowledge, knowledge of a sort that is the only
point from which to break the tenacious hold that Cartesianism
continues to have on philosophical thought at large—perhaps beginning with the thought that there is any such thing as philosophical thought at large. The goods of friendship are
distinguished, in contrast to Cartesianism, by the relinquishment
of a particular kind of certainty, in order to make room for a
greater one. We acknowledge our dependence on the given context and circumstances within which we serve to make the good
in common with others—a set of books and questions and friends
and places and tasks—in sum, on a tradition. We accept this tradition not as a bias clouding our view of a more universal knowledge, but as an anchor deepening our thought and lending truth
a voice in time. That is, we acknowledge the partiality of our position not as a reason for undermining it, but, like the acknowledgment of our mortality, as a condition of our taking root.
Unlike Cartesian knowledge, the goods of friendship are never
available from the outset. They are at once retrospective and
prospective. Friendship is a vow that I do not know everything,
and so a way of holding myself in readiness. It is the knowledge
that my words may only be generous where we own something
in common, and that the weight and resonance of their shared
truth goes beyond what could be called their correctness. Cartesianism’s denial of this dimension makes it difficult to change
the question, as I’ve noted, since all attempts to reason in terms
of certainty flatten everything else to their level. It is friendship’s
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promise, on the other hand, that we can compass the whole by
knowing it to be wider than our thinking, that it is because the
world exceeds our single grasp that we are capable of having it
in common reach.
If I have ventured these thoughts aloud here, it is because I
found one such community of learners in St. John’s, and because,
having been away some years, I realize now how few and far between are such settings for friendship. As Tocqueville noted,
Americans seem to be Cartesians from the cradle—there are always so many different competing views of the pursuit of happiness, that we tend to equate truth proper with what is outside the
scope of democratic contradiction. Because of this, Cartesianism
and American egalitarianism are apparent (though only apparent)
relatives. But the pressure of world-historical forces should not
prevent us from attending to the kinds of conversations concretely available to us. Nor should it prevent us from seeing that,
so long as we conflate the rigor of philosophy with the rigor of
mathematics, we will continue to be haunted by Descartes, the
first to speak the singular idiom of such a possibility. Perhaps it
is no longer possible to speak of public reason in the terms I’m
suggesting; but philosophy, after all, has never been comfortable
in public, and approaching it as a quasi-technical discipline has
only subordinated it further to the natural sciences.
There was once a man, the first philosopher of all, who, upon
being asked his name under duress, gave it out as Noman. At that
moment, he realized something each of us must discover for ourselves as adolescents: that reason is always in some sense slipping out of the bonds of the particular, that it cannot be fully fixed
in place, that our thinking runs out beyond our station and our
term of life. Intelligence draws lines, but in doing so it always
manages to straddle both sides of them; it can contain every multitude. It is outlandish—as Carl Page likes to say; there is no resting place it cannot quit. But Noman did not stop at that. He
recognized the anonymity of his cunning as an episode within
the larger story of the restoration of his name, which would only
be fully fleshed out as the name of a father, a son, a husband, a
king belonging to his land, a friend to a dog and to the pear trees
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he had planted in the orchard as a boy. In the same way, while
we are trying to squirm out from under the depthless vision of
the Cyclops, anonymity is our best and only protection. But so
long as that insight is not then relocated within the task of making
speech personal, of giving speech a way of dwelling in the world,
then our words cannot have place, cannot take root, and cannot
thrive. We will remain Cartesians.
�Jacob Klein: European Scholar
and American Teacher
Eva Brann
The subtitle of my talk might be “Liberal Education: Program
and/or Pedagogy?” The reason is that I think of Jacob Klein’s life
as being an embodiment of that slash, “and/or” and therefore an
occasion for asking what seems to me a question the answer to
which determines the success—I mean the lively and secure survival—of liberal education.
There is the much more often debated converse to the question: “Is there a specific pedagogy for liberal education?” This is
the question: “Is there a specific curriculum for liberal education
which goes with the kind of teaching you might call “liberal?” I
won’t dwell on the answer today, except insofar as it bears on
particular aspects of teaching. I’ll just say that I think the answer
is that almost anything can be taught liberally—to a point. In particular, the shop crafts are germane enough to the liberal arts
(which form one part of liberal education, as I’ll spell out later)
to serve as a suitable complementary curriculum. To prove it,
there’s that wonderful book by Matthew Crawford, who is both
a student of philosophy and a motorcycle mechanic: it is called
Shop Class as Soulcraft (and is the much worthier successor of
that cult classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance); it
shows how fixing things forms souls, just as reading books does.
Let me give my answer to the topic question up front. I’m
not a great believer in that mode of talking to my colleagues
which attempts to make a whodunit of the telling so that they get
to learn my resolution to the inquiry only when they’re mostly
long adrift in mind.
Eva Brann is a tutor and former dean at St. John’s College in Annapolis,
Maryland. This lecture was first delivered as the keynote address at the
Jacob Klein Conference on Liberal Education held at Providence College on Friday, March 11, 2016.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
23
I am persuaded, even with a certain passion, that Liberal Education does have its most appropriate program, its preferable
matter, and that this matter particularly calls for its own pedagogy. Concisely and thus a little too peremptorily put: You cannot
achieve liberal education in the mode of a specialized teaching
authority, a professor. That is by no means to say that professors
who know their stuff inside-out can’t sometimes teach liberally—
but it will be, I think, in an alternative style for them: Ex cathedra, “from the podium” will have to become “in the trenches,”
on a chair around the table with the other human souls.
I was one of that diminutive number of refugees for whom
that little devil Mephistopheles’ shamelessly candid admission
held: “I am a part of that power that ever seeks evil and ever accomplished good.” (It comes from Goethe’s Faust which no German-born person can live through a year without citing thrice.)
The Nazi persecution brought me to America where, with some
practical know-how and some luck, anyone who knows how to
be happy, can be happy, and to St. John’s College, where several
of my older colleagues were refugees. I came very young and
grew very old in Annapolis, so this band of my seniors, including
Victor Zuckerkandl, a well-known Viennese musician, and
Simon Kaplan, a Kant scholar, who came in middle age, are all
gone. Jacob Klein, called Jasha by us all, including by some
cheeky students (who are supposed to accord each other and their
tutors, as I will do, the honorific “Mr., Mrs., Miss” and later
“Ms.”), was among them. As far as I could tell—and I observed
avidly—they were well appreciated, even well loved by their
American hosts who, in their gracious naiveté, admired them for
their thorough learning and marveled at them for their pronounced personalities. But Jasha held a special place.
All the refugees that I’ve known or read of who were fully
adult when they emigrated led a cleft life—a European formation
and an American re-formation. Mr. Klein grew up and studied in
Slavic and central Europe and fled to the Anglophone West, from
the Nazis’ politically, but psychologically also from an antically
tyrannical father. This ogre, however, also came to the States and
made Sonoma County, where he turned grapes into raisins, unsafe for habitation. Among the many stories about him that Jasha
told me was that of his wedding gift to Jasha and Dodo. Dodo
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Tammann was the divorced wife of Edmund Husserl’s son, and
she became a powerful presence at St. John’s. The wedding gift
was a smallish bag of these raisins.
The years of Mr. Klein’s life were split almost exactly between Europe and America: from his birth in 1899 to 1938, his
arrival in America—thirty-nine years, and from 1938, his arrival
in Annapolis, to 1978, his death while still teaching—forty years.
(Winfree Smith, in A Search For The Liberal College [1983],
gives an indispensable account of Mr. Klein’s early years at St.
John’s, ending with his deanship.)
To me there is, in my mythifying mood, something providential in this half-and-half life. For in Europe Mr. Klein was a
private scholar without institutional bonds. He studied, conducted
private seminars and above all, wrote his principal book, entitled
in English, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (1934-36). It is a work of enormous scholarship, drawing
from primary and secondary works in all the modern and classical languages—oddly not Hebrew; this visibly Jewish man governed by a Jewish fate didn’t, as far as I could tell, have a Jewish
bone in his body. Let me interject here my understanding of this
apostasy. It was not the ordinary assimilation of convenience,
still so hotly debated when I was young, but an allegiance that
trumped everything, even his love for Russian novels, namely
his deep affinity for the Greeks—not the esthetic Greeks captured
in the formula “Noble naiveté, quiet grandeur” which appeared
in the first and greatest history of antique art, that of Johann
Winckelmann (1717-1768) and which dominated that famous
German philhellenism.—I myself grew up under its aegis. What
drew Mr. Klein to the Greeks was—let me joyfully risk some political incorrectness—a very masculine view of that Greek grace
as sober soundness, as, so to speak, the apotheosis of good sense,
a virtue which the Greeks call sophrosyne—literally, soundmindedness. It was a glory that I, who had spent my post-graduate
years as a Greek archaeologist, had never suspected—that behind
all those canonical great books, there might be a very specific intellectually handsome togetherness.
Since I’ve begun to understand something of the Origin of
Algebra, I’ve thought that its doctrine was a, perhaps the, principal example of this sense of Greek soundness. The book, after
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
25
all, traces out a loss, the loss of just this whole-heartedness. Not
that Mr. Klein was a modernity-basher. Far from it—he had studied physics and found the revolution on which he was reporting
and its modernity (plus, I should say, its extreme realization in
post-modernity) irresistibly interesting, and so his account of our
condition seemed to me far deeper and more persuasive than the
socio-political explanations I was given as a history major in
Brooklyn College. There was, furthermore, I learned in time,
nothing Heideggerian in his approach to the mode of this loss,
no call for the Destruktion (mitigatingly translated as “de-construction”) for the sake of recovering a pre-traditional ontological
origin. But, it seems to me, there might actually be large, sensibly
practical consequences from a propagation of the thesis of the
Origin of Algebra.
Obviously, I should now say as concisely as possible what
this thesis, this teaching, seems to me to be. The very subtle, very
reliable paragraph by paragraph exposition of the thesis in all its
complexity is to be found in Burt Hopkin’s Origin of the Logic
of Symbolic Mathematics (2011). I see it, more simply, in this
way: The Greeks, meaning the relevant written texts we have (but
I think the artifacts harmonize), had a direct, an immediate approach, to beings of thought, what might be called a first innocence, and if you like, even a naiveté, perhaps after all, even of
a noble sort. Their direct intellectual sight accorded those beings
a fullness, a meaning-fraught concreteness. Their way of regarding numbers is a prime example and probably the most illuminating case—negatively, because for mathematics the psychological
element is much reduced so that the intellectual mode stands out,
positively because the loss of this immediacy enabled the principal
science at the foundation of our epoch, astronomical and terrestrial
physics. Greek numbers, arithmoi, are collections of things, a
counting-up of them, in German, Anzahl. These counted-up assemblage-numbers undergo, in a long-breathed conversion traced
in the book, a reduction to mere symbols, completed by Vieta and
Descartes. In the helpful medieval language, they are transformed
from first to second intentions, meaning that a word that once
reached for a thing now reaches for the thought-belabored abstraction of the thing. This second-intentionality dominates so
much of modern discourse as to be practically a signature of
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modernity. My favorite example is this: Socrates follows a way,
in Greek a methodos, “a way gone after” (a good example: Republic 596a). We tend to have not a “method” but a “methodology,” not a jigged way, but the conception of the jigged way. We
talk, very often, in concepts rather than objects. Mr. Klein, a most
natural and, I might say, earthy person—and I might also say, like
most flesh-and-blood people full of student-delighting singularities—kookiness in plain language—had a gut-aversion to this
world of abstractions. He used to expend himself in trying to persuade Johnnies that Socrates’ forms, the eide, were not “abstractions,” literally “drawn-off,” life-deprived, thought-ghosts, but
full of attractive being.
That brings me to the second half of Mr. Klein’s life, the
American part, spent almost entirely at St. John’s College. He
did, to be sure, write two more books in this epoch. The first was
A Commentary on Plato’s Meno (1965). The Meno is to St. John’s
College something like what the Declaration of Independence is
to the United States, the condition of its possibility; it is our enabling work for freedom from academicism. The Meno shows
under what conditions learning by inquiry, as distinct from
knowledgeableness by study, is possible. Like the Algebra book
(as it is, ridiculously, known at home) the Meno book contains
some unforgettable insights—unforgettable because as soon as
you’ve read them you think you’ve always known them. This
was the kind of mental plagiarism Mr. Klein chuckled over as a
mark of his insights having been understood and adopted. My
particular pick is his discovery that the capacity of “image-recognition” (eikasia: not “imagining” or “imagination”) attached to
the lowest section of the divided line presented in the Republic
(509 ff., the commentary on the Meno mines other dialogues for
relevant illuminations) ranges through all the divisions to the
highest, because imaging is the generating principle of the world
that flourishes under the “Idea of the Good.” Thus our lowest capacity is also our most encompassing. These assimilable insights
are life-changing; I’ll refrain from personal testimonials, but you
can see that at the least the thought of an imagination-ontology
will affect your way of reflecting.
The second late book, Plato’s Trilogy, on the Theaetetus,
Sophist, and Statesman (1977), I could never take to. It is written
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27
in a mode that seems to belong to old age: It paraphrases the text
with the intention that the reader will extract a commentary from
the emphases and deviations. David Lachterman’s review of the
book1 helped me to see its accomplishments, one of which is that
it really functions as a sort of provocation to reflection on texts
left intact by the interpreter. (I might say here that David was, to
my knowledge, the most universally learned student who ever
came out of St. John’s; he carried on Mr. Klein’s projects in his
own competently ingenious way.)
Most of Mr. Klein’s writing was for lectures directed to our
students, and these, insofar as they were recoverable, were edited
by Robert Williamson and Elliot Zuckerman and published by
the college. They have that same quality that he saw in the Greek
authors: simultaneously with having grasped it, it grasps you: it
sits naturally in the intellect—mine, at least, and many of my colleagues’.
But these published works are not what dominated the second part of his life. In fact, he was almost comically inimical to
publication. When I came in 1957 for my appointment interview,
he placed me in a chair and, so to speak, danced around me, holding the two pot-publications I had proudly sent with my application—I was then an archaeologist—between thumb and index
finger as if they were some loathsome matter and then tossed
them back to me. (Publication wasn’t and still isn’t a criterion for
appointment or tenure at St. John’s.) Taking his aversion to publication seriously, I translated the algebra book in secret and confessed only late, because I had questions to ask. Then, however,
with splendid inconsistency, he was eager for it to come out into
the world, where it first languished, only to emerge slowly and
steadily into some fame and influence, particularly of course,
under Burt Hopkins’s energetic shepherding.
So now to the point. If the first half of his life, the European
part, was under the aegis of learning and scholarly production,
the second, American half was predominantly a teaching life, be
it as a tutor (our replacement of the title “professor,” though it’s
not used in address) or as dean of the college (1949-1958). As
1. David Lachterman, “Review of J. Klein’s Plato’s Trilogy, Nous 13
(1979): 106-12.
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for the latter function, I remember vividly that when the end-ofclass bell rang he would issue from his office to stand at the bottom of the stairs of our main building and scan the faces of
descending students for signs of life. Once he caught me coming
down, maneuvered me into his office, and chided me for having
threatened with bodily harm a student who had not been able to
inflect the Greek verb “to be.”
Here is the serious aspect of Mr. Klein as a teacher in an institution whose faculty had bound itself to an all-required, coherent plan of liberal education, with the consequent abolition of
electives for students and specialization for teachers and the replacement of the ways of learning and modes of teaching then,
and even more now, current in universities and colleges—less in
the latter since some of these ways are functions of size and consequently of—phantasized—economies of scale.
In my young and ardent years as a tutor I saw in Mr. Klein
the incarnation of a teacher in a program which was conceived
by its founders, Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan, as a contemporary re-animation of the traditional liberal education that
was first set out in the seventh book of Plato’s Republic and in
the eighth book of Aristotle’s Politics (where the word liberal,
“belonging to the free” [eleutherion] is, as far as I know, first
used to distinguish this upbringing from the vocational, utilitarian
sort). For Rome, the guiding text was Quintilian’s Teaching Program for Oratory, and in the Middle Ages, Hugh of St. Victor’s
Didascalicon and John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon (which is,
however, concerned only with the verbal arts). These works, to
be sure, often concentrate on the specific liberal arts, the skills
of learning, rather than on liberal education, which relies on texts
for reflection.
Indeed, when Mr. Klein arrived in late 1938, for the second
year of the college’s New Program, it was already fixed in its
broad organization into tutorials for the exercise of the liberal
arts and seminars for the discussion of great books. The liberal
arts were exactly the trivium, the three-way of words: grammar,
logic and rhetoric, their correctness, validity and persuasiveness,
and the quadrivium, the four-way of things: arithmetic, geometry,
astronomy and music, their countability, extendedness, regular
motions and attendant harmonies. The program of tutorials stuck
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29
quite closely to this scheme—reducing it to language and mathematics classes with the modern addition of laboratory. Rumor
has it that in the library of those early days, physics books were
catalogued under music, the study of bodies in ratio relations.
Learnedness was required to find the finest working examples
for exercises in these arts, taken from the most highly regarded
works of language, mathematics, and science. The early faculty
had put enticing tutorials together by the time Jasha arrived.
What he also found was a particularly felicitous modern fusion, instigated by Buchanan, of the so-called Great Books with
the Liberal Arts, which had long been regarded as ancillary, particularly to the exegesis of Scripture. Canon-establishing lists of
Great Books go back to antiquity and forward into our times, so
our founders were well-supplied (especially: Ernst Robert Curtius, Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter, 1948;
Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working
Classes, 2011). As it seems to me, Mr. Klein’s function with respect to the Program’s teaching matter was largely to add an additional element of competence and, most importantly, to
undergird the programmatic sequence with an intellectual history
that put the dawn of modernity found in the mathematical writers
of the late sixteenth and seventeenth century at the center of the
drama of a break between antiquity and modernity. It was a break
mirrored roughly in the discontinuity of our sophomore and junior years; its pathos is that of a great loss of human substance and
a huge gain of human power.
Buchanan himself was what is called a charismatic figure,
evidently (I didn’t know him) full of pedagogically energizing
outrageousness—very much the memorable master teacher dominating and drawing the college together—just what it needed in
its uncertain youngest years.
I must say here that the view I am about to offer of Mr. Klein
as presenting a model, perhaps the model, of teaching best fitting
a stable community of liberal learning is my own, perhaps to my
colleagues more of a construction than it ought to be, but very
plausible to me. It goes along with the conviction to which I’ve
confessed that a liberal education which is mindful of its tradition
and works pretty well day-to-day, with semi-frequent ascents into
sheer glory, has its own, proper teaching mode. I think that the
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delineation that follows fits not only a program of liberal education that has its own institution but also more partial, more tentative efforts. But I should report here that our founders
emphatically asserted that the program they were instituting was
not a curricular experiment. I think that attitude was crucial to
our holding together over the years: We thought—how shall I put
it?—that if this didn’t work out, then there was something wrong
with the world, not with the Program. And contrary to all pious
preaching about not being too inward-turned but more accommodating to reality, that passionate sense of being, for all our
flaws, on the right path turned out to be intensely practical. As I
recall him, Mr. Klein had a sovereign sense of being in a place
that had it right. I might add that I’ve visited a number of schools
where they did things quite differently but had the same sense of
“having got it right,” and the consequent affect between us was
immediate sympathy and potential friendship.
To begin with, then, he had the right temperament—a bit of
a gourmand (he, who despised academic grading would grade
Dodo’s uniformly delectable cuisine at every meal), a little indolent, pipe-puffing (a horrible weed called Balkan Sobranie),
amusedly tolerant toward all signs of intellectual effort in the
young and overtly repelled by adult intellectualism. In fact, he
took delight, not always fairly distributed, in the eager naiveté
and good-natured hijinks of the student generation of his first arrival; he had a special affection (which I’ve inherited) for the
scamps. (Our students of the present day, I might say, are more
experientially sophisticated and thus more psychologically
fraught—but none the wiser for it.)
I say “the right temperament,” but I mean a temperament; all
teachers in the liberal mode need a bit of a personality, both to
attract willing attention and to repel a too easy familiarity. Mr.
Klein had a lot of the appurtenances of personality, for example,
the ability to draw perfect circles on the board while facing the
class by pivoting his arm behind his back—a source of delight
to students studying Ptolemy. But these are gifts that you ape at
your peril.
Then there were other traits that were not a gift of nature but
the fruit of time. Older, more experienced teachers tend to carry
their authority with less strain and more élan, to maintain their
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31
repose and to intervene with aplomb, even when a learning occasion goes embarrassingly wrong—well mostly. These ways
you acquire more by keeping at it than by having a hero.
Then there were the bread-and-butter virtues of any teacher
in an institution, enforcing some discipline by mundane means—
calling on the silent, administering quizzes, requiring and attending to projects to be handed in. This dutiful fulfillment of
institutional requirements ought to be supervised by those in
charge, in our case that is the dean. Mr. Klein learned meticulous
dutifulness, as his wife told me, on the job; his pre-dean nature
was to let such things—such mere necessities—go in favor of
spontaneous life.
So far I’ve described a teacher at once too distinctively himself and too ordinarily dutiful to be a very imageable model. I’ll
now try to say how he came to be the paradigm of a teacher in a
school devoted to liberal education.
Let me begin by forfending the imputation that he followed
something called “the Socratic Method.” Neither Mr. Klein nor
we, the epigonoi as the Greek say, the successors, do any such
thing. On the one hand, it’s a contradiction in terms: Socrates
had, as I’ve said, a way, a pursuit, but not a method in the Cartesian sense of a set of jigged procedures for following an inquiry.
Mr. Klein used to say that each dialogue was its own world, and
in each conversation Socrates goes about his search in a different
way, taking into account the character of his conversational partners and of the object in question. So Socrates has his ways which
are not a method, and in that respect he is the very incarnation of
liberal teaching and our super-model. Yet, on the other hand, this
Socrates of the Platonic dialogues is, after all, Plato’s marionette,
who does as he’s told, which means he knows, or Plato knows
for him, exactly where he’s going. And that we never do know—
and we manage to rejoice in that fact.
And here finally begins my positive delineation of a pedagogy specific to liberal education and to Jasha Klein’s embodiment of it. It presupposes that liberal education, in its most
specific sense, is realized in a curriculum of texts handed to us
by the tradition, be they verbal, musical, visual. These works are
primary in the order of making or finding and prime in the ranking of quality or worth. Confronted with such works a teacher
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does well to recede into equality with the students, to inquire
along with them, and yet to be the safekeeper, the tutor of the enterprise. Mr. Klein was a master of the somewhat mysterious art
of leading from behind— by solicitous listening, by intimating
questions, even by expectant silence. He himself particularly admired a colleague, Richard Scofield, a gentleman of the old
American type, for his elegant tacitness.
This reticence had its infuriating aspects: The more a young
fellow-tutor wanted to be initiated into the deep lore we were
sure he possessed, the less forthcoming he was—sometimes, I
discovered, because he didn’t actually know, but more often because he was terminally disciple-proof; he would tolerantly respond to the admiring affection of beguiled students but would
not bind them to him by an inside teaching. It was part of that
soundness of his, which did have a Socratic look about it. His
most consequential discoveries fit, as I’ve said, into our own intellects as if there’d always been a place ready for them. Of
course, in time the insufficiencies emerged, not such as to undo
the insights, but such as to make them the center of a second sort
of attention, critical attention.
Playfulness, another Socratic element, is of the essence in
liberal learning—playfulness in making the most of the misfiring
of the inquiring intellect, playful exploitation of felicitous coincidences and other fortuities, playful extraction of sense from
nonsense, playful pinpointing of students’ personal ways—the
sort that feels to them not like offensive denigration but like gratifying spot-lighting. Playfulness, after all, goes with laughter, and
surprised laughter is the physical analogue to wonder, the beginning of philosophy. We young tutors, who had just emerged from
post-graduate studies, learned something wonderful: Learning
has a human face, and a teacher who can’t laugh, can’t be serious.
Seriousness is naturally next. Seriousness is opposed in one
respect to levity, for example a leaning some bright students
evince toward easily distractible intellectual gadgeteering. In another respect, seriousness is opposed to earnestness, dead earnestness, such as rigidly relentless industriousness. Both evade
entering into the “seriousness of the concept” (as Hegel terms it;
“Preface” 4, Phenomenology). “Seriousness” here means not be-
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33
laboring a thought but letting it work on you, not willfully grasping for insights but letting them come, by giving them room or—
as I like to put it—by futzing around. Time-taking patience and
messing-about belong to liberal learning, because these works
don’t open up to strategic invasions.
Serious teachers who join their students in dithering purposefully and procrastinating concentratedly must also sometimes appear in a formidable aspect. Socrates, for example, appears thus
formidable just once that I know of, though that leaves its daunting impression: When confronted with a young life going seriously wrong, here that of Callicles, he concludes with an
impassioned speech in a tone devoid of any tint of parity or playfulness: He says that he will follow his own account for a life of
virtue and bids Callicles and his crowd follow the same rationale
of conduct. “For,” he ends, “yours is worth nothing” (Gorgias,
end). On rare occasions I’ve heard that tone from Mr. Klein, a
tone utterly distinct from that of powerlessly querulous righteousness sometimes adopted by academics when great perturbations
are caused by small differences. These were moments when the
stakes were high—our students’ souls or our school’s survival,
particularly its resolute non-careerism—for this is, as I’ve said,
what the word “liberal” in “liberal education” originally betokens.
That brings me to the protection of the exchanges that are the
life of learning from dangers both within and without the classroom. Of these there are many, of which I’ll mention only one:
the corruption of conversation into debate, into argument, and
even into discussion, into all the modes of human communication
in which the passion of competition outweighs the desire for illumination. Mr. Klein practiced a pedagogy that incited in students the desire to shine but damped their impulse to outshine
each other. I think what made it work was his own sense that
some of the greatness of the works we were grappling with magnified us, but also that in the face of this grandeur our gradations,
natural or acquired, were minimized. But there was some kindly
cunning in it as well: to pretend in the face of much contrary evidence that everyone was genuinely at work and really up to it
and to keep pretending it until it—sometimes—came true.
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Perhaps I’ll mention one more vulnerability of any serious
community of young learners: the excitation of friendships
formed in the face of deep questions and difficult texts displaces
proper preparation and solid learning. For young teachers that
somewhat vacuous intensity wears out with time, but some of
our students do graduate having had more experience of the love
of learning than of learning. Characters like that hung around
Socrates, and, as I recall, Mr. Klein didn’t know what to do about
them either. However, to my mind there are worse ways to waste
one’s time.
I have not at all exhausted the pedagogical lessons that many
of my colleagues and I myself learned from Jacob Klein. Since I
can’t recall his ever mentioning to me a living model for himself,
this conclusion may be justified: What shaped the soundly ingenious scholar of intellectual history that he was in the first half of
his life, into the devoted teacher’s teacher of liberal learning that
he became in the second half, was a tiny college, St. John’s, with
an unadulterated program of liberal education, seated in the continent-wide American republic, with a continuous tradition of enabling liberty.—This half-European was as American as they
come.
I’ll finish with a little anecdote to show how Jasha was my
teacher and my model. When, after his death, Dodo was disposing of his library, she told me to take whatever I wanted. I was
simply paralyzed by the prospect of suddenly owning a lot of irreplaceable books. So I went minimal. I chose only his Greek
Plato in the Teubner and Oxford editions, multiple volumes,
falling apart with use and heavily underlined as well as annotated
in his tiny, legible script. Then, nearly two-score years ago, I
bound all the volumes up in a broad golden ribbon and never
looked inside them again until I was writing this talk. He would
have chuckled.
�On Negation: Other Possibilities in
Wallace Stevens’s Parts of a World
Jason Menzin
After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
—Wallace Stevens
“The Well Dressed Man with a Beard”
In three poems from Parts of a World (1942)1—“Of Modern Poetry,” “Landscape with Boat,” and “The Well Dressed Man with
a Beard”—Wallace Stevens reflects on the idea that poetry enables human life, and on the idea that the poet’s fictions can console us, compensating to some extent for the loss of older ideas
of order. This perspective is a shift in tone and sensibility from
the sharp irony, cool distance, and florid diction characteristic of
Harmonium (1923).2 Parts of a World seems to seek a solution
to the problem of Crispin in Harmonium’s “Comedian as the Letter C,” who is “washed away by magnitude,” overwhelmed by
the violence of untamed reality:
[Crispin] now beheld himself,
A skinny sailor peering in the sea-glass.
What word split up in clickering syllables
And storming under multitudinous tones
Was name for this short-shanks in all that brunt?
Crispin was washed away by magnitude.3
1. Wallace Stevens, Parts of a World (New York: Knopf, 1942).
2. Wallace Stevens, Harmonium (New York: Knopf, 1923).
3. Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode
and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997), 22.
Jason Menzin has taught philosophy at the Morrisey College of Arts
and Sciences, Boston College.
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“Of Modern Poetry” is a short, self-referential poem in the ars
poetica tradition. It enacts what it describes, pointing to itself at
its beginning and end:
The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.
...
It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.4
This “poem of the mind” is mainly the imaginative act of the poet
in the process of creating. But for Stevens, the poem of the mind
is also a more expansive metaphor for all imaginative activities,
from faith and philosophy to history, literature, and science. It
stands for all fictive acts, all human attempts to find coherence in
the chaos of the world outside themselves. “The act of finding /
What will suffice” is this imaginative project, which is rooted in
the need for order, meaning, beauty, joy, play, and pleasure.
The “Modern” in the poem’s title indicates that the imagination faces new challenges. Poetry must adapt to contemporary
needs. In the past, the mind “has not always had / To find” because “the scene was set”; it merely “repeated what / Was in the
script.” The poet could borrow freely from religious, philosophical, political, economic, moral, and artistic certainties. But the
script of a scriptwriter God not only controls reality’s radical contingency, it also constrains the imagination’s possibilities. God’s
scripted world unfolds from birth to death with logical, or at least
dramatically plausible, necessity among thoughts and feelings.
Belief in such a coherent narrative could once, perhaps, have provided a sense of stability.
4. Ibid., 218-19.
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But Stevens signals the transformation of the world with a
line break—“then the theater was changed”—suggestively enjambing “To something else.” The broken line mimics a fracture
in the world, while the enjambment underscores the urgency of
transitioning to a new order. The gap between the first and second
sections of the poem, across which the enjambment moves, mirrors the imaginative leap required if the poet is to cross from one
structure of meaning to another.
When the scene changes, the past becomes merely a “souvenir”—a stale memento—and the poet must renovate the theatre
of human meaning.5 For Stevens, the poet must step into the gap
of feeling and meaning created by the collapse of the old verities.
The imagination
. . . has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice.6
It cannot any longer repeat God’s script, but must meet the new
realities head-on, connect to contemporary people and places, even
“think about war.” It must leave Romanticism behind and search
out reality in plain language. “And it has to find what will suffice.”
But what is the sense of sufficiency? In essence, it is a response that matches a need. In physics, it is the equal and opposite reaction to an action. It is not, however, an answer or a final
resolution, but a reaction that reestablishes balance. It is, for a
time, enough.
“Of Modern Poetry” presents Stevens’s thinking about the
voice of the poet, written in Stevens’s own voice, without the eva5. William Butler Yeats described the same change of scene in his wellknown poem “The Second Coming,” in which “things fall apart” so
that “the centre cannot hold.” He compares this change of scene to the
fall from paradise, an apocalypse auguring a new creation. William
Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Scribner,
1996), 187.
6. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 218-19.
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sions of irony. The first lines of the poem are expressed in short
strokes with simple diction. The word it and its declined variations
occur fifteen times, and the whole of the piece lacks the sharp tone
in much of Harmonium. Despite the spare language, the governing
metaphor of the opening section is theatrics—plays and playing
in the theatre of the world. The image of poetry is a performance
before an audience. Play and performance run through the whole
poem, from a theatre with a set-scene, to an insatiable script-less
actor on stage, to a guitar-twanging metaphysician in the dark, to
a man skating, to a woman dancing. Play is part of a living being’s
response to the pressures of life, but it is also a self-sufficient act,
done for its own sake, a good in itself.
But if there is play, there is also work. And since “it,” the
mind of the poet, “has to find what will suffice” in a world where
“the theatre was changed,” the imagination must “construct a new
stage.”7 Stevens knows, as Nietzsche knew, that the death of God
means the loss of old givens. Several years after “Of Modern Poetry,” Stevens will echo Nietzsche, re-announcing that “the death
of one God is the death of all.”8 But Stevens also knows, with
Sartre, that human beings—and poets in particular—have the
artistic capacity to build a world out of their own experience. The
mind’s construction of a new stage is part of the poet’s construction of reality. This is Sartre’s existentialism compressed and
transmuted into the language of poetic creation.
Having constructed the new stage of poetic reality, Stevens
sets a single, long and complex sentence across the mid-point of
“Of Modern Poetry”:
It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 329.
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Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one.9
The imaginative mind not only develops new forms through
which reality may be understood, it also, “like an insatiable
actor,” plays at playing a role, and speaks words to the world.
These are the two complementary halves of the poetic whole: a
created stage-world and a fictive performance. But as with the
woman singing by the sea at Key West, the relationship between
creator, creature, and spectator is not simple. And here Stevens
insists that the poet must speak carefully, “slowly and with meditation,” the words that suffice.
Stevens’s figure for sufficiency is consonance, like words
that rhyme: the echo of “ear” in “hear,” the repetition of “ear”
and “ear.” The sounds of rhyme, expectation and fulfillment, imitate the poem’s broader ability to satisfy a psychic need. It is first
the sound, not the sense, of his words that triggers a response in
the actor-poet’s invisible audience. It is the sound that prompts
the audience to turn inward, to feel an internal response, listening
“not to the play, but to itself.” This is the mystery of poetry. A
bridge of words, of sense and sound, emerging from nowhere and
crossing the gap between poet and audience. This is sufficiency,
a temporary unity of feeling, “expressed / In an emotion as of
two people, as of two / Emotions becoming one.” It is through
this unity, when it happens, that the poet changes the world.
Stevens not only fuses feelings—unifying people and emotions—but also transmutes the mind poetically. At the poem’s beginning, the mind is an actor in the world-as-theater. When “the
theater was changed,” the mind becomes an insatiable actor who
“has to be on that stage.” Then, allowing the analogy to disappear,
mind as actor becomes musical metaphysician. The fictive personae merge, echoing in poetic form the fusion of “two / Emotions
9. Ibid., 219.
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becoming one.” Actor-mind, now reconstituted as instrumentalist,
continues to make sounds:
The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly
Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,
Beyond which it has no will to rise.10
In a poem about poetry, Stevens inserts an image of a philosopher, one who lacks a Platonic sun, lacks the light of reason—a
metaphysician making music in the dark. And the sounds that
issue from his guitar are sounds of the imagination.
But why does he “twang”? And why on one string instead of
several? Again, the sound of words first moves the audience toward emotion. “Twang” is sensibly onomatopoetic, vibrating in
the mouth as a string vibrates in the air. The single string reflects
his harmonization of distinctions; his music briefly unifies minds.
From the sounds of the wiry string a new formulation of “what
will suffice” emerges. Moments of “sudden rightnesses” flash
into existence and create a temporary equilibrium of feeling, a
womb-like sense of containment, a nearly unimaginable fullness
of satisfaction: “wholly / Containing the mind, below which it
cannot descend, / Beyond which it has no will to rise.” This is
not the permanence of a set-scene, nor the eternal verities of old
metaphysicians, but a moment of passing human integritas.
The poem closes with brief sketches of simple scenes from
human life:
It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.11
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
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Gone is the metaphorical stage, the actor, and the musical metaphysician. What remain are simple figures of play and motion
and gentleness: “a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman /
Combing.” Prefiguring the tone in much of Stevens’s late poetry,
these are quiet, transient, and lonely images of sufficiency. Like
the poem itself, these are instances of what might suffice, “the
poem of the act of the mind.”
✢✢✢
Unlike his practice in much of Harmonium, Stevens employs
irony in Parts of a World not merely to mock, but also to clear
an imaginative space upon which to frame new possibilities.
“Landscape with Boat,” a poem with a painterly title about an
artist, reflects this development in Stevens’s ironic sensibility.
First published in the autumn of 1940, “Landscape with
Boat” has four main sections, each with its own distinct focus
and tone: the first, like the “Snow Man” of Harmonium, is largely
descriptive; the second is critical; the third revelatory; the fourth
calmly reflective. Moreover, the poem has two halves—the first
framing the life and art of an ascetic figure, the second exploring
the sense of other possibilities.
“Landscape with Boat” begins with a deceptively simple line:
An anti-master-man, floribund ascetic.
He brushed away the thunder, then the clouds,
Then the colossal illusion of heaven. Yet still
The sky was blue. He wanted imperceptible air.
He wanted to see. He wanted the eye to see
And not be touched by blue. He wanted to know,
A naked man who regarded himself in the glass
Of air, who looked for the world beneath the blue,
Without blue, without any turquoise hint or phase,
Any azure under-side or after-color. Nabob
Of bones, he rejected, he denied, to arrive
At the neutral center, the ominous element,
The single-colored, colorless, primitive.12
12. Ibid., 220.
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The opening—“An anti-master man, floribund ascetic”—is
a sentence fragment, an extended noun, a label, language that
might appear on a small card beneath a painting on the wall of a
museum. It signals the poem’s subject matter without incorporating the living action and motion of a verb. The syntax of this
phrase—the indefinite article, the negation, the missing verb—
hints at the meaning of the figure Stevens has introduced. The
anti-master man is defined in part by inversion. He is by being
what he is not. He is neither Nietzsche’s master man nor Hitler’s;
he is not even the anti-master man. He is merely an indefinite
“an.” But he is also a “floribund ascetic.” “Floribund,” a neologism, clearly suggests “florid,” probably also “abundant,” and
therefore forms an oxymoron with “ascetic.”13 Although “floribund” is not a word in English, floribunda, “many-flowering” in
Latin, is a species of rose popularized at the 1939 World’s Fair.
With some or all of this in mind, Stevens characterizes the antimaster man as an ironic paradox of empty-fullness, a man of selfdenial and roses.
But what is this floribund ascetic? He is an artist, a peculiar
abstractionist, who removes elements from a painted canvas: “He
brushed away the thunder, then the clouds, / Then the colossal illusion of heaven.” This painter is both poetic imaginer as well as
ambiguously broom-brush-wielding artist. Thunder is sound, not
shape. The illusion of heaven is idea, not image. Neither can literally be “brushed away.” But the ascetic artist does brush them
away, removing both the real and the imagined sky, the thunder
and clouds as well as heaven, the stale ideas of order and coherence lost to the modern world. This inverse painting, the brushing
of negation, is a necessarily imperfect, incompletable process.
The painter who removes all color from a canvas ceases to produce painting. This ultimate abstractionist would succeed in his
end only by failing as an artist. And just so, despite his brushing
13. In “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” Stevens disaggregates this
fusion, in “happy fecundity, flor-abundant force” (Collected Poetry
and Prose, 336).
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away, “Yet still / The sky was blue.” The ascetic may succeed in
removing images and ideas, but he cannot brush away the blue
of the imagination.
But who is this anti-master man, this floribund ascetic? Is
this Stevens himself? The rich connoisseur of food and art and
flowers and books, living alone in a small upstairs room at home
in Connecticut? Is he the idea of a modern artist, a poet-painter
who denies the world and life to achieve a truth beyond the real?
Is it an echo of Nietzsche’s conception of the ascetic? A mockery
and critique of the poet? A critique of critique?
What is this abstractionist trying to do? What does he want?
What does it mean to take blue away from the imagination? Like
a refigured image of the earlier “snow man” of Harmonium, the
abstractionist tends toward negation and nothingness. He must,
in other words, “have a mind of winter” and “have been cold a
long time”14 to want “imperceptible air,” to want to see with a
single, cyclopean “eye” and not be touched by the blueness of
feeling and imagination. He would see with Homer’s monster’s
eye, without the depth of emotion, without color, half-blind, in
an almost perspective-less perspective without human sense—
an urge not for the chaos of senseless nonsense but for the bare,
“naked” barrenness of non-sense. He is also, perhaps, a figure
for the twentieth-century physicist, peeling back the surface of
both the world and the mind to find a colorless absence as the ultimate object beneath. Or, more comically, he is the poet carried
away by critique and the poetic reassessment of old ideas of coherence. He is Stevens critiquing himself and his own poems
about poetry, parodying the act of tossing too many things onto
the dump heap.15
This ascetic artist, a figure of negation, is “Nabob / Of bones,”
a non-man, shorn of everything but his internal frame. “He rejected, he denied,” brushing away his painting, his world, and his
14. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 8.
15. Cf. Stevens’s poem “The Man on the Dump,” Collected Poetry
and Prose, 184-86.
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self, in an effort “to arrive / At the neutral center, the ominous element.” The danger of this kind of abstraction is acute. It turns a
man into a skeleton, pulls clouds from the sky, rejects, denies,
and destroys. It is the search for the “ominous” center, something
non-human, sub-human, and impossible: “The single colored,
colorless primitive.” The primitive, like the artist’s “eye,” is singular, so that the form of the seeker here matches the form of the
thing sought. It, like the artist figured in the poem’s opening line,
is oxymoronic, colored colorlessness, and, like the artist himself,
is a thing of negation, neither this, nor that, but “neutral.”
It was not as if the truth lay where he thought,
Like a phantom, in an uncreated night.
It was easier to think it lay there. If
It was nowhere else, it was there and because
It was nowhere else, its place had to be supposed,
Itself had to be supposed, a thing supposed
In a place supposed, a thing that he reached
In a place that he reached, by rejecting what he saw
And denying what he heard. He would arrive.
He had only not to live, to walk in the dark,
To be projected by one void into
Another.16
This unsympathetic, comic-tragic figure’s effort fails, however, because lifeless life is not life but death, which is the end
of possibilities: “It was not as if the truth lay where he thought, /
Like a phantom, in an uncreated night.” There is finally no colorless color to find, no human experience beyond human feeling
and human thought. Unreality, however, does not prevent its supposition. The abstractionist is not only ascetic, but also paradoxically floribund. He seeks a truth beyond the imagination by
means of supposing, by imagining. And within Stevens’s poetics,
this seeming inconsistency makes perfect sense, since “the absence of the imagination had / Itself to be imagined.”17
16. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 220.
17. Cf. “The Plain Sense of Things,” in Collected Poetry and Prose, 428.
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Hypothetically, if the truth beyond the imagination were
“nowhere else,” then it would be “there.” But this truth is not
only not the twice-repeated “nowhere else,” it is also not even
“there.” It is non-truth. It is only “nowhere” because it is an experience of nothing. The negated, brushed away world and the
mind of ultimate rejection and denial does not exist. Or, if this
non-truth does exist, it has no sense for the living human being.
It would be “a thing that he reached / In a place that he reached,
by rejecting what he saw / And denying what he heard.” Nevertheless, Nabob perseveres in his efforts; despite obstacles and
impossibilities, “He would arrive.” But at what ridiculous,
tragic cost: “He had only not to live, to walk in the dark.” Perhaps the floribund ascetic is not only florid and abundant, but
also florid and moribund, flowery and dead, since his is a poetics of death.
In a remarkable use of enjambment, Stevens both uncovers
the heart of the ascetic painter-poet and figures his inevitable
end, explaining that Nabob had only “To be projected by one
void into / Another.” At the exact mid-point of the poem, a position which here signals the ascetic’s central emptiness, he is projected by one void—himself—into the blankness of the
unfinished sentence at the end of the poetic line. He is thrown
into the nothingness beyond the poem, a senseless non-existence
beyond human meaning. Strongly paralleling the “nothing” of
the “Snow Man” in Harmonium, the ascetic is projected by one
void, the nothing that he is, into another void, the nothing of the
non-world that he seeks.18
Had Stevens concluded the poem at this point, it would
merely be an ironic recasting of the “snow man” into the figure
of an inhuman poet-artist—from snow man to no man. The continuation of the poem reveals an important aspect of Stevens’s
poetic development.
The third section opens with a continued reflection on the ascetic artist in much the same tone as before:
18. Cf. again “The Snow Man,” in Collected Poetry and Prose, 8.
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It was his nature to suppose,
To receive what others had supposed, without
Accepting. He received what he denied.
But as truth to be accepted, he supposed
A truth beyond all truths.19
These five lines form a bridge between the second and third sections of the poem. They recapitulate the opening half of the poem,
reminding the reader of the abstractionist’s practice of un-painting. The metaphor of brushing away images is here made plain—
the ascetic artist receives ideas and images from “others”
“without accepting” them, supposing without believing, inheriting and denying his inheritance. Nabob is a figure of critique,
whose only affirmative supposition is “a truth beyond all truths,”
a nothing-truth of emptiness, a metaphysics of non-.
Stevens uses repetition in the bridge-section to create expectation and emotional force. The empty suppositions of the ascetic,
reiterated by the repetition of “suppose” in the five lines of the
bridge passage, are finally overwhelmed by a new supposing, the
powerful revelation of other possibilities of life through creative
figuring:
He never supposed
That he might be truth, himself, or part of it,
That the things that he rejected might be part
And the irregular turquoise, part, the perceptible blue
Grown denser, part, the eye so touched, so played
Upon by clouds, the ear so magnified
By thunder, parts, and all these things together,
Parts, and more things, parts.20
With a complete shift in poetic tone, Stevens undoes the ascetic artist’s opening act of de-creation. The return of the world,
with language that feels like air and sunlight overwhelming desolation, is beyond the abstractionist’s supposing. And although
carefully couched in the subjunctive “might” and the conditional
19. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 220.
20. Ibid., 220-21.
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“if,” the feeling of these lines, especially as it contrasts with the
sense of a world brushed away in the poem’s first half, contains
romantic—nearly biblical—force. The negating ascetic, of
course, “never supposed / That he might be truth, or part of it.”
And with the pulse-like repetition of “part,” Stevens brings back
the parts of a world brushed away by the ascetic in the poem’s
opening section. Stevens brings back the “turquoise tint”—now
“irregular”; the “blue”—now no longer the “imperceptible air”
of the ascetic, but “perceptible,” “grown denser”; the “clouds”—
now playful on the eye; the “thunder”—now magnifying the ear.
The painting of the poem’s opening has been restored, renewed,
with all but the “colossal illusion of heaven” reinstated. And
even that illusion, perhaps necessarily left off the canvas in
modernity, is transmuted in a second and final, restorative supposition:
He never supposed divine
Things might not look divine, nor that if nothing
Was divine then all things were, the world itself,
And that if nothing was the truth, then all
Things were the truth, the world itself was the truth.21
Echoing “Sunday Morning,”22 where divinity lives within the self
and within scenes of earthly emotion, this second supposition
projects the possibility of a new kind of divinity. Here the ascetic
is inverted. The thing sought is not nothing, but everything: the
world itself, the parts of a whole. This everything is not under
the canvas, not beneath the blue, or beyond, but here and now
and as things actually are. As in the flight of the angel in “Notes
Toward a Supreme Fiction” and that poem’s “expressible bliss,”
here differences are collapsed, like a mystical epiphany, and truth
is seen everywhere.23
But surely this goes too far. Stevens’s skepticism and his poetics of sufficiency is not a poetics of totality. And indeed, all of
21. Ibid., 221.
22. Ibid., 53-56.
23. Ibid., 349.
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this would be too sentimental, too romantic for belief, if not for
the qualifying conditionals, the uncertainty of “might,” the indefiniteness of “suppose.” These are not assertions of certainty,
but expressions of possibilities, contrapuntal potentialities to the
ascetic artist’s negations. Yet even these evasions fit into the orchestrated whole of Stevens’s own poem. This suggests, if only
obliquely, that the two abstractions—one of negation, one of totality—are not equally plausible or equally human.
In “Landscape with Boat,” artistic repetition, not mere repetitiousness, signals the potential for actual order—both in the
poem and in the world. Even as “suppose” is repeated several
times in this section, the word “he” is repeated seven times in the
opening section, “it” eight times in the second, and “part” seven
times in the third. After the repetition of “it” in the second section,
“he” is repeated six times. Before the repetition of “part” in the
third, “he” is again repeated six times. These symmetries of repetition provide cohesion to the poem both in sense and sound.
They are like a pulse within the poem, from the ascetic “he” to
the non-truth of “it” to the revelatory “part.” The existence of
these parts of the poem themselves enact the “parts” described
within the poem. If artistically shaped patterns, structures of poetic repetition, point to the possibility of parts in the world, then
there may be a concordance between poem and cosmos. The
poem may make possible a belief in the possibility of parts, a belief in the possibility of a whole defined not by inversion but by
life itself.
Within the shape of this whole, Stevens completes the poem
with a reflective voice, moving into the warmth of sunlight, air,
and water. He ends with a “better” supposing, a life of motion
and sound and warmth:
Had he been better able to suppose:
He might sit on a sofa on a balcony
Above the Mediterranean, emerald
Becoming emeralds. He might watch the palms
Flap green ears in the heat. He might observe
A yellow wine and follow a steamer’s track
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And say, “The thing I hum appears to be
The rhythm of this celestial pantomime.”24
Here, with the appearance of the steamer’s track, is a refreshed
“Landscape with Boat”—not the landscape brushed away by the
abstractionist, but a rich place, an image of what might be, of
what “might . . . might . . . might” be, of possible poetry and possible life. Here in the south of Europe a better painter, a man alive
to the scene before him, sits at rest on a sofa on a balcony overlooking the play of light and water on the Mediterranean. Unlike
the abstractionist—a void becoming void—this artist, like the sea
before him, is perhaps an “emerald / Becoming emeralds,” the
green jewels that are the parts of reality. This greater artist observes rather than destroys, and, instead of brushing away thunder
and clouds, watches palms flap leaves like green ears that can
hear a world in the warm air. This possible poet observes the liquid pleasure of wine and the liquid of the sea. He sees in the water
a “steamer’s track,” a relic of motion, a hint of the boat of the
poem’s title, an affirmation that this moment itself, this lived moment from the balcony above the sea, is the landscape with boat.
In the midst of this renewed world, the poet reflects in spoken
words on the sense of his own poetry: “The thing I hum appears
to be the rhythm of this celestial pantomime.” In harmony with
the poetics of the poem’s second half, this better poet feels his
poetry fitting into the rhythm of the world. He feels the rhythm
of his own language to be a sound of concord, a thing that might
reflect the greater poetry of a cosmos of moving parts.
✢ ✢ ✢
In “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard,” another short poem
with a painterly title, Stevens continues to work through themes
and ideas from “Of Modern Poetry” and “Landscape with Boat.”
Unlike the latter poem, however, with its two distinct halves,
“The Well Dressed Man with a Beard” consists of a body and
tail, a single stanza of sixteen lines and a one-line coda.
24. Ibid., 221
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After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.
If the rejected things, the things denied,
Slid over the western cataract, yet one,
One only, one thing that was firm, even
No greater than a cricket’s horn, no more
Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech
Of the self that must sustain itself on speech,
One thing remaining, infallible, would be
Enough. Ah! douce campagna of that thing!
Ah! douce campagna, honey in the heart,
Green in the body, out of a petty phrase,
Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:
The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,
The aureole above the humming house . . .
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.25
On initial reading, the negative conclusion of the poem’s
coda seems strangely paired with the humming affirmations that
end the main stanza. Perhaps a closer examination can help clarify the relationship between the coda and the whole.
The opening line is a compressed version of the two halves
of “Landscape with Boat,” in which the first half involves the
negations of the ascetic artist, while the second half makes affirmations that re-create the world. Similarly, this poem begins with
the recognition of a “no,” before moving to the affirmation of a
“yes”: “After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the
future world depends.” This sentence is obscure because “no”
and “yes” are not responses to particular questions, but instead
they express psychological polarities or even cosmic antitheses.
The “final no” is the end. It is death, rejection, perfection, and
apocalypse. This final no echoes the artistic purpose of the ascetic
painter-poet in the earlier poem. Here again, the “no” is not
merely an ironic negation, but rather an idea that clears the
ground for something else and greater—a “yes.”26
25. Ibid., 224.
26. Cf. the final line of Joyce’s Ulysses.
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Once the last “no” is spoken or thought, there is not nothing,
not silence, but the advent of a Christ-like “yes.” This “yes” is
the actuality of affirmation beyond negation. It is the basis of a
whole “future world.” “No” is the night, the absence of the world
in sleep; “yes” is the sun, the light of seeing, the world seen, the
imagination’s possibilities. “No was,” in the negation of past time
and non-existence, while “yes is” in the actuality of the evanescent present.
The long, dense conditional sentence that follows contains the
poem’s central imagery and points to the possibilities of a “yes.”
As in “Of Modern Poetry,” Stevens is again in search of what will
suffice—here the possibility of finding one thing that “would be /
Enough.” The skeleton of this sentence—“If the rejected things
slid over the western cataract, one thing remaining would be
enough”—echoes the structure of the poem’s opening line: from
no to yes. The protasis opens with negation—“the rejected things,
the things denied”—while the apodosis points to the potential for
something more, something “remaining,” that is sufficient. This
pattern, in small, suggests the whole of “Landscape with Boat,”
the possibility of moving from abstract negation to discovering
meaning to reclaiming a whole world. Stevens emphasizes the
conclusion of the apodosis through enjambment in the last line,
pointing from the potentiality of “would be” to the sufficiency of
a suggestively lonely “enough.”
Water passing over a cataract is an irreversible moment of
loss. The “western cataract” is the poem’s own “final no.” It is
the horizon of the setting sun, a spatialization of death. Like the
musty theatre from the opening of “Of Modern Poetry,” the rejected things that pass beyond are exhausted fictions, empty ideas
incapable of engendering meaning in the modern heart. But if not
every idea slides over the western cataract, if—in a remarkable
quadruple expression of singularity—“one, / One only, one thing”
should remain, then that “would be / Enough.” Even if the one
thing were physically infinitesimal, “no greater than a cricket’s
horn,” even if the one thing were intellectually insignificant, “no
more / Than a thought to be rehearsed all day,” it would be enough
because it would be something.
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The one thing, no matter how small, that survives the
decimation of time is actual and therefore powerful. The cricket’s
horn suggests both small size and enormous sound wholly
disproportionate to the insect’s physical magnitude. This
disproportion indicates the power of the one thing preserved from
the cataract’s eclipse. “[N]o more / than a thought,” rehearsed in
the mind (as if for a play on the stage in “Of Modern Poetry”),
the one thing remaining points to a passage on repetition in
“Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”:
A thing final in itself and, therefore, good:
One of the vast repetitions final in
Themselves and, therefore, good.27
The one thing, rehearsed and repeated, final in itself, is poetic expression, the power of words to change the world. Echoing the
actor and the metaphysician in “Of Modern Poetry,” both of whom
use sound to move their audiences, the thing that suffices here is
“a speech / Of the self that must sustain itself on speech.” As much
as bread and water, the right words may sustain life.28
To complement the “better” supposing in the second half of
“Landscape with Boat,” here the idea that something might
survive oblivion provides pleasure, even to the point of eliciting
exclamations. The “douce campagna” blends with the sweetness
of “honey in the heart” and the vigorous receptivity of “green in
the body.” This is a place of peace and pleasure brought on by
words that are enough. The “douce campagna” is a dream-like
belief, “a thing affirmed,” a ghostly energy humming in the
night—like crickets—where the human being sleeps and dwells.
But what is the meaning of the coda, “It can never be satisfied, the mind, never”? Is Stevens undercutting the possibility of
encountering and experiencing the “douce campagna”? Is this an
27. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 350.
28. Cf. the final stanza of “Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction”: “How
simply the fictive hero becomes the real; / How gladly with proper
words the soldier dies, / If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful
speech.” Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 352.
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anti-romantic backlash against the apparent sentimentality of the
poem? Is this the speech that ends possibilities? As with the conditionals and evasions in the revelatory third section of “Landscape with Boat,” it is reasonable to remember that Stevens
disdains the falsifying voice of naïve idealism. But perhaps there
is also more. Perhaps the coda is itself an instance of the “final
no” from the opening line of the poem. Perhaps the one thing that
survives the “western cataract” is the poem itself or the “petty
phrase” that is the poem’s opening line. By the poetic logic of
“The Well Dressed Man with a Beard,” after the “final no” there
comes a “yes.” And if this is true, then the reader must feel the
inevitability of an as-yet-unspoken “yes” coming after the
poem’s final “never.” If the opening line is to be believed, then
the end of the poem is not the end. Despite the emphatic negations “never . . . never,” which point to the impossibility of permanent satisfaction, “yes” implies an unending process of poetic
refiguring, a never-ending poetic response to a never-ending
human need for something real.
✢✢✢
Stevens’s shifting usage of terms of negation is a critical clue to
a change in his poetic sensibility between the publications of
Harmonium and Parts of a World. In Harmonium, negation is
characterized, on the one hand, by desolation, as in the impossibly icy mind of a snow man who, “nothing himself, beholds /
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is,”29 and, on the
other hand, by the half-mockery of Mon Oncle’s opening address,
in which “[t]here is not nothing, no, no, never nothing, / Like the
clashed edges of two words that kill.”30 But in Parts of a World,
despite the apparent similarity of expression, negation begets new
and potentially endless possibilities. In “Of Modern Poetry,”
“sudden rightnesses” create an emotional space for the mind
“below which it cannot descend, / Beyond which it has no will
to rise,”31 signalling not the inability of the mind to progress, but
29. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 8.
30. Ibid., 10.
31. Ibid., 219.
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the temporary bliss of sufficiency. In “Landscape with Boat,” the
ascetic “never supposed / That he might be truth,”32 signalling
not another layer of artistic demolition, but the opening of a new
vista on life. And in “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard,” that
“it can never be satisfied, the mind, never,”33 signals not the end,
but the never-ending need for poetry. “Never” and “not” and
“no” in Parts of a World signify affirmation rather than despondency. They point away from the precipice of the “western
cataract” and toward the solid ground of meaning, feeling, and
expression offered by a supreme fiction.34
32. Ibid., 220.
33. Ibid., 224.
34. The difference in Stevens’s understanding of negation in Harmonium and Parts of a World might well be compared to the final “no” in
Rev. 6:8 (“And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat
on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given
unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with
hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth”) and the “yes”
of a future cosmos in Rev. 21:1 (“And I saw a new heaven and a new
earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there
was no more sea”).
�“The Student,” by Anton Chekhov:
A Story Told and Glanced At
Louis Petrich
We students take our pleasure in stories. We students love stories
that lift us to the light of meaning and fill us with confidence to
face life’s elements on friendly terms. We are nevertheless engaged in a precarious undertaking. The meaning and strength we
obtain may be shared and the stories proclaimed universal; or they
may be unshared—opposed to each other—their stories indeterminate and parochial. In this second case the meaning and strength
that we happen to find may appear to others as the desperate attempts of a literate organism to keep its skin warm and its way lit
in the local cold and dark. It may not be possible to tell the difference in truth between these two kinds of meaning and strength.
I would like to tell you a story now, written in 1894 by Anton
Chekhov, called “The Student.” It is a multi-layered story, but
very short—about three and a half pages—taking twelve minutes
to tell. If you are reading this lecture, please try to hear the words
of the story, here included, as if they were being told to you for
the very first time.
∽
The Student
Anton Chekhov1
The weather was fair at first and still. The blackbirds were calling and
a creature in the nearby swamps plaintively hooting as if blowing into
1. Translated by Michael Heim. Used by the kind permission of The Estate of
Michael Heim.
Louis Petrich is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, where this lecture
was first delivered on November 3, 2017. It is dedicated to Amy Kass (19402015) and her husband, Leon (b. 1939). Like many others, the author was a student in their light of reflection for some years.
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an empty bottle. A woodcock flew past, and a shot boomed out merrily
in the spring air. But when the woods grew dark, an inauspiciously cold,
piercing wind blew in from the east, and silence fell. Needles of ice
stretched over the puddles, and the woods became disagreeable, godforsaken, hostile. Winter was in the air.
Ivan Velikopolsky, a seminary student and deacon’s son, was on
his way home from a hunt, following a path through a water meadow.
His fingers were numb, and his face burned in the wind. He felt that the
sudden blast of cold had violated the order and harmony of things, that
nature herself was terrified and so the dark of evening had come on
more quickly than necessary. Desolation was everywhere, and it was
somehow particularly gloomy. The only light came from the widows’
vegetable gardens by the river; otherwise everything far and wide, all
the way to the village four versts off, was submerged in the cold evening
mist. The student remembered that when leaving the house he had seen
his mother sitting barefoot on the floor in the entryway polishing the
samovar and his father lying on the stove coughing. It was Good Friday,
so cooking was forbidden and he was terribly hungry.2 And now,
stooped with the cold, he thought how the same wind had blown in the
days of Rurik and Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great3 and there had
been the same crippling poverty and hunger, the same leaky thatched
roofs and benighted, miserable people, the same emptiness everywhere
and darkness and oppressive grief, and all these horrors had been and
were and would be and even the passing of a thousand years would
make life no better. And he had no desire to go home.
The gardens were called the widows’ gardens because they were
tended by two widows, mother and daughter. The crackling fire gave
off great heat and lit up the surrounding plowlands. The widow Vasilisa, a tall, plump old woman wearing a man’s sheepskin coat, stood
nearby, staring into it pensively; her daughter Lukerya, who was short,
pockmarked, and had a slightly stupid face, sat on the ground washing
a pot and spoons. They must have just finished supper. Men’s voices
came up from the river, local farmhands watering their horses.
“Well, winter’s back,” said the student, going up to the fire.
“Hello there.”
2. The Lenten fast that lasts for forty days calls for varying degrees of abstinence
from meat, dairy, fish, olive oil, and alcohol; on Good Friday, the somber anniversary of Christ’s crucifixion, Orthodox Christians observe the strictest fast
of the year and are meant to eat nothing at all.
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Vasilisa started but then saw who he was and put on a welcoming
smile.
“I didn’t recognize you,” she said. “God be with you and make you
rich.”
They talked. Vasilisa had been in the world: she had worked for
the gentry first as a wet nurse and later as a nanny, and she had a dainty
way of speaking and a gentle, stately smile that never left her lips; her
daughter Lukerya, a product of the village and her husband’s beatings,
merely squinted at the student in silence with the strange look of a deafmute.
“Peter the Apostle4 warmed himself at a fire just like this on one
cold night,” the student said, holding out his hands to the flames. “It
was cold then too. And oh, what a terrible night it was. An exceedingly
long and doleful night.”
He looked around at the darkness, gave his head a convulsive
shake, and said, “You’ve been to the Twelve Apostles service,5 haven’t
you?”
“I have,” Vasilisa responded.
“Remember when Peter says to Jesus during the Last Supper,6 ‘I
am ready to go with thee, both into prison, and to death’ and the Lord
says, ‘I tell thee, Peter, the cock shall not crow this day, before that
thou shalt thrice deny that thou knowest me’? When the supper was
over, Jesus, grieving unto death, prayed in the garden, and poor Peter,
weary of soul and weak, his eyes heavy, could not fight off sleep. And
sleep he did. Later that night Judas kissed Jesus and betrayed him to
3. Rurik: semi-legendary Viking hero of the Russian Primary Chronicle (1200),
who conquered in the ninth century and whose dynasty ruled the area occupied
by Kievan Rus until the sixteenth century. Ivan the Terrible: Grand Prince of
Moscow 1533-84, first ruler to be crowned Tsar, feared for his power and traditionally associated with cruelty. Peter the Great: Peter I, Tsar 1682-1725, first
to assume title of emperor; most famous for his efforts to modernize Russia by
westernizing it.
4. One of Jesus’s twelve original apostles, who plays a large role in the Gospel
events.
5. Twelve Apostles: Also called “Twelve Gospels” or the “Lord’s Passion”; the
service conducted on the evening of Holy Thursday consisting of twelve readings drawn from all four Gospels, leading up to and including the Crucifixion.
The passages Ivan cites are a combination of verses from Luke 22, John 18,
and Matthew 26.
6. The final meal Jesus shares with the twelve apostles just before he is taken
into custody and crucified.
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his torturers. He was bound and taken off to the high priest and beaten
while Peter—exhausted (he’d hardly slept, after all), plagued by anguish and trepidation, sensing something dreadful was about to happen
on earth—watched from afar . . . He loved him passionately, to distraction, and could now see them beating him . . .”
Lukerya laid down the spoons and trained her fixed gaze on the
student.
“Having arrived at the high priest’s house,” he continued, “they
began questioning Jesus, and the servants kindled a fire in the midst of
the courtyard, for it was cold and they wished to warm themselves. And
Peter stood at the fire with them, and he too warmed himself, as I am
doing now. And a certain maid saw him and said, ‘This man was also
with Jesus,’ meaning that he too should be taken for questioning. And
all the servants standing by the fire must have looked at him with suspicion and severity because he grew flustered and said, ‘I know him
not.’ And when shortly thereafter another recognized him as one of
Jesus’ disciples, saying, ‘Thou art also of them,’ he again denied it. Then
a third time someone turned to him and said, ‘Was it not thou I saw with
him in the garden today?’ and he denied it a third time, whereupon the
cock immediately crew, and Peter, gazing from afar at Jesus, recalled
the words he had said to him at supper . . . And having recalled them,
he pulled himself together, left the courtyard, and shed bitter, bitter
tears. The Gospel says: ‘And Peter went out, and wept bitterly.’ I can
picture it now: the garden, all still and dark, and a muffled, all but inaudible sobbing in the stillness . . . “
The student sighed and grew pensive. Still smiling, Vasilisa suddenly burst into sobs herself, and tears, large and abundant, rolled down
her cheeks, and she shielded her face from the fire as if ashamed of
them, and Lukerya, her eyes still fixed on the student, flushed, and the
look on her face grew heavy and tense like that of a person holding back
great pain.
The farmhands were returning from the river, and one of them, on
horseback, was close enough so that the firelight flickered over him.
The student bade the widows good-night and moved on. And again it
was dark, and his hands began to freeze. A cruel wind was blowing—
winter had indeed returned—and it did not seem possible that the day
after next would be Easter.
The student’s thoughts turned to Vasilisa: if she wept, it meant the
things that happened to Peter on that terrible night had some relevance
for her . . .
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He glanced back. The lone fire glimmered peacefully in the dark,
and there were no longer any people near it. Again he thought that if
Vasilisa wept and her daughter was flustered then clearly what he’d just
told them about events taking place nineteen centuries earlier was relevant to the present—to both women and probably to this backwater
village, to himself, and to everyone on earth. If the old woman wept, it
was not because he was a moving storyteller but because Peter was
close to her and her whole being was concerned with what was going
on in Peter’s soul.
And all at once he felt a stirring of joy in his soul and even paused
for a moment to catch his breath. The past, he thought, is tied to the
present in an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of the other.
And he felt he had just seen both ends of that chain: he had touched one
end and the other had moved.
And when ferrying across the river and later climbing the hill he
gazed at his native village and to the west of it, where a narrow strip of
cold, crimson twilight still shone, he kept thinking of how the truth and
beauty guiding human life back there in the garden and the high priest’s
courtyard carried on unceasingly to this day and had in all likelihood
and at all times been the essence of human life and everything on earth,
and a feeling of youth, health, strength—he was only twenty-two—and
an ineffably sweet anticipation of happiness, unknown and mysterious,
gradually took possession of him, and life appeared wondrous, marvelous, and filled with lofty meaning.
∽
So what should we do now? Is the story not sufficient in its
telling? The student glances back to see if meaning adheres to
what his listeners outwardly felt by that fire. Let us do that, we
movers-on: glance back with me to the outward-looking first
paragraph, and let us creatively accompany the author as we wonder about felt meanings.
The weather was fair at first and still. I wonder why authors
bother to describe the weather. Is it merely to assist our imaginations in making the story seem vividly real? Or does the weather,
as banal a subject as they come, determine our recognition of
things, profoundly, not merely superficially? We like it to remain
fair, but we know it always changes, never quite predictably, like
lines of verse that obey a form but surprise us at each step. Any
attempt to describe the weather must therefore be qualified with
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Chekhov’s: “at first.” The word “still” that follows “at first” and
earns its momentary stop is a favorite of his. It captures the punctual motion and rest that we would feel as hearers of his musically
made stories if we knew Russian. The weather, when “still,” feels
poised, self-same, and we can almost rest our hope in its authorized continuity. But this lovely stillness, because it is “at first,”
feels ready to tip over, betray its promises, despoil its fair face,
and move unplotted toward no home of rest. So begins the story
Chekhov called his most perfect. Perfection lacks nothing, contains everything that belongs to its life and form. For a story to
be perfect, should it not be the first story told, yet poised to bend,
alter, and pour itself out as someone else’s?
The blackbirds were calling and a creature in the nearby
swamps plaintively hooting as if blowing into an empty bottle.
There is, at first, a “calling” sound, and we recognize the
source—blackbirds, but Chekhov does not tell us the meaning of
their calling. Shall we tell ourselves as co-authors that they are
calling each other to fulfill the wondrous and marvelous biological yearning to make life on earth reproduce itself always and
everywhere? It is good to recognize a call out there and feel uplifted by strong purposes, rather than to face the silence of nothing or the cacophony of chaos. At the center of this story is the
call of a particular bird at a precise time. It is not uplifting to its
intended hearer, at first.
Appearing second in this sentence, without even a comma of
pause (so quickly the weather changes), is a hooting sound of
complaint from some unknown “creature,” implying a creator if
we take the word literally. (Do you take the word “creature” literally? I shall answer that for myself, at least, at the end.) The
hooting sound, issuing from nearby swamps, places of growth
and decay, reminds the storyteller of the blowing one makes into
an empty bottle, the origin of music and poetry, perhaps. It reminds me that the pains of creaturely life must be relieved, for
even the righteous who survive the floods of annihilation take to
emptying the bottle afterwards, as the Bible tells, whose story of
creation begins with an almighty poetic blowing upon the original
chaos and emptiness. Calls to life and complaints of death that
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sound together in a chord: take them as the telltale sounding of
this particular author, Chekhov. Do the birds and other creatures
display the signs of a certain kind of author? I shall answer that
as well, twice over, in proper time.
A woodcock flew past, and a shot boomed out merrily in the
spring air. Another bird is recognized in the atmosphere of
spring: a cock of the woods, now here—boom!—now gone. Supper is being provided with that merry shot. The hunter may now
go home to fulfill family desires and rest.
But when the woods grew dark, an inauspiciously cold,
piercing wind blew in from the east, and silence fell. The
weather changes, as we knew it would, and the former blowing
into bottled emptiness to make sounding motion arise from stillness, now pierces to silence the calling birds of spring. Darkness
spreads its cold wings. That supper of woodcock may be the last,
for some time.
Needles of ice stretched over the puddles, and the woods
became disagreeable, godforsaken, hostile. Winter was in the
air. The puddles of swamp, from which life, they say, arises,
adapts to air, and returns at last to mud are now become icy needles to sting and pierce the touch. Who is responsible for the infliction of sharp pain on sensory life? He whose breath once
hovered over the empty deep and spoke things into being from
nothing by naming them has forsaken the woods, and the air of
speech belongs to the winter wind. Whose name is pronounced
from out of that disagreeable, hostile air?
The name we hear at once, at the start of the next sentence
of a new paragraph, is “Ivan.” This name is common in Russian
history and literature, but there is one Ivan among them all who
is particularly relevant (note that word, please).7 Ivan Karamazov
faces the question of whether to stay close to home to protect his
dissolute father from the threat of murder. Ivan Karamazov, after
much deliberation, decides not to remain near home, and thus he
is complicit in his father’s murder. By denying practical relation
7. Chekhov often instigates comparison with his literary masters, in this
case, Dostoevsky, author of The Brothers Karamazov (1880).
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to a person existentially connected to him, he negates the existence of that person and puts his own in question. Ivan Velikopolsky faces the same question: whether to return home to a father
coughing his life away on the stove while his mother sits barefoot
on the dirty floor polishing the samovar, or to leave them there,
cold and stooping in the dust.8
While we are at it, let us consider the names of the two widows. Vasilisa is a common Russian name found in fairy tales for
a peasant or housekeeper who by elevation of marriage becomes
a princess (think Cinderella). Our Vasilisa has imitated her storied
namesakes by working among the gentry, learning to speak daintily, and smiling in a stately fashion determined to live happily
ever after. The thought of her, by name, makes the despairing student turn back to the fire at which she stared, the light of which
inspires his spiritual elevation. But by its connection to a character whose storied smiles turn to sobs, his elevation by that light
is associated in our minds with fairy tales.
Let us pause over the image of light to do a little theology,
shall we? Recall that in the beginning of John’s Gospel, the light
goes unrecognized by the world, though the world came to be
through that light, and the dark never masters it. To those who
do see the light, there is given the right to become children of
God, not born of the “fleshly desire of a human father, but offspring of God himself.”9 This is elevation to an absolute love
and happiness of the highest order. Is this elevation by means of
the light, seen and recognized, a fairy tale? It ends, true enough,
with “a narrow strip of cold, crimson twilight” still shining in
the west, not yet mastered by darkness. But after we hear that
exhilarating, final (one long sentence) paragraph, built on this
twilight image: do we see and recognize any light as master illuminator of our diminishing turning pages? Calls and complaints,
8. Ivan Karamazov, in consideration for the suffering of innocent children, frames his position to his younger brother in terms of a ticketed
earth traveler: “It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return Him the ticket.” Without a ticket to the divine harmony
of things at the end of time, there is only the present, in which all things,
according to Ivan, are permissible.
9. John 1: 4-5, 10-13.
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fullness and emptiness turn, as leaves do, into the fading colors
of the persistent past.10 But who authors them and gives meaning
to their turnings?
Our consideration of Vasilisa’s name tasks us to pull together
our dispersed attention to fairy tales, John’s Gospel of light, a
storyteller’s poeticized feelings, and the miserable facts of nature
and society. Will we be elevated or broken down by our task? We
have one more name to consider before testing the outcomes.
Lukerya is so named to direct our attention to the Gospel of
Luke, who is said to have been a physician, like Chekhov, and
more relevant to the poor and oppressed than the other three
evangelists. Luke’s telling of Peter’s denial contains unique details seized by Chekhov for their dramatic interest. The maid who
first identifies Peter does so in Luke by staring at his face and
figure, not by his Galilean dialect.11 Lukerya lays down her
spoons and stares fixedly at the student’s face, as if, like the maid,
she were finding out his relation to a victim of torture, in order
to ask him something. Does he know and love that victim actively, or does he merely preach? Is he pierced by the present
look of suffering, more than by the icy wind on his skin? Lukerya
does not once look into the face of her mother, who by living
among the gentry distanced herself from her daughter’s cries of
pain. She holds in those cries like a deaf-mute, while staring open
the storytelling soul of the student for purpose of recognition.
We, too, shall stare open his soul, our souls, all of them.
To undertake which, recall this tremendously helpful insight
into the summoning power of storied words. Luke tells how
Peter and Jesus, the one uttering his third denial while the other
is being beaten by his guards, hear the cock crow (a new day!)
and turn their faces to meet and remember the words at the Last
Supper;12 so fantastical at the time of utterance, those words now
become scripted history. And only then, as a character in a story,
10. The last paragraph, a single sentence of prolonged poetic mastery,
elevates painful facts in thought and feeling to a realm of beautifully
expressed meanings, without the possibility, in a second sentence, of
contradiction.
11. Luke 22: 56.
12. Luke 22: 60-61.
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does Peter (in the student’s telling) “pull himself together.” Previously, he was dispersed, the input of his eyes denied by his
tongue relation to the history of his ears. Lukerya, tongue-tied
and stupidly staring, still waits for the crowing sound that will
summon recognition of her pain and give her the strength to pull
herself together as a character in a bigger story than her own,
but one that she can co-author.
The word “relevant” that I asked you to note often arises in
discussions of Chekhov. He was sharply criticized in his own
time for not writing relevant stories—that is, for not taking a position and prescribing a cure for Russia’s social and political ailments. He claimed that his only duty as a writer was to present
the truth of human life, as lived by late nineteenth-century Russians, as simply as he could, not to advocate particular reforms.
He honored Tolstoy as his master in truth-speaking letters, but
he had this to say of Russia’s bearded prophet of reform: “There’s
more love for mankind shown in electricity and steam engines
than in chastity and vegetarianism.” Chekhov puts the conflict
of purpose between relevance and truth at the heart of his story.
The student reaches for truth of the highest, most encompassing
kind, after he leaves the widows in their pain with nothing more
than a “good night.” While thinking of the meaning of the tears
of Vasilisa, not of their comfort or remedy, he stares back to see
the fire glimmer “peacefully in the dark,” with no people near it.
That solitary fire inspires his felt discovery of the truth and
beauty guiding the events of history. This was Tolstoy’s concern
in 1500 pages of War and Peace. The student gets the truth of
history in three and a half pages. But that is the art of Chekhov,
a writer trained by empirical facts as a physician to the discipline
of brevity. Can truth ever be relevant unless it accommodates our
brevity of breath? Chekhov understood the answer to be obvious.
He left relevance, as understood by his critics, to the secret workings on each soul of his briefly measured, immediately felt, simple words.
Perhaps you find no conflict between relevance and truth
even under pressure of mortality. For students as such are always
young, while they seek as lovers to meet the face of truth, like
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65
sea kissing sky at the horizon. Let us grant this fine sentiment to
ourselves—I think Socrates would. Three questions remain. Are
the truths met by the student credible? Do they justify the suffering that their instigation augments in the widows? And is growing
wise as the cock crows worth the bitter tears of heartbreak when
love of the dear old self is found facing you with a kiss at the
horizon? Let us try out two sets of answers to these questions,
which will, in turn, settle our earlier question about nature’s author. First, in sympathy with the student, let us glance back some
more (second paragraph).
The student is on his way home from a hunt on Good Friday.
He feels that the “sudden blast of cold”—like a shot from a gun—
has “violated the order and harmony of things.” But Good Friday
is supposed to be especially mortifying, and a seminary student,
no matter how cold his hands, ought to recognize the priority of
spirit over mere elements. In the Gospels, darkness covers the
land while Jesus expires on the cross mid-day, and an earthquake
splits rocks open when he breathes his last.13 But our student,
Ivan, remembers not these disordered phenomena, only the discordant postures of his earthly parents: his mother sitting barefoot
on the floor and his father lying on the stove. How hard it must
be to hold Gospel truths in mind before the uncouth suffering of
one’s dearest relations. As he moves homeward, he has a vision
of history inspired by the weather and his parents’ conditions.
The same wind always blows in your face—that is a fact of nature—and despite all proud conquest, unification, and modernization, Russians still squander the light stupidly, polishing their
silver samovars under leaky roofs, coldly coughing, downward
grieving, always dying. There is “the same emptiness everywhere,” which is also a fact of nature, scientifically understood
not to contain meaning in its dust. “All these horrors had been
and were and would be and even the passing of a thousand years
would make life no better.” The student has acquired a Biblical
prophetic cadence, but he has no good news to deliver, “no desire
to go home” to the ones he loves and cannot help.
13. Luke 23: 44; Matthew 27: 52.
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But what is most oppressive, we jaunty Americans might especially feel, is the tedium of all that Russian moaning and groaning. This native feeling of ours has received precise critical
formulation. In addition to being called “irrelevant,” Chekhov was
accused of indulging the “banalities” of useless complaint and
fantasies of hope. This criticism is easiest to appreciate in his
plays: while one character, stage left, let us say, is tearing her life
to shreds and another, stage right, is costuming hers in silk, inevitably a household servant from out of memory limps on stage,
trying not to spill a large samovar, and announces that it is time
to clear the table and drink some tea. That peasant woman, with
her insistence on commonplace reality, is sitting expectantly in
the background of this story: the student’s mother. When her son
arrives at home, full of the loftiest revelations of meaning, she
will be ready to serve the tea center stage and talk about the
weather and the proverbial world, for that is how people really relate. Chekhov, you understand, did not go for those Tolstoyan
episodes of being thrown to the ground half dead and looking up
at the infinite sky to encounter the life-altering repository of Truth,
ever solicitous of our human happiness. He thought, rather, that
the truth about relevance (another word for which is relationship,
or in the positive sense, love), is often a banal truth: you meet the
right person for mutual love and happiness, but at the wrong stage
of development, and the discordance of years or of readiness to
recognize each other’s relevance cannot usually be rectified by
the dramatic realigning of motions and ends, as Tolstoy performs
for Natasha and Pierre or Kitty and Levin.14 Nevertheless, it is not
too late in a Chekhov story, as in life, to make the best of bad timing by constant improvisation and large stores of quiet laughter
and watery eyes. When these fail and emptiness massages the
heart, resort from dread is taken in repetitions of phrase or gesture,
which like the polished samovar of tea punctuate the weary days
and awful nights with something familiar, shining, and collective
14. The first couple are major characters in War and Peace, the second,
in Anna Karenina.
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of people who seek warmth in the drink and light of life from the
banal superfluities of plaintive or fantastically hopeful speech.
Now to continue in sympathy with our student: as he first approaches the fire, the presence of the women being irrelevant to
his desire for warmth, he says “Well, winter’s back,” and he gets
no response. He then adds, “Hello there,” to which Vasilisa starts,
as one always jumps a little when something appears out of nothing. Then, seeing who he is, she puts on a welcoming smile, for
a student is good company to a woman who has learned to talk
above her station, and she says, “I didn’t recognize you. God be
with you, and make you rich.” Otherwise, what comes into being
out of nothing may quickly return to nothing. Her proverbial
words have an ultimate relevance, which Luke and John, in their
gospels, emphasize. They report, as instances of Peter’s denial,
these words, “I am not,” which are the precise negation of Jesus’
thrice repeated answer to the cohort who come to arrest him in
the garden, “I am he,” at which they fall to the ground, from
whose dust man first came into being.15 The student, like Peter,
puts his existence as a creature to question by approaching the
fire for bodily warmth while his soul at first goes unrecognized,
as if empty of riches, that is, of love. For take note of this: Peter’s
love for Jesus, which our translator describes with three words,
“passionately, to distraction,” is in Russian two words, bez pamjati, meaning literally, “without memory,” as if it were uncaused,
always there. To deny such a love, to empty it out at the moment
of trial, is to subject something timeless to historical criteria, according to which things without cause and memory go unwritten.
The student, recognized in memory, finds his existence as a
creature fortified when the widow invokes love without memory
in the proverb: “God be with you and make you rich.” She gives
evidence of the existential potency of these words by appearing,
like Peter in the courtyard, distracted by something always there.
She is wearing a man’s heavy coat, presumably her dead husband’s, and standing clean of dirt she stares into the fire pen15. Luke 22: 58; John 18: 5-6, 17, 25.
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sively. Chekhov does not say if she is distracted by her husband,
for what doctor knows where dead people go to occupy themselves, or what living people are thinking when they look occupied? No living men are present, though at any moment the
farmhands may appear from the river and change everything. The
daughter sits on the cold ground, ugly, stupid-looking, and
washes a pot and spoons. Who can tell what she is thinking?
Maybe we should consult the historical record of people who
have felt the same cold and terror of the dark. That is the student’s
approach to the mystery of three souls, who from out of all time
and space have become opaquely present to each other in bodies
lit by a fire in a garden on a particularly “doleful” night.
Peter, as we are told by Matthew and the student, follows
Jesus into the High Priest’s courtyard to watch from afar and see
the end of it all.16 Remember the empty bottle of the second sentence, which the student feels everywhere on his way home as
the condition of life. That emptiness, harboring potentials of
sound to creators, Peter will feel inside Jesus’ tomb. The end of
it all, which he would like to watch from afar, on the outside of
events, he must experience up close, from the inside. Our student
also sees afar in the past Peter’s bitter tears, but touches inside
the present the widows’ emotions.17 These two-sided aspects of
the “end of it all”—seen and touched, past and present, outside
and inside—are thematic in much of what follows.
In all four Gospels, it is a serving maid who first questions
Peter in the High Priest’s courtyard. The student adds dramatic
body to this verbal moment: the maid’s assertion of his identity,
“This man was also with Jesus,” lingers a few beats unanswered,
causing the other servants, men included (in John’s account, the
arresting police loom conspicuously),18 to look at Peter “with suspicion and severity.” Their hard looks “fluster” him into saying,
16. Matthew 26: 58.
17. The student is a Thomas who does not come up short on our modern
demand to test the veracity of past appearances by probing their present
wounds.
18. John 18: 18.
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“I know him not.” The flustering indicates that he begins not to
recognize himself inside as the recipient of those outside looks.
Who knows what Peter might have answered if only women were
present, without men to raise fears of what men do to each other
and to women? 19 If Peter had answered the maid honestly, thence
to be hauled away by those severe men, we would recognize him
today as another self-made hero of friendship (like those in
Homer and Virgil), rather than a runner to the empty tomb who
enters it alone and learns to fill it with the sounds of life.
That is something new, born of three denials, which we students practice all the time in three forms, for three worthy purposes of our own.20
I deny that a story is all about me for the purposes of sanity
and objectivity. I deny that I am free of past teachings and newly
elevated by present ones for the purposes of continuity and commonality. And I deny that it is art that moves me to imitate proud
combative heroes for the purpose of giving greater influence to
humble truth.
In practicing these three denials, I follow Peter, who points
every good student the way. First, he denies that Jesus’s ques19. Recall that it is the boasting of Peter in a group of men, each feeling
superior to verbal challenges as they compete for honor in the presence
of their beloved Jesus, which brings forth the prediction of his three denials and the crowing of the cock. The future is caused by a present
when both are understood as parts of one plot, whose characters serve
action, not speech—so cheaply uttered much of the time.
20. It was Chekhov’s story that made me attend to the richness in the
four Gospel accounts of Peter’s denials. His words of denial are not
identical, and neither are the questions they answer. They are three distinct replies to three different inquiries. Moreover, to fully understand
their meanings, we must remain aware of all seven layers of the story:
the Hebrew scriptures; the historical events and personages; the four
Gospel accounts of those events as fulfilling the scriptures; the student’s
retelling of Peter’s denials to the widows; Vasilisa’s attention to this
same story during the Twelve Apostles service the previous night;
Chekhov’s story of the student’s telling; and finally my telling to you,
this Friday evening, November 3, 2017, Chekhov’s story.
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tioning has everything to do with him personally. This gets him
admitted by the maid to the courtyard of objective seeing and discussion, with love kept safely impersonal. Second, he denies that
he is another, “of them,” loosed from the past and a newly authored beginning, rather than a conforming Jew. This keeps him
close to the fire of the ancient teachings. And third, he denies that
he is the memorable one from the garden, moved by a heroic
image appropriated from epic stories of martial friendship to
draw his sword and lop off the enemy’s ear. This denial keeps
him free from the suspicion that he comes, not in peace and civility, but wielding a sword.21 Without the practice of these three
denials, especially the third, there is no learning as we students
practice it here.
But then the cock crows, and Peter undergoes three distinct
responses, which successively undo the three denials. First, as
told by the student, he gazes at Jesus from afar, same scene as
before, but the questioning is entirely about him now. Second,
their faces meet and he recalls in the words said at supper that
he is one of them in character, people who associate and speak
differently, elevated but answerable to authority. And third, he
pulls himself together, leaves the courtyard, and weeps bitterly
for his beautiful, heroic image, emptied out for ease of breath and
freedom from pain. This third undoing, the most important, lets
the truth about Simon, the humble fisherman prone to sinking
and weeping, become the new fairness and stillness of human nature. We students, like Peter, undergo these same three motions
when we hear the cock crow and feel undone in our previously
objective, conformist, and anti-theatrical reading of stories.
What happens next? The Student sighed and grew pensive.
That sigh forces a little pause in the flow of events, where freedom is to be found. In that free pause, Vasilisa bursts into sobs
and hides her face, while Lukerya, still fixed on the student,
21. Matthew 10:34. Peter strikes at the ear (John 18:10) so that we might
recognize the meaning of this third denial: by it he escapes having to
suffer the priesthood’s violence, born like his from pride in its own severe agency, awarded precedence over the ear’s hearing of the Word.
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grows heavy and tense, “like a person holding back great pain.”
This would seem like a good time for the student to perform a
kind outward act, or, since he is pensive, to ask the obvious question: “What is going on inside your soul?” But instead, at the approach of the male “farmhands,” the opportunity to “move on”
he quickly takes. Since we are in sympathy with him, we shall
say that he bravely risks his spirit to solitary thought in the cold
and dark.
The reflection of light off the farmhands makes the outer
world of men’s affairs touch the inner one being stared opened by
women. It is like the crowing of the cock that instigates Peter’s
going out to stir the stillness of the world with tears, detesting
what he knows about his inside in relation to outside questions
and cruelties. The student knows that he has made an old woman
cry and her daughter much upset. He goes out from them into a
world whose facts deny the coming of Easter. But he makes Easter
happen in himself. How does he perform this transformation?
He performs it in three stages of physical and mental action.
First Stage: his thoughts turn to Vasilisa; her “abundant” weeping and its shame he interprets from afar this way: “if she wept,
it meant…[Peter’s] relevance for her”; but this conclusion, without external support, is forced by his inner hunger; so he dares to
glance back for evidence, and for that glance we must praise him;
he sees the fire glimmering peacefully in the dark, absent of people; again he thinks of Vasilisa—and also of her daughter—and
again he thinks, more confidently now, that those events narrated
from long ago must “clearly” have relevance to both women and
“probably” to “everyone on earth;” and this is so not because of
the universal art of storytelling that he has mastered—he is a
modest student in that regard—but owing to the “whole being”
of the old woman taken by concern for Peter’s soul, as if he were
her present child;22 for souls feel intimate with each other across
time and space by means of repeated words and common gestures
issuing from similar bodies. Second Stage: the soul of the student
stirs with joy, as the stillness of the freezing hour flows towards
22. Mark 12: 30-33.
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ends he sees and touches; he pauses to catch his breath, as the
former sigh of his spirit’s slow death is reversed in a quickening
of life;23 history he now thinks of as an unbroken chain of events
that conducts motions from end to end, not as a circle does, always repeating the same misery, but as a satisfying linear progression from beginning to ending, like a story told by a
master—but what kind of story? Third Stage: he crosses the
river—we hear nothing of the painful ice needles now; he climbs
the hill—nothing is felt of the biting wind now; he gazes upon
the village of his birth—no glimpse of the beatings and cringing
of life; he sees the last bit of crimson sunset, and again the light
encourages him with supreme confidence to find what he has
been seeking—the truth and beauty guiding human life in gardens and courtyards past and present; “in all likelihood and at all
times” they form “the essence of human life and everything on
earth”; and finally, life appears to him “wondrous, marvelous,
and filled with lofty meaning.”
The first sentence of the first stage is the key to all the rest:
“The student’s thoughts turned to Vasilisa: if she wept, it meant
the things that happened to Peter on that terrible night had some
relevance for her . . .” This sentence ends in the Russian with the
word, otnoshenie, translated by Michael Heim as “relevance.”
(Literally, it means “relation” or “relationship.”) This word is followed by an ellipsis that makes it linger critically in our thoughts.
The new paragraph answers at once to criticism: “He glanced
back.” The concern for relevance turns the head of the student to
see the light of the fire, which he first approaches in order to
warm his hands, but at which he stays to tell a well-known story
to two differently staring widows. It is not the warmth, but the
light of the storyteller’s truth—the fire that gives inspired voice
to the face—that the student and Chekhov insist on delivering.
The widows go home deeply moved by that voice and face. The
student, as we just witnessed, moves on to three revelations: universal relevance and intimacy of souls; the pulsing chain of interconnected events; and their guidance by truth and beauty,
23. 1 Peter 3: 18.
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always and everywhere. We can take these three stages and revelations as demonstrative of how the mysterious words that begin
John’s gospel actually operate in human beings: all that comes
to be is sensitive to the Word, and the relevance of the Word to
all the living is as light, which shines in the dark, and is never
mastered by the dark.24 Of course, as a reminder, our present
glances at the story are precisely those that sympathizers with a
seminary student would be expected to take.
But there is another story to tell about our relation to this
story. Just as Matthew reminds us in his Gospel that another story
is told among the Jews about the empty tomb of Jesus—that the
body was stolen, not raised—so there are another set of answers,
in the negative, to the three questions we asked earlier.25 Are the
student’s truths credible? Are the sufferings of the widows justified? And is the love at the horizon ever other than of self?
Matthew discredits the thieving story as a Jewish conspiracy.
Chekhov lets us relate to his story unhindered by his authorial
elbows. Here follows the negative relation to Chekhov’s story,
no less probable to thought and feeling, I think, than the positive
one we just experienced.
Let us begin by repeating two impressive words from the
first stage of the student’s transformation: “whole being.”26 Now
recall the two great commandments taught by Jesus in keeping
with scripture: to love the Lord your God, who is the one and
only God, with your whole being—all your heart, all soul, all
mind, and all strength; and, like the first, to love your neighbor
as yourself.27 The student fails to obey the second command to
turn self-love outward, to make it relevant, and this failure to be
relevant undermines his adherence to the first command to identify entirely with the truth of the ever present living God—living,
therefore, in the widows, presently. Let me now give standing
to these claims.
24. John 1: 3-5.
25. Matthew 28: 11-15.
26. “Peter was close to her and her whole being was concerned with
what was going on in Peter’s soul.”
27. Mark 12: 30-31; Matthew 22:39.
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In the garden, Jesus asks his three closest friends, Peter included, to stay awake with him. That is not a lot to ask, but the
love of self, rooted in bodily needs, overmasters their willing
spirits. The student is a sleeper of a much deeper kind, a waking
dreamer who loves life in the abstract, far from miserable people,
malleable to the hungers of his thought. Consider the characters
again. Lukerya is the innocent victim of her husband’s beatings.
She fixes her gaze upon the student, holding in the great pain that
his picturing power aggravates; but he walks away suddenly,
without a word of recognition, just as her husband inexplicably
died one day, leaving her unrecoverable, with “the strange look
of a deaf-mute.” Vasilisa, bettered by conformity to high society,
denies present relation to her dirty daughter by hiding her face
in shame not of her tears, as the student conveniently thinks, but
of her whole being, whose career has entailed denial of child for
the sake of worldly gains. Ivan treats both women not as neighbors to be loved by command as a suffering of unlovely particulars, but as characters to be drawn into making his dreary return
home part of a story that he wants to end triumphantly, without
any upsetting questions. He catches his breath from their sobs
and flusters.
This alternative understanding of character accords with the
following re-interpretation of the three denials. The student first
denies that he and the widows are concerned wholly with what
is going on in their own souls, not with the goings-on in Peter’s
soul. The wholeness of their beings they do not give away to anyone. Second, the student denies that history is open-ended, plotless, free to become better, worse, or incomparably different from
the past, not auto-progressively chained to it.28 Third, the student
denies that life is guided by ego and chance much of the time,
not by truth and beauty. (You might want to roll up your
sleeves—we’re going to push hard now.) What truth makes Vasilisa smile all the time? It is the ego of a social climber. What truth
28. Ironically, his retelling of Peter’s story contains his own creative
additions, in which he ought to recognize his freedom to occupy a better
or worse state of mind.
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makes her shield her face as she sobs by the fire? The shame of
happiness found out as pretense. What truth makes her sob so
abundantly? The fact that ego and its pretensions require ongoing
sacrifice of the one you love. Lukerya is guided by what solicitude? The chance that the husband who beats her may die sooner
rather than later. What beauty is there in a face that squints to see
things in the dark, is stupidly silent for fear of another beating,
and becomes fixed in a stare, heavy and tense, when the pain calls
her back unrelieved? Ivan Karamazov would applaud her insistence on the right of suffering innocence to hold back from brokered Easter reconciliations. Here, then, is the truth, if you really
want it relevant to modernity: try to better yourself by abandoning the dear ones who would otherwise keep you stuck in their
dull care, or by hoping for the early death of a painful relation,
until fortune can be mastered to achieve those ends. And if you
glance back, consider not the human wreckage, only the golden,
solitary fire. New days call for new gods and horizons of riches.
All this ugliness the student denies, though it is plain and ordinary
to see (and points the way to necessary social reforms), because
at the age of twenty-two he cannot help standing closer to birth
than death. Still healthy, strong, able to give his head “a convulsive shake” to throw off the encompassing dark, ferry the cold
river, and climb with ample breath the hill to see the last rays of
light shine upon his place of nativity, of course he feels, in the
days of egotistical youth, that everything on earth is guided by
similar motions of self-fulfilling vitality.
The student gets his Easter going by freely misconstruing
what is terrible and ugly in the souls of the widows, and moving
on from them. Their Easter is still hostage to shame and anger in
the day of desolation. Perhaps we cannot do better than to practice, like him, the denials that get us, in despite of others, the way
home from emptiness. But should we not try to hear the cock
crow after every twilight seminar song, like a gunshot?
Apropos of that question, I have to tell you something about
Chekhov’s acoustic tastes. He liked gunshots a lot. A year after
he wrote “The Student,” he was finishing his first major successful play, The Seagull. It contains a mother—an actress who lives
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entirely for herself in art—and it ends with her son’s suicide by
gunshot. Chekhov’s subtitle: A Comedy in Four Acts. Its opening
in St. Petersburg was a fiasco, and Chekhov was dismayed by an
art that gave its form over to the freedom of actors and audience
to misconstrue by their unlovely particular contributions. But
when The Seagull was staged a few years later by Stanislavsky
and the new Moscow Art Theatre it was a triumph, and
Chekhov’s name was on the way to becoming an adjective of reality—“Chekhovian.” The Moscow players knew how to let the
cock crow in the silent beats of the comedy, and so the minor
keys in its music were heard, and its mutually incomprehensible
characters, whose talking substitutes for plot, were pulled together by an audience properly concerned with the complicated
simplicities of their own knotted relations of love. Anyway, that
is what I meant a moment ago: we have to hear the cock crow if
we want to triumph in our egotistical comedies of living and
dying.
I am almost done talking, not improperly I hope. Jesus, you
know, was executed for talking very improperly: “blasphemy,”
his crime was called, which is the opposite of empty, unplotted
talk. To blaspheme, as you students know from the Greek, is to
injure the relations among men, women, and God by speech.
Peter denies knowing the accused blasphemer because he is
rightly afraid of the power of speech to make hate happen. In
fact, his second and third denials (in two of the gospels) become
vehement; he even curses his questioners for not believing him,
though cursing is itself a kind of blasphemy.29 Here, in miniature,
we witness the degeneration of speech from having lethal power
over the devotional lives of people, to self-contradiction, incredulity, bitterness of failure, and over time to empty talk and
shallow feelings that make nothing happen and no one takes seriously. The student follows Luke and John by leaving out from
his story the anger and cursing of Peter, and he follows Matthew
and Mark by leaving in the weeping. We may suspect that he
lacks the instinct for righteous anger, while possessing the pity
29. Matthew 26: 72-74; Mark 14: 71.
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of a young heart. Chekhov, too, lacks anger, his critics would say,
while he waters the eyes too much. He does not know the blasphemer, they would say, for he is a connoisseur of empty talk
who honestly shows us the vanity of literary pretensions. That is
why he points out at the end of this most perfect of his stories
that the storyteller is only twenty-two: all his transformational
thinking and feeling are but the workings of his youthful metabolism, which throws off the impertinent assaults of winter when
it is that time in the calendar—no more significant than a change
in the weather.
But wait a minute. If Chekhov has the honesty to admit that
the weather and chemistry are the powers that either kill or resurrect the sick soul, then is his admission not justly called by us
“blasphemy”? Try the question out this way: Chekhov, a doctor
who writes about ailing people denies relation to higher sources
of meaning in the names of applied biology and meteorology.
This injures the respect owed to his literary art—to speech itself—by making storytelling a pre-scientific substitute for drugtaking and social revolution. The making of love then loses its
articulate way and people become incomprehensible bodies one
to another. That denial of relation to higher meanings, with those
consequences, should sound like blasphemy to the priesthood of
letters and its seminar students, I think.
But wait one last minute, please. Remember that Chekhov
showed signs of tuberculosis in his twenties, but denied for years
the implications. He wrote “The Student” at the age of thirtyfour, while coughing up blood. During the ten years of worsening
health that remained, he devoted much precious time to playwriting, and he married an actress, Olga Knipper, whom he made
love to mostly from afar in the form of wonderfully articulate letters. He stopped practicing medicine. I think, in the end, he was
trying to pull together in new dramatic forms the movements of
bodies much given to dispersive talk by denials of love and death.
Have we not seen how his student, Ivan, needs the expressive
bodies of the widows for him to call Biblical characters into
presence to speak, as in a theater, into the outer darkness of the
world, to test the light of words? Remember also that the outer
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plot revealed by Jesus requires only that Peter deny him three
times before the cock crows. The anger or weeping is Peter’s
free contribution, or rather, a creative act by the particular storyteller. And that act makes all the difference to the soul. Our student does not get angry, does not weep, as Lukerya and Vasilisa
do; yet all three respond freely in body and soul to the same story.
There are many ways to deny that the cold and dark are curable;
yet the student still seeks, by the last glimmers of light, the way
home to the unlikely love that gave him improbable birth. When
he arrives, a young man still, but older than he was, he will drink
tea with his parents, his mother soon also to become a widow,
and I like to imagine that he will continue his story, taking note
of the weather and its changes, which he is learning to read.
And what about the widows? I myself would learn from Lukerya’s fixed face to beware the anger born of suffering that feels
betrayed and trapped by the egotism of love, for what is more
prone to hate than misery of heart that hears itself as the only
story being told? And from Vasilisa’s career I would beware of
guilt that relieves its burden in self-pity, hidden from the fire and
faces of the injured, turned to the stately world of swelling
speeches and fairy-tale smiles. And finally, speaking as I began,
let us students remember our creators in the days of our youth,
before the songbirds fall silent and the guardians of the house
stoop to dust.30
Thank you for listening to Chekhov’s story of the student,
and my attempt to show how much, and little, there is to tell.
30. Ecclesiastes 12: 1-4.
�Tetrastichs
Elliott Zuckerman
Preludes have long since ceased
to promise Fugues. What’s here—
each time after a silence—is yet another
interruption of uncertainty.
Meanings will spread, as when a loaded brush
touches some cotton-wool too wet
to limit bleeding. Etymons
will crawl along the fibers.
I think you will particularly like
Siberia. Let us all know
about the customs and the cold.
Think of us on holidays.
Do not say that Sometimes
it is only a cigar.
The point is not
to denigrate cigars.
The plaster hand, the portrait of Busoni,
all music put aside to try again
to stop the wrist from getting stiff:
What was this a lesson in?
Elliott Zuckerman is a tutor emeritus at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. These forty tetrastichs have been selected from a collection of 120. Each quatrain is meant to be a separate poem.
�80
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 59.1-2 (2017-2018)
A love potion? There is no need for one.
Just dramatize a double suicide
and leave the poison out. It can be done
with lemonade.
There was a different tenor in each act.
She sang her song of rapt transfiguration
and in her tones of ecstasy made clear
that she was ready to take on three more.
In the closing pages of your lecture,
you can take your leap. They’ll say
you haven’t proved you got there step by step.
There were no steps—the lecture started there.
Let’s celebrate the woman who
was tired of trees.
No longer to be reasoned with, no longer
listening, it’s one way to be old.
Your face is next to mine,
and even lingers—
the warm surprise of graceful lankiness,
my prince factotum.
After a thousand and three in Spain alone,
what clearer signs of drawing to an end
than throwing parties for the peasantry
and asking almost anyone to dinner?
�POETRY | ZUCKERMAN
The trees themselves
sensing how much space they need
plotted their equidistance
like dancers with extended arms.
I’d like the actor who agrees
that he must get inside the role he plays
to tell me what he tries to feel when he
portrays hypocrisy.
Hers were not hymn-tunes,
square in meter and in rhyme.
Her dashes represent
unmeasured time.
I’m happy that the Shropshire Lad
has his own pad.
I used to think that he
lived here with me.
I cannot hear the pipe unless
the shepherd blows it.
How can I tell the music
from the music?
At the doorpost of the tenement
I studied densities of old enamel:
pastel maps,
an opaque residue of smell.
81
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 59.1-2 (2017-2018)
After the concert, she told the other ladies
the pianist had a memorable rubato.
The ladies took it that the two of them
had spent the night together.
There is an elf
who charms me at the root of being.
Yet elfhood serves
no evolutionary purpose.
One must be
an artist
not to find
a food one likes.
Can one do in words a vast expanse
of every possible hue and shade of green
with somewhere a small patch of cadmium red?
Has it just been done?
The seven types of ambiguity
are not so clearly differentiated
as the seven
deadly sins.
The man who asks us
to excuse his pun
fears that we
may overlook his wit.
�POETRY | ZUCKERMAN
When rhetoric already lies
we cannot tell
whether what lies beneath the cant
is lying.
Imagine a garden without any toads
but the birds are real
and named by their song: two cuckoos, a quail,
and a nightingale.
It was hard to accept him as half of a pair
and the girl couldn’t hide her victorious air;
I tried not to stare at the hand on the knee
and acted a plausible copy of me.
I slice and sculpt and sand what happened till
an anecdote redecorates my past.
Such labor is the compliment
that humor pays to truth.
Someone says that wit began
with not the word but laughter alone.
It follows perhaps that early man
wept before the cause was known.
What if everything that came to mind
arrived with (so to say) a grade from God?
Little would change, for half the world would wonder
whether God was good at giving grades.
83
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 59.1-2 (2017-2018)
Elders who are troubled all their lives
by doubts that they’ve gone deep enough,
may want to test the thickness now
that so much surface has worn off.
Have I condemned nostalgia? It is the source
Of aching loveliness, maligned because
we had to wait for it, and at its dawn
it gave scant notice that it might return.
Nausicaa washing at the water
was grace itself.
But follow the line of her white arm
to reach the hand of merely human gesture.
The irises were cream and indigo,
a lazy bird prepared herself for flying—
and in the middle distance: Lo
and behold! the silver gateway of implying.
At ninety she retained the girlish charm
they taught her and she took to at sixteen—
a habit long impervious to reform,
no longer fired by flesh but baked in bone.
This castle runs on wheels, with makeshift brakes.
It inches on, headed askew. It leaks,
sudden, burning. The royalty worship the days—
Good morning, Good afternoon—and clutch their keys.
�POETRY | ZUCKERMAN
I used to say that song need not be sounded.
Now pitches are distorted in the treble.
No doubt the tones I hear have been confounded
by some didactic Muse, to cause me trouble.
Americans with European souls
need not restrict their comedy to manners.
The question of what continent we’re born on
takes second place to why we’re born at all.
Faces are plaster masks, egg-white, cream, and gray.
Silenus, spent, will hobble down the hall.
Three actions are complete: the quest, the crux, the fall.
Old age is not a coda, but a satyr-play.
When once again you tell that anecdote,
acquire a gurgle as you near the end.
They’ll think that you’ve just found renewed delight
in the climactic phrase already planned.
A musical trick was employed by the muscular Icarus
when inventing the famous lament about flying too high.
His appoggiaturas brought tears to a cynical eye
while his anapests lent the lament their precipitancy.
85
�
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Pastille, Willaim
Brann, Eva T. H.
Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
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Barba-Kay, Anton
Menzin, Jason
Petrich, Louis
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St. John's Review
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Text
The St. John’s Review
Volume 58.2 (Spring 2017)
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Editorial Assistant
Sawyer Neale
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President;
Joseph Macfarland, Dean. All manuscripts are subject to blind review.
Address correspondence to The St. John’s Review, St. John’s College,
60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or to Review@sjc.edu.
© 2017 St. John’s College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
��Contents
Essays & Lectures
Leibniz’s Monadology and the Philosophical Foundations of
Non-locality in Quantum Mechanics .....................................1
J. H. Beall
Depth Versus Complexity .................................................................25
Eva Brann
A Note on Apollonius’s Reconceptualization of Space ....................43
Philip LeCuyer
“Aristotelian Forgiveness”: The Non-Culpability
Requirement of Forgiveness ........................................................52
Corinne Painter
On Two Socratic Questions ..............................................................77
Alex Priou
Poem
Sabbatical..........................................................................................93
Louis Petrich
��Leibniz’s Monadology and the
Philosophical Foundations of
Non-locality in Quantum Mechanics
J. H. Beall
One of the most troubling aspects of our understanding of modern
physics generally, and quantum mechanics specifically, is the
concept of “non-locality.” Non-locality appears in an entire class
of experiments, including the so-called “two-slit” experiment. In
these, particles and “quanta” of light can be emitted and absorbed
individually. Yet in the way these particles or quanta traverse the
space and time between emission and absorption, they appear to
behave not as point particles, but as though they were distributed
throughout the entire spatial volume and temporal extent of the
experiment. That the phenomenon of non-locality has recently
been corroborated over macroscopic distances of the order of 10
kilometers makes these effects all the more remarkable.
In this lecture, I shall review the experiments and arguments
that have led to an acceptance of non-locality in modern physics,
and will suggest that the concept of space and time that this
understanding implies is consistent with Leibniz’s Monadology,
in which our ideas of space and time are fundamentally different
from those given to us by our intuitions.
1. Leibniz’s Monadology
Leibniz’s writings on the philosophical, mathematical, and
natural sciences represent a coherent, if somewhat surprising
whole. Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in the
Monadology, the Discourse of Metaphysics, and the LeibnizClark correspondence.
Leibniz begins with the view of God as a maker, a being who
makes the world the best it can possibly be.
Jim Beall is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. This
lecture was originally delivered on December 4, 2015.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Part and parcel of this view is Leibniz’s Principle of Sufficient
Reason. It goes something like this: one monad can only be
different from another because of its different character or
qualities. I’ll use a modern idea of a monad to illustrate this: an
elementary particle like an electron. I hope my choice will become
plausible a bit later when we start the discussion of quantum
mechanics.
Is one electron the same as another? If so, if there is no
difference between “this electron” and “that electron,” then they
would be the same, since by the Principle of Sufficient Reason
they cannot be distinguished. But my simply pointing to them is
an indication of the differences. “This electron” is different from
that one, because it has an explicitly different representation that
is indicated by my pointing at them. If I were to insist on a
Cartesian representation of this difference, I can make a threedimensional coordinate system with a particular origin and three
orthogonal axes, labeled x, y, and z. Numbering these axes, I can
locate “this” electron and distinguish it from “that” electron by
the use of three numbers, x1, y1, z1, and x2, y2, z2. I can then say
that I have a representation of each of these two electrons as
different, given these two sets of three numbers. I can even
represent their separation of this electron from that electron by a
three-dimensional version of the Pythagorean theorem.
Leibniz makes this explicit several places in his works. For
example, in the essay, “On Nature Itself,” he states this point in
arguing against Descartes’s reliance on geometry in physics.
Given such an identity or similarity between objects,
not even an angel could find any difference between its
states at different times, nor have any evidence for
discerning whether the enclosed sphere is at rest or
revolves, and what law of motion it follows. . . . Even if
those who have not penetrated these matters deeply
enough may not have noticed this, it ought to be accepted
as certain that such consequences are alien to the nature
and order of things, and that nowhere are there things
perfectly similar (which is among my [Leibniz’s] new
and important axioms) (Paragraph 13).
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BEALL
3
Of course, electrons have other properties as well: charge,
mass, angular momentum (they seem to spin like tops), magnetic
moment (they act like tiny bar-magnets), velocity, momentum,
and kinetic energy, among other things. Each of these qualities
or characteristics can also be represented by a series of numbers
or “coordinate expression.” I’ve always fancied that in a very
formal sense an electron or any other elementary particle (had
Leibniz known about them) could be represented as an aggregation of numbers (or coordinate expressions) related to another
monad. This other monad could also be represented in a similar
way. By the Principle of Sufficient Reason, some of these coordinate expressions are different from the coordinate expressions
of all other monads.
The other thing to mention about monads is their unity.
They are “simple.” They do not have parts. According to
Leibniz, they represent a unity of different properties, much like
a geometric point that is the nexus of many geometric lines.
Leibniz states that:
Everything is full in nature. . . . And since everything is
connected because of the plenitude of the world, and
since each body acts on every other body, more or less,
in proportion to its distance, and is itself affected by the
other through reaction, it follows that each monad is a
living mirror or a mirror endowed with internal action,
which represents the universe from its own point of view
and is as ordered as the universe itself (Principles of
Nature and Grace, Based on Reason, Paragraph 3).
Some even have the property of being “be-souled.” So look
around you. According to Leibniz, you are sitting among a
reasonably large group of monads, each of which is capable of
noticing you and regarding you as separate, individual “beings.”
There is one final thing about monads (among their many
interesting properties) that bears on our discussion of quantum
mechanics. As Leibniz says at another point in the Monadology:
The monads have no windows through which something
can enter or leave (Monadology, Paragraph 7).
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Monads have no “windows.” Yet each monad is a representation
to a greater or lesser extent of everything else in the Universe
because it is linked to all other monads by means of its relation
to God. That is, each monad is a reflection of the entire
Universe precisely because it is in some way a projection of a
part of God. The debt Leibniz owes to Plato’s Republic for this
concept (note that I did not say “image”) is nowhere directly
acknowledged by Leibniz, but it is manifest. The one quarrel
Leibniz would have with my associating him with the image of
the Cave in the Socratic dialog is simply that it is an image
rather than something that dwells in the understanding. For
Leibniz’s God is, at least to my thinking, a Mathematician, and
He, like Dedekind, holds that mathematics has no need of
geometry.
In this conception, then, there is a profound similarity
between all of our connections with one another and with the
physical, social, and moral world.
It seems clear, therefore, that Leibniz does not think that
space has an actual existence. As he states explicitly,
As for my own opinion, I have said more than once that
I hold space to be something relative, as time is, that I
hold it to be an order of coexistences, as time is an order
of successions (Letters to Clark, Leibniz’s Third Paper,
Paragraph 4).
This is radically at odds with Newton’s Principia, in which
Newton seems to deduce the existence of absolute space from
the existence of absolute (i.e., accelerated) motion. For Newton,
space is the “sensorium of God.”
Let us ponder this for a moment. For Newton, space has an
existence. We can look out into the space before us and hold it in
our minds as something, even though we can (as Kant does) in
our imaginations remove all of its contents from the space that
holds it. What is left over is space, be it a cubic centimeter in
front of us or a volume 100,000 parsecs on a side.
When Leibniz sees this emptiness, he views it as an actual
metaphysical void, something that not even God can relate to. As
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BEALL
5
such, it is an abomination. Leibniz cannot accept a thing that God
cannot act upon, and the idea of an actual void is such a thing.
Since God must be able to act on all creation, a genuine
metaphysical void cannot exist. This is one of the reasons why
the Leibniz-Clark correspondence (Clark was taking Newton’s
part) makes little headway to change the authors’ minds. The
grounds of the conversation are radically different.
It is a worthy anecdote to relate that Leibniz and Newton
never acknowledged the other’s invention of the differential and
integral calculus. And it is helpful to note that Newton’s development of the calculus relies on geometrical constructions, while
Leibniz’s relies on an evolution of Descartes’ algebra. It is true
that Leibniz uses sketches of curves and lines for his derivations,
in part because we are visual creatures, but Leibniz’s derivations
do seem to be less reliant on images of extension.
Thus, for Leibniz, extension has no actual existence. What
we interpret as extension, as space, is a representation given to
us by God. It is very likely that the same is true for time in
Leibniz’s metaphysics. This separation is like a three-dimensional
Pythagorean theorem whose terms are given to us. What we
interpret as a spatial extension is a coordinate interval that we
call space, just as temporal separation is a coordinate expression
that we call time. What separates us, what we interpret as
distance, is just a shadow on a Cave wall caused by our origin
within a common light. What separates us from the amber light
of ages past is an equivalent coordinate expression whose
regularity is provided by God.
I cannot resist at this point recalling for you the yarn in the
Odyssey when the hero is among the Phaeacians, and Homer
brings us back from the story Odysseus is telling into Alkinoos
and Arete’s palace hall with its feast and polished stone floors
and torchlight. The momentum of that telescoping does not stop
there, but places us back firmly into the present where we realize
that we are reading words two thousand years old about a story
that is a thousand years distant even from that remote past. Like
Leibniz’s God, Homer has linked us to the ages, and three
millennia are as nought.
�6
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
One other element of Leibniz’s philosophy will prove
useful later: Leibniz directly addresses the problem of a Deity
that weaves out our destinies to construct the best of all possible
worlds. This Deity knows everything we are capable of doing,
knows all of our potentialities, and further, knows all of our
past.
And since every present state of a simple substance is a
natural consequence of its preceding state, the present is
pregnant with the future (Monadology, paragraph 22).
Thus, the “demon” in Laplace’s Essay on a Theory of Probability
takes its inspration from Leibniz. Laplace says explicitly:
We ought then to regard the present state of the universe
as the effect of its anterior state and as the cause of the
one which is to follow. Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which
nature is animated and the respective situation of the
beings who compose it—an intelligence sufficiently vast
to submit these data to analysis—it would embrace in the
same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of
the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing
would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be
present to its eyes (Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on
Probabilities, Chapter II).
Leibniz seems to recognize the determinism of such a God, but
sidesteps the troublesome argument of the lack of free will by
claiming that God knows all possible predicates of our being, and
so chooses the path which we would follow anyway!
I regard the foregoing comments about Leibniz’s Monadology as a preamble to our discussion of the problem of nonlocality in quantum mechanics, especially as the concept of nonlocality has been articulated by interpretations of the work of
John Bell, an elementary particle theorist who worked at CERN
before his untimely death in the Fall of 1990. But first, I shall try
to provide some background on the landscape in which Bell
developed his justifiably famous theorem.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BEALL
7
2. An Eternal, Golden Braid: Quantum Mechanics in
Rutherford, Bohr, de Broglie, Heisenberg, and Einstein
It is surprising at first glance that of the four papers Einstein
published in 1905, the one for which he was awarded the Nobel
Prize in Physics was not the paper on special relativity, entitled
“On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” (Annalen der
Physik 17 [1905]: 891-921); nor the famous E=mc2 paper, “Does
the Inertia of a Body Depend upon its Energy Content?”
(Annalen der Physik 18 [1905]: 639-641); nor the one on Brownian motion, “On the Movement of Small Particles Suspended in
Stationary Liquids Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of
Heat” (Annalen der Physik 17 [1905]: 549-560).
(As an aside, it is worthy of note that this is the one
hundreth anniversary of the publication of the 1915 paper on
General Relativity, and the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of
Maxwell’s publication of his theory of light as electromagnetic
waves.)
The actual phrasing from the Nobel Prize Committee was
“for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his
discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.” The so-called
“photoelectric effect” paper has a curious title: “Concerning an
Heuristic Point of View Toward the Emission and Transformation
of Light” (Annalen der Physik 17 [1905]: 132-148). This was the
publication that marked the beginnings of what is now called
Quantum Mechanics.
In the paper, Einstein characterizes the wave theory of light
in the following manner:
The energy of a beam of light from a point source (according to Maxwell’s theory of light or, more generally,
according to any wave theory) is continuously spread over
an ever increasing volume.
In the next paragraph, Einstein notes that
The wave theory of light, which operates with continuous
spatial functions, has worked well in the representation
of purely optical phenomena and will probably never be
replaced by any other theory.
�8
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
But in the next paragraph, he says,
It seems to me that the observations associated with
blackbody radiation, fluorescence, the production of
cathode rays by ultraviolet light, and other related
phenomena connected with the emission and transformation of light . . . are more readily understood if one
assumes that the energy of light is discontinuously
distributed in space. In accordance with the assumption
to be considered here, the energy of a light ray spreading
out from a point source is not continuously distributed
over increasing space but consists of a finite number of
energy quanta which are localized at points in space,
which move without dividing, and which can only be
produced and absorbed as complete units.
On the one hand, Einstein allows for a “wave theory” like
Maxwell’s waves in a luminiferous aether in which the light is
transmitted, reflected, and refracted. He “heuristically” considers
light to be a particle during light’s emission from and absorption
into material bodies. It is perhaps ironic that Einstein was never
able to reconcile his conception of the dual nature of light with
the equivalent, dual character of particles as both material bodies
and waves, a solution posed by de Broglie to provide an explanation of Bohr’s model for the energy levels of the hydrogen atom.
Of course, this entire “braid” began with efforts to apply
models from classical physics that explain everything from
cannonballs to asteroids to planets to the very small structures
within matter such as atoms and elementary particles via Galileo,
Thomson, Millikan, and Rutherford.
By way of a truncated outline of the argument, Bohr used the
existence of hydrogen spectral lines and the contemporary work
by Planck to explain so-called blackbody radiation. Planck made
the hypothesis that discrete oscillators in matter had only certain
fundamental modes with which they could vibrate. He asserted
that these oscillators were in equilibrium with the thermal
radiation from matter with a particular temperature, and thus
explained blackbody radiation. Bohr wondered what the “Planck
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BEALL
9
oscillators” could be, since the classical picture of an orbiting
charge holds that it should radiate continuously. He hypothesized
that his atom settled into quasi-stationary states and emitted and
absorbed radiation during transitions from one energy level to
another.
It is likely that everyone in the audience is familiar with
Bohr’s model from high school science classes and many popular
lectures and books on the subject of science. You Seniors are in
the process of completing this sequence of papers.
In fact, the Bohr model has become a commonplace picture
of the atom. But such familiarity hides the utter strangeness of
the concept. The atom is stable for a while, and then is excited or
de-excited by the absorption or emission of light at a specific
frequency. These energy levels are Bohr’s answer to why the
spectra of light from certain gases contains only certain
frequencies. If you sprinkle salt onto the logs in your fireplace,
the resultant light is a brilliant yellow. That yellow light contains
only certain frequencies, frequencies that are as much an indication of the presence of the sodium in salt as your finger prints
are of you as an individual person. We know the constitution of
stars precisely because of this line-spectrum identification of
elements, stars that can be hundreds or thousands of light years
distant.
The strangeness of the idea of the Bohr atom bothered de
Broglie, who reasoned by a kind of symmetry derived from
Einstein’s photoelectric effect paper (wherein light can have a
particulate nature, as well as a wave-like nature) that particles
could perhaps have both a discrete nature and also a wave-like
nature. In an immensely clever argument (he won the Nobel
Prize for it), de Broglie argued that one can calculate the
“wavelength” of a particle by assigning it a specific momentum,
which implies that it has an energy. That energy can be used to
calculate a characteristic wavelength, E = hν = hc/λ. It is a
stunning triumph for so simple an argument that the wavelengths
thus calculated for an electron in the Bohr orbits for hydrogen
is exactly the circumference of the quasi-stationary orbits for
�10
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
electrons in the hydrogen atom. So the electrons are not exactly
particles when they are inside the atom. They also have wavelike qualities.
Schroedinger was a young assistant professor when de Broglie
published his astonishing idea. I have it on good authority that
Schroedinger was assigned the task of giving the journal club
lecture at his university the next week. It’s a bit like these Fridaynight lectures, but less formal and typically they are on a weekday
afternoon. The assignment was something like, “Take a look at
de Broglie’s paper and give us a synopsis of it at the journal club
next Tuesday.”
Schroedinger had a ski trip planned for that weekend (Friday
through Sunday, apparently). Being the persistent soul that he
was, he took a copy of de Broglie’s paper and a book on
solutions to differential equations in various coordinate systems
(rectilinear, cylindrical, and spherical) with him on the ski trip.
The short version of the story is that he didn’t get much skiing
done, but he came back well on the way of inventing wave
mechanics, an explanation for the energy levels of atoms as kind
of standing waves in space. His “eureka” moment came when
he said to his bewildered ski companions, “I have just fit the
energy levels of the hydrogen atom in a way you would not
believe!” The standing waves were similar to the threedimensional oscillations of sound waves in a concert hall. But
standing waves of what?
I believe Schroedinger originally thought of the standing
waves as waves of charge density. The electron has wave-like
qualities à la de Broglie, and it has charge, so it would make
sense as an extension of de Broglie’s hypothesis. But electrons
have discrete charges when they are measured by Millikan in
his famous oil-drop experiment. How come we never see
fractional charges?
Schroedinger’s description of electrons (or any elementary
particle, for that matter) was that they are aggregations of waves
that reinforce in a certain region and cancel out everywhere else.
This makes sense in explaining the energy levels of a hydrogen
atom, but causes other conceptual problems.
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Schroedinger’s description of a
particle as an aggregation of waves
of some sort caused Heisenberg to
analyze the behavior of such particles
when we try to measure them. If we
try to localize the particle as we do in
the act of measurement, we confine
it to a narrower region in space. That
means we add up more and more
waves. Each wave has a slightly
different speed. Schroedinger needed
these different speeds for different
wavelengths in order to get the
“wave-packet” to behave like a particle. But that means that the
momentum of the particle becomes less certain over time, since, in
order to localize the particle, we need to add more wavelengths, and
adding more wavelengths means the velocity (and therefore the
momentum) become more uncertain.
There is actually a calculable limit to the uncertainty in the
momentum times the uncertainty in the position of a particle. It is
greater than or equal to Planck’s constant. This is of course the
Heisenberg Uncertainty Relation. It says that there is a fundamental,
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and not simply an experimental, limit to our knowledge of the
location of a particle and its momentum.
A particularly helpful illustration of the Heisenberg derivation (and one that will be useful to us later in this lecture can
be had by looking at single-slit diffraction of a plane wave. The
wave can be a wave of light, an elementary particle like an
electron, or even a water wave. If it originates from a far-distant
source, the wave is essentially a series of parallel troughs and
peaks with its propagation direction perpendicular to those
troughs and peaks. When we allow it to approach a screen so that
the peaks and troughs (as seen from above) are parallel to the
screen, we can watch the interaction of the barrier with the
oncoming waves. If there is an opening in the barrier that is of
the same order as the wavelength of the waves, a fraction of the
waves can pass the barrier. When this happens, a part of the wave
front gets through the barrier, but for some fraction of the waves,
the direction of the waves is changed because of the wavefront’s
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interference with itself. This interference produces a dispersion
of the wave front that gives its velocity a vertical component. It
is important to note what has happened here. We have limited the
wavefront in the vertical direction to a δx that is essentially the
width of the slit. It has produced a dispersion in the velocity of
the wave in the vertical direction, a δv.
In Schroedinger’s terms, this dispersion in the velocity of the
wave in the vertical direction (that is, in the same direction as the
opening of the slit) is an uncertainty in the velocity. If we
consider the wave as representing the motion of a particle, then
the localization of the particle within a δx produces an uncertainty
in the momentum of the particle of order δp. This illustration is
not entirely fanciful. In fact, Heisenberg uses it as one of his
derivations of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Relation. Furthermore,
the smaller the slit, that is, the smaller the uncertainty in position,
the greater the uncertainty in the momentum.
This has led to no end of problems in interpretation. One
example of this is the fact that elementary particles (be they
electrons, protons, or photons), when emitted from a source and
directed toward a screen or grid whose spacings are the same size
as the wavelengths of the elementary particles, will show a
diffraction pattern on a screen downstream from slits. For the
sake of clarity, we will consider only photons, although the
discussion could as well apply to any elementary particle,
including neutrons, protons, electrons, etc.
Let a stream of photons set forth across the chaotic gulf toward
a screen. Imagine this as like a scene from Milton’s Paradise Lost
as Satan launches himself across the chasm between hell and
paradise. These photons are transmitted and diffracted as though
they are electromagnetic waves. When they reach two slits in the
screen, the waves interfere with one another so that there is a very
specific pattern of light and dark lines on the screen downstream
from the slits called a “two-slit” pattern.
Suppose we turn down the intensity of the light. Let us make
the light exceedingly dim, so that when we look at the screen or
detector, we find only one cell on the screen illuminated or
exposed (you remember photographic film, I trust) at a time.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
What happens next is remarkable. This figure shows the
buildup over time of electrons in a two slit experiment at very low
flux levels. We see one quantum at a time arriving . As we watch,
the diffraction pattern begins to develop. We see the characteristic
two-slit pattern. But we have allowed only one quantum (in this
case, electrons) to be emitted at a time. How can we possibly get
a two-slit pattern. Such an experimental apparatus exists. The
results from it behave exactly as I have said.
Apparently, the individual light or particle quantum goes
through both slits at once. It is spread out over the entire space
of the experimental screen (or more properly, the experimental
volume) and then excites only one element of the detector. If this
seems quixotic to you, it is. It is known as “the problem of
measurement” in the vernacular of Shady Bend. The wave
function (remember all those waves adding up to produce the
wave packet) is spread out even for a single particle or quantum
of light. The moment before it hits the detector screen, it is
everywhere on the screen. At the next instant, it collapses into a
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BEALL
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single point. This is known as the “collapse of the wave
function.” The collapse is apparently instantaneous. If these are
material particles or quanta of light, they sort themselves into a
single area on the screen instantaneously.
There were many objections to this explanation, not the least
of which was that it violates causality. The wave-packet description of the two-slit experiment requires that the waves instantly
collapse to a single point, after having, a moment in time before,
occupied the whole of the experiment.
Bohr and Heisenberg made noble efforts to resolve this
apparent contradiction by supposing that the wave function
description of elementary particles was merely a calculation of
likelihood or probability. Since probability is only a likelihood,
the collapse of the wave function is merely the result of a
measurement. And like any measurement, once it occurs, the
answer is always, “Yes. That’s what happened!”
Einstein would have none of it. His famous quote, “God
does not play dice!” about the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics was an indication of his
objection to the probability interpretation of the psi-function. In
his view, there was an underlying causal relation between the
elements of the experiments and their outcomes that was not
represented by quantum mechanics (QM). Yet QM is a remarkably successful theoretical method.
In a paper in response to the probability interpretation of
QM, Einstein, Podolski and Rosen (EPR) tried to show that the
uncertainty relation developed by Heisenberg was flawed, and
that some variations of the single or two slit experiment would
give an inroad into figuring out precisely what the momentum
and position of the particle would be. One of the thought
experiments proposed to measure the momentum transferred to
the screen by the impact of the particle, This (by conservation
of momentum) would allow the particle momentum to be
measured exactly, while the position would be localized to the
region within the slit. But when one took into account the
uncertainty in the position of the screen, the Heisenberg
Uncertainty limit returned.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
A variant of one of the thought experiments used two
particles that interacted prior to the slit, and then had one transfer
its momentum to one screen while another’s position was
determined independently. Again, by conservation of momentum
the second particle’s momentum and its position were to be
determined beyond the Heisenberg limit. Each response to EPR
by Heisenberg and Bohr led EPR to further amplifications of the
experimental apparatus. While the correspondence in the
scientific literature led many to accept the Copenhagen Interpretation and the Heisenberg Uncertainty limit, Einstein was
never able to believe the probabilistic nature of Bohr and Heisenberg’s interpretation.
Yet the alternative to a probabilistic interpretation was an
instantaneous collapse of a physical wave function. This instantaneous collapse would clearly exceed the speed of light, and thus
render it difficult to accept, since the limiting speed of the transfer
of information in Special Relativity is the velocity of light. This
is one of the fundamental hypotheses of Special Relativity.
This led John Bell to a further analysis of the two slit experiment, and the theoretical development of Bell’s Theorem (or
Bell’s Inequality), which has allowed many experimental test of
locality, causality, and the predictions of quantum mechanics. It
appears to contradict Einstein’s hopes for a “hidden variable”
theory, wherein true causality would be returned to the world.
Apparently, this is not to be realized.
3. Bell’s Theorem (or Bell’s Inequality)
But how does this happen? Bell’s theorem is essentially a test of
whether or not two particles, once they interact, can be separated
enough so that their states do not influence one another.
Remarkably, it is posed in such a way that it can be implemented
as an experimental test.
Schroedinger called this phenomenon, in which the wave
function of two particles becomes joined by their interaction, an
“entanglement” of the wave functions of the particles. And you
recall that all particles have a wave function description that
guides or governs their behavior.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BEALL
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This hypothesis bears on EPR’s paper. To reiterate, if two
particles interact, then the momentum of one could be determined
by inference due to measuring the momentum of the other, since
the momentum of the pair has to be conserved. At the same time,
the position of the first particle, for which we inferred the momentum, could be accurately measured for its position as long as
the pair were sufficiently far apart. Thus, the momentum and
position of a particle could be measured at a precision which
violated the Heisenberg uncertainty limit. At this point, EPR
could claim that the Heisenberg Uncertainty relation was merely
a practical limit, and that there was some underlying, governing
relation which we simply needed to find, some sort of “hidden
variable” that really determined the evolution of the system.
J. S. Bell was sympathetic to EPR’s view. His theorem (called
variously Bell’s Theorem or Bell’s Inequality) was an attempt to
establish whether or not EPR’s hypothesis could be tested
experimentally. The experimental setup is remarkably simple, but
not trivial. Two particles would be allowed to interact, to become
“entangled,” and then would separate and go off in opposite
directions. After a time, the particles would each be measured to
determine their properties. As with the EPR paper, the hypothesis
that their states could no longer interact would produce one result,
whereas the hypothesis that their states were still entangled when
they were measured would produce another result.1
The next figure (overleaf) shows the results of one of the
experimental tests of Bell’s Theorem, in this case the orientation
of the polarization of photons measured by two separated systems.
The straight line shows the limit of a “local, realistic” hypothesis,
that is, that the results are uncorrelated. Any experimental result
below the diagonal straight line indicates a correlation (that is, an
entanglement) between distant particles and their experimental
1. For a readable proof of the theorem, see Nick Herbert’s book Quantum Reality (New York: Random House, 2011) and his account at
http://quantumtantra.com/bell2.html, as well as his articles “Cryptographic approach to hidden variables” in the American Journal of
Physics 43 1975): 315-16 and “How to be in two places at the same
time,” New Scientist 111 (1986): 41-44.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
apparatuses. Perhaps most important, the results predicted by QM
show a very close agreement with the data!
In some later experimental tests, groups have tried to
estimate the speed of the transmission of the correlations by
changing slightly the timing of the setting of the measuring
apparatuses. In a ground-breaking paper by Robert Garisto
entitled “What is the Speed of Quantum Information?” (Quantum
Physics 2002 [arXiv:quant-ph/0212078v1]) the result of a
measurement conducted at CERN is that the correlations happen
at a velocity at least 10,000 times the speed of light over a
distance of 18 kilometers. I say “at least” because the electronics
of the experi-mental setup could not measure a faster correlation.
So for all intents and purposes, this speed is a lower limit. The
correlations occur effectively instantaneously.
What are we to make of such results? Henry Pierce Stapp’s
paper, entitled “The S-Matrix Interpretation of Quantum Theory”
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BEALL
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(Physical Review 3 [1971]: 1303-20), provides a highly recommended discussion of Bell’s Theorem, despite the imposing title.
(By way of a friendly warning, it’s best to get a bit of orientation
first by reading Section X, “Ontological Problems,” and Appendix B, “World View.”)
To give you some idea of Stapp’s take on Bell’s Theorem, I
quote from his paper at a point just after he shows a concise proof
of that theorem.
A conclusion that can be drawn from this theorem is that
the demands of causality, locality, and individuality
cannot be simultaneously maintained in the description
of nature. Causality demands contingent predictions;
locality demands local causes of localized results;
individuality demands specification of individual results,
not merely their probabilities.
As Stapp puts it:
I can see only three ways out of the problem posed by
Bell’s theorem.
1. The first is to accept . . . the idea that human
observers are cognizant only of individual branches of
the full reality of the world: The full physical world
would contain a superposition of a myriad of interconnected physical worlds of the kind we know. An
individual observer would be personally aware of only
one response of a macroscopic measuring device, but a
full account of reality would include all the other
possible outcomes on an equal footing, though perhaps
with unequal “weights.”
2. The second way out is to accept that nature is
basically highly nonlocal, in the sense that correlations
exist that violently contradict—even at the macroscopic
level—the usual ideas of the space-time propagation of
information. The intuitive idea of the physical distinctness
of physically well-separated macroscopic objects then
becomes open to question. And the intuitive idea of space
itself is placed in jeopardy. For space is intimately
connected to the space-time relationships that are
naturally expressed in terms of it. If there are, between
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
far-apart microscopic events, large instantaneous connections that do not respect spatial separation, then the
significance of space would seem to arise only from the
statistical relationships that do respect it.
3. The third way out is to deny that measurements that
“could have been performed, but were not,” would have
had definite results if they had been performed. This
way out seems, at first, to be closest to the spirit of the
Copenhagen interpretation. However, it seems to contradict the idea of indeterminism, which is also an
important element of the spirit of the Copenhagen interpretation.
Some comments are clearly in order here. The third option
Stapp articulates bears remarkable similarities to Laplace’s
Demon or Leibniz’s God as architects of the best of all possible
worlds. In that instantiation of reality, what we choose is exactly
what we will. But what we will as a predicate of our being is
completely known by the Deity and determined by it.
The first option is known as Stapp’s “many-worlds”
interpretation. That option is often mentioned in the same breath
as Schroedinger’s Cat.
In that interpretation, as Stapp says, the cat is both alive and
dead in the multiply unfolding universe of outcomes. Each point
where the quantum hits the screen represents a starting point for
a separate future.
As an interesting aside, we have some hopes of conducting
Bell’s Theorem type experiments here at St. John’s in a room in
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the basement appropriately called the Quantum Lab. But of
course, no cats will be allowed in that room.
Most people find the second option, non-locality, most
“appealing,” if that is the right phrase.
In the case of the first experimental measurements, conducted with two low-energy neutrons colliding; then recoiling
down separate arms of a vacuum line; and finally having their
angular momenta determined by a Stern-Gerlach apparatus (I will
spare you the details), there were (some thirty or forty years ago)
five measurements, four of which agreed with Bell’s inequality.
Since then, all of the experimental tests of Bell’s theorem have
confirmed it.
To emphasize how surprising this has been, I recall a
conversation I had with Professor Carol Alley at the University
of Maryland when I was a graduate student there. He is a famous
experimental physicist, one who used a laser to measure the
distance to the Moon from a site near Goddard Space Flight
Center during one of the Apollo Lunar Landing missions. As we
talked about Bell’s theorem, and it’s apparent experimental
corroboration, standing in the hallway in the Physics Building at
the University of Maryland, he was clearly quite perplexed that
there was any corroboration of the inequality. As we spoke, his
voice was getting louder and louder. Finally, I said to him,
“Professor Alley, you realize that you are shouting at me?” He
laughed and said, “Well, it’s certainly not you that I’m shouting
at, Jim. It’s the idea of this result!”
Left with the options Stapp articulated, which would you
abandon: causality, locality, or individuality. You cannot have
all three! Most people, faced with these options, give up
locality.
4. Like shadows on a Cave Wall: Leibniz’s ideas of “space”
as a kind of answer to the problem of non-locality
It is time to recall one of the things I am attempting in this lecture:
to use Leibniz’s conceptions of space and time in the Monadology as a metaphysical foundation for the idea of no-locality in
quantum mechanics.
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Let us reiterate the properties of monads. Monads are
singular. That is, they have many properties, but no parts. They
have no windows. All their impressions and reflections of the
Cosmos come through their reflection and articulation of the
Deity, which they represent in a small part.
Finally, it is likely, based on the experimental results of Bell’s
Theorem, that our intuitions of space and time are far removed
from the way the Universe actually is.
5. Concluding remarks
I conclude this lecture with two principal points and some
speculations.
First, it was many years ago that Roger Penrose in a book
called The Emporer’s New Mind, tried to explain the coherence
of mind by the physical effects of non-locality on a relatively
small scale—the electrochemical and quantum mechanical
processes in the human brain (cats, also, most likely, since
Penrose is fond of cats). This coherence would require entanglement of the prior physical states of these electrochemical wave
fronts, but this does not seem terribly surprising.
Second, entanglement does not depend simply or perhaps
even necessarily on proximity. At a fairly formal level, entanglement depends on interaction. The entanglement of cognitive
processes with the experiential world might be sufficient to
explain the commonality of experience, a term which I coin here
in this essay, especially given that the correlations persist over
manifestly macroscopic differences.
This bears, quite generally, on our ideas of culture, also. As
an example, think of how easy or difficult it can be to change
one’s entire conception of the world via a single conversation. I
thank Mr. William Braithwaite for the suggestion.
The concept of non-locality thus articulated can extend far
beyond the possibility of common experience to the possibility
of kindredness with our common weal. We might not, actually,
be separate spheres, hoping to connect, hoping to touch and
know the world. Like shadows on a cave wall, both we as
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individuals and the rest of the sensible world could actually
spring from a common light.
Finally, and this is a bit more speculative, but hardly
original, the entire evolution of the history of the Cosmos has
involved some pretty heavy entanglement. We now call it the
Big Bang.
This brings us to a further point regarding Leibniz’s Deity.
God might not have simply said, “Let there be Light.” God
might have actually been that light.
�Diver Tomb, Posidonia (Modern Paestum)
ca. 480-470, Museum, Paestum
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Depth Versus Complexity
Eva Brann
What a great honor it is to be invited to speak to the philosophers
of Athens, though I came flying into Atlanta through the blue
skies by airplane rather than sailing into the Piraeus over the
wine-dark sea by trireme!
My topic is a duality, an opposition in the way our world offers itself to the search for knowledge, which is mirrored in our
personal predisposition for a way of inquiry.
I’ve learned not to expect an audience to sit with bated breath
until I reveal my own inclination and also not to indulge myself
in post-modern indeterminacies. So I’ll say up front where, as
my students say, I’m “coming from” and, as matters more, where
I’m going with my title, “Depth Versus Complexity.” I think that
the first dimension of depth describes such bottom-seeking
knowledge as we’re capable of searching out; it may be called
philosophia, “love of wisdom.” The second dimension, on the
other hand, describes such surface-covering information as we
can attain by research; it could be named, to coin a term,
philotechnosyne, “love of skillful fact-finding.” Since it seems
to me hazardous, both aimless and dangerous, to plunge into the
depths below a surface that I’m not acquainted with, it also seems
to me that those who attempt such a plunge, which is always
made with eyes closed, should have their eyes wide open above
Eva Brann is a tutor and former dean at St. John’s College in Annapolis,
Maryland. This lecture was first delivered to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia on September 16,
2016.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
and be acquainted with much of the wide surface, always keeping
in mind Heraclitus’ dictum that “Eyes and ears are bad witnesses
to humans that have barbarian souls” (D-K 107). I will cite rather,
in behalf of being extensively informed, Socrates, who lived in
that first Athens as an ardent urbanite. He seems to Phaedrus, his
ostensible guide, like a stranger outside the city in the country
around Athens, and he says that he, Socrates, only learns when
within the city; but he shows that he has far more real local
knowledge than his companion.
The direct opposite of complexity would be simplicity; of
depth it is shallowness. I’m not disavowing but rather avoiding
those antitheses, for now. So I’ll describe the two ways not as directly opposite, but rather as orthogonal to each other. Therefore
let me begin in a somewhat unlikely way: with the most basic
Cartesian coordinate diagram of classical physics, in which the
horizontal x axis represents the fundamental independent variable, time, and the vertical y axis orthogonal (that is, at right angles) to it represents some other physical dimension—early on,
distance, velocity, and acceleration. That’s so even in latter day
elementary textbooks. But at a crucial moment in physics, its first
modern moment, the direction is different. The second theorem
of the Third Day of Galileo’s Two New Sciences (1638), sets out,
under the title of “Naturally Accelerated Motion,” the earliest
clearly quantified law of nature, that for free fall at the surface
of the earth,1 where acceleration is naturally uniform. Here time
is represented by an upright line, while the horizontal stands for
velocity. Moreover, time begins not at what will later be called
the origin, the intersection of the representative lines, but at a release point. Picture the diagram as rendering Galileo, nearly half
a century earlier, standing at the top of the Leaning Tower, about
to start his experiment by letting go of a ball. That experiment
was not, to be sure, an experiment at all but a demonstration of a
remarkable fact already known by Galileo, namely that balls of
different weights would, absent friction, hit the ground together.
1. The third day of creation in the Hebrew Bible is when the earth appears (Genesis 1:9).
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That’s somewhat to my point, since so-called information, gathered by experimental research is, I would guess, far less often put
to use as the source of new discoveries than as the corroboration
of pre-conceived knowledge.
What is a little off my point is the mind-boggling and modernity-determining way Galileo proves the law on the basis of a
postulate suggested by the Pisan demonstration. The postulate
says that, since weight is not involved in free fall close to the
earth’s surface, the simplest possible relation of velocity to time
is to be assumed, namely that the former varies directly with the
latter. Then the velocity-lines, set up horizontally on each moment of time, increase proportionally with the time of falling and
so assume the outline of a triangle whose base represents the velocity at the moment of impact. The interior of this triangle is a
kind of proto-integral, a summation of all the near-infinitesimal
velocity-lines, with side t for time and d/t for distance per unit
time, or velocity. These sides, when multiplied, yield twice the
area of a triangle representing the dimension t·d/t . Simply put,
the area of a triangle, a plane figure, now represents a distance,
a linear figure. I’m moved to say that this counterintuitive procedure instantiates the crucial effect of quantification: the symbolic quantity has no immediately apprehensible similarity to the
quality of the symbolized phenomenon, here distance.
I must interrupt my account here to say, very emphatically,
that Galileo clearly saw what was eventuating and did his clever
and careful best to circumvent the representation of distance by
area, so that his proof is conceptually clear but mathematically
cumbrous. More efficient and less mindful ways would soon be
found.2
As it turns out, the tsunami of information now available is
largely numerical in form and bears a ruptured relation to its qualitative subject. Incidentally, the law of free fall then simply stares
at you from the diagram: Since by the postulate the velocity ratios
2. Of course, this transmogrification had already preceded, when a
length uniformly increasing had been made to symbolize a similarly increasing rate, namely, the ratio of distance to time or velocity, d/t.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
are the same as the time ratios, we can substitute the time for the
velocity and say: In free fall on earth, in abstraction from friction
and in the absence of a force that might increase acceleration, the
distances vary as the squares of the times, d ~ t 2 Let me repeat:
I’m a little off topic with this tale, but only a little, since the story
of non-similar symbolism is deeply implicated in the tale of depth
vs. complexity.
My recall of a moment when time went diagrammatically
downward rather than outward is intended to remind you of other
ways time goes downward—and inward. If Galileo’s ball hadn’t
been stopped at ground zero it would have gone inward toward
the center of the earth.
There is another discipline in which time heads down. In archaeology, the deeper we dug (I say “we” because in my pre-Socratic days I was an archeologist), the later it was in our personal
day, the earlier it became in the world’s time: the deeper down,
the farther back. On our earth, the buried past lies progressively
deeper below the visible now that presents itself on the surface.
These material survivals went, if undisturbed, in readable stratifications, way back into prehistoric times.3
I refer to digging because it is an analogue, perhaps even the
source of metaphor for a psychic capacity called remembering.
In remembering we dive into our memory tank, often to meet a
memory floating or flashing up to forestall or even anticipate our
search. But sometimes we must recollect, dig laboriously downward through stratum after stratum of compacted memories, until
the desired one halts the search. Socrates distinguishes memory
(mneme) from recollection (anamnesis)—e.g., in Symposium
208a, and Meno 81d. Augustine, that great Platonic theologian,
devises an imaginative topology of the soul which visualizes that
3. “If undisturbed:” I recall a day of excitement at the American Excavations of the Athenian Agora (Marketplace), when a pristine Neolithic
deposit was thought to have been discovered. By evening the excavators
had reached bottom—and there lay a little button bearing the legend:
Army of the Hellenes. It came from a Greek army tunic; its presence
spoiled the temporal virginity of the find and with it much of its informational value.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
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depth-sounding destination of recollection (Confessions, Bk. X,
Chs. 11, 12, 17). Our quasi-sensory memory images densely fill
the innumerable fields and caves and caverns of our inward
quasi-spatial memory. Here we wander in remembrance. But yet
deeper within the huge inner world are placeless places for imageless presences such as true mathematical figures (meaning
those drawn with breadthless lengths on an inner quasi-plane),
precepts of the liberal arts, including logic, and the invisible
being of things discerned within, “themselves by themselves,”
the Platonic forms. These flee into the remotest recesses and must
be “excogitated,” literally “driven together and out,” that is, laboriously recollected. Then Augustine extends the depth—or
height—of the soul beyond memory and its recollective recesses.
“I will transcend” (transibo), he says, my memory and “ascending” (ascendans) through and beyond my memorial soul I will
mount up to God who is above me.
To my mind, this is a remarkable correction, or perhaps a
consummation, of Socrates’ account, who never tells, except in
post-mortem myths, how the forms and their ruling principle, the
Idea of the Good, actually come into the soul—or it to them. In
Augustine’s account, they penetrate, they enter, the innermost
depth of the soul, that is to say, the soul opens onto the heights
of Heaven. Depth and height are strangely identical. I will dwell
on this later, but here recall to you that the Latin word altus means
both “high” and “deep,” and also that Heraclitus says “The way
up and down is one and the same” (D-K 60).
Like Augustine, the enhancer of Platonic psychology,
Freud, its traducer, has an outside-in psychic topology. He himself called psychoanalysis “depth-psychology” (Encyclopedia
Britannica, 1926). His early typology in the Interpretation of
Dreams (1900) names at the upper end the perceptual system,
that is, awareness; behind or below comes the preconscious system, that is, the subconscious, where reside psychic facts not
presently in awareness but readily accessible. And deep down
there is the place of the unconscious, a hermetic hell, reachable
only by the experts in deep penetration, by the psychoanalysts.
The motto of Freud’s early book is “If I cannot bend heaven, I
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will raise hell” (Virgil, Aeneid VII 312). And that is why I call
Freud a traducer of the two ancients: For them the light increases with depth, for him the murk. As Lady Macbeth, who
might, poor woman, be a Freudian case, says: “Hell is murky”
(Macbeth, V.i.41).
I’ll return to Augustine’s Confessions, Book XI (23, 27, 28), to
me the highpoint of the inquiry into time. Here memory becomes
the place and the condition of time. Time is a “distention” of the
mind, a dilation brought about by its accumulating memories, and
the amount of this mental stretching is the measure of times. Neither
future nor past are; only the present, the here and now, exists. The
future is expectation now and the past is memory now, and time is
the presently felt extent of this expectational and memorial stretching upward into the future and downward into the past respectively.
To be sure, Augustine says nothing about up or down. But
Husserl, who takes his departure from Augustine in what is probably the greatest application of the phenomenological method to a
subject, namely his Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (1905), does exactly that in describing his own “Diagram of
Time” (para. 10). He speaks of the new nows changing into pasts
that continuously “run off’ and plunge “downward” into the depths
marked on a vertical line which symbolizes the “retention,” that is
to say, the memory of impressions.
Before showing you where I plan for all this to be going let me
take a minute to tell you about the etymologies of the words “deep”
and “down.” I am far from imagining that recovered meanings, be
they the careful etymologies produced by learned linguists, who
trace a word to its speculative Indo-European root, or the creative
derivations devised by imaginative amateurs, which have no basis
in research, prove anything at all. The dead-serious but linguistically
dubious etymologizing of certain philosophers strikes me as an improbity, while the apt hijinks of others seem to me good fun.4 But
both linguistically sound etymologies and imaginative verbal jeux
4. An example of—how shall I put it?—unstraightforwardness is Heidegger’s translation of Greek aletheia, “truth,” as “un-concealedness,”
as from alpha-privative a (“un”) and Lethe (“forgetfulness”), from a
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d’esprit can be thought-provoking, the latter because they’re meant
to be, the former because they may tell us something about the development of human reflection. But all in all, etymologies are incitements, not revelations, and poetic play, not philosophy.
Here is the linguistically respectable etymology of “deep.”
The Indo-European root, dheub, gives rise to “dip,” “dive,” as
well as “deep.” Thus it is reasonable to infer that “deep” originally signified plunging into an element and bringing up some
of it. The deepest dipping and diving our earth affords us is the
ocean, the deepest of the deep the Mariana Trench; let it stand
for non-metaphorical, literal, depth and diving. The “down” adjective is similarly physical; it is derived from dune, “hill”;
“down” means “off the hill,” moving from top to bottom.
Now let me do the same for “complexity.” “Com-,” Indo-European kom, signifies “beside, near, with”; “-plexity” derives
from plek-, “to plait,” originally from “flax,” a plant yielding textile fiber. So like depth, complexity is rooted in our dealing with
material objects. I’ve read that the most complicated object
known to us is our brain. I don’t need to insist that its complexity
is non-metaphysical, literal, just because I believe that complexity hardly ever is a metaphor.
We deal with complexity by “ex-plicating,” that is, undoing
the im-plicating entanglements of complexity, or by “ex-plaining,” that is, setting complexities out plainly. The two meanings
of the word “plain,” that is, “clear” and “flat,” have the same origin: the wide “plain” is where things are plain because view is
unobstructed, and the mathematical flat surface, the “plane,” has
the same origin. Hence “explaining” is a mode of extracting
meaning that explicates its subject by projecting it onto a flat surface. Thus, for instance, the brain is contained by a roughly round
skull (because, I imagine, the sphere is that mathematical solid
verb that means “to elude notice.” The etymology has some support,
but there is no evidence that to early and classical authors aletheia
meant anything but truth and genuineness as opposed to falseness and
counterfeit. An example of fun is from Plato’s Phaedrus (252c): Pteros
means, “Winged Eros” since pteron means “feather.”
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which has the lowest ratio of surface to content), so that its involutions need to be explicated in plane surfaces: in marked cross
sections for viewing and labelled schemata for functions and
plane mappings for neural networks.
What I’ve just said can serve to deal with an annoying sort
of argumentative deflection. Someone will interject, to derail
you: “It’s more complex than that.” To which the answer is: “Well
then, if you mean it, draw me a picture.” For complexity is the
eminently diagrammable, spatializable problem; it can be set out
plainly. To be sure, complexity is the opposite of simplicity, and
what these folks often say as the final put-down is: “You’re being
simplistic, you’re over-simplifying.” To which the apparently
merely eristic, that is, merely contentious, answer is: “And you’re
being shallow, superficial,” meaning: your overview has too few
nodes and connections to begin with and doesn’t go into the matter to boot.
It will be the point of my talk to show, perhaps a little too
briefly, that it is not merely argumentative to say that complexity
is a superficial view of the world, but has real non-derogatory
meaning, and then to conclude by attempting a description and—
I’ll be upfront about it—a defense of depth. Just as I don’t want
to say that they are opposite kinds of thinking, so, far be it from
me to claim that complexity and depth are “kinds” of thinking at
all. To my mind, it is plain unthinking to claim that there are different ways of thinking. Thinking is always thinking—always
the same in being “about” something, thus always qualified by
what it is about. It is always the same but often about something
different. For, of course, there are different objects of thought,
different ways to see what you must think about.5 Thus the people
who used to be referred to as primitives, and before that as savages, felt surrounded by well- or ill-intentioned spirits and, most
rationally, concluded that these needed to be propitiated in ways
they themselves might respond too—just as we would.
5. People also employ different devices, modes, ways of thinking, such
as figures, analogies, conjectures; it is hard to see how they could do it,
except against a backdrop of plain mentation.
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Or take Socrates. Some folks say that he was interested in
defining certain objects, that is, in delimiting them in the universe of discourse, in explaining them and their interrelations
verbally. Well, so he was, but only when they were heavily affected with non-being, as in his multi-definitional pursuit of the
sophist in the dialogue of that name, the results of which I’ve
spent some amusing hours diagramming. But when he is within
view of a true being, like one of the human excellences, asking
that notorious “What is . . . ?” question, definition is not his aim,
but a delving descent to depths attained in literal “under-standing” (as we say) or in a truth-following ascent to the heights
achieved through “over-standing” or epi-steme (as the Greeks
say). It is always thinking but sometimes of words, or about objects, or from different positions. Consider that if thinking
weren’t always just that we wouldn’t even know when we have
different intentions.
Now to some gist. What is complexity? Well, first, there are
several kinds I’ve discerned and no doubt others I haven’t.
There’s Wittgenstein’s kind, very clearly set out in the Philosophical Investigations (Part I, 1945, Part II, 1949). He says at
one point: “The deep aspect eludes us easily” (I 387, 594). “Do
not try to analyze the experience in yourself” (my italics, II xi).
So we are to turn to the public use of words, for example, explanations (I 69) and the behavior it induces, called the “language
game.”6 The external view, he says, “reveals a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing” (I 66). His
figure here appears to be one-dimensional, a thread of overlapping fibers (I 67), but since these also criss-cross, the real figure
6. It seems to me that the language game, which teaches meaning by
ostension, doesn’t work except for a dull-witted apprentice: Master
teaches pupil the word “slab” (flagstone) by pointing to an exemplar
and then sends him to fetch another from a pile (I 6). If he’s dull enough,
he’ll come back with a slab, but if he’s brightly observant, he’ll come
back and say: “I didn’t see another just like this one.” The master will
be thrown back on communicating The Slab, itself by itself, since no
one, I think, can see likeness except through modelling essence—but
the last clause goes beyond my present point.
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is clearly two- or three-dimensional. This is verbal complexity,
and it is characterized by overtness, extensive relationality, and
interconnectivity: “family resemblances” (ibid.); its point is to
get on with practicalities; speech is known from its use in the
world.
Another kind of complexity can be characterized as computable: It has sharply defined digital elements related by rules
of computation, that is, problem-solving procedures, algorithms. This complexity is hard-edged: digits in clear calculational relations. The point is to get the solution to the kind of
pre-formulated question called a “problem,” whose relation to
human experience is determined by the fiat of postulation.
Yet a third kind of complexity is informational, characterizable as bits of fact, raw or inferred, singular or aggregated in
categories. Information has only relative existence; in its first
nature it is like a mud flat, which becomes discrete only when
handfuls are molded into a clump of clay. Abstract information
is therefore irrelevantly pre-formed pseudo-knowledge. Thus
information, even when verifiable, consists of relational factoids that become active facts in a context of human intention.
Information becomes relevant to final decision-making when
a desire is formulated and an intention is formed. Then the
point is usually to underwrite the desired action, or to modify,
even to cancel it, if the facts are really terminally unspinnable.
My final, but surely not last, kind of complexity is psychical and social—that is, human. I won’t attempt to delineate it.
Its elements are too various in kind and degree and their relations too difficult, be it by human intention or natural obscurity.
Ungifted experts tend to deliver very gross conceptual depictions of the human world, but very great psychologists and anthropologists (the latter need to be the former more than the
converse, I think) manage to combine an extensive overview
with penetrating insight. I am thinking of the Greeks’
Herodotus and our Tocqueville. They manage to survey the
many phenomena that surface on our earth and to clue out underlying, I would say, the underlying distinctions and commonalities.
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Here, by a natural and easy transition (as Robert Brumbaugh
used to say, when he meant quite a leap7) I shall try to speak of
depth. It might seem presumptuous, did I not think that one may
speak of it without having been there: Trying is all.
To begin with, the deep divers that I have read and even
known, display respect for and acquaintance with phenomenal
complexities.8 I say “phenomenal” because the juxtaposition of
phainomena and onta, sensed “appearances” and intellected “beings” must surely underlie the distinction between complexity
and depth. Let me here say again that complexity usually is and
means to be a literal description of its realm, while depth is a
metaphor, a figural application of a this-worldly phenomenon:
dipping and diving into a material element.9
Thereby hangs a tale, a tale I will foretell in a sentence:
There is no, repeat, no way of speaking of the soul and of the
realm whose emissary it is except by analogy (prosaically) or
by metaphor (poetically). Indeed, all philosophical speech is, I
dare to claim, figurative. Let me remind you of two prime examples. Plato’s Socrates speaks of eidos, literally “look” or “aspect.” But the word is used “meta-phorically,” which means
“carried over” into the realm of thought, in which reside the beings that have “invisible looks.” (Mythically and punningly their
place is in the underwold: Aides aeides, “Hades the Invisible,”10
Phaedo 80d, Cratylus 404b.11) Or take the Stoic invention of the
7. At Yale, I slipped in and out (more out) of his lectures, the only graduate class in philosophy I ever attended at all (1951). The required undergraduate course at Brooklyn College was a big nothing
8. “Even known”: Jacob Klein, Dean of St. John’s College when I arrived (1957).
9. Thus descriptions that mean to delve are usually simplifications. Of
whom is it truer to say “you’re simplifying” than of a novelist who is
experienced in the delineating soul and the world?
10. Aeides: an allusion to the un-murky Greek Hades (Aides), the underworld where dwell luminously invisible things.
11. In other dialogues they are located up high (Symposium 211), in the
heavens (Phaedrus 247).
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“concept,” literally a “grasping together [of particulars].” These
metaphorical ways, the poetry of philosophy, are not, to my
mind, primitive evidence of some logic-overleaping access to
the Unconcealed that hides itself from the prosaic professors,
but our one possible way to reach beyond the sensory world by
taking advantage of the deadness of the metaphors that make up
our latter-day language. It is a semi-extinction that allows us to
use our words as if they had always meant what we mean them
to mean: non-sensory beings directly denoted by pure imageless
speech. Who hears “concept” as an assembling grasp, or “logic”
as a collecting art?12
Aristotle and Wittgenstein actually agree—imagine this!—
that there is articulable thinking not in need of quasi-sensory
imagining. For Aristotle it is the highest kind that functions without imagination: intellecting, noesis, the direct apprehension of
the knowable. For Wittgenstein no understanding of a proposition
is in need of imagining (On the Soul 1129a ff.; Philosophical Investigation I 396). I can believe it of Aristotle that his mind, his
nous, had such a capacity for viewless thinking, sightless insight—do any of ours?13
So, I claim, whether or not we are practicing etymologists,
whether we are literally the “truth-tellers” about our first words
(for that is the etymology of “etymology”), their defunct spirits
tug at us to return to them.
—No way to speak of underlying being non-somatically, I
said a moment ago, and no way to go into sightless depths (divers
without goggles do keep their eyes closed) without first taking
in the surface, the place of laid-out overtness, of infinite particularity, of connecting context. Here’s another Socratic corroboration: Socrates is generally and inattentively presented as
denigrating the multifarious and shifting phenomenal surface on
which we crawl about. But recall that he, an inveterate urbanite,
who says that country places don’t teach him a thing, had more
12. Logic: from Greek logos, whose root is leg-, as in “collect.”
13. It is practically undecidable whether either Socrates or Plato ever
claimed to have come within sight of the forms.
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local knowledge and more scenic sensibility than his companion,
a suburban stroller. That’s in the Phaedrus (229b ff.). And in the
Symposium (206b ff.), Socrates, we learn, has been taught to
think that the ascent into the heights of being must start with the
surely complex, and mostly surface-captivated experience of
falling in love, which is also the first glimpse into psychic depths.
And the same is true of Aristotle and Thomas and Hegel, who all
seem to know a lot about worldly and human complexity, especially the monk.14 I’m not just dropping names here but citing
concrete examples of experiential expansiveness.
With complexity given its due, what then is depth, this mode
figuratively orthogonal to complexity, a mode more askew of than
opposite to it? But I will stall one last time: What is depth and
the way down not?
1. It cannot, by its very nature, be governed by the formalisms of logic. For it is always reached through the revealing
veil of metaphor, which assures that the blunt first law of logic
be set aside, the one that proscribes “p · ~ p.” This law of noncontradiction forbids that a proposition be at once true and not
true, though for its first formulator, Aristotle, this is not a formal
axiom but an affirmation that its intentional object, the thing
meant in declaratory speech, is always a determinate being,
which either is or is not. So with acquiescence in the law of thinking and being goes this very implication, that the spatial world is
determinately, positively, what it is. Not so the depths. The way
down is very much a via negativa on the one hand: “I don’t really
mean what my speech is saying”—and therefore, on the other, a
via in-ventionis, a way of “going into,” of discovery—of things
not quite thinkable.
2. Nor is depth-diving a way of deduction, of the logical descent from maxims to conclusion, nor of induction, the logical
ascent from facts to generalizations.
3. Nor are the depths a mere alternative universe of dis14. Thomas: His “Treatise on the Passions” in the Summa Theologiae
seems to me unsurpassable; consider also Aristotle’s researches in the
animal kingdom and Hegel on history and the arts.
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course, an idly eccentric language game, since, I am convinced,
urgent intimations from that quarter, from our internality, those
pulls that precede articulated speech, are a common, an ineluctable, human experience. This is a claim scarcely capable of
verification other than by testimonial. But I simply believe that
even people who revel in their own and their world’s brute materiality are visited by such transcendent innuendos.
4. Nor is the way into depths subject to a Cartesian method,
prescribed by teachable rules for the direction of the mind.15
*****
What then, finally, is depth and the way down?
Well, to begin with, as Heraclitus says: “The way up and
down is one and the same” (D-K 60).16 I’ll adapt it to my purpose.
Perhaps I can put it thus: The way of our search and its discoveries leads deep down into the depths of our soul, mind, or consciousness, towards what is found last but is in itself first, a
grounding principle.17 Once discovered, it becomes the ruling
principle (arche) of our account-giving as we come back up onto
earth. So the delving and climbing reach the same end, an “alpha
and omega,” the insight and its expression.
That is the way, but the mode of our search is question-asking
rather than problem-solving. In this phraseology, depth is the
15. Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637), Rules for the Direction of
the Mind (1628).
16. He might concede that my experience of the way up and back is different, because I’m facing in opposite directions, but still, the overseeing Logos will give the same account of both. For the Heraclitean Logos
is both immanent, as determining the ratios (logoi) of the elemental
transformations of nature, and transcendent, as the one who gathers,
collects (legei) Everything into One; it is the latter Logos who contracts
up and down into one.
17. My version of Aristotle, Physics 184a: “The way is from things
more knowable to us and clearer, to things clearer by nature and more
knowable.” There is another meaning of “ground,” not mine here. It is
the a priori, the conceptually prior basement upon which to construct
an epistemological edifice, an explanatory system such as Kant erects
(Critique of Pure Reason, B 860).
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venue of questions, complexity of problems. Statements of problems can actually do without question-marks, they are perplexities presented to be explicated, straightened out, conceptually or
practically. Or, if you like, a problem is a hard-edged, well-defined question with a correspondingly jigged answer drawn from
a predetermined pool.
For example, here’s a metaphysical problem: to discern the
number of causes operative in the world. The solution is constrained by such presumptions as these: Everything this-worldly
has a cause, including apparent chance (Aristotle, Physics Bk.
II iv ff.); therefore, if anything is uncaused or self-caused it is a
divinity (Physics, Bk. VIII; Metaphysics, Bk. XII); causes are
multiple, because the world is complexly constituted, and “responsible,” meaning that they come to us as responses forced
from the beings pinned down by an interrogation. And so forth.
The solution is definite, and the discussion continues only insofar as some people reject it.
Here’s a practical problem: On my way back from Athens, it’ll
be a problem how to circumvent the notoriously long security lines
of your Atlanta airport. When I get to the front, I’ll think of other
things. Solving practical problems takes this-worldly know-how;
solving philosophical problems takes other-worldly activity. In either case, when a problem is really solved it is also dissolved; it
becomes moot. People preoccupied by solved problems are told to
get a life. (There actually are some solved philosophical problems
that stay solved, mostly those involving a superseded physics.18)
Questions, on the other hand, seem to me not properly perplexities. They don’t go away, they are perennial, not because
they are demonstrably insoluble but because they are not properly
proposed for solving but rather for going into, deeper and deeper.
The mode of engagement with questions, as I delineate it
for myself, is what Socrates calls aporia—literally, waylessness.19 Therefore the way of searching out the deep is indeed a
18. Some of these do in fact remain interesting, sometimes as testimonials to the concrete impasses that make grand theories implode.
19. Or “unprovidedness.” The above meditation on modes of searching
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meth-odos, a “way-to-be-followed,” but only in the sense of
an oriented movement, not in the modern meaning of a method,
a progress guided by procedures.
Entertaining questions thus requires wisdom, a considering,
reflecting frame of a mind still resonating with past experience
but now focused by desirous expectation. Otherwise put: Questions are a mode of blessed ignorance, a thorough apprehension
of our own cognitive limitations which clears our minds of mere
opinions and, while it prevents us from reaching for personal
originality rather than objective origins, moves us inward.20
A question, then, is a receptive opening in us—who knows
in what capacity of ours. The reception is expectant of an answer—of a spontaneous intimation rather than a driven determination, of an incitement more than a settlement, of a mental
vision or a verbal hypothesis instead of a conclusive solution.
has as a background Aristotle’s Book III of the Metaphysics, which
marks the transition of philosophy from amateur question-asking to professional problem-solving, the second such transition in the West. The
first was from pre-Socratic initiation into Logos or Truth by a divinity
to the Socratic search by going into oneself.
The word “problem” is not actually used by Aristotle in Book III; in
fact he speaks of “difficulties” and aporiai, which I think he assimilates
to “problems” in our sense. Plato already uses problema in the geometry-derived sense. A problem asks for a construction, which yields a
product, as opposed to a theorem, which gives insight. Some ancients—
this is to my point—objected to the notion of a mathematical problem
since mathematics is about knowing, not making (Heath, Euclid’s Elements, I 125). By this distinction hangs a tale extending into modernity,
but beyond the scope of this talk: the development of mathematical objects from concrete items to abstracted symbols.
20. “Blessed ignorance” is my adaptation of Nicolas of Cusa’s title, Of
Learned Ignorance (De Docta Ignorantia, 1440)—“blessed” for
“learned” because, of course, it’s precisely not learned. Even though
lots of graduates might be correctly awarded an I.D., an Ignorantiae
Doctor, it would be in the wrong spirit. What Cusanus means by learned
ignorance is the fully realized desire to know that has become unobstructed when we have thoroughly learned our ignorance (Bk. I i). Directing features of this desire are the via negativa (the way of gaining
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Such responses are often fraught simplicities, not abrogations of
difficulties but rather problem-generating fecundities.21
The aim of asking questions is to penetrate spatio-temporal
experience so as to reach the atemporal inwardness, commonly
called the essence, whose surface is the appearance. Here I should
stop because I am being carried away toward an ontological speculation from what I would be glad to call a meditation on, or at
most a phenomenology of, inquiry.22
*****
a foothold in the transcendent by what it is not), conjecture (the way
of holding a well-motivated opinion firmly enough to go on with but
flexibly enough for alteration), and analogy (the way of levering up
thought by recognizing similarities in different venues and through
these likenesses discovering differences). I think that these ways are
mutually implicated, but I have neither studied Cusanus enough nor
sufficiently thought out my notions.
21. Prime examples are to be found in the sayings of Heraclitus and
Parmenides, the two pre-Socratics distinguished by being not “physical”
(Aristotle, Physics 186b), but meta-physical. Here is one example: Parmenides says: “For it is the same both to be aware (noein) and to be”
(D-K 3; D-K 8, line 34)—most often translated along these lines: “For
the same thing can be thought as can be.” Heidegger interprets ingeniously in line with his notion of unconcealment: Being’s essence involves being apprehended (Introduction to Metaphysics (1935), 106).
I think we should not subvert bold depth by refusing to read what is
written. Parmenides regards Being as One, for which his figure is a
sphere. So he countermands the multiplicity inherent in his spherical
metaphor by gnomically intimating that Being is self-aware, self-translucent, self-implicated—as unextended, partless, undifferentiable, being
everywhere and nowhere, just as is awareness when its object is itself.
22. I regard it as somewhat corroborative of the descriptive verity of
my depth metaphor for a tendency of inquiry that it plays no discernible
role for Heidegger either in Being and Time (1927), where phainomena
and onta are assimilated [31, 35] or in the Introduction to Metaphysics,
where Being is self-emergent and involves its own manifesting appearance as a defining delimitation [77]. The reason for this absence is, I
think , that Dasein (an abstraction from a human being) which is only
in caring about its being, is altogether temporal and this-worldly—so
perforce a-metaphorical and un-deep.
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Are there consequences to the preceding exposition? To my
mind, there are personal ones surely—such as the acquisition of
a template to gauge what you’re doing and to judge if a quarter
turn inside and down may be desirable. There are disciplinary
ones probably, such as querying cognitive scientists concerning
the feasibility of inward-turned mental depth emerging from the
ultimate complex structure, the brain. And there are institutional
ones possibly—such as a reconsideration by philosophy departments of their highest degree, now the Ph.D., Philosophiae Doctor. It is, after all, a comical title which claims that you are a
proficient preceptor, a doctor, of the love of wisdom, a teacher,
that is, of love—a situation nowadays full of moral and legal pitfalls. Departments might add a secondary but more sensible degree, the Ph.D.2, to be read as Philosophiae Dilector, a “delighter
and dilettante in the love of wisdom.” For I think that while the
mapping of complexity, which is an institutional way of “doing”
philosophy, can keep you promotion-worthily busy and often
contentedly absorbed, the dilettantish delvers into depths, amateurish because philosophy true to its name cannot be a profession, might also have their diploma, though such diving may
bring up nothing but deep delight:
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song
To such a deep delight ’t would win me . . .
Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”
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A Note on Apollonius’s
Reconceptualization of Space
Philip LeCuyer
Apollonius re-envisions Euclidean space. He does this indirectly
by slowly and carefully re-envisioning one of the two most important objects in Euclidean space—the circle. Apollonius reopens the question that Euclid seemed to have settled in
Definition 15: what is a circle?
Euclid’s Elements is the only mathematical work used by
Apollonius in the Conics. The Elements constitute Apollonius’s
intellectual inheritance, a fundamental aspect of which is a concept of space that is essentially negative. Euclid’s series of five
negations is conveyed through the five postulates. The first one
states: “from every point to every point to draw a straight line.”
This means there are no holes in Euclidean space. The second
postulate states: “to produce a finite straight line continuously in
a straight line.” This means there are no edges to Euclidean space.
The third postulate, “to describe a circle with any center and any
distance,” means there is no directionality in space—all radial
directions are equivalent. The fourth, “all right angles are equal,”
means there is no handedness, no distinction between left and
right.
The famous fifth postulate is longer:
If a straight line falling on two straight lines make the interior angles on the same side less than two right angles,
the two straight lines, if produced toward infinity (ep’
apeiron), meet on that side on which the two angles are
less than two right angles.
This means that Euclidean space has no curvature. No holes,
no edges, no directionality, no handedness, no curvature. It is an
essentially negative concept.
Philip LeCuyer is a tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
The author thanks Grant Franks, also a tutor in Santa Fe, for fashioning
the figures.
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Apollonius does not—as Lobachevski, Bolyai, Riemann, and
the topologists do many centuries later—change any of these postulates. Rather, he exposes an unarticulated postulate which pervades or underlies the five stated ones, and in so doing introduces
a positive characteristic to space.
There are two sides shown in the fifth postulate: 1) the side
on which the three lines form a triangle, and 2) the other side on
which the lines produced toward infinity diverge forever. Euclid
leaves this other side of things in knowing silence. The Elements
is about the triangle, which is a figure, and about the circle, which
Euclid also defines as a figure, a schema. What then is a figure?
Euclid defines a “figure”as “that which, beneath (hypo) any
boundary or boundaries, is contained (periechomenon)”—literally, that which has a perimeter, a horizon, around it, something
characterized by “surroundedness.” The Elements stands as the
authoritative study of two and three dimensional figures and the
notion of containment. It culminates in the construction of the
five regular solids, and, as its finale, Euclid presents for our contemplation a comparison of the respective linear edges of the five
solids when contained in the same sphere. The definition of figure
governs the Elements from start to finish.
Figures are present in Apollonius’s Conics, but they are not
what is being studied. What is being studied is a set of curves,
first encountered as conic sections, to which Euclidean figures
are attached like monitoring devices on an athlete or a patient.
And what are these curves as a class? As a class, they are not figures because they do not all enclose finite areas. The exact same
reasoning, the same proofs, apply to those that do enclose areas
(ellipses and circumferences of circles) and those that don’t (hyperbolae and the special case of the parabola). If they are not figures, what are they?
One can see a sharp difference between Euclid and Apollonius in the way that each generates what is conical. Euclid does
this by revolving a right triangle around one of its two shorter
legs while that leg, held stationary, becomes the axis of a right
cone. Euclid’s cone is a three-dimensional figure made by revolving a two-dimensional figure. Each type of right cone pro-
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duces a different kind of conic section: one that has a right angle
at its vertex, made by revolving an isosceles right triangle, will
yield a parabola when cut by a plane perpendicular to its surface;
an acute cone will yield an ellipse, and an obtuse cone will yield
an hyperbola. This is true, but it is not true enough. Apollonius
will demonstrate that every size of every shape of each type of
conic is present in every conic surface—both right cones such as
Euclid generated finite versions of, and oblique conic surfaces
such as Euclid never dreamt of.
Apollonius’s foundational definition states:
If from a point a straight line is joined to the circumference of a circle which is not in the same plane with the
point, and the line is produced in both directions, and if,
with the point remaining fixed, the straight line being rotated about the circumference of the circle returns to the
same place from which it began, then the generated surface composed of the two surfaces lying vertically opposite one another, each of which increases to infinity (eis
apeiron) as the generating line is produced to infinity (eis
apeiron), I call a conic surface, and the fixed point I call
the vertex.
A conic surface is not a figure in the Euclidean sense. It is a
boundary, but not a boundary that contains by closing back on itself. Apollonius studies the conics, the parabola, ellipses, hyperbolae, and the circumferences of circles not as boundaries
containing areas, but as lines which reveal something deeper and
more important than space as inert content. (Note that when
Apollonius includes circles in a list together with conic sections,
he always calls them “circumferences of circles.”)
Before I turn to consider the step-by-step transformation of the
key Euclidean proposition through which Apollonius re-understands what a circle is, and so what space is, I will take up briefly
the remarkable last proposition of Bk. I of the Conics. The implications of this theorem are momentous. The pair of opposite hyperbolic sections produced by cutting the upper and lower conic
surfaces with a plane (the upper and lower curves in Figure 1) produce a second set of opposed curves, also hyperbolic and conjugate
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to the first set (the dotted curves). No point on this second set of
curves is on the conic surface. They are merely in co-planar space
with the first set of curves.
How did Apollonius do this? He prepared this moment by
defining (in Definition 11) a “second” diameter, which simply
names what Apollonius had just demonstrated for the ellipse in
Proposition 15. This “second” diameter in the ellipse is conjugate
and is also the mean proportional between the first diameter and
the first diameter’s upright side. It is therefore finite. Do opposite
hyperbolic sections have a “second” diameter? They do have a
conjugate diameter which as such bisects all the external lines
between them parallel to their first diameter (Proposition 16). But
is it finite? This conjugate diameter of the original vertical hyperbolic sections does not touch them anywhere. These sections
extend up and down to vertical infinities whereas the conjugate
diamter extends sideways—neither in nor on, but outside the
conic surface. Apollonius, citing Definition 11, states in Proposition 38 that the finite “second” diameter that was demonstrated
to exist in the ellipse, a finite curve, is also present in hyperbolic
sections. Based on this undemonstrated analogy with the ellipse,
the assumed “second” diameter of the original hyperbolic sec-
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tions is pressed into service as the first diameter of these conjugate curves, which therefore exist, but which were not produced
by cutting a conic surface. Not only that: these conjugate opposite
curves could themselves produce, in reciprocation, the original
hyperbolae without reference to any conic surface.
If this constitutive analogy between hyperbolae, ellipses,
and circumferences of circles holds, it means that conic curves
have no more or less to do with conic surfaces or cones than the
number four has to do with how many legs are on a cow. How
we discovered these curves, how we first produced them, does
not amount to a sufficient account of what they are. Neither
conic surfaces nor cones are ever again considered by Apollonius after this moment of liberation in the last proposition,
Proposition 60, of Bk. I.
The crucial proposition in Euclid, which Apollonius transforms by relentless generalization, occurs at the conclusion of
Bk. II of the Elements (and again in Bk. VI, 13). There Euclid
demonstrates that the square on any ordinate in a circle—i.e., on
any line from a point on the circumference of a circle perpendicular to a diameter, is equal in area to the rectangle on the resulting two segments of that diameter (Figure 2a). His first move, so
to speak, is to substitute this property of a circle for Euclid’s definition. We see this accomplished immediately in the first propositions in Bk. I of the Conics.
In his fourth proposition in Bk. I, Apollonius demonstrates that
the section produced by a cutting plane parallel to the circle used
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to generate the conic surface is itself a circle. Here he does use as
the basis of his proof Euclid’s definition of a circle as a closed figure (schema) in which all the straight lines falling on the circumference from a point within the circumference are equal to each
other. But in the very next proposition, Proposition 5, Apollonius
does not use that definition, but rather the Euclidean property that
the square on the ordinate is equal in area to the rectangle on the
diameter segments, in order to prove that what is called a sub-contrary cut in an oblique conic surface is also a circle. Having substituted this property for Euclid’s definition, the rest of the act of
re-understanding is accomplished by generalization.
The next step is to re-label the lines which embody the property (Figure 2b). Line “a” is still the ordinate. Line “b” is now
the perpendicular (least) distance from the point on the circumference to the one tangent of the ordinate’s diameter, and line “c”
the least distance to the other tangent. This re-labeling brings all
the components of the crucial property together at any and every
point on the curve (except the points of tangency themselves).
In Figure 2c, the restriction on which tangents are allowed is
broadened to include any tangents to the circumference. If both
of the tangents do not touch the same diameter, they will intersect. The line connecting the two points of tangency is no longer
a diameter but now a chord. The distance “a” is revised as shown.
Lines “b” and “c’”are still the least distances from some point on
the circumference to the new generalized tangents. How does it
stand with the square on the revised ordinate “a” vis-a-vis the
rectangle “bc”? This is a difficult problem, and as we gather from
the letter to Eudemus, Euclid was not able to solve it. Here we
have our first glimpse of the full-bodied three-line locus problem.
I will try to indicate why it is important.
Now comes the fundamental proposition—Bk. II, 29 (See
Figure 3). The curve has been generalized into “a section of a
cone or circumference of a circle.” The proposition demonstrates
that AD is a diameter, but Apollonius can only establish this by
a reductio ad absurdum proof. This means that it is not a direct
deduction from particular prior theorems, but an inference from
the system as a whole. It is not true because some other thing is
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true. It is true because otherwise all the other truths would collapse. In this sense, this proposition reveals a principle. It is this
principle, I think, this “additional thing,” that Apollonius was referring to in his letter to Eudemus when he wrote:
The third book contains many incredible theorems of use
for the construction of solid loci and for limits of possibility of which the greatest part and the most beautiful
are new.
And when we had grasped these, we knew that the
three-line and four-line locus problem had not been constructed by Euclid, but only a chance part of it and that
not very happily. For it was not possible for this construction to be completed without the additional things found
by us.
Apollonius’s construction of the locus problem itself in
Proposition 54 of Bk. III looks like figure 4. He cites Proposition
29 of Bk. II as the basis and backbone of his proof. The upshot
of it is that the square on HX (the distance from any point on the
curve to the chord connecting the tangents) is in a constant ratio
(not necessarily equality) to the rectangle BY, ZC. These in turn
are the distances (not necessarily the least) of the same point H
(which can be any point on the curve) to those two tangents. The
angles do not have to be right angles, and they can differ from
each other. Still, whatever the ratio is, it is constant.
These curved lines investigated by Apollonius reveal a property of space that lies deeper than the bundle of Euclidean characterizations. It is the property of constancy. Any two points,
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every two points, though differently located, can have in common
a ratio not of distances simply, but of areas specified by those
distances to three co-planar lines. The areas are no longer statically contained, no longer aristocratically contained “beneath”
the imposed boundary of a figure. They change incessantly. Only
the ratio between them, which is itself not an area, is constant. It
is as if all the points on a conic curve are the same point, exhibiting the same essential relationships to three given co-planar lines,
and differing only in location. The coherence of a conic line
comes about not by an artifice of drawing, nor from without by
the act of cutting a cone, but is intrinsic to the curve itself. A conic
curve is not a figure. It is a law.
For Apollonius, space is no longer the passive recipient of
figure or form that Plato described in Timaeus 51, (“a dream from
which we cannot awaken”), and as Euclid also thought. It is no
longer merely a medium which tolerates logic. The Apollonian
property of constancy in space matches with, and is manifested
by, conic curves, just as the presence of oxygen in the air is manifested by fire, by oxygenation. Space is not outside of time, not
merely eternal; it is constant in and through time. Apollonius has
in this way re-conceived space as a medium which is hospitable
to and enabling of certain lines, conic curves, that share this property. Through Proposition 54 of Bk. III we see that these curves
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in mathematical space can crystallize into a physical path, and
we understand why.
After Apollonius, between every two points there is not only
the austere straight line of Euclid’s first postulate, but an abundance—an actual infinitude—of self-defined intelligible curves.
It will take a bit more generalization to re-join the two sides of
Euclid’s fifth postulate. The three co-planar lines of the locus
problem, the two intersecting tangents and the chord connecting
their points of tangency on the curve, are Euclid’s two non-parallel lines and the line transecting them that we encountered on
the finite side of the fifth postulate. They will be re-drawn as nontangents and a non-chord, as any three co-planar lines, thereby
allowing the part of the curve within the triangle and the part beyond it—the converging finite and the diverging infinite— to be
re-joined as one thing. The constancy of the ratio of areas still
holds over the whole curve. Descartes would undertake that task,
but the heavy lifting in this new conception of space had already
been accomplished by Apollonius.
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“Aristotelian Forgiveness”:
The Non-Culpability Requirement
of Forgiveness
Corinne Painter
Introduction
Forgiveness is a topic of much historical, contemporary, crossdisciplinary scholarly and popular work. However, the literature
on Aristotle’s account of forgiveness (sungnomē)1 is not as significant as the treatment of other ethical, political, or psychological phenomena in his work, probably because his own treatment
of forgiveness is not given as much attention as other matters in
his thought.2 Although the existing scholarship dealing with Aristotle’s thought on forgiveness is extensive,3 this essay does not
1. For simplicity’s sake, I will use the English translation of this term
throughout the essay.
2. Gregory Sadler also acknowledges this in his article “Forgiveness,
Anger, and Virtue in an Aristotelian Perspective,” American Catholic
Philosophical Association, Proceedings of the ACPA 82 (2008): 229247, on 229-230.
3. For example, a recent general volume that includes a discussion of
forgiveness in Aristotle and other ancient authors is Ancient Forgiveness: Classical, Judaic, and Christian, ed. Charles L. Griswold and
David Konstan (NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and another
still fairly recent monograph that examines forgiveness beginning with
ancients is Charles Griswold, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration
(NY: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Both of these books are interested in situating their interpretations of Aristotle’s thought about
Corinne Painter is Professor of Philsophy at Washtenaw Community
College in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
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intend to present an examination, critical or otherwise, of the literature. Much of the work that investigates Aristotle’s thought on
forgiveness tries to locate it in an historical account of forgiveness
or focuses narrowly on the question of whether forgiveness is itself
a virtue or whether it is merely associated with virtue in Aristotle’s
thought. Neither of these interesting questions is my concern in
this essay. Instead, without settling the question of whether forgiveness is a virtue or is merely associated with virtue,4 I will examine Aristotle’s claims5 about forgiveness that appear in Books
III, V, and VII of Nicomachean Ethics,6 within the framework of
his discussion of unwilling, willing, and chosen, deliberate actions.
forgiveness within a broader context of other historical and contemporary accounts of forgiveness. Additionally, Gregory Adler’s essay (see
fn. 2) is an instructive essay that focuses on the relationship between
forgiveness, anger and virtue, as is Patrick Boleyn-Fitzgerald, ”What
Should Forgiveness Mean?” The Journal of Value Inquiry 36 (2002):
483-498. Like Adler, Boleyn-Fitzgerald also examines the relationship
between forgiveness and anger—especially helpful since I will not consider the topic of anger here. Obviously this short list of references is
not meant to be exhaustive. Another subset of the literature focuses on
the role that forgiveness plays in Aristotle’s virtue ethics, typically in
the context of Aristotle’s views on the emotions, where the latter appears
to be of primary concern. In this connection, see Essays on Aristotle’s
Rhetoric, ed. Amelie Oskenburg Rorty (Berkley: University of California Press, 1996) and Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. Amelie Oskenburg
Rorty (Berkley: University of California Press, 1980).
4. Beyond being interesting in itself, this question is also difficult to answer, since Aristotle’s analysis of forgiveness seems to allow both interpretations. I will attempt to show that we can discover much of value
in Aristotle’s account of forgiveness without answering this question.
5. I point this out in order to emphasize that I will be focusing on Aristotle’s text rather than on interpretations of his text by other scholars,
since my aim is to offer a coherent account of Aristotle’s remarks on
forgiveness rather than a comparison of how other interpreters of Aristotle have understood him.
6. Abbreviated hereafter as NE. I use the translation by Joe Sachs, Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics: Translation, Glossary, and Introductory
Essay, (MA: Focus Publishing, 2002).
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First, I try to explain which actions Aristotle claims are forgivable, when forgiveness ought to be granted, and why. Second,
based on this explanation, I compare Aristotle’s unassumingly
rich account of forgiveness to the leading contemporary secular
view of forgiveness that is advanced by Jeffrie Murphy, whose
account I take to be representative of what may arguably be characterized as the “standard” contemporary secular account of forgiveness.7 By focusing on Aristotle’s claim that forgiveness is only
appropriate for those wrongdoers who are not morally responsible
for their actions, I show that unlike the leading account of forgiveness—and perhaps even against our intuitions—forgiveness is intimately connected both to excusing and to justifying wrongdoings,
and that resentment need not precede forgiveness. Third and finally,
I conclude with the claim that Aristotle’s account of forgiveness
is more coherent than the leading account, and I wonder whether
it is not also more compelling, given the importance Aristotle
places on compassion for wrongdoers as opposed to holding them
accountable and then foreswearing the resentment held against
them, which take center stage in the contemporary account of forgiveness.
§1. The Forgiveness of Unwilling and Willing Action
There is more than a little disagreement in the literature regarding
Aristotle’s ethics—which depends upon his conception of virtue,
its general nature, its various instantiations, and how one becomes virtuous— and about his complicated account of the emotions—which he ruminates about in many of his works. Still,
while Aristotle does not define forgiveness in the most straight7. I do not mean to suggest that there is only one contemporary account
of forgiveness, or that there is no disagreement amongst contemporary
thinkers who reflect on forgiveness. As a perusal of the contemporary
literature on forgiveness shows, however, there are fundamental elements of the contemporary secular accounts of forgiveness that are held
in common, even if some of the details are debated. In the second part
of the paper, I focus on what I take to be the key element of the leading
contemporary account of forgiveness, critically comparing it to Aristotle’s account.
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forward manner, a reasonable account may be constructed on the
basis of attending to relevant descriptive remarks about forgiveness that he offers in NE.8 For example, in Bk. III, Ch. 1 and Bk.
V, Ch. 8, where Aristotle distinguishes unwilling, willing, and chosen, deliberate actions, we find explicit remarks about forgiveness
suggesting that chosen, deliberate wrongful actions are not properly forgivable, whereas “for unwilling actions [that is, actions
whose source is external force or certain forms of ignorance
(1110a1-2)] there is forgiveness” (1109b33), and that “there is also
forgiveness” (1110a24) for some acts that could be construed (in
a qualified sense) as “willing” since their “source . . . is in oneself”
(1110a16), i.e., in the wrongdoer.
§1a. Forgiveness and Unwilling Action
Regarding unwilling actions, Aristotle says that in addition to externally forced actions,9 the ignorant actions that are candidates
for forgivability are actions about which the wrongdoer knows
that the action ought not to have been done. Aristotle identifies
these actions as actions done “on account of ignorance of the particulars . . . with which the action is concerned” (1110b351111a3), which cause the wrongdoer to suffer and about which
the wrongdoer expresses regret or repentance (1110b19;
1110b24, 1111a20-21).10 In Book V, however, Aristotle clarifies
8. To be sure, Aristotle also discusses forgiveness in other works, especially in his Rhetoric; however—although there is no room here to defend this claim in the confines of this paper—his remarks about
forgiveness in the Rhetoric and elsewhere, if attended to carefully, can
be seen as consistent with those made in NE, even though they arise
while he is attending to different guiding themes or questions.
9. Not incidentally, Aristotle notes the difficulty of determining when
actions have their cause in an external force (see Bk. III: Ch. 1).
10. Aristotle uses “suffering” (or pain) as a synonym for “remorse,”
which is an effect that the wrongful act has on the wrongdoer’s feelings,
whereas he uses “regret” as a synonym for “repentance,” which is not
an effect on the wrongdoer’s feelings but involves in the wrongdoer’s
thinking. Importantly, neither of these effects require the passage of
time; for Aristotle seems to view these “effects” as sometimes experi-
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that not all unwilling actions are forgivable (1136a5), distinguishing differing forms of ignorance as follows: “for those
things that people do in error not only while being ignorant
but as a result of ignorance are forgivable, but those that are
done not as a result of ignorance but while one is ignorant
and as a result of a passion that is unnatural and inhuman are
not forgivable” (1136a6-9, emphasis mine). Aristotle also
states that
what is done on account of ignorance is in every instance not a willing act, but it is unwilling by its
painfulness and by one’s regretting it, while someone
who does a thing on account of ignorance without
being in any way distressed by the action has not
acted willingly, since he did not even know what he
was doing, [but] he has not acted unwillingly either,
since he is not pained by it (1110b18-23).
Since there are actions that do not fit neatly into the willing
or unwilling classifications, Aristotle creates the category of
“non-willing action” (1110b24) to mark off those “unwilling”
wrongful actions about which the wrongdoer is unware of the
wrongness and thus is neither pained by nor regretful of. It might
seem difficult to discern whether the newly categorized actions
are forgivable in Aristotle’s view; however, directly after constructing this new category of action, and despite the fact that he
uses “on account of ignorance” in his remarks both about “unwilling actions” and about “non-willing actions,” he states that
“acting on account of ignorance seems different than acting while
being ignorant” (1110b26, emphasis mine), where the latter
enced while the wrongful act is being performed; and in any case, these
dispositions demonstrate the non-culpability of the wrongdoer at the
time at which forgiveness is to be granted. I do not defend this claim
here, as I am fairly certain that this is commonly agreed to by scholars
of Greek who work on Aristotle. Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out
for those who are not familiar with Aristotle’s use of these terms and,
more importantly, because I will come back to this point in part two of
the paper.
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seems to mean that the person is ignorant in a robust sense. This
distinction appears to be determined on the basis of whether the
ignorance is associated with incomplete knowing or complete ignorance. Regarding incomplete knowing, this could be associated
with failing to know the particulars that frame the conditions for
the action when such knowledge is not expected, or with the
wrongdoer being innocently unaware of the wrongful nature of
the act, which occurs when there is no reasonable expectation for
the person to have known better. While the former acts are those
actions about which wrongdoers feel regret and pain and the latter
are acts about which wrongdoers do not feel pain or regret, both
kinds of actions seem to be unwilling actions of the sort for which
the ignorant wrongdoer is not to be blamed but should be forgiven, on Aristotle’s view (Bk. III, Ch. 1).
In contrast, the ignorance that is associated with complete ignorance appears, for Aristotle, to arise out of unnatural, inhuman passions, which, in turn, tends to result in not knowing about the
wrongness of the action in question even though one ought to know.
While these, too, are actions about which the wrongdoer does not
feel pain or regret, in this case, these actions appear to be non-willing
actions for which the wrongdoer is at least possibly blameworthy,
depending on other conditions or circumstances that characterize the
action or the disposition of the wrongdoer. As an example of this
kind of action, in Book V, Aristotle writes that “people apply punishment for ignorance itself if the one who is ignorant seems to be
responsible for it, as when . . . people are drunk, for the source is in
oneself, since one has the power not to get drunk, which is the cause
of the ignorance (1113b30-34). Although there are good reasons that
are known to us now that should move us to advance a more complex account of drunkenness that addresses its possible link to alcoholism, which is as an addiction over which those who suffer from
it have little to no control, this is a problem that goes beyond what
can be considered in this paper. In any event, it is reasonable to interpret this passage as suggesting that Aristotle appears to characterize (at least a certain kind of) drunkenness as the result of a
controllable passion that is unnatural and unsuitable for humans,
given that it causes us to act ignorantly in a blameworthy sense.
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However we interpret the distinction Aristotle makes between
the different kinds of actions based on ignorance—i.e., acts that are
performed on account of ignorance and acts that are performed while
one is ignorant—Aristotle’s remarks about unwilling and non-willing action reveal a long-debated tension in his thought that arises in
many contexts and is rooted in his teleological account of nature in
general and of human nature particularly. For the present consideration, the important question involves whether Aristotle claims that
wrongdoers should be held responsible for non-willing wrongful actions that are caused by what he calls “unnatural” and “inhuman”
passions, since the answer to this question determines whether such
an act is forgivable and, thus, whether the wrongdoer should be forgiven. This challenging question will be addressed shortly.
§1b. Forgiveness and Willing Action
Like unwilling actions, only some willing actions are forgivable,
namely, “when one does what one ought not to do on account of
motives” such as insufferable conditions that “strain human nature too far, that no one could endure them” (1110a25-26), or,
“when one endures something shameful or painful in return for
things that are great and beautiful” (1110a21-22). Here, one
might be motivated to argue that this last kind of action would
be better characterized as a chosen, deliberate action, given its
apparent utilitarian nature. But the appropriateness of this characterization depends upon whether all the conditions for an action’s having been intentionally chosen and deliberated upon are
met, which (amongst other things) include (in the case of vicious
action) whether the action is chosen from out of an unshakable
and firmly vicious character, and whether it is performed merely
for the sake of immoderate or otherwise excessive self-interest
or gain (see 1105a-27-35).11 Since the action that Aristotle describes here does not meet these conditions—for it is neither
11. I assume at least basic familiarity with Aristotle’s virtue ethics and
with his attendant account of virtuous and vicious action, and so I do
not offer a consideration of his Ethics here, especially as this would
take us too far afield from the focal concern of this paper.
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viciously performed nor done for self-interest of the sort described but for things that are “great and beautiful”—it is properly characterized as a willing, though unchosen, action. The
(complicated) distinction between these two classifications of
action and whether they are forgivable is discussed in what follows.
Notwithstanding this distinction, like unwilling actions for
which wrongdoers feel pain and regret, wrongdoers who perform these sorts of willing acts also feel pain and regret; however, unlike unwilling actors who are either externally forced
to perform wrongful actions or are ignorant of some necessary
information about the circumstances that would lead to a right
action, here, the actor is not forced by external causes to act,
since the source is in the actor and “anything for which the
source is in oneself is also up to oneself either to do or not”
(1110a17). Moreover, the (in a sense) “willing” wrongdoer
knows the wrongful nature of the action, including the “particular circumstances in which the action takes place” (1111a23),
but she cannot be expected to act differently, given the conditions that accompany the wrongful action, including its possible
consequences.
Given Aristotle’s complex consideration of the distinction
between willing and unwilling acts, which motivated him to
add non-willing acts as a new category of action, it seems clear
that what distinguishes forgivable unwilling actions from forgivable willing actions is (a) the source of the action—is the
cause external force or is it in oneself, at least in a qualified
sense?—as well as (b) whether there is ignorance involved and
if so, (c) what sort (1111a22-24). Additionally, in those cases
in which there is sufficient knowledge and ability to act in a
wrongful manner that either prevents a greater evil than the
wrongful action itself (1110a5) or “for the sake of something
beautiful” (1110a6)i.e., in order to bring about genuinely noble
ends – such actions are, indeed, forgivable, which is supported
by the distressed state in which this kind of wrongdoer finds
herself, which is characterized by suffering and regret.
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§1c. Forgiveness and Chosen, Deliberate Action and the
Double-Tiered Nature of Non-Willing Action
Careful reflection on his remarks in Book III and Book V suggests that Aristotle’s account of forgiveness does not allow
wrongdoers who perform chosen, deliberate actions, which are
those that are properly associated with virtue, or, in this case,
vice, and, thus, those that are in the fullest sense blameworthy,
to be forgiven. For it is clear that he speaks only of unwilling
(not non-willing) and some willing actions as those that are appropriately forgivable; indeed, chosen, deliberated upon wrongful actions are conspicuously absent from Aristotle’s account.
Hence, wrongful actions appear to be unforgivable if they are
committed (i) deliberately and intentionally (certainly not accidentally or in ignorance), (ii) with full knowledge of the
wrongful nature of the action, (iii) where there is a realistic possibility of choosing not to act wrongfully, (iv) on the basis of a
considered choice to gain pleasure or avoid pain (of the trivial,
self-interested sort), and (v) on the basis of the stable (virtually
immutable) disposition of the wrongdoer, which are the conditions that describe genuinely vicious action, insofar as it is performed viciously and not just in accordance with vice (see
1105a-27-35).12
It is important to acknowledge that for Aristotle, truly vicious action is not performed on the basis of losing a struggle
against a natural tendency to act in accord with a particular passion, such as being too quick to anger, for example, since the
vicious person no longer struggles to keep her unsuitable13 pas12. Again, I assume basic familiarity with Aristotle’s virtue ethics; but
for further elucidation of the conditions for virtue and vice and for the
genuinely virtuous and vicious action that is associated with these dispositions, see also: 1103b23-25; 1105b1-4; 1111b5-7; 1112a16; 1113b4-6;
and 1114b21-15.
13. In what follows, I use “unnatural” and “inhuman”—Aristotle’s
terms—and “unsuitable” and “unbefitting”—my terms—interchangeably, since I think Aristotle employs these terms as a way to describe
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sions in check but gladly takes pleasure in choosing to act in
accord with these “inhuman” passions while knowing that
doing so is inappropriate; for, this is a sign that a firm and unshakable character is at work, which is a condition of genuinely
vicious, and thus, fully blameworthy action (1103b23-25;
1105b1-4).14 However, in acknowledging this, we are moved to
re-consider the difficult question about non-willing action that
was posed earlier regarding whether Aristotle claims that
wrongdoers should be held responsible for non-willing wrongful actions that are caused by “unnatural” and “inhuman” passions, especially since the answer to this question provides the
key to determining whether these actions are forgivable. For,
simply put, if a wrongdoer is responsible for her wrongful act,
then her act is not forgivable, on Aristotle’s view, and, hence,
she ought not to be forgiven.
It was already acknowledged (in section 1a) that wrongful
actions that arise out of complete ignorance that is based in a person’s so-called “unnatural” passions and are therefore not accompanied by remorse or regret are neither willing nor unwilling
actions; however, these actions also do not appear to be chosen,
deliberated upon actions, given that they are performed in complete ignorance, i.e., while one “is ignorant.” Indeed, this is why
Aristotle created the new category of “non-willing” action. But
along with this, we noted the tension this newly created category
of action creates. For it seems that wrongdoers who perform nonwilling actions should not be held responsible for their actions
since they have no appreciation for the wrongness of their actions, given their basis in an apparent natural tendency to act in
passions that steer us away from achieving a virtuous character, which
is the means by which we can achieve our proper human telos, according to Aristotle. Again, it is not my aim to elucidate or examine Aristotle’s moral theory (or, for that matter, his teleology) in this paper.
However, in what follows, I discuss what I take to be Aristotle’s understanding of the meaning of “unnatural” and “inhuman” in the context
in which he uses these terms in this passage.
14. See fn. 12 for further textual evidence of this.
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accord with “unbefitting” passions over which such wrongdoers
do not seem to have control, at least not initially (and maybe
never). All human beings have passions and tendencies with
which they simply find themselves without having willed or chosen them. In fact, the attempt to develop a morally virtuous character involves our struggle to rid ourselves of the tendency to act
in accord with these “unsuitable” passions, which move us to act
in excess or deficiency of the mean that constitutes virtuous action, whatever this may be.15
This further clarification allows us to formulate the tension
at issue here more precisely: on the one hand, we neither will nor
choose to possess the natural passions and tendencies with which
we find ourselves but which present obstacles to the development
of a virtuous character. But, on the other hand, Aristotle’s further
consideration of non-willing actions that arise out of our natural
tendency to act in accord with these passions identifies these passions as “unnatural” and “inhuman” (1136a6-9), which appears
to motivate him to characterize these as actions for which the
wrongdoer may, ultimately, be responsible and for which, therefore, forgiveness ought not to be granted. I think this apparent
tension can be resolved, first, by noting that Aristotle characterizes these passions as “inhuman” and “unnatural” because they
present obstacles that must be overcome in the process of developing a virtuous character, and second, by acknowledging (a) that
this characterization is not only not inconsistent with the recognition that it is perfectly natural to possess tendencies to act in
accord with our passions, but (b) that it is necessary for us to possess such passions and tendencies in order for genuine virtue to
be possible. For the process of becoming virtuous requires us to
possess passions that we must attempt to reign in from the extremes of deficiency and excess to which they naturally tend until
15. What constitutes virtuous action and how one develops a virtuous
character is not discussed here; rather, the conditions for vicious action
are outlined only briefly in order to make sense of why Aristotle claims
that chosen, deliberate, wrongful action is not forgivable, unlike unwilling and most willing actions, which are forgivable.
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we are no longer struggling against this challenge, as was previously acknowledged.
Recognizing this prompts us to assign a “double-tiered” character to these sorts of actions. At first—and probably for much if
not all of our lives – these kinds of actions are non-willing actions
that arise out of entirely unwilled, unchosen “natural tendencies”
to follow passions with which we simply find ourselves, and
about which Aristotle remarks that “there is more forgiveness for
following natural tendencies . . . [particularly] for those that are
of a sort that is common to all people” (1149b4-5). Furthermore,
while Aristotle distinguishes between some natural tendencies that
appear to be common, such as “spiritedness and aggressiveness”
(1149b7) and those that appear to be less common, such as “desires that are for excess or desires that are for unnecessary things”
(1149b8), this is a difficult and nuanced distinction to understand,
not to mention one that does not allow us to easily identify the
specific actions that belong in each category. Nevertheless, he
clearly states that (at least) the former are forgivable, further elaborating on this in Book VII, Chapters 7—10, within which Aristotle initially distinguishes different forms of “unrestraint,”
claiming that persons who act in an unrestrained manner that is
associated with excessive desires are “more shameful” than persons whose unrestraint is associated with natural spiritedness
(1149b25-26). However, he subsequently identifies the former —
i.e., the more shameful—as “dissipated persons” who, “without
regret,” “choose” their actions typically for the sake of “gaining
pleasure for themselves,” not only characterizing them as “incurable” (1150a20-23), but distinguishing them from unrestrained
persons, who are “capable of regret . . . and curable” (1150b3234). He furthermore claims that acting in an unrestrained manner,
while certainly not admirable, is not vicious (1151a7):
the unrestrained person is not even like someone who
has knowledge and is actively paying attention to it,
but is like someone who is asleep or drunk. And
though he acts willingly (since he acts while knowing
in some manner what he is doing and for what end),
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he is not vicious, since his “choice”16 is that of a decent person (1152a15-18).
With this claim, Aristotle intimates that such persons are not (robustly) responsible for their actions and that they should therefore
be forgiven.
Importantly, even if we acknowledge that distinguishing dissipated from unrestrained actions is difficult and cannot be done
outside the concrete context within which actions are performed,
it seems clear that in order to determine when forgiveness ought
to be granted, we must be able to discern when a wrongdoer passively follows17 her natural tendencies or desires, for example, to
act aggressively (or to pursue unnecessary ends), or whether the
wrongdoer deliberately chooses to allow her natural tendencies
to act in accord with her immoderate, unsuitable passions to govern her actions, which can be accomplished by observing the
wrongdoer.18 For Aristotle argues that only if the latter occurs,
should persons be held responsible for the actions that arise out
of them, given that this demonstrates a deliberate, committed re16. Here Aristotle uses “choice” in a looser sense than when he uses it
while discussing actions that are richly and robustly deliberated upon,
the latter of which is a condition both for truly virtuous and for truly
vicious acts; but here, as the passage makes clear, he is attaching
“choice” to willing actions that do not rise to this level.
17. Joe Sachs offers an extremely helpful discussion of the passive nature of unrestraint, advancing that “Aristotle repeatedly refuses to call
unrestraint anything but a passive experience.” See footnote 201, Ch.
7, Bk. VII, p. 122; see also footnote 183, Ch. 3, Bk. VII, p. 122, which
provide evidence for how challenging it is to interpret Aristotle properly
with respect to how he conceives of unrestraint and the actions that flow
from it. For example, as Sachs points out, while Aristotle sometimes
speaks of unrestrained action as a “hexis,” namely when making indirect summary statements that include mention of unrestraint along with
other phenomena (e.g., 1151a27; 1151b29; 1152a35), whenever he
speaks about unrestraint on its own, he calls it a “pathos” (e.g., 1145b5,
29; 1147b 8, 16; 1148b6).
18. Probably for most of us, our actions will be motivated by a mix of
these “extremes” throughout out adult lives.
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fusal to attempt to overcome natural tendencies to act in accord
with unbefitting passions; indeed, despite knowing the wrongness
of our actions, in this case we allow our unsuitable passions to
rule us to such an extent that they become part of our very character, which we are unwilling to change. If this happens, we take
pleasure in intentionally and knowingly performing wrongful actions and we certainly don’t feel pain or regret over them. Consequently, these actions are unforgivable, and, thus, forgiveness
ought not to be extended to persons who perform them.
Having said this, it is imperative to underscore that for Aristotle, it is extremely difficult to develop the kind of character just
described, from out of which truly unforgivable actions arise,
which means that most wrongful actions are ultimately forgivable
in Aristotle’s view. For careful reflection on the reasons, conditions and circumstances that frame wrongdoings typically render
them excusable or justifiable rather than inexcusable or unjustifiable actions for which wrongdoers are morally responsible, and
when this is the case, forgiveness ought to be extended, according
to Aristotle. As we will now see, this is in contrast to the leading
contemporary account of forgiveness.
§2. A Closer Look at Forgiveness: Culpability,
Resentment, Excusing, and Justification
Aristotle’s account may strike one as strange, particularly if one
is familiar with the contemporary literature on forgiveness, since
in these accounts,19 in contrast with Aristotle, for whom it is the
non-culpability of the wrongdoer that makes the wrongdoer’s act
forgivable and the wrongdoer deserving of forgiveness, it is typically claimed that the question of forgiveness does not arise unless the wrongdoer is morally culpable for her wrongdoing. For
example, Jeffrie Murphy, a contemporary philosopher and legal
scholar whose work on forgiveness is amongst the most well19. As I mentioned in the Introduction, I take the work of Jeffrie Murphy on forgiveness as representative of the “standard” contemporary,
secular account.
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known, well-regarded, and frequently cited,20 appealing to the
account of forgiveness offered centuries ago by Bishop Butler,21
defines forgiveness as “the foreswearing of resentment, the resolute overcoming of the anger and hatred that are naturally directed toward a person who has done an unjustified and
non-excused moral injury” (504). Although Murphy (and others)22 may not agree with every aspect of Butler’s account of forgiveness, which I will not recount here, this definition highlights
that in addition to being preceded by the negative attitudes and
emotions of resentment, anger and, even, hatred, forgiveness requires the moral culpability of the wrongdoer. As Murphy states,
“we may forgive only what it is initially proper to resent; and, if
a person . . . is not responsible for what he did, there is nothing
20. For example, see Jeffrie Murphy, Getting Even: Forgiveness and its
Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) and “Forgiveness and
Resentment,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 7, Social and Political
Philosophy, ed. Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard
K. Wettstein (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 503516. Further references to Murphy refer to his 1982 article. But it is
worth noting that his more recent text takes an even stronger “anti-Aristotelian” position, in advancing the general thesis that forgiveness ought
to be more sparingly extended than it is and that resentment (and associated negative attitudes) ought to be more greatly valued and explicitly
cultivated as morally legitimate responses to wrongdoers.
21. Joseph Butler, “Sermon VII: Upon Resentment” and “Sermon IX:
Upon Forgiveness of Injuries,” in Fifteen Sermons (London, 1726). Not
incidentally, most contemporary scholars working on forgiveness appeal to Bishop Butler’s account of forgiveness in their analyses, and indeed, further references to Bishop Butler’s account refer to Murphy’s
analysis of it and are cited accordingly.
22. Two additional informative contemporary essays on forgiveness
include: Norvin Richards, “Forgiveness,” Ethics, 99.1 (1988): 7797 and Joanna North, “Wrongdoing and Forgiveness,” Philosophy,
62.242 (1987): 499-508, who, in agreement with Murphy, advances
that “one cannot forgive when no wrong has been done, for there is
no breach to be healed and no repentance is necessary or possible”
(502).
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to resent. . . . Resentment—and thus forgiveness—is directed toward responsible wrongdoing” (508).23
Indeed, Murphy goes to great lengths to distinguish forgiveness from several other concepts with which he claims it is often
confused (506), including the concepts of excuse and justification
(ibid.). According to Murphy, the essential role that resentment
plays in forgiveness gives rise, necessarily, to the distinction between these notions and forgiveness (ibid.), since these other dispositions are not defined by a foreswearing of resentment. In
elaborating on the distinction between forgiveness and excuse
and justification, Murphy maintains that
to excuse is to say that what was done was morally
wrong; but because of certain factors about the agent
. . . it would be unfair to hold the wrongdoer responsible or to blame him for the wrong action. [And] to
justify is to say that what was done was prima facie
wrong; but, because of other morally relevant factors,
the action was—all morally relevant factors considered—the right thing to do (ibid.).
Put plainly, neither excusing nor justifying actions of a wrongdoer are to be identified with granting forgiveness to a wrongdoer, on Murphy’s view, since it is only legitimate to raise the
question of forgiveness if the person who is wronged is justified
in resenting the wrongdoer, and resentment is only justified if the
wrongdoer is culpable for her action, which is a condition that
is not met when “wrong” actions may (or should) be excused or
justified.
In the context of forgiveness, Murphy sees the primary justification for and appropriateness of resentment as a tool that allows individuals to demonstrate proper self-respect, so that what
23. In the analysis that follows, I focus on Murphy’s consideration of
resentment, leaving aside a discussion of anger or hatred. This is both
because Murphy focuses his own analysis on resentment and because
resentment is the feature of his account that is most closely connected
to his claim that forgiveness requires the moral culpability of a wrongdoer, which is the point of disagreement that provides the primary
ground for my thesis that Aristotle’s account is more compelling.
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is at stake in the relationship between resentment and forgiveness
is a proper sense and celebration of one’s worth and the recognition of the significance of how intentional wrongdoings are a sign
of disrespect (505; 507). From this it follows that, on Murphy’s
view, the foreswearing of resentment that is a necessary element
of forgiveness is only appropriate in a moral sense24 if it is
granted under the condition that (a) forgiving the wrongdoer expresses rather than denies the autonomy and self-respect of the
person wronged, as well as (b) the moral agency—i.e., the culpability—of the wrongdoer is respected (ibid.; 508).25
24. I highlight the language of morality in order to reflect Murphy’s understanding that genuine forgiveness is to be identified with moral forgiveness, since it is granted for the “right” – i.e., for moral – reasons
(508). Additionally, although Murphy considers whether forgiveness
might be obligatory (511), ultimately, he claims that “we are not obligated to forgive… and no one has a right to be forgiven…. [though] we
can have good reasons for bestowing forgiveness” (ibid.). Dissimilarly,
Aristotle seems to articulate when and why a wrongdoer deserves – has
a right to – forgiveness, which suggests that he believes these cases may
be obligatory.
25. Murphy also lists a third condition that must be met in order for forgiveness to be appropriate, namely, that the generally accepted rules of
morality, whatever they are, must not be violated (505; 507; 508). In
addition, although I will not address this claim explicitly in this paper—
primarily because it seems both obvious to me and certainly not incompatible with Aristotle’s view of forgiveness—it deserves mention that
on Murphy’s view, genuine forgiveness should be identifiable neither
with forgetting a wrongdoing for the sake of therapeutic (e.g., emotional) reasons (507) or with letting a wrongdoer off the hook with the
hope of bringing about her repentance, the latter of which is a position
often argued for in religious contexts (512). Forgetting a wrongdoing
for therapeutic reasons would be motivated by a desire for self-preservation, whereas letting a wrongdoer off the hook in order to motivate
her repentance may be rooted in arrogance, neither of which is an explicitly moral motivation for action. Moreover, while these practices
may be personally or socially beneficial, they are not necessarily consistent with maintaining self-respect or autonomy, or, with respecting
the moral culpability of the wrongdoer; and in some cases, they may
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There are many reasons that Murphy analyzes as those typically offered as justifications that may be consistent with the conditions he lays out for appropriate (moral) forgiveness. However,
before briefly examining these, we would do well to note that
Murphy’s account of the distinction between forgiveness, excuse
and justification is perplexing. For in explaining why excusing
and justifying wrongdoings are not to be confused with forgiveness, he cites the fact that the wrongdoer is not responsible for
her wrongdoing due either (a) to the excusability of her action,
which is based on conditions about the wrongdoer (i.e., in Murphy’s terminology, the wrongdoer’s agency), or (b) to the justifiability of the action, which is based on conditions surrounding
the action in question (506). But isn’t this precisely why otherwise wrong actions are forgivable and why such “wrongdoers”
should be forgiven? As Murphy himself admits, these wrongdoers are clearly not responsible for their actions and thus they
should neither be resented nor be held accountable (ibid.). So,
why does Murphy (and many other scholars who agree with him)
refuse to claim, as Aristotle does, that these wrongdoers should
be forgiven? The reason appears to be his unwavering commitment to the idea that foreswearing resentment is a necessary element of the process of forgiveness and since there can be no
(proper) resentment in the case of wrong actions that are excusable or justifiable, forgiveness must be different than these (ibid.).
Sadly, the commitment to the existence of a necessary connection between resentment and forgiveness appears to be dogmatic, as I do not see any argument for the necessity of this
connection. For in Murphy’s analysis of the meaning and condibe incompatible with these values. Genuine, i.e., moral, forgiveness
should also be distinguished from letting a wrongdoer off the hook too
quickly (505), without engaging in proper reflection about whether the
wrongdoer deserves forgiveness, which is discussed in what follows.
It should be noted that there are other interesting aspects of Murphy’s
account of forgiveness that I do not consider in this paper, as I intimated previously, but this is only because I focus on what I take to be
the most glaring deficiency in his account, especially when compared
to Aristotle’s account.
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tions of forgiveness within which he discusses why resentment
is the precursor for forgiveness, he claims, as was acknowledged,
that the primary value defended by resentment is self-respect
(505; 507; 508). However, while it seems reasonable for a person
to resent moral injuries that are intentionally performed against
oneself, and that to fail to do so could signify (amongst other
things) a lack of self-respect, what does not seem reasonable is
(a) that wrongdoers who perform moral injuries intentionally are
the only appropriate candidates for forgiveness, as Murphy
claims, or, for that matter, (b) that such wrongdoers should be
forgiven, certainly not if they are pleased about the intentional
wrongdoing. Regarding (a), what seems to distinguish Aristotle’s
view from Murphy’s is whether it makes sense to consider an action “wrong” and the person who performs it a “wrongdoer”
when the action may legitimately be justified or excused (e.g.,
for one or more of the reasons Aristotle articulated). Given that
(in this context) the language of justification and excuse implies
that an action was performed that is taken to be wrong in some
sense—otherwise this language would not be used—we should
be compelled to acknowledge that wrongdoings may in principle
be justified or excused. It seems that Aristotle was aware of this,
given that his account of forgiveness relies on and promotes this
understanding of the way in which judging a questionable action
as justified or excused and, thus, as forgivable, ultimately presupposes its “wrongness” in some relevant sense.
Regarding (b), in order to determine whether wrongdoers
who perform their wrongful actions intentionally should be forgiven, it is helpful to consider the reasons that Murphy offers as
possible justifications for moral forgiveness and to compare them
with Aristotle’s view of when forgiveness should be extended
and when it should not. According to Murphy, the most promising justifications for forgiveness include: (i) the wrongdoer’s repentance or change of heart, (ii) the wrongdoer’s sincere apology,
(iii) the wrongdoer’s good or well-meaning intentions, and (iv)
the wrongdoer’s suffering being sufficient to demonstrate a relevant transformation of the wrongdoer (508). While Murphy goes
on to discuss each of these justifications separately (508 – 511),
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it is sufficient to note that they share in common that the wrongdoer may be separated from her wrongdoing (508; 509),26 since
only in these cases is forgiveness potentially appropriate, given
that this separation not only (1) allows respect for the worth and
autonomy of the one wronged as well as for the initial moral culpability of the wrongdoer (ibid.), but also, paradoxically, (2) recognizes the non-culpability of the wrongdoer at the time at which
forgiveness is granted (509).
Importantly, although, unlike Murphy, Aristotle does not
propose a necessary relationship between resentment, foreswearing resentment, and forgiveness, nor does he (explicitly) emphasize the importance of upholding self-respect and autonomy, and
although he outright rejects the notion that forgiveness requires
the culpability of the wrongdoer, arguing the opposite, Aristotle
nonetheless supposes the separability of the wrongdoer from her
wrongdoing, just as Murphy does. We need only recall the examples of unwilling and willing actions that Aristotle claims are
forgivable to see this, which were outlined in section one. In
fact, some version of each of the reasons listed, which Murphy
defends as potentially compatible with what he characterizes as
moral forgiveness, can be interpreted as present in Aristotle’s
account of forgiveness, given that they all imply the non-culpability of the wrongdoer at the time at which Murphy claims forgiveness is appropriate. Indeed, when Murphy’s reasons for
forgiveness are examined carefully, it appears that wrongdoings
are forgivable for him, too, only when wrongdoers are no longer
responsible for their actions, which suggests that although the
acts retain their “wrongness,” they are nevertheless either excusable or justified: they are still “wrong,” but because of conditions that are true about the actor or about the circumstances
framing the action, it would be unfair—i.e., wrong (pardon the
26. In this connection, taking cues from St. Augustine, Murphy writes:
“to the extent that the agent is separated from his evil act, forgiveness
of him is possible without a tacit approval of his evil act” (ibid. 508,
emphasis his) viz. the well-known religious proclamation to “hate the
sin but not the sinner.”
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pun)—to hold the wrongdoer responsible, as Murphy himself
admits (506; 511).
The main difference between Murphy and Aristotle on this
point was introduced in an endnote within which not only the
synonymous meaning of “suffering,” “pain,” and “remorse” as
well as the synonymous meaning of “regret” and “repentance”
was noted, but it was also noted that although these dispositions
refer to a “gap” in the wrongdoer’s feelings or thinking, this does
not necessarily imply a passage of time, as these dispositions
could be experienced simultaneously. For Aristotle, there is no
requirement that there be a point in time at which the wrongdoer
is inseparable from her action and thus should be resented but
then at some later time she is separable from her act because, for
example, she has repented, apologized or otherwise demonstrated
her regret and sorrow. Instead, Aristotle claims that if a wrongdoer is to be forgiven it is because either (i) her “wrong” act is
performed unwittingly (e.g., because she had incomplete knowledge), (ii) she regrets and is suffering from it, either while she
performs it or later, which, for him, means that her character is
not the (vicious) character of an intentional wrongdoer, which is
immutable,27 (iii) she means well insofar as she attempts to prevent a worse outcome than her action (e.g., she was well-intentioned), and/or (iv) she cannot reasonably be expected to act
otherwise, all of which make the wrongdoer non-culpable, and
hence the act justified or excused.
It seems to me that despite his appeal to the wrongdoer’s disposition at different points in time, Murphy ultimately agrees with
Aristotle, especially since he claims that the strongest case for forgiving a wrongdoer occurs when she has genuinely repented, apol27. Recall that for Aristotle, the transformation of a genuinely vicious
character is not possible, as was briefly discussed in section 1c of the
paper. To be sure, whether genuinely vicious (or virtuous) characters
are mutable is a feature of Aristotle’s virtue ethics that can (and continues to) be debated; however, with respect to the question of forgiveness,
as I will argue in the conclusion, his account is coherent and compelling
in a way that Murphy’s is not.
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ogized, or otherwise demonstrated remorse (509-511). For this
likely means that the wrongdoer is no longer culpable and thus
should no longer be resented, given that she has become a different person (511). Of course, Murphy would say that these kinds
of actions are only candidates for forgivability if their wrongdoers are initially culpable for their actions but later become no
longer culpable; for otherwise they were either never culpable
to begin with, since this is a requirement of forgiveness for Murphy, or they did not undergo a process that changes them from
an initially culpable wrongdoer to a person who is no longer that
same culpable wrongdoer. But beyond insisting on (a) the necessity that forgiveness requires the initial culpability of the wrongdoer and (b) foreswearing the resentment that appropriately
directs itself toward the culpable wrongdoer, Murphy does nothing to convince us of the connection between these. For, recall
(again) his attempt to distinguish forgiveness from excuse and
justification: when excuse is appropriate, something about the
wrongdoer’s ability to act makes it unfair to hold her responsible
for her action, thereby making her action excusable; and when
justification is appropriate, something about the conditions or circumstances framing the action also makes it unfair to hold the
wrongdoer responsible for her action, thereby, making her action
justified (506). As I think this (and related) passages in Murphy’s
analysis show, despite Murphy’s attempt to distinguish forgiveness, excuse, and justification, ultimately, even for him, proper
(moral) forgiveness cannot be granted to culpable, resentable
wrongdoers but should only be extended to wrongdoers whose
actions, at the time at which they are forgiven, are excusable or
justifiable, just as is the case for Aristotle.
§3. Concluding Remarks: On the Compelling Nature of
“Aristotelian Forgiveness”
On Aristotle’s account, resentment is not a necessary element of
forgiveness, not initially or in the form of needing to overcome
it, because from the outset, the kinds of wrongful actions that are
forgivable are not attached to wrongdoers who should be resented;
rather, their actions are excusable or justified, as was argued. I
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submit that Murphy (and others who agree with him)28 should give
up his reliance both on the moral culpability of the wrongdoer and
on the accompanying resentment and its eventual foreswearing as
essential ingredients of forgiveness for at least three related reasons. First, as I argued, even Murphy admits that at the time at
which forgiveness is appropriate, the wrongdoer is not culpable
because something about her or the conditions under which her
acts was or is performed—e.g., she repented or apologized or
meant well—result in the wrongdoing being justified or excused
without eliminating its “wrongness.” Again, Murphy himself admits this (506), betraying the incoherence of his position.
Second, holding onto resentment until the wrongdoer undergoes some sort of magically transformative process, which, with
Aristotle, we have good reason to believe is not possible if the
wrongdoer is someone who genuinely takes pleasure in intentionally acting wrongly, may be unreasonable to expect from a
person who is wronged, regardless of whether doing so upholds
autonomy or self-respect, which is by no means a foregone conclusion. This is especially true, given that there are many ways
that self-respect and autonomy can be maintained that do not require harboring dangerous, negative emotions that may easily
transform themselves into attitudes or actions, such as hatred and
vengeance, which (at least arguably) often fail to respect anyone,
and certainly speak against a sense of humility, not to mention
an appreciation for a shared sense of humanity (which is a point
to which I return in what directly follows). Furthermore, overcoming resentment requires some emotional gymnastics that it
is not clear could or should be cultivated, particularly given the
shaky foundation Murphy offers for why wrongdoers should be
resented, which Murphy does not support with much more than
his insistence that Bishop Butler is correct on this point. Again,
why should it be the case that forgiveness must involve the
foreswearing of resentment, since either it is unclear that the
wrongdoer should be resented in the first place, or, taking Aris28. Recall that Murphy’s account represents the mainstream, leading
contemporary secular account of forgiveness.
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totle’s lead, it is unclear that she should ever be forgiven? Put
plainly, why not understand forgiveness, as Aristotle did, namely,
as an attitude one takes with respect to a wrongdoer who deserves
it for one or more of the reasons outlined, none of which require
the one wronged to resent the wrongdoer, and all of which
demonstrate the non-culpability of the wrongdoer?
Third, given that there is no reason to believe that the absence
of resentment or its foreswearing in Aristotle’s account of forgiveness results in the one wronged failing to respect herself or
to exercise her autonomy, as I already hinted, Murphy would do
well to discard his insistence that forgiveness requires resentment
at all. Instead, he should offer an account of forgiveness that calls
for us to take on the perspective of the wrongdoer, as this is compassionate and respectful of the worth of all persons who deserve
it. I cannot help but wonder whether Aristotle’s account instructs
us to treat wrongdoers in an (appropriately) compassionate way,29
which allows us not only to exercise self-respect but also to respect the other and her circumstances more easily than Murphy’s
account permits. For the latter not only advances an arguably fictive distinction between forgiving and excusing and justifying
that fails to withstand philosophical scrutiny, but also fails to attend robustly to the reality that all persons are potential wrongdoers in the ways that both Aristotle and Murphy articulate. For
although Murphy acknowledges what he refers to as “moral humility” (513), he concludes from this only that we “should be
open to the possibility of forgiveness” (ibid.). In contrast, Aristotle suggests that relating to wrongdoers through compassion is
the goal, since this demonstrates human decency, which he intimately connects with compassion and thoughtfulness, which, in
turn, he claims should govern our relations with (most) others
(1143a20-22).
Thus despite what may remain unclear in Aristotle’s account
of forgiveness, “Aristotelian forgiveness” is (1) internally coher29. I take it that compassion—generally speaking, not within Aristotle’s
theoretical framework—can be inappropriate; however, I do not defend
this here, as to do so would take us too far afield from the paper’s focus.
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ent, (2) properly appreciative of the many reasons a wrongdoer
should not be held responsible for her act and should be forgiven,
which (3) is consistent with respect both for those who are
wronged and for those who perform wrongdoings, (4) calls for
compassion towards others and an appreciation for our shared
humanity, and finally, (5) does not fall prey to the emotional
quagmire that may threaten our attempts to forgive when we
ought and to refrain from forgiving when we ought not. Consequently, Aristotle’s account of forgiveness ought to be preferred
over the leading contemporary account.
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On Two Socratic Questions
Alex Priou
What pointless images come up on account of a
single word. Take the word something, for example. For me this is a dense cloud of steam that has
the color of smoke. When I hear the word nothing,
I also see a cloud, but one that is thinner, completely transparent. And when I try to seize a particle of this nothing, I get the most minute particles
of nothing.1
The most famous Socratic question—ti esti touto?—is often preceded by a far less famous, but more fundamental question—esti
touto ti? Thus we read, for example, in Plato’s Hippias Major:
Socrates: So, then, are not also all the beautiful things
beautiful by the beautiful?
Hippias: Yes, by the beautiful.
Soc.: By this thing that is something (tini)?
Hipp.: That is something, for what (ti) [else] is it going
[to be]?
Soc.: Say, then . . . what is this thing (ti esti touto), the
beautiful? (287c8-d3)2
Or, in the Symposium, where Socrates asks Agathon, “Is love love
of nothing or of something?” (199e6-7) Aristotle implicitly affirms the priority of this question to its more famous counterpart by only claiming that there is a science of being after
having confronted the “most difficult and necessary aporia of
all to look into,” namely, whether or not “there is something
1. Luria 1968, 132.
2. All citations are to Plato and his Euthyphro, unless otherwise noted.
All translations are my own.
Alex Priou is Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Kutztown
University in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. This paper was first delivered at
the Annual Meeting of the Association of Core Texts and Courses on
April 16, 2015 in Atlanta, Georgia.
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(esti ti) aside from the particulars,” “something one and the
same (hen ti kai tauton)” that would make such knowledge
possible (cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics 999a24-9, 1003a21-2).
Though this question is posed in many dialogues with respect to myriad topics,3 in every instance it receives but one
answer: it is something, namely something that is. The dialogue devoted to why this question always meets with an affirmative answer would appear to be the Parmenides, for
there Parmenides throws into question whether the eidē are,
only to establish that, if we have opinions that there is some
unity in being, such unity must be. 4 Nevertheless, the dramatic setting of the Parmenides is the quarrelling of the PreSocratic schools, and the popular dismissal of philosophy
that their quarrelling engendered. For a dialogue that establishes that the object of inquiry is simply because we have
3. Some examples (by no means exhaustive): Charmides 161d1-5 and
168b2-4, Parmenides 132b7-c2, Phaedo 64c2-3, and Theaetetus 160a9b4 and 163e4-7. Of course, Socrates often doesn’t ask this preliminary
question, perhaps with some reason for his silence in mind, the most
obvious and necessary example being Minos 313a1.
4. This claim condenses the respective thrusts of the first and second
parts of the Parmenides. Let the following suffice to establish the above
claim. The second part’s inquiry into the one that is preserves the intelligibility of unity without addressing the skepticism raised at the peak
of the first part, i.e., the view that there is no access to the one that is or
that the one simply is not (cf. 133a ff.). Parmenides addresses that skepticism in the final five deductions, which function as a reductio ad absurdum. This reductio culminates in a denial of unity not just in
being—for being could nevertheless still always appear to be, without
being—but in appearance and opinion, as well. This conclusion proves
untenable, since as a matter of fact unity is opined to be—indeed, at
many points during that very conversation. Thus the dialogue pushes
us to the conclusion that is enough that unity is opined to be for it simply
to be, i.e. for the claim that one is to be true, at least so far as human
beings may recognize. It’s on this point that the Parmenides and Euthyphro converge.
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opinions about it, we must, as I hope to show, turn to the Euthyphro. 5
From the very beginning of the dialogue, Socrates’s whole
way of life is in question. For an indictment has brought him to
the stoa of the king, thus compelling him to leave his usual haunts
in the Lyceum, where we find him in dialogues as early in his career as in the Charmides and as late as in the Euthydemus and
Lysis.6 To some extent, then, we share in Euthyphro’s surprise at
finding Socrates in such a place. Euthyphro expresses his surprise
by asking Socrates, “Has something new (ti neōteron) come to
be?” (2a1) Euthyphro’s phrasing, quite unintentionally prescient,
shows that more than Socrates’s way of life is in question. For
when Euthyphro later asks Socrates what Meletus claims
Socrates does (ti poiounta), Socrates will respond that Meletus
claims that he makes new gods (kainous poiounta tous theous)
(2a8-b4). Socrates appears to have made a new ti, a new something or what, and so to have radically revised how we think
about nouns.7 Not (just) Socrates, but his question is on trial (cf.
Apology 22e6-3b4). Euthyphro, however, understands Meletus
to mean by these “new gods” Socrates’s daimonion, and thus
takes Socrates to be his fellow religious innovator, to be something of an ally.8 But they are in many ways quite different.
Whereas Euthyphro expresses the utmost pride in his wisdom,
5. “The theoretical or methodological assumption (that to ask about
piety is to ask about an idea or form), if it is to be something more than
an assumption, requires a non-methodological—a conversational or dialectical—justification” (Bruell 1999, 127).
6. Cf. Bruell 1999, 118.
7. Cf. Davis 2011, 217.
8. Religious innovators, of course, could hardly ever be allies.—Geach
1966, 369 follows Euthyphro’s interpretation of the accusation. Burger
2015, 25-7 and Strauss 1996, 15 suggest that these gods may be
Socrates’s eidē. Meletus’s use of the plural in every version of the accusation we have suffices to dismiss Geach’s proposal (cf. Apology
24b8-c1; Xenophon, Memorabilia, I.1.1; Diogenes Laertius, Lives of
the Eminent Philosophers, II.40). Cf. Bruell 1999, 118-20.
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Socrates expresses shock when he first hears about Euthyphro’s
unorthodoxy and closes by cautioning him against deviating from
orthodoxy.9 To be sure, Socrates seems unique in his (however
ironic) respect, if not reverence, for Euthyphro, even going so far
as to say he is a desirer of Euthyphro’s wisdom, though others
laugh at him (14d4, 3b9-c2). Nevertheless, the situation is not
one of two religious innovators, but of two men with some inclination toward unorthodoxy. The one succumbs; the other resists.
If Socrates is not so unorthodox as he initially appears, then to
what extent is his allegedly new “what,” his ti, in reality new?
To what extent is Socratic philosophy latent in orthodoxy itself?10
9. Euthyphro twice affirms his wisdom with an oath by Zeus (cf. 4a12b3, 5b8-c3). The first oath comes after Socrates expresses shock with
an oath of his own at Euthyphro’s innovation (4a11-12). A little later,
Euthyphro momentarily slides into the third person while speaking of
his precise knowledge. That is, he speaks of himself as spoken of by
others. Socrates exploits Euthyphro’s vanity in his response by imagining a conversation, in which he speaks of him as wise before another
(cf. 5a3-b7, esp. 5a9-b1). Socrates is successful, for upon hearing this
imagined conversation Euthyphro swears his second oath. Socrates’s
closing caution against innovation occurs at 15c11-e2.
10. In this way, the question of the Euthyphro is much broader than
much of the literature assumes. For what is at stake is not just “the relation between religion and ethical knowledge” (Hall 1968, 1 [emphasis
added]), with the dialogue presenting “a powerful argument against any
attempt to base moral judgments on religious foundations” (Mann 1998,
123), but the relation between religion and knowledge as such. (For a
helpful list of secondary literature on this question, see Mann 1998, 123
n. 1.) The principal difficulty with this view is that the argument in question has a much broader range than the ethical or moral. No form of
dikaion or its cognates occurs in the argument in question (cf. 9d111e1). The argument thus abstracts completely from what the basis of
the gods’ love is. Indeed, the whole purpose of the argument is to raise
the question of whether there even is such a basis. Thus the fundamental
dilemma of this crucial passage, and so of the dialogue as a whole, is
not between a knowledge-based and religion-based ethics, but between
passive obedience to divine whim or wisdom and the active search for
wisdom by human beings, between reason and revelation.
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It is necessary to begin from the position of orthodoxy, as
represented by the reaction Euthyphro’s father has to the murder
of one of his servants. Euthyphro relates that his “father, binding
together his”—i.e., the murderer’s—“feet and hands, sent to
here”—i.e., Athens—“to hear from an interpreter (exēgētēs) what
(hoti) it’s necessary to do (poiein)” (4c6-d1). In certain circumstances, the position of orthodoxy makes clear precisely what we
are to do. Suspected criminals are to be bound. But in those circumstances where we don’t know clearly and precisely what we
are to do, the position of orthodoxy compensates for this lack by
having us defer to an interpreter. Such interpreters answer our
questions about what is to be done—in this case, say, regarding
what punishment is fitting for a hired servant who has killed a
household slave. Within the position of orthodoxy, then, there is
some reason for questioning—of what sort, though, we are as yet
unclear. Despite his apparent orthodoxy, Euthyphro’s father
clearly believes the fitting punishment to be death, for, when the
hired servant dies in his bonds, he is untroubled.11 Indeed, everyone except Euthyphro seems to agree with his father—the rest of
his family, the Athenians generally, and even Socrates. And
though this gives Euthyphro’s decision to proceed against his father a foolish air, it at least minimally redeems his efforts at religious innovation, since everyone, as it turns out, has arrived at
what orthodoxy demands on their own.12 That is, everyone plays
the interpreter. The ubiquity of interpretation comes to the surface
11. Edwards 2000, 218, following Allen 1970, 21, points out that Euthyphro’s father assumes he has “a right of summary justice which dispensed him from any duties to the man accused of murder,” a right that,
Edwards adds, Euthyphro implicitly denies. Both Euthyphro and his father appear more ambivalent than Edwards’s characterization allows.
After all, his father does send for an exegete, and Euthyphro does wait
some time before bringing the accusation to court.
12. Though Euthyphro questions the justice of the punishment his father
inadvertently visited upon the hired servant, not even Euthyphro questions that such a punishment is what the interpreter would have advised.
Indeed, Euthyphro is speciously silent on what the messenger said the
interpreter proscribed.
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when Socrates, in an attempt to explain his line of questioning
about what piety is, mentions his confusion about the words of a
poet. In attempting to clarify his confusion, Socrates begins to
speak of parts (though not of wholes)—that is, to use the ontological language more familiar from the Parmenides.13 Accordingly, if Socrates’s apparently unorthodox question lies latent in
the position of orthodoxy, it is in the role of interpreters (whether
ourselves or officials) and the phenomena that make them necessary to the position of orthodoxy.14
It is clear that Euthyphro considers himself a sort of interpreter, inasmuch as he bases his religious innovations on the traditional stories told about the gods. Socrates is surprised to learn
that Euthyphro has such an orthodox view. He goes so far as to
have Euthyphro swear before Zeus that he truly holds these things
to have come to be thus (6b3-4: su hōs alēthōs hēgēi). Socrates’s
second invocation of a god suggests that he is perhaps as surprised here at Euthyphro’s extreme orthodoxy as he was earlier,
when he learned of the extent of his unorthodoxy. Indeed, so surprised is Socrates that he interrupts a particularly simple argument, familiar from the Meno and Theaetetus—about what
constitutes an adequate answer to the ti esti touto question—to
affirm Euthyphro’s orthodoxy. Socrates’s interest in Euthyphro
thus stems from the fact that his religious innovations have one
13. Once Euthyphro says Socrates speaks correctly in claiming that the
pious is a morion of the just (12d4), Socrates (with Euthyphro following
suit) only refers to it as a meros (cf. 12c6, d2, 5, 6, 8, e1, 7, 9). In so
doing, Socrates throws into question (immediately after Euthyphro has
deemed it beyond question) the agreement that the pious is a proper
part, in the sense of having a natural joint, rather than just a piece or
fragment of justice.
14. In other words, the basic issue of the dialogue is this: “How can
[Socrates] make his ignorance prevail . . . over [Euthyphro’s] knowledge?” (Bruell 1999, 125) In order to so prevail, we must understand
why Socrates’s ignorance “permitted or compelled him to draw positive
(or negative) conclusions about the most important matters” (Bruell
1999, 124).
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foot in orthodoxy and one foot out. His case shows how the orthodox requirement for interpreters allows for such unorthodoxy
as we see in Euthyphro, an unorthodoxy that Euthyphro, Meletus,
and many others identify—whether rightly or wrongly—with
Socrates’s peculiar mode of questioning. Additionally, by asking
Euthyphro to say what the pious is, Socrates draws on Euthyphro’s desire to play the interpreter (exēgētēs), thus exploiting
Euthyphro’s offer to explain (diēgeomai) many things concerning
the divine (6c5-d2). Euthyphro’s offer comes on the heels of
Socrates’s surprise that Euthyphro believes or holds (hēgeomai)
such an extremely orthodox view (6b2-c4). Socrates uses hēgeomai for believing or holding some view in place of Euthyphro’s
earlier use of nomizō (5e6). In this context, Euthyphro offers to
show how what “human beings themselves happen to believe
(nomizontes)” gives “a proof that the law (nomou) is such” as
Euthyphro interprets it (5e2-6a3). Socrates’s substitution of hēgeomai for nomizō thus aims to arrive at certain phenomena present within law, the phenomena of believing, interpreting, and
explaining. By posing his idiosyncratic question in this context,
Socrates tests the extent to which the ti of the ti esti touto lies latent
in such phenomena, and thus in the view of orthodoxy itself.15
Socrates touches on the relationship between the ti of ti esti
touto and the phenomena within law most pointedly during an
argument famous for articulating the so-called “Euthyphro
problem.”16 In this argument, Socrates attempts to show Euthyphro that the love of all the gods is not a sufficient criterion for
determining what particular acts are pious—that is, that the godloved is an inadequate definition of the pious. Toward this end,
Socrates distinguishes between active and passive participles,
between the loving and the loved (10a10-11). The passive participle, i.e., the verb reified as a substantivized verbal adjec15. After Euthyphro’s proof, no forms of nomos and nomizō occur, an
especially surprising fact in a dialogue concerned with the rules or opinions that guide correct action with respect to the gods.
16. See note 10.
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tive,17 is then argued to be the consequence of the finite, passive
verb form, rather than the other way around. That is, Socrates
intends to show that something is a loved thing because it is
loved, but not that something is loved because it is a loved thing
(10c10-12). When brought to bear on the claim that the pious is
the god-loved, the priority of the finite verb to the substantivized
form shows that the gods’ activity of loving is but an affect or
experience of the pious, and not what it is. Socrates thus argues
that the ti of ti esti touto is, independent of how anyone—god
or man—is disposed to it intentionally. What something is is not
dependent on our inclinations, then, but our inclinations on what
it is. Yet Socrates’s argument is flawed principally because there
are some who love something simply because it is a thing loved,
i.e., a thing loved by another or others. Certainly some such phenomenon is what makes the Athenians laugh at Euthyphro or
grow angry with Socrates, what makes the Athenians inclined
to view such acts of interpretation as unorthodoxy. The position
of orthodoxy thus seems to exclude the ti of Socrates’s ti esti
touto. For from the perspective of orthodoxy, the fact that something has been said provides sufficient justification that it has
been said well (7a11-b1).18 No appeal to being is necessary, just
to opinion.
Nevertheless, orthodoxy’s manner of justification is not so
exclusive as it first appears. In his presentation of the aforementioned “Euthyphro problem,” Socrates expresses this manner of
justification in rather confusing language. His language poses a
significant problem for understanding his argument, not simply
because the logic is unclear or the use of “because” (hoti) is
17. Because rendering the passive verb forms in Greek into English requires using the verb “to be” with the participial form, the distinction is
somewhat elusive, as many notice (see, for example, Geach 1966, 378).
The distinction turns, I maintain, on the reification of an experience or
affect as a quality—and an essential one, at that—of what they seek to
define. Thus I have chosen to render philoumenon as “a loved thing.”
18. Reading eirētai gar at b1 with all the manuscripts and against their
seclusion by Burnet and others.
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equivocal,19 but rather because it is difficult to know which sense
Socrates intends hoti to have in this or that clause. More than
once, Socrates uses hoti to mean both “because” and “that,” i.e.
to indicate a fact and a justification, in a single sentence. Further, in his summary of his argument, Socrates clarifies that Euthyphro has failed to say what (hoti) the pious is, using hoti in
the sense of ousia, i.e., in the sense familiar from ti esti touto
(11a6-8). Socrates thus uses hoti in its three primary senses—
what we could call its justificatory, factual, and essential
senses—and in a way that appears unnecessarily confusing.
Thus in an argument meant to delineate a causal relationship
between particulars and universals, Socrates uses a word that
mixes all three into one. As we read, then, we must determine
in each instance which sense Socrates means hoti to have. In
the process, however, we cannot help but note that, as separate
as these senses may be syntactically, they are also quite inextricably linked. In accordance with proper usage, Socrates uses
hoti in the justificatory sense interchangeably with dioti. But
dioti is itself a contracted form of another phrase Socrates uses,
dia touto hoti, which employs hoti in its factual sense. If hoti
in the justificatory sense is equivalent to dia touto hoti, then
hoti in the justificatory sense contains within it hoti in the factual sense.20 Reasons rely on facts. But this still excludes hoti
in the essential sense, the sense interchangeable with the ti of
Socrates’s question, ti esti touto. Is the factual sense of hoti
completely separable from its essential sense? How could essential hoti be excluded, but factual and justificatory hoti main19. On the difficulty of understanding the sense of “because,” see Geach
1966, 379; Hall 1968, 6-9; and Cohen 1971, 6-8.
20. In reality, the justificatory language is far more complex: hoti is used
at 10a2, 3, c2 (twice), 3 (twice), 10 (twice), e5; dioti at 10b1, 4, 5, 7, 8,
9 (twice), 10, 11, d6, 9, e3; dia at 10b2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, d4, 5; dia touto
hoti at 10d4, 6-7, e2-3, 6-7; and the substantivized infinitive as an instrumental dative at 10e5-6. Of the forty-three occurrences of dioti in
Plato, twelve are in the Euthyphro alone, i.e., just over a quarter of the
occurrences in just fifteen Stephanus pages—really, on one page alone.
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tained? Doesn’t the lexical intimacy of these three senses suggest
a necessary connection between them? And if so, what is it?
This question amounts to whether the particular acts piety
dictates we perform are wholly particular, or rather must be
viewed in light of some general understanding of what piety is.21
Euthyphro seems reluctant to venture beyond these particulars.
When knowledge of piety first comes up, Euthyphro seems interested in teaching Socrates the pious and impious things, and
not the pious as such (4e4-5a2). Likewise, when Socrates first
asks Euthyphro about the pious as such, Euthyphro understands
the neuter singular to hosion to indicate a single pious thing, and
not the idea common to all particular, pious things (5c8-e2). And
much later, when Euthyphro begins to pull away from Socrates,
he is clear that what he would have to teach Socrates is not some
one thing, but a number of things (14a11-b1). Nevertheless, even
in his first definition, Euthyphro does come up with a somewhat
general rule that applies not just to his case, but to many others.
Likewise, when Socrates gives voice to the objection he and the
Athenians raise against Euthyphro’s innovation, his formulation
is rightly general (cf. 4b4-6). Indeed, the disagreement between
Euthyphro and the Athenians regards which general rule (or example become rule, e.g., Zeus’s “prosecution” of his father) applies to the particular case of Euthyphro’s father, his hired
servant, and the household slave.22 Justificatory hoti thus entails
21. It is an old question as to whether the Euthyphro “is meant to imply a
full-blown theory of Forms” (Geach 1966, 371). For a thorough discussion,
see Allen 1970.
22. At one point, Socrates shows Euthyphro that those disputing in courts
don’t dispute whether one should pay the penalty for injustice, but whether an
injustice was committed (8b7-d3). Shortly after this, Socrates expresses the
general rule guiding Euthyphro’s prosecution of his father in as particular a
form as he can, indeed to quite comic effect (cf. 9a1-8). Euthyphro’s initial
(and nearly absurd) inability to put himself in the shoes of the accused amounts
to an inability to see the ambiguity of how this or that law applies to a particular
deed, i.e., it amounts to the mistake of restricting the general entirely to the
particular. As Euthyphro’s quick retreat shows, this mistake is untenable, even
to those most devoted to the precision of the laws. Cf. Benardete 2001, 201.
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not just factual hoti, but essential hoti, as well. For which particular act is pious depends on the general rules that collectively
constitute what piety is. Consequently, it is not the case, as earlier
surmised, that, from the perspective of orthodoxy, the fact that
something has been said provides sufficient justification that it
has been said well (7a11-b1). As Socrates observes, other things
are said that don’t quite jibe with what has been said, thus necessitating further interpretation or conversation from us (7b2-5).
Indeed, without the question of which rule to apply to this or that
particular situation, there would be no need for interpreters.23 At
least in the present circumstances, then, the altogether orthodox
question of which rule or law applies to these or those circumstances provides sufficient grounds for Socrates to ask his apparently unorthodox question, ti esti touto?
But are these grounds sufficient in all circumstances?
Socrates suggests so when he compares his question about the
relationship between piety and justice to an account of fear (deos)
and reverence or shame (aidōs) in a pair of epic verses (12a6b1). When introducing these verses, Socrates speaks of the poet
as making two things, one of these being the verses, the other
being something he wishes to compare to what he and Euthyphro
were just discussing (12a7-8: epoiēsen, poiēsas.) But what the
poet made that is comparable to what they were just discussing
lies on an entirely abstract level. Thus, the poets don’t just make
verses; they make ideas, or rather determine their relationship.24
Socrates thus compares his inquiry into the ti of ti esti touto to
his interpretation of the poet’s verses (cf. Republic 515d2-7). But
23. “Euthyphro,” and, I would add, everyone else, “is unwilling . . . to
leave matters at the merely factual relation of a pious deed to the approval the gods confer on it by loving it, to let the piety of the deed be
determined by that love alone” (Bruell 1999, 129).
24. Burger 2015, 83-5 points out that grammatically the object of poiēsas
is Zeus himself, an allusion back to Meletus’s charge that suggests that
not Socrates, but the city’s poets are the makers of (new) gods. On the
complex way in which the poet’s genetic account relies on an eidetic account, see Bruell 1999, 131-2 and Burger 2015, 83 ff. (esp. n. 44).
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in his interpretation, Socrates criticizes the poet on the basis of
his and Euthyphro’s experience of deos and aidōs (cf. 12b2-c9).
Though Euthyphro happily goes along with Socrates, Meletus
would be unlikely—to put it mildly—to take Socrates’s criticism
of a fellow poet so lightly (cf. Apology 23e5). Nevertheless, Meletus’s claim that Socrates is “a maker (poiētēn) of gods,” namely
“one who makes (poiounta) new gods while not believing (nomizonta) in the archaic or original ones” (3b1-3), seems at best a halftruth.25 In a certain respect, Meletus appears to be right. As Socrates
argues, action requires discerning (diakrinō) what is good or bad,
noble or shameful, and just or unjust, so as to reach a sufficient
judgment (krisis) about what to do (7c3-d7). But in his mode of
questioning, Socrates exposes the insufficiency of all judgments by
exposing his interlocutors’ inability to answer (apokrinō). Meletus
is therefore correct that Socrates doesn’t believe (hēgeomai, nomizō)
in the archaic or original gods, since his investigation of the phenomena within law (nomos) exposes that answers are not forthcoming. Meletus is wrong, however, to conclude from this that Socrates
seeks to replace the archaic or original gods with new ones. For at
the core of Socratic refutation is the same issue that plagued Euthyphro and his father, that makes interpreters necessary and court
cases unavoidable: the ambivalence or multivalence of particular
deeds as to which vomos they fall under, and thus whether the deed
is pious or impious, or, should the particular deed already be agreed
to be pious, which nomos makes it so or is implicit in it and thus
renders like deeds pious.26 These altogether pious questions invoke the factual, justificatory, and essential uses of hoti that pro25. It is only “at best” a half-truth because, as Burger 2015, 35 notes,
Socrates is the (perhaps inadvertent) cause of both the dangerous liberation from generally accepted opinion and the subsequent return to that
opinion.
26. Socrates gives two competing formulations of the subject of his question. The first—tou hosiou te peri kai tou anosiou (4e2-3)—suggests a clear
and precise separation of the pious from the impious, while the second—
peri . . . tōn hosiōn te kai anosiōn (e5-6)—suggests that the same things
can be both pious and impious. On the connection between this issue and
polytheism, see Bruell 1999, 130-1 and Burger 2015, 59-61.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PRIOU
89
vide the necessary and sufficient conditions for Socratic philosophy.
What is at bottom unorthodox about Socrates, then, is not the
introduction of new gods per se, but the willingness to confess
ignorance about which laws apply to which particulars, and the
attempt to articulate the recalcitrance of the opinions contained
in law to clear and easy application to particulars. For in his
mythical self-presentation, Socrates says that Daedalus is both
his and Euthyphro’s progenitor—that is, that the circular character of Socratic refutation is not exclusively Socrates’s, but human
(11b9-c6). Man is somehow fundamentally Socratic, and it is
Socrates’s exposure of this fact that arouses the Athenians’s ire
(cf. 3c9-d2). They simply kill the messenger. Under this interpretation, what Socrates does may be an unorthodox failure of
piety, but it is the humble failure to rise to piety, rather than an
attempt to go above and beyond it. What is missing from this interpretation, however, and unfortunately takes us beyond the Euthyphro, is Socrates’s anticipation in the Sophist that a stranger
from Elea may be a theos elenktikos (216a1-b6). This substantial
revision of Homeric theology appears to guide Socrates’s reaction
to the god’s assertion of his wisdom, which assertion Socrates attempts to refute as though that were unproblematically pious
(Apology 21b9-c2). In this revision, Socrates implicitly claims
that not just human beings are beholden to the above ambivalence
or multivalence of particulars with respect to generals, but gods
as well. Let it suffice to conclude that this deeper implication of
what Socrates uncovers in the Euthyphro amounts, paradoxically,
to an accusation against orthodoxy of impiety: not Socrates, but
the city has made new gods in place of the theoi archaioi.27 For
27. Compare the alternative of Strauss 1996, 16-17. The present understanding of Socratic piety falls outside of the debate that McPherran 1985, 283-4 frames as between the constructivists, who take there
to be a view of piety latent in what follows the “aporetic interlude”
of 11b-e, and the anticonstructivists, who deny the same. For that debate presupposes considerable agreement, namely that what is referred to as “Socratic piety” relies on a definition of what the pious
as such is, whose reconstruction they respectively claim to be possi-
�90
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
not just man is Socratic, but his god as well.28
ble and not. If there is anything like “Socratic piety,” it cannot be based
on a static definition, but rather only on the awareness that no sufficient
definition is forthcoming.
28. The deeper implication of Socrates’s substitution of hēgeomai for
nomizō lies in the former’s secondary, original sense of “to lead,”
which suggests that believing is the active attempt to guide oneself
(and others), and not the passive acceptance of laws (on Plato’s use of
voice—middle, active and passive—see Davis 2011, 205-21). That is,
the laws present themselves as the answer to some desire for guidance.
But that desire, in posing the question the laws purport to answer,
proves not just prior to (and thus of higher status than) the laws, but
more general than the laws, which are always these particular laws.
The primary or principal phenomenon within law would thus be man’s
longing for such wisdom as would allow him to live well. On this phenomenon as that of soul, see Burger 2015, 73-5 (with 69 n. 36), as well
as Davis 2011, 217-18 and passim.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PRIOU
91
Bibliography
Allen, R. E. 1970. Plato’s Euthyphro and the Earlier Theory of Forms.
London: Routledge.
Benardete, Seth. 2001. Plato’s “Laws”: The Discovery of Being. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Bruell, Christopher. 1999. On the Socratic Education. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Burger, Ronna. 2015. On Plato’s Euthyphro. Munich: Carl Friedrich
von Siemens Stiftung.
Cohen, S. Marc. 1971. “Socrates on the Definition of Piety: Euthyphro
10a-11b,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 9: 1-13.
Davis, Michael. 2011. The Soul of The Greeks. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Edwards, M. J. 2000. “In Defense of Euthyphro,” American Journal of
Philology 121: 213-24.
Geach, Peter. 1966. “Plato’s Euthyphro: An Analysis and Comentary,”
The Monist 50: 369-82.
Hall, John. 1968. “Plato: Euthyphro 10a1-11a10,” Philosophical Quarterly 70: 1-11.
Luria, A. R. 1968. The Mind of a Mnemonist. New York: Basic Books.
McPherran, Mark. 1985. “Socratic Piety in the Euthyphro,” Journal of
the History of Philosophy 23: 283-309.
Mann, William. 1998. “Piety: Lending Euthyphro a Hand,” Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research 58: 123-42.
Strauss, Leo. 1996. “An Untitled Lecture on Plato’s Euthyphron” (David
Bolotin, Christopher Bruell, and Thomas Pangle eds.), Interpretation 24:
3-23.
��POEM | PETRICH
93
Sabbatical
Louis Petrich
I would have thought the broad summer airs,
By amplitude of want, more friendly shared.
Life—no surprise—opportune in corners,
Echoes up the cry of fire and ashes:
Teach us to care and not to care,
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks.
Island mine, sit me still, hair to skin light,
Sun beaten by the whip of wind and salt spray,
Stomach fitted upon rocks and coral,
Mostly hidden, unseparated below,
Sharp and aspiring above,
Good to take counsel over cares hard gone,
These straight and crooked cravings of my sea soul
To pour each drop of time that remains
Into practice of present looking toward,
Looking after what I found fine in you—
Deep-eyed causes,
Welling up close to speak
Through summer lips—
Oh, stay a little, and kiss the strewed rocks
Forsaken of stars, but here my remaking.
How fine the faces of sea and sky at the horizon meet!
Their line of appointment never bent
To give up place and tell long secret looks.
Unmeasured goings, no reckoning of returns!
An hour’s breath is allowed this body
To go beneath and feel no heaviness:
Louis Petrich is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. He wrote
this poem while on sabbatical in Bonaire, Dutch Caribbean.
�94
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Quiet there, beauty there,
Vast riches, strange attachments,
Currents you would never guess,
Cold-eyed passers-by at ease
In the whirligig of Becoming.
Counting down to the last,
I follow with borrowed sufficiency
The beaded gleams of light
Up to the birth meeting,
And pour handfuls of new looks upon the awful leavings of Love.
Contend less much, eternal counselors—
A made man collects by the shore.
���
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The St. John's Review
Volume 50, number 3 (2008)
Editor
C. Nathan Dugan
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Bramt
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
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The St. John's Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
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essays, reviews, and reasoned letters are welcome. All
manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to the Review, St. John's College, P.O. Box 2800,
Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available, at $5
per issue, from the St. John's College Bookstore.
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in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
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�2
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�3
Contents
Is There Great Jazz? ...................................................... 5
Andre Barbera
Preformationism In Biology: From Homunculi To
Genetic Programs ........................................................ 33
jorge H. Aigla, M.D
The Persians and the Parthenon: Yoke and Weave
Part Two: The Parthenon............................................. 53
Mera ]. Flaumenhaft
�4
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�5
-.:f Is There Great Jazz?
fj:-- Andre Barbera
Ten years ago I began a lecture with an excerpt from "Split
Kick." [Musical example 1] 1 That lecture was ostensibly
devoted to one evening's recorded performance by Art
Blakey's quintet in 1954. My barely hidden agenda was to
ask, 'is there great jazz?', to answer 'yes', and to consider the
implications for St. John's College. Now I ask the question
explicitly, although my confidence in an affirmative answer
has waned. Addressing the practical problems associated with
an affirmative answer is not the main thrust of my remarks.
Rather, I want to consider whether jazz really is worthy of
our attention.
What is 'great' and what is 'jazz'? I shall not attempt to
define greatness. As we consider jazz and its possible merit,
however, we may uncover some of the aspects of greatness
that we attribute to the works already on St. John's program,
or at least think about some of our prejudices on behalf of
those works.
Let us get straight about what kind of music jazz issomething we all know already. Jazz is primarily instrumental
music, emphasizing brass and reed instruments, based on
dance, popular song forms, and the blues, and is of distinctly
African-American character in its origin, development, and
soul. Jazz entails swing, the blue tonality, and improvisation.
Jazz musicians employ idiosyncratic timbres or tone colors. In
jazz, instruments are treated like voices and voices like instruments. Ultimately, one might find in jazz expressions of
Andre Barbera is a tutor at the Annapolis campus of St. John's College.
This lecture was delivered at AnnapOlis on September 8, 2006. }.,.{usical
examples arc listed in Appendix 1 and can be heard online by visiting the
St. John's Review webpage (www.stjohnscollege.edu/news/pubs/review.shtml)
and clicking the link "Jazz Examples to Accompany 'Is there Great Jazz?' by
Andre Barbera".
�6
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
individuality, autonomy, freedom. Many examples of jazz
lack some of these characteristics and perhaps a few lack
them all, but this rough definition should suffice. Of these
various characteristics, some are more important than others,
for example the African-American natnre of the musical
idiom. Jazz is race music, by which I do not mean that one
need be overtly cognizant of race to appreciate it, nor that
jazz musicians need to be African Americans. Nonetheless,
the nature of jazz, its soul, is African-American. Other
important characteristics of jazz include swing, the blues, and
expression of the individual. I shall speak about swing now,
and comment on the others later.
Swing is good, out of place in much music, but
undeniably a good musical characteristic. Swing is difficult to
define. It requires that the music neither speed up nor slow
down, thus betraying its origin in dance. Fifty years ago, in a
famous albeit imperfect treatment of the phenomenon, Andre
Hodeir noted: "In jazz, the feeling of relaxation does not
follow a feeling of tension but is present at the same
moment." And, "Swing is possible ... only when the beat,
though it seems perfectly regular, gives the impression of
moving inexorably ahead .... " 2
A well-known example of swing can occur in consecutive
eighth notes that are played such that the note on the beat
lasts longer than the note off the beat. [Musical example 2;
Appendix 2, Swing Eighths] How much longer one note lasts
than another varies and presents a notational challenge that is
usually and wisely ignored. One does not learn about swing
from written examples, and besides, this depiction is very
narrow, pertaining only to consecutive notes of equal
notational value. We shall consider a more subtle and
complex example of swing later.
Now that we have skirted the question of greatness and
provided a loose description of jazz, we might reasonably
wonder: why even ask if there is any great jazz? Empirically,
one can discern the influence of African-American music all
�BARBERA
7
over the globe, from the blues revival in 1960s England to the
second-hand influence of the Beatles throughout the Western
world, India, and the Far East, from the popular music of subSaharan Africa to the internet-transported pop music of
today. There are a handful of exceptions: the Nazis banned
this kind of music, and it is prohibited in some strict Muslim
societies. But by and large, blues, jazz, and African-American
music in general can be heard all over the world, in its
original forms as well as in myriad adaptations and dilutions.
Of the various sub-types of African-American music, jazz
is clearly the most sophisticated, the highest, by which I mean
the most developed and complex. Thus I maintain with little
or no reservation that jazz is the great music of the \Xlestern
world over the past one hundred years; but here I am using
'great' to mean hegemonic. Pervasive influence is insufficient
for us to canonize the music as great in our terms, as worthy
of our study, but it is sufficient reason for us to consider it.
Our aim here is to begin to evaluate the musical merit of jazz.
What are the qualities of jazz that might make it great in
the sense of The Republic or Euclid's Elements of Geometry
or The Brothers Karamazov? Here the long list of what is
ordinary about jazz intrudes, the reasons why jazz for all of
its charms is not great, but in fact rather common. I shall
address five aspects: setting, structi1re, boredom, recording,
and individuality.
Setting
We can go right back to our opening example to start
working on our list. The object of scrutiny is a performance,
a live recording. (Let us just agree to use the common if
somewhat nonsensical terminology of "live recording" to
distinguish recordings made in front of an audience from
recordings made in a studio.) The piece, "Split Kick" by
Horace Silver, is not written down in the traditional sense.
The performance is an isolated event occurring on a Sunday
night in February 1954, in a nightclub. People drink in nightclubs and talk and eat while the musicians are playing. Jazz
�8
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
has made it into the concert hall, but most often its setting is
one of entertainment and amusement. The use of 'noble' in
such a context seems overdressed and proud.
Blakey's quintet had been playing at Birdland for the
entire week, two sets a night. But these musicians were not a
working group, having been pulled together for the specific
purpose of that week's performances leading up to a live
recording. 3
Let us not ignore the spoken introduction. William
Clayton "Pee Wee" Marquette was the short-statured m.c.
who worked also as doorman at Birdland. He lived upstairs,
took his meals there, and "touch[ed] the guys in the band for
money. "4 Pee Wee reasoned that his promotion of the
musicians entitled him to a commission. Pee Wee also carried
with him an adjustable butane cigarette lighter set at the
maximum: apparently the sight of a two-foot flame shooting
up in the dark, basement nightclub provided a thrill to
patrons. 5 Does great music need a pitchman with a flamethrower?
At nightclubs, jazz musicians usually give two performances per night, and sometimes three on weekends. The
Village Vanguard, an old-style, cash-only jazz club in New
York, books groups Tuesday through Sunday, with performances at 9 and 11 on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and
Sunday; 9, 11, and 1 on Friday and Saturday. That's not art;
that's work!
Therefore, the setting for jazz is common.
Structure
"Split Kick" is a contrafact that relies on the standard, 32measure structure and harmony of a popular song, that is, on
a small, narrow, and fragile framework. 6 A structure like this
is central to almost all improvisation-this is in part why free
jazz blew itself up and did so fairly quickly. What did Mozart
do with this structure? There are his variations on themes,
usually for keyboard, which doubtless are close to transcriptions of improvisations. They show Mozart not at his best-
�BARBERA
9
one might even say 'worst' except that worst and Mozart's
music don't really go together. The variations are boring and
lack intensity, just one elaboration after another. The
structure of theme and variations imposes in most cases
limitations of harmony, meter, and phrase. There are a few
instances of jazz that break out of this mold, generally
ambitious and pretentious endeavors. If jazz were to be great,
it seems to me it must work within and simultaneously
transcend by some means the limitation of theme-andvariation structure.
Boredom
Structural limitations lead to the indisputable fact that vast
stretches of jazz performances are boring/ One might make
the same remark about other works of art, literature,
philosophy, and so forth. I shall not mention those works on
the program that I find most tedious, with the exception of
Tristan tmd Isolde. The conclusion of that opera is glorious by
any measure and stands perfectly well as good music, severed
from what comes before it. But part of its true glory rests in
relief, or release, the sense that the bad trip of the past four
hours is about to end.
We do not read all ancient geometers, do not study all
Viennese classical composers, do not read all enlightenment
philosophers. There is a fair amount of material attributed to
Euclid that we never look at, and for that matter we read only
about half of The Elements of Geometry. We have time to do
only so much, and besides, much of what we skip is boring.
With jazz, in a misguided sense of fairness-everyone gets
a turn-we have drum solos and bass solos, most of the
former and virtually all of the latter being boring to listen to.
This is not to question in the least the nearly indispensable
roles played by drums and bass in making good jazz. But all
sorts of solos by melodic or chording instruments are also
boring. My friend Stevie Curtin, a guitarist, says that there is
a lot of killing time in jazz. Such a notion is related to the
labor of the entertainer, and is of a lower order artistically
�10
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
than the boredom that is composed into works with an
intention of ultimate release or exhilaration.
Recording Industry
Since the 1920s, jazz has been disseminated not only to its
audience but also to its future practitioners largely by means
of recordings. To cite just one sequence: Lester Young listened
to the recordings of Frankie Trumbauer, Charlie Parker to
those of Lester Young, Lou Donaldson. and just about
everyone else to those of Charlie Parker. The recording
industry is a business, and most decisions regarding what gets
recorded and who hears it are made with an eye toward
turning a profit. All art and literature might be constrained to
some degree by the practicalities of life, but the short-term
demands of the free market hardly allow for the unfettered
and ennobling expression of the human spirit.
Worse still, the idiom of jazz, which depends upon
spontaneous invention, is disseminated in recordings that are
hardly products of spontaneity. Records are made by
acoustical engineers and then marketed. No doubt the live
recording is an attempt to mitigate this apparently contradictory relationship. Michael MacDonald, an audio
technician, producer of jazz records, and graduate of St.
John's College, mentioned to me that his goal as producer of
a "Live at ... " recording "was to place the listener in the
second row of tables, in from the stage." 8 To some extent, I
believe such recordings are effective. Think of our opening
example: it is as if we really are at Birdland; we can visualize
Pee Wee Marquette on the stage; we can see the musicians
taking their places; we imagine that the music is produced
spontaneously before us.
Alas, in this case there is some deception. From the Blue
Note documents sent to me by Michael Cuscuna, I conclude
that "Split Kick" was recorded in the middle of the third set
of five sets of recordings made that evening. Marquette says,
"We're bringing back to tl1e bandstand at this time, ladies and
�BARBERA
II
gentlemen, the great Art Blakey and his wonderful group .... "
Were they really coming back to the bandstand, or were they
just sitting there, waiting for the audio technicians to record
an introduction ?9
The Individual
In a list of the hallmarks of jazz, Gunther Schuller has placed
primary emphasis on the development by the performer of a
unique tone or tone color. 10 Schuller argues that the more
resistant the instrument, trumpet versus alto saxophone for
example, the more important it is to develop such a tone.
This idea characterizes jazz no differently than one might
describe pop singing-it all comes down to some captivating
tone color. In thinking especially about Miles Davis, a master
of various tones, I thought that Schuller might be right.
[Musical Example 3]
How to characterize Davis's tone? Variety: brassy notes,
bent notes, dirty notes, decaying notes, breathy notes. One
trumpet sound, in fact, seems to be pitchless, or composed of
many pitches, all breath. Writers have used various terms to
describe the color of Davis's tone. To me it seems first and
foremost to be fragile but inherently contradictory, both
harsh and delicate at the same time. An intended accolade
given to some popular and jazz musicians and singers is that
they could have played classical music, or they could have
sung opera. I am thinking of Sarah Vaughan in this regard. It
is safe to say, with that tone Miles never could have played
classical music.
In review, jazz is common, not great, because:
1. It is performed primarily in nightclubs;
2. It relies on the structure of theme and
variations;
3. In many instances it is boring, exuding a
workman-like or laborious quality;
4. It is controlled by the recording industry;
5. It is obsessed with tone color.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
12
From these remarks, one might think that I was called in to
help put down an insurrection of jazz rebels seeking to
contaminate the St. John's program with their music. To
generalize, the issue that I am placing before you is one of
entertainment versus ennoblement, that is to say, refreshing
versus new and improved. Thus far, I have been making the
case for jazz as entertainment, and as I attempt to show some
ennobling qualities of jazz, you will see that we never leave
entertainment and its limitations far behind.
*
*
*
There are many great jazz musicians about whom I have to
say only that they deserve lectures of their own. In addition,
strong, fruitful influences, like Latin music, important issues
regarding the composition of the jazz audience, and widely
celebrated and influential recordings do not figure in my
remarks. Thus my remarks are not broadly representative of
jazz, although I hope that they touch on its character. Most of
early jazz and all recent developments are also absent, which
betrays my prejudices and age.
Rather than great jazz musicians, let us ask if there is
simply a great jazz recording, or more narrowly, a great jazz
solo. We turn first of all to the great man of jazz, Louis
Armstrong, who almost single-handedly transformed his
work into one that revolves around the exceptional
individual.
Here is an excerpt from "Hotter Than That" recorded by
Armstrong and his Hot Five in 1927. The excerpt includes a
polyphonic, eight-measure introduction, then three choruses
of 32 measures each, followed by a call-and-response passage
between voice and guitar. I direct your attention especially to
the first and third choruses where we hear Armstrong first as
cornetist and then as vocalist. Despite the relatively primitive
recording conditions, it is abundantly clear to me why this
jazz was called 'hot'. I also call your attention, although it is
hardly necessary, to the latter half of the third chorus where
�BARBERA
13
Armstrong sings in 3/4 meter against the prevailing 4/4 meter.
[Musical example 4]
What I find truly remarkable about this vocal passage is
how Armstrong extricates himself from the 3/4-meter
pattern. He does not do so abruptly, but rather before
returning to 4/4 he follows the ten measures of 3/4 with a
measure of 12/8, whose off beats do not jibe with either the
4/4 or the 3/4 pattern. Jazz writers comment on the interchange between Armstrong and guitarist Lonnie Johnson that
follows this passage, although I sense a letdown at this point
after the brilliance of Armstrong's cornet playing and his
stunning scat singing.
"Hotter Than That" is a very important piece in the
history of jazz, but I feel the need to make some excuses for
it-primitive recording, no drums, a time-killing piano vamp.
Let us consider a somewhat more modern piece. A quick
search on the internet produced the following testimonials: 11
1. Terell Stafford, who has been hailed as "one of
the great players of our time, a fabulous trumpet
player" by piano legend McCoy Tyner, cites as one
of his most profound musical influences Clifford
Brown's rendition of "Cherokee."
2. On bandleader Bob January's website My
Favorite Things, under "My favorite recordings,"
there is a short list that contains Clifford Brown's
"Cherokee."
3. Trumpeter Woody Shaw, in an interview for
Down Beat [Aug. 1978], said: "I'll never forget
[Brown's "Cherokee"]. It just haunted me. Such a
beautiful dark tone. Clifford more or less shaped
my conception of what I wanted to sound like."
4. On a site that seemed to be connected to
Springfield Public School District 186, Springfield,
Illinois, in a section entitled "Entertainment:
Rediscovering classic jazz," Justin Shields cites
"one of the greatest jazz recordings in history, the
�14
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
classic 'Cherokee' [by Clifford Brown]."
5. And on a blog entitled Corn Chips and Pie:
Chunky nuggets, Millicent posted the following
[May 3, 2006]. "Let me tell you something: if I
played the trumpet (well, I did once, in the sixth
grade), I would transcribe every single note of
Clifford Brown's solo ... of 'Cherokee,' and I would
work on it every day of my life. Finally, at age 97,
I would master it, and every single resident of my
nursing home on Mars would shit himself in
wonder and awe. Then I would die."
Perhaps we should take a listen. We hear the introduction,
the tune or head, and then two choruses of improvisation by
Clifford Brown. A word about the introduction: it is a
pejorative cliche about the music of native Americans, but it
functions well in setting up the rapid, soaring, pentatonic
melody. [Musical example 5]
Clifford Brown's solo is truly exhilarating, especially the
last quarter of his first chorus with its breathless overflowing
of notes. The remaining solos on this performance by other
musicians are good, but certainly not in a league with
Brown's. So one experiences a let-down of sorts in the latter
half of the piece. Indeed, the same thing happens in Brown's
solo itself: the second chorus, as fine as it is, cannot match the
first. The bar has been set too high, too soon, having the
effect of a denouement that lasts too long.
Now I would like to turn to a jazz solo that I think is
great, on Frank Wess's "Segue In C,'' performed by Count
Basie and his orchestra at Birdland in 1961. The arrangement
of the piece is masterful, but I want to home in on the first
solo after Basie's introduction, Budd Johnson playing tenor
saxophone. Johnson was a highly regarded and widely
traveled musician, but it is safe to say that his is not a
household name, not even in some jazz circles. We shall hear
the last introductory chorus by Basie, followed by Johnson's
solo.
�BARBERA
15
Johnson's solo lacks the dazzling virtuosity that is heard
on "Cherokee." Rather it comprises six beautifully designed,
integrated blues choruses. Here we have a successful attempt
to overcome the inherent limitation of the theme-andvariation structure. Johnson has fashioned each chorus as a
melodic and emotional succession to the previous one, and
with a musical sense for the shape of the entire set of six. The
first is restrained, sweet-toned, and bubbles over with swing,
in part owing to the entrancing rhythm section. Indeed, much
of the music produced by Basie's orchestra can be taken as
exemplars of swing. The second chorus expands the register,
emphasizing tone 5, and ends with repeated tone 6 as a
springboard to a further expansion of the register to tone 8
in the third chorus. In the third and fourth choruses, the wind
instruments from the orchestra accompany the soloist with
riffs. The fourth chorus is marked at the beginning by a
quotation of "I Dream Of Jeannie With The Light Brown
Hair," which I note solely to orient the listener. The fifth
chorus is the emotional high point of the solo, containing
loud, long, high blue thirds leading into the first and fifth
measures. The sixth chorus, the denouement, is as subtle and
effective as the first. It begins with repeated C's, tone 1, and
ends with an almost self-effacing descent down to low tone 3.
[Musical example 6]
I have also attempted to notate the first three-plus
measures of the sixth chorus to emphasize an aspect of swing.
[Appendix 2, Triplets] Excluding subtleties of intonation, and
even assuming that the rhythmic designation of the individual
notes is approximately correct, where does one place the last
note, B-flat, of the example? In other words, is it the third
part of a triply divided half measure that falls late (indicated
by the arrow pointing right), or is it an anticipation of the
downbeat of the next measure (indicated by the arrow
pointing left)? Probably neither. [Musical example 7]
What we hear is the soloist fall behind the beat. Triplets
can produce the effect of speeding up or slowing down
depending upon the durational value to which the ear hears
�16
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
them as an alternative. In this case, the triplets in and of
themselves produce a drag on the beat, and Budd Johnson is
playing the triplets progressively slower. The passage is made
even more effective by the early appearance of the B-flat. This
is the note that transforms the tonic harmony of C major into
a secondary dominant chord pointing to the subdominant
harmony of measure 5 in the chorus. The secondary
dominant has occurred throughout the piece in measure four,
but in this case the phrase is truncated, at least theoretically,
by the omission of a second occurrence of the note C.
Therefore, the transformational B-flat arrives just a little bit
early even though the triplets are gradually slowing down.
The ear and the heart make sense of this.
Why don't we stop here and canonize "Segue In C"? I
have already mentioned that the piece is well orchestrated
and unfolds beautifully. There are a couple of written-out
ensemble passages to come as well as a trombone solo. The
latter is the problem. The trombone solo is not bad, and the
audience at Birdland that night seemed to like it, but in fact it
is no match for Johnson's solo, and at times seems downright
crude. It effectively diminishes the work.
With the examples by Louis Armstrong, Clifford Brown,
and Budd Johnson, we have encountered the problems or
dangers of seeking greatness: (1) in a recording; (2) in an
improvisation; (3) in a whole that consists of a series of
contributions by different individuals. I shall return to this
example by Budd Johnson at the end, but let us move on.
What is the work? In most cases we have books, writings
assembled and organized at some time and place into what
are now books with titles like the Elements of Geometry or
the Critique of Pure Reason. In some cases our works are the
realized performances of musical scores, for example Bach's
St. Matthew Passion. In other cases, somewhat more
problematic for us at St. John's, but not really for our
conception of the work, the object resides in a museum,
Leonardo's Mona Lisa or Picasso's Guernica, for example.
�17
BARBERA
With jazz, the nature of improvisation turns the work into
an action. Certainly there are instances of improvisations
becoming fixed compositions.' 2 Nevertheless, the very
essence of jazz seems to entail spontaneous music making,
real-time poiesis. Charlie Parker's legendary status in the
world of jazz rests in part on his unmatched ability to
produce unique improvisations repeatedly, even on multiple,
consecutive takes of the same tune in the recording studio.
Ted Gioia addresses this problem in The Imperfect Art:
Reflections 011 jazz and Modem Culture. He proposes to
develop an "aesthetics of imperfection." Gioia writes, " ... the
virtues we search for in other art forms-premeditated
design, balance between form and content, an overall
symmetry-are largely absent in jazz." And later, "our
interest in jazz, it would seem, is less a matter of our interest
in the perfection of the music, and more a result of our
interest in the expressiveness of the musician ... [whose
performances) are judged ... not by comparison with some
Platonic ideal of perfection but by comparison with what
other musicians can do under similar conditions. Our interest
lies primarily in the artist and only secondarily in the art." 13
On first reading, such a suggestion seems to imply a kind
of hagiography of individuals, in short, a study of great men
and their deeds. The achievements of Alexander the Great are
indeed great, and conceivably we might sit around and
discuss how he did it. In that discussion, the contributions of
some participants would be more valuable than others, but
likely so because of experience or at least outside reading. I
presume that an appreciation of jazz does not entail an
interest in this man or that, in Louis Armstrong or Charlie
Parker, but rather in the artist. We might be amazed at the
man who can play the fastest, or the highest, or the loudest
on a given instrument, but certainly this amazement differs
from our enchantment with Clifford Brown's solo on
"Cherokee."
As listeners to jazz, we marvel not at the highest or
loudest or strangest note, but at that consecution of notes
- -----------
---~
--------------
--
�18
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
aptly fitted to the tune, at a specific time and place, on a
specific instrument or instruments. If in so doing we are
studying great men, we are doing so only while they are
actually performing the deeds that make them great.
This brings us to a reconsideration of individuality, which
previously I had listed among those characteristics that make
jazz common. There the subject was tone color, that quality
of sound that might be uniquely identified with a performer.
A unique sound is of some interest owing to the originality
and skill needed to produce it, but it is hardly a principle of
great music. It is, at best, an ingredient.
There may be in jazz, however, a sense of the individual
far more significant than unique tone color. Part of Louis
Armstrong's great achievement during the 1920s was to make
jazz a soloist's music in place of the quasi-egalitarian ethos of
collective improvisation. His effect on jazz was analogous to
what Babe Ruth did for baseball, making it a slugger's game.
Since Armstrong, nearly all jazz has been concerto music,
music that requires an ensemble, but only to throw into relief
and to support the music of the individual.
The jazz soloist, the individual, goes about his work in
connection with the blues. The connection is in fact threefold. First, there is the structure, usually tripartite, built on
strong harmonic pillars. Second, there is the blue tonality
with its characteristic tone 3, its subtonic, and its embellishment of tone 5. Third, there is the sentiment, the lament
that conveys the soul of jazz. It is this third meaning of the
blues that is of paramount importance in defining the role of
the jazz soloist.
Lament underpins much jazz, but not in such a way that
hearing jazz (or blues) is a sad experience for the listener.
Quite the opposite. The listener, through the music, has his
cares-not necessarily woes-articulated in a way that
surpasses his own ability to express them. Blues guitarist
Brownie McGhee went so far as to reverse the relationship
ordinarily expressed by "having the blues." He said, "The
�BARBERA
19
blues was in the cradle with me rockin'. I never had the blues.
The blues had me. My cradle would rock without anybody
rockin' it. " 14 For the listener, something like catharsis takes
place, but not in the sense that the listener pities or fears a
representation of truly pitiable beings or frightful conditions.
The listener's condition or lament, rather, is transformed in
the musical expression and, if not lifted from her shoulders,
is at least lifted up before the community and to God. The
jazz soloist is a priest.
As is the case with most works of art, the expression is
individual, particular. The sentiment is not ''Abandonment
and infidelity are evil" but rather "My baby done left me."
Blues musician Bill Broonzy said, "It's a natural thing that no
two human beings had blues the same way." 15 Expressions by
and of the individual are hardly unique to music or to the
United States, but in this country there has existed over the
past two centuries a remarkably and perhaps uniquely fertile
ground for the sprouting up and growth of a musical idiom
that so expresses the soul. The setting is, of course, a special
case of the melting pot, a fertile ground that includes the
contradiction of enslavement of Africans sanctioned by a
government that in spirit may be the best attempt so far to
secure individual liberty in the context of society and its
responsibilities. The contradiction is enslavement coupled
with insult and irony.
One need not know about the enslavement of Africans in
the United States in order to appreciate jazz, but the existence
of jazz is, in my opinion, unthinkable without the
enslavement. This notion might cause mathematical minds
with a taste for justice to worry about or question the
goodness of the world: the price for a great artistic development being cruelty and dehumanizing social structure.
Such a thought-if there were not any cruelty, there would
not be any jazz-puts emphasis in the wrong place. The
world is a wonder, aspects of which may be considered in
terms of equations. (For those of you familiar with The
�20
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Brothers Karamazov, one might think of the difference
between Ivan and Zosima.)
A brief review: after considering an argument for jazz as
common, jazz as entertainment, we have been considering the
possibility of something greater. We have heard excerpts from
legendary solos by Louis Armstrong and Clifford Brown, and
a solo by Budd Johnson that overcomes the limitation of
theme and variations and in so doing achieves integrity. From
these examples we were required to consider what is the jazz
work, and this in tnrn led us to think about the jazz soloist as
an individual who, in the context of the blues, makes a
connection with the individual listener.
I have proposed an image of the priest for the jazz soloist,
but I want to emphasize the limited, thoroughly Western
notion that I have in mind. I do not see the soloist as a kind
of African tribal leader, or even as a Levite. In other words,
although the soloist serves as an intermediary, taking upon his
shoulders the burden of articulation, and thus in a way
performs a sacrifice, he does not do it primarily for the good
of the community. That good may be a by-product of his
action. Rather, he does it for you, or for me. He acts for the
individual. His entire musical being is that of the individual,
the autonomous one, cast in relief against the communal
background.
Before concluding with remarks on how the connection is
made, I would like to consider one more musical example, a
candidate for a great work, albeit a miniature. In fact, we
shall hear three versions. The piece is not much more than a
riff, composed by Charlie Parker and set in the 12-measure
blues sequence. Entitled "Now's The Time," it has a
moderate tempo in between the slow lament and the fast
instrumental blues. I call it a dance blues. 16
Parker recorded "Now's the Time" more than once, and
although his solos are almost always interesting, I know of
nothing special about those recordings to recommend them
as great. Here is the beginning of one from 1953-Parker's
solo on this recording is very good-so that we can hear the
�BARBERA
21
basic plan. In lieu of trying to write out the head or theme
based on a single performance by Parker, I have provided the
version published in The Real Book, with a copyright of
1945,17 [Musical example 8; Appendix 2, "Now's The Time"]
Now let us listen to the beginning of a recording by tenor
saxophonist Sonny Rollins from February, 1964. We shall
hear the head, just one blues chorus in this case rather that
two in Parker's, and then four choruses of improvisation.
[Musical example 9]
In my opinion, there are many factors that contribute to
the greatness of this performance: the busy drums; the highly
propulsive bass-clear evidence that you do not need to allot
a solo to the bassist as long as you let him really blow during
the performance; the tone of the sax-narrow or with
minimal vibrato at times, but chock full of pitch variation;
omitted notes, for example measure six of the head; thematic
choruses, the first built around ghost tones in approach to the
tonic, the second and third emphasizing tone 6 in both the
upper and lower registers, the fourth emphasizing tone 2. A
comprehensive analysis would tie together these tones of
emphasis, which function like the recitation tones of improvised psalmody." But here my analytical goal is much smaller
and narrower.
I call your attention to one very brief passage in measure
8 of the second chorus, although I shall gloss over the details.
I have transposed Rollins's solo to F for purposes of
comparison. 19 [Musical example 10; Appendix 2, Rollins,
2:5-8]
Rollins has centered initially on D, tone 6, for this middle
phrase of the blues, measures 5-8, but then there is a startling
flourish, the beginning of which is presented in the last
measure of the example. Assuming that D-flat and C-sharp
are the same notes, you can see that the sixteenth-note run is
a whole-tone scale. The whole-tone passage ruptures the
music; it breaks the groove. But this rupture makes musical
sense. Three or four of the tones comprising the scale are part
of the tonality, a blues in F. The B-natural and the C-sharp
�22
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
however are definitely outside, and these are the notes that
startle us, that give us the tension that accompanies relaxation. I believe that the inspiration for this rupture, and what
makes it work so well, can be found in the accompaniment to
the head.
We hear Ron Carter, the bassist, play a chromatic ascent
in the head in measures 5-8, in a rhythm only approximated
in the written musical example. [Appendix 2, Rollins, head 58] The B-flat and arguably the B-natural and C are also part
of the theme, but what about the C-sharp? The latter note
does not appear in the two recorded versions by Parker that
I am familiar with nor in the written version. [Musical
example 11]
From whom did the chromatic ascent come? Horace
Silver, perhaps? During A Night at Bird/and in 1954, Blakey's
group played "Now's The Time," and the chromatic ascent is
clearly presented by the pianist, Silver. Note that while the Bflat, B-natural, C-natural and their harmonization are played
by the entire ensemble, only Silver plays the C-sharp.
[Musical example 12; Appendix 2, Blakey and Silver, head 58]
Rollins must have heard this recording, and perhaps the
chromatic ascent had been making the rounds for some time
in the performance of "Now's The Time." Ten years separate
the two recordings. 20 When the chromatic ascent is carried to
an extreme of four notes, then we arrive at C-sharp, which
along with B-natural provides the missing tones for a
complete whole-tone scale. It is precisely in this connection
that Rollins is able to push or break the tonality, albeit for a
moment, and to do so with inherent musical logic.
I am not suggesting that Rollins came to his performance
in a fashion as pedantic as my presentation, although in jazz
circles he is famous for his introspection. A close look,
however, at an admittedly very short passage provides an
insight into and possible understanding of the musical
thinking of a jazz genius. Rollins apparently liked the result,
�BARBERA
23
because he plays a very similar passage in measure 7 of the
third chorus. [Musical example 13]
Let us now move from small to large, from consideration
of chromatic passing tones to the general question posed by
the title of the lecture. Have we found a great work of jazz?
Undoubtedly, provided that we stay within the realm of jazz.
The rest of the performance is also very good, with solos by
Herbie Hancock and again by Rollins, with further references
to the whole-tone phrase. But is the work really great? I see
two related reasons for saying "No." First, it is a recording,
and second, the recording took place in a recording studio.
There is no way around the first problem, one that is shared
by virtually all music that we study and to some degree by just
about every work on the St. John's program insofar as the
books are translations made from texts established by editors.
I feel that the problem is more serious with jazz, with that
musical idiom in which, as I have claimed, we are entertained
and perhaps ennobled by the individual in the very act of
individuation.
Attempting to solve the second problem, the studio
recording, is a temptation that I find irresistible. The solution
is a temptation because we know that in most cases the "live
recording" is also somewhat of a fabrication, a piecing
together by recording engineers of recorded excerpts. This is
the case with A Night at Bird/and. The reason why the
temptation is irresistible is because the engineers often do a
good job.
By a good job, I mean that the recording approximates
the real thing, and I make this claim from experience. I know,
I have experienced the real thing, an ennobling performance
by a jaz.z musician. At one point I considered apologizing for
what amounts to a dressed-up version of "jazz in my life."
Further reflection on the subject inclines me to think that the
personal aspect of the subject is in fact central. Jazz is about
individuals, it is music by the individual and for the
individual. It is not only concerto music, but concerto music
best heard in its actual, spontaneous development, and best
�24
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
heard up close, that is, as chamber music, in a setting where
the listener relates intimately and personally to the
performer. Our chambers are nightclubs.
The Blakey performance at Birdland is about as good a
recorded live performance as any that I know of. It is a
recording and thus artificial, or doubly artificial, but it
captures a sense of spontaneity and improvisation. The music
and the musicians are of high caliber. And they were cookin'
that night. Nevertheless, there may be no individual piece,
not even an individual solo that we could call great, not on a
par with the performances that we heard by Louis Armstrong,
Clifford Brown, Budd Johnson, and Sonny Rollins.
Where does this leave us? Even if we were to decide that
there are great performances of jazz that could be revisited
repeatedly, those performances would be relatively brief: five,
ten, fifteen minutes. There are a few examples in jazz of
extended compositions and performances, but by and large,
the great performances of jazz are miniatures. Such being the
case hardly excludes jazz from our consideration. We might
approach a performance like Sonny Rollins's "Now's The
Time" in a way similar to our approach to a motet by Josquin
des Prez or a sonnet by Shakespeare. Were we to try for
something larger, longer, my inclination would be toward the
Live at ... genre rather than the extended work-A Love
Supreme-or the thematic collection of recordings, for
example Out of Time. The problem with my preference, A
Night at Bird/and, is that we know it is an artifice, a collection
of miniatures pieced together to give the impression of a
whole. Its advantage, on the other hand, is the success of the
ruse, the conveyance of a sense of spontaneity spread out
over an evening's work, and this is crucial. For a great work
of jazz must convey the sense of the artist at work, that work
being a priestly lament that strives for, that longs for, that
articulates ... and here words fail me. I cannot say what jazz
articulates. Jazz, I believe, really is about something, albeit
ineffable. Furthermore, jazz has meaning, not just musical
meaning, but meaning as jazz. It exudes the spirit of America,
�BARBERA
25
especially North America. Freedom of the individual is
perhaps the characteristic most commonly associated with
jazz, and although this seems to be generally true, the peculiar
qualities of lament, sacrifice, and beauty are missing in this
characterization.
Let us narrow our scope by returning to the example of
Budd Johnson's solo in "Segue in C." The structure of theme
and variations is a limitation that hinders musical development, but at the same time it provides the channel through
which improvisation, individuation can take place. 21 Unlike
with literature and the non-temporal arts, with jazz the clock
is ticking. Unlike with the music of Mozart, with jazz the
clock is ticking now. Jazz is urgent, and so we feel it when
Budd Johnson falls behind the beat. We feel it not because we
fear that Johnson is going to lose the beat, but rather because
we can feel his control, his autonomy. [Musical example 14;
Appendix 2, Triplets] The blues and song form provide the
foundations of phrase and harmony that allow for such free
elaboration, that allow for elaborations about the
autonomous individual.
Time flows. Music forms time. Improvised music forms
time in time, perhaps self-referentially. Jazz, if it is great,
forms time in time in history: this individual, this place and
time, your lament, but made beautiful, transcendent.
I do not know if there is great recorded jazz. The portion
of this account that has sought such a work, that has
attempted to determine its characteristics, and that has
argued diffidently in behalf of a few cases, is shamelessly
based on personal testimony. In the final analysis, no amount
of explanation on my part will make jazz or any individual
performance great for you, just as I am powerless to persuade
you, ultimately, that the Mozart-da Ponte operas are great.
Knowledgeable and sensitive human beings point to these
works and tell us they are great. Personally I am certain in one
case, Mozart, and favorably inclined but uncertain in the
other.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
26
Appendix 1: Recorded Music Examples
Musical examples can be heard online by visiting the St. John's Review
webpage (www.stjohnscollege.edu/news/pubs/review.shtml) and clicking
the link "Jazz Examples to Accompany 'Is there Great Jazz?' by Andre
Barbera".
1. Split Kick
2. Now's The Time
Art Blakey Quintet, A Night at Bird/and, val. 1
Clifford Brown (tp), Lou Donaldson (as),
Horace Silver (p), Curly Russell (h), Art
Blakey (d), February 21, 1954, Birdland, New
York City
0:00- 0:58 (Marquette's introduction) and
0:00- 1:05 (Blakey, "Split Kick")
Sonny Rollins Quartet, The Essential Sonny
Rollins: The RCA Years
Sonny Rollins (ts), Herbie Hancock (p), Ron
Carter (b), Roy McCurdy (d), February 14,
1964, New York City
0:00-0:09
3. I Thought About You
Miles [)avis Quintet, The Complete Concert:
1964
Miles Davis (tp), George Coleman (ts),
Herbie Hancock (p), Ron Carter (h), Tony
Williams (p), February 12, 1964,
Philharmonic Hall, Lincoln Center, New York
City
0:00-1:13
4. Hotter Than That
Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five, The Hot
Fiues and Hot Sevens, vol. 3
Louis Armstrong (cor, voc), Kid Ory (tb),
Johnny Dodds (d), Lil Armstong (p), Johnny
St. Cyr (bj), Lonnie Johnson (gt), December
13, 1927, Chicago
0:00-2:16
5. Cherokee
Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet, Clifford
Brown's Fittest Hour
Clifford Brown (tp), Harold Land (ts), Richie
Powell (p), George Morrow (h), Max Roach
(d), February 25, 1955, New York City
0:00-2:48
�BARBERA
6. Segue In C (Alternate)
7. Segue in C (Alternate)
27
Count Basie Orchestra, Basie at Bird/and
Thad Jones, Sonny Cohn, Lennie Johnson,
Snooky Young (tp), Quentin Jackson, Henry
Coker, Benny Powell (tb), Marshall Royal (cl,
as), Frank \Vess (as, ts, fl, arr), Frank Foster,
Budd Johnson (ts), Count Basie (p), Freddie
Green (gt), Eddie Jones (b), Sonny Payne (d),
June 27, 1961, Bird land, New York City
1:04-3:28
Count Basie Orchestra
3:02-3:12
8. Now's The Time
Charlie Parker Quartet, The Essential Charlie
Parker
Charlie Parker (as), AI Haig (p), Percy Heath
(b), Max Roach (d), July 28, 1953, Fulton
Recording Studio, New York City
0:00-0:37
9. Now's The Time
Sonny Rollins Quartet
0:00 -1:40
10. Now's The Time
Sonny Rollins Quartet
0:36-0:52
11. Now's The Time
Sonny Rollins Quartet
0:00-0:15
12. Now's The Time
Art Blakey Quintet, A Night at Bird/and, vol. 2
0:00- 1:39
13. Now's The Time
Sonny Rollins Quartet
0:36-1:10
14. Segue inC (Alternate) Count Basic Orchestra
3:02-3:12
Play List
To locate the music examples on www.rhapsody.com, search by album
title, then by song title.
Album Title
Song Title
Basie At Birdland
Segue In C (Alternate Take)
Clifford Brown's Finest Hour
Cherokee
The Complete Concert: 1964
I Thought About You
The Essential Charlie Parker
Now's The Time
The Essential Sonny Rollins: The RCA Years Now's The Time
�28
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
The Hot Fives And Hot Sevens, Vol. 3
Hotter Than That
A Night At Birdland, Vol. 1
Announcement
Marquette
A Night At Birdland, Vol. 1
Split Kick
A Night At Birdland, Vol. 2
Now's The Time
Appendix 2
Swing Eighths
Triplets
Now's The Time
by Pee Wee
�BARBERA
29
Rollins, 2:5-8
Rollins, head 5-8
Blakey and Silver, head 5-8
Notes
1
Here is Pee \Y/ee Marquette's introduction:
"Ladies and Gentlemen, as you know, we have something special down
here at Birdland this evening, a recording for Blue Note Records. \Vhcn
you applaud for the different passages, your hands goes right over the
records there, so when they play 'em over and over, throughout the
country, you may be some place, and uh say: 'Well, that's my hands on
one of those records that I dug down at Birdland.'
We're bringing back to the bandstand at this time, ladies and gentlemen,
the great Art Blakey and his wonderful group, featuring the new trumpet
sensation, Clifford Brown; Horace Silver on piano; Lou Donaldson on
alto, Curly Russell is on bass.
And let's get together and bring Art Blakey to the bandstand with a great
big round of applause.
How 'bout a big hand, there, for Art Blakey.
Thank y' all."
�30
2
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence (1956; rev. ed., New York: Grove Press,
1979), 195 and 198.
3
I presume that the recording was made over the course of the last night
of the engagement because this specific collection of five musicians was
not a working group. Horace Silver recalls the recording lasting for two
nights over the weekend rather than one (HS 12/20/96). [This format
indicates the date of conversations between the author and Lou
Donaldson (LD) and Horace Silver (HS).] Other sources indicate one
night's recording. In 1975, Michael Cuscuna discovered four takes previously ignored or unknown. These were issued on a separate record as
Volume 3 (BNJ 61002). In addition there are according to Cuscuna four
"rejected takes, some not even complete on tape-never to come out."
(Personal correspondence, 1996) The current two-volume set of CDs
contains all preserved material except for the rejected takes (Blue Note
CDP 7 46519 2, DIDX 1130 and CDP 7 46520 2, DIDX 1131).
4
(HS 12/20/96). Lou Donaldson remembers Marquette serving the
function of 'policeman', who had his hands full keeping the often-rowdy
audience in check (LD 12/18/96).
5
Bill Crow, From Bird/and to Broadway (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1992), 88.
6
The harmonic sequence underlying the piece is 'borrowed' from
another song, "There Will Never Be Another You" by Harry \Varren and
Mack Gordon. It is quite common among jazz musicians to compose a
piece by adding a new theme or melody to the harmonies of a popular
song, and this procedure in itself would not seem to disqualify a work
from greatness.
7
Ted Gioia, The Imperfect Art: Reflections 011 Jazz and Modem Culture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 108-109. Gioia quotes Andy
Warhol: "I like to be bored." The author adds: "That much-if not
most-jazz is boring seems scarcely undeniable; given its extreme
dependence on improvisation, jazz is more likely than other arts to
ramble, to repeat, to bore."
8
Personal correspondence, June 26, 2005.
9
The same holds for "\Vee-Dot" on A Night at Bird/and. Marquette says,
"How 'bout a big hand, for Art Blakey, Art Blakey and his wonderful allstar[s]." But the recording documents show that this version of "\VeeDot" was recorded in the middle of a set.
10
"What Makes Jazz Jazz?" Musings: The Musical \Vorlds of Gunther
Schuller: A Collection of His Writings (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1986), 27. This is a talk given by Schuller at Carnegie Hall on
Dec. 3, 1983. " ... jazz is, unlike many other musical traditions both
�BARBERA
31
European and ethnic/non·Western, a music based on the free unfettered
expression of the individual. This last is perhaps the most radical and
most important aspect of jazz, and that which differentiates it so dramatically from most other forms of music-making on the face of the
globe ... so typically American and democratic .. .I would like particularly
to dwell on one dear way in which jazz distinguishes itself from almost
all other musical expressions ... and that is the way jazz musicians play
their instruments, with particular regard to the aspect of sonority, timbre,
and tone color.,
1l The internet addresses for (1)- (3) and (5) are given here; (4) is no
longer available.
www.terellstafford.com/main.html
www.bobjanuary.com/favorite.httn
www. woodyshaw.com/downbeat 1_cberg. pdf#search =%22Woody%20Sha
w%20DownBeat%22
http://cornchipsandpie.blogspot.com/2006/05/chunky-nuggets.html
12 Portions of the Rite of Spring apparently came from Stravinsky playing
around on the piano. Conversely, jazz musicians repeat solos, a famous
example being Coleman Hawkins's "Body and Soul," the thinking being
that if you have come up with a good solo, why mess with it. Lou
Donaldson admitted to engaging in an activity nearly the opposite to
learning one's solos (LD 7/8/96). In response to my question regarding
whether he practiced his instrument any longer, he said "No." Rather, he
has worked out a way of practicing on stage, at gigs. He plays songs in a
variety of keys and tempos, which amounts to practice.
13
Gioia, The Imperfect Art, 55 and 101.
14
Interview by Studs Terkel of Big Bill Broonzy (vocal), Sonny Terry
(harmonica), and Brownie McGhee (guitar), "Keys to the Highway," May
7, 1957, Chicago, WFMT.
15
Ibid.
16
Indeed another composer, Andy Gibson, combined the riff with a
simple melody to make "The Hucklebuck/' a popular dance and
recording of the late 1940s.
17
The Real Book, vol. 2, 2nd ed. (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Corporation,
no date), 293. The written example includes only the melody and not the
indicated harmonization.
18 Tone 6 substitutes for tone 5, a slight extension of normal movement.
Tone 2 does not substitute for tone 1 but rather points to it. Tone 2
specifies the end while at the same time leaving open the possibility of
additional choruses, a possibility that is realized by the piano choruses
and two subsequent choruses on saxophone.
�32
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
19 The head appears on the upper staff and Rollins's solo on the lower
staff.
20 Rollins had been working on "Now's the Time." Three weeks earlier,
Jan. 24, 1964, he recorded the piece with the same musicians. That
recording lasts sixteen minutes, four times longer than the one under
consideration. In some ways, it sounds like practice for the real thing. My
version of the Jan. 24 recording seems to be pitched in the key of B! And
even if it is in B-flat, the range for Rollins is a fifth above the range for
the Feb. 14 recording. Note also that Hancock only camps in the Jan. 24
recording, and does very little of that, in the course of the sixteen
minutes, perhaps another indication that this is an experiment in the key
of B major.
21
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann
(New York: Random House, 1966), 213. Necessity and "freedom of the
will" become one in artists.
�33
Preformationism In Biology:
From Homunculi To Genetic
Programs
1-
Jorge H. Aigla, M.D.
I. Introduction
Organic beings come to be. The way in which they do so has
been subject to much speculation and debate. In this paper I
shall review some of the ideas put forth regarding generation,
and argue that ways of thinking and seeing in the study of
development have had weighty influence on other areas of
biology.
II. Development
I should begin with what is perhaps the most notorious image
in all of biology: that of a human sperm containing a
miniature organism (Figure 1). I use the word "image"
advisedly, as this is not a drawing of what is seen, nor a
schematic diagram of an object, simplified in order to aid
understanding. Nicolas Hartsoeker produced it in his 1694
Essay de Dioptrique. 1
We would do well to study it attentively: it has detail,
definition, there is no blurriness, and it depicts a familiar
form. It wishes to suggest that a preformed microscopic
human individual is already present, complete, in the male
Jorge H. Aigla, M.D., has been a Tutor at St. John's College in Santa Fe since
1985. This essay is a modified version of a Friday Night Lecture originally
delivered in Santa Fe on December 6, 2002. The lecture was dedicated to
two friends and retiring coileagues: Hans Von Briesen, Director of
Laboratories, and to the late Ralph Swentzell, Tutor. I again dedicate this
essay to them. The author acknowledges his indebtedness to Professor
Richard Lewontin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard
University for his close reading of the essay followed by his helpful and
insightful comments and suggestions.
�34
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
sex cell. This type of what would come
to be known as "preformationism" is
really a 111<Jrphological pre-existence of
a miniaturized adult homunculus. It
rests folded, patiently, apparently
peacefully, and it is already developed.
Once presumably created, this future
being is simply "awaiting the hour of
its birth." 2 All that needs to happen is
growth of its parts by accretion. This
living being will be engendered, but
was not, strictly speaking, reproduced.
The image's beauty and suggestiveness (and cuteness) are nonetheless
plagued by its unreality: Hartsoeker
never saw it, could never have seen it
(given the state of microscopical
science at his time with absence of
corrected objectives for aberration and
astigmatism, without oil immersion for
increased resolution, and lacking
staining techniques for enhanced
contrast and visibility), and lastly, no
one shall ever be able to see it. It
simply does not exist. Hartsoeker
himself explicitly says only that
perhaps one would see this, if there FIGURE 1
were better instruments. 3
In order to expect to see this, or to be able to claim to
have "seen" this cased figurine, several observations and
mental conceptions have to come together. We shall take a
brief detour in our attempt to understand their confluence.
There are two, and only two, options for understanding
development: either the future being and its parts exist in
smaller form from the very beginning, or the adult parts come
�AIGLA
35
to be as products of development from structures that do not
originally resemble them in the least.
For the former "preformationist" possibility, a miniature
form of the future organism is already present, and development is merely unfolding (what was termed in early days
"evolution"), with growth of pre-existing morphological
entities.
Marcelo Malpighi (who had discovered with the aid of
the microscope the capillaries in the lung just four years after
William Harvey's death-1661) was the earliest proponent of
this view, and gave us several drawings in 1673,4 where the
baby chick is all there, from the start. One may be tempted to
disregard this view as nonsensical, but consider: how is one
to explain an apparent gelatinous blob of unformed matter in
the egg, giving rise to and becoming a chick (or a
salamander)? The puzzle of development was solved (in a
way) with the preformationist hypothesis, and it was
explained in purely mechanical terms: unfolding and
enlargement of pre-existing components. The alternative, so
it seemed to Malpighi and his followers, would have to
postulate a mysterious directiveness to the process of development, a vital and, to them, non-material force.
Two thousand years earlier Aristotle clearly understood
the two possibilities, and perspicuously argued against preformationism: "How will the foetus become greater by addition
of something else if that which is added remain unchanged?
But if that which is added can change, then why not say that
the semen from the very first is of such a kind that blood and
flesh can be made out of it, instead of saying that it itself is
blood and flesh?" 5 And wondering how parts of the embryo
get made, he asserts:
Either all the parts, as heart, lung, liver, eye, and
all the rest, come into being together, or in
succession, as is said in the verse ascribed to
Orpheus, for there he says that an animal comes
into being in the same way as the knitting of a net.
That the former (parts coming into being simulta-
�36
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
neously) is not the fact is plain even to the senses,
for some parts are clearly visible already existing
in the embryo, while others are not. 6
This argument of his is one of temporal succession in what
one observes. He concludes: "If the whole animal or plant is
formed from seed or semen, it is impossible that any part of
it should exist ready made in the semen or seed .... " 7 In
addition, his logical division of bodies into matter with form
inseparable from it, makes possible the whole doctrine of
epigenesis: the possibility of pattern emergent as a process,
like plaiting a net or painting a picture. Aristotle does not
address the further impossible consequence of the preformationists: not only is the organism pre-existent, but in this
already formed being, all of its descendants have to be present
-the so-called theory of encasement or fitting.
Trying to make clear the way in which matter and form
jointly come to be in the embryo, Aristotle wrote that "the
female contributes the material for the semen to work upon"'
and that the semen communicates to the material body of that
embryo the power of movement and form.' In this formulation Aristotle is simply being consistent with his notion that
"the mover or agent will always be the vehicle of the form," 10
and also with his conception that "that which produces the
form is always something that possesses it." 11 So the male
provides "the form," what seems to be at once formal,
efficient, and final cause, and the female contributes the
material cause.
Malpighi and Hartsoeker seem to be have clung to these
latter statements of Aristotle, but appear to have disregarded
the same author's foregoing arguments against preformationism. For Aristotle the semen provides the form for the
embryo, not the formed embryo.
Another factor that must have helped Hartsoeker believe
one should eventually be able to see what he delineated is the
observation by Anton van Leeuwenhoek of spermatozoa in
semen in 1680 {which he likened to "animalcules") through
�37
AIGLA
his microscope (Figure 2), which apparently was able to
magnify specimens 270 timesY It should not be forgotten
that a cell theory (of which I shall speak presently) did not yet
exist for Hartsoeker-it would take 150 years for spermatozoa to be identified as cells by Kolliker in 1841.
In any preparation of human semen, seen with the very
best available optics, the folded foetus cannot be seen; it can
only be imagined. In critical microscopy work, it is difficult
for the eye to see what the mind does not know, and the eyes
may well be blinded by what the mind knows. Further, the
eyes, at times, may see what the mind desires. Hartsoeker's
homunculus is a beautiful example of what I would call
wishful proleptic observation being fitted to preconceived
theoretical commitments. Malebrauche has described this
mode of operation: "The mind should not stop at what the
eye sees, for the vision of the mind is far more penetrating
than the vision of the eye." 13 I beg to differ, and would
venture to say, by contrast, that seeiug with the eye of reasou
may not be the best way of looking. Seeing is a complicated
8
FIGURE 2
1
�38
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
matter. Observation is colored by expectation and theory
(preconception). It may not be possible to encounter scientific
"facts" as data, objectively discovered. The wish to see
something may often well determine what is "discovered."
One could hardly blame Hartsoeker for providing us with his
famous image, notwithstanding the fact that he was not
adhering to the dictum our students are repeatedly urged to
follow: "Make sure you do not merely find what you are
looking for!"
Preformationism does not have to deal with the formidable problem of development as such, and Hartsoeker sided
with the "spermist" sub-school in wishing to find the
miniature organism in the male seed (the other school being
the "ovist").
Another microscopist, Wolff, in 17 64, described
"globules" in animal tissues, and when he aimed his good
instrument (by the day's standards) at the developing chick
egg, he saw no minuscule baby chick; and in cross section, he
discerned layers of spherical structures that eventually gave
rise (or differentiated) to an embryonic organism. He
opposed the preformationists, and his "epigenesis!" school
taught that development started from an entirely homogeneous and unformed mass, acted on by an extraneous forcea "vis essentialis" (a force related to being alive). The camps
had been set, and preformationism with its purely mechanistic tendencies, seemed to have been forever discredited, in
favor of an epigenetic process of differentiation, that in its
inception embraced a form of vitalism, and left us with the
gargantuan problem of true development.
III. Cell Theory
That the development of the cell theory itself was influenced
by other theories in biology is not widely recognized. Of
course atomistic speculations from the physical sciences
played a role; but there is more.
�AlGLA
39
c
In 1665 Robert Hooke had observed pores and box-like
structures in cork, which he christened "cells," but he said
nothing of their possible biological meaning.
Schleiden, studying plant tissues, attempted to explain
what he saw in strictly physico-chemical terms. A good
biologist, he knew of Wolff's publications and eliminated
preformationism altogether from anatomy and embryology.
He applied what must have seemed to him "epigenetic"
considerations to cell formation and development, and in
1838 summarized his work 14 (see Figure 3 15 ). He could illafford to think that cells came from cells (which sounded too
much like preformationism), so cells had themselves to
develop. He made the cell nucleus (discovered by Robert
Brown five years earlier) the center of cell formation, calling
it the "cytoblast." The nucleus itself (or the nucleolus, as his
writings are unclear on this point) separated out of the
formative fluid (the "cytoblastema") by a sort of precipitation
in a "mother liquor," and only then, about it condensed the
rest of the cell (the cytoplasm) and its membrane. He emphasized that plants consist exclusively and entirely of cells and
their products, and an early version of the cell theory was
born.
�40
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Notice that for Schleiden cells are mostly structural
elements and without physiological import, nor is there a
continuity of cells or of life in a precise sense. Also, we must
remark, this epigenetic cellular thinking fits well with spontaneous generation.
Schwann, a colleague of Schleiden, accepted this theory
of cell formation, and he deserves credit for extending it to
animals in 1839. 16 He also added some thoughts about
function and metabolism to this intermediate cell theory.
Schwann described the formation of blood corpuscles in
excruciating detail, ascribing also to the precipitated or
crystallized nucleus the power of cell formation de novo.
Let us pause and regard the engraving of Figure 3. After
much consideration I have come to the conclusion that cells
just do not look like this, and I say so after carefully studying
many different plant tissues, and having studied for over
three decades animal tissues nuder the microscope. The only
thing that resembles to any degree this illustration are figures
of the special form of cell death called apoptosis. Apoptosis is
programmed cell death, was characterized by the pathologist
Kerr in 1972, 17 and is now one of the most widely studied
genetic molecular phenomena. Cells that die due to a genetically programmed mechanism in apoptosis show nuclear
shrinkage, condensation, fragmentation, and in contrast to
other forms of cell death (necrosis), exhibit no inflammatory
response. Could Schleiden and Schwann have seen apoptosis
and interpreted it with the eye of their cellular epigenetic
framework? That is, did they take dying cells for cells
forming? It is impossible to tell, as this type of cell death
apparently plays a minor role, if at all, in plant tissues. Or
could perhaps their preparations have had bad fixation and
poor staining, and they be describing artifacts? This is
unlikely. What is possible for me to tell in reference to
Schwann's writings on blood cell formation, is that he was
imposing a chronological order on what he saw statically,
thinking the nucleus of red cells came before their membrane
and cytoplasm, whereas the order of development is precisely
�AIGLA
41
the opposite: the nucleus of red cells becoming smaller and
eventually being extruded, Schwann inferred, with the aid of
the imagination, a dynamic sequence of events in fixed
tissues, and he erred. He wished what he saw to depict and
imply what he wanted.
It is intriguing that the conceptual frame of epigenesis,
and the disproval of preformationism by Wolff in embryology, carried over into cell theory, retarding it and giving it
an originally erroneous mechanism for cell genesis.
This mistake was brilliantly dispelled by the pathologist
Virchow. In 1860, twelve years after Schleiden and Schwann,
he defined the cell as "the ultimate morphological and
functional element in which there is any manifestation of
life. " 18 For Virchow all cells (including abnormal ones like
those found in cancer growths) do come from pre-existing
cells, and he rightly saw Schleiden and Schwann's theory of
free cell formation as nothing but an avatar of de novo
spontaneous generation; and this, before Pasteur's work of
1860 and 1864, disproving once and for all the discontinuity
of life. At last the cell theory developed into its mature form,
and a unity underlying the diversity of living organisms was
established. The word "Biology" (coined by Lamarck and
Treviranus) now, finally, became meaningful.
The capping of the cell theory comes with Walter
Flemming, 19 who in 1879 described cell division or mitosis:
not only did cells come from cells, as Virchow showed, but
now all nuclei come from pre-existing nuclei.
rv: Modern Embryology
Once the sperm and the egg were also recognized to be cells,
investigators turned their eyes to the process of fertilization.
Hertwig20 in 1876 and 1885 determined that this event is due
to the joining of the male and female nuclei. Heredity must
then be due to the transmission of a material substance, and
the male contributes to the new organism some matter as well
as the female (contrary to Aristotle's teachings), and it is the
nucleus that is embodying this matter.
�42
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Van Beneden21 in 1883 saw that the colored stubby bodies
discovered by Flemming in cell division (and now named
chromosomes) played a role in fertilization. Studying the
round worm Ascaris megalocepha/us bivalens, which has four
chromosomes in each adult cell, he observed that two
chromosomes came from the father's sperm and two from the
mother's egg, before the new zygote formed and divided.
Although he does not say so explicitly, the hereditary
substance now seemed to be confined to these nuclear bodies.
The chromosomes then, are equally contributed by the
parents, and are constant in number for the species.
With the recognition that all cells arise from cell division
in adults as well as during embryonic development starting
with the zygote, the next question tackled was: How do cells
become different and give rise to a complex organism?
Let us turn to the experimental embryological work of
Roux, Driesch, and Spemann and Mangold. Roux 22 destroyed
one of the two blastomeres at the two-cell stage in the frog,
and got a half-embryo. Notice his experiment constitutes a
defect study. He concluded that the potency of a cell equals
its fate, and that each cell is self-differentiating, the whole
organism being simply the sum of independently developed
parts. In a sense, he advocated a preformation of limited,
fated, and pre-assigned potentialities, and established embryology as an experimental science of proximate causations and
mechanisms.
Roux's experimental results ran into difficulties with the
work of Driesch. 23 When this investigator separated (not
destroyed) one of the blastomeres of the sea urchin at the
same two-cell stage, he got a half-sized full embryo. Notice
his experiments are isolation studies. These results induced
Driesch to embrace an extreme vitalism, postulating a
nonmechanical entelechy (Factor E). 24 For what machine, if
cut in half, could still function normally? The potency of an
early cell is not preformed, and turns out to be much greater
than its fate. The resulting half-sized embryo strongly
suggests that cells at very early stages of development are
�AIGLA
43
pluripotent. Eventually Driesch's thinking, without a mysterious non-material "entelechy," became known as holistic
organicism: the organism is more than a mere summation of
individual parts added together.
The climax of this part of the story comes with Spemann
and Mangold25 who in 1924 showed that a portion of tissue
from a newt embryo could induce the formation and
production of other tissues, even of an incomplete new newt,
in a recipient. Developmental possibilities, then, are not
totally preformed, and many events in morphogenesis must
be the result of cell-to-cell interactions.
It must be emphasized that in Roux's experiments the
killed cell remained attached to the viable one, and the developing embryo did not "sense" this cell was dead. If the killed
cell had been separated, as in the work of Dreisch, the
embryo would then have compensated (regulated) its development into a (smaller) whole embryo. Driesch's work
reveals that a developing organism is a whole, and that its
plan for differentiation at any time and stage of its embryology lies in the totality of its being. This does not mean that
any and every alteration in a part of an organism will
interfere with the normal development of the rest of the
complete organism-this would be a claim of an extreme
form of wholism. The developmental process is a regulative
one, where the embryo has the ability to grow normally even
when some portions are removed or rearranged. The embryo
is a "harmonious equipotential system"26 because all the
potentially independent parts function together to form an
organism. Driesch's concept of "regulation" implies that cells
must interact with each other in complex ways, and the work
of Spemann and Mangold demonstrates that one tissue can
direct the development of another neighboring tissue. The
small grafted region in their experiments was called "The
Organizer" since it controls the organization of the complete
embryonic body. The organizer is a piece of tissue; tissues are
made up of cells; cells contain nuclei with chromosomes
within.
�44
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
V. Chromosomes
Mendel's work was published in 1865, and only
unearthed in 1900, after much embryological and cytological
work had been performed. Shortly after the re-discovery, in
1902 Boveri 27 united the sciences of embryology and
cytology. In his experiments he demonstrated that normal
development depends not on the number of chromosomes
per se, but in the normal combination of a complete set of
these structures. He managed to fertilize a sea urchin egg with
two sperms, so three sets of chromosomes became apportioned to four cells after the second zygotic division. The
chromosomes were distributed asymmetrically, by chance, to
the daughter cells. When these cells were gently separated
and allowed to develop, only those with at least one whole set
of chromosomes gave rise to a normal individual.
Furthermore, the abnormal embryos were abnormal in
different ways. His conclusion was seminal: chromosomes are
functional individuals, that is, each chromosome must possess
(and give rise to) different qualities.
The same year brought the work of the American Walter
Sutton, 28 who painstakingly documented the continuity and,
�AIGLA
45
more importantly, the distinct individuality and physiological
singularity of chromosomes in the Giant grasshopper. Figure
4 shows his most elegant camera Iucida drawings (not
diagrams or photographs) of chromosome groups. They are
unprecedented and unequaled, even when compared to
modern ones, in resolution and accuracy. Chromosomes are
then continuous in a given species from one generation to
another, from one cell to its descendants, and are also
morphological individuals one from another. They are the
preformed material substrate for heredity and development
in living organisms.
In truth, the chromosomal theory of inheritance, meaning
that chromosomes are the bearers of hereditary factors or
traits, had been established by Boveri and Sutton. But some
biologists wanted stronger, unequivocal evidence or proof.
Thomas Hunt Morgan, a senior colleague of Sutton at
Columbia University, was originally trained as an embryologist, and of course, detested any suggestion of preformationism. He was "an experimentalist at heart" (his own
words) and very much disliked inferences in biology. 29 From
the start he opposed the chromosomal theory of heredity,
since to ascribe to chromosomes the ability to confer
character traits must have carried the vice of preformationism
for him. We must add that the controversy over what had
exclusive responsibility for hereditary development, either
the nucleus itself or the cytoplasm instead, was not yet totally
settled. Furthermore, Morgan's opposition stood despite the
fact that sex determination seemed by then to be caused,
quite clearly, by chromosomes.
When he turned to genetics, studying the fruit fly
Drosophila, Morgan was unconvinced that a strict association
between specific characters and specific chromosomes
existed. He read in the work of Boveri and of Sutton only a
parallel behavior, during cell division and fertilization, of
chromosomes and Mendelian traits. His apprehensions may
strike us as peculiar but are not altogether awkward: it is
indeed strange to suggest that the shape or color of an organ
�46
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
in a living being was preformed in some as yet mysterious
way, in these stubby colored structures known as chromosomes. Although we do not have now, as with Hartsoeker,
any preexistence of a complete homunculus, our eye meets
preformed materials that are passed on and could determine
form and function.
Morgan's paper of 1910 30 is extraordinary in many ways.
In no other does one see the struggle an author is undergoing
in arriving at an inevitable conclusion that contradicts his
previous beliefs. He prevents himself throughout from even
using the word "chromosome"; he establishes that the traits
for sex and white eye color are "combined," but avoids
calling them physically linked. He refutes his own distrust
and establishes the chromosomal theory of inheritance by
demonstrating that one specific character corresponds to the
behavior of one specific "factor" (later shown to be a
chromosome, visible under the microscope).
Fortunately in this case, and unlike in the history of cell
theory, the suspicion against preformationism did not retard
progress in genetics. Morgan himself was soon converted,
becoming one of the staunch advocates for ascribing to
chromosomes their genetic role through his further work and
that of his students, particularly Sturtevant and Bridges (who
provided direct proof of the chromosomal theory of inheritance in a most difficult paper).
VI. The Genetic Program
Chromosomes were found to be constituted largely of
deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). DNA was shown to be the
material responsible for conferring visible (phenotypic)
traits. 31 The molecular structure of DNA was determined in
1953,32 and soon after the language of the genetic code. DNA
is the preformed element in natural living beings, and it
controls development-to a degree. In other words, development could be said to be preformational as regards genes
and their hereditary influences, but rigorously epigenetic in
actual constructional activities from undifferentiated begin-
�AIGLA
47
nings. And this leads us to the concept of the so-called
"genetic program," and to new problems and questions.
There are really two problems that both genetics and
embryology must address in order to get an adult organism
from a fertilized egg: cells becoming different (differentiation) and cells producing shapes (morphogenesis). Both
processes appear to be directed, and with the rise of information theory and the knowledge of the molecular biology of
instructions and mechanisms for protein coding by the DNA
base triplets, the notion of a genetic program is quite
reasonable. What exactly do biologists mean by a genetic
program? Where is it coded? And if it is coded in DNA, how
so?
First, the program is one of combinations of three
molecules (bases) determining an amino acid, and about three
hundred of these amino acids specifying an average protein.
If the genetic program has a language, the alphabet is made
up of single bases. It must be noted that a protein is not even
completely specified by its amino acid sequence, originally
coded by the DNA. The intracellular environment plays a
role in the final folded stable state of proteins, and every
protein has alternate stable states. The future shape of a string
of amino acids is "open," and the actual final configuration
only "closes" through environmental conditions."
Secondly, the genetic program must be an open one.
Evidence for this was provided one hundred years ago by
Harrison, 34 who observed independent differentiation in
nerve fiber outgrowth from single cells. Frog protoplasmic
fibers extended from nerve cell bodies into any region where
frog lymph was present in a Petri dish (in vitro)-a result not
consistent with a rigidly preordained genetic program. That
the program is modifiable and plastic is obvious from the
experimental results of Spemann and Mangold, and from
recent work with stem cells. Also, the phenomena of regeneration of limbs in some animals, of memory and of learning,
imply that the program is not rigid, yet has some specificity. 35
It is worth emphasizing that both-cell differentiation and
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
morphogenesis-are the result not only of a genetic program,
but also of what some have appropriately designated as a
"somatic program," consisting of the whole embryo at any
particular time and stage. 36 Neighboring cells and their
respective positions cause and induce changes in cell shape,
adhesion, motility, migration and function, and in the shape
of organs and of the organism as a whole. The program is not
a "recipe" for the final product; environmental information
and random developmental noise enter into a notcompletely-determined process."
Lastly, it is essential that the program turned out to be not
a descriptive program, as was thought previously (specifying
what the cell or the whole organism will look like), but
instead a program of instructions describing how to make an
organism. 38 Consider a structure in origami. A set of data
completely specifying its final configuration would be
extremely difficult to collect, and would not at all explain
how to achieve the end form. It is much easier to formulate
instructions on how to fold a piece of paper; simple instructions about folding have complex spatial consequences. In the
same way during development, gene action sets in motion
sequences of events that can bring about profound changes in
the embryo. If the program were the full description of the
organism, modern molecular biologists could rail again, this
time with an ultramicroscopic intonation, against preformationism. This generative program of instructions is carried
out on an epigenetic basis, and the road from DNA to
proteins to phenotype is extremely complicated and
tortuous." It is also the case that the environment can
influence, to a great degree, the variable expression of the
genetic program. 40 The embryo not so much develops as
emerges from the fertilized egg; it reveals itself, and one may
be tempted to say that it is almost evoked.
For some modern molecular biologists like Changeaux (a
famous collaborator with Jacob and Monod), any talk of a
developmental program is pointless, 41 and he wishes to
dispense with the term altogether, placing exclusive emphasis
�AIGLA
49
on epigenetic processes. He arrives at this (to me) extreme
view from his work on the development of neural connections in the nervous system (a sophisticated extension of
Harrison's work), where much plasticity occurs. This
malleability is only to be expected, so why is Changeaux so
much against the concept of a program? I am afraid that a
specter is haunting him: the specter of preformationism.
Rightly understood, a genetic program need not totally
determine and predict exactly what the precise shape of a
given nerve cell or of a nervous system with its billions of
synaptic connections, or of a whole vertebrate, will be. No
animal or plant is fully shaped and entirely determined by its
DNA. In this sense, living beings are not absolutely
predictable and may never be "computable. "42 Speaking of a
genetic program does make sense, especially if one considers
that this program is an historically evolved one, 43 and does
not provide an unalterable architectural blueprint, but only a
set of instructions for·the construction of a living being, and
at the same time, the means to carry it out.
Prominent developmental and molecular biologists have
recently wondered whether we "understand" development at
all. 44 The implications for a philosophy of biology are deep;
what seems to be at stake is our understanding of the concept
of "understanding" itself. It has become nearly impossible to
discern or even expect any broad general principles in embryology,45 and there may be not mnch more to explain than
what is observed. 46 We have an alphabet (nucleotide bases)
and words for development (triplets coding for amino acids
that make up proteins). What appears to be wanting, and has
so far remained elusive, is a "grammar of development." 47 My
guess is that this will not be forthcoming merely from the
completed human genome project that ascribes to portions of
DNA in different chromosomes the coding for the various
proteins that help constitute a living organism.
The foregoing discussion should result in a change in
conceptualization in the posing of the problem of differentiation and development. The old "classical" question was:
�50
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
"How does an apparently homogenous, small ball of yolkladen cytoplasm with a nucleus, turn into a large, complicated, highly organized adult with fully functioning organs?"
Now we had better ask: "How does the encoded structure,
compressed into the specialized maternal organ-the eggbecome transformed into the realized structure of an adult
organism?"48
VII. Epilogue
I have attempted to investigate the role of an idea, preformationism, in several areas of biology: developmental
anatomy, cell theory, the chromosomal theory of inheritance,
and the concept of a genetic program. Beholding an egg
should remind us that it embodies, for Aristotle, a world of
explanation. It should be apparent that for us, one of the
greatest mysteries lies hidden within, and what is more,
comes out of it.
Notes
1
Nicolas Hartsoekcr, Essay de Dioptrique (Paris, 1694), 230.
2
F. Jacob, The Logic of Life (Princeton, Nj: Princeton University Press,
1993), 20.
3
Hartsoeker, Essay de Dioptrique, 229.
4
L. \'V'olpert et alia, Principles of Development (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998), 3.
5
Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals, Bk. I, Ch. 8, 723a15-20, A.
Platt, trans., in The Complete \Vorks of Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
6
Ibid., Bk. II, Ch. 1, 734a16-22.
7
Ibid., 734a33-35.
8
Ibid., 729a29-32.
9
Ibid., 729b5-8.
10
Aristotle, Physics, Bk. Ill, Ch. 2, 202a9. R.P. Hardie and R.K. Gayc,
trans., in The Complete \Vorks of Aristotle, ed.
Princeton University Press, 1984).
11
Ibid., Bk. VIJJ, Ch. 5, 257b10.
J. Barnes
(Princeton, NJ:
�51
AIGLA
12 E. Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1982), 138.
13
Nicholas Malcbranche, De fa recherche de Ia
1700), 48.
verite, Vol. I, (Paris,
14
M.J. Schleidcn, Contributions to Phytogenesis, H. Smith, trans.
(London: for the Sydenham Society, 1847 [orig. 1838]).
15
R. Virchow, Cellular Pathology (London: John Churchill, 1860), 10
(Figure 4).
16 T. Schwarm, Microscopical Researches into the Structure and Growth of
Animals and Plants, H. Smith, trans. (London: for the Sydenham Society,
1847 [orig. 1839]).
17
]. F. R. Kerr ct alia, "Apoptosis: A Basic Biological Phenomenon with
long-ranging Implications in Tissue Kinetics," British Journal of Cancer,
26 (1972): 239.
18
Virchow, Cellular Pathology, 3.
19
In B.P. Voeller, The Chromosome Theory of Iuheritance (New York:
Appleton Century Crofts, 1968), 43-47.
20
In Voeller, The Chromosome Theory of Inheritance, 4-8; 26-33.
21
Ibid., 54-59.
22
In B.H. \Villier and J.M. Oppenheimer, Foundations of Experimental
Embryology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1964), 2-28.
23
In \Villier and Oppenheimer, Foundations of Experimental
Embryology, 38-50.
24
Hans Dreisch, The Science and Philosophy of the Organism, vol. I
(London: Adam and C. Black, 1907).
25
In \Vrllier and Oppenheimer, Foundations of Experimental
Embryology, 144-184.
26
Hans Dreisch, The Science and Philosophy of the Organism.
27
In \'\i'iliier and Oppenheimer, Foundations of Experimental
Embryology, 74-90.
28
W. Sutton, "On the Morphology of the Chromosome Group in
Brachystola Magna," Biological Bulletin IV, no. 1 (1902): 24-39.
29
S.F. Gilbert, "In Friendly Disagreement: Wilson, Morgan and the
Embryological Origins of the Gene Theory," American Zoologist 27
(1987): 797-806; S.F. Gilbert, "The Embryological Origins of the Gene
Theory," Journal of the History of Biology II, no. 2 (1978): 307-351.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
52
30
T.H. Morgan, "Sex Limited Inheritance in Drosophilia, '' Science
XXXII, no. 812 (1910): 120-122.
31
O.T. Avery, CJv1 Macleod, and M. McCarty, journal of Experimental
Medicine 79 (1944): 137-158.
31
J.D. \Vatson and F.H.C. Crick, "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids,"
Nature 171 (1953): 737-738.
33
D. Whitford, "Protein folding in vivo and in vitro," in Proteins:
Structure and Function (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2005).
34
R.G. Harrison, "Observations on the Living Developing Nerve Fiber,"
Anatomical Record 1 (1907): 116-118.
35
E. Mayr, "Cause and Effect in Biology," Science 134 (1961): 15011506.
36
E. :Niayr, This is Biology (Cambridge, lvlA: Harvard University Press,
1997), 21, 171.
37
R. Lewontin, The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment
(Cambridge, .MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
38
\X'olpert, Principles of Development, 21.
39
Science 295 (1 March 2002): 1661-1682, see complete issue.
40
Lewontin, The Triple Helix.
41
J.P. Changeaux, Neuronal Man (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1997), 195.
41 L. \Vol pert, "Development: Is the egg computable or could we generate
an angel or a dinosaur?" in M.P. Murphy and L.A.J. O'Neill, What is
Life? The Next Fifty Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995), 57-66.
43
.Mayr, "Cause and Effect in Biology"; Mayr, This is Biology.
44
L.Wolpert, "Do We Understand Development?" Science 266 (1994):
571-572.
45
Ibid.
46
R. Lewin, "Why is Development so Illogical?" Science 224 (1984):
1327-1329.
47
Ibid.
48
E. Mayr, "Comments on Theories and Hypotheses in Biology," Boston
Studies in Philosophy of Science 5 (1968): 450-456.
�53
The Persians and the Parthenon:
Yoke and Weave
Part Two: The Parthenon
1
Mera J. Flaumenhaft
"Who are you and what is your family? .. .How old were you
when the Medes came?"
Xenophanes
1. The Building and the Polis
There are no words on the Parthenon (Figure 1). So in one
sense it is true that, unlike Aeschylus's Persians, the building
offered Athens a "visual, non verbal" education. 37 But, like
every other feature of this logos-loving city, this silent marvel
in marble invites all who see it to articulate in words the
story-or multiple stories-it too tells about Athens and
Persia.
The first is the story of the building itself, the story of its
building. Like Aeschylus's play, it has its origin in the Persian
wars. But its site far predates these events, reminding us of
ancient times when Athens was a fortified community
centered around a palace monarchy. From its earliest days,
Athens, like Persia, shaped and rearranged the natural
features of the environment to serve the demands of its
communal life. In the early Bronze Age (1300-1200 B.C.), the
Mera Flaumenhaft is a tutor at the Annapolis campus of St. John1s College.
This essay is in two parts. Part One of this essay appeared in the previous
issue of The St. Jolm's Review, volume 50, number 2. Notes are continuous.
The photos included in the text are courtesy of Ann M. Nicgorski,
Willamette University, 1998. Dr. Nicgorski's excellent collection of images of
all the parts of the Parthenon discussed in this essay is available and easy to
use at www.willamette.edu/cla/Ytrvicws/parthenon/. For websites and books
with a fuller selection of photos, see the Bibliography before the Endnotes.
�54
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
FIGURE l (Courtesy of A. Nicgors.ki)
Acropolis, "high city," was artificially terraced and shored up
by a wall of cut rocks. So old and huge was this rampart that
it was called the "Cyclopean" wall; it was said to be the work
of a barely-civilized pre-human people, or of the legendary
Giants under the direction of Athena, who had defeated them
in an early war between the Gods and the Giants. 38
Eventually, the Acropolis above it became the site of a
fortified citadel from which the Athenian royal family ruled
the surrounding population.
Legend also told how Poseidon and Athena long ago vied
for primacy in this land. The sea was Poseidon's claim to
power; he caused a pool of salt water to appear on the rock.
Athena brought forth an olive tree as evidence of her power.
The judges ruled that the olive was the more valuable gift and
the goddess became the patroness of the city whose name she
shared. The incident was memorialized in the pool and the
olive that remained in the Erechtheion, one of the earliest
temples on the Acropolis. There is a story that, in 480 B.C.,
on the day after the Persians burned the Acropolis, the men
whom Xerxes sent to sacrifice in the shrine fonnd that "the
�FLAUMENHAFT
55
olive had put forth from its stump a shoot of about a cubit's
length" (Hdt., 8.55). By the early sixth century, the hill was
no longer dominated by a royal palace, but had become a
major sanctuary, accessible to all by a wide ceremonial ramp
that led visitors to a temple with an altar to a small olivewood
statue of Athena Polias, that is, "of the city." This carved
figure, xoanon, wrapped in her pep/as (robe), remained a
focus of civic religious life for centuries.
The statue had such close relations with Athens that, like
the supposedly autochthonous human population, it was
associated with no other earthly place. Its origins were
unknown; it was said to have fallen on this spot from the
sky, 39 the home of Athena's father, Zeus, on whose unlimited
empire Xerxes wished to model his own. Unlike the shadowy
legend of the statue's beginnings, the story of the birth of the
goddess herself was well known. So, indeed, are those of the
other Greek gods. Anthropomorphic in looks and character,
these gods are immortal, but not eternal; each came into
being, and each is associated with partial aspects of nature or
human experience. The story of a god's genesis often points
to the characteristic nature of that god. The full divinity of
each is most fully expressed when all are considered together.
But, unlike Persian multiplication, pantheon does not mean
mere aggregate or multiplied strength. Rather, it means a
defined plurality in which the elements are related, but differ
from, and are even in tension with, each other, and so
compose a viable and complete whole. Once again, as we saw
in Part One of this essay, the metaphor of well-woven fabric
comes to mind.
It was predicted that Athena's mother, Metis, whose
name means "cunning," "craft," or "counsel," would give
birth to a child excelling in these same qualities, one who
might rule the world. So Zeus, the child's father, swallowed
the pregnant Metis. When the time came, Hephaestus, also
crafty and cunning, split Zeus's head with an axe and
delivered the baby. And so Athena appeared in the world:
full-grown, fully armed, with an extraordinary intelligence,
�56
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the very personification of immediacy, wily craft, and
resourcefulness. Not born from a mother, never to be one
herself, the maiden, parthenos, became the patron goddess of
a city of extraordinary masculine activity, one that excelled
not only in physical strength, as evidenced in war, but also in
the political arts of public speech and commerce and the
technological arts of agriculture, horse chariots, and ships.
But this child of her father was patron to women as well. Her
craft was manifest in the spinning and weaving of wool, as
well as of words. The image of her owl appeared on loom
weights that remained indoors, at home, with the women, as
well as on the currency exchanged in the open-air Agora
below the Acropolis, where men congregated to conduct the
commercial affairs of the city. Pallas Athena stood behind the
pep/as-weaving women and the spear-carrying warriors
whose lives together made a complete human city. The civic
fabric of Athens was woven from her arts, equally at work in
men and women ..
The annual Persian feast to celebrate the Great King's
birthday was called "tuktu," that is, "perfection" (teleion,
Hdt., 9.11 0). Athens' greatest festival celebrated not the birth
of a divinized despot who claimed that he was different from
all other men, but that of a civic deity who really was. The
meaning of her pep/as, in contrast to Xerxes' in Aeschylus's
play, reveals much about the two regimes. 40 There were two
related summer festivals devoted to Athena, one involving
part of the city and one all of it, both focused on the
olivewood image and what she wore. In May, the women
celebrated the Plynteria, the "washing rites." Gently
undressing and veiling the olivewood Polias, they carried her
pep/as to a spring, or perhaps as far as the sea, to launder it.
In the meantime, in the Kallynteria, the "adorning rites," the
crude and featureless image was prepared to receive the clean
garment. She was bathed and oiled and decorated with
jewelry. Robed again, she was replaced near her altar in the
old temple to await the most important festival of the year,
which took place in the following month, and bore her name.
�FLAUMENHAFT
57
From as early as the seventh century B.C., the June
Panathenaia, the festival of "all Athenians," culminated in a
citywide procession in which Athena's people presented her
with her annual birthday gift, a new peplos. By the next
century the festival included musical and rhapsodic performances, athletic and equestrian contests, and the awarding of
tripods, figurines, and large vessels of olive oil to those who
excelled in honor of the goddess who brought the olive.
The weaving of the peplos for the olivewood statue was
begun, appropriately, nine months before the goddess's
birthday celebration during a festival of crafts, when the
loom's warp-the upright cords-was set up by nine women
"workers," ergastinai, from designated aristocratic Athenian
families and several seven to nine year old girls dedicated to
the service of Athena. These children lived on the Acropolis
for the nine months and helped weave the pep/os. This bright
purple and yellow, woolen "story-doth" was decorated with
a tapestry-like depiction of Athena's exploits in the victory of
the Gods over the Giants. As we shall see, the Parthenon, like
other Athenian works, repeatedly associates this mythical
victory with Athens' historical victory over Persia. In the early
celebrations of the Panathenaia, the peplos was a rectangle of
about five by six feet and would have fit the human-sized
wooden image. Later, it may have been as big as a ship's sail
and, like real sails, would have been made by sewing several
loom weavings together. 41 The larger peplos was probably
made by professional male weavers for the Greater
Panathenaia every fourth year 42 and may have been exhibited
in the old temple of Athena Polias after the festival. Before
that, however, the pep/os was transported, perhaps on a
wheeled ship-cart, from the northwest city gate near the
Kerameikos district along a processional route to the Agora,
to the base of the Acropolis, and then carried up to the top
for presentation to the goddess. The ship "float" may have
been made from a Persian trireme captured at Salamis. Like
the wooden benches in the theater, and the roof and internal
decorations of the Odeion, which were made of Persian masts
�58
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
and spars,43 it would have been an explicit reminder of the
Persian defeat. Again, the analogy of the Spanish Armada
makes vivid the attempt to keep an averted disaster literally
before one's eyes. In the hall of Gray's Inn in London, a
carved wooden screen thought to have come from a flagship
in the Spanish Armada has served a similar function for
centuries. It was rescued by firemen when the building was
badly damaged during the London Blitz and survives today to
remind the small island nation of its unlikely survival of both
Spanish and Nazi attempts to invade and conquer it. 44
How can we understand the festival fabrication rituals on
which this ancient city and its citizens spent so much time and
effort and money? Both the weaving and the civic procession
are prime examples of the ways in which the democratic polis
produced and maintained itself as a civic community.
Representatives from all parts of the population-old and
young, men and women, citizens and resident aliens, slaves,
and workers in many different crafts-participated in the
preparations that were overseen by a large number of administrative officials. The weaving at the center of the
Panathenaia was thus the occasion for weaving together not
only the pep/os, but also the different elements of the
Athenian city. The prescribed rituals and legal instructions
concerning the workers, places, times, materials, patterns,
colors, and the delivery of the woolen cloth occupied the
attention of much of the population. One can observe the farreaching effects of such "material" rituals in the building of
the ark and tabernacle by the wandering Israelites; it kept
them busy and made them obedient, law-abiding, and
devoted to what they had worked so hard on. The same
effects are aimed at in the annual festival that removes and
replaces the K'aaba cover in Mecca, and in Christian processions of a beautifully dressed image of a patron saint, like the
annual fiesta for La Conquistadora in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
In their outlook and technology, Athenians looked to the
new, the future, and change. At the same time these rituals
held them to the old, the past, and the recurring. Festival
�FLAUMENHAFT
59
preparations and participation compelled these self-sufficient
and resourceful citizens to recognize their dependence on
what was beyond their control. Free and self-governing, the
Athenians on such occasions devoted their powers and
resources to obedience to laws and the service of old traditions and gods. If, in celebrating Athena, they were simultaneously celebrating their own achievements and character,
the rituals in honor of the goddess seem designed to remind
them also of their limitations. By the middle of the fifth
century, the birth of Athena Parthenos, her victories over
Poseidon and the Giants, her procession, and her peplos
would all be pictured on the most outstanding building on the
Acropolis. For that fabrication and its effects on the city we
must return to the events memorialized in Aeschylus's
tragedy.
At the battle of Marathon in 490 B.C. a small Athenian
army and their allies defeated a massive Persian force that had
traveled vast distances by land and sea, transforming even the
shape of the lands they traversed, to conquer resisting cities
in Greece. 6,400 subjects of the great king died at Marathon.
The Athenians lost 192 citizen hoplites. In the aftermath of
this unlikely victory, Athens began to build a new temple on
the south side of the Acropolis in honor of her patron
goddess. This required extending the south platform of the
Acropolis, which dropped too steeply to accommodate the
planned temple. Although much work had been done, the
Marathon Hekatompedon ("hundred-footer" temple) was
still unfinished when the Persians returned under Xerxes in
480. This time they reached Athens itself and burned the
entire city, including the unfinished temple. Before the
Persians arrived, almost the entire population of Athens had
been evacuated to Troezen and to the nearby islands of
Aegina and Salamis, to which they probably brought the
olivewood image of their goddess. 45 As Aeschylus reminds his
Athenian audience, the religious and political life of the polis
lay not in its streets and buildings, but in the characteristic
activities and attitudes of its citizens. The boule (council)
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
continued to meet at Salamis, even as those it governed saw
smoke rising from the burning buildings and their contents,
including the peploi of former years, 46 on the Acropolis. A
year after Xerxes' defeat at Salamis, the force that had
remained in Greece with the Persian general Mardonins was
decisively smashed by the Athenians and their allies at the
battle of Plataea.
Here the story of the Parthenon almost ended, for after
the victory the Greek allies took an oath:
I will not set life before freedom ... having
conquered the barbarians in the war .. .I will not
rebuild any of the temples that have been burnt
and destroyed by the barbarian, but I will let them
be left as a memorial to those who come after of
the sacrilege of the barbarian. 47
This way of remembering through preserving ruins is seen in
the preserved parts of the cathedral the Nazis destroyed at
Coventry and was urged in recent deliberations about what,
if anything, should replace New York skyscrapers destroyed
by twenty-first century barbarians. The rubble in Athens was
left to lie or was used haphazardly in the hasty fortification
and reconstruction of the city. But in the repaired north wall
of the Acropolis some of the column drums from the
unfinished temple to Athena were deliberately placed so that
they could be seen from the restored Agora, the marketplace,
below. These pillars remain on view today.
Thucydides tells the story of the recovery of the victorious, but destroyed, city of Athens (1.89-108). Domestic and
civic buildings were rebuilt, and the port at Piraeus was laid
out and fortified. Despite Lacedaemonian objections, long
walls were built to the sea, and the Athenian naval force was
expanded. Most of the Aegean and coastal cities became allies
of Athens in the Delian League to keep the seas open and to
discourage future Persian invasions. Before long, the allies
preferred, and were encouraged, to give money to Athens and
let it build the ships necessary to protect them all. These cities
�FLAUMENHAFT
61
soon found themselves members of an alliance that was
rapidly coming to be dominated by its strongest city. In 454
B.C. the League's treasury was moved from Delos to Athens.
When peace was concluded with Persia in 449 B.C., the
Athenians summoned all the Greeks to a general assembly to
discuss future safety and to reconsider the Plataean oath not
to rebuild sacred places. One consideration was to be that the
Greek allies had failed to sacrifice to the gods who had saved
them from the Persians. Pressured by the Lacedamonians,
who declined to attend, and resenting the growing power of
Athens, no other League members showed up, and Athens
decided unilaterally to continue policing the seas and
collecting tribute.
At this point Pericles proposed rebuilding and enlarging
Athena's temple on the Acropolis. His oligarchic enemies in
the assembly objected to spending the money of the Delian
League for an Athenian project, charging that they would be
"gilding and bedizening our city .. .like a wanton woman
[who] adds to her wardrobe precious stones and costly statues
and temples worth their millions" (Plut. Pericles, Xll}. 48
Pericles countered that the allies were "owed no account of
their moneys" as long as Athens effectively "carried on the
war for them and kept off the Barbarians" (Plut. Pericles,
XII). Plutarch describes the enthusiasm with which the
populace then embraced this vast public works project. It
would call many arts into play and involve long
periods of time, in order that the stay-at-homes,
no whit less than the sailors and sentinels and
soldiers, might have a pretext for getting a
beneficial share of the public wealth ... So then the
works arose, no less towering in their grandeur
than inimitable in the grace of their outlines, since
the workmen eagerly strove to surpass themselves
in the beauty of their handicraft. And yet the most
wonderful thing about them was the speed with
which they arose. (Plut. Pericles, XII-XIII)
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Here Plutarch emphasizes the competitive spirit and the
speed that, like the swift victory at Salamis, characterized all
things Athenian. When the oligarchs continued to complain
about the great expense of the Parthenon, Pericles offered to
fund the undertaking himself, as years before, he had funded
the production of the Persians, and as, more recently, other
wealthy individuals had underwritten other buildings and
beautification projects in the ciry. In this way, he said, Athens
would be saved the cost and "I will make the inscription of
dedication in my own name" (Pint. Pericles, XIV). At this
dramatic gesture, the wary assembly quickly voted in favor of
public funding and sparing no cost. For the next few decades,
a great deal of the assembly's time was spent deliberating on
the features and expenses of the new temple. Even as it took
shape, it was supervised and discussed by the democratic
population for which it was being built. These discussions are
recorded in civic records and in the narrative accounts of the
extraordinary writers Athens also produced. Thus the aristocratic Pericles maneuvered his oligarchic enemies into
supporting polis-sponsored projects that would increase the
power of his radically democratic supporters. The Parthenon
was the centerpiece of the building program. The man whom
Plutarch calls "that political athlete" (Pint., Pericles, III) was
among the most interesting competitors ever to exhibit
himself upon the Athenian stage. The Panathenaic trophies
and the names of the athletes who won them are lost in the
anonymity of time, like those of the Persians who died at
Salamis. The name of the young aristocrat who made his
"brilliant debut"49 as the choregos of Aeschylus's Persians, was
not inscribed on the temple, but it was known forever after as
Pericles' Parthenon. 5•
Before looking at the Parthenon, let us glance briefly at
some Persian buildings where, as in Athens and Sparta,
physical constructions reflect the political structure and
principles of the regime. As Aeschylus describes it, the everexpanding Persian Empire is centered on the royal palace and
nearby tomb of the divinized monarch, the only godlike
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63
figure who appears on stage. Although the play is set in Susa,
it is clear that the king's palaces, like everything else in
Persia-except the monarch himself-are multiple; in
addition to Susa, Ekbatana and Persepolis are mentioned
repeatedly as the king's headquarters. But, unlike the civic
and political activities of Athens, which took place in one
bounded, permanent location, the Persian court was also
always on the move. 51 Super-civilized in some respects, it
retained nomadic aspects more characteristic of lessdeveloped peoples. The King sat upon a movable throne. The
portable royal tent, as elaborate as the palaces, was an object
of wonder to the Athenians, who may have copied its shape
in the roof of the new Odeion. 52 Herodotus says that
Ekbatana, the palace fortress built by Deioces, the first king
of the Medes, was built for himself and his bodyguards on a
hill and was reinforced artificially with seven strong walls; the
rest of the people lived outside the stronghold. Deioces
arranged that all business "should be contracted through
messengers and that the king should be seen by none" (Hdt.,
1.99). The structure of the hierarchical Persian regime
insured that each level-subjects, local officials, and regional
satraps-had dealings only with the ones immediately above
and below it. At Persepolis, the huge compound was not far
above the plain below and may have been surrounded by a
mud wall. This too was a closed site, open only at the king's
pleasure. An ancient commentator remarks that, "at Susa or
Ekbatana, the king was invisible to all," but everything was
arranged so that he "might see everything and hear everything. " 53 His viceroys, "the Great King's eyes/' 54 as
Aeschylus's Persians refers to them, were ever vigilant.
Even in the public audience hall, the Apadana, at
Persepolis, vision seems to have been obstructed by the many
columns and the distant ruler in the large, dark chamber
would not have been easily observed by his subjects. 55
Directions came from an unseen center from which attention
was also turned by the king's desire for unlimited expansion.
A long inscription describes "the palace which I [Darius] built
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
at Susa" 56 of timber, gold, stone, ebony, and brick transported
from the far reaches of the empire. Unlike the Athenian
political records with their public accounts of the expenses
and inventories of Periclean buildings, there is no Persian
record of the architects, organization, or political context of
Persian building. In Persia, as in Egypt, the King's massive
construction projects, like his military campaigns, were facilitated by the unlimited, enslaved manpower at his command.
The eastern monarchy did not discuss its "public" buildings
any more than it discussed its foreign and military policy. It is
not surprising that Persia produced no narrative history or
drama and that among the extant ruins of its great buildings
there is no evidence of either assembly places or theaters.
Herodotus's observations about the buildings and
monuments of "barbarian" nations other than Persia are also
instructive about what was different about Athens' greatest
monument. Not surprisingly, the nomadic and under-civilized
Scythians had no temples or cities; residing in movable tents,
their only significant permanent places were their fathers'
gravesites (Hdt., 4.127). These itinerant non-builders were
also not producers of cloth. They made no linen or woolen
fabrics, both of which require a stationary economy, but
dressed themselves mostly in animal skins. Early Persians,
before the eras of the great buildings, also wore leather.
Croesus and the Lydian conquest softened tl1em into the
lovers of luxurious fabrics, robes, and slippers with which,
along with enormous palaces, the Greeks associated them. In
Lydia, the greatest building was a royal tomb constructed by
craftsmen and by prostitutes who worked on it to earn their
dowries (Hdt., 1.93). The walled city of Babylon had two
walled compounds within it, one for the royal palace, the
other for a stack of multiple towers, ziggurats. The latter
contained a huge temple for Zeus with a great gold statue of
the god and altars for sacrifice to him. Herodotus says Xerxes
took the statue and killed the priest who had forbidden him
to do so (Hdt., 1.181-2).
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65
The most impressive buildings of the Egyptians were not
temples for gods, but massive memorials to the godlike kings
who built them. Thus, Moeris built a propylaia (gateway) to
the temple of Hephaestus as a memorial to himself (Hdt.,
2.101), and Cheops built pyramids, intending to preserve his
memory as a divinized ruler. Cheops used slave labor,
ordering all Egyptians to work only "for himself" (Hdt.,
2.124). Amasis, the last of the Egyptian kings described by
Herodotus, considered himself a "great lover of the Greeks"
(Hdt., 2.178). But Herodotus emphasizes how different
Egypt was: the sheer size of his propylaia and temple to
Athena at Sa'is, the "supernatural" (hyperphueas) size of its
stones, how long it took for two thousand men to transport
its building materials from great distances, and the many
colossal statues and hybrid man-headed sphinxes around the
temple. Herodotus was "amazed" at the huge shrine, made
from a single stone, outside the temple. It was said that one
of the workmen had been killed while trying, unsuccessfully,
to lever it into place (2.175). The story strikes an odd note,
given the thousands of anonymous slaves who lost their lives
to Egyptian projects. In Memphis, the statue of Hephaestus
measured seventy-five feet; it was so large that it had to lie flat
on its back in front of its admirably large temple (Hdt.,
2.176). Again and again, Herodotus associates the size and
character of the buildings of non-Greek peoples with their
political and religious character.
Now behold the Acropolis again, this time with the
completed Parthenon and surrounding buildings in place
upon it. From the top, all of Athens, including its boundaries,
would have been visible. The ancient city itself was walled,
and contiguous lands were contained between mountains and
the sea. Herodotus observes that the longest wall of the Great
King's private domain in Ekbatana was "about the length of
the wall that surrounds the city of Athens" (Hdt., 1.98,
emphasis added). Unlike the eastern empire that recognized
no natural boundary, Athens was open on the inside and
bounded-though accessible to outsiders-on the outside,
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
both physically and politically. Political life was not contained
in a closed palace, garden paradise, or tomb, where all
communication with the royal family was mediated by
officials or bodyguards. The sacred precinct upon the
Acropolis was articulated from its surroundings by its
elevation and by the grand gateway, the Propylaia, through
which it was entered. But, like the Agora, which was no more
than a ten or fifteen minute walk from any place in the city, 57
the Acropolis was accessible to all Athenians, to resident
aliens, metics who "dwelled among" (met-oikeo) them, and
to foreigners (xenoi) who visited from elsewhere. In festival
processions and athletic competitions, in battle, assembly, and
the theater, Athenians were on view to each other and direct
speech was the preferred medium of exchange. Unlike the
staircase to the Apadana, the stairs to the Propylaia invited
those who climbed them to enter and to look.
The new temple could be seen from everywhere in
Athens: from the lower hill on the Pnyx where the assembly
met, from the theater on the south slope of the Acropolis, and
even from the sea. Most other buildings in Athens were made
of dark wood and baked brown mudbricks. Rebuilt quickly
after the Persians went away, they were not made to be
looked at or to be visible from afar. Even the public buildings
in the Agora, including marble stoas, temples, and fountains,
would have had, at least from their location, a lower status
than the temple on the Acropolis. Various architectural
"refinements" that will not concern us here make the
Parthenon appear to be "springy" or to float skywards,
increasing its high status in the physical city. Because it is
located on the highest spot on the hill and near the edge of
the southern side where less traffic was possible, most views
of it from elsewhere on the Acropolis would not have
included other large structures. 58 Unlike the Agora, which
was planted with shade trees, the rocky hill above it did not
support trees or other vegetation-except Athena's olive.
There were, however, numerous smaller buildings,
monuments, and billboards, so that the ancient visitor's view
�FLAUMENHAFT
67
would have been far more cluttered than what we see today.
As we have seen, some of this "clutter" functioned as a
"public archive in bronze and stone," 59 providing information, to those who could read, about the building projects
themselves.
The temple to Athena was not used for child sacrifices,
prostitution, or royal burials. Visitors to the Parthenon came
to deliver the birthday peplos to the goddess-and to look.
What they saw was themselves, both in the flesh and represented in local marble. The temple was not used for
worship of the goddess. Rather, like Aeschylus's play, it was a
"monument" or "reminder" of the city's collective defeat of
a different way of life, a house for a goddess who exemplified
what they regarded as a superior life for human beings. As we
shall see, the pictures of the Parthenon clearly distinguish
men and gods, humans and beasts, as well as male and female
human beings. Deified kings, as well as sphinxes, Centaurs,
and Amazons, are all rejected as hybrid; each in its own way
undermines human nature. Unlike the unlimited, enslaved,
yoked manpower that worked and died on Persian palaces
and Pharaohs' pyramids, the Parthenon work force, although
it certainly included slaves, consisted of citizens, resident
aliens, and foreigners as well, all paid for their labor. In
addition to the myths depicted on the temple, there are myths
about it. An old story tells how a mule that was resting from
its task of dragging heavy marble up to the building site came
back, of his own free will, to encourage his yokefellows in
their work. 60 Athenian civic propaganda, spread easily among
a small population whose politics consisted of constant talk,
insisted that even beasts of burden were enthusiastic participants in this project. Self-yoking in a noble cause is the theme
of the story that Athenian Solon tells Croesus about the
blessed brothers, Cleobis and Biton, who put themselves
"under the yoke" of a carriage to pull their mother to
worship at the temple of Hera (Hdt., 1.31). Another story
contrasts with that of the Egyptian laborer crushed in the
temple of Athena at Sa'is, where the goddess is present only in
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the huge, inert statue (Hdt., 2.175). In Athens, in contrast,
Plutarch reports that, when the most zealous workman at the
construction site of the Propylaia entrance to the Acropolis
fell off the building, mortally injuring himself, Pericles was so
dispirited that the Goddess appeared to him in a dream and
told him how to heal the man (Piut. Pericles, XIII). The
popular myths repeatedly assert that Athena watched over
and took an active interest in the building of her city.
The dimensions of the new Parthenon were larger than
those of its predecessor so that it could accommodate the
statue that Phidias planned for it. But, like the city that
withstood the mixed and disproportionate Persian force, the
Parthenon is a monument to unity and proportion. In what
follows I shall not discuss the architecture itself, but concentrate on selected parts of the temple, in which "narrative"
depictions shape the viewers' collective memory of their
victory over the Persians. On the stage Aeschylus depicts
Persians who, although different from Athenians, are recognizable human beings like themselves. On the Parthenon, the
actors on the "stages" of the pediments and metopes on the
outer temple resemble the humans who view them, but are
super or sub-human in size or form. The inner walls of the
temple are the "stage" on which Athenians view themselves
engaged in the paradigmatic Athenian festival, the celebration
of Athena's birthday. As in Aeschylus's tragedy, the civic
clothing and dynamic "weaving" of Athenian democratic
politics is meant to look superior to the luxurious fabrics and
strong yoke of the Persian Empire. The most important ritual
fabric in Athens was woven to clothe the wooden image of
the goddess who watched over this city. Just as Aeschylus's
play represents the power and failure of Persia in the Queen's
robes and Xerxes' peplos, so the Parthenon's pediments,
metopes, and frieze, and the celebrated statue of the goddess
herself, make Athena's pep/as a politically significant artifact.
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69
2. Pediments: Before and Above the Polis
Although the Parthenon stands at the center of polis life, the
citizens who come to see it are made to look again, to re-view
their city in the light of what is outside it, both spatially and
temporally. Thus, the pediments, the triangular gables facing
outward east and west on the short sides of the temple, depict
the outermost context of the city, the cosmos in which the
bounded polis takes shape and flourishes. Unlike the
divinized Darius and Xerxes, who aspired to a realm as
extensive as Zeus's sky, the Parthenon assumes a realm that
transcends the limited human world. In two dramatic scenes
depicting well-known stories, the pediments exhibit divine
beings who have their primary location outside the city, above
the mortals whose affairs they are both spectators of and
participants in. These representations of the gods depict the
continual adjustment and balancing of different and complementary human qualities. They show how Athens became
Athena's city through the careful interweaving of all the other
gods-including those who seem antithetical to her waysinto a heterogeneous but viable whole. Although it depicts
opposition and strife among the gods, the "polytheism" of
the Parthenon is informed by a principle of a coherent,
unified cosmos. The "dramas" staged on the pediments do
not conclude in the mere defeat of one of the contesting
sides; the gods don't die. The victor wins by assimilating the
vanquished and adjusting the order of the world. We know
about the pediments from a few remarks of the traveler
Pausanias who saw them in the second century A.D., from
Jacques Carrey, who made drawings of them in 1674 before
they were largely destroyed in a gunpowder explosion in
1687, and from the damaged yet remarkable figures in
Athens, Paris, and the British Museum in London. Classicists
and archaeologists have put together a variety of plausible
scenarios for the two pediments. The non-expert can follow
their lead and think through, in a general way, what the intent
and effect of these scenes might have been.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
The pediments are populated with three-dimensional
sculptured figures. These are positioned at different angles,
some facing forward, others seen in profile. Some appear to
be moving towards the front triangular plane of the scene,
and some actually do penetrate it. The originals had attachments, some of which mnst also have projected outside the
plane. The triangular frame and the rounded character of the
sculptures remind one of theatrical tableaux; viewed more
closely, the sculptures might even have appeared to be
"rounder" than would distant actors who might appear flat in
a very large theater. The pediment figures are unusual in that
their backs, unseen after the sculptures were mounted, are
finished; like actors on a stage, they appear as "real"
personages, not just building ornaments. The "backdrop"
wall was originally painted bright red or blue, and the
colorful patterns painted on the sculpted clothing of the
figures would have stood out against it as costumed actors did
onstage. Tragic actors, like those in the Persians, are intelligible to the spectators, the "audience," primarily through
their heard speech. How do the silent pediment actors
"speak" to Athenians about the Persian wars of recent
memory and about the community that survived them?
The west pediment faces the spectator as he approaches
the Parthenon from the great (unfinished) entrance gate, the
Propylaia. His first view of the highest part of the "back" of
the temple (as it appears in descriptions and drawings) would
be a tableau of the contest between Athena and Poseidon,
who take center stage. The scene is set on the Acropolis.
Pausanias says their strife was for the "land," suggesting a
very early, almost proto-Athenian time. They are symmetrically flanked by horse-drawn chariots and gods. In the
narrowed corners are reclining river gods (and perhaps the
autochthonous king Kekrops), snakes, a sea monster, and
other figures associated with early legends of king Erechtheus
and his family: "The figures in the angles represent the royal
population of Athens before it was Athens. " 61 The contest
between Poseidon and Athena pits the natural abundance of
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71
surging fluidity against the artful prosperity of rooted solidity.
Fruit and oil, wooden boats and oars, will characterize
Athena's city, where speech and artful skill, techne, will shape
the sheer power and fertility of Poseidon. Thus, the victory of
Athena in this pre-political agon results not in the elimination
of the immortal god of the sea, bnt in his assimilation. On the
north side of the Acropolis both the olive tree and the salt
spring remained as reminders of the outcome. Travelers by
sea leaving or arriving at Athena's city would always see the
great temple of Poseidon on the cliff at Sounion. Equilibrium
rather than mere defeat is suggested by the position of the
contenders, both of whom remain upright in a "great
'Pheidian V'," 62 and by the way Poseidon's leg overlaps
Athena's, placing him in the foremost position. The pediment
suggests that balance in Athena's city involves harnessing
Poseidon for the city's benefit. But harnessing does not mean
simply yoking. Every visitor to the Parthenon remembered
that the Persians were defeated at sea, and that Athens'
greatness, in contrast to that of landlocked Persia, was the
result of her close and comfortable relation with Poseidon.
Unlike Xerxes and the Persians, Themistocles and the
Athenians knew that one doesn't "beat" or shackle the sea,
but collaborates with it by sailing and swimming. In the 4 70s,
after the maritime victory at Salamis, Athens may have
developed a Poseidon cult around the salt spring and the sign
of the trident,63 which, like the olive tree depicted in the
center of the pediment, remained visible on the Acropolis.
The west pediment memorializes the victory over Persia by
asserting that Athens succeeds under the supervision of gods
who transcend the city in time and place, but that, in Athens,
there is a time and place for all the gods.
The "front" east pediment also pictures a cosmic event,
"in the manner of classical drama ... played out in the course
of a single day." 64 The scene is Olympus. In the center, the
viewer would have seen a tableau that included Zeus, perhaps
seated on his throne, Athena, newly emerged from his head,
and Hephaestus holding the axe that liberated-and
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
delivered-her. With a mother named Metis, "craft" or
"wisdom," and gestation in the head of Zens, she comes into
the world as a manifestation of rational, self-reliant thought.
Just as the symmetry of Athena and Poseidon on the west
pediment conveys their simultaneous existence in Athens,
here the symmetry of Athena and Hephaestus around Zens
indicates that these two must be thought of together. "In
Athens, the birth of Athena makes a new god of Hephaestus,
for they share between them the patronage of all things made
by the hands. " 65 He is her midwife, but also the "working
partner to the newborn goddess of work. "66 Like the central
figures on the west pediment, the central group here is
flanked by an array of divinities, some individuals, and some
in groups carved from common blocks of marble. Tied
together, they suggest again that Athenian mortals look up to
a pantheon of complementary divinities. The east pediment's
location, Olympus, is a loftier mountain than the Acropolis of
the west pediment. It is far removed from the city around the
Acropolis, but the "explosion of power"" from the head of
Zeus affects not only the gods who have homes on Olympus.
"The event taking place between" Helios, the sun, in the
south angle and Selene, the moon, in the north "is ... an event
of cosmic significance. It is dawn. There is a new order on
Olympus. The coming of Athena has changed the world." 68
As we have seen, Athens commemorated Athena's birth
with a new dress, whose weaving and presentation provided
the city with an elaborate protocol for holding itself together.
The fast-moving, quick-thinking city of rationality and
progress here tied itself to tradition and repetition, to time.
The east pediment, like the festival and the Parthenon itself,
made the Athenians look backward as well as forward and
recognize their mortal limits. Thus, although the gods who
live forever have an endless future, time as it is depicted on
the east pediment is cyclical, not linear. Just as Athena's
victory on the west pediment does not simply banish
Poseidon, here on the east "Light does not banish darkness
from the world, for neither can exist without the other." 69
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73
Dawn, like Athena's birthday, always comes round again. But
although the gods do not die, even they tire and retire when
the sun goes down. Nothing captures this quite so well as the
immortal but weary horse of Selene's chariot, about to sink
under the night horizon in the northern angle of the
pediment. The horse breaks the plane and thus the distancing
frame of the pediment, and seems to reach into our world.
Viewers have always loved him, for although his days are not
numbered like ours, he expresses weariness as we too know
it.
Like the Persians, the Parthenon suggests "weaving" as an
image for the holding together of a human community. One
of the most astonishing things about the pediments is the
sculptured clothing, a trademark of Pheidias's style
throughout the Parthenon. Unlike the stiff Persian costumes
and royal gear that obscure nature with conventional wealth
in Aeschylus's dramatic depiction, the fabrics pictured here
reveal the bodies they cover. Iris's clinging, blowing dress,
Hestia's light, crinkly crepe under heavier woolen folds, and
Amphytrite's belted peplos amaze the viewer with the art of
the sculptor, who imitates soft fabrics in stone, but also with
the art that weaves real soft fabrics of cloth, the art of Athena
herself. Through the draperies, and probably through the
"embroidered" patterns that were painted upon them, the
groups of sculptures could unify "motifs involving a complex
dramatic action and including many interlocking
figures ... Pheidias invented a plastic means by which a scene
composed of many parts could be transformed into a single
powerful image." 70 Their flowing garments and the variety of
angled positions make the three goddesses on the east
pediment (perhaps Hestia, Dione, and Aphrodite) seem to
"weave" in and out among each other (Figure 2). We shall see
something similar in the low relief frieze inside the
Parthenon. Like the Athenian pantheon and Pheidias's sculptured tableaux of these gods, the weaver's art combines many
elements into a coherent whole. The politics of the city that
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
FIGURE 2 (Courtesy of A. Nicgorski)
fabricated the Parthenon sculptures and Athena's woven
peplos did something similar: it fabricated its way of life by
weaving together free speech in the political deliberation of
free individuals. Entirely different are the lined up, repetitious figures on the Persepolis Apadana staircase. Unlike the
lovely, varied, and flexible materials of the Parthenon, their
stiff, identical robes do not convey the famed beauty of
Persian weaving. In contrast to the dramatic tableaux vivants
of the Olympians on the pediments and the Athenians and
gods on the frieze (to be discussed below), even in Persia's
most accomplished works of art, the Persians remain
arbitrarily and stiffly yoked together, just as they are said to
be in Aeschylus's play.
3. Metopes: Outside the Polis
The outer sides of the temple display what's outside: earthly
alternatives that threaten to invade and destroy Athena's
polis. Wrapping around the outermost upper wall of the
Parthenon, below the pediments, is a horizontal band of
ninety-two squares, thirty-two on the long sides and fourteen
on the short. These metopes, seen "between the holes" or
"between the eyes," are separated from each other by slabs of
three vertical bars called "triglyphs," which frame each scene.
Originally painted in bright, contrasting colors, the figures on
the metopes were far more distinct than they appear today.
Each square presents a framed static scene, a snapshot, to the
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75
spectator who can view one whole side at the same time, or
each picture in the band, as he circles the temple. The
metopes are carved in high relief and most do not appear in
the round as the theatrical pediment statues do. Here, too,
the effect is sometimes compared to the changing scenes in a
drama, but now the scenes remain in place while the
spectator moves. Another difference is that in the theater the
scenes follow one another in time, suggesting causal relations
between them, while the metopes are freestanding or paired
images that do not depict a sequential narrative in time. The
central scene of Aeschylus's play is central in time; the center
of a band of metopes is central in space, although, as we shall
see, on the south side, it may represent a different time, but
one related in theme, to those around it. Like the play, the
metopes can be seen as four sets or "acts," each depicting a
particular conflict between Greeks (or their champions) and a
particular enemy: on the east, gods and Giants; on the north,
Greeks and Trojans, on the west, Greeks and Amazons, and
on the south, Lapiths and Centaurs. These subjects appear
repeatedly in the Parthenon and in other fifth-century
buildings. The threats depicted are all analogues to the
Persian invasion depicted by Aeschylus. The play uses words
to depict the unseen Greek alternative to the Persians seen on
stage. But the metopes depict the Greeks as well as their
would-be destroyers. Each set can also be "read," like
Herodotus's inquiries, as the struggle between the civilized
Greek city and a particular deficient alternative to the life it
regards as human.
All four sets depict battles with mythological enemies. On
three sides, mortal victors defeat mortal enemies. But on the
east wall, the final destination of visitors to the Parthenon, the
viewer would have faced the early cosmic conflict in which
the Giants, sons of Gaia, the Earth, arose to challenge the
hegemony of the heavenly Olympian gods. As we have seen,
the great "Cyclopean" foundations of the Acropolis were
reminders of Athena's victory and harnessing of Giant power
in the service of her city. In some versions of the legend the
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Giants are defeated and imprisoned in the locations of
volcanoes. The primitive Giants are the first depiction on the
metopes of an attempt of massive force to overcome divine or
human civilization. Their eruptions are associated more with
the powers of nature than with intentional evil. They cannot
be simply destroyed, but are containable and even usable.
Little remains of the eastern metopes, but their theme
appeared repeatedly on the Parthenon, most notably on the
great statue's shield and on the peplos itself." Thus, every
element of the east side of the Parthenon refers the ultimate
prosperity of Athenian civilization to the divine. Beneath the
birth of Athena on the east pediment and behind the Giant
metopes, the viewer would see the culminating panels of the
interior frieze, picturing the Olympian gods towards whom
the procession of Athenians moves. And through the east
doorway, beneath the pediment, frieze, and metopes, in the
innermost part of the temple, he would view the statue of the
Goddess herself. Nowhere on the Parthenon does any
historical human being become an immortal, as did the
mythical Heracles, who probably was depicted helping
Athena overcome the Giants. And unlike the giant representations of Darius and Xerxes in Persia, there are no enlarged
portraits of identifiable individual human beings.
Themistocles, not named but clearly referred to in
Aeschylus's play, is not identifiable on the Parthenon, and
Pericles, as we have seen, is present only in the spirit of the
project. 71 Nowhere is it suggested that human rule might
extend indefinitely, like that of Zeus or the Great King's
dreams. In the stories depicted on the Parthenon and in the
contained inward focus of the building itself, Athens differentiates itself from its recent Persian enemy. As we shall see,
the story of the Parthenon itself and of the politics of its
construction under Pericles suggests an Athens that will need
to expand its own aims, even as it remembers its defeat of
unlimited expansion. As the articulated and delimited city
moved towards its own version of empire, its relationship
with the goddess and gods of the eastern "front" of the
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77
Parthenon would shift radically from that celebrated in its
memorial monument in the decades immediately following
the Persian War.
For the conflict between mortal human beings, the
designers of the Parthenon's north metopes (the ones facing
the Athenian Agora) selected the war with the Trojans, a
people who are the same as their Greek enemies in their
nature, physis, but whose conventions, nomoi, like those of
the Persians, represent a different way of life. Although the
Trojan War was a Greek invasion, it was viewed as a response
to a previous "invasion" on the part of the Trojans since
Paris's violation was thought to undermine all civilized
custom. Thus, some of the surviving slabs show Menelaus,
Helen, and Paris. The historical and mythological Trojans
were an eastern patriarchal monarchy that, in some respects,
resembled Persia. Homer depicts the "Trojans" as a mixed,
polyglot, loosely combined force from many different places.
In contrast, the Greeks, although from many cities, are ethnically coherent; they speak the same language, function as a
political community, and coordinate their military efforts. 73
Like Aeschylus's Persians and Herodotus's Inquiries, the
Parthenon's north metopes depict an alternative human
culture in order to think about the customs most appropriate
to human nature.
The anthropology of the remaining metopes, the
Amazons of the west and Centaurs of the south sides, depicts
mythical beings that resemble, but are not quite, human
beings. Unlike the Trojans and Persians, they represent a
difference in kind-in nature-rather than in custom. The
first are entirely human, but entirely female, rejecting life
with males of their own kind. The second are entirely male,
but are hybrids of human and beast. Athenian civic
mythology had long depicted Amazons and Centaurs as
enemy invaders and threats to Athens and to Theseus, its
founding king. The metopes, like the tragic dramas, assume
familiarity with these stories, but they do not dramatize
incidents involving particular heroes. Little remains of the
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Amazon metopes, but a brief consideration of what they
represent will help to understand the unified thought of the
Parthenon and to set the stage for the better preserved
Centaurs.
The Amazons are liberated women. In contrast to the
typical Athenian confinement of women and their children
within the home, these untamed, unmarried horsewomen
hunt, fight, and even mate in the open air, rejecting the
confinements of the polis, of buildings generally, of conventional female clothing, and even of their own bodies. Their
name seems to refer to their custom of removing the right
breast; the breast-less (a-mastos) woman could more easily
pull a bow or throw a javelin, typically Persian weapons, as
opposed to Athenian hoplite spears. The voluntary mastectomies are reminiscent of Persian castrations described by
Herodotus; the exclusion of males and the isolation of the
Amazons also require denaturing and mutilation. Some depictions of Amazons show two breasts, exposed in a way
unthinkable for ordinary Athenian women. In others, they
appear in pants, short belted jackets, and pointed caps, and
have pale skin as opposed to the outdoors tans of Athenian
men.74 Athenian artists often pictured Amazons in Persian
dress and hats in order to mock the latter as effeminate.
Athenian mythology credited the defeat of the Amazon
invasion of Athens to Theseus, and located his victory on the
hill of the quintessentially masculine war god Ares, the rocky
platform just below the Acropolis. In the Oresteia Aeschylus
depicts the establishment of the Athenian court on the
Areopagus and makes clear that its supersession of the female
Furies is a critical step in the development of civic justice in
the Athenian polis. The defeat of the Amazons by the male
founder of Athens invites two questions.
The first concerns the truth of the common claim that
Athens simply assumed male superiority and that women
were regarded as inferior human beings. There is no doubt
that Athens was a male hoplite culture; men fought its wars,
spoke in its assembly, met in its markets, socialized in its
�FLAUMENHAFT
79
gymnasia and symposia, wrote for and performed in its
theater, and designed and built its temples. Women, in
contrast, spent their time at home, indoors, among other
women and female and young male children. They had no
property rights, did not take part in public deliberation, and
were certainly less articulate and less visible than their fathers
and brothers, husbands and sons. The myths about au
Amazonian alternative to such a life are not surprising. But it
is misleading to claim that Athens aims to exclude women as
it does the half-humans and barbarians on the outside of the
temple. There is a difference between differentiation and
exclusion. Athens and its myths distinguish appropriate
realms for male and female human beings, but they do not
attempt to eradicate the female. Amazons are excluded
because they attempt to exclude the male from human life.
Their defeat by Theseus resulted not in the elimination of
women, but in their integration into a human life that
includes both sexes. In the carefully revised civic legends that
replaced the hyper-masculine, godlike Heracles with Theseus,
the unequivocally human founder marries the Amazon queen.
She and her comrades live on in what, from the perspective
of egalitarian modernity, looks like a subordinate position.
But Athenian drama and religion make clear that women are
necessary, not just as producers of children, the only role for
which the Amazons reluctantly acknowledged their need for
men, but for civilized life as the Athenians saw it.
Once again, women's work offers an appropriate
metaphor. The communal fabric is woven from warp and
weft: each requires the other; they have different jobs to do.
One is upright, stiff, a visible support; the other is horizontal,
more pliant, weaves in and out, sometimes behind the scenes,
sometimes visible. Modern technology has gone a long way
to liberate the sexes from their strictly differentiated natures;
how far is yet to be seen. But in fifth-century Athens, where
Persians had to be repelled by hand-to-hand combat, and
where birth control, frozen foods, and mass-produced textiles
were not available, division of labor follows from natural
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
differences bet\veen the sexes. Differentiation may require
hierarchy. But we shonld also note that refusing to medize
included rejecting polygamy, as well as effeminate dress and
luxury. This snggests that polis life inclnded a developed
sense of the individnal worth of women as well as of men,
however constricted the lives of the former now appear. As
we have seen, the Panathenaic festival included, and even
featured, women. Only they could perform certain civic
fnnctions, including the most intimate ministering to the
patron goddess. The peplos had to be made, not by slaves, but
by female "citizens with known ancestry" who performed
this rite, "not for themselves, bnt for the city. It is the ritnal
that distinguishes the women of Athens from the women of
other states ... it is a ritual in which women and men both play
important roles." 75 However dominant the males of Pericles'
city were, its women were present and visible. The Amazons,
we must conclude, are on the outside, partly because they are
women who relocate themselves from inside to outside, but
also because they are women who attempt to remove
themselves from the full hnman condition, that is, from a
civic life that interweaves, however hierarchically, men and
women.
A second question about these warrior women is that of
their relation to Athens' patron, the warrior goddess, Pallas
Athena. Is she to be considered the paradigmatic Amazon? A
complicated answer is suggested by the different, but
overlapping, aspects of her presence on the Acropolis. In the
early days, worship of Athena Polias seems to have taken
place in the old Erechtheion temple where the olivewood
statue resided, and where Athenians brought multitudes of
little statuettes as offerings to her, seeking, perhaps,
protection, like that sought by later generations when the
Parthenon was sanctified as "Our Lady of Athens." During
her great annual festival, the women bathed her, applied
cosmetics, and dressed her in traditional female garb and
jewelry. She was human-sized or smaller and was associated
with female fertility, agriculture, and domestic prosperity in
�FLAUMENHAFT
81
peacetime. She may have been seated and she carried no
shield or weapons. There is nothing of the Amazon about her.
Another Athena, called the Promachos, "foremost
fighter," was a large bronze statue made by Pheidias perhaps
as a thank-offering for the Greek victory at Marathon. This
one stood outdoors on the western side of the Acropolis. Her
armed figure, the Centauromachy pictured on her shield, and
the Persian spoils displayed around her base, 76 suggest the
more masculine task of defending Athens. Although she is
more a symbol of public military strength than an object of
worship and private protector like the Polias, here she seems
relaxed, a secure victor over Persian invaders rather than an
aggressor in her own right. Her shining spear and helmet
were visible to ships sailing towards the city as they passed
Cape Sunium. 77 This Athena is no more suggestive of the
Amazons than the Polias is. In action, Athena as battle god
differed from her brother, the bowman Apollo. Walter Otto
long ago suggested "immediacy" as the feminine element of
her fighting spirit. 78 Unlike the "far-shooting" god, and unlike
Amazons and Persians, both of whom fought with bows and
arrows, Athena shows up near at hand among those she
champions, both women and men, as she does at Homer's
Troy and Aeschylus's Salamis.
The temple Pericles built in the decades after Salamis
housed the third Athena on the Acropolis, Pheidias's most
famous statue of Athena, the Parthenos, "maiden"; unlike the
Amazons, she is comfortable with a roof over her head. We
shall consider the colossal image when we arrive at the
innermost chamber of the Parthenon. For now, let us merely
raise the question: is she the divine image of the ordinarily
reclusive, fierce but shy, race of women warriors of Athenian
legend? Or is she something new, an Athenian god on the
march, ready to leave her home and city, the Promachos of
the post-Parthenon empire that Pericles sees as the natural
successor of the Persian one that failed in Athens?
The south metopes, which depict women merely as the
occasion for masculine conflict, have survived in good
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
enough condition to convey some idea of what they once had
to say. The thirty-two tableaux depict a well-known legend,
the battle between the Lapiths and their half-brothers, the
Centaurs, who, like Theseus's friend, the Lapith king
Pirithous, were fathered by Ixion. 79 Demanding a share in the
kingdom, they made war on the more civilized branch of the
family until an uneasy truce was established. In a foolish
gesture of reconciliation, Pirithous invited the estranged
relatives to his wedding, but the unruly Centaurs got drunk,
wrecked the party, and attempted to carry off Pirithous's
bride and the other Lapith women. Although the panels do
not present a continuous linear narrative of this event or its
outcome in the defeat of the Centaurs, they are arranged in
pairs, triplets, and groups by their composition and subjects.
All but one contain only two opposed figures, and that one,
east 21 (moving to the right, facing the south side of the
temple), concludes a central set of nine panels in which the
Centauromachy is not the subject. We reserve this mysterious
center for the end of our discussion.
As we have seen in Aeschylus's play and on the
Parthenon, Athenians associated their Persian enemies with
the fully human Amazons. Like Persian Xerxes, Trojan Paris,
and Amazon women, the male Centaurs disrupt marriage and
hospitality as the foundations of the human city. 80 But, for
several reasons, they seem even more alien. However
lopsided the Amazon attempt to avoid the limitations of
ordinary mature female lives, they are recognizably human in
form, belong to a coherent community, and make arrangements for its continuity. The Centaur seems more a member
of a herd than of a community. His hybrid body combines a
mature human nature with a mature beastly one. The result,
as pictured in the metopes, undermines rather than enhances
human wholeness. The Amazon isolates herself from the male
half of humanity; the Centaur combines male halves of two
different kinds. Aeschylus's play and the Persian Queen's
dream raise the question of whether different nations of
human beings can be viably yoked together to form a
�FLAUMENHAFT
83
coherent human regime. The Parthenon Centaurs depict a
"yoking" of two different kinds that is incapable of coherent
human life. Egyptian and Assyrian art often represent hybrids
of different animals and of animals and humans in the service
of humans. Persian monsters of this kind are found in eaglefaced lions and human-headed bulls in Pasargadae and
Persepolis. But on the Parthenon such a combination is the
enemy and would-be destroyer of civilized human life.
In contrast to the bodies of the Lapiths, who are beautiful
even in their painful twisting, the bodies of the Centaurs lack
unity and proportion. Combining the upright and horizontal
forms of its progenitors, the Centaur lacks the full powers of
either orientation. Like snapshots or scenes in a dramatic
pageant, the metopes freeze moments of violent action,
exhibiting the peculiarity of Centaur posture: they cannot
stand or kneel like men; they can rear like horses. Although
all Centaurs are man above and horse below, there are early
depictions (not on the Parthenon) with human forelegs. From
the front, these might look more human, but from the side,
they appear even less unified, since their nether parts are also
dual. Both combinations viewed from the side or rear present
not one whole, natural being, but a beast with two backs.
The most human parts of the Parthenon Centaurs are the
faces. Although some are grotesque and mask-like, while
others are said to be "sensitive" or "grandfatherly," several
features emphasize their un-emerged humanity, or their
reversion to bestiality. Their heads are set low on their
shoulders and are less visibly articulated from their bodies by
necks than those of the humans (south 26, 29, 31). Unlike the
dean-shaven faces of the young Lapiths, the Centaurs are
bearded; they look older and shaggy and the beards further
obscure the articulation of their heads. 81 In south 31 the
bearded head of the Centaur is hard to grasp, but the Centaur
has the Lapith by the throat (Figure 3). Rationality seems
pulled down or sunken into their violent, marauding Centaur
bodies. A recent interpreter claims that the more "human"
faces among the mask-like, ferocious ones are evidence that
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the sculptors did not
view these problematic
beings as uniformly alien
and hostile, or offer an
"easy apology for human
superiority," and asks
"whether they [centaurs]
should be construed as
other at all." 82 It seems
more correct to say that
the occasionally human
expressions underline
the grotesqueness of FIGURE 3 (Courtesy of A. Nicgorski)
their bestial behavior,
just as Xerxes' pain at his disastrous failure intensifies the
audience's understanding of what is wrong with his grotesque
project. Persian violations are the result of human nature
aspiring to the super-human; Centaur violations are the result
of human nature sunk into the subhuman. In both cases,
hybris characterizes the hybrid.
The sunken heads are emphasized even more by the
prominent rear ends of the Centaurs. Their upright human
torsos are short and the heavy bulk of their horizontal horse
bodies pulls them groundward. Even when rearing or
bucking, they are not taller than their human opponents.
Many originally had carved hairy tails that protruded out of
the frames of the deeply carved reliefs. Some interpreters
associate the tails with the supposed phallic character of the
Centaurs, deriving their name from the Greek word for
"goad" or "prick" (kentros), and relating it to obscene phallic
jokes that play on their name and sexually aggressive
character. 83 But interestingly, many of the Centaurs do not
have prominent or even visible genitals, as do most of the
Lapiths, who are often pictured in full frontal nudity. \Vhen
the Centaur organs of generation are visible, they are in
equine location. The early Centaurs with human front legs
raise the odd possibility of two different sets of genitals. One
�FLAUMENHAFT
85
would expect that these organs would be of great interest,
given the virile potency of the horse component, as well as
the hybrid nature of the combination. The relative lack of
attention to the genitalia of the Parthenon Centaurs reminds
the viewer that there are no accounts, as there are for
Amazons, of communities of Centaurs. After the first mating
of Ixion, references to females or to reproduction are rare.
The human torsos of the Parthenon Centaurs have navels
indicating their generation. But whatever their own
genealogy is, it seems that Centaurs, like mules and other
hybrids, are themselves sterile dead ends. Amazons do not
marry, but they generate and raise children; Centaurs do
neither: they rape.
Finally, the Parthenon Centaurs seem remarkably
unsexual in their attack on the Lapith women. The
impression the metopes give is more of disrupted communal
festivity, marauding violence, and theft than of lust; more
unfamiliarity with the celebratory social use of wine by a
civilized community, than a coordinated attempt to provide
themselves with women. This is not the rape of Sabines taken
for marriage to perpetuate a community. The two slabs that
do depict Centaurs with women (south 25, 29) show only the
attempted abduction and call attention to the awkwardness of
any actual coupling. Viewed as a whole, these metopes
suggest that the sculptors are more interested in depicting the
opposition of male bodies than the violation of female ones.
Like the pediment sculptures, the metopes are extraordinary in their representation of drapery, the fabric that
indicates the presence of differentiated but coordinated activities of men and women in a well-fabricated human
community. The nude bodies of the Lapiths are repeatedly
displayed against the fabric of woven capes made by the
mothers and wives they are fighting to protect. Kenneth
Clark's distinction between nudity and nakedness 84 reminds
us that the visible bodies of the Lapiths are not merely
exposed as those of animals would be. Rather, they suggest
the freedom and equality of citizen soldiers on view to each
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
other. Like the Athenian youths who performed a nude
armed dance at the Pauathenaia, they exhibit their readiness
to protect their threatened community. 85 In contrast to the
"nude" Lapiths, the half-animal bodies of the Centaurs, with
their lifelike muscles, hairs, and veins, would look strikingly
"naked." They are unfettered by the yokes, reins, and bridles
with which, elsewhere on the temple, human masters have
"clothed" their animals. On the frieze, these signs of human
domination were made more visible through the use of paint
or real reins or bridles attached to the stone with bronze
rivets. Two of the best-executed and best-preserved metopes
demonstrate some of the themes sketched above. Both focus
our attention on woven cloth as a sign of civilized humanity.
The composition of south 27, the sixth slab from the eastern
corner, positions the Lapith and Centanr combatants so that
their bodies pull away from rather than turn upon each other
as Poseidon and Athena do in the West Pediment (Figure 4).
The Centaur appears to be trying to remove a spear from his
back, and the Lapith is about to strike him again. All the
features described above-the upright posture of the man,
supported by his two sturdy legs, the exposed human genitals,
the unusually low horizontality of the beast, the sunken
Centaur head-are present here as in other panels. But the
remarkable pulling
apart of the two
bodies allows the
sculptor to concentrate attention on
the full folds of the
long cape worn by
the youth; the eye
falls especially on
the curved vertical
folds between the
figures. The cloth,
as well as the fact
that the nude man
FIGURE 4 (Courtesy of A. Nicgorski)
�FLAUMENHAFT
87
is carved in much
higher relief than the
Centaur behind him,
separates and makes
him stand forth from
his surroundings as the
naked beasts never do.
In his almost threedimensional
roundness, this man
resembles pediment
gods or human stage
actors. The open cape
FIGURE 5 (Courte-sy of A. Nicgorski)
reveals his articulated
human body and its dominating and generative powers, but
attests also to human shame and the recognition that, for the
human, cover and exposure are appropriate in different
circumstances. Finally, the sculptor's craft has represented in
its own medium the product of the weaver's craft: soft,
folded, perishable cloth is captured in hard, rigid, permanent
marble. In their drunken rampage, the Centaurs have
scattered weapons and jugs about the wedding feast turned
war. Techne, in the form of weapons, wine, and weavings, is
the trademark of the human; mere force characterizes the
non-human.
South 28 (Figure 5) functions as a partner to 27. Stunned
or dead, a Lapith youth lies flat on the ground, legs useless,
arms pinned under him, genitals flaccid, head tipped back.
Under him is his crumpled cloak, likely to be his burial
shroud when the battle is over. A bucking Centaur, naked
chest erect and arm stretched out like the Lapith's in 27,
towers above the youth. His carved tail, miraculously intact
over the centuries, stands out in triumph, and he grasps a
bowl from the wedding feast, perhaps the domestic "weapon"
with which he felled the Lapith. Unlike some depictions of
Centaurs, the ones on the Parthenon are not shaggy. 86 For the
most part, they are naked and unprotected. Therefore, the
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
most striking feature of this panel is the extraordinary wild
panther skin that hangs upside down from the Centaur's
outstretched arm. Part shield, part cloak, it is the complete
antithesis of the fabricated cloth that signals the human, even
more so since parts of it hang in folds reminiscent of the cloth
in other metopes. Here a wild hybrid carries the barely transformed skin of a wild beast, another violently killed victim
who never self-consciously faced his killer as human
combatants do. The open-fanged jaws and outstretched claws
of the dead panther hang directly over the face of the dead
Lapith, emphasizing the confrontation of the wild and the
civilized. Finally, the combination of man and beast in the
triumphant Centaur appears even more monstrous by the
additional limbs and tail provided by the draped panther skin.
Moving one more slab to the right, the spectator would
have faced, in south 29, another frozen moment. An elderly
Centaur with short, flabby torso and bald, bearded head low
on his chest abducts a struggling young Lapith woman. Her
vulnerability and violation are indicated by her torn peplos
and exposed naked shoulder and breast. Greek art often
displays the kalokagathos-the "noble and good" mannude, as he would have displayed himself in the gymnasium.
Respectable women, the wives, mothers, and daughters
whose lives were more secluded than those of the men,
usually appear clothed, only partly visible to observers. The
Lapith girl's crinkly dress reveals her spread legs, although, as
we have suggested, the Centaur seems more intent on robbery
than on sexual assault. All his strength is concentrated in his
left arm and the hand that restrains her powerless hand and
holds up her body as he attempts to gallop away. On this
Centaur's back, balancing the crinkly dress pressed against his
chest, is one of those capes that appear on some of the other
metope Centaurs. The garment does not fall naturally on the
Centaur's back; rather, this beast with two backs is cloaked
only on its human shoulders. Unlike the capes that "frame"
the vertical bodies of the nude humans, this one grotesquely
emphasizes the monster's hybrid nature; the naked horseflesh
�FLAUMENHAFT
89
of its nether part interrupts its downward flow. The
"piecrust" edging on the cape will be seen as the characteristic decoration of the cloaks of the young Athenian
horsemen of the frieze. Once recognized as a mark of the
civilized city and its citizens, it appears even more anomalous
on the horse-men that threaten civilized life.
The greatest mystery about the south metopes concerns
the apparent intrusion of seemingly unrelated material in
south 13 through 21. Unfortunately, these scenes are known
only through the Carrey drawings, which reveal that the
center panels of the Centauromachy contain no Centaurs.
Jeffrey Hurwit reviews suggestions that these panels are
dramatically (or cinematographically) coherent as a "mythological 'flashback"' in the manner of "similar debriefings in
the choral odes of tragedies," and that they may have
presented the background story of Ixion and his descendents,
or of "early Athenian kings and heroes."87 He suggests that
the central panels are not intrusive at all, but relevant to the
central purpose of the Parthenon: the celebration of Athena
and her city is itself a paradigmatic civic activity. Thus, these
carvings may depict Athena and her cult statues. South 19-21
may "have represented the spinning of cloth, the removal of
a robe or pep/as in a roll from a loom" and the "disrobing of
a stiff, old-fashioned cult-statue (the Athena Polias) in anticipation of the presentation of a new dress: the central events
of the Plynteria and Panathenaia come to mind. " 88 As we shall
see, these events are represented also at the final destination
of the Athenian procession on the east end of the frieze. If, as
I have suggested, the Parthenon repeatedly uses woven fabric
and the women who weave it as images of the interwoven
elements of a coherent enduring community, female woolworkers and dressers at the center of the male
Centauromachy make sense. From both ends and at the
center of the south side of the Parthenon, the violent
Centaurs undermine the foundations of human society:
hospitality, marriage, weaving, and civic religion.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
4. Frieze: Within the Polis
At the outermost and highest position of the temple's short
east and west ends, the pediments and their sculptures in-theround point to what is beyond and above the city. The
external band of "framed" metopes carved in high relief
below them on all four sides of the temple depict the
struggles of the civilized polis to maintain itself against terrestrial threats in the shape of fully and partially human aliens.
Within the columns on the inner structure a three-foot-high
ribbon of pictures carved in low relief also wraps around the
temple. The frieze is continuous, broken visually only at the
four corners of the building. But since it is viewed from
outside and below, through the columns, it is also seen as a
series of separate scenes like the metopes and like the articulated episodes of Aeschylus's play. Like the Persians, which
differs from most tragedies by depicting a contemporary
historical rather than a distant mythical event, the frieze
differs from other Greek friezes in depicting a contemporary
subject; it is a "documentary"" in real place and time: "For
the first time in Greek history, it shows mortal human
beings." 90 On the inside of the temple we view the city from
the inside, at home, at peace: a terrestrial, civilized
community attached to and defined by a particular locale.
In the play Athens views Persians and examines itself
indirectly by looking at them. On the Parthenon frieze Athens
looks directly at itself. The Parthenon frieze shows victorious
Athenians rather than defeated Persians. The Persians are now
remembered, not by preserving ruins and abstaining from
civic rituals, but by restoring these rituals at-and even onthe temple. The setting is, once again, the Acropolis. The
festival procession that had to be abandoned "when the
Persians came" now makes its way through all the important
public places in the city, serving once more, but with special
meaning, "as a symbolic reappropriation of the city's space by
the community." 91 Mourning memory has given way to
festive memory. The frieze replaces the flight of the people
and Athena from the city to Salamis with the procession of
�FLAUMENHAFT
91
the reestablished populace to the new home of the goddess at
the center of the city.
Like Pericles' funeral oration, the city on the frieze does
not emphasize individuality; unlike those of the Centaurs and
even the horses, the Athenian faces on the frieze are indistinguishable from each other. 92 Also, unlike the metopes with
their opposed pairs, the frieze contains all the elements of a
coherent population organized into groups. In characteristic
clothing, young and old, male and female, magistrates and
citizens, warriors and weavers, and even resident aliens who
call this city home, make their way to the east front of the
temple. The frieze resembles a story·cloth, wrapped around
an enclosed form. Like the city and the building itself, it
emphasizes the boundedness of the city. The observer circumnavigates the sides, looking inward towards the center. 93 As
we have seen, the final pomp€, "procession," of Aeschylus's
tragedy depicts the disintegration of the Persian regime and
the shamed ruler's retreat in his tattered pep/as into the
private confines of his palace, out of the view of those he has
ruined. In contrast, the Panathenaia pomp€ on the frieze
depicts an integrated regime in the act of delivering a new
pep/as to the goddess and openly displaying the "ruler"-the
demos, "people," itself-to the public view.
In the Persians, the dramatic action moves forward; the
scenes change, while the spectator remains stationary. On the
Parthenon, the procession is frozen into stationary stone. But
as the spectators move forward towards the front of the
temple, the frieze procession itself seems to advance. 94 The
spectators in the theater are simultaneously in their own time
and that of the play. Likewise the viewers at the temple are in
both the time of their own procession and the time of the
procession on the frieze. Like the play and the east pediment,
the frieze respects the unity of time, and its action too has a
beginning (at the southwest corner), middle (on the north
and south sides), and end (on the east where the two sides
meet). Unlike the framed metopes, which depict separate
episodes, the Ionic frieze is a "seamless whole" that can
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
present a narrative in "a continuous spatial and temporal
flow." 95 "Everything here is ongoing; everything is process.""
Various participants turn in different directions, adjust their
clothing, and wait, like actors, for their cues. Marshals
motion them forward, cavalry and chariot horses wait
patiently or rear restlessly, trained acrobats jump on and off
chariots, and a sacrificial ox digs in its heels.
A selective discussion will once more highlight the way
the frieze "remembers" the Persians and defines Athens in the
same "vocabulary"-this time pictorial-of yokes, woven
fabric, and speech. Again, comparisons with Persian visual art
prove instructive. The designers of the Parthenon and many
other Athenians were familiar with the great buildings of the
eastern empire, and it is likely that some of those who carved
its marbles had earlier worked on Persian buildings. Was the
Parthenon frieze "an ideological reply to the creation of their
old enemy," 97 or, after Athens had avoided the Persian yoke,
was "Persian imperial propaganda ... appropriated and
adapted by nco-imperialist Athens for the purposes of
promoting her own self-image"? 98 On the peripheral
pediments, metopes, and frieze of the great democratic
temple, the differences from Persian buildings are more
striking than the suggested "appropriations." But, as we shall
see, in the innermost chamber of the temple, the viewer is
sharply aware that Athens, too, "required an empire, but an
empire different from any that had ever existed." 99
Let us look again at the relief on the Apadana (throne
room) staircase at Persepolis. It depicts foreigners in
procession, bearing gifts to the Persian king. Their clothing is
repetitive, stiff, and stylized; no animated human body is
revealed or enhanced by the heavy robes of the Persians or
the simple tunics of their subjects. The foreign groups are
distinguished from each other in dress, gifts, and the animals
that accompany them but, like Xerxes' army of soldiers, they
are all alike in the most important respect, their enslavement.
They march stiffly, in single file, all in the same position, at
the same distance from each other. 100 The individuals are
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isolated even as they form a unit. The loss or addition of a
few figures would have little effect for, like Xerxes' armies,
they are not woven together into a coherent whole. Their
sameness suggests that the army of craftsmen who made them
were also "under the yoke." The figures are clearly carved,
with beards, hands, and feet making pleasing decorative
patterns like those in interior tiling or wallpaper. But they
lack animation and will of their own, neither gesturing to nor
speaking with one another. Individual figures or groups are
regularly tepeated so there is no narrative in time, no illusion
of motion. The effect is mesmerizing and intimidating, and
reduces the viewer to "gaze in something like awe-from
prostration level." 101 Another Persepolis relief shows Persian
subjects carrying the king on his throne. They too are all the
same; he is unique, above, and much larger than they. They
serve as the patterned architectural support on which his
weight presses.1 02
The difference in size is also seen in a rock relief at
Bisutun on which captured rebel kings approach Darius.l 03
The location of this impressive carving is itself interesting. It
sits high on a cliff overlooking a mountain, inaccessible, like
the Persepolis Apadana, to the sight of Persians as if it were
meant for the realm to which the King aspired-the whole
world. Unlike the Parthenon in the middle of Athens, this
monument in the middle of nowhere-or everywhere-bears
an inscription, the same words that begin all public utterances
of the King: "Proclaims Darius the king ... " The picture of the
diminished and yoked human beings before him conveys the
same political principle as the words: absolute despotism. On
the Persepolis staircase the camels, mules, and horses are
reined and bitted. On the Bisutun monument the hands of the
captured kings are tied behind their backs. Forced to face
their conquering master, they cannot look at or speak with
each other. The metaphor of Aeschylus's choruses and the
Queen's dream is depicted on the cliff at Bisitun: the captive
kings are literally yoked together by the cord around their
necks.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
In contrast to the Persian unity of repetition, the long and
varied Parthenon frieze conveys the dynamic unity of the city
it celebrates. Among the Greek cities, the Athenians alone
celebrated their unification in a public festival. 104 Civic
mythology told how, long before the building of the
Parthenon, Theseus united a number of independent communities to "live together," szmoikeo, in a single city. No longer
held together by a single monarch, the democratic citizens on
the frieze walk in pairs or groups that articulate them into
sub-classes of the city. Unlike the mass pictures on Persian
palaces and rock reliefs, the Athenian participants are neither
unconnected individuals nor yoked teams, but autonomous
and willing parts of an organized whole. The frieze conveys
their freedom-the same freedom Pericles describes in the
funeral oration-in several ways. The people are local
citizens, not foreign subject peoples of other nations. They
are self-organized. Marshals resembling their fellow citizens
in size and dress are stationed at various points to keep an eye
on the parts of the procession and to direct them to move at
the right times. There is no all-seeing agent of an unseen
monarch supervising the action. Other city magistrates at the
east end take part in the central ceremony of the festival, the
folding of the goddess's festal robe.
The figures on the frieze differ in size, but not as in the
Persian murals. In order to fit the frieze horses into the
confines of the three-foot band, the sculptors made them the
size of ponies, and the bulls being led to the sacrifice are no
taller than their human masters. There is no colossal Great
King or Pharaoh towering above his subjects. In the selfgoverning democratic city, only the gods are larger than the
citizens; seated, they are the same height as the standing
humans who deliver offerings to the only beings they
recognize as above them. The rest of the frieze figures are
distinguished into ranks of horses, lines of chariots, pedestrians, bearers of various implements and, on the east side,
the only mortal women depicted on the temple. Unlike the
figures in Persian frieze processions, the Athenian participants
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take different positions, and look in different directions.
Unlike yoked non-Persian processors, here even nonAthenian metics, who carry trays and parasols, willingly
weave their way in the procession to the front of the temple.
Only animals are reined or yoked together. The beautiful
horses on the frieze are separated from their human handlers
who coordinate animal strength with human needs in finely
wrought chariots. Unlike the diminished Persian subjects,
these zeugei pompikoi,' 05 "yoked processionals," seem to have
their nature enhanced by their participation in the civic
festival. They might remind us of the story of that mule who
returned of his own will, unyoked, to further the work on the
temple. Elsewhere on the frieze, graceful young riders recall
that Athena was also the "horse-taming goddess." Hers is the
power that enables men to train and work with horses, rather
than merely to subjugate them by force. The bulls and sheep,
as objects of sacrifice, are more mere instruments of their
human masters. But, like that of the weary pediment horse
described above, the depiction of the resisting "heifer lowing
at the skies" 106 reveals an extraordinary sensitivity to the
psychic dimension even of mastered animals. Persian bulls
and horses seem stiff and unanimated in comparison.
The frieze unfurls in a horizontal band, but there are no
prostrate subjects, dying La piths or half-horizontal Centaurs.
The posture of free citizens is upright. As if to underline the
free character of the event, the frieze includes among the
chariots, acrobatic contestants, apobatai, about whom little is
known, but who seem to have shown their agility by jumping
on and off moving chariots in competitions. It is sometimes
suggested that they represent the freedom and flexibility of
the Athenian hoplite warriors who, to the perplexity of historians, are not represented on the frieze. Most importantly like
Herodotus, Thucydides, and Aeschylus, who all point to free
speech as the key distinction between Persians and Athenians,
the Parthenon frieze depicts Athens' citizens communicating
with each other. Marshals beckon, horsemen and pairs of
girls chat, magistrates converse in groups, and the chief
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
archon instructs the child who helps him fold the pep/as. In
their freedom to speak-to describe, deliberate, and
disagree-the human members of this city resemble their
gods, who, on the frieze, are also depicted in conversation.
The procession begins at the southwest corner of the
temple. The first figure on the west side-the one farthest
from the front-is a nude young man who is arranging his
large cloth mantle as the procession is about to begin. Most
of the figures are clothed. The Parthenon frieze, like the
metopes and like the peplos ceremony of the Panathenaic
festival itself, repeatedly draws our attention to the ways in
which human beings cover their bodies.l 07 Along three sides,
the moving spectator sees at intervals marchers who are
adjusting their clothing, belts, or footwear as they progress
forward. The clothing of the figures on all sides of the temple
articulates them into groups, identifiable by cloaks, tunics,
hats, and footwear. The fabrics also indicate motion, speed,
and the direction of the procession and contribute to our
sense of real live activity on the frieze. The frieze also depicts
many objects-chariots, bridles, pots, trays, and stoolsfabricated by this technologically sophisticated people.
Interestingly, it shows no buildings, agreeing perhaps with
those who evacuated to Salamis, that the Athenian polis could
survive even if its buildings were destroyed, as long as its
political and ritual activities were maintained.
The long north and south sides of the frieze exhibit the
male warriors of Athens, unarmed, at peace. Modern viewers
have puzzled over the depiction of archaic chariot warriors
rather than fifth century hoplites. Some explain it as
supporting Pericles' expansion of the Athenian cavalry.
Others claim that the 192 figures (if you count right) on the
frieze were meant to represent the 192 hoplite soldiers who
fell at Marathon as they participated in the last Panathenaia
before the battle. 108 The depiction of young men guiding
spirited yet orderly horses suggests the character of the city
Pericles describes in the Funeral Oration. It is a stark contrast
to the dream that the Persian Queen describes in Aeschylus's
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play. As we saw in Part One, the submissive and the spirited
women pull against each other when Xerxes yokes them to
pull his chariot. The chariot horses on the frieze have more
in common with the horses that pull the chariots of the gods
in the corners of the west pediment. These horses and
humans who, unlike centaur horse-men, are fully distinguished from each other, are nevertheless a masterpiece of
intertwining elements. Here the technical art of perspectival
carving in extremely shallow bas-relief produces a stone
picture that looks almost like a flat woven mat. Once again,
the interweaving of the figures suggests the way in which this
city is bound together. A computer video in the British
Museum turns the chariot horses to show how they would
look if they faced the viewer. As the figures turn, the frieze
resembles a weaving that, stretched in different directions,
reveals but does not unravel the separate strands of which it
is fabricated. The horses and humans in the frieze procession
"hold together" as individuals do in the Athenian polis, but
not in Persia.
As the procession weaves its way forward, slowing as it
approaches its destination, the culminating scene takes center
stage and is "framed" by the
two central columns of the
eastern front. The frame is
structural and therefore
more prominent than the
changing "frames" the
viewer makes for himself as
he progresses towards the
pep/as scene (Figure 6); this
makes this scene "static
and eternalized." 1' ' Many
viewers feel that the
procession also becomes
"hushed" or "silenf' at this
point, as all senses focus on
the most important human
FIGURE 6 (Courtesy of A. Nicgorski)
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
fabrication on the frieze. It is literally a woven fabric. Below
the pediment depicting the birth of Athena are pictured the
city's chief ceremonial magistrate, the archon basileus ("king
archon"), his young assistant, and the goddess's birthday
pep/as. That they are folding, and not just holding, the pep/as
points to the integrity and continuity of the city, for they are
preparing to put it away, according to the custom of the past,
for the dressing of the image in the future.uo The confidence
about continuity and the future is also suggested by the
participation of children in the ritual. It is a stark contrast to
the dead-end feel of the Persians, where Aeschylus's young
and childless king withdraws in pathetic pompe in his tattered
pep/as. The ritually woven story-doth, which may have been
painted on the marble in bright yellow and purple, depicted
the victory of gods over Giants, the subject of the east
metopes. Its making and its part in Athena's festival symbolize
the way in which Athens itself is "woven" together. Evelyn
Harrison observes that, like the one on Keats's Grecian Urn,
"this is a picture of a folk." 111 By "brede/ of marble men and
maidens," Keats means both "breed" and "braid." Like the
urn pictures, the chiseled Parthenon "folk" resembles a
"braided" tapestry. Horizontal lines are still visible "to serve
as a sort of warp for the design." 112 Like the gods who
overcame the Giants, these citizens were able to overcome the
Persians because they were politically "well-woven." This is
what Athenians meant when they said they were "worthy of
the pep/os." 113
The web of state, or fabric of society, is the product of the
interweaving of warp and weft: male and female, public and
private, and, as the Eleatic Stranger explains in the
Statesman, of courage and moderation. In his description of
the ruling art, the true statesman, like the master weaver,
supervises and interweaves all the subordinate activities of the
city. After preparing a multiplicity of single strands of wool,
he combines them in a tightly woven, but freely flexible,
unity. Unlike autocratic tyrannies like Persia, where difference
is regarded as rebellion, and ropes, bridges, and fetters bind
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unrelated parts into a rigid, unnatural "whole," the Greek
city thrives on the "tension" between its different elements.l 14
It holds together from within, like a well-woven fabric or, as
we have seen, like the pantheon of the gods. The designers of
the Parthenon suggest that a "smooth web," which is smooth
not despite, but because of its tension, can be achieved in a
law-abiding democracy as well as in the virtuous monarchy
described by the Stranger. Here, too, statesmanship has interwoven raw materials, tools, vessels, servants, laborers,
merchants, ship owners, clerks, heralds, soothsayers, and
priests into a working whole. Plutarch's description of
Athens, coordinated and collaboratively at work on Pericles'
building projects comes to mind. But the statesmanship is that
of citizen magistrates, not monarch.
The eastern side of the frieze depicts women, not as
objects in the hands of Centaurs, but as active members of a
flourishing society, the producers of the city's swaddling
cloths, everyday garments, and ceremonial fabrics for the
living, as well as shrouds for the dead. Again, we should
emphasize that the weaving pictured here is not private but
civic work. The loom for weaving, like the plough for
planting and the press for making olive oil, is a domestic
peacetime contrivance of the armed goddess who, at other
times, champions the warriors who defend her city. Near the
end of the procession, Athena appears without her helmet
and weapons with the aegis in her lap. Here we see the
worker goddess, Athena Ergane, the patroness of
shipbuilders, woodworkers, and weavers like the ergastinai
who wove the peplos, seated, appropriately, with the metalworking smith, Hephaestus, who split Zeus's skull with his
ax, enabling Athena to be "born."
Like the gods on the pediments, the gods seated together
at the head of the frieze procession are multiple strands that
together make up a unified whole. They too are a "folk." Like
the rest of the frieze figures, they present a silent story to be
articulated by the viewer. Each divinity is identifiable by
distinctive looks or by conventional tags, some in the form of
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
objects that were once attached to or painted on the marble
reliefs: Apollo's headband (drill holes remain), Poseidon's
trident (now missing from his left hand), Hermes' hat, Ares'
club, Athena's aegis, Hera's veil, and Zeus's throne (the
others are on simpler, backless, stools). Each god has a special
position with respect to the others, either by genealogy and
history or by what each personifies. But not even a god is
autonomous or self-sufficient. None can even be himself until
woven into the pantheon in the context of the others. In
some places, the perspective of the low relief carving makes
their limbs look entwined or interwoven. They lean against
each other (Hermes-Dionysus, Poseidon-Apollo, ErosAphrodite), and refiect each other in their arm gestures
(Dionysus, Hera, Apollo) and veils (Hera-Aphrodite). Jenifer
Neils suggests that those in the right hand group, which
includes Poseidon, are associated with ports, the sea, and
naval battle. They are balanced by those of the left hand
group, which includes Demeter; these are associated with the
countryside, agriculture, and land battle. All together, she
claims, the gods remind the viewer of the completeness of the
recent Athenian victory over the Persians. 115
Their overlapping draped garments also unify them in an
integrated group. Like the garments everywhere on the
Parthenon, where there is little nudity,'" these are
remarkable. Except for the child Eros, the gods, like the frieze
Athenians, are all clothed in rippling, crinkly, folding, fiexible
material that conforms to the lifelike bodies beneath it.
Athena's peplos is carefully pinned at the shoulder and tucked
under her legs; Artemis wears a head cloth and modestly
adjusts her gown to cover her shoulder, and her skirted robe
falls about her differently positioned legs in a different way
from Athena's. The Athenian people, "worthy of the pep/os,"
worship gods whose clothing is tailored for anthropomorphic
bodies.
How are the frieze Olympians related to the frieze
Athenians? Some claim that the gods turn away and show
little interest in the procession in honor of the goddess. 117 But
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101
Neils revives a view that they are sitting in a semicircle and
thus are attending to the central pep/as scene "before"
them. us Viewers of the frieze who think of the "row" of gods
this way visually deepen the low-relief carving and bring out
its "texture." Like the flattened ranks of horses, the gods and
humans appear as they might in a woven tapestry. So the gods
are both interested and not interested in the mortals who
honor them. As at Troy, they can turn away to pursue their
amours, quarrels, and conversations. But, as Homer shows,
the most serious and interesting activities of the gods who live
on Olympus are the ones that are interwoven with those of
mortals on earth. Athena is as interesting as a strand in
Homer's stories of Achilles and Odysseus and in Aeschylus's
accounts of the founding of the Athenian court and defeat of
the Persians as she is in her own story. The Parthenon gives us
the gods both on their own and woven into our mortal
stories.
The frieze offers the Athenians a picture of themselves
that is also worthy of the gods' attention. The human festival
is, after all, the reason they have gathered together in Athens.
The only other place where they assemble in this fashion is at
home on Olympus. Now they have accepted seats of honor
and look relaxed, keeping their distance from the mortals yet
prepared to stay and grace the holiday with their presence.
There is time to be passed before the animals are sacrificed
and the meat is distributed in the Keramikos at some distance
from the temple. The Gods, who dine on nectar and
ambrosia, do not appear eager for the festival feast. Mortal
fighting, yoking, and weaving require mortal eating. But the
gods who live forever have leisure just to look and to talk.
Some of them view the approaching procession. Aphrodite
points out something to young Eros, who perhaps has seen
fewer of these events than the others have. And others, Zeus
and Hera, Athena and Hephaestus, and Poseidon and Apollo,
turn to each other and converse, just like the rwo groups of
five magistrates fianking them. If the pep/as has already been
displayed and is now being folded away, the culminating
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
scene of the frieze illustrates the purpose of the temple as a
memorial of the Persian attempt to destroy Athens. The
Persians have come and gone. In Athens, the gods who live
forever participate in the Athenian Panathenaia; Athena's
pep/as-and the people "worthy of the peplos"-endure.
5. Statue: Parthenos, Polis, Empire
As they arrived at the front side of the Parthenon the
spectators would first see the eastern pediment depicting the
birth of Athena. Beneath it the eastern metopes showed the
goddess's battle with the Giants. From between the central
columns her birthday pep/as on the frieze would be visible.
But the extraordinary visual displays we have discussed so far
were all only wrappings, the decorative coverings of the
house of the goddess herself. Ancient visitors to the temple do
not even mention the frieze, but all marvel at the statue. Deep
within, in her own private chamber, Athena Parthenos stood
alone, visible and awesome in
looks and size, to the "folk"
that came to her birthday
party. Unlike the Great King in
his Persepolis throne room,
this divinity was made to be
seen. But Pheidias's masterpiece can no longer be seen.
Pausanias's descriptions, some
ancient souvenir statuettes, a
small Roman copy, the
Varvakeion Athena (Figure 7)
and other statues of the type,
are all that's left to shape our
understanding of the famous
statue and what it could have
meant when the Parthenon
was the highpoint of the
Athenian polis. The full-size,
concrete reproduction in the
FIGURE 7 (Courtesy of A. Nicgors.ki)
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103
unlikely setting of Nashville, Tennessee has attracted much
popular and scholarly attention, but it is hard to believe that
the Parthenos could have looked like that.
The size of the little korai statues presented with
petitionary prayers of individual Athenians to the familiar
wooden image of Athena Polias 119 suggests the personal
attachment and affection that those who brought them felt
for their domestic goddess. The bronze Athena Promachos is
larger than the human warriors she would lead in warding off
a threat to their city; outdoors and approachable, she stands
"foremost" but at ease among them. We have seen how the
Parthenon, unlike the colossal buildings of other places, is
large, but somehow commensurate with human size aud the
capacity to take it in. This is true, despite the fact that
Pheidias deliberately made it larger than the earlier
"Parthenon" on its site so that it could contain the statue he
intended to put in it. Similarly, the large size of Athena on the
east frieze is subtly suggested by her seated position, but does
not overwhelm either the mortals depicted near her or the
mortal viewers of the frieze. But the standing 120 Parthenos
statue, although of human shape, was colossal, almost forty
feet tall, far beyond human scale. She was the power behind
the most powerful city in the world. Full-breasted and
clothed in an Athenian pep/as, she would not have resembled
the human-sized Amazons at the edges of the city. She held iu
her extended right hand a much smaller statue of Nike, the
goddess of victory, that was almost six feet tall. Athena
Parthenos stood ready and armed, with the Gorgon aegis not
resting on her lap as in the frieze, but as visible armor over
her pep/as. Her helmet, crowned with sphinx and griffins,
had its earfiaps up to indicate peacetime, but it was on her
head, and she held her spear. Her shield was engraved with
the familiar subjects of fighting Amazons and Giants, and her
sandals depicted, once again, the Centauromachy. Here, as
elsewhere in the building, Athena's defense of Athens in
contemporary times is associated with her defeat of these
earlier threats. But now the victor over the Giants is herself a
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
giant. The folds of her giant pep/as recall the stiff, fiuted
columns of her giant temple more than they resemble the soft
and folding fabrics we have been observing elsewhere in the
Parthenon.
Like the Zeus at Olympia, the Parthenos was marveled at
for its size and for the materials it was made of: the bright
white ivory of her face and arms, the gemstones of her eyes,
and the gold of her clothing and equipment. Unlike the
olivewood Polias that fell from the sky, perhaps as a gift from
Zeus, the Parthenos was admired as the fabrication of an
extraordinary Athenian artist. Just as the later, world-famous
statue at Olympia was Pheidias's Zeus, this masterpiece was
Pheidias's Athena, the product of human imagination and
technical prowess at their peak. In contrast to the smaller,
worn, wooden slab, this Athena was huge, hard, and very
heavy. The plates of gold that formed her dress weighed
almost a ton.
The atmosphere inside the temple was mysterious and
unsettling, illuminated by window light reflected from a pool
at the statue's base. The shimmering water and light must
have suggested a sort of animation in the immense and
immovable stone figure. The beauty of the Parthenos was
reportedly breathtaking. She must have been deinos, simultaneously "terrifying" and "terrific," "awful" and "a\vesotne."
Unlike the (probably) seated wooden doll that received
female ministrations and petitions, and unlike the seated and
sociable Athena of the east frieze, Pheidias's goddess was
upright and alone. Unlike the statuesque Persian Queen, who
is humanized by what she says, the Parthenos was silent. She
did not communicate with the mortals who came to see her.
Gifts were not presented to her or animals sacrificed at her
altar, and no priestess interpreted messages from her. Since
the huge, flat, ivory face was fastened to the surface and
removable-like the theater mask of Xerxes' mother-it must
have been less realistic and human than some of the more
expressive marble faces elsewhere on the temple. The size of
the immense, white hands, one holding a man-sized statue
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and the other balancing an enormous spear and shield, must
have appeared proportionally larger than the neck and face,
because they were closer to the viewer. Could one still see in
this colossus the goddess of handiwork, Athena Ergane, the
"worker," with hands on a woodcarving, pot, or loom? Or
would her hands suggest those of great Achilles, whose great
man-slaying hands ruthlessly killed Priam's son?
As we have seen, the Persians and Egyptians made such
statues, sometimes so large that they had to lie prone on the
ground. They were usually the images of Kings and Pharaohs,
who represented themselves as all-powerful, even divine, in
their homelands and as entitled to the universal empires they
aspired to outside. Does the colossal Athena still celebrate, as
the outer parts of the temple do, the bounded, self-governing
city and its victory over the despotic juggernaut that sought
to yoke it and deprive it of speech? Or is she, deep within the
temple, the embryo of the imperial Athens destined to emerge
in the fifty years following the Persian Wars? Paradoxically, in
preserving what it viewed as its fully free way of life, Athena's
city, democratic within, was becoming despotic without. The
rule (arche) that began in self-defense against an everexpanding despot soon became the ever-expanding means for
maintaining the extraordinary expense of its extraordinary
achievements. But necessity-for defense or for maintenance-was just the prologue to full-scale empire (arche) in
the Athenian mode.
The necessary means soon became an end in itself as
empire became the full expression of Athenian glory.
Thucydides' account of the war between Athens and its
erstwhile ally Sparta alludes frequently to Athens' erstwhile
imperial enemy Persia. The Persians had always exhibited the
King's valuable possessions as a means of displaying his
power. After the Persian wars, Athens, contrary to its earlier
customs, began to exhibit the valuable trophies left by the
fleeing Persian army. In 454 B.C., the year the Delian treasury
was moved to Athens, each of her colonies and "allies"
marched in the Panathenaic procession with an offering of a
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
cow and a full suit of armor. Some of these "allies" must
uneasily have remembered the Great King's demands for
earth and water several decades before. The Parthenon frieze
does not picture tribute-bearing allies, armed Athenians, or
alien slaves. But as Athens grew rich and powerful she began
to display herself, not only as the producer of dramas, games,
festivals, and art, but as a city worthy of power, as well as the
pep/as. The empire itself soon became part of the display.
Pericles' three speeches in Thucydides make clear that the
internal glory of Athens required external support, often at
the expense of those who did not participate in the
democratic life that Pericles describes. In contrast to the
Persian yoke, weaving has been the appropriate metaphor for
Athenian democratic politics. But Athens' appropriation of
the resources of the unraveling Delian League was destined to
conclude with the unraveling of Athens itself. Pericles does
not use the word "yoke" in his tough arguments for Athenian
rule over the former allies; nor do the Athenians who later
present Melos with their ultimatum. But the Melians know
they must choose between subjugation and death. Just as
Athens had become the only independent city in the Delian
League, its nominal democracy had become the rule of one
citizen (Thuc., 2.65). And Athena, comfortably interwoven
with her fellow gods on the Parthenon frieze, had reappeared
like Darius, in the depths of her temple, huge and
shimmering, overpowering and alone.
As an expensive war with Sparta became increasingly
likely, Pericles assured the Athenians that they had at their
disposal tribute from the allies, public and private dedications, sacred vessels, Persian spoils, and temple treasures.
Several decades before, Aeschylus had vividly contrasted the
private gold of the Great King with the communally owned
silver of the city that defeated him. Xerxes' stage-mother
asserts that he is accountable to no one. Now Pericles
reminded the Athenians that the pep/as of Pheidias's statue
was not a soft woolen fabric like that of Athena Polias, but
one of solid gold. But it, too, could be removed. For, when
�FLAUMENHAFT
107
Pheidias began his masterpiece, Pericles had advised him to
make the pep los detachable (Plut. Pericles., XXXI). 121 Pericles
now reminded the assembly that the goddess was there not
only to be looked at, but also to finance their "safety," and
that no ally need be consulted. As long as they replaced the
loan, they could make use of "the gold plates with which the
goddess herself was overlaid" (Thuc., 2.13). By this time, the
storeroom of the Parthenon was the depository of the Delian
League treasury that had been moved to Athens. Within the
lifetime of the men who had survived Salamis, the building
that began as a memorial of free Athens' defeat of imperial
Persia metamorphosed into a monument to imperial Athens.
In truth, the building was less a "temple" in which to worship
a goddess than the city's icon of its own power and a secure
storehouse for its usable resources; it had become "the central
bank of Athens." 122
Reversing Themistocles' pre-Salamis strategy of evacuating the population from Athens and depending on a
"wooden wall" of ships, Pericles' first speech advised outdwelling Athenians to "bring in their property from the
fields" and "come into the city" (Thnc., 1.143; 2.113) behind
the walls Themistocles had hurriedly built in anticipation of
war with Sparta. Donald Kagan points out that Pericles recognized this strategy as an attempt to overcome "problems
presented by natnre" by turning mainland Athens into a more
defensible "island" (Time., 1.143).123 One is reminded, not
only of Salamis, but also of the "unnatural" projects of
Persian and other barbarian overreachers to "yoke" the
Hellespont, turn peninsulas into islands, and reroute rivers by
digging channels. Thucydides says it was hard for a rural
Athenian to leave behind his town (polis) and the ancient
form of government (po/iteia) of his father (Time., 2.14).
When these suburban Athenians had come into the city-here
he says astu (Thuc., 2.17), the physical surroundings-they
had nowhere to go, so they camped in deserted places, and in
sanctuaries and shrines. The Acropolis and Parthenon were
off-limits. But many crowded into land at the foot of the
�108
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Acropolis-land that an oracle had warned against inhabiting-and in areas between the Long Walls, and in the
Piraeus (Thuc., 2.17).
Just before Pericles' second speech, the funeral oration,
Thucydides says that the Athenian army that invaded Megaris
with Pericles as its general was "the largest army of Athenians
that had ever been assembled in one body" (Thuc., 2.31). His
enumeration of the different parts of this force reminds one
of Aeschylus's descriptions of the Great King's army in the
earlier war. His Persian Queen would have been satisfied with
this numerical account of Athenian strength. The funeral
oration is the more subtle account of the source of Athenian
strength, the one the Queen could not appreciate. The free
city that defeated the Persians is to be celebrated and loved
for the character of its life: its political institutions, laws,
physical beauty, wisdom, and the character of its citizens.
Athens is open to all the world; no one is prevented "from
learning or seeing" (mathematos e theamatos, Time., 2.39);
the city is an exhibit, a school, from which all Hellas can learn
(Thuc., 2.41). But as Pericles continues, it becomes clear that
Athens is not a large enough stage on which to exhibit its own
excellence, and that he is thinking of a wider audience than
even Hellas. The delimited city that once remembered the
Persians is now offered the prospect of being honored and
remembered forever by the whole civilized world. Its citizens
can win glory by fixing their gaze, not only on the city but on
the "power [dzmamin] of the city" (Thuc., 2.43). Athens'
power must be displayed in the great theater of war and only
colonies or defeated enemies will serve as "everlasting
memorials" (mnemeia ... aidia, Thuc., 2.41) of her greatness.
Immediately after Pericles' celebration of Athens in the
funeral oration (2.34-46), Thucydides describes the plague,
making it clear that it was exacerbated by the crowding of the
country people into the city (again called astu): now even
temples were filled with corpses and "No fear of gods or law
of men restrained" (Thuc., 1.53). It is unlikely that Athena's
temple on the Acropolis remained unviolated. Plutarch says
�FLAUMENHAFT
109
that Pericles' enemies blamed him for the plague, attributing
it not only to the crowding, but also to the idleness of the
multitudes of men who were "pent up like cattle with no
employ or service" (Plut., Pericles. XXXIV). We might
remember his earlier enthusiastic description of the opportunities for employment and prosperity that Pericles' building
projects had provided.
Pericles' third and last speech is a sober acknowledgement
of the Athenians' sufferings and an exhortation not to allow
these private ills to jeopardize the "common safety" (Thnc.,
2.61). But "freedom" no longer means defying the Great
King's demands for "earth and water" and halting the
expansion of the Persian Empire. Athens and Sparta, as
different as they were, could willingly "yoke" themselves
together to avoid subjugation by Persia. Here Pericles speaks
again of the relationship between Athens' expanding
"empire," her drive to supersede her own limits, and the
necessary subjugation of her erstwhile ally:
... of two divisions of the world which lie open to
man's use, the land and the sea, you hold the
absolute mastery over the whole of one ... to
whatever fuller extent you may choose; and there
is no one, either the Great King or any
nation ... who will block your path as you sail the
seas ... Nor must you think that you are fighting for
the simple issue of slavery or freedom; on the
contrary, loss of empire is also involved and
danger from the hatred incurred in your sway.
From this empire, however, it is too late for you
even to withdraw ... for by this time the empire you
hold is a tyranny, which may seem unjust to have
taken, but which certainly it is dangerous to let go.
(Time., 2.62-63)
Pericles reminds his discontented fellow citizens that their
fathers acquired, preserved, and bequeathed the empire to
them, giving Athens a "great name" (Thuc., 2.64),
�110
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
presumably one far greater than the "Athens" that Darius
wanted to be reminded of, and than the Persian names which
had frightened all Greeks until Athens defeated Xerxes.
Pericles' last words are again about how, even as all things
decay, the memory (mneme) of the glorious Athenian enterprise will endure; the "splendour of the moment and the
after-glory are left in everlasting remembrance" (aeimnestos,
Time., 2.64).
The ivory skin and golden pep/as of Pheidias's Athena
seem to have remained on the statue through the end of the
Peloponnesian War. But she must have provided a kind of
political and psychological support for the empire that was
incubating as Pericles beautified and glorified the city.
Thucydides recounts how internally democratic Athens
became as brutal and denatured to its external subordinatesand eventually to itself-as the internally despotic tyranny of
Persia had been in its expansion. But the silent Parthenon tells
a much more tragic story than the one Aeschylus dramatized
for his fellow citizens. For Athens at her peak exemplified a
human way of life more noble and more natural than overextended Persian despotism, despite the latter's impressive
multiplication of territory, people, buildings, and gold. The
story of Athens is tragic, rather than merely sad or repellent,
for the same reason the story of Oedipus is tragic: the terrible
collapse comes about not, as in Persia, because of grotesque
suppressions and distortions of the human soul, but precisely
as a result of the full exercise of human capacities: selfgovernment, mastery of the sea, poetry, mathematics,
philosophy, art, and architecture, and the free human speech
that makes it all possible. It is difficult simply to say that we'd
prefer for Oedipus or Athens to have been more "moderate."
Pericles urged restraint, even as he cultivated an Athenian
love for Athens that was bound to end up as an eros for Sicily
(Time., 6.24). His ward, Alcibiades, the man most in love
with the Sicilian expedition, was disastrously recalled to
Athens in a ship called the "Salaminia." In the first half of the
century, Phrynichus and Aeschylus made it possible in the
�FLAUMENHAFT
111
theater for the surviving Athenians to weep for Miletus and
even for the Mede. As Athens completed the building
intended to remember its own razing and restoration, the city
hurtled forward to the events described in Thucydides'
terrible account. The colossal Athena within that building was
the terrible image of power that Pericles said would insure the
survival of Athens' name. The shining, bright monument to
Marathon and Salamis could not deter the dark, bloody
massacres at Mytilene, Melos, and Mycalessus. In some
terrible way, it contributed to them.
6. Pandora
We come at last to our last Athenian pep/os. The pedestal of
the statue of Athena depicted another carved gathering of the
gods at another birthday celebration of yet another
parthenos, the maiden Pandora. Hesiod gives two accounts of
the world's first human woman; in both, she and the gods are
the source of all of mankind's troubles. 124 After Prometheus
defied Zeus by giving fire to human beings, Zeus ordered
Hephaestus and Athena to produce a counter-gift, a
"beautiful evil" (kalon kako11), in response to Prometheus's
empowering gift. Hephaestus mixed earth and water and
fashioned a lovely maiden, Pandora, "all-gifts." Athena taught
her to do needlework and to weave the "skillfully embroidered" (po/udaidaloll) web. She dressed and veiled her, and
the other goddesses adorned her with finery. A surviving cup
shows Athena in her own shawl and aegis, pinning the peplos
on the new-made girl. 125 Everyone knows the end of the
story: Pandora opened the jar of "all gifts," releasing them
upon previously free and unburdened man, forcing him to
"bow his neck to the yoke of hard necessity." 126 Along with
the blessings of fire, agriculture, and weaving, man now
possessed the curses of disease, war, and slavery. The source
of human ills, of course, is human nature itself, and Athens
understood itself as the paradigmatically human city. The
tragic account of Athens' glory that we read in Thucydides'
long discursive book can also be "read" in the emerging
�112
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
empire's most impressive building. Like Pandora, the
"beautiful evil" made by Hephaestus, and like the terrible
events depicted in the tragedy that Aeschylus and Pericles
made beautiful for the theater, the monument that Pheidias
and Pericles made beautiful on the Acropolis is a kalon kakon:
the story of the Parthenon and the stories that it tells show
Athens in full flower, and also show the seeds of her selfdestruction.
This story began with an account of Aeschylus's Persians,
a humane view of the tragedy of an empire that attempted to
subjugate free Greek cities under the yoke and mantle of
worldwide tyranny. As different as they were, the defensive
alliance that voluntarily yoked Athens and Sparta together
succeeded in preserving them-and their differences.
Decades later, having torn each other and themselves apart in
the war that Thucydides attributes to Athens' own pursuit of
empire, Alcibiades, who had spent the war bouncing from
Athens to Sparta, to Thrace, to Persia, suggested that the two
former allies might achieve true glory if they once again
yoked themselves together to oppose Persia. This time the
alliance would not be defensive, but aggressive, with the aim
of establishing a Pan-Hellenic empire. The project could
never work since, as we observed above, the yoking of nnlike
partners, even under Darius or Xerxes, is bound to be
temporary. Athens and Sparta were too different to ally for
joint conquest, in contrast to defense, and Alcibiades was
nurtured in Pericles' Athens, not in the palace at Persepolis.
His last wild scheme collapsed completely as the Spartans
entered Athens, unopposed, seventy-six years after the battle
of Salamis. There is no play describing that event.
�FLAUMENHAFT
113
Bibliography
All the images discussed are available online at many websites. Any
reliable search engine will locate a large selection. They can also be found
in the following, easily available, books:
Athens:
Bruno, Vincent J. The Parthenon. New York: \'7.\V. Norton, 1974.
Connolly, Peter and Hazel Dodge. The Ancient City: Life in Classical
Athens and Rome. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Hurwit, Jeffrey .M. The Athenian Acropolis: History, Mythology, and
Archaeology from the Neolithic Era to the Present. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1999.
Jenkins, Ian. The Parthenon Frieze. Oakville: British Museum Press, 1994.
Neils, Jenifer. The Parthenon Frieze. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2001.
~~-~-·
YVorshipping Athena: Panatheuaia and Parthenon. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.
Neils, Jenifer, ed. Goddess and Polis. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1992.
\Voodford, Susan. The Parthenon. New York: Cambridge University Press,
1981.
Persia:
Allen, Lindsay. The Persian Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2005.
WiesehOfer, Josef. Ancient Persia. London: LB. Tauris & Co., 2001.
Notes
37
Donald Kagan, Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy (New
York, 1991), p. 161-62.
38
Jeffrey M. Hurwit, The Athenian Acropolis: History, Mythology, and
Archaeology from the Neolithic Era to the Present (Cambridge, 1999), p.
74.
39
40
Pausanias, I.xxvi, declines to comment on the truth of this story.
Peploi were given to Athena in the rituals of other Greek cities; Athens
seems to have been the only place where the "garment was actually
placed upon the statue." E. J. W. Barber "The Peplos of Athena," in
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
114
Jenifer Neils, ed., Goddess and Polis (Hanover, New Hampshire, 1992),
p. 106. Perhaps the earliest description of such a presentation is described
in Book Six of the Iliad, when the desperate women of Troy under siege
make such an offering in hope of her aid. \Vhen she prepares to go to the
aid of the Greeks, she takes off her "soft peplos, that she herself had
made and her hands had fashioned" (VIII.385-86) and dons the tunic of
Zeus and her armor.
41
Barber, in Neils (1992), p.llO.
42
The festival and evidence for its changes over time are described in
detail by Hurwit (1999) and H.\V. Parke, Festivals of the Athenians
(Ithaca, New York, 1977), pp. 29-50. See also Jenifer Neils, "The
Panathenaia: An Introduction," in Neils (1992), pp. 13-27. H. A. Shapiro,
"Democracy and Imperialism: the Panathenaia in the Age of Perikles," in
Jenifer Neils, ed., \Vorshipping Athena: Panathenaia and Parthenon
(Madison, Wisconsin, 1996), 215-25.
43
Kagan, p. 168.
44 Jan
Collie, Hidden London (London, 2002).
· 45
Brunilde Sismondo Ridgeway, "Images of Athena on the Akropolis,, in
Neils (1992), 122-42, p. 122; Peter Connolly and Hazel Dodge, The
Ancient City: Life in Classical Athens and Rome (New York, 2000), p. 12.
46
Hurwit, p.136.
47
Russell Meigs, "The Political Implications of the Parthenon,, in The
Parthenon, ed. Vincent J. Bruno (New York, 1975), p. 103, citing the
orator Lycurgus, Against Leocrates 81.
48 Plutarch's
Lives, Pericles, XII, Vol. III, trans. Bernadotte Perrin
(Cambridge, Mass., 1967), p. 37. Subsequent references will be given in
the text.
49
Kagan, p. 37
50 Meigs,
51
p. 111.
Allen, pp. 93-4.
52 Pausanias,
I.xx.
53
Joseph Wieseh6fer, Ancient Persia (New York, 2001), p. 34.
54
Persians, 979, and Hall, n. 979, p. 172.
55
Donald N. Wilber, Persepolis: The Archaeology of Parsa, Seat of Persian
Kings (New York, 1969), p. 57.
56
Wieseh6fcr, p. 26.
�FLAUMENHAFT
115
57
Christian Meier, Athens: A Portrait of the City in Its Golden Age, trans.
Robert and Rita Kimber (New York, 1998), p. 381.
58
The setting of the full-scale reproduction of the temple in a flat, treefilled park in Nashville, Tennessee makes the building itself feel very
different. The ancient view \vas probably more restricted than it is now;
the view from the west side was best. Ian Jenkins, The Parthenon Frieze
(London, 1994), p. 18.
59
Hurwit, p. 54.
60 Susan Woodford, The Parthenon (Cambridge, 1981), p. 20. Montaigne
says that "The Athenians ordained that the mules which had served in
building the temple called Hccatompedon [the earlier Parthenon] should
be set free, and that they should be allowed to graze anywhere without
hindrance." "Of Cruelty," in The Complete Essays ofMontaigne, trans.
Donald M. Frame (Stanford, 1975), p. 103.
61
Hurwit, p. 176.
62
Hurwit, p. 176.
63
Hurwit, p. 32.
Vincent J. Bruno, "The Parthenon and the Theory of Classical Form,"
in The Parthenon (New York, 1974), p. 91.
64
65
Evelyn B. Harrison (1974), "The Sculptures of the Parthenon," in
Bruno, 225-311, p. 248.
66
Harrison (1974), p. 249.
67
Harrison (1974), p. 233.
68
Hurwit, p. 179.
69
Harrison, p. 278.
70
Bruno, p. 94.
71
This may suggest that the primary aim of the building was to celebrate
this victory, rather than Athena's birthday. See Hurwit, p. 30.
72
An enemy of Pheidias claimed that the sculptor had made likenesses of
himself and Pericles in the Amazon metopes. Pheidias died while in prison
on these charges. Plutarch affirms the resemblance to Pericles (Pint.,
Pericles, XXXI).
73
Mera ]. Flaumenhaft, "Priam the Patriarch, His City, and His Sons,"
Interpretation, 32.1 (Winter, 2004): 3·31.
74 Page duBois, Centaurs and Amazons: W!omen and the Pre~History of the
Great Chain of Being. Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1991), p. 54, citing Bernard
Ash mole, Architect and Sculptor itt Classical Greece (London, 1972),
�116
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
pp.165ff. Sec also Larissa Bonfante, "Nudity as a Costume in Classical
Art," American Journal of Archaeology, Volume 93, No.4, (October,
1989), p. 555.
75
Mary R. Lefkowitz, "Women in the Panathcnaic and Other Festivals,"
in Neils, ed., \Vorsbipping Athena, 1996, 78-91, p. 81.
76
Hurwit, p. 24.
77
Pausanias, I.xxviii.
78
\'\falter F. Otto, The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek
Religion (Boston, 1954), p. 53.
79 The
myths about their ancestry are confused: they are the products of
the mating of Ixion and a marc, or of Ixion's offspring and a mare, or of
Zeus in the shape of a horse and Ixion's wife.
80
duBois, pp. 27-8.
81
In the frieze behind the mctopes, only older men, officials, and some of
the gods are bearded, but all have articulated necks.
82
Robin Osborne, "Framing the Centaur: "Reading 5th Century
Architectural Sculpture," in Art and Text in Ancient Greek Culture, Simon
Goldhill and Robin Osborne, eds. (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 71, 75-76.
Osborne ends by suggesting that "treating others as beasts" may "itself
constitute a lapse in propriety," p. 83.
83
duBois, p. 31.
84
Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (New York, 1956).
85
Bonfante, p. 554.
86
duBois, p. 30.
87
Hurwit, p. 173 and Note 62.
88
Hurwit, pp. 173-74.
89
Neils (2001), p. 196.
9
°Kagan, p. 160.
91
Louise Bruit Zaidman and Pauline Schmitt Pantel, Religion in the
Ancient Greek City (Cambridge, 1992), p. 106.
92
Peter von Blanckenhagen, Unpublished lecture, St. John's College,
Annapolis, date unknown.
93
The British lvluseum's Duveen Gallery reverses the direction of the
viewing, enclosing the viewer rather than the pictures.
94 The
CD that accompanies jenifer Neils's The Parthenon Frieze
(Cambridge, 2001) attempts to approximate the experience of walking
�FLAUMENHAFT
117
alongside the frieze by moving the frieze before the stationary viewer.
The corners of the temple are indicated by four red lines.
95Ncils (2001), pp. 33,37-8.
96
Evelyn B. Harrison, ''The Web of History: A Conservative Reading of
the Parthenon Frieze," in Neils (1996), 198-214, p. 211.
97 Woodford, p. 33.
98 Jenkins,
99
p. 26. Jenkins rejects the latter view.
Kagan, p. 111.
100 Woodford,
101
p. 36.
Green, p. 5.
102 \Vieseh6fer,
Plate V.
103 WiesehOfcr,
Plate I.
104
Robert Parker, Athenian Religiou: A History (Oxford, 1996), p. 14.
105
Neils (1992), p. 93.
10 6 John
Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn," 1820.
10 7 This
theme has been fully explored by Jennifer Neils in \'(!orshipping
Athena (1996), Goddess and Polis (1992), and The Parthenon Frieze
(2001). On Greek weaving, the pep/as, and cloth fabrication in general,
see also Barber, in Neils (1992) and Barber (1994).
lOS
Harrison (1996) is critical of John Boardman's speculation, 199-200.
109 Neils (2001 ), p. 70.
110
Harrison (1996), p. 203; Neils (2001), p. 68.
111
Harrison (1996), p. 210.
11 2 Neils
(2001), p. 80.
113
Harrison (1996), p. 200.
ll 4
Plato, Statesman, 303b-311c.
11 5
Neils (2001), pp. 188 ff.
11 6
Neils (2001), p. 186.
117 Phillip
Fehl has argued that the rocks in the frieze locate the gods, also
emotionally distanced from the humans, on distant Olympus. "Gods and
Men in the Parthenon Frieze" (1961), quoted in Bruno (1996), 311-21.
118
Neils (2002), pp. 61-6.
119
Hurwit, p. 18.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
118
120 Pausanias,
I.xxiv.
121
His foresight later saved the sculptor from an accusation that he had
stolen some of the gold. \Vcighing proved he had not.
122
Hurwit, p. 164.
1D
Kagan, p. 113.
124
Hesiod, Theogony, 571-616 and Works and Days, 60-105.
125
Jenkins, p. 41.
126 Jenkins,
p. 40.
�
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Dugan, C. Nathan
Brann, Eva T. H.
Hunt, Frank
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Barbera, André
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St. John's Review
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Text
LECTURE SCHEDULE
Summer 1981 - February Freshman
Samuel Kutler
On Perfection
June 12
John White
Poetics (of Aristotle)
June 19
Douglas Allanbrook
Concert
Great Hall
June 26
Donald Conroy
Pindar
July
Mr. Lindemuth
Ethics of Aristotle
July 10
Elliott Zuckerman
On Major and Minor
July 17
N o
July 24
Joe Sachs
Metaphysics of Aristotle
July 31
Winfree Smith
The Wandering Moon
June
5
3
L e c t u r e
(essay week-end)
�
Dublin Core
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Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
Description
An account of the resource
The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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1 page
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paper
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Graduate Institute
Title
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Lecture Schedule, Summer 1981 - February Freshman
Date
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1981
Description
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Schedule of lectures and concerts in Summer 1981, sponsored by the Graduate Institute.
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Lecture Schedule 1981 Summer
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College
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English
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text
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St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
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pdf
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Kutler, Samuel
White, John
Allanbrook, Douglas
Conroy, Donald
Lindemuth, Donald
Zuckerman, Elliott
Sachs, Joe
Smith, J. Winfree
Graduate Institute
Lecture schedule
Summer lecture series
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/d9190e5c959097a4188f5ff469d07616.pdf
b3442839fcfe23fee8cd338d2076802d
PDF Text
Text
Summer Lectures (1979)
8 June
Michael Dink
15 June
Elliot Zuckerman
22 June
Jon Lenkowski
29 June
Samuel Kutler
6 July
David Lachterman
13 July
John White
20 July
ESSAYS DUE
27 July
Mary Hannah Jones
3 August James Carey
Friendship in Plato’s Phaedo
An Opinion about Major and Minor
On Definitions
Play and Seriousness
On Aristotle’s Metaphysics
Aristotle’s Poetics
Muθos in the Odyssey
Aristotle and the Problems of Intelligibility
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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
Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
Description
An account of the resource
The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Contributor
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
2 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
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/.
Creator
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Graduate Institute
Title
A name given to the resource
Summer Lectures (1979)
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1979
Description
An account of the resource
Schedule of lectures and concerts in Summer 1979, sponsored by the Graduate Institute.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lecture Schedule 1979 Summer
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Publisher
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St. John's College
Language
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English
Type
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text
Rights
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St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
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pdf
Contributor
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Dink, Michael
Zuckerman, Elliott
Lenkowski, Jon
Kulter, Samuel
Lachterman, David Rapport, 1944-
White, John
Jones, Mary Hannah
Carey, James
Graduate Institute
Lecture schedule
Summer lecture series
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/8b7f58fd064c06069918ccd89878b4e4.pdf
5f9c68551158547d8d3303fdbddd539d
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Text
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�Lecture Schedule 1969-1970
Sept 26
Oct 3
Oct 10
Oct 16
Oct 24
Oct 31
Nov 7
Nov 14
Nov 21
Dec 5
Jan 9, 1970
Jan 16
Jan 23
Feb 6
Feb 13
Feb 20
Feb 27
Mar 6
Mar 13
April 10
April 17
April 24
May 1
Robert Goldwin
St. John’s College, Annapolis
P. von Blankenhagen
Jacob Lateiner, NYC
Robert Goldwin
St. John’s College, Annapolis
Harry M. Clor
Kenyon College, Gambier OH
Malcolm Brown
Center For Hellenic Studies, Washington DC
W. J. Fishback
Earlham Coll. Richmond IN
Edward Banfield
Harvard U. Cambridge MA
Victor Gourevich
Wesleyan U, Middletown CT
Mortimer Adler
Institute for Philosophical Research, Chicago
IL
Jonathan Fineberg
Harvard U. Cambridge MA
Deborah Traynov
St. John’s College, Annapolis
Alfred Sugg
Western Coll, Oxford OH
Br. Robert Smith
St. Mary’s Coll
Beaux Arts Quartet, NYC
Thomas Settle
Polytechnic Inst. of Brooklyn, Bklyn, NY
David Lachterman
Syracuse U., Syracuse NY
Dieter Henrich
Columbia U, NY, NY
Evelyn Harrison
Columbia U. NY, NY
Joseph Cropsey
U of Chicago, Chicago IL
Leo Strauss
St. John’s College, Annapolis
Bernard Kruysen,
New York, NY
Robert Horwitz
Dean’s Opening Lecture
“The Program of the Parthenon
Concert
“St. John’s College Asks John
Locke Some Questions.”
“What is Obsenity, and What’s
Wrong With It.”
“Rhetoric and Dialectic in the
Phaedrus”
“Groups- Galoi’s Great Gift
“The Unheavenly City
“The Relationship between
Ethics and Politics in the
Philosophy of Hegel”
“The Common Sense of Politics”
“Kandinsky and the Concept of
Abstract Art”
“Logic and Logos”
“Prometheus Bound”
“Two Concepts of Comedy”
Concert
On Galileo “The Natural History
of the Experiment”
“Selfhood and Reason”
“The Basic Structure of Modern
Philosophy”
“The Marathon Painting”
“On Descartes’ Discourse on
Method”
“The Problem of Socrates”
Concert
“Aristotle in Hawaii”
�Lecture Schedule 1969-1970
May 8
May 15
May 22
May 29
Kenyon Coll. Gambier OH
Paul Lehman
Union Theological Seminary, NYC
Laurence Berns
St. John’s Coll. Annapolis
Robert Osgood and Morton Halperin
Elliott Zuckerman
St. John’s College, Annapolis
“New Testament Paradigms of a
Politics of Confrontation”
“Rational Animal, Political
Animal”
Special Dual Lecture on
Vietnam
“On A Measure in Mozart”
�
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/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
4 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
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Creator
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Office of the Dean
Title
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Lecture Schedule 1969-1970 (handwritten & transcribed)
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1969-1970
Description
An account of the resource
Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 1969-1970 Academic Year.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lecture Schedule 1969-1970
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Publisher
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St. John's College
Language
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English
Type
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text
Rights
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St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
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pdf
Relation
A related resource
May 15, 1970. Berns, Laurence. <a title="Rational animal, political animal" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1094">Rational Animal, Political Animal</a>
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Goldwin, Robert A., 1922-2010
von Blankenhagen, P.
Lateiner, Jacob
Clor, Harry M., 1929-
Brown, Malcolm
Fishback, W. J.
Banfield, Edward C.
Gourevich, Victor
Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001
Fineberg, Janet
Traynov, Deborah
Sugg, Alfred
Smith, Brother Robert
Settle, Thomas
Lachterman, David Rapport, 1944-
Henrich, Dieter, 1927-
Harrison, Evelyn
Cropsey, Joseph
Struass, Leo
Kruysen, Bernard
Horwitz, Robert
Lehman, Paul
Berns, Laurence
Zuckerman, Elliott
King William Players
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/7b3cce8592a0bae4098d81e5c4b3d609.pdf
13ca99ff6974bf0302a65779b9f9b256
PDF Text
Text
..
~~
LECTURE SCHEDULE - 1974- 75
St. John's
Kepler and the Mode of
Vision
September 13, 1974
Curtis Wilson, Dean,
College
September 20, 1974
Douglas Allanbrook
Concert
September 27, 1974
Francis V. O'Connor (NY, NY)
Symbolism in Abstract Art
October 4, 1974
Robert L. Spaeth, Tutor, St . John's The Philosophy of
College
Neils Bohr
October 11, 1974
Dr. Leon Kass, Tutor, St. John's
College
October 18, 1974
LONG WEEK-END
October 25, 1974
Professor Philip Fehl, Dept of Art
History, Univ of Illinois
Grace and Redemption in
Michelangelo's Last Judgment
November 1, 1974
Samuel Kutler, Tutor, St . John's
Generalization
November 8, 1974
Sterling Brown
A Poetry Reading
November 15, 1974
Stradivarian Quartet
Concert
November 22, 1974
Elliott Zuckerman
On Measuring Verse
November 29, 1974
THANKSGIVING RECESS
December 6, 1974
King William Players
The Alchemist
December 13, 1974
Mortimer Adler
The Human Constant and
the Changing Scene
December 20, 1974
WINTER VACATION
January 10, 1975
Virgil Thomson (Composer and
Music Critic)
How the Critical Press
Works
January 17, 1975
Donald Brady (Dept of Philosophy
Cheyney State College)
Freud and Philosophy
January 24, 1975
David Stephenson, Tutor, St . John's Beauty Alone has Looked
on Euclid Bare
January 31, 1975
Eva Brann, Tutor, St . John's
February 7, 1975
LONG WEEK-END
February 14, 1975
Leo Raditsa, Tutor, St . John's
February 21, 1975
Ernst Haefliger, Tenor
Teleology and Darwin's
Origin of Species: Beyond
Chance and Necessity?
The Novels of Jane Austen
Thucydides and Aristotle's
Politics
Concert
�- 2 -
The Symbolic Character of
Christian Language and Action
February 28, 1975
Albert Mol1egen (Virginia
Theological Seminary)
March 7, 1975
Ars Antigua de Paris
March 14-28
SPRING RECESS
<April 4, 1975
Ranlet Lincoln (Dean, University
of Chicago, Univ. Extension)
Kirkegaard's The Sickness
Unto Death
April ll, 1975
Ellen Davis (Department of Art
Queens College, New York)
The Metopes of the Temple
of Zeus at Olympia
April 18, 1975
Paul Serruys (Department of
Languages, University of Wash)
Writing and the Origins
of Language
April 25, 1975
Laurence Berns, Tutor, St. John's
Francis Bacon and The
Conquest of Nature
May 2, 1975
Beate Ruhm von Oppen, Tutor,
St. John's College
B·ach' s Rhetoric and the
Translation of his Texts:
Concert
w-ith examples taken mainly
May 9, 1975
REALITY
May 16, 1975
Douglas Buchanan (Massachusetts
General Hospital)
from the Passion according
to St. John.
Some Observatla'ns on the
Present State of Psychiatry
and Psychoanalysis
�october 30, 1975
William Dunham
Campus Mail
Mr.
Dear Will!
In listing the Bicentennial lectures for a proposal I left out Herbert
Storing's on "The Founders' Views on Slavery," March 5. so there are
seven lectures after all!
The corrected list is as follows:
1.
December 12
Mortimer Adler, Director Institute for
Philosophical Research -- The American
Testament
2.
January 30
George Anastaplo -- Title to be announced
3.
February 20
Robert A. Goldwin, Special Consultant to the
President -- John Locke and the Constitution
4.
March 5
Herbert Storing, University of Chicago -The Founders' Views on Slavery
5.
April 2
Donald L. Kemmerer, Department of Economics
University of Illinois - The Role of the
Monetary System in American History
6.
April 23
Max Isenbergh, Professor of Law, University
of Maryland School of Law -- The Pursuit of
Happiness in the American Constitutional
System
7.
April 30
Eva T. H. Brann, Tutor, St. John's College,
Annapolis -- The Declaration of Independence
Sincerely yours,
Curtis A. Wilson
Dean
�
Dublin Core
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Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
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.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
3 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
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/.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Office of the Dean
Title
A name given to the resource
Lecture Schedule - 1974-75
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1974-1975
Description
An account of the resource
Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 1974-1975 Academic Year. Also includes a memo of a corrected list of lectures.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lecture Schedule 1974-1975
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Wilson, Curtis
Allanbrook, Douglas
O'Connor, Francis V.
Spaeth, Robert L.
Kass, Leon
Fehl, Philip
Kutler, Samuel
Brown, Sterling
Zuckerman, Elliott
Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001
Thomson, Virgil
Brady, Donald
Stephenson, David
Brann, Eva T. H.
Raditsa, Leo
Haefliger, Ernst, 1919-2007
Mollegen, Albert T.
Lincoln, Ranlet
Davis, Ellen
Serruys, Paul Leo-Mary
Berns, Laurence, 1928-
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
Buchanan, Douglas
King William Players
Relation
A related resource
September 13, 1974. Wilson, Curtis. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3668" title="Kepler and the mode of vision">Kepler and the mode of vision</a> (audio)
April 25, 1975. Berns, Laurence. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1091" title="Francis Bacon and the conquest of nature">Francis Bacon and the conquest of nature</a> (typescript)
April 25, 1975. Berns, Laurence. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3874" title="Francis Bacon and the conquest of nature">Francis Bacon and the conquest of nature</a> (audio)
May 2, 1975. Ruhm von Oppen, Beate. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3584" title="Bach's rhetoric and the translation of his texts">Bach's rhetoric and the translation of his texts</a> (typescript)
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
-
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7e5702a16b71bfd8f5aac6ab5cd8ec47
PDF Text
Text
I
•
ST
JoHN's CoLLEGE
ANNAPO LI S. MARYLAND 2140 4
Fou N D LO
September 16
!• ·'~~> A ~ K 1
Nc; WilliAM\
S<
H<>O I
FORMAL LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE 1983-84
Mr. Samuel S. Kutler, Dean
St . John's College, Annapolis
On Freedom
September 23
Mrs . Mera Flaumenhaft, Tutor
St . John's College, Annapolis
Looking Together in
Athens: The Dionys ian
Tragedy and Festival
September 30
Mr. Robert Goldwin
American Enterprise Institute
James Madison and the
Bill of Rights:
Something More Than a
Change of Mind
October 7
Mr . Charles Bell, Tutor
St . John's College, Santa Fe
The Axiomatic Drama of
Classical Physics
October 14
Long Weekend
No Lecture
October 21
Mr. Carey Stickney, Tutor
St. John's College, Santa Fe
The Tears of Odysseus
October 28
Miss Eva Brann, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
Intellect and Intui tion
November 4
The Fine Arts Quartet
Concert
November ll
Professor Jose Benardete
Philosophy Department
Syracuse University
November 18
All College Seminar
Death in Venice
November 25
Thanksgiving Holiday
No Lecture
December 2
Professor Ray Coppinger
Hampshire College
The Evolution of Behavior
in Humans and Dogs
December 9
Mr. Samuel S . Kutler, Dean
St . John's College, Annapolis
(POSTPONED)
,
TELEPHONE 301 • 263 • 2171
Infinity
On Comp lex Number s
�January 6
Maryland Heritage Concert
January 13
Professor Richard Morris
Columbia University
How the Great Peace of
1783 Was Made and Ratified
January 20
Mr. William Mullen, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
The Dances of Plato
and Pindar
January 27
Judith Gray, Soprano
Concert
February 3
Mr. James Beall, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
February 10
Long weekend
February 17
Mr. John Bremer
On Plato's Polity
Trotter Institute of Philosophy,
Management, and Education, Houston, Texas
February 24
Mr. Mortimer J. Adler
Institute for Philosophical Research
March 2
Professor Ernest L6 Fortin
Department of Theology
Boston College
Political Philosophy as
Prophesy: Dante's Comedy
March 30
Leo Smit, Piano
Concert
April 6
Mr. Howard Fisher, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
A Grecian Urn
April l3
Mr. Peter Kalkavage, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
The Song of Timaeus
April 20
Mrs. Wendy Allanbrook, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
Don Giovanni's Proper
Music
Galactic Nuclei, Active
Galactic Nuclei, and Quasars
No Lecture
Parts of Life
April 27
Mr. William Banks
Pomona College
Claremont California
May 4
Mr. Elliott Zuckerman, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
May 11
Professor Paul Barolsky
Delartment of Art
University of Virginia
Botticelli's - - - Vera:
Prima - The Anatomy of a
Masterpiece
May 18
Dr. Peter Arnott
Winchester, Massachusetts
~1arionette
May 25
Commencement Weekend
Perceptual Experience and
the Mechanisms of Human
Vision
On the Opening Chord of
Wagner's Ring
of Clouds
No Lecture
Performance
�
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/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
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.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
2 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
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/.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Office of the Dean
Title
A name given to the resource
Formal Lecture/Concert Schedule 1983-84
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1983-1984
Description
An account of the resource
Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 1983-1984 Academic Year.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lecture Schedule 1983-1984
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Kutler, Samual S.
Flaumenhaft, Mera J.
Goldwin, Robert A., 1922-2010
Bell, Charles
Stickney, Carey
Brann, Eva T. H.
Benardete, José A. (José Amado)
Coppinger, Raymond
Morris, Richard
Mullen, William
Gray, Judith
Beall, James
Bremer, John
Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001
Fortin, Ernest L.
Smit, Leo
Fisher, Howard
Kalkavage, Peter
Allanbrook, Wendy
Banks, William
Zuckerman, Elliott
Barolsky, Paul, 1941-
Arnott, Peter
King William Players
Relation
A related resource
April 13, 1984. Kalkavage, Peter. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3809" title="The song of Timaeus">The song of Timaeus</a>
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
-
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56d897bbb81af41fd955bc1bc69f115d
PDF Text
Text
•
ST
JoHN's CoLLEGE
ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND 21404
FouNDED 169& AS KING WiLLIAM ' s ScHooL
LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE 1984-85
September 7
Mr . George Doskow, Dean
St. John's College, Annapolis
William Blake's The
Marriage of Heav en and Hell
September 14
Mrs. Wendy Allanbrook, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
The Marriage of Figaro
September 21
Brevard Festival Trio
Concert
September 28
Mr. I. F. Stone
Washington, D.C .
The Case Against Socrates
(And how easily he might have
won acquittal)
October 5
Dr. Calvert Watkins
Department of Linguistics
Harvard University
How to Kill a Dragon in
Indo-European
October 12
Long Weekend
No Lecture
October 19
Professor Richard Breitman
Department of History
Amer ican University
Nazi Germany and
the Holocaust
October 26
Professor Robert Hanning
Department of English
Columbia University
Chaucer's World of Words:
Society as Art in the
Canterbury Tales
November 2
Mr. Joseph Killoren
Georgia
Novmeber 9
All College Seminar
T.S . Eliot and conrad Aiken:
A Modern Debate on Philosophical
Poetry
Siddhartha, He rman Hesse
November 16
Mr. Benjamin Milner, Tutor
St. John's College , Annapolis
Hobbes:
November 23
Thanksgiving Holiday
No Lecture
November 30
Mr. David Lachterman
Department of Philosophy
Vassar College
What is the Good of
Plato's Republic?
De cember 7
Mr. Seth Benardette
Department of Classics
New York University
The Bed and the Table:
Plato Republic X
December 14January 4
Winter Vacation
No Lectures
TELEPHONE 301-263- 217 1
On Religion
�ST
•
JoHN's Co LLEGE
ANNAPOLIS. MARYLAND 21 40 4
FouN DED I~>96 AS KIN G WILLI AM 's
ScHooL
LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE 1984-85
January ll
Mr. James Carey, Tutor
St. John's College
On Grace and Free Will
January 18
Mr. Leo Raditsa, Tutor
St. John's College
Tertullian on the Appearance
of Christian Women and the
Conflict Between Paganism
and Christianity in the
Second Century A. D.
January 25
Kronos String Quartet
Concert
February l
Mr. Robert Sokolowski
School of Philosophy
Catholic University
Reason and Christian Faith
February 8
Long Weekend
No Lecture
February 15
Mr . David Bolotin, Tutor
St . John's College
The Theaetetus and the
Possibility of False
Opinion
February 22
Professor Samuel Edgerton, Jr .
Graduate Program in History
of Art
Williams College
Galileo, Florentine disegno,
and the 'strange spottednesse'
of the moon
March 1
Richard Rephann, Harpsichord
Concert
March 8-24
Spring Vacation
No Lectures
March 29
Mr. Mortimer J . Adler
Institute for Philosophical
Research
Chicago
Toil and Leisure
April 5
Mr . Elliott Zuckerman, Tutor
St . John's College
The M
usic of Gilbert and
the Wit of Sulli van
April 12
M . Laurence Berns, Tutor
r
St . John's College
Religion Enlightenment, and
the American Character
April 19
Mr. Edwin J . Delattre, President
St. John's College
The Political Conditions of
Liberal Learning
April 26
Brother Robert Smith, Tutor
St. John's College
Montaigne
May J
King William Production
TELEPHO N E 101-263- 217 1
�ST
•
JoHN's C oLLEGE
ANNAPOLIS. M ARYLAND 2 1404
FoUN DED 1
696 AS KING W iLLI AM's ScHOOL
May 10
Mr. Charles Parsons
Department of Philosophy
Columbia university
May 17
The Concept of Number
Dr. Peter Arnott
Winchester, Massachusetts
May 24
Commencement Weekend
TELEPHO NE 101 - 263- 2'37 1
No Lecture
�
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/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
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.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
3 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
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/.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Office of the Dean
Title
A name given to the resource
Lecture/Concert Schedule 1984-85
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984-1985
Description
An account of the resource
Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 1984-1985 Academic Year.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lecture Schedule 1984-1985
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Doskow, George
Allanbrook, Wendy
Stone, I. F. (Isidor Feinstein), 1907-1989
Watkins, Calvert
Breitman, Richard, 1947-
Hanning, Robert
Killoren, Joseph
Milner, Benjamin
Lachterman, David Rapport, 1944-
Benardette, Seth
Carey, James
Raditsa, Leo
Sokolowski, Robert
Bolotin, David, 1944-
Edgerton, Jr., Samuel
Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001
Zuckerman, Elliott
Berns, Laurence, 1928-
Delattre, Edwin J.
Smith, Brother Robert
Parsons, Charles
Arnott, Peter
King William Players
Relation
A related resource
April 12, 1985. Berns, Laurence. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1087" title="Religion, enlightenment, and the American character.">Religion, enlightenment, and the American character.</a>
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
-
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6c9b212135ef200e50a908609773b589
PDF Text
Text
•
ST
JoHN's CoLLEGE
P.O. BOX 1671
ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND 21404
FouNDED 1696 AS KING W il li AM's ScHOOl
LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE - FIRST SEMESTER 1986-87
September 5
Mr . Thomas J. Slakey, Dean
St. John's College
Annapolis, Maryland
Inquiry and Insight
September 12
Mr. Robert Goldwin , Alumni
American enterprise Institute
Washington, D.C .
How to Read the Original
Const itution on Subjects
It Doesn ' t Mention
September 19
Mr . Henry Higuera, Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis, Maryland
Don Quixote and Dulcinea:
Eros and Empire
September 26
Mr. Robert Bart, Tutor
St. John's Col~ege
Santa Fe, New Mexico
The Miraculous Moonlight :
Flannery O'Connor's Story,
The Artificial Nigger
October 3
All College Seminar
October 1 0
Long Weekend
No Lecture
October 1 7
Mr. Michael Comenetz, Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis , Maryl a nd
Pushkin and th e Poetry
of Russia
October 24
Mr. Joe Sachs, Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis, Maryland
God o f Abraham , Isaac,
and Jacob
October 31
Mr. Jonathan Cull er
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York
Post-Structuralist
Criticism
November 7
Mr. Houston Baker
Univers ity of Penn syl vania
Philadelphia, PA
The Origin s of the
Sl ave Narrative
November 14
Mr. Edward Sparrow, Tutor
St. John ' s College
Annapolis, Maryland
Only Mercy Could
Make Hell
November 21
Mr. Laurence Birns
Counci l on Hemispheric Affairs
Washington, D.C.
Diplomacy or Ideology:
The Search for a
Meaningful Lat i n
American Policy
TE LEPHONE 301 -263-2371
�LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE - FIRST SEMESTER 1986-87 - PAGE 2
November 28
Thanksgiving Holiday
December 5
Concert
December 12January 4
Winter Holiday
No Lectures
January 9, 1987
Mr. David Bolotin, Tutor
St. John's College
The Life of Philosophy and
the Immortality of the
Soul: An Introduction
to Plato's Phaedo
Santa Fe, New Mexico
January 16
Mr. Thomas Banchoff
Brown University
Providence, Rhode Island
No Lecture
The Fourth Dimension and
Computer Animated Geometry
�ST JoHN's
•
CoLLEGE
P.O. BOX 1671
ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND 21404
fOUNDED 1696 AS K ING WILLIAM'S SCHOOL
LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE - SECOND SEMESTER 1986-87
January 23
Mr. Bruce Venable, Tutor
St. John's College College
Santa Fe, New Mexico
History and Non-Being
January 30
Mr. Alasda ir Mac intyre
Vanderbilt University
Nashville, Tennessee
The Good, the Desired,
and the Desirable
February 6
Long Weekend
No Lecture
February 13
Mr. Mortimer Adler
Institute for Philosophical
Research
Chicago, Illinois
The Two Bicentennia l s
February 20
Ms. Ann Hartle
Emory University
Atlanta, Georgia
Wonder and Death: The Human
Beginnings of Philosophy
February 27
Concert
March 5-22
Spring Vacation
No Lectures
March 27
Mr. Alan Greenberg
New Haven, Conn
The Architecture of
Democracy
April 3
Concert
April 10
Mr. Elliott Zuckerman, Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
The Chopin Mazurkas:
A Talk with Piano
Il lustrations
April 17
Ms. Pamela Kraus, Tutor
St. John ' s College
Annapolis
Cartesian 'Soul' and the
'Whole Nature o f Man '
April 24
Ms. Judith Van Herik
Pennsyl vania State University
University Park, Pennsyl v ania
May 1
Mr. Charles Jones
Department of Lingui stics
University of Wisconsin
Madison , Wisconsin
May 8
Mr. Walter Sterling, Tutor
st . John ' s College
Annapol i s
May 1 5
Mr. Peter Arnott
Winchester, Mass
TE LEPHONE 301 -263-2371
Freud on Gender
and I llusion
Some Things You Always
Knew About the Language
You Speak*
but were never taught
The Character of
Robert E. Lee
Marionette Performance
of Hippolytus
�
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/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
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.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
3 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
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/.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Office of the Dean
Title
A name given to the resource
Lecture/Concert Schedule - First Semester 1986-87 & Second Semester 1986-87
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1986-1987
Description
An account of the resource
Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 1986-1987 Academic Year.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lecture Schedule 1986-1987
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Slakey, Thomas
Goldwin, Robert A., 1922-2010
Higuera, Henry, 1952-
Bart, Robert S.
Comenetz, Michael, 1944-
Sachs, Joe
Culler, Jonathan D.
Baker, Houston A., Jr., 1943-
Sparrow, Edward
Berns, Laurence, 1928-
Bolotin, David, 1944-
Banchoff, Thomas
Venable, Bruce
MacIntyre, Alasdair C.
Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001
Hartle, Ann
Greenberg, Alan
Zuckerman, Elliott
Kraus, Pamela
Van Herik, Judith
Jones, Charles
Sterling, Walter
Arnott, Peter
King William Players
Relation
A related resource
October 24, 1986. Sachs, Joe. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3717" title="God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.">God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.</a> (audio)
October 24, 1986. Sachs, Joe. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3718" title="God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.">God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.</a> (typescript)
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/9eacfa9dc8714bd9559287cf161e9567.pdf
ea3a6df98d7fa84c897ed13bec8f775c
PDF Text
Text
LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE - 1993-94
August 27, 1993
Ms. Eva T. H. Brann, Dean
st. John's College
Annapolis
"Telling Lies"
September 3
Mr. Robin Kornman, Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"Lamentation and
catharsis in the
Iliad"
September 10
Professor Sabine McCormack
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan
"In very Ancient
Times: How the
Past was Remembered
in Early Colonial
Peru"
September 17
Dr. Elwood Ty Olson
Illinois Institute of
Technology
Chicago, Illinois
"Probabilistic
Models and the
Problem of
Falsifiability in
Statistical Reasoning"
September 24
Professor Mary Lefkowitz
Wellesley College
Wellesley, Massachusetts
"Women in Greek
Myth"
October 1
Mr. Elliott Zuckerman, Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"One Man's Meter"
october 15
Mr. David Bull
National Gallery of Art
Washington, DC
"Leonardo's Ladies"
October 22
Mr. Stephen van Luchene,
Dean
St. John's College
Santa Fe
"William Blake:
A Beginning"
October 29
Mr. Radoslav Datchev, Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"The Beginning
of All Things"
November 5
Professor Barry Mazur
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
"Visualizing the
Infinitesimals"
November 12
All College Seminar
November 19
Mr. Samuel Kutler, Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
December 3
King William Players
"Desiring What
is Beautiful"
�LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE - 1993-94
August 27, 1993
Ms. Eva T. H. Brann, Dean
st. John's College
Annapolis
"Telling Lies"
September 3
Mr. Robin Kornman, Tutor
st. John's College
Annapolis
"Lamentation and
catharsis in the
Iliad"
September 10
Professor Sabine McCormack
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan
"In Very Ancient
Times: How the
Past was Remembered
in Early Colonial
Peru"
September 17
Dr. Elwood Ty Olson
Illinois Institute of
Technology
Chicago, Illinois
"Probabilistic
Models and the
Problem of
Falsifiability in
Statistical Reasoning"
September 24
Professor Mary Lefkowitz
Wellesley College
Wellesley, Massachusetts
"Women in Greek
Myth"
October 1
Mr. Elliott Zuckerman, Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"One Man's Meter"
October 15
Mr. David Bull
National Gallery of Art
Washington, DC
"Leonardo's Ladies"
October 22
Mr. Stephen Van Luchene,
Dean
St. John's College
Santa Fe
''William Blake:
A Beginning''
October 29
Mr. Radoslav Datchev, Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"The Beginning
of All Things"
November 5
Professor Barry Mazur
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
"Visualizing the
Infinitesimals"
November 12
All College Seminar
November 19
Mr. Samuel Kutler, Tutor
st. John's College
Annapolis
December 3
King William Players
"Desiring What
is Beautiful"
�January 7, 1994
Professor Nomi Stolzenberg
"The Problem With
Law School
Tolerance"
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, California
January 14
Professor Martin Mueller
Northwestern University
Evanston, Illinois
January 21
Concert
February 4
Professor Kurt Raaflaub
Center for Hellenic Studies
Washington, DC
"Greek Democracy and
the Ancient Background
to the Constitutional
Debate in Early
America"
February 5
Professor Deborah Boedeke
Center for Hellenic studies
Washington, DC
"How Herodotus
Made History"
February 11
Mr. Steve Crockett
Atomic Energy commission
Washington, DC
"On Becoming Free"
February 18
Mr. John White, Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"The Theme From
Aristotle's Ethics"
March 18
Mr. Laurence Berns, Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
Aristotle and Adam
Smith on Justice:
Cooperation Between
Ancients and Moderns?
March 25
Mr. James Carey, Tutor
st. John's College
santa Fe
"Vedic Orthodoxy
and the Emergence
of Philosophy in
Ancient India"
April 1
Mr. David Bolotin, Tutor
St. John's College
Santa Fe
"Leo Strauss and
Classical Political
Philosophy"
April 8
Professor John Hollander
Department of English
Yale University
"Speaking Pictures"
April 15
Concert
April 22
All College Seminar
April 29
King William Players
May 6
Ms. Christel Stevens
University Park, Maryland
"Putting Yourself
Second: Some Thoughts
on Reading"
Classical Indian
Dance Troupe
�January 7, 1994
Professor Nomi Stolzenberg
"The Problem With
Law School
Tolerance"
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, California
January 14
Professor Martin Mueller
Northwestern University
Evanston, Illinois
January 21
Concert
February 4
Professor Kurt Raaflaub
Center for Hellenic Studies
Washington, DC
"Greek Democracy and
the Ancient Background
to the Constitutional
Debate in Early
America"
February 5
Professor Deborah Boedeke
Center for Hellenic Studies
Washington, DC
"How Herodotus
Made History"
February 11
Mr. Steve Crockett
Atomic Energy commission
Washington, DC
"On Becoming Free"
February 18
Mr. John White, Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"The Theme From
Aristotle's Ethics"
March 18
Mr. Laurence Berns, Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
Aristotle and Adam
Smith on Justice:
Cooperation Between
Ancients and Moderns?
March 25
Mr. James Carey, Tutor
St. John's College
Santa Fe
"Vedic Orthodoxy
and the Emergence
of Philosophy in
Ancient India"
April 1
Mr. David Bolotin, Tutor
st. John's College
Santa Fe
"Leo Strauss and
Classical Political
Philosophy"
April 8
Professor John Hollander
Department of English
Yale University
Speaking Pictures
April 15
Concert
April 22
All College Seminar
April 29
King William Players
May 6
Ms. Christel Stevens
University Park, Maryland
"Putting Yourself
second:
Some Thoughts
on Reading"
Classical Indian
Dance Troupe
�
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/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
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.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
4 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
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/.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Office of the Dean
Title
A name given to the resource
Lecture/Concert Schedule - 1993-94
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1993-1994
Description
An account of the resource
Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 1993-1994 Academic Year.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lecture Schedule 1993-1994
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Relation
A related resource
August 27, 1993. Brann, Eva T. H. <a title="Telling lies" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/264">Telling lies</a> (audio)
August 27, 1993. Brann, Eva T. H. <a title="Telling lies" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1244">Telling lies</a> (typescript)
March 18, 1994. Berns, Laurence. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1085" title="Aristotle and Adam Smith on justice">Aristotle and Adam Smith on justice</a> (audio)
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Brann, Eva T. H.
Kornman, Robin, 1947-
McCormack, Sabine
Olson, Elwood Ty
Lefkowitz, Mary R., 1935-
Zuckerman, Elliott
Bull, David
Van Luchene, Stephen Robert
Datchev, Radoslav
Mazur, Barry
Kuler, Samuel
Stolzenberg, Nomi
Mueller, Martin
Raaflaub, Kurt A.
Boedeke, Deborah
Crockett, Steven
White, John
Berns, Laurence, 1928-
Carey, James
Bolotin, David, 1944-
Hollander, John, 1951-
King William Players
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/48d2c985175794544b9115424b216bbf.pdf
675baca5bcae4146e7e162fbd4685c9c
PDF Text
Text
.
.II
•
··~
~~
St. John's College
P.O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404
41 0-263-237 1, Fax 4 10-263-4828
THREE HUNDRED Y E ARS
FOUNDED 1696 AS KING WILLIAM'S SCHOOL
LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE- 1997-98
August 29, 1997
Mr. Harvey Flaumenhaft
Dean
St. John's College
Annapolis
"Cosmic Views and
Classic Suppositions"
September 5
Mr. Michael O'Donovan-Anderson
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"Did Achilles Commit
Suicide?"
September 12
Mr. Sven Birkets
Arlington, MA
"The Spirit of the Book
in the Age ofthe Internet"
September 19
Mr. Elliott Zuckerman
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"Octaves: The Variety
of Sameness"
September 26
Professor John Lindsay-Opie
Rome Italy
"The Icon of the Holy
Trinity by Andrej Rublev"
October 3
Dr. Ronald Mawby
Whitney Young College
Kentucky State University
Frankfort, Kentucky
"Opening Questions"
October 17
Ms. Linda Wiener
Tutor
St. John's College
Santa Fe
"Reading Plutarch Like
a Book"
October 24
Mr. Stephen Booth
University of California
Berkeley, California
"Shakespeare's Language and
the Language of Shakespeare's
Time"
October 31
Dr. Robert Goldwin
American Enterprise Institute
Washington, DC
"How to Make a Constitution -American Style"
�November 7
Mr. Samuel Kuder
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"What Does Mathematics Have
to do With the Way We Lead
Our Lives"
November 14
Orlando Consort
Concert
November 21
Mr. Steven Crockett
Bethesda, Maryland
"Frederick Douglass on Force
and Persuasion"
December 5
King William Players
"The Book of Job"
January 9, 1998
All-College Seminar
January 16
Mr. Leo Pickens
St. John's College
Annapolis
"Hunting for Manliness
Herself in Plato's Laches"
January 23
Mr. Cordell Yee
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"Shu-Tao: OfGrammatology,
Chinese Style"
February 6
Mr. Grant Franks
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis/Santa Fe
"Everything Aristotle Has
Said Is Wrong"
February 13
Bachman-Klibonoff-Fridman Trio
Concert
February 20
Mr. Joseph Cohen
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"Sacred Scripture, Philosophic
Truth and the Best Regime: Themes
From Spinoza's TheologicalPolitical Treatise"
March 20
Dr. Samuel T. Goldberg
Baltimore, Maryland
"Psychoanalysis: A Window into
the Natural Functioning of
the Mind"
March 27
Angeles String Quartet
Concert
April3
Mr. Charles Segal
Steiner Lecturer
Harvard University
"Journey, Death, and Knowledge
in the Classical Epic Tradition:
From Gilgamesh to Ovid"
�April 10
Mr. David Bolotin
Tutor
St. John's College
Santa Fe
"Time in Aristotle's Physics"
Aprill7
Mr. John White
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"Bodies"
April24
Mr. Robert Pinsky
Poet Laureate of the United States
Newton,MA
"On the Inferno by Dante"
May 1
King William Players
Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida
May8
Ron Holloway and the
Ron Holloway Quintet
Washington, DC
Jazz Concert
�••
•
~ St. John's College
.·- ·~
'1-- ~
T HREE H U N DRED Y EA RS
FOUNDED 1696 AS KING WILLIAM'S SCHOOL
P. O. Box: 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404
4 10-263-2371, Fax 4 10-263-4828
----------------
LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE- 1997-98
August 29, 1997
Mr. Harvey Flaumenhaft
Dean
St. John's College
Annapolis
"Cosmic Views and
Classic Suppositions"
September 5
Mr. Michael O'Donovan-Anderson
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"Did Achilles Commit
Suicide?"
September 12
Mr. Sven Birkets
Arlington, MA
"The Spirit ofthe Book
in the Age of the Internet"
September 19
Mr. Elliott Zuckerman
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"Octaves: The Variety
of Sameness"
September 26
Professor John Lindsay-Opie
Rome Italy
"The Icon of the Holy
Trinity by Andrej Rublev"
October 3
Dr. Ronald Mawby
Whitney Young College
Kentucky State University
Frankfort, Kentucky
"Opening Questions"
October 17
Ms. Linda Wiener
Tutor
St. John's College
Santa Fe
"Reading Plutarch Like
a Book"
October 24
Mr. Stephen Booth
University of California
Berkeley, California
"Shakespeare's Language and
the Language of Shakespeare's
Time"
October 31
Dr. Robert Goldwin
American Enterprise Institute
Washington, DC
"How to Make a Constitution -American Style"
�November 7
Mr. Samuel Kutler
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"What Does Mathematics Have
to do With the Way We Lead
Our Lives"
November 14
Orlando Consort
Concert
November 21
Mr. Steven Crockett
Bethesda, Maryland
"Frederick Douglass on Force
and Persuasion"
December 5
King William Players
"The Book of Job"
January 9, 1998
All-College Seminar
January 16
Mr. Leo Pickens
St. John's College
Annapolis
January 23
Mr. Cordell Yee
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"Hunting for Manliness
Herself in Plato's Laches"
"Shu-Tao: OfGrammatology,
Chinese Style"
February 6
Mr. Grant Franks
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis/Santa Fe
"Everything Aristotle Has
Said Is Wrong"
February 13
Bachman-Klibonoff-Fridman Trio
Concert
February 20
Mr. Joseph Cohen
"Sacred Scripture, Philosophic
Truth and the Best Regime: Themes
From Spinoza's TheologicalPolitical Treatise"
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
March20
Dr. Samuel T. Goldberg
Baltimore, Maryland
"Psychoanalysis: A Window into
the Natural Functioning of
the Mind"
March27
Angeles String Quartet
Concert
April3
Mr. Charles Segal
"Journey, Death, and Knowledge
in the Classical Epic Tradition:
From Gilgamesh to Ovid"
Steiner Lecturer
Harvard University
�April 10
Mr. David Bolotin
Tutor
St. John's College
Santa Fe
"Time in Aristotle's Physics"
April!?
Mr. John White
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"Bodies"
April24
Mr. Robert Pinsky
Poet Laureate of the United States
Newton,MA
"On the Inferno by Dante"
May I
King William Players
Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida
May8
Ron Holloway and the
Ron Holloway Quintet
Washington, DC
Jazz Concert
�St. John's College
P.O. !lox 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404
410-263-2371, Fax 410-263-4828
-----
THREE HUNDRED YEARS
FOUNDED 1696 AS KING WILLIAM'S SCHOOL
MEMO
To:
From:
Subject:
Date:
The College Community
Harvey Flaumenhaft, Dean
Lecture
December 12, 1997
1tf-
The speaker cannot give the lecture scheduled for the first Friday evening
of the second semester.
The lecture for that evening (January 9, 1998) has therefore been cancelled,
and instead there will be an All-College Seminar on that evening.
�
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/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
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.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
7 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
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/.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Office of the Dean
Title
A name given to the resource
Lecture/Concert Schedule - 1997-98
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1997-1998
Description
An account of the resource
Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 1997-1998 Academic Year. Also includes a memo regarding the cancellation of a lecture on January 9, 1998.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lecture Schedule 1997-1998
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Flaumenhaft, Harvey, 1938-
O'Donovan-Anderson, Michael
Birkerts, Sven
Zuckerman, Elliott
Lindsay-Opie, John
Mawby, Ronald
Wiener, Linda F., 1957-
Booth, Stephen
Goldwin, Robert A., 1922-2010
Kutler, Samuel S.
Crockett, Steven
Pickens, Leo
Yee, Cordell D. K., 1955-
Franks, Grant
Cohen, Joseph
Goldberg, Samuel T.
Segal, Charles
Bolotin, David, 1944-
White, John
Pinsky, Robert
Holloway, Ron
King William Players
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/aad50acb5084eaf61cc82bc2bf00e2ce.pdf
a75aa2537c9bf8a801d3641a8f033cb0
PDF Text
Text
S!JOHN'S
College
Revised 911 3/02
LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE- 2002-2003
(First Semester)
ANNAPOLIS • SANTA FE
OFFICE OF
August 23 , 2002
Mr. Harvey Flaumenhaft
Dean
St. John 's College
" Freedom as a Fighting
Faith"
August 30
Mr. Joseph Macfarland
Tutor
St. John ' s College
" Behold, it is one
people': Two
Interpretations ofthe
Bable Story"
September 6
All-College Seminar
September 13
Professor John Conway
Depattment of Mathematics
Princeton University
"Numbers"
September 20
(Steiner Lech1re)
Professor John Lukacs
Depatt ment of History
Chestnut Hi ll College
"Our Historical
Condition"
September 27
Mr. Paul Galbraith
Concett
C lassical Guitarist
October 4
( Ho mecoming)
Ms. Eva T. H. Brann
Tutor
St. Jolm 's College
"The Empires of the
Sun and the West"
October 11
Long Weekend
No Lecture
October 18
Professor Bruce Z uckerman
School of Relig ion
Univers ity of Southern California
" Job, Leviathan, and
God: Fishing for a
Divine Monster in the
Monstrous Divine"
October 25
(Board Meeting)
American Chamber Players
Concert
November I
(Parents' Weekend)
Mr. Dav id Bolotin
Tutor
St. John 's College (Santa Fe)
"D o We Have a Right
to Live as We Please
(So Long as We
Respect the Right of
Others to Do the
Same)?"
THE DEAN
P.O. Box 2.8oo
ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND
2.1404
410-62.6-2.5II
FAX 410-2.95-6937
www.sjca. edu
�November 8
Professor Jacob Howland
Department of Philosophy
and Religion
University of Tulsa
"Storytelling and
Philosophy: The
Ring of Gyges"
November 15
Mr. Peter Gilbert
Tutor
St. John's College (Santa Fe)
"Predestination in the
New Testament and
St. Augustine"
November 22
Mr. Douglas Allanbrook
Tutor
St. John's College
Voice and Piano
Concert
November 29
Thanksgiving Weekend
No Lecture
December 6
King William Players
Tom Stoppard's
Arcadia
December 13
End of First Semester
No Lecture
�S!JOHN'S
College
Revised 26 February 2003
LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE - 2002-2003
(Second Semester)
ANNAPOLIS ·SANTA PB
January I 0
Mr. Jonathan Badger
Tutor
St. John's College
"Death and Desire in
Sophocles' Antigone"
January 17
Ms. Margaret K irby
Tutor
St. John 's College
" ' The Moment is
Eternity' : An
Introduction to
Goethe's Poetry"
January 24
(Board Meeting)
Mr. Hemy Higuera
Tutor
St. John 's College
"The Political
Foundations of
Modernity"
January 31
Long Weekend
No Lecture
February 7
(Steiner Lecture)
Professor John Allen Paulos
Department of Mathematics
Temple University
"A Mathematician
Reads the Newspaper"
February 14
Professor Ronna Burger
Department of Philosophy
Tulane University
"The Soul in Book IV
of Plato' s Republic"
February 21
Ms. Andreas Haefliger
Piano Concert
February 28
Spring Vacation
No Lecture
March 7
Spring Vacation
No Lecture
March 14
Spring Vacation
No Lecture
March 21
Mr. Joseph Cohen
Tutor
St. John's College
"Of God, Man, and
Human Well-Being:
Introducing
Spinoza's Ethics"
March 28
Mr. Stewart Umphrey
Tutor
St. John ' s College
"Biological Species:
The Very Idea"
Apri l 4
Mr. Elliott Zuckerman
Tutor Emeritus
St. John ' s College
"The Moment and
the Drone"
OFFICE OF
THE DEAN
P.O. Box 2.8oo
ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND
2.1404
410-62.6-2.5II
FAX 410-295-6937
www.sjca.edu
�April II
Professor Clifford Orwin
Department of Political Science
University of Toronto
Aprill8
All-College Seminar
April25
(Board Meeting)
King William Players
May2
Reality Weekend
May9
Commencement Weekend
"Was Thucydides a
Greek Historian?"
Shakespeare's Hamlet
�
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/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
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.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
4 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
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/.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Office of the Dean
Title
A name given to the resource
Lecture/Concert Schedule - 2002-2003
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2002-2003
Description
An account of the resource
Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 2002-2003 Academic Year.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lecture Schedule 2002-2003
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Relation
A related resource
October 4, 2002. Brann, Eva T. H. <a title="Empires of the sun and the West" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/270">Empires of the sun and the West</a> (audio)
October 4, 2002. Brann, Eva T. H. <a title="Empires of the sun and the West" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1251">Empires of the sun and the West</a> (typescript)
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Flaumenhaft, Harvey, 1938-
Macfarland, Joseph C.
Conway, John
Lukacs, John, 1924-
Galbraith, Paul
Brann, Eva T. H.
Zuckerman, Bruce
American Chamber Players
Bolotin, David, 1944-
Howland, Jacob
Gilbert, Peter
Allabrook, Douglas
Badger, Jonathan
Kirby, Margaret
Higuera, Henry, 1952-
Paulos, John Allen
Burger, Ronna, 1947-
Haefliger, Andreas
Cohen, Joseph
Umphrey, Stewart, 1942-
Zuckerman, Elliott
Orwin, Clifford, 1947-
King William Players
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/d3d681ef2ba25f42d3a917fef8b5f100.pdf
74ad4e15b29d90800ef68eba108fe504
PDF Text
Text
STJOHN'S
LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE FIRST SEMESTER 2009-2010
(Revised Dece mber II , 2009)
College
ANNA POLI S • SANTA P£
August 28
Mr. Michael Dink
Dean
St. John's College
Annapolis
Mol iere's Le
Misanthrope
September 4
All College Sem inar
Percy Shelley's
'1\Defense of Poetry'
September I I
Professor Roderick Hills
New York U ni vers ity
Schoo l of Law
Alcohol, Guns, and
Federa lism: Two Case
Studies on the Dangers
Of Nationalizing the
Culture Wars
September 15
(Steiner)
Dr. Elie Wiesel
An Afternoon with
Eli W iesel
September 18
E lliott Fisk
Conceit (Gu itar)
September 25
Mr. Pedro Martinez-F raga
Miam i, FL
Love, Romance, and Law
in Don Quixote
October 2
Mr. Samuel Kutle r
Tutor
St. John's Coll ege
Annapolis
Poetry and Mathematics
October 9
Long Weekend
No Lecture
October 16
Professor Patricia Fagan
U niversity of Windsor
W indsor, Ontario Canada
The Anxiety of Democratic
Revolution : The Greek Hero ic
in Plutarch's Life ofCoriolanus
October 23
(Steiner)
Professor Mitchell Mi ller
Vassar Coll ege
Poughkee ps ie, NY
Odysseus as Poet
as Philosopher:
Reflections on the
Great Wanderings
October 30
Anonymous 4
Secret Voices: The Sisters
of Las Huelgas, Music of
Thi1teenth-Century Spain
November 6
Mr. Gary B01jesson
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapo lis
Spirited Friends: On Dogs
and Friendship
OFFICE OF
THE DEAN
P.O. Box 28oo
ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND
21404
410-626-25II
FAX 410-295-6937
www. sjca. edu
�November 13
Mr. Yannis Simonides
Plato's Apology: A dramatic
Performance
November 20
Professor Sybol Cook Anderson
St. Mary's College of Maryland
St. Mary's City, MD
Revisiting Hegefs Dialectic
of Desire and Recognition
November 27
Thanksgiving Holiday
No Lecture
December 4
Professor Danielle Allen
University of Chicago
Chicago, IL
Why Plato Wrote
December 11
King William Players
Shakespeare's Twelfth Night
December 18January 10, 2010
Winter Vacation
No Lectures
�S!JOHN'S
College
LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE SECOND SEMESTER 2009-2010
(Revised April 2, 20 I 0)
January 15
Mr. David Stephenson
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
The Novefs Moral
Playground
January 22
Mr. Jeffrey Smith
Tutor
St. Jo hn's College
Annapolis
A ltruism in the Eyes of an
Antichrist: On Laurence
Sterne's Sentimental Journey
January 29
Ms . Mary Kinzie
Northwestern University
Writing Long: The Shift
Toward the Long Poem in
Frank Bidm1 and Others
February 5
Long Weekend
No Lecture
Februmy 12
All College Sem inar
Ecclesiastes
February 19
Parker String Quar1et
Concer1
February 26
Mr. Joseph Smith
Tutor
St. John's Coll ege
Santa Fe
Kanfs Rational Being
as Moral Being
March 5-2 1
Spring Vacation
No Lectures
March 26
Brother Donald Mansir
St. Mary's College
Cal ifornia
The D ialogue Between
Faith and Reason: A
Qur'anic Strategy for
Governance
April2
Mr. E lliott Zuckerman
Tutor E meritus
St. John's College
Annapolis
Falstaff and C leopatra
April9
Mr. Paul Ludwig
Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
What is Agape?
ANNAPOLIS • SANTA FE
OFFICE OF
THE DEAN
P.O. Box 2.8oo
ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND
2.1404
410-62.6-2.511
FAX 4I0-2.95-6937
www. sjca. edu
�April 16
No Lecture
April 23
Mr. Jacques Duvoisin
Tutor
St. John's College
Santa Fe
The Paradox of Pity
in Rousseatis Second Discourse
April30
King William Players
Machiavellfs Mandragola
May?
Reality Weekend
No Lecture
May 14
Commencement Weekend
No Lecture
�
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/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
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.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
4 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
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/.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Office of the Dean
Title
A name given to the resource
Lecture/Concert Schedule First Semester 2009-2010 (Revised December 11, 2009) & Second Semester 2009-2010 (Revised April 2, 2010)
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2009-2010
Description
An account of the resource
Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 2009-2010 Academic Year.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lecture Schedule 2009-2010
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Dink, Michael
Hills, Roderick
Wiesel, Elie, 1928-2016
Fisk, Elliott
Martínez-Fraga, Pedro J.
Kutler, Samuel
Fagan, Patricia
Miller, Mitchell
Anonymous 4 (Musical group)
Borjesson, Gary
Simonides, Yannis
Anderson, Sybol Cook
Allen, Danielle
Stephenson, David
Smith, Jeffrey
Kinzie, Mary
Parker String Quartet
Smith, Joseph
Mansir, Brother Donald
Zuckerman, Elliott
Ludwig, Paul
Duvoisin, Jacques
King William Players
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
-
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c4cf6af8022478fdc3e7e86cfa725548
PDF Text
Text
LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE 2012-2013
Date
Speaker
Title
August 24 2012
Ms. Pamela Kraus
Dean
St. John’s College
Annapolis
A Start on Reading
August 31
Mr. Samuel Kutler
Tutor and Dean Emeritus
St. John’s College
Annapolis
Beginnings
September 7
Mr. Adam Schulman
Tutor
St. John’s College
Annapolis
On Homer’s Iliad
September 14
Mr. William Braithwaite
Tutor
St. John’s College
Annapolis
What is Free Speech for the
Sake of?
September 21
Parker Quartet
Concert
September 28
Mr. Peter Kalkavage
Tutor
St. John’s College
Annapolis
The Musical Universe and
Mozart’s Magic Flute
October 5
Long Weekend
No Lecture
October 12
Lecture cancelled
October 19
Mr. Steven Crockett
Visiting Tutor
St. John’s College
Annapolis
Paradoxes of Elections
October 26
Dr. Daniel Selcer
Duquesne University
Pittsburgh, PA
Thought, Image, and the
Printed Page in Early
Modern Europe
November 2
Mr. David Stephenson
Tutor
St. John’s College
Annapolis
Melodies and Faces: A
Meno Meditation
November 9
All College Seminar
�November 16
New York Polyphony
Concert
Two Sides of Love
November 23
Thanksgiving Holiday
No Lecture
November 30
Mr. Greg Recco
Tutor
St. John’s College
Annapolis
The Conference in the
Meadow: The Choice of
Life in Plato’s Myth of Er
December 7
King William Players
Performance
December 14 January 6
Winter Vacation
No Lectures
January 11
(Steiner Lecture)
Professor James Wood
Harvard
The New Atheism and the
Modern Novel
January 18
Mr. Michael Grenke
Tutor
St. John’s College
Annapolis
What Will Heaven Be
Like?
January 25
Mr. Frederic Chiu
Concert
The Piano: Invention and
Transformation
February 1
Long Weekend
No Lecture
February 8
Mr. Dylan Casey
Tutor
St. John’s college
Annapolis
Surprises and Sweet Spots:
On Discovery and
Recognition
February 15
Mr. Daniel Harrell
Tutor
St. John’s College
Annapolis
Does Music Move?
February 22
Mr. Jacques Duvoisin
Tutor
St. John’s College
Santa Fe
I s the Soul a City?
A Question about
Aristotle’s Nicomachean
Ethics
March 1 – 17
Spring Vacation
No lectures
March 22
Mr. James Lennox
Aristotle’s Method in On
Respiration: The Origins of
Functional Anatomy
�March 29
Mr. Mark Sinnett
Tutor
St. John’s College
Annapolis
What Does the
Mathematical Physicist
Know?
April 3
Ralph Peters
The Price of Historical
Illiteracy: wishful thinking
and the death of strategy
April 5
Mr. Jeffrey Smith
Tutor
St. John’s College
Annapolis
Sympathy’s Dimensions:
Reflections on the Moral
Philosophy of David Hume
April 12
Mr. Phil Lecuyer
Tutor
St. John’s College
Santa Fe
Intellectual Sin
April 19
Mr. Elliott Zuckerman
Tutor Emeritus
St. John’s College
Annapolis
Why I still scan verse or
How to sleep in a
procrustean bed
April 26
King William Players
Performance
May 3
Reality Weekend
No Lecture
May 10
Commencement Weekend
No Lecture
(LCDR Erik S. Kristensen
Lecture Series)
�
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/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
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.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
3 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
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/.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Office of the Dean
Title
A name given to the resource
Lecture/Concert Schedule 2012-2013
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2012-2013
Description
An account of the resource
Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 2012-2013 Academic Year.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lecture Schedule 2012-2013
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Kraus, Pamela, 1945-
Kutler, Samuel S.
Schulman, Adam
Braithwaite, William
Parker Quartet
Kalkavage, Peter
Crockett, Steven
Selcer, Daniel
Stephenson, David
New York Polyphony (Musical group)
Recco, Gregory
Wood, James
Grenke, Michael W.
Chiu, Frederic
Casey, Dylan
Harrell, Daniel
Duvoisin, Jacques
Lennox, James
Sinnett, Mark, 1963-
Peters, Ralph
Smith, Jeffrey
LeCuyer, Phillip
Zuckerman, Elliott
King William Players
Relation
A related resource
September 7, 2012. Schulman, Adam. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/53" title="The anger of Achilles, and its source">The anger of Achilles, and its source</a> (audio)
September 7, 2012. Schulman, Adam. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/54" title="The anger of Achilles, and its source">The anger of Achilles, and its source</a> (typescript)
September 28, 2012. Kalkavage, Peter. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/36" title="The musical universe and Mozart's Magic Flute">The musical universe and Mozart's Magic Flute</a> (audio)
September 28, 2012. Kalkavage, Peter. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/37" title="The musical universe and Mozart's Magic Flute">The musical universe and Mozart's Magic Flute</a> (typescript)
November 2, 2012. Stephenson, David. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/57" title="Melodies and faces">Melodies and faces</a> (audio)
November 2, 2012. Stephenson, David. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/58" title="Melodies and faces">Melodies and faces</a> (typescript)
November 30, 2012. Recco, Greg. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/49" title="The soul's choice of life">The soul's choice of life</a> (audio)
November 30, 2012. Recco, Greg. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/51" title="The soul's choice of life">The soul's choice of life</a> (typescript)
January 18, 2013. Grenke, Michael. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/28" title="What will heaven be like?">What will heaven be like?</a> (audio)
January 18, 2013. Grenke, Michael. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/29" title="What will heaven be like?">What will heaven be like?</a> (typescript)
February 8, 2013. Casey, Dylan. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/22" title="Surprises and sweet spots">Surprises and sweet spots</a> (audio)
February 15, 2013. Harrell, Daniel. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/33" title="Does music move?">Does music move?</a> (audio)
February 15, 2013. Harrell, Daniel. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/34" title="Does music move?">Does music move?</a> (typescript)
March 22, 2013. Lennox, James. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/41" title="Aristotle on respiration">Aristotle on respiration</a> (audio)
April 12, 2013. LeCuyer, Phillip. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/39" title="Intellectual sin">Intellectual sin</a> (audio)
April 12, 2013. LeCuyer, Phillip. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/40" title="Intellectual sin">Intellectual sin</a> (typescript)
April 19, 2013. Zuckerman, Elliott. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/332" title="Why I still scan verse">Why I still scan verse</a> (audio)
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
-
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f6e1dd21081ef8a2cebace8df2df311b
PDF Text
Text
ST
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PLAZA
ANNAPOLIS
MARYLAND
�yr
i flamed in recognition of the
generosity of Stewart Greenfield,
alumnus of the class of 195 3
and member of the Board of
Visitors and Governors, and his
wife, Constance Greenfield.
St. John's College is deeply
indebted to Mr. and Mrs.
Greenfield for their gift which
will benefit generations of
students, faculty and citizens
of Annapolis.
�0 GR AM
I :30-
2:00p.m.
Prelude
Carrollton Brass Quintet
2:00p.m.
Presentation of Colors
by the U.S. Naval Academy Color Guard
National Anthem
written by Francis Scott Key, Class of 1796
sung by Aaron Silverman, Class of 1996
COMMENTS
Christopher B. Nelson
President, St. John's College
Stewart Greenfield
Board of Visitors and Governors
Kathryn Kinzer
Head Librarian, St. John's College
Robert 0. Biern
President, the Friends of St. John's
The Honorable Alfred A. Hopkins
Mayor of Annapolis
Louis L. Goldstein
Maryland Comptroller of the Treasury
Elliott Zuckerman
Tutor Emeritus, St. John's College
Dedication of the St. John's College
Tercentenary Commemorative Postal
Card Issued by the U.S. Postal Service
Ribbon Cutting
2:45 - 4:00p.m.
Self-guided Tour of the Greenfield Library
Reception on the Library Plaza
�HIS TORY OF
TH E S T. JO
THE FIRST FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY IN THE UNITED STATES
he King William School was established in 1696 by an act of the
era! Assembly of Maryland for "Propagation of the Gospel and the
Bucation of the Youth of this Province in Good Letters and Manners."
Thomas Bray, named Commissary of Maryland in 1696, felt that the clergy in
Maryland could not hope to visit and instruct all members of rural colonial
parishes, and he hoped that the provision of parochial libraries might ease this
deficiency. The "Bray Libraries" were to be given into the care of the members
of the clergy for the use of the parishes. A £400 gift of Princess Ann of
Denmark, for whom Annapolis was named, enabled the purchase of 1,095
volumes for the Annapolitan Bray Library, the first of the provincial libraries.
Both the establishment of the King William School by the civil authorities
and the Bray Library by the Anglican Church indicate the need felt in the
colonies for education in philosophical and spiritual matters. * The first
volumes arrived in Annapolis in 1697, the last in 1700. After fires in the
buildings that housed the collection, the libra1y was moved to the King
William School in 1704. In 1720, the Bray Books were transferred to the new
state house, and sometime in the second half of the century they were
returned to the King William School. * When St. John's College
commenced in 1784, the masters and students of the old King William School
joined the inaugural procession, and the property and endowment of the early
school- including the Bray Books- were conveyed to the new college. * Since
this early beginning, the college collection has grown- sometimes vigorously,
sometimes hardly at all- reflecting the fortunes of education in the country at
large. Since its arrival on the St. John's College campus, the library has moved
to McDowell Hall, Humphreys,
Woodward Hall, Mellon,
Woodward Hall, and now,
some 90,000 volumes strong,
to the new library. The new
Greenfield Library assures us
that 300 years of liberal
education through books will
continue long into the
20th century.
�H N' S
COL L E G E L IBRARY
THE
HALL 0 F
RECORDS
New Life for an Historic Building
n 1934 St. John's College deeded a section on the southwest corner of
campus to the State of Maryland for $10. The State constructed the first
state archive depository in the nation, the Maryland Hall of Records, on this
site. The Hall of Records commemorates the 300th anniversary of the state's
founding in 1634 and has a finely detailed interior with symbols of Maryland
carved in raised wood panels. Laurence Hall Fowler, a noted Baltimore
architect, designed the building in a Georgian Revival style to complement
the 18th and 19th century architecture of the St. John's College campus. * In
1986 Matyland's state archives moved to a new building on Rowe Boulevard.
The Maryland Board of Public Works approved the sale of the Hall of Records
in 1993 and St. John's College formally acquired the building in 1994.
Renovations were completed in 1996, the 300th anniversary of the founding
of St. John's College as King William's School and of Dr. Bray's library, the
oldest free public library in the United States and the origin of the St. John's
College library.
LIBRARY
PLAZA
n the post at the entrance to the
brary is a plaque honoring the memory
of Richard Weigle, who served as
president of St. John's College from
1949 to 1980. It is not inaccurate to
state that the College might not be here
today were it not for the leadership and
efforts of Dr. Weigle.
�A R c H I T
T H E
s a student I remember sitting
ouse one spring day, and for a
ming about the future instead of
t
woul
past. I remember wondering if I
er return to St. John's to once again
reflect on the good, beauty, excellence and
E
questions became a driving metaphor.
* In all
I wanted the design of the new library to evoke
a sense of history and change. The timelessly
ordered classicism of the historic building was
to be intentionally contrasted with the
sweeping modernism of the new construction.
other forms. Maybe I would even repeat, 'o
If you would, an old order expanded by a new
anthropos agathos with more vigor. Little did I
one. Using many finely crafted materials and
imagine that I would be back again, spending
shapes the design creates a dialogue between
four years actually constmcting instead of
an architecture of the past with an architecture
contemplating a form for the great books. It is
of today. This contrast happens not only with
always a sca1y proposition to satisfy a
the addition, but equally where new
deserving client, but to also satisfy my
construction occurs within the building. It
extended academic family was an exhilarating
must be remembered that the massive interior
challenge to say the least. How to shape a
core of the Hall of Records was a six story
form that not only followed its function, but
warehouse completely unsuitable for modern
also a form that many Platonists wouldn't
open book stacks. Computers were to replace
frown upon, seemed at best, an impossible task
card catalogs while open access to books and
on a campus that never ever took anything at
relaxed reading were to prevail over an
face value. Needless to say, in designing the
enclosed vault.
library, I had plenty of what we architects call
building of contrasts, attempting to evoke
friendly user input.
* The shaping of the
library was a test of nerves far more demanding
* As it stands today, it is a
paradox while following three simple themes:
stillness, movement and nature. Stillness is
than rubbing the Archimedean stones together.
reflected in the enduring serenity of preserved
Not unlike the gods on their best of days,
classical architecture, movement is evoked by
mysterious forces were always at work making
the paths of the heavenly spheres, and earthly
the impossible possible, and not surprisingly
nalllre is as clear as the sunlight, gardens and
* Approaching the building the
some days, making the possible impossible.
rustic stone.
The building was shaped by many caretakers,
classical orders of the early Fowler design for
and students of Plotinus will be happy to know
the Maryland Hall of Records remain
that sometimes many efforts can become one.
deferential to the quad and its guardians,
* Through all this four year saga you might
McDowell, Woodward, Pinckney, and
ask what it is the architect did besides bounce
Humphries. The new library's timeless
between all these gods like a cue ball on
symmetry and handsome entry remain as
a
billiard table. As the Socratic midwife I set
delicate and inviting as a classic Loeb volume
about pursuing the toughest question a
in the hand. Maintaining a sense of timeless
Quixotic architect can face. What shape is
temples in their sacred landscape was essential.
going to shape the library that will shape the
Gazing across the preserved green sea I'm
future Johnnies? Further, would Eva Brann ever
constantly reminded of Melville's simple poem,
approve of my imagination? I contemplated, I
"Creek Architecture."
meditated, I cogitated, and I agitated. Fax me a
muse faster than a New York minute, I prayed.
Metaphors were rolling, tongues were wagging
and ink stained napkins were endlessly trailing
behind me.
* In all my questioning, and
Not magnitude, nor lavishness
But form, the site;
Note innovating willfulness
But reverence for the archetype.
more meetings than there arc bricks, the
* Entering the library, the past and the
concept for the library began to take shape. It
present are married in a light filled core.
seemed to me the library should celebrate the
Sunlight in all its Platonic and spiritual
spirit of one of St. John's greatest gifts, the art
metaphors as the great illuminator pervades
of the question. Questioning the timeless
every room in the libra1y. Reconstructing the
c
T
�'
s
p
E R s
p
E
c
T I v E
building from a closed stack vessel to an open
strove to keep our reverence for the classical
living room for the campus was accomplished
archetype alive. Thank you Annapolis Historic
by filling every room with natural light and
District Commission, Historic Annapolis, the
outdoor views. The atrium is the center and
Ma1yland Historic Tmst, and the American
the focus of the library. From the central lit
Institute of Architects. Thank you
core all directions in the library are clear.
commissioners and then you Donna, Jeff and
The search for knowledge is as endless as the
Donna.
stair that takes you there.
* Climbing up the
* Unquestionably, the utilitarian
needs were of utmost importance. They were
stairway one views a series of elliptical
unrelentingly guarded right down to the last
segments. These patterns echo throughout the
iota of the last page in the last volume on the
library celebrating the celestial patterns and
last shelf that could fit on a single fiber of
reminding us of the astronomical transitions
carpet. There are people who can actually
between Ptolemy, Copernicus and Kepler. The
count the number of angels on the head of a
classical interiors preserve the known rational
pin and know the answer. Thank you campus
geometry of the past and are intentionally
committees. Thank you Kitty, Vicki, Wally,
$ As sure as
contrasted with the expansive paths above us.
Eva, Howard, Anita, and Wendy.
These curvilinear shapes are a constant
the sun rose and set, the budget was and
reminder of the unknown, the irrational.
always will be limited. Provisioning the voyage
Knowing and not knowing are always present
and steering the ship through numerous
in the differing geometries of the libra1y. As
financial shoals took one cool-headed set of
well we shouldn't forget the guardian columns
captains. Without the gclt there would be no
holding their torcheres of light as the quiet
gilded libra1y. You've taken us to the new
bearers of the building.
$ To the side of the
world and back. T hank you donors and thank
* With pencils and
historic building, a garden wall politely
you Bud, Jeff, and Chris.
envelopes volumes and concepts to come. The
trowels, computers and concrete, an undaunted
addition is, on the one hand, a garden and, on
and uneclipsed team of designers and guilders
the other hand, an abstract modern building
sculpted reality through snow and committees
crafted in stone and steel. Its shape echoes the
and more snow and more committees. Oh, and
endless pathways of the skylight in the main
I don't want to forget to mention committee�.
stmcture as well as the never ending paths of
Thank you Doris, Cathy, Tony and John.
nature. While the skin of the addition
Thank you Maureen and thank Cod for Atlas
intentionally contrasts with its neighbor,
himself, Junior Hood.
respect and dialogue remain. Adopting the
read, think, dream, and occasionally doze in
* As h1ture Johnnies
stone walls of Humphries and saluting Neutra's
the Greenfield Library, I hope that somehow
modern vision with a phalanx of steel fins once
these shapes and metaphors will give them
again remind us of past and present. The new
pause to reflect and question. For architects
stone work invites touch while abstractly
and for all of us, the relationship between
framing the indigenous plantings. Both inside
architecture and thought is a never ending
and out one is always in a light filled garden.
pursuit. To paraphrase Winston Churchill,
The site is preserved and the submerged new
"first we shape our buildings and then, they
form is intended to be as grand and polite as its
predecessor.
* So there you have an
shape us." I hope that we have shaped a form
well, and that it will continue to shape us all
introduction to the shaping themes. As we all
equally as well. Having continued to be a part
know, however, a shape is shapeless without its
of St. John's has been a heart filled blessing for
shapers. "Who were these shapers and makers?",
me. Thank you all for yet another odyssey I
you might ask. Let me introduce them
* First,
won't long forget.
the existing building had its unspoken demands
and if you didn't hear them, there was a chorus
of historic preservationists eagerly chanting
detailed directives. These champions tirelessly
Travis L. Price TTl, ATA
Class of 197 ·I,
SF
�TH E GR E ENFI ELD LIBRARY
THE MAIN LEVEL
The Hall of Records Plaque.When St. John's College
acquired the Hall of Records from the State of Maryland, the
College agreed to retain the original dedication tablet in the
entryway in recognition of the State of Maryland's
longstanding support of St. John's College and the other
independent colleges of Maryland.
2
The Friends of St. John's College Room is named in honor of
the citizens and businesses in and around Annapolis who
contributed to the library project. In honor of the College's
tercentenary the Friends of St. John's College set a goal to
raise
$1
million to restore and preserve the splendid Georgian
Reception Room in the Hall of Records as an area for reading
and research. They raised almost
$2
million. The College was
deeply honored by this expression of support. In the next year
the names of all donors to the Friends Room will be lettered
above the chair rail, honoring in perpetuity a community's
ongoing commitment to one of its oldest institutions. To
THE MAIN LEVEL
insure accuracy of the lettering, the names are first presented
in booklet form in the Friends Room.
3
The Lillian Vanous Nutt Room recognizes the contributions
of an artist whose talents, kindness, and generosity are known
to many in the Annapolis community.
4
The Gallagher, Evelius
&
Jones Conference Room honors the
prestigious Baltimore law firm, and one of its senior partners
Rick Berndt, whose guidance and financial support helped to
make possible this project.
5
Alumni Donors to the Library. On a calligraphied and fTamed
scroll on the landing at the mid-point of the main staircase will
IJ
be the names of the alumni who contributed to the renovation
I I I I I EI
and construction of the Greenfield library. To insure accuracy
III
I
£±±""'
prior to preparation of the scroll, the names are first on display
in booklet form.
THE SECOND LEVEL
6
The Stephen and Julia Ford Reading Room stands as a
symbol of the good will and concern shown by neighbors of
St. John's College and the residents of Annapolis.
THE SECOND LEVEL
7
The William E. Brock Rare Books Room is a tribute to the
former Senator, U.S. Trade Representative, and U.S. Secretary
of Labor and his wife Sandra, a member of the Board of
Visitors and Governors, for their extraordinary generosity and
hard work on behalf of St. John's College.
�S T. J 0 N S C 0 LL E G E
H
'
8
The Stephen L.
Feinberg
Periodical Room honors the
Chairman of the Board of Visitors and Governors and
Honorary Fellow '?f the College whose leadership, generosity
and commitment have helped to secure St. John's College's
future.
9
The Joy and Bennett Shaver Reading Room
friends of the College, whose volunteer
is
named for two
efforts through
Caritas and the Friends of St. John's and whose many other
contributions have set an
exam ple
for the community.
THE THIRD LEVEL
I0
The Ray Cave
Floor celebrates the
from the class of
1948 to his
devotion of
this
alumnus
alma mater and expresses the
sincere appreciation of the St. John's College community for
his tireless leadership as Chairman of the Campaign for Our
THE THIRD LEVEL
Fourth Century.
I 1
The Dr. and Mrs. George Schoedinger Ill Reading Area
named to recognize the contributions and interest of the
parents of alumna Sarah Schoedinger, Class of
MECHANICAL
ROOM
THE UNDERGROUND LEVEL
1992.
is
�E CIAL THANKS
The College also expresses its appreciation to the following:
Governor William Donald Schaefer for his generosity in permitting the
College to acquire the old Hall of Records Building.
The City of Annapolis, Anne Arundel County, and the
Historic District Commission of Annapolis whose cooperation
and support were vital to the project.
Travis Price, Doris Sung, and Cathy Cherry, from the firm Travis Price
Architects, Inc. for design, management and oversight of the project.
Henry L. Lewis Construction Company, Junior Hood and
Maureen Bands-Beckenholdt for their professionalism and precision.
John Gutting for his meticulous and sensitive landscape design.
Charles Wallace for coordinating the College buildings
and grounds operations with the construction schedules.
The St. John's College Campus Planning Committee for their careful
and valuable consultation on all design issues.
The Library staff, including head Librarian Kitty Kinzer,
Assistant Librarian Vicki Cone, and Walter Plourde for their expertise
during the planning phases and their thoughtful coordination
of the move into the Greenfield Library.
The students, faculty, staff and friends who, following tradition,
moved the books by hand from the old library to the
Greenfield library on May 6, 1996.
Desig11 by Zoe Pa11tclides Graphics
�-----·��-----�
/-
1996USPS
o-
7'
ynded
p
1 1696 as King William's School), the U.S. Postal Service is issuing
·
eci.ll postal card. The card's twenty cent stamp bears the image of
McDowell Hall.
McDowell Hall began as the grandiose dream house of
Maryland's colonial governor, Thomas Bladen, in 1742. Originally conceived
to have a central section with a wing on either side, the building soon proved
to be too expensive for the colony to complete. Roofless, its unfinished walls
exposed to the elements, the hulk which became known as Bladen's Folly sat
for more than 40 years before the site was given to a new college- St. John's
College- chartered in the new state of Maryland in 1784.
Reconstruction
of the building was completed in 1789, and the first students from King
William's School and the College moved in. The building served as dormitory,
library, dining hall, and classroom space until 1837 when a second College
building was constructed. McDowell Hall is named after John McDowell, the
first President of St. John's College. It is the third oldest academic building in
continuous use in the United States.
�
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Playbills & Programs
Description
An account of the resource
Playbills and programs from various St. John's College events. Many of these items are from productions by The King William Players, the St. John's student theater troupe.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Playbills & Programs" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=20">Items in the Playbills & Programs Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Coverage
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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playbillsprograms
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paper
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11 pages
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Greenfield Library Dedication Ceremony Program
Description
An account of the resource
Program from the dedication of the Greenfield Library, held on June 01, 1996 at St. John's College in Annapolis, MD.
Creator
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St. John's College
Publisher
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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1996-06-01
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St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
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text
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pdf
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Nelson, Christopher B.
Greenfield, Stewart H.
Kinzer, Kathryn
Biern, Robert O.
Hopkins, Alred A.
Goldstein, Louis L.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Relation
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<a title="Photograph of the Pre-ceremony" href="http://www.digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/104">Photograph of the pre-ceremony set up</a>
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English
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LibraryDedicationCeremonyProgram1996June01
Greenfield Library
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/794a6d91b5a834e127b4f6c1fdfd7877.pdf
160da4d3f0210e4c2121b66e1d443db3
PDF Text
Text
The St. John’s Review
Volume 51, number 2 (2009)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Barbara McClay
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson,
President; Michael Dink, Dean. All manuscripts are subject to
blind review. Address correspondence to the Review,
St. John’s College, P
.O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 214042800. Back issues are available, at $5 per issue, from the
St. John’s College Bookstore.
©2009 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction
in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
The St. John’s Public Relations Office and the St. John’s College Print Shop
�2
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
3
Contents
Essay
The Secret Art of Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis
Principia Mathematica, Part Two...................................5
Judith Seeger
“The Things of Friends Are Common”........................37
Christopher B. Nelson
Review
“My Subject Is Passion”...............................................45
Eva Brann’s Feeling Our Feelings: What Philosophers
Think and People Know
Ronald Mawby
�4
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
5
The Secret Art of Isaac
Newton’s Philosophiae
Naturalis Principia Mathematica
Part Two
Judith Seeger
4. The Second Hidden Text: The Great Work of Nature
Tis true without lying, certain & most true.
That wch is below is like that wch is above & that
wch is above is like yt wch is below to do ye miracles
of one only thing
And as all things have been & arose from one by
ye mediation of one: so all things have their birth
from this one thing by adaptation.
The Sun is its father, the moon its mother, the
wind hath carried it in its belly, the earth is its
nourse. The father of all perfection in ye whole
world is here. Its force or power is entire if it be
converted into earth.
Separate thou ye earth from ye fire, ye subtile from
the gross sweetly wth great indoustry. It ascends
from ye earth to ye heaven & again it descends to
ye earth & receives ye force of things superior &
inferior.
By this means you shall have ye glory of ye whole
world & thereby all obscurity shall fly from you.
Judith Seeger is a tutor at St. John’s College, Annapolis. This essay is
published in two parts. Part one appeared in The St. John’s Review, volume
51, number 1. All bibliographical references appeared at the end of part 1.
Endnotes are numbered continuously through both parts
�6
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Its force is above all force. ffor it vanquishes every
subtile thing & penetrates every solid thing.
So was ye world created . . . . (“Tabula
Smaragdina,” translated by Isaac Newton)37
The General Scholium with which the second and third
editions of the Principia end is so powerful that it may
obscure the discussion of comets that precedes it. That
discussion, however, is of crucial importance. The main text
of all three editions of the Principia culminates with
Newton’s demonstration that the formerly fear-inspiring
comets, rather than being supernatural signs of God’s wrath,
are natural bodies that obey the same laws as the planets. This
accomplishment is one of the triumphs of the book. But
Newton did not stop there. The wide-ranging disquisition on
comets at the end of Book 3—consisting primarily of celestial
observations, mathematical calculations, and inferences
drawn from Newton’s optical studies—includes, as well,
assertions about the active role comets play in the universe, in
passages that stand out in the context of mathematical calculations and demonstrations.
Consider, for example, the remarks that follow
Proposition 41 of Book 3 in all three editions. At this point,
Newton has already established that the bodies of comets are
“solid, compact, fixed, and durable, like the bodies of
planets” (918), and that their tails are composed of extremely
thin vapor which the head or nucleus of the comet emits
under the influence of the fierce heat of the sun. Then,
surprisingly (for what does this have to do with the mathematical determination of celestial motion ruled by universal
gravitation?), he states that this extremely thin vapor is
essential to the replenishment both of water on earth and of
a more subtle spirit required for life. The passage continues:
For vapor in those very free spaces becomes
continually rarefied and dilated. For this reason it
happens that every tail at its upper extremity is
SEEGER
7
broader than near the head of the comet.
Moreover, it seems reasonable that by this
rarefaction the vapor—continually dilated—is
finally diffused and scattered throughout the whole
heavens, and then is by degrees attracted toward
the planets by its gravity and mixed with their
atmospheres. For just as the seas are absolutely
necessary for the constitution of this earth, so that
vapors may be abundantly enough aroused from
them by the heat of the sun, which vapors either—
being gathered into clouds—fall in rains and
irrigate and nourish the whole earth for the propagation of vegetables, or—being condensed in the
cold peaks of mountains (as some philosophize
with good reason)—run down into springs and
rivers; so for the conservation of the seas and
fluids on the planets, comets seem to be required,
so that from the condensation of their exhalations
and vapors, there can be a continual supply and
renewal of whatever liquid is consumed by
vegetation and putrefaction and converted into dry
earth. For all vegetables grow entirely from fluids
and afterward, in great part, change into dry earth
by putrefaction, and slime is continually deposited
from putrefied liquids. Hence the bulk of dry earth
is increased from day to day, and fluids—if they
did not have an outside source of increase—would
have to decrease continually and finally to fail.
Further, I suspect that that spirit which is the
smallest but most subtle and most excellent part of
our air, and which is required for the life of all
things, comes chiefly from comets. (926)
This is an allegory of circulation as the alchemists understood
it, in which the spirit provided by the tails of comets is
analogous to the philosophers’ mercury—whose many names
included dew of heaven, oriental water, celestial water, our
�8
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
balm, our honey, May dew, silver rain—the spiritual agent,
whose properties were activated, according to Basil
Valentine, by expulsion from its habitat in the form of airy
vapors, and whose descent was perceived as heavenly
condensation falling to nourish the earth, which would perish
without it (Nicholl, 92-3).38 Newton is not here speaking of
circulatory motion within a single immovable plane, which he
has shown in Proposition 1 of Book 1 to be the motion of
bodies driven in orbits under the influence of centripetal
force. He is describing, rather, a continual churning within
the universe, the manifestation of nature as a circulatory
worker, to borrow his characterization of it in 1675.39 This is
an image of earth as retort, inasmuch as comets supply both
the fluids and the subtle spirit required for the development
of life itself.
The final book of the first edition of the Principia ends
abruptly with Proposition 42. But the second edition
continues. In addition to incorporating more observations
and calculations of the paths of comets, Newton in the 1713
edition extends the image of renewal nourished by comets to
the fixed stars themselves, writing, “So also fixed stars, which
are exhausted bit by bit in the exhalation of light and vapors,
can be renewed by comets falling into them and then, kindled
by their new nourishment, can be taken for new stars. Of this
sort are those fixed stars that appear all of a sudden, and that
at first shine with maximum brilliance and subsequently
disappear little by little” (937). This phenomenon, he
comments, had been noted by such reliable observers as
Cornelius Gemma, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler’s pupils.
In his last recorded conversation with John Conduitt,
Newton, at the age of 83, expanded upon the circulatory
image implicit in this understanding of those celestial events;
for, as the preceding citations from the Principia show, he
regarded the appearance of what we call supernovae as
evidence that the universe itself undergoes vast cycles of
destruction and regeneration. Conduitt wrote of this conversation that:
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it was his conjecture (he would affirm nothing)
that there was a <sort of> revolution in the
heavenly bodies that the vapours & light gathered
<emitted> by the sun <which had their sediment
as water & other matter had> gathered
themselves by degrees into a body <& attracted
more matter from the planets> & at last made a
secondary planett (viz. one of those that go round
another planet) & then by gathering <to them>
& attracting more matter became a primary
planet, & then by increasing still became a comet
wch after certain revolutions & by coming nearer
& nearer the sun, had all its volatile parts
condensed & became a matter fit to recruit <&
replenish> the sun (wch must waste by the constant
heat & light it emitted), as a fagot put into
<would> this fire if put into it (wee were sitting
by the <a wood> fire) & and that that would
probably be the effect of the comet in 1680 sooner
or later . . . (Iliffe, 1: 165).
Newton added that when this collision occurred, after
perhaps five or six more revolutions, it would “so much
increase the heat of the sun that <this earth would be burnt
&> no animals in this earth could live” (Iliffe, 1: 165).
Indeed, he seemed to Conduitt “to be very clearly of opinion”
that such a collision, and subsequent “repeopling” by the
Creator had happened at least once already, observing, first,
“that the inhabitants of this earth were of a short date,” partly
because “all arts as letters long ships printing – needle &c
were discovered within the memory of History, wch could not
have happened if the world had been eternal,” and, further,
that as far as the earth itself was concerned, “there were
visible marks of men [Westfall (1984: 862) has “ruin” here;
the word must be difficult to make out.] upon it whch could
not be effected by a flood only” (Iliffe, 1: 166). Such collisions were, Newton speculated, the cause of the suddenly
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brilliant stars he had noted in the Principia—but without
mentioning there, as he did in his conversation with
Conduitt, that he took those stars to be “suns enlightnening
other planets as our sun does ours” (Iliffe, 1: 165). When
Conduitt asked him “why he would not own as freely what
he thought of the sun as well as what he thought of the fixed
stars—he said that concerned us more, & laughing added he
had said enough for people to know his meaning” (Iliffe, 1:
166).40
Newton could laugh, even in the face of past and future
death and devastation, for he trusted that a benevolent and
all-powerful God—both perfect mechanic and perfect
alchemist—determines everything that happens in the
universe, including the generation and apocalyptic
destruction of all living things (as, of course, Newton had also
read in the Bible, though he seems not to have mentioned
that particular bit of testimony in the conversation Conduitt
recorded). The second text concealed in the Principia, by
giving us an alchemical account of the generation of life,
expresses Newton’s confidence in God as perfect master of
the Great Work. This text is fully contained in the following
sentence, added to the second edition of the Principia, in a
translation based on that of Cohen and Whitman (938), but
retaining the ampersands of the Latin text. The issue is not
the use of the ampersand itself, which appears stranger here
in English than it does in the Principia, as it is used
throughout that work. What is striking is that both a comma
and an ampersand separate every term from the one that
follows it. This is not Newton’s common practice when
listing members of a series:
And the vapors that arise from the sun & the fixed
stars & the tails of comets can fall by their gravity
into the atmospheres of the planets & there be
condensed & converted into water & humid
spirits, & then—by a slow heat—be transformed
gradually into salts, & sulphurs, & tinctures, &
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slime, & mud, & clay, & sand, & stones, &
corals, & other earthy substances.
In the second edition this sentence is followed by two more
sentences. In the third edition those two sentences have been
omitted, so that the sentence cited above is the last one in the
body of the work immediately preceding the General
Scholium.
By the time he wrote these words, Newton had
abandoned his attempts to achieve experimental evidence for
the existence of the forces he had sought through his
alchemical work, but his references to comets show that he
had not abandoned his faith in the truth behind that quest,
for the language and imagery of this sentence come from
mystical alchemy. The sentence can be read as an allegory of
the three fundamental processes by which, according to the
alchemists, nature perfects her work: sublimation (the vapors
arise from the sun, the fixed stars, and the tails of comets);
distillation (by gravity they are condensed and turned into
water and humid spirits); and concoction (they change form
under the application of a slow heat). This process as a whole
Newton knew as vegetation, which in one of his earliest texts
on this subject (called “Of Nature’s obvious laws & processes
in vegetation,” written between 1670 and 1675) he explicitly
distinguished from what he called the “gross mechanicall
transposition of parts” (3r). In the 1670s Newton had no
inkling either of universal gravitation—writing, for example,
that clouds could rise high enough to “loos their gravity”
(5r)—or of a possible connection between comets and life on
earth. Although he writes in the manuscript that, “this Earth
resembles a great animall or rather inanimate vegetable,
draws in aethereall breath for its dayly refreshment & vitall
ferment & transpires again with gross exhalations” (3v), he
does not claim to know the renewable source of the ethereal
breath. After writing the Principia, however, he was able, in
allegorical language, if not in the language of experimental
science or mathematics, to complete the system of life-giving
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circulation.41 The products of vegetation, listed in order as
rising from the depths of the planet toward its surface in the
presence of the fertilizing philosophical mercury falling from
the heavens are emphasized in the Latin text by the repetition
of the ampersand. The first three—fundamental salts,
oleaginous and fiery sulphurs, and transforming tinctures—
are alchemical ingredients of increasing power, associated
with spirit and necessary for the origin and development of
life. The next four describe the evolution of matter under the
gradual drying effect of slow heating: slime (the residue of
putrefaction), mire, clay, and sand. With the eighth member
of the series, stones (a category that includes precious stones),
we begin to see the organization associated with the mineral
kingdom, considered a union of spirit and matter. The ninth
member of the series is coral, which also appears in the generative series in “Of Nature’s obvious laws.” Unmodified this
would be red coral, a precious natural analogue (according,
for example, to Michael Maier, nine of whose works were
part of Newton’s library) of the crimson philosophers’ stone
(169). With coral we pass from the mineral to the vegetable
kingdom, for coral was thought in Newton’s day to be a
marine plant, which grew under water and hardened to stone
when brought into the air. The last member of the
sequence—seventh in the group comprising the evolution of
matter, third in the group comprising the evolution of life in
terms of the three “kingdoms,” and tenth in the entire
process comprising the gradual union of spirit and matter—
brings us to the animal kingdom, telling us that “all terrestrial
substances,” a category that includes our own bodies, have
come into being through the natural transmutation of
celestial vapors by gravity and the planet’s slow heat. Newton
begins this sentence speaking generically about planets. He
ends it speaking specifically about that which “concerns us
more”: our earth and ourselves.
The final sentence of the body of the Principia, then,
reaches back to the very beginnings of Newton’s concern
with cosmology. He has returned at the end to the old
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questions on a new level of understanding made possible by
his discoveries in the Principia, though not yet sufficiently
developed to be expressed openly in the mathematical
language of experimental philosophy. In the second and, even
more pointedly, in the third edition of the Principia (both
prepared with more leisure than the first edition), it seems,
Newton wanted to end his book with a powerful vision
encompassing all of nature; a vision which, like that of the
veiled text at the beginning of Book 1, would be at once as
clear as crystal to those who knew how to read it and as clear
as mud to those who did not. The dissertation on comets is
the last dual teaching. Through careful observations and
sophisticated mathematical calculations Newton has transformed our understanding of the nature of comets and the
laws behind their motion. But he has also composed hauntingly beautiful images of generation in our universe and on
our earth, for in the final allegory comets link the earth and
everything in it to the heavens. Newton chose not to express
this grand life-giving circulation openly in the Principia. But
he did include it. The processes revealed in these allegories
declare the Great Work of nature under the guidance of God.
In this vision perpetual circulation leads to life itself, and
universal gravitation is its motor.
5. “The fountain I draw it from”
Nature may truly be described as being one, true,
simple, and perfect in her own essence, and as
being animated by an invisible spirit. If therefore
you would know her, you, too, should be true,
single-hearted, patient, constant, pious, forbearing
and, in short, a new and regenerate man. (The
Sophic Hydrolith)42
I am not so bold as to assert that I have interpreted the
concealed texts correctly in every detail and I certainly do not
claim that I have discussed every appearance of symbolism in
the book. Nevertheless, I hope I have shown that a coherent
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vision may be seen by reading the beginning of Book 1 of the
Principia in terms of numerological, esoteric geometrical,
theological, and alchemical symbolism, and by reading the
end of Book 3 in terms of alchemical allegory. I am not
arguing that the Principia properly understood is a sort of
Paradise Regained couched in mathematical metaphors, and I
have not forgotten for a moment that I am dealing with the
foundational text of modern terrestrial and celestial
mechanics; that what I have been calling the exoteric text has
existed ostensibly on its own for over 300 years; and that the
esoteric texts, in the absence of the exoteric text, would be no
more than mystical fancies, and perhaps not particularly
interesting ones at that. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake
to dismiss or avoid the esoteric texts, because they open the
way to a new and richer level of understanding of the work
as a whole, as well as of its author.
In fact, the existence of concealed texts in the Principia is
a solution, rather than a problem. Newtonian scholarship has
been a prolonged and uneasy exercise in rethinking his work.
Isaac Newton devoted the passion of his soul and the activity
of his intellect to discovering the intelligibility and the unity
of the world in all its manifestations. Yet even before we knew
of his vast manuscript collection of theological and
alchemical writings, whose subjects and style are so very
different from those usually attributed to the author of the
Principia, Newton was considered a complex and contradictory character. Now, the impacts of successive revelations—among them the ardency of his alchemical pursuits,
the intensity of his theological studies, and his conviction that
much of his work was restoring ancient learning—seem to
some to have shattered the possibility of ever seeing him as a
single, cohesive individual.
The Principia has been the crux of the problem.
Mathematicians and physicists have, quite reasonably,
focused on its mathematical and physical aspects. Meanwhile,
Newton’s biographers and the students of his theological and
alchemical pursuits have, for the most part, surrendered the
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Principia to those capable of following its formidable mathematics. I hope that, by looking closely at the Principia in a
way that (to my knowledge) has not been attempted before, I
have demonstrated that the mathematical, philosophical,
theological, and alchemical aspects of Newton’s work are
intertwined. But, even granting the existence of the concealed
texts, important questions remain: Why would Newton have
incorporated these teachings into the Principia? Why would
he have hidden them rather than revealing them openly? And
to whom are they addressed?
The first hidden text is particularly perplexing. Even as
mounting evidence persuaded me that it must be there, I had
no ready answer to the question why someone absorbed in
the relatively hasty composition of such a difficult and timeconsuming work would (or even could) have taken the time
and trouble to construct it. And yet perhaps it is not so
surprising. The language of symbol and allegory would have
been second nature to a man so thoroughly steeped in the
interpretation of alchemical and theological texts.
Incorporation of allegory and symbolism into his own text
would not have required inordinate effort. More importantly,
while for readers of the Principia, the hidden texts might
seem to be subsidiary to the open text—if they are seen at
all—for its author the relationship would have been the
reverse. The esoteric texts are not appendages to the exoteric
text; they are, instead, its foundation. There were certain
things Newton was not disposed to doubt and he held certain
convictions he would not deign to explain. In 1676, for
example, in a letter to John Collins, after asserting what he
realized was astonishing power and generality for his method
of fluxions, Newton wrote, “This may seem a bold assertion
because it’s hard to say a figure may or may not be squared or
compared with another, but it’s plain to me by ye fountain I
draw it from, though I will not undertake to prove it to
others” (Correspondence, 2: 180). The symbolic texts allow
Newton to incorporate into his masterwork the certainty
which was the source of his amazingly fruitful vision of the
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world, without having also to prove its existence to others.
They proclaim the glory of God suffusing both the universe
and the souls of men: the ground of Newton’s assurance that
the pursuit of knowledge through experimental and mathematical means is the proper vocation of humankind.
So did Newton include the hidden texts as a prayer of
thanksgiving to God, or perhaps as a personal meditation,
without intending them to be visible to others? I do think that
expression of his deepest beliefs at the heart of his greatest
work must have been a balm to the lonely soul of its author.
Newton had an attentive niece, devoted disciples, sympathetic colleagues, and even friends; but he had no peers. His
manuscripts with their repeatedly suppressed declarations
and speculations tell the story of an individual tormented by
the conflict between the aching desire to share his convictions
and the conviction that he could not do so. The “classical”
scholia, parts of which I have quoted above, serve as a particularly poignant example of this struggle, which he finally
settled by not including them in the Principia. The hidden
texts, thus, help resolve what must have been nearly
unbearable tension. Newton would have known that,
whatever their fate as far as the rest of the world was
concerned, they were there as his testimony of faith.
Nonetheless, it seems impossible that he concealed texts
in the Principia simply for his solitary satisfaction. There are
abundant indications within the work that signal the existence
of the first hidden text, while the remarks cited concerning
comets are in plain sight of anyone who reaches the end of
Book 3. Moreover, Newton himself, in the General Scholium,
calls our attention to the relation between God and natural
philosophy in a way that, when read only in the light of the
surface text of the Principia, is more puzzling than enlightening. The extended discourse on God, located at the center
of the General Scholium, is, frankly, shocking. It bursts
through the surface of the text with the force of a pent-up
spring, a surging torrent of words, far too powerful and far
too passionate to be neatly contained within the book the
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Principia seems at first to be. And then this ardent outpouring
vanishes without a trace, subsiding as suddenly as it began,
beneath the sentence: “This concludes the discussion of God,
and to treat of God from phenomena is certainly a part of
natural philosophy” (943).44 No one who reads this passage
can doubt that its author was a man of exceptional piety, but
if he was so very pious (and if he really believed that to treat
of God from phenomena is part of natural philosophy), how
could he have slighted God in his greatest work? It is true that
the Principia is a book of experimental philosophy (though
there are necessarily few actual experiments in it), and that
there is no experiment that will simply prove the existence of
God. But, except for a few scattered remarks, God appears to
be so utterly absent from the work that—despite the
testimony of Richard Bentley’s lectures, titled A Confutation
of Atheism from the Origin and Frame of the World, delivered
in 1692 and published in 1693—Newton has been
condemned for writing an atheistic book (or, alternatively,
commended for writing a secular one).45 Of course, I have
been arguing that God is not at all missing from the Principia.
On the contrary, anyone willing to admit that this work (like
white light, the stone of the philosophers, man, and the
universe) may be simultaneously one and many, and able to
follow the clues Newton has provided, can see that it is, in
fact, filled with God’s presence and that we are meant to see
that presence.
But if we are meant to see that presence, then why hide
the teachings? There are several partial answers to this
question. One reason may have been Newton’s personality,
which has been described by such various terms as prudent,
paranoid, modest, arrogant, cautious, suspicious,
domineering, fearful, and vindictive. A more important factor
in his decision to hide the teachings could have been his
particular situation in the context of the political and
religious turmoil that was occurring in England during his
lifetime. Most importantly, the nature of the teachings
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themselves would have determined the form of their presentation.
As for his personality, extreme reticence, whatever its
source, was apparently part of Newton’s character. Public
revelation of any of his work seems often to have required a
struggle with himself as well as with others; most of what he
wrote, by far, he did not publish. But a simple appeal to
character does not really resolve the issue, for in the works he
did publish Newton was not always quite so reluctant to
reveal his beliefs as he was in the Principia. In the Opticks, for
example, published during his lifetime in six editions (three
in English, in 1704, 1717/18, and 1721; two in Latin, in
1706 and 1719; and a French translation in 1720), he wrote
increasingly openly of his hopes and speculations regarding
natural philosophy, though he still disguised them (however
transparently) as queries. He first published the Opticks,
however, after the death of his nemesis Robert Hooke in
1703 and his own ascent to a position of fame and power as
author of the Principia and president of the Royal Society,
and at a time when he was becoming more conscious of the
need to leave his work for posterity. Openness had also
characterized his early “New Theory about Light and
Colours.” But the tone of ingenuous excitement in which on
January 18, 1672 Newton (who was not yet 30 years old)
described his discovery of the nature of light to Henry
Oldenburg as “in my Judgment the oddest if not the most
considerable wch hath beene made in the operations of
Nature” (Correspondence, 1: 82-3) is one he never again
employed publicly. Instead, burned by the hostility that work
aroused, he designed his Principia to ensure that the
expression of his deepest passions and convictions would be
visible only to like-minded readers.
Newton’s penchant for secrecy, however, was not simply
(and perhaps not even primarily) a matter of character. He
had compelling external reasons to conceal his theological,
philosophical, and alchemical beliefs. With respect to
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theology, in the General Scholium to the Principia Newton
finally affirms the strict monotheism and the vision of God as
Παντοκρατϖρ that underlie his work, though with characteristic discretion he eschews the scorching anti-Trinitarian
diatribes he allowed himself in his unpublished manuscripts.
But by the time the second edition of the Principia was being
prepared—and the General Scholium was Newton’s final
addition to that edition—its author was Sir Isaac, secure in his
renown; and the Principia was so highly regarded that it had
practically become a sacred text itself. Had the unknown
Cambridge professor expressed his dangerously unorthodox
beliefs in 1687, he would have risked his career if not his life
(for religious heterodoxy was a capital offense in England at
the time). Moreover, the peril of confessing such beliefs did
not abate during Newton’s lifetime. He was a member of the
Convention Parliament of 1689, which declared equally
illegal the Roman Catholicism he loathed and the Arianism he
held.46 Newton could reasonably conclude that open
acknowledgment of his religious convictions would have put
his entire philosophical program at risk. At the very least it
would have provided for a lifetime of distraction, as he would
have been forced to engage in endless discussion and defense
of his beliefs. He had better things to do.
Newton had good reasons, as well, not to proclaim his
unorthodox philosophical convictions in the Principia,
closely tied as they were to his heterodox theology. He
believed that the existence of gravity had been made manifest
through its effects as revealed in the Principia, and that such
revelation, as he wrote in the General Scholium, was—
indeed, had to be—enough for now. Throughout his long life
he repeatedly tried to claim the right to say that he did not
know the cause of gravity, insisting (as had Galileo) that
knowledge of causes was not necessary for the pursuit of
natural philosophy. In fact, Newton was convinced that
requiring that causes be known, or hypothesized, before
effects could be studied stifled philosophical progress.47 In the
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General Scholium, after his often quoted assertion that he
does not feign hypotheses, Newton continues: “For whatever
is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a
hypothesis, and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or
physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no
place in experimental philosophy” (943). This statement—in
addition to neatly equating, in terms of their uselessness, the
metaphysical with the physical and the mechanical qualities
that the Cartesians held with the occult qualities which to
them were anathema—stakes out Newton’s philosophical
position on this issue. He publicly refuses to attempt to
explain gravity, and, with the authority of the Principia
behind him, he goes on to declare that a search for its cause
is, at best, beside the point.
But his protestations were not accepted by the mechanical
philosophers. Surely the heat with which they attacked him
was due in part to their understandable suspicion that he
thought he knew the cause of gravity, and that it was not
mechanical; for it was quite clear that impulse was unable to
account for universal gravitation. Explanation of gravitation,
therefore, seemed inevitably to require acceptance of a
doctrine of attraction, of action at a distance, of a force that
was, to use their heavily-laden word, “occult.”48 Newton
would readily have admitted that the workings of gravity
were occult—in the simple sense that we do not know exactly
how God does it. But he could never have satisfied the strict
mechanical philosophers on this point, no matter what he
said, for conservation of the universe as Newton understood
it required active force;49 and any admission of a nonmechanical cause into the universe was unacceptable to those
who held that the physical world could only be intelligible in
terms of matter and motion alone. If Newton harbored
personal beliefs about God’s active role in the universe, he
also realized that it would have been foolish for him to
express openly in the Principia convictions for which he
could not supply experimental evidence. Wisely, he designed
the surface text of the book to preclude speculation about
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causes. The deeper teachings—composed in a language not
susceptible to argument—were reserved for those who could
appreciate them.
As concerns Newton’s alchemical quest, as well, there
were abundant reasons not to reveal it openly in the
Principia. Again, one was the character of the open text as its
author constructed it, for if he had no demonstrable evidence
of the cause of gravity he had no demonstrable evidence even
of the existence of the forces he sought so avidly through
alchemy. Newton seems to have read alchemical texts with
the same intent with which he read all texts: seeing their
deliberately deceptive exposition and dense symbolic enigmas
as expressions of a single truth uniting nature and revelation,
obscured by a veil that could be penetrated by interpretation,
which in this case was aided by the experimentation at which
he was so adept. Whatever the philosophers’ stone may have
meant for other alchemists, for Newton I believe achievement
of the stone would have been the culmination of his life’s
work: it would have meant the acquisition through experimental means of that truth which he sought so very intensely.
As early as the first edition of the Principia, Newton struggled
with the desire to reveal his alchemical pursuits, writing in
the Preface, after describing the procedure he would follow
in the book:
If only we could derive the other phenomena of
nature from mechanical principles by the same
kind of reasoning! For many things lead me to
have a suspicion that all phenomena may depend
on certain forces by which the particles of bodies,
by causes not yet known, either are impelled
toward one another and cohere in regular figures,
or are repelled from one another and recede. Since
these forces are unknown, philosophers have
hitherto made trial of nature in vain. But I hope
that the principles set down here will shed some
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light on either this mode of philosophizing or
some truer one. (382-3)
As usual, however, he resolved that the open text of the
Principia was not the proper place for conjectures, no matter
how fervently he may have held them. This brief statement of
his strong suspicion and hopes and a few speculations in the
last paragraph of the General Scholium, which he cut short
for lack of experimental evidence, are as close as he comes to
openly stating his chemical aspirations in that work.50
Failure to obtain experimental evidence for chemical
forces might have been sufficient motive for Newton to
withhold open acknowledgment of those aspirations, but
there were other cogent reasons for discretion, as well.
Newton surely considered himself among the philosophical
alchemists, for, unlike the puffers or smoke-sellers, whose
base activity the philosophical alchemists universally decried,
he was surely not interested in acquiring personal power or
amassing wealth through chicanery. Nevertheless, he knew
that alchemists were widely considered to be rogues and
conjurors and as such were both ridiculed and feared.
Therefore, in personal terms, there was much to be lost and
nothing to be gained by publicly espousing alchemy. In
practical terms, serious alchemists considered the power they
hoped to achieve too dangerous to be proclaimed openly to
an imperfect world, a constraint that we know Newton
respected.51 And finally, the philosophical alchemists were
engaged in a spiritual quest for purification and perfection,
which they also called healing, not only of metals but also of
their own souls. True philosophical alchemy required a
relationship between the practitioner and his God wherein
the success of the work depended at least as much upon the
state of the alchemist’s soul as upon his facility in deciphering
texts or his dexterity in following procedures. The one thing
serious alchemical writings make perfectly clear is that only
the pious and pure of heart will be able to discern the proper
proportions of materials, the correct degrees of heat for each
part of the procedure, and the precise timing necessary to
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perfect the work.52 Achievement of the philosophers’ stone
would have been a gift of God awarded to one who merited
it. Open acknowledgment of engagement in this intense and
intimate quest would have been not only foolhardy but also
impious.
There are, then, abundant negative reasons for Newton
to have hidden his theological, philosophical, and alchemical
beliefs; but there is also a powerful positive argument for
including those beliefs in the form of concealed texts.
Newton seems to have considered, repeatedly, the possibility
that the world was ready for him to reveal, in his own name,
the convictions he held. And every time he considered that
possibility, he rejected it. He, therefore, took his place as a
member of a distinguished secret fraternity long engaged in
the task of seeking the truth and revealing it in a dual
manner: each work simultaneously expounding one text for
the many, and another, through symbols and figures, for the
few.53 He believed that the alchemists, the ancient sages, and
the inspired writers of the Holy Scriptures—recognizing the
peril to themselves and quite possibly to others of openly
displaying their true convictions in unsettled times like those
in which he was living—had conveyed their mystical
teachings in metaphors, fables, allegories, images, parables,
and prophecies, as well as numerological and esoteric
geometrical symbolism. All of their texts, like the book of
nature itself, required interpretation. Newton understood the
worth of his Book of Principles. Why should it differ in this
respect from the world-changing works that preceded it? In
his remarkable passage about God in the General Scholium,
Newton comes close to expressing in words the vision of the
concealed texts. But the full force of mystical belief cannot be
conveyed in everyday language, corrupted by the Fall and
confined by what Newton called its “unavoidable
narrowness” (McGuire, 199). Newton had numerous reasons
not to express his mystical teachings openly, but he also had
a powerful reason to express them in the way he did:
Symbolism is their proper language.
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An unavoidable, and perhaps uncomfortable, consequence of this reading is the recognition that not all of the
teachings in the Principia were meant for everyone (though
the shock of this realization should be attenuated by recalling
that the book is a restricted text at every level). But if the
teachings were not meant for everyone, to whom were they
addressed? Clearly, Newton wanted others to continue the
work he had begun. He published and repeatedly revised
both the Principia and the Opticks in the interest of
promoting the development of natural philosophy, which, he
told Conduitt toward the end of his life, he felt the comfort
of having left less mischievous than he found it. But, aside
from those two books, he seems to have cared so little (or
perhaps, in some cases, feared so much) what his contemporaries would think of his work that he preferred not to
publish it during his lifetime, particularly if publication meant
that he would be hounded and pestered by critics.54 On the
other hand, he cared very deeply that his work be preserved
and, furthermore, that others know that it was his. Both his
reluctance to publish and his wounded outrage—when his
originality, at least with respect to his fellow moderns, was
assailed (as by Hooke); or his work, to his mind, was
hindered (as by Flamsteed); or his priority and even his
probity were challenged (as by Leibniz)—may be partially
understood if we realize that Newton considered the intellectual community to which he belonged to be temporal.55 In
the concealed texts Newton was addressing primarily those
he would consider his true intellectual heirs. Those philosophers, carrying on the task of improving natural philosophy
and presumably familiar with its venerable dual tradition,
would be able to see and recognize the true foundation of the
work in which they were engaged.
For Newton knew that the work was not complete.
Although he recognized that his remarkable achievements
had reached new heights of natural philosophy, he was also
well aware that his deepest questions had gone unanswered.
There is evidence that when he finished the first edition of the
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Principia, he still hoped he would find those answers. In the
early 1690s he immersed himself in a monumental study of
the entire alchemical tradition. He may, as well, have
attempted to initiate his young disciple, Nicholas Fatio de
Duillier, into his alchemical pursuits. But it came to nothing.56
In 1693 Newton suffered a breakdown, a mysterious episode
which led to rumors on the Continent that he had become
permanently deranged or had even died. The onset of this
crisis has been attributed—not fully persuasively—to various
causes; but equally remarkable (and also unexplained) is its
abrupt end. This end was characterized by the full resumption
of his sanity—if not of the intense intellectual power that had
previously marked his life—only a few months after he wrote
the rambling letters to Samuel Pepys and John Locke that
were the source of their fears for his state of mind.57 His
failure to unlock the chemical secrets of the universe, despite
his fevered attempts to do so, must have been devastating.
But Newton finally accepted that he would not be the one to
answer those questions. In 1696, at the age of 53, he
abandoned his experimental search into the unity of nature
and took a position as master of the mint.
Nevertheless, he did not repudiate his earlier failed
attempts. On the contrary, he left ample evidence of his
ongoing conviction that such unity did exist. This evidence
includes his elaboration of the second concealed text in the
second and third editions of the Principia, as well as his
decision to leave both that work and the Opticks open,
inviting further study and suggesting possible directions for
it. Newton also scattered clues to his beliefs outside of the
works published in his name. He impressed some of his
unpublished views upon the young men whose careers he
fostered, and they in turn disseminated them. His disciple
David Gregory, for example, in “The Author’s Preface” to his
Astronomiæ physicæ & geometricæ elementa (1702) included
a history of astronomy, according to which the laws his great
mentor Isaac Newton supposedly was the first to discover had
been in fact only rediscovered, as they had been known to the
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ancients. In the twentieth century the manuscript of this
passage was found among Newton’s papers, written in
Newton’s hand. Newton himself had composed it.
In addition, though he is said to have burned numerous
papers in the days before his death, Newton left millions of
words concerning the interpretation of history and scripture,
as well as his interpretation of alchemical texts and detailed
notes on his experiments.58 As he seems to have left no
written account of his reasons for wanting his unpublished
manuscripts to survive him, it is impossible to be certain of
his motives. One might surmise, for example, that Newton
left us his alchemical notes as proof of failure, as evidence
that not even he could unlock the chemical secrets of the
universe by following that path, and therefore as an
indication of precisely how not to proceed. But what, then,
do we make of the historical and scriptural interpretations
that accompany that record? Are we to regard them as
repudiated, too? In the absence of a note stating his intent—
whose discovery among the manuscripts would be a real
coup—it seems likely that he retained hope that another,
knowing of his efforts now that he was “out of the way,”
could pick up his task of unifying scripture, history, and
natural philosophy where he had abandoned it. Newton
could not have known that the executors of his estate would
label his alchemical writings not fit to print. Nor could he
have known that his more radical theological manuscripts
would also be deemed unprintable, despite the desire his
niece expressed in her will that they be published. Newton, in
short, could not have known the extent to which his
published work—particularly his Principia—like the
philosopher’s stone he had sought for so long, had begun to
transform both the world and himself within it. One of the
effects of this transformation may have been to shield the
secrecy of its author’s convictions after his death more
thoroughly than he intended. But he seems not to have cared.
Dying intestate, he left the matter in the hands of God, who,
he trusted, would allow it to be revealed at the proper time.
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For Newton believed the time would come when an
improved world would be ready to accept his teachings. In
the spirit of the ancient philosophers he most admired, his
philosophical aspirations extended beyond the realm of
natural philosophy; he trusted that its perfection would lead
to that of moral philosophy, so sadly imperfect in the
turbulent world he saw around him. The last edition of the
Opticks ends with the following passage, looking toward
progress in natural philosophy, which Newton believed
would lead not to a new morality but to a return to pure
ancient morality:
In this third Book [for the Opticks, too, is divided
into three books] I have only begun the Analysis of
what remains to be discover’d about Light and its
Effects upon the Frame of Nature, hinting several
things about it, and leaving the Hints to be
examin’d and improv’d by the farther Experiments
and Observations of such as are inquisitive. And if
natural Philosophy in all its Parts, by pursuing this
Method, shall at length be perfected, the Bounds
of Moral Philosophy will also be enlarged. For so
far as we can know by natural Philosophy what is
the first Cause, what Power he has over us, and
what Benefits we receive from him, so far our
Duty towards him, as well as that towards one
another, will appear to us by the Light of Nature.
And no doubt, if the Worship of false Gods had
not blinded the Heathen, their moral Philosophy
would have gone farther than to the four Cardinal
Virtues; and instead of teaching the
Transmigration of Souls, and to worship the Sun
and Moon, and dead Heroes, they would have
taught us to worship our true Author and
Benefactor, as their Ancestors did under the
Government of Noah and his Sons before they
corrupted themselves. (405-6)
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But the outcome of Newton’s “method” has been quite
other than the unification of natural and moral philosophy he
intended. We can never know how things would have been
different had his concealed convictions been brought to light
before the twentieth century. In the event, his Principia was
driven like a wedge between reason and faith. Designed to
declare the power of the deity in the world and, thereby, to
revive and foster both natural and moral philosophy,
Newton’s masterwork has instead been seen as a monument
to the separation between science and religion, as antithetical
to the unity of the very traditions of which it was in fact the
culmination.
6. Conclusion: The Old Made New
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.59
So what then is this Principia? To construct his grand vision,
encompassing the whole of creation, Newton, of course,
drew on his exceptional mathematical ability. But the
Principia is more than the mathematical and physical
treatise—however great—that it appears to be. It is a little
world, an artful elaboration of secular and sacred traditions
of human knowledge, born both of Renaissance
Hermeticism, which was so influential in the development of
experimental science in the seventeenth century, and of
Newton’s faith in a beneficent creator who ruled the universe
and who (in the fullness of time) would allow his human
creatures to discover and reveal its lawfulness. Behind everything that Newton did was a firm faith in God’s providence.
All of his work conveys his conviction that we live in a world
whose history is the working out of God’s great story from
the creation to the apocalypse. We humans do not have the
power, he thought, nor should we have the desire, to alter
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that already-written story; but God has hidden clues to it in
both nature and scripture, which some of us may be granted
the power to see and understand. The texts concealed in the
Principia—in their vision of God’s glory filling, fertilizing,
and illuminating the entire universe and the soul of his
disciple—are Newton’s grateful acknowledgement of the
source of his understanding and also his message to the
future; they are the manifestation of his peculiar genius and
his true secret art.
I do not intend here to discuss the validity of Newton’s
vision of the world. My goal in this study has been merely to
urge a thoroughgoing reconsideration of his Principia, a book
that resolutely resists easy classification. Seen as a whole, the
work both supersedes, and incorporates, the secular and
sacred traditions of learning that preceded it. It is a
magnificent product of transformation and circulation, a
manifestation at every level of the old made new (and, for
that matter, of the new made old). Together with the unparalleled mathematical achievements of the open text, the
mystical journey near the beginning of Book 1 teaches us that
our minds are capable of ascending to the heavens and
beyond, while the cosmic allegory at the end of Book 3 shows
us that our bodies are composed of the material and spiritual
stuff of the universe. The open text is grounded upon the
visions expressed in the hidden texts, and the hidden texts
depend for their power upon the open text while extending
its domain.
The Principia, in sum, speaks to both our intellect and our
imagination, addressing our deep human desire to be intellectually, spiritually, and materially at one with our universe.
Newton’s greatest book is far stranger and far richer than we
have ever suspected. A mathematical and physical work of
prodigious power, the Principia is also an expression of the
highest art and a declaration of the deepest love of which this
remarkable man was capable.
*
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I would like to thank Curtis Wilson, Tom Simpson, and Dana
Densmore for reading and commenting on an early draft of
this paper. I would also like to thank Rob Iliffe and Peter Pesic
for doing the same for a nearly final draft, and the editors and
editorial assistants of the Review for seeing it through to
publication. I am especially grateful to Eva Brann for her
unstinting support from beginning to end. I have attempted
to address the questions and suggestions of these generous
readers. None of them bears any responsibility for anything
written here.
Notes
37
Isaac Newton’s translation of the Tabula Smaragdina, the “Emerald
Tablet” attributed to Hermes Trismegistus (quoted in Dobbs 1991, 274).
The passage continues with some alchemical instructions.
38
Simpson, too, in the final section of his article, addresses what he calls
the astronomical alchemy that comets undergo in their close approach to
the sun, which he calls the “furnace of the heavens,” a crucible that
reaches a temperature unattainable on earth, thus leading to “the
emission of that ‘spirit’ which was always the ultimate objective of the
alchemic search and is fundamentally needed in order to complete
Newton’s account of the true System of the World” (164).
39
Newton wrote in his Hypothesis explaining the properties of light: “For
nature is a perpetuall circulatory worker, generating fluids out of solids,
and solids out of fluids, fixed things out of volatile, & volatile out of
fixed, subtile out of gross, & gross out of subtile, Some things to ascend
& make the upper terrestriall juices, Rivers and the Atmosphere; & by
consequence others to descend for a Requitall to the former”
(Correspondence, 1: 366). These sentences were written while Newton
still accepted the vortex hypothesis of planetary motion, well before he
had any idea of universal gravitation. As he developed the Principia, he
abandoned the hypothesis of vortices and, indeed, in the Principia he
takes every opportunity to combat that hypothesis. I believe, however,
that the sentiment of the passage survives as a metaphor of the circular
chemical processes, moved by gravity, that make life possible.
40Actually
he had acknowledged it, writing: “The comet that appeared in
1680 was distant from the sun in its perihelion by less than a sixth of the
sun’s diameter; and because its velocity was greatest in that region and
also because the atmosphere of the sun has some density, the comet must
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have encountered some resistance and must have been somewhat slowed
down and must have approached closer to the sun; and by approaching
closer to the sun in every revolution, it will at length fall into the body of
the sun. But also, in its aphelion, when it moves most slowly, the comet
can sometimes be slowed down by the attraction of other comets and as a
result fall into the sun” (937). He does not, however, dwell on the implications of the predicted collision for life on earth, but moves directly on
to his remarks about supernovae to which Conduitt called his attention in
their conversation.
41
This image appears in the Opticks, as well. In Query 30, one of those
added to the Latin and later English editions of that work, Newton muses
about the convertibility of light and gross bodies into one another,
writing, “The changing of Bodies into Light, and Light into Bodies, is
very conformable to the Course of Nature, which seems delighted with
Transmutations” (374), and, later, “All Birds, Beasts and Fishes, Insects,
Trees and other Vegetables, with their several Parts, grow out of Water
and watry Tinctures and Salts, and by Putrefaction return again into
watry Substances. And Water standing a few Days in the open Air, yields
a Tincture, which (like that of Malt), by standing longer yields a Sediment
and a Spirit, but before Putrefaction is fit Nourishment for Animals and
Vegetables. And among such various and strange Transmutations, why
may not Nature change Bodies into Light, and Light into Bodies?” (375).
Like the alchemical allegory at the end of the discussion of comets in the
Principia, these passages were written after their author had abandoned
alchemical experimentation.
42
Quoted in Waite, 1: 75.
43
There are exceptions: notably Alexandre Koyré, I. Bernard Cohen, and
Richard Westfall. But Westfall, who has produced the most comprehensive account of Newton’s life and work, admits with frustration that
during two decades of study Newton became ever more of a mystery to
him. In a modern version of the opinion of the Marquis de l’Hôpital—
who wondered if Newton ate, drank, and slept like other men or was
truly the god he seemed—Westfall concludes that there is no measure for
Newton, that he is wholly other. I do not agree; but I do believe that
until we acknowledge the texts hidden in the Principia we will never
understand its author.
44
Et hæc de deo, de quo utique ex phænomenis disserere, ad philosophiam
naturalem pertinet (764). This quote is from the third edition of the
Principia. In the second edition Newton states that to discourse of God is
the business of experimental philosophy, a statement which makes even
more perplexing the apparent absence of God from this particular book.
Newton seems to have thought better of that claim, for he changed it in
the final edition. Larry Stewart contends that the General Scholium “was
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written, and certainly perceived to have been written, with an eye to the
difficulties and the defence of the anti-Trinitarianism of his disciple
Samuel Clarke” (145-6). It is not clear to me why Isaac Newton would
have used his masterwork as a tool to defend Samuel Clarke, though it is
possible, as Stewart claims, that the General Scholium was (at least to
some degree) a salvo fired against societal assault on experimentalism. If
Stewart is right we find ourselves presented with yet another case in
which Newton manages to say what he means in a veiled manner.
45
The scholium following the Definitions does mention “Scriptures,”
(414) which is Cohen and Whitman’s translation of the Latin “sacris
literis” (52). And the first edition of the Principia contains (in Corollary 5
to Proposition 8 of Book 3) the following sentence: “Collocavit igitur
Deus Planetas in diversis distantiis a Sole, ut quilibet pro gradu densitatis
calore Solis majore vel minore fruatur” (583). Corollary 5 was excised
from the later editions, and some of its content was included in Corollary
4. But Newton replaced “God placed . . .” with “the planets were to be
placed. . .” (Cohen 1969, 529-30). This, by the way, is further evidence
that Newton’s use of the passive voice in the Principia is deliberate and
significant. Cohen argues, I think rightly, that these passing references are
indications that Newton was thinking of God all along, as he constructed
every edition of the Principia.
46
During Newton’s lifetime, refusal to accept the doctrine of the Trinity
could lead to prison; in 1696 a man was hanged for denying that article
of faith. Moreover, open expression of unorthodox beliefs was costly to
some of Newton’s disciples. Edmond Halley’s supposed atheism, for
example, cost him the Savilian professorship of astronomy at Oxford
University, which was awarded to David Gregory, another protégé of
Newton, who apparently was scarcely more religious than Halley, though
he was more discreet about his heterodoxy; and William Whiston lost his
position as successor to Newton in the Lucasian professorship of mathematics at Cambridge University for espousing religious views similar to
those Newton held. Newton, of course, considered the Trinitarians to be
the real heretics, and at crucial times in his life he refused to compromise
his beliefs. He was willing to sacrifice his appointment to Cambridge
University rather than take the requisite holy orders; he fought hard and
successfully against appointment by King James II of a Benedictine monk
to the university (though in this case the grounds were Roman
Catholicism rather than Trinitarianism as such); and on his deathbed he
refused the sacrament of the church. Nonetheless, he attended church
services occasionally; and he supported the Anglican Church. I doubt that
his intent in doing so was merely to disguise his true convictions in order
to protect his reputation. Newton would have regarded the Church of
England as a valuable bulwark against the political and religious
encroachments of the Roman Catholic Church, which he called the
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Whore of Babylon, and which he identified in his Observations on the
Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John, published posthumously in 1733, as the little horn of the fourth beast prophesied in the
Book of Daniel.
The widespread social upheavals of the time may also have influenced
Newton’s decision to be circumspect about his theological beliefs. David
Kubrin, in his article “Newton’s Inside Out!” speculates that the reason
he censored himself and repressed his insights, ideas, visions, and grand
plan of the cosmos, “was largely social, and stemmed from the fact that
Newton realized the dangerous social, political, economic, and religious
implications that would be associated with him should he dare reveal his
true thoughts” (97). Though Kubrin focuses on the social aspects of
Newton’s ideas, his claim is reminiscent of Law’s assertion that Newton
did not reveal his supposed indebtedness to Boehme because he did not
want to be associated with enthusiasm.
47
Descartes, for example, criticizing Galileo’s method in his Discorsi, had
written to Mersenne, “Nothing that he says here can be determined
without knowing what gravity is” (October 11, 1638, quoted in de
Gandt, 118). If Newton had waited to know what gravity was before
writing the Principia, the book never would have been written.
48
Newton considered action at a distance, in a universe containing only
matter, ridiculous, for he did not believe that brute matter could act in
any way at all. In Rule 3 of Book 3 of the Principia, added in the second
edition (Koyré, 268), he explicitly repudiates the notion that gravity is
inherent in matter. In his third letter to Richard Bentley, he expressed this
conviction even more strongly, writing: “That gravity should be innate
inherent & essential to matter so yt one body may act upon another at a
distance through a vacuum without the mediation of any thing else by &
through wch their action or force may be conveyed from one to another
is to me so great an absurdity that I beleive no man who has in philosophical matters any competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it”
(Correspondence, 3: 254).
49
As he wrote to Bentley, “Gravity must be caused by an agent acting
constantly according to certain laws, but whether this agent be material
or immaterial is a question I have left to ye consideration of my readers”
(Correspondence, 3: 254).
50
Further evidence for Newton’s struggle with himself over this issue, as
well as his awareness of the effects revelation of his beliefs would have
had on others’ perceptions of both himself and his work may be seen in a
draft of a Proposition 18 (crossed out and relabeled Hypothesis 2), which
he wrote after finishing the first edition of the Principia. This hypothesis,
which was to have been part of a general conclusion to the Opticks,
reads: “As all the great motions in the world depend upon a certain kind
of force (which in this earth we call gravity) whereby great bodies attract
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
one another at great distances: so all the little motions in the world
depend upon certain kinds of forces whereby minute bodies attract or
dispell one another at little distances.” He refers to his demonstration of
universal gravitation in the Principia, and continues: “And if Nature be
most simple & fully consonant to her self she observes the same method
in regulating the motions of smaller bodies which she doth in regulating
those of the greater. This principle of nature being very remote from the
conceptions of Philosophers I forbore to describe it in that Book least I
should be accounted an extravagant freak & so prejudice my Readers
against all those things which were the main designe of the Book: but &
yet I hinted at it both in the Preface & in the Book it self where I speak
of the inflection of light & of the elastick power of the Air but the design
of the book being secured by the approbation of Mathematicians, I had
not scrupled to propose this Principle in plane words. The truth of this
Hypothesis I assert not, because I cannot prove it, but I think it very
probable because a great part of the phenomena of nature do very easily
flow from it which seem otherways inexplicable: . . .” (quoted in Cohen
1982, 63) He goes on to list some of the phenomena he has in mind.
Newton repressed but did not destroy this remarkable statement.
51
We know that Newton admitted the possibility that this fear was well
founded because of a letter he sent on April 26, 1676 to Henry
Oldenburg, Secretary of the Royal Society, regarding a question raised by
a “B. R.” (Robert Boyle) in the Philosophical Transactions whether he
should publish the recipe for a mercury that heated gold when mixed
with it. Newton stated that he doubted that this particular mercury could
be useful “either to medicine or vegetation.” Then he continued:
But yet because the way by which mercury [Newton here
places an alchemical symbol instead of the word] may be so
impregnated, has been thought fit to be concealed by others
that have known it, & therefore may possibly be an inlet to
something more noble, not to be communicated wthout
immense dammage to ye world if there should be any verity
in ye Hermetick writers, therefore I question not but that ye
great wisdom of ye noble Authour will sway him to high
silence till he shall be resolved of what consequence ye thing
may be either by his own experience, or ye judgmt of some
other that throughly understands what he speakes about, that
is of a true Hermetic Philosopher, whose judgmt (if there be
any such) would be more to be regarded in this point then
that of all ye world beside to ye contrary, there being other
things beside ye transmutation of metals (if these great
pretenders bragg not) wch none but they understand. Sr
because ye Author seems desirous of ye sense of others in this
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35
point, I have been so free as to shoot my bolt; but pray keep
this letter private to your self. (Correspondence, 2: 2)
Newton and Boyle engaged for years in a correspondence about
alchemical research, which itself was typically guarded in the manner of
alchemical writers who rarely revealed everything even to sympathetic
correspondents. Few of these letters survive, but in a letter of August 2,
1692 to his friend John Locke, who shared Newton’s interest in
theological and alchemical pursuits, Newton observes, and respects,
Boyle’s “reservedness” about revealing a certain recipe, a restraint he
speculated might have proceeded from his own (though he does seem
somewhat miffed that Boyle is being quite so reserved with respect to
him). (Correspondence, 3: 218)
52 Newton himself, in his old age, implied as much in a conversation with
John Conduitt, stating that, “They who search after the philosophers’
stone by their own rules [are] obliged to a strict and religious life”
(quoted in Dobbs 1975, 15; also see Iliffe, 1: 178).
53
In one of the “classical” scholia, which Newton decided not to include
in the Principia, after writing of the analogy the ancients made between
the harmony of musical strings and the weights of the planets, he
continues: “But the Philosophers loved so to mitigate their mystical
discourses that in the presence of the vulgar they foolishly propounded
vulgar matters for the sake of ridicule, and hid the truth beneath
discourses of this kind” (McGuire and Rattansi, 117). I am not claiming
that Newton considered the surface text of the Principia to be a vulgar
matter foolishly propounded for the sake of ridicule. My claim is merely
that in emulation of the ancient philosophers he composed the work as a
layered text.
54
As early as 1676, reacting in part to the criticism that followed his
1672 publication on light, Newton wrote to John Collins, who had urged
him to publish his method of fluxions:
You seem to desire yt I would publish my method & I look
upon your advice as an act of singular friendship, being I
beleive censured by divers for my scattered letters in ye
Transactions about such things as nobody els would have let
come out wthout a substantial discours. I could wish I could
retract what has been done, but by that, I have learnt what’s
to my convenience, wch is to let what I write ly by till I am
out of ye way. (Correspondence, 2: 179)
55
Special circumstances, among them Newton’s own character and that
of his adversaries, influenced the particular course of each conflict, but it
seems plausible that, as far as Newton was concerned, they all had the
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same ground. The perception that the importance of his work was
historical could also go some way toward explaining the numerous
portraits of himself he commissioned. Further, it sheds light on his
willingness in his later life to let others carry on the controversies his
work aroused, rather than entering them himself until they touched his
reputation too closely, at which point he would join the fray, but usually
anonymously. This tactic was not unique to Newton, but it may have
been unusually powerful in his case, as in later life he was able to speak
with the voice of the Royal Society. He allowed Roger Cotes to write an
explanatory introduction to the second edition of the Principia, but he
refused to read it, so as not to be asked to clarify or defend it. He did not
want his peace to be disturbed by the obligation of justifying his work to
anyone.
56
During the same years that he was making, and failing at, his final
alchemical attempts he may have contemplated excision of the first
hidden text from the Principia. Whether we think he did depends upon
how we read David Gregory’s notes and Newton’s own manuscripts of
proposed alterations to the book. In any event, if he considered dismantling that text, he did not do it.
57
The letter to Pepys was dated September 13, 1693 (Correspondence, 3:
279), and the letter to Locke three days later (Correspondence, 3: 280).
On September 28 Pepys’ nephew John Millington visited Newton in
Cambridge and was able to report to his uncle that, though “under some
small degree of melancholy,” he seemed quite sane as well as “very much
ashamed” at the rudeness of the letter, which Newton himself characterized as “very odd” (Correspondence, 3: 281-2). In a letter of October
3, Newton apologized to Locke, explaining that “by sleeping too often by
my fire I got an ill habit of sleeping & a distemper wch this summer has
been epidemical put me further out of order, so that when I wrote to you
I had not slept an hour a night for a fortnight & for 5 nights together not
a wink” (Correspondence, 3: 284).
58
Rattansi estimates that Newton wrote 1,300,000 words on theological
and biblical subjects (167), and Westfall estimates that notes and compositions on alchemy in Newton’s hand exceed 1,000,000 words (1980, 163).
59
Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act I, Scene 2.
37
“The Things of Friends are
Common”
Christopher B. Nelson
I came to a startling realization over the summer as I was
preparing to greet our newest class: that I had returned to this
college to take the position I now hold in the year in which
most of our incoming freshmen were born. The years have
passed quickly, it seems to me now, and my appreciation for
the community of learning I joined back then has grown as
my friendships within the community have deepened. I think
I became a wee bit sentimental as I ruminated upon my first
year as a student at St. John’s more than forty years ago. My
Greek has gone rusty, but as with most all of memory, the
things learned first are remembered best, and I have kept with
me over the years two Greek sentences I recall reading in my
first days at the college: χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά and κοινὰ τὰ τῶν
φίλων.
The first can be roughly translated as “Beautiful things are
difficult” or “Noble things are difficult.” The second can be
translated as “The things of friends are common” or “What
friends have, they have in common.” Back in the days of my
youth the College used a different Greek grammar book, so
this last week I took a peek at the Mollin and Williamson
Introduction to Ancient Greek, with which our students now
begin to learn Greek. And there they were, the same two
sentences, buried in an early lesson on the attributive and
predicate position of the definite article, and I rediscovered
something I once must have known about the two sentences,
something I had carried with me all these years: they are both
nominal sentences with the article τά in the predicate
position, making it possible to write intelligible, whole
Christopher B. Nelson is President at the Annapolis campus of St. John’s
College.
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sentences without the use of a verb. I was pretty sure I had
not committed these sentences to memory because of the
substantive-making power of the article τά. It’s more likely
that I remembered them because they were both quite short,
and perhaps because they appeared to carry a mystery and a
whiff of truth in them that I might untangle for myself if only
I worked on them long enough. I felt justified in this interpretation when I read in this new text that “nominal
sentences are best suited to the impersonal and timeless
character of maxims or folk-sayings” (31).
I wanted to understand better the little maxim κοινὰ τὰ
τῶν ϕίλων, “The things of friends are common.” The
sentence seemed to capture a beautiful thought, and I had the
notion that if I made the effort to understand this maxim
better, I also might come to see why “beautiful things are
difficult.” Two birds, one arrow—so to speak.
So, I begin my reflection by asking whether this little
maxim means that friends share what they have, or that they
ought to share what they have. Today, I give you half of the
lunch I packed for us both, and tomorrow you will share
yours with me. But the sandwiches we eat are hardly common
to us both; quite the opposite, they are rationed out
separately to each of us, albeit equally. We may each have an
equal share in a good thing, but not a common good. We each
consume what the other does not and cannot consume. So it
is with all sorts of goods, earthly goods, goods that are
external to us; what I give to you in the spirit of sharing with
a friend is something I will no longer have after giving it. I
will have less of it after sharing it than I did before I shared
it, however good and generous my act of friendship has been,
and however much I imagine I may have gained in the
improvement of my character by sharing.
But what, then, are the things that could be common to
friends? What kinds of things can truly be held in common
without having to be meted out among friends? I suppose
things of the soul are of this nature, things that belong to the
heart, the spirit, the mind, things that belong to our inner
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lives. We both may love a single object or person without our
having to share that love as we might share the expense of a
gift to the beloved one. My love doesn’t grow less because
you love too. And, of course, if we should actually love one
another, that love is surely greater and stronger for it being
reciprocated and reinforced over and over. So it is with things
of the intellect. When I learn something you have shared with
me, it does not pass from you to me like milk from a pitcher;
you have lost nothing, and yet I have gained something that
is now common to us both. The sum of what is common to
us has just grown; it has not been redistributed. And should
we together go about learning something new, we will each
be richer for what we come to have in common.
In pursuing such learning together we enter a whole new
community. For example, when we learn Euclid 1.47—the
Pythagorean theorem—each of us has it wholly but neither of
us possesses it. We now have something that belongs to us,
but not merely privately; we have gained something that is
common to us both, and in learning it we enter the
community of all who have learned it. This perhaps is why we
say “things in common” belong to “friends”: the soul is not a
wholly private place, but is able to enter this sort of
community with others.
But there is an added dimension that I think has
something to do with the reason we seek these common
things. We are moved to love something because it is
beautiful, or to love some person because he or she is
beautiful to us. We seek to know something because we
believe that knowing is better than not knowing, that this
knowledge will be good for us, perhaps even that it can be
turned to good in the world about us. These things we have
in common are beautiful and good things, and we wish
beautiful and good things for our friends. If the common
goods are those that increase our community by pursuing
them together, then the greatest acts of friendship must be the
searching together for such a common good.
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St. John’s College exists for this purpose: to provide a
place and countless opportunities for our students to pursue
together the common goods of the intellect. We call ourselves
a community of learning, aware that the word “community”
in English, as in Greek, has the same root as the word
“common.” We make many an effort to put into practice the
conviction that we learn best when we learn with others, who
like us, wish to increase the common good. Such a
community offers some pretty fine opportunities for
friendship.
We also have a common curriculum that has us all reading
books that are worthy of our attention, even of our love—
books written by men and women who were themselves
model fellow learners. The books and authors may even
become our friends, as can the characters in some of these
books. If incoming students have not already met the Socrates
of Plato’s dialogues, they soon do, and they spend a lot of
time with him in the freshman year. For some of them it is the
beginning of a lifelong friendship with a character with
whom—if open to the possibility—one can converse over and
over again. The words on the page may remain the same, but
the reader brings a new conversationalist to the text every
time he or she returns to the dialogue. At least, so it is with
me. I call Socrates a friend of mine because I know that he
seeks only my own good. He has taught me humility,
inasmuch as I possess it all.
I have many such friends in the Program. Some of them
are books. Homer’s Iliad has been my companion since the
seventh grade, and I never tire of returning to it. The Aeneid
has become a more recent friend who has helped me to
understand and better bear the responsibilities of fatherhood
and the trials of leadership. The Books of Genesis and Job
have helped me understand what it means to be human and
how great is the distance between the human and the divine;
I read them to remind me how little I really understand about
the relation between the two, which in turn serves as a spur
to seeking to understand better. Euclid’s Elements may be the
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finest example on the St. John’s Program of the practice of
the liberal arts, and it is beautiful for its logical, progressive
movement from the elemental to the truly grand. Plato’s
Republic is the finest book about education ever written; it
inspires much of what I do as I practice my vocation at the
College, reminding me that a community of learning is
reshaping and refounding itself any time a few of its members
come together to engage in learning for its own sake—and
that this is what we ought always to be encouraging at this
college, even by device when necessary.
Other friends of mine are authors: Sophocles, who can
evoke a human sympathy to inspire pity in each of his
dramas; George Washington, whose restraint in the use of
power is evident in his finest writings and in the mark he left
on the founding of this country; Abraham Lincoln, whom I
consider this country’s finest poet, whose very words
reshaped what it meant to be an American; Jane Austen,
whose every sentence can be called perfect (and so she is a
beautiful author to me); and Martin Luther King, who taught
me that non-violent protest is more than a successful tactical
measure to achieve a political end, but a proper and loving
response to the hateful misconduct of fellow human souls.
Then there remain the characters whom I embrace as
friends: besides Socrates, there is Hector, Breaker of Horses,
“O My Warrior”; and Penelope, who weaves the path that
allows Odysseus to return home, and is far worthier of his
love than he of hers. There is Don Quixote, the indomitable
spirit, and Middlemarch’s Dorothea Brooke, whose simple
acts of goodness change the whole world about her. I rather
like Milton’s Eve, mother of us all, who still shines pretty
brightly in the face of his spectacular Satan. I was a teenager
when I met Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, and I grew to
adulthood with him, probably following a little too closely
his path to responsibility. There’s the innocent Billy Budd,
unprepared to face the force of evil in man, and his Captain
Vere, the good man who suffers to do his duty.
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The Program also offers some reflections on friendship:
every winter, Aristotle provides freshmen with a framework
for considering different kinds of friendships and the goods
they afford. Perhaps they will find his list incomplete, or
perhaps their own experiences will be embraced by his explication. And then there are examples of friendships, pairs of
friends in many of the books, who will also provide lessons in
friendship, for better or worse: Patroclus and Achilles, David
and Jonathan, Hal and Falstaff, Huck and Jim, Emma and
Knightley, to name a few.
We journey through the Program with the assistance of
many friends, some of whom live among us here and now,
while some others live on in the books we read during this
four-year odyssey. They help us as we struggle with the big
questions that in turn can help to free each of us to live a life
that truly belongs to us. It is these friends, standing close by,
who help us to find our answers to the questions: Who am I?
What is my place in the world? How ought I to live my life?
One of my more beautiful living friends, a colleague here at
the College, has put it this way: “Our friends are doubly our
benefactors: They take us out of ourselves and they help us to
return, to face together with them our common human
condition” (Eva Brann, Open Secrets/Inward Projects, 55).
Another of my friends, a St. John’s classmate and medical
doctor, gave last year’s graduating class in Santa Fe this
reminder, that we can learn from our friendships with the
books how we might be better friends to one another: “So
often we make shallow and inaccurate presumptions about
people, like the cliché of telling a book by its cover, which
robs you of the deeper experience that defines us as humans
in our relationship to each other. For me every patient is a
great book with a story to tell and much to teach me, and I
am sometimes ashamed when my presumptions are exposed
and I then see the remarkable person within, between the
covers of the book of their own story.” This doctor has
devoted himself to saving the lives of patients suffering from
cancer, and he has this to say about how he is guided by the
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spirit of community and friendship within the soul of every
human being: “In my own work, it is sometimes said, we are
guided…by the idea that to save a person’s life, it is
considered as if one has saved the world. To me that has
always meant the life saved is much more than a single life
restored, as that person is someone’s spouse, someone’s
brother or sister, someone’s parent, or child, a member of the
community, of a church, synagogue or mosque, or a friend,
and as all are affected by loss, all are restored by their return.”
(Stephen J. Forman, 2009 Commencement Address, Santa
Fe). This statement is a powerful testament to the wonder of
friendship at work in the world.
In this last story, I have moved us away from the inner
world of reflection and learning to the outer world of putting
what one has learned to work in a life devoted to helping
others. The second must always follow the first. By this, I
mean that we owe it to ourselves and to others to take
advantage of the opportunities this community offers to learn
with our fellow classmates and tutors how we might acquire
a little self-understanding through the common endeavor we
practice here, before going out and putting it to work in the
world. And in the process, perhaps we will make a few friends
who will stay with us for the rest of our lives, enriching them
because “what friends have they have in common.”
This little nominal sentence, κοινὰ τὰ τῶν ϕίλων,
happens to be the penultimate sentence in one of Plato’s
dialogues, Phaedrus, which is the only book read twice for
seminar, at the end of both freshman and senior years.
Phaedrus and Socrates have engaged in the highest form of
friendship as they have conversed together to try to understand how a man or woman might achieve harmony and
balance in the soul by directing that soul to a love for the
beautiful. Socrates concludes the inquiry with a prayer to the
gods:
Friend Pan and however many other gods are here,
grant me to become beautiful in respect to the
things within. And as to whatever things I have
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outside, grant that they be friendly to the things
inside me. May I believe the wise man to be rich.
May I have as big a mass of gold as no one other
than the moderate man of sound mind could bear
or bring along.
Do we still need something else, Phaedrus? For I
think I’ve prayed in a measured fashion?
To which Phaedrus responds:
And pray also for these things for me. For friends’
things are in common. (279B – C, trans. Nichols).
45
“My Subject is Passion”: A
Review of Eva Brann’s Feeling
our Feelings
Ronald Mawby
Feeling our Feelings: What Philosophers Think and People
Know is Eva Brann’s latest large and wonderful reflective
inquiry into what it means to be human. Previously she has
written on imagination (The World of the Imagination, 1991),
time (What, Then, Is Time? 1999), and negation (The Ways of
Naysaying, 2001) as “three closely entwined capabilities of
our inwardness” (2001, xi). Now she takes up our affective
life: “that subtly reactive receptivity we call feeling, the
psychic stir seeking expression we call emotion, and the not
always unwelcome suffering we call passion” (2001, xi) as
well as those pervasive unfocused feelings-without-objects
called moods, each “as seen through the writings of those
who seem to me to have thought most deeply and largely
about it” (2008, 441).
Her inquiry aims at thinking about our feelings. The
second part of her subtitle—what people know—insists that
we have in our own experience the data that thinking about
feelings must address. Anyone who has been angry, for
instance, in one sense knows what the feeling of anger is. Yet
merely having felt the feeling does not enable one to grasp its
nature, sources, psychic situation, and human significance. To
grasp the full meaning of the feelings we need thinking, and
Ms. Brann believes that those who have thought best about
them are the philosophers. Hence she proposes “by way of
picked philosophers” to hit the “high points that will best
help me to make sense of myself—and of the world, natural
Eva T. H. Brann. Feeling Our Feelings: What Philosophers Think and People
Know. Paul Dry Books, 2008. Ronald Mawby teaches in the Honors Program
at Kentucky State University.
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and human-made, then and now, passing and perennial, the
world that impinges on me by instilling or eliciting feelings in
me” (xxi).
This book is singular. I would say it is sui generis were it
not of a kind with her previous trilogy of the human center
(1991, 1999, 2001). The reader naturally wants to classify
the book under the identifiable rubric of some collective
scholarly enterprise, but it resists. Ms. Brann explicitly warns
us of ten scholarly categories into which her book fails to fit.
In fact, although the book is full of learning, it is intended not
“as a work of scholarship for scholars but rather as an effort
at inquiry for amateurs” (xxv). Her inquiry into our affective
being aims at “getting a clear view of the contrasting possibilities and developing a warm—though correctable—
adherence to one of them for carrying on my life” (122), and
she hopes that reading philosophy “might be useful at the
least for gaining some sense of the way particular human
experiences are entailed by larger frameworks and, perhaps,
for finding a coherent set of livable opinions for ourselves”
(401). Her standards are dual: “verisimilitude by the criteria
of knowing and verifiability by the test of life” (442).
Ms. Brann, I would say, seeks significant truth, that is, a
view that can stand the scrutiny and serve the purposes of
both thought and life. She believes that large philosophical
accounts offer her the best chance of advance toward
significant truth. She knows her approach is not obviously
sound:
My approach is, I think, not very hard to defend
as a working method for marshaling views but not
so easy to justify as a way to establish truth. For
these grand wholes of philosophy are obviously
even less easy to reconcile than the narrow partialities of scholarship, while to cannibalize such
frameworks for handy parts to cobble together
would break up the very integrity that gives their
passion theories stature. Therefore the justification
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for my—somewhat unfashionable—interest in
grounds can hardly be, it seems to me, in culling a
theory from this tradition, but rather in showing
how and why the inquiry into human affect might
be thought to involve all the world there is. (398)
An option that Ms. Brann has declined would look toward
“psychological theories—those points of view that base their
observations concerning the passions on natural theories of
the soul (or the converse) and often only implicitly on
metaphysics (or its denial)” (xx). She justifies her neglect of
psychological science by saying that discredited psychological
theories disappear at once or fade away after becoming either
literary tropes or folk-psychological terms, whereas philosophical systems show a sort of eternal recurrence. Her
unpersuaded scientific opposition would interpret Ms.
Brann’s observation as showing that in science false coin is
eventually withdrawn from circulation, whereas in
philosophy bad pennies continually turn up. The scientist
would add that even for discerning the phenomena scientific
experiment has an advantage over philosophical reflection
because experimental manipulation can separate factors that
are ordinarily confounded, so the experiment may reveal
things that ordinary observation may not. On the other hand
the scientific literature tends to be dry: vital issues can be
desiccated through operational definition, and the reader
must travel many a dusty mile through descriptions of experimental setups and statistical analysis of results to find the
small god of factual truth who lives in those details. The issue
finally is whether such factual truths lead to a livable oasis of
significant truth, or whether philosophical reflection can lead
there, or whether “significant truth” names a mirage. I am a
lapsed psychologist whose life witnesses my sympathy with
Ms. Brann’s approach, but I add that psychological studies
too can be thought-provoking.
Having sketched Ms. Brann’s aim I turn to the book itself,
a handsome, well-produced volume of over 500 pages. I urge
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potential readers not to be put off by the perhaps daunting
prospect of so much philosophical exposition. As she says,
“my subject is passion” throughout, but one topic does not
imply one continuous argument. Ms. Brann presents the
philosophers independently, on their own terms, and saves
her own conclusions for the end, so one need not read from
beginning to end to profit from the book. The ten chapters
between preface and conclusion could be read separately as
free-standing expository essays, serving as orientation for
those who go on to the original texts, as recapitulation for
those who have previously read them, or as cribs for those
wishing to be spared the trouble. And the work is a delight to
read. Her expositions are clear, her comments insightful and
judicious. Basing my judgment on the texts I know, her
accounts, even when brief, are nuanced and correct. She
knows the conceptual geography so well that she is never lost.
As a guide Ms. Brann is attentive to the needs of the reader
and her lively lucid graciousness makes her a fun companion.
The prose moves quickly without hurry, combines delicacy
with penetration, shows a keen wit and generous spirit, and
exemplifies Eliot’s dictum on diction: ”the common word
exact without vulgarity, the formal word precise but not
pedantic.” The honesty of her thinking and the accuracy of
her writing produce a dominant impression of sun-lit clarity.
*
In the remainder of this review I wish to imitate Ms.
Brann’s model by separating my exposition of the book’s
contents from my personal response. I do not think Ms.
Brann expects everyone who reads her book to adopt her
conclusions; neither do I expect everyone to adopt mine.
When, after considering various factors and divergent
viewpoints, we tentatively conclude on a way to put it all
together, our conclusion is neither independent of nor strictly
entailed by the dialectical considerations that inform it.
Truthful reporting should be disinterested, all the more so
where the topic has personal significance. Therefore I first
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present the contents with minimal commentary, and then
discuss my response.
Ms. Brann begins considering “passion itself ” through
the depiction of erotic love in Greek lyric poetry. The
passionate lover receives the uneasy privilege of being subjugated by an external power: “Eros whacked me.” Here the
source of the passion is outside, and the soul contributes only
the power to be so affected. One persistent issue in thinking
about feelings is the ratio between exogenous and
endogenous factors: how much is the feeling shaped by its
object, and how much is the object merely a trigger that
evokes a soul-formed feeling?
Plato begins the philosophy of feeling with his inquiries
into eros (brought inside the soul), spirit, desire, and
pleasure. We get the Platonic images of the soul from the
Symposium, Phaedrus, and Republic, and the account of
pleasure in the Philebus. Ms. Brann follows the latter thread
to Aristotle on pleasure as a bloom on activity, to Freud on
pleasure as the reduction of psychic excitation, and to
modern research on desire.
Aristotle gets a chapter of his own as the founder of
methodological emotion studies. Aristotle writes about the
passions in his ethical and rhetorical works because of the
centrality in the soul of appetite. Passions, like virtues, are
seen as means between extremes. A focus of Ms. Brann here
is the analysis of shame, which in the “cycles of popularity”
among passions has recently been on the rise.
The Stoics come next, with special attention to Cicero. As
“moderns among the ancients” they have a representational
theory of mind and insist on the primacy of the theory of
knowledge. Yet unlike many moderns who view a drench of
the passions as a welcome relief from arid rationality, the
Stoics view passions as mistakes, irrational excessive impulses
that upset the soul, and philosophy as the cure.
We then make a long jump to Thomas Aquinas, who
places us as rational animals in the midst of creation and
situates passions between the intellectual and vegetative
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powers in the center of the soul. Thomas presents a “comprehensive and differentiated synthesis” (186) of the tradition.
Ms. Brann in a high tribute says that Thomas offers “the most
extensive and acute phenomenology of the passions known to
me” (446).
Descartes, the cunning innovator, next gives us “an initiating and deck-clearing simplification” (186). Descartes
considers a human being not as a rational animal but as a
minded machine, and says the passions arise in the body and
are felt in the mind. Ms. Brann traces Descartes’s taxonomy
of the feelings and ends her discussion of his Passions of the
Soul with this summary judgment: “a seminal treatise that
combines confident assertion with ready retraction, brisk
definitiveness with unabashed equivocation, proud
innovation with tacit recourse to the tradition, hopeful
emphasis on experimental science with a speculative physiology, and a determined reliance on the metaphysics of
distinct substances with an insistence on a human union that
the theory itself forestalls. But if the theoretical exposition is
surely obscure just by reason of its attempted lucidity, the
practical advice might be sage just because it is wisely
ambivalent” (227).
Spinoza refashions Cartesian notions into a system that
aims to overcome traditional oppositions such as body/mind,
impulse/freedom, desire/virtue, passion/action, emotion/
reason, and feeling/thinking. Spinoza’s onto-theology implies
that the impetus at the base of our being is emotional and that
affect is our body’s vitality. Intellectual understanding transmutes experience from passive to active and entails an
increase of joy. This chapter I found fascinating, as I have not
studied Spinoza, and his metaphysics is often taken as a
grounding precursor to contemporary mind-brain identity
theories. I don’t know whether his “God-intoxicated”
metaphysics finally works—Ms. Brann thinks not—but
thinking about it is invigorating.
The Spinoza chapter contains an interlude on Adam
Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, with its “wonderfully
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wise worldliness” that “operates with three moral-psychological terms, “sympathy,” “propriety,” and “the impartial
spectator” (236).
Whereas Smith assumes common sense, David Hume, the
topic of Ms. Brann’s next chapter, is reductively skeptical in
the Treatise of Human Nature. As she observes, “in matters
philosophical, when you deliberately deny depth you seem to
have to embrace compensatory complexity” (292). Thus
Hume’s view of the passions as reflective impressions
becomes “baroquely elaborate” (292), yet “the analysis of
pride in particular seems, complications aside, true to life”
(309).
In the chapter entitled “Mood as News from Nothing:
Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and the Age of Anxiety,” Ms. Brann
begins with Romanticism. She comments on Rousseau, Kant,
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Pascal before proceeding to
two thinkers who take up an “uncircumventable sense of
nothingness borne by a persistent mood about nothing in
particular” (342). Kierkegaard views anxiety as “the
intimation of the possibility of being free—to sin” (342) and
thus invests this mood with a deep theological-existential
import. Heidegger says anxiety reveals “The Nothing” that is
beyond beings and thus attunes us to the aboriginal. Ms.
Brann, who dislikes Heidegger’s character for its lack of
probity, nonetheless avers “Heidegger has told us an unforgettable truth in “What is Metaphysics?”: Moods are human
affects that tell not only how we are but what our world is”
(356).
Unlike these existential-ontological theories, Freud’s
account of anxiety uses “developmental, mechanistic, quantitative, that is, basically naturalistic terms” (368). Ms. Brann
contrasts ancient passion with modern moodiness, and notes
that moderns tend to see good moods as superficial and bad
moods as revealing, so anxiety, depression, ressentiment,
disgust, boredom, and their kin prevail in 20th century
thinkers and writers.
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We come at last to the dispersal of theorizing in our times.
Ms. Brann presents the very different philosophical accounts
of Sartre and Ryle, the empirically-based conceptualization of
Silvan Tomkins, and the currently dominate English-language
school of cognitivism. Cognitivism includes a cluster of
theories that generally view emotions as judgment-like evaluations that can motivate behavior. Modern theoreticians
emphasize the utility of emotions for the organism, a role I
think is made the more urgent since, unlike older theories in
which responsive and responsible reason can discern and
judge ends, many current theories admit only a shrunken,
neutered, calculative rationality.
In the final chapter Ms. Brann begins with a disquisition
on philosophical accounts as responses to the open receptivity of questions and as frameworks that set definite
problems by pre-determining constraints on solutions. She
then articulates the leading questions of the philosophical
accounts she has examined in the preceding chapters. She
concludes with her tentative answers to the questions that
motivated her project: Is feeling a legitimate object of
thinking? What is human affect? How are thought and feeling
related? Are emotions judgments? Are we fundamentally
affective or rational beings? Are the passions revelatory?
What distinguishes aesthetic feeling? Are the emotions good?
This fragmentary statement of content fails to convey the
book’s richness. It is full of insights, with many sagacious and
thought-provoking incidental remarks. It is striking how
often Ms. Brann can summarily depict philosophical accounts
of the soul with diagrams—images of the topography of our
inwardness.
*
Now then, what response did the book elicit from me?
Ms. Brann says that to make sense of ourselves we should
read the philosophers, and that made me wonder, for in my
experience the benefit of reading philosophy for finding
livable opinions depends on which philosophers I read, our
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shared basis in what I call common sense, and the dependence
of their insights on their systems. Let me explain with
examples.
Plato and Aristotle—the former through images and
arguments, the latter through analytic articulations—
organize, refine, and supplement common sense, so when I
read them I feel that we share a common world. They see
what I see, and a lot more, so I benefit. As a ‘seventh-letter’
Platonist I don’t look to the dialogues for a systematic
philosophy that can settle every question it raises, and I don’t
find one. Aristotle used to annoy me when I felt he truncated
a discussion saying “enough about that”; I would rebel,
wanting—I now see—a systematic completion that is askew
to his enterprise; he is usually not imposing a theory but
trying to articulate what is there, and when he has said all he
has seen, he stops. I profit enormously from reading these
authors, though, of course, for both, if we push every
question to the end we come upon mysteries.
In contrast, philosophers such as Descartes and Hume
seem to be constructing systems intended as alternatives to
common sense. They say, in effect, that what is really there is
less or other than common sense imagines, so when reading
them I feel I am in their systems rather than in the world, and
if their systems are incoherent, as I believe they are, then I am
nowhere, and the insights I do gain from them are in spite of,
rather than because of, their systemic notions. Take
Descartes. Ms. Brann agrees that we can see clearly and
distinctly that Cartesian matter and Cartesian mind cannot
interact, yet according to Descartes, they do. And Hume’s
systemic notions don’t illuminate my experience but render it
inconceivable; his conclusions seem to me an unacknowledged reductio on his premises. These authors, rather than
ending in mystery, begin there.
So I wonder, What is the value of an incoherent system
for illuminating the passions? How can we make sense of
ourselves using notions that don’t make sense? Ms. Brann
writes, referring to Spinoza’s Ethics,
�54
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
What is the good of attending to a text so beset
with perplexities? Well, to begin with, I cannot
think of a work that is not so beset when pressed.
At any rate, don’t we study philosophical writings
largely to learn what price is to be paid for certain
valuable acquisitions, and don’t we think out
things on our own largely to find out what
problems follow from what solutions and what
questionable antecedents we can tolerate for the
sake of their livable consequences? (278)
Our choice, then, is not between some perplexity and no
perplexity, but between various configurations of perplexity.
To avoid perplexity is to abandon thinking, or at least to give
up that serious amateur personal thoughtfulness that since
Socrates has been called philosophy.
Philosophy as amateur (i.e., loving, hence feeling)
thoughtfulness is related to Ms. Brann’s distinction between
problem-solving and question-answering, which I would
describe as follows. Problem-solving aims at reduction of
uncertainty; when a problem is solved, our sense of the world
becomes more determinate. A solved problem moves out of
our center of attention; as the solution becomes a determinate thread woven into the fabric of belief or projected as
a settled line of action, attention is freed for new tasks. The
question-answering thought of reflective inquiry aims at
heightened awareness. A question is the soul’s attentive
receptivity focused and formulated. When an answer is
glimpsed, our experience brightens. The question does not go
away when an answer is disclosed; rather the answering
world is formed and focused in our soul more intensely.
Philosophies in Ms. Brann’s scheme sit between questions
and problems, and face both ways. Philosophies can set the
terms for formulating problems. In this employment
philosophy is often antecedent to science, a communal enterprise devoted to the piecemeal discovery of truth.
Philosophies can also assemble and organize questions. In this
MAWBY
55
employment philosophy contributes to living well, and is not
a collective scholarly enterprise. It is an individual way of
being more consciously alive. Friends can help each other
here—in the end Ms. Brann’s book is just such a friend—but
we are finally alone in our sense of what is true about what is
significant.
I have a final response that concerns one of Ms. Brann’s
conclusions. Among the “unformed urgencies” that she
brought, or brought her, to this study is this question, the
question of her project: “Are we fundamentally affective or
rational beings?” (461). Spinoza affirms the former, Aristotle
the latter, and Ms. Brann sides with Spinoza but quite
properly plays on an ambiguity in “fundamental” to have it
both ways: “while we are at bottom affective, we are at our
height thought-ful” (362). She concludes that our inwardness
is affectivity variously aroused (453). Thus my being, not the
impersonal intellectual “I” that Kant says accompanies every
representation, but me, my very own inner ultimate self, my
subject, is passion.
But the question, Are we thinking or feeling beings? is
inadequately posed, since it excludes other alternatives.
Maybe what is primary for us is neither feeling nor thinking,
but doing and making. Maybe as human animals we act and
produce to remain in being and thinking and feeling arise out
of our living agency. Deeds worth doing and artifacts worth
making surely have been praised in our tradition. That Ms.
Brann writes books is at least consistent with the primacy of
works and deeds. For she agrees with Thomas that baths are
restorative, and she has tenure. Why not soak in a luxurious
bath, feelings one’s feelings, thinking thoughts, and when one
has a “eureka” insight rest content with a self-satisfied smile?
Why leap out and write a book? Might it not be because the
“production of a perfect artifact” (443) is another fundamental way of being human? Now she could reply, rightly,
that clarity of thought requires verbal expression, so writing
is a means to thinking. And certain feelings, such as pride,
require genuine achievements about which to be proud. Thus
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
56
good works and deeds may be instrumental to the best
thought and feeling. Granted. But the best works and deeds
also require, as instruments, good thought and feeling. Which
is primary, which derivative, is not clear to me, so I cannot
approve of excluding a possible answer through the posing of
the question.
While this is a weighty issue when considering what it
means to be human, in terms of this book it is a minor
quibble. Ms. Brann undertook this project to better understand herself as a feeling being, and offers the book as an aid
for any reader also “hoping to come near to an answer to the
question: What does it mean to feel?” (234) The final test for
each reader, then, is whether after having read it one better
understands one’s affective being. For myself the answer is,
Yes, I do. My vision is larger and my discernment is keener. I
am still not sure in what sense the inquiry into human affect
reaches all the world there is, but it surely reaches the depths
of the soul and, as Aristotle observed, the soul is in a way all
things. This book energized my thinking mind and enlivened
my feeling soul, and engaging with it has been a pleasure. Ms.
Brann is again to be congratulated for a marvelous
achievement.
*
Brann, Eva T. H. (1991). The World of the Imagination: Sum and
Substance. Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Brann, Eva. (1999). What, Then, Is Time? Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers.
Brann, Eva. (2001). The Ways of Naysaying: No, Not, Nothing, and
Nonbeing. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Brann, Eva. (2008). Feeling our Feelings: What Philosophers Think and
People Know. Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books.
�
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<em>The St. John's Review</em>
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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, 2009/2
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Kraus, Pamela
Brann, Eva T. H.
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
McClay, Barbara
Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Seeger, Judith
Nelson, Christopher B.
Mawby, Ronald
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Volume 51, number 2 of The St. John's Review. Published in 2009.
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The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_51_No_2
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College
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text
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pdf
St. John's Review
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https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a112ebe1027a2955fdae3b05a48a50d9.pdf
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Title
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<em>The St. John's Review</em>
Description
An account of the resource
<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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thestjohnsreview
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128 pages
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The St. John's Review, 2009/1
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2009
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Dugan, C. Nathan
Brann, Eva T. H.
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Browning, Thomas
Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Hopkins, Burt C.
Seeger, Judith
Yee, Cordell D. K., 1955-
Description
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Volume 51, number 1 of The St. John's Review. Published in 2009.
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The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_51_No_1_2009
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College
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English
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text
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St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
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pdf
St. John's Review
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